I am pleased to introduce you to Blogs For Victory.

Blogs For Victory will replace Blogs For Bush. Some of the more popular and blog entries have been copied over, should you want to continue the discussion there. Unfortunately, importing all the posts and comments proved to be too cumbersome.

And don't worry, Blogs For Bush won't be closing down. the archives will remain intact, but no future posts will be made here.

We hope you enjoy our new home.

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - The king of Spain told Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to "shut up" Saturday during a heated exchange at a summit of leaders from Latin America, Spain and Portugal. Chavez, who called President Bush the "devil" on the floor of the United Nations last year, triggered the exchange by repeatedly referring to former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar as a "fascist."

Aznar, a conservative who was an ally of Bush as prime minister, "is a fascist," Chavez said in a speech at the Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile. "Fascists are not human. A snake is more human."

Spain's current socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, responded during his own allotted time by urging Chavez to be more diplomatic in his words and respect other leaders despite political differences.

"Former President Aznar was democratically elected by the Spanish people and was a legitimate representative of the Spanish people," he said, eliciting applause from the gathered heads of state.

Chavez repeatedly tried to interrupt, but his microphone was off.

Spanish King Juan Carlos, seated next to Zapatero, angrily turned to Chavez and said, "Why don't you shut up?"

Its good to be the King - you get to tell creepy thugs to shut up.

But, waterboarding is not torture, and I have no idea why Democrats want terrorists to be coddled, not interrogated.

A friend of mine who served in the U.S. Navy gave me some firsthand information about the experience of waterboarding.

I was waterboarded during SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) Training as a new Naval Aviator prior to reporting to my first squadron. The purpose of this training was to prepare naval aviators for what they may experience if captured during a time of war. This training was based on the experiences of Naval Aviators and others who had been prisoners during the Viet Nam War. Mr. Mukasey is correct in his assertion that stating what types of interrogation techniques we will or will not employ, allows the enemy to prepare for these interrogation during their training.

So, torture or not torture? He explained:

Waterboarding is hardly torture. It does not maim, cause permanent physical damage,or result in death. It merely simulates the sensation of drowning and having no control over your ability to end the encounter for very brief periods of time. Khalid Sheik Mohammed was subjected to this interrogation technique and was able to resist much longer than would have been expected from an individual who had not been trained to resist waterboarding. This is an indication that our enemies are being prepared for the possibility of being captured.

So, not only are Democrats insisting that we no longer use waterboarding as an interrogation technique with captured terrorists, they want Mukasey to spell out what kind of interrogation techniques we would use, which is useful information for terrorists in their training so they are prepared for such techniques in the event they are captured.

Whose side are the Democrats on anyway? They don't want us monitoring terrorist phone calls, they don't want to properly interrogate them, but they do want to inform terrorists of how we listen to them and what kind of interrogation techniques they should prepare for.

The Iowa caucuses are known for their “living-room chats” where ordinary Iowans can meet candidates face-to-face and talk about what interests voters. When candidates have larger events or make major policy speeches, the crowds are bigger, but there is often still an opportunity for questions. But under the pressures of major media coverage, with polls narrowing in Iowa, campaigns can potentially control questions and coverage by planning questions ahead of time.

While no campaigns admit to this practice, at a recent Hillary Clinton campaign event in Newton, Iowa, some of the questions posed to the New York Senator were planned in advance, planting some audience members in the crowd.

I'm sure its happened before, I'm sure it will happen again - but Hillary, especially, is the candidate who is unwilling to get into an unexpected situation. She has a script, and she wants to stick to it. This is different from message discipline necessary to a successful campaign - this is attempting to manipulate the voters into supporting a candidate. She doesn't want to win the White House, she wants to obtain it - as it if were her right to be President.

In the illegal fundraising and in tactics like planting questions, Hillary is clearly showing that there is pretty much nothing she won't do to ensure the White House falls to her. Why? I don't know - but people who want power that badly are the very people who must be kept furthest from it.

McCain didn't vote, but we can be pretty sure, would have voted for him - Obama, Clinton, Dodd and Biden? Just didn't want to be on record as opposing the man...

Cowards.

This latest issue of banning Christ for Christmas arose at the Plant City Living Center in Plant City in--where else--Florida. The system moved in on an 85-year-old identified only as Mrs. Arnold. Mrs. Arnold was told that “federal law now prohibits her from displaying anything that references religion--words, decorations and the like--in the common area of her apartment building, a soulless, politically-correct-strapped HUD “facility”.

According to the center, HUD has issued a directive banning “any religious symbols or religious words associated with Christmas”, which effectively prevents the Mrs. Arnolds of Small Town, America from placing a small Christmas tree outside their humble doors if it contains any religious symbols or words--"even an angel”, as AFA said in a special alert asking for emails.

Why are nameless, well-paid bureaucrats allowed so much latitude designing laws that cannot help but demoralize little people?

The building at the heart of this latest controversy has about 40 one-bedroom apartments for seniors who are at least 62 years old.

If the residents want to have a Christmas party in their community room, they cannot call it a Christmas party. “The Center says HUD directs residents not to use the word ‘Christmas’ but to use the word ‘holiday’,” the AFA advisory said.

Some ‘holiday’ when it’s not cheered by any of your own long-held traditions!

Not even the Real One.

I find it all the more oxymoronic that people on the left who call themselves Christians, are so willing to sell their religious freedom to embrace the false promises and sour milk that flow from the golden calf that is the government teat.

In the absence of the acceptance of God, man himself attempts to fill the void to become that which he rejects.

With predictably disastrous consequences, I might add.

And unfortunately, those who choose to ignore history are bound and determined to drag the rest of us along on their path toward its insidious repetition.

Peter Weher at NRO's The Corner, following on Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard.

Unless someone can find someone saying this prior to mid-2005, I think I was the first person to suggest that Lieberman is the ideal candidate for Vice President on the Republican ticket in 2008 - though it might have to go through a name change on the party ID. In 1864, it was GOP Lincoln and Democrat Johnson, and I believe they called it a "Union" ticket.

The thing needed, right now, is national unity. The divisions in our nation only help our enemies, and we must show the world that the anti-war left is a marginal political ideology. Having a GOP/Democrat national unity ticket in 2008 is the best means of demonstrating that as far as the war goes, America is united in its quest for victory.

In the weeks and months after September 11, Democrats and Republicans put aside our partisan divisions and stood united as Americans. As late as October 2002, a Democratic-controlled Senate voted by a wide bipartisan margin to authorize President Bush to use military force against Saddam Hussein.

As the Iraq war became bogged down in a long and costly insurgency, however, and as President Bush’s approval ratings slipped, Democrats moved in a very different direction—first in the presidential campaign of 2004, where antiwar forces played a decisive role in the Democratic primaries. As you may recall, they also prevailed in Connecticut’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary last year.

Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically-elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush.

Iraq has become the singular litmus test for Democratic candidates. No Democratic presidential primary candidate today speaks of America’s moral or strategic responsibility to stand with the Iraqi people against the totalitarian forces of radical Islam, or of the consequences of handing a victory in Iraq to al Qaeda and Iran. And if they did, their campaign would be as unsuccessful as mine was in 2006. Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus’ new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq, reluctant to acknowledge the progress we are now achieving, or even that that progress has enabled us to begin drawing down our troops there.

Part of the explanation for this, I think, comes back to ideology. For all of our efforts in the 1990s to rehabilitate a strong Democratic foreign policy tradition, anti-war sentiment remains the dominant galvanizing force among a significant segment of the Democratic base.

But another reason for the Democratic flip-flop on foreign policy over the past few years is less substantive. For many Democrats, the guiding conviction in foreign policy isn’t pacifism or isolationism—it is distrust and disdain of Republicans in general, and President Bush in particular.

Really, that is all there is - no rationality, no convincing alternative policy...just a hatred of a party in general and a man in particular. So ingrained is this hatred that there was actually a proposal to impeach Vice President Cheney this week...which, if you are a lunatic Bush-hater, would be the first step on the path to impeaching President Bush, 'cause you don't want to remove Bush and get stuck with the even more evil Cheney, right?

Quite honestly, it is Florida, 2000. First and foremost, the people of the left have not forgiven President Bush for winning the 2000 election. To this day they will mindlessly repeat the laughable falsehood that the Supreme Court handed the Presidency to Bush; that Gore would have won a recount in Florida, if he had only been allowed to try. There is a great deal of mercilessness in American life these days - an unwillingness to forgive, a definitive desire to see everyone paid out to the last penny for what they have done. In my view, this is the result of a rise in paganism and barbarism in the American body politic - elements very strong in the left, but not unknown on the right.

Joe Lieberman hopes his Democrats will recapture their past glories and become, once again, defenders of American ideals. I fear that he will be disappointed - but we do need to change the dynamic of our political debate; we need to figure out how to get the poison out of our system, lest it destroy us eventually.

Geesh!

Gas prices are hitting $3.19 per gallon around these parts right now.

The "peak driving season," known for its relationship to high gas prices, is long past.

Yet oil is not only flirting with $100 per barrel prices, it's practically got its hand up her skirt, and its ever-skyrocketing prices will inevitably tank our economy.

China, in its booming economy, is poised to overtake the United States as the world's largest consumer of energy, by 2010, to be exact.

How is China handling its energy needs?

To combat higher oil prices, the Chinese are turning increasingly to coal. They plan to build 500 more coal-fired power stations, adding to some 2,000, older plants that spew smoke, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide. The situation is so far out of control that Beijing only recently discovered that Inner Mongolia had built without permission 10 new power plants totaling 8.6 gigawatts. Chinese coal output has doubled in the past five years. China is on course to overtake the US by 2009 as the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide.

And what about us?

Well, that's where we get this lesson from Dark Helmet:

The shame of it all, is that it doesn't have to be that way!

The only thing keeping us on the decline on our road to hell is the "good intentions" paved by our nation's leftists .

To fulfill their needs, China's coal-power plants and refinery starts are at the at the rate of approximately one every two days.

And what are we doing? Putting up windmills and burning our food supplies, while in the meantime slipping technologically and economically back into the dark ages.

When will we, as a nation, finally acquire the politically-incorrect gonads to tell the envirowhacko lobby to kiss off, put America first, and exploit and develop our own standing reservoirs of energy?

Those who say that we must abandon our pursuit of and current stores of energy in favor of developing something new are off in la-la-land. We can't afford to put our economy on hold for the next 20- to 30-some odd years until a novel source of energy comes on line.

This policy of sitting on what we have so as not to anger the enviro-whacko left is pure suicide, from both an economic standpoint as well as in terms of our national security.

But the decline of these United States is inevitable only if it is allowed to be thusly engineered.

Folks--We are Americans, and we have more than a cuisinart!

We have a brain trust over 300,000,000 strong; a people that with a history of even fewer numbers have done wonders given the entrepreneurial spirit powered by a free society.

Within three years of the advent of our venture into World War II, we were able to build one of the world's most powerful war machines, practically from scratch.

Within the space of less than a decade, we, the United States, were able to go from simple orbital satellites to sending humans to the moon!

Much to the amazement of many, we do have the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time!

We can tap current traditional sources of energy (we have, at the very least, another 50 years reserve) while simultaneously researching and developing new technologies.

Turn loose the dogs of our war on mediocrity, and let us not go quietly into that good night!

Give us a vision, and get the hell out of our way!

When such is the case, I can assure you that our best days will be ahead of us, not behind us!

This term "gender identity" is ill-defined, but what it appears to be is when a person "feels" they are female, we have to respect it. Whatever the heck all that means - as one person pointed out, its a trial lawyer's dream of a law...

Outside of that, just what really constitutes "homophobia"? The word is tossed around with wild abandon on the left, but is there an actual definition of it? Strictly speaking, the word means "fear of (gay) man". The word, of course, was invented as an excellent means of silencing debate on gay rights - if you don't agree, you are "homophobic", and that sounds really, really bad...especially in brainless, MSM reports. But I think that if we are to work to ban homophobia, then it should be understood just what we are banning.

And therein lies the trouble - the advocates of laws banning homophobia won't tell us what is being banned - thus leaving open the prospect that the principle of an Evangelical school could be fined or jailed for failing to hire a cross-dresser...or a priest indicted because he states that homosexual sex is "inherently disordered", as stated by the Catechism of the Catholic Church. We're in a very tricky business when we seek to ban speech - and if we are in any way to seek restrictions on what people say, then we should have to very carefully say just what it is we're banning - and until the gay rights activists give us exact definitions of what they want stopped, then we'll have to just be in blanket opposition to all their anti-discrimination proposals.

What do you think?

A Muslim man had invited the American soldiers from “Chosen” Company 2-12 Cavalry to the church, where I videotaped as Muslims and Christians worked and rejoiced at the reopening of St John’s, an occasion all viewed as a sign of hope.

The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. ” Thank you, thank you,” the people were saying. One man said, “Thank you for peace.” Another man, a Muslim, said “All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.” The men and women were holding bells, and for the first time in memory freedom rang over the ravaged land between two rivers.

Always good to keep in mind that the people of Iraq are, well, people...they are not the amoral ciphers our leftists believe when they say we can't bring democracy or that they have been fighting for ages and will never stop. People in Iraq are winning the campaign in Iraq...

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create in allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild “scientific” scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. Now their ridiculous manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmental conscientious citizens. Only one reporter at ABC has been allowed to counter the Global Warming frenzy with one 15 minutes documentary segment.

Wow. That's harsh.

Thing is, we know that data can be manipulated...wonder what a genuinely independent audit of all this would bring up?