Right Wing Nut House

I rise from my sickbed this morning to weigh in on Keith Olbermann’s latest “Special Comment” during which he referred to Fox News Reporter Chris Wallace - a journalist who has won every major broadcast news award around - as a “monkey posing as a newscaster” and accused Republicans of trying to foist blame for 9/11 onto the Clinton Administration.

The fact that I am dizzy, drugged up, and incoherent this morning makes me the perfect candidate to respond to Olbermann’s ignorant rant. Judging by some of the jaw droppers unleashed by the Unhinged One during his confused and typically shallow critique of Fox News, conservatives, Republicans, the Bush Administration, and the press, MSNBC should probably initiate drug screenings for its on air talent at the earliest possible moment. Either that or someone should make sure that Keith is still taking his Lithium religiously for it is apparent the reality Keith is experiencing is on some other plane of existence than the rest of us.

For the longest time, I tried my best to peg Olbermann, to define his appeal in normative terms; A left wing clown? A liberal provocateur? A humorist a la Will Rogers? A self-anointed Diogenes, carrying the lantern throughout America looking for the one honest man?

Olbermann tried all of these approaches and failed miserably. It wasn’t until he realized that his bread was buttered by liberal bloggers did he begin to demonstrate some traction with his show. In fact, it is eerie how like a liberal blog his show has become; wildly accusatory with no evidence to back up outrageous charges; sophomoric flights of logic and reason; an unhinged whining that causes the viewer to actually recoil in disgust at some of the self-pitying “woe is us” rhetoric; and a breathtaking shallowness that outlaws context and substitutes emotion for rational thought.

In this respect, Olbermann’s shtick is reminiscent of the high school know-it-all who used to drive everyone nuts by trying to prove he was smart by using a large vocabulary - invariably misusing terms willy nilly - while taking on a professorial air of superiority that attracted every bully in the school like flies to rotting meat. Loud, insufferable, and laughably incoherent at times, the know-it-all was able to gather around him the witless, the woebegone, and the wasted where he would hold forth every day in the lunchroom, his sycophants hanging on every word.

Reading this transcript of his remarks last night, it is clear that Olbermann has slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of idiocy. To call a fellow journalist a “monkey” is so far beyond what passes for rational discourse that even a lefty blog should find such rhetoric disturbing.

Of course, they don’t. In fact, they are cheering Mr. Olberman on to ever higher flights of rhetorical excess and juvenile name calling. Reporter Wallace is a “monkey.” Bush is a “coward.” This is what passes for reasonable dialogue on lefty blogs and Olbermann doesn’t let his audience down.

But the real dishonesty by Olbermann comes when he ascribes actions to the Bush Administration that he not only offers no proof for but that are also belied by the facts. For instance:

Moreover, for the last five years one month and two weeks, the current administration, and in particular the President, has been given the greatest “pass” for incompetence and malfeasance in American history!

This, of course, is one of the Ãœber talking points on liberal blogs; that the press are a bunch of lapdogs. One wonders how Olbermann and his shipmates on the S.S. Perpetually Outraged got their high school diplomas without benefit of acquiring the ability to read. How, in fact, did we find out about this “incompetence and malfeasance?” A little birdie? Perhaps Olbermann has powers of divination that allows him special access to the supernatural for his Special Comments?

Should we tell Keith and his crew that their ammunition to prove incompetence and malfeasance comes from the press and therefore negates the “Bush is getting a pass” meme? Not if you don’t want to be showered with brain matter following the collective explosion of liberal heads. Logical thought to a lefty is like anti-matter. When it comes in contact with the muddled gray stuff in their confused, limited, and emotionally charged cranium, the two forces annihilate each other thus causing a rupture in the space-time continuum. Thankfully, there isn’t much chance of swaying a liberal with logic so we’re safe for the time being.

Caution: The following will make you want to tear your hair out if you are older than 5, can write complete sentences, and have the wit and reason to know the difference between reality and make believe:

It is not important that the current President’s portable public chorus has described his predecessor’s tone as “crazed.”

Our tone should be crazed. The nation’s freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as al Qaida; the nation’s marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would’ve quit.

Nonetheless. The headline is this:

Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years.

He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration.

“Portable” public chorus? Olbermann’s strained alliteration is sprinkled throughout his piece and hearkens back to that know-it-all high school kid. And please note the hysterical comparison between al-Qaeda and the Administration. Such over the top stupidity is lapped up by liberal blogs. It fits in perfectly with their worldview that the War on Terror is a sham and that al-Qaeda is no more a threat than the mugger in the park or rapist in the alley.

And believing that “Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years,” by giving the Democratic spin on 9/11 is either sly disingenuousness or Olbermann is oblivious to The Narrative. The “truth” being spun by liberal bloggers, pundits, media, and politicians has been non-stop for 5 years. To give Clinton a privileged position as truth teller is laughable.

More strained and putrid prose from Olbermann with Keith getting out the kneepads to service his hero:

Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by any one, in these last five long years.

“Forceful and Triumphant?” The awkwardness is embarrassing, jarring to the senses. By trying to sound Murrowesque, Olbermann ends up sounding like Elmer Fudd.

And I hope Clinton has the common decency to respond to Olbermann’s gooey eyed groveling. Such lap dog devotion should be rewarded with at least a Milk Bone or some other doggie treat.

Saving the most calumnious for last, Olbermann then offers up a shocking charge without one scintilla of evidence to back it up:

After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts—that he was president on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility, entirely Mr. Clinton’s.

Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly.

As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy.

Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon.

No, you are not reading incorrectly. Keith Olbermann is accusing a major national news network of being in cahoots with the White House in an effort to “rewrite” history. He offers no proof of this conspiracy. No proof of this connection. No proof of anything at all, most especially that anyone is trying to “rewrite” anything.

Only in Olbermann’s hysterically juvenile fantasies (and those of his slavering supporters in the lefty blogosphere) does a recitation of the known facts - gathered by the 9/11 Commission, Richard Clark, and others - regarding the inconstancy, the hesitancy, the confusion, the misplaced priorities, the missed chances, and the suicidal underestimation of the capability of our enemies by the Clinton Administration become an effort for the Bushies to dodge responsibility for 9/11.

First of all, the historical record won’t let them. Nor will the historical record be unkind to Clinton’s efforts against terrorism which, despite its many flaws (flaws that when pointed out, for some reason, sends the left into paroxysms of apoplectic anger), at least recognized Bin Laden as a threat.

The fact of the matter is that the left saw a political opening via 9/11 (and found a way to negate the Administration’s political use of that date) and have attempted to shift the entire blame from Osama Bin Laden for the attacks and place it in the oval office. It has largely worked although I sense in the desperation of Clinton’s remarks as well as Olbermann’s rant that this rehash of arguments about 9/11 may be resonating with the American public. The semi-fictitious Path to 9/11, which has set off this debate, has people questioning the dominant lefty Narrative about 9/11 for the first time. It is this that Olbermann and Clinton are railing against; people re-examining the conventional wisdom and putting the American government’s response in a context detrimental to the political aspirations of Democrats.

But Olbermann’s charge of collusion between Fox and the White House is so ridiculous that only in the fringe fever swamps of the left will it get any play. In fact, an encouraging sign that some of the saner liberals are saying enough with regards to Olbermann’s ever more unbalanced “Special Comment” segment:

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Key.

Key who?

Key-th Olbermann is as shrill as Tiny Tim sucking a balloon full of helium and then blowing sixty-four octaves above middle C on a giant dog whistle right in your ear. And not the original recording, mind you - the cover. By Alvin & The Chipmunks.

Um…’kay. At least their hearts are in the right place.

(NOTE: Apparently, I am mistaken. There are no sane lefties out there. Imagine my embarrassment in learning that at the link above, “Shrill” doesn’t mean “strident or intemperate.” Or perhaps it does mean that but it is seen as a badge of honor by some liberals. Kinda like “speaking truth to power” minus the truth and substituting ear muffs. Or maybe the truth is there but you leave out the speaking part. Actually, I believe that many liberals believe that acting and speaking like an ass should be their ultimate goal.

My head hurts…)

Allah is waiting for Olbermann to go completely off the rails and start spouting 9/11 conspiracy theories. He’s already had on as guests several leading truthers so that wouldn’t surprise me one bit. It is evident that Olbermann has given up on trying to impress the kind of liberals who grace the salons of the Upper West Side. The society folk like their Bush hatred warm but not too hot lest it scorch those whose humor tends more toward the cerebral rather than Olberman’s Punch and Bush show physicality.

But I have no doubt he will be handsomely rewarded by the netnuts who luxuriate in his laughable attempts at profundity while egging him on to ever greater heights of irrelevancy.

You almost want to avert your eyes when the inevitable crash comes but, like those of us who watch NASCAR solely for the spin-outs and pile-ups, the entertainment value of watching Olberman melt like the Wicked Witch of the West right before our eyes will be immensely satisfying.

As blogswarms go, the Clinton interview on Fox News Sunday rates about a 7 on the 10 point Rathergate Meter, easily the biggest blog brouhaha of the year. There may have been larger stories. But for sheer emotionalism, it’s hard to beat Clinton and his dredging up the old conspiracy theories about the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy out to get him. It cheers the left and riles the right like no other issue in American politics. In many ways, the unhinged opposition to the Bush Presidency is a direct result of the twin earthquakes of Clinton’s impeachment followed almost immediately by the 2000 election debacle, both events seen by the left in the context of evil conservatives attempting power plays at the expense of the Democrats.

Of course, the right views any talk of this “conspiracy” with a mixture of laughter and contempt. Unless one wants to accuse the Republican party of being a “conspiracy” or like minded conservative individuals and organizations working together to oust a President they believed to be corrupting the law, then the idea of any kind of secret cabal, plotting in the shadows to overthrow the government kind of loses its potency. It says volumes about both Hillary and Bill Clinton that they viewed the legitimate political activity of their opponents, most of which took place in the open and indeed, publicized to to the max as something dark and evil.

But this hearkening to the past by Clinton in his interview had a more contemporary goal; reminding Democrats and the nutroots of their shared outrage. It not only suits Clinton’s self image of the courageous Democrat standing in the breach beating back the evil Republicans who sought to bring him down (while opposing him at every turn in his anti-terrorism policies), it also rallies the left to a defense of his Presidency which may have taken a bigger hit than any of us realize thanks to the broadcast of ABC’s The Path to 9/11.

Indeed, whether the show has a political impact is beside the point; it certainly angered the ex-President who seemed eager to tee off on the bemused Wallace. The Fox reporter sat in his seat dumbfounded as the former most powerful man in the world wagged a beefy finger in his face and accused him of a “conservative hit job,” a remarkable accusation given that Wallace had only asked one question about Bin Laden. Coupled with the off the wall suggestion that Fox was only doing the interview with him to assuage the supposed anger of their viewership who might be upset by Rupert Murdochs support of his climate initiative, and you have a portrait of someone so self-obsessed that one can only shake their head in disbelief that someone that enthralled with himself could ever have achieved high office.

As for the diatribe itself, righty bloggers are all over Clinton’s charges made in the interview today as are some in the mainstream press. Clinton’s statement that Republicans opposed him when he sought to kill Bin Laden has been totally debunked. Jack Tapper quotes contemporary press reports that give quite a different picture of support for Clinton’s attack on Bin Laden.

I think the president did exactly the right thing,” said House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said. “By doing this we’re sending the signal there are no sanctuaries for terrorists.” Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) called the attacks “appropriate and just,” and House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) said “the American people stand united in the face of terrorism.”

The AP says: “Gingrich dismissed any possibility that Clinton may have ordered the attacks to divert attention from the scandal. Instead, he said, there was an urgent need for a reprisal following the Aug. 7 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. ‘Anyone who watched the film of the bombings, anyone who saw the coffins come home knows better than to question this timing,’ Gingrich said. ‘It was done as early as possible to send a message to terrorists across the globe that killing Americans has a cost. It has no relationship with any other activity of any kind.’

Moreover, the story goes on to say that Gingrich adviser Rich Galen e-mailed to conservative radio talk show hosts that: “Speaker Newt Gingrich has made it clear to me” that the attacks were necessary and appropriate, Galen said. “This is a time to put our nation’s interests ahead of our political concerns. I am asking you to help your listeners, your friends, and your associates to look at this situation with the sober eyes it deserves.”

The real problem for Clinton was that the rest of the world didn’t believe him, not Republicans in Congress. And Patterico has a post that knocks down another Clinton/liberal charge; that Fox News never asked Bush Administration officials any of the same questions they asked him:

In 2004, Wallace asked almost the exact same question of Donald Rumsfeld that he asked Clinton today.

Here’s what Wallace asked Clinton today:

[H]indsight is 20 20 . . . but the question is why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?

And here is what Wallace asked Donald Rumsfeld on the March 28, 2004 episode of Fox News Sunday:

I understand this is 20/20 hindsight, it’s more than an individual manhunt. I mean — what you ended up doing in the end was going after al Qaeda where it lived. . . . pre-9/11 should you have been thinking more about that?

. . . .

What do you make of his [Richard Clarke’s] basic charge that pre-9/11 that this government, the Bush administration largely ignored the threat from al Qaeda?

. . . .

Mr. Secretary, it sure sounds like fighting terrorism was not a top priority.

Patterico also debunks another Clinton charge; that the Bushies were so unserious about terrorism that they fired Richard Clark, someone who, in retrospect, did indeed “get it” with regards to terrorism and Bin Laden.

Clarke was not fired; he was, in effect, demoted. When Bush took over, Clarke retained his title as “National Coordinator on Counter-terrorism” but Condi Rice demoted the position. After 9/11, Clarke requested a transfer out of frustration, and later left government and wrote a book, which contained bitter recriminations against Bush — and whose stories were elaborated and dressed up by Clarke as he hit the talk-show circuit.

So I’m left a bit baffled why Clinton thinks Clarke was “fired.” And it’s clear why Fox News Sunday never asked a Bush official why Clarke was “fired” — he wasn’t

No he wasn’t fired. But it is also true that Condi Rice, in an effort to marginalize Clark, downgraded his position. Rice didn’t want Clark with direct access to the President (as he had enjoyed in the Clinton Administration) because access is power in the White House and Rice was not up to sharing any with someone she looked upon with suspicion.

Regardless of whether Clinton’s charges are true or not (and most of them are not), the furor ignited by the confrontation is something the left has been dying for almost since Fox News started broadcasting. Indeed, the left would like nothing better than to use the issue to shine a light on what they perceive as the outrageous conservative bias of the Fox network.

I don’t watch much cable news anymore but when I did, I never felt that Fox’s reporting was slanted any more than CNN’s or any other network’s reporting. Even if this were the case, Fox almost always has representatives from both the right and the left to argue about the stories making news. Because of this, it has always been a mystery to me why the left feels so wronged by Fox. Prior to the practice of inviting representatives from both sides of an issue to debate it on the air, such a thing was never heard of on the nets. If CNN wanted analysis of a story, they either got another mainstream reporter to talk about it or some establishment liberal to comment. The only reason to have a conservative on was to savage him.

To this day, it puzzles me why the left goes ballistic over stories reported on Fox News. Regardless of why this is so, the liberals have been unable to get much traction with their charges - until now. When a popular ex-President says something about the bias of a network and those comments are widely disseminated throughout the country, I daresay that Clinton did more in 10 minutes to advance the left’s critique of Fox News than all their previous efforts combined.

But it is solidarity that Clinton seeks and, according to Ann Althouse, he apparently got it:

What’s struck me most, in the context of these recent events, is just how extremely *protective* of Clinton liberals (e.g. blogs & blog commenters) have become. This isn’t surprising, and it’s not a negative thing per se: cf. the protectiveness of Bush on the right, especially when he’s being assailed (unfairly & dishonestly, in their view) by the media. The comparison is illuminating, of course, because Bush does very little public self-defending against his harshest critics (and never complains of being ‘victimized’ by the media)– though of course commenters on the right do that for him. Clinton, with these recent actions, is (I think) trying to tap into a similar dynamic– e.g. trying to tap into the (surprising– and surprisingly mainstream) surge of protectiveness & feeling for him during the impeachment saga. (And lest we forget, that was the origin of moveon.org, wasn’t it.) . . .

I do think it’s likely that his latest public acts are a kind of strategic gamble, specifically directed at the left (rallying it for Hillary, who can then do what she needs to do to convince the center)– (and the left is eating it up aren’t they, he’s playing them like a piano)— more likely than that this last outburst was an ‘accident’ (esp. when the questioning was *so* to be expected– he himself practically *asked* for it, in making such a big deal of the 9/11 movie).

Glenn Reynolds thinks that the Clinton blow-up will affect the elections - negatively for the Democrats. I suppose it’s possible but I think it equally likely that it will once again unite Democrats in their shared outrage at what they see as the deviltry of their political opponents.

It should be interesting to watch both Fox ratings as well as how well Republicans poll over the next few weeks. Both could tell us much about what the American people are thinking as we head down the home stretch to the elections.

One of the more curious manifestations of Bush Derangement Syndrome over the years has come from the Soothsayer Wing of the Democratic party. These are the pundits that purport to be in the know regarding some pretty hair raising plans made by Evil George and the Neocon Cabal who have held the country in thrall for nearly 6 years, casting a spell on the sense and sensibilities of ordinary Americans in order to carry out their nefarious deeds.

Immune to the thought control rays emanating from Karl Rove’s office thanks to their superior tin foil hat design, this Cassandra-like group of Democrats have made it their business to give the country a heads up regarding the latest plans by Bushitler & Co. for turning America into a theocratic dictatorship or a fascist oligarchy.

Pity the friends of any of these crystal ball gazers if they happen to be stupid enough to take their advice on where to put money in the stock market. The track record for accuracy by this unhinged bunch of muckety-mucks is remarkable for not only its lack of success in predicting the future, but also that they expect everyone else to take their idiotic prophecies of doom seriously.

Unfortunately, there is a large segment of the press that seems incapable of applying the minimum amount of critical thinking necessary to see these Tarot Card readers for who they really are; unbalanced Bush haters whose judgment and instincts are shaped by the shadows moving furtively in their subconscious mind rather than anything that approaches reality. Because of that, the lefty Oracles manage to get their ridiculous prognostications disseminated to a large and suitably gullible assemblage of supporters who swallow their nonsense with a kind the kind of avidity with which children gobble up their Frosted Flakes.

The list of laughably wrong predictions and warnings from this crew is replete with examples from the simply stupid to the bizarre; foretellings of the suspension of the Bill of Rights, a military draft, a round up of dissidents, a staged terrorist attack in October, 2004 (the last “October Surprise” that never was), a “nullification” of the 2004 election if Bush lost to name a few. More recently, we were told that the US would assist Israel in invading both Syria and Iran during the recently concluded Israeli-Islamist War. In fact, we’ve been on the verge of bombing or invading Iran for at least two years. This proves the efficacy of the old saw “If at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again.”

On the subject of Iran, it seems that Democrats, nervously eyeing the polls as they watch their certain landslide in November begin to slip away, now believe that the President will deliver a coup de grace to their electoral hopes by unleashing an “October Surprise” in the form of a military strike on Iran.

Is it possible? Anything is possible. You could win the lottery. I could spontaneously combust (quite the spectacle, that). Republicans could rein in Federal spending. Glen Greenwald could stop being a blithering hysteric.

Gary Hart has not only predicted an attack on Iran but has been kind enough to write the President’s speech to the American people for him:

Then the president will speak on national television. He will say this: Iran is determined to develop nuclear weapons; if this happens, the entire region will go nuclear; our diplomatic efforts to prevent this have failed; Iran is offering a haven to known al Qaeda leaders; the fate of our ally Israel is at stake; Iran persists in supporting terrorism, including in Iraq; and sanctions will have no affect (and besides they are for sissies). He will not say: …and besides, we need the oil.

Therefore, he will announce, our own national security and the security of the region requires us to act. “Tonight, I have ordered the elimination of all facilities in Iran that are dedicated to the production of weapons of mass destruction…..” In the narrowest terms this includes perhaps two dozen targets.

But the authors of the war on Iraq have “regime change” in mind in Iran. According to Colonel Sam Gardiner (author of “The End of the ‘Summer of Diplomacy’: Assessing U.S. Military Options in Iran,” The Century Foundation, 2006) to have any hope of success, such a policy would require attacking at least 400 targets, including the Revolutionary Guard. But even this presumes the Iranian people will respond to a massive U.S. attack on their country by overthrowing their government. Only an Administration inspired by pre-Enlightenment fantasy could believe a notion such as this.

I would first point out that if Bush gave a speech like that, I would be willing to run naked through the next Democratic National Convention. Secondly, Hart’s snide little aside about the United States “needing the oil” is belied by the fact that any such attack would surely not give the US any control whatsoever over Iranian oil supplies and would probably initiate a supply cutoff by the Iranians (if we didn’t bomb the oil facilities as well). The remark about oil is leftyspeak for “Evil capitalists are behind this attack which has nothing to do with a madman getting his hands on nuclear weapons but has everything to do with oil company profits.” Simple minded sophistry.

Thank God this mountebank was found out to be a lying, arrogant, poppinjay before he was anointed as the Democratic candidate for President in 1980. This is born out in Hart’s small minded parting shot at the President in his article:

For a divinely guided president who imagines himself to be a latter day Winston Churchill (albeit lacking the ability to formulate intelligent sentences), and who professedly does not care about public opinion at home or abroad, anything is possible, and dwindling days in power may be seen as making the most apocalyptic actions necessary.

Bush may be incoherent. But Hart proves who is the adult and who isn’t with that last remark.

Not to be outdone in the “October Surprise” department, “Susan UnPC” writing at Larry Johnson’s blog No Quarter goes Hart one better. After expressing skepticism about an attack on Iran before the election, she evidently can’t resist the pull of pithy prognostication by highlighting a piece in The Nation that solemnly informs us that the President is going to send a “Strike Group” (?) of one aircraft carrier, one cruiser, one destroyer, one frigate, one supply ship, and a submarine escort to the Iranian coast.

I can see where the Iranians would be quaking in their boots. Such a fearsome array of American might could influence the mullahs to throw up their hands and surrender without us having to fire a shot.

One would think that any preparation for a strike on Iran would allow for considerably more seapower than that measly aggregation of naval assets that the armchair admirals at The Nation assure us will be on their way to the Iranian coast on October 1. In fact, given Iran’s vaunted anti-ship capability, it would seem to me suicidal to send only 5 warships into a potential combat area. And since it is unlikely our admirals have completely lost their minds, one would think that either the magazine is talking through its proverbial hat or that they put two and two together and came up with 3 1/2.

Susan UnPC then highlights the considerable downside in attacking Iran, something evidently no one on the left seems to think that the Administration has thought about. Instead, like Gary Hart, they see Bush and his “messianic” quest to rid the world of Iranian nukes before his time in office is over as proof that no one in the White House has told Bush what would happen if we attacked.

In fact, there have been several leaked analyses of the fallout from an attack on Iranian territory. And the Administration’s public pronouncements on the subject have been much more circumspect than they were in the run up to the Iraqi invasion.

That said, it appears the Administration is willing to give diplomacy a little more time - as long as they are convinced that Ahmadinejad isn’t using negotiations as a cover to build up his program as fast as possible.

But does any of this point to an attack on Iran as part of some electoral ploy by Bush to spring an “October Surprise” on the American people and fool them into voting for…who? Bush isn’t running for anything. And given the disgust with Republicans in Congress, it is a stretch to see any gain accruing to the GOP as a result of a very controversial and problematic military action.

For you see, the American people are much smarter than your average liberal. They aren’t as dumb as liberals presume them to be which means that they “get” the idea that attacking in October so close to the election would be more of an electoral gambit than a legitimate response to a national threat. What does it say about the left that they fear an “October Surprise” when any such move by the White House would more than likely boomerang much to the party’s detriment.

What this attitude says about the left illustrates why they can’t win elections. The American people will not trust a party that treats them like they were a bunch of bible thumping, goober chewing, nitwits who can’t think for themselves and need the guidance of the nanny state to help them tie their shoes in the morning.

The only “Surprise” we’re likely to see in October is a further erosion of the gigantic lead built up by Democrats over the summer as the American people realize the party has nothing to offer except deranged Bush hatred. And while they may despise Bush as much as the Democrats, they would prefer to vote for somebody or something rather than mindlessly oppose the President based on the prognostications of people who have yet to be right about predicting anything.

This post has been swirling around on the outskirts of my conscious mind for months. It has to do partly with the politics of the war but even more so with the strategy for fighting global jihadism. As news from Iraq and Afghanistan gets more grim by the week and it is becoming apparent that anti-western and anti-American sentiment has spawned jihadist networks far beyond anything Osama Bin Laden ever imagined for al-Qaeda, we are confronted with the uncomfortable question of whether or not our actions in the Middle East and elsewhere have exacerbated the problem of terrorism.

In short, is there anything we could have done differently that would have made the United States safer while still dealing effectively with the global threat of terrorism?

In one way, the question opens the abyss beneath our feet in that it calls into question everything we’ve been doing for the past five years to fight terrorism. But in another way, the question challenges the assumptions of those who offer much in the way of criticism but little in the way of alternatives.

In what will possibly be seen as one of the seminal documents in the history of the Global War on Terror, a recently compiled National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism lays out in stark and unbending terms, what 5 years of our efforts in the War on Terror have wrought:

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

That’s the headline; Iraq War creates more terrorists and terrorism. But there’s much more to ponder, including the notion that terrorist groups today are much more diffused across the world and have little or no connection to the “original” al-Qaeda:

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.

In the end, the NIE attributes this scattering of terrorists to both our efforts in taking out the Taliban and the fact that hatred of the west has thrown up many more radicals than most of us thought possible 5 years ago.

I am not disputing the conclusions in this leaked report. I am resisting the implications that some would draw from it; that if only we had not confronted the jihadists or worked to solve the root causes of terrorism, none of this would be true today.

I totally reject that notion. In fact, I believe it delusional thinking to say that we’d be any safer if we hadn’t invaded Iraq or if we had just lobbed a few cruise missiles at Osama Bin Laden following 9/11, or even if we had put enormous pressure on Israel to come to an agreement with the Palestinians. All of this ignores the one overarching truth about the nature of our enemies (and their tens of millions of supporters around the world); what they seek, we cannot give them.

Whether it’s a desire for the west to disengage from the Middle East - a region that supplies the lifeblood of our civilization - or a demand that we change our laws, our values, and our principles to accommodate them, or to simply submit to the will of Allah as they interpret it, we cannot yield. The jihadists wish us to change, to join them in living in the past where women were chattel, holy men dictated lifestyle, and the Muslim Caliphate was the glory of the known world.

The “root causes” crowd is fond of pointing out what they believe the reasons that terrorism is practiced on the west. They rightly repeat ad nauseum that terrorism is a tactic not an ideology and that given the huge disparity in military might between the west and the jihadists, employing the tactics of terrorism makes a good deal of sense. They also point to the extreme poverty of Muslim countries and that in many ways, Muslims are a “people out of time,” a direct result of a post-colonial residual feeling of inferiority and resentment. Terrorism gives the poor jihadis a means to strike back against their former oppressors (or current ones if you believe some of the more radical western leftists).

First of all, identifying “root causes” is all well and good. But short of massive transfers of wealth, overthrowing the despots who are sitting on top of all that oil, and allowing the State of Israel to be destroyed, just what the devil are we supposed to do to assuage this massive rage against us? That’s why this kind of psychobabble applied to people who desire to murder us all is disturbing to those of us whose thinking isn’t muddled by guilt ridden dreams of western imperialism or a belief that if only we could all sit down and exchange views, the jihadis hearts would soften and the problem would disappear.

An unfair exaggeration of the “root causes” crowd’s positions? Perhaps a little. But “solving” the problem of poverty anywhere is a chimera under any circumstances. And given the obvious tension between addressing the concerns of people being oppressed by despots and those same despots holding life in the balance for the western world with their hands clasped around an oil spigot, one can immediately see where the real world so rudely intrudes on the fantasies of the “root causes” crowd. And this goes to another favorite “root cause” of terrorism; our overall foreign policy and the fact that we are, for better or for worse, the only superpower around.

We are a nation of nearly 300 million people with an economy 3 times the size of the next largest producer. The world may hate our support for Israel but they can’t resist McDonalds. They may despise our support for despots around the world but they line up in droves to see Hollywood movies. They may riot over cartoons of the prophet, but they will work for years in order to save up enough to come to the United States for the opportunity to have a better life for themselves and their children.

Our superpower status is the result of the fact that the United States of America exists. Destroy the large corporations, contract the economy, bring every soldier home, dismantle our armed forces, makes ourselves a vassal of the United Nations and America would still be a superpower, still annoying most of the rest of the world. Of course, if we did all of that there wouldn’t be much left of the rest of the world. The world needs America pretty much the way we are now, despite the fact that it suits the nations to pretend this is not so for their own domestic reasons.

But what about radically altering our foreign policy and abjure our own concerns in the interest of world comity? This is an interesting criticism because it presupposes that we elect Presidents not to formulate policies to protect American interests but rather to bow to the interests of other countries. In effect, this critique posits the notion that we would be better off if we forgot about our own vital interests and used our power to injure ourselves, to shoot ourselves in the foot so to speak.

Again, is this an exaggeration of the “root causes” position? Not if you listen to some of its more articulate advocates like Noam Chomsky. The belief, for instance, that solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem can be approached by the United States reversing 60 years of support for the Jewish state by taking the side of the Palestinians in the dispute. Nothing less will satisfy the Palestinians and most of the Arab world so why pretend otherwise? The only “honest broker” desired by the Arabs is an auctioneer who will take bids on the pieces that remain of Israel once their enemies are through with them.

This doesn’t deal directly with the question of whether or not our tactics and strategy that we’ve employed in the War on Terror so far have made the problem worse than if we had gone a different route. But it does highlight the paucity of options between outright confrontation of the terrorists and a kind of middling, muddled, pre-9/11 approach to terrorism that saw us clearly on the defensive and faced with the prospect of future attacks that would use weapons of mass destruction.

Opinions on alternative paths we could have taken after 9/11 are as many as there are Democratic candidates for President. But one thing they will all agree on is that we never should have invaded Iraq. Indeed, the NIE outlined above would seem to indicate that the war was a blunder in that it has created more terrorists, radicalized young Muslims, and generated hate and revulsion against America throughout the Islamic world.

The counterfactual argument is tempting in this regard. No invasion of Iraq would mean fewer terrorists, less hate of America in the Islamic world, and generally speaking, a quieter world.

Even with Saddam? Some think so. In September of 2001, the world was more than ready to lift sanctions against Iraq and welcome Saddam back into the fold. How that would have played out over the next 5 years I leave to imaginations better suited for nightmares than mine but I think it safe to say that a re-invigorated Iraq would have been unpredictable and, given Saddam’s history, extremely dangerous to the neighborhood.

This is no secret which is why the United States Congress was calling for regime change in Iraq as early as 1998. But it important to point out that there would be no box for Saddam if the sanctions were lifted. And when even the Pope was calling for an end to them, as John Paull II did in 2000, you know that eventually the French and Russians, eager to bring their clandestine dealings with Saddam into the open, would have successfully agitated to have to sanctions lifted.

This is old ground, well travelled here and elsewhere. But given the alternatives between confronting Saddam and, despite the myopic and ass covering reports from Congress and our intelligence agencies, his clear support for terrorists (can critics guarantee that Saddam never would have established operational ties with al-Qaeda?), the range of options regarding Iraq narrows considerably. One can argue that the timing was wrong in confronting Iraq. But as something we eventually would have been forced into doing as a result of a general conflict with terror and terror states, it is very difficult to see how we could have avoided it.

Despite the NIE’s conclusions, it should be noted that it is not saying specifically that we should not have invaded Iraq. What it is saying should make us think long and hard about the disadvantages of confronting the terrorism beast without preparing for the fallout. I think even if we had been able to look into the future 3 years ago and have seen this report, the stark choices facing the Administration would have been exactly the same. It may be triumphalism for some to be able to point to the NIE as proof that things would have been different if we had not invaded Iraq. But that doesn’t change what conditions were like in 2003 and what was on the horizon if we did nothing.

I haven’t read a dead tree edition of Time Magazine in many, many years but one of my favorite Departments used to be “Milestones” that was actually run as a separate page of the Magazine. In it, they marked the passage of famous people, reported on births, accomplishments, and sometimes unusual or interesting happenings around the world.

But when I read this lone Associated Press story marking the “milestone” of war casualties equaling in number the victims of the attack on 9/11, my jaw did a little floor scraping:

Now the death toll is 9/11 times two.

U.S. military deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan now surpass those of the most devastating terrorist attack in America’s history, the trigger for what came next.

The latest milestone for a country at war came Friday without commemoration. It came without the precision of knowing who was the 2,974th to die in conflict. The terrorist attacks killed 2,973 victims in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

An Associated Press count of the U.S. death toll in Iraq rose to 2,696. Combined with 278 U.S. deaths in and around Afghanistan, the 9/11 toll was reached, then topped, the same day. The Pentagon reported Friday the latest death from Iraq, an as-yet unidentified soldier killed a day earlier after his vehicle was hit by a roadside bombing in eastern Baghdad.

Not for the first time, war that was started to answer death has resulted in at least as much death for the country that was first attacked, quite apart from the higher numbers of enemy and civilians killed, too.

What makes this piece so unbelievably disingenuous is that the reporter then takes the next 500 words to tell us why this “milestone” doesn’t matter:

Historians note that this grim accounting is not how the success or failure of warfare is measured, and that the reasons for conflict are broader than what served as the spark.

The body count from World War II was far higher for Allied troops than for the crushed Axis. Americans lost more men in each of a succession of Pacific battles than the 2,390 people who died at Pearl Harbor in the attack that made the U.S. declare war on Japan. The U.S. lost 405,399 in the theaters of World War II.

“There’s never a good war but if the war’s going well and the overall mission remains powerful, these numbers are not what people are focusing on,” said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Boston University. “If this becomes the subject, then something’s gone wrong.”

Beyond the tribulations of the moment and the now-rampant doubts about the justification and course of the Iraq war, Zelizer said Americans have lost firsthand knowledge of the costs of war that existed keenly up to the 1960s, when people remembered two world wars and Korea, and faced Vietnam.

“A kind of numbness comes from that,” he said. “We’re not that country anymore — more bothered, more nervous. This isn’t a country that’s used to ground wars anymore.”

In fact, the milestone itself was not really the reason for highlighting our war dead. It was to point to the fallacious notion that the war is part of the class struggle:

A new study on the war dead and where they come from suggests that the notion of “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” has become a little truer over time.

Among the Americans killed in the Iraq war, 34 percent have come from communities reporting the lowest levels of family income. Half have come from middle income communities and only 17 percent from the highest income level.

Even if true, what in God’s name does the economic background of our casualties have to do with anything? Does the reporter truly believe that this is a “Rich Man’s War?”

In order to prove that assumption, one must delve into the conspiracy theories involving Haliburton and the oil companies. Because while you could almost certainly prove that there have been increased profits for large corporations doing business with the government as a result of the war, there is not one scintilla of evidence proving that the reason George Bush went to war in the first place was to personally enrich himself or his Evil Corporate Friends. It is a fantasy that has been pushed by the left for nearly 5 years. The theory makes a titanic mistake in logic and reason by positing the notion that there is no other possible explanation for increased profits for Haliburton except the reason that Bush and Cheney wanted to do themselves and their friends a favor.

It insults the intelligence of thinking people to make such charges - which of course lets out the left and most of the press.

The overt bias inherent in this piece is a disgrace. One can be anti-war without allowing that bias to permeate a story about our honored dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Associated Press should either amend the story to make it a study of the economic disparities in Iraq War dead or pull the piece entirely. The highlighting of that “milestone” was gratuitous and without precedent in the history of war reporting.

I can certainly understand why former President Bill Clinton lost his temper at Chris Wallace when the Fox News reporter asked him:

WALLACE: When we announced that you were going to be on Fox News Sunday, I got a lot of email from viewers, and I got to say I was surprised most of them wanted me to ask you this question. Why didn’t you do more to put Bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business when you were President? There’s a new book out which I suspect you’ve read called the Looming Tower. And it talks about how the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, Bin Laden said “I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of US troops.” Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole.

CLINTON: OK..

WALLACE: …may I just finish the question sir. And after the attack, the book says, Bin Laden separated his leaders because he expected an attack and there was no response. I understand that hindsight is 20/20.

CLINTON: No let’s talk about…

WALLACE: …but the question is why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?

CLINTON: OK, let’s talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network…ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 9/11 Commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people.

If there was ever a clearer example of bias in news reporting, I have yet to see it.

First of all, Wallace had the temerity to ask a question that seemed to be uppermost in viewer’s minds. Imagine that! PAYING ATTENTION TO THE PEOPLE WHO WATCH YOUR NETWORK!

Ab. So. Lute. Ly. Shameful. You’d never catch a real news network like CNN or MSNBC doing anything so “unjournalistic.”

But that wasn’t the worst of Wallace’s outrageous bias. The Fox reporter actually had the balls to take information from a book penned by a notorious, far left liberal journalist that documents the sorry history of the Clinton Administration’s response to terror to ask the former President a question that those real journalists at CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and every local reporter from Aberdeen, TX to Zion, IL never got around to asking because they were too busy fawning and groveling at the feet of The Charming One;

WTF WERE YOU THINKING, YOU NITWIT?

It really is quite telling that Clinton blames his inaction on “right wingers.” When the number one enemy of the United States boasts that that US is, in effect, a paper tiger and that he felt he could attack us with impunity all because of the tentative, agonizingly slow and tepid response from the American Administration, it speaks to a curious lack of introspection on the part of the ex-President and his blind, rabid supporters that they refuse to allow that their actions in any way contributed to the disaster that followed.

Ace is sputtering with rage:

The man simply lies. It is a breathtakingly stupid and mendacious claim that rightwingers, as he calls us, actually opposed his weak single effort to get bin Ladin. Throughout the late nineties, I was apopleptic we weren’t doing anything at all about bin Ladin. We wanted more action. Not less.

The pretext for this lie is that rightwingers, myself included, did in fact “question the timing” of his one attempt to kill bin Ladin. It occurred, coincidentally enough, during the Lewinsky furor. On the eve of some testimony; can’t remember which, and it really doesn’t matter.

Conservatives did not object to this attack. We were enraged, however, that the man refused to attack bin Ladin at all until he was motivated to action by a threat to his own political safety. We were not angry he’d attacked bin Ladin; we were angry he hadn’t attacked bin Ladin before (or after, actually; anyone remember a subsequent attack?).

We were angry that the man had let bin Ladin attack us with impunity for years until he saw it as a good move politically to finally launch a poorly-timed cruise missile at bin Ladin. He was animated to action not to save American lives, but to save his own f**king political life.

I’m sure in his own mind, Clinton did not allow the Monica mess to impact his decision to let fly the cruise missiles on Afghanistan and Sudan. But Clinton, certainly one of the most talented politicians of the 20th century, knew full well what the perception would be of his military action taken in the middle of an impeachment inquiry. Wagging the dog speculation was not limited to right wingers. That scenario was on the lips of leaders around the world as well.

Lefty blogs are all agog over Clinton’s outburst. They consider it a “s smackdown.” They’re cheering on “The Big Dog,” actually believing in their delusional mindset that Clinton is “reframing the national security debate” by pointing out that Bush never tried to get Osama in 8 months while he tried exactly once in 8 years.

Oh please, please, pretty please reframe the debate just like that.

In fact, the left wishes to re-establish The Narrative that may have taken a bigger hit with the ABC semi-fictional representation of the events leading up to 9/11 than I originally thought. The Narrative’s power lay in the fact that it erased most history prior to January 20, 2001 except to highlight the brave but doomed efforts of the Clinton Administration to battle the terrorists. While they did indeed take Bin Laden seriously, what is missing from The Narrative has always been the details; the hesitancy, the reluctance to engage, the institutional roadblocks deliberately put up to thwart one agency or another, and finally the suicidal underestimation of Bin Laden’s potential to do us harm.

There were exceptions, of course. Richard Clark (damn his self promoting hide) and John O’Neil of the FBI. I would add to that list Michael Schuer of the CIA who recognized the threat but was marginalized by superiors in the agency. But we know all of this and, like Ed Morrissey points out, it is time to move on:

The time has come — it has long since come — for that history to become just that: history. None of us can pretend that Bill Clinton could ever have declared war on al-Qaeda in the manner Bush did without having a 9/11-type event as a catalyst. Not only would the Left have screamed much as they do now, albeit without the Hugo Chavez-type conspiratorial thinking, Republicans would have never given Clinton the kind of support needed to send American troops into Afghanistan. The political climate had been thoroughly poisoned by the time of the African bombings and Congress would never have put aside its deathmatch with Clinton to unite in a war effort, especially against a band of terrorists most Americans didn’t know existed.

All good points. But I would add one other. The way the left has constructed the 9/11 Narrative, it is still useful to them politically - even after 5 years. For that reason, they relish Clinton’s anger at someone asking a question that implies anything less than a strict adherence to their construct of events. They can even fantasize that The Narrative will change the political dynamics of debate over national security, although that kind of juvenile analysis should be beyond even the shallow thinkers over at Firedog Lake.

Clinton’s reaction is special because no one dared challenge him over his terrorist policies before. There were precious few questions asked about it during his Administration and even fewer since he’s left. And certainly, there were never questions asked that challenges the “approved” version of how the Clinton Administration carried out their obligations to protect the country. The Clintonistas and the left successfully buried most of this information in the 9/11 Commission Report by simply concentrating on the very real and outrageous failings of the Bush Administration in the lead up to 9/11. The rest of the history from that period went down the leftist rabbit hole and, according to Clinton and the rest of his slavering sycophants on the left, it should remain there, unseen and unspoken.

Chris Wallace should be commended for asking a question that was indeed on the minds of many of Fox News viewers. And the fact that Bill Clinton reacted the way he did speaks volumes about his being unaccustomed to ever being challenged on the issue before. His automatic fall back position of blaming “right wingers” reveals a man bereft of the capability of self-examination or shame.

But then, we knew that about him didn’t we…

One of the more interesting developments in the post cold war world has been the endless comedy engendered by various thugs, hypocrites, dirty necked galoots, and bloodthirsty tyrants who have been thrown up by mobs, mullahs, and militaries across the world since the wall fell.

The entertainment value in watching the rank anti-Americanism, the twisting of history, the deliberate lies and exaggerated rhetoric has been immense - better than the first episode of Survivor anyway. And in their own ways, Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have shown that each have missed their calling in life. Instead of being brutal tyrants oppressing the masses of their people, they very well could have been paired up to star in their very own sit-com. Or better yet, how about “The Hugo and Mahmoud Comedy Hour?”

The physical contrast is funny enough; Chavez - big, beefy, goat face ugly with a personality that seethes below the surface, ready to erupt at a moment’s notice. And Ahmadinejad - small, slight, elfish with that mischevious “Leave it to Beaver” smile as if to say “Don’t turn your back on me or I’ll drop a nuke in your soup!”

Almost like Laurel and Hardy. In fact, the similarities there would be striking. Chavez in a bowler hat with a little mustache, waddling alongside the vapid looking Ahmadinejad who sometimes appears to be half-asleep. The trouble they get into and then manage to get out of - usually as a result of random events having nothing to do with their own innate intelligence - is a perfect metaphor for their own careers.

In fact, the world has not seen their like very often. Idi Amin or perhaps a young Ghadaffi had the comic sense of the duo but not the messianic sense of mission or the real potential for troublemaking. The fact that both received long, sustained applause at the UN for their speeches should make every network executive in New York drool in anticipation of what their next act will look like.

Indeed, both didn’t disappoint. “Hugo Does Harlem” could be made into a Comedy Channel Special:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, appearing Thursday at a Harlem Church for an oil-for-poor event, repeated his ‘devil’ reference hurled a day earlier at President Bush during a speech at the United Nations.

“They told me that I should be careful after I called him the devil — and I think he is the devil — because he might kill me” Chavez told a crowd packed into the Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Harlem.

“But, I place myself in the hands of God,” he said.

The laugh-o-meter went off the scale with that last remark. This bodes well for ratings although the Comedy Channel already has their fair share of Bush Bashers in Stewart and Colbert. Perhaps they could sell the script to “The Home and Garden Network” or even “Animal Planet?”

As for our radioactive elf, the Iranian President, he took yesterday to lecture the Council on Foreign Relations about the Holocaust and history;

Maurice R. Greenberg: He has been quoted many times, including last evening, that the Holocaust needs to be explored as to whether or not it really occurred. And he says, “Well you know, every time somebody tries to do that, they get imprisoned.” Well, the reason some have been imprisoned is because it’s against the law in some places to deny that the Holocaust occurred.

Of course it occurred. And when he said that, I responded: “Listen, I went through Dachau during the war. To suggest it didn’t occur is simply a lie.” So he turned around and asked me how old I was, to determine if I was old enough to have been there. And then he changed the subject.

Q: So that was the extent of it?

MRG: Yes, but then there was a lot of follow up on that. He wanted to know why there was an objection to have professors and historians explore whether or not it had occurred. The fact of the matter, obviously we said, is that it’s a recognized fact that it occurred; it was 6 million Jews that perished in the Holocaust and that any single individual that denies that is not only wrong but is also trying to be revisionist of history.

[snip]

MRG: I think it’s almost impossible to do business with him as long as he has those views. He says: “Why should the Palestinians suffer even if there was a Holocaust? What does one have to do with the other?” I mean, they have nothing to do with each other. We don’t link them together. And we discussed that. They’re not linked.

He thinks the Palestinians should be permitted to return, that’s never going to happen. If the Palestinians returned to Israel, they’d swamp the country and there wouldn’t be an Israel. But he doesn’t want an Israel.

Q: It sounds like he didn’t make any effort to try to reach out…

MRG: No, no. There was no effort to reach out. He’s offensive. He’s smug. He’s a danger.

Not too much in the yucks department but more of a cereberal humor - something that might play better on The Sci-Fi Channel or maybe as a fall replacement for Keith Olberman on MSNBC.

Either way, American TV executives should take a long hard look at these two comedians. Not only would their anti-American rants play well in certain parts of the country, but they’d have that coveted 18-29 male demographic in the bag.

Curt over at Flopping Aces has a detailed look at the 9/11 Memorial built by the State of Arizona that illustrates what the far left International Freedom Center would have done with the memorial at Ground Zero.

You will recall that the original proposal for the Memorial included a 300,00 square foot exhibit of “the history of freedom” that would have included all sorts of extraneous left wing baggage about America’s sins of omission and commission over the years. Not to mention that the Board of the IFC was made up of some of the most unbalanced Bush haters in America. The actual Ground Zero Memorial would have taken up around 50,000 square feet and would have been buried underground.

What is fascinating about the Arizona 9/11 Memorial is that it goes to the heart of what the left actually thinks about that seminal day in American history. It isn’t a question of 9/11 being a tragedy - every American believes that. But as we saw with the liberal’s reaction to The Path to 9/11, The Narrative of that day must, by necessity, give short shrift to the role of Osama Bin Laden and the hijackers and concentrate instead on supposed American policies that led to the attacks.

In this way, blame can be easily shifted to America herself. And by highlighting America’s sins at the expense of the sins of the hijackers or even the courage and bravery of our citizens on 9/11, it also validates every leftist critique of American policy since the end of World War II. Viet Nam, our Latin American policies, the Cold War - the left’s historical narrative (skewed and twisted out of all proportion and reason) stands as a stark reminder that hijacking history in this manner is almost as great a sin as hijacking airplanes and flying them into buildings. In short, they are murdering the innocents and their memories all over again.

Get a load of some of things that the “memorial” wants us to “remember” about 9/11:

* “Erroneous US air strike kills 46 Uruzgan civilians (7/1/02)”

* “Congress questions why CIA & FBI didn’t prevent attacks.” (6/3/02)

* “Violent Acts Leading US to War”

Some see a crescent (representing Islam) when looking at the design of the memorial, although I think that may be reading too much into it. The problem with the Arizona memorial as with the now defunct plan for the memorial at Ground Zero is very simple:

Why can’t we just design and build a loving and powerful remembrance of what happened on September 11, 2001 only? Why is it necessary to include events and history that has absolutely nothing to do with what happened on that horrific day?

An inkling can be found in this Arizona history teacher’s anger at the whole idea of a 9/11 memorial in the first place:

In his fiery e-mail, Johnsen wrote: “What happened on September 11th was indeed tragic. Other adjectives would apply as well: unethical, immoral, shameful, needless, heartbreaking, unacceptable, etc. In my view, however, what it was not was a ’senseless’ tragedy … any more than it was ‘unthinkable’ … To me both terms suggest just a tad too much that there was simply no conceivable reason for 9/11 to have happened.”

[…]Johnsen closes his e-mail by suggesting the school “resist the Pavlovian nationalist platitudes for a change, and instead transcend our shock, grief and anger” into examining what part, “if any, U.S. policies play in breeding such hate and violence against us” and “begin engaging in democratic dialogue and coalition-building.”

No, I’m not making this moonbat a spokesman for the entire left. His extremist views would undoubtedly be rejected by many liberals. But his shifting of blame for the attacks from those who perpetrated the obscenity to America is telling indeed. For this is part and parcel of what the leftist members of the IFC had in mind with their “Freedom Center” being placed on the sacred ground of the collapsed towers.

Not content with simply honoring our dead and commemorating the survivors while telling the story of who carried out the attacks and the nature of that enemy, the left by definition must include “context” in any re-telling of the 9/11 story. That “context” would validate their post-9/11 political critiques of the Bush Administration as well as legitimize their ideological and historical criticisms of America herself.

As it stands now, the Freedom Center will be several blocks removed from Ground Zero as it should be. And the Memorial? As with the entire site, the project is hopelessly bogged down thanks to political squabbles and a curious inertia that seems to have gripped everyone involved. Five years after the attacks, New York politicians can’t seem to get their act together. And it’s long past time that they do.

I remember several months ago reading about a bi-partisan group that had been set up to make recommendations about what the United States could be doing differently in Iraq that would improve the situation.

The Iraq Study Group appears to be a little more than that. In fact, my Washington sense tells me that the group is not set up to see how things could improve but rather what would be the least painless way to leave Iraq for US domestic and foreign policy interests.

First, there are the group’s affiliations:

The United States Institute of Peace is facilitating the group with the support of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Center for the Study of the Presidency (CSP), and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

The pedigree of each of these groups is impeccable. Largely non-partisan, their ranks of experts have filled positions in the White House of both Democratic and Republican Administrations as well as the rest of the national security establishment.

Indeed, in some ways they are the national security establishment. And a glance at their boards of directors reveals the heaviest of hitters in both government and industry. Check out the board at CSIS for a good example of what I mean.

Another tell on what the real agenda of the Iraq Study Group is can be found in their mission statement:

At the urging of Congress, the United States Institute of Peace is facilitating the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, led by co-chairs James A. Baker, III, former secretary of state and honorary chairman of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, and Lee H. Hamilton, former congressman and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The Iraq Study Group will conduct a forward-looking, independent assessment of the current and prospective situation on the ground in Iraq, its impact on the surrounding region, and consequences for U.S. interests.

Was this group set up to try and forge a bi-partisan consensus on how to win the war? Here’s the Washington Post take:

The group has attracted little attention beyond foreign policy elites since its formation this year. But it is widely viewed within that small world as perhaps the last hope for a midcourse correction in a venture they generally agree has been a disaster.

The reason, by and large, is the involvement of Baker, 76, the legendary troubleshooter who remains close to the first President Bush and cordial with the second. Many policy experts think that if anyone can forge bipartisan consensus on a plan for extricating the United States from Iraq – and then successfully pitch that plan to a president who has so far seemed impervious to outside pressure — it is the man who put together the first Gulf War coalition, which evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991.

It’s no secret that most of the pundit elites in Washington abandoned any hope of victory in Iraq long ago. Conservative defections have included such luminaries as George Will, Bill Buckley, and Bob Novak. And if you read the Op-Ed pages of the Washington Post and New York Times religiously, you probably have noticed that a strong, bi-partisan consensus has already emerged among our foreign policy elites to exit Iraq.

Baker, of course, is the key. His job will be to sell the President on the coming draw down of American forces. What Baker thinks of his job was made clear in the WaPo article:

But in an interview in the current issue of Texas Monthly, Baker dashed the idea of “just picking up and pulling out” of Iraq. “Even though it’s something we need to find a way out of, the worst thing in the world we could do would be to pick up our marbles and go home,” he said, “because then we will trigger, without a doubt, a huge civil war. And every one of the regional actors — the Iranians and everybody else — will come in and do their thing.”

The study group appears to be struggling to find some middle ground between such a pullout and the administration’s strategy of keeping a heavy American troop presence until the Iraqi government can maintain security on its own.

In other words, no “cut and run” but rather the slow, inexorable drawdown of US forces whose exit will not so much reflect the ability of the Iraqi government to defend itself from internal enemies but rather how the pull out will be perceived by the rest of the world - including how it will play domestically.

Cut and run - even if it’s done slowly - is still cut and run.

The immorality of this strategy is shocking in its implications. The foreign policy elites have apparently decided that the war is unwinnable but that it would harm American interests if we simply up and left. Therefore, they are going to ask young American men and women to risk their lives not for victory, but…for what? To save face? To keep politicians from looking bad? To fool the American people?

In fact, any exit from Iraq that doesn’t leave a stable government capable of maintaining a modicum of peace on the streets would be seen by the entire world as a crushing defeat for the United States. How we get there by “extricating” ourselves is a fairy tale I’m dying to hear.

What the Washington Post sees as Bush stubbornness - the President is “impervious to outside pressure” - is actually the only rational policy for Iraq.

Not “staying the course.” There absolutely must be changes to our force structure including additional troops sent immediately to try and secure Baghdad. Other important alterations in strategy (not policy) would help with some of the other challenges faced by our troops. But the policy of helping the Iraqis until they are capable of defending themselves must be the correct one. Anything less and we might as well leave now. We simply cannot ask our troops - even if they are professional soldiers - and their families, to make the kinds of sacrifices they have already made for some kind of nebulous outcome in a conflict that has already cost more than 3,000 American lives and 20,000 wounded not to mention almost 50,000 Iraqi lives.

Another indication that the Iraq Study Group is not interested in even trying to redefine victory:

The administration’s more hawkish supporters, meanwhile, are nervous about Baker’s involvement, counting him as one of the “realist” foreign policy proponents they see as having allowed threats against the United States to grow in the ’80s and ’90s. Gary J. Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute voiced concern that the Iraq group was not listening to those advocating a more muscular military strategy to defeat the insurgency.

But Schmitt added: “People can worry about what Baker is going to say, but the president has a way of doing what he is going to do. There could be a lot of wishful thinking on the part of the older Bush crowd that the son got into trouble and now he’s going to listen to Baker the strategist.”

Our foreign policy elites want to abandon Iraq without appearing to do so. They apparently won’t offer any advice via interim reports until after the November elections. When they do, I expect their recommendations won’t offer anything new as far as a strategy for winning.

For that, they should be condemned because they are unwilling to face the unpalatable alternative that would place our soldiers in harms way in order to satisfy something less than victory.

UPDATE

Evidently, Rudy Guiliani resigned from the group several months ago citing “time considerations.” You don’t think it could have anything to do with the fact that he knows the group’s recommendations will not sit well with conservative hawks? And that Rudy may need the hawks come 2008?

Just wondering…

This has to be the strangest blog kerfluffle in history.

Ann Althouse wrote a post in which she made the mistake of trying to reason with an outraged liberal feminist who took offense at Ann’s comments about a picture of lefty bloggers snapped after their lunch with former President Clinton. Althouse subtly tried to make a point about the female bloggers arrayed around Clinton like flies drawn to a honeypot when into the comments section, Jessica from the blog Feminsting showed up to identify herself in the photo (she’s standing directly in front of Clinton) while availing herself of the opportunity to take a completely off the wall shot at Althouse:

“The, um, ‘intern’ is me. It’s so nice to see women being judged by more than their looks. Oh, wait…”

In a somewhat jocular fashion, Althouse responded:

“Well, Jessica, you do appear to be ‘posing.’ Maybe it’s just an accident.”

Althouse, who blogs from the Moonbat Capitol of the World (Madison, Wisconsin) should have known better. Her half jest was met with a lecture by Jessica:

It’s a picture; people pose. And I’m not sure I understand your logic anyway. If I “pose” for a picture (as opposed to sulking and hunching over?) then I deserve to be judged for my looks? I don’t see anyone talking sh*t about the other bloggers smiling pretty for the camera.

Cry Victim! And let slip the blogs of war!

Althouse put on her lawyer’s hat and once again, tried reasoning with the unreasonable:

Jessica: I’m not judging you by your looks. (Don’t flatter yourself.) I’m judging you by your apparent behavior. It’s not about the smiling, but the three-quarter pose and related posturing, the sort of thing people razz Katherine Harris about. I really don’t know why people who care about feminism don’t have any edge against Clinton for the harm he did to the cause of taking sexual harrassment seriously, and posing in front of him like that irks me, as a feminist. So don’t assume you’re the one representing feminist values here. Whatever you call your blog….

For the rest, you’ll have to follow various links to lefty blogs to get a sense how this dispute has descended into the most vile personal attacks. The episode morphed from a discussion about Clinton’s well known treatment of women and how feminists have been hypocrites for their unwavering support of his satyristic behavior into attacks on righty bloggers for what liberals see as hypocrisy about emphasizing female breasts. Atrios (predictably) pasted a picture of Helen Reynolds on his blog in one such attempt. And Jane Hamsher weighed in with equal predictability, attacking conservatives for…something…”

The obsession by creepy wingnuts with oggling Bill Clinton’s jock and any boobs that get within 60 feet of it continues. Mrs. Snickering Right-Wing Beat-Off hoists herself into the fray, but one has to wonder looking at the bizarre and disturbing photo above — are her agressions displaced?

The photo is of lovely Pamela of Atlas Shrugs and Glenn Reynolds at the PJ Media kickoff luncheon.

And then Hamsher got to the nub of the matter; conservatives are sexually repressed:

These people make the 19th Century Viennese look sexually well-adjusted.

A perusal of other lefty sites (and the comments at Althouse’s blog) reveals this to be the primary critique of the left regarding the right and female breasts; we are ashamed of our bodies and therefore simply aren’t liberated enough to enjoy the sexual act. And this brings us back to young Ms. Jessica and her “pose” in the photo from the Clinton lunch.

Actually, from a personal standpoint, I find Jessica a very attractive young woman. What my opinion of her would be after she opened her mouth and began to speak, I can only imagine.

Most men I know have had “dates from hell” with women like Jessica. Usually of the blind variety, the evening starts off well enough but rapidly degenerates into an intellectual quagmire as nothing the male says or does assuages the outrage felt by the brave victim standing up for truth, justice, and the female orgasm.

That said, I’ve often felt that feminists are almost as fixated on the female form as males. At least from the perspective of how that form is both a trap and an edge that most women use to excellent advantage. Where the feminist and the American male differ, however, is in the perception of that most marvelous of evolutionary adaptations found in the human species; the female breast.

Jessica features breasts in some prominent positions on her website as Althouse points out. And while I must confess that when looking at her picture from the Clinton lunch, I was much more taken with her general womanly form than impressed by her mammary endowment, I can nonetheless see where those men who are fixated on the female breast would take her “pose” as an effort to accentuate the positive so to speak.

For in the end, most feminists (indeed, most women), do not understand the male member of the species. We are a diverse lot when it comes to our sexual hot buttons. Some prefer the posterior rather than anterior. Others are moved to poetry by the length and shape of a woman’s leg. Still others are held in rapture by a set of mesmerizing eyes. For myself, there is something about a woman’s back, the way her slender shoulders droop languorously into a well formed, yet softly beckoning upper arm that sets my heart racing and blood pumping.

And yet for all of us, the sight of a naked woman’s chest or the thought of one almost universally elicits a desire to copulate. It has ever been so and I imagine will always be thus. To deny the humanity of this simple, powerful evolutionary urge or to decry its existence is ludicrous.

I understand that many feminists take issue with the way the female breast is used in our society - especially in marketing various products to males. Does it cheapen or denigrate women to be portrayed thusly? I have never bought into the notion that such advertising “objectifies” women any more than women objectify themselves when accentuating their physical attributes via clothing or makeup (a tradition that predates modern marketing) at the expense of their numerous other gifts. It could be that in hierarchal societies where males have absolute dominance, such behavior is forced upon women as their only means to exercise control over their own lives. But today? In this or most any other western country? I wonder if the long running feminist outrage over the exhibitionary nature of the female form isn’t losing much of its relevance in a society that recognizes and indeed celebrates the achievements of women in all walks of life.

This doesn’t obviate the very real discrimination against women in the workplace. Nor does it excuse the behavior of some men who abuse women physically and psychologically. But I think it does reveal a new paradigm that most liberal feminists ignore while stubbornly clinging to old verities about the position of women in western society. The world is changing. And those changes, allowing women to joyously express their own sexuality in ways unthought of by many of us in our youth, is a symptom of a tidal shift in attitudes by both men and women about a host of issues dealing with the interpersonal relationships between a man and a woman.

In short the feminists are winning. But acknowledging that singular fact would make their critiques and even the Movement itself virtually irrelevant overnight. It is a supreme irony that one of the very issues that feminists belabor the loudest - the objectification of women and the exploitation of their bodies - has lost much of its potency thanks to the attitude of most non-feminist women toward sex and the by play between a man and woman in the bedroom.

So go ahead, Jessica. Stick out that chest and be proud. Celebrate your power over men using the tools that 175,000 years of homo sapien evolution have given you.

Now if only we could convince you to keep your mouth shut…(just kidding).