“Meanwhile, the peacenik predisposition of the other Continentals is a useful cover for French ambition. Last year Paavo Lipponen, the Finnish Prime Minister, declared that ‘the EU must not develop into a military superpower but must become a great power that will not take up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests.’ This sounds insane. But, to France, it has a compelling logic. You can’t beat the Americans on the battlefield, but you can tie them down limb by limb in the UN and other supranational bodies.
“In other words, this is the war, this is the real battlefield, not the sands of Mesopotamia. And, on this terrain, Americans always lose. Either they win but get no credit, as in Afghanistan. Or they win a temporary constrained victory to be subverted by subsequent French machinations, as in the last Gulf War. This time round, who knows? But through it all France is admirably upfront in its unilateralism: It reserves the right to treat French Africa as its colonies, Middle Eastern dictators as its clients, the European Union as a Greater France and the UN as a kind of global condom to prevent the spread of Americanization. All this it does shamelessly and relatively effectively.” —Mark Steyn
Tag: liberty
“How many folks saw Colin Powell at the UN? I thought he was pretty persuasive, but a lot of folks are still demanding more evidence, you know, before they actually consider Iraq a threat. For example, France. France wants more evidence, they demand more evidence. And I’m thinking, the last time France wanted more evidence it rolled right through Paris with a German flag.” –David Letterman
“Not all Hollywood celebrities are ungrateful, anti-American lefties.” The MRC reports on an interview on Fox News Channel with actor Ron Silver, who offers a few choice bits:
bq. “But at that dinner, the EU had a dinner that night about the ‘new Europe,’ and they were being very self-congratulatory about their values, and implicitly they were suggesting that America was an imperial country, trying to impose their values on the rest of the world, which I don’t think is a bad idea by the way, I kind of think our values are fairy universal and might be helpful.”
bq. […]
bq. “I kind of link Rumsfeld’s ‘old Europe versus the new Europe,’ and we saw it in the last two weeks, with France and Germany, who were not with us on June 6, 1944, I don’t know why we expect them to be with us today.”
bq. […]
bq. “My opinion is that the entertainment community along with other advocates–human rights organizations, religious organizations, are always on the front lines to protest repression, but they’re always usually the first ones to oppose any use of force to take care of these horrors that they catalogue repeatedly, and I find that inconsistent as well.”
Kudos to Silver for standing against the Hollywonk culture. It is a testament to his acting skill that he can play such a leftie on The West Wing.
Yet another instance where I am ashamed to share a surname with this moronic windbag:
Monday morning on Today, however, Turner maintained that Iraq is “too small to pose a threat” to the U.S. and kept up the usual liberal mantra about how poverty fuels terrorism as he told Matt Lauer that “trying to make it a better world is my top priority. A more equitable world, that’s really the best way to combat terrorism is to, is to build a world where nobody’s angry enough to want to be a terrorist.”
You can read the full analysis here. I’d like to see poverty erased from this planet as much as the next person, but you don’t go about it in a way that smacks of communism. We have seen that experiment fail in our lifetime, yet people still think it is the answer.
“Americans are a people who have realized a dream of freedom, who have taken it from an abstract hope and turned it into a living reality. What made this possible was a founding generation that understood the essential principles of liberty, and acknowledged from the very beginning that the basis for human justice, human dignity and human rights is no more–nor less–than the will and authority of our Creator, God.
“The importance of this principle is definitive, because it allows us to understand that since we claim our rights by virtue of the authority of God, we must exercise our rights with respect for the authority of God.
“This truth becomes a sound foundation for discipline in our use of our freedoms. It becomes a bulwark against the abuse of our powers. It becomes also the ground for our confidence that, when we claim those rights, and when we exercise them, we do not have to fear the consequences, because we are a people who exercise our rights in the fear of God.
“This means that as American citizens, we can have confidence in our capacity, ability and character to take care of our own families. We can trust ourselves to raise our own children, to direct our own schools, to run our own communities and states, to do honest business together, and to generally take care of the things that need to be done for our nation and its people.” —Alan Keyes
Jim shared via email:
“As income tax time approaches, did you ever notice that when you put the two words ‘The’ and ‘IRS’ together it spells ‘THEIRS?'”
Former President Ronald Reagan is 92 today. Major retrophisch well wishes to President and Mrs. Reagan.
“conceal”
“hiding”
“evacuated”
“noncompliance”
“mobile biological weapons labs”
“nerve agents”
“some followers of a senior associate of Osama bin Laden are currently in the Iraqi capital, with the approval of Saddam”
To paraphrase Secretary Powell, not once has Hussein proven that any WMD he is known to possess has been destroyed. For the hard-of-understanding among you (read: “liberals”), just because a known liar says he has destroyed a weapon of mass destruction, and you find no evidence of said weapon of mass destruction, doesn’t mean said liar has destroyed said weapon of mass destruction. It just means it isn’t where it used to be.
I have pondered authoring an essay on how it is the Democrats, in fact, who have long favored racial discrimination, and not Republicans, but why go through all the trouble when someone has already done it for me?
We’ve been getting calls pretty steady all morning from friends and family, making sure we’re ok since all the reports have the Columbia breaking up over north Texas.
The shuttle broke up south of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, and local stations are using weather radar to track the debris field, which is now south and east of the D/FW metroplex, beginning around Nagodoches and moving slightly south and east through Rusk, TX, into western Louisiana.
I had heard on the news last night that the shuttle would be visible this morning, but forgot to mention it to my wife so we could set the alarms earlier than normal. A friend in Boston woke us up with a phone call to make sure we were ok, and that was the first we heard of it.
I recall a science demonstration at our high school in the mid-to-late 1980s where a guy had a blowtorch going on a space shuttle tile throughout his entire program. At the end, he had a student come up, removed the blowtorch, and dared the student to touch the tile. Trent (I remember his name!) was a little hesitant, but did touch it, and he reported it was completely cool.
Major Texas connections on this Columbia flight: Commander Rick Husband was from Amarillo, Pilot William McCool was from Lubbock, and mission specialist Kalpana Chawla was the 2d graduate of the University of Texas-Arlington to go into space.
Like many, I have now witnessed Columbia’s first flight into space, and it’s last return. Certainly, this is not the type of return anyone would have wanted. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the seven souls lost on the Columbia.
UPDATE (12:15pm CST): Lee has more thoughts and info.