Right Wing Nut House

GLEN REYNOLDS SAYS: “I’D RATHER READ THE CARNIVAL OF THE CLUELESS THAN DRINK PUPPY SMOOTHIES!”

Something is stirring in the depths of the blogosphere.

Can you feel it? A nebulous, shapeless mass is moving toward the light, struggling to resurrect itself. After a long sleep, the blog beast is shaking off the cobwebs and trying to make its way to the surface so that once again, it can prey on the stupidity, the idiocy, and the utter cluelessness of humankind.

It matters not who comes in contact with The Beast. Be they prince or pauper, glitterati or sham glam, politician or crook (more likely both), it matters not. Bloggers are sharpening their long knives and drooling at the prospect of once again letting loose a verbal barrage of outrageous invective and creative finger pointing. It’s coming. And nothing and no one can stop it.

The Carnival of the Clueless is back!

That’s right. One of the most popular link fests in the history of the blogosphere is making a comeback after a long, well deserved hiatus. And it is coming back with a vengeance. For this time, the Carnival will be the first such blogger project to be featured on live radio.

For those not familiar with the Carnival of the clueless, here are the parameters:

Each week, I’ll be calling for posts that highlight the total stupidity of a public figure or organization – either left or right – that demonstrates that special kind of cluelessness that only someone’s mother could defend…and maybe not even their mothers!

Everyone knows what I’m talking about. Whether it’s the latest from Bill Maher or the Reverend Dobson, it doesn’t matter. I will post ALL ENTRIES REGARDLESS OF WHETHER I AGREE WITH THE SENTIMENTS EXPRESSED OR NOT.

Of course, that won’t stop me from making snarky comments about those that I disagree with, but hey! Ya pays your monies and ya takes your chances, eh?

THE DEADLINE TO ENTER THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL WILL BE TONIGHT AT 10:00 PM EDT. Please send only recent posts – something that’s fairly topical – perhaps no more than 2 weeks old.

Then, on tomorrow morning’s Rick Moran Show, we’ll take most of the 1st hour to read and comment on the best of the entries. I can guarantee you some laughs as well as some jaw dropping idiocy.

You can leave a link to your entry in the comments section here. Or you can email me at Carnival-at-rightwingnuthouse-dot-com. Or you can visit Ferdy the Cat and use his handy Carnival Submission form to enter.

Hope you can join us for the fun.

Starting at 7:00 AM central time, you can listen to the show by clicking the button on the left sidebar.

Today’s show will feature the news headlines, commentary on the horrific video of our Marines being beheaded, a surprise visit from my liberal neighbor Marvin Moonbat, and we’ll take your calls to discuss the issues of the day

We’ll start taking calls after 7:30 AM Central at 1-888-407-1776.

Note: I had the number wrong before. Did the same thing on the air. No wonder nobody called!

The number is now correct.

In Kansas, 150 years ago, brother bled brother as a shooting war broke out between pro-slavery Missouri “Border Ruffians” and free state “Kansas Jayhawkers.” Known as “Bleeding Kansas,” it was a period before the firing on Fort Sumter when the cycle of violence made thinking about a full blown civil war between north and south acceptable.

Up to this point in American history, sectional conflict was seen as a remote possibility, something only firebrands from each section talked about. But as killing begat killing on the Kansas frontier, and especially after John Brown slaughtered seven pro-slavery farmers near Pottawatomie Creek by hacking them to death with broad swords in retaliation for the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas by southern sympathizers, Americans suddenly woke up to the fact that they were looking across a great chasm of differences at each other. More importantly, they began to see those on the other side of this divide as the enemy. It was but a short leap to make from Bleeding Kansas to Fort Sumter.

The massacre of Sunni Muslims over the weekend in a mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhood in the heart of Baghdad was unprecedented in its brutality and brazenness - even for Iraq. More than 40 Iraqis were dragged from their homes or cars, or simply picked up off the street and shot. This is clearly an escalation in the violence and must have ordinary Iraqis thinking very seriously about whether the low level sectarian conflict that has roiled the country for six months might finally break out into a shooting war in the streets:

A mob of gunmen went on a brazen daytime rampage through a predominantly Sunni Arab district of western Baghdad on Sunday, pulling people from their cars and homes and killing them in what officials and residents called a spasm of revenge by Shiite militias for the bombing of a Shiite mosque on Saturday. Hours later, two car bombs exploded beside a Shiite mosque in another Baghdad neighborhood in a deadly act of what appeared to be retaliation.

While Baghdad has been ravaged by Sunni-Shiite bloodletting in recent months, even by recent standards the violence here on Sunday was frightening, delivered with impunity by gun-wielding vigilantes on the street. In the culture of revenge that has seized Iraq, residents all over the city braced for an escalation in the cycle of retributive mayhem between the Shiites and Sunnis that has threatened to expand into civil war.

Witnesses say that the shooters wore black and were masked, the uniform of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Militia:

Iraqi officials and residents of the neighborhood identified the gunmen as members of the Mahdi Army, the powerful militia controlled by the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. In the past three days, Iraqi troops, with the support of U.S.-led forces, have raided the homes of militiamen and detained some of their leaders.

U.S. commanders and diplomats say Sadr and his militia constitute one of the gravest threats to Iraq’s security. Two years ago, U.S. forces fought Mahdi Army militiamen in Baghdad and in the southern holy city of Najaf. Sadr also holds considerable sway over the political system, with ties to more than 30 members of parliament and several cabinet ministers.

What the Post refers to as a “raid” was actually a coordinated assault on several Mehdi militia strongpoints by Iraqi forces backed up by American air power which was carried out on Friday. This was the first concerted effort by Prime Minister Maliki’s government to rein in the militias who are responsible for most of the revenge killings in and around Bagdhad.

Could this massacre be al-Sadr’s response? What kind of game is the unpredictable cleric playing? How much control does he really have over his men?

Piously, the anti-occupation al-Sadr is condemning the massacre and calling for peace even as some Sunni political leaders are calling for his head:

After the killings, Sadr appealed for calm but criticized what he called a “Western scheme” that foments “a civil and sectarian war among brothers.”

“Iraq is passing through a critical phase and a worsening security situation in spite of the presence of an independent government,” Sadr said in a statement. “I call on all parties, both governmental and popular, to exercise self-control first, and to shoulder their responsibility before God and society.”

Other officials in Sadr’s organization condemned the killings in al-Jihad and denied that the Mahdi Army was involved.

“We regret the statements made by some Sunni Arabs who said that the Mahdi Army militia had conducted the raid at Jihad and killed the innocent people there,” said Riyadh al-Nouri, a top aide to Sadr and his brother-in-law. “If the Mahdi Army wanted to enter into a fight, Iraq would become a blood bath.”

That last statement may be precisely the point. Al-Sadr doesn’t want a civil war as much as he wants influence in the government. His militia is all he really has to bargain with at the moment and the recent assaults may have hurt badly. The Iraqi troops apparently took out two of his major brigades, including one led by a legendary butcher named Abu Deraa:

The Shia terror against Sunni Arabs has a name, Abu Deraa. He’s being called the “Shia Zarqawi” for organizing death squads to take revenge after Sunni Arab suicide bombs kill Shia. But Abu Deraa isn’t the only Shia death squad leader. There are several, plus smaller ones from family or tribal groups organized to take vengeance for kin lost to Saddam’s thugs. This desire for vengeance, and the unwillingness of Shia to fight Shia, has, until recently, allowed a low level civil war to go on unchecked. But now the Shia are ready to fight their own, and in the last week, Shia and Kurdish police and soldiers fought Shia radicals, led by men like Abu Deraa. The Sunni Arab community know Abu Deraa by name, and have even posted pictures of him. That hasn’t changed anything, because Abu Deraa’s death squads still roam central Iraq, killing Sunni Arabs. Several dozen died in Baghdad yesterday, pulled from their cars, identified as Sunni Arabs, and killed on the spot.

There is some question of how much control al-Sadr actually has over his men. This is because unlike the larger and better organized Badr Brigade which answers to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the largest Shia party, al-Sadr’s political influence is restricted to a few ministers and members of parliament. Independent operators like Abu Deraa may have their own agendas and any influence exercised by al-Sadr may be negligible.

But al-Sadr is not above using the violence to score political points, something he has done in the past with some success. Following the February bombing of the Shrine at Samarra, al Sadr’s black-clad militiamen were seen by many Shias as saviors as they set up security checkpoints and guarded Shia mosques from vengeful Sunnis who themselves were reacting to militia atrocities against their co-religionists.

Prime Minister Maliki has checkmated al-Sadr at every turn lately, as the two major Shia parties - The Daawa and SCIRI - have frozen the radical cleric out of most deliberations regarding the future of the country. The massacre could be al-Sadr’s brutal way of reminding the politicians that he still has clout where it counts - in the streets. It may not be the best of tactics but it’s all he has at the moment.

As for Maliki, he seems to be grasping the reins of power and accepting the major challenges facing Iraq much more quickly than many observers imagined. By initiating hostilities with major elements of al-Sadr’s militia, he has correctly identified one of the primary obstacles to getting control of the security situation in the country. Instead of starting with some of the smaller Shia militias, he has thrown down the gauntlet to the most troublesome of them.

As StrategyPage points out, Maliki has a long way to go:

It’s not like the Sunni Arab leadership can just push a button, and make their bad guys go away. In Arab culture, the process moves a lot more slowly, and involves lots of talking, coffee, promises, deceit and drama. Apparently the drama has been convincing, because the Shia politicians running the country have persuaded Shia military and police units to go after Shia death squads. All of this is going to take months to play out. There will be cries of “Betrayal!” from the Shia community. Some Shia cops and soldiers will balk at busting fellow Shia, even if the perps are stone killers with dozens of bodies on them. However, the national leadership has agreed that peace with the Sunni Arabs, and an end to the vengeance killings, is necessary. Making this happen is the next crucial battle in the war.

Where are the US armed forces in all of this? Right where they should be; in the background offering logistical and air support to Iraqi army units who are doing the bulk of the fighting. This is an Iraqi problem and can only be solved by Iraqis. Our role will continue to diminish as Iraqi troops demonstrate more confidence and competence in handling combat operations on their own. While this is good news, it is getting to a point where we should begin asking questions about how much more good we can do and should our withdrawal be tied to political developments in Iraq that have little to do with any military calculations. As more and more Iraqi troops are trained and, more importantly, demonstrate that they are ready to handle the nation’s security problems on their own, the more we should be asking how much we should be beholden to the politicians in Iraq who don’t have our people’s interest at the forefront of their concerns.

Whether or not Iraqis see this latest escalation of violence as a line that has been crossed or simply more of the same horror remains to be seen. But there is no denying the fact that at the moment, Iraq is bleeding. And only resoluteness on the part of the government will be able to staunch the flow of blood that is making the lives of ordinary Iraqis a nightmare and the prospects for a significant American troop withdrawal remote.

Because of continuing technical difficulties with our new server, The Rick Moran Show will not be aired this morning as planned.

These problems are becoming enormously frustrating. We were supposed to relaunch yesterday but in trying to initialize the stream, we discovered a host of issues that we believed we would have resolved by this morning. This has not been the case, hence the delay.

WAR Radio expects to be up and running sometime today. In the meantime, please join me tomorrow morning for the inaugural edition of The Rick Moran Show.

I particpated in this week’s Pundit Roundtable at Willisms. McCracken had some crackling good subjects to comment on:

Topic 1: North Korea tested seven missiles this week. What, if anything, can or should be done about Kim Jong-Il, his missiles, and his nuclear program?

Topic 3: What is your favorite place you have been to?

My responses:

Topic 1: There really isn’t that much more we can be doing about North Korea than what we are doing now. China is the key to Kim’s heart, being the only thing standing between the NoKo’s and total collapse. Beijing supplies Kim with the food and fuel his country needs to survive on a day to day basis. And even with China’s help, there are indications that thousands are starving to death every month.

But why should China pull our chestnuts out of the fire? We are currently in a full blown competition with them in east Asia and anything that ties us down is just fine with them. So China plays a very interesting and dangerous game; keeping the fires of crisis stoked at a low level while walking a tightrope with us on one side and the North Koreans on the other. They don’t want to appear too uncooperative in getting Kim to give up his nukes while at the same time, it is in their interest for Kim to be threatening Japan, South Korea, and us.

The solution will have to come with us putting a little more overt pressure on China. At the moment, China still needs us a little bit more than we need them. We must use that fact to our advantage and get both Russia and China to knock some sense into the North Korean dictator.

Kim, by the way, is not crazy - not in the sense that he hears voices or wears a lampshade to Politburo meetings. But his society is the most insular in the world and he really has no clue how his pronouncements or actions come off to the rest of us. Former Secretary of State Albright was struck by this fact when she visited in 1997. It’s like living on a different planet being in North Korea.

Topic 2: One of the really beautiful things about America is freedom of the press. Unlike Great Britain, we have no Official Secrets Act which makes our press free to publish anything it desires, using only its own conscience as a guide.

I’m not sure why Bill Keller and the Times went with the bank monitoring story. The program was by all accounts legal and that the publishing of it embarrassed people in Europe who were helping us at great personal risk to their own careers and position. My only speculation there is that the Times has decided to take an absolutist position on the Bill of Rights - or at least those portions they feel the Bush Administration is violating. Not an indefensible position but certainly troubling.

As for the leakers, it is past time that there be examples made of them. We need arrests, prosecutions, and jail time for people who flout their oaths and damage our security by circumventing the whistleblowing system we have already in place in our intel agencies and blabbing some of most closely held secrets to the Washington Post or New York Times. If their consciences are bothering them so much about a specific action, there are procedures they can take short of talking to the press that would address their concerns. There simply is no excuse for their actions which leads one to the conclusion that they have ulterior motives in leaking. But personal or partisan, their motivations are irrelevant when we are talking about breaking the law.

Topic 3: Glen Lake, Michigan. It doesn’t exist anymore, at least not as I remember it. But when I was a kid, it was as close to heaven as this suburban boy was ever likely to get. There were forests full of deer to explore. There were sailboats and rowboats and swimming all day. There was a picnicking. There was also no TV and no phone which made curling up next to a roaring fire to keep out the northwoods chill with Edgar Rice Burroughs or Alexander Dumas such an utter joy. There was the first kiss as well. The first time I drank coffee. The first time I smoked a cigarette. The last time I saw my grandfather.

When my family started to take vacations there 44 summers ago, there may have been 2 or 3 motor boats on the entire lake. Today, thanks to making the Sleeping Bear sand dunes a national park, there are dozens of developments around the lake, even a high rise hotel. It is no longer the place it was in my youth. But it still exists in my mind as a magical, carefree place where our family was oh so close and where many of the mysteries of growing up were asked and answered.

*******************************************

Ken was also kind enough to ferret out a picture of Glen Lake as seen from directly across the lake from where we used to stay. I could almost see our big, rambling two story, 7 bedroom summer house where so many of my best memories from childhood played out.

Thanks for digging that up, Ken.

One would think that losing by 200,000 votes in a presidential election would be considered enough of a margin to protect the democratic process from being hijacked by a bunch of thuggish street brawlers. Alas, Mexican moonbats, taking a page from their brethren to the north who believe any election they lose must be rigged, are urging people to take to the streets and force a result more to their liking:

Downtown Mexico City swelled Saturday with the accumulated frustration and rage of the poor, who were stoked into a sign-waving, fist-pumping frenzy by new fraud allegations that failed populist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador hopes will overturn the results of Mexico’s presidential election.

López Obrador ignited the smoldering emotions of his followers Saturday morning, alleging for the first time that Mexico’s electoral commission had rigged its computers before the July 2 election to ensure the half-percentage-point victory of Felipe Calderón, a champion of free trade. In a news conference before the rally, López Obrador called Calderón “an employee” of Mexico’s powerful upper classes and said a victory by his conservative opponent would be “morally impossible.”

Obrador has even less proof of computer rigging than our own moonbats had of Diebold tomfoolery during the 2004 election. In fact, the charge is completely made up out of whole cloth, a cynical attempt to manipulate the poor, the uneducated, and the resentful into pouring into the streets of Mexico City in order to intimidate and threaten the authorities into giving them what they couldn’t get at the ballot box.

These are the same tactics leftist bully boys have used for more than half a century. What you can’t win fair and square, try and steal. It worked in Eastern Europe with Soviet tanks to back them up. It remains to be seen whether the Mexican authorities can resist calls to throw the election laws to the four winds and, in the name of internal peace, simply hand the election to Obrador.

What Obrador has already done is delegitimize the election results in the eyes of about half the country. This despite election monitors from Europe giving the contest a clean bill of health:

Lopez Obrador called for protests across Mexico, saying last Sunday’s elections were more fraudulent than those held during 71 years of one-party rule. European Union election observers have said they had found no major irregularities.

While Obrador calls for a manual recount of every ballot, the Mexican law specifically forbids it except under extraordinary circumstances:

López Obrador wants a vote-by-vote count, which would require opening sealed vote packets from more than 130,000 polling stations. Electoral commission officials have sided with Calderón’s strategists, who argue that the law does not allow for the packets to be opened unless tally sheets attached to the packets appear to have been altered. López Obrador said that only 2,600 vote packets were opened Tuesday and Wednesday during a marathon official count, which shrank Calderón’s lead from 400,000 votes after a preliminary vote to 230,000.

Thousands of López Obrador’s supporters, many of whom had marched across the city for hours, chanted “Voto por voto, casilla por casilla” — vote by vote, polling place by polling place — as they streamed into the Zocalo on Saturday. Many entered the square waving the yellow flags of López Obrador’s Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD.

When has the law ever stopped the left from getting what they want anywhere in the world? It’s “justice” that matters in the end. And “justice” is always defined as the lefty coming out on top and to hell with the law.

The Washington Post’s Ronald Klain demonstrates a myopia that’s breathtaking:

For Lopez Obrador, the clock is ticking loudly. If he wants to keep his candidacy alive, he must take decisive — and quite divisive — action. He must bring meaningful and documented claims of fraud in the election. He must call his supporters to the streets and question the legitimacy of the vote casting and counting process. He must demand that, notwithstanding Mexican law, every ballot be recounted, by hand, to ensure an accurate tally. Above all, he must reject any suggestion that Calderòn received more votes — indeed, he must insist that any fair count would show that he is the rightful winner.

“Notwithstanding Mexican law?” Just who does this moonbat think he is, Al Gore? Actually, Klain wishes Gore had followed exactly this strategy in 2000:

This, of course, was not the playbook that Gore followed in 2000. The vice president rejected advice to do these things. Instead of claiming victory, he limited himself to suggesting that the result was in doubt — and unknown — until a “full and fair” count could be completed. He urged calm among his supporters and called off street protests by progressive groups and allies. He never, ever questioned the legitimacy of the institutions — the courts or the canvassers — responsible for the tallies, and he forbade his lawyers and operatives from doing anything of the sort.

Gore may have “forbade” his operatives from questioning the legitimacy of the process but that didn’t seem to have much affect as party activists worked overtime to pull every trick in the book to circumvent Florida election law. We saw in the Washington State governor’s race what happens when Democrats are allowed to “count every vote.” Washington state Dems were actually able to not only count votes cast on election day, but also votes that mysteriously turned up several weeks after the election following two state mandated recounts that were held prior to the discovery of the “lost” votes in heavily Democratic King county.

This is why there are laws and procedures on the books that should be followed during election challenges. There was no law or procedure in Florida that mandated the kind of recounts ordered by the Florida Supreme Court. That body - a Democratic majority seated - created law on the spot in order to supersede the elected legislature who had diligently passed enabling legislation for election recounts. This is what the US Supreme Court overturned - the imaginary law created out of whole cloth by the Florida court. And I suppose it a footnote in history, but a consortium of media outlets did a recount anyway and confirmed Bush’s victory.

Why Obrador wants to trod this path is obvious; he thinks that he can manipulate his supporters into threatening the Mexican government with riots and unrest unless they do as he bids. This without any evidence of the kind of massive vote fraud that would enable him to overtake the self-declared winner Felipe Calderón. Since he’s already convinced his peasant supporters that he was the victor and that the election was stolen from him, Felipe Calderón will have an extraordinarily difficult time governing the country over the next 6 years. This is bad news for America as the instability could lead to greater numbers of illegals trying to cross the border to find work. And if Obrador were to win, what his socialist, redistributive policies would do to the Mexican economy can only be guessed at.

It is thought that Obrador’s policies would engender a massive flight of capital from Mexico. This would mean slower economic growth which in turn would mean fewer jobs. With an unemployment rate already approaching 20%, that would mean even more illegals making their way north to keep their families from starving to death.

Either way you look at it, Mexico is in for a rough ride for the next few years.

By now, you’ve probably been made aware of the despicable attack on Jeff Goldstein’s family from a University of Arizona professor of psychology named Deb Frisch. If you’ve been out of circulation lately, you can get the story from Blackfive here.

Short version: Frisch made a series of what can only be termed threats against Jeff and his two year old son. The threats were both violent and sexual in nature, referring to the Jon Bennet Ramsey case and expressing the desire that Jeff’s son suffer the same fate.

This is not hate speech. Nor is it name calling. Nor is it, as the good professor has tried to minimize on her blog “over the line of nastiness.” The only line it is over is perhaps a legal line that should, if there is a prosecutor on the ball in Tempe, Arizona, result in Frisch being frog marched to either the nearest detention center or wrapped in a straitjacket and thrown into a rubber room at the local insane asylum.

Aberrational behavior on the part of one loony lefty? Or symptomatic of an ideology that enables and indeed encourages its adherents to see political opponents as sub-human or retarded and thus, expendable?

We apparently will not fully discover the answer to that question because there has not been one single blogger on the left - not a one - who has seen fit to condemn Frisch’s threats against Goldstein and his family. This despite the fact that the story has been out there for more than 48 hours, an eternity in Blogland.

And then there’s the curious coincidence of two separate denial of service attacks on Goldstein’s website. I will be very interested to see where that DOS originated from and why it occurred when it did. As I write this, Jeff’s blog is still down and he has informed PJ Media that he won’t be up for a couple of days.

High profile conservative bloggers like Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs have been hit by DOS attacks in the last several months and the company Hosting Matters (Instapundit, Powerline, Captains Quarters among many) has also been under constant assault. Is this the best the left can do? I may simply not be paying much attention, but has this level of DOS attacks occurred on lefty sites? It wouldn’t surprise me necessarily if it did but the fact that the attacks on righty bloggers seem to be more frequent in the last 6 months or so, one has to ask the question; what are liberals so afraid of that they feel compelled to silence their most visible critics?

All of those bloggers who have called Goldstein a “paste eater” are nowhere to be found when it comes to policing their own ranks and thus have aligned themselves with Frisch and her criminal behavior. Silence implies assent in my book. And the fact that liberals have taken absolutely no interest in this incident is deplorable. Ann Coulter comes out with one of her loony toons remarks about killing Supreme Court justices and several dozen righty bloggers, many of them prominent, jump down her throat. Deb Frisch threatens physical harm against a two year old and gets a pass from the left.

What does that say about the moral fiber of the netnuts? Methinks they ate it to improve their regularity.

UPDATE: FROM THE “THAT WAS QUICK” DEPARTMENT

Michelle Malkin is reporting that Frisch has evidently “resigned.” Or been fired. I won’t link to the criminal’s blogsite but Michelle has the gist of the post:

…wrote some inflammatory comments at a blog by a guy named Jeff Goldstein called protein wisdom that infuriated many bloggers and commenters. Many of these bloggers emailed my boss at the University of Arizona to tell on me.

In hindsight, the things I wrote were over the line of nastiness. I apologize to Mr. Goldstein.

I have resigned from the University of Arizona so there is no need for other enraged people to write to administrators there.

The loon is also playing the victim card:

Some blogs have posted comments that I perceive to be physically threatening. I have contacted the FBI and the Pajamas Media staff to determine how to proceed with this aspect of this unbelievable experience.

My intention in this post is to de-escalate the situation. The comments that started this all were nasty, not threatening. But I feel very threatened by the response.

Jeff - I lost my job. You won. Could you call off the troops?

After picking my jaw up off the floor, I decided to see if any liberals were taking her to task in the comments to the post. Here’s one:

You really succeeded in making liberals look like psychopaths. Can you do the rest of us a favor, and either stop posting entirely, of join the Republican Party?

Well…it’s a start. Kit, one of the hosts of Wideawakes Radio (WAR Radio) which is set to re-launch tomorrow morning summed it up nicely in her comments:

You post a large number of comments on a conservative blogger’s site that not only make references to killing, but also sexually abusing his 2-year-old child. (And that’s not counting the insults to his wife.)

If you’ve truly quit your job, then I’m glad. You are not qualified or competent to teach American college students.

Frisch can evidently dish it out but not take it as she has apparently deleted several comments from the string on that post.

Finally, a commenter called “Liberal Avenger” weighs in with just the proper amount of compassion and stupidity:

I was under the impression that you were/are suffering from some sort of mental illness in making those comments. If that is the case, seek help - but don’t resign from your job. You needn’t lose your job because of this.

1. Call your boss and tell him that you are un-resigning
2. See a mental health professional if you aren’t seeing one already
3. Ignore the hypocritical wingnuts here who pretend as if what you did was some enormous crime against decency. It wasn’t. What you did was stupid and misguided. Conservative bloggers are masters at being stupid and misguided.

Poor wittle Debwah. All she did was refer to a two year old in a sexual manner and make threats against his person. I mean, after all, the kid belongs to a conservative so anything goes, right?

Maybe Mr. Avenger and Frisch can go a-vistiting to the same shrink.

UPDATE II: 7/9

I see where this site has been linked by a couple of liberal blogs who are complaining that I’m asking them to “apologize” for Frisch’s behavior when the mad doctor is a nothing blogger and that after all, what goes on in Iraq is the real obscenity.

I can find no mention on any conservative blog of anyone asking the left to “apologize” for not posting on this subject. But a little solidarity with the right in condemning this outrageous and frightening behavior would have been appropriate and appreciated.

As I mention in the post, this story was out there for 48 hours (6th story from the bottom of Memorandum on early Friday morning) and nary a peep of condemnation was heard from anyone on the left until Confederate Yankee’s post about the silence of the left on this issue was disseminated. Then, there were mostly mild rebukes of Frisch made in passing with the real thrust of most lefty writings being that they shouldn’t have to “apologize” for Frisch and that conservatives do it too, or do it worse.

And I refuse to back down from the statement that liberalism “enables and indeed encourages its adherents to see political opponents as sub-human or retarded and thus, expendable…” When most major league lefty bloggers can refer to Goldstein as a “paste eater” and Ed Morrissey as “retarded” I would say that it becomes understandable why Frisch’s statements would not be condemned and, under most circumstances, probably applauded by the likes of TBogg, Maha, Jane Hamsher, Digby, and the unheavenly host of lefties who believe themselves to be the moral and intellectual superiors of conservatives.

What the freepers did in encouraging harm against employees of the New York Times and their families was despicable and they should be roundly and soundly condemned for their advocacy of such action. The same goes for anyone, anywhere, of any ideological stripe who advocates violence or harassment of any kind against anyone.

That said, politics is a full contact sport. And liberals who whine about being called out for either their rhetoric or lack of moral courage should take their complaints somewhere else. Don’t bring them here.

Glenn Greenwald is almost never right about anything. He is an hysteric, a red meat partisan Democrat (who piously rejects that label despite being outed recently as a member of the partisan Democrat email list “Townhouse”). He can be acerbic, cranky, and a serial exaggerator of laughable proportions. He is also smart, passionate, and a dyed in the wool defender of our civil liberties, one of the most articulate in the blogosphere.

If you get the idea that I have mixed feelings about Greenwald, you would be correct. I generally find his critiques of conservatives unbelievably shallow, almost grotesque in the cartoonish and simple minded way he paints the right. He natters. He takes forever to make a simple point (something I’ve been guilty of more than once). And to top it all off, he’s popular and gets tons of traffic, thus awakening the green monster of jealously in me and stimulating the id to take over my unconscious mind, forcing me to imagine all sorts of foul things that could befall his blog.

But today, I’m agreeing with him:

One Bush follower after the next who has been furiously protesting the publication of leaks by the NYT and other newspapers — almost all of whom has accused the NYT of treason, of providing aid and comfort to their Al Qaeda friends, etc. for reporting leaked classified information — have written today about this leaked story. But all of them are ecstatic over this story, celebrating it as a great and heroic blow for the Bush administration and as proof that The Terrorists really are the Epic Threat they’ve been claiming. And almost none of them are protesting the unauthorized leak, let alone calling for the reporters and editors at the Daily News to be sent to gas chambers or put in federal prison for the rest of their lives.

Their celebratory reaction to this leak is particularly noteworthy given that the Daily News article itself acknowledged that its source told it that the leaked law enforcement investigation “is an ongoing operation.” And the FBI claims that this leak has jeopardized foreign intelligence sources.

Before I pat Greenwald on the back, let me bash him over his pointy head. The only debate about the efficacy of the press publishing secrets in wartime is occurring on the right. The question of whether or not to arrest and try the reporters and editors who publish these stories has been a topic of heated debate only among conservatives. As usual, Greenwald’s critique is shallow and off target.

The left, as with almost every other issue involving national security, has failed to engage in any kind of serious colloquy, even among themselves, as to the national security implications of these leaks. Instead, all we get is the ridiculous notion that the information shouldn’t have been classified in the first place because al-Qaeda already knows everything we’re doing to track them so publishing stories that detail our methods is perfectly alright because the government is violating our civil liberties. The fact that we don’t know enough about how these programs actually work to make that kind of determination doesn’t stand in the way of the left when their on a roll politicizing national security.

No one can take their argument that al-Qaeda is in the know about all of our tracking methods seriously. Which is why despite the many sins committed by Republicans in managing the government, the Democrats are by no means assured of taking over Congress in November. As much as the American people dislike Republicans, they simply don’t trust the Democrats on national security matters. Nor will they until the left begins to engage Republicans on the issues and not the politics of keeping the country safe.

But Greenwald has made a point that many on the right cannot dispute today. The fact of the matter is that publishing details of this investigation has harmed our ability to keep the United States of America safe and we shouldn’t be ignoring this fact in order to make cheap political points at the expense of the left.

The damage done in impairing our ability to prevent another attack on this country was severe:

Disclosure of the bomb plot coincided with the one-year anniversary of a terrorist bomb attack on London subways and a bus that killed 52 and injured about 700. Authorities said they hadn’t intended to release details about the plot this early and that whoever leaked the information had compromised the FBI’s relationship with some foreign intelligence services.

The person who leaked the details is clearly someone who doesn’t understand the fragility of international relations,” Mershon said. “We’ve had a number of uncomfortable questions and some upsetment (sic) with these foreign intelligence services that had been working with us on a daily basis.”

Whether the leak came from the Administration or from a foreign source doesn’t matter. Cooperation with other intel agencies is absolutely vital to ferreting out the possibility of a terrorist attack on the United States and any diminution of that cooperation is a blow to our security. It is clear that the New York Daily News should be placed in the same boat as the New York Times and other publications that use unauthorized leaks to either sell newspapers, make political hay, or both.

Greenwald makes another point that needs to be aired here; the rank hypocrisy on the right when it comes to the issue of national security leaks in general. As he points out, this isn’t the first time that there have been leaks showing the Administration on the ball that has had the right celebrating the government’s watchfulness. Consistency may be “the hobgoblin of little minds” as Emerson said but it should also be a faithful friend in politics. One can’t pick and choose which leaks are efficacious and which are detrimental. You and I are simply unqualified to make such judgements.

All of this being said, I can’t resist linking to this article in Raw Story that seeks to downplay the plot, thus re-enforcing the notion that the left is unserious about our security:

One former intelligence field officer says, and two other CIA officials confirm, that the alleged plot by Muslim extremists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in New York City was nothing more than chatter by unaffiliated individuals with no financing or training in an open forum already monitored extensively by the United States Government, RAW STORY has learned.

“The so-called New York tunnel plot was a result of discussions held on an open Jihadi web site,” said Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and contributor to American Conservative magazine, in a late Friday afternoon conversation. Although Giraldi acknowledges that the persons involved – “three of whom have already been arrested in Lebanon and elsewhere - are indeed extremists,” their online chatter is considerably overblown by allegations of an actual plot.

“They are not professionally trained terrorists, however, and had no resources with which to carry out the operation they discussed,” Giraldi added. “Despite press reports that they had asked Abu Musab Zarqawi for assistance, there is no information to confirm that. It is known that the members discussed the possibility of approaching Zarqawi but none of them knew him or had any access to him.”

There is every reason to take any plot, or “chatter,” or fantasies like this seriously. Even the article admits these perps are extremists with the desire to carry out such an attack. As we have seen to our endless sorrow, couple that desire with a fanatical determination to succeed and you get Mohammed Atta and 9/11. And the fact that Raw Story and most of the left would, in the aftermath of such an attack, skewer the Administration for not believing the extremists were serious only shows how truly frightening the prospect of the Democrats having their quaking hands on any of the levers that control our national security would be.

UPDATE

Pundit Guy has a perfect counterpoint to the left’s downplaying of this threat:

Have we become so far removed from that day in September of 2001 that we now criticize the very people who work 24/7 to protect us from being killed? Isn’t this the kind of complacency that the terrorists hope will spread through America, just so they can once more catch us asleep at the wheel?

In their eagerness to score political points about “fearmongering,” liberals have once again demonstrated that they are unfit to command. The American people will not elect those who have either forgotten 9/11 or who believe it didn’t change much.

“Those boys on the other side of that ridge…They never quite seem like the enemy.”
(General James Longstreet from the movie Gettysburg)

Longstreet was speaking of Union troops at Gettysburg, some of whom he had known and commanded before the war.

So what’s the excuse of our political and intellectual elites who never quite see an enemy when thinking about or writing of radical Islamists?

And not just western elites, either. In a frightening but predictable way, the entire War on Terror is in full backsliding mode as many ordinary citizens in Europe and America tire of the endless vigilance, the troubling compromises with civil liberties, the partisan political warfare, and the constant, nagging feelings of self doubt about the righteousness of our cause encouraged by 50 years of tearing at the edifice and hammering at the foundations of Western civilization by the European and American left.

At a time when our civilization is facing the greatest threat to its existence in more than 500 years, when the need for unity in recognizing, at the very least, that we are confronted by an enemy that wishes to do us immense harm, those most capable of giving voice to a rational defense of our values, our systems of government, our art - our very way of life, are wallowing in defeatism and worse, sympathizing with those who would do us in. Nurtured at the finest palaces of thinking the world has ever known - the Western university system - we are being systematically emasculated by the trimmers, the appeasers, and those afflicted with that most curious of Western diseases, the plague of multiculturalism.

In short, when perhaps our greatest need at this point in the war against Islamism is for our intellectuals - artists, people of letters, and philosophers to instill in the rest of us a sense of our own worth as inheritors of the traditions and values of Western culture, we are treated instead to lectures about moral equivalency and outright boosterism for the cause of the jihadis. In one of the greatest historical ironies in recorded history, those who have been nurtured in the freedom and tolerance of the West now would abandon the society that celebrates those values by either cowering in the shadows or giving voice to doubts reflecting the view that there is little in Western Civilization worth saving.

As early as 2002, leftist intellectuals sought to undermine the War on Terror by rejecting the very premise that we should be fighting a war at all. The “underlying causes” of the war were examined and found wanting. Policies of past and present western governments were used as justification for the jihadis to murder innocent people. There were even those who saw any effort of the United States to defend itself against states that gladly sponsor and support these murderous thugs as immoral.

And the damage to the cause has already been done. Exactly a year ago, Great Britain experienced its own national nightmare of a day when al-Qaeda linked terrorists claimed the lives of 52 British citizens in an attack on the London subway sytsem. The response of the British people to this attack was a curious combination of sorrow and appeasement. This exchange between a London policeman and an ordinary citizen who was protesting at a radical Muslim demonstration sponsored by a group whose leader thought the subway attacks justified is indicative of how a citizenry loses faith and courage when so few support the defense of their own country against murderous attacks:

…[an] English bobby vigorously silencing such a citizen, described as a van driver, who, according to the televised report, had angrily criticized the Muslim protesters. It is tragically enlightening.

“Listen to me, listen to me,” said the policeman, shaking his finger at the van driver. “They have a right to protest. You let them do it. You say things like that you’ll get them riled and I end up in [trouble]. You say one more thing like that, mate, and you’ll get yourself nicked [arrested] and I am not kidding you, d’you understand me?”

Van driver: “They can do whatever they want and I can’t?”

Policeman: “They’ve got their way of doing it. The way you did it was wrong. You’ve got one second to get back in your van and get out of here.”

Van driver: [bitter] “Freedom of speech.”

One wonders if those best able to articulate the value of free speech as well as how this peculiarly western notion is so vital to defeating our enemies would come out from the shadows and speak up with one loud voice in defense of this major Western tradition if such a conversation would ever have taken place. The policeman is there to protect the rights of all - not just those who threaten the peace.

In fact, western intellectuals are unwittingly assisting our enemies by feeding their paranoia and fantastical worldview. Every time they remind us of the moral equivalency between Westerners and jihadis, they feed the Culture of Grievance that so dominates the thoughts of radical Muslims:

How do you win against the Culture of Grievance? Call it COG for short, and don’t think you’ve never encountered it before. It’s at the heart of the Islamic radical movement, and a prime motivator of Islamic terrorists. COG is all over the place, but especially in places like the Middle East. COG is when a culture is more concerned about real, or imagined, grievances, than in just moving ahead and fixing things. Every nation has a certain degree of COG, which most of the time means little to foreigners. But when COG spawns terrorists (which COG often does) who go abroad and kill thousands of foreigners, than COG is an international problem.

Instead of a ringing defense of our way of life, the Western left emboldens the radicals by acknowledging that their claims of victimhood have merit. And while not coming out and advocating terrorism as a response directly, by justifying the murder of innocents by pointing to this policy or that event as “cause and effect,” the left plays right into the hands of those who use such critiques to mobilize and motivate their minions of death.

Perhaps we should take a page from Israel’s playbook in this regard. While it is true that Israel has its own “Blame Israel First” crowd on the left, the self confidence and belief in what they are doing to fight for their national lives stands in stark contrast to the hand wringing in most of the west. And what is truly remarkable to watch has been the abandonment of Israel by the European left. They have picked up the cause of the Palestinian terrorists who not only wish to defeat Israel but destroy her. How they arrived at this sorry conclusion is a puzzlement. Nearly 60 years ago, the European left gave Jewish nationalism a boost with their support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Why they have abandoned Israel in her hour of need has more to do with the Culture of Grievance than with any possible defense of Israeli society being reflective of Western traditions and values.

One would think that we could acknowledge mistakes made in the past without condemning an entire civilization to the ash heap of history. But apparently, the intellectual left is incapable of such a leap of faith. They have sacrificed rationality on the altar of Good Intentions. And I’m afraid that in the end, those good intentions may be the ruin of us all.

I think I need a drink. Bad. Bourbon, if you don’t mind. Make it a double, please - no ice.

I find as we almost reach the point of midsomer’s eve - when fairies and pixies dance around the sacred fire in the woods and the elves work their magic to torment us mortals - that the level of my ambition to do a decent day’s worth of writing for this site falls exactly to the level of my concern over my personal appearance.

As I sit at my desk, my hair is mussed, I haven’t shaved in 2 days, Zsu-Zsu has taken to maintaining a polite and proper distance from me (even in bed) and my cats are eying me with baleful glances of haughty disdain - as if I am an inferior being because I am unable to keep clean by licking myself all over.

I suppose I should break down and take a shower but to tell you the truth, there is something glorious in feeling grungy. Is this how our paleolithic ancestors felt all the time? I feel like grunting. Not the mindless ruttings of liberal commentators but rather the deep, satisfied vocalizations of a man at peace with his slovenliness and grateful for the primal sin of sloth.

I am revelling in my indolence, celebrating my apathy. My cup runneth over (and down my chin) with joy at the prospect of lazing in my bed watching re-runs of Law and Order at midday. Perhaps I’ll pop a movie into the VCR or slip a Gretchen Wilson CD into the player and kick back a spell. Maybe I’ll get lost in my Norwich, dreaming the dreams of the Byzantium emperors who failed finally and utterly to resist the advance of Islam. We are still paying for their stupidity today.

I could do any number of things. But before I can tend to my own psychic needs, the Watcher demands a pound of my flesh for neglecting he and my fellow council members over the last two weeks. Ergo, before I can play, I must pay:

Council results for W/E June 23rd:

Council Category

First Place: “The Iraqi Insurgency Has No Central Command” by The Glittering Eye.

Second Place: “Children in Danger From the UN” by Gates of Vienna.

Non Council Category

First Place: “The Jihadi Network’s Fatal Flaw” from The American Thinker

Second Place: “Srebrenica, Kosovo, Unknown” by New Sisyphus

Council results for W/Ed June 30:

Council Category

First Place: “The Dance of Escalation and Reaction” by Shrinkwrapped

Second Place: “How Do You Solve a Problem Like… Korea?” by The Glittering Eye

Non Council Category

First Place: “It’s an Islamic Jihad, Stupid” from Townhall.

Second Place: “Peter, Paul, and Ingrate” from Florida Cracker

If you’d like to participate in next week’s Watcher’s Council contest, go here and follow instructions.