31 March 2010 >> Not too long ago, taking to the streets to protest your government was considered a patriotic act.

It’s true!

But it seems that publicly airing your grievances stopped being patriotic right around noon on January 20th, 2009.

Once President Obama was sworn in, protesting became incitement to violence.

If you’ve opened up a newspaper or watched a cable news program in the past week or so, you’ve probably seen members of the media painting Tea Party activists as dangerous bigots. That’s because disagreeing with President Obama on issues like government spending and high taxes makes you a racist, you see.

What’s interesting about the media’s latest freak-out is that there were radicals a-plenty under President Bush. They protested in the streets. They talked openly about revolution and killing. But oddly, the violent imagery used by people claiming to be advocates for peace never registered with the media. They were too busy fawning over Cindy Sheehan.

Why the difference in coverage? Did the media cheerlead protests against President Bush to hurt him politically? Are they trying to marginalize the increasingly powerful Tea Party movement because they favor President Obama’s agenda?

One thing’s for sure: If there is such a thing as dangerous rhetoric, then the media is at least one president too late in reporting the story.

Don’t believe me?

Well, then let’s take a trip down memory lane... Video >>

20 August 2009 >> Not too long ago, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets with signs comparing our president to Adolf Hitler, painting him as “the world’s biggest terrorist,” even calling outright for his killing. Here in New York City, posters of a cartoon George W. Bush replete with simulated bullet holes began springing up around town.

It was a time when Democratic politicians complained loudly whenever they felt their patriotism was being impugned. In those days, bumper stickers reminded us that “Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism” and Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, declared that disruptive protests were “very American and very important.” Now that protests are directed against a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress, Nancy Pelosi thinks such disruptions are “un-American.”

During the Bush era, the media looked the other way at the extremist element in the protest movement; the large number of protest signs bearing swastikas and mathematical formulae like “Bush=Hitler” just didn’t interest them. But it did interest me, and because the media didn’t want to report it, I did some reporting of my own. The videos I posted online inadvertently launched me on a second career as a documentary filmmaker.

I recently dug through my old footage and found many examples of the same kind of inflammatory speech that the media and the Democratic Party—forgive the redundancy—now decry. What follows are just a few examples. More >>

19 July 2009 @ 7:22PM >> An insightful observation from a reader of Instapundit.com:

Notice how there was no “antiwar” movement during the ’90s, even though we were at war the entire time in Iraq, Haiti, Kosovo, a dab here and there in Afghanistan and Sudan. Then, after 9/11, it was the “Next Vietnam” with a passionate “antiwar” movement with the [New York Times]’s full treasonous participation, just like the good old days. And now, even though the daily death count has matched the highest daily rate we ever saw in Iraq, there is no “antiwar” movement or daily casualty count in all the newspapers. It’s like the “antiwar” movement can be turned off and on like a switch, depending on which party is in the White House.

12 March 2008 >> If you have 5 minutes of free time, this video will fill it with laughs.

5 October 2007 @ 9:12AM >> If an extremist group such as the Ku Klux Klan sponsored rallies in Washington D.C. that drew hundreds of thousands of people, I suspect the media would report who was behind the protests.

But several years ago, when anti-war protesters started rallying under the banners of communist relics, the media kept silent. The fact that the media was ignoring the radical element of the groups organizing the anti-war rallies was the prime reason that I was motivated to shoot the first few videos for this site.

Now that the protest movement has fizzled, a little light is finally being shed on the shady groups that sponsor the rallies. Reuters reports:

Saturday’s protest, sponsored by the Troops Out Now Coalition, came two weeks after an antiwar event sponsored by the ANSWER Coalition, which drew roughly 10,000 people. ANSWER also sponsored a rally in March.

The groups’ agendas are similar, opposing what they call “imperialist” U.S. policy not only in Iraq but toward countries like Cuba and Iran — which has alienated some supporters.

[...]

Both groups’ leaders were associated with the Workers World Party, which advocates a shift toward a Soviet-style planned economy. But a 2004 dispute prompted some members to form the splinter Party for Socialism and Liberation.

I wouldn’t exactly call this extensive reporting—only two sentences alluding to the extremism of the organizers—but these few words are still the most I’ve seen the establishment press write about the ideological underpinnings of the protest movement. And this is years after the fact, and only after the groups proved ineffective. Why are we just hearing about this now? Why hasn’t this been more extensively reported? Or even reported at all?

My suspicion is that reporters feared mentioning this sooner because it would have marginalized the protest movement. The protest leaders would be seen for the extremists that they are.

Perhaps I should be thankful for the media not doing its job. If this information had been reported several years ago when the story was still relevant, I might not have ended up with a career as a filmmaker.

23 April 2007 @ 8:44AM >> In this Front Page Magazine interview, I discuss the inspiration behind my first video, Protesting the Protesters; politics, human rights, the global Jihad & the Middle East; McCain/Feingold and Michael Moore (there is a connection!); the one-party state of Hollywood and academia; and, finally, my upcoming film Indoctrinate U.

25 September 2006 @ 8:21AM >> The National Organization for Women claims to be “the largest organization of feminist activists in the United States.” The organization’s goal is “to take action to bring about equality for all women” and to “end all forms of violence against women.”

So you’d think they might be concerned with the violent persecution of women that happens every day around the globe. Like the case of a woman in Iran who faces death by stoning after being convicted of adultery. Or the Pakistani woman in Italy who had her throat slit open for “refus[ing] to conform to an Islamic lifestyle.”

These days, the ladies at NOW can’t be bothered with all that. They’ve got far more pressing women’s issues to talk about, like the war in Iraq and the need to impeach President Bush.

It’s good to see that they’ve got their priorities straight.

14 August 2006 >> Last week, Senator Joseph Lieberman lost the Democratic Primary in Connecticut. In effect, he’s been booted out of his own party, no longer able to run for Senate under the label “Democrat.”

The Democrats in Connecticut excommunicated Lieberman because he was seen as being too supportive of President Bush’s foreign policy. So, the Democrats’ former Vice Presidential nominee will now be running as an independent in order to keep the seat that he’s held since 1988.

After it became clear that Lieberman was no longer considered a Democrat in good standing by Connecticut’s voters, I argued that it was “a great loss for Connecticut, for Democrats, and for America.”

Brain Terminal reader Keith Leonard disagrees with the level of importance that I and others have placed on the outcome of the election:

Although Lieberman lost it was only by a close margin (52-48).  I keep hearing from pundits, and you, that this is a resounding victory for the anti-war left.  On the contrary, I think it shows that the Democratic party, at least in Connecticut, is split on the issue.  I think the ‘reasonable’ left (as opposed to the radical left) deserves more credit.

It’s true that the election was not a landslide, but that doesn’t mean that the results are insignificant. The pacifist left has shown that they now have enough power in the Democratic party to knock off a guy who, just six years ago, was respected enough within his own party to be nominated for Vice President. There’s no question this is a turning point.

When one faction within a party achieves dominance over another, that’s significant. Perhaps the reasonable left deserves credit for being reasonable, but they can’t claim credit for controlling the Democratic party, at least not in Connecticut. The reasonable left lost to the pacifist left. There’s no other way to put it. And if anyone should doubt whether the reasonable Democrats lost, just look at the latest Rasmussen poll to come out of Connecticut:

Half (52%) of Lamont voters believe Bush should be impeached and removed from office. Just 15% of Lieberman voters share that view.

More than half of the Democrats in Connecticut who just voted to remove Senator Lieberman from office also believe that President Bush should be impeached. That’s a pretty big bloc of Democrats, and if this bloc represents the new power base of the Democratic party, then they should put their money where their mouths are and try to play that hand.

For a long time, the Democratic party leadership has gotten away with a double game: criticize everything about President Bush’s handling of the war on terror, but don’t offer any solutions of their own. They know that if they offer specifics, those can be criticized as well. But they want to avoid that criticism, so they keep quiet when it comes time to suggest alternatives.

If the Democrats are this cowardly in fighting the war of words that surrounds the war on terror, how can anyone expect them to effectively fight the war on terror itself?

The Connecticut primary shows that the pacifist wing of the Democratic party is on the rise. And if they should ever find themselves holding power in Washington, their first priority would not be to fight the Jihadists whose bombs are exploding all over the world, their first priority would be to impeach the only president who’s made a serious effort to combat those Jihadists. Interesting priorities.

Trying to put President Bush on trial for being too aggressive in fighting this war will tell the rest of America exactly where today’s Democratic party stands. I don’t think they’re politically suicidal enough to try something like that, but if Ned Lamont’s voters had their way, that’s exactly what would happen.

Will the Lamonties have enough influence within the party to push the Democrats towards impeachment after the November elections? Only time will tell.

5 July 2006 >> Apparently, the concept of peace is malleable:

A New Zealand peace activist is facing serious assault charges after he allegedly punched a rock singer in London, leaving the man in a coma.

31 May 2006 >> Last year, ProtestWarrior—the counter-protester group known for mocking anti-war protesters with clever signs and strong spines—had their website hacked. Thousands of credit card numbers were stolen by the hacker, apparently a left-wing activist named Jeremy Alexander Hammond, who targeted ProtestWarrior because of the political views of the site’s operators. (Does that make it a hate crime?)

After the FBI started looking into Hammond, he claimed that the investigation was politically motivated. (Would the FBI not typically investigate the theft of thousands of credit card numbers?) Now Hammond’s looking at hard time: an indictment was handed down last week for a crime that could carry a jail term of up to five years.

I suspect you’ll see more attempts to use technology to stifle political opponents. Until now, the Internet has been used primarily to enable speech. But it can also being used to suppress it. A number of other prominent websites have also been taken offline by hackers, and that’s just one incident in one day.

Throughout history, people have been executed and books have been burned in attempts to stamp out ideas. Humans always seem to have an urge to muzzle people who disagree with them. As more speech moves online, so will the attempts to stop it.

---

P.S. While I was over at ProtestWarrior, I ran across this link to a description of how The San Francisco Chronicle cropped a photograph at an anti-war rally to remove the more extreme visual elements. It’s a perfect example of how the establishment media sanitizes reporting of the protest movement, scrubbing away any hint of the more radical left-wing elements behind the protests.

3 May 2006 @ 9:36AM >> The quote of the day, courtesy of Osama bin Laden:

[T]he crime committed by a freethinker is the worst of crimes, that the damage caused by his staying alive among the Muslims is of the worst kind of damage, that he is to be killed, and that his repentance is not to be accepted.

[...]

Indeed, this is our Prophet’s law regarding anyone who mocks him, and belittles Islam and scorns it... They should be killed... It is intolerable and outrageous that the heretics are among us, scorning our religion and our Prophet.

Therefore, you must fear Allah and do His will. Do not consult anyone about the killing of these heretics. Be secretive in carrying out that which is required of you.

How exactly does one “give peace a chance” with someone like this? Failing to act against this type of corrosive ideology just gives bin Laden and his followers a chance to keep killing. In what way does that further the cause of peace?

2 May 2006 @ 4:07PM >> Stuart Browning, one of my partners in On The Fence Films, took his video camera to the May Day protest in San Francisco yesterday. For now, he’s got a series of stills from the rally; in a few days, he’ll be posting a video covering multiple cities.

Also, documentarian Andrew Marcus leads a multi-city team in covering the protests in conjunction with PowerLine and Pajamas Media. He’s got a few scenes from the protests, and will also be following up with more footage later this week.

2 February 2006 @ 10:39AM >> Some protesters in Chicago’s Daley Plaza seem to think so. Documentarian Andrew Marcus has the video.

The patriots protesting are still calling for revolution, it seems. Wake me up when it starts.

18 November 2005 >> According to London’s Guardian newspaper, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in the process of purging political opponents from the Iranian government:

Iran is facing political paralysis as its newly elected president purges government institutions, bringing accusations that he is undertaking a coup d’etat.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s clearout of his opponents began last month but is more sweeping than previously understood and has reached almost every branch of government, the Guardian has learned. Dozens of deputy ministers have been sacked this month in several government departments, as well the heads of the state insurance and privatisation organisations. [...]

Ahmadinejad took power in Iran in what some described as a flawed election where certain reform candidates—and all women—were barred from running for office. After Ahmadinejad’s election, several newspapers were shut down when it became known that they would print a critical letter from a reform candidate who had earlier lost to Ahmadinejad.

Known as a hard-line Islamist, Ahmadinejad is believed to be one of the terrorists responsible for the hostage crisis that consumed the final 15 months of the Carter Administration. Some of the 52 American hostages that were held in Iran for 444 days are “convinced” that Ahmadinejad was one of the leaders who orchestrated the holding of the hostages. More recently, Ahmadinejad has been making news by saying that Israel “must be wiped out.” Of course, like any good Jihadist, Ahmadinejad didn’t stop there. Here are some other choice quotes:

“And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism.”

[T]he “new wave of confrontations generated in Palestine and the growing turmoil in the Islamic world would in no time wipe Israel away.”

“[Any country that] recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury.”

Sounds like a pretty reasonable guy, right?

These recent developments are quite disconcerting in a country with very active nuclear ambitions. And it raises an interesting question for the peace-at-all-costs crowd. Their entire ideology is based on the mistaken notion that everybody behaves in a way that we would find rational. If a terrorist running a country in the process of enriching radioactive uranium turns out to be someone who can’t be reasoned with, what is the proposed solution? How do you broker a deal?

If you’re Israel—certainly under more immediate threat from Iran than the U.S. is—what concessions could you possibly make to satisfy an enemy that seeks no less than your complete destruction? Such threats from Iran don’t seem to leave much room for a face-saving compromise that would leave all parties smiling and shaking hands at a bargaining table. And even if you could arrange a deal, would it be wise to trust someone who uses this sort of apocalyptic rhetoric? History is littered with dupes who tried to make peace with aggressors hell-bent on war. It rarely worked out well for the dupes.

So, if there are any anti-war activists out there who truly believe the slogan “war is never the answer,” kindly send me an e-mail and explain how war can be avoided if a nuclear-armed Iran decides to launch a few missiles at Tel Aviv. What would you pacifists suggest if Iranian warheads start raining down on Israel—or on us? Peace is only possible when no parties want war. As soon as there’s one that does, you’re pretty much screwed.

11 November 2005 >> Former news producer Mary Mapes is still defiant.

Shortly before last fall’s election, Mapes was forced to resign in disgrace from CBS News after she and Dan Rather were caught peddling bogus memos intended to hurt President Bush’s chances for re-election. But Mapes still can’t figure out why people questioned her reporting:

In her first television interview since the National Guard story, Mapes sat with ABC’s Brian Ross to talk about the events surrounding the story and her book. She defended the story and asserted, “I think I’m somebody who got fired for trying to do their job in a difficult atmosphere,” adding, “I don’t think I committed bad journalism. I really don’t.”

Ross asked Mapes if she still believed the story on President Bush’s National Guard service was true and she answered, “absolutely.” She said of the Killian memos, which were used to validate the story before their authenticity came under intense scrutiny, that they have not proven to be inauthentic, adding, “I’m perfectly willing to believe those documents are forgeries if there’s proof I haven’t seen.” Ross asked Mapes if the standard ought not to have been for her to prove their authenticity, to which she responded, “I don’t think that’s the standard.”

Mapes assumes everything she sees is true, assuming it fits with her preconceived political notions. Apparently, she’s not alone in the media these days.

Many media outlets have breathlessly reported the charges of Jimmy Massey, a former Marine who became a prominent peace activist after witnessing what he says were war atrocities in Iraq. Problem is, none of the reporters who repeated his accusations ever bothered to check them out. And now that Massey’s been exposed as a fraud, it leaves a bunch of credulous reporters with egg on their faces:

For more than a year, former Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey has been telling anybody who will listen about the atrocities that he and other Marines committed in Iraq.

In scores of newspaper, magazine and broadcast stories, at a Canadian immigration hearing and in numerous speeches across the country, Massey has told how he and other Marines recklessly, sometimes intentionally, killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians.

[...]

Each of his claims is either demonstrably false or exaggerated - according to his fellow Marines, Massey’s own admissions, and the five journalists who were embedded with Massey’s unit, including a reporter and photographer from the Post-Dispatch and reporters from The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:

Editors at some papers look back at the Massey articles and are surprised that they ran them without examining whether the claims were true or without ever asking the Marine Corps about them.

“I’m looking at the story and going, ‘Why, why would we have run this without getting another side of the story?’” said Lois Wilson, managing editor of the Star Gazette in Elmira, N.Y.

David Holwerk, editorial page editor for The Sacramento Bee, said he thought the newspaper handled its story, a question and answer interview with Massey, poorly.

“I feel fairly confident that we did not subject this to the rigorous scrutiny that we should have or to which we would subject it today,” he said.

Rex Smith, editor of the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union, said he thought the newspaper’s story about Massey could have “benefited from some additional reporting.” But he didn’t necessarily see anything particularly at odds with standard journalism practices.

[...]

“You could take any day’s newspaper and probably pick out a half dozen or more stories that ought to be subjected to a more rigorous truth test,” he said.

“Yes, it would have been much better if we had the other side. But all I’m saying is that this is unfortunately something that happens every day in our newspapers and with practically every story on television.”

30 August 2005 @ 11:06AM >> Documentary filmmaker Andrew Marcus recently told me he’d be traveling to Crawford, Texas to cover the protesters and anti-protesters. That was a few days ago, and he has now posted some pictures and video from his visit.

23 August 2005 @ 10:11AM >> The International Freedom Center, the entity that started out at a September 11th memorial at Ground Zero, has for some time looked in danger of becoming an America-bashing museum. The New York Daily News reports the latest:

“Don’t feature America first,” the IFC has been advised by the consortium of 14 “museums of conscience” that quietly has been consulting with the Freedom Center for the past two years over plans for the hallowed site. “Think internationally, where America is one of the many nations of the world.”

[...]

Located in nine countries on five continents, the coalition museums chronicle apartheid in South Africa, slavery in Senegal, torture in Argentina, racism in the South and internment of Japanese-Americans in California, along with other historical horrors.

“No one in the civilized world would ever defend what happened on 9/11,” said Sarwar Ali, the coalition’s chairman and a trustee of the Liberation War Museum in Bangladesh.

“But what happened after 9/11 - with restrictions placed on human rights and the cycle of revenge and the allegations of human rights abuses in prisons - must also be explored,” Ali said in a call from London.

Coalition members gathered for their annual conference at a Holocaust site in the Czech Republic in July 2004 - and assailed the United States for “reasserting its power in an arrogant way,” the conference report shows.

[...]

At the conference, the coalition also leveled barbs at the IFC: “The Freedom Center is a caricature of the typical American response to everything [telling every story from an American viewpoint].”

September 11th was an attack on the United States. If this story isn’t told from an American viewpoint, whose viewpoint should we choose? That of the attackers?

The International Freedom Center was an ill-conceived idea to begin with. It should be scrapped altogether and replaced with a simple September 11th Memorial that can’t be politicized.

23 August 2005 @ 9:15AM >> Dissent is patriotic, we’re often told. So this must be the highest form of patriotism:

The USS Iowa joined in battles from World War II to Korea to the Persian Gulf. It carried President Franklin Roosevelt home from the Teheran conference of allied leaders, and four decades later, suffered one of the nation’s most deadly military accidents.

Veterans groups and history buffs had hoped that tourists in San Francisco could walk the same teak decks where sailors dodged Japanese machine-gun fire and fired 16-inch guns that helped win battles across the South Pacific.

[...]

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a former San Francisco mayor, helped secure $3 million to tow the Iowa from Rhode Island to the Bay Area in 2001 in hopes of making touristy Fisherman’s Wharf its new home.

But city supervisors voted 8-3 last month to oppose taking in the ship, citing local opposition to the Iraq war and the military’s stance on gays, among other things.

“If I was going to commit any kind of money in recognition of war, then it should be toward peace, given what our war is in Iraq right now,” Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi said.

Update: In the San Francisco Chronicle, Cinnamon Stillwell reports that San Francisco has effectively declared itself a “military-free zone.”

29 July 2005 @ 11:26AM >> The analysts for our intelligence services have a remarkably difficult job. Not only do they have to pick nuggets of important information from swamps of raw, often useless, and sometimes deliberately deceptive data, but they must then determine whether the data they gather constitutes a threat. To do this, they must set some threshold of sensitivity for the data. Two bits of information might not signal an impeding attack, but ten might. Of course, getting it right isn’t easy, as Jeff Jacoby notes in the Boston Globe:

Three weeks before the London bombings of July 7, Britain’s Joint Terrorist Analysis Center advised policymakers that “at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the UK.” That reassuring message from the country’s top intelligence and law enforcement officials, The New York Times reported last week, prompted the British government to lower its terror alert. Less than a month later, 52 people were murdered and 700 wounded when three subway trains and a bus were blown up in the worst act of terrorism the United Kingdom has experienced since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.

[...]

[T]he botched terror assessment raises a question for us, too: Which kind of intelligence failure is better — the kind that badly understates a threat, such as the one in London, or the kind that overstates a threat, such as the insistent warnings before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction?

[...]

So what kind of culture do we want intelligence agencies to foster among their operatives and analysts: one that tends to be overly focused on possible threats, or one that is more likely to downplay them? In general, would we rather take action to eliminate a danger that turns out to have been overstated — or take no action, and then be stunned when the enemy strikes?

Two years ago, I wrote:

In the case of the September 11th report, critics say intelligence analysts missed signals and failed to evaluate the threat thoroughly. Had the analysts been more vigilant, the argument goes, perhaps the September 11th attacks would have been prevented. And in the case of the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, the criticism is that intelligence analysts put too much credence in a few suspect pieces of data. In other words, the analysts were overly vigilant in assessing the threat. Of course, it is not possible to be too vigilant and insufficiently vigilant at the same time—but to the president’s critics, that’s beside the point. A political trap has been set that allows the carping to continue under all possible scenarios. Too hot, too cold...to some, it seems the porridge is always the wrong temperature as long as President Bush is serving it.

Because it is often difficult to distinguish suspicious intelligence reports from iron-clad information, human interpretation is required; inferences must be drawn. That’s why there are often disagreements in the intelligence community: different people looking at the same set of data can draw different conclusions. Such disagreements are not evidence of fraud, they’re evidence of varying levels of risk tolerance. That the Bush Administration is now less willing to accept a risk that was tolerated before is a direct result of the lessons learned on September 11th.

How risk-sensitive do we want our intelligence services to be? If we set the sensitivity threshold too high, we’ll get surprised by attacks like September 11th or the recent bombings in London. If we set the bar too low, we run the risk of relying on faulty information, which it appears we did with respect to Iraq’s WMD.

This is a discussion that we as a nation need to have. Indeed, this is a discussion we should have had by now. Unfortunately, it seems that the left these days wants none of the responsibility of putting forth possible solutions. Where is the left-wing plan for dealing with Islamist extremists who want to destroy Western society? We know that the left finds much fault in the United States, but in the nearly four years since the September 11th attacks, I still don’t know what the left proposes in response to the problem. (Sorry, I don’t accept doing nothing as a solution. We did nothing in response to terrorist attacks for years before September 11th, and look where that got us.)

It is legitimate to criticize President Bush, it is legitimate to criticize our past mistakes as a nation, but those criticisms seem to be the only thing the left can articulate. The are many self-proclaimed great thinkers on the left. Where are their ideas for confronting Islamic mass murder?

17 April 2005 >> The New York Times reports that more mass graves have been found in Iraq:

Investigators have discovered several mass graves in southern Iraq that are believed to contain the bodies of people killed by Saddam Hussein’s government, including one estimated to hold 5,000 bodies, Iraqi officials say.

[...]

If the estimated body counts prove correct, the new graves would be among the largest in the grim tally of mass killings that have gradually come to light since the fall of Mr. Hussein’s government two years ago. At least 290 grave sites containing the remains of some 300,000 people have been found since the American invasion two years ago, Iraqi officials say.

Armies of the self-proclaimed compassionate marched across the world to keep Saddam Hussein in power. A reckless cowboy, a dangerous warmonger, a stupid, conniving cretin stood up to the masses. If not for the cowboy, the compassionate would have succeeded and murders would still be rolling corpses into those mass graves. Now all that’s left of the thugs is weakening insurgency and an aging leadership rotting in jail. The Iraqis defied threats of death to go out and vote, and by doing so, they validated the actions of that idiotic cowboy and gave the finger, tipped in purple, to the compassionate whose actions would have consigned them to a lifetime of oppression. Peace might come to the world much faster if only there were more of those cowboy criminals.

15 April 2005 @ 9:37AM >> Arthur Chrenkoff, well-known for his Good News from Iraq series of posts, has some great advice for arguing against leftists.

25 March 2005 @ 5:40PM >> Victor Davis Hanson asks:

[W]hat do Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros all have in common? The same thing that unites Fidel Castro, the European street, the Iranians, and North Koreans: an evocation of some aspects of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany to deprecate President Bush in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Bush’s political opponents have been comparing him to Adolf Hitler for years. (I’ve made an online cottage industry out of documenting it myself.) Hanson psychoanalyzes the “Bush is Hitler” left, and concludes that—while the extreme rhetoric is evidence of their waning political influence—the environment it creates risks “unleashing even greater extremism by the unhinged.”

10 March 2005 @ 1:16PM >> Amir Taheri poses some important questions to leftist protesters:

[T]he Arab street seems to be heading for an explosion. From North Africa to the Persian Gulf and passing by the Levant, people have been coming together in various “Arab streets” to make their feelings and opinions known.

[...]

In almost every case we are witnessing a new kind of citizens’ movement, an Arab version of people power in action. But the most important feature of these demonstrations is that they are concerned not with imagined external enemies, be it Israel or the United States, but with the real deficiencies of contemporary Arab societies. In almost every case the key demand is for a greater say for the people in deciding the affairs of the nation.

[...]

What is interesting is that there are, as yet, no signs, that the “Western street” may, at some point, come out in support of the new “Arab street.”

[...]

I spent part of last week ringing up the organizers of the anti-war events with a couple of questions. The first: Would they allow anyone from the newly-elected Iraqi parliament to address the gatherings? The second: Would the marches include expressions of support for the democracy movement in Arab and other Muslim countries, notably Iraq, Lebanon and Syria?

In both cases the answer was a categorical no, accompanied by a torrent of abuse about “all those who try to justify American aggression against Iraq.”

[...]

Why are so many Westerners, living in mature democracies, ready to march against the toppling of a despot in Iraq but unwilling to take to the streets in support of the democratic movement in the Middle East?

Is it because many of those who will be marching in support of Saddam Hussein this month are the remnants of totalitarian groups in the West plus a variety of misinformed idealists and others blinded by anti-Americanism?

Or is it because they secretly believe that the Arabs do not deserve anything better than Saddam Hussein?

Those interested in the health of Western democracies would do well to ponder those questions.

26 January 2005 >> President Bush’s re-election left some Americans distraught and depressed. And with Inauguration Day set to rub salt in those still-healing wounds, I decided to act in the interest of national unity and extend an olive branch across the great Red/Blue divide. Would my overtures of peace be rebuffed? Video >>

21 January 2005 >> Funny how the folks who protest for peace and tolerance sometimes demonstrate so little of it themselves:

Ten minutes after telling his fellow protesters to stay safe, Gil Kobrin lay huddled in the slush and mud as two anarchists repeatedly kicked him in the back.

How he got from point A to point B is simple enough. Kobrin, accompanied by a dozen members of the conservative group ProtestWarrior, crashed a rally of hundreds of anti-Bush demonstrators at Meridian Park in Washington, D.C. Holding aloft signs that read “Say no to war unless a Democrat is president” and “Not to brag, but Bush won, so shove it!” they had set off earlier on inauguration morning in search of their opposites.

The ProtestWarrior contingent didn’t have to search for very long; the party came to them.

[...]

“I expected it, but I didn’t expect to be kicked in the back,” Kobrin said later. His boyish, twentysomething face wore a wry smile and he stood upright, but conceded that he was in some pain.

[...]

Patrick McKale, 22, an anarchist from Baltimore, said he was pleased that ProtestWarrior members took a few licks. He said he saw no irony in beating people up at a peace rally. “Just because you’re anti-imperialist doesn’t mean you’re not against violence.”

[...]

“Dude, you got your ass kicked,” one of them taunted at the ProtestWarrior group. Several anarchists, their bile neutered by the police presence, resorted to creative hand signs. It brought to mind something Kobrin had said in an earlier interview: “Ideally it should be a nice, cordial, open dialogue.”

Some in the anti-Bush crowd said they resented the fact that ProtestWarrior’s “man bites dog” schtick eats up a disproportionate amount of press attention.

“They’re taking the media away from us!” exclaimed one angry protester.

The left pats themselves on the back for their bravery in dissent, but look what happens when confronted with a little dissent of their own.

26 July 2004 >> What Kerry needs to do is attract some of the voters who don’t equate Bush with Hitler. That’ll be hard if Kerry is seen as surrounded by extremists. Maybe Kerry recognizes this but is trying to have it both ways, as he does when he votes in favor of bills before he votes against them. But this is an issue he can’t waffle on. When voters view the Democratic Convention, they’ll either see hatred on display or they won’t. I’m sure Kerry’s team will do their best to present a sanitized convention, but today’s Democrats seem to be driven by rage and not reason. And rage is very hard to contain, which means we may be in for a rather interesting week up in Boston. More >>

15 June 2004 @ 7:13PM >> Cinnamon Stillwell reports what happened at a San Francisco peace protest when word came of Ronald Reagan’s death:

[...] late in the afternoon one of the A.N.S.W.E.R. speakers informed the crowd that he had ‘’good news'’ to share. His gleeful announcement that Ronald Reagan had died brought a round of cheers from the crowd.

Peace indeed.

14 June 2004 @ 7:33PM >> David Gelernter has a fascinating piece in The Weekly Standard on Ronald Reagan and his courage in facing down the Soviets and the Western pacifists. Gelernter draws a parallel between that fight and today’s war, and notes that Western pacifism has been on the wrong side of history since World War I:

Nowadays Swedish demonstrators wave signs reading “USA-murderers” and “War is terrorism.” In 1982, Italian demonstrators brandished signs reading “Reagan brings war to Italy” and “Reagan executioner.” During the First World War, the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, “I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal”; in the mid-1930s, British prime minister Stanley Baldwin was reported to be “for peace at any price,” and in 1938, the politician Thomas Jones (Baldwin’s close friend) wrote that “we have to convince the world that for peace we are prepared to go to absurd lengths.” Same theme from World War I through this afternoon: The United States (and Britain) are guilty; war is evil no matter what; peace must be preserved whatever the cost.

Peace must be preserved at any cost: that is the worldview of the left today. Unfortunately, what they fail to recognize is that, by definition, peace can’t be unilateral. When an enemy wants war, no amount of hope and yearning will bring peace. Considering we now face an enemy whose stated goal is the complete destruction of Western society, today’s peace movement, if successful, will do little more than postpone the inevitable conflict until our opponents have a stronger hand. We may credit the left with “good intentions,” but what if those good intentions lead to our ultimate destruction?

26 April 2004 @ 11:20PM >> If you’ve ever wondered who benefits from the peace movement, consider this:

A group holding three Italians hostage in Iraq has threatened to kill them in five days unless Italians take to the streets to publicly denounce their country’s involvement in the U.S.-led occupation.

Let’s see if the protesters take the bait. If so, it’ll be another example of the European left helping terrorists achieve their objectives.

24 March 2004 >> Some people would like you to think President Bush lied when he talked about Saddam Hussein’s weapons. The funny thing is, many of the president’s current critics are politicians who made strikingly similar claims about Iraq in the not-too-distant past. To find out if the current spin was sticking, I impersonated a game show host and quizzed a few protesters about some particularly hawkish quotes from notable Democrats. Video >>