Things That Make You Go "Hmmm..."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20050517-091433-3816r.htm

WHO PROFITED FROM $ADDAM?

Despite the unsuccessful efforts by British MP George Galloway to turn
yesterday's Senate hearing on the oil-for-food scandal into a circus, Sen. NormColeman, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations,continues to make headway. Late last week, the panel issued its latest report --based in large part on interviews of former senior officials in Saddam's government, including Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and Vice President TahaYassin Ramadan -- which suggests that Mr. Galloway, French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and members of Russia's Presidential Council were recipients of illicit oil-for-food largesse.

Unfortunately, the most talked-about aspect of all of this is Mr. Galloway's vitriolic attack on the integrity of Mr. Coleman and the subcommittee, hisdenunciation of the war to liberate Iraq and his assertions of persecution atthe hands of Zionists, Christian fundamentalist and other alleged malefactors.

None of this is out of character for a man who has described the fall of Soviet Communism as a tragedy, who openly attacked his own government for opposing Saddam and who depicts Iraq's terrorist insurgents as liberators. Mr. Galloway's reprehensible political views aside, proving he was paid offby Saddam has been no easy task.

Last year, he won a libel suit against a British newspaper that reported, apparently based on forged documents that included correspondence from as far back as 1992, that he had benefited from the oil-for-food program. The Coleman panel uses a different set of documents, allof them issued since 2001.

The subcommittee concluded that Mr. Galloway was granted oil allocations as part of a complex series of oil transactions aimed at concealing the source of ill-gotten gain. (Last year, the CIA's Iraq SurveyGroup concluded that Saddam gave Mr. Galloway 20 million barrels of oil.)

"Galloway appeared to use a charity for children's leukemia to conceal payments associated with at least one such allocation ... according to senior officials [from Saddam's government], the oil allocations were granted by Iraq because of Galloway's support for the Hussein regime and his opposition to U.N.sanctions," the panel report said.

The report also raises serious questions about the conduct of Mr. Pasqua. It uncovered internal documents from the Iraqi Ministry of Oil suggesting that Mr.Pasqua received 11 million barrels of oil from the Ba'athist regime. Former aides to Saddam told the Senate subcommittee in interviews that former top Kremlin aide Alexander Voloshin and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a Russian ultranationalist and an outspoken supporter of Saddam, also earned millions in oil deals.

Things are becoming increasingly uncomfortable for some of Saddam Hussein'sstaunchest supporters.

Hmmmm.....

"The Downing Street Memo" Goes Down

I recieved a nice chuckle when one of my co-workers handed me a pringted copy of the so-called "Downing Street Memo" the purports to explain that the Iraq war was contrived by President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

There are several articles out there debunking this piece of fluff, but this one is the best researched. It even has footnotes, which is rare for a news article these days.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18059

Bush, Blair and the Plan for War
By Thomas Patrick Carroll
FrontPageMagazine.com May 17, 2005

On 1 May, just days before Britain’s national election, The Sunday Times obtained and published a secret government memo on the ousting of Saddam.[i] Public reaction was appallingly unsophisticated (much of it, anyway) and undoubtedly contributed to Labour’s lackluster performance at the polls.[ii] Because of the party’s poor showing, Prime Minister Tony Blair may now be forced to step aside, most likely in favor of Gordon Brown.

There is a sad irony in all of this. If more British voters (and the opinion makers who influenced them) had made a genuine effort to understand the significance of that memo, the elections would likely have gone in precisely the opposite direction and Blair would now be sitting on an even larger majority than he enjoyed before.

The document in question, classified SECRET – UK EYES ONLY, was a record of a meeting between Blair and his senior advisors. The topic was what to do about Saddam. The memo was dated 23 July 2002, well before the first coalition bombs struck Baghdad on 20 March of the following year.
The memo said that among Washington policymakers, “[m]ilitary action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

The text went on:
The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD… If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

The “military plan” was what ultimately became Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the “political strategy” was the diplomatic push on WMD. “We should work on the assumption,” the memo concluded, “that the UK would take part in any military action.”

Blair’s political opponents hit the ceiling, as did much of the press. This was proof that Bush and Blair had lied their countries into an unnecessary war, for reasons unclear but probably nefarious. Or so went the rant. Sir Menzies Campbell, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, was typical when he said the Blair government had “agreed to an illegal regime change with the Bush administration. It set out to create the justification for going to war. It was to be war by any means.”[iii]

Although too late to do Blair much good politically, a response to such charges is still worthwhile. If nothing else, it may make our struggle against militant Islam easier to appreciate going forward.

First, the matter of secrecy. Within hours after it hit The Sunday Times, Blair’s office came out and said the memo contained nothing new.[iv] And, of course, that’s right. But the very fact that the contrary would even be seriously asserted is amazing.

Almost from the moment military action against Saddam was publicly floated by the Bush administration, informed analysts were pointing out the obvious — i.e., there was a grand strategic design at work, not just some knee-jerk concern with WMD.

I myself have been laying out the strategic importance of Operation Iraqi Freedom for several years now, so I won’t repeat it again here.[v] Suffice to say, Bush and Blair (and especially Bush) recognized early on that a military invasion of Iraq, followed by a physical presence in-country for an indefinite period of time, was key to changing the poisonous social/political environment in the Middle East that enabled violent Islamist ideology to flourish.

The talk about Saddam and WMD was not a lie — Bush and Blair certainly believed it, as did pretty much every intelligence service in the Western world — but there was far more to Operation Iraqi Freedom than WMD. The now-famous memo is simply another confirmation of Bush and Blair’s proper concern with larger strategic realities, and the relatively subordinate role that Iraqi WMD played in their calculations. Nothing new there, as Blair correctly said.

But there is another aspect to this whole affair that is more troubling. We are now over three years into the war against militant Islam. It is simply inexcusable for opinion makers and public intellectuals (e.g., those who made such a fuss about the “revelations” in the Downing Street memo) not to grasp the strategic imperatives behind what we are doing in Iraq and elsewhere. It’s certainly okay to disagree with our strategy, but for supposedly sophisticated commentators to miss the entire point and continue raving about WMD and UN sanctions is simply beyond the pale.

Regardless of whether they support or oppose the Bush Doctrine and attendant strategies, critics have a responsibility to acknowledge those strategies and the goal of a new Middle East toward which they are driving.

A perfect example of an opinion leader who takes this responsibility seriously is Efraim Halevy, former chief of Mossad. He recently said about America’s strategy in Iraq and beyond:

I believe that for the U.S. to be able to reap the benefits of its very bold policies in the Middle East, it will be necessary for successive presidents to maintain a formidable military presence in the region for quite some time to come. The U.S. has set in motion a sea change in the entire region and we are only witnessing the preliminary phases of this change… I think there will be many in the Arab world who will come to appreciate the enormous contribution that the U.S. is making to the future of the societies of the Middle East. But for all this to happen, the U.S. must stay the course.[vi]

Whether one agrees with Halevy or not, at least he comprehends the strategic picture and is able to speak intelligently about it. Such understanding contrasts sharply with those who still talk as if all Bush and Blair were ever concerned about was enforcing UN resolutions.

The decision to invade Iraq was made as part of a broad strategy to shift the balance of power in the Islamic world, a strategy that will be playing out for years to come. Unfortunately, the voters and opinion makers who turned against Blair because of the Downing Street memo don’t understand that. Not their finest hour, to say the least.

Mr. Carroll is a former officer in the Clandestine Service of the CIA. He can be contacted through Carroll Associates at www.tpcarroll.com.

[i] “The secret Downing Street memo,” The Sunday Times, 1 May 2005, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html
[ii] Before the vote, Labour held a 161-seat majority in Parliament. That has now dropped to an anemic 67.
[iii] “Blair hit by new leak of secret war plan,” The Sunday Times, 1 May 2005, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1592904,00.html
[iv] Note 3 above
[v] For example, see “The Whole Argument for Operation Iraqi Freedom,” FrontPage Magazine, 18 February 2004, http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12230
[vi] “Q&A with former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy,” Haaretz, 10 May 2005, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/QA.jhtml?qaNo=125

Thank You.

Happy
Memorial Day

A Stranded Democrat

Keith Thompson has been a liberal longer than I have been alive. Recent events, however, have revealed to him the realization that the values that the party that had once championed his values has become something else entirely.

This is a rather lengthy piece found at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/22/INGUNCQHKJ1.DTL

It is well worth the time.

Sunday, May 22, 2005
(SF Chronicle)
Leaving the left/I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styledprogressives -- people who once championed solidarity

Keith Thompson

Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking theirlives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapidsuccession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from along-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but acause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community,even my sense of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide thesimpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode. My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see.

Now it's all too obvious.

Leading voices in America's "peace"movement are actually cheering against self-determination for along-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately,first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror. Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think Kafka, without the bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift, without the buzz. Every anomaly that didn't fit my perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring for solong ignored.

The insistent inner voice I learned to suppress now has myrapt attention. "Something strange -- something approaching pathological-- something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," the voice whispers. "How did this happen?"

The Iraqi election is my tipping point.

The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I didmany years before. I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite termfor reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community, where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics and Jews was unapologetic.

Liberal and conservative, like left and right, wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and"progressive thought"). The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful that way.

I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm workerjustice, lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate ever to a Democratic convention.

Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble.

To my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.

A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famouslydescribed the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word"evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert.

When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'"too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport.

My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like"gulag" to the dinner table. I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11,the war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations. Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated byMuslim fanatics.

Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots. Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on a mediocre day. (Robb's note: and the Left thinks WE are crazy!)

All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirkingresponse to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King's call for equal of opportunity.

These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender"disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity.

There's a word for this: pathetic.

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.

In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional orunintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).

Wait, it gets better.

When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can'tdo that."

When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and g oupstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided."

I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?

He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators.

Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudanis shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice for "all of God's children."

My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the bodypolitic. In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders'talk -- and we did.

With barriers to opportunity no longer written into law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies. America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human condition. (Robb's note: that's a good definition of Conservatism)

At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society whose capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to"foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give them room to breathe."

One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I became a liberal in the first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of myreactionary hometown. This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness.

I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.

True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.

Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism,self-reflection, and equality.

A left averse to making common cause with competent, self- determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for so many years.

All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name "progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.

So Much for Hillary's Centrism.....

Much has been made of Senator Hillary Clinton's alleged "move to the center". In this article, Hillary is trying to lay low during the conflict over judicial filibusters:

http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ/MGArticle/WSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031782853641&path=!nationworld&s=1037645509161

A few excerpts bear examining:

"Presidential politics may be a factor in Clinton's reserve, experts said, and she may be calculating that being too vocal could hinder her efforts to moderate her image."

This leads me to ask: "Hey Hillary, what is your stand on this issue?"

If Hillary is such a moderate, why didn't she get involved with Senator John McCain's "Gang of 14" moderates that diffused the showdown over judicial nominations?

Indeed, instead of showing support for that grand act of centrism by the "Gang of 14", Hillary showed her disdain for centrism by VOTING AGAINST ONE OF THE NOMINEES THAT WAS INCLUDED IN THE DEAL.

For proof of that she did this here is the link to the official web page of the US Senate:

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=1&vote=0012

Every Senator that voted against Pricilla Owen voted AGAINST the moderates and the deal that they struck.

Upon visiting the above link, you will also discover that Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia was the ONLY DEMOCRAT to vote in favor of Judge Owen.

By voting against Judge Owen, Hillary put herself TO THE LEFT of a former KKK member!!!!

"For somebody who is spending a lot of time taking a slow walk to the middle, this is probably not an issue she felt she needed to take a stand on," said Jennifer Duffy, a Senate expert for the Cook Political Report.

Did You Hear What They Said?

Hello True-believers and welcome to another exciting edition of "Did You Hear What They Said?".

For the newbies out there, this is where we actually quote people in the public sphere and let you know EXACTLY where they stand on the issues.

Without further ado, here we go:

FAITH

"These are perilous times for people of faith, not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud." --California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown

"I had no strong views about the new pope one way or another, but I'd have voted for him just for the pleasure of seeing him drive the U.S. media bananas. Apparently, The New York Times was stunned that their short list of Cardinal Gloria Steinem, Cardinal Rupert Everett and Cardinal Rosie O'Donnell were defeated at the last moment by some guy who came out of left field and isn't even gay or female but instead belongs to the discredited 'Catholic' faction of the Catholic Church." --Mark Steyn

"Nothing more separates Judeo-Christian values from secular values than the question of whether morality -- what is good or evil -- is absolute or relative. In other words, is there an objective right or wrong, or is right or wrong a matter of personal opinion?" --Dennis Prager

"The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families. ... How is it possible that Children can have any just Sense of the sacred Obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn their Mothers live inhabitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in constant Infidelity to their Mothers?" --John Adams

"[T]he most effective weapon against the disease has not been the AIDS lobby's 20-year promotion of condom culture in Africa, but Uganda's campaign to change behavior and to emphasize abstinence and fidelity -- i.e., the Pope's position. You don't have to be a Catholic or a 'homophobe' to think that the spread of AIDS is telling us something basic -- that nature is not sympathetic to sexual promiscuity. If it weren't AIDS, it would be something else, as it has been for most of human history." --Mark Steyn

THE COURTS (judicial filibusters)

"If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of lawyers in the first place." --Charles Montagu

"In liberal land, the thinking goes like this: If a majority of Americans seek a change in direction they must be denied by the courts for their own good. But when a tiny sliver of the minority seeks change it must be granted them by a handful of judges for the nation's good. This phenomenon used to be referred to as the 'tyranny of the minority', but is now simply known as the New York Times editorial policy." --Lisa Fabrizio

"Senator Reid can do the math: A Democratic Party, plus no ideas, plus obstruction, plus over-the-top partisan rhetoric equals continued minority."--Brian Nick, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee

"Again and again in recent years, the filibuster has been the shame of the Senate and the last resort of special-interest groups. Too often, it has enabled a small minority of the Senate to prevent a strong majority from working its will and serving the public interest."--Ted Kennedy 1975

(Hey Senator, what changed your mind???)

"If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour? That 150 lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected." --Thomas Jefferson

"Why are Senate Democrats so afraid of conservative judicial nominees who are African Americans, Hispanics, Catholics, and women? Because these...nominees threaten to split the Democrat base by aligning conservative Republicans with conservative voices in the minority community and appealing to suburban women." --Steven Calabresi

"Let me get this straight. The President comes to town, tries to implement what he ran on, gets re-elected rather easily, implements more of the agenda he ran on. You can't beat him on ideas, so you descend into name calling. And then you criticize him for creating the atmosphere of name calling by not abandoning what he won two elections on? And you really expect people to take you seriously?" --Duane Patterson

"A day after Senator 'Uriah' Reid brands the president a 'loser' and then apologizes, a week after Senator Ken Salazar labels Focus on the Family as the anti-Christ and then apologizes, and a month after Senator Robert Byrd brands the Senate GOP as Hitler's heirs, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) appeals to President Bush to bring moderation to the Republican side of the debate on the filibusters. Now that is rich. Wildly amusing and ineffective, but rich." --Hugh Hewitt

"The courts are the last hope for enacting the liberal agenda because liberals cannot get enough votes to control Congress or most state legislatures."--Thomas Sowell

"The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution." --Byron White

"[T]here is not a syllable in the Constitution which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution."--Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 32

WAR

"Sacrifice, not selfishness," he said, "must be the eternal price of liberty. Vigilance, not appeasement, is the byword of living freedoms."--General Omar Bradley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

"People...love to say that 'Violence never solved anything.' But what solved Hitler? Was it a team of social workers? Was it putting daisies into the gun barrels of Nazi Panzer divisions? Was it a commission that tried to understand what made Hitler so angry? No. What solved Hitler was violence." --Michael Medved

"There is...a deep anti-military bias in the media -- one that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it's very dangerous." --ABC's Terry Moran

PERSONAL VIRTUE

"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." --Oscar Wilde

"The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything." --Theodore Roosevelt

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." --Barry Goldwater

"Public life is a situation of power and energy; he trespasses against his duty who sleeps over his watch, as well as he that goes over to the enemy." --Edmund Burke

SOCIAL SECURITY

"Will the last Democrat with an idea please stand up? It doesn't even have to be a good one. Just pick an idea: a chicken in every pot, an intern under every desk, whatever. But please, Democrats, do something soon to indicate some minimal brain activity before a Florida judge shows up and pulls your feeding tube." --Michael Graham

“We don’t have a Democratic plan at this time."--House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer(D-Md.), refering to Social Security reform, May 18,2005 http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/051805/wexler.html

"The Democrat Party is like a mule. It has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity." --Ignatius Donnelly

IMMIGRATION

"It occurred to me...that 'illegal immigration' is an oxymoron. If it's immigration, it is not illegal, and if they are here illegally they are not immigrants, are they? Maybe it's time that a more accurate term be coined to describe these people. I'll start the process -- how about 'foreign trespassers?'" --Ron Olliff

ABORTION

"[Democrats], arguing on [the] basis that the Senate can provide advice and consent without voting, even at the committee level, is a rather 'strict' interpretation of the Constitution -- one that might even be called 'extreme.' How, one wonders, do these hyper-strict literalists find a constitutional right to abortion?" --Brandon Crocker

TAXES

"What's the incentive to MAKE more, if the Government continues to TAKE more?"--Glenn Beck, April, 29, 2005

BUH BYE, BILL

"The nice thing about not being president anymore is that...with no responsibility of office I can say whatever I believe. Of course, the bad thing is nobody pays any attention to what I say." --Bill Clinton

And finally, our trivia question. Who said the following:

"During the course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted...."

a) Ronald Reagan

b)Bill Clinton

c)Franklin D. Roosevelt

d)Thomas Jefferson

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d) Thomas Jefferson

Memorandum of WHAT?

The US Senate has proven that it is good at punting. That is the only way to describe what the "Gang of 14" has done to the process of confirming the President's judicial nominees.

Here is a link to the article in question:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/05/24/filibuster.fight/

Some parts of this agreement trouble me.

While I am glad that atleast SOMEONE got a vote (Pricilla Owen), the parts that apply to the future lead me to believe that the Constitutional Option will again come into play once Janice Rogers Brown and William Pryor get confirmed.

In the past, Judge Owen has been referred to as "extreme" by Democrats. For example, at this link you will find the following quotes by two Democrat Senators :

"I do not believe the nomination of Priscilla Owen is worthy of a lifetime appointment, and I do not believe her nomination is worth a constitutional confrontation that will forever damage the Senate," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the Texas judge's record "shows her to be an ends-oriented activist judge."

They both voted against her on Wednesday, but the fact that she was "extreme" and STILL GOT CONFIRMED leads me to wonder what is in store when William Myers and Henry Saad come up for votes on the floor of the Senate.

Another aspect of the CNN story bothers me:

"The group's members also agreed that they would oppose attempts to filibuster future judicial nominees except under "extraordinary circumstances."

What would constitute "extraordinary circumstances" was not defined."

NOT DEFINED????

To the Gang of 14 Democrats Robert Byrd (West Virginia), Daniel Inouye (Hawaii), Mary Landrieu (Louisiana), Joseph Lieberman (Connecticut), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Mark Pryor (Arkansas), Ken Salazar (Colorado), RepublicansLincoln Chafee (Rhode Island), Susan Collins (Maine), Mike DeWine (Ohio), Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), John McCain (Arizona), John Warner (Virginia) and Olympia Snowe (Maine) I have tow questions for you:
1) what does "extraordinary circumstances" actually mean?
2) what exactly, if anything, DO YOU STAND FOR????

Yes, this is a tough decision, but THAT IS WHY YOU WERE VOTED INTO OFFICE FOR!!!

The article continues:

"Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid later welcomed the deal and indicated Democrats would continue to filibuster Myers and Saad, likely dooming their nominations."

WAIT A MINUTE!!!

The headline on this story, in bold font on the web page, reads:

"The looming Senate showdown over filibustered judicial nominees has been averted by a bipartisan agreement"

But yet Senator Reid says that "Democrats would continue to filibuster".

The confrontation has not been averted. It has simply been punted down the road because 14 Senators DON'T HAVE THE GUTS TO MAKE TOUGH DECISIONS.

Punters belong in the NFL, not the US Senate.

I think we can call this the "Memorandum of Stupidulation".

Media Addicted to Liberalism

The first step to recovering from alcoholism is to admit that you have a problem.

With that principle in mind, why can't the Elite Media admit that they have a problem?

Here is an excellent article from Dick Morris, a man who has been on both sides of the politcal battles.

http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/DickMorris/051805.html


Newsweek is biased like the rest of the media elite

The Newsweek magazine story falsely reporting desecration of the Koran by American military interrogators in Guantanamo, Cuba, where terror suspects are being held, is the fourth major false report printed or aired by a highly respected arm of the Anglo-American journalistic establishment in the past year.

Each of those inaccurate stories has roiled the political waters and threatened to inflict colossal damage on either President Bush or British Prime Minister Tony Blair and on American and British efforts to defeat terrorists and the regime of Saddam Hussein. It is high time that the American people got the point: The organs of establishment journalism are slanted and biased toward the left and disregard the standards of fair and accurate reporting, with impunity, when an election is on the line.

The list of false stories is telling:

• In the spring of 2004, the BBC reported that Blair had ordered his intelligence people to “sex up” reports of the Iraqi program to make weapons of mass destruction. For months, Blair was on the defensive because of the report, and the intelligence operative who was the alleged source of the story committed suicide. It took a parliamentary commission to debunk the story and to force a BBC retraction. The ongoing damage to Blair’s credibility likely helped to account for his marginal showing in the most recent U.K. election.

• In September 2004, CBS News’ “60 Minutes” television program used forged and phony documents to try to besmirch Bush’s record in the Texas National Guard. It was only the careless error of the forger in printing the suffix “th” above the line that led to the truth.

• In the week before the election, The New York Times, the citadel of journalistic accuracy, ran a front-page story alleging that 370 tons of explosives had disappeared from an Iraqi storage site during the American occupation. The implication was that the carelessness of the Bush administration had put into the hands of the insurgent terrorists the very weapons now being used to kill our troops.

But the Pentagon soon established that the weapons either had been removed early in the U.S. occupation or had never been there when our troops arrived. The Times story led John Kerry to change his TV ads and focus his endgame campaign on the allegation.

• And now Newsweek has published an inflammatory story that has led to massive anti-American demonstrations in Afghanistan — the first since the war — protesting the seeming defilement of sacred texts. Sixteen people are dead because Newsweek got the story wrong, and the image of the United States is damaged in the Islamic world. And Newsweek refuses to hold anyone to account for this outrageous error, least of all its own senior management.

Each of those “mistakes” was biased in favor of the left and was committed in the haste of liberal journalists to get some ammunition to discredit Bush and the Iraq war. But when the same reporter who wrote the current story filed the first disclosure of the Monica Lewinsky affair with his editors at Newsweek, the magazine piously refused to run the story.

In fact, in all the years of the Clinton presidency, I cannot recall a single instance of a similarly inaccurate high-profile story attacking the Democratic president. Each of the scandal allegations ultimately proved to capture the Clintons in some sort of ethical violation. The sole exception that comes to mind is the FBI-file story, but, even there, the journalist reports that the files had been available to the White House staff were accurate. But when a Republican president is waging a war of which the left does not approve, a different journalistic standard appears to apply.

The media need to examine their own bias and correct it, lest still more readers and viewers turn away in the face of their obvious manipulation of public opinion.

Isn't the Truth Worth It?

In an editorial piece by CAROLE LEIGH HUTTON, the Detroit FREE PRESS PUBLISHER AND EDITOR found at this link:
http://www.freep.com/voices/columnists/ehutton17e_20050517.htm

she issues a mea culpa for a recent Mitch Albom article that had factual errors.

The cure for this serious ill was a series of measures to help make sure things like that never happen again. One of the items listed was this:

"Begin a program of random post-publication fact-checking to look for inaccuracies that slip through our multilayered editing process."

WAIT A MINUTE!

If certain facts about a story cannot be substantiated, WHY IS IT THEN GOING TO PRINT????

Sure, it may take more time and it may delay a story but ISN'T THE TRUTH WORTH THE EXTRA TIME????

What if it Happened to a Bible?

Here's a link and an excerpt:

http://reuters.myway.com/article/20050516/2005-05-16T002959Z_01_N15405868_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-RELIGION-AFGHAN-NEWSWEEK-DC.html

Newsweek says Koran desecration report is wrong

By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Newsweek magazine said on Sunday it erred in a May 9 report that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.
Editor Mark Whitaker said the magazine inaccurately reported that U.S. military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Muslim holy book down the toilet.

The report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League.

On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.

"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday.

The weekly news magazine said in its May 23 edition that the information had come from a "knowledgeable government source" who told Newsweek that a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay said interrogators flushed at least one copy of the Koran down a toilet in a bid to make detainees talk."

OK, here's the deal: What if it was a Bible that had been flushed?

Would there have been riots, killings, and injuries?

The answer simply is: NO.

Why?

The answer, again, is simple: Christianity is actually a religion of peace.

There are those that would cite the Crusades as evidence that Christianity is not a religion of peace. However, Christianity has evolved since then. Islam has not.

Name the last time Christianity mounted a "jihad".

Islam, however, continues (it seems) looking for an excuse to go on a jihad, or atleast sit idle while certain elements hijack their faith.

My contention is that if Islam were TRULY a religion of peace, those riots would NEVER HAVE HAPPENED.