joyfulchristian

Depends on your definition of "everyone"

Dahlia Lithwick on Hillary

Clinton did answer one burning question: “What does she want?” She just wants to win the war, turn the economy around, and fix health care. Since we all of us want those things, too, her real desire is actually to be the person who does it. Why doesn’t she just say that?

Really, everyone wants to win the war? Even all those people demanding we bring the troops home NOW regardless of the consequences?

Ahh, good old Reuters

..., the "news service":

GAZA (Reuters) - "It was Bush."

The verdict was near unanimous amid the tears and rage on Palestinian streets after Israel killed Hamas leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi in an air strike Saturday that many Arabs felt President Bush (news - web sites) must have approved.

"Bush has Rantissi's blood on his hands," said Khamis Saadi, among tens of thousands who swept into Gaza's shabby streets.

"All doors to hell should be opened against the Israelis and against the Americans," he cried.

U.S. officials denied giving a green light to Israel.

Rantissi was a mass murderer. He didn't commit the murders by his own hand, but he ordered the deaths of who knows how many innocents. It wouldn't bother me in the slightest to find out that Sharon had asked Bush, "Mind if we kill Rantissi?' and tha Bush had answered, "Go for it."

Sadly, I don't believe that's what happened. While the President has been supportive of Israel, he has shown a striking inability to understand that the Israelis have been fighting the same fight for 50 years that we've been fighting for the last 2 1/2. If we spotted Osama driving through the hills of Pakistan or Afghanistan, I have little doubt that Bush would order an attack. But I seriously doubt he would have approved this.

Not to fear, the Bush hating Palestinians have another theory:

But Palestinians, fuming over unprecedented concessions Bush gave Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites) last week for a Gaza pullout plan, felt Rantissi's killing was just another action in the same vein.

Sharon's Palestinian counterpart, Ahmed Qurie, called it "a direct result of American encouragement and the complete bias of the American administration toward the Israeli government."

The United States has always been a target of Palestinian and Arab ire because of its close relations with Israel.

But Bush's statement that Israel could expect to keep chunks of the West Bank seized in the 1967 Middle East war and ruled out a return of refugees to what is now Israel was felt by many Palestinians as a death blow for dreams of a real state.

"Bush freed the hands of Sharon to do whatever he liked with the Palestinian people, to kill their leaders and to confiscate their land," said one mourner in Gaza called Hammad.

By this logic, several EU ministers and presidents are "directly responsible" for the explosion of pizza parlors in Israel.

Meanwhile, no one has the guts to call Arafat a mass murderer. I will. Arafat is not a freedom fighter. He is a petty thug. A thief who's squirreled away millions, if not billions of dollars intended as humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people. And he is a murderer.

And taking out Hamas leaders is all well and good, but avoids the most fundamental problem. I hate to say something like this, but I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: There can be no peace as long as Arafat lives.

Okay. Yeah. Uh-huh.

More from that paradise to the south:

Fidel Castro accused U.S. President George W. Bush on Friday of plotting with Miami exiles to kill him as part of his administration's hardening policies against the communist-run island.

''We know that Mr. Bush has committed himself to the mafia ... to assassinate me,'' the Cuban president said, using the term commonly employed here to describe anti-Castro Cuban Americans.

Castro's comments came at the end of a 5 ½ hour speech that began Thursday night and continued into early Friday at the closing of a conference bringing together activists across the region who oppose the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

The Cuban leader didn't back up his accusations with specific details.

Of course he didn't back up the accusation with specifics. There's about as much chance of Bush ordering Castro's death as there is of me being elected President. Maybe less. (I am, after all, a natural-born citizen.)

This brings me back to an old theme of mine. We've now started down the path of removing tyrants on general principle. Where do we draw the line? Do we only remove those tyrants that we think cause a danger to ourselves? Or do we just do that first before we start going after them all?

We've now gone half-way across the world to overthrow a tyrant and free his people. Meanwhile, there's been one on our doorstep for 40 years and we've never given more than token efforts toward getting rid of him. How, exactly, do we justify our inaction?

I only wish

Joshua Claybourn points out a Hillary Clinton quote that almost defies belief:

She said that Bush, who campaigned as a "compassionate conservative" in 2000, had taken a "hard-right turn to pursue an extremist agenda" after moving into the White House.

"I don't know where it came from, but the fact is that this President Bush has not only been radical and extreme in terms of Democratic presidents but in terms of Republican presidents, including his own father," she says.

Now the first thing you've got to keep in mind is that when Hillary says "radical and extreme" she doesn't mean "outside the mainstream." She means, "ultra-conservative." ¹

Let's review shall we. President Bush has created a brand new cabinet department, thrown massive amounts of money down the hole that is the Department of Education, expanded the budget at a rate that would make LBJ drool, signed CFR which he had to know violated 1st Amendment association and speech protections, and just signed one of the biggest new entitlements in US history. All of this from a man who is supposedly so conservative that he's "radical and extreme."

I swear, in American politics today, words don't mean anything. Polticians throw words around because of their emotional content alone. Not only is no attention paid to whether or not accusations are true, no attention is paid to whether or not the accusations make sense or are logically consistent.

Anyway, as you can see I've put this post under a new category. The Left makes silly statements like this regarding Bush all the time and I want to start collecting them. This category is devoted to collecting everything liberals say about Bush that I wish were true. If you come up with any, please let me know.

¹ Of course, as far as she's concerned those are the same thing.