I'm not the most diligent of bloggers, but certainly one of the disincentives to blog over the last 6 months has been the horrible blogging software here on Townhall. It is a pain to use and none of the issues I raised with townhall's webmasters on day 1 have been addressed.

I'm taking this back to blogger.

http://24carrot.blogspot.com

This from DNA - India 's website: 'Cornwallis responsible for Muslim plight’ [in West Bengal]
 http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1071378

Yes, that Cornwallis. He's been dead for 201 years. Must be some kind of 'butterfly effect'.

I've been pondering the worldwide conspiracy to bring misery to muslims and in the process I've recognised many other cause-and-effect relationships. Consider:

I blame Oliver Cromwell for Mariah Carey's mental instability.
I blame the 1st Duke of Marlborough for the Russo-Japanese war.
I blame Gottfried Leibniz for the Lusitania.
I blame Johannes Gutenberg for the 60-minutes fake documents scandal.
I blame Vitas Bering for the Exxon Valdez 'accident'.
I blame Madame Pompadour for Britney Spears.
I blame Pythogoras for "The Hollywood Squares".
I blame Prince Kutuzov for the failure of 7up Gold.

Part of the left's never ending drone is that rather than fighting wars to defend our civilization we need merely to "sit down and talk to <insert enemy>, find where we can agree and work out our differences." This is an article of faith for the left, that through negotiation one can reach agreement with one's enemies. That there is never a necessity for armed conflict, even when you are yourself attacked. In the left's claimed reality no enemies are implacable.

So I propose a test: I challenge the American left sit down with the American right, find their points of agreement and work out  their differences. Until they have at least tried that I'm not willing to believe that it is possible to do so with another culture, especially a hostile one like the Mullahocracy of Iran.

That they have never even suggested such a thing is, I maintain, very revealing.

I would hope that we on the right will now say goodbye to a number of fantasies by which our leaders have operated over the last 6 years. We have this fantasy that our leaders are politically astute. I feel that we must acknowledge the opposite: Our president, bless his heart, is an incompetent politician. The outgoing leadership of both houses of congress are made up of incompetent politicians.

The president has never gotten comfortable with the idea that in this era of politics, it is necessary for the leaders of the party to stand up and pitch their agenda practically every day. As the highest elected official in the Republican party it has long been the president's responsibility to make the case for not only his policies, but those of the party. He has consistently shirked this responsibility.

As the leaders of their respective causcuses the House and Senate leadership are responsible for promoting the agenda of their caucuses and to make visible efforts to implement them. Neither leadership team accepted the sales portion of the job, and on the Senate side there was no visible effort to implement.

In one memorable incident, the Senate leadership publicly congratulated itself for "avoiding a confrontation" over the proper exercise of its constitutional authority. At that time I recall saying, "I want the confrontation." On fundamental issues it is imperative that the voter witness the party standing for something consistent with party ideals. Avoiding confrontation with your political opponents is not that. Worse, the desire to avoid confrontation puts the other side in charge. It is not dissimilar from indulging a badly behaved child. Rewarding tantrums guarantees more tantrums in the future. Announcing that you will avoid political confrontation guarantees that your opponents will use the threat of confrontation to control you.

I would hazard that there is no significant voting block of people who will vote Republican in hopes that they will allow their political opponents to roll them on every issue. That, unfortunately is exactly what the Frist-lead Republicans displayed and I argue it is the primary reason why Republicans failed to hold the Senate.

I would further suggest that there is no significant voting block that wishes to hear a litany of excuses for doing nothing, risking nothing and consequently seeming to stand for nothing from the Senate leadership. Nevertheless, this is the product we got from the Republican Senate leadership.

The House is more complex, but make no mistake: the same people vote for Congressmen as vote for Senators. If congress as a whole fails, both are harmed. The greater fault certainly was in the Senate this time, but by giving people nothing to vote for from congress as a whole, the Senate doomed the House majority as well.

Sometime after writing yesterday's post it became clear to me that I may have hit on a very important principle in the language and behaviour of the left.

I have long been aware that the left in America argues politics on the basis of straw-men. These straw-men originate with the caricatures of conservatives which they have created in their minds. It appears to me that the left acts as though they truly believe that these caricatures are not caricatures at all but actually accurate models of how conservatives think.

It may be that leftists don't actually listen to what conservatives are saying because they have convinced themselves that they already understand what conservatives believe. Hence the apparent tendency to resort to straw-man arguments (along the lines of "defend this ridiculous belief of yours").

So last evening it dawned on me what leftists mean when they accuse conservatives of "hypocrisy". To a leftist, a conservative is guilty of "hypocrisy" anytime he does not behave in line with the caricature leftists maintain about him.

I have some confirmation of this in the meme I have read and heard today that it is "hypocrisy" for Speaker Hastert or any other Republican not to behave as a class-A "homophobe".

If there is a project to create a Leftist-blather to English dictionary I am all over the letter 'H'.

Leftists frequently complain that conservatives are (in their opinion)  "homophobic". I could parse out what they mean by this loaded term. They use it sloppily (at best) but for the moment let's hold with their usage by which they seem to mean "inclined to prejudice toward and exclusion of homosexuals".

So here's what gets me about the media swarm around the circumstance of the resignation of Congressman Foley (R-Florida): The left seems to be demanding that Speaker Hastert resign because when presented with e-mails 3-ish years ago which seemed to indicate that Foley was gay, he did not immediately demand that Foley resign from the house.

In other words, the left claims to be upset with Speaker Hastert for not acting like a class-A "homophobe".

You know, I am usually glad when people don't do things I think are wrong. The left is just crazy.

I saw this yesterday evening on LGF, UN Official: Terrorist Label is Not Helpful. Mark Malloch Brown (who we've heard from before) is busy making a hash of the English language. In a bit of self-contradictory prattle which could almost be lifted from a Monty Python sketch about politicians he tells us that while Hezbollah uses terrorist methods, we mustn't refer to it as a terrorist organisation because they do not carry al-Queda membership cards.

Mr. Brown's position on world politics seems to be the familiar blame-America-first-last-and-always garbage which we have heard over and over throughout my lifetime. With respect to the longstanding Middle East conflict his position is particularly pernicious. Effectively he takes the position of a Hezbollah sympathizer. Other than through his demented public statements I have no indication of what the man is really about, but the little I have heard from him would lead a resonable man to believe that he may indeed be one.

Here's my question: how would his position be different if he were not a Hezbollah sympathizer?

I think it is clear that: 1. The leadership of the UN are all sympathizers to islamofacist terrorism and 2. It is not appropriate for the leadership of an "international organisation" to position itself as an ally of terrorists. This sort of thing should be denounced roundly by the leaders of civilized nations. We invite our own destruction to ignore the throughgoing corruption of the UN that Mr. Brown represents in his public statements.

I'm sure you are all happy to know that the Seattle shooter is not known to be a member of any terrorist organisation. Clearly that makes it all better, right?

It has become the standard theme of press reporting immediately after a terror incident for the press to look around for the perpetrator's al-Quaeda membership card, and not finding it, to make a point of telling everyone. The only way such a fact can be thought relevant is if you believe that acts of terror committed by apparent free-lancers are somehow less repugnant that if they were committed by card-carrying members of some aggregation of thugs. I get the impression that the point of all this silliness is to try to assert that this is not an act of terrorism. Hogwash!

Politically motivated violence against civilians is terrorism, plain and simple. I really don't care whether the perp has a frequent buyer's card for Honest Achmed's Gun Shop or Jihadland Fertilizer Co. or even Border's. When he commits such an act he's a terrorist.

It is an act of self-destructive denial to try to couch terrorist acts in friendlier terms. I'm not going to participate and I suggest you don't either. Terrorism by any other name would be just as deadly. The difference perhaps is that we will be slower to put a stop to it the more we tolerate the shrouding of these events in cloaks of ambiguity.

Israel is now fighting on two fronts. In both cases they were attacked by an enemy that makes no mystery of its ultimate intention. Both Hezbollah and Hamas (CAIR's master) will settle for nothing less than the destruction of Israel. Israel gets to choose between war or extermination. So far it looks like they are making the rational choice.

It is unambiguous to me that they are not just fighting our enemy but that they are fighting our war. For that reason I suggest everyone support the troops, in this case I mean the soldiers of the IDF.

I am looking around for links to sites where you can show your support in some material way. Here are a few:

http://pizzaidf.org
http://purimidf.org/
http://honeyidf.org/
http://burgeridf.org/

I will add more as I find them. I would like to find, if it exists, the IDF equivalent to Soldier's Angels.

13-Jul-06

This looks promising:

http://www.israelsoldiers.org

Another that looks good:

http://www.lonesoldiers.org.il/index_eng2.asp


American friends of Magen David Adom:

http://www.afmda.org

Apparently we can no longer count on the meaning of 'is'.

US Reverses Policy on military detainees
 
to this article in the Financial Times online the administration has decided to surrender to the courts on whether the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War actually means what is says.

Absolutely crackers.

EDIT: Fixed Links

 If you've never read the Geneva Convention, now is the time to get to it and get smart about it.

Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War

I can only conclude that 5/9ths of our Supreme Court Justices have never read it, or that having read it they have decided that they know better what it ought to mean, or that they are certifiable.

If you have read  it you understand that it distinguishes between lawful prisoners of war, who have particular rights, and unlawful combatants to have none. Article 4 defines who is a "Prisoner of War" and Article 5 asserts that the convention applies only to them.

During the Afghan campaign we captured a large number of people under arms in the combat zones and not in any kind of uniform. A considerable number of these were not Afghan nationals either. According to the Geneva Conventions these people are not "Prisoners of War" [per Article 4] and they have NO RIGHTS under the Convention [per Article 5].

I would also like to express my loathing for those legal scholars [especially Erwin Chemerinsky] who repeatedly assert that the US is not complying with the Geneva convention with respect to the unlawful combatants held at GITMO. Regardless of how we were to treat them, since they are not subject to the provisions of the convention per Article 5, nothing about the US government's treatment of them can be held as a non-compliance with the convention. To continually accuse the US of "ignoring", "violating", or "not complying with" the Convention in these circumstances is the lowest, most loathsome form of anti-American propaganda and has no place in a legal discussion. Promoters of such propaganda are unworthy of respect.

Despite all that, 5 Justices of the US Supreme court have decided not only that everyone we capture regardless of the circumstances must be treated as a lawful combatant, but moreoever is under the Jurisdiction of the US court system. I don't know what to say besides "AAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGGHHHH!". If we cannot trust these 5 to make a rational decision based on the written law and respectful of existing case law, aren't we conceding that they are insane?

There's a local charity called "Packages From Home" which creates care packages for our soldiers fighting the war. The pentagon has lent them a level of support, but this comes at a cost. I was informed this evening that all materials to be shipped to the troops must first be screened by a board whose job it is to prevent "offensive materials" from reaching the troops. Sounds innocent enough, but here's the catch: the board includes a representative of CAIR. CAIR is a front group for Hamas.

That's the sort of war we are fighting. We have allowed ourselves to have our hands tied by the sensibilities of the enemy. Sheer lunacy. We cannot hope to win this struggle if we must ask permission of the enemy for every step we wish to take.

Be outraged. In a sane America, CAIR and other proponents of islamofacism would have no say, none, no say at all over how we care for our soldiers.

Arrived today.

Made very welcome.

The great blog migration seemed like a wonderful excuse to re-start my blogging efforts. You can see my previous off-and-on efforts at http://pleasedonteattheclusterbombs.blogspot.com . In time I expect to migrate that content to this space as archives.