Tuesday, July 31, 2007

MSM Defeat Narrative Foundering on the Shoals of Truth?

With a pair of Brookings analysts—hardly known as Bush supporters—suggesting that the "surge" strategy might be going very well indeed, the left wingnut Defeat-In-Iraq narrative appears to be foundering as it hits the sharp reef of Truth. The Brookings assessment appears in no less than that Marxist Bible, the New York Times. The analysis is provocatively entitled, "A War We Just Might Win." It's evidence, perhaps, that this weakening media giant may at last be prepared to confront the real reason it's been steadily losing circulation. Mainly, that you can buy more professionally written fiction just down the street at your local Barnes & Noble.

The wingnuts' cheerleaders in the MSM may have some additional 'splainin' to do when their readers step up to the plate to challenge the anti-surge propaganda they've been putting out since early this year. Before the surge even got underway.

Tigerhawk has a pretty good analysis today as to what's been going on lately:
It has begun to dawn on even lefties with a couple of brain cells to rub together that we ain't fighting Iraq here. That war is over. We won. Saddam ain't the winner if we leave. He and the Baathists are dead. We are allied with "Iraq" in a fight against Salafist Al Qaeda. We had to figure out how to create our ally -- literally recreate Iraq -- and General Petraeus seems to have figured out how to do that. And furthermore, that ally has in turn figured out that in Petraeus and his strategy, Iraq has a capable friend in the US.
What a concept! As we've been preaching in HazZzMat since setting this site up in late 2005, we need to seize objective reporting and analysis back from the lefty propagandists in the media who've been pushing our "defeat" since 9/11. Tiger lays out the irreducible truth right here: We already won the war against Saddam's dictatorship. We've been, however, in a new war ever since, fighting the Al Qaeda Islamofascists in their own neck of the woods rather than on Broadway.

The left isn't interested in this distinction at all, since the aging Boomers at its head seem bent on re-creating another Vietnam-style "defeat" for us as their final dubious act of crowning generational glory. Now, however, it looks like their pre-cooked narrative is being overtaken by boots on the ground.

We might as well give Tiger the last word here:
Any war we choose to fight, and demonstrate the political will to see to its conclusion, we will win. Nobody should be surprised by this. We may not get every answer right - let's remember that General Pershing showed up in wool for the summer of 1917, we went to North Africa and Italy before Normandy, and Lincoln went through a bunch of losers before he found Grant -- but we get the big ones right.

Separately, it should not be lost on anybody that with Musharraf getting a bit more aggressive in Waziristan and Petraeus banging AQ pretty hard in Baghdad, we have an unusually good offensive going right now. Too bad it doesn't seem to get reported that way. And the only answer the enemy has is kidnapping people and carbombs. Just keep squeezing please. Harder.

Justice Roberts: DOA, Please. Luv, Netroots

When we heard early yesterday afternoon that Chief Justice Roberts had "collapsed," we were nervous, and even moreso when reports revealed that he'd had a "seizure." We confess to some skepticism about the early diagnosis of a "benign idiopathic seizure." (It's hard to find an agreeably clear description of this diagnosis on the web within a short time period, so our link is the best we can find for now.

Why our skepticism? Subjective, actually. Mr. and Mrs. W lost their 20-something daughter over a decade ago to a brain tumor, whose initial clue was a massive seizure that appeared without warning. Seizures, while connected to epilepsy, are not infrequently merely symptoms of something else that can prove to be worse. The Chief Justice is said to have had a similar episode in 1993. Let's hope that the inevitable brain scans will not show something worse. This guy is probably the most intelligent Chief Justice we've had in my lifetime, and we here at HazZzMat are wishing him the best of health and, hopefully, a long enough tenure to bring the High Court back to where it should always have been, interpreting law rather than imposing socialism while letting Democrats off the hook instead of having to vote each time on limiting our freedoms further.

Unfortunately, the wingnuts and netroots are cackling with their usual juvenile glee at Mr. Roberts' health issues. As in this typically vicious observation:
antifaschits: [responding to a request for prayers] why? karma, if it exists, will probably kick this SOB in the teeth. Except, unlike 40,000,000 americans, he has access to the best of the best health care plans in the world. If, unexpectedly, he sees his own frail human life, his ability to suffer and die, his future pass before his eyes, like it does to hundreds of thousands each day in this country, if it educates him about the harm he inflicts on others, then, yeah, I can see hoping for him. But more likely than not, he won’t. He will not recognize life as most of us see it. He will continue in his neocon way of viewing things, and simply add fat to the fire when he recovers and returns to the bench.
Similar excerpts from our intellectual betters are available at the above link.

Upon reading this and similar detritus related to the Veep's heart issues last week, one can only conclude that the latest youthful cadre of Democrat-Socialist wannabes is as juvenile, bigoted, and downright meanspirited as they are ignorant. Offloading every evil under the sun onto conservatives, they fail to recognize the pure evil of their own vile and wilful ignorance as they indulge in an unending orgy of primal scream therapy.

As one sensible blogger observes:
Ahhhhh! The party of tolerance and compassion (Disclaimer: except for conservatives and anyone else that doesn’t tow our party line.)
Or, as an earlier writer once observed:
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Monday, July 30, 2007

"Progressives" Bamboozle Electorate

Well, now, here's something astonishing from RasmussenReports:
During last Monday’s Democratic Presidential debate, Senator Hillary Clinton indicated that she preferred to be called “progressive” rather than “liberal.” The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that is probably a good move--Americans are more receptive to the term progressive.

Just 20% said they consider it a positive description to call a candidate politically liberal while 39% would view that description negatively. However, 35% would consider it a positive description to call a candidate politically progressive. Just 18% react negatively to that term. Those figures reflect a huge swing, from a net negative of nineteen points to a net positive of 17 points.

If we were lefties here at HazZzMat, we'd have to laugh. As anyone who reads the history books is well aware, "progressive" is the sneaky word that Marxists use to disguise their politics, better to hide their true intentions from the electorate. "Progressive," in short, is pretty much a synonym for "socialist." Which, of course, is exactly what Hillary is.

So it's no surprise that Hillary prefers to see herself described as a "progressive." A hard leftist, she knows full well that the lefty definition of "progressive" describes her politics perfectly. On the other hand, she also knows that the "progressive" label conceals her politics from a large chunk of the electorate which, like the idiots cited above, don't really have a clue as to what the code word "progressive" connotes.

How about the flip side of the equation?

On the other side of the ideological spectrum, being called politically conservative is considered a positive description by 32% and negative by 20%. It’s much better for a candidate to be described as being like Ronald Reagan—44% consider that a positive description and 25% negative. That swing is meaningful, but not as dramatic as the difference between liberal and progressive. Being called conservative generates a net 12 point positive response that jumps to 19 points when someone is said to be like Reagan.

What this tells us is that the left has successfully concealed its Marxist intentions by deploying its dishonest term "progressive" in such a way that it becomes more useful than "liberal" to describe their very-left political agenda while appearing to be "moderate." (After all, in the original sense of the word, how many of us, even on the conservative side of the aisle, would resist being called "progressive," which USED TO MEAN forward-looking and creative?)

Meanwhile, the left has also effectively demonized "conservative," as indicated above. On the other hand, if Republican politics are referred to as "Reaganite," the approval numbers suddenly improve, although the difference is not as "dramatic" as the "liberal" vs. "progressive" swing.

No doubt, the reason for this phenomenon is the fact that the left's endless restructuring of meaning has taken its toll, manipulating people who are in fact "moderate" or "centrist" into feeling more comfortable with describing themselves as "progressive." They apparently think that by avoiding the increasingly opprobrious term "liberal" and using "progressive" to describe their politics, they can now bask in the "forward thinking" connotation that used to give meaning to the term. Meanwhile, they are now apparently nearly oblivious to the use of the term "progressive" in Marxist language encoding.

There could be a lesson here. Maybe it's time for Repubs to reposition themselves as "Reaganites" as opposed to "conservatives." That way, they can indulge in the best of conservative policies and practices while cloaking themselves in the good vibes left behind by Ronald Reagan, the gold standard of conservative politics everywhere.

Hey, if the left can pull this off, so can we. And not a moment too soon. 2008 looms increasingly large. If the right can get its hands back around our culture the way Reagan did, disallowing field advantage to the, er, progressives, Repubs might have a better chance of taking the government back from the "progressive" wingnuts that are running it right into the ground even as we type this entry.

Return from Canada

Mr. and Mrs. Wonker have returned from the wilds of Stratford, Ontario, having enjoyed excellent performances/revivals of the Gershwin musical, My One and Only, and Oklahoma!

Additionally, even though we are in circuit-overload on Shakespeare here in DC, as a result of the city's 2007 Shakespeare Festival here (just concluded), we did manage to catch a rather eccentric performance of Merchant of Venice in Stratford as well. Unpleasant stuff, pushing the play's obvious anti-Semitism over the top, for what effect we're still not quite sure.

Nonetheless, the folks we stayed with in Stratford (most accommodations are B&Bs rather than hotels) were a delight.

The one thing about the town that Mr. and Mrs. Wonker noticed was the near complete absence of pounding, two-beat background music nearly everywhere, from idiots in autos to stores, to restaurants, to nearly everywhere else. This included a dining room in Windsor, where we overnighted before returning to the states. The Park Terrace Restaurant, on the Detroit River viewing level of the Hilton Windsor Hotel, did actually goose the sound system a bit. Business there was a bit on the light side, primarily consisting of a long table of 60-somethings plus our own assemblage of 6. We called for the music to be turned down, and apparently the other table did as well. (It had probably been cranked a bit by a member of the kitchen staff bored with the pace of the evening.) When the noise subsided, the other table gave a polite cheer and we gave them a thumbs-up. (And the Chateaubriand for 2 wasn't bad, either!)

Why do we point this out? Simple. When was the last time you went anywhere in public here in the U.S., particularly department stores and the like, where you WEREN'T assulted by all this cheap, very loud so-called music? Thought so.

Kudos to our Canadian friends for providing an opportunity to sample a noise-free environment.

More on our trip from time to time this week.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Monty Python - Lumberjack Song



See you next week! --W

Off to Canada, You Betcha

As threatened earlier in today's barrage of relatively short posts, Wonker and Mrs. Wonker will be heading off to the Shakespeare Festival up in Stratford, Ontario, a bit later today. Assuming that wireless actually works in Canada (heh), I'll try a post or two from north of the border. Otherwise, blogging will resume from sunny Virginia next week.

Meanwhile, we'll leave you in the capable hands of the intrepid Luther, who will keep the blogosphere, and HazZzMat, honest in our absence.

But now, Mrs. W. and I need to start practicing the Lumberjack Song to make sure we've got it down right. Check out our final entry if you want to sing along.

More on Drive-By Journalism

Not sure who coined this term. Rush uses it a lot. But it's meant to compare journalism&mdash'as it's practiced today by writers who call themselves journalists but are really Marxist propagandists—to inner city criminal perps who drive by, guns a-blazing, and slaughter anyone that's in their way.

A prime example happens in this morning's Washington Post, never, even at its best, a reliable bastion of truth. An editorial today (along with an article last week) viciously whacks suburban Prince William County Virginia for being the latest Northern VA county to attempt to tackle the problem of illegal immigration before its consequences turn suburbia into one huge, lawless barrio.

Here's another point of view from someone who lives there, John Miller, who just happens to write for the National Review Online:

Last Sunday, the Wash Post described life in the Virginia county where I live:

Some cowered indoors, wary of police sweeps. Others said they'd leave for another county, or state — anywhere that didn't seem as unwelcome as Prince William suddenly did. ... Hispanic residents there say a clasp of fear has gripped their community in recent days, as anxiety and confusion over the policies ripple through supermarkets, job sites, hair salons and living rooms.

This is in the aftermath of the county board approving an anti-illegal-alien resolution. Among other things, the police are supposed to check the residency of people they take into custody. Judging from the Post, you would think that Prince William County is now gripped by fear.

Well, you wouldn't know it from driving around here this week. Want to hire an illegal alien? You can still go to the same 7-11 on Route 1 in Woodbridge, where they gather every single morning for day-labor opportunities to pull up. Let me assure you: nothing has changed. And that goes for the Post's journalistic biases, too.
Oh, and no hugging, no learning at the Post. Here's some excerpts from today's hatchet job editorial, arrogantly titled "Nativism's Toxic Cloud":
TOXIC FALLOUT from the Senate's failure to enact immigration reform is drifting over the Northern Virginia suburbs. This month, Prince William County approved a resolution whose purpose is to make life unpleasant for illegal immigrants by denying them services and using local police to hound them. Now neighboring Loudoun County is moving in the same direction, spurred by a member of the Board of Supervisors who contends that immigrant "hordes" are ruining the county. In both cases, the favorite fantasy of elected politicians is that the pressure on undocumented residents will drive them out of the county and into the waiting arms of the feds. Not likely.

Illegal immigrants are in Northern Virginia for the same reason that they are in so many other parts of the country: Their labor is in demand. That's not going to change, unless the powers that be in Prince William and Loudoun have discovered a way to defeat market forces.
Boy, are they hitting the memes here, or what? In a sub-head, the smarmy editorial writer further warns that "In Northern Virginia, Immigrant Bashing Could Get Ugly." How much uglier than the lies in your editorial, El Smuggo? The Post is pushing the real toxic fallout here.

Lefty pols and journos who hate to cross the river from DC or suburban Maryland, still have an abiding belief that all Virginians are neanderthal racists, in spite of the fact that nearby Arlington and Alexandria are run by and for socialists. Hence, it's simple and easy for the Post to smear all Virginians with the absolutely unfair (and historically inappropriate) charge of "nativism." The left, of course, never wants to engage in an actual argument, which it will lose, but instead chooses to tar its opponents so it doesn't have to deal with their valid concerns. In this case, the increasing concern across the entire country that ILLEGAL (not legal) immigration and its casual acceptance by the government and the industries that exploit their cheap labor, are visiting a creeping disaster upon this country.

The Posties are furthering the leftist mythology here. But further, in an ironic bit of cheekiness, they are claiming that "market forces" are demanding MORE illegal immigration. These, we presume, are the same "market forces" that the Post editorial page roundly condemns, 24/7, except when they can use "market forces" to prove a false point. Once again, situation ethics at its best.

States and local jurisdictions are, in fact, stepping into the breach left by the feckless and irresponsible inside-the-beltway crowd, which is peopled, sadly, by plenty of members of both political parties. Their ultimate fantasy is that by casting a blind eye on the lawbreakers of whom illegals constitute the largest number, they will earn their eventual votes when amnesty is ultimately declared.

Well, American citizens, and LEGAL immigrants who have become or are becoming American citizens, are fed up. Fed up that, by observing the law, they are gradually fated to become marginalized as voters and citizens who actually believe in the rule of law, not situation ethics.

That, Posties, ain't "nativism." It's common sense.

Journalists Write Lying Crap. But Hey, It's Okay...

Instapundit unearths a link to the latest blithe illustration of moral equivalency. Now we discover, hail to deconstructionists, that the truth itself is actually relative:
As a journalist I hear all the time from people in business that they are misquoted. And you know what? People need to get over that, and I'm going to tell you why....

Journalists who think they are telling "the truth" don't understand the truth. We each have our own truth. When you leave out details, you might leave out what is unimportant to you but very important to someone else, and things start feeling untrue to the person who wishes you included something else...

So everyone feels misquoted because people say 20 or 30 sentences for every one sentence that a journalist prints. It's always in the context of the journalist's story, not the speaker's story...

Here's my advice: If you do an interview with a journalist, don't expect the journalist to be there to tell your story. The journalist gets paid to tell her own stories which you might or might not be a part of. And journalists, don't be so arrogant to think you are not "one of those" who misquotes everyone. Because that is to say that your story is the right story. But it's not. We each have a story. And whether or not someone actually said what you said they said, they will probably still feel misquoted.
This fatuous bit of crap is excerpted from the blithe rantings of one Penelope Trunk, via the Huffington Post. The gestation of this sophistry originated in a concept called "Situation Ethics," another abomination adopted the criminal Boomer generation, clearly appropriated and perfected by Bill and Hill. (Depends on what the meaning of "is" is.) In short, the deal is that declared reality is my reality. Screw yours. In my world it doesn't count. Or, as the wheezlingly old Hanna-Barbera cartoon character Quick Draw McGraw used to say, "I'll do the thinnin' [thinking] around here." (At least Penelope is candid.)

Maybe this is a good reason not to speak to anyone in the MSM. Whatever you say can and will be used against you if you don't follow the Party Line. And things that you don't say will be included as well. Do not mess with the pre-written story. The Commies are running this narrative line. Get over it.

Stop Global Warming: Eliminate People

A hilarious bit of the usual moonbat nonsense surfaces Down Under today via a Tim Blair piece:
IN A wonderful act of subversion, the Sydney Morning Herald's splendidly-named Stephanie Peatling this week managed to sneak a comic gem past her vigilant editors: "The greenhouse gas cuts Australia must achieve to prevent dangerous climate change may be substantially higher than thought, with modelling to be released today suggesting it should be as much as 95 per cent by 2020."

That modelling was the work of a leftist panic hive called the Australia Institute, presided over by director Clive Hamilton.

I called Clive on Thursday to discuss how we might achieve this reduction, which essentially would require that Australians stop doing everything, including breathing.
More evidence that the global warming freaks, led by their Imam, the Goracle, have truly jumped the shark. People of all stripes are starting to tune the propaganda out. Good choice.

Wanna Get Paid? Don't Work for Iran

Instapundit is just loaded with good links this weekend. Since Wonk is headed up to Canada starting this afternoon for a much-deserved vacation, best way to leave the blog before resuming radio silence is to leave you with some good tidbits.

The first comes from Iran, which for some odd reason, hasn't paid a lot of its employees for months. Instapundit quotes a source. Then Glenn Reynolds then provides his own brief conjecture:

Signs that the government may be running out of money have multiplied in recent months. Tens of thousands of civil servants, including school teachers, have not been paid since January. Bills from private contractors working for the government are piling up, threatening the survival of many businesses. . . .

All this may seem surprising if only because Iran has earned almost $150 billion from oil exports since Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005. So, were did the money go?

Um, centrifuges, maybe?

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Congress Less Popular Than Used Car Salesmen?

Well, that's what the latest polling data tell us. This from Don Surber:

The new Reuters poll is out and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have pulled an upset: They have managed to make George Walker Bush twice as popular as Congress.

An even bigger majority, 83 percent, say the Democratic-controlled Congress is doing only a fair or poor job — the worst mark for Congress in a Zogby poll.

In the national survey of 1,012 likely voters, taken July 12 through July 14, about 66 percent said Bush had done only a fair or poor job as president, with 34 percent ranking his performance as excellent or good.

While 83 percent said Congress was doing a fair or poor job, just 14 percent rated it excellent or good. Last October, in its final days, the Republican-led Congress earned ratings of excellent or good from 23 percent of voters.

Got that? The Democratic Party gets 14% job approval. Bush 34%.

If this were a Little League game, the 10-run rule would apply.

Indeed. We thought the Dems had arrived in DC this past January to "save" us from W. Looks like the voters may have to "save" Congress from these incompetents in 2008.

Congressional Democrats are spinning their wheels trying to “get” George Bush. Democrats promised not to waste their time impeaching Bush. That is what they are doing. The public disdain for Democrats is overwhelming.

It took 12 years for Republicans to drop to 23%. Dems already are down to 14%. That means even Mom is starting to wonder about you.

14% job approval. Nixon did better. On the day he left office!

What we're seeing here is the endgame of the Socialist-Democrat party's Gramscian approach to destroying a capitalistic society.
  • The Democrat-left alliance has, since WWII, infiltrated leftist judges into the judiciary—judges who legislate socialism from the bench, thus freeing elected officials from having to confront the voters with their own sorry records which would cause them to be defeated.
  • The left has entirely infiltrated the Federal government, whose employees by and large are Democrats who work hard to achieve the socialist objectives of Democrat administrations and work just as hard to thwart the capitalist objectives of Republican administrations by serving as a kind of 5th column.
  • The left has a nearly 100% hammerlock on public education and academia, ensuring that leftist propaganda has largely replaced legitimate study of history, literature, music, and cultural traditions going back to the beginning of our nation.
  • And the artistic community has degenerated from a once-lively originality to an agglomeration of left-wing propaganda hacks dedicated to replacing America's heroic, successful narrative with a negative one that casts the U.S. as a villain in international relations far worse than the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Hitler.
The final result of this pincer movement? An uninformed public which increasingly confuses the rantings of narcissistic lefty entertainers with wisdom; several generations now of young people who no longer have any grasp of history or their place in its traditions and who are no longer truly capable of participating in civic discourse; and, perhaps most ominously, a current crop of politicians culled from the bottom of the intellectual barrel.

It is this latter manifestation of Gramscianism that is proving most crippling. With key issues readily delegated to activist judges, there is very little risk anymore to an incumbent. With idiotic disclosure requirements, very few potential politicians of much greater intellectual capacity are stepping forward to run for office, guaranteeing and increasing number of seats for life for the political mountebanks.

So it is small wonder that Congress today is so despised. Sure, the Democrats managed to throw out a significant number of corrupt Republicans last fall, due less to their own brilliance than it was to public disgust. But in barely 6 months, the new replacement Congress has proved itself less astute than the average Hollywood starlet, frivolously pandering to whatever seems popular this week, destroying confidence in our troops stationed abroad, and launching dozens, perhaps scores of idiotic "investigations" of the current administration meant solely to embarrass George W. Bush.

The current Congress has, in fact, done absolutely nothing of any consequence. For this reason, the public has already turned on them, and the consequences are going to be more severe than the media are painting them. The press is setting up 2008 as the election in which the Dems will sweep Congress and regain the White House. Well, there's always a surprise waiting for the preening overconfident among us. The current Congress is on track to accomplish absolute zero by November 2008. The voters know who's in power. The Democrats' slim majorities in both houses are more fragile than the press would lead you to believe, as demonstrated in the poll results above.

All the Repubs need to do is re-grow a little spine, get back to the party that advanced the Contract with America in 1994, and stop acting like Democrats. The swing voters who voted blue in 2006 are already sickened at the results. They'll be glad to come back. But only to politicians who show some moral and intellectual courage and some pride in our great country. That's the message here. Both parties ignore it at their own peril.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Al Qaeda's Sock Puppet

One of the themes we pound away on here at HazZzMat is how the American and international left employs Gramscian techniques to eviscerate Western and U.S. cultural and social traditions, replacing them gradually with their own Marxist narrative. It's classic agitprop in slo-mo. Or, as Gramsci would put it, the gradual replacing of American-Western cultural and social hegemony with "new traditions" supplied by Karl Marx.

It appears that our terrorist friends in the Middle East, and more particularly in Iraq, have been employing similar tactics with great success, feeding what is in effect a fictional narrative to a gullible, reflexively anti-U.S. press to reinforce the fiction that the kingpins of Al Qaeda in Iraq, which leads the supposed "Islamic State of Iraq" shadow government, are strong, powerful, organized, and ready to take over as Iraq's rulers when the infidel (us) leaves.

But today we learn that:
U.S. Special Operations Forces scored a major victory against al Qaeda in Iraq’s senior leadership and gained valuable insight on the al Qaeda creation known as the Islamic State of Iraq. On July 4, Coalition forces captured Khalid Abdul Fatah Da’ud Mahmud Al Mashadani, a senior al Qaeda in Iraq and Islamic State of Iraq leader and close associate of Abu Ayyub al Masri, al Qaeda’s commander. Mashadani, also known as Abu Shahed, was captured in Mosul and is thought by the U.S. military to be the most senior Iraqi-born leader in al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
But wait, there's more:
During interrogations, Mashadani admitted that the Islamic State of Iraq was merely a puppet front group established by al Qaeda in order to put an Iraqi face on the insurgency. Mashadani cofounded the Islamic State of Iraq with al-Masri in 2006. “The Islamic State of Iraq is a ‘front’ organization that masks the foreign influence and leadership within AQI in an attempt to put an Iraqi face on the leadership of AQI,” said Brig. Gen Bergner.

But not only is the Islamic State of Iraq a contrived entity, its leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi is as well. “To further this myth [of the Islamic State of Iraq], al Masri created a fictional political head of ISI known as Omar al-Baghdadi,” said Brig. Gen Bergner. Al-Baghdadi is actually played by an actor named Abu Abdullah al Naima, and al Masri “maintains exclusive control over al Naima as he acts the part of the fictitious al-Baghdadi character.”

In other words, the fearsome Al-Baghdadi is a sock puppet. He never existed. (Wonder how much waterboarding was used to extract this info?)

It's fascinating how the MSM has endowed Al-Baghdadi over the last year or so with an array of super powers, successfully transforming him from a mere terrorist thug into an Islamofascist mastermind the Coalition could not possibly defeat, let alone find.

If we had a more objective media, it would be hard for the terrorists to pull off this kind of propaganda coup. But, playing the anti-U.S. Western media like an infidel Stradivarius, Al-Qaeda and its allies, who are actually being devastated in battle after battle with our forces, have created the perception that they're a lot more formidable than they are. In this case, they perfected a dominant counter-narrative that is now proving to be an elegantly constructed pack of lies. Such stories are easy to sell to a media that hungers, 24/7, to make George Bush and the U.S. look like morons. Now it's the media itself that collectively looks like a bunch of dolts. Not that this would ever bother them.

For a bunch of Islamic fanatics, Al-Qaeda et. al. have learned a lot about effective propaganda from the atheists of the left. Too bad another of their sham fictions has been put to rest. For now.

The Belmont Club has a slightly different spin:
Now the "Idolatrous Guard" [Al-Qaeda for the Iraqi National Guard] is having a chuckle over the "fake" Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, as AQI's feared leader turns out to be no more genuine than Mickey Mouse. One can only imagine how the Shi’ite Imam Al-Mahdi Army, AKA the “Army of the Antichrist”, is reveling in confirmation that the Islamic State of Iraq is nothing more than a front organization for a bunch of Salafists holed up in a Pakistani cave.

[Bill] Roggio is right in saying that Mashadani's capture is a victory for US Special Forces. Without those kinetic operators and the intelligence behind them no information operations will work. Words need bullets to back them up. But bullets need words behind them too, if they are to destroy ideas and not simply gunmen. So Mashadani's capture is also a victory for the shadowy warriors of the [American] counternarrative. They are not only telling a story. They are writing one.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

John Edwards, Champion of the Little Guy

We had to chuckle when we saw this mini photo-essay appended to the bottom of Lucianne's homepage today:



Designer Jeans: $275
Designer Shirt - $280
Haircut - $400
Poverty Tour Starting Today: Priceless

Again, I gotta say, I have yet to find a Democrat pol who makes less money than I do. Robin Hood John Edwards, the Kos Kidz' fave, ain't.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Ellison: Islamofascist Apologist Shows True Colors

From time to time, HazZzMat wonders what kind of doctored Kool-Aid voters are drinking when they elect psychopaths like Democrat Representative Keith Ellison, recently elected by voters in the Socialist Republic of Minnesota as the first Muslim in Congress. Check out his latest pronouncement via the UK's "Telegraph" website:
America's first Muslim congressman has provoked outrage by apparently comparing President George W Bush to Adolf Hitler and hinting that he might have been responsible for the September 11 attacks.

Addressing a gathering of atheists in his home state of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, a Democrat, compared the 9/11 atrocities to the destruction of the Reichstag, the German parliament, in 1933. This was probably burned down by the Nazis in order to justify Hitler's later seizure of emergency powers.

"It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that," Mr Ellison said. "After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader [Hitler] of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted."

To applause from his audience of 300 members of Atheists for Human Rights, Mr Ellison said he would not accuse the Bush administration of planning 9/11 because "you know, that's how they put you in the nut-ball box - dismiss you".

Vice-President Dick Cheney's stance of refusing to answer some questions from Congress was "the very definition of totalitarianism, authoritarianism and dictatorship", he added.

Mr Ellison also raised eyebrows by telling his audience: "You'll always find this Muslim standing up for your right to be atheists all you want."

Oh, really? Who is this dangerous moonbat kidding? If the Islamofascists ever come to power in the West, they will whack the atheists FIRST, as they are godless, before moving on to exterminate Jewish and Christian monotheists. Those in Ellison's audience buying into his transparent lie deserve to have their voting cards taking away.

Certain constituencies in the U.S. appear dedicated to electing and re-electing whack jobs to Congress (like Maxine Waters, Socialist-CA) where they work assiduously to undermine the country and impose socialism and higher taxes in the process, all using the hyperbolic language of class struggle and branding anyone who disagrees with them as a non-person or far worse.

To a great extent, this would seem to be the triumph of creeping Gramscianism in American politics, aided and abetted by a public education system that has altered core curriculum over the past 40 years by gradually eliminating the study of culture and tradition and replacing it with propaganda. The result: several generations at this point of adults with a zero to none grasp of U.S. and world history and a warped view that whatever the trouble is, it's our fault, particularly if we voted for George Bush. They are easy to manipulate by demagogues such as Ellison because they no longer have a grasp of the facts that used to be taught.

The Gramscian left has weeded out our actual history and culture, gradually replacing it with leftist propaganda points which now become the "new tradition and culture." Here's a succinct summation of what Antonio Gramsci might term the "counterhegemonic" process:
A counterhegemony refers to an alternate normative interpretation of the functioning of social, economic, and political institutions. If a counterhegemony grows large enough it is able to subsume and replace the historic bloc it was born in. Neo-Gramscians use the Machiavellian terms war of position and war of movement to explain how this is possible. In a war of position a counterhegemonic movement attempts, through persuasion or propaganda, to increase the number of people who share its view on the hegemonic order; in a war of movement the counterhegemonic tendencies which have grown large enough overthrow, violently or democratically, the current hegemony and establish themselves as a new historic bloc.
Clearly, the Minnesotans who voted for Ellison have reached the path of no return. When an elected Congressman can effectively get away again and again with slander and sedition in a public forum, the possibility of our decline and fall becomes a very real prospect.

Friday, July 13, 2007

DC Confidential: Fighting Crime One Expensive Bottle at a Time

Okay. Say you're an upwardly-mobile yuppie-boomer family living in an expensive townhouse in Washington DC's once-again fashionable Capitol Hill area. You've invited some of your closest upwardly mobile friends over for a summer barbecue. The evening is winding down, and some of the guests have left when, all of a sudden, a crazed thug opens your back yard gate from the alley. Brandishing a gun, he threatens a 14-year old girl in the party and demands money. A terrifying moment for sure. What the hell do you do now?

"We were just finishing dinner," Cristina "Cha Cha" Rowan, 43, told the man. "Why don't you have a glass of wine with us?"

The intruder had a sip of their Chateau Malescot St-Exupery and said, "Damn, that's good wine."

The girl's father, Michael Rabdau, 51, told the intruder to take the whole glass, and Rowan offered him the whole bottle.

The robber, with his hood down, took another sip and a bite of Camembert cheese. He put the gun in his sweatpants.

Good move, Cha-Cha. Why didn't Buffy think of this first? The French Paradox in DC? We won't keep you waiting to discover what happened next as innovative social justice flowed freely:

"I think I may have come to the wrong house," [the man] said before apologizing. "Can I get a hug?"

Rowan, who works at her children's school and lives in Falls Church, Va., stood up and wrapped her arms around the armed man. The four other guests followed.

"Can we have a group hug?" the man asked. The five adults complied.

The man walked away a few moments later with the crystal wine glass in hand. Nothing was stolen, and no one was hurt.

The stunned guests eventually called the cops, but the dude was gone. An empty crystal wineglass, sans fingerprints, was discovered later out in the alley.

Just another tranquil evening in the District. But say, this could be the start of something big, a novel way of fighting crime. Introduce crooks to the finer side of life. Wonder if they'll start serving wine and cheese at state pens next? With results like this, you gotta give it some thought, right?

Original story appeared this morning in the Washington Post.

Global Coldening in Australia?

Now here's something astounding from our friends in the Southern Hemisphere:
LAST month Australians endured our coldest June since 1950. Imagine that; all those trillions of tonnes of evil carbon we've horked up into the atmosphere over six decades of rampant industrialisation, and we're still getting the same icy weather we got during the Cold War.
So writes Tim Blair in the Daily Telegraph. Gosh, who knew? Blair provides some helpful, definitive observations from a "global warming" expert lest acolytes of the Goracle (DO check this link) become too perturbed:
But climate change is like Michael Moore's tracksuit - it can fit anyone. In 2005, Greenpeace rep Steven Guilbeault helpfully explained: "Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that's what we're dealing with."
Now that we've straightened out that arcane bit of hard science, I'm sure we'll all sleep more easily tonight.

Read the rest of Blair's great piece here.

Left Loves Imposing Morality: When It's THEIRS...

An interesting tidbit today in National Review Online, wherein the hard left ("liberal") agenda is fully exposed. Jonah Goldberg comments on Matt Iglesias' intellectual meanderings:
What's refreshing about this is that Yglesias is honestly and correctly admitting that liberals have no problem imposing their morality on others via a powerful and intrusive state. I wish that most liberals were as honest. If liberals want to complain about conservative social engineering, that's entirely legitimate (when true, of course). But please don't tell me that your objection is to social engineering per se. Liberals and progressives before them wrote the book on social engineering and even the most comstockish Republicans are pale imitators.
This goes a long way toward explaining, for example, why leftie Dem pols (and the ever-weird Trent Lott) would love to get Rush Limbaugh, et. al., off the radio airwaves. It's not that Rush exposes their seemingly genetic stupidity on the air five afternoons a week. It's that the very EXISTENCE of Rush, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, etc., along with the conservative blogosphere, serves as an irritating reminder that their plan to turn ALL information outlets into propaganda mills for socialism remains annoyingly incomplete as long as other voices get to sing.

With the left, it is all about absolute control, 24/7. The cannot easily hide their Stalinist ambitions. Like Stalin and the Islamofascists for that matter, they actually hate Democracy and work 24/7 to undo it when they're afraid it's working against them.

IMF: When Institutions Outlive Their Times


The freer flow of private capital across international borders has rendered redundant the large IMF lending programs that characterized the Asian, Latin American, and Russian currency crises of the late 1990s. Indeed, almost all of the IMF's erstwhile large borrowers—Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, and Russia—have fully prepaid their IMF obligations, while at the same time building an arsenal of international reserves that will enable them to weather well any future crisis without having to request large-scale IMF assistance. As a result, the IMF's outstanding loan book, which exceeded US $100 billion, as recently as end-2003 is now down to a mere US$15 billion...The ready flow of private international capital has also rendered redundant a large part of the World Bank's lending activities. The World Bank's large middle-income emerging market member countries like Brazil, China, India, Russia, South Africa, and Turkey can all now more than meet their external financing requirements by accessing the global capital market. Yet World Bank lending to these countries still accounts for over one third of the World Bank's overall lending operations....The World Has Changed, Why Won't The Fund and the Bank?, Desmond Lachman, TCSDaily.com, 7/13/2007

Free flow of capital across borders is the key concept. When market determines how money will flow, toward or away from lenders, the moralizing of bureaucrats in Brussels or Washington, DC, are not very interesting to listen to. They are also useless as a guide for investment. Like all governmental, or inter-governmental, agencies, the IMF is a system which lacks the self-awareness of when it needs to either a) change, or b) retire. The latter, which is probably the best idea, is not mentioned in Lachman's article.

Institutional markets are not the only story in this change. Probably the most significant change, from a popular point of view, is the dramatic growth in micro-lending. As mentioned before in a story on this blog, repayment of micro-loans is far better than it is on institutional ones. One need only look at the subprime mortgage market for a contrasting example to the tens of thousands of small loans sent out to India, Africa, Mexico, and a hundred other places. The latter get paid back. The latter transform lives one small step at a time. Maybe it's time to make the IMF offices a vignette in the Smithsonian.

Luther

America: Another Century? Quote of the Day


The 21st Century will be the American century, just like the 20th Century. Americans may have to tighten their belts a bit after all the sins of Alan Greenspan and the Clinton-Bush debt generation. But the dollar will still be the world's reserve currency long after the euro has disappeared and the yen has been forgotten...Dollar to Collapse? Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Daily Telegraph, 7/13/2007

"Disregard all hysteria," the author says. We should bring him over here to advise the Democrats. His reasoning for dispensing with the euro and the yen is very solid and cogent. Enjoy the whole piece.

Luther

Subprime & Asian Banks: How Not To Make Friends


I believe that forced liquidation of many portfolios in Asia will create further losses, but American borrowers will emerge in essence unscathed from all this. Holders of mortgage securities do not have any claim on the underlying assets, only on the intermediate companies, which will of course declare bankruptcy, thus leaving empty shells for lenders to pursue. Unlike in previous crises such as that involving the telecom sector in 2002, most of the losses will be absorbed by central banks around the world rather than North American or European commercial and investment banks...This is one of the greatest robberies of our time, and it will go unreported in essence. Hard-working Asian savers will see their central banks post billions of dollars in losses on the US mortgage crisis in the next few years, but nothing can be done about it given the general lack of accountability across Asia.... The Robbery of the Century, Chan Akya, Asia Times, 7/13/2007

The smart bank officers who invented the subprime mortgage market in the US, now falling apart at the seams, with $12 billion more downgraded on Wednesday, apparently never thought about the impact this would have on our ostensible allies in the East. In the Asian crash a few years back, the Chinese made a lot of noise (and a lot of Asians listened) about how this was a result of economic warfare by the West. It was hardly that, but the 3-card monte variety of finance that led to that Asian crash was invented on Wall Street. This time, the money put at risk is on behalf of American homeowners through real estate bond funds, emphasis on American.

This story is a paradigm of the underlying credit crisis in the American, and hence, the world economy. Desperate to push the consumer and housing markets, lending institutions across the world, but especially in the United States, have literally been standing on their heads to get money out the door. But, as the wise old investor, usually ignored in a boom, will tell you: if you ignore the fundamentals you'll lose your shirt (or your mortgage, or your mortgage-based fund). Bad debtors do not make for good returns.

Luther

Monday, July 09, 2007

Live Aid Flops

Earth to Al Gore: Give it up. We're sick of you and your wealthy, untalented sycophants.

That seems to be the latest from the "Live Earth" concert circuit. The much-puffed, multi-site event appears to have imploded dramatically this past weekend as private jet-setting entertainment royalty circled the globe to indulge in the usual leftist sanctimony meant to encourage rich socialistas and their smug fellow travelers glory in their moral superiority to the rest of us. This they accomplished at least in part by burning more fossil fuel energy than Baltimore uses in a year.

Take the Brit event for example—please, screams the Daily Mail's report, entitled "Live Earth branded a foul-mouthed flop":
Live Earth has been branded a foul-mouthed flop.

Organisers of the global music concert - punctuated by swearing from presenters and performers - had predicted massive viewing figures.

But BBC's live afternoon television coverage attracted an average British audience of just 900,000.

In the evening, when coverage switched from BBC2 to BBC1, the figure rose to just 2.7 million.

And the peak audience, which came when Madonna sang at Wembley, was a dismal 4.5 million. Three times as many viewers saw the Princess Diana tribute on the same channel six days before.

Two years ago, Live 8 drew a peak television audience of 9.6million while Live Aid notched 10million in 1985.

And this from the country that gave socialism a bad name. Attendance at other venues was equally dismal.

But what's going on here? Isn't everyone concerned about how Bush is destroying the entire planet? According to the figures above, a thinking lefty (of which there are very few) could be forgiven for imagining the world was more afraid of Ronald Reagan than W, given that the Live Aid concert nonsense seems to have peaked on the telly a good 22 years ago.

What's actually happened is that the smarmy left, which includes pretty much the entire entertainment industry, has totally jumped the shark on the global warming hoax they've been pushing with ever greater enthusiasm and fanaticism. At the same time, the public, in whose face they remain 24/7, is beginning to notice the phenomenal amount of carbon dioxide these political and entertainment gasbags are discharging even as they exhort us to save the planet from ourselves.

Or let the Daily Mail elaborate:

Critics said ... that the public had simply snubbed what they saw as a hypocritical event.

Musicians including Bob Geldof, Roger Daltrey and the Pet Shop Boys pointed out that a concert highlighting climate change had itself generated huge carbon emissions.

And speaking of gasbagging:

The BBC's coverage, which ran for 15 hours from 12.30pm on Saturday to 4am yesterday, also sparked dozens of complaints about bad language.

The swearing started at 1.30pm when Phil Collins, the first act on in London, used the f-word while singing with his band Genesis....The bad language prompted a number of angry postings on BBC messageboards....

A BBC spokesman said: "We asked artists not to swear but sometimes they get carried away. We are very sorry for any offence caused."

Sometimes? How about all of the time. The F-word and its numerous variants tends to encompass the entire range of expression of the average rock star.

Say, and the rockers and their fans aren't really very conscientious about the environment either when you get right down to it:

The mounds of rubbish left by the 65,000 concert-goers at Wembley further tarnished the event's green credentials.

Organisers claimed most of the waste would be sorted and recycled but the Daily Mail saw little evidence of that taking place.

Like the fabled Little Boy Who Cried Wolf (or is that now Little Person?), "global warming" sound system collective has been cranked up to peak volume just a little bit beyond the average bloke's tolerance at this point. As a result, Everyman has begun to tune these foulmouthed hypocrites out. Thank God. This smarmy, phony bandwagon has gone on entirely too long. We now return you to our regularly scheduled broadcast.

(Hat tip to Lucianne.com for the original tidbit.)

Friday, July 06, 2007

Lileks on the "Hippie Revival"

HazZzMat hasn't heard much from columnist-blogger James Lileks lately. At least not since he was unceremoniously dumped from the dead-tree version of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune as part of a "cost-cutting" measure. (Can't help thinking his humorous conservatism didn't help his career either at that Marxist house organ.)

Well, Jim's blog still lives, and we have also found him on the "Strib's" website where he recently opined on what is allegedly the country's latest fashion statement:
According to this fashion piece, written in the NYTimes and reprinted in today’s Source, we are Feelin’ Groovy. Or will be soon. Why? Because six young women who live in lower Manhattan are dressing like “hippies,” and they know someone who knows someone at the New York Times. Since it happens to be the 40th anniversary of the most important summer in the history of humankind, the Times writes a piece about Hippie Chic, and suddenly the rest of the nation is supposed to believe that the fashion sensibility of the Summer of Love will soon sweep the malls. Because we haven’t had a sixties revival of some kind in, oh, seventeen minutes.Will this stuff ever die? If it can be killed, how can the ordinary joe help? Must we pass some sort of laws, like the Mandatory Fedora Act or the Comprehensive Hate-Ashbury Omnibus Bill? I realize that fashion always takes cues from the past, updating and recycling, but it’s always the sixties or early seventies.
Lileks correctly zeroes in on the infantilism of the literary and journalistic left. For these aging boomers and their younger acolytes, the alleged Summer of Love and its accompanying ruinous anti-war rallies and defeatism marks a Gold Standard that they are trying to replicate for one final time this decade. For them, the '60s and early '70s marked the apogee of their boring lives, freezing them forever in a fantasy world where time has stopped for good.

Unfortunately, history, and even fashion, move on. While the MSM prattles away with such trivia, trapped in a narcissistic time warp from which there is no escape and indulging in adolescent fantasies of nubile, available young women stoned out of their gourds, serious-minded Americans, including the President and the military, are trying to put the Islamofascists out of business before these juvenile delinquents prevail and bring the Summer of Love permanently to an end.

It is one of the ironies of history that the current Administration—along with our brave military men and women deployed in the Middle East—is attempting to beat back a huge throng of crazed and dangerous criminals in order to make America safe for idiots such as those Lileks so accurately describes. But don't try to explain this to the moonbats, for whom Bush, not bin Laden nor the mad mullahs, remains the Great Satan. They'll rip off your head in order to prove how nonviolent they are.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Al Gored by Son's Drug Arrest

The Goracle has had to take some time off from his Global Warming evangilization tour to deal with a family matter. His son was busted for drugs on Independence Day no less. Is this Freudian or what? Al-Reuters has a slightly ironic take on this:

The 24-year-old son of former Vice President Al Gore was arrested for drug possession on Wednesday after he was stopped for speeding in his hybrid Toyota Prius, a sheriff's official said.

Al Gore III -- whose father is a leading advocate of policies to fight global warming -- was driving his environmentally friendly car at about 100 miles per hour on a freeway south of Los Angeles when he was pulled over by an Orange County sheriff's deputy at about 2:15 a.m.

The deputy smelled marijuana and searched the car, said sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino. The search turned up a small amount of marijuana, along with prescription drugs including Valium, Xanax, Vicodin, Adderall and Soma. There were no prescriptions found, he said.

"Environmentally friendly car at about 110 miles per hour." You gotta love it. A Prius burning at that rate would certainly make a significant contribution toward global warming.

However, it's not really our purpose here to dump on III. Presidential and Vice presidential kids are not elected to office, and whether it's III, Chelsea Clinton, or the Bush twins, their lives are their own business. And such lives can get pretty constricted when the parental units are operating inside the box of national politics. We actually sympathize with these kids.

To the contrary, we need to examine the condescension of lefty elites like the Goracle who tend to treat the masses, including, no doubt, their own kids, like simpering idiots. Our own thoughts on III's dustup with the law are probably best expressed by mystery writer and intrepid blogger Roger Simon, who confesses:
I am trying to suppress my schadenfreude at the tragedy of the Gore family today, but I have to admit it's difficult. I have always found Al Gore to be one of the most fatuous individuals on the national and now international scene - a phony scientist, a phony filmmaker, a phony Internet inventor, I could go on and on - and the fact that his son was arrested today with a pharmacy's worth of painkillers in his car (plus a little grass) is no surprise. If the Gores were my parents, I'd want to medicate myself too. And make no mistake about it, young Gore was trying to medicate himself - not seeking enlightenment through drugs as many of us did in our time (not that we found much). You don't take Xanax and Valium for mind expansion.

In this case I have plenty of sympathy for the son and absolutely none for the father and mother. They both have been lecturing us for decades -first about nasty music lyrics and now about the environment. It's all the same really, because it does not come from a place of truth. It comes from a place of pomposity. And that's what makes a lousy parent. Someone who is holier than thou but a fake.
Read the rest here. No point in commenting further. Simon nails it quite brilliantly.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Global Warming? BS Sez Brit Majority...

The public believes the effects of global warming on the climate are not as bad as politicians and scientists claim, a poll has suggested.

The Ipsos Mori poll of 2,032 adults - interviewed between 14 and 20 June - found 56% believed scientists were still questioning climate change.

There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money, it found.

Our pull quote today comes from the BBC website, believe it or not. Looks like the average Brit citizen is getting a little tired of the ecofreaks' endless hectoring on the subject. Wonker himself figures if he wants to get preached at, he can attend a revival meeting.

The final sentence above hits to the heart of the matter. By creating a false consensus, the "global warming" champs can con more government money for themselves and their one-sided "research" which will, of course, result in even more "scientific research" that proves what they already "know."

Again, for the umpty-umpth time, it's clear to HazZzMat that global warming and global cooling are part of macro-climate changes that have been going on ever since the Earth was carved out of the cosmos who knows how long ago. You can make a pretty good argument that man, through his burning of significant quantities of fossil fuels over the last century or so has perhaps added a percentage point or two to the latest warming cycle. But to read day after day in the papers that we are "causing" global warming is an absolute crock.

The spokesman for the Ipsos Mori study puts it this way:
"We are alive to climate change and very few people actually reject out of hand the idea the climate is changing or that humans have had at least some part to play in this," he added.

"However, a significant number have many doubts about exactly how serious it really is and believe it has been over-hyped."

Gee. Ya think?

Monday, July 02, 2007

End of the Amnesty Bill...For Now...

Scott Rasmussen’s first law of politics is that America’s politicians aren’t nearly as important as they think they are. That law was clearly demonstrated earlier today when the United States Senate finally surrendered to the American people on immigration.

Rasmussen Reports
As everyone now knows, it was not even close. The U.S. Senate, via its failure to vote for cloture, has more than likely doomed the notorious Immigration Bill, aka the Amnesty Bill, for the remainder of the current Congressional term. Neither pushes from the Bushies, the Dems, nor the Repubs in favor of the bill were, in the end, enough to close off debate and put the bill over the top.
What's curious here is that for weeks, both sides have been telling us that the bill was "in the bag." Don't they have any old-fashioned counters in the Senate anymore? In the end, it wasn't even close.

As per the quote from pollster Scott Rasmussen above, what we are currently witnessing is a complete disconnect of both political parties from the people they represent. The fast-spending Republicans paid the price for this first in the Fall of 2006 when they were whomped at the polls by their own true believers who were disgusted that their former heroes had morphed, seemingly overnight, into tax-and-spend Democrats trying to buy votes via earmarks, favoritism, and perks. The Dems, of course, are now back at it again, but add insult to injury by mounting "investigation" after "investigation" of the Bush administration to score negative points prior to the next national election. The Democrat-controlled Congress thus has absolutely zero in the way of positive accomplishments in the current session.

Admittedly, the Dems, who never really got the "mandate" they trumpeted last fall, find themselves in the same position the Repubs were in over the last several years. They lack a true controlling majority in the House, and likewise lack a veto-proof majority in the Senate.

Which gets us back to the Amnesty Bill. What we must all understand here is that the illegal immigration issue itself wasn't the real issue at all for the professional politicians of both parties. Rather, the key issue for each party is to pander to the overwhelmingly Hispanic illegal community as a way to "lock" electoral victory for years to come. It is sheer ward-heeler politics, nothing else.

The Dems started it with their highly successful shenanigans in California under the Clintonistas, during which they may very well have fast-tracked enough legal and illegal Hispanic immigrants into voting citizenship (or its effective equivalent) to place that state's 53 electoral votes permanently off limits to the Repubs. They are currently attempting to replicate this feat in other former Republican strongholds, particularly those on the border with Mexico, such as New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. They're already heading Colorado to blue- statehood as well, although this is being achieved largely by emigration OUT of California and to Colorado by the leftists who've already wrecked California.

Alarmed, the Republicans in general and George Bush in particular, are attempting to sway this Latino vote in THEIR direction by pandering even more to the legal and illegal Hispanic electorate. Bottom line: Both parties want to use the Latino diaspora to thrust the opposing party permanently out of office.

Where does that leave the American people? I.e., those legal citizens who obey the laws, go to work, and pay our taxes. Well, nowhere, that's where. And they finally got as mad as hell and sent Congress a message they couldn't refuse. That's what happened. Both parties, in other words, forgot who they were representing. But they just found out.

The MSM and New Idiotarian Trent Lott are angrily blaming this on "right wing talk radio" and are chatting up a revival of the "fairness doctrine" to get them off the airwaves. But in point of fact, conservative talk radio at best articulated what the average American felt and explained to them how they could effectively register that opinion on Capital Hill. Which they did. In overwhelming numbers. This was, effectively, a grassroots effort that got a little boost on the radio dial.

Furthermore, "right-wing talk radio" certainly doesn't account for all the DEMOCRAT VOTERS who gave the thumbs-down to this bill, which is easy to infer from Rasmussen's report:
The final Rasmussen Reports national telephone poll before the vote found that just 22% of Americans supported the legislation. No amount of Presidential persuasion, Senate logrolling, and procedural tricks was able to overcome that solid bi-partisan lack of public support (although it’s breathtaking to consider how close a determined leadership could come to passing such an unpopular bill).
Yep, 22%. Given that at any time, more voters are registered as Dems rather than Repubs, Rasmussen's number gives a pretty good indication that even a majority of knee-jerk libs were uncomfortable with giving Amnesty to 12 million illegals, rewarding them for flaunting our laws.

This is a wake-up call for the Executive and Legislative branches. Whether or not they'll heed it is anybody's guess. They don't have a very good track record.

Nonetheless, in this many-chaptered story which doesn't yet have an ending, it's clear at this point that the good guys won at least the current round here. No real American truly opposes immigration. It's the illegal immigration that we oppose. Enforce the borders and minds and hearts will eventually follow.