Bush's Wars Blamed for Police Ammo Crisis

If your local police officer or sheriff’s deputy shoots at a dangerous suspect and misses because he spent too little time practicing at the firearms range, you should blame President Bush. That was the message of a Washington Post report Monday titled “Police Feeling Wartime Pinch on Ammunition,” which placed at the feet of the president the responsibility for making ammunition for local law enforcement agencies difficult to obtain due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Post report was an illustration of what occurs when a reporter obtains multiple explanations for an alarming trend but chooses to emphasize the only possible explanation that fits the reporter’s or perhaps the news organization’s political agenda. The report included several factors that contribute to existing shortages of law enforcement ammunition for training, but each of these was dismissed in favor of adding to the list of societal and international crises allegedly caused by President Bush: “Quagmire” in Iraq; Hurricane Katrina; global warming; “cooking” intelligence to start wars; and now creating a famine of ammunition needed for law enforcement training.

Clearly intended to alarm local residents of the DC metropolitan region, the Post report opened by painting a dire portrait of law enforcement agencies eventually running out of ammunition:

The U.S. military's soaring demand for small-arms ammunition, fueled by two wars abroad, has left domestic police agencies less able to quickly replenish their supplies, leading some to conserve rounds by cutting back on weapons training, police officials said.

To varying degrees, officials in Montgomery, Loudoun and Anne Arundel counties said, they have begun rationing or making other adjustments to accommodate delivery schedules that have changed markedly since the military campaigns began in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Before the war, lag time from order to delivery was three to four months; now it's six months to a year," said James Gutshall, property supervisor for the Loudoun Sheriff's Office. "I purchased as much as I could this year because I was worried it would be a problem."

Montgomery police began limiting the amount of ammunition available to officers on the practice range a little more than year ago, said Lucille Baur, a county police spokeswoman. The number of cases a group of officers can use in a training session has been cut from 10 to three.

But some expressed concern that a prolonged shortage could eventually affect officers' competence as marksmen. Practice with live ammunition is a crucial part of any police training regime, experts say. A lack of practice can translate into diminished ability in the field, where accuracy and speed can mean the difference between life and death, they say.

So is the War on Terror really draining our local law enforcement agencies of the ammunition they need to train and remain prepared to serve and protect us? The answer is actually provided in the Post article, but the reporter failed to put the pieces of the puzzle together and view the big picture behind the ammunition shortages.

First, my experience with a federal agency that required stringent marksmanship training and monthly firearms re-qualification also included my observing shortages of live ammunition for training that pre-dated 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. After successfully qualifying at the firearms range, we were not allowed to repeat the range exercises because ammunition needed to be preserved for those who had not yet re-qualified. Again, this was before 9/11 or the current War on Terror. The reason for those shortages, which continue to this day, was budget priorities. There was plenty of ammunition available from a variety of vendors, but insufficient funds to purchase it. That is not to say that law enforcement agencies intentionally place a low priority on training days at the range. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly all law enforcement professionals I have worked with would be willing to dedicate far more time to situational exercises and marksmanship training than is made available to them by their agencies. However, these agencies are given strict budgets of taxpayer money and must distribute funds in priority order.

Officer or agent salaries and benefits must come first, followed by facilities, utilities, and equipment including duty weapons, vehicles, ballistic vests, and a host of other necessities for public safety and national security. Contract vendors of such equipment understand the necessity of their products and charge exorbitant prices that quickly erode ever-shrinking budgets. When you throw in the costs of running temporary jails at sheriffs’ stations, budget needs rapidly become a challenge for administrators to meet. Do you cut back on 911 dispatchers and ballistic vests or ammunition set aside for training? Both are important, but choices must be made. If agencies are facing shortages of ammunition for training, it is far more likely that the shortage is the result of a conscious priority decision rather than the availability of ammunition due to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Second, for those few and far between agencies that are funded at comfortable levels, experiencing ammunition shortages occur due to poor planning. If vendor delays become a problem, there are competitors available to provide the needed products. Agencies can also order their ammunition further in advance to avoid reordering only when supplies are already becoming dangerously low. The Post report quotes various law enforcement officials tasked with maintaining ammunition supply levels, and in each case the officials describe how it now takes six months to a year to get shipments of ammunition that formerly arrived in three or four months. Is this because so much ammunition is flowing to Iraq and Afghanistan? More likely, it is caused by a fact mentioned only in passing by the Post reporter: law enforcement agencies at all levels of government since 9/11 have focused on obtaining better equipment, more training, and more ammunition for their officers, deputies, and agents to better prepare them to defend their communities from terrorist attacks.

The Post report repeatedly asserted that the bulk of ammunition produced by manufacturers was flowing to Iraq and Afghanistan but offered no statistics to illustrate the difference between how much ammunition was shipped to military units fighting the War on Terror and the quantity shipped to law enforcement agencies throughout the United States. Likewise, the Post made no effort to research whether military shipments from the same supplier were also delayed because of the increased demand from law enforcement agencies. The report did mention that one major supplier of ammunition had experienced an increase of forty percent in orders from law enforcement agencies in 2006 and business was booming so nicely that the company was expanding its production levels and its profit margin to accommodate the growing demand. Two critical factors explaining the shortage of ammunition for law enforcement agencies were thus set forth in the article but only in the context that the rounds requested by law enforcement were of the same caliber as those used by standard-issue military weapons.

The ammunition supplier cited in the article did not indicate that their products were being shipped to the military in higher priority than to law enforcement, but the Post report implied that this was the case, blaming the two war fronts for depriving law enforcement of precious ammunition when the cause was actually underproduction to meet demand. That situation is being corrected through capitalism: the manufacturer is opening new plants and expanding old ones to meet the needs of its customers. If one major supplier cannot keep up with demand, others will.

If you know you will run low of a critical item in your household, such as milk or in my case cereal, you naturally buy a new supply well in advance so you do not find yourself with a bare cupboard. Likewise, law enforcement agencies need to set aside sufficient funds in each year’s budget for the following year’s needs so that equipment can be ordered early enough to overcome supplier delays. Many departments and agencies are beginning to do this, as they are learning from their previous re-supply miscalculations.

Other than competition for ammunition between the military and law enforcement, the shortages currently experienced appear unrelated to President Bush or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were many explanations for the shortages but the most controversial approach was to blame them on the current administration. While the president and two unpopular wars may have been the most convenient scapegoats for a common supply and demand problem, the most likely explanations were downplayed or used in a limited context designed to fit a pre-determined conclusion. The ammunition shortage is a serious issue that merited more serious attention to its underlying causes.

Technorati Tags: Law Enforcement Ammunition Shortage War on Terror Bush Administration Iraq War Afghanistan Washington Post Live Fire Training

Anti-Military Obama "Swift-Boats" Own Campaign

A widely read news article this morning quite successfully concealed an insulting and inaccurate statement presidential candidate Barack Obama directed at U.S. military personnel fighting al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in Afghanistan. The AP story, “Obama Gets Warning From Friendly Voter,” reported that “voter” Maggie North of Claremont, New Hampshire, warned Obama that he needed to avoid public disputes and nasty exchanges with his Democratic rivals if he wanted to be considered different or a “fresh” alternative to the usual political nastiness associated with Washington DC. All but one paragraph of the AP story dealt with Obama’s verbal exchanges with opponents, how campaigns “thicken a candidate’s skin,” and the evil influence of Washington lobbyists.

The one paragraph that should have stood out to readers and received the most attention was not analyzed at all in the AP report or challenged in any way as to its accuracy by the news organs that published it. It contained a slap in the face to U.S. troops in Afghanistan but was effectively obscured by the report’s focus only on the naïve and ill-advised confrontations Obama has engaged in with his party rivals.

Obama has frequently criticized the war effort in Iraq, claiming that he would pull troops out of Iraq and redeploying them in Afghanistan or sending them into Pakistan in pursuit of the Taliban and al Qaeda. His Democratic rivals and conservatives alike rightfully repudiated his stated intent to send troops into Pakistan with or without Pakistani President Musharraf’s approval. Yet during a campaign stop in Nashua, NH yesterday, Obama made a specious claim against U.S. troops in Afghanistan, accusing them in John Kerry-esque manner, of murdering innocents in a foreign land. When asked about pulling troops out of Iraq to fight elsewhere, Obama made the following comment about Afghanistan:

We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.

The question that reporters and potential voters who speak to Obama on the campaign trail should be asking is, “Where do you get your information about what our troops are doing in Afghanistan?” The oft-repeated and never proven claim that our troops are bombing and killing civilians in Afghanistan or Iraq are mainstays of anti-American news sources such as Al-Jazeera, but do not match U.S. military reports of daily actions in either of those countries. On this issue perhaps more than any other, Obama demonstrated knowledge starvation while a virtual feast of front line data was available to him from those actually doing the fighting.

It is no small thing for a presidential candidate to accuse the military of killing civilians and fanning the flames of anti-Americanism in Afghanistan, but the AP apparently felt his comments about lobbyists and having “thick skin” during a campaign were more newsworthy than the knife he plunged into the backs of our troops on the front lines in the War on Terror. Perhaps such daggers have become so common from Obama’s party that certain news organizations no longer consider them unusual or significant enough to cover properly. Our troops, on the other hand, have long memories and do not suffer lightly such accusations or blatant disrespect.

John Kerry “swift-boated” his own 2004 presidential campaign by opening his mouth in 1971 and falsely accusing his fellow Vietnam servicemen of committing atrocities against, and killing, civilians. That well-documented testimony to Congress was replayed throughout 2004 on conservative talk radio and served as a constant reminder to potential voters of Kerry’s true feelings toward the military and those who served in the Vietnam War far longer and with more honor than he did. Obama’s false accusation that our troops are now killing civilians in Afghanistan should likewise hang as a proverbial albatross around his campaign’s neck throughout his presumptuous run for the presidency.

Technorati Tags:
Barack Obama, Afghanistan, US Troops, Redeployment, Civilian Deaths, John Kerry, War Crimes, Swift Boat Veterans, US Military, Presidential Candidates, New Hampshire

For WaPo, 25% is "Balanced" Coverage

The Washington Post has a math problem. The term “balanced” usually implies equal representation, with both sides of an issue presented and the reader given the opportunity to choose between them. However, as today’s Washington Post illustrates, the Post believes that “fair and balanced” is achieved when one side of an issue is given 75 percent representation and the other is afforded only 25 percent. This imbalance did not surprise me given the Post’s well-documents liberal slant, but because the unequal representation of views involved the critical topic of why Islamists hate America, I felt it deserved critical analysis.

In today’s Post, the editors tackled the important issue of America as seen through the eyes of Islam by including articles written by four “Muslim Scholars.” The theme of the Post collection of articles, “One Islam, Many Circles” was clearly designed to create the impression that the articles by these four scholars would represent distinct differences in ideology and help answer the question every American ponders: “Why do they hate us?” One of the articles actually bore that title, and while that particular piece began in an engaging pro-American manner, it quickly degenerated into another blame America first argument, albeit couched in what to some may seem reasonable logic. After reading each of the four articles by these “scholars,” it was obvious that by the Post’s mathematics, three articles blaming America for Islamic terrorism and one article identifying Islam itself as the problem constitutes fair and balanced coverage of an issue.

The first article I examined was “Why Do They Hate Us?” by the author of the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid. Hamid’s piece started out with ample pro-American “feel good” sentimentality, wistfully recounting his early childhood in America and his patriotic American roots. Hamid then returns with his family to his native Pakistan as a nine year old boy, and describes his hometown of Lahore as a fun, peaceful, liberal city, with nightclubs, and other western forms of entertainment. In this nearly-idyllic setting, Hamid’s beloved Lahore quickly degenerated into a city filled with Islamic radicals carrying AK-47s who enforced strict codes of dress and morality and terrorized the city with crime waves and brutality. Who was responsible for this terrible transformation of Pakistan? After listing his pro-American credentials in the article, Hamid answered this question with the inevitable liberal response: America was to blame for Lahore’s demise and Pakistan’s radicalization.

Hamid’s description of how America’s role in training and equipping Mujaheddin fighters to battle with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan painted the portrait of a careless America that never should have interfered with that effort to drive out the Soviets. In Hamid’s version of history, America was only concerned about Afghanistan because of its proximity to Persian Gulf oil, and the flow of guns and heroin from the Mujaheddin training camps forever destroyed the liberal peace and fun of Lahore. This analysis begs the question that Hamid ignored rather conveniently in his description of events as he remembered them: what would have happened to Lahore and for that matter all of Pakistan had Afghanistan fallen permanently to the Soviets? How long does Hamid think that Pakistan would have remained untouched or unconsumed by Soviet expansion had the Mujaheddin, with some U.S. support, not convinced the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan? Perhaps Hamid should have directed his blame for the loss of Lahore’s peaceful condition on those who aggressively invaded Afghanistan and created the need for a Mujaheddin uprising in the first place: the Soviets. Was the U.S. supposed to do nothing when its Cold War communist enemy invaded a neighboring and strategically located nation? Apparently Hamid thinks so.

A warning to readers: if you start reading an article by a Muslim “scholar” and the piece opens with a lengthy attempt to establish the author’s pro-American credentials, you can be assured that immediately following that literary ruse you will find that the author’s premise is anything but pro-American. Hamid opens with talk of Star Trek, MASH, and barbeque chicken, but he concludes with warnings that America must educate itself about the foreign policy blunders of its past and that America must stop trying to be a superpower, all while admitting that he no longer lives in America but hopes America will correct its problems. That is what passes as Muslim “scholarship” at the Washington Post. A hint to Post editors: a “Muslim scholar” is not someone who is Muslim, has a PhD or writes novels, and will write opinions that fit your paper’s political bias. A “Muslim scholar” is someone who dedicates his/her educational and professional career to the study of Islam and is willing to challenge its accepted practices.

In fairness, Hamid wrote one very good paragraph during his “pro-America” smokescreen which unintentionally captured what is surely one of the primary reasons why America is hated in many corners of the world:

Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others. It will come his way no matter how kind, generous or humble he may be.

The following paragraph, however, contained the first hint that a transition to “blame America first” was coming:

But there is another major reason for anti-Americanism: the accreted residue of many years of U.S. foreign policies. These policies are unknown to most Americans. They form only minor footnotes in U.S. history. But they are the chapter titles of the histories of other countries, where they have had enormous consequences. America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.

Hamid then takes the article’s readers to his “sleepy” and peaceful Lahore, Pakistan before, in his opinion, America ruined the region. The troubling truth is that Hamid’s article, of the three “blame America first” Post pieces, was the best presented and most reasoned argument.

The two other Post articles by purported “Muslim scholars” were “As American as You Are,” and “What Went Wrong? Bush Still Doesn’t Get It.” The first of these was an in-your-face “like it or not we’re here to stay and you better get used to it” approach penned by another Muslim novelist (again, novelist and scholar are synonymous only at the Post), and the second is, as its title suggests, a further “blame America first” contribution. These two articles are related to each other in that they both contain misrepresentations of religion. In “As American as You Are,” author Mohja Kahf defends radical Islam (in which she was raised) by trying to put its excesses on an equivalent moral plane with what she considered the extremes of Christianity:

This Muslim squirms whenever secular friends -- tolerant toward believers in Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and Native American spirituality -- dismiss Christians with snorts of contempt. "It's because the Christian right wants to take over this country," they protest.

That may be, but it doesn't justify trashing the religion and its spectrum of believers. Christianity has inspired Americans to the politics of abolition and civil rights, as well as to heinous acts. Christian values have motivated the Ku Klux Klan to burn houses, and Jimmy Carter to build them.

This is not a new argument, but it ignores a profound truth that invalidates this type of moral equivalency defense: when believers of any faith murder under the guise of religion, regardless of self-declared righteous motives, they have moved beyond the tenets of faith and are engaging in pure evil not compatible with belief in any form of higher power. Thus it is error to ascribe even warped Christian values to the KKK or to associate extreme Muslim values with al Qaeda. Both groups are engaged in evil, not in religious fervor.

Kahf also put forth a disingenuous argument that America is too demanding of Muslims in its expectations for assimilation. In her words:

Assimilation is overrated. And it's not what minority religions do in the United States. Did Irish Catholics stop being Catholic when they arrived generations ago? People once believed that devout Catholics and Orthodox Jews could never be "true Americans." Today, I receive e-mails with solemn lists of why Muslims, "according to their own faith," can't possibly be "loyal Americans." The work of nut jobs. Yet purportedly sane people in Washington seem to think it's a valid question.

Rational Americans don’t expect Muslim immigrants to stop being Muslim during their naturalization process, and Kahf was misleading in her analogies with the assimilation of Catholic or Jewish immigrants. What Americans do expect, however, is that Muslims cooperate with law enforcement and purge the extremists among them who are engaged in treasonous activity. That is what Americans consider assimilation: loyalty to and preservation of America and its governmental system.

The related article, “What Went Wrong,” by Akbar Ahmed, the only actual Muslim scholar of the three authors, contained the typical anti-Bush talking points: U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq “poured gallons of fuel on a worldwide fire”; anti-Muslim rhetoric from the administration convince Muslims that they are under attack; the American media attacks on Islam. I guess Ahmed missed Hollywood’s intentional rewrite of Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears, which replaced the terrorists who detonated a nuclear device at the Super Bowl, originally written by Clancy as Islamists, with white South African nationals in order to avoid casting Muslims in a bad light. Despite these less than scholarly liberal talking points, Ahmed did provide an interesting research conclusion about Islam. According to Ahmed, the Bush administration has erroneously stereotyped Islam as violent. Ahmed’s own studies actually indicated that Islam consists of more than just moderates or extremists:

...In fact, we discovered three broad categories of Muslim responses to the modern world: the mystics, the modernists and the literalists.

The mystics are the most tolerant and the least political, defined by a universalist worldview that embraces difference rather than resisting it. Muslims in this group look to sages such as the great Sufi poet Rumi for inspiration. "I go to a synagogue, church and a mosque, and I see the same spirit and the same altar," Rumi once said. You'll find today's mystics in such places as Iran, Morocco and Turkey.

That paragraph is a fascinating statement of Islamic scholarship. Ahmed wrote that “mystics” are the “most tolerant and the least political” division of Islam, yet when he listed the nations in which “mystics” are predominant, Iran is front and center. If Iran’s mullahs and President Ahmadinejad represent the most tolerant division of worldwide Islam, then a war against terrorism will see horrific escalations in the future. The government that has vowed to annihilate Israel in an atomic fireball, is the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorist groups, and is ignoring UN sanctions to develop nuclear weapon capabilities is the “most tolerant.” I wonder if Ahmed has considered what Iran would be like if it were not so “tolerant.” Ahmed surely did not intend to do so, but his own research merely served to validate the Bush administration’s stance: Islamic extremism is the single greatest danger to America and its allies.

Ahmed showed his liberal political stripes throughout his article, but beyond political ideology, he also revealed a profoundly pro-radical agenda in his caricature of Pakistani President Musharraf. Musharraf, as I have previously reported, last week declared war on Islamic extremists within Pakistan, openly pitting moderate and radical Islam against each other in what could be a battle royal for Islam’s future as a world faith. Musharraf declared himself with the moderates, yet Ahmed claimed Musharraf does not represent Pakistanis and the U.S. should work for his ouster from power. Either Ahmed wants to see radical Islam put in its place by more moderate elements or he does not, and if he does not, one must question his reasoning.

The fourth article, “Losing My Jihadism,” the only one of the four that offered any actual Muslim introspection, was authored by Mansour al-Nogaidan, a writer for a Bahraini newspaper. This author had the audacity to suggest that the problem of Islamists twisting doctrines to justify suicide bombings and attacks on innocent civilians was actually an internal problem solvable only within Islam. He called for an Islamic version of Marin Luther to lead Islam into a period of reform in which its extremes could be purged. Nowhere in this article was there any hint of the “blame America for terrorism” arguments so prominently featured in the other three, and in that light it was refreshing reading.

It would have been all the more refreshing had it been accompanied by a companion article by a Muslim scholar self-critical of Islam’s reluctance to rise up and quench its internal fires of extremism. Unfortunately in the mathematics of the Washington Post, one out of four constitutes journalistic balance.

Technorati Tags:
Islam, Mujaheddin, Terrorism, Pakistan, Musharraf, Lahore, Afghanistan, Mohsin Hamid, Mohja Kahf, Akbar Ahmed, Mansour al-Nogaidan, Islamic Reform

Liberal Reaction to Failed Taliban Attack on U.S. Vice President: "Better Luck Next Time"

The major news story yesterday was a suicide bomber’s detonation outside the secured perimeter at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, during Vice President Cheney’s visit with military personnel there, but the attack was only half the story. The unabashed disappointment expressed by liberals to the fact that the attack failed was perhaps the aspect that deserves the most attention.

To summarize the incident liberals cheered, the bomb killed at least 23, including one U.S. soldier, one South Korean soldier, and one U.S. contractor. The remaining 20 victims were reportedly Afghani civilians, many of them truck drivers employed to deliver goods to the Bagram base, waiting in line to go through security screening for entry to the base. The bomber did not penetrate security and detonated outside the checkpoint, thus it would appear the Taliban claim that Vice President Cheney was the target of the attack was likely mere political bluster. The U.S. Military put forth the following statement that best describes a plausible motive for the rush by the Taliban to claim the attack targeted the Vice President:

"We actually think that their tying it to the vice president's visit ... was an attempt to draw attention away from the fact that the attack killed so many Afghan civilians, including a 12-year-old boy," said Lt. Col. David Accetta, a U.S. military spokesman.

Attacks at sites where high level U.S. dignitaries are visiting understandably receive extensive international coverage. However, the bombing also served to reveal something very ugly and despicable in American society: personal disdain for a vice president that has become so vitriolic that members of the opposing party are unashamedly disappointed when an alleged assassination attempt of the U.S. Vice President by a foreign enemy fails.

Consider this historical hypothetical comparison which should help place the liberal reactions to the claimed attack on Vice President Cheney quoted below in proper perspective:

It is February 1945, and after 4 years of brutal war in Europe and the Pacific, America has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties fighting a war against ideologies bent on the destruction of America. Vice President Harry Truman decides, at great personal risk, to visit U.S. troops at an air base in the Pacific preparing for a spring offensive against Okinawa. Keeping his intended destination secret, Truman arrives at the Pacific base, greets and dines with soldiers, offering them encouragement and continued support. During Truman’s visit, an enemy combatant approaches a security checkpoint at the Pacific base and detonates a suicide bomb that kills 23 people, including 2 Americans. Truman is taken to a prepared shelter until base security is confirmed, and then, in courageous fashion, continues with his visit and later flies to Manila to meet with a cooperative but somewhat embattled local leader, all while still in mortal danger from further attempts on his life. When news reaches America that the enemy claimed it had attempted to assassinate Truman but failed, many Americans write letters to the editors of local and national newspapers expressing their disappointment that the enemy had not shown more competence and succeeded in “killing Truman over there so we won’t have to do it here.”

Of course, in February 1945, no true American of any party would have harbored such thoughts or wishes against Truman regardless of political persuasion or war opposition (a negligible phenomenon in that war). Yet in today’s supposedly “enlightened” liberal society, disappointment and write-in expressions of anger that Vice President Cheney survived the attack at Bagram were the reactions of such a high number of readers of a highly popular liberal blog, the Huffington Post, that the web site managers were forced to shut down the reader comment thread for an article titled, “Over 20 Die in Attack on Cheney” after reader comments containing wishes that the Vice President had been killed filled 12 pages, as reported by World Net Daily. WND also successfully captured the comments before they were deleted by Huffington Post site managers.

For the record, the Huffington Post acted responsibly by closing the thread and deleting the comments, as they could potentially be a legal liability should some reader determine, based on the shared support of so many fellow readers, that he/she should attempt to do what the Taliban failed to accomplish. Thanks to World Net Daily, we have a representative sample of how personal, irrational, and truly un-American the anti-Cheney (and anti-Bush, which is actually even more acerbic) sentiment in the Democratic Party has become:

Better luck next time! (TDB)

Dr Evil escapes again ... damn. (truthtopower01)

So Cheney is personally responsible for the deaths of 14 innocent people ... and then he waddles off to lunch!! What a piece of sh--! (fantanfanny

Jesus Christ and General Jackson too, can't the Taliban do anything right? They must know we would be so gratefull (sic) to them for such a remarkable achievement. (hankster2)

Hey, Thalia, lighten up. I, for one, don't wish Cheny (sic) had been killed. I wish he had been horribly maimed and had to spend the rest of his life hooked to a respirator. Feel better now? (raisarooney)

Let's see ... they're killing him over there so we don't have to kill him over here? (ncjohn)

And they missed!? Oh, Hell. Like Mamma used to say, I guess it's the thought that counts ... (Anachro1)

You can never find a competent suicide bomber when you need one. Mark701)

Amazingly Democrats wonder why Republicans question their patriotism. As much as Republicans disliked Bill Clinton, hopefully even the liberal left can recognize that impeaching a man for perjury is a lesser level of disdain than wishing that terrorists had killed him while in office. Expressing such wishes verbally or in writing actually constitutes a felony under federal law, hence the Huffington Post’s wise decision to remove such comments from the blog. Republicans were not particularly fond of President Carter, but would have responded with unanimous condemnation and retaliatory force had he been sitting on the reviewing stand with Anwar Sadat when Sadat was assassinated in 1981. The idea of anyone attacking or killing our elected leaders should produce nothing but outrage and a determination to prevent that from happening to any of them, anywhere they may go, in war time or periods of peace.

More disturbing is the realization that many so-called Americans would ever wish for an enemy to determine who holds office by circumventing our democratic process through assassination. We choose our leaders and we should condemn and thwart any effort that takes that choice out of our control.

Many conservatives have argued that liberals are rooting against American success in Iraq and Afghanistan, and expressions of ignorant and inflammatory vitriol, as demonstrated by Huffington Post readers, provide additional evidence that such observations are accurate. Clearly the majority of readers commenting on the incident at Bagram Air Base hate Vice President Cheney on the same level as the Taliban, as they too wished to see him dead.

Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton have declared that Iraq is “Bush’s war,” which has become a phrase used interchangeably with “Iraq War” throughout the liberal media. Framing the war in that manner assures that actually winning in Iraq or defeating terrorists anywhere will hurt Democratic chances in 2008, hence they cannot be expected to do anything to tangibly improve national security or lead to military victory in the Middle East. They simply cannot afford to allow President Bush to succeed in any way, and their personal hatred for the Bush/Cheney team trumps all other instincts, even their own survival. After all, if the Taliban reportedly hoped to kill Vice President Cheney, why would Democrats think they would be immune from such attempts if they were in office?

Terrorists don’t distinguish between our parties and call cease fires on Americans during Democratic administrations. Apparently forgotten are the seizing of our embassy in Tehran in 1979, the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, the bombing of the USSS Cole in 2000, and other attacks during the Carter and Clinton administrations.

The liberal Vice President Cheney haters, in their rabid desire to blame him for everything from global war to global warming, should focus on organizing enough votes to elect a vice president they can support rather than wish radical Islamic terrorists would eliminate a man they failed to defeat politically. Americans should be united in our gratitude that the Vice President was not hurt, not because it was “Dick Cheney, “ or “Darth Cheney,” as liberals like to call him, but simply because he is America’s Vice President, regardless of party affiliation. A phrase the ACLU has not yet litigated against because it contains no God reference, E Pluribus Unum, states perfectly the unity with which America should respond when its leaders are targeted for assassination: Out of many, one.