For those of you who have been paying attention, do you wonder if the NY Times are going to see a court over the SWIFT surveillance? I'm thinking that they are going to want to push this to the SCOTUS and see exactly how far they can go with "freedom of the press." Who loses? Everyone. If this happens, we all lose. Because the Times have gone too far this time, and pushed into the realm of possible treason. So if they win, "freedom of the press" essentially makes the press omnipotent, with no one checking or balancing them. They just get to do whatever they want. I've always suspected that the Media was playing their own side in the ideological war, so this makes sense to me that they'd try for this. But if the NY Times loses, we're going to have popular discontent, because they'll treat it like we're destroying the Constitution because we think it might be handy if they would keep their mouths shut when they hear about legal, well-regulated counter-terrorism operations that they themselves suggested the US undertake.

And the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is heating up. The Palestinians have kidnapped an Israeli soldier (from inside of Israel) during a raid. Now the Israelis are going in, guns blazing, to get him out. The Palestinians, meanwhile, have abducted and murdered other Israelis and now claim to have fired chemical weapons into an Israeli town. I've heard rumors that the Palestinians are also claiming to have a stockpile of biological weapons that they are threatening to use. Now I have already stated that the Palestinians have, on every possible occaision, demonstrated that they are all-time worst people to give self-governance to, but this reaches an absolutely remarkable new level of sheer stupidity. What they are trying to do is give Israel an indisputable casus belli that the rest of the world can't even debate. A strong enough one for Israel to, as I believe Hamas put it, "wipe the map." Hamas is calling what they've recently done "acts of war." Perhaps they would be wise to remember that Israel tends to win its wars in less than a week. And they do things like win wars in a week and double the size of the country. If it wasn't so risky, the situation would go like this: Palestinians fire biological weapons at Israel causing grevious casulties, including among themselves because, hey, it's not a Palestinian rocket unless it kills at least three of their own. Gaza becomes a shiny strip of glass and the "West Bank" is moved inland a few hundred miles, as what we now call the West Bank is now a sea-filled crater. The longer this goes on, the less I am inclined to feel sympathy for the Palestinians in their endless quest for self-destruction via proxy. And I never was a sympathetic man in the first place.

Should be interesting to see how these things end up.

1 Comments:

• At 3:11 PM, July 03, 2006,  DerImpresario said…

  The most fascinating part is the words each side chooses to use. Israel is very cautious about even referring to the "kidnapping", as they call it, as an "act of war" (as Hamas calls it). Which begs the question - is it war, or is it not?
  
  58 years ago, the newly-minted nation stood against every single one of their neighbors. They were surrounded by hostiles or the Mediterranean. Their neighbors expected total victory and vicious genocide. Instead, they were decisely defeated. This was repeated twice more. But ever since the 6-Day War, Israel has responded to enemy aggression - a very deliberate choice of words on my part - with both hands tied behind their backs and blindfolds on. Ever since the mid-70s, Israel went from a "plucky little nation" to the world's greatest villain in the Mideast. While this is an "escalation," unless Olmert does something truly staggering, the familiar pattern of the last 30 years will continue. I admit to great ignorance regarding Olmert, but I am not confident.
  
  Using my (non-existent) psychic powers, it is my guess that Shalid will probably be found dead, the IAF will destroy more abandoned buildings in "symbolic" strikes, the IDF will withdraw back to Israel, the usual round of recrimination and condemnation will go around, the rockets will continue to fire, and life will continue as it has for the last three decades.

   

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