Yes, Bob Woodward is doing a journalist’s job here, reporting from a non-partisan perspective, but of course, since the people on the left side of the political equation don’t like to hear the truth (liberal propaganda is their version of “the news”), die hard lefties couldn’t help but become enraged.

The White House sure is…

Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.

What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.

“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

Read the entire article here.

From Liberty Extra.

Weapons of Mass Distraction -
Barack Obama Has No Clothes

From 2nd paragraph

Each week, the Obama administration (which has become indistinguishable from the Obama campaign) becomes more reminiscent of the old children’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” with the national media elites playing the members of the king’s fawning court, pretending that the president is not naked, that he is, in fact, resplendent in the best finery, and that his ever more absurd pronouncements are somehow credible. The latest issue is same-sex marriage.

Ever since Vice President Joe Blabbermouth, America’s second biggest national embarrassment, was dispatched to announce that he now favors the radical redefinition of marriage, followed in short order by his boss admitting that his position on the issue also has “evolved,” the political chatter on the left has been ridiculous. It reminds me of the snooty townswomen of River City doing their cheep-cheep-pick-a-little number from “The Music Man.” And it brings to mind the question, why now?

The answer seems obvious to those of us who keep our focus on the one topic that will ultimately define the fall campaign (whether the president likes it or not): the nation’s teetering economy. As a committed leftist, Barack Obama should be proud of his record. He has done some very profound things in his three-and-a-half years as president. He should be proud of his multi-billion dollar government bailout of the United Auto Workers, his trillion dollar “stimulus package” (which seems to have stimulated nothing other than his friends and campaign bundlers in the nation’s public sector unions and the industry known laughingly as “solar energy”), and, of course, his crowning achievement, Obamacare.

Read On.

I couldn’t agree more!

You may recall this post on the Komen Fund deciding to discontinue their largesse to Infanticide Central Planned Parenthood, after which they rescinded that decision.

Well, from the Washington Times:

Susan G. Komen’s short-lived decision to drop grants to Planned Parenthood was met with fury from the left wing, and its outrage was immediately reported by the liberal news media. But it wasn’t the first time Komen had been attacked from the left. As a private charity, Komen was within its rights to not renew grants for breast health care for Planned Parenthood, a group that doesn’t even perform mammograms, but that wasn’t how the media covered it. CNN blamed the decision on conservatives, while MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell claimed that “the politics of stopping Planned Parenthood has now put more women at risk of dying from breast cancer.”

It didn’t take long for that uproar on the left to prompt a reversal of Komen’s decision, and for Komen Vice President Karen Handel to resign from the breast cancer charity. The controversy also renewed criticism of Komen over a completely different issue: whether or not the common chemical BPA (formally known as bisphenol A), is a risk factor for breast cancer.

Above emphasis mine.

Can you believe this?

Of course you can! After all, we’re talking liberals, here, particularly the liberal…um, “progressive” media, for whom truth plays second fiddle to political agendas.

Read the whole thing here.

So you might say the Komen Fund was mugged by Planned Parenthood, the left wing media and their weaselist infanticidal proponents.

I’ve always thought that a strange title for an organization that’s more a Murder Incorporated for defenseless unborn, but very much alive, babies.

Naturally, since baby murder goes well, somehow, with the doctrine that’s become popular among our intellectual elite and the “progressive” politicians they elect, it is also supported by the mainstream media who, as we know, have a habit of reporting only what is convenient for the public to know in order to press their political agendas. As often as not, there are a few twists, spins and, to those who actively seek the truth, some profoundly loud omissions.

Fortunately, there are a few honest journalists out there, including those who write for the Culture and Media Institute.

Speaking of which…

Media Ignore Planned Parenthood’s $1.3 Billion Federal Funding Discrepancy

Networks and newspapers silent on government report contradicting abortion group’s taxpayer funding figures.

If $1.3 billion is unaccounted for and the media don’t report it, did it really happen?

According to an American Life League review of Planned Parenthood’s annual reports, the organization received more than $2 billion in federal grants and contracts between 2002 and 2008. A June 16 Government Accountability Report, however, found that the organization spent just $657.1 million of taxpayer money in the same time period.

The $1.3 billion discrepancy failed to catch the attention of the nation’s major media outlets. None of the networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) or major newspapers (Los Angeles times, The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post) reported it.

A Culture and Media Institute review of coverage found that only one newspaper listed among Nexis’ “major newspapers” – The Houston Chronicle – even mentioned the GAO report. The Chronicle’s June 16 article noted that Planned Parenthood spent $657 million of federal money over seven years, but did not mention the income/outlay discrepancy.

Amazing, here are all these media institutions in whom the public place their (I would say “our”, except I don’t trust those leftist turds, not me) trust for news, and only one of them even seems to “know” about a “discrepancy” on the part of an organization that our government siphons hundreds of millions of our hard earned tax dollars to.

Don’t Follow the Money

The media have made Planned Parenthood a go-to source for several stories over the last six months, including debate over abortion language in health care reform legislation, the trial of the activist who killed abortionist Dr. George Tiller, and the 50th anniversary of the Pill.

From Dec. 28, 2009, to June 28, 2010, the broadcast networks and the “Big 4” newspapers mentioned Planned Parenthood 56 times in news stories. None of those stories mentioned the GAO report, and only one article reported the amount of federal money going to Planned Parenthood.

The February 27 article in The New York Times mentioned an investigative operation by pro-life activist Lila Rose which found Planned Parenthood clinics willing to accept donations from people who wanted African American babies aborted. A separate New York Times report on January 28 characterized the investigation as “prank calls” to Planned Parenthood.

Four reports referred to state funding of Planned Parenthood, but did not mention federal resources granted to the organization.

Planned Parenthood’s 2008 Annual Report says $349.6 million in taxpayer-funded grants and contracts accounted for more than a third (36 percent) of the organization’s income that year, second only to health center revenue. Federal funding for Planned Parenthood has increased by 45 percent since 2001-2002, when it received a reported $240.9 million from taxpayers.

While federal orders mandate that government money not be used directly for abortions, pro-life advocates point out that federal money used to cover non-abortion costs frees up private money to pay for abortions.

“Frees it up.”

Favorite Experts

Planned Parenthood is by far the most cited pro-abortion group when it comes to national media coverage. In the last six months, 30 broadcast and print reports have quoted Planned Parenthood representatives and another 26 have mentioned the organization.

The 56 mentions of Planned Parenthood dwarf other pro-abortion groups, including the National Organization for Women (30) and NARAL Pro-Choice America (15).

When abortion was a major focus of health care reform debates, the media turned to Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards and other affiliated representatives to statements and analysis. When the media celebrated the 50th anniversary of “the Pill,” the media commemorated Planned Parenthood’s role in making it possible.

A February 26 profile in The Washington Post painted a glowing picture of abortion doctor Carol Ball. The article described a “difficult time” for Ball and other doctors who perform late term abortions in South Dakota.

When Planned Parenthood produced an ad in response to Focus on the Family’s pro-life Super Bowl ad, the media praised it. USA Today noted it “defend[ed] abortion rights,” although the Focus on the Family ad did not target abortion “rights.”

The New York Times on January 27 turned to Richards on the increase in teen pregnancy rates, and she used the opportunity bash abstinence education. “This new study makes it crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work,” Richards said.

In addition to news reports related to Planned Parenthood, newspapers published five letters to the editor from readers mentioning the organization and fives letters to the editor from Planned Parenthood executives.

Another seven op-eds and entertainment reviews mentioned Planned Parenthood, as well as 15 death notices, and a couple of comedians’ jokes. All told, the networks and newspapers mentioned Planned Parenthood more than 80 times in the last six months.

But when someone noticed a $1.3 billion discrepancy in Planned Parenthood’s handling of federal money – crickets.

See what I mean about the mainstream media?

The Sound of Silence

One letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times February 7 illustrated the effect the media blackout has had on public perceptions of Planned Parenthood.

Responding to the media-manufactured controversy over Focus on the Family’s pro-life Super Bowl ad, a reader wrote, “If I had it, I would give millions to Planned Parenthood to advertise on CBS during the Super Bowl.”

Well, dear reader, your wish has already come true. You might not know it from reading the Times, but Planned Parenthood already receives more than $350 million every year from you and every other American taxpayer, with no oversight from the “watchdogs” in the media.

$350 million every year!!!!

Of yours and my tax dollars, monies we could find much better uses for than having a bunch of “progressive” politicians give it to Planned Parenthood.

More than enough in any reasonable man’s book to justify giving every politician involved his or her just desserts.

I read this item in today’s Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web Today, published daily as part of the Opinion Journal by James Taranto, and having been to many demonstrations in my time during which I had the opportunity to observe “peaceful” liberals in action, couldn’t resist putting in my two cents.

“In a blunt caution to political friend and foe, President Barack Obama said Saturday that partisan rants and name-calling under the guise of legitimate discourse pose a serious danger to America’s democracy, and may incite ‘extreme elements’ to violence,” the Associated Press reports from Ann Arbor, Mich.

Two thousand miles away, another AP dispatch reports, there occurred an example of exactly what the president was warning about:

Close to 20 businesses were damaged after what started as a peaceful immigrants’ rights march in downtown Santa Cruz [Calif.] turned violent, requiring police to call other agencies for help, authorities said.

Police spokesman Zach Friend said an estimated 250 people started marching through the city around 10:30 p.m. Saturday.

It was a harmonious but “unpermitted and unsanctioned event,” he said, until some in the crowd started breaking windows and spraying paint on retail shops that line the downtown corridor.

Friend said he wasn’t sure if the damage was caused by people marching in support of immigrants’ rights, or if the group was “infiltrated by anarchists.”

Anarchy signs were spray-painted on some of the buildings.

“They’re a group of people who seem to fancy themselves as revolutionaries, but what they really are are a group of morons,” Friend said.

You’ve got to love the way the AP describes this: It started as a peaceful march but “turned violent.” It was totally harmonious “until some in the crowd started breaking windows.” And the window breakers might have just been infiltrators!

At “peaceful” liberal demonstrations during which I was part of the conservative counter-demonstration assemblages (usually, what we have is the lefties on one side of the street, the conservatives on the other), I have uniformly, not just occasionally observed one constant, other than that while conservatives arrive on our own as individuals or in small groups, a large number of the liberals and entourage are bussed in from all points in order to bolster the size of their crowd for media exposure purposes, and that is that when everybody has gone:

1. The conservative side of the street is immaculate, no trash or property damage to be seen, whereas,

2. The liberal side of the street is utterly trashed, garbage all over the sidewalk, newspaper vending machines and other non-bolted-down artifacts overturned and/or tossed into the actual street, also a none-too-rare garnish of graffiti and/or broken windows.

Moving right along to complete WSJ Editorial Editor Taranto’s actual topic, which compares the biased treatment liberals receive in such situations over conservatives…

Compare this with the lead paragraph of the AP’s March 20 dispatch on the anti-ObamaCare tea-party protests:

House Democrats heard it all Saturday–words of inspiration from President Barack Obama and raucous chants of protests from demonstrators. And at times it was flat-out ugly, including some racial epithets aimed at black members of Congress.

The claims of racial epithets have since been disputed and were never substantiated, but let’s give the AP the benefit of the doubt and assume that at the time, the reporter knew of no reason to doubt the word of the congressmen making the claims.

Even so, had the tea-party protesters gotten the Santa Cruz treatment, the AP would have noted that the rally was completely nonviolent, even if it featured some ugly words; that there was no ugliness at all until the protest “turned ugly”; and that the people who (allegedly) shouted the ugly words might well have been infiltrators.

If the Santa Cruz protesters had gotten the tea-party treatment, by contrast, the AP would have described the event simply as a riot and would not have distinguished between the peaceful protesters and the violent few who might be infiltrators anyway.

What’s more, conservative politicians and commentators would be sounding a constant refrain–echoed by the mainstream media–that politicians are inciting the violence with “antigovernment” statements like this one, reported April 23 by CBS News:

President Obama suggested today that the immigration bill expected to be signed into law in Arizona is a “misguided” piece of legislation that “threatened to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”

We don’t think that journalists should give the Santa Cruz protesters the tea-party treatment or the tea partiers the Santa Cruz treatment. Both sides ought to get the same treatment–fair treatment–from those whose job is to cover the news impartially.

As for Obama, his efforts to demonize the opposition are unseemly and unpresidential.

Given the breadth of his policies’ unpopularity, they amount to an attack on the majority of Americans. That seems likely they will prove politically unwise as well.

That, as they (whoever they are) say, is for sure!

…and his retinue are apparently encountering some degree of resistance, at long last.

British environmental analyst Christopher Monckton says Al Gore’s latest attack on global warming skeptics shows the former vice president and other climate alarmists are “panicking.”

And well they should be.

On Sunday, CBS News correspondent Leslie Stahl asked Al Gore on the television show 60 Minutes what he thinks of people like Vice President Dick Cheney who doubt that global warming is caused by human activity.

“I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they’re almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona, and those who believe the earth is flat,” replied Gore. “That demeans them a little bit, but it’s not that far off.”

However, Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy advisor for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, says the former vice president can enjoy his “flat earth fantasies” for a few months, but in the end, the world will be laughing at him.

“The alarmists are alarmed, the panic mongers are panicking, the scare mongers are scared; the Gores are gored. Why? Because global warming stopped ten years ago; it hasn’t got warmer since 1998,” he points out. “And in fact in the last seven years, there has been a downturn in global temperatures equivalent on average to about [or] very close to one degree Fahrenheit per decade. We’re actually in a period … of global cooling.”

Hmmm…

Mr. Monckton, my hat is off to you!

Monckton contends Gore is now “panicking” because he has staked his reputation as a former American VP on “telling the world that we’re all doomed unless we shut down 90 percent of the Western economies.” He also contends that Gore is the largest “global-warming profiteer.”

It’s pitiful that Algore, a typical modern Democrat, is willing to screw the rest of us, using a typical liberal agenda, in order to make megabucks for himself. Nancy Pelosi, another leftist hypocrite, is probably foaming at the mouth in anger that she didn’t think of this racket first.

Gore’s group The Alliance for Climate Protection is currently launching a new $300 million ad campaign that demands reforms in environmental law to help reduce the supposed “climate crisis.” But Monckton points out that in the U.K., Gore is not allowed to speak in public about his “green investment company” because to do so would violate racketeering laws by “peddling a false prospectus.” He says that fact came about after a British high court found Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, riddled with errors.

Emphasis mine, and speaking of emphasis, bravo, U.K.!

It’s good to see that someone, somewhere, has exposed Algore for the opportunitic fraud he really is. Now let’s see some prosecution for same: After all, an individual who commits fraud on a bank or other business to the tune of a few hundred bucks gets a felony sentence. Gore has swindled the world at large for millions, yet he’s still walking around free.

What’s wrong with this picture?

…and the rest of their kind, like the MSM and your general purpose liberal, as we know are still actively campaigning against the big Dubya, despite the fact that he’s not running for anything.

This is pretty much a mainstay of the liberal mindset. That is, they substitute platitudinal input for proactive tangible action — they have to know that their efforts to do whatever it is they want to do to George W. Bush is undoable, that they are merely making foolish noise in the process of burning up the contributions gleaned from their faithful followers, and more often than not making preadolescent style spectacles of themselves at the same time. I entertain no doubts as to the resentment the Three Stooges would feel had they been able to see these folks attempting to upstage them in the lunacy department.

When the Berkeley kerfuffle commenced (the peoples’ and city government’s war on the Marines recruiters there), I received a bunch of emails from Move America Forward on the issue and on their response to it, and have of course read of it in numerous other places. The backlash from around the country was sufficiently intense as to cause a couple of the Kommie San Francisco suburb’s city legislators to back pedal somewhat.

They say they support the troops but oppose Bush policies. In the same breath that they tell us they have nothing against the Marines, they tell us that the same Marines are murderers and torturers who mercenary themselves to Big Oil.

The U.S. Marines, meanwhile, are but one of several elements that comprise a community whose mission is to insure that those dizzy people in Berkeley remain free to speak out against the government and even…even against the Marines!

Please pardon me, but when the issue hit the news, and when I received the outraged emails from MAF, I hardly raised an eyebrow. I mean, this is Berkeley we’re talking about. These are the same varmints who, before the fires had even been put out on 9/11, were declaring that our country had deserved the terrorist attack. That we’d earned it. That it was our fault. How could anybody actually be shocked at anything of a treasonous nature that comes out of that lefty hell-hole?

If I were suddenly appointed king of America, I would certainly deny any voter in Berkeley, the city government included, even a dime of federal funds for anything, anything at all — this would be right before I had a large, unbroken “keep ‘em in” wall built around that leftist hell hole and then had it declared a nuclear waste dump. From then on, all people convicted of treason would be sentenced to life in Berkeley.

Radioactive Cows? In Berkeley? Mooooo!

However, I didn’t come here to talk about Berkeley. Screw Berkeley. Knock knock knockin’ on treason’s door…

A projected nine inches of snow is in the process of being dumped on Chicago, even as we speak (they’re so lucky in the Burbs, where the snow will stick, covering trees, rooftops and everything else, making for a beautiful morning after), so I’ve spent the day at home, catching up on professional stuff.

There’s a deli here called Ashkenaz that delivers a pleasing variety of Jewish fare, though I have to say that their knishes wouldn’t sell in New York — they lack every single attribute of a genuine knish, from seasoning to filling. But then, Chicago isn’t called the Second City for nothing. However, they do produce lox in all its glory, belly lox, Nova (Nova Scotia lox), etc, and deliver by the pound. They’re rather costly in this endeavor, but as far as I’m concerned, the quality of the product inspires the overlooking of their $40.00+ per pound price for cut lox. To me, salmon rules in its every form from smoked to poached in the seafood category, surpassed only by those big, meaty langostas one finds in the Caribbean.

So I’m spending this particular segment of my evening munching, in leisurely fashion, on lox and cream cheese sandwiches with ultra-thin sliced red onion and, having blown the dust off my old Enya albums (just kidding, I actually downloaded them from Yahoo! Music Jukebox), am listening to Watermark and Shepherd Moons. Celtic music with New Age overtones, good stuff.

However, I actually came here to make reference to yet another portside idiocy, one which, excluding all the above, will not take up all that much of your time. That is, the Waterboarding thing.

The left has villified it on a mega-scale, even the RINO, John McCain, has opposed it, and the tone of the arguments against it has been one that suggests it to be one of many horrible, unconscionable tortures our government employs to wrench, brutally and unmercifully, for days on end, even the most trivial, useless information from captured terrorists. It is business as usual for the fascistic, nazi Bush regime, etc, etc…

And the liberal media plays it up conjure nightmarish thoughts of the torture chambers at Prinz Albrechtstrasse or 2 Dzerzhinski Square.

Meanwhile, only three prisoners, major terrorists all, have been subjected to the actually non-harmful interrogation technique, and the longest duration involved was that of Sheikh Khalid Mohammed, a terrible minute and a half! All three subjects revealed information that saved a lot of innocent lives while leading to the neutralization of a large number of terrorists and their plans for further butchery of Americans and others.

Our intelligence pros aren’t electrocuting the functionality out of their testicles, beating them to a bloody pulp or decimating their minds with lysergic acid and amatol, they’re merely creating non-damaging discomfort for what amounts to mere seconds (while SKM, an abnormally tough customer, held out for some 90 seconds, the average is 1/3 of that time).

Yet our political left, who have just as much access to information as the rest of us, have chosen to ignore the facts and use waterboarding as an anti-Bush soap box, transforming the truth into exaggerations and bald faced lies in order to promote their false doctrines — in truth, given their desperation to strip us of our Constitutional system of government and quagmire us in socialism, I can’t say as I blame them: if you want to screw an entire electorate, you have to lie to them in a convincing manner. You have to promote your intended back-door entry as a pleasurable experience, one the entire family will enjoy, knowing that once they’ve let you in, the merciless shishkabobbing, weeping and gnashing of teeth will be beyond their control.

It doesn’t matter whether the sodomist is John McCain, Barak Hussein Obama or Hillary Klinton, the results will be the same.

Speaking for myself, when it comes to interrogating terrorists, I’d just as soon we refer to the Jack Bauer manual. Our misplaced sympathy for “ill-treated” terrorists is well defined in the old song about the gentle woman (for goodness sake) who saved the snake.

We’ve watched our politicians, justices and media intentionally misinterpret the Geneva Convention to “humanize” and redefine the status of the inmates at GITMO, and heard “certain parties” strongly suggest that we bring these terrorists into the American legal system for prosecution.

What it all boils down to, I think, is that these misguided souls are so secure in their illusion that certain bizarre things could never happen to them that they are confident that they’ll be safe, even if they eliminate the very safeguards that keep them safe.

What a bunch of maroons!

Linda Chavez has most certainly pegged Scooter’s successor in the annals of legal vandalism from the left.

His name isn’t yet familiar to most Americans, but I expect it will be by the end of 2008: Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. He is the man, according to recent press reports, who ordered the destruction of interrogation tapes made by the CIA, which allegedly show the effects of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” used against terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In the next few months, his name will likely be dragged through the mud, and he will be vilified as a rogue official engaged in a massive cover-up. I think he deserves a medal.

Hard Astarboard is behind her column 100%. It’s like, like… some occult prescience or, at the very least, simply a conclusion based upon what The Racing Form refers to as Past Performances, only applied to donkeys instead of horses.

I am in full agreement that Rodriquez is highly deserving of a medal for his actions, not the collosal villification he’s sure to have come his way in the not too distant future.

I can’t caution enough against the successful propagandizing power of the liberal mainstream media, which never stops working to misinform the public on every issue that can be politicized to make George Bush the Snidely Whiplash of global politics.

Now the Democrat controlled Congress, which is running on fumes in the perceptions of American voters, is also fair game, because they’re not browbeating hard enough to convince their Republican colleagues to support the Iraq Cut and Run agenda.

Here’s some hydro-Couric acid courtesy of Newsbusters, for example.

In my opinion, the most WTF!!!?-earning line in the entire article is,

As Couric pointed out how “nearly three out of four Americans say the troop surge is not working, that it’s having no impact, or actually making matters worse,”

…citing “a CBS/NYT opinion poll”.

The operative question here is, of course, how the hell do three out of four Americans know anything about what the troop surge is doing?

The answer is they don’t, but the media is feeding them the usual liberal political disinformation which, for three out of four Americans, is probably the only source of news in town. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, NPR, NYT, etc, etc…, and they think they know. And of course, what they think they know but don’t forms their opinions.

It really sucks big green donkey… well, suffice it to say that it is somewhat frustrating when one realizes that the lion’s share of U.S. public opinion is compiled via the process of lying to the people and then polling them based on the same lies. Garbage in, garbage out.

There’s a disturbance in the Force First Amendment. It has been created by unscrupulous political partisans taking fraudulent advantage of a perfectly wonderful Constitutional right in an effort to engender opinions among the American public without giving us all the facts. This is not reporting, it is marketing.

In many ways, it’s like news being replaced by spam.

For a breath of fresh air, however, regarding the troop surge, Kimberly Kagan weighed in on the subject in a WSJ Opinion Journal piece back on 11 July, which I had been saving to spring when I thought we’d heard enough defeatist MSM/ Congressional Democrat mallarkey re “the surge”.

In Washington perception is often mistaken for reality. And as Congress prepares for a fresh debate on Iraq, the perception many members have is that the new strategy has already failed.

This isn’t an accurate reflection of what is happening on the ground, as I saw during my visit to Iraq in May. Reports from the field show that remarkable progress is being made. Violence in Baghdad and Anbar Province is down dramatically, grassroots political movements have begun in the Sunni Arab community, and American and Iraqi forces are clearing al Qaeda fighters and Shiite militias out of long-established bases around the country.

This is remarkable because the military operation that is making these changes possible only began in full strength on June 15. To say that the surge is failing is absurd. Instead Congress should be asking this question: Can the current progress continue?

Read the entire article here.

…so short-changed by the mainstream media in almost every area that can be equated with politics, but none so much as our involvement in Iraq.

They deny that we’re fighting an enemy there, peddling a story of pure civil war in which U.S. servicemen are dropping like flies, the Iraqis want us out of there, Iraqi civilian deaths at the hands of terrorists are 100% our fault, etc, etc.

They ignore every positive event that occurs over there.

They make an instant buffet of the slightest allegation that any U.S. troops have committed a wrongdoing, slandering the troops in the most extreme ways before any investigation has even begun.

Since the majority of Americans count on the MSM to deliver them accurate and complete news, the propaganda they actually receive gives them leftward slanted and highly inaccurate reports of the state of affairs in Iraq, and this is the information upon which they rely when it comes time to vote.

The latest example?

Water boarding, keeping interrogation subjects in uncomfortable positions, other techniques that do no physical damage to said subjects, the “plight” of captured terrorists at GITMO, which the left has compared with gulags, concentration camps and the killing fields of the Pol Pot regime, and the embarrassment to which still other jihadi murderers were subjected at Abu Graibh commanded a lengthy and aggressive crusade by the mainstream media, yet graphic pictures of fiendish tortures from a captured al-Qaeda interrogation manual and of the tools of the trade don’t even warrant honorable mention from the MSM. Whose side are they on, again?

Since the left would have the American people believe that there is no al-Qaeda activity in Iraq (that would indicate that we actually have an enemy to fight in Iraq), they ignore other stories that place al-Qaeda in the country.

The mainstream media is doing an outstanding job as a propaganda tool for the left. They are also a discerning lot — the only rank and file soldiers and Marines we ever hear from on that quarter seem to be the scarce few they can find who are against the war. Otherwise, most so-called liberal intellectuals will tell you that the folks who are over there fighting have been duped by Bush & Cheney and don’t know what they’re talking about when they support their mission in Iraq. They ignore the large numbers of volunteers who stick around for a second tour, they ignore our troops’ contributions to the betterment of education, lifestyles and infrastructure in Iraq, and the progress they’ve made in training Iraqi police and military personnel to eventually take over all law enforcement and national security duties. They ignore the courage and spirit of the Iraqi people who turned out twelve million strong to vote in a democratic government. They ignore the success of the post Saddam stock market, the copious publications of the burgeoning free press…

…yet when an American soldier is killed, they crow gleefully and shout about it from the rooftops, adding the casualty to their one-sided scorecard. If a U.S. military unit waxes thirty five terrorists, it is: 35 Dead in U.S. Firefight rather than Marines Kill 35 Terrorists.

Over at And Rightly So, Civil Truth has posted a lengthy but well worth the read compilation of beliefs on the war and U.S. politics by a man who not only survived the destruction of 9/11, but a full tour as a Marine in Iraq as well.

Although I haven’t been what one would term “pro-draft”, the writer makes some convincing points in favor of a draft that have me reevaluating my point of view on that score, and other than his choices for President in 2008, I largely agree with most of what he has to say.

President Bush’s veto of the pork-ridden, cut & run, head for the tall timber, tails between our legs, whimpering surrender redeployment deadlined Congressional rendering evidently backed the Democrats far enough into a corner that they were forced to submit a much more sane and acceptable bill.

Of course, this is only a brief respite from the sabotage tactics crowd over on the port side and their mainstream media hacks, those tenaciously anti-American scumbags progressive souls, to borrow a line from a governor I once successfully voted for, “will be bock!”