Dems want to get religion

NY Times:

Bested by a Republican campaign emphasizing Christian faith, some Democrats are scrambling to shake off their secular image, stepping up efforts to organize the "religious left" and debating changes to how they approach the cultural flashpoints of same-sex marriage and abortion.

Some call the election a warning. "You can't have everybody who goes to church vote Republican; you just can't," Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, said last week at a forum on the election.

...

But Democrats disagree about how to establish the party's spiritual credentials. Some play down the need for changes, saying poorly framed surveys of voters leaving polls are overstating the impact of conservative Christian voters. Others argue that Democrats need to rephrase their positions in more moral and religious language. And an emboldened group of Democratic partisans and sympathetic religious leaders warn that Mr. Bush has beaten Democrats to the middle on social issues like abortion that resonate with religious traditionalists, arguing that the party should publicly welcome opponents of abortion into its ranks and perhaps even bend in its opposition to certain abortion restrictions.

...

"Our platform and the grass-roots strength of the party is pro-choice," said Elizabeth Cavendish, interim president of Naral Pro-Choice America. The party needs more religious language, Ms. Cavendish said, but not new positions.

...

"To be perfectly cynical about it,'' Father Neuhaus said, "what would a leading Democrat, even a Hillary Clinton, have to do? She could come out against partial-birth abortion, she could come out for parental notification. She could begin to represent herself as moderately pro-choice, maybe even with some linguistic sleight of hand, moderately pro-life."

Pollsters say Democrats might well find fertile ground among theological conservatives, if the party could get around those divisive social issues and its secular reputation.

What this story suggest is that the abortion issue has taken the Democrats out of the mainstream and their rabid opposition to judges who disagree with them on the issue has hurt them at the ballot box. But, the story indirectly indicates that the Dems still do not get it when it comes to religion. As much as anything it is the Democrat constiuancies active hostility to religion that makes their new god talk ring hollow. On the day that the ACLU forced a settlement with the Defense Department to stop sponsoring Boy Scout troops on base because membership requires a belief in God, not one Democrat spoke out against the settlement. Not one suggested that if you do not believe in God, do not join the Boy Scouts, but let those who do join.

Just when Euros thought they had a deal with Iran an opposition group says it has evidence of a nuke weapons program

NY Times:

An Iranian opposition group says it has new evidence that Iran is producing enriched uranium at a covert Defense Ministry facility in Tehran that has not been disclosed to United Nations inspectors.

The group, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, is planning to announce its finding in Paris on Wednesday. The group says that inspection of the site would demonstrate that Iran is secretly trying to produce nuclear weapons even while promising to freeze a critical part of its declared nuclear program, which it maintains is intended purely for civilian purposes.

A senior official of the group, Muhammad Mohaddessin, said in a telephone interview late on Tuesday that the group had shared the new information "very recently'' with the International Atomic Energy Agency. But he and other officials of the group said it had not discussed the matter with the United States government, and its claims could not be verified.

...the group also has a successful track record in gathering intelligence on Iran, and was the first, in 2002, to disclose the existence of what was then the secret Iranian nuclear site at Natanz.

...

...the previously undisclosed site, in northeastern Tehran, covers 60 acres and houses biological and chemical warfare projects as well as nuclear activity. It says that the site, known as the Modern Defensive Readiness and Technology Center, now houses operations previously carried out at another Defense Ministry site in Tehran that was destroyed by the Iranian government this year before international inspectors could visit it.

...

Officials of the opposition group said they believed that the Iranian Defense Ministry and Revolutionary Guards Corps were pursuing their program in secret and had not told Iran's atomic energy agency of the existence of the facility in Tehran.

The Tehran regime should not be trusted.

New frontiers of speed

BBC:

Nasa flew an unmanned experimental jet on Tuesday to a speed that preliminary data suggested was just short of 10 times the speed of sound - a record.

The X-43A - a supersonic combustion ramjet (scramjet) - made the run over a naval test range in the Pacific Ocean.

The 3.7m-long vehicle had already set a world best for an "air breathing" jet of Mach 6.83 - nearly seven times the speed of sound - on a flight in March.

The latest feat is the culmination of decades of work by many researchers.

Mach 10 is in the region of 11,000km/h or 6,800mph for the altitude at which the X43-A was being flown (33km or 111,000ft). The vehicle performed "flawlessly".

"It was about Mach 9.6," said engineer Randy Vorland. "We performed pretty much like we expected."

At the beginning of the 19th century no one had ever traveled faster than they could be carried by a horse or a sailing vessel. At the beginning of the 20th century no one had traveled faster than they could be carried by a train or early automobile--about 30 miles an hour. From the beginning of flight with the Wright brothers to braking the sound barrier took about 50 years. Shortky after the sound barrier was broken planes were flying at low multiples of the sound barrier and rockets were sending people into space traveling at unheard of speed. However, the new scramjet technology shows promise of even greater speed with the ptential to move people from the West Coast of teh US to the East Coast in about 30 minutes. Of course the plane would then probably have to circle for an hour or so waiting for an opportunity to land.

The reality based losers

Cathy Young, Boston Globe:

AS THE FUROR over the election dies down, with more unseemly whining from sore losers and some unseemly gloating from sore winners, certain stereotypes of Bush voters continue to have a lot of currency among disgruntled liberals. One of them is that Bush supporters, and conservatives in general, are dumb, ignorant, and out of touch with reality.

This notion has been bandied about with quite a bit of smugness. Some on the left have humbly taken to calling themselves "the reality-based community."

The idea that Bush voters are reality-challenged is based partly on surveys showing that a large percentage of Bush supporters believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or a program to develop them. Many also persist in the belief that Iraq had substantial ties to the Al Qaeda. Other Republicans who support tougher environmental and labor standards incorrectly assume that Bush favors these positions as well.

Is this a damning indictment of Bush voters and conservatives? George Mason University law professor David Bernstein, a libertarian who was highly critical of both candidates in the past election, points out on the Volokh Conspiracy blog that in other surveys, Republicans have on average scored higher than Democrats on knowledge of political issues than Democrats -- though voters across the board tend to be woefully ill-informed. Bernstein speculates that in the more recent polls, ignorant Bush supporters were likely to pick answers flattering to Bush, while ignorant Kerry voters did the opposite.

Furthermore, on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, the evidence leaves room for some ambiguity. I know intelligent and well-informed people who believe it is quite likely that Hussein managed to get his stockpiles out of the country before the invasion. As for collaboration between Hussein's regime and terrorist groups, it clearly did exist; the only question is how substantial it was.

...

A particularly amusing instance of the "Americans voted for Bush because they're so dumb" trope occurred in a post-election discussion at the online magazine Slate.com. Laura Kipnis, a professor of media studies at Northwestern University, noted that "The United States ranks 14th out of 15 industrialized countries in per capita education spending."

In fact, comparisons conducted by the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have found that only four countries -- Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, and Norway -- spend more per pupil on primary and secondary education than the United States. We also spend a higher percentage of our gross domestic product on education than most other industrialized nations. But Kipnis's statistic (for which she was unable to provide a source, saying that she used it in her last book but currently had no access to her notes) fits neatly into the stereotypes of American stupidity and greed.

In other news, a poll conducted on Nov. 3 showed that 13 percent of all voters believed Bush had stolen the election. (That adds up to about a quarter of Kerry voters.) Another 10 percent believed he had won it "on a technicality." After Salon.com, a strongly anti-Bush online magazine, published an article debunking various election fraud theories, the author, Farhad Marjoo, was deluged with e-mails asking if he was on the Republican payroll. "Reality-based," indeed.

Proof that some Palestinians have no interest in living in peace with Israel

AFP:

The militant Palestinian group Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades said it is opposed to Mahmud Abbas being elected president of the Palestinian Authority to replace Yasser Arafat and would instead back jailed West Bank Fatah leader Marwan Barghuti.

...

A poll conducted last month said Barghuti was the second most popular choice for Palestinian Authority president behind Arafat, who died last Thursday in a Paris hospital.

...

In June, Barghuti was sentenced by an Israeli to five life terms for murder. He denied all charges.

This is bizaar reporting. What responsible journalist would wait until the last paragraph to disclose that the Palestinians want a convicted murder as their new President? If the reporter and the Palestinians believe that murdering Jews is not an impediment to office how would they expect the murder to be able to reach an agreement with a Jewish state? This is just stupidity on stilts.

Shooting the wounded

Reuters:

U.S. Marines rallied round a comrade under investigation for killing a wounded Iraqi during the offensive in Falluja, saying he was probably under combat stress in unpredictable, hair-trigger circumstances.

Marines interviewed on Tuesday said they didn't see the shooting as a scandal, rather the act of a comrade who faced intense pressure during the effort to quell the insurgency in the city.

"I can see why he would do it. He was probably running around being shot at for days on end in Falluja. There should be an investigation but they should look into the circumstances," said Lance Corporal Christopher Hanson.

...

A pool report by NBC correspondent Kevin Sites said the mosque had been used by insurgents to attack U.S. forces, who stormed it, killing 10 militants and wounding the five. Sites said the wounded had been left for others to pick up.

A second group of Marines entered the mosque on Saturday after reports it had been reoccupied. Footage from the embedded television crew showed the five still in the mosque, although several appeared to be close to death, Sites said.

He said a Marine noticed one prisoner was still breathing.

A Marine can be heard saying on the pool footage provided to Reuters Television: "He's f***ing faking he's dead."

"The Marine then raises his rifle and fires into the man's head," Sites said.

NBC said the Marine, who had reportedly been shot in the face himself the previous day, said immediately after the shooting: "Well, he's dead now."

There is a difference between being injured and feigning death. An injured man who is no longer acting like a combatant is very different from a man who is "faking he's dead." Some one who is faking that he is dead is doing so in order to continue to act as a combatant. This is a very important difference that the reporter clearly missed. Someone who is faking could pull a weapon and kill the unwary as soon as they moved away.

Dems say they need better liars

David Limbaugh:

Lawrence Auster, in his always thoughtful "View from the Right" blog, ties my (Limbaugh's) current column, "The Never-ending Clinton Factor," to Peter Beinart's latest piece in The New Republic. Auster observes:

... Peter Beinart says the Dems, rather than being divided by mutual recriminations in the aftermath of the election, are in fact far too united for their own good. Instead of criticizing themselves and changing, they are complacently agreeing with each other that they basically did nothing wrong in the election. All they need to do, the Democrats are assuring themselves, is to try to convince the public that they are patriotic, that they can be trusted with the national defense, and that they are not cultural and moral aliens. But, as Beinart correctly points out, that is exactly what the Democrats strove so hard to do in this last election. How could anyone forget their ludicrous national convention, with its wall-to-wall evocations of patrioticm and military virtue that came across as false as a three-dollar bill?

This is an excellent point. The Dems are delusional if they don't realize they already tried to put on a mask in this last campaign. That is not to say that they couldn't succeed with a better candidate, but it's interesting that they apparently don't even realize they've already tried it.

The Judges ignorance of the Geneva conventions

David Rivkin and Lee Casey:

Not quite one week after the American people overwhelmingly endorsed George W. Bush's conduct of the war on terror at the ballot box, a federal district judge in Washington D.C., challenged the president's policies by ruling that Salim Ahmed Hamdan is entitled to rights under the Geneva Conventions. Mr. Hamdan was captured in Afghanistan, is being held at Guantanamo Bay as an al Qaeda member, and has been designated for trial before a military commission. President Bush has, of course, refused to grant any Geneva Convention status to al Qaeda members because that group is not, and could not be, a party to those treaties.

...

The Geneva POW Convention, however, does not apply territorially. It creates burdens and benefits for one-state party vis-a-vis other state parties. Thus, if two Geneva parties go to war, they are bound by the convention regardless of where the war is fought. By the same token, if a Geneva party fights a non-Geneva party, the non-party does not automatically qualify for the treaty's protections — even if the conflict takes place on a party's territory.
All of this is made clear by Article 2, common to all four Geneva Conventions, which provides that the treaties apply to any armed conflict "which may arise between two or more of the High Contracting Parties," regardless of whether there has been a declaration of war. This is the key language. Although Article 2 also states that the conventions "apply to all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of a High Contracting Party," this clause does not, and was not intended to, benefit combatants associated with a non-party.
Indeed, under Article 2's plain meaning, individuals fighting for a non-party can only be brought within the treaty's reach if the entity itself "accepts and applies the provisions" of the Geneva Conventions. To achieve this, of course, the belligerent must be a state or, at a minimum, a group plausibly seeking recognition as the lawful government of a state. Private individuals, including trans-national terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, legally cannot make war on anyone, and they are incapable of acceding to the Geneva Conventions — formally or informally.
In al Qaeda's case, of course, the question is academic. That group has flatly rejected any notion of law in war, let alone some form of humanitarian law. Unfortunately, in granting al Qaeda members Geneva protections, the Hamdan Court fell into a trap laid long ago by activists bent on restricting the rights of nation states under international law. Well before the September 11attacks on the United States, or the emergence of al Qaeda in the 1990s, various non-governmental organizations demanded that the traditional international law notion of reciprocity — which conditioned a state's obligations on the reciprocal actions of its adversary — be abandoned. Thus, one state-party's violations of the Geneva Conventions would not, automatically, relieve other parties of their obligations.

This is one of the most miguided decisions by an activist judge in history. It undermines national security. This decision must be reversed and this judge should be the subject of an impeachment inquiry. This is gross incompetance at best.

Birth rate among girls ages 10 to 14 declines to lowest level in 60 years

Houston Chronicle:

The birthrate among the nation's youngest mothers — girls age 10 to 14 — has fallen to its lowest level in almost 60 years, according to a federal report issued Monday.

The Texas rate is also dropping, but it remains one of the highest in the country.

"This report is, of course, good news," said Bill Albert, a spokesman for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, an advocacy organization. "But it makes you wonder who the guys are, and where are the fathers of these (infants) and are they being held responsible."

Ruth Buzi, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology with Baylor College of Medicine's Teen Health Clinic at Ben Taub General Hospital, said the declining rates are the result of education campaigns in schools about the consequences of teen pregnancy.

"The kids listen to us. We need to keep going and keep doing it," said Buzi, who has seen pregnant patients as young as 9. "Texas does not do so well. We have to continue working as a community."

Reports of declining teen pregnancy numbers often ignite debates about which is better: abstinence-only sex education, or sex education that discusses abstinence and contraception.

Earlier this year, a study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health suggested that the reason for the teen pregnancy decline, at least among high school students, is both: delaying sex and more effective contraception. The survey concluded that 53 percent of the decline in teen pregnancy rates can be attributed to decreased sexual activity, and 47 percent can be attributed to improved contraceptive practices.

Not all insurgents are fighting to the end in Fallujah

AP:

...

The spike in violence accompanied the American-led assault against Fallujah, the main insurgent stronghold, 40 miles west of Baghdad. The week-old offensive in Fallujah has left at least 38 American troops and six Iraqi soldiers dead.

The number of U.S. troops wounded is now 320, though 134 have returned to duty. U.S. officials estimated more than 1,200 insurgents have been killed.

In a telephone interview with reporters at the Pentagon, Marine Col. Michael Regner, operations officer for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said U.S. and Iraqi forces had captured more than 1,052 prisoners in Fallujah, most of them are Iraqis but some foreigners.

"Very few of them are giving up," Regner said. "They're fighting to the death."

He said U.S. troops and Marines were working their way back from the southern part of the city toward the northern part, clearing out pockets of resistance and recovering caches of weapons.

The 1,052 prisoners to go with the 1,200 puts the enemy casualty total in Falujah at 2,252 not counting injured insurgence who have not been captured yet. That is a significant attrition rate for a group that is not believed to have over 12,000 total members. This casualty total does not include the 100's who have made vain attacks and been killed throughout the country since the fallujah operation began. While there have been a few car bombing in recent day, with the loss of Fallujah it will be moredifficult for the insurgencts to build their rolling bombs. The loss of the sanctuary will have a cumulative effect in attriting enemy potential.

The cresendo in Fallujah

Boston Globe:

US forces dropped a pair of 2,000-pound bombs early yesterday morning on a bunker complex believed to be an insurgent training facility on the southern edge of this city, where the most dedicated and best trained rebel fighters are making a last stand.

The bombs shook the ground of the former insurgent stronghold and set off secondary explosions that went on for 45 minutes but could not be seen above ground, persuading officers of the Army's First Infantry Division that there were large stockpiles of weapons underground.

After nearly a week of fighting, American forces said they and their Iraqi counterparts had wrested most of the devastated city from insurgents, but continued to comb through buildings in search of an elusive enemy and to unleash heavy artillery that added to the destruction that Iraq's US-backed government will have to repair.

''It's like a drop of mercury in a maze," US Marines Major General Richard Natonski, the architect of the Fallujah operation, said yesterday of the difficulty capturing small groups of insurgents roaming the city.

''You push it in one direction and it breaks into pieces and flows all around," Natonski said on a visit to a forward command post.

...

Yesterday, Natonski said the operation was a success -- despite the eruption of violence in Mosul and other parts of the Sunni triangle -- because now it would not be easy for insurgents to establish a new base like the one they had in Fallujah.

''When they're moving they're vulnerable," he said. ''They no longer have the sanctuary they used to have in Fallujah, where they could rest, refit, resupply, and go back out."

The insurgency had also lost an important symbol, he said.

''This was there in your face: 'We have Fallujah and you don't.' They can't say that anymore," Natonski said.

Jihadis by the bus load

BBC:

...

US and Iraqi forces have traded gunfire with rebels across Baquba, 65km (40 miles) north-east of the Iraqi capital.

The clashes began at about 0800 (0500 GMT) when a bus carrying about 20-40 insurgents arrived in the town, a US sergeant told AFP news agency.

The rebels used rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire near a traffic circle and police station in the town.

The insurgents were killed in gun battles and the air strikes. Four US soldiers were wounded.

In one skirmish, "1st Infantry Division soldiers received fire from a mosque," a US military statement said.

Iraqi police stormed the mosque and found a weapons cache including rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and ammunition, the statement said.

Earlier, insurgents killed an Iraqi policeman as they took control of a police station in Buhriz, near Baquba.

This attack fits into my theory that these guys are making a significant mistake that appears to be provoked by losing their base of operations in Falljah. While the media has not recognized it yet loading up a bus of attackers is not sound strategy. It is desperation.

Old media has a bad election

Michael Barone:

It was a bad election for Old Media. More than in any other election in the last half-century, Old Media -- The New York Times and CBS News, joined often but not always by The Washington Post, other major newspapers, ABC News and NBC News -- was an active protagonist in this election, working hard to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush and doing what it could for John Kerry. The problem for Old Media is that it no longer has the kind of monopoly control over political news that it enjoyed a quarter-century ago. And its efforts to help John Kerry proved counterproductive.

...

...The left liberalism that is the political faith of practically all the personnel of Old Media is now being challenged by the various political faiths of New Media. Old Media no longer controls the agenda.

But it tries. At two crucial points in the campaign, Old Media used leaks from dubious sources to run stories intended to hurt the Bush campaign. The first was Dan Rather's Sept. 8 "60 Minutes" story on Bush's Texas Air National Guard record based on documents supplied by Texas Bush-hater Bill Burkett. CBS, admirably, posted the documents on its websites, and within 14 hours bloggers -- led by frontpage.com, powerlineblog.com and littlegreenfootballs.com -- had demonstrated that these purported 1972 documents had been produced on Microsoft Word. CBS's document experts, it turned out, had refused to authenticate them. Not until Sept. 20 did Rather acknowledge the documents were dubious. The story hurt Rather and CBS, not Bush.

Then there was the New York Times's front-page headline story Oct. 25 on supposedly missing weapons in Iraq. The story, based on leaks from International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohammed el-Baradei, who was trying to keep his job, turned out to be full of holes. But John Kerry decided to center his campaign for four of the five weekdays of the last full week of the campaign on the story. This, even though polls showed Bush had an advantage on handling Iraq. The Times story ended up hurting Kerry rather than helping him.

Finally, consider the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story. Kerry strategists are now saying that Kerry should have responded to the Swifties' charges sooner. But they didn't because they were confident Old Media would bury the story. Which it did, for months, from the formation of the group in April, the publication of its book "Unfit for Command" and the TV ads that started running in the summer. Old Media loved the Kerry narrative (decorated hero returns from Vietnam and opposes the war) and didn't want to disturb it by airing the Swifties' charges.

...

Kerry would have been better served, it turned out, by apologizing early on for his 1971 testimony that besmirched all troops in Vietnam. He could have done so in the spring when questioned by Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," but decided not to. Memo to future Democratic nominees: You can no longer rely on Old Media to hush up stories that hurt your cause. Your friends in Old Media don't have a monopoly any more.

Arafat's legacy

Charles Krauthammer:

The outpouring of tributes to Yasser Arafat is marked by two themes: (1) his greatness as creator, sustainer and leader of the Palestinian cause, and (2) the abrupt opening of an opportunity for its success now that he is gone.

The fawning world leaders saying this seem oblivious to the obvious paradox. If he was such a great leader, how is it that he left his people so destitute, desperate, wounded and bereft that only his passing gives them a hope for a fulfillment of their deepest aspirations?

Arafat's apologists explain this by saying that is because he had one weakness: indecisiveness. In the end, he just could not pull the trigger. When offered the deal of the century by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak at Camp David 2000, he was somehow too conflicted, too ambivalent to say yes.

Ambivalent? Nonsense. Yasser Arafat was supremely decisive and single-minded. He was not complex and, regarding Israel's fate, never conflicted. Indeed the reason for his success, such as it was -- creating the Palestinian movement from which he derived fortune, fame, and reverence -- was precisely his single-mindedness. Not about Palestinian statehood -- if that was his objective, he could have had his state years ago -- but about the elimination of Jewish statehood.

The Palestinians have nothing to offer Israel. They do not have either the will or the means to stop terrorism against Israel. Until they have both any agreement with the Palestinians would only make it easier for the Palestinians to persue their objective of destroying Israel. There will be no peace witht eh Palestinians until the terror groups are destroyed.

Iran's war against the US

Edward Pound US News:

In the summer of last year, Iranian intelligence agents in Tehran began planning something quite spectacular for September 11, the two-year anniversary of al Qaeda's attack on the United States, according to a classified American intelligence report. Iranian agents disbursed $20,000 to a team of assassins, the report said, to kill Paul Bremer, then the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq. The information was specific: The team, said a well-placed source quoted in the intelligence document, would use a Toyota Corona taxi and a second car, driven by suicide bombers, to take out Bremer and destroy two hotels in downtown Baghdad. The source even named one of the planners, Himin Bani Shari, a high-ranking member of the Ansar al-Islam terrorist group and a known associate of Iranian intelligence agents.

The alleged plan was never carried out. But American officials regarded Iran's reported role, and its ability to make trouble in Iraq, as deadly serious. Iran, said a separate report, issued in November 2003 by American military analysts, "will use and support proxy groups" such as Ansar al-Islam "to conduct attacks in Iraq in an attempt to further destablize the country." An assessment by the U.S. Army's V Corps, which then directed all Army activity in Iraq, agreed: "Iranian intelligence continues to prod and facilitate the infiltration of Iraq with their subversive elements while providing them support once they are in country."

With the Pentagon's stepped-up efforts to break the back of the insurgency before Iraq's scheduled elections in late January, Iran's efforts to destabilize Iraq have received little public attention. But a review of thousands of pages of intelligence reports by U.S. News reveals the critical role Iran has played in aiding some elements of the anti-American insurgency after Baghdad fell--and raises important questions about whether Iran will continue to try to destabilize Iraq after elections are held. The classified intelligence reports, covering the period July 2003 through early 2004, were prepared by the CIA; the Defense Intelligence Agency; the Iraq Survey Group, the 1,400-person outfit President Bush sent to Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction; the Coalition Provisional Authority; and various military commands and units in the field, including the V Corps and the Pentagon's Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force. The reports are based on information gathered from Iraqis, Iranian dissidents, and other sources inside Iraq. U.S. News also reviewed British intelligence assessments of the postwar phase in Iraq.

This is a lengthy story. However, it is clear that Iran is at war with the US. They just cannot openly declare it the way bin Laden did. Iran has been at war with the US since the days of Jimmy Carter. Someday we will be at war with Iran.

Validation by defeat

George Will:

A small but significant, because articulate, sliver of the Democratic Party seems to relish interpreting the party's defeat as validation. This preening faction reasons as follows: the re-election of George W. Bush proves that 51 percent of the electorate are homophobic, gun-obsessed, economically suicidal, antiscience, theocratic dunces. Therefore to be rejected by them is to have one's intellectual and moral superiority affirmed.

This insult directed at the electorate must appall most Democrats, who would prefer to be validated by victories. But disdain for the judgment of average Americans now colors various aspects of American life.

The culture of victimhood, and of the presumed incompetence of individuals, is both a cause and a consequence of a society sprinkled with warning labels written for imbeciles. Such as? On an iron: DO NOT IRON CLOTHES ON BODY. On a fold-up child's stroller: REMOVE CHILD BEFORE FOLDING. These warnings are, in part, defensive measures designed to protect manufacturers against an important Democratic constituency—trial lawyers wielding their premise that when anything goes wrong for anyone, someone else is culpable and should be made to pay.

...

Belief in the infantilism of the American public has been an expanding facet of some "progressive" thinking for 50 years—since the explosive growth of advertising, especially on television, in the 1950s. Then it began to be argued (see, for example, John Kenneth Galbraith's 1958 book "The Affluent Society") that Americans are a bovine, manipulable herd—putty in the hands of advertisers who can manufacture demand for whatever products manufacturers want to produce.

...

It is passing strange. As the American public has become more educated, American intellectuals have become more disparaging of the public's intellectual incapacities and moral shortcomings. In 1940, more than half of the U.S. population had only an eighth-grade education, or less. Now that 85 percent are high-school graduates, 53 percent have some college education and 27 percent are college graduates, it is an article of faith among the progressive intelligentsia that the public is becoming increasingly obtuse, bigoted and superstitious.

O'Neill stood up to the insults of the Kerry water carriers

Nat Hentoff:

During the most mean-spirited verbal gunfire of any presidential campaign I remember, I have most respected the steady, measured refusal of swift boat veteran John O'Neill to let his fierce, robot-like attackers deter him from his successful determinationto show that John Kerry is — as the title of his book puts it — unfit for command.
Mr. O'Neillwas called a "liar" to his face on a number of television appearances, and, on the Oct. 14 "Nightline," ABC-TV's Ted Koppel actually sent a crew to Vietnam to film alleged eyewitnesses in order to disprove one of the accounts in "Unfit for Command" of how Mr. Kerry won his Silver Star. Casually, ABC News director Andrew Morse mentioned that "the Vietnamese require an official minder to accompany journalists on reporting trips." The minder-censor from the Communist totalitarian state was there, watching, to ensure that the "eyewitnesses" stuck to the government script.
On camera, Mr. O'Neill told Mr. Koppel: "You went to a country where all the elections are hundred-percent [victory margin] elections, and you relied on people that were enemies of the United States" for the alleged testimony. Mr. O'Neill repeatedly showed Mr. Koppel how the supposed eyewitnesses contradicted Mr. Kerry's own accounts in the past.
At first, the mainstream media had ignored the charges of the Swift Boat Veterans. Alison Mitchell, deputy national editor of The New York Times, admitted to Editor & Publisher that she's "not sure that in an era of no-cable television we would even have looked into (the Swift Boat story)." But as happened with the exposure of Dan Rather's use of ultimately discredited documents to deride George W. Bush's National Guard service, cable television and the Internet allowed the public to examine both sides of the swift boat veterans stories.
Moreover, in a front-page Aug. 22 Washington Post story, reporter Michael Dobbs noted, as Mr. O'Neill often has, that "although Kerry campaign officials insist that they have published Kerry's full military records on their Web site (with the exception of medical records shown briefly to reporters earlier this year), they have not permitted independent access to his original Navy records." When Mr. Dobbs tried to get those Kerry records through a Freedom of Information request, he received just over six pages and was told by the Navy Personnel Command that the full file consisting of at least 100 pages could not be released unless Mr. Kerry himself signed a Standard Form 180 granting permission.
To this day, Mr. Kerry has not signed that release form.

The Hagel campaign for 2008

Washington Post:

Okay, now that the election is over, are you ready to talk about 2008? Chuck Hagel is.

The Republican senator from Nebraska has been thinking seriously about 2008 since he won reelection in 2002, and mulling a run for the White House even longer. He has a long history of doing, and getting, what he wants. He's ready -- well, ready to talk.

Hagel is not that good of a Senator and would be a terrible President. He is a semi Republican who tends to remind you more of Kerry than of Bush or McCaine, although he is closer to the latter which means the media enemies of the Republicans will be rooting for him and giving him favorable coverage like this Post puff piece.

Fallujah surpises

It is not surprising tht Zarqawi would get out of Dodge instead of staying to lead his men in a hopeless fight witht he US military. It is not surprising tht US forces overwhelmed the insurgents in Fallujah. And, it is not really surprising that the infamous 350,000 tons of high explosives was not being used in the bomb factoris of Fallujah.

What is somewhat surprising is the stupidity of the response by Zarqawi and his troops. The raiding strategy being used by the insurgents would suggest, that not only would as many as possible flee Fallujah, but, they would also go to ground and wait until another time to resume their raiding. Instead, the insurgents are striking out in a mini Tet type offensive in several spots around the country. They are revealing all of their plants in the new Iraqi army and police force and like the insurgents who remained behind in Fallujah they are being destroyed.

It has been suggested that about half the insurgents stayed to fight in Fallujah and the other half went to fight in other cities. By fighting rather than going to ground their numbers are going to be further attrited to the point where it will be hard for them to mount much disruption in the future. Their action reminds me of the Crusaders early response to Sadadin where they made futile charges into the teeth of a superior force. But these guys do not have a Richard I to at least partially bail them out. In the so called "war of ideas" out of over 1.2 billion Muslims in the world these guys have managed to come up with at most a few thousand poorly trained and loosely organized montheist, head choppers for Allah.

The fact of the matter is that the liberal media has always overstated the strength of the insurgents and attempted to convey a picture of ineptitude on the part of the US team and its allies in Iraq. But, the US effort was never as bad as portrayed.

Now, the insurgents who survive, whether by running away or by hiding, have lost their sanctuary and other assets in Fallujah. This is a devastating loss for them. An insurgency cannot survive without sanctuaries and the logistics of the insurgents war has just gotten much more difficult to maintain without a base to make bombs and slaughter houses to chop heads, any survivors are truly men on the run.

Their cells in Mosol have now been blown along with cells in Sunni cities stretching toward Syria where the rat lines for reinforcemnts would have to run. It may take a few more weeks for all of the cells to be destroyed, but their distruction should not be a question.

All insurgents in Fallujah control now are their feet

Daily Telegraph:

...

Lt Col Pete Newell, commander of Task Force 2-2, which took the eastern and part of the southern portions of the city, said: "I can walk anywhere I want in the city now.

"I guess that's the definition of being in control. All the insurgents have got control of is their own feet."

The last remnants, he said, would either surrender or die. "Eventually when they run out of food and water and nobody is telling them what to do, most will quit. But some of them won't. I'm sure there are some zealots out there and the only thing to do with them will be to kill them."

...

Col Craig Tucker, a Marine commander in Fallujah, said that quelling the insurgency would take time. "Whether they will pop up again here or not I don't know" he said. "You don't win this in six, seven months or a year. How long did Burma or Northern Ireland take?

"The pattern has been that the leadership flees. You're dealing with an element of leadership cowardice that's really difficult to fathom. They spout propaganda and get poor, ignorant guys all fired and then they go."

It is about time that the cowardice of Zarqawi et.al. was mentioned. His only appearance so far is posturing on a video claiming victory. It is time for him to walk the streets of Fallujah if he won, but his feet are trying to avoid fighting the Marines.

Iran says it will suspend nuke enrichment

CNN:

Iran has agreed to fully suspend its uranium enrichment program, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Hasan Rohani announced Sunday, a move that could improve Iran's relations with the West.

Although Iran has said its uranium enrichment activities are intended to produce fuel for nuclear power plants, the United States has said the program is aimed at building nuclear weapons.

The agreement followed 40 minutes of talks between Iranian government representatives and ambassadors of the European Union's so-called Big Three nations, France, Britain and Germany, Rohani said.

Earlier, a Western diplomat told CNN that Iran made the agreement in exchange for a promise not to refer the matter to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions.

It looks like the threat of the US seeking sanctions was more persuasive that Euro diplomacy. However, I do not trust the ayatollahs to keep their word. Telling an infidel a lie to get something they want is not considered a matter of honor to these guys.

Gues what was not found in Fallujah?

NY Times:

Foot soldiers combed the smashed and deserted houses in southern Falluja this afternoon after a mechanized unit smashed through the neighborhood, called Shuhada, the day before, routing insurgents in their last major redoubt within the city.

In house after house, the searches have turned up large caches of weaponry, like artillery shells and mortar rounds, along with electronics for making bombs and mujahedeen literature. Fearing booby traps, the troops generally entered the houses only after tanks rammed through walls or specialists put explosive charges on doors.

As the searches moved southward through the neighborhood, leaving a swath of devastation behind, shooting continued around the city, and at least one marine was killed by a sniper this morning, shot through the head from an area that had been all but obliterated the night before.

But it seemed clear that any further resistance in Falluja would have to come from smaller bands of remaining mujahedeen rather than a coherent fighting force.

"We're sweeping through the city now," said Maj. Gen. Richard Natonski, the top Marine commander in Iraq. "We're clearing out pockets of resistance. There are groups numbering from 5 to 30. They're moving too. They're trying to get behind us."

General Natonski added: "People will never appreciate the movement of soldiers down here, what it took to move them and immediately conduct a relief in place with the soldiers. It ought to go down in the history books."

How about 350,000 tons of high explosive that the Times noticed was missing the week before the election and implied tht the insurgents were using it to attack US troops?

The Dem's failure to study war

Michael Totten:

The 1960s New Left thought “Ain’t gonna study war no more” was a good idea and a clever slogan. It was neither. It was a way of admitting in public that they were entering a phase of willful ignorance.

Bill Clinton won the 1992 election in part with a slogan that said “It’s the economy, stupid.” If he and his party said “Ain’t gonna study the economy no more” they would have gone nowhere.

I haven’t heard that silly 60s slogan in a while, but I see the effects of it constantly. Some intellectuals on the left (both pro- and anti-war) do take national security seriously. You’ll find them writing for publications like Dissent and The New Republic, but you won’t find them many other places.

...

... this article, published two years ago, by Heather Hurlburt. How refreshing it is to read an article like this from a member of the anti-war left.

Democrats are in this position precisely because we respond to matters of war politically, tactically. We worry about how to position ourselves so as not to look weak, rather than thinking through realistic, sensible Democratic principles on how and when to employ military force, and arguing particular cases, such as Iraq, from those principles. There are a lot of reasons for this failure, including the long-time split within the party between hawks and doves. But we will never resolve that split, nor regain credibility with voters on national security, until we learn to think straight about war. And we will never learn to think straight about war until this generation of professional Democrats overcomes its ignorance of and indifference to military affairs.

[…]

The reasons for this apathy aren't hard to discern. Many Democrats who came of age during the Vietnam War retain a gut-level distrust of the military. Younger staffers, who may not carry the same psychological baggage, have few mentors urging them toward military or security issues. I speak from experience: My main qualification for my first Washington job--covering European security for Congress--was that I could locate the Warsaw Pact countries on a map and correctly identify the acronyms of the relevant international organizations.

But lack of expertise is only a symptom. The malady is an irresponsible lack of interest. The issues that drive most contemporary Democrats into politics are reproductive rights, health care, fiscal policy, or poverty, not national security. Even those young Democrats who are interested in foreign affairs tend to be drawn to "soft" subjects such as debt relief and human rights. Aspiring foreign policy wonks will often get pulled into military affairs by way of, say, their work on demining. But when these young people visualize exciting jobs in the next Democratic administration, they think State Department, not Pentagon.

[…]

...At the same time, most Democrats understood that a reputation for being "soft" on defense issues was a serious political liability. But instead of grappling with the substance of war and national security, Democrats began to approach their vulnerability as a problem of tactics and political positioning. (Emphasis added.)

Saddam's three secret missiles

Jane's Missiles and Rockets:

Between 2000 and the arrival in Iraq of United Nations Monitoring, Inspection and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC) inspectors in November 2002, Iraqi engineers worked on three clandestine programmes to develop long-range ballistic missiles. Details of all three missiles were revealed in the Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD published on 30 September 2004.

Two of the missiles were based on liquid propellants, the third on solid propellants. All would have had ranges of 500km or more, exceeding the 150km range restriction set by UN Resolution 687.

As a result of UN sanctions, none of these projects left the drawing board despite three years of work by Iraq, while the arrival of UNMOVIC inspectors forced Iraq to attempt the destruction of all evidence that the projects had existed.

According to a senior Iraqi missile engineer interviewed by the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the plan to develop missiles with a range of more than 150km dated back to 1997 or 1998....

Trippi predicts more Dem retirements

Kausfiles:

From Joe Trippi: Expect a big wave of Democratic retirements from Congress in the next couple of years, as veterans who've been holding on in hopes of regaining majority power give up. Many of these Democrats have been using their personal popularity (and powers of incumbency) to win in Republican areas. When they leave, their seats will flip. The GOPs could attain 60 votes in the Senate and maybe 30 more seats in the House. Thank you, Rep. Matsui!

Rationalizing their defeat in Fallujah

Strategy Page:

The major fighting in Fallujah is over, with about 30 American and Iraqi troops, and over 1,000 anti-government gunmen, dead. There are still several hundred gunmen hiding in different parts of the city, trying to get out. But the night vision devices, and large number of American sensors out in the desert surrounding Fallujah, make it very difficult to sneak away. The Arab media are already looking for editorial angles they can use to turn Fallujah into an Arab victory. Despite the fact that phone and cell phone access to the city was cut off when the fighting began, some Arab media are claiming "massive civilian casualties" and a "catastrophe" inside the city. Most Iraqis wanted Fallujah destroyed, seeing the Sunni Arab city as a source of support for over three decades Baath Party tyranny. Fallujah has always been a very religious city, providing support for al Qaeda and the idea of religious war with the rest of the world. This is also unpopular with most Iraqis. But most nations in the region are run by Sunni Arabs, and their media will portray Fallujah as a "martyr" to Sunni Arab ideals (which include persecution of Shias and Kurds, who comprise 80 percent of the Iraqi population.) Months of intelligence work had concluded that there were some 3,000 armed, hard core fighters in Fallujah. Only about half of those have been killed or wounded. The rest either got away before the battle began, or are among the few hundred gunmen still playing hide and seek with American troops inside the city. Many of the rest went to other cities and attacked local police stations, and set up roadblocks. This has caused a momentary loss of control in some neighborhoods. But these hard core fighters are, like their buddies in Fallujah, going to die out in the open. The death of so many gunmen in such a short time makes it difficult to recruit more of these guys....

Al Qaeda's plan to smuggle nukes through Mexico to US

Time:

A key al-Qaeda operative seized in Pakistan recently offered an alarming account of the group's potential plans to target the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction, senior U.S. security officials tell TIME. Sharif al-Masri, an Egyptian who was captured in late August near Pakistan's border with Iran and Afghanistan, has told his interrogators of "al-Qaeda's interest in moving nuclear materials from Europe to either the U.S. or Mexico," according to a report circulating among U.S. government officials.

Masri also said al-Qaeda has considered plans to "smuggle nuclear materials to Mexico, then operatives would carry material into the U.S.," according to the report, parts of which were read to TIME. Masri says his family, seeking refuge from al-Qaeda hunters, is now in Iran.

Fallujah 2.0 lessons learned

AP via Fox News:

The U.S. military's ground and air assault of Fallujah (search) has gone quicker than expected, with the entire city occupied after six days of fighting, Marine Maj. Gen. Richard Natonski said Sunday.

Natonski, who designed the ground attack, said he and other planners took lessons from the failed three-week Marine assault on the city in April, which was called off by the Bush administration after a worldwide outcry over civilians deaths. This time, the military sent in six times as many troops and 20 types of aircraft. Troops also faked attacks before the assault to confuse enemy fighters.

"Maybe we learned from April," Natonski said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We learned we can't do it piecemeal. When we go in, we go all the way through. We had the green light this time and we went all the way."

"Had we done in April what we did now, the results would've been the same," Natonski said during a visit to the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade, the unit charged with isolating Fallujah under a security cordon.

On Sunday, Marines and Army units were still battling gritty bands of defenders scattered in buildings and bunkers across the Sunni Muslim stronghold. Behind them, Iraqi troops were enmeshed in the painstaking task of clearing weapons and fighters from every room of Fallujah's estimated 50,000 buildings.

...

Natonski said he was astonished at how closely the battle has hued to his plan. He described the six days of ground war as a "flawless execution of the plan we drew up."

"We are actually ahead of schedule," he said.

Natonski said several pre-assault tactics made the battle easier than expected.

Insurgent defenses were weakened by bombing raids on command posts and safe houses. Air-dropped leaflets may have also demoralized some defenders and convinced some residents that the city would be better off under government control, he said.

In the days before the raid, ground troops feinted invasions, charging right up to Fallujah's edge in tanks and armored vehicles. Natonski said these fake attacks forced the insurgents to build up forces in the south and east, perhaps diverting defenders from the north, where six battalions of Army and Marine troops finally punched into the city Monday.

The deceptive maneuvers also drew fire from defenders' bunkers, which were exposed and relentlessly bombed before the ground assault.

"We desensitized the enemy to the formations they saw on the night we attacked," Natonski said.

Another key tactic was choking off the city, the responsibility of the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, Natonski said.

That move prevented insurgents from slipping out of the city during the assault, although many, including top leaders like Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Sheik Abdullah al-Janabi and Omar al-Hadid, are thought to have fled.

In the movie Zulu, the chief sent his warriors to stand outside the British compound drawing fire from the defenders. One of the officers ask, "What is he doing?" An observer responded, "He is counting your guns." The US in effect used the same tactic against the insurgents.

The cost of short circuiting the political process

David von Drehle:

For many Democrats, the worst thing about the election result is the prospect of President Bush's appointing a new generation of conservative justices to the Supreme Court. But in the long run, a rightward shift in America's courts could be one of the best things to happen to liberalism in years.

Half a century after the triumph of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark desegregation case, reliance on constitutional lawsuits to achieve policy goals has become a wasting addiction among American progressives. The recent battle over gay marriage, in courts and at the ballot box, demonstrates that liberals today are more adept at persuading like-minded judges than they are at persuading undecided voters. Over the past 40 years, while progressives were winning dozens of controversial court cases on issues ranging from abortion to school prayer, the Democratic Party failed nine times out of 10 to win a majority of the votes for president.

Over time, though, voters matter -- just as they mattered on Nov. 2, when liberalism took another beating -- and gay marriage was rejected in 11 out of 11 state elections.

Whatever you feel about the rights that have been gained through the courts, it is easy to see that dependence on judges has damaged the progressive movement and its causes. Liberals "became lazy at some point," says Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who has worked for groups as diverse as the Christian Coalition and the Democratic Leadership Council. "By relying on the judiciary, their political muscles have atrophied."

...

At the same time, the liberal focus on courtrooms has strengthened the conservative movement. Nothing riles up social conservatives like a stirring denunciation of the so-called "activist" courts. From Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to the present day, GOP candidates have invited voters to send a message to those men and women in robes who order broad cultural change without the consent of the governed.

And it works: In that same 40-year period, Republicans have won five majority-vote presidential victories to the Democrats' paltry one.

This guy is obviously a liberal, but he is one who understands the mistake liberals have made in ignoring the political process and instead looking for judicial dictators.

Learning fast in Fallujah

Ralph Peters:

IT all comes down to the grunt. Our military assault on Fallujah employed spectacular military technologies and innovative teamwork between services, thorough planning and overwhelming force. But the Infantry squad still decides who wins or loses.

Setting aside the greater issues of defeating terrorism and promoting a free Iraq, the Second Battle of Fallujah has been remarkable on a purely military level. Beyond the sophistication of our weaponry and even the valor of the American soldier, the fighting affirmed that our armed forces are very good at learning while at war.

The German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel supposedly said of American G.I.s that he'd never seen troops so green, but had never encountered troops who learned so fast. Well, today's U.S. soldiers and Marines don't go into war half-trained as they had to do in World War II — we now have the best-prepared forces in the world — but they still learn quickly on the battlefield.

Doctrine has rarely been an American strength. We've won our battles and wars through pragmatism, casting aside what didn't work and improving the methods that did. Instead of the inflexibility that outsiders attribute to our military, our armed forces are brilliant improvisers, ingenious at coping with war's surprises.

IN Fallujah, cooperation between the services — the Marines, Army and Air Force — took a major step forward, with Army heavy metal supporting the Marines, while Air Force fighters flew holding patterns overhead, waiting to deliver precision strikes in support of ground operations.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were used to an unprecedented degree, increasing our battlefield surveillance and targeting capability dramatically — some UAVs can even attack the enemy positions they locate. Robotics have begun to play a role in down-and-dirty combat in the streets.

Enhanced communications and battlefield-awareness technologies reduced friendly-fire incidents while allowing commanders a clearer picture of the battle than any leader has had since the days when the warlord stood on a hill and watched the slaughter unfold before his eyes.

But it still comes down to the young Americans who signed up for the Infantry.

URBAN warfare is formidably difficult and dangerous. The utility of our wonder-technologies plummets when we have to fight inside wrecked industrial plants or in the labyrinths of ancient cities. Past a point, the intelligence systems can no longer see. The troops at the tip of the spear engage enemies at short range in abruptly chaotic circumstances. Who lives or dies is decided with rifles, grenades and automatic weapons.

Iraqis take over screening and purging

Washington Times:

Iraqi authorities are moving against enemy informants and sympathizers in the ranks of the nation's hastily trained security forces by firing thousands of police officers and taking over from Americans the screening of new recruits.
Such informants are believed to have undermined numerous operations and tipped off terrorists, who last month killed 49 unarmed Iraqi army recruits as they traveled by bus near the Iranian border.
"Most of the screening as far as the staff is up to the Iraqi staff now," said U.S. Army Capt. Kevin Bradley, who trains Iraqi national guardsmen. "Right now, whether or not the person is clean, it depends on the Iraqis."

...

The Iraqi armed forces, meanwhile, have taken charge of their own recruiting. They often employ methods that, while falling short of U.S. civil rights standards, are proving effective, Capt. Bradley said.

...

Each recruit must now bring a letter of approval from his local community council, and each military base now dispatches committees to new recruits' neighborhoods to check on their "moral background," Maj. Ala al-Khifajey of the Iraqi national guard said.
What's more, nepotism is now the rule: Every new recruit must have a relative already in the service to vouch for him.
"We know our people," he said. "We know who to recruit and who to reject."
That marks a sharp departure from the methods used by the Americans, who ran the recruiting program the way they were used to doing at home, Maj. al-Khifajey said.
"The American way was, you fill out a three-page application form, they check your name against their list of terrorists, and after a medical and fitness test, you had the job."
But privacy rules and fair-hiring practices simply didn't work in a country surrounded by bloodthirsty enemies, infiltrated by suicidal Islamic extremists and ravaged by decades of poverty and war, he said.

The CIA purge of disloyal leakers as told by a leaker

Knute Royce, Newsday:

The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers thought to have been disloyal to President Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the war in Iraq and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

One of the first casualties appears to be Stephen Kappes, deputy director of clandestine services, the CIA's most powerful division. The Washington Post reported Saturday that Kappes tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Goss' chief of staff, Patrick Murray, but at the behest of the White House had agreed to delay his decision until Monday.

But the former senior CIA official said that the White House "doesn't want Steve Kappes to reconsider his resignation. That might be the spin they put on it, but they want him out." He said the job has been offered to the former chief of the European Division who retired after a spat with then-CIA Director George Tenet.

Without confirming or denying that the job offer had been made, a CIA spokesman asked Newsday to withhold naming the former officer because of his undercover role over the years. He said he had no comment about Goss' personnel plans, but said changes at the top are not unusual when directors come in.

Hurricane prep--load up on pop tarts and beer

NY Times:

HURRICANE FRANCES was on its way, barreling across the Caribbean, threatening a direct hit on Florida's Atlantic coast. Residents made for higher ground, but far away, in Bentonville, Ark., executives at Wal-Mart Stores decided that the situation offered a great opportunity for one of their newest data-driven weapons, something that the company calls predictive technology.

A week ahead of the storm's landfall, Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart's chief information officer, pressed her staff to come up with forecasts based on what had happened when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier. Backed by the trillions of bytes' worth of shopper history that is stored in Wal-Mart's computer network, she felt that the company could "start predicting what's going to happen, instead of waiting for it to happen," as she put it.

The experts mined the data and found that the stores would indeed need certain products - and not just the usual flashlights. "We didn't know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane," Ms. Dillman said in a recent interview. "And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer."

Thanks to those insights, trucks filled with toaster pastries and six-packs were soon speeding down Interstate 95 toward Wal-Marts in the path of Frances. Most of the products that were stocked for the storm sold quickly, the company said.

...

By its own count, Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, made by NCR, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.

...

"When you look at their behavior, you can tell that Wal-Mart considers data to be a top priority," said Christine Overby, a senior analyst for consumer markets at Forrester Research. Over the years, she said, Wal-Mart executives have spent handsomely for their systems, paying $4 billion in 1991 to create Retail Link and signing onto innovations like bar codes and electronic data interchange, a forerunner of the Internet, well ahead of the pack. Wal-Mart is also driving manufacturers to invest in radio frequency identification. By next October, the company will require its biggest suppliers to tag shipments to some of its distribution centers with tiny transmitters that would eventually let Wal-Mart track every item that it sells.

Insurgents box is shrinking in Fallujah

CNN:

As many as 1,000 insurgents have been killed in the six-day battle for Falluja, an operation that is "almost finished," Iraqi National Security Adviser Kasim Dawood said Saturday.

Dawood said 200 insurgents have been captured and Falluja is "liberated except for some pockets."

In southern Falluja -- a stronghold for fighters loyal to wanted terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- a U.S. military commander said his unit has cornered the enemy and he expects to have complete control of the area later in the day.

"As of this morning, their box has shrunk to 1,000 meters by 500 meters and it will be gone by 2 p.m. (6 a.m. ET)," according to Lt. Col. Pete Newell, commander of Task Force 2-2 of the 1st Infantry Division.

...

Insurgents in groups of five to 20 have been surrendering in northeast Falluja where the U.S. military is in control, said Col. Craig Tucker, commander of 7th Regimental Combat Team of the 1st ID.

Overnight, Task Force 2-2 elements cleared two blocks of the southern sector, finding significant weapons caches in five houses -- including rocket-propelled grenades and bomb-making materials, Newell said.

U.S. military aircraft provided cover for house-to-house searches conducted by the Marines and Iraqi security forces

The battle, undertaken to wipe out what the U.S. military regards as an insurgent command-and-control center, continued to rage during the evening hours as troops went from building to building to uncover weapons caches, tunnels and bunkers.

The victory if Fallujah is important for several reasons, but one of the most important is that it destroys the myth that US forces cannot win in an urban setting. Insurgents have deluded themselves into believing that asymetrical warfare fought out of cities could defeat US forces. They no longer have that thought to comfort them in their defeat. What this does is push them closer to the realization that their dreams will never be realized. It pushes them close to having to accept the reality of their defeat. It pushes Iraq closer to peace. It is a peace that would never have come without their defeat.

Alberto Gonzales shows what is possible in this country

Peter Brown:

...

Gonzales' life is a testament to the notion that in the United States anyone really can grow up to be president, or at least attorney general.

Without schmaltz, the unique reality is that the class differences that constrain social and economic mobility in large parts of the rest of the world are much more surmountable here.

...

It is not just that Gonzales will become the nation's first Hispanic attorney general if confirmed by the Senate. It is how he got there and what that journey says about him and American society.

He grew up as one of eight children in a two-bedroom house without hot water or a telephone until he was in high school. As a 12-year-old, his first job was selling sodas at Rice football games from the upper deck of the 70,000-seat stadium overlooking the bucolic campus. He watched the students wander back to their dorms, wondering "what it would be like" to go to that prestigious college, an existence far removed from that of anyone he knew.

Gonzales made his Mexican immigrant parents proud just by graduating from high school. That was all they or his teachers ever expected of him. They never thought about college -- it was beyond their frame of reference, and his financial means. He joined the Air Force.

Gonzales, then Bush's White House counsel, told Rice parents and students that day about being assigned to a base in Alaska where he began to see life's possibilities. During those long, cold nights he realized that he had the opportunity to do more with his life than he had ever imagined -- or anyone in his family had ever experienced.

He took the unusual route of going from enlisted airman to the U.S. Air Force Academy. Gonzales eventually transferred to Rice, where he fulfilled his childhood dream, then exceeded even his wildest imagination by graduating from Harvard Law School. That achievement led him to a white-shoe Houston law firm.

He later turned down an offer to work for the first President Bush. But in Houston Gonzales got to know the First Son and went to work for him when W. became Texas governor. He was subsequently appointed to the Texas Supreme Court. He became the president's top lawyer when his friend won the Oval Office.

Presidents love to curry favor with key constituencies through appointments, and with the emerging clout of Hispanics, the Gonzales appointment is a coup for the Republican Party.

...

Moreover, when it comes to politics and public opinion, one's life story almost always trumps ideology.

Last May at Rice, I was sitting next to a couple from India whose nephew was graduating. We discussed the unhappiness in the United States about the outsourcing of jobs to India. The graduate's uncle was understandably defensive about the matter and our conversation tapered off.

But, as I listened to Gonzales tell the students how much education changed his life and the importance of understanding life's possibilities, I saw this man shaking his head in agreement.

Gonzales' story is a universal one. All Americans -- be they blue-staters from Boston or red Americans in Reno -- should rightly be proud that it happened here.

The libs faulty dark vision

David Broder:

Some of my colleagues in the pundit business have become unhinged by the election results. The always diverting Maureen Dowd of the New York Times suggested the other day that "the forces of darkness" are taking over the country. The voters' confirmation of Republican-led government brings with it "a scary, paranoid, regressive reality," Dowd said, with "strains of isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism." After a campaign of "blatant distortions and character assassination," Republicans have returned to Washington bent on "messing with our psyches" and punishing "society's most vulnerable: the poor, the sick, the sexually different."

I know that many agree with that view. But before throwing yourself over a cliff or emigrating to Sweden, consider a couple of things.

George W. Bush was reelected by 51 percent of the people. His first significant action following Election Day was to retain Andrew Card, a Massachusetts-based business moderate, as his chief of staff.

His second was to accept the resignation of John Ashcroft, the hero of the religious right and the favorite bogeyman of civil libertarians, as attorney general. Ashcroft's replacement, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, will receive close scrutiny from Democratic senators, but almost all of them who commented said they welcomed the choice.

That's a funny way to start "another dark age."

Republicans will hold 55 of the 100 seats in the Senate. Among them are many, including such conservatives as Pat Roberts and Thad Cochran, whom I would trust to defend my journalistic freedom -- or Dowd's -- no matter how much they disagreed with what we wrote. I can count two dozen Senate Republicans who have experienced with their own families and friends the pain of mental or physical illness, or poverty, or racial or sexual discrimination.

Do you think they would stand silent while a vendetta against any of those groups was carried out?

The French unilateralist blow up the Ivory Coast

NY Post Editorial:

Quick: What Western power bypassed the U.N. recently, ignored the inter national community and launched a pre-emptive attack against the forces of a sovereign foreign government?

Why . . . France, of course.

That's right: French forces, acting unilaterally, deployed troops to strike the Ivory Coast's air force and took up strategic sites in the country's commercial center of Abidjan last Sunday.

Indeed, in what is being called a complete "overreaction," the French virtually wiped out the West African cocoa-producing nation's entire combat air fleet.

(True, that included just a few old Russian jets and some choppers. But what do you expect from the French?)

And, so far, the closest thing to WMDs that's been found is . . . chocolate. (It can lead to deadly obesity, n'est-ce pas?)

Which raises a question: Did that cowboy, Jacques Chirac, fear President Laurent Gbagbo's forces would attack Paris?

Chirac's troops rushed to war after Gbagbo's warplanes hit a French Army post in his nation. Nine French soldiers (and an American) were killed, but Ivorians are so outraged by the French "occupation," they've rioted, violently.

The revolting losers at the CIA

Washington Post:

The deputy director of the CIA resigned yesterday after a series of confrontations over the past week between senior operations officials and CIA Director Porter J. Goss's new chief of staff that have left the agency in turmoil, according to several current and former CIA officials.

...

Yesterday, the agency official who oversees foreign operations, Deputy Director of Operations Stephen R. Kappes, tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Murray. Goss and the White House pleaded with Kappes to reconsider and he agreed to delay his decision until Monday, the officials said.

Several other senior clandestine service officers are threatening to leave, current and former agency officials said.

...

Current and retired senior managers have criticized Goss, former chairman of the House intelligence committee, for not interacting with senior managers and for giving Murray too much authority over day-to-day operations. Murray was Goss's chief of staff on the intelligence committee.

Transitions between CIA directors are often unsettling for career officers. Goss's arrival has been especially tense because he brought with him four former members of the intelligence committee known widely on the Hill and within the agency for their abrasive management style and for their criticism of the agency's clandestine services in a committee report.

Three are former mid-level CIA officials who left the agency disgruntled, according to former colleagues. The fourth, Murray, who also worked at the Justice Department, has a reputation for being highly partisan. When senior managers have gone to Goss to complain about his staff actions, one CIA officer said, Goss has told them: "Talk to my chief of staff. I don't do personnel."

The overall effect, said one former senior CIA official, who has kept up his contacts in the Directorate of Operations, "is that Goss doesn't seem engaged at all."

If other senior clandestine officers leave, said one former officer who maintains contacts within the Langley headquarters, "the middle-level people who move up may eventually work out, but meanwhile the level of experience and competence will go down."

The CIA declined to comment on the issues raised by the current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. A CIA spokesman said McLaughlin's retirement "was a long-planned personal decision taken at a natural transition point in the administration and not connected to any other factors."

McLaughlin issued a statement that said: "I have come to the purely personal decision that it is time to move on to other endeavors."

Clearly the losers who tried to defeat President Bush are still trying to undermine him and the new CIA director. These guys need to learn the MacArther lesson. The Commander in Chief is the Commander in Chief and if they disagree with his policy they can quit. This is an agency that has failed at its main mission and is trying to undermine current policy. It needs to get rid of the failures and get on with supporting the Presidents war on terror.

The CIA's war with President Bush

David Brooks:

Now that he's been returned to office, President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Over the past several months, as much of official Washington looked on wide-eyed and agog, many in the C.I.A. bureaucracy have waged an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration.

At the height of the campaign, C.I.A. officials, who are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak after leak to discredit the president's Iraq policy. There were leaks of prewar intelligence estimates, leaks of interagency memos. In mid-September, somebody leaked a C.I.A. report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior C.I.A. official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world.

...

The White House-C.I.A. relationship became dysfunctional, and while the blame was certainly not all on one side, Langley was engaged in slow-motion, brazen insubordination, which violated all standards of honorable public service. It was also incredibly stupid, since C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory.

As the presidential race heated up, the C.I.A. permitted an analyst - who, we now know, is Michael Scheuer - to publish anonymously a book called "Imperial Hubris," which criticized the Iraq war. Here was an official on the president's payroll publicly campaigning against his boss. As Scheuer told The Washington Post this week, "As long as the book was being used to bash the president, they [the C.I.A. honchos] gave me carte blanche to talk to the media."

...

If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes. As it is, the answer to the C.I.A. insubordination is not just to move a few boxes on the office flow chart.

The answer is to define carefully what the president expects from the intelligence community: information. Policy making is not the C.I.A.'s concern. It is time to reassert some harsh authority so C.I.A. employees know they must defer to the people who win elections, so they do not feel free at meetings to spout off about their contempt of the White House, so they do not go around to their counterparts from other nations and tell them to ignore American policy.

Media minority double standard

Michelle Malkin:

Here are a few mainstream media rules of thumb: Minority Democrats in public office are inspirational role models. Minority Republicans in public office are embarrassing sellouts.
Minority Democrat politicians are principled. Minority Republican politicians are misguided.
Minority Democrat politicians represent the hopes and dreams of all Americans. Minority Republican politicians are traitors to their "communities." These rules are unwritten, of course, but the minority politician double standard is glaringly obvious in the national media fawning over newly elected U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois Democrat.

...

Mr. Obama's personal story is certainly impressive. The bi-racial Mr. Obama is son of a Kenyan immigrant and a rarely mentioned white mother (who raised him after his father ditched the family and returned to Africa when Mr. Obama was 2).

...

Republican Van Tran, a Vietnamese-American, staunchly defends the Second Amendment, immigration enforcement, traditional marriage, tax cuts, the war in Iraq and the sanctity of life. He is also a self-described "Reagan kid" and an outspoken anticommunist who escaped his native land at age 10. He has been targeted for his views and carries a concealed weapon to protect himself. Mr. Tran was elected to the California State assembly and is the first Vietnamese-American to serve in the statehouse.
Republican Bobby Jindal, 33-year-old son of Indian immigrants, was elected to Congress with a whopping 78 percent of the vote in his Louisiana district. A pro-life Catholic, Rhodes Scholar, free-market health-policy guru, reform-minded college administrator and Bush adviser, Mr. Jindal bounced back from a close gubernatorial loss to become the first Indian-American in Congress since 1956. He raised so much money for his campaign that he showered $25,000 of it on the Republican National Committee, $12,500 on the Louisiana Republican Party, and an estimated $125,000 on 45 Republican candidates around the country.
Mr. Tran and Mr. Jindal are remarkable rising stars, but as New York Times editorial writer Adam Cohen seemed to suggest in a derisive Jindal profile, minority conservatives are regarded by the mainstream media elite as "freakish" — no matter how impressive their resumes or resounding their electoral victories or moving their personal stories.

Media minority double standard

Michelle Malkin:

Here are a few mainstream media rules of thumb: Minority Democrats in public office are inspirational role models. Minority Republicans in public office are embarrassing sellouts.
Minority Democrat politicians are principled. Minority Republican politicians are misguided.
Minority Democrat politicians represent the hopes and dreams of all Americans. Minority Republican politicians are traitors to their "communities." These rules are unwritten, of course, but the minority politician double standard is glaringly obvious in the national media fawning over newly elected U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois Democrat.

...

Mr. Obama's personal story is certainly impressive. The bi-racial Mr. Obama is son of a Kenyan immigrant and a rarely mentioned white mother (who raised him after his father ditched the family and returned to Africa when Mr. Obama was 2).

...

Republican Van Tran, a Vietnamese-American, staunchly defends the Second Amendment, immigration enforcement, traditional marriage, tax cuts, the war in Iraq and the sanctity of life. He is also a self-described "Reagan kid" and an outspoken anticommunist who escaped his native land at age 10. He has been targeted for his views and carries a concealed weapon to protect himself. Mr. Tran was elected to the California State assembly and is the first Vietnamese-American to serve in the statehouse.
Republican Bobby Jindal, 33-year-old son of Indian immigrants, was elected to Congress with a whopping 78 percent of the vote in his Louisiana district. A pro-life Catholic, Rhodes Scholar, free-market health-policy guru, reform-minded college administrator and Bush adviser, Mr. Jindal bounced back from a close gubernatorial loss to become the first Indian-American in Congress since 1956. He raised so much money for his campaign that he showered $25,000 of it on the Republican National Committee, $12,500 on the Louisiana Republican Party, and an estimated $125,000 on 45 Republican candidates around the country.
Mr. Tran and Mr. Jindal are remarkable rising stars, but as New York Times editorial writer Adam Cohen seemed to suggest in a derisive Jindal profile, minority conservatives are regarded by the mainstream media elite as "freakish" — no matter how impressive their resumes or resounding their electoral victories or moving their personal stories.

New GIG to net "Gods eye view" for troops

Tim Weiner:

The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide web for the wars of the future.

The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats — "a God's-eye view" of battle.

This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, undersecretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow "Marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery" from a spy satellite, and "get it downloaded within seconds."

The Pentagon calls the secure network the Global Information Grid, or GIG. Conceived six years ago, its first connections were laid six weeks ago. It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build the new war net and its components.

...

Advocates say networked computers will be the most powerful weapon in the American arsenal. Fusing weapons, secret intelligence and soldiers in a globe-girdling network — what they call net-centric warfare — will, they say, change the military in the way the Internet has changed business and culture.

The "Sarin" suitcase

Christian Science Monitor:

...

As American and Iraqi forces have spread their grip across Fallujah, the constant skirmishes of close urban combat and burst-in, door-to-door searches are revealing more and more about insurgent tactics.

In the course of locating seven weapons caches in a single block around a mosque in northeast Fallujah, an Iraqi platoon Wednesday found a suitcase full of vials labeled "Sarin," a deadly nerve agent.

While further analysis determined that the find was probably part of a Soviet test kit with samples, its discovery in a room with mortar shells appeared to indicate an intent to weaponize the material.

This does not make sense. Why would you "weaponize" a test kit. If it is a test kit, it suggest Sarin was in their arsenal at one time. If it is Sarin or a component, it is a significant find.

Reviling the foreigners in Fallujah

Knight Ridder via Kansas City Star:

The fighters came to Fallujah last year with piles of cash, strange accents and a militant vision of Islam that was at once foreign and fearsome to residents emerging from nearly 30 years of Saddam Hussein's secular regime.

Yet out of custom and necessity, tribal locals offered their Arab guests sanctuary and were repaid with promises to help keep American forces out of the town. This week, with U.S. troops battling their way through the Sunni Muslim stronghold, several Fallujah residents said it had been a grave mistake to trust the foreigners who turned their humble stand against foreign occupation into a sophisticated terror campaign.

Once admired as comrades in an anti-American struggle, foreign fighters have become reviled as the reason U.S. missiles are flattening homes and turning Iraq's City of Mosques into a killing field. Their promises of protection were unfulfilled, angry residents said, with immigrant rebels moving on to other outposts and leaving besieged locals to face a superpower alone.

The fact that Iraqis are turning away from foreign terrorists, however, doesn't necessarily mean that they're turning toward the United States and Iraq's U.S.-backed interim government.

"We didn't want the occupation and we didn't want the terrorists, and now we have both," said a Fallujah construction worker who gave his name as only Abu Ehab, 30. "I didn't think the Arabs would be so vicious, and I never thought the Americans would be so unmerciful."

...

Fallujah residents, most of them now displaced by the fighting, said there were hundreds of non-Iraqi Arabs in town before the offensive began on Monday. However, they added, the ties of brotherhood had mostly unraveled and the remaining foreign fighters had tried to intimidate residents into staying as human shields.

A rebel-allied cleric who goes by the name Sheik Rafaa told Knight Ridder that Iraqi rebels were so infuriated by the disappearance of their foreign allies that one cell had "executed 20 Arab fighters because they left an area they promised to defend."

Other residents said foreign militants wore out their welcome months ago, when they imposed a Taliban-like interpretation of Islamic law that included public floggings for suspects accused of drinking alcohol or refusing to grow beards. Women who failed to cover their hair or remove their makeup were subjected to public humiliation. Those accused of spying for Americans were executed on the spot, residents said.

The turning point for a young man named Hudaifa came the day he saw a Yemeni fighter whipping an Iraqi in a public square. He recalled his humiliation this week in a conversation with other Fallujah residents now in Baghdad. Still fearful, the men asked that their last names not be published.

Reportin arafats demise

Lilleks:

Our paper had this headline: “Enduring Symbol of Palestine Dies.” Personally, I’m old school. I’d go with something, oh, factual, like “ARAFAT DEAD.” Hard to argue. Hard to find bias. I don’t know what would be satisfying, really. “Goaty Old Fiend Expires, Loses Power, Fortune, Bowel Control; Fills Room with Odor of Offal and Urine” would put people off their breakfast, I suppose. I am content to know he is not in Hell. Nope. Arafat did not go to Hell. He boards the ferry, yes; he makes it halfway across the River Styx, yes. Then the ferry blows up. Ten times a day for eternity. For a start.

One vertebrae at a time

BBC:

...

Lt Col Gareth Brandl of the US marines told our correspondent that the gradual driving back of the insurgents was working.

"We are here to reduce the enemy sanctuary, we're doing that. We are crushing his back, one vertebrae at a time."

...

Master Sergeant Roy Meek of the US marines said the insurgents were cornered in the south of the city.

"They can't go north because that's where we are. They can't go west because of the Euphrates river and they can't go east because we have a huge presence there."

Death by dispersal

Strategy Page:

Five days of fighting in and around Fallujah have left 25 American and Iraqi troops dead, as well as over 600 anti-government gunmen. There appears to be some coordination among the anti-government forces. There have been attempts by the anti-government fighters to break the cordon around Fallujah, so that hundreds of trapped gunmen can escape. So far, this has not worked. In Mosul, and elsewhere in central Iraq, gangs of anti-government gunmen attacked police stations and began openly prowling the streets. Coming out into the open like this, makes it easier to kill off the hostile gunmen.

The anti-government forces are partially run on illusions. For example, the halting of an American offensive in Fallujah last April is portrayed by anti-government forces as a military victory. This ignores the fact that the fighting was stopped in order to allow for a negotiated return of government control to Fallujah. The anti-government forces never intended to honor any pledges that came out of the negotiations, and portrayed their deception as a victory as well. This shows the cultural differences between the thugs who have run Iraq, and are trying to regain control, and reality.

Flushed out of their bases, the anti-government forces are much more easily killed, and a lot more quickly. This has an adverse impact on recruiting for the anti-government gangs. Battles like this are a reality check for the young men who have become mesmerized by the pro-Sunni propaganda, which portrays the gangs as valiant freedom fighters who are taking back control of Iraq for the Iraqis. That message is getting harder to sustain, as more and more evidence of Sunni Arab Iraqi atrocities come to light. Pro-Sunni media like al Jazeera find it difficult to shift their editorial slant, but are being forced to by public opinion, and the rather different portrayal of events by Iraqi media.... Seeing the Sunni Arab gunmen quickly rolled over by American and Iraqi troops is also a hard story for al Jazeera to cover.

The media is a bigger loser than Kerry

Dan Henninger:

It is often said that the only sure winner in American politics is the media. Amid GOP victory parties or the ruined dreams of the Kerry candidacy, the one constant is that the media marches on.

Maybe not this time. Big Media lost big. But it was more than a loss. It was an abdication of authority.

Large media institutions, such as CBS or the New York Times, have been regarded as nothing if not authoritative. In the Information Age, authority is a priceless franchise. But it is this franchise that Big Media, incredibly, has just thrown away. It did so by choosing to go into overt opposition to one party's candidate, a sitting president. It stooped to conquer.

The prominent case studies here are Dan Rather's failed National Guard story on CBS and the front page the past year of the New York Times (a proxy for many large dailies). Add in as well Big Media's handling of Abu Ghraib, a real story that got blown into a monthlong bonfire that obviously was intended to burn down the legitimacy of the war in Iraq. I think many people thought the over-the-top Abu Ghraib coverage, amid a war, was the media shouting fire in a crowded theater.

...

Two months ago, Gallup reported that public belief in the media's ability to report news accurately and fairly had fallen to 44%--what Gallup called a significant drop from 54% just a year ago. The larger media outlets have been pushing the edge of the partisanship envelope for a long time. People have kvetched about "spin" for years but then largely internalized it. Not in 2004. Big Media chose precisely the wrong moment to give itself over to an apparent compulsion to overthrow the Bush presidency.

The other Dem excuse--Kerry ran a bad campaign

Jonathon Last:

SO IT'S COME TO THIS: I'm John Kerry's last defender.

Two pieces of conventional wisdom emerged from last week's election. (1) Republicans owe their victory to anti-gay marriage initiatives and a massive values divide; and (2) John Kerry was a lousy candidate. Both are wrong.

David Brooks has fairly dispensed with the first trope, I'll tackle the second.

Writing in the Progressive, Matthew Rothschild complains that Kerry "never could give a decent speech." Since November 3, other Democrats have seconded this notion, and more. In Salon, Farhad Manjoo called Kerry "a pretty poor candidate;" Alexandra Pelosi went one further, pronouncing him "a terrible candidate." Mark Halperin laid nearly all of the blame for Tuesday's loss at Kerry's feet, saying, "John Kerry had a lot of problems too. . . . the Kerry campaign, with a bad candidate, a worse candidate, was not good enough to win."

Martin Peretz has recently written an entire ode to his dislike of Kerry.

And even before the election, people like Mickey Kaus and Noam Scheiber dumped on him from the beginning of his candidacy until almost the very end. This caterwauling is silly and unfair to John Kerry.

Did John Kerry run a poor campaign? Yes. Kerry never articulated where he stood on Iraq or, more importantly, how--exactly--he would be tougher than Bush in the war on terror....

The reason Kerry could never articulate a coherent Iraq policy is that two-thirds of his party wanted to cut and run and two thirds of the rest of the country thought that would be a horrible mistake and a retreat from the war on terror. He could either side with President Bush and send his base to Ralph Nader or he could side with his base and lose in a land slide. He actually did a pretty good job of finessing his incoherence by claiming Bush had made a mess (which his base agrred with) and saying that he could stay and fix it (which the rest of the country wanted to do). His problem was that he could not convince enough people that he would really finish the fight. His anti war instincts kept slipping out along with his "global test." Given his screwy base, he ran about as good a campaign as anyone else could have for the Democrats. Until the Democrats quit making excuses and recognize that their policies are being rejected they will continue to lose elections.

Arafat, one of the worst men--ever

Jay Nordlinger:

...

A reader e-mailed me, "Jay, I was watching CBS News, and the anchor described Arafat as 'a dedicated thorn in the side of the Israelis.'" Yes, that's what he was: a thorn in Israel's side. That's what all murderers are to their victims: thorns in their sides.

But Arafat did much more than murder Israelis, of course: He kept an entire people — the Palestinians — in an unchanging condition of grievance, penury, and statelessness. He must be one of the worst men ever to have power, which is saying something.

The media that comforts the enemy and tries to lower US resolve

Martin Fackler:

Are there no limits to the comfort and support being given to our enemies by our so-called news media? On the front page of the Oct. 20 issue of USA Today, we find the headline "Put to test, 300 Iraqi troops fled." But in the fine print we find that 2,000 other Iraqi troops stuck with U.S. forces in taking the militant stronghold in Samarra. The one of eight who purportedly fled got the headline: The seven of eight who remained and fought were mentioned as an afterthought. American successes in Iraq are ignored or minimized — only shortcomings are highlighted.
The Vietnam conflict was lost by the treason of our news media as it falsely reported the Tet offensive of 1968 as a defeat. In 1968, I was a combat surgeon at the U.S. Naval Support Hospital in Danang. Since we were also a prisoner of war hospital, we treated the enemy's wounded as well as our own. After the Tet offensive, we noted that our prisoners, who had been mostly Viet Cong (Communist South Vietnamese forces), were mostly North Vietnamese troops. Why? Because in the Tet offensive we killed 60,000 of the estimated 80,000 Viet Cong combatants virtually overnight. North Vietnam had to send its troops to replace the Viet Cong. The Tet offensive was an unmitigated military disaster for North Vietnam. The Viet Cong finally came out to fight (ambushes and guerrilla tactics had been the norm previously) — and we destroyed them. A national uprising against the Americans, which Tet's simultaneous countrywide attacks were intended to incite, never happened.
Our press, however, falsely reported the Tet offensive as a defeat for the Americans, harping on that distortion incessantly until it had destroyed the will of the American public to continue the war. That misrepresentation in the press coverage of Vietnam is well documented in "The Big Story — How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington" by the longtime journalist and the director of communications at the Library of Congress, Peter Braestrup.

...

Our desertion of Vietnam has certainly emboldened our enemy in the war on terror. One must wonder if September 11 would even have happened had we stayed and won in Vietnam. Our withdrawal graphically demonstrated the Achilles' heel of our democracy is its susceptibility to allowing its very freedoms to be used to destroy it. We say that our freedoms do not include the right to falsely cry "fire" in a crowded theater. But we allowed our "free press" to do its equivalent in its distortions about Vietnam. We are currently allowing it to do the same thing in its reporting about Iraq, which is frighteningly similar to that about Vietnam in its misleading content, distorted focus and malignant effect.

...

Thus far, battles in the war on terror are not being fought in our homeland — yet our press is too busy dwelling on anything it can interpret as bad. The American presence continues to draw terrorists into Iraq, where we are very successfully annihilating them, just as we did the Viet Cong in the Tet offensive of 1968. But our terrorist enemies are counting on the cooperation of our media to act as it did in reporting events from Vietnam: And our media is complying. Its subtle propaganda of ending news broadcasts with the names of those killed in Iraq tears at the emotions of our populace.

Unlike Vietnam, there is now a vigorous alternative media that is challenging the perspective of the defeatist in the old media. As for the Tet offensive, Lyndon Johnson knew the communist had been defeated during the Tet attacks, but he also knew his strategy of forcing a stalemate in order to get the communist to negotiate a disengagement, had failed. When you successfully execute your strategy and still do not win you have a bad strategy. One of the ironies of the war in Vietnam is that after four years of continuing basically the Johnson strategy, Nixon finally went with the "hard knock" strategy that the Joint Chiefs had recommended to Johnson in 1964. The result was the "Christmas bombing" campaign in the north along with mining of Haiphong harbor. In a matter of weeks the communist agreed to a disengagement that Johnson would have jumped at years earlier which would have saved thousands of lives on both side. The Johnson-McNamara team thought the "hard knock" strategy was too dangerous. They could not have been more wrong.

Keeping the terrorist busy in their country

George Will:

...

Abizaid believes that radical Islam today is roughly akin to Bolshevism in 1890 and fascism in 1920 -- there is time to stop its rise, but it must be stopped. Military success is certain. The enemy dare not mass. In Vietnam, U.S. battalions suffered defeats. In Iraq, there has been no platoon-size defeat, and regular U.S. infantry units perform tasks that would have called for Delta Force skills a decade ago. (Prairiepundit has been making this point for months!)

Abizaid laconically dismisses the idea that U.S. military energies are being depleted by "nation building" duties: "We're doing more fighting than fixing. The enemy gives us ample opportunity to fight." But while almost 3,000 Americans died on Sept. 11, there have been fewer than half that many military deaths in the three years since the post-attack fighting began, in Afghanistan. And one reason why terrorists have killed no Americans in America since Sept. 11 is that, as one officer puts it, "we're so much in their knickers abroad."

Success in Iraq, people here believe, is contingent on three ifs: if Iraqi military and security forces can stay intact during contacts with the insurgents; if insurgents are killed in sufficient numbers to convince the Sunni political class that it must invest its hope in politics; and if neighboring states, especially Syria, will cooperate in slowing the flow of money and other aid to the insurgency. If so, then the United States can -- this is the preferred verb -- "stand up" an Iraqi state and recede from a dominant role.

Abizaid, who speaks Arabic and has studied the region (and in the region, at the University of Jordan), believes that the Fallujah operation begins a 12-month period from which America will learn the parameters of the possible. When a visitor suggests that in two weeks we will know much, another officer tersely replies: "Two days."

That was said on Monday. So far the performance of Iraq's apprentice military, now working with U.S. units denoted by the blue icons on that screen, permits tentative -- very tentative -- optimism.

Libersals never take responsibility for their defeats

Charles Krauthammer:

In 1994, when the Gingrich revolution swept Republicans into power, ending 40 years of Democratic hegemony in the House, the mainstream press needed to account for this inversion of the Perfect Order of Things. A myth was born. Explained the USA Today headline: "ANGRY WHITE MEN: Their votes turn the tide for GOP."

Overnight, the revolution of the Angry White Male became conventional wisdom. In the 10 years before the 1994 election there were 56 mentions of angry white men in the media, according to LexisNexis. In the next seven months there were more than 1,400.

At the time, I looked into this story line -- and found not a scintilla of evidence to support the claim. Nonetheless, it was a necessary invention, a way for the liberal elite to delegitimize a conservative victory. And, even better, a way to assuage their moral vanity: You never lose because your ideas are sclerotic or your positions retrograde, but because your opponent appealed to the baser instincts of mankind.

Plus ca change ... Ten years and another stunning Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again. The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck.

In the post-election analyses, the liberal elite, led by the holy trinity of the New York Times -- Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd -- just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. As usual, Dowd achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the Republicans for pandering to "isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism" in their unfailing drive to "summon our nasty devils."

Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical voter rest?

Its origins lie in a single question in the Election Day exit poll. The urban myth grew around the fact that "moral values" ranked highest in the answer to Question J: "Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?"

It is a thin reed upon which to base a General Theory of the '04 Election. In fact, it is no reed at all. The way the question was set up, moral values were sure to be ranked disproportionately high. Why? Because it was a multiple-choice question, and moral values cover a group of issues, while all the other choices were individual issues. Chop up the alternatives finely enough, and moral values are sure to get a bare plurality over the others.

...

...George Bush increased his vote in 2004 over 2000 by an average of 3.1 percent nationwide. In Ohio the increase was 1 percent -- less than a third of the national average. In the 11 states in which the gay marriage referendums were held, Bush increased his vote by less than he did in the 39 states that did not have the referendum. The great anti-gay surge was pure fiction.

This does not deter the myth of the Bigoted Christian Redneck from dominating the thinking of liberals and infecting the blue-state media. They need their moral superiority like oxygen, and they cannot have it cut off by mere facts. Once again they angrily claim the moral high ground, while standing in the ruins of yet another humiliating electoral defeat.

Desperate insurgents driven to distractions in other cities while those left behind in Fallujah try to get away

AP:

Insurgents tried to break through the U.S. cordon surrounding Fallujah on Thursday as American forces launched an offensive against concentrations of militants in the south of the city. Some 600 insurgents, 18 U.S. troops and five Iraqi soldiers have been killed in the four-day assault, the U.S. military said.

U.S. troops, meanwhile, went on the offensive Thursday in Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, after guerrilla attacks launched against police stations and bridges across the Tigris river in an apparent bid to relieve pressure on their trapped allies in Fallujah.

A U.S. official acknowledged it might take "some time" to secure the city, 220 miles to the north.

Elsewhere, a series of attacks throughout central Iraq underscored the nation's perilous security. In Baghdad, a car bomb exploded Thursday moments after a U.S. patrol passed on Saadoun Street, killing 17 bystanders and wounding 30. There were no U.S. casualties.

It appears that insurgents who may have slipped out of Fallujah are attriting themselves in futile actions around Iraq. The insurgents in Mosul will suffer the same fate as those in Fallujah. They will be destroyed. Meanwhile the Marines press on in Fallujah and Ramadi. The insurgents are really making it easier for US and Iraqi forces to eventually destroy them by spreading their attacks they are strong no where and will defeated in detail if they are not blowing themselves up trying to kill non combatants. The insurgents are really giving the US forces an opportunity to speed the pacification of the country. But, they had little choice. If they had stayed and fought in Fallujah they would have met the same end.

The montheist headchoppers for allah slaughterhouse

AP:

U.S. and Iraqi troops battling their way through Fallujah stumbled on a horrific find - a small, windowless room with blood-soaked mattresses and straw mats on the floor that U.S. commanders are calling a "hostage slaughterhouse."

The room is in a small, concrete house is believed to have been used by militants who captured and possibly killed hostages here.

Marine Maj. Gen. Richard Natonski, who is commanding the offensive to retake the insurgent-held city, gave grim details of the "slaughterhouse" Thursday after paying a visit there.

"The room was small. There were no windows, just one door. Inside, the flag was on the wall. There were two thin mattresses and straw mats covered in blood," he said. "There was also a wheelchair, which we believe was used to move the prisoners around in. We believe they were bound and moved around the complex in the wheelchair."

Hanging on the wall of the small room was a black banner reading, "The Islamic Secret Army" with a logo showing a sword and a Kalashnikov rifle flanking a Quran.

...

Shortly afterward, Iraqi commander Maj. Gen. Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassem Mohan, announced some of the findings: hostages' documents, CDs showing captives being killed and black clothing worn by militants in videos.

Natonski said U.S. troops also found a computer, computer disks, and a large arms cache in the home, which included a living space and a kitchen.

"We are now currently exploiting the material that was found in the room to see and confirm whether this was in fact a room used for execution by the insurgents of innocent Iraqis and foreigners," he said.

He did not give any details on the identities of the hostages thought to have been kept there.

Marine intelligence officers are combing through the computer disks and other finds from the site, hoping to glean information on insurgents.

Global warming on Mars

The Speculist:

Things are heating up on Mars...literally. The planet is experiencing its own version of global warming. The dry-ice polar caps are diminishing. Paul Hsieh speculates that this must be on account of our failure to sign Kyoto. Wow, when somebody close to me told me that I could vote for Bush if I wanted to, but I would have to accept the fact that everything that happens from now on is my fault...well, I just didn't grasp the cosmic implications.

On the other hand, I can't help but wonder — if two planets so close to each other are both experiencing a rise in surface temperature, isn't it just possible that it might have to do with that nearby star they both orbit?

I have never heard a resonable explanation from the chicken little "scientist" of global warming fame of how we cause global warming on Mars.

A terrorist "success" story

Max Boot:

...

There has been no more successful terrorist in the modern age. Yet his biggest victims were not Israelis. It was his own people who suffered the most. If Arafat had displayed the wisdom of a Gandhi or Mandela, he would long ago have presided over the establishment of a fully independent Palestine comprising all of the Gaza Strip, part of Jerusalem and at least 95% of the West Bank....

...

His refusal to compromise, his unwillingness to give up the way of the gun consigned his people to economic and moral suicide. The current intifada, launched in September 2000 after Arafat turned down a generous peace offer from the Israelis at Camp David, has claimed three times as many Palestinian as Israeli victims. It has also led to a precipitous plunge in living standards in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — not something Arafat's wife and daughter would notice from their cozy Paris residence.

...

Though Arafat, of course, bore ultimate responsibility for his many sins, he could not have been so destructive without so many outside enablers, ranging from the Soviet Union, which supported him from the 1960s to the 1980s, to the European Union and the United States, which stepped into the sugar daddy role in the 1990s. And let us not forget his fan club among the Western intelligentsia, many of whom even now weep for his passing as if he were a great man instead of a criminal with a cause.

George W. Bush, alone among Western leaders, had the courage to stop dealing with the Palestinian thug-in-chief. On June 24, 2002, the president gave an important speech in which he called on the Palestinian people "to elect new leaders … not compromised by terror" and to "build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty." Now that Arafat has gone to the great compound in the sky, there will be pressure on Bush to resume the pointless "peace process," but it will be premature to do so as long as the terrorist kleptocracy spawned by Arafat continues to exist.

Fallujah at the end of the Sunni conveyer belt

Belmont Club:

...

Taking Fallujah then, was not merely a symbolic political act to reduce a 'symbol of defiance', but a sound operational move. It interdicts the conveyor belt of destruction that flowed from the Syrian border towards Baghdad. The logical next step is to cut the line again near the Syrian border, perhaps at Anah, so that by taking out both ends the middle is left unsupported. Alternatively, the US could roll up the enemy line of communication going north by taking out Ramadi which would force the enemy to sortie from Haditha, a little ville a lot farther from Baghdad. Although this will not totally destroy the insurgency, it will throttle movement along their lines of communication considerably. Guerilla warfare, like all warfare, is logistics. It just takes different forms.

In order to accomplish this task, the US has approximately 18 brigades -- about 50 battalions -- at hand. But many of these are assigned to important security duties and about 10 battalions were directly employed in the Fallujah operation or in support, and it will be some days, even weeks, before these units are available again to mount other operations. But the Prime Minister Allawie's 60 day declaration of martial law strongly suggests that the Sunni campaign will be finished before elections are held in January and that means there will be very little pause in American operational tempo. In fact, although the focus of media coverage has been on the urban battle in Fallujah, pursuit operations up and down the ratline to Syria are probably in progress. Chester was surprised to learn that contrary to his expectations, the British Black Watch regiment was to the west and probably north of Fallujah, not east as he expected. That means it was not between Fallujah and Baghdad, but between Fallujah and Ramadi. This suggests the hammer could fall on Ramadi, with Black Watch in a blocking position. One can only wait and see.

Arafat finally dies

Fox News:

Yasser Arafat always said he wanted to die as a martyr, but died instead of old age and a mysterious illness Thursday morning in a French military hospital.

...

Palestinians will remember him as an icon, a father figure and a symbol of resistance against the Jewish state.

But Israelis will remember him as an arch-terrorist — their nemesis for nearly 40 years.

His death marked the end of an era in modern Middle East history, and prompted calls from President Bush and other world leaders to seize the moment to spur new efforts at Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

The Palestinians have nothing to offer the Israelis. At this point their is no Palestinian leadership that can control the murders from groups like Hamas and Hizballah. Until the death cults are destroyed the Palestinians will never have peace.

Man found chained to wall in Fallujah

AP via CNN:

U.S. forces found and freed an Iraqi who had been chained to a wall and beaten by his captors in a building in Falluja, the military said Thursday. The man told Marines he was a taxi driver held for 10 days.

The man was bruised and starving when troops came across him Wednesday afternoon in the building in a northeastern district of the city, where U.S. and Iraqi forces have launched a huge assault against Sunni insurgents.

Marines spokesman Maj. Francis Piccoli said that U.S. troops had found the man chained to a wall and shackled by his wrists and ankles. The man had been beaten by his captors and was very malnourished, according to medical assessments.

A variety of weapons was discovered at the site as well, he said.

Reasons for clearing Fallujah

Strategy Page:

After four days, about 80 percent of Fallujah has been cleared of hostile gunmen. The opposition showed some signs of planning and training, but were greatly outmatched by the American troops who came after them. As has happened in previous urban battles, the U.S. forces systematically moved through the built up areas, killing off the armed opposition as they went. The media had played up the resistance in Fallujah as something special, being capable of giving American troops more of a fight. But this proved, as usual, to be self-inflicted propaganda. The new story line is that "most of the insurgents have fled." That is partially true. The objective of the battle in Fallujah, and other Sunni cities, is to get the areas under the control of Iraqi police. The gunmen in Fallujah were a mixed lot, some of them were criminal gangs, others were motivated by religion. But most were interested in regaining power for the Sunni Arabs. In other words, a successor for Saddam Hussein. With control of towns and cities, the Sunni Arab gangs can more effectively run their terror campaign. Without these safe havens, the anti-government gunmen are easier to run down and arrest or kill. This is what has happened throughout northern and southern Iraq, as well as most of Baghdad.

The "resistance" will continue because the people leading it are the same ones who ran Saddam Husseins terror and enforcement operation for decades. These guys have a lot of Iraqi blood on their hands, and their Shia and Kurd victims know who they are. Law and order in the Sunni Arab areas of central Iraq means a round up of the "war criminals" from the Saddam area. So the thugs fight on, as they have little choice.

Fallujah is about removing sanctuaries. Insurgents need them to be effective. Our immediate objective militarily in Iraq is making sure they have none.

Why liberals are losers

Emmett Tyrrell:

One of the reasons I can say with the utmost confidence that the liberal Democrats are going to be out in the cold for a very long time has to do with a sociological observation. Almost no liberal Democrat knows a conservative Republican of whom he is not contemptuous.

To be sure, liberals in their think tanks, their universities, their corporate offices or government bureaucracies encounter the occasional conservative. Doubtless over at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, many of the resident liberals knew that amiable moderate conservative former, Sen. Al Simpson. Many probably even liked him. Simpson is not easy to dislike. But did they respect his political values? The thing for a liberal is impossible.

...

The liberal Democrats' contempt for those who just won the Nov. 2 elections explains their amazing anger. Couple their contempt with their ignorance -- often studied ignorance -- of the people who just beat them, and you will understand why I say liberals are, politically speaking, finished.

In all the soul-searching I have read since the election, only one Democrat has demonstrated the insight to move on with the rebuilding of his party. That is Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, who told a New York Times reporter: "We need to be a party that stands for more than the sum of our resentments. In the heartland, where I am from, there are doubts. Too often, we're caricatured as a bicoastal cultural elite that is condescending at best and contemptuous at worst to the values that Americans hold in their daily lives."

Yes, the good senator said "condescending" and "contemptuous." He also talks as though the citizenry in the heartland has legitimate values. Those are basically the values of moral accountability, hard work, personal freedom, limited government and equality before the law, and then you can throw in many of the so-called liberal values: tolerance, compassion, some sort of egalitarianism. Those values are not unique to liberals, though liberals think they are.

It is clear that the Democrats in control of their party at this time are not smart enough to back Bayh. Perhaps, in the next four years, they may become desperate enough to back him. If they do, he will be the most competitive candidate they have. If they do not Bayh should consider switching to the Republican party. He is smart enough to be one.

Moving the goal post in Fallujah

Ralph Peters:

IN the Second Battle of Fallujah, military operations are ahead of schedule. Our casualties have been blessedly light. The terrorists who haven't fled are being killed by the hundreds. Our troops will soon achieve their goal of eliminating Iraq's key safe haven for terrorists.

Our Marines and soldiers have carried the ball inside the 10-yard line. The media's response? Move the goalposts.

The legions of pundits ("Will talk for food") now suggest that a win in Fallujah will be meaningless because we failed to kill or capture the terrorist leadership, because some of the thugs ran away and because Fallujah won't resemble Darien, Conn., by next Sunday.

On Tuesday, as our troops handily pierced the defenses terrorists had spent months erecting, The New York Times carried two front-page stories implying that our forces were facing possible defeat. The Times' military analysis was incompetent and just plain wrong. And the photo its editors ran above the fold showed a Marine curled in a ditch under enemy fire.

It wasn't reporting. It was a mix of anti-American propaganda and wishful thinking. Al-Jazeera couldn't have done it better.

...

What's really happening?

We're winning a critical victory. Since the political decision to stop short in Fallujah last April, the terrorists had bragged to the world that the city would never fall to the infidel. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his thugs turned Fallujah into a vast dungeon, complete with torture chambers and execution halls. The terrorists stockpiled weapons and ammunition, welcoming thousands of international "Jihadis" and using the city as a base to spread terror across central Iraq.

Fallujah became the new world capital of terror. And Allah's butchers proclaimed that they'd slaughter U.S. troops in the streets, if they tried to enter the city.

Guess who's dying now?

By fleeing without fighting to the death as they promised they would, the terror-masters discredited themselves. After Coalition leaders lost their nerve last April, the terrorists portrayed themselves as having faced down America's military might. This time, they ran away, leaving untrained recruits to take the bullet-train to paradise.

The swift fall of Fallujah is not only a practical disaster for the terrorists, but a massive loss of face for them throughout the Muslim world.

...

What have we found in Fallujah? Hostage slaughterhouses — butcher shops for human cattle. Stockpiles of ammunition and explosives in mosques. And a city scarred by all the marks of an Islamic reign of terror.

Talking heads may smirk and say that we'll still have to fight the terrorists elsewhere. True enough. But no one claimed that Fallujah would be the last battle. Of course, the terrorists who ran away will try to refurbish their image with more bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings.

But they've lost their greatest stronghold. They've lost their sole tangible symbol of success. And they've lost their image as dauntless warriors able to stand up to the U.S. military.

Insurgent leaders probably fled before Fallujah attack

NY Times:

Insurgent leaders in Falluja probably fled before the American-led offensive and may be coordinating attacks in Iraq that have left scores dead over the past few days, according to American military officials here. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who is the most wanted man in Iraq, has almost certainly fled, military officials believe. Americans say his group is responsible for attacks, kidnappings and beheadings that have killed hundreds in more than a year. Before the offensive began, some military officials said Mr. Zarqawi could be operating out of Falluja, but his precise whereabouts have not been known. "I personally believe some of the senior leaders probably have fled," Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, said in a video conference with reporters on Tuesday. "I would hope not, but I've got to assume that those kinds of leaders understand the combat power we can bring."

This is not that surprising nor is it that important. While it would have been nice if they had been dumb enough to stick around and get killed, the purpose of the attack is to take away their sanctuary. Think about as Afghanistan on a smaller scale. Without their sanctuary in Fallujah Zarqawi's monotheist head choppers for Allah have to go mix with the rest of the country and they never know when someone is going to claim the $25 million reward on the thugee in chief. Without the sanctuary, it will be harder for them to build their car bombs without being spotted. It will be harder for them to gather without being noticed. Life without their sanctuary will just get harder and harder.

Artillery hitting target within 1 meter from 3 miles away in Fallujah

Telegraph:

American troops scored one of their biggest successes in the battle for Fallujah when an estimated 70 foreign fighters were killed in a massive precision artillery strike on a building in a mosque complex.

Military intelligence officers were last night trying to confirm that a "high-value target" or HVT died in the attack. The man is suspected of being a key lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most wanted man in Iraq, and responsible for marshalling hard-line insurgence from other Arab countries.

The strike took place on Tuesday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the invasion of the rebel-held Sunni bastion began, after an Abrams tank commander from Phantom troop, part of the US Army's Task Force 2-2, observed large numbers of men converging on a building next to a mosque. "Guys with short brown hair, dark pants and carrying AK-47s were moving in groups of between two and five across the road to a yellow building," said Lt Neil Prakash, the tank commander.

"Then some started throwing Molotov cocktails and pouring gasoline on the road to create a smokescreen."

They apparently thought the smoke would obscure them from view.

Lt Prakash, whose call-sign is Red 6, observed the scene through the optical sight of his tank, 2,400 metres away in an "area of responsibility" or AOR covered by the 1st Company, 8th Marines, west of Task Force 2-2's AOR on the eastern edge of the city.

...

A Humvee from Phantom troop fitted with a Long Range Acquisition System (LRAS) was moved to within two kilometres of the mosque, well inside its maximum range of 15km, to get a second opinion on what was happening. "The strike was so sensitive that it took more than an hour to approve it," said Maj John Reynolds, operations officer for 2-2. "Normally it happens in minutes."

Lt Prakash was asked to provide a grid co-ordinate, accurate to within a metre, to minimise the chance of hitting the mosque, about 50 metres from the building.

At about 3pm, the higher authorisation came through and Lt Col Pete Newell, commanding 2-2 and with the call-sign Ramrod 6, gave the order to fire a barrage of 20 155mm high-explosive shells from howitzers about three miles away from the mosque.

Specialist James Taylor, manning the LRAS, watched the burst of shells hit.

"They landed on the left side of the building and I saw three bodies fly into the air," he said. "It was awesome."

Lt Prakash radioed that the rounds were right on target and requested 10 more to ensure maximum killing effect.

"One of the men was in a sniper position on the building," said Lt Prakash. "I saw him fall off, hit the ground and bounce up. There were about five bodies that went three, four, five storeys up in the air. I'd already counted between 40 and 50 men going into that building. There were men running out, coughing and doubling over. The second lot of rounds took them out and all those who had been crossing the road.

It is believed that Task Force 2-2 hit fighters gathered to discuss how to retreat after US forces had pushed the insurgents down from the north and in from the east.

Mobile phone intercepts and reports from Iraqi informants suggested there were 70 gunmen in the building and indicated that the very senior Zarqawi lieutenant had perished. A final assessment on who died has yet to be made.

Monotheist head choppers for Allah are dieing in Fallujah

Strategy Page:

American and Iraqi troops have cleared hostile gunmen from most of Fallujah, losing about twenty dead in three days of fighting. Enemy dead are over 500, with many uncounted bodies blown apart by bombs or buried in rubble. Enemy plans to lure American troops into ambushes and areas rigged with bombs rarely worked. American intelligence of the city was good enough to detect most of these traps, and troops advancing into Fallujah caught most of the rest. Apparently, about two thousand gunmen stayed in the city to fight, and die. Many of the more experienced fighters, and their leadership and technical people, had previously fled to other parts of Sunni Arab central Iraq. But there are no other towns where such anti-government groups could operate as openly and effectively as they did in Fallujah. The anti-government forces continue to concentrate their attacks and terror activities on Iraqi police and security forces. It is the Iraqi police who will make it more difficult for the gangs to stay hidden. The gangs cannot survive encounters with coalition combat troops, so the destruction of the Iraqi police force is a matter of life and death for them.

The "homophobic" state of mind

Debra Saunders:

Throughout history, same-sex marriage has been illegal. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, so that states could refuse to recognize same-sex marriages from other states. Sen. John Kerry opposes same-sex marriage but supports civil unions for same-sex couples. President Bush has about the same position as Kerry, except that he also supports a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

So it is odd that, according to pundits and readers, even though majorities of voters opposed same-sex marriage, only the GOP is the homophobic party.

In 2000, 61 percent of California voters approved Proposition 22, also dubbed the Defense of Marriage Act, which declared, "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." If the GOP is the homophobic party for opposing same-sex marriage, then California is the homophobic state.

On Sunday, Bush guru Karl Rove told Fox News that the president will push for a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage because "We cannot allow activist local elected officials to thumb their nose at 5,000 years of human history and determine that marriage is something else."

Rove's point about 5,000 years of history strikes at the heart of the debate. It is insane to blame George Bush for adhering to values dear to Americans since before the American Revolution.

...

The point of this column: Advocates should stop dismissing everyone who is against same-sex marriage as homophobic or hate-filled. Exit polls showed that 27 percent of voters support same-sex marriage, while another 35 percent support civil unions. These numbers tell you that it is only a matter of time before federal laws recognize the legal rights of gay and lesbian couples.

That is, of course, unless the intolerance of the gay-marriage lobby chases would-be supporters away. When activists frame all opponents to same-sex marriage as bigots and haters, they show themselves to be intolerant of those whose deeply held religious convictions tell them same-sex marriage is wrong.

Can Dems "get" religion

Jonah Goldberg:

...

Pelosi's dilemma is instructive. She desperately wants to be more accommodating to "so-called religious issues," but she can't put down her ACLU talking points about how dangerous religion is.

...

But at the end of the day, Democrats still have a problem. Regular churchgoers, pro-lifers, traditionalists: These folks vote Republican now in staggering proportions. Bush increased his share among Orthodox Jews by huge margins over 2000, capturing 69% of their votes. He also captured a few more blacks and a lot more Hispanics this year by talking about faith and morality.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are in a box. Of course, many Democratic politicians are religious. But politicians comfortable discussing religion are overwhelmingly Republican. Democrats get their money from Hollywood and their shock troops from college campuses. Both constituencies get the heebie-jeebies from God talk. And yet, if the Democrats can't win over churchgoers, they are destined to be a minority party for a long time.

Former Clinton staffer Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., explained to The New York Times, "People aren't going to hear what we say until they know that we don't approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment."

Most national Democrats sound silly talking about religion and faith. Like Pelosi, they can't resist offering applause lines to the Alec Baldwin wing of their party. And when they fake piety, it's even worse.

...

In the final presidential debate, John Kerry, a Catholic, did his level-best to talk about his faith. It is, he explained, "why I fight against poverty. That's why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this Earth. That's why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith."

But, at the same time, Kerry said he could not "transfer" his faith onto other people by legislating it. This struck many as a political and theological dodge. Why is it OK to brag about imposing the minimum wage and affirmative action — issues his faith is largely silent on — based on God's will, but it's wrong to do the same thing on abortion when his church's views there are clear and ironclad? Kerry wanted it both ways: to claim he was guided by faith on the easy stuff but that he couldn't impose his religion when it wasn't politically advantageous.

An important birthday

Over 200 years ago in Tun Tavern in the city of Philadelphia the US Narine Corps was born. This story by Willaim McGurn in the NY Post is about a more recent member of the Marine corps family:

FORGIVE Mindy Evnin if she's not up for cake and candles today. Even if she knows how important this birthday was for her son.

On this day in a Philadelphia tavern, the Continental Congress gave birth to the Marine Corps almost a full year before the Declaration of Independence. More than two centuries later in Fallujah, America still looks to the Marines to do the job no one else can.

And no one knows better than Mindy Evnin the price: On a dusty Iraqi roadside in April 2003, her son, Cpl. Mark Evnin, gave his life wearing that same uniform.

But you hear only admiration for the corps from Mindy.

Until the Marine recruiter came to her home the day after Thanksgiving during Mark's senior year at South Burlington (Vt.) High, his mother didn't know what her son would do with his life. And once he did know, it was sometimes hard to explain to her social circles: "At a book club where the other mothers were all talking about which college their children were going off to," says Mindy Evnin, "I shared that Mark wanted to go to sniper school."

Mark's recruiter had given Mindy a Marine bumper sticker — which, he noted, she had no right to affix to her car until Mark had made it through boot camp. As she confesses over lunch in Manhattan, "I told Mark I wasn't sure then I could ever put it on my car."

Gradually, however, as she watched the changes in her son and his pride in his achievements, she realized that the little boy who wore fatigues to Hebrew school was finally where he was meant to be: with his fellow Marines.

In Iraq last April, a San Francisco Chronicle correspondent embedded with Mark's unit let him use his satellite phone to call home. Two days later, Cpl. Mark Evnin was killed in action while returning fire in an Iraqi ambush.

And that's when Mindy really learned about the Marines. When Mark's buddies came back from Iraq, they wrote her as they might their own moms, and Mindy flew out to the base at 29 Palms, Calif., to spend some time with them. The young Marine recruiter who was in Burlington when Mark was killed recently invited Mindy to his wedding — and insisted on seating her in the row reserved for his family.

The sergeant-major whom Cpl. Evnin was driving when he was killed invited Mindy to his wedding. And on the first anniversary of Mark's death earlier this year, Marines sent her a bouquet of crimson-and-gold. (Actually, they had them delivered the day before, so she wouldn't be disturbed that painful day.)

...

And on this special birthday, with Marines fighting for Fallujah, remember too the Jewish mother in Vermont, a self-described product of the '60s, whose car now sports a bumper sticker that not so long ago would have been inconceivable: Proud Parent of a U.S. Marine.

Session of the blues

Tony Blankley:

I assume the Republican National Committee is busy recording and archiving the idiotic statements coming out of national Democratic Party leaders and commentators. There is no doubt that the election has not only yielded a victory for the Republicans, but also a bumper crop of self-destructive vitriol and bitterness from the Democrats.
The opinion pages of the New York Times (that would be pages A-1- D 37 inclusive) have been running articles by prime cut liberals, the general themes of which have been that conservative Christians are the equivalent of Islamic terrorists and that the benighted provincials who voted for President Bush are simply hate-filled bigots who have no place in America.
The apotheosis of this political dementia was put forward in my very presence on last week's McLaughlin Group by my friend and colleague Lawrence O'Donnell. Lawrence, in cool blood and in apparent full control of his senses, asserted that this election will give rise to a serious consideration of secession from the Union by the blue states.

...

In this regard, I couldn't help thinking of the founding election of the modern Democratic Party — the election of 1828, when Gen. Andrew Jackson of Tennessee defeated John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts by 139,000 votes out of 1.1 million cast.
That election, which defined the Democratic Party that we have known for almost two centuries, has been called the first triumph of the common man in American politics. It pitted the moneyed interests of the Northeast against the farmers and working free laborers of the South and West. It was the first election in which almost all of the states (22 of 24) used direct popular election rather than state legislatures to elect the presidential electors.
It was capped with a raucous inaugural celebration during which "rustic" common people shocked Washington society as they wandered through the White House celebrating, drinking and shaking President Andy Jackson's hand. And so started a bond between the Democratic Party and the typical working American that lasted 176 years — until last Tuesday.

...

This dominant sentiment of the Democratic Party elite — that scores of millions of Americans are categorically unacceptable as fellow countrymen — is evidence of a cancer in the soul of that party. These Democrats, quite expressly, are asserting that "Christers," people who believe in the teachings of Jesus as described in the inerrant words of the Bible, are un-American, almost sub-human. Some of these Democrats would rather secede than stay in the same country with such people. If they were in the majority with no need to secede, what would they do? Their bigoted and absolutist view of religious people is at least a second cousin to the Nazi view of the Jews.

Senators say Annan obtructing inquiry into oil for food scam

Judith Miller:

Leaders of a United States Senate subcommittee investigating allegations of fraud in the oil-for-food program in Iraq have accused Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, of obstructing their inquiry.

In a letter sent to Mr. Annan yesterday, the Republican chairman and ranking Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations charged that the secretary general and a panel he appointed to conduct an independent investigation into the charges of abuses appeared to be "affirmatively preventing" the Senate from getting documents from a former United Nations contractor that inspected goods bought by Iraq.

The senators also complained that Mr. Annan was blocking access to 55 internal audit reports of the program and other relevant documents and refusing to permit United Nations officials to be interviewed by the subcommittee's investigators.

...

The senators said it had taken four months for Mr. Annan to reply to the subcommittee's requests, and when he finally did, he refused to cooperate with the Senate inquiry.

"We are concerned that the U.N.'s nondisclosure policy is being used as both a sword and a shield," the senators wrote, "sharing such 'internal records' when it favors the U.N., but then declining to do so when such disclosure could have negative implications."

The blunt letter is signed by the subcommittee's chairman, Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, and Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

...

In their letter to Mr. Annan, the senators cited the United Nations' refusal to permit Lloyd's Register, which the United Nations had hired to inspect Iraq's purchases, to provide documents to the Senate investigators.

In an Aug. 31 letter, the director of the United Nations' legal affairs office told Lloyd's that while Lloyd's should cooperate fully with Mr. Volcker's panel, "under no circumstances" was it authorized to provide documents to the subcommittee.

The letter also asks Mr. Annan to permit the Senate investigators to interview 11 senior United Nations officials, including Benon V. Sevan, who headed the program. Mr. Duelfer's report said Mr. Sevan might have received oil allocations from Saddam Hussein. Mr. Sevan has denied any impropriety.

Is this Soros' revenge?

Guradian:

...

Is this a crisis? And if so, for whom? The past dollar crises that spring to mind are those of the 1970s and mid-1980s. Working backwards, the first problem in 1985 was not a declining dollar, but a dollar that was too strong for comfort, so much so that senior figures in the Reagan administration were concerned about the threat of US de-industrialisation and an associated outbreak of serious protectionism.

I think George Soros' trading activity should be investigated to see if he is responsible for the decline in the value of the dollar.

Evan Bayh may be the Dem's best hope

I just saw Sen. Bayh on Bill O'Reilly's program, and like most times I have seen him, I have been impressed. While his answers were diplomatic, you could see that he understeood where the Democrat Party got off track as well as the liberal media. He was particularly strong on the point that you cannot persuade people to vote for you when you are looking down on them.

He is from Indiana, thus not hampered by association with blue state craziness. From what I have seen he is a man of integrity who has shown an ability to win in a red state. It will be interesting to see if the Dems are desperate enough to try someone close to the mainstream of America. To really have a chance he needs to break away from the Democrat leadership's obstruction.

Russian generals photographed receiving award from Saddam days before war

Bill Gertz:

Two Russian generals were photographed receiving awards from Saddam Hussein's government for helping Iraqi military forces less than 10 days before the U.S.-led invasion.
The two retired officers were identified by the newspaper Gazeta.ru as Col. Gen. Vladimir Achalov and Col. Gen. Igor Maltsev, both former high-ranking officers involved in Soviet rapid-reaction and air defense forces.
Both generals were photographed receiving awards from Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed in early March 2003, only days before the war began on March 20, 2003. The photographs were taken in a building that was bombed by U.S. cruise missiles during the first air raids on Baghdad, the newspaper stated.
The mission and the reason the generals received the awards were not disclosed in the April 2, 2003, report. However, Gen. Achalov told the newspaper that he "didn't fly to Baghdad to drink coffee."
The comment bolsters the claims of Pentagon officials who say Russian military advisers and special forces units were helping Iraq's military and intelligence services before the Iraq war.

...

John A. Shaw, deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said last week that two European intelligence services have obtained documentary evidence indicating Russian spetsnaz, or special forces, troops were involved in a covert program to shred documents on Russian arms sales to Iraq, and to move weapons out of the country to Syria, Lebanon and possibly Iran.
The Russians were hired by the Iraqis to protect special Russian weapons and to organize the removal of arms through truck convoys. The Russian special forces troops were working for the GRU military intelligence service and wore civilian clothes, defense officials said.

Aerial map of Fullujah

Only the liberals have taken the side of the religous murders

Christopher Hitchens:

...

But all faiths are not always equally demented in the same way, or at the same time. Islam, which was once a civilizing and creative force in many societies, is now undergoing a civil war. One faction in this civil war is explicitly totalitarian and wedded to a cult of death. We have seen it at work on the streets of our own cities, and most recently on the streets of Amsterdam. We know that the obscene butchery of filmmaker Theo van Gogh was only a warning of what is coming in Madrid, London, Rome, and Paris, let alone Baghdad and Basra.

So here is what I want to say on the absolutely crucial matter of secularism. Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda? Suicide murderers in Palestine—disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO—described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. If this is liberal secularism, I'll take a modest, God-fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from Kentucky every time, as long as he didn't want to impose his principles on me (which our Constitution forbids him to do).

...

George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the U.S. armed forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary—that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?

Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. I dare say that there will be a few domestic confrontations down the road, over everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the display of Mosaic tablets in courtrooms and schools. I have spent all my life on the atheist side of this argument, and will brace for more of the same, but I somehow can't hear Ralph Ingersoll or Clarence Darrow being soft and cowardly and evasive if it came to a vicious theocratic challenge that daily threatens us from within and without.

The sickness of the left is seen in their attempting to find moral equivlancy between Christians and murderous Islamic radicals.

Poverty not a root cause of terrorism

Alvin Powell:

A John F. Kennedy School of Government researcher has cast doubt on the widely held belief that terrorism stems from poverty, finding instead that terrorist violence is related to a nation's level of political freedom.

Associate Professor of Public Policy Alberto Abadie examined data on terrorism and variables such as wealth, political freedom, geography, and ethnic fractionalization for nations that have been targets of terrorist attacks.

Abadie, whose work was published in the Kennedy School's Faculty Research Working Paper Series, included both acts of international and domestic terrorism in his analysis.

...

Before analyzing the data, Abadie believed it was a reasonable assumption that terrorism has its roots in poverty, especially since studies have linked civil war to economic factors. However, once the data was corrected for the influence of other factors studied, Abadie said he found no significant relationship between a nation's wealth and the level of terrorism it experiences.

"In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin," Abadie said.

Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable.

His research seems to support President Bush's position on bringing freedom and democracy to the middle east. It also refutes the Patty Murray school of terrorist as socail workers.

"Reality" in Hollywood

Burt Prelutsky:

When I titled my book "Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco," I could just as easily have pointed out that liberals are from Hollywood. It really is a different planet from the one most of us live on.
To begin with, it is populated with high school drop-outs and drama majors making millions of dollars a year, convinced they should decide how the rest of us think, live and vote. What you must never forget about these pampered pets is that the first lesson they learned in acting class was to get in touch with their feelings. Those self-absorbing exercises only served to diminish whatever thought processes they might have possessed. The end result is that, at their best, they can mimic emotions and action, but have an impossible time trying to suggest they are thinking about anything at all serious.
Never forget that the things we see on the screen are shadows. The real articles are people who spend their lives wearing other people's clothes, mouthing other people's lines, and being told how to walk and talk by directors. They should come with warning labels stating that, for all their fame and fortune, they are as bright as department store mannequins.
This past election was the most bitterly fought in memory, but nowhere was it waged more vituperatively than in Hollywood. In recent months, lifelong friendships have been torn asunder. Just this morning, I heard about a poker game involving writers and producers that had weathered 20 years of trials and tribulations but could not survive George W. Bush's re-election.
One thing you have to give Hollywood celebrities credit for is their monumental gall. I mean, Barbra Streisand insults conservatives more often than she bathes, knowing full well it won't harm her CD sales. Julia Roberts announces that if you look up Republican in the dictionary, you'll find it right after reptiles, and yet she continues selling movie tickets, even though 52 percent of the electorate recently cast their ballots for Mr. Bush.

Anti war pukes want to suceed but who would fight for them

Washington Times:

Secession, which didn't work very well when it was tried once before, is suddenly red hot in the blue states. In certain precincts, anyway.
One popular map circulating on the Internet shows the 19 blue states won by Sen. John Kerry — Washington, Oregon, California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Maryland and the Northeastern states — conjoined with Canada to form the "United States of Canada." The 31 red states carried by Mr. Bush are depicted as a separate nation dubbed "Jesusland."
The idea isn't just a joke; one top Democrat says, "The segment of the country that pays for the federal government is now being governed by the people who don't pay for the federal government."
"Some would say, 'Oh, poor Alabama. It's cut off from the wealth infusion that it gets from New York and California,' " said Lawrence O'Donnell, a veteran Democratic insider and now senior political analyst at MSNBC. "But the more this political condition goes on at the presidential level of the red and blue states, the more you're testing the inclination of the blue states to say, 'So what?' "

...

But Andy Nowicki, a libertarian blogger, said the blue states will never secede because "liberals don't want to leave their enemies alone. Instead, as their track record shows, they want to take over the government in order to force their enemies to endure perpetual sensitivity training for being such racist, sexist, homophobic, 'closed-minded' boors, i.e., for disagreeing with them."

Secession would mean there would be no one to defend them and they would not want to fight anyway so they would be easily conquered by "Jesusland."

Dividing and conquering Fallujah

Rowan Scarborough and Bill Gertz:

Coalition troops are employing a divide-and-conquer strategy in Fallujah, Iraq, capitalizing on months of pinpointed intelligence to seal off terrorist-held neighborhoods and then attack enemy pockets.
"It's going to be going on for a period ahead," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said of the long-anticipated operation, which began Sunday.
A military source said the Pentagon expects the battle for Fallujah to take about one week and estimated there are about 2,000 to 5,000 enemy fighters, about half of whom are non-Iraqi.

...

Since April, American forces have stayed outside the city. But intelligence collection has proceeded at a furious pace. Military sources said the U.S. command has a block-by-block schematic of the large city and knows from day to day where the rebels live and plan. That is how coalition aircraft have been able to direct precision-guided weapons at specific buildings known to harbor rebels.
"They have mapped the city and are taking the city down by sections," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney.

...

The coalition's block-by-block data on Fallujah is pieced together by numerous reconnaissance flights, communications intercepts and Iraqi informants inside the city. Two unmanned aircraft, the Predator and Global Hawk, provide constant video and still pictures for planners to analyze.
Terrorists have increased the use of intimidation tactics and violence to prevent citizens from leaving the city or informing against them, military source said.
Gen. Casey told Pentagon reporters via a teleconference call that estimates of a 10,000 to 15,000 U.S. and coalition strike force, including Iraqis, were "in the ballpark."
Gen. Casey said the insurgents are armed with AK-47s, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and anti-aircraft machine guns, he said.
However, the most danger to advancing American and friendly Iraqi forces will be homemade car bombs from terrorists.
"The weapons of choice for them are going to be the improvised explosive devices and the car bombs," Gen. Casey said. "And all our intelligence is telling us that they have lined some of the streets with the improvised explosive devices, much like we saw in Najaf and Thawra."
Vehicles packed with explosives also have been placed throughout the city, and "we expect them to come at us with car bombs, you know, as they're driving through the city now," Gen. Casey said.
The Iraqi government, in response, has banned auto traffic inside Fallujah as a way to protect troops.
The insurgents are thought to have an "outer-crust defense" that likely will collapse "toward the center of the city where they will be probably a major confrontation," Gen. Casey said.

Fighting Fallujah

Belmont Club:

...

The Fallujah can be conceived as a rough rectangle two miles on a side bounded by the Euphrates to the west, the railroad track to the north, a highway to the east and an "industrial park" and suburbs to the south. The recognized enemy stronghold is the upper northwest corner called the Jolan but their forces are likely to be more widespread than that. But in two successive nights, US forces have compressed the enemy from three sides (probably a fourth, as it is likely the US has also seized the 'industrial area' to the southeast and have actually penetrated the enemy stronghold of Jolan in parts, without any published casualties apart from the two Marines who died when their bulldozer flipped into the Euphrates.

Readers will recall the same pattern of operations in Najaf where US infantry secured the buildings and rooftops while vehicles advanced on the streets below. In Najaf as in Fallujah too, apparently, US forces did not advance on a single broad front but snaked in to seize key areas, breaking up enemy defenses into pockets which can no longer support each other. The pockets may be further isolated by bulldozing fire lanes. The low number of casualties so far indicates that US forces have successfully sidestepped enemy forces the way a broken field runner dodges tackles. The Strategic Studies Institute warns that heavy casualties may result from assaulting "mini fortresses", but many of those redoubts may be entirely bypassed and fields of fire cleared around them.

...

The Daily Telegraph has an atmospheric article which describes the terrible effect of networked forces on the enemy inside Fallujah.

"I got myself a real juicy target," shouted Sgt James Anyett, peering through the thermal sight of a Long Range Acquisition System (LRAS) mounted on one of Phantom's Humvees. "Prepare to copy that 89089226. Direction 202 degrees. Range 950 metres. I got five motherf****** in a building with weapons." A dozen loud booms rattle the sky and smoke rose as mortars rained down on the co-ordinates the sergeant had given. "Yeah," he yelled. "Battle Damage Assessment - nothing. Building's gone. I got my kills, I'm coming down. I just love my job."

... The insurgents, not understanding the capabilities of the LRAS, crept along rooftops and poked their heads out of windows. Even when they were more than a mile away, the soldiers of Phantom Troop had their eyes on them. Lt Jack Farley, a US Marines officer, sauntered over to compare notes with the Phantoms. "You guys get to do all the fun stuff," he said. "It's like a video game. We've taken small arms fire here all day. It just sounds like popcorn going off."

This engagement is all the more chilling because it probably happened at night. Five enemy soldiers died simply because they could not comprehend how destruction could flow from an observer a mile away networked to mortars that could fire for effect without ranging. All over Fallujah virtual teams of snipers and fire-control observers are jockeying for lines of sight to deal death to the enemy. For many jihadis that one peek over a sill could be their last.

...

From UAVs wheeling overhead to Marines going through alleys linked by their intra-squad radios (a kind of headset and boom-mike operated comm device), the US force is generating lethal, real-time information which is almost immediately transformed into strike action. Against this, the jihadis have no chance. This doesn't mean (as I pointed out above) that there will be no American losses. The battlefield is too lethal to hope for that. But it does mean that terrorism has unleashed a terrible engine upon itself. Capabilities which didn't exist on September 11 have now been deployed in combat. It isn't that American forces have become inconceivably lethal that is scary; it is that the process has just started.

The weapons cache war

Centcom:

Iraqi Security Forces and the I Marine Expeditionary Force continue to degrade and disrupt anti-Iraqi forces in the Fallujah-Ramadi area. I Marine Expeditionary Force employed U.S. Marine Corps aviation assets to deliver precision munitions to destroy preplanned targets in Fallujah.

In the last 24 hours, I Marine Expeditionary Force conducted coordinated offensive operations in and around the Fallujah-Ramadi area. I MEF destroyed several weapons caches.

At 4:10 a.m., Nov. 6, a U.S. Marine Corps aircraft, supporting a U.S. Marine Corps element, destroyed a weapons cache, which was a preplanned target. At 6 a.m., Nov. 6, a U.S. Marine Corps aircraft, supporting a U.S. Marine Corps element, destroyed a weapons cache, which was a preplanned target. At 10:45 p.m., Nov. 6, a U.S. Marine Corps aircraft, supporting a U.S. Marine Corps element, destroyed a weapons cache, which was a preplanned target. At 10:55 p.m., Nov. 6, a U.S. Marine Corps aircraft, supporting a U.S. Marine Corps element, destroyed a weapons cache, which was a preplanned target. At 11 p.m., Nov. 6, a U.S. Marine Corps aircraft, supporting a U.S. Marine Corps element, destroyed a weapons cache, which was a preplanned target. At 11:30 p.m., Nov. 6, a U.S. Marine Corps aircraft, supporting a U.S. Marine Corps element, destroyed a weapons cache, which was a preplanned target. At 11:55 p.m., Nov. 6, a U.S. Marine Corps aircraft, supporting a U.S. Marine Corps element, destroyed a weapons cache, which was a preplanned target.

This suggest pretty good intelligence on insurgent staging and weapon storage areas. As more of these chaches are destroyed the enemy will be driven away from its weapons while its forces are under attack.

In the April attack, a Marince Corps psyops team broadcast a prayer over the loud speaker:

"May the ambulance drivers of Fallujah have enough gas to pick up the bodies of all the dead mujihadein."

I hope they can break that old tape out of storage soon.

Specter vision

The folks over at The Corner are still fretting over Sen. Arlen Specter's comments about potential Bush judicial appointments. His suggestion that Bush should not send anyone who would not genuflex for Roe V. Wade shows how out of touch he is with election last week. The Republicans netted four new Senators and knocked off the Democrat leader who had been abstructing Bush's judicial appointees. Of the 22 percent of voters who said "values" was the most important issue for them in the election 79 percent voted for Bush. The message Arlen should have gotten from this election is that abortion is not an issue favored by the majority of voters and obstruction is opposed by a majority of voters.

If the Democrats continue to obstruct judicial appointments the remaining Red State Democrats will be defeated and the Republicans will have a filabuster proof majority for the first time sicne reconstruction. If the Democrats were smart they would stop the obstruction and try to get something that will help their Red State Senators stay in office.

Specter vision

The folks over at The Corner are still fretting over Sen. Arlen Specter's comments about potential Bush judicial appointments. His suggestion that Bush should not send anyone who would not genuflex for Roe V. Wade shows how out of touch he is with election last week. The Republicans netted four new Senators and knocked off the Democrat leader who had been abstructing Bush's judicial appointees. Of the 22 percent of voters who said "values" was the most important issue for them in the election 79 percent voted for Bush. The message Arlen should have gotten from this election is that abortion is not an issue favored by the majority of voters and obstruction is opposed by a majority of voters.

If the Democrats continue to obstruct judicial appointments the remaining Red State Democrats will be defeated and the Republicans will have a filabuster proof majority for the first time sicne reconstruction. If the Democrats were smart they would stop the obstruction and try to get something that will help their Red State Senators stay in office.

Insulting our intelligence

Many Democrats in the media have decided that those who voted for President Bush were either ignorant or morons. This from the party whose voters cannot figure out how to use a butterfly ballot or are unable to find their own precinct to vote in so the Dems want to let them vote anywhere in the county. At least the Republicans are smart enough to find the polling place and not spoit their ballot's.

Liberals do not get the realtionship of crime rate to punishment

Oh, That Liberal Media:

I have previously discussed on this blog

the common liberal complaint that people are being incarcerated "despite" the fact that crime rates are going down. This is even described as "ironic" by liberals at times. The liberals never seem to give any credence to the possibility that crime rates are going down precisely because more people are being incarcerated.

Just to prove that I am not making this up, I direct your attention to a New York Times article from today's edition, titled National > Despite Drop in Crime, an Increase in Inmates" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/08/national/08prisons.html?ex=1257570000&en=29c4b3fa8e3975be&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland">Despite Drop in Crime, an Increase in Inmates. The tone of the story is incredulous as it reports that crime rates are decreasing -- but those crazy law enforcement officials keep locking people up anyway!

Read it all.

Why Zarqawi has to make a stand in Fallujah

Belmont Club:

One partial answer is that Zarqawi will fight for Falluja for the same reasons he wanted it in the first place. Anecdotal evidence in April 2004 suggested that many bunkers had been built. The secondary explosions from US strikes over the last days implies that a lot of explosive has also been stored up. Zarqawi had invested quite a lot of effort into Fallujah and he would have done this only if it were valuable to him. The interesting and apparently paradoxical thing about terrorism -- which is often characterized as rootless and spectral -- is how rooted it is in sanctuaries, an apparent indication of their utility. Whether South Waziristan, Pankasi Gorge, the Bekaa Valley, Fallujah or the banlieus of Paris, terrorism apparently needs some locus in order to exert a material force.

In Dark Networks the Belmont Club referred to idea of the Dunbar Number, which John Robb and others have related to terrorist networks. Robb observed:

Distributed, dynamic terrorist networks cannot scale like hierarchical networks. The same network design that makes them resiliant against attack puts absolute limits on their size. If so, what are those limits?

A good starting point is to look at limits to group size within peaceful online communities on which we have extensive data -- terrorist networks are essentially geographically dispersed online communities. Chris Allen does a good job analyzing optimal group size with his critique of the Dunbar number.

His analysis (replete with examples) shows that there is a gradual fall-off in effectiveness at 80 members, with an absolute fall-off at 150 members. The initial fall-off occurs, according to Chris, due to an increasing amount of effort spent on "grooming" the group to maintain cohesion. The absolute fall-off at 150 members occurs when grooming fails to stem dissatisfaction and dissension, which causes the group to cleave apart into smaller subgroups (that may remain affiliated).

Al Qaeda may have been able to grow much larger than this when it ran physical training camps in Afghanistan. Physical proximity allowed al Qaeda to operate as a hierarchy along military lines, complete with middle management (or at least a mix of a hierarchy in Afghanistan and a distributed network outside of Afghanistan). Once those camps were broken apart, the factors listed above were likely to have caused the fragmentation we see today (lots of references to this in the news).

Chester says more or less the same thing in commonsense terms.

... the sanctuary of weaponry, local political support, command and control infrastructure (however sophisticated), and ready ties to cash sources cannot be picked up and moved. I've touched on this earlier when I mention why I think Zarqawi is still in the city. I'm not saying that small bands of insurgents can'tleave, posing as civilians and setting up shop elsewhere. What I'm saying is that by doing so, they will completely cut themselves off from command and control from above, and will no longer be able to mass in a single place. The US won't let this happen again. Therefore, if some small groups do leave, even if they are successful afterwards in some bombings or beheadings, eventually they will run out of steam without the logistical, moral, and command support that can be readily found when they have coalesced in a physical place.

Defeating RPG's with air bags

Strategy Page:

Rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) are the typical weapons of choice when insurgents decide to attack trucks and armored vehicles. RPGs are cheap, simple to operate, and if used properly can inflict significant damage on Stryker and Bradley armored vehicles. Unarmed and armored Hummers are especially vulnerable, since the various armor kits for the Hummer are designed to protect occupants from small arms and machine gun fire, not anti-tank grenades.

One quick fix to protect the Hummer is a unique airbag system developed by a small California company that deploys a "curtain" down outside the side of the vehicle being attacked. Four bags are needed to protect all quadrants and are held in place with simple Velcro straps. A small radar detects the incoming RPG or RPGs and inflates the airbag with a carbon dioxide gas cartridge. The RPG is literally "caught" by the airbag like a pillow and slowed enough so the nose-mounted fuse doesn't detonate the warhead. Instead, the RPG ends up collapsing upon itself, shredding the secondary self-destruct fuse and looking like a stomped-on beer can. Currently, the airbag and cartridge have to be replaced after one use, but the designers are working on a reusable airbag that can simply be rolled up and put back into place.

Terrorism without training

Strategy Page:

The evidence is piling up that Islamic radicals are motivated more by sermons and television news, than anything else. As a result, there is not one al Qaeda, but hundreds of informal groups, brought together by the shared belief that Arabs in particular, and Moslems in general, have gotten a raw deal from the infidels (non-Moslems), and it’s Gods will for the faithful to hurt the infidels as much as possible. Rather simplistic, but that just makes it easier to understand. However, the leaders, and followers, in these many small terrorist groups vary enormously in their backgrounds. Most of the leaders are college graduates, compared to five percent of the adults being college grads in most Moslem nations. These many leaders tend to attract a lot of less well educated followers. In fact, these guys are often illiterate, or recruited from prisons, urban slums or isolated rural populations. European countries have noted this, and now increasingly keep Moslem convicts separated from one another, to reduce terrorist recruitment possibilities.

The terrorist leadership, with a few exceptions (like the September 11, 2001 attacks), do not actually carry out suicide attacks. That’s what the ex-cons and illiterate guys are for. Fortunately, most of the terrorist cells get caught long before they can put together a workable plan. That’s because few of the graduates of the Afghanistan al Qaeda camps are still actively involved. Many of the Afghan grads apparently grew out of their terrorism phase, or simply decided that sort of thing was not for them. The “Afghanis” are the ones who received training in OPSEC (Operational Security, how to keep terrorist activities being discovered by the police.) These are the ones who are not getting caught. The college grads without the OPSEC training are not stupid, in fact most are trained in science and engineering and have access to al Qaeda’s training documents (on CD or downloaded from the net.) But it’s one thing to read about how important it is to keep your mouth shut and avoid the police, and to have someone hammer it into you during classroom work.

...

Even in Saudi Arabia, one of the most intensely Islamic nations in the world, terrorists can’t help spending too much time with each other, often in the same neighborhoods or even mosques. The Saudi police have killed one leader of al Qaeda, in Saudi Arabia, after another in the past year. As a consequence, the new leaders get younger, less experienced, and easier to catch. It's reached the point where Saudi public opinion is beginning to be sympathetic of the terrorists once more. This, however, will quickly change once more once another terrorist attack occurs.

Another problem the new terrorists cells have are increased border controls brought about by fear of terrorists. Not just in the United States, but world wide. While the larger number of checks is mostly catching common criminals and illegal immigrants, it is noting the movements of suspected terrorists, and disrupting the movements of these men.

...

...The number of Islamic terror groups that have managed to carry out attacks has been small, considering that millions of young Moslems have eagerly sought to do something destructive. Most of the violence is concentrated in places like Israel, Chechnya, Pakistan, Kashmir and Iraq.

Dealing witht he Lilliputs

Suzanne Fields:

...

At the end of the 20th century an imaginary character became a frequent visitortowonk conversations, with the United States compared to Lemuel Gulliver, the hero of Jonathan Swift's classic "Gulliver's Travels," who finds himself sunk in the sand on a beach in the kingdom of Lilliput, whose tiny inhabitants have tied him down with threads and pegs. Gulliver can hardly move.
"In this telling, the international community — that comfortable euphemism for the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court and other U.N. agencies and the massed ranks of Non-Governmental Organizations — sought to constrain America's freedom of action in a web of international laws, regulations and treaties such as the Kyoto accords," writes John O'Sullivan in New Criterion magazine. These Lilliputians have also been called "Tranzi's," the hip jargon for transnational organizations that seek to impose participation in "global governance," to impose "global tests" that serve the interests of "the international community" and not ours.
The Lilliputians as invented by Swift are little men marked by moral pettiness, trivializing pretense and obsession with pompous "points of honor." The United States has acted in accord with the Lilliputians in certain acts of humanity, where common interests meet, but the Lilliputians have generally tried to constrain Gulliver through propaganda and the contrived pressure of public opinion. Gulliver was unbound by September 11, as Mr. O'Sullivan notes, but "Gulliver's Travels" has since become "Gulliver's Travails."
Gulliver unbound means that the United States after September 11 could make an end run around the Lilliputians to appeal to coalitions of the willing to help in the fight against evil in Afghanistan and Iraq. If the United Nations or other international groups would not approve, independent nations could become allies in important ways: by recognizing the specific threat, supporting our approach to resolving it and by contributing resources. President Bush added a fourth component, introducing democracy in the Arab and Muslim world where self-government is an alien concept.
Gulliver thus becomes considerably bolder and more aggressive than Swift imagined. Swift himself was a deeply devout Christian, and did not believe as many of his contemporaries of the Enlightenment did that man can on his own transcend human limitations. Swift appealed to the moral and spiritual qualities — in a word, faith — that separate man from beast and enable him to rise above his animal nature. The Enlightenment never lived up to its promise that man could become perfect, or even move very far toward perfectibility. The Nazis and now the Islamists have proved that in our own era.
If we are to see America as Gulliver among Lilliputians, Gulliver should be perceived as an awkward, imperfect, but gentle giant who must not allow those with Lilliputian agendas to tie us down. We no longer have the optimism we felt when the statue of Saddam Hussein came tumbling down in Baghdad. The radical Iraqi insurgency is more widespread than we anticipated, perhaps because we eased the pressure in places like Fallujah in deference to the Lilliputians. But that's no longer the case and the Iraqi people are better off for our intervention. They have been freed from a dictator whose brutality rivals any in history. The Iraqis can speak freely, read and write freely and are pressing toward authentic elections.
Our own interests have been served. Gulliver unbound fosters democracy and pursues the war against Islamist terrorism, with no help from the Lilliputians....

Democrats and the God gap

The LA Times has an editorial where it talks about how Democrats can fashion their message in moral terms in order to recapture voters who are religious. They are not willing to modify their gay agenda or abortion agenda but think that gifts of the waelfare state can be made into a religious obligation of government.

However, as David Limbaugh points out in Persecution, How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity, liberals have shown an active hostility to religion and religious symbols all over this country. From nativity scenes on the court house square to the seal of the city of Los Angelos, to the Pledge of Allegiance, religious people find themselves in a hostile environment and will not be fooled by professions of faith in social programs.

Preparing Falluja for battle

Belmont Club:

But fundamentally the enemy can do nothing to dilute the concentration of combat power that is gathering all around Fallujah. This combat power not only takes the form of traditional firepower and infantry strength but also informational power. Chester links to an SFGate article suggesting the US will use UGVs (ground robots) in the upcoming battle. Some of these, like the Marine Gladiator, have been described in the press. A wide variety of ground and air vehicles have been in development and limited use even from the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Although the larger systems are controlled by datalinks which range out to thousands of miles, the smaller systems are controlled by line of site devices and wireless protocols that are essentially identical to the kind used in your laptop. The establishment of a wireless router infrastructure and the integration of these individual unmanned systems has become one of the key preparatory tasks of the battlefield. Once the assault begins in earnest these systems will help control fires, identify friend from foe and coordinate the battle. This is especially necessary because American forces will go through houses and alleys in built up areas, walking through walls with explosive dooropeners. There will be many small units maneuvering out of visual contact with each other. The air will be thick with American air and UAVs but that will only help if these can coordinate with one another and the people on the ground.

Yet after the last technological refinement has been applied, the Marine infantry will go forward to close with an enemy many of whom have traveled thousands of miles specifically to kill them; pilgrims of death. The Marines will want to live; and yet by some miracle they will advance. There in the ancient Land Between the Rivers young men from big cities and small towns will perform the most incomprehensible act of generosity on earth and press their extravagant gift into our uncertain hands.

The euros change in tone

Mark Steyn:

The big question after Tuesday was: will it just be more of the same in George W Bush's second term, or will there be a change of tone? And apparently it's the latter. The great European thinkers have decided that instead of doing another four years of lame Bush-is-a-moron cracks they're going to do four years of lame Americans-are-morons cracks. Inaugurating the new second-term outreach was Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror, who attributed the President's victory to: "The self-righteous, gun-totin', military-lovin', sister-marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-passport-ownin' rednecks, who believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land 'free and strong'."

Well, that's certainly why I supported Bush, but I'm not sure it entirely accounts for the other 59,459,765. Forty five per cent of Hispanics voted for the President, as did 25 per cent of Jews, and 23 per cent of gays. And this coalition of common-or-garden rednecks, Hispanic rednecks, sinister Zionist rednecks, and lesbian rednecks who enjoy hitting on their gay-loathin' sisters expanded its share of the vote across the entire country - not just in the Bush states but in the Kerry states, too.

In all but six states, the Republican vote went up: the urinating rednecks have increased their number not just in Texas and Mississippi but in Massachusetts and California, both of which have Republican governors. You can drive from coast to coast across the middle of the country and never pass through a single county that voted for John Kerry: it's one continuous cascade of self-righteous urine from sea to shining sea. States that were swing states in 2000 - West Virginia, Arkansas - are now solidly Republican, and once solidly Democrat states - Iowa, Wisconsin - are now swingers. The redneck states push hard up against the Canadian border, where if your neck's red it's frostbite. Bush's incontinent rednecks are everywhere: they're so numerous they're running out of sisters to bunk up with.

Who exactly is being self-righteous here? In Britain and Europe, there seem to be two principal strains of Bush-loathing. First, the guys who say, if you disagree with me, you must be an idiot - as in the Mirror headline "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" Second, the guys who say, if you disagree with me, you must be a Nazi - as in Oliver James, who told The Guardian: "I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s [sic] and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?' "

Mr James is a clinical psychologist.

If smug Europeans are going to coast on moron-Fascist sneers indefinitely, they'll be dooming themselves to ever more depressing mornings-after in the 2006 midterms, the 2008 presidential election, 2010, and beyond: America's resistance to the conventional wisdom of the rest of the developed world is likely to intensify in the years ahead....

...

...When one examines Brian Reade's anatomy of redneck disfigurements - "gun-totin', military-lovin', abortion-hatin' " - most of them are about the will to survive, as individuals and as a society. Americans tote guns because they're assertive citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. They love their military because they think there's something contemptible about Europeans preening and posing as a great power when they can't even stop some nickel'n'dime Balkan genital-severers piling up hundreds of thousands of corpses on their borders.

And, if Americans do "hate abortion", is Mr Reade saying he loves it? It's at least partially responsible for the collapsed birthrates of post-Christian Europe. However superior the EU is to the US, it will only last as long as Mr Reade's generation: the design flaw of the radical secular welfare state is that it depends on a traditionally religious society birthrate to sustain it. True, you can't be a redneck in Spain or Italy: when the birthrates are 1.1 and 1.2 children per couple, there are no sisters to shag.

The condescending left

Mark Steyn:

...

I had a bet with myself this week: How soon after election night would it be before the Bush-the-chimp-faced-moron stuff started up again? 48 hours? A week? I was wrong. Bush Derangement Syndrome is moving to a whole new level. On the morning of Nov. 2, the condescending left were convinced that Bush was an idiot. By the evening of Nov. 2, they were convinced that the electorate was. Or as London's Daily Mirror put it in its front page: "How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?"

Well, they're British lefties: They can do without Americans. Whether an American political party can do without Americans is more doubtful. Nonetheless, MSNBC.com's Eric Alterman was mirroring the Mirror's sentiments: "Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the 'reality-based community' say or believe about anything." Over at Slate, Jane Smiley's analysis was headlined, "The Unteachable Ignorance Of The Red States.'' If you don't want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: "F--- MIDDLE AMERICA."

Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that "MIDDLE AMERICA" has "F---ed" you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton -- or "Neanderthal," as Teresa Heinz Kerry described those unimpressed by her husband's foreign policy. In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't.

More to the point, nobody who campaigns with Ben Affleck at his side has the right to call anybody an idiot. H. L. Mencken said that no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Well, George Soros, Barbra Streisand and a lot of their friends just did: The Kerry campaign and its supporters -- MoveOn.org, Rock The Vote, etc. -- were awash in bazillions of dollars, and what have they got to show for it? In this election, the plebs were more mature than the elites: They understood that war is never cost-free and that you don't run away because of a couple of setbacks; they did not accept that one jailhouse scandal should determine America's national security interest; they rejected the childish caricature of their president and paranoid ravings about Halliburton; they declined to have their vote rocked by Bruce Springsteen or any other pop culture poser.

All the above is unworthy of a serious political party. As for this exit-poll data that everyone's all excited about, what does it mean when 22 percent of the electorate say their main concern was "moral issues"? Gay marriage? Abortion? Or is it something broader? For many of us, the war is also a moral issue, and the Democrats are on the wrong side of it, standing not with the women voting proudly in Afghanistan's first election but with the amoral and corrupt U.N., the amoral and cynical Jacques Chirac, the amoral and revolting head-hackers whom Democratic Convention guest of honor Michael Moore described as Iraq's ''minutemen.''

When will the left learn how unpersuasive insults are?

Media eleits want to fire the voters

Arnold Beichman:

After the East German people's uprising against Soviet occupation on June 17, 1953, the Communist Writers Union distributed leaflets throughout the Soviet zone saying the people had forfeited the confidence of the government and could win it back only by redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier in that case, asked the sardonic German communist playwright Berthold Brecht, for the government to dissolve the people and elect another people in their stead?
I was reminded of that biting Brechtian quip as I read the postmortem election lamentation of Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. His column reflected the bitter disappointment of media elites like Peter Jennings and Dan Rather with the American people. For them, the American voter had once more misbehaved by voting for a president of whom the media elites disapproved. The American voter had elected as president of the United States a man the media elites tried to bring down and, in the case of Dan Blather, with forged documents that revealed nothing except Blather's gullibility and hatred of President Bush.

...

Mr. Kristof, the New York Times moralist in chief, is aghast that, as he wrote, "millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses... ended up voting — utterly against their own interests — for Republican candidates." Only the Democratic Party, says Mr. Kristof, has the interests of the American people at heart, implying the American people just are too stupid to realize that.
Even worse are these demagogic words: "One of the Republican Party's major successes over the last few decades has been to persuade many of the working poor to vote for tax breaks for millionaires." In other words, those stupid, honky American workers are so dumb they are unaware of their own electoral stupidity. The arrogance of Mr. Kristof's condemnation is breathtaking.

Does Kristoff think it was in the interest of the people who worked in the yacht business to put them out of work with a luxury tax on the rich who bought yachts? Or could these people be smarter than Kristof and recognize that the rich make contributions to this econcomy when the spend and when they hire people that is much more beneficial than giving it to the government to redistribute.

Dereliction of Duty
Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies tht Led to Vietnam

This book was published in 1997 and author H. R. McMaster concentrates virtually all the action in Washington D.C. where Secretary of Defense McNamara deceives the Joint Chiefs and the Congress as he pushes President Johnson's Vietnam policy with a strategy conceived without input from the military.

Once presented with the McNamara-Johnson strategy, the Chiefs wargame the "graduated response" strategy twice--both times finding that it would lead to a stalemate and a quagmire. Interestingly, this was apparently the goal of McNamara and Johnson, both believing that a stalemate would lead the communist to negotiate a settlement.

Once you understand the strategic objective, it becomes clear why the Tet offensive which was a disaster for the communist turned out to be a strategic defeat for the Johnson administration. Having shown the communist that they could not win, they were still not able to negotiate a settlement.

It is also interesting that the settlement/disengagement that the Johnson administration was achieved by the Nixon administration employing exactly the strategy the Chiefs had urged before the war commenced--heavy bombing of North Vietnam and mining of the ports and it was accomplished in a matter of days, not years.

This is an excellent book. I highly recomend it. I should point out that the material in the preceeding two paragraph is not covered in the book, but is my own analysis. I will have more analysis on the material in this book later.

Annan unpersuasive on Falluja

Captain's Quarters:

Kofi Annan sought to protect the terrorists who continue their bloody grip on Fallujah by writing a letter to the governments of Iraq, Britain, and the US demanding a cessation of hostilities. The three governments reacted with scorn....

...Annan lays the blame for "escalating violence" at the feet of the Allawi government and the Anglo-American coalition that supports it. This has always been the UN approach; blame the victims for the terrorism. It matters little to Annan and the UN that the Allawi government has tried patiently -- a little too patiently, in my opinion -- to negotiate a peaceful solution with Fallujans, who absolutely refuse to give up the foreign terrorists that behead civilians for entertainment. As carbombs continue killing civilians, the UN wants Allawi to sit back and talk things over more with the masterminds who want Allawi dead and an Islamic dictatorship imposed on Iraq.

In the words of General McAuliffe -- "Nuts."

Annan's reaction to terrorists in Fallujah is quite enlightening. Here we have a city that holds some of the worst terrorists in the world, including the bloodthirsty Abu Masab al-Zarqawi, and Annan gets weak-kneed at the thought of eliminating him. It shows that the UN will never be an effective partner against global terrorism. For Annan and the UN bureaucracy, negotiations become an end instead of a tactic, in which the existence of dialogue is held more valuable than the saving of lives or the freedom of people.

The view that inhibits movement in Falluja

Strategy Page:

What kind of fighting will occur in Fallujah? It will be a game of wits, as well as weapons. The most professional and experienced anti-government gunmen are in Fallujah, and they have developed many countermeasures for the coalition advantages. A major disadvantage is the coalition control of the air, and the constant presence of UAVs, aircraft or helicopters. Too many gunmen have seen their buddies ambushed, or jumped by unexpected coalition troops, to ignore the possibility of a UAV above sending live video of the battlefield to coalition commanders. So the gunmen try to set up movement routes that cannot be seen from the air. Rugs or sheets are spread across alleys to make this possible, and sometimes even short tunnels are dug. The downside of this is that movement is inhibited. In fact, American troops do not always have a vidcam equipped UAV over the battlefield. But Department of Defense public affairs people like to distribute videos of such operations. The implication that American troops can "see everything" is meant to intimidate the enemy. It does, and slows down enemy movements, often fatally so.

...

Fighting in Fallujah will be a war of surprise and ambush. Whoever first figures out what the other side is up to will have an edge. The smart money is on the Americans. For while the "insurgents" have received lots of positive press for their unequal struggle, they have by far gotten the worst of it. In thousands of little battles, the anti-government forces are almost always defeated. Most of the time they just flee, but all too often they are killed or captured. Coalition intelligence officers know who they are fighting, and how they fight. This information is rapidly passed around and refined. The anti-government forces are a loose coalition of Sunni Arabs who want Saddam, the Baath Party or Sunni religious leaders running the country. Most of these men are Iraqis, with a minority (less than five percent) of foreigners who came to Iraq with more eagerness than combat experience. Many of the fighters are there for a paycheck, others are caught up in the excitement of it all. Few are professional soldiers. Enthusiasm without discipline and training just gets you killed in combat. Fallujah will see dozens of Americans killed, but the death toll on the other side will be much higher. We know that because this battle has been fought many times before. Not many surprises, although some intrepid reporters will try to invent a few.

Rejection of the elites

Kathleen Parker:

...

It's the elitism, mes freres.

Here's another clue: When courting voters in flyover states, one does not say: "I love you, stupid redneck morons." Especially not when sporting biking tights and straddling an $8,000 two-wheeler - a dollar amount, incidentally, that many Ordinary Americans consider a life's savings.

Not that John F. Kerry ever said such, but he didn't have to. Preening in luxury and surrounded by celebrity friends contemptuous of the values ordinary Americans hold dear, he might as well have waltzed down Beale Street whistling Dixie.

Never has a politician been so out of touch with the voters whose goals he purportedly shares. Nor a party so out of tune with the nation's defining song: "God Bless America."

The folks who re-elected Bush not only voted for the man they felt best represents their interests, but also against a culture they see as alien and hostile. The Bush vote was equally a protest against Hollywood, an increasingly untrustworthy media and the puerile Michael Moore contingent.

...

The two-America divide isn't fiction after all. And the division, as nearly everyone has noted, is about values. But what the Democrats got wrong, and what the New York Times subjects seem to be missing, is that traditional values and sophistication are not mutually exclusive. Nor does sophistication equate to intelligence, we hasten to add.

People who believe in heterosexual marriage because the traditional family model best serves children and therefore society are not ipso facto homophobic. Americans vexed about our casual disregard for human life are not necessarily Stepford-Neanderthals. And, those people who believe in some power greater than themselves are not always rubes.

In small towns across the nation, especially in the Deep South, one can find plenty of well-traveled, multilingual, latte-loving, Ivy-educated Ph.D.s, if that's your measure of sophistication. But they're not snobs, nor do they sneer at people who pay more than lip service to traditional values. In fact, they often share those very values in quiet, thoughtful, deliberative ways.

The Democratic Party is now entering the post-election navel-gazing stage of self-recrimination and analysis. How did it lose the very people who are supposed to be its target constituents? The puzzle is not that the Democrats lost, but that they can't see how. ...

Values vote myth

David Brooks:

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top.

This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong.

Here are the facts. As Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center points out, there was no disproportionate surge in the evangelical vote this year. Evangelicals made up the same share of the electorate this year as they did in 2000. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who are pro-life. Sixteen percent of voters said abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who say they pray daily.

It's true that Bush did get a few more evangelicals to vote Republican, but Kohut, whose final poll nailed the election result dead-on, reminds us that public opinion on gay issues over all has been moving leftward over the years. Majorities oppose gay marriage, but in the exit polls Tuesday, 25 percent of the voters supported gay marriage and 35 percent of voters supported civil unions. There is a big middle on gay rights issues, as there is on most social issues.

Much of the misinterpretation of this election derives from a poorly worded question in the exit polls. When asked about the issue that most influenced their vote, voters were given the option of saying "moral values." But that phrase can mean anything - or nothing. Who doesn't vote on moral values? If you ask an inept question, you get a misleading result.

The reality is that this was a broad victory for the president....

Why Dems lost

kenshi:

...

I'm going to get this out of the way with some tough love: A major reason why the Democrats lost so big in this election is that the Democratic party has become reactionary, elitist, out-of-touch, smugly statist, and extremely condescending. The vast majority of reaction on the Left simply echo those problems. How do they deign to talk to their opponents? With nothing but disgust, patronization, and condescension, a tone which has been endemic to Democratic positions for forty years.

The Democratic Party--my party--has finally become nothing more than the party of cognitive dissonance. That is why, like Zell Miller and a large fraction of usually Democratic middle America, I backed the other side on this one.

...

Mainstream media bragged of being able to boost the Dems by 15 percent (do you remember Newsweek saying that?). The "blogosphere" has been crowing that MSM failed to do so (for which the blogs also claim responsibility), but I don't agree. I think the MSM actually succeeded in bringing the Dems a 10 to 15 point boost in the election (and maybe more). Before the media spin machine started systematically slamming Bush 18 months ago, he was favored at around 66% in the polls. 66% minus 15% is...well...the 51% margin Bush was re-elected by. Thing is, even the thinly veiled support of most major media outlets wasn't enough to put Kerry in the White House. The Democratic party has completely, utterly, undeniably marginalized itself. The Dems no longer have a national party. All it takes is one look at the electoral map to illustrate that. The so-called "Purple Map" may make them feel better, but close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. A party that can only win in the Northeast and Left Coast is not a national party anymore. A party that manages to lose by 3 percent even with a huge boost from blatantly partisan favorable media coverage is on its deathbed politically.

...

The question, then, is: what next for the Dems? It is clear beyond any doubt now that the party must change or die. Losing by 3.6 million votes after pulling out all the stops to win (motivating the base, MSM partisanship, getting huge turnout, out-spending the opposition, etc.) makes that clear. The hardcore democratic base is now too small to win, but too big to let the party move to the center. The coalition politics that was once the greatest strength of the party has become its biggest liability. The Republicans are the "Big Tent" party now. The warring factions uneasily united under the Democratic banner have only succeeded in crippling one another: cancelling out like protons and anti-protons.

...

Another thing the party MUST do is get free from the choke-hold of intellectual elitism. Say it with me now:

People who voted for George W. Bush are neither ignorant nor stupid. Many of them had excellent reasons for doing so, even if we see other reasons they shouldn't have. It was their decision to make, and they made it with as much consideration and deliberation as they thought appropriate. Because we might disagree does NOT make them any less intelligent, educated, moral, compassionate, or anything else. I don't necessarily know what's better for the country than they do, but we all have to make our decision based on our values and available knowledge. Supporting political opinions or candidates I disagree with DOES NOT BY ITSELF MAKE ANYBODY A BAD PERSON.

I know that's a bitter pill for a lot of people to swallow right now, but without that medicine, the Democratic party will not be able to rise off its deathbed. I've already taken my dose today. Now it's your turn.

Gays self inflicted wound

David Horowitz:

...

...The American people – the American majority – is a compassionate majority, and minorities, including gays have gained many rights and other benefits in the last several decades as a result of the good will of that majority. The wound inflicted by this election on gay Americans who want to live in stable couples is self-inflicted. On the eve of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s reckless decision to defy a California marriage law that had been passed by a 60% majority of Californians and illegally “marry” gay couples, polls showed that a near majority of all Americans were in favor of civil unions for gays. I firmly believe that if the gay political leadership and spokesmen like Andrew Sullivan had pressed for the recognition of civil unions, which would have granted all those rights Sullivan refers to in his column, the American people would have granted them. It was the gay community’s contempt for the sensibilities of religious Americans who consider marriage a sacred institution and for others who don’t think that a 5,000 year old institution should be remade overnight by a handful of judges in Massachusetts and an arrogant mayor in San Francisco that led to the election debacle for gay Americans and for John Kerry.

David is exactly right, but gay political activist are too emotionally invested in their agenda to recognize how self destructive it is.

Media imitates Baghdad Bod and Dems fall for it

Washington Times Editorial:

Here's a thought for downcast Democrats trying to figure out why things went so right for President Bush: Stop listening to your own press. For the past two years every major organ of national communication except talk radio — network TV, New York publishing, major dailies, Hollywood and the music industry — ran with a single, anti-Bush theme. Cloistered in their opulent, heavily liberal urban centers, these outlets provided the Democrats with ready-made talking points from which to attack the president for his "failures," "lies" and faith.
In an unprecedented campaign to bring down a sitting president, the media long known for its liberal slant outdid itself in the ferocity and magnitude of its intentional partisan assault. The rule of thumb was to give every Bush-basher his due. Discredited partisans, like Richard Clarke and Joseph Wilson earned top billing on the New York Times bestseller list, while their own lies went unreported. Tabloid biographer Kitty Kelley was given a three-day interview on NBC's "The Today Show" for a book even most newspapers refused to review, while swift-boat veteran John O'Neill was slandered on a nightly basis.
The media awarded special attention to its celebrity clientele, of which no Hollywood temporary celebrity was too ignorant to point a camera at. They rolled out the red carpet for propagandist Michael Moore. They invited Bush-bashing tag-team Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins to join their talk shows, while Sean Penn was given column space in major daily newspapers. The anti-Bush teen-idols of MTV's "Rock the Vote" and Sean "P. Diddy" Combs' "Vote or Die" were dignified as the answer to the younger generation's low voter turnout. HBO gave Bill Maher an hour for Bush bashing, and Comedy Central gave Jon Stewart a half-hour. Like groupies, reporters followed Moveon.org's "Vote for Change" tour, which headlined such rock 'n' roll legends as Bruce Springsteen.
In their coverage, the elite media pumped stories that would get laughed out of any honest newsroom: The New York Times' front-page spread of the "web of connections" between the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and Republicans; Dan Rather's unapologetic use of forged memos; and the al Qaqaa cache of missing explosives that the NYT dropped one week before the election, and which CBS News planned to air 48 hours before voters went to the polls. And so it goes.

"Healing the divide"

Wesley Pruden:

...

The shock and awe will subside, of course, and the elites, big-time losers all, already have a recipe for closing "the chasm." All the winners have to do is adopt the agenda of the losers, and everything will be buff again.
George W. Bush has demonstrated in his first four years that he has no appetite for a poisonous elixir offered by enemies trying to persuade him to "grow." What the elites mean by "growing" is stiffing his friends and becoming more like them. Disdained by the elites as a moron with an IQ to match his shoe size, George W. knows who he is and how he got where he is.

The radical left continues to act like World War I generals who kept sending their troops into the new machinery of war killing them at unprecendented rates

Whith the help of people like Paul Krugman, Republicans may have a veto proof majority in the Senate two years from now. By continuing to accept the conservative Republican majority, the Krugman's of the left make it all the more likely that more Tom dashles will be defeated in the future by following their obstructionist agenda.

While Krugman claims that the bush administration lets ideology trump reality, it is in fact the Democrats who continue to suffer under that problem. While Iraq is not yet wonderful, it is not a "debacle" as described by Krugman. His very description of events in Iraq as a "debacle" shows his ignorance of warfare and history. Krugmann is being routed by a weak insurgency that cannot even muster a company size attack. When you do not want to liberate the Iraqis to begin with any adversity is enough reason to signal retreat even in the face of victory. By Krugman's logic, reconstruction in the South should have been abandoned because the Klu Klux Klan was resisting.

I will leave Krugman's economic alternate universe to others to decimate. Donald Suskind at National Review Online is especially good at pointing out the errors of Krugman's ways. He is so bad you would think the NY Times would recognize what an embarassment he is to liberalism.

Euro's press whine

Washington Times:

A mixture of dismay, despair — and in one case an unflattering assessment of the IQ of Americans who voted for President Bush — dominated European newspapers yesterday.
"How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?" asked British Daily Mirror in a front-page banner headline that described the election result as a "disaster" and lamented "war more years."
"March of the Moral Majority," bellowed the headline on the Daily Mail.
The Independent let its pictures do the talking, with the top of Page One featuring images of Iraqis being tortured at the Abu Ghraib prison, hooded suspects on their knees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and a Republican supporter with a sign saying, "Finally a Christian fighting evil, thank you George Bush."
The Guardian, a left-leaning British daily that encouraged readers to send letters to U.S. voters urging them to back Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry, commented:
"We may not like it. In fact, to tell the truth, we don't like it one bit. But if it isn't a mandate, then the word has no meaning. Mr. Bush has won fair (so far as we can see) and square. He and his country — and the rest of the world — now have to deal with it."

...

French newspapers, which had covered the election campaign in all its gory detail, could not hide their disappointment at Mr. Bush's victory.
Describing the result as a "revolution," an editorial in leftist daily Liberation declared: "A new reactionary majority has consolidated its hold on American democracy. The rest of the world may deplore it, but it will have to adapt to this reality."
Grudging respect for the free choice of American voters was a recurrent theme in many European newspapers .
Spain's leading daily, El Pais, commented: "George W. Bush is probably not the president the rest of the world would have wanted, but it is he who American voters have democratically elected."
Winning more votes than his opponent — unlike four years ago — and not having to rely on a Supreme Court ruling for victory mattered a lot to European newspapers, many of which never regarded Mr. Bush as the legitimate leader of the United States for the past four years.
"The American people have made their choice," said a front-page editorial in Belgian daily Le Soir. "It is now up to us to manage our relations with this key nation."

Liberal bloggers were the Baghdad Bobs of this year's election

Many liberals were shocked and distraught to learn that George Bush was reelected. One reason for taht is it is easy for liberals to insulate themselves from contrary opinions. If they just avoid Fox News, talk radio and three or four newspapers they will never hear conservative points of view that are unfiltered by the bias of the left.

Bloggers have the luxury of just talking about things that interest them, but by contrast conservative bloggers find it hard to avoid liberal media. So they find interesting ways to challenge the liberal media such as the CBS forged document scandel. Conservative bloggers also were properly skeptical of the NY Times missing explosive story.

Unlike the rest of America liberal bloggers and media types really believed they had discredited the Swiftvets, but conservative bloggers found the vets entirely credible as did many voters. The conservative bloggers were also tough on each other when it came to challenging facts and arguments.

Conservative bloggers aalso were more persuasive than their liberal counterparts. Reasoned argument is always going to be more persuasive that insults and and slogans. There is no better example than the tirade of a liberal commentator on MSNBC calling John O'Neill a liar over and over. It reflected the weakness of the Kerry response to the Swiftvets, never responding with facts but always responding with insults. People notice those things even if liberals in the media do not.

A Democrat voice of reason

The Backseat Philosopher:

We Democrats are supposedly the party of the therapists, the teachers, and the 'relationship experts.' If anybody would be proud of the title, 'active listener', it would be a Democrat. We're the soft ones who understand where the other side is coming from and negotiate.

Many Democrats think that our patience and understanding are our weakness. "We don't know how to fight like the Republicans," we all told ourselves after Florida 2000. "We have to be more like them: tougher, meaner." "We have to energize our base more."

Actually, no. Our error is that we Democrats are far less understanding than we think we are. Our version of understanding the other side is to look at them from a psychological point of view while being completely unwilling to take their arguments seriously. "Well, he can't help himself, he's a right-wing religious zealot, so of course he's going to think like that." "Republicans who never served in war are hypocrites to send young men to die. " "Republicans are homophobes, probably because they can't deal with their secret desires." Anything but actually listening and responding to the arguments being made.

And when I say 'responding,' I don't just mean 'coming up with the best counterargument and pushing it.' Sometimes responding to an argument means finding the merit in it and possibly changing one's position. That is part of growth, right?

Several Republican arguments are give to which the Democrats have never adequately responded. Read it all. One of the things I noticed in most recent campaigns is the absence of reasoned arguments for Democrat positions. What you get usually is a slogan or a quip. If they want to be really clever the response will have a rhyme. If liberals are supposed to be so smart, why can't they present reasoned arguments instead of insults and name calling?

The Dems no longer have a southern option

Since 1960 the only Democrats elected President have been from the south. One of the results of this week's election is that the Democrats southern bench has been further shrunk. With the loss of all five southern senate races the Democrats pool of candidates from the south just got much smaller and is likely to continue to shrink.

There are now no Democrats who hold statewide office in Texas. In other southern states the same thing is happening to the Democrat party. In 2002 Georgia threw out most of its statewide Democrats. While Tennessee and Virginia have Democrat governors neither has flashed any star power. Tennessee elected a Democrat after the last Republican governor acted like a Democrat on the tax issue. In Virginia, Mark Warner won by spending some of his fortune on boosting his ego with a governorship added to his resume.

Lousiana recently elected a Democrat in a race with Republican Bobby Jindel. This week Jindel won a House seat with nearly 80 percent of the vote.

There are now only four Democrat senators in what used to be the solid south. Two are from Arkansas, one from Lousiana and one from Florida. Sen. Nelson from Florida should expect a strong challenge from the very popular Katherine Harris who probably would have defeated the winner Mel Martinez in this years primary if she had not been persuaded to wait.

What this means is that Democrats are going to have to continue to rely on northeastern liberals or west coast lefties, none of which is likely to appeal to the red states in between. Also in the northeast two of the biggest state governorships are controled by Republicans--New York and Massachusett, and on the west coast California now has a Republican governor. That leaves them with most of their potential candidate having a small base.

Many democrats are talking up Hillary Clinton, but she would start with high negatives and the burden Kerry had of defending numerous senate votes.

Cameron Diaz loses right to her body

Mark Steyn:

...

The swollen turn-out on Tuesday -- the biggest since 1968 -- killed one of Moore's most cherished myths: that if only more people voted, the natural "liberal" "progressive" nature of the American people would manifest itself. "Slackers are going to rise up in this election," he predicted. "The slacker motto is: Sleep till noon, drink beer, vote Kerry."

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

According to Moore, there are hardly any conservatives in the US, but they do a great job of persuading all the progressives to stay away from the polling booths by putting obstacles in their path, like not giving them free underwear. So the long queues reported at polls were assumed by the media to be proof of that big pro-John Kerry youth vote we always hear about.

But, as always, the "youth vote" never showed up. Last year, I saw some patronising BBC documentary (aired on Your ABC) claiming that George W. Bush was controlled by fanatical Christian fundamentalists who believe in the Rapture. The "youth vote" is the Left's equivalent of the Rapture: it may happen one day, but not on any schedule you want to put money on.

...

Happily, The Guardian, the fever chart of the British Left, decided to arrange a controlled experiment in the effectiveness of the Bush-hating strategy. They targeted the voters of Clark County, Ohio, one of the swingiest counties in a critical swing state, by getting Guardian readers to send them letters explaining why they shouldn't vote for Bush. Antonia Fraser, John Le Carre and other celebrated Guardianistas put pen to paper and marshalled their arguments.

Richard Dawkins demonstrated the incisive forensic analysis of Bush one expects from one of Oxford's most celebrated professors: "An idiot he may be, but he is also sly, mendacious and vindictive ... thuggish ... pariah state ... brazenly lying ... cynical mendacity." Gloomy film-maker Ken Loach, who makes Moore look like Busby Berkeley, began: "Today, your country is reviled across continents as never before ..."

In return, The Guardian received many responses, saying things like "real Americans aren't interested in your pansy-ass, tea-sipping opinions", which was one of the more polite replies in that it eschewed observations on the defects of British dentistry. In 2000, Clark County went narrowly for Al Gore. On Tuesday, it went decisively for Bush. The local Republican chairman claimed that Fraser and co had done a grand job of rallying the county's Bush voters and getting them to the poll. Thank you, Guardian lefties! Had they launched Operation Massachusetts, Kerry would have lost his own state.

...

In their desperation, the Democrats have wound up damning a big chunk of the American people as stupid, bigoted and a bigger threat than Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida. This is ridiculous. As Catalano continues: "You will not be thrown in jail for the sole reason of being a liberal. Your child's public school will not suddenly turn into a centre for Christian brainwashing. Your favourite bookstore will not turn into puritan central."

She didn't add to that list of phony terrors my own choice gem from this election season, courtesy of that eminent political analyst Cameron Diaz, who advised Oprah Winfrey's viewers: "Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies. If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body, then you should vote." Poor Cameron. The scary people won. She's just lost all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she can't even move to France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.

The red country

Map of voting by counties.

Motivaating the youth vote

Scrappleface parody:

Rap star Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs is reportedly in stable condition after surviving a self-inflicted 'Vote or Die' attempt on Tuesday.

Despite millions of dollars, and countless appeals by popular youth role models, like Mr. Diddy and filmmaker Michael Moore, young people turned out to vote in historically typical percentages, rather than the flood tide Democrats had expected would sweep John Forbes Kerry into the White House.

Mr. Moore said he has confidence that his young fans, who cheered him wildly during his nationwide 'Slacker Uprising Tour', will turnout to vote eventually.

Messing up the exit polls

Dick Morris:

By now it is well-known and a part of the 2004 election lore how the exit polls by the major television networks were wrong.

Likely this faux pas will assume its place among wartime stories alongside the mistaken calls on Florida’s vote for one side and then for the other in the 2000 election. But the inaccuracies of the media’s polling deserve more scrutiny and investigation.

Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state.

So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. When I worked on Vicente Fox’s campaign in Mexico, for example, I was so fearful that the governing PRI would steal the election that I had the campaign commission two U.S. firms to conduct exit polls to be released immediately after the polls closed to foreclose the possibility of finagling with the returns. When the polls announced a seven-point Fox victory, mobs thronged the streets in a joyous celebration within minutes that made fraud in the actual counting impossible.

But this Tuesday, the networks did get the exit polls wrong. Not just some of them. They got all of the Bush states wrong. So, according to ABC-TV’s exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points.

To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here.

The mistaken exit polls infiltrated all three networks and the cable news outlets and had a chilling effect on the coverage of election night.

...

The exit pollsters plead that they oversampled women and that this led to their mistakes. But the very first thing a pollster does is weight or quota for gender. Once the female vote reaches 52 percent of the sample, one either refuses additional female respondents or weights down the ones one subsequently counted.

This is, dear Watson, elementary.

Another consideration is that the Democrats gamed the system. If they knew the key precincts, which they probably did, and told their voters in those precincts to be sure and talk to the exit pollers they may have stacked the deck.

The real losers

Linda Chavez:

The real loser in Tuesday's election wasn't Democrat John Kerry, but the liberal media and intellectual elite who demonstrated, once again, how out-of-touch they are with the American public. In the final analysis, John Kerry and running mate John Edwards accepted their defeat with dignity and grace. It remains to be seen whether their supporters among the intelligentsia will do the same. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof was typical. Writing "without knowing the election results," as he admitted in the column that appeared the morning after the election, he nonetheless felt he should lecture "the millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses who ended up voting -- utterly against their own interests -- for Republican candidates." The common folk, you see, just don't know what's good for them. That attitude explains why the elites continue to get it wrong.

There is simply no way to explain away the Republican Party's stunning victory Tuesday. Not only did the president win some 3.5 million more votes than his opponent, but he did so despite a relentless onslaught of bad press in the final days of the campaign. The president prevailed in spite of vicious attacks on his personal character and integrity by an array of well-funded partisan attack dogs. The president won re-election even though Democrats and their allied-groups outspent Republicans by an estimated $70 million.

Kristoff and other liberals still do not get the diastrous consequences of their soak the rich mentality and how it hurts the common folks. There is no better example than the luxury tax on yachts, that put the New England boat builders and all of their employees (none of which were rich) out of work. The rich put their marginal income back into the economy in ways that help the average American much more efficiently than the government ever could hope to, because of teh efficency of the capitalist free market system that awards the person with the best product or service at the best price, instead of the government system of awarding failure.

The big losers

Peggy Noonan:

...

Who was the biggest loser of the 2004 election? It is easy to say Mr. Kerry: he was a poor candidate with a poor campaign. But I do think the biggest loser was the mainstream media, the famous MSM, the initials that became popular in this election cycle. Every time the big networks and big broadsheet national newspapers tried to pull off a bit of pro-liberal mischief--CBS and the fabricated Bush National Guard documents, the New York Times and bombgate, CBS's "60 Minutes" attempting to coordinate the breaking of bombgate on the Sunday before the election--the yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took them down. It was to me a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt. It was the yeomen of King Harry taking down the French aristocracy with new technology and rough guts. God bless the pajama-clad yeomen of America. Some day, when America is hit again, and lines go down, and media are hard to get, these bloggers and site runners and independent Internetters of all sorts will find a way to file, and get their word out, and it will be part of the saving of our country.

Last note. As much as anyone, the POW wives of Vietnam, who stood against the Democratic nominee for president and for the Republican, can claim credit for the Bush victory. Everyone with a computer in America, and a lot of people with TVs, saw their testimony about the 1970s, and their husbands, and John Kerry. You could not come away from their white-haired, soft-faced, big-eyeglasses visages without thinking: He should not be commander in chief.

Oh, another last note. Tuesday I heard three radio talkers who refused to believe it was over when the ludicrous, and who knows but possibly quite mischievous, exit polls virtually declared a Kerry landslide yesterday afternoon. They are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. The last sent me an e-mail that dismissed the numbers as elitist nonsense and propaganda. She is one tough girl and they are two tough men. Savor them too.

Hispanic move to Bush a key ingrediant

Dick Morris:

GEORGE W. Bush was re-elected on Tuesday because the Hispanic vote, long a Democratic Party preserve, shifted toward the president's side.

The USA Today exit poll shows Hispanics, who had voted for Al Gore by 65 percent to 35 percent, supported Kerry by only 55 to 43. Since Hispanics accounted for 12 percent of the vote, their 10-point shift meant a net gain for Bush of 2.4 percent — which is most of the improvement in his popular-vote share.

The other two pillars of the Democratic Party citadel remained intact. John Kerry carried blacks by 89-11, only two points less than Gores 2000 showing of 91-9. The Democrat won the votes of single women by 63-36, even as Bush was winning 54 percent of married women to Kerry's 45 percent.

In America today, the Democratic Party is a demographic institution, anchored by its appeal to blacks, Hispanics and single women. Together, these three groups, a combined one-third of the electorate, voted 4 to 1 for Kerry and accounted for more than half of the Democrat's votes. The Republican Party is an intellectual and economic peer group that carries everyone who is not black or Hispanic or a single woman by 2 to 1.

...

Social-values issues are likely part of the reason for the Hispanic vote for Bush is likely. Always more Catholic than they were liberal, Latino voters are among those who cited values as most influencing their vote. But, beyond this is the fact that Hispanics are behaving like any other immigrant population — drifting toward the GOP after they have begun to establish themselves economically.

...

Bush's efforts to connect the War on Terror with keeping families safe worked wonders, winning him 54 percent of married women. But among single women, Bush got only 36 percent of the vote, almost 20 points shy of his performance among married females.

The social issues, which cut so well in luring Hispanics to the Republican fold, are killing the GOP among single women — who are 38 percent of all women. The party can ill afford to write off so large a vote.

What Morris seems to overlook on the single women front is that unlike race, marital status is easy to change, and with it attitudes change. If the same women are single four years from now that will probably be a disappointment to them and to Republicans.

New voters favor Bush

John Podhoretz:

TWO things happened on Tuesday night: George W. Bush won the election decisively, and John Kerry and the Democrats lost the election decisively. That’s what a close study of the final vote tally reveals. On Tuesday, 9 million more votes were cast than in 2000. On Tuesday, Bush received 8.3 million votes more than he did in 2000. If those 8.3 million Bush voters who weren’t there for Dubya in 2000 all came from the big pool of new voters, then Democrats should start getting ready to pack it up and move to France. Why? Because a Republican president has increased his ballot total by 15 percent simply by creating new Republican voters who didn’t exist before. This is potentially catastrophic for the Democratic Party. It will go into the next two national elections (in 2006 and 2008) with a Republican electorate 15 percent larger than it was four years ago. But look. It’s highly unlikely that every new Bush voter came from the overall newvoter pool. It’s safer to assume that new voters split the way the overall electorate split, 51-48 in favor of the president.

Under this scenario, John Kerry deserves congratulations for receiving about 4.3 million votes that didn’t exist when Al Gore ran for president four years ago. But before Democrats start sending Kerry congratulatory telegrams, they should consider this: Bush only got 4.7 million from the new-voter pool, then his historic total means he got another 3.6 million votes from people who voted Democratic in 2000.

So if you figure the new voters broke 51-48 in favor of the president, you also have to figure that George W. bush took a whopping 7 percent of Gore’s 2000 vote total away from the Democrats. Democrats can and should console themselves with the thought that they can get those voters back. If someone has pulled the Democratic lever before, there’s reason to think they can go Democratic again under the right circumstances and with the right candidate. But to do that, Democrats will have to accept reality. And the reality is this: Democrats voted for Bush in large numbers because they like him. They admire him. They want him to be president. They don’t think he’s an idiot, a fascist, a warmonger, a religious fanatic, a kook, a liar, a cheat, a monster, a bad guy. They think he’s done a good job. The Democratic Party has spent four years demonizing George W. Bush, and in part because of their stupid, useless, senseless negativism, Terry McAuliffe & Co. lost 4 million voters. Some strategists will surely argue that because the Democrats were so pointed in their attacks on Bush, they brought the 2.8 million people who voted for Ralph Nader back in the fold. There’s some merit in that argument. But that still leaves the party with a net loss overall from 2000. And that, my friends, is the story of this election. George W. Bush won the election triumphantly because he made new voters. And John Kerry and the Democrats lost the election ignominiously in part because of the self-destructive hate and venom they spat at the president, which caused Democratic voters to flee in droves.

The needed democrat purge

George Will:

...

As part of its penance for nominating a senator -- it has been 44 years since one was elected president -- and one more liberal (according to the liberal Americans for Democratic Action) than Walter Mondale, the Democratic Party should purge its Michael Moore faction. Moore, the vulgarian who made the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11," is unhinged by his loathing of Bush -- and of the country that has now reelected him. Moore and the hordes of his enthusiasts are a stain on the party -- as are those Democratic senators and representatives who in June made a merry festival of the movie's Washington premiere. Moore illustrates the fact that the Republican Party benefits -- it is energized by resentment -- when the entertainment industry and major journalistic institutions (e.g., the New York Times, CBS News) enlist as appendages of the Democratic Party's advocacy apparatus.

OOH la la!

Amir Taheri:

OOH la la! This was the first reaction of the French elite yesterday as they learned about President Bush's re-election. Having spent much of Tuesday evening jubilating about what they believed would be a landslide win for Sen. John Kerry, the crème de la crème of chic Paris could not believe that Bush had been returned for four more years.

The European elites had spent much of Tuesday evening dreaming about how a President Kerry would ratify the Kyoto accords, sign on to the International Criminal Court, cut and run in Iraq, send flowers to Yasser Arafat and, perhaps, open a dialogue with Osama bin Laden. When it became clear that the American voters wanted none of that, the chattering classes in Europe were left speechless. One Paris TV anchor was literally struck dumb mometarily when, after hours of crowing over Kerry's victory and the American people's supposed liberation from Bushist tyranny, he had to admit that things had gone differently.

The shock felt in Europe was even greater because of the size of Bush's victory. The president won more votes than any candidate in the entire history of America. Dubya also became the first to win the presidency with a majority of the popular vote, since his father in 1988.

People like French President Jacques Chirac, whose party has won just 16 per cent of the votes in a series of recent elections, or German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose party has lost every election in the past two years, would look with envy at the clean sweep made by Bush and his Republican Party on Tuesday.

Until Tuesday, the standard excuse by many Europeans who opposed key aspects of Bush's policies was that they were only anti-Bush, not anti-American. They tried to justify that bit of sophistry with Michael Moore-esque lies about how Bush, having "stolen" the 2000 election, did not really represent the American people.

With Dubya's victory, it will no longer be possible for the Hate-America international to pose as merely anti-Bush. Their claim that Bush and his gang of Likudniks had somehow hijacked the United States has been swept away by American voters.

A question of values

Washington Times Editorial:

It stunned the Democrats and many in the media, but it shouldn't have. Voters who care about moral values delivered the election to President Bush. Even with an uncertain economy and problems in Iraq, Mr. Bush rode social conservatism to victory. In a Wednesday-morning chin-pulling session, CNN anchor Bill Hemmer turned to his ex-politico colleague Carlos Watson and asked earnestly, "Why has the country gone so far in the conservative direction?" The truth is that the country was already there. It's just that the liberal media elites never realized it.
The exit polls couldn't have been clearer. They showed that more voters think moral values — that is, the vaunted "God, guns and gays" questions — are the most important question facing the nation than think the same about the state of the economy, the terrorist threat or the Iraq war. Regaining competitiveness with this group will be the Democrats' great generational challenge in the years to come. But it's far from clear that the Democrats even understand their problem, much less how to fix it.

...

The problem doesn't belong exclusively to the Democrats, of course; the media owns it, too. It's telling that in the weeks before the election, pollsters didn't even include "moral values" as an option when questioning likely voters. The ABC News/Washington Post poll listed the economy, terrorism, Iraq, health care, education, and "other" as the options. Under that formula, 10 percent chose "other." A plurality of the "other" contingent listed abortion, stem cell research, gay "marriage," religion or moral issues as the supreme concern.

Jusst as it was a mistake to push policy issues on abortion through the court system instead of the political system, it was a mistake for gays to push their "marriage" agenda through the courts. The result was to energize voters who reject the gay agenda. This was a wedge issue tht the gays created themselves and it has backfired big time for their supporters in the Democrat party.

Trendlines

Donald Lambro:

Two huge trendlines emerged from Tuesday's election: continuing decline of the Democrats in wide swaths of electoral territory across the South and West and growing Republican majorities in Congress.
The focus on the eventual mathematical settlement of Ohio's electoral votes in President Bush's favor seemed to obscure the larger picture of what happened Tuesday night: First, Mr. Bush won a 51 percent of the popular vote, the first time a president's done that since 1988. Second, he did it as his party significantly expanded its representation in the House and Senate, which doesn't happen very often in national re-election politics.

...

The Bush campaign clearly defeated the Democrats in this ground war, but there were big strategic differences between their operations: Mr. Bush's ground game was made up of volunteers who knew the neighborhoods and, in many cases, knew their neighbors.
Mr. Kerry's ground organization did this, too, but much of its get-out-the-vote army were staffed by mercenaries, paid workers, brought in (sometimes from out of state) to offset the GOP's grass-roots advantage, especially in Republican-dominated suburbs. A lot of Mr. Kerry's ground forces belonged to third-party groups who worked in his behalf but were not a real part of his core organization: labor unions, whose political clout has shrunk, and other independently funded liberal activist groups like Americans Coming Together (ACT), who worked outside of the Kerry campaign but in collusion with it.

It also turns out that the Democrats and their liberal supporters were scammed on voter registrations that were paid on the basis of new sign ups, many of which turned out to be ficticious.

Another aspect of the race is that the country has literally moved away from teh Democrats. If both sides had won the same states as they did this year in the 1960's or 1970's The Democrats would have had more electoral votes. Starting witht he 1980's census and moving inexerbly through 2000 the same state margin has grown for the Republicans.

Another thing the numbers tell us is that the Democrats are runnign out of excuses. In 2002, they claimed that they did not get their message out, even though clearly their message was rejected by a majority of voters. This year they got their big turnout and still lost. Logic should tell them that their message is being rejected, but Nancy Pelosi just seems to think we are too ignorant to get it and all we need is more education. Really!

The Dem's turnout delusionism

Michelle Malkin:

Despite apocalyptic claims of systemic voter suppression, upward of 120 million Americans were able to navigate traffic, traverse bad weather, find their polling places, stand in line without fainting, elbow their way past United Nations nosybodies and MoveOn.org mobsters, press their trembling fingers onto computer screens without getting shocked, and — gasp — competently cast their votes without tearfully begging for do-overs.
The projected turnout is up 15 million from the record set four years ago. With more than half the popular vote, President Bush has topped Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan's popular vote tallies. He will earn the distinction of being the presidential candidate who has earned more votes than any other in the nation's entire history. "W." stands for "Wow."
All this and yet, the plaintive Democratic wail until at least Thanksgiving will be: "If only more people had voted."
This isn't just sore-loser-ism. It's delusion-ism.
How many times did you hear pollsters, pundits, journalists and Democratic mouthpieces (sorry for the redundancy) say that "turnout will be key" to a Kerry/Edwards victory? Let's review.
When it became clear this week's election would have record turnout, the mainstream media widely assumed John Kerry would benefit. Pollster John Zogby prognosticated: "If there's a big turnout, especially of young voters, you may be looking at a Kerry victory." An outfit called the National Committee for an Effective Congress opined: "Presidential election [turnout] is expected to be nearly 50 percent, and higher turnout benefits Democrats." Marring an otherwise stellar record of predictions, Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics in Charlottesville observed: "Many new people are not showing up to say 'Good job, Mr. President.' "
Whoops.

Good news for GOP, Dems do not see a reason to change

Washington Times: