Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Rove Obsesses About Hilliary? The Entire Nation Should!


Neal wearing the beads in honor of Fat Tuesday


Washington Times reporter Bill Sammon has written a compelling book titled "Strategery." (He's scheduled to be a guest on the show tomorrow!) It's a great look inside the Bush White House and Bush's strategy for the 1996 reelection campaign. In the book Sammon writes that Karl Rove believes that Hillary Clinton will be the Democrats' 2008 presidential nominee, but that she will lose the general election. Hillary responds with Rove "spends a lot of time obsessing about me."

First step ... we define "obsessing." Very simply, it means " to preoccupy the mind excessively." When it comes to Hillary Clinton and the possibility that this liar could become our president, obsessing would seem to be the thing to do. So, Karl Rove probably isn't the only one. Anyone who loves this country, who cherishes freedom, who values economic liberty and who believes in the concept of individualism should be obsessing about Hillary and her quest for the White House.

Hillary views the people of this country with a level of disdain unmatched in other politicians. We are simply masses who are worthy of nothing more than to be governed and controlled by Hillary and the liberal elite.

There will be plenty of time to remind listeners and readers of the duplicity, the lies, and the just plain old-fashioned viciousness of this woman. For now ... feel free to obsess. Better now than later, when it may well be too late.

BIN LADEN HELPED DEFEAT KERRY?

More on Sammon's book. Administration staff members, and the president himself gave interviews to Bill Sammon for his work. It's really giving us some great nuggets of information. Bush, for instance, was asked about his 2004 victory over The Poodle. Specifically, the author inquired as to whether or not Osama Bin Laden's last-minute videotape helped him win.

Bush does give credit to bin Laden for some help, but holds that Kerry's boat was already sunk. The election turned out to not be anywhere near as close as the media was portraying it to be. Kerry was not going to win anyway. Thankfully, despite all of the blunders of the second term, we are infinitely better off than we would have been with John Kerry sitting in the Oval Office. You're forgiven if your hair stands up on end at the very thought.

What's also interesting is what comes at the end of the Drudge exclusive story. Bush's campaign manager now says the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth were an important part of the Bush victory. That's right...it was them, and not Bin Laden, that sealed The Poodle's fate. Yet at the time, the Bush campaign pretended to distance themselves from the Swifties. That's too bad.

It makes for an interesting headline, but the fact is that even in the face of an unpopular war, John Kerry was a gift from the Democrats to the Bush administration.

Internet Jihad Continues

Danish blog Agora reports on the latest victim:

The Danish site ytringsfrihed.org which leads a campaign to collect signatures in support of Freedom of Speech was hacked yesterday. The site released this statement:


Ytringsfrihed.org
hacked

Some may have been surprised if they visited our site February 27 between 12.30 and 13.00.

This site was defaced and a picture of Muhammed - what the hackers named the image - was put in its stead.

It’s now the 4th time (in less than a week) that Ytringsfrihed.org has been under attack and this time the hackers succeded in placing a picture of Muhammed on the site. The picture was not hosted on our server but on a portal called sunniport.com.

We would like to stress that the signatures themselves aren’t hosted on the main site, but are located on another server. Therefore the names of those who have signed have not been compromised. Noone but we have that information.

The hackers - from Turkey - seem to think that Freedom of Speech isn’t something to cherish. Or at least, they do not agree with us. One might be tempted to think that they do not want us to express our thoughts and beliefs - but that only they have that right…

Support the Freedom of Speech site here.

The Washington Times weighs in with an editorial today:

A troubling video of an insurgent sniper in Iraq known only as "Juba" is spreading across the Internet. As National Public Radio describes it, in the professional-quality video, "Juba" is quiet, efficient and ruthless as he trains his sights on American soldiers and pulls the trigger. Jihadist messages accompany the grisly footage -- in English. The video's colloquial American vernacular strongly suggests the video was either made in the United States or by people deeply familiar with this country -- and skilled in the use of the latest technologies.

"Juba" is just the latest indication of the frightening success of the Internet jihad. "Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but... our country has not," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said despondently earlier this month. Whether the United States is "losing" this high-technology war is debatable, but clearly we suffer critical losses the moment a "Juba" video in English comes into existence and spreads around the world...

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Reader S.M.H. writes: "[This] does not make sense. They are protesting the publication of images of the Prophet, by hacking a website with an image of the Prophet. Can this be explained?"

Logic is a Western extremist value, I guess.

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Previous:

Internet Islamists on the hunt
Jihad in cyberspace
The Islamists' war on the Internet

Saturday, February 25, 2006

NY Times Finally Gets It

Silenced by Islamist Rage

With every new riot over the Danish cartoons, it becomes clearer that the protests are no longer about the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, but about the demagoguery of Islamic extremists. The demonstrators are undeniably outraged by what they perceive as blasphemy. But radical Islamists are trying to harness that indignation to their political goals and their theocratic ends by fomenting hatred for the West and for moderate regimes in the Muslim world. These are dangerous games, and they require the most resolute response.

It is not the West that is most threatened in this crisis. The voices of moderation in the Muslim world are the ones that are being intimidated and silenced. Those few journalists and leaders who have spoken out against the rioting have been vilified and assailed, and even jailed. According to a report by Michael Slackman and Hassan M. Fattah in The New York Times, 11 journalists in five Islamic countries face prosecution for printing some of the Danish cartoons, even when their purpose was to condemn them.

In most of these cases, the legal action represents attempts by cowed authorities to appease the Islamists. But the effect — in Yemen, Jordan and other countries — has only been to give extremists a dollop of legitimacy, and to encourage them to turn up the heat. That, in turn, increases the perception of a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West.

It is time for moderate Muslims to abandon the illusion that they can placate the Islamists by straddling the fence. It is they who must explain to their people that the cartoons were an isolated incident, and not the face of hostile crusaders. It is they who must make it clear to their people that blowing up mosques, beheading hostages and strapping on belts of explosives are far, far greater evils than a few drawings in a distant paper. They must do so because their future is at stake — not Denmark's.

Friday, February 24, 2006

New Rasmussen Poll: Dems Favored Over Bush On National Security

Everyone has been saying the politics of the Dubai Ports World deal is bad news for President Bush. Well, now we have an idea of just how bad. Rasmussen Reports has just released a poll showing that Americans now trust Democrats in Congress more than President Bush on the issue of national security by a margin of 43% to 41%. Only 17% of those polled favor the DPW deal, 64% oppose.

Let's stipulate something up front: this is a single poll taken at the height of both the Congressional and public outburst over the realization of the DPW deal. That said, it does give an idea of how deeply negative the public's initial reaction to the deal was.

The debate in the press seems to have moved back in favor of the President's position, at least to some degree, but whether the public follows along with that shift in the coming weeks is another matter. I suspect there is a substantial block of people (on both the left and the right) whose opposition to the deal won't be shaken no matter how effective the White House is at putting on a full court press - if that's what they decide to do.

If the numbers Rasmussen produced on DPW and national security are confirmed by other polls, the political implications are pretty darn big. There's no way Republicans in Congress - especially those up for reelection this November - are going to stand by and let this single deal (irrespective of the merits) erase a 10-20 point advantage over Democrats on national security. Ain't gonna happen. Unless the numbers change significantly, there is no way Congress is going to let this deal go through as is.