Breaking News—Hillary plants question in Iowa town hall

Just breaking on Fox News. Hillary’s camp has admitted planting at least one question at a recent Iowa town hall style meeting. The Clinton campaign represented the event as open Q&A in the Iowa press. The Clinton campaign has promised that it won’t happen again.

Nuance is important. Rather than cease seeding audiences with pre-screened questions the “it” that will not be repeated is getting caught seeding the audience with pre-screened questions.

Since the person responsible for the current disclosure of the seeded question has already joined Craig Livingstone in an east Asian Shagri-La, we can expect no further disclosures from that quarter.

Everyone who is surprised raise their hands.

Rudy vs. the Clintons

Rudy began his public life combating organized crime in New York and throughout the east coast of the United States. The previous job surely prepares him to deal with the Clinton racket.

Yesterday Rudy reminded and Ames audience that history did not begin with 9.11, nor end during the Clinton White House years. The foolishness of the anti-military attitude of the Clinton Administration has come back to haunt they United States, in a most predictable way.

Bill Clinton cut defense and intelligence spending each of the first six years of his administration. Yesterday, Rudy provided a reminder to an Ames audience of who created the force that Democrats like Abscam Jack Murtha and the pornographer Jim Webb now claim is “stretched too thin.”

Just something to think about as we head into the weekend talk shows.

That 70s (Horror) Show.

One thing about Democrats, they are prone to nostalgia. Day after day and again today, Damascus Nancy Pelosi describes the Iraq campaign as a “war with no end in sight”. Two Dem Presidential Wannabes today opined that Pakistan is like 70s Iran. Nothing could be farther from 21st Century reality.

Let’s review that train of thought. Iran had a reasonably moderate but authoritarian pro Western government. The Pahlavi dynasty was divine right of kings’ old school style in the West but was astoundingly modern and moderate by Islamic standards.

Jimmy Carter was offended by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s authoritarian government. The Carter Administration undercut the Shah, and allowed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to brew the current blend of 8th Century morality and 21st Century Soviet style totalitarianism as the political ethos that rules Iran. Chavez wasn't the first dictator Jimmy enabled by any means.

However, the competing interests in Iran were the pro-Western Pahlavi dynasty and the violent and virulent Islamofascism of the Ayatollahs. Khomeini’s regime was the first to really marry ultra-orthodox Islam with the modern concept of the total state. The other Middle Eastern dictatorships of the era, primarily Syria and Iraq, were just fascists in those days.

Pakistan’s current crisis arises from a conflict between a pro-Western Musharref and the very pro-western Bhutto. There is no charismatic Islamic fundamentalist waiting to assume dictatorial powers in Pakistan, as there was in Iran.

Moreover, does anyone think that either the Pakistani or the American and Israeli response to the appearance of such a leader would mirror the feckless, blind self-loathing cowardice of Jimmy Carter in confronting such a potential leader? I rather doubt that George W. Bush or Musharref/Bhutto would fail to do what the CIA wanted Jimmy Carter to do-kill the bastard by any means possible. I think we would also capture or kill any such potential Ayatollah Khomeini’s closest supporters.

However, such comparisons say even more about the almost demented departure from objective history that informs the modern Democrat mentality. Abandoning Vietnam without victory and allowing the birth of Islamofascism in Iran are the two most significantly disastrous and preventable mistakes in American history. Yet, the modern Democrat-the heirs of the American political party that lead the United States to victory in a global war in which hundreds of thousands of Americans, and millions of our enemies, died; the party that had the courage to confront the most Stalinist of Soviet dictators, Stalin himself and his little dog Khrushchev too-has embraced defeat and despair as the pole star of its existence!

All to gain domestic political power. W said it best when he said modern Democrats were the party that once said we have nothing to fear but fear itself has become the party that offers nothing but fear itself.

Their promises, your money.

Democrats in Iowa this week continue to promise your tax money to others. In just the last 48 hours Chris Dodd has said that he will spend at least another $48 billion for Veteran’s Benefits. Hey, at least the people getting this benefit actually contributed something to the larger nation for which they should be rewarded. Moreover, Dodd is also talking about a defined group rather than a social entitlement for everyone.

Barack Obama promises far greater federal generosity. Obama has offered plans to convert the Family Medical Leave Act into a welfare entitlement, with paid leave instead of unpaid leave. Another Obama promise is to enroll workers in a portable IRA type program when the individual worker enters the work force, in addition to Social Security.

However, we know the way this works. Democrats never admit that the money for these entitlements always comes from you, the taxpayers. Who will fund the FMLA payments? You. Who will fund the portable IRA like pension. You again, and you will also be forced to participate in the funding of others.

Listen closely, every Democrat plan the Democrat presidential hopefuls float in Iowa requires the taxpayers to, at best, strain their money through the tightly woven mesh of the IRS before the taxpayer sees dime one from the Democrats-the government keeps about 80% to manage its “programs”, then people get the benefits, if any, from such a program.

If you wonder how this nonsense turns out in the real world, take a look at the liberal petri dish that has become California..

Liberal myths debunked-America isolated?

A major liberal myth since the Iraq invasion is the “isolation” the invasion has caused the United States. Day after day, the liberal press repeated the big lie that our “friends and allies” didn’t support the Iraq invasion.. Today, the red herring of deceit was confronted by the hammerhead of reality.

The lie was always obvious. All but four NATO nations supported the Iraq invasion. A majority of the UN Security Council nations supported the invasion. Two of the four NATO nations that opposed the campaign , France and Germany, then had governments inexorably implicated in the “Food for Oil Scandal”. In both France and Germany the liberal governments were trounced in their first elections following their break with the US over Iraq.

Here at TRS we have frequently exposed the disconnection between objective factual evidence of “isolation” by citing to the dramatically improved relationships the United States has enjoyed with several nations, significantly places like Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan (where the pro American Musharraf is engaged in some political brinksmanship with the even more pro American Bhutto) as well as former enemies like Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq. Hell, we’ve kind of got handle on the nut bag in North Korea (knock on wood).

It wasn’t just TRS saying it today. French President Sarkozy told the world that France is renewing its vows with Uncle Sam. French President Sarkozy said today that he came to the United States with a simple message: "To reconquer the heart of America in a lasting fashion." Doesn’t it sound nice to be courted again?

The only gray lining in this silver cloud is the limited audience it received. No coverage on the three network nightly news broadcasts. These are the same networks that do lavish close up coverage of every anti-American rally in the world.

Guess the good news doesn’t fit the template.

Dowd on Clinton-worth the read.

No one knows you like your own family.

In the context of a liberal cat fight between long time socialist, feminist, archetypes, Maureen Dowd and Hillary Clinton we have a glimpse of how nasty they get with each other.

Dowd’s column today is almost Coulteresque in describing the latest entries on Evita’s enemies list - the vast left wing conspiracy. Democrats like Chris Matthews and Tim Russert, whose assignation the Clinton camp advocated, are part of the get Hillary crowd and must be liquidated while Madam Defarge hides her insidious agenda behind the veil of American womanhood.

Maureen, I say you go get ‘em sister.

Immigration: One hundred years later the Bull Moose is still right on!

One hundred years ago, one of the greatest of Republicans was confronted by what people at the time described as an “immigration crises”. Both coasts were inundated with immigrants.

On the east coast, millions poured into the United States, mostly from southern Europe, TRS’s grandparents among them. On the west coast, millions more were entering from Asia. Vast cultural differences separated the immigrants, who came from environments as diverse as Sarajevo and Shanghais or Tokyo and Thermopylae. Those vast cultural differences were subordinated to the one common belief and desire that prompted a little Greek boy of 14 to cross the Atlantic by himself and bicycle from New York to Centerville Iowa-the desire to be an American.

In times most similar to our own, the question arose of the Republican and American response to all of the newcomers, whose strange languages and strange social practices were disturbing the mostly northern European traditions of the early migrants to America.

The original Bull Moose had an answer. In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt said:

"In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

As the modern Democrats demagogue the issue, seeking to brand us as racists because we expect modern immigrants, mostly Hispanic, will engage in the same social, political and cultural assimilation as did all of the previous immigrants to this country, we must fight back with TR's pugnacity. Democrats will use the press and the schools to preach "diversity" as a means of Balkanizing America by defining each individual as the member of a demographic group, cretaing special exceptions to American traditions (like refusing to fly an American flag at a school in Colorado because it might offens Hispanic students and parents) and worst of all, by creating a multi-lingual failed state-kind of like the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires from which so many of those early 20th Century immigrants came.

There really can be no "give" on this issue. Even in Iowa the Democrats are using the power of the Governor's office to pollute the election lists with registered voters who are not citizens of the United States. If we don't win now, there won't be any rematch on this issue.

Does anyone really want to wake up and find themselves in Yugoslavia?

Sunday Talk Review: FDT v. Delaware Joe on the Karachi Canvass

A comparison of Fred D. Thompson’s appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press with Joe Biden’s appearance CBS’s Face the Nation demonstrates the vast difference between the Democrat and Republican world views.

As most TRS readers by now know, Gen. Musharraf suspended the Pakistani constitution and declared martial law. The Supreme Court has been dismissed. Soldiers are surrounding the homes of several liberal (by Pakistani standards) political and judicial leaders. Of course, those soldiers just might be a comforting sight to the Pakistani liberals who have been the object of several foiled suicide bombings in recent weeks. Gen. Musharraf’s declaration hardly moves Pakistani democracy forward, at least in the short run.

Schieffer and Russert demonstrated their Democrat roots by framing the questions to both Biden and Thompson as if Musharraf’s suspension of the Pakistani constitution and declaration of martial law as somehow entirely within an American President’s control. Biden, of course, grabbed the bit and ran.

First, both Schieffer and Russert conflated the domestic Pakistani political situation with America’s relationship with Pakistan. Musharraf is pro-western. If Musharraf controls Pakistan the Pakistani government will continue to operate in a manner that is largely, although not entirely, consistent with American international needs. As with all foreign policy decisions the gain from destabilizing Musharraf must be balanced against the likely loss.

Moreover, the risk of any US action must also be weighed against the gain. Pakistan is the only Islamic nation with a nuclear weapon. Many elements within the Pakistani public, scientific and intellectual elites closely identify with militant Islam. Destabilizing Musharraf also risks placing Pakistan’s nuclear assets in contact with terrorists who would use them in a heartbeat. Whatever attempt to contain Islamofascism would be replaced with actual support for bin Laden and Al Qaida.

Delaware Joe opened with a crazy attack on President Bush as the cause of Musharraf’s action, without, of course, describing how American policy could have forestalled Musharraf’s action. In what has become the normal substitute for reason in the liberal critique of American politics, simply pressed the attack as a failure of a “Musharraf” policy rather than a “Pakistan” policy. What then, Senator, would you have done? That question remained unanswered.

However, Delaware Joe did provide a look at what he would do. First, he would have a plan to get out of Iraq (now, there’s a surprise). Then, assuming that we could exit Iraq without victory, the troops apparently aren’t coming home, they’re going to Afghanistan. Once deployed in Afghanistan the American military posture would be forward, poised to invade Pakistan so as to capture Osama.

How could anyone think that a large scale American military invasion of Pakistan could fail to discredit the fragile hold pro-Western Pakistanis have on their government and military. God knows TRS rarely rejects the rapid use of American power as an instrument of American security but Delaware Joe sounded just like the jingoes that discounted all risk in starting WW 1. The worst aspect of the Biden Pakistan policy-he’s the best the Democrats have on foreign policy, a veritable FDR compared to the other socialist pacifists in the Democrat field.

FDT sounded very Presidential on the subject. First, he laid out the risks of any American policy toward Pakistan. FDT spoke clearly of the American preference for a more democratic Pakistan. At the same time, Fred also urged the need for patience and the avoidance of snap decisions. FDT recognized that the Pakistani domestic crises might sort itself out without any US action. FDT discounted the idea of sanctions against Musharraf, presumably because of the risk that a destabilized Musharraf would be replaced by anything from a vacillating western style parliamentary gridlock to a near Sudan like failed state. At either end the risk that Paki nukes or other military and intelligence assets certainly would seem to urge caution in confronting the less democratic aspects of the Pakistani elite.

Fred gave Joe a beat down like Ali gave Frazier in Manila.