Donga Bonga is a village in Bahawalnagar district, in Punjab.  

And in Donga Bonga, another honor killing has taken place, a pair of sinners stoned to please Allah. 
 
http://www.nysun.com/article/47711

She wasn't married, but there isn't any word in the article as to his status.

It's bad enough that they were condemned as adulterers and stoned to death.  But two other points stand out in this story:

they were both in their 40s, presumably old enough to make their own decisions in life, and

they were not even tried, only SUSPECTED of adultery.



Boy, I sure am mad at President Bush.  This is obviously all his fault.  If he had only signed Kyoto, this would never have happened.  Darned Halliburton. 

This story is an eye-opener.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070129/wl_nm/iraq_dc

You may have heard about the big battle the other day in which somewhere near 300 Sunni rebels were killed and a dozen or so arrested.  You may have heard that they were planning an ambush attack to kill the Shi'ite leaders who gathered in one place for a big religious festival (the one where they bloody themselves over something or other, barbaric scenes, but that's another story).

What you probably have not heard is that the leader of this uniformed army, this rebel force of Iraqis from the Sunni side, is that he believed HIMSELF to be the Mahdi, and so did his followers.

Think about it...  Iran's Shi'ite president Ahmadinejad can't stop yakking like a giddy schoolgirl about the coming of the Mahdi, the 12th Imam, and the worldwide peace and love he'll bring.  But this was a force of Sunnis, led by a Sunni calling HIMSELF the Mahdi, READY TO KILL SHI'ITES.

So will the Mahdi be a Sunni or a Shi'ite?  And will the side which does not produce him be prepared to accept him? 

Sounds to me like a real problem.  If this man, or someone claiming to be him, ever actually appears, he's likely to touch off a world war with a billion or so participants.  And it will probably be soon; we already have one guy pretending to be him and rallying the troops to his side.

Or should I say we HAD a guy.  He's dead now, of course.  

And death is one of the events which can serve to cast doubt on a fellow's immortality.

UPDATE:  Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters has info to the effect that they were not Sunni but Shi'ites from a splinter group, trying to bump off Ayatollah Ali Sistani and his Iraqi Shia leadership.  This would mean Shia Islam has the potential for a "civil war" all on it's own, in addition to the inevitable conflict with Sunni Islam.

So do the Sunnis believe in the coming of the 12th Imam? 

I've got some more reading to do.  :-)

UPDATE II:  Now I read there were Sunnis AND Shi'ites in that rebel group. 

This Islam thing is a mess.  Even if every infidel is already dead by the time the 12th Imam gets here, he will have a full plate just trying to bring peace WITHIN Islam.

Which is both revelatory and depressing.

It isn't surprising that Harry Reid is still doing dodgy land deals and peddling influence.

It isn't even surprising that nobody on Capitol Hill or the Justice Department seems the least bit interested in this obvious violation of a variety of laws.

In fact the ONLY surprising thing is that this story--

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-reid28jan28,0,5893951.story?coll=la-home-headlines 

--was actually published in the Los Angeles Times.

It's sad, in my view, that the Senate Majority Leader is selling his soul for such paltry sums.  If a man must have his price, as Walpole said, a man of Reid's position puts every corrupt politician to shame with the mere six-figure profits he makes on these "arrangements".

And the saddest part of all?  The legislation he kept trying to push through, which would have benefited the lubricant company whose partnership resulted in Reid's gains from this land deal, never passed.

Not only does he sell his influence for cash, he fails to deliver on the influence!

Shame, shame, shame.  As long as Reid has been corrupt, you'd think he'd be better at it.



 

... at the simultaneously funny and sad events narrated in this story (link here, Townhall still having worklinking difficulties)--

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007/01/28/story_28-1-2007_pg12_1

--from an English language Pakistani newspaper.

An Islamic student organization and a Pashtun student organisation were putting up a poster, and the two groups each wanted to be the one that put it up.  That started a fight.  Officials moved one group outside and kept the other inside to stop the fight, but the group outside stole tires from a gas station and burned them in the street.  It took tear gas, rubber bullets and truncheons to stop the riot.

What was the poster about? 

It was a plea to fellow students to refrain from fighting on campus.

No kidding.

An underlying cause of this outbreak was more ominous; the Islamic organization had taken to harrassing students belonging to other organizations when they would pass by on the way to classes, or when they were arriving at school.  They stridently demanded that these students join the Islamic organization.  "No" was not accepted.

The Muslims claim that the other organization was trying to encourage students to cheat on exams, and that they were attempting to make people behave honorably as Islam demands.

The students say that when they went to the parent organization of the IJT, the student Islamic group, to complain of harrassment, the people at the parent organization attacked them with stones.

But it's all Bush's fault.  If he had only signed Kyoto, this would never have happened.  Saddam should still be in power.  No blood for oil.  It's all Chimpy McBushitlerburton's fault.  Impeach him now.

From the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer comes this story (Townhall is having severe tech problems, so instead of linking words I'll just give you the actual URL)--

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/news/local/16515657.htm

--about a recent visit by Jimmuh to Athens, Georgia. 

Lots of love, acceptance and baiser-derriere going on here (French, look it up) by the attendant journalists and by the author, Richard Hyatt, who is amazingly uncritical of Carter's chief claim, vis:

"We are developing an ingrained hatred for people who aren't Christians".
 
"The distortion that we are about to be destroyed makes us suspicious of those who don't worship the way we do," he said. "And our country has no reason to be afraid."

First of all, this is an insult to me.  I am a believing Christian who finds it specifically against my faith to "hate" anyone, in the sense that he means, to consider them outside the bounds of humanity and human dignity, based on anything other than what is in their hearts.  It is individual choices, not ethnicity or religion or any other cultural specific, that makes people worthy of hatred.  I absolutely do hate any and every person who is trying to kill me and my family and destroy my nation; I cannot imagine hating anyone simply because of how they look or sound or how they worship.  God forbid.  And I believe the vast majority of Americans are sensible in this way, that they don't instantly hate anyone on sight but rather give everyone a chance to either behave well or badly before any judgment takes place. 

The proof on the surface is widely available; you can read all manner of stories in the national press every day about Muslims who are expressing indignation and offense at something or other, but how many stories do you read about an ordinary American who actually treats a Muslim badly, attacks or injures or beats or shoots a Muslim?  Since 9/11, more than five years now, I recall fully ONE instance of a man shooting a Muslim who worked at a convenience store, and that was in late 2001!  If such things were happening, you can bet that CAIR and its media stooges would be giving them maximum publicity.  But they aren't.  There is no national ingrained hatred of Muslims. 

If anything, I'm concerned about a large segment of this nation who seem to be developing an ingrained hatred of Christians. 

Carter, of course, will be immune to this, as he's already chosen to lecture us, the misguided and slightly stupid Christians, those in need of wise leadership.

And as to the second assertion, Carter is either blinded by ideology or a complete moron if he actually believes we have "no reason to be afraid".

In his speech Bush listed several serious terrorist attack plans which we've thwarted in the past few years, and you can be sure many more are in early stages.  Many old Soviet nukes are still missing and unaccounted for, and just yesterday I read of a Russian who'd been arrested for trying to sell some weapons grade uranium.  Try and guess who his buyer was.

And 9/11 itself was a pretty good wakeup call that we in America have something to fear.  

Carter seems to be oblivious to all this.  Perhaps if he'd care to reveal exactly how many millions in funding is given to the Carter Center by Saudis and other Islamic players, we'd have a clearer sense of what's going on here.   Claudia Rosett, a journalist late of "UN Oil for Food Scandal" fame, has more on that in the article at National Review linked here--

http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=NmVlNzc4OWI5YTc4MDY1MzhiMDM2OWRhNjgzYzk0ZTk=JRA


I'll make one point about Israel that Carter always seems to gloss over or ignore-- 

Israel has never launched an offensive war.  Every action by the IDF is in line with it's name, the Israeli DEFENSE Force.  All around Israel, though, other countries have launched war after war against it, trying with all their might to exterminate Jews or drive them into the sea. 

It began with 1947, when Israel became a state.  No less than FIVE Arab countries launched a war, first announcing to Arabs in Israel that they should leave their homes while the Jews were slaughtered and then could return to a Palestine free of the filthy Jews.  Over 700,000 left, and naturally were not invited back when it was over.  They had shown their sympathies and had to live with them.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a dedicated ally of Adolph Hitler, believed in his plan to wipe out the Jews, sent Muslims to fight in the Nazi army for heaven's sake (as if Hitler had any more use for Muslims than Jews-- but he did accept the reinforcements, as he was a practical man). 

Carter HAS to know this history.  He graduated the Submarine Academy in '46, worked in the nuclear sub program in the Navy.  He has to know the history and the defensive nature of the Israelis.  He knows they don't just decide on a whim to charge into Gaza and bulldoze houses, that they are responding to prior attacks and attempting to prevent further attacks when they do these things.  

And Carter MUST know the Palestinians are mired in a sea of violence and corruption, stealing the money sent to them by well-meaning Europeans and Americans, opening Swiss bank accounts, buying weapons, all while their citizens suffer with no utilities, no trash pickup, broken down schools and almost no public services of any kind.  Little business is done there, and gunmen roam the streets, often simply starting fights with each other, sometimes singling out those they believe are traitors and informants and conducting vicious public executions which are always well attended and cheered.  

And the Palestinian people vote for these gunmen, vote for their own misery, because they are committed to the destruction of Israel.

Carter is either delusional or evil.  But the left lifts him up as exemplary, and paints him as a victim of conservative Christian assaults.

This is the Carter who, during Reagan's presidency, visited the Soviet embassy often, holding long talks with their diplomats about how they should deal with Reagan.  I wonder what he told them.

This is the Carter who, when the Iranian Revolution went down and over 400 Americans were held hostage, that is to say when Islamic radicals physically attacked and captured American SOVEREIGN TERRITORY in an act of war, sent a letter to Khomeini asking what WE had done to make THEM so angry, and what we could do to make them feel better!

Khomeini is known to have laughed out loud when he saw it.  He said he was expecting "lightning and thunder" from the Americans, but upon reading Carter's letter, happily announced "we can do anything we want!  The Americans will do NOTHING!"

He was right.  Until Reagan took office, of course.  Then those hostages came home in a hurry.

This is the Carter who masterminded the agreement with an ailing Kim Il Sung in 1994, an agreement that left his wackjob son with an easy path to nuclear weapons, thanks to Bill Clinton and to Jimmuh his special ambassador.

This is the Carter who congratulated Arafat upon the rejection of the Camp David accords in 2000.  And David Horowitz suspects (and cannot get a response from Carter) that he actually ADVISED Arafat not to take the deal, told him he could never hold power if he accepted a Palestinian state and let Israel off the hook of destruction.  

In a very real way, that would make Carter responsible for much of the death and misery of the Second Intifada, in which innocent Israelis by the dozen have been murdered by bombers in restaurants, on buses, in Israeli streets, and in which (if there are any) innocent Palestinians have doubtless suffered as well in the conflict. 

And this is the Carter who hugs and shakes hands with the mass murderer Fidel in Cuba and who pronounces Hugo Chavez' election in Venezuela to be free and fair, giving it the stamp of approval from the West. 

Jimmuh, dear reader, has no moral standing.  The trail of weakness and misery and accomodation he's left behind him has done lasting damage to the interests of America and of people worldwide who seek freedom.  He is a blight on the history of this nation, and whose only commendable attribute is that he's 82 and won't be around much longer.

But he can still pack a lot of damage into these last few years.  

UPDATE:

Stories like this-- 

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/staticarticles/article53954.html 

--are continuing to trickle down to us from various sources, and now that we've seen what Jimmuh wants to be remembered for, these stories aren't the least bit surprising.

Those among you who are passingly familiar with Biblical prophecies concerning the arrival of "antiChrist" may well find some unpleasant commonalities between those scriptures and this summary now being broadcast on Iranian state radio, an educational treatise concerning the imminent appearance of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi.

As I am not an Islamic scholar (I have a vertebral disk fusion and couldn't take all the headbobbing), I"m not qualified to comment on the apparent incoherence of this summary.  I'm sure much of Christianity looks incoherent to those not inclined to examine it more closely. 

Suffice to say that it goes to specific trouble to put Jesus in the role of assistant, secondary figure, to the Mahdi.  A holy dhimmitude, you might say. 

So much for "King of kings and Lord of lords, every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord". 

And much of what this radio program has to say about the Mahdi, his appearance, his magnetism, his personal qualities, seems to have been lifted straight from the AntiChrist for Dummies yellow paperback. 

For a Christian, I'm a skeptical enough guy.  I don't run around waving my arms and predicting anything in particular.  But if you're inclined to do that, even if you're only waving your arms on the inside, this lovingly offered enlightenment as to the mysteries of the Mahdi will probably set off a fresh burst of armwaving.

Me, I'm not so worried about the coming of the Mahdi as I am that Ahmadinejad thinks HE is the Mahdi.

Colonel Austin Bay led me to this article in the UK Guardian about Nick Cohen.

Cohen is a British columnist, writer, blogger and now author of a new book called "What's Left?" which will be published in February.

Cohen himself is left, or was.  He was a reporter for The Independent, among other papers, and a writer for New Humanist.   He has columns appearing regularly in several publications.

And Cohen's new book?  Asking, and hopefully answering, the burning question--  how did the western left come to support the far-right, in the person of the Taliban, radical Islam, even Saddam in his latter years?

Cohen in 2003 asked himself how gay rights groups, womens rights groups and human rights groups could have their representatives marching in anti-war parades arm in arm with Islamists, who are anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-semitic to the point of mass murder.  

The way I am known to put it is this-- don't they know the Islamists will KILL THEM FIRST?!?!?!

Cohen deserves a read when his book is released.  I especially want to hear him try to answer this juicy one--

Leftists complain about America's hypocrisy-- that we supported and armed Saddam during the '80's when he was an all powerful and horrible dictator whom the left loudly decried, but after the Kuwaiti invasion Saddam was our enemy and we were suddenly morally concerned with his behavior.  But leftists never seem to realize theirs is an equally hypocritical view.  How could they have complained about the evil Saddam all the way through the 1980's, but suddenly when he actually invaded another country and started raping and killing Kuwaitis and so forth, the left ceased to condemn him and by default were now his supporters, trying hard to prevent him from paying a price for his evil deeds?

As I've said since March 2003, the left has taken the position (and still holds it today) that Saddam Hussein should still be in power.

They refused to acknowledge this, of course, but it only made their complaints that much more unbalanced and senseless.  

No comment on mass graves with hundreds of dead, but put a pair of underwear on the head of a terrorist and you're Darth Vader in cowboy boots.  No comment on Saddam's rape rooms and torture chambers and extensive video collection of cutting off hands and throwing people off buildings and so forth, but those crap-flinging prisoners at Gitmo are being mistreated because the gloves with which our soldiers respectfully handle their Korans aren't WHITE enough.

Cohen asks "why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against are coming from the liberal left?"

Buy his book to find the answer.  Of course, it doesn't matter why, in the end.  The left simply has to be defeated and made irrelevant.  Anything less and this world will be circling the drain in short order, and all of us with it.

Michael Totten has found one.

He says "Terrorism is not Islamic. Islam prohibits it. Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood – Islam is innocent of them. Everyone calling for damage, killing, and blood is not from the religion. It is not from God. This is from the devil."

There was something in the Bible about being able to know a tree by its fruit.

I just can't believe the "God tree" grows fruit that murders innocent people, uses fear to force people to 'believe', abuses and oppresses women, and offers never-ending sex with permanently virginal girls as a heavenly reward for murdering people and dying in the process.

It just seems more devilish than God-ish to me.  Call me crazy.

Scooter Libby is going on trial.  For lying about doing something that the prosecutor has already officially found WAS NOT DONE.

Capital T for Travesty.

Meanwhile, look hard in the Yahoo news story linked here.  It goes so far as to say that nobody, not even Karl Rove (being painted here as the baddest of bad guys), has been charged with the leak, with "outing publicly the name of an undercover agent".  But what the story does NOT do, which would really underline how foolish and pointless this trial will be, is point out that the name of the leaker is ALREADY KNOWN, and that the prosecutor himself, Mr. Fitzgerald, KNEW THIS WITHIN A FEW WEEKS OF BEGINNING HIS INVESTIGATION.

So three years later, we in the general public finally find out the leaker was Richard Armitage, late of the State Department, and generally a Bush opponent and an opponent of the Iraq war. 

Which puts the lie to any notion that ANYBODY IN THE WHITE HOUSE DID ANYTHING WRONG here. 

So why exactly is Libby on trial? 

If anyone can figure out a legal reason, email me.  Otherwise I'll just assume that Fitzgerald is one of the legions of D.C. types who would do anything, violate any ethic, risk any reputation of their own, in order to damage Bush. 

Sick and sad.

UPDATE:  and frightening.  Fitzgerald, if I'm reading right, has managed to forbid Libby's lawyer from calling a memory specialist as a witness, to help support Libby's contention that he mixed up details and forgot things under the stress of trying to help manage the whole Iraq thing.  Why would the prosecutor prevent the defendant from trying to prove his contention of innocence (in its strictest sense, meaning the lack of desire for wrongdoing)?

And what's even worse, Fitzgerald has apparently forbidden the subject of Plame's status from being brought up at trial.  Recall if you will that Plame was assigned to Langley in a 9-5 job for the six years previous to being involved in this travesty-- which makes her decidely NOT an undercover agent according to the terms of the very law upon which Fitzgerald's investigation was based.

So Fitzgerald is quite literally conducting an investigation, and now a trial, while knowing all along that the law he's looking at could not possibly have been violated, that Plame's status placed her outside that possibility.

Can you say "Stalinist show trial"? 

And it's happening right here in Amerika. 

Thanks to my golf buddy Ixman for sending me this link.

One can disagree with Christopher Hitchens on some things, but when he makes up his mind to present a case, it's normally quite airtight.

In the column linked above, he carefully examines the many facets of the global difficulties we face today and makes concrete suggestions with which I can find no fault on first reading; I therefore submit it to both of you, faithful readers, for further examination.

I often wonder how it is he can be, and call himself, a liberal; he has entirely too much common sense and is too keen an analyst to believe what they claim to believe. 

It's my opinion, though, that his claim to liberalism is more of a rejection of my worldview than an intellectual acceptance of theirs.  He is an atheist, believing humanity to be an accident of evolution, and thus has no foundation for the sort of spiritual concepts that inform my worldview and set the standard for my behavior (that said, I offer the usual caveat, that I find myself failing to meet that standard pretty much every day).

And without that foundation, he cannot help but be attracted by the sort of thing leftists have returned to again and again in spite of obvious flaws and failures, which is to say communism and socialism and state control of the individual.  He seeks to satisfy his desire to "care for the poor" with social programs, even as he denies the spiritual lineage of that desire.

It never ceases to amaze me how God's gifts to mankind rise to the occasion, with or without the approval of those to whom the gifts are given.  One can only grin.  :-) 

Now that Mr. Kofi Annan has removed himself to retirement, it would be tempting to forget his presence, actions and words over these past several years.

But as our nation tautens itself like a giant guitar string over the whole enterprise in Iraq, as we work to build a democracy there while our own democracy slowly degenerates into insult and backstabbing and outright lies, it's good to remember how the understanding Mr. Annan felt about this difficult business of raising up democracies in Islamic regions:

"We have learned – at a painful price  – that the building of institutions on the basis of fundamental principles of democracy and rule of law is not a simple process that can be completed within a few short years".

Which sounded great to me, until I found out he was talking about East Timor.

You see, the UN was handling East Timor on its own, and thus cut itself plenty of slack about how long it was taking and how difficult it was.

But when it came to Iraq, the same consideration was and is nowhere to be had.  It's taking too long, it's costing too much, too many people are dying, we've got TO GET OUT NOW DO YOU HEAR ME NOW!!!

Here's a timely example of the sort of cultural marker that sets us aside as worthy of Islamic fundamentalist scorn (said scorn expressed rather explosively at times).

This Broadway mast*urbation musical is becoming what the story says is "the surprise hit of the season". 

Me, I"m not surprised at all.  So much of show business is metaphorical mas*turbation anyway, it's nothing if not a logical next step. 

But how will they script the obligatory tragic lost love breakup scene? 

(actor looks in mirror) "I wish I knew how to quit you!"

I found it on Drudge, on the same summary page that carried a link to a story about the Sundance Film Festival's most talked about entry this year--  a film called "Zoo", which annihilates one of the last barriers to the cinematically unmentionable-  sex between men and animals.

I'm guessing the snack bar hot dog sales are gonna fall off a bit at the screenings of that movie.  Ah, maybe the popcorn.... 

UPDATE--  I left out the funniest part of the Mast*urbation Musical story, and that was the headline that Drudge gave it--

"Musical on masturbation rubs people the wrong way"

There's a reason we're reading this week about a successful Chinese missile test that destroyed an orbiting satellite.

And his name is Bill Clinton. 

Remember Loral and high tech missile guidance secrets sold to China, remember Chinese generals, Chinese arms dealers selling AKs on the Los Angeles streets, female spies in Silicon Valley, Wen Ho Lee and the missing nuclear lab hard drives found months later behind the copier, the Lippo Group, John Huang and Johnny Chung, the giant coal deposit in Utah which suddenly became the Grand Staircase/Escalante National Park and prevented any American mining company from going into hi-grade coal competition with... the Lippo Group.  Clinton named 16 national parks while president, but in only one such naming did he cite (and misuse) the Antiquities Act of 1906 to do so.  This act was passed in order to protect ancient Indian sites from being built over or destroyed.  There were, obviously, no such sites in that area of Utah to be protected.

That act had been misused by presidents before.  The most recent prior to Clinton was Jimmuh in 1978, who misused the act to name national parks all over Alaska (doubtless to prevent the oil drilling which this country needs more every day), including the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, or Anwar. 

Remember buddhist monks sworn to poverty who donated $5,000 each to the Clinton/Gore campaign, and remember that Gore himself came to the buddhist temple and picked up the money in a big paper bag.  Remember that the temple reimbursed the monks immediately, and that nobody knows where it got the money to do that.

And remember, while Clinton was doing what he could to help the Chinese military acquire and perfect ballistic missile technology, which they are now poised to use against American GPS and communication satellites, he was simultaneously drawing down and defunding the United States Military until it was less than half the force that it once was.  Remember that he was making it impossible for the FBI and the CIA to share leads, and he was shrinking the intelligence budget for human spies and making rules which made spies impossible to put on the payroll (remember that Clinton rule that said we could no longer hire people who might be criminals or suspect dodgy types?  As if there are any other kind of people in that business!)

I couldn't care less about Monica Lewinsky, or that he lied about diddling her in the Oval Orifice.  These things are certainly signs of bad character, but they do not in themselves place the nation at risk. 

What bothers me is that the list of things I've compiled from memory here in this post is a short list, and that I know I've left a lot of things off of it because I can't recall them at this instant.  And these things DO put the nation at risk, every day.  

It's clear to me, and ought to be to everyone, that when the Chinese make up their minds to once and for all recover Taiwan for the motherland, they'll first knock out our spy satellites and GPS birds so that our dependence on smartbombs and hi-tech warfare will leave us staggering around blind and unable to defend the Taiwanese as we are promised by treaty to do.

It is also clear to me that Islamic interests have a rather large stake in the disabling of those same satellites, as well as the oil money (or just plain oil) to pay China for the service of removing them.  And it is entirely plausible that the latest round of nuclear missiles to be tested even now in Iran carry some of the American technology that Clinton arranged for the Chinese to acquire.  It is almost certain that Kim Jong Il's missiles do, as he is a puppet of the Chinese and resides on their border.

Bill Clinton may not be going down in history as the worst president in modern times (Jimmuh wins that prize going away in the stretch), but if anything like a worst case scenario unfolds in global political/military events to come, Clinton may well be the president whose direct and purposeful actions had the effect of bringing down the United States of America.

Starting with the satellites we need to defend ourselves and wage war.

Dear reader, I'm an ordinary working stiff, no college degree, no great insights or skills, no George Will or William Buckley am I, no sir.   Just a regular guy who reads the news.  

And this stuff is obvious to me.

But I don't know what to do about it. 

ADDITION:  Liberals will whine that none of this makes any difference compared to Bush and his "lies about WMD for oil" and his "illegal war for Halliburton profits" and so forth.

But while Bush is engaged in what has been until now a reasonably robust defense of American national interest, Clinton was selling those interests to the highest bidders. 

Bush's actions are debatable as to whether they are in our interest or not (and I believe they are); Clinton's are unambiguously selfish and low and vaguely criminal.  Time and again he had opportunities to do what's right for the country, and he consistently chose to do those things which were in his own self interest above all.  

And I'm not even getting into the "Bimbo eruption committee", the dead list or any of that old stuff.  Craig Livingstone, Whitewater, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Madison Guaranty, the McDougals, the Rose Law Firm, Billy Dale on trial in the Travel Office thing, the Mena Airport and drug-smuggling, Roger and cocaine, state troopers as procurers of hookers, and the list goes on............................

This guy makes Huey Long look like Mother Teresa.  He will go down in history.  And there is NOTHING he can do to salvage his "legacy".  He's already carved it in stone. 
 

... why they haven't been doing this all along.  

They could have sold a lot of these things here in the States, albeit by hurting sales of some of their higher priced models.

But I guess if you want to sell cars to Chinese and African people, you're not gonna do too well with the $45,000 Lexus SUV, at least not yet.

Only successful businessmen and warlords buy those.  And the warlords probably don't actually pay as often as they should.

Below you can see what the old buzzard believed was proper behavior for the Islamic gentleman.  Kill them all.  Kill Kill Kill.

Blackfive links to PJCountry and offers this alternative code of behavior for us here in the land of the infidel. 

"The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe."

John Walter Wayland (Virginia 1899)

Read Khomeini's words again below, to compare and contrast.

Now remember, in liberal-land all cultures are morally equal, just different.  No culture is better or worse than any other.  We white European folks better not ever catch ourselves thinking our culture is SUPERIOR in any way, oh no, that's just not right!  That's what imperialist colonialist oppressors think! 

Aaargh.