The World According to Jackie Mason
Wouldn’t you know it, Jackie Mason has a vlog. His latest is a pretty harsh (and well deserved) scolding of the Democrats, regarding their feckless positions on the war in Iraq.
Not only did most Democrats vote to authorize the removal of Saddam and his evil regime, they spent years emphasizing the threat he posed.
h/t Hot Air
Charles Krauthammer: Obama would be quite the Democratic gamble
For Barack Obama, it was strike two. And this one was a right-down-the-middle question from a YouTuber in Monday night’s South Carolina debate: “Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea?â€
“I would,†responded Obama.
James Taranto: Democrats go soft on crimes against humanity
Barack Obama’s latest pronouncement on Iraq should have shocked the conscience. In an interview with the Associated Press last week, the freshman Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate opined that even preventing genocide is not a sufficient reason to keep American troops in Iraq.
“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now–where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife–which we haven’t done,” Mr. Obama told the AP. “We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.”
Mr. Obama is engaging in sophistry. By his logic, if America lacks the capacity to intervene everywhere there is ethnic killing, it has no obligation to intervene anywhere–and perhaps an obligation to intervene nowhere. His reasoning elevates consistency into the cardinal virtue, making the perfect the enemy of the good.
U.S. official: Sunni extremists from Saudi Arabia make up half the foreign fighters in Iraq, many suicide bombers
About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis, he said.
Presumably, the balance of these foreign jihadis are Iranian.
While the focus of this LA times article is to emphasize the fact that a large number of foreign terrorists sowing chaos in Iraq are coming from a supposed ally, the important question to ask is: what are the Saudis’ (and Iranians’) intentions?
Some would like you to believe that they are simply taking up arms alongside their Iraqi brothers and sisters, in order to evict the evil American occupiers (a.k.a. the Great Satan). Too bad the facts on the ground utterly refute such nonsense. Those facts on the ground being the deliberate murder of large numbers of Iraqi civilians – on a daily basis – by these so-called “freedom fighters”, as Michael Moore once referred to them. Those facts on the ground being the increasing cooperation between native insurgent forces and the American military who, together, have al Qaeda on the run.
No, the Iranians, Saudis and other assorted Muslim regimes see a free Iraq as a major threat to their hold on power. And, their willingness to interfere in Iraq in such a manner comes from the belief that the United States really is a paper tiger, as stated by Osama bin Laden. Feed the American people a steady diet of bloody chaos in the streets of Iraq, kill as many American soldiers as you can, and the Americans will ultimately lose their stomach to fight, give-up, and leave. Just as they did in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia.
The consequences of a hasty American withdrawal – as even the NY Times predicts – would likely be genocide of the Iraqi people, and the creation of a powerful new terrorist state, run by whichever faction can quickest fill the power vacuum left in our wake.
Meanwhile, the Democrats, in their monumental irresponsibility, continue to push for just such a hasty withdrawal, just as the Surge (General Petreaus’ Counterinsurgency Strategy) is getting off the ground, and making demonstrable progress.
Watch how the utterly contemptible Harry Reid handles a question on whether Iraqis will be more or less secure, as a result of an American withdrawal:
Could it be that Reid is absolutely aware of the bloodbath that would ensue in Iraq, should his policy wishes be implemented, and just doesn’t care?
Food for thought.
Democrats: Saddam and his WMD pose a real threat
At least that’s what they used to think (pre-2003), when that was the politically expedient position for them to take.
What, was George Bush already busy rigging the WMD scam, while he was the Governor of Texas? What a shameless bunch of partisan hacks, the Democrat Party has become.
h/t: Jawa
Opinion Journal: Crocker and Petraeus speak some truths, if Senators are listening.
Nobody claims the Iraqi government is a model of democratic perfection, or that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is the second coming of Lincoln. We advised the White House not to lobby against his predecessor. But Mr. Maliki’s government is democratic and more inclusive than most reporting suggests, and it is fighting for its life against an enemy that uses car bombs and suicide bombers as its policy instruments. In an interview this week in the New York Post, General David Petraeus noted that while the performance of the Iraqi Army has been mixed, “their losses in June were three times ours.” To suggest that Iraqis aren’t willing to fight for their freedom is an insult to their families.
General Petraeus also noted that “the level of sectarian deaths in Baghdad in June was the lowest in about a year,” evidence that in this key battlefield the surge is making progress. As a result, al Qaeda is being forced to pick its targets in more remote areas, as it did last week in the village of Amirli near Kirkuk, where more than 100 civilians were murdered. More U.S. troops and the revolt of Sunni tribal leaders against al Qaeda are the most hopeful indicators in many months that the insurgency can be defeated.
David Horowitz: Why We Went to War in Iraq
The First Big Bush Lie, according to Gore, is that the Bush administration went to war to remove Saddam Hussein’s WMDs or, as he puts it: “The first rationale presented for the war was to destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.†This familiar Democratic claim is itself probably the biggest lie of the Iraq War, rather than anything the president or his administration has said. In fact, the first – and last – rationale presented for the war by the Bush administration in every formal government statement about the war was not the destruction of WMDs but the removal of Saddam Hussein, or regime change.
This regime change was necessary because Saddam was an international outlaw. He had violated the 1991 Gulf War truce and all the arms control agreements it embodied, including UN resolutions 687 and 689, and the 15 subsequent UN resolutions designed to enforce them. The last of these, UN Security Council Resolution 1441, was itself a war ultimatum to Saddam giving him “one final opportunity†to disarm – or else. The ultimatum expired on December 7, 2002, and America went to war three months later.
Contrary to everything that Al Gore and other Democrats have said for the last four years, Saddam’s violation of the arms control agreements that made up the Gulf War truce – and not the alleged existence of Iraqi WMDs – was the legal, moral and actual basis for sending American troops to Iraq.
