Kelblogg to Ex-Presidents: SHUT THE HELL UP!

I just got done reading the German magazine Der Spiegel's interview with former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, and after I picked my jaw up off the floor, all I can say is, when will Democratic ex-presidents shut the hell up already?

Look around and tell me how much political commentary you see out there from ANY former Republican ex-president. Then look at the two Democratic ones: Carter and Clinton. They are both all over the news endlessly. This used to be an unwritten rule, that you stay out of the limelight once you're out of office. Let future administrations do their thing without your comments to muck things up. Former presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush NEVER made comments about anything political once they'd left office. But apparently megalomaniac socialists Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton cannot help themselves.

Now Carter is off in Germany, bashing President Bush and American society. His commentary is truly incredible. This is a former president of the United States! Take 5 minutes and read this interview with Mr. Carter. It truly is a must-read.

I hardly know where to begin as far as criticism. Besides the "keep a low profile" mantra that Carter should have been keeping, his factual misstatements and outrageous opinions, given and published OVERSEAS, during a time of war, are beyond belief. I have lost what tiny amount of respect I still had for this joke of a president. I remember his presidency, and it was an abject failure on every front. High inflation, gasoline rationing and long lines, American hostages being taken in Iran, you name it.

Let's just tackle a few of the president's comments:

I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon. What happened is that Israel is holding almost 10,000 prisoners, so when the militants in Lebanon or in Gaza take one or two soldiers, Israel looks upon this as a justification for an attack on the civilian population of Lebanon and Gaza. I do not think that's justified, no.

Wow, what a whopper. He's a bigger fool than I thought. First of all, Israel holds NO political prisoners. Name ONE. Any prisoners they hold are criminals who were caught in the act (of things like murdering innocent people in cold blood) and put through a fair trial before imprisonment, just like in the U.S. Why should Israel return these folks? By contrast, Hezbollah (a terrorist group, by the way) has been attacking Israel across internationally-recognized and guarded borders ever since the day Israel vacated southern Lebanon. They've used rockets and soldiers to do this, and when Israel finally attacked a month ago, it was in response to a massive rocket barrage and an illegal crossing by Hezbollah where they killed 7 Israeli soldiers and kidnapped another before crossing back into Lebanon. What was Israel supposed to do? So Carter is a liar and an appeasing fool.

SPIEGEL: One main points of your book is the rather strange coalition between Christian fundamentalists and the Republican Party. How can such a coalition of the pious lead to moral catastrophes like the Iraqi prison scandal in Abu Ghraib and torture in Guantanamo?

First of all, in my opinion the stupidity at Abu Ghraib happened precisely because of a lack of religiosity there. Chaplains were told to stay out of everyone's way at Abu Ghraib. Keep to themselves. They did, and look what happened. When the new administration there came in, they put the chaplains front and center as one of their first orders of business. As far as torture at Guantanamo, that is so ridiculous as to be funny. Prisoners at Gitmo are treated better than any other prisoner in the history of warfare. They're given 3 squares a day and allowed to pray and given copies of the Koran to use. In addition, soldiers are told never to speak of or treat the Korans disrespectfully, out of respect for their prisoners. In return, they get prisoners faking illnesses to draw the soldiers in close, then get pelted with human feces and urine, and generally mistreated by these barbarians under their care. Furthermore, the "torture" the interviewer speaks of is nothing of the sort. We're not pulling guys' fingernails off or raping them or anything else even remotely close. Instead, they're subjected to such horrors as having to listen to annoying sounds, being kept awake for days at a time, etc. Boo hoo. So the statement and question itself is already idiotic.

Now consider Carter's response:

Carter: The fundamentalists believe they have a unique relationship with God, and that they and their ideas are God's ideas and God's premises on the particular issue. Therefore, by definition since they are speaking for God anyone who disagrees with them is inherently wrong. And the next step is: Those who disagree with them are inherently inferior, and in extreme cases -- as is the case with some fundamentalists around the world -- it makes your opponents sub-humans, so that their lives are not significant. Another thing is that a fundamentalist can't bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality. And so this administration, for instance, has a policy of just refusing to talk to someone who is in strong disagreement with them -- which is also a radical departure from past history.

I don't disagree with Carter very much on his characterization of fundamentalists. He goes overboard when he talks about "sub-humans," as no fundie that I've met thinks like this. They just believe the rest of Christianity (and everyone else) is seriously misguided and headed for Hell. I disagree, but it's a position I can at least respect.

However, more importantly, President Bush is NOT a fundamentalist. Not even close. Bush is an Evangelical, and there is a significant difference. In addition, Carter is asserting, here, that Bush's religion is somehow infecting the entire government and crossing that all-important (and made-up) wall between church and state. This is ridiculous, and so Carter's reasoning totally falls apart from the get-go. He is claiming that Bush refuses to negotiate with Hezbollah and the Palestinians because he's religious and looks down on both groups. Here is the truth: Bush, as a devout Christian, recognizes Evil when he sees it and stands up to it, instead of appeasing it, understanding that you can't legitimately negotiate with evil terrorists. Their goal is to wipe out Israel and the West, period. You don't negotiate that because it's an immoral and illegitimate position. That Carter, who at the time of presidency was the most overtly religious president in decades, doesn't see that is a real question mark.

I can't keep up with all the ridiculous and outrageous positions stated in this interview -- or even comment on the photographs of Carter alongside his Communist dictator buddy Fidel Castro -- but get a load of this:

SPIEGEL: You've been called the moral conscience of your country. How do you look at it yourself? Are you an outsider in American politics these days or do you represent a political demographic that could maybe elect the next US president?

Carter: I think I represent the vast majority of Democrats in this country. I think there is a substantial portion of American people that completely agree with me.

If that's true, then this country is headed down the toilet quickly.

Setting aside the absolutely preposterous comment that Jimmy Carter is the "moral conscience of the country," the immediate response is, of course, it's not true. There's no doubt many people think like him. However I don't believe the "vast majority of Democrats" agree with him, and I guarantee not a single Republican does. And I'll say this: Truman Democrats, a dying breed, should get on their knees and pray to God that the extreme left in this country, which has been taking over their party, loses its foothold and the party again becomes serious and respectable. The sooner the Democrats get serious and stop pandering to these insane atheist left-wingers, the sooner the country can again get back to have legitimate respectful debates on political questions.

All the Treason That's Fit to Print

The New York Times and L.A. Times are under massive fire from conservatives, and some liberals, this week for running a story a week ago about a secret U.S. government program that, under power of international subpoena, data-mined the financial records of a Belgian consortium that was known to handle transactions and probably money laundering schemes of known terrorists. The Belgian outfit, named SWIFT, provided this information, our people dissected it, and terrorists were actually caught with it.

No one who knew about the secret program questioned its legality, yet the NY and LA Times almost simultaneously ran major stories detailing the program's operations, under the idea of the public's need to know. Why the public had a need to know, no one seems to know. The paper's writers and editors, doing only interviews with "friendly" interviewers where they won't be seriously challenged, have made only nebulous assertions that the methods the government is using could conceivably be brought bear against the domestic population, so people need to know about this. That's it.

One thing is for certain: Al Qaeda now knows all.

It really is beyond despicable that these newspapers and their writers hate the country that enriches them so much that they are willing to sell it out in this way. Whether it was the truly damaging report a year ago on the administration's pursuit of terrorist telephone conversations into and out of the country -- which the NY Times (the same reporter - James Risen) exposed and which was completely secret -- or this program, which was also secret and had been proven to work, the Times appears not to care in any way. And they still claim they're not agenda-driven. Right.

Perhaps the most galling, the Times personnel have said in interviews that although the U.S. government met with them and urged them not to publish the story, they (the Times) thought and thought about it, then decided it was not going to cause any harm and published.

Where do you start with such asinine statements???? The government has pleaded with you to not publish to the entire world the details of a program no one is supposed to know about and the details of which you received from a person with security clearance who has broken the law by telling you. You listen to the government's pleadings (or do you, really?) and then you take it upon yourself, in your infinite wisdom and knowledge on national security matters, to go ahead and tell the whole world anyway. First of all, what claim do these people have to any real understanding of national security, the need for secrecy, the damage lost secrets can wreak, etc.? They are reporters. They have never even been run through a national security background check, much less received an official intel briefing. They haven't got the faintest damned idea of what damage their actions can cause. Yet they are arrogant enough to believe they know it all. Un-freaking-believable.

And in the second place, who died and made them intelligence czar? Who says they GET to release this information? On whose authority are they releasing state secrets to the world?

The Times argues that it's unreasonable to believe that Al Qaeda didn't already know this stuff. That's absolutely prepostorous and laughable. Every terrorist knew the specifics of what was being tracked, how, and where?

One thing's for sure: They do now. Guess who won't get caught there any more?

For its part, the U.S. Congress today was debating a non-binding resolution to basically censure "the media" for this outrage. Asked on national radio yesterday whether the NY Times or the LA Times would be named in the resolution, my local Congressman David Dreier said "No", and then went on to sputter about how it's not just them that are at fault, here, and that this kind of thing has happened before with other media outlets, he's sure of it, etc. etc. What a bunch of absolute garbage!! Hugh Hewitt, not known for getting angry, referred to himself as "ballistic" when he heard this. He asked Dreier a half-dozen times about this rationale, not buying it for a second, and I think Dreier, a political animal from head to toe, was expecting all kinds of praise for this act but got nothing but outrage and grief. Good. I was yelling at him myself during my drive home, listening to his nonsense. For God's sake, what does a newspaper have to do in this country to get scolded by the government??? How damaging a state secret do they have to reveal??

Mark my words: This stuff will not stop until the Bush Administration actually takes action against these traitors. Conservative pundit Andrew McCarthy said on Laura Ingraham's show the other day that the Times reporters ought to be brought into court under subpoena and asked who their leaker source was, and when they refuse to divulge the source, toss 'em in jail until they're willing to talk. He says they can be kept there for 18 months. Would it be worth a year and a half of confinement to not reveal a source that had damaged national security? Let's find out.

Reporter James Risen should be on the hook for 3 years, as far as I can tell, since he also broke the NSA wiretapping story a year ago. Is that leak - which did serious damage - even being investigated?? Who's to say that Risen's source is not the same person in both cases? Isn't it important to a) get that person out of the intelligence loop to stop further damage, and b) to lock that person up for treason? Why aren't we pursuing this? Why can't we muster even half as much outrage and prosecutorial zeal as the liberals have done in pursuing the Valerie Plame non-story?

Read more outrage at pretty much ANY conservative blog on the web. Hugh Hewitt has talked about it all week long, and Ann Coulter has an as-usual-devastating piece about it on her online column.

One final note: For all their claims that this release of secret national security information is not helpful to the terrorists because they already knew it all, word came out yesterday that the Belgians are "reviewing" the whole SWIFT program and it seems likely that they will end their cooperation with the U.S. government on it. If that's true, then it's PROVEN damage that these traitorous reporters have wrought against the United States.

Illegal Immigration Article Roundup

The Senate passed its unbelievably ridiculous bill today - during Mexican President Vicente Fox's visit to California - proving beyond any doubt how out-of-touch this body is with the American public. Only the House of Representatives stands between us and our continued - possibly accelerated - spiral down into oblivion.

For the life of me I cannot understand how so many Republicans could possibly vote for such an asinine piece of legislation.

Republicans have had control of both houses of Congress since 1994, and the Executive branch since 2000. Yet liberal legislation like this nonsense continues to get passed. Who is voting for these people? BOTH senators from Alaska voted YES. John McCain teams up with TED KENNEDY?? What is the world coming to?

One of the humdingers in this legislation include a provision that Republican Arlen Specter allowed in, which says the U.S. must consult with Mexico before building any kind of barrier at the border. It's this kind of un-serious legislation that will doom our country. Either terrorists will waltz through the border and start blowing up random shopping malls, or 15 million poor illegal Mexican immigrants will get amnesty (or continued lack of enforcement - same thing), have "anchor" children here, bringing more relatives and much larger families in with them, while sending billions of American dollars south to support Mexico's economy. All while continuing to turn the United States into a third-world country.

Michelle Malkin has a nice roundup of comments on the bill here and the "consultation" language here.

Charles Krauthammer, excellent as always:

...is it just conservatives who think the United States ought not be gratuitously squandering one of its greatest assets — its magnetic attraction to would-be immigrants around the world? There are tens of millions of people who want to leave their homes and come to America. We essentially have an NFL draft in which the United States has the first, oh, million or so draft picks. Rather than exercising those picks, i.e., choosing by whatever criteria we want — such as education, enterprise, technical skills and creativity — we admit the tiniest fraction of the best and brightest and permit millions of the unskilled to pour in instead.

South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint has a great "Top 10 Reasons to Oppose the Senate Amnesty Bill" list on his website.

ExposeTheLeft.com has audio and a transcript of a brilliant debate between Rush Limbaugh and Tony Snow, now the White House spokesman, on the bill.

The Washington Times ran an article on the bill's passage:

The leaders of both parties hailed the 62-36 passage as a historic success. Majority Leader Bill Frist said the vote represented the "very best" of the Senate.
"This is a success for the American people," the Tennessee Republican said. "It is a success for people who hope to participate someday in that American dream."

One wonders what could be further from the truth, or just how much worse of a Majority Leader we could possibly get in the Senate. Frist has been spineless every single day he's held that title.

And Mark Steyn, always good, writes about the Senate wanting to give illegal immigrants social security benefits for the work they did while illegal (i.e. using fraudulent social security documents). On John McCain's complaint on the Senate floor about his colleagues continuing to refer to his bill's provisions as "amnesty", Steyn made this brilliant observation:

"Call it a banana if you want to," he told his fellow world's greatest deliberators. "To call the process that we require under this legislation amnesty frankly distorts the debate and it's an unfair interpretation of it."

He has a point. Technically, an "amnesty" only involves pardoning a person for a crime rather than, as this moderate compromise legislation does, pardoning him for a crime and also giving him a cash bonus for committing it. In fact, having skimmed my Webster's, I can't seem to find a word that does cover what the Senate is proposing, it having never previously occurred to any other society in the course of human history.

I'm giving myself a headache. I'm going to bed. More this weekend. It's MEMORIAL DAY! PUT UP YOUR FLAG!

Gay Crusade Continues in California

The California State Senate this week passed a bill submitted by Sheila Kuhl, of ultra-liberal Santa Monica, that would mandate by law that any textbooks used by children in California include the contributions of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT) people in history. This, whether those people had anything noteworthy to contribute or not. So we're getting to the next step in what I call the Gay Crusade. Rewriting history, bringing people from history out of the closet posthumously, and writing about gay people who might have been completely marginal in every other respect, simply because they were (supposedly) gay.

If this bill passes the State Assembly (and it will), it will go to Governor Schwarzenegger's desk to be signed into law, and he has not taken an official position on this, yet. He has signed other pro-homosexual legislation in the past, though, so conservatives are rightly concerned.

I call it the "Gay Crusade" because it needs to be made obvious to people who haven't connected everything together, yet, that this is a master plan we're watching unfold, here. Up until 30 years ago, homosexuality was shunned by society as a perversion. When the AIDS crisis first broke out, people from all walks used to comment that it was God's punishment to gays for their behavior. When enough of this started happening, people started sympathizing more with homosexuals and, I believe, the door was opened for activists to begin parlaying that into real change in the culture. They argued, at the time, for common decency toward homosexuals, and simply to be left alone and not mistreated.

If it had stopped there, we might be somewhere today. But it did not. Once they won majority agreement to be left alone, they pushed for acceptance. This push for acceptance has been going on ever since. Acceptance of homosexuality as completely equal to heterosexuality is a done-deal as far as our media goes. Gay characters have been on television and in the movies for decades, now, and we are at the point in the gay lobby's "acceptance" campaign where we are now also supposed to completely accept homosexual unions. In other words, we've now gone beyond acceptance of each individual homosexual's choice of lifestyle, to accepting the homosexual relationships themselves. Gay relationships are depicted on mainstream television shows like "Will and Grace" in an effort to say, "we're exactly the same as you."

Recently we went beyond the "accept that the relationships are the same" argument and moved into "accept that the loving is the same" phase, where we were treated to watching homosexual kisses and even sex scenes in series like HBO's "Six Feet Under" and in the movie "Brokeback Mountain."

Amid all this insanity, we get Sheila Kuhl's "promote historical gay people" bill, which doesn't even limit itself to gay people. She has included transgenders, as well. People who change their sex or pretend to be the opposite sex. And this, regardless of whether the people actually contributed anything of historical value. And, whether those people were, in fact, GLBT, or alleged to have been so (a judgement call by the publishers).

But wait, it gets better. It doesn't only demand rewritings of textbooks. It also outlaws any activity that could be deemed hurtful or deragotory toward GLBT's on school campuses. So no judgement as to the morality of homosexuality at all. In fact, many have pointed out that this will no doubt lead to such things as King- and Queen-free proms and homecoming events, since that makes an assertion that the heterosexual union is the "normal" one. Make your own guesses as to other situations that could be equally ridiculed or shut down.

As absurd as this all sounds, it is really happening in the state of California. And if you don't live in California, you still should be concerned. Because California buys more books than any other state in the country, unless book publishers want to make "California" versions of their books (they won't), they will have to institute these changes in all their textbooks.

So there is a "master plan" at work, here, and this is just the latest salvo. How much further can it go?

What no one ever points out is that the Left, which runs this campaign, constantly characterizes their position as the one of "tolerance." The conservatives who oppose this sort of thing on moral grounds are the intolerant ones because we don't accept the Left's idea of sexuality. But this characterization is utterly and demonstrably false. Conservative people believe that the Bible is the word of the creator of the universe, God, and that His laws are to be taken seriously. He says unequivocally in several places in the bible that homosexual sex is a perverted action that leads to Hell, period. Man and Woman were made by God to be put together. Man and Woman, together, make the image of God. Even if you are not a religious person, you can easily see that men and women's genitalia were made to fit together, and for the purpose of procreation -- the perpetuation of the species. Yet the Left completely ignores all of these issues and belief systems in pursuit of its own agenda. That is the definition of intolerant. They do not tolerate everyone else's understandings of the way the world is. They are every bit as intolerant as they claim we are. In short, I will agree that I am intolerant of certain behaviors (and I make no apologies for it), but the Left will not admit this. They are hypocrites or ignorant, take your pick.

The Catholic Church has this to say about homosexuality:

Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered." They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

Yet all you hear from the Left is rhetoric about how "intolerant" we are and how tolerant they are. Don't believe it. In fact, we need to be fighting it hard, now more than ever. Just imagine where we'll be in 10 more years.

Today's Townhall Readings...

Some great work being done, as usual, over at Townhall. Doug Giles explains why no self-respecting Christian can vote the liberal ticket. Here are a few choice quotes:

Secularism to be continually mainlined into our public school system. Thanks to rabid, vapid secularism, our public schools and universities would rather you be a Rocky Horror super freak than a Christian. If your beliefs run to the bizarre or the banal; or if you want to smoke the same philosophical crack that Caligula, Nero, Castro or Lenin freebased, they'll accommodate you...Our schools are totally open to anyone and to anything, unless, of course, you're a Christian. And if that's the case, then you're likely to get more sympathy from a badger with minimal sleep than you will from liberal educators who are hard at work making your life hard.

The continued media endorsement of the same putrid, hedonistic stuff that sunk ancient civilizations. With the liberals in place, expect more weird crap in movies and on television. Expect to see more paintings of Christian symbols and saints smeared with elephant dung. Expect Christianity to be bashed and vilified and Christians made out to be buckled-shoed morons with three teeth and an IQ of 50. Expect the culture to coarsen. Expect your kids to continue to be exposed to things that only rock stars see backstage with groupies.

The Democratic Party's liberalism has degenerated over the last 40-50 years in regard to its view of Christianity and Christian rights. This party, which formerly embraced and protected our nation's great Christian heritage and teachings, no longer does so. Thus, today the Christian is between a rock and a hard place: he can either be a Christian or a liberal—but he cannot be both.

The whole thing is pretty aggressive; good reading. I read through a few other articles there, but most were not particularly powerful. Charles Krauthammer, however, never disappoints. His take on illegal immigration, which he's been writing quite a bit about lately, is dead-on. Today he's talking about the illegals' marches looking more American (fewer Mexican flags, more white t-shirts, etc.) and peaceful. The illegals are now comparing themselves to the blacks of the 60's. But Krauthammer, of course, isn't buying it:

Americans instinctively know the difference between these two civil rights crusades. Blacks were owed. For centuries they had been the victims of a historic national crime. The principal crime involved in the immigrant crusade is the violation of immigration laws by the illegals themselves.

Krauthammer sees the solution to this problem to be a tight border (for the first time), followed -- NOT preceded -- by amnesty. Here's the gist of his argument:

If you find a stranger living in your basement, you would be far more inclined to let him stay if he assured you that his ultimate intent is just to improve his own life and not to prepare the way for his various cousins waiting on the other side of your fence.

And that's the critical issue that the demonstrators and their supporters ignore. Is the amnesty they are demanding/requesting the beginning or the end? Is it a precedent or a one-time -- last time -- exception? Are they seeking open-ended immigration or do they agree that they should be the last wave of illegals?

So many big history-changing movements going on right now. Iran, illegal immigration, the liberal agenda. You really need to keep your eyes open in an environment like this.