Says it all. Great piece. I'm really happy he gave credit to Wolfowitz.
BUMP
Ping
I'm as happy as anyone else that the elections went off smoothly, but it doesn't mean the danger of a civil war breaking out at some point has passed. This is a significant milestone, but there's still a long way to go, and there will most likely be some setbacks along the way. Just being realistic.
This article should be mandatory reading in every American media newsroom.
Thanks for posting the whole thing before The Mad Excerpter got ahold of it.
Steyn Rocks!
Every time I think Steyn can't get any better, he does!
Will I every disagree with one word written by Mark Steyn? It's almost spooky.
Hahahahahahaha! '...pantomime horse where both Kofi and Chirac play the rear end...' {Priceless!)
Steyn is a treasure. Thank God he's a conservative!
'Robert Fisk, beloved comic doom-monger' This essay is marvelous!
'There's no danger of a "long-running civil war in Iraq".'
Actually, it is yet to be seen if there will be a civil war. The easy part was the election. The hard part will be compromise between the factions and the losers of the elections accepting their losses peacefully.
The most important thing: the terrorists lost considerable standing with the Iraqi people.
from Steyn's piece 8/25/2004
John Kerry's real 'band of brothers'
By MARK STEYN
A few months back, I bought a DVD set of an old TV variety show, black and white but digitally remastered. A bit too digitally remastered, as it turned out. It would be ungallant to name the lady artiste in question, but in several alarming close-ups it's all too clear she's come back from lunch a little the worse for wear, and in one scene she looks as if she's just been woken up after sleeping in the park for a week.
Not her fault. The make-up guy was making her look good enough for 1960 monochrome UHF lines. He couldn't have foreseen that 40 years on they'd have big-screen satellite TVs and DVD players and technology that would make that little facial pimple look like Mount Krakatoa about to blow through your screen.
That's what happened to John Kerry. For 25 years, he told The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, the United States Senate, and all manner of other well-known saps about his covert Yuletide operations inside Cambodia gun-running to anti-communists with his lucky CIA hat. To verify any of this would have required a trip to specialist reference libraries, looking up stuff on eye-straining microfiche, etc. So it was easier to let the old blowhard yak away and just nod occasionally.Senator Kerry couldn't have foreseen that Al Gore would invent the Internet, and there'd be this Google thingy, and all you'd have to do is tap in a few words and a nanosecond later it would all be at your fingertips – veterans memoirs, Cambodian history, declassified Johnson administration documents, previous Kerry "stretchers" (as Mark Twain called them).
The Kerry campaign has now conceded that, by his own contemporaneous account, the young lieutenant was nowhere near Cambodia in Christmas 1968 and, if he was ever on a covert gun-running operation across the border during his four months in Vietnam, he seems to be the only rookie Swift boat lieutenant to land in the territory and get entrusted with such a mission, and it was evidently so top secret that neither his commanding officers nor the men on his own boat knew a thing about it.
Yet the grandees of the US media refuse to show any curiosity about any of this, and they think anyone who does is a nut or part of the Republican "smear machine." When it comes to this newfangled Internet business, they take the line of Walter Cronkite, the long-retired avuncular anchorman from the pre-cable era. Last week, Walter huffed that "he finds that some stories published on the Web – scandals especially – play too fast and loose with the facts." As opposed to Walter, who doesn't play fast and loose mainly because he doesn't produce any facts – not a single specific example – to back up his assertion.
And playing fast and loose with the facts may be better than playing as slow and tight with them as Walter and his chums do. Right now, some three or four of his fellow Swift boat veterans back John Kerry, whereas some hundreds of them oppose him. This in itself is surely rather remarkable. But Ron Brownstein of The Los Angeles Times deplores the "partisan venom" of the election and compares the Swift boat veterans' anti-Kerry commercial to a "snuff film." Get a grip, man. Have you ever seen a snuff film? Those Islamist nutcakes were releasing one a week a couple of months back. Sadly, the news that some 80% of his fellow Swiftees do not accord Senator Kerry the same deference the media do is all too ickily "partisan" for Ron. Maybe he'd find it all less beastly if he were to take up a position as social secretary to a dowager duchess. As Lord Charteris, the Queen's courtier, remarked of Fergie: "Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar." That's Brownstein on the Swiftees.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I love Steyn.
last bump of the day I think. Got here via this:
Democracy that could thwart Bush's plans for Middle East
(more scary “uppity puppet” spin)
Sydney Morning Herald ^ | February 2, 2005 | Amin Saikal
Posted on 02/01/2005 7:22:53 AM PST by dead
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1333427/posts
which is also well worth reading. :') Happy February, all.