The Weekly Enlightenment

My side of the family had Christmas this past weekend, so this will be kind of short. Of course the big news was the failed terrorist attack on the plane going to Detroit. Just another reminder that we are still at war and there are people ready to kill Americans. Of course, I doubt it will be a wake-up call that there are people in the world who will kill us regardless of who our President is and how many times he apologizes for us. The initial reaction from members of the Obama administration is telling though. Both Janet Napolitano (DHS Secretary) and Robert Gibbs (press secretary) exclaimed that the system worked. The system worked so well, we had to rely on a Dutchman to subdue the attacker. Meaning, the would-be bomber got through security and onto the plane. Naturally, now Napolitano is claiming her words were taken out of context (you can read the whole context below and tell me what you think). As Ann Coulter points out, Republicans get mad when you take their words out of context. Democrats get mad when you quote them accurately. Also, if the system "worked", why is Napolitano making changes? Normally you don't change something that works.

Along with this, it puts a huge dent in the claim that it is the poor and uneducated who are drawn to terrorism. Of course, if it were that, the usual follow-up is that the United States is responsible for keeping the world poor (4% of the population, 25% of the world's resources). Thus the United States created the terrorist. In this case, the terrorist was very well to do. It has also been pointed out that Al Qaeda's leaders have been Western-educated as well, thus showing it as a choice, rather than being forced into it by the big bad United States. The usual leftist theory also doesn't explain why we don't have billions of terrorists since most of the world is poor.

On a side note, remember when Obama was asked during one of the debates about when human life begins? He said that was above his pay grade. But for some reason, running 1/6th of the U.S. economy via health care and pretty much all the economy through cap and trade isn't?

MUST READ
* If you read nothing else, read this. A superb article on where the United States is heading with the Senate health care bill.
* A must read opinion piece about how politicians are set out to "fix" something they know next to nothing about.
* On the radar, trial lawyers and Big Green lining up to rifle through the pockets of business (i.e. actually you and me paying higher prices for goods or having less choices).
* Ralph Peters is slowly becoming one of my favorite columnists. In this case, how we continue to lie to ourselves about the relationship between Islam and terror.
* The system worked.

What Media Bias?
* Unfortunately, I would guess many in the media actually think like this, that Iraq was a nice little country with no terrorists before we got there.

Silly Liberals
* Was Max Baucus drunk on the Senate floor?
* Of course, amazingly we probably wouldn't have heard about Napolitano unless she hadn't backtracked.
* Two of the leaders (since corrected to one) who planned the attack were apparently released from Guantanamo Bay. Of course, they should still be in there (who decided they should be released), but remember, Obama wants to close Gitmo.
* Iran trying to smuggle uranium...will Obama do anything about it? I hate to be pessimistic, but I can see us only talking, then by 2012, we can start being told that no one lost Iran (the reference is to China, in which we had subversives directing U.S. policy towards the Chinese Communists and not Chiang Kai-Shek).