TOBY PETZOLD

What mental pygmy at the New York Times wrote this piece of crap editorial yesterday? (Emphases mine)

The last thing this country needs as it heads into this election season is another attempt to push the intelligence agencies to hype their conclusions about the threat from a Middle Eastern state.

That’s what happened in 2002, when the administration engineered a deeply flawed document on Iraq that reshaped intelligence to fit President Bush’s policy. And history appeared to be repeating itself this week, when the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, released a garishly illustrated and luridly written document that is ostensibly dedicated to “helping the American people understand” that Iran’s fundamentalist regime and its nuclear ambitions pose a strategic threat to the United States.

It’s hard to imagine that Mr. Hoekstra believes there is someone left in this country who does not already know that. But the report obviously has different aims. It is partly a campaign document, a product of the Republican strategy of scaring Americans into allowing the G.O.P. to retain control of Congress this fall. It fits with the fearmongering we’ve heard lately — like President Bush’s attempt the other day to link the Iraq war to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Okay. The Times takes it for granted that the whole country already knows that a nuclearized Iran is a danger. Remember that. And then consider how we know that.

Do I really need to dredge up the many dozens of Democratic, European, and international assessments of Saddam Hussein as a regional menace and a threat to world peace and stability? Oh, come on! It’s late and you fucking well know the facts.

But we didn’t know them. Or we did. Yet Saddam’s overthrow —based on all that terrible false intelligence— is a fait accompli that not even Hillary Rodham Clinton —the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2008— is willing to publicly regret having advocated.

Just remember, though: the New York Times says we already know that Iran is a danger. Now. It is a danger now.

Next:

It’s obvious that Iran wants nuclear weapons, has lied about its program and views America as an enemy. We enthusiastically agree that the United States needs every scrap of intelligence it can get on Iran. But the reason American intelligence is not certain when Iran might have a nuclear bomb is because the situation is so murky — not because the agencies are too wimpy to tell the scary truth.

This is just absurd. What’s so “murky” about Iran and its nuclear amibitions? This editorial repeatedly concedes that Iran is actively seeking nuclear weapons. It says it’s “obvious.”

But “the situation”? It’s just so…murky.

Just remember: in the summer of 2006, the New York Times said that everybody already knows that Iran is a threat and that it wants nuclear weapons and that this Administration and its scaremonger allies were wrong to remind the American People and the world that we cannot allow these Islamofascist lunatics to obtain that power.

The anti-war Left is a boundless rectal cavity where logic and sense vanish.

One of the complaints people are making —now that Pluto has been demoted from planet to dwarf— is that this will obsolesce our children’s science textbooks.

Nonsense.

As a former schoolteacher, I can tell you for a fact that an outdated textbook is a perfect opportunity for any teacher worth his salt to supply the update himself. It adds to one’s authority and teaches children the proper skepticism to bring to any book.

Keep on turning, Pluto. We still love you. NASA does, for sure.

Via Professor Reynolds, have a look at Pamela Bone’s excellent essay in today’s The Australian on the sad subject of the Western feminist’s abandonment of women living under the yoke of Islam (emphasis mine):

The question is why so many Western feminists do not speak out about the cruelty that blights the lives of millions of women in Islamic countries and would do the same to women everywhere else should the Islamists succeed in their stated aim of creating a worldwide caliphate. “On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say,” [Sarah] Baxter writes. Says [Phyllis] Chesler: “Women’s studies programs should have been the first to sound the alarm. They did not.”

The reason, as writer Fay Weldon has said, is that these days racism is a much worse sin than sexism: a consequence, perhaps, of the success of the women’s movement in the West. Women who would speak out don’t because of a (justified) fear that they will be branded racists. Chesler has been ostracised by many of her old friends in the women’s movement. It has been said she has become paranoid or gone mad or, worse, turned right-wing.

I think Bone’s is probably the most insightful explanation of the abandonment issue —which I absolutely take for granted— that I have yet read. And it is part and parcel of the larger failure of the so-called Liberal West to advocate exactly those policies to the Muslim world that would sooner lead to the resolution of the struggle between our civilizations.

Because, in the end —by any empirical standard worth observing— the triumph of Western values is self-evidently justified. And that Western women, especially, cannot seem to bring themselves to advocate reproductive choice, suffrage, marital and property rights, and any number of other things to the wider world is an inexplicable tragedy —which arises, ironically, from the fault of unearned privilege.

You know, ladies, Oprah can’t do it all by herself. 

I don’t know why this fucking software won’t register certain comments, but I’m not going to let that derail my little blog. So, below is one such comment that is in response to my correspondent Arkady. From the “No Standing” post of 22 August:

Arkady, this “right of privacy” you’re talking about is a willful fiction. Why should you, to whom life in America is one unending web of conspiracism, choose to resort to this belief? You are a known quantity —in a thousand different ways. The only thing keeping you from being harmed by this fact is the will of those who hold your information.

Do they have the will? Shit! They barely have the capacity.

Believing that Karl Rove wants you —you— is grandly delusional.

I actually slapped my forehead when I read the following story this morning:

CHICAGO — A Cook County judge has decided there is enough evidence to prosecute a man who says an airport security guard misheard him when she thought he said that a sexual device in his backpack was actually a bomb.

Mardin Amin claims he actually told the guard the small, black object was a “pump” – as in a penis pump.

Amin’s attorney said her client was embarrassed to explain the object in front of his mother, who was traveling with him, so he whispered. The guard misunderstood, and thought he said “bomb,” according to defense attorney Eileen O’Neill-Burke.

“His mother is standing there so, under his breath, he says, ‘It’s a pump. Put it away. Put it away,’” O’Neill-Burke told The Associated Press on Thursday. The guard asked him again and he repeated that the object was a pump, the attorney said.

This is the most ridiculous story I will ever read.

For one thing, what kind of fucking morons do we have guarding our nation’s airports? Is it even possible that a trained security officer of any kind would believe that a penis pump is a bomb? It’s pathetic.

For another, why would someone who’s stupid enough to take a penis pump with him in his carry-on luggage actually go to the next level of stupidity by telling such a moron that the penis pump is a bomb?

Oh, and why do we have judges who are so stupid as to believe that such a case merits prosecution? Because people are idiots. Like Mardin Amin:

Amin told the Chicago Sun-Times after the hearing that security officials did not give him a chance to explain the misunderstanding, that he would never use the word “bomb” while going through a security checkpoint, and does not consider a penis pump an unusual object to own.

“It’s normal,” he said. “Half of America they use it.”

What?! “Half of America” means that every guy in America uses a penis pump. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t consent to sticking my johnson into any such contraption.

How the hell do people look each other in the eye anymore?

I don’t know what goes on with this stupid software sometimes, but I just had to delete a post because, in trying to fix it —and the attached comments that were mysteriously not showing up— it was screwing up everything else.

I fucking hate buggy nonsense.

The Gateway Pundit reports on the moonbat judge Anna Diggs Taylor. Quoting this story in Judicial Watch (emphases mine):

(Washington, DC)  Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and judicial abuse, announced today that Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who last week ruled the government’s warrantless wiretapping program unconstitutional, serves as a Secretary and Trustee for a foundation that donated funds to the ACLU of Michigan, a plaintiff in the case (ACLU et. al v. National Security Agency).

Judicial Watch discovered the potential conflict of interest after reviewing Judge Diggs Taylor’s financial disclosure statements. According to her 2003 and 2004 financial disclosure statements, Judge Diggs Taylor served as Secretary and Trustee for the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan (CFSEM).  She was reelected to this position in June 2005. The official CFSEM website states that the foundation made a “recent grant” of $45,000 over two years to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan, a plaintiff in the wiretapping case.  Judge Diggs Taylor sided with the ACLU of Michigan in her recent decision.

I already knew that none of the plaintiffs in this anti-American lawsuit had any standing to bring it, but now we at least know where Diggs Taylor herself stands: on the side of terrorists and their sympathizers.

Fox News is trying to keep it low-profile, for what I figure are good reasons, but two of their crew were abducted a week ago in Gaza and have not been heard from since: Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig. Centanni is the one before the cameras and Wiig the one behind.

Nobody knows who kidnapped them.

These are good men doing a hard job and I extend my best wishes to them and their loved ones that they be released soon and unharmed. 

On Fox News Sunday this morning, Chris Wallace ran some funny footage from earlier this week of the French armed forces coming to the rescue of Lebanon: it was a couple of motorized rubber boats with not even a dozen —albeit smiling and waving— men between them. Of course, these Gallic warriors made sure to be flying the Tricolor —yet I would suggest that such a display of maritime power was somewhat undermined by the fact that their flags were a third of the length of the boats themselves.

Oh, well. Give these human shields their due. Like all good dhimmis, they may be allowed their illusions of autonomy in the heart of the New Caliphate.

Mark my words: that misshapen little J. Robert Oppenheimer-looking thing they nabbed in Bangkok is lying. He’s got nothing to do with this case. He never touched Miss Ramsey.

I’m sorry for her family that she died so young, but JonBenet’s mother is the true villain of this piece. There’s something morally wrong with mothers who sexualize their daughters like that.

But nice try, Karl. I especially liked the bold clue of finding a patsy —pardon the pun— with a name so close to your own.