Posted on 12/08/2008 10:56:43 AM PST by swordfishtrombone
The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep "open" minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was "an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai's commercial center." Continuing to keep her brow heavily furrowed with the wrinkles of doubt and uncertainty, Santos went on to say that "[i]t is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
This same puzzled expression is currently being widely worn on the faces of all those who wonder if Pakistan is implicated in the "bloody coordinated" assault on the heart of Bombay. To get an additional if oblique perspective on this riddle that is an enigma wrapped inside a mystery, take a look at Joshua Hammer's excellent essay in the current Atlantic. The question in its title—"[Is Syria] Getting Away With Murder?"—is at least asked only at the beginning of the article and not at the end of it
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
How could someone who knows that Islam only responds to force actually take a position of support for a pandering, naive, limp-wristed idiot whose notion of dealing with a rogue nuclear state is "more aggressive diplomacy"?
I Chris’ world, logic and reason are mutually exclusive................
I really want a job where I can be consistently wrong and still be regarded as a sage.
In other words, I’d like Chris’s job. Of course, I’ll need advance warning so that I can schedule my lobotomy.
I really want a job where I can be consistently wrong and still be regarded as a sage.
In other words, I’d like Chris’s job. Of course, I’ll need advance warning so that I can schedule my lobotomy.
Obama will not have a clue how to respond to a domestic attack. He has no military experience, he views the military as another social program rather than an essential element of democracy, and he has a skull full of anti-Bush idiocy to guide him.
A domestic attack will happen and it will happen soon. Terrorist prey on those that they perceive to be weak.
There’s an 90% chance Obama will severely under-react (such as seeking a UN resolution), resulting in another attack. There’s a 5% chance he will over-react (initiate a world war). I only give it a 5% chance that he will react appropriately.
Christopher Hitchens is a rather sad man. He is intelligent enough to know that what he was taught his entire life as a leftist Trotskyite is a lie, but he is unable to break with his past. I imagine going through life in a drunken stupor is his compromise with reality.
Murderous and genocidal behaviour has never bothered the left before, and the attacks in Mumbai are not going to change that. Leftists have no fundamental morality, instead relying on situational ethics that change as quickly as it becomes convenient. They reject restraints on their own behaviour, so the outrages perpetrated by Islam concern them only in a marginal way. The west, and its mineshaft canary Israel, play the heavy in the leftist morality play, and few tears will be shed for villain. Why is Christopher Hitchens shocked at this?
Speaking of inconvenient and self-evident facts, we have Christopher’s endorsement of Obama. What exactly does he expect in the future from this man of the radical left, if not leftist behaviour? Hitchens must know who this man is, as he himself is of similar origins. Take another drink Chris, it’s gonna be a long four years!
I believe his opening is well-worded and on target. The NYT is deliberately avoiding the obvious and Hitchens puts it in front for all to see.
Hitchens ran with dogs and now doesn't like the fleas they all got......
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