Eat your heart out Michael Savage.

Michael Savage is a radio host. Michael Savage isn’t sane. One of his favorite topics is how the marine from Hamdaniya were being prosecuted for doing their job too well. Now that just anal but what he means is that even if they killed the Iraqis it wasn’t so bad because they were from the Sunni Triangle. Now the odds that they are terrorist sympathizers is reasonably high, but that it isn’t a capital crime. Far more important is the damage the crime does, if it happened, to the U.S. efforts. Michael Savage put 2 and 2 together and got 5. He knew that they were accused by Iraqis and that they were arrested. Therefore he assumed that the military indicted them solely based on the accusations. When you combine this with Newsweek breaking the story and Murtha convicting the soldiers in his mind you get a crusade made for ratings gold.

Savage, who believes that we should bomb the entire Sunni Triangle out of existence after getting everyone out, (how moderate) routinely had on attorneys and parents of these soldiers on. Throughout the interviews he would never consider these people biased at all. Not only would he interrupt the guests observations with calls for the soldiers’ releases he would frequently call for the prosecuters to be fired and court-martialed.

Now we have information, although from an unrealiable source, that two of these have confessed. Now the defense for the others are claiming that the confessions were coerced, but the defendants claimed to have confessed aren’t denying it. This leads me to believe that they really are guilty.

O fcourse my disdain for Michael Savage could have something to do with my opinion also. Savage is a chameleon who is either crazy or a really good actor. His positions are the standard Buchananite ones for the domestic front and economics while he is a solid Pattonite in foreign affairs. His anger is what makes me suspect him of being a fraud so much. It doesn’t seem possible that one person can get so angry at illegals, Bush, liberals who attack Bush, gays, people who talk to him at restauraunts, and virtually every other group out there. Such a person would either be commited for high blood pressure or violent behavior.

Webloggin  takes Michael Savage’s position and attacks the media for reporting on the story. Now the media is irresponsibly reporting on this story as being part of a trend, but I think that it is important to know and have some level of public awareness for military abuses. Having no coverage would, in my opinion, be worse than biased coverage because we have to let the Iraqis know that we will fairly deal with any claims against them. Also the fact is that the military isn’t leaking allt he details of their case while the defense is. Given that the soldiers confessed leads me to believe that the military has reasonably convincing evidence even if they coerced the confessions. If you support the military at least show some confidence that it isn’t evil enough to fabricate a case on no evidence. They might be innocent but it’s looking less and less likely.

Is the SDS now mainstream for the Democrat Party?

Tom Hayden in a Huffington Post article has a  lot to say about the ’06 elections. The Huffington Post bio of him remarkably ignores his role in the radical SDS.
We already know this: The public and the press were in the dark, but Vice President Cheney already knew British agents were arresting Muslim suspects in the trans-Atlantic bombing case when he attacked Ned Lamont and the Democratic Party for encouraging “al-Qaeda types.”
    When you make this accusation you are suggesting that  had the press and public known about this fact they would have been less inclined to believe Cheney’s statement. In fact this knowledge makes Cheney’s statement far more believable.
The US war in Iraq is a failure in the eyes of most Americans. The US-backed Israeli bombing of Lebanon has revived the discredited neo-conservative argument to carry the war to Middle Eastern terrorists.
No, the attempted bombing has revived the argument of taking the battle to the terrorists. Let’s face it, if we sit back and react to the terrorists we’ll lose this war and be killed, if we try for understanding we’ll be back atthe start except with a few thousand dead and a few more years of terrorist planning in the books. Also saying that Israel should be more careful in bombing Lebanon isn’t ridiculous, just wrong. Saying Israel shouldn’t bomb Lebanon at all is suicidal. Should Israel wait till Hezbullah sends a full scale army at them before engaging Hezbullah. Why shouldn’t Israel exploit their military advantage as Hezbullah is exploiting its advantage of a lack of morality (or rather a morality which doesn’t care about civillian casualties).
This is about the November 2006 election, Armageddon for Republicans who fear losing their monopolistic grip on the Congress, and about the 2008 election which will be a referendum on what the neo-conservatives have wrought. This is about the fate of the planet for this generation.
No, this is about terrorists who want to kill us. I think very few Republicans consider the elections Armageddon and by 2008 odds are that the Iraq war will not be the major issue. As an aside doesn’t calling the Republican control of Congress monopolistic seems a bit hyperbolic. There’s a fair market for both parties and the Republicans are winning now, hardly monopolistic.

Who has a plan?
Indeed who does have a plan for this war? It doesn’t seem that he has one besides leaving immediately.

The issue of Iraq is “ripe” for an anti-war majority at the polls. The “war on terrorism” is a different matter, which is why Republicans want to shift the public focus from the debacle in Iraq to the latest terrorist threat.Peace advocates don’t have a consensus on what to say. We need to win on the issue that is ripe, which is Iraq, while not being trumped by other issues which are still ripening. The case against Iraq must make sense to the broadest majority of Americans, and be bullet-proof against Republican and talk show fusillades.
His basic point here seems to be that the anti-war activists should lie about their ideas in general in order to get an electoral advantage. It seems to me that someone doesn’t believe in his convictions or in speaking truth to power. (Considering his view of the general populace I guess his motto would be ‘Lying to weakness’)

But what should be said on terrrorism? That we need a change from Bush policies that have not made Americans safer after 9/11? That Bush has talked about “taking the fight to the terrorists” but they already were in Britain, Canada, and almost in the air over the Atlantic while 140,000 Americans were sweating in Iraq? That Bush’s slaughterhouse in Baghdad, Bush’s arming of the Israelis with cluster bombs, and Bush’s unilateralism have incited more anti-American hatred than ever before?
     I’m taking it that by talking about the fact the terrorists are already here Mr. Hayden isn’t endorsing Michael Savage’s idea of interning all Muslims until Michael Savage decides that we can let them out. Also the fact that a terrorist plot failed  does not mean that we are not a safe place. Exactly how would Hayden prevent terrorism. Not through military action as he has made amply clear, and not through surveillance, I’m assuming, considering I haven’t heard him take a high-profile stand against the New York Times. Maybe he thinks we should buy the terrorists a Coca Cola and hope that they spend the next hundred years wiping out every Jew in Israel while we tie down their hands and feet and bring out the wheelbarrows to the sea. Then after we give them Israel and the terror doesn’t stop we can hand over the Vatican. Then we could give them Spain. Of course we’ll have to convert to Islam but that isn’t so bad really because these people are not bad, we’re bad. After all who’s great to the nth degree grand father did the Crusades, huh. Who killed the Jews in the Holacaust, who massacred the Armenians, oh never mind about that last one that was just an accident on their part.

That Bush’s budget-cutting, tax-cutting philosophy has left us stripped of resources to protect our ports, airports, nuclear plants, and other exposed facilities? That Bush’s oil policies are destablizing the planet, the economy and the atmosphere itself?
Let me tell ypu that this is one of the first times I’ve heard Bush accused seriously of being a budget-cutter. Also Hayden presents his plan for defense against terrorism. To quote an idealogical compatriot of his, Neville Chamberlain,
” Before giving a verdict upon this arrangement, we should do well to avoid describing it as a personal or a national triumph for anyone. The real triumph is that it has shown that representatives of four great Powers can find it possible to agree on a way of carrying out a difficult and delicate operation by discussion instead of by force of arms, and thereby they have averted a catastrophe which would have ended civilisation as we have known it. The relief that our escape from this great peril of war has, I think, everywhere been mingled in this country with a profound feeling of sympathy.”
We can’t as a radio caller suggested, “pull our troops out and build a 20 foot wall around the country. I agree that Bush’s economic policy has destabilized our economy. For example the European economy is tremendously stable almost exactly matching inflation while our economy is very unstable at approximately 4% instabilility a year.

Those are just suggestions. We cannot simply say “withdraw troops from Iraq”, though of course we should say that too. To the Democratic Party, I say keep the peace and justice movement in mind. Don’t sound like flip-flopping echos of the Republicans on terrorism and Lebanon. If you are going to take the fight to the Republicans, you can’t sound like Republicans lite.
So his political advice is to ignore everything but the Iraq War but to go for broke on that one issue. There is just one problem with his proposal. If by some chance things start going right in Iraq the Democratic Party has completely messed up their election chances and it could be 1972 all over again instead of 1974.