Obama’s angry, ignorant children strike again.

A Vietnam War memorial in the Venice area of Los Angeles has been extensively defaced by graffiti. The vandalism occurred sometime during the past week, KCAL/KCBS-TV (http://cbsloc.al/1RAa3mg) reported. The homespun memorial painted on a block-long wall on Pacific Avenue lists the names of American service members missing in action or otherwise unaccounted for in Southeast Asia.

News of the vandalism came as another veterans-related memorial was reported damaged in Henderson, Kentucky. Police say a Memorial Day cross display there that honors the names of 5,000 veterans of conflicts dating back to the Revolutionary War has been damaged by a driver who plowed through the crosses early Saturday.

In Virginia, the Petersburg National Battlefield has apparently has been looted, the National Park Service said. Numerous excavations were found at the Civil War battlefield last week, Jeffrey Olson, and agency spokesman, said in a news release Friday. Petersburg National Battlefield is a 2,700-acre park marks where more than 1,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died fighting during the Siege of Petersburg 151 years ago.

All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again.

Obama has done great damage to our military, reducing its size dramatically, cutting back on procurement and forcing them to use aging equipment, and leading it to demoralizing defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, as Kurt Schlichter argues in the Federalist, the worst damage that’s being wrought on our military is the moral rot of leftist relativism.

The problems with America’s military—which has now failed to win three wars in a row against backward fanatics whom the nineteenth-century Brits would have handily dispatched to hell in time for tea—are not merely budgetary. You can’t buy real leaders, leaders with strategic competence and moral courage. Aging equipment, while a problem, is nothing compared to the incompetence and moral cowardice of our military’s senior leaders.

He rightly notes that this rot didn’t begin with Obama’s presidency, but it has broadly metastasized. Our troops were not just handcuffed by highly restrictive Rules of Engagement in Afghanistan that have led to many, many unnecessary American deaths, but utterly shackled in dealing with Afghanistan’s culture of child rape. The senior staff of the military forces (career bureaucrats) decided on a semi-official policy of “See no evil, Hear no evil, speak no evil,” and put troops on the ground in the wretched position of either tolerating child-rape or sacrificing their military career.

So, if the captain acts according to Army values and puts a stop to the child rape, he’s wrong. If he does nothing, and later some congressman or reporter asks the general why his troops aren’t stopping child rapes, the captain is going to be wrong again. If you think the general is going to say, “Oh, the captain as just following my order to allow child rapes occurring in front of him to continue,” you are delusional.

Do you want to lose wars? Because this is how you lose wars.

We have the greatest troops in the world, probably in all of human history. Fighting with old, worn equipment is a challenge, but that can be overcome. The lack of competent, morally courageous senior leaders can’t be.

No one in Obama’s Inner Circle has ever served in the military or understands military culture.

In one of the most tone-deaf statements in White House history (we’re making a lot of history here), the national-security advisor, on a Sunday talk show, described Bergdahl as having served “with honor and distinction.” Those serving in uniform and those of us who served previously were already stirred up, but that jaw-dropper drove us into jihad mode.

But pity Ms. Rice. Like the president she serves, she’s a victim of her class. Nobody in the inner circle of Team Obama has served in uniform. It shows.
…
The president, too, appears stunned. He has so little understanding of (or interest in) the values and traditions of our troops that he and his advisers really believed that those in uniform would erupt into public joy at the news of Bergdahl’s release — as D.C. frat kids did when Osama bin Laden’s death was trumpeted.

Both President Obama and Ms. Rice seem to think that the crime of desertion in wartime is kind of like skipping class. They have no idea of how great a sin desertion in the face of the enemy is to those in our military. The only worse sin is to side actively with the enemy and kill your brothers in arms. This is not sleeping in on Monday morning and ducking Gender Studies 101.

To Team Obama, Bergdahl and the rest of those soldiers were just kids who didn’t study hard enough and got stuck in Afghanistan.

Team Obama’s latest gambit — accusing Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers of “swiftboating” him – probably won’t play very well either.

UPDATE (from Jeff): It also doesn’t help that, by his own admission, Obama broke the law in making the Bergdahl swap.

A top aide to President Obama is now apologizing to Congress for not informing lawmakers, as required by law, that the White House was planning to trade…

(Democratic Senator Dianne) Feinstein said that it was “very disappointing” that President Obama decided not to alert Congress about the deal…Feinstein said that in previous conversations with Senators about the trade, “there were very strong views and they were virtually unanimous against trade.” “The White House is pretty unilateral about what they want to do when they want to do it,” she added…

Unilateral? Whoa, did someone say the President was being “unilateral”?!

This is rich in iron(y):

Secretary of State John Kerry escalated his criticism of Edward Snowden, calling him a “coward” and a “traitor,” and saying that the NSA document leaker should return to the United States from Russia and “make his case.”

“Edward Snowden is a coward, he is a traitor and he has betrayed his country,” Kerry said in an interview on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown” with Chuck Todd. “And if he wants to come home tomorrow to face the music, he can do so.”

The point in itself may have merit; we can discuss. But for fun, let’s remember some points about Kerry. The following conclusions have been either proven, or at least well-indicated as likely, by eyewitness testimony and other evidence: (more…)

When I wrote my first post on liberalism as more of a social phenomenon than an intellectual one, I imagined a series of posts dealing with many different implications of that idea.  So far I’ve written three other posts in the series on topics ranging from slogans to leftist intolerance and political changers to the so-called “wealth gap.”

One big topic that I haven’t explored yet–even though I’ve meant to do so since the start of the series–is the way in which liberal ideas are perpetuated on social media and elsewhere through the use of simple-minded memes.  As I considered the idea of social liberalism, one point which came to mind is that so many liberal memes might seem catchy at first glance,  but they are either responses to outlandish straw men, or they make no sense whatsoever when subjected to even the slightest bit of scrutiny.

At Legal Insurrection, Professor Jacobson has written a few posts about the role of the leftist site Upworthy in promulgating memes of both sorts, including a post this past Tuesday on the high cost of low-information voters.  And he’s not the only one to recognize the importance of simple-minded memes for the left.  For example, this post at Breitbart.com takes the idea one step further to reflect on the significance of LOLcats in politics.

What interests me at the moment, though, is that there is a whole class of liberal memes which go beyond the simple-minded to the downright pernicious: they promulgate leftist thinking in a way that seems ironic or clever or humorous, even as they blatantly acknowledge the darker goals of leftist ideology.   I stumbled across a prime example of one such meme on Facebook about two months ago when an acquaintance “shared” a meme which had been promoted by the Facebook group “Being Liberal” back in December 2011.  I’ve pasted the image below.

We’re all familiar with the common liberal tropes about “beating swords into plowshares” and the frequent lament heard on the left that “if we spent on education or social programs what we spent on the military” somehow all of society’s ills would disappear.   This meme takes that same tack, but uses “irony” to take it one step further by suggesting that the government can use the military to “win the hearts and minds of the population” and put the “locals to work” working on infrastructure politics.

By supposedly employing “irony” to make its point, therefore, it moves from the simple-minded lament about spending more on education and social programs into the territory of the pernicious by endorsing the use of the military as a means of social control.  The person who posts or re-posts the idea can feign ignorance of the pernicious implications by saying that the meme isn’t “serious” or that it is “just making a point through irony,” but it’s a point which betrays the left’s ignorance of the way free people and free markets operate.  The point of the meme is unmistakable:  all good comes through government, and we ought to use the force of government to establish a planned economy.

The Facebook page for “Being Liberal” attributes this meme to one of its readers named Terry Sebolt who wrote in and said (with the disingenuousness common on the left): “”Those were my words, but not my pic. Feel free to put it anywhere you want. I meant every word of it, and hope people enjoy the irony, regardless of credit. It was a throw away line…”

The claim may be spurious, though, as I did some internet searching and the earliest example I could find for the meme online was this appearance on Twitter from August 9, 2011.  I’ve posted a screenshot of the image below.

Regardless of the authorship, though, the claim is intended to make a point by shocking, even though those who quote the statement will try to distance themselves from its actual implications.  Those implications, though, tell us a great amount about the worldview of the left.

What’s even more amazing in the case of the person I know who re-posted this meme is that she is an immigrant from eastern Europe with a PhD in a scientific field from an American university.   She often refers to the bad days growing up in her country under a brutal dictator when everyone was suffering.  And so she moves to the U.S. and spends time in universities and decides that she’s a “liberal” and approvingly re-posts that “ironic” image.  If that’s not an example of a socially-promulgated disorder, then I’m not sure what would be.

I saw this item at Reason.com the other day.  It’s a short piece reflecting on a video of a speech by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talking about how one’s “sensitivity to disgust” is supposedly some sort of predictor of one’s political views.  I haven’t watched the whole video yet, but the speech was given at the Museum of Sex in New York City, so some amount of its content seems designed to appeal to the audience that would be attending a speech in that location.

Jim Epstein at Reason.com summarizes the key points of the speech as follows:

“Morality isn’t just about stealing and killing and honesty, it’s often about menstruation, and food, and who you are having sex with, and how you handle corpses,” says NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who is author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics.

Haidt argues that our concern over these victimless behaviors is rooted in our biology. Humans evolved to feel disgusted by anything that when consumed makes us sick. That sense of disgust then expanded “to become a guardian of the social order.”

This impulse is at the core of the culture war. Those who have a low sensitivity to disgust tend to be liberals or libertarians; those who are easily disgusted tend to be conservative.

The full video of the speech is available at the above link.

My reaction to all this is that it 1). depends on how one defines conservative, and 2). it depends on what kinds of things one labels or considers to be examples of disgust.

With respect to point 1)., I think that a large portion of the conservative coalition is rather heavily libertarian-leaning, and it just makes more sense for us to identify as conservative and vote for Republicans because  the Libertarian party seems doomed to remain a fringe party, at least as long as that party’s leadership continues to endorse an isolationist or head-in-the-sand approach to foreign policy.  Now while it may be the case that many traditional “social conservatives” have a “high sensitivity to disgust” with respect to issues of sex, I’m not even convinced that that is as widely the case as Haidt’s remarks suggest.  I’ve heard socially-conservative Christian ministers talk about sex in ways that show they may have a better understanding of the variety of human sexual experience than many academics who claim to be experts on the subject.

On the other hand, with respect to point 2)., I can find many, many examples of “disgust” fueling the attitudes of liberals and leftists.  One could begin by looking at their intense hatred of Sarah Palin and anyone like her.  Some of that hatred, I would argue, was fueled by a disgust at the lives of anyone who doesn’t live the life of a modern liberal in a major coastal city.

Most modern liberals are disgusted by hunting, by the people who shop at Wal-Mart, by the petroleum industry, by the food industry, by the military, by evangelical Christians, and by the reality of life in small-town, rural America.  James Taranto and British Philosopher Roger Scruton call it “oikophobia”: it is a worldview which accepts or excuses the transgressions of select special-interest groups or of non-western cultures, while it judges the familiar by a harsh standard and condemns them with expressions of disgust at the nature of their lives.

Seen on a hybrid SUV in the (San Fernando) Valley:

FROM THE COMMENTS: James doesn’t “get the point of this post. We have free speech in this country, and that person is exercising his or her view to not support enlisting in the military.”

He’s right. The driver does have the freedom to express his view of the military. And I have the freedom to mock the driver for trying to discourage men and women from enlisting in order to defend this man’s freedom to criticize military service.

That said, point well taken, James, especially about liberals not being the only ones who drive hybrids. I have met a handful of conservatives who drive such vehicles–and sometimes with great enthusiasm.

Whoa. Jim Geraghty at NRO (and hopefully you’re subscribing to his newsletter like I do) offers the tidbit of the day from President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall yesterday (and Moe Lane provides the cued-up video):

We’re still gonna have to make some tough decisions about Defense spending, or even on programs that I like but we may not need.

Ladies and Gentlemen: I give you your Commander in Chief.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

Uber progressive blogger and Islamic terror apologist Glenn Greenwald is whining about how PFC Bradley Manning (alleged Wikileaks source, and anti-DADT activist) is being treated.  It is cute how in the beginning of his piece, Greenwald goes to great lengths to distance Manning from the Wikileaks story; but by the end is lauding Manning’s treasonous behavior and labeling him a “hero” (cue Berkeley City Council).

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime.  Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture.  Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning’s detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems.  He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a “Maximum Custody Detainee,” the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

Oh boo freaking hoo.  Glenn and I had a minor dustup on the topic via Twitter yesterday:

ME:  GayPatriot: RT @GregMitch: Glenn Greenwald on Bradley Manning held under “inhumane condiitons” possibly constituting “torture.” // Aww, cry me a river.

GG response:   @ggreenwald: You’d be crying a river – and doing much more – if you were held under inhumane conditions without being convicted of anything

My response: GayPatriot: I wouldn’t have committed treason against my country while wearing the uniform cuz my boyfriend dumped me. He’s a pissy bitch.

“Lexington Concord” at RedState has the right idea as to what to do with Manning (and any other Wikileaks sources, I might add).  It is priceless…

Glenn Greenwald is constantly telling us that the reason the terrorists want to kill us is not because they are regressive degenerates who hate Western values like freedom and tolerance, but rather because they just don’t like our military policies and how we’re all meddling in their business.

Well, I am not a man without a heart, so I am willing to propose a solution to Greenwald’s problem which I am confident the Army would be amenable to. As an added bonus, it will serve as an opportunity to validate Glenn Greenwald’s views on the causes of Islamic terrorism. We will give Bradley Manning his pillow and blankie back, and remove him from solitary confinement. In fact, we’ll let him be around lots of people. We’ll call an emissary with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, and tell them that we have a political prisoner to release to them, no strings attached. We will tell them that we are going to release to them an American who thoroughly rejects our interventionist policies and our military meddling – he rejects them so strongly, in fact, that he did everything in his power to see that American soldiers were killed and that Islamic terrorists were given access to our operational details. Therefore, we have decided to let him go to be with the Taliban so that he can self-actualize and join the fight against America with them.

I’m sure that like John Walker Lindh, the Taliban will be happy to have an American like this on board. So we’ll drive Manning out there to meet them at some safe remote location in Afghanistan somewhere, and we’ll release Manning and let him rush to join his new Taliban brethren.

Then we’ll tell them he’s gay.

Sign me up to help complete this diplomatic arrangement!  I think Manning would prefer my solution anyway:  firing squad.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I saw this last night live-and-in-person at the NRA 2010 Convention in Charlotte.  Newt had the house rocking the whole time, but this clip was the most memorable.  Outstanding.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

On USA Today‘s homepage today (at 5PM EST), there are three links prominently displayed to articles on the murder Sunday of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, including one to an article asking if religious conservatives share the blame for his death (not to mention a variety of other subsidiary links).  There are no links to the article on a Muslim convert’s shooting spree at an Arkansas recruiting center in which one soldier, William Long, was killed and another wounded.

As Michelle Malkin documents, this is not the first time military recruitment centers have been targeted.

And it’s not just USA Today which has devoted more attention to the murder of the abortion doctor.  Over at Newsbusters, Amy Ridenour finds there are “14 times more stories about George Tiller in Google News.”  It could be, she speculates (with tongue firmly planed in cheek), because Tiller’s murder occurred 24 hours earlier.

While USA Today wonders if religious conservatives contributed to the murder of Tiller and left-wing bloggers and their MSNBC lickspittle blame O’Reilly for the kiling, one smart young blogger wonders if those very bloggers are to blame for Long’s murder:

Salon, the Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos have already identified Bill O’Reilly as the culprit for abortionist George Tiller’s murder, so I now heap the blame on Keith Olbermann and all of the above mentioned websites and CNN for the shooting at a military recruiting center in Arkansas. . . .

We know that Markos Moulitsas, owner of the Kos, wants those fighting in Iraq and reporting in Iraq to die because he has expressed that opinion himself, and the other liberals have been encouraging the deaths of military recruiters and soldiers just by being against the war and against recruiting.

Read the whole thing.

So, you think USA Today will run an article asking if left-wing bloggers share the blame in Long’s death?  To paraphrase Amy Ridenour who wondered if there would “be approximately 7,000 references to William Long in Google News 24 hours from now,”  Don’t hold your breath.

It really leaves you speechless…..

During a House Judiciary Committee meeting, Congressman Steve King (R-IA) offered up an amendment to the hate crimes bill to exclude pedophiles from being a protected category under the hate crimes legislation.

Every single Democrat voted it down.

In the same meeting, Congressman Tom Rooney (R-FL) offered an amendment to include veterans as a class protected under the hate crimes bill. Not only did the Democrats vote it down, but Cogresswoman Debbie Waasserman Schultz attacked the Republicans for even thinking veterans might need protection under hate crimes legislation. After all, who but Democrats in Congress hate veterans?

And, after all, the Dept. of Homeland Security has all but declared veterans as “right wing extremists” intent on violence. So I guess Congressional Democrats are just trying to be consistent with Gestapo Janet.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Shouldn’t that be now be the rallying cry for the Sixties wackos who have been protesting, sans bathing, for the past seven years?

Welcome to Obama’s War!

U.S. President Barack Obama announced Tuesday that he is sending two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, marking the start of what many believe will be an escalation that will ultimately see the U.S. forces there double.

There are some 36,000 U.S. troops already in Afghanistan, and the additional 17,000 alone represent a nearly 50 percent increase.

No Blood For Opium!  No Blood For Opium!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Pop.  Pop.  Pop.  Pop.   That’s the sound of heads exploding from San Fran to Seattle by leftists who want to protect Al Qaeda, not Americans.

Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool – LA Times (h/t – The Corner)

The CIA’s secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba.

But even while dismantling these programs, President Obama left intact an equally controversial counter-terrorism tool.

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism — aside from Predator missile strikes — for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured.

The European Parliament condemned renditions as “an illegal instrument used by the United States.” Prisoners swept up in the program have sued the CIA as well as a Boeing Co. subsidiary accused of working with the agency on dozens of rendition flights.

But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.

That’s funny, I thought the American Left told me it was one of the WORST parts of “Bush’s War.”  In fact, wasn’t there even a leftist Hollyweird movie, that made little, called “RENDITION”.   My, oh my.

Pop.  Pop.  Pop.

Score one positive mark for President Obama.

Exit Question: Will the anti-Bush liberals who comment at GayPatriot now support this terror-fighting tool?  Or are they just tools?

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

If this doesn’t turn the stomach of every voter in America that hasn’t yet been brainwashed by The One or intimidated by the Obama Goons, nothing will.

Soldier’s Family Told Obama Not to Wear Son’s Bracelet – Gateway Pundit

Barack Obama played the “me too” game during the Friday debates on September 26 after Senator John McCain mentioned that he was wearing a bracelet with the name of Cpl. Matthew Stanley, a resident of New Hampshire and a soldier that lost his life in Iraq in 2006. Obama said that he too had a bracelet. After fumbling and straining to remember the name, he revealed that his had the name of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek of Merrill, Wisconsin.

Shockingly, however, Madison resident Brian Jopek, the father of Ryan Jopek, the young soldier who tragically lost his life to a roadside bomb in 2006, recently said on a Wisconsin Public Radio show that his family had asked Barack Obama to stop wearing the bracelet with his son’s name on it. Yet Obama continues to do so despite the wishes of the family.

How dare Senator Obama use the name of a dead Army soldier, whose name he can’t remember, as a sheer political stunt.  And against the wishes of Sgt. Jopek’s family, nonetheless.  

Senator McCain wears his bracelet in kinship and shared sacrifice with the family of Cpl. Matthew Stanley.

Senator Obama wears his bracelet in an arrogant defiance of what America stands for.  To Obama, the bracelet is yet another prop for his campaign, like the American flag he once did not wear on his lapel.

He makes me sick.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

John McCain was in the navy and then he was in the U.S. Senate. He has never cashed a check a bureaucrat didn’t write. I’m not trying to be glib, and I realize he was doing a solemn and dangerous job, killing people from the sky. But it was still government work.

Wait, except for those years as a POW. A sick but undeniable fact about John McCain: The only period in his life when he wasn’t living off the American taxpayer, he was living off the Vietnamese taxpayer.

John McCain’s father was in the navy and his father was in the navy. The last McCain who didn’t live in government housing owned a plantation in Mississippi when the state still had slaves.

Which is why John McCain always sounds so emotional when he gets to this line in his stump speech:

“I am absolutely committed to reducing the size of government.”

What he’s promising is eventually he’ll die. (Huffington Post)

And these libtards wonder why people believe they hate the military and are anything BUT tolerant? Huh.

h/t – Ace of Spades

– John (Average Gay Joe)

As Arte Johnson would say….. “Verrrrry interesting.”  (h/t - Instapundit)

Kanjorski says Dems were insincere about ending war - The Hill

Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) is seen in a video that has surfaced on the Web saying that Democrats “sort of stretched the facts” in the 2006 elections about their ability to end the Iraq war.

In a video posted to YouTube on Thursday, Kanjorski reflects on the Democrats’ approach to the war in 2006 and said they pushed the rhetoric “as far as we can to the end of the fleet — didn’t say it, but we implied it — that if we won the congressional elections, we could stop the war.”

“Now, anybody who’s a good student of government would know it wasn’t true,” he said. “But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress — we sort of stretched the facts.”
 
The video was dated Aug. 28, 2007, by the person who posted it. The remarks are not placed in a larger context.

Republicans reacted Friday by calling for Kanjorski to apologize.

“For Paul Kanjorski to admit that Democrats campaigned in ’06 on a fraudulent agenda to end the war not only exposes his own calculated efforts to fool the voters of his district, but it also raises the question of whether this was a coordinated effort by the Democratic Party as a whole,” said a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, Ken Spain.

“Paul Kanjorski should be ashamed of himself for using our troops in harm’s way as political pawns for his own partisan agenda.”

Now come on, really.   Is anyone REALLY surprised that the Democrats would use the lives of our soldiers as a bargaining chip with the American public in order to gain political power?  Some would call that orchestrated effort…. well, treason.

As Amy & Seth would say….. REALLY, Congressman Kanjorski, REALLY?  (I’m full of NBC allusions today…..)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

I thought I saw Al Gore’s cold breath in the air last week…. the New York Times finally admits success in recent surge by Iraqi troops in Basra.

Three hundred miles south of Baghdad, the oil-saturated city of Basra has been transformed by its own surge, now seven weeks old.

In a rare success, forces loyal to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki have largely quieted the city, to the initial surprise and growing delight of many inhabitants who only a month ago shuddered under deadly clashes between Iraqi troops and Shiite militias.

Just as in Baghdad, Iraqi and Western officials emphasize that the gains here are “fragile,” like the newly planted roadside saplings that fail to conceal mounds of garbage and pools of foul-smelling water in the historic port city’s slums.

Among the many uncertainties are whether the government, criticized for incompetence at the start of the operation, can maintain the high level of troops here. But in interviews across Basra, residents overwhelmingly reported a substantial improvement in their everyday lives.

“The circle of fear is broken,” said Shaker, owner of a floating restaurant on Basra’s famed Corniche promenade, who, although optimistic, was still afraid to give his full name, as were many of those interviewed.

You might recall the US Democrats who were quick to condemn the Iraqi troops actions in Basra when it began.

Oh, you don’t? Well, here ya go….  All of these statements were made as the result of Maliki’s actions in Basra:

Not-My Speaker Pelosi (D-CA):  “I hope we don’t hear any glorification of what happened in Basra,” said Pelosi, referring to a recent military offensive against Shiite militants in the city led by the Iraqi government and supported by U.S. forces.

Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE):  “Violence has come down, but the Iraqis have not come together.”

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI):  “The Bush administration has put all of our eggs in Maliki’s basket,” Levin said. “And he’s shown himself to be a political leader who is excessively sectarian, who’s incompetent and who runs a corrupt administration.”

I could go on and on and on….

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Last night at a Seder, we discussed the difficulty of accomplishing what so many on the left (as well as others of all political stripes) cry out for us to save Darfur. I share the sentiments of those who want to help the people in that troubled Sudanese province.

But, to help those people, we would have to defeat those oppressing them, the Sudanese government and the allied Janjaweed militias, the word defining those Arabic-speaking militants meaning, “a man with a gun on a horse.” In other words, they, like the Islamicist regime which supports them are armed.

Much as we would like, it doesn’t seem possible to stop these forces without some armed intervention. Would those who press the president to do something about Darfur support a military intervention similar to the one which toppled the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein? Would they complain if we left too early before helping set up a government strong enough to protect its people from militias like the janjaweed and allied terrorist organizations eager to win back their power and/or establish an Islamicist regime?

Unfortunately, we may have to go to war to help the oppressed people of Darfur. While it would be better to resolve this diplomatically, the United States, the United Nations and other nations have tried for years to negotiated a solution.

War may not be the answer here, but it could well be part of the solution.

I wonder how many of those who sport the self-righteous little bumper stickers proclaiming, “War is Not the Answer” on their car, also have one demanding that we “Save Darfur.”

Right now, as we’re trying to stabilize Iraq, we’re doing more than waging war against the terrorists seeking to undermine the elected government. The Bush Administration (and those supporting its broad policy in Iraq) never thought war in an of itself would be the “answer” to a brutal dictator who oppressed his people and defied the mandates of the United Nations. It was just the first step to ridding the world of his menace.

War was not the answer there. And it shouldn’t be the answer, but sometimes it’s an essential part of the response to tyrants such as Saddam Hussein and militant organizations like the janjaweed.

Well…well….well.

Fifty-five percent of Iraqis now say their own life is going well, up from 39 percent 12 months ago. And 62 percent say security in their local area is good, up 16 percentage points from last year.  These results, from an ABC poll carried out across Iraq and released today, paint a picture of a damaged country that is gradually starting to pull itself together again.

Attitudes toward Americans are ambivalent. On the one hand, Iraqis are deeply uncomfortable with the occupation — 73 percent say they oppose the presence of U.S. troops on Iraqi soil.  [GP Ed. Note - Um, who wouldn't be opposed to foreign troops in your country?]

When asked whether the U.S. troop surge has contributed to the drop in violence, a little more than half say no. But in a telling reality check, when asked whether U.S. troops should leave Iraq now, only 38 percent agreed — the majority wants U.S. troops to stay until security is guaranteed.

Oh, but wait….    *GP checks statements from Senate Majority Leader*

I am very confused.   Harry Reid tells me “the war is lost.”  I’m sure that’s because he has been to Iraq several times since the surge and has seen this first hand?  So he must be right, and the Iraqi people must be wrong.

*GP reads some news items*

Oops, no that’s not it.  Reid hasn’t been to Iraq at all.   But surely Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have sat down with General Petraeus when he has offered to brief them? 

*GP reads more news items….*

Nope, Reid and Pelosi both refused to attend briefings given last year by Gen. Petraeus.  Oh, and what was that?…..  Senator Hillary Clinton said late last year that in order to believe Petraeus’ statements that the situation was improving, it would require a “willing suspension of disbelief.”  

I guess we will just have to trust the Iraqi people and the US military on the ground to tell us the truth, since our Congressional leadership isn’t at all serious about winning the Global War on Terror.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)