According to official U.S. government sources, the September 11th attacks were consistent with the mission statement of al-Qaeda. The overarching motivation for the present al-Qaeda campaign was set out in a 1998 fatwa issued by Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu-Yasir Rifa’i Ahmad Taha, Shaykh Mir Hamzah, and the (Amir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh, Fazlur Rahman).[53]

The fatwa lists three “crimes and sins” committed by the Americans:

* U.S. military occupation of the Arabian Peninsula.
* U.S. aggression against the Iraqi people.
* U.S. support of Israel.

The fatwa states that the United States:

* Plunders the resources of the Arabian Peninsula.
* Dictates policy to the rulers of those countries.
* Supports abusive regimes and monarchies in the Middle East, thereby oppressing their people.
* Has military bases and installations upon the Arabian Peninsula, which violates the Muslim holy land, in order to threaten neighboring Muslim countries.
* Intends thereby to create disunion between Muslim states, thus weakening them as a political force.
* Supports Israel, and wishes to divert international attention from (and tacitly maintain) the occupation of Palestine.

If Democrats were so bent on driving out moderates would they have enlisted candidates like Heath Shuler, Tester, Jim Webb or Bob Casey to run for office? The party now has a large wing – the Blue Dogs that don’t subscribe to liberal orthodoxy. Another sign of the influence of moderates is their election of moderate Steny Hoyer in the House over anti-war Jack Murtha.

Lieberman was actually closer to Bush’s position on the war than many Republicans. He urged his Democratic colleagues to be more loyal to Bush in a time of war- which was extremely annoying. One of his first decisions since the election was to drop the subpoena for WH records during Katrina. So, he has some issues of loyalty of his own.

And Club for Growth has run conservative GOP candidates in primaries in an attempt to defeat Republican moderates.

“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear—kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor—with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.�
—General Douglas MacArthur

The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more and tolerated by all.
~Tacitus

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official…
~Theodore Roosevelt

Your team, and you’re free to disagree, has maligned patriots and even crippled and decorated war veterans and now many thousands of families who have made the ultimate sacrifice of their sons’ life or limb. Your side continues to equate disagreement with “the Deceiver” is unpatriotic, and the less people believe in Bush, and the more you guys continue to trumpet their divisive hate speech, the farther down your party is going to fall.

This is utterly reprehensible, and if this is what the GOP stands for now, may it go down in flaming, ignoble and total defeat, for as long as this hateful screed rules your party.

You don’t see the damage this has done to your party. Some of my friends were among your top donors. No more. Now they’re saying “I have no party”.

After all, it was the Democratic Party that made by far the most vigorous effort to purge internal dissent (Joe Lieberman)

As usual, Jason is still in denial.

The Democrats tried to purge Joe Lieberman. By sending Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer, Mary Landriau, and a host of others to CT to campaign on his behalf.

Now, what Jason wanted, was for all of those people to continue to campaign for Lieberman after he lost the Democratic Primary.

Sort of like how Jason kept campaigning for John McCain after he lost the GOP primary in 2000.

You did do that right Jason?

I’d prefer to keep the goalposts where Jason placed them. To that end, here’s a quote from Jason:

After all, it was the Democratic Party that made by far the most vigorous effort to purge internal dissent

His single example of this was Joe Lieberman. Didn’t the “official” Democratic Party support Lieberman until he lost the Democratic primary, at which point he he was no longer the “official” Democratic candidate?

By the way, the netroots, or whatever group that preferred Ned Lamont to Lieberman, is not the Democratic Party.

I would also point out that your examples aren’t all that hot. The Club for Growth is not the Republican Party. The official Republican Party entities supported Lincoln Chaffee and Arlen Specter (and I presume Schwarz, but I didn’t follow that race that closely). And Chaffee and Specter won their primaries, in the end.

Meanwhile, the currently leading Republican presidential candidates are John McCain (no arch-conservative) and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom had prominent speaking roles at the last GOP national convention. Can you name the last anti-gay-marriage, pro-life Democrat to be given a prominent speaking role at their national convention?

The National Review link–maybe?–is HERE.

If it were possible to preview comments, I might fix my mistakes before posting them.

It’s more than just an assertion that moderate Republicans are subject to challenges by more conservative elements of the Republican Party. It’s a completely true fact. Anyone with an internet connection can look it up.

For example, moderate Republican congressman Joe Schwartz of Michigan was defeated in a primary by a candidate backed by the Club for Growth. (Hotline link HERE.)

Republican senator Lincoln Caffee was challenged in his most recent primary election, also by a candidate supported by the Club for Growth.(Townhall link HERE.)

And in the 2004 elections, Republican senator Arlen Specter also had a primary challenger supported by the Club for Growth. (A link from National Review complaining about Rick Santorum’s support for Specter is HERE.)

You’re entitled to your own opinion, Jason. But you are not entitled to your own facts.

Don’t you care about your own credibility?

The American Republican Guard has been purging for absolute purity

Even though it is repeated often and rarely challenged, this seems to me a curious claim. After all, it was the Democratic Party that made by far the most vigorous effort to purge internal dissent (Joe Lieberman) while Republican leadership tolerates extremely vigorous dissent from the likes of Hagel and Brownback with ZERO evidence of retribution.

There may be an effort by those considered Republicans to reclaim the party, but usinmg an analogy the old Republican party is like the Bolsheviks of 1905 and the Bushevik party is rapidly becoming the Bolsheviks of 1935. Notice the things directly out of Orwell, double plus ungood thoughts are why bad things happen, thus the media destroyed our victory, there are only 2 ways to think about the war, for terrorism or against terrorism, the stripping away of complex semantics.

I consider those who defend the Republican party as now ruled morally eqivalent to those leftists who found rationalizations for the Bolsheviks or those moderates who claimec Uncle Ho ran a basically agricultural reformist arty rather than a movement tightly bound to Comintern.

And purging the impure is a part of the movement. This is logically were it’s heading. Hopefully we have safeguards built into our system crazed ideas such as millions upon millions of Kluxers in the twenties have been moderated before, but read the comments on the the rightist blogs, Democrats are traitors, vigilante action is justified and Michelle Malkin innocently posting phone numbers and addresses of the ungood.

We have already had people mailing packets of white powder. These people are thugs. But then again as Sinclair Lewis wrote: “It can’t happen here.”

I’d say Chuck Hagel has more credibility than Cheney any day. Hagel can look you square in the eye and actually consistently make sense. He has served as a grunt on the ground- while Cheney dodged the draft. No contest there.

To return to the topic at hand, yes, I think that having 70% of the American public voicing opposition to the war as it’s going now (and polls are just not very good at telling us how strongly people feel about something, how hardened their opinions are… a couple of weeks of good results from the surge would change those numbers) does in fact undercut the ability of the troops to carry out their mission. It makes it more difficult. It hurts their morale. Talk of withdrawal emboldens our enemies and encourages them to hold on a while longer.

Does that make the people who oppose the war bad people, or unpatriotic? No. Should they all shut up just because of it? I’d kind of like them to, but they have a right to speak out. But the Vice President, and I, are also free to speak out about the effect we think the strident opposition to the war has on our troops and their mission.

I’m perfectly willing to take you at your word on the long-term goals of al-Queda and bin Laden. But I think the war in Iraq is probably serving their short-term goals: recruitment and distraction.

By the way, I’m sure you’re familar with polls showing that a majority of Americans are opposed to the war. (ABC News article HERE.) I imagine you haven’t thought about it this way–but do you really think a majority of Americans are trying to undercut the troops?