Can I get an amen from the blogosphere?

If any other industry were doing as much public harm by producing a similarly substandard product, the press would be screaming for the government to take action.

Glenn Reynolds on Aussie PM Alexander Downer's critcism of inaccurate Israeli-Hezbo war reporting.

Meet the enemy and understand

As you might expect, the MSM has missed (or perhaps avoided) a wonderful teachable moment in the release of Fox's Steve Centanni and freelance camera dude Olaf Wiig. Howard Kurtz noted the conspicuous absence of coverage by other major media outlets:

Still, the kidnapping received no mention on the CBS, ABC or NBC nightly news until the first hostage video was released Wednesday. The relative paucity of coverage, compared with the intensive chronicling of (Jill) Carroll's captivity, may have reflected the fact that there are many more journalists in Iraq, and that the war in that country is a focus of far greater debate in the United States than the long-running conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Wartime or not, television also tends to play up kidnappings involving young women, which often become cable melodramas.

Or it could be due to the disdain with which Fox is regarded by the rest of the MSM due to its perceived conservative bent.

But the teachable aspect came not with acknowledging that the kidnapping had taken place, but with the broadcast of Centanni's and Wiig's conversion to Islam at the point of a gun.

Rather than simply reporting that the two journalists had been released unharmed, what should be of note to everyone concerned is this brief but all-too-clear look into the kind of world that the jihadis are trying to bring about. One in which the infidels either renounce their heathen religion and convert to Islam or get a bullet in the head.

It's very fashionable among leftists and Bush haters to preach that we only need to understand why they hate us and address their greivances. If we only would listen to them, they won't hate us any more and they won't threaten us with terrorism. Bush is too simplistic and hard-headed. He sees everything in black and white. What we need is a more, um, sophisticated and nuanced approach.

Hogwash. What should be painfully evident is that we're fighting against people with whom talk, reasoning and negotiation are of no use whatsoever. The Islamic fascists want to kill anyone who won't convert to the violent, extremist version of Islam to which they subscribe. Our only option is to find them, fight them, and defeat (read kill) them. If we do not, they will surely fight against us (as they have for two decades) and will happily repeat the Centanni/Wiig conversion exercise with the rest of us every chance they get.

Really, what else needs to be said?

Harold Evans in The Guardian:

The civil rights lobbies are working from a passé play book. They are blind to the lethal nature of the new Salafist totalitarianism. They won't recognize that we are facing an irrationalist movement immune to compromise and dedicated to achieve its ends of controlling every aspect of daily life, every process of the mind, through indiscriminate mass slaughter. It is a culture obsessed with death, a culture that despises women, a culture devoted to mad hatreds not just of Americans and Jews everywhere, but of Muslims anywhere who embrace a less totalitarian, less radical, more humane view of Islam. These Muslims are to be murdered, and have been in their thousands, along with "the pigs of Jews, the monkeys of Christians" and all the "dirty infidels".

Nor is the repellent language of hate limited to recognized terrorist groups like al-Qaida, Hizbullah and Hamas. It is in the school textbooks in palestine and in the schools of our "ally", Saudi Arabia. They promised to clean them up but a recent Washington Post investigation showed the books still tell the young they have a religious obligation to wage jihad against not only Christians and Jews but also Muslims who do not follow the xenophobic Wahabi doctrine. . . . These are historic fault lines. The right tolerated fascism in the thirties, the left Soviet Communism in the fifties. Of course these two earlier totalitarian movements were different in nature and our response when it came was not always well judged - the tendency is to think first of the excesses of the right typified by the witch hunts of the odious McCarthy, but we should remember, too, that the Democratic party in the immediate postwar years of Henry Wallace would have abandoned Europe just as the left in the eighties would have left Europe at the mercy of the new Soviet missiles.

The apologists for the Islamo-fascists - an accurate term - leave millions around the world exposed to a less obvious but more insidious barbarism.

Move right along...

Nothing to see here. Just because Osama and Ali had airline manifests, airport security information and a cache of untraceable cell phones, you shouldn't draw any hasty conclusions.

As the news item says, "It wasn't clear what significance the airline information might have."

Hmm. Let's think on that for a minute. Nope, nothing immediately comes to mind.

Re-McGovernization

You'd think they'd have learned their lesson the first time. Evidently, the Democrats are determined to - as is their want - snatch defeat from the jaws of victory yet again.

By booting Joe Lieberman and lurching leftward on the war, they will again sew the seeds of doubt in the minds of mainstream swing voters about the Dems trustworthiness on the one subject that is the most crucial at this point in our history. The netroots crowd (read Kos denizens) is dislocating their shoulders in their rush to pat themselves on the back and it's hard to argue that they had the critical role in focusing the far left's collective anger at Lieberman.

What they've tried to do here is create yet another litmus test for Democratic Party electability (this from the people who are always the first to complain long and loud that the Republicans are the ones that dip the paper). The first and most famous is, of course, that of abortion. As a practical matter, no one in the party that isn't pro-abortion can be elected to anything above local office.

The question is, did they accomplish this? Is there now a new line in the sand (support for the war) that no Democrat can cross? And I would suggest that, while the party center has certainly moved left, the Kossacks significantly overestimate their own power. Connecticut is a deep blue northeastern state that is in no way representative of the country as a whole. It was the ideal crucible for the nutroots to try to flex their muscles and Lamont had an unlimited personal fortune to spend on the campaign. These perfect conditions won't be duplicated anywhere else in the country.

That's not to say that the Republicans still don't have an excellent chance of losing the House (and probably deserve to). But if electing an empty suit like Lamont, whose only real issue is "bring the troops home tomorrow," does nothing else it will probably put enough of a scare into anyone who cares about the war with Islamofacism that it will make them think twice about putting Democrats in a responsible position. This is simply a fight that we can't aford to lose.

House races tend to turn more on local rather than national issues (let alone international ones), but the war is the kind of issue that can nationalize an election. If so, this should redound to the Republicans' benefit. The prospect of Speaker Pelosi can't give anyone a really comforatble feeling if they care at all about the importance of American military success in the next decade.

The John Wayne approach

Ouch. Another must-read from Mr. Hitchens in todays Journal. Some rather awkward questions for the administration. As always, read the whole thing.

Echoes of the 1930s

Along the lines of my Achilles post, below, is an excellent piece today by Victor Davis Hanson.

And finally examine here at home reaction to Hezbollah which has butchered Americans in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia from a prominent Democratic Congressman, John Dingell: "I don't take sides for or against Hezbollah." And isn't that the point, after all: the amoral Westerner cannot exercise moral judgment because he no longer has any?

Read the whole thing.

Swiftboats, ahoy!

As you might expect, a number of current and former servicemen, along with war-effort supporters on the conservative side have had just about enough of John Murtha's late life crisis and need for his 15 minutes. Accordingly, they've started a web site designed to do to him what the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth did for John Kerry.

Save the penguins!

For God's sake, save the penguins!

Heh.

Is Fidel on the roof?

There's a very old joke that just may apply to the current situation in Cuba.

A man goes on vacation and asks a friend to take care of his cat. The man calls a few days later to ask about he cat and the friend blurts out, "the cat is dead." The man is shocked and after composing himself, tells his friend that he could have handled the situation a little more tactfully.

"How should I have handled it?" asks the friend. "Well," the man says, "the first time I called, you could have said that the cat's on the roof and we're trying to get him down. At the next call, you could have said that we got the cat down, but he has a cold. Then tell me that the cold is worse, but the vet is working on him. Then finally tell me that they did everything they could, but the cat has died."

"Oh, I see," the friend says. "Sorry I didn't handle the situation very well."

"That's OK," says the man. "You're a good friend for volunteering to take care of the cat for me while I'm out of town. By the way, have you heard from my mother?"

"Well," the friend says after a pause, "your mother's on the roof and we're trying to get her down."
-----------------------------------
How might this oldie-but-goodie apply to the ailing Fidel and the workers' paradise 90 miles to our south? Other than a flotilla of US Navy transports landing on their beaches, nothing would throw a scare into the ruling junta more than Fidel's sudden death. The reaction of Cuba's prisoners...er, populace would be difficult to predict. Far better to break it to them slowly, letting them absorb the reality of what they've been dreaming of for 47 years - life without their beloved dictator.

Instead, Raul and his fellow thugs are likely rounding up the generals and consolidating their control to make sure that there are no surprises when the news breaks. The planning has probably gone on for years amid hopes that el jefe doesn't simply crap out at the podium during a five hour stem-winder and has the good grace to die in private where the process can be controlled.

I'll bet you a milkshake Castro's never seen alive again.

The west's Achilles heel

Many wonder why we seem to have slowly slipped further into a September 10th mindset over the last few years. This depsite atrocities like those in Bali, Madrid and London. Incidents like those in Chapel Hill and last week's Seattle mass shooting, not to mention arrests in Buffalo, Florida and others that escape me, haven't been enough to drive home the point that we really are at war with people that want to kill us all.

There are many reasons for this. Part of the blame can be laid on the President and the administration. With a few notable exceptions, it's hard to imagine a worse job of articulating why we're fighting and who we're fighting against. Then there's the fact that, despite all expectations immediately after 9/11, we haven't taken another significant hit. This must surely be due to good work by our national security apparatus as well as the national-security-above-all attitude of the President.

We can also look to the American left and the media when considering the lack of a war-time attitude in the U.S. Their obvious tack of treating George Bush and the Iraq war as a more immediate threat to American security than anything the terrorists may be dreaming up has, over time, had its desired effect. Frivolous items such as the Plame affair, as well as the attempt to criminalize (in the mind of the American public) security measures such as phone call monitoring and international bank transactions have worn on the collective will, too.

However, despite these and other recent factors, another more long-term change in the American (and Western) psychological make-up has had a more profound effect on our will to see and confront threats that should otherwise be self-evident and that is the long-term effect of the cult of multiculturalism and 'cultural sensitivity' on our colllective self worth.

Mark Steyn, in an article in Macleans, articulates this as well as anyone has:

In "Multiculturalism and The Politics Of Recognition," a very early entry into the field, Charles Taylor writes: "It makes sense to demand as a matter of right that we approach the study of certain cultures with a presumption of their value . . . But it can't make sense to demand as a matter of right that we come up with a final concluding judgment that their value is great, or equal to others." ...But, given that multiculturalism is principally an exercise in Western self-abasement, the presumption of greater value is the entire point. The problem, pace Taylor, is not that Group A holds values that are incompatible with Group B, but rather that Group A holds no values at all. In the modern multicultural state, we accord all values equal value: in effect, our values are that we have no values -- and so the best way we can demonstrate our lack of values is by deferring to those values most antipathetic to us.

With each new assault on human decency by someone named Ahmed or Ali, the first words out of the mouths of politicians and the press is invariably something to the effect of, "...while the accused was a member of the Acme mosque, there's no evidence whatsoever that the crime was terror-related... ." Uh huh.

This kind of boilerplate qualification is now de rigeur in order to conform to what have become the requirements of modern political correctness. Right thinkers everywhere feel morally obligated to begin any sentence referring to Muslim fudamentalist terror with the qualification that, of course Islam is a religion of peace and most Muslims are good people who despise the terrorists. Sure it may be hard to tell if this is purely P.C. pap or if maybe there's a certain amount of fear mixed in, but it's garbage nonetheless. You only have to look to old Europe to see where this has gotten them. They're just waking up to the fact that they're in real danger of losing their societies.

The heavy weight of white, western guilt (due to our wealth, our modernity, our culture, our Imperialist ancestors, whatever) and the incessent preaching of that guilt by sixties era socialists that have largeley taken over universities, foundations and the press in the last generation have had the desired effect of wearing down our will to believe that our society is not merely as good and morally valid as that of the Muslim world, but is in all way superior. Our moral backbone has been softened and our willingness to endure a long hard slog, as the war on Islamo-facism must surely be, has been significantly diminished. Any time we see a Lebanese civilian casualty, the first thought isn't that it's an unfortunate consequence of fighting the scum who use civilians as human camouflage. No, most think to themselves that war itself is the enemy and that Israel must stop its barbaric assault on these people.

It may take, God forbid, another body blow or two on U.S. soil before we have the moral certitude to carry this war to its necessary conclusion. As painful as that would be, it might have the long-term effect of waking the sleeping giant and saving tens of thousand of lives (or more) in the long run.

No interest in Londonistan?

It appears that Muslim Fun Day will have to be cancelled at Britain's largest theme park for lack of interest. With 1.7 million Muslims in the country, one would think that there would be enough people to make such an event pay.

Maybe it was, oh, the bomb-sniffing dogs stationed at the entrances to the park and rides that dampened the response?