Zero Dark Thirty

Just came back from watching Zero Dark Thirty.  Good stuff, and I can see why the Left hates it.

Here's what bunches up Lefties' panties:

1.  The movie shows the CIA successfully torturing people to get the information we need to find bin Laden.  Lots of things about this irritate the Left.  First, they cannot abide the idea any information we got through aggressive questioning was actually useful.  Second, they certainly don't want enhanced interrogation presented in such a way as to look like it could possibly be justified.  Zero Dark Thirty manages to do both.  Third, and this may be the most artistically unforgivable thing the movie did, the movie showed prisoner treatment far worse than anything the CIA actually did do* and we in the theater couldn't care less.  As far as I could tell from the audience around me, if the CIA guy wanted to shove the jihadi into a four foot by two foot box for a couple days, that was just fine by us.  This must particularly enrage your average anti-American Lefty in Hollywood.  It's one thing to make a movie that makes child molesters seem like regular guys; that's just expanding the horizons of us poor, benighted Red Staters.  But show the US Government righteously  jumping ugly in the defense of America, well, that must never be done.

2.  When a Navy SEAL goes to work he doesn't fool around.  Your average frogman commando clearing a room does not leave live bad guys behind him.  No Miranda rights read to anybody.  Once you do something to cause a SEAL to "engage" you, you are engaged good and proper and permanent.  Sorry, Haji, no hard feelings.  Once again, the audience around me seemed to agree this was a no-brainer. 

3.  Obama is a fool, a liar, or both.  The only reference to the Big O was a video clip of him in the background claiming the U.S. doesn't torture anybody.  The video was playing in the mess hall where two of the "torturers" were discussing business.  The only other reference to the administration at all was when the slick, well-dressed suits from the White House were making it clear to the CIA guys they were mostly interested in making sure an attack on bin Laden didn't reflect poorly on the President.

4.  I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere else yet but it may be an even bigger point than the others:  the movie continually referenced how the CIA messed up its assessment of Iraqi WMDs.  Not George Bush, not Neo-cons, not the Zionist lobby.  Sometimes the CIA just guesses wrong and it was the CIA that guessed wrong on Iraq.  The Left's urban myth about how George W. Bush "lied" us into a war in Iraq is a matter of faith among their true believers.  For this film to flatly declare that the Iraqi WMD mistake was just another intelligence screw-up, and not some evil plot concocted by the BusHitler, must be particularly galling.

5.  Just as a general matter, there isn't the slightest hint in Zero Dark Thirty of the US being the bad guy, nor does it raise any questions about who the true bad guys might be.  The people we are fighting are mass murderers.  Our "allies" among them sometimes have to be bribed just to help us out.  They burned three thousand Americans alive in the middle of New York City and the entire fight since then has been our response to that atrocity, and our attempts - often unsuccessful - to stop them from committing more atrocities.

The more I think about it, the worse this movie seems from a Lefty's point of view.  No wonder they can't stand it.

* For a retired CIA guy's take on the Zero Dark Thirty torture scenes, you may want to read this.

Pearl Harbor's Aftermath: American Payback Gathers Steam

The Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (14-15 November 1942)

From Wikipedia:

"From this close range, Washington opened fire and quickly hit Kirishima with at least nine main battery shells and almost forty secondary ones, causing heavy damage and setting her aflame. Kirishima was hit below the waterline and suffered a jammed rudder, causing her to circle uncontrollably to port."

David Petraeus - The Last of the Roman-Sounding Generals

Flavius Aetius was the 5th Century Roman general who finally stopped Attila the Hun's invasions of Roman territory.  He has been referred to as 'The Last of the Romans'.  Like all great Romans of the day he had many great enemies, not least of whom was his master, the emperor Valentinian III, who feared Aetius' ambitions and distrusted his loyalties.  Valentinian eventually assassinated Aetius, reportedly by his own hand, in the culmination of a plot carried out while Aetius was at court delivering some sort of financial report.

Heh, life is tough near the top.  Politics ain't beanbag, and it wasn't back then either.  Aetius was a general with a great reputation but as he - and more recently, David Petraeus - found out, being a famous general with a cool-sounding name doesn't protect you when the guy at the top believes he has reason to fear you.

The former Director of the CIA is right now testifying about what the White House knew, and when it knew it, about the attack on the consulate in Benghazi on 11 September.  His testimony will be impeachable no matter what he says because his character has been effectively assassinated.  Petraeus already briefed Congress and in that earlier briefing he supported the President's claims.  He is now in the unenviable position of informing Congress he lied in that earlier briefing in order to cover up lies the President was telling at the time.  Either way Petraeus is a liar.  Oh, and an adulterer.  There are good reasons not to trust people that are either and Petraeus is now certified to be both.  David Petraeus may have made the same mistake Aetius did 1600 years ago:  He thought he was still safe, that his boss wasn't ready to do him in.  That he was still useful enough to his master that his master would not move against him.  He misjudged his man.  David Petraeus could have rock-solid proof that Barack Obama was lying about Benghazi but his word will be discounted because he is himself a lying adulterer.

But here's the postscript to the Aetius assassination of 454 AD:  Within six months, the conspirators against Aetius had fallen out so badly one of them had the emperor himself assassinated.  There were a number of soldiers present whose duty of course it would have been to protect the emperor.  But they had been Aetius' men.  None lifted a hand.

If I were Barack Obama I would wonder who I could trust.  The men and women that had enough power to help the President destroy David Petraeus' reputation have no reason to expect any loyalty from Barack Obama.  They see how he is.  What happens when some of them start to worry about when Obama is going to stick it to them in public like he did to Petraeus?  Are some of them worrying already?

Was it "over" when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

Okay, I've had just about enough of this.  The country isn't what we thought it was.  Maybe we've hit the tipping point.  Maybe the republic can't be saved.  Decline is here, and it's unstoppable.  Blah, blah, blah.

Here's what happened:  we got smoked.  The eternal verities haven't changed.  Right is still right, wrong is wrong, and our government is still on an unsustainable path that will eventually lead us to ruin if it isn't checked.  The Democrats ran a better campaign.  They injected abortion into an argument about economic idiocy.  They successfully turned an election about the direction of this country into a discussion about "lady parts".  They ran a left-wing, ideologue, crony capitalist politician and managed to convince the electorate that our guy was the out-of-touch plutocrat.  While we sat around one-upping each other about how no one could possibly want to give this obvious fool another four years at the wheel, they, bit by bit, sliced off pieces of the voting public, and maintained enough control of the "narrative" that they managed to win the election.  They kicked our ass.

This is a disaster, but it's not a refutation of the idea that liberty is still better than slavery, or that a growing blob of a government is a bad thing.  Those things are still true.  The fool in the White House is still going to attempt to do foolish things, and our job is to attempt to stop him.  It just got harder, that's all.

What kind of conservatives would we be if we didn't already know that people are fickle, things go wrong, and life is and always has been a constant struggle?  Do I have to quote Kipling at you?

Zabeli - The Next Generation

Wesley Knight Zabeli.  Born 20 October 2012.  Mother and child are doing fine.

Yes, I'm now a grandfather.

Separated at birth?

Obama's Retro Campaign Slogan

Creepy, no?  

No title required...

Christianity Explained

In case you need a primer, here you go:  FAQ on Christianity for the Unbeliever.

Brokeback Jihad

Did you hear about the goatherd from the boonies that wanted to be a martyr for Jihad?  He didn't know what a 'martyr for Jihad' was but he heard he'd get to have sex with young virgins.  So he goes to town and by mistake walks into a gay bar.  He says "Can anyone here tell me how to be a martyr for Jihad"?  This old queen of a mullah sitting at the bar turns around, looks him up and down, and says…

That's as far as I've gotten.  But when I finish, the punch line will surely include the name Abdullah Hassan al-Asiri, the 'underwear bomber' that tried to blow up an airplane over Detroit on a recent Christmas Day.  Word is Mr. al-Asiri's Jihadi 'training' included repeated sodomizing by fellow jihadis.  

Seriously.

Apparently the underwear bomb was a complex contraption and part of the, uh, package extended into the jihadi's rectum.  To stretch his rectum sufficiently to accommodate the payload, it was decided to use the pre-AIDS, San Francisco Turkish Bath method:  sort of a friends-with-benefits, al Qaida style.  If you  thought you understood the Religion of Peace's position on sodomy, you might have believed this type of behavior was forbidden.  But don't worry, it seems the plan was endorsed by a real-live mullah, one Abu al-Dema al-Qasab, who ruled:  "(T)o undertake this jihadi approach you must agree to be sodomized for a while to widen your anus so it can hold the explosives."

Right, then.  It's all copasetic.  I know this next part will also be hard to believe but some of these terrorist clowns were still concerned about the propriety of it all, so they asked this mullah fellow to put it in writing as an official fatwa. I guess in a culture that usually kills homosexuals, you want to make sure the paperwork is, er, straight before your pals commence to joy riding up your Hershey Highway.   You got to cross all the T's before you start dotting the old brown-eye, you know?  So the mullah put it in writing:  "(J)ihad comes first, for it is the pinnacle of Islam, and if the pinnacle of Islam can only be achieved through sodomy, then there is no wrong in it."  There you go.  The pinnacle.  The juju man has spoken.  If you can't commit mass-murder without first taking it in the shorts a few times, then bend over because your band of brothers is forming a line. 

These guys never heard of sex toys?  The 'martyr' can't take a fake penis into the privacy of his own room and train solo?  What's the problem, latex allergy?  They have no produce markets in North Africa?  Only a real-live butt-rogering by a 'brother' terrorist will do?  And what's with this 'brothers' stuff anyway?  Being a mass-murderer isn't enough, being a homo mass-murderer isn't enough, you got to be a full-frontal, incestuous, homo mass-murderer in order to get to Paradise?  What would Henry V say about this particular pansy-ass band of brothers?  "We few, we happy few!  Once more into the breach!"

Is it only me, or does anyone else think maybe, just maybe, there's something queer going on?  Am I the only one that wonders is this sheikh and his inner circle getting more out of this deal than just infidel-slaying? Maybe they kind of really enjoy training new martyrs?  Is it possible these terrorist big-wigs are just a bunch of poofs, covering their inner Village People with the cloak of macho, mass-murdering, religious zealotry?  And, come to think of it, didn't they find bin-Laden holed up like some hermit crazy uncle, with nothing but an old TV and a few retro VHS porn tapes?  Guy's got four wives in the other room and he's sitting in the dark, spanking the monkey over some grainy Vivid Pictures classics from 1987?   The question occurs, was bin-Laden breathing heavy over the girls on those tapes?  Or could it have been the boys that he was focusing on?  Who would know?  I'm just asking.

The more you hear about these jihadis the more you realize how flat-out crazy they are.  Vicious, cunning, depraved, and 'Fargo'-kidnapper stupid.  How is it possible we allow anyone - and I mean anyone - to suggest these guys hate us because of anything we did?  That maybe it's kind of our fault?  Unadulterated nonsense.  The Jihad isn't about the Crusades 800 years ago.  It's not about Western colonialism or imperialism or anything else to do with us.  The Jihad is about guys like this crew:  barbaric savages, whose wiring was already wrong to start with, letting some gay pimp of a holy man start re-typing their control code to make them even weirder.  The sooner we kill the lot of them, the better.

Saw Prometheus last night...

... with my daughter.  I was going to write a review but this morning I noticed Kurt Schlichter had already done it for me.  He even took the trouble to do a much better job than I would have:

'Prometheus Shows Hollywood's Religious Ignorance

"Prometheus" is a hot mess with good visuals and good performances in the service of an incoherent plot and an even less coherent message. It wants to ask those Big Questions, but the vocabulary that its stunted sense of spirituality provides is simply too limited to do so. The answer to “Where did we come from?” turns out to be some guys who are marginally taller than us and who have the complexion of a back-up singer for The Cure. And we, the audience, are sorry we asked.

I'm personally glad I saw the movie but can't think of a single disagreement with Mr. Schichter's review.  If you gotta see each and every 'Alien' movie then you have to see this one.  If you don't have some  non-rational need to do so save your money.

US Military Checkmated in the Mid-East?

If you're not depressed enough about our options in the Mid-East, Richard Fernandez can hook you up:

But those catastrophes is now distinctly within the realm of possibility and palpably nearer. The bulk of America’s forces are in landlocked Afghanistan, dispatched by a genius policy that sought to ‘end the war where it began’. Those forces have scant means of resupply through Pakistan, which has finally manifested its open hatred for the United States. Nor can American forces be withdrawn from Afghanistan except through Russian controlled territory — the same Russia which Hillary Clinton must now face off against in Syria.
The administration has checkmated in such an epic manner as to beggar the imagination. Ordinary stupidity could hardly have effected such a comprehensive disaster. Mere imbecility would have been insufficient to the task. Only an arrogance that mistook ignorance and incompetence for “smart diplomacy” could have achieved such a train wreck.

I hadn't thought about things that way, and it's stunning to think about.  Read the whole thing here.

Layman 'splains it to the Bishop of Exeter

At the Telegraph Blogs, James Delingpole absolutely brutalizes the hapless bishop:

Bishop, you are no doubt a very busy man, what with all the sustainability workshops you have to attend and all the junk-science books by Mark Lynas and George Monbiot you have to read in order to keep abreast of the latest weapons-grade drivel about "climate change." 

Apparently the Bishop of Exeter thought to build some wind turbines or something without getting the community's buy-in.  When the laity found out about it, they kind of hurt his feelings.  Which caused him to whine in public.  Which got Mr. Delingpole's attention.  Which the churchman shouldn't have done.

The beating is merciless but as the Proverbs say:  "A whip for the horse, a bridal for the donkey, and a rod for the backs of fools."

To say the the whole thing is worth reading doesn't do it justice.

Noonan on Obama in the Wall Street Journal

Peggy Noonan supported Obama back in the day but, like many, apparently woke up:

The president was deliberately using a misleading argument to paint a false picture! But you know, why would he go out there waving an article that could immediately be debunked? Maybe because he thought it was true. That's more alarming, isn't it, the idea that he knows so little about the effects of his own economic program that he thinks he really is a low spender.

That's gotta hurt.  Read the whole thing.

Is Al Gore visiting England this week?

Winter storm batters Britain.

To Stand upon Hallowed Ground

Walter Russell Meade remembers the Normandy invasion.

Fordham Described Elizabeth Warren as Its ‘First Woman of Color’

Brian Preston at PJ Media discussing the work that cites Warren's supposed Cherokee nationhood:

Who on earth would ever read something titled “Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue”? How can any sane person get past the title? Two of the three words in its opening clause are not, in point of fact, real words. They are hybrids made up to sound smart. They sound like poison gas to anyone not initiated in radical feminism. Which is what they are.

I clicked on the link based on the title but the passage above really got to me.  As per Preston, who on earth talks like this?  I guess if you throw out enough semantic smoke it can be harder for people to notice you're burning intellectual dung.

 

The Belief That CO2 Can Regulate Climate Is “Sheer Absurdity”

From Powerline:

"Klaus-Eckart Puls is a German physicist and meteorologist who investigated the underpinnings of global warming hysteria and was horrified at how unscientific the global warming advocates are."

My problem with warming alarmism is not that I don't believe in science, it's that science is a methodology.  It's a formalized way to investigate the physical world and to determine - to the extent possible - how things work.  Conclusions that are scientific can be checked, double-checked, and verified.  The current global warming debate on the other hand is political advocacy, carried out using scientific sounding language.  That's a different thing.

Our First Gay President

Fabulous

The Non-Inevitability of 'Gay' Marriage

Rich Lowery at The Corner:

History is littered with the wreckage of causes pronounced inevitable by all right-thinking people. The failed Equal Rights Amendment looked inevitable when it passed Congress in 1972 and immediately 30 states ratified it. Opposition to abortion that was supposed to inevitably wither away is as robust as ever. The forces favoring gun control seemed unstoppably on the march when Congress passed the Brady Bill and the assault-weapons ban in the 1990s, but there are more protections for gun rights now than two decades ago.

This sounds about right to me.  Gay Marriage may someday be the law of the land but it is not inevitable.  It is currently fashionable but the longer the idea percolates, the more people will realize how bad an idea it is.  There is more support for the idea among young people - especially the college educated - and I think the lefty/relativist brainwashing that goes on in colleges frequently wears off as youth grows into maturity.

And I think the savvier supporters of gay marriage realize this.  Which is why they're shrieking like harpies to get it enshrined in the law now, before everybody wakes up and says:  wait a minute, we want to do what?!

UPDATE: Turns out this post got me unfriended on Facebook by someone I consider a friend. It doesn't seem that harsh to me but I guess opinions do vary.