Victor Davis Hanson, a Medary.com favorite, gets it right again:

So how do we make sense of what seems so nonsensical? Rather easily—just keep in mind four general talking points about America’s recent role in the world and most things gradually becomes clearer.

Point One (for Americans): My own flawless three-week removal of Saddam Hussein was ruined by your error-prone postwar peace.

Point Two (for Middle Easterners): We are for democracy—unless you Americans help us obtain it.

Point Three (for Europeans): We are privately for and publicly against what you do.

Point Four (for everyone else): When angry at either the United States (or yourself,) just blame the Jews in America, and Israel abroad.

Sometimes in these crazy times, that is all you need to know.

Amen.

Heard this morning on CNBC.

I'm not entirely sure what this means, but I'm pretty sure it's not a good sign.

Or, the Iranians are messing with the Western mind. Either way, they keep ratcheting up the tension level. They obviously don't think they're anywhere close to pushing the West over the edge, so they keep pushing.

Democracy: "two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for supper."

The self-congratulatory worship of the word "democracy" (Democratic Party, et al) is sadly deluded. Democracy without limited government is tyranny.

A democratic government, while preventing despotism of abuse of power by a governing minority, does not protect other minorities from social forces from other members of society with other forms of power that may be played out through plutocracy within an existing democratic government, or majoritarianism.

The goal of the West in Iraq should not be democracy. It should be liberty.

Liberty is generally thought of as a condition in which an individual has immunity from the arbitrary exercise of authority; it often also implies the right to exercise political rights such as standing for office.

Democracy gives you Hitler. Liberty takes Hitler down when necessary.

Update: Maybe we need to go with the title without the sarcastic inflection. Looks like we got Al Qaida's #1 bombmaking expert, Abu Khabab al-Masri. My apologies to the CIA . . . this time.

Original Post, Saturday, Jan. 14, 8:23 am . . .
Turns out we didn't whack Al-Zawahiri after all. From the USA Today: Al-Qaeda No. 2 wasn't on site during U.S. attack, officials say

Two Pakistani officials told The Associated Press on Saturday that the CIA had acted on incorrect information, and al-Zawahri was not in the village of Damadola when it came under attack. Al-Zawahri is ranked No. 2 in the al-Qaeda terror network, second only to Osama bin Laden.

"Their information was wrong, and our investigations conclude that they acted on a false information," said a senior intelligence official. His account was confirmed by a senior government official, who said al-Zawahri "was not there."

Why oh why do we tolerate this fetid cesspool of incompetent spooks to fester? There's an old saying, from World War II, or maybe earlier:

One hundred "atta-boy's" are cancelled out by one "aw, shit."

The CIA seems prone to very public, very damaging mistakes. I'm just a guy with a computer in the middle of the country, but it seems to me that we have other organizations (NSA, DIA, etc.) which seem somewhat more competent at what they do. At least, the mistakes they make are not nearly as public. Also, those other agencies don't seem to be in a perpetual state of war with the elected government of the U.S. Let's transfer intelligence operations from the incompetent CIA to these other organizations, and shut the doors down at Langley.

Remember all the "George Bush is in a Bubble" talk around Christmastime? No? Sorry. Well, anyway, the BDS meme of the day back then was that W was isolated from the real world--a "boy in the bubble" so to speak. Nonsense like most BDS babble, but there you have it.

On the other hand, The American Thinker reports that the NY Times is erecting a real, tangible bubble for its columnists:

The Times is refusing to allow email from non-subscribers to its star columnists. That’s right, you have to pay in order to be able to respond directly to the bloviators.

Sheesh.

This monograph from the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute basically boils down to:

We're screwed. Y'all better get psyched up for Cold War II: Radical Islamism vs. Western Liberalism.

A quote from the monograph:

What more should the United States and its friends do? Ultimately, nothing less than creating moderate self-government in Iraq, iran, and other states in the region will bring lasting peace and nonproliferation. This however, will take time. Meanwhile, the United States and its friends must do much more than they are currently to frustrate Iran's efforts to divide the United States, Israel, and Europ from one another and from other friends in the Middle East and Asia; and to defeat Tehran's efforts to use its nuclear capabilities to deter others from taking firm action against Iranian misbehavior.

It continues on in that rather depressing vein for 300 pages. I'm slogging through it.

Knee-jerk critics and supporters of the Bush foreign policy need to read this.

The time for partisan political games is past, but most everyone playing those games haven't figured it out yet, much to the peril of our civilization, let alone our "national security".

Hat tip: Belmont Club via Free Republic.

Read the whole thing.

the public must be warned that dealing with a nuclear Iran is not a matter of a good versus a bad choice, but between a very bad one now and something far, far worse to come.

I've signed on to the following letter, hosted by NZ Bear

An Appeal from Center-Right Bloggers

We are bloggers with boatloads of opinions, and none of us come close to agreeing with any other one of us all of the time. But we do agree on this: The new leadership in the House of Representatives needs to be thoroughly and transparently free of the taint of the Jack Abramoff scandals, and beyond that, of undue influence of K Street.

We are not naive about lobbying, and we know it can and has in fact advanced crucial issues and has often served to inform rather than simply influence Members.

But we are certain that the public is disgusted with excess and with privilege. We hope the Hastert-Dreier effort leads to sweeping reforms including the end of subsidized travel and other obvious influence operations. Just as importantly, we call for major changes to increase openness, transparency and accountability in Congressional operations and in the appropriations process.

As for the Republican leadership elections, we hope to see more candidates who will support these goals, and we therefore welcome the entry of Congressman John Shadegg to the race for Majority Leader. We hope every Congressman who is committed to ethical and transparent conduct supports a reform agenda and a reform candidate. And we hope all would-be members of the leadership make themselves available to new media to answer questions now and on a regular basis in the future.

Signed,

N.Z. Bear, The Truth Laid Bear
Hugh Hewitt, HughHewitt.com
Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.com
Kevin Aylward, Wizbang!
La Shawn Barber, La Shawn Barber's Corner
Lorie Byrd, Polipundit
Beth Cleaver, MY Vast Right Wing Conspiracy
Jeff Goldstein, Protein Wisdom
Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
John Hawkins, Right Wing News
John Hinderaker, Power Line
Jon Henke / McQ / Dale Franks, QandO
James Joyner, Outside The Beltway
Mike Krempasky, Redstate.org
Michelle Malkin, MichelleMalkin.com
Ed Morrissey, Captain's Quarters
Scott Ott, Scrappleface
John Donovan / Bill Tuttle, Castle Argghhh!!!

Radley Balko at the Cato Institute has "predictions" for 2006. Follow the link--you don't want to miss the punch line at the end of the article.

A quick sample:

My predictions:

—Moved by terrorist fears and anti-immigrant fervor, we will move ever closer to a national identification card. Citizens of the United States won't be allowed to do something as simple as ride the bus without first showing "their papers," invoking comparisons to communist regimes in the former Iron Curtain countries.

Someone in Congress will introduce legislation calling for a national ID card, but with Orwellian panache, will attempt to assuage fears of civil libertarians by calling for the words "this is not a national ID card" to be printed on the actual national ID card.

—The drug war will continue apace. Police dressed in paramilitary gear will conduct multiple early-morning raids on the homes of nonviolent marijuana offenders, including using forced entry, stun grenades, and other combat tactics commonly used in urban warfare.

—In the name of public safety, some small town will install cameras on its streets that nab motorists who speed, then send them a ticket in the mail. But in a thinly disguised move to generate more revenue, said town will lower the speed limits after installing the cameras, in effect entrapping motorists into fines they don't deserve.

—Drug warriors will finally drop the charade, and arrest the Bill of Rights. On drug charges, of course.

—Staking out new ground in egregious corporate welfare, an American city will once again build a new stadium for the millionaire owners of a professional sports team, at taxpayer expense. This time, however, the millionaire franchise owners will get a bonus $50 million from the city's taxpayers for breaking the lease on the old stadium — which the city will do for the express purpose of building the new one.

Worse, the team will get half of all revenues from non-football related events held at the taxpayer-funded stadium. Worse yet, the city will seize land from businesses who've been in operation for decades — not just to build the stadium, but to build parking lots around the stadium. The proceeds from which, once again, will go to the millionaire franchise owners.

The Alito hearings may be remembered primarily as the point at which the Democrats' tactics of smear and innuendo became self-evidently ineffective.

Several observers are seeing a parallel in the Democratic Senators' antics with Tailgunner Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist hearings of the 1950's. This analogy is of course profoundly offensive to the Left, secure in their righteous belief that the Right has a monopoly on strident over-the-top Senatorial witch-hunts.

Peggy Noonan comments:

Either liberals like Ted Kennedy really believe that conservatives harbor deep in their hearts an animus toward women, and blacks, and Hispanics, and everyone who is not a white male, or liberals simply enjoy, for reasons that are cynical and perhaps also psychological ("The people I fight are bad; this buttresses my belief that I, in spite of what I know about myself, am good"), suggesting that conservatives are full of narrow-minded bigotry and hatred.

As a matter of fact, Peggy, yes, the Left really does believe that. And that belief blinds them and cripples them, resulting in the sorry spectacle of the Alito confirmation hearings.