Oops - George W. Bush...

...didn't start the renditions program that has got most of the German media working themselves up into a frothing frenzy over the decline of American democracy: it started on Bill Clinton's watch!

A tip of the Frog's Fedora to David's Medienkritik.

Kermit

the MainStream Media is sometimes called...

...the Alien Nation News. What follows is from Steve at ThreatsWatch. It is illustrative of why I consider that our nation's 4th Estate has become part of our nation's 5th Column. I am of the quaint and archaic persuasion that media should report news rather than purport to be news. There is a very distinct line between news and propaganda. This is the line which separates the '4th Estate' from the '5th Column'.

Loud Booms are War Crimes

"With all of the violence erupting around Israel and within Gaza in particular, an ABC story with the headline that reads Israel’s Sonic Booms Terrifying Gaza Children is another indication that Israel has few friends in the region, including the international media outlets."


"With terrorists kidnapping westerners in Gaza, suicide bombers’ unrelenting thirst for blood inside Israeli borders in malls and on buses, and rocket attacks on apartment buildings, that a news organization chooses to highlight mere loud noises (sonic booms) created by Israeli aircraft and characterized them as ‘terrifying’ is troubling on one hand and, yet, not unexpected and amusing on the other. ABC focused its story around frightened Palestinian children and even took the trouble to seek out a Gaza psychiatrist who called the sonic booms ‘war crimes’."


"There was no such mention of terrified children or their psychological well-being in the Kiryat Shmona apartment buildings where two katyusha rockets exploded (complete with shrapnel) Tuesday night. Nor is there ever any mention that shredding non-combatant civilians (not excluding children) in malls and on buses with suicide bombs is a ‘war crime’."


"But Israel causing loud booms ‘without notice’ warrants investigative reporting."


This had to come from a real creepy-crawly Swamp(!). One that makes Bubba's Bog seem like a scenic wetland which shoul be guarded by Greenpeace and preserved as a National Park.

Peace and all good,

Kermit

FrontPage Magazine's...

...Woman of the Year:

"I hate [war] as the pacifists in bad or good faith never will. I loathe it. Every book I have written overflows with that loathing, and I cannot bear the sight of guns…When peace stands for surrender, fear, loss of dignity and freedom, it is no longer peace. It's suicide."

Oriana Fallaci

"...Europe is Europe, and now for refusing to live according to Shari’a law, a woman who helped free Italy from Il Duce is on trial for speaking her conscience about the next impending, Islamofascist threat.

Since the trial, she has taken refuge in Upper Manhattan, during what she openly anticipates will be the final year of her life, estranged from the people she loves and the land she helped free. Yet in her exile, she has rallied another democracy in danger of slouching into pre-9/11 complacency. She tells all the American anti-terror crowds she can that the media are collaborating with America’s enemies. America faces an implacable enemy out to impose an all-encompassing legal code upon the entire infidel world, and the media continue to portray the jihadists as poverty-stricken victims of Yankee imperialism, someone with whom to enter into a dialogue. This is blurring the West’s vision of the true nature of the enemy and obscuring the stakes if we fail.

The media, though, are not the all-important problem. Most importantly in her view, Americans have lost their passion for freedom. They have specifically lost The Rage and the Pride, the patriotism that comes from being a believer in liberty and the burning desire to protect our "Shining city upon a hill" at all costs. That’s what she’s trying to stir, and the world will be safer in 2006 if it catches spark from her flame..."

-quoted from "Front Page Magazine"

POWERLINE BLOG...

...is a must read this!!!

The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into tmorning, even before you hit the Washington Compost!

Dana Priest's Global Show-n-Tell

Today's Washington Post page-one round-up disclosing a little new and summarizing a lot of previously reported "highly classified" national security information is by Dana Priest: "Covert CIA program withstands new furor." Here are the article's opening paragraphs:

"The largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources..."

We've previously commented at length on several elements of Priest's story. This morning we yield the floor to Bill Bennett, who has been talking about Priest's story on his "Morning in America" show:

Here we go again...but at least we have no real new disclosures here--just basically an editorial and roundup of what we already know--thanks to her and the NYTIMES. It really is an editorial masquerading as a news story: she is describing a vast CIA program (what we might call "war footing") known as GST (initials not explained) that is "compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved..."

The Frog's suggestion for "the Headline That I Would Like to See" is...

Washington Post Files Bankruptcy

Peace and all good,

Kermit

brief entries...

...for a while.


#1... Christmas (as usual) was wonderful. It didn't really kick in until about 15 minutes into the candle light Midnight Mass. For reasons which don't need to be gone into, Christmas usually starts, for me, on rocky ground.

#2... A 1:1 relationship seems to be developing between bad things getting past the firewall on my home computer and my expressions of total disgust with the Liberal (pinko) side of the Demoratic Party (with which I include Noxious Weepublicans). I had something ugly happen to the hard drive, that, until I prove to myself that it was a random electro-mechanical problem, I will chalk up to the VAST left wing conspiracy.

#3... All is well, and stuff will be added to the bog from at work. This will account for the brevity of the posts.

#4... Belated Merry Christmas and a a timely Happy New Year.

Kermit

PS - the rightwing conspiracy in which I am involved is only halfvast.

:) :) :)