“I don’t know anything about cars.” - Edward E. Whitacre, Jr., Newly Annointed Chairman Of GM

I

really can’t believe I’m in America, reading in American media what an American president is doing to an American enterprise.  But I am.  It is true.  The government has named a new chairman for General Motors.  Not the GM board of directors, not the shareholders, but Steven Rattner, Obama’s car czar, who knows about as much about cars as the new chairman, Edward Whitacre.

This is far more radical than anything I thought Obama would be able to pull off, even in eight years, let alone 14 weeks.  Following on yesterday’s SCOTUS decision which said, basically, a contract is no longer a contract so investors can expect no protections, the critical condition of glorious American capitalism could not be more apparent.  I worry that it will not survive until 2010’s mid-term elections.

Whitacre was picked for two reasons.  The published one is that he guided AT&T through the transition from land-based wire telephone carrier to a leader in the wireless industry.  The Obamaites see a similar future for GM, with it transforming from a market-driven car company to a government-driven car company, manufacturing cars Big Brother wants us to drive, whether we want to or not.

The unspoken reason for his selection is because Whitacre can be counted on to do what government tells him to do, as was evident when he quickly (and rightly) acquiesced to government pressure to open AT&T’s hardware to the feds for post-9/11 surveillance purposes.  Not all telcom CEOs folded so quickly to government pressure, and since folding to government pressure is what’s in store for GM, Whitacre will make an ideal Obama-era chairman for the company.

The appointment should infuriate the Left.  Besides being a lackey to George Bush’s gestapo security machine, Whitacre received a peon-snubbing $158.8 million retirement package from AT&T and was involved in some pretty brutal corporate downsizings (probably in no small part due to shifting jobs overseas).  Oh, and let’s not forget that under his tenure AT&T censored (oops!) a Pearl Jam concert right when the band was blasting George Bush.

But Daily Kos has nothing posted on him as of his hour.  Democratic Underground? Mum.  [By the way, I typed "democraticunderground" instead of "democraticunderground.com," and was redirected to one of those stupid sponsored-link pages.  Guess who came out on top?  Barbara Boxer!] As for Huffington Post, which as I predicted in a tweet earlier today leads with how Homeland Security foresaw today’s attack on the Holocaust Museum in its report on right-wing radicalism, it also couldn’t find a reason to cover - let alone criticize - Whitacre’s appointment.

Of course not.  They know what’s going on.  Their long-awaited revolution is happening and they don’t want to crow about it too early because suddenly they’re very concerned about the enemy getting wind of our intentions.  Not al-Qaeda - tell them anything - they don’t want their enemy, normal Americans, to wake up to what’s going on.  No, they want to be much further down the road to economic ruin in the name of wealth redistribution before they haul out the red flags and have a victory parade.

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et’s take a break from all the newsy frivolity - the economic recovery plan, the market mayhem, Ahmadinejad’s latest threats against Israel, oh, I don’t know … the election - and deal with something really, really serious. Sarah Palin’s lip liner. We join the world’s largest leftyblog:

On September 10th, Wonkette received a tip that Sarah Palin’s lipliner is a tattoo.

From: C______@gmail.com>
To: tips@wonkette.com
Date: Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 2:59 PM
Subject: tip on Sarah Pallin Notes: Sarah’s sister in-law owns a beauty parlor in Wasilla…apparently Sarah’s lip liner is tattooed on…not sure what to do with that one.
leak to wonkette

So although the allegation comes in a strangely cryptic email and there is no actual proof that this procedure was performed, we’ve been studying Sarah Palin’s mouth very closely …

Are they obsessed? Yes, I’d say they’re obsessed. The 43.49% that say it is a lip tattoo are obsessed, the 23.24% that say it’s not are obsessed, and even the 28.68% who have studied and pondered and pondered and studied and just couldn’t make up their minds are terribly, terribly obsessed.

By the way, Incredible Daughter #2, who is trained in this sort of stuff (she’s not just a beauty, she’s a beauty professional) took one look at the picture above and said:

No way. It’s uneven … but WHO CARES?

Smart girl. Do you think we’ll see a poll next on whether Joe Biden’s got hair plugs? No, of course not. It doesn’t matter because he’s a man so let’s not get catty, and more to the point, he’s not a woman who has done the unspeakable sin of not goose-stepping with the bra-burners. Conservative women, we are led to believe by this obscene obsession withe Palin, aren’t allowed to think, work, run for vice president, and they certainly aren’t allowed to get lip liner tattoos.

Here’s a question that we conservatives might want to spend the next day or two on: Do you think Nancy Pelosi has a new face tattooed over her old one?

Y

ou get the sense Huffpo has been waiting impatiently, tracking every word from Sarah Palin’s mouth, ready to tear into her the moment something vaguely approaching a gaffe comes out. Today they pounced:

Gov. Sarah Palin made her first potentially major gaffe during her time on the national scene while discussing the developments of the perilous housing market this past weekend.

Speaking before voters in Colorado Springs, the Republican vice presidential nominee claimed that lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.” The companies, as McClatchy reported, “aren’t taxpayer funded but operate as private companies. The takeover may result in a taxpayer bailout during reorganization.”

Any student who’s taken Comparative Gaffes 101 immediately recognizes this as barely a needle-mover on the Gaffe-o-meter, falling far short of classic gaffes like Joe Biden’s “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” or Michelle Obama’s “For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”

For the record, we taxpayers haven’t sent any money Freddie or Fannie’s way yet. But it’s undeniable that the risk the precarious position of the two entities pose to all us taxpayers is huge, and one way or the other, we’re going to be asked to cover that risk - either by an economic tragedy if they fail, or a taxpayer funded government bailout to keep them from failing.

And both the Obama and McCain camps favor the bailout - a safe course, although I wonder if a free fall in the free market might not be much cheaper in the long run.

Ready to jump on the gaffe but seeing that it’s a jump onto thin ice, Huffpo had to find someone to offer them a safety net, and found it in Dean Baker, co-director of the pro-big government, anti-free market Center for Economic and Policy Research - which counts the Fannie May Foundation among its contributors - one of dozens of hard left foundations Fannie Mae supports (others include The Tides Foundation, National Council of La Raza, the ACLU and NOW.) Can you say, “conflict of interest?” Can you say, “what the heck is Fannie Mae doing?”

Some of CEPR’s earlier claims to fame before today’s obligatory Huffpo quote, according to Discover the Networks, include:

• Predicting that Welfare-to-work would “cause not only an increase in poverty among welfare recipients, but also an increase in the numbers of the working poor.”
• Inveighed against “the worst excesses and irrationalities of a market system” that cause “crises, panics, overshooting, recessions and even depressions.”
• Continuously defends Hugo Chavez, raises money for his interests and published a research brief blamed Venezuela’s lagging economic growth on opposition groups supposedly receiving U.S. funding.
• But, after supporting every program it can find for increasing the size, power and budget of the federal government, opposed any expenditures on the war in Iraq.

The desperation of the Left is showing. Sarah Palin has them scared, very scared.

By the way, Palin made the statement in Colorado Springs last Saturday. Apparently the MSM, even the ones that are in the pocket of the bright and clean and nice-looking guy, are not jumping on this bandwagon.

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here are so many negative comments in the left side of the blogosphere about Sarah Palin one hardly knows where to start.

Just look at the front page of Huffington Post. Here are the lead-off headlines:

VETTING PALIN: Andrea Mitchel Says McCain Has Only Met Palin Once… Palin: What Exactly Does The VP Do Everyday?… McCain Spokeswoman: I Have No Idea What McCain’s Relationship Is With Palin…PALIN’S POLITICS: Creationism In Public Schools… Time: Unclear What Her Foreign Policies Are… Says Global Warming Is NOT Man-Made… Said Hillary’s “Whining” Turned Her Off…

And that’s just the top of the page; it gets worse as you scroll down. Let’s break down these headlines: Andrea Mitchell tells us that Palin’s only there out of sheer luck. Next we learn she’s stupid. Then, McCain must have been high when he picked her. She’s a Neanderthal, she can’t possibly be right on foreign policy because we don’t know what her positions are, she’s a Neanderthal, she’s a bimbo.

In other words, we’re seeing the Left’s response to any woman who isn’t a strident, aborting feminist. They love their women that way, but if they’re not cut from that cloth, derision, insult and hatefulness are just fine. Here’s a case in point, from the 5,470 HuffPo comments:

“Fear the Palin bounce.”

“Hahahaha - maybe bouncing on McCain is the only way she got chosen!”

What’s with these feminista Dems not being able to allow that a woman can advance any way but by using sex?

Just about every HuffPo columnist is attacking Palin, and through Palin, McCain, and through McCain, Republicans, so I decided to narrow the field by looking at what one of their female columnists, Linda Bergthold, had to say. She’s not impressed, calling her column, The VP Choice that Cost the Presidency for McCain. (Whoa … is she conceding McCain had a chance?)

Let’s break down her lead, complete with my comments:

I think we will look back at today as the day when the Republicans most certainly lost the Presidency. In choosing Sarah Palin of Alaska for Vice President, the Republicans have made a cynical but clever choice. [As opposed to Obama's Biden choice, which was cynical and desperate.]

At least they think it is clever. She is a woman, young (44 years old), a Governor (only two years) [Obama has only three years as a Senator, most of them spent campaigning, not leading], a mother (five children) [Horrors! What a BREEDER!} , pro-life, and pro-gun.

But what is she not? She is NOT pro-choice. [Bergthold apparently thought that was worth saying twice, apparently unaware that at least 50 percent of America is with Palin on that]. She has NO national experience [and Obama's is what, exactly?]. She has never been under the intense scrutiny of a national campaign [Nor was Obama, until this campaign - how dumb is this broad woman?].

She is under investigation for some incident in Alaska that is messy and personal. [I'll give you George Soros' own link to that story; you weigh it against Ayres and Wright and let me know what you think].

She has no international experience [Nor does Obama, except for one lousy speech in Berlin]. Her experience governing is in a very small state, famous for its “Bridge to Nowhere” kind of political graft. [She killed the bridge, and at least she's run something, unlike Obama. Well wait, he ran an Annenberg Challenge grant, squandering over $100 million and accomplishing nothing.] Her Republican colleague [wrong choice of words, if you check her record] in that state, Senator Ted Stevens has been indicted for corruption [she became governor based on her successful fights against corruption].

If you can find a better example of a visceral reaction coming from surging hate hormones, let me know. Bergthold didn’t even bother to read up on Palin, apparently, or taking a page from Saul Alinsky’s playbook, she just ignored the truth and wove her own narrative.

Boil down the millions of pages of negative comment and seething hatred that have been churned out by the Left since McCain’s announcement and what you have left is the brilliance of McCain’s selection. The Dems can’t attack the GOP vice presidential nominee without attacking their own presidential nominee.

Nowhere is this more evident than the criticism that she’s a token who wouldn’t be where she is were it not for her gender. Does anyone honestly think that a clean, nice looking white guy could have gotten where Obama is if he had nothing more than a paper-thin resume and a nice presentation? Honestly?

Pollyanna is not my secret middle name. I realize that Palin’s got challenges ahead of her and that she could end up being a liability for the ticket - just as Joe Biden could well be.

But Palin wasn’t picked because she’s a woman or a Focus on the Family conservative - or, for that matter, the one with the fattest resume. She was picked to fill a much bigger gap in the McCain ticket. What gap? The Obama Excitement Gap. Obama is where he is today only because he generates larger than life excitement. That is the gap McCain had to fill, and looking about - Romney, Pawlenty, Huckabee, Whitman - no one was there to fill it, no one at all except for Alaska’s corruption-bustin’, basketball-coachin’, dog-sleddin’, bear huntin’, oil drillin’, pageant winnin’, baby makin’ governor, Sarah Palin.

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ime will tell whether patriotism matters, because we are busy setting up the test case.

Our schools, our intelligentsia, our media and our publishers are all busy setting up patriotism as an inferior, baser alternative to internationalism, and are painting soldiers of valor as victims of war, striving to create a whole generation that will believe as they believe: That America is not worth fighting for.

Tom Sowell, in what just may be the most important read of this 4th of July, shows us how history is supposed to be used - to keep us from repeating it - in his Real Clear Politics essay, Does Patriotism Matter? He turns to France in the years following WWI, when the teachers unions and academia fought to destroy patriotism in favor of internationalism, and to paint soldiers - all soldiers, French and German - as equal victims of cruel, unjustifiable war.

At the outset of the [German] invasion [of France in WWII], both German and French generals assessed French military forces as more likely to gain victory, and virtually no one expected France to collapse like a house of cards — except Adolf Hitler, who had studied French society instead of French military forces.

Did patriotism matter? It mattered more than superior French tanks and planes.

Did the American Left learn anything from this experience? Of course not! History, to them, is made to be rewritten, not learned from. So we see on this 4th of July, displays of patriotism on the Left like this one, at Daily Kos:

The Declaration of Independence was the laundry list of grievances stating America’s case for freedom. Its accusations against the King ranged from egregious (”He has plundered our seas, burnt our towns and ravaged the lives of our people”) to the trifling (”Sometimes when he sees us at a party he acts like he doesn’t know us”). But proud men would not take up arms against the Crown solely because the King had “erected a multitude of new offices.” The authors of the Declaration knew they would also have to appeal to man’s higher nature, to stir men’s souls. They needed something with some zazz. Enter a hot-shot tobacco executive from Virginia, Thomas Jefferson.

His task would be to synthesize the unique brand message of America down to something that would captivate the hard to reach “12-28 ragtag militia” demographic, all the while not offending traditional “Butterchurn Moms.” His first attempt at a Preamble was:

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AMERICA. A is for All the tea they taxed. M is for the Minutemen they shellaxed…”
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It tested poorly. But his rewrite would be win-win:

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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
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In a scant 35 words, Jefferson had given the nation the kind of positive brand identity that tendered moot the issue of whether or not we had to live up to its ideals. Still, knowing the inherent contradiction between their noble words and the reality of a slave-owning nation, Jefferson and the Founders wisely decided to strike from the Declaration of Independence the phrase “or your money back.”

Oh, tickle me pinko. Or this, by Charles Karel Bouley at HuffPo:

I could write volumes about patriotism this July 4th. How many column inches in the last few weeks has been devoted to whether or not Barack Obama is patriotic enough, if a war record is on or off limits, and what the love of country truly means. Is anyone in government today truly patriotic?

I’m not I suppose. I don’t like the “Star Spangled Banner” as our national anthem. It’s too violent and too hard to sing for anyone except Whitney or Barbra or… get the point? I think “America The Beautiful” is a far better national anthem. So, I’m unpatriotic.

I question everything. I agree whole-heartedly with Gen. Wesley Clark about Sen. John McGoo’s war record and how just because you’re a POW doesn’t mean you’d make a good POTUS.

And I question our patriotism this July 4th. We, the People who should have seen this gas increase coming, who let a president bankrupt a nation once great, a failed war…Yes, I could rant and rave about that here for paragraphs and paragraphs.

He then links to a radio rant that is nothing but Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, of railing against the media for even questioning Obama’s patriotism - apparently an off-limits inquiry in a nation where patriots have died to protect free speech.

Contrast that with this, from 365 and a Wakeup, winner of this week’s Watcher’s Council contest:

In my first duty assignment I learned why our drill instructors focused so intently on hardening us. I needed that strength when we secured mass graves in Bosnia. I needed it when we faced refugee camps so crippled with famine that the fluid flow of the human body was reduced to hard, angular lines. And I needed that strength when we in countries where the only rules were the brutal laws of physics and ballistics. Exposure to these harsh realities could have broken our spirit, but there were joys to counterbalance the pain. Sometimes we would find it in the sing song lyrics of children chirping in high pitch squeals we couldn’t decipher. Other times we found our solace in the serenity our presence brought to areas where civilization had been stripped to its animal core. But mostly we found it in each other, and in the simple knowledge that our actions proved that life could triumph over death, if only for a moment.

Just because the Left wants to belittle and denigrate patriotism doesn’t mean we should allow it to; it doesn’t mean we can’t put up a spirited - patriotic - defense of it. We should, because if we don’t, we’ll sorrily find out the answer to the question posed in the headline of this post: Yes indeed, patriotism does matter. It matters very much.

S

o Wesley Clark diminished John McCain’s war record, dismissing him as inexperienced. (Who is that pillar of experience you’re working for, General?) That’s nothing compared to where the howlers of the Left are taking it.

Salon’s War Room columnist, Alex Koppleman was able to keep the foam in his mouth:

I can appreciate the fact that Clark’s comments might seem intemperate, but the reaction is more than a little over the top.

First, there are no similarities between Clark’s remarks and the Swift boat attacks. Clark never said, and wouldn’t say, that McCain lied about his service, or won medals he hadn’t earned.

Second, did Clark say anything that was, you know, false? To be sure, McCain served heroically, and endured torture and abuse that I can hardly imagine as a POW. The nation will always owe him a debt of gratitude for what he endured. But Clark’s point is that this service, four decades ago, does not necessarily constitute a presidential qualification today. We don’t hear that often, but that doesn’t make it outrageous.

I could quibble and snark, but why bother when Koppleman represents a voice of reason compared to the real foaming fomenters of the loony Left. John Aravosis of the mis-named Americablog, please step forward:

Yes, we all know that John McCain was captured and tortured in Vietnam (McCain won’t let you forget). A lot of people don’t know, however, that McCain made a propaganda video for the enemy while he was in captivity. Putting that bit of disloyalty aside, what exactly is McCain’s military experience that prepares him for being commander in chief? It’s not like McCain rose to the level of general or something. He’s a vet. We get it. But simply being a vet, as laudable as it is, doesn’t really tell you much about someone’s qualifications for being commander in chief. If McCain is going to play the “I was tortured” card every five minutes as a justification for electing him president, then he shouldn’t throw a hissy fit any time any one asks to know more about his military experience. Getting shot down, tortured, and then doing propaganda for the enemy is not command experience. Again, it’s not nice to say say, but we’re not running for class president here. We deserve real answers, not emotional outbursts designed to quell the questions.

“He won’t let you forget” … “play the ‘I was tortured’ card every five minutes” - You know, it’s hard to avoid McCain projecting his experience as a prisoner of war every time you see him. Not being able to lift his arms because of Viet Cong torture kind of does that. The worst injury Aravosis has probably ever experienced is a bruised ego.

As to the charges of the torture film (Where is it, by the way? Try to find it on YouTube.), Aravosis seems to miss the point that those who didn’t comply with VC demands to go on camera didn’t survive to run for president. They died - horribly - on the spot, which is why the military no longer requires captive soldiers to disclose no more than “name, rank and serial number.”

Rick Moran at Rightwing Nuthouse writes on Aravosis and his vile dig:

QUESTION: Why did John McCain make a propaganda film for the enemy?

ANSWER: Because if you didn’t, the enemy would torture you until you died.

Those “agrarian reformers” and “peace loving socialists” that Aravosis’ ideological brethren were calling the the North Vietnamese back then were not very nice people. Every single prisoner who fell into their hands endured unspeakable degradation and torture until they cooperated. Aravosis makes it sound as if giving in to pain is a character defect. He cannot imagine in his safe little world – a world that allows him to peep into Republican bedroom windows to catch his political foes in a homosexual act and then out them against their will – the kind of mind numbing, excruciating, pain that causes grown men to cry like children and call out for their mother.

Besides running Americablog, one of the foulest and loathsome of the leftyblogs, what claim to moral superiority over McCain does Aravosis have?

Well, let’s see, he founded Stop Dr. Laura because he wanted to shut down her first amendment rights to discuss the downside of homosexuality. He organized Matthew Shepard Online Resources to turn an event that had nothing to do about homosexuality into a celebration of bias against straight people. And, as Moran linked, he loves to destroy people who would just as soon be private about their sex lives.

Lying, homo-totalitarian slimeball that he is, Aravosis has pretty much disqualified himself from participating in any discussion of qualifications for president … except Obama’s qualifications, of course. As a Constitution-trampling agent for “social change,” he’s just the guy to speak in support of the socialist organizer from Chicago.

Even those at the peak of leftist commentary, like Glenn Greenwald, can sense that there’s something wrong with the hypocrisy of (soon to be ex?) Gov. Eliot Spitzer:

That hypocrisy precludes me from having any real personal sympathy for Spitzer, and no reasonable person could defend him from charges of rank hypocrisy.

But that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t get a good, secularist, amoralist defense:

But how can his alleged behavior — paying another adult roughly $1,000 per hour to travel from New York to Washington to meet him for sex — possibly justify resignation, let alone criminal prosecution, conviction and imprisonment? Independent of the issue of his hypocrisy — which is an issue meriting attention and political criticism but not criminal prosecution — what possible business is it of anyone’s, let alone the state’s, what he or anyone else does in their private lives with other consenting adults?

Indeed, one of Greenwald’s commenters, DCLaw1, takes it a step further, with nodding heads all around:

I have always found it very curious that one of the following, but not the other, is illegal:

(a) Two people have sex, one of them gets paid for it;

(b) Two (or more) people have sex, all of them get paid for it, and it is videotaped and sold to third parties as a commodity.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument why this difference makes any actual sense.

In that, DCLaw1 is absolutely right. They ought to throw the porn stars, directors, producers, gaffers, editors and best boys in the slammer, too. There was a day, before Free Speech got naked, when that would have been what people like then-DA Spitzer did to earn their keep.

Whoa. The heads just stopped nodding.

But the Left has much bigger fish to fry than simple morality in the Spitzer case. As Scott Horton writes in Harpers:

It looks like the Bush Justice Department just bagged themselves another Democratic Governor.

Horton has a figure, undocumented, that under Bush’s Justice Department, 5.6 times more cases were opened against Dems than Republicans.

He would like us to think that these are all high profile political cases, but he offers us no data to prove it. In fact, he says, “Indeed, a study of the cases out of Alabama shows clearly that even cases opened against Republicans are in fact only part of a broader pattern of going after Democrats.”

Let me hazard a guess here. More drug dealers and pimps are Dems than Republicans. Are we being told to elect Clinton or Obama so the purveyors of crack and whores, and crack whores for that matter, will face less prosecution?

And stop me if I’m reaching here, but in watching The Godfather, I never got the sense that anyone in the Corleone circle of influence was a big man in the GOP elite.

Of course, we know from ABC that it was suspicious fund transfers that got Spitzer in trouble, not hooking up with hookers, and we know that it was a bank that initially reported him to the feds, not Karl Rove.

Are we being told to vote for Obama or Hillary so suspicious fund transfers are to be ignored? Hmmm. Maybe.

That seems to be Firedoglake’s POV, given the questions asked there:

1. Why would the bank tell the IRS and not Spitzer himself if there was a suspicious transfer?

I believe it’s this troubling thing called the law.

2. What is the USA doing prosecuting a prostitution case?

Her point, of course, is that the local DA, not the feds, should be prosecuting it. Certainly that’s a harken back to the Clinton admin, whose Justice Department was notoriously soft on sex crimes. But look at the facts: A person from New York was doing business on a large scale with a prostitution ring in DC. Federal jurisdiction, baby.

3. Mike Garcia is a Chertoff crony.

She’s following this case a lot closer than I am, but please … cronyism? Cronyism, thy name is politics. The Dems are all over cronyism during the Bush Admin. It must be because they were exhausted containing their outrage during eight years of Clinton cronyism. This rings of 9/11 Truther Whacko garbage.

4. How did Spitzer’s name get leaked to the media, and who did it? Didn’t happen to Dave Vitter.

The answer is Karl Rove, of course! Why ask? And if we’re so concerned about such questions, Jane, who leaked the FISA surveillance story to the media?

5. Why did Mike Bloomberg suddenly start talking about running for governor recently?

Could it be because he decided not to run for president? Spitzer is 18 months into his term … about time to fire up an opposition campaign, ya think?

6. The Mann Act? Are you kidding?

People who don’t like prostitution being prosecuted don’t like the Mann Act and are always harping about it being a political tool more than a prosecuting tool. But it was written to provide the tool for prosecuting interstate prostitution. I kid you not.

7. Spitzer’s been in the line of fire of the GOP hit squad for a while.

Technically, that’s not a question. But here’s one for you, Jane: What high profile, ambitious Republican has not been in the Dems’ line of fire for a while?

Eliot Spitzer’s fall is a great personal tragedy and his family has the misfortune of it also being a great political spectacle. By turning his crime and fall into a rant against prostitution laws, Bush, old laws, the GOP, Chertoff and goodness knows what else, the Left is doing their man no favors.

But I’d rather watch their ranting than Spitzer himself, any day.

The McClatchy headline and the lead are bold indeed:

Experts: No Evidence of Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program

WASHINGTON — Despite President Bush’s claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger “World War III,” experts in and out of government say there’s no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

Even his own administration appears divided about the immediacy of the threat. While Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney speak of an Iranian weapons program as a fact, Bush’s point man on Iran, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, has attempted to ratchet down the rhetoric.

Leftyblogs were quick to jump on this bandwagon because, after all, there is no evil in the world other than Bush:

If you listen to White House officials, Iran’s nuclear-weapons program is already a reality. There’s no hesitation on the rhetoric — the program, top administration officials say, is an unfortunate reality that demands our immediate attention. As Dick Cheney recently put it, “Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions. We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

With this in mind, it’s probably worth taking a moment, now and again, to point out that there’s no conclusive evidence that such a program actually exists. (The crooks and liars at Crooks and Liars)

Then there’s The Newshoggers with this pig-eyed view:

One of the contributing worries of people who believe that there is a significant possibility of overt US military actions against Iran before Jan. 20, 2009 is the roll-out of the propaganda and FUD factors. We have Kyl-Lieberman taking the place of the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, we have the unfounded accusations, we have the massive hyping of potential threats built upon gossamar threads of plausibility, we have freakish exile groups stovepiping their ‘intel’ and we have a coterie of officials who have a long-standing hard-on for ‘regime change’ with power in the White House.

One of the positive repeats of that entire cycle was the McClatchy/Knight Ridder team. They were the ones who were digging around and pointing out the bullshit on weapons claims, threat assessments and intel ’sources’ while the big boys in the national media reprinted official claims without any skepticism on the front page, or in the lede. McClatchy is doing it again today with an analysis of the Iranian nuclear capacity in a great article.

Beware, my friends, it appears the Leftyblogs are content to make news from headlines and leads, and not really probe into the articles they are basing their posts on. The highly suspect and blatantly anti-Bush motivations of McClatchy’s headline and lead-writers notwithstanding, let’s fisk a bit, shall we?

The gist of the article is that Iran is no doubt pursuing a nuclear program, but there’s no evidence they’re actually making bombs. Well, duh. There’s not much point in making bombs until you have something to put in them, eh? And there’s plenty of evidence related in the article about their efforts to do that, including:

• Seized drawings “that indicated that Iranian experts studied mounting a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.”
• Seized plans for a deep-bored shaft “apparently designed to contain an nuclear explosion.”
• A document viewed by the IAEA that showed how to produce uranium hemispheres which have no application in nuclear power plants “but form the explosive cores of nuclear weapons.”
• Iran’s assertions that it only has P1 centrifuges, not P2’s, which are much faster, fly in the face of IAEA evidence that they do, indeed, have plans for P2s.
• Iran’s assertions that they’re not doing anything with their P2 plans flies in the face of proof “that Iran sought to buy thousands of specialized magnets for P2s from European suppliers.”

And on and on. The McClatchy article, in totality, is a condemnation of Iran’s claims that it seeks nukes only for peaceful purposes, but the Left is content to skim the headline and lead and make their own safe, anti-American conclusions.

hat-tip: memeorandum

If I could nominate one news article this week as the one most likely to drive MoveOn.org and the Kos-sac into a fine dither, it would be the second excerpt from Bill Sammon’s The Evangelical President that ran in the SF Chronicle.

In Sammon’s piece, we see a president that is supposedly too stupid to articulate his way to the end of a sentence, and too partisan to ever look beyond the hateful blinders of his GOP cohorts, actually planning for the possible transition of the Iraq war to a Democratic president.

(Not that he thinks that will happen. In the first part of the two-parter, Bush predicts that Clinton will win the primary but lose the general, a statement that’s obsessed the leftyblogs.)

Sammon reveals that Bush is “quietly providing back-channel advice to Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to modulate her rhetoric so she can effectively prosecute the war in Iraq if elected president.”

Chief of Staff Josh Bolten told Sammon:

“He wants to create the conditions where a Democrat not only will have the leeway, but the obligation to see it out.”

The Left will think the Bush is taking recreational breaks with Marion Barry when they read the president’s remarks to Sammon:

The Examiner asked Bush why Democratic candidates such as Clinton and Barack Obama, who routinely lambaste his handling of Iraq, should take his advice.

“First of all, I expect them to criticize me. That’s one way you get elected in the Democratic primary, is to criticize the president,” Bush replied. “I don’t expect them to necessarily take advice from me. I would expect their insiders to at least get a perspective about how we see things.”

He added: “We have an obligation to make sure that whoever is interested, they get our point of view, because you want somebody running for president to at least understand all perspectives, apart from the politics.”

Besides, Bush suggested that Clinton and Obama just might benefit from his advice.

“If I were a candidate running for president in a complex world that we’re in, I would be asking my national security team to touch base with the White House just to at least listen about plans, thoughts,” he said.

And apparently the Clinton campaign, and possibly others, are doing just that — listening to the thoughts of a man MoveOn et. al. would have us believe is incapable of thinking. Why shouldn’t they? Unlike most of us, they’ve seen Bush up close and bluster as they will in public, they know he’s a smart man with a clear, long-term vision.

Of course, his long-term vision could become a short-term vision in the hands of a Dem president, but it looks more and more like we will be able to wrap up Iraq much more successfully than appeared would be the case earlier this year.

Part of the reason for optimism is that Bush has done such a good job of making that possible. He’s taken the hits on surveillance and Guantanamo so others won’t have to. He’s changed tactics and leadership. He’s cobbled together his shattered party to stand up to Dem white-flag bullying. And, we now learn, he’s reaching out to anyone who may take his chair to help them form a viable ongoing policy for Iraq.

There must be no joy in Kosville.

hat-tip: Jim

Update: The Bollinger transcript is out; view it here. He did quite a good job all in all, as I discuss above … which I’ll post as soon as I’m done.

I‘m still waiting for a transcript of Lee Bollinger’s reportedly scathing introduction of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be posted. Despite the views of some I respect that it was an award-winning intro, I’m holding my opinion until I can see the transcript.

Here’s why.

The LAT clip below is indicative of most clips I’ve read regarding the appearance:

In his scathing introduction to the much-anticipated on-campus event, Bollinger told the leader of Iran that he resembled “a petty and cruel dictator.”

Bollinger levied repeated criticisms against Ahmadinejad, calling on him to answer a series of challenges about his leadership, blasting his views about the “myth” of the Holocaust “absurd” and saying that he doubted he “will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions.”

“Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” Bollinger said, to loud applause.

He said Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust might fool the illiterate and ignorant.

It appears from all the coverage I’ve read that Bollinger focused on the Holocaust, which certainly wouldn’t have been my focus. As appalling has Ahmadinejad’s view on the Holocaust is, it is inconsequential in terms of the politics of today. That’s not to say the extermination of Jews isn’t a critical issue, but Bollinger should have gone after Ahmadinejad for his declarations that Israel should be wiped off the map today. That is much more relevant than his denial that Hitler tried to exterminate them 60 years ago.

I also have seen no mention that Bollinger attacked Ahmadinejad for Iran’s supply of munitions, funding and training to terrorists in Iraq, all in a deliberate effort to kill as many American troops as possible.

It would have taken some real courage to bring that up at Columbia, a place where a fair number on the faculty and in the student body probably think killing “imperialist” U.S. soldiers is a fine thing to do. Criticizing holocaust deniers, in contrast, is not risk-taking in an American campus (yet, thank God), so I don’t give Bollinger any kudos for that.

Like I say, when I get to read the transcript, I may change my viewpoint.

Meanwhile, I thought David Schizer, the dean of the Columbia Law School did some pretty commendable risk-taking with this statement:

A controversy has developed about the invitation extended to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran by the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. Although Columbia Law School was not involved in arranging this invitation, we have received many inquiries about it.

This event raises deep and complicated issues about how best to express our commitment to intellectual freedom, and to our free way of life. Although we believe in free and open debate at Columbia and should never suppress points of view, we are also committed to academic standards. A high-quality academic discussion depends on intellectual honesty but, unfortunately, Mr. Ahmadinejad has proven himself, time and again, to be uninterested in whether his words are true. Therefore, my personal opinion is that he should not be invited to speak. Mr. Ahmadinejad is a reprehensible and dangerous figure who presides over a repressive regime, is responsible for the death of American soldiers, denies the Holocaust, and calls for the destruction of Israel. It would be deeply regrettable if some misread this invitation as lending prestige or legitimacy to his views.

Our university is a pluralistic place, and I recognize that others within our community take a different view in good faith, and that they have the right to extend invitations that I personally would not extend. I know that we will learn from each other in discussing the difficult questions prompted by this invitation. (emphasis added)

That’s getting it right.

Meanwhile, over at Kos, we read this:

As an American, I was stunned and embarrassed by Bollinger’s harangue of Ahmedinejad. It was a craven and cowardly capitulation to political pressures, and unworthy of the academic institution that Bollinger represents. I know who and what Ahmedinejad is, but I also know that he was at Columbia at Columbia’s invitation. Bollinger’s speech was less a challenge to Ahmedinejad than it was an ambush, and it dishonered [sic] all of us as Americans.

Hmm. I wonder what this writer’s response would be if Bollinger had been equally pointed in introducing the president of the United States. I’ll hazard a guess that he wouldn’t think that to be unworthy of Columbia or — and this is really odd — dishonoring to Americans.

And speaking of Kos, we also see this on the site, courtesy of LGF:

Obviously, this is not a poll based on reality so a lot of people used it to make political statements that do not reflect what their actual actions would have been if we were suddenly transported to Bizzaro World, where such a vote might in fact take place.

Be that as it may, Kos posed the question, a question no one on the Left in the pre-Bush era would have ever thought about asking. It appears that as the Bush administration is winding down, the demented hatred of Bush is only increasing among the rabid Left.

hat-tip: memeorandum