Bush lied, ideologies died

Michael J Totten reports:

Iraq is where ideologies go to die. Arab nationalism, Baathism, anti-Americanism, al-Qaidism, Donald Rumsfeldism, and Moqtada al-Sadrism have either died there or are dying. Conventional liberal opinion, more or less correct about the foundering American war effort from 2004 to 2006, has been severely bloodied—along with Iraq’s worst insurgent groups and militias—by General David Petraeus’s leadership of the American troop surge. Even post-9/11 fear of Islam has proven unsustainable for those who regularly interact with ordinary Iraqis.

“Everything dies in Iraq”. “Stench of death overshadows counter-insurgency efforts in Iraq”. “Another month of surge sees the death toll in Iraq continue to rise”.

If you are a journalist wishing to use one of these headlines for an article, contact me and we’ll talk. My fees are very reasonable.

I want a war sim…

Den of Hydralisks urges anyone with an interest in present US military conflicts and/or Starcraft-style real time strategy gaming to read this piece of genius by David Wong. It is all kinds of awesome. I nominate it for web article of the century. Excerpt:

I want that Public Support Meter to rise and fall according to Troops Lost, Length of Conflict, Innocents Killed and Whether or Not There is Anything Else On TV That Week. I want to lose 200 public-support points because, in a war where 8,000 units have been lost, one of my Mutalisks happened to be caught on video accidentally eating one clergyman. Then, later, my destruction of an entire enemy city will go unnoticed because the Nude Zero-Gravity Futureball championship went into overtime.

A little bad press would serve those mutas right for being all pomp and glory up there in the air while we hydras do the dirty work on the ground and get scant credit for it (not that we’re complaining, mind you).

H/T to Dean’s World

Colbert on O’Reilly

I think everyone’s seen this but it’s just that memorable. 

You can easily make the mistake of thinking Colbert is at his best when hosting an interview if you’ve never seen him guesting one XD

Haiku-writing

9/11 Linked
To Iraq, in Politics
If Not in Fact

Inspired by the above almost-Haiku identified by James Taranto as masquerading as a Washington Post headline, I thought I’d try listening to my own poetry muse for a change. Here are a few I came up with. I hope you find them pleasing to your mental ear and soothing to your soul.

Jews, Christians, Muslims
Why can’t we all get along?
The Jews most of all

Bush and bin Laden
A cycle of violence
A cycle of pain

Match made in heaven
Our love will last forever
Al Gore and the tree

Why do they hate us?
Don’t they know hate is a crime?
Live, love, and abort

Serene emptiness
Snowy field of silent white
The page will not load

Caged bird cannot fly
All men desire freedom
OJ Simpson too

Falling autumn leaves
Who will pick them up? Someone?!
Suffocating, help!

Waking in cold sweat
Nightmare of nations come true
Results in, Jeb won

So who else likes to write Haiku?

Protest against free speech!

Surveying the important work my fellow activists are accomplishing is inspiring indeed, and there is no question that we are making a profound difference. We’ve protested against nearly everything that moves, including such wrongs in the world as Bush, the electing of Bush, Republicans, the right wing, capitalism, prisons, the police, rule of law, democracy, progress itself, the American army in Iraq, the American army, America, Americans, armies, Israel, Jews, Jewish religious symbols, the former existence of the World Trade Center, heterosexuality, Bush’s plan, Bush’s poodle, Bush’s cat, Bush’s haircut, and so on. (work-unsafe examples of each of the above can be found here)

But we must bear in mind that all the efforts of nihilism could come to nothing were we to leave out one critical thing.

Those brave patriots who protest against military recruitment and schools everywhere which prohibit the military from opening their mouths anywhere in earshot of a potential young goose-stepper are on to this one thing, I believe. As were those astute Oaklanders who fitly recognized the word ‘marriage’ to be hate speech. As was that teacher last year who encouraged her students to destroy an anti-abortion display. As are all of us who continually call for the clamping of clamorous conservative voices on talk radio.

These were all steps in the right direction, to be sure, but have we gone far enough? Is there more we could be doing?

As Henry David Jefferson once said, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of the tree of liberty to one who is hacking at the root.” Do you get where I’m going with this?

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The information front, yeah

This perpetually distracted, half-baked upstart of a blog doesn’t try to be anyone’s first or last source of analysis on the war on terror, but if there is one message I hope does not go missed by anyone out there who may not have the time to follow the news as closely as we all should, it is this one: Please, do not draw your conclusions solely from what you read and hear from the mainstream media (perhaps best symbolized by the NYT). Our soldiers continue to tell us the very same thing strategy analysts have been saying all along. Not that we are losing the war in Iraq on the ground, no. But that we are getting thoroughly thumped in one very important front of that war.

Bezmenov on ideological subversion

Obviously it was filmed a very long time ago, but I find this interview with ex-KGB agent and defector Yuri Bezmenov fascinating. Here he discusses Soviet efforts to demoralize America through ideological warfare. How successful would you say those efforts were?

“Only about 15% of time, money and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures or psychological warfare.”

Wow. The espionage stuff is all most of us Westerners think of when we recall the Cold War.

From the perspective of the present, the predictions he made regarding the future of our nation seem exaggerated. Whatever else one can say about the welfare state, it hasn’t spelled the doom of America yet. The point of interest is how these memes injected into our system have influenced our political processes, and how they affect our capacity to act as a nation today.

The same user has uploaded additional clips from the interview which can easily be found by following the related links on Youtube.

Random news

Evidence of water on Mars gets stronger and stronger. Let’s hope this brings us one step closer to discovering who built the Face.

What is this? The Canadian Prime Minister refusing to meet with Bono? Am I reading this correctly? Does this guy know who Bono is?? Hello?!! I guarantee there are more people in the world who recognize the name of Bono than recognize whatever the name is of this upstart Canadian fellow. Forget you, Canada!

Church of England threatens legal action against Sony for portraying the interior of the Manchester Cathedral in a violent video game. That should be a fun legal battle to watch. Church of England had better not win.

Bush meets with the Pope. The Pope concludes “nothing positive comes from Iraq”, thus confirming what folks often say about Popes being out of touch with reality. Can he really have not noticed what has been going on in Anbar, Diyala, Salahadin, and Babil?