Fox News keeps reporting live from the hometown of Paul Johnson, and says the locals are driving up and down the street "venting their anger" at "the messenger".
Yeah, sure. The media is "just the messenger". They're never biased. They're never part of the problem. They never have any blood on their hands.
Boy, I'd like to hear what those people in Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey are saying to the media. I really would.
Another American had his head sawed off today.
May God rest and keep him.
For the rest of us, there's rage. Rage on Fox News, deep concern in the rest of the media, rage on the blogosphere. Certainly rage among the People.
In their horror, grief, and rage, people are talking about paving the ME or drilling for oil through glass.
Normal people. Good, kindhearted, normal Americans. No matter where you live or what your family, a fair number of your relatives, and your co-workers, and your neighbors are thinking these things right now.
Oh sure, they're just lashing out in their grief and rage, and after some minutes, or hours, or at most days, they'll calm down and stop thinking or saying such terrible things.
But you know what? With each one of these incidents the tide rises higher, and takes a bit longer to recede.
Now imagine this goes on for months. Maybe a few years. And it will, even if Kerry is elected (you know they will not stop until they're dead or we are). And now imagine on top of that, that the terrorists get through and make a major attack in the US, worse than 9/11.
Imagine not just one Paul Johnson, but 10,000. American men, women, and children. Again.
And again (remember, the terrorists won't stop).
You want to sit there and tell me that eventually, in one of our spasms of grief and rage following one of these atrocities, that we aren't going to in fact start nuking first and taking names later?
That's why we're in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not about Oil. Not about Bin Laden. Not about 9/11. Not about freeing Iraq or removing Saddam, or enforcing UN resolutions, good and just as these reasons are.
We're in Iraq as the last, best hope of avoiding a major, possibly genocidal, nuclear strike on the Middle East. The Middle East, and Islam, must reform, or die. America will not take this forever. I say that not as a threat, but as a conclusion. I know my countrymen.
UPDATE:
Michele has similar thoughts. Michele is a very good, moral person. I offer her as Exhibit B.
In an hour or so I might feel different. I might not. The residual anger over Nick Berg stayed with me a for a while. Each time something like this happens, the anger dissipates slower and leaves a shadow behind. How long before the shadow is all that's left?
Michele gives an excellent and most appropriate rant that at least half of all adults in this country should read. I mean it.
We're frickin' at war people. War! It doesn't matter whether you like it, or believe it, or think it appropriate, or whatever, because the fact is that Islamofascism is at war with you. And has been since at least 1979. In the larger sense, they've been at war with us for most of a century. It's just that it's taken the modern technology (that we invented) to give them arms long enough to strike at us. Well, now they're here, they're in Canada, they're in Europe. They're in your backyard and every place you want to go on vacation. They want to kill you. Yes, YOU, reading this. Their idea of a good Saturday night is making a little home video of sawing some American's head off.
So stop it. STOP IT!
This is the EXACT same thing I said to the idiot Republicans as they sold this country down the river to persecute Clinton. Just Stop It.
Stop putting your head in the sand, stop believing in lies (you KNOW the crap you're spewing is lies, don't tell me you don't - remember I was on your side not long ago and I know how it works - you just peddle it for narrow political purposes), stop nipping at the heels of those who are fighting this war and protecting your sorry, ungrateful asses.
America is a lot more important than you, or what you want, or the Democratic party, or your narrow self-interest, or who is President. We're at war with people who destroy skyscrapers and saw off heads. For now. Soon, within a very few years, they are very likely to have nuclear weapons.
Stop ignoring them, stop lying about them. Stop helping them. You know that what you do helps them.
Please. I beg you from my heart.
Now that's a shocker, isn't it? The Pope reportedly supports a non-Catholic over a Catholic for President of the United States.
In the June 4 edition of “Corriere della Sera,” Luigi Accattoli, the Vatican journalist who most faithfully reports the views from the pontifical palazzo, wrote that the pope has already decided: he prefers the evangelical Bush to the Catholic Kerry. And “he wants to help him with the Catholic voters.”
The Pope is going to help deliver Catholic voters? Wow.
If even the Pope doesn't think much of Kerry, what does that say?
Steven Den Beste reminds us once again just what's at stake. The Presidential election in nothing in comparison. No matter who you think will be better at prosecuting the war, let no one think that this is a war that can be escaped.
That's actually one of the big reasons why we're at war. The Islamic extremists consider tolerance to be heresy. They cannot accept us as we are, even though we're quite willing to accept them as they are. They demand that we conform to their view of how we should behave, and we won't do it.So either they'll force us to conform, or they'll kill us all, or we'll force them to be tolerant, or we'll kill them all. Or maybe everybody will end up dead.
The first of those won't happen. My nation is not going to surrender, and they are not going to convert this nation into an Islamic Republic without exterminating the vast majority of us first. (If they try, they'll discover the true reason for our Second Amendment.) Each of the others is a distinct possibility, but the third one (us forcing them to be tolerant) is by far the least bloody of those outcomes. That's the basis of the US strategy in the war (though there's much more to it than that).
If it fails, the body count is going to get extremely high. Islamic extremists may eventually gain the means to slaughter large numbers of us, but they won't ever have the ability to wipe us out completely.
On the other hand, we have the ability to wipe them out now, if we're ruthless enough to kill 10,000 innocent civilians for every militant we kill. Burning down the house to kill the roaches is pretty extreme, but there's no doubt it actually would kill almost all the roaches.
If it comes to that, it would be nearly as much of a disaster for us to do that as it would be for them to have that done to them. But if we face the stark choice of surrendering or committing nuclear genocide, then the body count is going to become very large in a very short time.
I'm willing to do almost anything to avoid that. But I am not willing to surrender in order to avoid that.
I came across this one somehow.
Of course, this whole post does give rise to thoughts about what an amazing world we live in. Less than 30 minutes after witnessing a pleasant surprise like I did today, I've written and posted photos about it the whole world can see. It's a fantastic world we live in that such a quick, detailed, and personal connection can be made between a reader on another continent and myself so easily. We're lucky to be living in such great times.
We do live in great times. Amazing times. Wealthy and prosperous times. Iraq and culture wars and birthrates and Lying Leftists and blah blah blah notwithstanding. These are great times to be alive.
Thanks for reminding me, Jason.
Ronald Reagan is renowned, in part, because he was willing to say what few others would: that the Soviet Union was an Evil Empire. Those words were a shot heard 'round the world, as various survivors of the now-dead empire have now related.
Where is the leader who will say the truth about China: that it's an Evil State?
A state that grossly oppresses it's own people, continues it's conquest and occupation of Tibet, and seriously threatens Taiwan, a state which is both an ally and the closest thing to a Western democracy in Asia.
China is a state that has a history of, and continues, to cause unrest in it's region and to prop up brutal military regimes. If it were not for China, Communist China mind, there would be no North Korea.
And, although it means zero to the political elites of both sides in the West today, let us at least remember the dead briefly and remind that the Communist Chinese government, the same government that is in power today, has the bloodiest record in history. Worse than Hitler. Worse than Stalin. That takes some doing.
And yet we give them Most Favored Nation trading status. The Press is incessant about Abu Ghraib but is completely silent about the Chinese Gulag. Walmart has become the largest company in the world (by some measures) largely on the basis of the huge volume of trade they do selling China to Americans.
We ought to be ashamed. And we ought to have a leader who will speak the truth about this.