Happy 4th of July!

This morning, as I often do, I caught up on the radio programs I missed during the week while I was at work (where I can't listen to anything except requests for intelligence, and coworkers' complaints and praises about spouses and ex-spouses, and children, and...well, you know the story). Apparently, I again missed another great segment of Hugh Hewitt's radio show yesterday (3 July).

Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire and Killing Rommel, spoke briefly with Hugh about a new project that's related to an early novel he wrote about Alexander the Great — The Afghan Campaign. Pressfield has noted some striking similarities with Alexander's campaign and the recent campaigns by U.S. and coalition forces in Operation Enduring Freedom and also Operation Iraqi Freedom. Pressfield has also produced five short (about 5 minutes each) videos about the one element that existed in Afghanistan then, 2,300 years ago, and today.

Watch these very insightful videos at Blog.StevenPressfield.com. These are must see videos for anyone with loved ones in theater, or who just happen to care about our nation's efforts against these mountain people on the other side of the world.

NOTE: Mr. Pressfield, thank you very much for sending those signed copies of Killing Rommel to my friends, the two active duty service members. They greatly appreciated the generous gift.

        

I had to work a few hours today, and when I left the office and started my car to head home, C-SPAN Radio (FM 90.1) was on. Jeremy McInerney, University of Pennsylvania, was speaking about Thucydides and his remarkable revolution of historical writing on the Peloponesian War, and how the lessons of that war, as detailed by Thucydides, can provide insight into the modern world, particularly for the Obama administration [source | Watch: Part One, Part Two, Part Three].

Within just a few minutes I was able to determine exactly where on the political spectrum Professor McInerney stood. Not because of any particular political statement, but rather the way in which he placed something in context (at about 5:00 minutes into the lecture). Here's the key quote that exposed the professor's ideological position. The professor was examining the notion that some believe that "because human nature is the same, human history will always play out along predictable lines, either repeating itself, or coming close to that." The professor continued:

Now, this is a favorite view among those who, for example, will always return to Nazism as the test case of how, or how not, to behave. [They say,] "We appeased Hitler and saw the sorry outcome of that policy, therefore do not appease Osama bin Laden, do not appease Kim il-Jung, the Dear Leader, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, or whoever else happens to be on our hit list."

With that statement, I immediately recognized the professor as a Leftist. The professor is suggesting that Osama bin Laden and the others he cited somehow just happened to find themselves on a U.S. government "hit list." This is just patently absurd. It suggests that these people didn't distinguish themselves as dictators with a ruthless track record of slaughtering thousands (and, in the case of Kim and Pol Pot, millions) of innocent people in the pursuit of greater personal power. Even more, it suggests that the United States invents hit lists of arbitrarily selected world leaders and then contrives causes to isolate them from the global community.

Professor McInerney's ideas are dangerously naive, and were dissected and refuted brilliantly by Lee Harris in his book Civilization and its Enemies (2004). In that book, Harris argues that ruthlessness can only be defeated by those willing to act with near equal ruthlessness. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is more likely to accept the advice of those like Professor McInerney.

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson offered some sober advice that's a far cry from the appeasement rhetoric of Professor McInerney.

        

        

When the stimulus bill was up for votes back in March, the Obama administraiton was warning that without the stimulus, the economy would reach record low levels and unemployment rates could reach 9%. Well, the stimulus passed, and here's the results. (h/t Instapundit)

        

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) wants to divert the money paid back from financial institutions to the U.S. Treasury (that is what's supposed to happen in accordance with the TARP legislation that was passed last year), and direct toward low income housing projects instead of paying down the federal debt, notes John Hinderaker of Powerline.

Paying down the debt would benefit all Americans, regardless of race, class, or gender. But not everyone from every race, class, or gender votes Democrat. What group does vote 100% Democrat? Low-income urbanites, which is who Frank wants to keep on the dole and dependent on the federal government (Barney Frank in particular) and its beneficience (with other people's money).

As John Hinderaker suggested, everyone should call their representative and demand this legislation never get to the House floor.

        

The scary woman from California is still in Israeli custody.

        

Oops. They remembered Abu Ghraib (of course), but forgot "Ladies and Gentlemen: We got him!"

        

Yes. The title of this post is no joke. Watch.

        

The abortion mills at Planned Parenthood are still providing cover for child molesters [watch], and the establishment media remain silent. Of course, to draw attention this outrage may compromise the holiest of all rites of the secular Left's religion — SELF.

Child molesters around the country are breathing a great sigh of relief every time Planned Parenthood covers up one of their cohorts' dirty deeds. And parents around the country just don't give a damn, because abortion is the sacred rite of all American girls who want to join the not-so-exclusive religion of SELF — a religion that requires at least one child sacrifice and absolutely no guilt about anything, ever, because guilt is the enemy of selfishness.

Previous post: Planned Parenthood Protecting Pedophiles

        

California’s Speaker of the Assembly, Karen Bass, let the veil slip when she criticized the American public for contacting their elected public servants and reminding them who's the boss. In short, she called anyone who thinks elected officials should be accountable to the electorate and who contacts their elected representatives a terrorist — not a constituent or voter — she called them terrorists! [Source]

It's high time that our elected officials be reminded that they work for us, something I've written about before [read]. Unfortunately, the only way to do that is to vote them out of office. However, that's not likely to happen to any Leftist Democrats in office. Their constituents are fascists and statists already, and are more than happy to let a cadre of elitists rule their lives. This fact was evidenced by a Leftist who admitted that she likes dictators, as long as they provide free healthcare [source].

Is there any wonder why the Obama administration is committed to establishing a federally-run healthcare program?

This whole affair fits rather nicely into the mindset of the statist or Leftist. To the statist, private property and capitalism are anathema to their goal of obtaining power over all aspects of people's lives. The Cap-and-Trade bill that passed the House last week [source] offered another glimpse into the way the Left is attempting to acquire all power and eliminate its greatest foe — the private citizen, armed, informed, self-sufficient, and skeptical of anyone who says "just give me more control over your assets and income and let me make the tough decisions for you, and I'll make your life much better — I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

        

On March 9, 2009, President Barack Obama overturned the ban established by President Bush in 2001 on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. During the signing ceremony, Mr. Obama said his administration (unlike the backward retards in the Bush administration) would not let politics interfere with the advancement of science [source].

In keeping with his trend of broken campaign promises [source | source | source | source | source | source], it appears Mr. Obama just is not able to stay above politics — in spite of his matra of "change you can believe in." As Michelle Malkin noted today, instead of preventing politics from interfering with science, President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn't let science interfere with politics. An EPA research analyst, Alan Carlin, was instructed by his superior to shut up about his report.

That report (a scientific report, by the way) contradicts what the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats have been selling to the American public these past few months regarding global warming and carbon emissions. Leftists have been telling Americans that the world is on the verge of imminent catastrophe unless we reduce carbon emissions, and in order to get a new piece of legislation on carbon emissions passed and sent to the president for his signature, they've been relying upon their standard hyperbolic rhetoric of doom-and-gloom.

Apparently the report just didn't jibe with the politically correct paradigm of man-made global warming causing a catastrophe, and America coming to the rescue of the world by reducing global warming (er, I mean, climate change). Malkin pointed out that a series of internal EPA emails reveals how the agency treats EPA scientists who don't toe the party line:

On March 12, Carlin's director, Al McGartland, forbade him from having "any direct communication" with anyone outside his office about his study. "There should be no meetings, e-mails, written statements, phone calls, etc." On March 16, Carlin urged his superiors to forward his work to EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, which runs the agency's climate change program. A day later, McGartland dismissed Carlin and showed his true, politicized colors: "The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. … I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." Contrary comments, in other words, would interfere with the "process" of ramming the EPA's endangerment finding through. Truth in science took a back seat to protecting eco-bureaucrats from "a very negative impact." In another follow-up e-mail, McGartland warned Carlin to drop the subject altogether: "With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don't want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research, etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate."

Also, Malkin has also highlighted the 8 Republicans who voted with the Democrat majority on the Global Warming legislation.

The Investors Business Daily Ediorial Page has several recent articles about the new legislation and the hoax being perpetrated by the Democrats in Congress — these are must read editorials for some sanity amidst the cries of global apocolypse:

Only Warming Is On The Left
Carbongate
Waxman-Markey: Man-Made Disaster
Global Warming Bill Is A Job-Killer
Where's The Crisis?

UPDATE: Newsbusters highlighted one Republican's speech just before the vote on the Global Warming legislation [watch]. It's over 50 minutes of sanity, but apparently it couldn't withstand the hyperbole of catastrophe-speak coming from the Leftists across the isle. Also, an article in the UK Telegraph dissects the EPA's suppression of dissent [source]. At least the media across the pond are watching our government.

UPDATE: Alan Carlin interview.

UPDATE: Richard W. Rahn: "It is known that the legislation will have a negligible effect on global CO2 emissions, particularly since the big polluters, such as China and India, are not playing ball. It is also known that the "cap and trade" system that the legislation calls for has been a failure in Europe, where it has been in operation for the last few years, in that it has proven to be far more costly than envisioned, has not met the CO2 reduction targets, and has been highly susceptible to corruption and abuse."

UPDATE: Rich Karlgaard: "The Waxman-Markey bill that passed the House on Friday by a 219-212 margin will punitively tax energy sources that contribute 90% of current U.S. electricity (or 71% if you want to leave out nuclear). The taxes will be used to subsidize the 10% renewable contributors (but really just 3% after you leave out hydro)."

        

How can the government get away with this? Easy. The majority of Americans just don't give a damn. "Gimme my American Idol and Lost, and leave me the hell alone!"

        

CHAAAAAAA-CHING!!!! (h/t Hotair)

        

Joshua Muravchik's The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East. Muravchik was featured on C-SPAN2's Book TV [watch]. In his new book, "Muravchik profiles seven people from the Middle East who are fighting for democracy and political freedom. Mr. Muravchik's subjects, both men and women, come from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Palestine, Kuwait, and Syria."

        

Gretchen Peters' book Seeds of Terror examines the Afganistan poppy trade, and "traces the Taliban's illicit activities from vast poppy fields in southern Afghanistan to heroin labs run by Taliban commanders, from drug convoys armed with Stinger missiles to the money launderers of Karachi and Dubai." She was featured on C-SPAN2's Book TV [watch]. Her website links to her blog and other resources.

        

Jack Kelly (h/t Hotair):

Another clue to the president's timid and tepid response to the turmoil in Iran is the number 129. That's the number of times Mr. Obama voted "present" in the Illinois Senate.

        

Ed Morrissey noted at Hotair that President Obama has adopted George Bush's policy on detainees:

Obama has essentially endorsed the detention policies of George Bush without the courtesy of apologizing for slandering him over the last two and a half years.  Obama and his allies screeched endlessly about indefinite detentions, and not just in Gitmo, either.  They specifically railed against the holding of terrorists without access to civil courts in military detention facilities around the world, specifically Bagram, but in general as well.  Not even six months into his term of office, Obama realized that Bush had it right all along.

        

Many people still seem to think that conservatives are to blame for the current financial crisis. These folks say that conservatives fouled up the economy by supporting deregulation. However, the evidence is pretty clear to anyone willing to examine it that the exact opposite is true.

The bottom line is that the current crisis is the result of the housing bubble that busted early last year (2008). Democrat Chris Dodd even admitted as much [source]. Thus, the question is, what caused the housing bubble?

PBS attempted to explain the financial crisis, but missed the mark severely [source]. Therefore, if you cannot correctly identify the cause of a crisis, then the remedy likely will be useless or even harmful [source].

Also, the crisis likely will not be solved anytime soon. The reason is that the people attempting to "fix" the problem are the very ones who cause it [source]. Even more, the very ideology that drives the current administration's actions are corrupt [source], thus they are likely leading the nation's economy down the wrong path, away from rather than toward recovery.

The result of that corrupt ideology is corrupt government actions, like when the Democrat-controlled Congress passed a $787 billion spending bill without any member of Congress having read it [source]. Then, in keeping with the modus operandi of a corrupt government, the very same elected officials who were responsible for the crisis [source] pretended that everyone other than themselves is at fault [source].

Even more, once the corruption was exposed, these corrupt officials disregarded and undermined the United States Constitution in order to try to "fix" the problem [source].

Now they want to take over the automobile and health care industries!!!

        

Neda, the Iranian woman who's brutal murder on the streets in Iran, has been identified, notes Hotair. WARNING: Graphic, very graphic video.

        

When President Obama opened up federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, he did so with crass political rhetoric bordering on comedy — which I wrote about in a previous post [read]. Well, Steve Crowder is an actual comedian:



As Crowder noted, embryonic stem cells are just not a lucrative and promising source for scientific breakthroughs, as I noted in an earlier post.

        

The goofy blonde ex-SNL star didn't like the vulgarity of a new film. She hit the nail right on the head with her description of what Hollywood thinks is funny today (mindlessly crude isn't funny, it's just vulgar):

Well, today I walked out of a Judd Apatow movie crying.  It was the scene where the obese homosexual is fortune-telling by looking at the bowels of a sheep that has been sodomized by a person.  The movie was “Year One.”  I tried to be open-minded as I watched the first 20 minutes of masturbation, fornication, circumcision jokes, continual penis references, bestiality, violence, and Biblical blasphemy.  I told myself this was a PG-13 movie and the writers were “lost” so they didn’t know how vulgar they were being. I looked at the ten-year-old and his father sitting next to me.  I must be old-fashioned or something.  But, then I noticed no one was laughing.  No one was walking out either.  I was hoping that the crude jokes were flying over the heads of the poor children who were sitting there wide-eyed and innocent.  My daughter is 15 and she loves Jack Black and the guy from “Juno,” so I thought we could have a Mom/teenager date.  I asked myself, “Vicki, is this movie making you feel good?”  Myself replied, “This movie is making me angry, very sad, hopeless, and dirty-feeling.”  As the onscreen obese gay man poked at the bloody intestines and told the fifth anal sex joke, I looked at my daughter, and we got up and walked out.  I started crying in the parking lot as we walked to our car.  I am not from this world.  I am an alien.  No wonder me and Apatow never hit it off.

        

        

Another Democrat from Illinois is way over his head in Washington, notes Mere Rhetoric. However, in the wonderful world of government, incompetence is rewarded with promotion — especially when you pay your way to the top. (h/t Hotair)

        

MSNBC personality Chris Matthews slammed Gov. Sarah Palin and other conservatives for demonizing the government [watch].

Matthews noted that the term "government" is a misnomer used by conservatives to create a monolithic enemy that should be feared and hated by the American people. He offered this analysis in light of the recent shootings by lone wolf extremists (i.e., the Holocaust Museum, the abortion doctor, and the army recruiter), implying that conservatives are a threat to the public.

In short, Matthews said that Palin's comments were "very close to the edge" of the line between violence and non-violence, and Palin was talking the language of the "nuts" on the far-right who are committed to shooting government officials (NOTE: the shooter was not a conservative, as evidenced by his hatred of G.W. Bush, neo-cons, and a host of other noted conservatives who support the State of Israel [source] | [counter-argument]).

However, before Matthews sets out to marginalize Palin and other conservatives who are concerned about bloated bureaucracies in Washington that suck trillions of taxpayers' dollars into the furnace of wasteful government coffers and infringe on the rights of states and localities, he should revisit the Founding Fathers' writings about limited government [read].

        

President Barack Obama is getting heat from both sides for his apparent ambiguity about the post-election unrest in Iran the past week. Some conservative commentators are concerned that Mr. Obama's 15 June [watch] and 16 June [watch] responses to the protests was too ambiguous and lacked the kind of freedom-loving rhetoric the forces marching in the streets want to hear from the leader of the free world. Of course, there are Leftists condeming conservatives for criticizing the president — including this blogger's post arguing that neocons are being hypocritical about the Iranian election results, which lacks evidence of hypocrisy but which cites one neocon saying one thing, and another neocon saying something different; however, the blogger fails to explain how two different people saying two different things is hypocrisy — a point that Max Boot articulated clearly [read] in response to another confused blogger [read].

There are some on the Left who are speaking out about the protesters and are concerned that President Obama will not step up and challenge the Mullah's handling of the situation [read], and some Leftists say things have to get far worse before Obama should take a public stand on the crisis [read].

One thing is clear, though. President Obama is caught between a rock and a hard place. If he angers the Mullahs in Iran, they could unleash hell in Iraq, which would sorely complicate Obama's promise to pull out the troops by the end of next year. Surely he doesn't want the place to go to hell after he was handed a growing democracy with rapidly declining death tolls. Thus, Obama has to take a wait-and-see approach, or, if you will, he must vote "present," as he did nearly 200 times as a state sentator in Illinois.

MORE:
President Obama's Nowruz (Iranian New Year) Message [watch].
Iranian media response to Obama's Nowruz speech [watch].
A BBC documentary (Feb 2009) about Ayatollah Khomeini's 1979 Islamic revolution [Part One].
A BBC documentary (Feb 2009) on Iran and the West [Part One].

        

Thomas Friedman:

Second, for real politics to happen you need space. There are a million things to hate about President Bush’s costly and wrenching wars. But the fact is, in ousting Saddam in Iraq in 2003 and mobilizing the U.N. to push Syria out of Lebanon in 2005, he opened space for real democratic politics that had not existed in Iraq or Lebanon for decades. “Bush had a simple idea, that the Arabs could be democratic, and at that particular moment simple ideas were what was needed, even if he was disingenuous,” said Michael Young, the opinion editor of The Beirut Daily Star. “It was bolstered by the presence of a U.S. Army in the center of the Middle East. It created a sense that change was possible, that things did not always have to be as they were.”

        

CNN:

In what a U.S. military official calls an "inadvertent encounter," a Chinese submarine hit an underwater sonar array being towed by the destroyer USS John McCain on Thursday. The array was damaged, but the sub and the ship did not collide, the official said. A sonar array is a device towed behind a ship that listens and locates underwater sounds. The incident occurred near Subic Bay off the coast of the Philippines. The official, who declined to be named because the incident had not been made public, would not say whether the U.S. ship knew the submarine was that close to it. However, the Navy does not believe this was a deliberate incident of Chinese harassment, as it would have been extremely dangerous had the array gotten caught in the submarine's propellers. The Navy has complained in the past that Chinese vessels, including fishing boats, have deliberately tried to disrupt U.S. naval activities in international waters near China In one widely publicized incident in March, five Chinese vessels maneuvered close enough to the USNS Impeccable to warrant the use of a fire hose by the unarmed American vessel to avoid a collision. The Navy later released video of that incident.

        

The latest controversy involving Gov. Sarah Palin, her 14 year old daughter, and David Letterman, has again exposed the moral ambiguities of the Left. For instance, I've noted several Leftists who've been asked about Letterman's comments, whether they thought his remarks were wrong, over-the-top, or went too far (however they were phrased).

On several instances, the Leftist in question was unable to offer an unqualified condemnation of the remarks. Instead, Leftist offer comments about how they wouldn't have said or done those condemnable things, as if that's reassuring or somehow taking a moral stand against the outrage. For example:

• "I wouldn't have said that" [Alan Colmes].
• "I can't defend these comments" [David Letterman].

The inability of the Leftist to condemn something without qualification is again symptomatic of the Leftists' committment to an ideology that eschews moral judgement. This truth was examined with clarity by Evan Sayet at the Heritage Foundation, probably the most concise and profound analysis of the mind of the Leftist [video embedded below].



The lastest:

• Keith Olbermann says Letterman is the victim [read].
• CNN panelists defend Letterman and call Palin's family "fair game" [watch].
• Mika Brzezinski says Palin-hatred is "rabid" [watch].
• The forgotten Letterman joke about Eliot Spitzer's ties to prostitutes [watch].
• Matt Lauer defends Letterman [watch].
• The View discussed the controversy and Joy Baher defends Letterman [watch].
• Even the noted classicist and historian Victor Davis Hanson has chimed in on the contoversy [read].
• Also, Palin herself spoke about the issue with Wolf Blitzer [watch].
• Jim Treacher notes that Letterman really hasn't apologized [read].
• Harold Ford, Jr., offered moral ambiguity to Brzezinski [watch].
• Contessa Brewer defended Letterman [watch]. 
• Letterman's history of bashinig Sarah Palin and her family [watch].
• Amanda Fortinin says the sexism is acceptable when it's from the Left [read].
• Michelle Malkin says Letterman needs help [read].
• Brent Bozell and Megyn Kelly discuss the controversy [watch].

Previous posts:

• Michelle Malkin on Letterman's Palin Derangement Syndrome

        

Nicely done. Zo and Crowder look at the true face of Republicans.

        

Hotair has the video of Michelle Malkin talking about David Letterman's vile attacks on Sarah Palin and Willow Palin. Also, the National Organization for Women is speaking about the issue now. Allahpundit makes a good point: "The right will join in calling out sexism directed at liberal women when the left stops treating conservative women as “inauthentic” or traitors to their gender because they happen to be pro-life. Deal?"

        

The Representative from Massachusetts responded to tough questions by throwing a temper tantrum, again (h/t Hotair). All reasonable people who known that when someone responds to questions with hypersensitivity like this, there's something deeply wrong with either their personality or they are living a life of corruption and lies. Either way, Representative Barney Frank clearly is unable to defend his position, and lacks the fundamental decency expected of elected officials.

This is not the first time Barney Frank has behaved this way. Apparently, it's his modus operandi to become the poor victim of nasty opponents who deserve no response to their evil questions. When challenged, Barney's responses often include ducking-the-question tactics that entertain his supporters but neglect to answer the question, accusatory language about evil intentions motivating the questioner, and adopting a "victim" status to engender sympathy from the audience. Past examples of this behavior include: Harvard Student (Apr 2009); Chris Wallace (Nov 2007); and Crying on the House Floor (2007).

Poor, little Barney always seems to be the victim of nefarious bullies. Sad little guy. Considering the fact that he keeps getting reelected to office by the good people of the Bay State's 4th District, it appears that whiny little "victims" are their politician of choice.

Interestingly, Joel Pollak (who gave Barney a "tough time" at Harvard) noted to Greta Van Susteran that the reason he became a Republican last year was because he noticed that Leftists often demonize anyone who questions their beliefs, while Conservatives actually offer a defense of their position [watch].

        

Bill Whittle, who last month body-slammed Jon Stewart [watch], examined the history of the 1960s television series Star Trek, and managed to incorporate it into the current political setting. Great stuff! Watch.

        

CBS News: "Smith, co-founder of Vice Magazine and VBS-TV, and his cameraman, first applied for permission to enter the Communist nation as journalists, but Pyongyang agreed to let them in as tourists."

        

AFP: "Lebanon's Western-backed coalition declared it had retained control of parliament Monday after facing a serious challenge from the militant Hezbollah group and its allies."

        

AFP: "North Korea's top court convicted two American journalists and sentenced them to 12 years in a prison Monday, intensifying the reclusive nation's confrontation with the United States."

        

AFP reports: "Conservatives decisively beat Socialists in EU Parliament elections marred by a record low turnout, results showed Monday, after the centre-left failed to capitalise on concern over the recession. The vote marks a painful defeat for Europe's left, whose poor showing opened the door for far-right anti-immigrant and eurosceptic parties to seize the moment and gain support for their hardline message. Left-wing parties in power in Britain, Spain and Portugal were punished by their electorates while their allies in opposition in Germany and France suffered brutal losses.... Embattled British Prime Minister Gordon Brown faced a new fight for his leadership Monday after the polls brought humiliating results for his Labour Party and a surge in far-right support."

        

Hotair posted a series of entries over the course of just two days that highlight the continued worship of President Obama by the establishment media.

• LA Times
• Evan Thomas of Newsweek
• Newsweek Cover

The worship is so apparent, that even Jon Stewart had to point it out, and British PM Gordon Brown can't resist speaking the name of the Prophet Obama. Remember, all this happened in just in a few days. We've got 3 and a half years of this to endure!

        

A friend sent me the link to a NASA article that contained this interesting little nugget: "Clean air regulations passed in the 1970s, for example, have likely accelerated warming by diminishing the cooling effect of sulfates."

        

President Barack Obama spoke today in Cairo [transcript | watch], and reached out to the "Muslim world."

Liz Cheney responded to the speech twice on MSNBC, with Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough [watch] and later with Andrea Mitchell [watch], and Charles Krauthammer had some choice words for the president's speech [watch].

UPDATE:

• Walid Phares noted that Obama's speech will serve nicely as propaganda for Islamofascists and Muslim government leadership [watch].
• Anne Bayesfsky says the speech contained outright lies and demonstrated the president's ignorance of Middle East history, including recent history and current events [watch].
• Clifford May, Megan Ortagus, and Austin Bay noted the moral ambiguities and historical ignorance in the speech, and they also highlighted Obama's failure to acknowledge the existence and threat of the Taliban, Democracy in Iraq, and threat of Islamofascists in Iran acquiring nuclear weapons [watch].
• Yaron Brook spoke about the moral ambiguities of Obama's speech [watch].
• Rick Moran and Stephen Green discussed Obama's approach to nuclear proliferation, the fact that Obama is attempting to approach Islam as if it's a nation-state, and also Obama's claim that Islam is a source of tolerance and progress [watch].
• Reut Cohen examined the response to the speech from several Middle East leaders, and also offered her take on the speech [watch].
• MEMRI examined Arab Muslim media reactions to the speech [read].

        

Steve Chapman:

The Supreme Court that upheld that gender discrimination claim was composed of nine men — just as the court that ordered an end to racial segregation in public schools was all-white. The court that upheld affirmative action by public universities had only one black member. There were no women on the court that found constitutional protection for abortion rights. Right or wrong, the justices in those cases clearly strove to put aside their narrow personal interests and uphold the fundamental principles of the Constitution as best they could. Most Americans, most lawyers and most judges, I would guess, believe that's exactly what judges should do. Why doesn't Sonia Sotomayor?

It was also men who gave women the right to vote.

        

Big surprise.

        

Allahpundit wonders why this school isn't a touchstone for the GOP. I wonder why also.

        

Slobbering.

        

Clay Waters noted the difference between a minority conservative appointee and a minority liberal appointee per the establishment media.

        

Brad Wilmouth examined Fox News' interview of Americans tortured in Iraq.

        

Matthew Philbin highlighted the growing sense of dependency and entitlement that's gripped the American public, and it's affect on today's political rhetoric.

        

When I was a student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, I worked briefly for the school newspaper. During the 2000 presidential election, the paper published a list of issues that included where each candidate (George W. Bush and Al Gore) stood on each issue. Among the list of issues was Education, Economy, Foreign Policy, and something called "Choice." I was amused by the way the Leftists who ran the paper subscribed to the notion that the abortion issue can be framed in terms of choice just by calling the abortion issue "Choice."

Of course, then, the establishment media has adopted the phrase "choice" to describe abortion, as Brad Wilmouth at Newsbusters has noted.

        

I went to New Mexico a few weeks ago.The weather was awesome. I also visited Old Town Mesilla on Sunday, and got a caricature portrait done by an Air Force veteran, John Pittari. John is a fascinating character, and has lived a very interesting life. It was a pleasure to sit for him.

        

        

Today in Washington, D.C., I was approached on the street by two young female ACLU representatives (who were very polite and willing to engage in a civilized discussion). They were seeking a financial commitment of a dollar a day to their organization, and were equipped with the latest talking points about the "enhanced interrogation method" memos that President Obama released last month. The younger white girl opened the sales pitch with a litany of concerns about civil liberties violations, America's declining standing in the world, and the dismantling of the U.S. Constitution by the previous administration.

When I confronted their position, the other girl joined in with another wave of standard Leftist rhetoric about how the U.S. government prosecuted Japanese for conducting waterboarding on American soldiers during WWII — here's the ACLU's official article by Jameel Jaffer which notes this event. I countered with the fact that we subject thousands of American service members to waterboarding, thus by their logic the service members who conduct these interrogations are subject to prosecution for torture. They responded that those events are not the same because the service members have volunteered to be waterboarded, yet the detainees (all three of them) at Guantanamo Bay who were waterboarded by CIA operatives didn't volunteer to the procedure. I asked them if Abu Zubayda, the mastermind of 9/11, who was one of the three waterboarded detainees, volunteered to engineer the terrorist attacks. It was a weak rhetorical attempt to remind them of the sort of character they were defending. It warranted no sympathy to my point of view.

The discussion wandered, and included such topics as due process (I argued that soldiers cannot be forced to abide by the same standards as domestic police officers vis-a-vis chain of custody, etc., thus these terrorists cannot be treated the same as common criminals), the definition of torture, and a few other items. The conversation lasted about 10 or 15 minutes, and ended cordially with handshakes.

However, when I got home this evening, I listened to yesterday's Hugh Hewitt radio show [podcasts]. Hewitt interviewed MSNBC personality Lawrence O'Donnell, and they discussed this very topic [previous post]. They also discussed O'Donnell's interview with Liz Cheney on Good Morning America [watch]. Apparently, O'Donnell played fast and lose with the facts, as Hewitt discovered during the radio interview [transcript]. The bottom line is that O'Donnell was out of his league versus Liz Cheney, who presented facts and a logical argument. O'Donnell, on the other hand, opened his argument with a very confused comparison between "sources and methods" and the facts derived from those sources and methods — a point that Cheney clarifies rather brilliantly after O'Donnell says: "You can't have it both ways. You can't say that if we release classified information it makes us less safe, and now let's release more of them [1:20]."

Furthermore, O'Donnell followed up his confused opening argument with questionable statements (which are now known to be false). For instance, O'Donnell noted to Cheney that U.S. service members have been prosecuted for waterboarding. However, when Hewitt pressed O'Donnell to cite one case, he was unable to, and began (mid-interview) to search on Wikipedia for evidence of such a case. (Of note, I've been advised by several history professors that Wikipedia is not a source, and should I cite it in a paper, I'd be demerited at least one full grade for doing so. A standard that's apparently too strict for MSNBC analysts.)

O'Donnell's confused and illogical argument also included the charge that if the waterboarding was an effective means of extracting information from terrorists, why were only 3 waterboarded and not all 500+ detainees? This is known as a "non sequitur." In short, O'Donnell was in above his head, and appeared clueless about the fact, and unable to grasp the fundamentals of the issue. He was able to recite several talking points, though, which Cheney easily deconstructed.

Putting aside for the moment the fact that a top analyst at a major news organization made a (seemingly unsubstantiated) charge without having researched the evidence. Puttin aside also the fact that then when challenged with citing the evidence, the MSNBC analyst turned to Wikipedia for guidance. That alone is dismaying. However, what's even more remarkable, though, is that when O'Donnell finally did cite an instance of a U.S. service member being prosecuted for waterboarding, it turned out to be a case where a U.S. service member was prosecuted for performing "water cure" on civilians during the Spanish-American war in the Philippines in 1902. As Hewitt pointed out, the "water cure" is a violently invasive procedure whereby an individual is tied down and a large volume of water is forced down their throat, causing their stomach to distend, and then they are violently beaten around the abdomen. This is a far different procedure than the one we conduct on our own service members in SERE training. (Also of note, the Wikipedia page on "waterboarding" continues to confuse these two techniques.)

I've examined this issue relatively thoroughly in several previous posts [Part Seven | Part Six].

In short, one of MSNBC's top analysts has been exposed as being short on common knowledge and common sense, severely lacking in logic and argumentation skills, and disturbingly incurious about the world outside Washington, D.C.

Liz Cheney also went head-to-head with another MSNBC personality, Norah O'Donnell [watch]. The result was remarkably similar. When Norah O'Donnell realized (about 7:00 into the interview) that she's facing a person who's clearly more capable and knowledgeable about the facts and logic of the argument, she resorts to the standard fare Leftist mantras, and employs another Leftist tactic: shouting over your opponent. It's quite revealing. Key quote from Cheney: "I think it's important that we take a step back from the emotion of this." That's an impossible request for the Leftist.

Later, Norah O'Donnell interviewed Larry O'Donnell about what Cheney said during the previous segment [watch]. In keeping with the tactics of the Left, O'Donnell made the charge that Liz Cheney was somehow afraid to engage in a debate about the issue with an opponent, presumably one as heartily equipped as O'Donnell himself. Note that Norah O'Donnell says she was unaware that Larry O'Donnell wanted to be part of the segment with Cheney. Larry O'Donnell then proceeds to attack Liz Cheney and characterize her as someone who's completely unwilling to be challenged. This is rather curious, considering that she's appeared several times on what can be called "hostile" programs, including Norah O'Donnell's own program just moments before. Curious.

Larry O'Donnell then proceeds to charge Cheney with lying, and smears both Liz and her father Dick Cheney. O'Donnell's tactic reveals someone who's unable to grasp the details of the issue, and chose instead to attack personally his opponent. This is clear evidence that Larry O'Donnell is either uninformed or unable to understand the issue, or both, perhaps.

Another personality who appeared on Norah O'Donnell's second segment was Washington Post reporter Jonathan Capehart, who called for a truth commission to find out how truly evil are Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Never mind that Cheney has called for the release of memos detailing the vital information that was gained through the enhanced interrogation techniques. Apparently, that sort of information could only help the Bush administration's case for using waterboarding. That wouldn't be good.

Also of note, an interesting thing happened in Norah O'Donnell's second "Cheney-free" segment. Notice what Carehart says: "I agree 100% with what Lawrence [O'Donnell] just said. It's too bad that there wasn't someone to counter Liz Cheney [4:30]." Wasn't that Norah's job? Apparently, she wasn't up to the challenge. Has any Leftist?