Random Nuclear Strikes

Dishes Amnesty International a big plate of skunk pie, that is. And at the secondary capital of liberal loonieness, HuffPo, even.

The two principal “human rights” organizations are in a race to the bottom to see which group can demonize Israel with the most absurd legal arguments and most blatant factual misstatements. Until last week, Human Rights Watch enjoyed a prodigious lead, having “found” – contrary to what every newspaper in the world had reported and what everyone saw with their own eyes on television – “no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack.”

Those of us familiar with Amnesty International’s nefarious anti-Israel agenda and notoriously “suggestible” investigative methodology wondered how it could possibly match such a breathtaking lie.

But we didn’t have to wait long for AI to announce that Israel was guilty of a slew of war crimes for “widespread attacks against public civilian infrastructure, including power plants, bridges, main roads, seaports, and Beirut’s international airport.”

(snip)

Amnesty’s evidence that Israel’s attacks on infrastructure constitute war crimes comes from its own idiosyncratic interpretation of the already-vague word “disproportionate.” Unfortunately for Amnesty, no other country in any sort of armed conflict has ever adopted such a narrow definition of the term. Indeed, among the very first military objectives of most modern wars is precisely what Israel did: to disable portions of the opponent’s electrical grid and communication network, to destroy bridges and roads, and to do whatever else is necessary to interfere with those parts of the civilian infrastructure that supports the military capability of the enemy. That’s how the America and Britain militaries fought World War II. (In fact, Israel shows far more restraint than Britain did during World War II. Prime Minister Churchill directed the Royal Air Force to bomb the center of towns with the express purpose of killing as many civilians as possible.) Had the Allies been required to fight World War II under the rules of engagement selectively applied to Amnesty International to Israel, our “greatest generation” might have lost that war.

I’m not always supportive of Mr. Dershowitz’s points, but with this one, as the saying goes Read.It.All.

If you wander into the comments section, you’ll find, among other things, a smattering of people accusing Dershowitz of being paid by the pro-Israel lobby for writing such things. It’s rather disgusting to see the hate come out like that, for the sole reason that he is correct.

Very shortly after Mr. Dershowitz’s post at the HuffPo, the co-founder of Air America Radio, Sheldon Drobney, posts a reply to it. I’d call it a rebuttal, but the guy never actually covers the subject. He really only tries to impress everyone with his knowledge of WWII history and somehow ends up talking about nuclear proliferation.

I wasn’t impressed with his knowledge and with this one, as the saying goes, read at your own peril.

It is in the comments section of Drobney’s post where the magic truly happens.

If you call rabid anti-Semitism “magic”.

Instead of any real problem.

Kevin Drum rationalizes being anti-WalMart

Sebastian Mallaby has a column in the Washington Post today that’s so relentlessly misguided that I just don’t have the energy to take it on. But I do want to say one thing about it, because it fits into the “irate moderate” theme that I was talking about a few days ago.

The column is about Wal-Mart, and Mallaby is complaining that although moderate Dems got out of the corporation-bashing business in the late 80s, they’ve since lost the religion. Every single moderate Dem — even Joe Lieberman! — is now bashing Wal-Mart. “How can supposedly centrist Democrats defend this betrayal of their principles?” he asks sadly.

Well, here’s the thing. When every single moderate Dem starts attacking Wal-Mart, maybe nobody’s betraying any principles at all. Instead, maybe they’ve figured out something that Mallaby hasn’t: it’s not the 80s anymore and things have changed. And one of the things that’s changed is that Wal-Mart has gotten a lot bigger, unions have continued shrinking, working class wages have stagnated, and corporate power has grown tremendously. It’s perfectly rational for even moderate, pro-business Dems to look at the record of the past couple of decades and conclude that things have gotten pretty far out of whack and that Wal-Mart is a good symbol of this imbalance.

Do guys like Drum realize that when everyone gets more money, seeing as how there isn’t a set amount of money in the world, that money slowly becomes worth less. One of the nice things about this surge in the economy, thank you Mr. Greenspan, is that inflation was kept in check and stayed low, with wages keeping pace.

Yes, gas prices have gone up, causing a slight raise in the price of goods because they need to be transported from the factory/field to the market, but the uptick in prices wasn’t caused by a surge in inflation, like in the 70’s.

All the Dems are doing is attacking a successful corporation because, to their socialist constituents, it represents all that is wrong with America: Eevviill Corporations. Never mind that a large number of the Dems, if not a majority, profit from their ownership of WalMart stock.

Drum postscripts to say that he himself doesn’t consider WalMart or the business community as “Evil” per se, but because WalMart only helps the lower and middle classes on the retail end (ie: low cost of goods) and not on the inside (ie: union style wages), they could become “Evil” at any possible moment.

This is the same bullshit argument the left uses against the oil companies when the whine, bitch and moan meme about ‘record profits’ comes out for the umpteenth time.

Never mind that the numbers they are using are profits from worldwide sales (they never, ever mention that part), and never mind that money the oil companies make selling petroleum products to Americans in miniscule to what they make selling them to other nations (another point mysteriously forgotten when the meme goes boom). The left sell the big lie because the two smaller lies are too difficult to get out in one sentence for their minions to continuously regurgitate.

They want to get rid of the tax incentives given to energy companies, never remembering that because all costs are passed onto the consumer, corporations don’t pay a single cent in taxes.

These facts are so simple, yet studies have shown that impact therapy won’t get them through the numb bonestructures surrounding liberals and ‘progressives’ brains.