Bomb Attacks And Presidential Politics

It's impossible to read today's accounts of the bombing of a military recruiting station in Times Square and not think of Barack Obama's 1995 meeting with unrepentent Weather Underground terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn and his subsequent relations with them.

In 1970, Ayers and Dohrn were planning to kill Army officers in New Jersey with a bomb, which fortunately exploded early, killing one of their own. Last night's attack was similarly an attack on the military, most likely motivated by the same reasons -- opposition to a war.

The bomb in Times Square went off at 3.43 a.m. On August 24, 1970, just one minute earlier, a much more powerful bomb went off at the University of Wisconsin, blowing up much of Stirling Hall and killing Robert Fassnacht, a relative of mine, who was doing physics research in the building at the time -- research unrelated to the war that the three members of the bomb-planting New Year's Gang, political kin to the Weather Underground, had planted.

There were many other such actions across America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and this morning's Times Square bombing could well signal the start of a new round of terrorist violence directed at the military. The constant anti-Bush drumbeat from the Dems and their allies on the far Left are complicit in these attacks.

Obama is not a bosom buddy with the Weather Underground leaders; they don't serve on his campaign and have been only casual acquaintances in his life. Still, I don't know anyone who has such acquaintances -- certainly not anyone running for president -- much less someone whose relationship with such scum is on the friendly level.

Ayers and Dohrn have not repented for their crimes. In fact, Ayers has said he only feels guilty about not having "done more," presumably meaning he's sorry he didn't kill more men in uniform.

As our soldiers fight a war that is being fought to protect us and spread Democracy as the best means for neutering the threat of global Islamic terrorism, some at home feel compelled to bomb, or block access to, the offices where people voluntarily go to sign on to the noble effort, exercising their free will and free speech in a legal manner.

Barack Obama is the only presidential candidate affiliated with these bombers, however nebulously. It may just be an unfortunate consequence -- but it is also definitely the result of the company he keeps.

Quote Of The Day: Berserkley Edition

"The First Amendment gives the city of Berkeley the right to be idiotic, but from now on they should do it with their own money,"
-- Sen. Jim DeMint

It's just the typical, infuriating Berkeley stuff: The City Council decides freedom actually is free, and votes to kick the Marine recruiting station out of town, calling them "unwelcome intruders."

I wonder if the citizens of Rome's more "enlightened" quarters took the same sort of actions against the Roman Legions' recruiting office ... just before the Huns showed up.

The Council let Code Pink park in front of the recruiting station, broadcasting hate speech. And the city stood by for 7 1/2 hours as three aging war protesters chained themselves to the recruiting station door to block access to the building -- something that is a Great Sin to the Left if done to a baby-killing emporium, but apparently is acceptable in this case.

Some on the sane side of the political spectrum blogged about this as it was occurring. For their efforts, the SF Chron -- supposedly an objective newspaper, he noted wryly -- led off its article:

As the right-wing blogosphere railed ...

You have to be right-wing to see the US military as a force for stability and good in the world? You are railing if you criticize such foolishness? Aren't the left-wing City Council and Code Pink the true railers? (The Chron did not, as you can guess, refer to the Council or the protesters as left-wing; does that mean they're mainstream?)

Into all this, as those of you who followed this story as it unfolded know, waded the Republican senator from South Carolina (home of a gazillion military families), Jim DeMint:

DeMint began drafting legislation Friday to cut $2.1 million in federal funding to Berkeley in a current congressional budget bill and transfer the money to the Marine Corps. The funding would include $750,000 for prospective ferry service, $87,000 for the Berkeley Unified School District nutrition education fund and $243,000 for the Chez Panisse Foundation, which promotes nutritional awareness in school lunch programs.

"The First Amendment gives the city of Berkeley the right to be idiotic, but from now on they should do it with their own money," DeMint said in a statement.

He called the council's vote "a slap in the face to all brave servicemen and women and their families."

Can you say "died in committee?" DeMint's bill will never make it to the floor, but as symbolism goes, it's better than a bunch of aging anti-Vietnam war protesters chaining themselves to a door.

I'd amend the bill to de-fund the Berkeley police department, because as public sidewalks were being illegally blocked, the commerce of the nation illegally halted, and individuals' rights to enlist in military service trampled upon, here they were. Across the street. Hands in pockets. Doing nothing.

The National Guard came to the aid of Oakland, Berkeley's neighbor, during the devastating fires in 1991, to the tune of $1.3 million in time and materials. Should something similar happen in Berkeley, let's hold the Guard at the city boundary. Commanding officers can instruct the troops that saying "Neener! Neener!" is optional.

Update: Sign Move America Forward's petition to the Berkeley City Council here.

Hat-tip: memeorandum

500,000 Iraqis Did Not Die

A few months after the notorious and suspect Johns Hopkins/Lancet study of civilian deaths in Iraq was issued, a new study by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government has issued a new study estimating 500,000 fewer war-related civilian deaths.

The Hopkins study pegged the death count at 655,000, a number no one by anti-war fanatics (and some Dem prez wannabes) accepted as anything other than hysteria. The new study says 151,000 civilian Iraqis have died violent deaths since the start of the war, 95% from military operations, insurgent attacks or sectarian violence.

(Certainly, 151,000 violent deaths is an awful thing, but by comparison, between 24,000 and 40,000 civilians died in a single night in the bombing of Dresden, and in just two years the Nazis were able to shrink the Warsaw ghetto's population from 400,000 to 70,000.)

WaPo's report on the new study highlights why the counts are so different:

Both teams used the same method -- a random sample of houses throughout the country. For the new study, however, surveyors visited 23 times as many places and interviewed five times as many households. Surveyors also got more outside supervision in the recent study; that wasn't possible in the spring of 2006 when the Johns Hopkins survey was conducted. (emphasis added)

Given that the same method was used, the broader sampling ensures more accurate results. The methodology was apparently much better as well:

"Overall, this is a very good study," said Paul Spiegel, a medical epidemiologist at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Geneva. "What they have done that other studies have not is try to compensate for the inaccuracies and difficulties of these surveys, triangulating to get information from other sources."

Les Roberts, who was involved in the Hopkins/Lancet study also praised the new study as more accurate.

"My gut feeling is that most of the difference between the two studies is a reluctance to report to the government a death due to violence," he said. "If your son is fighting the government and died, that may not be something you'd want to admit to the government."

Strangely, today WaPo said the Hopkins/Lancet study pegged the count at 601,000. Did they not check their own archives for the 655,000 figure? Does time heal mortal wounds?

Unfortunately, the new Iraq/WHO study, which you can read in its entirety here, does not include a break-down of violent deaths among the three war-related causes -- military ops, insurgent attacks or sectarian violence. If the breakdown were available, I'm sure it would show Islamists to be responsible than Americans for the deaths of Iraqis. I'm looking forward to that study.

Even so, the new study has deflated a Great Canard of the anti-war movement.

"Great Canard?" some may ask. Well, click here to see how the foaming-mouthers have falsely extrapolated the false Hopkins/Lancet study to create a 1.1 million civilian death count.

Now comes the test: See how tenaciously the Left holds on to the 655,000 figure, or the 1.1 million or the 17 kazillion figure, rather than acknowledge that they are playing with numbers even their creators now reject.

No matter what numbers they use, they will continue to fault the U.S. invasion for all of Iraq's woes, conveniently forgetting what was going on there before the invasion. Under Saddam Hussien:

• Between 100,000 and 200,000 Kurds were killed, more than all the violent deaths since the invasion
• The crazy war Saddam started against Iran resulted in more than 1 million deaths.
• 85,000 died as a result of crazy war against Kuwait
• An unknown number if Shi'a were killed after the Kuwait war when Hussein brutally suppressed their quest for freedom.
• By the Left's accounting, 100,000 children died during the post-war period from disease and malnutrition, they say were caused by sanctions but were indeed caused by Saddam's refusal to comply with the sanctions, and his ability to siphon aid money off into humanitarian palace-building efforts.

(All except the last bullet sourced to Wikipedia)

Will any of this matter to the anti-war Left? No; they don't let facts bother them. But to the more rational among us, the new study is confirmation that our liberation of Iraq has resulted, as we all knew, in a huge net gain for humanity, even at the tragic cost of 151,000 civilians, Iraqi police and Army losses, and our own military losses.

The deaths of Islamists insurgents is in itself a net gain for humanity, so their body count goes in the "gain" column, not the "loss" column -- another benefit of the war.

Anti-War Hollywood Update

It just dawned on my I've been terribly unfair to Redacted, Brian De Palma's strident anti-war flick. I last wrote that it opened 50th at the box office in limited release, but I never checked back to see how it's doing in broader release.

Guess what? There is no broader release.

On Box Office Mojo's rankings for the last weekend, the film simply does not appear at all. Box office oblivion.

But there is this expected fact: International box office is now almost 300 percent of U.S. box office for the film. Beware,though, because you can play statistical mischief with small numbers. The film's U.S. box office is a stunning stunted $25,628; it's global take is now at $71,968.

Adding insult to infantile anti-Americanism, the film's ranking among BOM's readers slipped from D- to F.

Meanwhile, the most successful of the anti-war films, Lions for Lambs, fell 61% over the previous week, dropping from 8th to 13th. Not even Redford, Streep and Cruise can keep this diatribe running for more than three weeks.

BOM readers gave it a D, by the way.

Redacted: Opening With A Bullet (To The Brain)

OK, it was in limited release -- just 15 screens -- but Brian DePalma's long-awaited dreaded anti-war flick Redacted opened in 50th place, according to Box Office Mojo.

We simply won't know whether it will be the worst anti-war box office bomb of all time until (if) it achieves greater release, but the reviewers at Box Office Mojo think it may be headed that way, giving it a score of D-. And that's among an audience of Hollywood-types.

Four of the site's on-line reviewers gave it an A. Then things got bad. One B, no Cs, 2 all too kind Ds ... and 34 Fs.

Really, isn't that an F+?

Hollywood's Sacrificed Dead Things

Here's a quiz for you:

What's 26 million, 24.3 million, 19.2 million and 6.7 million?

If you answered 76.2 million, you're right ... but not for the purposes of this quiz. For this quiz, the answer is the weekend take of Bee Movie, American Gangster, Fred Claus ... and in a distant, distant fourth place, Lions for Lambs, the whacked but star-packed anti-war flick.

Hollywood has not yet realized that their fervid anti-war film making is not lions for lambs, but lambs for lions: movies that are mere sacrificed dead things, reflecting their tiny views in a tiny mirror for tiny audiences.

Hollywood's KoolAid Fest Continues: Wimps For Lambs

UPDATED
I just went to the Lions for Lambs Web site to find out how bad it really was but it was so bad I couldn't even get into it without posting first.

The home page presents a bunch of phrases that fly at you before fading away like NanPo's leadership -- world peace, alternate energy, healthcare, no more wars. (I'm not sure how "no more wars" is different from "world peace," but perhaps I'm not nuanced enough.)

The phrases stopped flying and a little window opened, saying "What do you stand for? Type your answer here."

So I did: Free market capitalism and defeating jihadists.

Happily I clicked "enter," only to be confronted by the ugliness of liberal censorship (a.k.a. "tolerance"):

THANK YOU for your submission!
Check back to see if it is approved.
Approved submissions may be posted on the site.

"THANK YOU for our submission?" They must have something dreadfully wrong. I'm not submitting to this crap, not ever!

Just in case you're still curious, I offer you this review, from the Daily Kostic:

It has taken some time, but Hollywood is finally taking the gloves off and punching hard at the administration with unveiled force. Buoyed by artists, actors and producers passionately committed to promoting a serious political message of desperate straits and a need for public activism, this newfound courage has resulted in at least one film that deserves highest praise both for artistry of cinema, depth of emotion, and complexity of message.

Oh Mia Madre! I can't wait ... until it, too, bombs at the boxoffice. And here I thought the Hollywood elite were against bombing.

The Token Dem from our office is excited about this movie, however, as I learned the other day while we were waiting for a plane in San Francisco when Robert Redford came onto Larry King Live.

“That’s going to be a good movie,” he said.

“I’m not going to see it,” was my immediate and utterly unthought reply.

When did this happen? When did Hollywood become so divisive that such see/don't see decisions are made at such a visceral level?

Token Dem pointed out that the shoe used to be on the other foot, with a conservative Hollywood blacklisting Leftists and churning out movies that supported the American status quo. The Left, I assume, reacted just as viscerally to certain stars and certain movie genres, staying away in droves. Mini-droves, perhaps, but droves nonetheless.

But now, put Alec Baldwin, Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, George Clooney or Sean Penn in a movie and half of America will instantly decide not to see it. Perhaps we conservatives are too extreme; perhaps Hollywood is too extreme – which is it?

Neither, entirely, because you can't answer this question in Hollywood. To answer it, you have to go to Boston. I believe the divisiveness stems back to the alliance of Hollywood and the Dems we saw during the 2004 Democratic campaign, and specifically on the reception Michael Moore received at the Democratic convention.

Acceptance of Moore equated with acceptance of Bush complicity in 9/11 and an America too dreadful for most of us to imagine. Yet there he was, given the blue ribbon treatment, seated in the best seats – next to an ex-president, for crying out loud – and gushed over by the Dem political, policy and fundraising elite.

Already, most conservatives had stayed away from Fahrenheit 911, unwilling to fatten Moore’s portly bank accounts; then the convention served to tie that emotion to the Democratic platform. In the campaign that followed, we saw liberal Hollywood at its worst, reaching its nadir when Cameron Diaz, snot and tears aplenty, blubbered to a national television audience that the re-election of Bush would lead to a big, legalized gang bang.

With the war, the Left in Hollywood built on Moore’s paranoid, nasty vision of America and began churning out movies like Jarhead, Rendition and In the Valley of Elah that were to feature films what Fahrenheit was to documentaries: agenda-heavy, intolerant and wholly unenjoyable for a significant percentage of Americans.

How unenjoyable? Here's Joshua Goldberg in USA Today:

So far, these movies are tanking. Rendition opened on 2,250 screens, with three Oscar winners in the cast, and it was beaten its opening weekend by a re-release of the 14-year-old A Nightmare Before Christmas. Elah was a bigger bomb than those used in the "shock and awe" campaign. The Kingdom earned less than $50 million, and surely only did that well because it was marketed as an action movie rather than an anti-war one.

Hollywood is drinking its own KoolAid. Even though none of these movies fared well, they satisfied a hungry need shared by the producers, directors, writers and actors to be part of the anti-Bush, anti-war movement, in a blind faith that they would finally be the anointed one who would open the eyes of an America to stupid to see the light.

Now we’ve come to the point when a pointless piece of fluff like The Game Plan makes more at the boxoffice than the last crop of antiwar movies combined, and Lions for Lambs is greeted not with anticipation, but with speculation that perhaps Tom Cruise has ruined his career by signing on.

I believe all this is attributable in part to a dumbing down that has swept Hollywood. It takes intelligence and finesse to be subtle and nuanced but any buffoon can crank out a heavy-handed diatribe. We have had no Dr. Strangelove for the Iraq war; we have not even had an Apocalypse Now.

Finally, it is also attributable to the lemming mentality of Leftist Hollywood, where no one dares to write or fund or shoot or distribute a patriotic, pro-American, pro-military film, even though there is an untapped market.

In Hollywood, it is better to miss the market the approved way than to achieve success outside Hollywood's prescribed bounds, and that's turned so many of us off we won't give our $8 to their cause, we won't give our time to their messages, and we won't support anything about their effort to dishonor our cause.

Voices From Iraq The Left Doesn't Want Us To Hear

Failure in Iraq, failure in Iraq: It's the drum beat of the Left heard loud and repetitiously in DC this weekend, among the puppets and play actors. All the noise and silliness is intended to drown out the emerging truth in Iraq, a truth that's very threatening to the anti-Bush, anti-progress Progressives.

Today's Opinion Journal has news of exactly the sort they Left wants to drown out: the latest column by Fouad Ajami giving us loud and clear the voices from inside Iraq.

Voices that don't say we're winning, but that we've won.

"Little more than two decades ago, in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution and the Lebanon War of 1982, the American position in this region was exposed and endangered. Look around you today: Everyone seeks American protection and patronage. The line was held in Iraq; perhaps America was overly sanguine about the course of things in Iraq. But that initial optimism now behind us, the war has been an American victory. All in the region are romancing the Americans, even Syria and Iran in their own way." -- Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi

"We may differ with our American friends about tactics, I might not see eye to eye with them on all matters. But my message to them is one of appreciation and gratitude. To them I say, you have liberated a people, brought them into the modern world. They used to live in fear and now they live in liberty. Iraqis were cut off from the modern world, and thanks to American intervention we now belong to the world around us. We used to be decimated and killed like locusts in Saddam's endless wars, and we have now come into the light. A teacher used to work for $2 a month, now there is a living wage, and indeed in some sectors of our economy, we are suffering from labor shortages." -- Nouri al-Malaki

And here's an unnamed Iraqi speaking about the recently murdered anti-al Qaeda tribal leader Abu Reisha, a murder the Left gleefully trumpeted as another sign of failure in Iraq:

"No doubt he was shooting at Americans not so long ago, but the tide has turned, and Abu Reisha knew how to reach an accommodation with the real order of power. The truth is that the Sunnis launched this war four years ago, and have been defeated. The tribes never win wars, they only join the winners."

The Left has not yet even recognized that we can win in Iraq, let alone even conceive the idea that we have won and our purpose now is to sustain the victory.

That leaves this holding onto this purpose: To steal defeat from victory.

hat-tip: RCP

Kitty's Back, And As Snarly As Ever

Nice Kitty, Kitty. Don't scratch! Don't bite!

No good. She's not listening. Long-time Bush-hater Kitty Kelly is back, with the LATimes' most emailed article, a hissy attack on the Bush's for not participating personally in the War in Iraq.

The president tells us Iraq is a "noble" war, but his wife, his children and his nieces and nephews are not listening. None has enlisted in the armed services, and none seems to be paying attention to the sacrifices of military families.

In fairness, Laura's a bit old to enlist, don't you think? And you'd think daughter Jenna's brief service as a UNICEF -- that's the UN, Kitty! The UN! -- intern would win some respect. But Kitty's much nastier than that:

The presidential nieces and nephews also have missed the memo on setting a good public example. Ashley Bush — the youngest daughter of the president's brother, Neil, and Neil's ex-wife, Sharon — was presented to Manhattan society at the 52nd Annual International Debutantes Ball at the Waldorf Astoria. Her older sister, Lauren, a runway model, told London's Evening Standard that she is a student ambassador for the United Nations World Food Program, but she would not lobby her uncle for U.S. funds. Her cousin, Billy Bush, chronicles the lives of celebrities on "Access Hollywood."

Nieces and nephews? What do Bush's nieces and nephews have to do with anything? They sound like successful young people, and we haven't heard anything about them marching down the streets of LA or NY with signs saying Bush was behind 9-11, so what tree is Kitty running up?

"Uncle Bucky," as William H.T. Bush is known within the family, is one presidential relative who has profited from the Iraq war. He recently sold all of his shares in Engineered Support Systems Inc. (ESSI), a St. Louis-based company that has flourished under the president's no-bid policy for military contractors. Uncle Bucky told the Los Angeles Times that he would have preferred that ESSI, on whose board he sits, was not involved in Iraq, "but, unfortunately, we live in a troubled world."

Oh, that tree. Hiss. Yawn.

Kitty scathes her way through the Bushes, managing to insult Barbara and George H.W. along the way, but never bothers to ask about the Dem Congress. How are their children showing support for the troops, the cause and the war?

Well, Kitty, they aren't. The last time I heard, not a single child or grandchild of a single Dem congress member is serving in the Armed Forces. But that's fine with you, isn't it, because despite all your reference to FDR's kids, this isn't really about showing patriotic support for the war is it?

Nope, it's about showing unpatriotic opposition to the War.

By the way, Kitty, how many of your nieces and nephews are serving?