7/02/2004
Janus, the New Patron Saint of the Media
What really gets me about the media fixation on Abu Ghraib is their ridiculous double standard when it comes to the behavior of the terrorists. The terrorists hack off Nick Berg's head and put it TV for the world to see. No Geneva convention complaints.
They hold Spc. Matt Maupin prisoner for almost 3 months, don't give the Red Cross/Red Crescent any access, and now have probably shot him and buried him in an unmarked grave. Again, no media outrage, no complaints that the terrorists aren't adhereing to the Geneva convention.
Terrorist bombs kill and maim scores of Iraqi civilians. No matter, just terrorists doing what they do. Back to those pictures of Lyndie English grinning like an idiot at a pile of naked Iraqis. A bunch of Palestinians gun down an alleged 'collaborator' in the street after interogating him for a couple of days. Gee, why aren't the press inquiring as to where their interogation methods were all nice and touchy-feely? No, the press prefers to blame it on Israel.
The press on the Iraq issue is like the little kid trying desparately to avoid hearing what reality is telling them: they've got their eyes closed, hands over their ears, running around yelling "LALALALALALA-NO WMD!!!LALALALALA-NO AL-QUAEDA!!!!!LALALALALA-ABU GHRAIB!!!!!!!!"
God somebody needs to smack those idiots.
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Why Is the Rest of the Media Ignoring This?
The story below-"Zarqawi targets female soldiers " has thus far only shown up in the Washington Times.
Seaches on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN for "female soldiers" & zarqawi only turned up links to the Times story and commentary on the freerepublic.com site. (Interestingly, similar searches for '"female soldiers" & iraq' turn up a bunch of link about sexual assaults by our own troops. Also turns up a FoxNews story from last month that al-Sadr told his followers they could keep any female soldiers they captured as slaves.)
Are they loathe to show Zarqawi for the disgusting animal that he is? Are they afraid that stories like this would undermine public support for one of their pet social engineering projects? Something is seriously wrong over in Big Media Land. The story has all sorts of stuff that should sell- war, evil terrorists, threats, damsels in distress. Maybe that last bit isn't "progressive" enough for them.
Also, the combination of the lack of coverage of this story, combined with the large number of stories about sexual assaults by our own troops, to me, shows the Big Media's hostility to the military. They see it as a male-dominated gang of knuckledragging mysogynist neanderthals one step removed from the trailer park who are badly in need of re-education. Oh, and they share Michael Moore's view of the terrorists as heroic 'freedom fighters' and don't want to sully that image by showing the great unwashed masses the truly disgusting nature of the animals that we're fighting.
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7/01/2004
Zarqawi targets female soldiers
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Terrorists in the Abu Musab Zarqawi network in Iraq are specifically trying to kidnap an American female service member to further horrify the U.S. public.
Two senior defense sources said the word is being passed within the network on the importance of taking one or more women hostage.
"We have heard through intelligence channels that several extremist organizations are attempting to capture coalition servicemen and women," said a senior military officer in Iraq. "We have instituted additional force protection methods to thwart these attempts."
Another defense source said there is an "edict, either on paper or as an order," within terrorist networks to capture an American female service member.
I'm not sure if this is just another manifestation of the mysogynistic nature of Islamism, or if al-Zarqawi doesn't understand the American psyche, especially that of our military, or if the guy really has a death wish.
Zarqawi obviously thinks that capturing then raping/torturing/beheading a female American soldier is going to make us run away in horror. Guess again, shithead. It's not going to make us run away, except for the perpetual panties-in-a-wad folks who want to run away already anyway. It's going to piss us off. And I know it's chauvinistic and not very "progressive" and all, but American male soldiers are quite protective of the females. You heard about the 1st Armored Division troops who fought al-Sadr's militia for 6 hours to keep them for capturing a wrecked Humvee? That's nothing. Try to take one of their female comrades. Just try. None of your men will survive to the relative comforts of Abu Ghraib.
And on another note: I'm a U.S. Army Infantry officer. My wife is a civil affairs specialist in the Army Reserves. She's not over there right now, but she might be at some point in the future. Civil affairs troops are among the most exposed troops in Iraq. So I take this as a personnal threat against my wife. It was business before. But you just made it personal, asshole.
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At Least Mugabe Is Honest About It
A few weeks back, I posted a story on Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe's plan for the government to seize ownership of all farmland in his country. Well, now King County, Washington has a plan, proposed by county Executive (and Democrat gubernatorial candidate) Ron Sims that would do much the same thing to rural land in King County. I found the story first on FoxNews.com
KING COUNTY, Wash. - Residents of King County, Wash., will only be able to build on 10 percent of their land, according to a new law being considered by the county government, which, if enacted, will be the most restrictive land use law in the nation.
Known as the 65-10 Rule, it calls for landowners to set aside 65 percent of their property and keep it in its natural, vegetative state. According to the rule, nothing can be built on this land, and if a tree is cut down, for example, it must be replanted. Building anything is out of the question.
Most of the residents who will be directly affected by the regulations - those who own property in the rural areas of the country - are fuming. They see the new regulations as a land grab and a violation of their property rights.
"My take is it's stealing - out and out stealing," said county resident Marshall Brenden. "They're taking 65 percent of your land that you fought for years to pay for, paid mortgages on and now you can't use it."
Of course, Sims and his fellow travellers on the county commission don't call it seizing the land. They call it environmental preservation. And they would allow current landowners to retain ownership of the land, at least in a legal (and tax obligation) sense. They just wouldn't be able to use most of it.
supporters and environmentalists say personal property rights do not trump the rights of a larger community to save the eco-system.
"We're trying to keep the rural area a place that isn't just McMansions and ball courts, but instead has those natural processes," said Tim Trohimovich of the group 1000 Friends of Washington
"Personal property rights do not trump the rights of a larger community"
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
Sounds like Sims et al are right in tune with their hive queen, Hillary.
Now, here an idea for Mr. Trohimovich. If your group think these undeveloped spaces are so important, why don't you collect donations from your members and buy the land yourselves? Then you could leave it in it's natural state, just like you want. Of course, if you owned it, you'd have to pay the property taxes on it, which requires money. Which requires so way to generate that money. Now, how you generate that money is up to you. But building and selling houses is a good way.
Alternately, the county could do as this editorial suggests and buy the land itself. Of course, this would cost a lot of money (which the county doesn't have.) Plus, once the land becomes government-owned, it is not longer taxable. Which means the county's income becomes even more constrained.
This rule is yet another example of two things: first, that environmentalists are like watermelons-green on the outside, but communist red on the inside. And second, that communism/socialism is theft. The environmentalists, by attempting to deny landowners their right to use their property as they see fit, are trying to get government to steal those people's land and hiding it behind "the common good" because having the government do it doesn't cost them anything.
Selfish, cowardly thieves, with no respect for individual rights. That's all these people are.
ALMOST FORGOT: For those who don't live in the state of Washington, the county seat of King County is Seattle. That explains a lot about this story.
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6/30/2004
ProtestWarrior.com Does the Today Show
I wonder if the talking heads even noticed?
Debriefing here.
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It Really Is World War IV
An excellent post yesterday by Mrs. Du Toit that actually comes out of the comment's section of her husband Kim's blog. It includes a laundry list of troubles around the world, all of them occurring where Islam bumps up against the rest of the world, including Muslim insurgencies in 25 different countries.
We keep being told by those on the Left and their allies in Big Media that Islam is the "religion of peace." If that's true, why do Muslims have such a nasty habit of getting violent when they bump up against non-Muslims? And why are the loudest voices we hear from Muslim religious leaders those of ones calling for "death to the infidels?" Why are there almost no voices condemning the disgusting acts of the Islamist terrorists? Why do the supposedly peace-loving Muslim masses not throw out their violent outcasts?
If the modern world didn't run on oil, and if there weren't huge amounts of oil under the sands of the Middle East, Islam would not be a threat. The Arabs would be just a bunch of backward camel-humping goatherders wandering around the desert with towels on their heads. But the money that comes from the oil has made them a threat to the rest of the world-to pagans in Africa, to Christians in the Philipines, to Hindus in India, to godless Communists in China, and to the Christians of Europe and the Americas.
I can see only three possible outcomes from this war-and it is a war. Stop kidding yourselves. The worst possible outcome is that they win, establish a worldwide Caliphate based on the Islamist vision, plunging the world into a new Dark Ages. The second, and most desirable, is that the "silent majority" of Muslims that we keep hearing exists finally bow up and give the fanatics the thrashing they deserve, and bring the Islamic world into the modern era. And the third possibility is that we are forced to crush the Islamic world.
If the masses of Islam are unable to take control, it becomes a clash of civilizations and a war for the very survival of our way of life. I don't know about you, but if it comes down to us or them, I chose us.
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6/29/2004
Potential Danger from Yesterday's Canadian Elections, Eh.
From Eli Lehrer in today's NRO:
The NDP [who are likely to be the partners of choice of the Liberal Party for a coalition government] is dead set on taking away Canadians' guns and even reducing gun freedoms in the U.S. "We're proposing going across the border to the U.S. and actively engaging in lobbying to have gun-control laws in the U.S. strengthened," NDP leader Jack Layton explained at a May campaign rally...
...
...this plan is ironic, since more crime probably flows from Canada to the U.S. than vice versa: The nation has an overall crime rate half again higher than the United States'. Toronto, once the safest large city in North America, now has more muggings, car thefts, and violent assaults per capita than New York City. All of Canada's major provinces would rank among the 20 most dangerous American states. Since American crime rates peaked in the early 1990s, crime has fallen in 48 American states and over 80 percent of America's major cities. Meanwhile, it has risen in six of Canada's ten major providences and seven of its ten largest cities. The reasons for this divide are complex, but it's notable that the United States imprisons wrongdoers at about five times Canada's rate and has about a quarter more police on a per-capita basis. Canada, meanwhile, can boast only of a national gun-registration database that cost 1,000 times more than originally projected.
...
Gun control has failed in Canada and everywhere else governments have tried to impose it. Canadians have reasonable concerns about crime, but their next government's likely gun-control plans won't help things.
And here I thought the presence of multiple parties, as found in parliamentary systems, was supposed to lead to more centrist governance. But up the the Great White North, they're getting pulled further to the loony-left. Apparently the Canucks are having problems with violent crime, much of which involves guns, so of course they blame it on guns coming from the U.S.. Nevermind the fact that I'm reasonably sure a licensed gun dealer isn't allowed to sell guns to anyone with a Canadian address without a huge amount of paperwork.
Like I'm going to listen to a bunch of twonks who were to chicken to join the Revolution lecture about gun control. They can lecture me on gun control if I can lecture them on the finer points of the buttstroke to the head.
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The Iraq War Was Planned Before 9/11!
According to eminent British military historian John Keegan. From his new book The Iraq War, excerpted in NRO:
The plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom began to be drawn up as early as 1995, when Saddam's combination of deviousness and intransigence persuaded Washington that it might not be possible to avoid a military confrontation if his determination to develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction were to be quashed.
That danged President Clinton! Always planning imperialist wars to enrich his friends in the oil industry!
On a side note: this is merely an incident of military planners doing what military planners do: making plans for potential conflicts. Somewhere in some dusty archives in the Pentagon are plans to invade Mexico, updated at least as recently as 1940 or 1941. Probably plans to invade Panama is the Panamanians decide not to let the Navy use the canal. Plans from the Cold War to invade Cuba, though those might be kept up to date. It's what military officers get paid to do during peacetime-plan for wars, even ones that most likely won't happen.
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Contemporary American Liberalism, Distilled
From SFGate Via Andrew Sullivan:
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." -Sen. Hillary Clinton, speaking at a Donk fundraiser in San Francisco.
Think she compared notes with the young Kerry fundraiser who told James Lileks "Well, why is it your money? I think it should be their money." Via Instapundit.
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I Think Andrew Sullivan is Losing It...
Andrew Sullivan is an excellent writer and commentator. He's the first blogger I ever read. And I applaud him for doing everything he's been able to do while dealing with HIV. But I have come to believe that his homosexuality, especially his personal interest in homosexual marraige, has caused him to lose pretty much all sense of objectivity when it comes to dealing with Christianity and the Christian religion, at least those parts of it that still believe that the Bible means what it says.
On his blog today, Sullivan compares Michael Moore's F911 to Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, saying that F911 is for the "unthinking hordes of the far left" just as Passion is for the "unthinking hordes of the far right." Andrew, what exactly is it about The Passion that makes it "far right?" I haven't seen the movie, but I really can't see how there's anything polical about it. I've read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and I don't remember any political messages in Christ's death. And does this mean that Pope John Paul II, whose review of the movie stated, "It is as it was," is a member of the "unthinking hordes of the far right?"
I think Sullivan's problem is that he can't stand the fact that the Church still holds the position that it has held for almost two millenia (longer if you continue the line of the Church before the coming of Christ back through the Old Testament,) that homosexual acts are mortal sins, and therefore will not accept and condone his lifestyle, and he feels that they hate him and all homosexuals. Andrew, I say this as a Christian of the Lutheran persuasion, the Christians, even the Evangelical and Catholic ones, don't hate homosexuals. Nobody hates you for having homosexual feelings. Nobody hates you for having committed homosexual acts. But when you insist on forgiveness and acceptance without repentance, you're going to have a problem. And repentance means that you understand the wrongness of what you have done, are truly sorry, and intend not to do it again.
As a libertarian, I believe in your freedom to do whatever you want with your genitals and your life. But that doesn't mean I have to believe that it's morally right. And I don't think it makes me a bad person, or even part of your despised "far right."
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Powerful Stuff
Brian Scott has a great post on abortion, God, and the nature of life, interspersed with some amazing pictures done with new ultrasound imaging technology. The pictures pretty much say it all about why the promoters of death abortionists pro-choice people don't like this technology.
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6/28/2004
Marine Letter to the Terrorists
Blackfive has posted a letter from a Marine veteran of the 3/4 Marines to the terrorists in Iraq. Just about says it all.
To the terrorists currently operating in Iraq,
I see that you have captured a U. S. Marine, and that you plan to cut off his head if your demands are not met. Big mistake. Before you carry out your threat I suggest you read up on Marine Corps history. The Japanese tried the same thing on Makin Island and in a few other places during World War Two, and came to regret it. Go ahead and read about what then happened to the mighty Imperial Army on Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. They paid full price for what they did, and you will too.
You look at America and you see a soft target, and to a large extent you are right. Our country is filled with a lot of spoiled people who drive BMWs, sip decaf lattes and watch ridiculous reality TV shows. They are for the most part decent, hard working citizens, but they are soft. When you cut off Nick Berg's head those people gasped, and you got the media coverage you sought, and then those people went back to their lives. This time it is different. We also have a warrior culture in this country, and they are called Marines. It is a brotherhood forged in the fire of many wars, and the bond between us is stronger than blood. While it is true that this country has produced nitwits like Michael Moore, Howard Dean and Jane Fonda who can be easily manipulated by your gruesome tactics, we have also produced men like Jason Dunham, Brian Chontosh and Joseph Perez. If you don't recognize those names you should. They are all Marines who distinguished themselves fighting to liberate Iraq, and there will be many more just like them coming for you.
Before the current politically correct climate enveloped our culture one of the recruiting slogans of our band of brothers was "The Marine Corps Builds Men." You will soon find out just how true that is. You, on the other hand, are nothing but a bunch of women. If you were men you would show your faces, and take us on in a fair fight. Instead, you are cowards who hide behind masks and decapitate helpless victims. If you truly represented the interest of the Iraqi people you would not be ambushing those who come to your country to repair your power plants, or sabotage the oil pipelines which fuel the Iraqi economy. Your agenda is hate, plain and simple.
When you raise that sword over your head I want you to remember one thing. Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun is not alone as he kneels before you. Every Marine who has ever worn the uniform is there with him, and when you strike him you are striking all of us. If you think the Marines were tough on you when they were cleaning out Fallujah a few weeks ago you haven't seen anything yet. If you want to know what it feels like to have the Wrath of God called down upon you then go ahead and do it. We are not Turkish truck drivers, or Pakistani laborers, or independent contractors hoping to find work in your country. We are the United States Marines, and we will be coming for you.
Thanks,
David C.
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Iraqi Terrorists Appear to Have a Death Wish
Of course, we all know that nothing will make them happier than an appointment with the 72 Virgins Dating Service, but I didn't think they were this eager. Guess being a soldier of Jihidistan doesn't pull in the chicks like it used to.
Terrorists Threaten to Behead Marine
So...to review the bidding: Last week, they beheaded an American civilian in Saudi Arabia, and a South Korean aid worker in Iraq. Apparently, the reaction in the RoK has been a good bit stiffer spined that is being generally reported here-with many urging the government to send combat troops instead of just medics and engineers. Combat troops from an army that's been staring down a massive army commanded by madmen for 50 years. Troops who were among those most feared by the VC.
Then they kidnapped three Turks and have threatened to behead them. I know the Turkish Army isn't up to par with American troops, but they know how to fight, and I'm sure Turkey won't look too kindly on the killing of it's citizens. These morons seem to be banking on the Turks being as noodle-spined as the Spanish. I don't see it happening.
And now they've grabbed a Marine. And a Lebanese-American Muslim one at that. Now, having read the story a couple of times now, there's a few things that don't seem quite right to me. Like how exactly did the "infiltrate a Marine outpost" and lure the guy outside? But whatever is going on there, if they kill him, the Marines are going to be pissed. And they're not going to take "back off and let the Iraqis handle the problem" for an answer. Whatever city these cowardly shitbags are hiding in will be surrounded, then gone through room-by-room until every last one is dead. And I say good job.
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Oh, That Attempt to Buy Uranium from Niger...
Intelligence backs claim Iraq tried to buy uranium
Don't hold your breath waiting for the U.S. media to pick up this story.
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The Best Anti-Terror Force: Us Pt II
Cyber sleuths patrol the Web for signs of terrorism
Turns out the info that snagged SPC Ryan Anderson of the Washington National Guard, who is about to be court martialed for attempting to give info on U.S. military equipment to Islamist terrorists was gathered by a group of citizens acting on their own.
The group's website: 7-Seas.
America's best defense is an alert, informed, and connected citizenry. (Adding armed to that list helps too.) If any of my net-savy readers want to help out, there's a place where you can.
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