A commenter took issue with my passing reference to Cindy Sheehan in a previous post. My point was she does not represent the views of the vast majority of Americans, nor does she speak for all mothers who have lost a “child” in the war on terror. Of course, our soldiers are not children, they are adult volunteers. In the case of Casey Sheehan, after his first tour in Iraq he re-enlisted. He also volunteered for the rescue mission in which he lost his life. He was brave. He was a hero. He was where he wanted to be doing what he wanted to do. He represents all that makes America great. I do not believe his mother speaks for him either.

Anyway, Mark Steyn’s column in the Chicago Sun Times pretty much captures my views on this issue.

A soldier provides Matt Lauer with a dose of reality…..

Great column in the New York Sun about a fellow traveler on the road to enlightment. Shh! Don’t tell the Dems. They still not know there are millions of us.

Via Roger L. Simon

Just when I was starting to feel all warm and fuzzy (see previous post) I encounter this crap from Teddy Kennedy:

“Top officials in the Administration have endorsed interrogation methods that we’ve condemned in other countries, including binding prisoners in painful ‘stress’ positions, threatening them with dogs, extended sleep deprivation, and simulated drownings.”

And this killer response (pun intended) from Arthur Chrenkoff:

Ironically, Senator Kennedy himself drowned more people than American interrogators. As James Taranto would write, “Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment”.

Ok, someone tell me again why mainstream Democrats like this are worthy of any respect. Thank God the American people had the good sense to keep Kennedy Klone Kerry out of office. Oh wait, KKK is already taken by Democratic Senator Byrd from West Virginia.

And the Dems wonder why they can’t win elections?

Florida Cracker has a nice story about the budding friendship of Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush:

It’s kind of late in the game, but Mr. Clinton finally has the father he always wanted:

Family and friends who say the improbable love fest between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton is totally genuine still can’t refrain from occasionally rolling their eyes.

Barbara Bush, the 41st president’s tart-tongued wife, calls them the Odd Couple. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush now refers to the Democrat who ended his father’s political career as “Bro.”

A close friend of the Bush family spoke for many partisans on both sides of the political divide last week by musing, “It’s a good development for the country – but it sure is a strange development. I’m a little speechless.”

And President George W. Bush, who created this tag-team mismatch by naming his immediate predecessors joint envoys for U.S. tsunami relief efforts, brought down the house at Washington’s A-list Gridiron Club dinner last month by mentioning Clinton’s recent surgery.

“When he woke up he was surrounded by his loved ones: Hillary, Chelsea and my Dad,” Bush deadpanned.

It’s a sweet story- don’t pick at it; just enjoy it.

—

The emerging warm friendship between the Oscar and Felix of American politics, who now call themselves Bill and George and have even begun telephoning one another for advice, is that rarest of commodities: a good-news story amid the partisan rancor of an increasingly polarized capital city.

“I’m enjoying the relationship, and to be honest with you I didn’t think I would,” Bush recently told the New York Daily News.

Once bitter political foes with minimal regard for each other, the 80-year-old Bush and 58-year-old Clinton have forged surprisingly close ties, a who-would-have-thought development helped along by a parallel thaw between Clinton and the current President Bush.

“This is definitely for real,” a top aide to one of the exes said. “We thought the relationship would come to an end with the tsunami. It certainly didn’t.”

That’s an understatement. Clinton has rearranged a busy West Coast schedule to appear with the elder Bush in Houston next month, and more joint events are in the works. The two talk regularly, and their staffs are in almost daily contact. They’ve golfed together, sat side by side at the Super Bowl, and cut TV spots appealing for tsunami contributions.

The News also has learned that Clinton will speak at the Bush library at Texas A&M University this fall. A reciprocal visit to the Clinton library will surely follow, and last week Clinton told The News he’s looking forward to golfing with Bush in Maine this summer.

“They really have been having a great time together,” Sen. Hillary Clinton told The News.

Aides and friends to both admit being confounded by the relationship. Except for graduating from Yale and sharing a secret fondness for ribald humor, there is little in their DNA to suggest such chumminess.

A former Clinton assistant thinks their membership in the country’s most exclusive all-male club is at the core of the thaw. “This is a fraternity even more exclusive than Skull and Bones,” the aide noted, referring to the mysterious Yale society that counts both Presidents Bush among its members.

It’s a sign of their mutual affection that the elder Bush has resorted to what he usually derides as “psychobabble” to try to explain the relationship.

“Maybe I’m the father he never had,” Bush recently speculated, referring to the fact that Clinton’s father died in an automobile accident before the future president was born.

Advisers to both men scoff at cynics who allege the relationship is politically motivated, yet concede that the former leaders – as well as President Bush and Hillary Clinton – benefit from their detente.

“They’re trying to move Hillary to the center for 2008, and this helps de-demonize her and her husband,” a longtime Bush confidant said.

Similarly, a veteran of the Clinton White House argued that reaching out to Clinton helps the current President Bush by softening the perception his policies have divided the country.

“It gives Clinton back some legitimacy,” the source said, “but Bush knows Clinton is still popular and has a lot of international goodwill that can be helpful to Bush. It’s good all-around PR.”

Several sources say this mutual-inoculation society began building below the political radar last June, when the younger Bush – who ended every 2000 campaign speech by vowing to restore dignity to a scandal-tarnished Oval Office – made extremely gracious remarks when Clinton’s portrait was unveiled at the White House.

More recently, the elder Bush has told friends he appreciates that Clinton refrained from blasting his son’s Social Security reform plan and strongly supported U.S.-backed elections in Iraq.

By all accounts, the friendship blossomed on their whirlwind March visit to Asian nations hammered by the tsunami. Clinton insisted the octogenarian Bush take the stateroom, with its full-sized bed, on their 757 government jet.

Touched by Clinton’s deference, Bush stretched out while Clinton slept on the floor – on a comfy Tempur-Pedic mattress Bush brought along for his younger predecessor.

“President Bush’s energy and stamina really impressed me during our travels together,” Clinton reminisced to The News. “Thanks to my own health problems, I was the tired one after a long day of work! Now that I’ve had my surgery, maybe I stand a better chance of being able to keep up with him.”

Since the Asian trip, the two former leaders of the free world have often seemed joined at the hip. Only the most rabid Bush and Clinton haters could object.

“Here we are in one of the ugliest times in American politics, and something good like this happens,” a former senior government official said. “It sends an awfully positive signal.”

Well, I’m not going to mock or make fun. I think it would be nice to see more of this kind of thing. Although I voted for Bill Clinton 4 times*, he turned out to be a pretty big disappointment. I don’t so much care about the Monica fiasco, but letting Bin Laden get away was inexcusable. Well, nothing to be done about that now, so if we can stop the dehumanization of political opponents that’s progress towards finally achieving a level of debate where the issues, not the personalities are what matter.

Which is not to say that extremists who hate America (Michael Moore comes to mind) are worthy of respect. But as a person who has remained married to a sometimes scary liberal I like to think that somewhere in the vital middle we can find some common ground.

Maybe.

* Twice for President, twice as Governor of Arkansas.

Powerline has some great info and insights on the two judges who will be brought for confirmation before the Senate.

So it will be interesting to see if the Democrats play the filibuster game again. There is no reason these judges should not be confirmed. The lies the Dems and media are spreading don’t hold up, and the debunking by Powerline of the CSM article is but the latest example.

No one has shown me one shred of evidence that these judges are not qualified to serve on the courts as desired by President.

I love it when the only response Europeans can make to the weakness of their own society is to say “oh yeah, well America sucks worse”. No one denies that we have our own issues to deal with here, but I don’t see the same kind of emigration statistics like the brain drain occuring in the old world. What is really hilarious is the mantra that the European economy is stronger than ours. I guess if you keep telling yourself that long enough you might actually start to believe it.

Of course, that does not make it true. No less authority than that liberal bastion called the New York Times has an article dispelling the myth of a higher standard of living  in Europe.

All this was illuminated last year in a study by a Swedish research organization, Timbro, which compared the gross domestic products of the 15 European Union members (before the 2004 expansion) with those of the 50 American states and the District of Columbia. (Norway, not being a member of the union, was not included.)

After adjusting the figures for the different purchasing powers of the dollar and euro, the only European country whose economic output per person was greater than the United States average was the tiny tax haven of Luxembourg, which ranked third, just behind Delaware and slightly ahead of Connecticut.

The next European country on the list was Ireland, down at 41st place out of 66; Sweden was 14th from the bottom (after Alabama), followed by Oklahoma, and then Britain, France, Finland, Germany and Italy. The bottom three spots on the list went to Spain, Portugal and Greece.

Alternatively, the study found, if the E.U. was treated as a single American state, it would rank fifth from the bottom, topping only Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi. In short, while Scandinavians are constantly told how much better they have it than Americans, Timbro’s statistics suggest otherwise. So did a paper by a Swedish economics writer, Johan Norberg.

Contrasting “the American dream” with “the European daydream,” Mr. Norberg described the difference: “Economic growth in the last 25 years has been 3 percent per annum in the U.S., compared to 2.2 percent in the E.U. That means that the American economy has almost doubled, whereas the E.U. economy has grown by slightly more than half. The purchasing power in the U.S. is $36,100 per capita, and in the E.U. $26,000 – and the gap is constantly widening.”

Can you imagine how bad it would be if the Euros actually paid for their own defense? Whatever. I stand by the assertion that Europe as we have known it is unlikely to survive the 21st century. If they weren’t so damn arrogant I might even feel some pity as their pathetic society goes the way of the dinosaur. Godless socialism, declining birthrates, staggering Muslim immigration, and an economy in the toilet. All hail the brilliance of our betters for creating a perfect storm of destruction.

Meanwhile, as we watch the former powers of Europe fade into oblivion, the Chinese are making noises. China will be America’s challenge in the coming years. I expect we will prevail but we won’t have the time or resources to bail out our feckless former allies for a third time.

Oh well.

George Will has an excellent column noting that Europe may well be in a death spiral. While Mr. Will’s contention that this can be traced to Europe’s embrace of secularism may or may not be entirely correct, there is no denying these demographics:

Europe itself is withering. On the day of John Paul II’s funeral, the European Union’s statistics agency reported that the decline of birthrates means that within five years deaths will exceed births in the European Union. By 2013 Italy’s population will begin to decline; the next year Germany’s will begin to drop. After 2010 Europe’s population growth will be entirely from immigration. By 2025 not even immigration will prevent declining fertility from accelerating what one historian calls the largest “sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death of the 14th century.”

In his new book “The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God,” George Weigel, biographer of John Paul II, argues that Europe’s “demographic suicide” will cause its welfare states to buckle and is creating a “vacuum into which Islamic immigrants are flowing.” Since 1970 the 20 million legal Islamic immigrants equal the combined populations of Ireland, Denmark and Belgium.

“What,” Weigel asks, “is happening when an entire continent, wealthier and healthier than ever before, declines to create the human future in the most elemental sense, by creating a next generation?” His diagnosis is that Europe’s deepening anemia is a consequence of living on what he considers the thin gruel of secular humanism that excludes transcendent reference points for cultural and political life. Such reference points are, he thinks, prerequisites for freedom understood as “the capacity to choose wisely and act well as a matter of habit.”

The sad thing is, the Euros think they are perfectly healthy. And they delight in feeling superior to us ignorant Americans. Hmm, maybe being delusional is but one symptom of their illness. Still, since they appear clueless as to their peril it is unlikely they will wake up and take some much needed medicine before its too late. No doubt when the Islmofascists take control, they will expect us to come riding to the rescue (again). But I expect we are going to have our hands full with China.

Well, thanks for the memories Europe. Before you all became pussies and wimps, you had some glory days. Perhaps we can take lessons from your coming demise and avoid your self-inflicted fate. As I recently told someone who was talking about the useless French: “No nation is entirely worthless. It can always serve as a bad example.”

Via The Anchoress

Why?

This transcript from Brit Hume’s Wednesday night interview with law professor Jonathan Turley confirm how dishonest the Democrats are being when it comes to explaining their efforts to deny an up-or-down vote on ten of the president’s judicial nominees. The Democrats claim that these nominees are extremists, outside the “conservative mainstream,” as Senator Schumer has said. However, Hume asked Turley, who is a moderate to liberal, to assess the four most prominent judges being blocked.

With respect to Janice Brown, Turley was “a little bit mystified as to why [she] has attracted so much criticism.” He does not consider her an extremist, and he commended her for rooting her decision in a philosophy of the law.

Next up was William Pryor. Turley knows Pryor personally from their days as appeals court law clerks, though they are not friends. Turley’s view — “I think he’s gotten a raw deal, quite frankly.” Turley explained that (as we have pointed out), though Pryor is conservative he ignores his own views when necessary to follow the law. Maybe the Democrats have become so addicted to the unprincipled rulings of their favorite liberal judges that they cannot give credit to principled conservative jurists.

As to Priscilla Owen, Turley stated, “My view is that she was interpreting things like the parental notification law in a way that was plausible. I don’t agree with it. But she’s not some wild-eyed extremist.”

Last up was Terrence Boyle, who has served for years as a United States district judge. Turley does not consider Boyle an extremist, but he noted that Boyle is often reversed by his appeals court (which is conservative) for “plain error.” In other words, the Democrats stated reason for opposing Boyle lacks merit, but there may be a case that he’s simply not a good judge. The Democrats should make that case and then let the Senate vote.

Turley was back on Fox last night to discuss the other six stalled nominees. The transcript isn’t up yet, but it was basically more of the same. Turley thought that two of the six (Haynes and Myers)arguably had taken extreme positions in their capacity as Bush administration lawyers. As to the other four (Neilson, Saad, McKeague, and Griffin), Turley could not even get Democratic staffers to give him a basis for finding them to be extremists, and Turley knew of none. His view was that the Dems have no substantive arguments against these four, and that they are being blocked by the two Democratic Senators from Michigan as some form of retribution.

So, let’s have a vote. It’s the American way.

Via PowerLine

As we move into the final stages of the power play to end Senate filibusters on judicial nominees, it is interesting to note that rather than attempt to defend the indefensible, Democrats instead seek to silence the opposition through demonization and disrespect of beliefs they cannot comprehend.

I am not a particularly religious person, but I strongly believe that people of faith have as much right to be heard as anyone else in this debate. When did holding religious values become something to be feared and mocked? Why shouldn’t people have the right to have their moral convictions represented through the democratic process?

Ann Althouse has a great post that makes this point much better than I can. Please go have a read. Here’s a taste:

Religious advocacy groups have as much right to engage in political speech as anyone else, and religious people have plenty of reason to be concerned about who gets onto the courts and who is kept off. Here, they profess concern that the filibuster is being used to discriminate based on religious beliefs.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is contributing a 4-minute videotape to the program. Is it wrong for a politician to associate with religious leaders who are advocating a political position? I can see worrying that a particular group has a lot of political influence, but that is ordinary politics, not a reason to silence people who are speaking out on matters of public concern and who identify with or are motivated by a particular religion. And Frist agrees with them in opposing filibustering judicial nominees. He’s not obligated to shun them because of their religious affiliation.

So what is the response from Democrats?

“Our debate over the rules of the Senate and the use of the filibuster has nothing to do with whether one is religious or not,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said at a news conference with Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader from Nevada. “I cannot imagine that God – with everything he has or she has to worry about – is going to take the time to debate the filibuster in heaven.”

The first sentence of that statement is simple disagreement about the basis for opposing the nominees, and of course, one would expect people like Durbin to say they are not discriminating on a religious ground. That second sentence subtracts from the credibility of the denial, however, because it’s little more than a mockery of religion.

Democrats seized on Dr. Frist’s participation in an effort to portray Republicans as intolerant extremists. “In America, we are in a democracy, not a theocracy,” Mr. Reid said, urging Dr. Frist to back out of the event. “God does not take part in partisan politics.”

I don’t see the sense of this statement. Religious people fighting for a cause they believe in do not make the government a theocracy. Many prominent and highly respected political activists — notably Martin Luther King, Jr. — have operated from a religious foundation. It’s nothing new, and it doesn’t deserve to be demonized. There’s a tone of mockery toward religion in what Durbin and Reid are saying, as they twist the Council’s political activity into the idea that God is somehow debating about or participating in partisan politics. I’m sure that draws easy laughs and gasps from people who scoff at religion, but it’s quite unhelpful.

There’s an important and serious argument going on now about who should be on the federal courts. The Senate Democrats are using the filibuster to block a small number of the nominees, ones they consider way too deeply embedded in social conservatism and thus at odds with the moral values they represent. The socially conservative Christians want these people on the courts because they want their moral values expressed through courts. It’s a very important stand-off, but making it all about religion is a distraction. A person’s fundamental moral beliefs play a role in his or her decisionmaking, even if that person is a judge and is trying mightily to follow orthodox interpretive methodology. So the Senators are right to fight about the nominees the way they do, and they will have to work out this issue of majority rule and the filibuster device. But these recent comments by Durbin and Reid are offensive, inflammatory, and manipulative.

You know, I see liberal commenters expressing great fear of an American theocracy, complete with comparisons of conservative Christians to the Taliban. While I certainly would not care to have someone else’s religious beliefs imposed on me, it seems the greater danger is the blatant attempts of the left to silence those voices to which they disagree. I see this as a clear and present danger to the freedoms we most cherish. For if the views of the Christians are unworthy of being heard, who will be next?

I do not believe that in the marketplace of ideas any extreme view will survive. Let the Senate vote on the President’s judicial nominees as the Constitution intended. Then hold the elected leaders accountable for those votes. There’s a name for that. It’s called democracy.

Cross posted at The Wide Awakes

The NY Times gives Kofi Annan a soapbox and he presumes to lecture us on Sudan. He who steadfastly refused to call what is happening there genocide and has stood idly by while Sudan-supported militias have murdered thousands for the crime of not being Arab. The man apparently has no shame and the depths of his hypocrisy appear bottomless.

Captain Ed provides a much deserved rhetorical boot to Kofi’s ass:

Kofi Annan takes to the opinion pages of the New York Times today to preach accountability to Americans, a stunning and laughable assertion from the man who has led the United Nations to its nadir of credibility at least partially based on his own lack of accountability…

Annan makes it sound as if the civil war came as a result of a famine, and that the deaths could not have been prevented. He has it backwards. The famine came as a result of the war, and the failure of Annan himself in designating the Darfur atrocities as a genocide — which would have obligated him to act to stop it — contributed to hundreds of thousands of those deaths. For Annan to use those figures as a scold against the Western nations that had all but demanded Annan to acknowledge the Darfur genocide is akin to Marshal Petain standing on the grounds of Bergen-Belsen in 1945 and demanding food aid to Jewish victims of a “famine”.

Hey, I’ll go Annan one better. Annan set up a famine-relief program for Iraqis called Oil-For-Food, into which went at least $64 billion dollars. Somewhere between $10B and $21B of that money disappeared into the pockets of the genocidal dictator it was meant to bypass, meaning that up to a third of the money never made it to the starving people it intended to feed and heal. Millions more of the money went into the pockets of UN personnel, such as his own right-hand man, Benon Sevan, and his own son, Kojo Annan. Kofi never bothered to ensure that the program, the largest aid program he ran, was properly audited.

The last person to lecture the US, the West, and the world on accountability should be Kofi Annan. Had he any shred of honor, he long ago would have resigned his post in the face of the collapse of his credibility on this point alone. The editorial board of the New York Times should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this abomination on its pages, and its tacit endorsement of Annan as global scold should cement its reputation as a clueless, inept, and outrageously biased media outlet which has no further credibility to speak on international affairs. There may be more disgusting examples of hypocrisy and shameless propaganda in media — the Times’ Pulitzer for Walter Duranty’s Stalin apologias come to mind — but few reach this standard.

Well Kofi, get ready to meet Ambassador Bolton. There’s gonna be a new Sheriff in town, but frankly I think the UN may be broken beyond repair.

Well, I guess that ain’t exactly news, is it? You would think my capacity for outrage at the moral equivalence that is the foundation of the Left’s hypocrisy would be maxed out by now. But no, the Left finds new and astounding ways to boggle my brain with repulsive behavior in a fashion that appears limitless.

And as much as I despise all that is France, it appears that the Germans are looking to defeat them yet once again, this time in the battle of dubious thinking. Two salvos from the German left appear to be a powerful blitzkrieg like stroke of madness that other contenders on Left may find hard to best. As reported at Davids Medienkritik :

Few places symbolize the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of the German left more clearly than Chechnya. When US President George W. Bush visited Germany last February, tens-of-thousands of angry demonstrators turned out in Mainz and all across Germany to vent their outrage at the Iraq war and the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Now, less than two months later, Russian President Vladimir Putin is in Germany. And a whopping 30 protesters showed up to demonstrate the bloody Russian war and widespread human rights violations in Chechnya. Putin and Schroeder were all smiles as they tipped champagne glasses and signed multi-billion dollar business deals for everything from Russian natural gas imports to German bullet train exports in Schroeder’s hometown of Hannover. Naturally, with the cash registers busily ringing away, Chechnya never came up and the German media has all but ignored the topic…

…The entire charade clearly demonstrates how the so-called German “peace movement” has changed little since the days of the Cold War when thousands protested in outrage over US involvement in Vietnam, but gave the Russians a free pass during the brutal Soviet war of occupation in Afghanistan. The movement’s unending attempts to seize the moral high ground have been repeatedly undercut and exposed by the same sort of left-leaning Doppelmoral time and again…

Once again: Where are the hoards of angry anti-war protesters now that Vladimir Putin is in Germany? Why aren’t they out waving rainbow PACE flags, beating drums, burning Putin effigies and pounding the pavement in mass protest by the thousands? Where are the shrill cries of “no blood for oil?” Where are the concerned friends of oppressed Muslims with their Palestinian flags? Where is the outrage at the violation of the Geneva Conventions and international human rights? Where are the mock funeral processions and empty coffins? Where are the candle-light vigils and the portraits of the dead and missing? Why has the German left sold out in the interest of selling trains and securing the rights to import oil and gas?

Clearly: As long as this double standard in the handling of Iraq vs. Chechnya remains, the German left will continue to suffer a massive credibility gap. It is hard to lend any credibility to a movement that is so obviously biased and motivated by a one-sided hatred of America.

Hmm, and to think this is happening in that bastion of moral superiority, Europe. No wonder Michael Moore is so popular over there. As loathe as this ignorant hick is to critisize my betters, in this case those enlightened Germans (you know, the fun bunch that brought us two world wars and the holocaust), I feel compelled to share some of Davids other post exposing just how sick and jaded German thinking has become:

Hard to beat the idiocy of this wacko conspiracy theory: A top member of the German Green party – Antje Vollmer, the highest ranking woman in Germany’s parliament (and a real beauty by any definition) – accuses the U.S. government of an underhanded campaign against pedophile Catholic priests aimed at punishing the pope for his opposition to the Iraq war.

Poland’s participation in the Iraq war an attempt to weaken the Pope’s “hinterland”? An anti-pedophile campaign as a veiled attempt to attack the pope’s position against the Iraq war?

Oh, those evil neocons…never shy about hatching dark conspiracies. This probably means they are behind the Michael Jackson pedophile accusations as well…probably to discredit him for being such a macro-pacifist. This all just makes one wonder: How long will it be before the US government hauls in Michael Moore on child molestation charges and ships him of to Gitmo? Who will be the next victim of this vast conspiracy? Have the neo-cons no shame? If they are willing to take the pope down, they could be willing to take anyone down.

It gets worse, read the whole thing if you have the stomach for it.

Meanwhile, I’ll just step back real quietly. I wouldn’t want to provoke these lunatics too much. It’s best that they be left to rage against the awesome evil of BusHitler while we go on about our business of deposing tyrants.

Still, watching the wackiness of the Left is sorta like a visit to the zoo, isn’t it? The antics of the silly monkeys can be quite entertaining at times I suppose.

Via Vodka Pundit

Nothing makes me sicker than hypocrisy. Wait, there is one thing that makes me sicker. Hypocrisy that results in the death of innocents.

We are all painfully aware of the oil-for-food fiasco. UN bureaucrats enriching themselves by stealing money intended to buy food and medicine for the people of Iraq. And now we know that UN “peacekeepers” in the Congo have been using the impoverished children of that desperate land as their sexual playthings.

I have been a long time critic of the UN on many levels. It is a worthless institution. I could live with that I suppose, but its tendency to destroy that which it is sent to protect is unforgivable. The scope of the corruption and hypocrisy is made all too clear in this article from the Guardian. It was written by a former UN employee and pulls open the curtains on the evil in blue helmets.

Here’s a glimpse:

The children’s installation is introduced by the words: ‘They should still be with us.’ A nearby display asks whether they could be. It honours the actions of ordinary people of courage. People like Yahaya, a 60-year-old Muslim who saved Beatha, who narrates her story: ‘The killer was chasing me down an alley. I was going to die any second. I banged on the door of the yard. It opened almost immediately. He [Yahaya] took me by the hand and stood in his doorway and told the killer to leave. He said the Koran says if you save one life it is like saving the whole world. He did not know it is a Jewish text as well.’ Next to these tributes is another installation – a reproduction of the infamous fax by the UN Force Commander, General Romeo Dallaire, imploring the then head of UN peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, for authority to defend Rwandan civilians – many of whom had taken refuge in UN compounds under implicit and sometimes explicit promises of protection.

Here, too, is Annan’s faxed response – ordering Dallaire to defend only the UN’s image of impartiality, forbidding him to protect desperate civilians waiting to die. Next, it details the withdrawal of UN troops, even while blood flowed and the assassins reigned, leaving 800,000 Rwandans to their fate.

The museum’s silent juxtaposition of personal courage versus Annan’s passive capitulation to evil is an effective reminder of what is at stake in the debate over Annan’s future: when the UN fails, innocent people die. Under Annan, the UN has failed and people have died.

His own legions have raped and pillaged. In two present scandals, over the oil-for-food programme in Iraq, and sex-for-food in Congo, Annan was personally aware of malfeasance among his staff, but again responded with passivity.

Well, ok you say. Rwanda, that was bad. And yeah, the corruption in the oil-for-food deal is unacceptable. And the Congo, that was surely an aberration. So, three examples where the UN could have done better. Is that all you got?

I wish.

One very personal example: when I worked in Liberia in the mid-Nineties a new chief administrative officer was dispatched to Monrovia by the UN to replace the previous CAO, who was removed (then reassigned elsewhere) for taking a 15 per cent kickback on UN procurement contracts. In the name of cleaning up the old corruption, the new CAO tapped our phones, paid locals to spy for him and threatened to send home anyone who opposed him, all to facilitate his own quest for a 15 per cent kickback on everything we purchased.

The worst part was watching him try to coerce as many of his young ‘local staff’ to sleep with him as possible. A UN salary is enough money to support an entire extended family in a country such as Liberia, so these vulnerable women were in a tortuously compromised position by their boss’s unwanted advances.

I was the human rights lawyer and these girls would come to my office in tears asking for help. I wrote memo after memo of complaint to my chain of command, but no one did anything. I even confronted the CAO personally. To no effect. When I visited the UN human resources office in New York to complain personally, they laughed at my naive outrage: ‘It happens all the time in the field,’ they said. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

In the meantime, a quarter of a million Liberians died, and warring factions committed war crimes. And the UN did – nothing. Just as it was simultaneously doing nothing, more infamously, in Rwanda and Bosnia.

So, I have to ask…where is the outrage? Who amongst us could not be outraged? Who would not be demanding Kofi’s resignation? Who will speak in favor of maintaining the status quo at the UN?

Oh, its our “peace loving” friends on the left. Who’d a thunk it?

The second searing irony for me is that the American neoconservative right has occupied the moral high ground in critique of Annan, outflanking the left, which sits on indefensible territory in his support. But if prevention of genocide and protection of the vulnerable are not core priorities on the left, then what is? If anyone’s values have been betrayed, it is those of us on the left who believe most deeply in the organisation’s ideals. I am mystified by the reluctance of the left both in the US and the UK (the Guardian ‘s coverage, for example) to criticise Annan’s leadership. The bodies burn today in Darfur – and the women are raped – amid the sound of silence from Annan. How many genocides, the prevention of which is the UN’s very raison d’être, will we endure before the left is moved to criticise Annan? Shouldn’t we be hearing the left screaming bloody murder about the UN’s failure to protect vulnerable Africans? Has it lost its compass so badly that it purports to excuse the rape of Congolese women by UN peacekeepers under Annan’s watch? Is stealing money intended for widows and orphans in Iraq merely a forgivable bureaucratic snafu?

I am co-author of a book critical of Annan’s peacekeeping legacy, Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone . My co-author, Dr Andrew Thomson, penned a line that drove the UN leadership to fire him. Lamenting UN negligence in failing Bosnian Muslims whom it had promised to protect in its ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica – where 8,000 men were slaughtered – Thomson wrote: ‘If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs.’

Tell me again about liberal values. What exactly do these people stand for? Have they no shame? Is their hatred of America so great that they can not find time to criticize the evil that is personified in the UN?

Tell me later. Right now I need a bath.

Cross posted at The Wide Awakes

I have pontificated previously on how the left has abandoned its traditional values of supporting the spread of democracy (much as the right has left behind its more isolationist leanings). Stephen Green of Vodka Pundit offers another example of the left’s descent into madness on the issue of arms sales to China:

”This is not the right time to lift the embargo,” Friedbert Pflueger, foreign affairs spokesman for the Christian Democrats, said in an interview.

”It sends the wrong signal to China. It is also damaging for Europe’s relations with the United States. We are going to bring this issue to the parliament and vote on the matter.”

The European Union imposed the arms embargo after the Tiananmen Square massacres in 1989. Pushed by France and Germany, which have substantial economic interests in China and whose leaders are eager to increase sluggish growth rates, the EU is preparing to lift the embargo, saying the human rights situation in China has improved.

As Mr. Green succinctly notes:

Remember when the lefties told us selling arms to dictators was a bad idea? Remember when righties were accused of being little more than shameless money grubbers with no interest in human rights?

Remember that? Wasn’t that cool?

Yeah, I remember. I’m still a liberal, it’s just that in this bizarro universe they call me a neo-con.

Whatever.

At least, after viewing these photos that’s how I see it.

Via Cut on the bias

Hmm, after seeing this we may want to double our border patrols to keep that creeping menace well to the north. Oh yeah, you can find the same clueless people in San Francisco, New York City, and under other rocks where creepy things reside. I absolutely cannot comprehend this mentality…..

Via Tim Blair

Well, I may be a day or two late here, but on the two year anniversary of the war for liberation of Iraq, it is good to use that perspective to reflect on some of the consequences of our intervention. Charles Krauthammer has a great column in the Washington Post that is a must read. Here’s a taste:

At his news conference on Wednesday, President Bush declined an invitation to claim vindication for his policy of spreading democracy in the Middle East. After two years of attacks on him as a historical illiterate pursuing the childish fantasy of Middle East democracy, he was entitled to claim a bit of credit. Yet he declined, partly out of modesty (as with Ronald Reagan, one of the secrets of his political success) and partly because he has learned the perils of declaring any mission accomplished.

The democracy project is, of course, just beginning. We do not yet know whether the Middle East today is Europe 1989 or Europe 1848. In 1989 we saw the swift collapse of the Soviet empire; in 1848 there was a flowering of liberal revolutions throughout Europe that, within a short time, were all suppressed.

We do not yet know, however, whether this initial flourishing of democracy will succeed. The Syrian and Iraqi Baathists, their jihadist allies, and the various regional autocrats are quite determined to suppress it. But we do know one thing: Those who claimed, with great certainty, that Arabs are an exception to the human tendency toward freedom, that they live in a stunted and distorted culture that makes them love their chains — and that the notion the United States could help trigger a democratic revolution by militarily deposing their oppressors was a fantasy — have been proved wrong.

It is not just that the ramparts of Euro-snobbery have been breached. Iraq and, more broadly, the Bush doctrine were always more than a purely intellectual matter. The left’s patronizing, quasi-colonialist view of the benighted Arabs was not just analytically incorrect. It was morally bankrupt, too.

The international left’s concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism. Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out this selective concern for the victims of U.S. allies (such as Chile) 25 years ago. After the Cold War, the hypocrisy continues. For which Arab people do European hearts burn? The Palestinians. Why? Because that permits the vilification of Israel — an outpost of Western democracy and, even worse, a staunch U.S. ally. Championing suffering Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese offers no such satisfaction. Hence, silence.

Until now. Now that the real Arab street has risen to claim rights that the West takes for granted, the left takes note. It is forced to acknowledge that those brutish Americans led by their simpleton cowboy might have been right. It has no choice. It is shamed. A Lebanese, amid a sea of a million other Lebanese, raises a placard reading “Thank you, George W. Bush,” and all that Euro-pretense, moral and intellectual, collapses.

Obviously, seeing the seeds of liberty beginning to blossom in the heretofore desert of tyranny is the greatest accomplishment of all. And yet, there have been other victories that are worthy of note. Not the least of which is the exposure of the anti-war left for what they truly are–poseurs who hate America and the values we cherish. They do not love freedom and peace, and their actions in opposing the spread of democracy belies any claim to the contrary.

And the curtain has also been pulled back to reveal the true motivations of the MSM who shamelessly allied themselves with those opposed to the Bush doctrine. Millions of Americans watched January’s elections in Iraq, and the earlier Afghanistan transition to democracy and saw the lies and deceptions that the networks and newspapers had been reporting as news. As soldiers return from the front, and bloggers continue to do the real reporting on our war efforts, more and more people are going to learn the truth. And a day of reckoning will come. Mudville Gazette (written by an Iraqi vet) has a great post on the at best incompetence and at worst malfeasance in the media’s failure to give the American people a proper accounting on the war effort.

Glenn Reynolds has some suggestions for the next gathering of the anti-war crowd:

Sackcloth, ashes, and signs reading: WE WERE WRONG, SORRY WE TRIED TO BLOCK ARAB DEMOCRACY, and WRONG ABOUT AFGHANISTAN, WRONG ABOUT IRAQ — DON’T LISTEN TO US NEXT TIME would be appropriate.

Don’t hold your breath on that one Glenn. But there is no going back. And perhaps the loss of credibility suffered by the left and the media will bring some sanity back to political discourse. Or not. But a new day has dawned and the efforts of those who oppose the spread of freedom have been proven to be in vain.

So as we mark an anniversary of an important milestone in the war on terror, we can also celebrate some significant victories here on the homefront.

And I say to myself, what a wonderful world….

Cross posted at The Wide Awakes