Making Baby Jesus Cry

[baltassoc]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
I, like probably you, remember watching the 72 Olympics, live.

You're old.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by baltassoc
You're old.

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
You've spent a whole half day not posting photo-shops, and where did it get you? respected? No.

If anything the anti-Penske rabble rhetoric is even more shrill, if that's possible. i say go back to your first love.

Word!

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
I was recently talking with a European attorney who informed me that the ultimate problem with America on the international scene was that we lacked the sophistication and maturity of the Europeans. I responded that it is too bad that we have not developed such a mature sense of anti-semitism as the Europeans, but noted that the Democrat party in America is looking for ways to sell the Israelis down the river to the next holocaust so maybe that should hearten the Euros.

Apparently he was offended by this and told me to "wank off". I proceeded to throw my Zinfandel in his face and have him ejected from the soire.

Presumably this was white zinfandel.

[Not Bob]

Originally posted by Spanky
Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam wasn't a very good choice either.

There are those who think that Kissinger wasn't all that great a choice, either.

And, penske, you may want to correct your prior posts to reflect that Arafat only won 1/3 of the Peace Prize -- he shared it with Rabin and Shimon Peres.

[Hank Chinaski]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m.../ixportal.html

• United in greed, divided it falls
  By Mark Steyn
  
  
  How many Annans does it take to change a light bulb? Well, if the replacement light bulb's being shipped to Uday Hussein's Iraqi Olympic Committee recreational basement as part of the UN Oil-for-Food programme, there's no telling how many Annans you'll need.
  
  You'll recall that Kofi Annan's son Kojo - who had a $30,000-a-year job but managed to find a spare quarter-million dollars sitting around to invest in a Swiss football club - has been under investigation for some time for his alleged ties to the Oil-for-Food programme. But the investigators have now broadened their sights to include Kofi's brother Kobina Annan, the Ghanaian ambassador to Morocco, who has ties to a businessman behind several of the entities involved in the scandal - one Michael Wilson, the son of the former Ghanaian ambassador to Switzerland and a childhood friend of young Kojo. Mr Wilson is currently being investigated for suspected bribery over a $50 million contract to renovate the Geneva offices of the UN World Intellectual Property Organisation.
  
  The actual head of the Oil-for-Food racket, Kofi sidekick Benon Sevan, has resigned, having hitherto insisted that a mysterious six-figure sum in his bank account was a gift from his elderly aunt, a lady of modest means who lived in a two-room flat back in Cyprus. Paul Volcker's investigators had planned to confirm with auntie her nephew's version of events, but unfortunately she fell down an elevator shaft and died. It now seems likely that the windfall had less to do with Mr Sevan's late aunt and more to do with his soliciting of oil allocations for another company.
  
  Meanwhile, Alexander Yakovlev, a senior procurement officer for UN "peacekeeping" missions - and, if you're on a UN mission in Africa, no, he can't fix you up with a hot-looking eight-year-old from the local village; Mr Yakovlev apparently dealt with the non-child-sex aspects of UN procuring - anyway, Mr Yakovlev salted away just shy of a million bucks in kickbacks in his account in Antigua. He's just been arrested in New York and pleaded guilty to money laundering, wire fraud, etc.
  
  Despite the current investigations into his brother, his son, his son's best friend, his former chief of staff, his procurement officer and the executive director of the UN's biggest ever programme, the Secretary-General insists he remains committed to staying on and tackling the important work of "reforming" the UN.
  
  Unfortunately, his Executive Co-Ordinator for United Nations Reform has also had to resign. Officially, Maurice Strong, Under-Secretary-General, godfather of the Kyoto treaty and chief UN negotiator on North Korea, resigned because he'd put his step-daughter on the payroll - she's also quit - and because of his ties to Tongsun Park, a Korean businessman charged by the US Attorney's office with taking millions of dollars from Saddam to act as an unregistered foreign agent for Iraq. Mr Park allegedly invested a million of those Saddamite greenbacks in a business of Under-Secretary-General Strong's son - a now bankrupt Canadian petroleum company.
  
  By happy coincidence, Under-Secretary-General Strong and Kojo Annan were both appointed, on the same day, to the board of a company called Air Harbour Technologies, a business registered in the Isle of Man and whose directors also included Michael Wilson, the guy under investigation for the UN office renovation contract in Geneva. It's a small world, at least at the UN. AHT was wholly owned by the son of Sheikh Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister. Yamani Jnr was putting together a $60 million oil deal with Saddam, and seemed to think the presence of UN officials and offspring on his board might help him.
  
  But not to worry. To demonstrate his ongoing commitment to "reform", Kofi Annan has now put his Deputy- Secretary-General, Louise Frechette, another Canadian, in charge of the "reform agenda". In a February report by Mr Volcker's committee, Mme Frechette is said to have helped Mr Sevan block efforts to bring details of the Oil-for-Food boondoggle before the Security Council.
  
  How do we know all the above? We only know because the US invaded Iraq and the Baathists skedaddled out of town leaving copious amounts of paperwork relating to the Baghdad end of Oil-for-Fraud, since when Claudia Rosett and a few other dogged journalists have been systematically unstitching the intricate web of family and business relationships around the UN's operations.
  
  You'd think that by now respect for the UN would be plummeting faster than Benon Sevan's auntie down that lift shaft. After all, these aren't peripheral figures or minor departments. They reach right into the heart of UN policy on two of the critical issues of the day - Iraq and North Korea - or four, if you're one of those Guardian types who's hot for Kyoto and peacekeeping. Most of the Ghanaian diplomatic corps and their progeny seem to have directorships at companies with UN contracts and/or Saddamite oil options. I had no idea being a Ghanaian ambassador's son opened so many doors, and nor did they till Kofi ascended to his present eminence.
  
  The other day I sat behind a car from Massachusetts bearing the bumper-sticker "War is Never the Answer". Well, it depends on the question. In this case, without the war, we wouldn't even be asking the questions. Without the paper trail in Baghdad, who would have mustered the will to look into Oil-for-Food and see it through to the point where it's brought down a clutch of career UN bigwigs? They're no great loss to humanity: Mr Strong's "legacy", the Kyoto treaty, is already seen as a joke that's likely to crash the economies of those few countries who've made the mistake of taking it seriously (New Zealand), and, as for his North Korean outreach, we should be grateful it ended before a full-fledged Kim Jong-Il Nukes-for-Food programme was up and running.
  
  But this is how the transnational jet set works, and those sensitive flowers who don't have the stomach to look under the rock could at least do us the favour of ceasing to bleat about, in Clare Short's marvellously loopy phrase, the UN's "moral authority". In The Times the other day, Matthew Parris demanded to know whether I could now admit the Iraq war had been a mistake. No. I'm still in favour of it 100 per cent - and these rare shafts of light on the sewers of transnationalism are merely one more benefit.

That anyone on this board ever mentioned the Un as a source of legitimacy for international decisions makes them naive. If they mention them again, having seen how the world's security was sold, they are fucked retards.

What's best is that all of you can only point to leaving the UNin control of cleaning up Iraq as the alternative to invasion. Have you no pride in your opinions being shown as idiotic? How can any of you continue to post? I swear if I had been part of such a massive brain fart you'd not see this sock again. It'd be time for a scok change.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
who has ties to a businessman behind several of the entities involved in the scandal - one Michael Wilson.........Mr Wilson is currently being investigated for suspected bribery over a $50 million contract to renovate the Geneva offices of the UN World Intellectual Property Organisation.

I wonder if this Michael Wilson is any relation to the corrupt partisan Joseph Wilson-Plame.

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski


That anyone on this board ever mentioned the Un as a source of legitimacy for international decisions makes them naive. If they mention them again, having seen how the world's security was sold, they are fucked retards.

2. Frankly, the offensiveness of some of the assertions regarding the UN and its faux credibility make me wonder why those posts are even still in existence......Ty?

[Penske_Account]

The report of the September 11 Commission, once a best seller and hailed by the news media as the definitive word on the subject, must now be moved to the fiction shelves.

The commission concluded, you'll recall, that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon couldn't have been prevented, and that if there was negligence, it was as much the fault of the Bush administration (for moving slowly on the recommendations of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke) than of the Clinton administration.

Able Danger has changed all of that.

Able Danger was a military intelligence unit set up by Special Operations Command in 1999. A year before the September 11 attacks, Able Danger identified hijack leader Mohamed Atta and the other members of his cell. But Clinton administration officials stopped them -- three times -- from sharing this information with the FBI.

The problem was the order Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick made forbidding intelligence operatives from sharing information with criminal investigators.

The military spooks knew only that Atta and his confederates had links to al Qaeda. They hadn't unearthed their mission. But if the FBI had kept tabs on them (a big if, given the nature of the FBI at the time), September 11 almost certainly could have been prevented.

What may be a bigger scandal is that the staff of the September 11 Commission knew of Able Danger and what it had found, but made no mention of it in its report. This is as if the commission that investigated the attack on Pearl Harbor had written its final report without mentioning the Japanese.

The only dispute over Atta's whereabouts is whether he was in Prague on April 9, 2001, to meet with Samir al Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer.

Czech intelligence insists he was. Able Danger, apparently, had information supporting the Czechs.

But acknowledging that possibility would leave open the likelihood that Saddam's regime was involved in, or at least had foreknowledge of, the September 11 attacks. And that would have been as uncomfortable for Democrats as the revelation that September 11 could have been prevented if it hadn't been for the Clinton administration's wall of separation.

The September 11 Commission wrote history as it wanted it to be, not as it was.

Forget about Cindy Sheehan. Forget about Rove. Obviously, the BIG STORY here is that the Dems lied. Again and again. Clinton's foreign policy and internal disdain for the intelligence community combined with Jamie Gorelick's incompetence led directly to 911. Further we now have proof of Iraq's complicity.

Hey Mrs. Sheehan, here is why we are in Iraq you jew-hater! It's because they helped in the 911 plot where 3000 Patriots lost their lives.

I sure hope the Jersey Girls are going to be out in front of this issue as their golden calf, Clinton, gets gorelicked!

eta: Hey Ty, where was Richard Clarke on this??!?!? How come he didn't cite Atta specifically to Bush??!!?

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Penske_Account

The problem was the order Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick made forbidding intelligence operatives from sharing information with criminal investigators.

Given that Hillary was instrumental in hiring Gorelick I assume she is going to step down from her Senate seat in contrition for her complicity in the deaths of 3000 Americans, right?




speaking of hillary, allow me to publicly ask, on the record, "Senator, if the voters of NY send you back to the Senate, will you pledge to serve a full term???

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
My question for the Liberals on the board?

1) Considering the hatred of Israel among the population of Iraq, how is democracy in Iraq going to help Israel?

If we ever were to see a democracy in Iraq, I'm not sure it would help Israel much, since I suspect that the Iraqi people have as little love in their hearts for Israel as their leaders have had. The question is entirely speculative, though, since a functional democracy in Iraq is a pipe dream.

2) What evidence is there that the invasion of Iraq was to help Israel at the expense of US interests.

None of which I am aware.

3)Considering the fact that if Isreal will be only seven miles wide right in its middle if the West Bank is given up, why should Isreal give control to the West Bank to a people intent on destroying it. Wouldn't giving up the West Bank be an act of suicide?

There is very little danger just now that the Palestinian authority, or any other Arab government, could come anywhere close to matching the IDF from a military perspective. That said, Israel will find a sustainable peace only when it can deal with a government in the West Bank which has legitimacy and which it can trust.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop

That said, Israel will find a sustainable peace only when it can deal with a government in the West Bank which has legitimacy and which it can trust.

I suggest annexing the West Bank and "inviting" its current non-Israeli inhabitants to relocate to Jordan or beyond. That should allow your end to be met. Be well met, at that.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
If we ever were to see a democracy in Iraq, I'm not sure it would help Israel much, since I suspect that the Iraqi people have as little love in their hearts for Israel as their leaders have had. The question is entirely speculative, though, since a functional democracy in Iraq is a pipe dream.

Are suggestng the Iraqis are incapable of perpetuating their W-given democracy?!?! I sense a little a racism here, why do you doubt the Muslims Ty?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Penske_Account
Hank, be fair, it was the Gorelick wall, which Jamie Gorelick attempted to cover up at the 911 hearings and which should have disqualified her from sitting on the panel and certainly lessens the validity of its findings.

So it turns out that Penske is Not Me. Huh. Who knew?

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
So it turns out that Penske is Not Me. Huh. Who knew?

Outable!

As Mods don't we have a sworn duty to withhold privileged information that we become aware of in our moderational capacities!!??!!?

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
since a functional democracy in Iraq is a pipe dream.

So you think there is absolutely no chance that there will be a functional democracy in Iraq in the next ten years?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
That's just bullshit. One's side's stated goal is to drive the other side into the sea. The other side's stated goal is to live in peace with reasonable and defensible boundaries (which will be something less than what they are entitled to).

There are Israelis who want a state which does not permit Palestinians to have a land of their own -- e.g., who would settle and control Gaza and the West Bank. Those Israelis -- and there are many of them -- seek more than "reasonable and defensible boundaries."

There are Palestinians who seek something less than driving the Israelis into the sea. Israel should not bother to negotiate with the others. But failing to deal with these Palestinians in good faith, and failing to do things that strengthen them, will predictably strengthen the extremists. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Israel's strategy at times has been to weaken the moderates, to keep the conflict percolating and strengthen its own position.