Bush supporter and well-known blogger Matt Margolis was verbally and physically attacked at a Bush fundraiser by Bush-haters. With zero provocation.
Isn't that nice? If the Left doesn't get their way, if they can't shout you down with their lies and hate and braindead slogans, why, they'll just punch your lights out.
And that really should tell you all you need to know.
Vote for Bush, or vote for Kerry's Brownshirts. You're free to choose.
Michele, in a very clear-headed post, offers us this:
And Islam is not the only culture that permeates our society to the point of disaster. There is the culture of hate, spawned by Americans themselves, the ones who teach Palestinian kids to hate the USA, the ones who side with dictators, the ones who praise our enemies and tell people to not support the troops. The clash of civilizations is not just between two peoples, but three. It's us, them and those who are the bridge between us and them. You know who you are.
Exactly. Not one World War, but two. This clicked for me back in January in The Statist War and the Islamofascist War.
Sigh. We've got a tough row to hoe. But at least if we realize that there are two wars at once, and that any person or group could be on either side of either war, things become clearer.
Attrition
Michele says a couple of things I wanted to cite over at a small victory. Taking the second first, she is at a low point, with war-weariness very understandably setting in.
You know, this is getting redundant and ridiculous. Every day, I write the same story with different settings. Every day, I write out of anger or despair or worry. And I preach to the proverbial choir. The people who aren't in that choir - for the most part they stop by, they drop a few assumptions and insults in the comments and they move on. There are some readers who stick around, and have stuck around for a long time, and they know how to converse and debate and I appreciate them for that.But what good is it doing me to rant and rave every day? What purpose does it serve to sit down at the keyboard every morning and type away about terrorism and war when nearly everyone who reads this thing feels the same way I do? I have 43 articles in a folder waiting to be written about or cited. I have emails with links to other articles or blog posts. It's what I do. Write about all the bad things going on the world. I have to do that at Command Post as well. Even if it's on a different level over there, it still makes all too aware of everything that's going on around us.
Before I started a blog, I didn't know that much about world affairs. Now I feel like I know too much. And it all comes tumbling out every morning, sometimes in the afternoon and evening, and jesus christ people, aren't you getting tired of it? Aren't you tired of reading what I'm tired of writing?
Yet, I don't stop. Even though I have no idea what the purpose is, I don't stop. I've been interviewed three times in the past two weeks by people writing papers on blogging. Each one has asked me "Why do you blog?" I said to the last person, I don't know. I honestly don't know.
I'll just say what I've had to say to myself, more than once:
This is a war of attrition. Not attrition of men or material, but rather attrition of morale.
Al Qaeda's strategy is to attack our morale, our will to fight. We attrit their morale. They attrit ours.
If this is so, just your very will to keep writing is indeed the battlefield. As is mine. And every email we send, every co-worker we talk to, every hit we get, however few they may be, is one more brick in the wall of our will.
Al Qaeda is trying to tire us, to wear us out, to wait for us to fall into despair, or boredom, or neglect, or any of the other unthinking attitudes we've had that let this thing fester for so many years in the first place. The weakness of the West is only in our will.
Keep writing, Michele. I think we all keep each other strong. We are each part of the battle.
Or so I see it. I realize I may have an incorrect idea of the significance of each of us. But I don't think so. :)
911/Clarke hearings
I also wanted to make a quick comment on this, re Dick Clarke.
My government did not fail me. If they failed me, there would be more than 3,000 dead people. If they failed me, we would be under Sharia law or, going back further, a communist country. I believe with all my heart that my government - from the Clinton years to the Bush years - did their best for us with what they knew.An apology like this one is a passive-aggressive move designed to elicit hugs and handshakes and maybe a few book sales.
What I would prefer is that someone would stand up in D.C. and say "We have nothing to apologize for. The Murdering Islamists and their followers are the ones who need to apologize, and you will never get that."
And then we kill the bastards, move forward and try to stop this from every happening again.
Put down your signs, put away your dossiers and get off your ass and actually do something except Monday quarterbacking.
Exactamundo. Thank you.
These hearings are important, but NOT as an exercise in finger-pointing. Their sole purpose should be to learn what we can do better. Using them for political purposes in time of war may be inevitable, but it brings great discredit on those who do so, so far as I'm concerned.
We need to be looking forward and thinking about how to win this thing, not fighting amongst ourselves. Al Qaeda is loving this.
Heh. Noam Chomsky has a new blog.
With comments.
How much you wanna bet that doesn't last? :)
And no, I won't be trolling over there. But I bet some others will.
Here's a juicy one, plucked at random from what little Noam has written so far:
People in the more civilized sectors of the world (what we call "the third world," or the "developing countries") often burst out laughing when they witness an election in which the choices are two men from very wealthy families with plenty of clout in the very narrow political system, who went to the same elite university and even joined the same secret society to be socialized into the manners and attitudes of the rulers, and who are able to participate in the election because they have massive funding from highly concentrated sectors of unaccountable power that cast over society the shadow called "politics," as John Dewey put it.
LOL! ROFLMAO!
Did you ever hear the like?
And this guy is at MIT?
This guy has a PhD?
This guy is world-reknowned?
Yer kiddin me. Please, tell me yer kiddin me.
This guy is an ass.
Hat tip to lgf.
John Derbyshire wrote a brilliant piece today.
Go read it all now, please.
He covers a lot of ground, but along the way he brought out something that's been really bothering me for some time, but I never talked about it.
And that in itself is the story.
We have not, in fact, gone "beyond tolerance" at all, we have merely invented new kinds of intolerance. We have not swept away caste-feudalism and replaced it with a shining meritocratic egalitarianism; we have just traded in one style of caste-feudalism for another style. This is not a society "in which people feel free to hold whatever private views on all human groups and behaviors." People are ashamed of their private beliefs and fearful to disclose them. They are baffled by the fact that sincere opinions held by their parents and grandparents, rooted in custom, good sense, scripture, and everyday observation, are now shouted down as "bigoted" and "intolerant." What use are private beliefs anyway, if they are excluded from the public square by a suffocating conformity, imposed by an ever-vigilant Thought Police backed by armies of predatory lawyers?
There are things I believe, opinions I have, that I dare not speak on this website. And I bet the same is true for everyone reading this. There are things you believe, but that you daren't say. Well, other than perhaps to your closest family, in private, in low voices. And never written down.
Right here, in the Land of the Brave and Home of the Free.
Because your opinions, if they do not toe the prescribed societal line, might be used against you. You might be shunned, harassed, lose your job, be fined, or even go to jail, depending on just what opinions they are and where you express them.
Lose your job or suffer legal punishment for a belief that your father, and your father's father, and their fathers before them had. Thought crimes, in effect.
What the heck happened to this country?
Don't tell me I'm wrong, or that I'm imagining this. You know what I say is true.
It just struck me. We're now 20 years past 1984.
Maybe in more ways than one.
Schroeder has indeed been spending too much time hanging out with the French. He's developed a most amazing case of gall.
Get this: after stabbing us in the back and giving us the finger at the same time over Iraq, Schroeder now suggests that Germany be given a permanent seat on the Security Council. He also claims the US should readily support this "in light of Germany's efforts in the fight against international terrorism."
Wow. This after bragging about Germany's "deliberate non-participation" in their supposed-ally's recent conflict.
Drinking too much of that Perrier, Gerhard.
At first I was going to go ballistic on this fantasy.
But you know, I've reconsidered. I now fully support Schroeder's suggestion.
Let's give Germany a permanent Security Council seat.
Ours.
While we're at it, let's give them the rest of the UN too. Move it all to Berne or Bonn, I don't care, just get it the Hell out of America.
Faster, please.
Hat tip to The Emperor, and hence to David's Medienkritik
As I write this, Fox News is running a subhead of "Placing the Blame", talking about 9-11 and the Clarke book. This is just emblematic of a hue and cry I hear throughout the media and the political fan/flack ranks right now, talking about blaming someone or other for some supposed incompetence regarding the WOT.
People, wake the f**k up! Do you WANT the Islamofascists to win? Is that it? Does the West have some death-wish? Bin Laden thinks so. Are you trying to prove him right?
The "blame" for terrorism belongs one place and one place only: on the terrorists.
The other half of it is that a lot of folks seem to think that there's something to "blame" about how the WOT has been conducted so far, or about the current situation in Iraq.
The fact is that the WOT is generally going quite well, and the last couple of years have, for the most part, been filled with success after success.
If you had sat down, on 9/12/01, and predicted that in 2 years we would have driven the Taliban from power and ousted Saddam Hussein, produced a new government and constitution in Afghanistan, be well on the way to the same in Iraq, broken wide open a global nuclear weapons proliferation conspiracy, elicited several countries in the ME to start moving towards reform, AND prevented any new attacks against the US, you'd have been laughed off the stage. Laughed.
But that's what has in fact happened. Those are the facts on the ground.
Yet just now, as we near victory, what happens? OUR OWN PEOPLE begin to try to throw it all away, and for the basest and most venal of reasons.
Nice going.
This war is not Islamofascism's to win. It's ours to lose. If we do, it will truly be a tragedy, due to our own fatal flaws.
Look in the mirror, people. And then look over your shoulder.