New Trend On The Rise: The Patriotic Terrorist

“That’s why calling them terrorists would be intolerant and pretty shameful.

But what about “patriotic terrorists?”

That’s kinda neat.

What is a patriotic terrorist?

It is an American who claims to love his or her country while enjoying the enemy’s success against said country. It is a person who gets deeply offended if you question their patriotism, while also appearing to share the same ideals of the more spirited folk who like to blow up innocent people.”

Jenny Hatch

The vaulting ambition of America’s Lady Macbeth

“Now, you might say, hold on. Aren’t all politicians veined with an opportunistic streak? Why is she any different? The difference is that Mrs Clinton has raised that opportunism to an animating philosophy, a P. T. Barnum approach to the political marketplace.

All politicians, sadly, lie. We can often forgive the lies as the necessary price paid to win popularity for a noble cause. But the Clinton candidacy is a Grand Deceit, an entirely artificial construct built around a person who, stripped bare of the cynicism, manipulation and calculation, is nothing more than an enormous, overpowering and rather terrifying ego.”

Jenny Hatch

FAQ – The Pledge!
1) I see you right wing bloggers who are demanding a loyalty oath as virtually goose-stepping through the internet. I am gobsmacked. I am filled with heart-ache.
Huh? Are there any questions?
2) What is the purpose of the pledge?
It is not a loyalty oath. Nothing like it. The pledge rests on the premise that Republicans who are supporting the anti-surge resolution are doing so as a craven political play. The pledge is merely a way of showing them that it is an extremely poor political play. And since political advantage is the coin of their realm, we think it may serve to change their hearts and minds.
3) But isn’t it somehow unseemly to demand that these people sign a petition to show their loyalty to the White House?
Again, as is so often the case, you completely miss the point. We’re not asking the Senators to sign the pledge. We’re asking people who will move any Republican who votes for the resolution to the head of their s**t list to sign the petition. The pledge is merely a way for the grassroots to communicate their feelings to the Republican Party.
4) Have you taken the pledge?
Yes. Enthusiastically.
5) What about the notion that this whole exercise is the equivalent of summoning a circular firing squad?
There’s nothing circular about it. This petition is directed at a handful of Republican Senators who, the petition’s signers feel, are willing to weaken the war effort to serve their own political agendas. To elaborate on your firing squad analogy, we’ve got over 10,000 signatures. 10,000 people firing at four or five Senators does not a circular firing squad make.
6) Will these Senators or the Republican Party care about the signers? After all, about 120 million people voted in the presidential election. What’s the big deal about 10,000 people signing a petition?
It’s a huge deal. Bloggers and blog readers are much better informed than the typical citizen. Their collective opinion can serve as an early warning sign for politicians who might be curious how something will play with the larger audience. In other words, the reaction of the blogosphere and the growth of the petition is a leading indicator of how the wider conservative public will view the resolution vote. For an excellent discussion on this topic, read the chapter on mavens in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point.” (Reading the whole book wouldn’t be a bad idea – it’s a fine work.)
7) Isn’t it a bit unseemly that you’re trying to enforce loyalty in this manner?
No. And for what it’s worth, we’re not asking anyone to violate their principles. This entire exercise is premised on the view that the Republican Senators who will support the resolution will do so not out of any sort of conviction but due to political expediency.
8) But what of those that really feel in their core of cores that the surge is a mistake?
They have a right to speak their mind. Or let’s put it this way – they had Petraeus there and had every right to engage him over what they obviously consider to be his shoddy tactical analysis. But now that day is past. The only constructive thing that can come out of an anti-surge resolution is that a bunch of Senators can cover their tushees if the surge doesn’t work. The price we’ll pay for the Senate covering its collective derriere is too high.
9) What is that price?
Showing the enemy that we’re not united. Showing the enemy that the majority of our government is so desperate to get out of Iraq, it is willing to pronounce defeat even before the most serious fighting has begun.
10) But what if the Senators feel we’ve already lost?
Then they should say so. If they really want to go for the political courage full Monty, they could even propose a way forward in the war against Radical Islam. But I haven’t heard a single Republican Senator say we’ve lost, including the ones who are planning on supporting the resolution.
11) So where do I go to sign the petition and buck up our faltering solons?
Right here. Do it.
Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com

This is a big weekend in terms of the direction of the War on Terror. I have been reading so much these past two days that my head is spinning with all of the information whirling around and around. The bottom line is that this is the week that will determine the course of the war for perhaps the next decade. It is the Battle of the Bulge, It is Iwo Jima, it is Tet….right now…
What can you as a citizen do to help the cause of the war and our troops?
Here are a couple of activist things that are going on today:
Sign the Pledge
Read this post by Hugh Hewitt and then make some calls and send some emails to your congress person to help fight the Biden Resolution.
I can feel it in my heart, this is the turning point in the war. Please, do not let a group of thoughtless people in the Senate decide the fate of Democracy in the Middle East. They are the most selfish, short sighted, prideful group of windbags America has ever had in Congress.
Please email or call them TODAY and let them know how very wrong they are.
Jenny Hatch

I burned Time Magazine this morning to use the ashes as manure on my herb garden.
Pajamas Media Link
I guess I am too used to reading real analysis on the military blogs. Yesterday I happened to pick up a copy of Time Magazine at the rec center where I work out. Out of curiousity I read the title article from the Jan 15th, 2007 issue with the title “The Surge, Does sending more soldiers to Iraq make ANY sense?”
As I read the article by Michael Duffy titled “What a Surge Really Means” I was enraged by the tone, defeatism, use of unnamed sources, and overall chicken little assumptions of the author. If this is the leftist pap Time has been serving up its readership as evidence of a gourmet meal of analysis no wonder Time is laying off employees right and left.
In a 2004 Reason Online Article (F Bomb alert for the sensitive), author Glenn Garvin claimed that:
“Journalism, academia, policy wonkery: They all maintain well-oiled Orwellian memory holes, into which errors vanish without a trace. Stern pronouncements are hurled down like thunderbolts from Zeus, and, like Zeus, their authors are totally unaccountable to mere human beings.”
“Time’s Strobe Talbott decreed in 1982 that it was “wishful thinking to predict that international Communism some day will either self-destruct or so exhaust itself in internecine conflict that other nations will no longer be threatened.” A Wall Street analyst who misjudged a stock so badly would find himself living under a bridge, if not sharing a cell with Martha Stewart. But Talbott instead became Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, where he could apply his perspicacious geopolitical perceptual powers to Osama bin Laden.”
and

“That’s especially true when the mistake is not a discrete, concrete fact like a misspelled name but a broader error of perspective or analysis. It took decades for the Times to admit that the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting of its Stalin-era Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, was delusionary drivel. Even so, his Pulitzer stands. And the Times has yet to bite the bullet on its correspondent Herbert J. Matthews, the clueless Castro groupie who wrote that the comandante was winning his guerrilla war in Cuba at a time when he actually commanded fewer than 20 men.

Sometimes the refusal to confront errors is simple hubris. But often it masks a queasy reluctance to start down a path of self-examination, for fear of where it will lead.”

That being the case, I wonder why anyone at all would be inclined to read the Duffy piece in last weeks Time, and think that it was relevant to any sort of a debate being conducted right now about the surge of troops in Iraq.
Let’s review some of these quotes from Mr. Duffys piece:

“But seen in another light, the surge is the latest salvo in the 30-year tong war between the two big foreign policy factions in the Republican Party: the internationalists and the neoconservatives. The surge belongs to the neocons and in particular to Frederick Kagan, who taught military history at West Point for a decade and today works out of the American Enterprise Institute as a military analyst.

Kagan argued for a surge last fall in the pages of the Weekly Standard, the neocons’ house organ, after the military’s previous surge, Operation Forward Together, failed in late October. Kagan turned to former Army Vice Chief of Staff Jack Keane, a retired four-star general who still has street cred at the Pentagon, to help flesh out the plan and then sell it to the White House. The neocons don’t have the same juice they had at the start of the war, in part because so many of them have fled the government in shame. But they are a long way from dead.”

Fled the government in shame? Who has fled the government in shame?
Oh Yeah, I remember Vanity Fair did a piece on the regrets of the Neo Cons a while back, the article had so much credibility that it was used all over the nation right before the election as evidence that even those crazy Neo-Cons were abandoning the President and his Iraq Policy.

“A dismayed Administration official who has generally been an optimist about Iraq described the process as chaotic. “None of this,” he predicted of the surge and its coming rollout, “is going to work.”

Who said this? Come on dude….have some guts…if you don’t believe this is going to work, go on record and say it with your name attached, you defeatist coward.

“Kagan told TIME that U.S. troop force “should be down significantly” from what it is now–“enough to permit economic development, the recruiting and training of the Iraqi army, political development and reconciliation.” Under this scenario, U.S. forces can turn to eradicating the insurgents full time once Baghdad is “stabilized.”

Not everyone buys this happy talk. “Are we assuming the insurgents don’t get to vote on this?” asks a veteran of both the Iraqi and Vietnam wars. “I see more arrogance than ever, assuming once again that Western genius counts for more than Eastern resolve.” Already the sectarian militias so eager to kill civilians across Baghdad have been careful not to confront U.S. forces.

Again, WHO is this veteran of Nam and Iraq who claims Bush administration arrogance. The time for unnamed sources is over in Washington D.C. If you don’t have the courage of your convictions to spew your views to the public with your name attached, then shut your mouth.
At least, if you don’t want to put your quote with your face, name, and email address attached so that you can be held accountable for your words, please do not assume that anyone is going to be interested in what you have to say (Time Magazine journalists with an agenda to take down a presidency will forever be quoting you however).

“SO, IS THE SURGE BUSH’S LAST STAND?

PROBABLY YES, WHETHER BUSH INTENDS IT that way or not. There is always a chance that a surge might reduce the violence, if only for a while. But given that nothing in Iraq has gone according to plan, it seems more likely that it won’t. That’s why many in the military assume privately that a muscular-sounding surge now is chiefly designed to give Bush the political cover to execute a partial withdrawal on his terms later.”

Assumptions, assumptions, assumptions……NOTHING in Iraq has gone according to plan! What an idiot! I cannot believe the hubris of this writer. Again, his generalizations about the many in the military who have somehow telepathically sent their innermost thoughts to this Time Magazine propagandist who then claims to speak for them. Who are these many military people? Give us their names, faces, and let them speak for themselves. If they are not willing to go public, then don’t use them as sources.
and finally:

“A retired colonel who served in Baghdad put it more bluntly: “We don’t know whether this is a plan for victory or just to signal to Americans that we did our damnedest before pulling out.”

Who is this retired colonel, and why didn’t you use his name??? I don’t give any credence to anything you have written Mr. Duffy. Your whole piece stinks, it smells like the garbage, refuse, and filth that it is.
I will enjoy watching Time Magazine get its just dues for decades of coddling tyrants, being the soap box from which communist sympathizers and collectivist propagandists sent out their missives to an American public deluded about the intentions of those who would seek to deprive them of their liberty and national sovereignty.
Why should anyone at all take one word of what you write seriously Mr. Duffy?
I’m Going back to the Blogs…..and will never again pick up a copy of Time Magazine.
Jenny Hatch