The Discerning Texan

I always have my doubts about “trends.” The history of 20th-century America is largely about a country that never prepared for war, and was always compelled--by our enemies--to conduct enormous crusades. It was seemingly all or nothing for us. The history of America in war, like that of most others, is largely about making enormous blunders at the beginning, and then sorting it out. Our great strength is not so much avoiding error, but the ability to recover quickly, change tactics and even strategy, and get it done. I think that applies to the three world wars in the last century.

The scary thing about our current jam is that 9/11 was supposed to have been the wakeup call, but we are again asleep. For this I blame our leaders--both the administration and the Dems. The administration is constitutionally unable to explain itself, and the Dems have no qualms about losing all present battles so long as they can elect their candidates and bring down this president.

The greatest failure of our leaders, with rare exceptions, is their refusal to see the war plain, which means Iran and Syria (might as well call them “Syran,” since they operate in tandem, with Tehran pushing most of the buttons). It was never possible to “win in Iraq” so long as we insisted on fighting in Iraq alone. You can not win a regional war by playing defense in one country. It was, and remains, a sucker’s game. Syran pays no price at all for killing our kids and our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now in Gaza and Lebanon/Israel.

Syran reasonably concluded that there was no price to pay for killing us, and so they predictably expanded the scope of the war. Our leaders do not see this whole; they see each component as a separate issue. They see that Hezbollah is an Iranian entity. They see Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers at work in Lebanon and Iraq. They know the best weapons in the war come through Syran and in many cases are manufactured by Syran. Any logical person has to conclude that you cannot win this war without defeating Syran.

But not a single voice comes from the White House to explain this, let alone to craft a strategy to accomplish it. The best foreign-policy speech in a long time--a lucid analysis of the threat of Islamic fascism and several excellent suggestions of how to combat it--was made two weeks ago by Senator Santorum, and yet his relatively modest bill to support freedom for the Iranian people has been vigorously contested and systematically blocked by Secretary of State Rice and Senator Richard Lugar.

Meanwhile, a collection of frauds, writing in places like Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Mother Jones, continuously recycles a story saying that a neocon (code for “Jewish”) conspiracy duped Bush into going to war in Iraq, and is now arranging the invasion of Iran. Documented lies, like those peddled by Joe Wilson to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, are treated as reliable. Fantasies about American armed forces operating covertly in Iran, like those written by Seymour Hirsh, get taken seriously. And people like me are accused of masterminding the whole thing, even though I oppose a military campaign against Iran.

No one can doubt that this is a willful disinformation campaign, aimed at paralyzing and then destroying the president. I do not think people in the White House have ever fully appreciated their peril. I think that lack of understanding goes hand-in-hand with the failure in strategic vision that underlies our unwillingness to fight the regional war that is being waged against us.

It is the Thirties again. Many of the statements above apply to Franklin Roosevelt’s first two administrations, and to the political atmosphere of those dreadful years. Then, too, the mounting power of what became the Axis was ignored. As my father often reminded me, a few months before Pearl Harbor, at a time when Nazi armies were long since on the march, the draft passed by a single vote. Apologists for Hitler and Mussolini were legion, and some of our leading intellectuals were saying that American democratic capitalism was a failure, and we would do well to emulate the European totalitarians.

Folks on the internet (welcome to the brave new world) and fair and balanced news organizations have been working to understand the Qana quandry. The attacks happened between 12 and 1 AM, and people evacuate. Then some ‘poor’ people take shelter and the building collapses. But as bodies are pulled from the ‘rubble’ pictures show rescuers and victims amazingly free of dust and debris and blood. Did people die at the site? I am sure some did. But is Hezbollah pulling a fast one on a gullible world quick to jump to conclusions? Here are some reports on the matter.

The Isreali Insider notes a child victim with rapid rigor mortis setting in, among many other discrepencies:

Why would the civilians who had supposedly taken shelter in the basement of the building not leave after the post-midnight attack? They just went back to sleep and had the bad luck to wait for the building to collapse in the morning?

National Public Radio’s correspondent reported that residents of that building had left and the victims were non-residents who chose to shelter in the building that night. They were “too poor” to leave the down, one resident told CNN’s Wedeman. Who were these people?

What we do know is that sometime after dawn a call went hour to journalists and rescue workers to come to the scene. And come they did, in droves.

While Hezbollah and its apologists have been claiming that civilians could not freely flee the scene due to Israeli destruction of bridges and roads, the journalists and rescue teams from nearby Tyre had no problem getting there.

Lebanese rescue teams did not start evacuating the building until the morning and only after the camera crews came. The absence of a real rescue effort was explained by saying that equipment was lacking. There were no scenes of live or injured people being extracted.

There was little blood, CNN’s Wedeman noted: all the victims, he concluded, appeared to have died while as they were sleeping — sleeping, apparently, through thunderous Israeli air attacks. Rescue workers equipped with cameras were removing the bodies from the same opening in the collapsed structure. Journalists were not allowed near the collapsed building.

Meanwhile The Editors of the Washington Times discusses the war crime of using civilians as a "shield" to conduct operations--against other civilians! Here is a snippet of their commentary:

Israel is being vilified by opportunistic politicians and the international media over the air strike that killed 56 persons early yesterday in the Lebanese village of Qana. In the rush to blame Israel, a number of relevant facts are ignored:

1) the sad fact of the matter is that, no matter how much is done to minimize the risk to civilians, civilians inevitably die in wars;

2) Israel has placed its soldiers at risk in order to minimize civilian casualties in Lebanon, while Hezbollah, in flagrant violation of international law, including the Geneva Conventions, deliberately behaves in ways to maximize harm to Israeli and Lebanese civilians;

3) in Qana there were indisputable military targets, including locations from which Hezbollah has been firing rockets into Israel;

4) pending the outcome of an investigation, there is no way to tell whether all of those killed in the airstrike were "civilians," as Israel's critics confidently tell us, or whether the dead were actually a mix of combatants and noncombatants.

Senior Israeli officials said yesterday that Hezbollah rocket launchers were concealed in civilian buildings in the village, from which 150 rockets were fired over the past 20 days. They showed reporters video footage of rocket launchers being driven into Qana, from whence rockets were fired at northern Israeli towns, including Kiryat Shemona, Afula and Ma'alot. Israel targeted the building hit early yesterday because intelligence reports indicated that Hezbollah operatives were inside, along with Katyusha rockets and launchers. Typically Hezbollah fighters fire rockets at Israeli targets and then dart into nearby buildings.

Indeed, as it has repeatedly done in the course of the 19-day-old military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces have relinquished the element of surprise by dropping leaflets on Qana and many other Lebanese towns telling residents that they should leave the area because the IDF is preparing to conduct military operations against Hezbollah. Just as Israel tries to move Lebanese civilians out of the line of fire, Hezbollah does its best to put them in danger and peril. In a dispatch published yesterday in Australia, the Sydney Sunday Herald Sun demonstrates just how Hezbollah wages war.

Finally there is this superb ewssay by the always hard-hitting James Lewis of The American Thinker, entitled "Who Killed the Children of Qana?" Here is a representative excerpt of his powerful argument:

Nothing is more heartrending than the suffering of children. Emotionally we all want to put the blame on the bombs, the bombers, and those who ordered the bombing. And yet that is obviously a twisted perversion of reality. Because it is the explicit policy of Islamist terror groups to hide behind children, shooting missiles at Israeli civilians all the time. The gains to the terrorists are enormous. Israelis inevitably feel guilty about the unwanted casualties, but they don’t know what else to do in the face of constant attacks on their own children at home. The Muslim masses are predictably outraged because they only hear one side of the story. And the Leftist media continue to lie—- there is no other word for it—- about who is choosing to expose children to danger.

So the seeds are planted from the beginning. The BBC and the New York Times have labeled the black hats and the white hats for years and years. We are seeing just another replay of Leftist propaganda since Stalin—- who was the innocent victim of Western aggression until decades after his death, when a few old Lefties sheepishly admitted his crimes. Communism killed some 100 million innocents in the 20th century, according to the authoritative Black Book of Communism (Livre Noire du Communism in the original French).

And yet, the most famous intellectuals of the 20th century served this murderous ideology. We are simply seeing a repeat today, with the usual suspects on the Left siding with Islamic fascism just as they took sides with the Leftist fascism of Stalin and Mao.

The Qana story is just a replay of Abu Ghraib, the myth that Saddam had no WMDs, the Wilson-Plame bedroom farce, and on and on. It has just become a kind of reflex of the Left: Israel and the United States are always wrong. Everything is set up for the same mendacious narrative.

Hezbollah killed the children of Qana, just as it killed the children of Haifa. Hezbollah is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his fellow criminals of the mullahcracy in Tehran, who created the Hezbo monster with malice aforethought to “wipe Israel off the map.” There’s no mystery here. They are dead serious about a second genocide against the Jews of Israel. There has never been any effort to lie about it on the part of the Khomeini cult in Tehran. So we know who is responsible.

And yet, the “liberal” media always blame the good guys. There is something twisted and perverse about the media narrative, some sense of delight in enabling the overt malice of the Islamofascists. Because the media know. They know what’s going on. They are just playing dumb, trying to turn their easily-led audiences against those they hate the most. The media take an almost sexual delight in facilitating the murderous malice of Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad. In the calculus of moral responsibility, the New York Times and its ilk must therefore be held to blame in equal measure with the aggressor. “If it bleeds, it leads,” is their working slogan, and it is hard to evade the thought that the biggest “journalists” and editors have learned to enjoy that game, that sense of importance, that arrogation of power. They are co-conspirators in the slaughter of innocents.

In fact, the notion that "fighting" a war is the monopoly of those "in uniform" gets to the heart of why America and its allies are having such a difficult time in the present struggle. Nations go to war, not armies. Or, to be more precise, nations, not armies, win wars. America has a military that cannot be defeated on the battlefield, but so what? The first President Bush assembled the biggest coalition in history for Gulf War I, and the bigger and more notionally powerful it got, the better Saddam Hussein's chances of surviving it became. Because the bigger it got, the less likely it was to be driven by a coherent set of war aims.

War is not like firefighting: It's not about going to the burning house, identifying what needs to be done, and doing it; it's not a technical solution to an obvious problem. And, if you think it is, you find yourself like George Bush Sr. in 1991, standing in front of the gates of Baghdad and going, "Er, OK. Now what?" Some people look at the burning house and see Hezbollah terrorism; others see Israeli obduracy, or a lack of American diplomacy, or Iranian machinations, or a need to get the permanent Security Council members to send peacekeepers, or "poverty" or "despair" or an almighty pile-up of abstract nouns. You can have the best fastest state-of-the-art car on the road, but, if you don't know where you're going, the fellow in the rusting '73 Oldsmobile will get there and you won't. It's the ideas that drive a war and the support they command in the broader society that determine whether you'll see it through to real victory. After Korea and Vietnam and Gulf War I, it shouldn't be necessary to have to state that.

No one can argue with U.S. military superiority. America has the most powerful armed forces on the planet. The Pentagon is responsible for 40 percent of the world's military spending, and outspends the next 20 biggest militaries combined. It's responsible for almost 80 percent of military research-and-development spending, which means the capability gap between it and everyone else widens every day.

[....]

We live in an age of inversely proportional deterrence: The more militarily powerful a civilized nation is, the less its enemies have to fear the full force of that power ever being unleashed. They know America and other Western powers fight under the most stringent self-imposed etiquette. Overwhelming force is one thing; overwhelming force behaving underwhelmingly as a matter of policy is quite another.

So even the most powerful military in the world is subject to broader cultural constraints. When Kathryn Lopez's e-mailer sneers that "your contribution to this war is limited solely to your ability to exercise the skillset provided by your liberal arts education," he's accidentally put his finger on the great imponderable: whether the skill set provided by the typical American, British and European education these last 30 years is now one of the biggest obstacles to civilizational self-preservation. A nation that psychologically outsources war to a small career soldiery risks losing its ability even to grasp concepts like "the enemy": The professionalization of war is also the ghettoization of war. As John Podhoretz wondered in the New York Post the other day: "What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?"

That's a good question. If you watch the grisly U.S. network coverage of any global sporting event, you've no doubt who your team's meant to be: If there are plucky Belgian hurdlers or Fijian shotputters in the Olympics, you never hear a word of them on ABC and NBC; it's all heartwarming soft-focus profiles of athletes from Indiana and Nebraska. The American media have no problem being ferociously jingoistic when it comes to the two-man luge. Yet, when it's a war, there is no "our" team, not on American TV. Like snotty French ice-dancing judges, the media watch the U.S. skate across the rink and then hand out a succession of snippy 4.3s -- for lack of Miranda rights in Fallujah, insufficient menu options at Gitmo.

Our enemies understand "why we fight" and where the fight is. They know that in the greater scheme of things the mosques of Jakarta and Amsterdam and Toronto and Dearborn are more important territory than the Sunni Triangle. The U.S. military is the best-equipped and best-trained in the world. But it's not enough, it never has been and it never will be.

We ignore Steyn's words at our own extreme peril. Will the cost of our collective weakness and lack of will be the loss of Civilization as we know it? And what price is "too high"? New York, LA, or London going up in a mushroom cloud. Half the population dying in a bioterror attack? Our enemies are not concerned about our "human rights"; they are concerned only that we are hastened to our graves as quickly as possible. In the face of pathological enemy like the terror masters of Radical Islam, can we afford NOT to do whatever is necessary to win this War?

Finally, the damning images that prove that Hezbollah terrorist militiamen dressed in civilian clothes, who seem to have gathered an inordinate amount of support in Lebanon, have indeed been using civilian, mostly Christian neighborhoods as shields against Israeli attacks, and hiding and using weapons in a densely populated area.

The exclusive photographs smuggled out of Lebanon, were obtained by the Australian News Ltd. and published by their Sunday Mail here, and Sunday Herald Sun here. Why am I not surprised...

The Melbourne man who smuggled the shots out of Beirut told yesterday how he was less than 400m from the block when it was obliterated.

``Hezbollah came in to launch their rockets, then within minutes the area was blasted by Israeli jets,'' he said.

``Until the Hezbollah fighters arrived, it had not been touched by the Israelis. Then it was totally devastated.

``After the attacks they didn't even allow the ambulances or the Lebanese Army to come in until they had cleaned the area, removing their rockets and hiding other evidence.

I am sorry for the horrific human suffering created in the bombing of Qana, southern Lebanon today, but if these people do not care for human life they endanger, why should Israel sacrifice their own which they do care about? Hezbollah has been using Qana as a base for launching hundreds of rockets at Israel, happily waiting for the bitter memory of the Operation Grapes of Wrath propaganda to do their dirty work for them. The people there should be horrified and disgusted at what Hezbollah are doing, and at the inability and unwillingness of their own cowardly Government to disarm Hezbollah, instead of allowing the MSM to portray Hezbollah as some kind of liberating heroes. Israel cannot be blamed for loss of life in these circumstances.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are noting the strange 8 hour gap between the attack on Qana and the colllapse of the apartment building which killed so many children.

“The attack on the structure in the Qana village took place between midnight and one in the morning. The gap between the timing of the collapse of the building and the time of the strike on it is unclear,” Brigadier General Amir Eshel, Head of the Air Force Headquarters told journalists at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, following the incidents at Qana.

Eshel and the head of the IDF’s Operational Branch, Major General Gadi Eisnkot said the structure was not being attacked when it collapsed, at around 8:00 in the morning.

The IDF believes that Hizbullah explosives in the building were behind the explosion that caused the collapse.

Another possibility is that the rickety building remained standing for a few hours, but eventually collapsed. “It could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack, and maybe remained there, Brigadier General Eshel said.

Buildings about hal a kilometer away were attack at 7:30 AM, so the ricklety building theory may have something to do with it.

But why on earth were so many children and other presumed innocents inside the building 8 hours after it was attacked? Pardon my suspicions, but isn’t this possibly a case of Hezbollah intentionally killing them, in order to have an effective propagando tool?

Of course, the nut-job Left in the United States has long claimed that 9/11 was an inside job, and that the Twin Towers and one other building were (for some obscure reason) demolished by controlled demoltion. But I think this is not at all comparable. There is an excellent propaganda gain for Hezbollah from the slaughter of innocents, and they are a group which has never been bothered by a few deaths of “martyrs.”

Exactly.

As Novak says, the original question was: How did a man publicly critical of the Bush policy get the CIA's nomination for a mission to Niger? When he asked this question of his first source, he was told in effect, "That's easy. His wife works there and recommended him for the trip." This has since been confirmed by the report of the Senate intelligence committee, which quotes a memo from Valerie Plame making the recommendation in so many words (on the bizarre grounds that Wilson already enjoyed warm relations with the people he would supposedly be investigating at the Niger Ministry of Mines). It seems to me that Novak was well within his rights to check with Karl Rove and with the CIA that this was indeed the case, and to take down his copy of Who's Who in America from the shelf. As he puts it, "I considered his wife's role in initiating Wilson's mission … to be a previously undisclosed part of an important news story."

I have heard a few desperate individuals arguing that we have only Novak's word for all this, and I am not myself numbered among his most ardent admirers, but it is plainly out of the question that after almost two and a half years of being subpoenaed, and questioned by the FBI, and testifying under oath to a grand jury, and having only recently been advised by Patrick Fitzgerald that he is no longer a subject of investigation, Novak would perjure himself in print or on television. This leaves only one unresolved question, which is whether or not CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, when contacted by Novak, confirmed Plame's name but beseeched Novak not to use it. This is a bit better than Novak's word against Harlow's. Novak broke his silence while still under investigation to deny Harlow's claim—a rash step to take while he could still have been caught giving misleading evidence. His past role as a right-wing defender of the agency against whistle-blowers also makes it highly improbable that he would have exposed any employee to danger. Whereas Harlow, with a collapsing and discredited bureaucracy to defend, has every motive to remember admonishing Novak much more firmly than he actually did. (Come to think of it again, what was the CIA thinking of, sending a partisan amateur to investigate his own friends at the suggestion of his wife?)

No reporter or lawyer concerned with the case believes that Novak's original source was any other than Richard Armitage. I have heard it lamely said that, if true, this would "undercut" the idea that Wilson and Plame were targets of an administration vendetta. No. it wouldn't "undercut" the idea. It would annihilate it. Mr. Armitage exceeds even his own former boss and current best friend Colin Powell in visceral hatred of the neoconservatives. In that sense, and in his collusion with Bob Woodward on the story of the origins of the war, he actually is a "partisan gunslinger"—but on the Wilson side of the argument. However, in the present instance, that would only lend credence to Novak's testimony that the "disclosure"—if it was a disclosure and not just a confirmation of something well-known—was inadvertent.

So, after almost three years and an exhaustive investigation by a fairly serious and renowned prosecutor involving the jailing of a distinguished reporter, it has been concluded that there was never any breach of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act to begin with. One official at the White House has allegedly been caught in a secondary or even tertiary conflict of evidence. And the hapless Wilsons have been obliged to file their own civil suit, as if the "discovery" it might afford will surpass what Fitzgerald, armed with a quiver of subpoenas and waivers, has been able to accomplish. Meanwhile, the evidence continues to mount (see my Slate columns on the Zahawie case: here, here, and here) that the original British intelligence on the Niger connection was genuine, and that Wilson missed it. And I have some more material on that, which I shall be sharing with you soon.

Another example is a so-called "memo to the Secretary of State" written for Foreign Policy magazine by Barbara Crossette, the long time UN correspondent for the New York Times and now a consulting editor at the United Nations Association of the United States of America. She wants the Secretary of State to reconsider Bolton’s re-nomination. Among Bolton’s sins, says Ms Crosette, is that "[At] the United Nations, Bolton has often overwhelmed and angered delegates from other countries…" Ms. Crossette’s case against Bolton is reported on an anti-Bolton site devoted to defeating Bolton’s re-nomination called Bolton Watch. http://boltonwatch.tpmcafe.com/

The one world government advocacy group Citizens for Global Solutions also opposes Bolton’s re-nomination, stating on its website: "Unfortunately, Bolton has seriously damaged the United States’ 60-year working relationship with the U.N. with less-than-diplomatic tactics; the results of which have led to a further diminution of American influence." click here

As a curious sidelight, it is interesting how interconnected some of these anti-Bolton groups turn out to be. For example, Scott Paul, one of the leaders of Bolton Watch, is currently Campaigns Manager at Citizens for Global Solutions.

What underlies these pathetic complaints about Ambassador Bolton’s performance is not really a concern about his style, but rather a debate over the degree to which the U.S. must bend its core principles to the lowest common denominator of ‘international consensus.’ Bolton’s opponents want to ensnare the United States in a web of multilateral institutional arrangements that would not only undermine U.S. sovereignty but would often be counterproductive. They want to slip UN misdeeds under the rug, pretending they never happened or are of little consequence.

Obviously, Kirk and Spock wanted no part of this, and when the two planets were faced with the prospect of REAL war, the messy kind where things get broken and whole cities get wiped out, only then were they willing to look at the madness of what they were doing.

Today things are a bit different, but for the “soft, kind-hearted” West—we might as well be in such a war: we are so afraid of collateral damage causing us bad press that we hesitate to fight a REAL war—like we did in the Civil War and World Wars I and II—I am speaking once again of a mindset where we are willing to do whatever is necessary to win, understanding that sometimes there have to be sacrifices of innocents in War made for a greater good (in this case so we don’t go up in a mushroom cloud or else be forced to live in a 9th Century Caliphate under Sharia law…). There is only one problem, only one side is fighting the war this way—and it isn’t us. We have become so used to the antiseptic “smart” bomb taking out only the intended military target, that when our cowardly enemies hide amongst civilian populations the World cries foul if there is collateral damage—that is unless the casualties are American or Israeli…

The reason I bring this up is that we have been here before—in Vietnam. I alluded to this in my link to Marc Sheppard's fine work yesterday. Vietnam was the perfect example of a war that America was winning, yet we caved because our press were collectively howling like hyenas that we weren’t--and the flower children of the '60's bought that load of garbage hook, line, and sinker. History has shown that, in fact, the Tet offensive—which set icons like Walter Cronkite to calling Vietnam a “quagmire” that "couldn’t be won"—in fact was a catastrophic military loss for the NVA. But it didn’t matter—all that mattered was that CBS and Uncle Walter were shaping public perceptions at home, and even though those perceptions of how the war was going was 100% wrong--to the point of being almost intentionally so--we turned tail and ran anyway. After which another holocaust was ushered in: the minute the US left the NVA and Khmer Rouge slaughtered millions of nameless South Vietnamese and Cambodians who were not lucky enough to escape to the West. Estimates are that between 2-4 million died in the Killing Fields of Vietnam and Cambodia. And why? Becuause America lost the will to do the right thing for these people. Which of course is what our media is asking us to do to the Iraqis and Israelis today.

Only this time, the stakes are MUCH higher. Nuclear weapons in the hands of jihadists who care only about killing as many of us as they possibly can is not my idea of how to win this war for the survival of our civilization. And so I started thinking last night about my blogging—not just for fun--but to make a real difference. As in Vietnam, the winner of this war will be shaped more by public opinion at home than it will by boots on the ground: I have no question in my mind whatsoever that the United States military can win any battle it sets out to win. We just have to have the willpower to let them do their thing here at home. So the more hearts and minds I can reach in this War for ideas and bandwidth, the more people will have exposure to some of the best minds writing on the Web today.

And this is where a slight adjustment in course may be helpful: The facts are, my blog was not getting the number of hits that other similar blogs have been getting. Certainly not as many as I would like considering I have been at this for two years now. I know--not that all of us can be Glenn Reynolds or Hugh Hewitt—but something is telling me that to really make a difference in this War for hearts and minds, maybe I need to change something if I am to reach a wider audience.

As I have pondered these things, I count myself as fortunate that I have been contacted over the last several months by bloggers and syndicated writers I respect enormously; men like James Taranto and Rick Moran, to name a couple. And some of the feedback I’ve gotten included (for some) that they would be more comfortable if I only posted a few key paragraphs rather than their entire articles. Guilty as charged: my mission statement has always been about just getting the information out there so the masses can see the best political writing on the web—but I can respect that some people actually would like you to visit their site (after all I want more visitors too…). And so I think I am going to try and paste a bit less material from other blogs and linking a lot more. This will hopefully achieve several aims:

1. It will allow me more time to read and find the great writing already out there, and much less time editing.
2. I may get to link to more material each day and also increase the hit counts of those whom I frequently use as sources.
3. It will hopefully mitigate things a bit wherever any offense might have been taken in the past. (Along with my heartfelt apologies to any who have been inconvenienced because of the sheer amount of material of theirs I have published here.). The fact is: we on the right side of things in this War are stronger working together than competing. I am not in this for money—and with “six degrees of separation” even making a difference with just one more person per day could have incalculalble ripple effects that I will never know or appreciate. And that is what keeps me going.
4. It will give me the impetus to do a bit more of my own writing, although Mark Steyn I am not…

This doesn’t mean that I will quit altogether pasting quality quotes—I’m just going to change my mission a bit and look at the numbers. If they actually go down due to this change, then maybe I need to rethink what I’m doing yet again. Still it is worth a try if only to see if I can get a little better about brevity and getting to the “main idea”, and also to see if by doing so I can actually make The Discerning Texan a more robust and interesting place to visit every day. In the meantime, I need to thank all of my loyal readers and would like to thank especially Radio Blogger, and Chris Muir for choosing to link me on their blogrolls. These are giants in the blogosphere and I really appreciate their continued support. Still...it might be nice to move a bit further up in Radio Blogger’s NASCAR standings.

Also I would be remiss if I did not mention: Frau Budgie, Texas Fred, Hatless in Hattiesburg, Texas Cowgirl, Alamo Nation, Pat in NC, and many others have been great about commenting and linking often. I do appreciate you all.

In any case, please bear with me while I experiment with some slight format changes, briefer posts and more links, (unless it my own writing). And yes, I probably will keep putting up at least one cartoon. Sometimes a simple cartoon communicates so much more than hundreds of words could. And there are some great cartoonists out there who should be seen by more people.

Hopefully this new approach will allow me to highlight even more good material, and that thus my loyal readers will click through to some of the best blogs going today. The important thing is that the battle for our country’s hearts and minds is the most important battle in this War. I will always be looking for ways to improve the site, because our nation’s future could depend on any one of us getting through to the right people—before it is too late.