1389 Blog - Counterjihad! » Bush family

Do You Remember January 3, 2007 – Five Years On?

Sparta — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:45:20 +0000

This message has been making the rounds of the Internet. While the original author is unknown, the timeline and the facts are accurate and easily verified.
Please email, tweet, post on Facebook or on your own blog!

This is just a history lesson. I am sending it to all regardless of party. It is history and nothing can change it. All Americans should pass this on to everyone in their database. Both parties need to cut expenses, both parties have some blame, but this is truly what happened and Americans need to wake up and take our country back in 2012!!

REMEMBER JAN. 3, 2007

The day the Democrats took over was not January 22nd 2009, it was January 3rd 2007, the day the Democrats took over the House of Representatives and the Senate, the start of the 110th Congress. The Democratic Party gained a majority in both chambers for the first time since the end of the 103rd Congress in 1995.

For those who are listening to the liberals propagating the fallacy that everything is “Bush’s Fault,” think about this:

January 3rd, 2007, the day the Democrats took over the Senate and the Congress:

The DOW Jones closed at 12,621.77
The GDP for the previous quarter was 3.5%
The Unemployment rate was 4.6%
George Bush’s Economic policies SET A RECORD of 52 STRAIGHT MONTHS of JOB CREATION!

Remember that day…

January 3rd, 2007 was the day that Barney Frank took over the House Financial Services Committee and Chris Dodd took over the Senate Banking Committee.

The economic meltdown that happened 15 months later was in what part of the economy?

BANKING AND FINANCIAL SERVICES!

THANK YOU DEMOCRATS (especially Barney) for taking us from 13,000 DOW, 3.5% GDP and 4.6% Unemployment…to this CRISIS by (among MANY other things) dumping 5-6 TRILLION Dollars of toxic loans on the economy from YOUR Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac FIASCOES!

(BTW: Bush asked Congress 17 times to stop Fannie & Freddie – starting in 2001 because it was financially risky for the US economy). Barney blocked it and called it a “Chicken Little Philosophy” (and the sky did fall!)

And who took the THIRD highest pay-off from Fannie Mae AND Freddie Mac? OBAMA

And who fought against reform of Fannie and Freddie?
OBAMA and the Democrat Congress, especially BARNEY!!!!

So when someone tries to blame Bush…
REMEMBER JANUARY 3rd, 2007…THE DAY THE DEMOCRATS TOOK OVER!

Bush may have been in the car but the Democrats were in charge of the gas pedal and steering wheel they were driving the economy into the ditch.

Budgets do not come from the White House. They come from Congress and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democratic Party.

Furthermore, the Democrats controlled the budget process for 2008 & 2009 as well as 2010 & 2011.

In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases. Bush should have vetoed every bill that came in front of his desk!

For 2009 though, Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the 2009 budget.

And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete 2009. Let’s remember what the deficits looked like during that period:

If the Democrats inherited any deficit, it was the 2007 deficit, the last of the Republican budgets. That deficit was the lowest in five years, and the fourth straight decline in deficit spending. After that, Democrats in Congress took control of spending, and that includes Barack Obama, who voted for the budgets.

If Obama inherited anything, he inherited it from himself.

In a nutshell, what Obama is saying is, “I inherited a deficit that I voted for,
And then I voted to expand that deficit four-fold since January 20th, 2009.”

There is no way this will be widely publicized unless each of us passes it on.

“The problems we face today exist because the people who WORK for a living are outnumbered by those who VOTE for a living.”

Jay Sekulow Shills for the American Dictatorship

CzechRebel — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 22:05:32 +0000

Jay Sekulow on Fox News discussing Presidential Primary in Virginia

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by OfficialACLJ on Jan 2, 2012

Several candidates failed to meet Virginia’s legal requirements to be on the ballot in the state’s Presidential primary. Is such a high bar to be placed on the ballot for president constitutional?

“Free” Elections?

Oh, I can still remember those public school teachers telling us about “Communist elections.” They used to tell us that, in Communist countries, “You can vote for Joe or you can vote for Stalin.” We were supposed to quiver and think of that Joe Stalin fellow, the Mr. Wonderful who helped us win World War II and who later became Mr. Evil, our first enemy in the Cold War. But they always told us how “free” our elections were. They would tell us how we could “vote for anyone we want.”

Well, that was not a complete lie, in that some voters like to write in ‘Mickey Mouse’, just to push it to its illogical extreme. However, it is a significant enough lie. The United States has pretty much been locked into a two-party system since the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment. I.e., since there is no “second prize” in our national elections, presidential and vice-presidential candidates run on the same ticket, with absolutely no fear that the third most popular viewpoint can capture the second prize. Hence, the best a candidate who is not running as a Democrat or Republican can hope for is to play the role of a spoiler.

So, the Democratic and Republican parties act as great gatekeepers in the same way the Communist Party did back in the days of the USSR. Of course, in the USSR, everyone knew they had only one party and little choice. In the USA, we have the feeling we have some choice–and that is often the case.

What choices do voters actually have?

That said, the elements of dictatorship remain part of the picture on election day. For example, I’d like to ask our Democrat readers: Who will be challenging Obama for the nomination this time? Hmmm? No one? Well, I guess y’all are so happy with this dude that nobody would think of such a thing. OK, back in 2004, who was challenging George W. Bush for the nomination? Doesn’t anyone ever challenge a sitting president in his own party? Well, at least Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter. That was just back in . . . 1976. Like over a third of a century ago!

So, unless a President is retiring, we have a primary election choice in only one party–that is only half of the field, as it is pretty rare to see a partisan challenge of a sitting President. Now let’s look at what choices are available to voters in the party that is currently out of power.

Few would want to grant ballot access to anybody and everybody who signs a few papers and offers to be President. Elections are expensive to run, and ballots with hundreds of names on them would be too unwieldy and time-consuming for each voter and for the election officials. Ballot access should require some indication of a significant amount of support for the candidate. And, generally speaking, each State’s government and that State’s political party should be allowed to create REASONABLE means to determine whether a candidate has a significant enough following to allow the party faithful of its state to consider that individual for their support.

Virginia was the first colony. It was first in freedom. It produced the first President and lead the US in many ways. Leaving the US in 1861, it was first in freedom in the Confederacy, until captured by the Yankee dictatorship. General Robert E. Lee’s home became the great Yankee cemetery. Controlling and Yankeefying Virginians has been the mission of the American dictatorship ever since.

Et tu, Sekulow?

Jay Sekulow is supposed to be one of the good guys. He is a lawyer who fights abortion and homosexual extremism; he defends the rights of Christians and Jews, and seems the type of guy who makes us feel a little guilty when we tell lawyer jokes. So, when the ONLY two candidates who happen to make the GOP ballot in the Commonwealth of Virginia are Mr. Establishment, RINO (Republican In Name Only) from the quintessential all-Democrat-all-the-time-please-disregard-all-party-labels State, and an open and notorious Libertarian, you would think it might raise a red flag in Sekulow’s mind.

Of course, we have had Bachmann, Cain, Perry, Gingrich, and most recently, Santorum garnering major support in the polls. It is hard to say that any of them can be left off the ballot by any REASONABLE method. Of course, the fact that no other State has managed to winnow the field down to two candidates this year also argues pretty loudly that Virginia’s system is not very REASONABLE. In fact, it would probably be more reasonable for Virginia’s Republican leaders to decide who will be the State’s uncommitted delegates in some “smoke-filled room” and send them to the Convention. Heck, if I were a Virginia Republican voter, I would see the “smoke-filled room” as a much fairer system. If I don’t like what the leaders of my local party did, I could take it up with them, in person and/or at the next local election.

But Mr. Sekulow is out there screaming that rules are rules! He says that most years, they have plenty of candidates on the ballot in Virginia. (Irrelevant, because the ballot access law was recently changed.) He says that you Republicans can choose between a Democrat in Republican clothing and a Libertarian who has been nice enough to serve as a “Republican Congressman” for many years.

If the Sekulow the-law-is-the-law argument were absolute, we would have to apologize to the Nazis tried at Nuremberg. Every one of us who has gone to law school knows that we look not ONLY to the law as written, but the interest that the law was written to protect. Every Christian knows there is a difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.

Jay, if you are shilling for Mitt Romney because you feel he is “the most electable”, I can respect that, though I think you are deeply mistaken. If you are shilling for Ron Paul because you believe that the good he does by promoting libertarianism and limited government outweighs the harm that will be done by the libertines who are promoting him, I would agree that you have a point.

Of course, if you are getting paid for this, all lawyers can understand that. We all heard it during our first year in law school: “If someone is paying you X dollars per hour, you could make an argument for . . . .” So, if a wealthy client is paying you for this, Godspeed, Jay!

However, please spare us your the-law-is-the-law mechanical reaction to this injustice. The Republican voters of Virginia should have an actual Republican on the ballot. In the 2012 Primary, Republican voters in Virginia will be completely disenfranchised and Jay Sekulow is amongst the disenfranchisors.

Obama: Debt Man Walking

1389 — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:05:10 +0000

From Fox News:

Obama says adding $4 trillion to debt is unpatriotic.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by maywhitley31 on Aug 23, 2011

On July 3, 2008 — the day before Independence Day — Barack Obama said that adding $4 trillion in debt was irresponsible and “unpatriotic.

Obama: The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.

Obama to Seek Third Debt Ceiling Increase Since Summer Deal

The Obama administration will ask Congress to raise the nation’s borrowing limit by $1.2 trillion this week, marking the third and final increase from a deal negotiated over summer.

Treasury officials say the increase will boost the nation’s borrowing limit to $16.4 trillion. Treasury officials say the increase is necessary because the nation will be within $100 billion of the current limit by Friday.

In August, Congress and the administration agreed to raise the borrowing limit by $2.1 trillion in three steps. The parties also agreed to cut more than $2 trillion from the deficit over the next 10 years.

Congress can reject the increase, though Obama can then veto their objection. If Congress doesn’t act by Jan. 14, the increase will take place automatically.

Such stuff as nightmares are made on…

Non-Muslim Muslims and the Jihad Against the West

1389 — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 15:19:18 +0000

Podcasts

Bosch Fawstin did a follow-up on this article on the podcast “Don’t Let it Go….Unheard”. The segment starts at 31 minutes in and lasts for about a half hour.
He will also appear on The Jamie Glazov Show Tuesday, Dec. 6 at 8-9pm Pacific time. Try to listen in live.

From FrontPage Magazine:

By Bosch Fawstin December 2, 2011 @ 12:38 am

My name is Bosch and I’m a recovering Muslim.

That is, if Muslims don’t kill me for leaving Islam, which it requires them to do. That’s just one of the reasons I’ve been writing and drawing against Islam and its Jihad for a number of years now. But fortunately for us, Islam hasn’t been able to make every Muslim its slave, just as Nazism wasn’t able to turn every German into a Nazi. So there is Islam and there are Muslims. Muslims who take Islam seriously are at war with us and Muslims who don’t aren’t.

But that doesn’t mean we should consider these reluctant Muslims allies against Jihad. I’ve been around Muslims my entire life and most of them truly don’t care about Islam. The problem I have with many of these essentially non-Muslim Muslims, especially in the middle of this war being waged on us by their more consistent co-religionists, is that they give the enemy cover. They force us to play a game of Muslim Roulette since we can’t tell which Muslim is going to blow himself up until he does. And their indifference about the evil being committed in the name of their religion is a big reason why their reputation is where it is.

So while I understand that most Muslims are not at war with us, they’ve proven in their silence and inaction against jihad that they’re not on our side either, and there’s nothing we can say or do to change that. We just have to finally accept it and stop expecting them to come around, while doing our best to kill those who are trying to kill us.

Another problem with Muslims who aren’t very Muslim is that they lead some among us to conclude that they must be practicing a more enlightened form of Islam. They’re not. They’re “practicing” life in non-Muslim countries, where they are free to live as they choose. But their “Islam” is not the Islam. There’s no separate ideology apart from Islam that’s being practiced by these Muslims in name only, there’s no such thing as “Western Islam”.

Non-observant Muslims are not our problem, but neither are they the solution to our problem. Our problem is Islam and its most consistent practitioners. There is nothing in Islam that stays the hand of Muslims who want to kill non-Muslims. If an individual Muslim is personally peaceful, it’s not because of Islam, it’s because of his individual choice, which is why I often say that your average Muslim is morally superior to Mohammad, to their own religion. The very rare Muslim who helps us against Jihad is acting against his religion, but that doesn’t stop some among us from thinking that his existence somehow means that he represents more than himself.

The only reason we’re talking about Islam is because it doesn’t mean peace. Islam wasn’t hijacked by a “small minority of extremists” on 9/11, it was hijacked by a very small minority of moderates whose embarrassment in being associated with such an immoderate religion leads them to engage in moderate truth telling about it, proving their irrelevance as allies.

In addition to these politically active moderates, when you see well-assimilated Muslims in the West, you’re not seeing Islam in action, you’re seeing individuals living up to the old adage, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. They’re essentially post-Islamic Muslims who have rejected Islamic values and have embraced Western ones. But since the process of their assimilation was implicit – as it happened naturally by their exposure to Western, i.e., pro-life, values – both Muslims and non-Muslims alike prefer to generously give Islam some credit for it. But a good Muslim, by our standards is a bad Muslim by Islamic standards. Objectively good human beings, who identify themselves as Muslim, give Islam a good face, one far better then it deserves. This only gives us a false impression about what it is we’re facing, with just another excuse not to face it. And this leads to our acceptance into our culture of stealth jihadists who have figured out how to say what we want to hear, while they scheme behind the scenes to further Islamize the West.

In the name of distinguishing the enemy from Muslims who mean us no harm, far too many Western commentators have avoided using the name “Islam” for the enemy’s ideology, and instead have decided to create their very own terms for the threat we’re facing, terms that are alien to the enemy. Terms such as:

Islamic Fundamentalism.

Islamic Extremism.

Totalitarian Islam.

Islamofascism.

Islamonazism.

Political Islam.

Bin Ladenism.

Radical Islam.

Militant Islam.

Islamism.

Jihadism.

We didn’t use terms such as “Radical Nazism”, “Extremist Shinto” and “Militant Communism” in the past. “Militant Islam”, Political Islam”, etc., are redundant terms. Our pretending otherwise has proven disastrous. Thousands of American lives, both civilian and military, have been sacrificed because of policies predicated on the myth that “Islam means peace.” We didn’t try to reform Shinto or Nazism during World War II; the major changes in those cultures took place only after we thoroughly de-militarized them.

And it’s no accident that Western analysts of Islam who are most informed about Islam are also most critical of it, while those least informed are least critical. But then there are those who, in their study of Islam, have become so enamored with their subject that, instead of sticking to what Islam is, they often write about what it isn’t, what they hope it might be. They seem preoccupied with doing their part to save Islam from those who have allegedly corrupted it.

The Muslim world is where the true meaning of Islam can be found in practice. Islam – not any alleged deviant form of it – means misogyny, censorship, anti-Semitism, homophobia, wife-beatings, beheadings, honor killings, pedophilia/“child marriages”, murdering infidels, etc. This is evil, and Islam sanctions every bit of it, but we’ve been told that we must respect “one of the world’s great religions” because it’s a religion. Following 9/11, the only thing George W. Bush knew about Islam was that it was a religion, and that apparently was a good enough reason for him to exonerate it as he did. And his advisor on Islam, David Forte, told Bush exactly what he wanted to hear, that “Nothing this evil could come from religion.” But 9/11 did come from a religion. Whatever else 9/11 was, it was an act of faith.

And Bush saying “Islam is peace” shortly after 9/11 gave the enemy a gift they couldn’t have foreseen. Here was the one man who was charged to defend America from their attack and here he was defending the very ideology that motivated the attackers. Honesty is the best policy in general, and when it comes to war, it’s a moral imperative to find out the truth, to tell the truth and to act on the truth, no matter what sacred cow is killed in the process. And so a big part of why nearly 3,000 victims of jihad on 9/11 haven’t been avenged is because of respect for religion, even for a religion that calls for our destruction.

Muslims who really care about Islam are part of an organized effort to spread Islam, and I sometimes refer to this collective effort by Muslims as “Organized Islam.” No matter the means involved, Muslims working towards a more Islamic world want the same thing the jihadists want. This organized effort includes Mosques, Muslim organizations, Muslim individuals writing books, blog posts, etc. And they all invariably engage in anti-Western, Anti-Israeli propaganda, at the very least.

I often hear that we should be working with the Muslim world. Working towards what? As Ayn Rand writes, “In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.” Any time we spend “working” with a culture that calls for our destruction, we are working towards our own destruction, consciously or not.

While it’s true that jihadists don’t represent most Muslims, they do represent Islam. But then why don’t most Muslims engage in jihad? Like in any culture, heroes are a small minority, and that goes for Islamic culture as well. The jihadists are Islam’s heroes; they are the ones most dedicated to following Allah’s commands and they’re celebrated in the Muslim world for it. They are also the only ones to whom Islam guarantees paradise. And their rarity was made even clearer when we learned that only the pilots of 9/11 knew it was a suicide mission. Our enemy knows that it’s tough to get even hardcore Muslims to sacrifice their lives for Islam, but they don’t want us to know that. Just as they don’t want us to know that behind their boast that they love death is the fact that they hate life.

And while Muslims who blow themselves up in order to kill non-Muslims are a small minority, Muslims who would explicitly condemn them are an even smaller minority. And while I think that Muslims are mere sheep to their Jihadist wolves, there are also too many Muslim cheerleaders for jihad. How many Muslims celebrated 9/11? Far too many. Even in my own lax Muslim upbringing in America, there was an omnipresent anti-Semitism and misogyny. Some members of my family admired Adolph Hitler, who I refer to as “Islam’s Favorite Infidel.” Regarding misogyny, the birth of a girl became a day of mourning for Muslim women in my family; they understood the suffering this girl would endure under Islam, even in America.

Though we say we’ve been at war for over ten years, we haven’t even begun to fight the war the way we should be fighting it. And those calling for a change within Islam during this war would be surprised at how much Islam can be changed through an honest war on our behalf. You can’t make a violent religion like Islam non-violent by argument, only by greater retaliatory force against state sponsors of jihad terrorism.

The future of Islam and the well-being of Muslims is said to be of importance to us. Post – 9/11, the defense of our culture, our values, our very lives has been optional, but our defense of Islam has been absolute. It began with Bush’s “Islam is peace” and it continues with Obama, who said in his Submission Speech in Egypt in 2009, in front of members of The Muslim Brotherhood, “I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” If only he felt the same about America.

We can’t be both for Islam and for ourselves. This enemy is fully on their own side and fully against us and they’ve made themselves believe that they’re the good guys and that we’re the bad guys, and our actions have done nothing but turn their hatred of us into an ever-deepening contempt. Before we see the enemy for what it is, we need to see ourselves for what we are. Only then can we, with full moral conviction, make them pay for what they’ve done and move us towards victory.

Our problem is not “Islamophobia”, but Islamophilia. It is this uncritical, uninformed, absolute defense of Islam by Western elites after 9/11 that I refer to as Islamgate. It’s a scandal for the ages that few involved would ever admit to being part of.

I care about the truth. I care about Western Civilization. I care about myself, my loved ones and my friends. I care about Iife. And that’s why I don’t care about Islam.

Our altruistic concern for the future and well being of the Muslim world has come at the expense of American lives and treasure. We’ve placed the well being of “The Muslim World” above our own self-defense. We’ve placed today’s Big Lie, “Islam means peace”, above the truth we need to act on. We’ve placed the lives of Muslim civilians above the lives of our soldiers, placing them in absolutely unnecessary danger in order to protect innocent (or even guilty) civilians. Our Rules of Engagement might as well be renamed the Golden Rules of Engagement, as our soldiers have been forced to treat the enemy the way we’d like to be treated. And the enemy takes full advantage of that, as they do of all of the policies our morally vain politicians have concocted. We need to shift the focus onto our own well-being at the enemy’s expense for a change.

We’ve tried everything since 9/11 except real war. War is the answer to Jihad.

So who cares about Islam? Muslims, Jihadists, Islamophiles, Leftists who naturally side with anti-American ideologies, guilt-ridden fellow travelers who think America is usually in the wrong, and religionists who believe any religion is better than none. But since Leftists and Islamophiles usually know very little about Islam, who truly cares about Islam? Those who are at war with us.

In the end, I care about Islam and the Muslim world as much as the Muslim world cares about America and the West. This is war. We can’t be on both sides. I’m not rooting for Islam or the Muslim world.

I’m rooting for us.

Bosch Fawstin is an Eisner Award nominated cartoonist currently working on a graphic novel, The Infidel, of which the first chapter is now available as a digital comic. Bosch’s first graphic novel is Table for One. He is also the author of ProPiganda: Drawing the Line Against Jihad, a companion to The Infidel, and the 1st print appearance of Pigman.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

The Forgotten Man: The REAL 99%

1389 — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:07:23 +0000

YouTube: The Forgotten Man – Jon McNaughton

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by SethAdamSmith on Sep 7, 2010

What has President Obama done? Visit: http://www.mcnaughtonart.com

Against the background of a darkening sky, all of the past Presidents of the United States gather before the White House, as if to commemorate some great event. In the left hand corner of the painting sits a man. That man, with his head bowed appears distraught and hopeless as he contemplates his future. Some of the past Presidents try to console him while looking in the direction of the modern Presidents as if to say, “What have you done?” Many of these modern Presidents, seemingly oblivious to anything other than themselves, appear to be congratulating each other on their great accomplishments. In front of the man, paper trash is blowing in the wind. Crumpled dollar bills, legislative documents, and, like a whisper—the U.S. Constitution beneath the foot of Barack Obama.

For my take on the painting (and to find out who the Forgotten Man is) click here: http://sethadamsmith.com/2010/09/07/the-forgotten-man/

The only quibble I have with The Forgotten Man is that Abraham Lincoln would not have been been all that perturbed by Obama, or anyone else, trampling on the US Constitution, owing to the fact that Lincoln had quite a history of flouting the Constitution himself. Ironically, Lincoln would have been far more upset by seeing a mulatto in any position of political power. For that reason only, Lincoln’s facial expression and stance in the painting makes sense.

Be that as it may, The Forgotten Man is a poignant visual portrayal of our current plight. More about the painting here. Click the image to enlarge, then mouse over each image in the portrait for details.

Our Tax Dollars at Work – NATO Troops in Kosovo Open Fire on Serb Protesters!

Sparta — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 02:28:34 +0000

From the American Council for Kosovo

NATO Tries to Force Christian Serbs to Submit to Criminal Albanian Muslim “Authority”

September 27, 2011: Today, NATO forces in Kosovo opened fire on Serbian demonstrators protesting efforts by KFOR (NATO’s “Kosovo Force”) and the ironically designated European Union “rule of law” mission (“EULEX”) to force Serbs to submit to the illegal Albanian Muslim “authority” posing as an independent government in Priština. As summarized by retired U.S. diplomat Gerard Gallucci, who formerly served in Kosovo:

On September 27, the NATO force in Kosovo (KFOR) lost completely its guise as UN peacekeepers and became a repressive, lawless military occupation force. After seeking to use force to remove peacefully maintained barricades and to close a alternate road used by northern Kosovo Serbs, some locals apparently threw stones at the KFOR soldiers who then responded – in “self defense” – by firing at the otherwise defenseless Serbs, wounding at least six. The NATO action ought to be thoroughly investigated by an independent body to verify whether or not war crimes were committed. KFOR and EULEX ought to stand down and stop trying to change the political reality on the ground through such bullying and repressive measures before they provoke real violence.

At this time, writes Gallucci, “Details about the day’s events remain somewhat unclear. Various reports have suggested that the NATO shots fired were either rubber bullets or live ammo. It is also unclear whether the soldiers involved were German or perhaps American or Polish.” But make no mistake: if not for a political green light from Washington, NATO would not have taken the initiative of authorizing violence to remove Serbian barricades.

This latest escalation follows weeks of rising tensions since late July, when Hashim “Snake” Thaci – so-called “prime minister” of Kosovo, mafia kingpin, war criminal, and organ-trafficker – placed illegal checkpoints on the administrative line between Kosovo and the rest of Serbia, in a bid to force Serbs in northern Kosovo to submit his illegal administration. Incredibly, KFOR and EULEX, in violation of their “status neutral” mandate under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, which is the only legal authority for their presence in the province, have backed up Thaci and his criminal cronies. The question now is, does this latest resort to violence mean NATO has decided on use of force – in the pattern of the genocidal 1995 “Operation Storm” in the Serbian Krajinas with the help of U.S. mercenaries – to impose a final solution on Serb resistors to the the Albanian Muslim administration? Or will public attention force them to back off?

No less dismal than the spectacle of American and other NATO soldiers acting as enforcers for Thaci & Co. is that of Serbia’s supine “pro-western” government, under President Boris Tadic. Aptly dubbed “Vichy Serbs” by writer and analyst Vojin Joksimovic, Tadic and his government, seeing their own citizens under fire on their own national territory, can think only of stepping up “technical negotiations” with the Priština-based terrorists. For that reason, in a Joint Statement of the All-Serbian National Council “Serbs Rally Together,” on September 17, 2011, Kosovo Serbs declared (in part, read the full statement here):

WHEREAS we are committed to the ideal of freedom and inspired by our sacred spiritual heritage of Kosovo but mindful of our future generations, while never forgetting our obligation to respect the will and the sacrifice of our glorious ancestors who created Serbia and left it for us to preserve,

WHEREAS, determined to stop and prevent further dismemberment and occupation of Serbia and united under the blessing and leadership of His Grace Bishop Artemije, we have resolved and hereby announce to Serbia and the international community our resolution as follows:

KOSOVO AND METOHIJA ARE UNDER OCCUPATION

The Belgrade regime of Boris Tadic considers the occupying powers his partners; it negotiates with them, draws up agreements, pacts and treaties, but always to the detriment of the Serbian nation as a whole and, particularly so, to the detriment of the Serbs who live in Kosovo and Metohija.

If the Serbs could call their enemy by its rightful name—OCCUPIER—and the conditions under which they have been living in Kosovo and Metohija for the past 12 years—OCCUPATION—then they would do as one does under occupation: they would endure and fight until the end, until the liberation.

We give notice to NATO and to Albanian terrorist occupying powers in Priština that we do not recognize any agreement or treaty they have signed or will sign with Tadic and his coalition. Treaties concluded during occupation through blackmail and trickery have always been considered invalid.

We particularly want to point out that we shall not tolerate further threats, attacks on our security and efforts at assimilation of the Serbian people in Kosovo and Metohija. Those who have done this or are planning to do so will soon be confronted with legitimate forms of self-defense.

We remind our people that no shame is attached to being under enemy occupation, but it is certainly shameful to praise the occupier or collaborate with him. Not only is it shameful, it is a sin against our ancestors who had fought for hundreds of years to liberate Kosovo and Metohija from centuries long Turkish occupation.

It now remains to be seen who will prevail: the Serbs of Kosovo and Metohija, who have declared themselves against occupation of their country, or their occupiers: the Albanian Muslim separatists and their NATO and EU enablers in Washington, Brussels, Berlin, London – and worst of all, in Belgrade.

The blackest deeds occur when the perpetrators believe no one is watching. Most Americans have long since forgotten about Kosovo, and about the Balkans in general. Today, how many Americans remember the 78 days of “humanitarian” bombing in 1999 by the Bill Clinton administration on behalf of the Thaci’s “Kosovo Liberation Army” – a gaggle of jihadists and Albanian Mafia kingpins? How many recall George W. “the Decider” Bush’s announcement in 2007 in Tirana, Albania, that to please our Islamic “allies” in the “War on Terror,” he would simply proclaim, on no authority whatsoever, “enough’s enough, Kosovo’s independent.” (And then the grateful Albanians stole his watch!)

Almost no one.

But the fact that few Americans remember doesn’t change the fact that at this very moment, under the authority of President Barack Hussein Obama, NATO – acting in our name, and supported by our tax dollars – is bringing force to bear against Christian people living in their own country, to force them to submit to hostile Muslim occupation and to accept their eventual extinction.

James George Jatras
Director, American Council for Kosovo
Washington, September 27, 2011

Rumsfeld’s Biggest Regret: Bush Administration Too Politically Correct to Name the Enemy: Radical Islam

1389 — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:45:16 +0000

Gee, ya think?

Gates of Vienna: Tongue-Tied

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld discusses America’s failure to name the enemy:

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video.

I would go much further than this.

The concept of “radical” versus “moderate” Islam is bogus.

From MEMRI:

Turkish PM Erdogan: The Term “Moderate Islam” Is Ugly And Offensive; There Is No Moderate Islam; Islam Is Islam

Speaking at Kanal D TV’s Arena program, PM Erdogan commented on the term “moderate Islam”, often used in the West to describe AKP and said, ‘These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.”

Source: Milliyet, Turkey, August 21, 2007

Here’s the problem:

“We don’t want to be seen as against a religion.”

But what if our opponents’ “religion” requires them to be against us? What if their ideology requires them to be in a permanent state of war against us “unbelievers”?

Islam is not a religion in the sense that our Founders understood a religion to be. Islam is an expansionist, enemy, totalitarian political ideology that seeks to annihilate everything outside of itself. Islam no more deserves the protection of the US Constitution than Nazism or Stalinism did.

This political correctness, this refusal to name our enemy and to defeat it both on the battlefield and in the marketplace of ideas, will eventually destroy us and everything that we stand for.

It is time to stop calling Islam a religion, and start calling it an ideology.

Rick Perry Must Distance Himself from Grover Norquist!

1389 — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 16:54:36 +0000

Grover Norquist is a professional Islamoblow who, for many years, under the guise of an anti-tax activist, has made a career out of corrupting the Republican Party with his “Muslim outreach”. The upshot is that the Muslim agenda has reached into the Republican party and has tainted many prominent Republicans, including the Bush family.

We have no need for Norquist to be our spokesman for cutting taxes and spending – we have the Tea Party for that. Norquist is also at the root of the Perry/Aga Khan curriculum controversy in Texas, about which there is much more at the link below.

It is not too late for Rick Perry to show Norquist the door, and to disavow any further efforts to “reach out” to the “Muslim community” – who actually are enemy aliens for all intents and purposes, even (or perhaps especially) those who have sworn an oath of citizenship in violation of the teachings in the Qur’an. We don’t need to “reach out” to enemy aliens – we need to deport them forthwith. The main thing that we need to teach people about Islam is that it is one hundred percent incompatible with the US Constitution and with life in any part of the civilized world.

Yeah, I’m a hard liner if there ever was one. And I will never apologize for that.

The Perry/Aga Khan curriculum: Ace folds, presents as the curriculum material that isn’t the curriculum at all

Ace asks: “Ummm… we’re not allowed to talk with Grover Norquist anymore, Pam? Can’t sign his anti-tax pledges?” Actually, it’s the other way around: is it really necessary to play ball with Norquist in order to come out for cutting taxes? Is there no candidate who will have the courage to endorse his tax policies but distance himself from him because of his Islamic supremacist ties?

Read it all. There’s tons of well-researched information here.

I don’t speak for Pam Geller. But I do say this: No, you’re not allowed to talk with Grover Norquist anymore, unless you want the whole world to know that you are a sellout to the Islamic expansionist agenda. It’s all up to you.

Much more about Grover Norquist here.

Yes, Norquist is married to a Palestinian Muslima, hence his personal reasons for pushing the Islamic agenda every chance he gets. I remember the days when marriage to an enemy alien (which is exactly what she is) disqualified a person from any position of public trust. The above link also details Norquist’s associations with CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood front groups. He should be in prison for aiding and abetting terrorist organizations, not posturing as a “conservative” and corrupting the entire Republican Party.

Update:

As Rodan pointed out:

Why must Rick Perry distance himself from Grover Norquist? The whole GOP should. He’s vile agent of the Muslim Brotherhood. He should be shunned by ALL Republicans, not just Rick Perry.

So singling out Perry is intellectually dishonest. Grover should be purged and shunned by all.

Fair enough. Consider it said.

Obviously, I am not sold on Rick Perry. That said, I am a counterjihad blogger, and it is not my business, nor that of 1389 Blog, to get in bed with any political candidate. We are not part of anyone’s political campaign. Our job is to determine where politicians actually stand on the counterjihad, and to hold every politician’s feet to the fire.

However, if Rick Perry is the GOP candidate, and I’m still alive by then (never a foregone conclusion for any of us over 55), I expect to be voting for him.

If I’m DEAD by then, I expect to be voting for Obama, along with the rest of the deceased-American community. Too bad this isn’t a joke.

More here:

Sultan Knish: Rick Perry and Islam

Who Owns the Media – and What Can We Do?

1389 — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 22:28:31 +0000

There is much more to the story behind the widely-hyped coverage of the Murdoch/News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

The real story is all about who owns the gatekeepers to the world of information: the excessive concentration of ownership of the major media and entertainment outlets, even the supposedly “conservative” ones. It’s also about what YOU can do to make an end-run around those self-ordained gatekeepers to get your message across.

Short Little Rebel: Who Is Rupert Murdoch & Who Controls The News?

I began this article to address the growing scandal in England over media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World Newspaper. This English tabloid, its managers, reporters, private investigators & even the London Police have been embroiled in a phone tapping scandal that began in 2006 when police investigations discovered that Prince William’s private phone messages had been hacked by the newspaper. One editor & one private investigator were convicted in 2007 and jailed in the incident. But the allegations & investigation are far from over. Only days ago, new allegations against the paper claim that it also tapped into two murder victims’ home phone messages (deleting some) in 2002, the private home messages of victims of London’s 7/7 attacks and even the home messages of dead soldiers’ families’ home messages.

This is news in and of itself. However, as I investigated the matter further, I couldn’t help but come across Rupert Murdoch’s larger story - the story of a multi-billionaire who ‘owns’ one of the largest news organizations (including Fox & its affiliates) in the world:News Corp.Sources have it that Murdoch’s News Corp. reaches about 1/4 of the earth’s population. Allegations, some of which is confirmed by Murdoch himself, say that he uses his organizations to reflect his own personal political agendas.In some years, he has supported Hillary Clinton & Barak Obama in the United States and Tony Blair in England – all leftist politicians. Other years, he has supported conservative individuals such as Bush and David Cameron of England. The Sun, one of Murdoch’s English papers, crowed its success in swinging a critical election in England. Murdoch himself is on tape bragging about how he ‘tried’ to affect certain elections and failed.

I disagree with Short Little Rebel on this one matter: GWB (and, indeed, the entire Bush family) and David Cameron are not conservative, but center-left.

Many political figures of today represent themselves as conservatives, but any reporter from 1910 would have recognized them all as flat-out Bolsheviks, as do I. (If you have any doubts, please review the list of recommended policies in the Communist Manifesto.)

Astounded that one man could control so much information, I was led to wonder, “Who owns the rest of the news media?”There are six top news media outlets: GE who owns NBC, MSNBC & TeleMundo; News Corp which owns FOX, the Wall Street Journal & the N.Y. Post; Walt Disney (again, who knew?) which owns ABC; Viacom, whose only news venture appears to the an Indian media company, Global Broadcast; CBS; and finally, Time Warner which owns CNN. I researched the stock market to see who owned them. While each has individuals, like Rupert Murdoch, who own large stakes, it is the institutions which own the lion’s share. As I looked through these institutions, I saw an eerie pattern of ownership emerge. I have provided links for your information. Do you see the same pattern I saw?

Seeing the patterns, I decided to create a series of charts which would track what news outlets each of these institutions controlled.
[…]
The results left me speechless. ALL of the news media are PRIVATELY owned by six or so families and/or groups: the oldest & the richest of all people. Both the liberal & conservative press belongs to them. They share ownership equally. The scheme they have used to purchase ALL the news media outlets is disgusting, people of America. While it took me an entire day of intensive research through the stock exchanges, it wasn’t that difficult to re-engineer the information and backtrack the ownership to a tiny number of people. When I looked at my final charts, I wasn’t sure what disgusted me more – the fact that they don’t even bother to really hide the information or the information itself…

Read the rest and view the charts!

No, Fox News is not a conservative news network!

Fox News has never even claimed to be conservative. Of course, I can see why Fox News might seem conservative, compared to the hard-left “alphabet” networks, New York Times, Washington Post, and the supposedly “independent” wire services. But then, the vulgar propaganda/infotainment spewed by the mainstream networks belongs in the same category with the Soviet-era Pravda, or perhaps the English-language version of al-Jazeera. It doesn’t take much to seem “conservative” compared to that.

And Fox News certainly isn’t getting any better these days. While Glenn Beck was right about many things, he was completely mistaken about a few other things (which I won’t go into here). He certainly wasn’t perfect, though, on the whole, he did much more good than harm, and I certainly miss his presence on Fox News. He was spot on with regard to George Soros and with regard to the Caliphate.

At this point, conservatives looking for network news coverage do not yet have anywhere else to go besides Fox News. Arguably, it’s better than nothing, but not by much!

It would not be going too far to say that Fox News has lost whatever punch it once had, simply because it has become the target of outright blackmail:

PJM: The MSM’s ‘Media Matters’ Blackout

The MSM is enjoying a very quiet laugh at the expense of one of their competitors: the Fox News Channel. They’re not saying a word about the all-encompassing, possibly illegal abuse Fox News is experiencing at the hands of the George Soros-funded (to the tune of $1M) Media Matters for America.

Media Matters was co-founded by current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, something which she proudly proclaims. Her fellow founder is David Brock, the fallen conservative journalist who thereafter drifted leftward. Media Matters is an alleged media “monitor,” describing itself on its website thusly:

Launched in May 2004, Media Matters for America put in place, for the first time, the means to systematically monitor a cross section of print, broadcast, cable, radio, and Internet media outlets for conservative misinformation (emphasis mine).

Around March of this year, Brock announced Media Matters was dramatically diminishing said “cross section” by openly declaring “war on Fox.” (The official announcement came just after Soros’ $1M check cleared.) The above link is to the only mainstream outlet I could find that mentions this story.

Brock says Media Matters will hound Fox News with “guerrilla warfare and sabotage.” For instance:

Media Matters, Brock said, is assembling opposition research files not only on Fox’s top executives but on a series of midlevel officials. It has hired an activist who has led a successful campaign to press advertisers to avoid Glenn Beck’s show. The group is assembling a legal team to help people who have clashed with Fox to file lawsuits for defamation, invasion of privacy, or other causes. And it has hired two experienced reporters, Joe Strupp and Alexander Zaitchik, to dig into Fox’s operation to help assemble a book on the network, due out in 2012 from Vintage/Anchor.

This isn’t “media analysis.” This is a multi-million dollar leftist PR hit squad. Brock is doing all of this because he claims Fox News has become the titular head of the Republican Party.

And herein lies a legal problem for Media Matters.

Media Matters is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)3 organization. Esteemed attorney C. Boyden Grey explains what that means…

More here.

The sad part is that Fox News has apparently capitulated to this pressure by swinging more and more to the left. Instead, they should be going after Media Matters, and everyone associated with it, with everything they’ve got. But considering their ownership, it is easy to see why they are capitulating.

Oh, and by the way, Fox Detroit seems to have capitulated to the leftist powers-that-be in much the same way: Big Journalism: Fox Detroit Apologizes for Exposing Big Labor.

What about the blogosphere and other “alternative media”?

Well, that depends. As with Fox News, the problem with many of the “bigger” non-liberal blogs, websites, and news forums is that after awhile, the people who run them tend to lose their moxie. They become afraid of losing advertisers; no longer being invited to meet prominent figures; antagonizing stockholders, owners, or financial backers (especially those with Islamic or other foreign ties); or being censored in other ways. Some people are also, by nature, afraid of confrontation, especially when it involves expressing disagreement with their friends and colleagues, or with associates whom they thought were friends.

So these high-profile bloggers and admins begin to pull their punches:

They practice self-censorship about acceptable topics for news coverage, and how those topics should be addressed – especially when it comes to the counterjihad.
In place of hard news and controversy, they draw traffic with eye candy and “fluff”.
They may continue to copy and paste relevant material from, or publish links to, various news sources, but they refuse to draw the obvious conclusions from those news stories, or to allow their commenters to draw any conclusions that might make someone uncomfortable.
They avoid everything that might draw unwanted attention from some governmental body, pressure group, or even other bloggers and commenters.

Self-censorship is boooooring…

If you really want to see the full range of topics for news coverage and debate, you’ll have to visit some of the “smaller” blogs too. Yes, you’ll have to use your own judgment about the quality of news and the validity of opinion on each blog, but then, you should be doing that with ALL sources of information!

Get involved!

“Alternative media” is INTERACTIVE media. You don’t have to just sit there and listen and be spoon-fed. It’s YOUR job to help report the facts as you see them, wherever you happen to be. You can start your own blog if you like, but you can also comment on existing websites or blogs, or you can join a team blog or forum. You can also use other social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as face-to-face contacts, to promote worthwhile blog posts and news articles to everyone you know.

On 1389 Blog, the admins, team members, contributors, and commenters are all volunteers. We abide by certain rules (stated in the comment policy) so it isn’t a free-for-all, but we cover stories and views that the bigger blogs won’t talk about. Most of us blog and comment under our screen names – it isn’t about promoting ourselves, it’s all about the message. And at this point, we don’t sell ads, and we have no plans to do so in the future, so we don’t have to worry about losing a source of revenue. Comments are moderated, but we make a point of putting comments through in a timely manner.

Much the same is true of 2.0: The Blogmocracy, which is a team blog/forum. I’m one of the contributors there also. You’ll have to register to comment there, but registration is free, it is ALWAYS OPEN, and takes just a minute. Comments are posted immediately. Guest bloggers are welcome. There’s also a regular call-in radio show. Consider this an invitation!

There are many other good “smaller” and/or noncommercial blogs like these – which is why 1389 Blog posts so many links in the sidebar.

Also see:

PJM: How Network News Helped Bring About the Crash

When we seek out the causes and culprits of our current economic crisis, there is one area in need of reform that should not be overlooked: the mainstream news media. It is not too much to say that the people in the NBC, ABC and CBS news operations were major contributing factors to the crash of 2008 and are helping to pave the way to future economic troubles now.

In the book Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon, authors Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner tell how, in the early nineties, faulty or skewed studies by ACORN and other groups fed the idea that there was pervasive racial bias by mortgage lenders, with blacks and Hispanics being unfairly rejected for loans. “The findings lit up the media, confirming many people’s suspicions about banks’ lending practices,” the authors write of one such study. In fact, properly interpreted, the data suggested that banks were making their loans not on the basis of race but on the basis of credit-worthiness. But as the misinformation confirmed left-wing ideas, the media pressure was on for a government fix…
PJM: Alternative Media is Today’s Free Press

On their own initiative, Americans are cutting through the trivia and the propaganda
[…]
Rather than acting as an agent of protection against an intrusive government, today’s mainstream media — or big media, as I call it — seeks at best merely to entertain us. At worst, it has become an unofficial agent of the state, acting almost exclusively on its behalf.

Whether or not big media intends to promote the government is irrelevant, for the net effect exists regardless. The point is that it has defied the system as it was designed, begetting a serious problem.

Fortunately, even those who torment us cannot defy the natural order of things, so again we find the rules of cause and effect at work. As man, in his natural state, seeks to be free and resists the authoritarian nature of the state, inevitably alternative media was born…
Blogmocracy: The Saudi Money at News Corp/Fox News Speaks Up

Just wondering out loud…It would be interesting to know if the Saudis have any control on what goes on in the US arm of News Corp/Fox News…
Review of “Page One: Inside the New York Times”
(h/t: Blazing Cat Fur)

In the weeks before the release of the documentary Page One, New York Times columnist David Carr, the film’s unofficial star, attracted a bit of publicity by appearing on Bill Maher’s HBO talk show, where he called the residents of America’s “middle places” – the “red” states, and Kansas and Missouri in particular – participants in what he called “the dance of the low sloping foreheads.” He was responding to Maher’s assertion that these are not America’s “smart states,” and allowed himself a bemused, self-satisfied smile as he basked in audience approval after his observation, doubling down on the gibe by coyly adding “Did I just say that aloud?”…

Letter to the Editor: Obama’s “Achievements”

Sparta — Sat, 28 May 2011 01:02:47 +0000

Obama has put us in a deeper hole

Patriot-News (Harrisburg, PA)
Published: Friday, May 27, 2011, 12:24 AM

In response to “Obama has done a lot during his time in office” (letters, May 22), the author offers a “short list” of President Obama’s achievements.

The theme of the letter was that Republicans are the party of “Wall Street,” yet it was President Obama who bailed out Wall Street, Goldman-Sachs, GE (that made a profit of $14 billion yet paid no taxes), the car industry, the mortgage industry (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, who are responsible for the deep economic recession we are experiencing today) and the banking industry, all at the expense of the American taxpayer.

Before touting President Obama’s achievements, take a further look at the following: One in seven Americans lives in poverty and is on food stamps. The latest government figures show a poverty rate increase from 12.7 percent to 13.2 percent or 39.8 million people. Unemployment is at its highest level since the Great Depression.

Furthermore, rather than being in two wars, President Obama has put us into three, the latest being Libya, and even now is fighting against congressional controls of the War Powers Act that he supported when George W. Bush was president. And this is the President Obama who was in office less than two weeks when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

STELLA JATRAS, Camp Hill

The last paragraph to my letter was deleted:

“I strongly recommend that everyone see the movie “Atlas Shrugged” which depicts the dangers of an overreaching federal government that picks winners and losers in the private sector, just as President Obama is doing today. Almost 20 percent of Obamacare waivers went to Nancy Pelosi’s district in California while Harry Reid’s entire state of Nevada received a waiver to opt out of Obamacare Other waiver recipients were labor unions which supported Obamacare being rammed through a Democrat Congress. To top it all, our President sides with the Mexican government against his own American citizens in the state of Arizona while his Department of Justice selectively decides which federal laws it will defend. Ironically, “Atlas Shrugged” was written over 50 years ago by Ayn Rand but we are living the nightmare today.”

Obama Supports Islamist Takeover Of Egypt

1389 — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:38:16 +0000

The Obama administration and the entire liberal establishment are actively supporting the Islamist takeover, not only of Egypt, but of all Muslim countries.

Caroline B. Glick: Clueless in Washington

(h/t: yenta-fada)

Does the US fail to understand what will happen to its strategic interests in the region if the Muslim Brotherhood is the power behind the throne of the next regime?

I would go much further than that. Genuine US strategic interests in the Middle East and everywhere else, including at home, would mean an all-out effort to roll back the worldwide jihad.

But the strategic interests of the US government at this point are exactly the opposite of the genuine stragetic interests of the American citizen, voter, and taxpayer. The Obama Administration and the US State Department are doing everything they can to promote the Islamic jihad.

…Certainly it is true that the regime is populated by old men. Mubarak is 82 years old. It is also true that his regime is corrupt and tyrannical. Since the Muslim Brotherhood spinoff Islamic Jihad terror group murdered Mubarak’s predecessor president Anwar Sadat in 1981, Egypt has been governed by emergency laws that ban democratic freedoms. Mubarak has consistently rejected US pressure to ease regime repression and enact liberal reforms in governance.

This reality has led many American commentators across the political spectrum to side enthusiastically with the rioters. A prestigious working group on Egypt formed in recent months by Middle East experts from Left and Right issued a statement over the weekend calling for the Obama administration to dump Mubarak and withdraw its support for the Egyptian regime. It recommended further that the administration force Mubarak to abdicate and his regime to fall by suspending all economic and military assistance to Egypt for the duration.
[...]
The problem with this recommendation is that it is based entirely on the nature of Mubarak’s regime. If the regime was the biggest problem, then certainly removing US support for it would make sense. However, the character of the protesters is not liberal.

Indeed, their character is a bigger problem than the character of the regime they seek to overthrow.

According to a Pew opinion survey of Egyptians from June 2010, 59 percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics. When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.

Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.

WHAT ALL of this makes clear is that if the regime falls, the successor regime will not be a liberal democracy. Mubarak’s military authoritarianism will be replaced by Islamic totalitarianism. The US’s greatest Arab ally will become its greatest enemy. Israel’s peace partner will again become its gravest foe.

Understanding this, Israeli officials and commentators have been nearly unanimous in their negative responses to what is happening in Egypt. The IDF, the national security council, all intelligence agencies and the government as well as the media have all agreed that Israel’s entire regional approach will have to change dramatically in the event that Egypt’s regime is overthrown.

None of the scenarios under discussion are positive.

What has most confounded Israeli officials and commentators alike has not been the strength of the anti-regime protests, but the American response to them. Outside the far Left, commentators from all major newspapers, radio and television stations have variously characterized the US response to events in Egypt as irrational, irresponsible, catastrophic, stupid, blind, treacherous, and terrifying.

They have pointed out that the Obama administration’s behavior — as well as that of many of its prominent conservative critics — is liable to have disastrous consequences for the US’s other authoritarian Arab allies, for Israel and for the US itself.

The question most Israelis are asking is why are the Americans behaving so destructively? Why are President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton charting a course that will necessarily lead to the transformation of Egypt into the first Salafist Islamic theocracy? And why are conservative commentators and Republican politicians urging them to be even more outspoken in their support for the rioters in the streets?

Does the US not understand what will happen in the region as a result of its actions? Does the US really fail to understand what will happen to its strategic interests in the Middle East if the Muslim Brotherhood either forms the next regime or is the power behind the throne of the next regime in Cairo?

Distressingly, the answer is that indeed, the US has no idea what it is doing. The reason the world’s only (quickly declining) superpower is riding blind is because its leaders are trapped between two irrational, narcissistic policy paradigms and they can’t see their way past them.

The first paradigm is former president George W. Bush’s democracy agenda and its concomitant support for open elections.

Bush supporters and former administration officials have spent the last month since the riots began in Tunisia crowing that events prove Bush’s push for democratization in the Arab world is the correct approach.

The problem is that while Bush’s diagnosis of the dangers of the democracy deficit in the Arab world was correct, his antidote for solving this problem was completely wrong.

Bush was right that tyranny breeds radicalism and instability and is therefore dangerous for the US.

But his belief that free elections would solve the problem of Arab radicalism and instability was completely wrong. At base, Bush’s belief was based on a narcissistic view of Western values as universal.

When, due to US pressure, the Palestinians were given the opportunity to vote in open and free elections in 2006, they voted for Hamas and its totalitarian agenda. When due to US pressure, the Egyptians were given limited freedom to choose their legislators in 2005, where they could they elected the totalitarian Muslim Brotherhood to lead them.

The failure of his elections policy convinced Bush to end his support for elections in his last two years in office.

Frustratingly, Bush’s push for elections was rarely criticized on its merits. Under the spell of the other policy paradigm captivating American foreign policy elites — anti-colonialism — Bush’s leftist opponents never argued that the problem with his policy is that it falsely assumes that Western values are universal values. Blinded by their anti-Western dogma, they claimed that his bid for freedom was nothing more than a modern-day version of Christian missionary imperialism.

It is this anti-colonialist paradigm, with its foundational assumption that that the US has no right to criticize non-Westerners that has informed the Obama administration’s foreign policy. It was the anti-colonialist paradigm that caused Obama not to support the pro-Western protesters seeking the overthrow of the Iranian regime in the wake of the stolen 2009 presidential elections.

As Obama put it at the time, “It’s not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling, the US president meddling in the Iranian elections.”

And it is this anti-colonialist paradigm that has guided Obama’s courtship of the Syrian, Turkish and Iranian regimes and his unwillingness to lift a hand to help the March 14 movement in Lebanon.

MOREOVER, SINCE the paradigm claims that the non-Western world’s grievances towards the West are legitimate, Obama’s Middle East policy is based on the view that the best way to impact the Arab world is by joining its campaign against Israel. This was the central theme of Obama’s speech before an audience dominated by Muslim Brotherhood members in Cairo in June 2009.

Like the pro-democracy paradigm, the anti-colonialist paradigm is narcissistic. Whereas Western democracy champions believe that all people are born with the same Western liberal democratic values, post-colonialists believe that non-Westerners are nothing more than victims of the West. They are not responsible for any of their own pathologies because they are not actors. Only Westerners (and Israelis) are actors. Non-Westerners are objects. And like all objects, they cannot be held responsible for anything they do because they are wholly controlled by forces beyond their control.

Anti-colonialists by definition must always support the most anti-Western forces as “authentic.” In light of Mubarak’s 30-year alliance with the US, it makes sense that Obama’s instincts would place the US president on the side of the protesters.

Read it all.

But why?

One reason is that, as waldensianspirit points out, “when ill winds blow no matter the source, Obama works for his faith”. And our Quisling president doesn’t have to come out of the closet officially as a Muslim to be promoting the interests of our Muslim enemies every chance he gets. (See Is he or isn’t he? Only his imams know for sure.)

Another reason is the tranzi-progressive/jihadi axis, which has infested not only the State Department, but many other areas of influence and power. I would go so far as to say that the US State Department has been a treasonous nest of Islamist moles for the past four administrations.

The American Left’s Role in Leading Mid-East Regime Change

(h/t: Bob in Breckinridge)

As the world watches Egypt crumble into chaos, with over 100 dead and 2000 injured, the Obama administration continues to be somewhat and rather curiously ambivalent. On the one hand, on Friday, Vice President Biden came to the defense of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, saying that he shouldn’t step aside. Yet, on the same day, the Telegraph (ala Wikileaks) reported that the U.S. had planned “regime change” for the “past three years” while both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton demand that internet be restored to the Egyptian protesters. This morning, Secretary of State Clinton again clarified the United States’ official position, ”We do not want to send any message about backing forward or backing back.”

For all the lack of clarity on where the Obama administration stands, one thing is becoming more and more clear: Signs are beginning to point more toward the likelihood that President Obama’s State Department, unions, as well as Left-leaning media corporations are more directly involved in helping to ignite the Mid-East turmoil than they are publicly admitting.

If it is indeed the case that the Obama administration, with help by private-sector companies and the union movement has led an “internet revolution” in the middle east and toppled two governments within a month, the longer-term ramifications for U.S. relations with other allies such as Saudi Arabia and certain other Arab monarchies, could prove to have much more far-reaching consequences.

The Role of Unions in the Tunisian Revolution.

Last month, a riotous and deadly revolution began in the North African nation of Tunisia, which led to the ouster of long-time ruler President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. According to a Huffington Post report:

After 23 years of iron-fisted rule, the president of Tunisia was driven from power Friday by violent protests over soaring unemployment and corruption. Virtually unprecedented in modern Arab history, the populist uprising sent an ominous message to authoritarian governments that dominate the region.
[snip]
U.S. President Barack Obama said he applauded the courage and dignity of protesting Tunisians, and urged all parties to keep calm and avoid violence.

Although there have been numerous articles regarding the role of unions in the Tunisian “revolution,” perhaps none have been so clear as this one in the Huffington Post:

Though the movement appears to be a mix of grassroots spontaneity and targeted direct actions, it has achieved political valence through the savvy of organized labor activists. In the days leading up to the uprising, unions were feeding the foment of the demonstrators by calling strikes nationwide, including an 8,000 strong lawyer strike that paralyzed the courts.

As Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst commented:

Unlike the short-lived uprising in neighbouring Algeria or recent socio-economic protests in other Arab countries, the popular Tunisian uprising was immediately supported by all the opposition groups, from the Islamists to the Communists, as well as by the labour unions, which helped it spread to all major parts of the country, including the influential north.

While the General Tunisian Workers’ Union (UGTT) was initially involved in helping to set up a transitional government, its leadership has since pulled out due to a popular uprising from the rank-and-file workers. Nevertheless, the AFL-CIO announced on its blog that:

The global union movement is reaffirming its strong support for the General Tunisian Workers’ Union (UGTT) and the Tunisian people in their courageous struggle for equality, social justice, political freedom and democracy.
[snip]
In a statement, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which includes the AFL-CIO, said it welcomes the fall of the dictatorship in Tunisia and fully supports UGTT’s call for an end to corruption and nepotism and a genuine transition toward a true democracy.

Much more here.

In Barack Hussein Obama, we are truly dealing with a Vidkun Quisling writ large, playing his evil part on a worldwide stage:

U.S. open to a role for Islamists in new Egypt government

(h/t: Rodan)

Obama administration said for the first time that it supports a role for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamist organization, in a reformed Egyptian government.

The organization must reject violence and recognize democratic goals if the U.S. is to be comfortable with it taking part in the government, the White House said. But by even setting conditions for the involvement of such nonsecular groups, the administration took a surprise step in the midst of the crisis that has enveloped Egypt for the last week.

The statement was an acknowledgment that any popularly accepted new government will probably include groups that are not considered friendly to U.S. interests, and was a signal that the White House is prepared for that probability after 30 years of reliable relations with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

More here.

Just sayin’

Although the US evidently no longer enforces its laws against treason, assisting an enemy of the US in front of witnesses all over the world does, indeed, fit the definition of treason in the US Constitution. Traitors who sell out to their country’s enemies are not looked upon kindly by history.

According to Wikipedia:

After the war he [Vidkun Quisling] was tried for high treason and executed by firing squad at Akershus Fortress. Today in Norway and other parts of the world, quisling is a synonym for traitor.

The Muslim Brotherhood is, indeed, an enemy, not only of the US, but also of all non-Muslims everywhere.

If you want to learn what the Muslim Brotherhood is all about, this post reveals their agenda: Egypt: Populist Revolt or Muslim Brotherhood?

If you oppose the Muslim Brotherhood, you will also want to boycott Campbell’s Soup.

US-Backed Kosovo Administration Implicated in Organ-Trafficking Racket…

1389 — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 04:46:22 +0000

A Mystery Is Solved

Back in 1999, I had no information about the organ trafficking. But I had heard that a considerable number of Serbs had gone missing during the Kosovo War and its aftermath. I contacted prominent and influential people both in the US and all over the world – politicians, media figures, other activists, various celebrities, even heads of state – demanding an investigation to uncover the whereabouts of the missing Serbs.

Even though some other activists helped by circulating my request, nobody replied. Absolutely nobody.

More recently, I was dismayed to learn that at least some of the Serbs who had gone missing at that time had been butchered and sold for their organs.

Now the reckoning begins.

…But Will It Matter?

Reprinted by request from American Council for Kosovo

By James George Jatras
Wednesday, 15 December 2010

One can’t help but wonder how many times we have to be hit over the head before it begins to sink in that America’s intervention in Kosovo was based on a pack of lies from the start. The ‘accepted’ narrative of Kosovo as the great success story parades under the headline: U.S. and NATO Allies Nobly Stepped in to Stop Genocide by Evil Serbs. The reality was U.S. Dragged NATO Allies Kicking and Screaming Into Support for Muslim Mafia Committing Genocide Against Christian Serbs.

Comes now the Council of Europe’s human rights investigator Dick Marty with damning accusations that Hashim Thaçi, a/k/a Gjarpër (Snake), currently masquerading as “prime minister” of the illegal separatist administration in Pristina, heads a “mafia-like” operation that included murdering captives, mainly Serbs, to sell their organs on the black market. Is even that ghoulish revelation enough to force a reconsideration of the preening self-justification of a humanitarian intervention most Americans have long since forgotten? We can hope. But did the plotted attack on Fort Dix changes any minds? No.

Now we have organ trafficking. Let’s remember the organ-trafficking story first broke over two years ago and seemed to be withering away in the face of brazen stonewalling by “authorities” in Pristina and Tirana (with full backing from Washington, of course.)

Release of Mr. Marty’s report, just as Thaçi is claiming victory in Kosovo’s recent elections, suggests that somebody in Europe wants to jump off this bandwagon to disaster. But for Americans, the question is: How horrible do the facts need to be before we start looking behind the curtain to see what our government is so desperate to conceal

In the unfortunate partisan myopia that plagues American politics, some of my fellow conservatives might be tempted to blame it on Bill Clinton and leave it at that. Of course, it was largely a “Clinton problem” back during the 1999 NATO war against Serbia. To their credit, most Congressional Republicans voted against the war, which our Razorback Rommel illegally launched even though the House of Representatives had voted down the authorization to use military force. But while Republicans mainly voted No, the neoconservative establishment was whipping up support for the Clinton White House. Unfortunately, with neocon domination of the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy, and their desperation to win Islamic friends after 9/11, the Bush policy on Kosovo was even more Clinton than Clinton, leading to the decision to try to force the issue of Kosovo’s independence in violation of every principle of international law and national sovereignty.

So, what will Washington do now about “our” guy Thaçi? Do a Google Image search for his name with almost any top U.S. figure of either party you can think of and you’ll see him in a warm handshake, often a chummy embrace with a virtual Who’s Who of the American establishment: George W. Bush, Condi Rice, Bill Gates, Clinton (both of them), Joseph Biden, Madeleine Albright, Wesley Clark, etc. (See Snake and Friends at the end of this message.) One would like to think some one of these worthies would now have the decency to say (even if only in virtuous hypocrisy), “What, I didn’t know! I’d never have supported these guys if I had!” But the problem is, even aside from these organ-trafficking peccadilloes, the U.S. establishment did know – from Day One – that Thaçi and Co. (the “Kosovo Liberation Army,” KLA) were a bunch of thugs. So did the intelligence services of our allies. (And make no mistake – it’s not just Thaçi. If Thaçi needs to be dumped, we can guess that “Plan B” will be to install in his place another of his equally vicious KLA colleagues.) They – our government – knew the KLA were criminals running the drug, slave, and weapons rackets throughout Europe. They knew the KLA was supported by Osama bin Laden (with whom Thaçi met personally in Tirana in 1998 to plan the jihad in Kosovo, according to the former head of Albanian intelligence), the Iranians, the Saudis, the Turks, and other supporters of an Islamic re-re-conquest of the Balkans. And we supported them anyway, shredding every rule of law and decency in the process. Now what? In all probability, circle the wagons, hope it will blow over, and keep twisting arms around the world in support of the illegal separatist terrorist entity “KosovA”.

As for Serbia, if there were a respectable government in Belgrade, instead of a group of quislings, they wouldn’t be preparing to meet with representatives of Thaçi’s government in direct negotiations. Instead, conspiring with their U.S. and European supporters and collaborators in the Serbian Orthodox Church, Belgrade’s recent “contribution” to the Kosovo fiasco is their persecution of Vladika Artemije, Bishop of Ras and Prizren and Kosovo and Metohija, who over two years ago was calling for then-President Bush to refuse to meet with Thaçi and demanding an accounting for the organ-selling outrage!

Let us hope that Mr. Marty’s fine work doesn’t get thrown down the Memory Hole with any and all other facts inconvenient to Washington’s policy. But it’s not enough just to track down the individual perpetrators, or even to pack Thaçi off to jail (though both would be a good start). It’s time for the lies that have undergirded our entire Balkan policy to be exposed, for the United States to stop its obsessive support for Islamic jihad against the indigenous Christian population, and specifically to back off from our absurd and destructive global lobbying on behalf of the KLA regime.

Some might argue that “we’ve come too far” to reverse course now, that American commitment to “KosovA” is irreversible. But it s never too late to stop doing the wrong thing and start doing the right thing. If Mr. Marty s organ-trafficking revelations can be a catalyst for a truthful reassessment of American policy and of the events of recent years, the victims will not have died in vain.

Washington
December 15, 2010

Snake and Friends

Snake and Rice (with “president” Fatmir Sejdiu)

Snake and Biden

Snake and (now French foreign minister) Bernard Koushner, British General Michael Jackson, fellow KLA thug Agim Ceku, and American General Wesley Clark

Snake and Bush

Snake and Gates

Snake and Albright

Snake and H. Clinton

Snake and B. Clinton

More here:

Kosovo PM Linked to Sale of Human Organs

1389 — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 19:23:25 +0000

Reprinted with permission from 2.0: The Blogmocracy

By Rodan

Hashim Thaci who was trained by AL-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the late 90′s and was the leader of their Kosovar affiliate, The KLA which has been linked to drug and human trafficking. This is no shocker to anyone who has been following the events in that region knew that not only were they Muslim Albanian Jihadists, they were also a criminal syndicate. It was these crimes and their terror attacked on Serbian civilians which lead in 98/99 to Serbia’s crackdown in the province. As usual the Progressives and Muslim nations claimed this was genocide and create false stories about the Serbs, just as they are doing with Israel today. The United States by our bombing of Serbia, help create this Narco-Islamic state. This Islamic and criminal regime is propped up by our tax dollars.

Hashim Thaci, who won re-election in the fledgeling country on Sunday, was described as the “most dangerous” of the leading mafia figures who emerged from the former Kosovo Liberation Army a decade ago. The report says that the West was aware of Mr Thaci’s crimes, yet backed his rise to power.

Members of his criminal organisation were said to be behind the trade in human organs when speciallyselected, mostly Serbian prisoners, were killed for their kidneys in a deal with an Albanian clinic, the report states.

[...]

“As and when the transplant surgeons were confirmed to be in position and ready to operate, the captives were brought out of the ‘safe house’ individually, summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic,” said the report, due to be debated by the Council of Europe tomorrow.

[....]

The report concludes that Mr Thaci became “untouchable” because of his sponsorship by the United States and other western powers who were looking for a powerful figure to emerge as a political leader. Mr Thaci and his cronies remain free because key potential witnesses have been violently intimidated or killed, the report concludes

Read the rest: Kosovo PM ‘is Mafia boss linked to drugs and sale of human organs’

This is failure of US foreign policy. We gave created a haven for criminality and Jihad in Europe. Kosovo is an illegal nation as it’s a historical Serbian province which we illegally severed. While we claim we are fighting war on terror, we have enabled a terror regime in the Balkans. As the picture above shows, Bush who claims he was fighting terror smiles and shakes hands with a terrorist. As an American, I am ashamed of us supporting a vile organization like the KLA which is the Hamas of Europe. Clinton bombed Serbia, but it was Bush who recognized these criminals as a legitimate state.

Nice war on terror we have, we fight one Islamic group, while we support one of their affiliates. As the pictures below shows, it’s a Bi-Partisan problem.

Here’s Thaci and Biden.

Here’s Madeline Albright and Thaci after the bombing of Serbia in 1999.

This is your tax dollars at work!

Please write your Congressmen to get all American aid to Kosovo cut off. We should have no part of a criminal regime engaged in terror and criminal activities.

But wait, there’s more…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Organ-ized Crime: Kosovo organ trafficking busted

Click here to view the embedded video.

UN War Crimes Tribunal Aided the Continued Jihadi Organ-Harvesting in Kosovo
Warning: Raw language and graphic subject matter!

Also see:

Lozansky-Jatras letter to Sen. Jon Kyl in support of START

Sparta — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:49:18 +0000

http://www.washingtontimes.com/advertising/open-letter/
(Washington Times, 11/23/10, p. A3)

OPEN LETTER TO SENATOR JON KYL

November 23, 2010
Hon. Senator Jon Kyl
730 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Jon,

We regret to make this letter public, but time is of the essence, and we were afraid that otherwise it wouldn’t be brought to your attention before the quickly approaching end of the “lame duck” Congress.

In a curious departure from regular Senate procedure (one Senator, one voice) your voice can count for more than one and in fact decide the outcome of an issue crucial to U.S. security and U.S. – Russia relations. Several Republican senators have indicated that they will be guided by you in voting on START ratification, thus putting all burden of responsibility for making a historical decision on you.

While this is within your procedural prerogatives as a Senator — and a measure of your colleagues’ respect for your judgment — we respectfully suggest you reconsider using your considerable influence in this matter.

If you recall, it was the late Paul Weyrich and us who helped organize your trip to Moscow about twenty years ago, as the Soviet Union collapsed. We also helped bring other prominent Republicans to Moscow, like Vice-President Dan Quayle, Senator Phil Graham, Congressman Henry Hyde, and many others. At that time we all had great expectations for Russia, liberated from communism, to evolve into one of America’s strongest and most reliable allies. So the purpose of those trips was to see the situation on the ground and generate some ideas for the success of that vision.

Well, twenty years on our goals are far from being realized, much to our regret. If you believe many of our fellow Republicans the main fault for this spectacular failure lies with the Clinton administration, as was clear by about the year 2000.

At that time, the Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert formed the Advisory Group on Russia chaired by Christopher Cox, Chairman of the House Policy Committee. The membership of that committee read like a Who’s Who of the Republican Party in Congress, including heads of the most important committees.

The report of that group, titled “Russia’s Road to Corruption,” was a devastating analysis of the work of Clinton and his top advisors on Russia policy – Al Gore, Strobe Talbott, and Laurence Summers, the men who had squandered away a historic opportunity to bring Russia on our side.

The 100+-page-long report is fascinating reading; it is readily available on the Internet at http://www.fas.org/news/russia/2000/russia/index.html though for some reason it mysteriously disappeared from the original site, http://policy.house.gov/russia

We wish we could indeed put all the blame on the Democrats, but have eight years of George Bush brought us closer to our original vision? Unfortunately, in those years US – Russia relations reached their lowest point since the end of communism. Now, after 9/11 there was a real chance to repair the damage done in the nineties. At that time Putin did everything Bush was asking for in his attempt to defeat the Taliban. Naturally, Moscow expected some kind of positive gesture from Washington in return. Instead, it got NATO Eastern expansion, the US unilateral withdrawal from the ABM treaty, “color revolutions” in countries along Russia’s borders clearly instigated from the outside, a democracy promotion crusade, a pipeline policy intended to sap Russia’s energy revenues, arming Georgia to the teeth, and worst of all, a push for former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO.

As we all know, Bush policies did not bring too many dividends to America. We have an astronomical national debt, close to ten percent unemployment, two endless and pretty hopeless wars, the rise of militant Islam, and many other problems including, quite unnecessarily, ever worsening U.S. – Russian relations.

We should admit that Obama’s administration “Reset” policy with Russia started to turn things around, and the ratification of START treaty would be a logical step in this direction. It will also help reduce the two countries’ nuclear stockpiles thus enhancing U.S. national security, as stated by practically all current and living former U.S. Defense and State secretaries, Pentagon and NATO top brass, and the expert community. Over and above this, it may offer yet another chance for U.S. to engage Russia, still a nuclear superpower despite all the setbacks it has suffered, and clearly the biggest, most populous and arguably most powerful country in Europe.

Twenty years ago the Russian government’s stated objective was a formal alliance with the United States and NATO. Russia pursued a strongly pro-American foreign policy, while the United States enjoyed unprecedented affection and admiration among masses of ordinary Russians. Today, U.S. – Russia relations have been practically shattered but, as the recent NATO summit in Lisbon shows, there is a thrust to move towards achieving the same goal that many of us dreamed of after the collapse of communism.

It just happens that the fate of this treaty is in your hands. Knowing you we are sure you will look at this matter not from a narrow partisan view but as a statesman with a great vision for the welfare and security of the United States and mankind. Do what’s right for America: Ratify the treaty.

Warm regards and Happy Thanksgiving,

Edward Lozansky
President
American University in Moscow

James George Jatras
Former Foreign Policy Analyist, U.S. Senate Republican Policy Comittee
Former U.S. Foreign Service Officer

• The reality is, despite what anybody says, I as secretary of defense and the entire uniformed leadership of the American military believe that this treaty is in our national security interest.
Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense

• So, I believe, and the rest of the military leadership in this country believes, that this treaty is essential to our future security. I believe it enhances and ensures that security. And I hope the Senate will ratify it quickly.
Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff

• Today marks a fresh start in NATO-Russia relations. For the first time in history, NATO countries and Russia will be cooperating to defend themselves. Our security is indivisible. We share important interests and face the same threats to our common security.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO Secretary-General at the November 2010 NATO Summit in Lisbon

• The fact that we are talking to Russia about common threats and the chance to cooperate with Russia on missile defense is an extremely important step. That could be proof that the Cold War has finally come to an end.
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany

Rush Limbaugh Gets It

1389 — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 02:00:44 +0000

Originally published on 2.0: The Blogmocracy

I was quite a fan of Rush Limbaugh toward the end of the Clinton administration, during the Kosovo War and its aftermath. Rush was one of the very few public figures who dared to point out that the war was not only pointless but wrong.

Later on, during the George W. Bush administration, I came to believe that Rush Limbaugh cut GWB way too much slack. Rush had been friends with the Bush family since his sportscaster days, and was, in my opinion, too willing to give GWB and his advisers the benefit of the doubt. Later in GWB’s term, after I began traveling around and working on unpredictable schedules where I ordinarily could not listen to the radio on any regular basis, I no longer kept track of Rush Limbaugh.

But now, I happened to see this transcript of one of Rush’s speeches, and I think he can offer us not only some funny anecdotes, but also some valuable perspectives.

Rush Speaks at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia

…RUSH: But… (chuckles) For these 23 years I’ve thought that a whole bunch of people were on our team who really aren’t, and it’s become crystal clear. And we talked about this piece that was in the American Spectator by Angelo Codevilla called “America’s Ruling Class,” which is just a brilliant, brilliant piece and it codified and it established exactly what’s going on in the country today. It’s not Republican versus Democrat. And by the way, this is not to say that there’s no difference between the two because there clearly is. But we’re in the midst here of a crossroads that I don’t think any of us have ever faced in the country. I was thinking back the other day in my review of the 23 years: Make fun of liberals, talk about the things that they do and their policies. But we never, ever really thought that they would succeed to the point that the country as founded would be threatened.
…
RUSH: You know, when you hear people talk about what was here before America was founded in a positive way, that’s right out of the multicultural curriculum that has invaded public education in this country for the last 25 years. Now, to translate Obama, what he really means is: “Back in the good old days. Back before white Europeans arrived and brought syphilis, racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, and environmental destruction. Back in the good old days when the Indians were at one with the country, with the nation, with nature and so forth — and back when everybody was hunky dory getting along.” It’s hard for people to get their arms around the fact that the country has elected somebody who has a grudge against the country.

AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)

RUSH: People still don’t want to believe it. And I am as serious about this as I have ever been about anything. I have no doubt that for whatever reason — and we can go through the list of what it is that Obama doesn’t like about the country. I know he’s been educated, informed and raised to not like this country from his father who didn’t like colonialism. His grandfather was run out of Kenya, the Mau Mau revolution, the Great British revolution at the time and that’s why Obama got rid of the bust of Winston Churchill first thing in the Oval Office. He didn’t just put it in the basement. He sent it back to the British embassy. He has a genuine animus. It’s not an accident that when it comes time to give a gift, he picks 25 DVDs at random from Amazon and doesn’t even send the correct country codes so the Prime Minister can watch them.

He’s got an axe to grind with the country. He doesn’t like it. He has been raised that this country as founded was unjust and immoral and he is hell bent on a course to change it, to cause us to have to pay the price for this. Now, you say this — and you’ve heard me say it on the radio daily — and if you’re immersed in this stuff daily and if you’re honest, if you’re honest with yourself about what you see and what you read; you can’t conclude anything other than that. But a lot of people, even who voted for him who are not happy now, they just can’t get their arms around the fact that we’ve elected somebody who has that view of the country. Sadly a lot of people on what I call “our side” of the aisle, the so called conservative media intelligencia inside the Beltway, they just think that he’s misguided, wrong, doesn’t understand economics, and is a little like a doofus.

And he may be all of that, but he’s much more. He has a plan. He’s the architect of reforming this country in a way that we wouldn’t recognize it as founded. There’s no way — folks, there’s no way — anybody that has the ability to be honest with themselves can look at his economic policies after a year and a half of utter, from our perspective, failure. Job destruction. I mean, the unemployment rate continues to climb. People have stopped looking for work. It is a disaster out there — and nobody in their right mind, after a year and a half of this, would say we need more of it. People would say, “This isn’t working!” This is his fault. We’ve had a year and a half of debt that has accrued, in his year and a half, that is more than all the debt from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. Yet he blames George W. Bush for it and he blames us! He blames the American people. He says, “No, the days of the American people, the days of America leading the world economically are over.” The hell they are! They are not over.…

Imam Obama?

…RUSH: They think, the media thinks that 20% of the American people believe Obama’s a Muslim because I began calling him “Imam Obama.”

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: The problem is, they took this poll on how many people think he’s a Muslim long before I started calling him Imam Obama. Why would anybody think Obama’s a Muslim? He only wants to bring Khalid Sheik Mohammed to trial in New York City and he wants to build a mosque at Ground Zero

AUDIENCE: (booing)

RUSH: Now, you stop and think of that for a second. This is somebody who either doesn’t understand why that’s a bad idea, or does understand it’s a bad idea and wants to just ram it down everybody’s throats. Which? It’s the latter, right? You think it’s the latter?

AUDIENCE: (applause)

RUSH: It’s perfectly understandable. Here’s a guy and his absolutely insane attorney general, Eric Holder, who wants to bring a guy, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — who said, “Please kill me. Martyr me! I want to meet the 72 virgins. Kill me at Club Gitmo. Kill me.” “No, no! We’re going to bring you to New York and we’re going to put you on trial. We’re going to give you a three year forum to tell the world how rotten the United States is.” That’s what that trial’s for, and it’s going to cost $200 million a year that we don’t have, unfunded security, for this trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a couple other of his henchmen? And everybody says, “Rush, don’t worry about it. They’ll never find a jury that will acquit.” (chuckles) Oh, really? In New York?

AUDIENCE: (laughter)…

Discomfiting America’s self-anointed ‘elite’

…RUSH: Do you know Joy Behar? If there’s anybody ever inappropriately named, it’s Joy Behar. There’s somebody who’s never happy. I used to work next door to her at WABC in New York. I mean, there’s not a happy day in the woman’s life.

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: She’s still — her butt’s so tightly scrunched up because Elton John sang at my wedding. She just can’t believe it!

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: I remember the New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a couple of years ago, invited me to go out on the town with her on a January night in New York. You know, I just love going into liberal enclaves and just blowing the places up. It’s like this. This is an electronic cigarette. Pull this baby out in an elevator and watch the liberals panic.

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: I was over playing golf in Hawaii at a bar and whipped one of these things out. It’s water vapor. There’s no tobacco; there’s no flame. And the manager comes up, “Mr. Limbaugh, really, I’m sure you know we don’t allow smoking here in the bar.” I said, “I’m not smoking. This is an electronic cigarette,” and I unscrewed the filter, the cartridge to explain it to him he says, “Oh, oh, okay.” He walks away fine. I keep puffing away at it. He comes back in five minutes: “Mr. Limbaugh, ummm, uhhh, people say you are setting a bad example. One woman said you’re really enjoying it too much. Could you…?”

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: So when Cindy Adams calls and says, “Would you like to go to an HBO private screening?” I say, “Yes.”

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: It was a movie starring Susan Sarandon —

AUDIENCE: (groans)

RUSH: — who was playing the character Doris Duke, the tobacco queen, and the screening was at the Time Warner Center… Well, it’s Columbus Circle somewhere. So we go in there and, folks, it is the ruling class. I mean, these people we talk about, these self-defined elites. But when we call them “elites,” they are not better than us. That’s not what we mean. They think they are better than everybody else, but they aren’t. They are a minority. We’re being governed, we’re being ruled by a minority, and that’s going to change starting in November. But more on that in just a second.

AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)

RUSH: So… So I walk in with Cindy Adams, and you could just see. Tina Brown and her husband Harry what’s his face, Harry Evans. Harry Evans. Short little guy. Tina’s about here. You see that and you wonder: How does it work?

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: And their eyes bug out. They look at me. They just can’t believe it. They look at Cindy: “Why did you drag him in here?” So guess who I see taking off her coat and checking it? Joy Behar.

AUDIENCE: (groans and laughter)

RUSH: And she doesn’t see me. Now, we literally worked together at WABC in New York for, I guess two or three years, and I was very helpful to her. ABC was trying to get her a television talk show for years, and I went up to New Haven, Connecticut, to do a pilot with her and I flew out to Hollywood to do a pilot. I helped her every time she asked me to appear on her television pilots, and still she hates me!

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: So I see her and she’s with this guy that has been her boyfriend for 15 years. I mean, this guy, believe me, is so henpecked, the only thing he does behind her back is zip her up.

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: If it weren’t for his varicose veins, the guy would be totally colorless. So I see Joy over there and I walk up and I just give her a big hug: “Joy, how are you?” and she acts like she’s being raped! She panicked. She freaked! “Oh, my God!” She sees me. “YOU! How did YOU get in here?” She really said that: “How did YOU get in here?” I said, “Cindy Adams brought me.” I mean, it was the last place I was supposed to be. I love just tweaking these people — and they sat me right behind Susan Sarandon in the screening

AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)

RUSH: And right next to her daughter. And Susan Sarandon, of course, comes in late because she’s the star. And she goes to the stage to explain this brilliant, moving role that she played, and comes down and takes her seat and sees that it’s right in front of me — and Cindy Adams is seated to my left. She turns to Cindy and she says, “This is one heck of a photo op.” So I love it. I just love tweaking these people. You can do it each and every day because the truth of the matter is that they live in their little enclaves and they are insecure. At the end of the day they’re all very insecure, and this is why they band together. But their insecurity has led to a pompous arrogance in the way they deal with everybody, and it has infected people on our side in Washington, DC. You know, the liberals do run that town. They run it politically, they run it socially, and everybody wants to be part of it. In your neighborhood you want to matter, you want to live and be friends. You don’t want to be antagonistic with people. So too many of our people have gone out of their way to try to say, “We’re not like those Limbaugh wackos.” Some of them, like National Review magazine. It used to be Bill Buckley’s magazine: “Stand to thwart history and say, ‘Stop!’” And now they’re in this chorus that says Christine O’Donnell can’t get elected. It’s silly. I look at it: Here’s a magazine founded by a man, William F. Buckley, whose intention was to have the countryside strewn with the carcasses of liberals everywhere.

AUDIENCE: (applause)

RUSH: And now they’re invoking “the Buckley Rule,” the Buckley Rule which means “support the most electable conservative.” Well, I don’t know how you support Mike Castle. He’s not a conservative. He’s a RINO. Harry Reid couldn’t wait! Harry Reid couldn’t wait for Mike Castle to get there and join him in voting on cap and trade. So one of the points that I want to make about all of this and the Tea Party is that I still run into people. Despite the successes of the Tea Party and the overwhelming polling data that suggest a really successful November, people are still in some cases depressed and insecure because they don’t see their values, their success stories represented in traditional media. Traditional media still impugns, laughs at, and makes fun of us all — and they’re not media folks. They really never have been. This is one of the things. I used to think they were not objective reporters. I knew there were liberals, but now they’re activists and they are making no pretense. They don’t report news. They are just activists now. They are out trying to further an agenda. It’s Obama’s agenda. It’s the Democrat Party’s agenda. So anybody who is expecting them to be fair or honest in recognizing things we succeed at, you’re always going to be disappointed. Take solace in the fact that last week the three nightly newscast shows — Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric — lost 700,000 more viewers.

AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)

RUSH: That’s big. Here’s the difference. This, of course, will never happen, but if the radio ratings came out and I had lost 700,000 listeners, the last thing I would do is say, “Those stupid people.” I’d say, “What am I not doing here? How have I failed to connect? How have I let the audience down?” They don’t. The news business is the only business where the customer is not only wrong, he’s an idiot!

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: You call and complain and they say, “Well, I’m sure you can’t understand the way we do our jobs. You can’t understand the process by which we put together the news. It’s really, really beneath our ability to explain it to you.” So they lose viewers, and they’re happy about it because they think they’re getting rid of the rubes. I watch. I have the news on during my show every day just because you never know. Some car chase might happen and you have to comment on it, some big news story.

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: And I happen to see Andrea Mitchell (NBC News-Washington) and she’ll have… did I say something wrong? Or it’s potty time? Oh, good. Whew! (chuckles) The future of the country right there and I come this close to blowing it.

AUDIENCE: (laughter and applause)

RUSH: So I watch these shows, folks. I watch and I realize — like let’s say she will have as her guest F. Chuck Todd.

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: F. Chuck is the — what is he? — White House correspondent, NBC News political director. He’s a journalist in good standing. And I see him talking to Andrea and Andrea talking, and they’re not talking to an audience. They’re talking to themselves and they’re talking to other news people watching. F. Chuck is hoping Bob Schieffer’s watching and is impressed. F. Chuck hopes Walter Cronkite’s watching from the Great Newsroom Up There and is impressed. F. Chuck hopes that other news people are watching. He hopes the New York Times editors are watching. They do it for each other. They write their articles, their columns, news stories for each other. They don’t connect with their audience. We in the new media present to them a giant question mark. They do not understand how it is that our enterprises are successful and growing. They have to say that you are my robots. They have to insult you. It can’t be that you and I share the same values. It can’t be that what I really do is simply validate what you already think. You know, I don’t teach you anything.

AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)

RUSH: The secret… The secret to my success is I happened to come along in 1988. Back then look at what there was. There was ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, US News, local rag newspapers, and CNN. That was it. And I came along and there was no national conservative voice in the media. So I fill the void — and our business plan did not say, “We’re going to fill a void. We’re going to be the only conservative voice.” I just said, “I’m going to do a good show. I’m going to try to attract an audience. I’m going to be honest about the things I believe and roll the dice and see if it works,” and it did. To this day people, even in talk radio on competing stations or on the leftist side, do not understand the recipe for success. It’s so simple. It’s right out in front. You be honest, you have a connection with the audience, you have credibility, and they believe you. You never, you never steer them wrong as a host. You build the loyalty. And we haven’t lost any dollars, we haven’t lost any audience in 23 years. We’re growing while they’re all plunging and falling apart.

AUDIENCE: (whistling and applause)

RUSH: Now… this is obviously a testament to my superior talent and skill.

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: But in truth, in truth what it is is a very…almost humbling thing for me to have this large an audience. I mean, they put out 15 million listeners. It’s more like 23 to 25 million in a week. To have people like you show up here, I’m in awe of it every day. I don’t… When I say, “I have to meet and surpass audience expectations every day,” I do. I do not take you being here or listening on the radio for granted for even a moment.

AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)

RUSH: It’s not just that I love you all knowing what you believe and what you want for the country. It’s I respect your intelligence. I don’t talk down to you, I don’t assume that you’re ignorant or a novice, and a lot of people in the conservative media are the same way. We’re just real people. We have a genuine connection, and it drives them nuts — and when they have to resort to impugning you, me, all it does is strengthen us, and it makes us more committed than ever to oppose them and defeat them. They have created this monster themselves.

AUDIENCE: (applause)…

Rush on Michael Vick

…RUSH: And then I’m watching the opening weekend of the NFL. By the way, a shout-out to Kevin Kolb. Did you see the headline in the Philadelphia paper today? “Michael Vick, Top Dog”? Whoa! I saw that, I said, “What does Vick think of that?” I mean, I came out dressed in black today in honor of Andy Reid.

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

Holding liberals accountable

…RUSH: It’s like anything else in liberalism. It has as its purpose to control our lives, to have power over us, and it plays on the common human emotion of guilt: I’m going to make them feel guilty for destroying the climate, but I’m going to also tell them they can save it. All they’ve got to do is drive around piece of crap cars and pay higher taxes. All they’ve got to do is move into smaller houses. All they’ve got to do is buy one sheet of toilet paper like Sheryl Crow. These people are idiots! These people are stupid and we have to sit here and listen to Christine O’Donnell and Sarah Palin be insulted, and these people are absolute nimrods. So I go back and forth: How in the world did this guy get elected? Then I see the Nissan commercial and I realize we have a battle here, and some of us look at the objective: Okay, we’ve got to go out and change people’s minds and get them to join us. I looked at the Obama CNBC thing and I saw these people ostensibly expressing problems with his policy say, “Now, there’s somebody. We can go get that person.” This Velma Hart was her name. This woman is ripe for the taking if we somehow get to Velma. “Yes, your answer, this is your new reality. On purpose. No future. No economic future. Yes, and you were looking right at the man, the president of the United States who’s giving it to you. Yes.” I wonder, “Could we convert the woman?” Then I say, “Do we have time?” The first objective is to just vote against anybody with a Democrat behind their name.

AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)

RUSH: That’s what has to be done. It’s time to stop being defensive and think we need to explain ourselves to them.

AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)

RUSH: They’re the ones at some point who we are going to call upon and we’re going to demand an accounting for the damage they have caused the country and the future.

AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)…

No more RINOs; no more ‘reaching across the aisle’

…RUSH: Time to stop thinking of ourselves defensively. We don’t need to seek validation from people who are never going to acknowledge who we are in the first place, the media or Democrats. We don’t need Mike Castles and John McCains to cross the aisle. We don’t need it. When you admit it, when you say, (imitating McCain) “That’s right, Limbaugh, I can reach across the aisle! I’m the only one who can do it!” That means that you are inherently saying you’re not good enough, McCain. You’re only going to be good enough if you get those people to join us. Well, those people are destroying us. Why do you want to join them? I had a big dinner party in New York at Roger Ailes’ house. I haven’t hid this on the radio. Karl Rove was there. Christine O’Donnell’s name came up. He didn’t say a word. Mike Castle’s name came up and Judge Napolitano was there and Neil Cavuto.

AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)
…
RUSH: So anyway, the trashing of the Tea Party, the criticism of people like Christine O’Donnell from our side is going to continue. And the reason it’s going to happen — you know, people have asked me, “Why is Rove doing what he’s doing?” I really don’t know. I mean, I can understand before an election, but after she’s won? Why give the Democrats fodder for their own TV commercial? I don’t understand it. We’re told that when these RINOs win like Specter and these people –

AUDIENCE: (booing)

RUSH: We’re told, “Come on now. We have to join forces and be unified.” Fine, okay. And we always do, don’t we? We grit our teeth, we mutter some obscenities, but we do it. Okay. So here now the terribly sophisticated, brilliant, erudite Mike Castle won’t dane to even call Christine O’Donnell and congratulate her. (audience interruption) He did call? He did call? Wait a minute now. One voice at a time. Did he call and tell her to go to hell or did he call and congratulate her? Did he say he’s going to endorse her? What we found out was that Obama and Biden called Castle to commiserate after all this. Now, see, I’m just some hick from Missouri but that kind of tells me something.

AUDIENCE: (laughter)

RUSH: We have people on our side who want to be thought of as reasonable. We’ve been painted as racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, extremists, so forth, and I’ve said on the radio a number of times that the Republican Party has its own rift. We’ve got northeastern liberal Republicans who do not like social issues, the pro-lifers being in the party, don’t like going to the convention with them. They are embarrassed to be seen with them. Their liberal buddies in New York make fun of them for being in the same party as a bunch of Billy Bobs with gun racks in the back of a Ford 150. Plus, their wives give them hell like you wouldn’t believe.

I told this story on the radio. I was in the Hamptons back in the early nineties. One of the few times I’ve been there. It was a dinner party at some famous people’s house you would know. And after the dinner party one of them came up to me, jabbed me in the chest and said, “What are you going to do about the Christians?” I said, “What do you mean what am I going to do about the Christians?” “Well, yeah, yeah, they listen to you. What are you going to do about it?” I said, “What are you talking about?” “Abortion, man, it’s killing the party. It’s going to kill the party. You’re going to have to tell these Christians –” “Why am I going to have to tell the Christians? Why don’t you?” And this guy actually said, “My wife won’t leave me alone. She’s bugging me about this. You’ve got to do something because they listen to you.”

So the people who are not with us are something that I’ve grown to despise, people concerned about what others think of them, people who try to be what they are based on what they think others want them to be. You know, we’ve all done that. We’ve all done that in high school. The problem is some people still haven’t gotten out of high school and still live in that clique world and they’re still concerned, and too many people on our side are still concerned about what those people, the left and the liberals and the people that run the show in Washington think of them. And they don’t want to be thought of as unreasonable or racist or sexist. So they’ll criticize us. And they’ll jump in Christine O’Donnell’s chili. They’re afraid of being associated with her because they hear what the liberals are saying and they don’t want to be laughed at like they’re laughing at Christine O’Donnell. So we have two challenges. We have to prevent a third party from forming because that’s going to elect Democrats from here to kingdom come.

AUDIENCE: (applause)

RUSH: At the same time we have to succeed in Reaganizing the Republican Party once again.

AUDIENCE: (applause)

RUSH: And that’s what the Tea Party is. As for me, people ask, “Why do you still do this? I mean, could work 30 weeks a year, four days a week.” Some people say, “Yeah, he already does.” But I don’t. “What do you have left to prove?” I said, “I’m not trying to prove anything. The way I look at what I do, I still feel blessed to have the opportunity I have. And I wish everybody had the opportunity to find in life their passion and get paid for it.” I mean, I got fired a whole bunch of times and I did jobs that I was not really meant for, but had to eat. I’ve been fired all these times but finally found what I was born to do. And I’m doing it, and I have no desire to stop doing it, especially now because it matters so much.…

Read it all.