Right Wing Nut House

A couple of weeks ago when that Dutch airliner returned to the Amsterdam airport following an incident involving 12 men who, after boarding the plane late, began to pass around cell phones and walk up and down the aisles, I asked on my radio show “What is going on here?”

In the last several months there have been numerous incidents involving suspicious behavior of passengers or threats that have been phoned in or found scrawled on air sickness bags. And counterterrorism experts say that even though most of these incidents are explainable because of heightened security fears, there are just too many of them to dismiss out of hand. In fact, these experts believe that some of these incidents could have been “feints” by terrorists:

“We are constantly being probed by terrorists,” Mr. Hagmann said. “We are going to have a limited number of incidents that are just a ploy, a nonevent as a result of misunderstandings or innocuous activity. You can expect that and factor that in. But the extent we are seeing today — the numbers are well beyond the norm.”

At least 23 incidents worldwide since the Aug. 10 arrests of two dozen suspects have led to 11 emergency landings or flight diversions, four of them escorted by military jets, and 16 arrests.

The majority of disruptions occurred on domestic and inbound international flights. The number of publicly reported security incidents peaked on Aug. 25, with eight incidents on that day, Mr. Hagmann said.

Judging by that shocking number of incidents on August 25 as well as the other reported events, one would have to conclude either we have the biggest bunch of bedwetting scaredy cats running our airline security or that something very, very bad may be in the offing. And, of course, those numbers don’t include incidents that are not publicly reported.

This kind of speculation is not new. Annie Jacobsen of the Womens Wall Street Journal has written a series on her own experience in a flight where 14 Syrian men behaved in an extraordinarily strange way - moving about the cabin, making sudden moves toward the cockpit, going in and out of the bathroom frequently among other noticeable activities. Jacobsen has also kept track of a few other similar incidents. Her tussle with DHS over getting them to investigate the incident is indicative of either a dysfunctional counterterrorism system or bureaucratic laziness.

Are we being paranoid?

Laura Mansfield, a counterterrorism consultant and Arabic translator, says many of the incidents involve terrorist sympathizers hoping to divert attention from actual terrorists moving forward with real plots.

“There is a combination of things going on. They are trying to get the threat level reduced by creating a bunch of false alarms so people will be complacent. It’s also a strategy of red herrings and disinformation,” she said.

The aviation threat level in the U.S. went to Code Red, or severe, after the Britain arrests and today remains on Code Orange, or high.

Miss Mansfield said that although the terrorists pay no attention to anniversary dates, recent activity and the release of several tapes indicate that Islamic militants want badly to strike the U.S. before this upcoming September 11.

An example of sympathizer involvement Miss Mansfield cited is a 2004 campaign in which in an Islamist Web site urged Muslim tourists to distract law enforcement by videotaping landmarks, nuclear plants, water-treatment facilities and infrastructure on their vacations.

According to many on the left, there is very little to worry about, that the War on Terrorism, alert levels, arresting people who are plotting terrorist acts, and spying on terrorists is all part of a gigantic conspiracy by the Bush Administration to make political hay out of terrorist threats by using fear as a political club to force the American people to vote for Republicans.

Yes it is true that terrorism as a political issue is a huge plus for Republicans. But instead of seeing straw men in the wind perhaps Democrats should be asking themselves why that is so? Is it because Americans are a bunch of cowardly lions with no courage and, as John Dean speculates in his best selling book “Conservatives Without Conscience” a predilection to follow authoritarian politicians?

Or could it possibly be that Americans are an eminently practical people and prefer a political party that takes terrorism as seriously as they do and worries less about “understanding” terrorists as putting them 6 feet under?

Don’t look for an answer any time soon on that score. There is no place on earth where there is less introspective analysis than on the left wing of the Democratic party.

That same Islamist website encouraging ordinary Muslim tourists to distract our counterterroism efforts added this chilling message:

“The distractions are going well,” the site reported. “The Americans are chasing those with video cameras believing them to be terrorists. That permits us to do our preparations undetected.”

Another piece of the same puzzle from a mosque in Georgia:

Last year, Miss Mansfield visited a mosque in Georgia that advertised an English and Arabic session on God and family. She attended the Arabic session where a man identified as Khaled recounted a New York flight. He and his friends acted suspicious and made simultaneous restroom runs to frighten passengers.

“He laughed when he described how several women were in tears, and one man sitting near him was praying,” Miss Mansfield later wrote in an account of that meeting on her personal Web site.

“As the meeting drew to a close, the imam gave a brief speech calling for the protection of Allah on the mujahedeen fighting for Islam throughout the world, and reminded everyone that it was their duty as Muslims to continue in the path of jihad, whether it was simple efforts like those of Khaled and his friends, or the actual physical fighting,” Miss Mansfield wrote.

Please note the “simultaneous restroom runs” and compare it to Annie Jacobsen’s experience. Coincidence? Or part of a mis-direction playbook authored by jihadists?

And another little tidbit of information to chew on; Federal Air Marshall’s have been forced to reveal themselves twice in the last two weeks. They have done so only once previously in the 5 years since 9/11.

I am not asking you to connect any dots. There are no dots to connect so don’t bother. What I am asking is “What is going on here?”

And the terrorists may not even need to bring down a plane to accomplish their goal:

We have to keep in mind the terrorists want to strike at our economy, and the airline industry is very weak. These diversions and cancellation of flights cost the airline industry a lot of money, and we have to look at that,” Mr. Hagmann said.

Dave Mackett, an airline pilot and president of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance, says the diversions are costing airlines millions and leaves the industry vulnerable to lawsuits.

“This cannot be the new norm,” Mr. Mackett said.

And whatever happened to those 12 Indian Muslims on that Amsterdam to Mumbai flight that was escorted back to the Amsterdam airport by F-16’s?

They were released within 48 hours after enormous pressure was applied by the Indian government. And when they returned to India?

“It was a misunderstanding on the part of the airline. We were treated well and want to forget it as a bad experience,” Mohammad Iqbal Batliwala, one of the passengers told reporters on arrival at the airport.

Batliwala refused to comment further saying that he was tired.

Another passenger Shakeel Chotani said that the ‘misunderstanding has been sorted out’.

Meanwhile, the remaining passengers refused to speak to the waiting media and were taken away by their relatives.

The passengers took over an hour to come out of the terminal building after their aircraft landed.

A “misunderstanding by the airline?” A refusal to say anything else? The other men running off without saying anything?

One question; how would you feel if you were innocent and rousted in such a manner? I know I would be screaming bloody murder to the press the first chance I got. And I wouldn’t chalk it up to a “misunderstanding” by anybody but rather a clear case of profiling.

Extremely odd. And one more puzzle piece to put off to the side until we figure out where it might fit - if it even belongs to the terrorism puzzle at all.

Bully for the US government!

Not content with letting the moonbats, the freaks, the paranoids, and the ignoramuses who spout 9/11 conspiracy theories get away with their nonsensical idiocies any longer, the government released two separate reports debunking several major claims of the 9/11 fantasists in an effort to keep the record of that horrible day from being hijacked by crazies.

And as a bonus, in the process of answering the reports, two major 9/11 conspiracists have revealed themselves to be laughable, hopelessly moronic nutcases.

Kudos also to New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer whose brilliant summary of the evidence includes his own debunking of the “implosion theory” of how the towers fell. Dwyer’s piece should be required reading for every school kid in America so that future generations will see these 9/11 fantasies for what they truly are; pathetic mouthings of desperately unbalanced people whose “evidence” depends more on wishful thinking than empirical proof.

Nevertheless, federal officials say they moved to affirm the conventional history of the day because of the persistence of what they call “alternative theories.” On Wednesday, the National Institute of Standards and Technology issued a seven-page study based on its earlier 10,000-page report on how and why the trade center collapsed. The full report, released a year ago, and the new study, in a question and answer format, are available online at http://wtc.nist.gov.

About a dozen researchers produced the new study over the last two months by assembling material from the longer report that addressed the conspiracy claims.

“With the fifth anniversary coming up, there seemed to be more play for the alternative viewpoints,” said Michael E. Newman, a spokesman for the institute. “We have received e-mails and phone calls asking us to respond to these theories, and we felt that this fact sheet was the best means of doing so.”

The fact that it took a dozen people two months to condense the evidence for the tower’s collapse down to 7 pages should make you angry. This waste of time and resources is the direct result of people who should (or actually do) know better but whose ignorance and inability to grasp reality (or who choose to believe otherwise for political purposes) have infected the gullible, the shallow thinkers, and out and out loons who have spread their laughable theories on the internet and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Dwyer easily demolishes the implosion theory with the help of a couple of experts:

The demolition theory has managed to endure what would seem to be enormous obstacles to its practicality. Controlled demolition is done from the bottom of buildings, not the top, to take advantage of gravity, and there is little dispute that the collapse of the two towers began high in the towers, in the areas where the airplanes struck.

Moreover, a demolition project would have required the tower walls to be opened on dozens of floors, followed by the insertion of thousands of pounds of explosives, fuses and ignition mechanisms, all sneaked past the security stations, inside hundreds of feet of walls on all four faces of both buildings. Then the walls presumably would have been closed up.

All this would have had to take place without attracting the notice of any of the thousands of tenants and workers in either building; no witness has ever reported such activity. Then on the morning of Sept. 11, the demolition explosives would have had to withstand the impacts of the airplanes, since the collapse did not begin for 57 minutes in one tower, and 102 minutes in the other.

Professor Steven Jones, a physicist at Brigham Young University and a God in the 9/11 tin foil hat community, makes an utter fool of himself trying to answer several of the simple questions Dwyer raises above:

In an e-mail message yesterday, Professor Jones did not explain how so much explosive could have been positioned in the two buildings without drawing attention. “Others are researching the maintenance activity in the buildings in the weeks prior to 9/11/2001,” he wrote.

He said his investigation was finding fluorine and zinc in metal debris and dust gathered from near the trade center site, and argued that those elements should not have been found in the building compounds. “We are investigating the possibility of thermite-based arson and demolition,” he wrote, referring to compounds that, under controlled circumstances, can cut through steel.

The federal investigators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology state that enormous quantities of thermite would have to be applied to the structural columns to damage them. Not so, said Professor Jones; he said he and others were investigating “superthermite.”

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? “SUPERTHERMITE?”

What’s next? Invisible “maintenance workers?”

Also making a himself look like an idiot was that gadfly of the 9/11 conspiracy bozos Kevin Ryan whose online publication www.journalof911studies.com, has been filled with some of the most uproariously funny takes on who or what brought down the towers including this gem: “The Flying Elephant: Evidence for Involvement of a Third Jet in the WTC Attacks.”

Here’s Ryan vainly trying to challenge the existence of the nose on his face:

The report brought to light one little-known detail about the morning: a private demolition monitoring firm, Protec Documentation Services, had seismographs at several construction sites in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Those machines documented the tremors of the falling towers, but captured no ground vibrations before the collapses from demolition charges or bombs, according to a separate report by Brent Blanchard, the director of field operations for Protec. It is available online at www.implosionworld.com.

Asked for comment, Mr. Ryan said that his online 9/11 journal would soon publish an article on those seismic recordings. He also maintained that the Protec paper did not adequately address why puffs of smoke were seen being expelled from some of the floors. However, the federal investigators said that about 70 percent of a building’s volume consists of air, and what looked like puffs of smoke were jets of air — and dust — that were pushed ahead of the collapse.

Maybe it was Howard Dean. He certainly blows a lot of smoke and do we know where he was on 9/11?

The other report was issued by the State Department’s PR department and contains simple, easy to understand counterpoints to the top ten conspiracy theories about 9/11:

The State Department report, which officials said was written independently of the new institute study, is titled, “The Top Sept. 11 Conspiracy Theories” and says, “Numerous unfounded conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 attacks continue to circulate, especially on the Internet.” Produced by an arm of the State Department known as a “counter-misinformation team,” the report is dated Aug. 28 and appears as a special feature on the department’s Web site, at http://usinfo.state.gov/media/misinformation.html.

These reports, as Dwyer points out, will not convince any of the true believers among the 9/11 conspiracy crowd. It does something much more important; it halts the momentum that was being generated by the fact that the 9/11 fantasists had the playing field pretty much to themselves. They were able to advance their stupidities and begin gaining acceptance for their cockamamie theories because the effort to debunk them was not half as organized as the effort to hijack the narrative. In the game of public relations, those who are most organized usually win. In this case, the government has taken it upon itself to expend the resources necessary to give the lie to the conspiracist’s notions of what happened on 9/11 while publicizing its findings nationwide as only the government can. At the very least, there is now another source - one more accessible and easy to understand - that people who are truly interested in the subject can turn to for information.

The release of these two reports should not have been necessary. Not that people shouldn’t question the government’s investigation but rather they should believe the integrity of the scientific process as well as the mountain of evidence that the government used to come to the conclusions it did about 9/11. There comes a point where even skeptics have to give in to the weight of evidence and common sense. These reports help that process enormously.

Today is a good day for the truth. And it is a good day for those of us who are fighting to make sure that 9/11 remains as a reminder of who attacked us and why rather than a day that Americans will be forever confused about the nature and origin of the pain and trauma we suffered.

UPDATE

Ed Morrissey doesn’t believe the reports will do much good:

As I wrote a couple of days ago in relation to the nut who thinks Stephen King killed John Lennon, one cannot counter insanity and paranoia with sweet reason. King himself tried to do so with Steve Lightfoot, the paranoid who has pursued him for over twenty years, and his effort got paid off by Lightfoot’s insistence that King’s kind message constituted a death threat in code. Reason doesn’t enter into it. Mental illness does not respond to reason, and this impulse reflects a sickness that all of the scientific studies and review of facts will never cure. It’s a belief that all evil begins in America and that everything wrong in the world has its source in Washington DC — combined with an unhealthy dose of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Don’t expect a cure for this insanity any time soon. If anything, these reports act as a vaccine for the unafflicted — and a warning for those who may be tempted to stare into the abyss.

I agree with Ed’s analysis, especially that the best we can hope for with the release of these reports is that fence sitters and those with an open mind can be convinced.

See also this Reuters article I got from Blue Crab Boulevard whose own take is well worth the read.

The site has been up and down for the last several hours. Not sure what the problem is but I have a maintenance ticket with Blogs About and hopefully, they’ll be working on it.

In the meantime, bear with us. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Glenn Reynolds:

THE FATTENING OF AMERICA: So the Insta-Daughter and I went for lunch at Ruby Tuesday’s. That’s not news, as we go there regularly. They had a new menu, which isn’t news either, as they get new menus on a near-monthly basis.

What’s new is that almost everything on it was fattening to the max.

They used to show the calories on the menu, along with other nutrition information. Not any more, and with good reason. A simple Cheeseburger is 1120 calories — equal to two Big Macs — and even the Turkey Burger, which you’d expect would be healthy (and which used to be) is 824 calories, more than a Whopper with cheese. And it’s that way across the menu.

I don’t mind that they have fattening stuff on the menu, but they seem to have stripped off almost all the old healthy favorites. The steaks are the lowest-calorie offerings left.

We got up and left without ordering; there wasn’t anything we wanted. We won’t be back until they change the menu again, which is too bad because we’ve always liked the place.

I think it is marvelous that most restaurants are now catering to those on diets or who wish to eat healthy food. In that cutthroat industry, anything that can put fannies in the seats can help a business stay afloat longer than the 2 years that the National Restaurant Association says the average restaurant survives.

But I would take exactly the opposite approach. For you see, I’m one of those mossbacks who believes that going out to eat is an occasion, a time to throw off the constraints imposed by diet and healthy eating in order to make an absolute pig of oneself. And if it ultimately takes a few days off my lifespan, I would consider that a small price to pay for the sheer pleasure of filling up on the greasiest, the fattiest, the most obnoxiously decadent repasts that the human mind is capable of contemplating.

As such, I would open my very own restaurant which would cater solely and exclusively to those who worship Dionysus and Bacchus and wish to indulge to excess their desire for artery clogging, calorie topping, diet busting, life shortening vittles.

I would call it “The Fat People’s Republic” and there would be no finger-wagging or head shaking when a customer ordered a double cheeseburger with cheesefries and a large coke. Nor would anyone bat an eyelash when someone wanted extra mayo with their liverwurst. All employees would receive training in keeping a straight face and civil tongue in their heads regardless of what kind of greasy slop a customer ordered.

But my innovations would extend far beyond the food served. These would included extra wide chairs with a half moon portion of the table carved out so that those with generous paunches would be able to get close to the table. And the bread basket would be on railroad tracks so that no one would ever have to reach for the fresh rolls. The basket would have a string leading to each seating placement (color matched to the table cloth, of course) that each diner would be able to pull on in order to bring the freshly baked hot bread to the watering mouth of the customer.

Also, there would be a scientifically designed table layout that insured no one would ever have to endure someone’s overly ample rear brushing their shoulder as they moved toward their table. Leg rests for those wishing to prop their feet up after they eat would also be made available. Everyone knows that elevating the legs after eating assists digestion.

No calories would be listed on the menu. No fat counts. It is assumed that the diner knows the consequences of eating Lardo Pizza or Fatty Duck so that no warnings would appear anywhere on the menu regarding the life shortening fare I would offer.

No salad bar. But nachos, 3 different kinds of fritos, 10 different varieties of potato chips, and 11 different dips would be available for appetizers.

Desert would be mandatory or double the check. And speaking of desert, gimme some of this!

ANTONY Worrall Thompson never does things by halves. He “gives it large” every time he cooks, from the enourmous steaks he serves in his organic-beef theme restaurant in Britain to the rich dessert now described as the fattiest food ever.

A single slice of the Worrall Thompson’s Snickers pie dessert contains more than 1250 calories, according to Britain’s Food Commission.

The recipe includes five Snickers bars with mascarpone, eggs, sugar, cream cheese and puff pastry.

Each serving contains the equivalent of 22 teaspoons of fat and 11 teaspoons of sugar, the Food Commission said.

I think my restaurant would thrive for decades. Unless the thin people take over the world in which case I would have to go underground. Or be reduced to selling Twinkies and Ho-Ho’s off the back of a truck.

There are times like today that I feel like a voice in the conservative wilderness, crying out with a futility akin to a lion roaring his challenge to an empty forest. Or perhaps (more aptly) the feeling of being just an innocuous blogger, a small fish in a very large sea whose views neither deserve nor will ever garner a wide audience.

So be it. “Injustice anywhere,” Martin Luther King said, “is a threat to justice everywhere.” If that be the case, then raising my voice to chastise my government, my friends, and my ideological soulmates for the strange, willful blindness to an injustice staring them in the face is more than worth the disapprobation and anger directed my way.

I am speaking of the injustice of our detainee policy, specifically as it relates to the approximately 445 men being held at the Guantanamo Detention Camp. Our government, on more than one occasion, has referred to these prisoners as “enemy combatants captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan.” This is a lie. It simply isn’t true. The Pentagon’s own investigations into the status of these men shows otherwise. The brutal fact is our government is not telling the truth about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay and as a result, a monstrous injustice is being perpetrated in our name.

Are there terrorists being held at Guantanamo? Undoubtedly yes. But the question of justice that should concern us is not necessarily the guilt or innocence of a particular prisoner. What should make us hang our heads in shame and agitate for change is the process by which it is determined which detainees are a genuine threat to the United States and which were innocent bystanders caught up in the confusing aftermath of the War in Afghanistan.

Because despite what our military and government officials have been telling us for years, the majority of prisoners at Guantanamo were not “captured on the battlefield” but rather were handed over to the American authorities in Pakistan and areas of Afghanistan far removed from any of the battlefields of that war:

One thing about these detainees is very clear: Notwithstanding Rumsfeld’s description, the majority of them were not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.

Much of the evidence against the detainees is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that’s more than 10 percent of Guantanamo’s entire prison population. The veracity of this prisoner’s accusations is in doubt after a Syrian prisoner, Mohammed al-Tumani, 19, who was arrested in Pakistan, flatly denied to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal that he’d attended the jihadist training camp that the tribunal record said he did.

Tumani’s denial was bolstered by his American “personal representative,” one of the U.S. military officers — not lawyers — who are tasked with helping prisoners navigate the tribunals. Tumani’s enterprising representative looked at the classified evidence against the Syrian youth and found that just one man — the aforementioned accuser — had placed Tumani at the terrorist training camp. And he had placed Tumani there three months before the teenager had even entered Afghanistan.

Any idea you might have that these “Combat Status Review” proceedings are fair, thorough, and speedy is incorrect. The released documents prove otherwise. In fact, these military boards move at a snail’s pace and, as the Pentagon’s own records show, are an evidentiary travesty:

Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence — even the classified evidence — gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It’s based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars.

In their defense, the military denies all of these accusations while making the astonishing claim that there are no innocent men unjustly imprisoned at the facility This interview, conducted by my brother Terry on a June 27th Nightline with Admiral Harry Harris, Commander at Guantanamo shows that either Harris is being disingenuous at best or that he is truly in the dark about how many of his prisoners came to be incarcerated at his facility:

MORAN: So no man who ever came to Guantanamo Bay came there by mistake was innocent?

You know, it’s a recognized principle in international law that belligerents can hold enemy combatants. And we certainly have these folks that we’ve taken off the battlefield that have gone through these processes we just spoke about.

(As an aside, I have rarely been prouder of my brother professionally as he continuously challenged Harris throughout the interview).

At the moment, according to the government’s own count, there are approximately 130 men, some of them clearly innocent, still being held in legal limbo waiting to go home. One of them, Murat Kurnaz, was just released on August 24. His crimes?

Shortly before March 27, 2005, apparently through an administrative slip-up, the evidence against Kurnaz was declassified. Much of the evidence therein was exculpatory, but an unsigned, unsupported memo suggested guilt.

One allegation was that he was traveling to Pakistan with Selcuk Bilgin, who was a suspect in a bombing, possibly the 2003 Istanbul Bombings. It appears that Bilgin did not travel, having been stopped at the airport for an unpaid fine. In any event, no case was made against Bilgin.

According to a December 22, 2005 story by United Press International, a brief stay at a Tablighi Jamaat hostel lead to the decision to capture Kurnaz.

Kurnaz was caught in a legal quagmire where it is clear that because he was not vouchsafed even the minimal rights of a prisoner granted under the Geneva Convention, he was unable to overcome just the suspicion of guilt:

The United States recently responded to pressure from the German government and released detainee Murat Kurnaz from Guantanamo Bay. Although he spent four years in the U.S. prison there, Kurnaz was never charged with a crime, and there are no indications that he was involved in any terrorist-related activity. Had he been afforded his constitutional right to due process upon detention, it is highly likely that this innocent man would not have wasted four years of his life in prison.

How many more Murat Kurnaz’s are there? Does it matter to you that there may be dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in captivity who are no more a threat to the United States than my pet cat Snowball?

It does to me. And the fact that the tribunals set up to adjudicate these men’s cases was inadequate to the task of discovering the truth should outrage every one of us who cares about American justice.

Harris dismisses the various studies done in response to FOIA requests as “incomplete:”

MORAN: One more on this general legal topic. The Combat Status Review Tribunals that you’ve mentioned, they were studied by lawyers. And that study found that the military’s own records show that 55 percent of the detainees here never committed a hostile act against the U.S. or coalition forces. Only 8 percent were found to be, by the military, al Qaeda fighters. And only 5 percent were actually captured by U.S. forces, many of the rest sold into captivity.

So the basis, the underlying premise of that study is based on less than half of the information that was obtained. And if they draw a conclusion from that, I mean, a solid, serious conclusion from that, then I believe that any reasonable person would agree that that’s a faulty conclusion.

Are they “faulty conclusions?” Lawyers for some of the detainees have described most of the evidence as “hearsay” which is admissible in these CSRT’s but would be thrown out of most any court in any free country of the world. This is important because the debate over detainee’s rights is now over not whether they will be given any of the rights you and I take for granted under the Constitution, but which rights will be granted consistent with maintaining the safety and security of the United States while living up to a minimum standard of justice that would reveal the guilt or innocence of prisoners.

This is the delicate balance that Congress is trying to strike as they seek to comply with the recent Supreme Court decision that ruled the present system unconstitutional. Very few (except the usual civil liberties absolutists) are arguing that these men should be tried like any American criminal. What Congress is looking at is some kind of modified Courts Martial proceeding that would grant detainees at least some of the protections guaranteed under the Constitution.

Progress on the bill is slow. Meanwhile, men whose captivity came about as a result of bounties offered by the military, collected by warlords and Northern Alliance commanders and whose “crimes” may entail nothing more than their being Arabs caught in the war zones await vindication:

But the largest single group at Guantanamo Bay today consists of men caught in indiscriminate sweeps for Arabs in Pakistan. Once arrested, these men passed through several captors before being given to the U.S. military. Some of the men say they were arrested after asking for help getting to their embassies; a few say the Pakistanis asked them for bribes to avoid being turned over to America.

Others assert that they were sold for bounties, a charge substantiated in 2004 when Sami Yousafzai, a Newsweek reporter then stringing for ABC’s “20/20,” visited the Pakistani village where five Kuwaiti detainees were captured. The locals remembered the men. They had arrived with a larger group of a hundred refugees a few weeks after Qaeda fighters had passed through. The villagers said they had offered the group shelter and food, but somebody in the village sold out the guests. Pretty soon, bright lights came swooping down from the skies. “Helicopters … were announcing through loud speakers: ‘Where is Arab? Where is Arab?’ And, ‘Please, you get $1,000 for one Arab,’ ” one resident told Yousafzai.

“The one thing we were never clear of was where they came from,” Scheuer said of the Guantanamo detainees. “DOD picked them up somewhere.” When National Journal told Scheuer that the largest group came from Pakistani custody, he chuckled. “Then they were probably people the Pakistanis thought were dangerous to Pakistan,” he said. “We absolutely got the wrong people.”

I realize we are at war. I realize mistakes are often made in war. I realize the necessity of being as sure as humanly possible that anyone released from Guantanamo will do the United States or its citizens no harm. I realize that some of the evidence gathered by the military is of a classified nature and cannot be released to the press or even sometimes to the prisoner and his lawyer. I realize we cannot offer these detainees all the rights guaranteed to American citizens under the Constitution.

I realize all these things. And I am not insensate to the dilemma this issue poses both legally and politically to our policymakers.

But the fact that 4 years after the Guantanamo facility was opened there still may be dozens of innocent men being held in captivity by the United States government is a singular blot on our honor and a stain on the principles we hold dear as a liberty loving free people.

You cannot be unmoved by this issue. You cannot dismiss the evidence as the rantings of leftists or of the enemies of the United States. You cannot chalk it up to MSM bias or to Democrats playing politics. The evidence of our turpitude is convincing and cannot be denied.

This issue must be resolved finally and completely. Congress must get off the mark and pass a detainees rights bill before the election.

To wait any longer only adds to our shame.

Two stories. One about a TV docudrama. One about the putative end to a scandal that was to have brought down (at various times), the President, the Vice President, Karl Rove, and the Republican party.

What they have in common is that both are part of the carefully constructed Narrative of the Bush Administration told in storybook fashion by the left these past 6 years. In fact, they are the keystones to that Narrative and as such, their transfiguration from established fact to political myth undermines the entire rationale for the left’s opposition to the War on Terror as well as several vital themes in The Narrative that Democrats were counting on to bring them victory in November.

First, the docudrama Path to 9/11. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the 9/11 Commission Report knows of the Clinton Administration’s missed opportunities in the hunt for Bin Laden. And, although I haven’t seen it, I can guarantee FBI Director Louis Freeh and his stubborn refusal to fully support his number one counterterrorism agent Jack O’Neil (played by Harvey Keitel in the film) in his quest to get Osama will not come off well either. Evidently, Secretary of State Allbright and National Security Advisor Berger are also given unflattering treatment.

All of this destroys The Narrative, of course. How can you have Bush dropping the ball on terrorism that the Clinton Administration so ably managed during their years in the White House if those years are portrayed as a time of missed opportunities and unheeded warnings as well?

This part of The Narrative has always been problematic for the Clintonistas and they made a mighty effort during the 9/11 Commission public hearings as well as expertly managing the aftermath following the release of the report so that as little blame as possible accrued to them. It worked pretty well although the last polls taken on this issue that I could find were from 2004 and show the country convinced that both Administrations were equally at fault for the attack.

In truth, neither Administration served America well in the years leading up to and the day of the attack. The American nation was in a titanic state of self denial not only about al-Qaeda but also about the nature of the threat from Islamism. “Blame” is irrelevant when all of us were led to believe by both Clinton and Bush that America was safe and that there were no threats that could harm us. Sleepwalking through history like this is something we Americans have done many times. It wasn’t invented by Clinton. Clinton’s national security team may or may not have taken al-Qaeda more seriously than the Bush team. But neither recognized the existential threat that radical Islam posed to the nation and neither took the necessary steps either in homeland security or overseas intelligence gathering to mitigate the threat.

But for the left, the truth of the matter in blame for 9/11 endangers the “Bush Incompetence” part of The Narrative. People may not blame the President for 9/11 any more than they blame Clinton but when interwoven with other fact flakes, exaggerations, and outright lies, it buttresses their storyline by becoming one more example of the President’s critical lack of competence in managing the affairs of the nation.

The netnuts are pushing back against this threat to The Narrative by vowing to boycott the film. Meanwhile, the Clintonistas are playing a much different game. There is word that there is an effort by former officials to lobby The Disney Company to edit the film so that some of the scenes involving Clinton dithering on terrorism are excised:

I’m hearing all kinds of disturbing, though predictable, stories about a Clintonista offensive against “The Path to 9/11,” an ABC documentary written and produced by Cyrus Nowrasteh (”Into the West”), and directed by David Cunningham (”To End All Wars”). I haven’t seen it yet (although I hope to this weekend), but it is already drawing rave reviews from people who have (the piece is reviewed at FrontPage, here).

Apparently, the documentary recounts the bureaucratic bungling and lack of action against al Qaeda that was pervasive prior to the September 11 atrocities. It is by no means, I understand, pro-Bush. It is, instead, an effort to present history accurately. This evidently has many former Clinton officials and apologists in their default kill-the-messenger mode. Great pressure is being brought to bear on ABC and Disney to reopen the editorial process at this late stage (the documentary is supposed to air on September 10-11) so that the years 1993-2001 may remain forever airbrushed.

Lest anyone think the Bush Administration is treated with kid gloves, read this piece at Patterico’s by Justin Levin who has seen the film:

The ironic part is, the critics of this movie who haven’t seen it yet are going to have egg on their face. This film in no way ”blames the entire event on Clinton” as some falsely claim. “The Path to 9/11″ absolutely slams Bush in a number of ways:

1. It depicts Condi Rice ignoring Richard Clarke’s advice about Al-Queda and undercutting his authority within the White House.

2. It depicts the August 6th “Presidential Daily Briefing” wherein Rice is explicitly warned before 9/11 that Bin Laden intends to hijack American airplanes.

3. It makes Richard Clarke look like a tragic hero (even though everyone knows that he later went on to become one of Bush’s biggest critics).

4. It contains an epliogue that cites 9/11 Commission members giving the current government a failing grade in implimenting their recommendations.

There’s more, I’m sure. If it is at all accurate, it will portray the military, the FAA, and others as paralyzed by events.

And that’s all the right wants - accuracy. But apparently the Clintonistas have other things on their minds; namely, Hillary in ‘08 and how anything reflecting badly on the Clinton years will hurt her chances in the Presidential election.

A fascinating historical counterpoint to this effort by the Clinton mafia to airbursh history is the remarkable story that involved the great historian William Manchester and his searing account of those horrible days in November 1963 that saw the assassination of Kennedy and its aftermath. While Manchester claims that the Kennedy family did not have an absolute veto over what went into the final draft of Death of a President, his story (found in his expanded essay Controversy) about the back and forth between he and the Kennedy family about details in the book was both poignant and, at times disturbing.

Bobby Kennedy had yet to break with LBJ and was worried that the disdain portrayed in the book by RFK and his people toward Johnson would precipitate a split before he was ready. Bobby was running in 1968 and thought that the book made him look petty and vindictive. The enormous pressure exerted by the Kennedy family on Manchester to change much of the book’s treatment of the relationship between RFK and Johnson almost gave the author a nervous breakdown. In the end, most of it stayed.

This puts the Clintonista effort to lean on ABC to edit Path to 9/11 in a little different light. They are not so much concerned about Bill’s legacy as Hillary’s future. In this respect, it makes Sandy Berger’s trip to the National Archives for which he was convicted of destroying secret documents all the more interesting.

And it highlights the necessity for the left to try to keep the underpinnings of The Narrative intact by keeping the focus of failure squarely on the Bush Administration. If that block were ever removed from the edifice holding up the storyline of Bush incompetence, The Narrative itself is endangered.

And that brings us to the end of the Wilson-Plame Affair and how the left is scrambling today to salvage the fragments of that scandal and try and reweave The Narrative to cover the gaping hole left by the total and complete discrediting of liar Wilson.

The Washington Post administered the coup de grace:

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

The loss of the Wilson portion of The Narrative is a much more devastating a blow. Upon the Wilson house of cards was built the entire “Bush lied, people died” meme as well as much of the rationale for the anti-war movement in the first place. It’s like the old nursery rhyme “For want of a nail, the war was lost.”

If Wilson lied, the uranium story is true.
If the uranium story is true, Bush didn’t lie.
If Bush didn’t lie, Saddam was a threat.
If Saddam was a threat, following 9/11, he should be dealt with.
If we were going to deal with Saddam, we had to invade.

In addition to the anti-war part of The Narrative, the Wilson imbroglio also contributed mightily to the “Bush is dictator” portion of The Narrative. The fact that Karl Rove and others in the Administration told tales about Valerie Plame is now placed in an entirely different light not to mention Fitzgerald’s investigation being undercut substantially. What was going to be “Fitzmas” with White House officials being frog marched to jail willy nilly is now seen for what it always was; a witchunt carried out by an out of control federal prosecutor, egged on by partisans who hoped to use what Fitzgerald uncovered in an impeachment move against the President (and perhaps the Vice President as well). This is still a possibility but its success has become problematic.

The initial “reweaving” of The Narrative comes from Wilson himself. Here is a portion of a letter he had published today at Democratic Underground (no link to DU, please):

I want to let you know how much Valerie and I continue to be buoyed by your support and your dedication to getting the truth out and holding the administration and its lackeys accountable for the terrible policies they have foisted on our country and on the world. We must keep fighting.

As you think about this, our website (Wilsonsupport.org) has a copy of the letter I sent to the SSCI when its report first came out, challenging some of its conclusions. The LeftCoaster has a terrific study by eriposte on the whole Niger forgery case from beginning to end. Firedoglake and the Next Hurrah both have highly informative analyses of the case by skilled researchers and former prosecutors. I recommend them all as resources to jog memories. by this afternoon, I expect that our own team will have an updated set of talking points to distribute for your use as well.

Each of you in one way or another has contributed to the public’s (and in many cases our own) understanding of the issues from the beginning. Thank you for continuing to do.

In short, they’re not giving up. It should be interesting over the next few days to see how the Plame story can continue without Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson as helpless victims.

What all of this amounts to is that the left has its work cut out for it. For nearly 5 years, The Narrative has proceeded relatively smoothly with the storytellers able to bat aside challenges to the fable rather easily. These are the first real cracks in the facade of lies, exaggerations, false allegations, witchunts, and sometime laughable sometimes serious attempts to undermine the credibility of the President of the United States during a time of war. It all adds up to politics trumping truth. And if these two events contribute in even a small way to undermining The Narrative, we may be at a turning point that could eventually reveal the perpetrators of this myth making as the cads and calumnious haters they truly are.

Join me this morning from 7:00 AM - 9:00 AM Central Time for The Rick Moran Show on Wideawakes Radio.

Today we’ll look at Iran’s defiance of the UN and where we go from here. We’ll also look at the President’s speech yesterday before the American Legion Convention. And we’ll talk about the space program.

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Two examples today from different international bodies prove that those in the west who seek the shelter of law to justify both individual actions of self defense and national wars to ward off aggression are better off either groveling before their enemies and begging for mercy or simply committing suicide.

First, via the Claremont Institute, we discover that the UN General Assembly has decided to divorce itself entirely from natural law by taking away an individual’s right of self defense:

Glenn Reynolds alerts us to this U.N. Report which denies that there is such a thing as a right to self-defense in international law.

No international human right of self-defence is expressly set forth in the primary sources of international law: treaties, customary law, or general principles.

The second amendment implications are expertly dealt with by David Hardy:

I think the point is that the Special Rapper wants to class self-defense as something less than a “right” (i.e., as a manner of criminal defense) because if it were recognized as a “right” it would be something governments would be bound to guarantee — and that leads right to Prof. Glenn Harlan Reynold’s argument that a right to arms should be guaranteed as an international right. How could governments “guarantee” such a right (in the sense of doing something more than saying “you can plead this as a defense if prosecuted” — as might be expected the UN document treats “rights” as something more than “the government must leave you alone” — while outlawing the items a person needs to exercise that right? This leads to the anomaly that the report claims that the right to life is a “right,” but the right to keep from having your life taken is not. I suppose it equates to — you have a “right,” however unenforcable, to be protected by government, but not to defend yourself if it fails to do so. As might be expected from the source, the concept of “right” is rather ineptly socialist: rights are what you may ask the government to do for you. (And of course strongly of the legal positivist school: rights are not something that pre-exist government, and any official declaration of them, derived from a deity, morality, or man’s nature. Rather, in this view they are created by the document, or government, that acts to write them down. Created, as opposed to guaranteed).

Hardy nails this execrable piece of illogic to the church door. He points out the fundamental flaw in the direction that international law has been headed these past few years; the denial that there are independent of government a set of “natural laws” that are vitally necessary to the existence of human liberty.

This, of course, has been a foundational belief in American law and American life since the Declaration’s “self evident” truths completed the work of 17th century political philosophers like Hobbes and Locke. And as Samuelson points out in the Claremont post, the UN has divorced itself from this legal philosophy in order to adopt a much more capricious and arbitrary set of guidelines:

As Reynolds notes, David Hardy shows the pretzels of logic, or perhaps of illogic, that the U.N. needs to make in order to reach that conclusion. As he notes, the U.N.’s conception of law is simply positivistic, and hence divorced from nature. In other words, it is arbitrary ideology, not law.

[snip]

Of course, as I have noted before the U.N., has grown to be hostile to the natural rights foundation of the United States by its very nature. At the foundation of the U.N.’s understanding of law is an idea that is irreconcilable with the natural rights foundation of the U.S. Hence the U.N. does not grasp the necessity of a natural right to self-defense, a right of inestimable importance to us, and formidable only to those who would be tyrants.

And speaking of arbitrary ideology, Alan Dershowitz looks at Amnesty International’s report on the recently concluded Israeli-Hizbullah war and rails against its extraordinarily biased conclusions:

In fact, through restraint, Israel was able to minimize the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon, despite Hizbullah’s best efforts to embed itself in population centers and to use civilians as human shields. The total number of innocent Muslim civilians killed by Israeli weapons during a month of ferocious defensive warfare was a fraction of the number of innocent Muslims killed by other Muslims during that same period in Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Algeria, and other areas of Muslim-on-Muslim civil strife. Yet the deaths caused by Muslims received a fraction of the attention devoted to alleged Israeli “crimes.”

This lack of concern for Muslims by other Muslims - and the lack of focus by so-called human rights organizations on these deaths - is bigotry, pure and simple.

AMNESTY’S EVIDENCE that Israel’s attacks on infrastructure constitute war crimes comes from its own idiosyncratic interpretation of the already-vague word “disproportionate.” Unfortunately for Amnesty, no other country in any sort of armed conflict has ever adopted such a narrow definition of the term. Indeed, among the very first military objectives of most modern wars is precisely what Israel did: to disable portions of the opponent’s electrical grid and communication network, to destroy bridges and roads, and to do whatever else is necessary to interfere with those parts of the civilian infrastructure that supports the military capability of the enemy.

What does the report have to say about the gross violation of international law and the war crimes committed by Hizbullah when they fired 4,000 missiles into Israeli towns and villages with the sole purpose of killing as many civilians as possible:

THE MORE troubling aspect of Amnesty’s report is their inattention to Hizbullah. If Israel is guilty of war crimes for targeting civilian infrastructure, imagine how much greater is Hizbullah’s moral responsibility for targeting civilians! But Amnesty shows little interest in condemning the terrorist organization that started the conflict, indiscriminately killed both Israeli civilians (directly) and Lebanese civilians (by using them as human shields), and has announced its intention to kill Jews worldwide (already having started by blowing up the Jewish Community Center in Argentina.) Apparently Amnesty has no qualms about Hizbullah six-year war of attrition against Israel following Israel’s complete withdrawal from Southern Lebanon.

As has been widely reported, even al-Jazeera expressed surprise at the imbalance in the Amnesty report:

During the four week war Hizbullah fired 3,900 rockets at Israeli towns and cities with the aim of inflicting maximum civilian casualties.

The Israeli government says that 44 Israeli civilians were killed in the bombardments and 1,400 wounded.

AI has not issued a report accusing Hizbullah of war crimes.

In fact, AI specifically notes that they have no evidence that Hizbullah used Lebanese civilians as human shields to protect themselves from retaliatory attacks by the IDF. This blatant lie is only one indication of Amnesty International’s selective bias against Israel and its arbitrary application of international law. In fact, as Dershowitz points out, AI applies the law to the IDF in such a way as to make it impossible for Israel to legally defend itself:

Consider another example: “While the use of civilians to shield a combatant from attack is a war crime, under international humanitarian law such use does not release the opposing party from its obligations towards the protection of the civilian population.”

Well that’s certainly nice sounding. But what does it mean? What would Amnesty suggest a country do in the face of daily rocket attacks launched from civilian populations? Nothing, apparently. The clear implication of Amnesty’s arguments is that the only way Israel could have avoided committing “war crimes” would have been if it had taken only such military action that carried with it no risk to civilian shields - that is, to do absolutely nothing.

For Amnesty, “Israeli war crimes” are synonymous with “any military action whatsoever.”

This points up a philosphy that seems to have taken over Amnesty International as well as other international bodies with regards to the application of the law as it relates to western countries; you are always wrong and third world countries are always right.

Simplistic? Recent UN pronouncements on vital western freedoms like freedom of the press as well as Amnesty International’s recent comparison of Gitmo to the old Soviet Gulags continue a pattern that has been in motion for most of the last quarter century; hostility to western beliefs in freedom as well as a politicization of the law in order to achieve propaganda ends.

By bending over backward to appease third world peoples who suffered under western domination for most of the last 100 years, these international bodies are destroying the foundation of international law by divorcing it from its roots. Those roots are found in western thought about the nature of law and how it relates in the real world to people’s freedom. By substituting arbitrariness for logic and tradition, the UN and groups like AI risk overturning fundamental protections for all people.

This is too high a price to pay in order to pander to third world sensibilities.

My victories in the weekly Watchers Council competition have been few and far between this year. Therefore, I declare today “Victory Thursday” in honor of my post “Iraq: Quit or Commit” emerging victorious.

One reason for my dearth of wins has been the addition of so many good writers. That and I believe Shrinkwrapped places subliminal messages in his posts ordering us to vote for his entries. He can do that. He’s a shrink, ya know. And can we help it that we’re held spellbound by his fascinating digressions into the human mind as it relates to politics?

And while we’re on the subject, I have no doubt that Callimachus should be banned from further Council competitions. It’s no fair that I feel the urge to vote for his posts every week. Someone who writes so well and makes so much sense should simply move on in order to leave me to my mediocrity and feelings of inferiority.

And now that Dymphna is feeling better (God Bless you, woman) I have to worry about her every week. Bad enough she’s smarter than me. Why does she always have such fascinating material to write about?

I have no patience with writers like Jimmie. What takes me 3000 words to say, the Shackman nails it in 500 or less. And if I had his passion, I wouldn’t need those stupid little blue pills.

What about Dave? He’s a pain in the neck for us rabble rousers. Anyone so reasonable and who writes with such clarity desperately needs an injection of bile so that he can be just as incoherent as I am.

The Wonks need to get a life outside of the classroom. On second thought, then we’d lose the most valuable perspective on education in the blogosphere.

Greg is another one of those “reasonable” bloggers who actually uses things like facts and logic to make his points. Whatever happened to good old fashioned all-American out of control rants?

When I first started to read Joshuapundit, I thought “Oh lovely…another WOT blog. Just what I need.” After reading about 3 posts, I was hooked. Dead on commentary with a twist of humor now and again. Much too palatable…

Imagine my outrage when I found at that Soccer Dad had joined our little group. I almost wrote to the Watcher in protest since I had been reading SD for about a year already and knew damn well that his addition meant he would get the “family values” vote every week. That and his incisive, well researched posts spelled trouble.

Newbie Matt Barr calls his blog “Socratic Rhythm Method.” Even though it sounds like the preferred birth control strategy that my erudite and intellectual parents used (they had 10 kids), I was amazed that, like Socrates, I felt like drinking hemlock after reading a few posts and realizing that I had one more Council member to worry about every week.

Finally, I knew I was in trouble the moment I read newbie AbbaGav’s post “Hizballah Entertainment News: Way to Go Mel!” An Israeli who can find humor in the Hizzies? It’s not fair…just not fair…

So I better enjoy my victory while I have it. Judging by the competition I have every week, opportunities to give my Peter Pan crow would seem to be extremely limited for the foreseeable future.

Oh…finishing first in the Non Council category this past week was “Bad Faith” by 3AM Magazine.

And if you’d like to participate in the Watcher’s competition every week, go here and follow instructions.

Several times since I began this blog, I have pointed out that the unbelievably vicious hate spewed by the left toward President Bush has automatically enabled every nut with a gun in America (and around the world) to believe that assassinating the President would make them a hero.

There is nothing new to this idea as a similar fear was expressed many times during the Clinton Administration. The vitriol directed towards Clinton by the far right made the Secret Service extremely nervous until the day he left office. Indeed, there were two bona fide and thankfully clumsy attempts to harm the President, neither of which placed the Commander in Chief in any danger but underscored the very real nature of the threat.

And the Warren Commission’s deliberations in trying to decide how much blame for the assassination should be given the city of Dallas and the venomous hate directed toward Kennedy in the weeks leading up to his visit on November 22, 1963 were instructive with regards to both Oswald and Ruby’s actions.

This is why our Secret Service takes an incredibly dim view of people who even joke about assassinating the President. Threats to our national leaders by foreign elements is one thing. But home grown nuts who feel justified in murdering the President because the constant exaggerated rhetoric about dictatorships, and Hitler, and making conspiracy theories a mainstream element of politics gives a potential assassin the false belief that there are a lot of people out there who want to see Bush dead.

Is it a “false belief?” I hope so. I really don’t want to believe that there are lefties out there who would wish to see the President killed. Even the Brits who made a movie about what happens in America after the assassination of Bush don’t advocate the killing of the President. The docudrama called Death of a President set to air this fall on British TV appears to be a harsh critique of of American domestic and foreign policy that is dramatized by showing what would happen in the aftermath of Bush’s killing:

Peter Dale, head of More4, which is due to air the film on October 9, said the drama was a “thought-provoking critique” of contemporary US society.

He said: “It’s an extraordinarily gripping and powerful piece of work, a drama constructed like a documentary that looks back at the assassination of George Bush as the starting point for a very gripping detective story.

“It’s a pointed political examination of what the War on Terror did to the American body politic.

“I’m sure that there will be people who will be upset by it but when you watch it you realise what a sophisticated piece of work it is.

“Sophisticated” indeed. And judging by the fact that the author of this piece put the War in Terror in quotation marks earlier in the article - as if there is no such thing except in the fevered imagination of those silly Americans - one can guess what that “examination” of our body politic will find.

I don’t necessarily mind the idea behind the film. It may have been a better idea to wait until Bush was out of office and then doing the film as an alt/history piece rather than a futuristic sci-fi extravaganza. But if the idiot wants to embarrass himself by making such a film (most British filmakers end up embarrassing themselves when trying to make a film about America), let him have at us and be done with it. And although there would be protests aplenty, my curiosity would get the better of me and if the film were released for TV here, I would probably watch it.

But even the British director isn’t saying that killing Bush would be a good thing. No one that I know of has even hinted at something like that nor would they dare make light of such a situation and nobody ever would, would they?

Would they?

The work may or may not be good drama and may or may not make some excellent points about American political culture. I’m just saying I don’t want Bush to be assassinated. Really, truly. Here are the top ten reasons why:

10. Regular television programming would be pre-empted for days, except maybe for the Super Bowl.

9. News coverage of the assassination and state funeral would shine the rosiest light possible on the President’s memory, causing some viewers to think maybe he wasn’t so bad, after all. (In fact, this might be the only way Bush could get his approval numbers over 50 percent again.)

8. Darryl Worley would record a song about it.

7. For the next several months you wouldn’t be able to pass a supermarket tabloid rack without seeing pictures of Bush and Jesus — together forever.

6. You’d have to listen to your wingnut father-in-law rant about it all through Thanksgiving dinner.

5. The Right collectively would become even more paranoid than it is already.

4. For the rest of your life, you’d have to listen to people referring to Bush as a “martyred president.”

3. The assassination would fuel a whole new generation of conspiracy theorists.

2. Bush wouldn’t live long enough to see what historians will write about his presidency.

1. Dick Cheney.

Ms. Maha of Mahablog evidently is in desperate need of attention. Next time, may I suggest you wet your pants? Judging by the infantile attempts at humor above, I daresay you would find the fawning over by adults who wish to change your diaper more in keeping with both your intellectual prowess and emotional maturity.

That said, I am at a loss for words (so of course I’ll continue anyway).

To say that the above is in poor taste is a given. I don’t care where you are on the political spectrum, if you don’t condemn this unbelievable affront to human decency then you should be ashamed of yourself. Maha can say that she doesn’t want Bush to be assassinated until she’s blue in the face but writing what she did goes so far beyond the pale of legitimate political attack that an apology to her readers should be in order.

Except, her readers agree with her. This is one of the first comments:

great post maha! good reasons all — but #1 is especially disturbing

Comment by temperance — August 31, 2006 @ 12:40 pm

Please note that the commenter finds the constitutional ascension of Dick Cheney to the Presidency “disturbing” but not the assassination of Bush itself.

I wonder if Lambchop is going to take Maha to task for this outrageous slander. I wonder if Dave Niewert will write another ponderous post using his extensive lexicon of faux psychobabbling terms to describe the sickness of thought and reason at work here. I wonder if Billmon will grace us with another one of his specialities; incoherent ramblings that will eventually blame “neocons” for Maha’s idiocy. I wonder if TBogg will try and top what Maha did?

Does it matter? Not really. All of the above and the company they keep on the left have long since left rationality behind and have descended into a hellish nightmare of political warfare that brooks no opposition and judges orthodoxy based on the most intellectually narrow and emotionally shallow reasons imaginable. In their world, the death of Bush at the hands of an assassin would not necessarily elicit public celebration but rather more likely, present an occasion for snark such as we see above. They are much too sophisticated to share in the horror that such an event would cause the overwhelming majority of their countrymen.

I would like to believe that someone on the left will leave a comment scolding Maha for her obscenity of a post. But then, I’d like to believe in the tooth fairy except I gave that up long ago.

UPDATE

Malkin has a tour de force roundup of the history of lefty assassination fantasies. I’m going to bookmark that post.

UPDATE II

I am sorry to report that any rumors you may have heard that there was a smidgen of gray matter in Ms. Maha’s brain were not only grossly exaggerated but probably based on the assumption that since her lips move, coherence must emerge from her mouth.

Judge for yourself: (See Update)

Gracious, poor Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House came down with the vapors over my post, above, which I figured even a rightie would recognize as mere silliness. (Some people have no sense of humor.)

I cannot tell you Barbara how silly your post was. In fact, as I pointed out above, I fully realized you were making fun of the idea of Bush being assassinated.

THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT YOU NINCOMPOOP!

Let’s have a little “silliness” about the Holocaust, shall we?

Why did the Auschwitz shower heads have 12 holes? Because Jews have 10 fingers!!

I LOVE THIS! Let’s try some lynching silliness:

Rope. Tree. Maha. Some assembly required. (Gawd, I KILL myself)

For a real knee slapper, let’s get silly about BOTH the Holocaust and Blacks:

What did the cook say to the jewish black dude?
Get in the back of the oven?

How about some illegal immigrant silliness?

Why didnt Mexico send a team to the olympics this year?
Because everyone who can run, jump, or swim is already over here.

I love being silly, don’t you Barbara? And the reason I was being silly about these subjects was to force feed the idea into your miniscule intellect THAT THERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT YOU SIMPLY CANNOT BE “SILLY” ABOUT.”

It has nothing to do with “political correctness.” It has everything to do with simple common decency. And you blew it girl, period.

Shame on you. For shame. Shame.