Guts and Glory

Was it worth all of those crashes?

Hat Tip: The Daily Wh.at

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A Tea Party, Indeed

I gathered a whole load of reax to the Honor Rally. Enjoy!

A reader wrote in to the Dish:

Glenn Beck said he wore a bulletproof vest because his wife insisted on it. And I don’t understand how Hitchens can call the people at the rally self-pitying white people.  The Iraqi soldier with no hands (who is now training other soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, believe it or not) and the Vietnam vet whose face was burned off were far from self-pitying.  I believe the latter will be on Beck’s Friday show, along with other clergymen and women.

I didn’t see anyone there who was self-pitying.  I saw many people of all ages and races.  Maybe Hitchens is the one who is protesting too much.  Or maybe he was angry because Beck had 240 clergymen and women on stage with him (ministers, priests, rabbis, and imams), all different races, all holding hands. You should have watched Beck’s show yesterday, not the Monday show.  Yesterday he answered Hitchens and every other reporter/journalist who wrote about the rally and got mostly everything wrong.  BTW, the rally raised $5,000,000 for the children of Special Ops.  Yes, what a self-pitying group of white people.

Some additional reading/footage here:

The VanityFair piece detailing the new world of anger, fear, and illusion inhabbited (so we’re told) by Sarah Palin.

Mental Health Break

A visual romance of sorts.

Nuclear Crossroads: Israel, Iran, and the USA

Moving across a few counties gave me a great opportunity to catch up on my Atlantic reading (thanks Nate Dog for driving). For at least an hour, I read up on Iran, Nuclear Warfare, Henry Kissinger, and the current brouhaha that is percolating over Iran’s soon-to-be nuclear capabilities. Here are some of my thoughts on this article.

There is a “50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July”, according to Jeffery Goldberg. The repercussions of such a decision give Israel and the USA no easy answers at all. Each decision (Israel bombs Iran’s nuclear reactors, Israel doesn’t bomb Iran’s nuclear reactors, the US support Israel, the US doesn’t support Israel, the US seeks more negotiations, the UN continues its sanctions) could prove to be disastrous for Israel and the US and even give worldwide sympathy to Iran. The last two, negotiations and sanctions, have proven to be somewhat helpful.

Some high up leaders in Israel believe Iran is taking advantage of Obama’s tendency towards negotiations. That time has allowed for stricter UN sanctions which have cut off Iran’s connects to foreign supplies needed for nuclear bombs. As Goldberg points out, “when they [Iran] make the parts themselves, they are making parts that don’t have quality control.” (When Goldberg mentioned this comment to a senior Israeli official, he said, “We agree with this American assessment, but we also agree with Secretary Gates that Iran is one year away from crossing the nuclear threshold.”)

The move towards nuclear capability has larger-than-life implications (both literally and metaphorically). Robert D. Kaplan quotes Henry Kissinger’s 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy that “by acquiring nuclear weapons, a nation becomes able, for the first time, to change the regional or global balance of power without an invasion or a declaration of war.” “Iran,” Kissinger told Kaplan, “merely by pursuing nuclear weapons, has given itself a role in the region out of proportion to its actual power, and it gains further by the psychological impact of its being able to successfully defy the United Nations Security Council.” The ability for Iran to wield control over its people two summers ago with the faulty election and now with nuclear progress places it in many Christianists apocalyptic sights. After reading Kaplan’s piece, I am left wondering what limited war would look like between multiple nuclear capable countries.

Back to Goldberg. There is skepticism on both sides (Israel and USA) whether Barack Obama would side with such measures taken up by Israel. We have to remember this is not an invasion of Iran (see Iraq and Afghanistan) but the proposed bombing of the Natanz, Qom, Esfahan, and Bushehr nuclear reactors. Add to that the probability of the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah and Iran retaliating against U.S. troops or Israel (“Hezbollah, which now possesses, by most intelligence estimates, as many as 45,000 rockets—at least three times as many as it had in the summer of 2006, during the last round of fighting between the group and Israel.”)

A question that kept popping up in my mind throughout this piece (and as I read a Zionist periodical at the doctors the previous day) was why is there such a stubborn sacredness over this land to the point of nuclear bombing? Before calling me an idiot or ignorant, I can see the promises from G-D to Abraham and his descendent’s that Israel would once again belong to them (possession, not ownership).  The point we are at now is using nuclear bombs and a ballooning U.S. military “stipend” to protect Israel from ever being powerless again (and stopping Iran from creating the new Auschwitz). You are stuck in a messy situation anytime you have a Holocaust denier as your president (Iran) but this stubborn zeal over land by both sides has gotten quite old for me. Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quoted as saying “Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome,” he said in April. “In an area that’s so unstable right now, we just don’t need more of that.”

Summer Has Come and Passed

Here’s a song for those that it may apply. This song was stuck in my head for the first month of college a few times.

Hyperbole Watch

“Progressives and Islamists are indeed on the same side. Their common disdain for Christianity explains why left-wing judges in America find any inkling of Christianity in the public square unconstitutional, while Islamist judges in the Middle East deem it executable.

Their common view that life is expendable explains the left’s embrace abortion-on-demand and why the Islamists don’t hesitate to deploy their own children for homicide bombings.” –Gary Bauer on the similarities he sees between Islam and Progressivism

Are You Fit?

Thanks JP for this link. These monkey bar guys are crazy fit!

Add Humor to the Equation

David Cross tells it how it is.