Fun Fact Friday

Ralph Peters spells out some facts:

…I happen to agree with Sen. Barack Obama…the terrorists had a tenuous connection with Saddam’s regime. But it’s 2008, not 2003. And our next president will take office in 2009. It’s today’s reality that matters.

* After our troops reached Baghdad, al Qaeda’s leaders made a colossal strategic miscalculation and publicly declared that Iraq was now the central front in their jihad against us. Matter of record, in the enemy’s own words. * Some Iraqi Sunni Arabs, lamenting the national pre-eminence they’d lost, rallied to the terrorists.

* Al Qaeda in Iraq…then embarked on a campaign of widespread atrocities: videotaped beheadings, mass bombings of civilians, assassinations, widespread rape…kidnappings and brutal efforts to dictate the intimate details of Iraqi lives. * Al Qaeda’s savagery alienated the Sunni Arab masses in record time. Suddenly, those American “occupiers” looked like saviors. * By the millions, Sunni Muslims turned against al Qaeda and turned to the US military, inflicting a catastrophic propaganda defeat on the terrorists.

* Supported by the population, US and Iraqi forces inflicted a massive military defeat on al Qaeda. At present, the terror organization’s own Web masters admit that al Qaeda is nearing final collapse in Iraq.
Those are facts.

Peters also writes:

To date, not one “mainstream media” journalist has pressed the leading advocates of unconditional surrender to describe in detail what might happen after we “bring the troops home now.”

To this I add my reminder that, not too long ago it was considered one of America’s great failings that we abandoned the Iraqi people in1991. Suddenly, abandonment is “smart,” and – since it is the position of the left, it must be moral and ethical, too.

The more things improve in Iraq, the less the press will tell you about it.

Iran is not interested in diplomacy. It has been at war with us since they took our people as hostages during the Jimmy Carter presidency, a 4-year term we’re still living out.

Nancy Pelosi now ‘fesses up and admits that we’re fighting Iran. I’m pretty sure that’s what her remarks boil down to.

Radical Islamists have been calling us the Great Satan since 1979. “Talking” to them will not change that. It will just make them feel like a big cat with a mouse. Even their loving Obama won’t change it.

The showdown between the Islamists and the West has been building for 500 years or so.

Al Gore has invented the Carbon Curtain And Global Warming (lately corrected to “Climate Change” because the temperature is going down, not up – and imagine that, the climate is going through one of it’s cycles) is hoo-hah of a politico/religious persuasion. Krauthammer says:

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher’s England to Deng’s China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but — even better — in the name of Earth itself.

Environmentalists are Gaia’s priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect.

As I’ve noted elsewhere:

One meets postmodern secularists of diverse interests who remain supportive of a basic scheme that is balkanizing our world into environmentalism, anarchism, paganism, pantheism, food-puritanism and other isms, and who have simply embraced a religion outside of monotheism. If you think by abolishing the Abrahamic Big Three you’re going to abolish religion, well…good luck. Every secular religion comes with its own Liturgies, Rubrics and Rituals, its own Sins, Laws and Saviors.

An Inconvenient Truth is going to be a dreadful opera. I still say if things are as bad as Gore et al vaunt, there should be no public concerts or performances or filmmaking of any kind. If a crisis is really a crisis, shouldn’t entertainment go by the wayside?

You’re paying more than you should for fuel, and our nation is less secure when held hostage to foreign suppliers. You can correctly blame congress and enviro lobbyists for the fact that we do not tap our own resources to control our costs and our supplies.

I’m pretty sure Richard Armitage admitted to outing Valerie Plame, so I don’t know what to think about the scales falling from McClellen’s eyes in mid-bookwrite. I mean…it sounds like if Scott wanted a book published, he’d have to pay for it:

“First we had to ascertain what kind of book he wanted to write,” said Osnos, a former Washington Post reporter and editor. “We are journalists, independent-minded publishers. We weren’t interested in a book that was just a defense of the Bush administration. It had to pass our test of independence, integrity and candor.”

Emphasis mine. Apparently in that world, one cannot have integrity and candor and STILL be a defense of the Bush administration. Oh.

President Bush is not a snob or an elitist. And he even has some appreciation coming his way from surprising quarters. This is a non-Bush-voting fellow who seems to get that we actually are safer than we were.

The press treats Obama better than Hillary, and treats Hillary better than it treats John McCain.

One last fun fact: the press never meant it when they said competency matters. Some feel only Obama matters.