TOBY PETZOLD

Michelle Malkin links to this post at MEMRI where you can watch (and then read the transcript) to a long clip of excerpted remarks that Field Marshal Nasrallah recently made on Lebanese television.

The gist of them? That he never told anyone in Iran or Syria that he intended to assault and kidnap those Israeli soldiers —but that he did tell certain members of the political leadership in Lebanon that such was his plan. And the reason?

Two issues cannot tolerate any delay. One is the issue of the prisoners, because of the human suffering. The second issue is any attack against civilians. I told them on more than one occasion that we are taking the issue of the prisoners seriously, and that abducting Israeli soldiers is the only way to resolve it. Of course, I said this in a low-key tone. I did not declare in the dialogue: “In July I will abduct Israeli soldiers.” This is impossible.

Interviewer: Did you inform them that you were about to abduct Israeli soldiers?

Hassan Nasrallah: I told them that we must resolve the issue of the prisoners, and that the only way to resolve it is by abducting Israeli soldiers.

Interviewer: Did you say this clearly?

Hassan Nasrallah: Yes, and nobody said to me: “No, you are not allowed to abduct Israeli soldiers.” Even if they had told me not to… I’m not defending myself here. I said that we would abduct Israeli soldiers in meetings with some of the main political leaders in the country. I don’t want to mention names now, but when the time comes to settle accounts, I will. They asked: “If this happens, will the issue of the prisoners be over and done with?” I said that it was logical that it would. And I’m telling you, our estimation was not mistaken. I’m not exaggerating. Anywhere in the world - show me a country, show me an army, show me a war, in which two soldiers, or even civilian hostages, were abducted, and a war was waged against a country - and all for two soldiers. This has never happened throughout history, and even Israel has never done such a thing.

You really ought to watch the whole thing. Nasrallah is trying to promote this bullshit notion that his kidnapping of those boys was in the interests of securing a prisoner exchange —and just as surely, he is trying to deflect any attention away from the notion that Iran or Syria ordered this.

The towelhead doth protest too much, methinks.

When I say I want to share my dreams with you, I’m not talking about my aspirations or my visions of a happy future —but the incredibly disturbed fragments of the R.E.M. cycles I sometimes happen to awaken with. These are rare for me to remember, which is why I find them worth relating.

This morning, I awoke with one such fragment still flitting about my head. I was northbound on North Lamar Boulevard here in Austin, driving in some sort of white SUV. I became aware of being followed by a woman in another large vehicle, with whom I was keeping constant and —yes— phantasmagorically impossible eye contact. She wasn’t hostile or anything but, in our unspoken communication, it became incumbent upon me to pull over there in front of the headquarters of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Getting out of the vehicle, I walked around to the sidewalk where I immediately saw the object I had been instructed to inspect: in a concrete slab abutting the sidewalk was, naturally enough, the Dean Martin Memorial Manhole Cover. It was inscribed in Italian, which I, with complete fluency, understood.

I don’t remember anything from it, except that it somehow referred to the Mafia —the term la cosa nostra being implied in the phrase “our hereditary markets.”

The only connection I see between this dream and the one I reported to you from the other night is the connection between the names Howard Dean and Dean Martin.

If I happen to dream about Martin van Buren or Martin Luther tonight, I am calling a psychiatrist.

Tim Russert kicked Josh Bolten’s ass this morning on Meet the Press over Bush’s stem cell bill veto. Of the human embryo, Russert asked (emphases mine):

MR. RUSSERT: Then if the president believes it is human life, how can he allow private stem cell research to go forward, go forward, if, in fact, that is murder?

MR. BOLTEN: It’s a very, it’s a very difficult balance. I mean, the president recognizes that there are millions of Americans who don’t recognize that as a human life, and that the promise of that research for the saving of life is so important that they, that they want that to go forward. What the president has said is that as far as the federal policy is concerned, no federal funds, your tax dollars and my tax dollars, will go towards promoting the destruction of that human embryo.

MR. RUSSERT: But you’re using federal funds for existing lines, which were of embryos. So were those embryos that the federal government is experimenting on obtained by homicidal means?

MR. BOLTEN: Those, those embryos, those stem cell lines, were already—those embryos were already destroyed, and, and that’s where the president—the president’s policies draw the line. That is that our tax dollars, from the point that the president made his policy statement forward, our tax dollars are not going to go to further incent the destruction of those fertilized embryos. Let me, let me…

MR. RUSSERT: The logic, Mr. Bolten, as people are listening to this, the president is saying no, we can’t use embryos that are going to be discarded by in vitro clinics because, according to a spokesman, that’s murder. But we can use embryos that were existing before I became president, that’s OK. And if you have a private company and you want to use those embryos, that’s OK. Back to the central question: does the president agree with his spokesman, Tony Snow, that the research on the embryo in, in fact, to use that embryo is murder?

MR. BOLTEN: The president thinks that that embryo, that fertilized embryo, is a human life that deserves protection…

First of all, Josh, it isn’t necessary to say that an embryo is “fertilized.” We got past that tautology in high school biology.

Second, if Bush issued that veto to appease the morons who believe that human embryos are inviolate and soul-infused human beings, then he is wrong to accept their use in research in any context. If it’s murder, it’s murder. Right? It should not matter when those embryos were used.

Third, it is somehow offensive to resort to the idea that this is a taxpayers’ concern. Is that Bush’s cover? That he’s out there defending the American taxpayer who does not want his money going towards something as awful as researching stem cell science that might actually lead to health benefits for all? Ridiculous! Just as it is stupid for atheists to complain that their rights as taxpayers are being abrogated when public schools administrators allow a pre-game prayer at a high school football game, it is stupid to argue that it’s a moral crisis for us as taxpayers whether these stem cell programs are Federally funded.

If that’s the essence of conservatism in America, I’m laughing.

What a buttloaf:

U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D- Mass., who was in town Sunday to help Gov. Jennifer Granholm campaign for her re-election bid, took time to take a jab at the Bush administration for its lack of leadership in the Israeli-Lebanon conflict.

“If I was president, this wouldn’t have happened,” said Kerry during a noon stop at Honest John’s bar and grill in Detroit’s Cass Corridor.

Bush has been so concentrated on the war in Iraq that other Middle East tension arose as a result, he said.

“The president has been so absent on diplomacy when it comes to issues affecting the Middle East,” Kerry said. “We’re going to have a lot of ground to make up (in 2008) because of it.”

What a buffoon. If Kerry had been elected President, it would have been a victory for those who hate America.

If Hizballah is such a wonderful organization —and since it is a political party within Lebanese society— why aren’t they amenable to diplomatic persuasion? Why aren’t they responding to this situation through political means?

Because their kind of politics may be summed up in a single word —so much better, of course, in the original German: Judenhass.

They aren’t interested in the usual processes that characterize what we Americans think of as political partisanship: compromise, horse-trading, parliamentary manuevering, etc. That has never been their purpose or desire. All they live for is the destruction of the Zionist entity and the Jewish people.

This really isn’t politics by other means, as Clausewitz put it. This is the latest manifestation of generations of hatred that doesn’t seek to co-exist, but to annihilate. As such, I don’t think a “political solution” is worth a damn.

Fuck the Cedar Revolution if this is what comes of it.

Via the Power Line comes this response to a reporter at the United Nations a couple days ago by Ambassador John Bolton (emphasis mine):

How you get a ceasefire between one entity, which is a government of a democratically elected state on the one hand, and another entity on the other which is a terrorist gang, no one has yet explained. The government of Israel, everybody says, has the right to exercise the right of self-defense, which even if there are criticisms of Israeli actions by some, they recognize the fundamental right to self-defense. That’s a legitimate right. Are there any activities that Hezbollah engages in, militarily that are legitimate? I don’t think so. All of its activities are terrorist and all of them are illegitimate, so I don’t see the balance or the parallelism between the two sides and therefore I think it’s a very fundamental question: how a terrorist group agrees to a ceasefire. You know in a democratically elected government, the theory is that the people ultimately can hold the government accountable when it does something and doesn’t live up to it. How do you hold a terrorist group accountable? Who runs the terrorist group? Who makes the commitment that a terrorist group will abide by a ceasefire? What does a terrorist group think a ceasefire is? These are - you can use the words “cessation of hostilities” or “truce” or “ceasefire.” Nobody has yet explained how a terrorist group and a democratic state come to a mutual ceasefire.

Now, as I have been reminded here, Hizballah was created in response to Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Of course, Israel had a reason to do this: the PLO were using the south of Lebanon as a base of operations for terrorist attacks on northern Israel. The same thing is happening today, only it’s not the PLO or Fatah committing these acts of aggression in the north, but Hizballah —a Syrian and Iranian-sponsored terrorist army that acts as a law unto itself within Lebanese society.

If this weren’t the Zionist Entity we were talking about, but some other country that does have a right to self-defense, no one would be asking whether that country should suffer the constant threat of terror from a supposedly peaceful neighbor without responding.

That is to ask, what was the provocation this time that moved Hizballah to kill and capture several IDF soldiers and fire thousands of rockets into northern Israel?

On CNN tonight, Nic Robertson was wondering aloud whether Lebanese president Emile Lahoud’s vow to send his army to fight alongside Hizballah was a way of keeping the IDF “at bay.”

No, Nic. That was Lahoud’s way of asking Mr. Nasrallah to not kill him, pretty please.

Speaking in the third person, Lahoud responded to Robertson’s question of whether he will give that order:

It’s not Lahoud who gives them the order, it’s the government. And I’m sure the government will give the order not to allow Israelis to invade Lebanon, for sure.

Lahoud is staring into the abyss and knows he can’t look away.

Go read the interview. He has no choice but to support the “liberators” of his country. After all, they are the government.

Bill Richardson is on the TV telling the delicious Paula Zahn that Dr. Rice should be over there persuading our European allies to put sanctions on Hizballah. How is she supposed to do that? The EU and Javier Solana can’t even bring themselves to declare Hizballah a terrorist organization. That’s because they’re such godforsaken dhimmis that they won’t dare cross the coming European caliphate.

What the fuck?! That’s something Solana needs to be persuaded of? Get lost! 

Kofi Annan is an utter snot rag. His organization has never been anything more than an official cover for dictators, mass murderers, and Communists. Oh, and Jew-hating Muslims.

Why does my country countenance this garbage on its own soil?

Glenn Reynolds says that Bill Clinton is going to campaign for Joe Lieberman. Deeper down in the linked report is this bit of analysis (emphases mine):

Lieberman famously broke with Clinton in 1998 when he took the Senate floor to condemn the president’s marital infidelity as “immoral” and denounce his “premeditated” deception. The speech was widely interpreted as Lieberman’s stepping-stone to the Democrats’ vice presidential nomination two years later.

That’s exactly right. And who put Lieberman in the Veep’s spot? Al Gore, the undying hero to today’s far Left and the man who very conspicuously rejected Clinton’s help in the 2000 Presidential race. Gore is also the man who purposely screwed the very loyal Lieberman in 2004 by depriving him of a clear entry into the race. And where are Gore and the moonbats today? Doing their damnedest to oust Lieberman in favor of an opportunistic multimillionaire.

Clinton, in a recent speech at the Aspen Institute conference, defended Lieberman and his staunch support for the war in Iraq. He questioned why antiwar Democrats are seeking to oust a fellow Democrat, saying that instead of seeking to retire Republicans they were pursuing “the nuttiest strategy I ever heard in my life.”

That’s the funniest damned thing I’ve read all day. Thanks for screwing the moonbats, Bill, and giving the Right a win-win situation: if your influence is still strong, the netroots will be embarrassed, not only at losing once again, but by exposing their venomous character to the rest of the Democratic Party in trying to dismiss you as a sell-out (something that will also impact your wife). Meanwhile, the Republicans would get to keep an honorable ally among the opposition.

But, if your assistance to Lieberman fails to cinch the deal, it will sow some doubt as to your influence in what everyone sees as a major bellweather battle for the fall.

I just love it!