musing minds

Just caught the latest MSM coverage of the Iraqi constitution. It appears that anything short of complete consensus among the stakeholders will be considered a failure. Jayson at PoliPundit provides an explicit example. Is the media setting unrealistic expectations so as to gaurantee any result a failure in Iraq (and therefore a failure of Bush’s policies)?

Here’s some perspective for you: Quebec did not sign onto the Canadian Charter/Constitution when it was repatriated from Britain in 1982. That’s right, Canada – a peaceful country with a stable economy and a couple of hundred years of representative democracy under its belt, was unable to obtain complete consensus among the country’s stakeholders. For those of you not up on Canadian federalism, Quebec is a culturally and linguistically distinct society within Canadian federation. Quebec was not, however, a ruling minority that ruled over the majority through a brutal totalitarian regime over the past half-century and which actively supported terrorist attacks leading up to the drafting of the Constitution. The Sunnis were.

Obtaining complete consensus on a constitutional framework among all the stakeholders in any pluralistic society is difficult if not impossible. Setting up an expectation of complete consensus among the various groups in Iraq, and particularily among the Sunni minority, given that country’s history, is not only unrealistic, it’s simply dishonest.

UPDATE: Here’s a short, simple primer on the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution and the previous and subsequent failed attempts at reaching a consensus.

Welcome PoliPundit readers! Please look around…

For months now the anti-war crowd has attempted to bend over backwards to avoid the appearance of being against the U.S. soldiers themselves. They believe that the troops are dying or getting injured in vain for an immoral imperialistic cause and occaisionally accuse them of committing autrocities, yet they attempt to shield themselves from the moral consequences of speaking out against men and women who volunteered to put their lives on the line to defend our freedoms by qualifying their protests with bare assertions of their support for the troops.

And how do they get around the logic of “supporting” troops who they accuse of killing innocent Iraqis? Simple, they are victims themselves: young, ignorant, innocent, dupes who bought into Bush’s lies.

The problem with taking such positions of convenience is that they are hard to sustain. It’s much easier to say what you truly believe, rather than relying on logical gymnastics to create the perception that you believe in something else. Eventually the logic collapses under the wieght of contrary conduct.

So when the protesters gathered this week at a veterans hospital and began harrassing the “victims” of Bush’s lies, and the families of those victims, who surely must also be victims themselves, all the while acknowledging that they would be causing further grief to these injured soldiers and their families, it wasn’t surprising in the least. The first thing that came to my mind was “what took them so long?” (H/T Michelle Malkin)

The other day on Fox news, they had an attorney for a convicted sex offender and Marc Klass on to discuss the 2500 foot “barrier” around schools that dictates where a convicted sex offender can and can not live.

The attorney was saying that we are a mobile society and keeping a convicted sex offender from living in that 2500 foot radius makes no sense, as the convicted sex offender can still get in his/her car and go to a school. He also said that the half mile radius was too large and, in an urban area, would just push the convicted sex offender further out, into the suburbs, causing the same problems there.

Marc Klass was agreeing with him on this point.

Is it just me, or isn’t the point of the 2500 foot radius to keep our children from walking past the convicted sex offender’s home on their way to and from school? Generally, (at least in my town) if you are within a half mile of a school there is no bus service and the children must walk to school. I don’t want my children walking past a convicted sex offender’s house twice a day, every school day.

Consider that this rule is to the benefit of both the children and the convicted sex offender. For the children, they don’t have to be so afraid to walk to school. I would think that the sight of many children walking past the house each and every day would pose a great temptation. By removing the convicted sex offender from the path the children walk to school, this temptation just isn’t there.

Without this rule, a convicted sex offender could wait for a child to come by by him/herself and get them into the privacy of their own home quickly, with a much better chance of getting away with it. With the rule, the convicted sex offender must look for victims where it will be harder to do so.

I think our children are far safer with this rule in place, than they are without it.

Welcome Basil’s Blog readers! Please look around.

While the one sided coverage of Iraqi casualties continues, a lone voice in the MSM wilderness, Katherine Kersten of the Star Tribune, writes an excellent piece about the media’s failure to inform and provide context on Iraq. While I strongly urge you to read the whole thing, check out her concluding line:

Our major media have a duty to give us the big picture on Iraq. This — not the tears of Crawford — is what we owe fallen soldiers and their courageous comrades.

It would be nice if this lone voice turned into a chorus, but I’m not holding my breath. (H/T Powerline)

Below I post about the possible self-fulfilling prophecy of an Iraqi quagmire based on an unprecedented display of biased one-sided reporting. Powerline does a nice job of going back in time and putting into context the sacrifice that has been made to defend freedom. They help us imagine how WWII would have been reported by today’s MSM and how that may have effected the outcome.

They also drive home the point of the complete absence of context to the daily Iraq death tabulation by referring to a stunning fact: the peacetime accidental casualty rate in the military forces between 1983-1996 was greater than the current casualty rate in Iraq by a two to one margin.

Launching August 29th – The Grand Old Portal

From the press release:

The Grand Old Portal is a human-edited search engine of Republican websites on the World Wide Web. This search engine is different from other search engines as it only lists sites that support the Republican Party. Each site that is submitted is reviewed by an editor who then determines if the site will be listed in the search engine.

Webmasters who run websites that support the Republican Party are invited to visit http://www.GrandOldPortal.com and submit their website for inclusion in the search engine. Even though the website will not be launched until the 29th of August, webmasters are still encouraged to submit their websites now for inclusion.

Via GOPBloggers

Angry’s new address is http://agwnblog.com and his new email is agwnblog at gmail dot com.

This change has been made in our blogroll.

MuNu is back up!

Rusty Shackleford is at his backup site http://mypetjawa.blogspot.com/

The MuNu emergency site is http://munuemergency.blogspot.com/

John Gibson had two guests today talking about immigration, Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO)and Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the Minuteman Project.

The transcript follows:

Gibson: A week after Arizona declared a state of emergency along its border with Mexico, the Feds have finally stepped up and responded. The Homeland Security has promised to help the state fight illegal immigration, drug smuggling, human trafficking, and the violence that comes along with those activities. So what does this promise really mean?

Congressman Tom Tancredo joins us now. The Colorado Republican is Chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus. Congressman, Governor Napolitano in Arizona put on a lot of pressure and the Feds have said OK we’ll come help. What kind of help can she realistically expect?

Tancredo: Well that’s a great question. I don’t know what help has been promised and I don’t know what they’re actually going to do because, of course, everyone in America has been begging them to go down on the borders and do something about the fact that we have an invasion. And so far they’ve ignored it. Now I am happy that both Governor Napolitano and Governor Richardson have done a U-turn, a political U-turn on this issue. You know you do wonder I have to tell you when those two folks look in the mirror in the morning how many faces do they see? {laughs} Because, honestly, it’s just incredible to me that you can be so pro-open borders, work so hard for the ah you know to placate the immigration crowd and then the next day when you decide it’s politically, the thing to do, popular, make a big turnaround.
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The Right Nation a wonderful Italian Blog who has linked to us in the past ( South Park Conservatives Roundup and Piccoli maccartisti digitali crescono ) Now has an all English version of their website for those of us who don’t speak Italian…

The Right Nation

Via Brian Maloney‘s Linkfest at Michelle Malkin