Priorities… Snark of the Day

It’s a real problem if our press shows pics of Saddam in his FruitOfTheLooms.

But it’s OK to repeatedly show pics of victims being beheaded?

Perhaps it’s just me… but is something a little out of whack, here?

I have had problems With Telegraph writer Tom Utley in the past… and in fact I’m a little put off by his headline here… “How strange to find Christians who practise what they preach ”

However, read the story. In an earlier post today, I quoted the Archbishop of Denver.
This is the kind of frame of mind, the kind of influence on one’s daily life that he was talking about.

BBCT: John Derbyshire

FOXNews says:

WASHINGTON — A U.S. congressional committee has drafted a bill that threatens to withhold tens of millions of dollars in dues from the United Nations (search) unless the world body conducts wide-ranging reforms, possibly setting the stage for a funding battle like the one that plunged the U.N. into financial crisis a decade ago.

Actually, what it really threatens to do is force the UN to change it’s ways or die of starvation… a move the US should ahve done long ago if peace nad freedom are at all on the list of goals.. as they should be.  The US is the 600 lb gorilla here and should start acting like it. The Democrats won’t like it, but the voters likely won’t much care what the Democrats like and don’t like. We had best remind the Democrats that what they’ve done so far about the UN has worked so very well…

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. who is archbishop of Denver, at this mornings Catholic Prayer Breakfast;

We need to understand that in the early Church, those words – “Jesus is Lord” – were a political statement. The emperor claimed to be Lord both in the private and public lives of the citizens of the empire. When Christians proclaimed Jesus as Lord, they were proclaiming the centrality of Jesus not only in their personal lives, but in their public lives and their decision-making as well.

That took real courage. And it had huge consequences for their lives. Jesus was hung upon the cross because of his claim of Lordship. Christianity was illegal for the first 250 years of the Church’s life because Christians proclaimed, “Jesus is Lord.”

It puts the intentions of the founders of this country in a diferent light, now, doesn’t it?

Now, I’m not suggesting by any means that Christianity is directly political.  After all, Politics is naught but a reflection of the values of the person or persons in question.  But given the deeply rooted values of Christians, and the roots western culture in general has in Christianity, that’s bound to affect the politics and the culture of any western country.

And the founders understood this relationship, and this history.

KJL notes the MOVEON ad, showing Frist blowing up the Capitol and asks:”WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? ”

Clearly, KJ, you have not been listening to Howard Dean or Err America of late. This kind of extreme is not new for them.

In response to some E-mail;
Look, let’s lay this filibuster thing wide open.

The Democrats got handed their butt in a basket last election… particuarly Tom Daschle. They got themselves ousted for one reason: Their obstructionism.

The voters got tired of it and voted for more Republicans.

Now is not the time to wimp out on us, Republicans.
Now is the time, to act like you actually won the election, not ‘strike a deal’.

Drop the hammer on these people… eliminate the filibuster.
NOW.

Stanley Kurtz at The Corner:

“Contemporary liberalism seeks to diminish Christianity and promote secularism. And liberals sometimes do this in ways that play into the hands of Islamic terrorists. I suppose I could be talking about Newsweek, but I’m really thinking of ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’ Ridley Scott’s film about the Crusades. I had the misfortune of seeing ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ the other day. It is the apotheosis of Hollywood’s secular liberalism. Hatred of religion. That is what ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is about. Every scene, every character, every plot-twist advances the central message: religion bad/secularism good. Are secular liberals running a campaign against ‘people of faith?’ You bet they are. Just go to the movies and you’ll see it. This is not about making money. ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is pulling Hollywood further into its slump. Who wants to see this p.c. propaganda, anyway? No, the media’s on a crusade against religion. And they’re sinking under the weight of their missionary obsession. “

Bingo, Stan. Welcome to the party.

I had a buddy come to me this morning with a clipping from an old article he’d found in the Chronic Democrat… err Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle. They no longer have it online of course, but I did manage to find the quote, on, of all places, Blogs for Bush.  In the quote, Howard Dean takes the following stance on Usama BinLaden.

“I’ve resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found,” Dean said in the interview. “I will have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials.”

So, more recently, we’ve watched as even the Democrats recoil and distance themselves from comments from Howard Dean:

“I think Tom DeLay ought to go back to Houston, where he can serve his jail sentence down there.”

NewsMax points up that….

….”Incredibly, in the next breath the top Democrat complained about “this ugly, nasty dialogue that is coming from the right wing of the American Republican Party.”

So, let me understand this.
Since Howard Dean is running the Democrats…(and apparently having his strings pulled by George Soros) we can assume he speaks for Democrats, I suppose.

Do the Democrats really think BinLaden deserves the presumption of innocence by Tom Delay does not?

Well, here it is, people…. the Democrats clearly consider Delay a greater threat to their power than they consider BinLaden to be… and the American public… the American VOTER… be damned.

Do rank and file Democrats really like what they see happening to their party?

Update:A sharp reader points out that Viking Pundit made this point yesterday. Thanks for the tip, Cliff.

Ed over at Captain’s Quarters:

“True to his word, Reid has started using all available procedural tactics to stage a temper tantrum, but now it’s just at the mere introduction of nominees for debate. What happened to Robert Byrd’s plaintive pleas for freedom of speech? Harry Reid apparently has declared free speech in the Senate to be ‘dead, dead, dead!’ ahead of its time.

Frist stands ready to employ the Byrd Option while Reid goes for the Gingrich Option. History shows how well each of them wound up working before, and nothing’s changed in the time since to think that the end results will differ. If Reid wants to block intelligence committees from meeting during wartime, let that be his legacy to American history.”

No mystery how the MSM will depict this happening.
The Republicans should have dropped the bomb on this fool months ago, in my opinion.  The more time to get some actual work done before the ’06 election at which point the record of success would carry the day at the voting booth.

Which, I think, is the one thing the Democrats fear most; A record of Legislative success on the part of the Republicans.

Beckwith has a great zinger and an accusation of a double standard, and an interesting question all rolled into one:

What if it turned out that the guards at Gitmo did in fact flush a Koran down the toilet, but that they did so because they received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to photograph the “event” and display it at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City under the title “Flush Koran.” It would not be unlike what happened in the late 1990s when NEA recipient Andres Serrano offered us for public display the now infamous “Piss Christ,” a crucifix upside down in a jar of urine.

I may come back and comment later. For the moment, I’m laughing too hard.
Great stuff….

AP is reporting: “BURBANK, Calif. – Actor Frank Gorshin, the impressionist with 100 faces best known for his Emmy-nominated role as The Riddler on the old ‘Batman’ television series, has died. He was 72”

Sad.
According to the article, his final performance will be on CBS’s CSI on Thursday.

ABC in Baltimore reports that yesterday was the day the very last Astro Van rolled of the Baltimore assembly line.

OK, not much for YOU, I guess… but a look down the right column should tell you why it means something to ME.

Another victiom of the EPA and the Unions. The Astro/Safari was a great rig. I’m getting 21mpg on the road with it… and that’s with AWD.  It has a towcap of around 5500lbs.

Now, if I want to stick with a conversion van with a healthy towcapacity, I’m forced to go to the full-sized vans, which will get at best 15-17mpg.

Make sense to you?

The Running Conservative has had a death in the family.

Stop by and drop Kate a kind word; she could use one.

What is the world’s record for text messaging? How many can you send in a month? Gizmodo seems to have the answer.

You’ll forgive me if I’m less than impressed with Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmad, who yesterday complained we need to be more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims, saying in part:

“The apology and retraction are not enough.  “They (Newsweek) should understand the sentiments of Muslims and think 101 times before publishing news which hurt feelings of Muslims.”

I’ll ask here the same questions I asked at Q&O yesterday…

Why?

How far does one need go to avoid hurting the feelings of a demonstrated madman?  Does the same question apply in the plural?

Look, I fully agree… NewsWeak/WaPo needs to be seriously spanked on this one, but I gotta tell ya… it’s to the point where I don’t give a hot crap about Muslim feelings when I see the kind of infantile nonsense we saw last week, following Isikopf’s idiocy.

Boortz speaks well to that one, this morning:

Tell you what: When you stop killing your own daughters; when you stop trying to lock young girls into burning buildings; when you eschew shooting school children in the back; and when I can look in a newspaper and read that Muslims are NOT involved in one way or another in revolts, insurrections and hot wars around the world — and when you’re not working so hard to kill American civilians — and when you start to show some tolerance and respect for the world’s other religions .. then maybe I’ll feel a bit more worm and fuzzy toward your incredible religion of peace.

Really.

I mean, will someone please explain the advantages of bending over far enough to be liked by such a group of people?

Then too, there are some alarming parallels, here, between this situation and the MSM’s involvement in starting the LA riots a few years back. As you may recall in that case, instead of showing the unedited version of the tape of Rodney King’s arrest, during which King was trying to beat up on the officers, trying to escape, and intead of showing the 100mph plus car chase, in which King endangered the lives of thousands, they showed the same 17 seconds of tape over and over. The continued with this until such time as the under-informed populace reacted.  In other words, the people in question were goaded into acting on essentially false information. The result was a riot that took lives property and created a public relations nightmare… for those supporting western culture….during which time we were self-rightiously told we needed to be more sensitive to the feelings of minorities.

In both cases, the rioters who actually did the damage, and the MSM who goaded them in with misinformation, share the blame for the damage done. In both cases, I fully expect neither will face the conseuquences for their actions, and rather western culture… and it’s personification that is the US establishment will catch the blame. In both cases, the rioters are not someone you’d want to marry into your family.

Whom do you suppose would benefit from this pattern?