Losing Our Sons Is A Must-See Video

burkasrugly posted: "Fellow Infidels, Today we have a guest writer, Robert Norvell.  We saw Mr. Norvell's letter to the editor in the Jonesboro Sun recently and contacted him to see if we could reprint his excellent letter.  He agreed and we have included it below for yo" Respond to this post by replying above this line New post on actjonesboroar Losing Our Sons Is A Must-See Video by burkasrugly Fellow Infidels, Today we have a guest writer, Robert Norvell.  We saw Mr. Norvell's letter to the editor in the Jonesboro Sun recently and contacted him to see if we could reprint his excellent letter.  He agreed and we have included it below for your reading pleasure - Burkasrugly Recently Americans for Peace and Tolerance released a documentary film entitledLosing Our Sons. This documentary is based upon on true events that occurred on June 1, 2009 in nearby Little Rock, Arkansas. On that date Hakim Abdul Mohammed, a Muslim convert, gunned down two American soldiers at the Army Navy Recruiting Center on Rodney Parham Road. One of those soldiers, Private William Andrew Long, died and another soldier was wounded. This film documents meticulously the events leading up to this fatal tragic encounter on an early June day in Little Rock. Abdul Hakim Mohammed began life as Carlos Bledsoe in Memphis, Tennessee. He was born into a devout Baptist family. His father owned a local tour company called Blues City Tours. Melvin, Carlos' father, was determined to give his son the best education possible and at some later point turn over the family business to him. So Carlos went to nearby Nashville to enter college. It was there that Carlos encountered a virulent strain of radical militant Islam. He converted to this movement and changed his name to Abdul Hakim Mohammed. Abdul was sponsored by his Nashville mosque to study in Yemen where he was further radicalized under the tutelage of Anwar al-Awlaki. Abdul came back to the United States determined to carry out Jihad. Andy Long was also raised in a Christian home. At the age of twenty four he joined the U.S. Army. He finished his basic training and was awaiting his first deployment to South Korea. On that fatal day of June 1, 2009 he was shot in the chest at point blank range four times. Despite heroic medical treatment he expired from his wounds in less than an hour. Daris Long lost his only son, Andy, to an act of Islamic terrorism. Melvin Bledsoe lost his son, Carlos a.k.a. Abdul Hakim Mohammed, to a court mandated life sentence plus 30 years without possibility of parole. Hence, the title of the film is Losing Our Sons. However, there is saving grace to this horrible tragedy. Daris Long and Melvin Bledsoe the two fathers of the two lost sons reconciled. Now Long and Bledsoe are speaking around the country warning about the dangers of Islamic radicalization. On Fathers' Day they both appeared on the Mike Huckabee Show to speak out against this danger. Both men are on a campaign to make sure no other American family has to suffer a similar calamity. Go to the website: www.losingoursons.comto watch Mike Huckabee's comments and to also view trailers of this documentary. Every American family should view this film. burkasrugly | August 20, 2012 at 2:11 am | Categories: Radical Islam | URL: http://wp.me/p1t1Gt-Ge Comment    See all comments Unsubscribe or change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://actjonesboroar.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/losing-our-sons-is-a-must-see-video/ Thanks for flying with WordPress.com

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Republicans Hope, but Don't Change

Republicans Hope, but Don't Change
by Peter Schiff

For much of the past few generations, the debate over balancing the federal budget has been a central feature of every presidential campaign. But over time, the goalposts have moved. As the amount of red ink has grown steadily larger, the suggested time frames to restore balance have gotten increasingly longer, while the suggested cuts in government spending have gotten increasingly shallower. In recent years, talk of balancing the budget gave way to vague promises such as "cutting the deficit in half in five years." In the current campaign, however, it appears as if the goalposts have been moved so far that they are no longer in the field of play. I would argue that they are completely out of the stadium.

It says a great deal about where we are that the symbolic budget plan proposed last year by Congressman Paul Ryan, the newly minted vice presidential nominee, has created such outrage among democrats and caution among republicans. The Obama campaign warns that the Ryan budget is a recipe for national disaster that will pad the coffers of the wealthy while damning the majority of Americans to perpetual poverty. The plan is apparently so radical that even the Romney campaign, while embracing the messenger, is distancing itself from the message (it appears that Romney wants to bathe himself in the aura of fresh thinking without actually offering any fresh thoughts). In interview after interview, both Romney and Ryan refuse to discuss the details of Ryan's budget while slamming Obama for his callous "cuts" in Medicare spending.

(It is extremely disheartening that the top point of contention in the campaign this week is each candidate's assertion that their presidency could be the most trusted not to cut Medicare. Mindful of vulnerabilities among swing state retirees, Republicans have also taken Social Security cuts off the table as well. What hope do we have of reigning in government spending when even supposedly conservative Republicans refuse to consider cuts in the largest and fastest growing federal programs?)

So what was the Ryan Budget's radical departure from the status quo that has caused such uproar? If enacted today, the Ryan budget would so drastically upend the fiscal picture that the U.S. federal budget would come into balance in just... wait for it.... 27 years! This is because the Ryan budget doesn't actually cut anything. At no point in Ryan's decades long budget timeline does he ever suggest that the government spend less than it had the year before. He doesn't touch a penny in current Social Security or Medicare outlays, nor in the bloated defense budget. His apocalypse inducing departure comes from trying to limit the rate of increase in federal spending to "just" 3.1% annually. This is below the 4.3% rate of increase that is currently baked into the budget, and farther below what we would likely see if Obama's priorities were adopted.

Because there are no actual cuts in his budget, Ryan hopes that fiscal balance can be restored by 2040 only because he assumes that we achieve returns to the annual economic growth that are equal to levels averaged for much of the last century. In other words, he sees slow growth of the last four years as the aberration, not the new normal. As with all other government projections, this is on the extreme optimistic end of the spectrum. In truth, there is nothing on the horizon that should make anyone think these growth figures will be achieved. America's crushing debt, burdensome regulations, political paralysis, and nagging demographic problems bode poorly for the return to trend line growth anytime soon. More likely, based on the speed towhich republicans will shrink from popular backlash, is that the "cuts" that Ryan proposes will be abandoned as soon as they prove to be politically unpopular.

In fact, among his other overly-optimistic assumptions are that the unemployment rate falls to 4% by 2015 and an unprecedented 2.8% by 2021, another real estate boom begins almost immediately, and there is an average inflation and ten-year treasury rate for the next ten years of 2.04 and 4.15 respectively. These are assumptions that would make even the most rabid economic cheerleaders sit on their pompoms. Despite these pollyannish economic growth and record low unemployment projections, Ryan still assumes interest rates will remain near historic lows and that none of the cheap money showered onto the economy will ever find its way into the CPI. In other words, it's the economic equivalent of winning the lottery twice in a row while failing to account for the higher taxes that accompany such good fortune.

Like all other government forecasters, Ryan never considers how rising interest costs on the many trillions of dollars of outstanding government debt holdthe potential to completely upend budget projections. For more on this, see my recent commentary "The Real Fiscal Cliff."

More likely, the continued accumulation of unsustainable levels of debt under the Ryan plan will eventually cause our creditors to lose confidence in our ability to repay. It will cause interest to spike, the economy to tank, unemployment to soar, spending to rise, revenues to decline, and the budget deficit to spiral out of control. Rising interest rates hold the potential to spark a sovereign debt and currency crisis that will render the entire plan irrelevant anyway.

While I appreciate that Ryan has the courage to take a position at the vanguard of his party in the campaign for fiscal responsibility, the modesty of his plan is just the latest reminder of how utterly divorced from reality Washington politicians remain. Like all of his brethren, Ryan is pinning his budget battling plans on the pain free "grow your way out of it plan." But as long the government consumes so much of the nation's productivity, the conditions to create that growth will never occur. Hope is not a strategy.

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/peterschiff/2012/08/19/republicans_hope_but_dont_change/page/full/

The Other Side of Hitler

Wednesday, August 15, 2012
The Other Side of Hitler
by Jacob G. Hornberger

Whenever the subject of Adolf Hitler arises, it usually begins and ends with the Holocaust and World War II. That's unfortunate because Hitler had another side, one that is similar to that of liberals and conservatives in America.

Consider Social Security. Hitler was as firm a believer in Social Security as American statists. Like them, he too believed that it was the duty of the government to take care of the elderly by providing them a retirement stipend.

I'll bet that many Americans don't realize that Hitler had a Social Security program before President Franklin Roosevelt foisted the program onto the American people during his New Deal program in the 1930s. The German Social Security program actually originated during the regime of Otto von Bismarck, who was known as the Iron Chancellor of Germany. That's why the U.S. Social Security Administration pays homage to Bismarck by including a bust of him on its website.

Hitler also believed that the state should provide healthcare to the citizenry. He would have loved Medicare and Medicaid but would have been felt that such programs just didn't go far enough. He promised healthcare for everyone, not just the elderly and the poor.

Wouldn't it be great if the mainstream press were to bring this up in the upcoming presidential debates? Just imagine a commentator asking: "President Obama and Gov. Romney, Adolf Hitler shared the same deep commitment to Social Security and government-provided healthcare that you two gentlemen have. How would you explain this? Would you say that Hitler had his caring and compassionate side ­ that he too loved the poor and needy, as you two gentlemen profess to do?"

Hitler, like Obama and Romney , also considered himself Germany's job-creator-in-chief. Like them, he believed that it was the rightful duty of government to manage an economy, including by creating jobs for the citizenry.

One of Hitler's primary means of creating jobs was to build and maintain a powerful military establishment within Germany. That's also what Obama and Romney believe ­ that America's vast military-industrial complex and overseas military empire is a grand way to reduce unemployment.

Government-business partnerships? Hitler loved them, just as Obama and Romney do.

Paper money and a central bank? Hitler ardently believed in them, especially as a way to stimulate Germany's economy, just as Obama and Romney do.

When we closely examine Hitler's overall economic philosophy, we find that it is the same as that of Obama and Romney and other American statists, including those in the mainstream press. Hitler's philosophy can be summed up in a phrase he used in a letter he wrote commending Roosevelt on his New Deal programs: "The public weal before the private gain."

Doesn't that phrase reflect the philosophy of American statists? Isn't that what their condemnation of Ayn Rand is all about? In the statist mind, the individual does not exist for his own sake. He doesn't exist to pursue his own happiness. That's selfish. Instead, for the statist, people's personal interests must be subordinated to the common good ­ to the much bigger needs of the collective ­ to the greater good of society ­ or, as Hitler put it, to the public weal.

Given this collectivist mindset, how can it surprise us that Obama, Romney, Hitler, and other statists would support the welfare-state, managed-economy way of life? In their view, everyone's income belongs to "society" and government has the rightful authority to forcibly seize it and redistribute it to those whom government officials feel need it more ­ such as the poor, the elderly, the bankers, the corporations, the auto companies, the farmers, the foreign dictators, and the other recipients of the government dole. The notion that people should be free to keep what they earn and decide for themselves what to do with it was anathema to Hitler and Roosevelt, just as it is to Obama and Romney and other statists. Like Hitler, American statists believe that a nation's goodness is defined by the extent to which the government is forcing everyone to be good with its welfare-state programs.

That's not all. Guess who inspired American statists to construct the biggest public-works project in American history ­ the Interstate Highway System. You guess right! Adolf Hitler's autobahn system in National Socialist Germany was the inspiration for this giant socialist project here in the United States.

Public schooling? Hitler was a dedicated to the idea as American statists are. Like them, he viewed state schooling as a means of producing "good little citizens" ­ that is, people who loyally and "patriotically" defer to the judgment of their public officials in international affairs. Thus, just as Americans didn't challenge President Bush's WMD rationale for attacking Iraq, Germans didn't challenge Hitler's claim that Czech forces had attacked German troops, which Hitler used as his justification for invading Czechoslovakia.

The war on terrorism and the suspension of civil liberties? Just as the U.S. government's assumption of emergency powers came after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Hitler's acquisition of emergency powers came after the terrorist attack on the Reichstag. While Hitler's emergency powers were supposed to be temporary, they lasted well past 10 years after the terrorist attack, just as the U.S. government's emergency powers have. Hitler would have undoubtedly envied the extent of the U.S. government's emergency powers ­ the powers to take citizens and noncitizens into custody as "enemy combatants," to incarcerate citizens and noncitizens in military dungeons or concentration camps for life without trial or due process, try people with kangaroo tribunals (Hitler kangaroo tribunal was called The People's Court), invade and occupy countries that had not attacked Germany, torture citizens and noncitizens into providing confessions and evidence, and assassinate citizens and noncitizens anywhere in the world.

Consider the following planks of the Nazi Party and ask yourself whether it conflicts with the political and economic philosophy of Obama, Romney, and other American statists:

We ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all. Therefore, we demand: an end to the power of the financial interests . We demand profit sharing in big business. We demand a broad extension of care for the aged. We demand. . . the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of the national, state, and municipal governments. In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our system of public education. . . . We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents. . . . The government must undertake the improvement of public health ­ by protecting mother and child, by prohibiting child labor ­ by the greatest possible support for all clubs concerned with the physical education of youth. We combat the . . . materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of "The Common Good Before the Individual Good ."

Needless to say, we libertarians have no reluctance about talking about the other side of Hitler. But then again, unlike liberals and conservatives and other statists, we also oppose everything Hitler stood for, not just the Holocaust and World War II.

http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2012-08-15.asp

Immigrants, the Scapegoats

Thursday, August 16, 2012
Immigrants, the Scapegoats
by Jacob G. Hornberger

Guess who the Greek government and Greek citizenry are blaming for their economic woes. Immigrants ­ the people who also serve as a favorite scapegoat for many Americans who, like the Greeks, are lamenting the ever-mounting crisis of the welfare-state, interventionist way of life.

According to an August 6, 2012, article in the New York Times, Greek officials are calling the wave of illegal immigration an "invasion," which of course is the same term that many American anti-immigrant types employ against illegal immigrants here in the United States.

The Greek minister of public order (for some reason, the U.S. government does not yet have that type of minister), Nikos Dendias, exclaimed, "Our social fabric is at risk of unraveling. The immigration problem is perhaps even greater than the financial one."

So, just like President Obama and his immigration gendarmes are doing here in the United States, recently "about 4,500 officers conducted raids on streets and in run-down apartment blocks in central Athens, a police spokesman said, calling the sweep one of the largest ever by the force."

The Times points out that there are 800,000 registered immigrants in Greece and an estimated 350,000 illegal immigrants, "adding to the anxieties of many Greeks, who are seeing the government's once-generous social spending evaporate. They complain that the foreign residents are depriving them of jobs and threatening the national idea."

Sound familiar? In fact, that's one of the lessons to be learned here ­ how similar to Europe's statist societies the United States has become, especially with respect to the welfare state and interventionism and the scapegoating of immigrants as statism continues to crack up.

Dendias has it wrong. The cause of Greece's economic woes has nothing to do with immigrants, legal or illegal. There is one ­ and only one ­ cause of such woes ­ the Greek government, specifically the socialism and interventionism of the welfare state and managed economy. Immigrants, legal or illegal, are not the cause of Greece's difficulties. It's the exact opposite: immigrants actually serve to ameliorate the economic crises caused by the government.

Here's the basic problem: The Greek people, like so many Americans, have come to look on government as their provider ­ their dole giver. Today, after sucking the private sector dry with taxes to fund ever-increasing doles, the dole recipients are fighting over a smaller pie. No, let me correct that. They used to fight over an ever-decreasing pie. Today, they're fighting over small morsels of what is left from what used to be a pie.

As they fight with each other over the morsels, their level of their anger and frustration rises. Yet, they don't dare blame the government for their woes. That would be like a child condemning his parents. That's scary to a child because the child knows that his parents could cut him off from food, clothing, and other essentials of life. That prospect ­ being cut off from their dole ­ is just as scary to Greek dole recipients.

So, the dole recipients lash out at some other convenient target. Immigrants fit the bill perfectly, especially the illegal ones, who can't openly defend themselves. If only immigrants were forced to return to their countries, the argument goes, the welfare state, managed economy way of life could be preserved and once again expanded. Happy days would be here again, with the Greek people able to kick back, relax, and just live off of their ever-increasing government dole.

Immigrants bring a strong work ethic, a desire to work hard, and an entrepreneurial spirit to a society. Their efforts contribute to enlarging the amount of the private sector wealth, which the public sector depends on to pay the government salaries and the dole.

Therefore, it is foolish for the Greek government and the Greek dole recipients to be deporting immigrants when it's the immigrants that are helping to create the wealth on which pubic officials and dole recipients depend.

After several decades of welfare-statism and interventionism, the chickens are finally coming home to roost. Europeans should be placing the blame with it properly lies and abandon, permanently, their statist way of life. They should completely dismantle the dole system and also prohibit public officials from managing the economy. They should leave immigrants alone and open the borders to whoever else wants to come to the country.

Meanwhile, American statists continue to maintain that our nation's rejection of its founding principles of economic liberty and its embrace of European statism constituted progress. Actually, it was a monumental retrogression, one that has brought our nation ever-growing crises, discord, conflict, controls, infringements on liberty, malaise, impoverishment, and, of course, the same scapegoating of immigrants that is now going on in Greece.

http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2012-08-16.asp

The Reinvention of David Frum

The Reinvention of David Frum
Why do discredited neocon talking heads just keep talking – and why does anyone listen?
by Justin Raimondo, August 17, 2012

David " Axis of Evil" Frum first gained notoriety as one of George W. Bush's more polemical speechwriters. During the run-up to the Iraq war, he was all over the media, agitating for the invasion and viciously denouncing anyone who questioned the wisdom of such a course. In an infamous article for National Review, entitled " Unpatriotic Conservatives," he attacked those conservatives and libertarians who counseled caution, smearing Robert Novak, Pat Buchanan, Llewellyn Rockwell, Samuel Francis, Thomas Fleming, Scott McConnell, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, Jude Wanniski, Eric Margolis, Taki Theodoracopulos, and myself as, variously, "defeatist," "conspiracy theorists," and "anti-Semitic." Here is Frum, in March of 2003:

"They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation's enemies."

Frum went on for at least three thousand words, attacking his enemies as traitors and terrorist-sympathizers. It was all lies, of course, and I answered them here. Yet now we see Frum has reinvented himself as a "moderate" Republican, and has carved out a new career for himself as the kind of conservative who gets invited on NPR and CNN to snark at his former comrades. In a recent interview with Politico, he was asked: "What do you know now that you wish someone had told you 10 years ago?" His answer:

"That the Iraq War would be a disaster. Come to think of it, they did tell me."

In the accompanying photo, Frum is sitting on a patio somewhere, smiling and petting his golden retriever. Who, me worry? Such a blithe spirit, that Frum, who is wearing white pants with no socks. Deaf to the bitter cries of the dead and the maimed, not to mention those he accused of treason, he puts his feet up in a pose of summery relaxation. The memory of his hysterical smears – "They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country" – seems to have dissipated into the stratosphere. He's put it out of his mind.

This is the New David Frum, the moderate, measured, wonkish would-be charmer, who only loses his soft edges when the subject of foreign policy is raised. After a well-publicized break with the American Enterprise Institute over his supposed opposition to Republican orthodoxy, he also broke with National Review, where he had once taken on the role of ideological enforcer, and underwent a makeover. He set up the "Frum Forum" as the online headquarters of the Frummian Republicans, a small but extremely self-satisfied gaggle of online bloviators, who sneered at the Tea Party and cheered as Frum announced the GOP was in danger of being taken over by anti-government " extremists."

This was just what the Obama-ite media wanted to hear, and in spite of the minuscule numbers of the Frum Republicans, their Leader was soon all over the idiot box, spreading the gospel of what can only be called the Scoop Jackson wing of the GOP. A Republican with "conservative" credentials talking trash about the Tea Party? Bring it on!

It isn't surprising that a neoconservative would go renegade: after all, neoconservatism is itself a renegade ideology, whose partisans originated on the far left, and, in the process of moving rightward, continuously red-baited and smeared their former comrades. Frum is an exemplar of the species. Just as he pontificated about the rightness of the "liberation" of Iraq, today he pontificates, certitude unabated, on any and all subjects, with a pulpit at the Daily Beast and a regular gig on CNN . Whenever the "mainstream" media requires a "moderate" conservative, the New Frum is on call.

For those who are wondering why commentators who have been consistently wrong about practically everything can still market their alleged expertise, it's instructive to go back and see what the Old Frum had to say about the particulars of my alleged treason:

"The week after the fall of Kabul, Raimondo acknowledged that though the Afghan war seemed to have succeeded, disaster lurked around the corner: 'The real quagmire awaits us. . . . When the history books are written, Operation Enduring Freedom will be hailed as a great success – provided it doesn't endure much more than a few weeks longer.'"

Today's treason is tomorrow's reality, it seems. Yet Frum has never acknowledged the utter wrongness of his smears, let alone apologized, and I just don't mean to me personally.

Bob Novak was a great guy, one of the last of the old school of rough-and-ready journalists who really deserved to be treated with a lot more respect, especially by his fellow conservatives, than he ever got. When Novak questioned the Iraq war, and our Israeli-centric policy in the Middle East was when they really began to turn on him, Frum leading the charge. What were Novak's sins, according to the Old Frum?

"Here is Robert Novak again, this time on September 17, 2001, predicting that any campaign in Afghanistan would be a futile slaughter: 'The CIA, in its present state, is viewed by its Capitol Hill overseers as incapable of targeting bin Laden. That leads to an irresistible impulse to satisfy Americans by pulverizing Afghanistan.'"

Novak, wherever he is, must be having quite a laugh: I can hear his mordant chuckle, which used to delight me so, and see the twinkle in his eye as his ghostly voice remarks: "And wasn't I right?"

The problem with today's television talking heads is that there's too many Frums and no more Novaks. Our media culture is the complete inversion of a meritocracy, a weird Bizarro World alternate universe where value is measured by how many times you've been dead wrong. Frum is the perfect product of this upside-down system, rivaled only by Bill Kristol, whose record as a prognosticator is even worse than Frum's.

The point is not that I expect Frum to acknowledge let alone apologize for his viciously untrue and malicious accusations: he hasn't got the cojones to admit he was wrong. That's the real difference between a babbler and a commentator who deserves to be taken seriously. The latter will always acknowledge when and where they've been wrong. Not to toot my own horn, but I've tried to make this my consistent policy over the ten or so years this column has run. That isn't because I'm noble or even willingly honest – because, after all, this is the internet, and there's this thing called "Google." That's what keeps us honest, the generation of amateur-turned-professional journalist-opinionators who reached a wide audience for the first time online. Because, as someone once said, "We can fact-check your ass" – and your record.

The lack of accountability, and not only in the media but in politics and in everyday life, is one of the more depressing aspects of today's culture. I strive every day to make Antiwar.com a notable exception to that execrable trend, along with our dedicated staff: we are constantly checking and rechecking our sources, and accuracy always trumps ideology.

Although we make no bones about having a point of view – the casual visitor to this space is bound to pick up on my libertarianism – our method puts the facts first; the analysis comes later. Our mission is providing those interested in the subject of American foreign policy and how it impacts the world with an indispensable resource: timely information coupled with analysis from a non-interventionist perspective.

We didn't really have much of an audience until after September 11, 2001. Ever since that day our daily unique visitors have rarely numbered less than 50,000. Our growth is really the story of how the post-9/11 foreign policy debate in this country developed. Amid the hysteria of the early years of that decade, when the Frums of this world thought they could intimidate and marginalize us, it was sometimes hard to see that we would be vindicated, in the end, although – as in the above citation shows – I had my moments of clarity.

While we are very far from perfect, I'm proud of our record for accuracy – nay, sheer prescience! We've been right from the beginning, from our critique of the Balkan wars and their eventual outcome to our early identification of Osama bin Laden as a major player on the world stage. This space sported the first comprehensive online analysis of 9/11 and its meaning, written and posted hours after the event. We have continued to not just analyze but also to report what is actually happening overseas in circumstances where truth is often obscured by the fog of war propaganda.

There's just one problem: our Bizarro World media culture. The "mainstream" media, being a meritocracy-in-reverse, doesn't reward prescience: the big corporate money behind the Daily Beast and CNN, for example, look at Frum's record of misguided opinions and flat out wrong predictions, and their eyes light up with dollar signs. Holy moley, this loser is a real winner – that's life in Bizarro World.

In a world of amnesiacs, the Frums are media royalty, and so they are treated. We, on the other hand, having the disability of being proven right time after time – we here at Antiwar.com are the beggars of the online media world. Lacking the benefits of corporate philanthropy, we must go to our readers, dunning them for financial support. We are forced to do this four times a year ­ as punishment for our prescience.


http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/08/16/the-reinvention-of-david-frum/