Friday, August 11, 2006

A Half-Dozen Things To Bum You Out For The Weekend.

You know, I'd rather be counting down the days until Michelle Wie was legal or posting about video games than all this depressing jihad stuff, but at the rate the treasonous Left and feckless Right are going, Wie's not gonna see the age of majority and the Wii won't matter as we cope with the global depression that will occur when WW4 breaks out. :(

Leading off, Hugh Hewitt's guest blogger Dean Barnett reports that 51% of Dems don't want Dubya to succeed:

Fox asked, “Regardless of how you voted in the presidential election, would you say you want President Bush to succeed or not?” 51% of Democrats answered “No” to that question. 40% answered yes, and 9%, who are still apparently trying to determine just how deranged they are by their Bush hatred, answered “I don’t know.”

The depths to which the modern Democratic Party have sunk never lose their ability to shock me. In the 1990’s, I couldn’t stand Bill Clinton but I didn’t root for him to fail. From a purely selfish standpoint, I owned a business and owned stocks; the economy going in the crapper would not have been good. On a patriotic level, I also realized that there were far more important things than my disdain for the priapic POTUS.
He then added, "One of the 51% Who Wants Bush to Fail Chimes In":
This is good, courtesy of the comments section:
The shocking thing to me is only 51% of Dems get that right now: if (sic) Bush were to "succeed," we'd be unemployed, poor, with no security in our old age, with no health care, with no education, with born humans equated legally to blastulae and brain dead popele (sic) and constantly in "fear" of "terrorists."
Please take special note of the scare quotes around “fear” and “terrorists.” I love it when the reality-based community weighs in on matters with its characteristic thoughtfulness, subtlety, civility and firm grasp of world events.
Someone else in the comments section responded even better:
Mumon, You're a Moron
"If Bush were to 'succeed,' we'd be..."

"Unemployed": Have you failed to notice that unemploment in this country has been extremely LOW the last several quarters? Employment comes about as a consequence of robustness of the economy.

"No security in our old age": If you are referring to Social Security, you HAVE no security in your old age! SS is on track to fail catastrophically, and the amazing thing about you Libs is the way that you were able to myopically ignore a problem that you used to scream about, only because your hated GWB was trying to do something to fix the problem.

"No health care": Talk to anyone involved in the financial side of the Health Care Industry (anyone involved in billing, coding, etc.), and ask about the salutory effects of HIPPA, enacted by Bill Clinton. True, Bush has done nothing to solve the problem, but neither has he done anything exacerbate it. Pointedly, he has had bigger fish to fry.

"With no education": Your ability to hyperbolize is impressive, to say the least. In point of fact, though, this is one area where you have a valid criticism of GWB, if only because he has allied himself with the forces of the teachers' unions who fight daily in their own favor, and against the best interests of our kids.

"constantly in 'fear' of 'terrorists'": The ability of both yourself and those like you to constantly ignore the fact that there are at minimum 100 million people or so worldwide who want to see all of us in the West either dead or subjugated to Islam and Sharia law, never fails to take my breath away. This is not an invention of Karl Rove, moron; these people were chanting "Death to America" 30 years ago. If Bush fails, the odds go up dramatically that they will be chanting that while standing triumphantly over our charred corpses.

Idiot.
The fact that we even have to point out the sophistry of the Left's useful idiots makes me sad for the future.

Now, Charles Krauthammer has some thoughts about the Ned Lamont victory that spell disaster for the Dems future:
Lamont said in his victory speech that the time had come to "fix George Bush's failed foreign policy." Yet, as Martin Peretz pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, on Iran, the looming long-term Islamist threat, Lamont's views are risible. Lamont's alternative to the Bush Iran policy is to "bring in allies" and "use carrots as well as sticks."

Where has this man been? Negotiators with Iran have had carrots coming out of their ears in three years of fruitless negotiations. Allies? We let the British, French and Germans negotiate with Iran for those three years, only to have Iran brazenly begin accelerated uranium enrichment that continues to this day.

Lamont seems to think that we should just sit down with the Iranians and show them why going nuclear is not a good idea. This recalls Sen. William Borah's immortal reaction in September 1939 upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II: "Lord, if I could only have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided."

This naivete in the service of endless accommodationism recalls also the flaccid foreign policy of the post-Vietnam Democratic left. It lost the day -- it lost the country -- to Ronald Reagan and a muscular foreign policy that in the end won the Cold War.

Vietnam cost the Democrats 40 years in the foreign policy wilderness. Anti-Iraq sentiment gave the antiwar Democrats a good night on Tuesday, and may yet give them a good year or two. But beyond that, it will be desolation.
My problem with Krauthammer's formulation is that the desolation he speaks of won't be of the Dem Party, but the ENTIRE WORLD! World War is upon us and too many people are in denial as to what needs to be done. Bill Bennet has an excellent piece at NRO, "Why Israel Fights…and why the U.S. must let her.":
If Jews are the canaries in the coalmine of how a civilization, state, or country will treat religious or ethnic minorities, what is Israel — the only democratic state in the Middle East, and the only Jewish state in the world? For several years now, I have been asking the question: Will our culture and the international community allow us to fight the war we need to fight to prevail? An interim answer to that question is now playing out for Israel, our international canary in the darkest of mines.

Israel, which comprises some 10,000 square miles, compared with Arab countries that total over five million square miles — not including Iran — has shown itself to be a model of democracy and decency. Over one million Arabs live in Israel with full rights of citizenship, they vote and serve in Israel’s parliament. Syria wants Israel gone and Iran’s president openly calls for Israel’s destruction. With the exceptions of Egypt and Jordan, no Arab state officially recognizes Israel as a state. And yet, bereft of oil, Israel’s per capita gross domestic product tops 24,000 dollars (compared with the oil-rich Saudi Arabia whose per capita GDP hovers at 13,000 dollars), and it remains a thriving bastion of democratic liberalism in an ocean of oligarchies and dictatorships.

Israel has been the state sponsor of no terror, has kidnapped no innocent citizens of other countries, and has fought for its life ever since it was founded in 1948 as its neighboring states have started war after war to wipe it off the map. And yet, Israel is continually asked to cease defending itself by the United Nations, by the European Union, and by a coterie of other international organizations that have called on Israel’s neighbors to cease their terrorist activities and human rights violations almost never. It is an expectation of Israel that it act like a civilized nation. Fair enough. But the expectation of the terrorists is zero. A contemporary, international version of “boys will be boys” governs in the form of “terrorists will be terrorists.” That is all they have to live with, and up to, in the way of judgment. Meanwhile, it is illegal for Jews or Christians to become citizens of Saudi Arabia, it was Zionism the U.N. once condemned as “racist.”

While the formula for the long-sought-after goal of “peace in the Middle East,” has long been based on the trope of “land for peace,” where Israel would give up disputed land in exchange for peace or recognition, Israel has given up land time and again, and yet somehow one million Israelis are spending tonight in bomb shelters. When Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 there was no peace, when Israel withdrew from Gaza, Hamas took over the territory and used it as a base for rocket launches ever since.

[snip]

Yes, Israel’s war is our war. About this, our mutual enemies have no doubt. The same cannot be said of the international community. Now is the time for Israel to clean Hezbollah out of the Middle East, just as we are trying to clean al Qaeda out of everywhere else they have planted their soldiers. This is a long haul, and a dangerous war, but it will be longer and made more dangerous with appeasement and ceasefires being urged upon Israel and, for that matter, the United States.

Let Kofi Annan condemn Israel. Let ex-State Department officials wring their hands. Let the Security Council issue its condemnations if it must. But at the end of the diplomatic doublespeak and the denunciations of editorial writers here and abroad, let the countries on the frontlines, fighting for their existence, act like any normal country would under attack and save themselves. In so doing, they will save those who also strive to be normal, democratic, and free. For if Iran’s “frontline” succeeds, Israel and the U.S. will cease to exist on the globe below which Hezbollah’s rifle is held. And al Qaeda will cheer the outcome for its newfound ally.
Well, that's bleak and Newt Gingrich says "The Only Option is to Win":
Our enemies are quite public and repetitive in saying what they want. Not since Adolf Hitler has any group been as bloodthirsty and as open. If Holbrooke really wants a "stable and secure" Israel he will not find it by trying to appease Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.

This issue of national security goals will be at the heart of the American dialogue for some time. If our enemies are truly our enemies (and their words and deeds are certainly those of enemies) then victory should be our goal. If nuclear and biological threats are real, then aggressive strategies to disarm them if possible and defeat them if necessary will be required.
But what really, REALLY got me depressed was this lengthy article reprinted at The Corner that bluntly states, "The War Is Coming, No Matter How Hard We Try to Evade It."
British commentator David Pryce-Jones, in his blog at National Review Online, sums up the general sense of things:

I have often wondered what it would have been like to live through the Thirties. How would I have reacted to the annual Nuremberg Party rallies, the rants against the Jews, and Hitler’s foreign adventures which the democracies did nothing to oppose, the occupation of the Rhineland and Austria, Nazi support for Franco in the Spanish civil war, and the rest of it. Appeasement was then considered wise, and has only become a dirty word with hindsight….

Now Iran is embarked on foreign adventures in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon. It is engaged on all-out armament programs, and is evidently hard at work developing the nuclear weapon that will give it a dimension of power that Hitler did not have…. Appeasement is again considered wise.

What these commentators are picking up is not an exact parallel to any one event of the 1930s—hence their scattershot of historical analogies. Instead, what they are picking up is a sense of the overall direction of world events: we are clearly headed toward a much larger, bloodier conflict in the Middle East, but no one in the West wants to acknowledge it, prepare for it, or begin to fight it.

[snip]

We can't avoid this war, because Iran won't let us avoid it. That is the real analogy to the 1930s. Hitler came to power espousing the goal of German world domination, openly promising to conquer neighboring nations through military force and to persecute and murder Europe's Jews. He predicted that the free nations of the world would be too weak—too morally weak—to stand up to him, and European and American leaders spent the 1930s reinforcing that impression. So Hitler kept advancing—the militarization of the Rhineland in 1936, the Spanish bombing campaign in 1937, the annexation of Austria and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the invasion of Poland in 1939—until the West finally, belated decided there was no alternative but war.

That is what is playing out today. Iran's theocracy has chosen, as the nation's new president, a religious fanatic who believes in the impending, apocalyptic triumph of Islam over the infidels. He openly proclaims his desire to create an Iranian-led Axis that will unite the Middle East in the battle against America, and he proclaims his desire to "wipe Israel off the map," telling an audience of Muslim leaders that "the main solution" to the conflict in Lebanon is "the elimination of the Zionist regime." (Perhaps this would be better translated as Ahmadinejad's "final solution" to the problem of Israel.)

Like Hitler, Ahmadinejad regards the free nations of the world as fading "sunset" powers, too morally weak to resist his legions of Muslim fanatics. And when we hesitate to kill Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, when we pressure Israel to rein in its attacks on Hezbollah, when we pander to the anti-Jewish bigotry of the "Muslim street"—we reinforce his impression of our weakness.

[snip]

The left also senses the impending war, but they have a very different reaction. Their favorite analogy is not the prelude to World War II, but the beginning of World War I.

It is widely acknowledged that World War II was made far more horrible by the years in which free nations appeased Hitler, allowing him to strengthen his armies before he took over Europe. That analogy lends itself to one conclusion: the sooner we attack Iran, the better.

World War I, by contrast, is largely regarded as the result of a giant, tragic mistake, a failure of diplomacy in which the great powers of Europe, seeking a network of alliances that would guarantee a "balance of power," instead trapped themselves into a senseless war.

[snip]

The larger evasion is this: the left senses that a regional war is coming, that Iran is hell-bent on starting it, and that there is no way to avoid it. But all of this runs directly counter to their whole world-view. Rather than questioning that world view, they simply assert that this can't be happening. They have to believe that something, anything—no matter how implausible—will stop it from happening. If we just get everyone together and talk, and we keep tinkering with diplomatic solutions until we find something that works, surely we can find a way to avoid a regional war in the Middle East. Can't we? Please?

And so the left confirms the right's sense that the appeasement of the 1930s is the best historical precedent for the current era.

Fortunately, George Bush is not Neville Chamberlain. He has already waged two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Imagine if, during the 1930s, the Allied Powers had already joined forces to defeat the fascists in Spain, then invaded Italy and overthrown Mussolini's regime. It would have made the coming conflict easier—but it would not have defanged our most dangerous enemy.

Unfortunately, George Bush is not Winston Churchill. It is as if, having suppressed fascism in Spain and Italy, we were still appeasing Germany and subordinating our interests to a wobbly consensus at the League of Nations. Just as Germany was the central enemy in the European theater of World War II, so Iran is the central enemy in the Middle East today.

Observing the events of today—the hesitation and uncertainty, the stubborn clinging to the fantasy that the enemy can be appeased if we just keep talking and find the right diplomatic solution—I now feel that, for the first time, I really understand the leaders of the 1930s. Their illusion that Hitler could be appeased has always seemed, in historical hindsight, to be such a willful evasion of the facts that I have never grasped how it was possible for those men to deceive themselves. But I can now see how they clung to their evasions because they could not imagine anything worse than a return to the mass slaughter of the First World War. They wanted to believe that something, anything could prevent a return to war. What they refused to imagine is that, in trying to avoid the horrors of the previous war, they were allowing Hitler to unleash the much greater horrors of a new war.

Today's leaders and commentators have less excuse. The "horror" they are afraid of repeating is the insurgency we're fighting in Iraq—a war whose cost in lives, dollars, and resolve is among the smallest America has ever had to pay. And it takes no great feat of imagination to project how much more horrible the coming conflict will be if we wait on events long enough for Iran to arm itself with nuclear technology. Among the horrific consequences is the specter of a new Holocaust, courtesy of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

The good news, such as it is, is that the air of foreboding about this new war is somewhat exaggerated. Yes, the conflict will become larger and bloodier—far bloodier than it would have been had we acted earlier. But Iran is not Nazi Germany—a large, united, economically and technologically advanced nation that could nearly equal our military capability. Iran is a poor, backward nation with a large, restive dissident movement. Its military bluster is a hollow shell hiding its underlying weakness. It's time to break that shell and kill the monster inside—before it grows any bigger and more powerful.

We can all sense that the war is coming. It is vital for America to seize the initiative and fight it on our terms, when we have the maximum advantage.

It's five minutes to midnight. The time to strike Iran is now.
Sorry to quote so much here - there's even more at the link - but when you see the backwards-looking, unhinged, rage-fueled and suicidally insane Left blow off what's plainly obvious because it doesn't fit their Bush Derangement Syndrome-corroded minds and thirst for revenge, it's hard to feel optimistic. They will lead us to annihilation if they believe that it would hurt Dubya's poll numbers.

We end where we started, with Dean Barnett's post, "Imagining Victory" (lousy title) which posits:
HE FIRST STEP TO victory on the global war terror will be dropping that stupid name “global war on terror.” This is the first war in our history where we’ve declined to even identify who we’re fighting. In the Civil War, the Union didn’t pause to label the Rebs and in World War II we willingly called out the Axis Powers.

But in this war, we resolutely refuse to identify who we’re fighting. Most of the readers of this site know that we’re fighting the followers of radical Islam; they want so badly to spread their own perverse philosophy that they want and need us dead. Most people who have seriously intellectually engaged with the current struggle know this. I don’t think it’s the tiresome braying of CAIR that’s triggered our reticence. I think it’s our own highly refined reluctance to offend that shackles us.

When the neo-cons (like me) said that we would be greeted with garlands of roses in Iraq, we meant it. We couldn’t imagine anyone preferring an 8th century theocracy to freedom and liberty. But subsequent events in Iraq and Palestine have had to give any thinking person pause. The people of Palestine democratically opted for a government that promises non-stop war with a much more powerful enemy. Where the people of Iraq stand remains opaque.

[snip]

Until the Jihadists realize they can’t win, they will continue to fight. Every instance of Western weakness succors them. Every U.N. resolution, European cry for diplomacy and academic case for moral equivalency feeds their notion that their victory is inevitable.

Getting to victory will be an ugly thing. Our weapons will kill innocents, just as they did in Nagasaki and Dresden. And we will suffer our own losses. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that America will have to suffer a grievous loss before unshackling its own might. And our first grievous loss will not be our last. Like any global conflagration, this one will be full of horrors, horrors that most refuse to contemplate.

SO WHAT’S THE ALTERNATIVE? Graham Allison, Joe Nye and other Kennedy School types will tell you that we can talk Radical Islamists out of this whole crazy Jihad thing with just some judicious use of our “soft power.” We can win hearts and minds, they argue, if we just try a little tenderness.

Their argument, however, betrays a spectacular ignorance regarding Jihad philosophy . There’s nothing new going on here, nothing that’s not 14 centuries old. The only difference is that a trillion dollars in petro-dollars has given the forces of Jihad power and reach that even the Prophet never imagined. To think we can jawbone our way out of this is dangerously wishful thinking.

It’s an ugly situation. It’s a miserable reality. But denying it or creating elegant professorial sophistries won’t make it vanish.

We can win and we will win, but doing so will be neither painless, bloodless or easy.
Judging from the hand-wringing and wailing about our casualties - which are much higher than they would've been if we hadn't fought this war half-assed; frozen by White Guilt; wasting our soldiers lives and bodies needlessly - it's clear that the intelligencia have have succeeded in making surrender and hopes for merciful treatment by our new masters the preferred course of inaction by the public. "NO WAR FOR OUR OWN SURVIVAL!" may as well be the chant of these sheeple. (Never cared for that term, but it fits here.)

The suicide-inducing disease of liberalism has sapped the spines and gonads of the world and the Islamofascists know it and they will sweep thru us like the armies of the dead in "Return of the King". When you've got three Palestinians getting caught in Michigan with 1000 cell phones which can be used to set off bombs, Madrid-style; Keith Olberman making the UK plane-bombing plot sound like a Team Dubya scam; Mike Wallace rushing to Iran to suck the Iranian Hitler's dick, pronounce it tasty and refer to Israel as "the Zionist state"; and now reports that the pathetic PM of Israel, Olmert, who mismanaged Israel's response to Hezbollah's terror is about to buy into a UN deal which will hand Israel it's first defeat in war (and probably not the last), the jihadis, with their single-minded focus on incinerating the future must be sharpening their daggers and smiling at the victory that will be handed to them more than won.

Yeah, try to have a nice weekend knowing all this.

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