The message was loud and clear: there is no longer any room for the likes of Joseph Lieberman in the Democratic Party.

Forgotten were Lieberman’s decades of service to his party, his vice presidential candidacy in 2000, his years of loyally voting for his party’s liberal measures in the U.S. Senate and his incredible decency. All that counted in this week’s Connecticut primary was his support of the war in Iraq and his refusal to go along with the cowardly cut-and-run group that has taken over his party.

In their eyes this was the unforgivable sin, and for committing it he earned the scorn of the left-wing crazies who have managed to take control of the party of Harry Truman, Scoop Jackson and John F. Kennedy. He simply had to go.

I may disagree with many of his liberal political positions but I bow to no one in recognizing the undeniable fact that he is that rarest of all politicians – a decent, honest, deeply religious man whose word could always be trusted.

In a sane political party those qualities alone would earn him the loyalty, support and respect of his fellow Democrats, but in the party of Howard Dean, Michael Moore, George Soros and MoveOn.org those qualities don’t matter. In that party, decent men and women need no longer apply.

There has been much talk and all kinds of proof that a crazed, well-financed segment of the Democratic Party had taken control; what happened in Connecticut Tuesday showed it to be a fact. From this point forward, only those willing to sign on to the hate-America Stalinist policies of the party’s now-dominant left wing will survive.

The rest will follow Joe Lieberman into the new Gulag reserved for those Democrats who refuse to bow their knees to the reigning monarchs of the extreme left and insist on putting principle above party.

I trust that most of my fellow Americans are as shocked as I am over this turn of events. There is no longer a rational dialogue between the two major parties, or even within the Democratic Party itself. The deranged babbling of the Soros-MoveOn.org loonies is now the only language spoken.

This is a disaster for the Democrats. It has converted what was a legitimate - if frequently wrong - political party where seemingly rational political policies were advanced, into a cabal of unhinged ideologues where no dissent is permitted.

It could also be a disaster for the nation should the loonies of the Democratic left prevail in the fall elections. To begin with, we would quickly witness a replay of Vietnam – a war we won on the battlefield but lost in the halls of Congress which, while claiming to support our troops, slashed the military budget to the bone, de-funding the war.

The end result was the creation of a communist regime in Saigon, and the imprisonment and death of a million Vietnamese – a nation condemned to slavery under the brutal Hanoi dictatorship.

If the crazies gain power on Capitol Hill we can expect to see their cut-and-run policies put into play by the simple expedient of choking off the finances required to fight the war. With our troops withdrawn, we could expect to see Iraq and the entire region descend into chaos, depriving us of our vital Mideastern oil supply lifeline.

Moreover, should we flee from our solemn commitment to help pacify Iraq and secure for the Iraqi people a stable democracy, what other nation would be able to trust us to keep our promises? Taiwan would see itself as defenseless and Japan would be forced to go nuclear to defend itself. The message would be loud and clear to all – Uncle Sam is not a trustworthy ally.

The left has already made it clear that they plan to harass the president and start impeachment proceedings in the middle of a war, no less. They make it plain they will increase taxes and cripple the economy, and return to their cherished goal of imposing a socialist system on the American people.

The Connecticut primary was a red flag warning us of what’s ahead.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561

NPR and Fox News commentator Juan Williams is a certified liberal – so liberal some have called him the black Alan Colmes, the liberal half of Fox’s Hannity and Colmes. When he writes a book you’d expect the liberal media to fall all over each other to be the first to review his book and have him as a guest on network radio and TV.

That hasn’t happened, however, because his book “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America - and What We Can Do About It,” has crossed the boundary of what is - and what is not - permitted by the high priests of liberal orthodoxy.

For this grievous offense he has been cast into the outer darkness reserved for conservatives and other patriotic Americans.

On my radio show the other night Juan told me how he has been silenced by the very liberals who have always clasped him to their bosoms. When I asked him if he’s been put on the “back burner” he said: “It’s not the back burner, but the burner itself that has disappeared. You just don’t get covered when you try to talk about what I consider to be central issues in terms of not just black America but all America. It’s part of American history, it’s part of the reality of the way we live, especially with increasing numbers of minorities in the American population, racial politics, drop-outs in schools, the fact that people talk about what’s going on with jails and all that.

“People just don’t want to talk about why we are in a grievous situation even now in the 21st century with regard to race and the kind of leadership we have on race.”

This is a tragedy. It is important that Juan Williams be heard loud and clear, and that his book should have the largest readership possible. Like Bill Cosby before him, Juan has looked his fellow blacks in the eye and told them the truth – a truth they must face if they are to overcome the obstacles that hold them back.

He deplores the incredible rate of illegitimate births among blacks – a staggering 70 percent of all black children are born out of wedlock. These children are deprived of a normal upbringing, of a family with the father present in the home.

So-called black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton draw his scorn. Williams notes: “If you attack anybody who is designated by the white media as a black leader you are therefore attacking black America and blaming the victim and you’re not seeing the larger picture while you have real problems afoot in terms of educating black kids, in terms of watching black kids born out of wedlock into poverty in this country, in terms of watching what I consider a culture of failure where people don’t call to account … violence and sadistic rap music.”

“Nobody says let’s have a march against these drug dealers, let’s have a march against bad schools. You never hear that kind of talk.”

So Juan Williams sets out to tell the truth, writes a book about it, and he can’t get on liberal television, he can’t get on ABC, NBC or CBS because they have sold out to these leaders of the black community picked by guilt-ridden white liberals. White liberals refuse to allow blacks to be individuals. They look at them only as a group. They have put them on their liberal white plantation where their hand-picked black taskmasters such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton rule the roost.

As Juan Williams has learned, anybody who shines the light of truth on this sordid arrangement will be barred from speaking about it. He is learning that you cannot go against the liberal left agenda even if you are a member of the liberal left.

It is said that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. Juan Williams is being mugged. He has important things to say to fellow blacks and to the America he loves. If the left wants to silence him, it’s up to conservatives to give him a platform where he can speak truth to liberal power.

Buy his book and mug a liberal.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

On July 18, CNN correspondent Nick Robertson aired a report from Beirut. Throughout his entire report on “Anderson Cooper 360,” Robertson accepted uncritically the claims of a Hezbollah “guide” about what he was seeing.

According to NewsBusters’ Rich Noyes: “Robertson touted his ‘exclusive’ exchange with a Hezbollah propagandist who led him on a tour of a bombed-out block of southern Beirut. Hezbollah claimed to show that Israeli bombs had struck civilian areas of the city, not the terrorist group’s headquarters.

Wrote Noyes: “The Hezbollah ‘press officer,’ Hussein Nabulsi, even directed CNN’s camera: ‘Just look. Shoot. Look at this building. Is it a military base? Is it a military base, or just civilians living in this building?’ A few moments later, Nabulsi instructed CNN to videotape him as he ran up to a pile of rubble: ‘Shoot me. Shoot. This is here where they said Sheikh Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, is living. This is wrong!’

At one point Roberston said: “As we run past the rubble, we see much that points to civilian life, no evidence apparent of military equipment.”

As he concluded his report, anchor John Roberts gushed, “Well, extraordinary tour that you took there today, Nic. And a lot of people here at CNN say you’re very, very brave for doing it, but we expect nothing less. Nic Robertson in Beirut, thanks very much.”

Not once during the entire segment, which was unvarnished Hezbollah propaganda, did Robertson mention that he was being led around by the nose by a Hezbollah propagandist.

All this led NewsBusters to wonder if Robertson is looking to be the next Peter Arnett, the disgraced leftist Aussie journalist who allowed himself to become a mouthpiece for Saddam Hussein.

Robertson finally came clean on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” Sunday, when he admitted that “… there’s no doubt about it. They had control of the situation. They designated the places that we went to, and we certainly didn’t have time to go into the houses or lift up the rubble to see what was underneath.”

If Robertson was alone in allowing himself to be used by the enemy it would just be an isolated incident, but instead, he’s just one of a pack of journalists who never seem to be able to support the U.S. or its ally Israel in the war on terror.

Thanks to the mainstream media’s constant carping about alleged U.S. or Israeli “brutality,” the hands of the American military in Iraq and the Israeli’s in Lebanon are tied up in all sorts of politically correct handicaps that prevent them from taking decisive action when that’s what is required to win.

Recently on my radio broadcast I said if I were president for one day ending the war would be the easiest thing in the world. I would simply sign an executive order pulling all embedded reporters out of war zones where America is involved. I’d sign a second executive order having a complete media blackout of the war zone for the next six months.

I had an army Lieutenant Colonel on the show and I asked him if I did that, how long it would take him to you to end this war?

“Maybe thirty days or so,” he said.

The war goes on longer because of the media’s slanted coverage – we can’t do what we need to do for fear of the backlash with the media questioning everything we do, everyplace we go.

The media have no problem taking the word of every insurgent posing as an innocent civilian. They ignore the established fact that the insurgent’s main strategy is to bury themselves in the civilian population.

This is how they fight wars. They don’t mind women and children dying. That is all part of their strategy. They understand that the U.S., Israel and other civilized nations have values and a moral standard and they realize that we will do everything in our power to protect innocent people. They blend in with the people and when the innocent civilians they use as human shields are killed they use the deaths as propaganda tools and the media eat it up.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

We were right all along, and that gives us the right to say “we told you so.”

Nobody wanted to listen when former Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and a lot of American conservatives warned that you cannot negotiate with terrorists such as Arafat, Hezbollah and Hamas, or their sponsors in Syria and Iran. We were accused of being warmongers and told that the future of Israel lay not in defending itself, but in making concession after concession to an enemy sworn to demolish the Jewish state and drive its people into the sea.

Goaded by the peace-at-any-price crowd who can never recognize evil when it stares them in the face because they don’t recognize that evil exists, Israel attempted to mollify the anti-Israel United Nations and the hand-wringing liberals here and abroad by playing nice with their sworn enemies.

Israel withdrew from Gaza, driving their own people - who had settled there with Israel’s approval and encouragement - out of their homes and land. In return for this magnanimous gesture, the terrorists showered missiles on Israeli territory almost daily.

Undaunted by this display of the real and vicious nature of the enemy, Israeli’s government pushed on with plans to evacuate the West Bank, and hand it over to what purports to be a Palestinian state aborning.

The response: more missiles raining down on innocent Israeli citizens and more threats to destroy Israel.

When it finally dawned on the Israeli government that appeasement does not work when the enemy refuses to be appeased with anything less than total victory and the total destruction of the state of Israel, one would have thought that the international liberal appeasement movement would have applauded Israel for going all-out to defend its people.

It’s obvious that this was not to be – the appeasers merely stepped up their rhetoric, demanding that the international community intervene and force Israel to sit down and negotiate with Hezbollah and Hamas and heaven knows who else. There is now a great hue and cry demanding diplomacy and negotiations - all aimed at preventing Israel from finally putting an end to the terrorism that they have for so long endured. Nobody echoes Douglas MacArthur’s warning that there is no substitute for victory.

You’d think the appeasers would learn from what happened when MacArthur was prevented from achieving victory in the Korean War. The reality of a crazed North Korea would not exist as a nuclear-armed communist dictatorship had MacArthur been listened to.

The international community, which is content to let the United States and Britain shoulder the burden of fighting the war on Islamic terrorism, stands on the sidelines. Instead of cheering us on, it condemns us for defending them against the terrorism that threatens them as much as it does us.

They whine about the need to accommodate the displaced Palestinians by allowing them to have a state of their own, side-by-side with Israel, but ignore the fact that the Palestinians could have their state for the asking, but are prevented from doing so by Hamas and Hezbollah and their sponsors in Iran and Syria who will accept nothing less than the destruction of Israel.

It really irks me to hear the networks give time to the likes of Madeline Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State and one of those demanding diplomacy as the only means of dealing with the Mideast crisis. The administration she served sat idly by in the face of such outrages as the first World Trade Center bombing and the bombing of the USS Cole. In return for their patience we got 9/11. In return for their efforts to broker peace between Israel and the PLO, all we got was continued tension and unrest in the Middle East. In return for her submission to North Korea we got missiles aimed at the U.S. and Japan.

Newt Gingrich is right. We are in the midst of World War III and you don’t win wars by courting the enemy, you win them by doing what Israel is doing – fighting back with everything they’ve got. God help them if they listen to the siren song of peace through weakness, of victory through negotiation.

We were right all along, and we have a right to crow.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

Just when you think that the national Democrat party can sink no lower, they reach down into the mud and mire in their bag of political tricks and come up with a new and slimier example of their utter shamelessness.

Not content with merely undermining the valiant efforts of our servicemen and women risking and sometimes losing their lives fighting international terrorism around the world, the Democrats have now produced a video commercial exploiting the deaths of American soldiers and Marines in order to raise money and win votes.

Their new fundraising video shows some 12 flag-draped coffins of dead American servicemen inside a cargo plane. This shocking scene is followed by an image of a soldier staring at a helmet propped up by a machine gun that is stuck in the ground, obviously marking the spot where an American died defending his country against a vicious enemy.

The disgusting commercial goes on to show pictures of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, successive photos of President Bush (who “obviously” caused the hurricane), a mug shot of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Tex., disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Vice President Cheney.

Apparently there never was a hurricane before Katrina – it was America’s first. Elect Democrats, the ad suggests, and there will be no more hurricanes, no more dead American servicemen, and no more lobbyists (except for former Sen. Tom Daschle and his wife) - if only the American people can be fooled into voting for Democrats in the fall elections, or coughing up money to pay for more slimy commercials exploiting our dead.

What the ad should say is: Elect Democrats and there will be no more America – the whole nation will be transformed into scandal-ridden, bankrupt New Jersey.

Says Tom Reynolds, R-N.Y., the National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman (NRCC), the Democrats are trying to “blatantly exploit the sacrifices made by the men and women of our Armed Forces” for political purposes. “Regardless of what your views on the war may be, this crosses the line,” he said in a statement released by the NRCC, adding that Democrat Congressional Campaign Chairman Rahm Emanuel “owes our troops, their families, and the families of the fallen an apology.”

Contrast this with my Dad Ronald Reagan’ s campaign slogans about “Morning in America,” that drew a bright picture of the shining city on the hill, a nation filled with good, decent hardworking people whose promise is still being fulfilled. The Democrat version is more “like nightmare in America’ – an imaginary and dismal picture of a nation that is in fact enjoying the strongest economy on the face of the earth.

Americans voted overwhelmingly for my Dad because he made us feel good about America. Why would anyone vote for Democrats who insist on painting a dismal, sordid picture of an America in decline?

Where is the media outrage over this sordid money-grubbing commercial? According to the Media Research Council, the liberal media only get upset when Republicans use ads to cite the war on terrorism.

When a campaign ad for the re-election of President Bush in 2004 showed images of the 9/11 attacks on America, the media were then quite outraged. Said ABC’s Charles Gibson: “The President, as you probably know, used scenes from Ground Zero in his first campaign ads that were broadcast. That ignited a debate about whether it’s appropriate to use such images in an election campaign.”

Tom Brokaw said: “The President today also shrugged off critics who’ve complained that he’s politicizing the September 11th attacks … The Bush campaign is using an image of the World Trade Center in another television ad. And NBC’s Ann Curry said: “More fallout expected today from President Bush’s re-election ads that feature images from 9/11. Family members of some of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks say they will protest the President’s attendance at a groundbreaking ceremony for a 9/11 memorial on New York’s Long Island.”

Asked the MRC: “Should we expect the same outrage from the press concerning this campaign video by Congressional Democrats, or are such images only verboten when used by a politician the press despises?”

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

It keeps popping up like weeds in your garden. Just when you think you’ve weeded out all their myths and falsehoods, the advocates of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) are back pounding on your door and demanding your tax dollars to fund this latest example of junk science masquerading as the real thing.

The Senate is once again taking up the matter at the behest of Majority Leader Bill Frist, a doctor who ought to know better and who is going all out to revive the issue and push for federal money to fund embryonic stem cell research, now all but banned from getting taxpayer dollars by presidential fiat. As always, the proponents of ESCR have one big thing going for them: vast public misunderstanding of what it’s all about.

Thanks to the liberal media, opportunistic politicians and a highly vocal segment of the dollar-hungry research community, opponents of ESCR are universally pictured as being against stem cell research. They are never identified as being wholeheartedly in favor of non-embryonic stem cell research, the most promising kind, but instead as being against all stem cell research, period.

This is an important distinction which has not been made, so the majority of the American people have been convinced that opponents of ESCR are a bunch of yahoos who don’t understand or appreciate science and those who practice it, or the medical miracles ESCR research promises.

Poppycock! It needs to be said right up front: at this time those promised ESCR

miracles are merely the products of the proponents’ hopes and dreams, and mostly based on the now admittedly falsified claims of a South Korean scientist — not of the current reality, which is grim. Far from curing everything from Alzheimer’s Disease to spinal cord injuries, and a whole host of other medical problems as proponents promise, all ESCR has produced thus far is cancerous tumors in lab animals. And even top ESCR scientists now admit that any progress in the field is 25 years away, after they stop killing lab animals, that is.

Yet you hear proponents say that cures for Alzheimer’s and spinal cord injuries are right around the corner and if only science had been allowed to go ahead with ESCR a long time ago my dad could have been cured of Alzheimer’s and Christopher Reeve would have lived to walk again.

The ESCR community based most of their inflated claims on the work of South Korean scientist Huang Woo-suk, who claimed to have created the world’s first cloned human embryos and extracted stem cells from them, raising hopes of cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Dr. Huang was widely acclaimed as a world-class stem cell pioneer and treated as a hero until investigations disclosed that he had fabricated key data in two papers published in the U.S. journal, Science. He has now admitted the fraud and has been indicted along with five of his associates.

It’s important to remember that there is no ban on embryonic stem cells research. Anybody who wants to do it is free to do so, he just can’t do it on the public’s dollar. If it held the promise that proponents claim, top pharmaceutical companies would be vying for chances to throw their research dollars at it. After all, if it worked as promised they could expect to make huge profits. That they don’t see such prospects should tell us something.

As a result, those seeking to continue to spend their time working on ESCR have to go looking for other sources of funding, and all that’s left for them is the federal treasury. And that’s what it’s all about.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

You could call it “Treason Central,” or “al Qaeda West,” but no matter what you call it, the building housing the once-august New York Times at 229 West 43rd St. in New York City is a beehive of anti-American hostility, where selling out the nation’s secrets has become the newspaper’s stock in trade.

This latest episode of the Times revealing information vital to the government’s ability to protect the American people from new 9/11s is just another example of the Times’ contempt for the security of the people of the United States of America in a time of war.

To say that they have no shame fails to indicate the depths of infamy to which the Times has sunk. What they have done is sheer and outright treason, and it’s the third time the Times has adopted Benedict Arnold as its role model, having blabbed about the monitoring of international phone call records and, prior to that, having told our enemies that their communications with their agents in the U.S. were being listened to by intelligence agencies.

What makes my blood boil is the arrogance of the Times’ editor Bill Keller, and his fellow editors, in flatly refusing the requests of the administration, the two former heads of the 9/11 Commission and even Rep. John Murtha - hardly a friend of the Bush Administration - that the newspaper refrain from publishing the details of the program tracking the international flow of terrorist money, a vital weapon in the war on terrorism, and a weapon they have now very probably disarmed.

Just who do these people think they are? What makes them think they have the right to endanger the security of the people of the United States of America? By their actions they have repeatedly shown they have no shame and have not a shred of concern for the safety of their readers.

Rep. Peter King, R-NY, Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has said that “the real question here is the conduct of The New York Times by disclosing this in time of war, they have compromised America’s anti-terrorist policies. This is a very effective policy. They have compromised it. This is the second time The New York Times has done this. And to me, no one elected The New York Times to do anything. And The New York Times is putting its own arrogant elitist left-wing agenda before the interests of the American people.”

Rep. King told Fox News anchor Chris Wallace that the NYT reporters, editors, and publishers responsible for that story should be charged under the Espionage Act, which is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

A lot of my listeners have called with the suggestion that Americans boycott the Times’ advertisers while others agree with Rep. King that the Times’ editors should be hauled before a judge to account for their treasonous activities. Aside from the fact that boycotts of this nature seldom work, and the idea of indicting the Times for treason won’t fly because they have a right to publish whatever they want, what this case demands is that they be shamed – to be made pariahs and held up before the nation and exposed for all to see as the traitors they are. And Americans should never be allowed to forget this.

The Times claims that under the First Amendment they have a right to publish anything they want. That’s true, but they don’t have the right to engage in what amounts to treason, to giving aid and comfort to an enemy that wants to kill us all.

Keller defends his publishing of material damaging to the national security on the grounds that the public has the right to know. What he’s really saying is that al Qaeda has the right to know, and he’s going to do his darnedest to see that they do know all America’s secrets.

From now on, we should treat the Times as we would treat any skunk – hold our nose whenever we see it. After all, that odor we sense is the odor of treason.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

The Biblical book of Ecclesiastes tells us tells us there’s a time for everything, including a “time to love and a time to hate…a time for war and a time for peace.”

There is also a time for rage, and in this time of war that time is now.

The bodies of two courageous U.S. soldiers, Pfc. Kristian Menchaca and Pfc. Thomas Tucker, were found Monday, and, according to CNN reports, “mutilated and booby-trapped.” They had been so horribly mutilated with their eyes gouged out and their remains so desecrated a visual identification was impossible - DNA testing was needed in order to confirm their identities. CNN also reported that not only were the bodies booby-trapped, but homemade bombs also lined the road leading to the victims, an apparent effort to complicate recovery efforts and kill recovery teams.

That story makes my blood boil – and it should make yours reach boiling point too. More than anything else in the recent events in Iraq, this horrific outrage demonstrates with awful clarity the kind of depraved monsters we are facing in the war on terrorism.

It also shows why they must be eliminated from the face of the earth. They are a species with which civilized mankind cannot co-exist. During the Civil War when Gen. T.J. (Stonewall) Jackson was asked how to deal with the enemy, he had a simple answer: “Kill ‘em; kill ‘em all.”

The hideous torture and killing of Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker should tell us that it’s time to adopt Jackson’s strategy as our own. Their deaths are proof that we face an enemy that will never cut and run, but will lurk in the shadows and strike out against us at every opportunity until they have been wiped off the face of the earth. Nothing else can guarantee the safety of the American people.

Incredibly in some quarters, instead of provoking rage - and a firm and renewed determination to prevail in the war against Islamofascist terrorism no matter how long it takes - this unspeakable outrage has been seized upon as an opportunity to make political capital out of a disaster of mammoth proportions.

The antiwar left in the Democrat party and the Bush haters in much of the mainstream media have been shameless in their reaction to the deaths of these two brave men.

How many relatives, for example, did NBC News have to canvass before they found a kin of Pfc. Menchaca who would take the occasion of his relative’s murder to express his anti-administration views? NBC’s Today Show found Ken MacKenzie, Menchaca’s uncle, who obligingly told NBC, “Because the U.S. government did not have a plan in place, my nephew has paid for it with his life.” He added that the government should have offered a $100 million reward and offered to exchange mujahideen detainees for the soldiers’ lives. It seized enough money from Saddam Hussein to afford it, he said.

He had nothing to say about the brutes who murdered his nephew, and expressed no anger at them.

The Democrats all but jumped for joy over the sleazy opportunity they saw to exploit the soldiers’ deaths for their political purposes. Listen to Illinois Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin’s comment that the discovery of the two mutilated soldiers’ bodies is a “grim reminder of the price we’re paying for a failed policy in Iraq.”

Like McKenzie, he didn’t bother to direct his anger at the fiends who committed the atrocity.

Nor did he or any of his anti-war Democrat colleagues bother to note that the so-called “failed policy” in Iraq has produced 5 million Iraqi children inoculated since the U.S went into Iraq, or how many schools and hospitals have been built, the 32,000 teachers trained, that 20 million Iraqis now have clean water – all the positive things they or the media studiously ignore.

Now instead of the rage they should feel, these white-flag-waving Democrats are demanding that the U.S. set some sort of timetable for withdrawal, ignoring the fact that such an act would be a signal to the al-Qaeda butchers to be patient and hang in there and wait for the U.S. to cut and run.

Have they no shame?

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

I’ve been wondering why there is something familiar about the behavior of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, and suddenly it dawned on me that we have our own similar insurgency right here at home – it is called the Democrat Party.

Think about it. Both are operating under the same motivation – an unrequited lust for lost power. And both will do just about anything to retrieve it.

Remember, under Saddam Hussein’s long rule, his fellow Sunnis – a distinct minority in a nation with a vast Shiite majority – were the kings of the hill – and incredibly cruel monarchs to boot.

Saddam may have ordered the atrocities, but it was the Sunnis who carried them out, torturing, beheading and otherwise brutalizing the Shia and the Kurds and looting the nation’s treasure.

They were very well compensated for their services – and since being ousted by the U.S. invasion and the deposing of their benefactor they have been unable to accept their current powerlessness. They are, as the liberals like to say, “in denial.” They just can’t live with their loss of authority and act as if they can somehow regain what they lost by mounting an insurgency against the new Iraqi government.

It’s a case of “anything goes,” as demonstrated by their recent idol, the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Killing their fellow Iraqis - including women and children - by the hundreds, destroying the infrastructure, and depriving their fellow Iraqis of electricity, water and income from oil are all acceptable methods of expressing their lust for power.

What it all comes down to is a willingness to tear down their own house if they can’t assert absolute ownership of the premises. It’s what is known as a “rule or ruin” strategy.

Here in America we have a similar situation – a political party that for years dominated Capitol Hill. They ruled the roost for so long that they began to believe they had some divine right to control the House and Senate.

They got to run the committees, with senior members reveling in the title “Mr. Chairman” with all the perks that went with the title. Only they were allowed to introduce legislation or hire committee staff – the minority had to go to them, hat in hand, to get even a tiny minority staff. Thankfully, they weren’t able to torture or behead the Republican minority at will, but they never let it be forgotten that they were in charge and if Republicans wanted the key to the men’s room they’d have to bow and scrape to get it.

Like the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Democrats cannot accept their minority status, even though when the GOP took over Newt Gingrich refused to impose the kind of absolute, anti-minority rule his party suffered under the Democrats. They were treated as colleagues, not serfs whose presence was to be barely tolerated. Since then, the Democrats have shown not one whit of gratitude.

Like the Sunni insurgency, the national Democrat party and its congressional contingent has demonstrated time and again that they will willingly sacrifice the welfare and security of the American people to get their way.

As Michael Barone has written: “It comes down to this: A substantial part of the Democratic Party, some of its politicians and many of its loudest supporters do not want America to succeed in Iraq. So vitriolic and all-consuming is their hatred for George W. Bush that they skip right over the worthy goals we have been, with some considerable success, seeking there — a democratic government, with guaranteed liberties for all, a vibrant free economy, respect for women — and call this a war for oil, or for Halliburton.

“Successes are discounted, setbacks are trumpeted, the level of American casualties is treated as if it were comparable to those in Vietnam or World War II. Allegations of American misdeeds are repeated over and over; the work of reconstruction and aid of American military personnel and civilians is ignored.”

In the end, all that matters to them is regaining the power the American people took from them in 1994, and, thank God, have kept it out of their hands ever since.

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.

The other day I watched President Bush making the case for immigration reform in an appearance down on the border in New Mexico. He made a very persuasive case for tightening border security and even for some kind of temporary guest-worker program, and I’m sure he was right on the same page with the majority of his fellow Americans.

Then he spoiled it all when he climbed out on a limb and put himself at odds with America by sticking to his demand for enacting the Senate’s so-called comprehensive immigration reform, which most everybody else calls a program for amnesty.

Just how far out on that limb he went became evident when the voters of San Diego sawed it off by defying the liberal media and electing Brian Bilbray to the U.S. Congress. He was involved in the fight of his life, seeking to fill the unexpired term of former Republican Rep. Duke Cunningham, now in the slammer for wholesale acceptance of bribes.

According to the chattering class, the voters in his district were just itching to teach the GOP a lesson for saddling them with a congressman who did everything but put a for-sale sign on his office door. They would either vote against Bilbray or not vote at all simply because he was the GOP standard bearer.

It didn’t happen that way. Bilbray won, and he won because he was on the right side of the immigration issue. He stood for tough border enforcement and he opposed the Senate bill the president has gone all-out to get enacted.

His Democrat opponent, school teacher Francine Busby, was on G.W.’s side – she backed the Senate bill and that became the main issue in the campaign. She stood with the president and Sen. John McCain on the wrong side of this issue. McCain even ducked out of an appearance with Bilbray at the last minute apparently in retaliation for Bilbray’s vehement opposition to McCain’s Senate bill.

Busby really got on the wrong side of the issue when she told illegal aliens, “You don’t need papers for voting.” In so doing she played right into Bilbray’s hard-nosed immigration stand and apparently helped convince a lot of Republicans who had planned to stay home on election day to come out and vote for Bilbray.

The point of all this is the president’s utter failure to understand how the majority of Americans feel. They are single-minded about the issue – they want the border sealed tight against the flood of illegal aliens pouring across the border. At the moment that’s all they want, and they are convinced that tackling the problem of what to do about the 12 million or more illegal aliens here only clouds the issue.

Moreover, they know that the Senate bill is loaded with such absurdities as giving Social Security benefits to illegals who use forged documents to gain employment. Talk about waving a red flag in front of a bull — that piece of Senate arrogance conveyed a message that the members of the Upper Body could not care less what the people think and want.

A lot of the 12 million or so illegals now in the United States have been here for years. What’s the big hurry about dealing with them? Can’t it wait until we take care of the immediate problem – securing the borders? Must we confuse the issue by adding a huge program to provide what most Americans rightly or wrongly consider to be a form of amnesty?

It’s all a matter of first things first. Let’s solve the border problem now. We can attack the problem of the illegals now here once we secure our borders.

That’s what the people want and by insisting on an all-or-nothing approach the President runs the risk of ending up with nothing and also costing his party control of the Congress in the November elections. That’s what the voters of San Diego made clear Tuesday. Is he listening?

©2006 Mike Reagan. If you’re not a paying subscriber to our service, you must contact us to print or web post this column. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc. Cari Dawson Bartley email [email protected], (800) 696-7561.