One could make a strong case that the Bush administration has been negligent in its handling of post-Invasion Iraq, as well as its handling of the domestic insurgency here at home. It becomes more clear everyday that the Democrats are guilty not of negligence, but of criminal ignorance when it comes to Iraq and the war.
Take the new chair of the House Intelligence Committee (please) Silvestre “I Don’t Know Shiite” Reyes. “Chairman” Reyes was recently asked some basic Al Qaeda 101 questions by a reporter for Congressional Quarterly and he flunked badly,
A reporter recently directed the questions about Islam to Texas Democratic Rep. Silvestre Reyes. Reyes failed, which would perhaps not be a big deal if Reyes were an ordinary congressman.
But heâ??s not. Come January, Reyes will chair the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees all U.S. intelligence activity, a good portion of which is directed toward the war on terror.
Reyes could not tell Congressional Quarterlyâ??s national security editor Jeff Stein whether al Qaeda was made up of Sunnis or Shiites. From Steinâ??s scathing column on the exchange:â??Al Qaeda, they have both,â? Reyes said. â??Youâ??re talking about predominately?â?Â
â??Sure,â? I said, not knowing what else to say.
â??Predominantly â?? probably Shiite,â? he ventured.â?Â
Now today we get word from ABC News, that noted member of the vast right wing conspiracy, that Al Qaeda in Iraq was not only behind attacks all across that country, but planning attacks in this country.
Details Emerge About Possible Terror Threat
Suspects, Reportedly Tied to Al Qaeda in Iraq, Sought Student Visas
WASHINGTON, Jan. 22, 2007 â?? Mimicking the hijackers who executed the Sept. 11 attacks, insurgents reportedly tied to al Qaeda in Iraq considered using student visas to slip terrorists into the United States to orchestrate a new attack on American soil.
Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, recently testified that documents captured by coalition forces during a raid of a safe house believed to house Iraqi members of al Qaeda six months ago “revealed [AQI] was planning terrorist operations in the U.S.”
Has anyone asked Nancy Pelosi about this? After all, she told us recently that Al Qaeda was NOT in Iraq and she knew so because of the 9/11 Commission. Seriously, that’s what she said.
House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told reporters on Wednesday that she feels it is “sad” that President Bush continues to blame Iraqi insurgent violence on al Qaeda.
“My thoughts on the president’s representations are well-known,” Pelosi said. “The 9/11 Commission dismissed that notion a long time ago and I feel sad that the president is resorting to it again.”
Never mind the fact that the 9/11 Commission in no way addressed the issue of Al Qaeda in Iraq. This women, the newly elected Speaker of the House, is on record as saying Al Qaeda is not operating in Iraq.
That very weekend, Tim Russert of Meet the Press, demonstrated his grasp of Democrat talking points by repeating Pelosi’s assertion to Stephen Hadley, the National Security Adviser. Russert’s questioning, and Hadley’s responses, are very illuminating,
Tim Russert asked National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to explain why President George W. Bush keeps harping on al Qaeda while discussing the insurgency in Iraq.
“Whenever the administration seems to be having trouble with Iraq, in terms of its message, al Qaeda comes front and center,” said Russert, before showing a clip of President Bush blaming insurgent violence on al Qaeda at a press conference during his visit to Estonia last week.
“Because it’s true, Tim,” Hadley responded.
Russert then asked, “It’s true, what?”
“It’s true,” Hadley insisted. “If you look at what Zarqawi said, who was the lead al Qaeda operative in Iraq, he articulated very early on a strategy for provoking sectarian violence by attacking Shi’a so they, in turn, would attack Sunni. This was part of their strategy to sow chaos, to thwart the advance of democracy and make Iraq a safe haven for terror.”
Hadley explained that despite the fact that Qaeda attacks comprised the “small[est] fraction of the total of incidents…they are responsible for some of most heinous incidents — the car bombings and other things that result in the massive — the large civilian casualties, and it is those casualties and those incidents that have provoked the reprisals that the president has talked about.”
“It’s very important for the American people to understand that there is a key al Qaeda piece in all of this, and that is why one of the principal responsibilities we have, the challenges we have, is to deal with al Qaeda in Iraq,” Hadley said.
Hadley added that Qaeda in Iraq was as much as a threat as Shiite death squads.
Four years in and the Democrats haven’t a clue who we are fighting or why. They only thing they have proven is that they have ZERO interest in fighting any longer. I feel safer already.
Matthew Currier Burden, author of Blog of War and proprietor of Blackfive joined us once again for Someone You Should Know, our weekly collaboration to bring the inspirational, true stories of the men and women fighting for us around the world to the radio.
This week, Matt told us the incredible story of Specialist Daniel Unger.
What is Pundit Review Radio?
Pundit Review Radio is where the old media meets the new. Each week Kevin and Gregg give voice to the work of the most influential leaders in the new media/citizen journalist revolution. Hailed as “Groundbreaking” by Talkers Magazine, this unique show brings the best of the blogs to your radio every Sunday evening from 7-10pm EST on AM680 WRKO, Boston’s Talk Leader
Tonight we had the pleasure of welcoming Claudia Rosett to Pundit Review Radio.
Her reporting on the UN Oil for Food scandal led to Congressional hearings and criminal indictments.
We discussed the UN Culture of Corruption and how it hurts our interests; the greatest hits of the Kofi Annan administration; the sacking of John Bolton; former President Jimmy Carter and would-be President Hillary Clinton.
What is Pundit Review Radio?
Pundit Review Radio is where the old media meets the new. Each week Kevin and Gregg give voice to the work of the most influential leaders in the new media/citizen journalist revolution. Hailed as “Groundbreaking” by Talkers Magazine, this unique show brings the best of the blogs to your radio every Sunday evening from 7-10pm EST on AM680 WRKO, Boston’s Talk Leader.
I had the distinct honor of speaking with Alan Nathan and Tony Blankley on Alan’s nationally synidated talk show “The Alan Nathan Show” about the Democrats’ continued usurpation of exective powers with regard to funding the war.
Full audio here. (You can forward to the second half of the audio to listen to our discussion.
While I disagree with Joe Lieberman on virtually every one of his positions on social and economic issues, I have always agreed with his positions on the War on Islamic Totolitarianism. Perhaps his being Jewish and having relatives in the Holocaust has something to do with the fact that he clearly recognizes that totalitarian ideologies prey on weakness and can only be defeated with brute force.
He say down with Kimberley Strassel of the Wall St. Journal (subs req) this weekend to talk about Iraq, the president’s new plan, and his party. I know many of you don’t subscribe to the Wall St. Journal online so I will provide you with as many of the key excerpts as I can.
I only wish the answers he gave to the questions posed were positions shared by his fellow Democrats. It is obvious Lieberman was the last Truman-FDR-JFK Democrat left in the Senate before he officially became an Independent (he considers himself an “independent Democrat”). It’s too bad, because we need more men with the moral clarity and conviction of Senator Lieberman.
According to the Senator:
Iraq is the central part of a larger and ultimately longer-term conflict in the Middle East between moderates and extremists, between democrats and dictators, between Iran- and Iraq-sponsored terrorism and the rest of the Middle East. . . . Are we going to surrender to them, surrender that country to them, and encourage people like them to be in authority and power all over the Middle East and in a better position to strike us again?” asks Mr. Lieberman. If only Livy had his quill today.
He goes on to say:
In 2003 “we did something that was right and courageous, which was to overthrow Saddam Hussein,” says Mr. Lieberman. “He was a genocidal dictator, he tried to assassinate a former American president, he used chemical weapons [on his] . . . own people . . . He was a hater of the United States.” Saddam was a danger, not to mention a barrier to creating a democratic Middle East that ceases to be a threat to the U.S.
On Bush’s Mistakes:
Mr. Lieberman, who returned from his latest visit to Iraq in December, freely acknowledges what he believes were “the series of mistakes that were made after Saddam Hussein was overthrown,” from the disbanding of the Iraqi army to our reluctance to send more troops (something he has advocated since the fall of 2003). Still, “we were getting to a point where we were making some significant progress–and it is important not to overlook this. There were three elections held. Those were a powerful demonstration of what no one is able to deny, even those who now want to turn away and give up on Iraq. Which is that the majority of the Iraqi people want a better life for themselves and their families. The majority is not involved in sectarian violence and clearly not involved in terrorism.”
And what about critics asking whether there are any guarantees the plan will work?
“None of us can be certain [the president’s plan] is going to work; all the choices we have in Iraq right now are difficult. But by far, the one that is the worst, and would have disastrous consequences, is to pick up and leave, in small steps or in one large step, for all the reasons we know,” he replies, emphatically. He also wants to speak beyond the proposal itself, to its author. “I have admiration for the president, because I believe he gets it. He understands the challenge of our time, which is from Islamic extremism. . . . And he knows what he’s doing is not popular. But he’s doing it because he thinks it is right for the country.”
Democrat’s opposition?
Some feel let down because the WMDs were never found; others are “affected in a political context by the loss of public support.” But he ends up back at a baser truth, conceding that “some people, I just think have been partisan about this–and that, to me, is the worst reason.”
The dangers posed by the Democrat resolution to cut funding:
Mr. Lieberman is also frustrated that those supporting the resolution are dodging the tough questions. “The resolution that is being talked about, in one sense I’d say it is offensive, because it is only cosmetic. . . . It won’t affect the implementation of a new plan to succeed, to win in Iraq. But at the same time it will send a mixed message to those who are fighting for us in Iraq, and those who are fighting against us in Iraq. It will be a very graphic example . . . that we are divided.”
His challenge to fellow Dems:
“Part of the case would be, look, if you are really against the war and you are really against what the president is proposing, have the nerve to do what Congress under the Constitution is authorized to do: Move to cut off the funding and then let’s have a real head-to-head debate.”
Are there any alternatives?
The other alternative, of course, is to simply admit defeat. Some in Congress are working up the courage to say as much, and to further suggest that abandoning Iraq wouldn’t be all that bad. “People say this is just like Vietnam, we could leave, and that would be that. That won’t be that. We’re in a war which has it origins in this part of the world, in the Middle East, in the conflict within Islam. If we pull out and essentially surrender to the extremists and terrorists, they are naturally going to follow us right back to our shores.
“If we leave the place collapses. And it’s more than civil war, it’s ethnic cleansing. The Iranians come in and dominate a good chunk of the country. Al Qaeda takes over a good part and uses it as a base. The Kurds [can sustain themselves] but it gets very ominous. . . . And then the same group of people who attacked us on 9/11, they achieve a victory, and they will use that victory to strike at us again.”
And that is the very essence of the problem for Democrats. They have become the isolationist-anti-war McGovernite party who have not even begun to ask what would happen if we “redeployed” out of Iraq back home. Thankfully, Senator Lieberman has reminded them in addition to Republicans such as Snowe, Smith, and Hagel.
I hope they are listening.
A few weeks ago I posted an e-mail sent from a friend entitled “How Long Do We Have” and have since come to find out by a friend of this blog- “The Optimist”- that there were parts of the e-mail that were not accuarate according to a search on snopes.com he directed me to. While the source of the e-mail is a trusted friend of mine, I will admit that when the issue was brought to my attention yesterday, that our friend the “Optimist” was correct that there were parts of the e-mail that were indeed not 100% accurate and for this I apologize for misleading any readers. This is something I would never intentionally do.
Let’s examine the discrepencies according to snopes.com for clarification:
The population of the counties and square miles of area won by each Bush and Gore appear to be accurate. They are consistent with the election-result map published by USA Today on 20 November 2000.
Accurate.
The number of states won by each candidate is wrong, but the numbers given (29 and 19) imply this piece was written before the results of the Florida and New Mexico vote-counts were determined. The final tallies were 30 states for Bush and 20 for Gore.
Understandable discrepency given the Florida “recount” fiasco engineered by Gore to steal the election from Bush.
The quote from “Alexander Tyler” is very likely fictitious. His name was actually “Lord Woodhouselee, Alexander Fraser Tytler,” and he was a Scottish historian/professor who wrote several books in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
However, there is no record of The Fall of the Athenian Republic or The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic in the Library of Congress, which has several other titles by Tytler. This quote has also been cited as being from Tytler’s Universal History or from his Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern, books that do exist. These books seem the most likely source of the quote, as they contain extensive discussions of the political systems in historic civilizations, including Athens. Universal History was published after, and based upon, Elements of General History, which was a collection of Professor Tytler’s lecture notes.
Again, the words used are “very likely no record” but this is not conclusive.
The most glaring innacuracy in the original e-mail seems to be that the purported author Joespeh Olson “had no authorship or involvement in this matter.”
The other part that was innacurate was the county by county murder rate.
By calculating the murder rate for each county and then taking the averages, we find a murder rate (defined as number of murders per 100,000 residents) of about 5.2 for the “average” Gore county and 3.3 for the average Bush county. But since people, rather than counties, commit murders, a more appropriate approach is to calculate the total number of murders in the counties won by each candidate and divide that figure by the total number of residents in those counties. This more appropriate method yields the following average murder rates in counties won by each candidate:
Gore: 6.5
Bush: 4.1There is a distinct difference between these two numbers, but it is nowhere near as large as the quoted e-mail message states (i.e., 13.2 for Gore vs. 2.1 for Bush). Note that the average of these two figures is 5.3, which, as expected, is very close to the reported national murder rate of 5.5.
That being said, original innacuracies aside, I stand by my original analysis in which I said:
This may seem an â??extremistâ? and point of view, but when one considers the fact that 50% of workers in this country pay no federal and state taxes and actually receive money back each year from the govt from the earned income tax credit and child tax credit and other entitlements and welfare subsidies coupled with the fact that the most productive citizens (who liberals refer to as the â??richâ?Â- i.e. any family with a combined income of greater than about $80,000 in the top income quintile) pay an excessive and disproportionately high ammount of total taxes- about 75% of all taxes- it becomes clear that we are, indeed, half way down what Hayak refered to as the â??road to serfdom.â?Â
Will history repeat itself or will we learn from it and ensure that it doesnâ??t?
Once again, my sincere apologies for not catching this. My fault. Thanks for pointing it out to me Optimist!
A few people in and around Boston are talking a lot about a football game being played on Sunday afternoon. The rest of them are talking about the line-up we have on Pundit Review Radio! Stream the show live Sunday night 7-10pm at WRKO.
7pm EST: Claudia Rosett of the Wall Street Journal, Pajamas Media and The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
Claudia Rosett writes on international affairs, drawing on 22 years experience as a journalist and editor, reporting from Asia, the former Soviet Union, Latin America and the Middle East. Currently based in New York, she writes regularly for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Commentary, The American Spectator and The Weekly Standard, and makes frequent guest appearances on TV and radio.
Since 2002, Ms. Rosett has exposed the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, the largest financial fraud in history. As a result of her investigation, the U.S. House and Senate launched inquiries into the program. Ms. Rosett has appeared before three U.S. House Committees and Subcommittees to testify on Oil-for Food. Her work on Oil-for-Food earned Claudia the 2005 Eric Breindel Award and the Mightier Pen award.
We will be speaking with Ms. Rosett about her recent reporting on Jimmy Carter, and her award-winning reporting on the UN Oil for Food scandal.
8pm EST: Author Gregory Davis, author of the controversial book Religion of Peace?: Islam’s War Against the World
From the Publisher
Is the “War on Terror” Based on a False Hope?
In the days following 9/11, George W. Bush assured America and the world that Islam was a “religion of peace” and that the violent followers of Osama Bin Laden had twisted the true Muslim faith. Acting on this belief, President Bush and other Western leaders sent troops to the Middle East in an effort to bring freedom and democracy to the Muslim world.
But what if this “understanding” of Islam is based not on fact, but instead on equal parts wishful thinking and Islamic deceit? It would mean that the entire War on Terror is based on a faulty–and increasingly deadly–premise.
In Religion of Peace? Islam’s War Against the World, author and filmmaker Gregory M. Davis rebuts the notion that Islam is a great faith in desperate need of a Reformation. Instead, he exposes it as a form of totalitarianism, a belief system that orders its adherents not to baptize all nations, but to conquer and subdue them. Islamic law’s governance of every aspect of religious, political, and personal action has far more in common with Nazism than with the tenets of Christianity or Judaism.
9pm EST: Matt Burden from Blackfive will join us with the story of Specialist Daniel Unger, definitely Someone You Should Know
9:20pm EST: Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, one of Washington’s true power players, returns to give a State of the Union preview and let us know his expectations for taxes under a Democrat led Congress.
What is Pundit Review Radio?
Pundit Review Radio is where the old media meets the new. Each week Kevin and Gregg give voice to the work of the most influential leaders in the new media/citizen journalist revolution. Hailed as â??Groundbreakingâ? by Talkers Magazine, this unique show brings the best of the blogs to your radio every Sunday evening from 7-10pm EST on AM680 WRKO, Bostonâ??s Talk Leader.