Monthly Archives: October 2006

Jose Padilla

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RealTime

By Tom Brown

MIAMI (Reuters) – Lawyers for alleged al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla have asked a Florida judge to dismiss the terrorism case against him, saying he was tortured and force-fed psychedelic drugs while held at a U.S. military brig for more than 3-1/2 years.

RatTube.com » First Responder “Owns” 911 Debunkers

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Incredibly powerful speech by first responder David Miller, National Guard. He goes into detail calling out propaganda media such as Popular Mechanics and Times Magazine, as to the shills and traitors they are each time they denegrate rescuers by referring to them as conspiracy nuts. David Miller tells it like it is, he is dying. He was a hero Sept. 11th 2001, and he is 100 times that hero now. DO NOT SKIP THIS VIDEO!!!

http://rattube.com/blog1/2006/10/31/first-responder-owns-911-debunkers/

OpinionJournal – Best of the Web Today – October 31, 2006

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OpinionJournal WSJ.comOpinionJournal



Best of the Web Today – October 31, 2006

    By JAMES TARANTO

    Reporting for Duty
    John Kerry* appeared yesterday at Pasadena City College to campaign for Phil Angelides, Democratic challenger to California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is from the Pasadena Star-News’s report on the event:

    Kerry then told the students that if they were able to navigate the education system, they could get comfortable jobs–“If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq,” he said to a mixture of laughter and gasps.

    YouTube has video. It turns out “comfortable jobs” was a paraphrase; here is the direct quote:

    You know, education–if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq[**].

    What a stirring call to self-service from this war hero and patriot.

    * But he supports the troops!

    ** He might have added, “fighting in a war that I voted for.”

    The Mature Alternative to Howard Dean
    John Kerry issued the following statement today in defense of the above-noted remark. We quote it in full and verbatim:

    Statement of John Kerry Responding to Republican Distortions, Pathetic Tony Snow Diversions and Distractions

    Washington–Senator John Kerry issued the following statement in response to White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, assorted right wing nut-jobs, and right wing talk show hosts desperately distorting Kerry’s comments about President Bush to divert attention from their disastrous record:

    “If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

    I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have.

    The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it. These Republicans are afraid to debate veterans who live and breathe the concerns of our troops, not the empty slogans of an Administration that sent our brave troops to war without body armor.

    Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men. And this time it won’t work because we’re going to stay in their face with the truth and deny them even a sliver of light for their distortions. No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq.”

    Um, well . . . (ahem!) that certainly puts the whole thing in a different light.

    The Arabs and the Midterms
    “Arab governments are looking for change in U.S. policy in the Middle East after the midterm elections,” the Associated Press reports:

    One thing they hope for is that a politically weakened President Bush would talk with Iran and Syria. They also hope he would show greater interest in the Palestinians and find a way out of the crisis in Iraq.

    So if you want a politically weakened president cutting deals with terror-sponsoring dictatorships, vote Democratic on Nov. 7.

    Ex-Friends
    The New York Times reports that political polarization is taking a personal toll for many Americans: “People who once feistily shared their convictions about politics now report biting their tongues around–or even completely avoiding–friends and relatives who disagree, trying to avoid fights over the Bush administration and, specifically, the war.” Here’s one example:

    For years, Sheri Langham looked at the Republican politics of her parents as a tolerable quirk, one she could roll her eyes at and turn away from when the disagreements grew a bit deep.

    But earlier this year, Ms. Langham, 37, an ardent Democrat, found herself suddenly unable even to speak to her 65-year-old mother, a retiree in Arizona who, as an enthusiastic supporter of President Bush, “became the face of the enemy,” she said.

    “Things were getting to me, and it became such a moral litmus test that all I could think about was, ‘How can she support these people?’ ” said Ms. Langham, a stay-at-home mother in suburban Virginia.

    The mother and daughter had been close, but suddenly they stopped talking and exchanging e-mail messages. The freeze lasted almost a month.

    “Finally, it hit me that if one of us got hit by a bus tomorrow, I don’t want my final thought to be, ‘She supports George Bush,’ ” Ms. Langham said. They resumed contact, but have agreed not to discuss the administration and the war, or even forward each other humorous political e-mail messages.

    What’s interesting about the Times piece, as blogger Josh Treviño notes, is that “every person in the piece who actively rejects a friend or family member over politics is a Democrat”–a fact that reporter Anne Kornblut does not specifically note. Treviño observes:

    The American left–which we’ll posit as synonymous with Democrats here–is sincerely angry, and the anger goes beyond reason in a surprising number of cases. The conservative view of politics holds that it does not encompass all spheres of human activity. . . . There is no sound reason, for example, to reject association with like-minded parents, or friendships with co-workers, or the company of one’s own mother, on the grounds of political disagreements. Yet we see emphatic Democrats doing all these things in Kornblut’s piece. Why? We can only hypothesize, with the caveat that perhaps, if the tables were turned, Republicans and conservatives might behave the same way toward their family and neighbors–even if, in the last comparable period, from January 1993 through January 1995, it doesn’t seem they did.

    A core leftist tenet may be expressed in the old feminist cliché, “the personal is political.” This gets muddied a bit by the left’s predilection for espousing “privacy,” as found in some metaphysical emanation or penumbra of the Constitution; but the net–and discrete–effect of this espousal is not a depoliticizing of the “private” sphere. Precisely the opposite: where “privacy” is invoked, it is toward a definite politicized end, be it the legitimization of arbitrary couplings under the rubric of marriage, or the breaking-down of the social structures necessary for the maintenance of a conservative order. In this context, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to maintain relationships with people with whom one disagrees on political or ideological grounds.

    There is an internal consistency here, but it’s pitiable nonetheless. The spectacle of a grown woman rejecting her own aged mother over their conflicting opinions on the Bush Administration, to take just one anecdote from Kornblut’s piece, is at best an affront to piety borne [sic] of a monumental lack of perspective. To borrow a non-leftist parallel, one is reminded of Ayn Rand’s furious fault-finding with those who dared disagree with her. . . . But Rand’s group was, and remains, essentially a cult. The Democratic Party is not. Or, I should say, it didn’t used to be.

    Yet if the Democratic Party–or, more precisely, the Angry Left–is a cult, it is a peculiar sort of cult. It is a cult with no leader, only what we might term an “antileader,” namely George W. Bush. And it is a cult whose adherents imagine that there is a cult on the other side. As we noted in February:

    There is a sort of Newton’s Third Law of politics, which was at work during the previous administration as well. People on the left who reviled Bill Clinton’s policies in such areas as trade, welfare and capital punishment nonetheless backed him, and supported him fervently when Congress impeached him.

    For most conservatives, Bush is not perfect but he is far better than the alternatives that were on offer in 2000 and 2004. Those on the left who look at the right and see blind loyalty for the most part are actually viewing a reflection of their own blind hate.

    Roger Simon makes the case for reviving the old idea that it’s impolite to discuss politics in social settings. We’re not sure we agree; we often enjoy discussing and arguing politics with friends. But it’s a delicate matter, requiring both sensitivity and detachment. If you become angry or demanding when a friend or loved one does not see things your way, there is a good chance you will sour the relationship. If this happens, the personal toll may be heavy; the political payoff is almost certain to be nonexistent.

    Unenthusiastic Endorsement Watch
    Chris Reed of the San Diego Union-Tribune calls our attention to an endorsement in that newspaper:

    The Democratic candidate for treasurer, Bill Lockyer, has displayed a vicious partisan streak in his eight years as attorney general, using his powers to sandbag initiatives he doesn’t like and to file frivolous lawsuits solely to score political points with unions and environmentalists. In his previous job, as Senate president, he was the epitome of the pay-to-play Sacramento culture, famously blocking a law meant to keep criminals out of California casinos and card clubs after taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the gambling industry.

    Incredibly enough, we have no choice but to endorse him. . . . Lockyer may be the devil, but he’s a smart devil. . . .

    We set out to give Lockyer the most grudging election endorsement in the history of the printed word. We hope we have achieved our goal.

    Close, but we still give the edge to the <a href=”http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110009171