The Discerning Texan

Let's remember how we got here. Democrats latched on to the firings in hopes of building some case that the White House had engaged in cronyism and cover-up. The Justice Department, in the spirit of cooperation, turned over 8,500 documents and made available a parade of officials for public testimony. Mr. Conyers and his counterpart at Senate Judiciary, Patrick Leahy, found nothing. So they then demanded the White House turn over privileged communications and submit high-ranking officials to public questioning. Mr. Bush invoked executive privilege, and Mr. Conyers went to Defcon contempt.

This is a constitutional issue, but you don't have to be Robert Bork to get your head around it. The Founders created three separate (but equal) branches of government. The Constitution gave each their own powers, while also supplying checks to prevent the branches from encroaching on each other.

Congress gave itself the right to issue criminal contempt citations long ago, and bully for it, but there's nothing in legal history to suggest that in this case it has the right to apply that power to the president or his subordinates. It'd be one thing if Mr. Conyers had proved beyond doubt that a crime had been committed. He hasn't. Instead, this is a straightforward battle between Mr. Bush's claim of executive privilege and Congress's claim of oversight. Both sides, in theory, have a legitimate case.

So the idea that Congress now gets to win this battle by simply declaring the other side criminal is bizarre. Under that twisted logic, Mr. Bush has just as much right to grant himself a similar power and hold Mr. Conyers in criminal contempt for interfering in executive-branch business. This is not, obviously, a very grown-up way of settling constitutional disputes.

Labels: Defeatocrats, Democrat Sabotage, Hearts and Minds, PC, Thought Police

VOTER BEWARE:This shows these organizations’ true nature. At their core, they are dictatorial, hateful and intolerant of opposing points of view. In my opinion, that’s the personification of evil and McCarthyism. They aren’t satisfied with getting their way most of the time. Their goal is getting their way all of the time. Based on their willingness to silence media outlets that offer people a different perspective of the news, shouldn’t America worry that Daily Kos, MoveOn and likeminded organizations won’t think twice about silencing any opposing voices, whether it’s through the Fairness Doctrine, threats of financial ruin or whatever tool is available?

At least 5,000 people nationwide have signed up to compile logs on who is running commercials on Fox, Gilliam said. The groups want to first concentrate on businesses running local ads, as opposed to national commercials. “It’s a lot more effective for Sam’s Diner to get calls from 10 people in his town than going to the consumer complaint department of some pharmaceutical company,” Gilliam said.

It’s time that we broke out the double-barrels against these hatemongers. It’s time that we highlighted their utter lack of respect for the First Amendment. It’s time that we realized the Daily Kos, MoveOn.org, the Campaign for America’s Future and other likeminded organizations aren’t interested in having a dialogue with America’s voters. It’s time we realized that they’re interested only in dictating the terms by which they dominate the political landscape.

To say that I’m furious is an understatement of historic proportions. Not that I agree with it, but it’s one thing to boycott a business with whom you disagree. It’s an entirely different matter when you try silencing media outlets.

Threatening to ruin businesses who advertise on media outlets that you disagree with is the essence of censorship. Threatening businesses who advertise on FNC is meant to intimidate FNC. That’s the ultimate in fascism. It’s something a freedom loving people can’t tolerate.

I've got news for these yahoos; if they are going to demand "equal time" for their viewpoints, their sacred networks like NPR, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC are fair game too. Otherwise this thing could get really ugly--as in Venezuela ugly...

Labels: Censorship, Nutroots, The Left, Thought Police

Labels: Democrat Sabotage, Media War, The "Fairness" Doctrine, Thought Police

9/11 is, of course, not a "card" at all, but a devastating attack on the country that despite its horrible toll could have been even worse --far, far worse if the terrorists had been better skilled in their selection of targets and luckier in their logistics that morning. The Boston Globe's headline perfectly conveys the left's understanding of 9/11 --a political event that it fears works for the Republicans and especially Giuliani. The center-right understands 9/11 as the defining moment of our era, and Giuliani's response to it a model of leadership in the still extraordinarily dangerous times in which we live.

The Globe's headline should evoke condemnation of the paper's relentless agenda-journalism which now extends to the characterization of a national emergency as a part of a poker game. We'll see.

On this question of media selectivity, the blogosphere has become incensed that big media mostly ignored the murders, especially given that there are reporters currently in Baqubah. Newsbusters and countless others are on it. More disturbing to many bloggers is that major mainstream players were busted (again) by Pajamas Media just days ago for reporting outright fabrications of a “massacre” that never occurred.

Although I can’t answer to the cause of the problem, I humbly offer permission to media outlets to republish excerpts of the dispatch or the dispatch in its entirety, including my photographs from the story (if used as they are in the dispatch) at no cost during the month of July 2007. I only ask that the site receive proper attribution and that any publication taking me up on the offer email the website with the details.

If much of mainstream media does not recognize barbarity, clearly their readers can and do. Readers throughout the world might consider contacting their local papers and favorite websites with the link to this update. The story is very important in that it is well-documented with photos and video, and the Iraqi and American soldiers who were present are named and easily reachable. Those mainstream reporters currently in Baqubah could readily take up the baton.

Labels: Islamic Fascism, Media Bias, Media War, PC, Terrorism, Thought Police

Labels: Hearts and Minds, Media Bias, Media War, Thought Police

Labels: Cartoons, Thought Police

You know the story, since it continues to be told non-stop by the media, television, movies, and half the curricula in schools and universities: evil American corporations and their lackeys in the government were (and still are) brutalizing the Third World in order to maximize profits and strengthen their hold on power. This nefarious capitalist plot was sold to the oafish American people under the camouflage of Cold War rhetoric about resisting Communism (now “terrorism”) and protecting American “freedom,” which was in fact an illusion masquerading the uptight, repressed American’s servitude to consumerism and mindless entertainment. A handful of doughty college professors, “activists,” and journalists, however, bravely unmasked this wicked conspiracy, and despite the counter-attack unleashed by corporate government henchmen in the FBI and CIA, eventually exposed the capitalist conspiracy. A neo-imperialist war in Southeast Asia was ended, the crypto-fascist Nixon regime brought down, and limits placed on the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon. Pulitzer prizes, tenure, flattering movies, and six-figure book deals followed, not to mention what South Park calls the “huge cloud of smug” polluting the bicoastal liberal enclaves and every university campus.

Indeed, this melodrama continues to provide the template for the way popular culture and the mainstream media interpret the current war against Islamic jihad. From Vietnam and Watergate derive the plot and formulas into which current events are shoe-horned. The harping on pre-war intelligence mistakes and the missing WMD’s, for example, can be traced back to the alleged lies that justified the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The hysteria over Scooter Libby and the attention lavished on the duplicitous Joe Wilson are incomprehensible without Watergate and its beatified “whistle-blowers.” The sophomoric anti-war movement and its shrill saints like Cindy Sheehan are taken seriously only because of the inflated mythic paradigm of the protests against the Vietnam War.

The problem is, subsequent history has uncovered the facts that expose the hollowness of these myths. The war in Vietnam was started by a communist regime attempting to extend the revolution throughout Southeast Asia. The war was not “lost,” but won and then lost when the U.S. Congress lost its nerve and abandoned South Vietnam to the tender mercies of the communists. Journalists like the recently deceased and lionized David Halberstam were not intrepid truth-seekers exposing the lies of a corrupt government, but opportunists and ideologues driven by their vision of “social justice,” which in the event turned out to be suspiciously similar to the communist version. Watergate was not a triumph of justice but a disastrous inflation of a political misdemeanor, crippling the Nixon administration at a critical moment and emboldening America’s enemies, as subsequent Soviet adventurism throughout the seventies proved. And the anti-war movement was riddled with communist ideologues beholden to Moscow and manipulating the herd of sappy idealists, sophomoric utopians, and other useful idiots.

The net result has been a four-decades-long projection of American weakness and self-loathing that has convinced the jihadists that we believe in nothing other than our own physical pleasure and psychic comfort. Having heard our own elites tell the world for decades that we are corrupt and our freedoms an illusion, why shouldn’t they despise us and find us worthy of contempt? And when our major media, our icons of popular culture, and the Democratic leadership all are competing to declare the war against jihad a corrupt failure, why shouldn’t the jihadists continue to fight on, since they are winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the blue half of the United States? The jihadists are excellent students of history, which has taught them that the road to September 2001 in New York passed through Saigon in 1975, Tehran in 1979, and Beirut in 1983.

Labels: Ignorance of History, Revisionist History, The Left, Thought Police

Labels: Cartoons, Talk Radio, The "Fairness" Doctrine, The Left, Thought Police

Labels: Congress, Illegal Immigration, Media Bias, Media War, Talk Radio, The "Fairness" Doctrine, Thought Police, US Senate

PREDICTION: Right now it's Democrats pushing a return to the "Fairness Doctrine," but they'll soon be joined by Republicans tired of things like this, and there will be pressure to extend regulation to the Internet. Incumbistan will unite under threat from outside.

Labels: Blogging, First Amendment, Talk Radio, The Internet, The Left, Thought Police

Oakland has banned a group of African-American Christian women from accessing a government e-mail and message board system because it considers them bigoted and interested in conducting hate speech. While the same systems regularly carry political statements from gay-rights groups, the city has banned the women because of the loaded language in their communications -- words such as marriage and natural family. George Will explains:

Marriage is the foundation of the natural family and sustains family values. That sentence is inflammatory, perhaps even a hate crime.

At least it is in Oakland, Calif. That city's government says those words, italicized here, constitute something akin to hate speech and can be proscribed from the government's open e-mail system and employee bulletin board. ...

Some African American Christian women working for Oakland's government organized the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), which they announced with a flier describing their group as "a forum for people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day. With respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family Values."

The flier was distributed after other employees' groups, including those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and activities on the city's e-mail system and bulletin board. When the GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down and destroyed by city officials, who declared it "homophobic" and disruptive.

The city government said the flier was "determined" to promote harassment based on sexual orientation. The city warned that the flier and communications like it could result in disciplinary action "up to and including termination."

Labels: First Amendment, Nutroots, PC, The Left, Thought Police

... We should have learned something by now. In the Muslim world, artistic criticism can be fatal. In 1992, the poet Sadiq Abd al-Karim Milalla also found that his work was "not particularly well-received": he was beheaded by the Saudis for suggesting Muhammad cooked up the Quran by himself. In 1998, the Algerian singer Lounès Matoub described himself as "ni Arabe ni musulman" (neither Arab nor Muslim) and shortly thereafter found himself neither alive nor well. These are not famous men. They don't stand around on Oscar night, congratulating themselves on their "courage" for speaking out against Bush-Rove fascism. But, if we can't do much about freedom of expression in Iran and Saudi Arabia, we could at least do our bit to stop Saudi-Iranian standards embedding themselves in the West.

So many of our problems with Iran today arise from not doing anything about our problems with Iran yesterday. Men like Ayatollah Khomeini despised pan-Arab nationalists like Nasser who attempted to impose a local variant of Marxism on the Muslim world. Khomeini figured: Why import the false ideologies of a failing civilization? Doesn't it make more sense to export Islamism to the dying West?

And, for a guy dismissed by most of us as crazy, Khomeini made a lot of sense. The Rushdie fatwa established the ground rules: The side that means it gets away with it. Mobs marched through Britain calling for the murder of a British subject – and, as a matter of policy on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity, the British police shrugged and looked the other way.

One reader in England recalled one demonstration at which he asked a constable why the "Muslim community leaders" weren't being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer told him to "f--- off, or I'll arrest you." Genuine "moderate Muslims" were cowed into silence, and pseudo-moderate Muslims triangulated with artful evasiveness. Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who went on to become leader of the most prominent British Muslim lobby group, mused about the Rushdie fatwa: "Death is perhaps too easy."

In 1989 Salman Rushdie went into hiding under the protection of the British police. A decade later he decided he did not wish to live his life like that and emerged from seclusion to live a more or less normal life. He learned the biggest lesson of all – how easy it is to be forced into the shadows. That's what's happening in the free world incrementally every day, with every itsy-bitsy nothing concession to groups who take offense at everything and demand the right to kill you for every offense. Across two decades, what happened to Rushdie has metastasized, in part because of the weak response in those first months. "Death is perhaps too easy"? Maybe. But slow societal suicide is easier still.

Labels: Islam, Islamic Fascism, PC, The Left, Thought Police

And the White Knight is walking backwards
And the Red Queen's lost her head...

Labels: Hearts and Minds, The "Fairness" Doctrine, The Left, Thought Police

Labels: Communism, Hugo Chavez, Thought Police, Venezuela

Labels: Communism, Free Speech, Hugo Chavez, Jimmy Carter, The Left, Thought Police

The SurrenderMedia is perplexed and confused. Yet again the Islamo Fascists have failed to bring on the quagmire. Again, they have failed to show they can withstand the focused efforts of the West. Again, they have failed to make the case they are too strong for America to stop:

The killing of the one-legged Dadullah is a major victory against the Taliban, which is trying to overthrow the government after being driven out of power in late 2001. Dadullah’s death could disrupt the insurgency over the next few months, although it’s not clear whether the movement will be hurt in the long run.

[…]

But his death, and the Taliban’s failure to deliver the sort of fighting promised for months, raises questions about what is happening with the movement. Although there have been pockets of harsh fighting in Helmand province and almost daily suicide attacks in Afghanistan, the violence has not been at the levels anticipated by many this year nor the levels vowed by the Taliban.

Only defeatists were expecting the Taliban surge. Only Surrendercrats were waiting - with palatable anticiptation - the spanking of America and her allies by these brutal fascists. But the reality is our position is one of strength, not faltering weakness (H/T Salon on noting the typos). Freedom does shine a powerful light that rots the support of these fascist movements. The Taliban, and al Qaeda, are finding brutality does not bring support - it brings out self defense. al Qaeda is penned into Diyala province and desperately trying to strike back. But their efforts in the face of up 7,000 trained and well equipped troops heading to the Province are tragically laughable.

Labels: Hearts and Minds, Islamic Fascism, Media Bias, Media War, NY Times, PC, Thought Police

As it turns out, Troy wasn't even referring to the main campus when he complained about the gun-free zone. He told us that security actually does a good job protecting the main campus, but he attended classes in the school's downtown Minneapolis facilities at night -- which is not a safe place to be, and where Hamline provides no security. Since Troy has a state license to carry a concealed weapon -- which means he's passed the background checks and training requirements -- all he wanted to do was to get their permission to have the opportunity to defend himself in case he got attacked.

So far, the school hasn't budged. Troy doesn't really want to return there anyway under the circumstances, but he worries that the incompletes he had to take and the record of the suspension will damage his chances to get into law school. In fact, he has just about despaired of that career at this point, and isn't sure what he will do now.

Labels: Indoctrination not Education, PC, Right to Bear Arms, The Left, Thought Police

Labels: Islamic Fascism, PC, Racial Politics, The Left, Thought Police

Labels: Academia, Indoctrination not Education, Islam, PC, The Left, Thought Police

Labels: "Consensus" Science, The Left, Thought Police