It’s a reflection of the boss. The boss also had a history before he became a candidate of being around and friends with the likes of Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers. The liberals scolded us last year on how irrelevant all that is and how it’s a smear campaign against Obama. But, if you live in that environment and you find nothing inherently wrong with that kind of radicalism. Then a Van Jones will show up. You’ll watch him years and years and you’ll think this guy is perfectly mainstream.

We’ve been saying this very same thing for over a year now. What did we hear from the left when Obama’s associations with nuts and racists was brought up? Why, we’re all just racists ourselves….nothing to see here.

We all railed against the MSM bias in not covering the associations, and now we need no clearer proof of this then the Van Jones story. If you received your news from the MSM you had no idea who Van Jones was, Andrew Brietbart:

…the American mainstream media – ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, et al – must be held to account for sitting on the sidelines as this major story kept building without them, went viral on YouTube, and then became so large that a key appointee of President Obama was forced to step down.

But with their decision to ignore the Jones story, they may have actually done Mr. Obama far more harm than good: Who vetted this guy? How did he get past the FBI? What did he say, and how did he answer the infamous seven-page questionnaire that all Obama appointees were required to fill out? Inquiring Freedom of Information Act minds want to know.

For most people in this country, the resignation was the first they had heard of Van Jones. For this sin of journalistic omission, there’s institutional media blame. Bias is too tame a word for the utter shamelessness on display: Only Republican scandals – real and imagined – matter.

~~~

…the Jones narrative hurts Mr. Obama because it underlines how the mainstream media helped elect the president by glorifying him instead of vetting him.

Just as Mr. Obama was not even cursorily investigated, Van Jones, a fellow “community organizer,” was not given the slightest media attention when named as an unaccountable “czar” selected to oversee billions in taxpayer money for the ambiguous purpose of “green energy.” And that despite having a body of damning evidence that could be found with a single Google search by an ADHD-addled high-school journalism student.

Andrew details a couple more stories about this administration that the MSM is silent on:

One of the stories is that ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a massive radical organization, is poised to receive billions from the Obama “stimulus.”

ACORN’s voting division is currently under investigation in multiple states for fraud. And its housing division exists to fulfill an unclear mandate that has been accused of using funds to pay for political protests. If the alternative media digs further and finds out ACORN is guilty as charged, and as corrupt as its ample critics say it is, the onus is those who didn’t question when the Obama team decided to allocate billions to expand the group’s reach.

Brian Williams, the ball is in your court.

Another story not making the evening news is that of artist Patrick Courrielche, who has shown that the National Endowment of the Arts is seeking to use government funds to promote Obama administration initiatives. On Sunday’s “This Week,” George Will pierced the mainstream media veil.

“Recently there was a conference call arranged by the National Endowment for the Arts, with a representative of the White House, for potential grantees or actual grantees of the federal government, getting subsidies – the theme of it was how the arts community could advance the president’s agenda. Now I don’t know how many laws that breaks, but I am sure there are some.”

What are you waiting for, Katie Couric?

We know what she’s waiting for. She’s waiting for it all to blow over, for the left to come to the rescue, so she and her fellow “reporters” don’t have a hand in damaging their messiah. As the saying goes, the cover up is always worse then the crime. Hell, why didn’t she just try to excuse Van Jones and his beliefs like another nut…ahem…Democrat tried today. (h/t JustOneMinute)

Now he’s been thrown under the bus by the White House for signing his name to a petition expressing something that 35% of all Democrats believed as of 2007 — that George Bush knew in advance about the attacks of 9/11.

Nope, that’s not a The Onion piece….that’s Jane Hamsher who just made Krauthammer’s point. You surround yourself by nutcases and you start to think being a nutcase is normal.

Former White House staffers I’ve spoken with say they would bet the FBI uncovered much of Jones’s past–especially if Jones truthfully answered their questions. What would then happen is this: the background report would go to the Counsel’s office (run by Greg Craig), who would then raise the question of whether what the FBI found was disqualifying with the the potential employee’s boss. Jones was hired by Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley, but he presumably (and ultimately) reports to the chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel must have decided that nothing in Jones’s background was alarming enough to prevent his appointment.

So even if Jones is thrown overboard this weekend, it’s worth asking: Did Rahm sign off on Jones’s appointment despite what the FBI must have discovered about his background. And, incidentally–did Jones tell the truth to the FBI?

The man who would befriend the likes of these three loons:

Wouldn’t find anything odd about another racist conspiracy nut…so I lay odds that it was Obama who gave the nod.

Either way, its another one under the bus and good riddance. Now he can go back to Color of Change and work more on that Beck boycott….because its going soooooo well for them /sarc

Oh, btw….Jake Tapper is the ONLY msm person pursuing this story. Shocking eh?

Mike posted earlier on how Democrats plan to memorialize commemorate the events of September 11th, this year:

Van Jones, an Obama environmental adviser, said 9/11 would be an opportunity to “connect, to find other people in your peer group who are also passionate about repowering America but also greening up America and cleaning up America.”

Musings of a blame-America Firster:

We need to get down on our knees and thank these Native American communities. But also the Latino community, Asian community, and every other community that’s willing to come here and help us out, ’cause we obviously need some help. We need some wisdom from someplace else. ‘Cause what we’ve come up with here don’t make no sense at all.”

* [W]hat about our sisters and brothers that are in prison right now?

Yeah, America’s the worst of all possible nations- a blight upon the planet earth that “don’t make no sense at all”. Throw it all out- bathwater, baby, rubber ducky, and all.

Any surprise he’d also believe 9/11 was orchestrated by the machinations of our government than by Islamic takfiri terrorists?

Gee…what was I thinking?!

Sometimes, I can be such an @$$hole….

Watch this, and consider that we’re not talking about beating up a Marine, but getting rough with the people who planned and executed the 911 attacks, who tried to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, who SUCCESSFULLY MURDERED 3000 civilians.

Chris,

YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

Poor Ford. He knows torture’s an issue that-in the end-causes more damage to Democrats than to Republicans. He knows the reality that in 2001, 2002, and 2003 the US intel community was freaking out, dazed, and confused (as every 911 and Iraq investigation shows), and he just can’t tell the Bush haters to stop, let it go, MOVEON.

Why?

Because torture, 911, BUSHLIED, etc are all distortions of the truth that come out if there’s an investigation.

Good luck Harold. I’m with CHEEENY-Show the docs. Show em all!

However, the myth that a ticking bomb scenario doesn’t exist is a lie. It DID exist, and it does exist today. Before 911, the US new for months that a big attack was coming. George Tenet told the Joint House/Senate inquiry (as also reported in the 911 Commission and Richard Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies) that he was running around DC like he was on fire. Then, the FBI grabbed Zacarias Moussaoui, and his laptop computer. The investigative process blocked American investigators from looking at the laptop which would have revealed the 911 plot and likely prevented it. Equally, he was not allowed to be tortured. America could have prevented 911 if the investigative process wasn’t hindered, OR if he was tortured.

Months later, Zubaydah and KSM are captured. Intel agencies know another 911 attack is coming, but the process can’t figure it out (again). This time, harsh interrogations were used, and then torture (not all harsh interrogation is torture and vice versa), and a 911 attack was prevented (according to multiple CIA directors, the Vice President, the President, and the new Director of National Intelligence.

Sick and sad as it is to say, torture worked. It was a last resort, and it worked.

SO, we can look at it simply. When intel says there’s an attack coming, and the investigative process is stumped, America can either:
A) stoop to torture and hope that it reveals the attack like it would have with Moussoui, and did with KSM
or
B) refuse to stoop so low, and know that lives could have been saved.

I say the lesson here is do like the Navy does in a sinking ship. When you’re told to close the hatch and let people die so that the ship may survive, close the hatch. Let the people in NYC, DC, Los Angeles, San Fran, etc., let them get attacked & then tell their families that we had people in custody who knew of the attack, but we didn’t want to torture em. We CHOSE to let the people die. That’s the decision.

Do like they do in the military and cut your losses. Close the hatch. Let the attack happen (still understanding that the investigative process is blocked like before and after 911).

The families won’t understand, and politically it’s equally suicidal, but the honor of the flag is protected. Besides, maybe then Richard Clarke’s testimony to the 911 Commission will be remembered, ‘America needs more body bags before people will get it.’

Then he came back

And after 3 months of investigation, the Obama Dept of Justice has reached the same conclusions that President Bush’s did years ago:
-no one will take the detainees
-no (Democrat) member of Congress can get re-elected if you put the detainees in their district
-a lot of the remaining detainees are too dangerous to release
-Gitmo just might not be able to be closed after all

1) The US didn’t take its eye off the ball in Afghanistan and let UBL escape because Bush was preoccupied w Iraq. UBL escaped in Nov2001, Iraq buildup began 10 months later, and Iraq was invaded in 2003. WILL SOMEONE PLEASE GET OBAMA A CALENDER

2) The cost of the war in Iraq literally changes every week according to Obama. Tonight he claimed it was $700+bn. No. That’s the cost of the war on terror as a whole. Iraq (per the Congressional Research Service) cost $444.6bn as of July. For reference, the cost of all the Clinton Wars was about $450bn most of which was spent “containing” Saddam, and that “containment”….caused UBL to decide to start killing Americans; caused the war on terror

3) Obama promised to encourage democracy, reforms, peace, love, and happiness in Pakistan via foreign aid, but Biden said in the VP debate that the first thing they’d cut due to the financial crisis….is foreign aid.

(waiting for link to transcript)

Very often when it comes to the Iraq War people are forced to conclude that a politician who was wrong about something war-related was either ill-informed about a matter or that the politician lied. With President Bush, it’s all too easy to believe that he was ill-informed or incapable of processing information…yet, it’s more politically expedient to believe that he is lying when he’s wrong about something. Often this stems from the intrinsic belief that he gets briefed on all the information the Men-In-Black can possibly give him. Since getting his official nomination, Senator Obama now gets similar briefings.

Senator Obama did the interviewon September 4, 2008.
Senator Obama got his first presidential level classified intelligence briefing…September 2, 2008

No doubt at these high level briefings the focus was on the biggest threats in the world today: Al Queda, Iran, the situation in Iraq, and Pakistan. Additionally, Senator Obama was allowed to ask questions about subjects etc.

On Al Queda, the Senator said that Al Queda and the invasion of Iraq were not related. That’s completely false.

On Al Queda, the Senator said in the interview that the US had taken its eye off the ball (off Al Queda) by invading Iraq. The fact is that that Osama Bin Laden escaped into Pakistan in Nov/Dec 2001, and the US invaded Iraq almost 2yrs later. No US forces were pulled from chasing Al Queda in Pakistan. Only 1 unit was pulled from Afghanistan to Iraq before the invasion (the 5th SFG), and while some US units were pulled from Afghanistan later, they were replaced by NATO forces. The covert fight against Al Queda in Pakistan never ended. If anything, it’s increased dramatically (recall that the man who planned the 911 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, was captured in Pakistan just a week and a half before the US invaded Iraq).

Surely some of the briefing focused on Iraq where:
1) the Surge worked-even Senator Obama reluctantly admits this now,
2) One man, Senator McCain, expected it to work as well as it did (Senator Obama denies this)
3) the Surge was NOT a military only offensive as the Senator claimed. The Bush Admin NEVER sought a military only solution in Iraq
4) Had Senator Obama’s 2006/2007 strategy been followed instead of the Surge, Iraq would likely have collapsed, caused a regional war, and forced a third American invasion of Iraq
5) The Surge DID work politically as well as in terms of security (this has been common public knowledge since at least July 2007)

On Pakistan, Senator Obama has complained that the Bush Administration hasn’t done enough, but he also admits that his own Pakistan policy is the same as the Bush policy
(interestingly enough, there was NO CONDEMNATION from the Obama campaign regarding the US raid into Pakistan 2 days later)

When it comes to the Iranian nuclear program, Senator Obama-having been informed by American intelligence agencies just days before, was coy at best, and chose to falsely claim that years of diplomatic efforts had somehow failed because of President Bush….not the Iranians.

How can a Presidential candidate be so wrong on such important matters of national security? How can he be so wrong after having been briefed as the President is, and having been able to ask all kinds of questions about today’s threats? The facts are simple. Either Senator Obama slept through the classified briefing, the briefing had nothing to do with the most dangerous threat assessments right now, or he flat out lied to Bill O Reilly.

Does America want a President who cannot admit his mistakes and who deliberately misleads the Americna people on matters of national security? Does America want a President who dismisses classified intelligence and instead misleads America to suit his own arrogance and political agenda? Many make those accusations of President Bush, but as we face the election, the decision moment for all of us, shouldn’t we be brave enough to ask those same questions of the next President before he’s elected rather than after?

Ladies and gentlemen,
Boys and girls,
Cats and dogs,
Forget the Olympics…THE REAL GAMES ARE IN DENVER!!!!

I thought of all kinds of ways to make a quick movie snippet or something multimedia, but in my YouTube raw meat search…something caught my eye, flipped my trigger, and just seemed SO PERFECT for the occasion. So please, press play on this 1992 ode to confusion, chaos, and searching rather than accepting. It’s a throw back to a time when Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Jessica Simpson, and so many others were still playing with their Barbie girls. A time when Saddam had just had his ass kicked and people believed he was contained (yeah, ’cause dictators learn their lessons and never hold grudges). A time when the Clintons were taking DC, and a generation was realizing those student loans had to be paid some day….and that someday was approaching fast.

And in the wake of what conservative musicians like these saw as confusing and scary, we can now fast-forward to this weekend’s antics.

A time when American gold medalists dared to thank President Bush in a LIVE interview on NBC forcing the network to delete the video from their website, threaten every single copy posted on YouTube, and even got the remarks removed from transcripts.

A time when Pres Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqi govt to withdraw US combat forces from Iraqi cities over the next 9 months and continue the withdrawal of other US forces from Iraq.
A time when Dems eat Dems over stupidity, ignorance, and arrogance, and most importantly

A time when the faux-anti-war group, “Dykes Against Dubya” reforms to protest against President Bush (a Republican) at the Democratic National Convention.
Bumper Stickers Still Available!!!!

It’s a time when people protesting the war in Iraq (which is ending, “US, Iraq reach deal to pull US troops out by June“) march to get their message heard using loud voices, bullhorns, big speakers, and giant banners, and then when FOX News tries to give them an open mic to express themselves….the protesters continue to pull the plug and harass the reporters so as to HELP get their message out to more people.

So pop the popcorn, crack open the brew, stretch out the recliner, grab the remote, and enjoy the show as Democrats protest Democrats and promise to recreate the riots-err, I mean “peaceful protests” of 1968. (note, did the City of Denver really agree to stop enforcing marijuana offenses for the convention? If so…it might be the most brilliant act of crowd control in history)

…and so it begins

Protesters Disrupt Convention Access; At Least Two Arrests Before DNC Begins

TENT State University per MTV

Oh, and there’s some great pics here

Man, it’s happening so fast….I just keep askin’

Hey yeh yeh yeh
Hey yeh yeh
Anybody know w hat’s goin’ on?

Well, at least I found the answer to a question that’s been naggin’ me forever: Where do these Che Guevarra lovin’ people come from? Don’t they have jobs? Why yes…they do

Today, we’re getting reports that another covert (well, it WAS covert) air strike has taken place in that region. If so, it’s the FIFTH time this year that we know about. How many do you think we don’t know about in this secret war’s most secret area and against the most top secret targets?

More here….

UPDATE by Curt

Some updated info here:

Taliban and Afghan National Army backed by American forces have traded severe firing in Sooran Dara area of Mehmand and Bajaur Agencies on Afghan border late Tuesday evening.

Sources told this correspondent that Afghan National Army backed by American forces and gunship helicopters clashed with Taliban when the former on a tip-off attacked a Taliban hideout in the Sooran Dara area.

Unconfirmed reports receiving from the Dara revealed that dozens of Taliban and Afghan National Army are feared dead in the clashes.

Pakistan Tehrik-e-Taliban spokesman Maulvi Umer talking to this correspondent via phone from an undisclosed location said that clashes erupted in Sooran Dara area when American and Afghan National Army backed by gunship helicopters and jets attacked Taliban on the Afghan border.

He said that Afghan National Army and American forces and their jets also violated the territorial limits of Pakistan and continued to fly over Mehmand and Bajaur Agencies for few minutes.

Ok, now here is where some speculation comes into the mix. The US would fire a drone missile at a high value target. No way they are going to do that for just a bunch of regulars. The attack happened in the Mohmand area of Pakistan:

The missile was thought to have been fired into the Mohmand ethnic Pashtun tribal area in northwest Pakistan where this year, U.S.-controlled Predator aircraft have struck at least four sites used by al Qaeda operatives, killing dozens of suspected militants.

Who has some family in that area?

It is pertinent to mention, however, that al-Zawahiri is reportedly married to a woman from the Mohmand tribe who lives with her father in the border area between Bajaur and Mohmand agencies

James Robbins believes the target may have been OBL:

This is some of the baddest of the badlands in Pakistan, and a great place to hide if you are Osama bin Laden.

Obviously, this attack was targeted at someone high value….but just how high value was he?

• It failed to prevent the war in Afghanistan.
• It failed to prevent the war in Iraq.
• It failed to change power in the executive branch.
• It failed to end the war in Iraq.
• It was duped by Democrats in 2006 who promised “A New Direction In Iraq” without ever having even formed a committee to brainstorm ideas until 2 months after being elected.
• It failed to prevent The Surge offensive.
• It failed to stop cannibals in the Congo [and was silent while 4-6million died as UN peacekeepers raped and sold children en masse].
• It failed to stop the bloodshed in Darfur.
• It speaks out against the efforts (war) of US forces to protect people from terror.
• It speaks the same rhetoric as the enemy’s propaganda. It is silent in response to terrorist attacks.
• It is openly embraced by Islamic holy warriors.

What is the “peace movement” doing wrong?

In late 2002 through early 2003, millions and millions of people took to the streets around the world and protested against further military attack on Iraq. They failed to prevent the invasion and removal of Saddam Hussein. Post war investigations and even interviews with many senior level regime leaders (as well as with his interrogator) show that Saddam never believed the U.S. would have the will to go against the world’s anti-war movement. At most, he expected another Operation Desert Fox, and it wasn’t until the last few weeks or days that he finally recognized that the invasion was going to happen. What do you think might have happened if millions of people took to the streets and-instead of trying to deter action (as Saddam believed would be successful)…what if those millions had protested in demand that Saddam answer Blix’ 129pgs of “Unresolved Disarmament Issues”? Could the “Peace Movement” have better achieved peace by protesting against Saddam rather than against those who would later remove the dictator? Would the Peace Movement be more effective if it protested against dictators, warlords, etc rather than representative governments?

Maybe the Peace Movement has failed because it’s embraced the very tactics that it alleges were used to start a war? Before the war, we were told by members of the Bush Administration that the war would be short, costs offset by Iraqi oil revenue, and casualties would be comparable to those of Desert Storm. Those claims were wrong. Opponents of the war often point to them as deliberately wrong, misleading, etc.; i.e. lies. Conversely, for the past four years the American people have been told that the Army was on the verge of collapse, that there was no way to continue the war in Iraq without a draft, that casualties are 50x higher than the actual number of bodies, that the cost is trillions higher than it really is, that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror (despite the fact that 95%+ of the suicide bombers were Al Queda, and 80% of all civilian casualties were from Al Queda suicide bombings). Today’s Peace Movement seems to feel it’s ok to lie and/or mislead to try and end the war in Iraq in the same way that Bush Administration people are accused of having lied and misled to start it.

Maybe the movement fails because its promoters really aren’t willing to help people/nations in trouble? When a nation is starving, and it asks the world for food then the U.S sends food. When a nation is facing a massive disease, and it asks for medicine, then the U.S. sends it. When a nation is hit by a tsunami or earthquake or other natural disaster the U.S. sends aid. When a nation is under attack from terrorist groups that are allied, affiliated, or even part of the enemy that the U.S. is at war with (as is currently the case in Iraq) then why shouldn’t the U.S. send help?

Maybe it’s something as simple as respect? Looking back at the protests and marches that brought about changes in civil rights and helped end the Vietnam War history books show tens of thousands of people dressed in their Sunday-best. Many people see today’s protest marches, and they look like carnivals. Groups like Code Pink seem the opposite in appearance to the respectful, professional look of the 60’s civil rights marches. Does this polar shift in respectful protest to a more “carnival” protest had an effect on the Peace Movement? Do people respect clowns as much as they did more formal protesters of the past?

I don’t know, but the fact remains that the Peace Movement seems more a partisan political tool and a carnival than a substantive and meaningful call for action. Perhaps someday it will succeed in bringing peace to a war torn nation rather than support those tearing it apart? Perhaps it would be more successful if it marched and took action against the terrorists?

For a detailed look at the 3/15/08 protest in LA from where these pics were taken, please visit this site. It’s worth it!

What’s going on here? As Bill Maher discovered one day during the taping of his HBO series “Real Time,” their goal is just to be heard–in any venue at any time under any circumstances. In spring of 2005, for example, I gave a lecture at the Los Angeles Public Library, after which I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with Michael Mooreish ambitions of exposing the “truth” about the 9/11 conspiracy, and he wanted to know if he could interview me. I responded, “you mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and his nineteen Al-Qaeda operatives to fly planes into buildings?”

“That’s what they want you to believe,” he said.

“Who is ‘they’,” I queried.

“The government,” he whispered in hushed tones, as if “they” might actually be listening in at that very moment.

“Yeah, well, ‘the government’ is a little vague for me,” I suggested. “Who in the government wants me to believe that Al-Qaeda did it?”

“The Bush administration,” was the by now predictable answer.

“But didn’t Osama and some members of Al-Qaeda not only say they did it,” I reminded him, “they gloated about what a glorious triumph it was over America and western capitalism, materialism, and secularism?”

“Oh, you’re talking about that video of Osama,” he exclaimed knowingly. “That was faked by the C.I.A. and leaked to the American press to mislead us. There has been a disinformation campaign going on ever since 9/11.”

“How do you know?” I inquired.

“Because of all the unexplained anomalies surrounding 9/11,” he answered.

“Such as?”

“Such as the fact that steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees Fahrenheit. No melted steel, no collapsed towers.”

At this point I ended the conversation and declined to be interviewed, knowing precisely where the dialogue was going next–if I cannot explain every single minutia about the events of that fateful 11th day in September, 2001, that lack of knowledge, in his mind at least, equates to direct proof that 9/11 was orchestrated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the CIA in order to implement their plan for global domination and a New World Order, to be financed by G.O.D. (Gold, Oil, Drugs) and launched by a Pearl Harbor-like attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thereby providing the justification for war. The evidence is there in the details, he explained, handing me faux dollar bill (”9-11″ replacing the “1″ and Bush supplanting Washington) choc-a-block full of web sites. Where I have heard all this before?

In the early 1990s I launched a full-scale investigation of the Holocaust deniers, initially as the cover story for Skeptic magazine and subsequently expanded into a book length treatment, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say it? The deniers employ this tactic of anomalies-as-proof to great effect. David Irving, for example, claims that there are no holes in the roof of the gas chamber at Krema 2 at Auschwitz-Birkenau. So what? So plenty, he says. No holes in the roof of the gas chamber at Krema 2 means that the eyewitness account of SS guards climbing up on the roof and pouring Zyklon-B gas pellets through the holes and into the gas chamber below where the prisoners were herded into, means that the eyewitness account is wrong, which means that no one was gassed in Krema 2, which means that no one was gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which means that no one was gassed at any prison camp, which means that no Jews anywhere were systematically exterminated by the Nazis. In short, “no holes, no Holocaust,” says David Irving, a slogan emblazoned on t-shits of his supporters at his London trial in which he sued a historian for calling him a Holocaust denier.

No holes, no Holocaust. No melted steel, no Al-Qaeda attack. The parallels are equal, and equally flawed.

I wonder what makes these people tick?

You can also watch this recent YouTube video where some twoofers start in on David Frum and his answer, take stronger medication.

Love it.

An Islamist website said it would carry a new recording from al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden about “foiling plots” in Iraq.

The website said the 56-minute recording would also be about the Islamic State in Iraq, an al-Qaeda linked group in the country.

It did not say when the video or audio recording, produced by al-Qaeda’s media arm As-Sahab and entitled “The Path to Foiling Plots in Iraq”, would be posted.

Al-Qaeda messages have been often released within three days of their announcement on websites.

“May God expose the cover-up by Al Jazeera, the channel of the infidels,” said the website, which is often used to issue messages from al-Qaeda.

It was not clear whether this meant bin Laden would speak about a controversy in which his supporters have accused the popular news channel of misrepresenting his comments on Iraq.

Some Islamists have said Al Jazeera misrepresented bin Laden’s views by airing excerpts of comments he made in October that insurgents had made mistakes in Iraq because of fanaticism.

Kinda curious timing to release it on the day his group assassinated Bhutto don’t ya think? 

On the assassination itself Bruce Riedal states the obvious:

It was almost certainly the work of al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda’s Pakistani
allies. Al-Qaeda has been trying to kill Ms. Bhutto for decades. She
has been the target of assassination attempts by al-Qaeda before. They
were most likely responsible for the attack on her when she first
returned to Pakistan. Their objective is to destabilize the Pakistani
state, to break up the secular political parties, to break up the army
so that Pakistan becomes a politically failing state in which the
Islamists in time can come to power, much as they have in other failing
states where al-Qaeda knows its chances for success are higher.

And Mark Steyn reminds us of some facts that should of been obvious, but wasn’t:

Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan had a mad
recklessness about it which give today’s events a horrible
inevitability.

Since
her last spell in power, Pakistan has changed, profoundly. Its
sovereignty is meaningless in increasingly significant chunks of its
territory, and, within the portions Musharraf is just about holding
together, to an ever more radicalized generation of young Muslim men
Miss Bhutto was entirely unacceptable as the leader of their nation.
“Everyone’s an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know
everything,” I wrote last month. “It
seems to me a certain humility is appropriate.” The State Department
geniuses thought they had it all figured out. They’d arranged a shotgun
marriage between the Bhutto and Sharif factions as a “united”
“democratic” “movement” and were pushing Musharraf to reach a deal with
them. That’s what diplomats do: They find guys in suits and get
‘em round a table. But none of those representatives represents the
rapidly evolving reality of Pakistan. Miss Bhutto could never have been
a viable leader of a post-Musharraf settlement, and the delusion that
she could have been sent her to her death. Earlier this year, I had an
argument with an old (infidel) boyfriend of Benazir’s, who swatted my
concerns aside with the sweeping claim that “the whole of the western
world” was behind her. On the streets of Islamabad, that and a dime’ll
get you a cup of coffee.

And lastly is the news that Ron Paul blames the US for the assassination (big shocker there!) and also said that al-Qaeda has reason enough to be annoyed with us.

But in Ron Paul’s world, all problems are the result of the US taking
action. Any action. Anywhere. Against anyone, doing anything. In the
case of Pakistan, he says we should cut off aid to our “puppet” in
Pakistan and make sure not to march in there with troops. There is, of
course, at most a neglible possibility that we’ll send troops into
Pakistan to do anything beyond taking on al Qaeda or securing the
nukes. India might, but even that’s highly unlikely. And never mind
that Pakistan’s history with democracy is sketchy, to say the least.
Should we not have attempted to work with Musharraf against al Qaeda,
Patriot Paul? Paul also tosses out the canard that we supported Osama
bin Laden. Someone really needs to disabuse him of that notion one of
these days. Someone should bone him up on the history of al Qaeda as
well. It didn’t form because we support Musharraf, as Paul seems to
think.

Disabuse him of that notion?  Hell, it’s hard enough getting to him through his wall of twoofers and neo-nazi’s. 

Our government’s official story regarding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, tells us that 19 Arab hijackers successfully defeated the United States military by hijacking four commercial airliners within two hours on a budget of approximately $400,000. These men, armed only with small knives, box cutters and Mace, were able to knock down the World Trade Center towers in New York City and strike the Pentagon.

Which implies that the official story described by Mindy Kleinberg is bunk.  How else can you read this letter?

So if you follow this implication to the finish line then she must believe the interrogation tapes of KSM and friends would of told them that Bush did it?

Whoakay….

Oh, and they didn’t knock down those towers with a few box cutters.  They knocked them down with giant fuel laden bombs.   Kinda figured you girls would of known that already but whatever.

From the CNN/YouTube GOP Debate Wednesday night:

From the CNN/YouTube GOP Debate Wednesday night:

YouTube question: Good evening, candidates. This is (inaudible) from Arlington, Texas, and this question is for Ron Paul.

I’ve met a lot of your supporters online, but I’ve noticed that a good number of them seem to buy into this conspiracy theory regarding the Council of Foreign Relations, and some plan to make a North American union by merging the United States with Canada and Mexico.

These supporters of yours seem to think that you also believe in this theory. So my question to you is: Do you really believe in all this, or are people just putting words in your mouth?

Cooper: Congressman Paul, 90 seconds.

Paul: Well, it all depends on what you mean by “all of this.” the CFR exists, the Trilateral Commission exists. And it’s a, quote, “conspiracy of ideas.” This is an ideological battle. Some people believe in globalism. Others of us believe in national sovereignty.

And there is a move on toward a North American union, just like early on there was a move on for a European Union, and it eventually ended up. So we had NAFTA and moving toward a NAFTA highway. These are real things. It’s not somebody made these up. It’s not a conspiracy. They don’t talk about it, and they might not admit about it, but there’s been money spent on it. There was legislation passed in the Texas legislature unanimously to put a halt on it. They’re planning on millions of acres taken by eminent domain for an international highway from Mexico to Canada, which is going to make the immigration problem that much worse.

So it’s not so much a secretive conspiracy, it’s a contest between ideologies, whether we believe in our institutions here, our national sovereignty, our Constitution, or are we going to further move into the direction of international government, more U.N.

You know, this country goes to war under U.N. resolutions. I don’t like big government in Washington, so I don’t like this trend toward international government. We have a WTO that wants to control our drug industry, our nutritional products. So, I’m against all that.

But it’s not so much as a sinister conspiracy. It’s just knowledge is out there. If we look for it, you’ll realize that our national sovereignty is under threat.

Cooper: Congressman Paul, thank you.

(Applause)

Ok, I know some of my readers are also apprehensive about such things as a “North American Union”. I would be too…..if it posed an actual threat in the real world. I’m sorry, but lefties aren’t the only ones that fall victim to conspiratorial fear-monger. I think the North American Union is nothing more than a conspiracy for conservatives. There isn’t a single politician I can think of who is pushing for an NAU. If you know of one, let me know.

Given how ArPee believes there is cause for concern, is it any wonder that he’s attracted 9/11 Truthers and so many other conspiracy nutjobs to rally to his call?

John Hawkins offers some of the best antidote to the conspiracy. I suggest you read my links in this previous post (includes articles by Michael Medved). You might sleep better at night.

Responding to Emily’s YouTube question on “three federal programs you would reduce in size in order to decrease…” the size of government, Ron Paul answers:

I would like to change Washington, and we could by cutting three programs, such as the Department of Education — Ronald Reagan used to talk about that — Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security is the biggest bureaucracy we ever had.

(Applause)

“Ronald Reagan used to talk about that”…..*rolls eyes*

Why is it, that Ron Paul opportunistically likes to drape himself in the mantle of the Founding Fathers and Ronald Reagan, with whom he would be at odds with on the matter of foreign policy?

He also has cited how Nixon was voted into office by Americans because Nixon pledged to bring troops home on grounds of “peace with honor”. But Ron Paul shares more with McGovern- the true anti-war candidate- than with Nixon on the Vietnam War; Nixon did not want to abandon our South Vietnamese allies and lose the country to communist rule.

I actually would like to see a push toward the reduction of the size of government, which may even involve the complete elimination of federal programs like the Department of Education and the Department of Agriculture.

Many conservatives have campaigned on promises of smaller government; but to the degree to which we’d like for this to happen, is it a plausible possibility, or a quixotic pie-crust promise? Easily made, easily broken?

And besides, what we can do is we can have a stronger national defense by changing our foreign policy. Our foreign policy is costing us a trillion dollars, and we can spend most of that or a lot of that money home if we would bring our troops home.

(Applause)

As in all things, there is criticism to be made in regards to our foreign policy; but the kind of criticism Ron Paul levels at current U.S. foreign policy, shares much in common with the blame-America criticism of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. If Ron Paul thinks American interventionism is not doing more good than harm on behalf of the world (and in particular, on behalf of America) then I suggest he drop Imperial Hubris for a moment, and read the following books:

Imperial Grunts and Hog Pilots and Blue Water Grunts, by Robert Kaplan.

Robert Kaplan has been embedding himself with small deployments, throughout the world. And he will stick with a unit for weeks- not just a day- to get to know the soldiers and to earn their trust. What our soldiers are doing in foreign lands benefits America and benefits humanity, around the world.

In an interview with Hugh Hewitt, Robert Kaplan says,

people have this image of the U.S. military going all over the world as a busybody, propping up dictatorships. It’s so false. In fact, the only regimes we prop up through training missions are of certified democracies, certified by Congress, which we have not imposed on them, that they’ve evolved organically on their own as democracies.

The Savage Wars of Peace, by Max Boot:

Far from being isolationist before World War II and the formation of NATO, America from the very beginning of the Republic intervened in a nearly continual series of civil wars, coups, and hostage rescues. Starting with attacks on the Barbary Coast pirates between 1801 and 1805, the nation has always interfered in other nations’ business far from home.

Two generations of college students have been taught that all such “adventurism” is nothing but imperialism and running-dog capitalism–and Boot does not deny that states naturally send in their forces out of national interest rather than mere idealism. But he shows that the majority of the time the Marines intervened to stop the slaughter of civilians, to retaliate against the killing of Americans and destruction of their property, and to prevent chaos from spreading beyond a country’s borders. While such incursions often served the local property-owning elites and corrupt grandees, such interventionists as Thomas Jefferson, Chester A. Arthur, and Teddy Roosevelt assumed that order and stable governments were usually preferable to mass uprisings, constant revolution, and mob rule.

Dangerous Nation, by Robert Kagan:

Americans, in fact, have always defined their interests broadly to include the defense and promotion of the “universal” principles of liberalism and democracy enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. “The cause of America is the cause of all mankind,” Benjamin Franklin declared at the time of the American revolution, and as William Appleman Williams once commented, Americans believe their nation “has meaning . . . only as it realizes natural right and reason throughout the universe”.

This is the real “traditional approach”: the conviction that American power and influence can and should serve the interests of humanity. It is what makes the US, in Bill Clinton’s words, the “indispensable nation”, or as Dean Acheson colourfully put it six decades ago, “the locomotive at the head of mankind”. Americans do pursue their selfish interests and ambitions, sometimes brutally, as other nations have throughout history. Nor are they innocent of hypocrisy, masking selfishness behind claims of virtue. But Americans have always had this unique spur to global involvement, an ideological righteousness that inclines them to meddle in the affairs of others, to seek change, to insist on imposing their avowed “universal principles” usually through peaceful pressures but sometimes through war.

This enduring tradition has led Americans into some disasters where they have done more harm than good, and into triumphs where they have done more good than harm. These days, this conviction is strangely called “neo-conservatism”, but there is nothing “neo” and certainly nothing conservative about it. US foreign policy has almost always been a liberal foreign policy. As Mr Will put it, the “messianic impulse” has been “a constant of America’s national character, and a component of American patriotism” from the beginning.

The other constant, however, has been a self-image at odds with this reality. This distorted self-image has its own noble origins, reflecting a perhaps laudable liberal discomfort with power and a sense of guilt at being perceived as a bully, even in a good cause. When things go badly, as in Iraq, the cry goes up in the land for a change. There is a yearning, even among the self-proclaimed realists, for a return to an imagined past innocence, to the mythical “traditional approach”, to a virtuous time that never existed, not even at the glorious birth of the republic.

This is escapism, not realism. True realism would recognise America for what it is, an ambitious, ideological, revolutionary nation with a belief in its own world-transforming powers and a historical record of enough success to sustain that belief.

Coming off of an interview with Robert Kagan, Michael Medved writes,

Ignoring the long record of American involvement in such conflicts in every corner of the globe, those who question our current world-wide role express reverence for a simple-minded (and non existent) tradition of isolationism. They cite George Washington’s words in his celebrated Farewell Address of 1793: “The Great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations, is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible….’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world.” Jefferson also warned against “entangling alliances,” at the same time he negotiated a vast expansion of U.S. territory with France, and pursued the daring and difficult Barbary Wars.

Even Pat Buchanan, the three time Presidential candidate most often identified as a contemporary advocate of “isolationism,” rejects the idea that the nation ever cowered behind its Atlantic and Pacific “water walls.” In his provocative and beautifully written book “A Republic, Not an Empire,” (1999), Buchanan argues: “The idea that America was ever an isolationist nation is a myth, a useful myth to be sure, but nonetheless a malevolent myth that approaches the status of a big lie…. What is derided today as isolationism was the foreign policy under which the Republic grew from thirteen states on the Atlantic into a continent-wide nation that dominated the hemisphere and whose power reached to Peking….To call the foreign policy that produced this result “isolationist” is absurd. Americans were willing to go to war with the greatest powers in Europe, but only for American interests. They had no wish to take sides in European wars in which America had no stake.”

To hammer home how wrong Ron Paul is on foreign policy and a romanticized non-existent isolationist/non-interventionist past, Mike Boyer at Foreign Policy Passport Blog writes,

1. Foreign Policy and the Constitution. Paul is what you might call a Constitutional originalist. He divines his governing philosophy from the Constitution and America’s Founders. But his understanding of their vision is profoundly flawed. Paul appears to believe the founders vested absolute authority for foreign-policy making in Congress, not the executive. “Policy is policy,” Paul wrote in 2006, “and it must be made by the legislature and not the executive.” But there’s almost no evidence the founders saw it in such simplistic, absolute terms. Law professor Michael Ramsey, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, recently noted (pdf) this in very eloquent terms in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Reasonable people can agree that Congress has failed its oversight responsibilities with regard to Iraq and the Bush Doctrine. But Paul’s thinking here is simply not supported by the weight of historical evidence.

2. “Noninterventionism.” This is the word Paul uses to describe his foreign policy, and he insists the term also encapsulates the vision of the Founders. While Paul claims “noninterventionism” is not isolationism, it sure sounds like it is. For instance, he even seeks to dismantle the Bretton Woods system of international cooperation born from the ashes of the Second World War (more on that below). Isolationism by any name, friends, is still isolationism. Sure, such sentiments were rampant in 18th and 19th century America and before WWII. The same sentiments are resurfacing today as a backlash against Iraq. Intelligent people can disagree about the Bush Doctrine’s place in history. But let’s not make up facts. The post-9/11 period has been filled with literature by such historians as John Lewis Gaddis and Walter Russell Mead debunking the notion that the founders were only concerned with domestic security and never saw an ideological component to America’s place in the world.

Hat tip: American Power.

Here is McCain attacking Paul on the isolationist point (yeah, yeah, yeah…he’s a “noninterventionist”, because he wants to still “do trade” with other nations- do read the link, and then tell me if you really see a distinction between the terms):

McCain: I just want to also say that Congressman Paul, I’ve heard him now in many debates talk about bringing our troops home, and about the war in Iraq and how it’s failed.

(Applause)

And I want to tell you that that kind of isolationism, sir, is what caused World War II. We allowed…

(Applause)

We allowed …

(Audience booing)

Cooper: Allow him his answer. Allow him his answer, please.

McCain: We allowed — we allowed Hitler to come to power with that kind of attitude of isolationism and appeasement.

(Audience booing)

And I want to tell you something, sir. I just finished having Thanksgiving with the troops, and their message to you is — the message of these brave men and women who are serving over there is, “Let us win. Let us…

(Applause)

Cooper: We will — please. We will get to Iraq…

(Applause)

All right. Let me just remind everyone that these people did take a lot of time to ask these questions, and so we do want direct questions to — the answers. We will get to Iraq later, but I do have to allow Congressman Paul 30 seconds to respond.

Paul: Absolutely. The real question you have to ask is why do I get the most money from active duty officers and military personnel?

(Applause)

Is he talking about “donors identified as affiliated with the military,”?

Like everything else Ron-con-related, I believe he is spinning the results of this.

As the reporter in the Houston Chronicle says,

“many contributors do not disclose their occupations, making it difficult to determine the total extent of military contributions to any one candidate.”

More importantly, the amount of contributions are incredibly small, hardly proving much of anything. Beth adds in the Outside the Beltway comment section:

Also not understood by the obsessed Paulbots and other assorted antiwar nutters: the fact that “military employees” includes civil service employees of the various services. That means a GS-7 who works at Whatever Air Force Base in BFE, Idaho has their employer listed as “Air Force.” For all we know, not one of those people is someone in uniform. I’m sure there are some, but it certainly is not all, nor is it indicative of some big antiwar sentiment in the military. For Paultards and Sullivan to extrapolate that idea from this is laughably absurd.

Furthermore, if one compares the 3rd Quarter statistics of Paul and McCain regarding the contribution amounts of those who do not list their employer, 100 dollars worth was given to Ron Paul’s coffers, compared to that of McCain’s: 2,244,223.39. Out of all of that money, how much of that could have been donated by active and retired veterans? Or “Affiliates” of the military? We don’t know. But it seems clear, by the paltry $100 given by the person(s) not listing employment, that the Ron Paul supporters are overwhelmingly listing their employment when making contributions.

Michael Goldfarb at The Weekly Standard writes,

among all the candidates, the total number of contributors surveyed here numbered less than 1,000–out of an Armed Forces of 2.2 million. And, remember, most of these contributors aren’t even active duty.

So yes, Andrew [Sullivan], those tasked with fighting this war do get it, which is why they aren’t donating to Paul. The only real report we have on political contributions from active duty military in this election cycle has Paul taking in just over $19,000, and that’s only counting donations larger than $200. So, maximum, we’re talking about 90 active duty soldiers who we know have actually contributed to Ron Paul’s campaign. The rest is pure speculation, and the Chron’s tally of $63,440, with its average of $500 per donation, is unlikely to be populated by many of the guys who are “actually fighting this war.”

Ron Paul continues…

What John is saying is just totally distorted.

(Protester shouts off-mike)

Paul: He doesn’t even understand the difference between non- intervention and isolationism. I’m not an isolationism, (shakes head) em, isolationist. I want to trade with people, talk with people, travel. But I don’t want to send troops overseas using force to tell them how to live. We would object to it here and they’re going to object to us over there.

(Applause)

In case you did not click onto the Jump Blog link, like I encouraged you to do, I am reprinting the relevant sarcasm:

So, we shouldn’t entangle ourselves in foreign affairs…except of course to trade with them. And travel to them. And have diplomatic relations with them. Which of course would lead to things like trade treaties. Which lead to real treaties. Which lead to military obligations and charges of American Imperialism and makes a target of our trade partners. Which would put us right back where we are. If, that is, the terrorists didn’t just decide to start knocking us off back here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Which of course they would. Good idea Ron. It’d be much better to fight ‘em right here.

Isolationism= Non-interventionism.

Governor Norquist: President Bush made a commitment when he ran for president in 2000 an 2004 that he would oppose and veto any tax increase that Congress sent him. My question to each of the candidates is: Would you promise to the people watching this right now, that you will oppose and veto any efforts to raise taxes as long as you’re president?

Paul: I have never voted for a tax increase; never will. But the tax issue is only one-half of it.

You can easily pledge not to raise taxes, but you have to cut spending.

(Applause)

There’s really nothing special about Ron Paul’s response here. It’s the right answer; basically, the same one all the Republican candidates gave (more or less).

Next YouTube question, and perfect one prescribed to the doctor:

Journey: Hi. My name is Journey. I’m from Texas. And this question is for all (inaudible) pro-life candidates.

In the event that abortion becomes illegal and a woman obtains an abortion anyway, what should she be charged with, and what should her punishment be? What about the doctor who performs the abortion?

Cooper: Congressman Paul, 90 seconds.

Paul: You know, it’s not a federal function to determine the penalties for a crime of abortion if it’s illegal in a state. It’s up to the state, it’s up to the juries. And it should be up to discretion because it’s not an easy issue to deal with. But the first thing we have to do is get the federal government out of it. We don’t need a federal abortion police. That’s the last thing that we need.

(Applause)

But for the …

Cooper: Should a woman be charged with a crime?

Paul: Pardon me?

Cooper: Should a woman be charged with a crime?

Paul: I don’t personally think so. I’m an O.B. doctor, and I practiced medicine for 30 years, and I of course never saw one time when a medically necessary abortion had to be done.

But so I think it certainly is a crime. But I also understand the difficulties. I think when you’re talking about third trimester deliberate abortion and partial birth abortions, I mean, there has to be a criminal penalty for the person that’s committing that crime. But I really think it’s the person who commits the crime. And I think that is the abortionist.

Cooper: So you’re saying a doctor should be punished.

What sort of punishment should they get?

Paul: Well, I think it’s up to the states. I’m not in the state — I’m not running for governor. And I think it’s different, and I don’t think it should be all 50 states the same way. So, I don’t think that should be up to the president to decide that.

Ron Paul gets a plus on this one.

Next.

Buzz Brockway: Hello. My name is Buzz Brockway from Lawrenceville, Georgia. All the talk about the war in Iraq centers around how quickly we can get out. I think that’s the wrong question. We need to make a permanent or long-term military commitment to the region.

By staying in Iraq, we provide long-term stability to the region, we provide support for our allies, and we act as a deterrent to the trouble-makers in the region. Which presidential candidate will make a permanent of long-term military commitment to the people of Iraq?

Thank you.

Cooper: Congressman Paul, 30 seconds.

Paul: The best commitment we can make to the Iraqi people is to give them their country back. That’s the most important thing that we can do.

(Applause)

Well, that’s odd…..I could have sworn we have been doing just that, by first ridding them of a murderous dictator; then helping a budding democracy flourish while helping the Iraqi people drive out the occupiers who have been fomenting chaos and discord.

The Iraqi people have their country; we are there helping. It is in our interests to do so, and in their interest.

Already, part of their country has been taken back.

No thanks to the white flag Americans who would have had us abandon them to al-Qaeda violence and al-Qaeda victory.

In the south, they claim the surge has worked, but the surge really hasn’t worked. There’s less violence, but al-Sadr has essentially won in the south.

The British are leaving.

Michael Yon responding to purported violence in wake of the British pullout:

Basra is not in chaos. In fact, crime and violence are way down and there has not been a British combat death in over a month. The report below is false.

Ron Paul continues…

The brigade of Al Sadr now is in charge, so they are getting their country back. They’re in charge up north — the Shia — the people in the north are in charge, as well, and there’s no violence up there or nearly as much.

So, let the people have their country back again. Just think of the cleaning up of the mess after we left Vietnam. Vietnam now is a friend of ours — we trade with them, the president comes here.

What we achieved in peace was unachievable in 20 years of the French and the Americans being in Vietnam.

Peace didn’t occur because we pulled out of Vietnam. The South was overrun because the North broke their agreement with us, and Congress failed to back our pledge to protect our South Vietnamese allies, should this happen. Not only did more death and suffering result from our abandonment of responsibilities, but we also lost the honor that Duncan Hunter referred to in a previous GOP debate. That too, seemed to escape Ron Paul’s fathoming.

What would the ripple effects of an American retreat, advocated by the Paul Pots, be to Iraq? For America? In Vietnam, our enemies stopped at their shores; with the conflict in Iraq, our enemies, who Lawrence Wright said have been bogged down in Iraq, will not stop until they reach our shores.

So it’s time for us to take care of America first.

(Applause)

Does handing al-Qaeda a victory in Iraq, or even the perception of victory “take care of America first”? When Osama bin Laden was able to claim victory at the Lion’s Den against Soviet forces, it was a minor inconsequential loss for the Soviets, but a major propaganda win for “jihad” recruitment.

Al-Qaeda enjoyed new life and recruitment prior to the troop surge and Sunni tribe Salvation Fronts, not because of what the U.S. has achieved in Iraq, but because of perceptions and media propaganda about our involvement in Iraq.

Cooper: Senator McCain?

McCain: Well, let me remind you, Congressman, we never lost a battle in Vietnam. It was American public opinion that forced us to lose that conflict.

(Applause)

I think it’s important for all Americans to understand the fundamental difference. After we left Vietnam, they didn’t want to follow us home. They wanted to build their own workers’ paradise. If you read Zarqawi, if you read bin Laden, if you read Zawahiri, read what they say. They want to follow us home. They want Iraq to be a base for Al Qaeda to launch attacks against the United States. Their ultimate destination is not Iraq.

Their ultimate destination is New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Phoenix, Arizona. This is a transcendent challenge of our time.

(Audience booing)

McCain: I believe that we can meet it and we will defeat it.

(Applause)

Cooper: Congressman Paul, I know — we’ll get everyone in on this. Congressman Paul, just wanted to allow you to respond.

Paul: Shortly after the Vietnam War ended, Colonel Tu and Colonel Summers met, and they were talking about this. And our — and the American colonel said, “You know, we never lost one battle.” And Colonel Tu, the Vietnamese says, “Yes, but that’s irrelevant.”

And it is irrelevant.

The moral lesson of that story is lost on Ron Paul. The point is, militarily, we did not suffer defeat. We suffered defeat at the hands of Walter Cronkite and the media reportage, in public opinion and waning support and understanding of the war; and we suffered defeat by the lack of will to win in Congress. In not fighting it to win, we could only insure a defeat. And this is why Colonel Tu understood that it didn’t matter that the North Vietnamese sustained massive casualties and losses. Body count didn’t matter to them. But it mattered to us. Military wins and losses were irrelevant, because the real battle was taking place in public opinion polls and back in Washington.

But we have to realize why they want to come here. Wolfowitz even admitted that one of the major reasons that the Al Qaida was organized and energized was because of our military base in Saudi Arabia.

He says, “Oh, now, we can take the base away.” He understood why they came here. They come here because we’re occupying their country, just as we would object if they occupied our country.

(Audience booing)

We took our military base away, because after OEF, there was no longer any reason to enforce the southern no-fly zone, over Iraq.

Cooper: Well, it’s Congressman Tancredo. And we’re running short on time. So, please, let’s try to get to these.

You have 30 seconds.

Tancredo: I wish that we lived in the world that Ron is describing — I wish that we lived in a world where we did not have to worry. By simply removing our forces, we would be safe.

Unfortunately, Ron, honest to God, I don’t believe that that is the case. We are living in a world where we are threatened. It is radical Islam.

(Applause)

It is — the ideology, the political and religious ideology of radical Islam is a threat to America, and it would be a threat to America if we never had a single person serving anywhere outside this country.

I disagree with Tancredo when he speaks of bombing Mecca and Medina. But on the point of ideology being the root cause, Tancredo has it absolutely right. Islamists who militantly follow the fundamental tenets of the Koran and Hadith reject modernity and see the very existence of non-Islamic societies as an offense to Allah.

Ron Paul likes to tell us “listen to what they say”. Yet, he seems to completely ignore the rhetoric of radical Islam which includes the Shia Islamic militants of Iran who await the coming of the 12th Imam, and the Sunni al-Qaeda master plan which desires to pitch the Islamic world into a “clash of civilizations”; both theologies wish to create an Islamic super-caliphate, and cleanse the world of all things un-Islamic.

Citing “occupation of the Saudi peninsula” as the casus bellum, misses the crux of the problem: radical Islam, which does not need an excuse to commit barbarism and murder, independent of American foreign policy.

Perhaps a good stocking stuffer for Ron Paul would be Lawrence Wright’s, The Looming Tower.

Cooper: We’re running short on time. I want to get Ron Paul’s video in. Let’s watch.

(Begin videotape)

Paul: The people are sick and tired of what they’re getting, and they want some real changes.

I don’t want to run your life. We need less taxation, less regulations, a better economic system.

We were not meant to be an empire; we were meant to be a republic, protecting liberty here at home.

It’s up to you to spread this message around this country. This is an American cause, it’s a cause of freedom. There’s something going on in this country, and it’s big. It’s really big.

(End videotape)

Cooper: That’s part of the Paul campaign.

In a recent LATimes column, At Peace with Pax Americana, regarding American “empire”, Jonah Goldberg cites from a book I’ve long had my eyes on: Colossus, by Niall Ferguson.

Critics of American foreign policy point to the fact that the U.S. does many things that empires once did — police the seas, deploy militaries abroad, provide a lingua franca and a global currency — and then rest their case. But noting that X does many of the same things as Y does not mean that X and Y are the same thing. The police provide protection, and so does the Mafia. Orphanages raise children, but they aren’t parents. If your wife cleans your home, tell her she’s the maid because maids also clean homes. See how well that logic works. When they speak of the American empire, critics fall back on cartoonish notions, invoking Hollywoodized versions of ancient Rome or mothballed Marxist caricatures of the British Raj. But unlike the Romans or even the British, our garrisons can be ejected without firing a shot. We left the Philippines when asked. We may split from South Korea in the next few years under similar circumstances. Poland wants our military bases; Germany is grumpy about losing them. When Turkey, a U.S. ally and member of NATO, refused to let American troops invade Iraq from its territory, the U.S. government said “fine.” We didn’t invade Iraq for oil (all we needed to do to buy it was lift the embargo), and we’ve made it clear that we’ll leave Iraq if the Iraqis ask. The second verse of the anti-imperial lament, sung in unison by liberals and libertarians, goes like this: Expansion of the military-industrial complex leads to contraction of freedom at home. But historically, this is a hard sell. Women got the vote largely thanks to World War I. President Truman, that consummate Cold Warrior, integrated the Army, and the civil rights movement escalated its successes even as we escalated the Cold War and our presence in Vietnam. President Reagan built up the military even as he liberalized the economy. Sure Naomi Wolfe, Frank Rich and other leftists believe that the imperialistic war on terror has turned America into a police state. But if they were right, they wouldn’t be allowed to say that.

Yet somehow we are told by the Paul Reverists that our civil liberties are being eroded by The Patriot Act and NSA wiretaps that are in place to protect American citizens against the next terror attack.

Two compelling new books help explain why our “empire” is different from the Soviet or Roman varieties. Walter Russell Mead’s encyclopedic “God and Gold” argues that Anglo-American culture is uniquely well suited toward globalism, military success, capitalism and liberty. Amy Chua’s brilliant “Day of Empire” confirms why: Successful “hyperpowers” tend to be more tolerant and inclusive than their competitors. Despite its flaws, Britain was the first truly liberal empire. America has picked up where the British left off. Whatever sway the U.S. holds over far-flung reaches of the globe is derived from the fact that we have been, and hopefully shall continue to be, the leader of the free world, offering help and guidance, peace and prosperity, where and when we can, as best we can, and asking little in return. If that makes us an empire, so be it. But I think “leader of the free world” is the only label we’ll ever need or — one hopes — ever want.

Cooper: Let’s go to the next question — it’s for Ron Paul.

Mark Strauss: Mark Strauss, Davenport, Iowa.

This question is for Ron Paul.

Mr. Paul, I think we both know that the Republican party is never going to give you the nomination. But I’m hoping that you’re crazy like a fox like that and you’re using this exposure to propel yourself into an independent run.

My question is for Ron Paul: Mr. Paul, are you going to let America down by not running as an independent?

Thank you.

Paul: Now that’s what I call a tough question, because I have no intention of doing this.

I am a Republican. I have won 10 times as a Republican and we’re doing quite well. We had 5,000 people show up at a rally in front of the Independence Hall with blacks and Hispanics and a cross-section of this country.

You know that we raised $4.3 million in one day?

(Applause)

Without spending one cent. We didn’t even pay an individual to go out and they weren’t professional fund-raisers. It came in here — it was automatic.

We’re struggling to figure out how to spend the money. This country is in a revolution. They’re sick and tired of what they’re getting. And I happen to be lucky enough to be part of it.

Cooper: I’ll take that as a no.

(Applause)

lol…