REST IN PEACE, JAMES SUH

Matthew Heidt of Froggy Ruminations has a great post up on the funeral for a fellow Navy SEAL, James E. Suh. It has some good photos and one picture of the man that just stops you dead in your tracks. His gaze, that is:

 

James Suh fought the good fight. Though many don’t see it, he was fighting for humanity, for freedom, for individuals the world over.

[W]e pledge to bind ourselves again to one another;
To embrace our lowliest,
To keep company with our loneliest,
To educate our illiterate,
To feed our starving,
To clothe our ragged,
To do all good things,

knowing that we are more than keepers of our brothers and sisters.

 

We are our brothers and sisters.

 

In honor of those who toiled and implored God with golden tongues,

and in gratitude to the same God who brought us out of hopeless desolation,

We make this pledge.

There are so many ways to make the pledge and keep the pledge. This grateful American honors the man with the haunting gaze who made and kept the pledge in his own way.

Rest in peace, James E. Suh.

 

SUMMER WEATHER

For the first time in what seems like a long time but probably isn’t, we’re having some fairly substantial morning rain in Tallahassee. The National Weather Service has a new experimental website up that will give you a pretty good loop showing you your present local radar. Below is a static image, not the loop, for Tallahassee a bit earlier today:

 

I’ve always been fascinated by this kind of technology – we absolutely take it for granted today but not that long ago it simply did not exist.

 

REPUBLICAN VICTORIES ON CAPITOL HILL, WHETHER RECOGNIZED OR NOT

So, last night I’m scanning the dial and happened upon CNN. There was a panel discussion going on; it was Lou Dobbs’ show and Ron Brownstein of the L.A. Times was one of the panelists. All I remember is that it was negative about what had just occurred on Capitol Hill. Somehow, the Republicans were portrayed as having problems, problems, and more problems. Revolts were popping up all over the place.

Now (given what happened yesterday), that is the very definition of sad sack media slavishness to talking points wouldn’t you say? Thankfully, I wake up this morning and, lo and behold, what greets me on the Washington Post website but this truthful gem:

A Flurry of Republican Victories on Capitol Hill
Key measures had suffered from years of partisan wrangling; passage represents significant wins for president, congressional GOP leadership.

– Charles Babington and Justin Blum

Context, context, context.

Agenda journalism goes down a lot easier when the MSM members can at least admit the obvious. What of the New York Times? No, no, no – they couldn’t dare admit something so obvious. Disaggregate, like this:

Senate Approves Bill Protecting Gun Businesses
By CARL HULSE
The Senate also passed legislation on highways and energy and renewed its version of the antiterror USA Patriot Act.
• Most Patriot Act Provisions Made Permanent
• Lawmakers' Pet Projects Find Home in Bill
• Senate Leader Criticized for Stem Cell Shift

So, is their focus on guns? No, but that’s the scarier headline.

Okay.

Read more and you will get the basic facts. The paper of record, however, failed in this instance where the Washington Post did not.

 

FLORIDA BOY EXTRAORDINAIRE CONTINUES TO SHOW THE MSM HOW REAL REPORTING IS DONE

Michael Yon (from Polk County) continues to cover Iraq with unvarnished distinction; his post welcoming into American citizenship a real variety of soldiers fighting the good fight in Iraq.

My two brothers and I all served in the United States Army. Yon’s post reminds any ex-soldier what we usually love about the Army – the men and women who become your brothers- and sisters-in-arms. I have a nephew serving now as a mechanic in Special Operations. He may or may not be going for his Green Beret in the next year (yes, I am a bit worried about that). I mention him in this post because his best friend is a white boy from Tennessee who happens to be a big U.T. Volunteer fan. My nephew, of course, is a big Gator fan. I’m hoping to get both of them down to the great Sunshine State for the weekend festivities surrounding the Florida-Georgia game. Hopefully, Florida will have beaten the Vols behinds by then. All of this to say, it’s that kind of relationship that the Army makes possible, if not probable. Other institutions in America do this to, of course, but the Army makes it really accessible to the average American.

Back to the post . . .

Yon has some good pictures and profiles in the post; check them out. I’m drawn to this guy:

“The Q”

There’s another soldier here from Mexico, Victor Quinonez. Everyone calls him Q. At 23, Q fights like crazy; he’s earned his great combat reputation. I joke with Q that he’ll either be a top military leader, or in trouble with the law if he doesn’t listen to his leaders. And Q always tells me, “Mike, when the shit goes down and the bullets are flying, you stick with me and I’ll get you out. Never fear when the Q is here! You’ve seen me in action. You know I’ll get you out. I’m a Mexican, not a Mexican’t!”

First time I met Q, I thought he was full of something, and he was, but it wasn’t what I was thinking. One time, during a brief shootout, I kind of broke through a gate for cover in a house, and Q said, “Mike, what you hidin’ from!” I answered, “Bullets, dumbass! Get in here!” “You come out here!” Q said, “We’re gonna get these guys!” Now he’s like my young Mexican-American brother and I get worried he’ll get shot or blown up.

It’s been true since the U.S. was founded that some of the best Americans were not born in America. And we can use all the good people we can get. That’s something to remember.

Damn right. I still have vivid images from my days in the Army of guys from Mexico named Luna, Quinonez, etc. Yon’s “Q” sounds like the real deal. And I like that Mexican bit.

 

THE WORLD’S GRIEVANCE-MONGERS

Mark Steyn is still trying to fight the good fight in Britain, advising folks there to wake the hell up:

As fascism and communism were in their day, Islamism is now the ideology of choice for the world’s grievance-mongers. That means we have to destroy the ideology, or at least its potency -­ not Islam per se, but at the very minimum the malign strain of Wahabism, which thanks to Saudi oil money has been transformed from a fetish of isolated desert derelicts into the most influential radicalising force in contemporary Islam, from Indonesia to Leeds. Europeans who aren’t prepared to roll back Wahabism had better be prepared to live with it, or under it.

And here is Chrenkoff, with a riff building on Steyn:

As I’ve tried to say many times recently, Al Qaeda is more than just the sum of individual grievances. You can solve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict or the problem of Kashmir, but Al Qaeda will still be with us. That’s not an argument for not trying to solve these international problems - by all means, a Palestinian state is a laudable end - but don’t kid yourself that this will end terrorism, because:

a) Al Qaeda doesn’t just want a Palestinian state - it wants a Taliban-style Palestinian state that is to the exclusion of, and not in addition to, the Jewish state, and

b) it wants a lot more than that - it’s the Caliphate or bust.

Trying to eliminate various geo-political grievances might help by reducing the number of potential single-issue terror recruits - but it won’t end the terror. The list of grievances is seemingly inexhaustible, which means there will always be reasons for somebody to get worked up about something happening somewhere around the world (the IRA’s war largely consisted of Irishmen blowing up other Irishmen and the Brits on the British Isles; Al Qaeda’s war consists of Moroccans blowing themselves up in Iraq). Secondly, there will always be enough people attracted to Al Qaeda’s totalitarian dream - people who want the flag of the Prophet flying over every capital, the end of Dar Al Harb, and the conversion or death of all the infidels.

When you have to choose sides in such a situation – and you do have to choose sides, even if you would prefer not to – the decision is really easy. Much of the problem in America (vis-à-vis recognizing the war we’re in) is the large number of folks who refuse to give up on utopian-flavored theories and preferences in the face of this determined enemy.

Because they are susceptible to “grievance-mongering” they, in turn, are sympathetic to Islamofascist grievance-mongerers who are hijacking Islam. It’s as simple as that.

Back to Mark Steyn, who is really pissed that the British welfare state is being used by the folks to bring down the British way of life:

I wasn’t the first to notice the links between Euro-Canadian welfare and terrorism. Mickey Kaus, an iconoclastic California liberal, was way ahead. But, after three-and-a-half years, one would be entitled to assume that a government whose fortunes are as heavily invested in the terrorist threat as this one’s might have spotted it, too — especially given the ever greater numbers of British jihadi uncovered from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Israel and America.

That’s why I regretfully have to disagree with the editor of this great publication in his prescription of the current situation which appeared in these pages a week or two back under the headline ‘Just don’t call it war’. As you’ll have gathered, the boss objects to the language of ‘war, whether cultural or military.... Last week’s bombs were placed not by martyrs nor by soldiers, but by criminals.’

Sorry, but that’s the way to lose. [RattlerGator: this is so obviously true you have to wonder why folks keep resisting it – oh, that’s right, they’re grievance-mongerers, too] A narrowly focused ‘criminal’ approach means entrusting the whole business to the state bureaucracy. The obvious problem with that is that it’s mostly reactive: blow somewhere up, we’ll seal it off, and detectives will investigate it as a crime scene. You could make the approach less reactive by a sustained effort to improve scrutiny of immigration, entitlement to welfare and other matters within the purview of government. But consider those two snippets from the Tuesday papers and then figure out the likelihood of that happening. A ‘criminal’ approach gives terrorists all the rights of criminals, and between British and European ‘human rights’ that’s quite a bundle. If it’s a war, you can take wartime measures — including withdrawal from the UN Convention on Refugees, repeal of the European Human Rights Act, and a clawback of sovereignty from the EU. But if you fight this thing as a law-enforcement matter, Islamist welfare queens will use all the above to their full extent and continue openly promoting the murder of the Prime Minister, British troops, etc. with impunity.

Softly-softly won’t catchee monkey.

Are you laughing at that last line as much as I am? Beautiful stuff.

Of course, Bill Clinton listened to all those brilliant Europeans and studiously followed the law enforcement model. John Kerry wanted us to go back to it. That would have been pure madness.

Mullah Omar was banking on the law enforcement model being employed – until George W. Bush dropped not a surprise, but a “so-prize,” on their behinds. Still, many on the left want to go back to the law enforcement model; Mark Steyn says hell no and I’m with Mark.

 

CHRENKOFF SCORES A KNOCKOUT!

This is so good and relatively brief that I’m reproducing it in full:

Electronica songmaister Moby used to criticize Eminem for misogynistic lyrics (really?). Eminem, in turn, reciprocated with this well-reasoned and witty riposte in his hit “Without You”:

And Moby, you can get stomped by Obie,
You 36 year old bald headed fag, blow me,
You don’t know me,
You’re too old let go
It’s over, nobody listens to techno

But regardless, Eminem has finally won Moby’s seal of approval - because of his anti-Bush, anti-war in Iraq stance. “I found myself respecting him for doing that,” says Moby. And so the man who not so long ago was saying “any music that glorifies abuse, misogyny, homophobia or racism is disturbing, but especially so when it’s targeted to a fanbase of 10-year-old boys” is now gushing:

“Honestly, if he retired, I think the world of music would be a poorer place. He’s a really fascinating public figure... I’d much rather have public figure musicians like Eminem because at least he’s exciting.”

And what about being called a “bald headed fag” and parodied in a video?

“To have the most successful musician in the world dress up like you in a video and sing about you in a song - it was honestly some of the best publicity I’ve ever had.”

George W Bush - you are a truly a miracle worker. Who else, after all, could end a feud between an egomaniacal white trash rapper and a sensitive New Age electronica maestro?

Moby, “Hotel” might just be my favorite new CD this year, but you’re an idiot.

And the man titled the piece Moby Dick! Oh man, I love that ability to slice and dice.

 

ARTHUR TEELE JR.

I’ve got to get on the road and travel but what an amazing story this Arthur Teele saga is – absolutely incredible.

 

CUTTING TO THE CHASE

Martin Kimani, delivering more of the cold, hard truth:

"It is common knowledge that many housemaids in genteel middle class Nairobi are never paid a wage; it is their parents, or ‘auntie’ who receives the pittance that they are owed every month. Anyone who has lived or visited the city for any length of time also knows that it is not uncommon to have ten-year olds doing the washing, cleaning and cooking for an entire family while enduring a steady diet of slaps and kicks. And I do not exaggerate when I point to the high frequency of maid rape in many households. If you ask your typical Nairobi ‘babi’ or middle class boy what his first sexual encounter was, he will spin a tall tale about the ‘older girl who lived just up the road’. Wrong. The first encounter, and the second and the third, is more often than not with the maid. She is shared among the boys in the house, their friends in the neighbourhood sometimes and very often the man of the house who after dropping off the kids and wife to school in the mornings, will sneak back for a quick one. This sexual access is usually procured forcefully with the implicit threat that for the maid to resist will result in instant dismissal. Here's a little clue for HIV/AIDS health workers who decry the transmission of the disease from philandering husband to wife: it is the maid who is at the centre of a domestic sexual web that runs through the sons and their father, not to mention any other lovers she may take. This is of course not to blame her, it is to recognise that the helplessness that attends many maids – relentlessly mistreated, isolated from friends and family, and economically disempowered – exposes them to the malign actions of a class of people whose upward aspiration is often marked with a immense contempt for their ‘inferiors’."

When you read this there is an automatic acknowledgment, deep in your soul, that it is the absolute truth.

Here’s to more truth-telling in Africa and more acceptance of responsibility.

 

COSBY REPUBLICANS ABOUT TO CHANGE THE G.O.P. CALCULUS?

Shay at Booker Rising thinks so:

Towards A Possible Agenda
Mind you, I personally disagree with much of the agenda that I outline below (I am fiscally conservative and socially moderate, and believe in small government), but I also believe that black communities desperately need more political competition. I am a pragmatist, and thus will offer recommendations that will help get us there. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a liberal commentator, recently wrote: "The fear and loathing many blacks still have of Bush's policies for now guarantee the Democrats a winning hand in the hard fought game for black voters. But Republicans think they can do something that was unthinkable a scant four years, and that's break the Democrat's stranglehold on the black vote. Bush and Mehlman may be on to something." What will grab these folks, so the Republican Party can reach its stated goal of capturing 25% of the black vote by 2008? In conversations with old-school black folks and looking at the Pew Research Center data, these positions seem to grab at the Cosby Republicans:

support for school prayer: they believe it creates better-behaved children and acknowledges God at the center of humanity

support for school vouchers: they believe enables black parents to choose better schools for their kids

opposition to abortion: viewed as black genocide

opposition to gay marriage: they believe it threatens the already fragile black marriage rate. They also view attempts by (overwhelmingly white) gay activists to link the issue to the Civil Rights Movement as almost blasphemous, racially arrogant, and leeching off black folks' hard work

pro-union: they believe it protects workers from corporate overreach

tax cuts for middle class but keep progressive structure: they don't believe that the rich pay their fair share

support for more African aid & more trade: links to their social gospel ethic

opposition to illegal immigration: viewed as mostly hurting black workers

support for government safety net: linked to their belief that government should care for the needy, but they will also support restrictions to curb irresponsible behavior

are turned off by "blacks are victims" rhetoric: they believe racism exists and will rant against it, but don't buy that it dominates as it did in the 1950s

support for affirmative action: view it as a step up for folks who are willing to improve themselves, and as payback for centuries of black oppression

There are some folks who mostly but don't entirely fit the model. For example, Mr. Aldridge mentioned above is a social moderate who supports gay marriage. So it's not a monolithic group. However, these populist folks stand out for their strong religious faith and conservative views on many moral issues. They also tend to support a social safety net, which would set them apart from conservative Republicans. Although given big-government conservatism of late, perhaps not. Cosby Republicans are skeptical about the effectiveness of free markets, and favor government regulation to protect the public interest, protect morality, and government assistance for the poor. They may overlap with white moderate Republicans on issues such as the environment and tax cuts for the middle class, but will diverge on key social issues.

However, this group is also suspicious of the Republican Party, because of its infamous Southern Strategy in wooing white voters - whom they or their parents fought battles against during the Civil Rights Movement - and wonder if the party likes black folks. The recent GOP apology, via chairman Ken Mehlman, at the NAACP's national convention may help thaw the ice. However, this is a huge hurdle for the Republican Party to cross in its outreach to old-school blacks. To get over the hump, the Republican Party must do a far better job of defining itself in media that this subgroup actually follows, which is black media. Right now, the Democratic Party defines the GOP in black media, and it ain't a flattering definition either.

Support for school prayer? Check.

Support for school vouchers? Check.

Opposition to abortion? The whole culture of life theme resonates with black people but this is a very complicated issue that results in a kinda-sorta check.

Opposition to gay marriage? Absolute check.

Pro-union? No go, black people don’t give a damn about that.

Tax cuts for middle class but keep progressive structure? Honestly, black people really don’t think about this but they generally don’t believe the rich are paying their fair share [in fact, this is an area ripe for greater education – the Democratic talking points can definitely be attacked] so I give this a kinda-sorta check.

Support for more African aid and more trade? No go, Black people in all honesty don’t give a damn about this.

Opposition to illegal immigration? Check.

Support for government safety net? Check.

Turned off by “blacks are victims” rhetoric? Check. We’ve clearly seen the unintended consequences.

Support for affirmative action? Check. But, like me, more and more folks are seeing that we’ve carried a hell of a lot of water for white females and are questioning if the baggage is worth it.

More later, but this is a good start for greater substantive discussion.

 

MEMORIES

Just One Minute is steady on the case of the continuing Valerie Plame – Joe Wilson thing. One of the comments to the post struck me, though, more than the post itself:

I remember 1991. We went in not knowing how bad Saddam's WMD were...and found they were a lot worse than what Bush 1 had said they were. And I was serving then and supported the president and was worried that he had exaggerated. But he hadn't. In 2003, it was the reverse. But IMHO, we still had causus belli. And that was because Saddam had ejected the inspectors. It was up to him to comply.

Note that in 1991, only 6 Democrat Senators supported the war. Even thought Kuwait had been invaded. They ran for the hills when the war went so well. Now, they (mostly) voted for this one and want to bail out when it get's tough.

That’s the way it appears to me, too. Just as so many people want to say they supported the action in Afghanistan but really didn’t.

 

KEEP THESE CONTEXTUAL RULES IN MIND

Dafydd ab Hugh's Five Universal Rules of Intelligence:

1. The Law of Imperfect Precognition: Sometimes there is no "right choice." Throw the dice.

2. The Law of Imperfect Postcognition: Not even hindsight is ever really 20-20.

3. The Law of Colliding Interests: Five different people can each make a rational decision and still wind up in a melee.

4. The Law of the Rational Onion: There is always another layer of analysis that contradicts everything you've already concluded. At some point, you just have to stop.

5. The Law of Models: There is a real reality out there, whether you can see it or not. And it bites.

Works for me.

 

SAD BUT TRUE FACTS PROVIDE INSIGHT INTO A HIDDEN WAR?

Kay Hymowitz in City Journal lays down the devastating facts on the crumbling foundation of the black family in America – and throws a disturbing historical marker back in our faces:

Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.

By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is a largely low-income—and disproportionately black—phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.

So why does the Times, like so many who rail against inequality, fall silent on the relation between poverty and single-parent families? To answer that question—and to continue the confrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention in polite company—you have to go back exactly 40 years. That was when a resounding cry of outrage echoed throughout Washington and the civil rights movement in reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department of Labor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray. Entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the prophetic report prompted civil rights leaders, academics, politicians, and pundits to make a momentous—and, as time has shown, tragically wrong—decision about how to frame the national discussion about poverty.

My God, how I wish “ghetto family” and “Negro family” had not been equated by Moynihan – Hymowitz apparently does it, too. There’s something in that conflation that explains (in part) the visceral rejection of the correct diagnosis offered by Moynihan, I do believe.

The rejection is explained even more, of course, by the preponderance of the statist approach dominant in the 1960s. I have a sneaking suspicion that this very issue probably served as the crux of how a historically dysfunctional Democratic Party – a rabble rousing collection of folks (WASP cultural elites from all over the nation, white working class laborers from all over the nation) co-opted the emerging black vote guaranteed by the Civil Rights Acts of the era.

The rest is history. Some social programmatic “bones” were thrown our way that wound up buttressing (and glorifying) some of the sorrier elements of our culture. Chalk it up as yet another unintended consequence.

African Americans simply do not believe in collectivist-inspired European-style initiatives and do not interact well with them. I suspect this is true of folks all over the African diaspora. For instance, according to Hymowitz:

Moynihan went much further than merely overthrowing familiar explanations about the cause of poverty. He also described, through pages of disquieting charts and graphs, the emergence of a “tangle of pathology,” including delinquency, joblessness, school failure, crime, and fatherlessness that characterized ghetto—or what would come to be called underclass—behavior. Moynihan may have borrowed the term “pathology” from Kenneth Clark’s The Dark Ghetto, also published that year. But as both a descendant and a scholar of what he called “the wild Irish slums”—he had written a chapter on the poor Irish in the classic Beyond the Melting Pot—the assistant secretary of labor was no stranger to ghetto self-destruction. He knew the dangers it posed to “the basic socializing unit” of the family. And he suspected that the risks were magnified in the case of blacks, since their “matriarchal” family had the effect of abandoning men, leaving them adrift and “alienated.”

More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. They “shape their children’s character and ability,” he wrote. “By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.” What children learned in the “disorganized home[s]” of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs, or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law. Marriage, on the other hand, provides a “stable home” for children to learn common virtues. Implicit in Moynihan’s analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence Moynihan’s conclusion: “a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.”

Hymowitz writes that President Johnson agreed, subsequently giving a speech that he would later describe as his “greatest civil rights speech.” However, the statist elements in the government were not pleased and a large number in the black community weren’t either.

In part, the hostility was an accident of timing. Just days after the report was leaked to Newsweek in early August, L.A.’s Watts ghetto exploded. The televised images of the South Central Los Angeles rioters burning down their own neighborhood collided in the public mind with the contents of the report. Some concluded that the “tangle of pathology” was the administration’s explanation for urban riots, a view quite at odds with civil rights leaders’ determination to portray the violence as an outpouring of black despair over white injustice. Moreover, given the fresh wounds of segregation, the persistent brutality against blacks, and the ugly tenaciousness of racism, the fear of white backsliding and the sense of injured pride that one can hear in so many of Moynihan’s critics are entirely understandable.

Maybe, maybe not. What I do know is that here is the point where Hymowitz either blinks vis-à-vis her political analysis or is ignorant of a crucial world historical point: African American centrality to the perceptions war going on between the United States and the Soviet Union. I find that most white people are completely oblivious to this point.

And I’ll have more on this issue in future posts.

 

THE END OR THE BEGINNING? EITHER WAY – CHARGE HARD!

Wretchard the Cat:

The phrase “Global War on Terror” may, in retrospect, turn out to be the least descriptive of terms to apply to the worldwide upheaval since September 11. Perhaps future historians will find a more appropriate phrase to describe the changes that have remade the political and attitudinal landscape not only in the Middle East, but also in the West. In that tale Iraq will play a strange part. Never an obvious strategic an end in itself, the campaign against Saddam’s former dominion served as the vortex around which forces defined themselves, dividing into one side or the other, in the process of remolding the world. The effects of the decision to invade are still rippling through Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and Europe. And the odds are that if there is a settling of accounts in Iraq it will not be the last country in which this happens. The Times of London interview of President George Bush last month suggests that at the highest levels American leadership sensed rather than calculated that taking down the most powerful Middle Eastern state would set a tsunami in motion that only the US, in its power, might ride largely unscathed.

THE TIMES: Mr President, last night you mentioned the link between Iraq and 9/11, but there’s evidence of Iraq becoming a haven for jihadists, there’s been a CIA report which says that Iraq is in danger of — are you at risk of creating kind of more of the problems that actually led directly to —?

PRESIDENT BUSH: No. Quite the contrary. Where you win the war on terror is go to the battlefield and you take them off. And that’s what they’ve done. They’ve said, ‘Look, let’s go fight. This is the place.’ And that was my point. My point is that there is an ideology of hatred, an ideology that’s got a vision of a world where the extremists dictate the lives, dictate to millions of Muslims. They do want to topple governments in the Middle East. They do want us to withdraw. They’re interested in exporting violence. After all, look at what happened after September 11 (2001). One way for your readers to understand what their vision is is to think about what life was like under the Taleban in Afghanistan.

So we made a decision to protect ourselves and remove Saddam Hussein. The jihadists made a decision to come into Iraq to fight us. For a reason. They know that if we’re successful in Iraq, like we were in Afghanistan, that it’ll be a serious blow to their ideology. General (John) Abizaid (Commander of US forces in the Middle East) told me something very early in this campaign I thought was very interesting. Very capable man. He’s a Arab-American who I find to be a man of great depth and understanding. When we win in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s a beginning of the end. Talking about the war on terror. If we don’t win here, it’s the beginning of the beginning. And that’s how I view it.

And maybe that’s the way it was.

And all punk ass surrender monkeys be damned – move forward with confidence, America, move forward.