SCENE:  Mitch BERG is waiting in line at the box office to buy advance tickets to see PJ O’Rourke.

Suddenly, Bill GUNKEL, chairman of the Inver Grove Heights chapter of Former Republicans for Ron Paul, walking by to find a place that sells pancakes, notices BERG.  

GUNKEL:  Hey, Berg!   Ron Paul was right all along about Iraq!

BERG:   Huh?

GUNKEL:  He opposed the war in Iraq from the very beginning.

BERG:  Well, no cigar for that; he opposes the Civil War.

GUNKEL:  Well, yeah for good reason…

BERG:  Before you launch into that, Bill, why doncha tell me what it was that Ron Paul knew about Iraq that the rest of us didn’t?

GUNKEL:  He had no WMDs!

BERG:  OK.  Right. Now – forget for a moment that the authorization to go to war had 23 different separate reasons, grouped into four different categories; Aggressive actions against its neighbors including sponsoring terrorism and paying for suicide bombers in Israel; gross human rights violations, including two separate mass genocides against the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs;  violations of the terms of the 1992 peace accord, and WMDs.  WMDs amounted to three of the 23 reasons for the authorization.

And pretty much everyone in the world that wasn’t regarded as a crank…

GUNKEL:  …hey!

BERG:  Sorry, everyone in the world that wasn’t regarded as a crank and Ron Paul looked at the same evidence that the President did, that showed there were WMDs, and believed it.  Including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Joe Biden.

GUNKEL:  But Ron Paul was right about the WMD!

BERG:  Right.  And almost nobody – none of the world’s major intelligence agencies, diplomatic services or anyone else – agreed.  And as long as Hussein was in power, nobody was going to know any better.

GUNKEL:  So Ron Paul is smarter than all of them!

BERG:  Er, sure.  And how do we know it?

GUNKEL:  Because there were no WMDs.  Or not many.

BERG:  And we know this why?

GUNKEL:  Because we never found any!

BERG:  Who never found any how, or when?

GUNKEL:  Our troops, in Iraq, after…the…  [GUNKEL pauses]

BERG:  In other words, the invasion, and only the invasion, confirmed Ron Paul’s thesis, and without the invasion, there’d have been no foreseeable way to confirm or deny it.

GUNKEL:  Statist RINO!

And SCENE.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In the olden days, honest Democrats praised expertise:

Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz) wrote this about “Terrorism” by Benjamin Netanyahu, released in 1986:

“Few are as well equipped to bring us this message as Netanyahu. He currently serves as Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations. Netanyahu not only distinguished himself as a commander in many operations for his country’s military but served for several years as the executive director of the Jonathan In stitute, a Jerusalem research foundation on terrorism. He has been touched in the most personal way by modern terrorism. His brother, Lt. Jonathan Netanyahu, died leading the historic Entebbe rescue mission and is the namesake of the institute.”

President Obama says Netanyahu lacks credibility because he’s been wrong about Iran before, predicting bad things that haven’t happened yet. Meanwhile, the UN says it can’t finish its inspection because Iran is still lying about its nuclear program

.

Joe Doakes

Just has everything Obama says has a shelf date, so this everything in the Democrat past.

Even if the United States were not being led by the pusillanimous and incompetent Obama administration, it would be high time for Middle Eastern and NATO countries to start picking up some of the burden of dealing, financially and militarily, with the terrorist threat they face.

And time will tell whether this story checks out, or is more than a token effort.

It’s worth noting that the Reggimento San Marco is the Italian version of the Marine Corps.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

NYT concedes Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction after all. But it wasn’t yellowcake uranium, so Bush still lied. So there. Neener, neener.

Joe Doakes

debating the media is a little bit like arguing with an overly precocious eighth grader.

Al-Shabab directly threatens the Mall of America by name:

At the end of the video, a masked man says: “If just a handful of mujahedeen fighters could bring Kenya to a complete standstill for nearly a week, then imagine what the dedicated mujahedeen in the West could do to American — or Jewish-owned shopping centers across the world? What if such an attack were to occur in the Mall of America in Minnesota? Or the West Edmonton Mall in Canada? Or in London’s Oxford Street?”

The man then urges fighters to “hurry up.”

I firmly believe that the vast majority of the Twin Cities’ tens of thousands of Somalis are here to escape their homelands’ ancestral religious squabbles, and live productive lives.

But the numbers of kids, born and raised in Minnesota, who are going back to Somalia, to Syria and Iraq to fight against the west, and against apostate Islam, shows that Muslim teenagers can be just as rebellious as their American neighbors.

The vast majority of Chechens in the US came here to earn a living – but two of the, the Tsarnaev brothers, did not.

The vast majority of Palestinian-Americans, including at least a few of my neighbors, came here to escape the constant miserable conflict in their homeland; but Nidal Hussein created some of his own.

It only takes one or two people to make a “vast peaceful majority” irrelevant.

The rumor spread yesterday that Jordan’s King Abdallah, enraged by the grisly, medieval murder of Jordanian fighter pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh, is personally leading, or even flying, combat missions.

It’s apparently not true, causing at least part of the US media to spring into action against an enemy they hate vastly more than ISIS.  And I can’t imagine many air forces that’d be too keen on having a 53 year old fighter pilot (even if he were rated on combat aircraft, which according to several Arabic newspapers, he’s not; he’s an infantryman who is rated in civilian aircraft and unspecified helicopters), to say nothing of their chief executive flying directly into harm’s way.  .

On the other hand, after six years of a President who can’t be inveigled to condemn extremist Muslim terrorism today without comparing it to Catholic terror from 700 years ago, who equivocates between all sides in every issue (unless it’s Democrat vs. Republican, naturally), who is like hot air in that he equalizes himself across all available intellectual and moral space, I can see why the idea of a leader who leads, who makes moral judgments and personally drops 2000 pound GPS-guided judgment on the guilty, is so seductive.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Why wasn’t President Obama in the photo of world leaders at the massive Paris march protesting the Charlie Hebdo killings?

Maybe he was at the REAL march and missed the fake photo staged at a completely different place?

No, he wasn’t, but I can’t blame him. I wouldn’t have blown off a golf game to fly over for a lame photo op, either.

It’s all Potemkin Villages with these people, nothing is ever what it seems.

Joe Doakes

Potemkin it’s not just a battleship anymore.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When someone says “Not All Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims,” Liberals respond “What about Oklahoma City bombing?”

The Oklahoma City bombing occurred in 1995 – twenty years ago. Since that time, Wikipedia lists nearly 100 terror attacks by Muslims.

The blast in Oklahoma City killed or injured about 800 people. Muslim terrorists killed and injured more than that in following 5 years alone.

McVeigh and Nichols were Lone Wolves, unaffiliated with any larger movement seeking to change American policy. Tim McVeigh was executed and Terry Nichols is serving 161 consecutive life sentences in federal prison. They pose no future risk.

Muslims, on the other hand, commit fresh atrocities with disturbing frequency. They are expressly following a long-range plan to convert America into a Muslim nation under sharia law. Their on-going risk is palpable.

“All Muslims are terrorists” is exaggeration for conversational effect . . . but not much

Joe Doakes

i’m going to disagree with Joe, but only in the last paragraph. It is a big exaggeration.

The worlds two largest Muslim states – India and Indonesia – have very little in the way of secular terror. Or at least not in the sense that you see it in the Middle East. Oh, yes, Hindus and Muslims go added hammer and tongs in India – but that’s less a religious than ethnic dispute. As, indeed, are most “religious wars”.

And while we in the Twin Cities have seen some concerning signs among some Somali immigrants, the vast majority of Muslim immigrants to the United States came here for the same reasons many of our forefathers did; to scape the internal, debilitating, petty squabbling in our ancestral homelands.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Everybody knows warfare has changed since David’s tribe fought Goliath’s tribe.
Persians, Greeks and Romans developed large-group tactics for soldiers and ships.
European nations adapted tactics to weapons (volley fire for muskets, artillery fire when machine guns made marching in rows suicidal, then rapid movement by horse, truck or helicopter to outmaneuver and encircle the enemy).
Earlier generations of warfare depended on draftees forced to obey orders. The Geneva Conventions are based on the notion that common soldiers aren’t the driving intellect behind the war and so should be treated decently when captured.
What to make of groups that don’t fit this model? Take the Vietnam Anti-War “movement:” Students for Democratic Society held teach-ins, Weather Underground bombed government offices while Symbionese Liberation Army robbed banks and blew up police cars . . . all generally intended to change American policy at home and abroad, but fought with no conscript soldiers or top-down organization.
How should we deal with groups united by a common belief, staffed with volunteers, trained and willing to kill to influence policy but wearing no uniforms and following no “Rules of War,” selecting their own targets and loosely affiliated with – but not controlled by – any central authority? American Revolutionary Minutemen. French Resistance. German Wolverines.
Muslims Jihadis?
Joe Doakes

The traditional answer? Fight them with more of the same…

In the days since the Paris Charlie Hebdo and Jewish Deli massacres, it’s become fashionable in media circles to say, in one language or another, “I Am Charlie Hebdo”.

I’m not.

The French paper was sort of like the American satirical institution South Park – with an unhealthy dose of that traditional drug of the European idle elite, mindless and often nihilistic pseudointellectualism.   And among that class’ fatal conceits in the days since the massacre is the idea that free speech will win out over terror.

It’s BS, of course:

Freedom and individual liberty can, and must, win over terror; “The pen is mightier than the sword” could only have been written by someone who never had to bet his life, and certainly not his family’s lives, on it.

Against civil, political opponents, speech is fine; against those who’d kill you, our freedoms need a more aggressive, tangible defense.

But Charlie Hebdo was not the criminals; the terrorists were.

Along with big media outlets like the AP and the NYTimes, I’ve been asked why I don’t run Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons.  Unlike the AP and the Times, I’m not a hypocrite – I don’t get any particular kick out of offending peaceful, law-abiding members of any faith just because I can.  Most Muslims, especially in America, want nothing to do with violent Shi’ite or Wahhabi extremism; I feel no need to piddle on their faith to stick it to terrorists…

…especially because my “beat” in Minnesota, and we have plenty of thin-skinned personality cultists in this state who don’t take satire well:

Anyway – just as the best defense against bad speech is better, louder, good speech (which this blog and my show are), the best defense against a bad guy with a gun remains…:

…a good guy, or gal, with a gun; uniform optional and, in extremis, not strictly necessary.

Satire is many things; it is not bulletproof.

…when Barack Obama was going to “restore respect for this nation” abroad?

Either does he.    The US was absent, in body and spirit, from a rally that even had Mahmoud Abbas and Benyamin Netanyahu walking together.

He really, really is a terrible president.

Some say last week’s attack in Paris underscores a change in terrorist tactics – from high-overhead, difficult attacks on “hard” targets (targets that are in some way defended), like the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, the USS Cole, and even US airliners on 9/11, to “soft targets” like the Nairobi Mall, schools in Pakistan and Nigeria, tourist hotels and synogogues, and rooms full of recalcitrant journalists in cities where guns are banned in fact or effect.

It’s a trend that intelligence officials say makes the fight against terrorist threats more complex and potentially more disturbing because the kinds of attacks now grabbing global headlines require far less planning and are harder to detect and disrupt.

It’s not a new trend, of course; after 9/11, Al Quada attacked a disco in Bali, buses and trains in London and Madrid, and countless other “soft” targets.  And the PLO was massacring Israeli school children in their kibbutz classrooms and buses (the 1970 Avivim Massacre, the Kiryat Shmona massacre, and the Ma’alot Massacre) over forty years ago.

There are those who say the answer is to give police and intelligence even more power than they already have – which makes sense on the one hand, and pushes us further down the slippery slope toward having no freedom at all, in which case the terrorists will have not only won, but they’ll keep killing people anyway.

The Israeli examples are instructive, of course; after the three heart-wrenching massacres I list above (which killed 42 school children altogether), the Israelis started allowing teachers to carry legally-permitted guns in the classroom.  Over time, that morphed into security guards, which I think is a step back, but the point is they turned “soft targets” into “hard targets”.

In parts of the US, “soft targets” are a little harder; many, many people have made themselves into “harder targets” with their legally-permitted firearms, to the chagrin of not a few murderers (spree killers rather than terrorists, although to the would-be victim, the distinction is secondary).

And Minnesota is one of those places with a fairly enlightened civilian carry permit law.  It could be better – see Arizona, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming – but it’s gotten better over the past decade.

So Minnesota targets should be just that little bit “harder”, right?

Oh, no.

(Sad trombone).

Back to the drawing board there.

…when Jerry Falwell brought his squad of goons to the office of Hustler magazine, and killed everyone on the staff when they defamed him?

No?

Hmmmmmmmmm.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

New password standards going into effect on January 1st, no fewer than 8 characters, no more than 16, must contain numbers and special characters. Can’t be anything easy or memorable or significant to me, and can’t be written down.

In other words, my log-on password must be a complex string of gibberish that changes every month. So how am I going to remember it?

I’m guessing asdfjkl; isn’t going to cut it. How about “ihatepasswordsecurity?” Oops, forgot the 1. And the special character @.

All this to protect me from logging into my assigned computer in my own office, to access public data on a public server.

The terrorists have won.

Joe Doakes

if we could get the worlds hackers and spammers to target the terrorists, the war would be over pronto.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Muslim terrorist killed in the Australian siege is being called a “lone-wolf” and not part of an organized terror group.

He’s the latest in a long line, so many that Mark Steyn suggests they form the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves.

A single incident is an incident. Two incidents is a pair, three is a few and twelve is a dozen incidents. All single incidents.

When does a string of incidents become something more, such as a trend or a movement or perhaps even enemy action: when we reach a certain number of “isolated incidents?” Or when we admit to ourselves that they’re not?

Joe Doakes

When?

When a Republican is president, of course.

The Administration’s comforting tale – that terrorism is no longer the centralized juggernaut we faced from the nineties through 2001 – might be as inaccurate as any of the Administration’s other claims:

After 32-year old Canadian Muslim Michael Zehaf-Bibeau stormed the Parliament building in Ottawa, shot a soldier on guard duty fatally in the back, made his way into the Hall of Honor, and opened fire before eventually being gunned down himself, Canadian officials said there was no evidence tying him to Islamic State.

But in late November, Canadian Justice Minister Peter MacKay told me in an interview that not only did the Canadian government believe that Zehaf-Bibeau and Martin Couture-Rouleau, a Muslim who drove over two soldiers only days earlier, were radicalized by the Islamic State, they now suspect both men may have been in direct contact with the group.

“They were influenced by ISIS there is no question,” MacKay told me at the Halifax International Security Forum.

Clearly, the Canadian Justice Minister a conspiracy theorist of some kind.

…inveighs me to pray for a safe outcome for everyone in the siege in Sydney, where latest reports say the police have stormed the Lindt cafe where Iranian cleric named, according to press accounts, Man Monis has been holding between 15-30 hostages.  According to Australian press reports, Monis is on bail after being charged with murder and sexual assault, and has spent the past several years sending hate mail to families of Australian service people killed in action – sort of a Muslim Fred Phelps.

And I do pray for exactly that.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit part of me hopes the sonofabitch got two shots in the head.

UPDATE:  Clearly the entire story is BS.

Mr. Monis, the alleged hostage-taker, was allegedly armed with a pump-action shotgun – which is, at close range, more deadly than any “assault rifle”.  Monis has been convicted of harassment, and was out on bail on murder and sexual assault charges.  In addition, Australia has strict civilian gun control.

There’s just no way a person with Monis’ record could get a gun!  That would be illegal.

…the good old days, back in 2012, when “Al Quaeda was on the run” , bringing an end to the War on Terror Terrorism’s war against us? 

Or when the left’s sole defense goal was “killing Bin Laden”, which – they apparently thought – would end the War on Terror Terrorism’s war against us?

No?

Either do the terrorists. 

Word arrives to us that there’s been a shooting at the Canadian War Memorial, with more shooting apparently inside the Canadian parliament building. 

We are reminded that two days ago, one Canadian soldier was killed and another injured when they were run down by a car in Quebec.  The driver, according to Canadian news sources, had “Jihadist sympathies”.

UPDATE:  Here’s the CBC’s live blog:

UPDATE 2:  From the blog, a CBC reporter tweets:

2 men with long hair and scarves ran off after man wearing ceremonial guard uniform shot at War Monument this morning. #ottnews

UPDATE 3:  Highly unconfirmed reports from Twitter say one shooter is dead.

UPDATE 4: CVT news is rpoerting another shooting on Parliament hill.  This is unconfirmed. 

UPDATE 5:  Reports say “several dozen”, perhaps “30 to 50”, shots were fired in the Parliament after the shooting of the Canadian soldier at the War Memorial.   As of a minute ago, it’s still an active shooter situation.

UPDATE 6:  Following situation on Twitter.  The Ottawa Police don’t have any better luck with perimeters than CTU does on “24”; the perimeter for an apparently second (or more) gunman/men has been widened.  Photos of police searching cars on bridges around Ottawa.

UPDATE 7:  Reports say one shooter is on the roof of a building about a block from Parliament.

UPDATE 8:  A reporter shot this video from inside Parliament as the police found one shooter.

All that marble – the echo alone is a weapon…

I can’t imagine the training it’d take to make one run toward that noise.

UPDATE 9: The shooter in parliament was apparenetly shot by the Sergeant at Arms, a Mr. Kevin Vickers.

UPDATE 10:  The NYTimes reported that the Canadian soldier shot at the War Memorial had died.  This is disputed by Canadian sources.  I’ll bank on the Times being wrong, as always in these situations.

UPDATE 11:  The CBC is naming the shooter as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. 

Clearly a Parté Québécois terrorist.

…then you know you’re bad.

When you’ve got Carter bagging on you from the right on defense and foreign policy, it’s time to whiz on the dogs and call in the fire.

I can write off most of what the Obama Administration has done as stupidity born of extremist ideology, or incompetence. 

But his Administration’s betrayal of the Kurds?  That’s beyond stupid, beyond depraved.  I’ve added emphasis. 

While we spend tens of millions bombing “ISIS oil refineries” that are little than moonshining stills costing thousands of dollars

As these lines are being written, some 400,000 Kurds in and around the town of Kobane in northern Syria, on the Turkish border, are being besieged and assaulted by massed legions of Islamic State killers armed with scores of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and heavy artillery. Against these, the Kurdish defenders have only AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. The Kurds have called on the U.S. to send in air strikes to take out the jihadist forces. In response, the administration sent in two fighter jets Saturday, which destroyed two Islamic State tanks and then flew away.

For all the yapping that both sides are doing about “boots on the ground”, the Kurds are there, and are more than ready and capable of doing the job. 

But can our idiot administration get even that right?   While we pour arms and supplies and aid into the centralized Iraqi army – originally formed to help perpetuate the lunacy of unified Shi’ite/Sunni/Kurdish Iraq that has never existed except as an administrative boundary enforced at gunpoint by successive waves of Ottoman, British and Ba’athist rulers – we’re letting the Peshmerga, the motivated, experienced, capable Kurdish military, die on the vine:      

 The Kurds are begging for arms. The administration has not only refused to send arms, but is exerting pressure both on our NATO allies and on Israel not to send any either. Over 150,000 Kurds have fled their homes to try to escape to Turkey, but they are being blocked at the border by Turkish troops. Meanwhile, Turkey is allowing Islamist reinforcements to enter Syria to join the Islamic State, while Islamist elements of the Free Syrian Army, funded and armed by the United States, have joined forces with the group in the genocidal assault on the Kurdish enclave.

The author, Robert Zubrin, compares the situation with the Warsaw Uprising, where Stalin sat on the banks of the Wisla River across from Warsaw and let the Nazis kill off the Polish freedom fighters for him. 

Mr. “President”:  Get the Turks in line, or kick them out of NATO.  Let NATO and the Israelis arm and help the Kurds, if you’re not smart and brave enough to do it yourself. 

For most of Obama’s cosmic stupidity, I can nod my head and say “see you at election time”.  That’s American politics.

This?  This is depravity. 

And for this?  If you support this clown car of an Administration on this depraved policy, then my contempt for you is a seething, visceral, boiling-hot mass you are not ready to face. 

More on this on the air Saturday.  Much, much more.

… as we teeter on the brink of another war, I urge you to pray for our troops, and spare a couple for our first responders as well; I might also suggest avoiding crowded places, loading hollow points, and getting yourself much better informed about what’s going on in the world.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Remember when all President Obama planned to do was cure the sick, end joblessness, slow the rise of the oceans, heal the planet, end war, secure our nation’s borders and restore our nation’s image abroad?

That was nothing.

Now he’s going to “eliminate the the schism between Sunni and Shia that has been fueling so much of the violence in Syria, in Iraq.”

As Powerline asks:“Whoa! We are going to ‘eliminate the schism between Sunni and Shia?’ The schism that goes back to the 7th Century? And we are going to “eliminate the schism” through diplomacy?”

No. Not “we.” President Barack Obama, possibly assisted by Secretary of State John Kerry. After all they have promised to accomplish so far, why would you have any doubt? Nobel Committee, call your office.

Joe Doakes

In a side note, in re last night’s speech, a friend of mine texted me in re the President saying ISIS – the “Islamic State in Syria” – “wasn’t Muslim” [1]; apparently their name is…

“Innocent Separatists Impacted by Sophistry”.

Naturally.

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama will address the nation Wednesday, September 10th, outlining his plans to fight Islamic terrorists.

Islamic terrorists have hit America twice on September 11th. If they have something lined up and hit us again on Thursday, right after President Obama tells the world his grand plan to fight Islamic terror, the entire world will him revealed as a clueless but arrogant poseur. No Greek playwright would have written a character with that much hubris, the audience wouldn’t have believed it.

Do I want to see American interests hit by terrorists just to see Barack Obama humiliated? As Jack Benny used to say: “I’m thinking.”

Joe Doakes

I get Joe’s point – but I’m not thinking about it.  Of course not. 

The problem, of course, is that the questions “to attack or not to attack?”, and “where and when?”, are questions that belong to those who are on the offensive; those who have what in strategic and tactical circles is called “the initiative”, or in sports circles “momentum”. 

Say what you will about the US’s actions between 2002 and 2008 – the human, financial and moral costs, the politics, the morals of the tactics and methods and the whole enterprise – but we were on the offensive.  We, largely, chose when and where the war would be fought. 

We’re on defensive now.  We – Barack Obama – lost the initiative; squandered the “momentum”. 

The other side chooses whether Barack Obama spends tomorrow in the Situation Room or on the Golf Course. 

I’m praying for Golf. 

The problem is, they’ll choose it the next day, and the week after that, and the month after that…

…and “ensuring that we’re the ones who make that choice – and make it a moot one through sheer force of diplomatic, moral and if necessary military power” is one of precious few legitimate reasons to have a government.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The UN has peacekeepers acting as a buffer in the Golan Heights between Syria and Israel. Syrian rebels associated with Al Qaeda demanded UN troops from Fiji surrender, which they did. The Fijian troops were taken hostage.

Syrian rebels also demanded UN troops from the Philippines surrender, which they refused to do. The Syrian rebels attacked the Pilipinos, who retreated into Israel as Irish UN forces covered their retreat and Syrian government forces shelled the Syrian rebels to prevent pursuit.

The captured Fijians remain captured. The Pilipinos want an investigation into why the UN commander from India ordered Phillipino and Fijian peacekeepers to surrender to terrorists. Now the officer who refused to surrender to terrorists has been placed on leave.

And that’s the problem with the UN peacekeeping idea in general. Nobody cares if the other country’s guys get killed defending some worthless land in somebody else’s back yard. It isn’t our country so we’re not going to let our guys die for it. But if yours do, well, that’s okay.

Bad enough when it’s UN troops. Worse if it’s American troops. Let Israel off the leash and the problem will be solved in days, if not hours.

Joe Doakes

“Peace” is not always synonymous with “absence of shooting”.