flipflops

NYT report:

"As violence declines in Baghdad, the leading Democratic presidential candidates are undertaking a new and challenging balancing act on Iraq: acknowledging that success, trying to shift the focus to the lack of political progress there, and highlighting more domestic concerns like health care and the economy."

This should be highly entertaining! The Democrats will be backpedaling and flippity-flopping, while their moonbat left wing twists itself into knots of rage. (I hear Code Pink is contemplating changing its name to Code Livid. For the Stalinist hard core at InternationalAnswer.org, it will be just one more demonstration that liberals must never, ever be trusted.)

The geniuses at the NYT don't seem to notice that shifting the focus to domestic concerns means shifting the focus to the abysmal record of a Democratic Congress that has proven itself a wall-to-wall embarrassment under the laughably inept leadership of Harry & Nanci, and which currently enjoys the lowest approval ratings in history. Sounds like a winning strategy to me!

This is too good.

Byron

Movie Review

The review 'Redacted' is Repulsive by Ross Kaminsky is accurate enough as a surface-level depiction. But it ultimately misses the mark because the reviewer failed to properly understand what he was watching.

DePalma's film is not an entertainment vehicle, but an anthropological document, like 'Nanook of the North' and similar. As such, it presents a valuable and fascinating glimpse of the world as seen through the eyes of the Hollywood Left, an exotic tribe that occupies a uniquely sheltered and isolated ecological niche in Southern California. The group's heavy use of mind-altering drugs is not directly portrayed in the film, but the effects of the practice are apparent throughout, as events unfold within a pervasive, unrelenting paranoid miasma.

Reportedly a bizarre and disgusting experience for the few outsiders who have seen it, the film seems to have been produced for viewing by tribe members only, as a kind of sacramental ritual of shared community values. It will most likely find its true home in the Smithsonian, where it may eventually have value as an artifactual text, providing opportunities for study by future generations of scholars, and amusement for curious museum goers.

Byron

Stem Cell Breakthrough

Dammit! Bush wins again: Researchers Report Stem Cell Breakthrough

Reality Check

Is the normally loyal liberal media starting to get cold feet about the likelihood of a U.S. defeat in Iraq?

Is the media in the process of deciding that they can't afford to be on the wrong side of history, and therefore may need to abandon the Democrats' flagship, the USS Loser?

Do Harry & Nanci perhaps feel the rug starting to slip from under them? Can they plausibly claim that stalwart allies like Newsweek and the NYT (see below) have suddenly turned into liars for Bush?

If Iraq continues to improve, this is going to get extremely interesting for a Democratic Party that is still frantically trying to create a defeat for the US military by cutting off funding for the war. They richly, richly deserve what may be about to happen to them, and it will be an enormous pleasure to watch.


Life Has Gotten Better in Baghdad - Rod Nordland, Newsweek

Violence in Iraq Continues to Drop - Buckley & Gordon, New York Times

Adios, Al Qaeda

Blowback [Mark Steyn]

The Iraqis step up and the US stands down. An interesting development:

Former Sunni insurgents asked the United States to stay away, and then ambushed members of Al Qaeda in Iraq, killing 18 in a battle that raged for hours north of Baghdad, an ex-insurgent leader and Iraqi police said yesterday...

Meanwhile, farther east, in Diyala Province, members of another former insurgent group, the 1920s Revolution Brigades, launched a military-style operation yesterday against Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Iraqi Army said...

Afterward, hundreds of people paraded through Buhriz, about 35 miles north of Baghdad, witnesses said. Many danced and fired their guns into the air, shouting "Down with Al Qaeda!" and "Diyala is for all Iraqis!"

The al-Qaeda strategy of slaughtering large numbers of fellow Muslims appears to have caught up with them.

"...for all Iraqis!" Al Qaeda is finished in Iraq, and you could see it coming a year ago. Once Al Qaeda lost the ability to recruit locally, it was a dead man walking. The leadership was always foreign, and now they were forced to import their fighters from Jordan, Saudi, etc. Disaster. An insurgency has little or no logistics tail and can only succeed when it lives off the local population and has their support. But these were foreigners in an intensely local tribal society, with the wrong accent and nothing to offer except a nasty version of Islam nobody wanted. The only way they could live off the locals was to terrorize and oppress them, which they did with psychotic enthusiasm. And so, Al Qaeda made itself the hated enemy. Once the Surge gave Coalition troops a permanent presence, the locals couldn't wait to give these guys up, or to try to hunt them down and kill them themselves. Al Qaeda suddenly found itself with no place to be, and folded up like a cheap suitcase.

Al Qaeda deserves some of the credit here, for foolishly showing Iraqis the kind of future they had in mind. Fanaticism is always a disease of the few; the great majority of people everywhere want nothing to do with it.

A few idealist jihadis will no doubt try to go out in glory before they are picked off, but the organization is defeated. From here out, it's mopping up the dead-enders, reconstruction (with outrageous amounts of corruption), lots of exasperating Iraqi political maneuvering, and grinding our teeth while we watch Iraqi national pride push gratitude aside. In other words, about like post-war France, par for the course.

Byron

Media in action

The subject is the infamous footage that seemed to show Israeli soldiers shooting a boy cowering from crossfire next to a building, while his father tried to shield him. The sequence went world-wide like a firestorm, and is now the object of a lawsuit against the French news network that paid for and distributed the video. The purpose of the lawsuit is to force the network to release the original raw footage, which it has refused to do. Imagine that.

The upshot of the case so far seems to be that news footage out of Palestinian areas is typically staged, a kind of Palestinian propaganda movie industry, and provided to anti-Israeli news outlets (which means all of them in the Islamic world, the BBC in Britain, virtually all of them on the European continent, and some in the US.) for network distribution. The obvious implication is that such reports should be assumed to be media-promulgated garbage until independently verified. This lawsuit indicates what it takes to get verification from the original source, in this case after 7 years of trying.

Similar problems have plagued US news reports from Iraq because of heavy reliance on local paid stringers, without due consideration that they may be out to grind a sectarian axe or that they have simply learned to provide the kind of story and slant the liberal media will pay for. A story with a US reporter's byline is often the unverified product of a paid local stringer. The problem can also be entirely in-house, as in the case of CNN. Eason Jordan, chief news executive at the network, finally admitted that CNN gave Saddam Hussein's regime favorable coverage (e.g., covering up atrocities known to CNN) for about 12 years ending in 2003 as a quid pro quo for allowing CNN to maintain its "news" operation in Iraq. In other words, CNN for those years functioned a worldwide propaganda outlet for one of the most vicious regimes in world history. Journalism at its best.

The proof of how abominable the major media's performance has been is simply this: The turnaround in Iraq, and the reasons it has occurred, are neither surprising nor mysterious to anyone who has followed the dispatches of Michael Yon or J.D. Johannes or Michael Totten. These are not professional journalists, but merely honest analysts and chroniclers who are on-scene, and who have called it as they saw it happening. But if you have depended on the NYT, CBS, NPR, et al., for your information, then the shift is so unexpected and anomalous that you probably have great difficulty believing that it could possibly be happening. Nothing in the major media's coverage of the war would have prepared you for success.

Byron

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/

Pajamas Media has followed the case of the al-Dura taping, in which the French network France 2 has tried to defend itself against charges of staging an incident which touched off an intifada. In that defense, France 2 has essentially told the court that all other news media does the same in its reporting from the Middle East:

So when asked why he had inserted unconnected footage of an Israeli soldier firing a rifle into the Al Dura sequence in order to make it look like the Israelis had killed the boy in cold blood, an official of PA TV responded:

"These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth… We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth."

When Talal abu Rahmah received an award for his footage of Muhammad al Dura in Morocco in 2001, he told a reporter, “I went into journalism to carry on the fight for my people.”

These remarks serve as an important prelude to considering the France2 rushes that will be shown in court in Paris on November 14 in the Enderlin France2 vs. Philippe Karsenty defamation case. These tapes were filmed by Talal abu Rahmah on September 30, 2000, and for seven years, Enderlin has claimed that the tapes prove him right and show the boy in such unbearable death throes that he cut them out of his report. But several experts who have seen the tapes (this author included) claim that the only scene of al Dura that Enderlin cut was the final scene where he seems alive and well; and still more disturbingly the rest of the rushes are filled with staged scenes.

Victory

The link (via Instapundit) is to the sort of thing you never see in our media, which from the beginning has preferred to fight a war against Bush. An honest media would never have found itself on the wrong side of history, because it would have been doing its job of accurate and unbiased reporting all along. After all, you can hardly go wrong if you honestly chronicle events. But our media operated from bad motives, tried to drive an agenda, and everybody who doesn't already know that soon will. Reap what you sow.

The piece below is a description of what victory in Iraq looks like, and something about how it is being accomplished. It has the things that have been impossible to find in the major media: honesty, perspective, and knowledge of military operations.

Just start reading and see if you can stop:

http://www.mudvillegazette.com/archives/009692.html

Top Conservatives and Liberals

The UK Telegraph published a list of the Top 100 most influential conservatives and Top 100 liberals, compiled by the paper's Washington correspondents. It's a fun read, with nice vignettes of each individual and why they rank where they do.

CONSERVATIVES: What's striking about this list is the virtual absence of figures from the religious right. There are only three, and they rank far down: #65: Richard Land (Southern Baptist heavyweight), #70 Gary Bauer, and #81 Tony Perkins (Family Research Council). This probably reflects the declining salience of the abortion issue.

I see this as a hopeful sign for the future of the GOP.


LIBERALS: I take the parallel to the religious right to be the Moonbat Left, equivalent to the religious right in their uncompromising zeal, threatening extremism, and ability to evoke gut-level, polarizing revulsion from the other side. The news here is not so encouraging. In the liberal top 20 alone are found four certified Moonbats: #7 Michael Moore, #12 Markos Moulitsas Zuninga (Daily Kos), #15 George Soros (funder of the others), and #20 Joan Blades and Wes Boyd (MoveOn.org, of "Gen. Betrayus" fame, among other things).

I take this to be a bad sign for the future of the Democratic Party; these people clearly deserve their high influence ranking, which is way too influential for the good of the party. They will drive it into the left ditch.


Thing is, what's bad for one party is eventually bad for the other, also. Without a strong opposing party, the one in power quickly drifts into arrogance, excess, intellectual laziness, and lack of pragmatic creativity. It becomes captive to its ideological purists, and is soon wisely rejected by the voting public. I thought the GOP had retired the trophy for that kind of debacle, but this Congress under Reid and Pelosi seems determined lower the bar to new heights. The Democrats can probably be thankful they didn't win the Presidency, because then the brakes would really be off the bobsled. If I can't have wise, pragmatic governance, and it seems that I can't, then I'll take the stability of division and gridlock. And, please, term limits, term limits, term limits.

Byron