Compare and Contrast

Fred:

For years, CAIR has claimed to represent millions of American Muslims. In fact, they claim to represent more Muslim in American than … there are in America. This has alarmed Americans in general as the group often seems to be more aligned with our enemies than us — which isn’t surprising as it spun off from a group funded by Hamas. As you know, Hamas has been waging a terrorist war against Israel and calls for its total destruction. It also promises to see America destroyed. Nowadays, Hamas is busy murdering its Palestinian political rivals.

Bush:

The Bush administration is quietly weighing the prospect of reaching out to the party that founded modern political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood.

So not only is the Bush Doctrine dead, its putative author can’t even remember what it was for.

Saluting Bravery

We need more ex-Muslims like these.

The Chicken Little Agenda

I heard an interview with the author this morning on KSFO. The book sounds like it could be a handy resource for worry-worts. His story about how the “ozone hole” bugaboo got started was pretty funny.

Short version: An assistant to Jack Anderson didn’t understand that the McMurdoe scientists were pulling his leg.

First, God created idiots.

That was just for practice. Then he created school boards.

Mark Twain saw our day.

Fred Spanks Harry

Firmly.

Partition Iraq?

Withdrawing now, and chopping it up into regions won’t end the war; it’ll create several new ones, according to Donald Horowitz.

It is of course still possible to argue that withdrawal is preferable to an open-ended involvement, on the grounds that the high costs to us of involvement exceed the high costs of withdrawal. But the opposite position–which happens to be mine–is also tenable: The consequences of withdrawal are worse than the costs of continuing involvement. That is where the debate should be joined, based on a careful assessment of the comparative advantages of each course and of middle courses, such as partial withdrawal. That would be a serious debate, rather than the vacuous one that Congress has so far engaged in. Is it too much to ask that Congress rise to the occasion, as it did during the Cold War, and get serious about assessing the interests of our country?

Too much to ask of this congress?

More on the offensive

A good post at Confederate Yankee warns

Once reality slowly dawns on the media that they are misunderestimating the scope and scale of the assault, steel yourself for a rush of inaccuracies as they seek to get something, anything published, much of it based upon rumor, some of it based upon outright propaganda and lies.

Good call. I think we can depend on a counter-assault from the MSM before AQ scores many kills.

Just when you thought the UN couldn’t get any lower

There are no words.

The Doctor Is In

Michael Yon has posted the first of his promised dispatches. Petraeus is the doctor, and major surgery is underway.

The enemy will try to herd us into their traps, and likely many of us will be killed before it ends. Already, they have been blowing up bridges, apparently to restrict our movements. Entire buildings are rigged with explosives. They have rockets, mortars, and bombs hidden in places they know we are likely to cross, or places we might seek cover. They will use human shields and force people to drive bombs at us. They will use cameras and make it look like we are ravaging the city and that they are defeating us. By the time you read this, we will be inside Baquba, and we will be killing them. No secrets are spilling here.

Our jets will drop bombs and we will use rockets. Helicopters will cover us, and medevac our wounded and killed. By the time you read this, our artillery will be firing, and our tanks moving in. And Humvees. And Strykers. And other vehicles. Our people will capture key terrain and cutoff escape routes. The idea this time is not to chase al Qaeda out, but to trap and kill them head-on, or in ambushes, or while they sleep. When they are wounded, they will be unable to go to hospitals without being captured, and so their wounds will fester and they will die painfully sometimes. It will be horrible for al Qaeda. Horror and terrorism is what they sow, and tonight they will reap their harvest. They will get no rest. They can only fight and die, or run and try to get away. Nobody is asking for surrender, but if they surrender, they will be taken.

We will go in on foot and fight from house to house if needed. We will shoot rockets into their hiding spaces, and our snipers will shoot them in their heads and chests. This is where all that talk of cancer and big ideas of what should be or could be done will smash head on against the searing reality of combat.

These words flow on the eve of a great battle, but are on hold until the attack is well underway. Nothing is certain. I am here and have been all year. We are in trouble, but we have a great General. The only one, I have long believed, who can lead the way out of this morass. Iraq is not hopeless. Iraq can stand again but first it must cast off these demons. And some of the demons must be killed.

Mock the Jihad

National Lampoon wants to know if they should make a movie called 72 Virgins.

(Warning: Some crude humor. But it’s all at the expense of the Jihadis, so there you go.)

A Load of Hooey

Science is science.

Consensus is politics.

Bryson is a scientist.

You do the math.

Reid Bryson, known as the father of scientific climatology, considers global warming a bunch of hooey.

The UW-Madison professor emeritus, who stands against the scientific consensus on this issue, is referred to as a global warming skeptic. But he is not skeptical that global warming exists, he is just doubtful that humans are the cause of it.

There is no question the earth has been warming. It is coming out of the “Little Ice Age,” he said in an interview this week.

“However, there is no credible evidence that it is due to mankind and carbon dioxide. We’ve been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years. We have not been making very much carbon dioxide for 300 years. It’s been warming up for a long time,” Bryson said.

Military Motivator

Black Five (which turns four years old today – congrats!) found some really funny stuff.

Perspective Matters

I don’t know why John Stossel hasn’t been fired for competence yet.

“[O]ne reason that people are upset by gas prices is that the price is in your face every time you drive by the gas station. But it may surprise [you] that this year the price of lettuce, broccoli and apples increased much more than the price of gas. You probably don’t know that because they don’t post big signs like gas stations do. And think about what it takes to bring us gasoline. First, oil has to be sucked out of the ground, sometimes from deep beneath an ocean or underneath ice, or from places where workers risk their lives. And just to get to the oil means the drill has to bend and dig sideways through as many as seven miles of earth. What they find has to be delivered through long pipelines or shipped in monstrously expensive ships, then converted into three different formulas of gasoline, trucked in trucks that cost more than $100,000 each, and then the gas stations have to spend a fortune on equipment to make sure drivers don’t blow themselves up while filling the tank. Even after all that, gasoline is still cheaper per ounce than the bottled water gas stations sell.” —John Stossel

Yon Checks In

People on his list just got an email saying:

General David Petraeus has announced the beginning of a major offensive in Iraq.

I have satellite gear and should be posting daily updates.

If you haven’t yet, now would be a good time to bookmark his blog.

Meanwhile, he has posted the last of his four part series, Death or Glory. At the end he hints about future dispatches:

As these words go to print, I am entering into major combat along with U.S. forces against Al Qaeda.

Simon Cowell reads Buttle’s World

And he’s taken my advice to heart. Not only did Potts win the contest, but

Potts, who has also landed a record deal with Simon Cowell, the TV show judge, said of fixing his teeth: “I’m not sure about veneers but I do want to get the crown repaired. It would be nice to be able to smile naturally. I feel very self conscious about it at the moment. But whatever I do I’m not going to change who I am.”

You can see a more confident Potts in his deal-clinching performance of Nessun Dorma.

Mr. Cowell: Please make sure you get a good orchestra and engineer. I’m looking forward to this album.

Speaking of Beyond Parody

Even for someone who heads the UN this is pretty stupid.

I scanned the article and couldn’t find the part where it’s Bush’s fault. Must have been an oversight. Give them a day or two.

Major Offensive in Iraq?

Glenn Reynolds got some tantalizing email from Michael Yon, but I see no details yet on the latter’s blog.

Beyond Parody

Even Mark Steyn is almost speechless at the latest from the Episcopalians.

As funny as this is, it’s also scary. This is how a civilization dies.

The kind of soldiers we have

A Chaplain blogs an experience he had in Iraq which is quite telling. They’re all waiting to watch Superman 3, and there’s a glitch during playback of the national anthem.

Now, what would happen if this occurred with 1,000 18-22 year-olds back in the States? I imagine there would be hoots, catcalls, laughter, a few rude comments, and everyone would sit down and call for a movie. Of course, that is, if they had stood for the National Anthem in the first place.

Who’s in charge in Gaza?

Apparently it’s the Mikado.

(If you’re not a Gilbert & Sullivan fan, you have some research to do.)

If you call, they will listen

So says an email Michell Malkin got from a Hill Staffer regarding the upcoming attempt to re-introduce shamnesty.

The hope now lies with the American people. The American people have been speaking – and Senators are beginning to listen. Don’t give up now. It is clear that Senators are beginning to understand that this bill is not supported by a sizable and important segment of the American public – middle America. There are many Senators still on the fence that are being counted on to pass this bill. This is why today it is up to the people. If there is any hope – the American people must speak, and must speak loudly. Make phone calls to Senate offices, repeatedly, and non stop until the bill is defeated. Faxes and email – flood their offices. Fax in voided checks to the NRSC and the RNC with letters saying you won’t support them – and if you have ever given money before, ask for it back. Make very clear that this is the ultimate breach of faith and that there will be consequences.

Read the whole thing.

Pardon me

while I wipe a tear from my eye.

Trashy Art

Museum installations that are mere piles of trash would normally be filed under stereotypes for bad modern art. But this is clever.

Get This Man A Recording Contract

Now.

I’m not generally a fan of operatic tenor voices. To me, Pavarotti is borderline unlistenable. No, sometimes he’s quite unlistenable. The only tenors I’ve actually enjoyed up to now are Placido Domingo and Andrea Bocelli – sometimes.

Paul Potts, for my money, leaves them all in the dust. He’s made me cry – twice – via just YouTube. No other tenor has made me cry even once. I can’t imagine how good he must sound in person, or in a well-engineered recording.

Once again, here he is singing Nessun Dorma.

Update:
Jonah Goldberg, who gets the hat tip for this in the first place, posts a letter which says well what I wanted to say.

His expression before he begins to sing is that of a man resigned to disappointment. Even when he smiles, his eyes convey a profound sadness. He has been a nobody all his life. He, and perhaps only he, knows he has greatness inside of him, but he is obviously a humble man, massively insecure, afraid of rejection, unsure of himself outside the cocoon of anonymity. But you get the feeling he also knows that this may be the one chance he gets to escape the cocoon, and as he begins to sing, you can see him fighting down his fear. I think that is the wellspring of the emotion that pervades his performance. He is fighting against a life of obscurity. By the song’s end, what was an average Joe has stepped up, beaten back his fear, and broken through. In those few seconds, he put the void behind him, and his life will probably be changed forever because he called up the courage at that moment to show what he was really made of. We saw greatness, long denied, finally being born.

Read the whole thing.

Another Update:
He’s had some training, as well as some amateur experience. None of that is surprising; neither does it detract from his performance a whit. Bottom line: He makes an album, I buy it.

I’m With Fred

He’s blogging.

Even though most of the posts are his ABC columns, I do get the impression that he writes his own stuff.

Grab the Hankys

You won’t believe this.

Peter Robinson interviews Fred Thompson

Peter, for those keeping score, wrote Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech.

Fred is running for President.

They met the other day.
Peter wrote this on The Corner:

On Monday, former senator Fred Thompson spent half a day at the Hoover Institution, discussing policy with a roomful of Hoover fellows. In this, my first encounter with Thompson, I was hugely impressed—hugely. He proved relaxed, likeable, determined, warm, funny, and—a trait not always seen in candidates for high office—humble. (He reached into his briefcase, pulled out a three-ring binder, and then spent the entire session taking notes as assiduously as a college student.)

This Explains the Funny Accent in Sweden

Or something like that.

Worried about the West Nile Virus?

Don’t be.

An Atheist’s Defense of Religion

This is a very interesting article, and a pretty close parallel to my own thinking these days.

The obvious examples of secularized religions are communism, socialism, and fascism, each of which generally involves worshipping government by slightly different rituals or for slightly different reasons. As these convictions faded, faith in the welfare state, and especially environmental protection, has risen to take their place for reasons government should be worshipped. Environmentalist devotees claim that we will experience the apocalypse disasters, for which some people are rebuilding Noah’s Ark. These disasters can be prevented if we take the advice of prophets people who understand, like Al Gore. Of course, if we sin pollute a little too much, well, we can always buy indulgences carbon offsets.

It’s exactly right to call Algore’s brand of environuttism a religion, because it’s all about faith, transforming humans, and not remotely about science. My quibble is that, to me, Atheism is also a religion, because it relies on unprovable, ergo mystical, knowledge. But I think I know what kind of atheist he means.

Another way to put it, stated with intended irony, is “by their fruits ye shall know them”. I now judge the world’s religions by what sort of people they produce. Judaism and Christianity have, in the last few centuries, become what Douglas Adams called “mostly harmless”. The “Religion of Peace”, on the other hand, has some serious growing up to do.