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 likely that Democrats will abandon the project unfinished and simple leave Iraq like we left Vietnam to self destruct. That is why they have taken steps to kill the most American troop since January 2005. Regardless of why we got into Iraq, it seems to me that we now have a practical and moral obligation to help the Iraqi people with the project of creating a democracy in the middle of the Arab world. But there is a question as to whether modern American culture has the stomach for such a daunting task . . .
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IRAQ: UNITING AGAINST THE JIHADIS
BUT WORRIED THE AMERICANS WILL SPLIT

by Amir Taheri (NY Post)

October 20, 2006 -- TALK to Iraqis these days, and you'll likely hear one thing: What are the Americans and Brits up to? The worry is that the U.S. and U.K. political mainstreams now regard the Iraq project as a disaster, with cut-and-run, or whistle-and-walk-away, the only options.

Most Iraqis regard the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the dismantling of his machinery of war and oppression and the introduction of pluralist politics to Iraq as an historic success. The issue is how to consolidate that victory, not to snatch defeat from its jaw. Those challenging this historic victory are enemies of both the Western democracies and the Iraqi people.

Iraq today is the central battlefield in the global war between two mutually exclusive visions of the future. Yet the jihadists now know they can't win on that battlefield. After three years of near-daily killings, often in the most horrible manner imaginable, they've failed to alter Iraq's political agenda. Nor have they won control of any territory or even broadened their constituency.

Read the entire article.

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By Michelle Malkin · October 19, 2006 01:02 PM
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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...
...Ramadan is the holiest month in the Muslim calendar. For Muslims in America and around the world, Ramadan is a special time of prayer and fasting, contemplation of God's greatness, and charity and service to those in need. And for people of all faiths, it is a good time to reflect on the values we hold in common, including love of family, gratitude to God, the importance of community, and a commitment to tolerance and religious freedom."

Religious freedom? Ask an apostate. Ask Abdul Rahman Ask Indonesian Christians. Ask Saudi Christians. Ask Egyptian Christians.

Tolerance? Ask gays in Iran. Ask Danish cartoonists. Ask Salman Rushdie.
Want more? Just Google "Ramadan violence."

See entire Malkin piece with all the links

By George Will
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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 year's growth (3.9 percent) was adding to America's GDP the equivalent of the GDP of Taiwan (the 19th-largest economy). Nancy Pelosi vows that if Democrats capture Congress they will "jump-start our economy.'' A "jump-start '' is administered to a stalled vehicle. But since the Bush tax cuts went into effect in 2003, the economy's growth rate (3.5 percent) has been better than the average for the 1980s (3.1) and 1990s (3.3). Today's unemployment rate (4.6 percent) is lower than the average for the 1990s (5.8) -- lower, in fact, than the average for the last 40 years (6.0). Some stall.

Economic hypochondria, a derangement associated with affluence, is a byproduct of the welfare state: An entitlement mentality gives Americans a low pain threshold -- witness their recurring hysterias about nominal rather than real gasoline prices -- and a sense of being entitled to economic dynamism without the frictions and "creative destruction'' that must accompany dynamism. Economic hypochondria is also bred by news media that consider the phrase "good news'' an oxymoron, even as the U.S. economy, which has performed better than any other major industrial economy since 2001, drives the Dow to record highs.

The Jack No. 2 well, in deep water 170 miles southwest of New Orleans, recently discovered a field with perhaps 15 billion barrels of oil -- a 50 percent increase in proven U.S. reserves. This news triggered a gusher of journalistic gloom: More oil means more woe -- a reprieve for that enemy of humanity, the internal combustion engine, and more global warming, more air pollution, more highway fatalities, more suburban sprawl.

The recent 20 percent decline of the cost of a barrel of oil, from a nominal record of $78.40 (which, adjusted for inflation, was well below the 1980 peak of $92 in 2006 dollars), has produced an 81-cent decline in the average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline in 70 days. For consumers, that is akin to a tax cut of more than $81 billion.

President Bush's tax cuts were supposed to cause a cataract of red ink. In fiscal 2006, however, federal revenues as a share of GDP were 18.4 percent, slightly above the post-1962 average of 18.2. And the federal budget deficit was $247.7 billion, just 1.9 percent of the $13.1 trillion GDP. That is below the average for the 1970s (2.1), 1980s (3.0) and 1990s (2.2).

It is said that workers' compensation has been stagnant. But to tickle that bad news from the statistics you must treat "compensation'' as a synonym for wages, and then ignore the effect of taxation on individuals' well-being.

Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur of the American Enterprise Institute, writing in National Review, say annual wage growth since 2000 has been 0.6 percent, but the annual increase in real hourly compensation, including benefits -- and if you do not include them, why are they called benefits? -- has been 1.3 percent. And taxes -- particularly those paid by middle-class families with children -- have declined substantially.

Furthermore, as Hassett and Mathur write, consumers, by modifying their behavior, protect or enhance their well-being in ways not captured in economic statistics. For example, an American who, prompted by higher energy prices, traded in a Hummer for a Prius has served his or her standard of living. "If I ate 80 apples last year, and the price of apples increased this year to a million dollars, my welfare would not go way down; I would just switch to oranges,'' the authors write.

Finally, today's widening income disparities will be partly self-correcting. Granted, income statistics show the increasing disadvantages of persons with education deficits. But that is the market saying -- shouting, really -- "Stay in school!'' Over time, the voice of the market is rational, credible and therefore a potent instrument for changing behavior.

georgewill@washpost.com

By Victor Davis Hanson
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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 when President Clinton had his trials, personal and otherwise.


Not so now with Presidents Carter and Clinton. They repeatedly harp about the sins of the current administration. By now, everyone has seen clips of Clinton losing his temper (complete with finger-wagging) and lashing out at the "right-wingers" on TV. He lectures on political extremism, even as one of his wife's staff members slandered John McCain by saying he broke under torture while a POW in Hanoi. And even at 82, Jimmy Carter almost daily carps over Bush's foreign policy.

Do not forget the unhinged billionaire leftist philanthropists. Ted Turner said he resented President Bush asking Americans, after 9/11, to take sides in our war against Islamic terrorists. George Soros claimed that President Bush improved on Nazi propaganda methods.

The frustration with Bush & Co. has driven a few in the media almost to the point of clinical madness. In 2004, a clueless Dan Rather imploded by airing clearly forged memos that called into question Bush's National Guard service - with the result that he was eased out by an embarrassed CBS News. More recently, Keith Olbermann, the foaming news head on the struggling cable channel MSNBC, keeps his ratings low with uncontrollable rants about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pushing a "new fascism."

On college campuses, the old leftist intolerance of unwelcome free speech is back with a fury. A guest spokesman for the Minutemen immigration reform group was shouted down at a recent Columbia University lecture. Earlier, Harvard's liberal president Larry Summers was forced out, after timidly questioning academic orthodoxy about the role of women in science and engineering.

What sends liberal criticism over the edge into pathological hysteria?

Is it that George Bush is a polarizing figure, not just in terms of his Iraq policy, but also because of his Christian Texan demeanor?

Or is the current left-wing savagery also a legacy of the tribal 1960s, when out-of-power protestors felt that expressions of speaking bluntly, even crudely, were at least preferable to "artificial" cultural restraint? Why should graying veterans of the barricades, then, remain "polite" when their country's less sophisticated red-state yokels are taking it in the wrong direction?

The Democrats have not elected congressional majorities in 12 years, and they've occupied the White House in only eight of the last 26 years. The left's current unruliness seems a way of scapegoating others for a more elemental frustration - that they can't gain a national majority based on their core beliefs. More entitlements, higher taxes to pay for them, gay marriage, de facto quotas in affirmative action, open borders, abortion on demand, and radical secularism - these liberal issues don't tend to resonate with most Americans.

To compensate, leftist pundits, billionaire philanthropists and politicians, from current officeholders to ex-presidents, work to ensure that isolated moments of Republican ineptness (George Bush strutting on a carrier deck in his flight suit) and wrongdoing (repulsive e-mails from a perverted Congressman Mark Foley) blare out as the only issues of the day. This distracting drumbeat, not their own agenda, is the only strategy for success in the next election.

True, reactionaries in the 1990s expressed a Neanderthal hatred of Bill Clinton. But now shouting leftists have lowered the bar. The danger, of course, is that by emulating the rhetoric of a Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore, the feral Democrats - when they come back into power again as tamed leaders who must govern - will have created Frankensteins. And, as we know, such monsters always turn on their creators.

Right Wing Politics

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
(C) 2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/10/liberals_gone_wild.html

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 strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop.

And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalized insurgency.

As a bleary Dean Martin liked to say, in mock bewilderment, at the start of his stage act: "How did all these people get in my room?" How did all these jihadists get rooms in Miami and Portland and Montreal? How did we come to breed suicide bombers not just in Gaza but in Yorkshire?

IN the globalized pre-9/11 world, we in the West thought in terms of nations - the Americans, the French, the Chinese - and, insofar as we considered transnational groups, were obsessed mostly with race. Religion wasn't really on the radar.

So an insurgency that lurks within a religion automatically has a global network. And you don't need "deep cover": You can hang your shingle on Main Street and we won't even notice it. And when we do - as we did on 9/11 - we still won't do anything about it, because, well, it's a religion, and modern man is disinclined to go after any faith except perhaps his own.

But Islam is not just a religion. Those lefties who bemoan what America is doing to provoke "the Muslim world" would go bananas if any Western politician started referring to "the Christian world." When such sensitive guardians of the separation of church and state endorse the first formulation but not the second, they implicitly accept that Islam has a political sovereignty too. Thus, it's not merely that there's a global jihad lurking within this religion, but that the religion itself is a political project - and, in fact, an imperial project - in a way that modern Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism are not.

Furthermore, this particular religion is historically a somewhat bloodthirsty faith, in which whatever's your bag violence-wise can almost certainly be justified. (Yes, Christianity has had its blood drenched moments, but the Spanish Inquisition, still a byword for theocratic violence, killed fewer people in a century and a half than the jihad does in a typical year.)

So we have a global terrorist movement, insulated within a global political project, insulated within a severely self-segregating religion whose adherents are the fastest-growing demographic in the developed world. The jihad thus has a very potent brand inside a highly dispersed and very decentralized network much more efficient than anything the CIA can muster. And these fellows can hide in plain sight.

NOT long after 9/11, I said, just as an aside, that these days whenever something goofy turns up on the news chances are it involves some fellow called Mohammad.

A plane flies into the World Trade Center? Mohammad Atta.

A sniper starts killing gas station customers around Washington, D.C.? John Allen Muhammad.

A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri.

A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed Hedayet.

A terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed.

A British subject self-detonates in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammad Hanif.

A terrorist cell bombs the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed.

A gang rapist preys on the women of Sydney, Australia? Mohammad Skaf.

A group of Dearborn, Mich., men charged with cigarette racketeering in order to fund Hezbollah? Fadi Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud, Mohammad Fawzi Zeidan and Imad Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud.

A Canadian terror cell is arrested for plotting to bomb Ottawa and behead the prime minister? Mohammad Dirie, Amin Mohamed Durrani and Yasim Abdi Mohamed.

Sophisticates object that very few of the Mohammads on the list above are formal agents of al Qaeda. But so what? There are no "card-carrying members" of this enemy: That's what makes them an ever-bigger threat: You don't need to plant sleepers. If you've got a big pool of manpower and a big idea that's just out there all the time - 24/7, flickering away invitingly like a neon sign in the Western darkness - that's enough to cause a big heap of trouble.

AND there are minimal degrees of separation between all these Mohammads and the most eminent figures in the Muslim world and the critical institutions at the heart of the West. For example, in 2003, Abdurahman Alamoudi was jailed for attempting to launder money from a Libyan terror-front "charity" into Syria via London.

Who's Abdurahman Alamoudi? He's the guy who until 1998 certified Muslim chaplains for the United States military, under the aegis of his Saudi-funded American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council. In 1993, at an American military base, at a ceremony to install the first imam in the nation's armed forces, it was Mr. Alamoudi who presented him with his new insignia of a silver crescent star.

He's also the fellow who helped devise the three-week Islamic awareness course in California public schools, in the course of which students adopt Muslim names, wear Islamic garb, give up candy and TV for Ramadan, memorize suras from the Koran, learn that "jihad" means "internal personal struggle," profess the Muslim faith, and recite prayers that begin "In the name of Allah," etc.

OH, and, aside from his ster ling efforts on behalf of multicultural education, Alamoudi was also an adviser on Islamic matters to Hillary Clinton.

And it turns out he's a bagman for terrorists.

Infiltration-wise, I would say that's pretty good. The desk jockeys at the CIA insist, oh no, it would be impossible for them to get any of their boys inside al Qaeda. But the other side has no difficulty setting their chaps up in the heart of the U.S. military, and the U.S. education system, and the U.S. political establishment, and the offices of U.S. senators and former First Ladies.

Mark Steyn was a winner of the 2006 Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism. Excerpted with permission from "America Alone: The End of the World as We KnowIt" (Regnery).

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. Perhaps climate change deniers should even be killed off, hanged like those evil men who were tried Nuremberg-style the first time around.

Whatever the truth about our warming planet, it is clear there is a tidal wave of intolerance in the debate about climate change which is eroding free speech and melting rational debate. There has been no decree from on high or piece of legislation outlawing climate change denial, and indeed there is no need to criminalise it, as the Australian columnist suggests. Because in recent months it has been turned into a taboo, chased out of polite society by a wink and a nod, letters of complaint, newspaper articles continually comparing climate change denial to Holocaust denial. An attitude of ‘You can’t say that!’ now surrounds debates about climate change, which in many ways is more powerful and pernicious than an outright ban. I am not a scientist or an expert on climate change, but I know what I don’t like - and this demonisation of certain words and ideas is an affront to freedom of speech and open, rational debate.

Read the entire article.