What Is This World Coming To?

A new article in Newsweek discusses the possibility of Senator Obama losing his Presidential bid and touches on the effect it will have on racial tensions in the United States.

In the African-American community, the thinking on Obama’s candidacy has gone something like this: In the beginning, there was disbelief that a black man could become president. Then, when Obama became the Democratic nominee and soared in the polls, listeners were concerned for his safety. Now that the race with John McCain is as tight as Sarah Palin’s smile, (the black community) has started to worry about Election Day itself. There is still a fair amount of optimism in the black community, but it’s being tempered by two words: what if. What if Obama loses? How should people respond? What should they feel?

The article also suggests that an Obama loss would automatically incite anger, but quickly drops the issue:

There’s not a lot of anger—yet—but you can start to sense the potential for it. “I’m going to be mad, real mad, if he doesn’t win,” says Daetwon Fisher, 21, a construction worker from Long Beach, Calif. “Because for him to come this far and lose will be just shady and a slap in black people’s faces. I know there is already talk about protests and stuff if he loses, and I’m down for that.”

This brings up the ever increasing certainty of racial relations AFTER the election… they won’t be good. In fact, they promise to be worse.  That is what Bob Parks of “Black and Right” fears:

I got this video link from my son-in-law in Oklahoma, with a note saying it was produced as an individual campaign commercial effort. You gotta love Youtube. Where else could a hero like this reach out to remind us directly of what sacrifice really is? One thing comes across loud and clear: “It was not a mistake.”

Remember the famous “sixteen word lie?” It was the lead story in every liberal newspaper in the world for weeks:

“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa .”

It was those sixteen words that Ambassador Joe Wilson wrote his NYTimes op-ed piece about. It was Joe Wilson’s op-ed piece that brought Wilson national attention, which in turn shone a spotlight on his family, which of course led to the revelation that his wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA.

Pretty much everything that has been said or done about Iraq and Saddam Hussein over the past five years has included some variation of those sixteen words.

Before we go on, let me clarify something. To this moment, the British government still stands behind its intel report, which is all Bush said in those sixteen words. Read them with me one more time.

“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa .”

So why isn’t the mainstream liberal press all over this AP story?

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

What’s now left is the final and complicated push to clean up the remaining radioactive debris at the former Tuwaitha nuclear complex about 12 miles south of Baghdad — using teams that include Iraqi experts recently trained in the Chernobyl fallout zone in Ukraine.

But wait! I thought Saddam Hussein didn’t have a nuclear program? Wasn’t that all made up by the Bush administration to trick America into going to war? Wasn’t the absence of evidence taken to be evidence of absence, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld memorably put it?

“Everyone is very happy to have this safely out of Iraq,” said a senior U.S. official who outlined the nearly three-month operation to The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.”

This doesn’t seem to make sense. When did this five hundred and fifty metric TONS of yellowcake uranium show up in Iraq? Was it AFTER the war that was ostensibly waged over Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program? The nuclear program that the Democrats STILL deny existed?

“The yellowcake wasn’t the only dangerous item removed from Tuwaitha. Earlier this year, the military withdrew four devices for controlled radiation exposure from the former nuclear complex. The lead-enclosed irradiation units, used to decontaminate food and other items, contain elements of high radioactivity that could potentially be used in a weapon, according to the official. Their Ottawa-based manufacturer, MDS Nordion, took them back for free, the official said.

The yellowcake was the last major stockpile from Saddam’s nuclear efforts, but years of final cleanup is ahead for Tuwaitha and other smaller sites.”

“Years of cleanup are ahead” regarding “Saddam’s nuclear efforts . . .” WHAT nuclear efforts? Saddam Hussein DIDN’T HAVE A NUKE PROGRAM. Everybody knows that. The New York Times said he didn’t. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that was a Bush “lie.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Saddam didn’t have a nuke program. So did Joe Wilson, John Kerry, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Barack Hussein Obama, Al Gore, John Murtha, Jim McDermott, David Bonior, Jim Webb, oh, and al-Qaeda and its surrogates . . . so what’s the deal here?

Somebody lied about whether or not Saddam had a nuclear program. If it wasn’t the Bush administration . . . well, that tends to narrow the field somewhat, doesn’t it?

When there’s a suicide bombing in Iraq, it is Page One News in America. If there are plenty of casualties, it is a Page One Above-the-Fold News (with pictures.) If Americans are among them, then you can count on it being continued on Page Two (with additional pictures.)

But if the news smacks of anything resembling military successes in Iraq, if it gets any mention at all, it is generally buried somewhere in the middle of the paper. The anti-military (and therefore anti-American, unless one is so naive as to think freedom is actually free) bias in the mainstream media (and among the Democrats in general) is so blinding that even the San Francisco Chronicle took note:

The success of the Bush surge - with Iraqi forces having led offensives in three major cities and taking on Shiite militias - has been greeted in America with a collective shrug. “My perhaps overly cynical view is that it’s probably too much to hope for - a lot of good-news stories coming out of Iraq,” U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said during a recent conference call. But also, with the al-Maliki government clearing once dangerous areas and violence dropping, “Iraq no longer occupies the status as the overarching, all-encompassing crisis that requires full national attention.”

The mainstream media, particularly the liberal standard-bearers like ABC and CNN are ready with a quick answer.

“And yet, there is a “marked drop-off in the appetite for stories from Iraq,” ABC news’ Terry McCarthy told the Observer. “That’s partly due to the election, partly because of the fatigue, and partly because things have started to go right here. The spectacular car bombs, the massive attacks, you just don’t see them anymore. A drip, drip story that’s getting a little better day by day doesn’t make a headline.”

CNN’s Michael Ware calls it “audience fatigue.” Other journalists, who have risked their lives covering the war, complain that Americans aren’t paying attention to their stories on Iraq.”

“Audience fatigue” — that’s a novel way to justify propagandizing the news. “We’d report on it, but you don’t care.” The Iraq War has been the seminal issue for two presidential elections, both of which were styled by the media as a ‘referendum on the Iraq war’. In the first ‘referendum’ the vote was whether to quit while we were losing or fight until we were winning.

The public paid enough attention then to leave John Kerry in the Senate and George Bush in the White House, despite the best efforts of the media to convince voters that the war was lost.

“When liberal Democrats were trying to take over Congress in 2006, they used the war to clobber President Bush and told America that if they were in power, the war would end. Well, they took control of Congress, and the war continues. So now there are fewer political points to be won banging the war.”

Good point. And now that we are clearly winning, the media complains that the public isn’t paying enough attention to the Iraq War for them to bother reporting it? It must be a 21st century variation of that old news adage. “All The News We See Fit To Print.”

Hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizen have risked everything to secure Iraq; 4,098 Americans made the Supreme Sacrifice for their country. But CNN had decided for its audience that they are ‘tired’ of being informed of their successes on our behalf.

“It seems the better the war goes, the less interest some partisans show in Iraq. Their attention wanders if they can’t play the blame game and chant, “Bush lied.” Ah, and this time, the critics were wrong when they argued that the surge could not work. Obama was wrong, and, face it, opposing the surge was the politically easy thing to do.”

The San Francisco Chronicle highlights the hypocrisy of the Democrats, but in so doing, fails to do justice to the real point of the story. The mainstream media has completely abandoned any pretense of objectivity, and has become an openly partisan political propaganda machine.

They control what you see, what you hear, what you are informed of, and they decide on your behalf what should be important to you when making your political decisions. They don’t pretend to hide it, and they evidently don’t care whether you like it or not. And even that isn’t the most important aspect of the story.

They don’t pretend to hide it — and WE pretend not to see it. After all, nobody wants to be the first one to shout “the Emperor has no clothes.”

Bad news for the Democrats. Even the Washington Post is admitting that al-Qaeda is losing its war against the United States:

Less than a year after his agency warned of new threats from a resurgent al-Qaeda, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays the terrorist movement as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

In a strikingly upbeat assessment, the CIA chief cited major gains against al-Qaeda’s allies in the Middle East and an increasingly successful campaign to destabilize the group’s core leadership.

While cautioning that al-Qaeda remains a serious threat, Hayden said Osama bin Laden is losing the battle for hearts and minds in the Islamic world and has largely forfeited his ability to exploit the Iraq war to recruit adherents.”

“Largely,” but not completely. Osama’s task is to convince his followers that the United States is an evil, Satanic entity that deserves to have destruction visited upon it as a matter of religious duty. So Osama can still use clips from Democratic candidates, or taped sermons by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, or a copy of Scott McClellan’s book to help him make his case to new recruits.

Perhaps that is one reason that terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman is skeptical: “al Qaeda’s obituary has been written far too often in the past few years for anyone to declare victory,” he told the WP. “I agree that there has been progress. But we’re indisputably up against a very resilient and implacable enemy.”

(It’s hard to be sure if the ‘resilient and implacable enemy’ Hoffman is speaking of here is Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Scott McClellan. All of them seem quite resilient to me.)

The WP wasn’t willing to concede the point, but it did quote Hayden saying we’re winning in Iraq without following up with a paragraph disputing the contention. Maybe its true, after all.

But don’t tell the Democrats. They’ll just produce a new list of “Reasons For Jihad” talking points. Better to just win the war and tell them later.

If you wanna get elected president in 2008, the conventional wisdom says you gotta close down Gitmo. The Guantanamo Bay detention facility has become the focus of global protests against alleged “U.S. human rights violations” during the war on terrorism.

Calls to close the facility and release or try its 460 foreign detainees are steadily mounting — they come now from close allies such as Britain and Germany, from the United Nations Committee Against Torture, and from every major human rights group.

The problem is that everybody wants to close Gitmo but nobody wants to accept the prisoners housed there. Even if it were possible to locate them inside the continental United States, (which would then place them behind Constitutional protection) there is the NIMBY factor. (NIMBY=Not In My Back Yard) Read the rest of this entry »

Austin-based televangelist John Hagee sent a letter to William Donohue, president of the Catholic League of America, apologizing for having “emphasized the darkest chapters in the history of Catholic and Protestant relations with the Jews.” In his letter, Hagee wrote:

“Out of a desire to advance a greater unity among Catholics and evangelicals in promoting the common good, I want to express my deep regret for any comments that Catholics have found hurtful.”

Hagee’s apology was a political response to the liberal effort to draw a moral equivalency between Hagee’s endorsement of John McCain and Barack Obama’s twenty-year relationship with his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Wright revealed himself to be a divisive racist whose views on white America rival those of the KKK in reverse. According to Wright, white America developed AIDS as a means of genocide against black Americans, imports drugs specifically to ‘hook’ black Americans and therefore was entirely deserving of the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

If one reads through the various blogs and liberal media assessments of Hagee’s endorsement of McCain, one finds headlines such as “The All-White Elephant In the Room” by the NYTimes’ Frank Rich.

Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video — far from the only one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious networks, including twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.”

According to Rich, there is zero difference between McCain’s acceptance of an endorsement from John Hagee and the 20 years that Obama was a member of Wright’s church.

“Mr. McCain says he does not endorse any of Mr. Hagee’s calumnies, any more than Barack Obama endorses Mr. Wright’s. But those who try to give Mr. McCain a pass for his embrace of a problematic preacher have a thin case. It boils down to this: Mr. McCain was not a parishioner for 20 years at Mr. Hagee’s church. That defense implies, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain was a passive recipient of this bigot’s endorsement.”

Rich reserves the word ‘bigot’ for Hagee — Wright earns no such epithet. Hagee is a ‘bigot’ for relating what was, regardless of one’s views, an accurate version of medieval Vatican history. (Just look at that bigot — standing in front of the Star of David!!)

Wright’s views are historically groundless and, despite the fact they lump the entire white race together as one large, evil family, are at worst, worthy of candid discussion. Says Rich:

“Yet if there’s any coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid conversation on race has yet to begin.”

Yet to begin? Is Rich kidding? If anything, it is liberals like Rich that are stifling the closest thing to a fair debate on race in America since the 1950’s. Wright blames whites for attempted genocide and Rich calls the negative reaction ‘hypocrisy’ — Hagee relates the accurate history of the medieval Vatican and gets tagged a “bigot“.

The facts are these. Barack Obama attended Wright’s church for 20 years. Obama used on of Wright’s sermons as a title for his book. Wright married the Obamas. Wright baptized Obama’s kids. Obama credits Wright with ‘leading him to Jesus’ — a claim that, if true, would render Wright the most important advisor in Obama’s life. And Obama defended Wright and his comments, extolling the good that Wright has accomplished and likening him to a “crazy uncle.”

Hagee endorsed John McCain’s politics. There’s no relationship between Hagee and McCain. McCain doesn’t go to Hagee’s church. He doesn’t seek his political advice. He never called Hagee is ‘mentor’.

To my knowledge, McCain offered no excuses whatever for Hagee’s comments or defended him for all the ‘good’ that he has done as pastor of one of the largest mega churches in Texas. No wonder there isn’t any debate on race in America.

All whites are bigots while black racism is justifiable — because all whites are bigots. It’s simple. Isn’t it?

It is, if you are a liberal moron. For the rest of us, it just got much more complicated.

According to a report in the World Tribune, al-Qaeda had developed a plan to poison Iraq’s water supply with nitric acid, potentially killing tens of thousands of people in the process.

US forces discovered an 11-page letter intended for al-Qaeda’s Iraqi station chief, Abu Ayyoub Al Masri. It outlined a series of plans to expel the U.S.-led coalition, kill tens of thousands of Shi’ites and destroy the Iraqi security forces.

“This will lessen the pressure against us and the holy warrior brothers in all of Iraq when the enemies fight among themselves and weaken,” the author of the letter, known only as Abu Safyan, said.

Now, for the good news. US forces took the letter from Abu Safyan’s body after he was killed during a counter-insurgency operation.

This document is just one man’s articulation, one terrorist’s views about instigating conflict and turning Iraqis against each other,” U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner said. “But it is also quite consistent with the patterns of violence we see from AQI.”

Abu Safyan proposed a reorganization of al-Qaeda in Iraq. In his recommendation, al-Qaeda would be divided into a unit of snipers, experts in assassinations and suicide bombers. The three groups, he wrote, would coordinate to “bring down the city or the area.”

Navy SEAL Michael A. Monsoor had fast thinking to do when a live grenade came out of nowhere to bounce off his chest: Take the clear path to safety that he had but his comrades didn’t, try to toss it safely away, or throw himself on top of it.

With barely an instant’s hesitation on that Iraqi rooftop, Monsoor took the last course, sacrificing his life to save the men around him. For that, President Bush on Tuesday awarded him the Medal of Honor.

The Medal of Honor is awarded for an act of such courage that no one could rightly be expected to undertake it,”said President Bush as tears streamed down his face. “Yet those who knew Michael Monsoor were not surprised when he did.”

Democrats plan to push legislation this spring that would force the Iraqi government to spend its own surplus in oil revenues to rebuild the country, sparing U.S. dollars.

I thought it was the Republicans who were the ones planning to steal Iraqi oil.