The Rant

The point Thomas Friedman was making in his article about the Tet offensive was that the North Vietnamese were very aware of political events in the United States, and their offensive before elections, while militarily a disaster, was successful in a political sense in breaking the will of the Americans, especially given the nature of the television coverage given to the battles. The jihadists and insurgents have stepped up murdering Americans hoping to break the will of the decadent United States. Of course, the Democratic media have predictably translated this subtle point to mean: "Iraq is another quagmire like Vietnam." The major media and Democrats continue to cooperate with the insurgents propaganda; such as CNN airing terrorist snuff videos, presumably to discourage Americans from perservering and finishing a difficult task. For some reason, the "insurgents" seem to believe that getting the Republicans out of office will help their cause; that it is more...

________________________________________________ By Michelle Malkin · October 19, 2006 01:02 PM _________________________ President Bush honored Muslims who have assisted the War on Terror at an iftar dinner Monday night at the White House. He praised "New York City police officers and a EMT worker who risked their lives to save their fellow citizens on 9/11; a military doctor and a member of the Navy's Chaplain Corps; members of our Foreign Service; and military veterans who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq to protect our country and help those nations build free and democratic futures." All well and good. But when President Bush starts overgeneralizing and whitewashing reality, his shallow platitudes about Islam become a hindrance. "Islam is a religion that brings hope and comfort to more than a billion people around the world. It has transcended racial and ethnic divisions. It has given birth to a rich culture of learning and literature and science... ...Ra...

By George Will ___________________________ WASHINGTON -- Recently Bill Clinton, at the British Labour Party's annual conference, delivered what the Times of London described as a "relaxed, almost rambling'' and "easy anecdotal'' speech to an enthralled audience of leftists eager for evidence of American disappointments. Never a connoisseur of understatement, Clinton said America is "now outsourcing college-education jobs to India.'' But Clinton-as-Cassandra should not persuade college students to abandon their quest for diplomas: The unemployment rate among college graduates is 2 percent. Clinton is always a leading indicator of "progressive'' fashions in rhetoric. And every election year -- meaning every other year -- brings an epidemic of dubious economic analysis, as members of the party out of power discern lead linings on silver clouds. " Worst economy since Herbert Hoover ,'' said John Kerry in 2004, while that ...

By Victor Davis Hanson _______________________________ Why do Republicans drive leftists so crazy these days? Liberal democrats are beginning to sound like rowdy students on spring break, shrieking and exhibiting themselves on camera. Consider some of the recent rabid outbursts by once sober, old-guard politicians. West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller insists that the world would be better off if Saddam were still running Iraq. Crotchety Congressman John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, rushed to announce that our Marines were guilty of killing Iraqis in "cold blood" before they were tried. Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin has compared our interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, while Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry said our soldiers have "terrorized" Iraqi women and children. Then there is the constant anger from Democratic ex-presidents. It used to be that out-of-office chief executives kept relatively hush. Presidents Ford and Bush Sr. - both voted out of office - did not bray...

By MARK STEYN Taken from the New York Post October 17, 2006 -- Vermont-based columnist Mark Steyn is one of the most trenchant writers in the English-speaking world today. Hitting stores this week is his new book, "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" - a grim look at the West's fecklessness in the face of the threat from radical Islam. The Post is happy to give its readers a taste with this excerpt. - THE EDITORS THE dragons are no longer on the edge of the map: That's the lesson of 9/11. When you look at it that way, the biggest globalization success story of recent years is not McDonald's or Microsoft but Islamism. The Saudis took what was not so long ago a severe but peripheral strain of Islam - practiced by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere - and successfully exported it to Jakarta and Singapore and Alma-Ata and Grozny and Sarajevo and Lyons and Bergen and Manchester and Ottawa and Dearborn and Falls Church. It was a stri...

Friday 6 October 2006 GLOBAL WARMING: THE CHILLING EFFECT ON FREE SPEECH THE DEMONISATION OF 'CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL' IS AN AFFRONT TO OPEN AND RATIONAL DEBATE. by Brendan O’Neill Whoever thought that serious commentators would want it made illegal to have a row about the weather? One Australian columnist has proposed outlawing ‘climate change denial’. ‘David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial’, she wrote. ‘Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence. It is a crime against humanity, after all.’ (1) Others have suggested that climate change deniers should be put on trial in the future, Nuremberg-style, and made to account for their attempts to cover up the ‘global warming…Holocaust’ (2). The message is clear: climate change deniers are scum. Their words are so wicked and dangerous that they must be silenced, or criminalised, or forced beyond the pale alongside those other crackpots who claim there was no Nazi Holocaust against the Jews....