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Quoting Andrew Breitbart, with permission, from a conversation we had yesterday:
The EU is trying to not engage in the war on terror, as a means of being passed over by Al Qaeda planners. Let the Americans be the sitting ducks—we have vacations to take, free medical exams to go on, and nuanced philosophical conversations to have, etc. Hell, we even have the Olympics to host!
Well… this is an attack and then some:
There’s no one at the Olympics, for crying out loud! Al Qaeda attacked you, Greece and, by extension, the EU.
People didn’t show up. Despite European Union thinking that they are innoculated from attack by terrorists, people know that Al Qaeda is not selective and COULD strike on neutral grounds. The EU’s hoped-for spoils for exhibiting weakness, moral abdication and appeasement are not granted by the Islamofascists who refuse to negotiate, or offer a list of demands—because their goal is not to live in harmony in the future with anything other than an Islamic World order.
Another sign of the EU’s moral bankruptcy is the Iranian refusing to compete against a Jew. The Olympiad is once every four years a symbol of what the UN aspires to be: an idyllic one world order. But the reality is that radical divisions between what is right and what is wrong are codified in this twisted show of world disunity: anti-semitism and been-there-done-that world-class appeasement are alive and well in the UN/Olympic Utopia.
It’s uncanny. In addition to the physical similarity, I think there’s a resemblance in that they’re both acting—they’re both seeking to play the part of someone who is smart. (It’s the scene in The Wizard of Oz where the Scarecrow gets a brain.) It seems to me that Ray Bolger’s a better actor than Kerry is.
Images via Allah and WikiPedia.
U.S. Troops Are Being Pulled Out of Germany and Other European Nations. VDH notes “an embarrassing desire for free American protection” on the part of European nations, at a time when the elites of some of those nations “are angry at the United States.” They’re going to be seeing somewhat less of it. 170,000 troops and support staff are being pulled out of Europe and Asia and redeployed.
US plans to cut forces overseas by 70,000
The US is expected to announce on Monday that it is pulling 70,000 troops out of Europe and Asia in the largest restructuring of its global military presence since the second world war.
People briefed on the plan say two-thirds of the reductions will come in Europe, most of them military personnel stationed in Germany who will be sent back to US bases.
An additional 100,000 support staff and military families worldwide will be part of the realignment.
...Germany will continue to be home to sophisticated training and command facilities and to a mobile infantry force which will be equipped with the new light-armoured Stryker vehicles and is expected to form the core of a restructured European presence.
The Bush administration has been re-evaluating the US military’s global posture almost since its first days in office. Senior Pentagon officials emphasised that the move was not intended as a punishment for Germany’s lack of support in the Iraq war.
Update 8-15-04: Don’t miss this post on the subject from the great German blog, Medienkritik:
But…but… this means job losses in the tens of thousands in Germany!! You can’t do this! [...] We’re already struggling to sustain our 6-week-annual vacations and the 35-hour week, not to forget our generous welfare state – we simply can’t afford even more job losses! We need US taxpayer dollars to keep our standard of socialism!
Do you know no decency, Sir? I mean, Germany had done so much to support the US fight terrorism in Iraq, like…er…like… – well, that’s obvious, anyway. Don’t Gerhard Schroeder and Joschka “I am not convinced” Fischer deserve better treatment for their unwavering support, even in difficult times? And didn’t the German population always show great sympathy for your decisions to go to war against terrorism?
Think twice about your decision, Mr. President!
Otherwise we might turn to France to guarantee our security in the future. They’d sure be more than willing to risk their soldier’s lives to defend Germany.
You sure as hell can bet on that!
A Very Funny Parody of Left-Leaning Blogs, The Iraq War Was Wrong Blog , sprang up earlier this month. (via LGF .)
Kerry’s growing resumay
I had heard of Kerry served in Vietnam, but. I hadn’t known until recently that he was the skipper of a Swift-Vet Boat! I know alittle someting (I think – IRRC) about Swift-Vet Boats and all I can say is, Talk about impressive. Chock it up to another reason to vote pull lever “Jon Kerry” in November.
Kerry’s Cambodia Fabrications Are Lampooned in a poem by Vietnam vet Russ Vaughn:
‘Twas the night before Christmas and we were afloat
Somewhere in Cambodia in our little boat.
While the river was lightened by rockets red glare
No one but the President knew we were there.
The crew was all nestled deep down in their bunks,
While the Spook and I watched the sampans and junks.
Our mission was secret, so secret in fact,
No one else would remember it when we got back.
...Dont bother to quibble with history my friend,
By pointing out Johnson was President then.
Dont listen to Swiftees who try to explain,
For I tell you that night is seared into my brain.
Down Hibbard, down Lonsdale, and you too ONeill,
So you dont remember? Well its something I feel.
I dont need all you Swiftvets to support my campaign,
Cause Christmas in Cambodia is seared into my brain,
Into my brain, into my brain, into my brain…
The 911 commission came up with a very effective way of building group consensus. Thomas Kean, chairman of the 911 commission, on THE O’REILLY FACTOR, 7/22/04 (no link—transcribed from a recording):
We had an interesting thing by the way. Whenever we got into a discussion on the commission and we started to really disagree on some things, we had a mantra, and that is, “Let’s go back to the facts.” You have to agree on the facts.
“Let’s go back to the facts.” This unassuming and easily overlooked action is effective within working groups, as in the example of the 911 commission.
It is also very useful in discussion or debate. A perfect example is found on Silent Running, in an article discussing recently published statements by Rick Perlstein of the Village Voice:
Welcome to the blogosphere, Mr. Perlstein. Excuse us while we engage in a favorite exercise, known as “fact checking your ass”, via a loose adaptation of a style known in the ‘sphere as ‘Fisking’.
...Now, I’m sure the you have some background materials to support this particularly incendiary charge, yes? Now that you’re in the ‘sphere, here’s your chance to do what is done here – give us a link, please.
“Give us a link, please,” means “Let’s go back to the facts.”
This is a great way to have a polite conversation with someone regarding politics whose views differ from yours.
“Let’s go back to the facts”—this is exactly what the Left is not doing; it’s something the blogosphere is doing extremely well; and it’s an easily overlooked, and very powerful tool, for building accurate opinions—within working groups, and in discussion and debate.
Update 8-19-04. Welcome, Carnival of the Vanities readers! This site is proud to have this article included in the latest Carnival of the Vanities, hosted this week by FringeBlog.
The Kerry camp does itself no good by today’s overreaction to comments made by one the Swift Boat Vets, Jerry Corsi:
“President Bush should immediately condemn this sleazy book written by a virulent anti-Catholic bigot. It says something about the smear campaign against John Kerry that it has stooped to enlist a hatemonger,” said campaign spokesman Chad Clanton.
But the person Clanton refers to, Jerry Corsi, was clearly speaking with intentional hyperbole in the criticized comments, and is only one of the authors of the book.
Here are the comments in question:
But as he prepared to launch the book, “Unfit for Command,” Jerry Corsi apologized for the remarks in an interview with The Associated Press Tuesday, saying they were meant as a joke and he never intended to offend anyone.
In chat room entry last year on freerepublic.com, Corsi writes: “Islam is a peaceful religion just as long as the women are beaten, the boys buggered and the infidels are killed.”
In another entry, he says: “So this is what the last days of the Catholic Church are going to look like. Buggering boys undermines the moral base and the lawyers rip the gold off the Vatican altars. We may get one more Pope, when this senile one dies, but that’s probably about it.”
Corsi, who described himself as a “devout Catholic,” said the comments are being taken out of context. “I considered them a joke,” said Corsi, who owns a financial services company and has written extensively on the anti-war movement.
...”I don’t stand by any of those comments and I apologize if they offended anybody,” Corsi said.
By reacting in such a manner, the Kerry campaign is drawing far more attention to the Swift Boat Vets than they otherwise might have received, and is also involuntarily contributing to their believability. In the (slightly paraphrased) words of Shakespeare, “The [candidate] doth protest too much, methinks.”
The Kerry camp is surely familiar with these arguments, that they are shooting themselves in the foot by drawing attention to their critics in this way. The fact that they’re doing it anyway, suggests that they may be desperate and see no other course.
Update 8-14-04: It appears I was correct about the Kerry camp being desperate on this topic. See posts here and here at PoliPundit for links to others citing evidence of a Democratic “meltdown” over this.
Kerry’s claimed decisiveness:
“Had I been reading to children and had my top aide whispered in my ear, ‘America is under attack,’ I would have told those kids very politely and nicely that the president of the United States had something that he needed to attend to . . . and I would have attended to it,”
...is at odds with his famed policy towards our allies, as illustrated by this great Ramirez cartoon.
See this Jessica’s Well post for what really happened:
“KERRY: I was in the Capitol. We’d just had a meeting—we’d just come into a leadership meeting in Tom Daschle’s office, looking out at the Capitol. And as I came in, Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid were standing there, and we watched the second plane come in to the building. And we shortly thereafter sat down at the table and then we just realized nobody could think, and then boom, right behind us, we saw the cloud of explosion at the Pentagon. And then word came from the White House, they were evacuating, and we were to evacuate, and so we immediately began the evacuation.”
That’s right—Kerry admits that at the actual time, he couldn’t even think, and he didn’t even have the responsibilities of the President of the United States.
As Roger L. Simon observes, Kerry’s behavior is much like that of the stock comedy character of the commedia dell ‘arte, the braggart soldier.
Perhaps later in the campaign Kerry can tell us what he would have said if he were the first person to set foot on the moon.
Karl Zinsmeister, editor in chief of The American Enterprise, recently spent three months with Coalition soldiers on combat patrols. His observations are not to be missed.
If I tell you that scores of Iraqi detainees have been killed and maimed this year in Abu Ghraib prison, you may not be surprised. But you’re probably guessing wrong about who hurt them. The moronic American guards who are now on trial for improperly humiliating some Iraqis caused no deaths or injuries: The many casualties in the prison were all inflicted by Iraq’s guerilla terrorists.
During this spring’s frenzy of reporting on the plight of detainees at Abu Ghraib, I was surprised that none of the stories mentioned what anyone who has spent time at the prison (as I have) knows is the central danger to the prisoners there. By far the gravest threats to the Iraqis in that facility are the mortars and rockets that guerillas regularly lob into the compound knowing full well that the main victims of their indiscriminate assaults will be fellow Iraqis. One attack on April 21 of this year, for instance, killed 22 detainees and injured another 91.
Somehow the media forgot to mention that. The reason being that it would have detracted from their story of the mistreatment of prisoners there. That mistreatment would have seemed less important when juxtaposed with the actual killings of scores of those prisoners by Iraqi guerrilla terrorists.
It also would have rightfully angered people in the U.S. still further against those terrorists, at a time when big media is supporting the terrorists by calling them “radicals” and “insurgents” rather than murderers, killers and terrorists. Imagine how strongly public opinion would be outraged at the guerrillas if it were revealed that they were killing their own fellow-countrymen, by shooting them like fish in a barrel?
I think, if anything, Karl’s been too easy on the media in this article.
Or take another of the Iraq stories most loudly trumpeted in our media: the electricity shortages. You know Baghdad continues to suffer periodic blackouts news reports remind us of that ad nauseum. Just one more example of U.S. ineffectiveness in this war: The generating system is broken and nothing gets fixed, right?
Wrong. Despite continuing efforts by guerillas to sabotage the grid, Iraq is now generating more electricity than existed in the country before the war. So why do we continue to hear about shortages? Two reasons:
First, Saddam shamelessly hogged the country’s electricity in his capital, shunting 57 percent to Baghdad while the provinces were starved for juice. Today, power is distributed fairly to all population centers, and Baghdad gets 28 percent of the total. Though that means occasional shortages in privileged neighborhoods unused to such things, Iraqis as a whole are better off.
Second, Iraq is in the midst of a consumer surge. The economy will grow an estimated 60 percent this year. Iraqis, who have flocked to cell phones and imported a million cars, are also snatching up washing machines, air conditioners, and electronic devices never before available to them. A third of the country now has satellite TV. Electricity demand is thus rising even faster than the steady increases in generation.
We’ve brought a successful democratic economy, in what historically is an eye-blink, to a region that has been oppressed for decades. We’ve done tremendous good to the people of Iraq. We’ve made an a powerful ally in the midst of nations which harbor terrorists. We’ve successfully erased a nation which harbored and supported terrorists.
(Hussein financially rewarded families of terrorists who killed Israelis. Anyone arguing that such terrorists would never want to kill Americans on U.S. soil is kidding themselves.)
And we’ve created a new trading partner which will generate billions in trade over the years to come, offsetting the costs of the war.
Over the last year and a quarter, America’s major media have given us millions of words about the Iraq struggle, most of them accurate. Yet they’ve often done a poor job of communicating the big, important truths about developments in that country. The very largest, most critical truth they’ve missed is that the Shiite middle has stuck with us through many travails.
This was demonstrated again when the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr went on the warpath during the spring. Scads of reporters and newsroom analysts declared a general uprising, the loss of majority Shiite support, the beginning of the end for the U.S. in Iraq. “United States forces are confronting a broad-based Shiite uprising,” announced the lead sentence of an April 7 New York Times story written from Washington. A Newsweek headline on April 10 screamed: “THE IRAQI INTIFADA: Suddenly the insurgency is much broader and much more dangerous than anyone had imagined it could become.”
These reports were wrong. Ordinary Shiites and Shia leaders alike subsequently made it clear that the mad cleric does not speak for the majority of them. They quietly plotted amongst themselves and with the Coalition to neutralize Sadr. His uprising petered out.
Read the whole thing.
Europe’s disdain for us is just a pose, a matter of words; their actions tell a different story.
From Victor Davis Hanson:
It is disturbing to see John Kerry insist that America has lost its friends and, through imbecilic diplomacy or worse, alienated those abroad. The world I see would beg to differ. Emigrants strive to reach American shores more often than all other destinations combined. Globalization is now synonymous with Americanization itself. The world’s preference for American food, music, travel, popular culture, fashion, and entertainment all suggest a dynamism in the United States found nowhere else.
One third of the planet India and China has evolved from being impoverished and bitter neutrals or outright enemies into capitalist powerhouses dependent on American free trade and outsourced jobs.
...European elites, it is true, are angry at the United States. But that pique is more a result of projection and scapegoating rising from its own problems, not ours as it struggles with demographic crises, unassimilated immigrants, impotence abroad, an embarrassing desire for free American protection despite concomitant resentment and envy, and a growing realization that while the world talks up the EU, when it has real problems, it goes to Washington.
In this regard, Greece is a metaphor for the entire ambivalence of the continent. It now worries about Arab terrorists in Athens, despite courting Middle East dictators for decades. It castigates the U.S. for bothering an Islamic Iraq, but Greeks lauded Milosevic in support of his Orthodox crusade against Albanian and Kosovar Muslims. A few years ago we were booed by Athenians for trying to save Muslims in the Balkans, and now we are even more vehemently trashed for allegedly killing them. Thousands publicly hissed at the U.S. in the immediate aftermath of 9/11; yet American sailors openly patrol the Greek coastline while Special Forces not so openly help train Olympic security officers. Add it all up and there is one constant: Greece (like Europe) really does count on the U.S. as much as it counts on never having to say that publicly.
Europe relies on U.S. military might to defend it. It would be ideal if Europeans would say, “Thank you so much. If it wasn’t for you, we’d have to spend billions defending ourselves, and we could scarcely afford it.” But it would take unusual courage and nobility for them to do so.
From Max Boot:
It did not matter to Kerry that the U.N. Security Council had voted unanimously to authorize military action to free Kuwait; at that point, isolationism was more important to him than multilateralism.
So Kerry opposed military action by a Republican President, even though the U.N. supported it. But he supported all military actions by a Democratic President:
Kerry changed his tune with Clinton’s election in 1992. He supported all of Clinton’s military actions in Bosnia, Haiti, Iraq and Kosovo although these were manifestly wars of choice, not necessity.
Max concludes:
This muddle raises the question of whether Kerry has a worldview, or whether he merely goes wherever the political winds blow.
In his acceptance speech Kerry claimed to be “complex”:
Now I know there are those who criticize me for seeing complexities—and I do…
Kerry is not “complex”; he merely has no consistent beliefs on any subject. Flip-flopping, contradicting himself within individual speeches, misstatements of fact… secret plans… this is what he is offering the nation at this time.
Yesterday I specified so many internal contradictions within Kerry’s acceptance speech that it appeared necessary to conclude that either he was showing hypocrisy, or else possibly, he just didn’t know what he was saying.
Some absurd misstatements of fact in the same speech may be relevant to this question.
Kerry made a number of evident misstatements of fact in his acceptance speech.
This one is really funny:
A young generation of entrepreneurs asked, what if we could take all the information in a library and put it on a little chip the size of a fingernail?
As anyone who knows anything about the subject can attest, that much data is stored not on individual chips, but on hard drives.
Kerry’s point that:
...America never goes to war because we want to; we only go to war because we have to.
...is a lazy misstatement of fact. As everyone knows, wars forced on America by attacks on our shores have been very few. From Robert Kagan, via ipse dixit:
The United States has sent forces into combat dozens of times over the past century and a half, and only twice, in World War II and in Afghanistan, has it arguably done so because it “had to.” It certainly did not “have to” go to war against Spain in 1898 (or Mexico in 1846.) It did not “have to” send the Marines to Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Nicaragua in the first three decades of the 20th century, nor fight a lengthy war against insurgents in the Philippines. The necessity of Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in World War I remains a hot topic for debate among historians.
...Then there were the wars of the post-Cold War 1990s. The United States did not “have to” go to war to drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. No one knows that better than Kerry, who voted against the Persian Gulf War, despite its unanimous approval by the U.N. Security Council. Nor could anyone plausibly deny that the Clinton administration’s interventions in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were wars of choice. President Bill Clinton made the right choice in all three cases, but it was a choice.
Last, let’s check Kerry’s charge that the families of soldiers are being forced to raise money to send them body armor.
You don’t value families if you force them to take up a collection to buy body armor for a son or daughter in the service
When he said it I actually thought it must be true, given that he was saying it on the record for the most important audience of his career. However, it’s not at all accurate. Per Eliana Johnson, via Michelle Malkin:
Since the Interceptor technology emerged in 1999, the military has been gradually replacing the older vests. At the outset of the war, about 40,000 troops lacked the new Interceptor armor, although every soldier on the ground possessed the older armor. According to Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, industries are producing the new armor “as fast as they can and as fast as they’re making it we’re getting it to Iraq.” Three manufacturers worked overtime to produce the vests and plates required to outfit everyone in Iraq by the end of the year, and by mid-January 2004, all troops in Iraq possessed the up-to-date vests. By mid-summer, sufficient numbers of armored Humvees will have arrived.
Between flip-flopping, contradicting himself, and making preposterous errors in matters of fact, the question must be asked:
Does Kerry have any idea what he’s talking about?
Kerry’s famous for flip-flopping. However, he contradicts himself not just from one speech to the next, but even within individual speeches. Let’s look at some contradictions within his acceptance speech.
Kerry Calls for Building Alliances with Other Nations – But Slams the Saudis.
...we need to rebuild our alliances. ...we need to lead strong alliances.
... I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation—not the Saudi royal family.
He says he wants strong alliances, but makes an out-of-left-field slam against the Saudis.
Kerry Praises Optimism – But Claims America is in a Miserable State.
We’re the optimists. For us, this is a country of the future. We’re the can do people.
This’ll be good. Let’s see his optimism in action:
...My fellow Americans: we are here tonight united in one simple purpose: to make America stronger at home and respected in the world.
...And I am determined now to restore that pride to all who look to America.
He praises optimism in the abstract, but he says America isn’t respected and inspires no pride. I guess he just sucks at optimism.
There’s a pattern here. He praises a thing in the abstract, but then does exactly the opposite with regard to specifics. Can it really be that predictable? Let’s look at some more instances.
Kerry Calls for Taking the High Road in the Campaign – But Has Callous Words for Bush.
My friends, the high road may be harder, but it leads to a better place. And that’s why Republicans and Democrats must make this election a contest of big ideas, not small-minded attacks.
But that came right after this:
...let’s never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States.
So he claims in the abstract that wants to take the high road, but instead of doing that, makes a specific statement that Bush has misused the most precious document, the Constitution. It’s amazing that he can be so two-faced within literally two sentences.
Kerry Says He Opposes the Politics of Division – But Pushes for Tax Increases on the Rich.
This is our time to reject the kind of politics calculated to divide race from race, group from group…
Isn’t it amazing? He makes a big noise about not dividing group from group, but does exactly the opposite, pushing his dumb class-warfare agenda:
...And I will roll back the tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals who make over $200,000 a year, so we can invest in job creation, health care and education.
It appears that this cracks the code. He praises a thing in the abstract, and then does exactly the opposite with regard to specifics.
Even within a single speech.
One can give him the benefit of the doubt that he just doesn’t know what he’s saying. Otherwise, the word for this is “hypocrisy”.
