TEST SITE – To The Point News – Page 645 – The Oasis for Rational Conservatives

Article Archives

AN EPITOME OF EVIL

Published August 4, 2004 | By Dr. Jack Wheeler

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.

IDENTITY THEFT: “PHISHING” FOR VICTIMS

Published July 29, 2004 | By ttpn

Identity theft is prevalent in the news now. The thieves use Spyware: worms to monitor keystrokes and steal passwords. They’ve advanced way beyond the old fashioned ways, like searching your dumpster looking for discarded receipts. Now they’ve become more brazen than ever, using “phishing,” or emails pretending to come from a known and trusted source. Some of their messages are so silly, that victims who fall for them can only be called willing, given all the publicity about security and identity theft that wafts through the airwaves daily.

WHAT OTHER CONCLUSION WOULD YOU COME TO?

Published July 28, 2004 | By Guest Author

I have known Senator John McCain for 33 years. I have known Senator John Kerry for the same length of time. Sen. McCain I met in person, in a prisoner of war camp. In the Spring of 1971, Senator McCain and I were in a camp the Communists told us was a punishment camp in which we had been placed because we were "reactionaries" with "bad attitudes." In the same camp, I came to know about Senator Kerry, but only by reputation. In the 2000 presidential election I supported John McCain because, from my personal knowledge of him gained in that camp, I knew that he was fit to serve as President. In the 2004 presidential election, again based upon my knowledge gained in that camp, I oppose the election of John Kerry because I believe that he is unfit to serve as President.

WIN THE WAR, NOT THE “WAR OF IDEAS”

Published July 28, 2004 | By Michael Ledeen

The debate on "how to win the war of ideas" regarding terrorism is a trap, because it diverts our attention and our energies from the main thing, which is winning the war on terrorism. It's an intellectual amusement, and it gets in our way. As that great Machiavellian Vince Lombardi reminds us, winning is the only thing.That's why the public figure who has best understood the nature of the war, and has best defined our enemy, is George W. Bush. Of all people! He had it right from the start: We have been attacked by many terrorist groups and many countries that support the terrorists. It makes no sense to distinguish between them, and so we will not. We're going after them all.Yes, I know he seems to lose his bearings from time to time, especially when the deep thinkers and the sheikhs and the Europeans and Kofi Annan and John Paul II insist we can't win the hearts and minds of the Middle East unless we first solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. But he has repeatedly pulled himself out of that trap very nicely, and he invariably does so in terms that show he has a uniquely deep understanding of our enemies.George Bush says the way to win the war is to liberate the Middle East from the tyrants who now govern it and sponsor terrorism. And that's exactly right.

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF JOHN KERRY

Published July 28, 2004 | By Dr. Jack Wheeler

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.

SECRET SERVICE INSIGHTS

Published July 28, 2004 | By Dr. Jack Wheeler

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

FASCIST OBESITY

Published July 27, 2004 | By Dr. Jack Wheeler

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

Published July 26, 2004 | By Dr. Jack Wheeler

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?

THE FALLUJAH FLY-TRAP

Published July 21, 2004 | By Jack Kelly

What the liberal press won’t tell you is the astoundingly good news coming out of Iraq now. An example is a series of raids by the Iraqi police in Baghdad last week that netted at least 525 criminals. Since Saddam Hussein emptied his jails of some 70,000 hard-core criminals on the eve of the war, the Iraqi police have a long way to go to restore law and order. But the skill with which the raids were pulled off, and the courage displayed by the cops indicate they are off to a very good start. But best of all is that foreign jihadi terrorists who have come to Iraq in response to al Qaeda's call are giving up and going home.

THE DISCOVERY OF IRAN

Published July 21, 2004 | By Michael Ledeen

The organizers of the Council on Foreign Relations special task force to promote the appeasement of Iran must be cursing their uncommonly bad luck. They scheduled a meeting in Washington today to call for increasing normalization of relations between the United States and Iran. With a fine eye for dark comedy, the Council persuaded two relics of the catastrophic Carter years to appear: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Gates. The principal advocate of the policy, however, is undoubtedly the president of the Council, Richard Haas, who has long seen rapprochement with the mullahs as an "historic opportunity" for the United States. Haas was the head of Colin Powell's Policy Planning Staff.Whatever chances they had of successfully advancing appeasement were shattered over the weekend.

THE COMING NICOTINE MAFIA

Published July 21, 2004 | By Dr. Jack Wheeler

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.

HILLARY’S OCTOBER SURPRISE

Published July 21, 2004 | By Dr. Jack Wheeler

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 GREAT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE REPORT

Published July 15, 2004 | By Michael Ledeen

Wow, more than 520 pages! As Dan Darling and I worked through it (and don't miss his more detailed analysis at www.windsofchange.net), we were constantly entertained by big blocks of "redacted" pages. Why don't they just put in ellipses instead of all those blacked-out paragraphs? Maybe the Government Printing Office gets paid by the page, and Congress wants the GPO to have more money?The other great mystery is how the authors expect us to read the report. It's terribly written, and talks breathlessly about "trade craft" when "logic" or "common sense" would do better. It takes multiple sentences to say things that should be reduced to one or two. Are there no editors around?

WILL THE ATTACK COME ON ELECTION DAY?

Published July 15, 2004 | By Dr. Jack Wheeler

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.

WHEN IT’S TIME TO REFORMAT YOUR HARD DISK

Published July 14, 2004 | By ttpn

Sooner or later we all need to. Perhaps your hard disk fails. All hard disks fail sooner or later. Or you’ve installed too many programs and uninstalled too many trial programs. Your computer has slowed to a crawl because your registry is fractured, full of errors. Maybe your system’s been hit by numerous virii or other intruders that are impossible to get rid of. Perhaps you want to partition your hard disk or add or change operating systems.Are you prepared? How long will it take you to get back up?