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Conservative commentary served up in bite-sized bits.
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Thursday, December 19, 2002
Christmas vacation has started, and so you probably won't see much, if anything, of me through the end of the year. Merry Christmas, and a happy New Year! Wednesday, December 18, 2002
The web site AlterNet.org, according to their mission statement, certainly sounds as if it's nonpartisan. Well, I don't know about the rest of the site, but their War on Iraq section certainly leans (nay falls) liberal. And it has recently exhibited one of the classic symptoms of that; a lack of understanding of reality. In a December 16th posting, they reported lauded Sean Penn for "putting his body behind his anti-war rhetoric" and visiting Baghdad for a look at the people there who blood he imagines he'll have on his hands should we go to war with Iraq. Given the miniscule percentage of casualties of the last Gulf War that were civilians, one has to think those folks are pretty safe. They have only Saddam himself to fear if he ups the ante. However, what AlterNet isn't reporting, and what Sean Penn is shocked to discover is that Saddam used the visit to create propaganda for himself. Baghdad's online news service invented plenty of quotes to attribute to him, claiming that he condemned threats of war from the US and Britain, and that he confirmed that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. Penn, nor the liberal, ironically named Institute of Public Accuracy, apparently won't comment about the backstabbing from the fine Iraqi people he was there to comfort. Some have suggested that the anti-war crowd is essentially a pro-Saddam crowd, and that their actions give aid and comfort to the enemy. I wouldn't go that far in a generalization (although Saddam does...he says he's hoping they win the day), but Penn's actions certainly could exhibit that effect. His new moniker "Baghdad Sean" has been well earned. Again, it's a classic symptom of a liberal worldview. This doesn't come as a surprise to any clear-thinking person, but those who are totally taken aback by this turn of events are all of the same political persuasion. Wonder if AlterNet will, in their quest to provide "quality journalism, dependable research, issue-focused public interest content and passionate accuracy", will even give this turn of events a mention. Let's watch and find out. Monday, December 09, 2002
And speaking of not looking at history, Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America does some deconstructing of his own on the 9th Circuit court's decision on the Second Amendment. Considering how much judges rely on precedent, this has to be willful ignorance. Michael Medved has a great article deconstructing the top 10 anti-war arguments, just in time for political discussions during the holiday parties and dinners. Bon apetite! What a lot of this comes down to is parroting back anti-war excuses from the last half century replacing "Iraq" in the place of the last bad guy. It also requires taking a blind eye to history, which is never a good idea (as any historian will tell you). Neither of those actions is wise when one is debating something as serious as warfare. UN Weapons Inspections: Day 13: OK, so Iraq didn't make mustard gas during the time we had been kicked out of there, my mistake. They only started work on nuclear bombs. That's all. No biggie. Friday, December 06, 2002
Correction: According to James Taranto's "Best of the Web", the mustard gas artillery shells found in Iraq were not contraband. "In fact, inspectors had identified the weapons but didn't have time to destroy them before they were kicked out of Iraq in 1998. This time the inspectors were making sure the shells were still intact, as the Iraqis were not supposed to tamper with them--a somewhat perverse result of the U.N. resolutions, since it ended up leaving Saddam with weapons of mass destruction during the period with no inspections." I apologize for the error and conclusion-jumping. But I'm still watching. How much of the planet is still untouched wilderness? If you said "about half", you'd obviously not be an environmentalist. You'd also be right. Well, the first major winter storm has hit the US, and will probably (hopefully?) quiet the global warming debate, at least until spring. The Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal website has an interesting take on the global cooling going on, and how those predicting excess heat on our planet were in the recent past predicting excess cold. Thursday, December 05, 2002
UN Weapons Inspections: Day 9: Didn't get into the double-digits, and they've found "a powerful chemical weapon" already (specifically mustard gas in artillery shells). However, you'll have to do a bit of digging to find that out. In the AP article I've linked to, the fact that they were found isn't mentioned until the sixth paragraph, and the headline is "Iraq: Inspectors Spying for U.S., Israel". No thanks to the Associated Press for doing what it could to downplay this (but thanks to Jim Taranto's "Best of the Web" feature of OpinionJournal for pointing this out). OK then, time to send in the troops, or is the anti-war crowd going to concoct another excuse? |
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