New 101 Album Out Soon!

I stake my musical reputation on this being an excellent album. Head on over to limekilnrecords.com to pick it up for a miniscule $8 (plus shipping - $11).

Jeremy Enigk is coming out with a new album sometime soon(ish). It'll be a good laugh when it turns out to be closer to Billy Corgan's solo album than Return of the Frog Queen. Make all the recent SDRE converts cry...

Haditha Massacre

Well, I haven't written anything on the latest suffering visited on the people of Iraq because I thought it was quite obvious that it was a tragedy and self-explanatory, and no one would argue otherwise. Unfortunately, Michelle Malkin decided she had to prove me wrong.

Let me start by saying that Ms. Malkin's columns are so painfully twisted that I often am unable to make it through one. However, when I saw today's, titled "Why Rush To Call Haditha A Massacre?" I knew that this one merited reading. She starts off by shifting the attention from the massacre to the congressman who has been promoting the need for an investigation, claiming that because the "investigations are ongoing," we cannot possibly know the truth of the incident. She then manages to gloss over the realities of the situation, "children are dead. Other children have been orphaned," and move on to what she does "know:" She talks of the marine killed and his bravery, and that his body was split in two by the explosion, neither of which have no bearing whatsoever on the incident. She then claims that "Haditha is crawling with terrorists," citing an AP report on two attacks on Americans last August that killed 20 servicemen. In a country where Americans and the puppet-government forces come under attack 600 times a week, two attacks hardly constitutes that the city is "crawling" with insurgents, much less terrorists.

But let us give her the benefit of the doubt. Let's say Haditha is an insurgent stronghold. Those killed still were innocent civilians; they were executed in their beds. Ms. Malkin insinuates otherwise by declaring Haditha as a city filled with resistance. It's too bad the only audacity she shows in her column is used to attack the victims of the massacre. She then quickly moves past the massacre and attempts to gain the moral high ground by declaring that:

"Finally, there is this incontrovertible fact: There are countless numbers of anti-war zealots on the American Left [notice the caps, it's a vast conspiracy] rooting for failure. They believe the worst about the troops. They've blindly embraced frauds who've lied about their military service and lied about wartime atrocities [Kerry? I guess...Though I certainly didn't "embrace" him]. They've allied themselves with socialist kooks and coddled murderous dictators. They are looking for any excuse to pull out, abandon military operations and reconstruction, and impeach the president."

I don't often get angry, but I do when a national columnist passes off the past sins of the American right to the left. Please, if anyone could name a single "murderous dictator" who the left is "coddling," please do so. However, I can name literally dozens of them that the conservative forces in this country, her ideological brethren, have embraced. Perhaps most absurd of all is that the man I'm sure she supports executing, Saddam Hussein, committed his atrocities while the United States was selling him weapons to fight a murderous war of aggression against Iran. Who was in power at the time? None other than the posterboy of modern conservatism, Ronald Reagan. As for the present, we continue to support the Saudis despite their abominable human rights record, the Egyptians and Pakistanis despite the total lack of even a semblance of democracy, the Israelis despite their unwillingness to act reasonably in the conflict with the Palestinians, and, of course, Vladimir Putin despite his vicious and brutal campaign of annihilation against the Chechens and his disregard for even the most basic of constitutional statutes.