Camille Paglia assesses the election in this particularly crazy political year and delivers a negative endorsement for John McCain. It makes us like McCain all the more (full disclosure: we’re part of the “grumpy old men” demographic):
John McCain’s courage under torture during the Vietnam War deserves everyone’s gratitude and respect. But as a national candidate, the stumpy, uptight McCain is a lemon. Oy, that weaselly voice and those dated locutions and stilted intonations. Who needs a weird old coot with a short fuse in the White House?
Paglia asks: “Who needs a weird old coot with a short fuse in the White House?” That characterization might be something of a stretch, but even if it’s not, we’re satisfied with the candidate, given his current and oft-stated views. We have to admit that, as a member of the belligerent old coot cohort, we’re at the center of the market where McCain is most attractive, but so be it.
Unless the uproar by some prominent conservative media figures is some sort of attempt at a clever strategy, it seems like a bit of an affectation to us at this point. It has begun to strike us as very odd that some who ardently supported President Bush on most matters are vehemently anti-McCain, when, for better or worse, the two haven’t been really all that different on many policies — except that McCain’s recent pronouncements have been to the right of Bush.
John Hinderaker quotes Senator Clinton on ABC and extends the analogy to Social Security. The idea is that, just as a young person would have to be crazy to voluntarily enter the social security system today, because the numbers show that it all costs, no benefits to him, precisely the same sort of economics can be extrapolated in so-called universal health care:
Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday she might be willing to garnish the wages of workers who refuse to buy health insurance to achieve coverage for all Americans…when pressed on ABC’s “This Week,” she said: “I think there are a number of mechanisms” that are possible, including “going after people’s wages, automatic enrollment.” Clinton said such measures would apply only to workers who can afford health coverage but refuse to buy it…
There is an analogy between the compulsory aspects of the candidates’ health care proposals and Social Security. A young man or woman would be crazy to participate in the Social Security system if he or she had any choice. If anyone saved 12.4% of his earnings over a lifetime, he would not only have far more money in retirement than Social Security can provide, it would, equally important, be his money, to invest and dispose of as he sees fit. But the government needs young people’s money to support their grandparents’ retirements, so Social Security is forced upon them.
Given the internet and the nature of modern information flow, there is less excuse than ever in the world for the Law of Unintended Consequences, particularly when the negative results are first order consequences of the initial act. But perhaps such is the nature of human folly and hope that there will be a willing suspension of disbelief in any scheme that appears to promise something for (almost) nothing in the short term.
Senator Obama discussed the Clinton campaign on ABC:
I find the manner in which they’ve been running their campaign sort of depressing, lately. It was interesting in the debate, Sen. Clinton saying “don’t feed the American people false hopes.” Get a reality check, you know? I mean, you can picture JFK saying, “we can’t go to the moon, it’s a false hope.” Let’s get a reality check. It’s not, sort of, I think, what our tradition has been.
2008. The New New Frontier. From the signs we’ve seen in the media to date, we can expect a lot more of this, particularly in a post-Hillary environment, in the unlikely event that should happen. Speaking of a hypothetical post-Hillary environment in the minds of the media, Roger Simon at the Politico adds this about two rallies he attended:
Obama said things like: “We are one nation; we are one people; and our time for change has come.” Clinton said things like: “I founded in the Senate the Bipartisan Manufacturing Caucus.”
TIME chimes in on New Hampshire in this negative post (other reviews were far more upbeat):
If the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s 100 Club dinner is any bell weather – Barack Obama will handily win here. When Obama, the dinner’s last speaker, took the stage the crowd surged forward chanting “O-bam-a” and “Fired Up, Ready to Go!” So many people pressed toward the stage that an announcer asked people to “please take their seats for safety concerns.”
By comparison Hillary was twice booed. The first time was when she said she has always and will continue to work for “change for you. The audience, particularly from Obama supporters (they were waving Obama signs) let out a noise that sounded like a thousand people collectively groaning. The second time came a few minutes later when Clinton said: “The there are two big questions for voters in New Hampshire. One is: who will be ready to lead from day one? The second,”
and here Clinton was forced to pause as boos from the crowd mixed with cheers from her own supporters. “Is who can we nominate who will go the distance against the Republicans?”
Not just past slights. Apparently the media are putting, if we read this correctly, anti-Hillary “bullets” into people’s brains — or something like that. Frankly, President Clinton’s statement seemed a little incoherent.
The greatest media scandals of this decade have been Rathergate and the smearing of the Swift Boat Veterans. In each case mainstream media organizations failed to accept responsibility for false reporting. History will prove unkind to the media companies and their leaders who failed in the most basic duties of their charter.
Bruce Kesler, who knows more about the SwiftBoatVets than anyone else in the blogosphere, has pointed us to To Set The Record Straight: How Swift Boat Veterans, POWs and the New Media Defeated John Kerry by Scott Swett and Tim Ziegler, which outlines the basis for the media’s disgrace. John O’Neill wrote the foreword.
John Kerry’s sad life of tall tales should have unravelled after he was caught spending Christmas in Cambodia, but of course that did not happen, since the media took his side against the SwiftBoatVets. No doubt coming generations will write a more correct and definitive history. We’re looking forward to reading this first draft of that history.
Senator Joe Lieberman speaks about the Democratic Party and the Kyl-Lieberman amendment in a NY Sun story. It is hard to recall that he was the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate in 2000:
Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically-elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush.
Iraq has become the singular litmus test for Democratic candidates. No Democratic presidential primary candidate today speaks of America’s moral or strategic responsibility to stand with the Iraqi people against the totalitarian forces of radical Islam, or of the consequences of handing a victory in Iraq to al Qaeda and Iran. And if they did, their campaign would be as unsuccessful as mine was in 2006. Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus’ new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq, reluctant to acknowledge the progress we are now achieving, or even that that progress has enabled us to begin drawing down our troops there…
several left-wing blogs seized upon the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, offering wild conspiracy theories about how it could be used to authorize the use of military force against Iran. These were absurd arguments. The text of our amendment contained nothing — nothing — that could be construed as a green light for an attack on Iran. To claim that it did was an act of delusion or deception. On the contrary, by calling for tougher sanctions on Iran, the intention of our amendment was to offer an alternative to war.
Nonetheless, the conspiracy theories started to spread. Although the Senate passed our amendment, 76-22, several Democrats, including some of the Democratic presidential candidates, soon began attacking it — and Senator Clinton, who voted for the amendment. In fact, some of the very same Democrats who had cosponsored the legislation in the spring, urging the designation of the IRGC, began denouncing our amendment for doing the exact same thing.
The problem with the Kyl-Lieberman amendment of course had little to do with its substance, and a lot to do with politics. I asked some of my Senate colleagues who voted against our amendment: “Do you believe the evidence the military has given us about the IRGC sponsoring these attacks on our troops?” Yes, they invariably said. “Don’t you support tougher economic sanctions against Iran?” I asked. Again, yes — no question. So what’s the problem, I asked. “It’s simple,” they said. “We don’t trust Bush. He’ll use this resolution as an excuse for war against Iran.”…
there is something profoundly wrong — something that should trouble all of us — when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran’s murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops. There is likewise something profoundly wrong when we see candidates who are willing to pander to this politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base — even if it sends a message of weakness and division to the Iranian regime.
In the NY Sun story, a Lieberman critic said: “There is a large grain of truth that Lieberman is very much overstating….He is absolutely right that so far we have not heard in the presidential primaries, candidates speaking to the Democratic tradition of expanding democracy around the world and using force to advance American values, and that is in large part because of the sense that America is in a dire situation in Iraq. I think we will see the Democratic nominee return to these kinds of values.” We shall see.
In the old days, the job of stock analyst was only one step up on the ladder of excitement from that of actuary. Dreary conference calls with CFO’s, boring lunches down at the NYSSA. Times have changed. We had never heard of stock analysts getting death threats, and certainly not threats that were splashed across the front pages. Now we have. Times of London:
Meredith Whitney, the analyst who prompted a $369 billion (£177 billion) plunge in the value of US shares on Thursday by issuing a negative note on Citigroup, hit out at Wall Street’s culture of intimidation yesterday after receiving several death threats from investors in the bank.
Ms Whitney, a CIBC analyst who is married to the former World Wrestling Entertainment champion Death Mask, prompted a near 7 per cent drop in Citigroup’s shares on Thursday, after suggesting that the bank needed to raise more than $30 billion to restore its capital cushion.
She also downgraded her recommendation on Citigroup’s shares to “market underperform” in the note that set off America’s biggest stock market decline since August.
Ms Whitney, Forbes’s second-highest ranked stock picker for 2007, told The Times: “People are scared to be negative, especially when a company has such a wide holding. Clients are not pleased with my call and I have had several death threats…
We are sure it is completely by chance that the analyst getting death threats is married to WWE wrestler Death Mask. Any resemblance to a production by Vince McMahon is purely coincidental.
There are allegations that the Chinese government has hijacked the major US search engines and redirected their Chinese search traffic to Baidu. AFP:
US Internet search engines in China were being hijacked and directed to Chinese-owned Baidu, analysts said Wednesday, speculating that this may be retaliation for the White House award to exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama. Analysts at Search Engine Roundtable, a website focusing on Internet search, said Chinese users trying to search on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft websites were being directed to the Chinese search engine.
“It seems like China is fed up with the US, so as a way to fight back, they redirected virtually all search traffic from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to Baidu, the Chinese based search engine,” the analysts wrote.
The authors said it was not clear exactly how or why the searches were being redirected, but China is known for tightly controlling the Internet and using a variety of filters to screen out search results for issues relating to dissidents or the Tibetan spiritual leader. On Wednesday, US President George W. Bush called for an end to “religious repression” in China as he defiantly became the first US leader to appear in public with the Dalai Lama.
As has been noted, Baidu, a Chinese company, is listed on NASDAQ. Search engines get much of their revenue from their traffic, because internet advertising revenues are related to page views, click-throughs, or other such metrics. Question: if China has been redirecting traffic from these other US public companies to the US public company Baidu for the economic benefit to China or otherwise, is it guilty of stock manipulation? Should the SEC be investigating China?
The New York Times coverage of the unraveling of Haditha is reminiscent of its coverage of Mike Nifong and Duke. It’s such a pity when the facts — prejudged so wrongly and so far in advance by the MSM — do not fit the progressive action line. Here are some excerpts from the Times’ obituary for the lost My Lai of Iraq, in which it is called an “unusual departure” for the prosecution to comment that it ill serves society to go to trial with a case it can’t prove:
Last year, when accounts of the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of marines came to light, it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity, just as the conflict in Vietnam had spawned the My Lai massacre a generation ago.
But on Thursday, a senior military investigator recommended dropping murder charges against the ranking enlisted marine accused in the 2005 killings, just as he had done earlier in the cases of two other marines charged in the case. The recommendation may well have ended prosecutors’ chances of winning any murder convictions in the killings of the apparently unarmed men, women and children….
“When you have an investigating officer like Ware, who says ‘don’t go there if you can’t prove,’” your case, Mr. Solis said, “we’re left with what appear to be very reduced charges.” He added: “He’s aggressive, and he seems to make his judgments without regard for anything but the law. He must know that people — civilians, primarily — are going to howl about this, but that doesn’t seem to be a concern.”…
“It does surprise me to see that the killing of seven women and children by grenades and rifles, for the purposes of clearing structures, is being treated the way this investigating officer has treated it,” said Eugene R. Fidell, an expert in military law in Washington.
In an unusual departure from the analysis of the facts in Lance Corporal Sharratt’s case, Colonel Ware warned that putting marines on trial for murder without having the evidence to prove it could “erode public support of the Marine Corps and mission in Iraq.”
“Unusual departure”? It seems rather the opposite to us — that the logical conclusion from any discussion of the facts and evidence in the case is the statement of Colonel Ware that it ill serves society for a prosecutor to proceed to trial with a case he can’t prove. Or are we missing something? In any event, a little unbiased journalism might be a welcome “unusual departure” in the disgraceful coverage of Haditha. The pieces at Gateway Pundit and Powerline provide more examples of bias and unprofessional behavior.
George Will describes the increased volatility of the left and the right and the apparent empowerment of third party movements by the multiplicity of media (and the BCRS, which Will does not cite):
the responses of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in the Sept. 26 debate, to this question: “Will you pledge that by January 2013, the end of your first term, more than five years from now, there will be no U.S. troops in Iraq?” Their dusty answers were clear enough: No and no. Because those responses were more or less sensible, they infuriated the party’s incandescent antiwar activists. Those activists thought that in the 2006 elections they had won for their party the power to end the war, but they have had to settle for increasing the minimum wage.
Surely it is not fanciful to imagine that in the fevered recesses of these activists’ minds there are thoughts of running, or at least threatening to run, an independent antiwar candidate in the general election. Most political professionals discount this possibility, saying that restive Democrats learned their lesson in 2000, when Ralph Nader’s 97,488 votes in Florida cost Al Gore the presidency. But another lesson of that episode is that a small number of intensely disaffected “progressives” can have momentous consequences. Hence they might have considerable leverage by threatening an insurgency.
Speaking of insurgencies, last week there were menacing rumblings from social conservatives about running an independent antiabortion candidate if Rudy Giuliani is the Republican nominee. Perhaps if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, social conservatives will be terrified back into the fold, their fury assuaged by Giuliani’s repeated genuflections in the form of promises regarding what such conservatives care most about — judicial nominations.
But do not underestimate the temptation, to which the intense cohorts on Democratic left and Republican right are susceptible, to kick over their party’s furniture for the fun of it. The pleasures of moral purity are available to those who fancy themselves a small-church militant in an unconverted world. The multiplication of political media has infused politics with an extraordinary volatility. For example, in 2006, when Rep. Mark Foley, the Florida Republican, was incinerated in the House page scandal, his national name recognition went from essentially zero to the high 80s in six days.
Will quotes Adam Smith on causation: “It is not the multitude of ale-houses…that occasions a general disposition to drunkenness among the common people; but that disposition, arising from other causes, necessarily gives employment to a multitude of ale-houses.”
However, while it is true that the fiery sentiments of some on the Left and Right arise before any third party movements, McCain-Feingold and the New Media have lowered the barriers to entry and created favorable conditions for schismatics: (a) low cost, instant, professional looking messages; (b) the appearance that smallish groups have critical mass because it’s so easy to generate a crowd in cyberspace; and (c) ample funding for the fringes; among other elements. We shall see if any serious insurgencies arise over the course of the next 13 months.
Joe Conason of the NY Observer states one point of view on the oddest political controversy in the media this year. Mr. Conason’s frame of reference seems to have relatively little in common with our own, which, in this instance, more resembles that of Jack Kelly. Here is an excerpt from Conason’s piece:
Only in a media environment where conservatives have long felt exempt from scrutiny would Limbaugh still feel free to mock the military service of those who disagree with him. He is, after all, a certified chicken-hawk who cheered on the Vietnam War as it ground up tens of thousands of young Americans, but saw no reason why he should serve. His local draft board in a Missouri county, where his family enjoyed political influence, granted him a 1-Y deferment after he dropped out of college and forfeited his student deferment. Explaining how he escaped the draft, he has cited both a “bad knee” and a cyst on his backside that supposedly rendered him medically unfit.
Despite that undistinguished record, however, he has never hesitated to denigrate the service of Sen. John Kerry, former Sen. Tom Daschle and other Democrats who volunteered to wear the nation’s uniform. He spent hours repeating the “Swift boat” lies when Kerry ran for president in 2004. And now he insinuates that the troops and vets who question this war are “phony soldiers.”
What really worries Limbaugh and his right-wing comrades is that more and more of those who bravely serve America abroad, from foot soldiers to flag officers, have begun to voice their anger at the reckless policies that have cost them so dearly. Leaders of VoteVets, a group of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans organized in support of smarter security policy, have angrily challenged Limbaugh to repeat his slur to their faces — something he is most unlikely to do.
Thanks to all the veterans with the courage to speak out — no matter what their opinion — it is no longer so easy for the Limbaugh crowd to claim the military and the flag as their exclusive property. That illegitimate seizure of everyone’s patriotic heritage is coming to an ignominious end.
Of course some in the military oppose the war, and certainly many object to the way it has been fought. Yet we are still talking about a US fighting force that, when polled three years ago, supported Bush over Kerry by a 69% to 24% margin. The idea of the rising tide of an anti-war all-volunteer military — “more and more of those who bravely serve America abroad, from foot soldiers to flag officers, have begun to voice their anger” — seems a bit far fetched, and the overheated prose of Mr. Conason suggests a wish rather than an observation.
Things have gotten a bit strange in the war against conservative talk radio:
Senator Harkin: I’ll just close, Mr. President, by noting that in August, seven soldiers published an op-ed in the New York Times criticizing the current strategy in Iraq. Tragically, two of those soldiers were subsequently killed in action, making the ultimate sacrifice for their country. I can only assume by Mr. Limbaugh’s definition that they too were “phony soldiers.” Now what’s most despicable is that Mr. Limbaugh says these provocative things to make more money. So he castigates our soldiers, this makes more news, more people tune in, he makes more money. Well, I don’t know. Maybe he was just high on his drugs again…
Senator Reid: Here is what we wrote: “Dear Mr. Mays.” Here’s the letter, Mr. President. “At the time we signed this letter, 3,801 hundred American soldiers had been killed in Iraq. Another 27,936 have been wounded. One hundred and sixty others awoke this morning on foreign sand far from home to face the danger and uncertainty of another day at war. Although Americans of goodwill debate the merits of this war, we can all agree that those who serve with such great courage deserve our deepest respect and gratitude….That’s why Rush Limbaugh’s recent characterization of troops who oppose the war as “phony soldiers” is an outrage. Our troops are fighting and dying to bring to others the freedoms that many take for granted. It is unconscionable that Mr. Limbaugh would criticize them for exercising the fundamental American right to free speech. We call on you to publicly repudiate these comments that call into question their service and sacrifice and ask Mr. Limbaugh to apologize for his comments.
We understand that some have called this rather implausible attack on the pro-military conservative talk show host battlefield preparation for the political media war of 2008, but to us, it just looks foolish. Furthermore, the bit from Harkin is downright bizarre, given his history.
Sidney Blumenthal says that one of the most viewed posts in the life of the blogosphere was the result of a grand conspiracy, instantaneously executed:
Within minutes of the conclusion of the broadcast, conservative bloggers launched a counterattack. The chief of these critics was a Republican Party activist in Georgia. Almost certainly, these bloggers, who had been part of meetings or conference calls organized by Karl Rove’s political operation, coordinated their actions with Rove’s office.
Over the past months, there has been a ratcheting up of rhetoric and preparations for a war against Iran. Now there are military men going on the record about war planning for Iran, a new development, with several possible motives. UK Times:
Project Checkmate, a successor to the group that planned the 1991 Gulf War’s air campaign, was quietly reestablished at the Pentagon in June. It reports directly to General Michael Moseley, the US Air Force chief, and consists of 20-30 top air force officers and defence and cyberspace experts with ready access to the White House, the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Detailed contingency planning for a possible attack on Iran has been carried out for more than two years by Centcom (US central command), according to defence sources. Checkmate’s job is to add a dash of brilliance to Air Force thinking by countering the military’s tendency to “fight the last war” and by providing innovative strategies for warfighting and assessing future needs for air, space and cyberwarfare. It is led by Brigadier-General Lawrence “Stutz” Stutzriem, who is considered one of the brightest air force generals. He is assisted by Dr Lani Kass, a former Israeli military officer and expert on cyberwarfare…
Checkmate was formed in the 1970s to counter Soviet threats but fell into disuse in the 1980s. It was revived under Colonel John Warden…Checkmate’s role is to develop the necessary expertise so that “if somebody says Iran, it says: ‘here is what you need to think about’. Here are the objectives, here are the risks, here is what it will cost, here are the numbers of planes we will lose, here is how the war is going to end and here is what the peace will look like”.
Warden added: “The Centcoms of this world are executional – they don’t have the staff, the expertise or the responsibility to do the thinking that is needed before a country makes the decision to go to war. War planning is not just about bombs, airplanes and sailing boats.”
So war planning against Iran would appear to be more real than ever, with military officials going on the record about it. In addition, the advertising of Checkmate would appear to be intended to make the point that a campaign against Iran would be better planned than the Iraq War. Such a preemptive US domestic propaganda campaign also suggests that the administration is very serious about an Iran war.
the official address to the 9/11 commemoration ceremony by Deval Patrick, who is apparently the governor of Massachusetts: 9/11, said Gov. Patrick, “was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States.” “Mean and nasty”? He sounds like an oversensitive waiter complaining that John Kerry’s sent back the aubergine coulis again. But evidently that’s what passes for tough talk in Massachusetts these days…
If you’ll forgive such judgmental categorizations, this isn’t about “them,” it’s about “us.” The long-term survival of any society depends on what proportion of its citizens thinks as Gov. Patrick does. Islamism is an opportunist enemy but you can’t blame them for seeing the opportunity: In that sense, they understand us far more clearly than Gov. Patrick understands them…
Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and twenties? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of Deval Patrick-style cultural relativism – nothing is any better or any worse than anything else; if people are “mean and nasty” to us, it’s only because we didn’t sing enough Barney the Dinosaur songs at them – in such a world a certain percentage of its youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something fierce and primal and implacable.
Tra, la la. What a rabble rouser. We have much better things to do today, teach children conflict resolution, play non-winner games, try out the new ab buster, and of course watch OJ and more OJ.
James Lewis looks at Europe and sees a self-inflicted mess. His analysis is interesting in that it identifies coldly calculated domestic political gain, at the expense of losing the country, as the culprit:
London had its Underground bombing a couple of years ago. Madrid had its train bombings, which drove Spain out of the anti-terror coalition. France has had two years of seasonal riots on the outskirts of Paris, and Germany just arrested bomb-plotters trying to create “another 9/11″ at Frankfurt Airport or the Ramstein US air base. The Netherlands had its public murder of Theo Van Gogh, as well as unpublicized violence, and Denmark had its cartoon riots. Levels of rape by immigrants who view women as cattle are up all over Europe, as well as honor killings, genital mutilation, chain immigration and a rising atmosphere of fear and intimidation. If you don’t think people are scared in Europe, you aren’t paying attention…
The governing elites don’t care. After all, the multi-culti crowd who run the place created the problem of uncontrollable immigration in the first place, because immigrants vote Left, just like illegal immigrants in the United States, who are also considered automatic Democrats. So the calculation is that the Left can endanger its native voter base, and still make up for the loss by importing and buying Muslim votes. So far, that calculation has worked very nicely for the political class, so that major cities like Amsterdam, Paris and London are rapidly trending Muslim in polulation. Socialist Britain hasn’t even managed to get rid of terror-preaching Imams who are not legal British citizens. The rule of Shari’a comes next if you just wait long enough.
Roger Simon wrote a paragraph the other day whose concepts were beyond the ken of all but a handful of Americans six long years ago:
anyone who says the three religions are the same when Judaism and Christianity have gone through numerous reformations and Islam has not is simply delusional or lying or a combination of the two. For that reason, fundamentalists are a minority in Judaism and Christianity, while everybody is in one sense a fundamentalist in Islam. The Koran is the verbatim word of God, therefore immutable. The Bible is only a report of the word of God. Out of this, we still have Islamic people beheading people, trying to blow up civilians in subways, destroying Buddhist monuments, institutionally oppressing women and all the rest in 2007, not 1007. Are the perpetrators the exceptions? Sure to some degree (though not in the oppression of women). And there are certainly more of these violent types by far, exponentially far, than there are in any other religion. Do we see the Islamic world rising up in opposition to their behavior? Not at all.
The ability to write that paragraph is precisely how the world has changed since 9-11, whether Christiane Amanpour and CNN choose to acknowledge it or not.
We had never encountered the term poetry slam until today. This was a pretty good way to make its acquaintance. Perhaps the revolution will be televised after all. HT:LGF
There appear to be a number of signs that this year’s annual warning from Adam Gadahn might possibly have a bit of substance behind it. For example, the New York City police department went into high gear yesterday after Debka reported a dirty bomb threat against NYC, LA, and Miami; now police activities are being “scaled back.” The editor of Debka made the salient point to Ynet that the NYC police were not acting on Debka’s report alone:
Be it true or false, imaginary or realistic, DEBKAfile’s Giora Shamis can rest easy on Saturday, after having spun New York police into a frenzy following a Debka report that al-Qaeda might be plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the city…”The New York Police didn’t have to take my information seriously,” he said. “They had other information, additional to ours.”…”We never know if the threat is real or not, but if you follow these publications for years, you can get a feel for whether the threat is serious or not. This time this threat seemed -– due to the intensiveness of the exchange of messages — to be more serious than others.”
Interestingly, Bill Roggio reports that al Qaeda and Taliban training camps — the kind the US destroyed in the aftermath of 9/11 — have been emptying out:
The Fourth Rail interviewed a senior US military intelligence official and a US military officer, both of whom are familiar with the situation in the Northwest Frontier Province and wish to remain anonymous. The sources confirmed Mr. Shahzad’s information concerning the al Qaeda and Taliban camps in North Waziristan and the Taliban’s reorganization is accurate. Both sources are particularly concerned about the implications of the emptying of the camps…Mr. Shahzad reported there were 29 al Qaeda and Taliban camps in North and South Waziristan, and all but one “have been dismantled, apart from one run by hardline Islamist Mullah Abdul Khaliq.”…
The al Qaeda and Taliban personnel abandoned the 28 camps after “the US had presented Islamabad with a dossier detailing the location of the bases as advance information on likely US targets,” Mr. Shahzad reported….”This is one of the reasons that we are worried about a major CONUS [Continental United States] attack,” the senior military intelligence source told The Fourth Rail, noting the recent influx of news of terror cells attempting to penetrate the US. “If they evacuated their bases, they almost certainly did so out of fear of more than just the Pakistani army.”
Meanwhile, DHS reports increased penetration attempts from both Canada and Mexico, via ABC:
“Tunnels under U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico serve primarily as conduits for transporting illicit drugs into the United States. In addition, reliable reporting indicates that some tunnels also are used for alien smuggling, including special interest aliens.”…In its own report, “Special Assessment: Underground Tunnels: A Border Security Threat,” DHS noted that 65 tunnels have been discovered since 1990 — all but one originating in Mexico — and the pace of tunneling or the discovery of tunneling appears to be accelerating…
Canadian officials meanwhile have issued a warning that “several…counterfeit visas…have been intercepted at Pearson International Airport in Toronto.”…”The counterfeits were detected in the possession of nationals of Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, and most recently, nationals of India. The counterfeits, purportedly issued in Kiev and Chandigarh, bear serial numbers starting with ‘A043283.’”
Finally, some odd things have been happening in Washington as well. The Republican administration is suddenly making noises about taking border enforcement seriously, and the Democratic Congress went along with warrantless domestic surveillance with relatively few complaints. Happenstance, coincidence, or other? (And, by the way, should we start thinking about August 22 again, as Bernard Lewis suggested last year?)
Observations by Michael Yon, who has spent 18 months embedded with troops in Iraq:
almost none of those who have cast themselves as truth-tellers have the requisite credibility for the job. The one man who does was told he had only until September to evaluate progress. I’m not suggesting that I make a worthy substitute for the commanding general, David Petraeus, on this or any subject, but since December of 2004, I have spent roughly a 1½ years on the battlefields of Iraq.
I’ve traveled alongside American Army and Marines and British forces, from Basra to Mosul and just about anywhere of note in between. When it comes to Iraq, being there matters because of the massive disconnect between what most Americans think they know about Iraq, and what is actually going on there…
Al Qaeda is in Iraq, intentionally inflaming sectarian hostilities, deliberately pushing for full scale civil war. They do this by launching attacks against Shia, Sunni, Kurds and coalition forces. To ensure the attacks provoke counterattacks, they make them particularly gruesome.
Five weeks ago, I came into a village near Baqubah with American and Iraqi soldiers. Al Qaeda had openly stated Baqubah was their worldwide headquarters — indeed, Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed just a short drive away. Behind the village was a palm grove. I stood there, amid the crushing stench of death, and photographed the remains of decapitated children and murdered adults. I can still smell the rotting corpses of those children.
Clearly, not every terrorist in Iraq is Al Qaeda, but it is Al Qaeda that has been intentionally, openly, brazenly trying to stoke a civil war. As Al Qaeda is now being chased out of regions it once held without serious challenge, their tactics are tinged with desperation.
And some rather pointed conclusions:
1. Iraqis are uniting across sectarian lines to drive Al Qaeda in all its disguises out of Iraq, and they are empowered by the success they are having, each one creating a ripple effect of active citizenship.
2. The Iraqi Army is much more capable now than it was in 2005. It is not ready to go it alone, but if we keep working, that day will come.
3. General Petraeus is running the show. Petraeus may well prove to be to counterinsurgency warfare what Patton was to tank battles with Rommel, or what Churchill was to the Nazis.
Wow. That’s an incredible endorsement of General Petraeus. It was just a few months ago that we heard him damned with the faint praise of being called an “intellectual,” and derided as “arrogant” and “excessively ambitious.”
