A whole mess of stuff this morning

As a number of others have already pointed out, the mainstream media are doing their best to turn a mass murder committed by someone who worshipped at the same mosque as two of the 9/11 hijackers, made repeated attempts to contact al-Qaeda-supportive clergy, and shouted “Allahu Akbar” at the start of the attack into something other than an Islamic terrorist attack.

If this wasn’t such a dreadfully serious matter, it would almost be funny watching Democrats insist that there’s no elephant in the bathtub. Perhaps the most bizarre of these claims is that of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who insists that the core problem behind Fort Hood is that “America loves guns.”
And all the violent crime and shootings in Chicago is just because the rest of us don't want to follow him down the drain, uh huh. And here's a quote for all the Soviet lovers:
(Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (2003) describes how prisoners in the Soviet work camp system did not refer to the society outside the barbed wire as “freedom.” They called it bolshaya zona, or “the big prison zone”: “larger and less deadly” than the camps, but not fundamentally different.)



Biden has ties to a corrupt mess? And the New York Effing Times covers for him? Well, whoda thunk it? Problem is, their own past stories kind of mess with the narrative:
Blogger Tom Maguire is somewhat incredulous at the Times' assertion Biden was "influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but [does] not advocate such a partitioning of the country." In fact, Maguire unearths this op-ed Galbraith wrote for, well, The New York Times some two years ago:

IN a surge of realism, the Senate has voted 75-23 to acknowledge that Iraq has broken up and cannot be put back together. The measure, co-sponsored by Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, and Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, supports a plan for Iraq to become a loose confederation of three regions — a Kurdish area in the north, a Shiite region in the south and a Sunni enclave in the center — with the national government in Baghdad having few powers other than to manage the equitable distribution of oil revenues.

Picking up where Maguire left off, here's a New York Times op-ed directly authored by Biden from 2006 where he advocates partitioning Iraq. And here's another New York Times article from 2007 -- "Biden plan for 'soft partition' of Iraq gains momentum." Here's the New York Times covering a campaign ad Biden ran in Iowa where he advocates his plan to partition Iraq. I could go on.

What happened here is clear -- Joe Biden advocated policies in Iraq that his adviser Galbraith also advocated. Galbraith profited handsomely off those policies through close ties to oil companies. Does anyone think that if this story were about an adviser to Dick Cheney profiteering as a nexus between powerful politicians and oil companies that the paper would dishonestly obscure the relationship between the two men?
Hey, but that would be about Darth Cheney, so that's different!


From Crittenden on the Ditherer in Chief:
It’s not quite a strategic retreat, more of a retreat into strategizing as Obama dithers about the dithering, informs his national security team it’s back to Square One. Scratch everything, back to the drawing board. He wants to stop thinking about the war until he can figure out the peace part. OK, that may not be exactly how senior administration officials put it, but at this point, inaction speaks louder than words.
...
Never mind whether he’s going to commit more troops. He isn’t ready to commit to whether he’ll commit to commiting more troops. This part is fun:

Military officials said Obama has asked for a rewrite before and resisted what one official called a one-way highway toward war commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recommendations for more troops. The sense that he was being rushed and railroaded has stiffened Obama’s resolve to seek information and options beyond military planning, officials said, though a substantial troop increase is still likely.

Ha ha, his resolve to keep dithering has been stiffened! Good one. AP scribbler with a keen sense of irony or AP scribbler without a clue?

(Well, in fairness, even if the president did declare back in 2008 this war was a vital national security interest, and he did signal last spring he was on board with counterinsurgency, and even if he did appoint Gen. Stanley McChrystal to get the job done in May, the general’s recommendations only arrived in August, and the president didn’t look at them until, what, late September, and he’s been really busy this whole time letting Congress bollix his health-care initiative, throwing Eastern Europe under the bus and flying to Copenhagen, that kind of thing, so he’s only been able to squeeze in seven high-level national security meetings, or is it eight? Is it so unreasonable to ask for new options on top of the new options that he asked for on top of the new options that McChrystal gave him? Meanwhile, China’s ass wants kissing and then we’re into the holidays … )


Hell with it. Things to do...