The Anchoress

I am still under the weather. Hopefully tomorrow will be back on my feet.

This is very, very hard to watch. And you’ll only watch it once. (Via Laura)

But watch it, you should. And imagine what it must have been like up there, for Kevin Cosgrove and the others, helpless, unable to breathe, knowing you are probably not going to make it out, talking to a dispatcher who can do nothing for you but listen - who is likely dying on the inside because she cannot do more…then…“oh, God…”

While you’re watching, be cognizant of the fact that if those planes had struck the WTC 15 minutes later, the enemy might have managed to kill, not 3,000, but 30,000. And that would have pleased them just fine. Realize that there is an enemy out there that doesn’t want anything from us, not land, not money, not concessions…they simply want us dead. It is an enemy that will kill 300,000 and feel only bloodlust for even more, an enemy that does not mind dying to achieve this goal. When your enemy does not care whether he lives or dies, you cannot pussyfoot around him, you cannot make concessions, you cannot appease, you cannot fight a “nice” war. You have to simply go in there and wipe them out.

Which, btw, neither the US, nor Israel have done, all protestors to the contrary.

Still under the weather, and I’m supposed to be in bed, but I snuck out to read news. A quick spin around the internets:

Check out the nifty interview of Jim at Gateway Pundit. Very nice and the attention is more than deserved, as you can see simply by scrolling down his site each and every day. Always interesting and informative, and often GP brings you stories no one else is mentioning.

The American Thinker looks at an “insider” DU poll that is a little depressing.

Buster is begging me to fisk this woman but I haven’t the energy. He says if I don’t do it by Sunday, he might do it for me. He has quite a lot to say about her. I personally think there is a happy medium between over-doting on kids and being so detached from them that you can’t bear to sit through a movie with them - in a theater - without text-messaging your friends. There must be a happy medium between insisting that you spend every second with your kids and insisting that your own life comes first. This lady does not live in the happy-medium place.

I loved driving my kids around, and was sad when they got their licenses and that part of my life ended. We had some of our best, most productive chats in the car as I chauffered my kids and their friends from one place to the other, and some of our biggest laughs. I can still remember the time my Elder Son, an uncanny mimic, had me laughing so hard with his impressions of our parish priests that I - completely breathless - had to pull over or risk getting us all killed. This mother can’t bear the idea of subjegating her life or freedom or time to the needs of her kids and she’s apparently afraid of spending “30 hours a week” (!) driving them around. What a shame. I miss those car-times, a lot.

Melanie Phillips writes: What is essentially a war of defence and of survival, however, is being presented to Britons in their armchairs as a war by Israel of unconscionable aggression, with all the suffering taking place among the Lebanese who are in turn presented as the innocent bystanders caught up in a war in which they have no standing. The fact that Hezbollah was elected to the Lebanese parliament, holds government portfolios and has been allowed to operate with impunity by the Lebanese as a state within a state to carry out its murderous objectives towards Israel is almost totally ignored. Yes, innocent Lebanese are dying and suffering in this war, and that is awful. Innocent civilians, tragically, are always victims in any war. But Lebanon itself is not an innocent bystander at all. Right. Also, read Krauthammer and Beinart, if you missed them.

Ed Morrissey relates that Israel is calling up 30,000 reservists. This shouldn’t have been as difficult as it has become. But Israel is trying to make war as nicely as possible, to please the critics. It doesn’t really work. Churchill never sent out flyers to let the enemy know where they would next be striking. Israel does, pays for that in blood, and is still criticized.

Dr. Sanity has (and links to) brilliant commentary on that new and odd development in modern warfare - the need to make war while being “nice.” You’ll want to read it.

The Democrats are vowing to obstruct again, and defeat John Bolton’s appointment to the UN. Why? Other UN officials don’t like him!. Awwww…and here we thought his job was to look after US interests…turns out it was to make other officials like him. Check out Bolton eviscerating John Kerry and handing him his entrails in that video. Democrats: what leadership! I want them in power, mmmmhmmmm!

Did you hear WMD were found in So. Iraq? Neither did I.

Mamacita is writing about education and testing and you should read it, if you have kids. Yes, we have some pretty lousy schools. Some of them are lousy because they hired lousy teachers. However, I believe that many of our “lousy” schools are bad because of the political pressure of certain families who WILL NOT ALLOW their kids to be challenged, punished, or in any way whatsoever held responsible for their own actions, and by a society that insists that it is not a kid’s fault if he/she behaves badly: it’s SOCIETY’S fault, poor kids, poor poor kids, and they crush, kill, destroy, disrupt, vandalize, talk back, threaten, bully, sleep, sell drugs, take drugs, rape, harass, street-talk, mug, skip, and otherwise renege on the unwritten school/society/student contract because of somebody else, not themselves. The poor things can’t help it. It’s not their fault. They’re victims of the system. It is this lack of backup from families, and administrators who are unwilling to buck the political system of a community and crack down HARD on offenders, that are our worst problem. Spot on. My best pal is a high school Social Studies teacher in a very “rich” school district and the parents are, in her words, “out of control and disinterested in having their kids held accountable for their own work.”

Ever get invited somewhere only to find out your there to make it easier on the inviter? Tracey has. We’ve all been there, she reflects on it.

There are so many great things to link to, but I’m getting really tired and can’t do all the nice chit-chatty-lead-in stuff right now, and while I know I am missing many important bloggers, I hope they’ll forgive it. Meanwhile, just trust me when I say that if you go to any of these following links, you will be reading something good, thoughtful and important! Gerald on Baby Boomers, Alexandra’s Voice from the Grave, Victor Davis Hanson’s Vocabulary of Untruth, Blue Crab’s Acts of Barbarism and his defense of Condi against unconscionable condescension, Siggy’s Future Written Yesterday, Shrinkwrapped’s futher thoughts on strategy and on narcissism. Patterico has everything you ever wanted to know about sockpuppetry.

And don’t forget to check out my blogroll…lots of good stuff there. Now, I’m really done.

I read the news and all I can think is, we need Winnie! In this hour, only this sort of voice will do.

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, What is our policy? I will say; “It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.” You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”
- Winston Churchill, to the House of Commons on May 13, 1940 in his first address as the newly appointed Prime Minister.

And, another Churchillian speech - this time before the House of Commons, June 18, 1940, on the eve of the Battle of Britain. Let’s play a game, shall we? Let’s remove the worlds “Britain” or “England” or “Hitler” or “Christian” and replace them with some timely equivalants:

I expect that the Battle of Britain [our times] is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian [Western] civilization. upon it depends our own British [Israeli] life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire [Holy Land]. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us now. Hitler [Hezbollah] knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe [and the Middle East] may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire [Israel] … last[s] for a thousand years, men will say, “This was their finest hour.”

Man, do we need a Churchill today, to say these words, unambiguously, unblinkingly, without equivocation, without kowtowing to “correct” language.

Related: The Dark, Lamentable Catalogue.

Two must-read pieces, one from a conservative, and one surprising and welcome piece from a liberal.

Krauthammer, Conservative

What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world and given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?

Hearing the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world - governments, the media, UN bureaucrats - has completely lost its moral bearings.

Beinart, Liberal

The Democratic Party’s single biggest foreign policy liability is not that Americans think Democrats are soft. It is that Americans think Democrats stand for nothing, that they have no principles beyond political expedience. And given the party’s behavior over the past several months, it is not hard to understand why.

Oh, btw, CNN reveals how Hezbollah stages stuff. Good for them, I say. It is good that they are doing this, since just last week they were giving Hezbollah editorial control over their content.

It was just under a year ago that we were being told that Cindy Sheehan needed to register as a speaker, with an agency, because she needed to make some money.

The actual quote was: She said her contract with Speaking Matters, which has not yet disclosed how much a Sheehan appearance will cost, will help her “finally make some money …’cause Casey’s insurance money’s going to run out pretty soon.

I always thought it was perfectly respectable of a person to register with an speaker’s agency, if speaking was what one wanted to do, but I was grossed out by how Sheehan went about justifying her decision, and how some defended it, particularly when someone suggested that Sheehan “needed” to make the move because this healthy 40-something-year-old woman had “lost any income that her son might have brought her.”

I think this was about the time I really started to dislike Sheehan. When she played the “widows and orphans” card.

Anyway, here we are, a year later, and “Casey’s insurance money” has still not run out, since now Sheehan claims she is using “Casey’s insurance money” to buy a plot of land in Crawford, Texas.

War protester Cindy Sheehan has purchased a 5-acre plot in Crawford with some of the insurance money she received after her son was killed in Iraq.

The group she helps lead, Gold Star Families for Peace, says on its Web site that it will return next month to protest the war in Iraq in the small town near Waco where President Bush has a ranch. Like last year, Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, will again demand to meet with the president.

Ahem, please note that this article doesn’t bother to mention the fact that she has already met with President Bush.

Supposedly the folks who sold the land to her are saying now that they didn’t realize they were selling to Sheehan, since someone else acted as her agent. Aw, very nice, very “up front,” there, Cindy.

Apparently after she got snotty and used aggressive and stupid language toward someone who was trying to deal with her, the folks behind Sheehan figured out that Cindy’s sort of not easy to deal with. So they took care of the purchase for her. With “Casey’s insurance money.” Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Well, that’s nice for her. Now she has a permanent address from which she can work to embolden the insurgents who killed her son - her recently re-enlisted, war hero son - so that other mother’s sons may die, as well. She’s going to work to “bring the troops home,” so that Casey’s death, and all the others, can be completely in vain. She wants to render what has been heroic sacrifice - liberating a people, liberating women, bringing hope to a nation - into utter meaningless.

She’s got the vision thing.

I’m going back to bed. This farce is wearying.

Related:
Does Suffering Make us Exploitable?
The Company She Keeps
A Grotesque
Media Whores and their Creators

Sort of been ordered to bedrest for a few days in hopes that I won’t need an infusion of iron. They’ve knocked my daily dose up to what seems to be the equivalent of eating buckets of nails, and the numbers still suck. “The good news is your liver’s okay,” the doctor says, “the bad news is I don’t know how the hell your body is manufacturing red blood cells. Go home - here, eat all these nails and get some sleep. Drink Guinness - it makes you strong! And eat red meat! Eat it bloody! And eat beef broth, with some red wine poured into it! Get that bone marrow!”

My doctor is a lovely Italian fellow, not Irish, but he swears the Guinness helps, and is always telling me a daily bottle of the black-and-foamy would be a good thing. I keep forgetting.

This is not a terrible sentence. Buster grills up a flank steak, I get to listen to lots of music, and I’m reading both a good Chesterton book, The Ball and the Cross and, when that gets tiring, a pretty funny trashy romance a neighbor brought over…I’ll tell you about them when I have more energy…I’m also sleeping a whole lot. I’m totally tired.

And this speech is a moving winner. Read it all.

Or, if you can’t read it all, read some of the excerpts John Hawkins has highlighted at his site.

A few to tempt you:

“Let me begin by thanking the American people, through you, on behalf of the Iraqi people, for supporting our people and ousting dictatorship. Iraq will not forget those who stood with her and who continues to stand with her in times of need.

“The fate of our country and yours is tied. Should democracy be allowed to fail in Iraq and terror permitted to triumph, then the war on terror will never be won elsewhere.”

Bull Moose has the best commentary on it.

::: SCROLL DOWN FOR BUMPERSTICKER UPDATE:::

Yes, I know I have defended Hillary’s right to have cleavage, and I have gently suggested that overspending on hair and makeup is unwise…that there is a middle ground between Mr. Cheap Cuts and a $3,000 trim…

But now…there is this bust. This “presidential” bust for the “President Hillary” we are told is a foregone conclusion in 2008.

It’s…well, it’s pretty hideous. For some reason, Hillary - who is an attractive woman - here looks like the love child of Jimmy Carter and Eleanor Roosevelt, but wearing the breastplate usually associated with Brunnhilda in Die Walkure! This artist has done her no favor. I don’t think it is an accident that Yahoo did not include the photo (presumably provided in the press release) in its coverage.

The boobs are the nicest part. Maybe the girls just look too young and perky, but it’s not really about the boobs…it’s about the weirdly elongated sternocledomastoid muscles and the…well, the unflattering everything else.

If I were Hillary, I would be working very hard, and very fast to get rid of this image and to do all I could do to keep people from saying, “Oh, Hillary is just Jimmy Carter with boobs…”

Nothing could sink her ambitions faster. And since the picture is out there…it may already be too late. For the next two years, you’ll see that picture and “Jimmy Carter with Boobs” everywhere. Associations are important. A thought is a thing.

What have I always told you…nothing is static, everything is always in flux. Assume nothing, because there are no foregone conclusions. And never, ever forget, that sometimes it’s the strangest, most unpredictable things, which have the most lasting and intense impact.

Anytime a woman is sculpted to look like Jimmy Carter, that is not a happy day in that lady’s life.

Blue Crab Boulevard has more, and Kittylitter, who is also seeing Jimmy Carter in that thing, has a side-by-side comparison.

UPDATE: Sharkman has created a bumpersticker!

From the trek last week, Buster rappels down a 60 foot cliff. Told you he was a big guy.

Related: The Summer of Buster