Comments on: Nutroots aghast at possibility that conditions might be improving in Anbar

By: Hot Air » Blog Archive » Video: We’re making military progress, says … Dick Durbin?

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 17:33:26 +0000

[...] So shocked is CNN anchor John Roberts that he repeats the question — twice — to make sure he’s understood him correctly. Kudos to Roberts too for calling him on the goalpost-shifting here. Faced with the undeniable fact of the Anbar awakening (well, almost undeniable), the Democrats have subtly shifted from Reid’s and Pelosi’s and Edwards’s line that the surge has failed to the more nuanced (and more accurate) line that the political process has failed. Entirely true and entirely undisputed, from leftist bete noires O’Hanlon and Pollack on down to warmongering wingnut embed bloggers. More on that in a moment, but first click the image to watch. [...]

By: Hot Air » Blog Archive » NIE: Al Qaeda will probably try to use AQ in Iraq to attack U.S.

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:53:52 +0000

[...] If it’s not under his direct control it’s not for lack of trying. The obvious implication of the finding is that we can’t afford to leave AQI intact, but that means a sustained campaign in Iraq and the left won’t like that. So expect them to stick with withdrawal on grounds that either (a) AQI wouldn’t have existed but for the U.S. invasion, ergo we sort of deserve to lie in the bed we made or (b) the NIE was cooked by Bush to justify a sustained campaign and should be dismissed out of hand. That’s their approach to the Anbar awakening and to certain inconvenient facts about Iran. It’ll also be their approach to this New York Sun scoop on one of the non-declassified assessments in the NIE placing AQ leadership in two areas bordering Afghanistan: to the east, the Pakistani tribal regions and to the west… One of two known Al Qaeda leadership councils meets regularly in eastern Iran, where the American intelligence community believes dozens of senior Al Qaeda leaders have reconstituted a good part of the terror conglomerate’s senior leadership structure… [...]

By: Hot Air » Blog Archive » Finally: JD Johannes apologizes to Glenn Greenwald for believing the Anbar awakening exists

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 02:14:02 +0000

[...] ‘Bout time. I’ve seen this happen over and over with the embeds there. Johannes, Yon, Roggio, Bill Ardolino, Pat Dollard, reporters from every major print news organization in America — they go over, they’re not prepared for the heat, they don’t drink enough fluids, and they end up hallucinating. And curiously, it’s always the same hallucination: that the Sunnis in western Iraq have purged the Salafis in their midst and achieved an “astonishing success in Anbar,” as John Burns, the latest victim of neocon heat stroke, recently put it. The Times had better either treat him or get him out of there before it gets worse and he starts babbling that Al Qaeda in Iraq poses a significant security threat to the country. [...]

By: Hot Air » Blog Archive » Blast from the past: Missing Iranian general defected, now spilling nuclear secrets

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 18:03:35 +0000

[...] Hopefully the proliferation wonks at Danger Room will have some take on this tomorrow. I’m skeptical that a country that can’t quite get the centrifuges spinning right has somehow mastered cutting-edge laser technology, but anything’s possible. Exit question: How will ace reporter Glenn Ellers Ellensburg, fresh off his bombshell expose of the phantom awakening in Anbar that the world’s media has conspired to create, treat this rather troubling news? [...]

By: Hot Air » Blog Archive » NYT editorial: Pull out now

Hot Air » Blog Archive » NYT editorial: Pull out now — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 04:34:51 +0000

[...] That’s what he gets for cribbing from Ellensburg, whose own pathetic, agenda-driven denial about the “awakening” in Anbar is comically blown to pieces in tonight’s edition of — wait for it — the New York Times, in a piece by the typically excellent John Burns about the “astonishing success in Anbar” generally and Ramadi in particular. Of the three Times pieces linked here, that’s the one to read. Not because it’s optimistic (it isn’t) but because it puts the lie to Hoyt’s leftist complaints about the coverage. Click. [...]

By: Hot Air » Blog Archive » You don’t say: U.S. captures top Hezbollah bombmaker in Iraq

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 02:21:17 +0000

[...] Not even the left will be surprised by this but they’ll publicly scoff and attack the story anyway lest it give any more credence to Bush’s complaints about Iran. Greenwald used that same “reasoning” a few weeks ago with respect to the Anbar Awakening: it simply couldn’t be true, because if it’s true then it means progress really is being made and if progress is being made then it justifies extending the mission and we can’t have that. Ergo, it must be false. Doubtless one of the nutroots superfriends will deploy that logic tomorrow for this story. I’ll be sure to print it out and add it to my scrapbook of What Conservatives Can Learn from Liberals about Journalism, right next to Eric Boehlert’s lectures during Jamilgate about the danger of letting a political agenda shape one’s view of the facts. [...]

By: Hot Air » Blog Archive » Roger Ebert: If you criticize CNN, you might be a terrorist

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 22:22:13 +0000

[...] Bonus leftist blind-to-the-threat points: this comes in the context of a review of “A Mighty Heart,” the new film about the murder of Daniel Pearl by jihadist animals. Exit question: Does the stern bromide about those who resent the truth apply to the nutroots too or, per Eric Boehlert, does this avenue run one-way only? [...]

By: Hot Air » Blog Archive » Is the media “blacking out” the battle in Baquba?

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:37:30 +0000

[...] Exit question: How much heat is Klein going to take from the nutroots all-stars for daring to publish something vaguely positive about the battle? [...]

By: Hot Air » Blog Archive » Reid charms nutroots by dumping on Pace and Petraeus; Update: McCain rips Reid

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 15:15:48 +0000

[...] Pace is on his way out so he’ll skate from now on but prepare to see Petraeus impugned ever more shrilly as we get closer to September, even though he’s been handed an impossible situation and even though had his counterinsurgency plans been followed from the beginning of the war, we might be looking at a different reality now. Rick Ellensburg, always ahead of the curve, has already started spitting venom at him. More will follow, especially if the September report sounds anything like this. [...]

By: Hot Air » Blog Archive » Joe Klein hammers “often witless” nutroots “extremists”

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 15:27:59 +0000

[...] When last we checked on this tiresome spat, Rick Ellensburg was shrieking that there is no good news from Anbar province no matter what right-wing Nazi apologist Joe Klein might be hearing from his (snerk) military sources. On and on it goes, with Klein at some point having picked through the hundreds of open threads at Atrios’s site to find he’s been dubbed “Wanker of the Day.” It’s all part of the grand experiment to prove, with geometric logic, that the media is actually “right-wing” because liberals like Joe Klein aren’t left-wing enough. First, let me say that I really enjoy blogging. It’s a brilliant format for keeping readers up to date on the things I care about—and for exchanging information with them… [...]

By: Hot Air » Blog Archive » U.S. troops spring 41 Iraqis from Al Qaeda torture shop in Diyala

Sun, 27 May 2007 16:46:46 +0000

[...] As for that Anbar awakening that the nutroots persists in sneering at despite the fact that because it’s honest to goodness good news, the BushCo cheerleaders at the Chicago Tribune and Newsweek chime in with their own progress reports today. Verdict: no one can say yet how long it’ll last or how deep the new loyalties are, particularly if the Maliki government doesn’t reward them with reconstruction aid, but for the moment it’s for real. Newsweek: The Pentagon is praying that its new allies will reconfigure the war. The success of the Ramadi experiment has given rise to hopes that the model can be applied elsewhere in Iraq. A year ago insurgents were launching nearly 30 attacks a day in the city; now the daily average is less than one. Anbar province as a whole is showing similar improvements. Brig. Gen. John R. Allen, deputy commanding general of the Second Marine Expeditionary Force in Anbar and a tribal-affairs expert, describes the province as “a laboratory for counterinsurgency.” From roughly 500 attacks a week, the rate has sunk to barely a third of that figure. Weapons-cache discoveries, based largely on tips from sympathetic Iraqis in Ramadi, have skyrocketed nearly 190 percent. The fledgling local police force could muster only 20 recruits a year ago; today, with local sheiks encouraging tribe members to sign up, it has 8,000… [...]

By: todd76705

todd76705 — Fri, 25 May 2007 22:11:49 +0000

The Democrats were for victory before they were against.

By: UNCoRRELATED

UNCoRRELATED — Fri, 25 May 2007 18:21:15 +0000

True Religious Fanatics…

I’ve had way too many conversations with religious fanatics in my life. It started out as a effort to understand, and ended with the realization that I was dealing with people with an anti-empirical epistemology (a term of philosophy that……

By: Bradky

Bradky — Fri, 25 May 2007 06:06:53 +0000

I prefer: “Potestas Democraticorum delenda est!” because I hope to see in my lifetime the Democratic party outlawed, its leadership imprisoned for treason, it’s assets confiscated, and DNC headquarters imploded and leveled and replaced by a hot dog stand.georgej on May 25, 2007 at 1:47 AM

I look forward to the day when one of his guests brings a Louisville Slugger to the show and play HARDBALL with his mush-filled head. That’d be worth the price of cable for a year!
georgej on May 23, 2007 at 4:01 AM

I think you need to talk to a professional and soon.

By: georgej

georgej — Fri, 25 May 2007 05:47:26 +0000

“God help us if Roggio is right…”

No. God bless us if Roggio is right. And God DAMN the Democrats if Roggio is right. Damn them for being traitors to America.

Spurius Ligustinus wrote:

Cato the Elder used to close every speech he gave before the Roman Senate with the reminder, “Carthage must be destroyed.” A modern-day person who understands leftists like Cato understood the Carthaginians could be excused for concluding every post with, “Liberalism is a mental disorder.”

I prefer: “Potestas Democraticorum delenda est!” because I hope to see in my lifetime the Democratic party outlawed, its leadership imprisoned for treason, it’s assets confiscated, and DNC headquarters imploded and leveled and replaced by a hot dog stand.

There are so very few Democrats who are worthy of beind the political descendents of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Truman, JFK, or even Hubert Humphrey or “Scoop: Jackson. Zell Miller has retired. Joe Lieberman was kicked out of his party. The “blue dogs” or so-called conservative Democrats elected last November are toeing the line hewed by Pelosi, Murtha, Reid, and Kennedy. They are TOADIES, nothing more.

By: Doug

Doug — Fri, 25 May 2007 05:00:51 +0000

It’s a geographic fact! If you are standing in Iraq facing North, ‘De Nile’ is to the Left.

I need sleep.

By: God I love this « Cadillac Tight

God I love this « Cadillac Tight — Fri, 25 May 2007 03:10:59 +0000

[...] Allah has the netroot’s reaction to the good news from Anbar here. [...]

By: TallDave

TallDave — Thu, 24 May 2007 23:39:18 +0000

Allah — I wouldn’t worry about Greenwald, he’s got lots of imaginary friends to see him through this crisis.

By: LeatherPenguin » Joe Klein Reaps the Nutroots Whirlwind

LeatherPenguin » Joe Klein Reaps the Nutroots Whirlwind — Thu, 24 May 2007 23:35:46 +0000

[...] via Allahpundit: Nutroots aghast at possibility that conditions might be improving in Anbar What’s funny is that I remember Eric Boehlert tut-tutting righty bloggers back at the time of the Jamil Hussein story about not being able to accept the reality in Iraq as reported by the mainstream media. In fact, the opposite has always been true: any good news, however small and no matter what its mainstream media pedigree, is received by the left with hostility and summarily adjudged discredited. That’s especially true in this case because Anbar was written off by military insiders last fall as lost to Al Qaeda, so to see hope revive in an area that was supposed to serve as Exhibit A in the left’s case for withdrawal is an especially bitter pill for them to swallow. For most of America, of course, it’s good news. [...]

By: crosspatch

crosspatch — Thu, 24 May 2007 23:11:25 +0000

I think you forgot Bosnia and Kosovo.

By: Freelancer

Freelancer — Thu, 24 May 2007 22:35:03 +0000

I think the hawks need to present the withdrawal concept with some historical perspective.

How about we pull out of the countries we’ve occupied in the last hundred years, in the same order we entered them? That means we need to withdraw from Germany, Italy, Spain, Iceland, Japan, and Korea before we leave Iraq. Yes, I think those other countries can probably function on their own just about now, and from a combat point of view, our troops haven’t killed too many enemies in those countries lately.

On the other hand, in Iraq there are still tens of thousands of terrorists/unsurgents that we are responsible for mopping up, since we are the invading/occupying nation. As soon as the problem is small enough for the Iraqi infrastructure to handle on its own, we should leave, and keep no more of our military behind than we’ve kept in say, Japan for the last 62 years.

By: Ed Driscoll.com

Ed Driscoll.com — Thu, 24 May 2007 21:40:51 +0000

All Too Eager To Be Rolled…

In The Washington Examiner, Lorie Byrd writes:An aspect of the war on terrorism that gets too little attention, yet is as important as any other, is the media war. Whether they realize it, members of the mainstream media are participants……

By: Karl

Karl — Thu, 24 May 2007 21:33:22 +0000

I must note that when Thomas Ricks was was claiming Anbar was lost, Bill Roggio was noting that his military and intelligence sources, who had actually seen the entire report, were mad about the misreporting. And that same Roggio post noted the Anbar tribes banding togethr to fight AQ.

By: The Ritz

The Ritz — Thu, 24 May 2007 21:15:07 +0000

The left is more afraid of Bush succeeding then they are of the Jihadists succeeding

William Amos on May 24, 2007 at 4:42 PM

NAILED!

By: crosspatch

crosspatch — Thu, 24 May 2007 20:52:01 +0000

The thing is, before we went to war in Iraq, there was a joint Spain/UK/Italy proposed resolution that would explicitly authorize our invasion if Saddam didn’t comply with the inspections. France played a major role in shooting that down before it was even presented so it never got a UNSC vote.

Now it turns out the Chirac has this secret $30 million bank account in Japan and if it turns out there was any money from Saddam in there, the entire lead-up to the war takes on a completely different look.