Haw-Haw & Blah-Blah

Is there anything more poetically just than this?

A Marine Corps sergeant under investigation in connection with the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha is accusing Representative John P. Murtha of defaming him in public comments about the case.

Lawyers for Frank D. Wuterich, 26, argue in a suit to be filed Wednesday in federal court that Murtha falsely accused Wuterich "of cold-blooded murder and war crimes."

The suit maintains that Pentagon officials "who have briefed or leaked information to Mr. Murtha deliberately provided him with inaccurate and false information" and that the congressman subsequently "has made repeated statements .... that are defamatory" to Wuterich and his fellow Marines.

The suit accuses Murtha of spreading "false and malicious lies" about Wuterich and his squad that were "intended to serve his own private purpose and interests" [such as his expressed ambition to become House Majority Leader under a restored Democrat regime] and that Murtha's comments "have been reproduced by countless third parties throughout the world."

After ducking the matter for several days, Haw-Haw offered up the sort of lame excuse that one would have expected:

Representative John Murtha denies that he libeled a Marine who filed a defamation lawsuit against him on Wednesday, saying his comments about the killing of twenty-four civilians in Haditha, Iraq, were meant only to attack America’s strategy in the war....

"When I spoke up about Haditha, my intention was to draw attention to the horrendous pressure put on our troops in Iraq and to the cover-up of the incident.

"Our troops are caught in the middle of a tragic dilemma. The military trains them to fight a conventional war and use overwhelming force to protect U.S. lives. I agree with that policy, but when we use force, we often kill civilians. What are the consequences?"

The consequences are that Wuterich and three other Marines from his 3rd battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, are under criminal investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service - which itself belies Murtha's smear of their superiors as having perpetrated a "coverup". The consequences for Murtha's attempt to try, convict, and execute Sergeant Wuterich and his buddies in the court of public opinion is, at the very least, this defamation suit, which I would think would not have been filed if there was any serious doubt as to their innocence. An even better outcome would be for the traitorous old bastard to be thrown out of office in November for his despicable self-promotion at the expense of the men and women in uniform on whose behalf he outrageously claims to speak, as well as trying to foist his malicious defeatism upon our allies as well.

While Haw-Haw is infuriating, Lurch is merely tiresome, and bordering on pitiful:

Senator John Kerry, D-MA, appearing Thursday on MSNBC's Imus in the Morning, still maintains that life in the Middle East would be much more peaceful had he been elected president in 2004....

"I know it stuns some people because half the country can’t imagine that there will ever be peace in the Middle East, and the other half can’t imagine there will ever be a Democratic president again,” Kerry said.

So...Dems can't imagine that there will ever be peace in the Middle East? But I thought he said that were he president, a golden age of nothing but peace would have magically blossomed. Guess he must have been speaking extemporaneously again. He always sounds incoherent when he does that.

The failed 2004 presidential candidate said he would have worked with other nations throughout his administration to boost United States credibility in the world. Without that credibility, he maintained, the United States does not have the "moral authority” to lead when crises appear across the globe.

The Bush Administration has been doing nothing but "working with other nations" in its second term. That's a big reason why there IS a war in the Middle East and why Iran is about to dramatically escalate it in the next month. It's indistinguishable from the course Kerry claims he would have taken, other than, I guess, that Mr. French would have been even more obsequiously deferential to the EUnuchs and the UN and would have pulled the plug on the Israelis from the git-go a month ago. Just keep kicking that can down the road and hope it doesn't blow up on your watch.

How that boosts our international credibility - which is predicated upon our willingness to act unilaterally and with force aforethought if our warnings are not heeded - is anybody's guess. How much international credibility did we have before 9/11? After it we had a brief shower of international pity; it took the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to regain credibility where it truly matters - with our enemies. A lot of that has eroded over the past three years. Had Kerry been elected it would have vanished overnight.

Except in his own mind, of course. Which appears to be as oblivious to current events as ever:

"For three-and-a-half years we [the United States] weren’t even involved in getting our allies to help us stop Iran from getting nuclear power,” Kerry said.

For three and a half years we weren't trying at all to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. The last two years the President tried to get our allies to help us do that, which is essentially the same thing. The only thing that could have stopped that short of pre-emptive war was to engineer the mullahgarchy's overthrow from within via the backing and support of pro-democracy insurgents. Instead we've allowed Iran to turn that table on us in Iraq and wasted that window of opportunity, as well as the one for pre-emptive military action. And now the war we've tried to duck is on our doorstep, at the initiative of our Islamist enemies who are reportedly "extremely confident," doubtlessly due in large part to our conspicuous reluctance to do anything serious to try and stop them.

Remember that during the 2004 campaign one of Senator Kerry's bright ideas vis-a-vie "stopping Iran from getting nuclear power" was to give the mullahs nuclear reactors the same way that Bill Clinton had done for the NoKos - which, of course, is part & parcel of why North Korea has nuclear weapons today.

It's no secret that libs are imbecilic in proportion to their self-imagined genius, but the Boston Balker abuses the privilege. And he just cannot shut up:

As for the prospects of peace among Israel and its neighbors in the Middle East, Kerry said: "I don’t think this Administration has done anything near what Republican and Democratic presidents, historically, have done to address these kinds of issues.”

IOW, "this Administration" hasn't put Ehud Olmert in a hammerlock and dragged him face-first to kiss "Sheik" Nasrallah's ass. Largely because Hezbollah is an Iranian terrorist group that, prior to 9/11, had massacred more Americans than any other, and it is in the interests of ourselves, our allies, and even moderate Arab regimes, in addition to Israel, that the IDF be allowed to finish the job of wiping the Hezbos off the face of the planet.

Senator Kerry would have America be an "honest broker" between a besieged Western democractic ally and the proxy of a vicious, intractible, irreconcilable enemy that is fanatically dedicated to our destruction. Such a gutteral level of moral equivalency is grotesquely obscene; it is also the perverted mindset that has helped create the current crisis.

When confronted with the reality of what Hezbollah is, Kerry did his usual "Yes, but" backpedal:

Kerry acknowledged that Hezbollah is "a surrogate for Iran” in the effort to destroy Israel, but he disagrees with the methods used by the Bush Administration to deal with the conflict there.

"Hezbollah needs to be stopped, but there are different ways of doing it,” the senator said. "I’m all for special forces and special operations, but we also need to be pursuing an alternative track that provides alternatives for people and there has been an absence of that.”

Kerry offered no alternative ideas.

Wasn't that the epitaph of his presidential campaign?