ELSEWHERE

Wishful thinking at work? The Guardian was one of the newspapers taken in by the "captured soldier" hoax. There is a wiser version of the story here. Powerline has some acerbic comments. There is a picture of the toy here

The Guardian has also at last found a way of putting an anti-U.S. spin on the Iraqi election turnout. They say that the turnout in the 1967 South Vietnam election was good too. From that they somehow manage to deduce that both the Vietnamese and the Iraqis really hate America! Would it not be just a tad simpler to conclude that BOTH the Iraqis and the Vietnamese want democracy but that the Vietnamese didn't get it? And why did they not get it? Because a peacenik U.S. Congress cut off aid to the South Vietnamese while Russia and China did NOT cut off aid to North Vietnam. There is nothing like that happening in Iraq today. TCS has some interesting comments on the matter too.

Isn't welfare wonderful? "The number of people out of work in Germany has risen above five million for the first time since reunification in 1990, the Government is expected to announce today. The rate of unemployment is likely to exceed 11 per cent, heaping pressure on the Government of Gerhard Schroeder, the Chancellor, to speed up the pace of reform to kickstart the country's faltering economy".

That's democracy: "A quarter of a century after Saddam Hussein executed its leaders and drove their comrades underground or into exile the Iraqi Communist party has resurfaced and looks set to make a respectable showing once votes are counted in Sunday's elections"

Tom Wolfe says that America's intervention in Iraq is part of a long line of American interventions abroad -- most which were in fact under Left-leaning Presidents. A good quote from the very popular Theodore Roosevelt (founder of the "Progressive" party) in 1904: ""The steady aim of this nation, as of all enlightened nations, should be to strive to bring ever nearer the day when there shall prevail throughout the world the peace of justice. ...Tyrants and oppressors have many times made a wilderness and called it peace. ...The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war. ... The right of freedom and the responsibility for the exercise of that right cannot be divorced." Very much like GWB's recent inaugural address.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with a big range of select reading.

My latest posting on MarxWords shows that Marx despised the Russians. My latest posting on "A scripture blog" looks at "In the beginning" in both Greek and Hebrew.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

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