Category: Networks

This is blackmail. This isn’t.

Robert McCartney was murdered by members of Sinn Fein/IRA recently, and his sisters will be spending St. Patrick’s Day with President Bush. The Telegraph reports that the McCartney sisters have been threatened by Sinn Fein/IRA:

The sisters of murdered Robert McCartney are on their way to the US for a St Patrick’s Day meeting with the president amid threats from Sinn Fein to keep out of politics.

The family and the partner of Mr McCartney fly to America for talks with George W Bush the day after Sinn Fein warned them not to enter politics.

Two Sinn Fein/IRA members are known to have been in the pub at the time of the killing, and neither has come forward with evidence, and now they’re telling the sisters to shut up. Isn’t that odd?

Immediately, Sinn Fein/IRA has tried to spin their threats as something else, but their statement was very clear: they told the sisters not to “cross the line into politics” with their grievance; I heard their man Martin McGuinness say this much on NPR.

We have RICO laws in the US to enable the authorities to deal with intimidation by mafia chieftains of the sort we’re seeing here. Why can’t the Brits simply take these reprehensible scum into custody and hang them like the dogs they are? (After a fair trial, of course.)

Bill Quick has an amazing story about the stupidity of the IRA:

Now, the arrogance and brutality of the IRA’s ‘hard men’ is looking to precipitate the greatest decline in SF’s fortunes in recent years. After an altercation in a Belfast pub on January 30th, 33 year-old Robert McCartney was beaten and stabbed to death. It soon became common knowledge that the murder had been carried out by a group of IRA hoodlums. Of course, there was initial denial, and then a bit of face-saving as Sinn Fein/IRA claimed to have expelled three of its members. That didn’t satisfy anyone – being booted out of an illegal mafia/terrorist organisation hardly meets the demands of justice. Now, in what is quite possibly the most bone-headed bit of PR idiocy I have ever seen, the IRA has extended the McCartney family an extraordinary offer: how about we shoot the guys responsible, and we’ll say no more? This has led to a huge furore of condemnation, as well it should, and Sinn Fein/IRA’s prospects of rejoining the power-sharing arrangement of the Peace Accords look to be postponed indefinitely.

The IRA should be opposed for Darwinian reasons, if not for brutality.

Vis a vis the demise of Dan Rather (today he says sayonara) and the radical movement toward democracy that’s taking root in the Middle East, I’d like to advise some of my friends among the dead enders to consult the prophet of the 60s, Mr. Bob Dylan:

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

When The Independent and the New York Times see what’s happening but you don’t, perhaps you need to open the Doors of Perception.

Just a thought.

March 15 is one of my favorite days of the year — it’s Eat an Animal for PETA Day, a time when all of us who love truth, justice, and barbeque can celebrate our reverence and respect for the things that matter.

My plan this year is to go with the grand slam: a little beef, some pork, a poultry, and a fish, because it’s the best way I know to celebrate diversity.

March 15th is the tastiest day of the year.

Highlight of the Independent’s cover story:

It is barely six weeks since the US President delivered his second inaugural address, a paean to liberty and democracy that espoused the goal of “ending tyranny in our world”. Reactions around the world ranged from alarm to amused scorn, from fears of a new round of “regime changes” imposed by an all-powerful American military, to suspicions in the salons of Europe that this time Mr Bush, never celebrated for his grasp of world affairs, had finally lost it. No one imagined that events would so soon cause the President’s opponents around the world to question whether he had got it right.

That debate is now happening, in America and beyond, as the first waves of reform lap at the Arab world. Post-Saddam Iraq has held its first proper election. In their own elections, Palestinians have overwhelmingly chosen a moderate leader. Hosni Mubarak, who for 24 years has permitted no challenge to his rule in Egypt, has announced a multi-candidate presidential election this year. Even Saudi Arabia is not immune, having just held its first municipal elections. Next time around, Saudi spokesmen promise, women too will be permitted to vote.

Most remarkably of all, perhaps, popular demonstrations in Beirut last week brought the downfall of one pro-Syrian government and – with the help of fierce pressure from Washington and the EU – the agreement by Syria to start withdrawing its troops in Lebanon.

Commenting on the Independent’s cover story, Michael Totten says:

These headlines are becoming more and more common these days.

Rupert Cornell, who wrote the cover story, says “As Syria pulls out of Lebanon, and the winds of change blow through the Middle East, this is the difficult question that opponents of the Iraq war are having to face.”

Sorry, I don’t mean to gloat, and I shouldn’t. It’s still possible that the whole thing will blow up in our faces and I’ll be the one who has to eat crow. I don’t think it will turn out that way, but I don’t know that it won’t. Nobody does.

What I find interesting here is that this shows the foresight of historians like Victor Davis Hanson. He has long argued that we should stop worrying about anti-American and anti-war jackassery and just win the damn war. If things work out in Iraq and the Middle East, he’s been saying, opposition to the U.S. and the war will largely evaporate. I have had my doubts about that since the opposition is often so reactionary and toxic. But this definitely belongs in his evidence column.

LGF is a little more succinct.

It’s a brave new world where conservatives champion democracy and change while liberals pout for the status quo. And strange.