Abu Wabu

What Other Kind Is There?
Alan Dershowitz on Jimmy Carter's connections to dirty Saudi money:

Recent disclosures of Carter's extensive financial connections to Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia, had deeply shaken my belief in his integrity. When I was first told that he received a monetary reward in the name of Shiekh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and kept the money, even after Harvard returned money from the same source because of its anti-Semitic history, I simply did not believe it. How could a man of such apparent integrity enrich himself with dirty money from so dirty a source? And let there be no mistake about how dirty the Zayed Foundation is. I know because I was involved, in a small way, in helping to persuade Harvard University to return more than $2 million that the financially strapped Divinity School received from this source. Initially, I was reluctant to put pressure on Harvard to turn back money for the Divinity School, but then a student at the Divinity School, Rachael Lea Fish showed me the facts.

They were staggering. I was amazed that in the twenty-first century there were still foundations that espoused these views. The Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-up, a think-tank funded by the Shiekh and run by his son, hosted speakers who called Jews "the enemies of all nations," attributed the assassination of John Kennedy to Israel and the Mossad and the 9/11 attacks to the United States' own military, and stated that the Holocaust was a "fable." (They also hosted a speech by Jimmy Carter.) To its credit, Harvard turned the money back. To his discredit, Carter did not.

Jimmy Carter was, of course, aware of Harvard's decision, since it was highly publicized. Yet he kept the money. Indeed, this is what he said in accepting the funds: "This award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan." Carter's personal friend, it turns out, was an unredeemable anti-Semite and all-around bigot. ...

The extent of Carter's financial support from, and even dependence on, dirty money is still not fully known. What we do know is deeply troubling. Carter and his Center have accepted millions of dollars from suspect sources, beginning with the bail-out of the Carter family peanut business in the late 1970s by BCCI, a now-defunct and virulently anti-Israeli bank indirectly controlled by the Saudi Royal family, and among whose principal investors is Carter's friend, Sheikh Zayed. Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of the bank, gave Carter "$500,000 to help the former president establish his center...[and] more than $10 million to Mr. Carter's different projects."

Al Qaeda In Iraq
Leftist idiots like those at TalkLeft (no link from here- not now, not ever) keep insisting there is no al Qaeda in Iraq. I guess what they really mean is that there is now at least one less member of al Qaeda in Iraq:

The United States has scored a major victory against al Qaeda's global network. Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, one of Osama bin Laden's senior deputies who was "personally chosen by bin Laden to monitor al Qaeda operations in Iraq," has been captured and transfered to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. government put a $1 million bounty out for Al-Hadi's capture.

It is unknown who captured al-Hadi, or where or when he was captured. "'Abd al-Hadi was trying to return to his native country, Iraq, to manage al Qaeda's affairs and possibly focus on operations outside Iraq against Western targets," according to the Department of Defense. "'Abd al-Hadi also met with al Qaeda members in Iran and believed that they should be doing more with the fight, including supporting efforts in Iraq and causing problems within Iran." Last year, Coalition forces captured senior al Qaeda operative Omar Farouq in Basra after he left Afghanistan to plan operations inside Iraq.

I guess al Masri hasn't been doing his job.

Now watch as the usual suspects make hay not out of the fact that this terrorist asshole is probably responsible for the 7/7 attacks, and the planning of others in Britain, but for the fact that he was held in a CIA Prison For Terrorist Assholes.

Following on the heels of the above revelation is this story confirming another blow to an organization that doesn't exist, this time featuring the capture of weapons from a country that doesn't want a nuclear device with which to destroy Israel:

U.S. forces detained 17 suspected insurgents in raids targeting al-Qaida in Iraq on Saturday, the military said, a day after the Pentagon announced the capture of one of the terror network's most senior and experienced operatives. Elsewhere, U.S. fighter jets destroyed a truck bomb discovered in Anbar province, and an American raid south of Baghdad netted insurgent weapons apparently imported from neighboring Iran, the military said Saturday.
...
The U.S. military in Baghdad said Saturday's raids targeting suspected al-Qaida in Iraq insurgents netted four people in Mosul; six near Karmah, 50 miles west of Baghdad; two near the Syrian border; two in the Iraqi capital; and three near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad. The statement linked some to al-Qaida in Iraq, including one who allegedly served as an intelligence officer.
...
In Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi forces detained eight suspected insurgents and confiscated three caches of weapons during a raid on an apartment complex on April 22, including mortars, rockets and ammunition. The weapons appeared to be new and "were stamped with recent dates and Iranian markings," the military said.

Per Hugh Hewitt:
From Powerline's John Hinderaker this morning:

So al-Hadi, a former Iraqi soldier who became a top al Qaeda operative in Afghanistan and later supervised that organization's operations in Iraq was caught re-entering that country from Iran: three entities that, we are told, cannot possibly have anything to do with one another.

Iraq Withdrawal For Idiots
Senator Joseph Lieberman's speech to the Senate in its entirety:

Mr. President, the supplemental appropriations bill we are debating today contains language that would have Congress take control of the direction of our military strategy in Iraq. Earlier this week the Senate Majority Leader spoke at the Woodrow Wilson Center and laid out the case for why he believes we must do this—why the bill now before this chamber, in his view, offers a viable alternative strategy for Iraq.

I have great respect for my friend from Nevada. I believe he has offered this proposal in good faith, and therefore want to take it up in good faith, and examine its arguments and ideas carefully and in depth, for this is a very serious discussion for our country.

In his speech Monday, the Majority Leader described the several steps that this new strategy for Iraq would entail. Its first step, he said, is to "transition the U.S. mission away from policing a civil war—to training and equipping Iraqi security forces, protecting U.S. forces, and conducting targeted counter-terror operations."

I ask my colleagues to take a step back for a moment and consider this plan.

When we say that U.S. troops shouldn't be "policing a civil war," that their operations should be restricted to this narrow list of missions, what does this actually mean?

To begin with, it means that our troops will not be allowed to protect the Iraqi people from the insurgents and militias who are trying to terrorize and kill them. Instead of restoring basic security, which General Petraeus has argued should be the central focus of any counterinsurgency campaign, it means our soldiers would instead be ordered, by force of this proposed law, not to stop the sectarian violence happening all around them—no matter how vicious or horrific it becomes.

In short, it means telling our troops to deliberately and consciously turn their backs on ethnic cleansing, to turn their backs on the slaughter of innocent civilians—men, women, and children singled out and killed on the basis of their religion alone. It means turning our backs on the policies that led us to intervene in the civil war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the principles that today lead many of us to call for intervention in Darfur.

This makes no moral sense at all.

It also makes no strategic or military sense either.

Al Qaeda's own leaders have repeatedly said that one of the ways they intend to achieve victory in Iraq is to provoke civil war. They are trying to kill as many people as possible today, precisely in the hope of igniting sectarian violence, because they know that this is their best way to collapse Iraq's political center, overthrow Iraq's elected government, radicalize its population, and create a failed state in the heart of the Middle East that they can use as a base.

That is why Al Qaeda blew up the Golden Mosque in Samarra last year. And that is why we are seeing mass casualty suicide bombings by Al Qaeda in Baghdad now.

The sectarian violence that the Majority Leader says he wants to order American troops to stop policing, in other words, is the very same sectarian violence that Al Qaeda hopes to ride to victory. The suggestion that we can draw a bright legislative line between stopping terrorists in Iraq and stopping civil war in Iraq flies in the face of this reality.

I do not know how to say it more plainly: it is Al Qaeda that is trying to cause a full-fledged civil war in Iraq.

The Majority Leader said on Monday that he believes U.S. troops will still be able to conduct "targeted counter-terror operations" under his plan. Even if we stop trying to protect civilians in Iraq, in other words, we can still go after the bad guys.

But again, I ask my colleagues, how would this translate into military reality on the ground? How would we find these terrorists, who do not gather on conventional military bases or fight in conventional formations?

By definition, targeted counterterrorism requires our forces to know where, when,
and against whom to strike—and that in turn requires accurate, actionable, real-time intelligence.

This is the kind of intelligence that can only come from ordinary Iraqis, the sea of people among whom the terrorists hide. And that, in turn, requires interacting with the Iraqi people on a close, personal, daily basis. It requires winning individual Iraqis to our side, gaining their trust, convincing them that they can count on us to keep them safe from the terrorists if they share valuable information about them. This is no great secret. This is at the heart of the new strategy that General Petraeus and his troops are carrying out.

And yet, if we pass this legislation, according to the Majority Leader, U.S. forces will no longer be permitted to patrol Iraq's neighborhoods or protect Iraqi civilians. They won't, in his words, be "interjecting themselves between warring factions" or "trying to sort friend from foe."

Therefore, I ask the supporters of this legislation: How, exactly, are U.S. forces to gather intelligence about where, when, and against whom to strike, after you have ordered them walled off from the Iraqi population? How, exactly, are U.S. forces to carry out targeted counter-terror operations, after you have ordered them cut off from the very source of intelligence that drives these operations?

This is precisely why the congressional micromanagement of life-and-death decisions about how, where, and when our troops can fight is such a bad idea, especially on a complex and changing battlefield.

In sum, you can't have it both ways. You can't withdraw combat troops from Iraq and still fight Al Qaeda there. If you believe there is no hope of winning in Iraq, or that the costs of victory there are not worth it, then you should be for complete withdrawal as soon as possible.

There is another irony here as well.

For most of the past four years, under Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the United States did not try to establish basic security in Iraq. Rather than deploying enough troops necessary to protect the Iraqi people, the focus of our military has been on training and equipping Iraqi forces, protecting our own forces, and conducting targeted sweeps and raids—in other words, the very same missions proposed by the
proponents of the legislation before us.

That strategy failed—and we know why it failed. It failed because we didn't have enough troops to ensure security, which in turn created an opening for Al Qaeda and its allies to exploit. They stepped into this security vacuum and, through horrific violence, created a climate of fear and insecurity in which political and economic
progress became impossible.

For years, many members of Congress recognized this. We talked about this. We called for more troops, and a new strategy, and—for that matter—a new secretary of defense.

And yet, now, just as President Bush has come around—just as he has recognized the mistakes his administration has made, and the need to focus on basic security in Iraq, and to install a new secretary of defense and a new commander in Iraq—now his critics in Congress have changed their minds and decided that the old, failed strategy wasn't so bad after all.

What is going on here? What has changed so that the strategy that we criticized and rejected in 2006 suddenly makes sense in 2007?

The second element in the plan outlined by the Majority Leader on Monday is "the phased redeployment of our troops no later than October 1, 2007."

Let us be absolutely clear what this means. This legislation would impose a binding deadline for U.S. troops to begin retreating from Iraq. This withdrawal would happen regardless of conditions on the ground, regardless of the recommendations of General Petraeus, in short regardless of reality on October 1, 2007.

As far as I can tell, none of the supporters of withdrawal have attempted to explain why October 1 is the magic date—what strategic or military significance this holds. Why not September 1? Or January 1? This is a date as arbitrary as it is inflexible—a deadline for defeat.

How do proponents of this deadline defend it? On Monday, Senator Reid gave several reasons. First, he said, a date for withdrawal puts "pressure on the Iraqis to make the desperately needed political compromises."

But will it? According to the legislation now before us, the withdrawal will happen
regardless of what the Iraqi government does.

How, then, if you are an Iraqi government official, does this give you any incentive to make the right choices?

On the contrary, there is compelling reason to think a legislatively directed withdrawal of American troops will have exactly the opposite effect than its Senate sponsors intend.

This, in fact, is exactly what the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq predicted. A withdrawal of U.S. troops in the months ahead, it said, would "almost certainly lead to a significant increase in the scale and scope of sectarian conflict,
intensify Sunni resistance, and have adverse effects on national reconciliation."

Second, the Majority Leader said that withdrawing our troops, and again I quote, will "reduce the specter of the U.S. occupation which gives fuel to the insurgency."

My colleague from Nevada, in other words, is suggesting that the insurgency is being provoked by the very presence of American troops. By diminishing that presence, then, he believes the insurgency will diminish.

But I ask my colleagues—where is the evidence to support this theory? Since 2003, and before General Petraeus took command, U.S. forces were ordered on several occasions to pull back from Iraqi cities and regions, including Mosul and Fallujah and Tel'Afar and Baghdad. And what happened in these places? Did they stabilize when American troops left? Did the insurgency go away?

On the contrary—in each of these places where U.S. forces pulled back, Al Qaeda rushed in. Rather than becoming islands of peace, they became safe havens for terrorists, islands of fear and violence.

So I ask advocates of withdrawal: on what evidence, on what data, have you concluded that pulling U.S. troops out will weaken the insurgency, when every single
experience we have had since 2003 suggests that this legislation will strengthen it?

Consider the words of Sheikh Abdul Sattar, one of the leading Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province who is now fighting on our side against Al Qaeda. This is what he told the New York Times when asked last month what would happen if U.S. troops withdraw. "In my personal opinion, and in the opinion of most of the wise men of Anbar," he said, "if the American forces leave right now, there will be civil war and the area will fall into total chaos."

This is a man whose father was killed by Al Qaeda, who is risking his life every day to work with us—a man who was described by one Army officer as "the most effective local leader in Ramadi I believe the coalition has worked with... in Anbar [since] 2003."

In his remarks earlier this week, the Majority Leader observed that there is "a large and growing population of millions—who sit precariously on the fence. They will either condemn or contribute to terrorism in the years ahead. We must convince them of the goodness of America and Americans. We must win them over."

On this, I completely agree with my friend from Nevada. My question to him, however, and to the supporters of this legislation, is this: how does the strategy you propose in this bill possibly help win over this population of millions in Iraq, who sit
precariously on the fence?

What message, I ask, does this legislation announce to those people in Iraq? How will they respond when we tell them that we will no longer make any effort to protect them against insurgents and death squads? How will they respond when we declare that we will be withdrawing our forces—regardless of whether they make progress in the next six months towards political reconciliation? Where will their hopes for a better life be when we withdraw the troops that are the necessary precondition for the security and stability they yearn for?

Do my friends really believe that this is the way to convince Iraqis, and the world, of the goodness of America and Americans?

Does anyone in this chamber really believe that, by announcing a date certain for withdrawal, we will empower Iraqi moderates, or enable Iraq's reconstruction, or open more schools for their children, or more hospitals for their families, or freedom for everyone?

Mr. President, with all due respect, this is fantasy.

The third step the Majority Leader proposes is to impose "tangible, measurable, and achievable benchmarks on the Iraqi government."

I am all for such benchmarks. In fact, Senator McCain and I were among the first to propose legislation to apply such benchmarks on the Iraqi government.

But I don't see how this plan will encourage Iraqis to meet these or any other benchmarks, given its ironclad commitment to abandon them—regardless of how they behave.

We should of course be making every effort to encourage reconciliation in Iraq and the development of a decent political order that Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds can agree on.

But even if today that political solution was found, we cannot rationally think that our terrorist enemies like Al Qaeda in Iraq will simply vanish.

Al Qaeda is not mass murdering civilians on the streets of Baghdad because it wants a more equitable distribution of oil revenues. Its aim in Iraq is not to get a seat at
the political table. It wants to blow up the table—along with everyone seated at it. Al Qaeda wants to destroy any prospect for democracy in Iraq, and it will not be negotiated or reasoned out of existence. It must be fought and defeated through force of arms. And there can be no withdrawal, no redeployment from this reality.

The fourth step that the Majority Leader proposed on Monday is a "diplomatic, economic, and political offensive... starting with a regional conference working toward a long-term framework for stability in the region."

I understand why we are tempted by these ideas. All of us are aware of the justified frustration, fatigue, and disappointment of the American people. And all of us would like to believe that there is a quick and easy solution to the challenges we face in Iraq.

But none of this gives us an excuse to paper over hard truths. We delude ourselves if we think we can wave a legislative wand and suddenly our troops in the field will be able to distinguish between Al Qaeda terrorism and sectarian violence, or that Iraqis will suddenly settle their political differences because our troops are leaving, or that sweet reason alone will suddenly convince Iran and Syria to stop destabilizing Iraq.

Mr. President, what we need now is a sober assessment of the progress we have made and a recognition of the challenges we face. There are still many uncertainties before us, many complexities. Barely half of the new troops that General Petraeus has requested have even arrived in Iraq, and, as we heard from him yesterday, it will still be months before we will know just how effective his new strategy is.

In following General Petraeus' path, there is no guarantee of success—but there is hope, and a new plan, for success.

The plan embedded in this legislation, on the other hand, contains no such hope. It is a strategy of catchphrases and bromides, rather than military realities in Iraq. It does not learn from the many mistakes we have made in Iraq. Rather, it promises to repeat them.

Let me be absolutely clear: In my opinion, Iraq is not yet lost—but if we follow this plan, it will be. And so, I fear, much of our hope for stability in the Middle East and security from terrorism here at home.

I yield the floor.

And Finally...
Again from Hugh Hewitt, Thoughts for Harry Reid By Tarzana Joe

Would Rockne be remembered
If the towel he had tossed?
Forget about the Gipper, boys
This game’s already lost.

Would Lincoln be a hero
And on pennies be embossed
If he announced that, after Shiloh
This Union, friends, is lost.

Would Caesar have surrendered
Before the Rubicon was crossed?
Did Ulysses pull the plug
When his barque was tempest-tossed?

Would Perry’s flag be flying
Would hist’ry gip a rip
If, on it, he embroidered
“Do give up the ship!”

If we’d been bowed by setbacks
Or our opponents’ fury
Nothing would have happened
On the deck of the Missouri

So in the battle of our lifetime
If I can be the chooser
I’d rather keep on fighting
Than declare myself the loser.

Joe can be reached at tarzanajoe@hotmail.com.

Jules Crittenden has everything covered in the battle of wits between President Bush and the Democrat defeatists led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. One of the most interesting items on JC's roster is Sayanything's assertion that the Dems have pre-surrendered to the President and his constitutionally-mandated authority to conduct war.

Sounds reasonable to me; surrender is their default position, because it buys them the approval of their base. The problem is that their base, which is anti-war-at-any-cost, anti-Bush, anti-America and terrorist-enabling, is the monster they must feed in hope it eats them last.

And boy, is that thing gonna chow down in '08.

Michael Ledeen:

...the best analysis of, and remedy for, liberal guilt I've read in a long long time.

Try this, for example:

We have bought into multiculturalism because we no longer have the fortitude, the honesty or the intelligence to look someone in the eye and tell them, “Look, you are humiliated because you do not have the culture or political leaders or the education to be otherwise. You really need to stop making such a big deal about feeling humiliated. Why not try some of these simple steps toward civilization instead:

1. Specifically outlaw honor killing;

2. Stop beating your wife and/or kids;

3. Send your kids to a decent school where they won’t waste their time memorizing an entire “holy book” to the exclusion of learning critical thinking skills and studying arithmetic, science and geography;

4. Forget using Israel, Jews and America as the excuse for being a loser;

5. Understand that your leader (fill in one: Ahmadinejad, Assad, Kadafy, Mubarak, Abdullah etc…) is a tyrant of the worst sort and is actually working hard to keep you ignorant and filled with rage; that’s how your feudal system works.

6. For God’s sake stop thinking of anyone who believes...in a different way than you do as less than human. That only makes you feel worse when you see that those “unbelievers” live better than you do. If you take care of all that, there would be no need for you to feel humiliated anymore.”

Joining civilization is not rocket science.

From the New York Times:

A Holocaust survivor gunned down trying to save his students from the Virginia Tech shooting rampage was buried in Israel Friday to the sobs of his grieving family.
Engineering Professor Liviu Librescu's body was wrapped in a prayer shawl according to Jewish tradition, and his two sons intoned the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead.

A representative of the Romanian government posthumously awarded the Romanian-born Librescu the country's highest medal for his scientific accomplishments and heroism. Romanian officials laid a wreath at the grave.

''I walked through the streets today with my head held high because I have such a father,'' his elder son, Joe, said.

Librescu, a 76-year-old aeronautics engineer and lecturer at the school for 20 years, died trying to barricade the door of his Virginia Tech classroom to keep the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, away from his students.

It's always interesting what the msm deems *news worthy*. For instance, look at the coverage the Imus affair received. You would have thought this Imus character burned down the White House, he was a headliner for a week. And the Duke lacrosse case, that's another strange one. That was on the news full-time until the case started unravelling, then when it was clear the boys were innocent, news organizations ran from it like it was typhoid fever. Even Jesse Jackson acts like he's never heard of it (he still hasn't apologized to the boys for inferring that they were rapists).What doesn't the msm deem as news? Stories like this:

These two were out on a date minding their own business when they were car jacked and this is what happened to them.The animals pictured below raped Christopher Newsom, cut off his penis, then set him on fire and fatally shot him several times while they forced his girlfriend, Channon Christian, to watch. An even more cruel fate awaited her!

Channon Christian was beaten and gang-raped in many ways for four days by all of them, while they took turns urinating on her. Then they cut off her breast and put chemicals in her mouth … and then murdered her.

Ask yourself the obvious question: If this was four white people that did this exact same thing to a young black couple, would this be front page news? Simplify it even, do you think this is newsworthy? If it is newsworthy, where is CNN with the coverage, or the NY Times, or any of the msm? Their silence speaks volumes.

The Duke gang rape story is imaginary, not real.
The damage done by the Duke gang rape story is real, not imaginary.
The double murder was real, not imaginary.
Did the Duke Hoax and the way the media covered it contribute to the double murders?
I wonder, especially after reading that "her kidnappers sprayed cleaning fluid into her mouth to cleanse it of DNA."
There's an old saying in the media: if it bleeds, it leads.
Apparently not when the victims are white and the accused are black.

And

Trust me when I say this story is more newsworthy than the Natalie Holloway case, the Duke lacrosse scandal and Anna Nicole Smith combined. A young couple, students from the University of Tennessee, were victims of a carjacking and were kidnapped, raped, tortured and eventually murdered by five people. Descriptions of their deaths were so brutal that I had to read them several times to fully process the implications.

To keep reading The Flying Imams.

Hot Air looks at Fred Thompson's meeting with House Republicans. Verdict: they like 'im.

The comment section for this post is a hoot. Ya gotta love the Hot Air faithful, happy warriors all.

In From The Cold quotes Jackie Robinson on his journey to baseball's heights, and the blessing that made it possible:

"Whatever obstacles I found made me fight all the harder. But it would have been impossible for me to fight at all, except that I was sustained by the personal and deep-rooted belief that my fight had a chance. It had a chance because it took place in a free society. Not once was I forced to face and fight an immovable object. Not once was the situation so cast-iron rigid that I had no chance at all. Free minds and human hearts were at work all around me; and so there was the probability of improvement. I look at my children now, and know that I must still prepare them to meet obstacles and prejudices.

"But I can tell them, too, that they will never face some of these prejudices because other people have gone before them. And to myself I can say that, because progress is unalterable, many of today's dogmas will have vanished by the time they grow into adults. I can say to my children: There is a chance for you. No guarantee, but a chance."

Insurgents in Iraq plot to video their attack on Coalition Forces but instead record their own demise.

Sweeeeet.

Caution: Graphically fair and balanced.

Sixty years ago, April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson began playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

God loves baseball.

I didn't even get past the second paragraph of Jack Kelly's Sunday column before I was almost floored by British health secretary Patricia Hewitt's profoundly idiotic utterance: "It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking," Ms. Hewitt said. "This sends completely the wrong message to our young people."

In an act of war by a criminal regime, your soldiers have been kidnapped from Iraqi waters while fulfilling a UN mandated mission, after which their rights under the Geneva Convention have been repeatedly violated, and your government is worried that images of one of its illegally imprisoned soldiers smoking a cigarette sends the wrong message.

There's a wrong message here, alright, but it ain't about cigarettes. That is so profoundly, unimaginably stupid that it is no wonder the Iranians, whose stock-in-trade is embarrassment-by-kidnapping, targeted the British for its latest provocations. That monumental stupidity also perfectly illustrates the problem with today's brand of leftist idiot/terror-apologist moron, as Kelly points out:

Some liken liberal appeasers to those Britons who wanted to make a deal with Hitler after the fall of France in 1940. That's unfair to those appeasers. Their attitude was not honorable, but it was reasonable. The Nazis then possessed a substantial advantage in military power. Today's liberal appeasers embrace dhimmitude even though it's the West that has a huge military and economic advantage.

This extent to which liberals are willing to accept inferior status to Muslims even in their own countries is mind-boggling. In Britain, schools are dropping references to the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims, the Daily Mail reported. In Minneapolis, some Muslim cab drivers reject passengers carrying alcohol, and Muslim clerks in a grocery store have refused to wait on customers who want to buy pork products. In several Western countries, some Muslim cab drivers have turned away blind passengers with seeing-eye dogs. (Many Muslims consider dogs "unclean.")

Liberals are not so much terrified by the threat radical Islam poses as they are oblivious to it. A recent poll indicated a majority of Democrats are more worried about global warming than Islamic terror. While many liberals do indeed need to have backbones surgically implanted, more need to have their heads examined.

One dummy dhimmy is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is under the mistaken impression she was also elected secretary of state. She was unwilling to bring up for a vote a resolution supporting the British in the hostage crisis, but was eager to suck up to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

****

The infidels Allah is about to destroy, he first makes mad. I suspect that Mahmoud the Magnanimous (as journalist/blogger Jules Crittenden has dubbed the president of Iran) believes this. And with liberals taking his side against their own governments, who can blame him?

The Flying Imams is a new blog dedicated to keeping track of Islamist cover organizations like CAIR and al Jazeera, and their many and varied attacks on Western civilization. Its author, Captain Jack, "strives to bring you the latest information on possible terrorist threats, probes, dry-runs and just plain stupidity from the skies."

Freedom Dogs adopts Time's "tearful Reagan" sniping to a more pressing issue.



The subhead references Mark Steyn's column on the collapse of the British spine.

President Bush's counter-insurgency campaign led by General Patreus is already bearing fruit, scant news of which is getting out to the folks. Since the President mentioned IRAQ THE MODEL in a speech, the idiots have been swarming there. Big surprise.

Here's ITM's tale of a meeting with U.S. troops over a neighborhood barbeque:

I often find myself in arguments with people about the behavior of American soldiers when they search homes and many of the people I talk to base their argument and negative impression on the footage of some raids we see on TV or on experiences of presumed relatives or friends.

I realize that for some other Iraqis having their homes searched wasn't as smooth or as pleasant an experience as ours but this is my story and I thought I'd share it.

These guys tell it straight. Love it.