COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Basra, an "unmitigated disaster at every level"


British liaison team was sent to the Iraqi army headquarters during the battle. "They were greeted by a group of Iraqi generals sitting around a large desk, shouting into their mobiles without a map in sight. Chaos ruled."

Battle to retake Basra was 'complete disaster'
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent Telegraph
Last Updated: 11:02pm BST 19/04/2008

The British-trained Iraqi Army's attempt to retake Basra from militiamen was an "unmitigated disaster at every level", British commanders have disclosed.

Senior sources have said that the mission was undermined by incompetent officers and untrained troops who were sent into battle with inadequate supplies of food, water and ammunition.

They said the failure had delayed the British withdrawal by "many months".

Their comments came as the Iraqi army, this time directly supported by American and British forces, began a second operation in Basra in an attempt to find insurgent weapons caches.

The push, which was met with fierce resistance, took place in the Hayania district of the city, where there were clashes two weeks ago.

In the first operation, it is understood that one Iraqi brigade became a "busted flush" after 1,200 of its soldiers deserted.

At one stage during the battle, stories were circulating at the British headquarters that Iraqi troops were demanding food and water from coalition forces at gunpoint. "It was an unmitigated disaster at every level," an officer said.

Gen Mohan Furayji, the Iraqi commander who was in charge of troops during the operation, was described by a senior British staff officer as a "dangerous lunatic" who "ignored" advice.

The British officer, who is based at the coalition headquarters at Basra Air Station, said that the decision to allow Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, to run the operation had been a "disaster which felt as though an amateur was in charge".

More than 15,000 Iraqi troops were ordered to seize control of the city last month following an uprising by the Mehdi Army, the powerful militia group which is largely trained and financed by Iran.

President George W Bush described the battle for Basra as a "defining moment" for Iraq, while British officials at the time praised the professionalism of the Iraqi army.

However, the operation ended in a stalemate, with the Iraqi government agreeing to a ceasefire.

Criticism of Britain's involvement in Basra resurfaced last week during Gordon Brown's visit to America.

The New York Times reported, incorrectly, that British troops were refusing to help the Iraqi army, which the newspaper said was "deeply embarrassing for Britain".

In a devastating critique of the Iraqi military, British commanders have disclosed that "chaos ruled" the operation to retake Basra.

One officer said the Iraqi army's 14th Division had only 26 per cent of the equipment necessary to take part in combat operations.

He said: "There were literally thousands of troops arriving in Basra from all over Iraq. But they had no idea why they were there or what they were supposed to do. It was madness and to cap it all they had insufficient supplies of food, water and ammunition.

"One of the newly formed brigades was ordered into battle and suffered around 1,200 desertions within the first couple of hours - it was painful to watch.

"They had to be pulled out because they were a busted flush. The Iraqi police were next to useless. There were supposed to be 1,300 ready to deploy into the city, but they refused to do so. The situation deteriorated to the extent where we [the British Army] were forced to stage a major resupply operation in order to stave off disaster.

"The net effect of all of this is that the British Army will be forced to remain here for many months longer."

The Sunday Telegraph has also learnt that British commanders had devised a plan for Gen Mohan. The plan came with the caveat that it should not be started until mid-July because Iraqi troops were not ready. But the officer said that the Iraqi general had ignored the advice.

He said that a British liaison team was sent to the Iraqi army headquarters during the battle. "They were greeted by a group of Iraqi generals sitting around a large desk, shouting into their mobiles without a map in sight. Chaos ruled."

Basra was handed back to Iraqi control last year after the Army withdrew from its last military base in the city.

The Ministry of Defence had hoped to reduce the number of troops serving in southern Iraq to about 2,000 this spring, but that plan has been shelved and British troops are once again patrolling the city's streets.


42 comments:

  1. Both Ms Rice and Mr Cheney declared Basra a success, years ago.

    Let's not go and start revising history, now.

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  2. General Petraeus was fixing to go before the Senate with a surge that was militarily successful but with no political progress in Iraq to show for it, which is, you know, the primary reason for the surge. So somebody leaned on al-Maliki really hard to do something, which he did. He even went down to Basra himself. The only conceivable carrot and/or stick is a threat to withhold some funding or service US taxpayers are currently providing now. The threat worked wonderfully. President Obama will use the same procedure, but far more extensively.

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  3. Iraqi Army Seizes Basra From Militia as Cleric Threatens New Uprising
    An operation to rout Moktada al-Sadr’s militia intensified, while Mr. Sadr threatened to declare “war until liberation” if the crackdown did not cease.

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  4. BAGHDAD — Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi government’s monthlong military operation against the fighters.

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  5. The American military said in a statement that British and American military training teams were working alongside Iraqi soldiers and that the Iraqi military consulted with senior British and American officers before undertaking this stage in the battle.

    The consultation is a contrast to the early days of the Basra operation, personally led by Mr. Maliki, when Iraqi troops moved in on Basra, with little prior consultation with either the Americans the British, the coalition troops who have a base in the area. Later, members of Mr. Maliki’s inner circle conceded that they had a communications problem, especially with the British, that needed to be rectified.

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  6. Sat Apr 19, 07:21:00 PM EDT
    Wrong

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  7. If the iranian embassy in bagdad is giving maliki its blessing for his fight against al sadr--then sadr is finished. he has no support anywhere. the other shias in iraq are all against him.

    sadr's warning that he'll start an uprising is totally empty. his people are evaquating their offices in basra without a fight.

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  8. 8:01--jeez vic relax woodja?

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  9. If the iranian embassy in bagdad is giving maliki its blessing for his fight against al sadr--then sadr is finished. he has no support anywhere. the other shias in iraq are all against him.

    sadr's warning that he'll start an uprising is totally empty. his people are evaquating their offices in basra without a fight.

    Sat Apr 19, 08:44:00 PM EDT

    Except that he's very popular among poor Shiites and the most important relationship Iran has to protect is its relationship with the Shiia elite in Baghdad - that would be the current government - which is attempting to extend its authority.

    And good for them, because the sooner they do, the sooner we can, you know, unass.

    But not really.

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  10. That is really nice, Doug, I always like the old parades like that.

    The wife and I are hauling ass back to Ohio in two or three weeks. This time I am taking a good camera, so as to put up some photos, and check in once in a while.

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  11. I happened to see the last 4 min of an ebay auction for a 47 Ford Tractor w/the dual range tranny (6 speeds) in pretty good shape, partially restored.
    Only $1,300.
    1947 Ford 8n Tractor - Rebuilt Motor w/ Sherman Trans
    Winning bid: US $1,350.01

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  12. I can do without the rest of the column, but up to the Guatemalan peasant woman...well, you know it's true:

    Popular Will

    Conservatives perfect working-class p.c.

    Jonathan Chait, The New Republic Published: Friday, April 18, 2008

    Barack Obama's comments about the white working class have thrown the political campaign into a particularly comic spasm of pretense and hypocrisy, but I was planning to let it go, I really was, until George F. Will decided to leap to the defense of the proletariat. Yes, that George F. Will. The fabulously wealthy, bow tie-wearing, pretentious reference-mongering, Anglophilic fop who grew up in a university town as a professor's son, earned two advanced degrees, has a designated table at a French restaurant in Georgetown, and, had he dwelt for any extended time among the working class, would be lucky to escape without his underwear being yanked up over his ears. Will devoted his column to expressing his displeasure at Obama's "condescension" toward the working class.

    Obama's offense, as we all know, was to call white working-class voters "bitter" over their economic misfortune during the last few decades, and thus prone to "cling to" guns and religion. Taken literally, Obama was saying that these voters have taken up religion and gun ownership only over the last few decades--a notion so transparently false that he surely couldn't believe it. And, in fact, he doesn't: In a 2004 interview with Charlie Rose, Obama described how traditions of hunting and churchgoing stretch back generations. He proceeded to argue that, in the absence of plausible economic improvement, people in small towns will vote on the basis of those traditions that give their lives stability. This is not a controversial view among Democrats. Bill Clinton once said that Republicans "find the most economically insecure white men and scare the living daylights out of them"--a less respectful expression of the same analysis.

    But Clinton said that more than a decade and a half ago, and, since then, Democrats and Republicans have developed an exquisite sensitivity toward any slight against the white working class. Blue-collar whites now occupy the same position in American politics that people of color hold in the smaller political subculture of academia: a victim-hero class whose positions (usually as interpreted by outsiders) enjoy the presumption of moral superiority.

    The victim-hero class is the object of competitive flattery and the subject of mutual accusations of disrespect. You can't read a Peggy Noonan paean to real America--"a healthy and vibrant place full of religious feeling and cultural energy and Bible study and garage bands and sports-love and mom-love and sophistication and normality"--without thinking of a junior faculty member extolling the dignity of Guatemalan peasant women.

    [...]

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  13. Bobal

    I am trying to relax. Just having a little fun for a few days before some heavy lifting. For months I have been avoiding controversy but I have been feeling guilty about it. Now, along comes comes Robert Kagan at World Affairs with an apologia for Neo-Conservate ideals, here, and my blood starts to boil.

    I fool around with cars as a hobby and have a big show in a week. After that, I am going after Kagan and his buddies.

    My opinion is that if we don't get those bastard's hands off of our foreign policy, we are in deep shit.

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  14. Good that Jonathan has something to write about other than Ayers or Wright, or po Mrs Obama barely payin off those lones w/4 million dollars in income.

    Whatever you and Johnnie say tho, he's still a PHONEY, through and through.

    ...but don't take MY word for it:
    Just ask Starling, or Michael Steele.

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  15. (Steele hosted Hewitt, probly available on the web)

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  16. So, is this good news or bad, this Basra disaster?

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  17. Wiki:

    The Andromeda Galaxy is approaching the Sun at about 300 kilometers per second (186 miles/sec.), so it is one of the few blue shifted galaxies. Given the motion of the Solar System inside the Milky Way, one finds that the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are approaching one another at a speed of 100 to 140 kilometers per second (62–87 miles/sec.).[18] The impact is predicted to occur in about 2.5 billion years. In that case the two galaxies will likely merge to form a giant elliptical galaxy.[19] However, Andromeda's tangential velocity with respect to the Milky Way is only known to within about a factor of two, which creates uncertainty about the details of when the collision will take place and how it will proceed.[20] Such events are frequent among the galaxies in galaxy groups.

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  18. Time to fire up the afterburner, and set sail, Mat!

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  19. But Kitty, who has just jumped in through my window, and is scratching at the bedroom door, thinking, there is food in the kitchen, which there is, as she always does--she will make a little "purr" too when I let her out--as a "thank you"--doesn't seem concerned at all.

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  20. Kitty really owns this house. She is the Queen of the House. She does not do a damned thing to earn her living. Yet, all is provided for her. A simple "purr" is enough to make the two legged react. A scratch opens the door.
    And, when she is really in the mood, she will stroll in, lay on her back, and get a tummy rub.

    Kitty owns this house, and pays no taxes, for the priviledge.

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  21. No predators in the great outdoors?
    Our cat is tiny, probly stunted from her homeless condition.

    Roamed the whole neighborhood for months w/fast traffic, dogs, cats, methheads, and etc.

    Then when we brought her here where there is little traffic, 1 unleashed dog, no methheads, and etc, we all thot she'd find paradise outdoors.

    Then some large neighbor cats attacked her, and scared her into being a homebody who doesn't stray far from the house.

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  22. Doug, the animals make humans out of us, huh? I love the cat. Used to have a puppy, but doesn't work out, living in a city.

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  23. Omigawd!
    ...all this time...
    Feeling guilty about interchanges w/Farmer al-Bob, having deserted the homestead some years ago.
    (w/MANY regrets)
    What the hey?
    Gotta be near the dialysis machine, or wot?

    Damn!
    Another Hero down the crapper.

    Claim back your manhood!

    Let's mount up and join Habu's Montanna Posse!

    ReplyDelete
  24. Mat's namesake:
    ---
    The Man who lived under the "L"
    No sign of ahbez. So he went to the police.

    “Sure we know him,” said one of the officers. A while back, ahbez had been stopped by a cop who figured from the shoulder-length hair – this was 1946, remember – that the guy was a nut who’d escaped from the asylum. ahbe told him calmly, “I look crazy, but I’m not. Other people don’t look crazy, but they are.” The officer chewed that one over and eventually replied, “You know, bud, you’re right. If anybody gives you any trouble, let me know.” When Mort Ruby made his enquiries, the police told him ahbez didn’t stay anywhere too long, but you might find him up on the hill under one of the ‘L’s in the ‘HOLLYWOOD’ sign.” So Ruby clambered up to the famous sign, and there under the first “L” he found eden ahbez asleep. When he woke up, the songwriter didn’t recognize Cole’s manager. He’d forgotten him completely.

    By the time Mort Ruby had a deal on the song, Capitol Records had decided the lyric really was too far out. And that was that, until August 12th 1947, when, at the end of a recording session with a full orchestra and with a few minutes to spare, Cole suggested that they should try the ahbez number. In March 1948 Capitol issued the song “Lost April”, with “Nature Boy” as the B side. By now, there was a rumor in the music business that Nat Cole had one of the greatest songs ever up his sleeve. The first disc jockey to receive the record was Jerry Marshall at New York’s WNEW. He listened to “Lost April”, shrugged, and decided to play the flip side. On March 22nd 1948, at 2.16pm, on WNEW’s “Music Hall”, Marshall introduced the record with the words:

    Here’s a winner - a song everybody is going to love.

    By 2.20pm the phone calls were flooding into the station. Within a few weeks, while Nat and Maria Cole were on their honeymoon, the song was America’s Number One, a million-seller and a phenomenon. As The New York Age reported...
    ---
    But “Nature Boy” got bigger and bigger. Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass did it, and John Coltrane, and Bobby Darin, and Stephane Grappelli, Marvin Gaye, Grace Slick, Jose Feliciano, George Benson… It became a standard for folks who didn’t like standards. Cher recorded it as a tribute to her late ex-, Sonny Bono. It was the song that held together the “score” of the film Moulin Rouge. Celine Dion made it a pillar of her Vegas spectacular, A New Day, in a performance that would have horrified ahbez: He’d taken the song to Nat Cole all those years ago because he liked the “gentleness” of Cole’s voice. Still, by his final years, he didn’t much care for the original version either. Returned to obscurity and living in the California desert, he was befriended by Joe Romersa, a drummer and sound engineer, to whom he confided his dissatisfaction with the song’s ending:

    The greatest thing
    You'll ever learn
    Is just to love and be loved in return.

    He told Romersa “it was close”, but based on what he’d experienced since then, he’d changed the ending to:

    The greatest thing
    You'll ever learn
    Is to love and be loved
    Just to love and be loved.

    “To be loved in return is too much of a deal,” he said, “and there is no deal in love.” He’d rewritten the melody to accommodate the somewhat clunkier lyric.

    No, no, no. You can understand why the guy only had one hit. It’s the precision of the rhyme that redeems it from just being the usual fey hippie-dippy maunderings, that give “Nature Boy” its strange combination of formality and other-worldliness. The rewrite wrecks that. And, even if made aware of the modification, I doubt any of its recent interpreters, from Harry Connick Jr to David Bowie, would bother using it.

    Oh, well. ahbe lost his wife Anna, for whom he wrote “Nature Girl”, to leukemia in 1963, and their son Zoma in 1970. A nature boy in winter, he faded into a spaced-out white-bearded flute-playing Methuselah, still writing poems and music and this and that until he was hit by a car and died of his injuries in 1995. Did America’s first lower-case songwriter mind that the “L” in that “HOLLYWOOD” sign he lived under was a capital letter in an all-capitalized word? Who knows? But on his centenary his one lasting contribution to the American songbook remains a hit with a capital H.

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  25. And Lenny Bruce had been dead for 20 years by the time those lines were written. The rest is written in the preferred Stipe stream-of-consciousness style. And, as an impressionistic blur, it’s pretty good – Bruce aside, it’s vivid and urgent in the way it sets up total societal collapse for reasons that are never fully explained. Anthony DeCurtis calls the song “apocalyptic wryness”, which I like to think is what America Alone’s about. On my recent tour down under, I was described by one commentator as pioneering a whole new genre – “apocalyptic stand-up” – but I’m happy to settle for “apocalyptic wryness”.
    In the end, though, all the rat-a-tat imagery of “End Of The World”’s verses isn’t why folks dig it. Like a lot of post-rock songwriting, its power derives from a hook – in this case, a big bold thought, repeated, and again:

    It’s The End Of The World As We Know It
    It’s The End Of The World As We Know It
    It’s The End Of The World As We Know It
    And I feel fine…

    Stadium crowds just love singing along with that. It’s instantly recognizable, which is why it was used in Independence Day, just before the aliens invade, and indeed at a similar moment in Chicken Little. And now it’s accidentally evoked by my little book. Back when I thought of it as just a plain old end-of-the-world book, I found myself singing another song, a big hit for Skeeter Davis who happened to die as I was writing the thing:

    Don’t the-ey know
    It’s The End Of The World?
    It ended when you said goodbye…

    - which is perfectly fine for a country love song. But for “apocalyptic wryness” REM have it all over Skeeter. So buy the book and, if you find yourself singing along, try a variation or two:

    It’s The End Of The World As We Know It
    It’s The End Of The World As We Know It
    It’s The End Of The World As We Know It
    And I read Steyn…

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  26. Doug said...
    Omigawd!
    ...all this time...
    Feeling guilty about interchanges w/Farmer al-Bob, having deserted the homestead some years ago.
    (w/MANY regrets)
    What the hey?
    Gotta be near the dialysis machine, or wot?

    Damn!
    Another Hero down the crapper.

    Claim back your manhood!

    Let's mount up and join Habu's Montanna Posse!

    Sun Apr 20, 05:22:00 AM EDT

    ?

    ReplyDelete
  27. I thought you lived in a log Cabin in the middle of the homestead.

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  28. The Origin of "Suck"
    ---
    A voice cried far out on the playground:

    -- All in!

    Then other voices cried from the lower and third lines:

    -- All in! All in!

    The players closed around, flushed and muddy, and he went among them, glad to go in. Rody Kickham held the ball by its greasy lace. A fellow asked him to give it one last: but he walked on without even answering the fellow. Simon Moonan told him not to because the prefect was looking. The fellow turned to Simon Moonan and said:

    -- We all know why you speak. You are McGlade's suck.

    Suck was a queer word. The fellow called Simon Moonan that name because Simon Moonan used to tie the prefect's false sleeves behind his back and the prefect used to let on to be angry. But the sound was ugly. Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder.

    To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the cocks. That was a very queer thing.

    And the air in the corridor chilled him too. It was queer and wettish. But soon the gas would be lit and in burning it made a light noise like a little song. Always the same: and when the fellows stopped talking in the playroom you could hear it.

    It was the hour for sums. Father Arnall wrote a hard sum on the board and then said:

    -- Now then, who will win? Go ahead, York! Go ahead, Lancaster!

    Stephen tried his best, but the sum was too hard and he felt confused. The little silk badge with the white rose on it that was pinned on the breast of his jacket began to flutter. He was no good at sums, but he tried his best so that York might not lose. Father Arnall's face looked very black, but he was not in a wax: he was laughing. Then Jack Lawton cracked his fingers and Father Arnall looked at his copybook and said:

    -- Right. Bravo Lancaster! The red rose wins. Come on now, York! Forge ahead!

    Jack Lawton looked over from his side. The little silk badge with the red rose on it looked very rich because he had a blue sailor top on. Stephen felt his own face red too, thinking of all the bets about who would get first place in elements, Jack Lawton or he. Some weeks Jack Lawton got the card for first and some weeks he got the card for first. His white silk badge fluttered and fluttered as he worked at the next sum and heard Father Arnall's voice. Then all his eagerness passed away and he felt his face quite cool. He thought his face must be white because it felt so cool. He could not get out the answer for the sum but it did not matter. White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and second place and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.

    Joyce

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  29. Pentagon Study? Current Events in Iraq? Not so Fast...
    Jonathan Landay and John Walcott.
    Walcott... sounds like one of Trish's heros.

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  30. Reverend Eric Lee’s Anti-Semitism: A Personal Story [video]
    (I would remind:
    All of the Black Messiah's foreign policy advisors are Pro-Palestinian.)

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  31. "Time to fire up the afterburner, and set sail, Mat!"

    All I get when I try to do that is methane gas.

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  32. "All of the Black Messiah's foreign policy advisors are Pro-Palestinian."


    That might not be such a bad thing. Israel needs to start acting independently and take ME oil permanently off line. With a hostile administration, this decision will be easier to discharge.

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  33. You need an oxygen tank!
    ---
    Jewish people who support Obama are like poultry supporting Colonel Sanders. That has nothing at all to do with his race.

    Obama had the opportunity to take a strong stand against the burgeoning anti-Semitism on the left by casting out Wright. He had a chance to bridge the divide and say “This is absolutely unacceptable and I want no part of it. I’m sorry I didn’t speak out for 20 years, but I’m going to do so now.”

    Instead he became an apologist for racial hatred, anti-Jewish extremism, and anti-American ism, even saying it reflected the black community. What an insult to patriotic black people who do not buy into the hate!

    But look at the support he got. The media and its liberal personalities annointed him a saviour for an act of cowardice and duplicity. So I can’t just blame Obama. His speech was compared to King and Lincoln. What a pile of steaming manure. People had better wake up to what Obama will do to this country — provide cover for the worst haters of our society.

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  34. (a comment from the linked thread)

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  35. via LGF:

    "Commuters in London and its neighboring towns and villages in southern England woke up to an unusual smell Friday morning: a stink that led many to wonder if the city’s sewers had overflowed.

    Not even the queen was spared, as newspapers reported that Windsor Castle also suffered from the effects of the putrid smell.

    The U.K. Meteorological Office (Met Office) was quick to assure callers that there was no reason to panic. The foul smell was not English, Sarah Holland, a forecaster for the Met Office told the BBC. “The origins of the smell come from Europe,” she said."


    Yeah, right.

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  36. Global Climate Change.
    We're Doomed!

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  37. Methuselah: That might not be such a bad thing. Israel needs to start acting independently and take ME oil permanently off line. With a hostile administration, this decision will be easier to discharge.

    Excellent. Oil facilities can be repaired quickly (see post-Gulf One history). That will do more to permanently queer the deal between the US and that shi'ity little country than when they recruited Jonathan Pollard to spy on us, or even when Israel killed 34 Americans aboard the USS Liberty.

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