#6
I've never considered the name Fred to be two are three syllables long; however, I did know a Tim from the Florida panhandle, lower Alabama, that pronounced his name as Ti um. Must be a southern thang.
#9
Sad thing is, 'Monica' and her editors thought this was good journalism.
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/12/2007 17:30 Comments ||
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#10
Just think, they could have printed something giving background on the various conflicts around the world, or putting some complicated theory of physics into layman's terms, but instead chose to go with this.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
08/12/2007 18:50 Comments ||
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#11
now that's quality reporting. Ever look up when "Hillary" was named? Never mind... I recognize layers of agenda editors and fact checkers when I see it
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/12/2007 19:12 Comments ||
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#12
Typical yankee liberal crap - they're soooo smart and Southerners are just soooo dumb.
Here's a question for you, smart bitch (that's bee-yatch in yankee-talk) that you are: Which part of the country has the RUST BELT, and which doesn't? Which part thinks Ted Kennedy is a good idea, and which doesn't?
Idiot.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
08/12/2007 19:44 Comments ||
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#13
More on Monica Hesse (see the pic). "Guerilla Queer Bar Takeover"? That's deep. Real deep.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
08/12/2007 20:23 Comments ||
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#14
Not good enough to be a homemaker.
That will be on your gravestone, Monica bitch.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
08/12/2007 20:27 Comments ||
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#15
Guys. Fred Thompson has the establishment scared sheetless.
#1
I wish these would get posted and excerpted, instead of just linked. This guy hits the nail on the head as to why network news is so reality-challenged. Too bad he quit the BBC back in the 60s, that kind of hurts his credibility as "coming in from the cold".
#2
Are there any equivalents to Rush Limbaugh or Bernard Goldberg over the pond? It seems like there is no one left there to challenge the mainstream liberal monolith.
Another year, another milestone tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on the petty pace of time. Pakistan will be sixty in a couple of days. Or should I start counting from December 17, 1971, the day Jinnahs Pakistan died and another Pakistan was born? By what name should I call this new one? Bhuttos Pakistan? Yahyas Pakistan? Bhutto called it New Pakistan, for we had successfully got rid of the land where the Muslim League was born and the people who had arguably struggled for Pakistan harder than the rest. I have decided to call it Hamara Pakistan Our Pakistan. I think this is the most honest, for we are all responsible for what happened to Jinnahs Pakistan and we are equally responsible indeed complicit and culpable for what has happened to Our Pakistan. Where do we stand today? At yet another crossroads perhaps for the last time. The next few months will decide in which Pakistan will go. One is oblivion. In December 1971 we lost half of Pakistan. Today we are in danger of losing the rest.
Successes there have been many; failures even more far more. Our greatest success is that we never lost our sense of optimism even till now. Our greatest failure is that poverty haunts the land abject, subhuman poverty. There is our nuclear capability to clap about, which we achieved against many odds and despite many hurdles. What goes unsung is that we have been home to the largest number of refugees in the world, not just from Afghanistan but all surrounding countries. We won a cricket world cup and many gold medals in hockey.
We dominated the world of squash for two decades. We have produced some fantastic poets and some great singers. We did something neither Napoleon nor Hitler could do: we defeated the Russians and played a major role in the downfall of the Soviet Union. Even after truncation we are one of the most beautiful countries in the world, with lakes and mighty rivers and a fabled sea. We have deserts, mountains and plains, an incredibly varied flora and fauna, the second-highest mountain and the highest lake in the world. We have incredible natural wealth all sorts of minerals and natural gas, everything except oil, which perhaps will also be found one day. We have always been self-sufficient in food, thanks largely to Ayub Khans dams and the industry of our oppressed peasants. We have the strongest military in the Muslim world. In short God gave us all the wherewithal needed to make a country great. So why, on balance, have we failed? The answer, dear friends, lies not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.
We have still not decided what we want to be, which is why we have suffered two failed constitutions. All three have claimed (hypocritically) that we are an Islamic Republic, yet Islam is nowhere to be seen, only deviance and ritual. We are far removed from the democratic and egalitarian spirit of Islam, which is now at the mercy of de facto clerics and obscurants of all hues. We still dont know what we are and why we are. We are not agreed on what our creed is. Some want western style electoral democracy, for they genuinely believe that elections one after another will eventually lead to better things. Others wish to hark back to the State of Medina under the Prophet (PBUH). Still others wish to emulate the Afghanistan under the Taliban. We are trapped between liberal extremism and religious extremism, because extremism thrives when all except a lucky few are uneducated and illiterate. Intolerance and hypocrisy have become national traits. Not knowing what we are, we have been yo-yoing between half-democracy-half-dictatorship for 60 years. It is a political-military compact in which each rules by turn. This hypocrisy has led to our biggest and most embarrassing failure poverty.
Any surprise then that law and good order have broken down. Politicians and political parties have been pushed into the background (no surprise, given their track records) and the political ground has been usurped by others. The organs of the State the three branches of government are at odds with each other, encroaching on one anothers domain. The legislature is an embarrassment, a Lucky Irani Circus that does everything but legislate. The executive has regularly run roughshod over the legislature and the judiciary. Extremists have hijacked the pulpit and their beliefs are spreading like a virus. Terrorists stalk the land. The government more accurately, the executive stands paralysed, making one blunder after another, groping around blindly. The populace looks on bewildered, agog, aghast. All this for lack of an ideology, a belief system which gives mission, direction and objectives. What we need now is revolution that will overturn this iniquitous order and replace it with an egalitarian one. Survival lies in this alone. To do that, we have to go back to our roots to rediscover our objectives.
The idea of Pakistan was fashioned by Iqbal and most succulently spelt out in his Allahabad address in 1930. He philosophised it in his poetry, until it became a mystical imperative. He tried to reawaken the Muslim from his colonial slumber and make him reclaim his legacy by rediscovering his Self or khudi. He sought to liberate the Muslim mind from the golden shackles of the West and the rusty shackles of the hidebound cleric and re-instil in him the confidence to think for himself, not parrot the thoughts of the colonizer like Macaulays Brown Sahib does nor like a throwback lost in the irrelevant, hair-splitting obscurantist nonsense of the de facto cleric How many angels can dance on the point of a needle? wondered the obscurant, spending years debating this pointless point. Iqbal succeeded to the extent that he reawakened enough of Indias Muslims to enable Pakistan to be made, but sadly we had an immediate relapse as the new country fell into the hands of Brown Sahibs with black skins; white masks and feudal politicians, neither of whom had helped in the creation of Pakistan. All we actually achieved was going from the slavery of the White Man to slavery of the Brown Sahib and the White Mans toadies, the feudal robber barons and tribal warlords. Iqbals contempt for such people and his call to revolution is beautifully echoed in his famous poem, Firman-e-Khuda Farishton Say Gods Command to the Angels. It was originally titled Ode to Lenin but was changed because Lenin was a communist unbeliever.
Arise! Awaken the Poor of my world / Shake the citadels of the great.
Set the blood of slaves on fire! / Let the little sparrow engage the dreaded falcon.
As the hour of the kingdom of the poor approaches / Obliterate every vestige and visage of the oppressor.
Burn every single ear of grain from the field / That does not feed the farmer.
What could be clearer than that? Happy Birthday, Pakistan, and may you live forever. Ameen.
Posted by: john frum ||
08/12/2007 08:30 ||
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"But to recap the usual factors held responsible for the founding of Pakistan, Islam was not in danger in pre-1947 India. Indeed, considering the sectarian violence and religious bigotry we face today, it was in better health then. Nor was democracy the issue because even if partition had not happened, India was getting democracy once the British left. The Indian Independence Act promised that.
So what was the compelling reason for the Muslims to insist on a separate homeland especially when there was no going around the uncomfortable fact that, no matter how generously the frontiers of the new state were drawn, an uncomfortably large number of Muslims would remain in India?
The purpose of Pakistan, transcending anything to do with safeguarding Islam or promoting democracy, was to create conditions for the Muslims of India, or those who found themselves in the new state, to recreate the days of their lost glory."
Posted by: john frum ||
08/12/2007 18:02 Comments ||
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#5
recreate the days of their lost glory
From all the incessant murder, terrorism, dishonour killings, fanaticism, polio epidemics and sundry mayhem, I'd say they've done a right tidy job of it.
#6
Jeebus, is there nothing this dipwad won't take credit for? From taking down the USSR to singlehandedly instilling "democracy", this article is as full of effluent as Mexico City's treatment plants after a full day of beans and burritos.
Posted by: BA ||
08/12/2007 21:52 Comments ||
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Come August 15 and the well-worn tale of the sub-continent's partition is retold with an enthusiasm worthy of the Arabian Nights. It is, methinks, an insurance against Indians in cocky celebration of Independence Day rather than in modish flagellation over the lost paradise of Lahore and Karachi, Dhaka and Chittagong. Maudlin sentimentality laced with large doses of prescriptive guilt make for a heady brew. Fevered memories race ahead of torpid minds, inducing a disoriented sense of loss.
This generally is establishment British theatre, its scripted sense of disbelief. Pakistan may have sprung from Islam's sacred seed, but it needed the earthly intervention of John Bull, as imperial British house doctor, to release the struggling infant from the womb. There were once fond hopes that the mewling creature would grow into healthy, tameable manhood. Alas for the best laid plans of mice and men.
Britannia's hound has mutated into a defiant latter-day Hound of the Baskervilles. From the blasted heath of Afghanistan, to the killing fields of Iraq and the bomb-strewn debris of London and New York, we hear the chilling jihadi howls of the darkest night. The monster has slipped its leash and the handler's own hearth and home are now in peril.
Even as television and radio documentaries expose the searing hostility of Britain's jihadi citizens towards the country of their birth or adoption, the British media - with the BBC leading from the front - subject their public to the seasonal India-Pakistan construct based on counterfeit moral and political equivalence. Partition films and programmes should be seen as calls to a dirge.
Deaths beyond imagining and the cruelties of the world's greatest forced migration are grim reminders of human depravity. Like the Holocaust, they should never be cast into some anaesthetised limbo.
But the Nazi Holocaust possessed the organising intelligence of a totalitarian state bent on the final solution of racial extermination. The holocaust that accompanied the sub-continent's partition belongs to the category of random and locally driven slaughter not unknown to history.
The Caesarean operation resulted in the twin births of a free India and a homeland for the region's Muslim population called Pakistan, which translates as 'Land of the Pure'. Free of the primordial tensions of inter-communal living, India and Pakistan have gone their separate ways.
India and Pakistan represent opposing political and moral poles and hence, it would appear, never the twain shall meet. Perhaps they will some day. After all, the Good Book tells us that Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, fed the multitude with five loaves and two fishes and turned water into wine.
So one lives in hope. The children of the present are condemned to embark on life's long crusade with Gen Pervez Musharraf and Osama bin Laden, an arduous undertaking best likened to a relationship of parallel lines, which, say wise mathematicians, meet in infinity.
Apart from its politicians - a heavy cross stoically borne by the Indian people - India today has much to celebrate. The entire gamut of science and technology, thrusting business enterprise keen to conquer new worlds, and a functioning democracy, warts and all, constitute the epic of our times. The vicissitudes of six momentous decades have tempered a nation whose future was the frequently predicted apocalypse of dissolution and fratricidal strife.
For much of the West's far-Left and hard-Right Oriental despotism, not democracy, represented the true grain of history. Such ideologues perceived Maoist China as the lighted beacon, India as the beacon quenched in smoke.
The India-US civilian nuclear accord is seminal recognition of India as a state whose time has come. The leader of the Western alliance, the world's sole superpower and progenitor of the sanctions regime against India, is signalling a diplomatic revolution of far-reaching consequences to the international community, which it would do well to take on board.
It is scarcely a coincidence that the right-Wing, India-baiting, London-based Economist's broadside at the Bush Administration is matched by a similar diatribe from the Indian Communist parties who lay exclusive claim to the copyright of Indian patriotism, the same who once derided Indian independence as counterfeit, the brainchild of Anglo-American imperialism.
The great Dr Johnson, blessed with second sight, described patriotism as "the last refuge of a scoundrel". Time magazine, The Times of London and the Left broad church New Statesman have published supplements and special articles on the India phenomenon. Consider that, in February 1967, a year before the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was signed and the sanctions regime against India seeded, the India correspondent of The Times, Neville Maxwell, signed off his stay in New Delhi with the prediction that India's general election would be the country's last before the arrival of Indian military rule.
Mention of Chairman Mao's People's Communes and his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution would induce in our scribe the usual levitation of ecstasy. It was popular sixties' circus.
Ptolemy's universe may have collapsed under the weight of the Copernican revolution, but the far-Left and the hard-Right, long mired in their semi-literate conceits, have yet to appreciate the true significance of change.
We return thus to the partition file. What should be celebrated in its myriad contents is the separate emergence of a sovereign India secure in its democratic pluralism, firm in its uses of science and technology.
The dream of a united sub-continent would surely have turned into a nightmare of competing confessional dispensations, of which Lebanon is a prime example. The supreme irony is that the murderous politics of Mohammed Ali Jinnah's 'Direction Action Day' and 'Deliverance Day' has become the staple Pakistani life. The Quaid-e-Azam bears prime responsibility for the rivers of blood that flowed from partition, yet this also is an eternal warning to Indians to guard against their inner demons and the incendiary lunacies of mob rule.
The liberal imperialism of Britain and America has played Russian roulette with Pakistani militarism and its jihadi allies. The game has not been worth the candle. The spectre haunting civilised humanity today is not that of international communism but a crusading Islam bent on chastening a diverse world into a common, dreary shape.
This conflict of minds and bodies will not be won until the West draws on the special strengths of Russia and India, said one George Bathurst to The Spectator. He saw no room for cherry pickers.
Posted by: john frum ||
08/12/2007 07:45 ||
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#1
This conflict of minds and bodies will not be won until the West draws on the special strengths of Russia and India, said one George Bathurst to The Spectator. He saw no room for cherry pickers.
Russia is out of the loop. They haveas is so often the casesided with the enemies of civilization. No such assessment applies to India and the West had best nurture this thriving Asian democracy in every possible way.
#2
The liberal imperialism of Britain and America has played Russian roule**e with Pakistani militarism and its jihadi allies. The game has not been worth the candle. The spectre haunting civilised humanity today is not that of international communism but a crusading Islam bent on chastening a diverse world into a common, dreary shape.
Communism remains a threat so long as China still pretends to practice it. However, it is a downstream threat when compared to Islam. The Muslim world's near-total absence of military might presages an abrupt end to all humane approaches in dealing with their perfidy. No sane culture will forever excuse or endure Islam's ceaseless and deadly predations.
#3
Partition left Hindus unprotected in Pakistan, and Muslims protected in India. India was screwed. While Pakis have reduced Hindus from 20% to 1% of the population; Muslims have doubled to 15% in India. And they get sharia guarantees in the national constitution, as far as personal family law goes. Christians and Hindus are persecuted in Pakistan; while they Indian government has to pay $30 million in Haj (pilgrimage) subsidies every year, Pakis won't allow new Hindu temples to be constructed.
I have put the above to legislators; they acknowledge the information, and then go back to their dhimmi ways. Hindu nationalists despise Gandhi and Nehru; we will despise our current leaders for bringing in Muslims as if they are typical grateful immigrants.
From Bill Roggio and the Weekly Standard. The New Republic had claimed that they couldn't go any further in their 'investigation' of the matter since the Army had prevented Pvt. Beauchamp from talking with them. Bill Roggio talked to the Army -- of course he did.
I recently emailed Col. Steve Boylan asking for whatever information he could provide regarding the status of the investigation of Scott Thomas Beauchamp. Here is his response:
His command's investigation is complete. At this time, there is no formal what we call Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) actions being taken. However, there are other Administrative actions or what we call Non-Judicial Punishment that can be taken if the command deems appropriate. These are again administrative in nature and as such are not releasable to the public by law.
We are not stonewalling anyone. There are official statements that are out there are on the record from several of us and nothing has changed.
We are not preventing him from speaking to TNR or anyone. He has full access to the Morale Welfare and Recreation phones that all the other members of the unit are free to use. It is my understanding that he has been informed of the requests to speak to various members of the media, both traditional and non-traditional and has declined. That is his right.
We will not nor can we force a Soldier to talk to the media or his family or anyone really for that matter in these types of issues.
We fully understand the issues on this. What everyone must understand is that we will not breach the rights of the Soldier and this is where this is at this point.
So Scott Tom doesn't want to talk to his editors at TNR right now? Wotta surprise. This keeps up, and Franklin Foer is going to have to find another Soros-funded front group to join.
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/12/2007 00:00 ||
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#1
Of course, they can't talk to him! He won't return their calls!
Actually, I'm not sure one can leave a message on a Morale Welfare and Recreation phone....
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/12/2007 7:29 Comments ||
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#2
TNR can always write him a "Dear Scott" letter.
#3
NJP can be unpleasant, let us say. I remember one Sp4 who was ETS'ing from the Army in three weeks, and decided to use an obscenity laced-tell off to his NCO squad leader before departing. So back behind the barracks he was really letting fly, when the battalion SGM walked around the corner, behind him.
He then got to spend over two weeks using a push mower to mow the POST. A post with about a golf course's worth of grass on it. In summer. From 8am to 5pm every day.
#8
As I have mentioned before, they probably wne non-judicial, thats company grade Article 15. Once he leaves his current unit, "officially" the Article 15 goes away, other than changes in pay grade. He is probably confined to quarters, given extra duty (like CQ runner _every_ night), and generally not feeling very smart about what he did. If his NCOs are good, his refusal to talk to the media might be his first indication that he has a clue - he needs to cut that stuff out, and start soldiering. And who know, maybe they can salvage him into a decent soldier. Sometime shitbirds like that can take it the hard way and then learn there is a real world and all that fantasy crap needs to be tossed away.
Then again he may not have learned a damn thing and is just biding his time.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
08/12/2007 22:45 Comments ||
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#10
Pappy, just between you, me and the fencepost, I'll first: Thank you beyond measure for giving so much in the service of our country. Second; Give you credit in that what you say behind my back doesn't vary much from what you say in front of it. That beats the shit out of what else goes on. As with Frank G., I'm truly confident that if we sat down for a well-scheduled drinking session, we'd most likely find we're on the same page in most places that matter. I could be wrong, but I doubt that I am.
Againfrom what I can tellyou gave one Hell of a lot for our country. However much I might carry on at length, there are not enough words to express my gratitude for your contributions to myand America'sfreedom. Thank you,
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