Now, I’ll first repeat my firmly held position that John McCain is no great shakes, but come on. How do you, with a straight face, suggest that Obama, who even CNN admits largely owes his political career to someone who targeted his fellow Americans with explosives, should be held harmless for that association? How do you then, in the very next breath, suggest that McCain and Palin are somehow responsible for what one or two unhinged nutbags say or do while attending a rally?

Further, when most of the Democratic party online has spent the last five years calling Bush a war criminal, a traitor, or worse, how do you feign indignation when someone suggests that calling our military a bunch of baby killers is tantamount to treason? Here is Obama’s exact quote in context:

Now you have narco drug lords who are helping to finance the Taliban, so we’ve got to get the job done there [in Afghanistan], and that requires us to have enough troops that we are not just air raiding villages, and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.

Compare that to John Kerry’s now infamous winter soldier testimony:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command….

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

This portrayal of our military as a bunch of mongols ravaging the countryside with little regard for “killing civilians” and “air raiding villages” is epidemic in the Democratic Party. It is part of the anti-military talking points. You can’t possibly act surprised that people take Obama’s remarks as an attack on our military.

Yet we’re supposed to look the other way when a man who wishes to be Commander in Chief denigrates our troops?

At the same time, we’re supposed to give a candidate a pass for associating with a man who apparently believed, and remains without remorse for the belief, that the only appropriate use of military power should be against civilians working in our own government? A man who, after bombing his countrymen, still says he wishes he could have done more for his cause.

Honestly? You will defend Barack Obama’s associations with that man, and his own disdain for our troops, yet you will try, with flimsy reasoning, to connect the GOP ticket with some random crowd members?

What if the roles were reversed. What if John McCain had spent 15 years cuddling up to Tim McVeigh? What if Terry Nichols had held a campaign kickoff event for J-Mac in his home? What if McVeigh had worked to secure tens of millions of dollars for an initiative that John McCain ran? Would you give him a pass? I doubt it.

While I am shocked by the Democrats’ indifference to Ayers, I also think the events of the Vietnam war were, as Obama says, 40 years ago. People have moved on.

However, I do not see how you can ignore that, also ignore your candidates defamation of our military’s service on behalf of our nation, and then try, laughably, to make McCain and Palin responsible for some random nutjob in a crowd of thousands.

It makes you look hypocritical and ridiculous.

A Wired article titled Suicide Bombing Makes Sick Sense in Halo 3 falls into the second category.

I used to find it hard to fully imagine the mind-set of a terrorist.

That is, until I played Halo 3 online, where I found myself adopting — with great success — terrorist tactics. Including a form of suicide bombing. …

I know I’m the underdog; I know I’m probably going to get killed anyway. I am never going to advance up the Halo 3 rankings, because in the political economy of Halo, I’m poor.

Specifically, I’m poor in time. The best players have dozens of free hours a week to hone their talents, and I don’t have that luxury. This changes the relative meaning of death for the two of us. For me, dying will not penalize me in the way it penalizes them, because I have almost no chance of improving my state. I might as well take people down with me.

Or to put it another way: The structure of Xbox Live creates a world composed of two classes — haves and have-nots. And, just as in the real world, some of the disgruntled have-nots are all too willing to toss their lives away — just for the satisfaction of momentarily halting the progress of the haves. Since the game instantly resurrects me, I have no real dread of death in Halo 3.

The author does specifically state that he is not trying to “trivialize the ghastly, horrific impact of real-life suicide bombing” or to “gloss over the incredible complexity of the real-life personal, geopolitical and spiritual reasons why suicide bombers are willing to kill themselves” because this is “impossibly more nuanced and perverse than what’s happening inside a trifling, low-stakes videogame.”

And yet he follows that disclaimer with this statement:

I’ve read scores of articles, white papers and books on the psychology of terrorists in recent years, and even though I have (I think) a strong intellectual grasp of the roots of suicide terrorism, something about playing the game gave me an “aha” moment that I’d never had before: an ability to feel, in whatever tiny fashion, the strategic logic and emotional calculus behind the act.

This may be one of the strangest pieces of ‘journalism’ I have seen in some time. To argue that you understand terrorism because you have “read scores of articles, white papers and books” and have a “strong intellectual grasp” betrays your completely egocentric worldview. I have read books on terrorism, have taken courses on the subject from renowned experts in the field, and studied the subject with great vigor, but I claim to have no sense of what causes someone to take another person’s life for a political goal.

The one clear difference the writer ignores is the fact the person he’s fragging “from beyond the grave” in Halo was actually trying to kill him in the game. Most often terrorists in real life do not strike directly at other combatants. They strike at innocent women and children.

Thompson’s piece might make sense if terrorism were confined to attacks on military targets (as they sometimes are in Iraq), but falls desperately short of anything approaching a rationale conclusion when weighed against the actions of terrorists who strike at families dining at Sbarro.

Drawing analogies is dangerous if it’s easy to poke holes in your comparison. In this case, it’s all too easy. To compare, in any way, the irrational acts of depraved terrorists bent on killing innocents to make a political point and the spastic tactics of poor video game players does little to make a point. It does more to teach others how not to make a case.

To be perfectly clear, the Administration has truly bungled a great number of things. The war in Iraq is just one item in a long list that includes the Katrina response, the ongoing mess that is the Justice Department, the Myers nomination, social security reform, immigration, etc., etc. That said, the one thing they have gotten consistently right is their belief that the outcome in Iraq cannot be a withdrawal and surrender of the nation to extremists.

That was our approach to Somalia, and 15 years later it is still a disaster cranking out militant ideology. That was our approach to Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew and we paid the price in the form of the Taliban and its support for terrorism.

Whether there were terrorists in Iraq prior to our military action there, the fact is there are certainly terrorists there today. Handing them the country as we head out the door is not a viable option from a military standpoint or for the sake of the world my kids will inherit.

Despite my misgivings about much this Administration has done, I stand firmly in the belief that we must not surrender Iraq, we must not allow Congress to usurp the power of the Commander in Chief, and we must not set arbitrary deadlines for a withdrawal simply because “the people” don’t like the way things are going. “The people” look at the world as they see it today. We hire the President and Congress to move us toward a future world. For their jobs, they owe us more than retreat and defeat.

As a result, I am signing onto the petition created at WeWinTheyLose.com. If you would like to join as well, the petition and a simple form to complete are provided below for your use.

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Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero, deputy director for regional operations in the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, said adults in a vehicle with two children in the backseat were allowed through a Baghdad checkpoint on Sunday.

The adults then parked next to a market in the Adamiya area of Baghdad, abandoned the vehicle and detonated it with the children still inside, according to the general and another defense official.

“Children in the back seat, lower suspicion, we let it move through,” Barbero said. “They parked the vehicle, the adults run out and detonate it with the children in the back.”

“The brutality and ruthless nature of this enemy hasn’t changed,” Barbero said.

Absolutely unconscionable.

Take, for instance, Chris Bowers at MyDD. A recent post of his takes issue with the acts of the unhinged right.

Much like the democratic means attempted by conservatives to outlaw abortion, the media pressure against Edwards didn’t work. Unfortunately, the violent threats against Melissa did. Over at Pandagon, Amanda offers a taste of some of the tamer threats she received during the episode, and which it appears she continues to receive. Ultimately, it appears that it was the continuing threat of violence, not any media pressure or caving from the Edwards campaign, that allowed the right-wing to “take scalps” in this whole affair. (emphasis mine)

Well, if you look at McEwan’s post (which Bowers excerpts) what she said was:

There will be some who clamor to claim victory for my resignation, but I caution them that in doing so, they are tacitly accepting responsibility for those who have deluged my blog and my inbox with vitriol and veiled threats.

She received what she considered to be threats. That is, to be sure, absolutely inappropriate. The posts over at Pandagon are atrocious. The venom in them is atrocious.

The trouble is, with few exceptions, none of them, actually threatened violence. They said horrid violent things, and wished all manner of ills on Marcotte, but they weren’t specifically threatening. They wished harm on people simply because they disagreed with their lifestyle. Why does that sound so familiar? Oh wait!

They sounded like the comments of Kos himself. They sounded like the comments of the fringe left (#8 is my favorite example).

Even McEwan, at least, referred to them as veiled threats. Her post not only downplayed the nature of those threats, but also explained that those who had called for her expulsion from Camp Edwards were “tacitly” condoning those who had threatened her.

Well, frankly, that’s just stupid.

Does that mean that anyone who is pro-environment is tacitly endorsing the actions of groups like Earth First when they spike trees to break chain saws and cripple loggers? Hardly.

Does that mean that people who advocate for higher CAFE standards or electric cars are tacitly endorsing the actions of the Earth Liberation Front? Nope.

Bowers (and McEwan to a lesser extent) are guilty of exactly that of which they accuse Republicans – attempting to equate one very reasonable action to the irrational acts of a fringe element. In doing so, they seek to persuade others against the rational act.

For Catholics to oppose the continued employment of Marcotte and McEwan was a perfectly reasonable and legitimate act. Anyone who issued threats, or engaged in fringe behavior should be recognized as the fringe. Those actions are beyond the pale.

Bowers, on the other hand, uses McEwan’s post to engage in the worst possible form of misdirection. Threats against her are bad. Claiming that those threats represent some sort of sustained conscious campaign on behalf of the Republican Party is just ridiculous.

Terrorism and the threat of violence against American citizens remains a key political tool for the American right-wing. This is true both in the sense of conservatives and Republicans trying to scare people into voting for them / justifying their legislative agenda, and in the sense of actual terrorism and threats of violence against Democrats and progressives who stand in their way… physical violence and the threat of physical violence is still successfully being employed as a political tactic against individual progressives in America.

If you want to look at the use of terrorism as a political tool, fine. Do it honestly, however. Any discussion of such violence should recognize the role of the left in actual terrorism. The two examples cited above would be good places to start.

Earth First and the ELF have caused significant damages to businesses that are legally operating just as abortion clinics are. ELF was actually identified as the single greatest domestic terror threat until the attacks of 2001. Does Bowers renounce their actions? If so, why doesn’t he recognize the activity of the fringe left as well as the fringe right?

If he doesn’t reject their actions, and believes that the spiking of trees to prevent legal timber gathering, and the acts of arson and vandalism carried out by ELF are legitimate financial attacks (assuming they don’t hurt of kill anyone), then surely he believes abortion clinic bombings done after hours, when the clinics are empty, would be perfectly legitimate too. Right?

Unfortunately, he doesn’t spread his distaste of violence and threats of it around evenly. I suspect if you scan through the comments on MyDD, you’ll probably find more than a handful of veiled threats against the Bush Administration. Does he denounce all of his readers for the stupid comments of a few? If he did, maybe his claims about the fringe of the Republican Party would ring true, rather than hollow.

Why didn’t the CIA and FBI realize the extent of bin Laden’s involvement in terrorism? Because Clinton never took the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center sufficiently seriously. He never visited the site and his only public comment was to caution against “over-reaction.” In his pre-9/11 memoirs, George Stephanopoulos confirms that he and others on the staff saw it as a “failed bombing” and noted that it was far from topic A at the White House. Rather than the full-court press that the first terror attack on American soil deserved, Clinton let the investigation be handled by the FBI on location in New York without making it the national emergency it actually was.

The Washington Times and NY Post react with Condi and further info to discredit the claims Clinton made. (Does anyone care to wager the mainstream media will challenge his claims like this?)

On the NIE front, the Washington Post might as well have issued a special edition with wall-to-wall NIE coverage. E.J. Dionne uses it to bolster his argument that the protesters of today are no ‘hippie radicals’ and the GOP faces trouble in November.

That is why news over the weekend of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is especially troublesome for Republican electoral chances. By finding that the war in Iraq has encouraged global terrorism and spawned a new generation of Islamic radicals, the report by 16 government intelligence services undercuts the administration’s central argument that the Iraq war has made the United States safer.

Michael Abramowitz and Jonathan Weisman continue the WaPo NIE highlight reel and cover the Democrats use of the report in their electoral strategy.

Democratic lawmakers yesterday seized on elements of a new classified intelligence assessment as validation of their long-standing position that the Iraq war has been a distraction from the broader war against terrorists, seeing the new study as an opportunity to undermine President Bush’s determined offensive to turn terrorism to political advantage in the midterm elections.

What I find interesting about the Democrat tactic is the fact that they’re arguing the Iraq War is a distraction from terrorism, but ignoring the fact that our presence in Afghanistan – widely perceived to be legitimate by comparison – is also fueling the fire. We’re coming under increasing attack in Afghanistan, and that is an ‘approved’ front in the war on terror.

If the difference between the two is our internal comfort level, someone should let the insurgents know they need to lay off in Kabul because our presence has been self-justified.

The Wall Street Journal probably has the best solution. They suggest the government simply declassify the report – allowing for redaction or summary of sensitive information that would reveal sources or methods.

It’s impossible to know how true this report is, of course, since the NIE itself hasn’t been leaked. The reports are based on what sources claim the NIE says, but we don’t know who those sources are and what motivations they might have. Since their spin coincides rather conveniently with the argument made by Democratic critics of the war, and since this leak has also conveniently sprung in high campaign season, wise readers will be skeptical.

Releasing the NIE is probably the best idea. It’s not like most of what’s in the report would be news to anyone.

The whole debate on the NIE is actually a good case study in how to reduce a problem. The argument seems to be whether the bad guys like us less today than they did before we went into Iraq. They had killed 3,000 Americans in one morning before we went into the Middle East – claiming to still be offended by our efforts in Iraq circa 1991 and our continuing presence in Saudi Arabia – but all of that is lost.

The whole discussion has come down to a debate over “degrees of hate”. It’s kind of stupid if you think about it. Does it matter how much they hate us? If they were flying planes into buildings before they really, really hated us, doesn’t that tell us that we are even more justified in trying to eradicate the threat?

I think it does.

There is a dichotomy between two camps with differing views of America. One sees America as a country of and for itself, which was attacked without provocation by a hidden enemy. To respond to that requires firm resolve and an unshakable belief that what we’re doing is right, even if we’re doing it wrong.

The other side sees America as the progenitor of its attackers. Our foreign policy choices have bred anger in our attackers and we must address our own failings to stave off their assault. To them, the war in Iraq is yet another example of the failed foreign policy that has led to our current situation. To fight terrorism, they disconnect those who oppose and attack us in Iraq from those that oppose and attack us in New York.

Serious Americans recognize that there is a degree of truth to both arguments and our cause is not helped by both sides marginalizing the other’s beliefs. Our cause is also not helped by talking points that over-simplify the world.

The President, yesterday, broke out just such a talking point.

“Iraq is the central front in this war on terror,” he said. “If we leave the streets of Baghdad before the job is done we will have to face the terrorists in our own cities. We will stay the course. We will help this young Iraqi democracy succeed and victory in Iraq will be a major ideological triumph in the struggle of the 21st century. I firmly believe we’ll succeed.”

This is, to say the least, ridiculous. Does anyone believe the peaceful handover of Baghdad to the Iraqi people will end the worldwide scourge of terror? There was no war in Iraq when we were attacked in 2001. There was no war in Iraq when we were attacked in 1993. To claim that finishing the mission in Iraq will somehow guarantee we are not attacked stateside is a specious claim at best and laughably ignorant at worst.

A serious discussion needs to take place, but the nature of our Attention Deficit Media prevents that. Comments like these also do little to advance that agenda.

His main contention seems to be the Democrats have repeatedly stymied GOP efforts to do the right thing with regard to foreign policy simply because it was politically expedient for them to do so. As examples he cites the Dubai Port deal, the planned boycott of Maliki’s address to Congress, and the amnesty program granted to insurgents in Iraq who had been accused of killing US troops there.

In every case, he points to the administration’s actions as being in the right, and the Democrats as merely pandering for partisan gain. He’s wrong on both counts.

The Administration has nobody but themselves to blame for their predicament and the Democrats are only holding Bush to the foreign policy course he charted when he uttered the now infamous chide that ‘if you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.”

Where the Democrats are wrong is in their hypocrisy. The Democrats shouted down those sentiments during the election, but everything they have done to hobble the administration is consistent with that principle.

Take the Dubai ports deal. The united Arab Emirates are a known financial resource for terrorists. They were singled out as such by the investigation into the 9-11 attacks, yet we are supposed to grant them economic deals that disregard their lack of meaningful action on terrorism?

What about the Maliki speech? Beinart argues that Iraq is supposed to challenge our position on Israel to prove he’s not a US stooge. Does Peter really believe their is a Muslim man or woman on the street who is not already convinced that any Iraqi government built, installed, and maintained by our military presence is a lap dog of the US? His challenge to Israel will not prove otherwise. The only outcome of Maliki’s comments would be the continued fostering of radical anti-semitism in the Arab nation.

Finally, the granting of amnesty to Iraqi’s who killed US troops is not only contrary to international and US law, but also creates moral outrage for the families and friends of those killed fighting this war.

Now I believed in the invasion of Iraq and still do, so this is not a pretext to chastise the Administration for an ill-conceived invasion. The only reason I needed to go into Iraq was the overthrow of a man who took sadistic pleasure in killing people. Saddam needed to go and I am damn glad we did it. But I am not willing to suffer the loss of my countrymen at the hands of thugs we liberated to simply let them go free as killers.

All of these beliefs are in line with the Administration’s stated policy, yet they are the positions taken and held by the Democrats. If anyone is acting from a position of political calculation, it is the Administration. It now finds itself in a deteriorating foreign policy situation, and wishes to engage in quick fix diplomacy after telling the people there are no quick fixes.

Israel has every right to defend itself against naked acts of aggression by Hezbollah. Calling on world leaders, regardless of their religious affiliation, to denounce the use of terrorism is something that we did following the attacks of 9-11. If the administration has forgotten that day, and now wishes to encourage terrorist appeasement by our so-called allies, they will have no more strident opposition than mine.

Despite Beinart’s short-sighted belief in conceding our soul for the sake of a simmering middle east – rather than a boiling one – Democrats in this case are taking the correct positions. Sadly, they are positions once held, but now abdicated, by the Administration.

There are several nations (Iran, Syria, North Korea) that have repeatedly called for the outright destruction of the US, Israel, or both. They spend their days trying to identify ways to exterminate us and/or our Jewish allies. There is no appeasement possible, no negotiation that will be honored by people of such hate and single-minded evil. We need to understand that and resolve ourselves to doing what is necessary to protect our nation, and support our allies who seek to defend themselves.

The other thing that is really bugging me is the US citizens who are stuck in Beirut and clamoring for the US government to get them out. I watched the Today show this morning and some woman was bitching about being stuck in the middle of these hostilities and demanding that her government do something faster. The coverage made this out to be another failing on par with the Katrina relief effort.

I hate to point the finger of shame at people that stupid, but here it goes.

This is not New Orleans. This is not American soil. These people have chosen to set up camp in a part of the world that has been unstable politically and at war with itself for the better part of 2,000 years. If the shit hits the fan, and they get a little poo on them, that’s the chance they take by living there. If the government can’t arrange cruise ships to boat their dumb asses out within a 24 hour window, that’s a risk they’ll have to live with if they choose to live in the region.