German outreach to Muslims backfires

The medicine Islam needs may kill it: Flinstones Vitamins & Arsenic.

Although it may be the case that Obama will keep some of the country’s torture apparatus in place–I hope to all get out he doesn’t–it’s not worth whining about it. Fake-Captain Ed:

If Obama now agrees with McCain on this issue, that’s an improvement — but will the press treat Obama like they treated McCain? Will they start talking about him as though he was the reincarnation of the Marquis de Sade and Vidkun Quisling rolled up into one person? The MoveOn/Code Pink fringe certainly will, especially after his reversal on FISA reform this summer, on which the media largely gave him a pass.

I suspect they will give him a pass on this occasion, too. And that will speak volumes about their dishonest and vitriolic attacks on McCain in February, smearing his honor for partisan political purposes.

It won’t “speak volumes” to anyone who doesn’t already believe the “in the tank for Barry” narrative already. If it comes to pass that Obama makes a 180 (or any turn less than a 90), the press will push a “flip-flop watch,” and add it to the hell they’re inevitably going to give him for the “Obama Recession.”

Bottom line: Fake-Captain Ed is upset that his side lost so magnificently; he’ll be whining about this kind of thing for the next 8+ years, god willing.

…Did you know Fake-Captain Ed can read the President-Elect’s mind? It’s true:

So what happens when the incoming Obama administration decides to continue indefinite detention and back away from Feinstein’s bill on interrogation techniques?

Note his use of when, not if.

From the NYT article Ed supposedly read: “The president-elect’s transition office would not comment on whether that idea was even under discussion.”

He really is Special.

It’s true!

And apparently wingnut is now synonymous with failure.

It’s a virtual certainty that Michelle is working on a post about this right now, but A la Pundit got there first:

This turd will be on Good Morning America tomorrow to hawk his book, if you can believe it. Will Diane Sawyer think to ask him how friendly the families were? Or, more importantly, what he learned from his epochal meeting of the minds recently with Reverend Wright? A rich trove of video treasure awaits us in the morning, my friends. Exit question: Has anyone queried The One on what sorts of crimes one would have to commit to lose their coveted “family friend” status? I realize questions of basic personal judgment are inappropriate on “dishonest narrative” grounds, but I’m curious nonetheless.

“Turd”? Ayers Derangement Syndrome rears its generous head. Had the Malkinites taken my advice, they wouldn’t have wasted so much time and energy on Ayers. He was a non-issue. Had his middle name been “bin”? Maybe.

As for A la’s bullshit “exit question”: I highly doubt anyone has asked Comrade Hussein anything of the sort. It would be meaningless. He’s such an inclusive guy, he’d probably welcome any Malkinite into his home on Pennsylvania Avenue for punch and vanilla pudding.

the malkin-ayers connection

bill ayers wouldn’t be able to “cash in” if people like michelle malkin hadn’t been talking about him so much. you could argue that malkin and ayers are directly profiting off each other. malkin is making money by railing about ayers and ayers is making money by riding the notoriety that he gets from that said railing. they’re like symbiotic business partners.

And we must extend this to the bloggers Michelle Malkin pays–most notably the guys at Hot Air. If blogger’s pay was based on results, the Malkinites would have filed for Chapter 11 last week.

It’s been less than a week and the loyal opposition has been just that–unwaveringly loyal. Since Comrade Hussein hasn’t even had a chance to put forward an agenda as yet, the Capt. Ed Morrisseys of the Right-o-Sphere are left with the tactics that didn’t help them put McCain ahead.

Capt. Ed wrote the following today:

Obama to close Gitmo, but then what?
…
The Supreme Court left the US in the position of either blowing the cover of intel resources by forcing the government to provide constitutional protections to enemies of the US at war with our nation, or releasing them to plan more attacks. Either Obama or McCain would have to deal with that ridiculous position, and so far, Obama seems to be pursuing the same basic strategy that the Court rejected twice.

(Awful sentence emphasized for my own enjoyment.)

Eventually, this whole myth that Obama is too inexperienced to make sound decisions will go away. Until then, we’ll have to put up with anti-Constitution conservatives like Capt. Ed.

Here’s a rundown of what’s likely to happen:

Judges reading between the lines of the GTMO decisions will refuse to hear cases based on secret evidence, regardless of what the Executive and Legislative branches want. (Constitutional rights do extend beyond our borders and even beyond the skin of our citizens.) This will lead to the DoJ pursuing the cases against the detainees in good faith based on as much declassified material as they are allowed. Then, a jury will decide.

Another poll falling into the bad-news-for-Barack category. Queeg:

One of the more striking numbers from the poll is the younger voter demographic. Obama has had a large lead in most polling in voters under 35, and in Minnesota, the college-age and young adult vote is a formidable weapon. Now, though, McCain and Obama evenly split that vote, which bodes ill for Obama in a general election.

First off, the data analysis that went into this report must be wrong. In no way will Obama and McCain split the 35-and-under vote. Impossible, really. My guess (without having any other references) is that corrections for party affiliation were to strong for Republicans and independents. Seems that whenever a poll claims they based numbers on 45% Dems, 28% Criminals, and 17% independents, the wingnuts go on a rampage.

It’s still worthwhile to look at poll numbers even if the absolute percentages aren’t accurate. They can still give an idea of where support is shifting. Obama, then, isn’t necessarily losing ground but opinion is shifting towards McCain slightly, due mostly to his Beard.

Obama has an opportunity now to enter the debates as an apparent underdog. (And Americans love an underdog!) In this situation, the viewers (and there will be a lot of them) go in with high expectations for the Favorite (McCain) and low expectations for Obama. Rope-a-Dope, anyone?

Capt. Ed Morrissey of the U.S.S. Mass Over Volume:

Could the GOP retake the House?

…same answer to this one, too:

Is New York in play? Update: Obama loses 18 points since June

Obama on McCain/Palin: “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig”; Update: Video added

• Obama: Dumb pig Palin is dumb pig.

A sustaining din of indignation has a steady source in the blogging collective surrounding Michelle & Jesse Malkin.

It appears to be getting more shrill as the group grows. This week saw a raising of stakes of sorts: paranoia of media manipulation in the coverage of the continuing slaughter in Lebanon, Joe Lieberman’s primary loss to a political fish, and the arrests of alleged violent jihadists in Britain.
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More bad writing. Michelle navel gazes by proxy:

I’m excited to welcome Ian Schwartz, formerly of Expose the Left, to the team over at Hot Air. He’s an energetic and innovative young entrepreneur who helped kick off the video revolution on the right side of the blogosphere. Ian will be working with us, and starting college this fall, as we expand our programming and operations. We’re lucky to have him!

(BTW, that’s the whole post. No need to click through.)

Update: (8/7, evening) Silly me. I’ve been distracted today by talented dead writers. I didn’t even bother to go to Expose the Left to get Ian’s take on his new gig. I see this:

Beginning August 17th, the archives of Expose the Left will be accessed through a different link then [sic] it is now.

We’re in for a bumpy ride, folks. If you’re the praying type, beg the Almighty for him to take Bryan’s failures as an example, thus knowing his place and not posting much in the way of text — Amen.

As of yet, his Hot Airian purpose is not clear. Sporadic, yet frequent, updates as they come in. Developing…

Bryan Preston, “Hot Airian” extraordinaire, offered up a poorly written rant last night in an attempt to point out some of the mainstream press’s misplaced priorities. I’ll go through the post itself with commentary. Don’t think of this as a “fisking,” but as a focused exposition of why The Prestigious Internet, especially the blogosphere, has been testing my imperturbability lately.

Today’s news featured anti-semites on rampages. Every day since 9-11 seems to have featured anti-semites on rampages somewhere in the world, but two of today’s stories happened right here in the US of A.

The phrase “anti-semites on rampages” is very queer. It’s not usual to use the word rampage when referring to a single person. So after reading the first sentence a couple times, then the second sentence a few times, it was still unclear if Bryan means to say that different groups of anti-semites are going on wholly different rampages (like in the case of the Danish Muhammed cartoons) or if individual anti-semites are going on their own mini-rampages? And how the hell does a day feature anything, much less an anti-semite?
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Economical blog posting is a virtue.

Yesterday the Malkins celebrated the third anniversary of Technorati. But the interesting part of that post comes in the form of off topic rambling:

Speaking of redesign, the moonbats at digg are whining about the format of my blog post headlines. So, I’ve turned off the caps. (Update: Well, I tried to, but it didn’t work. If you know your way around MT, let me know what I need to do. Thanks. Update II: No more CAPS!) Not that it’ll cure their BDS. But it can’t hurt.

“[M]oonbats?” “[A]t Digg?” “[W]hining?” “[P]ost headlines?”

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…and crackerdom ensues.

I’m not entirely sure what possessed A la Pundit to cover this, considering the rabid racism of his base audience.

And he doth proclaimeth (with a healthy dose of ye olde verbal irony):

It’ll cure blacks’ sense of grievance and make whites more sympathetic to the injustice of slavery by driving home the economic costs.

I don’t believe the author of this sentence has the capacity to sympathize with the man who couldn’t patronize a store owned and operated by a person who looks like him if he so desired. Granting small bits of humanity such as this to a people oppressed for the good part of 500 years is beyond a dollar amount. Who cares how angry a bunch of racists get?
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Yesterday marked the weakest blogging day out of Malkin Central in some time. (Discounting this past Saturday, of course.*) Not too surprising, because it comes after nearly 48 hours of vigorous updating wherein the troops she agrees with were given (con)textual backup (over an odious song). Maybe she’s been working on a post for The Immigration Blog, which hasn’t been updated since June 9th.

Then again the lag may be attributed, not to something as simple as “battle fatigue” a la 82nd Chairborne Brigade (cite), but to a barrage of fire coming from the Left-O-Sphere’s own A-List nasties. (We’ll know for sure if some not-so-glorifying emails find their way to the front page of MM.com later today.)

Warning: This post is long. If you find my prose tedious and boring, you may as well stop here.

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Anyone concerned with human rights should be appalled by the (laughably weak) charges against Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. Unlike Michelle, I do not agree with Fallaci’s assessment of Islam, but I am willing to concede that her writings (from what I have seen) do not constitute “hate speech”, which is the basis of speech-restricting laws, such as those against Holocaust denial.

That said, is Michelle’s reporting of the facts accurate? Of course not. Her agenda requires that she distort the narrative to the extent that she can claim that ‘European dhimmitude’ will land on U.S. shores in no time. In her Women Warriors episode of VENT from May 9, our esteemed host claimed that Fallaci “faces up to two years in jail, in Italy”. It appears that she found this fact in a WSJ editorial that was written well before the law was changed in January 2006. From the New Yorker Fallaci profile that Malkin herself linked to:

A Mussolini-era criminal code holds that “whoever offends the state’s religion, by defaming those who profess it, will be punished with up to two years of imprisonment.” Though the code was written to protect the Catholic Church, it has been successively amended in the past ten years, so that it encompasses any “religion acknowledged by the state.” The complaint against Fallaci marks the first time that the code has been invoked on behalf of any religion but Catholicism. (In January, Fallaci’s supporters in the Italian Senate pushed through an amendment to the code, reducing the maximum penalty to five thousand euros.)

As a respected member/journalist of the New Media, I’m sure Michelle will be eager to clear this up for her readers, and call for the repeal of this oppressive statute.

Blogger and “Vent” producer Bryan Preston, who according to my projections may surpass John “Hindrocket” Hinderaker as the right’s leading source of embarrassment nearly four months from now, wasn’t satisfied with simply making shit up this week. He also had to go and call out a major British newspaper for not hating Muslims enough.

Now, it’s up for debate which of his writings from this week is crazier: That “MeCHA [sic]” desires to commit genocide against all non-Latinos in Aztlan or the condemnation of a metropolitan daily for not “hanging the raghead.” (OK. He didn’t publish the last part, but it certainly fits.)

[Ed. Bryan’s post appears to have been deleted from the Hot Air blog. As a public service, I’ve supplied the text of the post, in full, as it appeared in my RSS reader, below the fold.]

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