Right Wing Nut House

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 a new front that has just opened up in the War on Terror. Somalia is in danger of going the way of Afghanistan and that country’s neighbors don’t like it. We’ll also examine two excellent articles on Hizbullah that define where that group fits in the War on Terror. And we’ll look at the 2006 midterms from the perspective of Republicans coming back slightly. Is it enough? Can it continue?

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The important thing, obviously, is that Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig have been freed from their captivity. And in an interesting twist that makes one think that their kidnappers knew all too well what Fox News is and what the attitude of the rest of the world media is toward them, they forced the two journalists to “convert” to Islam.

AND JUST LIKE JILL CARROLL, THEY WERE FORCED TO MAKE A PROPAGANDA TAPE CONDEMNING AMERICA:

Fox Television journalists held for 13 days in the Gaza Strip were released Sunday after they were shown on a videotape saying they converted to Islam.

The two journalists, American Steve Centanni, 60, and New Zealand cameraman Olaf Wiig, 36, “have liberated themselves” by converting to Islam, according to the statement accompanying a videotape from a group calling itself the Holy Jihad Brigades.

Gaza journalists confirmed that Centanni and Wiig arrived at a hotel in Gaza shortly after noon local time.

[snip]

Parts of the latest six-minute tape, aired on al-Jazeera television, showed Centanni and Wiig seated cross-legged. Both read from written statements condemning the American policy in the Middle East. In one scene, both men were shown eating.

“It is Apache helicopters firing Hellfire missiles made in America that kill the residents in Gaza,” Wiig said on the tape.

Their statements were punctuated on the tape with screens of written verse from the Koran, and scenes from Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq that was the site of abuse of Muslim prisoners by American soldiers.

This “conversion” wrinkle is certainly personally humiliating for the two reporters. I say this not disparaging Islam but rather pointing out the obvious; conversion at the point of a gun points up the total control the kidnappers had over the lives of their captives. That is the message the kidnappers were sending. And it appears to me that the kidnappers may also be very aware of the fact that Fox News is seen by most of the western press as a “conservative” news outlet. Since it is no secret where the most vigorous opposition to the agenda of radical Islam comes from, one wonders if these particular jihadists were trying to send a message to conservatives; resistance is futile.

Are they that sophisticated? Think Reuters and then tell me they are not. Radical Islamism is the most media savvy enemy America has ever faced. For whatever reason, the old Soviet Union was clumsy and at times, laughably off target in their attempted media manipulations.

But these guys have studied the western mind, studied western politics, and most importantly, studied the process of how the modern collection and dissemination of news is done. They are aware of news cycles and feeding frenzies. We already knew they were very good at creating irresistible images for the wire services and other independent news sources whose reporting the major nets depend on during a war. What their manipulation of images of these particular hostages may mean is that they are aware of the politics of media coverage as well.

It almost appears as if the kidnappers had been reading the blogs over the last week. If there was one way to embarrass their tormentors in the right wing blogosphere, it would be to show that no one can resist the power of their religion. Whether they realize what the reaction by lefty blogs will be - gratitude for their release followed by a lecture on tolerance and some pointed remarks equating this hostage release with the way righty blogs handled the Jill Carroll imbroglio - is impossible to say but given the sophistication of their media relations as well as how internet savvy their cells have proved to be, I wouldn’t put it past them.

And even if the kidnappers don’t know what blogs are, the lefty blogs would have a point regarding Jill Carroll. If you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest you read her gripping story that will be out in book form soon, excerpts of which have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor. (HT: Bill Roggio). Carroll’s ordeal should remind all of us that no matter what one’s politics, all Americans are held hostage when one of us falls into the hands of these thugs.

Carroll was targeted for kidnapping for the exact same reason the Fox News reporters were taken; to influence and terrorize the American public. This is also the reason both were required to make a tape spewing anti-American propaganda. The thugs are not concerned with our petty political squabbles except as a way to divide us. They didn’t “like” Jill Carroll any more than they were fond of Steve Centanni. Carroll’s alleged sympathy for Islam didn’t do her any more or less good than Centanni’s connection to Fox News denoting hostility to radical jihadism. It just didn’t matter.

Maybe the good that comes out of this incident is that conservatives will realize that it doesn’t matter to our enemies whether reporters write sympathetic pieces about them or whether they do highly critical new stories on their movement. What matters is that they are American. That’s all that matters. The rest is so much chaff.

UPDATE

Michelle has links to all the video as well as her transcription of this from Centanni:

I just hope this never scares a single journalist away from coming to Gaza to cover this story because the Palestinian people are very beautiful, kind-hearted, loving people who the world need to know more about and so do not be discouraged. Come and tell the story. It’s a wonderful story. I’m just happy to be here. Thanks for all your support.

Ed Morrissey thinks the conversion ploy shows that the jihadists are amateurs:

The Holy Jihad Brigade apparently wants to include themselves among the Big Three of Palestinian terrorism. They have a strange way of applying. Besides forcing the conversion of the two to Islam, they made them play dress-up and recorded a degrading video of the pair denouncing the West in Arabic robes. I’m not sure who they thought such a display would convince, but Centanni and Wiig wisely played along with the demands, and now this laughable statement gives evidence of the childish and intellectually stunted nature of Palestinian terrorism. Even Haniyeh will be embarrassed by that show.

This could be. “Holy Jihad Brigade” could be a bunch of guys who hang out together after Friday prayers and who decided to get a little attention by kidnapping some westerners. It’s possible they didn’t know the significance of the Fox News connection nor that their motives in releasing the videos were anything more than, as Ed says, a “childish and laughable” exercise in propaganda.

If so, they sure got lucky picking a journalist with ties to a news organization that is closely identified with an ideology that has given the Islamists the most sustained and unrelenting opposition in the west.

Also, be sure to check out the videos at Ms. Underestimated.

Holy Mother! The aforementioned Mr. Russell Shaw is either a publicity glutton or a total nutcase.

Doesn’t this guy know when to shut up?

Not content with making a fool of himself on Friday with a post where he idly wonders if a terrorist attack in October wouldn’t unseat the Republicans and lead to “regime change” in 2008 for the Democrats, Shaw proves today that it wasn’t a fluke, that he is indeed a certifiable loon:

It strikes me as more than a little ironic that some self-regarded patriotic conservatives would somehow interpret my analytical, “what would happen if” I Hope And Pray We Don’t Get Hit Again BUT…post as a call for the enemies of America who hit us on 9/11/01 and cost the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people to hit us again.

Not only because I wish for the death of no one, but because many of these same people are among the first to agree with Ann Coulter that for speaking out against the way the war on terror has been conducted since they lost their husbands, some of the 9/11 widows are “harpies.”

First of all, the only place on earth that Shaw’s article from yesterday would be considered “analytical” is in perhaps the third grade where the 10 year olds would have very little trouble picking it apart.

But Ann Coulter? Where in the wide, wide, world of sports did THAT come from. Not only is the Coulter thought left dangling like a lone strand of spaghetti at the end of a fork, but the fact is there was a massive backlash against Coulter in the conservative blogosphere for her tirade against the 9/11 widows. This is worse than “analytical.” This is incoherent.

To compare the way that some conservatives cheered Coulter on in her blaspheming the widows with the way they piled on Shaw is, well, nuts. If one were to give me a thousand choices for comparing the way conservatives have come down on Shaw for his idiocy yesterday, Coulter wouldn’t even be on the radar.

Besides, most conservatives pretty much ignored the premise of his article about his “almost wishing” for another massive terrorist strike in favor of tearing into his vision of a liberal Utopia if the Democrats are handed the reins of government by the voters. That and his notion that conservative policies are killing people deliberately. These go unmentioned in today’s installment of the Shaw Chronicles.

Unbelievably strange.

After pouting that he has been misunderstood, Shaw then compares the morality of a terrorist attack against civilians with losses in the Iraq War as evidence of conservative’s moral relavency.

Okay…do your own fisking of that. I think the premise fisks itself quite nicely.

This kind of hopeless stupidity (where sane people just kind of laugh and throw up their hands in resignation that nothing will ever get through to this guy) could simply be chalked up to someone who may have been dropped on his head as a child or the product of some horrible scientific experiment that went wrong. Except Shaw then proceeds to inform us that there are many forms of terrorism - and most of them are carried out by Republicans and conservatives against the American people:

But on the broader scale, some critics may fail to realize that for millions of Americans, terrorism is a frequent presence. Not the terrorism of a shoe-bomber, or of trumped up orange alerts based on intercepts of guys shouting “Jihad” in an Internet chat room, but the real psychological and economic terrorism often visited on Americans in the guise of:

The sight of two uniformed service members approaching your home, and the knowledge that your worst fears after not hearing from your son for two weeks are about to come horribly true;

The “please help us” screams from the victims of Hurricane Katrina- their plight unaddressed by an incompetent FEMA headed by an appointee of the same administration that is keeping us safe from terrorism;

The fourth call you have received this morning from the bill collector, who cares not that you have been put out of work by the greed of a multinational corporation who shipped your job overseas last year (and thanks in most part to the GOP, no longer have bankruptcy as an easily available option).

It’s all there, isn’t it? State sponsored terrorism courtesy of the Republicans.

I have dealt many times with this liberal compulsion to take the English language and bend it to their will by using or inventing words and then defining them not according to general usage or out of any desire to improve clarity but rather in order to appropriate their secondary value as emotional talismans to be stroked and fondled in order to elicit the appropriate response.

Using the word “terrorism” to describe government incompetence or the results of government policies is one such example. Equating what terrorists did on 9/11 with what Shaw considers FEMA incompetence is so far beyond the pale of rational discourse that it beggars belief. It would do no good to point out that you don’t rebuild a major American city that was 80% destroyed in one year even with a Bill Clinton led FEMA. Facts are irrelevant and indeed impediments in Shaw’s construct. What matters is using the word “terrorist” to elicit an emotional response regarding a host of government actions or inactions.

And the left accuses conservatives of fear mongering?

The litany of terrorist acts by the government and conservatives continues:

The need to wait two hours for three buses to take you to work because the price-gougers in the oil markets have made it too expensive to put gas in your car until you get paid again in two weeks;

The baby your niece will be forced to have after being impregnated by her no-good, meth-addled ex boyfriend because the only doctor who performed abortions within 200 miles has decided he doesn’t want to be terrorized by the “pro-lifers” anymore;

The moans from your cancer-ridden aunt in your upstairs guest bedroom- moans that the government won’t let you palliate with medical marijuana or even mercifully cease should she be at peace with her God about that option;

How can you respond rationally to irrationality? How can you debunk someone who thinks that marijuana is a pain killer? How can you explain to someone that anti-abortion protests are legal in the United States and that 76% of women need to travel less than 50 miles for an abortion (slightly farther than the average cancer patient needs to travel for treatment with rural areas skewing both numbers).

As for the vagaries of the oil markets or eeeeevil corporations sending jobs overseas (while 11 million have been created here at home), how can you explain capitalism to a nincompoop? Or explain that if you are getting calls from bill collectors because you have lost your job, you can still file for bankruptcy, that Shaw doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Shaw is an ignoramus. Any doubt erased here:

All of these events happen every day- as the consequence of policies promoted or sanctioned by the same government who is “keeping us safe against terrorism.” And while these events of our daily lives most often do not lead to sudden deaths as with terrorism, they can promote stress and slow death by 1,001 cuts. Cuts as a consequence of what it means to be poor and vulnerable in a nation ruled by the rich and powerful.

And sometimes, it is not only we humans who are victims of terrorism. The polar bear marooned on the ice floe due to global warming, the tiger who futilely scampers away from high-powered rifle fire at the game ranch owned by rich Republican contributors- well, they are victims of terrorism too.

I wish for a nation free of the fear of terrorism- not only the kind that visited our shores nearly five years ago to this day, but for a nation where the indignities of social, economic and environmental injustice strike terror in so many hearts and minds.

Stress = terrorism? Polar bears? Game ranches “owned by rich Republican contributors” victims of terrorism too?

Shaw forgot blades of grass on Republican controlled golf courses that take a beating because conservatives tend to wear spikes while liberals don’t.

Let me tell Mr. Shaw what I wish for: A nation free from myopic idiots like him who give rational thought a bad name. Any more “analytical” pieces like this one and his Friday post and Shaw just might achieve the coveted position of having his name turned into an internet verb.

Russell Shaw has made a lot of people angry with this post at HuffPo about his desire for another 9/11, which he believes would show the American people that George Bush can’t protect them and thus cause a Democratic stampede at the polls in November that would bring the left to power.

First of all, I should amend the above statement slightly to reflect the fact that Shaw has made a lot of conservatives angry. The netnuts either agree with him or have yet to catch up to the blogswarm. Their reaction should be interesting. My guess is they will condemn his premise while agreeing with his version of America under Democratic rule.

And that is where Shaw’s real stupidity shows itself. I can’t believe he is actually serious about the premise of this article:

What if another terror attack just before this fall’s elections could save many thousand-times the lives lost?

I start from the premise that there is already a substantial portion of the electorate that tends to vote GOP because they feel that Bush has “kept us safe,” and that the Republicans do a better job combating terrorism.

If an attack occurred just before the elections, I have to think that at least a few of the voters who persist in this “Bush has kept us safe” thinking would realize the fallacy they have been under.

If 5% of the “he’s kept us safe” revise their thinking enough to vote Democrat, well, then, the Dems could recapture the House and the Senate…”

We all know that being provocative in the blogosphere is the quickest way to fame. Shaw used so many qualifiers and caveats in his post fantasizing about rivers of blood flowing in American streets that the poor dear nearly tied himself into intellectual and moral knots. It proves that rather than really wishing for an attack, he wanted the widest possible audience for his vision of mass death leading to an electoral landslide. Shaw simply posits this outrageous premise to highlight what America would look like with the Democrats in charge.

In Shaw’s Utopia, the thousands of deaths in another 9/11 attack would be offset by many times that number “saved” by Democratic policies. In short, Shaw is intimating the jaw dropping idiocy that Republican policies kill people already and that if it takes a terrorist attack that kills thousands more in order to remove the Republican blight, so be it.

One might wonder about the gentleman’s sanity except this is standard fare for the left when it comes to critiquing conservative governance. It isn’t enough that Republican policies might be wrong, or misguided but rather they are unhealthy and are formulated with the idea of deliberately killing people.

Here’s an example of Shaw’s Utopia righting all wrongs with liberals riding to the rescue on a white horse:

Block the next Supreme Court appointment, one which would surely result in the overturning of Roe and the death of hundreds if not thousands of women from abortion-prohibiting states at the hands of back-alley abortionists;

It should be noted that getting rid of Roe V Wade would not end abortion in the United States. States would be free to pass their own laws regarding the right of a women to an abortion. This, of course, is how the issue of abortion should have been settled in the first place - through the democratic expression of voters not the diktats of a judge. In fact, prior to Roe, most states had relaxed their abortion laws and were moving toward the kind of legalization favored by the majority of Americans - abortions permitted in the first trimester with exceptions for the life and health of the mother and in cases of rape or incest.

The problem for abortion advocates is that instead of only having to deal with one entity - the US Supreme Court - to get their way, now they would have to deal with 50 state legislatures and all that messy democracy stuff. This is hugely expensive not to mention fraught with the danger that people might not agree with you and pass an abortion statute that reflects their own thinking on the matter rather than the thinking of their betters.

The world with the Democrats in charge gets even better:

Be in a position to elevate the party’s chances for a regime change in 2008. A regime change that would:

Save hundreds of thousands of American lives by enacting universal health care;

Save untold numbers of lives by pushing for cleaner air standards that would greatly reduce heart and lung diseases;

More enthusiastically address the need for mass transit, the greater availability of which would surely cut highway deaths;

Enact meaningful gun control legislation that would reduce crime and cut fatalities by thousands a year;

Fund stem cell research that could result in cures saving millions of lives;

Boost the minimum wage, helping to cut down on poverty which helps spawn violent crime and the deaths that spring from those acts;

Be less inclined to launch foolish wars, absence of which would save thousands of soldiers’ lives- and quite likely moderate the likelihood of further terror acts.

Would universal health care really save “hundreds of thousands” of American lives? I guess one of the advantages of blogging at Huffpo is that you can throw out any old sh*t about any subject and not have to prove it to anyone.

How about funding stem cell research that would save “millions of lives?” Doesn’t Mr. Shaw know that adult stem cell research is more than adequately funded and that the debate over whether embryonic stem cells would cure anybody of anything is hardly conclusive either way? Again, no need to prove anything. He’s blogging at HuffPo.

Would gun control save thousands of people a year? Cities with the strictest gun control seem to have the highest rates of homicide. But Shaw doesn’t have to prove anything. He’s blogging at HuffPo.

It appears that Mr. Shaw doesn’t have to prove either his critique of conservative governance or that his prescriptions would actually address any shortcomings. After all, he’s blogging at HuffPo.

Be that as it may, this fake controversy generated by Shaw is extremely helpful in exposing the left’s curious detachment from reality regarding the War on Terror. I guess as long as it happens to someone else, as long as someone else is incinerated or drops out of the sky in an airplane that has been blow to kingdom come, the war is only a domestic political battleground and not a life and death struggle with fanatical jihadists.

Why do people pretend that the United Nations is a place for the countries of the world to solve serious problems?

In order to solve serious problems, there must be a serious effort. There must be serious people who approach problems with a serious attitude. There must at least be agreement that what is decided will be taken seriously by the people who make the decisions. And finally, there must be a seriousness of purpose by the world community in order to if not enforce then certainly enjoin the parties involved to obey the mandates of the world body.

Anything less than this - anything that comes up short means that the United Nations is a failure as an institution where deadly serious conflicts are addressed in a serious manner by serious people with serious solutions proposed.

I want to hear no more about “They’re doing the best they can.” An attitude like that can get a lot of people - many of them Americans - killed.

I don’t want to hear any more platitudes like “As long as they’re talking with each other, they’re not shooting at each other .” That kind of stupidity presupposes that an enemy doesn’t use the “talking” part of the equation to get ready to shoot while the rest of the world that opposes him actually thinks that talking will solve the problem.

And I will brook no more nonsense from starry eyed idealists who see the United Nations as the “first stirrings of world government.” The UN has had nearly 60 years to “stir” and all it has done is dry up, harden, and ossify into a brittle, broken down bureaucracy so patently corrupt and full of hatred and envy that its towering cynicism in claiming the diplomatic high ground is used by the thugs of the world solely as a way to sway western public opinion so that they can continue on their genocidal way without interference from the only people that can stop them.

The United Nations is not a serious place. It is a place where people pretend. It is a place where people pretend to address the serious issues of the day when they have no desire to do so nor seriously engage any process that would begin to solve them. It is a place where people pretend that what they do or say matters one whit to the gimlet eyed thugs whose murderous designs on the rest of humanity are downplayed and even rationalized. And it is a place where people pretend that all of this is so despite knowing full well that it is not.

Adults do not pretend. Adults deal with the world as it is not as they would like it to be. In this, the UN then has become a playground, a fantasyland for childish notions of “peace” and “stability.” It has become the number one enabler of genocidal maniacs, brutish aggressors, and fanatics with an eye on Armageddon. And since the consequences of facing down the evil is too painful, they pretend the evil doesn’t exist.

There may have been a time in the bi-polar world created by the rivalry between the USA and USSR when the UN served a purpose. In this one instance, it was indeed better to pretend that what the world body did mattered, that the talking-shooting scenario was important to the continued existence of life on the planet. The alternative was unthinkable.

But that was when both superpowers recognized the efficacy of the UN fig leaf. They could climb down from confrontation without loss of prestige or face. In this case, it was mutually assured pretending that kept the peace and prevented the missiles from flying.

Such calculations are lost on our adversaries today. To them, the UN exists as a PR adjunct, a useful tool to massage western media and sap the will to resist among the populations of the only people with the wherewithal to stop their mad designs from coming to fruition. In this, the UN has become part of their media strategy.

Witness President Ahmadinejad’s response to the UN Security Council on his nuclear program. He is defying the will of the Council by not halting the Iranian enrichment program. But he has successfully paralyzed the world body by agreeing to talk about the Iranian nuclear program in the context of possibly ending it. No one really believes he has any intention of ending the program nor stop the Iranian’s quest to build a nuclear device. But the UN will pretend that he does and more talks will ensue with pressure placed on the negotiating parties to give in to the mullahs in order to avoid conflict. The original resolution ordering him to cease enrichment activities by August 31st conveniently forgotten.

We have seen this pattern many times; in Darfur, the Saddam fiasco, and now the continued demands for the disarming of Hizbullah. If one resolution doesn’t work, another one is passed as the world body basically pretends that the other resolutions do not exist. In any other context, such activity would be sufficient cause to commit the lot of them to a hospital mental ward for an examination to determine how much in touch with reality the members are. But in the case of the UN, this is reality.

Am I exaggerating? Not by much. This is part of the game of diplomacy as it is played out in the early 21st century. Process trumps results. And as long as that is true, the UN will remain an impediment to world peace and a place where the enemies of civilization will continue to press forward, secure in the knowledge that stopping them will entail a radical shift in the way that the world community deals with such threats.

Isn’t it therefore time to take the question of whether the United States should remain in the UN out of the fever swamps inhabited by right wing wackos and place it squarely in the mainstream of conservative thought for serious discussion.

It’s not the money. The $3 billion or so we give to the UN (about 27% of the UN’s total budget) is a pittance, a hiccup in our $2 trillion budget. Congress gobbles up $3 billion as an appetizer. It’s about what we spend on elections every 4 years. I could care less about the money or even if the UN gives us our money’s worth which is an extraordinarily dumb yardstick to decide whether or not we should remain a member.

And forget all the good the UN does in the fields of refugee assistance or world health. Those worthy and necessary functions could be handled out of Zurich or Geneva. The bureaucracy is already there and the United States should continue to support the humanitarian goals of these and other vital world agencies. But using these agencies as an excuse to remain beholden to an organization that has proven its uselessness time and time again in the face of determined evil seems irrational to me. Better we form regional alliances and “Coalitions of the Willing” to confront and control both the state and non-state entities that threaten us. This does not mean war. It means showing resolute strength in the face of aggressive nation states and extra-state actors. While it may not deter them it could cause them to alter their plans, always a good thing in diplomacy or war.

We have reached a point where the UN no longer serves the interest of the United States in any meaningful way - at least not in any way that we would miss. If others wish to continue to play pretend with the fate of the planet, let them. For our part, we should withdraw from the United Nations unless and until they reform themselves so that they can seriously address the problems that now threaten our civilization.

Any other course smacks of suicide in my book.

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 Mookie al-Sadr and his growing political strength in Iraq that does not bode well for the future. We’ll also have a little bit of lefty lunacy as well as some Iranian chest thumping.

And at 8:30 AM central, I’ll be joined by The American Thinker’s Doug Hanson. Don’t miss our discussion about Iraq WMD’s and the CIA’s war against the White House.

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UPDATE

Here’s a link to a zip file that you can download and play. The interview is in two parts.

DEMOCRATS DISCUSS THE THREAT OF TERRORISM AGAINST THE UNITED STATES

I remember the good old days when liberals would place the War on Terror in quotation marks as if the “war” only existed as a political ploy to elect George Bush and Republicans. In this universe, talk of terrorism against the United States was a gigantic trick, a distraction that was used to establish King George’s kingdom while surreptitiously savaging our civil liberties and readying the concentration camps for occupation by regime opponents.

There was something comfortable about this idiotic construct. After all, by denying there was a “war” in the first place, one could blithely go along secure in the knowledge if they were right, liberals had a hook they could use to reel in gullible voters on election day. And if they were wrong and al-Qaeda or some other terrorist group struck, they would simply point out that Bush once again failed to protect us despite their opposition to every single measure the government has taken to do so.

Of course, the left would be banking on the media to help the American people forget that they demeaned the very idea of a War on Terror in the first place. In this, they would probably be successful given the general apathy and short attention span of most voters. But no matter. For the left, it’s “heads I win, tails you lose” when it comes to national security posturing.

Now for reasons having to do with their failure to elicit the proper outrage by the voters against the President’s anti-terrorism efforts - the foolish American people actually support the President’s trying to protect them - the left has switched gears and have taken a “Don’t worry…Be happy” approach to the threat of sudden death from fanatical jihadists:

Most of all, though, we should recall that what’s scary about, say, al-Qaeda isn’t the number of people it has killed, or even the number of people it can kill — it’s the number of people it would like to kill. Terrorists armed with liquid explosives are a problem on a par with lightning strikes or peanut allergies. Terrorists armed with a nuclear bomb is a legitimate nightmare.

I don’t know about you but after reading that I feel much better. I mean, leave aside the fact that dead is dead no matter how the depressing event happens. I would certainly feel worse if I went to the hereafter as a result of eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich than if I met my demise as a passenger on a plane that was blown to smithereens by a liquid bomb planted by some Islamonut. I happen to adore my P & B (Skippy Creamy, of course, with gobs of Concord Grape Jelly) and would be loathe to give it up for anything.

Then again, we don’t ban peanut butter from airplanes. Authorities however, take a rather dim view of liquid bombs being brought on board passenger aircraft, correctly deducing that while peanut butter is sticky and could ruin the upholstery of airplane seats, a liquid bomb might do considerably more damage and should therefore be confiscated before boarding.

According to Mr. Yglesias, however, we should be expending the same amount of resources and attention to terrorism as we do on the pressing problem of overdosing on Skippy. Or perhaps on educating golfers about the fact that the 2 million volts of electricity contained in a bolt of lightening is attracted to an upraised metal golf club the same way that Osama might be attracted to Whitney Houston. If saving lives was the only goal in preventing terrorism, the left could have a point, couldn’t they?

Philip Klein:

Furthermore, terrorism is a different type of threat because in addition to the human carnage it leaves behind, it targets symbols of American power and prosperity (such as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon). Were we to have a nonchalant attitude toward terrorism because it mathematically presents a lower fatality risk relative to other dangers, it would not only put us at risk for attacks worse than Sept. 11, but it would demonstrate weakness to current and potential adversaries. As the 9/11 Commission reported, Osama Bin Laden was inspired by the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia in 1993. How would our enemies and allies view America today were we to brush aside dastardly attacks on prominent symbols of our financial and military might?

Personally, I prefer nonchalance to all this preparedness crap. That way, no one can accuse you of having an “inordinate fear” of terrorism. I’m sure you’ve heard the latest slings and arrows coming from our liberal friends; conservative “bedwetters” and “chicken littles” who quake in their boots about dying in a terrorist attack - as if there was any chance of that happening. Better to brush off the threat and put on macho airs (Do liberals had anything down there that would give them real courage in the first place?). This impresses females and also has a salutary affect on the left’s facial acne eruptions what with all those hormones being released in response to their primal chest thumping and declarations of fearlessness.

And just in case we haven’t quite gotten the message about terrorism being no more of a bother than allergies and thunderstorms, up steps Ron Bailey in that bastion of reasonableness Reason Magazine:

Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.

So do these numbers comfort you? If not, that’s a problem. Already, security measures—pervasive ID checkpoints, metal detectors, and phalanxes of security guards—increasingly clot the pathways of our public lives. It’s easy to overreact when an atrocity takes place—to heed those who promise safety if only we will give the authorities the “tools” they want by surrendering to them some of our liberty. As President Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural speech said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself— nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” However, with risks this low there is no reason for us not to continue to live our lives as though terrorism doesn’t matter—because it doesn’t really matter. We ultimately vanquish terrorism when we refuse to be terrorized.

For the record, I stink at math so we’re going to have to take Mr. Bailey’s descent into the statistical wilderness at face value. Besides that, Mr. Bailey actually has a point. There are other things besides terrorism to be afraid of in America - and one of them is Bailey and his ideological ilk.

To say that Mr. Bailey gets first prize for sophistry and jaw dropping idiocy is to let him off too easily. I would first make the request that the next terrorist attack that occurs - and we know that one is coming and will be successful - Bailey, Yglesias, and the entire crew of lefty head cases who are advancing this meme should be forced to pay a visit to the families of the dead and comfort them with their statistics, graphs, and the law of averages. And when queried about why their loved one died, they could always say “Stuff happens.”

I’m sure that will ease their pain and suffering.

But the truly dangerous nature of Mr. Bailey’s (and others) statistical approach to national security lies in its deceptive call for a “return to normalcy.” While I shouldn’t make fun of their obvious sincerity and concern over the government’s aggressive anti-terrorism efforts, the point is that enduring terrorist attacks on a regular basis because we failed do everything possible to prevent them due to the low probability that any one American will die is loony. Not only is it politically unsustainable it is a disheartening effort to cheapen individual human lives. The intellectual gymnastics performed by people who think like this are breathtaking. It turns everything about America that we admire and that others have fought and died for on its head; that the individual is and must be supreme over the state.

For when the state begins to think like Bailey et. al., it becomes easier to treat Americans as an amorphous mass of humanity rather than individuals with rights, privileges, and responsibilities. Their admirable concern for the state’s overreach in its anti-terrorism efforts loses any relevance when one can turn their argument around and say less than .01% of 1% of people’s civil rights have been egregiously violated. Thus, the anti-terror programs that they find objectionable can be justified using their own logic against them.

We are closing in on 5 years at war in this country. We have yet to reach any kind of a national consensus on the liberty vs. security issue, a prerequisite for our survival as a free country and national entity. This argument being made by Bailey, Yglesias, and others is extraordinarily unhelpful in this cause and serves only to undermine our efforts both to protect our selves and our rights.

I kind of liked it better when they didn’t think we were at war at all…

Stung by international criticism regarding their paltry offer to add a mere 400 troops to their force serving in the United Nations International Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Jacques Chirac promised to add an additional 1600 men to the French commitment:

In a nationally televised address, Chirac said France will increase its deployment from an already announced 400 troops, and hopes to retain command of the force. He said the United Nations had provided the guarantees France had sought involving the mandate of the force.

“Two extra battalions will go on to the ground to extend our numbers within” the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), Chirac said. “Two thousand French soldiers are thus placed under blue helmets in Lebanon,” he added, referring to the colored headgear that members of UN peacekeeping forces wear.

“These 2,000 soldiers include the 400 military personnel already present on the ground,” he added after meeting with Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, as well as his foreign and defense ministers and military chiefs.

Italy has agreed to take on the thankless task of commanding the force which will have a mandate to “defend themselves” and civilians” in the likely event they get shot at:

Potential contributors to the force have expressed concern about the lack of a clear and strong mandate, which could hinder troops on the ground and leave them unable to defend themselves if they come under fire, like the existing UNIFIL force in Lebanon.

But the United Nations has now authorized the force to use weapons in self-defense and to defend civilians.

Evidently Bush has been busier than many people realized in pushing the recalcitrant Europeans to fill out the bulk of forces that will be sent to implement Resolution 1701:

In Rome, Prime Minister Romano Prodi said President George. W. Bush had told him by telephone of his “positive” view of Italy’s offer to lead the force. He added Bush was also leaning on allies to offer troops.

“I expect that reluctant or not, smiling or not, there will be an ample European contribution,” Prodi said in an interview with RAI state radio. “Bush is making a strong effort to put pressure on friendly countries in order to broaden the number of participants in the mission.”

The European commitment will become clearer after a meeting tomorrow in Brussels. It appears that the bulk of the 15,000 man force will therefore be made up of real soldiers and not drawn from the armies of nations that believe Israel has no right to exist:

Greece, Finland, Poland and Spain have all indicated that they will contribute, prompting European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso to say Thursday he was “confident that Europe will provide the necessary support to expand UNIFIL.”

In addition, Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia have said they will participate, though Israel is resisting the offer from the latter two because of an absence of diplomatic relations.

And someone should tell the Italians that they should get with the program and not try and disarm Hizbullah. Their Foreign Minister didn’t get the memo:

D’Alema said that the international force would “assist” the Lebanese Army in disarming Hizbullah and restoring the government’s sovereignty over the southern region.

He said some form of assistance could also be extended to help Lebanon control its border with Syria and stem the flow of arms destined for Hizbullah, but ruled out deploying the international force along the Lebanon-Syria border. “That would require an enormous number of troops and is not called for in the resolution,” D’Alema told a joint news conference.

Livni said Hizbullah could play a role in Lebanese politics but insisted on the enforcement of 1701 in order for “Hizbullah not to be an armed militia at the end of the process but to take part in Lebanese political life.”

D’Alema said that the disarmament of Hizbullah was “in large part” up to the Lebanese government

Will there come a point where someone, somewhere, insists that UN Resolutions 1559 and 1701 be fully implemented? Both resolutions call for Hizbullah’s disarmament in the clearest language possible. How many times will the UN “insist” the terrorists disarm before someone does it?

And what about the stipulation regarding the interdiction of Syrian and Iranian arms to Hizbullah? Are we just going to let that one drop? Are they hoping that Israel is going to forget that they agreed to a cease fire with that very important stipulation as part of the deal? Will they prevent Israel from doing their job for them?

Many questions and few answers as the new force is deployed. If past history is anything to go by, the force will not be effective at doing anything save hunkering down when the going gets tough. The UN has yet to deploy a force that has been able to stop determined adversaries from killing each other. And given the mandate applied to this one, I don’t expect anything different.

Okay, so I blew it. I like totally forgot to post last week’s winners and losers (yours truly falling into the latter category) in the Watchers Vote. And it was only by the grace of God that I remembered to send in a post for this week’s vote.

Allow me to remedy my malfeasance before the Watcher sends me one of his “Dear Rick” emails with all sorts of veiled threats and matter of fact recitations of the horrible penalties involved for not following the rules of the Council. The consequences are secret but I can tell you that they are not pretty and that they involve someone named “Mistress Diana” and a whip, chains, with lots and lots of leather.

Results from W/E 8/11

COUNCIL:

1. Done with Mirrors for “We Could be Heroes”

2. AbbaGav for “A Few Points That Are Not Morally Equivalent”

3. Shrinkwrapped for “Clans of the Alphane Moon”

4. Joshuapundit for “The War Against the Jews and the War Against Us”

NON COUNCIL:

1. One Cosmos for “Israel has no Right to Exist”

2. Shape of Days for “A Photojournalist Weighs in on the Adnan Hajj Scandal”

3. Abu Aardvark for “Islamist Bandwagons”

Results from W/E 8/18

COUNCIL:

1. Shrinkwrapped for “A Questionable Assumption”

2. Yours Truly for “A Hinge of History”

NON COUNCIL

1. Eteraz for “Muslim Musings on British Muslims”

2. The People’s Cube for “Flat Fatima — Revolution In News Photography”

If you’d like to participate in the weekly Watchers Vote, go here and follow instructions.

I have nothing but the greatest respect for journalists as well as a deep appreciation for the almost impossible job they have when trying to cover a war. The danger, the confusion, the rush to fill air time and to make deadlines - all this is a contributing factor to the difficulty in placing yourself in the midst of warring parties and report what is going on.

I also am trying to appreciate how hard it is to separate fact from propaganda and try your best not to be manipulated by either side into skewing your story. I got an earful the last time I visited this issue from a genuine photojournalist who has covered numerous conflicts around the globe. He told me in a series of fascinating emails that it is at times unavoidable to pass along propaganda from one side or another. I accept this is a price of being in a war zone. But then there are things that should not be accepted by my friend the photo journalist or anyone concerned with the credibility of the media.

As I predicted in this post the debunking of war reporting by the MSM that started with the exposure of Reuters as a shill for Hizbullah has not gone away and indeed, has gotten more intense.

The microscopic scrutiny being applied by the conservative blogosphere to how the MSM screwed the pooch in their coverage of the war (lefty blogs have dismissed the issue as “one picture” that was only “slightly altered”) has continued despite the media moving on to more important matters - like the fake confession in a 10 year old murder case by a disturbed pedophile. After all, why deal with the media’s assistance to a terrorist group in getting their propaganda out when you can garner ratings and viewers by devoting absurd amounts of time and effort to titillating your audience with pictures of an unfortunate little girl dressed up to look like an adult?

The latest episode in this slow motion car wreck for the media comes to us via Michelle Malkin. The story of those evil Joooooos targeting ambulances with missile strikes that was reported by many so-called reputable news agencies has been debunked by a woman who calls herself “Zombie.” Read both Michelle’s post and Zombie’s analysis to get the complete picture of what we’ve only guessed at prior to this; that the media was, if not a willing partner, a gaggle of “useful idiots” for Hizbullah during the coverage of the war.

We know of Zombie from her frontline photo reports of various protests by radical leftists over the past few years. In this instance, Zombie used her analytical skills and knowledge of photography to offer up a definitive and devastating account of how Hizbullah fed the media’s preconceived notions about Israel and banked on the laziness of editors in order to perpetrate a fraud upon the world.

The ease with which they accomplished this is breathtaking in its implications. What Zombie’s work shows is that the media was not concerned with reporting the “truth” or even the “facts” but rather with telling “the story.” In the recently concluded Israeli-Islamist war, the “story” was Israel heartlessly bombing civilians which in turn gave substance and urgency to the UN’s efforts to stop the war short of Israel achieving its military objectives.

There is little doubt that the IDF was pounding the hell out of Hizbullah, especially the last 72 hours before the cease fire. While it is doubtful that the outcome of the “war of perceptions” would have been different (Hizbullah was not going to be “destroyed” hence they would be declared the winner by the world press regardless of how much damage they sustained), the shattering conclusion to be reached by examining Zombie’s analysis, as well as the analysis of several bloggers who have debunked other photos and stories, is that Hizbullah military assets and fighters were saved thanks to their expert propaganda campaign. They successfully manipulated the press through heartbreaking visuals and carefully choreographed stories into reporting the war in such a way as to place political pressure on the United States to force the issue of a cease fire at the UN.

Were there civilians killed in Lebanon? There is no doubt of this. How many? The Lebanese government says over 1000 were killed but there is absolutely no independent verification of that number nor is there any reason to believe that all of those deaths were indeed “civilian” in nature. The work of Zombie and others places the burden of proof now on the Lebanese government and the news media to give an accurate accounting of civilian deaths in Lebanon during the war. Numbers from any other source - including the UN - can now legitimately be questioned and indeed, can rightly be called exaggerations since it is clear that so much of what we heard and saw from Lebanon was a lie.

It cannot be stated forcefully enough that the media absolutely must undertake a massive re-examination of their coverage of this war, ideally using independent investigators, in order to find out how so much of their coverage was so easily co-opted by Hizbullah propagandists. Was it simple laziness? Was it competitive pressures? Was it gullibility? Any way you look at it, the entire media comes out looking like dupes. And their already damaged credibility has suffered another blow that means from here on out, bloggers are going to take nothing from them for granted. If they thought they were being fact checked prior to these incidents, they haven’t experienced anything yet.

Will they reform? I believe that we have not seen the last of these revelatory investigations about MSM coverage during the war. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop on this story - that “stringers” used by many in the print media to help in compiling stories on the war were also either Hizbullah operatives or sympathizers. I feel confident that someone with the resources and the time will be able to ferret that story out of the shadows eventually also. But even if that aspect never materializes, the mainstream press is going to have to come to grips with the fact that the way they gather news and report it must change or whatever credibility they have left will be lost.

UPDATE

In a related story, Allah has the jaw dropping response of Editor and Publisher to all the charges of fakery, flummoxing, and stagecraft by the media during the war.

I don’t know quite what to say. But Allah does:

I don’t know what to say, except that if these guys see no higher ethical obligation in war photography than press-conference photography; if they have no moral objection to enabling the exploitation of children’s corpses for propaganda purposes; if they detect no corruption in their presence at the scene of a newsworthy event shaping the participants’ actions during the event; then David Perlmutter’s got a bigger job ahead of him than he realizes.

Perlmutter is the journalism professor whose article in last week’s E & P set off Greg Mitchell and was the reason for this two part screed on how bloggers suck and it’s okay to print propaganda pictures.

That’s an oversimplification but after reading Mitchell’s piece and the comments of several war photogs, one can hardly come away thinking anything else.