Category: Networks

George Soros’ stooge Duncan (Atrios) Black is whining about the so-called Chickenhawks who opposed Saddam even though they hadn’t actually been tortured or murdered themselves, so the Indepundit puts him in his place:

DUNCAN BLACK says Nathan Taylor should “sign up or shut up.”

I’ve never met Nathan Taylor. I’m guessing that Duncan hasn’t, either. Yet Duncan seems to be arguing that Nathan can’t support the war unless he is prepared to fight in it himself.

I’m not going to speculate as to why Nathan hasn’t enlisted. It’s his life, and he has to make his own choices. Not having met Duncan, I also won’t speculate as to why he wants Nathan to “shut up.” I thought liberals were supposed to believe in freedom of speech.

It’s not surprising that some of these free speech-deniers support the communist Chinese police state recently embarassed by hackers:

Police states, like China, have a serious problem with the Internet. They need it, for economic reasons. The Internet has become part of the worldwide economic infrastructure. But the Internet also allows unfettered exchange of information. For a police state, this is bad. A police state remains in power, in part, by controlling the media. China has a booming economy, and cannot afford to lock down, or keep out, the Internet, as has happened in police states with poor economies (North Korea, Cuba, Burma). So China is adding more software, and personnel, to police Chinese Internet users. So far, their approach has made many casual Internet users wary of saying, or looking for, anything the government does not approve of. But millions of more savvy Chinese Internet users know of ways to get around the “Great Firewall of China,” to do as they wish on the Internet. This attack on the Beijing General Security Service was just a reminder that the Chinese war on the Internet is far from over.

The Internet is the kind of disruptive technology feared by fascist powers.

You would think that dams would be a no-brainer in a country that gets all its rainfall in three months of the year and has no significant snowcap to slow its release into the rivers and the ocean, where most people still work in agriculture and where drought and starvation are constant problems. Certainly, every government in India has built them, and every political party has supported them, and they’ve done more than any other modern invention to raise living standards for the poor.

But along comes an expert who knows better than all these people, a person of such excellent insight in civil engineering and agriculture she puts all the experts to shame, exposing hidden facts that dams actually cause flooding, disease, and even earthquakes. This genius is Arundhati the novelist, champion of the poor:

Big Dams started well, but have ended badly. There was a time when everybody loved them, everybody had them – the Communists, Capitalists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists. There was a time when Big Dams moved men to poetry. Not any longer. All over the world there is a movement growing against Big Dams. In the First World they’re being de-commissioned, blown up. The fact that they do more harm than good is no longer just conjecture. Big Dams are obsolete. They’re uncool. They’re undemocratic. They’re a Government’s way of accumulating authority (deciding who will get how much water and who will grow what where). They’re a guaranteed way of taking a farmer’s wisdom away from him. They’re a brazen means of taking water, land and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich. Their reservoirs displace huge populations of people, leaving them homeless and destitute. Ecologically, they’re in the doghouse. They lay the earth to waste. They cause floods, water-logging, salinity, they spread disease. There is mounting evidence that links Big Dams to earthquakes.

That’s some heavy stuff.

Molly Ivins complains that the right twists liberals’ positions around:

Setting up a straw man, calling it liberal and then knocking it down has become a favorite form of “argument” for those on the right. Make some ridiculous claim about what “liberals” think, and then demonstrate how silly it is. Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and many other right-wing ravers never seem to get tired of this old game. If I had a nickel for every idiotic thing I’ve ever heard those on the right claim “liberals” believe, I’d be richer than Bill Gates.

So she clarifies things with this boner:

I think we have alienated our allies and have killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein ever did.

I think we should take Molly’s wishes to heart and carefully and correctly state her positions and those of people who think as she does.

It’s much more damning to use direct quotes like this one. Jeff Bishop has more.

Happy Independence Day.

Nixon called Indira Gandhi an “old witch” but she wasn’t as hostile to the US as Arundhati Roy, the narcissistic Indian novelist-turned-revolutionary who wants our enemies to hit us and hit us hard while she stands back and watches (login nobugs, pw bugmenot):

Personally I’m not prepared to pick up arms now. But maybe I can afford not to, at whatever place I am in now. I think violence really marginalizes and brutalizes women. It depoliticizes things. It’s undemocratic in so many ways. But at the same time, when you look at the massive amount of violence that America is perpetrating in Iraq, I don’t know that I’m in a position to tell Iraqis that you must fight a pristine, feminist, democratic, secular, non-violent war. I can’t say. I just feel that that resistance in Iraq is our battle too and we have to support it. And we can’t be looking for pristine struggles in which to invest our purity.

She’s basically aligned with Al Qaeda; it’s good to know that, in a “keep your enemies closer” sense.

H/t Michael Totten.

Politech relates some military reaction to the speech, all of it positive. Which leads him to this:

Memo to the left wingnuts who’ve been telling those who believe in the war (as an alternative to just leaving Saddam in power) that the chickenhawks need to join the military: it’s good to see that so many servicemembers and their families see the war as the president does. Now won’t you wackjobs please shut up?

May I propose that all who opposed the liberation of Iraq and called its civilian supporters “chickenhawks” please remove themselves to someplace like North Korea where they can experience the kind of life the Iraqis had under Saddam? Otherwise I may have to call them “terrorchickens”.

UPDATE: Mr. Goldstein is annoyed with the infantile name-calling as well:

One of the silliest arguments confronting pro-war supporters is the infantile “chickenhawk” accusation frequently floated by those swimming in the shallow end of the anti-war pool—the idea being, in theory, that if you aren’t a member of the military, you aren’t entitled to express a public opinion on the Iraqi war. Of course, in practice, non-military personnel such as those who are quick to use the chickenhawk argument are themselves permitted to express an opinion on the war—provided it’s the correct opinion, namely, that the war is illegal and immoral, and that Bush and his cronies are evil lying scum…

The idea that one need volunteer for military service in order to speak publicly in favor of the war creates any number of crazy analogues (for instance, is it okay to speak out against slavery if you’ve never owned or been a slave?)—not to mention presumes a commitment on the part of those anti-war speakers who invoke the chickenhawk argument to join the insurgency, should they wish to argue against the need for war.

Sadly, the chickenhawk argument, though logically puerile, can prove quite rhetorically effective—in the same sense that charges of homophobia and racism have proven effective in debates over gay marriage and government funded affirmative action programs: such charges, cynically delivered, tend to stifle substantive discourse, forcing one side of the argument onto the defensive by changing the focus of the debate from the issues themselves to the character of certain professors of those issues—and in that regard, they help to sustain the status quo.

Indeed.

Here’s your basic instant reaction from the Gallup Poll on the question of who’s winning in Iraq:

	U.S. and its allies	Insurgents in Iraq	Neither side	No opinion
2005 Jun 28 (Post-speech)	54%	7	35	4
2005 Jun 24-27 (Pre-speech)	44%	9	44	3

That’s bigger bump in “we’re winning” than I would have expected, and bad news for those Democrats who insist we aren’t fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq, let alone winning.

H/t Bill Quick.

Laurence Simon’s cat Edloe has gone to the great catnip patch in the sky.

Condolences.

It seems to me that the American people want to know if we’re winning or losing in Iraq. The message from the MSM is that we’re losing, which I doubt, but the President didn’t offer enough evidence to win over many of the fence-sitters. It was nice that he highlighted the fact that we’re fighting Al Qaeda on the streets of Baghdad and all, but the bottom line is what matters. If we’re making progress, the people will be patient, but if we’re not, they’ll just change channels.

Basically, he blew it tonight, so he should wait a month and do it again, this time with the evidence of success.

Here’s your basic transcript in case you didn’t hear it.

UPDATE: OK, the details are starting to come out, so maybe it wasn’t so bad; the President hit the high points, and the minions will supply the detail.

The good folks at Moveon.org have an automated letter-writer to respond to Chimpie McBushitler’s speech. You enter your name, and it tells you what you think:

It’s time to start responsibly coming home from Iraq.

The president offered nothing new in his speech. No plan. No exit strategy. Nothing.

Iraq is no closer to stability than it was a year ago. Things keep getting worse every week. More than 1,700 Americans have been killed and more than 12,000 wounded.

The U.S. occupation is fueling a growing insurgency. Our presence is exacerbating the problem. There are tens of thousands of insurgents backed by hundreds of thousands of supporters.

We got into this war based on lies – the wrong way. It’s time to get out the right way. The first step is to realize that the Bush policy is out of touch with reality.

We need a real exit plan with a real timeline providing real accountability for our leaders. We need to turn control of the training of Iraqi forces and the rebuilding of Iraq to the international community. And we must renounce permanent military bases in Iraq because that angers the Iraqi people.

Now don’t run over there and claim your name is Saddam and you want your palaces back.

H/T Captain Ed, who live-blogged the speech.

This is a cute little piece:

WASHINGTON, June 27 – Senators from both sides of the aisle competed on Monday to extol the humane treatment of detainees whom they said they saw on a weekend trip to the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. All said they opposed closing the center.

“I feel very good” about the detainees’ treatment, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said.

That feeling was also expressed by another Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

On Monday, Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, said he learned while visiting Guantánamo that some detainees “even have air-conditioning and semiprivate showers.”

Another Republican, Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, said soldiers and sailors at the camp “get more abuse from the detainees than they give to the detainees.”

In the last month, several senators, including some Republicans, have suggested that Congress should investigate reports of abuses at the detention center or that the military should close it to remove a blot on the country’s image.

One senator, Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, has come under criticism and apologized repeatedly for comparing reported abuses at the camps to treatment in Soviet gulags or Nazi concentration camps.

Poor old Durbin is getting the cold shoulder from his buddies on both sides of the aisle these days.