Category: Enemies: Foreign and Domestic

If Only Patriots Could Vote

Kerry says Republicans questioned his patriotism because they challenged his Senate record on defense issues. He then seems to question Dick Cheney’s patriotism because Cheney didn’t serve in Vietnam. Mmm…

Let’s restrict voting to patriots. And let’s define patriots as those who have served as members of the armed forces of the United States in wartime. No, let’s say that a patriot is someone who has seen combat with the enemy while serving as a member of the armed forces of the United States.

I wonder how badly Kerry would lose.

Kerry needs all the non-patriot votes he can get. And I’ll bet he won’t reject any of them.

Never Relent

President Bush said it in his acceptance speech, on September 2, 2004:

…I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country. I will never relent in defending America — whatever it takes….

And I said it here, on April 2, 2004:

Our thoughts for the next several hours [following the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001] were with our daughter, whom we knew was at work in the adjacent World Financial Center when the planes struck. Was her office struck by debris? Did she flee her building only to be struck by or trapped in debris? Was she smothered in the huge cloud of dust? Because telephone communications were badly disrupted, we didn’t learn for several hours that she had made it home safely.

Thousands of grandparents, parents, husbands, wives, children, grandchildren, lovers, and good friends — the survivors of the 3,000 who died that day in Manhattan, the Pentagon, and western Pennsylvania — did not share our good fortune. Never forgive, never forget, never relent.

That’s why George W. Bush should be re-elected. He will never relent. He understands that we are at war. And he will wage war, by many means and in many places.

Iran, Praying to Allah for a Kerry Win?

“Watchdog: Iran Plans to Process Uranium.” Dumb, dumb, dumb. The only question is who bombs first, Israel or U.S.

Psychoanalyzing Peace Protesters

NYTimes.com headline: “Hundreds Are Arrested as Protests Escalate”

Scene: A psychiatrist’s office in Manhattan

Patient: Please tell me, Dr. Spielvogel, why do I become so violent when I protest for peace?

Shrink: Vy not? Unlike zose against whom you protest, you haff no responsibility for defending ze nation. You are venting your feelings of powerlessness.

Patient: But vy — why — do I become violent when I vent?

Shrink: Vell, ven you vere an adolescent, and you rebelled against your parents, you had to do it by nonviolent means because you depended on zem for your bed and board.

Patient: So, you think I’m really acting out my adolescent rebellion against my parents?

Shrink: Vell, zince you are only capable of shouting mindless slogans — ven you aren’t doing zomesing violent — it is clear to me zat you haven’t advanced beyond adolescence. In fact, I sink you have regressed into childhood.

Patient: I’m not going to take this lying down.

Shrink: Lying down, zitting up, makes no difference to me. Zat will be $200. And no protesting or I’ll cut off your prescription of Thorazine. Next patient…

Al Franken — leftwing nutjob, alleged comedian, and front man for Error America — sharing his wit and wisdom with a political opponent, at the Republican National Convention.

This Is a Test

Here we have Iran, warning of a preemptive strike on U.S. forces in Iraq. According to the linked news story, Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani warns that Iran might launch a preemptive strike against U.S. forces in Iraq to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. Shamkhani also makes the usual belligerent statements about Israel.

Here’s the first question. Suppose we have good intelligence and warnings that Iran is about to launch a preemptive strike, either against U.S. forces or Israel. Should we preempt Iran’s preemption? I say yes. Why should we wait to be attacked? Where’s the sense in that? If someone is going to die, it should be our enemies, not Americans or our friends in Israel.

Now, let’s make it harder. What about attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities if we have good intelligence that those facilities are in fact ready to produce nuclear weapons. Again, I say yes. Iran is clearly belligerent to the U.S. and Israel. Why wait until Iran can produce weapons that might be used against U.S. forces or Israel? I say it again: If someone is going to die, it should be our enemies, not our Americans or our friends in Israel.

What’s so hard about that?

How True

I ran across an extinct anti-war blog where this is splashed below the title:

“War is a judgment that overtakes societies when they have been living upon ideas that conflict too violently with the laws governing the universe.” – Dorothy L. Sayers

And I thought, “How true.” The war being waged upon America and the West by Islamo-fascists overtook us because we had ignored for too long this “law”: Militant Islam is a implacable enemy of Western civilization. Militant Islam will not be bought off, mollified, or contained. It can only be crushed.

He Must Be a Manhattan "Intellectual"

Art Spiegelman, creator of something called Maus, for which he apparently won a Pulitzer, has now created something called In the Shadow of No Towers, which The New York Times calls his “artistic response to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as an expression of his deep opposition to the war in Iraq.” The following quotations are from interviews conducted at his Lower Manhattan studio, as well as by telephone and e-mail.

Spiegelman recalls the morning of September 11, 2001:

My wife…and I had just walked out our door when we saw that first plane crash into the tower about 10 blocks south of us. We ran down to find our daughter, Nadja, a freshman at Stuyvesant High School, and got her out of the school just before the north tower collapsed right behind us. Then we made our way to the U.N. School to scoop up 10-year-old Dash. I was willing to live through the disaster wherever it took me, as long as we were all together as a family unit.

Then he comments on Mikail Moore’s Fahrenheit 911:

I sure admire his ability to make effective arguments that can be understood outside the rarefied circles of one’s already-convinced friends. His sympathy for that woman who becomes the star of the second half of the film [whose soldier son was killed in Iraq] is, to me, so admirable. I was just so impatient with her. It allowed him to express more clearly than I the class-war aspects of this and how to talk to people who are acting against their own best interests.

Class war? Is he talking about Saddam and all those palaces from which he was evicted? Is he talking about the Iraqis who were impoverished by Saddam’s rapaciousness and control of Iraq’s oil? What class war does he have in mind? Perhaps he’s referring to all those American draftees who were marched off to Iraq at gunpoint.

He doesn’t talk about the innocents who were slaughtered on September 11, 2001. He doesn’t talk about the cretins who flew the planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, or about Osama bin Laden, or about terrorism in general. It’s all about him. It’s all about his hatred of the war in Iraq. But he’s going to make some money off September 11, by selling copies of his thing to like-minded Manhattan jerks.

In the "So What?" Department

The New Republic reveals a nefarious plot :

PAKISTAN FOR BUSH.
July Surprise?
by John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman & Massoud Ansari

Post date 07.29.04 | Issue date 07.19.04

[Editor’s Note: This afternoon, Pakistan’s interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayyat, announced that Pakistani forces had captured Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian Al Qaeda operative wanted in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The timing of this announcement should be of particular interest to readers of The New Republic. Earlier this month, John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman, and Massoud Ansari broke the story of how the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistani officials to apprehend high-value targets (HVTs) in time for the November elections–and in particular, to coincide with the Democratic National Convention. Although the capture took place in central Pakistan “a few days back,” the announcement came just hours before John Kerry will give his acceptance speech in Boston.]

Why not now? It’s better than next year.

Enough, Already

To Bonnie Raitt, Joan Baez, Linda Ronstadt, John Fogerty, Willie Nelson, and Whoopi Goldberg, and Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins, and Sean Penn…

…and to all the other trendy singers and actors who think Bush is evil and America has taken the wrong path, I say this:

Shut up and do what made you rich. Just don’t try to think profound thoughts, you’re not up to it.

What We’re Fighting

The nation wasn’t unified against the enemy by 9/11 in the same way as it was by Pearl Harbor. Many Americans are still in denial about the implacability of Islamic fundamentalism. The wishful thinkers among us believe that the enemy will “go away” if we simply stop provoking it in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. They need to think again:

Iraqi Prime Minister Targeted for Assassination

Zarqawi Purportedly Issued Death Threat in Online Audiotape

By Robert H. Reid

The Associated Press

Wednesday, June 23, 2004; 10:20 AM

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A recording purportedly made by the mastermind of bombings and beheadings in Iraq [said, in part]…”We will carry on our jihad against the Western infidel and the Arab apostate until Islamic rule is back on Earth.”

UNTIL ISLAMIC RULE IS BACK ON EARTH. Do you get it now?

Know Your Enemy

Knowing the enemy is more instructive than “understanding” the enemy (as the bleeding hearts would have us do). Consider this, from BBC News World Edition:

Aid workers die in Afghan ambush

Three foreign and two Afghan aid workers have been killed in an ambush in the north-west of the country, according to police.

The attack occurred in the village of Khair Khana, in Badghis province, 550 km (340 miles) west of Kabul.

The victims were members of international aid organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres [Doctors Without Borders] and were thought to be setting up a clinic in the area.

The former ruling Taleban has said it carried out the attack.

Drunk Driver Appointed Traffic Court Judge

If there was any lingering doubt about the corruptness of the 9/11 Commission, Attorney General John Ashcroft dispelled it yesterday in his testimony before the Commission.

Ashcroft disclosed that Commissioner Jamie Gorelick wrote this, which Ashcroft properly described as “[t]he single greatest structural cause for September 11…the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents.” Ashcroft continued, “Government erected this wall. Government buttressed this wall. And before September 11, government was blinded by this wall.” Specifically,

In the days before September 11, the wall…impeded the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. After the FBI arrested Moussaoui, agents became suspicious of his interest in commercial aircraft and sought approval for a criminal warrant to search his computer. The warrant was rejected because FBI officials feared breaching the wall.

When the CIA finally told the FBI that al-Midhar and al-Hazmi were in the country in late August, agents in New York searched for the suspects. But because of the wall, FBI Headquarters refused to allow criminal investigators who knew the most about the most recent al Qaeda attack to join the hunt for the suspected terrorists.

At that time, a frustrated FBI investigator wrote Headquarters, quote, “Whatever has happened to this — someday someone will die — and wall or not — the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems’. Let’s hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decision then, especially since the biggest threat to us, UBL, is getting the most protection.”

Of course Gorelick didn’t foresee the particular, horrific terrorist acts we call 9/11, just as a drunk driver doesn’t foresee the particular, horrific accident caused by his drunkenness.

If Gorelick’s policy hadn’t become known immediately after 9/11 — and hadn’t been rectified already — Ashcroft’s testimony would have contained the only true “bombshell” to emerge thus far from the 9/11 hearings.

Re-fighting Old Wars

Ted Kennedy thinks Iraq is Bush’s Vietnam. Why can’t it be Bush’s Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, invasion of Grenada, Gulf War, or even the whatchamacallit in the Balkans? None of those wars became a quagmire? Not true.

We were stuck with Cuba and the Philippines for decades after winning the Spanish-American War. We still have troops in Germany almost 60 years after winning World War II, and troops in Korea 50 years after the quagmire — oops — stalemate there. I think we still have a military presence in the Balkans, even after having brought Milosovich to the uncertain tribunal of international justice.

Ted, you should come up with a term more imaginative than “quagmire.” How about “Chappaquiddick”? “Iraq is Bush’s Chappaquiddick” would have the ring of moral authority, wouldn’t it?

The Iraqi Insurgency

The insurgents and al Qaeda are in cahoots, probably with the backing of Syria, Iran, and others. They’re trying to do what bin Laden tried and failed to do with 9/11, namely, demoralize the U.S. and force our withdrawal from the Middle East, to open the way for the ascendancy of Muslim fundamentalism. They won’t succeed as long as Bush is president, but they’re hoping, of course, that U.S. forces will fail to overcome the insurgency (or at least fail to do so quickly or decisively). That would help to ensure the election of Kerry, whom they view as being more likely to cut and run — a view that Kerry’s guru, Ted “Quagmire” Kennedy, has lent considerable credence.

We must, therefore, put down the insurgency and put it down quickly. I think we can and will as long as the worry-warts in Washington don’t put too many constraints on the Marines, which seems unlikely. According to a Marine who’s in Iraq, the president “has given us the green light to do whatever we needed to do to win this thing so we have that going for us.” That’s a quotation from an interesting and balanced e-mail posted by Andrew Sullivan.

So, I think the enemy has, once again, underestimated our strength and resolve. The “second Iraq war” — as some are calling the insurgency — may in the end prove to be the decisive war. We can win it. I expect that we will win it.

The Terrorists’ Election Strategy? Take 3

A few days ago, I suggested that “terrorists might stage a spectacular attack in the U.S. and claim that it’s retribution for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Such a claim would be cynical, of course, but it would probably swing the election to Kerrry.”

Well, it seems to have worked in Spain.

The Terrorists’ Election Strategy? Take 2

The Terrorists’ Election Strategy? Take 2

A few days ago I suggested that terrorists might “[w]ithhold attacks on the U.S. until after November 2, to distract Americans — enough of them anyway — from the war on terror. That would divert attention from Bush’s (rightful) strength as a war leader and toward the economy, where Bush (wrongly) seems to be vulnerable.”

Here’s another possibility: Terrorists might stage a spectacular attack in the U.S. and claim that it’s retribution for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Such a claim would be cynical, of course, but it would probably swing the election to Kerrry.

The Terrorists’ Election Strategy?

Withhold attacks on the U.S. until after November 2, to distract Americans — enough of them anyway — from the war on terror. That would divert attention from Bush’s (rightful) strength as a war leader and toward the economy, where Bush (wrongly) seems to be vulnerable.