A group of Natives gather on a rocky cliff. Below they see a ship pulling up to shore. Even at this distance, they can see that these visitors are not from the local area.
Chief Killthebear looks at his Indians. There goes the neighborhood.
**
Captain James Seymour watches as his men drag the rowboat to the shore. He and his men look up to see a waiting squad of Native natives.
Captain: Oh, look. Valet parking.
** RTWT. Teach it to your children. It's more entertaining than the truth and probably closer than what they're teaching in Public Schools today.
We don't need to solve the immigration problem forever. We need to solve it now.
Peggy Noonan
It is July 10, 1858, a Saturday evening, and Lincoln is speaking in Chicago. The night before his opponent in their race for the U.S. Senate, Stephen Douglas, had referred to him graciously in his big speech, and invited him to take a good seat. Lincoln seized the opportunity and invited Douglas's audience to hear him the next night.
And so here he was, speaking, as usual, text and subtext, on slavery. But near the end, he turned to who populates America. Half or more of his audience, he suggested, could trace their personal ancestry back to the founding generation, "those iron men" who were "our fathers and grandfathers." Remembering their creation of the United States, thinking of "how it was done and who did it," has civic benefits. It leaves Americans feeling "more attached to one another, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit."
Continued on Page 49
So, the KGB has successfully whacked a Putin critic in Great Britain. I'm sorry, the KGB has allegedly successfully whacked a Putin critic in Great Britain. This comes after about two years after they allegedly nearly successfully poisoned Yushchenko in Ukraine, in an attempt to whack the leader of the Orange Revolution.
The Syrians successfully whacked... whoops, there I go again. The Syrians allegedly successfully whacked a critic in the Lebanese cabinet, less than two years after they allegedly successfully whacked the Lebanese Prime Minister. (I expect any minute now to hear the news that Bashir Assad signed a deal with News Corp. for a book entitled, "I Didn't Order Hariri Assassinated, But Hypothetically If I Did, Here's How It Went Down.")
Saddam Hussein got the death penalty in a two-year-and-change trial that the organization Human Rights Watch has deemed "fundamentally unfair" and "unsound." I suppose we may have the wrong Iraqi dictator; perhaps it was some other Saddam Hussein who slaughtered all those people.
And the last time a great butcher faced an international tribunal, Slobodan Milosevic, he died in the midst of a trial that was stretching into its fifth year.
In other news, the Germans wanted to put Donald Rumsfeld on trial for war crimes. Because if there's any country that has the moral authority to judge American actions in war, it's Germany.
There's a reason Americans are generally skeptical of international institutions and their laws, rules, and regulations. They generally stink.
Besides the revelation that "Grosse Pointe Blank" was an inadvertent documentary, the current assassination chic reveals that democratic reformers, the international order, civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time, etc., are doomed, at least as long as they play by these rules. The Syrians, the KGB, terror groups, etc. ignore all rules and laws and simply do what is necessary to kill anyone who stands in their way.
The "good guys" not only don't use the same tactics, they've pledged to never consider it, through executive orders and death penalty bans. It's funny how Rep. Charlie "Let's Reinstate The Draft Specifically Because It Will Make the U.S. Military Less Effective" Rangel can lament the "assassination" of Uday and Qusay. The killing of Abu Zarqawi was also often described as "an assassination" in the U.S. press. Sadly, a hellfire missile coming out of the sky does not pause to read the target his rights.
I made the mistake of watching "Munich" last week, in which I learned that assassinating members of Black September who helped plot a terrorist attack is "not righteous." That it's not something that good Jews do. No, good Jews lay down and die for their assailants, apparently. Or they live safely in Hollywood like Spielberg and make movies about how immoral it is for Israelis to assassinate terrorists.
In a world in which the innocent are not safe while eating in Britain, or driving through the streets of Beirut, or running for office in Ukraine or working in skyscrapers in New York City, I turn to my social betters, the ones so quick to lament the blood on our hands from "assassination" and ask, "Okay, how do you want to fight this war?" Or perhaps, more specifically, "how do you want to win?" The bad guys are out to win, and will put out all the stops.
And if they say "international tribunal," they might as well come out and say, "we're okay with dying."
Because, you know, waterboarding is mean. Much meaner than poisoning someone or shooting up his car.
UPDATE: So not long after this initial post, I got quite the response from a reader in Europe:
There is no such thing as the KGB, so such an organization could not "whack", or even "allegedly whack" anyone, whether in London or elsewhere.
Semantics. The Russian secret police and spy network can change the letterhead, but theyre the same bunch of cold-hearted SOBs. If it bothers you so much, print out the posting, cross out KGB and write FSB above it.
Indeed, the British police are not even certain the man was deliberately poisoned and have downgraded the investigation to "suspicious death", which suggests they're moving away from that theory. He ate sushi just before he fell ill.
Interesting. The man is on his deathbed, pointing the finger at Putin, and the insistence is, the fish did it. Round up the usual sushi chefs. Of course, eating bad sushi often leaves diners with their hair falling out, their throats swelling, severe damage to the nervous and immune systems and sudden heart failure. Happens all the time, right?
Im sure its strictly coincidental that he had tea with a former KGB bodyguard before falling ill.
The interesting thing is why he was investigating this woman journalist's death and on behalf of whom. Since the neocons/Israel Lobby have been screeching from day 1 that it was Putin who did it, finding evidence to support that claim would be nothing new. However, if he had uncovered evidence that she had been murdered by someone else, and was too honest to suppress it, that would be a sensation that the guilty parties might not want to come out. A qui profite le crime?
It was Neocons! Honest to God, this is like a parody of inane lefty conspiracy theories.
Putin critics like "this woman journalist" Anna Politkovskaya are getting shot, dying in mysterious circumstances left and right, and the suspicious mind of our friend slips right over Putin and goes straight to Tel Aviv and the American Enterprise Institute. Come on, man, even Inspector Clouseau got the right guy eventually.
I have never before heard anyone claim that Yushenko was poisoned by any agency of the Russian state or any other foreign state for that matter. Yushenko himself has never made any such claim. I assume you just made that up.
Or how about the guy who just got poisoned himself? Courtesy of that noted neocon propaganda rag, the New York Times: . . .
Anyway, back to our friend the skeptic:
The ordinary principles of criminal investigation suggest that neither Syria nor Iran nor the US had anything to do with the Gemayel murder. All three had everything to lose and nothing to gain by such a crime. A qui profite le crime?
Gemayels claim to fame is that he was an anti-Syrian politician; and yet our friend sees absolutely no benefit to Syria in this guy getting whacked.
I also note that this give-Syria-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-because-they-have-no-motive thinking has yet to extend to the Lebanese:
Mourning gave way to calls for unity, defiance and confrontation. Demonstrators in the crowd shouted for the resignation of the Lebanese president, Émile Lahoud, who is allied with Syria. They cursed the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and spat on pictures of Gen. Michel Aoun, a Christian who has aligned his party with Hezbollah.
It seemed that Lebanons struggling pro-Western movement, at least for a day, had regained its footing in outrage and fear at yet another political assassination. Mr. Gemayel, 34, was the fifth anti-Syria leader to be killed since Mr. Hariri was killed in February 2005 and his supporters immediately blamed Syria and its allies in Lebanon, charges that Syria strongly denied.
But hey, what would the Lebanese know? Im sure theyre too busy dodging bullets and bomb shrapnel to conduct a rational investigation.
When I see you reduced to ranting and sneering, I realize that you believe that your ideology is defeated. Welcome to the club.
Reassuringly, this e-mail comes from an account with the European Court of Justice, the supreme court of the EU.
I feel safer, dont you?
Posted by: Mike ||
11/24/2006 10:45 ||
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When the Soviet Union dissolved and the KGB was reorganized as the FSB, they cleaned out all the bad guys and put a bunch of guys with pressed suits and ties and the highest of morals and intentions.
Then, of course, came the rise of the neocons and their Joooooo allies in Washington DC and Israel.
When the stuff started to hit the fan in Lebanon, of course the peaceloving Syrians agreed to move their troops and intelligence agents out of the country right away and without hardly a bit of hesitation. You see, it was the evil Joooooos and their neocon allies in Washington DC and Israel that were pulling all the strings and, actually, yeah, it was them that put the hit on Hariri and Gemayel and they just made it look like it was Syria behind it.
Of course! It all makes sense!
Naturally, since the evil Joooooo Zionists are in complete control of the entire world, and the Nine Unknown are controlling things from their secret mountain hideouts in Tibet Israel and Washington DC it also had to be them that put the hit on that poor Russian journalist who was gunned down a few weeks ago.
And, of course, the evil Joooooo Zionists and their neocon allies in Washington DC and Israel are totally behind the poisoning of this ex-KGB agent in London!
I'll bet they're also behind stirring up all the violence and everything in Iraq and that North Korea, Iran, Syria, and all the rest are just peaceful players in the game. After all, what does North Korea or Iran need with nukes, really? I mean, I'll bet it's all just a ploy and that the Iranians aren't really doing anything nuclear at all. It's those evil Joooooos and their neocon allies in Washington DC and Israel doing it all and behind it all.
Damn! I never woulda' believed it could possibly be so!
Excellent piece on the potential consequences of the unholy alliance between "realist" foreign policy and Democrat political ambition. A few key passages to get you going:
. . . someone ought to step back and consider the cumulative political effect of what of late has turned into an unrestrained gang-stomping of the sort normally seen at Miami-Florida International football games. We are ensuring that no future president, of either party, will project military power anytime soon short of retaliation for a nuclear attack. Every potential presidential candidate, including John McCain, has to be looking at the Bush administration's experience and concluding there is simply no political upside in doing so. We are backing the country's political mind into the long-term parking lot of isolationism, something fervently wished for at opposite ends of the U.S. political spectrum. . . .
Like the Europeans, we may talk ourselves into a weariness with the world and its various, unremitting violences. No genocide will occur on American soil, but the same information tide that bathes us in Baghdad's horrors ensure that Darfur's genocide will come too near not to notice. Too bad for them, or any aspiring democrats under the thumb of Russia, China, Nigeria, Venezuela or Islam's highly mobile anti-democrats. We've got ours. Let them get theirs.
Does this overstate the buildup of anti-Bush, anti-Iraq sentiment? Will U.S. policy, in the hands of ideologically frictionless bureaucracies, slide forward? Maybe. But even the realists and cynics might concede there has been some benefit, perhaps going back as far as Plymouth Rock, in having one nation standing for the conceit, or even the ideal, that men elsewhere with democratic aspirations could at least count on us for active support. This is the core idea in the Bush Doctrine. If its critics don't start making some distinctions, they may discover that profligacy of opinion in our time carries a very steep price.
Posted by: Mike ||
11/24/2006 08:19 ||
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#1
This piece dovetails nicely with what Hitchens has been writing on a regular basis since 9-11. The libs in this country cannot truly be called liberal because that would imply they actually have principles.
#2
If they are unwilling to support democracy elsewhere, why do you assume that they support democracy here? Cause they say so? Actions speak louder than words.
Kudos to US Airways. Risking fines and a boycott, it did the right thing this week by removing a group of Muslim men from a flight to protect its crew and passengers.
By most accounts, the six bearded men were behaving suspiciously at a time when airports were on high alert for sky terror during the holidays. "There were a number of things that gave the flight crew pause," an airline spokesman said. According to witnesses and police reports, the men:
Made anti-American statements.
Made a scene of praying and chanting "Allah."
Asked for seat-belt extensions even though a flight attendant thought they didn't need them.
Refused requests by the pilot to disembark for more screening.
Also, three of the men had only one-way tickets and no checked baggage.
Police had to forcibly remove the men from the flight, whereupon they were taken into custody. A search found no weapons or explosives, and they were released to continue on their journey.
Within hours, the men enlisted a Muslim-rights group to make a stink in the press, insisting they were merely imams returning home from an Islamic conference in Minneapolis. They say they were "harassed" because of their faith.
#2
I can well remember all these incidents. That's why the only legislation should be a law to prohibit Muslims from using public transit of any sort in the US. Expect a lot of shit from Ellison, Conyers, Dingell, and even Levin kissing up to Muzzies in the next couple years. What we have is 3 staunch Muzzie sellouts and one wishy-washy. If any pro-muzzie legislation is introduced, I hope we can stop it cold by massive mail/email/calling campaigns to the Congress.
#3
Words are so cheap. If the legal system supports their idea that Muslims should get exemptions from security checks and profiling, that's one more tool in the terrorist belt. I'll bet the NYT and the ACLU would be all for that, or at least not against it, unlike their stance on tools that might actually protect innocent folk, including innocent Muslims (I'll bet they didn't think of that!).
And if the legal system says 'No', oh well.
So it looks like the "win vs. no-loss" cell in the risk-matrix. Duh.
Someone also mentioned on that there was a conference held in the city where they were spouting the usual anti-american rhetoric. Is this the conference? Were these apparently not-so innocent Muslims attendees at that conference?
#4
Ellison, an African-American convert who wants to criminalize Muslim profiling
As the old saying goes; Sunlight is the best disinfectant. That said, the FBI and Secret Service had better be putting this scumbag traitor Ellison under the magnifying glass, preferrably in very bright sunlight. The Arizona connection mentioned stinks of terrorist activity and needs to be taken apart at the seams.
#5
What the authorities - and most especially the leadership of the Democrat party - fail to grasp is that if the public believes it cannot trust its safety to those authorities it will take its security into its own hands. Every time I have boarded an aircraft these last five years I have made a point of saying "hi" to a couple big guys near my seat. If things go badly I need to know who is going to be in the trenches, or the aisles, with me.
It should be obvious that in any fight for the plane the six men dragged off that flight would most likely be on the other side. The Democrats can pretend it isn't so, heck, the law can pretend it isn't so. But facts are still facts.
Confronting Iran
By Joshua Muravchik
AEI.org | November 24, 2006
We must bomb Iran.
It has been four years since that country's secret nuclear program was brought to light, and the path of diplomacy and sanctions has led nowhere.
First, we agreed to our allies' requests that we offer Tehran a string of concessions, which it spurned. Then, Britain, France and Germany wanted to impose a batch of extremely weak sanctions. For instance, Iranians known to be involved in nuclear activities would have been barred from foreign travel--except for humanitarian or religious reasons--and outside countries would have been required to refrain from aiding some, but not all, Iranian nuclear projects.
But even this was too much for the U.N. Security Council. Russia promptly announced that these sanctions were much too strong. "We cannot support measures ... aimed at isolating Iran," declared Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov. It is now clear that neither Moscow nor Beijing will ever agree to tough sanctions. What's more, even if they were to do so, it would not stop Iran, which is a country on a mission. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put it: "Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen. . . .The era of oppression, hegemonic regimes and tyranny and injustice has reached its end. . . . The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world." There is simply no possibility that Iran's clerical rulers will trade this ecstatic vision for a mess of Western pottage in the form of economic bribes or penalties.
So if sanctions won't work, what's left? The overthrow of the current Iranian regime might offer a silver bullet, but with hard-liners firmly in the saddle in Tehran, any such prospect seems even more remote today than it did a decade ago, when students were demonstrating and reformers were ascendant. Meanwhile, the completion of Iran's bomb grows nearer every day.
Our options therefore are narrowed to two: We can prepare to live with a nuclear-armed Iran, or we can use force to prevent it. Former ABC newsman Ted Koppel argues for the former, saying that "if Iran is bound and determined to have nuclear weapons, let it." We should rely, he says, on the threat of retaliation to keep Iran from using its bomb. Similarly, Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria points out that we have succeeded in deterring other hostile nuclear states, such as the Soviet Union and China.
And in these pages, William Langewiesche summed up the what-me-worry attitude when he wrote that "the spread of nuclear weapons is, and always has been, inevitable," and that the important thing is "learning how to live with it after it occurs."
#2
It's worth almost $1B to the Russians. Now we know why the Russians are so sure the Iranian nuclear program is peaceful.
The Russians are probably hoping we go in there and mop them up (after they get paid, of course) rendering it a "No harm ==> no foul" situation which they get to skate out from under. Again. I'll bet they think they've got a pretty clever sting going here.
Sometimes long journeys begin with a single step. No Western government, no Western leader has been willing to challenge the fanatics in Iran. In recent daysto the total indifference of the dead tree media, the UN Low Commission on Refugees, and the Putin regimethe plight of an woman and her two children, marooned in the lounge of the Moscow Airport, apparently doomed to a potentially fatal return to Iran, has been followed by Pajamas Media. Then, miraculously, an American law firm convinced the European Human Rights Court to intervene. She is apparently not going to be extradited to Tehran, at least for two weeks. The mullahs were thwarted.
And now, against a background of endless chest thumping by Ahmadi Nezhad (who has proclaimed that the world is being swept by a process he modestly calls "Ahmadnezadisation"), and the recent events in Lebanon presaging an Iranian/Syrian move to unleash civil war and overthrow the legitimate government in Beirut, there comes a very significant humiliation of the regime and its lunatic president:
ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) - Iran was suspended from international soccer by FIFA on Thursday because of government interference with the country's soccer federation.
The decision was made Wednesday at an emergency council meeting of soccer's world governing body. FIFA said it had given Iran a Nov. 15 deadline to reinstate elected soccer federation president Mohammed Dadgan and comply with FIFA regulations.
"This deadline was not met," FIFA said.
The Iranian people are passionate soccer fans, and they will rightly blame the regime for this categorical rejection. FIFA has done what no Western leader has dared do: punish Iran for its cavalier violation of international standards.
There will certainly be a political price to pay for this; the only question is how costly it will be. Watch out for demonstrations in Iran. But watch out online, not in the MSM.
Posted by: Mike ||
11/24/2006 08:34 ||
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Soccer brings countries together more than politics ever does!!!!.
I wish you Americans would be more interested in the 'Beautiful Game'.It has worldwide love!
H/T Pajamas Media.
Franklin Roosevelt was elected president for an unprecedented third term in 1940 because at the time the world faced unprecedented danger, instability, and uncertainty. Much of Europe had fallen to the advancing German Army and Great Britain was barely holding its own. A great number of Americans remained committed to isolationism and the belief that the United States should continue to stay out of the war, but President Roosevelt understood Britain's need for American support and attempted to convince the American people of the gravity of the situation.
In his annual address to Congress on January 6, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt presented his reasons for American involvement, making the case for continued aid to Great Britain and greater production of war industries at home. In helping Britain, President Roosevelt stated, the United States was fighting for the universal freedoms that all people possessed. As America entered the war these "four freedoms" - the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear - symbolized America's war aims and gave hope in the following years to a war-wearied people because they knew the were fighting for freedom.
#1
I must say FDR was a briiliant leader. And, I've been a life long Pub. This man had all the qualities required to solve tremendous problems in the 1930's and 1940's. No wonder he was idolized by my parents and grandparents. They went through something beyond trying times. And FDR was out front cheering and leading. Too bad we don't have even a tinge of that today. We need some leadership too.
#2
The EU is also based on "four freedoms," which predictably bear no resemblance to ours: the free movement of goods, labor, services, and capital. Homo economicus, the New European Man.
I can't forgive FDR's court-packing scheme. He threatened to expand the Supreme Court from nine judges who respected Constitutional limits on federal power, to fifteen who'd give a pass to FDR's massive welfare state "reforms." The threat alone was enough to make the nine see things his way, and that's how most of our bloated entitlement bureaucracy came into being.
True to Democrat form, FDR employed threats and subverted the Constitution to get his way, with unintended (but foreseeable) consequences that did more harm than good in the long-run. FDR may have won WWII, he helped make it damn near impossible to win any others after that.
More and more, I wonder whether lefties mean it, any of it. Take Rosie ODonnell. The other day, one of her co-hosts on The View was musing on current events and opined, If you take radical Islam and you want to talk about what is going on there you have to
And at this point Rosie interrupted. One second. Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state.
Does she really believe that? That radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam? These terms are imprecisely defined. You get the feeling that to Rosie ODonnell radical Christianity is pretty much Christianity or at any rate any Christian denomination without an openly gay bishop. Still, its hard to imagine even Rosie would feel just as threatened by an evangelical Protestant church opening up next door as by, say, a Wahhabi madrassah.
Continued on Page 49
#1
Frankly, Christian theologians need to conduct the same criticisms of Islam, that Muslims toss at other faiths. Interfaith contacts benefit only Muslims.
#2
Why does the Left choose to fight "radical Christianists" and ignore the radical Islamists? I've got something of a theory: Rosie et al. are lifestyle liberals who, not to put too fine a point on it, want to do what they want to do if it feels good, free of negative consequence. The Judeo-Christian notion of "sin" is that there are certain things you are not supposed to do even if you want to and it feels good, and there are negative consequences for sin. These people have been hearing disapproval of what they want to do from traditional Judeo-Christian sources all their lives, and so those people are the enemy!
Why do they not feel the same way about Islamofascists?
1. They've never lived under sharia and they don't know any Wahabbi imams.
2. The Wahabbi imams hate the Christers almost as much as they do, and while the enemy of my enemy may not be my friend, but he's someone I can do business with if I have to.
Posted by: Mike ||
11/24/2006 8:18 Comments ||
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Perhaps Rosie should remember that Radical Islam wants death by stoning to gays and adulterers AND apostates.
Radical Islam wants NO separation of church and state and that means Mullahs instead of High Court Judges, and an Ayatollah or Sheikh instead of a president.
Oh and Rosie, when the Radical Islamists take over, your word is worth 1/2 of that of a man's in the court of Sharia law.
And if you are raped, because you didn't wear a burqa you deserved it and should be imprisoned because you are 50% responsible for the crime.
#4
Oh and Rosie, when the Radical Islamists take over, your word is worth 1/2 of that of a man's in the court of Sharia law.
Actually, I believe it is ¼th, but whose counting. The Rosies of the world bash "radical Christianity" (*I have no idea what that is) because Christians, no matter how radical, won't be sawing their heads off for insulting Christ!
Hey! Maybe we ought to borrow a few plays from the muzzie playbook.
To be blunt: the playbook that has winning plays in it tends to be the one that, sooner or later, everybody uses. Every group with an axe to grind and goals to accomplish will eventually use Islamo-fascist tactics. I'm not pointing my finger at Christiantity - we baby Jesus loving types have been pretty restrained for a long time - but the other guys seem to have changed the rules.
I wonder how old "gun owners should all be put in jail" Rosie O'Donnell is going to react to the first gay suicide bomber? How about the first time Act Up stages a hostage crisis? Sound fantastic? It shouldn't: the rules have changed.
#6
This fat f**king bitch is the ruination of this show. This fat sow would be exterminated within seconds by jihadis the instant her loud pie hole flapped open. Actually, seeing her head sawed off her fatass wouldn't bother me, very much unlike Daniel Pearl.
#7
SpecOp35, we don't advocate harm to American citizens on this blog no matter how odious their beliefs. Rosie is entitled to her beliefs even though I (and most everyone here) believe she's a clueless, harmful idiot. So let's tone down comments that might be interpreted as threats. Thanks, the management. AoS.
Posted by: Steve White ||
11/24/2006 16:44 Comments ||
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A question for Rosie O'Donnell:
If there is no difference between Christian fundimentalists and Muslim, how come there aren't mass demonstrations calling for Andres Serrano and Phillip Pullman's deaths?
#9
"Why does the Left choose to fight "radical Christianists" and ignore the radical Islamists?"
My theory's a little different from yours: Rosie et al are miserable people, and their misery makes them hateful. The hatred needs a target, and "Christianists" are handy, trendy targets, and above all safe ones.
The hatred comes first-- and the bullshit rationalization of its object comes later.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
11/24/2006 17:52 Comments ||
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#10
she should petition Sharia for Gay Marriage. They might not want to deal with her tho', with their distaste for pork
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/24/2006 18:34 Comments ||
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#11
To address the moron known as Rosie before going deeper into this:
My theory's a little different from yours: Rosie et al are miserable people, and their misery makes them hateful. The hatred needs a target, and "Christianists" are handy, trendy targets, and above all safe ones.
Bingo, David D.. Christians are a safer target. They do not threaten to saw your head off for defaming their religion. It is far easier for someone of Rosies moral and mental laxity to criticize a perceived (or trumped up) enemy at home than to do her homework, abandon her own preconceived notions, and unite with fellow Americans, Christian or otherwise, in the common cause of preserving our nation. Rosie and too many other liberals are so blinded in their hatred for America that they cannot see the Islamic forest for their own ideological trees.
Back on topic:
Were living through the battle of the born-agains: Bush the born-again Christian, bin Laden the born-again Muslim.
Again, Ill call into question just how badly mistaken Bush may have been to not point up the threat of Islamism to some greater degree during this last election cycle. No, he did not have to declare war on the entire Muslim world, but there certainly may have been some real merit to militating the American public towards a better understanding of the enemy we face.
The authors above comparison is quite puerile with respect to the larger issues at hand. This same infantile assessment is reflected further along as well:
But its hard not to warm to an author who describes the United States as the worlds God-intoxicated hegemon with such implacable plonking earnestness.
If ever there was a God-intoxicated hegemon, it is Islam. To ignore this vital fact solely for the sake of engaging in another stale round of Bush-bashing is both irresponsible and a disservice to the reading public, who would be far better served by having their attention directed to the larger threat.
Without question, the media has been the most egregious violator when it comes to being off-message, unless one accepts that their true intention is to promote Islam at the cost of national security. However, in light of the powers vested in him by dint of office, Bush has also strayed well off message. It is also quite possible that Bush underestimated how many Americans he enraged by actively eroding the separation of church and state. He gave his administration an unmistakable air of Christian dogma and not only made it easier for Islam to paint our nation as Christian Crusaders, but lent an easy foothold to domestic critics as well. People like Rosie are sufficiently shortsighted whereby a threat nextdoor can easily consume whatever meager reserves of attention span they may have and thereby prevent such mental midgets from recognizing the larger threat of Islam.
Make no mistake, Islam is the greater danger and, more often than not, the great unwashed uneducated have little if any notion of just how significant the threat is. Bushs mumbling in his bully pulpit has not helped this one whit. His continued address of Islam as The Religion of Peace has almost entirely neutered neutralized any momentum he might have gained from finally trotting out the far more appropriate name, Islamofacism.
The articles author refers to:
a stealth campaign to inflict upon the US a future in which American politics and culture have been systematically purged of secularism, and in which the Constitution will be rewritten to bring it into line with the moral and sexual worldview of the Vatican. Thats quite the ambition. American religiosity is for the most part strikingly unRoman and Father Neuhaus himself finds the evangelicals a bit of a bore, what with their forced happiness and joy and awful music.
This is a direct reflection of public dissatisfaction with Bushs erosion of church and state, even if his actions nowhere approach the hysteria projected by the above quote. You can be certain that less well read morons and knee-jerks will gleefully bash Bush for doing exactly what is cited above, even though there is a yawning gulf between the quotes content and actual reality.
in America the church is about to swallow the state
That the above quote even received page space from the press shows just how sensitive, if not completely overblown, this issue is.
I fully understand that Bush, as a Christian, most likely feels personally compelled to bring forward his faith in personal life. Questions arise when that same faith may interfere with this nations unity, political cohesion or even its security. Bush may well have alienated more hawkish elements of the republican electorate with his reluctance to prosecute the Middle East campaign in a more decisive fashion. His PC approach must have been seen by them to stink as sweet as any liberal spoutings of the same balderdash.
Combine this with his inability to project a clear message regarding the massive threat that Islam poses to our nation, its liberties and even its religious institutions and the damage only multiplies. Clearly, there was a substantial portion of crossover voters that migrated away from the republican message. The resulting defeat for republicans will do far more damage to our national security than any potential risks from denouncing Islam more clearly or simply backing away, at least temporarily, from his decidedly Christian agenda. This howling about Theocrats would seem to point rather strongly at such a perception, regardless of whatever substance, or lack thereof, they may actually contain.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
A group of Natives gather on a rocky cliff. Below they see a ship pulling up to shore. Even at this distance, they can see that these visitors are not from the local area. 
Kudos to US Airways. Risking fines and a boycott, it did the right thing this week by removing a group of Muslim men from a flight to protect its crew and passengers.
