…despite the fact there is no imminent threat, nor any weapons of mass destruction. Via Yahoo News:

Around the world, protestors call for action on Darfur

Protests took place around the world on Sunday to demand that world leaders act to prevent further bloodshed in Darfur on the fourth anniversary of the conflict’s start.

The Global Day for Darfur, organised by a coalition of rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, saw activists around the world turn over more than 10,000 hourglasses filled with fake blood.

These are designed to convey the message that delaying intervention will cost even more lives in the troubled western region of Sudan.

What would you bet that many of these same protesters have demonstrated demanding an end to the intervention in Iraq? So it’s out of one “civil war” and into another for these folks apparently. As has been noted many times before, their interest in intervention seems to be inversely proportional to U.S. national interests.

Those opposed to the liberation of Iraq claim they oppose the action because we didn’t find WMD there after the invasion. But we invaded in order to make sure Iraq didn’t have WMD. So the mission, on that front at least, was a success. “Mission Accomplished” you could say.

But what matters now is the future. What possible rationale could there be for abandoning the people of Iraq, while at the same time intervening in Darfur?

Has it ever been the case before in history that a simple banner has driven so many so far over the edge of irrationality? It was just a banner, liberals, get a grip. But the banner gave Hillary Clinton the opportunity to demonstrate an odd left-wing tic:

[Hillary Clinton] lambasted the speech nearly four years ago, in which Bush “” under a “Mission Accomplished” banner on an aircraft carrier returning to home port “” declared an end to major military actions in Iraq.

That speech, Clinton said, was “one of the most shameful episodes in American history. … The only mission he accomplished was the re-election of Republicans.”

Really? One of the most shameful? Right up there with slavery? Jim Crow? The impeachment of Bill Clinton?

What is it with liberals that makes them feel the need to describe things in such hyperbolic terms all the time – “most shameful”, “worst economy in the last 50 years”, “worst president since (Hoover, Buchanan, whomever)”?

The president gave a morale-booster speech to some sailors returning from the war, and that’s among the “most shameful episodes” in the entire history of our nation? Overly optimistic in hindsight, obviously, but shameful? Hillary cannot possibly believe such unmitigated drivel. So why do they say such absurd things? And why do they get away with saying such absurd things?

One obvious reason is that the mainstream media are almost all fellow Democrats. It’s a lot easier to ratchet up the rhetoric to absurd levels when it’s less likely anyone will call you on it. It’s also a tendency on the left to care more about having the right feelings about an issue than about the truth. With that mindset, any rhetoric that grabs people emotionally – “worst _____ ever”, “just like Hitler”, “fascist!”, “racist!” etc. – is fair game; whether it’s true or not is beside the point.

It really takes a lot of nerve, or confidence you won’t get called on your double-talk by a fawning press, to condemn someone for a statement, while simultaneously making essentially the same statement you’re condemning. But that’s basically what Barack Obama did in response to a speech by Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday.

Giuliani essentially said he believes Republicans have better policies to keep Americans safe from another terrorist attack, and that Democrats support policies that would be less effective. This is exactly the kind of statement one would expect a candidate for office to make. In response, Obama said:

“Rudy Giuliani today has taken the politics of fear to a new low and I believe Americans are ready to reject those kind of politics,” Obama said in a statement. “America’s mayor should know that when it comes to 9-11 and fighting terrorists, America is united. We know we can win this war based on shared purpose, not the same divisive politics that question your patriotism if you dare to question failed policies that have made us less secure.”

First, the statement about “questioning your patriotism” is just a canard, a falsehood. Criticizing Democrats does not equate to questioning Democrats’ patriotism.

But leaving that aside, notice what Obama is saying there – the policies of Republicans are “failed policies that have made us less secure.” So it’s perfectly OK for Obama to say Republican policies will make us less safe, it’s totally outside the bounds of decent discourse for Giuliani to say the same thing – that Democrats’ policy preferences would make us “less secure”.

Does Obama believe this nonsense? Or is the outrage phony? We suspect he just says whatever he thinks will sound good to the audience.

Debating whose policies will better protect our national security isn’t out of bounds. It’s exactly what the campaign should be about.

We don’t feel like belaboring the fact that the Democrats are lying blatantly every time they claim Bush “lied us into war”, since we’ve covered that topic many times before, but here’s more evidence that they’re lying, from the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet. Much has already been made about Tenet’s claim that his “slam dunk” comment was taken out of context, but here’s the important part, from the NY Times:

Mr. Tenet takes blame for the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s weapons programs, calling the episode “one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure.” He expresses regret that the document was not more nuanced, but says there was no doubt in his mind at the time that Saddam Hussein possessed unconventional weapons. “In retrospect, we got it wrong partly because the truth was so implausible,” he writes. [emphasis added]

So the head of the CIA had no doubt that Saddam had WMD, but the Democrats’ story now is essentially that President Bush just made it all up. Their claim is blatantly, obviously false. But anything to pick up a few more seats in Congress.

U.S. Constitution:

Article. I.

Section. 2.

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States…

House Democrats:

Pffffffth… Constitution, shmonstitution…

The Democrats simply ignore the Constitution when it conflicts with their wishes, and cite it as Gospel when it suits them. That’s what a “living, breathing Constitution” means.

Thus, they can say it’s a gross affront to the document when federal agents intercept enemy communications during a war without getting permission from a judge in advance, but it’s perfectly fine to ignore the plain text if it means one more Democratic seat in the House. You’ve got to have priorities, after all.

From the NY Times:

As Congressional Democrats sought to reconcile their differences and send an Iraq spending bill to the White House, Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, said Thursday that “this war is lost,” a stark assessment that Republicans argued would demoralize American troops fighting in Iraq.

If that is the case (we do not believe the war is lost), then Senator Reid and his fellow Democrats who agree with him have an obligation to act on that belief. Not to talk, not to pass meaningless non-binding resolutions, to act.

It is morally unconscionable to send troops, to fight and possibly be maimed or killed, into a battle you believe they cannot possibly win. So those who believe as Reid does have a duty to bring forth a bill now to cut off funding for the war and bring the troops home as soon as they can feasibly be removed from Iraq. Not a year or 18 months from now. Now.

So the Democrats need to decide – are they going to continue playing political games when lives are at stake? Or are they going to show the slightest shred of (misguided, confused) courage and conviction, and put their votes where their defeatist mouths are?

More:
Michelle Malkin
Senator Lieberman
Eugene Volokh

Senator and Democratic party presidential candidate Barack Obama apparently compared the mass murder at Virginia Tech to Don Imus’ juvenile, racially charged joke, calling Imus’ words “verbal violence.”

“There’s also another kind of violence that we’re going to have to think about. It’s not necessarily the physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways,” he said, and goes on to catalog other forms of “violence.”

There’s the “verbal violence” of Imus.

There’s “the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job is moved to another country.”

But, hopefully to state to obvious, words are not violence, and moving some jobs to another country is not violence. Making such a glib comparison is morally repugnant and foolish. Unfortunately, this sort of abuse of language is all too common on the left today.

The thing is, we don’t believe Obama believes this drivel either, or that he thought through these comparisons before making them. But which is worse – to believe such nonsense, or to cavalierly use an ongoing tragedy as a catchy line in a political speech? Either way, Barack Obama doesn’t come out looking good.

Others:
Captain’s Quarters
Townhall Blog
Michelle Malkin
Charles Krauthammer

According the the ABC News website, Senator Hillary Clinton claimed, in response to a heated question from the audience, she didn’t really understand what she was voting for in October 2002 when she voted for the war in Iraq:

Clinton also said she believed she was giving the President the authority to send U.N. inspectors to Iraq.

The legislation Senator Clinton voted for was called “Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq“.

So did she really get confused by that, or is she being weaselly and dishonest about it now, hoping she can dupe enough people to win the nomination? Of course this question is rhetorical. On the other hand, since being dishonest about the war in Iraq is standard Democratic party fare now, primary voters may have to decide based on some other criteria.

We wrote last week about a Washington Post article that confirmed relationships between Iraq under Saddam Hussein and terrorist groups, though the Democrats in and out of the press have sought to minimize and discount those relationships, and imply the Bush administration purposely misled the country into the war in Iraq.

Today, in a good post at National Review Online’s blog The Corner, Andrew McCarthy summarizes an article from The Weekly Standard offering more support for the existence of a relationship between the former regime of Iraq and al Qaeda. The post begins:

The invaluable terrorism researcher Tom Joscelyn had a devastating piece in yesterday’s Daily Standard (on the Weekly Standard‘s website), demonstrating the lengths to which Senator Carl Levin and the Washington Post continue to go to bury and discredit solid evidence of a meaningful relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Levin’s revisionist narrative that the connection was cooked up by neconservatives like former Defense under secretary Doug Feith, over the complete objection of the CIA, as a false justification for toppling the Iraqi regime is flat-out fantasy “” although fantasy with legs given the uncritical recitals it gets in the mainstream media and the inexplicable failure of the Bush administration to counter it with facts.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Members of the Bush administration have certainly been wrong about some things, probably about many things. But the Democrats who continue to claim that the case for the war was made up, and that there’s no connection between the war in Iraq and the war on terror, are the ones seeking to deliberately mislead the nation.

McCarthy is also right to criticize the unwillingness of the administration to engage in the debate. They have a responsibility to defend the (entirely defensible) decision to invade Iraq.

So CBS fired Don Imus for calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed hos”. We haven’t heard Imus’ program, so can’t comment on the allegations that this is par for the course for him, but based on news reports, he seems to have been making similarly offensive comments for years. His words were obviously very offensive and stupid, but certainly no more so than anything you can hear in any ten minute period on MTV, where as far as we know no one has been fired.

The level of outrage seems way out of proportion to the offense in this case. Rutgers Coach Vivian Stringer said, “…not only did he steal our dream, he hurt us tremendously. He hurt our character.” Huh? If your dream can be stolen because some guy you never heard of says something mean about you on the radio, then you are way too fragile. We suspect though that the coach was engaging in some hyperbole there, and that her players and their dreams will survive. It is an unfortunate aspect of the current social climate that every offense must pin the outrage meter; but all offenses are not equal. Imus didn’t call for the return of segregation, he jokingly used a derogatory term made all too common by the now ubiquitous, poisonous “hip-hop” culture. That that social cancer has spread as far as it has may be considered the real scandal in all of this.

His words were not anywhere near as offensive as those recently uttered by the still-employed Rosie O’Donnell on The View, where she repeated the completely nutty 9/11 conspiracy theory that explosives were planted at the World Trade Center, supposedly by American agents. Accusing some of your fellow citizens of mass murder certainly has to be considered worse than Imus’ cheap name-calling. But Imus can’t get away from the legitimate anger he generated because someone else gets away with worse.

Some are complaining that Imus’ free speech rights are being violated somehow by firing him. But no one, including Imus, has a right to be put on the air by a media company – you have the right to free speech, you do not have the right to be provided a forum by others.

Still, even though there’s no constitutional issue involved, the idea that a person can have their career ended because they make one comment some people find offensive is disturbing on principle. In a decent society, hateful words must be condemned, but fallible human beings must also be able to recover from mistakes. It is too often the case that people on the left call for someone to be fired because they consider just about all non-liberal speech to be offensive, bigoted, racist, sexist, etc. Even though Imus is not a conservative, the professional grievance-mongers have gotten a scalp, and will be emboldened to seek more.

In addition, it is not a defense of Imus’ grossly offensive comments to note the supreme irony that he got fired while race-hustler Al Sharpton gets to continue his, and was even given some respect as a Democratic presidential candidate. But there’s nothing new in noting the huge double standard when it comes to racial issues in America.

Another supreme irony is the assertion from NBC News President Steve Capus that they needed to fire Imus to protect the network’s integrity as a serious news organization – expressed on the Keith Olbermann show.

So we have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, we shed no tears for a radio personality who seems to have a history, based on news reports, of making that kind of comment. But it does set a bad precedent for those who want to silence any speech that they don’t like.

The Washington Post confirms – Iraq under Saddam Hussein had longstanding ties to terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, contrary to the baseless assertions of Democrats, who have for several years now repeated the slanderous fantasy that President Bush and his administration made up the threat posed by the regime of Saddam Hussein.

From the Post account:

The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community’s prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.

So the CIA and the Post acknowledge there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda, they’re just quibbling about the extent. They’re also using post-invasion intelligence to make arguments about pre-invasion events, which is disingenuous.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who requested the report’s declassification, said in a written statement that the complete text demonstrates more fully why the inspector general concluded that a key Pentagon office — run by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith — had inappropriately written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the U.S. intelligence consensus disputed.

Notice the assumption that the CIA is apparently always right, and so can never be disputed. An odd stance to take towards a government agency that has gotten so many things wrong so often. What happened to the left’s usual celebration of dissent?

…the report said, the CIA had concluded in June 2002 that there were few substantiated contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and Iraqi officials and had said that it lacked evidence of a long-term relationship like the ones Iraq had forged with other terrorist groups. [emphasis added]

So the CIA reports that Iraq had long-term relationships with terrorist groups, but according to the Democrats “Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism.” And they repeat this obvious falsehood while accusing the Vice President of lying. Absolutely shameless.

As we’ve noted repeatedly, the consensus view before the war, even going back throughout the eight years of the Clinton administration, was that Iraq was a threat, had WMD, and was a state sponsor of terrorism. But since things got tough in Iraq, the Democrats have cherry-picked the intelligence after the fact, focusing on the footnotes and caveats, to engage in the utter slander that “Bush lied us into war”. They have sought partisan advantage over U.S. national security at almost every turn.

Pavlovian cries of “racism” from the unthinking left are as surprising as the Sun rising every morning, but they’re still irritating. A classic example comes at the expense of Newt Gingrich, who recently apologized, en español, for some ill-chosen words about English immersion vs. bilingual education. Mr. Gingrich initially said:

“We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English,” he told the [National Federation of Republican Women] last weekend, “so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.”

Gingrich claims, and it’s reasonable to believe, that he was referring to a “ghetto” in the sense of an isolated enclave, not in the sense the word is often used in the U.S. today, to refer to a poor, often ethnically segregated neighborhood. But the word choice was obviously not the best. A speaker has to be cognizant of the common usage of words, and how those words will be perceived by the wider audience.

However, there’s no basis at all to claim Gingrich’s statement was “hateful” or “racist” or had anything at all to do with race. Unfortunately, for so many on the left, everything has to do with race.

Washington Post Staff Writer Jose Antonio Vargas shows his biased true colors early in his snarky “report” about Gingrich’s apology with the line:

The apology was delivered in English and Spanish, with the three-minute Spanish video, “Mensaje de Newt Gingrich,” subtitled in English. Can’t get any more bilingual than that.

(However: Memorando al Señor Gingrich: In Spanish, the “r” is rolled and the syl-la-bles are se-pa-ra-ted.)

We’re absolutely sure Mr. Vargas would have no problemo whatsoever if a conservative were to offer a similar flippant correction to a Latino immigrant who didn’t speak his newly learned English with a perfect American accent. Right. And we are the King of Spain.

The remarks drew a barrage of comments from the Latino community…

Actually, from a few members of the left-leaning, grievance-mongering “Latino community.”

…and were quickly repudiated on popular Web sites such as Latin Americanist, Latino Pundit and Vivir Latino– U.S. Latino life in blog form. A headline on Vivir Latino read “Newt — Not Ghetto Fabulous,” with Maegan Ortiz, the site’s New York-based editor, writing: “Don’t you love how politicos use Spanish when it works for them and when it doesn’t, they trash it?” Similarly, Hispanic organizations such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund were incredulous, calling Gingrich’s comments “hateful.”

“There is a clear understanding among Latino citizens and Latino immigrants that you must learn English to get good jobs, to fully participate in this society. There is no resistance to that fact,” said Peter Zamora, a credentialed bilingual education teacher who is the co-chairman of the Washington-based Hispanic Education Coalition, which supports bilingual education.

Added Ortiz, who, like Zamora, watched Gingrich’s mea culpa Wednesday night: “It’s just so ironic that he’d use a video spoken in his ghetto Spanish to say sorry about a nasty, racist remark directed at the Latino community. I mean this is a guy whose own official Web site has his own biography written in Spanish. How hypocritical is that?”

It’s left unexplained by these activists how exactly the remarks were racist or hateful. That’s because there’s no basis at all for these thoughtless, knee-jerk responses. There’s no connection between race and language. None. Which race speaks English? Which race speaks Spanish? How is it in any way “hateful” to wish that people who live in the United States learn English and thus gain greater success in life? We’d call such thinking twisted, except it’s obvious no actual thought went into their remarks.

And of course no liberal can go more than five minutes without accusing someone who disagrees with him of hypocrisy. But again, it is left totally unexplained how it is the least bit hypocritical for Gingrich, who speaks English every well, to advocate that all Americans learn to speak English well.

Mr. Gingrich misspoke, and then he reached out to those he offended and apologized. Decent, fair-minded people should accept his apology. The Perpetually Offended Left will of course never do so.