Free Republic

August 21, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Blame Everyone Except Russia!The West seems unable to speak with one voice against Russian aggression. By Victor Davis Hanson Everyone is distracted by the Olympics. The squabbling here on the campaign trail consumes the media. Two presidential candidates and a lame-duck president all are weighing in on foreign policy. No wonder Vladimir Putin thought it was a good time to invade Georgia. Apparently the Russian prime minister knew exactly what he was doing but assumed no one in the West did. And he was right. Our pundits and politicians are all over the map...

Speaking yesterday, Barack Obama implied that the United States is to blame for Russia's aggression in their invasion of neighboring Georgia. Obama criticized the Russian invasion, and then said it helps if we (the U.S.) are setting the right example. It certainly seemed to be implied that Obama was equating the U.S. invasion of Iraq with Russia's invasion of Georgia. Of course, Obama would not want to be bothered with the fact that the United States invaded Iraq to remove a despotic dictator who oppressed his people and Russia - led by a despot in Vladimir Putin - invaded Georgia...

Link via Karl, who wonders what Obama could possibly mean here after his stirring testament at Saddleback to what a “real bad person” Saddam Hussein was. The Illinois senator’s opposition to the Iraq war, which his comment clearly referenced, is well known. But this was the first time the Democratic presidential candidate has made a comparison between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russia’s recent military activity in Georgia. “We’ve got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies,” Obama told a crowd of supporters in Virginia. “They can’t charge into other countries. Of course it helps...

Yesterday, Barack Obama told a Virginia audience “We’ve got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies. They can’t charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point.” Faced with a geopolitical challenge that demands unwavering Western fortitude and American stewardship, Barack Obama apologizes for the misuse of American strength and initiative. This speaks of a worldview in which America’s faults are always kept at the fore and a national security paradigm in which the U.S. must seek to understand enemy action as a manifestation of American arrogance. This...

Strategy Who Started Cold War II Posted by Patrick J. Buchanan on August 18, 2008 The American people should be eternally grateful to Old Europe for having spiked the Bush-McCain plan to bring Georgia into NATO. Had Georgia been in NATO when Mikheil Saakashvili invaded South Ossetia, we would be eyeball to eyeball with Russia, facing war in the Caucasus, where Moscow’s superiority is as great as U.S. superiority in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis. If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the...

Mikheil Saakashvili's decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia's invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser's decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships. Nasser's blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili's blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili's army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours. Vladimir Putin took the...

For many on the left, WE are the aggresors in Georgia Where you stand on Georgia says a lot.By Christopher Cook First, consider the presidential candidates.McCain has taken a strong stand against Russia's crushing of a sovereign nation. Obama, not so much.Of course, as is to be expected, America turns to Republicans whenever they notice anything serious going on in the world, and that can be seen in the poll numbers: people by far prefer McCain on the Georgia matter. Then we have the left vs. the right.People on the right, generally, believe that a free nation and a free...

American blunders fostered the situation, and now the United States will pay a high global price War became unavoidable in the Caucasus when Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sent the country's military to "liberate" the autonomous region of South Ossetia from its Moscow-backed local authorities. While Georgia and Russia bear principal responsibility for a conflict that both have been courting for years, the United States also shares the blame. And now America's interests will suffer, not only in Georgia and the former Soviet Union but around the world. South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and even Georgia itself may seem like small and distant...

A recent mission to Iraq headed by top archaeologists ... found that, contrary to received wisdom, southern Iraq's most important historic sites ... had neither been seriously damaged nor looted after the American invasion. This, according to a report by staff writer Martin Bailey in the July issue of the Art Newspaper. The article has caused confusion, not to say consternation, among archaeologists and has been largely ignored by the mainstream press. Not surprising perhaps, since reports by experts blaming the U.S. for the postinvasion destruction of Iraq's heritage have been regular fixtures of the news. Up to now ......

The New Yorker, in an attempt to point out the ridiculously over-the-top nature of some of the criticisms against Barack Obama, has the following picture on the cover of their magazine that seems to have garnered a reaction quite opposite to the stated intention. Some Dems are furious, some Repubs are snickering: Michelle Malkin has a good reminder for those who are incensed at that Obama cartoon. In other campaign news... there were rumors that the Obama campaign was going to become a NASCAR sponsor -- which is a perfect fit for Obama, as you go constantly and sharply to...

The U.S. failed to recognize the significance of the radical Islamists. The timing is right for a major new history of America's engagement with the contemporary Middle East. Admittedly, key archival documentation remains under lock and key and will be inaccessible for a long time to come, both in the United States and elsewhere. But enough material is available, in the form of declassified documents, memoirs, oral histories and journalistic treatments, to begin to piece together the story of how we came to our current predicament. Enter Sir Lawrence Freedman, a specialist on nuclear strategy and the Cold War and...

Summary: AMAZING ANIMATION, Shame they wasted it on rank socialist agitprop

Discovered in the directory left wide open by the Obama site designers: a PDF file containing Obama’s plan to “hold accountable any perpetrators of war crimes� in Iraq.And something tells me they don’t mean Al Qaeda.

The papacy may or may not have tried to ban the crossbow. But the Second Lateran Council (1139) certainly disparaged the “murderous art of crossbowmen and archers” when their weapons were directed against Christians. The dismayed council decided to prohibit their use on Christians “from now on.” Alas, perpetuity proved to be short-lived. Likewise, naval arms limitations treaties after World War One failed to stop naval warfare in World War Two. As naval-history.net notes, in 1936 Hitler’s Germany “agreed to prohibit unrestricted submarine warfare against unarmed ships.” Yes, in 1936 Hitler claimed -disarmingly-that he wanted peace, and legions of appeasers...

There are people in this world who believe that America is a force for evil in the world. They are called Europeans. Then there are people who feel the same way, but who will help elect the next president of the United States. They’re called Obama supporters. Calm down, my Cambridge friends. I am not saying that Sen. Barack Obama hates America. But even his most ardent supporters must admit - when they aren’t fainting away at his campaign appearances - that there is a direct and disturbing correlation between hating America and loving Barack. In Europe, for example, they...

Honors Moral Equivalency for Palestinian Terrorism - Remember these two drug-addled citizens of Greater Hirsutia and their famous advertisement for bed sores, AIDS, and how to help Communism succeed in its tyranny? They called it a "Peace Bed-In." Well, homely actress Maggie Gyllenhaal--who famously told us that America is to blame for 9/11 and that we deserved it--is teaming up with "peace activists" (I call them the capitulation team) and Ben & Jerry's at the ice cream company's New York to re-create the John Lennon and Yoko Ono Peace Bed-In of 1969. Joining Ms. Gyllenhaal will be photographer Roy Kerwood,...

Republicans Discount Global Warming McCain, Bush At Odds With Most Of Party POSTED: 2:15 pm EDT May 15, 2008 UPDATED: 2:46 pm EDT May 15, 2008 The proportion of Americans who say that the earth is getting warmer has decreased modestly since January 2007, mostly because of a decline among Republicans, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. That puts most Republicans at odds with their standard-bearer, President George W. Bush, and with GOP presidential contender Sen. John McCain. Both men said this week global warming is real and must be addressed. Republicans are increasingly skeptical that...

Oil prices have surpassed $120 a barrel, and it is beginning to hurt pampered Americans who have been shielded from the real cost of energy by bad public policies. Americans should have been paying $4 a gallon long ago, for if they had, we would now have decent public transportation systems throughout the country. Additionally, the incentives to make fuel-efficient modes of transportation would have been in full swing. Nothing angers me more than hearing goofs blaming the Middle East for America's energy problems. America is to blame for America's energy problems, and the Middle East has on more than...

Food riots and anti-US protests in Somalia are compounding the chaos in the long-suffering war zone in the Horn of Africa. Meanwhile, an Amnesty International Report released Tuesday alleged that Islamist militants, as well as US-backed Ethiopian and Somali government troops, are committing widespread atrocities against civilians in the capital, Mogadishu. And a recent US strike against what it says was an Al Qaeda leader in Somalia has sparked further protests. The Associated Press reports that Tuesday saw a second day of protests over rising food prices, with hundreds of youths burning tires, throwing stones, and blocking roads. Somalia is...

A German opera house is to unveil a provocative new production staged in the ruins of New York's World Trade Centre. It features naked pensioners and Mickey Mouse masks, Hitler salutes and Elvis impersonators. The self-consciously outrageous September 11th staging of Verdi's 'A Masked Ball' has been dreamed up by Austrian director Johann Kresnik. He has described the concoction as a populist critique of modern American society, aimed at showing up the disparities between rich and poor, which attracting a large audience. It will be a different, a provocative masked ball on the ruins of the World Trade Centre," he...

[Obama friend and associate, William/Bill Ayers, from his own red-communist-star-headed website, calls out Hannity and 'others' to debate communism vs capitalism] April 6, 2008: Imperialism. I’m against it, and if Sean Hannity and others were honest, this is the ground they would fight me on. Capitalism played its role historically and is exhausted as a force for progress: built on exploitation, theft, conquest, war, and racism, capitalism and imperialism must be defeated and a world revolution—a revolution against war and racism and materialism, a revolution based on human solidarity and love, cooperation and the common good —must win. We begin...

Newly elected Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier of Hillsborough was sworn into Congress this morning and delivered a fiery speech criticizing President Bush's Iraq policy that led some Republicans to boo and walk out of the House chamber. Speier, who won a special election Tuesday to fill the seat of the late Rep. Tom Lantos, was always an outspoken lawmaker in her years as a San Mateo County supervisor, state Assemblywoman and state Senator. She served notice Thursday that she plans be just as aggressive as a member of the House. "The process to bring the troops home must begin immediately,"...

A new U.N. Human Rights Council official assigned to monitor Israel is calling for an official commission to study the role neoconservatives may have played in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

While many Democrats for political reasons are calling upon President Bush to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Peking many DUmmies as well as other Democrats really think the U.S.A. should be BANNED from the Olympics altogether. All those millions of Chinese who were starved to death by Mao during the Great Leap Forward? No big deal according to the DUmmies when compared to the massive crimes of the U.S.A. as you can see in this mea culpa THREAD titled, "Should the U.S. be banned from The Olympics?" How much you want to bet that this DUmmie...

On Friday, March 28th, Barack Obama made his latest stab at explaining away why he spent 20 years as a comfortable member of the volatile and racist Trinity United Church of Christ on the south side of Chicago. This was the church where Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr. bellowed sermons filled with hate for whites and the United States of America as well as a church that published anti-Jew, pro Hamas terrorist articles in church newsletters. And, like all Obama's other "explanations on this matter" this one leaves a lot to be desired. This time, Obama tried his best to make...

BERLIN (AP) - Lynndie England, the public face of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, told a German news magazine that she was sorry for appearing in photographs of detainees in the notorious Iraqi prison, and believes the scenes of torture and humiliation served as a powerful rallying point for anti-American insurgents. In an interview with the weekly magazine Stern conducted in English and posted on its Web site Tuesday, England was both remorseful and unrepentant—and conceded that the published photos surely incensed insurgents in Iraq. "I guess after the picture came out the insurgency picked up and Iraqis attacked the...

It was a clear, hot summer day on Aug. 6, 1945, when 10-year-old Kenji Kitagawa kissed his mother and brother goodbye before leaving for school. The fifth-grader didn't know that would be the last time he would see them alive. Life was forever altered for Kitagawa and the rest of the world 62 years ago, as an American B-29 bomber, flying 26,000 feet above his hometown of Hiroshima, Japan, dropped an atomic bomb. Now 73, Kitagawa travels the world as part of an effort to educate people on the destructive power of nuclear weapons. Sponsored by the Hiroshima Peace Culture...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - France is tops, and the United States dead last, in providing timely and effective healthcare to its citizens, according to a survey Tuesday of preventable deaths in 19 industrialized countries. The study by the Commonwealth Fund and published in the January/February issue of the journal Health Affairs measured developed countries' effectiveness at providing timely and effective healthcare. The study, entitled "Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis," was written by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It looked at death rates in subjects younger than 75 that could have been prevented...

Activists planning protest at Rose Parade By: North County Times wire services PASADENA - Peace activists said Sunday they plan to protest and unfurl signs during the Rose Parade on Tuesday, and then march down Colorado Boulevard as the parade ends, calling for an end to the Iraq war and for the impeachment of the president and vice president. A group calling itself the White Rose Coalition said its members plan to demonstrate in front of the TV camera platforms at the Norton Simon Museum starting at 6 a.m. New Year's Day. Pasadena police said Sunday they had just heard...

ModernConservative.com has received a tip from a reliable source that may have election-shattering implications. According to our source, an activist here in Arizona has been approached by the Ron Paul campaign; the campaign has requested that he run the Arizona effort to get Ron Paul on the general election ballot as a candidate of the Constitution Party. Our source has requested anonymity, and we have agreed. We can, however, vouch for his/her general reliability. Our source also provided us with details that added credibility to the account. (Unfortunately, disclosure of those details would put at risk our promise of anonymity....

Ron Paul blames the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on the “interventionist” policy of the United States, and says Al Qaeda is justified in being “annoyed” at us.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore drew cheers at 190-nation talks by saying the United States was the main block to launching negotiations in Bali on a new global climate treaty. Efforts to start two-year negotiations on a pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol flagged on Thursday, the ...udge the outcome. Gore stole the show in Bali after two days of lengthy ministerial speeches which had waxed on familiar themes about the urgency of action to slow global warming and the need for cooperation. ... "There's no precedent in history, culture for the radically new relationship between humanity and the...

I'm constantly amazed by the naïveté and narcissism of the Code Pink women. It's almost like battered women syndrome. They keep believing in people who expect them to make the beds and cook the food, and if any protestation is issued, the response is a backhand to the face and a shove down the stairs. Many groups, both Republican and Democrat alike, have been burned by politicians who care about one thing and one thing only: getting re-elected. Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin is surely not that stupid....

Our next president will likely face a Russia led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, determined to stand up to a West Russians believe played them for fools when they sought to be friends. We pushed NATO into Moscow's face, bringing six ex-Warsaw Pact nations and three ex-Soviet republics – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – into our Cold War alliance and plotted to bring in Ukraine and Georgia. We pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty over Moscow's objection, then announced plans to plant ABM radars in the Czech Republic and anti-missile missiles in Poland. Putin has now responded in kind,...

Disease rate higher for those with U.S. clients, study says Female prostitutes in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez who catered to American “johns” had a 50 percent higher rate of syphilis or another sexually transmitted disease than those who didn't, according to a UCSD study. The women paid by American customers were younger and more likely to speak English than their counterparts, and they were more apt to inject drugs and have unprotected sex, said Steffanie Strathdee, chief of the international health division at the University of California San Diego. She wrote the report, which appears in the current edition of...

Row over 'tree man' virus samples By Felix Lowe and agencies Last Updated: 5:00pm GMT 26/11/2007 An Indonesian fisherman who developed tree-like growths on his hands and feet is at the centre of an international medical spat after his country's health minister criticised doctors trying to treat him. Indonesia's health minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, lambasted the US doctor currently treating the 35-year-old man, who has the rare affliction caused by the Human Papilloma Virus. Indonesia's health minister Siti Fadilah Supari (second right) inspects Dede's tree-like growths Mrs Supari is angry that Dr Anthony Gaspari has taken blood and tissue samples...

Hippies are just born problem-solvers, aren't they? /s

The University of Delaware has suspended a program that had recently come under fire for being nothing more than an indoctrination program. The program required residence hall students to acknowledge "all whites were racist." According to Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the program has been in place four years, but since University President Patrick Harker joined the university, the program has really increased the intensity.

"Putin's Hostile Course," the lead editorial in The Washington Times of Oct. 18, began thus: "Russian President Vladimir Putin's invitation to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Moscow is just the latest sign that, more than 16 years after the collapse of Soviet communism, Moscow is gravitating toward Cold War behavior. The old Soviet obsession -- fighting American imperialism -- remains undiluted. ... "(A)t virtually every turn, Mr. Putin and the Russian leadership appear to be doing their best in ways large and small to marginalize and embarrass the United States and undercut U.S. foreign policy interests." Snip.... Missing from...

While on the House floor, Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA), took the SCHIP debate to a new low. He said, “You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President's amusement.� So not only is Stark accusing President Bush of waging a war for "amusement," but he's accusing American troops of "blowing up innocent people." Pete Stark should apologize immediately to our troops, and President...

It's no secret that I don't care much for Ron Paul, but after reading some of the hurt and angry responses from Ron Paul fans to his first place finish in the Right-Of-Center Bloggers Select Their Least Favorite People On The Right (2007 Edition) poll, I thought it might be worth taking the time to explain to them why Paul is so unpopular with mainstream conservatives. In an effort to be polite, I am not going to be snarky about it, but I should forewarn Paul's fans and, for that matter, any "Big L" Libertarians who may be reading, that...

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster,” Nietzsche said. “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” We’re gazing into the abyss all right, and Blackwater is gazing back. Besides having an army for hire, brave kids who are paid to fight so that most Americans are not personally touched by war, we have the real mercenaries. And they’re a spooky cadre, careening outside the laws of Iraq, the United States and the military. President Bush continues to preach that we must defeat the “dark ideology”...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal judge refused Friday to dismiss a defamation case against Rep. John P. Murtha and ordered the Pennsylvania Democrat to give a sworn deposition in the case. A Marine Corps sergeant is suing the 18-term congressman for alleging ''cold-blooded murder and war crimes'' by unnamed soldiers in connection with the deaths of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha. The deaths became prominent in May 2006 when Murtha, who opposes the Iraq war, said at a Capitol Hill news conference that a Pentagon war crimes investigation will show Marines killed dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians in...

A federal judge refused Friday to dismiss a defamation case against Rep. John P. Murtha and ordered the Pennsylvania Democrat to give a sworn deposition in the case. A Marine Corps sergeant accuses the 16-term congressman of falsely accusing him of "cold-blooded murder and war crimes" in connection with the deaths of Iraqi civilians. The Justice Department wanted the case dismissed because Murtha was acting in his official role as a lawmaker. Assistant U.S. Attorney John F. Henault said the comments were made as part of the debate over the war in Iraq. U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer said...

Ron Paul supporters are raising a ruckus because WorldNetDaily columnist Melanie Morgan wrote not-nice words about Paul's presidential campaign. Here's the Digg thread where the Ron Paul supporters are flipping out: HERE'S THE DIGG PAGE WITH THE COMMENTS FROM THE RON PAUL CROWD And here's the excerpt from Melanie's column at WorldNetDaily. You can read her full column - HERE. ________________________________________ RON PAUL: Poor Ron Paul – it's tough to be the candidate of the conspiracy crowd and maintain any shred of credibility. This week, Paul had to denounce his own supporters who mobbed Rudy Giuliani on a Michigan ferry...

Bidwell Junior High School administrators said a letter sent home with students in an eighth-grade class Tuesday was a good idea for a history lesson, with bad execution. The letter, which appeared to ask parents to renounce their U.S. citizenship, prompted phone calls to the school from several irate recipients. He concluded the letter with "After careful consideration of the facts of our current situation, I have decided to announce to everyone that I am no longer a citizen of the United States, but a free and independent member of the global community." "The point was, I wanted to ask...

From yesterday's post (now locked for some reason), we find this from the BBC: - - - - - - - - - - BBC Tells Kids U.S. Brought 9/11 on Itself By John Stephenson | September 11, 2007 - 15:50 ET The BBC decided to set up a website explaining 911 to kids. They have several sections set up to help the kids out on understanding the war on terror the BBC way. In one section they ask, Why Did They Do It? Guess who gets the blame? The way America has got involved in conflicts in regions like...

MEXICO CITY: The closure of an American-run railroad in Mexico stranded thousands of U.S.-bound Central American migrants near the Guatemala border and many of them were deported Wednesday by immigration authorities. Some camped along rail lines waiting for trains that will never come. Others tried to walk hundreds of kilometers (miles) to the next working rail line and some turned themselves in to Mexican authorities. The government sent hundreds of federal police and soldiers Tuesday to clear out the migrants, who for decades have hopped freight cars on the Chiapas-Mayab railway. The company has run freight trains on two sets...