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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (485850)	6/4/2009 8:26:32 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577143

Murder by any means Crime seen through politically correct lenses By Michelle Malkin The Washington Times Thursday, June 4, 2009 COMMENTARY: When a right-wing Christian vigilante kills, millions of fingers pull the trigger. When a left-wing Muslim vigilante kills, he kills alone. These are the instantly ossifying narratives in the Sunday shooting death of late-term-abortion provider Dr. George Tiller of Kansas and the Monday shootings of two Arkansas military recruiters. Dr. Tiller's suspected murderer, Scott Roeder, is white, Christian, anti-government and anti-abortion. The gunman in the military-recruitment-center attack, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, is black, a Muslim convert, anti-military and anti-American. Both crimes are despicable, cowardly acts of domestic terrorism. But the disparate treatment of the two brutal cases by the White House and the media is striking. President Obama issued a statement condemning "heinous acts of violence" within hours of Dr. Tiller's death. The Justice Department issued its own statement and sent federal marshals to protect abortion clinics. News anchors and headline writers abandoned all qualms about labeling the gunman a terrorist. An almost gleeful excess of mainstream commentary poured forth on the climate of hate and fear created by conservative talk radio, blogs and Fox News in reporting Dr. Tiller's activities. By contrast, Mr. Obama was silent about the military-recruiter attacks that left 24-year-old Pvt. William Long dead and 18-year-old Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula gravely wounded. On Tuesday afternoon - more than 24 hours after the attack on the military-recruitment center in Little Rock, Ark. - Mr. Obama held a news conference to announce his pick for Army secretary. It would have been the right moment to express condolences for the families of the targeted Army recruiters and to condemn heinous acts of violence against our troops. Yet Mr. Obama said nothing. The Justice Department was mum. So were the legions of finger-pointing pundits happily convicting the pro-life movement and every right-leaning writer on the planet of contributing to the murder of Dr. Tiller. Mr. Obama's omission, it should be noted, came just a few weeks after he failed to mention the Bronx jihadi plot to bomb synagogues and a National Guard air base during his speech on homeland security. Why the silence? Politically and religiously motivated violence, it seems, is worth lamenting only when it demonizes opponents. That also helps explain why the phrase "lone shooter" is ubiquitous in media coverage of jihadi shooters gone wild - think convicted "Jeep Jihadist" Mohammed Taheri-Azar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; or Israel-bashing gunman Naveed Haq, who targeted a Seattle Jewish charity; or Los Angeles International Airport shooter Hesham Hedayet, who opened fire at the El Al Israeli airline ticket counter - but not in cases involving rare acts of pro-life violence. Even Jeffrey Goldberg of the left-leaning Atlantic magazine noticed the double standards. He called attention to a National Public Radio report on the military-recruiter attack that failed to mention the religion and anti-military animus of the suspect. Wrote Mr. Goldberg: "Why not tell people what is actually happening in the world? We saw this a couple of weeks ago, when the press only gingerly acknowledged that the malevolent though incompetent suspects in the synagogue bombing-conspiracy case in New York were converts to Islam. How is the public served by this kind of silence? The extremist Christian beliefs of George Tiller's alleged murderer are certainly relevant to that case, and no one in my profession is hesitant to discuss them. Why the hesitancy to talk about the motivations of the man who allegedly killed Pvt. William Long?" The truth is that the "climate of hate" doesn't have just one hemisphere. But you won't hear the Council on American-Islamic Relations acknowledging the national-security risks of jihadi infiltrators who despise our military and have plotted against our troops from within the ranks - including convicted fragging killer Hasan Akbar and terror plotters Ali Mohamed, Jeffrey Battle and Semi Osman. You won't hear about the escalating war on military-recruitment centers on the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times - from vandalism to obstruction to Molotov-cocktail attacks on campus stations across the country; to the shutdown of a Pittsburgh military-recruitment office by zealots holding signs that read "Recruiters are Child Predators"; to the prolonged harassment campaign against the Marine recruiting center in Berkeley, where Code Pink protesters called American soldiers assassins; to the bomb blast at the Times Square recruiting center in March 2008. And you'll certainly hear little about the most recent left-wing calls to violence by a Playboy magazine writer who published a vulgar list of conservative female writers and commentators he said he would like to rape (the obscene word he used is not printable). The list was hyped by the magazine's publicity team and lightheartedly promoted by mainstream publications such as Politico.com (founded by Washington Post reporters). Is it too much to ask the media cartographers in charge of mapping the "climate of hate" to do their jobs with both eyes open? Michelle Malkin is author of the forthcoming "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2009). washingtontimes.com

To: tejek who wrote (485850)	6/5/2009 5:55:35 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577143

The Chicago View By DAVID BROOKS All smart analyses of the Obama administration begin with Chicago. That’s where the top members of the administration were tested and formed. The Chicago mentality is the one they take with them wherever they go. That means they start with an awareness of diversity. The nation and the world are a bunch of jostling wards that have to be knit together. That means they are not doctrinaire. Chicagoans like to see themselves as pragmatists, not ideologues. That means they contain both sides of The Great Tension. In Chicago, there is a tension between the lakefront and the neighborhoods inland. The lakefront tends to be idealistic, earnest and liberal. The neighborhoods are clever, cautious and Machiavellian. In all great endeavors, the Obama administration weaves together both of these tendencies. President Obama’s Cairo speech characteristically blended idealism with cunning. At one level, the speech was an inspiring effort to create a new dialogue in the Middle East. Obama came to a region in which the different groups have their own narratives and are accustomed to shouting past one another. Obama, as is his custom, positioned himself above the fray and tried to create a new narrative that all sides could relate to. In the Obama narrative, each side has been equally victimized by history, each side has legitimate grievances and each side has duties to perform. To construct this new Middle East narrative, Obama strung together some hard truths, historical distortions, eloquent appeals and strained moral equivalencies. The president’s critics complained on Thursday about Obama’s distortions: The plight of the Palestinians is not really comparable to the plight of former slaves in the American South. The Treaty of Tripoli in 1796 was not really a glorious example of Muslim-American cooperation, but was a failed effort to use bribery to stop piracy. But this is diplomacy, not scholarship. Obama was using this speech to show empathy and respect. He was asking people in different Muslim communities to give the U.S. a new look and a fresh hearing. He was showing people in a region besotted with tiresome hysterics how to talk to one another with understanding and dignity. That was the idealistic part of the speech, and it was effective. But there was another layer, designed for the people in the ministries. In this layer, Obama implied American policies that are cautious and Machiavellian. On nearly every substantive issue, Obama scaled back American goals and expectations. The U.S. used to talk of ending Iran’s nuclear program. But, as Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy observed, now Obama only hopes to prevent Iran from weaponizing its nukes. The U.S. used to aim to de-radicalize Islam. Now Obama accepts radical groups so long as they don’t kill people. The U.S. used to want to turn Iraq into a model for the region. Now Obama merely wants Iraq to be the sort of place the U.S. can safely leave behind. The big retreat to realism concerns democracy promotion. The Bush administration tried to promote democracy, even at the expense of stability. That proved unworkable. But many of us hoped that Obama would put a gradual, bottom-up democracy-building initiative at the heart of his approach. This effort would begin with projects to create honest cops and independent judges so local citizens could get justice. It would make space for civic organizations and democratic activists. It would include clear statements so the world understands that the U.S. is not in bed with the tired old Arab autocrats. There was a democracy-promotion section to the speech, and given the struggle behind it, maybe we should be grateful it was there at all. But it was stilted and abstract — the sort of prose you get after an unresolved internal debate. The president didn’t really champion democratic institutions. He said that governments “should reflect the will of the people” and that citizens should “have a say” in how they are governed. Obama didn’t describe how a democratic Iraq could influence the region. He seems to have largely given up on democracy promotion in Egypt. Larry Diamond of Stanford liked the Cairo speech but pointed out that Obama delivered it in a country where an aging dictator is passing power to his son, where the country is crumbling to dust because of autocracy and stagnation. The administration seems to accept this. Meanwhile, as The Washington Post noted, it’s slashing aid to Egypt’s democratic activists. This speech builds an idealistic facade on a realist structure. And this gets to the core Obama foreign-policy perplexity. The president wants to be an inspiring leader who rallies the masses. He also wants be a top-down realist who cuts deals in the palaces. There is a tension between these two impulses that even a sharp Chicago pol is having trouble managing.