Brutally Honest

"Military efforts to date... incredibly successful... masterfully planned and executed..."

I've not been to Reynolds in some time (I'm just a busy guy, what can I say) but when I returned today, I found this link that, from the perspective of history, seems so dead-on:

Now the one thing that strikes me about the military efforts to date is just how incredibly successful they've been, and how masterfully planned and executed they turned out to be. Not perfect, of course (You mean there's terrorists setting off explosives? Against Americans and their supporters? In the Middle East, no less? Say it isn't so!). But a lot of the toys that John Kerry voted against turned out to be damned useful in the War on Terror. I don't want to even think about how an Afghanistan operation with Vietnam-era technology and tactics would have gone for us - I think in that case we'd have been wishing for another Vietnam. And if you've ever cracked a history book, you'll realize that only 1200 deaths in a year and a half of invading a dictatorship, overthrowing its dictator, and fighting a chronic insurgency is astoundingly good news, especially when added to the fact that the long-predicted flood of refugees never materialized, the terrorists that Saddam's regime had nothing whatsoever to do with suddenly got extremely interested in the fate of Iraq (and no, we're not turning peaceful, simple folk into bloodthirsty terrorists - at worst, we're forcing them to choose their side a little sooner than they would have on their own, and denying them the option of biding their time until the Great Satan looks sufficiently weak to try their hand at terrorism on their chosen terms), and Iraqis are still signing up to take on the battle for their country against these thugs and getting set to vote in their first-ever real election in a couple of months.

And the Commander-in-Chief at the helm during these amazing accomplishments is called incompetent? You've got to be kidding me.

Oh how many of us wish we were being kidded...

UPDATE: Reynolds also turned me on to this Krauthammer piece, a must read for anyone who'd like to stick it in the ear of your average Bush-hating Kerry supporter:

This election comes down to a choice between one man's evolution and the other man's resolution. With his endlessly repeated Tora Bora charges, Kerry has made Afghanistan a major campaign issue. So be it. Whom do you want as president? The man who conceived the Afghan campaign, carried it through without flinching when it was being called a "quagmire" during its second week and has seen it through to Afghanistan's transition to democracy? Or the retroactive genius, who always knows what needs to be done after it has already happened -- who would have done "everything" differently in Iraq, yet in Afghanistan would have replicated Bush's every correct, courageous, radical and risky decision -- except one. Which, of course, he would have done differently. He says. Now.

Do read it all.

Walter Cronkite has fallen and he can't get up

Catch the headline of this San Francisco Chronicle piece written back in March:

A nation trusted him. And he has never betrayed that trust. We're still listening to Walter Cronkite.

Well... maybe no longer:

The revered American former news anchor, Walter Cronkite, said on CNN's Larry King Live programme that he is "inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man ... probably set up Bin Laden to this thing".

And thanks to Juliette, Brutally Honest's readers are privvy to an intercepted cyber-conversation that took place between Rove and Mr. Bin Laden:

From: binny@toraboradeathcave.com

Date: Thurs October 28, 2004

To: karl@satan.net

Subject: new videotaping we have

Yo, Rovemeister!

Is Osama here. How you do? Hope all is well with campaign for evil, etc. (How about that John Kerry wife - the crazy one. Two burkas for her at least! Kerry, he was surely wearing the fermented hummous goggles when they wed!)

Anyways, maybe can help campaign with new video, featuring me in star role. See attachmented clip below.

Yours in happiness,

Osama

From: karl@satan.net

Date: Thurs October 28, 2004

To: binny@toraboradeathcave.com

Subject: re: new videotaping we have

Osama, you old dog!

By all means, please release this video ASAP. And, as we’ve previously discussed, for every percentage point we gain in the swing states we’ll send you another kidney we’ve harvested from murdered Democrats in Florida.

Best wishes,

Karl

And that's the way it is...

Heh.

380 tons of explosives... less than four-hundredths of 1 percent...

Gary Cruse points us in the direction of this Jack Kelly piece in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette that sums things up nicely:

On Friday, Maj. Austin Pearson of the 3rd Infantry Division said he was part of team that removed and then destroyed 250 tons of munitions from Al-Qaqaa shortly after the fall of Saddam. None of the munitions his team destroyed were under IAEA seal, Pearson said.

Pentagon officials note there is no evidence the terrorists in Iraq have ever used RDX or HMX, which suggests these explosives were moved out of the country before the war began. Satellite photographs taken just before the war show a lot of trucks at Al-Qaqaa.

The 380 tons of explosives probably couldn't have been removed between April 10, when the 2nd Brigade of the 101st was at Al-Qaqaa, and May 8, when the Iraq Survey Group certified the explosives were missing. It would have taken 40 large trucks to haul the explosives away. All the main roads at this time were clogged with American military traffic.

"Confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency's inspectors recorded that just over three tons of RDX were stored at the facility," ABC reported Oct. 27. "The IAEA documents could mean that 138 tons of explosives were removed from the facility long before the United States launched 'Operation Iraqi Freedom.' "

The 380 tons are relatively small potatoes, considering the size of Saddam's arsenal. There were an estimated million tons of weapons and explosives in 8,700 weapons depots, several as large as 10 miles by 10 miles square, according to the Iraq Survey Group.

Of this, the United States has destroyed some 280,000 tons, and has prepared 160,000 tons more for demolition. The 380 tons missing from Al-Qaqaa amount to less four-hundredths of 1 percent (.004) of the total estimated weapons and munitions in Iraq, less than two-tenths of a percent of what already has been destroyed.

A good news organization would have put the 380 tons in perspective, but we're talking about The New York Times.

The New York Times could hardly be called a news organization any longer, much less a good one. The Old Grey Lady, along with CBS and so much of the rest of the Main Stream Media, has become a mouthpiece for the DNC. No longer do they care to be stealthy about their bias.

It's in-your-face partisan journalism and you'd have to be an outright fool to disbelieve it.

The Bush/Kerry contrast

Bob at CanadianComment turns us on to this Weekly Standard piece by Stephen Hayes:

ON MAY 5, 2004, Peggy Buryj, got the worst news a mother can get. Her son, Jesse, had been killed in Iraq. Jesse was manning the turret of a Humvee at a checkpoint in Karbala, south of Baghdad, when he noticed a dump truck racing towards his vehicle. Despite warnings, the driver did not stop. Jesse fired more than 400 rounds at the truck, killing the driver. But the truck didn't stop. It rammed his Humvee, tipping it over. Jesse suffered massive internal injuries and later died on the operating table.

...

Six weeks later, Peggy Buryj claims that she received a phone call from a representative of John Kerry's presidential campaign. The caller identified herself as "Linda" and asked Mrs. Buryj, a registered Democrat, if she would appear at a Canton rally for John Kerry. Buryj agreed, but with a condition. She wanted to ask Kerry one question: "Why did you vote against the $87 billion for support troops in Iraq?"

"And I wanted to ask him--because I never hear journalists ask him, or anybody ask him--what was his reasoning for voting down the money?"

Buryj understood that her request was politically sensitive. So she told the Kerry campaign that she was willing to ask Kerry in private, before the event, or in a phone call. She promised that she would not go public with his answer. She even offered to sign a confidentiality agreement pledging that she would not talk to reporters about Kerry's answer.

"They were inviting me because of my son," she says. "You know, they were using me for their benefit, you know? Local hero's mother, you know?" Buryj notes that the Kerry campaign did not invite the Rameys, parents of Staff Sft. Richard Ramey, who died in Iraq February 8, 2004. "They were Republicans," she says. "I'm a Democrat."

Nevertheless, she wanted to attend the rally. "I wanted to go. I just wanted an answer to my question."

She never heard back from the campaign.

Of course she didn't.

A month later, Buryj received a call from the Bush campaign. President Bush wanted to meet her, in private, along with the families of two other fallen soldiers from Stark County. There would be no reporters in the room. She was not asked if she supported the president.

Bush spoke to a rally of 5,000 at the Canton Memorial Civic Center on July 31. Afterwards, he met for 20 minutes with Buryj, the Rameys and the family of Sgt. Michael Barkey, who had been killed in Iraq on July 7. Buryj says she cried when she saw Bush. "He cried on my shoulder as much as I cried on his."

Bob puts it best:

Goes to show how small of a man John Kerry actually is. If talking to, or meeting a person causes him the smallest of inconveniences, they get blown off. This from a supposed defender of the middle class, who cares about all Americans equally. I guess that only applies if he has something to gain politically.

A vote for John Kerry is a vote steeped in deception, a vote to fulfill a man's blind ambition, a vote to grant power to a campaign that has shown it will go to any length to get elected, a vote that proves the old P.T. Barnum adage that there's a sucker born every every minute.

Questions, so many questions.

Gerard at The American Digest links to The Kerry Spot where pertinent questions are asked:

Okay, having had a good night (and morning) of sleep, I've gathered some more coherent thoughts on this Osama tape and the election.

First, is there any doubt that some bootleg DVD or videotape of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" made it to a remote mountain village somewhere near the Afghan-Pakistan border?

Now we hear Osama saying, "It never occurred to us that he, the commander in chief of the country, would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone, because he thought listening to a child discussing her goats was more important."

Was the story of Bush's seven minutes in the schoolhouse really well known or a hot topic of discussion before Moore's movie came out? Is there any doubt that if not Osama, then one of his flunkies watched that movie and excitedly repeated the story to his spiritual leader, bubbling with excitement that even American filmmakers were exposing the foolishness of the Crusader Bush?

All the stuff Osama said about George H.W. Bush - (has 41 ever been mentioned in a previous Osama tape?) and the Saudis and corruption and the oil deals - does any of that sound any different from the arguments in Fahrenheit 9/11?

...

There are times when America wants the eloquent, nuanced multilateral, French-speaking, consensus-building, flexible and cautious negotiator. And then there are times when the country wants the plain-spoken butt-kicking aggressive unilateralist cowboy. Guess which time this is?

...

The far left hates George W. Bush with a raging fury. So does al-Qaeda. Was it really so shocking that the rhetoric of the former would eventually be taken up by the latter?

No, this tape should cause many on the left to stare into the mirror for a long time and ask, “What have I turned into? How did I become so reflexively partisan, so blinded by rage, so intemperate in my rhetoric that my own arguments are being echoed by a man who planned and enjoyed the mass murder of Americans?”

“How the hell did I reach the point where I agree with Osama bin Laden on Bush?”

Emphasis added.

Great questions eh?

Would one of you leftist moonbats, one of you ignorant sycophants, one of you members of the vast uneducated and/or propagandized masses voting for Kerry stop by and give us some cogent answers?

We'll wait...

"On this Campus East of Eden, In Babel's High Academies"

Tom is on a roll of late and this time he's skewering academia (or at least certain segments of it). Here's an excerpt:

"Campus East of Eden"
( In Babel's High Academies)

We're gliding through The Lovely Garden
O, Human Reason...be our Guide!
Revelation's long discarded;
And Freud implores.....
"Enjoy the ride!"

Here the trees are heavy-laden,
And the fruit is plump and sweet....
Science is our Red Delicious
Our McIntosh?
Charles Darwin's Teat.

Science is The True Religion!
Protestants we can't allow!
Humanism's Holy Edict...
To Darwin's "Tree of Life" we bow.

"Deity"'s a wish Fulfillment,
For "Perfect Dad" we never had...
A Sublime Psycho-Neurosis,
A Mass Delusionary Fad.

The Garden Story?...
Gawd! How foolish!
Evolve beyond that Fairy Tale!
Real truth is much more pluralistic...
The Missing Link's our Holy Grail.

Darwin proved beyond a shadow
Of a doubt that Tale's a Lie!...
Science tells us sure as shootin'
No "Father God"'s up in the sky.

"Revelation"'s Fruit is rotten...
Indeed, it's rotten to the core!
Our most highly educated,...
"The Wise" don't buy it anymore!

Really, Man!
Just trust your instincts!
And swing on down out of that tree...
Darwin proved we're former monkeys!
So drop that Hairy Tale for me!

(Pay close attention, Mr. Cheetah,
Trogladyte...Backwoods Bufoon...
Mr. Darwin's our True Prophet....
"Erectus Ho-Most High Baboon"!)

Truth is in The Science Textbook.
Your "Garden Tale" has been revised.
The Bible's Message?
Worse than lacking!....
Might I suggest...It's fossilized!

Carl Sagan said the Bible's Bogus...
(You mutant, oddball, backward twit)
So hang it up!
(Genetic Throwback)
Don't be so naturally unfit.

This mutant, oddball, backward twit is loving Tom's work... I hope you'll go now and read the rest... it's well worth your time.

Christianity is like a human poem

Real Live Preacher has done it again. He's posted a must read:

What if you and I could set aside all the church bullshit for a little while? I’m serious. Just for the purpose of a good conversation we would forget all the huge buildings and the tortured, organizational labyrinth that supports them, the marketing sound bites, the appalling TV shows, the whole Christian subculture that is such a mystery to the outside world, the creepy “I love Jesus so much” language, the stunning hypocrisy, all of it. What if we could just forget all of that for a time?

I know we can’t really set all that aside because McLuhan was right. The Church is our medium and this medium is now our message. Most definitely our message. The only message we know anymore. There’s no escaping that. But you and I are friends, and we can do whatever we want when we’ve had a couple of beers and are talking about crazy things that should be but are not and perhaps never will be.

...

See, I think Christianity is like a human poem, written over thousands of years by people who have a sense that there is something more important for us than just waking up every day and going about our business. I’m one of those people, I’m afraid.

RLP is making some serious sense. Do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing.

"You are guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty"

The wife and I watched portions of the video this evening. It was chilling, to say the least. Here are but a few of the words launched against us all:

No, my fellow countrymen you are guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. You are as guilty as Bush and Cheney. You're as guilty as Rumsfeld and Ashcroft and Powell. After decades of American tyranny and oppression, now it's your turn to die. Allah willing, the streets of America will run red with blood matching drop for drop the blood of America's victims.

People of America, I remind you of the weighty words of our leaders, Osama bin Laden and Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri, that what took place on Sept. 11 was but the opening salvo of the global war on America and that Allah willing, the magnitude and ferocity of what is coming your way will make you forget all about Sept. 11.

We are less than a week away from electing a President that will have to deal with the kind of threat posed by the coward pictured.

John Kerry's record, as a 20 year senator, as an anti-war demonstrator, as someone who has consistently denigrated our military and more recently as a campaigner who will say anything to be elected, provides the evidence necessary to disqualify him from being our next commander in chief.

It's really that simple.

UPDATE: My kindred spirit, David at Not Perfection, has similar thoughts.... great minds...

Hyper Cerebral Blogosis - My near death experience

This is serious(ly funny):

LAGUNA BEACH, CALIFORNIA -- Doctors are blaming a rare electrical imbalance in the brain for the bizarre death of a blogger whose head literally exploded in the final week of the election!

No one else was hurt in the fatal explosion but a small room at the blogger's residence was sprayed with blood and brain matter when Gerard Van der Leun's head suddenly blew apart. Experts say he suffered from a condition called Hyper-Cerebral Blogosis or HCB .

"He was deep in concentration with his eyes focused on the screen and his fingers frozen over the keyboard," said Laguna Beach early responder, Miguel Wilsonista. "He seems to have hit 'Post' for what had to be the 3,456,856th item of inept political photoshopping this year when the blast occurred.

"His browser history documents that he went from Drudge to Real Clear Politics to Talking Points Memo to Instapundit to Fox News to the New York Times to MSNBC to Kos to Roger Simon to Little Green Footballs to The Corner to Atrios to Google News to Allah to Belmont Club to Wonkette and finally, and probably fatally, to Andrew Sullivan. All of a sudden his hands flew to his temples and he screamed in pain. Seals and surfers far below on Main Beach in Laguna looked up from the water startled by the shrieks of agony cascading down from Arch Beach Heights. Then, as if someone had put a bomb in his cranium, Van der Leun's head popped like a firecracker."

Incredibly, Van der Leun's is not the first case in which a blogger's head has spontaneously exploded during these last few days of the campaign. Five bloggers are known to have exhibited HCB in the last week.

This Brutally Honest blogger, having just returned from a gathering of the brethren (by marriage), was exposed to something at that get-together that nearly caused my own noggin to burst.

Without going into too many details, a family (by marriage) political discussion ensued that might've easily been fodder for David's recent post.

However, in the interest of family (by marriage) peace, I did not attempt, in any way, to point out the ignorance the faulty logic on display and instead, with the full intent of maintaining familial (by mariage) harmony, kept my rather large mouth closed.

And all that restraint nearly resulted in my head erupting.

Mrs. Brutally Honest, seeing the size of my coconut grow quickly to match in circumference your basic blue ribbon pumpkin at the local fair, decided that it was time to make like a birthing baby and head out.

Avoiding, by minutes, the sixth death attributed to HCB.

Thank you my little black sheep...

:)

The continuing saga of the alleged Bush Blunder

President Bush weighed in today (finally!) on the latest attempt by John Kerry and his MSM ideologues to smear this administration and the military, an attempt I think is illustrated aptly by our good friends at Cox & Forkum.

Here are key points from the President's speech to Pennsylvanians in Lancaster:

As you're out gathering the vote and as you're out talking to people about this election, remind people of this startling statistic: only four members of the United States voted to authorize the use of force and then voted against providing the funding for our troops in combat -- only four -- two of whom were my opponent and his running mate. (Boos.)

So they asked him -- they asked him -- I'm sure the people of Lancaster, Pennsylvania were just as surprised as people all around the country when he gave his famous answer about his vote. He said, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion right before I voted against it." (Laughter.) He's given a lot of explanations since then, a lot of 'em. One of the most interesting ones of all was that it was just a "complicated matter." There's nothing complicated about supporting our troops in combat. (Cheers, applause.)

After repeatedly calling Iraq the "wrong war" and a "diversion," Senator Kerry this week seemed shocked to learn that Iraq was a dangerous place full of dangerous weapons. (Scattered laughter.) The senator used to know that, even though he seems to have forgotten it over the course of the campaign. But after all, that's why we're there. Iraq was a dangerous place run by a dangerous tyrant who had a lot of weapons. We have seized or destroyed more than 400,000 tons of munitions, including explosives, at more than -- thousands of different sites, and we're continuing to round up more weapons every day. I want to remind the American people if Senator Kerry had his way, we would still be taking our "global test," Saddam Hussein would still be in power, he would control all those weapons and explosives, and could have shared them with our terrorist enemies.

Now the senator is making wild charges about missing explosives when his top foreign policy adviser admits, quote, "we do not know the facts." Think about that. The senator's denigrating the action of our troops and commanders in the field without knowing the facts. Unfortunately, that's part of a pattern of saying almost anything to get elected, like when Senator Kerry charged that our military failed to get Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora even though our top military commander, General Tommy Franks, said the senator's understanding of events does not square with reality and our intelligence reports placed bin Laden in any of several different countries at the time.

Our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site. This investigation is important and it's ongoing, and a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief. (Cheers, applause.)

When it comes to your security, when it comes to the security of our families, my opponent takes a very different approach. He says that September the 11th did not change him much at all. (Boos.) And his policies make that clear. He says the war on terror is primarily a law enforcement and intelligence-gathering operation.

Well, September the 11th changed me. I remember the day I was in the -- at ground zero, September the 4th, 2001. It's a day I will never forget. There were workers in hard-hats there yelling at me at the top of their lungs, "Whatever it takes." I remember a man grabbing me by the arm, he looked me square in the eye and he said, "Do not let me down." Ever since that day, I wake up every morning trying to figure out how to better protect America. I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes. (Cheers, applause.)

Of course, none of this is stopping Kerry from continuing his attacks. Even today, after Kerry adviser Mike McCurry was quoted as saying that the munitions could have been moved before the U-S invasion, perhaps by Saddam Hussein himself, Kerry continues to attack the administration, and by default, the military.

Of course, Kerry has a history of attacking the military. In that regard, he has been uncharacteristically consistent.