…if I neglected to post this one.

A team of national security experts assembled by the conservative Center for Security Policy, a Washington, D.C., think tank, issued a report last week warning of that Shariah law–which they described as a “legal-political-military doctrine”–is the “preeminent totalitarian threat of our time.”

Continuing…

The team was led by retired Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin, the former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and Lt. Gen. Harry Edward Soyster, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. It also included, among others, James Woolsey, the former director of Central Intelligence Agency; retired Adm. James A. Lyons, the former commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet; Joseph E. Schmitz, the former inspector general of the Defense Department; Frank Gaffney, the former assistant secretary of defense for international security policy and current president of the Center for Security Policy; and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy, who successfully prosecuted Omar Abdel Rahman, the Muslim jihadist leader convicted of being the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The group drew a distinction between Muslims who embrace Shariah law as the comprehensive model for governing all human society and those who view it as a reference point for personal behavior but not for the conduct of government and the state.

“Shariah is the crucial fault line of Islam’s internecine struggle. On one side of the divide are Muslim reformers and authentic moderates–figures like Abdurrahman Wahid, the late president of Indonesia and leader of the world’s largest libertarian Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama–whose members embrace the Enlightenment’s veneration of reason and, in particular, its separation of the spiritual and secular realms,” the authors write.

“On this side of the divide, shariah is a reference point for a Muslim’s personal conduct, not a corpus to be imposed on the life of a pluralistic society,” they say. “By contrast, the other side of the divide is dominated by Muslim supremacists, often called Islamists. Like erstwhile proponents of Communism and Nazism, these supremacists–some terrorists, others employing stealthier means–seek to impose a totalitarian regime: a global totalitarian system cloaked as an Islamic state and called a caliphate.

“On that side of the divide, which is the focus of the present study, shariah is an immutable, compulsory system that Muslims are obliged to install and the world required to adopt, the failure to do so being deemed a damnable offence against Allah,” they write. “For these ideologues, shariah is not a private matter. Adherents see the West as an obstacle to be overcome, not a culture and civilization to be embraced, or at least tolerated. It is impossible, they maintain, for alternative legal systems and forms of governments peacefully to coexist with the end-state they seek.”

The “kicker”:

The report concludes that U.S. policy-makers must confront this insidious threat, saying to ignore it any longer would be “intolerable.”

“Under successive presidencies, the United States has failed to understand, let alone counter successfully, the threat posed to its constitutional form of government and free society by Shariah. In the past, such failures were reckless. Today, they are intolerable,” the report concludes. “As we have seen, Shariah explicitly seeks to replace representative governance with an Islamic state, to destroy sovereign and national polities with a global caliphate.”

{Above Emphasis Mine}

This is an important article.

Read it all here.

…I hadn’t seen before, but which after taking a gander at found it definitely needed to be added to my blogroll.

It’s called Doctor Zero.

I highly recommend it.

Actually, I didn’t discover it, say, like an explorer discovers a new land. I learned of Doctor Zero while reading James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today.

While you’re about it, that, too, is worth reading, as it always is.

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

On another note, I will be leaving the country for a short time in the next few days. I was waiting for word that my plans were finalized, and now have it.

During that time, I don’t expect I’ll have Internet access, but I’ll post that I’m leaving before I go.

– Seth

…Victor Davis Hanson must be shared. I rarely post an entire column, but this one is just so… so…

Well, it’s titled, appropriately enough, Rethinking George Bush?

Former President George W. Bush left office with the lowest approval ratings since Richard Nixon. In reaction, for nearly two years President Barack Obama won easy applause by prefacing almost every speech on his economic policies with a “Bush did it” put-down.

But suddenly Bush seems OK. Last week, the president did the unthinkable: He praised Bush for his past efforts to reach out to Muslims. Vice President Joe Biden went further and blurted out, “Mr. Bush deserves a lot of credit.” Biden topped that off with, “Mr. President, thank you.”

Even liberal pundits have now called on Bush to help Obama diffuse rising tensions over the so-called Ground Zero mosque and Arizona’s illegal immigration law.

What’s going on?

For one thing, recent polls show an astounding rebound in the former president’s favorability — to the extent that in the bellwether state of Ohio, voters would rather still have Bush as president than Obama by a 50-42 margin. Nationwide, Obama’s approval ratings continue to sink to near 40 percent — a nadir that took years for Bush to reach. It has become better politics to praise rather than to bury Bush.

Iraq seems on the road to success, with a growing economy and a stabilizing government. Don’t take my word on that; ask Vice President Biden. He recently claimed that the way Iraq is going, it could become one of the Obama administration’s “greatest achievements.”

Obama himself seconded that when the former war critic called the American effort in Iraq “a remarkable chapter” in the history of the two countries.

Then there are the growing comparisons with Bush’s supposed past transgressions.

Compared to Obama, they’re starting to look like traffic tickets now. Take the economy and the war on terror. Americans were angry at the Bush-era deficits. But they look small after Obama trumped them in less than two years.

For six years of the Bush administration, Americans enjoyed a strong economy. So far, there hasn’t been a similar month under Obama. Bush had a one-time Wall Street meltdown, but Obama’s permanent big-government medicine for it seems far worse than the original disease.

If Hurricane Katrina showed government ineptness, so did the recent BP oil spill. Maybe such problems in the Gulf were neither Bush nor Obama’s fault alone, but are better attributed to the inept federal bureaucracy itself — or to freak weather and human laxity.

On the war on terror, Obama has dropped all the old campaign venom. Bush’s Guantanamo Bay detention facility, renditions, tribunals, intercepts, wiretaps, predator drone attacks, and policies in Afghanistan and Iraq are no longer dubbed a shredding of the Constitution. All are now seen as national security tools that must be kept, if not expanded, under Obama.

In comparison to Obama and his gaffes, Bush no longer seems the singular clod whom his opponents endlessly ridiculed. The supposedly mellifluent Obama relies on the teleprompter as if it were his umbilical cord. His occasional word mangling (he pronounced “corpsman” as “corpse-man”) and weird outbursts (he recently complained that opponents “talk about me like a dog”) remind us that the pressures of the presidency can make a leader sometimes seem silly.

Bush now seems cool because he has played it cool. The more Obama and Biden have trashed him, the more silent and thus magnanimous he appears. Bush’s post-presidency is not like that of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton — both have criticized their successors and hit the campaign trail — but similar to that of his father, who worked with, rather than harped about, Bill Clinton. That graciousness not only has helped George W. Bush in the polls, but it finally seems to be mellowing out Obama as well.

Criticism of Bush got out of hand the last few years of his term. Writing novels or making documentaries about killing the president, or libeling him as a Nazi, is not the sort of politics that we want continued during the Obama years. So it makes sense before the general election to halt the endless blame-gaming, before what goes around comes around.

The frenzy of Bush hatred and Obama worship that crested in the summer of 2008 is over. We now better remember the Bush at Ground Zero with a megaphone and his arm around a fireman than the Texan who pronounced “nuclear” as “nucular.” Meanwhile, hope-and-change now seems to offer little hope and less change.

America woke up from its 2008 trance and is concluding that Bush was never as bad, and Obama never as good, as advertised.

Well done, sir!

…what it deserves, and does not like it. Oh, well.

In one of the most stunning results of the midterm season, marketing consultant Christine O’Donnell, backed with endorsements from tea party activists and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, became the latest “outsider” candidate to knock off an establishment-backed Republican by defeating Rep. Michael N. Castle in Delaware’s Senate primary.

Truncating…

The biggest shock, on a night when the District and seven states held primaries, came in Delaware. Once considered an underfunded fringe candidate with no chance to win, Ms. O’Donnell prevailed with 53 percent of the vote, compared with 47 percent for Mr. Castle.

“The common-sense men and women of Delaware are tired of the ’same old’ coming out of Washington. They don’t want more of the same,” Ms. O’Donnell told a crowd of exhilarated supporters. “Well, we are not more of the same.”

Her win follows an almost equally unforeseen victory last month for tea party favorite Joe Miller in the Alaska Senate primary, ousting GOP incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who has not yet ruled out a write-in bid. Mr. Castle, a nine-term House member and former governor who was re-elected two years ago with 61 percent of the vote, was considered a heavy favorite to win the GOP primary for the seat formerly held by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The result could have major implications for GOP hopes of recapturing the Senate, as a Delaware race considered a near sure bet under Mr. Castle could be much tougher to win with the lesser-known, polarizing Ms. O’Donnell.

(emphasis mine)

Well, business-as-usual Republicans, this is the sort of thing that happens when the people — the very conservatives who put you in office to begin with and then watched as you sold them out with the same “all politics, all the time” approach to governance we expect from the Democrats — become sick and tired of being ignored by a bunch of self seeking political parasites who have forgotten that the folks on the Hill work for the people, not the other way around.

You see, most of us don’t trust you anymore. When you had the majorities in the House and Senate, you frittered them away, the result being an anti-Constitution, runaway leftist government.

Even now, with the Democrats in serious trouble where the November midterm elections are concerned, we have the most powerful Republican in the House of Representatives demonstrating his party’s lack of resolve to do right by conservatives, hell, by the American people as a whole, and, despite the opportunity to do so, performing, eloquently, the Kiss of Shame on the Obama White House.

Let them yell that those conservatives and Republican voters who vote out the G.O.P. incumbents are not being “team players” if they want, but they’re wrong: The folks who vote for the Republican upstarts rather than their incumbent opponents are very much team players, they aren’t playing on the G.O.P.’s pitiful “politics first” team, for sure: They are playing on Team America.

…the same tired blackmail, which of course is working, as always.

Without exception, every time anything happens anywhere that is “offensive to Islam”, Muslims everywhere immediately riot, burn property and murder innocent people, yet Islam promotes itself as a peaceful religion.

It seems to me that any religion whose believers respond to every insult or perceived gesture or act of disrespect with extreme violence is anything but peaceful, anything but capable of intelligent or semi-adult discourse (hell, their now predictable responses are not any different from the tantrums thrown by spoiled pre-adolescent children, except in the sense that people who have nothing to do with the matter at hand are killed or crippled, when they don’t get their way), anything but fit to exist among civilized human beings.

If a non-Muslim citizen threatens to indulge in criminal activity as a response to an insult or other slight, he or she is forcefully reminded that such behavior will result in prosecution and sentencing to prison. This does not apply, apparently, to “the faithful”.

The Cordoba House imam threatens, without threatening directly (the “penalty” is, of course, understood, as violence is an established standard of global Islamic response), that if his project does not go ahead as planned, in its close proximity to Ground Zero, murder and mayhem by peaceful Muslims worldwide.

General Petraeus, President O and others fear the same sort of backlash if that pastor in Florida burns Korans tomorrow.

Of course, it’s a violation of Muslims’ religious rights to prevent them from opening mosques here in America that preach death to infidels.

Meanwhile, possession of a Judeo-Christian Bible in Saudi Arabia is a crime punishable by imprisonment or worse, and woe be to anyone who dares try and build a church or synagogue there.

Burning American flags is also a popular pass-time in some Islamic countries, as is loudly and joyously celebrating the aftermath of successful terrorist attacks in western countries.

The way things are going, Islamofascists won’t have to use actual violence to deprive us of our right to worship as we believe or of our most basic liberties; They’ll only have to bully our politicians with threats of Muslim riots and other violence to obtain unconditional surrender.

As Erick Erickson of Red State fame puts it, you cannot win with these people.

…the economy some more (?) by “creating new jobs” in the transportation infrastructure.

I swear, any moron who is still a hard and fast Obama supporter will demonstrate his/her obtuseness by arguing in favor of the president’s plan as though it would usher him/her into a great paying job.

Sorry, numb nuts, but that ain’t the reality of the thing: The only people who benefit from B. Hussein Obama’s highway, runway and other large scale construction projects are the unions that supported his election campaign.

Obama will continue to reward them for supporting him off the back of the taxpaying public, keeping the unions working while ignoring the collective copious unemployment of the average citizen who’s not union.

Obama is so transparent that whenever I hear one of his supporters rave about the “great job” he’s doing, it reaffirms my lack of faith in the prevailing intelligence of collective Americans.

…I simply must share it, in case someone who visits Hard Astarboard hasn’t seen it.

An indignant President Obama complained last week, “I can’t spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead.” Fine. How about plastering a copy of his presidential oath of office there instead? The kowtowing commander-in-chief is in dire need of a daily reminder that his job is to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” — not international law or global diktats.

Case in point: Last week, Obama’s State Department handed in America’s first-ever report to the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights in conjunction with something called the “Universal Periodic Review.” In short, the 29-page document (pdf) is a self-aggrandizing report card touting the administration’s far-left domestic and foreign policy initiatives for the world’s approval. The report boasts of racial- and gender-bean-counting in the executive branch; Justice Department outreach to Muslim grievance groups opposed to post-9/11 security measures; teachers’ union payoffs in the federal stimulus law; continuing commitment to closing the Gitmo detention facility for enemy combatants; and the illusory lifesaving effects of Obamacare on minorities through “expanding community health centers” (which have yet to be built, but not that it matters in our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president’s age of post-achievement).

The report also includes a section on “values and immigration,” which essentially singles out Arizona’s immigration enforcement law as a human rights deficiency “that is being addressed in a court action.”

Yeah, this issue had mention here a few days ago, but some things bear repetition when they are downright offensive, so, truncating a bit…

No one should be surprised, of course, that the Department of Blame America First is prostrating itself before the likes of repressive U.N. Human Rights Council members Libya, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and China. No one should be surprised that Obama’s globalist panderers couldn’t simply keep their mouths shut and refrain from trashing Americans with whom they disagree. In May, you’ll recall, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Michael Posner preemptively trashed our country’s human rights record to Chinese government officials and humiliated Arizonans — and all Americans — who support states’ rights to protect their borders and enhance their security through strict immigration enforcement. An obsequious Posner called S.B. 1070 “a troubling trend in our society” in his bow-and-scrape conversations with the ChiComs.

The inclusion of Arizona in a politically correct catalogue of human rights and wrongs is more than “downright offensive,” as Brewer put it. It’s a national travesty. In the very same Obama administration document, the State Department praises the administration for its “robust protections for freedom of expression.” The report notes sanctimoniously: “As a general matter, the government does not punish or penalize those who peacefully express their views in the public sphere, even when those views are critical of the government. Indeed, dissent is a valuable and valued part of our politics.”

Yeah? Tell that to the Democratic members of Congress leading the punitive economic boycott and political demonization of Arizona. Or to Attorney General Eric Holder, who rushed to attack S.B. 1070 before he had even read it. Fresh off this U.N. mess, Holder’s Social Justice Department has launched yet another vendetta against Arizona. On Monday, DOJ filed suit against Phoenix-area community colleges because they imposed strict citizenship screening of potential employees.

As Obama throws America under the bus for the cause of open borders, the shady U.N. human rights police must be laughing their jackboots off.

The entire column is here.

November, 2012 is sure taking its sweet time getting here…