I am (a) still learning how to do this blogging and (b) am glad I cleaned up my machine with RegCure, about which I cannot say enough at $40 for a year, $20 or $15 a year to renew. This thing cleans, let me tell you. All of a sudden, I get automatic emails, for instance, when someone comments on my site. Realizing I’ve been missing things comment-wise, I found this, in which either someone is pulling my leg a la Borat, or I have come to the attention of the Taliban:

1. mullah cimoc | August 6, 2007 at 10:41 pm

mullah cimoc say need smart ameriki explain this questions about control media of usa:

1. What am linking between him rush limnbuagh, him hannity, tv love the torture show “24?,william kristol and him fox tv news show for make ameriki the uneducation? In Waziristan them imam say all from master propaganda expert mr. roger ailes.

Please smart ameriki explaining this connection for mullah cimoc.

2. Am true neocon trick ameriki for starting irak war, lie of wmd plant by israel intel?

Am true him neocon the israel citizen or him wife the israel citizen?

Am true neocon him acting the agent of israeli?

Please explaining this for mullah cimoc.

3. so many the ameriki woman kill abortion the baby, taking the LBT (low back tattoo) and the slut have sex with every man and to smoke the cigerette and the meth. How ameriki society to surviving extinct when this happen?

All in waziristan needing this informtion. to thanking you so much our friend.

I couldn’t just let that sit relatively unnoticed in Comment-land. You understand.

Tags: Waziristan

Independent correspondent Michael Yon is warning us.  “The disconnect” between what’s happening in Iraq and what’s in the newspapers etc. is stunning:

It is clear that Iraq is turning a corner.  Not only are Sunni and Shia talking here in Baghdad, but the fighting definitely is abating.  I’ll be out in Sunni and Shia neighborhoods all day Tuesday and Wednesday.  Petraeus’ ideas are starting to work.

 I’ve been watching for days as LTC Patrick Frank pulls neighborhoods together here in the Rashid district of Baghdad.  We’ve been swamped going to reconciliation meetings. ( Spent hours in meetings today. )  LTC Frank is one of many battalion commanders I have seen who are winning in their zones.  A Washington Post writer was here for several days  and his observations were similar. 

He expands on this here, not in the clearest prose around, but cogent enough:

I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.

This is not original with Daniel Pipes, but I can’t imagine it being argued more cogently:

Two positions dominate and polarize the American body politic today. Some say the war is lost, so leave Iraq. Others say the war can be won, so keep the troops in place.

I split the difference and offer a third route. The occupation is lost but the war can be won. Keep U.S. troops in Iraq but remove them from the cities.

Etc.

This from Tony Blankley, editorial page editor for The Washington Times, gets at the main and utterly conclusive reason for not leaving Iraq, namely that if we do, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet: 

[I]f al Qaeda can plausibly claim they drove America out of Iraq (just as they drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan) they will gain literally millions of new adherents in their struggle to destroy America and the West. We will then pay in blood, treasure and future wars vastly more than we are paying today to manage and eventually win our struggle in Iraq…. As Osama bin Laden once famously observed, people follow the strong horse. We have two choices: Use our vast resources to prove we are the strong horse; or get ready to be taken to the glue factory.

Opinion Journal’s Political Diary quotes this from today’s Times.

Time Mag’s Joe Klein wandered from the anti-war, anti-Bush reservation long enough to report what embedded “warbloggers” such as Michael Yon have been telling us about Anbar province.  Instapundit here is a good place to start with this secret story that can’t quite make it to our Mainstream Media friends.

The good news is success being achieved.  It will kill Pelosi and friends, already reeling as they see themselves losing two wars right now, on Bush and corruption, about which look here.

The bad news is a yawner by now.  MSM is slow, clumsy, and wedded to its prejudices.  Something’s got to give.