S

ix very long paragraphs into a seven-paragraph column in Slate, Christopher Hitchens finally gets around to the big question, as if it was an intellectual breakthrough of such import it needed a hefty introduction:

Which brings me to a question that I think deserves to be asked: Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran?

Oh, you mean like the Bush Doctrine?  Show them a little Democracy and stand back? Hitchens hedges his bets, saying “one swallow does not make the summer,” and subheading the article (possibly by editors, not Hitchens), “Given the connections between Iraq and Iran, it’s not as unlikely as it sounds).

Unlikely? One swallow? Iraq has a Shi’ite majority and Iran is a Shi’ite country.  Iranians know what the condition of Iraqi Shi’ites was before the war, and they know their condition now.  They see elections that are fair and open being held just across the border, and they know of candidates now holding office in Iraq that would never be approved by the Mullahs to even run in Iran.

The Bush Doctrine meme has been remarkably thin in all the coverage, blogging, punditry and tweeting over the Iran elections, but it stands in the middle of the story like an 800-pound gorilla no one wants to write about. Bush’s war in Iraq so obviously led to the deep yearning for freedom in Iran that the leftist readers of Salon are howling in defensive, unsustainable protest:

Trace192 lays out the familiar diatribe:

Hundreds of thousands of American injured.. millions of innocent Iraqi civilians displaced or killed.. billions of taxpayer’s money wasted..

And there’s Hitch, still desperately grasping at straws in an attempt to justify it.

The loss of life in Iraq, while exponentially smaller than leftists predicted prior to the war, remains tragic and the Left refuses to let a single one of those deaths stand for something.

Candoxx has a disbelief of biblical proportions:

Well well well, not since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ has the extrication of one man and his sons from the planet resulted in so much, eh?

On planet Hitchens.

Philadelphia Steve is so sure of his worldview that he doesn’t want to be bothered by being asked to think about any opposing view. He’ll just remain 100% sure of himself about everything, despite history, despite events:

Do the Neocons ever give up their attempts to justify Bush’s bungled, incompetent, wasteful invasoin and occupation of Iraq?

No.

And they never will.

The only question is why Slate, or anyone else, continues to waste space on people who have been 100% wrong on everything.

why?

Sir Real turns logic on its head, seeing a democracy (of sorts) ruled by Shi’ites as a threat to Iraq just like that big bad Sunni Saddam was:

On the one hand, it’s self-evident that people’s experiences (with, say, a brand spankin’ new neighboring government) color their perceptions.

On the other hand, are you effing kidding me?

You could, AT BEST, argue that the Iranian people are willing to demonstrate because they no longer have to fear Saddam on the border. (The Iran-Iraq war killed 188k+ Iranian men and boys- not the kind of thing you want to re-occur by, say, destabilizing your current government). But to imply that Iraq is some sort of democracy showroom, and that the events of June ’09 are the Iranians just itchin’ to buy is deeply self-serving, especially on the part of those who cheerleading led us there in the first place.

Geopolitics as dominoes- Stupid then (RIP McNamara), Stupid now.

And of course there’s always the leftist who can’t put together a thought without profanity, like the commenter blahblahblah, who’s so jaded, so cool to it all, so above it, so blithely unbothered that he/she actually comments as if thinking in poems; obscene poems to be sure, but poems nonetheless:

Every f****** Iranian you know
believed in the lie that was Moussavi’s lie
which he enunciated at a press conference before the g**d*** returns came in
when he declared that he was the winner of the election,
when in fact every lucid fact and number
before and after the election nationwide spoke otherwise.
So why the f*** should I care about your f***** friends,
when you’ve all become just a bunch of wishful thinking lying b******.

Give me change or a revolution based on the f****** truth
and not the hopeful lies with which you peddle so dearly hateful sir.
Good f****** grief.

I’ll leave out the obscenity, since it’s just not needed: Good grief.

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B

ush hatred runs deep, burns bright and lasts long; it pumps up the American Left like the taste of blood enrages a pitt bull.  Witness the latest coldhearted hatred, from that sump of leftist hate, Salon:

In May, the U.S. economy lost 345,000 nonfarm jobs, pushing the unemployment rate from 8.9 percent to 9.4 percent. According to official statistics, 14.5 million Americans are now looking for work and, as a recent headline at Time.com put it, “The jobs aren’t coming back anytime soon.” In fact, a team of economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank recently reported that “the level of labor market slack could be higher by the end of 2009 than at any other time in the post-World War Two period.”

The news, however, is not altogether grim. While times are especially tough for teenagers (22.7 percent jobless rate) and blacks (14.9 percent jobless rate), one group is doing remarkably well. I’m talking about former members of the Bush administration who are taking up prestigious academic posts, inking lucrative book deals, signing up with speakers bureaus, joining big-time law firms and top public relations agencies and grabbing spots on corporate boards of directors.

What a shock! The free market economy still exists despite all Obama has done in the last six months to destroy it, and the very best of the last eight years have found a market for their skills. America should be ashamed!

The author, appropriately monikered Nick Turse, sums up the Bush years, and the efforts of those around the president for those years, as “high-priced wars, ruinous economic policies and shredding of economic safety nets.” Obama has spent more and committed us to more in six months that Iraq cost us through the Bush years. His economic policies have taken the ruin Bush started to new catastrophic levels. And I have no idea what Turse even means by shredding safety nets. Are people starving in the street? Unable to get health care?

I guess when the president you worship is performing disasterously, the best cover is to go back and attack the Bush administration. It keeps the ol’ heart pumping, maintains the vitality of all those dark insults, and distracts one’s attention from the running fiasco that is Obama’s Washington.

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“There’s never been anything like this,” a former Pentagon official told the WSJ about spy attacks on computers holding top secret weapons development information, along with national infrastructure control systems. “[They've attacking] everything that keeps this country going.”

The most recent revelation reveals spy hackers going after F-35 fighter secrets, says the WSJ:

Computer spies have broken into the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project — the Defense Department’s costliest weapons program ever — according to current and former government officials familiar with the attacks.

Similar incidents have also breached the Air Force’s air-traffic-control system in recent months, these people say. In the case of the fighter-jet program, the intruders were able to copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems, officials say, potentially making it easier to defend against the craft.

The latest intrusions provide new evidence that a battle is heating up between the U.S. and potential adversaries over the data networks that tie the world together.

Someone is after us, big time.  So what are the Dems doing?   Attacking Bushl  Natch.

Obama stepped up the campaign against foreign spies the Bush admin this week by releasing memos detailing torture harsh but fitting interrogation techniques, which is sure to offend the Spanish, who, BTW, have never gotten around to ratifying the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and the UN Committee Against Torture.  It certainly has incensed the Dems:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, wrote Mr. Obama asking him not to rule out prosecutions until her panel completed an investigation over the next six to eight months. (NYT)

Meanwhile, Obama did one of his classic “go talk to the people you just screwed” stints, reminiscent of his chat with USS Cole families, to the CIA, telling them to ignore the folks from his admin who are intent on knocking the agency down, and reassuring them that they’re all his good friends in Obama Happy Land. All the while, the president’s staff was refusing to rule out legal sanctions against the lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the interrogation methods.

And to ice this particularly untasty cake, we learned from Dick Cheney last night that memos exist detailing in explicit detail the intelligence gained from the interrogations – memos that so far the Obama admin has refused to release, despite the president’s CIA-directed hyperbole:

“Don’t be discouraged by what’s happened in the last few weeks,” he told employees. “Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn. But the fact that we are willing to acknowledge them and then move forward, that is precisely why I am proud to be president of the United States and that’s why you should be proud to be members of the C.I.A.” (NYT)

The NYT buried the Cheney demands deep in its story, after detailing all the yahoos that want to get their  hands on the Bushies.

If the president didn’t want them to be discouraged, if he’s really interested in learning from the past, if he wants to acknowledge history, he will give us history, not just one side of it.

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W

atch this two-minute clip – even if you have to hunker down in your cubicle with the volume turned down as your boss lurks nearby.  The premise is simple:  The Marines welcome Bush/the Marines welcome Obama; the Marines say goodbye to Bush/the Marines say goodbye to Obama. 

God bless the Marines – they just don’t mask their feelings about their Commander in Chief well at all.

A big hat-tip to Infidels are Cool for this one, especially since Infidelesto grabbed this freeze-frame from the video that pretty much says it all:

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The Mullah’s Superbowl

I

started reading a new book today, Prayers for the Assassin by Robert Ferrigno (Kindle edition here), and was struck by the timing. Here’s how it starts:

The second half of the Super Bowl began right after midday prayers. The fans in Khomeini Stadium had performed their ablutions by rote, awkwardly prostrating themselves, heels splayed, foreheads not even touching the ground. …

Music blared as the cheerleaders strutted down the sidelines – all men, of course – knees high, swords flashing overhead. the Bedouins and the Warlords surged onto the field, and the crowd leaped up, cheering.

Interesting premise, eh? I’m about four chapters in (reading on the eliptical), and it’s off to a good start.  Here’s the article that tipped me off to the book, which I found today via What Bubba Knows. Continue Reading »

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The Greens Go Very, Very Red

I

just logged onto Terra Daily, a Greenie/Warmie hysteria site that books itself as “Earth News, Earth Science, Energy Technology, Environment News.” I often look at Terra while writing Sunday Scan because it’s so amazingly gloomy – all about environmental disasters and (related, they claim)  higher CO2. But today it reads like the People’s Daily. Have the Chinese bought the environmental movement lock, stock and barrel?

The lead story, China says Somali mission signals no change in military policy, is a statement from the Chinese military saying, in effect, “Don’t worry just because we have ships engaged off the coast of Somalia. We’re still just a passive little defensive navy.”  And this has what, exactly, to do with the environment?

The second lead is China pledges more support for impoverished Malawi, noting that last year Malawi switched its backing from Taipei to Beijing. The green connection seems to be missing here.  That’s followed by, under the heading “Farm News,” China couple first to take milk pay-out: State media, and under “Sino Daily,” China awash with fake 100 yuan notes. Again, does anyone see green here instead of red?

There are two more stories out of China before we finally get to the typical Terra Daily fare of surging CO2 levels and death tolls from floods (nothing to be seen about the various deep cold snaps, though).  Nothing on the site explains this transformation since I last looked at it last Sunday. It’s all presented totally matter of factly, as this news is the news that appeals to the Gaian deep greeners.

Maybe it does.  Maybe they’re finally letting their true colors show.  Or possibly, Terra Daily was flailing, unable to find enough readers to keep the owners in their metro-yuppie-hipness, so they sold out to the Chinese.  If so, it’s very heavy-handed, which is what we’d expect.  And if so, it won’t stop with little ol’ Terra Daily.  From sea to shining sea, major newspapers are looking for buyers.

Continue Reading »

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E

arlier in the week, I heard that Pres. Bush’s approval rating had climbed to 34 percent from the previous ratings in the low-20s, and thought how kind America is to think a bit better of the man as he prepares to leave office. Here’s the lead of the news item, as it appeared on the CBS Political Hotsheet blog on the 14th:

President Bush’s approval rating is rising as his presidency draws to a close, a new Gallup poll finds, and now stands at 34 percent. Sixty-one percent now disapprove of his performance.

But this morning, on CBS’ The Bush Legacy page, we see this:

President Bush will leave office as one of the most unpopular departing presidents in history, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll showing Mr. Bush’s final approval rating at 22 percent. Seventy-three percent say they disapprove of the way Mr. Bush has handled his job as president over the last eight years.

For those who went to schools funded by the federal government, that’s a 12 point drop in popularity and a 12 point increase in unpopularity.  And for those who went to the Pollyanna Institute of Higher Learning, no,  the second CBS story does not make a reference to the earlier, more favorable story.

Here’s the Gallup question that generated 34 percent support:

Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?

And here’s the CBS/NYT question:

Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush has handled his job as President over the last eight years?

The only difference between the two is temporal, with Gallop asking generally how they approve, and CBS/NYT asking over an eight-year scope.  That will result in some difference in polling – I expect it could be as much as a two point swing – but it won’t explain a 12-point swing.  Gallup asked its questions between the 9th and the 11th, and CBS/NBC asked between the 11th and the 15th, so the only difference there is that the CBS/NBC folks may have heard Bush’s farewell address, which should have pushed his numbers up, not down.

The only way to explain such a difference in just three days is the methodology.  Gallup’s results are based on telephone interviews with 1,031 adults nationwide, but does not provide data on the make-up of the pool.  CBS/NYT does:

Total Republicans – 281
Total Democrats – 416
Total Independents – 415

Any questions about deeply ingrained media bias?  Anyone think CBS/NYT, if they wanted to, would have been able to put together a polling sample that more accurately reflected the political make-up of America?

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T

he NY Times just can’t get over it:  A moderate-right administration actually hired “right-thinking Americans” instead of flaming liberals for Justice Dept. posts.  Nothing new here.  Move on by, folks.  But we’ll quote Eric Lichtblau’s contribution to journalistic excellence alley-mugging nonetheless:

WASHINGTON — A former senior official at the Justice Department routinely hired Republicans, Federalist Society members and “R.T.A.’s” — “Right-Thinking Americans”— for what were supposed to be nonpolitical posts and gave them plum assignments on civil rights cases, an internal department report released Tuesday found.

Lichblau’s piece exists because the assignments were in civil rights cases and, you know, all conservative Republicans are flaming racists so how much more awful can it get? But wait!  There’s nothing here about racism.  Lichblau’s report quotes what the report says of the target of the investigation, Bradley Schlozman, who you see there, appropriately, on the right:

… he talked about reshaping the political makeup of the Civil Rights Division and doing away with “pinko” and “crazy lib” lawyers and others he did not consider “real Americans.” In one e-mail message regarding a pool of job applicants, he wrote that “as long as I’m here, adherents of Mao’s Little Red Book need not apply.”

I don’t know about you, but Schlozman is my hero.

Here’s a challenge to Lichblau:  Come back in six months (if the NYT is still around), take a look at the Obama Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Division and try to prove to us that it’s not full of left-thinking Americans.  It will be, as it should be – that’s the president’s prerogative.  But Lichblau will never, ever write that story.

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T

his morning, I heard a bunch of BBC’s radio worldwide service anchors telling the world what’s ahead in 2009 that will make them happy. What a bunch of blithering idiots.

One guy said that the economic downturn, while it will hurt some people, will allow him to be happier in 2009 than 2008 because the smokestacks of crippled, economically ravaged industry won’t be spewing out as much carbon. If there was ever a guy I’d like to see laid off because of the downturn, it’s him.

If you need more evidence that many supporters of anthropogenic global warming cling to their beliefs because they are anti-industrial, just play back the tape on this guy.  He’s a new Pol Pot, wanting to primitivize the world.  If he has his way, killing fields will follow, but he’ll never feel a whit of guilt, just as the left feels no guilt about Cambodia, because the dead will have died not of rising oceans and global temperatures, but from bad water, malaria, floods and landslides that could have easily been solved if money had been spent more intelligently than on dubious efforts to “stop global warming.”

Another anchor also cued off the economic downturn, saying he’ll be happy because there will be less hubris in 2009. He focused on Burj Dubai, the soon-to-be world’s tallest building, now nearing completion in Dubai, predicting that no one will move into it since hubris will be gone, and it will become nothing more than a roost for desert birds of prey.

We’ll see about that, shan’t we? (Note the BCC inflection?) BBC itself said of the Burj:

When finished, the skyscraper will have more than 160 floors, 56 elevators, apartments, shops, swimming pools, spas, corporate suites, Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani’s first hotel, and an observation platform on the 124th floor.

That’s a lot to be unoccupied – a whole lot of hubris leaving the planet.  He might have focused on the Burj, but I think his real thoughts were on America, because our hard-earned greatness and the self confidence that results is viewed by many less fortunates as hubris.  He probably particularly saw Pres. Bush’s’ foreign policy as an example of too much hubris. I disagree, but I can understand why he’d feel that way; I certainly see the multiple military fiascoes Britain suffered at the end of its empire period as the result of too much hubris.

He might also be down on hubris because he holds the liberal view that advancement and achievement are wrong.  After all, the other thing that made him feel that he’ll be happier in 2009 is that more people will be growing their own vegetables and fruits.  But they’re returning to the old ways not to reject hubris, but because the economy sucks.  Those factories that won’t be spewing as much carbon won’t be supporting as many workers, so the return to gardening is just another jolly return to pre-industrialization.  Oh, happy liberal!

A third also teed off Bush, saying 2009 will make him happier because it will signal a return to intellectualism, where (paraphrasing) “‘the emphasis will be on many good books, not a Good Book.”  He was too cowardly to say “the Good Book.”  Again, here’s Bush the cowboy Christian yahoo and Obama the intellectual whose Christianity fools no one.

It’s true Obama likes intellectualism; like FDR, Obama is comfortable surrounding himself with academics and Ivy Leaguers, causing one wag to say that if anyone attacks America during the Obama years, they should do it during the Yale-Harvard game, since the entire administration will be at the game.  Of course, the Beeb anchor is blinded by bias, ignoring Bush’s voracious book consumption, his Yale education, and the brilliance of his staff. And don’t get me started on the permanent damage Roosevelt’s brain trust did to America.

So the Beeb blithered. Bloody big surprise there.  But can I do any better?  What will make me happier in 2009?

Incredible Wife and i were talking about this a couple nights back and in our own little world, if we can hold our own and at least keep up with 2008, we’ll be happy.  But I think we’re looking at bigger pictures here, so here’s my answer:  I’ll be happy in 2009 because Bush will be gone.

I don’t hold that view because I’m a Bush-hater; readers of C-SM know I’m not.  Nor do I hold it because of my disappointments in Bush:  His inability to communicate his vision, his failure to clamp down on spending, his creation of a troubling new pharmaceutical entitlement.

No, I’ll be happy that Bush is gone because from 2009 on, the world will have to evaluate performance without the misperceptions, misreporting, hate and bias that colored so many lenses from 2000 to 2008.  We’re back to “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more,” but in a much more critical and important era.  Pres. Obama’s performance will quickly become his, and he will rise and fall without the false taint that hampered Pres. Bush.

I hope he does well, that he moderates his leftist views and does good things for our country, the economy and the world.  If so, we’ll be able to see it as such because he is starting his administration remarkably free of dark marks.  If he does not, if he takes us down a dark road toward continued economic downturn and increasing acceptance of socialist democratic principles, we will be able to see it as such.

So we have in 2009, at long last, clear lenses.  I won’t miss Bush-bashing one iota, and I look forward to the world having to grapple with Obama the man instead of Obama the image.

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W

ith less than three weeks to go in the Bush presidency, AP has finally let ‘er rip, running a blushingly positive portrait of our president, Bush’s Personality Shapes His Legacy by AP White House correspondent Ben Feller.

Feller presents a portrait of a very intelligent president who probes for answers, loves efficiency, reads voraciously (US and world history), and understands and appreciates honor.  Bush’s malapropisms are curtly dismissed with just a paragraph so more time can be given to more significant parts of his character – athleticism, commitment, love of his family, casual likability.

This is the Bush all of us who respect the president have known all along.  If Feller and his compatriots had been writing from this foundation since 2000, the rest of the world would know it as well. So Feller and his press corps bedfellows are not very good fellows at all, are they?

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