This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Politics

  • A pro-Democrat post

    A TaH reader (thanks, Brad) emailed me a link to RealClear Politics that, after considering a few hours (remembering the price that Joe Lieberman and Ellen Taucher have paid), I’ve decided to share with other readers. Probably one of the few times you’ll ever see me praise a Democrat. Behold! Ed Koch speaks;

    When the U.S. leaves Iraq, as the Democrats promise they will force President Bush to do, will we face the prospect of emboldened Jihadists, with the cry of “God is Great” on their lips, blowing Americans up here in the States? If terrorists explode radioactive bombs and tank trucks of chlorine gas in American cities, or worse still, full-fledged nuclear weapons, what will our reaction be? Will we be like the English and Spanish who, when their commuter trains were blown up in London and Madrid, rolled over and surrendered to terrorist demands?

    That should be the question that American voters should be asking. Along with;

    Why won’t we take those who threaten us at their word? Why do we continue to make excuses for their threatening behavior until finally we will be forced to act because they have exploded the dirty bomb or the real nuclear bomb in our homeland?

    And the words of warning you’ll never hear from another registered Democrat;

    Wake up, America! This war is not only taking place in Iraq. The struggle is for the future of the world. Our enemies intend to conquer us, and they say so openly. The time to resist is now.

    Of course no entry in praise of Democrats would be complete without mentioning Joe Lieberman’s (I know he’s an Independent, but he’s still a Democrat) piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday entitled The Choice on Iraq. He chastized Democrats for being so overwhelmed by the Bush Derangement Syndrome to admit that Iraq’s outcome will determine our own future;

    But the fact is that we are in a different place in Iraq today from even just a month ago — with a new strategy, a new commander, and more troops on the ground. We are now in a stronger position to ensure basic security — and with that, we are in a stronger position to marginalize the extremists and strengthen the moderates; a stronger position to foster the economic activity that will drain the insurgency and militias of public support; and a stronger position to press the Iraqi government to make the tough decisions that everyone acknowledges are necessary for progress.

    Unfortunately, for many congressional opponents of the war, none of this seems to matter. As the battle of Baghdad just gets underway, they have already made up their minds about America’s cause in Iraq, declaring their intention to put an end to the mission before we have had the time to see whether our new plan will work.

    Lieberman’s final paragraph was equally as powerful as Koch’s, but  a bit less dramatic;

    We are at a critical moment in Iraq — at the beginning of a key battle, in the midst of a war that is irretrievably bound up in an even bigger, global struggle against the totalitarian ideology of radical Islamism. However tired, however frustrated, however angry we may feel, we must remember that our forces in Iraq carry America’s cause — the cause of freedom — which we abandon at our peril.

    So at least two get it. When can we expect the remainder to follow?

    Just giving up on their “slow-bleed” policy isn’t enough. If Democrats would abandon the moonbat wing, the moonbat wing would go away. If Democrats would abandon that vocal minority of Americans who think that simply bringing home the troops would solve all of our problems and get behind our troops for a few months, they’d triumph. The jihadists and the flakes thrive on attenton. Just ignore them for a few months, for Pete’s sake. 

  • Let’s watch this productive moment in time

    According to AP, (by way of the Wall Street Journal) the US and Iraq will hold a conference with Syria and Iran;

    Envoys from the West and Islamic nations — including Iran, Syria and the U.S. — are expected to attend a conference next month on efforts to stabilize Iraq, a diplomatic adviser said Tuesday.

    Earlier, U.S. and Iraqi forces staged raids in Baghdad’s main Shiite militant stronghold as part of politically sensitive forays into areas loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr.

    The multination conference, planned for mid-March in Baghdad, is an attempt by the government to seek greater regional assistance and study ways to fight insurgents and tensions between Iraq’s majority Shiites and Sunnis. No firm date has been set.

    Talk about mental masturbation. The Iranians and Syrians will take just the event all by itself as an indication that they’ve got us over a barrel and they’ll make all kinds of moronic demands.

    Some nations had expressed reservations about taking part in the conference because of security concerns and political sensitivities.

    I think I’d be more wary of presenting an image of weakness when we’re winning the war than I’d be wary of political sensitivities. Maybe a couple of air strikes on those smugglers on the Iran border would help.

  • So who’s surprised?

    According to Politico’s Daniel W. Reilly and Jim Vandehei, the Democrats have had a hard time trying to keep their campaign promises;

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is discovering the cold truth about governing with a slim majority: It’s much easier to promise behavioral change for Congress than to deliver it.

    Pelosi vowed that five-day workweeks would be a hallmark of a harder-working Democratic majority. So far, the House has logged only one. Lawmakers plan to clock three days this week.

    The speaker has denied Republicans a vote on their proposals during congressional debates — a tactic she previously declared oppressive and promised to end. Pelosi has opened the floor to a Republican alternative just once.

    Pelosi set a high standard for herself when she pledged to make this “the most ethical Congress in history” — a boast that was the political equivalent of leading with her chin. And some critics have been happy to hit it.

    So who’s surprised? This is the same party who controlled Congress for 50 years and are still complaining about the same policy changes they’ve been complaining about for 50 years. Democrats aren’t in the business of conducting business, they’re in the business of keeping their jobs.

    They complain that Republicans stand in their way of accomplishing their agenda, but since they hold the majority they shouldn’t be having these problems, should they? Even back in ’94 when they tried and failed at creating a national health care system, they blamed Republicans for their own party members who wouldn’t vote for the measure.

    The Democrats need crises to retain power – they need the hand-wringing mutton heads to be scared into voting. Look at their big “Bush is going to start the draft again” push in the 2004 election when they realized that Americans weren’t being scared over the war.

    Even Harry reid is having problems with his Senate majority. AP reports that he’ll have to delay debate on the Democrats’ plan to revisit the 2002 authorization for war;

    Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev., said Monday he wanted to delay votes on a measure that would repeal the 2002 war authorization and narrow the mission in Iraq.

    Senior Democrats who drafted the proposal, including Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware and Carl Levin of Michigan, had sought swift action on it as early as this week, when the Senate takes up a measure to enact the recommendations of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission.

    Reid, who will huddle with Democrats Tuesday to discuss whether to postpone the Iraq debate, cited pressure from victims’ families for quick action on the Sept. 11 bill as the reason for doing so.

    What victims? The victims of what? The Democrats are finally figuring out that their most vocal supporters are a tiny majority in this country – they realize that their mandate is no mandate at all.

    Since they didn’t have a plan before the election and they pulled the Murtha slow-bleed plan out of their collective ass after the election, Americans aren’t as pleased with Democrats as Democrats thought they’d be.

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., meanwhile, said she doesn’t support tying war funding to strict training and readiness targets for U.S. troops.

    The comments distanced her from Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who has said he wants to use Congress’ spending power to force a change in policy in Iraq, by setting strict conditions on war funding.

    Even Murtha is becoming a lightening rod, apparently. So I guess being in the majority isn’t all it’s cracked up to be when people expect you to actually work and make policy.

  • EJ Dionne is still smearing like it’s 1998

    My favorite Leftist moron (you can hear him lisping as you read), EJ Dionne proves that he doesn’t understand the reality of the war against terrorists in today’s Washington Post;

    The fabricate-and-smear cycle illustrated so dramatically during the case of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby explains why President Bush is failing to rally support for the latest iteration of his Iraq policy. The administration’s willingness at the outset to say anything, no matter how questionable, to justify the war has destroyed its credibility.

    He could be talking about the Clinton Administration, couldn’t he? He completely disregards the fact that Joe Wilson has lied more times to the American people than the entire Democrat Party has lied to the American people in it’s two-hundred-year history. He claims he was sent to Nigeria by the Vice President (in his New York Times opinion piece) whic turned out to be false. He went on to claim that his wife had nothing to do with his being sent to Nigeria, which turned out to be false as well. 

    Wilson claimed that there was no evidence that Hussein had been shopping for uranium in Nigeria, which is also false. Wilson claimed that the Bush Administration “outed” his wife the secret squirrel CIA agent, yet it turns out that Wilson himself outed her to General Paul Valelly.

    So why does Dionne bring up that old hack again? To compare it to Cheney’s statement last week about Blinky the Botox Queen;

    Yet Cheney has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. His latest demon is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom he accuses of validating al-Qaeda’s objectives.

    “Al-Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will,” Cheney told ABC News on Friday by way of explaining his earlier attack on the speaker. “That’s their fundamental underlying strategy, that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we’ll quit and go home.”

    Cheney added: “And my statement was that if we adopt the Pelosi policy, that then we will validate the strategy of al-Qaeda. I said it, and I meant it.”

    Dionne doesn’t think this is productive (much like Pelosi herself in her statement that I reported last week);

    No doubt he did, and those words illustrate the administration’s political methodology from the very beginning of its public campaign against Iraq. Back in 2002 and early 2003, it browbeat a reluctant country into this war by making assertions about an Iraqi nuclear program that proved to be groundless and by inventing ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that didn’t exist.

    Then, once our troops were committed, anyone who had second thoughts could be trashed and driven back as a pro-terrorist weakling. The quagmire would be self-perpetuating: Once you checked in, you could never leave.

    Um, EJ, think maybe because your side (ya know the side that the editorial staff of your own paper thinks is “alarmingly uneducated about conditions in Iraq” ) has been lying since the beginning. Can I mention the “quagmire” word to which you and your buddies have been clinging since before the troops set foot in Iraq? Before the first sand storm hit on the second day, ya’all were invoking Viet Nam (which you were also responsible for prolonging with the rest of your chattering class).

    In fact, the crowd at the Huffington Post, more specifically, Paul Abrams can’t resist the urge to invoke Viet Nam even today – as if to make my point for me, and proving you a yammering fool.

    And in case you haven’t noticed, EJ, dear boy, the Left are completely pro-terrorist, and complete weaklings on the war against terrorists. You blast our troops for minute violations of the law of land warfare, and completely overlook the enemies’ huge, nose-on-your-face violations. Ya’all are willing to forgive complete nutjobs, while warning that we can’t stop people who intend to do us real harm. What’s up with that, EJ?

    And now Ms. Rice is jumping in, too. According to Eric Pfeiffer at the Washington Times this morning;

    Miss Rice strongly criticized the Democrats’ plans, some of which would also restrict what actions U.S. troops may take or put impossible conditions on their funding.
        “I think policies that diminish the flexibility of the commanders, the commander in chief, but especially the commanders in the field, that disrupt the normal process of allowing the executive branch to determine things like training times and so forth, this would be a problem,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.”
        She said that while “it’s very important for to have the oversight role when it comes to the execution of policy in the field, there has to be a clear relationship between the commander in chief and the commanders in the field.”
        “If you ever disrupt that chain, then you’re going to have the worst of micromanagement of military affairs, and it’s always served us badly in the past,” Miss Rice said.

    So, I guess EJ is going to get on the name-calling bandwagon against the Madam Secretary now.

    And Carl Levin admits that he wants to enable terrorists;

    Mr. Levin said Democrats still plan to bring forward a resolution that reverses the congressional authorization for President Bush to invade Iraq. Democrats have said they would approve a new resolution limiting the scope of Mr. Bush’s ability to wage war in Iraq, with an aim to bring home most U.S. forces from the country by March 2008.
        “Hopefully, we’re going to come with a resolution which is going to modify, in effect, the previous resolution that was very broad,”

    “Well, then we have a constitutional battle on our hands because this is a binding resolution,” he said. “It would be very difficult, I think, for him to sustain that position given the fact that he has relied so heavily on our resolution authorizing him to go to war in the first place.”

    Doesn’t sound like any of the Democrats want the US to win, does it, Dionne, Jr.? In fact, it seems that Democrats are doing their best to lose while trying to rewrite the Constitution. Doesn’t sound like the American thing to do, does it?

  • Global warming

    That global warming is getting all over the driveway again.

  • Patriotic Pelosi gets her knickers twisted

    According to AP (masquerading as My Way News), VP Cheney said;

    “I think if we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we will do is validate the al-Qaida strategy,” the vice president told ABC News. “The al-Qaida strategy is to break the will of the American people … try to persuade us to throw in the towel and come home, and then they win because we quit.”

    Testosterone-engorged Pelosi then jumps on the table (figuratively, of course) and takes offense, according to Fox News Channel;

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday phoned President Bush to air her complaints over Vice President Dick Cheney‘s comments that the Congressional Democrats’ plan for Iraq would “validate the Al Qaeda strategy.”

    Pelosi, who said she could not reach the president, said Cheney’s comments wrongly questioned critics’ patriotism and ignored Bush’s call for openness on Iraq strategy.

    “You cannot say as the president of the United States, ‘I welcome disagreement in a time of war,’ and then have the vice president of the United States go out of the country and mischaracterize a position of the speaker of the House and in a manner that says that person in that position of authority is acting against the national security of our country,” the speaker said.

    And I guess disagreement is a one-way street in Pelosi-land. A no-confidence vote on our military engaged with the enemy isn’t acting against our national security a bit, eh? For her to characterize the VP’s comments like that is just specious yammering by the intellectually vacant Blinky Botox. How’s that for disagreement, Nan?

    What’s all of this crap about being patriotic suddenly? Before September 2001, you couldn’t find two leftists who’d admit to being patriots that you could rub together in the entire nation. Now suddenly, their knickers get twisted when you question their committment to our winning this war against terrorists. Although the thought of rubbing Pelosi and Murtha against each other is enough to make me skip lunch today.

  • I guess ya hafta be there to understand

    After Tony Blair announced that the UK was drawing down 1/3 of it’s presence in Iraq, the whiteflag Republicans started freaking out according to the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker;

    “What I’m worried about is that the American public will be quite perplexed by the president adding forces while our principal ally is subtracting forces,” said Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), a longtime war supporter who opposes Bush’s troop increase. “That is the burden we are being left with here.”

    The notion that the British pullback actually signals success sounds like bad spin, added Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). “I think it’s Alice in Wonderland looking through the looking glass,” he said.

    It’s almost as if they didn’t believe the President when he said we wouldn’t be in Iraq one more minute than we needed to be there. Blair is only pulling 1/3 fewer troops than he has now because THEY’RE NOT NEEDED. When was the last time we heard of a major assault in predominantly Shi’ite Basra?

    In fact on the second internet page of the WaPo story cooler heads are quoted;

    “What the British are doing, and what we really need to do, is to tease out the cultural complexities of this thing,” said Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest (R-Md.). “On the one hand, they are signaling to all the Iraqi people, whatever sect they are — Sunnis, Shias, Kurds — they are not going to be an occupying force. That’s a powerful signal to send. And the other signal is that they are passing the torch to the Iraqis, who are the only ones who can handle this ancient — I’d say primitive — sectarian dispute.”

    The White House argued that comparing the British situation in Basra and the U.S. position in Baghdad fundamentally distorts reality. The south, where the British have been in charge, has no Sunni insurgency and far less violence than Baghdad or Anbar. The coalition plan all along has been to pull out foreign troops when an area is ready for Iraqi control, the White House said.

    The announcement was hardly a surprise to Bush Administration despite the WaPo’s opinion posited as a headline that it was awkward timing. Sharon Behn of the Washington Times quotes Secretary of State Rice;

    “The coalition remains intact,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said during a visit to Berlin. “It is the plan that — as it is possible to transfer responsibilities to the Iraqis — coalition forces would no longer be needed.”

    And the Brits aren’t withdrawing completely. Apparently Prince Harry is being deployed to Iraq in the Spring;

    Harry – a second lieutenant – has expressed his desire to serve alongside his comrades in Iraq, saying that there was “no way” he was going to undergo rigorous training and then stay away from the battlefield. He graduated last year from Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

    Good on him! That might help the British understand why soldiers go to war. Might.

    According to BBC News, Tony Blair insists that he’s not opposed to sending more troops if they’re needed in Iraq again;

    However, when he was asked about reversing that decision on the Today programme, he said: “I don’t want to get into speculating about that because we have the full combat capability that’s there.

    “So, if we’re needed to go back in any special set of circumstances we can, but that’s not the same as then increasing back the number.” 

    So how the Washington Post considers this “awkward”, I have no idea.

    UPDATE; By way of Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, I discovered that Reihl World View has a link up to a January 11, 2007 BBC article announcing Blair’s plan to withdraw some troops from Iraq.

  • “That’s fine and good, but this is about Iraq”

    The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin and Michael Grunwald report that the nut…er…net-roots are eating their own DINOs;

    Progressive blogs — including two new ones, Ellen Tauscher Weekly and Dump Ellen Tauscher — were bashing her as a traitor to her party. A new liberal political action committee had just named her its “Worst Offender.” And in Tauscher’s East Bay district office that day in January, eight MoveOn.org activists were accusing her of helping President Bush send more troops to Iraq.

    Helping? Jennifer Barton, the lawmaker’s district director, played them a DVD of Tauscher blasting the increase as an awful idea in a floor speech eight days earlier.

    “The words are fine and good, but we are looking for leadership,” scoffed Susan Schaller, one of the activists.

    Leadership? Barton showed them the eight golden shovels Tauscher had received for bringing transportation projects to her suburban district, along with numerous awards she had won for her work protecting children, wetlands, affordable housing and abortion rights.

    “That’s fine and good,” Schaller repeated, “but this is about Iraq.”

    I guess we can’t expect the mindless drones of the Left to focus on more than one topic at a time. It just illustrates the fact that the Democrats think they can win the Presidential election in 2008 by focusing all of their energy on the war in Iraq. they think that their anti-war campaign is what won them the majority (despite the fact that the polls tell a different story – see Sister Toldya, Captain’s Quarters – despite what the Washington Post says).

    Their “10s of thousands” of protesters have given them the false bravado to start throwing their own under the bus. Despite what that intellectually vacant strategy did for Joe Lieberman.

    By the way, the Washington Post does their best to defend Ellen Tauscher by explaining that she used to support the war and she used to be against Pelosi, but, honest, she’s changed now.