Its impossible to exaggerate the climate of virulent anti-Americanism and hatred of Israel which, extending way beyond the left into the centrist heartlands of Middle Britain, has so distorted British politics and indeed, all but destroyed British rationality.
#2
America isn't the only land whose voters have to deal wid Gummermint-centric Waffle/DialectiCrats, etal. whom are on all sides = any sides = no side(s) of the issues at the same time. As said dbefore, when it comes to unconditional and unilateral power and advantage, not even the Left is for the Left.
#3
From the precis: Kim senior, "a popular anti-Japanese guerilla leader." Kim junior, a "canny operator." Coulda been big in Hollywood if only... Get the picture?
That's hillarious! He was an officer in a Soviet Army anti-Korean infiltration unit Stalin created in case the Soviets invaded Korea. He was a captain in the Red Army. His rise to power was due entirely to Soviet sponsorship.
Along the way he supressed factions that fought alongside Mao's Army and Homegrown Communists (who fled south).
Al
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
09/08/2006 11:44 Comments ||
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#2
This is no suprise. The U of M is beyond liberal. They have purged their history section on WWII. Sickening. So the U kissing George Galloway, the traitor for allah's terrorist. Pathetic but not out of normal for these flag burning jackazzes.
In perusing the left blogosphere looking for reaction to the ABC mini-series The Path to 9/11 one would think that the project was chock full of lies, historical inaccuracies, and pro-Republican propaganda.
But look a little closer and you find that all liberal blogs highlight the same 3 scenes as proof of bias by Disney and the writers. Thatfs three scenes in a 5 hour movie. Is that reason enough to condemn the entire project with the most outrageously exaggerated, end of the world rhetoric imaginable? One would think that the film they are talking about was a Republican campaign commercial by the wild flights of hyperbole theyfre throwing around.
The leftfs condemnation of the few minutes of admittedly historically inaccurate scenes (that if ABC canft cut or fix will probably doom the show entirely) represents only one half of the forces who are critiquing the film. The complaints about the portrayal of Clinton and his people failing to act are being made by the cadre of Clintonistas who see any revelations regarding this aspect of 9/11 as a direct threat to Hillaryfs candidacy. Some of these same actors who are yelping the loudest have dreams of serving in the Clinton II presidency. And aside from the evident license that the screen writer took with the specific scenes under attack, there is a sense that Clinton and his people would rather the entire project disappear down the rabbit hole.
But there is a whole other side to the liberals efforts to tear this show apart. This is the faction that is screaming that the film doesnft blame Bush enough for 9/11. How do they know if they havenft seen it? The know because The Narrative that they have been using for 5 years to undermine his Presidency is a tissue of lies, half-truths, deliberate exaggerations of the facts, and hysterical intimations of evil. In short, the truth – even if it is revealed in a flawed docudrama – threatens the alternate reality they have created about 9/11.
Go to any 5 lefty websites and you will probably see the same picture on a couple of them. Itfs a shot of Bush sitting in the classroom (now with a Mickey Mouse Club hat on his head) as the planes hit the towers. This is the image of 9/11 the left wants the American people to remember. Not the falling towers. Not people jumping to their deaths. They are using ridicule to belittle the President because they know that memories of 9/11 will revive feelings from that time that would be unhelpful to their efforts in November.
Bush himself is attempting to resurrect those feelings during this anniversary. His travels that day will take him from Washington, D.C., to New York, to Pennsylvania. And he is going to give a prime time speech that night.
This, the left can deal with. They can rightly point out that the President is playing politics with the anniversary. But the feelings of solidarity with the President that the American people demonstrated in the aftermath of the attacks scares the holy living beejeebees out of the left. And thatfs why they are attacking this film with more energy and vigor than they have ever demonstrated attacking the enemies of the United States.
The film has the potential to undermine both the Clintonistafs whitewashing of history and the BDS-enraged bloggers who seek to save their threatened Narrative of events from being challenged by reality. And the pressure they are putting on ABC will more than likely succeed. Watch for ABC to announce the cancellation tomorrow morning and instead offer the film for release on DVD.
And then watch the heads roll at ABC over this $40 million boondoggle while the left goes back to denying the very essence of what 9/11 meant.
#2
Interesting.... interview with screenwriter tonight, said only the first night had been released, the time up to 2000. Then kinda hinted to the second night, not too good to Bush etc.
Will be interesting, if this disses Bush on Monday nite. Have read, it isn't too kind to Condi. Hummmm wonder what the now disseses will say about the second night if it makes Bush and team look bad? Silence, is their native language.
Interesting that ABC only released the first night. Maybe they didn't want any flack if they make Bush look bad.
Will be hard --- 7 months against 8 years, and most cabinet and support not in place till May or June.
It concerns me, ABC may get the last laugh, with the last remember of the Path to 911, aiming blame at Bush. They do protray Richard Clark as a "hero."
Hezbollah's ability to repel the Israel Defense Forces during the recent conflict was largely due to its use of intelligence techniques gleaned from allies Iran and Syria that allowed it to monitor encoded Israeli communications relating to battlefield actions, according to Israeli officials, whose claims have been independently corroborated by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
"Israeli EW [electronic warfare] systems were unable to jam the systems at the Iranian Embassy in Beirut, they proved unable to jam Hezbollah's command and control links from Lebanon to Iranian facilities in Syria, they blocked the Barak ship anti-missile systems, and they hacked into Israeli operations communications in the field," Richard Sale, the longtime intelligence editor for United Press International, who was alerted to this intelligence failure by current and former CIA officials, told Asia Times Online.
The ability to hack into Israel's military communications gave Hezbollah a decisive battlefield advantage, aside from allowing it to dominate the media war by repeatedly intercepting reports of the casualties it had inflicted and announcing them through its television station, Al-Manar. Al-Manar's general director, Abdallah Kassir, would not comment on the information-gathering methods that had allowed it to preempt Israel's casualty announcements, but he admitted he was in constant contact with Hezbollah's military wing.
When Israeli troops invaded southern Lebanon, they found themselves bogged down in stronger-than-expected Hezbollah resistance. The story of the handful of Hezbollah militants who single-handedly defended the border village of Aita Shaab has already become legend. Ultimately, Israel decided that the only way to neutralize them was to carpet-bomb the village, reducing it to rubble in the process.
Part of the reason for Hezbollah's decisive battlefield performance was that it was gleaning valuable information by monitoring telephone conversations in Hebrew between Israeli reservists and their families on their personal mobile phones.
"If an enemy sets up a small group of EW people familiar with the terrain and reasonably aware of the current tactical situation, a stream of in-the-clear calls could have been a gold mine of information mentioned inadvertently," said Sale, quoting a CIA official.
A London Sunday Times article titled "Humbling of the super-troops shatters Israeli army morale" reported the story last week. It stated that Hezbollah was "able to crack the codes and follow the fast-changing frequencies of Israeli radio communications, intercepting reports of the casualties they had inflicted again and again".
The development marks a potential turning point in the region's strategic balance. Hezbollah's ability to repel Israel's elite troops marked the first time that an Arab force had frustrated a concerted invasion scenario by Israel. This has led to a concerted rethink on the part of the Israeli leadership, in which it is being assisted by American experts, according to Israeli intelligence website DEBKAfile.
It adds that the American experts are particularly focused on how Iranian EW installed in Lebanese army coastal radar stations blocked the Barak anti-missile missiles aboard Israeli warships, allowing Hezbollah to hit at least one Israeli corvette, the Hanith.
"Assuming that these capabilities came from Syria and Iran, most probably by way of Russia and China, one would have to believe that both the US and Israel have learned from the experience, and that leaning process will be applied in future conflicts," said Robert Freedman, Peggy Meyerhoff Pearlstone professor of political science at the Baltimore Hebrew University.
The Debka article also claims that Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah was hosted throughout the war in an underground war-room beneath the Iranian Embassy in Beirut. Iranian involvement was suspected throughout the conflict, and a captured Hezbollah guerrilla confessed on Israeli television to have visited Iran for training. The most able and committed Hezbollah guerrillas usually visit Iran for religious indoctrination and training in the firing of non-Katyusha rocketry.
"It [the technological breakthrough] may mean that the US and Israel no longer have the ability to operate at lower levels of violence on a supreme basis," said a Middle East analyst. "The playing field is more leveled. This may mean more diplomacy or it may mean more, and more concentrated, violence."
Iran and Syria advanced their SIGINT (SIGnals INTelligence - intelligence-gathering by interception of signals) cooperation last November, as part of a joint strategic defense cooperation accord aimed at consolidating the strategic aspect of their long-term alliance. Aside from being an invaluable help to Hezbollah, the ability to read Israeli and US codes could aid Iran in monitoring US movements in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"It goes to the heart of one of the factors ... routinely regarded as one of the clear advantages for all First World versus Third World nations or forces - electronic warfare and secure communications," said Gary Sick, who was national security adviser under US president Jimmy Carter. "We are supposed to be able to read and interfere with their communications, not vice versa. A lot of calculations are based on that premise."
#1
May be some elements of truth here, but when they say " gave Hezbollah a decisive battlefield advantage" they do damage their credibility. Also, citing Gary Sick is not a real credibility builder either.
#4
"It [the technological breakthrough] may mean that the US and Israel no longer have the ability to operate at lower levels of violence on a supreme basis," said a Middle East analyst. "The playing field is more leveled. This may mean more diplomacy or it may mean more, and more concentrated, violence."
This is the money line for Israel and the United States. If terrorists insist upon ratcheting up what is required to defeat them, it is incumbent upon us to oblige these twisted f&cks. There is no alternative. Appeasement or coexistence with these pychotic killers is not an option.
#6
I'd bet dollars to donuts that it won't happen NEXT time - and Hezbollocks will guarantee there IS a "next time".
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
09/08/2006 19:42 Comments ||
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#7
Now that it has been discovered that they are listening........"Happening again" should be encouraged. Read into that whatever you would like....... grin, grin.
#9
"We are supposed to be able to read and interfere with their communications, not vice versa. A lot of calculations are based on that premise."
And where are they learning to do the things they do? From us, in our universities! We grant the visas to come here and learn our technology. They want the 7th Century, we should see that they get it. No more education visas for Muslims, or ChiComs either.
Not yet, but it may soon be irrelevant. The way I look at it, we are one election away from playing cowboys and muslims. Conquer, expel, exploit, colonize. Repeat.
Posted by: ed ||
09/08/2006 11:28 ||
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#1
We haven't tried it yet. When the middle east looks like Berlin in 1945, then I'll believe it.
Hanson states:
"We may indeed witness eventually the end of the primacy of the Western way of war. Yet that demotion will not be due to the Islamic way of war, but rather to the specter of a thermonuclear exchange with paradise-loving enemies, immune to notions of deterrence an awful situation in which conventional Western military advantage is reduced to nothing."
This is similar to what Wrechard of Belmont Club has been saying; if we loose this war now, ther will be another. We won't loose the next one, but millions will die.
Posted by: Mark E. ||
09/08/2006 12:09 Comments ||
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#2
What looks like quagmire now may soon, in retrospect, and in later acknowledgment of the ambition of the undertaking, seem both noble and successful. Such an historical assessment is also likely when we consider that the U.S. military has killed thousands of terrorists abroad, and has severely disrupted al Qaeda while we have suffered no repeat of September 11 here at home.
I have often thought this very thing... the critics of the WOT often forget that changing history and seeing fruit bearing rewards in any type of government change is often measured in decades not years...
#3
I suspect that Iran is about to be crushed. Charles Johnson (LGF) and others reflect betrayal in the admission of a Visa to Ayatowelhead Khatami. I believe that the White House expects that the murderer will outrage Americans, and he already has. Outrage is the fuel of war. Lock, load and release.
When the murderer mouths off at the National Cathedral, Americans will remember President Bush's Cathedral speech in which he threatened to destroy the country's enemy at the "hour of our chosing." And the sooner the better.
#4
The greatest single tactic America's Secular- and God-based Socialist Totalitarian enemies can be summed up as "You will give us our power or we'll take you and everybody, Sun + Earth, wid us to hell". IOW, BEING ALLOWED TO LIVE i.e. LIFE; versus BEING FORCIBLY DESTROYED WID EVERYBODY ELSE.
While working and doing various things the other day, I lent an ear to the radio. The morning host was talking about pessimism, and how hes sick of it. Sick! I agreed. It's not just specific pessimism about specific issues, which is sometimes apt and wise, but the overall glumness you get from the news media. Of course, you can find glumness anywhere. Swaths of the right are pessimistic about America because immigration will result in the national anthem sung in Toltec by 2018, and chunks of the left are pessimistic because Chimpy McDiebold may serve out his term without impeachment or interment. Everyones glum about something. But I listen to the news on the radio every hour on the hour, and it makes me want to saw ditches into my wrists. Its the needling worrisome hectoring tone of the newscasters that annoys me. There's a a woman who handles the morning shift on ABC; she emotes every syllable, infusing them with a sense of impending disaster, and then she hands it off to Vic Ratnor, who likewise leans into every phoneme with worried urgency, regardless of whether its an oil shortage (which could rekindle inflation!), a discovery of a new oil field (which could cost billions to exploit!) or a study on the effect of global warming on popsicles (which could stain the rug!) The two of them could make a flooded antihill sound like the end of the Republic.
The news is never good. If the economys up, theres an expert on hand from the Institute of the Possible Downside warning about unforseen pressure on the bond market, softening housing, hardening tensions, turgid wage growth, and explosive release of inflationary pressures. Have a cigarette. Was it bad for you?
TV news gives me the same impression, which is why I avoid it. All those earnest faces. Good evening, were deeply concerned, and powerless to do anything about it. Although we hope you infer from our brows the need to contact someone, and urge action on this issue. Now heres a baby giraffe.
The formulation seems simple: The continued existence of problems at this late date in human history implies that were regressing. Were screwing up, weve lost it, and we wander confused amongst the morass of the malaise and vice versa. Hard times, brother. Hard times. Im not saying they should pretend we live in the Republic of Happy Bunnies Who Pee Champagne, but for Gods sake, sometimes youd think the bread lines snaked from the Hoovervilles to the soup kitchens again. Im probably confusing the sugar-coated recollections of early youth with actual history, but I grew up with a sense of optimism and confidence in the country. That really makes me sound like Mr. McFartus shakin a whittlin stick at the jaunty-hatted younguns, I know. But the icons in my dim early youth, either by absence or presence, were JFK and Humphrey. They werent defeatists, and they didnt give off that rank stink of anger.
Of course, someone who's angry about different things is always unbalanced, right? Im sure Im regarded as a delusional tool because I worry more about Islamicists than global warming. But it comes back again to that theme I blathered about a few weeks ago, the idea of the eternal adolescent strain in American culture; to the adolescent, the cynic is the truth-teller. The optimists are the fools. (It takes an adolescent to think that people who believe in nothing are the best judges of those who believe in something.) Its all a pose, for the most part, but after a while it feeds on itself. Pessimism produces its own coal, stokes its own furnaces. Optimism is harder. Optimism takes work. You have to roll your own.
Hah! The iPod just kicked on that fine messy song Tubthumping. I get knocked down. But I get up again. I get knocked down. But I get up again. Youre never going to keep me down. That's the spirit, ya commie buskers! I dont listen to that song and wonder what has he done to get knocked down? I salute the boozed-up shouting chanty brio of the sentiment, which is the distant cousin of Cagney snapping of "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy." Really. Chest out, chin high, eyes bright, up yours if you're heart can't find the tinder to shout hoorah. Look: theres always a place for the bitchers, the carpers, the griefers, the snipers, the angry marginal sorts flinging poo from the cages of their own beliefs. But its not the pessimists who will save the West. Itll be those who believe the West is worth saving, and not because it is the least horrible option whose defense must be prefaced with endless apologies, but because it really is the best hope we have. Would you rather be a libertarian in China? A Christian in Sudan? A Zoroastran in Iran? A lesbian in Saudi Arabia?
But - but we supported the Shah, and -
Yes. Interesting how supporters of the Shah didn't storm our embassies or wage a 30 year Death-to-America campaign after we cut the Shah loose. Reset the hands. We can argue about all manner of strategies now, but there's one division that counts more than any other, and its fundamental and pervasive. Pessimism or optimism. Ones very satisfying. The others hard. Id say we dont have any choice, but we do, and that choice may undo us yet.
May, I said. Im naturally pessimistic, and I hate it, and fight it. Cautious optimism: methadone for cynics.
Posted by: Mike ||
09/08/2006 09:01 ||
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#1
Yes, and you get it from the door knockers who come with the End of the World repent message. They watch too much tv and hear too much radio and read too many dead tree pubs. Think its bad, just think of the 13th and 14th Centuries when the Mongols and plagues devastated the known world. Taking a quarter of the European population is something two world wars of the 20th Century never achieved.
Terrible, terrible. Just pull out the Almanac and check the census data from 1900 on and see life expediency increase every 10 years. Just glancing around the room I see conveniences which merely 20 years ago would have been luxuries or purely the products of imagination rather than reality. Even the statistical poor today have it better off than most middle class of the 50s.
Today, I possess more things things than all the powerful rulers of the pre-20th Century possessed. Did Alexander have central air and heating? Did the grand rulers of India or China have double door refrigerators with water dispenser? Could any of the Caesars booked on-line and be in Tahiti in a couple of days? I have access to health care and medical knowledge that make a long life less of the will of god than any of them could wish for. I can travel from one corner of the world to another both physically and virtually in hours if not seconds. I can communicate at the speed of light to those locations as well. I have gazed upon the surface of strange and alien landscapes with eyes that reach out to xenoscapes upon celestial bodies that were merely distant points of lights in the sky for them. I can enjoy a diet of the most varied nature at anytime of the year. Fruits in the dead of winter, fresh ocean fish caught hours ago and available in the middle of continent. And I am an average Joe.
I know the world is not perfect. I also know the world has never been perfect. When I stand upon the accomplishments of thousands whove built the world I truly enjoy and appreciate, I do not mourn the imperfections. Ive learned a long time ago to ignore the songs of doom and gloom. However, I do distress when they sing their song for power and so many follow the piper witlessly. For they make their own worlds dark and unhappy by their own choosing.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
