Forward Biased

Democrats continue to drag us down

I have nothing against Democrats in general.  What concerns me is the manner in which their party leaders continue to embrace the more radical side of their base, and the damage that is doing to the country.  How's that, you say?  They're in the minority, so what could they possibly be doing to damage the country?

Well, the problem here is they have gone so far down the path of strident obstructionism and Neo-Socialist ideas that they are no longer a viable minority party.  They have utterly failed in their responsibility to provide realistic opposition to the majority party in order to keep them honest.  For example, I want nothing more than to vote against the weaselly Sen. Mike DeW(h)ine (RINO - OH) in the 2006 elections, but the opposition party has gone so far down the path of irrelevance that even with my nose plugged I can't in clear conscience vote for DeWine's Democratic opponent, knowing full well that if elected, job #1 would be to raise my taxes, and job #2 would be to piss away vast amounts of time and money on a George W. Bush Witch Hunt. 

In other words, while the members that sit in the House and Senate Majority Leader seats would change if the Dems win big in 2006, the fiddles would still be playing as Rome burns.

Where to turn?

I've come to the conclusion that our Government is innately corrupt.  I am not referring to the Democrats labeling of the GOP "Culture of Corruption" when I say this - it is patently obvious that it is the entire body politic that is corrupt, and the decay goes far deeper than political affiliation. 

Our Nation was founded on strong principles, based on a detailed Constitution, and balanced with a triumvirate of co-equal branches.  The risks inherent in a pure Democracy were foreseen, and addressed via the implementation of a government comprised of civilian representatives.  Law was intended to be supreme, being blind to social standing and enforced equally across the populace.

Over the years, there has been a constant erosion of these principles, and we are now to the point where our current government is nearly indistinguishable from that which we freed ourselves 200+ years ago.

Obviously, the notion that law would be applied equally to all is facile.  While many, many examples are available, there are two that are in the news these days.  First, I've already commented on the dangers of government not only turning a blind eye on its responsibility of enforcing immigration policy, but actually proposing to reward those that chose to enter this country illegally.  I will now be watching very closely to see if any prosecution is brought to bear on the dishonorable Mary McCarthy, the recently discovered "leaker" of vital national secrets.  Personally, based on the minuscule slap on the wrist received by the equally reprehensible Sandy Berger, I'm not optimistic.  In fact, I fearlessly predict that she will reap millions of dollars making the rounds of the talk shows and from the ubiquitous book deal.

We are quickly devolving from a nation that respects the law, acts accordingly, and punishes those that don't into an anarchy in which laws are selectively applied, or in some cases, not enforced at all.  Unelected government employees, in concert with a left-leaning and ratings-hungry press, are attempting to subvert the policies of our elected officials, and they're getting away with it.  Bitter retired generals are calling for the termination of the Secretary of Defense, foregoing centuries of Constitutional tradition that ensure civilian leadership of the military, in favor of cynically promoting their lucrative book deals.  These same government employees outed an intelligence gathering program that could mean the difference between life and death for thousands of people, and the press teamed with the minority party to applaud their "bravery." 

That latter example is a two-fer.  Not only does it demonstrate the lengths to which self-interested, cowardly career bureaucrats are willing to go to discredit an administration they don't like, it also shows how far we've gone down the path of destroying the balance of the three branches of government.  It is not at all uncommon to hear people going on and on about the illegality of the NSA intelligence gathering operation, apparently speaking from a position of near total ignorance.  Or, maybe I'm wrong.  Either way, I was taught that the Executive Branch was co-equal with the Legislative Branch and the Judicial Branch.  As such, the Executive Branch is imbued with its own rights and responsibilities by the Constitution, and these rights cannot be abrogated by either the Legislative or Judicial branch.  The responsibility for the defense of our country is placed with the Executive Branch, and part of that responsibility by necessity includes the right to gather intelligence on our enemies.  Hyperactive bed-wetters may scream about the erosion of Civil Liberties, but I have yet to hear any proof whatsoever that this program was used for anything but to ensure the security of our populace.

So, where does this leave us?  Well, we have another election this year.  This is our opportunity to vote for the folks we want to represent our interests in Washington.  Or is it?  Do we really have a say anymore?  I contend that we do not.  Forgetting for a moment that the typical candidates from the two major parties can only be defined as "awful" and "more awful," gerrymandering and pandering have brought us to the point where incumbents basically tell us who we can vote for, and not surprisingly, it is nearly always a choice between the incumbent and a candidate that hasn't a chance in hell of winning. 

Our government extorts confiscatory taxes from the minority of the electorate and uses the funds to buy votes from the majority of the electorate. Our Government, which was supposed to provide only for the general welfare and defense of our nation, has now grown into a insatiable leviathan that exists solely to support its own growth.  And the half of the country that directly profits from this inappropriate largesse is just fine with that, and hey, why wouldn't they be?

Well, I feel better having gotten some of the pent-up vitriol out of my system.  Can you tell it's tax season?

Another Useless Prognostication

Being a master at going out on a limb with completely consequence-free predictions, here's another:

Russ Feingold may have learned a painful lesson in timing, but his recent call for censure/impeachment of President Bush is the wave of the future.  I fearlessly predict that the impeachment of Bush's ethically and morally challenged predecessor for blatant perjury (surely just the tip of the iceberg of crimes and misdemeanors when it comes to him) will be the start of a new second term tradition of impeachment proceedings against the President whenever the Congress is led by the opposing party.

Honestly, how can this be anything but a sour grapes temper tantrum (or cynical pander of donations from the Kos crowd)?  Does Feingold really believe that Bush's authorization of wire-tapping calls from known terrorists is cause for censure?  If so, I beg to differ.  Personally, I would get behind impeachment of the President for exactly the opposite, if such were the case.  I'm probably a little to the right of most people on this issue.  "Illegal" wire-taps?  Sorry, I'm afraid I don't care one iota if our current laws have lagged behind the demands of our times.  Frankly, when it comes to rooting out terrorists and protecting our country, I am an advocate of whatever. it. takes.  If our mealy-mouthed, vote-pandering, ineffective and inherently corrupt legislature refuses to address the issues, then more power to the pragmatic leadership of the Executive Branch.  That branch has Constitutional rights and responsibilites that are equal with those of the other two branches.  My message to those two corrupt and lethargic branches: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Feingold has iced the cake that he baked with his co-hort in the McCain-Feingold debacle against Free Speech.  His priorities clearly lie in the court of what's best for Feingold, and the rest of us be damned.  My reaction is predictable: Get bent, Senator.

What media bias?

We've all heard of Cindy Sheehan.  For a while there, if she sneezed, it was reported everywhere you looked.  Maureen Dowd famously claimed that grieving mothers of fallen soldiers have "absolute moral authority" when they protest the war.

So, Maureen, how about Merrilee Carlson—not to mention the many others like her?  Do they also have "absolute moral authority" when they speak out in opposition to everything Sheehan stands for?

Todd Manzi of Townhall.com writes:

A grieving mother of a soldier killed in Iraq wants to voice her opinion. She has a message about the war in Iraq and feels the American people need to hear what she has to say.

Her name is Merrilee Carlson and her story is compelling and newsworthy. Unlike another mother of a fallen soldier, Carlson is not a household name. Her message is exactly opposite of the over-exposed message of the well-known protesting mom.

Regarding the war in Iraq, Carlson says, "We have to take a step back and look at what we have asked our military to do. We have asked them to do a job. It doesn’t matter how we got there. The fact is we are there and we have a job to finish."

Carlson began trying to get her message out last August and September. She didn’t like what was coming out of Crawford and felt the need to correct the record.

In the last couple of weeks the organization that Carlson chairs, Minnesota Families United, has been in the center of a controversy that, by any objective reasoning, should have made national news.

Minnesota Families United teamed with Progress for America Voter Fund and produced two television spots. Minnesota was used as a test market for the spots and PFA made a rather large statewide television buy. The ABC affiliate in the Twin Cities market, KSTP, refused to air the spots.

The decision not to air the first MFU commercial was made by Rob Hubbard, General Manager. His objection was over two lines in the spot:

1) The media only reports the bad news, but American troops are making real progress
2) You would never know it from the news reports, but our enemy in Iraq is Al Qaeda.

Thank goodness for the blogosphere, or you'd never know about this sort of thing.

There's no real question, of course, about just why they're ignoring her.  But I want someone—anyone—from the Legacy Media to tell us why.  Have a little courage.  Speak the truth about why you're ignoring her.

On Thursday, February 16th, the Chair of the Democrat Party in Minnesota called on all TV stations to pull the ad. The top Democrats in Minnesota want to suppress the message of Carlson’s group.

Merrilee Carlson was born and raised a Democrat. She doesn’t like politics and she wants to make it clear that her group is non-political. So, the Democrats in Minnesota are trying to suppress the message from mainstream families who have suffered the loss of their children from the war in Iraq. Why is this not news?

That other mom was a full-time, anti-war protester for more than a year before she came up with the PR stunt to go to Crawford during the president’s vacation. The media accepted the stunt and gave her message enormous coverage. This prompted Carlson to take action for her message. Now Carlson is in the middle of legitimate news and the media is silent.

Have we come to the point where it takes a stunt to make news? Merrilee Carlson is thoughtful, sincere, professional and respectful of those who disagree with her. Not only does she have the exact opposite message from the spectacle in Crawford last summer, she has the exact opposite approach. Regarding the efforts of her group she said, "This isn’t about us. We are not looking to be that public figure; we have stepped out because of the need. This is not about us, it is about our children."

Obviously, the mainstream media is going to do everything they can to avoid Carlson. They are not interested in balancing her view against the anti-war view they have so heavily promoted. We already knew the media was liberally biased. Now it’s apparent they are also biased against ordinary people as well. The foaming-at-the-mouth fanatical fringe gets news coverage and the people who portray the best qualities of us are ignored.

Despite its protestations that it's necessary for this country to function constitutionally, the American Legacy Media has sunk to the level of being a mere tool of the leftist, Democratic point of view.  There's not much difference between them and any other propaganda tool in history.  Many folks want to compare them to the Nazi propaganda machine in the 30s and 40s, but let's not go that far.  Let's just call them what they are:  propagandists.  Propagandists and enemies of freedom.

(Hat tip to Ralph Bristol, and thanks to Greyhawk for the Open Post!)

Here they come, folks

One thing you have to say about American politicians is that they are, by and large, predictable.  They will, with rare exceptions, come after the fruit of free enterprise, namely money, every chance they get, because it is with that that they buy power campaign for votes and swing voters their way.

They will also never tell you their root motivation for doing so, since they would tend to be somewhat less effectual in being re-elected should they not appear to have the best interests of their constituencies at heart.

Up to now, the internet has been mostly exempt from taxation.  But its plump, low-hanging fruit has been too much of a temptation to ignore for long.

Enter Alaska Sen. Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens (R-RINO).

Senators back new broadband taxes

At a Tuesday hearing convened by the Senate Commerce Committee, several senators from largely rural states called for expansion of the Universal Service Fund (USF), a multibillion-dollar pool of money that's currently used to subsidize telecommunications services in rural and other high-cost areas, schools and libraries.

Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican who counts himself among the fund's staunch supporters, said Tuesday that "without Universal Service, just having a dial tone would average about $200 per month" for many residents in his home state.

Right now, long-distance, wireless, pay-phone and wireline telephone services are required to contribute a fixed percentage of their revenues to the fund, which they typically do by tacking an additional fee onto their customers' bills.

But supporters of the fund, which gives out on average more than $5 billion each year, say it has dwindled because traditional services, such as long-distance, are taking in less money, while unanticipated voice technologies, such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), are not expressly required to pay up. (A number of the larger voice over Internet protocol providers, including Vonage, have said they already pay into the fund, but there doesn't appear to be a formal regulation requiring them to do so.)

No formal regulation?  Can't have that, can we?  After all, someone somewhere might not choose to contribute "his fair share."

Let's just cut to the chase here, folks.

One constant feature of taxes in general (and the income tax in particular) is the tendency to concentrate as much revenue generation as possible into as few individuals as possible, thus making it impossible for the people who actually pay the lion's share of taxes to accomplish anything politically, particularly if it has to do with de-hiring the leeches who are bleeding them dry.  This is at the root of all the shrill cries of "TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH!!" whenever the subject comes up.  Face it, folks—since the "rich," however you choose to define them, pay the vast majority of taxes in this country, any tax relief at all will be of some benefit to them, and often is of more benefit to them since, after all, they're paying most of the taxes.  This little fact is conveniently ignored by opponents of tax rate cuts, and maddeningly ignored by proponents (who seem to have no political common sense at all).

In 1997, the top 5% of wage-earners paid the majority—51.9%—of all income taxes.  The bottom half of all taxpayers paid only 4.3 percent of income taxes.  There is nothing in the world fair about that, but it is spun as "fair" since, after all, the "rich" have "more than they need."  Who are you to tell me what I need, Jack?

It's pretty obvious that, in a battle between the people who benefit from taxes and the people who actually pay them, the beneficiaries win—as do the politicians who get to hand out the goodies.  And this fact is hardly lost on our good public servants.

While the income tax is the most obvious example of consolidation of the tax base, it's hardly the only one.  Otherwise taxes would be one of the simplest aspects of US law.  As it is, tax laws are the most complex and arcane in the land.

Of course, this fact is attributed to our good lawmakers' efforts to insure "fairness."

Though all the senators at Tuesday's hearing clearly agreed on the need for USF reform, their priorities differed. For instance, Jim DeMint, a South Carolina senator who has introduced a broadly deregulatory proposal advocated phasing out USF handouts entirely in certain areas where new broadband technology is actually less inexpensive to deploy than its telecommunications predecessors.

"As we look for fairer ways to spread the cost out," he said, "I think we need some ideas on how we can move areas away from subsidization and move into competition."

"Fairer ways to spread the cost out," Jim?  That's the exact opposite of what going on: the consolidation of the cost to a few, mostly politically impotent (due to their reduced numbers) individuals.  And see how he uses words designed to appeal to me, his constituent?  "Moving away from subsidation and moving into competition" is exactly what I support. 

Would that it were exactly what is going to happen.

Gore in 2008? I don't think so

Courtesy of Dick Morris, here’s a fearless prediction that Al Gore, an individual even more stubborn and personally-myopic than the mediocre junior Senator from Massachusetts, has a chance to win the 2008 Democratic nomination for the presidency. And why would his chances be better this time?  Morris thinks memories have faded, or the media brainwashing is complete:

The idea that he was an incompetent candidate has been replaced in Democratic iconography by the idea that he was cheated out of the presidency.

So what? Sure, there are folks out there that believe he was cheated. There are folks out there that don’t believe we put a man on the moon. Big deal. There are folks that believe the 2004 election was stolen too, but they’re not exactly lining up to re-nominate Kerry, are they? I think the majority of voters will decide that Al’s unstable behavior after his loss in 2000 is too much to stomach and that giving him another chance out of some type of misdirected sense of fair play is too risky.

Morris might be right, though. 2008 might be the year when the DNC decides that “electability” doesn’t matter for the nominee, and they should go with the poster-child of the angry, irrational Left. I’m sure the GOP would love to see that happen every bit as much as they were salivating over the possible nomination of Howard Dean in 2004. The nomination of Al Gore would virtually hand-deliver the Centrist vote to the GOP, unless the GOP goes nuts and nominates a candidate from the far-Right fringe.  And I don't see that happening.

I don't think this argument makes much sense either:

Gore may be a man whose time has come in his party. It was he who warned of climate change and predicted its consequences. Hurricane Katrina was just a fulfillment of the prophesies Gore wrote about in his late-1980s book Earth in the Balance. He has been an energy-conservation nut for years, and his obsessions with alternatives to oil will play better and better as we come to realize how our addiction to oil has led us to dependency on the dealers of this particular drug — Iran, the Saudi royal family and Hugo Chavez.

Facts are probably going to be inconvenient for Mr. Gore, especially now that the partisan media no longer has a stranglehold on mass communications.

It’s not like Katrina was the first hurricane we’ve ever seen, and given that it was a dime-a-dozen category III storm by the time it made landfall, no climate change argument is going to make much ground with voters that aren’t suffering chronic BDS. It will also be hard for him to argue that a dependency on Saudi Arabia is a bad thing after his recent treasonous speech bought and paid for by the Saudi royals. Standing in front of an audience hostile to America and saying that Bush isn’t friendly enough with them is going to make it hard to stand in front of Americans and tell them that Saudis are bad. Playing both sides of the fence worked for BJ Clinton (William Jefferson, you pervs), but it didn’t work for Kerry and it won’t work for Al. Neither has the approachable and gregarious personality of Clinton, and neither will be able to sell the triangulation with a smile and a chuckle like he could. Frankly, despite the friendly media blackout on that speech, the GOP will get the message out and that alone will put paid to any hope of appealing to other than rabid-left voters.

Like a completely refurbished “pre-owned vehicle,” Al Gore seems to be positioning himself to Hillary Clinton’s left and as greener than John Kerry for a run at the 2008 Democratic nomination for president. His slogan might well read “reelect Al Gore.”

Yes, he probably will try to run at least partially on the “I really won in 2000, so it’s only fair to get a do-over” strategy. His delusion on this topic is as complete as that of the Kos Kidz. Unfortunately for Mr. Gore, quite a bit of analysis has gone into the results of the 2000 election, and by any fair measure it has been proven that no number of legitimate recount strategies would have won the race for him. The only recount method that would have changed the outcome required the baldest and most partisan cherry-picking of ballots, and to Al’s eventual disappointment, these were findings from studies done by the people that wanted him to win the most: the editors of the NY Times*.

* I'm going on memory on this point, but I will research this later.

Update:

I'm glad I looked that up.  There's a paragraph about it on Wikepedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election,_2000, but they don't seem to provide permalinks for each paragraph (something that mystifies me given the length of some of the entries), so scroll down until you find "The Florida Ballot Project recounts."

It turns out there were eight different recount strategies tested.  Gore won four and Bush won four.  There can't be a tie, though, so I'm going to apply a self-serving tie-breaker: when Gore won, it was by a maximum of 171 votes and a minimum of 60.  Bush won by a minimum of 225 and a maximum of 537.  The higher number is the result that eventually got certified.  Questions about which of the different recount strategies should have been used in the final decision are certainly valid and can be debated endlessly, but obviously your position will depend on your desired outcome.  I choose, therefore, to state that the winner is the candidate with the higher average number of votes gained by recount, and that is George W. Bush. 

Regardless. I still contend that this is not a winning strategy for Gore.  I clearly remember nodding in agreement at the Sore-Loserman 2000 bumper stickers that eventually showed up after the eldction debacle had gone on far too long.  Back then, I wasn't nearly as sympathetic to Joe Lieberman as I am now.  (I wanted Joe to get the nomination in 2004 - there is a very real chance that I would have cast the first Democratic presidential ballot in my life)  The point is, whining about the past is not the way to convince me you have a plan for the future.  We had plenty of that in 2004, and it was a pointless waste of time and energy.

Also of note, as I stated the recounts were funded by newspapers, but the Wikipedia article doesn't specifically mention the NY Times. It does name the Washington Post as one of the funding organizations, though.  As they say in darts, right church, wrong pew.

Surprise, surprise!

When checking my refer logs I always look forward to surprises, as there usually is something there I've never seen before.  Such happened yesterday, when I noticed a link back to the New York Times' domain—what on Earth...?   What would I be doing getting a refer from there?

Turns out that the Times has a reader comments forum board of sorts, filled with the usual suspects: lefty wingnuts, moonbats, idiotarians, and other assorted hardware and genera, with the occasional brave non-leftist challenging their usual assumptions.

Lo and behold, FB was quoted from two posts made just yesterday.  You can see both quotes on the Times forum page here (free registration or BugMeNot required).

Thanks to reader joanboitet for the good word—and welcome to FB.  Please feel free to add to, or start, a discussion here any old time.

Why they all stay on the plantation

In the children's book Why Mommy is a Democrat, we see a few examples of why we're glad that we aren't.  Democrats, I mean.  You know.

Here are three sample pages from inside the book that illustrate perfectly what I'm talking about.

Evidently Democrats don't know that it takes eight letters to spell "Democrat."

Yup, you got it—Democrats treat us all like we're still children who need their loving care to stay "safe."

Wonder why it costs $160,000 to go to this school?  You get one guess (and they still don't know how to spell...)

They make this stuff way too easy.

UPDATE:  Look at the creepy ears on these weird alien-looking squirrel-things.  Could it be that this is where "pointy-haired bosses™" come from?

RE-UPCHUCKUPDATE:  You did notice the common last line in each page's text, right?  The line that so perfectly expresses the self-image of the leftist nanny-statist, and should make every self-respecting American over eight years old run for his life?

Democrats do things for you...just like Mommy does.

That says volumes, folks. 

Trouble is, that's exactly what tens of millions of Americans (not so much of the self-respecting variety) want and vote for every chance they get, and their ostensible "representatives" are more than happy to give it to them in spades, buying their votes, ovation, even their very dignity and self-satisfaction with the money they've stolen taken from all of those who have learned that they are the masters of their own futures and abundance.

(Thanks again to Greyhawk for the Open Post!)

Why they hate us

Since there seems to be so much confusion amongst the people of this great nation concerning the reasons we are at war and whether they are valid (even whether we are really at war), I thought I might boil it all down to its basics and post a little primer for everyone.

Everybody wants to "understand" our enemy in order to better "address" his concerns, descriptions of them, and the situation that led us into war, and as a result, the explanations of the reasons for the Islamic world's hatred of the West have waxed both eloquent and complex.

Therefore, I've got a nice little shortcut to understanding them—and the war—for you.  Ready?  Good.  Here it is.

They want everyone in the world to submit to Islamic Sharia law.  Anyone who refuses to do so is to be summarily killed.  The net result is that the whole world will eventually be composed of folks who were faced with a choice between the five pillars and the killers, and chose to remain alive and submit to Islam (which literally means "submission" in Arabic).

Is that the world in which you want to live?  A world with no freedoms at all?  A world where every single civil right people have fought and died for in this country is denied out-of-hand?  I'm not gratuitously using Dr. Martin Luther King's name here, but do consider him, along with all the others who have fought, and often died, for freedom in this country, such as Susan B. Anthony, and even the rag-tag army under Gen. Washinton that managed to defeat the world's greatest army, the British—shall we just lay down the freedoms they so courageously fought for and simply "submit" to Islam?

Heh.  I didn't think you would like that very much.  That's good, that's good.  Now get ready, because this is all boiling down to one issue: it's either us or them.  And, not to make light of it, but just so you know ahead of time, some of us are going to die in the fight.  Perhaps a lot of us if they set off a nuke somewhere.  You may as well get ready for that now.  But Americans have never been slow or loathe to die when their freedom was at stake.  The few vocal ones who rail against this war today are, thankfully, very much a minority.

Shhh—everybody, I think I heard someone asking a question.  Uh—yes, you over there!  Your question is:  shouldn't we give diplomacy an opportunity to work before resorting to violence?  Why not try to reason with these people and come to some sort of reasonable compromise like civilized people are supposed to do?  I mean, come on, let's give peace a chance!  Right?

Very good question, and it deserves a very good answer, which is this:  these nice folks are not reasonable and civilized as we understand those words.  They don't want to "reason" with us and they care not for pretty, civilized things like "dialog." They want to conquer us, plain and simple, because to them, there is no room for compromise, no issue on which they are willing to "give."  Unfortunately, in order to try to satisfy the UN crowd, we're determined to try to reason with them anyway. 

And, the trouble is that they know this and they take advantage of it right under our noses.  They patiently listen to us diplomatically speaking the diplomatically important diplomatic words we speak so diplomatically, but in which they are interested not one whit except as it buys them time to do the really important stuff behind our backs.  Giving diplomacy time to work, in this case, actually grants precious time to the enemy to develop more and deadlier ways to foist terror on us infidels who refuse to submit to Islam.

Diplomacy has never worked with these kinds of people, and has rarely really ever worked at all, for that matter (the modern very incarnation of diplomacy, the UN, has never actually solved a problem anywhere in the world of which I'm aware).  The downside to letting diplomacy have its day, of course, is that we waste time that we could be using to do the one thing that does work with these kinds of "people" (loosely speaking, of course):  showing power.  Demonstrating strength.  Killing people.  Like it or not, that's what they respect.  And that's the only response from us that will gain their respect.  Period.  Everything else we do causes them to laugh, laugh at our weakness.  And they've been laughing a lot lately.

I know that killing people isn't what we think is a valid, civilized perspective, but we're not being given a choice here.  They're the ones who not only started but are continuing and prolonging this.  They hate us, but not because of some nonsensical, concocted idea of "poverty" and "disenfranchisement" (cue flower petals and long-haired, weeping guitar strummer) that we have imagined, invented from the whole cloth of our presuppositions.  You fool—look at their own words to define who they are, who they hate, and why they hate them (us).

It's because we, by our very existence, mock Islam.  It's not merely our newspaper cartoons, it's our very lives!  What else explains their years-long attempt to strike us that culminated in 9-11?  Did they fly planes into Danish buildings because of those cartoons?  No, in that case they settled for mere rioting and small-scale murder.

The USA shouldn't be allowed to exist, you see.  Allah is displeased with all these infidels possessing so much economic and political power which should, by all rights, belong to the faithful followers of Islam's "the way," or Sharia law, and Mohammad's disciples must do something about that, namely, cut us unbelieving rascals down to size, and then either convert us or kill us.

On 9-11 they thought they cut us unbelieving rascals down a notch or two, for sure.

But what they really did was similar to what the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor in 1941, when Japanese Admiral Yamamoto's prophetic words came true: "I fear all we have done is to wake a sleeping giant, and fill him with a terrible resolve."

These words came true in WWII.  America stood together and defeated their enemies.  Now, will these words come true in WWIV (the so-called "War on Terror")?  That's the six-gazillion-dollar question.  No, wait—it's the six-billion LIVES question.  If this isn't a world war, then nothing else ever has been.

And now you basically understand the Islamic world and why it hates us so.  You also understand what our only response to them must be.  Easy, right?  Why does everyone hafta make everything so dang complicated?

(Thanks to Greyhawk for the Open Post!)

Things you don't see every day, part 2

Well, my goodness.  Wonders never cease.

Senator John McCain of AZ (R-RINO) has displayed considerable backbone, not to mention a wry and snarky sense of humor.  I'm quite often frustrated with the man, but he certainly deserves credit when it's due.

Via commenter Maggie45 at Daily Pundit , we learn that the Honorable Senator McCain has sent a letter to his Honorable Compatriot, Senator Barack Obama (D-Disingenuous), that begins thusly:

Dear Senator Obama:

I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere. When you approached me and insisted that despite your leadership’s preference to use the issue to gain a political advantage in the 2006 elections, you were personally committed to achieving a result that would reflect credit on the entire Senate and offer the country a better example of political leadership, I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable. Thank you for disabusing me of such notions with your letter to me dated February 2, 2006, which explained your decision to withdraw from our bipartisan discussions. I’m embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won’t make the same mistake again.

...and ends with this:

...I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party’s effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn’t always a priority for every one of us. Good luck to you, Senator.

Ouch.  I couldn't have said it better myself.  Of course, in my opinion, "the public interest isn't always a priority" for the Gentleman from AZ either, but that's another issue.