Victor Davis Hanson with a timely reminder:

…Once we get beyond the emotional high of seeing two young Americans rescued from such a creepy regime, I think we are going to collectively sober up and realize that we just did what we always said we would never do: bargained for the release of hostages from terrorists. Think away the notion of North Korea as a legitimate government, and we are indeed left with begging a terrorist clique, at a critical time in non-proliferation talks, to release those they kidnapped for the purposes of humiliating the United States. What would have been the press reaction had Bush I been asked by someone like Boone Pickens to visit Pyongyang to free two of his company’s kidnapped employees in North Korea with the complicit blessing of the Bush II administration amid talks about nuclear violations?

The genesis of the ill-famed “Iran/Contra” affair was the desire by President Reagan to get American hostages out of the hands of Islamist savages who had already proved their brutality by cruelly murdering some of their captives. An admirable and humane impulse, but it eventually led to giving weapons to the very Islamists we were actually in battle against. There can be no deals with terrorists – even if those terrorists have set themselves up in an organization which apes human government. Much as I was (and am) delighted that those two women were released, I wonder how many others will be made to pay the price now that the terrorists know we will deal with them in return for released hostages?

The Israelis have this same problem – time and time again they have given up hundreds of captured enemies because the Islamists have one or two Israeli soldiers in captivity. All these exchanges do is provide incentive for more taking more captives. I wonder how many of our enemies are wondering, now, just what we’ll give up for one or two additional American prisoners?

It is a hard thing, but it must be done – when an American is taken captive, our position should be that we will punish those who took captive and/or harmed an American…this punishment may range from criminal prosecution to a well aimed, Special Forces bullet, depending on what seems most appropriate. Regimes who sponsor capturing Americans must be advised that massive US military strikes will follow swiftly upon our conclusion that said nation had a hand in the outrage. Some of our enemies will not listen and will take captives and brutally kill them…but not that many, because there would be no upside for it.

Terrorists are despicable savages, but they do have an inner logic – they want us afraid and grovelling…show no fear and wield the sword for innocent, unarmed prisoners and the enemy will make different calculations.

Beware of change for the sake of change:

The perceptive reformer combines an ability to reform with a disposition to preserve; the man who loves change is wholly disqualified, from his lust, to be the agent of change. – Russell Kirk

Michael Yon’s latest:

Daily dramas unfolded, including the bangs, booms and small-arms fire that punctuated the times. At 1800, I was preparing to go to orders with 1 Platoon, A Company of 2 Rifles, when shots from a large-caliber rifle began cracking low over base. I passed by sniper, Kris Griffith, and said, “Hey Kris, why don’t you grab your rifle and go shoot that guy?” Kris replied that two other sniper teams were on it. “He’s close,” I said, and Kris answered, “About 600 meters.” Then we went our separate ways….

Underscores this:

The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict by increasing the number of troops in heavily populated areas like the volatile southern city of Kandahar, the insurgency’s spiritual home.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned that means U.S. casualties, already running at record levels, will remain high for months to come.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the commander offered a preview of the strategic assessment he is to deliver to Washington later this month, saying the troop shifts are designed to better protect Afghan civilians from rising levels of Taliban violence and intimidation. The coming redeployments are the clearest manifestation to date of Gen. McChrystal’s strategy for Afghanistan, which puts a premium on safeguarding the Afghan population rather than hunting down militants…

I believe that what is meant by “upper hand” here is that the Taliban have gained the initiative and we are reacting to them rather than forcing them to fight on our chosen ground. This is still bad, but no one should think that such reports mean the Taliban are winning – winning in the sense of endangering our troops with destruction or withdrawal. Michael Yon makes the assertion in the first linked article that the Taliban are “undisciplined savages” and are thus our best allies in defeating them – the worse they get, the better we appear in contrast. Of course, this only works as much as Joe Average Afghani believes we can protect him from the “undisciplined savages”. If the locals think that we’re going to leave them high and dry, they’ll kowtow to the Taliban as much as is necessary to survive.

Yon also notes that a lot of the problem we’re having is from bombs made from gasoline and fertilizer – which means that while weapons may be coming in from Pakistan and Iran, the mere securing of the Afghan border won’t stop the fighting. In light of all this, I believe that General McChrystal has the right strategy – protect the Afghans from the Taliban. This will not only deny a support system for the Taliban but also force them to attack us where we’ve prepared the field of battle – they’ll be forced to walk right in to the killing grounds we’ll set up for them.

This will be a long, difficult and, at times, very bloody fight. But we’ll win…as long as our political leadership supports the troops.

And put us neatly in our place:

…In a welcome about-face, the State Department told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Richard Lugar, R-Ind., in a letter Tuesday that the U.S. would no longer threaten sanctions on Honduras for ousting its president, Mel Zelaya, last June 28.

Nor will it insist on Zelaya’s return to power. As it turns out, the U.S. Senate can’t find any legal reason why the Honduran Supreme Court’s refusal to let Zelaya stay in office beyond the time allowed by Honduran law constitutes a “military coup.”

This marks a shift. The U.S. at first supported Zelaya, a man who had been elected democratically but didn’t govern that way. Now they’re reaching out to average Hondurans, the real democrats.

Sure, the U.S. continues to condemn Zelaya’s ouster and still seeks mediation of the dispute through Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. But no U.S. sanctions means Hondurans have won…

Free people standing up for themselves will always be glorious – in the face of both tyrants and fools. I’m glad that Obama has called off the leftist dogs, but its a sad day when Hondurans have to teach us a lesson in democracy…but it is a lesson well worth learning, my fellow Americans.

Real martyrs – not bloodthirsty murderers pretending to be such, but meek people spreading the word and paying for it with their lives:

A ministry that assists the persecuted Church worldwide is trying to put pressure on North Korea’s communist government, after a Christian was executed there for distributing the Bible.

Activists in South Korea reported recently that communist officials in North Korea publicly executed a 33-year-old mother of three. Ri Hyon Ok…

…Jim Jacobson, president of Christian Freedom International, says the execution signals a major change in the crackdown on religion in North Korea. He believes the house church movement will be strengthened by the senseless murder.

“There’s a really opposite and equal reaction to this that means more Bibles will probably go in as a result of this. Christians will be evermore strengthened in their faith, as unbelievable as that sounds,” he admits. “The more you persecute Christians, the more Christianity thrives.”

My heart falters when I read such things, wondering if I would have the courage to accept such a fate. I simply don’t know – but I do know courage and faith, and this is it.

Deficit grew by $181 billion in July

Bankruptcies May Hit 1.4 Million

CEO of Nortel steps down as company liquidates

Dynegy sells plants for $1 billion, 2Q loss widens

Gas prices nationwide jump 16 cents

Credit cards holders shocked to see interest rates skyrocket, limits plunge

Volume of ‘subdivision’ vacant lots overwhelms banks

Some fire-sale prices on have dipped to 20 to 30 cents on the dollar

Where did that bank bailout go? Watchdogs aren’t entirely sure

U.S. Economy May Be on Brink of Recovery, Tyson, Krugman Say

This is a fight I’m willing to have – first, the stage setter, from Byron York at the Washington Examiner:

On “Meet the Press” this morning, host David Gregory played a brief clip of Limbaugh’s monologue — a sentence in which Limbaugh said, “There are far more similarities between Nancy Pelosi and Adolf Hitler than between these people showing up at town halls to protest a Hitler-like policy” — and then asked guest David Brooks to comment. “I hadn’t seen the Rush Limbaugh thing,” Brooks said. “That is insane. What he’s saying is insane.”

I asked Limbaugh for a reaction, and here is his answer:

Everyone seems to ignore that Pelosi started this, saying town hall participants were showing up with swastikas, etc. That’s calling them Nazis, as Dick Durbin referred to our Gitmo interrogators from the Senate floor. I’ve been listening to the left compare George W. Bush to Hitler for eight years. I’ve been listening to Democrats and the left compare conservatism to Nazis my whole career. This time I responded. In kind, by comparing the radical left policies of the Nazis to today’s radical left leadership of the Democrat Party. I’m not surprised they don’t like it.

I, too, am sick of this ignorant accusation that conservatism comes within a country mile of Nazism. The truth is that liberalism, feminism, socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism and the like all stem from the same revolt against Christianity – from the same desire to have done with Judeo-Christian civilization because, in the views of the varied proponents of these beliefs, it has all been wrong. Some aspect or other of our civilization displeases and the baby is to be thrown out with the bath water. While there might be differences of means, the fact remains that all of them want our religious convictions ripped out by the roots so that a new humanity can be ushered in.

Here is something for all to ponder – a quote:

…these dying nationalities, the Bohemians, Carinthians, Dalmations, etc., had tried to profit by the universal confusion … in order to restore their political status quo ante of A.D. 800. The history of a thousand years ought to have shown them that such a retrogression was impossible; that if all the territory east of the Elbe and Saale had at one time been occupied by kindred Slavonians, this fact merely proved the historical tendency, and at the same time the physical and intellectual power of the German nation to subdue, absorb and assimilate its ancient eastern neighbors; that this tendency of absorption on the part of the Germans had always been, and still was, one of the mightiest means by which the civilization of Western Europe had been spread in the east of that continent; that it could only cease whenever the process of Germanization had reached the frontier of large, compact, unbroken nations, capable of an independent national life, such as the Hungarians and in some degree the Poles; and that therefore the natural and inevitable fate of these dying nations was to allow this process of dissolution and absorption by their stronger neighbors to complete itself.

Sounds a bit Hitlerian, doesn’t it? Could be right out of Mein Kampf – but, its not: its Karl Marx, writing in the wake of the abortive 1848 revolutions in Europe. He’s writing off the entirely of the slavic population of Europe outside Russia and basically saying that the Germans were a natural master race from whom these dying peoples should gratefully accept instruction and absorption. This is the Jewish founder of modern communism saying that the Germans are a master race! There is zero surprise that Hitler was able to cobble to together his program – it was a grab bag of Marxism, nationalism, fascism, Darwinism and occultism…and each and every last aspect of it was in opposition to what we conservative hold dear.

If a conservative really wishes to be an extremist, he’d start calling for the revival of the Holy Roman Empire, or some such. Conservatism may make many mistakes, but it cannot have a love of Nazism – its not possible; it is like trying mix to oil and water, or Christian humility with prideful arrogance. The thing just cannot be done.

Part of the problem is, quite simply, that the left has run the debate – and has classed religion and patriotism as aspects of fascism. It was said that fascism would come to America carrying a cross and wrapped in a flag. This is, for us patriots and believers, just an absurdly stupid statement to make. Its like saying that greed will come to America carrying a Salvation Army bucket and wrapped in clothing for the poor. The flag will always remind us of Washington and Lincoln and our glorious Founders; the cross will always remind us of our Savior who suffered so that we might live. People carrying the cross – wrapped in a flag or not – will make errors; but to imagine that a million Christians would never think for a moment about Christ’s injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves or that patriots will never remember, “give me liberty, or give me death” is, well, to be willfully blind.

Let us have this out – let us find out who is sending thugs to intimidate voters; thugs to beat up protesters; telling lies about the opposition. Let us see who is whom and then let the people judge which side is more akin to our fascist and Nazi enemies of old – with Limbaugh, I say that it is Nancy Pelosi, and those like her.

Keep in mind just what sort of people we’re dealing with:

How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin. – Ronald Reagan

For giving us this visual:

Reporting dissent is the highest form of patriotism! Is your neighbor suspiciously “well-dressed”? Is he mouthing off about cancer-survival rates under socialized-medical systems while wearing a cravat? Give us his name, and we’ll give you his spats! Just go to flag@whitehouse.gov, not to be confused with flagging@whitehouse.gov, which is the e-mail address for reporting President Obama’s latest approval rating. Go to flay@whitehouse.gov if you’d like Speaker Pelosi to walk across your back as a whip-wielding SS dominatrix barking “Vee haff vays of making you tokk less casually, dummkopf!”

Of course, I’m pretty lousy, myself, for bringing it to more peoples attention. Ah well, the truth must come out about these creeps in government.

In the 1929 stock market crash, the DOW lost a bit more than 45% of its value – and then rebounded about 50% off that low…only to drop to 90% off its 1929 high before it bottomed out. People were happy during the brief, post-1929 crash run up, too. Prosperity was just around the corner.

5,000 is not the bottom for the DOW.