Obama, after tittering and poo-poohing the notion of going to Iraq with Mac, is thinking about it after all.

(Presumably he’ll need a Pashto interpreter).

Why would that be?

Steam Valve at TvM notes something I’ve posted before on Memorial day:

It is the Soldier, not the minister
Who has given us freedom of religion.

It is the Soldier, not the reporter
Who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the Soldier, not the poet
Who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer
Who has given us freedom to protest.

It is the Soldier, not the lawyer
Who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the Soldier, not the politician
Who has given us the right to vote.

It is the Soldier who salutes the flag,
Who serves beneath the flag,
And whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who allows the protester to burn the flag.

It is, of course, Memorial Day – the day when Americans pay homage to those who’ve died defending this country.

Along with remembering the sacrifice, though we need to remember the results of the sacrifices of so many of our nation’s heroes; our independence; the credibility of our independence; expansion, of course; the sanctity of the union and of human freedom;

the viability of freedom against industrial fascism;

the viability of the free world itself.

But what of the 4,000+ Americans who’ve died in our current war? There are those who insist their sacrifice is in vain – who would make that view our national policy, which would, indeed, be a national nightmare.

And yet, John Hinderaker shows us, that is not the case. The world before 9/11 was a dangerous place:

1988
February: Marine Corps Lt. Colonel Higgens, Chief of the U.N. Truce Force, was kidnapped and murdered by Hezbollah.

December: Pan Am flight 103 from London to New York was blown up over Scotland, killing 270 people, including 35 from Syracuse University and a number of American military personnel.

1991
November: American University in Beirut bombed.

1993
January: A Pakistani terrorist opened fire outside CIA headquarters, killing two agents and wounding three.

February: World Trade Center bombed, killing six and injuring more than 1,000.

1995
January: Operation Bojinka, Osama bin Laden’s plan to blow up 12 airliners over the Pacific Ocean, discovered.

November: Five Americans killed in attack on a U.S. Army office in Saudi Arabia.

1996
June: Truck bomb at Khobar Towers kills 19 American servicemen and injures 240.

June: Terrorist opens fire at top of Empire State Building, killing one.

1997
February: Palestinian opens fire at top of Empire State Building, killing one and wounding more than a dozen.

November: Terrorists murder four American oil company employees in Pakistan.

1998
January: U.S. Embassy in Peru bombed.

August: Simultaneous bomb attacks on U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killed more than 300 people and injured over 5,000.

1999
October: Egypt Air flight 990 crashed off the coast of Massachusetts, killing 100 Americans among the more than 200 on board; the pilot yelled “Allahu Akbar!” as he steered the airplane into the ocean.

2000
October: A suicide boat exploded next to the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 American sailors and injuring 39.

2001
September: Terrorists with four hijacked airplanes kill around 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

December: Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” tries to blow up a transatlantic flight, but is stopped by passengers.

And since then?

The September 11 attack was a propaganda triumph for al Qaeda, celebrated by a dismaying number of Muslims around the world. Everyone expected that it would draw more Muslims to bin Laden’s cause and that more such attacks would follow.

In fact, though, what happened was quite different: the pace of successful jihadist attacks against the United States slowed, decelerated further after the onset of the Iraq war, and has now dwindled to essentially zero. Here is the record:

2002
October: Diplomat Laurence Foley murdered in Jordan, in an operation planned, directed and financed by Zarqawi in Iraq, perhaps with the complicity of Saddam’s government.

2003
May: Suicide bombers killed 10 Americans, and killed and wounded many others, at housing compounds for westerners in Saudi Arabia.

October: More bombings of United States housing compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia killed 26 and injured 160.

2004
There were no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.

2005
There were no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.

2006
There were no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.

2007
There were no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.

2008
So far, there have been no successful attacks inside the United States or against American interests abroad.

When you remember what the world looked like on September 12 – rumors of more attacks, the US embarking on an invasion of a nation that had played a disproportionate role in gutting the USSR, visions of a big chunk of the world dancing in the streets at the sight of the towers falling – it seems incredible that we’ve gotten to this point.

And we didn’t get here by prostrating ourselves in front of our enemies, or via diplomacy for that matter.

So this Memorial Day, remember those who’ve sacrificed everything for this country.

Then, and now.

(more…)

Invading Iraq – so says the opposition – caused thousands of marginalized, angry Moslems to flock to Iraq to join Al Queda.

Where we killed them, mauled them, demoralized them, and killed them some more, to the point where they are a tiny fraction of what they were.

A prolific jihadist sympathizer has posted an ‘explosive’ study on one of the main jihadist websites in which he laments the dire situation that the mujaheddin find themselves in Iraq by citing the steep drop in the number of insurgent operations conducted by the various jihadist groups, most notably Al-Qaeda’s 94 percent decline in operational ability over the last 12 months when only a year and half ago Al-Qaeda accounted for 60 percent of all jihadist activity!

Read, naturally, the whole thing.

(Via Powerline)

The “Anti-War Committee” is hosting a pro-“Palestinian” march this Saturday, to commemorate the exile of the “Palestinians” from Israel.

Unmentioned, of course, will be the fact that this problem could have been solved sixty years ago; the Israelis have always been perfectly willing to co-exist with Palestinians Arabs, provided they weren’t all about throwing Israel into the sea.  Arabs in Israel are currently the only Arabs in the middle east who live under a functional, secure democracy.’

But that means nothing to the local  “peace” movement, who will continue to parlay the racist myth that the Palestinian “Diaspora” is a sign of Zionist racism rather than Arab-government dogmatic opportunism.

They are, as Neal from Loyal Opposition puts it, perpetrating a fraud on the spectators.  He describes the situation:

The Anti War Committee believes that “Israel as an illegitimate apartheid state, and we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for justice and self-determination”. It requires no stretch of the imagination the AWC is calling for the destruction of Israel and murder of the Jews – the stated goal of Hamas, Hizb’Allah, Fatah, Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

These are the useful idiots that will be marching in the streets of Minneapolis on Saturday: sympathizers to the slaughter of every Jew in Israel. By acting as mouthpieces and spreading their vile propaganda, the AWC, PSC, and the rest of their mob are complicit.

The progeny of Grand Mufti Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini will slither up Hennepin Avenue, with their Palestinian jihadist flags and kuffiyehs, bleating about how horrible it is for Israel to defend itself against the jihadist armies who would see the Jews expunged from the Earth itself. Again – and again – and again – they will spew their ahistoric slander upon our streets and pollute our eyes with their libels, until, at Loring Park, anti-Semitic excrement and obscurantists will retch their Jew hating venom.

Of course, there’s a short view, and a long view:

G-d will look down upon the blasphemers of civilization and decency and He will know what must be done.

G-d, in His infinite wisdom, shall eventually cause the rains to fall and the Park will be cleansed, and the Jew haters will be as dust in years hence.

The trees and flowers will bloom, the grass will grow, and the birds shall sing.

And the Jews will still be here.

Speaking of perpetrating frauds – the Minneapolis E-“Democracy” discussion forum, run by MinnPost writer David Brauer – allows the Anti-War Committee to post announcements for the demonstration, but refuses to allow Neal to expose the other side of the issue.  This is of a piece with E-“Democracy”‘s bigotry on issue after issue; suffice to say that if they get any tax money, it needs to be stopped.

A commenter yesterday broke into an unrelated thread (as is his wont) to demand that I write about Iraq and Afghanistan.

OK.

We’re winning in Iraq. The tide turned during the surge, and it’ll stay turned. Iraq’s fractious politlcs will take years to settle, and Al Quaeda and the Ba’athists will try to mount a campaign of harassment to try to affect the US election (because the most important front in that war, since the very beginning, has been inside the beltway.

And yes – we’ll likely be in Iraq for a long time, if not 100 years. People who read and understand little enough of history to be liberals point at Senator McCain’s statement and snigger.

The more curious among them – the ones that dont’ get all their news from Jon Stewart – point out that comparisons to our 60+ year involvements in Germany, Italy, Korea and Japan aren’t the same – and they’re right. Counterinsurgency is a very different cat to skin. The Iraq war is much more like the Philippines; a very brief conventional war (and accomplished mission!), followed by six years of “hot” insurgency and years of low-level troubles from groups that were both unrelated to and utterly provoked by the original rulers, and 35 years of military involvement (that dovetailed into another war that headed off the planned handover of all sovereignty by five years). It’s also got a lot more in common with El Salvador – where an asymmetric assortment of US troops, diplomats, contractors and aid workers conducted a compaign that brought medical care, money and security to the Salvadoran hinterlands, and the rule of law to the Salvadoran military, government, and eventually society as a whole.

Afghanistan is still very much in the balance. More on that later.

So – ask a question, get an answer. For whatever it’s worth.

The Minnesota Monitor is a financial first cousin of Peruvian terrorists?

The Iron Matron at KAR has the story:

Found today at the Capital Research Center:

Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that George Soros’s Open Society Institute has been funding terrorism. In a column entitled Friends of Terror in Peru, O’Grady notes that

Thursday’s vote by the European Parliament to take the Peruvian guerrilla group known as the Tupac Amaru (aka MRTA) off its terrorist list has Peru in an uproar. For good reason: The MRTA is notorious for kidnapping, torturing and murdering civilians to advance its political agenda. More recently, Peruvian officials have linked it to Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian Movement,” which seeks to destabilize democracies in Latin America, and to the Colombian rebel group FARC…

…Meanwhile the work of other foreign-funded NGOs in the interest of terrorist organizations warrants urgent attention. Take the Peruvian “human-rights” group Aprodeh, which labored in Europe to get the MRTA off the terrorist list there, even though Peru still considers it a grave threat to its security.

…In 2007, according to government records, Aprodeh received funding from Oxfam America, George Soros’s Open Society, the John Merck Foundation, the city of Barcelona, the Dutch embassy and a U.S. government agency called the Inter-American Foundation, among others. On Friday, the Peruvian government asked Aprodeh to explain how its NGO status allows it to intervene on behalf of terrorists, as it did in the European Parliament… [emphasis added]

Soros funds MN Monitor and Aprodeh?!???

Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci adds:

You forgot to close the circle!

(Don’t worry – I took a screengrab just in case).

The Center for “Independent” Media; a gift that just keeps on giving.

My thesis: The Minnesota Monitor has changed missions in the past few months; where they were once a dubiously competent but utterly earnest attempt at a “news” organization, it is now a walz-to-the-wall propaganda tool of the left.

So let’s dip our toes into a story that’s just a tad off the Monitor’s turf and/or expertise; the Iraq war.

Compare, contrast, and ascribe credibility via whatever standards you use to filter the news in this asymmetric world:

The Monitor’s source – David Schultz, Hamline professor also known as “The Larry Jacobs of the “Wellstone was a Moderate” set”, reports from his tenured office in Saint Paul:

“That should have been the headline in the media: Surge failed. But it didn’t play. It almost reminds me of when Oliver North testified before Congress back in the ’80s. He showed up with a chest of medals and everyone was dazzled by his presence. I just wonder if the media was similarly dazzled by seeing this general, and [was] unwilling to dig beneath.”

Nattering about semantics and subtext with a military speaker is like dissecting the underlying leitmotif of a hockey game; soldiers don’t work for speaker points. At any rate – score one “against” from Dave Schultz – plush-bottom yoohoo from an obscure college who was likely declaring the war lost before 9/11, and will be declaring it lost years after the last shot is fired in anger.
In the other corner,M ichael Yon – former Green Beret, who’s been reporting from Iraq for the past couple of years, a guy who had no problem bucking the Administration’s line on the war when it was needed (earning a ban from the Sean Hannity Show, and more power to him), says (among many other things – read the whole thing):

Equally misguided were some senators’ attempts to use Gen. Petraeus’s statement, that there could be no purely military solution in Iraq, to dismiss our soldiers’ achievements as “merely” military. In a successful counterinsurgency it is impossible to separate military and political success. The Sunni “awakening” was not primarily a military event any more than it was “bribery.” It was a political event with enormous military benefits.

The huge drop in roadside bombings is also a political success – because the bombings were political events. It is not possible to bury a tank-busting 1,500-pound bomb in a neighborhood street without the neighbors noticing. Since the military cannot watch every road during every hour of the day (that would be a purely military solution), whether the bomb kills soldiers depends on whether the neighbors warn the soldiers or cover for the terrorists. Once they mostly stood silent; today they tend to pick up their cell phones and call the Americans. Even in big “kinetic” military operations like the taking of Baqubah in June 2007, politics was crucial. Casualties were a fraction of what we expected because, block-by-block, the citizens told our guys where to find the bad guys. I was there; I saw it.

The Iraqi central government is unsatisfactory at best. But the grass-roots political progress of the past year has been extraordinary – and is directly measurable in the drop in casualties.

Read the whole thing (and Yon’s interview with Glen Reynolds is worth a listen, too).

Compare. Contrast.

Place your bets.

The fourth Medal of Honor of the Iraq War (CORRECTION: the third, actually) was presented yesterday, to Navy Seal Mike Monsoor.

From the President’s remarks:

In May 2006, Mike and another SEAL ran into the line of fire to save a wounded teammate. With bullets flying all around them, Mike returned fire with one hand while helping pull the injured man to safety with the other. In a dream about the incident months later, the wounded SEAL envisioned Mike coming to the rescue with wings on his shoulders.

On Saint Michael’s Day — September 29, 2006 — Michael Monsoor would make the ultimate sacrifice. Mike and two teammates had taken position on the outcropping of a rooftop when an insurgent grenade bounced off Mike’s chest and landed on the roof. Mike had a clear chance to escape, but he realized that the other two SEALs did not. In that terrible moment, he had two options — to save himself, or to save his friends. For Mike, this was no choice at all. He threw himself onto the grenade, and absorbed the blast with his body. One of the survivors puts it this way: “Mikey looked death in the face that day and said, ‘You cannot take my brothers. I will go in their stead.’”

His brothers in arms noticed, of course:

Perhaps the greatest tribute to Mike’s life is the way different service members all across the world responded to his death. Army soldiers in Ramadi hosted a memorial service for the valiant man who had fought beside them. Iraqi Army scouts — whom Mike helped train — lowered their flag, and sent it to his parents. Nearly every SEAL on the West Coast turned out for Mike’s funeral in California. As the SEALs filed past the casket, they removed their golden tridents from their uniforms, pressed them onto the walls of the coffin. The procession went on nearly half an hour. And when it was all over, the simple wooden coffin had become a gold-plated memorial to a hero who will never be forgotten.

Read the whole thing, of course.

Oddly, the New York Times has yet to cover the story. (UPDATE: They covered it, eventually. As of 6PM Central last night, when I originally wrote this piece, they had not).

Question for Nick Coleman:  In society today, high school students are exposed to just about everything adults are.  Forget about sex and violence and a cynical Hollywood and Madison Avenue, which treats ’em like ripe marketing targets, hypersexualized little ripe sucks.

Thanks to the hyper-left orientation of the Minnesota Federation of Teachers and the educational academy, they also get a steady diet of political correctness and the DFL line on issue after issue.  I used to pay my kids a buck for every piece of political indoctrination they brought home from school – and they made out pretty well.

Schools bus students to pro-teachers’ union lobbying events, on school time.  More cynically still, many school districts are proposing “community service” “requirements” that would make students earn part of their graduation requirements by…providing free labor for “community” non-profits.  On questioning, I got proponents to admit that the groups they had in mind included ACORN, the Sierra Club, Clean Water Action, NARAL and the like – but not, naturally, dissenting groups; a kid who believed in Second Amendment rights couldn’t earn social studies credit interning with the NRA, for example.

Whatever.

Anyway – Nick Coleman, a la Captain Renault, is was shocked, shocked to learn that politics were involved in this past week’s “Vets for Freedom” rally.  Scott Johnson pretty well eviscerates Coleman’s column:

Coleman never contacted Hegseth to give him the opportunity to address the allegation that VFF is or was a Republican front group. And he didn’t bother to show up for any of the local appearances the group made in town on Tuesday. Had he done either, he would have discovered that VFF is the brainchild of (mostly decorated) Iraq war combat vets David Bellavia, Knox Nunnally, Mark Seavey, Joe Dan Worley, and Wade Zirkle — not a White House operative among them. They joined together on their own impetus to rally support on the home front for victory in Iraq against what they saw as the miselading portrait of the war painted in media organs such as, well, the Star Tribune.

VFF seeks political support for the objective of victory in Iraq. Thus its expression of gratitude to Senator Coleman and congressional Democrats such as Brian Baird (D, WA) and Jim Marshall (D, GA) who have heard the group out and come to share its point-of-view. The assertion that it is a partisan organization is a partisan lie.

More cynical still?  Coleman briefly mentioned the group of “anti-war” activists who hounded Flake High in to politically-correct submission.  But he mentions not a word of their intensely political motivation of the “anti-war” groups.

Dave Thul – an actual Iraq veteran – writes an excellent piece on his interchange with Karl “Howlin’ Mad” Bremer, a man who’s spent the last ten years of his life dedicated to attacking Rep. Michele Bachmann.  (Although various conservative commentators have linked Bremer to the campaign of harassment that caused Flake High to shut the Veterans for Freedom down, Bremer disclaims any direct involvement in the campaign.  He also notes that he is himself a veteran, and that he’s been harassed as a result of the belief that he’s been involved.  While I’ve condemned Bremer’s monomaniacal focus on Rep. Bachmann, and his frequently yellow and self-indulgent “journalism”, and think that he is the personification of the “bad speech” that the First Amendment bids us to provide “more better speech” to counter, I condemn any personal harassment, and salute his service as an MP back in the seventies).

Read Thul’s piece.  And think about what the public schools teach every single day.  And ask yourself – while they pay lip service to their alleged “mission” of creating citizens who are capable of participating in our civil society, when was the last time you actually saw them exposing kids to any idea that dissented from the DFL’s platform?

A few days ago, many of us in the local center-right blogosphere got a good laugh at a local leftypundit’s declaration “if you say you’re not a racist, you are”.

Apparently the corollary is “if you negotiate carefully and in good faith to make sure that a potentially-political event is non-political,  you are political”.

Or so Nick Coleman would have you “think”:

Tuesday’s cancellation of a visit to Forest Lake High School by Iraq War veterans in a giant bus labeled “Vets For Freedom National Heroes Tour” produced a bonanza of outraged media reports:

“Heroes banned by School! Minnesota hates the Heroes!”

Or maybe a Minnesota school was just trying to keep its students from becoming pawns in a political game.

There would not have been much outrage if that big bus, instead of saying “Heroes Tour,” had been painted to say “Republican Tour to Shore Up the Pro-War Vote.” But that would have been an honest paint job.

And it would have made clear why Forest Lake Principal Steve Massey — now vilified by right wing radio and TV — did what he did.

Massey and Forest Lake — a patriotic small town with a Fourth of July parade where spectators stand and doff their hats and put their right hands over their hearts every single time an American flag goes by — are getting a bum rap.

The visit to Forest Lake was worked out by Massey and Forest Lake alum Pete Hegseth, an Iraq veteran who heads Vets for Freedom. VFF says it is nonpartisan, but the liberal watchdog group the Center for Media and Democracy said it began as a Republican front group managed by White House insiders.

Their plan? According to the Center for Media and Democracy, the plan is to drum up support for the war. The group’s political bent was clear last year when it bought TV ads to thank Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., for supporting the war.

Hey, folks: It’s an election year. Things may get ugly. They sure were in Forest Lake.

Permit me to say something: Vets for Freedom are real vets, their heroics are authentic (but not all heroes support the war) and their right to their opinion is unquestioned.

But uniforms and valor should not hide a political agenda. On that, they must be questioned. Even in a school. Especially in a school.

Massey had little choice.

Forest Lake shows how badly we need to talk about this war. And how very hard it is to do.

The term “Hero” gets overused terribly these days – and if there’s a term that should retain its punch, “hero” is it.

Still, to me (and, I think, the vast majority of Americans), anyone that puts his or her life – family, career, X-box, whatever “life” is – on hold for months or years to answer his or her country’s call and duke it out with a horde of very evil people in one of the crappiest places in the world, voluntarily, is some kind of hero.
One of the best interviews the NARN has had in recent months was with David Bellavia, a former Army squad leader who related his experiences (listen) at the Battle of Fallujah in his book, House to House.  If you’re into that sort of thing, this book is the single best book about grunt-level, house-to-house infantry combat I’ve ever read – and I’ve read a few.  It’s harrowing, will leave you with white knuckles, and is impossible to put down.  Just as non-fiction literature alone, it’s an amazing achievement.

But Bellavia’s not done yet. Ed videotaped his appearance at the Veterans For Freedom appearance at the Fort Snelling O Club last night – and noted (with emphasis added)…:

The Army awarded him the Bronze Star and Silver Star, and Hegseth warned us that these were just temporary; he’s under consideration for the Medal of Honor for his bravery, which would make him the first living MoH recipient from this war. He went into a house alone where at least six insurgents had his unit pinned down, and the only one to come out alive was Bellavia.

Bellavia continues his efforts to defeat the enemy in Iraq with a stirring presentation, one that at turns was funny, heartwrenching, inspirational, and defiant.

Watch the vid – and, if  you get a moment, check out the book.

Remember – when the principle at Forest Lake High School cancelled the Vets for Freedom assembly, he claimed the event (which had reportedly agreed to eschew politics), was “too political”.

Well, good heavens – we wouldn’t want politics in our schools, would we?
P-Short, writing at TvM and True North, notes:

Back in 2004, Patty Wetterling held her campaign kickoff announcement at a public school during the school day.  I do not recall complaints from liberals.  I do seem to recall, though my memory could be faulty, the school’s logo prominently featured on the podium or perhaps behind the candidate.

Of course, if you’ve ever had kids in the schools (and not just public ones!), you know the drill; the kids are endlessly drilled in the PC interpretations of Global Warming, the War on Terror, social issues – pretty much everything.  They bus kids to the capitol, to serve as captive picketers for Education Minnesota’s various legislative pushes, at events planned on school time, and that use school functions to recruit parents to help use their kids as political props!

And the Saint Paul Public Schools – they’d never stoop to partisan politics to pander to the politically powerful.  Would they?  (Yes, I know – naming schools after public figures is nothing new.  But there’s a level of reverence for the “Wellstone Legacy” involved at the school, and in the SPPS, that takes it a few notches beyond, say “Roosevelt Elementary”, my elementary mater).

For the record, I honestly don’t care if school present kids with all kinds of politics – indeed, they might learn to be better citizens.

But Flake High’s capitulation had nothing to do with poltics; by all appearances, it was about the “threat” of the wrong kind of politics.

It’s been a bad week for getting to events.

Monday, I wasn’t able to get to see Dennis Prager at the Northland.  King has the report.

Last night, prior commitments prevented me from getting to the Vets for Freedom event at the Fort Snelling O Club.

Ed was there, of course:

The VFF had already scheduled an event for tonight at the Fort Snelling Officers Club, but the event got a lot more publicity from the fiasco in Forest Lake. Fortunately, that’s only about ten minutes away from my home, and another meeting we had tonight got postponed. I went to the club expecting to see a few dozen people in a hastily-arranged setting. Instead, I found around 150 or so people crammed into a standing-room only venue. The crowd had to spill out into the foyer, the bar, and two auxiliary rooms to contain all of the Minnesotans who dropped everything to support the VFF speakers.

I had something I couldn’t drop – so it’s a good thing Ed brought his camera.  He’ll be interviewing…:

Pete Hegseth [he’s been a NARN guest], Jeremiah Workman [from Blackfive], David Bellavia [author of House to House, which is the best book I’ve ever read about life as a grunt infantryman, bar none; he’s also been a NARN guest], and Tim Parks. I got video of Hegseth and Bellavia, as well as John Kline’s address to the group. I’ll be posting each separately tomorrow — and I hope it will prompt people to visit the VFF site and support the group.

As they say, “indeed”.

The news has gotten around – the Vets For Freedom Heroes Tour, a nationwide bus tour of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, was scheduled to appear in Forest Lake to speak at Flake’s High School, alma mater of Pete Hegseth, one of the group’s leaders.

The FLHS principal cancelled the appearance.  Reports indicate the district folded to pressure from anti-war groups, mostly from outside the district.  There’s apparently more news about to break on this story, and True North is covering it.

Chief at TN writes:

Why would I thank the far left for this infringement on free speech? Well I guess that already answers it. They have shown once again who wants freedom of speech to be practiced. Rather than offering to have their own anti-military forum, say on the following week, these people pitch their point until the school concedes to banning these fine young vets tell their story. Nice work.

Why? because once again it gives far more press to Pete Hegseth and his VFF effort. He has already been on the top of the Democrat Underground, Michale Moore’s site, several of the metro area radio shows, and it would be a safe guess, he will be on many national radio and TV shows before the day is over.

So instead of talking to 150 students, a handful of teachers and perhaps some parents, the VFF message is getting broadcast all across the nation for free.

Re-create 68? Yes, please.

There is nothing the Twin Cities’ far-left fears more than other peoples’ freedom of speech.  Eventually, it’s going to cost them. 

Yesterday, in a gratingly stupid post, Steve “Mister Furious” Perry at MNMon said (with emphasis added):

Bribes — more commonly known as signing bonuses — are “one of the main reasons why the Army has been able to meet its recruiting goals in spite of the ongoing specter of serving in Iraq,” [author Michael] Massing writes.

He would seem to be one of those lefties who “supports the troops” because “it’s a good place to put all the people who are too dumb to be me” – but that’s not really the point.

One would think that if the troops were just a bunch of bribed mercenaries, this would not be the case:

According to Army statistics … 70 percent of soldiers eligible to re-enlist in 2006 did so — a re-enlistment rate higher than before Sept. 11, 2001. For the past 10 years, the enlisted retention rates of the Army have exceeded 100 percent. As of last Nov. 13, Army re-enlistment was 137 percent of its stated goal.

You wouldn’t think a poor, “dumb” kid who came to the service out of desperation would stick around after they loaded up on bonuses and swag. Would you?

People have commented, here and elsewhere, about the tone the Monitor has taken since Perry – former City Pages editor back when it was known as a place with some damn fine journalism sprinkled in among the ofay hipsterism – took over. What was once a genial, well-meaning and frequently dumb group propagandablog has turned into a shrill, shallow, gratingly obvious vehicle that would seem to be trying for a slice of the Kos/MyDD market, with a nasty stupid streak and an appetite for uncritically gurgitating press releases.

I’m trying to figure out where it was that Steve “Mister Furious” Perry made the switch from “good journalist and editor” to a sort of intellectual Alexandra Dupre.

I was going to write something about the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

But, as is often the case, Jeff Kouba at TvM does it better.

Excerpt:

Bush was laying out the case that diplomacy means nothing if it isn’t backed up with a stick. Tea and crumpets do not make thugs and terrorists shake in their boots.

Hillary and Barack and the craven party they represent want to go back to those days of feckless diplomacy where dictators quickly figure out that there are no real consequences for aggressive violence. This is really what we’re voting on in November. What are we going to tell the world? Will we say as a nation we still have the resolve to see this through, or we will signal retreat?

Go read it.

The times were dire.

The good people were dispirited.

Evil silliness seemed to reign supreme, and threatened to overwhelm the good people and their lives.

The people cried out for a hero.

And from the east southwest, to the skirl of a plastic Viking horn, one arose:

Join me and other Freedom Loving Americans who stand in support of our Troops at the Lake Street/Marshall Ave. Bridge on the 5th Anniversary of the Liberation of Iraq. The Anti-war Kooks will be there. Let’s show ’em that they do NOT hold the majority opinion.

Bring signs, American Flags, Bells, Horns,

Enge – the irrepressible one-man conservative counterprotest movement – will be gadflying the “peace” protest at the Marshall-Lake Bridge from 5-6 tonight.

Enge was responsible for one of my favorite moments in my radio career. Four years ago, at the helm of the Engemobile (a stake-bed pickup festooned with right-leaning banners and flags, and a big honking sound system), Enge was gadflying one of the Smugosphere’s “peace” protests at Summit and Snelling. He called in to the NARN broadcast, then in progress.

I asked him to turn the Engemobile’s sound system over to AM1280, and drive through the intersection slow down in the middle of the crowd of “peace” demonstrators.

He flipped the station on, cranked the speakers, and maneuvered into the crowd.
“Grow up, take a bath, and get a job!

Great to have ya back, Enge. 5PM is a byatch, but I’ll give it my best shot.

The Minnesota Monitor – the region’s Soros-funded propaganda outlet – has been doing its best, it seems, to burnish its rep as a “news” outlet; hiring Steve “Mister Furious” Perry, getting its staff to write more like reporters and less like snot-nosed polemicists, the whole thing.  Is it too little, too late?  We’ll see…

But at the end of the day, the site shows the danger of being a bought-and-paid for propaganda outlet; when its masters want propaganda distributed, truth is the first casualty.

Andy Birkey’s not a bad guy; he’s a fine writer, and he’s written some good stuff. But he covers the gay beat; while he’s no worse at Second Amendment coverage than anyone else in the local Soros/Leftymedia, this piece, frankly, starts with a basis in complete ignorance, and moves into utter fabrication.

Birkey doesn’t get far.

A National Rifle Association-backed bill is likely to be heard in the House Public Safety Committee this week, possibly Thursday. Dubbed the “Stand Your Ground” bill, HF 498 would make it easier to kill someone in self-defense.

That’s just plain wrong.

Read the bill. And then read this piece I wrote last week, in which I sum up the law-abiding citizen’s burden under current law when claiming self-defense. I spelled out the rules:

In Minnesota, if you choose and need to defend yourself or your family with lethal force, you must meet all four of the following criteria:

1. You can’t be a willing participant in the struggle: you can’t dive into a fist-fight and then shoot your way out of it.
2. You must reasonably fear death or “great bodily harm”: That means “a jury’s gotta buy it”.  And “great bodily harm” has a legal meaning; it means you gotta get hurt very, very badly. 
3. The force you use must be reasonable under the circumstances: If the police come to your house to find a body with no knife or gun, but clutching your TV, Tivo and monitor, you might have trouble with this one.
4. And finally, You must make every reasonable means to de-escalate the confrontation: That means you must back away from the altercation. In the home, that means you have to try to back away. There are limits, of course; if you are in a wheelchair, you’re not expected to develop superhuman strength and agility; if it’s -40 outside and there’s a howling wind and you have an infant, no jury and few prosecutors would fault you for shooting; if you have kids sleeping upstairs and your abusive ex-spouse has come through the door with a chainsaw, backing away is a very relative thing.

The bill changes nothing about the citizen’s obligation to prove that self-defense with lethal force was justified. It merely tightens up a few of the technicalities.

Let’s summarize what’s in SF446, starting in Subdivision 2 (Subd. 1 is definitions, although they’re worth reading as well)

• It clarifies the circumstances under which defending oneself (or someone else) with lethal force is authorized. It changes current law in that it allows self-defense when someone “Reasonably Believes” (i.e. – a jury will buy it) they could sustain “substantial” or “great” bodily harm (#2 in the criteria above). These are legal terms with real meanings; we’ll get to them below. (Subdivision 2)
• Subdivision 3 says an individual “may stand the individual’s ground in any place where the individual has a legal right to be, and may use all force and means, including deadly force, that the individual believes is required to succeed in defense. The individual may meet force with superior force, so long as the individual’s objective is defense.” In other words, as long as you have an otherwise legitimate claim of self-defense, (you meet all four of the criteria above), you are not obligated to retreat from the fight (criterion 4, above)
• Subdivision 4 states that a homeowner may legally presume that someone (unknown to thehomeowner!) who is breaking into their house or car can be presumed to be a potentially lethal threat.
• Subdivision 5 essentially states that the provisions above can be part of a legal claim of self-defense.

And that’s it. It means that a homeowner doesn’t have to figure in his head “if that’s a razor blade, does that mean I only have a fear of “substantial” rather than “great” bodily harm?” (Zealous prosecutors have put otherwise law-abiding citizens in jail over that in the past). It means that a homeowner doesn’t have to parse a burglar, rapist or robber’s intent when they find them in their homes (a friend of mine spent years and tens of thousands of dollars defending himself against a zealous prosecutor for shooting a warning shot at a burglar. In his or her home).

The bill would replace existing statutes that justifies the taking of life in cases where bodily harm or death is eminent, [let’s cut Birkey some slack and assume he means “imminent” – Ed.] and create a broader set of circumstances for which “shooting first” is immune criminal prosecution.

Point of order: In self-defense situations, “shooting second” can be a really bad idea. I’m not sure who in the media came up with the “Shoot First Bill” meme, but it’s kinda a dumb one.

Introduced by State Sen. Pat Pariseau, R-Farmington, and Rep. Tony Cornish, R-Good Thunder, and supported by a number of Republicans, the bill is opposed by members of law enforcement and isn’t likely to pass the DFL-controlled legislature.

Part of the concern over the bill is that it diminishes the duty to retreat — that the first line of defense is not to kill, but to get out of harm’s way if it is safe to do so.

This “concern” is purely potemkin theatrics. There is no “duty to retreat”; to claim self-defense, one must currently show a “reasonable” attempt to de-escalate the conflict. Of course, “reasonable” means reasonable to a jury, sitting in a nice, secure jury room, in daylight, after having a county prosecutor ask them, rhetorically, “don’t you think he could have gone to the second floor, or out the door?” in a nice, brightly-lit courtroom, with all the time they need to make the decision.

Attorneys also fear that the bill could give criminals a license to kill.

“This expansion of the right to use deadly force would apply equally to criminals as to law-abiding citizens,” wrote Dakota County attorney James C. Backstrom. “It would create viable self-defense claims in situations like bar fights. It could allow rival gangs to shoot at one another with impunity. With no duty to retreat, anyone could claim they were responding to a threat of serious harm and were therefore justified in killing a person.”

I’m going to emphasize the next bit rather intensely:

This would seem to be patent misleading bullshit. There is nothing in Cornish/Pariseau’s bills about repealing the first of the four criteria; “one can not be a willing participant.  There’s nothing in the bill that would change any of the other requirements – that the fear of harm and the force used must be “reasonable”, as in “must convince a jury”.  Indeed, the bill states specifically that the law-abiding shooter may only shoot where the individual has a legal right to be (see above!); it says nothing about revoking any of the qualifications for a shooting to be considered self-defense!

I will be seeking comment from County Attorney Backstrom’s office on this statement, which would seem at best to be misleading, and at worst to be flatly at odds with legal reality, and issued for purposes of poltiical propaganda.  (Indeed, Backstrom’s op-ed piece, from which the quote is drawn, would seem to be a good candidate for a serious fisking).   I’ll (try to) be charitable, here; Backstrom could be talking about far-fetched technical defenses (when lawyers say things like “could create viable cases”, it means they’re stretching and stretching hard…).

The Cornish bill would remove some of the county prosecutor’s discretion in prosecuting otherwise law-abiding gun owners; it’d take away some of the need to parse the intent of people breaking into homes and cars.

That is all.

To pass this bill off as anything else with no attempt to get the broader legal and factual context is to serve as a DFL propaganda tool, and to toss aside any claim to journalistic credibility.

(I’d love to have left a comment about this in Birkey’s post – but apparently George Soros isn’t so flush that he’ll buy them a comment engine that actually functions..)

I got a chuckle:

Me: I love that we both wanted to hate [American Idol contestant] David Cook, but ended up loving it.

…

Curly: It was sort of how I felt when I realized the troop surge was actually working.

There are times I wish Glen Reynolds hadn’t made “heh” a blogosphere cliche.

Palestinian gunman kills eight Jewish seminary students:

Witnesses said the gunman went into the library at the Mercaz Harav seminary in the city’s Kiryat Moshe quarter and opened fire.

Here’s the interesting part:  the shooting was stopped…wait for it…wait for it…

…by an armed student:

One of the students, Yitzhak Dadon, reportedly shot the gunman twice before he was finally killed by an off-duty Israeli army officer, who had gone to the school after hearing gunfire.

“I shot him twice in the head,” he told the Reuters news agency.

“He started to sway and then someone else with a rifle fired at him, and he died.”

I have a strong hunch he wasn’t going to be doing any more shooting after that.

Israel has had a policy of allowing lawful concealed carry in schools of all types since an earlier rash of terrorist school shootings.  The rate of school shootings in Israel is vanishingly low.
Why does the American left hate students?

Yesterday’s explosion at the Times Square military recruitment office is still under investigation – but, as Malkin notes, the left in America, by commission and omission, has long been engaged in a campaign against the military, through its most visible representatives, its recruiters.

Those of us watching the far-left’s preparations for the GOP Convention in Saint Paul this fall have been warned to keep an eye out around military recruiting centers, memorials (downtown Saint Paul has several) and anything else with military connotations.

Malkin also covers the continuing investigation into yesterday’s bombing; while the leftymedia continues to back away hard from the notion that it could be left-wing domestic terrorism, Congressional Democrats have been getting mail from someone claiming to be involved.  While in itself this proves nothing, it’s interesting watching the lengths that ABC went to (in the linked post) to avoid mentioning the target of the blast (is journalism really about getting the who, what, when, where, why and how?).

At any rate, watch how this coverage shakes out for cues about how the leftymedia will cover potential violence this fall in Saint Paul.

(Hint:  Poorly)

One of the things we’ve been told to look out for during the Republican National Convention is for the anarkids and the Code Pink harpies to try to blockade or vandalize military recruiting stations and other military-associated landmarks; monuments, armories, and so on.

While the NYPD isn’t saying much about this morning’s bombing at the Times Square recruiting station in New York, John Hinderaker speculates:

The Times Square recruiting station “has been the site of regular antiwar protests since the start of the Iraq war.” Given the increasing virulence of attacks on the military and on military recruiting facilities by antiwar groups like Code Pink, most notably the repeated confrontations in Berkeley, one could speculate that a liberal group is the most likely culprit. So far, however, there are no suspects.

We’ll see, of course; one suspects that the NYPD (and the alphabet soup of federal agencies) will take this pretty seriously.

From Barney Greenwald’s classic soliloquy after the court martial in The Caine Mutiny:

See, while I was studying law ‘n old Keefer here was writing his play for the Theatre Guild, and Willie here was on the playing fields of Prinshton, all that time these birds we call regulars–these stuffy, stupid Prussians, in the Navy and the Army -were manning guns. Course they weren’t doing it to save my mom from Hitler, they’re doing it for dough, like everybody else does what they do. Question is, in the last analysis–last analysis–what do you do for dough? Old Yellowstain, for dough, was standing guard on this fat dumb and happy country of ours. Meantime me, I was advancing little free non-Prussian life for dough. Of course, we figured in those days, only fools go into armed service. Bad pay, no millionaire future, and You can’t call your mind or body your own. Not for sensitive intellectuals. So when all hell broke loose and the Germans started running out of soap and figured, well it’s time to come over and melt down old Mrs. Greenwald–who’s gonna stop them? Not her boy Barney. Can’t stop a Nazi with a lawbook. So I dropped the lawbooks and ran to learn how to fly. Stout fellow. Meantime, and it took a year and a half before I was any good, who was keeping Mama out of the soap dish? Captain Queeg.

I thought about that when I read this.  Medea “Code Pink” Benjamin before, defending Berkeley’s assault on the Marines:

“If it weren’t for people like the people in Berkeley, standing up for what they believe, we’d be living under Hitler.”

Medea Benjamin yesterday:

“While we were at the protest in Berkeley from 12 to 4 PM a white volvo drove by and a man spat upon code pink. They chased him down the street and got into a verbal altercation. The police were NO WHERE in sight. That’s not the best part, ready for this? Medea Benjamin yelled and I quote “Marines!” she actually yelled for our help because this man had stepped out of his car.

Perhaps a mistake?  Something lost in translation from human to Code-Pink-ese?

I even asked her if she was yelling Police and she told me “I said Marines” then put her arm around my friend Allen (the Marine vet) Ironic?

Paging Alanis Morissette.  And Jose Ferrer.
(Via Malkin)

I, and some of my friends, got a jolt of perverse satisfaction on the news last year that the Israelis had apparently bombed a Syrian target that, according to some reports, was a nuclear weapons production site.  Some rumors say that North Korean technicians were on the site, and among the casualties.

Bummer.

And now, a car bomb in Damascus, of all places, has erased terror leader Imad Mughniyeh.  Youssef Ibrahim at PJM writes:

Celebrating a car bomb is not the politically correct thing to do.

Yet there is something deeply satisfying about the assassination of Islamofascist terror master Imad Mughniyeh before the stroke of midnight the other day in the central command post of Islamofascist movements inside Damascus, Syria.

Whoever planned it scored a blow so hard, so disturbing, it brought the secret services of Iran, Syria, Hamas and Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah all together into Syria’s capital where they are now trying to figure out what happened.

For the benefit of the lefties who think Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a victim of US arrogance and the real victim of the war on terror, you’ll have to rationalize a few things out of your minds to truly mourn the death of Mughniyeh (quoting Ibrahim) – he’s “a killer of hundreds of Americans including Marines, CIA folks and diplomats, a man whose reach wrecked a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires as well an American oil workers’ housing complex in Saudi Arabia”, not to mention the terror against Lebanese reformers for the past decade or three.  Not to say they won’t make that rationalization, but it might be a speed bump, no?

Ibrahim notes the poetic justice of the occasion:

The Islamofascist association is right to be upset. This is the sort of thing that can spread. For years car bombs made in Damascus have blown up Lebanese nationalists starting in 2005 with a spectacular murder of a Prime Minister and 22 others. He was followed to the grave by scores of Lebanese other victims, parliamentarians, journalists, civil servants and army generals at regular intervals, plus a three month war with ”Fattah Al Islam” a Syrian-trained Islamofascist Palestinian group sent to wage war in Lebanon’s refugee camps last year.

For President Bashar Assad the Damascus call last week was the first time he got return postage. Now new vistas open along with— macabre as it is— a new path, namely that bombings are a game good guys can play too, and very close to where President Assad lives and plans his.

I don’t know who did the job – indeed, given the mercurial nature of terrorist allegiances, it could have been a “friend”, although you’ll forgive me for hoping it was the good guys.

Any port in a storm, as they say…

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is going on trial on Monday for his role in the attacks. The military tribunal starts Monday.

And a big chunk of the American body politic and landed punditry is pretty sure that Mohammed is the one being wronged, here:

On Monday, some six years after 9/11, military prosecutors filed charges against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda’s foreign-operations chief, along with five of his conspirators. They will stand before a military tribunal, and if convicted they could face execution. And as if to prove that the U.S. has lost its seriousness and every sense of proportion, now we are told not that KSM is a killer, but a victim.

The victim, supposedly, of President Bush. Opponents of military commissions (including Barack Obama) want KSM & Co. turned over to the regular civilian courts, or at least to military courts-martial; anything else is said to abridge American freedoms. This attitude is either disingenuous or naïve, or both, because it is tenable only by discounting the nature of the attacks and the enemies who carried them out.

Let’s make this perfectly clear: KSM is a foreign national, whom evidence points to having planned the 9/11 attacks, captured overseas, in action against Americans, America, and the West. The Constitution doesn’t apply to him, any more than it did to Masaharu Homma or Yomiuki Yamashita or Herman Goering. There are generally-accepted procedures, to be sure – and a society that cares about due process needs to ensure that they’re followed – but they have little to do with the Constitution.

He was not in uniform, not a member of a military group, and not a member of a partisan group fighting for its own nation against an occupier, so the Geneva Convention really doesn’t apply.

The military tribunal system is both legal and appropriate. Torture, I’m less sanguine about – but that’s really not the issue here.

The real issue, here, is that a good chunk of American opinion would rather indict the US than Mohammed:

Whether they intend it or not, KSM’s victimologists are dupes in his campaign to undermine the antiterror enterprise. They also risk tearing down the firewall between national security and the civilian courts, where Constitutional principles could easily bend after some future attack to the gravity of national self-defense.

The proceedings are likely to be transparent, with only a limited portion closed to observers. It is true that this could become a forum for claims of childhood trauma, or a platform for grievances against the U.S., as with Zacarias Moussaoui; they also could degenerate into a media carnival. But that has more or less already happened. One virtue of public proceedings is to show that the U.S. is not conducting the Star Chambers of liberal caricature. Another is to reveal the ideology that irrigates al Qaeda’s violence.

The ultimate purpose of the tribunals is to administer justice. It is a strange worldview that considers such tribunals and the death penalty inappropriate for the murders of 2,972 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, and hundreds more world-wide. A society that would not tender justice to a human butcher like KSM is not serious about defending itself.

A guy could be forgiven for having his doubts about that last bit.