Entries Tagged 'antiwar idiots' ↓

These two headlines were next to each other at Memeorandum yesterday:

John Bolton to be target of citizen’s arrest at Hay Festival — John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, faces a citizen’s arrest when he addresses an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales this evening. — George Monbiot, the journalist and activist …

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

Discussion: MoJoBlog and A Blog For All

Discussion:

Jonathan Stein / MoJoBlog: John Bolton to Be Target of Citizens Arrest in Wales

Lawhawk / A Blog For All: Journalist Seeks To Arrest John Bolton in UK

New York Times:

Al Qaeda Warrior Uses Internet to Rally Women — BRUSSELS — On the street, Malika El Aroud is anonymous in an Islamic black veil covering all but her eyes. — In her living room, Ms. El Aroud, a 48-year-old Belgian, wears the ordinary look of middle age: a plain black T-shirt and pants and curly brown hair.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

 

Discussion: Jihad Watch, JammieWearingFool, The Poor Man Institute and Danger Room

Discussion:

Robert / Jihad Watch: Muslim woman wages Internet jihad in Belgium

JammieWearingFool: ‘She is Very Radical, Very Sly and Very Dangerous’

The Poor Man Institute: I am beginning to suspect that the War on Terror is composed entirely of horses**t

Noah Shachtman / Danger Room: She Wages Online Jihad

I’ve been saying for a while now that the world is upside down. These headlines underscore that reality:

The former U.S. ambassador to the UN—whose role is to represent the United States in front of the world—is targeted by “progressives” [in this case, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper] as a criminal because he was ” ‘instrumental in preparing and initiating the Iraq war by disseminating false claims through the State Department” while he was under-secretary of state for arms control.’ ”

Meanwhile, an acknowledged jihadist, whose role is “to inspire other people to wage jihad,”gets the front page treatment in the New York Times, which quotes the director of Belgium’s federal police force thus: “She enjoys the protection that [lenient Belgian law] offers. At the same time, she is a potential threat.”

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that “war-mongering” is being treated as a crime on one side—namely, ours—but not on the other. Not very fair, that. Nor very confidence-inspiring for your normal everyday citizen of the West, who wants the authorities to prevent crimes—to act before a terrorist incident occurs, not to react afterward.

After all, anyone can react after a crime is committed—in any number of ways, including the extralegal. If the authorities allow too many such crimes to occur (through lenient laws, or lenient enforcement of laws), eventually the people being hurt by such crimes will start to take the law into their own hands.

The conventional wisdom of the media elite, crystallized today by David Brooks, says that Hillary Clinton cannot possibly win.

Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance.

Five percent.

It would be way too tiresome to provide the dozens of links that support Brooks’s point of view. It’s much more interesting to link to the news side of things at the New York Times, where someone is (finally) asking the important question: can a “progressive” win the White House?

Of course the NYT doesn’t frame the question quite like that. Instead, the sly headline writer asks: “Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?”[ e.a.]:

the Obama campaign is challenging the fundamental political premise that has prevailed in Washington for more than a generation: that any majority coalition must be carefully centrist, if not center-right. Bill Clinton ran in 1992 as a candidate willing to break with liberal orthodoxy on many issues, including crime and welfare, and eager to move the party — which had lost five of the six previous presidential elections — to the middle. Mr. Clinton’s New Democrats assumed a certain level of conservatism among voters.

Mr. Obama and his allies are basing his campaign on a different bet: that the right-leaning political landscape Mr. Clinton confronted has changed. Several major Democratic strategists, and outside analysts as well, argue that the country has shifted to the left because of the Iraq war, the economy and seven-plus years of President Bush, and that it has become open to a new progressive majority.

Further down, we hear once more this claim about a new political climate that is favorable to Obama:

[M]any of Mr. Obama’s supporters say he has recognized this new political climate in a way that Mrs. Clinton has not. They say he is ready for a new, self-assured era in which progressives (few have returned to using the word “liberal”) make no apologies about their goals — universal health care, withdrawing troops from Iraq, ending tax breaks for more affluent Americans — and assume that a broad swath of the public shares them.

That’s an interesting assumption, but I fear it’s not rooted in fact. Indeed, the NYT quotes TNR in a most interesting way:

As The New Republic recently put it, “Clintonism is a political strategy that assumes a skeptical public; Obamaism is a way of actualizing a latent ideological majority.”

If skepticism is Clintonian, call me a Clintonite. A latent ideological majority? In what universe?

Currently, despite the party establishment’s wanting to give her (and the centrist voters who are loyal to her) the bum’s rush, she is neck and neck in votes with her messianic Democratic opponent. Call me skepetical, but I say this more or less ensures that in a general election, Obama will be buried in a match-up with McCain. And that when the voting is finally over, the dreamers’ “latent ideological ‘majority’ ” will represent an even smaller but more hysterically vocal minority.

Only by then, they will have (conveniently for their enemies) labeled themselves as a proudly out-of-the-mainstream political party. A neat trick, that.

Who knew?

On Tuesday night, the nine members of the Berkeley City Council are expected to do something they, or the Marines, for that matter, very rarely do: retreat in the face of fierce opposition. …

[Their] proclamation, which called the Marines “uninvited and unwelcome intruders,” sparked an angry response in the form of hundreds of telephone calls, thousands of e-mail messages and countless hours of “How dare they!” on the radio and elsewhere.

This is one of the cases where not all publicity is good publicity.

Code Pink, seen here in a recent performance,

and other fringe radical groups probably thought it was a good idea for Berkeley to take on the Marines,  to call attention to the continuing war in Iraq, along with their aggressive malice toward anyone they decree responsible for it.

Undoubtedly, they thought they were “safe” doing this on their home turf in Northern California, whose demographic is Nancy Pelosi’s core constituency (the one she was signaling on Sunday when she repeatedly called the surge and Iraq a “failure.“)

Something tells me that this constituency’s “ideas” are going to be tested in the coming months. One straw in the wind is the Berkeley mayor’s cluelessness, and his clumsy attempt to pretend that the city council didn’t launch a frontal attack on the United States armed services as a hostile entity:

Mayor Tom Bates, who was in the Army and seems slightly bewildered by the backlash, said the [new] resolution would be “a substitute for what we’ve had out there.”

“Actually I wouldn’t even call it a substitute,” Mr. Bates said a moment later. “I think it’s just a restating of our policy.”

Somehow, I doubt that Mr. Bates will be allowed to rewrite Berkeley’s history with impunity.

The Council regularly takes up foreign policy and other faraway issues. But even veterans of the scene say the Marine hoopla is one for the books.

Ms. Olds, who voted for the parking spot but not the language about the Marines, said she had never seen such a response. Not that the Council did not deserve it, she added.

“I live in the [Berkeley] hills,” Ms. Olds said. “And they don’t like this one bit.”

I’m pretty sure that the folks who live in the “hills” are rich Democrats—Pelosi’s core constituency. They allow the fringe to represent the views of their party at their own risk.

Ezra Klein’s latest attempt to lay blame for the war in Iraq won’t wash:

Lots of people, ranging from Paul Wolfowitz to Paul Wellstone, believed Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, and a far-from-completion nuclear program. The difference came in how you imagined the war would go, how difficult, and bloody, and expensive, and long, it would be. You could convince the American people, particularly after our illusory win in Afghanistan, that a short victory would be good all around. But no one would have signed up for this mess. And that’s where we needed our analysts to interject a dose of reality, a grounded take on how hard this would be, not a heap best-case, wishful thinking. And they failed us.

It pains me to have to remind the young Mr. Klein that people are responsible for their own “doses of reality.” If they fail to inform themselves—especially in a country where we can find things out for ourselves, where we have all the information available to us at the click of a mouse—it isn’t the fault of the many marketers (from every walk of life, not just politics) who are endlessly trying to sell us stuff, including ideas and images.

Don’t blame others for the fantasies that you believe in.

And while you’re at it, try to avoid denial, too.

Faced with the high odor of real perfidy [which leaves them unable simply to deny the truth], people unwilling to risk a break skew their perception of reality much more purposefully. One common way to do this is to recast clear moral breaches as foul-ups, stumbles or lapses in competence — because those are more tolerable, said Dr. Kim, of U.S.C. In effect, Dr. Kim said, people “reframe the ethical violation as a competence violation.”

She wasn’t cheating on him — she strayed. He didn’t hide the losses in the subprime mortgage unit for years — he miscalculated.

Klein doesn’t want to accuse liberal hawks like Ken Pollack of an ethical violation. He wants to cut them a break. He is still blaming them, not himself, and is barking up the wrong tree. He is still in denial.

Back in the 1960s, we seemed to understand that war is … war: not healthy for children and other living things.

Today’s NYT describes the result of “legislative quagmire” in the Senate and the “impasse” in the “war debate” in Congress—more, and more fervent, partisanship [e.a.]:

[L]awmakers and their allies are shifting to what has proved to be more solid ground when it comes to the war: political recriminations.

Every twist and turn of this week’s grinding Senate stalemate was accompanied by a new round of political advertisements and accusations. Republicans were portrayed as putting loyalty to President Bush before support for strained troops, while Democrats were characterized as being beholden to the ultra-left, as embodied by MoveOn.org. The partisan clamor will grow louder as the policy fight recedes.

Indeed, and that’s because empty barrels make the most noise, as reflected by today’s letters to the editor. Five out of six correspondents to the Times, in a section the paper calls “Is There Any Way to Support the Troops?,” lambast the Dems as “feckless,” “pusillanimous,” etc. and Reps for “blindly supporting” Bush and his “neocon cohorts” in the “continuing catastrophe” of Iraq. Blah blah blah.

The sixth letter, however, makes an important point that I believe Dems will need to take into account sooner or later [e.a.]:

When will the Democrats learn that the ordinary person on the street wants the Iraq mission to be a success, not the failure that they are hungry to heap on this administration?

While there is seemingly no end in sight to the blundered Iraq crisis, the one thing that is clear is the will of people to see this struggle through to a better day.

There is no doubt at all that we Americans have come to hate this war and that we are sick of it, and heartsick about it (those of us who have hearts, that is—and I have my doubts about the new breed of “progressives”). However, there is no evidence—none at all—which suggests that Americans want to turn tail in Iraq and call it a day.

It is a fundamental characteristic of American society at every level that we idolize winners and despise losers. Moreover, everything in our social culture—from college sports to high school cheerleading to the Oscars to the Pulitzer Prize to the Miss America pageant to the Fortune 500 to Little League to National Merit Scholarships to Eagle Scouts to the 4H-Club to the bestseller list to the box office to employee-of-the-month awards to the 100 Most Powerful People in Hollywood issue of Entertainment Weekly, to name just a few American institutions and endeavors—is a contest in which the screamingly obvious goal is to win.

Partisan Democrats who fail to grapple with this reality—that Americans want to win in Iraq, just like they want to win everywhere else in life, and not go down to a humiliating, ignominious, and disgraceful defeat—are, I believe, not only misreading the political landscape. They’re also misreading Americans.

In fact, these political partisans themselves want so badly to win against Bush that they’re trying to convince Americans that we’re going to lose in Iraq no matter what, and furthermore that it’s okay to lose in Iraq, that there’s no dishonor in losing, that there’s no cost to America if we lose, that the best way to support the troops is to get them home, that we shouldn’t care about refereeing someone else’s civil war, that washing our hands of the mess we made and leaving others to resolve it is fine and dandy.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think these clearly defeatist, wrong-headed, and juvenile—not to mention immoral—”arguments” are going to win the day.

Where is the famous “can-do American spirit” in these arguments?

Where is America stumbling badly and then redeeming itself in these arguments?

MoveOn is selling a narrative of American defeat in Iraq—with no possibility of redemption.

This will not only not win over centrist, moderate, swing-voting Americans. It will alienate them. I can’t prove it, of course, but I can read it in the culture, as could anyone who bothers to look at America with a sociological rather than a strictly partisan political eye: Americans are not anti-war. They are anti-losing.

Lesley Chamberlain’s new book Lenin’s Private War should give pause to those in the leftosphere with an urge to purge

Carlin Romano explains:

In 1922, a year of living dictatorishly, Lenin devoted astonishing time to handpicking intellectuals to be exiled from Russia. In missives to underlings, including a go-getter named Joseph Stalin, he railed against these “bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who think they’re the brains of the nation. In fact, they’re not the brains, they’re the shit.” He told Stalin in a note, “We are going to cleanse Russia once and for all.” An earlier Bolshevik poster already showed Lenin sweeping enemies from the globe over the caption, “Comrade Lenin cleanses the filth from the land.”

Wikipedia illustrates:

Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Filth from the Land

William Grimes, writing in the NYT, elaborates about how it all went down:

She sees the episode as a continuation of the armed conflict between Red and White forces, part of what she calls the “Paper Civil War,” in which the Bolsheviks closed down independent journals, purged universities and took the first steps in creating a new intellectual class of militant Marxist-Leninists.

“Only when Lenin deported the liberal intelligentsia in 1922 did the overall conflict end,” she writes.

Ms. Chamberlain’s narrative divides into three parts. The first, and the most interesting, deals with the Paper Civil War. Relying on archival material that has surfaced in the post-Soviet period, she traces the quiet campaign by Lenin and his underlings to identify dangerous thinkers, round them up, manufacture legal cases against them and expel them permanently. The thinking and the procedures behind the expulsions resonate profoundly. They are the dress rehearsal for Stalinist terror to come.

Meanwhile, inside the Beltway, the ‘Crat Pack ^TM, heady with its great victory in Chicago and as blissfullly ignorant as ever, continues on its merry way, auditioning for positions (any positions!) in the regime of the ‘Crat Who Would Be President—whoever he or she may be. Happy job hunting, all you whippersnappers! (And I hope your parents taught you that you should always have a Plan B.)