Abu Wabu

Now John Hinderaker knows it too.

AJ Strata reports that Moqtada al-Sadr has surrendered after his thugs got their asses kicked by the IMF. American forces provided air support, proving that the IMF can't stand up on their own and that The Surge Has Failed™.

And of course the MSM are also big losers in the fight. Another demonstration here.

Bill Roggio:

Six days after the Iraqi government launched Operation Knights’ Charge in Basrah against the Mahdi Army and other Iranian-backed Shia terror groups, Muqtada al Sadr, the Leader of the Mahdi Army, has called for his fighters to lay down their weapons and cooperate with Iraqi security forces. Sadr’s call for an end to the fighting comes as his Mahdi Army has taken serious losses since the operation began. . . .Since the fighting began on Tuesday 358 Mahdi Army fighters were killed, 531 were wounded, 343 were captured, and 30 surrendered. The US and Iraqi security forces have killed 125 Mahdi Army fighters in Baghdad alone, while Iraqi security forces have killed 140 Mahdi fighters in Basra.

The mullahs must be fuming.

AoSHQ is re-running an excellent video that's been around for a while now but is worth viewing again. Why? Because wisdom and knowledge are like horsepower- you can never have too much. Idiots will call this video hateful (which is what they call everything that makes them cry- trust me, I know this.); I call it educational and informative.

Just doing my part for the greater good, an act of compassion.

An exchange between Andrew C. McCarthy and David Freddoso at The Corner on the case of the Haditha Marines illustrates the great value of honor to our society:

Haditha News [David Freddoso]
In case you missed it yesterday, charges of involuntary manslaughter, aggravated assault and reckless endangerment were dismissed against Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum, one of the eight Marines who was present when 19 civilians were killed at Haditha.

As someone with no understanding of courts martial, I am hesitant to draw any conclusions, but it still looks like the government has a very weak hand in this case right now. They had earlier tried to get Tatum's testimony through an immunity deal, which Tatum refused. Now he's off the hook, apparently without any strings attached, according to his defense team. He will be compelled to testify in the trial of one of the other Marines — Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich — but apparently there is no agreement for him to testify against Wuterich.
03/29 01:48 PM

Re: Haditha News [Andy McCarthy]
David, with respect to witnesses in general, and especially with witnesses from our military who adhere to a code of honor, the expectation is that they will testify to the truth. If a witness does that, as I would expect a Marine to do, whether the testimony turns out to be for or against someone is a function of the facts of the case, not the disposition of the witness.
03/29 03:01 PM

re Haditha [David Freddoso]
Andy: Yes, naturally, it goes without saying that witnesses are to tell the truth. The point I was awkwardly trying to make in layman's terms is that this does not appear to be a case of one defendant flipping on another in exchange for a deal.

According to defense counsel, the charges against Lance Cpl. Tatum were dismissed "with prejudice." One JAG reader who spent nine months in Fallujah tells me this would mean that Tatum is completely free and clear of legal jeopardy, even though he did not make a deal with the prosecution.
03/29 04:22 PM

re: re Haditha [Andy McCarthy]
Yes, David, I assume he is free and clear because the military prosecutors, being just as honor-bound as the military witnesses called in such trials, dismissed the case upon becoming convinced not only that there was insufficient evidence of guilt but that Lance Corporal Tatum, in fact, was innocent.

Assuming it is true that the charges were dismissed "with prejudice" (which has the same double-jeopardy effect as an acquittal), the prosecutors must have been persuaded of his innocence. After all, they could — regardless of whether Tatum agreed or disagreed — have dismissed the charges "without prejudice." Such a disposition would have no jeopardy effect; meaning that if, in the course trying other defendants, new evidence emerged that Tatum was guilty, prosecutors could re-charge him. That is the safe course, and it is the one prosecutors take when there is any doubt about someone's complicity. But when you become convinced that someone is innocent, the honorable thing to do is drop the charges with prejudice, not hedge your bets.

I am not trying to give David a hard time. It's just that, as a long time Justice Department prosecutor and someone who never served in the military, I am a great admirer of the honor of the military, which runs through its justice system like it runs through its culture. There is no cultural parallel in civilian life. (When I ran the satellite U.S. attorney's office in upstate New York, I was privileged to supervise the JAGs when they occasionally had to appear in civilian federal court in White Plains in connection with felonies committed on the grounds at West Point.)

Prosecutors don't have to dismiss charges with prejudice — even if they're conviced of someone's innocence, they can always hedge their bets. Yet the military prosecutors do dismiss the charges because it's the right thing to do. Theoretically, this means the former defendant, now unconcerned about legal jeopardy, would be free to slant his testimony at any future trial to favor his comrades-in-arms. Yet, that would be a violation of the honor code and it is simply assumed that no Marine would do that. A Marine will testify truthfully — not for or against anyone.

I don't mean to turn this into some kind of utopia that it's not. I just greatly admire the assumption of honor, which presumes everyone will do the right thing and thus makes it easier for everyone to do the right thing.
03/29 07:43 PM

Then there's John Murtha.

Mark Steyn on Earth Hour participants:

You couldn't ask for a better image for this movement than apparently sane people voluntarily keeping themselves in the dark.

It's always worth reading Michael Ledeen for his insights on Iran, especially with the mullahs' own surge against Iraqi and American forces now under way. His March columns:

This is the Sort of Thing that Drives the Mullahs Crazy
Magdi, Ayaan, Salman, and Us.
Iran's At War With Us (Imagine That!)
Is the Great Iraqi Civil War On at Last?
Khamenei is Shooting Craps...
How Do You Tell if It's a Persian Cat???

Bonus Round: The Secretary of State Thinks She's Suffering

Hugh Hewitt invited Mark Steyn to evaluate Barack Obama's self-narrated sound version of his book, Dreams Of My Father.

Want context? On Obama's hourly-updated explanations of his passing familiarity with "that man who was at our wedding and then we saw him again at our daughters' baptisms. Did you ever catch his name, Michelle dear?", here is Steyn:

This shtick isn't helping. The headline on this story is "Obama: America Doesn't Get Rev. Wright." Really? More talk like that, and the issue will be whether it's Obama who doesn't get America.

Power Line's John Hinderaker and Paul Mirengoff:

It strikes me that Barack Obama is uniquely unfit to be President, or, for that matter, to serve in the Senate.

***

It's pretty clear that no form of Christianity other than black liberation theology had any chance of attracting Obama. Wright's sophomoric ranting was a perfect fit for Obama. It made him feel authentically black (see Shelby Steele on this subject), it fit the anti-American narrative Obama had picked up in the Ivy League, and it was the best church around for advancing Obama's career in Chicago politics. People have had religious experiences on considerably less than that.

NRO's Stephen Spruell points up the latest Obama Deception. In his Ohio Primary campaign, Barack Oblabama blamed the failure of a major Ohio employer on free and open trade:

In the days leading up to the March 4 Ohio primary, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign aired a TV ad that featured a man named Steven Schuyler standing in front of a Delphi Packard Electric plant in Warren, Ohio. In the ad, Schuyler says he worked for Delphi, an automotive supplier, for 13 years until NAFTA enabled the company to ship his job to Mexico. “Barack Obama was against NAFTA,” Schuyler says, adding, “We need a president that will bring work into this country.”

The Delphi ad might qualify as the most deceptive of the 2008 race. First, Delphi did not exist as an independent company when Congress passed NAFTA in 1993. It was part of General Motors until it was spun off as an independent supplier in 1999. Second, foreign competition did not drive the company to eliminate American jobs. It declared bankruptcy in 2005 because the legacy labor costs it inherited from GM made it impossible to compete against other U.S.-based suppliers. Third, workers at the Warren, Ohio plant were offered generous buyouts and early-retirement packages. Its employees were not just kicked to the street.

Obama's campaign thrives on victimhood, which is why he used the whiner in his commercial. The fact is that Delphi was exsanguinated by market forces and union demands. Shit happens in the free market, yo, Obamalina or not.

Top Clinton Donors Chastise Pelosi, says the TPM headline. More like Top Clinton Donors take Madame Herself to the Clinton woodshed on the worldwide stage. Man, do these guys play for Keeps.

Booyah, and all that implies.

Operation Chaos proceeds apace.

Drip.

Obama-style idiocy is "Coming Home!... To Roost!"

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Drip. Drip.

'Hate Talk Express" is Rush Limbaugh's intellectual property. He brought it up this morning as a proposal for an Obama campaign bus tour. I borrow it because it's all part of Operation Chaos.

And because Rush is so evil. I love evil. Like Cheney or Rove Evil, that's so cool.

The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave -- why doesn't he leave even today -- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.

Mark Steyn exhibits his marksmanship with an arrow to the heart:

‘I’m sure,” said Barack Obama in that sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac, fries, and strawberry shake sound profound, “many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”

Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests, or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree flown-the-coop nuts.

***

A century and a half after the Civil War, two generations after the Civil Rights Act, the Reverend Wright promotes victimization theses more insane than anything promulgated at the height of slavery or the Jim Crow era. You can understand why Obama is so anxious to meet with President Ahmadinejad, a man who denies the last Holocaust even as he plans the next one. Such a summit would be easy listening after the more robust sermons of Jeremiah Wright.

The rights to Disney's "Path To 9/11" are being sought by a shareholder who wants to distribute the movie that had Democrats screaming to censor it.

Here's a sample.

I wasn't impressed with David Mamet's professed discovery of common sense, because he obviously suffers from Bush Derangement Syndrome. Others have been kinder to Mamet, apparently assuming that the man has navigated a complete conversion to conservative thought, but he has done no such thing. He has merely declared that he isn't quite as intellectually lazy as he once was. There is in fact no relationship between the two.

Having said that, Jonah Goldberg has his own thoughts on Why Mamet Moved Stage Right that start from a viewpoint different from mine, although I think we end up at the same place.

Imagine the fate of a Republican Presidential candidate who dared utter the phrase "typical black person."

Anyway, now that Obama has acknowledged the existence of the mysterious "typical white person", might as well have some fun: here's all the Stuff White People Like.

Look! Here comes one now!

Via The Jawa Report

Barack Jeremiah Obama's church supports Hamas.

I'm floored.

Well. Not really.

Sen. Barack Obama's Chicago church reprinted a manifesto by Hamas that defended terrorism as legitimate resistance, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist and compared the terror group's official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America's Declaration of Independence.

The Hamas piece was published on the "Pastor's Page" of the Trinity United Church of Christ newsletter reserved for Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., whose anti-American, anti-Israel remarks landed Obama in hot water, prompting the presidential candidate to deliver a major race speech earlier this week.

So now what? A major Middle East Conflict speech in which Obama reveals that his grandmother is a typical Israeli?

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Thumbs down. A Dishonest Evasion:

At least the Illinois senator was more candid than he had previously been about what he heard from Rev. Wright in the pews: He mentioned that he had heard “remarks that could be considered controversial” and that he “strongly disagree[d] with many of his political views.” As soon as these words were uttered, though, the minimization began: “I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”

Perhaps. But not many of us have heard our religious leaders ask the congregation to pray for God to “damn America.” So Obama then tried to draw a distinction between Wright’s videotaped rants and his typical preaching (which could merely “be considered controversial”). Those rants, he said, “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”

But that distorted view of the country is at the heart of Wright’s “black-liberation theology”; it is one of the foundations of his ministry. For Obama to pretend his videotaped statements were an aberration is a dishonest evasion.

The best thing is that now the entire world knows that.

"It strikes me that this history sheds important light on the conventional view of a 'cycle of violence.'"


"If Obama's saying that those who fear young black men on the street are racists, the equivalents of Rev. Wright in offensiveness, then he's just insulted a whole lof ot people."


"So, he's shuffled from "he doesn't exist" to "I didn't hear him" to "I didn't agree" to "my white grandmother was racist, too, and look how I turned out". Perhaps Obama doesn't two-step so much as he slithers."


"Two corollaries always follow the Obama victimology: moral equivalence and the subtle suggestion that any who question his thesis of despair are themselves suspect."


"...there's only 563 mentions of the phrase "make history" on barackobama.com and another 1,750 mentions of "making history" on the candidate's website alone. How on earth could anyone have gotten the idea that Barack Obama was suggesting that a spectrographic analysis of his skin color proves that his mere election as president would be a positive historical event?"


"I fell in love."


"The additional heat in the oceans must be hiding even deeper in the oceans, or gathering out in space, like an alien armada poised to destroy the earth."


"The US military lost more soldiers in the first 5 years of the Clinton Presidency than were lost in the first 5 years of the Iraq War."


"[Neoconservative] ideas and policies have already been victorious, not only in the Cold War, but against the terrorists (medievalists) and also against the bankrupt ideology that continues to infuse the progressive (i.e. leftist ) movement and their thinly-disguised totalitarian agenda from the previous century."

On fire.

A poem for Barack Hussein Obama by Roger L. Simon.

Obama pulled his whitey-hating racist friend and mentor Jeremiah Wright out from under the bus to make room there for his own grandmother (Republicans doing this sort of thing are referred to inside Democrat circles as "typical Republicans"). Rich Lowry:

"The Throw Your Grandmother Under the Bus Speech" That's what a friend of mine calls it. She only raised him—to get compared to a raving anti-American pastor in his hour of political need.

Gotta get me some of that sweet, crrrreamy audacity.

A Campaign Spot reader:

"...it certainly sounds like he is creating a moral equivalence between a grandmother, who he did not choose and he was blessed to have in his life, and a pastor who he sought out, who he felt some sort of spiritual inspiration from, and who he does not share any bloodlines with... The idea that his grandmother expressing fear of black men is in any way equivalent or should even be mentioned in the same context as Jeremiah Wright's racial diatribes is utterly ridiculous. I doubt if his grandmother ever got up in church on Sunday and loudly proclaimed her personal reservations about black men, nor did she blame them for all of her people's troubles."

Scott Johnson has thoughts on Obama's sellout of his own Grandmother.

Oh, yeah: I'm shocked, shocked! to hear Obama admit in his speech that he was lying when he earlier stared the nation in the face on network and cable TV and denied ever having heard any of Wright's hate-filled diatribes, as in "If you heard it, I didn't, and if you disapproved of it, so do I!" So now we know that Obama is a purposely manipulative and opportunistic liar, as we have pointed out before. No-one in the liberal MSM will say it, but that is now on the record.

Yes, words matter.

Great back and forth:Ace, Allah, Ace, Allah, Ace.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Rezko. Drip. Drip.

Rush Limbaugh:

Blackmail. "You keep playing the Jeremiah Wright stuff, we'll see to it that this country stays roiled and divided; you stop playing the Jeremiah Wright stuff and maybe we can Move On, and be at one with one another."... He's just trying to get this Reverand Wright stuff off television, that's all that bite was, trying to guilt everyone at the networks into not doing it, under the guise that by not playing Rev. Wright, we are Coming Together. And while all this is going on, we're not supposed to mention his middle name, either. We don't mention his middle name, we don't call him a liberal, we don't play any more Rev. Wright videos...or else.

Barack Obama:

Whites need to fight white racism and excuse black racism, and I should be President. That's the only way America can be great.

Via Shannen Coffin at The Corner, Barack Wright Obama on Don Imus:

Contrast that "two (or more) strike" posture with Obama's response to Don Imus's slanderous remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team last spring. Obama was the first Presidential contender to call for Imus's firing by NBC. "I understand MSNBC has suspended Mr. Imus," Obama told ABC News, "but I would also say that there's nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group. And I would hope that NBC ends up having that same attitude." Now perhaps it can be said that Imus's remarks were part of a pattern of stupid and degrading comments by the radio shock jock, but Obama's call for Imus's firing was apparently based on this single event. "He didn't just cross the line," Obama said. "He fed into some of the worst stereotypes that my two young daughters are having to deal with today in America."

If by "America" Obama means "The Trinity United Church of Christ", well, I'll give him that.

Back to the story, that last sentence about his daughters intrigues me. I'm sure the American people would be very interested in hearing Obama describe the stereotypes his two daughters are facing. Surely the Obamas would never allow their daughters to be placed in a school environment that tolerated stereotyping, so perhaps it's happening in another environment in which they are placing their daughters but which they cannot control, for instance in their chosen house of worship.

I'm sure every idiot agrees that we should ignore the Obamas' apparently shoddy parenting, so let's focus on the battle against stereotyping. I Believe it would be uplifting to the nation to hear how the Obama girls are dealing with these stereotype-thingies they face. Surely so luminously gifted a writer and orator as Obama can't wait to share with all Obamericans the audacity of overcoming stereotype-thingies.

This is right up Obama's alley. And since he is all-knowing, he will do this. Fer shure.

Patterico: as Barack Wright Obama likes to remind us, words matter. This will be a recurring theme.

Idiots are grasping at word that Newsmax blew it on the "nodding in church" story, because it might be that throughout the whole time his beloved mentor was spewing whitey-hatred to his fawning 8,000-member congregation that included Obama and his family over twenty years, Obama wasn't there on that one particular occasion.

There are two points to be made here: 1) Newsmax blew it and 2) big fucking deal. Wright has been a crucial figure in Obama's life for more than two decades. Not just in his rise through Chicago's South Side political machine, but in his life journey and personal philosophy. Obama credits Wright with bringing him to Christ; that's almost as intimate as a relationship can get. Wright married the Obamas and baptized their children. Obama has always pointed to Wright as his minister, close friend, mentor and political sounding board. Obama has rolled with Wright's hateful shit for twenty three years, donated 23,000 dollars to his church in support of its apparent mission to convince its members of their victimhood at the hands of an evil White America, and is only now distancing himself from Wright because the man's decades-long record of racist hatemongering, finally under widespread scrutiny, has become radioactive to Obama's campaign.

No part of that is in the least bit undone by Newsmax.

So I'll leave further "catch Obama nodding" to others because it's irrelevant. Tom Maguire:

This does not resolve Obama's central problem - he is telling the nation that

"We’ve got a lot of pent-up anger and bitterness and misunderstanding. But what I continue to believe in is that this country wants to move beyond these kinds of divisions."

but there is no evidence that, over the course of twenty years, he has moved his own minister past anger and bitterness.

Nor is there any evidence that he even tried, because that very anger and bitterness served Obama's ambitions very well for two decades.

Now, back to the story of Obama's racist, whitey-hating, victim-mentality-cultivating, conspiracy-mongering pastor, close friend, advisor and mentor of twenty-plus years - the one who has suddenly been airbrushed from Obama's campaign.

Re-reading this post I realize that liberalism is Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is there is no Fight Club. And the first rule of liberalism is there is no liberalism, for the same reason: upon comprehending it, no sane person would tolerate it.

Bumped & Updated

Barack Obama will now attempt to strike back against the revelation of his mentor's hatred for America with the race card, all the while trying to disguise it as indignation, disappointment and moral superiority. Just you watch.

I opined to my wife the first time I listened to Obama some months ago that he was speaking to black America, and that his non-black followers just assumed he meant them too. Now that I've also heard Obama's great good friend and spiritual mentor of twenty years Rev. Wright and Obama's great good wife and spiritual spokesmoaner Michelle Obama, I am even more convinced of that judgement.

Wright's sermons regularly and intentionally (he reads from a prepared text) stoke racial hatred against white America; I believe the same ethos is at work when Michelle Obama talks about how oppressed and downtrodden people are in America today, how hard and unfair life is in America today. It also puts in context her remark that she has never been proud of her country until now: how the hell could she be if she buys into Wright's poisonous view of America?

Michelle Obama is not speaking to all of America; she's exhorting black women and by extension their communities to think of themselves as victims of Whitey. Together the Obamas have ripped off the Jackson/Sharpton race hustle and made it look respectable. You throw that net out and you'll snag all kinds of politically correct, guilt-ridden liberals who want to believe this is their salvation at last.

It's no wonder to me that Obama's campaign is so touchy about all this new criticism; I think they hear it through the filter of Wright's brand of angry black racist envy and therefore are simply not equipped to answer honest criticism on its merits rather than as a racial affront. Pastor Wright has spent some two hundred thousand hours over 36 years indoctrinating his congregation to think that very way.

Barack Obama will now attempt to strike back against the revelation of his mentor's hatred for America with the race card, all the while trying to disguise it as indignation, disappointment and moral superiority. Just you watch.

Imagine how disastrous it would be to have that mindset permeating the next administration.

Ace puts the drop on Obama's lawerly non-denial denials. Wow.

Rich Lowry points to a passage in Obama's book in which he fawningly recalls a Wright sermon featuring the very same racial venom and dispiriting hatred for America he now claims never to have heard in all those twenty years as Pastor Wright's bright and ever-more-ascendant protege.

Just what sort of idiot does Barack Obama take me for?

Power Line has a series of posts on Barack Obama's relationship to his pastor under the fitting theme "The Audacity Of Hate". Some excerpts:

The Audacity Of Hate

Wright has been Obama's pastor for 20 years. He married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, The Audacity of Hope. Obama says he was not at the church on the day Wright blamed America for 9/11. "It sounds like he was trying to be provocative," is the best Obama can offer on this one.

More generally, according to ABC, Obama has said, "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." This suggests that Obama considers Wright's statements about America (that it treats its citizens as less than human and brought 9/11 on itself) defensible. Obama's campaign aides are closer to the mark when they describe Wright's comments as "inflammatory rhetoric."

Obama has also said that Wright is "is like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with." But who takes spiritual guidance from hate-spewing old uncles?

The Audacity Of Hate, Part Two

[O]ther than affinity (or at least lack of disagreement) and opportunism, what other explanations are there for Obama's tight, longstanding relationship with a religious leader like Wright?

The Audacity Of Hate, Part Three

As a former debater and debate judge, I couldn't help noticing that Pastor Wright appeared to be reading his diatribe. His hateful drivel wasn't some spur of the moment revelation; he actually committed it to paper.

I didn't realize big-time preachers could get away with reading their impassioned sermons. I guess his "content" made up for it.

The Audacity Of Hate, Part Four

Several points come to mind. First, the "things [Obama] believes" (and should be "judged" on) include the following: Pastor Wright should be his spiritual leader; Pastor Wright's church should receive a substantial amount of money from Obama; Obama's children should, at an impressionable age, be exposed to Pastor Wright's sermons, as opposed to less hateful religion instruction they could receive elsewhere.

Second, Obama is still defending Wright, and very lamely (Wright's "on the brink of retirement;" he's made "some controversial statements" in the past; his statements are being "cherry picked"). Wright wasn't near retirement in 2001 when he blamed 9/11 on the U.S; nor was he near retirement in 2003 when he said God should "damn America." And the statements at issue aren't merely "controversial" or "just wrong"; they are deplorable.

And what about the fact that Oprah Winfrey is also a member of Wright's flock? Seems that the lines to her show are burning up. Ed Morrissey:

Given the intense media interest in Mormon underwear and LDS doctrine in the fall of 2007, one might expect a little more scrutiny of the much more political and racially-charged message coming from the pulpit of the Trinity United Church. It looks like that may have already begun, and the reputations of both Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey rest on how quickly and adeptly they can distance themselves from the debacle.

Now via The Autonomist we begin to learn the extent to which Obama has been lying about his professed "distance" from his beloved mentor's anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-American hatemongering:

Wright laced into America's establishment, blaming the "white arrogance" of America's Caucasian majority for the woes of the world, especially the oppression suffered by blacks. To underscore the point he refers to the country as the "United States of White America." Many in the congregation, including Obama, nodded in apparent agreement as these statements were made. [Emphasis added]

The sermon also addressed the Iraq war, a frequent area of Wright's fulminations. Young African-American men," Wright thundered, were "dying for nothing." The illegal war," he shouted, was "based on Bush's lies" and is being "fought for oil money."

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Stephen Hayes has for years been chronicling the news the MSM loves to either ignore or misreport regarding the proven connections between Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda and its offshoots and proxies. His new article in the Weekly Standard follows a recent blog post on the Pentagon's new report that outlines those connections. Of course, the New York Times and the rest of the MSM somehow miss the information in the report that counters their narrative. That's to be expected, but it's still wrong and dishonest:

This ought to be big news. Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein actively supported an influential terrorist group headed by the man who is now al Qaeda's second-in-command, according to an exhaustive study issued last week by the Pentagon. "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives." According to the Pentagon study, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was one of many jihadist groups that Iraq's former dictator funded, trained, equipped, and armed.

...How can a study offering an unprecedented look into the closed regime of a brutal dictator, with over 1,600 pages of "strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism," in the words of its authors, receive a wave-of-the-hand dismissal from America's most prestigious news outlets? All it took was a leak to a gullible reporter, one misleading line in the study's executive summary, a boneheaded Pentagon press office, an incompetent White House, and widespread journalistic negligence.

...What's happening here is obvious. Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein's long support of jihadist terrorism. Most reporters don't care. They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary--not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself--can convince them to reexamine their mistaken assumptions.

Bush administration officials, meanwhile, tell us that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on terror and that American national security depends on winning there. And yet they are too busy or too tired or too lazy to correct these fundamental misperceptions about the case for war, the most important decision of the Bush presidency.

What good is the truth if nobody knows it?

Saddam's Dangerous Friends

Dan Wismar has compiled a list of links to Hayes' extensive reporting on The Connection. He also notes the media's widespread dishonesty on this story.

Tom Joscelyn weighs in on the subject, which he has covered as well: "the report ties Saddam’s regime to at least five different al Qaeda associated groups, including two groups that formed the core of al Qaeda." (Emphasis mine)

In discussing the State Department's report on Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism, Power Line has pointed to a UN report that "essentially licenses terrorism against Israel".

Stories such as this AP account flag the new UN report by special rapporteur John Dugard. Dugard's provides an appalling example of the role playled by the United Nations in disseminating the most virulent forms of contemporary anti-Semitism. The report essentially licenses terrorism against Israel. Dugard explains that there are two kinds of terrorism -- one "mindless" and the other killing Israelis in the name of "national liberation." The latter is "inevitable," according to Dugard.

Dugard's report arrived too late to be recognized properly in the State Department's report on global anti-Semitism, but Eye on the UN has posted a petition protesting Dugard's report.

It's simple, really: if only Israel didn't exist, everything would be cool. Until then, Palestinians and other Islamist groups really can't be blamed for murdering Jews from Tel Aviv to Buenos Aires and back. Of course, when Israelis defend themselves, well, that just makes it worse.

They're just askin' for it, y'know?

The Rape Defense; the gift that keeps on giving to the Palestinians.

So David Mamet has announced that he's no longer a brain-dead liberal.

Who knew he was given to redundancy?

Whatever. His declaration doesn't automatically make him a member of Team Right, especially not with bullshit brain droppings like this:

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

Yadayadayada.

I've got my problems with President Bush, but I don't invest him with tired old idiot lies that are obviously still a big part of Mamet's mindset. Mamet may think he's no longer a brain-dead liberal, but until he gets over his BDS, he's still stuck in an intellectually lazy stupor.

Angry Obamagrrrl Samantha Hussein Power got canned from Glowing Jesus '08 for calling Hillary! a monster.

Then Geraldine Rodham Ferraro got canned from Billary '12 for breaking the PC speech codes we more intelligent folk choose not even to acknowledge, much less kowtow to- more personal freedom that way, which we really appreciate.

A serious question therefore obtains: What do these two events have in common, besides the heavenly incandescence of Barack Obama's divine light and the certainty that his wife Michelle is right now moaning via live worldwide satellite feed about being isolated in America?

NRO's Kathleen Parker:

What’s clearly wrong is the convenient labeling — and silencing — of people as racist or sexist for expressing opinions that run counter to acceptable speech codes as determined by the minders of outrage.

Thus distracted, we ignore the real monster, whose name is Identity Politics.

It has two faces — and always bites the hand that feeds it.

I love that phrase, "minders of outrage".

It's going to be a long, dirty fight. Idiots do not even observe, let alone respect rules; witness that whole "living constitution" thing. So it's going to be not just mean but stupid. May it all get as nasty as the Clintons can possibly make it for Obama, for as long as they possibly can.

Reasonable Americans need to experience a Democrat bloodbath to affirm their faith in the system.

Go.

A Daily Kocksucker whines about the so-called "Rush Effect", conveniently ignoring that crossover Democrats voted for McCain in the early primaries.

If Democrats and the MSM can raid the early primaries each in their own special way to elect John McCain as the Republican candidate, they can all Smell My Bag™ when Republicans exercise their right to vote for Hillary.

So stop whining already, Kocksuckers. Ya bore me.

The Wall Street Journal notices.

How many Tom Delays equal Elliot Spitzer?

Paul Krugman:

I’m sorry to say that a large part of the progressive movement seems to have lost its sanity.

In other news, I'm sorry to say that a large part of the universe seems to operate on the laws of physics.

That's the vapid title of this article featuring this photograph:

Via Little Green Footballs, which makes pussies cry.

Congratulations to Palestinians as they celebrate the murder of more Israelis.

Five!

George McGovern was once the poster boy for idiots, back when I dabbled around the edges of idiocy myself. I appreciated his intelligence and humor but never doubted that as President he would be an unmitigated disaster, so flawed was his world view.

To his credit Senator McGovern has recently ventured forth from Idiotworld and discovered a brilliant American concept: individual freedom and responsibility.

Since leaving office I've written about public policy from a new perspective: outside looking in. I've come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society. (Editor's note: Nnn'DUH!)

Why do we think we are helping adult consumers by taking away their options? We don't take away cars because we don't like some people speeding. We allow state lotteries despite knowing some people are betting their grocery money. Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind. But we don't operate mindlessly in trying to smooth out every theoretical wrinkle in life.

The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.

Wow, man, that is some primo shit.

Barack Sesamestreet Obama's troubles are mounting.

Oby's anti-Israeli foreign policy advisor Samantha Power is gonzo thanks to her Michelle Obama-like indiscretion. Obama's chicanery with the Canadian government has his man Goolsbee on the run. The Rezko trial unfolds. And his spokeswoman Susan Rice affirms that only McCain is ready for a 3 a.m phonecall.

Reality is a cruel mistress.

On the global warming idiocy. He intends to sue the GW acolytes, which is how you get liberals to tell the truth.

Two days ago: A wonderful remembrance by Jay Nordlinger of his friend Bill Buckley.

By monster I mean some horrendous presence or apparition that explodes all your standards for harmony, order and ethical conduct... That's God in the role of destroyer. Such experiences go past ethical judgements. Ethics is wiped out... God is horrific.
- Joseph Campbell, The Power Of Myth

Ed Morrissey, now blogging full time at Michelle Malkin's Hot Air, has a post up today that echoes the previous posts here and here. He begins with reference to Alan Dershowitz' Wall Street Journal article Worshippers Of Death, in which Dershowitz points out how the enemy's very nihilism, and that of his willing civilian enablers, makes it necessary to devise new rules for dealing with what he identifies as the terrorist "continuum".

The obvious problem is that the Islamofascists are in love with death, as they themselves declare on a daily basis, and we know they cannot be negotiated with; all they want is to destroy us and our way of life, and they thirst for glory as martyrs in service to that end, including those we wind up killing as so-called collateral damage. The question therefore forced on we the rational by the enemy is, how do we define "collateral damage"? I agree with Morrissey's answer:

[W]e need to understand this war as something other than Hitler rolling into Poland or Japan bombing a naval base in Pearl Harbor. We face a network of radical theological nihilists who want to destroy civilization by using our civilized impulses against us. We have to maintain those impulses but not shy away from doing the necessary work of ridding the globe of this new and dangerous cancer, militarily, politically, and financially. That will require the West to understand that the collateral deaths are the fault of the terrorists, whether that is in Afghanistan, Gaza, Iraq, or anywhere else where terrorists launch attacks in the midst of civilians.

In short, it requires the West to dump the fantasy of the old set-piece paradigms and get serious about saving millions and perhaps billions of lives in the long run by doing what needs to be done now. The irrational do not seek a negotiated solution, and rationality cannot be rescued by surrendering to the irrational. (Emphasis mine)

The enemy specifically rejects all ethical judgements. It is therefore not we but the enemy who has placed Western civilization into this conflict between doing what is necessary to destroy this malignant evil, and sticking to our old paradigms of conventional warfare in which civilized people agreed on civilized laws, including the rules of war. When our enemies hide by weaving themselves into the very willing fabric of their society rather than standing up like warriors in the civilized tradition, then their civilians, innocent or not (mostly not in the cases Dershowitz cites), must necessarily be killed when we counter their attacks with our own. If that is how they choose to fight, we must accommodate them with a commitment and sense of purpose that suits the job at hand. "Rationality cannot be rescued by surrendering to the irrational."

As a society at war with an implacable enemy bent on our destruction, we must answer that aggression with the clear intent of destroying the enemy wherever it hides and in whatever form it takes, including Dershowitz' pregnant female homicide bomber. The deaths of the innocent will be on the enemy's heads, not ours; given the enemy's nature I can live with that, just as I can live with a Dresden or a Hiroshima if that's what will save the civilized world.

It has been so in the past and it will be so again if we are to prevail against this latest horrendous apparition.

We have always emerged from war with our humanity intact, and we always will. That is our nature.

In the "progressive" spirit of examining root causes, a National Post editorial on who bears responsibility for the fate of Gazan Palestinians:

On Friday, a 13-month-old Palestinian girl was killed by shrapnel in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. Hamas blamed Israel for the death. But according to locals, the deadly explosion occurred when a Palestinian rocket aimed at Israel went off course and blew up the victim's house. By the time the weekend was over, dozens more Palestinians would be killed -- as well as two Israeli soldiers -- as Israel waged an air and ground campaign against Palestinian rocket crews and their Hamas enablers.

As in any war, it is the child casualties that attract the greatest sympathy and anguish. But Friday's 13-month-old victim carries special significance: Her death by the Palestinians' own rocket fire perfectly symbolizes the self-destructive pathology that has afflicted the Palestinians since the 1960s. Palestinian leaders would quite literally prefer to slaughter their own people than turn Gaza into a normal country that deals on civilized terms with its neighbours.

Time to haul this Post writer up in front of a hate crimes judge.

Avi Lewis has joined Al Jazeera. The Post wishes him God-speed, hardy-har.

Flashback: Ayaan Hirsi Ali meets the "progressive" Canadian posterboy of anti-American hatred. Muslim Goddess 10, CBC's resident socialist parasite 0.

Yeah, he'll fit right in over at Dhimmi Central.

Small Dead Animals: if it's anti-Semitism you're looking for, scratch a "progressive".

Ladies and Gennemun, the next President of the Audacious States of Obama, "questioning" General Petraeus during the hearings on The Surge. After a long, lurid slide, the mask finally falls away at about 6:30 to reveal The Magic One's Inner Idiot:

"You broke it, you bought it" was a popular leftist refrain a while back, referring to Colin Powell's caution to Bush prior to the rescue of Iraq from Saddam Hussein and Islamic fascism.

"You broke it, you own it", meaning you take responsibility for your actions and decisions, is a more fitting construction, one which should have been explained to the Palestinians who, given the precious gift of a vote in 2006, broke their democracy by electing thugs and murdurers, and now are faced with owning the wreckage.

Andy McCarthy:

We are lectured a great deal about the importance of democratizing the Middle East as, somehow, a strategy to defeat terrorism. I do not want to reargue this issue or make too much (again) of the fact that popular elections have thus far succeeded in empowering terrorists.

My question for the moment is this: Does this democratization ever entail any responsibility? The Palestinian "civilians" were given a choice in 2006, and they chose to elect Hamas — a choice that was overwhelming in Gaza, where the terror organization — having ousted the more "moderate" terror-mongers from Fatah — now rules. If the civilians, eyes wide open, opt to be led by a terrorist organization whose chief calling card is its pledge to destroy Israel (a sentiment shared by a large majority of the "civilian" population), how upset are we supposed to get when the said civilians get caught in the cross-fire that is provoked by the savages they elected?

My answer is not at all. We should instead pray for the Israelis, who understand the obligations and responsibilities of real democracy, and have every right to practice it in peace.

Israeli patience amazes me. Hamas is playing the same game in Gaza they played in Lebanon: attack innocent Israeli civilians because they can, then hide behind "civilians" whom we all know are rarely innocent, since they harbor Hamas to begin with. And when some of those civilians become collateral damage during an Israeli retaliation, they can once again depend on the UN, the EU, the international press and idiots worldwide to point their collective fingers at Israel as "child-murderers", which ignores the Western legal convention of 'reckless endangerment", of which Hamas are clearly guilty in these cases, since they hide amongst their populations while engaging in acts of war (If their constituencies had any brains they would hire American lawyers to file lawsuits against their murderous and self-destructive tribal elders).

They do this because they want Israel's hands tied with world approbrium, leaving Hamas free to carry on their existential war against Israel. It's not difficult for reasonable people to see what Hamas and their human shields are doing when they fire rockets into Israel and then cry when Israel retaliates. Everyone knew a kid who acted like that in the playground at school, and it was always fun watching them get their pussy asses kicked around the block while they cried.

So what is the solution? First, some reality: The "two-state solution" is no such thing because only Israel agrees to it. The Palestinians, Hamas and Fatah, do not. The status quo is a charade that benefits no-one, least of all Israel. Diplomacy, talks, meetings, promises, all have been fruitless since long before Arafat; that's a long time. Every Israeli concession is met by Palestinians with further destruction. They are bloodthirsty, treacherous and tenacious, but they lack the power to defeat the Israelis; the Israelis are so sensitive to world opinion as stoked by their enemies that they have not yet resolved to destroy the terrorists trying to destroy them, any retaliation instantly being labelled as "disproportionate".

The terrorists' all-out war against Israel should be met by Israel with unmitigated fierceness, first against the Islamist terrorist leaders, every single one that can be identified. Then on to the footsoldiers until the last wretched animal is killed and displayed in death on the front page of the New York Times.

That done: peace, bro.

Via K-Lo at NRO, Rush Limbaugh counsels a caller on staying in the fight against the sickness of liberalism:

Liberalism .... is totalitarian in nature. It is an effort to control everybody, or as many people as possible. It's based on the assumption that most people are blithering idiots and haven't the ability to lead responsible lives on their own.

This is fostered by willing accomplices in the news media who are constantly beating the drum of doom and gloom and fatalism and pessimism, and they have a lot of power in creating these negative moods that people have, not so much about their own lives, but about everybody else's. The overall effort here is to dispirit and to depress people and to make people give up in attempting to achieve. Listen to Michelle Obama in Zanesville, Ohio. She's basically telling people to give up. She's telling people who are poor to stay poor because there's just too much trouble in attempt to go acquire wealth. You might have to go borrow money, go to college, student loan. She's telling people to stay poor. She wants people to stay poor. Why? I don't know if she has an inherent dislike for the country, she's got some bitterness, but she's also a liberal. She wants to be in charge of these people and their welfare.

This is how liberals get their votes. It really boils down to nothing more complicated than that, except it's hideous what liberalism does to the human spirit, it attempts to destroy it, even to the point of making enemies out of people who have achieved something, out of people who have become successful. Even they are attacked, especially they are attacked. Conservatism, on the other hand, doesn't seek to control anybody. Conservatism seeks to liberate. Conservatism believes that the human being, the United States of America citizen, is capable of anything he or she wants. Conservatism believes in the goodness and the greatness and the potential for such, in every human being and wants to get as much out of the way in terms of obstacles as possible. Conservatism wants to motivate those people. Conservatism wants to inspire those people. Conservatism wants happy, content people pursuing life and liberty. Conservatism believes that the greatest country we can have is where there is as much freedom as possible, as defined by the founding documents of this country when there is as little government as necessary, and when people are free to utilize their own desires and their ambitions, because conservatives believe in the basic goodness, the good-heartedness and the decency of every human. Liberals do not.

Liberals are filled with rage. They are filled with anger. They are filled with contempt for the very people that we love, for the very people that we hope and invest great things in. Liberals don't want to risk that. You understand the more prosperous, the happier, the more content people are, the less there is need for liberalism. The more people accruing wealth, the more people acquiring assets, the more people succeeding in free market capitalism, the greater the threat to liberalism. So of course they are going to trash the very foundations of this country, and as Michelle Obama did, try to make as many people as possible think it's not theirs, it's not for them, it's not intended for them. Only elites like Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have what it takes to overcome these rigors and so forth. Well, that's a hell of a battle to try to fight. The problem that we've been having lately, John, is that rather than fight it, we're trying to limit their growth. We're trying not to stop liberalism; we're trying to limit it a little bit. So when national crisis — of course, everything, according to the left is a crisis — so when we have a crisis, like the best health care system in the world is a crisis, we have to fix it.

So liberals come up with a fix that's based on inherent liberalism, that it's unfair, that some people aren't insured, some people can't get as good a coverage as somebody else. So we have to nationalize it, we have to put liberals in charge of it, we have to put people who have never run a business, wouldn't know the first thing about it, in charge of it. Then we're going to put in jail as many people who are in that business for screwing it up. Then what do we have? We have Republicans saying, "Well, I don't think we should go that far," but they accept the premise. Republicans are accepting too many premises advanced by the left and trying to tweak them and make 'em look less liberal and more conservative rather than rejecting the whole concept of liberalism out of hand, and that's what has you frosted. You don't see any warriors on your side of the aisle. You see appeasers; you see people who want acceptance; you see people who are afraid to stand up for the country when it's trashed by people like Murtha and Dick Durbin and Ted Kennedy and so forth.

Believe me, you are not alone. But the solution is not to opt out. The solution is to stay engaged, live your life the way you do, and influence as many people with whom you come in contact; you will have more impact than you will know. It's a presidential year. A lot of what I've said is going to be exposed. We don't know where we're going with this. We have no idea. Barack Obama says he's a blank slate, he's a canvas, you can write whatever you want him to be. This whole campaign is that, to tell you the truth.

A Happy Warrior Honors the Original Happy Warrior:

In his speech at the National Review 50th-anniversary gala, he did me the great honor of reading out a passage of mine from the birthday issue that happened to have tickled his fancy. I am a considerably less elegant writer and listening to Bill reading my rough-and-tumble prose in his languid vowels was a bit like hearing Maria Callas sing “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” But the column he gave me in his magazine is called “Happy Warrior,” and we have at least that in common: He was a very happy warrior, a great twinkling beamer full of merriment who relished taking on the conventional opinions of a complacent establishment against all the odds. Forty-nine years ago, he wrote, “We must bring down the thing called liberalism, which is powerful but decadent, and salvage a thing called conservatism, which is weak but viable.” It is an unending struggle because, while the facts of life are conservative (as his friend Margaret Thatcher put it), liberalism is eternally seductive. But, as they will tell you in the capitals of post-Communist Eastern Europe, the world is better off because William F. Buckley Jr. stood athwart history and changed its course.

Read it all.

UPDATED

Once again, Hamas is askin' for it, and the Israelis look like they are about to deliver.

Defense Minster Ehud Barak on Friday blamed Hamas for the escalating violence in the south, and said the Islamic movement would bear the consequences of it.

"Hamas is directly responsible for the current situation and will be the one to bear the cost of our response", Barak said during a visit to Ashkelon, adding that "an Israeli response is necessary and will be carried out."

...Also Friday, the chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee said the IDF must reoccupy part of the Gaza Strip for an unlimited time and overthrow the Hamas government.

"The State of Israel must make a strategic decision to order the IDF to prepare quickly to topple the Hamas terror regime and take over all the areas from which rockets are fired on Israel," MK Tzachi Hanegbi (Kadima) told Israel Radio. He said the IDF should prepare to remain in those areas for years.

MK Gideon Sa'ar (Likud) said his party would back an invasion of Gaza, though he fell short of advocating reoccupation.

"There is no doubt that the security response needs to include a ground component," said Sa'ar. He said the "takeover of territory in the northern Strip" from which the Palestinians launch rockets at Israel would reduce the barrages from Gaza.

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

"The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, [the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Vilnai told Army Radio on Friday.

As evidenced by the ridiculous "holocaust" accusation above, Israel will get clobbered in the international media and at the U.N., but there's nothing unusual about that. It's insane, but that doesn't make it unusual. The rockets fly from Gaza, Israelis die, no problem. The Israelis punish the assholes who fire the rockets, and the world goes apeshit.

UPDATE
That didn't take long.