If at first you don't succeed...lie, lie again

Great article by Michael Barone on the failure (despite desperate attempts) of the liberal left to 'tank' the Bush presidency, entitled "Bush Bashing Fizzles".

Now the unsupported charges that "Bush lied" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have been rekindled via criticism of Karl Rove. A key witness for the Democrats and mainstream media was former diplomat Joseph Wilson. Unfortunately for his advocates, he turned out to be a liar. A year after his famous article appeared in The New York Times in July 2003 accusing Bush of "twisting" intelligence, the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a bipartisan report, concluded that Wilson lied when he said his wife had nothing to do with his dispatch to Niger, and Chairman Pat Roberts said that his report bolstered rather than refuted the case that Saddam Hussein's Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa. So despite the continuing credulousness of much of the press, it appears inconceivable at this point that Karl Rove will be charged with violating the law prohibiting disclosure of the names of undercover agents. The case against Rove -- ballyhooed by recent Time and Newsweek cover stories that paid little heed to the discrediting of Wilson -- seems likely to end not with a bang but a whimper.

Apparently, Greg Stamford from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel hasn't gotten the word. Here he demonstrates why he is my leading contender for "Moonbat of the Month".

So ask yourself: If you were serious about fighting weapons of mass destruction, would you blow the cover of an agent gathering intelligence about them? Would you put at risk her network of spies and informants? Well, some official in the White House seems to have done precisely that. And a leading suspect is Rove. Also implicated is Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Their apparent motive? To discredit Wilson, who had sought to set the record straight about a claim Bush made in his 2003 State of the Union address.
Trying to scare the bejabbers out of us, Bush said that Iraq had "an advanced nuclear weapons development program" and that the British government had learned that Saddam Hussein had recently sought to purchase uranium, the key ingredient, in Africa. But at the request of the CIA, Wilson had investigated the African connection and found it to be bogus. It rested on a forged document. After futilely going through channels to correct Bush's statement, he went public.

So...where do I start? Powerline had a great analysis of what is going on in the press regarding the Wilson 'affair'. I quote:

The quality of the reporting on the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame story has been appalling. It raises in stark form the question whether "mainstream" reporters get facts wrong because they are ill-informed, or because they are counting on their readers being ill-informed.

That, or they think that if they repeat the lies enough times in bold print, people will start believing them.

Valerie Plame was actually 'outed' in the mid-1990s by a spy in Moscow. And then the CIA accidentally blew her cover when certain classified documents were compromised by the Cuban government. How do we know this? Through the media's friend-of-the-court brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, trying to defend Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper. Read the brief here.

Read the excellent article by Andrew McCarthy on this topic here.

Read this entire post on the subject from Powerline.

And for more, check out GOP.com's "Joe Wilson's Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies and Misstatements". (Lies?)

Stamford concludes his piece with the following:

The dangerous theory emerging in my mind does explain a puzzle: why Bush embarked on a vaguely defined and, thus, unwinnable war on terrorism in the first place.

The seemingly more sensible course would have been to declare war on the group that warred on us - namely, al-Qaida - and those who abet that group. A virtue of the narrower focus is that it puts victory, though tough to reach, in view. After experiencing the modern equivalent of Pearl Harbor, America needed to lift its spirits with the equivalent of a V-J Day - al-Qaida's destruction.

The defeat of terrorism ought to be a goal of national policy. But in the wake of 9-11, America needed a real war against the real culprit, not a metaphorical war, as in the never-ending war on drugs.

But for Bush, winning may not be the point - at least not that kind of winning. Making political gains may be the point.

Huh? The only dangerous thing about Stamford's mind is that he is allowed to air its contents in the pages of a sizeable Midwest newspaper. Give us a break.

John Howard Helps Reporter with Short Memory...

Great response from John Howard to the knot-head reporter who suggested in a press conference today that the recent London bombings were a direct result of the UK's involvement in the war in Iraq.

Here is the transcript. You can also see the video here, courtesy of Trey Jackson.

Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it's given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.
Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.

And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.

Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn't have done that?

When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn't be in Afghanistan?

When Sergio de Mello was murdered in Iraq -- a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, a person immensely respected for his work in the United Nations -- when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that de Mello had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor.

Now I don't know the mind of the terrorists. By definition, you can't put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber. I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I've cited. The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq. And indeed, all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggests to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of principles of the great world religion that, at its root, preaches peace and cooperation. And I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.

From K. Lopez on NRO Corner.

The Anchoress has a great photoblog showing the history of terrorist attacks that occurred before the coalition invasion of Iraq. Check it out here.

The narcissistic left just cannot believe that these Islamic fanaticists just hate us because we exist--not because we did something to offend them...

John Roberts--Now Let the Spin Begin

It will be interesting to see how the Democrats deal with the nomination of John Roberts for the U. S. Supreme Court. A few months ago, I would have thought that there was still a chance that they might behave in a civil and reasonable fashion.

However, after the Karl Rove debacle, I think we can expect the usual "much ado about nothing" from the left and the media until everyone's heads start to spin.

Here is an excellent article from Powerline listing the potential areas of attack and an analysis of each.

I predict that the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel will criticize the choice because Roberts is:
1. not a woman
2. not a minority
3. not a liberal

I hope I am wrong...

Michael Crichton Does it Again...

Just finished a great book -- State of Fear by Michael Crichton. The book is a quick read, with the trademark Crichton combination of a gripping story line backed up by excruciating research on the subject matter - global warming.

He quotes Mark Twain in his preface:

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Crichton spent three years researching the information in a list of environmental studies, which are contained in a 20-page bibliography in the back of the book.

His most important points have to do with the dangers of the 'politicization' of science--an alarming trend in our world.

He also quotes Alston Chase:

When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the role of politics in science.

Facing Reality

One wonders how many more terrorist attacks in different countries it will take for the left to understand that this is not all about Bush. (A lot more, if you read Leonard Pitts' editorial in today's Journal/Sentinel. Link here to the online version at the Detroit Free Press).

I quote...

Here's my take: Staggered and made to feel helpless by the Sept. 11 attacks, the nation needed something to hit. So we hit those that needed hitting -- the Taliban, which had sheltered Osama bin Laden -- but we didn't stop there. Apparently, we bought into the xenophobic notion that taking down a Muslim tyrant who wasn't threatening us was the same as taking down the Muslim extremists who had hurt us so badly.

Hopping mad and led by a president spoiling for a fight, we attacked the wrong guy. And many of us didn't care because it gave us the sense that we were doing something. It gave us false comfort.

It is past time we faced that fact.

Yes, I would agree with Leonard that many in this country and elsewhere are operating under a sense of false comfort.

But for very different reasons....

Contrast Leonard's predictable response to the London bombing with Nick Cohen's piece in The Observer.

In these bleak days, it's worth remembering what was said after September 2001. A backward glance shows that before the war against the Taliban and long before the war against Saddam Hussein, there were many who had determined that 'we had it coming'. They had to convince themselves that Islamism was a Western creation: a comprehensible reaction to the International Monetary Fund or hanging chads in Florida or whatever else was agitating them, rather than an autonomous psychopathic force with reasons of its own. In the years since, this manic masochism has spread like bindweed and strangled leftish and much conservative thought.

All kinds of hypocrisy remained unchallenged. In my world of liberal London, social success at the dinner table belonged to the man who could simultaneously maintain that we've got it coming but that nothing was going to come; that indiscriminate murder would be Tony Blair's fault but there wouldn't be indiscriminate murder because 'the threat' was a phantom menace invented by Blair to scare the cowed electorate into supporting him....

But it's a parochial line of reasoning to suppose that all bad, or all good, comes from the West - and a racist one to boot....Again, I understand the appeal. Whether you are brown or white, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist, it is uncomfortable to face the fact that there is a messianic cult of death which, like European fascism and communism before it, will send you to your grave whatever you do. But I'm afraid that's what the record shows.

And this from Charles Moore, in the Telegraph, "Where is the Gandhi of Islam?"

The strength of a civilisation is shown not only in its great monuments and works of art, or in its famous people: it appears also in the instant, instinctive behaviour of millions at a moment of crisis. By this measure, London is part of a great civilisation.

Yet there seems to me to be a radical disjunction between our heroic capacity to deal with the immediate effects of terrorism and our collective refusal to confront what lies behind it. The effects of this disjunction are, literally, fatal.

The inimitable Stephen Hayes (from Milwaukee!) has another great article on the linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda, The Mother of all Connections.

Perhaps it is simply too frightening for the left to confront the reality of terrorism. It is more safe and comfortable to blame our government for the extreme hatred that drives these Islamic extremists. Somehow, that gives them the feeling that the situation really is under our control....

False comfort indeed.

No Excuses, But...

Well, I know this is really not an excuse, but...

This is why I didn't blog at all last week.

Blogger has just made it very quick and easy to add pictures from your hard drive or the internet to your blog. Check it out.