Dr. Jack Wheeler
DICTATORSHIP’S ONLY SOLUTION
In the spring of 2000, I was the keynote speaker at a conference of business leaders from Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, held in Cartagena, Colombia. The fellows from Venezuela all had the same question: What can we do about Hugo Chavez?I told them they had to face reality. As an admirer and protégé of Fidel Castro, there is one way and one way only he will leave office: in a coffin. This was not what they wanted to hear...Democracy is not only the best guarantor of peace between countries, but the best guarantor of peace within a country as well. When people can choose their government with ballots they do not have to - nor have any moral right to - resort to bullets.Here’s the flip side: When people cannot choose their government with ballots, then they do have to resort to bullets - and they have a moral right to.Democracy is institutionalized peace. Dictatorship is institutionalized violence. So let’s state it clearly: A dictator has no right to life. By his violent and murderous suppression of freedom, the people so suppressed have the moral right to terminate his existence.
WHY THEY CALL HIM HANOI JOHN
Here’s a story you won’t see the New York Times pulling out of their archives and emblazoning on their front page. But thanks to the Internet, you can send it to everyone you know.It is dated July 23, 1971 and is about John Kerry’s exploiting the families of American prisoners of war for political gain. As a wife of a POW says bitterly, John Kerry is constantly using the families’ grief and suffering for his own political ambitions.Kerry has made his Flashman four months in Vietnam as the centerpiece of his campaign, so he is fair game for Swift Boat Veteran ads condemning it. But what he did during the war after he returned from Vietnam is far more important and deserves far more scrutiny than what he did in Vietnam.Read this story and you will see why Kerry deserves the sobriquet, “Hanoi John.” A discussion of its implications is in TTP Guest Author Bob Turner’s The Real Manchurian Candidate?. Again, I encourage you to forward this on.
TERRORISM ON THE ROPES?
At a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico this week, George Bush assured America: “I know what I’m doing” regarding winning the war against Moslem terrorists in Iraq and threatening our country. Although the Pogo Press is doing its best to prevent voters from figuring it out, GW is right. He is conducting a full court press right now, and rolling the terrorists up in a ball.Let’s start with Afghanistan. The Taliban is breaking apart. About one-third of the Taliban remnants still fighting in Afghanistan have broken away from Taliban leader Mohammed Omar, who has now lost control of a number of his senior commanders. The pressure of 18,000 American and NATO soldiers relentlessly hunting them down and killing them has precipitated the dissolution of the Taliban.Then there are all the contract guys across the border in Pakistan.
GOOD AT SELLING LIES, LOUSY AT SELLING TRUTH
My friend and neighbor, well-known economist Richard Rahn, summarizes the Republicans’ greatest political weakness thus:
The Democrats are good at selling falsehoods, and the Republicans are lousy at selling the truth.There couldn’t be a better example of this than the July BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) jobs report. The Dems and their Pogo Press propagandists bayed to the moon on how the payroll survey showing only 32,000 new jobs created for the month was “disastrous,” and “pathetically anemic.” In reality, it was the Bush campaign’s response to the liberal headlines proclaiming employment disaster that was pathetically anemic.
AN EPITOME OF EVIL
It was 30 years ago, during a conversation at his brownstone in Brooklyn, that Dennis “The Wizard” Turner concisely explained to me what he thought of liberals. “I honestly think,” he said, “that Liberals are more disgusting than Communists.” Dennis’s observation was brought to mind when I read a message from Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition . Lou was telling me about acts of depravity so unimaginable that I thought not even liberals were capable of them. I was wrong.
A LETTER FROM A YOUNG ADVENTURER
Dear Dr. Wheeler,I am a 16 year old Boy Scout from Kansas and I recently read your book "The Adventurers Guide". I wholeheartedly agree with your opinion about adventure, but the only roadblock that seems to get in my way is lack of money. I would appreciate it a lot if you could give me some insight on how you dealt with this problem, and how I might overcome it. Also, I have read on various web sites that you still lead 2-3 expeditions per year, and I was wondering where they would be to and the age limit, cost, and other requirements.Sincerely, Nathan MontgomeryDear Nathan -- It means a lot to me that you were able to gain some value out of a book I wrote so many years ago. And all during those years I have been trying to figure out the answer to your question. Basically it is a choice: discover some way to make money doing adventurous things, or have a business that makes enough money that you can do adventurous things in your spare time. Both are not easy.
SECRET SERVICE INSIGHTS
What follows is an unedited interview with a recently retired member of the Secret Service who was assigned to guard the lives of several US Presidents and their families, regarding how he and his colleagues were and are being treated by Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Laura Bush, and President Bush ---JW
THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF JOHN KERRY
Here's a confession that my long-time readers will find as no surprise: the possibility that John Kerry will defeat George Bush in November has never seriously occurred to me.The Bush Campaign should of course act otherwise, act as if the race will be frighteningly close and fight tenaciously for every electoral vote. Yet I remain convinced today during the Boston Yawn-Fest as I have always been that the election will be a Bush Blow-Out. Kerry will be lucky to carry Massachusetts (remember, the most popular politician in the Bay State now is conservative Republican Governor Mitt Romney) and perhaps a few others - that’s it.Every day now another political negative is piled on to the Everest of Negatives Kerry must and cannot scale. He reminds me of the mathematician’s joke about the guy who was so negative that whenever he walked into a room people would ask, “Who left?”Kerry has so much going against him you don’t where to start. Let’s begin with the Democrats’ total lack of enthusiasm for him. They are energized only by what they are against: Dubya. This a re-run of 1996 Dole-Clinton in obverse. Loathing Bill Clinton was not enough. Not an emotional ounce of that loathing could be alchemized into passion for Bob Dole. So the pathological hatred the MichaelMoorecrats have for George Bush doesn’t count at the ballot box. They really should have held the Dem Convention in Hollywood because all that’s on display is Potemkin Passion: hoopla and cheers as phony as a Hollywood set façade.
FASCIST OBESITY
Let’s hope Medicare slipped in its ruling on July 15 that obesity will now be looked upon as a government-recognized illness while George Bush’s attention was distracted elsewhere (like dealing with the latest Al Qaeda threats) - so that GW will squash it before it goes into effect. Such a ruling is true fascism at work.Such rulings would be expected under a Kerry-Edwards Trial Lawyer Presidency, giving trial lawyers carte blanche to sue any number of food providers. But it’s fascism in any presidency. Fascism is characterized not by government ownership of industries (that’s socialism), but stifling over-regulation of industries - and with the collusion of the regulated industries for the purpose of throttling competition from upstarts.The perfect case of such fascist collusion is between the FDA and the big pharmaceutical companies. The FDA conducts an unending war upon dietary supplements because they are so much cheaper than pharmaceutical alternatives. Here’s an example.
ROPE AND CEMENT
On July 26, The London Telegraph ran the absolutely positively most delicious story I have seen in many an al-ilah (the moon, worshipped by pre-Islamic Arabs, and contracted into allah by Mohammed).You know that famous quote of Lenin’s epitomizing his contempt for capitalism? “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will fight among themselves to sell us the rope.” You wonder what Lenin would say to fellow Marxist Yasser Arafat.It turns out that Palestinian businessmen with connections to Arafat and other officials in the “Palestinian Authority” are making millions of dollars selling cement to the Israeli Government to build the Security Wall. Is this too beautiful or what?
HILLARY’S OCTOBER SURPRISE
There’s the coolest buzz making the rounds in Washington’s power watering holes, and let’s cross every finger we have that it’s true. To review the bidding, Hillary desperately wants to be POTUS. But if Hanoi John gets elected this November, he will obviously as the incumbent be the candidate in 2008. The earliest she could run would then be 2012, deep in her sixties and possibly ancient history. There is only one conclusion she can reach: Her only shot is to run in 2008 - which requires that George Bush be re-elected and John Kerry defeated in 2004.You’re familiar with the term “October Surprise.” Right at the last moment, in late October, the parties try to pull a rabbit out of the media hat. The Dems sprung a decades-old DUI bust of GW a week before the election in 2000, the Pogo Press went into a feeding frenzy right on cue, and it almost submarined him on election day.I wish Barbara Comstock running Oppo Research for the Republicans as much luck as it takes to figure out what dirty trick the Dems will try to spring this time. Yet while I’m sure they have an October Surprise planned - the buzz is that Hillary has one planned herself.No one knows what it is - but we know four things about it.
THE COMING NICOTINE MAFIA
If a libertarian genie granted me the power to eliminate one and only one agency of the federal government, I would choose the FDA - the Food and Drug Administration, which more properly should be named the Federal Death Agency. It would be a tough choice, I know - passing up the chance to get rid of such bureaucratic pestilences as the IRS or the EPA. The FDA, however, has caused the death of countless millions of people by preventing the development or approval of medicines that could have saved their lives - and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. That means you and I will die prematurely due to the FDA’s perverse blocking the path to medical progress.The FDA is the penultimate case of government having the uncanny ability to pose as the solution to society’s problems while in reality making them vastly worse. The US Senate’s current efforts to give the FDA regulatory authority over tobacco products provides a perfect example.What the Senate is attempting to do is enable the FDA to wage war upon nicotine - which it will do by ordering the amount of nicotine progressively reduced in tobacco products. This will create a black market for high nicotine content cigarettes smuggled from overseas. As government attempts to stop the smuggling escalate, the smugglers will look for ways to reduce the bulk of their illicit goods - and will soon discover the ideal value-to-volume ratio in an unbelievably dangerous form: crack nicotine.
WILL THE ATTACK COME ON ELECTION DAY?
Everyone in America is holding his or her breath, sure that an Islamofascist terrorist attack will be perpetrated before the November election. Al Qaeda wants to pull off another Spain, it is thought. Blowing up the Madrid trains just before the Spanish election defeated the anti-terrorist Aznar government and put spineless Bambi Zapatero, in office.Al Qaeda’s greatest goal right now is to prevent the re-election of George Bush. That is why the safest place in the US this month will be Boston. There is no way anything will be perpetrated to attack the Democrat Convention. New York during the Republican Convention is another matter.But this is what is expected. Here is what worries me.
CONSTANTINE MENGES – IN MEMORIAM
NOTHING LEFT
Who are your heroes? Those of us on the right have plenty to choose from. Two who come first to my mind are Ronald Reagan and John Wayne. I’m sure it would be easy for you to list others.What about the heroes of the left? Remember when the left idolized Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas? That’s history now, sad and gone. Castro and Ortega are still around, but they’re has-beens just like the rest.What did all the heroes have in common - what was it that made them heroic in the eyes of the left? Not that they were Communists (which they were), but that they hated and were fighting against America. The left’s insuperable problem now is that the world’s primary America-haters can’t be their heroes. They can’t idolize Moslem terrorists. Not even Noam Chomsky can wear an I Love Osama t-shirt. No campus revolutionary can replace his passé Che poster with one of Osama. Such embracing of undeniable evil is too much even for them.Thus the lefties no longer have any heroes. All they have left is their hate, their hate for America, for Western Civilization, for white males - which is distilled into hate for one white male in particular: George W. Bush.
ENRON AND THE PRESIDENT
The indictment of Enron chairman Kenneth Lay gives the Democrats a “windfall” according to the San Francisco Chronicle:
The indictment of former Enron chief Ken Lay represents an election year windfall for Democrats -- who say the man President Bush nicknamed "Kenny Boy'' is a poster boy for corporate greed and malfeasance. Lay's indictment Wednesday (July 7) in connection with the energy giant's 2001 bankruptcy hands Sen. John Kerry and the Democrats the perfect person to link the president's re-election campaign to the high-living corporate miscreants who left their companies, workers and stockholders in financial ruin, politicians and analysts said.It is true that the corruption and influence-peddling between Enron and the President of the United States went very deep. Consider:
SUMMING IT ALL UP
He didn’t do it - and I was kind of crossing my fingers he would. Kerry couldn’t get Hillary to be his running mate. The Left has energy this year which the Right doesn’t. Hillary would have energized the Right more than anything else. Yet it’s all for the best, because the energy we’re talking about is wholly negative. Let the Left have that kind of energy to themselves, the energy of hate, bitterness, and rage....To sum this up, To The Point is offering The Sums It All Up Bumper Sticker. To sum the logic up: While not all those who vote for Kerry hate America, all those who hate America will vote for Kerry - and while not all those who love America will vote for Bush, all those who vote for Bush love America.The bottom line is a vote for Kerry is a vote for the Michael Moore-ification of America, it is a vote for the defeat of America against her enemies. And for that reason, it is a vote that there will be far too few of in November.You can order The Sums It All Up Bumper Sticker by clicking HERE. We of course encourage you to order one for every friend you have. You can also right- click on the image, then copy and paste it into an email to every friend you have - or simply forward them this article. Whichever you do, let’s get out the simple to-the-point message of The Sums It All Up Bumper Sticker:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR. PRESIDENT
July 4th is Freedom’s Birthday. July 6th is George W. Bush’s - this year his 58th. Take the time on July 6th to give a toast or say a prayer of thankfulness that America is so fortunate to have this extraordinary man as her president in these parlous times.Bush-hatred among the left has reached levels of true derangement and pathology - particularly so because the left hate George Bush for his virtues. They hate him because he is the moral antithesis of Bill Clinton. They hate him because he has the courage to defend America without apology. They call him a liar because he is not. They call him stupid because they are terrified that he is brilliant.The reality is that George W. Bush is scary smart - and has cajones the size of Texas.
FREEDOM’S BIRTHDAY
July 4th is Freedom’s Birthday. My suggestion is, amidst the fireworks and barbeques and flag-waving fun - all of which is great - that you take the time to feel good about America.Put aside your worries and concerns, your frustrations and fears about what’s wrong with America. For one day, forget the negative - put it all in a zip-lock bag, hide it in the back of the freezer, and pretend it doesn’t exist.One reason is that for all your worries about America’s culture and morality - you and all your fellow conservatives can feel good about your country. Liberals can’t. One of the defining characteristics of leftie-liberals is an inability to feel truly proud of their country - proud to the bone.You cannot be a liberal without feeling apologetic and embarrassed over being an American. You cannot be a conservative without lacking any such embarrassment or compulsion to apologize at all.Being an American is simply the coolest thing in the world. Wherever I have traveled in the world - it’s over 180 countries now - whenever someone asks me, “Where are you from?”, it’s always such a thrill to answer, “America - I’m an American.”I’m an American. Say it to yourself. Doesn’t it feel fantastic? It’s a feeling liberals can never have.
ELIMINATE IRAQ
Not the country. Not the people who live in the country. Eliminate the country's name. "Iraq" is a plain Arabic noun - al-iraq - meaning “the shore and grazing area of a river.” Inspiring, isn't it? Prior to 1921, there had never been a country called “Iraq” - never in history. “Iraq” was an invention of the British after World War I, who along with the French were carving up pieces of the defeated Ottoman Turkish Empire into colonies called League of Nations Mandates. Yet there already was a name for the region encompassed by the Ottoman remnants, a name from the mists of time. For thousands of years before it was eliminated from history by reasons known only to the unfathomable British colonial mind, it was called Mesopotamia.
GROVER IN MANCHURIA
Wrap your brain around this:
· The Policy Director for the Intelligence Division of the Department of Homeland Security - who has access to classified information on all our ports, airports, and everything else pertaining to national security - is a Moslem with direct ties to Islamic radicals under indictment by the FBI.· This individual, named Faisal Gill, received his security clearances despite his lying on his clearance forms about his ties to Islamist organizations. When his deception was disclosed, he was suspended last March - and then reinstated with his clearances intact.· The reason he got the job, received his clearance, and was reinstated after being suspended, was pressure from the single most influential Republican activist and lobbyist in Washington, Grover Norquist.
MY LIE
It is startlingly instructive to see Bill Clinton seize the public limelight again immediately after the funeral rites for Ronald Reagan, to juxtapose the dignity of those rites with the deception of Clinton’s book, the national outpouring of grief and admiration for Ronald Reagan with the adolescent infatuation for Slick Willie.Bill Clinton’s intelligence and abilities exceeded Ronald Reagan’s - but they don’t count. It was their choices that made the difference between Clinton’s sleaze and Reagan’s nobility.This month, June 2004, the American people have been pulled between two poles: the positive of Ronald Reagan’s appeal to the best within them, and the negative of Bill Clinton’s appeal to irresponsibility and depravity. I am confident the pull of Ronald Reagan will be the stronger.One reason is that it’s too blindingly obvious that Bill Clinton’s book should have been entitled My Lie.
THE NUMBER ONE DANGER TO THE WORLD TODAY
Last April, famed theoretical physicist Haim Harari, Chairman of the Davidson Institute of Science Education and former president (1988-2001) of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, gave a speech entitled “View from the Eye of the Storm.” It is a fascinating discursion by a brilliant mind on the conflict between Western Civilization and Islam.Dr. Harari singled out Iran as "the number one danger to the world today." Yes, Iran is waging war upon the United States, is the primary sponsor of terrorism in Iraq, and will soon be capable of indulging in nuclear blackmail and terror. Yet it is not Iran that is the world’s primary danger. It is Colin Powell’s State Department which is waging war against George W. Bush and is doing everything it can to keep Iran’s Islamofascist regime in power.
FORGET THE TRIAL
The most disastrous news to come out of Iraq this week was the demand by the new Iraqi Interim Government for custody of Saddam Hussein. We are reaping the moldy harvest of the American liberal obsession for legalism. All one had to do is see the farce of Slobodan Milosevic’s trial to know what judicial lunacy awaits a similar tribunal travesty for Saddam.Yet this is suddenly the least of our worries. Turning Saddam over to the Iraqis means he will escape from custody. Through bribery or blackmail or force, the Iraqis will either let him escape or be unable to prevent it - which means all the treasure and blood America has spilled to liberate Iraq will have been in vain.
KERRY HONORED BY VIETNAM COMMUNISTS
There is a photograph prominently displayed in the Vietnamese Communist War Remnants Museum (formerly known as the "War Crimes Museum") in Saigon (called Ho Chi Minh City by the Communists). The photograph, in a room dedicated to foreign activists who contributed to the Communist victory over America in the Vietnam War, shows Senator John Kerry being greeted by Comrade Do Muoi, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam.
THE GENIUS OF SHARON
Back in early February, I told you that Ariel Sharon’s purpose in building a Security Fence walling off the “West Bank” was to precipitate a civil war among Palestinian terrorist groups (The Coming Palestinian Civil War, TTP Weekly Report, February 6, 2004). Four months later, we can see Sharon’s strategy is clearly working.In those intervening months, terrorist attacks are way down while the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) has relentlessly hunted terrorists down and either killed or stymied them. Hamas has been decapitated. Arafat, sick and dying, finds his grip on power slipping away. Even senior members of the Palestinian Authority run by Arafat are admitting that it would disintegrate except that it pays salaries to 140,000 workers - which are now in serious arrears.The February essay predicted a dark period of murderous chaos with Palestinian militants killing each other off in a warfare of competing mafias. Thus there are now news reports that militants in the West Bank and Gaza have “created a lawless society in which citizens complain more about the armed gangs than about Israeli soldiers.” Yet there are indications that this could be short-lived.
A SPASM OF SPITE
In the Monday, June 14, 2004 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan wrote a despicable hit piece on her fellow speechwriters in the Reagan White House. It was entitled “The Ben Elliott Story,” supposedly a tribute to the White House Chief Speechwriter told in the context of seeing him at President Reagan’s National Cathedral funeral service - yet it ended up being a nauseating attack on her former colleagues.The people she attacked are my friends, and it so happened that I attended President Reagan’s service with them. That she took this sacred occasion to vindictively smear them is beyond and beneath contempt. I was compelled to write the following letter to The Wall Street Journal:To: Ned Crabb, Letters Editor, Wall St. JournalIt is a sad and bizarre spectacle to see Peggy Noonan immolate her reputation in a gratuitous spasm of spite. As someone who worked closely with the Reagan White House speechwriters for five years - 1983-1988 - I know the source of the resentment. She was never part of the team.
TOUCHED TO THE POINT
In 1989 on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had a meeting in Prague, Czechoslovakia with a group of Anti-Communists dedicated to ridding their country from Soviet rule. Their leader was Martin Palous, a founder of the Charter 77 democracy movement. He explained that when he and other Czech intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel formed Charter 77 in 1977, they did so against all hope. “To dream of real freedom for our country was unthinkable,” he said. “The best we could ask is some little bit of light, some small increase of breathing space for us to think and talk more freely.” Then the world changed: Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States.
LOVING GORBY
This past week has seen a good many Reaganaut Reunions here in Washington DC. At several of them, we raised our glasses to toast Gorby - Mikhail Gorbachev. All of the Reagan Doctrine guys loved Gorbachev - but not quite in the same way as did the State Department squishes.Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to burst from nowhere when he became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) and leader of the USSR in March of 1985. The liberal media swooned over the smiling suave telegenic Russian - so smart, so sophisticated, so capable of making a shining success of Soviet Communism! We did everything we could to encourage the swooning press’ delusion - for we knew the truth about Gorby.
THE GREAT-SOULED MAN
In October of 1965, Ronald Reagan came to speak at UCLA. I was a senior, and it was a depressing time to be a College Republican. Barry Goldwater had been thrashed the previous year, and my professors were so left-wing that I took one to court because of her biased grading. The UCLA Student Union was packed, SRO. There was a buzz that Reagan was considering running for governor against the entrenched Democrat, Pat Brown. My buddy and fellow CR Bill Anthony and I sat expectantly in the audience. As Reagan began to speak, he filled the room with an energy that was both exciting and soothing, and the thousand-plus students were entranced. Then he caught us by surprise.
TENET DOWN, POWELL TO GO
Here’s my initial take on CIA Director George Tenet’s resignation today (June 3). I think this is very good news. It shows that the Pentagon, Rumsfeld in particular, is fighting back. Remember - as was discussed last week in The Real Problem in Iraq - the real war in Iraq is between the State Department and the CIA on one side (that of the UN and Arab rulers like the Saudi Royal Family) and the Pentagon on the other (America and freedom-democracy for Arabs and Iraqis).The focus of the war is now over the Oil-For-Food scandal, with State-CIA trying to squelch it, the Pentagon trying to expose it. As the fellow who discovered the scandal - some $5 billion in bribes paid by Saddam to dozens of the world’s most powerful people - and who has the incriminating documents, Ahmad Chalabi had to be destroyed.As of last week, State/CIA was winning. Then they overplayed their hand - twice.
SOPHISTICATED STUPIDITY
As an Army General, Colin Powell knows how to wage war. Unfortunately, the kind of war he knows how to wage best is bureaucratic, not military. Worse than unfortunately, the war he is waging is against his own president.It is tempting to hurl accusations of treason or something close to it in the face of the State Department’s chronic obsession of coddling America’s enemies. But with rare exceptions, the Pinstripes are far from traitors and look upon themselves as loyal Americans. Conservatives need to resist the urge to question their patriotism, and examine instead their method of diplomatic reasoning - which can be characterized as Sophisticated Stupidity.
THE DISGRACE OF KARPINSKI
We received a deluge of comments regarding
A EUROWEENIE STRIKES BACK!
This is the funniest email I have received in years. I thought about putting it in the Humor File because you’ll collapse laughing so hard when you read it. But it’s not a gag - the guy is serious! He’s from Switzerland - a place we all thought had some respect for freedom and dissent. This email displays just how far Europe has sunk into Terminal Weeniedom. It is also a cold shower reminder that the totalitarian ideologies of Communism, Fascism, and Naziism originated in Europe - and how Europeans are once again trashing their own freedoms. This letter is hilarious - but it’s also a sobering reminder of just how unique and precious our American freedom is. The letter is in full, with my comments in italicized brackets ---JW From: Kurt BrülisauerTo: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2004 11:50 AMSubject: Some comments concerning the content of your web siteSir, Looking for comments on the Iraq prisoner abuse issue, I found your site. With growing disgust I've read some of your articles that are freely accessible. The first one I read, "Why can't she take it like a man?", shows a dumb macho behavior but your attitude concerning the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal is not uncommon in right circles. Having read other comments of so called "patriot" sites I was not very surprised about your putting the blame on a single person, but you are the only one who insults at the same time the officer in charge just because she is a woman. A new quality of baseness. Nevertheless I find your article about what you call the Pogo Press worse. Like the Nazis during the Weimar Republic you abuse the freedom of press and of speech just to fight the free press. Unfortunately there is a swamp of fascist American sites on the internet that do the same thing every day without being sanctioned. [Note carefully: Any criticism of the liberal press is Nazi, fascist, and must be “sanctioned,” i.e., made illegal. This is truly Orwellian.]
THE REAL SCANDAL IN IRAQ
In order to understand what is going on in Iraq right now, it is simply imperative that you do a quick re-read of Childishness in Iraq written in August of 2003 and posted in Classics. This will give you the initial background on Ahmad Chalabi and the source of the vendetta Jordan’s King Hussein, the CIA, and the State Department have been conducting against him.What’s changed is that the line in the second paragraph about Jerry Bremer following the lead of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz rather than “his putative bosses at State” is no longer true. Bremer’s real boss is Robert Blackwill, Deputy National Security Advisor at the White House. He is directly in charge of US policy and operations in Iraq, and he has sold out to the squishes at State and the CIA. Which means he has sold America out to the UN.This is a first-class disaster, folks. It is the real scandal in Iraq, not the humiliation of Baathist thugs by seven yahoos in one cell block of Abu Ghraib. The trashing of Ahmad Chalabi, epitomized by Newsweek’s cover story this week entitled “Our Con Man in Iraq,” means that State and the CIA have staged a coup in Iraq - and that only Chalabi had the guts to oppose it. So he had to be destroyed.Here’s the sordid deal.
MOSQUE CLEANING
One problem our troops in Iraq have is the guerrillas using mosques as weapons store rooms and armed sanctuaries from which they can attack us with impunity. This is a favorite tactic of Muqtada al-Sadr and his “Mahdi” rebels, who have shamed and insulted the world’s Shia community by turning its most sacred shrine, the golden-domed Imam Ali Mosque into an armory. The fat little bearded thug thinks he is safe in the mosque, for were we to storm the mosque risking its destruction, it could cause the Shia uprising he dreams of. What he doesn’t know is that we could quickly cleanse the mosque of him and his murderous riffraff without firing a shot.
SONIA GHANDI’S MASTERSTROKE
India’s stock market collapsed this week in a panic free fall after the return of the Congress Party in last week’s elections. The investor freak-out increased when it seemed that Congress would have to include India’s Communist Party of Marxism-Leninism in its ruling coalition. Then came Sonia Gandhi’s masterstroke.
WHY CAN’T SHE TAKE IT LIKE A MAN?
We know conclusively that the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal is as phony as a Bill Clinton sex denial because there are no calls for the resignation of the one individual most responsible for the abuses. That would be the officer in charge of Abu Ghraib and all US military prisons in Iraq, the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski. And why have there been no calls for her resignation? Let’s be honest. It is because she is a woman. Thus the frightening lesson of the abuse scandal: Political correctness trumps national security even in wartime.
THE POGO PRESS
The most oft-quoted line of Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo of the 50s and 60s is “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Given that the liberal media has so clearly become cheerleaders for America’s defeat in Iraq, it is only appropriate that To The Point refer from now on to them as the Pogo Press. Perhaps such a label will help the Bush White House to realize that the Pogo Press has become so suffused with Bush-hatred that it has become America’s Number One Enemy in the War on Terrorism. That is, the Pogos understand that America cannot be defeated militarily in Iraq, just as we couldn’t in Vietnam, and can only be defeated politically, which we were in Vietnam. Thus they are determined to engineer a Vietnam-like political defeat in Iraq no matter how catastrophic the loss of Iraqi lives in a resultant civil war or the future of freedom for the entire Middle East or America’s capacity to defend itself against Al Qaeda terrorism - that’s all worth it in order to ensure George Bush’s defeat in November.
ABU GHRAIB AND TFM
The most personally frustrating aspect of the Abu Ghraib folies is that over a year ago I submitted an interrogation method to the Pentagon that was foolproof, immediate, effective, and humane. It’s called TFM Interrogation, utilizing a nutritionally-engineered diet of Tryptophan-Free Meals. A TTP article discussing the method is now posted in the Classics section.