IT’S A SPECIAL VETERAN’S DAY Carnival of Cordite.

UPDATE: And here’s a special Veteran’s Day Gay Cavalcade.

DARFUR UPDATE:

The UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) said on Thursday that it had received an unconfirmed report that some 1,500 armed men had attacked and burned six villages in South Darfur, killing 18 people earlier this week.

UNMIS said the report indicated that on Sunday and Monday, the armed group travelling on camels, horses and in vehicles killed the 18 victims, wounded 16 others, and attacked and burned the villages of Dar es Salam, Jamali, Funfo, Tabeldyad, Um Djantara and Um Putrum in the Gereida area of South Darfur.

I think it’s going to take more than U.N. commissions. Why can’t we send these people some guns and trainers?

MORE ON BUSH’S SPEECH: A reader emails:

For supporters of the war (like me) the salient question about Bush’s speech is: Is this just the beginning of a sustained, coherent counter-argument or just a one-off?

To use a baseball analogy, Bush is like the batter who hits for power and not average.

When he connects, he can a hit spectacular homer.

The problem is, he rarely connects.

The Democrats, by contrast, are playing littleball, whittling at the GOP with an investigation here, a misquote there, an MS Word doc from 1973 …

It’s the Texas Rangers against the Chicago White Sox–and we all know who won the World Series.

If the President keeps this up, then–great! Supporters have been waiting eons for the elephants to get back in this fight.

On the other hand, if this is another one of the President’s “there, that oughtta hold the little buggers for the next six months” gestures, then things won’t change except to get worse.

The GOP needs to realize that actions don’t always speak louder than words, especially in politics, and especially for Republicans.

Yes, it’s all about the follow-through.

UPDATE: Lorie Byrd has thoughts on Bush’s timing.

IF YOU HAVEN’T CHECKED OUT Jim Bennett’s blog, Albion’s Seedlings, you might want to.

RICHARD COHEN, PorkBuster?

WELL, THE HATEMAIL HAS POURED IN after my earlier post on Bush’s speech. For the record, though, I didn’t say (and don’t think) that anyone who opposes the war is unpatriotic. (In fact, only antiwar people seem to keep raising this strawman). But the Democratic politicans who are pushing the “Bush Lied” meme are, I think, playing politics with the war in a way that is, in fact, unpatriotic. Having voted for the war, they now want to cozy up to the increasingly powerful MoveOn crowd, which is immensely antiwar. The “Bush Lied” meme is their way of getting cover. This move also suggests that their earlier support for the war may itself have been more opportunistic than sincere, which I suppose is another variety of unpatriotism.

This bit of hatemail, though, seems to carry the flavor best:

Did you ever really think you’d be the kind of person who would be calling dissenters from a right-wing, gay-bashing, anti-evolution, incompetent war-making administration “unpatriotic”?

I’m not sure where evolution or gay rights come into this (I’ve “dissented” on those points myself, after all), but I think this illustrates that the “Bush lied” issue has more to do with anti-Bush sentiment than with anything having to do with the merits of the war.

But it’s not “dissent” that’s unpatriotic, something I’ve been at pains to note in the past. It’s putting one’s own political positions first, even if doing so encourages our enemies, as this sort of talk is sure to do. And that’s what I think is going on with the sudden surge of “Bush Lied” stuff from Congressional democrats.

Of course, outrage over questioning of patriotism is kind of one-sided. You can say that Bush and Cheney started the war with a bunch of lies to enrich their buddies at Halliburton, and that their supporters are all a bunch of chickenhawks on the White House payroll. But that’s different because — because Bush is anti-evolution, and doesn’t support gay marriage! Or something.

UPDATE: Thanks to the speed of the blogosphere, John Cole has responded to Kevin Drum’s rather misleading quotation of my earlier post, before I even noticed it.

I suspect Kevin left out my bit about Democratic politicians pandering to the antiwar base because, well, it’s obviously true and it kind of spoils his point.

John gets this part right:

Painting as unpatriotic those individuals who change their opinions simply for political reasons is wholly appropriate, and that is what Glenn stated. Reynolds is not, as Kevin Drum would have you believe, simply calling anyone against the war or anyone who believes that the the reasons used to go to war were inaccurate ‘unpatriotic.’

See, it’s not so hard if you actually read the post. Jeff Goldstein has related thoughts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Richard Samuelson emails:

The response to your posts is interesting. One question that might be interesting to ask. To what degree to your critics believe that patriotism is a good thing? To what degree do they believe it is proper to support one’s own country ahead of others?

How to criticize one’s country responsibly is a very interesting question, particularly with regard to an ongoing war. On the one hand, it is one’s duty as a citizen to support one’s country when it is engaged in a war. Even if one opposed the war at the start, it is one’s job in a democratic republic to show faith in one’s fellow-citizens, and give them the benefit of the doubt on the rightness of the decision. On the other hand, a good citizen has a responsibility to criticize the government when he finds it to be misguided.

I wonder if the passion behind the rhetoric here is existential. If this war is justified, it raises doubts about whether the world will ever become war-free. For that reason, it raises fundamental questions about the possibility of true progress in any grand sense. If this war is justified, it might mean that patriotism will always remain a virtue in some circumstances, because the world will always, in some ways, be divided between us and others. It might be, in short, an attack upon the implicit universalism of so much modern ideology. Giving that up might be too high a price to pay. Hence it’s easier to dismiss the war as fundamentally corrupt from the start.

I don’t know, but it’s surprising the extent to which people who routinely make the Halliburton and chickenhawk slurs seem to require much greater delicacy from others.

MORE: Tom Maguire:

In any case, I believe there is a substantial difference between “Your false charges are undermining the troops” and “Your criticism is undermining our troops”.

OK, I understand that for purposes of debating this point, war critics will have to insist that *all* their criticisms are perceived as false. However, that is simply not so. For example, a war opponent who argued that this war would not go well without international support and a specific UN resolution is entitled to that opinion, and I don’t see how it could be proven to be either true or false. Consequently, I don’t see how the specific passage offered by the Times could be viewed as an attempt by Bush to stifle that particular dissent, or to question that critic’s patriotism.

But I am gloomily resigned to having it explained to me.

The Democrats do seem to be finding traction with the new approach. The old talking point – “I would have spoken out against the war, but Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly would have been mean to me, and Arnold might have called me a girlie-man” – lacked a certain John Wayne quality.

Whether the new talking point – “I couldn’t see through Bush’s lies” – takes hold depends on just how empty-headed various Dems want to appear as they abase themselve before their base.

Heh. Indeed.

MORE STILL: Reader Dan Farmer emails:

How is the constant repetition of, ‘Bush fooled me, I didn’t know what I was doing!’, help the Democrats? How will they stand up to the perfidy and guile of our real enemies and sometimes allies? Maybe someone can work that into a winning campaign slogan, but it’s beyond me. How about “We’re Dumber than Bush!”?

That’ll sell.

STILL MORE: Josh Wills emails:

Only one question comes to mind when I read your post on the hate mail you received in response to your comments on “unpatriotic” congressional Democrats- still nicer than the hate mail you got for your (still blasphemous) barbecue post?

Oh, the barbecue hatemail was much worse. But the spelling was better.

BEST HEADLINE OF THE DAY: “Will The DoJ Probe the CIA for CYA?”

UPDATE: Related CIA post here.

OVER AT THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH, the senior Djerejian offers thoughts on what’s wrong with our public diplomacy efforts, and what we ought to be doing: “[A] process of unilateral disarmament in the weapons of advocacy over the last decade has contributed to widespread negative attitudes and even hostility toward the United States and left us vulnerable to lethal threats to our interests and our safety.”

READER DAVID BANKS EMAILS: “As a local and frequent reader of your blog, I surely would like to see more of the great around East Tennessee photos. After all the many references to digital cameras, I know you have them!”

Actually, I’ve been too busy book-writing, paper-grading, etc., to do my usual photo expeditions this year. But I did take a camera with me as I strolled around campus yesterday. Here’s one picture, and I’ll try to upload some more later.

DEMOCRATS DENY having pre-war intelligence.

GATEWAY PUNDIT has much more on Bush’s speech, including links to video.

ADAM BONIN:

We would rather not be engaging in a tit-for-tat with Reps. Shays and Meehan following their latest response to the joint letter circulated by Markos Moulitsas and Mike Krempasky yesterday. Our preference has always been to work together with those representatives and outside groups sincerely interested in balancing the desire to stem corruption with the need to protect political activity online, and I will continue to speak with anyone interested in alternatives to H.R. 4194 as it is presently constructed.

But that letter demands a response, and it does because of what it reveals. For all their strutting about the “great virtue” of discourse on the Internet, Reps. Shays and Meehan repeatedly attack our letter for “circulating on the Internet” as though the medium alone somehow detracted from the truth of its message, almost as if we had posted it in a bathroom stall rather than faxing it to all 435 Members’ offices before posting online.

Read the whole thing.

BUSH SLAMS HISTORICAL REVISIONISTS ON THE WAR: About time. Jeff Goldstein has more.

And read earlier posts on this subject here and here. Also here.

[And if you’re coming in on a link from elsewhere, be sure to read this later post].

The White House needs to go on the offensive here in a big way — and Bush needs to be very plain that this is all about Democratic politicans pandering to the antiwar base, that it’s deeply dishonest, and that it hurts our troops abroad.

And yes, he should question their patriotism. Because they’re acting unpatriotically.

UPDATE: InstaPunk looks at the origins of the big lie on Iraq. Meanwhile, Michael Ubaldi emails:

President Bush should revisit the media-distorted Duelfer report, which confirmed that Saddam Hussein changed his strategy in the latter 1990s and intended to rebuild his WMD capacity when the sanctions-regime-turned-bonanza was lifted.

Ending the Gulf War — and by democratizing, aiding the prosecution of the war on terror — was always about Iraq and the despotic government its authoritarian culture made possible.

Just read the items linked above.

UPDATE: Reader Kathleen Boerger emails: “Could you do me a favor and define ‘patriotism’ please?”

I think it starts with not uttering falsehoods that damage the country in time of war, simply because your donor base wants to hear them.

Patriotic people could — and did — oppose the war. But so did a lot of scoundrels. And some who supported the war were not patriotic, if they did it out of opportunism or political calculation rather than honest belief. Those who are now trying to recast their prior positions through dishonest rewriting of history are not patriotic now, nor were they when they supported the war, if they did so then out of opportunism –which today’s revisionist history suggests.

Judging from the lefty hatemail this post has created, I have to observe that it’s odd — people who have spent the past year saying that Bush took us to war to enrich Halliburton somehow now think it’s beyond the bounds of civilized discussion to question people’s motives on the war. That’s part of the big lie, too.

More on historical revisionism, here.

If Democrats were smart, meanwhile, they’d be taking Bob Krumm’s advice:

Instead of looking backward to question why we’re at war, Democrats should focus on winning by increasing the size of the military, portraying a positive message, supporting not just the troops, but also their mission, and showing the world a united homefront in the midst of war.

There’s precedent for this counterintuitive approach–1992. When Bushes win victories abroad, the focus returns quickly to their failures at home. And as far as many Republican voters are concerned, there are domestic deficiencies aplenty in this Bush administration. Just as there were in his father’s.

So, Democrats, stop running against the war. You serve only to unite an otherwise disenchanted Republican base. If you take the war off the front page by winning it, Republicans will have to depend on their domestic record for victory. And, unfortunately, there’s little there to rally the base.

The desire of so many on the left to relive the Vietnam era is Karl Rove’s secret weapon.

MORE: The full text of Bush’s speech is here. Excerpt:

While it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. (Applause.) Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.

They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction. And many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: “When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security.” That’s why more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate — who had access to the same intelligence — voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power. (Applause.)

The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges. (Applause.) These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America’s will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them. (Applause.) Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. (Applause.)

(Applause.) Er, and (about time).

And read this post by Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics, too. Excerpt: “In the end, the story of the run-up to the Iraq war is about intelligence, but not in the way most people think. Intelligence is always flawed and imprecise, even more so when you’re dealing with a closed, paranoid and authoritarian regime like Hussein’s. It’s foolish to suggest Bush should have bucked consensus estimates on Iraq WMD built from more than a decade of intel, and it’s even worse to suggest he lied for not doing so.”

STILL MORE: Don Surber says it was Bush’s Gettysburg Address.

THE NEW GALLOWAY BROTHERS DOCUMENTARY, Why Wal*Mart Works and why that makes some people C-R-A-Z-Y! is coming out next week. There’s a trailer online now. I guess it’s the one they edited in the car.

I’ve never understood why Wal-Mart makes some people crazy, but it clearly does. I prefer Tarzhay myself for its more upscale ambience, but my discomfort with Wal-Mart is purely aesthetic, and I think it’s odd that some people see it as evil incarnate. As I said when they interviewed me for this film (I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know if I wound up on the cutting-room floor, which is probably where I belong), I think there’s a class issue: Wal-Mart is unavoidable evidence that the American working classes don’t think, or live, the way the American thinking classes want to imagine. For this sin, Wal-Mart can never be forgiven.

Of course, they could really get my loyalty with a Samuel’s. With Hebrew Nationals and free wi-fi!

BE YOUR OWN HOTSPOT: A solar-powered, EVDO-based backpack wi-fi setup.

FATHERS AND SONS: This Veterans Day piece in NRO mentions InstaPundit reader John Lucas and his son David.

ANDREW BREITBART: Al Qaeda killed my friend. Read the whole thing.

JEFF JARVIS: “Google wants the rest of the world to put its stuff online to be searchable by Google. Will the stuff Google creates be searchable by everyone else?”

I’M DEEPLY UNIMPRESSED WITH “INTELLIGENT DESIGN,” but this NPR story on the harassment, firing, and intimidation of scientists and academics who support intelligent design, or even seem like they might, is pretty appalling. (More accurately, the story is very good, but what it reports is appalling). This is pretty much scientific McCarthyism, and it ought to be stopped.

Listen to the story, and read this letter from the Office of Special Counsel on the Smithsonian Institution’s behavior in a particularly disgraceful episode

Of course, with friends like Pat Robertson, Intelligent Design hardly needs enemies.

MARY MAPES UNLEASHED: More reports and video of her continuing help-remind-people-how-CBS-reelected-Bush tour!

RALPH KINNEY BENNETT remembers Veterans’ Day.

JOANNE JACOBS’ NEW BOOK is still way up on Amazon. Congratulations, Joanne!

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: It’s the Porker of the Month!

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today named Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C.) Porker of the Month for working to thwart a budget reconciliation package that could save taxpayers $53.9 billion over five years. As ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, Rep. Spratt preaches fiscal restraint yet refuses to offer savings proposals and even held a mock hearing to misconstrue miniscule spending reductions as deep cuts. . . .

Mandatory spending currently accounts for 54 percent of the federal budget. Left unchecked, it will absorb 62 percent in just 10 years and will eventually crowd out all other federal priorities. Rep. Spratt prefers to bury his head in the sand and punt the problem to future generations to deal with. He claims to favor across-the-board spending cuts as an alternative to the GOP plan. But Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.) has proposed seven across-the-board cuts — of one percent each — to appropriations bills this year, and Rep. Spratt voted against every one.

For ignoring the looming crisis in mandatory spending, for using scare tactics to portray modest spending restraints as deep cuts, and for refusing to cut wasteful spending to offset hurricane recovery and reduce the deficit, CAGW names Rep. John Spratt Porker of the Month for November 2005.

Oink.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE OIL: Another peace activist with oil-for-food interests.

MEGAN MCARDLE is blogging about abortion. She keeps posting, so just keep scrolling.