Lies become truth when they support your cause.

Another example of media incompetence. The rush for a sensational headline that doubles as "evidence" for their cause. In reality, it is a blow to the US in a war of information verses propaganda. Who's side is our media on?

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...six Iraqi Sunnis were dragged from a mosque in Baghdad last week, doused with kerosene, and burned to death by a Shia mob.
...

The Associated Press ran the dousing story on November 24 and the story was repeated world-wide....

Sensational, "headline-generating" elements absolutely jam the story: gruesome savagery, mob action, chaos in Iraq.

The AP identified "Police Captain Jamil Hussein" as its source for the story, with a second source identified as "a Sunni elder."

On November 25, the press office of Multi-National Corps-Iraq (MNCI) published press release... stated that investigation showed only one mosque had been attacked and found no evidence to support the story of the six immolated Sunnis.

an email from MNCI to the AP that states "...neither we nor Baghdad Police had any reports of such an incident after investigating it and could find no one to corroborate the storyWe can tell you definitively that the primary source of this story, police Capt. Jamil Hussein, is not a Baghdad police officer or an MOI employee."

...the AP has quoted "Jamil Hussein" in at least eight stories since April 2006.

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Before you read a story, know who's side they are on.

Victor Davis Hanson is writing regularly at PajamaMedia. Here he continues to state the obvious that a majority cannot see.

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The problems in Iraq, in the radical Middle East at large—with democratization, with nuclearization, with Islamism—are not, repeat not, a lack of dialogue with Syria and Iran.

We know what both rogue states wish and it is our exit from the Middle East and thus a free hand to undermine the newly established democracies of Lebanon and Iraq—in the manner that all autocracies must destroy their antitheses.

They both sponsor and harbor terrorists for a reason—to undermine anything Western: a Western-leaning Lebanese democracy, a Western-style democracy in Iraq, a Westernized Israel, or soldiers of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.

...democracy is as destabilizing to them as jihadism is to us...

...millions of us still out there who, Jacksonian in spirit, close ranks and will support our troops wherever they are. But we simply cannot ask Americans to die in Anbar province while talking to the Iranians and Syrians who are doing their best through surrogates in killing them.

Becuz the Jew taste gud

Yesterday, a member of the Lebanese cabinet was assassinated. This is part of the process by which Syria will retake control of the Lebanese government. And you can follow along at home with Michael Totten:

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UPDATE: ...The Hezbollah/Syrian axis has been trying to bring down the government by pressuring three more members to resign. One down, two to go. Looks like the coup d'etat is in progress.

UPDATE: Another member of Lebanon's political cabinet, Michel Pharaon was targetted with assassination today. He survived. But if the bastards had gotten him, the government would have fallen and stage one of the coup would be over.

UPDATE: Hezbollah is planning massive street "protests" on Thursday. Tony Badran notes: "This assassination will likely ensure that if such street rallies do take place, clashes would erupt, as it's clear that the Syrians are set on that. (Just another reminder for the idiots who believe Syria is a force of "stability.") Syria has a primary objective that outweighs everything else: kill the Hariri tribunal, and redominate Lebanon at any cost..."


UPDATE: Mary Madigan is frustrated with fools who want to sit down and "talk" (in other words, cut deals) with Syria and Iran:

Discussions about Middle East politics remind me of a bit from a comic, Pearls Before Swine. One of the characters is a Zebra, who can't understand why the lions keep eating his fellow Zebras. So, he writes a letter to the lions filled with philosophical questions about peace, understanding and the nature of being, asking why can't they all get along, why can't they be friends..

The answer comes back from the lions "we eat Zebras becuz you taste gud."

UPDATE: The UN Security Council approved the tribunal that will put the Assad regime and its Lebanese tools on trial.

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Oh, Great. The UN to the rescue. Isn't that how we got here? To those who wanted Israel to stop fighting, this is what it has become. The wound is festering, again, and soon it will be time for the painful task of cleaning out the wound, again, or risk losing the leg.

AD

I was directed to Jules Crittenden via Instapundit. Jules references MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction):

"It's a policy I call Assured Destruction, because unlike the Cold War, there doesn't have to be anything mutual about it. "

When I read this, I though, "He's probably right. Iran will nuke Israel, and we won't have the stone to "destroy" back. We'll fight our PC war in retaliation for the annihilation of a people."

But, as they say, "read the whole thing". Jules's policy is in the preceding paragraph:

"If in fact we find an actual nuclear weapon, or one explodes anywhere in the world, the Iranians -- and the North Koreans as well -- need to know that we will assume it was theirs, and act accordingly."

Funny (or sad) how the mind works....

It's how it ends that counts.

We're in Iraq so that it doesn't become an Afghanistan, an Iraq (under Saddam) or Iran or Syria or Hezbollah or Gaza....

From Investor's Business Daily:

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A nation that's defended Europe from aggression in the 60 years since World War II is asking why Iraq can't defend itself.
...

Yes, we should demand more of the Iraqis. But those who ask whether we can or should stop Iraqis from killing themselves forget that we're in this to stop others from killing us and using Iraq as a base camp from which to do it.

We've been Europe's security blanket for six decades. We are Japan's security blanket. We are South Korea's.

... We forget that this war really began when a truck bomb went off in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in 1993, nearly killing tens of thousands.

Iraqis — civilians, military and police — are risking their lives for their country every day, from the millions who proudly held up their purple fingers to the young police applicants who are murdered as they line up to serve their country. Then more line up in their place.

Are the Arabs ready for democracy or are they doomed by an ingrained tribalism? We need only to look at Lebanon, where a multicultural democracy once flourished. Beirut was called the Paris of the Middle East until the country became a human shield for the PLO and then Hezbollah terrorists supported by Syria and Iran.

The Lebanese might have sustained their multicultural democracy had we not cut and run after Hezbollah killed 241 Marines in Beirut in 1983, deciding we could no longer afford to be Lebanon's security blanket. Sometimes democracies need a little help from their friends.
...

Democracy is a fragile and rare commodity. We forget how close this government of the people and by the people actually came to perishing from the earth. It might not ever have come into being if a French fleet hadn't provided a security blanket at Yorktown.

Well, it didn't take long.

More Evidence that the Democrats are threatening to give in to the terrorists, from Andrew Olmsted. And if he's right, they want out, now, so that they don't have to deal with it in '08. And the mess pulling out creates can all be blamed on Bush.

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I see that the Democrats are now ready to start pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq. While I suppose this is no surprise, I'm disappointed to see it. The Democrats have rightly pointed out that Republicans acted without gathering all appropriate data, leading to problems like Iraq. Yet now they're poised to do precisely the same thing.

With all due respect to the Democratic leadership, I'd be impressed to learn that this move was being made on the basis of extensive discussion with military and political leaders from the U.S. and Iraq. I suspect instead that the Democrats have pretty much always wanted to be out of Iraq and want to get the question of Iraq off the table.
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Combine this with Pelosi's endorsement of Murtha for Majority Leader, and you see the new face of the US. A face I believe most of America does not want.

After Reflection, It's Time to Carry-on

Ok, so the republicans lost the majority. But we're still here. And we need to speak louder than before since we are not the balance.

As we feared, and as was stated by the conservative media, the Democrats have started to take steps and to indicate that they are going to surrender. They may not, still. They may not be able to with slim margins in the House and Senate. There are still many democrats who believe that we need to be victorious in Iraq. But the new leadership is sending out messages that they want hand victory to the enemy. A victory that will be far more painful that 9/11 some day.

Josh Treviño at The Claremont Institute writes:

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Kaplan's essay, reprinted here, invokes two military debacles of the recent past: Beirut in 1983, and Mogadishu in 1993. Each featured a shocking toll of Americans killed in spectacular fashion, and each saw a swift American withdrawal thereafter. The respective retreats were justified by the political leadership on the grounds that the American people had thereby turned against the mission. Kaplan demolishes this rationale, noting that in each case, American popular support for decisive action rose in the aftermath of the respective tragedies, collapsing only after the political leadership decided to withdraw. This pattern is shown to hold true even against the mythos of Vietnam: Americans turned away from that cause not because of the toll in young men, but because they lost their belief in the political leadership's will or ability to win.
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Don't let this history be repeated again. We know all too well what happened on 9/11.

Democracy Rules

As usual, there are plenty of people out there that can summarize how I feel about the election better than I. Below is just a couple at random. Bottom-line: Democracy at work. The country will benefit in the end. I have faith in our system.

Dean Barnett (Hugh Hewitt)
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Most importantly, we didn’t lose because our countrymen suddenly misplaced the virtues that make America great. It is a distinctly liberal trait to blame “the people” when they don’t vote as one would dictate. I’ll brook none of that from our side. The fact is, we thought our country would be better off with a Republican congress. We made a case to the American people. They didn’t buy it because they thought it was a weak case.

And you know what? They were right. In the closing weeks of the campaign season, I felt like I was a lawyer who had a bad client while writing this blog. That client was the Republican Party which had broken its Contract with America from 1994 and had become unmoored from its conservative principles. As its advocate, I couldn’t make a more compelling case for Republicans staying in power than the fact that the Democrats would be worse. I believed in that case, but when that’s all the party gave its advocates to work with, you can honestly conclude that Republicans got this drubbing the old fashioned way – we earned it.


And Bill Quick via Instapundit
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Remember: what happened last Tuesday wasn't a disaster. It was Democracy. It was a disaster only for those who believe that there should be one permanent ruling party, no matter how decadent, treacherous, and sleazy that party is.

Be of good cheer. The Republicans will be back in 2008, and much better for what happened to them in 2006.

Finally a couple quotes at Eject!Eject!Eject!
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"The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first, the love of soft living and the get rich quick theory of life." -- Teddy Roosevelt

"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities." -- Winston Churchill

Take 2: Israel vs. Lebanon (Hezbollah-Syria-Iran)

The Belmont Club refers to a Michael Totten article reporting on Lebanon. Michael sees war breaking out again in this region. And, as stated by Wretchard at the Belmont Club:

"Most people knew this would happen, including some I think, who called most loudly for a ceasefire. Not because they were malevolent but because of a deep-seated human desire to avoid a present unpleasantness even if it means worse in the future."

From Michael Totten:

Most Lebanese fear and loathe Hezbollah precisely because they fear Nasrallah points his guns at Beirut and Tel Aviv at the same time. NasrallahÂ’s current belligerence proves theyÂ’re correct.

The Israelis may have temporarily depleted HezbollahÂ’s arsenal stock, but it makes little difference. Syria and Iran are arming them all over again.

Charles Malik says sectarian clashes are a routine occurrence and are rarely mentioned in local or international media.

ThereÂ’s a case to be made that Lebanon is at war even now, not only with Israel and Syria but with itself. As Bart Hall put it at Winds of Change: “"Peace is the absence of threat not the absence of conflict."”

It's not Worth the Risk?

The Examiner quotes Senator Rick Santorum on the eve of his reelection:

"The war is at our doorsteps and it is fueled, figuratively and literally, by Islamic fascism nurtured and bred in Iran,"“ Santorum warned. "… Many Americans are sleepwalking, just as they did before the world wars of the last century. They pretend it is not happening, that it all has to do with the errors of a single American administration, even of a single American president. … It'’s time to wake up."

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This is a perfect example for tomorrow's election. A Senator who believes that there is a war going on and that there are armies that want to destroy America and everyone in it. And an opposition that has "not yet demonstrated that they recognize our peril."

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We know only that they have urged withdrawal from Iraq, but are always vague about what happens after that. And they have consistently opposed every means of intelligence-gathering that has clearly prevented new terrorist attacks and thus saved countless lives.

The Damage is Done

It's unfortunate that as we get further from events, details become more clear. Someday we will see that the Bush Administration (and Congress, and Britain and the UN) was a lot closer to being right than wrong about WMD in Iraq. But that won't change the minds of those who have already been convinced that "Bush lied". What a shame that people have been mislead my the political system and a biased mainstream media.

Captain's Quarters, 11/03/2006
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...The Times has just authenticated the entire collection of memos, some of which give very detailed accounts of Iraqi ties to terrorist organizations. Just this past Monday, I posted a memo which showed that the Saddam regime actively coordinated with Palestinian terrorists in the PFLP as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. On September 20th, I reposted a translation of an IIS memo written four days after 9/11 that worried the US would discover Iraq's ties to Osama bin Laden.

It doesn't end there with the Times, either. In a revelation buried far beneath the jump, the Times acknowledges that the UN also believed Saddam to be nearing development of nuclear weapons. . . . The Times wanted readers to cluck their tongues at the Bush administration for releasing the documents, although Congress actually did that. However, the net result should be a complete re-evaluation of the threat Saddam posed by critics of the war. Let's see if the Times figures this out