John C. Bersia won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000. What happened since then? Eight years later the man apparently can’t even do a Google search let alone deep research. This week he joins the ranks of old media ignorants who wrote about the Pentagon’s investigation into documents and tapes captured from Saddam’s regime. Like so many others, he chose to write about it without ever having even seen the report. At least he put his thoughts into the OPINION section instead of a NEWS section, but that suggests he knew he wasn’t writing about the report at all. He was writing his opinion of a report he’d never seen or investigated. The world wonders if anyone in the old media is actually interested in reported unbiased news, and thus interested in this report, OR if they’re all interested in voicing their uninformed, incorrect, and otherwise false opinions instead. So far the trend is the latter.

Let’s take a closer look…. Read the rest of this entry »

Obama, in a speech today, said the price of oil has gone up because of the Iraq war.

Amazing how the rallying cry used to be the war was for oil. If that were the case gas should be pretty cheap since we have access to all that oil. Guess its changed a bit now huh?

Senator Barack Obama on Thursday blamed the fragile economy on “careless and incompetent execution” of the Iraq war, imploring voters in this swing state to consider the trickle-down economic consequences of the war as they choose a successor to President Bush. Read the rest of this entry »

Woops!

Recognize who is with Bill here from a 1998 picture?

And an anonymous blog set up to defend his church offers some compelling photographic evidence of this: A photograph of Wright and President Clinton, which it says was taken on September 11, 1998 — the date of a White House gathering for religious leaders. Read the rest of this entry »

I fear that McCain will take the same high road approach to politics as Bush did. I have a huge amount of respect for Bush, as any regular reader knows, and believe that he was the right man at the right time to lead this country….and he did it well. Not perfect, but no President has ever been perfect. That goes for Lincoln and Washington also.

But when he took the high road with political appointments, meaning he didn’t can the Clinton appointed ones, he set himself up for the The Shadow Party to take command. And did they ever take command.

Now we have a very honest debate on the decisions and character of a Democrat opponent and McCain is going to take the high road instead of highlighting it:

An aide to John McCain was suspended from the campaign today for blasting out an inflammatory video that raises questions about Barack Obama’s patriotism. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest broadcast purportedly from Bin Laden (it was voice only) appeared in the last few days on websites sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

There are several interesting aspects to this text.

Sources for Journalistic outtakes of “tape”.

CNN

FNC (since we do allow Fox to be used on this website despite calls from certain “open minded progressives” to censor them)

Notice that both sources say about the same thing.

So I found the actual text of the message without having to go to the islamofascist website.

Transcript of actual text:
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, AP has done it again. They’ve clearly ignored the latest investigation into ties between Saddam’s regime and the Al Queda network of terrorist groups. Even their own article tries to play both sides of the coin (a writing tactic used primarily by High School students to write book reports on texts they’ve never seen).

“Fact Check: Bush on Al Qaida, Iraqis”
By JENNIFER LOVEN

…That’s about as factual as the article gets. Beyond that, it’s filled with contradictions that try in vain to spin the documented findings to bolster their historically flawed position on the issue; that there were never and could never be any ties between Saddam’s regime and the Al Queda network. Read the rest of this entry »

“I have failed to liberate Iraq, and transform its society into an Islamic society.”

– Moqtada al-Sadr, Asharq Al Awsat newspaper, March 8, 2008 Moqtada al-Sadr — the radical cleric dubbed “The Most Dangerous Man in Iraq” by a Newsweek cover story in December 2006 — has just unilaterally extended the ceasefire he imposed on his Mahdi Army militia last summer. And on the eve of the Iraq War’s fifth anniversary, Sadr also issued a somber but dramatic statement. He not only declared that he had failed to transform Iraq, but also lamented the new debates and divisions within his own movement. Explaining his marginalization, Sadr all but confessed his growing isolation: “One hand cannot clap alone.”What happened? Over the past five years, Sadr has been one of the most persistent and insurmountable challenges for the U.S. Leveraging his family’s prestige among the disaffected Shiite underclass, he asserted his power by violently intimidating rival clerics, agitating against the U.S. occupation, and using force to establish de facto control over Baghdad’s Sadr City (named after his father, and home to two million Shiites on the east bank of the Tigris) and large swaths of southern Iraq.
LINK

Exit question, what compelled Sadr to make this realization? :

Was it the indefatigable resolve of the Bush Administration’s commitment to prevent Iraqi society into an Sadr’s “Islamic society,” or was it the threat of American retreat presented by the Democrats’ Congress and their Presidential candidates?

Thoughts?

Perfectly said by Rick Moran:

Barack Obama is just another politician – devious when he has to be, vague when it suits him, and a liar when necessity calls. May this incident involving Reverend Wright open the eyes of most of those who have lost themselves in Obama’s rhetorical fog so that they can see who and what they are supporting for President of the United States.

Meanwhile the MSM has tripped all over themselves to “forgive” Obama’s foo-pah of befriending a racist. Just a little misunderstanding right? He was soooo courageous to tell the country that we need to end the division in America. That Wrights hate is the past and he is the future. But did he ever do that at his very own church? Did he bring change there? Isn’t the first place to prove you can lead is among those close to you? But he didn’t do that, no, he sat listening to the hate. He brought his children to listen to the hate….and he never changed a thing in that church. Read the rest of this entry »

A perfect example of the lefty spin on the McCain “gaffe” that wasn’t a gaffe is this conference call Michael Goldfarb participated in with the Center of American Progress (a leftist organization) that included Jon Stoltz, founder of VoteVets.org, Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at CAP, and Ilan Goldberg of the National Security Network:

Goldberg said McCain “fundamentally misunderstands the problem of what’s actually going on in Iraq.” He says each insurgent group has “its own interests” and “they’re all fighting each other.” Katulis then said that McCain “lacks a basic mastery of the facts,” and that “he doesn’t understand the challenges that America faces.” (Hit them where they’re strongest!)

Then the questions. First Laura Meckler of the Wall Street Journal asks if there are “groups within Iran” that have supported al Qaeda. Jon Stoltz replies that Iran “almost went to war with the Taliban.” He says “I fought these people.” She repeats, is there “any Iranian influence with al Qaeda?” Stoltz responds, “Not from what I saw on the ground in Iraq.” Meckler again, “well you won’t necessarily see from the ground in Iraq…” Stoltz cuts her off, “we’re the ones who do the fighting.” Meckler says “I understand that but you can’t see every influence from a neighboring country, I mean are you really saying because you didn’t personally see it, it doesn’t exist?” Stoltz says “not from the people we fought.” Read the rest of this entry »

With Hillary stating a few days ago that we cannot win in Iraq Bush came out today and told her and the rest of the country that we ALREADY are winning in Iraq, and will continue to do so unless the defeatists win and force a withdrawal:

Question: Take a guess how this writer feels about Iraq

Five years after launching the invasion of Iraq, President Bush strongly signaled Wednesday that he won’t order troop withdrawals beyond those already planned because he refuses to “jeopardize the hard-fought gains” of the past year.

As anti-war activists demonstrated around downtown Washington, the president spoke at the Pentagon to mark the anniversary of a war that has cost nearly 4,000 U.S. lives and roughly $500 billion. The president’s address was part of a series of events the White House planned around the anniversary and next month’s report from the top U.S. figures in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. That report will be the basis for Bush’s first troop-level decision in seven months. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, we knew the liberal MSM would come out in favor of their chosen one, and they didn’t disappoint:

There are moments — increasingly rare in risk-abhorrent modern campaigns — when politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs. In the best of these moments, the speaker does not just salve the current political wound, but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with.

Inaugural addresses by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt come to mind, as does John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religion, with its enduring vision of the separation between church and state. Senator Barack Obama, who has not faced such tests of character this year, faced one on Tuesday. It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better

There have been times when we wondered what Mr. Obama meant when he talked about rising above traditional divides. This was not such a moment.

Mr. Obama’s eloquent speech should end the debate over his ties to Mr. Wright since there is nothing to suggest that he would carry religion into government.

Whoakay then. End the debate? You just can’t make this stuff up. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the better analysis of Obama and Wright today by Stanley Kurtz:

Remember when we were hearing about the need to purge Michael Moore and the MoveOn crowd from the Democratic Party? Obama is the polar opposite of all that–and in a devilishly clever way. Rather than move the Democrats away from the Michael Moores or Jeremiah Wrights, Obama buys absolution for them from the rest of the country. No, Obama does not fully agree with Jeremiah Wright, but the Democratic Party under Obama will be complacent about its Michael Moore wing. That’s why the MoveOn types are so excited about Obama. There will be plenty of the most left-leaning appointees staffing the federal bureaucracy and set into judgeships under Obama, and all of it will be smoothed over by speeches about national healing and understanding pain. Under Obama, the Michael Moore-MoveOn wing, far from being purged, will be in the catbird seat, and all because they’ve found the perfect spokesman.

Obama says he’s too close, and too personally indebted to Wright, to break with him. But how did he get close to Wright to begin with? Wright could not have taken up so huge a space in Obama’s life unless Obama had let Wright in. And Obama let Wright in because of Wright’s sermons, not in spite of them. Obama may not have agreed with Wright’s solutions, or even with his final judgements, but something about Wright’s anger had to have attracted Obama–had to have seemed tantalizingly “authentic.” From the beginning, Obama had to have been sufficiently attracted to Wright’s excesses to forgive them. Then he sought to draw closer. In this positive attraction to anti-American anger (even if that anger is not quite entirely shared) Obama embodies the sensibilities of the elite academic radicals that are his real heritage and milieu. Read the rest of this entry »

Obama today:

Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes

Obama yesterday:

The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign.

So he heard them or he didn’t? (check out Mikes post below on this lie)

“Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety“

“These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America“

“As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me“

“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community“

Well, there ya go. It was a remarkable speech……remarkably middle of the road that is. Obama tries to be all things to all people here, on all sides. It contains a bit of distancing from Wrights remarks, a bit of condemnation. He also embraces some of Wrights comments and explains some of them. Read the rest of this entry »