Thursday, October 21, 2004

Thursday picks

Michelle Malkin says "Rosie the Riveter has given way to Sally the Sniveler.":
But Rosie is gone. And in her place, we have Hysterical Women for Kerry. They are self-absorbed celebrities who support banning all guns (except the ones their bodyguards use to protect them and their children). They are teachers' union bigwigs who support keeping all children hostage in public schools (except their own sons and daughters who have access to the best private institutions). They are sanctimonious environmentalists who oppose ostentatious energy consumption (except for their air-conditioned Malibu mansions and Gulfstream jets and custom Escalades.)

They are antiwar activists who claim to love the troops (except when they're apologizing to the terrorists trying to kill our men and women in uniform). They are peace activists who balk at your son bringing in his "Star Wars" light saber for the kindergarten Halloween parade (but who have no problem serving as human shields for torture-loving dictators). They are ultrafeminists who purport to speak for all women (but not the unborn ones or the abstinent teenage ones or the minority conservative ones or the newly enfranchised ones in Afghanistan).

She has more comments about her column here. Michelle also comments on Senator Kerry's Ohio hunting trip yesterday in her post, "YOU CAN'T FOOL A SPORTSMAN". (I'll also add her to my blog list on the right this evening.)

Over at Opinion Journal, Claudia Rosett has the latest installment on the Oil-For-Food scandal at the UN. (For more on the topic see my Columbus Day Digest.)

Don't miss the Wall Street Journal editorial, "Desperate Kerry tries to scare seniors" about Social Security:
At his party's convention in Boston, Mr. Kerry pledged, "As President, I will not privatize Social Security." OK, fine. But as President, what would he do to prevent a fiscal catastrophe? Isn't this part of a President's job description?

He certainly hasn't left himself much room for leadership. His campaign Web site says: "As president, John Kerry will not raise Social Security taxes, raise the retirement age, cut benefits for people that rely on Social Security or privatize Social Security." These promises simply can't all be kept. There is a choice to be made.

Mr. Bush is at least proposing one way to address the problem that is open to public scrutiny and debate. Senator Kerry refuses to choose, assures us that with "minor changes" it will all work out somehow, and demonizes his opponent for having a plan. These are the scare tactics of a desperate candidate, and we hope the Bush campaign doesn't let him get away with it.

In The American Thinker, Herbert E. Meyer writes "The Lessons of 9-11":
What we learned on September 11 is this: We are now living in a world in which a small number of people can kill a large number of people very quickly. They can hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings, spread anthrax spores through the mail, pour botulism into a city’s water supply, detonate a “dirty” backpack filled with radioactive waste in a shopping mall, or even get their hands on a nuclear device and set it off in one of our cities. And so the lesson of 9-11 couldn’t be more clear: our tolerance for political horseplay must drop, to just a small fraction above zero.

Now you see why going after al Queda and other terrorist groups is necessary, but not sufficient. As long as there are states willing to play footsie with the terrorists by giving them sanctuary, selling them arms, laundering their money, providing false passports, or helping them to shift people and equipment around the world – and as long as there are states whose own policies and actions threaten mass murder – civilization cannot be safe.

Also at The American Thinker, Edward L. Daley has some sarcastic commentary about Kerry's Nov 3 strategy:
Since it's apparent that we, the American people, are no longer capable of running our own elections, who better to do it for us than bus-loads of left-wing legal eagles and Kyoto-supporting foreign bureaucrats? A practicable answer to that question escapes me, as I'm sure it does all of you who are reading this now. [...]

Why, it's almost as if these cantankerous cretins think that America is a nation which values the opinions of wholly ordinary people as highly as it does those of Harvard educated law practitioners!

I mean, have you ever...?

James K. Glassman writes a thoughtful piece for TechCentral Station about Who, or What, Grants Us Our Rights?:
Kerry believes that the United States government, through the Constitution, "affords" rights to Americans. My dictionary defines "afford," in this context as "give, grant, confer." In other words, we fortunate, benighted Americans have a country, a government that grants us rights.

That's an utterly inaccurate reading of the great documents of the founding of this nation. Our government does not grant us any rights at all. On the contrary, Americans start off with rights, and it is we who grant the government certain limited powers to protect those rights.

Where do our rights come from if they don't come from government? They come from God -- which may be why John Kerry doesn't get it.

Lorie Byrd at Polipundit posts "A Brilliant Retort To The Arm Chair Generals":
It is an old military maxim that blunders can be forgiven, but a lack of boldness cannot. There will always be blunders. The simple becomes difficult in war. Take for example the following question: what is 2+2 equal too? An easy question right? Now imagine I gave you 15 such questions and you had 2 seconds to answer them. Most likely you would answer some and leave the rest. Looking at those questions you missed in isolation I might say, “What kind of blathering idiot are you? You can’t even answer simple questions like 2+2=4″. That is why Armchair Generals are so annoying. They look at one thing in isolation with all the time in the world to think about it and say confidently “the answers obvious". But when you are out in the fight everything looks different. Nothing is ever seen in isolation. You never have enough time. You never know more than 1/10 what you need to know. There will always be blunders.

But the job has to get done anyway. And to get this kind of job done boldness is essential. A leader who never blunders, but who doesn’t take the fight to the enemy is worthless. A leader who sets about to win - win ugly if needs be - is priceless.

You can read the whole thing at Andrew Sullivan’s site.

And finally, Little Green Footballs reports that "Retired General Tommy Franks is still taking the fight to the enemy, with an op-ed in the New York Times pointing out John Kerry’s lies about Afghanistan: War of Words." A sample:
Contrary to Senator Kerry, President Bush never “took his eye off the ball” when it came to Osama bin Laden. The war on terrorism has a global focus. It cannot be divided into separate and unrelated wars, one in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. Both are part of the same effort to capture and kill terrorists before they are able to strike America again, potentially with weapons of mass destruction. Terrorist cells are operating in some 60 countries, and the United States, in coordination with dozens of allies, is waging this war on many fronts.

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