Crush Liberalism

Rangel would zero-fund Iraq war

From The Hill:

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) will chair the powerful Ways and Means Committee if Democrats win control of the House next year, but his main goal in 2007 does not fall within his panel’s jurisdiction.

“I can’t stop this war,” a frustrated Rangel said in a recent interview, reiterating his vow to retire from Congress if Democrats fall short of a majority in the House.

But when pressed on how he could stop the war even if Democrats control the House during the last years of President Bush’s second term, Rangel paused before saying, “You’ve got to be able to pay for the war, don’t you?”

Rangel’s views on funding the war are shared by many of his colleagues – especially within the 73-member Out of Iraq Caucus.

Some Democratic legislators want to halt funding for the war immediately, while others say they would allocate money for activities such as reconstruction, setting up international security forces, and the ultimate withdrawal of U.S. troops.

“Personally, I wouldn’t spend another dime [on the war,]” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.).

Woolsey is among the Democrats in Congress who are hoping to control the power of the purse in 2007 to force an end to the war. Woolsey and some of her colleagues note that Congress helped force the end of Vietnam War by refusing to pay for it.

There you have it. If Dems win the election, then Iraq will be zero-funded. If this isn’t a de facto strategy of “cut and run”, then Bill Clinton is a level-headed choir boy.

It’s quite simple, folks. If you believe that the “cut-and-run” approach is the best method in dealing with Iraq, then vote for Dems and it will be done. If, however, you fear that “cut-and-run” will send the same signal of weakness to the Dark Ages jihadist camelhumpers that prior administrations have sent (from Carter’s Iranian fiasco to Reagan’s Beirut withdrawal to Bubba’s limpwristed anemic reactions), then you must do your part to ensure that “Chairman Rangel” does not become a reality.

Choose wisely.

September 26, 2006 Posted by crushliberalism | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

"Declassify the Terrorism NIE"

If the administration doesn’t have enough hair on its scrotum to prosecute those who are violating federal law by leaking classified national security intelligence information to the obliging New York Treason, at the very least they could follow the Wall Street Journal‘s advice to declassify the entire National Intelligence Estimate:

As media scoops go, those based on “classified” information seem to have a special cachet. But judging from the latest, selective intelligence leak about terrorism, we wonder if anyone would bother to read this stuff if it didn’t have the word “secret” slapped on it.

That’s our reaction to Sunday’s New York Times report claiming that a 2006 national intelligence estimate, or NIE, concludes that “the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” according to one of the unidentified “intelligence officials” cited in the article. This is supposedly because the war has provoked radical Islamists to hate America even more than they already did before they hijacked airplanes and flew them into buildings. If this is the kind of insight we pay our spooks to generate, we’re in more trouble than we thought.

It’s impossible to know how true this report is, of course, since the NIE itself hasn’t been leaked. The reports are based on what sources claim the NIE says, but we don’t know who those sources are and what motivations they might have. Since their spin coincides rather conveniently with the argument made by Democratic critics of the war, and since this leak has also conveniently sprung in high campaign season, wise readers will be skeptical.

The White House responded yesterday by saying the full NIE on “Trends in Global Terrorism” is far more nuanced and complex than the press reports claim. Spokesman Tony Snow added that one “thing the reports do not say is that war in Iraq has made terrorism worse.” So here’s our suggestion for President Bush: Declassify the entire NIE.

It’s not as if NIEs usually contain sensitive raw intelligence. They’re more like Council on Foreign Relations reports, full of consensus analysis and glorified by the mere fact of being “secret.” To the extent that any passages might compromise sources and methods, those parts could be redacted or summarized. Meanwhile, disclosure would give the American public a valuable window into the thinking that goes on at places like the CIA. Since some of our spooks are leaking selectively to make the President look bad, Mr. Bush should return the favor by letting the public inspect the quality of analysis that their tax dollars are buying.

Releasing the NIE would also show that the White House has learned something since 2003, which is when the last pre-election bout of selective intelligence leaks began. That leak du jour claimed that an October 2002 NIE had contradicted Mr. Bush’s claims in his [RANDO]State of the Union address about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa. We happened to gain access to the complete NIE, however, and reported on July 17, 2003, that the leaked accounts were incomplete and misleading. The Senate Intelligence Committee vindicated our account a year later, but the Bush Administration could have reduced the political damage by declassifying that 2002 NIE immediately.

As for the substance of the 2006 NIE’s alleged claims, does anyone doubt that many jihadis are rallying against the American presence in Iraq? The newspapers tell us that much every day. Whether the war in Iraq has produced more terrorist hatred than would otherwise exist, however, is a matter of opinion and strategic judgment.

We recall, for example, that one of Osama bin Laden’s justifications for declaring war against the U.S. was American enforcement of sanctions and a no-fly zone against Iraq before the 2003 invasion. Bin Laden didn’t need the war to hate us. More broadly, the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan has deprived the jihadis of two safe havens and sources of funds. So while there are still many al Qaeda-type terror cells out there, there’s no reason to believe they are any more dangerous now than before April 2003. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the terrorists who was harbored in Iraq before the war, certainly isn’t any more dangerous; he’s dead.

The real issue at stake here is a political and policy fight over the future of Iraq. The Democrats claim that Iraq is a “distraction” from the war on terror and so a rapid U.S. withdrawal would leave the U.S. with more resources to fight elsewhere. Mr. Bush says Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror, and that withdrawing would create a vacuum that the Islamists would fill and give them a potential new state-supported base of operations. That’s the choice voters really ought to be thinking about as they go to the polls in November, and if the NIE has something useful to say about that debate, Mr. Bush should disarm the selective leakers in his bureaucracy by making it public.

Actually, as I put this together, I see that the White House may be doing just as the WSJ proposes.

September 26, 2006 Posted by crushliberalism | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

"Islamic Fascism 101"

Quick, someone get this column by Victor Davis Hanson over to Sen. Feingold’s office before he bitches about the term “Islamic fascism” again. Excerpts:

Make no apologies for the use of “Islamic fascism.” It is the perfect nomenclature for the agenda of radical Islam, for a variety of historical and scholarly reasons. That such usage also causes extreme embarrassment to both the Islamists themselves and their leftist “anti-fascist” appeasers in the West is just too bad.

First, the general idea of “fascism” — the creation of a centralized authoritarian state to enforce blanket obedience to a reactionary, all-encompassing ideology — fits well the aims of contemporary Islamism that openly demands implementation of sharia law and the return to a Pan-Islamic and theocratic caliphate.

In addition, Islamists, as is true of all fascists, privilege their own particular creed of true believers by harkening back to a lost, pristine past, in which the devout were once uncorrupted by modernism. (Sounds much like the Unabomber, doesn’t it? – Ed.)

True, bin Laden’s mythical Volk doesn’t bath in the clear icy waters of the Rhine untouched by the filth of the Tiber; but rather they ride horses and slice the wind with their scimitars in service of a soon to be reborn majestic world of caliphs and mullahs. Osama bin Laden sashaying in his flowing robes is not all that different from the obese Herman Goering in reindeer horns plodding around his Karinhall castle with suspenders and alpine shorts.

Because fascism is born out of insecurity and the sense of failure, hatred for Jews is de rigueur. To read al Qaeda’s texts is to reenter the world of Mein Kampf (naturally now known as jihadi in the Arab world). The crackpot minister of its ideology, Dr. Zawahiri, is simply a Dr. Alfred Rosenberg come alive — a similar quarter-educated buffoon, who has just enough of a vocabulary to dress up fascist venom in a potpourri of historical misreadings and pseudo-learning. (Actually, that describes a lot of American leftists, too. You know, they learn just enough to give the illusion that they’re not profoundly stupid? – Ed.)
…
Fifth, fascism springs from untruth and embraces lying. Hitler had contempt for those who believed him after Czechoslovakia. He broke every agreement from Munich to the Soviet non-aggression pact. So did the Japanese, who were sending their fleet to Pearl Harbor even as they talked of a new diplomatic breakthrough.

Al-Zawahiri in his writings spends an inordinate amount of effort excusing al Qaeda’s lies by referring to the Koranic notions of tactical dissimulation. We remember Arafat saying one thing in English and another in Arabic, and bin Laden denying responsibility for September 11 and then later boasting of it. Nothing a fascist says can be trusted, since all means are relegated to the ends of seeing their ideology reified. So too Islamic fascists, by any means necessary, will fib, and hedge for the cause of Islamism. Keep that in mind when considering Iran’s protestations about its “peaceful” nuclear aims.

We can argue whether the present-day Islamic fascists have the military means comparable to what was had in the past by Nazis, Fascists, and militarists — I think a dirty bomb is worth the entire Luftwaffe, one nuclear missile all the striking power of the Japanese imperial Navy — but there should be no argument over who they are and what they want. They are fascists of an Islamic sort, pure and simple.

And the least we can do is to call them that: after all, they earned it.

Sorry, Feingold, but if it’s all the same to you, we in normal America are going to continue referring to our enemies as they are and not as you would have them to be.

September 26, 2006 Posted by crushliberalism | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Quote of the day

From Saddam Hussein, via CBS (I checked other sites to verify that this story was not forged “fake but accurate”):

The chief judge in Saddam Hussein’s genocide trial threw the ex-president out of the courtroom Monday in a stormy session boycotted by the former ruler’s defense team.

“I have a request here that I don’t want to be in this cage anymore,” said Saddam, referring to the court. He waved a yellow paper before he spoke to chief judge Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa.

Really? I wonder if any Kurds said to Saddam that “we have a request here that we don’t want to be gassed anymore!” Maybe some Iraqi girls said to Saddam or one of his crazy camelhumping sons that “we have a request here that we don’t want to be raped anymore!” Perhaps some dissidents begged Saddam that “we have a request here that we don’t want to be fed feet-first into a wood chipper anymore!”

“Want” in one hand, “sh#t” in the other…and see which gets full faster. Tough luck, you genoicidal b#tch!

September 26, 2006 Posted by crushliberalism | Uncategorized | Leave a Comment