Nigerian Explosion: Bombs Hit Churches in Christmas Day Terrorist Attacks

At Telegraph UK, "Coordinated bomb attacks across Nigeria kill at least 40," and "Boko Haram: the group behind the Nigerian attacks."

Also at London's Daily Mail, "Bombs kills 39 at Catholic churches during Christmas Day mass as series of explosions rock Nigeria."

And at New York Times, "Churches Are Hit in a Series of Bombings Across Nigeria." (Via Memeorandum and The Other McCain.)

Ron Paul Talks About Newsletters in 1995 Video

Ron Paul can't keep walking out on interviewers when asked about racially inflammatory statements.

With videos like these, he's on record in the mid-1990s as being very knowledgeable about the content of things put out under his name. The New York Daily News has a report, "Video surfaces of Ron Paul talking about racist newsletters in 1995, far earlier than he said he knew about them."

And the New Republic has a roundup, "TNR Exclusive: A Collection of Ron Paul’s Most Incendiary Newsletters."( Via Memeorandum.) And see also David Weigel, at Slate, "Ron Paul and the Coming Race War."

By this time it's pretty much all out there. The best thing for Ron Paul would be to come clean. His name is on some of these newsletters, so it sounds like a bald faced lie when he denies knowledge of them.

And see previously at Pamela's, "BOMBSHELL! RON PAUL'S RACIST NEWSLETTERS."

Ron Paul's Positions Play Well in Iowa

Too well, unfortunately.

At Wall Street Journal:

FORT MADISON, Iowa — On the debate stage, Rep. Ron Paul often finds himself isolated from his rivals for the White House. All the major Republican candidates call for limited government, but Mr. Paul's platform is unique in saying that means scaling back drug laws and opposing aggressive action to rid Iran of its nuclear capabilities.

Here in Iowa, however, Mr. Paul's mix of positions has found an audience—and it's big enough to give him, at least for now, the unlikely title of front-runner in the state.

The Texas congressman holds a lead among younger voters, some of whom cite his skepticism of U.S. military action and opposition to federal marijuana laws. Mr. Paul is also drawing a share of fiscal conservatives due to his longstanding call for smaller government. And with his call to "end the Fed," he is attracting voters who are wary of the Federal Reserve and Wall Street.

"I will be a Ron Paul supporter first and then a Republican," said Frank Conrad, a 62-year-old corrections officer and cattle farmer, who has had a Ron Paul sign on his garage for four years. "He's saying the things I believe."

Few people think Mr. Paul's coalition can carry him all the way to the GOP nomination. His isolationist foreign-policy views have turned off many Republicans. Evangelical Christians, a prominent part of the party, tend to look to other candidates, partly because they believe Mr. Paul will be insufficiently protective of Israel.

But amid a highly fractured GOP field, Mr. Paul has held the lead in three of the last four publicly available polls of GOP voters in Iowa, with support ranging from 20% to 28%.

More at the link.

PREVIOUSLY: "What Ron Paul Thinks of America."

What Ron Paul Thinks of America

From Dorothy Rabinowitz, at Wall Street Journal:

Ron Paul's supporters are sure of one thing: Their candidate has always been consistent—a point Dr. Paul himself has been making with increasing frequency. It's a thought that comes up with a certain inevitability now in those roundtables on the Republican field. One cable commentator genially instructed us last Friday, "You have to give Paul credit for sticking to his beliefs."

He was speaking, it's hardly necessary to say, of a man who holds some noteworthy views in a candidate for the presidency of the United States. One who is the best-known of our homegrown propagandists for our chief enemies in the world. One who has made himself a leading spokesman for, and recycler of, the long and familiar litany of charges that point to the United States as a leading agent of evil and injustice, the militarist victimizer of millions who want only to live in peace. 

Hear Dr. Paul on the subject of the 9/11 terror attacks—an event, he assures his audiences, that took place only because of U.S. aggression and military actions. True, we've heard the assertions before. But rarely have we heard in any American political figure such exclusive concern for, and appreciation of, the motives of those who attacked us—and so resounding a silence about the suffering of those thousands that the perpetrators of 9/11 set out so deliberately to kill.

There is among some supporters now drawn to Dr. Paul a tendency to look away from the candidate's reflexive way of assigning the blame for evil—the evil, in particular, of terrorism—to the United States.

Continue reading.

Paul can win Iowa. He can't win the GOP nomination. See, "Why Ron Paul Can't Win."

Folks suggested earlier that the Republican establishment would turn on Paul if he came close to securing the nomination. Again, he's sounds too crackpot to me for that thought to even register, but this is a crazy year in politics, so I don't dismiss an intra-party program of merciless destruction if push comes to shove.

The racist newsletter problem is bad enough, from a credibility standpoint, at least. But Paul's foreign policy is not something he can brush off: he's campaigning on it. To give that platform serious legitimacy by elevating its advocate as the GOP standard-bearer would be a horrible omen for the future of politics on the right. And it would also tell us something about the shape of the conservative political universe that this particular candidate could come so far into the mainstream. It would be a testament to the visceral dislike with the Obama-Democrat policy agenda, but it would also signify a mainstreaming of political isolationism in American foreign affairs. That alone would be one thing, but Paul's ideological program is closely intertwined with the bubbling up of anti-Semitism from the fringes, and would combined horrifically with the left's program for the extermination of the Jewish state.

That's what bugs me most about Ron Paul and his paleoconservative brew.

See AoSHQ for a refresher.

Tyranny and Indifference

A great piece, as usual, from Bret Stephens, at Wall Street Journal (and Google):

The power of indifference is something I first understood from Havel himself after interviewing him, over a beer, in the gardens of Prague's Czernin Palace. The occasion was a June 2007 conference of international dissidents that he co-chaired with Israel's Natan Sharansky. I asked him about his views on the war in Iraq. He had once supported it, but now he was more tentative. The rationale, he said, had not been "well-articulated." The timing of the invasion was "questionable." As in the 1960s, the U.S. risked becoming an emblem of William Fulbright's "arrogance of power."

Then Havel stopped himself and, as he seemed wont to do, put the train of his thought in reverse. "The world," he concluded, "could not be indifferent forever to a murderer like Saddam Hussein."

Here was the nub of the matter when it came to the invasion of Iraq. Never mind the faulty human or technical intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction: The real WMD, better known as Saddam Hussein, was always hiding in plain sight. Over the course of 25 years he and his henchmen gassed, assassinated, machine-gunned and otherwise murdered somewhere between one million and two million people. That's a big number, the equivalent of a dozen or so Hiroshimas.

Yet because most of the victims were Kurds, Shiites, marsh Arabs, Iranians and Kuwaitis, the question was why it should matter to the West—anymore than, say, the butcheries in the Congo matter. Opponents of the war argued that it should not: that there was no emergency; that no supreme national interest was at stake; that humanitarian interventions needed to be carried out consistently or not at all. Failing those tests, they concluded, guaranteed that the war was folly from the start.

If Havel's now-celebrated career means anything, however, it is to beware that facile conclusion. In his great 1978 essay, "The Power of the Powerless," written just as his career as a dissident had begun in earnest with his signing of the Charter 77 manifesto, he warned against "the attractions of mass indifference" and the "general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity." Havel feared that one's indifference to the question of the freedom of others would ultimately result in a well-fed indifference to the question of one's own freedom.

"A big danger of our world today is obsession," he told the conference the day of our interview. "An even bigger danger is indifference."

All this was Havel's way of saying that political extremism—whether of the Leonid Brezhnev, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden variety—would flourish if free people did not actively resist the temptation to acquiesce to it in the name of "peace," or some other go-along-to-get-along slogan.

And remember, while progressives praise folks like Havel, he's right up there with Christopher Hitchens when it comes to standing down progressive terror enablers.

As Last Troops Exit Iraq, Obama Spikes the Political Football

At Black Five, "Gloating About Something He Had Little to Do With":

Remember, this is someone who voted against funding for our soldiers in combat in Iraq. Also remember that this plan that has now been executed, i.e. our withdrawal from Iraq, was one negotiated by the previous administration before he ever took office.

But that doesn’t at all keep him from using the event as a campaign ad.

All in good taste, of course.

I wrote on this earlier, "War in Iraq Officially Over."

And at the Los Angeles Times, "As last U.S. troops exit Iraq, they leave a troubled land behind." It's a good piece, despite the typically negative headline.

Progressives Demonize Christopher Hitchens Upon His Death

You see, Christopher Hitchens committed the ultimate sin for the neo-communist left: Once one of them, he turned on progressives with a vengeance in his denunciation of the left's treasonous and enormously self-serving opposition to the Iraq war.

Progressive asshat John Cook has this at Gawker, "Christopher Hitchens’ Unforgivable Mistake." It's a bilious screed that simply ridicules Hitchens without substantively rebutting his arguments.

And also Glenn Greenwald, "Christopher Hitchens and the protocol for public figure deaths" (via Memeorandum).

And progressive hate master Thers, at Pile 'o Shit on Fire:

Hitchens seems to have had a gift for making anyone who ever met him personally forgive him for talking horseshit. Well, fuck him anyhow.

Stay classy, Thers, you f-king idiot. And that goes double for your morally impaired buddies at LGM.

Bonus: DougJ at Balloon Juice almost quit the blog after John Cole issued a fatwa against "ugly corpse-kicking bullshit in this thread." Thers obviously didn't visit the thread.

Senator McCain Slams Obama's Leadership on Iraq

At Weasel Zippers, "McCain Shreds Obama After He Takes Credit For Success of Iraq War: “History Will Judge His Leadership With The Scorn And Disdain It Deserves”…"

This is why I backed McCain in 2008. Good to hear him smack down the administration. We need to hear it.

PREVIOUSLY: "War in Iraq Officially Over."

War in Iraq Officially Over

The main story is at New York Times, "U.S. War in Iraq Declared Officially Over." (At Memeorandum.)

Also, the president's speech at Fort Bragg is at the video here. I watched it. It's ceremonial and symbolically important.

What's bothersome is that Barack Obama, during his time in the U.S. Senate and as a candidate for the White House, held more outright hostility to the war than any other Democrat at the time --- and that's quite an achievement, given the extreme antipathy to the mission in Iraq among the shitwad hate-America dirtbags, murderers, and rapists who did everything in their power to sabotage the deployment. Screw these people. At the video above, Obama in 2008 chirps all the far-left talking points on the war. None grates more obnoxiously than the claim that the "failed" and "mistaken" mission in Iraq was "detracting" from the war in Afghanistan. No sooner did Obama come to power than the stab-America-in-the-back progressives start clamoring for an end to the Afghanistan war. Yes, we can claim we won in Iraq --- and that's what the president did Wednesday in North Carlolina --- but it's an especially triumphant victory given that we beat our foes on the ground in combat and our political foes here at home. The left's war on the Bush administration's national security policy was a treasonous display of hatred that is literally unforgivable for any decent citizen who recognizes the costs of the mission for the country, and especially for those who have fought it. I am not, however, joining the bandwagon of those criticizing the administration's withdrawal. The White House botched negotiations for a continued troop presence --- and no doubt Iran will be increasing its influence in Iraq and across the region by the day --- but our support will continue in other ways, such as the continued deployment of stand-by forces throughout the Persian Gulf theater of operations.

We always find a way to prevail despite the treacherous agenda of the domestic enemies at home.

See also American Glob from last year: "Let Me Be Clear: Obama Deserves ZERO Credit For Iraq."

RELATED: At Los Angeles Times, "U.S. military formally ends mission in Iraq."

Professor Michael Avery Sends Email Criticizing Care Packages for U.S. Troops

This man is really brimming with hatred.

At Fox News, "Massachusetts Law Professor Calls Care Packages for U.S. Troops 'Shameful'."

And at FrontPage Magazine, "A Professor’s Hatred for Our ‘Killer’ Troops":

The disclaimer “we support our troops” has practically become obligatory for proclamations of opposition to U.S. wars. But a Boston law professor felt compelled to declare to students and colleagues that he supports neither the wars nor the troops fighting them.

Michael Avery, a professor of law at Suffolk University Law School, responded to an online solicitation for support for care packages for overseas servicemen by labeling them killers undeserving of sympathy.

“I think it is shameful that it is perceived as legitimate to solicit in an academic institution for support for men and women who have gone overseas to kill other human beings,” Avery professed in an email sent on the eve of the Marine Corps’ birthday and two days before Veterans Day. “I understand that there is a residual sympathy for service members, perhaps engendered by support for troops in World War II, or perhaps from when there was a draft and people with few resources to resist were involuntarily sent to battle. That sympathy is not particularly rational in today’s world, however.”

In the five-paragraph mass email, Avery also counseled students, faculty, and administrators “to be more mindful of what message we are sending as a school” and questioned the presence of an enormous American flag in a campus atrium. “Why do we continue to have this oversized flag in our lobby?”

“Perhaps some of my colleagues will consider this to be an inappropriate political statement,” the law professor continued. “But of course the solicitation email was a political statement, although cast as support for student activities. The politics of that solicitation are that war is legitimate, perhaps inevitable, and that patriotic Americans should get behind our troops.”

Avery, a recipient of the since-discontinued bachelor of laws degree at Yale University whose education included a late-’60s stint at the University of Moscow, has been active in left-wing causes for more than four decades. He is a past president of the National Lawyers Guild, and his resume boasts of work at the ACLU Foundation and Yale University’s Political Justice Workshop.

Wow, what a surprise!