In Their Own Words - taking a right turn today

Greetings From Pennsylvania
Out of the Blue... State

1. O'Reilly doesn't seem to know his loofah from his left. And perhaps he should keep his hands on his loofah and out of America's well being. Or.. as my WWII Dad (D-Day at Omaha, no less) would have said - Friend or enema? (DL)

Bill O'Reilly takes aim at San Francisco: Fox host reportedly said it was OK for terrorists to target the city
MSNBC Updated: 1:03 p.m. ET Nov. 11, 2005 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10004302/
Does Bill O'Reilly have it in for the city by the bay? San Franciscans have been in an uproar this week over apparent comments by the host of Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor" that it was A-OK for terrorists to wipe the city off the map.

At issue are comments from O'Reilly's Election Day broadcast on his syndicated Westwood One radio show about a San Francisco ballot measure opposing the presence of military recruiters in city schools. if al-Qaida comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco.

You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead," O'Reilly continued, referring to the 1933 San Francisco landmark that sits atop Telegraph Hill.

2. How about those who chose NOT to serve when given the chance in Vietnam? Would O'Reilly rather not protect them, as well? Here's one of them. (DL)

Rove re-emerges at conservative lawyers' group: President's advisor addresses the Federalist Society
By Tom Curry National affairs writer MSNBC Updated: 4:58 a.m. ET Nov. 11, 2005 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9982264/
WASHINGTON - Emerging from weeks of political hibernation, President Bush's longtime advisor Karl Rove told the right-wing Federalist Society that rulings by liberal judges will “provoke a strong counter-reaction” through laws or constitutional amendments to limit the judiciary. He also denounced last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling Roper v. Simmons in which five justices ruled that convicted murderers under the age of 18 could not be put to death. Rove noted that 20 states allowed capital punishment for those under 18 and argued that the high court was depriving those states of the right to self-government.

3. Well, here's another one on the right heard from. Again, I can't say we agree on things, but at least he's been an honest critic of his own party. Is a portion of the right, and a portion of the left, meeting towards the center? Probably not if our extremists can help it. Perhaps it's leaving others quite alone. I think these are words many Americans, Republican and Democrat, are thinking right now. We may or may not all share the same concern for the political health of the folks that got us into this. (DL)

The crisis of the GOP by Patrick J. Buchanan
Posted: November 10, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47344
With the rout of the Schwarzenegger initiatives, Democratic victories in New Jersey and Virginia, and Bush's free-fall in national polls on his job performance, credibility and character, the Republican Party is in imminent peril of losing the country.

Indeed, since 9-11, the party has indulged in willful self-delusion that it has become America's Party. The Bush triumph in 2004, talking heads brayed, settled the matter: Red State America has triumphed over Blue State America. The future belongs to us.

This was always hyperbole. Where Nixon and Reagan rolled up 49-state landslides in re-election runs, Bush won 31 states, losing every state north of the Potomac and east of Ohio, two of the three great industrial states of the Midwest, Michigan and Illinois, and was skunked on the Pacific rim. Had Kerry hammered him on trade and lost jobs in Ohio, Bush would be a one-term president.

What killed the first Bush presidency and is ruining the second is the abandonment of Reaganism and embrace of the twin heresies of neoconservatism and Big Government Conservatism, as preached by the ideologues at the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal. Bill Clinton is starting to look like Barry Goldwater.

Both Bushes abandoned the economic patriotism that had put America and Americans first. Working America and the middle class have been sacrificed on the high altar of this Moloch of Republican Free Trade. And how have our Chinese brethren reciprocated our magnanimity? The late editorial-page editor of the Journal, Robert Bartley, once said, "The nation-state is finished." He and his progeny have surely done their best to bring that about.

Thus, in March 2003, Bush, in perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history, invaded an Arab nation that had not attacked us, did not want war with us and did not threaten us – to strip it of weapons we now know it did not have.

Result: Shia and Kurds have been liberated from Saddam, but Iran has a new ally in southern Iraq, Osama has a new base camp in the Sunni Triangle, the Arab and Islamic world has been radicalized against the United States, and copy-cat killers of al-Qaida have been targeting our remaining allies in Europe and the Middle East: Spain, Britain, Egypt and Jordan. And, lest we forget, 2,055 Americans are dead and Walter Reed is filling up.

Democratic imperialism is still imperialism. To Islamic peoples, whether the Crusaders come in the name of God or in the name of democracy, they are still Crusaders.