Read this!

So now, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is suddenly interested in complying with UN resolution 1559, which calls for the disarmament of Hezbollah. One can’t help but wonder why his government made no effort to comply with the resolution until the Israeli Defense Force {IDF} began pounding the bloody crap out of his country.

Of course, the anti-Israel U.N. never enforced Lebanon’s failure to comply with the resolution, since it was more a cosmetic kind of thing than anything the corrupt global organization actually intended to be taken seriously.

Siniora said the Israel Defense Forces assault had devastated his country, and called for international aid.

Go, IDF!

Deploying Lebanese troops on the southern border, now controlled by Hezbollah, would meet a repeated United Nations and U.S. demand. This demand is also backed by UN resolution 1559, calling for the disarmament of Hezbollah and deployment of the Lebanese army in its stead. But the government fears that using force against Hezbollah could trigger another sectarian conflict in Lebanon, which was ravaged by civil war between 1975 and 1990.

Hey, guy, who’s running your country? A legitimate and responsible government, or a terrorist organization? If you expect anyone to take your government seriously, it has to enforce order in your country and has to be the only governing authority — that means it needs to take whatever risks are necessary to do away with the power Hezbollah enjoys in Lebanon. If you have to deploy troops in the south to fight tooth and nail against Hezbollah guerillas, then that’s what you have to do.

“I declare today that Lebanon is a disaster zone in need of a comprehensive and speedy Arab plan… and [it] pleads to its friends in the world to rush to its aid,” he said.

The Lebanese army is about 70,000 strong, equipped with American, French and Russian weapons but virtually no air force.

The UN Security Council on Saturday again rejected pleas that it call for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon after the United States objected, diplomats said.

Emphasis mine. Bravo, Condi, Bolton & Bush!

If Fouad’s government isn’t “up to” addressing the Hezbollah problem, maybe they ought to sit back, break open a can of pomegranate cola and weather things out while Israel gives their country the terrorism-purging enema it so badly needs….

H/T James Taranto

I hate to say this, but the reference to French weapons brings to my mind a few thousands of cases of white flags on hand-held poles. France must be the only country in the world whose military employs personnel whose job it is to declare, “We Surrender!”

Later.

I love the way the media pounced on Bush’s use of a four letter word, especially in this headline that says Mideast crisis drives Bush to colorful language.

Bush replied: “What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit.” Shortly afterwards Blair noticed the microphone and hastily switched it off, but not before the recording had reached news media.

{The correction from “it” to “is” in the quoted text is mine, there is a typo in the actual article}.

Hmmm, reminds me of an occasion on which Ronald Reagan, purportedly not realizing a mic was live, scared the piss out of the Soviets with a quip about preparing to launch missiles.

I like the fact that the leaders of the U.S. and Britain are friendly and informal enough in their private conversations to speak without having to be “PR”. The way the media sounds, you’d think this was an earth shaking event. Possibly even more earth shaking than when a President makes adulterous “whoopie” with his interns, lies to Congress, commits rape and serves up sexual harrassment as frequently as a server in a diner delivers coffee to customers.

Personally, I’d've preferred, “Tony, I hope Israel tears those terrorist motherfuckers a new asshole”, but you can’t have everything….

Mark Steyn’s current column has got to be the truest and funniest I’ve ever seen on Mideast peace efforts.

An excerpt –

It’s easy to fly in a guy in a suit to hold a meeting. Half the fellows inside the Beltway have Middle East “peace plans” named after them. Bush flew in himself a year or two back to announce his “road map.” Before that it was Cheney, who flew in with the Cheney plan, which was a plan to open up a road map back to the last plan, which would get us back to “Tenet,” which would get us back to “Mitchell,” which would get us back to “Wye River,” which would get us back to “Oslo,” which would get us back to Kansas.

LOL!

War is not a good thing, but it is sometimes an unfortunate necessity. That said, in forcing that necessity upon Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas have, to all intents and purposes, all but pleaded with the Israelis for the exciting experience they are having now.

BEIRUT — Israel intensified its air assault on Lebanon yesterday, bombing central Beirut for the first time and pounding seaports and a key bridge as it tightened a noose around this reeling nation.

Trying to defuse the crisis, Lebanon’s prime minister indicated he might send his army to take control of southern Lebanon from Hezbollah — a move that might risk civil war.

Mighty nice of you, friend. You and your citizens have no problem whatsoever with a major terrorist organization being part and parcel of your country until they bring the wrath of the most powerful war machine in the Middle East down on your country. Suddenly, you are going to “take control”, even at the risk of civil war. Now that the country you govern is being physically dismantled right before your eyes and well beyond your control, you want to get up on your hind legs and do what you should have done some time ago, except for your support of the terrorists and the support for the terrorists by most of your citizens.

Like the Israeli government has said on the subject, “Seeing is believing”.

On Israel’s second front, against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, Israeli aircraft yesterday struck the Economy Ministry of the Hamas-led Palestinian government and three other targets, killing two persons, Palestinian and Israeli officials reported.

Israeli tanks approached the town of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza this morning, residents and Palestinian security forces said. The town lies across the border from an Israeli town, Sderot, frequently hit by Hamas guerrilla rockets.

What did these Islamofascist zealots expect? That they could attack Israel forever and with impunity, and not eventually (like now) face the wrath the Jewish State’s awesome military forces are capable of dishing out when it is time to defend the homefront?

In a recent post, I referred to an expression: If you mess around with the bandwagon, you have to expect to get hit with the horn.

Wellllllllllllllll……………….

Washington Times bossman Wesley Pruden, as brutally frank as always, tells us,

If you’re looking for a fight in a dark and dangerous neighborhood, you can usually find one. If you pick on the wrong man, you deserve the bloody nose, cracked teeth or broken jaw.

Hmmmmm, sounds sort of like what some critters in Lebanon and some other critters in the Gaza Strip are learning to identify with, even as we speak.

Read Wesley Pruden’s OpEd Here.

If you’re an American liberal, anybody at the NYT {except William Safire} or an Islamofascist, read it and weep.

So it’s the wee hours, I recently finished doing some work and have done some blogging, it’s almost time I hit the rack and I’m kicking back with a large mug of Cafe Bustelo and some Sambuca on the side. I have some old music(rightnow, the theme from Romeo & Juliet, next I think Paul Mauriat’s Love Is Blue) playing from my MusicMatch library via Logitech speakers I bought last December {Logitech gets my personal uncompensated endorsement, the sound is excellent} and I’m thinking about the state of things…

Israel is fighting a war against Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Gaza. We’re talking war, not just a small counterterror Op, in which the IDF is fighting, for the moment, on 2 fronts.

The best President we’ve had since early 1988 is in the process of diminishing America’s sovereignty several notches in the pursuit of forming a small-scale EU with Mexico and Canada. What’s really disturbing about this is that we hear almost nothing from the media about this and even less from members of Congress.

Now, where the MSM’s concerned, I can understand. Being liberals, they have been busting their touchases these last few years to propagandize we, the people, into casting off “the bonds” of American identity and love of country, and becoming “people of the world united” or something like that, becoming as much like France as possible and of course, offering our collective “guilty American neck” to the chopping block of Islam.

{Ah, Summer Place, by Percy Faith!}

It’s really great to know that fellow Americans like the communists at the ACLU and the traitors folks at the New York Times are behind the nation 100% — Actually, to judge from what they consider journalism, they have become what comes out of the nation’s behind. Get some Charmins, clean ‘em up. On the other hand, if you’re in a priveleged position in a government security or intelligence agency, you can report on the latest defense secrets to the NYT and they guarantee to safeguard your identity while they print the details. Can’t blame ‘em, right? Someone’s got to help fundamentalist Islam murder us, right? It may as well be Keller as anyone, right? Thank G-d he took the initiative to act on our behalf!

{Every Time We Touch, by Maggie Reilly, who had one of the most awesomely beautiful voices I’ve ever heard. She did some recordings with Mike Oldfield as well as her own great stuff back in the 1980s. I’d've loved to see her and Annie Haslam do a back-to-back concert, they’d have been highly compatible, or her and Annie’s band, Renaissance, about tied as my second favorite with Yes, just behind my #1, Focus}

Wow, at half a century, the 1970s and 80s seem like contemporaries of the Boston Tea Party!

At 50, you also have memories of a time when nobody calling himself an American would disrespect our country and the principles upon which it was founded the way the Democratic Party, via its liberal element, does today.

At 50, you can rejoice that you won’t be here to see the end result of what liberalism turns our country into over the next half century.

My prediction is the society Sly Stallone is defrosted into in Demolition Man, where cops, not even armed with lethal weapons, “request” that a criminal lay down his weapon and submit to arrest, and there’s no enforcement procedure to respond to “Fuck you, make me!” because in the Utopian mindset of that time, citizens naturally respond as expected.

I’d hate, however, to be forced to learn how to use the 3 sea shells.

They’re not showing much concern for the protection of your card info in their systems, though they’re more than happy to take your money.

It would seem that in this age of identity theft, all too many retailers are chaffing at the bit to accept payment for their merchandise via your credit cards and debit cards while, at the same time, they’re not quite as tenacious where protecting the confidential information — your confidential information — their card processing terminals collect to obtain transaction approval.

What’s up with that?

Mona Charen is one of my favorite political columnists. I recently read her book, Do Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim To Help(And The Rest Of Us) and was really disappointed…. when I realized I’d hit the last page. It was so on-point and such a great read that I hated it to end. She really knows whereof she speaks, and hasn’t got any problem with saying it point blank, PC be damned.

At any rate, her latest column weighs in on Israel’s justification for the long overdue defensive action they are engaged in, even as I type this post.

Excerpt –

(The Washington)

Post starts with the swearing in of the Hamas government on March 29. Fair enough. But the next item is “June 9: Explosion kills seven members of a Gaza family. Witnesses blame Israeli artillery, but Israel denies it.” Missing is any reference to the non-stop shelling of Israel from the Gaza strip that began in 2005 and has not let up since. Nearly 3,000 rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel…

Read On.

Stepping completely away from politics for the moment, this is an e-card I received from a friend whom I haven’t talked to, emailed or otherwise had contact with for some time, entirely my fault.

H/T Nikki

…. is this excellent editorial at The New Republic.

What has been clarified by this round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, first and foremost, the character of Israel’s adversaries. They are Islamist terrorists, and proud to be so. More ominously, they are Islamist terrorists come to power. Hamas is no longer only a movement; it is now also a government. In the months since Hamas was elected by the Palestinians to govern (or misgovern) them, the regime of Ismail Haniyeh and company has presided over the launching of hundreds of Qassam rockets into Israel, applauded a suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv restaurant (it would have been hypocritical of them not to applaud it!), allowed an unprecedented escalation of the conflict with the firing of a souped-up rocket into Ashkelon–the first time such a strike has been made against a major Israeli city–and, of course, kidnapped Corporal Gilad Shalit. All of this, again, is the work of a government. When Hamas was elected, there was an eruption of assurances in the media that power will breed responsibility, that the drudgeries of governing will usurp the ecstasies of bombing, and so on. “Hamas?” the headline on the cover of The New York Review of Books asked hopefully. But the Hamas rulers of Palestine have made it plain that they see no contradiction between governing and bombing. Success at the ballot box has had no calming effect. It has merely conferred political legitimacy upon moral depravity.

The long and the short of it is that Israel is not defending herself against guerilla activities by a faction of “downtrodden” souls, they are defending themselves against an Act Of War by a sovereign government. If the Palestinians want terrorists as leaders, well, so be it — they can reap what they’ve sown.

And as for Hezbollah and their Lebanese hosts, welllllll, they were warned a long time ago….

Hezbollah, of course, is not a government, but it is a part of a government. Its freedom of action, its unreconstructed radicalism, its pervasive presence in Lebanese politics: All this brings to mind nasty memories of a few decades ago, so that it is not incorrect to say that, over the last 30 years, Lebanon has exchanged a PLO mini-state within its borders for a Hezbollah mini-state within its borders. When Shalit was kidnapped, Hamas cited the precedent of Hezbollah’s kidnappings (and prisoner-exchanges) in the past, as if in exoneration of its own extortion. Hezbollah has always been Hamas’s teacher in the great madrassa of anti-Israeli terrorism. Now the teacher has taken a cue from the student and taken its own Israeli hostages. Israel must now remind its adversaries that it was deadly in earnest when, decades ago, it proclaimed that it would tolerate no such aggression along its northern border.

When you rent a DVD, you are deluged at the start of the feature with federal and international warnings regarding the illegality and criminal penalties of bootlegging the contents of the disc. When you see a no parking sign, there is, as often as not, a warning that if you park there, your car will be towed away and how much it will cost to get it back. A “No Trespassing” sign often makes sure you understand that if you trespass, you will be prosecuted. When I worked in a casino security department and we “86″ed someone from the property, we read them, from a card that everybody carried, a trespass warning that left no doubt that the next time the 86er was found in the casino or anyplace else on our property, he or she would be immediately arrested and sent to jail, and prosecuted. If the subject didn’t understand English or purported not to, or even had the slightest foreign accent, we would call in an employee(a dealer, change person, whoever) that was fluent in the subject’s native language and have them translate the trespass warning word-for-word. On highways, “No Littering” signs tell you how much you will be fined for littering.

The reason for all these warnings and posted explanations of the penalties for the transgressions indicated is to make unmistakeably plain what will happen if the warnings are not heeded, so that in court, the “I didn’t know” defense would not hold any water. Unscrupulous, greasy, seedy, anal-cavity liberal trial lawyers and drooling left wing judges brought this necessity upon society, but that’s one for another time.

My point being, decades ago, Israel warned the Lebanese and their terrorist Hezbollah butt-boys that there would be dire military consequences if there were any further cross border attacks — the Lebanese government is responsible for dealing with its in-house terror factions. If they choose to let them do as they please, they, like the Palestinians who voted in terrorism as their choice of leadership, deserve whatever Israel feels like dishing out. Actions have consequences, and if you indulge in the first, you have to accept the second.

And make no mistake about the culpability of other countries as well, like Iran and Syria. This is war by every “legal” definition no matter what the “international community” says — and it was declared on Israel, not the other way around, by governments that either enjoy legitimate sovereignty or, as in the case of the Palestinians, are recognized as such.

There is also a larger strategic dimension to the Hamas-Hezbollah offensive. These provocations stink of Assad and Ahmadinejad. The Hamas action in Gaza appears to have been ordered by Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader who resides in Damascus–which is to say, it is also a piece of Syrian intrigue. Nor can anything of significance take place in Lebanon without the sanction of Damascus; and Hezbollah enjoys not only the toleration of Syria but also the time-honored support of Iran, which is also Syria’s great ally in a region that may be otherwise turning in a better direction. Perhaps Meshal’s responsibility for the Gaza attack will now allow Haniyeh to masquerade as a moderate. (The Washington Post this week published an op-ed by Haniyeh that was full of outrageous assertions. It seems that an election is all that stands between terrorism and punditry.)

I sincerely hope that liberals in Israel (fat chance, if they’re anything like American liberals) have now taken to heart the consequences of making concessions to the “my way or the highway” brand of terrorism that seems to be the driving force behind Islam.

I love the last paragraph in the editorial:

It is also worth noting that the Hamas-Hezbollah aggression is aimed at damaging precisely those political forces in Israel–now represented by Ehud Olmert’s government–that withdrew Israeli settlers from Gaza and is committed to withdrawing Israeli settlers (70,000 of them) from the West Bank. It was one of the great ironies of recent times that Olmert’s party rose in Israel at the exact moment that Hamas rose in Palestine; but the irony has turned deadly. They, the Palestinians, really do want everything. And so they are about to learn, yet again, that, as long as they want everything, they will get nothing. This may satisfy the nihilists in charge, since nihilists live for nothing.