spinbadz own

Has soon-to-be-outgoing British PM Blair really, in some of the areas at front and centre in hearts and minds and that actually count, done enough to "reform" Britain?

The Bill Clinton show extravaganzised Blair's reform credentials. The New Statesman (Zaki Chehab) didn't seem to be ultra-impressed with them a month or so back though:

" ... Al-Qaeda's leadership has surveyed the world and it has identified Britain both as a rich source of recruits and as an important target.

" ... Arab leaders such as Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, and Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria had long been frustrated by the British government's refusal to move against Islamist groups that were openly recruiting and raising funds in British cities. ...

" ... Why did (security services) not take more seriously the open warnings from radical Islamist leaders to Arabs and Muslims, advising them not to go to shopping centres or use the Underground in central London?"

Premeditated?

John Dickerson in Slate:

Did Clinton come across a little unhinged?

Sure, but that's an advantage in a midterm election ...

(Said) his spokesperson ... afterward: "We're fully aware of Fox News' and Chris Wallace's agenda, and President Clinton came in prepared to respond to any attack on his record. When Wallace questioned his record on terrorism, he responded forcefully, as any Democrat would or should."

Clinton can ... campaign for competitive candidates ... by banging the table in a single performance on Fox.

Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Read Richard Clarke's book, the former president repeatedly admonished Wallace.

... Fox News mogul Rupert Murdoch donated $500,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative last week and hosted a fund-raiser for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton this summer.

Mangled?

Dick Morris on The Hill:

There he was on live television, the man those who have worked for him have come to know ・the angry, sarcastic, snarling, self-righteous, bombastic bully, roused to a fever pitch. The truer the accusation, the greater the feigned indignation.

His self-justifications constitute a mangling of the truth which only someone who once quibbled about what the "definition of 'is' is" could perform.

Clinton: "There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk Down."

Morris: "(B)in Laden told Fortune Magazine in a 1999 interview that the precipitous American pullout after Black Hawk Down convinced him that Americans would not stand up to armed resistance."

Clinton: "I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill bin Laden ... I worked hard to try to kill him."

Morris: "(Clinton) notif(ied) Pakistan of our cruise-missile strike in time for them to warn Osama and allow him to escape ... (and) refuse(d) to allow us to fire cruise missiles to kill bin Laden when we had the best chance, by far, in 1999."

"(T)he plan to kidnap Osama was derailed ... because Clinton had not yet made a finding authorizing his assassination (because of the fear that) that Osama would die in the kidnapping and the U.S. would be blamed for using assassination as an instrument of policy."

"In my frequent phone and personal conversations with both Clintons in 1993, there was never a mention, not one, of the World Trade Center attack. It was never a subject of presidential focus."


Andrew Klavan, LA Times:

(I)n (Reagan)days, my children ... the media was almost all Colmes and precious little Hannity ... you would've thought the country was being run by a miserly, warmongering idiot instead of the greatest president of the century's second half.

And yet even after his two terms were over ... I cannot remember Reagan ever "defending his legacy" with anything more than a quip and a smile.

Compare and contrast Clinton. Questioned mildly ... President Me went absolutely medieval ... leaning forward threateningly, rapping his fingers against Wallace's notes and proceeding to, well, lie ...

"And you got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever," Clinton told Wallace.

"I never thought of myself as a great man," Reagan said, "just a man committed to great ideas."

Clinton, on the other hand, is a narcissist who finds it difficult to grasp in any real sense that there is a place where his "inner man" ends and the rest of the world begins.

Ann Coulter:

The day of Clinton's scheduled impeachment, Dec. 18, 1998, he bombed Iraq.

Clinton's own campaign adviser on Iraq, Laurie Mylroie, says Clinton and his advisers are "most culpable" for the intelligence failure that allowed 9/11 to happen.

Whitewash of the day:

Deb Saunders: President Bill Clinton ... embraced his angry side ...

lol

Bill Clinton, and his proxy-cum-beneficiary Hillary, are past and present grand masters of modern politico-media arts. One of these is skill at conjuring the specious, and theneceforth feeding the apocryphal, especially where specious-cum-apocryphal serves to deflect from Clinton culpability.

We might wish upon George Bush some of this particular genius, as well as some of the love and admiration his predecessor commands in the liberal media world. The latter ensures that when one of the Clintons hissies on-air about vast right-wing Clinton-scapegoating conspiracies, as in Bill's latest spat at Chris Wallace on Fox, the hissied position is whitewashed into credible form.

For the whitewashing to be effective, that which is (a) gormless must be quashed; and (b) credibly headlinable headlined.

Part of the gormless in the present case is the notion that 9/11 was conceptualised, justified, plotted, planned, funded and bought and paid for, set in motion, practised and reviewed, approved for get-go and finally executed all within the first 8 months of W. Bush's presidency.

We all know it wasn't so.

Most realise the plot itself must have been hatched sometime before Bush took office. Tell-tale flags dot the plausible scenario:

The World Trade Centre was first attacked during Bill's tenure. Bin Ladin's anti-American jihad was already aflame through that tenure. Clinton's US - unlike Bush's -quantified jihad attacks under the "criminal" legal banner. Bush's US - unlike Clinton's - was from the get-go fashioned weak and isolated following a disputed presidential election, aggressive Chirac grandstanding at the head of a new trans-European assertiveness, and 'world opinion' uproar post-Kyoto.

I say 'fashioned' because:

(a) the US may be argued not to have then actually been especially weak or isolated;
(b) Chirac may not have been seen by confreres to have been any kind of real trans-European messiah, just as
(c) Europe may not have been especially homogonous or
(d) Kyoto especially apt as a device to save the world from greenhouse toxicity, or
(e) the world especially in need of saving from said toxicity.

'World opinion', however, was based at the time of 9/11 upon such shibboleths.

Their validity or otherwise would have had little weight with Bin Ladin and Qaeda, who we now know to place much weight on utilising images and propaganda as a conjunctive to activity.

9/11 was a made-for-television event, complete with its live second plane crash. Bin Ladin videos and tapes since that time, and the assortment of snuff slayings and fear clips put out by his comrades, are also made for television. Bin Ladin's letter to America on the eve of Bush's re-election was timed for television, and conceived as if by Michael Moore, designed to tap into the popular far left propaganda of the time.

Such is the modus operandi of an agitator militarily inferior to its enemy. It must project power beyond means, hence propaganda is an essential tool in its armoury.

There is nothing new or exceptional to Bin Ladin in the MO itself - the scale of activity (atativity?) he figureheads is historic. Given the givens, we can safely say that a zeitgeist Muslim world perception of American weakness probably influenced the timing of 9/11, just as the perception of Clinton corruption and hubris probably influenced the attack's conception.

What would someone like Bin Ladin have made of President Clinton's infamous 'Monica bombs' - those astounding sudden rocket attacks on countries in the traditional Islamic belt that coincided with US Congressional deliberations over the Clinton impeachment?

Surely this is something he would have been rather upset about, and uninclined to whitewash or forgive, coming from the hated country that spun the Mossadeq web, that inherited Sykes-Picot, that produced Capone, "The Godfather" and the JFK kerfuffle. That befriends and protects Israel.

Further, what would Qaeda members and their leader-in-cave have made of the reasons for the Clinton impeachment, the sexual proclivities and actions of the married sitting President with a near-minor, or of the matters investigated by the Starr committee in the lead-up to the impeachment, including - for this was part of the core meat of Starr's original mandate - the alleged trade of political favours and information for money?

All of the above-implied allegations against Clinton can be argued, in a western sense, to be unexceptional products of realpolitic.

Bin Ladin, however, is of course not a person with western sensibilities.

The conception of the American-led west as rife with corruption and immorality is germane to Islamist hatred: when Shiite Khomeini called the US "The Great Satan" and when Sunni ideologue Sayyid Qutb coined that term, they were referring not to the political or the military, but to matters of morality and integrity, to the sexual, to the religious, to Q'uranic categorisation of Satan as "tempter".

Many in the west regard the morally suspect Bill Clinton as perhaps merely more and even more-admirably Machiavelian than assorted predecessors, as a product of 'the system', as a complex good-and-bad - but hey, at least potent - character of the type found in a James Ellroy novel. The Islamist world cannot be expected to entertain similar ideals or accepted bounds of perceived villainy, particularly where, as in the case of the 'Monica bombs' - or in the continuing presence of US soldiers near Mecca, the reddest (greenest?) of flags in Islamist eyes - their own world can be seen to figure in the consequences of such villainy.

It was on such terms - their terms - that the 9/11 action was conceived and justified.

Whether one agrees with them or not, we must have regard to their views if we are to honestly understand the process by which the 9/11 attacks became reality, and President Clinton's latest rejection of responsibility neither helps in that regard, nor serves to relieve the impression that self-interest appears to dictate his proferrings on this and most subjects.

It's hard to imagine what realistic options there can be to deal with Ahmmadabudjihad, short of assassination or bombing Iran. You know what Iran will do with nukes once they get their hands on them - it's inevitable that the terror-inspired fear factor would be exponentially greater than now.

And we know that the Iranian leader is an Islamist True Believer.

They say he sees the messiah in the mirror.

He says his very success along the path to nukedom, as infidels and enemies 'bow down before him', is proof of the good of his self-adopted mission from Allah.

So a few dashes of different proofs in that pudding are probably not a bad thing at all.

Yet Chirac is now being reported as saying that the UN Security Council shouldn't even be sanctioning Iran.

It doesn't seem particularly wise, on the surface, not that I have ever been inclined to be a Chiracian appreciator.

The explanation, according to Britain's "Independent" newspaper, is:

The concession to Iran seems to be linked to events in Lebanon, where there had been concern that French soldiers may be targeted by Iran's proxy militia, Hizbollah

Now, Chirac can't be criticised for protecting his countrymen, but I do have problems with accepting that simply rolling over and spreading your legs, in the face of apparent threats, is the best way to achieve that in the long term.


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Regarding the Reuters' report cited below, other than in the way described all elements conform to the slant expected, the thrust of the item appearing to be to make fun of a US Senator who dares make fun of the Iranian president's name.

Making fun of a non-American President's name is, of course, unacceptable in Reutergrad and in an entirely different category to relentlessly ridiculing an American President's Republicanness, name, religious beliefs, speech, tax policies, supporters, physical ailments (real or imagined), facial expressions, associates, education, intelligence, foreign policy, general knowledge, accent, domestic policies, children, father, barbecue habits, working hours, capacity, worldliness, national guard service or pronounciation, which is all acceptable. Don't even pretend otherwise.

Imagine how difficult open-mouthed and bumbling Dubya-isation would be if the very handle "Dubya" didn't exist to hang it all on. Or the nightmare if Ahmadinejad was allowed to Ahmagog- and armageddon-ised.

Is it a typo, an aberration, a dissenting Reuporter on jihad, a change in policy?

Not once but twice in a single news report we today find Reuters using the the word "terrorism" without scare quotes:

The United States accuses Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons, of supporting terrorism and of aiding the insurgency in Iraq. Iran says its nuclear program is to generate nuclear power.

... President George W. Bush delivered a speech at the U.N. General Assembly in which he said the Iranian government was using the country's resources to fund terrorism and pursue nuclear weapons.

From Victor Hanson:

"The only surprise about the edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf that has become a best seller in Middle Eastern bookstores is its emboldened title translated as “Jihadi”- as in “My Jihad”- confirming in ironic fashion the “moderate” Islamic claim that “jihad” just means “struggle,” as in an “inner struggle”- as in a Kampf perhaps."