US PRESIDENCY AS ACCUMULATIVE ERROR

David Swanson, author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union has written a chilling piece of commentary on the state of the American presidency.

Below is an excerpt:

SECOND, I LOOKED AT THE POWER OF WAR. Our Constitution wisely placed it in Congress. It is now in the White House and growing ever stronger. President Obama has demanded and received a larger military budget than Bush ever had, plus a larger war budget on top of that, not to mention the secret budget for some of the spy agencies that engage in war. President Obama continues to insist on funding the wars off the books with so-called emergency supplementals. He's put bases into more nations. He's put more troops in the field. He's expanded the use of mercenaries and contractors. He's dramatically expanded the illegal use of drones to bomb Pakistan and other nations, resulting—among other forms of blowback—a man trying to set off a bomb in Times Square, a man whose father's job used to be guarding nuclear weapons. Obama's Pentagon is pushing hard to use drones in U.S. skies as well. Meanwhile, Obama has—in another badder than Bush innovation—formally authorized secret military action in dozens of nations. He's formally done away with habeas corpus and established the power to imprison people at Bagram and other sites completely outside any legal process. He's kept our death camp at Guantanamo open. President Obama has continued to assert the power to torture, and torture has continued. He's also continued to assert the power to kidnap or "rendition" people and send them to nations that torture. But, most disturbingly, Obama has largely replaced torture with murder. People we would have sought to capture two years ago, we now seek to murder instead. And Obama has claimed the power to assassinate anyone, including American citizens. And, needless to say, the warrantless spying programs and other violations of civil liberties roll on unquestioned, and Miranda rights may be at risk now too. And one reason to think things may be even worse than we know is that Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than any of his predecessors.

Read it all at Corrente: Obama Was Created By Our Failure to Impeach Bush

CONTROLLING THE WATER GANGSTERS

SLOWLY BUT EARNESTLY the noose around humanity's neck is tightening. Soon, most of us will bow and grovel to the dictates of our masters now wearing sheep's clothing but are ravaging wolves instead. Many of us will die in the first wave of resistance. Others among us will fight on. Sorry, not exactly an original thought, but a thought clutching an emphatic truth nevertheless.

It's no secret to anyone who has known me or my shadow that I was once an enthusiastic Huey P. Long admirer for years after having read T. Harry Williams' biography of Long in the middle 1970s. However, after stumbing through a life among takers and givers, sloth managers and peace activists, gun gonzos and political vipers, I'm a bit less resolute on Longism these days, although his words still do occasionally melt this woulda, shoulda coulda heart of mine, even as I've moved back home to my beginnings as befits my belief in the American Constitution above all else, including drop dead goo-sounding politicians. When I read that the Kingfish, after all he did for a then very impoverished oil-rigged Louisiana, after going national, was planning on running for the presidency to unseat FDR in 1936 only to get himself shot dead...

...all I could think of was the word C-O-N-T-R-O-L. I love my country. Its furious heritage, its loquacious promise of better days ahead. I also chafe and occasionally fight back a tear when I am moved to chagrin her current predicament.

To be brutally honest although I never felt the true call, I now regret I never served my country militarily, but I do recall fondly my days as a Boy Scout, who in hot pursuit of the illustrious Eagle rank, fell one rank short at Life at the age of fourteen due to circumstances I could not control, but could have endured and modified to impact that pursuit. That I did not is a regret. As a scout, I learned to believe in conservation, but I also find that the environmental lobby as it has evolved today has taken a once beautiful concept and distorted it beyond due diligence into a perversion of the original mandate.

This latest water grab seems nothing less than one more Federal program aimed at perverting the American mandate with jurisdictional tyranny the final endgame. The strength of a nation is its people, and to strip liberty from a people accustomed to freedom of choice and the privilege of property is to trample the spirit and usurp the strength of the nation dependent on the vital rechargeable energy that liberty bestows.

To replace the spirit of liberty by the moribund grimaces of a bureaucratic ghost is to announce the death of a nation.

HOROWITZ ON HOROWITZ

What follows is an edited version of a radio interview on KKMS AM 980 with David Horowitz conducted by hosts Lee Michaels and Jeff Shell. The show opened with the one of the hosts asking the following question: Tell us a little bit about yourself, because I think it’s important for us to understand your background and how you got where you are as a context for your current views.”)

My parents were members of the American Communist Party and I was part of the progressive left, which was the communist left, and which has grown ominously large today, and has seen its candidate elected to the White House. I was the editor of the largest magazine of the New Left, which was organized by the children of communists, so-called red diaper babies like myself. We regarded America as the enemy. We began as an isolated political minority, but the hate America crowd has grown alarmingly in size since then. Today, nobody is embarrassed about slandering his own country even in time of war—and this includes our current president, who recently apologized for the actions of his country to Latin American communists, Jew-haters and self-declared enemies, such as Venezuela’s Yugo Chavez and Nicaraguan jefe Daniel Ortega, a degenerate who molested his own daughter.

In Obama’s presence Ortega went into a rant against America claiming that our government conducted a “terrorist” war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, when in fact American pressure forced an end to the Sandinista dictatorship and the re-institution of a free press and open elections. What was President Obama’s response to the Ortega attack? “Well, I was only six years old at the time.” In other words, an apology for our “terrorist” acts against the Marxist dictatorship. This is disgraceful and also dangerous.

To answer your question as to how I arrived at the views I now hold, during the early 1970s I was working with the Black Panther Party, whose leaders were the heroes of all progressives and were assumed by progressives to be the victims of American oppression and police brutality. As I soon discovered, the Panthers were, in fact, criminals and murderers and not the victims the left claimed them to be. In 1974, they killed my friend, Betty Van Patter, which brought all this home to me. The left protected the Panther murderers and made apologies for their other criminal deeds. Today, campus progressives invite the killers to their schools and give them ten-thousand-dollar speaking fees to denounce America as a “racist” country and criminal nation, which is what progressives want to hear.

The second principal cause of my change of heart was the Vietnam War. I was one of the leaders of the antiwar movement of the time. Of course, these antiwar movements of the left aren’t really antiwar movements in any meaningful sense of the word. They are anti-American movements, designed to make America lose whatever war it is engaged in. If there had been a peace movement during the lead up to the war in Iraq, for example, there would have been at least one demonstration in front of the Iraq Embassy calling on Saddam Hussein to obey the UN resolutions and the arms control agreements he had signed. But there wasn’t, not one. The so-called antiwar activists were not demonstrating for peace. They were demonstrating against America and its efforts to hold Saddam to the UN peace agreements he had signed.

During the Vietnam years, the goal of the so-called antiwar movement was to cause America to lose the war—and that includes every leader of the anti-Vietnam left: John Kerry, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, and so on. The anti-Vietnam movement wanted America to lose because for the left, for progressives, we are the bad guys: America, the oppressor. America did lose the Vietnam war as a result of our protests. The anti-American antiwar movement forced America to give up the fight for freedom in Vietnam, to retreat from the field of battle, to withdraw overnight. It was the same prescription that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed and the congressional Democrats wanted for Iraq. Fortunately they failed, and consequently Iraq is not ruled by terrorists today.

But in Indo-China the ending was different. Once America quit the field of battle, the Communists proceeded to slaughter two-and a-half million poor Vietnamese and Cambodian peasants—one of the worst genocides in history. But there wasn’t a single demonstration by progressives against this atrocity. Bloodbaths are okay if they are committed by progressives of color in the name of “social justice.”

From Communism to Islamo-fascism, the left in America—as elsewhere—has had a lifelong love affair with tyranny and terror, which is the title of an important book that one of my FrontPage editors, Jamie Glazov, has just published. It’s called: United in Hate, the Left’s Love Affair with Tyranny and Terror. That is who they are. Progressives are adept at speaking the language of peace and love and justice; but these words are just a smokescreen for their real agendas which are search and destroy. Anybody who has ever encountered a progressive up close in any kind of political disagreement knows that this is a hate movement. They hate conservatives; they hate Republicans; they hate white males, and increasingly they hate Christians and Jews. They hated George Bush.

Read it all.

ANN COULTER

WITHOUT RESORTING TO HER USUAL banter of sarcasm and low blows, Ann Coulter still softens no punches in making her viewpoint perfectly clear to Hardball's Chris Matthews, apparently filmed off-location in sunny Florida.

WAR COVERAGE SHRINKS AS SUCCESS GROWS

HERE IS AN AMAZING STAT, a veritable sparkle in the eye of the beholder theory we call media bias. Unfortunately, no data from the right-leaning FOX News was included. From an article by Confederate Yankee:

Reality, however, does not have a leftward bias (neither does it have a rightward bias). Reality, like nature, seeks equilibrium... balance.

The reaction of the newsworks is simple when reality intrudes on the narrative: they dispute it, then they ignore it, and if they can no longer ignore it, they pretend that they never held a contrary position.

Presently, the falloff in news coverage in Iraq is the result of media attempting to ignore that the "quagmire in a failed state" narrative they've been promoting has been failing for over a year.

According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been "massively scaled back this year." Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The "CBS Evening News" has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC's "World News" and 74 minutes on "NBC Nightly News." (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)

CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.

I'm sure that psychologists have more precise terms to describe this collective behavior, but it comes down to this: the situation in Iraq is far better than the media have predicted it would be, and they aren't sure what to do. They don't want to report success, as success means having to explain why they've been wrong. They also morbidly hope—no doubt subconsciously—that things will once again turn worse, and vindicate their years of predicting doom and failure.

So coverage withers away. The war becomes a non-event, and thankfully, a Presidential campaign between a far left shape-shifter and an occasional Republican provides a welcome distraction.

The War in Iraq is plenty interesting to Americans. That has never faded in five years, and most would be heartened to hear what independent reporters have been indicating for months; that real progress has been made economically, diplomatically, and militarily.

But the newsworks don't want to admit they may have been wrong, and so their interests have now focused elsewhere. They don't want to undermine a political party that long ago made abandoning Iraq a key part of their party platform. They don't want to expose a shameful candidate who has made defeating his own military and abandoning a fledgling democracy his signature issue.

From their perspective, it is better to provide only the bad news, and when the bad news fails to live up to expectations, to ignore the uncomfortable.

A SPEECH LIKE NONE OTHER

Here's a very funny piece by Wesley Prudon published by the Washington Times.

DAVY CROCKETT IS THE PATRON SAINT of every politician who ever left Washington with a bruised ego and a broken heart. When he was bounced out of Congress in 1830, Davy told the folks on the banks of the Nolichucky River in Tennessee: "I'm going to Texas, and the rest of you can go to hell."

Departing presidents have left town nursing similar sentiments but avoided saying them out loud. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, continuing their endless rassling match today in Indiana and North Carolina, could take Davy Crockett's benediction as a caution. George W. Bush surely feels like Crockett is kin, and there's the fantasy of a speech floating across the Internet that George W. could but never would deliver. But if he had only the self-discipline of his critics, this is what he might say:

"If the polls are right, more than half of you don't regard yourselves as 'my fellow Americans," so I'll cut right to the chase. I'm getting out of Dodge. Before anyone gets in a lather about me quitting to avoid impeachment, let me assure you that no laws were broken, the Constitution is intact. I'm quitting because I'm fed up with you people. You have no interest in what's actually going on in the world. Most of you are too lazy to do your homework and figure it out.

"Let's start local. The politicians and pundits have persuaded you that the economy is in the tank. That's despite record numbers of homeowners, including record numbers of minority homeowners. Minority business ownership is at record levels, too. Our unemployment rate is as low as it ever was during the Clinton administration. The stock market has rebounded to record levels and more Americans than ever own stocks. But all you can do is whine about gasoline prices, and most of you are too dumb to realize that the price of gasoline is high because the Chinese and the Indians are driving cars now, and because Al Gore and a handful of wacko greenheads are more worried about polar bears and their beachfront property than they are about you.

"I'm tired of this 'blood for oil" crap. If I were trading blood for oil, I would have seized Iraq's oil fields a long time ago. And don't give me this 'Bush lied, people died' crap, either. I could have planted chemical weapons planted all over Iraq to be 'discovered.' Instead, I owned up to the fact that the intelligence was faulty. The rest of the world thought Saddam Hussein had the goods, too, same as me.

"Fools don't understand that we face a unique enemy. The 'soldiers' of our new enemy, unlike our old Soviet enemies, are actually eager to die. That's OK with me, and good riddance, as long as they aren't trying to take as many of you with them as they can. But they want to kill you in the name of what I generously called 'the religion of peace' (not that I ever believed it any more than you do). You all should be grateful that the Islamists haven't killed more of us here in the United States since September 11, but you're not. That's because you've got no idea how hard a small number of intelligence, military, law enforcement and homeland security people have worked to make sure of that.

"I warned you that this would be a long and difficult fight, but most of you think 'a long and difficult fight' amounts to a single season of 'Survivor.' You won't look through the long lens of history, the way our enemies do.

"The facts are easy enough to find. They're all over the Internet, along with a lot of stuff that ain't true. You have to pay attention and sort it out, but most of you would rather watch 'American Idol'. I could say more about your idiotic belief that government, not your own wallet, is where money comes from. But it would sail right over your heads.

Read it all.

FITZGERALD: HOW DUMB, HOW LONG?

HUGH FITZGERALD OF JIHAD WATCH today asks, "How dumb do we have to be, and for how long?" The answer of course, is blowing in the wind. And you know what that means. Massive destruction. Bombs and explosions of every sort do indeed tend to present the olfactory sensitive with a peculiar odor of the day. But until then, let's just play with words, and send them money, yep that's what they need, more money, boast our misguided leaders.

SAN'A, Yemen - A bomb rigged to a motorcycle blew up amid a crowd of worshippers leaving Friday prayers at a mosque in a rebel stronghold of northern Yemen, killing at least 18 people and wounding about four dozen, officials said. –from this news article

Shi'a and Sunnis at it again. Yes, of course, the American government must do what it can to try to stop this kind of internecine warfare among Muslims, in Yemen as in Iraq. Otherwise there might be a "catastrophic" situation. Otherwise there might be "chaos" in the Middle East.

And somehow this "chaos" and this "catastrophe" that will ensue will, we are told, be bad for us, in ways always unspecified, as if we are simply to accept the conclusion of our betters—you know, the people in the government who pick up their news just as you and I do, but who lack the time, and the inclination (unlike you, unlike me) to spend the time to read about Islam, to read the texts of Islam, to learn what the Western students of Islam (not the espositos but the real thing) have said about the contents of Islam.

For they are just too occupied and preoccupied to sit in a room and read. They may be cosseted, chauffeured about, and so on, but their daily lives are full of meetings, and hectic busyness, and travelling hither and yon, and getting someone above to "sign off" on something, and coming up with "policies" that need to be formulated by consulting with everyone and his brother, and then written up in the stilted bloodless bureaucratic language which is now the favored medium—they know no other, they have never been exposed to any other—of those in the government, and who presume to instruct, and to protect us. They have to deal now with this crisis, now with that, and with every part of the world.

How can someone as mediocre as Bush, advised by someone as mediocre as Rice—people who have never had the inclination or leisure to read widely in history, or to exercise their imaginative faculty through literature—be expected to have read about Islam? Yet if you cannot imagine something, it is difficult to think about it. If you cannot imagine an islamized Western Europe, if it is simply beyond you, then you will not worry about what that would mean, and are not likely to come up with ways to avoid that completely plausible and deplorable, and entirely avoidable, future for the heart of the West.

One more thing. If leaving Iraq would, as some direly warn, cause great disruption, chaos, a "catastrophe" in the area, then why don't any of the Sunni Arab states, presumably those who would have the most to lose, bother to give any aid at all to the government of Iraq? Answer: why should they? They do not wish to shore up Shi'a who rule in Baghdad. They will, however, continue to urge the Americans to stay, in order to keep the Sunnis in Iraq supplied with guns and money and with a powerful protector that will pressure the Shi'a to make concessions, and concessions—and the Americans will, listening gravely to the advice of rulers of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other small sheikdoms, fall for it, not realizing how they are being suckered.

And if leaving Iraq would, as some direly warn, lead to terrible disruptions in the supply of oil (during the Iran-Iraq War, that lasted for eight years, there was little disruption and the price of oil went steadily down), then why aren't other oil-consuming nations concerned? Why hasn't China lifted a finger, or spent a penny, to help promote stability and prosperity in Iraq? Could it be that the Chinese are, like the Sunni Arabs, perfectly content to watch the continuing squandering of American money, material, men, morale, happy to see us bleed ourselves, in order to do something which will benefit China and other oil-consumers as much as, perhaps more than, it will benefit the United States?

How dumb do we have to be, and for how long?

Get our troops out of Iraq. Let he chips fall where they may. Inform the public what we are really up against, Begin preparations for all-out war. Seal the ALL borders. Stop all Muslim immigration. Issue national identity cards. Begin a national rationing program for pertinent goods, especially petroleum products. Modify trading levels with China until they bulk up their safety oversights and rectify the massive trade deficit the US has been complaining about for over a decade. Tell Americans that each of us need to gird our loins with the American spirit and start acting like we've got good sense. Maybe, just maybe, candidate Ron Paul had a good idea, or two, or several.

And here's some positive news (well, the ACLU is against it, as well as all the usual suspects who are probably not quite as "law-abiding" as they would have us believe) on the defense front. The LA Times has reported that the LAPD has instituted a new anti-terrorism program that should serve as a national model for detecting suspicious activity, reporting it peer to peer and upward to the federal levels.

WAR THEORY 101

The question among Westerners with the keen sense of what's happening in the world today, "Why don't the democracies stop pandering to the Muslims and start taking corrective measures? There is little doubt that if the Western societies chose to confront Islam on Islam’s terms, the conflict would be over in a very short order."

And most of those same folks agree that this global conflagration would be over in short order, but not until the West returns to logic and begins fighting to win for the sake of its own survival as it did with Germany and Japan in WWII, and quit fighting to enforce a superficial peace mandated by the U.N, in Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Kuwait, Somalia...

War is actually understood and is not some mysterious creature open for daft speculation. Unless one completely destroys the aggressive population's will to continue the fight, one cannot achieve peace. And once victory is achieved, and and the vanquished is allowed to re-establish a government, one does not let them incorporate the reason for the war into their "new" constitution. In Germany and Japan, the Allies told the defeated what could and could not go into their new constitutions. This meant Naziism and Shintoism, respectively. Yet in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US has allowed these weak governments to base their constitutions on Sharia which is what caused the problem in the first place.

This flaw in war science is why the US hasn't "won" in the past 60 years.

THE MENDACITY OF ROOT CAUSES

In a surprise turnaround, given the usual dhimmitude exhibited by our liberal university power structure, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was repeatedly tested as he questioned the official version of the September 11 attacks and defended the right to cast doubt on the Holocaust in a tense appearance at Columbia University, whose president accused the hard-line leader of behaving like "a petty and cruel dictator."

Ahmadinejad smiled at first but appeared increasingly agitated, decrying the "insults" and "unfriendly treatment." Columbia President Lee Bollinger and audience members took him to task over Iran's human-rights record and foreign policy, as well as Ahmadinejad's statements denying the Holocaust and calling for the disappearance of Israel.

"Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," Bollinger said, to loud applause. He said Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust might fool the illiterate and ignorant.

"When you come to a place like this it makes you simply ridiculous," Bollinger said. "The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history." Ahmadinejad rose, also to applause, and after a religious invocation, said Bollinger's opening was "an insult to information and the knowledge of the audience here."

"There were insults and claims that were incorrect, regretfully," Ahmadinejad said, accusing Bollinger of falling under the influence of the hostile U.S. press and politicians. "I should not begin by being affected by this unfriendly treatment."

During a question and answer session, Ahmadinejad appeared tense and unsmiling, in contrast to more relaxed interviews and appearances earlier in the day. And thus a banner day in American intellectual toughness has been witnessed. May this event at Columbia signal the end of the political correctness era, and the beginning of a true intellectual analysis on our campuses and in our think thanks. But don't count on it.There are still many who realize that the propaganda war is always a surgical composure. Columbia students did applaud this man. This clip will be used by our enemies.

And you can bet the tone of both the guest speaker Ahmadeinejad and his audience wiil be skewed in his favor today when the Iranian president speaks at the "Islamic" United Nations.

Moving along, here's another sweet plum from the mindful tree of Hugh Fitzgerald:

Qur'an, passim. Hadith, passim. Sira, passim. Take them seriously, take them to heart, do not ignore what they tell you, and the duty of Jihad becomes clear. Follow the logic of Jihad, and the instruments available to Muslims at this moment in history: qitaal as terrorism, the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, demographic conquest. Now choose one or more. Al Qaeda chose the first, but is also delighted with those who employ the second, and the third, and the fourth methods for spreading Islam, and removing all obstacles to Islam, whether this is accomplished by terrorizing, or buying off, or misleading, or simply outbreeding, the Infidel enemy.

That is the answer to "why did this happen." No one would have sought to find the "root causes" of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in anything other than Kodo, the blend of emperor-worship and extreme Japanese militarism that all through the 1920s began spreading throughout the ruling class, both military and civilian, in Japan. No one would think to find the "root causes" for Hitler's attack on Poland that led Britain and France to finally declare war, in anything other than the doctrine promulgated by Hitler that the "Aryans" of Germany needed, and were entitled to, Lebensraum by seizing lands belonging to all non-Aryan and therefore inferior peoples.

No one should seek to find the "root causes" of Muslim terrorism, carried out entirely by Muslims, for reasons clearly articulated by the most truthful terrorists (including Bin Laden and many of his aides), that constantly relate back to the doctrines of Islam, to passages to be found in Qur'an and Hadith, and in the details of Muhammad's life found in the Sira.

The "root cause" of Muslim terrorism at Ground Zero, as of Muslim terrorism directed at civilians in southern Thailand, or in India, or in Israel, or in the southern Sudan, or in Amsterdam, Madrid, London, and a thousand other places, is Islam. The "root cause" of Muslim terrorism is Islam.