dangerous liberty

A must read Hitchens: Plamegate’s ridiculous conclusion. By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

He is not easy on David Corn of The Nation. Nor should he be. It was Corn who started the whole 16 words imbroglio so many moons ago, based on Wilson’s lies. At best his judgement is suspect, at worst he deliberately misled, as he has accused Bush for many years. Hitchen’s explains:

In the stylistic world where disclosures are gleaned and ironies underscored, the nullity of the prose obscures the fact that any irony here is only at the authors’ expense. It was Corn in particular who asserted—in a July 16, 2003, blog post credited with starting the entire distraction—that:

The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation’s counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.

After you have noted that the Niger uranium connection was in fact based on intelligence that has turned out to be sound, you may also note that this heated moral tone (”thuggish,” “gang”) is now quite absent from the story. It turns out that the person who put Valerie Plame’s identity into circulation was a staunch foe of regime change in Iraq. Oh, that’s all right, then. But you have to laugh at the way Corn now so neutrally describes his own initial delusion as one that was “seized on by administration critics.”

The fact that Corn doesn’t disclose outright that he was one of the ‘adminstration critics’ says a great deal about his journalistic ethic.

Got this link from Instapundit: Captain’s Quarters, as usual, has the best skinny on the situation in Iraq. Recently captured Al Q documents show a bleak picture for Islamist Jihad in Baghdad.

Centcom has a great page “What Extremists Say“, which has regularly updated video and translated documents.

UPDATE: It does concern me that our military is using MS IIS servers for their webpages. I’m surprised it isn’t hacked regularly and can’t stand seeing %20 in the URLs! But I’m picky that way.

Powerline discusses misreporting a recent hearing in the New York Times in The verdict, take 2. The entire hearing can be viewed here. The particular clip they deal with in their post is here.

After hearing the testimony, I think Powerline has it right. All the judges agreed the president has inherent authority which sometimes trumps statutes. Most seemed to agree presidents would be remiss to cede authority, which is the reason for presidential signing statements.

Michael Yon’s latest, Proximity Delays, is up.

Yon discusses the effect on him of ‘proximity delay’, how his observations are so close to the soldiers and mission that he is many times constrained in what he can say.

The Zarqawi letter, for instance. Yon knew about it a week before CNN:

kept silent for days on the Zarqawi-letter dispatch, ready to post what was probably the single most important piece of insider information to drop into our hands in quite some time. I requested clearance several times per day, each time being asked to hold back. I complied.

But then, without even giving the leaders at Deuce Four a head’s up, a typically entralling military press release went out to major, mainstream, media outlets. We all learned of it on CNN. The Zarqawi-letter story was almost unrecognizable. Because, in the hands of a network that hasn’t had a body in the field in Mosul long enough to get their bearings, the best the media could do is paraphrase the military press release. So what should have been a front page banner headline story ended up buried on page 6.

Yet another example of how ‘news’ from the tee-bee will give one a distorted view of reality.

LTC Kurilla was shot 3 times in combat yesterday, may God watch over him and bring him through this. Kurilla is a heroic figure and a prime example of the American GI.
Says Yon in his post script:

The operation has begun. The Commander of Deuce Four, LTC Erik Kurilla, was shot three times in combat yesterday in front of my eyes. Despite being seriously wounded, LTC Kurilla immediately rejoined the intense and close-quarter fight that ended in hand-to-hand combat. LTC Kurilla continued to direct his men until a medic gave him morphine and the men took him away. I was right there. When I returned to base, I was actually “ordered” not to write about the fighting until given clearance, and was told that my phones could be confiscated. I will ignore such “orders” at my own discretion. I am preparing a dispatch now.

I love this guy and don’t even know him. Both guys - Yon and Kurilla. Thank God for them both.

Scott Randolph is finished being a Democrat. The Sheehan Drumbeat pushed him into the light, apparently.

As for Cindy’s ‘troops’, I want them to know I support them, but not their mission.

The ever blunt Chris Hitchens was on CSPAN’s Washington Journal this morning. Watch the entire video here, it is 41 minutes long.

Hitchens is asked about an TAP story on his culpability as an advocate for military action in Iraq and he answers quite forcefully:

The naive people are those who think that the confrontation in Iraq could’ve been avoided.That we could’ve just watched to see what might happen as Saddam went more and more crazy and as his lunatic sons either took power together or had a war between each other as to which it would be.

Hitchens is a great advocate, especially because the charge of ‘right wing nut’ cannot be used on the guy. He’s a hard one for leftists to dismiss.

Here he puts a typical and typically weak leftist argument against US ‘neo-colonialism’ in its place and answers why our democracy is better and what to say as to our responsibility for slavery and colonialism. The old ‘dirty hands argument, ie, because we’ve got some shameful things in the past, we are not allowed to advocate a moral position, the next caller carries it through. This caller is so typical of the really dunderheaded left. Listen to any CSPAN call in and you’ll see how clueless so many left wing callers are. It is always great to see their special logic answered by someone articulate and informed

I always learn something whenever I listen to Hitchens outside the scope of sound bites. He’s a quintessential humanist moralizer.

He says it isn’t just that Hussein was a bad guy, but the face of modern evil - sadists running the assylum.

Mark Frauenfelder posts at Boing Boing - profile of neutron bomb inventor. He links to a Charles Platt piece (pdf, txt or PDB) on Sam Cohen, the inventor of a nuclear weapon he considered ‘the most moral weapon”.

Platt’s piece is thought provoking, not only becaues he’s overtly anti-war and perhaps isolationist (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but also because of his ruminations on the psychological make up of people who seek power and eventually make policy:

Representative Melvin Price was the most senior member of the JCAE, and had played a major role in formulating nuclear policy for more than a decade. Supposedly he was an expert on all things nuclear, but his response may have bothered Cohen more than any other. At the end of a briefing, Price asked only one question: “What’s a neutron?”

Perhaps Cohen should have known what to expect, yet still he was appalled. Elected representatives on committees that established policy at the highest level were motivated by base self-interest, expediency, and petty rivalries. They were not only ignorant, but uninterested in educating themselves. Given a choice between saving public money and spending it, they preferred to spend it. Allowed the option of destroying a city or leaving it unscathed, they opted to destroy it. Forced to choose between maximizing human suffering on innocent civilians or minimizing it, they chose to maximize it.

Journalists were not much better. They could have learned the ethical basis for the neutron bomb easily enough if they cared to do so, but, they didn’t care. They took the lazy way out, quoting cheap shots from peace activists’ press releases, which never failed to tag the bomb as the “ultimate capitalist weapon.” Cohen took grim solace when Leonid Brezhnev denounced him publicly as an “international war criminal,” but the vilification he received in his own country was hard to endure.

This was when Cohen was testifying before Congress, advocating the development of his inexpensive weapon, that would minimize destruction of property and environment, while achieving the war objective of killing enemy soldiers.

His experience should serve as a reminder to us all, especially those who support the Iraq War, about the venality and stupidity of elected officials, especially when it comes to control over the deadly US arsenal and the funds to build it - and the fear tactics all those in power use to keep the normal folk from fundamentally questioning why so much of their tax money must be spent on systems that are outdated, but are built in powerful Congressmen’s districts and states.

Read the essay, it is well written and gives a smidgen of insight into our atomic bomb past.

Michael Yon’s latest dispatch is up.

Read it. He has a 30 second video of a IED going off as his stryker team moved out.

UPDATE: It’s not his latest. His latest is coming, it is a repost of a prior dispatch. The video isn’t ‘news’, it happened some time ago.

Angry in T.O. posts Cindy Sheehan: The President cares more than she will admit.

I cannot do this subject any justice with my own words. It is touching and shows the character of our President. The excerpted Newsweek story says it all:
Michelle Malkin draws our attention to a powerful Newsweek article quoted above:

The most telling-and moving-picture of Bush grieving with the families of the dead was provided by Rachel Ascione, who met with him last summer. Her older brother, Ron Payne, was a Marine who had been killed in Afghanistan only a few weeks before Ascione was invited to meet with Bush at MacDill Air Force Base, near Tampa, Fla.

Ascione wasn’t sure she could restrain herself with the president. She was feeling “raw.” “I wanted him to look me in the eye and tell me why my brother was never coming back, and I wanted him to know it was his fault that my heart was broken,” she recalls. The president was coming to Florida, a key swing state, in the middle of his re-election campaign. Ascione was worried that her family would be “exploited” by a “phony effort to make good with people in order to get votes.”

Ascione and her family were gathered with 18 other families in a large room on the air base. The president entered with some Secret Service agents, a military entourage and a White House photographer. “I’m here for you, and I will take as much time as you need,” Bush said. He began moving from family to family. Ascione watched as mothers confronted him: “How could you let this happen? Why is my son gone?” one asked. Ascione couldn’t hear his answer, but soon “she began to sob, and he began crying, too. And then he just hugged her tight, and they cried together for what seemed like forever.”
…

Ascione’s family was one of the last Bush approached. Ascione still planned to confront him, but Bush disarmed her in an almost uncanny way. Ascione is just over five feet; her late brother was 6 feet 7. “My whole life, he used to put his hand on the top of my head and just hold it there, and it drove me crazy,” she says. When Bush saw that she was crying, he leaned over and put his hand on the top of her head and drew her to him. “It was just like my brother used to do,” she says, beginning to cry at the memory.
…

As he spoke, Ascione could see the grief rising through the president’s body. His shoulder slumped and his face turned ashen. He began to cry and his voice choked. He paused, tried to regain his composure and looked around the room. “I am sorry, I’m so sorry,” he said.

Read the whole post, it is a keeper.

Michael Yon has a new dispatch from Mosul.

This guy is a hero, putting his butt on the line to give us the stories MSM reporters, ’safe’ in their Green Zone hotels, have not been producing.

Please donate money to this brave reporter, he’s operating on our donations alone.

His dispatches show those of us back home how brave and fearless our fighting men are in one of the most dangerous places on the planet, especially if one wears the uniform our soldiers wear.