John Howard: The One Man Majority

Attributed to Andrew Jackson:

One man with courage, makes a majority.

By God, we have a one man majority in Australia.

Prime Minister John Howard has refused Muslim calls to censure Treasurer Peter Costello over comments he made about Islamic extremists.

This is what triggered this particular spat of Muslim anger:

Muslim leaders have called for Mr Howard to censure Mr Costello over his speech last night to the Sydney Institute in which he said anyone who believed Islamic sharia law could co-exist with Australian law should move to a country where they felt more comfortable.

Just because Muslim men are afraid of their women, is no reason western men will put ours in a burka.    We are not stupid enough to try.

(H/T:  Thomas Lifson, American Thinker )

Chuck Hagel just called held a press conference. Hagel announced that he was not running – yet:

In an odd twist, the Nebraska senator called a news conference to say he would decide about his political future later this year

Hagel has no support among republcan voters, and now he has alienated his only supporters – the press.  Way to go Chuck  

Too bad for Chucky, that it takes far more than a megomaniac sized ego to get elected president.   And his over sized ego in the only assert Chuck has.

For the good news, John McCain can rest a little bit easier, as he remains the only maverick formally in the race.

ONEIDA, N.Y. —AP- A train carrying propane derailed in upstate New York Monday morning, causing an explosion that sent a huge fireball into the dawn sky. Black smoke poured out for hours as the city’s downtown was evacuated.

Ouch.

CSX, who owns that line, has not had a good time of it the last few months. This would be the third derailment I know if in that timeframe, the second major one. They’ve suspended Amtrak service to the area. Which means, Empire service… the whole Albany to Toronto run… is out for Amtrak.

How sweet it is.

Moonbats storm Mrs. Pelosi’s house, via Don Surber.

Dennis Kucinich sounds like a voice of reason, via Sister Toldjah:

AUSTIN (TX) — The cancellation in the past two days of two planned nationally televised debates because of candidates’ “scheduling conflicts” and unwillingness to participate smacks of “manipulation by some candidates who would rather run and hide than defend their records and their positions on the war,” Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich said today while campaigning in Texas.

David Obey calls liberals idiots. via Michelle Malkin.

Mrs. Pelosi gets attacked from the right by the Los Angeles Times, of all sources:

AFTER WEEKS OF internal strife, House Democrats have brought forth their proposal for forcing President Bush to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by 2008. The plan is an unruly mess: bad public policy, bad precedent and bad politics. If the legislation passes, Bush says he’ll veto it, as well he should.

My question is how will the blue dogs continue to caucus with the moonbat left?

Sunday Telegraph– Scientists who questioned mankind’s impact on climate change have received death threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community.

They say the debate on global warming has been “hijacked” by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

One of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming.

“Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened,” said the professor.

“I can tolerate being called a sceptic because all scientists should be sceptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal.”

Indeed, so it has. At the bottom line, this is more about politics and money, than it is about ‘saving the planet’ …as if it NEEDED saving.

Like a lot of us here have said before, the whole issue of Anthropogenic Global Warming offers so many opportunities for political power that it has long abandoned its exclusive connection to science and gone into the realm of politics.

Martin A Knight, Red State.  

McClatchy Newspapers -WASHINGTON – The White House acknowledged on Sunday that presidential adviser Karl Rove served as a conduit for complaints to the Justice Department about federal prosecutors who were later fired for what critics charge were partisan political reasons.

House investigators on Sunday declared their intention to question Rove about any role he may have played in the firings.

You know, what I haven’t seen questioned as yet, is, what was the performance of these lawyers who got fired?  Seems to me that before we dive into political opportunism, as the Democrats seem to want to do… (Hell, let’s be honest… when don’t they…) how about asking the question whether not they deserved to be fired, based on job performance?  By definition, that question would include the concept of whether not they were operating themselves under some sort of political motivation.

Addendum:

In other words, so some lawyers got canned. What of it? Why is wrongdoing assumed?

Oh, yeah, I forgot… the Democrats are desperate to bring down a Republican administration at any cost. I keep forgetting.

Well first it was that Mrs. Clinton was making ludicrous comparisons to Lady Thatcher.   The Iron Lady never stood for office on her husbands coat tails.

Now either having given up on the comparison to Lady Thatcher, or finding it laughable, Mrs. Clinton has now taken to comparing herself to John F. Kennedy.   Maggie Haberman, in the New York Post:

March 11, 2007 — NASHUA, N.H. – Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton invoked the campaign of the nation’s lone Catholic president, John Kennedy, last night as she talked about her challenge in becoming the first female commander-in-chief.

“He was smart, he was dynamic, he was inspiring and he was Catholic. A lot of people back then [1960] said, ‘America will never elect a Catholic as president,’ ” the White House hopeful told the New Hampshire Democrats’ 100 Club fund-raiser here.

I feel like a dog surrounded by fire hydrants.   Yes, Kennedy was smart, but not smart enough to graduate Havard on his own merits.  Kennedy was indeep inspiring:

“Ask not what your country can do for.  Ask what you can do for your country”

The next inspiring thing Mrs. Clinton says will be her first.  

Then too it is article of faith among republicans that Nixon actually won the 1960 election.

More:  A.J. Strata, Strata-Sphere.

Captain Ed this morning brings up Kosovo.  He suggests that for the last eight years the United Nations is been doing nothing but shuffling paper and wasting time.  He quotes a WaPo article:

A year of contentious talks on the future status of Kosovo ended Saturday in a bitter deadlock over a U.N. plan that would set the disputed Serbian province on the road to independence.

Serbia’s nationalist prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, warned of “the most dangerous precedent in the history of the U.N.” if the Security Council — which will have the final say — approves the plan.

Kostunica said the blueprint, which would grant Kosovo supervised statehood and elements of independence including its own army, flag, anthem and constitution, could encourage other independence-minded regions around the world to break away. Serbian President Boris Tadic said he found the idea of parting with the province “unbearable.”

Kosovo has been a U.N. protectorate since 1999, when NATO airstrikes on Belgrade ended a Serbian crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in the southern province. The U.N. plan is an attempt to resolve the final major dispute remaining after Yugoslavia’s bloody 1990s breakup.

And then says:

Eight years has changed nothing. The ethnic Albanians still want their own nation in Kosovo, and the Serbians refuse to part with it. Another eight years will probably produce the same result. Neither side will give an inch on the main issue, which is independence for Kosovo. Both sides remain absolutely committed to the outcome they desire and will not negotiate away their demands.

… The UN may or may not have stopped a genocide; it’s safe to assume they did, given the Serbian leadership at the time. However, they have done nothing to resolve the underlying conflict that started the war, and given the diametrically opposed sides in the conflict, they don’t have that capability at all. The UN went in without a plan, and now their only strategy appears to be to bore everyone with an extended deployment of peacekeepers, whose ability to keep the peace has been shown to be somewhat limited in any case.  If that really is their strategy, the UN will have to deploy there for generations or centuries, as the 40-year reign of Joseph Tito didn’t solve the underlying crisis, either — and his troops were much more effective in keeping the peace than the blue helmets in Kosovo today.

I’ve gone through all this extensive quoting business, because it strikes me, as a whole, that this little Kosovo escapade, is remarkably similar to what the Democrats are charging we got ourselves into in Iraq.  And so, logically, comes the question; “Why the different response?”.

Look, I supported at the time are going into Kosovo.  I still think it was a good idea. Assuming, of course, that we didn’t let the UN run things as we ended up doing.
If you factor out the criminal investigations pending against Bill Clinton at the time that we went into Kosovo, both the reasons that we went in, in each case… Iraq and Kosovo, have been remarkably similar, with the exception of the idea that the United States has made far more progress in establishing a working government in Iraq, than the United Nations has managed to do in eight years of trying the same thing, in Kosovo.  Yet, the Democrats say nothing about our continued involvement in Kosovo, and scream bloody murder about Iraq. Logical question: Why?
The different reaction may be related to a Democrat being in the White House of the time of the invasion of Kosovo.  It may also have something to do with the involvement of the United Nations.  It may be a combination of these factors, since both of them seem to lead down the path of world government. They also suggest a connection to the failure of the effort there.
Perhaps, in the end, it is what the juxtaposition of Iraq and Kosovo say about the effectiveness of each path that disturbs the Democrats so.
The United Nations has utterly failed to get the job done in Kosovo.  The path that the Democrats counseled at the time of our getting involved with Kosovo, (That is to say, involving the great debate society of Turtle Bay ) is labeled for all time, as an unarguably miserable failure.

Meanwhile, the story on Iraq has yet to be written.  For all that our efforts in Iraq have been flawed we have today to have larger success in Iraq, then we have in Kosovo.  Yet, we see the Democrats pushing for our failure in Iraq, at all costs.

The opportunity in Iraq was very much an equal of the opportunity in Kosovo.

Is what we’re seeing here, With the leftists attacking every move we make in Iraq, is what we’re dealing with the interational equal of the leftist predilection of their desire for equal outcome, trumping equal opportunity?

AP-The cameras get turned on Michael Moore for a change at the South by Southwest film festival, where the documentary Manufacturing Dissent will have its world premiere.

The film from directors Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk, playing March 10 at the Austin festival, follows Moore during the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 and questions many of his tactics.

Among its revelations: that the confrontational documentarian did interview former General Motors Chairman Roger Smith, the elusive subject of his 1989 debut Roger & Me, and simply chose to leave it out of the finished cut.

Yeah, well… As I recall, Moore has spent a good deal of time, telling us over the last twenty years or thereabouts, that he had in fact interviewed Roger Smith.  Gee… Michael Moore lied.

Who would have thought?

The snark of the day comes from Don Surber:

I am greatly amused by the whooping and hollering by the lefty blogs over stopping the Nevada Democratic Party from having a presidential debate on Fox News. Taking the Democrats off the most popular cable TV news network is the kind of out-of-the-box strategy by the Kos krowd that got Ned Lamont elected last year.

Oops.

It is not that I object to the language police.  I do.  It the highly selective nature of their enforcement.   In effect  the crime of speaking while normal.

The PC police have attempted to take certain words out of circulation.   Any word, with no regards to its number of perfectly good meanings, becomes unacceptable if one particular meaning is poltically incorrect.

In the much discussed recent example, John Edwards and the liberals had a hissy fit when Ann Coulter described Edwards as a wuss by using the perfectly good word faggot, a word some people use to describe people who choose to engage in homosexual behavior.  

Recently Bill Maher also used a perfectly good word,. that also can be used to describe people who choose to engage in homosexual behavior:

The Republican Party, besides Rudy Giuliani, Bush likes to dress up. He likes to be a cowboy, or Iceman from “Top Gun.” And they have something very gay, excuse me, going on with Ronald Reagan. I mean, they love Ronald Reagan in a way that’s just gay. I’m sorry. But, I think they want to put him on a stamp so that they can lick his backside.

Now it is well accepted that Ronald Reagan was gay.   Indeed no president ever smiled more, nor told a better joke.   Now sadly some also use the word gay to refer to people who choose to engage in  homosexual behavior.

This misuse of the word gay might lead some to believe that Maher was attempting to impune the Gipper’s manhood or that of conservatives in general.

Of course there can be no organized protest to fire Maher. ABC already has.  Nor drop his columns;. He has none.  Yet expect the PC police to ignore Maher, as indeed we all should.?

John Edwards would have you believe that he should be president.   Or course Edwards also argued that obstetricians caused celbral palsey.   Yet Edwards was the first candidate to cut and run from the Nevada debates, which were scheduled to coverd by Fox News.

The Edwards campaign said:

Fox News has already proven they have no intention of providing “fair and balanced” coverage of any Democrat in this election.
¼br /> In recent weeks they have run blatant lies about Senator Obama’s background. And Fox was only too happy to give Ann Coulter a platform to spew more hate a few days after her bigoted attack on Senator Edwards and the gay community

Yes Fox News is horrid network.  After all Fox broke the Tailwind, Bush National Guard, and  New Orleans sniper stories.

Now if Edwards can’t face down a question from the likes of Britt Hume how in the heck does he propose to stand up to the likes Usama bin Laden, Kim Jong Il, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

The Battle of Thermopylae was fought circa 480 BC.  Ellis L. Knox, provides a good description and summary of the battle: 

The Greeks lost the battle. They had come hoping for a victory and instead had been routed. But Thermopylae was always hailed as a triumph for Greek arms because the Persian army was crucially delayed.

Thermopylae allowed the Greeks time to organize. The Athenians continued to build their ships in order to take control of the seas again.
The Greeks were actually heartened by the example of Leonidas and the 300 Spartans plus allies who fought at Thermopylae. The battle served as an example to officers and soldiers alike of what courage and self-sacrifice could achieve. It is still remembered today as such an example.

The battle was the subject of the 1962 movie “The 300 Spartans”   The IMDB plot description:

Essentially true story of how Spartan king Leonidis led an extremely small army of Greek Soldiers (300 of them his personal body guards from Sparta) to hold off an invading Persian army more than 20 times as large. The actual heroism of those who stood (and ultimately died) with Leonidis helped shape the course of Western Civilization, allowing the Greek city states time to organize an army which repelled the Persians. Set in 480 BC.

I think it fair to say that the Spartans were valiant , and the the battle historically significant .   Given that Greece is considered the cradle of civilization and the battle saved the Greeks,  had the battle a different outcome, I’d most likely would not be here to write this post.

Added:  Victor Davis Hanson offers his historical perspective:

Greek writers and poets such as Simonides and Herodotus were fascinated by the Greek sacrifice against Xerxes, and especially the heroism of Leonidas and his men. And subsequently throughout Western literature poets as diverse as Lord Byron and A.E. Houseman have likewise paid homage to the Spartan last stand — and this universal idea of Western soldiers willing to die as free men rather than to submit to tyranny. Steven Pressfield’s novel Gates of Fire and the earlier Hollywood movie The 300 Spartans both were based on the Greek defense of the pass at Thermopylae.

The battle also is the subject of the movie 300 which opened this week.   Dana Stevens, of Slate, purports to write a review of the movie.   Stevens makes no mention of historical accucacy, or lack thereof same.  Rather Stevens devotes her venom to fact that the movie 300 does not conform to her particular politcal view:

Here are just a few of the categories that are not-so-vaguely conflated with the “bad” (i.e., Persian) side in the movie: black people. Brown people. Disfigured people. Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws. Elephants and rhinos (filthy creatures both). The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.

I am not sure if Stevens is suggesting that the Persians be depicted as tall, blond Vikings or that no politically protected class ever be depicted as a villian in any movie.

In a sense Stevens is not objecting so much to the movie, but rather to the idea that the Spartans choose to fight at all.

As Stevens’ objection is defending your freedom. I would have a suggestion for her what to when barbarians knock down her gate, demand to kill her men, rape her women and enslave her children.  But I won’t say it.

Aside:  the movie 300 is based on the graphic novel of the same name.  Graphic novel means glorified cartoon.  I saw a few clips of the movie and they had a cartoonish flavor to it.  Doubt that I will see the movie.  I don’t go to a lot.

Update:  Added Victor Davis Hanson.

Yes, I know, I’m behind in my reading.  In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Joseph Rago puts up something that certainly wouldn’t get by the sensors over at Dean’s World:

NEW YORK–Ayaan Hirsi Ali is untrammeled and unrepentant: “I am supposed to apologize for saying the prophet is a pervert and a tyrant,” she declares. “But that is apologizing for the truth.”

Statements such as these have brought Ms. Hirsi Ali to world-wide attention. Though she recently left her adopted country, Holland–where her friend and intellectual collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2004–she is still accompanied by armed guards wherever she travels.

Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Mogadishu–into, as she puts it, “the Islamic civilization, as far as you can call it a civilization.” In 1992, at age 22, her family gave her hand to a distant relative; had the marriage ensued, she says, it would have been “an arranged rape.” But as she was shipped to the appointment via Europe, she fled, obtaining asylum in Holland. There, “through observation, through experience, through reading,” she acquainted herself with a different world. “The culture that I came to and I live in now is not perfect,” Ms. Hirsi Ali says. “But this culture, the West, the product of the Enlightenment, is the best humanity has ever achieved.”

Let’s face it, it would make it past the editorial board on any other paper in the country, either.  Reasons; it’s telling the truth.  However she tends to stray somewhat when she starts trying to nail it down to the cause;

At his sentencing, Mohammed Buyeri said he would have killed his own brother, had he made “Submission” or otherwise insulted the One True Faith. “And why?” Ms. Hirsi Ali asks. “Because he said his god ordered him to do it. . . . We need to see,” she continues, “that this isn’t something that’s caused by special offense, the right, Jews, poverty. It’s religion.”

Actually, no.  That response is unacceptable.  It’s not religion per say, it is the perversion of a particular religion. Granted, that the degree of perversion required to get a given religion to that point is variable according to the particular religion in question.  I don’t doubt based on my readings of the Koran that Islam takes somewhat less of a trip to get to the despotism that she mentions.  Indeed, she breaks down this phenom, in the case of Islam thus; .

What we are all taught is that when you want to make a distinction between right and wrong, you follow the prophet. Muhammad is the model guide for every Muslim through time, throughout history.”  This supposition justifies, in her view, a withering critique of Islam’s most holy human messenger. “You start by scrutinizing the morality of the prophet,” and then ask: “Are you prepared to follow the morality of the prophet in a society such as this one?” She draws a connection between Mohammed’s taking of child brides and modern sexual oppressions–what she calls “this imprisonment of women.” She decries the murder of adulteresses and rape victims, the wearing of the veil, arranged marriages, domestic violence, genital mutilation and other contraventions of “the most basic freedoms.”  These sufferings, she maintains, are traceable to theological imperatives. “People say it is a bad strategy,” Ms. Hirsi Ali says forcefully. “I think it is the best strategy. . . . Muslims must choose to follow their rational capacities as humans and to follow reason instead of Quranic commands. At that point Islam will be reformed.”

My problem with her (understandable) reaction is that it paints with far too broad a brush.  When she can paint of the Judeo/Christian tradition, the same kind of picture she paints of Islam, she’ll have a point. As she herself says:

“I have my ideas and my views,” she says, “and I want to argue them. It is our obligation to look at things critically.”

When she gets to that point, about the remainder of the world’s religions, perhaps somebody give me a call.

All that said, however, she is not totally without merit.  For example, she does have it nailed pretty closely, when she identifies the central problem as culture;

“The multiculturalism theology, like all theologies, is cruel, is wrongheaded, and is unarguable because it is an utter dogmatism. . . . Minorities are exempted from the obligations of the rest of society, so they don’t improve. . . . With this theory you limit them, you freeze their culture, you keep them in place.”

Quite so.  Further, when you been over forward for minorities in the name of multiculturalism, what you’re doing is denying that your culture and the success of it is the reason those minorities came to live in the protection of your culture in the first place.  If that majority culture is lost, what is the protection for the minorities then?