The Palestinians are again demonstrating the peaceful, brotherly nature of believers in the Religion of Peace.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Hamas and Fatah gunmen battled each other in the streets Sunday, having sent civilians fleeing from their homes in an increasingly bloody power struggle that left more than two dozen Palestinians dead over the weekend.

And the world, including George Bush and Condoleeza Rice, truly believe that these barbaric people are capable of self governing in their own sovereign territory!

The latest round of fighting began late Thursday after a Hamas activist was killed in a bombing. By Saturday night, 25 Palestinians — including a 2-year-old and a 12-year-old — had been killed and at least 76 were wounded, bringing to a standstill fitful efforts to unite the two rival factions in a coalition government.

In light of Mahmoud Abbas’ recent remarks that instead of fighting each other, the two factions, one of which he heads up (Fatah), should both turn their guns on Israel, there is little to choose between them. I mean… I mean… Abbas is the man everybody refers to as the moderate leader.

So what’s the actual difference between “moderate” and “extreme” Muslims, then? Offhand, I’d say absolutely nothing. Both ascribe to the same religious laws, and their religious laws govern every aspect of their lives. The Koran embraces fascism and murder, despite the propaganda, protestations and lies of terror supporting Islamofascist P.R. organizations like CAIR, who have even the Bush Administration fooled.

As for the Palestinians, well… they elected a terrorist organization to govern them, and having found that the handouts from the rest of the world have dried up as a result, are seeking new elections, not because they don’t want to be ruled by terrorists, but because they want to get back on global welfare.

So now, they’re engaged in the only kind of internal political discourse of which Islam’s faithful are capable, Muslim murdering Muslim.

There was an on-point editorial in yesterday’s Opinion Journal that very definitely bears reading.

To understand why the Founders put war powers in the hands of the Presidency, look no further than the current spectacle in Congress on Iraq. What we are witnessing is a Federalist Papers illustration of criticism and micromanagement without responsibility.

Consider the resolution pushed through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday by Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel, two men who would love to be President if only they could persuade enough voters to elect them. Both men voted for the Iraq War. But with that war proving to be more difficult than they thought, they now want to put themselves on record as opposing any further attempts to win it.

Their resolution–which passed 12-9–calls for Iraqis to “reach a political settlement” leading to “reconciliation,” as if anyone disagrees with that necessity. But then it declares that the way to accomplish this is to wash American hands of the Iraq effort, proposing that U.S. forces retreat to protect the borders and hunt terrorists. The logic here seems to be that if the Americans leave, Iraqis will miraculously conclude that they have must settle their differences. A kind of reverse field of dreams: If we don’t come, they will build it.

When the Democrats proclaimed that Iraq would be another Vietnam, what they didn’t add was that they intended to make it so in every way possible, duplicating the strategy they used to sabotage and sell out our military forces during that war.

And like during the Vietnam era, the Democrats in Congress are exceeding their authority by stepping on that which the Constitution assigns the President. Most of them voted for the war, after which their only responsibility was to step back and allow the President to prosecute it.

To add to that, continuing to do the same things that lost them the Congressional majority, the Republicans on the Hill are still disgracing the party by kissing up to the Democrats and neglecting to support the President, essentially looking after their own careers rather than looking after the nation they were elected to govern. A number of those careers ended in November of last year, but no lesson seems to have been learned.

All of this also applies to the many Congressional efforts to set “benchmarks” or otherwise micromanage the battlefield. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she is “cursed with the responsibility gene” that makes her unwilling to cut off funds, but instead she proposes to set a cap on U.S. troops in the theater. So while General Petraeus says he needs more troops to fulfill his mission, General Clinton says he doesn’t. Which battlefield commander do you trust?

House Republicans are little better. They blame Mr. Bush and Iraq for their loss of Congress, rather than their own ethics, earmarks and other failures. So looking ahead to 2008 they now want to distance themselves from the war they voted for, albeit also without actually having to vote against it. Thus their political brainstorm is to demand monthly “benchmarks for success” that the Bush Administration and Iraqis will have to meet.

So every 30 days, General Petraeus and his men will have to take their attention away from the Baghdad campaign and instead report to Congress on how well Iraqis and Americans are communicating with one another, among other crucial matters. Minority Leader John Boehner is even asking Speaker Nancy Pelosi to create another special Congressional committee to look over the general’s shoulder. It’s a shame Ulysses S. Grant isn’t around to tell them where to put their special committee.

In addition to being feckless, all of this is unconstitutional. As Commander-in-Chief, the President has the sole Constitutional authority to manage the war effort. Congress has two explicit war powers: It has the power to declare war, which in the case of Iraq it essentially did with its resolution of 2003. It also has the power to appropriate funds.

There is a long and unsettled debate over whether Congress can decide to defund specific military operations once it has created a standing Army. We lean toward those who believe it cannot, but the Founders surely didn’t imagine that Congress could start dictating when and where the 101st Airborne could be deployed once a war is under way.

Mr. Bush was conciliatory and respectful in his State of the Union Address Tuesday night, asking Congress to give his new Iraq strategy a chance. In a better world, the Members would do so. But if they insist on seeking political cover by trying to operate as a committee of 535 Commanders-in-Chief, Mr. Bush will have to start reminding Congress who really has the job.

The editorial can be read in its entirety here.

…from time to time can be found over at Sparks From The Anvil, great commentary, links and every reason why the American public needs to learn the truth about our Iraq enterprise — and why it is vital that we achieve total victory there — not the profound malarkey fed out by the liberal media and lying Democrat politicians.

These Democrat members of Congress have access to genuine information, yet they choose to ignore it and lie to the American people in order to achieve political goals, not even considering that their agendas are extremely dangerous to this country, and the mainstream media is on that same team.

Within the links in Wordsmith’s post can be found some rather tragic scenarios, not only for the Iraqis but for the entire world, that can result from a Democrat “cut and run” strategy being implemented in Iraq.

The left reports failure where there is success, employs moot arguments to smother tangible reality and ignores, altogether, the import of the difference between victory and defeat in what is actually the crux of the War On Terror. The MSM saturates the American public with Bravo Sierra, supporting the same cow chip steaminess spewed by politically motivated Democrat politicians, and the American people, believing that there are honor, credibility and patriotism existing in those quarters, swallow the lies hook, line and, as Jeremy Irons says in the third John McLane flick, zinkah….

A Montana cowboy was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”

The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers,”Sure, Why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an
image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored.

He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes,receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says the cowboy.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

You’re a Congressman for the U. S. Government”, says the cowboy.
“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required.” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about cows… this is a herd of sheep.
Now give me back my dog.

H/T BJS

New York, financial, fashion and cultural capital of the New World.

Where they use the local taxpayers’ money for many things, including the free distribution of 18 million condoms a year, which they now plan to supply with decorated wrappers, sporting the New York City brand.

Available soon from New York’s City Hall: an official New York condom in a jazzy wrapper, perhaps one printed with a colorful subway map or some other city theme.

New York City hands out 1.5 million free condoms a month in ordinary wrappers, and health officials figure people would be more likely to actually use them if the packaging were more distinctive.

“Brands work, and people use branded items more than they use non-branded items, whether it’s a cola or a medicine, even,” Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden said.

Sounds to me like yet another bureaucrat is having himself a mares-eat-oats moment.

… means absolutely nothing to most of Congress, or even to the President, anymore.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., a longtime critic of Bush’s position on immigration, also slammed the president’s State of the Union remarks in a statement released Tuesday.

Suggesting that Bush tried to “guarantee a Congress sympathetic to his ‘amnesty for all’ plan” during the 2006 elections, Tancredo said the new Democrat-controlled Congress “seem[s] hell-bent on cramming this mass amnesty down the throats of the American people whether they want it or not.”

Tancredo also questioned Bush’s pledge for increased enforcement of immigration laws, saying that “one or two high-profile raids are not proof of a commitment.” He was referring to the recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on six meat-packing plants that resulted in more than 1,200 arrests and 148 charges related to identity theft.

“What we are looking for from the administration is the same degree of energy expended in the enforcement of our immigration laws as they used to seek out a drug dealer in Mexico, so he could be brought back to testify against border patrol agents who were trying to do their job,” Tancredo added, referring to two border patrol agents now in prison for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler.

Our government sure has changed on us in the last several years, and there is no indication that this metamorphosis is complete.

In a comment I left at another blog awhile back and in an email conversation with a blog friend more recently, I equated America (our entire form of government, the rights we enjoy, etc) not very far in the future with a verse from the film Camelot:

Don’t let it be forgot
that once there was a spot
for one brief shining moment
that was known as Camelot.

A tourist walked into a curio shop in San Francisco. Looking around at the exotica, he noticed a very lifelike, life-sized bronze statue of a rat. It had no price tag, but it was so striking he decided he must have it. He took it to the counter. “How much for the bronze rat?”

“No,” said the man, “I came back to see if you have a bronze Democrat”.

H/T Brenda

… that Greg Crosby’s got it spot-on.

Further evidence, to my way of thinking, that today’s Democrats are no less an enemy of the United States than al-Qaeda; not necessarily by design, but via either naivety or downright stupidity, take your pick.

And they call Bush stupid!

Here’s one I couldn’t resist posting:

THREE THINGS TO THINK ABOUT:

1. COWS

2. THE CONSTITUTION, and

3. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

COWS
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that our government can track a cow born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she sleeps in the state of Washington? And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give them all a cow.

THE CONSTITUTION
They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don’t we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it’s worked for over 200 years and we’re not using it anymore.

TEN COMMANDMENTS
The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a
courthouse………You cannot post “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery” and “Thou Shall Not Lie” in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians - it creates a hostile work environment.

H/T Shana

Just because the folks on the left side of the aisle are lying scoundrels doesn’t mean that Amy Proctor has them pegged!

H/T Old Soldier