Considerettes

This might be in poor taste and insensitive, but I can’t see letting this go. Nick Berg did indeed die a horrible death at the hands of some horrible people, and his family has a right to be left alone to grieve. But Michael Berg, Nick’s father, has decided go public in a news conference and come out against Bush and the war with some preposterous charges. I find this fair game for a fisking; if he’s going on the record, I don’t see it as insensitive if I do too.

“People like George Bush and (US Defence Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld don’t see the pain that people have to bear – they don’t know what it feels like to have your guts ripped out,” Michael Berg told a news conference.

While I don’t think that Bush and Rumsfeld are entirely unaware of the personal consequences of war, I’ll certainly give Mr. Berg the point about not knowing what it’s like for him. Very, very few of us have had the experience he and his family have had in knowing the manner their son died, and having that death posted on the Internet for millions to see worldwide. This had to be gut-wrenching, absolutely no doubt about it.

But nothing Mr. Berg goes on to say follows from that. People who didn’t agree with the war in Iraq don’t know what it feels like to have your guts ripped out either, but that doesn’t mean they’re correct any more than it means that Bush and Rumsfeld are wrong. Having endured bitter anguish isn’t a prerequisite for going to war.

“What I’m trying to do is show to the American people and the British people … that war has a wretchedly horrible face,” said Berg’s father.

The implication is that, were it not for this news conference, we’d all be thinking that war has a 100% happy, beautiful face attached to it, which, of course, is patently false. From video of the missile strikes, to pictures of blown-up buildings, to pictures of burnt bodies in Fallujah, to “Abu Graib, Abu Graib, Abu Graib”, the news media has been extremely helpful in showing us all the horrible face of war. The reality is that it’s the liberation of a people, the opening of schools and hospitals, the public utilities that are at better-than-pre-war levels, all all the other good news that comes from the horrors of war that the media has given particularly short shrift to. Letters of good news from GI’s get relegated to the blogosphere, and letters from Iraqi supporters thanking the US for their liberation must pay to get their thanks across to the American people. I’m sorry, Mr. Berg, but we do know that war is ugly and horrible. What you have experienced is particularly so, and thus you understand the cost of war better than most. But understand that we who believe that the removal of Saddam Hussein was a good thing do understand the costs in our own lesser ways.

Nick Berg, 26, travelled to Iraq several times looking for work in the reconstruction effort before going missing on April 9.

“He thought he was supporting the Iraqi people and the Bush administration by going over there, not with a gun but with his engineering tools,” Michael Berg said.

And he was right, Mr. Berg. That’s is the best description of what he was doing. Just like the Halliburton folks and other contractors trying to rebuild Iraq after a dictator, a war, and terrorists. And his death was incredibly honorable because he died in the service of people he had never met and would, in all likelihood, never see or deal with again. Yet he gave of himself. He died while serving the people of Iraq, and any thanks the Iraqis have for their liberation must be shared with him. Again, that was a good thing he was doing. His support of the aims of the Bush administration–liberation, rebuilding, securing–was not a mistake.

Bush and the American media have ignored the “true horrors” added Berg senior, who has blamed Bush and Rumsfeld for his son’s death in previous interviews. He said he believed anti-war sentiment was now very strong in the United States.

“There are 11,000 plus Iraqi citizens that are dead and each one’s family is as affected as I was, but the American media doesn’t cover these people. It doesn’t cover the people who are suffering the most.”

Bush and Rumsfeld didn’t send him to Iraq, sir. And why do you not have as much to say against those who actually killed him as you do against Bush and Rumsfeld, whom Iraqis are thanking for their actions?

And as I mentioned, the mainstream media has profusely covered the suffering.

“This is not a game that people in Washington get to play,” Michael Berg said. “It affects people the way it’s affected me and my family and the families of Paul Johnson, Kim Sun-il and the thousands of Iraqis.”

“Observing someone’s pain just makes you think just how can they (Bush and Blair) possibly do this. There isn’t enough money in the world that could ever make this worthwhile.”

Was the American War of Independence worthwhile? Far, far more people and families were affected. Do you wonder how the Founding Fathers could possibly have done that? You are correct that there isn’t enough money to make it worthwhile, but freedom is priceless, and it is worth it.

You son, Mr. Berg, died in the cause of setting the Iraqi people free. Please don’t diminish his death by diminishing the cause that he went there for. Honor him, as we do, even those of us who do understand that war, as horrible as it can be, is sometimes necessary.

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Where do a Syrian journalist, a Syrian military intelligence officer, the US intelligence community, David Kay, a former analyst for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a former CIA Middle East analyst, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon all believe some of Saddam’s WMDs are? Syria. Have you heard this in the mainstream media? If not, why not?

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Good news watch:

Following the formal handover of sovereignty to Baghdad, 15 Iraqi and Iraqi-American groups have issued an open letter to the American people, thanking them for the sacrifices they endured to liberate their country.

The letter will be delivered to President Bush at the White House today and published in a full page ad in USA Today.

Yup, probably the only way that letter will get any recognition by the media; by buying space to print it.

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Who said this?

We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.

A. Karl Marx
B. Fidel Castro
C. Hillary Clinton

If you really have no idea, the answer is here.

So who decides what’s the common good? Who decides how much they’ll take? The answer, for the garden variety socialist, is “the government”. A monolithic bureaucracy will make decisions on what’s good for you, what you need and put a one-size-fits-all solution in place for hundreds of millions of people. Well, at least Hillary had the guts to say it out loud, but do you Democrats really want that kind of socialism?

Local to solutions to local problems is still the best bet.

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The Smarter Cop has a great roundup of 25 (and I’m sure there are more) lies and exaggerations in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 “documentary”. I thought only fictional movies could be loosely based on a true story?

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What constituency, if it had voted in the 2000 presidential election, could have turned the tide for Al Gore to become President? What group, consisting of over 12 million, could have voted in that election but didn’t? That group will grow to over 18 million this year. They won’t be voting, but if they did they could have been the deciding factor, not just in the Bush/Kerry race, but a number of close state races. And why, when statistics show that they would be enough to push most of these elections to the Democrats, are Democrats themselves trying to “disenfranchise” these voters, making sure that they never vote in this or any future election?

Larry Eastland calls them the “Missing Voters”. The trend has been called the “Roe Effect” by James Taranto. These missing voters are those who never got a chance to vote because they never got at life due to “Roe v. Wade”; aborted babies who, most likely, would have absorbed their parents’ beliefs and values. Mr. Eastland puts it best when he concludes:

Liberal Democrats are having both more abortions–and more abortions as a percentage of their ideological and political group–than either of the other groupings.

As liberals and Democrats fervently seek new voters and supporters through events, fund-raisers, direct mail and every other form of communication available, they achieve results minuscule in comparison to the loss of voters they suffer from their own abortion policies. It is a grim irony lost on them, for which they will pay dearly in elections to come.

Of course it will be lost on them. For those who believe that it’s a choice, not a life, the only result will be a disregard for that life, notwithstanding their protestations to the contrary. Obvious to us, but lost on them. It’s a grim sort of social Darwinism at work, and it’s a shame that it has to be paid with the price of innocent lives.

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Take a week off, and miss a lot. Not only that, but my plan to wax eloquent on the transfer of power to Iraq in the two days prior to the turnover was sabotaged at the highest levels!

But frankly that’s a Good Thing. It caught the terrorists flatfooted, mutes any charges of grandstanding against the Bush administration, and does the real conservative thing; give people their power/money/government back earlier than anticipated. I’ve already heard that Dan Rather suggested that the early turnover was due to the unimagined terror incidents that had been increasing, but c’mon now; if even I predicted an increase in violence in the days & week prior to the turn over (here and here) 2 months ago, do you really believe this sort of desperation was unexpected?

Brilliant move by Bush. Bremer’s already left the building. Happy birthday, Iraq!

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I’ll be in a wedding in a week, and the whole family’s going to be in town (both sides) during that time, so blogging’s going to take a bit of a back seat. I may still get in some posts, especially if the news warrants it. Enjoy!

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Same-sex marriage advocates prove, by their actions, that they don’t intend the issue to be a “states’ rights” issue at all. They want a federal mandate, or a reasonable facsimile.

The long-anticipated legal battle to extend gay marriage to couples who live beyond Massachusetts borders begins today, as two suits challenging a law barring those couples from marriage are filed in Suffolk Superior Court

Yesterday, in the same hotel ballroom where seven other plaintiff couples gathered to celebrate the November Supreme Judicial Court ruling granting them the right to marry, a new group of same-sex couples stood on the stage. All eight plaintiff couples in the new case are from out of state. Some were granted licenses and married in Massachusetts. Others were refused license applications because they are not residents of the state and would not swear an oath that they intend to reside here.

Governor Mitt Romney and Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly say a 1913 law forbids same-sex couples from other states from marrying here. The marriages of same-sex couples granted marriage licenses in defiance of their orders will not be recorded by the state, Romney has said.

This has never been in dispute (outside of those same advocates denying it). That is why there must be a federal answer to this. They are choosing the battlefield, and then they complain that they’re being met on that very battlefield.

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The 9/11 Commission, as most folks know by now, said that it found “no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.” But just because they may have not been actively cooperating, does that mean there was not any “link” (as the subhead states in that article) at all?

There were plenty of links, going back some 10 years. They were helping each other out, even if Hussein had no direct involvement in 9/11. As Cox & Forkum suggest, it’s as if the commission (and the media) expect to find a signed contract between bin Laden and Hussein and video of a press conference announcing cooperation before they’ll even consider there to be something as tenuous as a “link” between the two. C’mon folks, welcome to the 21st century.

UPDATE: The Media Research Center is calling the major networks on this.

The Republican Chairman and Democratic Vice Chairman of the 9-11 Commission on Thursday rejected the media’s widespread reporting that the commission’s report issued the day before had directly contradicted Bush administration statements about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Yet on Thursday night ABC’s Peter Jennings declared that there “continues to be a discrepancy between the commission’s findings and the President’s on whether al-Qaeda has a link to Saddam Hussein,” and CBS anchor Dan Rather repeated how “the commission yesterday said it had found no credible evidence of a quote, ‘collaborative relationship’ between al-Qaeda and Iraq — no plotting together against the United States,” but, he added in treating President Bush as out of step, without mentioning how Kean and Hamilton had corrected CBS’s mis-reporting, “President Bush insisted again today that there was a quote ‘relationship’ of some kind and defended his position.”

NBC’s Tom Brokaw took a similar tack, repeating how the commission had found “that there was no ‘collaborative relationship’ between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.” But, Brokaw lectured, “despite that conclusion, President Bush insisted there was a relationship between the two.” NBC buried what should have been its lead. At the very end of his report, almost as an afterthought, David Gregory informed viewers of how “Lee Hamilton said today that he does not see much different between administration statements and the commission’s report.”

And, as is typical, Fox News Channel gives the “fair and balanced” take on it all, reporting what the broadcast networks refuse to.

FNC’s Special Report with Brit Hume, but hosted by Jim Angle, on Thursday night played these clips of Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton made at an early afternoon press conference:

Kean: “Were there contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq? Yes. Some of them are shadowy, but there’s no question they were there.”

Hamilton, two soundbites: “I must say I have trouble understanding the flap over this. The Vice President is saying, I think, that there were connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government. We don’t disagree with that.”
“So it seems to me that the sharp differences that the press has drawn, the media has drawn, are not that apparent to me.”

Thus Hamilton undermined the premise of two days of the media line on how the report supposedly undermined Bush and Cheney.

Oh, that liberal media.

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JunkYardBlog is putting forth an action item to “Fight the Lie” that Bush supposedly lied about WMDs to get us into Iraq. He suggests doing a Google search for “Clinton Iraq 1998″ (linked for your convenience) and keeping track of how many people in that administration also said that Iraq had WMDs. Were they all lying, too? Make a bookmark out of that search, and call it up when folks try to spread the lie.

But JYB adds another thing that I didn’t know about. Add “ohio state” to that search and you’ll see where the Clinton foreign policy team was out in full force trying to drum up support for…a war in Iraq!

Fight the Lie.

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Good News Watch:

NEW YORK (AP) - A closely watched gauge of future economic activity rose a stronger-than-expected 0.5 percent in May, suggesting that the U.S. economy will continue sturdy expansion through the summer.

The Conference Board said Thursday its Composite Index of Leading Economic Indicators increased to 116.5 last month following rises of 0.1 percent in April and 0.8 percent in March.

Analysts had been expecting an increase of 0.4 percent in May.

Ken Goldstein, economist for the Conference Board, noted that the index has risen in 13 of the last 14 months. The latest numbers, he added, “reflect a robust economic environment this spring and point to more of the same this summer.”

It’s growing so fast, Goldstein said, that the Fed may have to raise interest rates to hold down price increases and “cool the economy”. It’s red hot! Listen closely to your mainstream media source to hear all about it.

(But hold not thy breath.)

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Oh fer goodness sake.

GENEVA - A U.S.-based company has been warned by a United Nations expert not to sell bulldozers to Israel because of the way the Israeli army is using them.

Jean Ziegler, the UN’s special expert on the right to food, sent a letter to Caterpillar Inc. saying that the company could be considered an accomplice in human rights violations.

The letter to Caterpillar chief executive James Owen expressed Ziegler’s concerns “about the actions of the Israeli occupation forces in Rafah and in other locations in Gaza and the West Bank.”

<satire>In a related story, the UN has threatened US farmers with considering them accomplices in human rights violations if their food is used to feed the Israeli army.</satire>

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Sorry, Nancy, but the Gipper wouldn’t have approved.

While Nancy Reagan is urging the Bush administration to reverse its opposition to federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, a document has surfaced indicating President Reagan would not have supported his wife’s campaign.
…
The order was to “continue and broaden the [1988] moratorium on NIH [National Institute of Health] grants for certain types of fetal experimentation,” according to Charles Colson, the former Nixon aide who now leads a Christian ministry, Prison Fellowship.

Colson, in his daily radio commentary, said he received the document from William Clark, Reagan’s national security adviser and close personal friend.

“Reagan took a clear stand against research that would harm or destroy ‘any living child in utero,’ in all stages of development in which scientists were then able to experiment on them,” Colson said.

Clark insists Reagan clearly was opposed to funding embryo research.

Writing recently in the New York Times, he said, “After the charter expired for the Departments of Health, Education and Welfare’s ethical advisory board – which in the 1970s supported destructive research on human embryos – [Reagan] began a de facto ban on federal financing of embryo research that he held to throughout his presidency.”

The presidential adviser also noted Reagan, in his 1993 speech known for it’s “evil empire” reference, “spoke strongly against the denegration of innocent human life.”

“And [Reagan] favored bills in Congress that would have given every human being – at all stages of development – protection as a person under the 14th Amendment,” Clark said.

Reagan also favored a Human Life Amendment defining life as beginning at conception.

So on point after point, Bush and Reagan would have solidly agreed on these issues. And bloggers like this and that, and the others that seem to think there’s some kind of conflict in values here need to re-learn what Ronald Reagan himself really believed.

And Bronson’s got it right. “I could be wrong, but from what I’ve seen, I do not believe that President Reagan would have wanted Nancy or his children to advocate for killing embryos just because it would benefit him personally.”

Clark puts some words in Reagan’s mouth, but I think they’re perfectly fitting coming from a conservative like him:

In addition, Clark notes, Reagan “would have asked the marketplace question: If human embryonic research is so clearly promising as the researchers assert, why aren’t private investors putting [their] money into it, as they are in adult stem-cell research?”

Consider that.

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The first newspaper to endorse John Kerry for President was the Philadelphia News, and Hugh Hewitt interviewed Frank Burgos, the editorial page editor to ask him about that endorsement. He had quite a difficult time defending his points, and I took note of the dancing he did when Hugh asked him about the jobs that were created in the first quarter. The first part of this clip is the section of the segment where he tried to defend it when Hugh asks him how many of those new jobs are “good” jobs, even by Frank’s standards. Basically, he couldn’t answer, he couldn’t defend his editorial assertion. He finally said that we have to ask the American people what they think about the jobs. The second part of the clip is where I called and answered that question, and it’s not what Mr. Burgos was hoping. In fact, the editorial seems more of a description of what Mr. Burgos wishes were the case (i.e. conditions that would hurt Bush, regardless of the Democratic nominee).

“Considerettes Radio” on The Hugh Hewitt Show (WGKA, Atlanta, GA) 6/16/2004 7:05pm EST (554K)

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