[Alas Babylon!]

!!!!!!IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT!!!!!!

I will not point fingers at anyone on our side for our loss on Tuesday, because I really don’t think we are to blame. I thought we would do better, frankly, but it appears we just couldn't get it over the goal line before time ran out. In many cases, the victory/defeat line was only a few thousand votes apart. It’s not like we got a thumping, thrashing, or butt-kick. The only thing is how it will effect our country. That has a lot of us concerned more than how it happened.

In any case, you know who I blame…The drive by media. Their bias has been well documented on this thread. My wife and I were talking about it on the drive home from work. Neither of us could think of a way--beyond what we're doing (on this thread, for example)--to counter the media. We just have to keep doing what we’ve been doing for 8 years—only harder!!!

So folks, here is my challenge for the Sunday Morning thread for the next two years:

We need to be reporters on the reporters. We need to document their lies, distortions, smears, half-truths and omissions. We need to howl in their faces, and call them on it each and every time.

Will you join me?

I’m going to find a comprehensive media email list (someone has compiled and posted it before) to start sending out emails to the Sunday screaming faces with word-for-word transcriptions of what they said, and why it is biased. In the past I’ve sat here and typed about Tim Russert’s biased, hunched-over-questioning; this time I’m going to tell HIM about it. Timmy, you are on notice! Every frown, every hunch, every pudgy-fingered grasping your talking points memo while you interrogate Republicans will be documented and you will be called on it!!!!

(Insert John Belushi scream and flips out of chair, papers flying)

[Finny]

In any case, you know who I blame…The drive by media.

God bless you! That was one thing about which I really disagreed with Rush and other commentators, when they kept saying, "We only have ourselves to blame." That's true to a degree, but I think it's also like trying to roll a boulder uphill. No matter what "we" do, the deck is stacked for the opposition in a very big way because of media bias. Fortunately, that is slowly changing. I can only hope it changes quickly enough to save disaster.

Had the major news outlets reported in a balanced way about the war, the economy, and political corruption, many people would have voted much differently.

[AliVeritas]

AB, I suggested the very same thing as post one; In addition, thought we should have teams by states/counties/districts with dossiers of possible candidates, the incumbent, their financials, voting records, where they speak, boards they sit on and who's in their pockets... things that could come up for our guys (just in case), and previous misreportings/rumors debunked before they come to the table (obviously, if true... that's different). Kudos, i'm in.

U.S. must prove it's a staying power
Mark Steyn

On the radio a couple of weeks ago, Hugh Hewitt suggested to me the terrorists might try to pull a Spain on the U.S. elections. You'll recall (though evidently many Americans don't) that in 2004 hundreds of commuters were slaughtered in multiple train bombings in Madrid. The Spaniards responded with a huge street demonstration of supposed solidarity with the dead, all teary passivity and signs saying "Basta!" -- "Enough!" By which they meant not "enough!" of these murderers but "enough!" of the government of Prime Minister Aznar, and of Bush and Blair, and troops in Iraq. A couple of days later, they voted in a socialist government, which immediately withdrew Spanish forces from the Middle East. A profitable couple of hours' work for the jihad.
I said to Hugh I didn't think that would happen this time round. The enemy aren't a bunch of simpleton Pushtun yakherds, but relatively sophisticated at least in their understanding of us. We're all infidels, but not all infidels crack the same way. If they'd done a Spain -- blown up a bunch of subway cars in New York or vaporized the Empire State Building -- they'd have re-awoken the primal anger of September 2001. With another mound of corpses piled sky-high, the electorate would have stampeded into the Republican column and demanded the U.S. fly somewhere and bomb someone.

The jihad crowd know that. So instead they employed a craftier strategy. Their view of America is roughly that of the British historian Niall Ferguson -- that the Great Satan is the first superpower with ADHD. They reasoned that if you could subject Americans to the drip-drip-drip of remorseless water torture in the deserts of Mesopotamia -- a couple of deaths here, a market bombing there, cars burning, smoke over the city on the evening news, day after day after day, and ratcheted up a notch or two for the weeks before the election -- you could grind down enough of the electorate and persuade them to vote like Spaniards, without even realizing it. And it worked. You can rationalize what happened on Tuesday in the context of previous sixth-year elections -- 1986, 1958, 1938, yada yada -- but that's not how it was seen around the world, either in the chancelleries of Europe, where they're dancing conga lines, or in the caves of the Hindu Kush, where they would also be dancing conga lines if Mullah Omar hadn't made it a beheading offense. And, as if to confirm that Tuesday wasn't merely 1986 or 1938, the president responded to the results by firing the Cabinet officer most closely identified with the prosecution of the war and replacing him with a man associated with James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and the other "stability" fetishists of the unreal realpolitik crowd.

Whether or not Rumsfeld should have been tossed overboard long ago, he certainly shouldn't have been tossed on Wednesday morning. For one thing, it's a startlingly brazen confirmation of the politicization of the war, and a particularly unworthy one: It's difficult to conceive of any more public diminution of a noble cause than to make its leadership contingent on Lincoln Chafee's Senate seat. The president's firing of Rumsfeld was small and graceless.

Still, we are all Spaniards now. The incoming speaker says Iraq is not a war to be won but a problem to be solved. The incoming defense secretary belongs to a commission charged with doing just that. A nostalgic boomer columnist in the Boston Globe argues that honor requires the United States to "accept defeat," as it did in Vietnam. Didn't work out so swell for the natives, but to hell with them.

What does it mean when the world's hyperpower, responsible for 40 percent of the planet's military spending, decides that it cannot withstand a guerrilla war with historically low casualties against a ragbag of local insurgents and imported terrorists? You can call it "redeployment" or "exit strategy" or "peace with honor" but, by the time it's announced on al-Jazeera, you can pretty much bet that whatever official euphemism was agreed on back in Washington will have been lost in translation. Likewise, when it's announced on "Good Morning Pyongyang" and the Khartoum Network and, come to that, the BBC.

For the rest of the world, the Iraq war isn't about Iraq; it's about America, and American will. I'm told that deep in the bowels of the Pentagon there are strategists wargaming for the big showdown with China circa 2030/2040. Well, it's steady work, I guess. But, as things stand, by the time China's powerful enough to challenge the United States it won't need to. Meanwhile, the guys who are challenging us right now -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere -- are regarded by the American electorate like a reality show we're bored with. Sorry, we don't want to stick around to see if we win; we'd rather vote ourselves off the island.

Two weeks ago, you may remember, I reported on a meeting with the president, in which I'd asked him the following: "You say you need to be on the offense all the time and stay on the offense. Isn't the problem that the American people were solidly behind this when you went in and you toppled the Taliban, when you go in and you topple Saddam. But when it just seems to be a kind of thankless semi-colonial policing defensive operation with no end . . . I mean, where is the offense in this?"

On Tuesday, the national security vote evaporated, and, without it, what's left for the GOP? Congressional Republicans wound up running on the worst of all worlds -- big bloated porked-up entitlements-a-go-go government at home and a fainthearted tentative policing operation abroad. As it happens, my new book argues for the opposite: small lean efficient government at home and muscular assertiveness abroad. It does a superb job, if I do say so myself, of connecting war and foreign policy with the domestic issues. Of course, it doesn't have to be that superb if the GOP's incoherent inversion is the only alternative on offer.

As it is, we're in a very dark place right now. It has been a long time since America unambiguously won a war, and to choose to lose Iraq would be an act of such parochial self-indulgence that the American moment would not endure, and would not deserve to. Europe is becoming semi-Muslim, Third World basket-case states are going nuclear, and, for all that 40 percent of planetary military spending, America can't muster the will to take on pipsqueak enemies. We think we can just call off the game early, and go back home and watch TV.

It doesn't work like that. Whatever it started out as, Iraq is a test of American seriousness. And, if the Great Satan can't win in Vietnam or Iraq, where can it win? That's how China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela and a whole lot of others look at it. "These Colors Don't Run" is a fine T-shirt slogan, but in reality these colors have spent 40 years running from the jungles of Southeast Asia, the helicopters in the Persian desert, the streets of Mogadishu. ... To add the sands of Mesopotamia to the list will be an act of weakness from which America will never recover.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/132340,CST-EDT-steyn12.article

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Pacifists are cowards and deluded morons

http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/Columnists/Robinson_Ian/2006/11/12/2326533.html

Yesterday was Remembrance Day and I am grateful I did not encounter someone wearing a white poppy.

Because the urge to backhand the wearer across the face and tear the symbol of disrespect from that individual's lapel would, I fear, be almost overpowering.

I try to be a civilized man, but when I hear of those profaning one of the most sacred symbols of our culture, it makes me a little crazy.

The red poppy symbolizes those who have been slain in the defence of our country and culture.

It sprang from the poem written by Canadian military physician Lt.-Col. John McCrae, In Flanders Fields during the First World War.

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses row on row

That mark our place"

Apparently, poppies grow very well in ground torn by artillery and fertilized with human corpses.

The simple, powerful verses urge us to remember those who died defending freedom. It commands that we never forget those sacrifices. It demands we remain forever vigilant in the defence of liberty.

Canadian men and women fighting in Afghanistan are the direct inheritors of that tradition of sacrifice that extends from Lt.-Col. McCrae's time through those who fought in the Second World War and Korea and I am proud of them, as all Canadians should be.

The white poppy was first introduced in England when Great Britain wasn't so great, in 1933. That nation was in the thrall of the morally bankrupt creed of pacifism -- that weakness was one of the root causes of the Second World War -- and designed as an anti-war symbol to "honour" civilian dead.

It is one thing to honour civilian dead of wars. It is another to attach that to the current anti-war movement whose website -- just Google "White Poppy" and click on the first thing that pops up -- boasts the motto: "War is a crime against humanity. I renounce war, and am therefore determined not to support any kind of war. I am also determined to work for the removal of all kinds of war."

So fighting Kaiser Wilhem in 1914 was evil. Never mind that the Germans waged aggressive war against the West, conquered Belgium and huge chunks of France.

So fighting Adolf Hitler in 1939 was wrong. We should have sat upon our hands and waited for him to finish off the Jews and enslave all of Europe and Russia.

Fighting the Empire of Japan, according to these fools, was also wrong. We should have stood idly by while the Japanese Army raped and pillaged its way across China and the the Far East and enslaved millions.

When the totalitarian North Koreans and Chinese swept across an internationally recognized border, we should have engaged them in spirited debate. After all, all war is a "crime against humanity."

And when Islamic fascists decided to declare war on the Western world because our values don't include draping our women beneath barbecue tarps to protect men from lustful thoughts, we should have just shrugged our shoulders and let them kill us.

Every war fought by Western nations over the last century can be declared a moral war. We didn't start them. But we finished them and as a nation and as individuals, we are are better for it.

The only true crime against humanity is the morally bankrupt creed of pacifism.

Pacifists are cowards.

All of them.

Any human who refuses to act in defence of his person, his family, his nation, his culture, is a deluded moron. A dangerous deluded moron.

The white poppy shouldn't be white.

It should be yellow.

That way it would match the stripe up the backs of those who wear it.

http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/Columnists/Robinson_Ian/2006/11/12/2326533.html

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For Conservatives, It’s Back to Basics
(Advice from the NYTs? I don't think so)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/weekinreview/12kirkpatrick.html?_r=1&ref=weekinreview&oref=slogin
-------

Since MSNBC decided to tell us how Rummy feels (yeah right, hence no link), I took a cue from a commenter to go see Rummy in person instead (video). Most excellent.

Landon Lecture Series Page (KSU)
(Rummy starts at 16:00
http://ome.ksu.edu/lectures/landon/past.html#2006

The Donald Rumsfeld I Know That You Don't Know
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1737301/posts

[AliVeritas]

Speaking of the buzz word for today... Oversight.


Giving the Old, Old Grey Lady Some Oversight
http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/21603/








For the project:

"Dangerous and Frustrating" Time Ahead for America, Former CIA Director Predicts in Ubben Lecture (Many A/V links)
December 3, 2001
http://www.depauw.edu/news/index.asp?id=11800

[AliVeritas]

Guess whose FBI files were also obtained among 700 in 1996?
(Yep, Gates... something to keep in mind)
http://www-cgi.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/news/9606/26/fbi.files/

[AliVeritas]

In case you missed it and it comes up:

Lebanon - UNIFIL Patrol Takes Nights Off

Despite the 20,000 troops deployed in southern Lebanon, the United Nations admits that weapons smuggling from Syria continues unhindered. A German report finds UNIFIL does not patrol after dark.

And they rarely leave camp.

Spanish UNIFIL official Richard Ortax admitted to the paper that no patrols are carried out at night “because of the danger involved.” UNIFIL commanders said their function is to "observe changes in the behavior of the local population."

One junior officer told Der Spiegel he was glad that his battalion had only left its camp once. "It's absurd," he said. "We landed here and set up our tent city, but since then we've only left the camp to drive around and to make sure that we're seen."

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=114650
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UK - MI5 chief's warning on terrorism
Note: Anytime the head of MI5 comes out... it's serious.

Text of speech:
http://www.mi5.gov.uk/output/Page568.html

BBC short version (ridding myself of the propaganda parts):

MI5 knows of 30 terror plots and is keeping 1,600 individuals under surveillance, the security service's head has said.

In a speech Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said the terror threat was "serious" and "growing" and would be "with us for a generation".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6134516.stm

[Angelas]

Count me in!

[AliVeritas]

For the breaks.

FYI,
A lot of us were discussing the reasons Al Q is leaving Afghanistan in droves (they were told to quickly, but why?), I for one think it's not good, they're free to do other things.

http://ussneverdock.blogspot.com/2006/11/afghanistan-al-qaeda-surrenders-and.html

http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2006/11/why-is-al-qaeda-retreating-from-afghan.html#links

Wear a Hajib/Turban Day
(No kidding, it's California, sponsored by Muslims and others),
Also, Cat Stevens... terror financier

http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/

[Cindy]

ON THE NET This Week:

Check out the ongoing coverage of the Threats that face us here:

THE THREAT MATRIX (November 2006 edition)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1730468/posts

---

FreeRepublic.com Keywords of Interest:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=globaljihad
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=jihad

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=waronterror
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=wot

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=russia
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=iran
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=venezuela

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=jakarta

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Before, During After September 11, 2001:

http://www.truthusa.com/911news.html
http://www.truthusa.com/911news2.html
http://www.truthusa.com/911.html

---

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/pa/pa_1161.html
PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman
This information is current as of today, Sun Nov 12 2006 09:13:22 GMT-0800.

Worldwide Caution
October 11, 2006

[Anselma]

A.Babs-

Love what your doing, but preaching to the choir only goes so far. If you think that sending notices to the corrupt talking lib-heads is going to shame them into being fair, you're in for a bummer. The reason they have their shows is that they are what they are.
But I've been reading that this election was really decided by the independent vote. And if that's true, which I think it is, then they are the people we need to reach.

And if you see that's true, also, then why bother to send notices to the talking heads? Why not paste together a summation, clear, and as concise as possible, on each of the most egregious talking head examples, and fire them off to a whole list of newspapers and websites, ones that the independents might see? Could something like this be done? Could each thrumpmail have a different set of senders (from this post?)so that they won't be easily sloughed off as always coming from the same source?
Just my thoughts. I don't really mean to say that "preaching to the choir" isn't valuable- it obviously helps to share info, clarify points and get direction. But to get change ... I dunno.

[A.Hun]

Thanks for the thread AB. Your idea is good, but I'm afraid this election taught us that in politics, the truth does not matter without a way to broadcast it and counter the spin.

I don't know how that can be accomplished. Talk radio didn't do it this time.

Anyway, I'll certainly help.

Good day to all.

[Txsleuth]

Great post...and great idea, Alas!!!

I sure do wish I lived in the northeast ....because I would seriously think about setting up a regular protest spot, right outside of the buildings that house the MSM!!

Especially on Sunday Morning..it would be nice to have their lies disputed as the shows are being shown in later time zones.

We know ONE THING that the dems do a LOT better than the GOP...they complain a lot!! That old saying "the squeaky wheel gets the grease", really plays out with the dems.

We need to be that "squeaky wheel" for 2 years, consistently, constantly...just keep SQUEAKING...someone has to start paying attention.

[Nancee]

Thank you anyway, but I just cannot bring myself to listen to or watch any of the above-mentioned.

Nancee

[Miss Didi]

Thanks, Alas, for all you do! Reporting for duty. Although, it was very difficult to come back from mass to find Howard Dean and his best friend Chris Wallace on Fox and not start screaming at the TV.

[Freee-dame]

In the past I’ve sat here and typed about Tim Russert’s biased, hunched-over-questioning; this time I’m going to tell HIM about it.

I will join you. It's the only way we have to fight back.

[CDB]

Will you join me?

Of course, AB! Count me in. Always.

[Arizona Carolyn]

Did you happen to catch Liz Trotta this morning on Fox? If not, she was great (as usual) and concise in pointing out that it was pathetic that none of the personalities doing the news-desks on election night were actually reporters, but rather political hacks -- from Tim Russert an old Mario Como lackey to Katie Couric.

Her comment was this is downright disgusting turn of events and made them so uninteresting that all they could do was read the numbers off a teleprompter or sit and make inane comments because none of them had the experience to be doing what they were doing.

She was tough, and rightly so. Eric Shawn tried to argue about Katie Couric and Liz laughed at him and said "obviously" he had not watched her on the Today Show because she was in no way, shape or form a political reporter with the depth of knowledge to be running the news desk on election night.

They discussed this a little further and Liz pointed out that news was no longer news, but celebrity journalism that once in a while gives a tidbit of real substance.

[I_like_good_things_too]

Good job!

[syriacus]

Nice idea, countering the media lies.

[MNJohnnie]

Hey All I am so glad to fondly find some people taking this as an opportunity not as a disaster. I have the Top Ten this week and was really dreading it.

All ready pretty much ready to drop kicked my radio to the curb. I am simply sick of everyone looking for someone else to scapegoat for Tuesday.

Simply amazing that the same supposedly "Conservative" politicians and media types that served as the Democrat Party Water Carriers for the last 2 years NOW want to posture as if THEY had nothing at all to do with causing Tuesday and it is EVERYONE else fault but theirs. ENOUGH all ready.

So it will take me a couple of days to work thru the thread. If ever their were people who needed a beat down it is the Always Angry clique of the Conservative Movement.

Frankly people got NO clue that this is not just a time out. It is entirely probably the Republicans will now spend an extended period out of power. Those primarily rural districts the GOP flipped in 1994 just ran back to their traditional home turf the Democrat party. Give the power of incumbency and CFR, there is NO guarantee we will not spend another 40 years out of power now.

I am not going to get thru this for a couple of days so look for the Top Ten Tuesday. Sorry but it has been a very long, very bad week and there are not many people outside of Freepers I am liking right now.

This may be a long bloody road back and it did not have to be if our "Conservative" pundits, the McCain types and their sheep like followers had even a small smidgen of party discipline. You will NEVER see the Dems go thru this kind of petulant childish "100% or Nothing" nonsense. They know enough to keep their dirty laundry out of the papers. Well our Always Angry types got us NOTHING. I hope they enjoy it.

[hattend]

mms://a1503.v108692.c10869.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1503/10869/v0001/mlb.download.akamai.com/10869/library/open/features/monday_flag_350.wmv?media_type=wms&av_type=video&event_pk=486348&product=gen_video