PS #1: I voted today and even though I am out in the boonies, we had cherry voting machines. They're called iVotronics and as you vote, in real time, it prints out your selections so there will be a written record. So, if you were to point and click Michael Steele let's say, on your left, it would immediately print out Michael Steele in the Senator's slot.
Now, turnout should be down significantly from last time around, so the lines shouldn't be as long on Tuesday as they were in 2004, but it's a good idea to go ahead and vote early this week-end, when the lines will be short, if you can. At a minimum, it should save you some time and if you're the impatient sort, who might be tempted to take off rather than wait in a long line or if you will get yelled at if you're late for work, early voting might be the difference between getting a vote in or missing out.
And do make sure you vote, folks, no matter how the big races in your district are shaping up. There will be Republicans up and down the ticket that can use your support. Don't let them down.
"Rap star Kanye West was named Best Hip Hop artist but still came off as a sore loser at the MTV Europe Music Awards.
Kanye apparently was so disappointed at not winning for Best Video that he crashed the stage Thursday in Copenhagen when the award was being presented to Justice and Simian for "We Are Your Friends."
In a tirade riddled with expletives, Kanye said he should have won the prize for his video "Touch The Sky," because it "cost a million dollars, Pamela Anderson was in it. I was jumping across canyons."
"If I don't win, the awards show loses credibility," Kanye said."
What an egomaniac! If only he would have screamed "MTV doesn't care about black people," when he left the stage, it would have been absolutely perfect!
Participate In The GOP's Get Out The Vote Campaign
The GOP needs some help with its Get Out The Vote Campaign and Right Wing News is going to provide you all the info you need to play a part. Basically, what you do is sign up and then the GOP provides all the info you need to make calls to Republicans in key districts. You'll be surprised at how easy it is and how many voters you can coax to the polls in an hour or two.
Heck, I've done this sort of thing before, although it was way back in the bad old days, when you had to show up at Republican HQ and couldn't make calls from the comfort of your own home. So, come on, folks -- sign up, make a difference, do your part to maintain a Republican majority!
Click here or on the GOTP image if you're interested in participating.
Ken Mehlman got together with some bloggers this afternoon and he definitely had a message that he wanted to get across. Here are the three points he hammered home before he went off the record:
#1) For whatever reason, exit polls have over the years tended to favor Democrats over Republicans. It may be because the sample is too female, because they use big precincts for exit polls and we do better in small precincts, or because of something else. Just be aware that the exit polls will be wrong.
#2) Some of our toughest states will come in early. Keep that in mind and try not to declare the House lost too early because of that because it could depress turnout in the states that come in later.
#3) The polls are way oversampling democrats. Some of these polls are going +5 to +12 Democratic over the last cycle. But, in the last 25 years, the electorate has NEVER been that Democratic. So, in other words, a lot of the polls are wrong because they're oversampling the number of Democratic voters.
There have been two Republican Googlebombs launched over the last few weeks. Googlebomb #1, on Oct 23, 2006; Googlebomb #2 was detonated on Oct 26, 2006 and it featured all YouTube videos.
So, we're now up to the final week-end before the election and I'm sure a lot of people are wondering how well it worked. Pretty well actually.
Overall, we got 70 of 86 negative links into the top 30 search results on Google for the Democratic candidates we targeted. With Googlebomb #1, which has been out there a little longer, we managed to get 41 of our 45 links into the top 30 links for the Democratic candidates we went after. With the 2nd Googlebomb, we got 29 out of 41 links right on target.
Here's a rundown of the individual races we targeted:
(GB1) = Googlebomb #1, (GB2) = Googlebomb #2
Steve Kagen #2 (GB2)
Steve Kagen #3 (GB1)
Brad Ellsworth #4 (GB1)
Baron Hill #4 (GB1)
Michael Arcuri #4 (GB1)
Zack Space #4 (GB1)
Ned Lamont #5 (GB1)
Phil Hare #5 (GB2)
Gabrielle Giffords #5 (GB1)
Bruce Braley #5 (GB1)
Baron Hill #5 (GB2)
Michael Arcuri #5 (GB1)
Lois Murphy #5 (GB1)
Chris Carney #5 (GB1)
Debbie Stabenow #6 (GB2)
Claire McCaskill #6 (GB2)
Jon Tester #6 (GB2)
Ed Perlmutter #6 (GB1)
Christine Jennings #6 (GB1)
Patricia Madrid #6 (GB2)
Mary Jo Kilroy #6 (GB1)
Phil Kellam #6 (GB1)
Eric Massa #6 (GB2)
Phil Hare #7 (GB2)
Diane Farrell #7 (GB2)
Ron Klein #7 (GB1)
John Yarmuth #7 (GB1)
Patricia Madrid #7 (GB1)
Phil Kellam #7 (GB2)
Joe Donnelly #8 (GB1)
Jack Davis #8 (GB1)
Chris Carney #8 (GB2)
Jon Tester #9 (GB1)
Julia Carson #9 (GB1)
Joe Sestak #9 (GB1)
Darcy Burner #9 (GB2)
Ben Cardin #10 (GB2)
John Murtha #10 (GB1)
Patty Wetterling #10 (GB1)
Harry Mitchell #10 (GB2)
Tim Mahoney #11 (GB2)
Tammy Duckworth #11 (GB1)
Kirsten Gillibrand #11 (GB1)
Zack Space #11 (GB2)
Patrick Murphy #11 (GB1)
Leonard Boswell #12 (GB1)
Chris Murphy #12 (GB1)
Bruce Braley #12 (GB2)
Tammy Duckworth #12 (GB2)
Mary Jo Kilroy #12 (GB2)
Claire McCaskill #13 (GB1)
Harold Ford #13 (GB1) (Broken Link)
Tim Mahoney #14 (GB1)
Kirsten Gillibrand #14 (GB2)
Ben Cardin #15 (GB1)
Ed Perlmutter #15 (GB2)
Brad Miller #16 (GB1)
Debbie Stabenow #15 (GB1)
Ben Cardin #19 (GB2)
Alan Mollohan #19 (GB1)
John Barrow #20 (GB1)
Sherrod Brown #20 (GB2)
Chris Murphy #20 (GB2)
Bob Menendez #22 (GB1)
James Webb #22 (GB1)
Jim Marshall #23 (GB1)
Brad Miller #23 (GB2)
Patrick Murphy #23 (GB2)
James Webb #25 (GB2)
Bob Menendez #30 (GB2)
Could this end up making a difference in a few close races? Sure, if a particular link was good enough, went high enough up the list, and enough independent voters read it while they were doing last minute research, it could swing a few hundred independent voters trying to figure out which direction to go in. So yeah, this could definitely help, in some instances at least, move races from the blue to the red column.
At the University of Pennsylvania, they had a costume party and a couple of the students came as terrorists. Here's a picture of one of them standing next to the President of the University of Pennsylvania.
Quite frankly, that picture alone should be enough to end her career and get him kicked out of college.
Here's another picture (and caption) that I found particularly disturbing:
Here we're about to behead Miss Santa Clause. I read verses from the Qu'ran before the violence ensued.
During WW2, I guarantee you that there weren't a lot of people dressing up as Nazis and going to Halloween parties in America because it wouldn't have been tolerated. Heck, it's considered bad form to go to a costume party dressed as a Nazi today, 60+ years after the end of WW2. And, the fact that there are people going to Halloween parties today dressed as terrorists and doing fake decapitations isn't a sign of progress in my book.
"Actually, that second picture is so absurd I think the whole gag is meant to be ANTI-terrorist." -- CoolCzech
The kid with the fake suicide bomber kit on has also gone on a trip to Syria. Personally, I think he's a jihad wannabe living the fantasy and I am a little amazed that those two punks made it out of there without getting hurt.
Are The Lefty Bloggers To Blame For The Mess In The Connecticut Senate Race?
Now if Ned lamont were to somehow miraculously pull out a win on Tuesday of next week, everyone knows that the netroots would take all the credit for it -- and they'd have at least a little justification for it. After all, there's no way Ned Lamont would have beaten Joe Lieberman in the Democratic Primaries without the liberal bloggers pushing ole Nedmentum so hard.
But, since Lamont's campaign has tanked and Lieberman is going to steamroll him, the lefty bloggers have abandoned him and there's some discussion over whether they bear any responsibility for the whole debacle:
"Down more than a dozen points in the polls, Mr. Lamont has practically become a self-financed candidate, pouring $12.7 million of his own money into his campaign to compensate for lackluster fund-raising. He is sorely missing the grassroots fervor and national attention he enjoyed early on, when he was the darling of the blogosphere and the bellwether of Democratic politics. Mr. Lamont is making a last-ditch effort to refocus his message on Iraq and regain his prior momentum, but it seems to be too little, too late.
Democratic strategists and consultants, some of them sympathetic to the campaign, are already talking about it in the past tense.
“I think it was possible for Lamont to pull it off,” said Bob Shrum, a veteran political analyst. “There were moments right after the primary where it was basically a tied race.”
The apparent end of the much-ballyhooed Lamont phenomenon is causing a great deal of soul-searching and recrimination in all corners of the Democratic Party. The bloggers that once championed Mr. Lamont as an awkward but earnest savior now alternately blame Washington’s strategists for hijacking their candidate and Democratic leaders for abandoning him. Beltway consultants fault the Lamont campaign for failing to move the candidate beyond his left-wing celebrity and define him for a greater electorate.
“You know, it’s Ned Lamont’s campaign,” said Mr. Lamont.
He bristled at the suggestion that he got caught in the middle of a Democratic power struggle and argued that the party had come around to his message on Iraq. “I’d like to think we’ve made a small difference in that, but more important, I think the nation is reaching the same conclusions we were at, about a year ago, that it is time for that change.”
...The commercials that the campaign ran after the primary seemed to appeal much less to a general audience than to Mr. Lamont’s base of liberal primary voters. The ads—produced by the firm of Bill Hillsman, who helped Jesse (the Body) Ventura become governor of Minnesota—were unorthodox, to say the least. The kooky ones featured Mr. Lamont singing Wang Chung songs, flipping burgers and beaming in front of crowds of young, energized voters. The negative ones—and there were plenty—featured Mr. Lieberman morphing into George Bush, crashing into a brick wall or echoing Richard Nixon.
The campaign did make some efforts to reposition itself for a general election. Hillary Clinton, who held a fund-raiser for Mr. Lamont, loaned him Howard Wolfson, one of her most trusted consultants, as an unpaid advisor. Stephanie Cutter, Senator Ted Kennedy’s spokeswoman—who also worked as director of communications for John Kerry’s Presidential campaign—came on board and eventually helped prep Mr. Lamont for the debates.
“I don’t think there is any question that he helped lead, shape and change the dialogue around this issue,” said Mr. Wolfson, who remained bullish about Mr. Lamont’s chances and refused to acknowledge any tension within the campaign. “Every campaign is a group of disparate voices.”
Still, bloggers held Mr. Wolfson responsible for the campaign’s derailment. This month, the left-wing Huffington Post compiled its readers’ grievances about the fizzling campaign into a premature concession speech for Mr. Lamont.
“I turned my campaign over to hired guns who think that running to the middle is a winning strategy—even though it’s proven to be a loser time and time and time again,” the post read.
In a recent post for his popular left-wing political blog MyDD, Matt Stoller called Democratic leaders “moral lepers” for abandoning Mr. Lamont.
“What I have seen in this race is a complete abrogation of responsibility on the part of everybody except the netroots and Ned Lamont,” Mr. Stoller said in a telephone interview. “Trusting these people is a huge tactical error. Never trust anything that these insider Democrats tell you,” he said, adding, for good measure, “Bill Clinton is a liar.”
The lefty bloggers ended up putting Lamont and the Democrats in the Senate in a no-win position.
In Lamont's case, by jumping into bed with a bunch of wacko left-wing bloggers, he undoubtedly ended up scaring a lot of moderates and Republicans in Connecticut into Joe Lieberman's camp. Moreover, trying to run the same campaign he ran to win the primary, in the general election, would have been pointless. Everyone already knew Lamont was the anti-war candidate and, of course, the sort of appeals that get Matt Stoller, Kos, and Jane Hamsher excited aren't going to work on moderates, Republicans, or even a good sized chunk of the Democratic Party.
Then, when it comes to the Democrats in the Senate, they were between a rock and a hard place. They were put in a position where they either had to irritate the left-wing bloggers or Joe Lieberman, the guy whom they desperately need to caucus with them and vote their way for the next six years. Could they really afford to stick it hard to Joe when they knew all along that he was going to win? No, they couldn't.
And yeah, they did know Joe was going to win. Some of us were telling you way back in August that Lieberman was in the catbird's seat and Lamont would lose the general election just based on the nature of the race and the demographics of the state. So, it isn't the campaign Lamont ran in the general election, he was doomed to lose from the moment Joe Lieberman decided to run in the general election forward.
But however you slice it, since the lefty bloggers would have owned the win, they certainly should own the loss and the resulting mess, too. They should have picked their battles more wisely.
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What Will The Election Results Tell Us? By Betsy Newmark
Charles Krauthammer ponders what conclusions can be reached if the Democrats do indeed do as well as predicted in the elections. Critics of Krauthammer will regard this as the pre-spin for GOP losses. But the points are still true.
First of all, we should remember that this is the historical pattern in the sixth year of a two-term president's administration. The one exception is Bill Clinton in 1998 when Republican overreach on impeachment strengthened the Democrats in those off year elections.
According to the pollsters, pundits and pols -- Democratic and nervous Republican -- a great anti-Republican wave is a-coming. Well, let's assume major Democratic gains: 20 to 25 House seats and four to six Senate seats. The House goes Democratic for the first time in 12 years. The Senate probably stays Republican, but by such an excruciatingly small margin that there is no governing majority.
What to say about such a victory? Substantial, yes. Historic, no. Before proclaiming a landslide, one has to ask Henny Youngman's question: "Compared to what?" (His answer to: "How's your wife?") Since the end of World War II, the average loss for a second-term presidency in its sixth year has been 29 House seats and six Senate seats. If you go back to Franklin Roosevelt's second term, the House loss average jumps to 35. Thus a 25/6 House and Senate loss would be about (and slightly below) the historical average.
True, today there is far more -- and more effective -- gerrymandering as computer power and shamelessness both have grown exponentially. So fewer seats are competitive. But that is true only for the House. You cannot gerrymander the Senate. (Of course, the Democrats are trying even that, with their perennial push for two Senate seats for the 9 to 1 Democratic District of Columbia, which should instead exercise voting rights in the state of Maryland, to which it is geographically, economically and culturally contiguous.) In his sixth year, the now-sainted Ronald Reagan lost eight Senate seats that gave the chamber back to Democratic control. That election was swayed by no wars, no weekly casualty figures, no major scandals. The first inkling of the Iran-contra scandal broke on the morning after the election.
And then Krauthammer goes on to examine whether such predicted losses tell us that the public has rejected the Republicans and Bush.
Yes, the campaign has been nationalized. But will the results be? In the House, a good five seats (Bob Ney, Tom DeLay, Don Sherwood, Mark Foley, Curt Weldon) are likely to be lost to scandals having nothing to do with Bush or Iraq. Of the losing Senate races, only Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania can be said to be dying for the sins of their party.
The other races, if lost, will be lost largely for local reasons. In Ohio, the state is rocked by an enormous Republican scandal at the gubernatorial level that is taking the whole party down with it, Sen. Mike DeWine included. In Montana, Conrad Burns is in trouble because of his association with Jack Abramoff, not George Bush.
In Virginia, a state that should not even be in play, George Allen has run the worst campaign in living memory, stumbling onto one ethnic land mine after another -- "macaca," the Yiddish mama, N-word allegations. And in New Jersey, the one Democratic seat that could conceivably go the other way and save Senate control for the Republicans, the drag on Sen. Bob Menendez is the very nonnational issue of official corruption.
So when the results come in and the Democrats begin to crow, remember this: By historical standards, this is the American people's usual response to entrenched power -- a bracing and chastening contempt. Sixth-year presidents nearly always bring their parties down. (Republican overreaching on the Monica Lewinsky scandal made Bill Clinton's sixth year an exception.) Moreover, this year, the out-of-the-blue Foley scandal interrupted whatever national momentum the Republicans had gained after successfully passing legislation on terrorist interrogation and detention, and thus refocusing attention on their strongest suit, the war on terrorism.
The election will be a referendum of sorts on Iraq. But it will be registering nothing more than uneasiness and discontent. Had the Democrats offered a coherent alternative to the current policy, one could draw lessons as to what course the country should take. But if either friends or enemies interpret the results as a mandate for giving up, they will be mistaken.
Of course, the Democrats, if they win so strongly on Tuesday, they'll trumpet that they've been given a mandate for their views. The fact that they haven't laid out what their plans for Iraq are will suddenly be irrelevant.
This content was used with the permission of Betsy's Page.
Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990’s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.
Perhaps there is more reason to fear some of these documents shouldn't have been posted.
But it's hard to make that case without revealing that, I repeat, Hussein was at one point one year away from building a bomb.
This is going to be one of those rare occasions where there's no daily news. Sorry about that, folks! The daily news will return in its regular spot on Monday.
I recently finished Mark Steyn's superb book, America Alone, which is about disturbing European demographic trends and the danger of radical Islam. The book was just mesmerizing, one of the best books I've read in years, and as you'd expect with anything Steyn penned, it was so magnificently written that I could hardly tear myself away from the book. If I were to give the book a letter grade, it would be an A+ -- it's "must read" material.
Let me put it in a slightly bigger nutshell: much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive the twenty first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands -- probably -- just as in Istanbul there's still a building known as Hagia Sophia, or St. Sophia's Cathedral. But, it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. -- P.xiii
Here's what did happen between 1970 and 2000: in that period, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the global population to just over 20 percent, and the Muslim nations increased from about 15 percent to 20 percent. -- P.xiv
I wonder how many pontificators on the "Middle East peace process" ever run this number: the median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years. Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a "moderate Palestinian" leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation -- or pseudo-nation -- of unemployed, poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the "Palestinian problem" that doesn't take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time. -- P.xvi
All dominant powers are hated -- Britain was, and Rome -- but they're usually hated for the right reasons. America is hated for every reason. The fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lap-dancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too godless, America is George Orwell's Room 101: whatever your bugbear you will find it therein; whatever you're against, America is the prime example of it. -- P.xxiii
The refined antennae of Western liberals mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked Italy in a generation or three hence, they cry, "Racism!" To agitate about what proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate. But, it's not about race; it's about culture. If 100 percent of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn't matter whether 70 percent of them are "white" or only 5 percent are. But if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn't, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90 percent of the population or only 60 percent, or 50, or 45 percent. -- xxvii
(T)here's a lot to be said for a great nation that understands its greatness is not an accident and therefore it should spread the secrets of its success around; conversely, there's not much to be said for a great nation that chooses to hobble itself by pretending it's merely one vote among co-equals on international bodies manned by Cuba and Sudan -- the transnational version of "affirmative action"...." -- P.xxvii
Even in America, too many Democrats take it as read that the natural destination of an advanced Western Democracy is Scandinavia. If it is, we're all doomed. -- P.xxix
The single most important fact about the early twenty-first century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe, and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged. A society ages when its birth rate falls and it finds itself with fewer children and more grandparents. For a stable population -- i.e. no growth, no decline, just a million folks in 1950, a million in 1980, a million in 2010 -- you need a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That's what American has: 2.1, give or take. Canada has 1.48, an all-time low and a more revealing difference between the Great Satan and the Great White North than of the stuff (socialized health care, fewer handouts, more UN peacekeepers, etc.) that Canucks usually brag about. Europe as a whole has 1.38. Japan, 1.32; Russia, 1.14. These countries -- or, more precisely, these people -- are going out of business. -- P.2
Big government depends on bigger population: Americans have a relatively smallish government compared to Canada and Europe, but the US Social Security system assumes a 30 percent population growth between now and 2075 or so and, even then, expects to be running a deficit after 2017. Now imagine you're Spain and you've got even bigger public pensions liabilities and a population that's going to be halving every thirty-five years. The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control, but not both. That mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There's no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital -- and that's before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems. -- P.3
What's the Muslim population of Rotterdam? Forty percent. What's the most popular boy's name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmo, Sweden? Mohammed. By 2005, it was the fifth most popular boy's name in the United Kingdom. -- P.6
In 2050 -- Italy's population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria's by 36 percent, Estonia's by 52 percent -- or more. Seventeen European nations are now at what demographers call "lowest low" fertility: 1.3 births per woman. In theory, those countries will find their populations halving every thirty-five years or so. In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there's no point sticking around a country that's turning into an undertaker's waiting room. Not every pimply burger flipper wants to support entire old folks' homes single-handed... -- P.11
In their bizarre prioritization of "a woman's right to choose," feminists have helped ensure that European women will end their days in a culture that doesn't accord women the right to choose anything. Non-Muslim females in heavily Muslims neighborhoods in France now wear headscarves while out on the streets. -- P.16
Anyone who's traveled in the Middle-East will recognize that moment -- not with the wacky death-to-the-great Satan guys but with the hot-looking Westernized Bahrani lady doctor you're enjoying a little incendiary flirting with. And then -- ten, twenty, forty-five minutes into the conversation--she says something nutty. Often what's nuttiest is that it's completely illogical: in the Spring of 2002, I met many Arabs who believed simultaneously that (a)September 11 was pulled off by the Mossad and (b) it was a great victory for the Muslim people. -- P.17
So if a population "at odds with the modern world" (in Phillip Longman's phrase( is the fastest-breeding group on the planet, how safe a bet is the survival of the "modern world?" -- P.19
In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering its voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under Sharia, but -- as have parts of Nigeria -- they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the "tolerance" of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, thought without a significantly different ending. -- P.38
(T)he secondary impulses are so advanced that many of America's allies no longer share the same understanding of basic words like "power." In 2002 Finnish prime minister Paavo Lipponen gave a speech in London saying that "the EU must not develop unto a military superpower but must become a great power that will not up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests." No doubt it sounds better in Finnish. Nonetheless, he means it: for many Europeans, the old rules no longer apply. They've been supplanted by new measures of power like how smoothly you fit in at the transnational yakfests (EU, UN, ICC, etc.). -- P.44
The Left, for its part, offers an appeal to moral virtue: it's better to pay more in taxes and to share the burdens of a community. It's kinder, gentler, more compassionate, more equitable. Unfortunately, as recent European election results demonstrate, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: once a fellow's enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest; he's got his, and if it's going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he's dead, it's fine by him. "Social democracy" is, it turns out, explicitly anti-social. -- P.45
The bullying, intimidating side of Muslim immigration in Europe seems to be largely absent in America, in part at least because the assertiveness of the individual American citizen makes it a riskier undertaking. -- P.46
What would happen if America were to follow Mr. Hutton's advice and "join the world"? Well, those "40 million Americans without health insurance" would enjoy the benefit of a new government health care system and, like their 250 million neighbors, would discover the charms of the health care "waiting list" -- the one year, two years, or more Britons and others wait in pain for even routine operations; the six, twelve, eighteen months Canadians wait for an MRI scans, there being more scanners in the city of Philadelphia than in the entire Great White North. They're now pioneering the ultimate expression of government health care: the ten month waiting list for the maternity ward. -- P.51
We -- the befuddled infidels -- talk airily about "reforming" Islam. But what if the reform has already taken place and jihadism is it? What if the long percolation through Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Revolution, and contemporary Western-promoted whinging over grievances such as "colonialism" is the reform. -- P.82
When they want to, Islamists can assimilate at impressive speed. So we have fire-breathing Imams milking Euro-welfare and litigious lobby groups with high-rent legal teams. Neither of these are features of Arab life. Rather, they illustrate how adept Islam is at picking and choosing what aspects of Westernization are useful to it. Whatever the arguments are for and against "gay marriage," there are never going to be many takers for it. But the justifications for same-sex marriage are already being used to advance the cause of polygamy, and there are far more takers for that. It's already practiced de factor if not de jure in France, Ontario, and many other Western jurisdictions, and government agencies, such as the United Kingdom's pensions ministry, have already begun according polygamy piecemeal recognition for the purposes of inheritance law. Neither feminists nor homosexuals seem obvious allies for Islam, but lobby groups have effortlessly mastered the lingo, techniques, and pseudo-grievances of each. -- P.84
You'll recall that most Western media outlets declined to publish those Danish cartoons showing the Prophet Mohammed. Thus, even they were piously warning of a rise in bogus "Islamophobia" -- i.e. entirely justified concerns over Islamic terrorism and related issues -- they were themselves suffering from genuine Islamophobia -- i.e., a very real fear that, if they published those cartoons, an angry mob would storm their offices. It was a fine example of how the progressive mind's invented psychoses leave it without any words to describe real dangers. -- P.85
The "moderate Muslim" is not entirely fictional. But it would be more accurate to call them quiescent Muslims. In the 1930s, there were plenty of "moderate Germans:" and a fat lot of good they did us or them. Today, the "moderate Muslims" is a unique contributor to cultural diversity: unlike all the visible minorities, he's a non-visible one -- or at any rate, non-audible. -- P.86
(O)ne can't help noticing that the most prominent "moderate Muslims" would seem to be more accurately designated as apostate or ex-Muslims like the feminist lesbian Canadian Irshad Manji and the California academic Wafa Sultan. It seems likely that the beliefs of Mohammed Ataa are closer to the thinking of most Muslims than those of Ms. Majii are. The pseudonymous apostate Ibn Warraq makes an important distinction: there are moderate Muslims, but no moderate Islam. Millions of Muslims just want to get on with their lives, and there are -- or were -- remote corners of the world where, far from Mecca, Muslim practices reached accommodation with local customers. But all of the official schools of Islamic jurisprudence commend Sharia and violent jihad. So a "moderate Muslim" can find no formal authority to support his moderation. -- P.88
I was startled in successive weeks to hear from Dutch and English acquaintances that they've begun going out "covered." The Dutch lady lives in a rough part of Amsterdam and says when you're on the street in Islamic garb, the Muslim men smile at you respectfully instead of jeering at you as an infidel whore. The English lady lives in a swank part of London but says pretty much the same thing. Both felt there was not just a physical but psychological security in being dressed Muslim. They're not "reverts," but at least for the purposes of padding the public space, they're passing for Muslim. And as more of the public space becomes Muslim it will seem more and more comfortable to do that. -- P.94
Two forces are facing off on the European continent: on the one side, the modern social-democratic state that the America Left thinks should be our model; on the other, the resurgent Islam that the American Left insists is just a scam cooked up by Karl Rove. We now have an excellent opportunity to test both propositions. How bad is it going to get in Europe? As bad as it can -- as in societal collapse, fascist revivalism, and then the long Eurabian night, not over the entire continent but over significant parts of it. And those countries that manage to escape the darkness will do so only after violent convulsions of their own. -- P.104-105
It's true that there are many European populations reluctant to go happily into the long Eurabian night. But, alas for them, modern Europe is constructed so as to insulate almost entirely the political class from populist pressures. As the computer types say, that's not a bug, it's a feature: the European Union is a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem, and one of the problems it was designed to solve is that fellows like Hitler and Mussolini were way too popular with the masses. Just as the House of Saud, Mubarak, and the other Arab autocracies sell themselves to the West as necessary brakes on the baser urges of their peoples, so the European leadership deludes itself on the same basis: why, without the EU, we'd be back to Auschwitz. -- P.105
The transatlantic "split" has nothing to do with disagreements over Iraq, and can't be repaired by a more Europhile president in Washington: you can't "mend bridges" when the opposite bank is sinking into the river. If Americans think that the post-bombing 2004 Spanish election result was a disgrace, look down the road to the next election cycle, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and beyond. In the United States, psephologists speculate on the impact of Ralph Nader's 2 or 3 percent in swing states. Think about an election in which 20 percent of the voters are a self-segregating Muslim bloc. If Washington had a hard time getting any useful contribution to the war from Europe in 2001 or 2002, you do the math ten or fifteen years hence. -- P.107
About six months after September 11, I went on a grand tour of the Continent's Muslim ghettos and then flew on to the Middle East. The Muslims I met in Europe were, almost to a man, more alienated and angrier than the ones back in Araby. -- P.118
The theoretical virtue of "multiculturalism" is that it's a form of mellifluous cultural cross-pollination: the best of all worlds. But just as often it gives "the worst of all worlds" the worst attributes of Muslim culture -- the subjugation of women -- combined with the worst attributes of Western culture -- license and self-gratification. Tattooed, pierced, Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of northern England are as much of a product of multiculturalism as the turban wearing Sikh Mountie in the royal escort. Islamofascism itself is what it says: a fusion of Islamic identity with old school European totalitarianism. But, whether in turbans or gangsta threads, just as Communism was in its day, so Islam is today's Identity of choice for the world's disaffected. -- P.120
The jihadists understand that the Continent is up for grabs in a way that America isn't. And as their numbers grow, it seems likely that wily Islamic leaders in the Middle-East will embrace the cause of the rights of European Muslims in the same way that they claim solidarity with the Palestinians. -- P.121
Four years after September 11 it turned out there really is an explosive "Arab Street," but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois. Since the beginning of the century, French Muslims have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They're losing that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness. -- P.122, 123
Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But Europe is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They're in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It's way too late to re-run the Battle of Poitiers. P.123, 124
As President Reagan liked to say, "status quo" is Latin for "the mess we're in." -- P.132
"Containment" is another overvalued commodity: it's an expensive dictator management program that, in the case of Iraq after the first Gulf War, required the United States Air Force and the RAF to bomb the country ineffectually every other week for twelve years, in return for which the Americans were blamed for UN sanctions and systematically starving to death a million Iraqi kids -- or two million, according to which "humanitarian" agency you believe. Of course, the minute the war started and these genocidal sanctions came to an end, the Left decided this UN "containment" had after all been a marvelous and desirable thing. -- P.133-134
Europe is a weak power, a supposed Greater France remorselessly evolving month by month into Greater Bosnia -- P.135
Islamism is a twenty-first-century political project driven by seventh century ideology. That's a potent combination of ancient and modern. In Europe and North America, incendiary Imams -- uneducated and knowing barely a word of the language spoken by the society in which they live -- have nevertheless done a grand job at re-primativizing second - and third-generation Western Muslims. Not all of them, of course, but how many does it have to be to become a problem. -- P.138
(Ahmadinejad) believes in the return of the Twelfth Imam -- the so-called "hidden Imam" -- and quite possibly that he personally is the fellow's designated deputy. The president, as mayor of Tehran, wanted the city's boulevards widened so that the hidden imam wouldn't be insulted by having to ride in triumph through narrow streets. ...(Ahmadinejad) told (in 2005) Natwar Singh, the Indian foreign minister, that everything would be hunky-dory in two years time, which Mr. Singh took to mean when Iran's nukes would be ready but which turned out to be the Twelfth Imam's ETA. Human history has never wanted for millennial cultists of one form or another, but ours is the first age in which such men have the means to pull off the apocalypse. In medieval Europe, the apocalyptics had intent; President Ahmageddonouttahere is an apocalyptic with a delivery system. "The end is nigh" is an old slogan. Now the means are nigh. -- P. 142, 143
(W)hat we're confronted with in Iran are known knowns: a state that's developing nuclear weapons, a state that's made repeated threats to use such weapons against a neighboring state, a state with a long track record of terrorist sponsorship, a state whose actions align with its rhetoric very precisely. What's not to know? So the question is: will they do it? And the minute you have to ask that question you know the answer. It's the same answer to the same question: Will they go ahead and slaughter the Breslan schoolchildren? Will they decapitate the bumbling Englishman? Will they kill the Iraqi aid worker and the American "Christian peacemaker"? -- P.149
"Mutually Assured Destruction" only works if you know who lobbed the thing your way in the first place. One reason Iran set up Hezbollah and other terrorist franchises is to have "plausible deniability." Actually, it's implausible deniability, but that's good enough for the UN. So, if the links back to the mullahs were just the teensy-weensy bit tenuous and murky, how eager would the United States be to reciprocate? Bush and Rumsfeld might, but an administration of a more Clinto-Powellite bent? How much pressure would there be for investigations under the auspices of the UN? Perhaps Hans Blix could come out of retirement, and we could have a six-month dance through Security Council coalition-building with the secretary of state making a last-minute flight to Khartoum to try to persuade Sudan to switch its vote. -- P.149, 150
From the Ayatollahs to the freelance jihadists, there are, in the end, no "root causes" -- or not ones that be negotiated by troop withdrawals from Iraq or the other red flag raising ceremony for a Palestinian state. There is only a metastizing cancer that preys on whatever local conditions are to hand. -- P.150
When people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. As Hussein Malawi, former leaders of Hezbollah, neatly put it, "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." -- P.151
In our time, even the most fascistic ideologies have been canny enough to cover their darker impulses in bathetic labels. The Soviet bloc was comprised of wall-to-wall "People's Republics," which is the precise opposite of what they were -- a stylistic audacity Orwell caught perfectly in 1984, with its "Ministry of Truth" (i.e,, official lies). But the Islamists don't even bother going through the traditional rhetorical feints. They say what they mean and they mean what they say -- and we choose to stay in ignorance. Blow up the London Underground during a G-8 summit and the world's leaders twitter about how "tragic" and "ironic: it is that this should have happened just as they're taking steps to deal with the issues -- as though the terrorists are upset about poverty in Africa and global warming. Even in a great blinding flash of clarity, we can't wait to switch the lights off and go back to fumbling around on the darkling plain. -- P.152
Yet as the great strategist of armored warfare Basil Liddell Hart wrote: "The destruction of the enemy's armed forces is but a means -- and not necessarily an inevitable or infallible one -- to the attainment of the real objective." The object of war is not to destroy the enemy's tanks, but to destroy his will. As Liddell Hart put it: "Our goal in war can only be attained by the subjugation of the opposing will....All such acts as defeat in the field, propaganda, blockade, diplomacy, or attack on the centres of government and population are seen to be but means to that end." -- P.156
Facing a foe who has nothing but will and manpower, do we have the strength to (in Liddell Hart's phrase) subjugate that will? -- P.157
In 1796 George Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton: "The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from it duty and interest." That neatly sums up the Euro-American relationship: the United States has become a slave to its habitual if largely misplaced fondness for Europe, while Europe has become a slave to its habitual if entirely irrational hatred for America. -- P.160
Almost all the supranational bodies -- from the EU to the International Criminal Court -- are, if not explicitly hostile to American values, at the very least antipathetic to them. -- P.172
In the eighties, Paul Kennedy warned the United States of "imperial overstretch." But the danger right now is of imperial understretch -- of a hyperpower reluctant to sell its indisputably successful inheritance to the rest of the world. -- P.172
"You're either with us or you're with the terrorists?" Most of America's European "allies" check the Neither of the Above box and most Middle Eastern "allies" checked the Both of the Above box. Belgium isn't exactly with the terrorists, but it isn't with us in any meaningful sense. Saudi Arabia is with us but also funding the terrorists in every corner of the world. And both countries get away with it. -- P.174
There's something a little bizarre about a so-called unipolar world in which it's the unipole that gets shafted every time. -- P.174
Nudge things half a decade down the road. There'll be an informal Islamo-veto over many areas of French and European policy. Russia and China have already determined that, whatever their own little local difficulties with Muslims, their long-term strategic interest lies in keeping the jihad as an American problem. The internal logic of the demographic shifts will be to make much of the world figure it makes sense to be on the side America's not. -- P.175
In 2004, Goh Chok Tong, the prime minister of Singapore and a man who talks a lot more sense than most Continental prime ministers, visited Washington at the height of the Democrats' headless-chicken quagmire frenzy. He put it in a nutshell:" The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the UN. The central issue is America's credibility and will it prevail." The prime minister apparently understands that more clearly than many Americans.
That's been my basic rule since September 11: anything that shifts power from the individual judgement of the free citizens to government is a bad thing, not just for the war on terror, but for the national character in a more general sense. -- P.187
The EU figures it needs another fifty million immigrants in the next few years just to maintain a big enough working population to fund the lavish social programs its vast retired army of baby boomers expects to enjoy. And the sonly available sources of immigrants are North Africa and the Middle-East. Whether these are the chaps to keep Pierre and Gerhard in the style to which they've become accustomed is highly doubtful: according to some Scandinavian statistics, 40 percent of those on welfare are immigrants. Elsewhere, the picture is similar: welfare regimes work a lot better for their Islamist beneficiaries than for native Continental ones.
In 2005, Anne Owers, Her Majesty's chief inspector of prisons, banned the flying of the English national flag in English prisons on the grounds that it shows the cross of St. George, which was used by the Crusaders and so is offensive to Muslims. The Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Agency has also banned the English flag from its office. So has Heathrow Airport. -- P.197
Bomb us and we agonize over the root causes. Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that "Islam is a religion of peace." Issue blood curdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels , and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can't wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush and Blair. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the "vast majority" of Muslims "jihad" is a harmless concept meaning "healthy-lifestyle lo-fat granola bar." Thus the lopsided valse macabre of our times: the more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room. -- P.200
There's a contradiction at the heart of Islamist confidence, nicely caught in a story from New Zealand about female Muslims driving around in burqas. According to some police representatives, this mode of dress somewhat restricts the field of vision, and also offers opportunities for fleeing bank robbers to disguise themselves as Muslim women. However, nobody wants to be insensitive, do they? And, on the whole, the police were happy to take the Islamic lobby groups at their word that the burqa was a requirement of these women's faith. But as Greg O'Connor of the New Zealand Police Association couldn't resist adding, "If one's belief system was so strong that one didn't want to show one's face then perhaps that belief system should extend to not driving." Indeed. If your clothing can't evolve out of the came-train era, maybe your mode of transportation shouldn't either. -- P. 201, 202
At the heart of multiculturalism is a lie: that all cultures are equally "valid." To accept that proposition means denying reality -- the reality of any objective measure of human freedom, societal health, and global population movement. -- P.203
To a five year-old-boy watching Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee procession on the Mall in 1897, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his eighteenth birthday the greatest empire the world had ever known would have sunk to an economically moribund strike-bound slough of despond whose tax rates drove its best talents abroad, and whose most glittering colonial possessions now valued ties to Communist Russia over the mother country. It's difficult to focus on long-term trends because human life is itself short-term. -- P.207
Rightroots And Helping With The Republican Get Out The Vote Campaign
Do You Want To Help The GOP out?
We're getting pretty close to go time and there are still some things you can do to help Republican candidates win next Tuesday.
Folks, there are AT LEAST 12 Rightroots candidates that are still in the hunt:
Michele Bachmann (MN-06)
Mike Bouchard (MI-Sen)
Max Burns (GA-12)
John Gard (WI-08)
Thomas Kean (NJ-Sen)
David McSweeney (IL-08)
Ray Meier (NY-24)
Rick O'Donnell (CO-07)
Peter Roskam (IL-06)
Michael Steele (MD-Sen)
Chris Wakim (WV-01)
Mike Whalen (IA-01)
Also, if you'd like to help out via phone in the GOP Get Out The Vote Campaign, you can sign up to do so here. So, even if you don't have any money and aren't in a competitive district, you can still make a difference.
Last night, South Park did sort of a "pox on both their houses" episode about evolution. It criticized people who reject evolution because of their religious beliefs and people who try to use evolution as a club to attack Christians. Here are a couple of clips from the show.
The first one features Ms. Garrison giving her version of how evolution works. There's no profanity, but it's a bit risque and slightly offensive:
Later on in the episode, Ms. Garrison has changed sides and insists that evolution means that God doesn't exist and SP mocks her hatred of Christianity:
A lot of liberals absolutely despise the military and so they end up in this eternal wrestling match with themselves that pits the oozing contempt with which they regard our troops with what it's politically advisable for them to actually say. Every so often, they lose the match and their acidic dislike of our soldiers comes out into the open.
The latest example of this comes from liberal journalist/propagandist Seymour Hersh, who had this to say about our troops serving in Iraq:
"In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation. It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq."
In other words, he hated the troops that fought in Vietnam and he hates the troops fighting in Iraq today. Unfortunately, the only surprising thing about that is that Hersh is willing to admit it.
A win for the Democrats in the 2006 election would be a loss for not just the Republicans, but Americans in general. If you're one of those who think Democratic control of Congress will only last for two years -- and that the Republicans will rediscover their Conservative roots while "wandering in the wilderness" -- you haven't thought the matter through. If the Democrats take control, they will take steps to entrench their position by expanding their voter base, none of which will be good for the country... and the effects of which could last a decade or more. That's not "fear-mongering," that's taking a serious look at what Democrats could do to ensure they keep their hold on power, using threats of holding up legislation and blocking nominees to get their bills passed.
It's certain that Democrats will raise both the minimum wage and taxes. All they really have to do is sit tight and let the Bush tax cuts expire. NY Representative Charles Rangel, who will chair the Ways and Means Committee if Democrats take the House, has said he "cannot think of one" of Bush's tax cuts worthy of renewal. Higher taxes won't affect "the rich," at whom high taxes are supposedly aimed -- they'll simply pull money out of their investments and tuck it away where it can't be taxed. The poor don't actually pay income tax, leaving those who make money -- but not enough to hire expensive tax accountants -- to pay ever higher taxes.
Investor pullouts will cause the stock market to drop, taking a toll on retirement funds like 401(k)s. Consumer confidence and spending will fall, while interest rates and inflation rise. Companies will have to lay off employees and raise prices to keep showing a profit. The higher minimum wage will accelerate the layoffs as small companies struggle to stay afloat. Larger companies will relocate more of their operations abroad to save money. The middle class, which will have to shoulder more of the higher tax burden, will begin to shrink, increasing the gap between rich and poor -- and leading to more demand for government support and income redistribution. Unemployment will rise, the welfare rolls will once again increase, and so the Democrats, by playing the old "Republicans want to stop your benefits" card, will gain voters for the 2008 campaign and beyond. Those who are dependent upon government handouts will almost always vote for the politicians who promise to continue or increase them.
Democrats frequently attack Wal-Mart, one of America's largest employers, for its lack of unions and healthcare plans -- ignoring the fact that Wal-Mart employees consistently vote against unions, and that Wal-Mart offers a healthcare plan at a reasonable per-month cost. Forcing the retailer to accept unions would be a great coup for the Democrats, as a huge percentage of mandatory union dues inevitably find their way to fund Democratic campaigns. The Democrat-controlled Maryland legislature, for example, recently voted to force Wal-Mart to pay for expensive health insurance for its workers, a union-driven move designed to make signing a union agreement (despite the wishes of its employees) look cheap. The unions -- with the help of their old partners, the Democrats -- would expand their Wal-Mart corporate union campaign to the rest of the country. Naturally, Wal-Mart would have to increase employee wages in order to comply with union demands... which would lead to store closings, layoffs, and even more unemployment and welfare recipients to swell the Democratic voter ranks.
The Senate passed an immigration reform bill that gave what amounts to total amnesty as well as special privileges to illegal immigrants. It would have allowed all current illegal immigrants to stay in America while awaiting legal status, after which they could bring in their extended families. It also included no provision for making workers who would come to America under its vaunted "guest worker" program return home when their time was up. The Senate bill, if signed into law, would have resulted in up to estimated 100 million new immigrants over the next twenty years -- far more than we could possibly assimilate in so short a time. Only the Republican majority in the House of Representatives prevented this nightmare from becoming reality, with their staunch insistence on an "enforcement first" bill. HR 4437 (passed by 92% of Republicans, opposed by 82% of Democrats) insisted that the government try to stop the flow of new illegals before dealing with those already here. The House Republicans also issued a flat refusal to consider blanket amnesty. If Democrats take control of the House, that barrier will vanish like mist, and the Democrats will have a flood of uneducated, largely ignorant new low-class workers to turn into good little Democrat voters, all demanding a piece of the government pie.
Democratic control of Congress could last for years, crushing this country under the burden of nanny-state social programs paid for with ever-increasing taxation upon the only productive members of society. Soon, like most of Europe, we could be mired in a demi-Socialist hell as jobs are guaranteed by the government, causing corporate reluctance to hire new workers, leading to a permanent underclass of angry unemployables with whom the dwindling group of Old Americans can't even communicate. The only way any party could win back control of the government would be to move as far Left as they can, in order to capture those votes. Even if Democrats lose Congress again in a few years, the damage will have been done -- benefits and rights granted are almost impossible to take away. Conservatives will no longer have a party at all. We might not even have a country.
And when people complain about what America has become, my response will be, "Did you vote in '06? Did you 'teach the Republicans a lesson' by staying home? Then you got what you wanted."
After I stepped on the left side of the blogosphere's favorite fake "conservative" of the moment, John Cole, lefty Glenn Greenwald took great exception to it.
Greenwald's rambling and ill thought out post basically begins with the idea that of course Cole has had a heartfelt change of views because George Bush is such an awful person:
"More important still, Americans didn't change their views because the media suddenly became adversarial or effective in its watchdog function (it didn't), nor because Democrats found a will or a way to provide meaningful opposition (they haven't), nor because the Bush administration's propaganda is now less ruthless or deceitful (it isn't). They changed their minds largely on their own, by simply looking at what is going on around them and using their critical faculties to compare what they see to the claims made by the Bush movement, and they have noticed the gaping disparities. And they are angry about it. Very angry."
Cole obviously didn't have any sort of long, well thought out, change of heart because I used to semi-regularly read his blog and his views flipped like a light switch going on and off right after the Terri Schiavo controversy. It was that one event that caused him to spin off the axis just like Sullivan flipping out over gay marriage. One day Sullivan was fond of the GOP and strongly pro-war and then, once George Bush came out in favor of a Constitutional Amendment protecting marriage, everything changed in an instant. The only difference for Cole was the issue he went nuts over. Cole even admitted as much in his original post:
I don’t know when things went south with this party (literally and figuratively- and I am sure commenters here will tell me the party has always been this bad- I disagree with that, and so do others), but for me, Terri Schiavo was the real eye-opener. Sure, the Prescription Drug Plan was hideous and still gets my blood pressure pumping, and the awful bankruptcy bill was equally bad, and there were other things that should have clued me in, but really, it was Schiavo that made me realize this party was not as advertized.
Greenwald goes on to make a ludicrous argument that no intelligent person who has ever regularly read the right side of the blogosphere could ever put forth with a straight face:
"Hawkins can take some solace in the fact that it isn't "just him." Quite the contrary, it's how Bush followers -- by definition -- think. It's one of the principal attributes that defines them. Criticisms of the Leader and the Movement are a priori invalid and false and no energy needs to be expended to figure out why that is. It is just assumed to be so, and the real task is then to figure out all of the deep character flaws in the person voicing the criticism so that they can be personally discredited, their sincerity doubted, and then everything they say from that point forward comfortably ignored."
Oh yeah, I remember how Bush got a free pass on Harriet Miers, the Dubai Port deal, his excessive spending, and illegal immigration. Conservatives just sucked it up and said, "We can't criticize the leader!" Wasn't that how it happened? Please! Bush has been semi-regularly flogged by conservatives for a long time now, but in areas where he has deserved it, not because of the Bush Derangement Syndrome that is so common these days on the left.
Greenwald then adds:
"Unsurprisingly, Hawkins' smear of Cole's motives is factually false, and it is easily demonstrated to be such. Throughout the year, as Cole became increasingly critical of the Bush administration (and as he even shared his blog with a committed anti-Bush co-blogger, Tim F.), the traffic for Cole's blog remained relatively stable and, if anything, gradually decreased (the only exception being October, when many blogs experienced increases in traffic due to things like the Foley scandal and the imminent elections). If (as is plainly the case) someone like Hawkins doesn't actually care about whether his accusations are factual in any way, wouldn't he still want check Cole's traffic stats before accusing him of being motivated by the increased traffic he gets -- just to avoid embarrassment if for no other reason?"
Yes, Cole's traffic has stayed relatively steady over time in some respects, but let's take a closer look at it. There are actually a lot of peaks in there that are undoubtedly caused by Cole getting big links:
Now, where do you think those big links would have been coming from? Well, here's his referrer's page for today:
You'll notice that most of the links are from left-wing blogs (I just missed getting the Daily Kos and Democratic Underground links in the screen capture).
So, if your blog goes from being a conservative blog that gets links from other conservative bloggers to a liberal blog with a liberal audience, that's only going to have a chance to get traffic from the likes of Kos, Crooks and Liars, and Glenn Greenwald, don't you think it's entirely possible that it could have an impact on what you're writing? For example, if Cole had said in his conservative hit piece that despite any disagreements he might have with Bush, he was still a supporter of the war or thought Bush was trying to do the right thing, do you think these left-wing blogs would have linked him anyway? No. Do you think Glenn Greenwald would be defending him? No way. Liberals can't tolerate that sort of dissent from liberal dogma. So, Cole's jump to the left might have been initially motivated by his strong dislike of the Christian conservatives who were speaking out for Terri Schiavo, but once he started relying on liberal blogs for traffic, he had, at least to a certain extent, remember where his bread was buttered.
The bloggers were asked to choose "yes," or "no," as answers to the first two questions:
1) Do you think the GOP is going to retain control of the House?
Yes (38) -- 61.3%
No (24) -- 38.7%
2) Do you think the GOP is going to retain control of the Senate?
Yes (56) -- 90.3%
No (6) -- 9.7%
On the following question, bloggers were allowed to make anywhere from 1-6 unranked selections from 25 different options that were presented. Their answers come after the question with the number of bloggers selecting each choice in parentheses and the percentage of bloggers picking each answer following that.
3) The Republican Party has been having a lot of difficulty during this election cycle. If you had to pick 1-6 reasons for that, what would they be?
Top Tier Issues
W) The way the war in Iraq has gone. (48) -- 77.4%
P) The GOP isn't doing enough to control spending. (46) -- 74.2%
K) Republicans don't fight back hard enough against Democratic attacks. (37) -- 59.7%
D) Because the GOP is perceived as being too soft on illegal immigration. (32) -- 51.6%
S) The perception that the GOP is corrupt. (32) -- 51.6%
J) President Bush's approval rating. (21) -- 33.9%
O) The GOP isn't being aggressive enough in the war on terror. (19) -- 30.6%
R) The perception that the Federal Government did a poor job of handling Hurricane Katrina. (19) -- 30.6%
V) The Mark Foley scandal. (17) -- 27.4%
Secondary Issues
I) High gas prices. (9)
T) The Republican party has catered too much to social conservatives. (5) -- 8%
U) The Republican party hasn't catered enough to social conservatives. (5) -- 8%
E) Because too many Republicans are anti-embryonic stem cell research. (4) -- 6.5%
G) Bush's failed attempt to reform Social Security. (4) -- 6.5%
M) The Gang of 14 deal on judges. (4) -- 6.5%
X) The way Republicans in Congress handled the Terri Schiavo affair. (4) -- 6.5%
Y) The way that Dennis Hastert handled the William Jefferson scandal. (4) -- 6.5%
Insignificant Issues
F) Because the GOP has been "too conservative." (2) -- 3.2%
H) Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. (2) -- 3.2%
A) Accusations that the GOP is "pro-torture." (1) -- 1.6%
L) The fallout from the Dubai Port Deal. (1) -- 1.6%
Q) The GOP opposition to the minimum wage. (1) -- 1.6%
B) Because the Democratic Party has pushed a more appealing positive agenda than the Republicans. -- 0%
C) Because the GOP is perceived as being too hard on illegal immigration. -- 0%
N) The GOP hasn't done enough to stop global warming. -- 0%
Ex-conservative, John Cole over at Balloon Juice, is shoveling manure as fast as he can at his former allies on the right.
At one time Cole ran a reliably conservative blog, but about the time Terri Schiavo became a big issue, he got a real bee in his bonnet about religious people being allowed to have a voice in the Republican Party, too, and he flipped out and veered left. In other words, he pulled an Andrew Sullivan and got so upset that the majority of the conservative commentariat disagreed with him, that it twisted his whole philosophy.
Of course, he benefitted from stepping to the left a lot more than Sullivan did. Sullivan had a big audience and actually seemed to pay a price for switching allegiances. On the other hand, Cole went from being a small fry conservative blog to being a small fry ex-conservative blog that regularly got links from liberal blogs like the Daily Kos that love nothing more than to read a blogger claiming to be a conservative ripping on other conservatives.
Here's Cole's latest spiel that could have been written by any of a hundred other hacks in the liberal blogosphere (Yet, it gets attention because someone claiming to be a Republican is writing it):
"In short, it really sucks looking around at the wreckage that is my party and realizing that the only decent thing to do is to pull the plug on them (or help). I am not really having any fun attacking my old friends- but I don’t know how else to respond when people call decent men like Jim Webb a pervert for no other reason than to win an election. I don’t know how to deal with people who think savaging a man with Parkinson’s for electoral gain is appropriate election-year discourse. I don’t know how to react to people who think that calling anyone who disagrees with them on Iraq a “terrorist-enabler” than to swing back. I don’t know how to react to people who think that media reports of party hacks in the administration overruling scientists on issues like global warming, endangered species, intelligent design, prescription drugs, etc., are signs of… liberal media bias.
And it makes me mad. I still think of myself as a Republican- but I think the whole party has been hijacked by frauds and religionists and crooks and liars and corporate shills, and it frustrates me to no end to see my former friends enabling them, and I wonder ‘Why can’t they see what I see?” I don’t think I am crazy, I don’t think my beliefs have changed radically, and I don’t think I have been (as suggested by others) brainwashed by my commentariat.
I hate getting up in the morning, surfing the news, and finding more and more evidence that my party is nothing but a bunch of frauds. I feel like I am betraying my friends in the party and the blogosphere when I attack them, even though I believe it is they who have betrayed what ‘we’ allegedly believe in. Bush has been a terrible President. The past Congresses have been horrible- spending excessively, engaging in widespread corruption, butting in to things they should have no say in (like end of life decisions), refusing to hold this administration accountable for ANYTHING, and using wedge issues to keep themselves in power at the expense of gays, etc. And I don’t know why my friends on the right still keep fighting for these guys to stay in power. Why do they keep attacking decent people like Jim Webb- to keep this corrupt lot of fools in office? Why can’t they just admit they were sold a bill of goods and start over? Why do they want to remain in power, but without any principles? Are tax cuts that important? What is gained by keeping troops in harms way with no clear plan for victory? With no desire to change course? With our guys dying every day in what looks to be for no real good reason? Why?"
In other words, supposedly Cole is hopping into bed with people like Kos, Jane Hamsher, Michael Moore, Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, William Jefferson, John Kerry, & Ted Rall, because he thinks Republicans are mean.
This whole, "The Republicans are being unfair to James Webb," line is particularly hilarious given that the entire campaign in Virginia, for months, seemed to be about nothing more than mentioning the word "macaca" about a million times and alleging that George Allen used the N-word 25 years ago. Then it's, boy, how dirty is it for Republicans to actually publish perverted excerpts from James Webb's novels? Why can't they run a clean campaign! Moreover, the same guy who is complaining that Bush spends too much money apparently thinks Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and the rest of the libs in the Senate are going to get the deficit fixed right up. Great. Meanwhile, the Republicans are corrupt, but the Party of Harry Reid and William Jefferson is pure as driven snow. Gotcha, Cole!
Maybe it's just me, but when I see people like John Cole, Andrew Sullivan, and David Brock basking in praise from the left and criticizing the right for all the same things that their new best buddies do day in and day out, I can't help but think that they're, at least to a certain degree, phonies who're writing things not because they believe them, but because they think it'll pull in more traffic and money for them. For example, is John Cole's stance on the war what he believes or what he needs to keep his new friends on the left linking him? It could be one or it could be the other. It's hard to say with a guy like Cole.
Also, let me add that Cole really shouldn't say that, "My party is nothing but a bunch of frauds," because when you've been carrying water for the Democrats for a year and a half or so, the Republican Party isn't in any meaningful sense "your party" any more. Personally, I haven't considered Balloon Juice to be a Republican/conservative blog for a long time. In my book, Cole traded in his party and his ideology a long time ago and the only reason he's still pretending otherwise is because it benefits him to do so.
Kerry Didn't Mess Up A Joke. He Messed Up By Telling People What He Really Thinks
As you may know, John Kerry has now claimed that his comments which implied that our troops are stupid was actually part of an anti-Bush joke that went wrong. Kerry has also, unsurprisingly, used the occasion as an opportunity to attack George Bush.
In other words, Kerry says the troops are stupid and when people misunderstood what he plainly seemed to be saying, it's their fault for not realizing that he "misspoke" -- oh, and George Bush is a jerk!
However, John Kerry has a long history of trashing the troops, so the fact that he was quoted doing so again wasn't really a surprise. Moreover, I think it's entirely possible, probably even likely, that the "joke" angle is just after-the-fact spin on what he said.
Keep in mind that Kerry actually first made a name for himself in the public eye by trashing the troops. Here are some quotations from and about John Kerry back when he was acting like the male version of "Jane Fonda:"
"There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50 calibre machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down." -- John Kerry, April 18, 1971
"John Kerry's recent admissions caused me to realize that I was most likely in Vietnam dodging enemy rockets on the very day he met in Paris with Madame Binh, the representative of the Viet Cong to the Paris Peace Conference. John Kerry returned to the U.S. to become a national spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a radical fringe of the antiwar movement, an organization set upon propagating the myth of war crimes through demonstrably false assertions. Who was the last American POW to die languishing in a North Vietnamese prison forced to listen to the recorded voice of John Kerry disgracing their service by his dishonest testimony before the Senate?" -- John O'Neill in May, 2004 (Swift Boat Veterans For Truth)
"More Than any other person, John Kerry is responsible for the false image of Vietnam veterans as dysfunctional misfits. Kerry betrayed all of us when he returned from Vietnam." -- Retired U.S. Navy SEAL captain with service in Vietnam, John Bailey
"In 1971, when John Kerry spoke out to America, labeling all Vietnam veterans as thugs and murderers, I was shocked and almost brought to my knees, because even though I had served at the same time and same unit, I had never witnessed or participated in any of the events that the Senator had accused us of. I strongly believe that the statements made by the Senator were not only false and inaccurate, but extremely harmful to the United States' efforts in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world. Tragically, some veterans, scorned by the antiwar movement and their allies, retreated to a life of despair and suicide. Two of my crewmates were among them. For that there is no forgiveness. " -- Richard O'Mara (Swift Boat Veterans For Truth)
"I served in Vietnam as a boat officer from June of 1968 to July of 1969. My service was three months in Coastal Division 13 out of Cat Lo, and nine months with Coastal Division 11 based in An Thoi. John Kerry was in An Thoi the same time I was. I'm here today to express the anger I have harbored for over 33 years, about being accused with my fellow shipmates of war atrocities. All I can say is when I leave here today, I'm going down to the Wall to tell my two crew members it's not true, and that they and the other 49 Swiftees who are on the Wall were then and are still now the best." -- Robert Brant (Swift Boat Veterans For Truth)
Oh, and who can forget this gem from that same time period:
Several months ago, in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit -- the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told stories that, at times, they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country ...
Of course, there's a more recent quote, too:
"And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the – of – the historical customs, religious customs." -- John Kerry
Plus, let's face it, Kerry only said what a lot of liberals already think. As Dan Riehl has pointed out, there are already liberals writing into the San Francisco Chronicle and agreeing with Kerry's characterization of the troops:
Q: Should Kerry apologize?
Amy Altschul, Oakland
Why should a person apologize for telling the truth? The truth is, for those who are not educated, the military is one of their only outlets. This does not mean the people are stupid, it means they are uneducated. Their lack of education often means the military, which currently means Iraq.
Vernon Burton, San Leandro
For what? Telling the truth? If a few more so-called leaders started telling the truth about Iraq, maybe we could save some of those lives that are being thrown away for nothing.
Miriam Rosenau, Berkeley
No way. Since when are you supposed to apologize for telling the truth?
PS #1: It's noteworthy that there has already been some real political fall-out as a result of Kerry's comments.
In Iowa, Bruce Braley has called off an appearance with Kerry according to the Mike Whalen campaign. A campaign stop with Bob Casey in Pennyslvania has also been cancelled. Mike Bouchard's campaign in Michigan has also called on, "Senator Stabenow to do the right thing and ask him to apologize." Bouchard also added that,
"Senator Kerry not only owes an apology to the brave men and women who are putting their lives on the line everyday to help us fight and win the Global War on Terrorism, but he owes an apology to the families of those who have sacrificed so much for their country."
PS #2: I've heard a lot of libs saying that Kerry isn't allowing himself to be "Swift Boated" this time. Well, there's a reason why the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were so effective in 2004. It's because they were extremely credible, moreso than Kerry as a matter of fact, and he never had a good response to a lot of the things they said. People say he responded late. Well, he did. But, his response wasn't very good when he did come forward because the Swift Boat Vets seemed to have the truth on their side. In fact, Kerry actually had to backtrack and change his story about going to Cambodia and the "no man left-behind" event where he won a Silver Star and a Purple Heart because his story didn't hold water. Today, we hear a lot of talk on the left about the Swift Boat Vets being "discredited," but that's not true. Basically, one day the Kerry campaign just said these guys have been discredited and the MSM slavishly picked it up. There were no links or explanations as to why they'd been "discredited;" they just had to be defined as "discredited" because they were doing so much damage to John Kerry's campaign. Read this interview that I did with John O'Neill and you'll see what I mean. That's not a guy who was "discredited;" that's a guy who comes across as considerably more credible than John Kerry.
In the end, you can rack up a big body count with car bombs, suicide bombers, and by killing people who happen to be standing in line waiting for jobs or to get into stores, but you can't win a war that way. To win a war, you need an army that can take and hold territory.
Unfortunately, the government of Iraq is choosing to turn a blind eye to the militias that are murdering countless people, undermining the government, and making it impossible to stabilize the country. Here's the latest example of this foolish mentality:
"Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki flexed his political muscle Tuesday and won U.S. agreement to lift military blockades on Sadr City and another Shiite enclave where an American soldier was abducted.
U.S. forces, who had set up the checkpoints in Baghdad last week as part of an unsuccessful search for the soldier, drove away in Humvees and armored personnel carriers at the 5 p.m. deadline set by al-Maliki. Iraqi troops, who had manned the checkpoints with the Americans, loaded coils of razor wire and red traffic cones onto pickup trucks.
Their departure set off celebrations among civilians and armed men in Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite district controlled by the Mahdi Army militia loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Small groups of men and children danced in circles chanting slogans praising and declaring victory for al-Sadr, whose political support is crucial to the prime minister's governing coalition."
For Maliki to allow al-Sadr, a fellow Shiite and one of his political supporters, to get a free pass here is incredibly shortsighted. Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is responsible for the wide scale mass murder of Sunnis and they'll be a potential threat to the government once the US pulls out of the country. If Maliki doesn't want to deal with him now, with the United States military fighting shoulder to shoulder with Iraqi troops, how is he going to be able to deal with him later, after many of our troops have left?
Moreover, at a certain point, you have to think George Bush is going to say, "Hey, this just isn't acceptable. Either you allow us to help you get this maniac's followers under control or we're just going to wash our hands of Iraq and let you deal with the Frankenstein's monster you allowed to grow under your watch."
To tell you the truth, the United States should have assassinated al-Sadr long ago -- but, it's not too late to rectify that mistake and pin it on rogue elements of the Mahdi Army, Al-Qaeda, Iran, somebody. The CIA used to do this sort of thing all the time. Surely they can still pull it off. Why can't al-Sadr be found dead in his room tomorrow of a "heart attack," along with some child porn, a copy of The Satanic Verses, "Instructions from Iran telling him what to do," and "letters to Bin Laden," pleading for help? I know, I know, we're not supposed to assassinate foreign leaders. But, isn't it about time we rescinded that silly rule? If the President of the United States could simply order troublesome foreign leaders killed, the world would be a much better place.
