Judicious Asininity

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Tue Oct 31, 2006

How many times can you say b.s. to a TV program?

CNN's Broken Government set a new record in our house

Last count, 587 times! I relaxed a bit when they dragged out the Democrat's conscience of the Senate, Robert "Sheets Byrd' to shore up their un-ending stream of lies, distortions, mis-representations and outright treachery. You'd expect a slight attempt at balance. But then I remembered I was watching CNN, the people who think it's just dandy to show terrorists killing American soldiers, the people who hid Saddam's crimes so they could maintain a "news" presence in Iraq.

George Soros - Terrorist defender in WW4

Nazi collaborator in WW2

Anyone following the efforts of the left to undermine the President and this nation will know that George Soros has been using the fortune he made from currency speculation to finance those efforts.

We also know that he was a Hungarian Jew who escaped the holocaust. Sweetness and Light has posted some of the transcript of a 60 minutes interview with George Soros from 1998. I'll quote a small portion:

KROFT: (Voiceover) And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.

Mr. SOROS: Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that's when my character was made.

KROFT: In what way?

Mr. SOROS: That one should think ahead. One should understand and--and anticipate events and when--when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a--a very personal experience of evil.

KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.

Mr. SOROS: Yes. Yes.

KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.

Mr. SOROS: Yes. That's right. Yes.

KROFT: I mean, that's--that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?

Mr. SOROS: Not--not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't--you don't see the connection. But it was--it created no--no problem at all.

KROFT: No feeling of guilt?

Mr. SOROS: No.

KROFT: For example that, 'I'm Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.' None of that?

Mr. SOROS: Well, of course I c--I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was--well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in markets--that if I weren't there--of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would--would--would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the--whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the--I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.

I suppose he thinks he had no role in what happened to his fellow Hungarian Jews, the ones who did not escape the Nazis, the ones who went up in smoke in the Nazi death camps. It wasn't him, so he didn't care. Millions of Jews perished. Millions more experienced deep guilt and shame because they could not save their families and communities from the Holocaust. Not Soros. I think Sweetness and Light is right:

But the statements he made in this interview to my mind are quite chilling. He forgives himself everything. He says that if he hadn't done it somebody else would have.

All of which would seem to indicate that Mr. Soros has no conscience. A lack of conscience is said to be a common symptom of sociopaths.

Sun Oct 29, 2006

The truth will out

A brilliant columnist catches our President in a moment of brilliance

Mark Steyn reports that:

Bush concluded with an exasperated: "If it's not the Crusades, it's the cartoons."

Jihadists have become expert at exploiting our PC attitudes to our disavantage. Our President gets it.

Fri Oct 27, 2006

Can the TSA stop a cunning bomber?

Consider what has worked for terrorists in the past

Take the two Chechen women who brought down two Russian planes within minutes of each other. They used RDX, a detectable explosive, but smuggled it past lax Russian security. The Jihadists make common cause with the Chechens. They would no doubt share expertise.

Then we have Ramzi Yousef

who was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, concocted a plan a year later to attack 11 flights traveling from central Asia to the United States. The plot was uncovered in the Philippines in January 1995, two weeks before its execution date, after Yousef and others accidentally started a fire in their apartment and police showed up.

Before he was arrested, Yousef did a trial run with a lower-power bomb. He assembled it in the lavatory of a flight from Manila to Japan and left it on board after he departed on a connecting flight. The bomb exploded, but the Boeing 747 limped to an emergency landing with only one casualty.

Documents found on Yousef's computer that emerged during his trial (Click here for PDF) showed that the plotters had filled bottles of contact lens solution with nitroglycerin and planned to use Casio digital watches as the timers, coupled with two 9-volt batteries in the bomb as a power source. The 9/11 Commission's report said Yousef also had prepared dolls wearing clothes containing nitrocellulose, an explosive compound.

I've previously noted that Yousef may have had an indirect hand in the loss of TWA 800.

We know that the Jihadists have considerable expertise in using cell phones to trigger IED explosions. What would it take for them to smuggle a bomb in their checked luggage on board? Can they hermetically seal an RDX bomb so it can only be detected by X-rays? If they can do that then a passenger could trigger an explosive with a cell phone. But, why bother? Remember Pan Am flight 103?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that terrorists could easily take down passenger jets. They've succeeded in the past. Why haven't they tried more often? There are stable binary liquid explosives, such as Lixor, that they could smuggle aboard aircraft. Heck, all they have to do is infiltrate the crews who clean or maintain aircraft.

I tend towards the bigger bang theory. How do you top 9/11? Bombing a few planes wouldn't be enough. All it would do is tighten airline security to the point where the terrorists themselves could not travel. The public would demand Muslim free air travel. Without relatively free air travel, terrorists could not attack Western targets.

So we see amateur efforts, such as the UK plot, that tie up resources and create public resentment at the authorities. But there is no concerted effort to bomb planes. The terrorist's efforts are now directed towards bigger bangs.

What happened to the Plame Blame Game?

Nada according to the MSM

Rove's off the hook; they're off the book.

Typical.

Tue Oct 24, 2006

TSA Insanity

What a huge waste of resources

I flew from Cleveland to Hartford and back over the weekend to run the Mystic Places marathon. It was a nice trip but there were large bottlenecks at both airports where travellers went through TSA screening. Everybody was checked for explosives using the "puffer kiosk". Everybody had to take their shoes off. They are still checking fluids and one young woman was forced to ditch an expensive bottle of perfume because it contained more than 3oz of fluid. What are the chances that this woman and her boyfriend could construct a bomb on board using this perfume? Pretty remote. What are the chances that a woman could smuggle explosives aboard a plane using body cavities? Pretty good. It happened twice in Russia.

The shoe bomber plot was widely publicized so we now get to take off our shoes. The fluid plot was well also widely publicized so we can't carry common fluids onto a plane. The Chechen plot that used body cavities was not widely publicised so body cavities get a free pass, despite the fact that terrorists were successful using that technique. Why the double standard? Maybe it's because searching everyone's body cavities would expose the TSA procedures for what they are: a useless sham that lulls everybody into a false sense of security.

Could the "puffer kiosk" have detected the Chechen women before they got on board? I'd feel a hell of a lot better if it could.

Thu Oct 19, 2006

Leaker caught?

You mean, a Democrat staffer on the House Intelligence Committee leaked to the NYT?

Via Pajamas Media we see this LA Times report that:

House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra has suspended a Democratic staff member because of concerns he may have leaked a high-level intelligence assessment to The New York Times last month.
...
An aide to California Rep. Jane Harman, the committee's top Democrat, did not have an immediate comment Thursday night.

The New York Times did not immediately answer a telephone message seeking comment.

I think water boarding would be the appropriate way to deal with leakers. In fact, singularly appropriate. They'd suffer no lasting harm but we'd soon find out how much damage they'd done to our nation's security.

Wed Oct 18, 2006

Why the GOP will win the House and Senate

9/11 Republicans are petrified by the prospects of a Democrat victory

My wife is a social liberal/fiscal conservative who generally voted the for candidates who most closely tracked her agenda. Sometimes they'd be Democrats and sometimes Republicans. Not any more. She knows where Neo Neocon is coming from. The behavior of the Democrats since 9/11 has convinced her that a Democrat victory in November would be a victory for radical Islam and a disaster for Western civilization. The party that rejected Joe Lieberman and embraced Michael Moore is not a party that can defend the United States. A party that wants to grant terrorists more rights than US citizens would leave us defenceless against their plots. A party that thinks monitoring terrorist communications threatens our constitutional rights is not to be trusted with our lives. A senior Democrat hawk who suggests the US can withdraw its military assets to Okinawa repesents a party without a clue about how to defend the United States and our way of life.

The Republicans have angered the base. The GOP's wanton spending and expansion of entitlement programs has not gone unnoticed by fiscal conservatives. But we know the Democrats would be worse and that stays our hands from pulling the Donkey lever. The GOP's reluctance to stem the flood of illegal immigrants has angered those who believe in the rule of law. But the Democrats would be far, far worse. If they had their way, every illegal would be given the right to vote Democrat.

Yes, the base is unhappy with the GOP and the enthusiasm is not there. The polls reflect that. But what they don't reflect is the base's fear of what a Democrat victory would mean. That fear will drive the base to the polls on election day. My wife sure hopes I'm right.

Tue Oct 17, 2006

Don King helps Michael Steele in Maryland

Not the first time King has done the right thing

The Baltimore Sun notes that King is supporting Steele's senate bid. Of course, it has to trash King by dwelling on his past. But there is one act that tells me that King is a patriotic American. Blackfive has the story of how Don King treated a group of Marines to a prize fight in Las Vegas. The highlight:

Late Thursday, I received a call from Coylette James who also works for Mr. King. This time, I didn't ask, "Don who?" She said there was a problem with the shipping company and would it be OK if she sent the tickets in the morning via air freight.

As promised, the tickets arrived at the Palm Springs airport, and when my two young Marines returned with the box, we were all shocked. True to their word, they'd sent us 200 free tickets. What they didn't tell us is that they were $400 and $600 seats.

It's a good story and it paints a rather different picture of King. It also helps explain why he is helping Michael Steele.

Mon Oct 16, 2006

Politicized science is a disturbing development

Two recent examples reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works

One:

Almost like clockwork, the formerly respected British medical journal, The Lancet, publishes another high estimate of deaths attributable the US invasion of Iraq just before anotherUS election. LGF links to a debunking of the Lancet Report by Iraqi Body Count, an organization that does not support the effort to bring freedom to Iraq. Of course, the Lancet is based on extrapolating from a snmall, unrepresentative sample to a much larger population. Bogus assumptions always deliver bogus results. So, what is such easily debunked rubbish doing in a peer-reviewed medical journal? Politics, leftist politics, to be more specific. Lying for your cause is justifiable. Where have I heard that before? Oh, that's standard Muslim practice ordained by Mohammed himself.

Two:

Instapundit links to a piece by Brendan O’Neill discussing the demonization of those heretics to doubt the truth that runaway global warming, caused by man's activities, is going to destroy the planet. I'll believe that when the true believers explain why the Earth warmed above present day temperatures during the medieval warm period, and why such warming is more dangerous than the next ice age, which is overdue. It's gotten so bad that the true believers have taken to calling the skeptics "global warming deniers" is an obvious ploy to link the skeptics to holocaust deniers. O'Neill explains how badly the argument has been politicized:

Some take the moral equivalence between climate change denial and Holocaust denial to its logical conclusion. They argue that climate change deniers are actually complicit in a future Holocaust – the global warming Holocaust – and thus will have to be brought to trial in the future. Green author and columnist Mark Lynas writes: ‘I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead. I put [their climate change denial] in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial – except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have to answer for their crimes.’ (11)

There is something deeply repugnant in marshalling the Holocaust in this way, both to berate climate change deniers and also as a convenient snapshot of what is to come if the planet continues to get warmer. First, the evidence is irrefutable that six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis; that is an historical event that has been thoroughly investigated, interrogated and proven beyond reasonable doubt. (Although as the American-Jewish academic and warrior against Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt, has pointed out, even the Nazi Holocaust is not above debate and re-evalution; it is not a ‘theology’.) There is no such proof or evidence (how could there be?) that global warming will cause a similar calamity. Second, it is, yet again, a cynical attempt to close down debate. The H-word is uttered as a kind of moral absolute that no one could possibly question. We are all against what happened during the first Holocaust, so we will be against the ‘next Holocaust’, too, right? And if not – if you do not take seriously the coming ‘global warming Holocaust’ – then you are clearly wicked, the equivalent of the David Irvings of this world, someone who should possibly even be locked up or certainly tried at a future date.

O'Neill also notes how unscientific the global warming zeolots have become:

Yet some scientists have attacked the idea that there can ever be untouchable cast-iron scientific facts, which should be immune from debate or protected from oil-moneyed think-tanks. An open letter to the Society – signed by Tim Ball, a professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg, and others – argues that ‘scientific inquiry is unique because it requires falsifiability’: ‘The beauty of science is that no issue is ever “settled”, that no question is beyond being more fully understood, that no conclusion is immune to further experimentation. And yet for the first time in history, the Royal Society is shamelessly using the media to say emphatically: “case closed” on all issues related to climate change.’

Or as Charles Jones, an emeritus English professor at the University of Edinburgh, put it in a letter to a publication that recently lambasted climate change deniers, ‘[W]e are left with the feeling that [climate change] is a scientific model which is unfalsifiable and which has not been – and indeed cannot be – the subject of any theoretical counter-proposals whatsoever. As such, it must surely be unique in the history of science. Even a powerful model such as Relativity Theory has been the object of scientific debate and emendation.’

I have previously posted on Michael Mann's hocky-stick graph that flattens out the medieval warming period and little ice-age, and tacks on a dramatic rise in temperatures in the 20th century. Needless to say, he makes the same "mistake" as the authors of the Lancet body-count paper; he misuses statistics, as the Wegman report reported. But Mann delivered politically correct results that the gullible have spewed forth.

Sat Oct 14, 2006

So, where are the moderate Muslim countries?

Strike Bangladesh from the list

Done With Mirrors discusses the plight of Mr. Salah Choudhury, a Muslim Bangladeshi journalist. According to the WSJ, :

Assuming he survives till Thursday, he will face charges of blasphemy, sedition, treason and espionage in a Dhaka courtroom. His crime is to have tried to attend a writers' conference in Tel Aviv on how the media can foster world peace. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.

Someone should tell the State Department to wise up. Back to the WSJ:

Welcome to Bangladesh, a country the State Department's Richard Boucher recently portrayed in congressional testimony as "a traditionally moderate and tolerant country" that shares America's "commitment to democracy, human rights and the rule of law." That's an interesting way to describe a country ... whose governing coalition, in addition to the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, includes two fundamentalist Islamic parties that advocate the imposition of Shariah law. There are an estimated 64,000 madrassas (religious schools) in Bangladesh. ... In March the Peace Corps was forced to leave the country for fear of terrorist attacks. Seven other journalists have also been brought up on sedition charges by Ms. Zia's government, most of them for attempting to document Bangladesh's repression of religious minorities.

My definition of a moderate Muslim country: one which protects the rights of religious minorities. On that count, Bangladesh joins Indonesia and Pakistan as countries where religious minorities live under constant threat of violence perpetrated by the Muslim majority. Ditto most of the Middle East, including Iraq and Egypt.

The moderate Muslim country seems as mythical as the moderate Muslim majority.

Thu Oct 12, 2006

Beware Organic foods

Organic foods are more poisonous than those grown with pesticides

Jim Miller makes the point:

But don't commercial pesticides add an additional risk? Not necessarily. And to understand that, you need to know a fascinating fact about plants. Plants do not (with exceptions such as fruits) like to be eaten. And so they have evolved, over the years, many defenses against animals that would eat them. In particular, they have invented, if you will, their own chemical pesticides, such as nicotine.

Producing these pesticides is expensive for the plant; it takes away energy that the plant could be putting into stems, leaves, and seeds, so the plants vary the amounts of pesticides they produce depending on the level of attack from animals, especially insects. Plants grown "organically" often have higher levels of insect damage, which suggests that that they also have much higher levels of pesticides, natural pesticides. And those pesticides are not, unlike most commercial pesticides, on the surface, where they can be washed off.

Plant breeders have tried to make plants more pest resistant by traditional breeding techniques. This 1989 article by Bruce N. Ames, Chairman of the Dept. of Biochemistry, Univ. of Calif. at Berkeley, points out the problem:

All plants produce their own natural pesticides to protect themselves against fungi, insects, and predators such as man. Tens of thousands of these natural pesticides have been discovered,and every species of plant contains its own set of toxins, usually a few dozen. When plants are stressed or damaged, such as during a pest attack, they increase their natural pesticide levels manyfold, occasionally to levels that are acutely toxic to humans. Only a tiny percentage of these natural pesticides has been tested in animal cancer tests, but of those that have been tested, the percentage that turns out to be carcinogenic is about as high as for man-made pesticides (about 30 percent). The same appears to be true for natural teratogens (agents that cause birth defects). It is highly probable that almost every plant product in the supermarket contains natural carcinogens and teratogens. The pesticides that we are eating are 99.99 percent all natural (we eat 10,000 times more natural than man-made pesticides), are relatively new to the modern diet, because most of our plant foods were brought to Europe within the last 500 years from the Americas, Africa, and Asia (and vice versa). In response to the environmentalist campaign about tiny traces of man-made pesticides, plant breeders are active in developing
varieties that are naturally pest resistant. However, the primary way plant breeders are able to increase natural resistance to pests is to breed plants with increased levels of natural pesticides. It should be no surprise, then, that a newly introduced variety of insect-resistant potato had to be withdrawn from the market, due to acute toxicity to humans caused be much higher levels of the teratogens solanine and chaconine than are normally present in potatoes.

Similarly, a new variety of insect-resistant celery recently introduced in the United States had to be withdrawn after it caused widespread outbreaks of dermatitis due to a concentration of carcinogens at 9,000 ppb rather than the usual 900 ppb. Many more such cases are likely to crop up--they are undetected as yet due to lack of immediate observable effects--because there is a fundamental trade-off between nature's pesticides and man-made pesticides.

Worse, organic foods require more space for cultivation. More farm land means less space for nature preserves. So, skip the expensive organic sections at your local supermarket and head for the regular aisles. Better to wash off man-made pesticides than ingest an excess of natural pesticides.

Note that genetically engineered plants are a different story.

Tue Oct 10, 2006

North Korea is not just a US problem

Let North Korea's neighbors deal with the problem

Tigerhawk asks:

Another question: The North Koreans have humiliated China, which issued a statement on Sunday that a North Korean nuclear test "could not be tolerated." This is where we learn what kind of dragon China really is. Meanwhile, Japan is going to get even jumpier. With the war generation all but dead and buried, will this be the flipping of the switch in Japanese opinion that gets that country marching in a new direction?

As I noted in my facetious suggestion that Dear Leader be awarded the Olympic Games in exchange for giving up his nukes, China has a lot to lose if North Korea continues down the road to nuclear weapons.

South Korea has the most to lose if Dear Leader decides to reunite Korea. An anti-missile system doesn't help South Korea much; North Korea can deliver a nuke to Seoul in a conventional artillery and rocket barrage. South Korea's only defense is good old M.A.D. So that means that an economically advanced country has a strong incentive to go nuclear.

Japan has already had a Nork missile lobbed over its air space. It sure doesn't want those missiles tipped with a nuke. A missile defense system would help Japan. But everyone knows that you can't win by playing defense. Count another nuclear power in China's backyard.

Russia wouldn't be happy with South Korea and Japan becoming nuclear powers. Its Eastern seaboard is tough enough to defend without four nuclear powers squabbling on its border.

So, where does that leave Uncle Sam? The North Koreans could send a missile or two our way but our missile defense systems are good enough to deal with that threat. The biggest problem is the transfer of North Korean nuclear weapons and technology to state sponsors of terrorism, like Iran. Its neighbor's will pay close attention to anything shipped by land. Given that the North Koreans have broken virtually every agreement they ever signed, the US and its allies will likely get UN permission to monitor North Korean shipping. With enough pressure, the US should be able to get North Korean's neighbors to deny them overflight permission. In other words, sanctions can keep North Korea bottled up.

The Bush administration's strategy of working with North Korea's neighbors is the right approach. China, South Korea, Japan and Russia have more to lose than the US in the short term. China and South Korea have the most leverage. Bush should toss the ball in their court.

Mon Oct 09, 2006

North Korea, China and the Olympics

My solution to the crisis

Communist nations love the Olympics. It puts them on the world stage and gives them undeserved credibility. Their athlete factories can churn out medal winners and demonstrate that the socialist system works better than the capitalistic system. The Beijing 2008 Olympics are a really big deal for China. That's one of the reasons why they want to keep North Korea quiet until after the Olympics. Unfortunately, North Korea wouldn't play along and tested their baby nuke.

This puts tremendous pressure on China's leaders. They don't want North Korea to collapse in the lead up to the Olympics. They don't want war to break out on the Korean peninsula. Most of all, they don't want Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to go nuclear. If this is a tough problem for the US, it is an even tougher problem for China.

How to buy off North Korea? Give them the 2012 Olympics. Staging the games is so darned expensive they'll have no money left over to build nukes. To recoup the expense they'll have to open up the country to hundreds of thousands of tourists. But the prestige of staging the games is so great that Dear Leader just might fall for it.

Sun Oct 08, 2006

Phony Foley Polling

Why polls can't be trusted

A Denver-based company called my wife yesterday to ask a series of questions to be used in some pre-election poll. Most of the questions were the expected ones about various candidates for state and national office. However, towards the end of the survey, there were several questions about Mark Foley, Dennis Hastert, and the two parties. The questions themselves were so loaded that it was impossible to answer them without validating the assumptions on which they were based. She spent several minutes insisting that the chap conducting the survey go to his supervisor to challenge the wording of the questions. After perhaps 5 or 6 minutes, her call was disconnected, maybe because it had exceeded a time limit.

This is not an exact replication of the question; she didn't tape the interview. But how would you answer this:

Q: Do you think that Republicans covered up the sex scandal involving a Congressmen and a minor?

There was no sex, there was no cover-up, and the page in question was over the legal age of consent in DC. One would have thought pollsters were above asking questions like "when did you stop beating your wife?" Apparently not.

Fri Oct 06, 2006

Who to believe on Gitmo?

Blogger Patterico's contact or the hearsay of a paralegal?

According to AP:

The Pentagon said Friday that it will investigate a Marine's sworn statement that guards at Guantanamo Bay bragged about beating detainees and that they described it as common practice.

The Marine, a paralegal who was at the U.S. Navy station in Cuba last month, alleges that several guards she talked to at the base club admitted routinely hitting detainees.

"From the whole conversation, I understood that striking detainees was a common practice," the sergeant wrote. "Everyone in the group laughed at the others' stories of beating detainees."

The woman's name was blacked out of a copy of a two-page affidavit provided to The Associated Press by a civilian defense attorney working with Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, the Marine Corps' defense coordinator for the Western United States and based at Camp Pendleton.

Meanwhile Patterico has been publishing interviews with Stashiu, an Army nurse who served at Guantánamo.

I pressed for more detail on incidents of excessive force against, or mistreatment of, the detainees. How many such incidents occurred while Stashiu was there? Were the detainees injured badly? Were the offenders court-martialed? What happened to them?
There were maybe 4 or 5 incidents that I heard of. At least one resulted in a courts-martial. The rest were punished because no matter how provoked you were, that was the job. I am not aware of anyone who messed with a detainee without being struck first, but being struck was not a license to retaliate. We were only allowed enough of a response to defend ourselves and disengage or contain the detainee. Any gratuitous response was worth at least a field-grade level non-judicial punishment (fairly harsh and pretty damaging to a career, but not necessarily a career-killer).
Did Stashiu do physical exams in any way as part of his examinations? Did he ever see signs of physical abuse?
We did physical assessments at admission (short of what most would consider a physical exam, but relatively thorough and included vital signs, visual inspection, and questions about history and what brought them in to us.) I saw one injured detainee from a forced cell extraction who had vigorously resisted because he was paranoid and delusional (definitely not faking). He later explained to me how the minor injury happened and told me he didn’t blame the guards. He did remember the incident, but was not in complete control of his behavior at the time. Nothing broken or sutured and quickly treated. No indications of abuse ever came to my attention or I would have reported it.
I asked if any detainees had just disappeared while Stashiu was stationed at Guantánamo? To his knowledge, did any die under suspicious circumstances?
None disappeared or were otherwise unaccounted for to the best of my knowledge. Nobody died under any circumstances, suspicious or otherwise, while I was there.

Perhaps both are right. The guards at Gitmo take a lot of abuse from the terrorists. Stashiu again:

Consider that flinging “cocktails” of urine, feces, saliva, sperm, vomitus, and combinations thereof was threatened daily by detainees and performed several times each week. Also, verbal abuse from detainees was very common. . . . This was in addition to physical assaults on guards with everything from shanks, kicks, elbows, and a variety of rather clever makeshift weapons.
...
We were told about one female medic who had to have major reconstructive surgery on her face following a detainee assault. She was too close to the beanhole (door opening) and the detainee was able to reach out, grab her head, and pull her face-first into the steel frame of the door, shattering most of the facial bone structure.

Under those circumstance there may well be nasty things said about the terrorists when the guards are off duty. Personally, I'm truly amazed at how much consideration the terrorists have been given. The fact that they can communicate with the outside world is apalling and dangerous to the people who serve at Gitmo and the rest of us. Captain's Quarters isn't impressed that terrorists in US custody can communicate with the outside world:

imprisoned terrorists already in our custody have little problem sending mail to their jihadist friends unmolested

This must stop.

Wed Oct 04, 2006

Foley Hypocrisy

The Democrats stir up partisan mud while the nation is at war

INVESTORS.com editorializes:

The fact that Foley resigned virtually within minutes of being told that ABC News had copies of his salacious e-mails and text messages indicates he at least felt shame for his actions. Can the same be said for Democrats?

Sadly, it doesn't seem so. How else can you explain the following?

• In 1983, then-Democratic Rep. Gerry Studds of Massachusetts was caught in a similar situation. In his case, Studds had sex with a male teenage page — something Foley hasn't been charged with.

Did Studds express contrition? Resign? Quite the contrary. He rejected Congress' censure of him and continued to represent his district until his retirement in 1996.

• In 1989, Rep. Barney Frank, also of Massachusetts, admitted he'd lived with Steve Gobie, a male prostitute who ran a gay sex-for-hire ring out of Frank's apartment. Frank, it was later discovered, used his position to fix 33 parking tickets for Gobie.

What happened to Frank? The House voted 408-18 to reprimand him — a slap on the wrist. Today he's an honored Democratic member of Congress, much in demand as a speaker and "conscience of the party."

• In 2001, President Clinton, who had his own intern problem, commuted the prison sentence of Illinois Rep. Mel Reynolds, who had sex with a 16-year-old campaign volunteer and pressured her to lie about it. (Reynolds also was convicted of campaign spending violations.)

You get the idea. Democrats not only seem OK with the kind of behavior for which Foley is charged, but also they protect and excuse it. Only when it's a Republican do they proclaim themselves shocked — shocked! — when it comes to light.

We can not be surprised at Democrat hypocrisy. When Sandy Berger stole and destroyed highly classified documents by concealing them in his pants, Democrats sloughed it off with a chuckle. When Novak exposed the fact that allegedly undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame had been involved in sending her lying husband to Niger to check on Iraqi intentions to buy yellow-cake, the Democrats and their MSM hand-maidens erupted in righteous fury, pretty much like they are doing now on Foley.

As in the Plame blame game, the water is being muddied. The suggestive emails that Republican leaders saw early on are being conflated with the more explicit instant messages that have just come to light. The MSM is doing nothing to clarify the situation. Why should they? This could be Watergate redux, and the press is looking for the cover-up behind the crime. Hence the hunt for Hastert's hide.

Meanwhile, terrorists are still slaughtering civilians and US troops in Iraq, the Taliban have found a sanctuary in Pakistan, the North Koreans are threatening to test their latest export product, a nuclear weapon, and the Mad Mullahs are getting ever close to being able to wipe Israel off the face of the map with a nuke or two. Do the Democrats have any answer to these problems? Of course not. That's why they are playing the October surprise card to the hilt. What else would a bunch of sore losers do?

Mon Oct 02, 2006

European culture in retreat

So much to lose and nothing to gain

PBS has shown two great music programs recently. Last night we watched the Vienna State Opera 50th Anniversary Reopening Gala. The show was honoring the reopening of the Vienna State Opera House in 1955, ten years after it was virtually destroyed by an allied bombing raid. The music was beautiful and the performances astonishing. We particularly loved the selections from Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, with Soile Isokoski, Angelika Kirchschlager and Genia Kühmeier. This evening we watched Mozart at 250: The Salzburg Festival Celebration. Readers will recall that it was a Mozart Opera that was cancelled because one of the scenes might give offense to Muslims and cause them to kill any infidels involved, or not involved; it doesn't seem to matter to them.

But I wonder how many of the people involved in staging and performimg the great works that are part of Europe's gift to the civilized realize that almost everything they love is حرام Ḥarām or forbidden by the virulent strains of Islam that wage war against the West. The retreats documented by VDH at NRO are the beginning, rather than the end, of waves of appeasement that will sweep Europe. Who's to say that the next performance of Mozart's The Abduction From The Seraglio will not be set upon by Muslims. This Opera is set in a Turkish seraglio (sequestered living quarters used by wives and concubines) and could be seen as somehow insulting to Muslims.

We in America should not be too complacent. Hollywood has not touched the subject of Islamic terrorism since Arnie's True Lies in 1994. True, we did get United 93 and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, but these were historical reenactments. But we have seen no American heroes fighting Muslim badguys and nutjobs in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have seen (not that I did) dreck like Syriana,, that made Big Oil the villain. We have seen (not that I did) Flight Plan, a movie about a passenger jet being taken over by the flight's Air Marshal and a flight attendant, instead of the four obvious Muslims who were on board. Debbie Schlussel gives that garbage short shrift.

So, while America has not yet gone into European appeasement mode, the movie industry that helped rally the nation in WW2, seems to be working for the other side. But one wonders if the people who work in Hollywood have thought about what would happen to them if we lost the war against expansionist Islam? No movies. No sex. No music. No TV, except for religious broadcasts, public executions of infidels, and recruitment ads for suicide bombers. The Nazis would have had good use for Hollywood, minus the Jews, of course, but not Bin Ladin or Ayatollah Khomeini's heirs.

Islam crushes the cultures it conquers. It is slowly doing just that in Europe. If we stop fighting, our culture will suffer the same ghastly fate.

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