Posse Incitatus

Freedom's victory

Yesterday's elections in Iraq mark a turning point in world history.  In their own way, they are more significant and decisive than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Regime change has happened often in the Arab world, but elections are altogether unique.

The Posse congratulates and salutes the brave people of Iraq who, faced with the supreme challenge of our time, succeeded brilliantly.  There is much left yet to do, but all people of good will should rejoice in this great victory for the cause of freedom.

The Democrats, however, seem to be having promblems with this.

Given the choice between lauding freedom and throwing bricks at George W. Bush, the best most can do is smile through clenched teeth and downplay the event.  Others simply throw bricks.

Here is the Man Who Would Have Been King, Sen. John Hamlet Kerry:

"It is significant that there is a vote in Iraq," Kerry said in an interview with NBC television's Meet the Press. "But ... no one in the United States should try to overhype this election.

"This election is a sort of demarcation point, and what really counts now is the effort to have a legitimate political reconciliation," Kerry said. "And it's going to take a massive diplomatic effort and a much more significant outreach to the international community than this administration has been willing to engage in.

"Absent that, we will not be successful in Iraq," he said. [Emphasis added by the Posse]

Give the man credit for consistency (at least in this instance).  Whether or not an Arab democracy emerges it doesn't matter, what is important is whether France and Germany support it.

Classic Kerry.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Tim Blair provides proof that hatred of freeom extends all the way to Australia.

A happy antidote to this bizarre terrorism fetish on the part of the "progressive" left can be found over at Arthur Chrenkoff's blog.  He's built a whole "Good News from Iraq" around the event, which we find highly appropriate.

It's the best news from Iraq in years.

Too bad the left is so blinded by hatred that it cannot see it.

The prophetic Posse

Some time ago, the Posse noted that many who had spoken most loudly and clearly for war in Iraq had mysterious changed their position.

Via Tim Blair, we find an excellent roundup of these Yellow Hawks by Tim Cavanaugh at Reason.

This passage is brutal, but true:

Set aside the question of where these tough guys got the detailed military expertise that tells them how many troops and what kind of occupation would have been sufficient. I want to know whether the liberal hawks understood the nature of war at all. Apparently, they thought you could invade and occupy a foreign country and still quibble over the niceties, carrying along caveats with your ammo.

Exactly what we have been saying for months, though we have focused on Sullivan more than the others.

Predicating support for a war on there being no sebacks or defeats is effectively refusing to support the war at all - for there has never been and never will be a war without disappointments.

Sullivan and company are like the Europeans who threw flowers in 1914, dancing in the street at the outbreak of war, only to announce their bitter opposition to it when the boys aren't home by Christmas.

That is why we use the term "Yellow Hawk" to describe them: they are intellectual cowards, unable to accept responsibility for the consequences of their own arguments.

They couch their arguments in seemingly military terms, but in fact they have no idea what they are talking about.  Sullivan's strange (and, as has been well-documented, utterly unrealistic) insistance on keeping Saddam's army intact would have done nothing to make Iraq safer.  It is, in fact, an impossible precondition, a fig leaf for defeatism.

We are pleased to see others recognize this lack of backbone in liberal hawks and we promise to never let Sullivan and company forget it, once the campaign is concluded and the Bush administration and its valiant allies stand vindicated.

Hoping for failure

Tim Blair offers still more evidence that the mainstream press remain implacable enemies of democracy in Iraq.

Paul McGeough is awash in gloom, and his article is nothing but a gleeful celebration alleged American failure.

Nowhere in his joyfully pessimistic recitation of discouraging figures does he discuss the alternative that the Iraqi people endured for a quarter-century:  a vicious despotism founded on torture and controlled starvation.

This is the fate that awaits Iraq if democracy fails, and the Iraqi people understand it.

McGeough seems to as well, but he wouuld rather millions died or lived in slavery than George W. Bush and the Coalition of the Willing be proved right.

The Posse has the utmost honor and respect for those fighting to establish freedom in Iraq - military and civilian alike.

Their path is among the most noble ever trodden by humanity and their journey is one that cannot be allowed to fail.

We believe the elections will succeed and that Iraq will grow ever stronger and more free.

And when this happens, we hope the naysayers will hang their heads in shame, for they said it couldn't happen.

Worse than that, they actively worked to undermine morale so that it wouldn't happen.

Assuming these people even cast reflections, how do they look at themselves in the mirror each day, knowing that they serve as the propaganda arm for some of the most vicious terrorists on earth?

Is being against Bush, against the "neocons" so important that they must align with the Islamofascist thugs that think nothing of blowing up schoolchildren simply to get in their newspapers?

Never forget that every atrocity, every bombing, every death and maiming is an attempt by the terrorists to do enough damage that they can make the front page of the New York Times.

That is their scoreboard.  That is their reward for their carnage.

Consider well the role our press has played in this slaughter of the innocents - and the reckoning they will face - in this life or the next.

Watch on the Euphrates

Captain Ed posts the text of a message believed to instruct Iraqi terrorists on how to disrupt next week's elections.

The instructions are detailed and clever.

This part in particular shows the dept of the terrorists' strategic wisdom:

Once the elections supplies, including the boxes full of ballots, have been seized, you must hurry to publish this in the media to show the world that the elections which took place were a failure. In order to prevent them from lying and falsifying [this information], identify the location of each seized box and documents.

And know that by disrupting the elections process, you disrupted Bush's last endeavor in Iraq after the failure of all his previous operations. [emphasis added by the Posse]

The Posse have long noted how the media plays into the hands of the terrorists, often serving as nothing more than a propaganda arm.

In previous wars, it was understood that national will was paramount.  War, after all, is nothing more than a clash of competing wills.  Break the enemy's will and his armies will collapse.

For this reason, news was carefully managed, with bad news delayed, covered up or offset by overblown good news.

A setback would be greeted with calls for gritted teeth and renewed determination.  Hardships from wars past were often cited as proof that such defeats could be overcome.

But that was then.

In the present conflict, major news agencies have already decided the war is lost. 

The left is overcome with hatred, and it openly welcomes defeat.

The terrorists understand this, and are using to to refine and improve their strategy.

This is what makes these instructions so clever and so vile.

The free presses of free people are effectively helping terrorists in their bid to deprive the Iraqi people of their freedom.

The mainstream press therefore combines factual inaccuracy with propaganda support for the enemies of liberty.

And they wonder why the networks are losing viewers.

Knight-Ridder joins the defeatists

Kevin over at the Smallest Minority provides yet more proof that the mainstream media aren't neutral, they are working to assure American defeat.

This is a trend we have noted before, and one that will doubtless continue until victory is assured.

The indicators that Knight-Ridder are utterly meaningless, for they are entirely one-sided:  the do not show what the Coalition is doing to the enemy.

This is key - and why the defeatists prefer to tell only one side.

No victory in history cannot be spun as a defeat if only simply omits the proper details.

The Battle of Fredericksburg is often held up as one of the most lop-sided Confederate victories in the Civil War.  But if one quotes only Confederate losses, points out that Union soldiers remained solidly encamped on Southern soil and emphasizes the damage done to the town itself, it begins to look as if the South suffered an unmitigated defeat.

Knight-Ridder follows a similar pattern.  It plays up US losses and setbacks, while utterly ignoring our accomplishments.

Are more schools open?  Are more hospitals open?

Are food and medicine widely available?

Has the quality of Iraq's drinking water improved?

And finally, what are the losses of the enemy?  Are they immune to defeat - as the Japanese were believed to be - or will making enough"martyrs" out of them finally break their will.

These are the questions that decide victory and defeat and the fact that Knight-Ridder ignores them shows that it has chosen its side (that of the terrorists) and is now working to ensure American defeat.

More on Moore

Via the hated Instapundit, we learn that the bodyguard in question was not personally employed by Michael Moore - he merely worked for a firm that provided service to Moore.

As Moorewatch points out, this is in many ways a distinction without a difference.

Most Americans can't afford to hire bodyguards of any sort, armed or not.

The person in question is reputed (by the company) to be a former Marine and with a great amount of professional experience.

The Posse will concede that gun control might work if every American with a gun was allowed to trade it in for 24-hour protection by US Marines.

Failing in that, guns seem a reasonable alternative.

Guns for me, but not for thee

Captain Ed links to the hilarious news that Michael Moore's bodyguard has been arrested for carrying an unlicensed firearm.

Some might call Moore a hypocrite, but from our own extensive knowledge of the liberal mind, the Posse can say this simply isn't so.

Gun control has never been about eliminating guns, it has always been about taking guns away from everyone but the elites.

By virtue of his celebrity status, Moore is now qualified to have a gun - and so are his bodyguards.

When gun control advocates talk about the evils of guns, they mean the evils of you having a gun, not them.

The Posse picked this up years ago, which is why such news fails to surprise us, though we do find it amusing.

We will note that this mentality does not necessarily apply to all gun control supporters.  Many suffer from the fear of responsibility.

But this can be reconciled (in the case of celebrities) with the fact that the bodyguard is the one with the gun.

Thus the bodyguard can be trusted to possess the mystical qualities otherwise reserved to the police.

Does this mean Moore isn't a big fat hypocrite?

No, insofar as he refused to practice what he preaches.

We simply wish to point out that in his own mind, his actions are entirely consistent.

And when you get down to it, that is really the problem with gun control today: its most vocal and high-profile supports consider themselves immune from it.

A flat learning curve

Kevin is on a roll over at the Smallest Minority.

The Posse never tires of reading mind-bogglingly stupid quotes from gun control supporters.  It's a good thing, because the idiocy required to utter them seems endless.

However, we will point out that while the statements may seem idiotic on the surface, they in fact mask a deeper meaning, and when that meaning is deciphered, the statement makes perfect sense.

The Maryland State Police have, after extensive study and years of research, concluded that the state's ballistic fingerprint database is a worthless waste of money.  It sucks down dollars that could be spent elsewhere on things that actually reduce crime and has never solved a single case.

Other state police agencies studying similar programs have - again, after years of research - concluded the exact same thing.

To most people, this would be a time to admit the obvious:  ballistic fingerprints aren't.  They don't work.

But for the gun control movement, it is merely time to circle the wagons and fight harder.

Again, reading the quotes from the AP article, it may seem that Leah Barrett is simply stone-stupid.

But that ignores the deeper meaning of her remarks, which we will repeat and then examine in detail:

Gun-control groups favor ballistic fingerprinting systems, saying they are effective crime-fighting tools. Leah Barrett, executive director of CeaseFire Maryland, said state police are not using the database enough.

On the face of it, this is breathtakingly moronic.  Essentially Barrett is saying that her group knows better than a mountain of research and real-world results.

And like Kevin, we love the notion that the database doesn't work because the police aren't using it enough. We've admitted that we aren't very good at math, but it seems to us that if you have a 30 percent failure rate, increasing the use of it will increase the number of failures.

But that isn't really what she is saying.

What she means is that this technology should work because her group wants it to.

The fact that it hasn't is simply proves that the police aren't trying hard enough.

This is key to understanding her next statement.

She said scrapping the state program could deal a setback to better ballistics imaging. "I think it's a real tragedy because other states are looking at New York and Maryland to see how we succeed with this," she said.

Step past the idiocy and look at the deeper meaning.

Scrapping the program would be a setback - for gun control.  The "tragedy" to her isn't the waste of police resources, it is the abandonment of something her group dearly wants - and something that simply cannot exist.

That is the tragedy.

It is much the same as demanding that someone trying to fly by flapping his hands flap harder and faster.  When said person gives up for obvious reasons, it isn't a tragedy, it is an admission of reality.

A tragedy would be the result of him leaping off a cliff because his advisors told him it was the only way to properly motive himself.

Kevin also misunderstands her use of the word "success."

The "success" she is referring to is in getting the database created in the first place.  Whether or not it solves crimes is beside the point.

Yes, we know that this may seem to conflict with the earlier need for the database to work, but gun control has long left reality behind.

The important thing isn't that the criminals get arrested or people are made safer, it is that gun control continues to rack up successes as a movement.

That is the "succeess" she is talking about.

Now that this information is out there, other states won't be able to repeat CeaseFire Maryland's coup of creating a worthless bureaucracy that exists only to harass gun owners.

Don't get us wrong, Kevin correctly nails the actual idiocy of what she says, but it is essential to understand that gun control isn't about facts, it is about emotions and, when it gets down to it, winning.

That is why the key to winning any debate on gun control is to immediately remove emotion from the discussion and speak purely in practical terms.

North Korea shudders

The Posse was interested to see this over at Captain's Quarters.

If authentic, it would be yet another telling sign of North Korean's impending collapse.

We've been watching this situation there as closely as we can, and when added with some of the strange doings we noted earlier, the Posse can only wonder if the dam is finally to the point of breaking.

The Posse strikes back

In the comments to the previous quote, Tim Lambert (or someone claiming to be him) makes this strange assertion:

I did not set up my website and blog to destroy Lott. That's your fabrication.

We suppose there could be some discussion on what the meaning of the word "destroy" is. 

We meant it in the sense of "destroy the man's career and reputation based on his existing work and actions."

The Posse would posit that any fair-minded individual would agree that this is one of Tim Lambert's goals.

Was it why he started his web site, Deltoid?

Necessarily, it is hard to say.  However we made our claim only after reading this post on Deltoid:

It’s now two years since I started this web log. Here is my first post. Originally it was just a page for me to join the discussion about Lott’s fabricated survey, but the focus seems to have expanded beyond that.

To get an idea how much blog traffic has increaased, my first post got linked by Glenn Reynolds and several others commenting on the Lott affair. As a result I had almost 1000 visits after three days. Now I get almost that much traffic every day.

Perhaps our English comprension skills are as questionable as our math, but that seems like a fairly straightforward statement.

Scrolling up and down the link Lambert gives, it is "all-Lott, all the time" - and none of it is favorable.

This wouldn't bother us in the least.  Everyone needs a hobby, after all.

But for Lambert to deny the obvious - that Deltoid was set up specifically to destroy John Lott, something he admits in his own words - is utterly absurd.

"Character assassination" involves (in our opinion) name-calling, lies, slanders and other underhanded techniques.

We've never accused Tim Lambert of such an action.

But there is no question that he is out to destroy John Lott, just as Clayton Cramer destroyed Michael Bellesiles.

Our recommendation to Tim Lambert is this: Be honest about who you are and what you want, and you will be taken more seriously.

Denying something so patently obvious as whether or not you wish to deal a death-blow to Lott's academic career does nothing to enhance the strength of your claims against him.

The Posse has yet to catch John Lott in an actual falsehood. 

You, however, just committed one on this very page.

Now who do you think looks more credible to us?