We Should Live - Ben Bateman

John F. Kerry, who wants you to know that he served in Vietnam, explained recently on video that if you stay in school you can be smart and succeed. Otherwise, you could end up in Iraq. Don’t expect to see this on the nightly news, but expect to see it everywhere on the net.

Via LGF.

Update: Kerry won’t back down. He insists that he didn’t insult the troops, and instead was trying to criticize Bush. And he would get away with it, too, if our news were still filtered by the liberal media. But on the internet, everyone can hear his words exactly as he spoke them. Who are you gonna believe, him or your own lying ears?

Update 2: The whole mess with Kerry is outrageous, but this line from Kerry’s non-apology just made me sick:

If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

The first sentence is almost comically nonsensical.  You know that he’s trying to say that he would never attack the troops because he’s a veteran.  But if you read exactly what he said in that first sentence, he actually said that you’re only crazy if you think that he would insult the troops without also insulting the president.  And he’s right, I suppose.  As a new mad-dog Democrat, you’re crazy if you think that Kerry would pass up any chance to criticize the president.

But leave the word games aside and think about what Kerry intended to say: Because Kerry is a veteran, he would never criticize the troops.  And that’s just hysterical, because in his younger years Kerry the veteran had this to say before Congress and on TV:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command….

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

Immediately after he returned from Vietnam he tried to make a name for himself by telling the country that US soldiers were ignorant thugs and sadists.  Why should anyone be surprised that he still holds that opinion?  Now he hopes that no one will remember what he said back then.  But this is the information age, and that kind of deceit can no longer stand.

Glenn Beck has published a short movie emphasizing some of the wonderful progress that the Iraqis are making.  In a sane country, this stuff would be on the news every night, counterbalancing the death and danger.  But you have to click here to see it.

Codie Stott is a 14-year-old white English schoolgirl. Recently she was attending a science class at Harrop Fold High School in Worsley, Greater Manchester. The class was doing group science projects, and Codie was assigned to a group in which the other five members were all Pakistani, all of whom could speak Urdu, and only one of whom could speak English. The group was told to discuss the assignment. The five Pakistanis in the group began a lively conversation in Urdu in which young Codie was unable to participate. So she approached her teacher and said, “I’m not being funny, but can I change groups because I can’t understand them?”

The teacher immediately realized that Codie’s statement was potentially a section five racial public order offense, and had her placed in isolation for the rest of the day. A week later, the young criminal was arrested by police officers and taken to Swinton police station, where she was fingerprinted, photographed, questioned about the incident, and held in a cell for three and a half hours.

Headteacher Dr. Anthony Edkins explained the school’s response: “We aim to ensure a caring and tolerant attitude towards people and pupils of all ethnic backgrounds and will not stand for racism in any form.” The story doesn’t indicate whether he went on to explain why this caring and tolerant attitude doesn’t seem to extend to white British schoolgirls who speak only English.

Truly, Britain is doomed.

Update:

In a related story, a school in Britain now requires all its students, Mulsim and non-Muslim, to wear the Hijab, or Muslim head scarf. Surely compulsory female circumcision can’t be far behind.

My two favorite political commentators sit down for a chat here to discuss how the Middle East is conquering Europe, one baby at a time.

And Mark isn’t the only one who sees demographics as the key to the growing clash of civilizations.  Iran’s president Ahmadinejad is pushing for repeal of some of his country’s birth-control policies:

I am against saying that two children are enough. Our country has a lot of capacity. It has the capacity for many children to grow in it. It even has the capacity for 120 million people. Westerners have got problems. Because their population growth is negative, they are worried and fear that if our population increases, we will triumph over them.

His critics in Iran point to the country’s high inflation and unemployment rates.  But Allahpundit points out that Ahmadinejad might have some plans on how to channel the restless energy of thousands of unemployed Iranian youths.

It’s simple: If your country isn’t producing on average more than 2.1 babies per woman, then your country doesn’t have much of a future.  If your country’s birth rate is substantially lower than that, then your country won’t exist in any recognizable form 100 years from now.  And if your births per woman is around 3.0, then you probably already own the future.

That doesn’t mean that your life will be especially pleasant.  Growth is painful for countries and civilizations just as it is for individuals.  All those young Muslims will have trouble finding jobs, and their standard of living will be well below what it would be has their mothers born fewer children.  And that’s precisely the choice that most westerners still can’t fathom: Your life can be easy, relaxed, and full of pleasure—and in the future few people will remember you or believe what you believed.  Or your life can be full of pain, tribulation, and hard work—and after you die people will be much more likely to remember you, believe as you believed, and even share your DNA.

No amount of technology or rhetoric can spare us this choice.  Our lives in the West are much, much easier than the lives of our forebears, or of those in third-world countries.  With disposable diapers, baby monitors, and modern hospitals, it’s easier for us to produce and raise children than ever before.  Yet no matter how easy our lives are, it is easier still not to bother with the (historically minimal) burdens of producing and raising children.  In a relative sense, young people still must give up a large proportion of their comfort and pleasure to reproduce and transmit their genes and culture into the future.  In fact, our technology has made the choice far more difficult with easy and cheap contraception.

The tricky thing about the choice between pleasure and life is that no amount of argument or evidence can affect it much.  No scientist with a test tube can prove that life is worth living.  No one can prove to a young woman that the pains and risks of pregnancy and childbirth are worth her while.  No one can prove to a young man that he’s better off as a monogamous father than as an unattached playboy.

It’s probably built deep into our genes that some proportion of any group of people will conclude that life isn’t worth living, and that life is best lived as a lotus eater.  And that’s where modern liberalism’s unlimited tolerance is so deadly.  If you force those who want to live to tolerate and coexist with those who don’t want to live, then they’re all going to die.

Ever since the Iraq war started, the liberal news networks have been pushing enemy propaganda thinly veiled as news. Yesterday that veil got much thinner. Terrorists in Iraq have compiled a video of their snipers killing US troops. They sent the tape to CNN, and CNN showed it on television.

CNN’s excuse is that it wanted to show the unvarnished truth about the war in Iraq. And that’s idiotic on too many levels to count. A propaganda video from a terrorist organization is not the unvarished truth! It’s the truth heavily varnished—by people who want us dead! Had these people worked during WWII, would they have shown Nazi propaganda, or Japanese propaganda?

The very idea that an American would intentionally help people who want to kill American leaves me sputtering with rage. This is treason. This is helping people who kill Americans. LIKE YOU!

It’s astonishing to consider how tolerance for treason has changed. Consider:

Tokyo Rose

During WWII, the Japanese military broadcast radio propaganda to our troops in the Pacific, such as in a show called The Zero Hour. These shows carried news from home, spun so as to demoralize our troops. But it was different from CCN or the New York Times in its approach: Rather than demonizing our troops, it feigned sympathy for them and reminded them of their privations in the field and the presumed unfaithfulness of wives and girlfriends back in the states.

The Japanese officers in charge of the program thought that this approach would be more effective with a female announcer, so they found Iva Toguri aka Tokyo Rose, to deliver the propaganda. Ms. D’Aquino was an American citizen
who was visiting a relative in Japan when the war broke out. Dire poverty in wartime Japan pushed her into taking a job with the military helping them with English-language propaganda. According to this detailed account, she stayed fiercely loyal to the United States, and joined with other captured Americans in subtly sabotaging the propaganda.

After the war, she was lured by the promise of substantial money to claim that she was Tokyo Rose, though it’s unclear that she really was. But the magazine that promised her the money reneged on the deal, and she was instead arrested and convicted of treason. Even though it was quite clear that she had done nothing wrong, she spent 8.5 years in prison.

It was unfortunate that an innocent woman was sentenced to prison, but I point out the story to illustrate how seriously Americans once took treason. The idea of imprisoning or executing traitors was entirely normal back then, as I believe it has always been historically. Only recently do we have the bizarre idea that governments should tolerate open treason.
Hanoi Jane

Or consider Jane Fonda, who visited North Vietnam in 1972 and eagerly produced propaganda photos and radio broadcasts in support of a government that was dailiy killing our troops. (Details here.) This topped off years of active participation in the US anti-war movement, which the North Vietnamese considered essential to its prosecution of the war.

Many people still hate Jane Fonda for what she did during the Vietnam War. It was considered outrageous, and became something of a rallying point for those opposed to the anti-war movement. Today it would hardly raise an eyebrow.

Lynne Stewart

And now we have Lynne Stewart, the defense lawyer who helped terrorists communicate with their incarcerated leader, Sheik Rahman. This was in the pre-9/11 world, back when liberals were more open about their hatred of America. Ms. Stewart’s actions were not accidental, nor was she naive about what she was doing, other than about her chances of being caught and punished. She was supporting terrorists because she hates America, and now she considers it terribly unfair that the government plans to punish her for it.

She’s not alone, of course. The judge in her case, a Clinton appointee, gave her a prison sentence of 28 months. The usual liberal-communist apparatus is behind her, struggling to lighten her punishment. To the liberals on the coasts, she’s another Cindy Sheehan, speaking truth the power of an oppressive government, blah, blah, blah.

This can’t go on forever. A country can’t survive for very long if it tolerates open treason among its residents, just as it can’t survive for long if it has no control over its borders. Why is it so difficult for so many Americans to grasp the idea that citizenship requires loyalty? If you want our country destroyed, then you shouldn’t be allowed to stay in it. If you want our government to fall, then you shouldn’t enjoy its protections. And if you want to help people kill Americans, then I think that Americans ought to kill you first.

The terrorists want us dead. They want me dead, you dead, your neighbor dead, and the kid down the street dead. They want us all dead. They want the liberals dead, too, and I cannot fathom why the liberals don’t understand that. They want Lynne Stewart dead, just as soon as she’s no longer useful to them. They’ll hold back her head with the left hand, then sever it from the shoulders with a big knife in the right hand, just as they did with Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, and others. They don’t really care about some stupid Danish cartoons, or about some obscure historical quotation in a speech by the Pope. All they really care about is killing all the non-Muslims so that they can rule the world.

And soon they’ll have nukes, because the liberals want us to waste time with the UN while Iran is busy purifying uranium.

You’ve probably heard the old saw about boiling a frog: He’ll jump out if you throw him in hot water, but sit quietly and die if you throw him in cold water and heat it up slowly. Well, that story is nonsense. It isn’t true of frogs, and it isn’t true of people. Nobody dies peacefully while conscious. At some point in the future, Westerners will understand that the Muslims truly intend to kill us, and Americans will do something about it.  After all, 9/11 was only a couple thousand dead, and the terrorists have much higher aspirations.  There is some number of dead Americans that will wake us up, but it’s apparently much higher than 3,000.