Malkin vindicated: 'Lone nut card' played by Napolitano in NWA terror case

When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was arrested after attempting to detonate an explosive aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253, Michelle Malkin ended her Christmas Day post with a prediction:

Victim card/lone nut card in 3, 2, 1 . . .

The administration has evidently decided to go with the "lone nut" angle:

The U.S. has "no indication" that an attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight was part of a larger plot by a terrorist group, a top Obama administration official said.
"Right now we have no indication that it is part of anything larger, but obviously the investigation continues," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on CNN's "State of the Union" program on Sunday.

Right. But what of the connections to al-Qaeda in Yemen?

Authorities say the 23-year-old suspect spent months in Yemen being trained for the Christmas Day suicide mission.
Investigators believe Abdulmutallab was connected to al Qaeda by the same radical imam, American-born Anwar Awlaki, who is linked to the American Army major accused of opening fire at Fort Hood in November.
According to investigators, the bomb . . . was built in Yemen by a top al Qaeda bomb maker. . . .

This is incompatible with Napolitano's claim on CNN that this was not "part of anything larger." One cannot train with al-Qaeda under the influence of a radical imam, and utilize an exploisve designed by al-Qaeda, without being part of something larger.

So far, I've seen no evidence of the "victim card" being played on behalf of Abdulmutallab, but this Associated Press biographical profile of the suspect portrays him as having had a "saintly aura" as a student in England. Give the media time, though. Their best spinmeisters are still on holiday.

UPDATE: Further evidence (as if we needed more) that Janet Napolitano is a useless dimwit:

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said that the thwarting of the attempt to blow up the Amsterdam-Detroit flight this week demonstrated that "the system worked."
Asked by CNN's Candy Crowley on "State of the Union" how that could be possible when the young Nigerian who sought to set off the bomb was able to smuggle explosive liquid onto the flight, Napolitano responded: "We're asking the same questions.”
Napolitano added that there was "no suggestion that [the bomber] was improperly screened."

(Hat-tip: Blogmocracy 2.0.) If failure to keep a bomber off a plane means "the system worked," then obviously this means no changes to the system are necessary, right? Wrong. The al-Qaeda-trained "lone nut" has just given the Transportation Security Administration the excuse it needed to make commercial air travel even more miserable. My libertarian friend Radley Balko observes:

TSA will apparently adopt a new policy prohibiting passengers from moving during the last hour of a flight. Also, no pillows or blankets during that last hour.
In addition to keeping with its usually tradition of making policy on a reactionary basis, this one wouldn’t even have done anything to prevent the attempt over the weekend.

No doubt, the TSA will also enhance its policy of conducting random searches of elderly women from rural Minnesota in order to prevent CAIR from accusing them of "profiling."

TSA: Protecting You From Olga Swenson!

UPDATE II: Ed Morrissey calls this Napolitano's "Chip Diller moment," and Mary Katharine Ham Tweets:

"The system worked." Jasper Schuringa is "the system," apparently.

The "bring your own Dutchman" approach to airline safety.

UPDATE III: And now The Boss weighs in on the clueless nitwit in charge of DHS:

Beginning with her embrace of the impotent euphemism "man-caused disasters" to the hit job on conservatives and veterans that she was forced to apologize for, to her assertion that crossing the border illegally "isn't a crime per se," to her boneheaded claim that 9/11 terrorists came in through the Canadian border, Ja-No has confirmed time and again that she's not ready for prime time.

Yes, but you've got to give Janet Napolitano credit for preventing terrorist attacks by those right-wing extremists, not to mention her perfect record against the Olga Swenson menace. Just imagine what carnage might have been wrought by elderly Lutheran ladies, if not for the vigilance of DHS!

UPDATE IV: Another anti-terror success for TSA:

Police say Ivana Trump has been escorted off a plane in Florida after she became belligerent when children were running and screaming in the aisles.
Authorities say the first ex-wife of billionaire Donald Trump cursed at the children Saturday, and when flight attendants on the New York-bound plane tried to calm her, she became even more aggravated.

No word yet on whether Ivana's attack was part of a larger terrorist conspiracy by rich divorcees.

'What. The. Hell.'

Michelle Malkin reacts to the ObamaCare "provision requiring insurance plans that cover dependents to provide benefits to children up to age 26."

Twenty-six. Think about that. If you're 18 and really serious about getting health-care coverage, here's a suggestion: Join the Marine Corps.

Not only will the Marines provide you with health care, but you also get free food, free housing, free clothing and free travel to exotic countries where you can actually get paid to kill foreigners.

How cool is that, dude? Not to mention, chicks dig that whole muscular-guy-in-a-uniform thing.

So turn off your gaming console, get your lazy butt off the sofa, go to your nearest Marine Corps recruiting station and sign up today. If the taxpayers are going to give you slackers free health-care, at least you should earn it the old-fashioned way: Killing foreigners.

Now the bad news: We're not at war with Canada. Yet.

P.S.: Don't forget to vote for me in the 2009 Malkin Awards.

2009 Malkin Awards: I'm a FINALIST!

Andrew Sullivan has nominated me four times for the prestigious "Malkin Award" and now I see that I am a finalist for the 2009 Malkin. The competition is tough -- I'm up against Erick Erickson, Michael Goldfarb and Glenn Beck, among other worthies -- but let's be honest: None of them can compete with the Greatest Hypothetical Evah!

"Swear to God, if they ever want a Gentile prime minister, my first order would be to deploy the IDF in a north-south line, facing east. My second order would be 'forward march' and the order to halt would not be given until it was time for the troops to rinse their bayonets in the Jordan. After a brief rest halt, the order 'about face' would be given, and the next halt would be at the Mediterranean coast."

Sully later made that hypothetical hyperbole the basis of accusing me of advocating genocide(!?!), which of course I was not. Peaceful by nature, I grew up a few miles from the ruins of New Manchester Mill -- burned by Stoneman's cavalry in 1864 -- and therefore have always had a keen understanding of what war really means (cf., Hiroshima).

Fatah, Hamas and Hezbollah recognize only one definition of "peace": Dead Jews. So when they start blowing up buses and firing rockets at civilians, these terrorist monsters are sending out an invitation to war, and they can't complain about getting an RSVP from the IDF.

Notice that this perspective doesn't require playing moral referee between Jews and Palestinians, or settling the historical grievances between them. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the reality that more than 60 years after Israel declared its independence, her terrorist enemies don't even recognize Israel's right to existence, and endlessly foment hatred against Jews. Ergo, Sonny Corleone in Gaza.

However, you don't have to share my idiosyncratic view of geopolitics to vote for me in the Malkin Awards competition. Any accusation of bloodthirsty warmongering based on that particular quote is invalid under that widely recognized codicil of the Blog Ethics Code known as the Glenn Greenwald Rule:

Anything said while ridiculing Glenn Greenwald is OK, because he always deserves it.

Hurry up and vote for me in the Malkin Awards, and be sure to hit my tip jar, because you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of Genesis 12:3.

Oh, boy! 'Fistgate' on Fox!

Sean Hannity just announced that Michelle Malkin's going to be on after the commercial to talk about every middle-schooler's favorite subject!

Don't try this at home, kids!

UPDATE: The Boss gives big props to Gateway Pundit! Attagirl, Michelle!

UPDATE II: Michelle and Hannity made a point about the kind of sexually explicit stuff that is being pushed on kids in the name of "tolerance" -- you can't quote most of it on TV, or in a mainstream newspaper. And the advocates of "tolerance" know this.

If the average taxpayer or the average parent were to see the worst of this stuff, there would be a riot.. And if they understood the psychological influence of "comprehensive sexuality education" -- or saw what goes on in the classrooms where kids are taught this stuff -- they'd be urging that the instigators of such programs be fired. Ten years ago, I interviewed Wendy Shalit:

Her conflict with a sexually explicit culture actually began years earlier when, as a fourth-grader, her complaints about a sex-education class led her parents to request that she be excused from the classes. She spent those hours in the library.
"I was glad to be in the library, because the other girls got teased, and I would just pretend like I didn't know what they were talking about," she recalls. "And in a lot of cases, I didn't, and I was glad not to, frankly."
Sex education in public schools should be "completely abolished," Miss Shalit says. “At best, it's redundant, because kids do not learn the facts from sex education. They know it already."
But Miss Shalit also says sex education hurts girls -- "and boys, too" -- by eroding natural modesty. "The problem is that we have it so early now, we really don't allow people to develop their personalities before their sexual identity," she says.

Wendy's book is A Return to Modesty.

Hate to point this out again, but . . .

There are five A's in RAAAAACIST. For some reason, Michelle Malkin misspells (or miscounts) the word:

Crying “RAAAAAACIST:” Always the first and last refuge of left-wing scoundrels.

Maybe Harry Reid is angry because Bob Byrd has gone wobbly on health care?

The question with Reid is, which came first, the scoundrel or the left-wing? He's a shameless opportunist whose instincts are much like those of another congressional pugilist, Rep. Jim Moran (D-Mentia).

Via Memeorandum. More from Hot Air, Big Government, Riehl World View, Ed Driscoll, Le·gal In·sur·rec· tion, Red State. and Richard McEnroe at Three Beers Later.

UPDATE: Harry Reid has a problem with all those raaaaacist people who don't support ObamaCare. You know who I mean: Nevada voters!

President Barack Obama has lost ground in the last month in getting Nevadans to embrace his health care reform package and, for the first time, opposition is above 50 percent and support is below 40 percent, a new poll commissioned by the Las Vegas Review-Journal reveals.
The telephone poll of 625 registered voters found that 53 percent of Nevadans oppose the president's attempt to provide a remedy for problems in the nation's health care system. Support for the plan is at 39 percent.

So, a 53% majority of Nevada voters are haters. And their hate, as Harry Reid suspects, is related to race -- namely his 2010 re-election race:

Nevadans aren't warming up to Sen. Harry Reid, despite plenty of early advertising designed to boost his image, a new poll shows.
Just 38 percent of respondents said they had a favorable opinion of the Democratic Senate majority leader, the same percentage as in October and 1 point higher than in August.
The survey of 625 registered Nevada voters by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research suggests the promotional bombardment that Reid launched more than six weeks ago has yet to hit its target.
"I'd be worried," said Michael Franz, an assistant professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, who studies political advertising. "I'd stop if I had aired ads for two or three weeks and it wasn't moving the needle."

Nine different Republicans raaaaacists are running in the primary for a chance to take on Harry, and either of the two best-known GOP candidates beats Reid in a head-to-head poll matchup.

Clearly, the Nevada Chamber of Commerce needs to come up with a new slogan:

Nevada: Where Everything Fun Is Legal,
Including Gambling, Prostitution and Hate

Remind me to bill you guys for the consulting fees . . .

That other 'climate of hate'

Not the Tea Party "rage" hyped up by the Defamation League. Not the phony "Southern populist terrorism" scare that made Andrew Sullivan hysterical with fear. And not the Boston Globe's bogus claim that President Obama has been targeted by a record number of threats.

No, I'm talking about the climate of hate in the real world where, Michelle Malkin reports, police are being gunned down in cold blood:

The Left's police-hating chickens are coming home to roost. While partisan liberals have gone out of their way to blame conservative media and the Tea Party movement for creating a "climate of hate," they are silent on the cultural and literal war on cops that has raged for decades – and escalated tragically this year.
The total number of law enforcement officers shot and killed this year is up 19 percent over last year, according to the Christian Science Monitor. More officers have died in ambush incidents this year than any other since 2000. . . .
Clemmons had told numerous friends and family members to “watch the TV” before the massacre because he was going to “kill a bunch of cops.” The witnesses did worse than nothing. Several have been arrested for actively aiding and abetting Clemmons – with shelter, food, money, and medical aid — before he was discovered in Seattle early Tuesday morning and shot after threatening a patrol officer investigating Clemmons’ stolen vehicle. . . .

Read the whole thing.

Holiday Book Sale 2010 Begins!

Last year's Holiday Book Sale was a smashing success, so we're back again for more. Why fight the crowds at the mall, when you can buy books from your favorite blog? Ordering online through Amazon is easy and, through the Amazon Associates program, I get a small commission on each book you buy here. Let's start with three recent bestsellers where I've got a personal connection:

• Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies by Michelle Malkin -- Not only is this the first major book to expose the corrupt background of the Obama administration, including the role of ACORN and SEIU, but it's also the Best. Book. Evah! (That's because my name is mentioned in the acknowledgements on page 291.) Think of it this way: Christmas is about love. You love Michelle, you love me, you love whoever you're buying the book for, and I'm going to love my Amazon commission. What a perfect gift, huh?
• Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America by Ann Coulter -- OK, so Ann didn't give me a shout-out in the acknowledgements. She did, however, cite me in the footnotes (page 265) for my reporting on a 2007 hate-hoax at George Washington University. Also, I got to hang out with Ann during her visit to D.C. in August. I only hang out with cool people, so all Coulter books bear The Other McCain Seal Of Coolness, even those that don't mention me in the footnotes.
• Going Rogue: An American Life by Sarah Palin -- I covered Palin during the 2008 campaign and, when someone jokingly suggested me to help the Sweetheart of the Heartland write her memoir, I countered with a much better suggestion: Lynn Vincent, with whom I co-authored Donkey Cons. The result? A smash bestseller! Too bad a certain GOP presidential candidate ignored my advice about that Wall Street bailout, but the whole concept of "President McCain" was frightening to the American people, and who can blame them? (Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Bob Barr!) But give Crazy Cousin John this: He made exactly one good decision during that campaign and that was Sarah Palin. Buy her book.

You notice something here? All three of these books are written by smart, powerful, beautiful women -- just like my wife. And my smart, powerful, beautiful wife expects me to make money from this blogging thing, so you should definitely order some books.

Your conservative friends and family members will enjoy these thoughtful gifts. And what about your liberal friends and relatives? Just imagine the look on their faces when they open the package and see what you've given them.

Now, imagine giving your annoying liberal sister-in-law all three of these books: Malkin, Coulter and Palin.

Some things are priceless, and that's a holiday memory you can cherish forever.

You'll pay for this, Jules Crittenden!

In writing about Andrew Sullivan, the city editor of a Boston newspaper manages to use two painfully suggestive terms, "bottomless" and "cavernous." I'm billing him for two cases of industrial-strength brain bleach.

Meanwhile, I previously overlooked the latest not-to-be-missed Ace beatdown on Sully's latest excursion to insanity. And Michelle Malkin is moved to mercy:

Perhaps the publisher and editors of the august Atlantic magazine should consider giving the man an extended sick leave.
Or at least some Zyprexa.

About three bottles of Zyprexa ought to do the trick, if washed down with enough whiskey. Mercy.

Ouch, Boss!

OK, I probably deserved this shot from Michelle Malkin:

And no, it isn't "playing the victim" to expose their bigotry.
It’s calling them out.

Without naming me, she evidently refers to my post yesterday:

Grant that the editors of Newsweek hate Sarah Palin. We have every reason to believe that the choice of photo of Palin in shorts represented an attempt to diminish and belittle Palin, to portray her as a cheesecake bimbo, the political equivalent of Lindsay Lohan. . . .
That this is "sexist," OK. Gotcha. But does Sarah Palin want to assume a feminist victimhood posture, to say that she is being oppressed by the patriarchy?

Given that I don't like it when people tell me how to frame my response to attacks on me, I suppose that I shouldn't be telling others how to frame their responses to attacks on them. The Golden Rule, in other words.

So if I'm correct that The Boss was aiming that elbow at me, I acknowledge the fault was mine. Mea culpa.

The old rule in the Washington Time newsroom was, "When in doubt, blame McCain." When I resigned last year, I wondered how they'd get along without having me around as the reliable scapegoat.

Answer? Not too good. Not too good at all.

Michelle Malkin: 'Political correctness is the handmaiden of terror'

How true. And I'll risk accusations of Glenn-Beckism by pointing out that "terrorism" and "political correctness" are both legacies of Marxist-Leninist thought.

Lenin advocated "revolutionary terror," first as a means of attacking the bourgeois regime and then, once the revolutioaries had seized power, as a means of intimidating the population and compelling cooperation with the revolutionary agenda.

The phrase "politically correct" is also of Marxist-Leninist origin. The concept of "democratic centralism" required that the Bolshevik vanguard arrogate to itself the authority to dictate what was and was not true, what policies should be pursued, etc. Once the Communst leadership had decided what the proper "party line" was, then all dissenters were said to be politically incorrect, and were anathematized as Enemies of the People.

This was how it came to be that after Stalin after Trotsky -- who had been second only to Lenin in the leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution -- he ordered Trotsky's image airbrushed out of photos of the original revolutionary leadership. And that was only one example of where political correctness led.

It is amazing to me the degree to which this type of Marxist-Leninist thinking has not merely survived, but thrived despite the collapse of the Soviet Union. And nowhere is this more true -- in a deeply ironic way -- than in the way so many conservatives have forgotten the Soviet origins of modern terrorism. I quote from a 1977 Heritage Foundation study:

The International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . . . has been the most important Soviet agency for the support of terrorism. Through this agency, the Soviets established two training schools for terrorists: the Lenin Institute or Institute of Social Studies and the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Both of them regularly train their students -- 300 to 600 at any one time at the Lenin Institute - -in the techniques of "sabotage, terrorism, assassination, and other kinds of clandestine ar:d violent warfare."

Another Heritage Foundation study from 1984:

The presence in the U.S. of large numbers of disaffected aliens, many from cultures with traditions of political violence, could be of concern. . . . It is not unreasonable to assume that some of these may be sympathetic to the political goals of some terrorist movements that espouse their national, religious, or ideological beliefs. This minority may provide an audience for terrorist propaganda or a valuable infrastructure for terrorist financial or logistical support.

Both of those studies were written by the author of The Soviet Strategy of Terror, published in 1981 by the Heritage Foundation. But the politically incorrect Sam Francis has been airbrushed out of conservative history. So it is that we have lost a vital key to understanding the problem of terrorism by "disaffected aliens . . . sympathetic to the political goals of some terrorist movements."

History, Ancient and Modern
Certainly, it is possible to see the roots of Islamic terror in the 7th century A.D., beginning with the warrior-prophet Muhammed and continuing with the Muslim conquests that advanced by the sword across Turkey and into Asia, over North Africa, to Spain, and into Europe before finally being halted by the Christian victory over the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683.

All of that is relevant background, but has little to do with the specific manifestation of terror-jihad that has arisen in the Islamic world since the 1960s. The fanatical anti-American stance of these groups has very particular connection to the Soviet strategy of terror.

The PLO and Fatah, in particular, received support from a network of communist agents. And the propaganda agents of the Kremlin were also involved. If you'll go back and study it, you'll notice that the Palestinian cause was embraced by the New Left shortly after American student radicals began trekking to Cuba and Eastern Europe for "study."

The skeptic will point out that Marxism is dogmatically atheist, while Islamic terrorism is devoutly religious. True, but it is likewise true that although Marxism is anti-nationalist, the Soviets exploited nationalist sentiment (e.g., in Vietnam) wherever they felt it might advance their long-term revolutionary goal.

Terrorism and 'Liberation'
What is today considered a religious phenomenon -- Islam's jihad against the West -- actually originated with 2oth-century Arab nationalism, of which "Palestinian liberation" was the principle manifestation from the 1960s onward. This was all part of the Soviet agenda of creating satellites via "wars of national liberation."

Whether it was the Viet Cong or the Sandinistas or the PLO, all such revolutionary outfits shared a common anti-American agenda. The Soviets supported all these groups for the same reason: One "brushfire" war at a time, the U.S. could be deprived of potential allies in its Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union, which claimed to speak on behalf of the victims of American "imperialism."

When the Ayatollah's Shi'ite revolutionaries in Iran dubbed America "The Great Satan," they were merely expressing in religious terms what the Soviets were proclaiming in secular terms. In the calculus of the Cold War, what was bad for the U.S.A. was good for Moscow, you see. It wasn't until the Soviets tried to impose their will by direct military intervention in Afghanistan that they got a taste of the fanaticism of "liberation" the Kremlin had done so much to foment.

Of Motives and Murders
The homicidal rage of "Sudden Jihad Syndrome" -- evidently the motive for Nidal Malik Hassan's murderous rampage -- is the legacy of a history forgotten.

Objectively, there is no reason that the Islamic world should be infested with violent anti-Americanism. There is no objective reason why Israelis should constantly be plagued by Palestinian terror, nor that Iranians should suffer under the yoke of the mullahs and Ahmadinejad. The resentments which give rise to these phenomena are unacknowledged fruit of the Marxist-Leninist legacy.

Wherever it is proclaimed that capitalism is exploitation and that the United States is an agent of oppression, then the specific form and rhetoric of "anti-imperialist" violence -- whether religious or secular, ethnic or nationalist -- is just a detail.

All of these latter-day "revolutionary" movements are, in some sense, mere third-hand replicas of a Bolshevik prototype. The Taliban are an Afghan clone of the Khmer Rouge, Hugo Chavez is the Ceauşescu of Venezuela and Saddam Hussein was a Mesopotamian Stalin. Conservatives ought to understand this, and to say it out loud, no matter how politically incorrect it may be to say it.

More effort ought to be devoted to persuading the Islamic world that that their religion ought not require the periodic slaughter of Americans, Europeans or Israelis. But before we can persuade them of this, Americans must first persuade ourselves.