Abu Wabu

The noise created by Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History Of The American Left From Mussolini To The Politics Of Meaning fills the national town square in typical fashion. On the Right, the sharing of ideas, the exercise of intellectual rigor and the satisfaction derived from honest discussion and debate; on the left, whining, cursing, violent fantasizing and the gnashing of teeth.

Belmont Club's Wretchard often finds the nugget in the mud and has done so in his post, Liberal Fascism, Islamism and the 21st century, in which he raises a key point in Hugh Hewitt's interview with Goldberg:

This exchange captures the link between the 20th century struggle against Communism and Fascism and the 21st century's epic battle against radical Islamism. The key difference between those ideologies and the Lockean view is where they put God -- or if you prefer Ultimate Legitimacy -- in relation to society. Both liberal fascism and Islamic fundamentalism put God on earth; both are theocracies in the sense they believe that God actually rules temporally. In the first case the Deity takes the form of an enlightened vanguard; in the second case Allah rules through the Caliphate via Sharia law.

Pertinent to today's phenomenon of Barack Hussein Obama as Jesus 2.0.

Erica Stalnecker presents a link roundup at NRO.

Editorials
DC Examiner: Demand a Recount
Chicago Tribune: Buckley's World
The Daily Telegraph: William F Buckley
Investor's Business Daily: Bucking History
Los Angeles Times: In His Own Right
National Post: Editorial Board on the Death of William F. Buckley: A Conservative Giant
Philadelphia Inquirer: A Man of Letters - Lots of Them
The Washington Post: Conservatism Loses Its Most Eloquent Voice
Union Leader: Farewell, WFB: Remembering Bill Buckley

News Stories & Commentary
Paul Needham: William F. Buckley Jr. ’50 Dies at 82
Julia Keller: William F. Buckley, Conservative Icon
John Bogert: Having a Beer With William F. Buckley Jr
John O'Sullivan: As Long As He Was Alive, The Liberals Could Never Win
Scott Kraft: William F. Buckley Jr
Jacob Heilbrunn: The Last True Conservative
Jeet Heer: Man of Ideas
Adam Daifallah: The Death of William F. Buckley
Robert B. Semple Jr.: William F. Buckley Jr
Douglas Martin: William F. Buckley Jr., 82, Dies; Sesquipedalian Spark of Right
Aileen Jacobson: Conservative Pundit William F. Buckley Jr. Dead at 82
Carolyn Click: ‘Inspiration to Millions’
David Jackson: Eloquent Champion of Conservatives Dies
Jed Babbin: William F. Buckley, Jr. Dead at 82
Lee Edwards: Bill Buckley: The Founder of the Movement
Mark Skousen: Bill Buckley and Me: A True Story
Ann Coulter: William F. Buckley: R.I.P., Enfant Terrible
Dana Cook: William F. Buckley Jr., 1925-2008
Henry Allen: William F. Buckley Jr., Rapier Wit Of the Right
Bart Barnes: Erudite Voice of the Conservative Movement
Mona Charen: A Profoundly Consequential Life

Obituaries
Times of London: William F. Buckley Jr: Obituary
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Obituary: William F. Buckley Jr. / Erudite Founder of Modern Conservative Movement
The Toronto Star: Champion of Conservatism
Slate: William F. Buckley, RIP

Via Hot Air
Prior to attacking the NAFTA Agreement in recent statements, Barack Rodham Obama's campaign contacted Canadian Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Wilson to assure him that such statements were only campaign rhetoric and not to be taken seriously by the Canadian government.

Barack Obama has ratcheted up his attacks on NAFTA, but a senior member of his campaign team told a Canadian official not to take his criticisms seriously, CTV News has learned. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton have been critical of the long-standing North American Free Trade Agreement over the course of the Democratic primaries, saying that the deal has cost U.S. workers’ jobs.

Within the last month, a top staff member for Obama’s campaign telephoned Michael Wilson, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, and warned him that Obama would speak out against NAFTA, according to Canadian sources.

The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face value.

So Obama formalizes with the Canadian Government that he is lying to American voters in service to absconding with the White House. Or he is lying to the Canadian Government; neither decision is a good start for an aspiring President; not to his friendly neighbor, trading partner and close ally, and certainly not to American voters. In any case, the world now knows that Barack Obama is an opportunistic liar.

Ed Morrissey:

In case the Democrats don’t realize it, Canada is our most important trading partner — and they rely on NAFTA heavily. Canada is our number one resource for oil, followed by our other NAFTA partner Mexico. If we junk NAFTA, it will create a fairly large diplomatic rift and ripples throughout our economy. Instead of making us more popular in the world, the Democrats will start making us less popular on our own continent and alienate our closest friend, as well as damage all three economies.

Perhaps that’s why Obama’s campaign didn’t want the Canadians to take him seriously. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans are taking him seriously, even if Obama apparently doesn’t return the favor.

Ever since Al Gore promised me that the Earth would soon warm to the point that I could travel from Chicago to Phoenix in a sailboat, I've been dreaming of living in the New Northern Tropics. Ocean breezes, a perpetual tan, drinks with the little umbrellas, all in the comfort of my very own all-inclusive Reykjavic timeshare. Now, those dreams are as dead as a drowned polar bear. The jig is up, folks. The planet is going to freeze:

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Kyoto has always been a fucking joke. Flash: Earth's temperature changes are the result of solar activity and not SUV-driving soccer moms.

Duh.

Query: How long before Al Gore and his band of envirofascists find a way to scam the New Global Cooling Disaster?

Drink Deep, Fools: More Bad News
Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
Reseacher: Arctic Temperatures "Not Especially Warm"
Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age
SUV Not Big Enough for You? Try an XUV

To the Palestinians for murdering another Jew.

Nice work, boys. Proud of ya.

Now We're Getting Somewhere
The New Republic is accusing Barack Rodham Obama of race-baiting the Clinton campaign:

The Obama campaign's "fairy tale" gambit was particularly transparent. Commenting on Obama's explanation of why he is more against the war in Iraq than Hillary Clinton, and disturbed by the news media's failure to report Obama's actual voting record on Iraq in the Senate, the former president referred to what had become the conventional wisdom as a "fairy tale" concocted by Obama and his supporters. Time to play the race-baiter card! One of Obama's most prominent backers, the mayor of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin, stretched Clinton's remarks and implied that he had called Obama's entire candidacy a fairy tale. (The mayor later coyly told a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she had not intended to criticize Clinton: "Surely you don't mean he's the only one who can use the phrase 'fairy tale,'" Franklin said, in a tone that the reporter described as "mock indignation.") Appearing on CNN, one of its pundits, Donna Brazile, hurled the wild charge that Clinton had likened Obama to a child. "And I will tell you," she concluded, "as an African American I find his words and his tone to be very depressing." With those kinds of remarks--"as an African American"--the race card and the race-baiter card both came back into play. Although Brazile is formally not part of Obama's campaign, her comments made their way to the South Carolina memo, offered as evidence that Clinton's comment was racially insensitive.

I intensely dislike the Clintons, but no one for a moment believes they are "racially insensitive". What dishonest nonsense. Only a brazen demagogue would even think of daring to accuse them of that, and Obama is that guy.

Wow. He really is The One. He's everything I could ever Hope for in a Democrat candidate for President. He is a Godsend. He is truly the Angel of Change, and he has just sealed the election.



For John McCain.

Big kudos to The Real Revo.

Derived from the weekly PBS television show of the same name, Peter Robinson's "Uncommon Knowledge" is now shown exclusively on the internet at the NRO and Hoover Institute websites. The interviews are insightful current affairs discussions featuring political leaders, distinguished scholars, and leading journalists.


The most recent edition features Peter Robinson's interview with the great Dr. Thomas Sowell on his new book, Economic Facts and Fallacies. In the first three segments posted at NRO, Sowell deals with male–female employment fallacies, the MSM's abuse of economic data, and the broadly corrosive effects of university tenure.

Rest in Peace. So long, sir, and thanks for all the principals.

Via Hot Air, the obligatory clip:



Also, a 2006 interview with Charlie Rose.

Today will be a day for reading The Corner.

Ed Morrissey and National Review's Jim Geraghty remember Bill Buckley on Blog Talk Radio.

Andrew C. McCarthy looks back at the day radical Islam declared war on civilization in 15 Years@War

In hindsight, we now know the silver lining caused us to miss the ferocity and determination of our enemies.

Only a few weeks before the bombing, the blind sheikh, who had been in constant communication with his co-conspirators, had attracted a crowd of followers at a Brooklyn rally. “God has obliged us to perform jihad,” he thundered. “The battalions of Islam and its divisions must be in a state of continuous readiness . . . to hit their enemies with strength and power.”

The “enemies at the foremost of the work against Islam,” he declared, were “America and the allies.” For them, he had a warning:

If those who have the right [to have something] are terrorists then we are terrorists. And we welcome being terrorists. And we do not deny this charge to ourselves. And the Qur’an makes it among the means to perform jihad for the sake of Allah, which is to terrorize the enemies of God and our enemies too. . . . Then we must be terrorists and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.

Radical Islam had sought an Armageddon for its declaration of war. But the paltry number of deaths, an absolute miracle under the circumstances, denied the jihadists the monstrous “victory” they’d hoped for. Simultaneously, it confirmed us in our determination to regard them as mere criminals.

As Instapundit notes, this and other stories about Obama's friends and fellow travellers has grown legs.

Power Line is on a roll in backgrounding B. Hussein Himself. We already have extensive information on Himself's anti-Israeli policy advisors, domestic terrorist pals, seedy bagmen, his anti-semitic pastor, Louis Farrakan and other shady characters. Now, in A Centrist With No One To His Left and A Centrist With No One To His Left, Part Two, they take a look at his voting record and policy thoughts, such as they are.

Barack Hussein Obama's past and ties are finally becoming the subject of wide discussion. Power Line has written a series of posts about his virulently anti-Israeli foreign policy advisor Samantha Power who, along with B. Hussein Himself, has availed herself of some of George Soros' vast anti-American resources.

Power Line: Soft Power
Power Line: Soft Power, Part Two
Power Line: Soft Power, Part Three
Power Line: Soft Power, Part Four

A key quote from Paul Mirengoff:

Perhaps Obama can explain which of Powers' views (as documented by Lasky and Baehr) make her so attractive to him. Is it her view that the Jewish lobby pushed us into war with Iraq (a view that even Walt and Mearsheimer are no longer willing to defend)? Is it her view of Israelis as war criminals whose tactics the U.S. mimics to its detriment in Iraq? Is it her outrage at the way Israel treated the U.N.'s faux peacekeepers in South Lebanon, the ones who stood by while Hezbollah gained a dominant position and used it to commit aggression against Israel? Perhaps it's simply her willingness to embrace virtually every slander of Israel that can be dredged from the fever swamp, and the hatred of that State this willingness reflects.

Ali Abunimah, a well-known Chicago-based activist for Palestinian causes, says that Obama has apologized to him for not being more up-front in his support for these causes, and has expressed the hope that this will change once the constraints of running for office are out of the way. With key advisers like Power in the wings, Obama looks like a good bet to deliver on his audacious hope should Americans be foolish enough to elect him president. (Emphasis mine)

Others have done admirable work uncovering that which the Obama camp is trying so hard to keep contained. Noah Pollak has several posts on his blog at Commentary Magazine:
Obama and Israel, continued
Obama and Israel–It Gets Worse
“Can Friends of Israel–and Jews–Trust Obama?”
Is He Or Isn’t He?
More Samantha Power
Samantha Power: the Salon Interview
Obama’s Power Ranger
Look Who’s Talking
An Inconvenient Truth

Ed Lasky has written extensively on Obama at American Thinker, including the incredibly thorough and enlightening Barack Obama and Israel, a must-read. Along with Richard Baehr, his other work on the subject includes the following:
Barack Obama's Middle East Expert
The Audacity of Questioning Obama's Commitment to Israel
Samantha Power and Obama's Foreign Policy Team

along with these other references:

http://www.nysun.com/article/70615http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/pollak/2085
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/?p=2093
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/14/AR2008011402083.html
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/trager/2123
http://www.nypost.com/seven/01182008/postopinion/editorials/baracks_un_righteous_rev_760599.htm
http://www.forward.com/articles/12508/
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/02/019701.php
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/01/019669.php
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5783.html
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0108/tobin012408.php3?printer_friendly

Under the title Obama's Chicago-style Politics, Patrick Ruffini exposes a Senate Democrats plot to freeze the McCain campaign by blocking FEC appointments. And which Democrat placed a hold on a key appointment that prevents the FEC from doing its job?

Hint: He glows like Heaven itself.

Now here's a larger issue: is this part of a pattern?

Sure looks that way. Hot Air has news of more, and more recent, Barack meetings with Weathermen terrorists Willliam Ayres and Bernadette Dohrn. And the Times Online says A British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama's fundraiser just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender.

Can you say "Rezko"? I know: me too.

Let's begin by assuming the very worst. Let's assume Obama is horribly corrupt and he makes it to the White House. But let's allow ourselves to Hope that he Changes. Upon entering the hallowed confines of the Oval Office he has an epiphany and is miraculously no longer beholden to his patrons and is free to exercise his best, most honest and assiduous judgement as President; the angels of his better nature if you will. He becomes pure as the driven snow. Doesn't matter. Obama's naive world view remains the same as we know it to be based on his statements (just words), and his career record as a politician. On those alone, the man is clearly not suited to go anywhere near the Oval Office.

Also, check this out: First Lady Michelle Obama. Fair game, yo. Not Ready For Prime Time. I said the same thing about John F'n Kerry in 2004, that he was an empty suit and a disaster in the making, with a freakin' crazy spouse to boot, and of course we see now that that was true: does anyone out of three hundred million Americans regret that Teraiza Heinz Kerry was not the First Lady?

I am right about Ubama, too: if elected, he will be not just a disaster, not just a fucking disaster, but a fucking huge disaster, especially when he appoints to the Supreme Court. And if that happens, Americans won't elect another Democrat to the White House until amoebas drive speedboats.

So it just might be worth it.

HT: National Lampoon

Just for the record, the so-called "victim" who assembled the piece of shit videos he calls a story about Barack Obama on YouTube is named Larry Sinclair.

No link- not now, not ever.

Such is the value of a YouTube account.

The NY Times' piece-of-shit story on John McCain has buried the Old Grey Mare under a storm of righteous criticism, so I've got to hand it to them that they now have the cojones to trot out their Public Editor Clark Hoyt who, under the guise of taking Bill Keller to task for allowing said fiasco, actually takes an entirely fresh and innuendo-laden shot at McCain.

The pity of it is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good story. McCain, who was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 for exercising “poor judgment” by intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a corrupt savings and loan executive, recast himself as a crusader against special interests and the corrupting influence of money in politics. Yet he has continued to maintain complex relationships with lobbyists like Iseman, at whose request he wrote to the Federal Communications Commission to urge a speed-up on a decision affecting one of her clients.

Well now.

It isn't really like that is it, Mr. Hoyt? In fact you've left out some very pertinent facts regarding those charges you make against McCain- well, okay, they're not really charges- you're right. To be fair, they are more accurately just more of the same disingenuous nudge-nudge-wink-wink bullshit comprising the original smear article you now pretend to criticize.

First, McCain's lawyer Bob Bennett said on the very day the Times printed its smear that, as counsel to the Democrat-majority committee investigating the Keating Five back in the day, he explicitly told the committee that his investigations proved beyond a reasonable doubt that McCain was innocent of any wrongdoing, but that McCain's name was kept in the investigation by Democrat members in order to offer up a Republican in what was in fact a scandal confined to Democrats.

As for writing "to the Federal Communications Commission to urge a speed-up on a decision affecting one of [Vicki Iseman's] clients", the record shows that McCain indeed did exactly that. The implication is that this is wrong. It isn't. It would have been had McCain suggested his support for a particular outcome in the pending decision, but he did no such thing. He wrote to the FCC on behalf of Iseman's client because said decision had been demonstrably unusually delayed; McCain wrote to ask that the matter be finally resolved.

So Public Editor Clark Hoyt is the man charged with cleaning up after Bill Keller. But Hoyt's piece-of-shit article masquerading as an admonition to Keller is in fact an extension of the New York Times' original slandering of McCain by innuendo. So no, the New York Times has not yet hit bottom.

UPDATED---SCROLL DOWN

First: not a damned thing to do with bad policy by Bush- in fact, quite the opposite. Second, not a damned thing to do with the war in Iraq diverting resources. In fact, the problem was "trying to resupply an operation at the end of an 8,000 mile supply chain the last 1,000 miles of which is by tactical air and then by ground through the most austere and remote environment on the planet." A massive effort that dwarfs even the historic Berlin Airlift, and lasting far, far longer.

The truth behind the story is far less damning–if even damning at all. The captain (he is a captain now, but was a lieutenant when all this occurred back in 2003!) didn’t have half his platoon in one theatre while the rest was deployed somewhere else. Instead his unit, as a result of normal personnel rotations, had lost soldiers who had been transferred elsewhere and hadn’t yet been replaced. The Army’s individual replacement system, which makes such a gap in coverage possible, is in the midst of an overhaul toward a unit replacement system. Ironically, the long-overdue overhaul was in large part forced on the Army by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over the objections of many senior officers in the service who were wedded to the older system which had been in place for three generations.

(UPDATE: Four years ago I wrote an article for Military Review on this very subject. Unfortunately, the article is full of impenetrable army jargon, but the gist of it is a reform proposal much of which the Army actually implemented.)

We also now know that 1) U.S. soldiers were not forced to steal ammo and weapons from the Tally-Ban to replace their own (what a laugher) and 2) Barack! needs help with military matters. A lot of help. The first hint is that he may want to dispense with the old "good war, bad war" silliness. I Hope He will Bring Change to the tired old leftist idiocy of spreading Beauchampian soldiers-as-victims lies instead of debating policy.

UPDATED: Gateway Pundit has the most comprehensive review of this mess that I've seen so far. The most interesting development is that The One has been called out by mere mortal Senator John Warner, former Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Warner wants to hold a hearing on Obama's allegations and has invited The One to both grace the Committee with His knowledge on the matter and also to allow its members to bathe in His Glorious Light.

Michael Goldfarb is also on the case at the Weekly Standard.

Via Ace
I was a loyal viewer of Star Trek: The Next Generation, so this is red meat for me. Great stuff.

Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle. Just click and you will see how much he can do for you.

Stuart Koehl examines Barack Ubama's Afghanistan rifle-platoon-story-disguised-as-morality-tale:

Overall, I think Obama would be better sticking to his "message of hope"--hope that nobody will ever ask him to make any substantive statements on military affairs, ever again.

The Politico writes on Obama's meeting with Weathermen bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While musing on CNN's shilling for Castro, Tiger Hawk reminds us of this self-explanatory gem from John Derbyshire:

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

This is, of course, much the same thinking that claims that Iraqis were better off with the "stability" that they enjoyed under the tender mercies of the Hussein family.

From Jonah Golberg at NRO

Obamania and Trudeaumania.

Wow.

AIM's Cliff Kincaid reports on legislation that, spearheaded by Barack Obama will rob the U.S. economy of 845 billion dollars. That's Eight Hundred and Forty-Five Billion with a great big "B". The One seems bent on redistributing wealth out of the United States and into the United Nations, who can do with it what they want.

Now there's a comforting thought.

Debbie Schlussel points out a well-made YouTube video that begins the deconstruction of The One in Obamboozled: Did B Hussein O Steal Speeches From Racist Spike Lee Movies? The vid puts a face to the name David Axelrod, the central figure behind the campaigns of B. Hussein Ubama, John Edwards and Deval Patrick, all based on a weird kind of populism that, in Oby's case, has taken on the air of a religious cult, which is where the link to the Malcom X story comes in.



An anonymous behind-the-curtains figure runs three different campaigns all employing the same cheap populist buzzphrases and empty rhetoric, now borrows lines from a movie about a radical American Muslim politician. That's just a little too fucking creepy. On the other hand, it fits with the Che banners in The One's campaign offices and other subtle (and, in the case of The She-One, not-so-subtle) unpatriotic tics manifesting themselves throughout the campaign. It all makes for a weird and, I think, dangerous brew that people may come to wish they'd never been tempted to taste.

Speaking of weird, here's the latest from The She-One:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

And so there is Barack's message as conceived by David Axelrod and delivered through Mrs. Obama: You are cynical. You are divisive. You are isolated. You need improvement. You need to be better. You are uninvolved. You are uninformed. You are disengaged. You need to have your present life taken away from you so that all your faults can be corrected. And only Barack can do that.

And here is my message to Barack: you don't speak for the likes of me. I'll leave it up to you to declare who you do speak for, but it ain't me.

Actually, President Bush having a bit of fun with Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf on his state visit. What a weenie.

The good kind.

Just for the record, the so-called "journalists" who assembled the piece of shit they call a story about John McCain in the New York Times are Jim Rutenberg, Marilyn W. Thompson, David D. Kirkpatrick and Stephan Lebaton.

No link- not now, not ever.

Such is the value of an endorsement from the paper of the wretched.

UPDATED
Via Ace
Chairman Ted will be pleased: An internal CNN memo coaches its anchors with mealy-mouthed apologist talking points about one of the most murderous thugs and prolific purveyors of human misery of the last half-century:

From: Flexner, Allison
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 7:46 AM
To: *CNN Superdesk (TBS)
Cc: Neill, Morgan; Darlington, Shasta
Subject: Castro guidance

Some points on Castro – for adding to our anchor reads/reporting:

* Please say in our reporting that Castro stepped down in a letter he wrote to Granma (the communist party daily), as opposed to in a letter attributed to Fidel Castro. We have no reason to doubt he wrote his resignation letter, he has penned numerous articles over the past year and a half.

* Please note Fidel did bring social reforms to Cuba – namely free education and universal health care, and racial integration. in addition to being criticized for oppressing human rights and freedom of speech.

* Also the Cuban government blames a lot of Cuba’s economic problems on the US embargo, and while that has caused some difficulties, (far less so than the collapse of the Soviet Union) the bulk of Cuba’s economic problems are due to Cuba’s failed economic polices. Some analysts would say the US embargo was a benefit to Castro politically – something to blame problems on, by what the Cubans call “the imperialist,” meddling in their affairs.

* While despised by some, he is seen as a revolutionary hero, especially with leftist in Latin America, for standing up to the United States.

Any questions, please call the international desk.

Allison

Oh, sure, he calls himself a communist leader, but a spade is a fucking spade; he has been a model communist leader: a mass murderer and a monstrous fascist dictator. He was a proxie in the Western Hemisphere for the Soviet Union, allowing their missiles to be aimed at North America from Cuban soil and fomenting communist insurgencies in Central and South America. His America-hating fans like to point out that he has outlasted ten U.S. Presidents; they don't like to acknowledge that he accomplished this so-called feat by imprisoning and/or murdering his opponents and critics and denying Cubans elections or even a constitution.

You know, like Bush, Cheney and Rove have done in Amerikkka.

Karol at Alarming News on Castro:

Every hipster doofus in a Che shirt promotes his murderous, totalitarian legacy.

UPDATE
Power Line:

The 49 years of Castro's rule was insufficient for Flexner to pick up the connection between "free" goods and a slave state, or the primitive state of Cuban health care. Flexner seems to have missed the CNN story on Castro's destination of choice for his own medical treatment. It's difficult to find reliable data on the state of racial relations in Cuba, and Flexner cites none, but she apparently also missed Eldridge Cleaver's comments on the state of race in Cuba after his sojourn there as a fugitive:

The white racist Cuban dictatorship is more insidious and dangerous for black people than is the white racist regime of South Africa, because no black person has illusions about the intentions of the Afrikaners, but many black people consider Fidel Castro to be a right-on white brother. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Via NRO's Bench Memos:
On August 18, 2006, the New York Times heralded a decision by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ordering the shutdown of the NSA's terrorist surviellance program with a 1,400-word story by Adam Liptak and Eric Lichtblau. After a Sixth Circuit panel overturned Diggs' ruling, the Times ran a 900-word story by Liptak on July 7, 2007.

Today the Times published news that the Supreme Court ruled the ACLU had no standing in an appeal of the Sixth Circuit's ruling. The item appeared in the tenth paragraph of a story on page 15.

Surprise, surprise: the American newspaper most committed to undermining this President, even at the cost of national security, buries a Supreme Court ruling that underscores the President's constitutional authority to order warrantless surveillance.

Unlike Jimmy Carter, who waited until he was firmly ensconsed in the White House, the Obamas are already earnestly diagnosing late-onset American Malaise, and the aspiring First Lady is leading the charge to national mediocrity through envy. The Weekly Standard's Jonathan V. Last has listened in on Mrs. Obama on the campaign trail as she talked about herself, her country and The Obamian One.

In many ways, Michelle Obama's stump speech is reminiscent of her husband's. She dwells at length on the issue of change and frequently talks in the idiom of political self-help. She worried that "We spend more time thinking about what can't be done, what can't change, what won't work. And the problem with that is that it cuts us off from one another in our own communities. It's cut us off from the rest of the world. And the sad part about it is we're passing on all these fears, this cynicism--we're passing it on to the next generation." "Everything," she explained, "begins and ends with a little bit of hope and a whole lot of dreaming."

Mrs. Obama's remarks were also light on policy--which is understandable. After all, she's not the one standing for office. But she showed something like contempt for even the idea of actual policy talk. "I know voters like a plan," she said. "What's the details, tell me about your policies. Plans are important, I agree. . . . But a lot of this stuff isn't rocket science."

Instead, she voiced deeper concerns: "Barack knows that at some level there's a hole in our souls," she said. This was a variation on her normal line that "Barack Obama is the only person in this race who understands that, that before we can work on the problems we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation."

Michelle Obama obviously believes her husband is up to this challenge. (In Nevada she told a crowd that "Barack is one of the smartest men we will see in our lifetime.")

Wow. A chill just ran up my leg.

Ezra Levant's government interrogator and dhimmi collaborator Shirlene McGovern, who was Just Doing Her Job at the Islamofascist Whiners Commission of Al Bhurta, has apparently resigned from Levant's case:

The human rights commission advised my lawyer that McGovern quit because of the public backlash against the commission -- and against her in particular. In other words, she didn't like being called a censor in the blogosphere.

I'm not sympathetic. I believe that any government bureaucrat who makes a living interrogating citizens about their political beliefs ought to be held in public contempt. McGovern truly doesn't get it -- she thinks what she does for a living is perfectly bland, just like her.

As I wrote in the Globe last month, at my interrogation, McGovern wanted to make small talk and shake my hand. I upset her by not being complicit in my own prosecution.

In the future, I suggest that, if asked at cocktail parties, McGovern tell people she has a less disreputable job -- say, tax collector, or parking ticket issuer.

And here's Levant on denormalization:

By "denormalizing", I mean bringing the public's perception of these commissions in line with the awful facts about them. Denormalizing the commissions means demonstrating how they disrespect Canadian values, showing how they have become a sword, attacking human rights, rather than a shield protecting them.

These commissions aren't normal. It's not normal to haul publishers before the government to ask them about their political thoughts. It's not normal for a secular state to enforce a radical Muslim fatwa against cartoons. These human rights commissions are counterfeits; they improperly benefit from the reputation of real courts, but they also destroy respect for the whole legal system -- that's just what counterfeit currency does amidst real currency.

Levant proposes five steps on a legislator's list of steps toward guaranteeing freedom of speech, the final one being the ultimate goal:

5. Abolish both the commission and the tribunal.

That's the only permanent solution. There is no need for government censors in Canada. Nor is there any need for the other jobs of the commissions, which were meant as solutions to problems that are now largely obsolete. We already have labour law and employment law to deal with people fired for improper reasons. We already have landlord and tenant law to govern housing. These might have been issues forty years ago, but they're largely solved now, which is why the commissions have moved on to other, ignoble tasks, like persecuting pastors or censoring cartoons.
Far better for a government to abolish those commissions, and take those budgets and invest them in civics programs -- teaching Canadians, especially new immigrants, about the most precious and valuable human rights around, the ones we have inherited from 800 years of tradition in the free west. It is not a coincidence that the two recent complaints against free speech were filed by radical Muslim immigrants from Egypt and Pakistan. Basic civics classes -- not partisan political indoctrination, but a basic primer in the rule of law; fundamental freedoms; the equality of men and women; non-violent solutions to problems, etc.

A week ago, I would have thought that this last option would have been politically impossible. But, given the overwhelming support I have received from the general public -- and the positive reception from even liberal and many left-wing commenters -- I think that an abolition of the commissions and their tribunals would be well-received.

Levant's approach to Canadian values and freedoms is immoveable: they are not open to negotiation or watering down so as to accomodate other values that are inherently un-Canadian; that's what this whole fight is about, and it begins and rides on freedom of speech and expression.

The difference between the United States and Canadian Constitutions and Bills of Rights is that the American founding fathers defined the fundamental freedoms as having been conferred upon man by God, an irreducible point. The Canadian version calls for "peace, order and good government," leaving the question of who decides that from day to day open to interpretation.

My freedoms are not "open to interpretation."

Via Hot Air, The Great One tears into the Until-Recently-Ashamed One.

Idiot brainrot took up valuable WaPo editorial space (an oxymoron in this case) today in Leon Fleischer's grand existential opus, My White House Dilemma, about his Inner Struggle to reconcile accepting the accolades of a Kennedy Center gala with snubbing the Office of the President of the United States in order to insult George W. Bush and generate maximum PR return. In other words, the same old boring idiot crap.

Matthew J. Frank dismantles Fleischer's self-absorbed idiocy:

According to Leon Fleisher, "Bush administration policies have amounted to a systematic shredding of our nation's Constitution." This has been so endlessly, mindlessly repeated on the left since the commencement of the Iraq war, if not earlier, that there is now no felt necessity on the part of those saying it to support such an idiotic claim with arguments of any kind. And Fleisher has none, of course—only a litany of bald assertions about an "illegal war," etc. He has simply swallowed the Big Lie and regurgitated it to account for a fit of pique and to excuse his inexcusable rudeness.

That last sentence, in case you missed it, is pretty much the entire deal with the idiots.

Gabriel Malor answers the question arising from the work of Cato Institute scholar Timothy Lee, who is busy trying to dismiss the risk to national security caused by the lapse of FISA reform:

What Lee fails to mention is that in February or March of last year (we can't be sure because the ruling is secret), a FISA court judge ruled that foreign-to-foreign communications are subject to a warrant requirement if they are carried over the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure. So there's actually a pretty good reason to think our nation will be in more danger in 2008 than in 2006.

[...]

Democrats frequently claim that President Bush is engaged in a power grab, that he's trying to overturn the Fourth Amendment. House Democrats spent Friday bleating about an "imperial presidency." They're just spreading a different variety of fear, one that they've perpetuated ever since they started referring to the "sElected President" and "King George."

Malor also cites Andrew C. McCarthy, who continues to counter the wishful thinking that so completely clouds the Pelosian mindset:

When you go from no restrictions to no collection absent probable cause, that represents an enormous drop off in capacity. It's that simple. Democrats who claim that people like McConnell are engaged in partisan fear-mongering are talking nonsense. And as McConnell noted this morning, every day we don't fix this problem, the problem — the investigative leads you don't get, the connections you don't make, the things you don't learn but which you should know — metastasizes. Intelligence is dynamic: you can't stop collecting for a day, a week, a month or more and then figure you are picking up right where you left off. What you have lost tends to stay lost.

The heartbreaking, sad, gobsmacking, gobsmackingly sad heartbreaking news about Nancy Pelosi is that she has taken her eyes off the real war on terror in order to wage war on President Bush for her trial lawyer supporters, allowing the real enemy an advantage he wouldn't otherwise enjoy were Pelosi, um, let's say, sane.

What a Chimpelosi.

What a Peloshitler.

Let's kill her.

Via NRO: An introduction to the new big name in solar power.

Listen up, Senator McCain.

UPDATED
President Bush today addressed the matter of Nancy Pelosi's refusal to put the FISA reform legislation to a House vote. Here is the text of his radio address:

Good morning. At the stroke of midnight tonight, a vital intelligence law that is helping protect our nation will expire. Congress had the power to prevent this from happening, but chose not to. The Senate passed a good bill that would have given our intelligence professionals the tools they need to keep us safe. But leaders in the House of Representatives blocked a House vote on the Senate bill, and then left on a 10-day recess. Some congressional leaders claim that this will not affect our security. They are wrong. Because Congress failed to act, it will be harder for our government to keep you safe from terrorist attack. At midnight, the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence will be stripped of their power to authorize new surveillance against terrorist threats abroad. This means that as terrorists change their tactics to avoid our surveillance, we may not have the tools we need to continue tracking them -- and we may lose a vital lead that could prevent an attack on America.

In addition, Congress has put intelligence activities at risk even when the terrorists don't change tactics. By failing to act, Congress has created a question about whether private sector companies who assist in our efforts to defend you from the terrorists could be sued for doing the right thing. Now, these companies will be increasingly reluctant to provide this vital cooperation, because of their uncertainty about the law and fear of being sued by class-action trial lawyers.

For six months, I urged Congress to take action to ensure this dangerous situation did not come to pass. I even signed a two-week extension of the existing law, because members of Congress said they would use that time to work out their differences. The Senate used this time productively -- and passed a good bill with a strong, bipartisan super-majority of 68 votes. Republicans and Democrats came together on legislation to ensure that we could effectively monitor those seeking to harm our people. And they voted to provide fair and just liability protection for companies that assisted in efforts to protect America after the attacks of 9/11.

The Senate sent this bill to the House for its approval. It was clear that if given a vote, the bill would have passed the House with a bipartisan majority. I made every effort to work with the House to secure passage of this law. I even offered to delay my trip to Africa if we could come together and enact a good bill. But House leaders refused to let the bill come to a vote. Instead, the House held partisan votes that do nothing to keep our country safer. House leaders chose politics over protecting the country -- and our country is at greater risk as a result.

House leaders have no excuse for this failure. They knew all along that this deadline was approaching, because they set it themselves. My administration will take every step within our power to minimize the damage caused by the House's irresponsible behavior. Yet it is still urgent that Congress act. The Senate has shown the way by approving a good, bipartisan bill. The House must pass that bill as soon as they return to Washington from their latest recess.

At this moment, somewhere in the world, terrorists are planning a new attack on America. And Congress has no higher responsibility than ensuring we have the tools to stop them. Thank you for listening.

The President did not address the real reason behind Pelosi's treachery: there are about forty lawsuits pending against telecom companies who assisted the government in tracking offshore enemy communications, and the new legislation would protect those companies from those lawsuits for work performed in the interest of national security. And it just so happens that Nancy Pelosi's friends and contributors in the plaintiffs' bar will lose millions if that should come to be.

In a severe rebuke to Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) said this in support of the legislation:

Now, let me say something more. What people have to understand around here is that the quality of the intelligence we are going to be receiving is going to be degraded. It is going to be degraded. It is already going to be degraded as telecommunications companies lose interest. Everybody tosses that around and says: Well, what do you mean? I say: Well, what are they making out of this? What is the big payoff for the telephone companies? They get paid a lot of money? No. They get paid nothing. What do they get for this? They get $40 billion worth of suits, grief, trashing, but they do it. But they don't have to do it, because they do have shareholders to respond to, to answer to.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell:

What will happen at midnight tonight is much more significant than stump speeches, steroids or superdelegates. On Sunday, the terrorist tracking program the Director of National Intelligence tells us has led "to the disruption of planned terrorist attacks" no longer will be fully operational because of Congressional inaction.

What is most distressing is that the terrorists haven’t ceased their activities, but we’ve conceded the capability to fully track them because the House Democrat Leadership blocked a vote on a bipartisan solution and then chose to close up shop and go home without completing their work.

This is not a political contest, it is a live-fire situation. What we do—or in this case, don’t do—has consequences for our national security. At midnight, the country will be more at risk than it is today. And that risk will increase each day we don't have a solution to this problem.”

UPDATE
In Nancy Pelosi Is Now On The Clock, Duane R. Patterson writes:

How can [Pelosi] have taken her eyes off the war on terror by tying the hands of our intelligence operatives? Partisan politics. Part of the patch on the FISA bill includes immunity from lawsuits against telecommunication companies that cooperate with the federal government on foreign surveillance. Nancy Pelosi acts as though her loyalites lie more with protecting the interests of the trial lawyer lobby than they do with the successful prosecution of the war on terror.

So if she wields the power as Speaker to scuttle a bill [and weaken] the country's defenses, as of Midnight last night, she and her Democratic Party must be held accountable for the consequences of that action. When the jihadists try to attack us again, as they have shown every indication that this is their fervent desire, it must be the Democrats that have to answer for why, in a time of war, they intentionally made our intelligence agencies' job harder.

Day one, Ms. Pelosi. How many free days are you willing to give the enemy a chance to plot, plan and organize against us before you allow all of your other colleagues in Congress the chance to do their job, and therefore, giving our intelligence community the tools to do their job?

Tick. Tick. Tick.

It's as if in Nancy Pelosi's mind September 11 never happened, so as a service to Nancy Pelosi, here's a timely reminder:



The next time you see something like this, it will have been brought to you in part by the Nancy Pelosi-led House Democrats, who should all be sent packing at the earliest constitutional opportunity for not immediately and openly challenging their so-called "leader" on her incredible affront to the American people.

Are you still distracted by the belief that President Bush is distracted by Iraq? I thought so. Here as a public service is the truth about Bush and Africa, and this doesn't even include the news that Bob Geldof says that Bush is doing far more for Africa than any previous President.

To the consternation of many liberals, President Bush liberated two large and strategically important nations from the clutches of Islamofascism. When these liberals applied great pressure on Bush to pave the way for the return of Islamofascism in much of one of these countries, he not only defied them, but devised a strategy that appears to have inflicted a defeat on al Qaeda, that most virulent of Islamofascist elements.

Often when a president focuses so intently on a particular enemy in a particular region, he does so to the detriment of U.S. foreign policy in other areas. Yet President Bush has managed to devote an unprecedented level of dedication to dealing with the problems of Africa, a region that has rarely commanded any serious attention from the U.S.

Bret Schaefer and Anthony Kim of the Heritage Foundation use the occasion of Bush’s visit to Africa to recount some of the administration’s accomplishments and initiatives in Africa. They fall into four areas: (1) fighting disease, especially HIV/AIDS, (2) dramatically increasing U.S. assistance to sub-Saharan Africa, (3) enhancing economic growth through trade and investment, and (4) recognizing Africa's increased strategic importance.

With respect to fighting disease, the administration launched a $15 billion initiative to combat HIV/AIDS, the largest commitment by any country. According to Schaefer and Kim, during the past five years, the administration's program has made it possible for 1.4 million people in Africa to receive life-saving treatment. The Bush administration has been similarly generous when it comes to economic assistance. From 2000 to 2006, the United States doubled its development assistance to $21.5 billion and quadrupled its development assistance to sub-Saharan Africa to $5.6 billion.

The Bush Administration also expanded trade with Africa by opening the U.S. market through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Under this Act, many African goods receive zero-tariff access to the U.S. market. In response to these lower costs, two-way trade between the U.S. and Africa has grown by almost 140 percent since the introduction of AGOA, including an increase of more than 90 percent in non-oil/gas trade. Schaefer and Kim point out that trade and investment are more effective at promoting economic growth because they directly contribute to private-sector development without a government or nongovernmental organization intermediary.

President Bush gets scarcely more credit for his efforts and accomplishments in Africa than for his efforts and accomplishments in vanquishing terrorists and the countries that harbor and support them. His military successes are denigrated and his humanitarian successes are ignored.

Andrew C. McCarthy continues to explain the implications of Nancy Pelosi's BDS-fuelled game of chicken with the Bush Administration over reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Using as it does the safety of the American people as a tool of extortion and punishment against not the office of the President but against the individual who presently holds the office, it's probably the most insanely irresponsible political attack on the Presidency in American history:

Can you see what’s happening here? The whole reason Congress enacted the PAA in the first place is because FISA was never meant to apply to foreigners outside the U.S. communicating with other foreigners outside the U.S. We are not supposed to need court authorization for that. We are not supposed to have to write affidavits, approved by the attorney general and others, demonstrating probable cause that such people are agents of foreign powers — as well as demonstrating that other alternative investigative techniques would not yield the same intelligence.

Those are protections afforded by the FISA statute. Foreigners outside the U.S. are supposed to be outside the protection of the FISA statute, just as they are outside the protection of the Constitution. Saying the government can go to the FISA court is no answer: Government is not supposed to have to go to the FISA court. These people are not supposed to have FISA rights. They are not supposed to have Fourth Amendment rights.

We are talking about thousands upon thousands of communications, totally outside the U.S. (in the sense that no person inside our country is a participant) which the intelligence community used to be able to intercept and sift through without any burdensome judicial procedures whatsoever. That is how FISA was written, and that is how FISA was understood for almost 30 years. Then last year, a secret FISA-court ruling attempted to bring all those communications under FISA-court control — apparently on the theory that, because some digital bits of these conversations may zoom through U.S. hubs in global telecommunications networks, somehow a conversation between a guy in Pakistan and a guy in Afghanistan should now be considered a U.S. wire communication.

FISA... was intended to protect people inside the U.S. from being subjected to national-security surveillance absent probable cause that they were acting as foreign agents. (Emphasis mine)

Requiring FISA compliance for foreign-to-foreign communications does not protect anyone inside the U.S. It protects non-Americans, some of whom will be terrorists and none of whom is entitled to any protection under American law. It makes it impossible for the intelligence community to monitor all the foreign-to-foreign communications that we used to monitor because we will never be able to show, for every target, probable cause that he is an agent of a foreign power — as FISA requires. The PAA did not call for that; it simply required a certification that we were monitoring people believed to be outside the United States.

Pelosi's lie that the country is just as safe blinded as it is with appropriate and perfectly legal intelligence collection protocols is nothing but potentially disastrous grandstanding for the idiot left.

The July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate stated:
globalization trends and recent technological advances will continue to enable even small numbers of alienated people to find and connect with one another, justify and intensify their anger, and mobilize resources to attack — all without requiring a centralized terrorist organization, training camp, or leader.

Translation:
There are ever larger numbers of potentially hostile operatives who are galvanized by jihadist ideology without necessarily being connected to a known terrorist organization. Casting a broad surveillance net to collect intelligence overseas is how we detect and thwart any threat they may pose. It’s how we protect Americans in the homeland and on the battlefield.

As of midnight, that net is gone.

We know Pelosi thinks of the American people, including servicemen and women in harm's way, as children; now she is holding them up in front of the enemy just to get to President Bush.

While idiots cheer her on.

Michelle Obama spins a gossamer tale of how her husband will fix Americans' souls. Heady stuff, until Hugh Hewitt strips the bark off the rhetoric.

I'm only too happy to have this on the record.

Now I'm going to slash your throat.

UPDATED
Not if you are a Democrat, as Power Line describes in three related postings:
Not Serious

Now, here is an investigation that would actually be worth pursuing: why did Nancy Pelosi and her House leadership refuse to take up the FISA reform bill? Did they deliberately sacrifice the security of Americans to placate their far-left base? Or was there a corrupt bargain with major Democratic Party contributors, who hope to make millions by suing telecoms? Did Nancy Pelosi politicize our national security by subordinating the security interests of all Americans to the financial interests of the Democratic Party's biggest contributors?

Circumstantially, the answer to the last question would appear to be "Yes." Perhaps that explains why Pelosi and her confederates are so eager to focus newspaper headlines on ridiculous "investigations" of the Bush administration.

Not Serious About Energy Policy Either

As Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation demonstrates, the Democrats aren’t serious about energy policy either. Both gasoline prices and oil company profits are high. Thus, House Democrats propose to raise taxes on oil companies. But, according to Lieberman, oil companies already pay their fair share of taxes. In fact, their effective tax rate of 37 percent is slightly higher than that of large corporations in general.

More importantly, the proposed tax hike would tend to produce even higher gasoline prices. It would do so in part by discouraging investment in new domestic drilling for oil and natural gas, thereby tending to decrease supply as demand continues to grow. In addition, any new tax on gasoline, whether at the pump or at the producer level, will raise the cost of this product to consumers. Furthermore, says Lieberman, the Democrats’ proposal would undermine our energy security by providing a competitive advantage to OPEC and other non-U.S. suppliers whose imports are not subject to most of the bill’s provisions.

The Democrats should understand this. As Lieberman reminds us, they tried something very similar in 1980 during the Carter administration, when they imposed a “windfall profit tax” on oil companies. According to the Congressional Research Service, this tax “reduced domestic oil production from 3 to 6 percent, and increased oil imports from between 8 and 16 percent.”

To make matters worse, the Dems would use the new revenue generated from the tax increase to subsidize alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power. Lieberman notes that, even after decades of tax breaks, alternative energy provides only a small fraction of America’s energy needs. Solar energy, for example, provides only 3 percent of our electricity due to its high cost and unreliability. And the Department of Energy estimates that the overall percentage of electricity attributable to renewable sources is not likely to increase even by 2030. In short, the forms of energy the Democrats want to subsidize are the sources of the future, and likely always will be.

Not Serious About Foreign Policy Either

Yesterday I noted Eli Lake's New York Sun story on Zbigniew Brzezinski's trip to Damascus. In Damascus Brzezinski met with Assad and senior officials of his regime, whose security he seeks to promote. This at the same time that the world was reminded of the Syrian sancturary of terrorist mass murderer Imad Mugniyeh. On Wednesday Brzezinski issued a statement affirming that both Syria and the United States have a common desire to achieve stability in the region. Zbigniew Brzezinski is the kind of "realist" who can't see what's in front of his nose.

Today Lake returns to report that one of Hillary Clinton's national finance chairmen for Ms. Hillary's presidential campaign -- Hassan Nemazee -- left Damascus last night after a visit there as part of the same RAND Corp. delegation that Brzezinski headed. The Clinton campaign offered Lake no comment on Nemazee's Syrian visit last night. The New York Sun is more forthcoming in its editorial on the subject.

A Google News search on "Brzezinski Damascus" reveals again today that the Obama/Clinton delegation to Syria remains a deep secret confined to readers of the New York Sun, Power Line and Martin Peretz.

The Democrats' program for national self-destruction continues apace.

UPDATE
Andrew C. McCarthy addresses the above theme in his new Human Events article, "Profiles In No Courage." The gross irresponsibility he describes vis Ubama and Hillary! is simply astounding.

Via David Thompson: Turn the volume waaaay up.

Michelle Malkin has resurrected her Solidarity campaign with Danish newspapers and editorial cartoonists after the arrests of five allegedly caught planning the murder of Kurt Westergaard, one of the Danish cartoonists. I'm only too pleased to sign on.

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Haaretz reports that terrorist asshole and mass murderer Imad Mughniyah was killed when his car exploded on Wednesday, February 13. The deputy leader of Hezbollah was responsible for a long campaign of murder and mayhem and will not be missed by a single civilized human being. Still, the official line from the Syrian government is that he was a good guy and that his fiery deliverance is the work of the Jooos.

Via Haaretz, a short list of this asshole's crimes against humanity includes the following:

Mughniyah was indicted for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people, and was the subject of an arrest warrant for the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy there, in which 29 people died.

He was responsible for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA passenger jet, and the murder of a soldier in the U.S. navy. Four Hezbollah operatives hijacked the flight, travelling between Athens and Rome, to Beirut, beginning a 17-day ordeal in which the plane made two trips to Algeria. The hijackers killed U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem in Beirut.

He has been accused of a role in the bombings of U.S. Marines and French army barracks in Lebanon in 1983 that left more than 300 people dead.

Mughniyah is believed to be behind a 1983 bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut, in which 63 people lost their lives.

Islamic Jihad, a shadowy pro-Iranian group widely believed linked to Hezbollah, kidnapped dozens of Western hostages, including Americans, in Beirut in the mid 1980s at a time when Mughniyah was thought to be the group's commander. The group killed some of its captives and exchanged others for U.S. weapons to Iran in what was later known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Among the victims of Islamic Jihad was the CIA's Middle East station chief.

According to Syria's Interior Minister Brig. Gen. Bassam Abdul-Majid, Mughniyah was a "Lebanese combatant", part of whose job description appears to have been murdering innocent people in the name of Allah, or Palestinian liberation, or fiftys and c-notes- I'm only guessing, mind you- while whoever blasted him to smithereens, and Abdul-Majid suspects it was the Joooos, are terrorists and criminals. I'm always fascinated by that, but whatever- it goes with the territory.

Abdul-Majid also said an investigation into the blast was under way, and that his Hezbollah brothers suspect it was the work of a group of Sderot-based Mossad agents disguised as kindergarteners.

The truth is that several entities could be responsible for this asshole's demise, what with the Broad Spectrum of Humanity that he slaughtered, but blaming the Jooos is the default position, what with their cursed insistence on defending themselves and punishing their attackers. Damned Jooos....

Now, I'm nothing if not compassionate, so now that this asshole has been sent to Hell On A Carseat, I advocate that whatever is left of him be awarded complete and full protection under the United States Constitution.

At this point, it's the right thing to do.

Says Captain Ed:

Hezbollah has no reason to stamp its feet, however. They live through terrorism, and when their enemies strike back, they have no one to blame but themselves. Good riddance to Mughniyeh, and may the rest of Hezbollah's terrorists go out the same way -- and soon.

Thomas Joscelyn on Mughniyah's "instrumental role in al Qaeda’s rise."

Jeffrey Lord makes the case in the American Spectator that John McCain and his surrogates need to stop attacking the messenger that is conservative talk radio, and start listening to the message:

Anyone who spent time at CPAC this past week, as I did, could not possibly miss the energy, passion, and intellectual volcano that is the American conservative movement. While media attention was understandably focused on McCain's Thursday appearance, the real story of the next stage of American conservatism was with the attendees themselves. They were the physical embodiment of Hannity's point, the real leaders of the conservative future.

Stopping to chat with both exhibitors and attendees I found filmmakers, Internet activists, policy wonks, software experts, educators, book publishers, attorneys, journalists, authors, diplomats, advertising marketers, fundraisers, clergy, students and seniors, to name but a few. Enthusiastically promoting conservative projects reflecting their specific interests, they were the very definition of intellectual vitality and political awareness. In one corner of the hall there were tables groaning under the weight of hundreds of books written by, for, or about conservatives, many of them -- don't you love it? -- New York Times bestsellers.

Most of these people are not as well known as Sean Hannity or his talk radio colleagues. But make no mistake, in terms of their passion and commitment to conservative principles they are one and the same. To understand the potential represented by all of these people as they enthusiastically walked me through their projects is to know with assurance that conservatism in America is moving forward yet again, on the edge of a vibrant transformation into a serious 21st century political and cultural force.

AFTER SEEING ALL OF THIS ACTIVITY and spending considerable time over two days talking with many of these people, people who came from all over the country, it is passing curious that there seems to be some sort of effort under way by some McCain supporters to lash out at Hannity and others, unaware that precisely the kind of people I spoke with at CPAC both listen to talk radio and consider themselves more than capable of making their own decisions about both McCain and the conservative movement.

With Newsweak magazine's overwrought "There Will Be Blood" cover splash, it's already clear the MSM is hoping their dream of a battle on the right will come true. It may. But if it does, it won't be McCain vs. conservative talk radio; it will be McCain having to earn conservative votes.

If he doesn't, everybody cries. The conservative message to McCain et al is simple: slip me some principles, baby.

Read it all.

Thomas Sowell touches on the subject from a different angle over at NRO:

Even before Mitt Romney bowed out — with class, by the way — supporters of John McCain, and Republican party pooh-bahs in general, were chastising those conservatives in the media who had criticized Senator McCain.

Those who leveled their attacks at Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other conservatives who had criticized McCain’s record completely misconceived the role of the media.

Journalists do not exist to get one party’s candidates elected or otherwise serve one party’s political interests. The public are the journalists’ clientele.

And in USA Today, Jonah Goldberg says part of McCain's problem is buyer's remorse felt by conservatives about George W. Bush: 'Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.'

His 199th. Henry Cabot Lodge's famous profile of Lincoln was published in Hero Tales From American History, which he co-wrote with Theodore Roosevelt in 1895.




Other recommended reading: Scott Johnson's look back at the greatest American President in "Remembering Mr. Lincoln", and Doris Kearns Goodwin's marvellous Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

With PMSNBC's serial misreporter David Shuster freshly on ice, this prescient Tom Maguire post now serves as an entertaining and informative lesson on typical leftwing MSM propaganda ops:

So often I find myself asking - is it true, or is that a report from David Shuster? In the brutally competitive world of television news David Shuster of NBC has hit upon a winning formula - make stuff up that appeals to his left wing audience. Below I have highlighted five dubious reports, all related to the Plame case and all slanted against Bush and Cheney. In multiple misadventures with Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews Mr. Shuster has

(1) edited away a key qualifier to make it appear that Cheney authorized the Plame leak;

(2) misrepresented the contents of a the publicly-available portion of a National Intelligence Estimate;

(3) walked out of a courtroom with "news" everyone else missed, attributing to the Libby defense announcements made by the prosecution (and later clarified);

(4) aired an "exclusive" originally broken by Raw Story but confirmed by no one else; and

(5) again walked out of a courtroom with "news" everyone else missed, turning a Fitzgerald metaphor into a literal charge.

Here we go:

The ensuing is the kind of exposé that leftists try to avoid absorbing at any cost. The sudden realization they've been duped by cheap frauds like Shuster, Olbermann and Droolboy causes severe cognitive dissonance, an inevitable result of that horrible moment when they eschew intellectual rigor and just roll over and believe these guys. It's liars like Shuster, Olbermann and Droolboy who make re-educating idiots so difficult, so it's doubly, nay triply important for the efforts of responsible scribes like Maguire to be as widely available as possible.

As usual, I provide this service as an act of compassion to dupes everywhere.