Apparently, the “Bush as Hitler” comparison is still alive and well. (Noted by InstaPundit.) It’s astounding to me that anyone still spews this and expects anyone to take them seriously.

Playwright Harold Pinter calls the US government the most dangerous power that ever existed. I would say he’s right, but not in the way he intends. Any massive power can be dangerous. The potential is always there, and the United States is arguably the most powerful nation in the history of the world. That’s dangerous power if improperly wielded. What Pinter considers “dangerous” is that the US want to be the superior military force on the planet. However, 1) that’s entirely reasonable given that we’re the most prosperous and free, and thus the most demonized and most threatened, country on the planet, and 2) it would be insanely foolish to “strive” to be #2 on the planet and then trust to luck that whoever winds up #1 is our friend. Given the lay of the military land, it’s probable that we’d be friendly with the new emergent #1, but why roll the dice with national security?

Earth to Mr. Pinter: We’re already de facto #1 and 9/11 still happened. Excuuuuuse me if we decide we’d rather that not happen anymore.

And to call the Guantanamo Bay detention center a “concentration camp” is liberal hyperbole at it’s finest. Gas chambers? Anywhere? The ovens at Gitmo are being used, as it turns out, to fatten up the detainees, not incinerate them! They’re living better there than they were in Afghanistan. And yet this is comparable to some Nazi death camp?

Blair is a mass-murderer? For doing what, preventing civilian casualties by Saddam Hussein that would be two orders of magnitude worse than those that occurred during the Iraq war? I did some googling for “‘harold pinter’ hussein condemn”, and found:

• Pinter, along with a number of others in February of 1998, complaining that sanctions were hurting Iraqi citizens (and now we know why; not because of the sanctions themselves but because of the mismanagement at the UN)
• A notation on a communist party web site about Pinter supporting an anti-sanctions demonstration in August of 2000, as well as a letter cosigned by him denouncing what was being done in Iraq due to sanctions (never mind the raping of women and misdirection of oil-for-food money).
• A speech given by Mr. Pinter in which he makes boatloads of unsubstantiated statements, and then delivers the preposterous line “The planned war against Iraq is in fact a plan for premeditated murder of thousands of civilians in order, apparently, to rescue them from their dictator.” (“Apparently”, the civilian war casualties which prevented the continuation of thousands upon thousands of murders done by the Hussein regime wasn’t a good enough reason for Mr. Pinter. And this line comes after one where he accuses the US of only caring about US deaths and ignoring others. Mirror, Mr. Pinter?)
• A mention in The Guardian (March 18, 2003) on how readers can add their name to an anti-war petition called “A Manifesto for Peace & Progress”, co-signed by Harold Pinter.
• A quote from Mr. Pinter blaming America for 9/11. “The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of America over many years, in all parts of the world.” Also, compared to Hussein, whose atrocities we’re discovering were even worse than we knew, Bush is the world’s worst leader.
• A poem denouncing “The Yanks in their armoured parade” as they march off to war with Iraq. (Thing is, if you remove all references to America, the poem would more closely resemble Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Consider that.)

…and on and on. Most articles dealt with Mr. Pinter’s opposition to the war and/or the sanctions during the previous years. In a few cases, his words appeared on Communist Party or pro-Jihad web sites. In some cases, bloggers try to defend him by parroting back dire predictions about the war that never came true or attempting to impugn the motives of the President. (One even called Hussein’s Iraq “a nation at peace”. That’s one tortured definition of the word “peace.)

The salient point is this: I perused the Top 40 of the results from Google, and in none of these hits was the word “condemn” ever used in relationship to Saddam Hussein. Pinter points fingers at the US, Great Britian, and anyone else who would dethrone a murderous dictator and ruin Iraq’s state of alleged “peace”. He never once, in condemning foreign governments, condemned the one actually killing thousands of people over the course of decades, or that actually went to war over (Kuwaiti) oil. He saved his worst criticisms for leaders who, among other things, saved the Iraqi citizenry from further atrocities, all the while magnanimously claiming to care about innocent deaths around the world.

His compassion stops where his politics starts, and that’s unfortunately the definition of elite liberalism.

WorldNetDaily has the latest news about global warming. Well, actually, cooling. The main reasons these findings run counter to the computer models everybody’s been using is that…they’re not computer models; they’re actual physical temperature readings. Further, the pollution you see in the air could actually be cooling things.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; the uncertainty in the climate science field is so high that we shouldn’t be making public policy based on it.

Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate yesterday, does a great job in uncovering the hatchet job the media has been giving Paul Wolfowitz, from deliberately mispronouncing his name, to deliberately misquoting him, to blaming him for every single anti-Muslim wacko in the US. It’s a further demonstration of both liberal bias in the media (The Guardian specifically) as well as how badly the left needs to jump on any speck of “proof” that Bush and his administration are somehow misrepresenting themselves and their motives to the country. But they can’t use the truth, so they have to revert to mud-slinging and false reporting. Sure, The Guardian did correct their errors, which by itself is a good thing, but the damage had already been done and the liberal punditry had already echoed the lies loud and long. Don’t count on retractions from them. We’re still waiting for Maureen Dowd to retract her misquote of Bush supposedly asserting that al-Qaeda was no longer a problem.

I’ve been trying to pull together a list of people that should also be accused of lying to the American people if you’re one who insists that Bush and Blair did so when they talked about Iraqi WMDs. Just like the 9/11 intelligence question, if you want to accuse Bush of lying, there’s also a laundry list of folks who’d have to be part of that conspiracy, starting with Bill Clinton (who also said they had WMDs) and the UN (who’s resolution 1441 started from the assumption that they existed). However, making my job easier, the inimitable Instapundit has compiled a number of posts from all over that point out that show the list of those who said Hussein was harboring WMDs is quite long indeed. They include the aforementioned, plus:

• Hans Blix
• German intelligence
• Jacques Chirac
• Al Gore

The “peace” marchers are all over Bush on this (as they were recently here in Atlanta), but once again their hands are tight over their ears, not wanting to believe anything’s wrong with their crowd, but jumping on every single shred of possibility that Bush is Hitler, regardless of how baseless each of those shreds are, and regardless of how they’ve looked the other way prior to Dubya’s inauguration. As Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds says, “Well, it’s better than admitting that if you’d had your way, Saddam Hussein would still be shoveling children into mass graves, I suppose.”

Is Eric Robert Rudolph a “Christian terrorist”? Some at the Washington Post seem to think so, but as Marvin Olasky points out…

The Post did not point out that leading American pastors have universally condemned bombing of abortion businesses, but many leading Islamic clerics in the Middle East have refused to condemn the murder by Muslims of innocent civilians. Nor did it note that the Quran (in contrast to a document of similar length, the New Testament) has only a few statements promoting peace but over 100 advocating warfare. (Example: “Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you (9:123)).

Eric Rudolph may call himself a Christian, but the Christian community has, quite overwhelmingly, a different opinion. Keep that in mind when reading “balanced” news stories. Read the article for more examples of “balance” in (of all places) the New York Times.

Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, the top 2 editors at the NY Times have resigned. This can only be good news for journalism in general and the Times in particular.

How possible is peace between Israel and the Palestinians when the winner of a Palestinian writing contest says this:

“My heart has turned into a sad block of pain. One day I will buy a weapon and I will blow away the fetters. I will propel my living-dead body into your arms, my father, and you will gather me into your hands.”

Al-Qaeda recruit? Nope, a Palestinian 7th grader. The group “Palestinian Media Watch” has brought the results of this contest to light, but I wonder who is listening. Other top winners expressed hatred towards Israel, PM Sharon and President Bush. The question is, were there any letters that extolled peace?

It’s unknown, says the media watchdog group, which added that if children submitted peace-promoting letters and Palestinian leaders only honored those with violent themes, the Palestinians are promoting hate education.

“On the other hand, [if] there was not even one peace-promoting letter [submitted], it is equally disturbing, as an ominous warning of how successful the PA education has been in creating a generation dedicated to hatred of Israel,” said Itamar Marus, the media group’s director.

Is it possible to negotiate with a group of people who say one thing but practice something else so diametrically opposed? If a peace agreement is hammered out, that would be wonderful, but after that, listen to the children to know whether or not it will work.

Stephen Stanton at Tech Central Station gives Paul Krugman a fisking he so richly deserves for his NY Time article on the “evils” of a tax cut. From unsubstantiated numbers, to wondering which of 9000+ pork barrel programs Krugman considers sacrosanct, to appearing shocked at the obvious (those who pay the most taxes get the most back), to pining for the days of 92% tax rates, Krugman’s arguments fall by the wayside one by one.

Stanton certainly uncovers the facts behind the catch-phrases the left has been parroting.

Update: Instapundit has links to other folks fact-checking Krugman. (I though that’s what the NY Times editors were supposed to do.) They include Wunderkinder and Donald Luskin.

Tobacco, a weapon of mass destruction? Hyperbole, anyone?

Linton Weeks of the Washington Post has a great column today dealing with Sidney Blumenthal’s book “The Clinton Wars”. He approaches his column from a “This is Your Life” perspective, comparing what Sid wrote in the book with how those he wrote about responded to it, giving it the classic TV show feel. Well executed, as well as rather interesting that so many that you’d consider on Sid’s side are really panning the book.