(Thanks Don!)

A concerned Liberal wrote a lot of letters to the White House complaining about the treatment of terrorists being held in Guantanamo Bay. She received the following reply:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20016

Dear Concerned Citizen,

Thank you for your recent letter roundly criticizing our treatment of the Taliban and Al Quaeda detainees currently being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Our administration takes these matters seriously and your opinion was heard loud and clear here in Washington. You’ll be pleased to learn that, thanks to the concerns of citizens like yourself, we are creating a new division of the Terrorist Retraining Program, to be called the “Liberals Accept Responsibility for Killers” program, or LARK for short.

In accordance with the guidelines of this new program, we have decided to place one terrorist under your personal care. Your personal detainee has been selected and scheduled for transportation under heavily armed guard to your residence next Monday.

Ali Mohammed Ahmed bin Mahmud (you can just call him Ahmed) is to be cared for pursuant to the standards you personally demanded in your letters of complaint. It will likely be necessary for you to hire some assistant caretakers. We will conduct weekly inspections to ensure that your standards of care for Ahmed are commensurate with those you so strongly recommended in your letter.

Although Ahmed is a sociopath and extremely violent, we hope that your sensitivity to what you described as his “attitudinal problem” will help him overcome these character flaws. Perhaps you are correct in describing these problems as mere cultural differences. We understand that you plan to offer counseling and home schooling.

Your adopted terrorist is extremely proficient in hand-to-hand combat and can extinguish human life with such simple items as a pencil or nail clippers. We advise that you do not ask him to demonstrate these skills at your next yoga group. He is also expert at making a wide variety of explosive devices from common household products, so you may wish to keep those items locked up, unless (in your opinion) it his might offend him.

Ahmed will not wish to interact with you or your daughters (except sexually), since he views females as a subhuman form of property. This is a particularly sensitive subject for him and he has been known to show violent tendencies around women who fail to comply with the new dress code that he will recommend as more appropriate attire. I’m sure you will come to enjoy the anonymity offered by the burka — over time.

Just remember that it is all part of “respecting his culture and his religious beliefs” — wasn’t that how you put it? Thanks again for your letter. We truly appreciate it when folks like you keep us informed of the proper way to do our job.

You take good care of Ahmed — and remember — we’ll be watching.

Good luck!

Cordially,

Donald Rumsfeld

This past Sunday, Mike Wallace, on the television show 60 Minutes, somehow managed to overcome the MSM/DEM bias and present a rather moving pictorial of a wounded soldier who has returned from Iraq, Jessica Clement.

Her statements were simply moving, and her way of thinking selfless and honest. I present them here as they are in stark contrast with today’s mainstream media and society in general.

I reproduce the applicable portion here in full because we all need to know and understand the sacrifices that our young American soldiers are making and, further, understand the cherished values, mores and hopes displayed by the people who continue to make our country safe. From the 02-12-06 episode of 60 Minutes:

Doctors also worried that another vet from Iraq, Jessica Clements, might be a vegetable after a roadside bomb shot shrapnel into three lobes of her brain.

Jessica had been a model in Akron, Ohio, when she left high school to join the Army. As a staff sergeant in Iraq, she spent her days driving fuel trucks. “I remember days driving down the road thinking to myself, ‘Is today the day I’m gonna get hit?” Or, ‘Am I gonna get shot today?’ And just praying, ‘OK, keep us safe. Let us get where we need to go without any casualties,'” she explains.

Her luck ran out on May 5, 2004, when a bomb exploded under her truck, shooting shards of shrapnel – large and small – into her brain. “I still have shrapnel that’s remaining in my brain,” she says. “This right portion here, you can see a little, the line. . .from where my skull was removed. The neurosurgeons physically cut the right portion of my skull and removed it.”

The doctors removed a part of her skull because the swelling would have caused so much pressure that it could have killed her. They kept the right half of her skull off for four months, and for much of that time Jessica remained in a coma.

“They only gave me a two-percent chance of coming out of the coma and living, surviving,” says Jessica. “Somebody has to be in that two percent, though. Why not me?”

She remembers enduring a “ridiculous amount” of pain along the way. “I hate to admit this, but there were days when I wondered to myself if I would have been better off had I not made it because I was in so much pain,” she says. Asked if she is still in pain, Jessica says, “Right now I have a shooting pain that’s going from right above my ear over to this side. It’s kind of going diagonally across. But it’s nothing. I’m used to it.”

The constant pain, sporadic seizures, and bouts of anger still can’t compare with what she’s already endured: re-learning how to walk and talk and more.

“Basically I had to relearn how to think again and how to figure things out. I did have to learn how to walk again,” she explains. “One day I remember I sat back in bed and I moved my leg about an inch trying to get it up on the bed. I had only moved about an inch. But I had never been so happy before. I was just excited. Okay, great. It moved an inch. So that motivated me. Okay, tomorrow, I’m gonna try for two inches, see if I can get it going again.”

Jessica says believes she survived for a reason and that she now knows what that reason is.

“I believe that it’s to help other people. So I decided to go into social work,” she says.

“I would like to work for the VA or the DAV, the Disabled American Veterans association. So I can help other veterans. I’m still a soldier at heart,” she says. “I’m still a soldier. Even though I’m discharged from the Army—medically discharged, I’m always gonna be a soldier,” Jessica says.

“And I’m always gonna have that mentality. So if I can continue to help other soldiers, other veterans, that’s what I really want to do.”

What message would she like to send to other wounded vets? “I would love to tell them just to not give up,” she says. “And, no matter how bad your pain is, remember that tomorrow is a new day. Just keep that in mind, and just please stay positive. And you will get through this.”

___________________________________

Hollywood cannot understand, and never will.

Jessica Clement: Today’s Hero.

In a continuing clash of cultures, the European Union finally appears to be understanding the breadth and depth of the problem that it collectively and individually advanced over the years and that, in order to survive, it must begin to craft a firm stance against violence and delineate accepted practices in its member countries — and acknowledge that “acceptance” and “tolerance” does not always = smart.

From the Associated Press:

Thousands rampaged through several cities in Pakistan’s worst violence against Prophet Muhammad caricatures, burning buildings housing a hotel, banks and a KFC, vandalizing a Citibank and breaking windows at a Holiday Inn and a Pizza Hut.

At least two people were killed Tuesday in Lahore, where intelligence officials suspected outlawed Islamic militant groups incited the violence to undermine President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s U.S.-allied government.

Europeans Grow Some Vertebrae:

In southern Iraq, Basra’s provincial council demanded the withdrawal of Denmark’s 530-member military contingent from the region unless the Danish government apologizes for the cartoons – which it refuses to do, saying it has no influence over the media.

The president of the European Commission backed the Danish government’s refusal, saying freedom of speech cannot be compromised. “It’s better to publish too much than not to have freedom,” President Jose Manuel Barroso told Jyllands-Posten, the paper that first published the drawings.

QUAILGATE!

The DEM (Defeatist, Elitist Media) have their collective panties in a bunch once again, only this time it’s about VP Cheney sending birdshot into his 78-year-old friend — who is sitting up in bed this morning and laughing about the incident.

If you read closely between the lines and listen to the news conference, the complaint is that it took 14 hours for the DEM to be “notified.” Their issue — I should say, the WASHINGTON media’s issue — is that some rinky-dink “local” paper (in Corpus Christi) was notified by the ranch owner but no one placed THEM, the VERY IMPORTANT Washington Press Corps, into the loop. They got scooped! Zounds! Heresy!

About the $7 upland game bird stamp? What you won’t read is that this new law came into effect as of January 1st, 2006, and the Veep already had a check in the mail. From the Drudge Report:

— A member of the Vice President’s staff wrote a check for 140 dollars understanding that this would purchase a Texas non-resident season hunting license that would permit the Vice President to hunt quail in Texas. It appears now that the license itself cost 125 dollars, and an extra 15 dollars covered the cost of a Federal migratory bird stamp. The Vice President did not need the Federal stamp, as he already possessed one.

— The staff asked for all permits needed, but was not informed of the 7 dollar upland game bird stamp requirement.

— Because the requirement is new, the Department has informed us that it is issuing warnings, and the Vice President expects to receive one. He will take whatever steps are needed to comply with applicable rules.

CHENEY NEEDS TO RESIGN! was the mantra at the news conference. Poor Scott McClellan — but at least he had the huevos to counter the charge with “that’s a ridiculous question.” The real issue is that the DEM became offended: they got scooped by “lesser mortals!”

Remember “back then” when the public was told it was no one’s business if Clinton unzipped his pants in the Oval Office? So now it’s everyone’s business when there’s a hunting accident, off duty, on the weekend, on a private person’s ranch, involving a VP “less than popular” with the DEM?

I’m certain your employer, hearing that you got into a vehicle accident and another party was injured, would fire you in response to the rest of your co-workers calling for your head.

When it was discovered that Cheney shot a Republican lawyer, his popularity jumped 20 points.

Q: What’s the difference between Gore and Cheney?

A: Gore shoots his mouth off.

About that Al Gore — and again, what you WON’T READ:

On Sunday, speaking in Jiddah on Saudi Arabian soil, at the Jeddah Economic Forum, Al Gore said that the U.S. government committed “terrible abuses” against Arabs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that most Americans did not support such treatment. Gore said Arabs had been “indiscriminately rounded up” and held in “unforgivable” conditions. The former vice president said the Bush administration was playing into al-Qaida’s hands by routinely blocking Saudi visa applications.

“The thoughtless way in which visas are now handled, that is a mistake,” Gore said during the Jeddah Economic Forum, at the Jeddah Hilton. “The worst thing we can possibly do is to cut off the channels of friendship and mutual understanding between Saudi Arabia and the United States.”

Gore told the largely Saudi audience, many of them educated at U.S. universities, that Arabs in the United States had been “indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable.”

Who sponsored Al Gore’s presence at the conference? That would be The Bin Laden Group among others, per Bill Bennett.