Anthrax speaks

I love Anne Coulter.  Forget the obligatory I-don't-always-agree-with-her-&-she-goes-too-far disclaimer (save that for squishy liberals), I admire her wit and toughness.  She calls 'em like she sees them, and she sees sharply.

The first month Clinton was in office, Islamic terrorists with suspected links to al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center.

For the first time ever, a terrorist act against America was treated not as a matter of national security, but exclusively as a simple criminal offense. The individual bombers were tried in a criminal court. (The one plotter who got away fled to Iraq, that peaceful haven of kite-flying children until Bush invaded and turned it into a nation of dangerous lunatics.)

In 1995 and 1996, various branches of the Religion of Peace -- al Qaeda, Hezbollah and the Iranian "Party of God" -- staged car bomb attacks on American servicemen in Saudi Arabia, killing 24 members of our military in all. Each time, the Clinton Administration came up with an excuse to do nothing.

Despite the Democrats' current claim that only the capture of Osama bin Laden will magically end terrorism forever, Clinton turned down Sudan's offer to hand us bin Laden in 1996. That year, Mohammed Atta proposed the 9/11 attack to bin Laden.

Clinton refused the handover of bin Laden because -- he said in taped remarks on Feb. 15, 2002 -- "(bin Laden) had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him." Luckily, after 9/11, we can get him on that trespassing charge....

As soon as Clinton was no longer "distracted" by impeachment, he went right back to doing nothing in response to terrorism. In October 2000, al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole, killing 17 sailors and nearly sinking the ship.

Clinton did nothing. This is only an abbreviated list of Clinton's surrender to Islamic savagery. For a president who supposedly stayed up all night "working" and hated vacations, Clinton sure spent a lot of time sitting around on his butt while America was being attacked. ...

Thanks to TiVo and the President's interruption of the final segment of The Path to 9/11, I didn't get to see the whole show, but I saw enough to get very angry again with do-nothing bureaucrats who denied that we were at war.  Let's finish the mission.

Comments

[Mighty Mo]

Good morning. Glad to have you back.

[redpill]

I have no problem with Coulter "going to far." I like that.

The problem is that she goes too far with the truth to accentuate her points.

Almost all of the "facts" she lists in the story above have been debunked or properly explained, many in the 9/11 report.

For example, the Sudan offered Bin Laden in 1996 BEFORE he had perpetrated any act against the U.S...before Clinton even had evidence that he was planning an attack against the U.S.

How does anyone know that George Bush would have handled that differently, pre-9/11? He wasn't overly concerned about terrorism, by all accounts, before 9/11.

She's using the current perception of Bin Laden to make Clinton look bad in 1996, but the truth is Bush probably would have done the same thing at that time (especially since there was no place to put someone who wasn't charged with a crime pre-9/11.)

There were arrests and/or bombings in every instance listed in her story.

Did we invade a country that "harbored" terrorists as a response?

No, we didn't but there was a good reason for that.

The "mission" you write about us needing to finish has only created more of a terrorist problem, according to the National Intelligence Estimate released in September of 2006 and, well, common sense.

What mission do you think needs to be accomplished? Do you really think that an anti-American movement formed for decades around the perception of America as a country exploiting the Middle East and its people for its own gain is going to be extinguished by invading?

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-159.html

[pedro]

My brother in law, "Mike the Liberal Jewish Brother in Law", has challenged me to define victory, and I've been giving it a lot of thought. It's tempting to go on and on about necessary conditions, ideal conditions, inbetweens and relative grading, but while listening to a Kurd on the radio the other day the answer became clear and simple to me:

When southern Iraq is as good as Kurdish Iraq, that's the minimum mission. When Baghdad is that good, that's victory. When Sunni-stan is that good, that would be outstanding. I think the first two are possible and will be accomplished before too long (not that the enemy will quit altogher -- it's just too easy to set off car bombs against soft targets). By "before too long" I mean substantial progress before the end of the year. I think Sunni-stan can be pacified +/- in two years, but won't really be as good as Kurdistan for a generation. And that will take some luck, given Arab culture.

About President Clinton, and Senator Clinton, too, I just don't care. The former is water under the bridge, the latter doesn't have a snowball's chance of winning the election.

[redpill]

Two things:

In this post, you (and Coulter) brought Clinton up more than six years after he left office so he hardly seems "water under the bridge" to you (or her.)

Second, since you love Anne Coulter, do you think calling someone a "faggot" adds to the public discourse?

All someone like Coulter, on either side, does is harden people to their positions. There are liberal commentators I dislike just as much.

We are all Americans and this isn't the fourth grade.

And you didn't really address either of my main points:

1) Many of the "facts" in Coulter's books and columns can be debunked with an elementary-school understanding of how to use Google and the 9/11 report. Do the facts not matter if she's blonde and humorous? Fact check the column you clipped from and tell me where I'm wrong.

2) Do you really think that an anti-American movement formed for decades around the perception of America as a country exploiting the Middle East and its people for its own gain is going to be extinguished by invading?

[pedro]

1. President clinton served two full terms. It's impossible to ignore him nor do I want to. By water under the bridge I meant I'm done with gnashing my teeth about him and with ranting and raving.
2. Faggot? Does the term "BusHitler" ring a bell? It doesn't bother me much because all the sissy boys I know use that term all the time. If it doesn't offend them, why should it offend me? Same with indian mascots and gender specific pronouns.
3. To me, being an American requires more than being born here. Indeed, that's not a requirement at all. To be an American you must adhere to the principles of the Founding Fathers. You cannot adhere to the Founders and to Lenin or Marx or Mao or Che or Mohommed. You must choose. There IS such a thing as "un-American" and there IS such a thing as "unpatriotic". Whining will not intimidate me from using those terms when I think they are appropriate.
4. Do I think we can win by invading? You have it backwards. I don't think we can win without invading. Obviously, there's a lot more to winning than invading but the time for jaw jaw was long passed. I can't think of a way to defeat the Ba'athists and Islamic Fascists without fighting them, quite literally, in their own back yard.

Sorry this sounds so truculent, but I'm a bit under the weather. I'll be Happier tomorrow.

[redpill]

Hmmm...You're on the verge of losing me when 1) you start talking about it being un-American to belong to a certain religious group. (You must have a different version of the Constitution than I do) and 2) you defend a slur based on the experiences you have had with your friends.

If your children said that, or other things like that, would you not correct them? I think you would because you know they aren't appropriate and you wouldn't want to raise kids who talked like that.

Are you like so many people regarding politics today? You pick a side and stick with/defend it regardless of what they do?

Finally, why do you think 9/11 happened...because "they hate us for our freedom?"

[pedro]

Well, you're right about correcting my kids if they used the term "faggot" or any other potentially derogetory (sp?) term. My kids are still pretty young: 11, 9 & 7. When they get older they can learn the nuances of acceptable terminology, and also learn that it's not something everyone agrees with. My brother in law and his, err, husband always say "silly faggot, dicks are for chicks". Then there's queer nation. Etc. So like I said, I don't feel myself elible for offense by proxy. I love my brother in law, and his, err, husband, and in fact all the gay guys I've known have been really nice and cool and I liked them a lot. The lesbians I've known have made me a lot more uncomfortable, and I suspect that's because some of them are not really lesbians but merely man-haters. But what do I know? I've only been to four Indigo Girls concerts where I was just about the only straight guy there. A very interesting venue... did you know there are only about 4 official lesbian hair styles (counting the various LipStick lesbian styles as one)?

But I digress. Where were we?

Oh, yeah, do I believe they hate us for our freedom? Well, yes, that's true, but that's not all. They hate us because we humiliate them. We're better than they in every measurable way except Muslim fanatacism, and they can't abide that. They also can't subjugate us, and they hate us for that. And our women are a bunch of sluts by their standards, so they'd like to rape them then stick them in burqas, those they allow to live. They're ancient, we're modern. We think, they believe. We're free and are willing to fight to stay that way, they're not and are willing to fight to make us like them. They're still pissed about stuff that happened 700 years ago, we can hardly remember who got kicked off American Idol two weeks ago. They play polo with dead goats, we play football.

Unless we succede in subverting their culture with the virus of liberty, then millions will die starting with Tel Aviv, New York, and Washington, DC. I'd like to avoid that, if possible.

[redpill]

This is exactly where I was trying to get.

The ideas that you are conveying about the reasoning behind 9/11 and other terrorist attacks is a very common, but incorrect perception.

Your argument ignores the foreign policy aspect of the equation which, if you study Bin Laden at all,is the ONLY motivation he ever states behind his actions.

In the 1996 "fatwa" against the U.S., Bin Laden presents a long list of what he believed to be American and Israeli aggressions against Muslims, and he especially singles out Gulf War I, the installation of American military bases after the conflict and what he believed to be the repression of the people's desire not to have U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia.

You should read it:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/international/fatwa_1996.html

He specifically states that the purpose of the jihad is to expel the U.S. out of Saudi Arabia.

Nowhere does he mention anything about U.S. culture or society.

Al Qaeda was formed and dramatically gained popularity as a direct result of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East.

If our main concern in "the war on terror" is preventing future terrorist attacks, what do you think the invasion of Iraq has done to their ability to recruit and commit future attacks?

Somewhere out there, amongst all the jargon and propaganda promulgated by both parties, are the actual facts.