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 >>

11 January 2007 >> There’s something about our psyche which seems to make self-criticism the new national pastime. Naturally, our political leaders know this. They know that when hundreds of newspapers and television stations align in a daily tearing-down of the war effort, the American people will eventually lose their nerve and want to give up. Others know this, too, which is why al Qaeda distributed copies of Black Hawk Down as a means to understand how the media can be used to amplify a relatively minor military failure and drive the United States from the field of battle. If terrorists provide enough negative footage to our media, they know we’ll turn and run. But if we fight too vigorously, that will be held up by our own media as evidence of our inherent evilness. More >>

5 November 2006 >> Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe reports on a few fronts in the global Jihad:

Australia: Australia’s foremost Muslim cleric triggers an uproar when he likens women who don’t wear an Islamic headscarf to “uncovered meat” and blames them for attracting sexual predators.

Afghanistan: The kidnappers of Italian photojournalist Gabriele Torsello threaten to murder him unless Abdul Rahman, an Afghan Christian convert, is returned to Afghanistan and handed over to an Islamic court.

Iran: The president of Iran calls Israel “a group of terrorists” and threatens to harm any country that supports the Jewish state. “This is an ultimatum,” warns Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the elmination of Israel and the United States.

Thailand: Islamist terrorists bomb a column of Buddhist monks as they collect offerings of food in Narathiwat, a city in southern Thailand. One person is killed; 12 are injured.

France: “We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists,” says police union leader Michel Thoomis. “This is not a question of urban violence any more. It is an intifadah, with stones and firebombs.”

Britain: In a “true Islamic state,” sexually active homosexuals would be executed, says Arshad Misbahi, an imam in Manchester’s Central Mosque.

Meanwhile, Muslim Kurds in Iraq prefer to live in peace:

There are no insurgents in Kurdistan. Nor are there any kidnappings. [...] Iraqi Kurdistan is optimistic, full of hope, infused top to bottom with a go-go, build-build attitude.

Who would have thought that a glimmer of hope for peaceful coexistence with our Muslim brothers could be found in—of all places—Iraq?

16 September 2006 @ 7:53PM >> According to Rocco DiPippo of a blog called The Autonomist, the story I covered in “The Taliban’s Free Pass” on Thursday may not be accurate. DiPippo contacted an official at the U.S. Military’s Central Command who said, “Normally cemeteries and other religious places and spaces would be areas where we would try to avoid given their religious and cultural sensitivity, but there is no blanket prohibition, circumstances always vary.”

The CENTCOM official, Major Matthew McLaughlin, said that the sensitivity to sites like cemeteries “was not the driving force behind the decision not to engage this target — inappropriate to say any more on the rationale.”

It is understandable that the military would like to avoid attacks in sites that would be perceived as culturally inflammatory, and it makes sense to treat such sites with greater caution. But it would border on military malpractice to let high-value targets elude us because of that alone. Although it sounds like that may not have happened in this case, Major McLaughlin implies that the military’s default position is to stand down whenever the enemy occupies certain hallowed ground. I’m sure members of the Taliban and al Qaeda are aware of this, and I’m sure they take advantage of it.

I would hope that the rules of engagement allow such decisions to be made quickly enough that they could be acted upon before the opportunity slips away. How many layers in the chain of command need to sign off on a strike in this type of situation? How much time could that process take? As a civilian, I’d be curious to know.

Because my current impression is that we’re still holding back against an enemy that sees our restraint as weakness. And I’m not sure they’re wrong. Sensitivity is not necessarily a helpful trait in war.

14 September 2006 >> If you watched The Path to 9/11, you may be surprised to hear that this sort of thing is still happening:

Taliban terror leaders who had gathered for a funeral - and were secretly being watched by an eye-in-the-sky American drone - dodged assassination because U.S. rules of engagement bar attacks in cemeteries, according to a shocking report.

U.S. intelligence officers in Afghanistan are still fuming about the recent lost opportunity for an easy kill of Taliban honchos packed in tight formation for the burial, NBC News reported.

The unmanned airplane, circling undetected high overhead, fed a continuous satellite feed of the juicy target to officers on the ground.

“We were so excited. I came rushing in with the picture,” one U.S. Army officer told NBC.

But that excitement quickly turned to gut-wrenching frustration because the rules of engagement on the ground in Afghanistan blocked the U.S. from mounting a missile or bomb strike in a cemetery, according to the report.

[...]

Agonizingly, Army officers could do nothing but watch the pictures being fed back from the drone as the Taliban splintered into tiny groups - too small to effectively target with the drone - and headed back to their mountainside hideouts.

It’s another small sign that we’re still not 100% serious about fighting the war on terror.

---

Update: Major Matthew McLaughlin of U.S. Central Command disputes the accuracy of this report, saying that the location “was not the driving force behind the decision not to engage this target.”

7 July 2006 @ 3:06PM >> Although former Taliban spokesman Rahmatullah Hashemi has been rejected from Yale’s Eli Whitney Students Program, the current Yale student is being invited back for another year in Yale’s non-degree studies program:

Hashemi, 27, spent last year studying at Yale through the Nondegree Students Program. He can return to Yale and remain in that program next year if he wishes, Tatiana Maxwell — president of the International Education Foundation, which was created to fund Hashemi’s schooling at Yale — told The New York Times. Hashemi gained national attention when The New York Times Magazine ran a profile of Hashemi as its cover story in February.

[...]

John Fund, a Wall Street Journal columnist who has been covering the Hashemi controversy, said the decision seems to placate all parties involved.

“It is a purposefully muddled end,” Fund wrote in an e-mail. “I think everyone here is trying to save face ...Yale can claim they didn’t bend to pressure, sponsors can claim he can still get his U.S. education.”

[...]

While some students and teachers — including many of those who interacted directly with Hashemi — supported his presence at Yale, others did not view the issue as favorably. Two alumni, Clint Taylor ‘96 and Debbie Bookstaber ‘00, launched a campaign and Weblog called NailYale — a name that makes reference to the rumored Taliban practice of removing the nails of women who wear noticeable nail polish — encouraging alumni to forego donations to Yale until the University’s decision to admit Hashemi was more fully explained. Members of Yale’s Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity wore T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Taliban man, go home!” for their year-end TANG competition this spring.

[...]

Taylor, who has been critical of Yale’s decision to allow Hashemi on campus from the start, said Yale likely felt the pressure of the building dissent about Hashemi’s presence at Yale.

4 April 2006 >> Yale alumnus Clint Taylor isn’t too happy with his alma mater’s decision to admit the former spokesman for the Taliban. So he has joined with other Yale graduates to start the “Nail Yale” campaign:

The Taliban’s misogyny ran so deep that they would chop the fingernails from women who dared to wear nail polish. Please join me in sending to the members of the Yale Corporation red cosmetic fingernails, as a reminder of the brutality of the Taliban regime whose minister their university has welcomed to American soil.

For those of you new to this story, it is interesting to note that while Yale was rolling out the red carpet (in the form of a generous tuition discount) to a former Taliban official, the school was also arguing to the Supreme Court that it should be allowed to continue its campus-wide ban on U.S. military recruiters.

Yale is accountable to its trustees who make up the Yale Corporation. Yale’s decisions reflect on them. Recently the Corporation decided, for sound moral reasons, that the University should divest all holdings in companies operating in Sudan. In doing so, it said that the companies involved in propping up the Sudanese government were committing a “grave social injury”. But the injuries of the Taliban are also grave, and they are ongoing.

Taylor argues that Yale’s trustees might be able to bring common sense back to the once-great Ivy, and that the “mail a nail to Yale” campaign combined with an alumni donation boycott can get their attention. For the convenience of interested alumni, Taylor has also assembled the contact information for various Yale Corporation board members, including the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut.

This is an issue that concerns all Americans, and indeed all free people. Its implications reach far beyond Yale, but if you have donated money to Yale in the past, please make clear you will give no more until the situation is resolved.

The Yale Corporation meets, as far as I can tell, around April 13-14. Let’s make certain they’ve been briefed about this issue, and the damage it has done to Yale’s reputation.

24 March 2006 @ 12:01PM >> At the same time that Yale was petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the school to continue its ban on military recruiters visiting campus, the university was also educating the unrepentant former spokesman for the Taliban at a 40% discount.

Yale’s argument against the recruiters was that, because of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy towards gays, the military is a discriminatory institution that violates the school’s non-discrimination policy and therefore can’t be allowed on campus.

It would be a lot easier to believe Yale was standing on principle if the school wasn’t simultaneously hosting an official of the Taliban, a regime that executed people for being gay and cut off the fingers of women who wore nail polish.

I guess we now know: if given the choice between supporting gay rights or supporting America’s enemies, Yale will choose the latter.

Of course, it would be nice to get the school’s perspective on this, but beyond a brief non-statement, the Yale administration isn’t talking.

So yesterday, I went to Yale to see if I could entice any university officials to speak on camera. Not surprisingly, I was met with silence, a door slammed in my face, and eventually, the police.

The video will be released in the upcoming film Indoctrinate U. In the meantime, we’ve posted a write-up and some pictures at the On The Fence Films website.

2 March 2006 >> In the Yale Daily News, Jamie Kirchick writes about Yale’s “student Taliban” Rahmatullah Hashemi, Class of 2009:

In 2000, Hashemi, then 21, became a “roving ambassador” for the Taliban — Angelina Jolie for the Islamofascist set, if you will. He toured the U.S. defending the “achievements” of the Taliban, even visiting Yale. In the months leading up to Sept. 11, Hashemi had a falling out with the Taliban; he became disillusioned with their banning of neckties, chessboards and the Internet because he “wanted something good for Afghanistan.” Presumably, Taliban policy prior to its crackdowns in spring 2001, which included public torture and murder of homosexuals, veiling of women and destruction of ancient Buddhist statues, were all “good for Afghanistan.” Attempting to show intellectual growth, Hashemi told the News Monday he “really support[s]” free speech, adding, “I did and do believe in women’s rights. Yes, women should be able to vote.”

How progressive. There is little evidence to show Hashemi’s beliefs have changed much; indeed, available information indicates his views on world affairs hardly differ from ignorant conspiracy theories so common today in the Muslim world. In an article posted on the Web site of the organization sponsoring his stay in the U.S., he writes, “Seemingly, like the poor Taliban, common Americans are ignorant of the fact that their franchise state of Israel in the Middle East is serving as an American al-Qaida against the Arab world.”

[...]

In a letter to the News, Eric Knibbs GRD ‘10 wrote, “I was not aware that ideology could disqualify a Yale applicant” (”Students’ ideologies should not play role in admissions decisions,” 2/28). I believe it should not. But an applicant’s employment as an agent for a declared enemy of the United States that abetted a terrorist attack that took the lives of some 3,000 civilians is another matter.

The administration believes Yale is lucky to have Hashemi. According to the New York Times, Yale had “another foreigner of Rahmatullah’s caliber apply for special-student status.” Said former Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw, “We lost him to Harvard. I don’t want that to happen again.” Who was the applicant? A member of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party? A protege of Robert Mugabe’s?

25 January 2006 >> This seems to dispel the notion that Afghanistan or Iraq could rightly be considered a quagmire:

Iraqis and Afghans are among the most optimistic people in the world when it comes to their economic future, a new survey for the BBC suggests.

[...]

In Afghanistan, 70% say their own circumstances are improving, and 57% believe that the country overall is on the way up.

In Iraq, 65% believe their personal life is getting better, and 56% are upbeat about the country’s economy.

People aren’t going to be optimistic about their economic future if their country is sliding into chaos. They’re going to be optimistic if they’re noticing improvements. So it seems interesting to note that we Americans—informed by our media yet thousands of miles away—are far more pessimistic about Afghanistan and Iraq than the people who actually live there.

13 January 2006 @ 9:45AM >> It seems al Qaeda has a bit of a P.R. problem in Afghanistan:

Eighty-one percent of Afghans said they think that al-Qaeda is having a negative influence in the world with just 6% saying that it is having a positive influence. An even higher percentage—90%—said they have an unfavorable view of Osama bin Laden, with 75% saying they have a very unfavorable view. Just 5% said they have a favorable view (2% very favorable).

The Taliban isn’t faring much better:

Eighty-eight percent said they have an unfavorable view of the Taliban (62% very unfavorable). Only 8% said they have a favorable view. [...] 82% said that overthrowing the Taliban government was a good thing for Afghanistan, with just 11% saying it was a bad thing.

And while the United States may not be the most popular country in the coffee shops of Europe, the citizens of a nation we freed from tyranny seem to be a bit more happy with us:

Equally large percentages endorse the US military presence in Afghanistan. Eighty-three percent said they have a favorable view of “the US military forces in our country” (39% very favorable). Just 17% have an unfavorable view.
International agencies also get a warm endorsement. An overwhelming 93% gave the United Nations favorable ratings (57% very favorable). International agencies providing aid for reconstruction were rated as effective by 79%, with 38% saying they are very effective.

[...]

This general support for US military presence and for the overthrow of the Taliban government is also reflected in some of the most positive ratings of the United States found in the world. Eighty-one percent said that they have a favorable view of the US (40% very favorable), with just 16% giving an unfavorable rating. In the war zone, one in four (26%) had an unfavorable view of the US, but 73% were favorable.

2 January 2006 @ 1:26PM >> In times past, the valor of our men and women in uniform was worthy of coverage from the establishment media. Nowadays, the media rarely notices our soldiers unless they can be added to the death count. Leave it to the blogosphere to cover the stories that the establishment media ignores. The website Riehl World View presents 2005: The Year in Military Heroism.

8 December 2005 @ 12:40PM >> Ever wonder why you hear almost nothing in the media about Afghanistan? Probably because Afghanis themselves are so optimistic about the future.

19 July 2005 @ 11:11AM >> Item 1:

[Brigadier General Jay] Hood was briefing the subcommittee on one particular terrorist detainee [who] had lost his leg. During his stay at Guantanamo, American military doctors provided him—at taxpayer expense—with a modern prosthetic leg, Hood said. A subsequent review of his status resulted in the decision to release him from American custody.

Hood told the subcommittee that this terrorist has since rejoined the fight with his jihadist brothers in Afghanistan.

Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairing the hearing, revealed some of his outrage at that fact with biting sarcasm.

“Has he reported back from the battlefield against Americans how well the leg we provided him with works?”

Item 2:

During a routine patrol in Baghdad June 2, Army Pfc. Stephen Tschiderer, a medic, was shot in the chest by an enemy sniper, hiding in a van just 75 yards away. The incident was filmed by the insurgents.

Tschiderer [...] was knocked to the ground from the impact, but he popped right back up, took cover and located the enemy’s position.

After tracking down the now-wounded sniper with a team from [the] Iraqi Army Brigade, Tschiderer secured the terrorist with a pair of handcuffs and gave medical aid to the terrorist who’d tried to kill him just minutes before.

(Emphasis mine.)

19 May 2005 @ 5:32PM >> Ann Coulter:

When ace reporter Michael Isikoff had the scoop of the decade, a thoroughly sourced story about the president of the United States having an affair with an intern and then pressuring her to lie about it under oath, Newsweek decided not to run the story. Matt Drudge scooped Newsweek, followed by The Washington Post.

When Isikoff had a detailed account of Kathleen Willey’s nasty sexual encounter with the president in the Oval Office, backed up with eyewitness and documentary evidence, Newsweek decided not to run it. Again, Matt Drudge got the story.

When Isikoff was the first with detailed reporting on Paula Jones’ accusations against a sitting president, Isikoff’s then-employer The Washington Post — which owns Newsweek — decided not to run it. The American Spectator got the story, followed by the Los Angeles Times.

So apparently it’s possible for Michael Isikoff to have a story that actually is true, but for his editors not to run it.

[...]

Newsweek seems to have very different responses to the same reporter’s scoops. Who’s deciding which of Isikoff’s stories to run and which to hold? I note that the ones that Matt Drudge runs have turned out to be more accurate — and interesting! — than the ones Newsweek runs. Maybe Newsweek should start running everything past Matt Drudge.

Andrew McCarthy, National Review:

Here’s an actual newsflash — and one, yet again, that should be news to no one: The reason for the carnage here was, and is, militant Islam. Nothing more.

Newsweek merely gave the crazies their excuse du jour. But they didn’t need a report of Koran desecration to fly jumbo jets into skyscrapers, to blow up embassies, or to behead hostages taken for the great sin of being Americans or Jews. They didn’t need a report of Koran desecration to take to the streets and blame the United States while enthusiastically taking innocent lives. This is what they do.

The outpouring of righteous indignation against Newsweek glides past a far more important point. Yes, we’re all sick of media bias. But “Newsweek lied and people died” is about as worthy a slogan as the scurrilous “Bush lied and people died” that it parrots. And when we engage in this kind of mindless demagoguery, we become just another opportunistic plaintiff — no better than the people all too ready to blame the CIA because Mohammed Atta steered a hijacked civilian airliner into a big building, and to sue the Port Authority because the building had the audacity to collapse from the blow.

17 May 2005 @ 6:14PM >> Recently, Newsweek erroneously reported that military officials guarding al Qaeda detainees at the U.S. facility in Guantanamo Bay flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. The report was later picked up by Al Jazeera and was ultimately repeated by radical Muslim leaders in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The reports sparked violent riots that led to at least 17 dead and hundreds injured before Newsweek finally retracted the story. Many have been covering this story thoroughly over the last few days, so rather than rehashing everything that’s been said elsewhere, here are a few observations:

• In 1998, Michael Isikoff, the reporter behind the retracted Newsweek report, was also the guy who almost broke the Monica Lewinsky story. I say almost because as we all know by now, Matt Drudge broke the story. Drudge was given an opening because Newsweek’s editors pulled the plug at the last minute. Was it a case of Clinton favoratism? Or was it a need for more thorough fact-checking? If it was the latter, why didn’t Newsweek apply a similar standard in this case?
• Newsweek’s original report referred to “sources” corroborating the Koran-flushing story. The “s” at the end of “sources” indicates more than one source. But, as we now know, Newsweek had only one source for the story. So why lie to readers that way? Even if Newsweek couldn’t be certain of the original report, the one thing they could be absolutely sure of was how many sources reported the story to them. Was Newsweek trying to make us think the story was more legitimate than it turned out to be? Or is this standard journalistic practice? Inquiring minds want to know!
• Has anyone actually tried flushing a book down the toilet? It isn’t easy! You need either a really big toilet or a really small book. Even my copy of the diminutive The Wit and Wisdom of Al Franken jammed up my commode.
• Since the beginning of our War on Terror, the media has reported unsubstantiated allegations from al Qaeda detainees. The mere reporting of these charges serves to legitimize them, whether or not they were backed up by any evidence. In fact, al Qaeda training manual advises captured operatives to “complain of mistreatment while in prison.” Making unfounded charges is part of the playbook of our enemy! So, it would be nice if the media, which prides itself on skepticism, would treat the statements of al Qaeda prisoners at least as skeptically as they treat those of our leaders.
• After Enron and the other financial scandals of the last decade, newspapers and pundits from sea to shining sea declared the importance of regulating businesses. Submitting corporations to outside accountability, we were told, was the only way corruption and fraud could be stopped. Well, we now have 17 dead and hundreds injured in riots around the Middle East. Why? Because Newsweek’s screw-up left our enemy with a propaganda victory. Yet, for some reason, I don’t hear any journalists calling for their own industry to be regulated. (I’m emphatically not arguing for it, by the way; I’m just noticing a hypocrisy.) People lost money because of fraud at Enron, and executives ended up in jail. People died and a foreign policy nightmare was created because of bad reporting at Newsweek, and the magazine issues a weak apology. The real-world consequences of Newsweek’s negligence might be far worse than Enron’s, but Newsweek itself doesn’t seem to be facing any consequences other than a tarnished name.
• Newsweek didn’t kill anybody, radical Muslim lunatics did. Still, it would be quite helpful if our media remembered that these same lunatics would kill every non-Muslim to bring about their global Caliphate if given the chance. Reporters might not feel a duty to act in the best interests of their country, but you’d think that self-preservation would at least require that they not act as extensions of our enemy’s propaganda apparatus.
• For all the times that I’ve seen liberal commentators compare Christian conservatives to Muslim extremists, I do not recall anyone getting killed when Andres Serrano got government funding to put a crufix in a beaker of urine and call it art. I don’t recall any riots after Sinead O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on live TV. Yet, our media repeatedly transmits the message that “our fundamentalists” are no different from “their fundamentalists.” We can’t defeat an enemy if we perceive ourselves as just as bad—if not worse—than they are. But that’s exactly the message the moral relativists in our media broadcast time and time again.

Other coverage of the Newsweek fiasco:

• The London Times: “Newsweek sparks global riots with one paragraph on Koran”
• The London Times: “Incendiary Koran claim may be false, editor admits”
• CNN: “Newsweek backs off Quran desecration story”
• Reuters: “Newsweek says Koran desecration report is wrong”
• Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post: “Newsweek Apologizes”
• Newsweek: “How a Fire Broke Out”
• Newsweek: “Did a report in NEWSWEEK set off a wave of deadly anti-American riots in Afghanistan?”

22 February 2005 @ 5:24PM >> Three weeks into the war in Afghanistan, American and coalition forces controlled about a fifth of the country. Eager to compare every American conflict to Vietnam, that’s when the media and the American left began their predictable use of the term “quagmire” to describe the conflict. A week later, of course, the Taliban government was crushed and its ragged remnants fled to the mountains.

It wasn’t widely covered in our media, but last fall, Afghanistan had a rather successful election that was remarkably free of bloodshed. To say the election was a historic event is to downplay it. It was monumental.

Now there seem to be even more reasons for optimism:

One of the Taliban’s most senior and charismatic commanders has become a key negotiator as more and more members of the Islamic militia in Afghanistan give up the fight against the Americans.

The commander, Abdul Salam, earned the nickname Mullah Rockety because he was so accurate with rocket propelled grenades against Russian troops.

He later joined the Taliban as a corps commander in Jalalabad before being captured by the Americans after September 11.

Now he is a supporter of President Hamid Karzai and is tempting diehard Taliban fighters to accept an amnesty offer and reconcile themselves to Afghanistan’s first directly elected leader.

“The Taliban has lost its morale,” he said, speaking by satellite phone from the heartlands of Zabul province, a Taliban redoubt.

“But you have to go and find the Taliban and call to them and ask them directly. If they believe they will be secure and safe they will come down from the mountains.”

After the Taliban’s three-year struggle against a superior U.S. force, there is growing optimism among the Americans and Afghan government that the end is close.

8 April 2004 >> Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission made for riveting listening. The political fireworks were on full display when the Democrats on the panel pressed Rice, asking why President Bush had not developed a pre-September 11th plan to preemptively attack Afghanistan and disrupt al Qaeda. These questions, of course, come from the same folks who criticize Bush administration for acting preemptively against Iraq.

The inconsistencies of the Democratic arguments against the Bush Administration make it impossible for them to put forth any alternate vision, because anything they propose will conflict with some of their previous criticisms. Even that they’ll deny, though; they’ll sweeten their waffles with the syrup of nuance, the word they use to cover up the fact that they’re holding several completely contradictory stances simultaneously.

According to principles of quantum mechanics, it is possible for a subatomic particle to occupy multiple positions at the same time. Perhaps the Democrats hope to become the quantum party. If so, it explains why John Kerry, the consummate Quantum Candidate, is the perfect person to head the Democratic ticket this fall. More >>

11 April 2003 >> “It took three weeks for the media to declare the Afghan war to a quagmire, but it took them only a week to make the same proclamation about the Iraq war. Although the media can’t claim credit for accuracy, they at least deserve a pat on the back for increasing the speed at which they’re wrong by a whopping 200%.” More >>

4 April 2002 >> “We’re in a fight for survival, we must destroy our enemy before we ourselves are destroyed. Some of us understand this; people can call us ’simple’ if that makes them feel superior. But we simpletons apparently see something that smarter people can’t: we must defeat al Qaeda before they get the bomb, or we’re toast. Not recognizing that simple fact is a sign of someone who’s a little too smart for their own good.” More >>

17 January 2002 >> Attorney General John Ashcroft on John Walker Lindh (also known as Abdul Hamid to his fellow Taliban): “Youth is not absolution for treachery, and personal self-discovery is not an excuse to take up arms against one’s country. Misdirected Americans cannot seek direction in murderous ideologies and expect to avoid the consequences.” More >>