THE DEMAGOGUE AND THE PIGEON
Way back last month in June, Barack "middle name not permitted to be mentioned" Obama campaigned on the theme of "Change We Can Believe In." Now, several days later, in July, his theme should be "Change We Can't Keep Up With." Abortion, gun control, capital punishment, FISA laws, the status of Jerusalem, faith-based federal programs, public financing of his campaign, welfare, NAFTA and free trade, and his commitment to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United Church have all fallen to reconsideration, re-phrasing, changed rhetorical modulation and other semantic miracles. His Iraq position is currently in the process of glissading from "anti" to "pro" - so we will have to wait a while before saying he has actually changed it. Which brings us as it always does in such circumstances to America's greatest fraud-sniffer, H.L. Mencken. He defined a demagogue as "one who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots."
DOES THE DISHONESTY OF THE US MEDIA HAVE NO BOTTOM?
The New York Times mentioned in a story June 21 that Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, was "in the midst of a major security operation." So what happened? Marie Colvin of the Times of London had an answer Sunday: "American and Iraqi forces are driving al Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror." Al Qaeda was making its "last stand" in Mosul, and now is done, finished, kaput, said Ms. Colvin, who was embedded with the 2nd Iraqi Division for Operation Lion's Roar. The victory is so complete that Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki said Saturday (7/05) his government has defeated the terrorists in Iraq. Defeated. Past tense. Not a word about this "spectacular victory" appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times Sunday, or on the evening network newscasts of ABC, NBC, CBS, or CNN. Well, the New York Times did run a story on the front page Monday about an "epic battle," but it was about a tennis match at Wimbledon.
UPDATES FOR A HAPPY FOURTH
637 million IE Browsers at risk Researchers claim there are 637 million Internet Explorer users at risk, because they are less likely to update their browser for security updates, than Firefox, Safari and Opera users. If this is you, please protect yourself and update now. Independence Day Happy July 4th to all Americans, we have so much to be proud of! People know your Bill of Rights You live in the land of the free, please know your rights! Syllabus of SCOTUS in District of Columbia ET AL. V. HELLER No. 07-290. Argued March 18, 2008-Decides June 26, 2008. America The Beautiful Katharine Lee Bates first wrote this song in 1913. We've all sung the first stanza many times - but there are seven more. For all the stanzas and a history about her, click on the link above.
FREEDOM’S BIRTHDAY 2008
[This was originally in To The Point for July 4, 2004. This is the version for 2008. We at To The Point wish all of you an exceedingly happy Fourth of July.] July 4th is Freedom's Birthday. My suggestion is, amidst the fireworks and barbeques and flag-waving fun - all of which are great - that you take the time to feel good about America. Put aside your worries and concerns, your frustrations and fears about what's wrong with America. For one day, forget the negative - put it all in a zip-lock bag, hide it in the back of the freezer, and pretend it doesn't exist. You travel around the world and you see the remnants of history's great civilizations. You walk through the preserved wreckage of Rome's Imperial Forum or the Acropolis of Ancient Athens and you wonder -- what was it really like to be here when these civilizations were at their peak? You can do that today in Washington DC -- or your hometown. We Americans are privileged to live in one of history's supreme moments. We Americans are participants in one of history's greatest civilizations in its prime. Someday in some future epoch, history will have moved on, and there will be distant centuries between that time and the American Era. People will then look upon America as we do upon ancient Egypt or Greece, and will do so with same wonder and awe. I suggest you look upon America with that wonder and awe now.
EAST OF THE DEAD SEA
The 2,000 year-old Rose Red City of Petra was the religious center of an ancient desert people named Nabataeans. They didn't build huge temples such as this - they carved them out of cliffs of rose-red sandstone in their hidden mountain sanctuary east of the Dead Sea. Their capital was the ancient city of Ammon, known to the Greeks and Romans as Philadelphia, after the Hellenic ruler of Egypt, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (309-246 BC). Nabataea flourished until it was conquered by the Roman Emperor Trajan (53-117 AD). The Nabataeans converted to Christianity and lived as peaceful farmers until they were overrun by Arab invaders in the 7th century who forced them to submit to Islam. They vanished, and so did any memory of Petra until it was discovered by a Swiss explorer, Johann Burckhardt, in 1812. Ammon, pronounced Amman (ah-man vs. ah-mone) by the Arabs, had been reduced to rubble by a series of earthquakes during the Middle Ages, and remained a small village with some Roman ruins for centuries. The entire area east of the Dead Sea was a forgotten desert wasteland, incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in the early 1500s and ignored by the Sultans in Istanbul. And then the history that continues to shake our world today began...
DEMOCRATS WRONG, AL QAEDA RIGHT ON IRAQ
There hasn't been a terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001. The number of experts who, on Sept. 12, 2001, would have predicted this happy state of affairs is precisely zero. The principal reason why we've been safe at home these last seven years has been the war in Iraq. Sen. Obama describes the war in Iraq as a "distraction" from the war on terror. But that's not how al Qaeda saw it. In a 2005 letter to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, al Qaeda's number two, Ayman al Zawahiri, described Iraq as "the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era." A few months earlier (December, 2004), Osama bin Laden himself said in an audiotape: "The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries; the Islamic nation on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other. It is either victory and glory or misery and humiliation." For al Qaeda, Iraq has turned out to be misery and humiliation. To the great disappointment of Democrats.
MASTER OF THE O-TURN
It's a good thing many of Barack Hussein Obama's supporters don't care much about issues, because their candidate has been changing his position on them with dizzying speed. "Barack Obama aligned himself with welfare reform on Monday, launching a television ad which touts the way the overhaul 'slashed rolls by 80 percent'," ABC News reported July 1. "Obama leaves out, however, that he was against the 1996 federal legislation which precipitated the caseload reduction." When the Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia's ban on handgun ownership June 26, Sen. Obama said he supported the decision of the 5-4 majority. But last November he told the Chicago Tribune he thought the DC handgun ban was constitutional. While in the state legislature, he proposed legislation that would, in effect, have banned handguns in Illinois. There are a lot more examples. As a flip-flopper, Obama leaves John Kerry in the dust. He's such a "master of the U-turn" that an Obama political U-turn should be called an O-turn.
A PESHMERGA’S QUESTION
This is Mir Mokhsen, a Peshmerga or Kurdish freedom fighter who has fought in hundreds of battles for Kurdish freedom for half a century. He has faced Saddam Hussein's tanks, Russian-made helicopter gunships, chemical weapons and poison gas, the unspeakable brutality of Saddam's soldiers countless times - and survived. He has never given up. Never. This revered warrior has a question for you: As an American, the freedom he has risked his life so much for has been given to you - so what are you doing to preserve it? Mir Mokhsen has heard that there will be a gathering of Americans dedicated to preserving their freedom in Boston at the end of August. He wishes he could attend, but he belongs in the mountains of his beloved Kurdistan. You, on the other hand, belong in Boston, where the American Revolution began. The To The Point Revolutionary Rendezvous is August 22-24. Don't disappoint Mir Mokhsen. Don't disappoint yourself. Be there and join your fellow TTP'ers for a revolutionary good time. To participate, click on the Rendezvous box in the TTP left side bar, and call TTP General Manager Miko de los Reyes at 703-992-4529 or [email protected]. Please call or email Miko right away. No procrastinating. That means now! After all, you wouldn't want Mir Mokhsen to think you're not a freedom fighter, would you?
CONGRESSMEN WITHOUT A MIRROR
Are you aware that without speculators, most food and physical products would cost a whole lot more? Because many members of Congress don't possess a mirror, they have been looking for the villain who is causing gasoline prices to soar. A large number, mostly but not exclusively Democrats, have decided that speculators, or at least "greedy speculators," are the villains. Many members of Congress make up "solutions" to things they do not understand and cause problems where there are none or make real problems worse, which explains the current run-up in gasoline prices.
INCONVENIENT FACTS ARE IRRELEVANT FOR GLOWARMERS
You've probably heard the permanent ice cap in the Arctic has receded considerably, because the people who are worried about global warming talk about it all the time. You may not know ice in Antarctica is growing. This is an awkward topic for global warming alarmists, because if global warming were, ah, global, this shouldn't be happening. So how could ice be melting at the north pole while it's building up at the south? There's a good reason, but as it's natural and not man-made, glowarming alarmists and their journalistic cheerleaders are paying no attention to it.