Conservative commentary served up in bite-sized bits.

" Considerettes"?

"Warning: first examination of Considerettes suggests an excess of rational thought goes into that blog."
- Clayton Cramer

Comments, questions, cookie recipes? E-mail me! (frodo at thepaytons dot org)

Considerettes in the news:
UPI
Hugh Hewitt
Slate

<< Return to
"Consider This!"



Features
Georgia Marriage Amendment Rally
Considerettes Radio:

2004
2 /16/04 2 /23/04 3/ 5/04 3 /9/04 3 /10/04 3 /16/04 4 /1/04 4 /7/04 4 /21/04 5 /4/04 5 /6/04 6/ 1/04 6 /9/04 6 /16/04	7 /6/04 (1) 7 /6/04 (2) 7 /29/04 7 /30/04 8 /16/04 9 /1/04 9 /8/04 9 /13/04 9 /16/04 9 /24/04 1 0/6/04 1 1/9/04 1 2/9/04
2005
1 /11/05 1 /31/05 2 /28/05 3 /14/05 3 /21/05 5 /16/05 5 /23/05	8 /1/05 8 /10/05 9 /6/05

Considerettes for your PDA



Web Rings
p ? Atlanta Blogs # n
< GAwebloggers ? >

My other blog
Considerable Quotes
Contributor to
Stones Cry Out

My diaries at

(Commenting available)

I'm a reporter for BNN:
The Bloggers News Network





Ye Olde Blogroll

Join Fair Tax Fans

The Weekly Standard has a graphic of the back page of its May 5th issue on their web site. It's a parody, showing what "Ye Newe York Times" might have looked like on November 11, 1781, had the current liberal bent of the paper been evident back then. Good for a chuckle.
posted at 11:47 AM

Remember former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, the guy who claimed that Paula Jones, et. al. were just going after Clinton so they could get lucrative book deals?

He's got a book deal. (And by the way, Amazon doesn't list any books by Paula Jones.)
posted at 12:14 PM

I was out of town on business all last week, hence the dearth of postings. But I'm baaaaack. :)

OK, I'll admit it. I jumped way too fast on reports of WMD's discovered in Iraq during the war; reports that turned out to be false. I decided from then on to give some time to reports such as those to see if they passed scrutiny before passing them on and commenting on them.

And maybe I'm breaking my rule this time, but the London Telegraph is reporting today (free registration required for reading) that they have documents retrieved from the (former) Iraqi intelligence agency (Mukhabarat) describing from at least February 1998 a close relationship between al-Qaeda (and Osama bin Laden himself) and the Iraqi government. This of course proves what the Bush administration had a tough time proving before the war. They had some circumstantial evidence the Powell presented to the UN, but it wasn't very convincing. Now, however, they've been vindicated to a good degree, and can now more properly claim that the war in Iraq was, at least in part, a portion of the war on terrorism.

My hunch back then, during Powell's presentation, was that they had other evidence but didn't want to tip their hand quite as much as they did with the WMD-related photos and recordings. But they believed they had enough evidence that the connection was there, and that documents like these would show up following the war. That was a serious gamble, but it appears to have paid off.
posted at 10:47 PM

According to Taranto's Best of the Web Today, the Marines, in their own way, did what they could to protect the museum pieces.

And why didn't America stop such looting as did take place? Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz of the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division "said he couldn't move into the museum compound and protect it from looters last week because his soldiers were taking fire from the building--and were determined not to respond."

They couldn't stick around because they were being shot at, and they wouldn't shoot back with the big guns for fear of destroying things. Time for the carping to cease.
Oh, and not everything was lost. Taranto also quotes a Wall Street Journal article:

Thanks to Iraqi preparations before the war, it seems the worst has been avoided. Donny George, the director-general of restoration at the Iraqi Antiquities Department, Wednesday said his staff had preserved the museum's most important treasures, including the kings' graves of Ur and the Assyrian bulls. These objects were hidden in vaults that haven't been violated by looters.

"Most of the things were removed. We knew a war was coming, so it was our duty to protect everything," Mr. George said. "We thought there would be some sort of bombing at the museum. We never thought it could be looted."

Blame the looters, not the Marines.
posted at 5:18 PM

I've been trying to put into words how I feel about the left's hue and cry about the Baghdad museum that got ransacked and why the Marines didn't protect it vs. the rescue of children from Saddam's jails. Not to worry, though. Hugh Hewitt has done a masterful job in pointing out, not just the absurdity of the complaints, but the lack of discernment of the difference between good and evil.

Forced to choose between leaving the museum unharmed and freeing the children from the now infamous children's jail, which would you choose? On a broader scale, would you prefer the order of Saddam's regime, including the horrific practices of its jails, or a week of looting and chaos?

Even if there was no specific point in time when the choice between the museum and the jail was required, there are still priorities that need to be followed, and guarding a museum has got to be much farther down on the list than rescuing children.

And if one child died in there while we were guarding the museum, you gotta know that the left would be saying just the opposite. "Why were we guarding bones and pottery when children were dying?" They'd be right, but only by chance, because they're reflexively anti-military and the military would've been wrong to do that.

A good article, with many ramifications.
posted at 12:35 PM

Assuming

1 - Country A invades Country B.
2 - Country C drives Country A out of Country B.
3 - Country A signs a cease-fire agreement with Country C, contingent on certain conditions that must be met by Country A.
4 - Country A violates those conditions.
5 - Country C resumes hostilities.

Would the action represented by step 5 be considered:

A - As mentioned above, a resumption of hostilities started in step 2.
B - A new war in which Country C is making a pre-emptive strike.

If you answered A, you'd be right. And the fact is, you'd be right regardless of the time spent deciding on whether step 4 had actually occurred. For example, if it took 12 years (due to international foot-dragging) to come to the conclusion that the cease-fire agreement had been violated, you still couldn't answer B.

Well, I guess you could if you were stridently anti-Bush, or the New York Times...or both. The Times, reporting on their CBS/New York Times poll, said, "But a majority remains opposed to a policy of pre-emptive attack like the one President Bush invoked in invading Iraq...". However, the way the question is reported in the article suggests the Times was manipulating, not just the results, but the questions themselves.

Amid poll questions about the war with Iraq, the article says this:

And the nation has yet to embrace the tactical doctrine of pre-emption Mr. Bush advanced to justify the war in Iraq and, potentially, an invasion of Syria, North Korea or Iran. For example, 51 percent said the United States should not invade another nation unless it was attacked first.

First of all, the current hostilities with Iraq are the result of Iraq failing to comply with a cease-fire agreement and 18 UN resolutions. That cease-fire agreement was part of a war that was clearly backed by the international community. There was no pre-emption involved.

Further, the question imposes the belief that this war was pre-emptive on the respondent. The Times says the question was whether the United States should invade another nation pre-emptively. A "Yes" answer to this expands to, "Yes, this war was pre-emptive, and we should do it again", while a "No" answer says, "Yes, this war was pre-emptive, and we should not do it again". The premise of the question is false, but that one little word "another" no doubt flew by respondents, even those who didn't think this was a pre-emptive attack. When we're taking a poll, how many of us spend the time to carefully judge any hidden assumptions made by the question and just answer it quickly? Most, I'm sure. Thus the Times gets to proclaim a falsehood because it manipulated the question.

I really don't like poll reporting. It's simply the artificial generation of news, and the whims of people so easily change in these days of the 24-hour news cycle. But that doesn't stop organizations like these from using them and manipulating them. Granted, most of the rest of the numbers look very good for Bush, making them difficult to downplay. But be careful when reading polling data and look for hidden assumptions. A single word can make the difference.

And I wish journalists would learn a little bit of very recent history on this whole Iraq situation. The whole "pre-emptive" kick they're on doesn't stand up in the face of it. Once again (and again, and again), history refutes liberal catch-phrases and assumptions.
posted at 9:52 AM

I check my web server logs often, and today I noticed that someone came to this site from another conservative site called Anti-Pope. No, he's not plotting the downfall of Pope John Paul II. You'll have to read his FAQ to know what he means by that and where he stands on the issues.
posted at 8:58 AM

I was on vacation most of last week, and lacking phone access, but I did make one entry during that time so I could get it posted upon my return.

April 9, 2003, 7:18pm

I've been watching all day what's been going on in Iraq today; namely the symbolic fall of Saddam Hussein, as the people of Baghdad, with a helping hand from coalition forces, took down a relatively new statue of the man. It ain't over 'til it's over, as an embedded Yogi Berra might say, but the pictures today coming from all over Iraq certainly aren't what Bush's nay-sayers had in mind when they were saying their nays 3 weeks ago (and for many, as recent as 1 week ago).

On the O'Reilly Factor this evening, Bill and two others (Dick Morris and Douglas Brinkley, PhD) were discussing winners and losers in this. Losers included network media, the UN, the Democrats in general (and vocal anti-war ones in particular), and Vladamir Putin. Winners included the president of Spain (who stuck his neck out in publicly standing with the coalition), Tony Blair, and Hillary Clinton. Hillary was a winner because she voted for the "use of force" resolution, and then completely shut up on the issue while fellow Democrats dug their holes deeper with every nay. However, I wonder how long the attention span of the Democrat base will be. Will they realize that these folks just don't understand the world as it is today, and that they have no idea how silly predictions of World War III sound (so soon after making the same predictions before Afghanistan)? I hope they remember, but I'm not holding my breath.

My pick as a big loser in all this would be the alleged "peace" movement. The longer the war went, and the more they protested, the bigger Bush's numbers got. I think they were hoping to create another Vietnam-era groundswell, but they failed in a huge way. Some in the "peace" movement that went to Iraq as human shields were directly exposed to the most potent remedy for their idealism: reality. Once they saw the real Iraq, and real people telling them about their real suffering, they realized the folly of promoting a "peace" that merely meant continued killing and rape and torture. They realized that real peace, in these situations, comes from victory, not simply a lack of fighting.

Here's hoping it's over soon, and the people of Iraq can get to the business of self-government.
posted at 9:15 AM

With all the global warming going on, are today's average temperatures the highest in 1000 years, as some environmentalists claim?

Nope, not according to the latest review of 240 scientific studies on global temperature:

Such claims have now been sharply contradicted by the most comprehensive study yet of global temperature over the past 1,000 years. A review of more than 240 scientific studies has shown that today's temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather - in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists.

So when could it have possibly been warmer than now, with all the greenhouse gases man produces?

The findings prove that the world experienced a Medieval Warm Period between the ninth and 14th centuries with global temperatures significantly higher even than today.

They also confirm claims that a Little Ice Age set in around 1300, during which the world cooled dramatically. Since 1900, the world has begun to warm up again - but has still to reach the balmy temperatures of the Middle Ages.

Must've been all the exhaust from the horses.
posted at 12:55 PM

The Army's stumbled into nerve gas stashed in an Iraqi military complex and, of all places, an agricultural warehouse.

And NPR is reporting that a cache of medium-range missiles with sarin and mustard gas were found, ready to fire.

Hans Blix (and anti-war protestors), call your offices. You've missed a lot of messages.
posted at 12:37 PM

DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe is concerned by infighting among Democrat presidential candidates. Now, it's bad enough when politicians in the same party start making personal attacks on each other, but when McAuliffe realizes it, and actually says something about it, it must really be getting rough.

After all, this is the guy who painted such a rosy picture of last November's election outcome even when the Republicans made so many historic gains and wins. If he recognizes a problem, it must really be awful.
posted at 2:11 PM

Bob Beckel was a deputy secretary of State in the Carter administration, and national campaign manager for Walter Mondale. He's also in favor of the war in Iraq. Best part:

Having had several painful discussions with some of my closest friends, many of whom I've worked with for 30 years, I come away with the crux of the problem with their argument against this war. They all agree that Saddam Hussein is evil, but believe that thousands of Iraqi civilians will be killed by our troops and bombs. I don't know how many civilians have already died or surely will in the weeks ahead, not to mention our own troops.

There is only one certainty in this whole miserable situation. If Hussein is left in power, thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians will be killed

But anti-war protesters call that "peace", don't ya' know?
posted at 1:00 PM

In the US, perhaps there still is hope for the peace movement. None other that Nat Hentoff, writing for the Village Voice, says that, even if you don't buy the WMD reasons for going into Iraq, or if you do believe that it's all about oil, there is still at least one very, very good reason to take out Saddam anyway:

As I told The New York Sun in its March 14-16 roundup of New Yorkers for and against the war:

"There was the disclosure . . . when the prisons were briefly opened of the gouging of eyes of prisoners and the raping of women in front of their husbands, from whom the torturers wanted to extract information. . . . So if people want to talk about containing [Saddam Hussein] and don't want to go in forcefully and remove him, how do they propose doing something about the horrors he is inflicting on his people who live in such fear of him?"

Hentoff admits his lack of admiration for Bush (no real revelation there), but he goes on to savage the UN and Bill Clinton for not acting. And he lauds Tony Blair for his speech to the House of Commons laying out the humanitarian case for taking out Hussein.

What's most heartening to me about this article is that it's not a conservative piece preaching to a conservative choir in a conservative magazine. It's a Vietnam protestor who understands what the term "peace" really means writing to an audience many of whom need to learn it. This is cause for hope.
posted at 10:09 AM

The London Times is reporting some very disturbing news from that bastion of European sophistication, France:

• British war graves were desecrated in northern France, painted with, among other things, "May Saddam prevail and spill your blood".
  
• This is apparently not an isolated case of French extremism. A poll in Le Monde says that a third of the French are hoping for a victory by Saddam Hussein.
  

The French anti-war movement has been exposed to be as much a pro-Saddam movement as anything else. If they're really for peace, why would they prefer a murderous dictator be left in power? That's not peace! That may be the absence of a fighting war involving an outside country, but it's by no means peace.

It's about time the "peace" protestors defined their terms. There's been war going on in Iraq for decades. But it's all been internal, and apparently this doesn't fit the definition of "war" for far too many. But, as has been noted, as many, or more, people have died every year in Iraq since the Gulf War than died in the Gulf war itself! Allowing that to continue, and in fact hoping it does, is the height of hypocrisy and contradicts any supposed peaceful intentions on the part of those who wish for that.

And this from an alleged "ally". The next question is; how much of that sentiment has permeated the US "peace" movement?
posted at 9:47 AM