Your American Civil Liberties Union at work:

A group of atheists in Salt Lake City is taking on the State of Utah and the Utah Highway Patrol over the law enforcement agency’s use of crosses on roadways to memorialize troopers killed in the line of duty.

The lawsuit has triggered a debate about whether a cross is an appropriate way of honoring troopers killed in the line of duty.

The American atheists filing the lawsuit said they respect the sacrifices the troopers have made, but they are offended by the used of what they call a religious symbol to honor them.

“Government should not endorse religion in general, nor should a government endorse a particular religion,” attorney Brain Barnard said. “For a Jew to look at it, for a Muslim to look at it, for a Buddhist to look at it, they are not going to say that’s a neutral symbol.”

In my opinion, this has absolutely nothing to do with people’s sensitivities and everything to do with making as forceful a statement as possible because religion is inexorably linked with judgmentalism, the Right wing, conservatism and the like. The Left is determined to remove religion completely from sight, period. The start is at the governmental level. Once that is accomplished, well, the level will change. Trust me on this.

Are you offended when you see a cross honoring those who have fallen in the line of duty, either soldiers or law officers?

Do the logical extension: what about Arlington Cemetary?

And the award goes to:

Our first two-time recipient, Congressman John P. “Jack” Murtha.

Murtha is a retired Marine Colonel and deserves respect for serving in the Marines in the early 1950’s, for re-enlisting in 1966 and serving in Vietnam, earning a Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts and the Vietnamese Cross for Gallantry. My respect, however, ends there.

First, Murtha advocated an entire pullout from Iraq and, for having done so, earned my previous Moonbat Award.

Now, speaking before a civic group in Latrobe, Pennsylvania on Thursday, December 1st, Murtha said that most U.S. troops will leave Iraq within a year because the Army is “broken, worn out” and “living hand to mouth.”

I’m sorry, but that’s simply a flat-out lie.

Our armed services are the best equipped they’ve ever been, better than in Vietnam, Korea or World War II. You would expect that, would you not?

We are making progress in Iraq. Progress you don’t hear about. Did you know there are:

– 120 Iraqi Army and Police combat battalions
– Batallions are comprised of between 350 and 800 Iraqi forces
– 80 Iraqi battalions are fighting side-by-side with coalition forces
– 40 others are taking the lead in the fight
– 90 square miles of Baghdad province turned over to Iraqi security forces
– Over a dozen bases in Iraq handed over to the Iraqi government
– Iraq has now six basic police academies, and one in Jordan
– They produce over 3,500 new police officers every ten weeks

And this isn’t even taking into account the December 15th elections.

We are in Iraq. We should not leave, unless we don’t mind dumping millions of people back into a confusing and dangerous maelstrom and creating an horrendous vacuum — which would be filled only by the most powerfully treacherous of killers; i.e., read: terrorists.

Let me distill it down even further, Mr. Murtha: “withdrawing” troops from Iraq on a timetable palatable to yourself or other defeatists would not only be tactically beyond stupid, it would be, in a word:

Surrender.

It’s not quite Saturday yet and the bats have insisted I proffer my MOTWA:

And the award goes to:

House of Representatives John “Jack” Murtha (D), Pennsylvania.

Once again!!

We should get out of Iraq.

Bush lied; people died.

There were no WMD in Iraq.

2,000 + soldiers have died for nothing.

Iraq is worse off now than under Saddam Hussein.

The United States would be safer had we done nothing following 09-11-2001.

Islam is a religion of peace as are all its worshipers.

The war is all about oil profits.

Halliburton is profiting from the war in Iraq and Vice President Cheney is behind its war profiteering. Halliburton is running the Presidency and the nation.

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Sound like Talking Points from the Left?

Of course it does.

Joseph Goebbels said it best: “a lie, repeated often and forcibly, gains the legitimacy of truth.”

But wait; there’s more. Support recently comes from sides least expected: two venues representing the Democrats and the Left, Joe Lieberman and The Economist, believe that we need to continue on our current military path in Iraq.

First, Joe Lieberman wrote in last Tuesday’s 11-29 Wall Street Journal:

I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there. More work needs to be done, of course, but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood–unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn.

Progress is visible and practical. In the Kurdish North, there is continuing security and growing prosperity. The primarily Shiite South remains largely free of terrorism, receives much more electric power and other public services than it did under Saddam, and is experiencing greater economic activity. The Sunni triangle, geographically defined by Baghdad to the east, Tikrit to the north and Ramadi to the west, is where most of the terrorist enemy attacks occur. And yet here, too, there is progress.

There are many more cars on the streets, satellite television dishes on the roofs, and literally millions more cell phones in Iraqi hands than before. All of that says the Iraqi economy is growing. And Sunni candidates are actively campaigning for seats in the National Assembly. People are working their way toward a functioning society and economy in the midst of a very brutal, inhumane, sustained terrorist war against the civilian population and the Iraqi and American military there to protect it.

The cover of the 11-26 – 12-02-2006 edition of The Economist declares in bold white letters at the bottom: “Why America must stay,” over a photo of a soldier behind sandbags in Iraq.

How can this be? And why would a left-leaning, Eurocentric, British publication print such tripe — unless there were something more than a semblance of a grain of truth?

To wit:

Mr (John) Murtha and millions of others maintain that America is doing more harm than good in Iraq, and that the troops should therefore come home. This newspaper strongly disagrees. In our opinion it would be disastrous for America to retreat hastily from Iraq. Yet it is also well past time for George Bush to spell out to the American people much more clearly and honestly than he has hitherto done why their sons and daughters fighting in Iraq should remain in harm’s way.

Every reasonable person should be able to agree on two things about America’s presence in Iraq. First, if the Iraqi government formally asks the troops to leave, they should do so. Second, the argument about whether America should quit Iraq is not the same as the one about whether it should have gone there in the first place.
It must be about the future.

_________________________________

Bestill my quaking heart that anyone from the Left should admit what lawyers commonly call “facts in evidence.”

The Economist further admits:

The cost to America of staying in Iraq may be high, but the cost of retreat would be higher. By fleeing, America would not buy itself peace.

Mr Zarqawi and his fellow fanatics have promised to hound America around the globe. Driving America out of Iraq would grant militant Islam a huge victory.

Arabs who want to modernise their region would know that they could not count on America to stand by its friends. If such reasoning sounds negative—America must stay because the consequences of leaving would be too awful—treat that as a sad reflection of how Mr Bush’s vision for the Middle East has soured. The road ahead looks bloody and costly. But this is not the time to retreat.

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You must be kidding me — how totally bizarre is this? But there is even more, involving a major American politician in a way that she could not in any way have envisioned:

Even Hillary Clinton is not supporting a pullout of troops, much to the chagrin of Cindy Sheehan:

“I think she is a political animal who believes she has to be a war hawk to keep up with the big boys,” Sheehan writes in an open letter posted on anti-Bush filmmaker Michael Moore’s website. “I would love to support Hillary for president if she would come out against the travesty in Iraq. But I don’t think she can speak out against the occupation, because she supports it. I will not make the mistake of supporting another pro-war Democrat for president again: As I won’t support a pro-war Republican.”

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I feel a Moonbat Award coming on. . .

Here’s how it went down in Fornicalia:

On October 7th, 2003, Fornicalia’s first-ever gubernatorial recall election was held in an attempt to remove what I considered to be the emptiest of empty political suits, then-Governor Gray Davis. Election results were confirmed and certified on November 14th. Davis became the first governor in Fornicalia history to be recalled, and only the second in the entire history of the United States to be recalled.

Directly from the recall petition: [Governor Davis’s actions were a] “gross mismanagement of California Finances by overspending taxpayers’ money, threatening public safety by cutting funds to local governments, failing to account for the exorbitant cost of the energy, and failing in general to deal with the state’s major problems until they get to the crisis stage.”

Davis was so terribly ineffectual that even the sluggish, sloth-like and left-leaning blue electorate recognized his incompetence and voted him out. That in and of itself was one helluva statement.

After having announced his candidacy on the Jay Leno show, and saying he would make a sincere attempt to reduce the influence of special interests, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected by a large margin out of 135 candidates — essentially, a so-called mandate from the masses.

The results (top 12 candidates) were:

NAME – PARTY – VOTES – PERCENTILE OF VOTE

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rep, 4,203,596, 48.6
Cruz M. Bustamante, Dem, 2,723,768, 31.5
Tom McClintock, Rep, 1,160,182, 13.5
Peter Miguel Camejo, Grn, 242,169, 2.8
Arianna Huffington, Ind, 47,486, 0.6
Peter V. Ueberroth, Rep, 25,125, 0.3
Larry Flynt, Dem, 17,446, 0.3
Gary Coleman, Ind, 14,235, 0.2
George B. Schwartzman, Ind, 12,370, 0.2
Mary Cook, Ind, 11,174, 0.2
Bruce Martin Margolin, Dem, 9,177, 0.2
Bill Simon, Rep, 8,904, 0.2

With this mandate, Gov. Schwarzenegger repealed, within 24 hours it seemed, an incredibly unpopular vehicle license fee and overturned legislation that would have granted driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. He linked both parties to overhaul the workers’ compensation system, renegotiated gambling compacts with the state’s Indian tribes (not the most popular of measures), and linked both sides with a $15 billion borrowing measure that, some say, merely delayed the proverbial paying of the budgetary piper. He also vetoed gay marriage. All this in roughly one year.

He then went out on a limb and pushed for our November special election containing quite a number of excellent propositions that, in my estimation, would have placed our state firmly back on the path of normality — and was rewarded with a resounding electoral kick in the teeth.

Arnold did an amazing thing for a politician: he took a huge, huge step, an extraordinary step, and pushed for propositions that would have helped the greater masses, yielded budgetary control, and (as Arnold is wont to say) “all those things.”

I was fearing he would go centrist; now he certainly has and perhaps even centrist-left:

Susan Kennedy, a former head of the California branch of the National Abortion Rights Action League, a long-time gay rights activist (she married her partner Vicki Marti in 1999) was named yesterday to replace Patricia Clarey, the former aide to Republican Governor Pete Wilson.

Kennedy has, incidentally, joined Daniel Zingale as the second former Davis aide to join Schwarzenegger’s staff in (coincidentally?) the past month.

Arnold essentially tried to do too much too soon, created enemies and gored the oxen of too many two-faced, hypocritical voters — who happen to need oxen-holing.

So I suppose it shouldn’t shock us to discover, with a 2006 re-election campaign looming, he’s going for more bang for his buck.

He already knows he won’t get it from the Right.