I love watching the liberals squirm when forced to address issues and events that... well... plainly disagree with their entire ideology. Believing George W. Bush is a merciless warmongering idiot does not jibe with the FACT that The Bush Doctrine is responsible for at least 2 elections in regions that either never have or have not in a long time experienced them. With Georgia and the Ukraine now firmly separated from their Communist style governments, the Palestinians and Israel on their way to a plan for peace and Lebanon soon to be free from Syrian occupation, guys like Ed Kilgore of The Talking Points Memo are finding less and less to support their blame America, Bush is an idiot ideology.

Here is Ed Kilgore explaining how Ronald Reagan was not responsible for the fall of the Soviet Empire just as George W. Bush has not dealt a crippling blow to tyranny and despotism:

This is the kind of thinking, of course, that has convinced God knows how many people that Ronald Reagan personally won the Cold War. It's the old post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy. This is a president and an administration that chronically refuse to accept responsibility for the bad things that have happened on their watch--even things like the insurgency in Iraq that are directly attributable to its policies. Barring any specific evidence (provided, say, by Lebanese pro-democracy leaders)that Bush had anything in particular to do with Syria's setbacks in Lebanon, I see no particular reason to high-five him for being in office when they happened.

So it is merely coincidence that Communism fell while Reagan was in office as Democracy in the Middle East has nothing to do with the Bush Doctrine. Poor liberals. They must DENY DENY DENY just to make themselves feel like they have any relevancy left at all.

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Just heard it on FOX News. The judge that can be seen in the video shot when Saddam was arraigned was murdered today. There are no internet web reports yet.

UPDATE: It was not the judge seen in the Saddam hearing but rather another judge also working on the upcoming Saddam trial.

DEVELOPING.....

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In Hillah, site of yesterday's bombing, several thousand Iraqis demonstrated against terrorism, chanting "No to terrorism!" and "No to Baathism and Wahhabism." I like that last one especially:



Meanwhile, Centcom commander General John Abizaid testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on recent successes in breaking up Zarqawi's organization in Iraq:

Against Zarqawi we have been very successful ... because of Iraqi intelligence sources, because of treason within his organization, because people are getting tired of what he is doing, which is killing innocent Iraqi people for no reason whatsover. And his days in Iraq are numbered.

Abizaid's reference to "treason" within Zarqawi's organization is especially cheering. Not to Zarqawi, of course; with a $25 million price on his head, any hint of disloyalty among his subordinates is likely to be fatal. From Powerline.

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I am still reeling over this editorial from today's New York Times. When I read the 1st 2 paragraphs to my wife, she commented on how "pragmatic" FOXNews.com had become. When I revealed that what I had just read her was the editorial page from the NYT, she nearly spit her coffee out in total surprise. I will share with you now the paragraphs I read to her this morning:

It's not even spring yet, but a long-frozen political order seems to be cracking all over the Middle East. Cautious hopes for something new and better are stirring along the Tigris and the Nile, the elegant boulevards of Beirut, and the impoverished towns of the Gaza Strip. It is far too soon for any certainties about ultimate outcomes. In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes for headlines with post-election democratic maneuvering. Yesterday a suicide bomber plowed into a crowd of Iraqi police and Army recruits, killing at least 122 people - the largest death toll in a single such bombing since the American invasion nearly two years ago. And the Palestinian terrorists who blew up a Tel Aviv nightclub last Friday underscored the continuing fragility of what has now been almost two months of steady political and diplomatic progress between Israelis and Palestinians.

Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power. Washington's challenge now lies in finding ways to nurture and encourage these still fragile trends without smothering them in a triumphalist embrace.

The rest of the editorial follows the same pattern and it is (I can't believe I am about to say this about an NYT editorial) very much worth the read.

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Voices of moderation in the Muslim Community have been strikingly few in the last 3.5 years since Muslim extremists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and The Pentagon. So excuse me for taking every opportunity to showcase every moderate Muslim voice I can find. Mr. Nawash points out an element to Islam that, as far as I know, has not been examined before, Political Islam:

Extremism is also growing because of an ideology called political Islam. The basis of political Islam is the rejection of secularism and the belief that the mosque and the state should be completely intertwined. Unfortunately, history has shown that when politics and religion are completely intertwined, disaster results.

He also discusses the issue of the "Freedom House Report" which among other things found extremist Islamic literature in some leading American mosques.

Muslim-bashing. That’s the accusation many of my fellow Muslims now hurl at the various news outlets for their news stories about a Freedom House investigation that found extremist Islamic literature in some leading American mosques. This name-calling is unfortunate.

Most importantly, extremism in the Muslim world continues to grow because most Muslims are unwilling to admit that we have a problem with extremism and support for terrorism. The response by Muslims to the Freedom House report is not the first time that the Muslim community resorted to denial and accusations of Muslim-bashing when presented with evidence of Muslim culpability.

If you have the time, I advise you read and share the article which can be found here.

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