When I was growing up back in the 1950s and 1960s, I, like most people, I suppose, never dreamed that our society would become like it is. There was always healthy competition between the Democrats and Republicans, but there was always a line of sorts that neither side crossed. People on both sides were proud of America and proud of our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage. Patriotism was fashionable, even among Democrats. Children were raised to respect authority figures like teachers and cops(though, during the Vietnam conflict, the peace movement deviated from that aspect of their upbringing), television left more intimate events to the imagination and produced great shows(better than what I saw more recently before I stopped watching it) and the news media had a better grasp on the meaning of the verb “report”. You felt you could trust what you read in the papers or heard on the evening news. People could say what they meant without having to couch their words in the obscurity of so-called ”political correctness”(PC is still a foreign concept for me, I still say exactly what I mean, using whatever words I feel best get my point across).

Today we seem to have gone 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

We have the Democrats, a party that, since being hijacked by liberals, has moved so far to the left that were the earth flat, they’d have all fallen off years ago, bashing their country at every opportunity under the guise of caring one way or the other about an issue; In reality, the current crop of Dems have demonstrated that they are more concerned with scoring political victories than with the economy, national security, the citizens’ rights they claim to champion or pretty much anything else they express an interest in.

They want to abolish God from any and all public properties, hiding behind a “separation of church and state” that doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution, yet insist on butt munching Muslims when it comes to Islamics’ religious rights, even those of incarcerated terrorists. Last year I read of a school in California where, though Jewish and Christian kids aren’t allowed to pray, all students were required to attend Koran classes and one day per week show up in Arab garb.   

Along with a news media that’s drifted far to the left, they presently focus all their energy fighting the War On Bush, crowing joyously out from behind facades of concern whenever we lose soldiers in Iraq, comparing our troops to Nazi storm troopers, Camp Delta to a gulag or a concentration camp, anything to discredit President George W. Bush and truth doesn’t even factor into the bargain. They obstruct Bush any way they can, fighting every appointment he makes to every agency and organization whether the candidate is good, bad or otherwise, their goal being to make the President fail. It doesn’t matter that such a failure might result in more 9/11s, Iraq falling to another bloody dictatorship after all the sacrifices of our brave military personnel and those of other coalition countries, or even Armageddon. All these traitors — that’s right, t-r-a-i-t-o-r-s, there’s no other word that so aptly describes these assholes — care about is their partisan politics and what’s really scary, on the order of the Dems getting the White House and/ or Congress somewhere in the future, is that while they lambast Bush over every move he makes, not one of them has any solutions to any of the problems that my President has thusfar addressed rather brilliantly. 

While the left has chanted their “Bush lied, people died” and “No blood for oil” slogans, we have seen two murderous Islamic dictatorships become democracies, the concept of democracy embraced in a couple of other Arab states and we have enjoyed tax cuts that allow us to keep more of our own money. We have seen the economy, measured in new jobs, begin to grow again and a homeland security structure bringing our various intelligence and security agencies into a cooperative loop and greatly decreasing the chances of more terrorist attacks. We have seen government programs enacted that are aimed at bringing our educational standards back to their former excellence.

This has been solely the work of the Bush Administration and the Republican party, despite incessant, aggressive obstructionism by the Democrats, the same people whose major contribution during the Clinton Administration was to make America appear weak in the eyes of the global terrorist organizations Bubba and his people should have been fighting. 

Today, while the Bush Administration fights the Global War On Terror, the Democrats fight their own war on the President.

The upside to all this is that as the Democrats become more and more vitriolic, and downright insulting to the intelligence of the voting public, they continue to drive away votes(not entirely, of course, they’ll always have dingbat California liberals and a faithful following of blue state boneheads to keep them from being shut out altogether), and the longer we can stave off a resurgence of power from the left side of the aisle the better off America, and the world, for that matter, will be.

In today’s Jewish World Review there’s an interesting piece by Dennis Prager called The case for Judeo-Christian values: Without man, the environment is insignificant. 

Based on the Story of Creation, Mr. Prager’s premise is that the environment, like all else that God created on the first 5 days, was put there for the use and enjoyment of man, who arrived on Day 6.

One major conflict between the Judeo-Christian value system and the various secular ones competing with it revolves around these questions: Is nature created for man or is man merely a part of nature? Or, to put it in other words, does the natural environment have any significance without man to appreciate it and to use it for his own good?

The Judeo-Christian responses are clear: Nature has been created for man’s use; and on its own, without man, it has no meaning.

Dolphins are adorable because human beings find them adorable. Without people to appreciate them or the role they play in the earth’s ecosystem to enable human life, they are no more adorable or meaningful than a rock on Pluto.

That is the point of the creation story — everything was made in order to prepare the way for the creation of man(and woman, for those whose college education leads themto confuse the generic “man” with “male”). G-d declared each day’s creation “good,” but declared the sixth day’s creation of man “very good.”

Critics find three biblical notions about nature unacceptable: that man shall lord over it; that it was created solely for man and therefore has no intrinsic value; and that it is not sacred.

Go ahead and read the whole thing. If you are one of those liberals devoted to the atheist left’s War On God or one o’ them thar environmentalists it will probably piss you off, but who cares? I believe in God and it really irritates me that there are assholes in my country who are trying to legislate and sue every last vestige of Judeo-Christian belief out of existence while demanding that Muslims’ religious beliefs are indulged to their tiniest whim.

Yeah, that’s right, man rules nature, he’s not its equal, according to The Book the left so detests. The environment is there for man. Go cry in your tofu, then learn to live with it.

Does this mean that the biblical view of nature gives man the right to pollute the earth or to abuse animals? Absolutely not. Abusing animals is forbidden in the Torah:

The ban on eating the limb of a living animal, the ban on placing two animals of different sizes on the same yoke and the ban on working animals seven days a week are just a few examples. To cause gratuitous suffering to an animal is a grave sin. As for polluting the earth, this, too, is religiously prohibited. If the purpose of nature is to ennoble human life and bear witness to G-d’s magnificence, by what understanding of this concept can a religious person defend polluting nature?

We are indeed to be responsible stewards of nature, but for our sake, not its. 

This morning, in a post about Camp Delta titled Club Gitmo, Vilmar of Ranting Right Wing Howler fame linked to an article in FRONTPAGEMAG.COM by Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu, who wrote about a visit to GITMO to see first hand this detention center referred to by (Bene)Dick(t) Durbin as everything from a concentration camp to Pol Pot’s killing fields.

In the article, the author described extremely humane circumstances, big meals and generally a state of detention any inmate in a carefully monitored U.S. federal prison would envy.

The only inhumanity he cited was the agressive hostility of the prisoners, who physically attack guards who are bringing them meals or other items, reaching under face masks to try to rip out eyes, trying to grab and break guards’ limbs, thowing feces, yelling death threats, you need to read the article, then compare what you read with the remarks of Dick Durbin.

You are right to worry about inhumane treatment taking place at GITMO. But your concern should be for the dedicated, well trained, highly professional American men and women who are subjected to a daily barrage of feces, urine, semen and spit hurled at them along with vile invective as they implement a humane, enlightened system of confinement on men who want nothing more than to kill Americans.

These quiet, professional Americans, who live under the motto “Honor Bound for Defense of Freedom,” deserve our utmost respect and concern. Shame on anyone who slanders or disrespects them for short-term and short-sighted political advantage.  

As Vilmar pointed out in his post, you’d better read it there because you won’t see it anyplace else, and he was definitely correct there, as I searched several MSM venues for any reference to the fact that Durbin had it backwards: The detainees are the people doing the mistreating. You know, the detainees the liberals are so deferrent to, those peaceful Islamic souls who would just as soon butcher an American liberal’s six month old baby as they would any other American’s. 

I did find an article over at Fox News titled Senators Agree On Gitmo Operations that unsurprisingly got no mention in the New York Times. After all, it wasn’t anti-Bush enough to earn its place in the Newspaper of Record. 

WASHINGTON- A group of senators who travelled to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, this weekend to observe the conditions at the detention facility held separate news conferences on Capitol Hill Monday, but seemed to agree on one point— that the facility should not be shut down.

Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Ben Nelson of Nebraska said that while they believe some kind of standard should be set for the status and treatment of the prisoners there, they did not observe anything in interrogation practices or conditions that would prompt them to agree with a call to shut the facility down.

“It is my opinion that closing the detention camp at Guantanomo Bay would result in less accountability in the treatment of prisoners, not more,” Wyden said. ”The question we have to ask is who do we trust more to treat these prisoners humanely — Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt or the United States?”

…Wyden said that past practices he had heard about at Guantanamo, a.k.a. Gitmo, have been changed, and procedures and conditions at Camp Delta, where the prisones are housed, offer the best committment to human rights. He acknowledged that the prisoners at Guantanamo “are not your garden-variety criminal defendants.

“However, the most urgent task now is for Congress to articulate what reasons can justify holding these prisoners and for Congress to finally establish the precise legal status of these prisoners,” Wyden said. “Just because it is a war doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any concrete rules.”   

That’s nice. The Democrat couldn’t find anything wrong and couldn’t very well make anything up about what he saw because also present were two GOP senators, so he told the truth about Camp Delta, albeit putting a nowwww it’s okay spin on his statements and adding that Congress needs to establish the legal status of the detainees and justification for detaining them, a little lip service to his party. His remark that, “Just because it is a war doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any concrete rules.” is pretty lame.

I don’t remember finding any special humanitarian rules posted anyplace that determined special guidelines for fair and balanced treatment of those human beings who died in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field on the morning of 11 Sep 01. Still the point has been made by two Dem senators that conditions at Camp Delta are fine.

Also on the trip were Repulican Sens. Jim Bunning of Kentucky and Mike Crapo of Idaho, both of whom went further than Wyden and Nelson and said not only are conditions acceptable at Guantanamo Bay, but that they want to ”set the record straight” that prisoners are being treated in a way that’s totally consistent with American values. They noted that the new facilities at Gitmo include air conditioniong, good meals, facilities for religious worship and “top-notch health care.”

Prisoners have “everything to make them as comfortable as possible in detention,” Bunning said.

“It’s my conclusion that I don’t think you would be able to find a detention facility where people were better treated … the health care is better or equal to what our own troops get,” added Crapo, who did say it might be useful to come up with some kind of new status for these prisoners. Crapo said the reason is not to ensure better treatment but only because it would set a universal understanding of their status.     

When I looked through the NY Times earlier for some mention of this visit and these remarks and couldn’t find any, I figured there are two possible reasons:

1. GITMO being found not to be the gulag they’d hoped the two Dems would report it to be is not in their best interest to share with their liberal readership.

2. They might print the story later, after they’ve had the time to get the right anti-Bush spin on it.

What!? No gulag? No killing fields? No electrodes for the detainees’ testicles? This… This is outrageous!

Previously, I linked to a page at the Thomas website. 

The site is a running record of proceedings in both houses of Congress, and a good place to peruse the work output of those people we send to Capitol Hill to represent our, and our fellow Americans’ interests in the governance of our country.

The sheer number of ongoing bills for Constitutional amendments, some important, some frivolous, boggles the mind.

There are bills up for everything from renaming federal buildings to allocating funds.

I find reading summaries of what was debated and decided in different Congressional sessions intensely amusing.

When I think of our original Congress I always envision a bunch of patriots who were instrumental in winning the American Revolution pounding out the legal and moral issues of their time and holding emotion-charged strategy debates, each man making bold, profound statements to emphasize his points.

Today, I envision these two giant chambers, full of lawyer/politicians, in long hours of hot debate:  

“No way! The fifth paragraph has to appear above the third, and a comma inserted between the sixth and seventh words, space after comma.” 

“Get real. If there’s gonna be a comma anywhere in the first sentence, it’ll be between the fourth and fifth words, and once we’ve reached agreement on that, we can debate whether or not to include your proposal for a space after it.”

“That space after the comma, I’ll have you know, will clarify many questions voters in my district have on this issue. Listen, how about if we delete the colon in sentence two of the second paragraph, replace it with a semicolon and….”

{just a bit of Seth-humor, there}

Go check out the link and explore the site if you’ve never been there, a good way to keep up with what’s being debated on Capitol Hill and who sponsors and supports each issue. 

Another article at CENTCOM(U.S. Central Command)’s website, titled Isn’t fighting fires dangerous enough? tells the story of yet another Iraqi patriot that you would never find among the Bush hating, political left motivated Mainstream Media. Those partisan assholes want the American public to believe we’re(therefore the Bush Administration is) failing in Iraq, and they tailor their “news” to fit that template rather than telling us the truth.

Actions speak louder than words - particularly in Iraq. Such is absolutely the case, every morning, when Baghdad Fire Chief, Laith Abbas, gets out of bed and heads to work. 

Each day, he faces the reality that there is a significant “price on his head” by those who would destroy efforts to build a democracy in Iraq. However, for the good of the country, there are those - like this intense, wiry professional - who strive each day, one difficult step at a time, to build their part of what they hope will soon become an active, viable democracy.

Read the rest.

Any real American patriot who believes in our form of government and the spread of democracy would be encouraged by this man’s story. He is the embodiment of the Iraqi people, a nation that wants its chance to be free and is willing to take any risks necessary for the privilege.

The people in the U.S. who would deny the Iraqis the same freedoms we have because their success would be a success for W, mostly Democrats, are profound fucktards who don’t belong in a free society, they should have their U.S. citizenship yanked and be flown to someplace like Zimbabwe, never to return. Here are anal cavities who, just to realize their cheap anti-Bush political agendas, have no problem consigning an entire country, finally free after centuries of one kind of dictatorial government after another, most recently the rule of the sociopathic Hussein family, back to the kind of hell we’ve only recently liberated them from.

Liberals must be tough as nails if they can look in the mirror without vomiting all over themselves.   

Oprah Winfrey’s pissed off at Hermes, because their Paris store wouldn’t let her in to shop 15 minutes after closing(they were apparently having a promotional event, and she wasn’t on the invitation list). They probably wouldn’t have let me in after closing either, but I’d understand. Oprah doesn’t, because like many celebrities, she obviously feels that she’s ”more important” than any mere mortal(remember the big hoopla they made when she had to do jury duty, the media gave it nearly identical coverage to that of the Ronald Reagan memorial service). Yeah, sure, when Oprah’s inconvenienced, it’s big news.

Ms. Winfrey claims it was because she is black.

You go to a store after it closes. They refuse you admittance because they are closed, read the sign, lady! “But I’m Oprah! Surely a mere Closed sign doesn’t apply to me! It must be because I’m black!”

Now, she plans to boycott Hermes and do a show on the affair, despite a profuse official apology from Hermes.

However, on another side of the story,

According to the New York Post, a witness who was with Oprah when she tried to get into the store claims that the talk show host was told that “We’ve been having a problem with North Africans.”

Most North Africans I’ve met have been Arabs, who’ve been swarthy rather than black.

If this remark was actually made, Oprah does have some reason for being a little miffed.

My only reservation here is that I’ve been in several such highbrow stores, most recently Gucci to buy someone a present, and from what I’ve seen, the employees and managers are extremely civilized, polite and well spoken people(you don’t hire abrasive types to deal with customers who might buy single small items from you that are marked up into the thousands of dollars), not the sort to make such remarks.

When I lived in Nevada I worked for a busy casino, and as a casino employee, like employees of stores like Hermes, one thing you learn damn quick is that judging a customer’s spending power by appearance(excluding obvious types like winos, speed freaks, junkies, etc) is extremely foolish. We had regular high rollers who looked like day laborers, one even an old mega-alcoholic who looked the part, who didn’t give a second thought to, let alone worry about dropping $30,000.00 plus on a 21 table in under 2 hours three or four times a week. We had low-income “looking” black regulars who made $5,000.00 sports bets on two or three games a day. In stores like Hermes, employees are usually reaaalllly careful how they talk to people.

My point is, was this racial remark really made, or was this account fabricated? I’m so used to hearing the racial card played that I’ve gone beyond the giving of the doubt that someone levelling such a charge is telling the truth. I’m not from Missouri, but in such a case you have to “show” me.

Of course, this happened in Paris, so it might have happened just as stated. Why? Because the employee alleged to have made the comment was probably French and as we know, the French are “different.”  

At CENTCOM’s website today was a report that U.S. forces discovered still another stash of essential tools used to promote The Religion of Peace.

I don’t think I need to add anything, do you?

Yesterday I didn’t post at all because I was in and out all day and when I was on line I spent most of my time trying to find some sane explanation for this unbelievable SCOTUS ruling. It was all over the Blogosphere yesterday and I read more than twenty different posts and probably twenty five media reports and Op Eds on  the ruling, and couldn’t find a single approving comment. Correct me if I’m in error, but I was brought up on the premise that in America we are ruled by the people. How many Americans do you suppose would have voted for this?

I have to admit utter failure, there was no way I could find one, because there was none to find.

The Supreme Court has given license to cities to take away your home, your property, and sell it to any private business concern they think will use the land to generate more tax revenue and/ or create new jobs. The individual municipality now has the authority, from the highest court in the land, to make the last word judgement that the site of your home could be used for something else “for the good of the community” or whatever, and offer you market price for your home, usually a lot less than what you could sell it for to an individual. It’s an offer you can’t refuse, because if you do, they have only to condemn the place and then you lose even more, if not all.

These berobed fungi seem to have forgotten what we went to war with Britain over back in the 1770s. It was to escape just that kind of government control, to live in a free country where one can live as one wishes, achieve according to ones ambitions and abilities without being taxed to death and be the master of all one possesses. Now, thanks mainly to the liberals in the Court, the government is as much the owner of your home as you are.

So much for another American freedom. Stalin would have been soooo proud!

You’ll remember a recent SCOTUS ruling confirming federal authority to prosecute(for possession and use) persons permitted by states to use marijuana for medicinal purposes, the dissenters were the conservatives in the Court. Maybe the liberals will learn that “neocons” and “neoconettes” in the Supreme Court protect their rights much more tenaciously than the portsiders do. Dream on, Seth.

Also Yesterday

I was reading the Euphoric Reality blog and a post about the <treasonous, in my book, when perpetrated, defended or endorsed by American citizens> flag burning issue, and ended up going to the Stop The ACLU Coalition’s site and spending considerable time there. I ran across the Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005.

Representative John Hostettler, R-Ind., has teamed up with the American Legion to prevent the American Civil Liberties Union and others like them, from strong arming defendants.

The Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005 would prohibit attorneys fees from being collected in cases of religion abuse.

The ACLU boasts more than 400,000 members and supporters who handle more than 6000 cases each year. Its 2003 revenue topped $44 million while it claims to have been awarded more than $2 million in settlements. 

Wow! They make 44 mill while the people and causes they purport to represent make an aggregated 5% of that amount.  Shameless, morally bankrupt parasites need only graduate from Law school and pass the bar someplace, and the ACLU has a good home for them.

See, this is what the ACLU is all about. They identify themselves as an advocate of civil rights and use that noble self description as a license to sue moneyed institutions, the federal and municipal governments for preference, over bagatelles like this:

You have, say, a small city, population 50,000 whose religious community is 75% Christian. Incorporated over 150 years ago they have, for the last 125 of those years, had a Nativity scene erected in front of City Hall each Holiday season. Nobody in town has a problem with it, in fact most of the town enjoys the tradition.

Enter the ACLU, with a suit against the city for forcing its religious beliefs on non- Christians as official policy in that the Nativity scene is erected on city property by city employees. The ACLU wins the suit and they are paid their fees, by law, by the city they’ve successfully sued. This means the taxpayers of that municipality, who wanted the Christmas display, have to pay the ACLU for winning a suit against having the display.

So all those citizens who believe the ACLU is championing a cause be advised, they are just a business. Unfortunately, they are an evil business whose greatest contribution to the American people has been to erode the moral fabric and many of the traditions in our society that have made America great– in order to line their own pockets.

The Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005, if passed, would prohibit the collection of legal fees by the ACLU and other parasite scumbag legal groups when they sue government over gratuitous church & state issues. Once we take the profits out of these lawsuits, watch how quickly these “guardians of civil rights” curtail their Legal War On God. 

The Bill Summary & Status is here.

I linked to this during my daily read of Best of the Web Today.

This is insane, how far are these people going to go in their efforts to rewrite American History? These Berkeley liberals are trying to have Thomas Jefferson Elementary School renamed because Jefferson owned slaves. 

How far does this mean the libs will go?

Maybe they’ll sue to have Jefferson’s very existence stricken from our children’s history books. Perhaps they’ll push to change the causes for the South’s secession that brought about the Civil War. And why stop there? For that matter, why bother to even mention the War Between The States in children’s history books, why not rewrite the entire American saga from the Mayflower through, say, the Eisenhower Administration? That way they could erase inconvenient holidays like Thanksgiving, that commemmorates the pilgrims’ giving of thanks to God, and any other aspects of U.S. history and culture they find embarrassing.

But then, what can we expect from those fine, patriotic folks in Berkeley, the same “Americans” whose verbal reaction to the horrors of 11 September 2001 was that The United States had deserved it? 

It amazes me that there are still people out there who believe that Israel and the United States can deal with the Palestinians as though they were doing so with a civilized nation. The Palestinians themselves are demonstrating that they are incapable of maintaining any kind of stable govenment nor of controlling the activities of their terrorist organizations, who attack Israel whether there are peace negotiations on the table or not, whether Israel gives concessions or not. 

On the one hand, there’s the Palestinian Authority(P.A.), representing the PLO and led by Arafat successor Mahmoud Abbas. That body retains the same quagmire of massive corruption that it did under Arafat and exhibits a total lack of control over the plethora of terrorist organizations based among the Palestinians. 

On the other hand, there’s Hamas, the premier Palestinian terrorist organization cum political party that has built its constituency in large part by vowing to end the corruption in the P.A. They have been growing increasingly popular among the Palestinian voters and threaten to become popular enough to one day become the P.A.

Hamas and their cronies in the al aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Fatah,  etc continue their terrorism against Israel as Abbas purportedly tries to hold the peace talks with Ariel Sharon and the Bush Administration together, effectively sabotaging those negotiations a)because Sharon, and rightly so, refuses to make any concessions without including the cessation of hostilities in the package, and b)because Abbas’ credibility as the leader of his people is greatly diminished due to his admitted inability to curtail the activities of either the terrorist groups or the corruption in his own organization. He may not even be there for long, Hamas might become the party in power. Hamas isn’t interested in peace, their goal isn’t the Palestinian state envisioned by Roadmap advocates: They want the whole potato knish. They would like nothing more than a bloodbath in which they murder every Jew in Israel(fat chance), according to their charter.   

And they are recognized by a significant percentage of Palestinians as a viable political party!

An article in the Jerusalem Post about the summit meeting just wrapped up between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, titled Palestinians deem summit a failure,  says

….Palestinian leaders expressed frustration over Israel’s insistance on linking major concessions to the cessation of violence. 

WTF! Are they saying that Israel should just accept the butchery of its citizens as just a run of the mill, day to day, inevitable, “not to worry, old man” cost of doing business with the Palestinians? There’s the problem right there, the Israelis are not dealing with those of a modern human mentality that can be reasoned with, they are dealing with evil people who see nothing wrong with killing the innocent and embrace doing so with as much emotion as they might experience over going to the bathroom.

If I wasn’t totally convinced before, I am now. The only way there will ever be peace between Israel and the Palestinian people will be after Israel has exercised an extreme military option. You cannot negotiate peace with any success when the other side doesn’t want it. When the other side is dominated by bloodthirsty people who couldn’t care less what they agree to nor what treaties they sign(it is acceptable practice, according to their beliefs, to lie, as long as you are lying to infidels) and who have no compunction about killing themselves in order to murder your people.

Sure, there are many Palestinians, some of whom I have met, who want peace and friendship with Israel and who despise both corruption and terrorism, but they seem to be a considerable minority to judge from the actions of their community.  I truly believe that when members of a given community become a danger to those of other communities, the community in question is engendered with a responsibility to clean its own house or be held accountable for the actions of its bad seed.

Sharon is absolutely right in insisting that peace on the Palestinians’ side of the equation be part and parcel of any agreements he signs off on. 

You can’t install the software of peace when there are too many broken links on the site.

Israel has offered, and ceded, a lot more concessions to the Palestinians than they’ve received in return, even releasing convicted terrorists from prison. The Israelis have set a date for razing Jewish homes in Gaza, displacing something like 7500 residents, sparking internal political turmoil as intense and disruptive as the Iraqi debate is in the United States. Most of what the Israelis get in return for concessions are further demands.

In a column in Jewish World Review, Richard Chesnoff writes

….There’s growing talk that the Bush Administration, impatient over lack of viable movement toward an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, may soon trash longstanding American policy and authorize limited U.S. diplomatic contact with Abbas’ chief rival and Israel’s worst enemy: the Islamic terrorist organization known as Hamas.

Talk about potential disasters!

No kidding! I refer you again to the website about  Hamas.

This extremely dangerous diplomatic turn may be precipitated in part by growing fear in the administration that Yasser Arafat’s heir doesn’t have the stuff needed to make peace happen and by frustration with Sharon’s internal political woes.

It’s also hard for both President Bush and Secretary of State Rice to ignore hard facts on the West Bank/Gaza ground. Abbas’ PLO continues to lose popularity while Hamas gains. During recent Palestinian municipal elections, the group campaigned on a clean government platform and won nearly half the municipal councils at stake!

So, what’s wrong with talking to Hamas? A lot. As Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy recently put it, “Hamas is more than just a party with which we disagree, it is a terrorist organization responsible for the murder of hundreds of Israelis, Americans and citizens of many other countries.”

I don’t  concur with the basis for Mr. Chesnoff’s speculations, but the premises he offers are indeed food for thought. What I don’t see happening is the Bush Administration opening up polite diplomatic dialogue with a terrorist organization. Terrorists are our enemy and their only ambition is our destruction. Once again, Hamas Charter.  Pay particular attention to the two lines that say, 

There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.  

How, or even why for that matter, does one attempt to negotiate with people who uphold such a covenant?

No, I don’t see Condie Rice sitting down with somebody like Hasan Yusuf to pursue “meaningful” diplomatic negotiations.

                                                      **********************

So we have these two sides to the Palestinian political structure, one that can establish control among neither its members nor its constituents, that being the P.A., and one that is dedicated to murdering as many innocent people as possible in the name of God, both vying for control of a Palestinian state. The Party of Murder is gaining, the Party of Confusion is losing.

Yeah, I know, I’m not even a little bit PC, I tend, in fact, to be downright blunt, so:

Being completely realistic, there are only two possible conclusions where the question of peace between Israel and their Palestinian neighbors are concerned.

1. Peace talks underscoring bloody violence forever, or

2. That extreme military option I mentioned above.