Leftism

Delayed Vindication

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Shannon Love was taken to task by the anti-war left way back in 2004. The reason why he drew their ire was because he dared to question the wisdom of a suspicious study that appeared in the Lancet. The study claimed that about 100,000 civilians died in Iraq during the first year after US forces invaded.

Why was this suspicious? Mainly because the authors of the study laid the blame for the deaths at the feet of the Coalition, the number of deaths were ten times higher than any other credible estimate, and because it was released just in time to effect the 2004 US elections.

(If you are interested in the back and forth, this post is a roundup of all essays discussing the study.)

Strategypage reports that the Iraq government has just released the findings of a study of their own.

“The government has released data showing that 110,000 Iraqis have died, mostly from sectarian and terrorist violence, since 2003.”

So the 100K figure is finally correct, only five years after it was first reported. And the Coalition forces didn’t cause the majority of the deaths but terrorists, criminals, and blood feuds are to blame.

Does this matter now, five years after the fact?

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You’ve Just Been Punked by the City of Washington D.C.

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The city of Washington D.C. is ticketing people for parking in their own driveways!

It turns out that D.C. has an odd, obscure law stating that the land between the front of your house and the street, otherwise known as your driveway and front yard, falls under a bizarre classification known as “private property set aside for public use.” Essentially, though owners have to pay for its maintenance and upkeep (they can be fined if they don’t), it’s considered public property. Which apparently means that, technically, you can’t park your car on it. The city recently dusted off the law, and began writing parking tickets if any part of a resident’s car is parked between the front facade of their house and the street, even if it’s parked in the driveway.

When Anderson complained, one D.C. official told her that if she wanted, she could pay the city to lease the land between the front of her house and the street, which would allow her to park her car there legally. [emp added]

Upon hearing about this my spouse commented, “No wonder they don’t want citizens to have guns.”

Certainly sounds like a, “Woman! Fetch my Gun!” type of situation.  

If some city official had told me I could lease my own driveway back from the city, I would have been looking around for the hidden cameras.  Seriously, this is so bad it’s funny.  

We Are So Boned

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Bad news, Obama’s Chairman of the  Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,  Jon Wellinghoff,  is bad at math.  

No new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in  the United States, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission  said today.
 
“We may not need any, ever,” Jon Wellinghoff  told reporters at a U.S. Energy Association forum.
 
Wellinghoff said renewables like wind, solar and biomass will provide enough energy to meet baseload capacity and future energy demands. Nuclear and coal plants are too expensive, he added.

Okay, let’s look at the numbers, shall we?

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Obama’s War Crimes Hypocrisy

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So, Obama is thinking about prosecuting lawyers for war crimes. [h/t Instapundit]

Frankly, I doubt that Obama will actually go through with it. Leftists like to talk big about how horrible and murderous America’s military and  intelligence  services are, but history has shown that they are just hypocritical cowards when it comes to acting on their hysterical rhetoric. John Kerry started his political career with this statement made under oath before congress in 1971:

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.

A shocking allegation but absolutely standard for the pro-communist-victory leftist of the day. It’s important to remember that for Kerry and the rest of the 25% most leftward part of the American political spectrum, America’s fight against communism in Indochina wasn’t just foolhardy or doomed but actively evil. America was engaged in an evil imperialistic war to prevent the people of Indochina from embracing the enlightened communist future they desired. Since America was a Nazi-like country that would attack and oppress innocent people, it followed that American soldiers would use Nazi-like tactics.  

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Obama’s New Nuremberg Defense

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The Nazi  defendants  at the Nuremberg trials must be down in Hell kicking themselves for not thinking of this  [h/t Instapundit]:

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said over the weekend the administration did not support prosecutions for “those who devised policy.” Aides later said he was referring to CIA superiors who ordered the interrogations, not the Justice Department officials who wrote the legal memos allowing them.Then came Obama’s comments Tuesday when a reporter asked him if he backed prosecution for those who devised the interrogation policy. He had already shot down the idea of prosecuting any of the CIA agents who carried out the interrogations on grounds they were following the law at the time.

Wow, so the standard now is that you’re off the hook for crimes against humanity if the lawyers told you it was okay? Sweet! Does that work for other crimes as well?

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