Howard “Yeearrrgh!” Dean was on Fox News this morning with Chris Wallace discussing the Shirley Sherrod thing, and Dean reiterated simple truths such as the sun rises in the east, kids shouldn’t run with scissors and that Fox News is racist.

Wallace asked Dean if he was aware that the Sherrod video did not air on Fox News until after the Obama administration had already crapcanned Sherrod. Dean stumbled after the question because it looks like he temporarily forgot he wasn’t being interviewed by CNN, but the answer of course is irrelevant to Howard and the talking points he’s peddling.

Dean went on to say that the White House over-reacted because they were afraid Sherrod “was about to go on Glenn Beck.” Now there’s a non media-driven administration for you.

Gingrich scored with this: “If the Obama administration is this afraid of Fox News, how do they deal with the Iranians?”

It kind of makes you wonder what Ahmadinejad could have coerced the Obama administration into doing if he had a certain video (as “out of context” as it may be) and was threatening to leak it to Glenn Beck — but why get bogged down by the larger, more important picture when you’ve got Republicans to beat in November?

Allahpundit at Hot Air adds…

Another question per his insistence that what Fox did with the tape was “absolutely racist”: Is Dean suggesting that O’Reilly and Hannity wouldn’t have aired an embarrassing excerpt from a speech delivered by a white liberal? I recall Glenn Beck having a field day with that clip of the very white Anita Dunn talking about Mao. The liberal line on Fox, I thought, is that they’ll use any weapon to hand to attack the left and Obama, not just lefty minorities. This one’s more effective, I guess, however true or untrue it may be.

(h/t Weasel Zippers)

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Can the Democrats’ “Do As I Say, Not As I Do” file get any bigger? Thanks to Jeff Poor at the Business and Media Institute, we now know that the Democratic National Committee is employing the very data mining techniques to build its party base that Democrat leaders have assailed when used by the Bush administration to prevent terrorist attacks.

Data mining for the DNC, but not for national security:

What’s in your wallet? Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean would like to know.

Dean and Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan were speakers at a luncheon at the National Press Club Nov. 5, where both reflected on what went right and wrong with their efforts during the 2008 election cycle.

Dean revealed his party used credit card data to predict voting outcomes. However, Democrats and the media have been highly critical of credit card companies that provide that data.

“We now can do what they can do,” Dean said. “We have your credit card data like they do. They’ve been for years doing something that we, until 2006, weren’t able to do. We can predict with 85 percent accuracy how you’re going to vote based on your credit card data without bothering to see what party you’re in – the Secretary of State’s office.”

“They’ve been doing it for a long time,” Dean said of Republicans. “No wonder we’ve been throwing rocks at the bottom of the well. These guys – we can argue about how well they run the country, but they certainly know how to run elections.”

Dean’s admission that his party is using credit card data in elections is curious because a plank in the Democratic Party’s 2008 platform vows to regulate that very instrument through a “Credit Card Bill of Rights”…

Snooping to further partisan goals: Good. (Just ask Joe the Plumber.)

Snooping to investigate those funding and furthering jihad: Bad.

But oh, don’t you dare question their patriotism.

Looking a little pale there, eh, Howie?

YEARGGHHH:

Howard Dean smells an opening.

Seizing on the heavy-handed response of John McCain and the RNC to the completely unobjectionable anti-Obama ad by the North Carolina GOP I spotlighted yesterday, Dean is now pressing McCain further on the issue–and claiming that if McCain doesn’t succeed in forcing the state party to withdraw its ad, it’s a failure of his “leadership” (read: bullying) skills.

The DNC has sent out this e-mail to supporters:

While the McCain campaign made a show of protesting the ad, McCain made no mention of the fact that key officials in the North Carolina GOP are members of McCain’s state steering committee and McCain donors.

Nor did he mention the fact that the state chair who is bucking his leadership is a member of the arrangements committee of the Republican National Convention. Given his ties to state Republican leaders, if McCain is serious about making sure this ad never airs, he should have no trouble making it happen. If not, McCain should return their contributions, remove them from his campaign committees, and strip the state chair from her role on the GOP’s convention committee.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean today issued the following statement calling on McCain to exercise real leadership and pull the plug on this ad:

“This is a test of leadership for John McCain. If he can’t pick up the phone and make members of his own party stop airing a television ad he claims to oppose, how can he lead our country through an economic crisis or the war in Iraq? After shifting his positions on gun control, immigration and tax cuts throughout this campaign, McCain should not equivocate on this issue. Making a show of releasing your emails to the press is not leadership. If he is serious, he will get this ad pulled.”

McCain and the Beltway GOP elite have no one to blame but themselves for engineering this debacle. They’re delusional in trying to put a positive spin on the episode. See the RNC’s superiority complex pose at David Brody’s blog. If grass-roots conservatives have been left with the impression that Howard Dean runs the RNC, it’s not because of anything Howard Dean has said and done over the last 24 hours.

NC blogger Katy Benningfield provides some local reporting and insights:

The phone is ringing off the hook at NC GOP headquarters and the money is said to be rolling in, but it’s not enough. Our party needs more and they need YOUR contribution to get this ad off the Internet and ON THE AIR. Contribute online, here.

The state party is apparently receiving threats, as the Raleigh Police Department has been guarding NC GOP headquarters all day. The doors to the Hillsborough Street building are locked. After the firebombing of the same structure by anarchists a few years back, they’ve learned to expect the unexpected.

This is making national news and Katy’s Conservative Corner has never been more proud to be a North Carolina Republican than today.

John Hood shares more NC analysis.

Meanwhile, TV station WRAL has rejected the ad. The article doesn’t say on what grounds they made the rejection.

Here it is again. Always happy to remind you of who the real extremists are:

***

John Hawkins at Right Wing News to RNC: “Weenies.”

***

Update: Excerpts of Jeremiah Wright’s therapy session with Bill Moyers are trickling out…

In his first wide-ranging interview since video clips of his inflammatory sermons were aired, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. defended himself over the controversy, saying that his words were twisted.

Mr. Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor, gave an interview to Bill Moyers on Wednesday, to air on PBS tomorrow.

“I felt it was unfair,” Mr. Wright said, according to excerpts of the interview released Thursday. “I felt it was unjust. I felt it was untrue. I felt for those who were doing that, were doing it for some very devious reasons.”

In Mr. Wright’s sermons, he suggested that Americans bore some responsibility for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, saying “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” He also blamed the government for the spread of AIDS among African-Americans, characterized the United States government as corrupt and referred to the “U.S. of K.K.K. A.”

He did not apologize or back away from his remarks in the interview, instead saying that people wanted to paint him as “some sort of fanatic.”

…When asked what the people who aired the clips “wanted to communicate,” Mr. Wright said, “I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint? That’s what they wanted to communicate.”

Jeremiah Wright did a fantastic job of communicating that all on his own.

Now, everybody hush up. We’re being “not appropriate and helpful,” you know.

***

Update: Allah has a vid clip of the Moyers-Wright therapy session.

Problem is, there’s no one there to listen. The FEC has four vacancies and won’t meet a quorum:

The national Democratic party wants campaign finance regulators to investigate whether Sen. John McCain would violate money-in-politics laws by withdrawing from the primary election’s public finance system.

McCain, who had been entitled to $5.8 million in federal funds for the primary, has decided to bypass the system so he can avoid spending limits between now and the GOP’s national convention in September.

Federal Election Commission Chairman David Mason notified McCain last week that he can only withdraw from public financing if he answers questions about a campaign loan and obtains approval from four members of the six-member commission. Such approval is doubtful in the short term because the commission has four vacancies and cannot convene a quorum.

“John McCain poses as a reformer but seems to think reforms apply to everyone but him,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Sunday.

Who’s to blame? Obstructionist Democrats who have played dirty politics FEC appointments. John Fund reported last June on their campaign:

Appointments to the Federal Election Commission rarely draw attention. But at a confirmation hearing today, there’s likely to be some fireworks over Hans von Spakovsky.

Mr. von Spakovsky has already amassed an 18-month long, largely uncontroversial record at the FEC as a recess appointment. But that’s not likely to stop Senate Democrats from grilling him about his time at the Justice Department during President Bush’s first term. The aim will be to portray him as a partisan who mishandled voting rights cases. Exhibit A will be his support for state voter ID laws.

For months, since the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys sparked a mini scandal, Democrats have insisted that the president has improperly politicized the Justice Department. Specifically, the accusation is that, under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, DOJ has pursued a political agenda by enforcing laws to curb voter fraud.

Last week, Judiciary Committee Democrats held a hearing aimed in part at discrediting a 2005 Justice lawsuit seeking to force Missouri to cull ineligible voters from its rolls. But while the Missouri case was thrown out by a district judge, similar Justice lawsuits in Indiana and New Jersey led to voter rolls being cleaned up.

There is no limit to the hyperbole directed at Mr. von Spakovsky. He has come under such vitriolic fire from Gerald Hebert, now with the liberal Campaign Legal Center, that even Bob Bauer, the counsel to the Democratic Senatorial and Congressional Campaign Committees, has called his criticism of the nominee’s FEC record “an argument boiling over with personal contempt and so short on reasoned argument.”

Other critics claim that Mr. von Spakovsky ignored concerns that a Georgia law requiring photo ID at the polls would disenfranchise poor and minority voters who have a hard time obtaining documentation. They note that a federal judge twice blocked the law from going into effect.

But yelling “voter suppression” in a crowded congressional theater should be done with caution. In the Georgia case, the federal judge didn’t find evidence that the law was racially discriminatory. He struck it down on other grounds. Also, the Georgia Supreme Court on Monday unanimously threw out a separate challenge to the state’s photo ID law.

Indeed, courts have tended to uphold voter ID laws. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned a Ninth Circuit ruling that had blocked an Arizona ID law. In doing so, the Court noted that anyone without an ID is permitted to cast a provisional ballot that could be verified later. The court also noted that fraud “drives honest citizens out of the democratic process.”

Voter ID laws are hardly the second coming of Jim Crow. In 2005, 18 out of 21 members of a federal commission headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker came out in support of voter ID laws. Andrew Young, Mr. Carter’s U.N. ambassador, has said that in an era when people have to show ID to travel or cash a check “requiring ID can help poor people.” A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last year found that voters favor a photo ID requirement by 80%-7%. The idea had overwhelming support among all races.

Just Google Hans von Spakovsky and you’ll see the nutroots/far Left smear machine in full tilt.

Who really cares about voter fraud and election integrity? Not the demagogues Democrats now berating a bunch of empty chairs that they helped create.

Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are done. John McCain will be the Republican nominee — he’s the only one with a reasonable path to the nomination.

So how do we beat him? We stand up — right now — start fighting, and show the American people that he’s not who they think he is.

We can’t wait for Hillary or Barack to win the nomination. Now that the Republicans have a candidate, the dollars are starting to pour in from special interests who will do anything to beat the Democratic nominee. They’re just waiting for us to decide so they can start smearing.

Here’s what U.S. News and World Report recently reported about how the RNC is getting ready…

[RNC Chairman Mike] Duncan and his aides want to be ready to go on the offensive against the Democratic nominee presumptive in an effort to define the opposition candidate on GOP terms. Opposition research is already well along, and the plan is for surrogates to talk to the media around the country while a TV ad campaign in key states and media markets as soon as the Democratic nominee is determined.

We must be ready to fight back, and fight back hard, today.

Now that we know our opponent, it’s time to build a national effort on the programs you and I have worked so hard to create over the last four years – from our cutting-edge technology to our voter protection programs, it’s time to shift gears.

I need you to contribute $25, $50, or $100 to help us fight John McCain right now:

http://www.democrats.org/FightMcCain

John McCain is a media darling, but don’t trust his carefully-crafted image – he’s worked for years to brand himself. From Iraq to health care, Social Security to special interest tax cuts to ethics, he’s promising nothing more than a third Bush term.

After championing campaign finance reform and ethics legislation to score political points, he now has a staggering amount of lobbyists involved in every aspect of his campaign. In fact, two of the top three sources for John McCain’s campaign cash are D.C. lobbying firms, and he looked the other way as Jack Abramoff bought and paid for the Republican Party and the Culture of Corruption.

On immigration reform, he’s run as far to the right as he can, aligning himself with the most extreme elements of the Republican Party.

On the war, McCain scoffed at Bush’s call to leave troops in Iraq for 50 years, saying “Make it a hundred!”

On a woman’s right to choose, McCain has vowed to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade.

On the economy, one of the issues that the American people care most about, McCain has said: “I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.”

We can’t afford four more years with a President who drives the economy into the ground. We can’t afford four more years with a President who fights an endless war in Iraq. We can’t afford four more years with a President who gives tax cuts to companies who ship jobs overseas; with a President who can’t get every American the health care they deserve; with a President we just can’t trust.

I don’t just want to beat John McCain – I want it to be a landslide. If you’re as committed as I am, I need you to make a contribution today:

http://www.democrats.org/FightMcCain

Only the Democratic Party is legally allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money to back our nominee and tell the real story about John McCain. We proved that our strategy worked in 2006, and it will work again this fall.

Help us today:

http://www.democrats.org/FightMcCain

Let’s get going,

Howard Dean

More at HA, where see-dubya quips:

MEMO TO HILLARY: When your name is “Clinton”, and you attack the ethics of the Bush administration…

DO NOT MENTION THE OVAL OFFICE CARPET.

Er, yeah.

Ick.

***

Victor Davis Hanson weighs in:

Will anyone ever become offended that Sen Clinton serially now drops her Wellesley nasal tones to affect a condescending drawl in the presence of African-Americans, as if blacks all speak in a southern slang?

And does “us always having to clean up after people” suggest — Howard Dean like — that she assumes an assembly of black leaders is paramount to domestic workers?

And speaking of lifting rugs and finding “stuff under there” does she realize that image of surprises lurking in the White House private quarters immediately evokes Hillary’s mysterious billing records of the Rose Law firm-under court subpoena but strangely missing for two years-that abruptly “turned up” in the “book room” in the personal residence of the White House? And as I recall Ms. Clinton was the first First Lady to testify in front of a grand jury.

There is something very sad and amateurish in all this falsity-given her image as the smart, tough in-the-know politico. Real bathos.

We must ask ourselves tonight how we can forge and wield a popular majority from one end of this country to the other, a majority united on basic, positive goals with a platform broad enough and deep enough to endure long into the future, far beyond the lifespan of any single issue or personality.

We must reach out and appeal to the patriotic and fundamental ideals of average Americans who do not consider themselves “movement” people, but who respond to the same American ideals that we do. I’m not talking about some vague notion of an abstract, amorphous American mainstream. I’m talking about ” Main Street ” Americans in their millions. They come in all sizes, shapes and colors—blue-collar workers, blacks, Hispanics, shopkeepers, scholars, service people, housewives, and professional men and women. They are the backbone of America, and we can’t move America without moving their hearts and minds as well.

Fellow Americans, our duty is before us tonight. Let us go forward, determined to serve selflessly a vision of man with God, government for people, and humanity at peace. For it is now our task to tend and preserve, through the darkest and coldest nights, that “sacred fire of liberty” that President Washington spoke of two centuries ago, a fire that tonight remains a beacon to all the oppressed of the world, shining forth from this kindly, pleasant, greening land we call America.

***

The American Conservative Union has issued a statement:

The American Conservative Union and the Conservative Political Action Conference today issued the following statement:

The just completed 2007 Conservative Political Action Conference on March 1 – 3, 2007, was the largest in the 34 year history of the event, featuring 33 panels on a variety of public policy issues, 24 stand alone speakers including public officials, writers, student activists, media personalities and comedians.

ACU, the event’s primary sponsor and CPAC strive to provide a platform and forum for a variety of differing views and personalities. ACU and CPAC do not condone or endorse every speaker or their comments at the conference. As such, ACU and CPAC leave it to our audience to determine whether comments are appropriate or not.

“Ann Coulter is known for comments that can be both provocative and outrageous. That was certainly the case in her 2007 CPAC appearance and previous ones as well. But as a point of clarification, let me make it clear that ACU and CPAC do not condone or endorse the use of hate speech,” said David A. Keene, ACU Chairman.

What this means for the 2008 CPAC remains unclear.

Here’s what conservative bloggers thought of the speech.

Speaking of hate speech, Patterico chronicles it on the Left.

And John Hawkins finds plenty of example of the other F-word on liberal blogs.

Doesn’t make it right. But it’s definitely worth pointing out.

***

My friend Captain Ed has come under ugly attack, and responds with his trademark graciousness.

Readers of this blog have enthusiastically cheered when I criticized the Left for their incivility. For almost a solid week, we debated the Edwards blogger scandal, where Edwards hired two women who routinely used hateful epithets in describing Christians (“Christofascists” and “Godbags”, as I recall), and people wanted his hide for it. I blasted Howard Dean for his announcement that he hated Republicans and everything for which we stand. This blog has spent the last 42 months taking on that kind of rhetoric, with thousands of posts and thousands of hours of my time.

That takes little courage, however. How brave is it to criticize those who hate and attack me?

It isn’t enough to scold your opponents for their incivility; one has to have the courage to criticize their allies for it as well. That takes more fortitude, because it means alienating those who one presumes have become friends. It means weathering with some grace the kind of comments that people have thrown at me since Friday afternoon. Some may not want to generate that kind of storm, and after today, I don’t blame them a bit.

If one wants to change the tone of political discourse, then one has to start with one’s self, and hold one’s own side accountable for their incivility.

Howard Dean.

As Robert Spencer noted last week:

It is interesting to see the Democrats standing with heads bowed piously while the Imam Husham Al-Husainy prays, in veiled terms to be sure, for their conversion to Islam, and oh yes, for the destruction of Israel (“And help us to stop the war and violence, and oppression and occupation”).

***
Previous:

Challenging the DNC’s imam
The Democrats’ hateful new imam
The DNC imam’s prayer

They just can’t help themselves.

In case you needed to be reminded which party puts playing politics with the war above serious solutions, here’s the video of Rep. Charlie Rangel on Sunday resurrecting the draft–as a way to deter the White House and Congress from launching wars. And for those who think his motives actually have something to do with the situation on the ground in Iraq, Rangel makes clear it’s all just a gesture:

He said having a draft would not necessarily mean everyone called to duty would have to serve. Instead, “young people (would) commit themselves to a couple of years in service to this great republic, whether it’s our seaports, our airports, in schools, in hospitals,” with a promise of educational benefits at the end of service.

We already have a National Health Service Corps, AmeriCorps, National Civilian Community Corps, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), and Citizen Corps Councils/Fire Corps/Medical Reserve Corps.

I’m having flashbacks to the fall of 2004, when liberal activists, top Dems, and the MSM spread draft rumors in an attempt to scare young people into voting against…Republicans. MTV did it (Oct. 28, 2004):

[A] recent poll conducted by the National Annenberg Election Survey indicated that 51 percent of the young people polled said they believe that Bush, if re-elected, will re-establish the draft system (see “Despite Defeat Of Draft Bill, Issue Refuses To Die”).

In response, Bush has addressed the rumor publicly: once during the second debate, and also on the campaign trail. During a speech in Ohio on Wednesday, he quickly quashed any proposed return of the draft: “There will be no draft,” he said. “The all-volunteer army will remain an all-volunteer army.”

The candidates’ rhetoric has done little to quell concerns: According to a recent Choose or Lose survey, 45 percent of the young people polled said that the issue of the draft is one of the most important in the coming election.

Max Cleland and Howard Dean did it (Sept. 17, 2004):

Cleland and Dean tell students that Bush would conscript them and ship them to Iraq

…In a speech at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Cleland told students they might find themselves pressed into military service if Bush wins a second term.

“America will reinstate the military draft” if Bush is re-elected and continues the Iraq War, Cleland predicted, according to an account of his speech by the Colorado Springs Gazette…Former Kerry rival Howard Dean, now traveling the country to drum up support for Kerry and raise money for Democratic candidates, said last week at Brown University in Providence, R.I., “I think that George Bush is certainly going to have a draft if he goes into a second term, and any young person that doesn’t want to go to Iraq might think twice about voting for him.”

The Dean-Cleland strategy seems to be an attempt to drive up support for Kerry among college students and perhaps among some parents as well….

And John Kerry did it (Sept. 22, 2004):

Answering a question about the draft that had been posed at a forum with voters, Kerry said: “If George Bush were to be re-elected, given the way he has gone about this war and given his avoidance of responsibility in North Korea and Iran and other places, is it possible? I can’t tell you.”

Bogus draft e-mails spread across campuses. CBS and NBC ran alarmist pieces without disclosing the anti-war biases of their supposedly neutral interview subjects.

And now, after all that anti-Bush sound and fury, we have the incoming Democrat chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee proposing what all those fear-mongers claimed a GOP administration would do. Where are all the cluck-cluckers now?

Rangel’s proposal will go where it has gone every other time he has proposed it: Nowhere.

It’s a fitting symbol of what Democrat rule in Congress will be the next two years: A worthless, cynical expenditure of time and energy that accomplishes absolutely nothing.

Sen. Mel Martinez, who will become the new general chairman of the Republican Party after it lost control of Congress, said on Tuesday he would not be an “attack dog” in the 2008 White House race.

…”One of the things that I made clear as I discussed this job role with the president is I was not going to be an attack dog, and I don’t intend to, and I wasn’t asked to be one,” he told reporters at the White House.

Okay, we get it. You won’t be an “attack dog.” You’ll be a roll over-and-fetch dog. Just what we need going up against Howard Dean.

Barf!

Saying Maryland Democratic leaders must do more to encourage black candidates so “we do not have another Michael Steele problem,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean on Thursday criticized the state party’s lack of diversity on its recent winning tickets.

Speaking at a breakfast meeting in Washington, Dean expressed concern about Steele, Maryland’s black, Republican lieutenant governor, who was defeated in his quest to fill a vacated Senate seat in Tuesday’s election.

“I just think we have got to do a better job in Maryland four years from now about diversity on the ticket,” Dean said.

Flashback Feb. 2005:

During a meeting Friday with the Democratic black caucus, Dean praised black Democrats for their work for the party, then questioned Republicans’ ability to rally support from minorities.

“You think the Republican National Committee could get this many people of color in a single room?,” Dean asked to laughter. “Only if they had the hotel staff in here.”

Who’s laughing now?

Oh, how I relish the thought of Michael Steele going head-to-head as RNC chair with The Screamer. He says he’d consider it. Well, what’s everyone waiting for?

A “pain in the neck” is what parents call their kids when they won’t stop whining for ice cream, what you call your boss when he gives you work at 5pm on a Friday, and how you refer to the umpire that gave your team a bad call. It’s not really, tough enough for a dictatorial mass murderer.

Dean’s comments are just more proof that Democrats really, truly, wholly don’t get it. Saddam Hussein invaded two sovereign countries, brutally murdered the Kurds, his thug sons raped women and young girls, cut off limbs, slaughtered whole families, built prisons for children, and rained down pain and destruction on the people of Iraq like Howard Dean can not possibly imagine. His downplaying of the evil of Saddam Hussein shows he’s unfit for any sort of leadership role. I can’t wait for Dean’s statement that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is such a jerky face and that Kim Jong Il is so, like, annoying.

Hat-Tip: “S”

An apparent discrepancy in the portrayal of events surrounding the deaths of four unarmed U.N. observers in Lebanon threatens to unravel Secretary-General Annan’s initial accusation that Israel “deliberately” targeted the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon.

A Canadian U.N. observer, one of four killed at a UNIFIL position near the southern Lebanese town of Khiyam on Tuesday, sent an e-mail to his former commander, a Canadian retired major-general, Lewis MacKenzie, in which he wrote that Hezbollah fighters were “all over” the U.N. position, Mr. MacKenzie said. Hezbollah troops, not the United Nations, were Israel’s target, the deceased observer wrote.

LGF posts a CBC radio interview with retired Canadian Major General Lewis Mackenzie discussing the emails. He noted:

“What he was telling us was Hezbollah soldiers were all over his position and the IDF were targeting them. And that’s a favorite trick by people who don’t have representation in the UN. They use the UN as shields knowing that they can’t be punished for it.”

The full email from the deceased Canadian is at the CTV site.

Canadian PM Stephen Harper is not buying Kofi’s krapola. Andrew Bolt at The Herald Sun takes a closer look at UNIFIL press releases to explain why the UN post was bombed. More journalists in the MSM should follow suit.

Gene at Harry’s Place links to this story, which features the photo of the side-by-side U.N. and Hezbollah flags at the UNIFIL outpost that you won’t see printed on the front page of the NYtimes. Let’s see it again:

The story reports:

Beyond experiencing the uncertainty felt by ordinary Israelis, [Roy ]Rempel found the trip illuminating in a broader, strategic sense. During a visit to Israel’s northern frontier, a trip that only took a few hours, he witnessed for himself the pre-1967 borders and “the security dilemma Israel faces up there.”
Hills in Lebanon overlook the northern town of Metulla and “you get a sense of how vulnerable those communities are. Hezbollah positions look down on a child’s wading pool at [Metulla's] Canada Centre,” he noted.

[Tanis] Gilbert, who was quite familiar with the Israeli scene because of her work in [Montreal Liberal MP Irwin] Cotler’s office, said she was scared during the visit to northern Israel, when the group toured an Israeli military outpost and came “face-to-face with Hezbollah.”

The Shiite terrorist group has erected a billboard facing Israel on which it placed enlarged photos showing mutilated Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon. “Hezbollah taunts the soldiers on a daily basis,” she said. “The fact they [Israeli soldiers] see this every day and managed to stay restrained was amazing to me,” Gilbert said. “The resilience of the Israeli people was amazing to me, that they go with normal lives even though things are blowing up around them. They have amazing resilience,” she said.

Indeed.

The Washington Times pushes back at Annan’s crooked finger and concludes: “Alas, in the salons of Turtle Bay, blaming Israel remains very much in vogue.”

Yup. I’m waiting for Howard Dean to denounce the U.N.’s “anti-Semites.”

***
Previous: Hezbollah and the U.N.