Black Dog Menaces Guardian - More articles clogging up my favorites menu

Big Black Blogging Shepherd Watching You, Guardian! (see previous entry) She's a beauty, don't you think?

Vatican awakening to jihad? I sure hope so.

Can we stick a fork in the "root causes" crap which permeates socialist-leftist thinking yet? It's done.

You'd never know there was any good news in Iraq unless you read this Opinion Journal feature which comes out every two weeks. Or you can read military blogs.

Amir Taheri is a great editorialist who I've mentioned before. Iraq: time to look to the future is brilliant.
What has happened in Iraq, however, was not imposing democracy by force. It was removing those who used force to prevent the emergence of democracy. Using force to remove impediments to democracy is nothing new. It has happened many times in history. The English and French revolutions were instances of using force to break the structures of tyranny that prevented democracy from emerging. Today, India is the world’s largest democracy because the British used force there to destroy the feudal society of Maharajas and Nawabs and other despots who would never have allowed the people any say in decision-making.

I think Prince Charles has converted to Islam. This exegeses on Islam is as one-sided as they get.

If you are like me, a Bush voter, you might be sick of the name-calling from the many leftists who can't imagine any reason for your vote other than assuming you are a theocratic, redneck, bigot. The Values-Vote Myth by David Brooks (NYT) is a good refutation. It's the Moderates, Stupid by a Clinton Democrat is even better.

The Vatican is still battling "secularism" in Europe. I think they should deal with the jihad first.

Here are two great articles from TCS. Wired Islam, can it help defeat the jihad? Yes and no. The jihadis are all over the Internet. Two, Elections and the Muslim World makes several critical points. One, terrorism is not new to Iraq. Saddam's regime waged an ongoing terror war against his own people. When the government has a monopoly on terrorism, it destroys any competition. Also, it's another example of leftist bigotry (my description) to say Muslims are not capable of freedom and democracy.

The obvious link between these claims is, broadly, the belief that the Muslim world is impervious to democratic change and that any action by us to implement it will only raise greater obstacles to progress. One must first understand that this stereotypical conception of global Islam is grossly ignorant and prejudiced. It much resembles the common Western apprehension that all Muslim countries live under exclusive sharia law, that none is pluralistic, and that Islam is universally jihadist. None of these views is accurate.

Let us begin with the issue of American invasion and the purported reaction to it. It has become a cliché of Bush-haters to assert that Islamist terrorism has grown since the intervention in Iraq, but even a superficial examination of Islam worldwide reveals a much better situation than many Westerners imagine. In Iraq itself, the Saddam regime exercised murderous terrorism against the Shia majority and the Iraqi Kurds, but with Saddam gone, that can hardly be said to have increased. The rebellion of Moqtada ul-Sadr has been neutralized and Iraqi Kurdistan is essentially pacified. The Saudi-inspired terrorists in Falluja have already begun to alienate their base by their attempt to transform the city into a fundamentalist redoubt.

When I said Osama was endorsing Kerry I only had the early translations. As it turns out, he promised to attack the Red States. I'm glad this had almost no effect on the election (according to exit polling). Even Kerry would have chased Osama, I'm pretty sure.

Janet Daley is one of my favorite new columnists. Bush's 'crime'? Just being a patriot.
Like most expatriate Americans living in Britain, it was a phenomenon I am unlikely ever to forget. The response to the deaths of 3,000 civilians, by comment writers in the Left-wing newspapers and the producers of "flagship" BBC current affairs programmes, was to orchestrate abuse of the bereaved country. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read a leader in Saturday's Guardian which pronounced with brazen sanctimoniousness: "The attack of September 11 2001, an event of historic seriousness, created an unprecedented outpouring of solidarity worldwide."

Oh really? Well, then the Guardian must have been wildly out of step with world solidarity at the time because it was gleefully leading a chorus of "America got what it deserved". And the BBC - sorry to return to this again but it remains burnished in my consciousness - staged an edition of Question Time in which anyone who expressed sympathy for the US was howled down.

Anybody who says that this kind of pathological hatred - the kind that relishes the loss of innocent life as a well-deserved "lesson" - would evaporate with the election of John Kerry, or any other contender who was remotely in tune with the American political culture, is trying very hard to deceive himself or the rest of us.

Perhaps there is a clue to the psychological logic of this argument in the Guardian leader's triumphal conclusion: "Three years later, much of that solidarity has been squandered."

Are the people who attacked the US at the time of 9/11 now trying to justify that gratuitous viciousness by claiming that it has been, as it were, retrospectively justified by the invasion of Iraq?

Will we ever know the truth about Flight 800? Clinton wanted terrorism which could help him politically. Fighting the jihad might have reduced his Muslim vote.