In a typically defeatist AP article on Iraq (suicide bombers, US deaths, factional strife, etc.), the 12th paragraph finally yields this bit of good news, buried about midway through the piece:
Less than a month before a national referendum on Iraq’s new constitution, the government’s campaign to win support for the charter has won the critical backing of the most influential Shiite religious leader.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, meeting with aides Thursday in the holy city of Najaf, urged his followers to vote “yes,” according to two top officials in his organization, who refused to be identified because they were not authorized to speak for the reclusive cleric. He only issues statements through his office and makes no public appearances.
In January, millions of Shiites followed al-Sistani’s call to vote in Iraq’s first democratic elections in nearly half a century, and the ballot gave the Muslim sect a majority in the new parliament and government.
If two-thirds of the voters in any three of Iraq’s 18 provinces reject the constitution during the Oct. 15 national referendum, a new government must be formed and the process of writing the document would start again.
Sistani may or may not influence moderate Sunnis, who continue to waver in their support—my suspicion is that Sistani’s efforts, coupled with the inevitability of the process and the success of recent US-led anti-terror efforts, will indeed convince many fence-sitting Sunnis to support the Constitution in its current form, though the dead-enders will continue to agitate for a civil war, particularly if they think it might return them to power—but regardless, his backing will likely mobilize enough Shia in Baghdad to insure the two-thirds vote necessary to avoid collapse.
A positive development—one that will be dutifully ignored by the useful idiots gathering this weekend to rehash Vietnam-era protests under the fawning aegis of a compliant press.
But remember: don’t you DARE question their patriotism.
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Mudville Gazette has more.
1) We will lose Iraq…because the Left and the media wants us to lose Iraq.
2) The Iraq War will be a defeat…because Bush and the American people were shamed into submission by the Left and the media.
3) Bush will lose…because he and his supporters chose to listen to those who want the US to fail, mainly the Left and the media.
4) Bush and his supporters biggest failure will be trusting the Left and the media to not stab our military in the back.
5) The brave US military men and women will have died in vain because the Left and the media wanted them to.
6) Millions of Iraqis will perish, and it will be the fault of the US, Bush and the war supporters… because they let the Left and the media subvert the military effort.
7) The GOP will lose elections because it lost the war…because the Left and the media wanted to lose the war.
8) The Islamists will grow in power by beating the US and showing how weak and powerless the West is…because the Left and the media wants the West weak and powerless.
9) The US will lose the War on Terror, and deserve to..because it is really is weak and powerless in the face of Islam, which is what the Left and the media set out to prove in the first plance.
10) The Left and media wants the US to lose the War on Terror…and they will win because the anti-leftists let them win.
“The GRU and KGB helped fund just about every antiwar movement and organization in America and abroad… What will be a great surprise to the American people is that GRU and KGB had a larger budget for antiwar propaganda in the United States than it did for economic and military support to the Vietnamese.” – Russian defector Staanislov Lunev in ‘Through the Eyes of the Enemy’(page 78).
Geez, imagine that.
tw: couldn’t be to hide how batshit crazy you people are?
I had the misfortune of tuning in to a bit of the O’Reilly vs. Donahue blow-hard grudge match the other night and I think it illustrates certain prinicples about these anti-war types:
1. They learn and process nothing. Nothing affects their arguments one way or the other and they adamantly refuse to alter either their presentation or any of the specifics of their argumentation. Thus, one hears the same memes repeated ad nauseum as if they had never been challenged and/or debunked. At a bare minimum, one would expect that good faith debate would demand at least some acknowledgement that somebody else is talking.
2. Watching two big mouths shout at one another is not good for my blood pressure, especially when one of the big mouths is Phil Donahue doing his level best to portray a smug, liberal, baby boomer, a-hole – my personal “most hated persona”.
Fred
I particularly like the smug a-hole’s claim that while Saddam was indeed a bastard, he was our bastard because of the pictures of Americans shaking his hand. That is what passes for logic among this crowd these days. If you challenge them on it, they will resort to anger or changing the subject.
How in the hell do you even begin to reason with a mindset that is that inflexible and illogical? You don’t. They are not interested in rational discourse, they are interested in getting their way period.
“They are not interested in rational discourse, they are interested in getting their way period.”
They basically want you to Submit.
They don’t want you to think or argue, just to submit to their will and follow their crackpot utopian plans.
Fred,
That is why I do not watch any of those shows. It seems that, in the appearance to be “balanced” they have two ideologues from the two extremes whose only mission is to get in all of their sides current “talking points”. There is never any rational discussion of the issues.
I heard a little of it, Donahue started on that “sending children over there” bullshit and I had to turn it off. How these pinheads can claim to support our troops by calling them mindless children is beyond me.
They don’t support them. They hate them. If you have any doubt at all think about what happened with the protests at the military hospitals. You know, the ones where protestors showed up to taunt the injured soldiers. If you doubt it, listen to the way they condescend to the military and belittlle the enlisteds. If you doubt it, think of their reactions to any report of Americans soldier’s abuses, whether the reports are factual or not. If you doubt it, think of the way they turn every military funeral into their own cheap political theater. If you doubt it, think of the way they have white washed Cindy Sheehan’s lunacy. They hate them. They hate them so viciously they can barely stand it, and they think that the rest of the world is too dumb to see it.
Defense Guy,
If logic applied to the anti-war side, then they would realize the fact that we put the bastard there puts a moral obligation on us to remove said bastard.
More positive thinking from the progressive side:
There really is no hope for those towelheads dontcha know.
If that fuckin Donahue had been on the airplane he’d have said, “C’mon guys…let’s just all sit quietly and do what these guys tell us and we’ll get off the plane and everyone will be alright.”
I’d call him a douche-bag, but I’m not that opposed to douche-bags.
rls,
I don’t think ideology is the problem. We are all, to one degree or another, ideologues  even pragmatists and realists. The problem with Donahue is that he’s a partisan hack disguised as a thinker. O’Reilly? Well, I think his problem is that his head is full of pudding (Butterscotch).
No, I think O’Reilly’s probblem is more that he wants to shape opinion and have an impact, but doesn’t actually have any ideas or opinions of his own.
Yeah, but don’t you think Sistani is sitting pretty right now? The coalition is destroying his rivals, and the Shia majority will finally and lawfully dominate the country–if he can persuade the Shia to vote his way. Let’s hope the result looks more like India than Pakistan when the dust settles.
To “question” is to speak in the interrogative.
I prefer simple declarative statements.
They have none. (Patriotism)
As for
I just LOVE this website
Who armed Saddam
We certainly did back Iraq in the years between 1973 to 1990 to the tune of about 1% of their Armaments ranking us between Libya and South Africa. Now almost ALL the rest came from
The Soviet Union, FRANCE, China and the Warsaw Pact in THAT ORDER.
No surprises there or changes from today with the exception of the Warsaw Pact Countries, being Free now instead of Slaves to Socialims THEY are now members of the Coalliton of the Willing.
Of course your usua Left-behind Brain will about this time start sputtering about biased and false sources.
That is when you smile and put this one shot between their eyes?
Source?
Oh the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Last I heard the Swedes were not a hot-bed of Neo-Con Red Necks.
By this time they should be reduced to glassy eyed, foaming mouth, gibbering, incoherence.
rotflamo
“They basically want you to Submit.”
Funny sort of slave mentality, that. Sounds more like master to me…
For Slavery to function the deliniation is not just simply Slave/Master.
On the Slave side there were usually levels of Slave Overseers, trustees etc,
The trick is to give each level something to lose and someone to look down on. Being on the very bottom s*^*d big time but those slaves were usually worked to death in a fairly rapid order etc.