….why, you ask?

Because any report that doesn’t echo the “Bush Lied!” mantra is rejected out of hand by liberals, whereas any report, no matter the paucity of supporting evidence to support the left’s bumpersticker theme, is automatically considered gospel, invoking a collective murmur of approval from beneath millions of tinfoil hats.

For instance, in this NewsMax article,

On the CBS-TV show, and in subsequent media interviews that appeared throughout the world, Drumheller said that the White House was excited about the fact that the CIA was getting information straight from Naji Sabri, the then Iraqi foreign minister. But when the White House found out this source was reliably saying that Saddam had no WMD, Bush and his White House weren’t interested.
“He [Sabri] told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program,” Drumheller told correspondent Ed Bradley in a segment called “A Spy Speaks Out.”

However,

Now it appears Drumheller’s claim was untrue, according to the findings of a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation. Rather than undercutting the Bush administration’s rationale for invading Iraq, Sabri’s account shows how well-founded the intelligence on Saddam’s weapons program appeared to be.
Ironically, just as Drumheller claimed that Bush ignored the truth about Iraq, the media have ignored the documentation in the Senate report demolishing Drumheller’s claim.

{emphasis mine}

Given the penchant the MSM has for reporting only “news” that agrees with their anti-Bush agenda and is further geared exclusively toward what their liberal readers, watchers and listeners want to hear, what are the odds on such a turn of events making, say, the headsheet of the NYT, about 100,000 to 1?

At least 134 stories and TV shows have referred to Drumheller’s claims and his criticism of the CIA and Bush administration in general. One of the stories ran as the second lead of the June 25, 2006 Washington Post.

All the news, all the time…

So far, no media outlet has run the Senate committee’s addendum demolishing Drumheller’s claim that Bush and his White House did not want to hear the truth about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Fancy that!

According to a column by Dennis Prager, I may have been a little hasty in recent posts when I opined that the Israeli left might well, even in the face of the ongoing purely defensive Jewish State military action against terrorism, continue to emulate the American left in pure lemminglike fashion.

Happily, this doesn’t seem to be the case — Israeli liberals, unlike our own, are in touch, it would seem, with a much larger chunk of reality than one might give any liberals credit for.

The Left’s anti-Israel positions until now were based, at least in theory, on its opposition to Israeli occupation of Arab land and its belief in the “cycle of violence” between Israel and its enemies. However, this time there is no occupied land involved and the violence is not a cycle with its implied lack of a beginning. There is a clear aggressor — a terror organization devoted to Islamicizing the Middle East and annihilating Israel — and no occupation.

That is why the Israeli Left is almost universally in favor of Israel’s war against Hezbollah. Amos Oz, probably Israel’s best-known novelist and leading spokesman of its Left, a lifetime critic of Israeli policy vis a vis the Palestinians, wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

“Many times in the past, the Israeli peace movement has criticized Israeli military operations. Not this time. . . . This time, Israel is not invading Lebanon. It is defending itself from daily harassment and bombardment of dozens of our towns and villages. . . . There can be no moral equation between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah is targeting Israeli civilians wherever they are, while Israel is targeting mostly Hezbollah.”

Given an identical situation in the U.S., if their conduct re our homeland’s defense against terrorism is any indicator, our own liberals would be out in the streets in force, doing the usual blocking of intersections with a little gratuitous vandalism thrown in, the ACLU hammering out dozens of lawsuits against the government, the New York Times sabotaging our defensive efforts at every turn, Greenpeace, GBLT (– I like the 2nd and 3rd letters in that order, it sounds like a certain popular sandwich, with granola added), NOW, The Sharpton-Jackson Axis, All Of Hollywood, Planned Parenthood, ELF, Everyone In Berkeley, 98% of Congressional Democrats, my personal favorite, Dykes On Bikes, and every other liberal organization “weighing in” against America. CAIR (the terrorist supporting Council for American-Islamic Relations) would be bending forward to allow PC liberals a better angle at which to perform “The Kiss Of Shame”.

It’s refreshing to know that there are some lefties out there who possess some quantity of common sense and have retained that most valuable commodity, the survival instinct. Too bad they don’t live here.

I wonder if Israel would agree to an exchange — their liberals for ours….

The entire column can be read here.

The following comes from an email from Move America Forward

Unfortunately, it arrived in my G-mail with a zillion mile long Google-mail address, so linking it would be a major PITA.

It is an on-point message from Master Sergeant John Ubaldi:

On Tuesday, Americans across the nation will celebrate the 230th birthday of the United States of America. Everyone will be enjoying picnics, backyard barbeques, and the traditional fireworks display viewed throughout the country. Today, the armed forces of this republic are engaged in the monumental undertaking that determines if the democratic experiment begun on July 4th, 1776 will begin to sprout in the turbulent lands of the Middle East.
It’s easy to forget the noble undertaking begun so long ago, easy to forget the auspicious beginning that gave hope to a world that a government can be ruled by its citizens. President George Washington warned Americans that they had a new responsibility when he stated in his first inaugural address, “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
From the birth of this Republic, the foundation of this country was the proposition that all men are created equal. As President Abraham Lincoln stated in the Gettysburg Address, “That this nation under God, Shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Abraham Lincoln envisioned that the guiding principles of the Declaration of Independence and the rights conveyed in the United States Constitution would be the foundation that humanity rests on, eloquently written in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” It’s instructive that many of our brave military men & women understand they are serving the cause of freedom enumerated in that cherished document, sacrificing and establishing the basic foundation of democracy in the unstable often volatile region of the Middle East.
To the families of the fallen brings a special solemn meaning of sacrifice, as Margaret Johnson, mother of fallen Army Captain Christopher Johnson, stated in the Washington Times, “He knew the cost of freedom and that it was not free, and he volunteered to go to Iraq anyway.”
The many Gold Star Families who lost a loved one in the war against terrorism have the courage and satisfaction that their loved ones sacrificed all in freedom’s cause. President Kennedy wrote in “Profiles in Courage” that, “In the days ahead, only the very courageous will be able to take the hard and unpopular decisions necessary for our survival in the struggle with a powerful enemy. And only the very courageous will be able to keep alive the spirit of individualism and dissent which gave birth to this nation, nourished it as an infant, and carried it through its severest tests upon the attainment of its maturity.”
As we celebrate the birth of this nation and the freedoms that we enjoy, we must remember the country’s most treasured wealth; the youth who are engaged in the eternal fight against the adversary of darkness. Freedom cannot survive here if neighboring nations have lost theirs.
The contemplation of the meaning of freedom is too often a vernacular of popular expression that easily reverberates in our dialogue as we discuss the rights embodied in the Constitution. Over time a tilt toward the direction of evil has contaminated the moral compass that we enjoy. Too often we have failed to realize that many regions and nations of the world still live under the cloud of totalitarianism, unable to enjoy the basic rights of man.
Freedom and democracy include the participation of all, but too often many nations of the world are left in dark blanket of oppression that enslaves them to an endless abyss of misery. For freedom to be sowed, nations and individuals must be willing to stand up to the forces of evil or forever sentence future generations to a world without freedom.
As the debate intensifies surrounding The War on Terror, many people throughout the vast expanse of the Middle East live as President Vaclav Havel lived under the banner of communism in Czechoslovakia. As the first President of his nation, after the fall of communism, stating in 1990, “That we live in a contaminated moral climate. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.”
It seems many of us view July 4th as having little meaning beyond a day of watching fire works, and planning the backyard barbeque, but we fail as a nation to remember the history that is personified and articulated in the Declaration of Independence with the embodiment of individual liberty enshrined in the United States Constitution.
Individual freedoms have been the hallmark and legacy that America brought to the world, not for the benefit of America, but for the benefit of humanity. We celebrate these rights, and cherish the fundamental rights of freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom of religion, but we fail to remember that millions around the world are denied these basic rights.
Today in the spirit of that revolution that forever changed mankind, we are again building the fundamental foundation of democracy in a region that has only known terror and oppression. Americans too easily take for granted these basic rights, when we have been blessed with an overabundance of freedom that millions living under the yoke of oppression yearn for.
Abraham Lincoln stated in a letter to Henry Pierce on April 6, 1859 that, “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.”
We often only look at our own circumstance without looking at the broader ramifications of our public discourse in regard to our intervention in Iraq. Alexander Solzhenitsyn stated in a Harvard Address in June 1978, “The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, and in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.”
Opponents of the War on Terror, often speak of love of the basic rights guaranteed under the Constitution, that they are defending what we hold sacred. These same individuals hide behind the very foundations on what this nation was founded on, secure in the beliefs that they have nothing to fear from a tyrannical government. Those who protest against our troops and the missions they are serving in do not offer a practical solution to help those suffering under the suffocating burden of a despotic regime.
It’s easy to speak cavalierly about freedom if you are someone who has never fought for that freedom, when you live in the freest nation in the history of mankind. I note that those people seldom if ever mention the enslaved individuals behind the walls of tyranny in North Korea, Iran, and would have kept millions of Iraqi’s under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
President Theodore Roosevelt said it best in Paris, France on April 23rd, 1910, “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Having served in Operation Enduring Freeom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq), I witnessed first-hand the progress of people who are beginning to break the yoke of bondage that has enslaved them for generations. Many have stated that the people of the Arab and Muslim world do not want democracy imposed on them; we aren’t imposing democracy, but establishing the foundations of democracy, that only they can choose to implement and embrace.
Last year Iraq witnessed three monumental elections that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. I was moved as I stood there, looking into the faces of these eager pioneers who for the first time were controlling their own destiny. The elections in December 2005 witnessed over 70% of the Iraqi people voting in the first free election in the Middle East. Contrast that 70% turnout with our own election last month when we could barley get over 30% of eligible voters to participate in a primary election. I believe our founding fathers would have been embarrassed that so few Americans took part in the electoral process. What’s our excuse?
Nobody including those who serve want conflict! Ask those who served during World War II if they wanted to serve, they didn’t of course, but they all knew that freedom is a cause worth defending. Those who find nothing important enough to them to be willing to defend and fight for, seem to me to be the sort of miserable creatures that John Stuart Mills wrote about. These people stand back and allow the forces of evil to gain a foothold in the hearts and minds of mankind.
As Mills stated, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
On this Fourth of July lets celebrate the principles of what this nation stands for: that freedom belongs to all mankind, and lets help lift the weight of tyranny so all mankind may enjoy the fruits of freedom. The revolution that started on July 4th 1776 sparked a desire in the hearts of men that man is destined to be free as our creator intended not to be enslaved, but free! Lets spread that same freedom to others or some day our own freedom will be in jeopardy! Lets stand for freedom for all!

This arrived in an email a little while ago, and I thought I’d share it.

To judge by the “a few months ago, the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell,” beginning, it’s obviously been out there for some time, but the rest of the content is pretty much timeless.

Just an interesting piece of evidence of the curious behavior of the Roosevelt administration toward the Jews during WWII —–

A few months ago, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, gave a posthumous award for “constructive dissent” to Hiram (or Harry) Bingham. For over fifty years, the State Department resisted any attempt to honor Bingham. For them he was an insubordinate member of the US diplomatic service, a dangerous maverick who was eventually demoted. Now, after his death, he has been officially recognized as a hero.

Bingham came from an illustrious family. His father (on whom the fictional character Indiana Jones was based) was the archeologist who unearthed the Inca City of Machu Picchu, Peru, in 1911. Harry entered the US diplomatic service and, in 1939, was posted to Marseilles, France, as American Vice-Consul.

The USA was then neutral and, not wishing to annoy Marshal Petain’s puppet Vichy regime, President Roosevelt’s government ordered its representatives in Marseilles not to grant visas to any Jews. Bingham found this policy immoral and, risking his career, did all in his power to undermine it.

In defiance of his bosses in Washington, he granted over 2,500 USA visas to Jewish and other refugees, including the artists Marc Chagall and Max Ernst and the family of the writer Thomas Mann. He also sheltered Jews in his Marseilles home, and obtained forged identity papers to help Jews in their dangerous journeys across Europe. He worked with the French underground to smuggle Jews out of France into Franco’s Spain or across the Mediterranean and even contributed to their expenses out of his own pocket. In 1941,

Washington lost patience with him. He was sent to Argentina, where later he continued to annoy his superiors by reporting on the movements of Nazi war criminals.

Eventually, he was forced out of the American diplomatic service completely. Bingham died almost penniless in 1988. Little was known of his extraordinary activities until his son found some letters in his belongings after his death. He has now been honored by many groups and organizations including the United Nations and the State of Israel.

H/T Brenda

This seems to be the week for boneheads-in-training for The World’s Dumbest Criminals. On Tuesday, there was this guy, and now we have a real winner who apparently aspired to be a jewel thief.

FARGO, N.D. - Diamond earrings stolen from a college fundraiser were recovered when a Minnesota man tried to have them appraised at the jewelry store that donated them, authorities said.

Police said the man was arrested after he brought the $4,600 earrings to Wimmer’s Jewelry at the West Acres mall. Store owner Brad Wimmer said the man had the original box along with the description of the jewelry.

“It was all very goofy,” Wimmer said. “The value of the earrings was right on the description.”

Goofy, right.

The value of the earrings automatically makes the theft a felony, so hasta la bye bye, bonehead.

David Limbaugh’s on-point forecast of the Democrats’ political fortunes come 2008 should serve as a warning to the once formidable party that the liberals hijacked and turned into a quagmire of defeat that reads like a 20th Century journal of the French military.

Their own presidential role model, Bill Clinton, and his vice president, Al Gore, were adamant about the looming problems with Social Security. There was much talk of lock boxes and other schemes to “protect” this hallowed institution. And let there be no mistake — both gentlemen, along with their entire political party, considered Social Security to be in “crisis.”

Yet, when President Bush dared to take action to reform Social Security, instead of merely talking about the issue, Democrats obstructed at every turn and even denied there was a serious problem, much less a crisis. Let them continue to gloat about their obstruction, but let history reflect their dangerous deferral of a problem that threatens our long-term fiscal solvency, a matter they profess to be close to their hearts.

The Dems’ problem, as I see it, is that they’ve begun believing the liberal point of view, which is apparently that most Americans are stupid, uninformed, and believe without reservation all the malarkey the Democrats’ political leaders and the Mainstream Media feed them.

They are dead wrong. As Limbaugh asserts, and rightly, the major issues in 2008 are going to be national security and the war in Iraq.

Voters were already skeptical of the Democratic Party on national security issues. But in the last few years, that skepticism may have ripened into full-blown distrust. And if not, it should have.

At the root of the public’s lack of confidence in Democrats over national security is the party’s ambivalence about the prosecution of the war and its absence of moral certitude about the nature of our enemy.

To this day, Democrats can’t tell you whether it’s a good thing we attacked Iraq. They were against the war in Iraq before they were for it only to be against it again, and now they’re probably just waiting to see how things turn out to decide, ultimately, whether they should be for or against it.

As an American, I am profoundly ashamed of those on the left side of the aisle for their dangerous substitution of cheap political agendas for the patriotism we once expected from all our senators and representatives.

As a conservative Republican, I’m grimly amused by the way the Dems are helping to assure a continued Republican majority on Capitol Hill and the election of a Republican to succeed George W. Bush.

Grimly, because their War On Bush is and has been compromising American lives both here and in Iraq. Amused, because it’s always amusing watching a bunch of idiots sabotage their own chances of success with such tenacity.

Limbaugh’s column is spot-on, and is here in its entirety.

An Austrian civil liberties group called Quintessenz has been hacking into, downloading imagery from and then sabotaging lawful police surveillance cameras in public places.

When the Austrian government passed a law this year allowing police to install closed-circuit surveillance cameras in public spaces without a court order, the Austrian civil liberties group Quintessenz vowed to watch the watchers.

Members of the organization worked out a way to intercept the camera images with an inexpensive, 1-GHz satellite receiver. The signal could then be descrambled using hardware designed to enhance copy-protected video as it’s transferred from DVD to VHS tape.

The Quintessenz activists then began figuring out how to blind the cameras with balloons, lasers and infrared devices.

It’s interesting that these folks don’t seem to have anything to say about asshole tourists in various cities who practically shove their videocams in your face as you go about your business, without asking permission, or simply tape streams of passing pedestrians without asking anybody if it’s okay, and those are not illegal activities.

The videocams police set up to record activities in public places are not, therefore, infringing on anybody’s privacy. Anything you do in a public area is just that, public, including strong armed robbery, drug dealing, unlawful obscenities, hooking, picking pockets or engaging in terrorist acts. Picking out suspicious persons or known suspected criminals on realtime video can prevent everything from felonious assaults on innocent citizens or prevent multiple murders.

And, just for fun, the group created an anonymous surveillance system that uses face-recognition software to place a black stripe over the eyes of people whose images are recorded.

In my opinion, these people are obstructing legitimate law enforcement tools and protective venues endorsed by the majority of their fellow citizens and in so doing, creating public endangerment.

If interference with any of these cameras results in the monitoring authorities’ not being able to identify someone about to commit, or in the process of committing a crime or terrorist act, or to spot one of said situations in time to prevent it, the saboteurs — yes, that’s what these “civil liberties activists” are — the penalties for this sabotage should be equal to the punishment merited by the perpetrators they have protected.

According to an article by Sam Dillon in Treason Central the NYT,

The average American college graduate’s literacy in English declined significantly over the past decade, according to results of a nationwide test released yesterday.

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, given in 2003 by the Department of Education, is the nation’s most important test of how well adult Americans can read.

It seems to me that the literacy levels of young adults have been declining in direct correlation to our advances in technology.

It’s interesting to note that while black and Asian students’ scores have increased, white and hispanic literacy levels have decreased.

Read the rest here.

And there’s this, LOL, the episode of the Rampaging Santas.

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