Show This Column to Anyone Who Claims Bush Lied about WMDs in Iraq - John Hawkins - Page 1

Show This Column to Anyone Who Claims Bush Lied about WMDs in Iraq - John Hawkins - Page 1

...you have to be malicious or just an imbecile at this point to accuse Bush of lying about WMDs.

To begin with, numerous foreign intelligence agencies also believed that Saddam Hussein had an active WMD program. The "intelligence agencies of Germany, Israel, Russia, Britain, China and France" all believed Saddam had WMDs. CIA Director George Tenet also rather famously said that it was a “slam dunk” that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Incidentally, it’s hard to fault the CIA for their conclusions when even, “In private conversations that were intercepted by U.S. intelligence, Iraqi officials spoke as if Saddam continued to possess WMD. Even Iraqi generals believed he did. In the fall of 2002, the Iraqi military conducted exercises in chemical protective gear – but not because they thought the U.S.-led coalition was going to use chemical weapons.”

Additionally, many prominent Democrats who had access to the same intelligence that George Bush did came to the same conclusion and said so publicly. If George W. Bush lied, then by default you have to also believe that Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, John Edwards, Robert Byrd, Tom Daschle, Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders also lied. Some of them, like Hillary Clinton, even alleged that Saddam was working on nuclear weapons.

“In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security.” — Hillary Clinton, October 10, 2002

Iraq's WMD: The Shameless New York Times Moves the Goalposts - Larry Elder - Page full

Iraq's WMD: The Shameless New York Times Moves the Goalposts - Larry Elder - Page full

Contrary to the expectations of all 16 of our U.S. intelligence agencies, the "weapons hunters" sent to Iraq by President George W. Bush found no "stockpiles" of WMD.

Never mind that there was a 15-month run-up to the war, during which time Saddam was not combing his moustache. A former Iraqi general, Georges Sada, who met with members of Congress, has long claimed Saddam Hussein moved tons of WMD by land and air into Syria during the run-up to the 2003 invasion. James Clapper, the current Director of National Intelligence, has also said publicly that he, too, believes the WMD were there. But Bush's two weapons hunters found no stockpiles.

President George W. Bush looked like a fool.

Bush-hating critics chanted, "Bush lied, people died." About the prewar intelligence, Sen. Ted Kennedy said, "Before the war, week after week after week after week, we were told lie after lie after lie after lie." Critics said the lives of over 4,000 troops were wasted, in addition to the money supposedly squandered prosecuting the Iraq War.

Now comes the 10,000-word, eight-part story in The New York Times. The front-page story, called "The Secret Casualties Of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons," says WMD were in Iraq: "In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act."

Moreover, the soldiers were told to keep quiet about the WMD:

"Troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found. ?'Nothing of significance' is what I was ordered to say,' said Jarrod Lampier, a recently retired Army major who was present for the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war: more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound.

"Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company, joked of 'wounds that never happened' from 'that stuff that didn't exist.' The public, he said, was misled for a decade. 'I love it when I hear, 'Oh there weren't any chemical weapons in Iraq,' he said. 'There were plenty.'"

This is not new news to those who get news from publications other than the Times. Following a 2010 WikiLeaks leak, Wired magazine wrote: "By late 2003, even the Bush White House's staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction. But WikiLeaks' newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction (emphasis added). ... Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam's toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict -- and may have brewed up their own deadly agents."

But, rest assured, the Times emphatically insists, the discovered WMD "did not support the government's invasion rationale." It doesn't? Well, you see, according to the Times, Bush still misled Americans because the discovered WMD were "old" and "degraded," not part of an "active" weapons program. "Active?"

But only days before the bombshell Times piece, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow restated why she felt Bush "lied." Not once during her three-minute send-up about Bush "lies" and "wrong" intel, did Maddow ever use the word "active," let alone the term "active weapons program":

"There still exists -- on the right -- a sort of dead-ender fringe who believe thatactually Saddam Hussein really did have weapons of mass destruction. He must have. George Bush couldn't have been wrong about that. I say it's a dead-ender fringe because even ... George W. Bush had to admit he was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. Iraq did not have them. ...

"We are four weeks out from the elections this year. It is 10 years today since our own government officially admitted the whole WMDs thing about Iraq was a lie. It's not like an accusation that it was a lie. It's a lie. We've admitted it was a lie."

Maddow then handed the floor to colleague Lawrence O'Donnell, who promptly piled on. But again O'Donnell, like Maddow, said nothing about "active": "Rachel, I wish this wasn't true, but I do have a prediction for you -- and that is that you have not done your last segment about a Republican who believes that there were (starts laughing) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

Now we know. WMD were, in fact, in Iraq.

The New York Times, Democrats and the doofi at MSNBC should apologize to President George W. Bush, an honorable man who attempted to do the right thing, only to be savaged by his critics. Fox's Charles Krauthammer has a term for this inability to acknowledge a scintilla of decency in our 43rd president -- "Bush Derangement Syndrome."

Fahrenheit 9/11 Lies Revisited: Leftist Filmmakers Split Profits From Traged...

Fahrenheit 9/11 Lies Revisited: Leftist Filmmakers Split Profits From Tragedy, Defamation

via Big Journalism by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro on 2/18/12

One of the biggest mistakes conservatives made in defending President George W. Bush was ignoring a little movie called, "Fahrenheit 9/11." Most Bush supporters I know shake their heads and roll their eyes when I ask them if they've seen the documentary because they "wouldn't watch that trash," but I always remind them that if they don't watch it, they won't be able to effectively expose its deceptions.
Although Fahrenheit came out in 2004, I was tempted to assemble this little collection of Fahrenheit deceptions after I learned that Michael Moore and the Weinstein brothers have finally settled a lawsuit they were in over the movie.
Moore's Westside Productions filed a civil suit against Harvey Weinstein and his brother Robert last February over $2.7 million (a little pocket change in the grand scheme of the hundreds of millions the film made). The Weinstein's struck back saying that Moore was greedy since he'd already reportedly walked away with over $20 million from the movie. The specific details of the settlement were not disclosed in documents filed last week in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Fahrenheit is one of the few movies that actually almost had an effect on a presidential election, and it's director even admitted that he hoped the film would directly impact the outcome of the Bush v. Kerry challenge–in favor of the Democratic Party. (Two conservative alternative documentary films titled Fahrenhype 9/11 and Celsius 41.1 were released shortly after Fahrenheit, exposing many of the deceptions in Moore's film.)

Considering the timing of Fahrenheit and the vulnerability of America back then, I think it's fair to say that Michael Moore exploited the emotional sting of defeat Americans were feeling shortly after the Iraqi insurgency struck back, and it became apparent the war would not be won overnight.
It didn't take long for Fahrenheit to become the highest selling documentary film of all time grossing over $220 million. Some movie theaters, particularly in leftist areas of the country such as the Bay Area of Northern California even refused to enforce the "R" rating so that young people could see the film.

The basic assertion of Fahrenheit is that the Bush administration falsified evidence about Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, drew a false connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks and deviously riled up fear throughout the United States to gain support for an unjustified war and the USA Patriot Act.
Investigative reporters including Christopher Hitchens and Stephen F. Hayes discovered numerous inconsistencies in the film's claims, but the most comprehensive list of "deceptions" in Fahrenheit came from Dave Kopel and the Colorado based 'Independence Institute.'
Kopel composed a July 1 2004 report titled "Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11" which brilliantly unmasked the film's inconsistencies and subtle deceptions. Kopel brilliantly outlined his findings with thorough detail.

I've covered some of those and more for those of our readers who haven't seen the movie–and for those of our reader who have, but didn't see through the veil of deceit.
Fahrenheit starts out covering the controversial presidential election of 2000, but the first attack on Bush's actual presidency starts when Moore cites a Washington Post study that falsely accused W of spending 42 percent of his time (before 9/11) on vacation implying that he dropped the ball. According to Kopel, the Post figures failed to include weekends. Long story short: Bush never played hooky nearly as much as the liberal mainstream media would have us believe.
Fahrenheit then moves on to falsely portraying Bush as insensitive for continuing to read a children's book to a classroom of a Florida elementary school children after being told about the attacks on the World Trade Center.
The Washington Times however reported that although it could not be seen on film, Ari Fleischer was holding a sign to the President from the back of the room that read, "DON'T SAY ANYTHING YET."
Gwendolyn Rose-Rigell, the principal of Emma E. Booker Elementary School praised Bush's action in an Associated Press report: "I don't think anyone could have handled it better," she said. "What would it have served if he had jumped up and ran out of the room?"
The movie never mentions any of that.
Fahrenheit also accuses the president of being negligent in allowing the Sept. 11 attacks to have happened, and suggests they could have been prevented. The film outlines a story in which the president allegedly did not read an August 6, 2001 FBI memo that said Osama bin Laden had ordered his al-Qaeda operatives to hijack commercial airline planes to plan a terrorist attack. The actual memo however was much more equivocal and read:

"We have not been able to confirm corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a… service in 1998 saying that bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of the Blind Shaykh Umar Abd al-Rahman and other U.S. held extremists. Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

Moore also tries to draw a non-existent, diabolical correlation between President Bush and the bin Laden family due to his relationship with the Saudi regime. Fahrenheit focuses on an incident that occurred after 142 Saudis including 24 members of the al-Qaeda leader's family were flown out of the country on Sept. 13th.
The implication was that Bush allowed potential 9/11 suspects to leave the United States in the wake of the attack because he did them a special favor.
What Moore fails to mention is that the FBI interviewed 30 of the Saudis including members of bin Laden's family before they were permitted to leave. Moore also fails to mention that it was whistleblower Richard Clarke who cleared those departures and that Osama bin Laden is estranged from his family–who own one of the largest construction companies in the world–and actually do significant business with the U.S.
Another absurd Fahrenheit connection drawn is because of Bush's former National Guard friendship with James Bath who later became the U.S. based money manager for the bin Laden family. Fahrenheit implies that the bin Laden family invested in Bush, but it was Bath who invested his own money in Bush's failed energy company, Arbusto.
Moore also tries to portray himself as a savvy investigative reporter who managed to get uncensored copies of Bush's National Guard records, which had Bath's name blacked out. The implication was that there was a conspiracy to hide their friendship from the public. Moore fails to mention that Bath's name was blacked out after April 14, 2003 with passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA). His name was blacked out because his reference in Bush's report entails a health related physical exam that both men failed to take, and those matters became confidential.
There was no cover up–simply compliance with federal law.
Fahrenheit takes a shot at drawing a unique relationship between Bush and Saudi Prince Bandar, failing to mention that Bandar has been a bipartisan Washington power broker for years. Also, Bandar had a close relationship with the Clinton administration as well. Clinton personally received $750,000 for giving a speech in Saudi Arabia and Kopel says that the Saudis have donated as much as $20 million to the Clinton library.
Moore suggests another faux tie Bush has to the bin Laden family: His father's link to the Carlyle Group to which he served as a senior adviser. The bin Ladens had invested $2 million in Carlyle Group fund, which actually has a bipartisan collection of partners, including leftist financier George Soros. Nonetheless, at the time Fahrenheit was released both Bush Sr. and the bin Ladens had reportedly cut ties with the group.
Moore ramps up the Bush-Saudi connection by implying that the Saudi Embassy had special protection in the wake of 9/11 because of uniformed U.S. Secret Service protection outside the building. The reality of course is that many foreign embassies receive Secret Service protection when they are in possible danger of attack. In fact, Article 22 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations dictates that every host country is obliged to protect foreign embassies within their own borders.
Fahrenheit tries to draw a conspiratorial relationship between Bush and both the Saudis and the Afghan Taliban regime. Moore asks in the film, "Is it rude to suggest that when the Bush family wakes up in the morning they might be thinking about what's best for the Saudis instead of what's best for you?"
Kopel points out that despite this so called conspiratorial alliance between the Bush administration and the Saudis, the Saudis did not join the coalition of the willing against Iraq and the oil rich country also asked the U.S. to move their regional military headquarters to Qatar.
Fahrenheit also tries to draw a weak connection between the Bush administration and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan until its overthrow by U.S. military forces after 9/11. As evidence, the documentary shows video footage of a March 2001 visit to the U.S. by a Taliban envoy named Sayed Hashemi who was allegedly welcomed by a Bush official. In reality, Hashemi's arrival was not welcomed, and recognition of the Taliban's status by the Bush State Department continued to be denied.
Some of Fahrenheit's most sinister deceits involve Iraq because this goes to the heart of accusations against President Bush for starting an illegal war under false pretenses.
Fahrenheit starts out this lengthy chapter of the film by arguing that Iraq never attacked the United States. Moore obviously has forgotten about Saddam Hussein's April 1993 assassination attempt against President George H. Bush during his visit to Kuwait.
President Clinton was so convinced the FBI was correct in their investigative assertions that Iraqi intelligence was behind Bush 41's attempted murder that he ordered 23 Tomahawk missiles fired from Naval cruisers in the Gulf upon Iraqi intelligence headquarters.

Kopel also points out that Saddam's regime repeatedly fired upon American and British pilots in the no-fly zone in the wake of the Gulf War cease-fire under U.N. Resolution 687.
Although the connection has never been proven, Moore still dismisses a fascinating theory developed by Laurie Mylorie, a Harvard Professor who authored, "The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks," and "Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study in Revenge.
Mylorie, who served as Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential election advisor on Iraq suggested in both books that Iraq was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and former CIA Director James Woolsey supported her theory.
Mylorie's evidence was compelling: She pointed out two major connections: (1) Ramzi Yousef, who was the orchestrator of the 1993 bombing was working for Iraqi intelligence at the time, and (2) Abdul Rahman Yasin, the operative who mixed the chemicals for the bombs was a former Iraqi intelligence agency who was granted asylum to Baghdad after fleeing the FBI in the wake of the WTC attack.
Another bad attempt Fahrenheit makes at discrediting Bush's preemptive strikes against Iraq is arguing that the country supposedly never threatened the United States. Kopel sites a November 15, 1997 comment in which Babel, the main state press mechanism in Iraq wrote that, "American and British interests, embassies and naval ships in the Arab region should be the targets of military operations and commando attacks by Arab political forces."
On November 25, 2000, Saddam made a televised speech in which he opined that "The Arab people have not so far fulfilled their duties. They are called upon to target U.S. interests everywhere and target those who protect these interests."
On the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2002 a weekly magazine owned by Saddam's son, Uday Hussein was quoted saying that all Arabs should "use all means and they are numerous against the aggressors … and considering everything American as a military target, including embassies, installations, and American companies, and to create suicide/martyr squads to attack American military and naval bases inside and outside the region and mine the waterways to prevent the movement of war ships …"
Fahrenheit does everything it can to allege that the Bush administration made a false connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks, but the Bush administration did not make that direct connection. President Bush repeatedly explained that the reasons that he and the United States Congress came together (the U.S Senate voted in favor of empowering President Bush to enforce all outstanding U.N. resolutions pertaining to Iraq 77-23 including Democratic leaders such as John F. Kerry, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton) was because the Sept. 11 attacks were a wake up call, and that Iraq was a dangerous loose end that needed tying up.
The 9/11 Commission Report however has confirmed on page 61 that Sudanese Islamic leader al-Turabi brokered a non-aggression pact between Saddam and al-Qaeda in 1993. Although the pact was not an operational one it is the only known pact between any head of state in the world and al-Qaeda. This fact was originally presented in Weekly Standard reporter Stephen F. Hayes' 2000 book, "The Connection: How al-Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America."
Hayes reported that 1992 Iraqi intelligence reports indicate that Osama bin Laden was an intelligence asset to the Ba'athist regime, and that the former deputy director of Iraqi intelligence under Saddam told U.S. officials that bin Laden asked the Ba'athist regime for arms and training during an in person meeting in 1994.
In 1995, senior al-Qaeda leader Abu Hajer al met with Iraqi intelligence officials, and in 1998 the Department of Justice under President Clinton issued a federal indictment citing Iraqi assistance with al-Qaeda "weapons development."
In 1999, a senor Clinton administration counter-terrorism official told the Washington Post that they were "sure" Iraq had supported al-Qaeda chemical weapons programs.
Although the 9/11 Commission Report concluded that, "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States," it also concludes that there were "friendly contacts" between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Hayes points out as well that the chief prosecutor of the World Trade Center bombers has said that the staff report ignores substantial evidence of Iraqi involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.
As Kopel says: "Fahrenheit dishonestly pretends there was no relationship at all."
This is the overall problem with "Fahrenheit 9/11." It not only falsely portrays President Bush as having diabolically exploited the Sept. 11 attacks to justify the Iraq War, it tries to discredit the value in having liberated Iraq in the first place. It also diminishes the national security need to have eliminated Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athist regime.
Although many conservatives and patriotic Americans have refused to watch the documentary, it is important to know the assertions and deceptions the movie makes because its sales prove that it has had a powerful impact on Western culture in terms of how the Iraq War and the history of the Bush administration is viewed.

Critics of Bush don't realize how his hard-line stance toward terror helped keep US safe

Critics of Bush don't realize how his hard-line stance toward terror helped keep US safe - NYPOST.com

Years ago, when my young son and I visited a dude ranch in Montana, a local rancher told us he butchered his cows for meat. My son, Scott, who was only 7, was horrified. "You kill your own cows and eat them?" he asked with urban disgust.

The rancher answered with country logic, saying something like, "Well, how is that different from you eating cows that other people butcher?"

Numerous reports, including one from former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, that waterboarding started the daisy chain that led to the courier that led to Osama bin Laden's hideout, qualify as a distinctly inconvenient fact for hard-line liberals. They call waterboarding and other harsh techniques immoral and denounce supporters as apologists for torture.

And then they and their families ride the subway or an airplane or walk the street, believing they are safe. By and large, they are safe, thanks to the dedicated patriots whose heroic work does not allow for the snobbery that passes for moral superiority. The reality of war, warriors will tell you, leaves little margin for nuance.

Being forced to hear the hard facts about interrogation was only part of the misery bin Laden's demise caused the Michael Moore set. The communication and surveillance technology that made possible the raid into Pakistan for the kill mission -- capture was not the goal -- vindicated the black arts of the CIA and Pentagon intelligence, two favorite targets of the professional left.

The Democrats' 'Bush lied' lie

A lie is when someone knows something is false and utters it anyway. Everyone and his dog  thought Saddam was sitting on stockpiles of WMD.
 

The Democrats' 'Bush lied' lie

via PrairiePundit by Merv on 7/14/10

Karl Rove:

Seven years ago today, in a speech on the Iraq war, Sen. Ted Kennedy fired the first shot in an all-out assault on President George W. Bush's integrity. "All the evidence points to the conclusion," Kennedy said, that the Bush administration "put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth." Later that day Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle told reporters Mr. Bush needed "to be forthcoming" about the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Thus began a shameful episode in our political life whose poisonous fruits are still with us.

The next morning, Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and John Edwards joined in. Sen. Kerry said, "It is time for a president who will face the truth and tell the truth." Mr. Edwards chimed in, "The administration has a problem with the truth."

The battering would continue, and it was a monument to hypocrisy and cynicism. All these Democrats had said, like Mr. Bush did, that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. Of the 110 House and Senate Democrats who voted in October 2002 to authorize the use of force against his regime, 67 said in congressional debate that Saddam had these weapons. This didn't keep Democrats from later alleging something they knew was false—that the president had lied America into war.

Senate Intelligence Chairman Bob Graham organized a bipartisan letter in December 2001 warning Mr. Bush that Saddam's "biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs . . . may be back to pre-Gulf War status," and enhanced by "longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies." Yet two years later, he called for Mr. Bush's impeachment for having said Saddam had WMD.

On July 9, 2004, Mr. Graham's fellow Democrat on Senate Intelligence, Jay Rockefeller, charged that the Bush administration "at all levels . . . used bad information to bolster the case for war." But in his remarks on Oct. 10, 2002, supporting the war resolution, he said that "Saddam's existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose real threats to America."

Even Kennedy, who opposed the war resolution, nonetheless said the month before the vote that Saddam's "pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated." But he warned if force were employed, the Iraqi dictator "may decide he has nothing to lose by using weapons of mass destruction himself or by sharing them with terrorists."

Then there was Al Gore, who charged on June 24, 2004, that Mr. Bush spent "prodigious amounts of energy convincing people of lies" and accused him of treason, bellowing that Mr. Bush "betrayed his country." Yet just a month before the war resolution debate, the former vice president said, "We know that [Saddam] has stored away secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."

Top Democrats led their party in making the "Bush lied, people died" charge because they wanted to defeat him in 2004. That didn't happen. Several bipartisan commissions would later catalogue the serious errors in the intelligence on which Mr. Bush and Democrats relied. But these commissions, particularly the Silberman-Robb report of March 31, 2005, found that the "Bush lied" charge was false. Still, the attacks hurt: When they began, less than a third of Americans believed the charge. Two years later, polls showed that just over half did.

...

While the false charges did hurt Bush politically in this country, they also hurt US foreign policy as others outside the US decided it was OK to be disrespectful to the President and accuse him of being a liar too.

By allowing the President to be a stoic punching bag, it hurt his presidency for the remainder of his term. It later morphed into the Democrats actively seeking our defeat in Iraq, and people like Harry Reid declaring that the surge was a failure before all the troops were in the country. It was one of the most shameful partisan shows in recent history.

It is good that Rove is reminding people of the Democrats bad faith. It is something they should remember as they vote this fall.

The Media Double Standard on Presidents

(Hat tip: Prairie Pundit)
In the Boston Herald, Howie Carr calls the press on its double standard in reporting on Presidents.

The fawning media rumpswabs are finally turning on Barack Obama - to a point. So let's review the state-run media's role in creating this calamity, by substituting hagiography for journalism in coverage of this clueless boob.
First, how they "reported" on George Bush, then how the Messiah fared until recent days with the same simpering sycophants.
Criticizing Bush - the highest form of patriotism. Criticizing Obama - hate speech. Who caused Bush's problems? - Bush. Who causes Obama's problems? - Bush.
When Bush mispronounced a word (like nuclear) - more proof he is a complete cowboy moron.
When Obama mispronounces a word (like corpsman) - how dare you even bring this up, racist?!
Unemployment at 4.6 percent under Bush - a jobless recovery.
Unemployment at 9.7 percent under Obama - the new normal, "steady," a lagging indicator of the happy days that CNBC says are here again.
Demanding the right to videotape flag-draped military coffins at Dover AFB under Bush - the public has a right to know! Never showing any returning coffins now that Obama is president - the public doesn't care.
Economic woes under Bush - portents of a new Depression. Economic woes under Obama - a blip on the radar screen, surprising.
Cindy Sheehan under Bush - a future recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Sheehan under Obama - give it up already, you old bag.
Bush playing a rare round of golf - complete video coverage, showing his utter indifference to the suffering of the American people.
Obama playing one of his endless rounds of golf - only still photos allowed, yet another glowing indication of our dashing president's youth and physical fitness.
Bush's speeches - a chill up their legs. Obama's - a thrill up their legs.
Media reviews of Bush's handling of Katrina - he hates black people. Media reviews of Obama's handling of the oil spill - Halliburton did it.
Bush tapping the phones of foreign terrorists with congressional authority - fascism. Obama's continuing attempts to rein in free speech on the Internet - good public policy.
Bush on Air Force One - junkets, fund-raising for GOP fat cats. Obama on Air Force One - fact-finding missions, reassuring the American people of his tireless FDR-like commitment to them.

Two hundred-point midday drops on the Dow under Bush - ominous plummet. Same drops under Obama - the market is seeking direction.
Democrat women elected under Bush - a triumph of feminism. Republican women elected under Obama - a setback for feminism. (Brit twit Tina Brown actually said this last week to Obama worshipper George Stephanopoulos on "Good Morning America.")
Popular Bush-era rhyme - Bush lied, people died. New rhyme - Obama snoozed, oil oozed. Just kidding - anyone in the drive-by media who ever dared utter such blasphemy would be banned from both MSNBC and the Hamptons. They'd be shunned by the Beautiful People as totally as Ann Coulter and Michael Savage - or George W. Bush.

Dangerous rhetoric?

From Power Line:

 

Evan Coyne Maloney is the documentary filmmaker and proprietor of Brain Terminal. During the Bush administration, Evan was out in the field with his camera observing protests and interviewing protesters. He is therefore in a good position to recall the signs and symbols of the left-wing opposition to the Bush administration's post-9/11 national security policies. How do they compare to the Tea Party protesters expressing their opposition to Barack Obama's program of national socialism?

Evan has now produced a timely new video splicing together footage that he calls "A trip down memory lane." He describes it as four minutes of nonstop examples of violent imagery and extremist rhetoric employed by left-wing anti-Bush protesters. He writes: "For some reason, despite it being well documented at the time by me and many others, the media chose to ignore it." Indeed.

Agents Provocateurs and Tea Partiers

Link to AIM Blog.  RTWT.

 

During World War II we faced Tokyo Rose, the English-speaking broadcaster of Japanese propaganda. Her purpose was to demoralize American soldiers and sailors and undermine the war effort against the fascists and the Nazis. During the Cold War, the Soviets had their own version of Tokyo Rose. They would cite American and Western sources of information in an effort to convince the world that U.S. foreign policy was imperialist and corrupt. President Reagan launched an information counter-offensive, exposing communist disinformation and propaganda. The rest is history. Soviet lies were exposed, and the Soviets lost the Cold War.

....

Russia Today is eager to publicize Alex Jones and his claims about 9/11, the Bilderbergers, bankers, and various other villains and culprits because they divert attention from the increasingly totalitarian nature of the Russian regime and the military threat that Russia still poses to American interests. This is not to say that there may be some truth in some of the claims that Jones makes about some of the groups and individuals manipulating U.S. policy. But Jones takes these claims to a ridiculous extreme, in order to create the impression that he somehow has inside information about the government and the forces behind it.

Consider the 9/11 truth movement. Jones has become the face of that movement, even though another Jones, former Obama official and communist Van Jones, is another prominent advocate of the view that America attacked itself on 9/11.

....

If we are to believe the 9/11 truth movement, the Bush Administration put the plot together-or finalized it-in a short period of time, only eight months, after Bush took office in January 2001. Then, after 9/11, an elaborate cover-up was engineered, with the connivance of top Bush officials, in order to keep the public in the dark.

Make no mistake that important questions remain unanswered about 9/11 and serious figures such as Rachel Ehrenfeld and Peter Lance have been raising them. It is mind-boggling that President Bush gave George Tenet, CIA director at the time of 9/11, a presidential Medal of Freedom. Tenet is the official who told Bush that finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would be a slam dunk.

An Absurd Theory

Which raises the question: if U.S. officials orchestrated 9/11, in order to go to war in the Middle East, why couldn't these same officials have planted weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to justify the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime? That would have been relatively easy, compared to the complicated and elaborate schemes required to strike the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and then to blame the attacks on Muslim Arabs hijacking U.S. commercial aircraft.

....

Consider another individual closely associated with Alex Jones who also appears regularly on Russian TV-Webster Tarpley, a former associate of cult leader Lyndon LaRouche. Jones and Tarpley work hand-in-glove, including on Jones' films, "The Obama Deception" and "Fall of the Republic." Tarpley's mentor, Lyndon LaRouche, served prison time on financial fraud charges and operates what critics have called an anti-Semitic or neo-fascist cult.

....

Convicted con man LaRouche is considered the intellectual author of the 9/11 truth movement because he started questioning whether Muslims had staged the attacks right after they occurred. Larouche started out as a Marxist and, in a 1976 lecture, titled, "What Only Communists Know," declared his desire to bring into being "a new Marxist international..." The "inside job" theory of 9/11 is a Marxist view holding that a rogue or "imperialist" U.S. administration has covered up its own diabolical role in the events of that terrible day and blamed Muslim Arabs for the attacks. Once again, we see the propaganda theme that Muslims are poor victims of American foreign policy, cleverly diverting our attention from the very real and dangerous Islamic threat.

....

Here's what one eyewitness said happened-and it was captured on videotape: "Alex Jones shows up with a bullhorn and what can only be described as a gang of thugs, and proceeds to disrupt the entire rally, shouting over the speakers, shutting down the program, and ultimately driving off most of the participants with his obnoxious antics... [Jones] ranted on and on about the New World Order and various issues completely unrelated to the purpose of the protest, while surrounded by his personal videographers and thug-like followers."

One observer commented, "Alex Jones...[was] there to discredit the patriots by helping feed the mainstream media's effort to make the true Americans look like morons and paranoid lunatics, therefore effectively drawing attention away from the blatant and illegal disregard of our 2nd amendment rights..."

In this context, consider the fact that the LaRouche movement is behind the distribution of the photos and posters which feature Obama with a Hitler mustache. Of course, such an image is what the media hone in on, rather than what is being said at the podium-which fits LaRouche's purpose perfectly. And that purpose is to discredit the Tea Party movement.

....

A former LaRouche insider and expert on the cult suggests that Jones and Tarpley are actually competitors for the same audience but have teamed up for common purposes. He, too, has noticed LaRouche material being posted on the Alex Jones and Ron Paul websites as well as various gold bug and tea party sites.

"Since Obama won," he explained, "the cult is doing exactly what it did when Jimmy Carter was elected. It merely turned to try to be a parasite off of the right-wing anger and this time Obama is an easy target. This is the same cult that raised money and recruited among the left when Bush was in power and was being labeled a Nazi."

This observer says that what the cult is doing is "carpetbagging" at any Tea Party or right-wing meeting or website it can find: "The idea is that they just abandoned the anti-Bush propaganda and are using the anti-Obama sentiment to raise money."

They are also physically attending Tea Party meetings. He noted that the Tea Party movement in Massachusetts had a LaRouche cult member by the name of Rachel Brown address their meetings and go on their radio show. Indeed, Brown went on Tea Party radio to discuss "the British empire's drive for global fascism." It is typical of the LaRouche movement to attack the British, especially the Queen of England, for everything that goes wrong in the world. She went on that show with Harley Schlanger of the LaRouche political action committee.

....

This former LaRouche insider says that the Tea Party movement must act quickly to get rid of the odor of the LaRouche cult; otherwise, it will be used against them. He says, "I am worried about the Tea Party being connected to the cult and not publicly denouncing them for showing up like parasites."

These forces of anti-Americanism, operating under the false flag of patriotism, must be exposed for who they are-before their antics irreparably taint the responsible pro-freedom movement and defeat a once-in-a-lifetime chance to take our country back.  

What if Bush had said "Corpse Man"?

Video linked to this piece by Tony Gallardo at The American Thinker.

If Bush had so badly mispronounced "corpsman", the mainstream media would still be running it on a continuous tape loop.

But of course, there's no media bias.

9/11 Revisited

Respectful Insolence pulls from the archives a report on the 9/11 conspiracy theories.

No doubt you've heard of the 9/11 "skeptics" who don't believe that the impact of two large jetliners was enough to bring down the Twin Towers. These and conspiracy theorists like them have been responsible for the movie Loose Change (the producers of which, contrary to their claims that they are doing this "for the victims," have some really vile and despicable things about those who died) and the 9/11 "Truth" movement. These guys love to spin tales about how somehow the U.S. government (sometimes, depending on who's telling the tale, with the help of the Mossad) was actually responsible for the attacks, how supposedly the planes alone were not enough to bring the buildings down, and how there must have been bombs or other devices already in the towers. All of this was done, if you believe the tinfoil hat brigade, for nefarious purposes like giving the government a pretext to invade Iraq, to enrich Haliburton, or a variety of other reasons connected to reality only in the most tenuous way, if even that. One of the more prevalent among the many competing claims (some of which are mutually exclusive) is that it wasn't really commercial jetliners that struck the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon at all, but rather missiles or refueling military tankers. Never mind the thousands of eyewitnesses and the copious photographic, documentary, and physical evidence that do in fact support the conventional idea that it was suicidally murderous Islamic terrorists who hijacked these jetliners and piloted them into these buildings. It must have been the government or the Jews who did it. Popular Mechanics and the most recent episode of Skeptic Magazine have deconstructed the conspiracy theories of the 9/11 "Truth" movement quite well, as has the blog Screw Loose Change and the website Debunking 911, including its claims that the fires in the building couldn't have weakened the steel enough to cause the buildings to fall and that there must have been explosive charges that caused a "controlled implosion."

A report at Skeptic's website can be found here.

Van goes

Obama's Green Jobs Czar Van Jones is leaving. He blames the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy™.

How viciously sneaky of the right wing. They dared to use the man's own words against him. As Powerline's John Hinderaker commented, Van Jones was a one-man youtube channel." Really, how underhanded can critics go - using what the guy said himself as evidence against him. That's what can be done now in this age of youtube. Remember macaca? Well, Jones had more than a decade of macaca moments in his past and they kept finding their ways to the internet. How unfair all that payback is, isn't it?

What is really interesting is how the press has covered this whole thing.

The major media has totally ignored it. As Byron York tabulated on Friday when the whole kerfuffle was reaching a crescendo on cable, internet, and talk radio, the network news and nation's two leading newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, hadn't printed a word about the controversy.
....
...we have the amusing spectacle of a man that the Washington Post's Garance Franke-Ruta and Anne E. Kornblut called "legendary" on Saturday and "towering" on Sunday having to resign. Can't love him enough, can you guys?

Even so, they can barely bring themselves to quote what the guy actually said and did to get people so riled up. Come on, can't these reporters get on the internet and check out Google and youtube for themselves? Or is it just easier to swallow the line that it was right-wingers egged on by Glenn Beck who got rid of this guy?

It's Jeremiah Wright all over again. The Obamanians and their media fans are so deeply perched inside their bubble that they don't think that statements that seem so normal and reasonable to them like Wright's rantings and Jones' musings about white polluters and environmentalists wanting to poison black folk or how the Bush administration used the flag to beat, whip, and lynch anyone opposed to torture. Yeah, because we saw all those folks protesting BushHitler being lynched back in the day. But these sorts of comments didn't seem to ring any sort of alarm bells with the Obama folks, because it's what they're used to hearing all the time. It sounds perfectly sane to them. It's what they read on their websites and hear at their gatherings. Just as Obama didn't seem to notice anything objectionable in Jeremiah Wright's regular preaching, Jones' pseudo-intellectual paranoid explanations of how he sees the world as working didn't seem all that remarkable or worth denying the guy a job as a senior adviser to the President. It was only when it was put through the evil spin of people like Glenn Beck that it suddenly became "lies and distortions to distract and divide."

For the Left, war without Bush is not war at all | Washington Examiner

Byron York looks at the left's change of heart with respect to Cindy Sheehan. He concludes: For the Left, war without Bush is not war at all | Washington Examiner

Remember the anti-war movement? Not too long ago, the Democratic party's most loyal voters passionately opposed the war in Iraq. Democratic presidential candidates argued over who would withdraw American troops the quickest. Netroots activists regularly denounced President George W. Bush, and sometimes the U.S. military ("General Betray Us"). Cindy Sheehan, the woman whose soldier son was killed in Iraq, became a heroine when she led protests at Bush's Texas ranch.
....
Not too long ago, some observers worried that Barack Obama would come under increasing pressure from the Left to leave both Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, it seems those worries were unfounded. For many liberal activists, opposing the war was really about opposing George W. Bush. When Bush disappeared, so did their anti-war passion.

Where does BDS go when there's no "B"?

Where do the vapors of Bush Derangement Syndrome go when there's no Bush to attack?

Now that Mr. Bush is quietly going about his retirement, this strain of rage - the GWB43 virus - has spread like wildfire, finding unsuspecting targets, each granting us greater perspective into what not long ago seemed like a mysterious phenomenon isolated only on our 43rd president.

The first person to catch the virus was Sarah Palin, whose family also was infected, including, unforgivably, her children.

Then it was Joe the Plumber, for asking a question.

Next were the Mormons.

Then it was Rush Limbaugh - who hit back.

Next, tax-day "tea party" attendees were "tea bagged."

Then there was a beauty contestant.

And a Cambridge cop, too.

And now we have town-hall "mobs."

Smile ... you've been "community organized."

When put on the media stage, these individuals and groups have been isolated for destruction for standing in the way of a resurgent modern progressive movement and for challenging its charismatic once-in-a-lifetime standard-bearer, Barack Obama.
....
The origins of manufactured "politics of personal destruction" is Saul Alinsky, the mentor of a young Hillary Rodham, who wrote her 92-page Wellesley College senior thesis on the late Chicago-based "progressive" street agitator titled, "There Is Only the Fight."

Mr. Obama and his Fighting Illini, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, have perfected Mr. Alinsky's techniques as laid out in his guidebook to political warfare, "Rules for Radicals." In plain language, we see how normal, decent and even private citizens become nationally vilified symbols overnight - all in the pursuit of progressive political victory.

"Rule 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)"

With the complicity of the mainstream media and abetted by George Soros' money and netroots nation, Mr. Bush never stood a chance.

But the more the virus spreads, the more we study it and, perhaps, find the cure. The repetitive use of the same technique against anyone who would dare stand up and oppose the progressive movement and especially its leader has exposed the game and rendered its tactics less effective.

In fact, one could make the argument that the Republican Party, usually slow on the uptake, has finally figured it out. There are no major Republican targets out there opposing Mr. Obama and his aggressive agenda. The conservative movement appears leaderless, but perhaps for the best.

Maybe that is the strategy: Standing back and letting the Obama machine flail in its pursuit of its next victim.

A grass-roots movement of average Americans has stood up, making it extremely difficult to isolate and demonize an individual.

Mr. Alinsky noted in "Rule 12" that it is difficult to go after "institutions." And attacking "tea baggers" and "mobs" has only created more resistance and drawn attention to the left's limited playbook. Even Americans expressing their constitutionally protected right to free speech are open game.

Now that many people are Googling the Alinsky rule book and catching up with the way Chicago thugs play their political games, Mr. Obama and the Fighting Illini are going to be forced to create new rules - or double down on the old ones.

Worse yet, as his approval ratings descend rapidly - Rasmussen has him at 47 percent, the lowest of his presidency - angry citizens may be turning the tables on him, using Mr. Alinsky against him.

They won't have to "freeze" and "personalize" him either. He's got 3 1/2 years left with the klieg lights focused on him. And if Mr. Obama can't get the economy rolling and continues to demonize everyday folks for his failures, he will be further isolated from sympathy and even ridiculed.

Yes, it's cruel - and effective.

Dissent is Patriotic

Criticism of Obama is racist. Bringing swastikas to a protest is a bad thing.

But it was okay to bring swastikas to a Bush protest, and equate Bush with Hitler.

Source

GitMythology debunked

In Commentary Magazine, Arthur Herman writes:

Obama’s order “closing” Gitmo actually left it open for a year, ostensibly until new arrangements could be made for the 240 or so inmates still detained there—though Obama admitted privately it might have to stay open longer than that. Later, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that, far from being “the Bermuda Triangle of human rights” that Human Rights Watch’s Wendy Patten had dubbed it, Gitmo was in full compliance with the humane-treatment provisions of the Geneva Convention. Meanwhile, the military commissions, which Human Rights Watch and others groups had denounced as a travesty of justice, were only being suspended for 120 days, pending a review—and, indeed, following that review, will be reinstated almost exactly as they were before.

• the twelve separate inquiries into the abuses alleged by critics and former detainees at Gitmo that found no evidence of those abuses taking place;
• the revelation during the release earlier this year of the so-called “torture memos” that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques had been applied to exactly three suspects in the course of eight years and had never been standard operating practice at Gitmo;
• the evaluation by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point that 73 percent of Gitmo detainees were “a demonstrated threat” to Americans;
• and, finally, the fact that the detention facility was created in the wake of a declaration by Congress in September 2001 that “all necessary and appropriate force” should be used “against those nations, organizations, or persons” [emphasis added] responsible for the attacks of September 11;

So why the opposition?

At least some of the blame goes to:

...the aggressive and unending efforts of a cadre of lawyers, activists, left-leaning Democrats in Congress, and civil libertarians against the facility, its purpose, its goal, and its existence. These efforts began even before it was opened, in November 2001, and continue to this day. The anti-Gitmo forces worked tirelessly to shape the public perception that Gitmo was the red-hot center of an aggressive policy approach that led the leftist financier George Soros to declare: “The biggest terrorist in the world is George W. Bush.”

Some of the myths discussed are:

Most of the detainees aren't terrorists at all.

In point of fact, the military captured more than 70,000 men and put every one through a rigorous screening process. Ten thousand were released immediately. By the time the military had completed its work, only 800 remained in custody. These were the ones they had deemed hard-core trained terrorists who could not be released without running the risk they would rejoin the battle. The question was what to do with them.

And about the Yoo "torture memos":

Yoo was tasked with providing a set of ground rules for detention, interrogation, and trial of the detainees. The Department of Defense had wanted to treat these as three separate issues. However, Yoo and the OLC lawyers believed they had to be handled as parts of a single policy—especially since at the same time they were also setting guidelines on how the CIA would be allowed to question suspects that fell into its hands.

Those rules and memos were assembled over the course of many months bridging 2001 and 2002, in the immediate shadow of 9/11 with the possibility of a second massive attack looming on the horizon. Later, the press would brand them “torture memos,” and the Obama administration’s decision to release the full texts of those memos in April 2009 fed the frenzy. However, they could just as well be branded “anti-torture memos.” Yoo and his colleagues used them to define the boundaries at which interrogation of unwilling and uncooperative prisoners would cross over into the category of torture. Once those boundaries were breached, any action would be illegal under United States law and international treaties, including the 1994 United Nations Convention Against Torture. They looked to practices by Israeli as well as British intelligence services that had undergone legal scrutiny in their own countries, and they also considered historical norms about torture since the Middle Ages.

The OLC understood as well as any of its later critics that torture—the cruel and needless infliction of pain in order to dominate and control others or to exact confessions or information—was barbarism. It was precisely in order to prevent such barbarism that the memos were drawn up in the first place. It was also why then, and later, army and CIA interrogators tried to avoid even drawing close to those boundaries without explicit authorization.

Read the whole thing.

A confession

Michelle Malkin spotted this on a website called "Post Secret", where people can post their postcard-sized confessions...

 

 

As she points out, there's always Rush Limbaugh.

Worst president in the world?

Commentary magazine blog.

Is BDS self-limiting?

Many diseases are "self-limiting". That is, they will go away after a period of time, no matter what treatment the patient receives. There are many who think Bush Derangement Syndrome will go away after Obama's coronation inauguration day. Wesley Pruden writes:

With only 26 days left to harangue, mock and bash President Bush, some of our colleagues in the media aren't wasting a day. Bashing ex-presidents, except for the ex-presidents with shrill prominent wives, isn't nearly as much fun as bashing while he's still the real thing.
....
The rush to get in a last few licks at a sitting Republican president is a game a lot of bashers play. Some of the bloggers were bitterly disappointed - complaining is the main point of blogging - that George W. didn't call off the election, as pointy-headed bashers freely predicted through the summer months that he would, or call out the National Guard to prevent the inauguration. There's still time for that, but not only has George W. so far failed to declare himself president-for-life, he's going out of his way to make things easy for the president-elect. He even bailed out Detroit, giving Barack Obama the opportunity to decry later his delaying the inevitable, when Detroit finally craters, or he can bail out the bailout later, as he hears opportunity knocking.
But bashing George W. is the only news that's fit to print in certain places: "There are plenty of culprits [to blame for bad economic news]," reported the New York Times, "like lenders who peddled easy credit, consumers who took on mortgages they could not afford and Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk. But the story of how we got here," (and here comes the curve ball), "is partly one of Mr. Bush's own making ... "
But we never get to the other "partly" bits, the parts about how "Wall Street chieftains who loaded up on mortgage-backed securities without regard to the risk," and how Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat of New York, and Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat of Massachusetts, did more than any other 10 men to insulate Fannie Mae from nosy regulators and effective federal supervision. Fannie and her senior executives - one of whom was (and maybe still is) Barney's special friend - grew rich on taxpayer largesse while blowing on the kindling of the fire that melted the subprime housing market.
The worthies at the New York Times are worried, like George W. himself, about his legacy. They all should know better; legacies are not plucked from the pantry shelf, but develop over the years without help or hindrance from either critic or legacee. George W.'s critics are spooked by what happened to Harry S. Truman, who straggled back to Missouri with the contempt of nearly everyone ringing in his ears ("to err is Truman") and within two decades became one of our most popular ex-presidents. Now is the time to blame the president for everything bad, and give him credit for nothing good. It's mere coincidence that America has been safe from Islamist terror every day since 9/11.

Merv at Gateway Pundit doesn't think bashing will end this January, or even this year. I suspect he will be blamed for everything that goes wrong until the end of Obama's stay in office. Then, if a Republican gets elected, he'll be the next scapegoat.

The Democrats' torture narrative

At National Review online:

According to the Levin report, the Bush administration reacted to 9/11 by "redefining" the law to permit aggressive interrogation tactics. Thus, the fable goes, in early 2002 the president determined that neither al-Qaeda nor Taliban fighters were entitled to prisoner-of-war treatment, in effect blocking application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and the "well established military doctrine" of "legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions." The administration then covertly set about having its Justice Department alter the legal definition of torture, the story goes, while its interrogators were schooled in illegal tactics by experts at the Defense Department. These techniques were employed by the CIA on important captives and became elements of a new warfare culture that spread to military interrogators at Gitmo and led, eventually, to the Abu Ghraib scandal. 

That narrative is flawed in its fundamental assumptions and fictional in its sweeping conclusions. The Bush administration did not "redefine" detainee treatment law; it undertook to determine what the law says and whom it covers. The intent of the Geneva Conventions, the principal law on the subject, is to civilize warfare by affording benefits, including an absolute bar against abusive treatment, to eligible prisoners of war — i.e., to captured soldiers who adhere to the laws of armed conflict, meaning, among other things, that they forgo intentionally endangering civilians. By definition, al-Qaeda is not qualified for Geneva protections because it is a terrorist organization: It is not one of the sovereign nations that signed the 1949 pacts, and it specifically targets civilians. Though the Taliban was the de facto government of Afghanistan, its fighters also target civilians and hide among them, and consequently they do not qualify for Geneva protections.

....

Prisoner abuse should not be taken lightly. There have been nearly two dozen detainee deaths reported, five of which are believed to have occurred during interrogations. But these episodes are endemic to warfare, not peculiar to the Bush era or a result of the president's policies. Abuse is not to be tolerated — and it isn't: dozens of U.S. military personnel have been disciplined and a number tried in courts-martial. There is a world of difference between relatively rare wrongdoing at the hands of a miniscule number of soldiers and a government program of torture. 

The torture narrative is at odds with the facts. The U.S. does not have a policy of torturing captives, nor does it fail to abide by its obligations under the Geneva Conventions. When abuse has occurred, steps have been taken to punish the wrongdoers and rectify military practices. Those efforts will continue. A sober study would have made that clear. Congressional Democrats have instead found it expedient to smear the administration, the military, and the intelligence community for political purposes.

Shoes fly, don't bother me

The news is full of accounts of an Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at the President during a press conference. From The Anchoress, I note:

In reading some of the forums, this commenter at Ann Althouse made a spot-on analysis that actually can be broadened.

Harsh Pencil wrote:

The reporter knows deep down that he can throw his shoe at Bush only because of Bush and it shames him. He can't forgive Bush for that.

Yes. Spot-on. And when I read that, I realized Harsh Pencil had articulated the sense I have had, since 2001, that Bush Derangement Syndrome was rooted in shame and fear. I remember reading a Maureen Dowd column written shortly after 9/11 in which she blathered on about no longer being able to occupy her time discussing which nylons she bought (or something like that - I told you, it was blather). While I cannot remember the column clearly, I remember the odd (for then) tone of resentment Dowd expressed in it toward Bush, and at the time I thought:

she is resentful that it is Bush who she must look to for safety, that it is the parental, cowboyish Bush who is protecting her, and not the adolescent Gore.

I'm pretty sure Bush Derangement Syndrome is nothing more than adolescent angst because "their side" did not get to lead and reassure and hold-steady in a time of danger and uncertainty. It's a larger demonstration of Bill Clinton's regret that 9/11 did not happen on his watch, so he could have a chance to be a "great" and wartime president.