More Proof That Liberals Never Learn

One thing about liberals; if they can't convince anyone that their version of history is correct, they'll continue saying it regardless. Sort of like the 9/11 Truthers.

Take this post which attempts to show Republican = bad, Democrat = good. More attempts to show Ronald Reagan as evil, stupid, senile, or all of the above.

Take this portion of the argument:

Economic growth during the Reagan presidency was 3.4 percent, the same as it was during the Jimmy Carter administration. Bill Clinton? Why, he raised taxes. On the rich. And the economic growth during his two terms in office was 3.6 percent. The economic growth rate now, after George W. Bush’s tax cuts and deregulation, is 2.2 percent.

This argument looks good only if you don't bother checking facts or history. For example, Reagan inherited Jimmy Carter's "misery index"-ridden economy, which actually contracted in 1980, the last year of Jimmy Carter's administration. The fact that Reagan inherited a terrible economy and managed to turn it into a 3.4% growth rate is phenomenal. Reagan achieved this growth by cutting income taxes for everyone and deregulating various industries.

And let's look at Bill Clinton. It's simply a lie to say Clinton raised taxes only on "the rich." Clinton raised taxes on everyone, including the poor. Clinton raised the federal gasoline tax, which disproportionately affects the less fortunate (who tend to drive less fuel efficient vehicles). Clinton activated retroactive taxes, which hit small businesses and investors among others.

And there were other, unintended consequences of Clinton's tax hikes. The tax on executive salaries over $1 million led to the practice of giving stock options as part of a compensation package. Part of the economic troubles in 2002, under President George Bush, were a result of executives dumping the options and getting their cash out.

But another inconvenient fact for the author regarding Bill Clinton's economic "success" was that his spending was largely curtailed once Republicans took over the House of Representatives in 1994. More than anything, it was the reduction in spending which caused the deficit to disappear.

And then there's economic growth under George W. Bush. Author News Writer conveniently leaves out inconvenient facts such as the attack on our country on 9/11, or economic problems caused by Democrat economic policies. It's easy to blast your political opponent when you don't tell the truth.

The rest of the post is more of the usual liberal drivel about how Ronald Reagan wasn't responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or that, with hindsight, we can nitpick through Reagan's presidency and accuse him of not doing enough in one area or another. Funny, I never see liberals apply this hindsight to, say, Carter's appeasement of Islamic fundamentalists in Iran or Clinton's legalistic approach to terrorism. No, evidently, only Republicans in general, and Ronald Reagan in particular, are subjected to that sort of scrutiny. Which is just more proof of why liberals never learn.

Because the Truth Hurts

Japan's defense minister Fumio Kyuma apologized today for telling the truth.

Defence Minister Fumio Kyuma said he had not meant to offend the victims when he said on Saturday that the bombings "couldn't be helped" because they had brought World War Two to an end and prevented the Soviet Union from entering the war against Japan.

"If my remarks were seen as lacking regard for the feelings of atomic bomb victims, then I am sorry," he told a news conference.

On Saturday, Kyuma had said in a speech: "My understanding is that it ended the war and that it couldn't be helped ... I don't hold a grudge against the United States."

The remarks drew condemnation from victims of the August 6, 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and the August 9 attack on Nagasaki, which together killed more than 210,000 people by the end of the year. Some opposition parties demanded Kyuma's resignation.

The Japanese have always had a hard time facing up to the truth of their behavior in World War II, and this is just the latest round. As Captain Ed pointed out, the firestorm started 10 days ago when the Japanese government announced that it was planning to tone down textbook accounts of Japanese soldiers ordering Okinawan civilians to commit suicide during WWII.

Lawmakers from Japan's southern island of Okinawa, site of one of World War Two's bloodiest battles, blasted a government decision to tone down textbook accounts of soldiers ordering civilians to commit suicide.

Friday's resolution urging the government to scrap the textbook revision comes a day before the anniversary of the end of the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, a "Typhoon of Steel" that left some 200,000 dead -- soldiers, civilians, Japanese and Americans.

Many Okinawan civilians, often entire families, committed suicide rather than surrender to Americans, by some eyewitness accounts on the orders of fanatical Japanese soldiers.

Some conservative Japanese historians -- also eager to revise descriptions of wartime atrocities in China and other parts of Asia -- have called into question the eyewitness accounts, arguing the suicides were voluntary.

In March, the education ministry ordered publishers of high school textbooks to modify their descriptions of the suicides. The step outraged many Okinawa residents.

"It is an undeniable fact that mass suicides could not have occurred without the involvement of the Japanese military," the Okinawa assembly said in a statement that was presented in person to the education ministry in Tokyo later on Friday.

"We strongly call on the government to retract its instruction and immediately restore the description in the textbooks so the truth of the Battle of Okinawa will be correctly conveyed and such a tragic war will never happen again."

But, as Captain Ed states, there's more.

That reaction paled in comparison to the worldwide condemnation of a group within Japan's ruling party, who declared that the Rape of Nanking was a fabrication. In six weeks, the Japanese killed between 150,000-300,000 civilians in a city that presented no wartime threat to Japan. The disciplined Imperial Army turned into a pillage movement, raping women, killing civilians indiscriminately and purposely. They put the city to the torch -- and it wasn't an isolated incident. After getting a bloody nose from the Chinese in Shanghai, they pillaged all the way to Nanking.

The Japanese have refused to acknowledge these atrocities, and many more besides, which gives them the intellectual cover to consider themselves victims in the final two bombings of the war. In truth, the Japanese had conducted themselves as brutally and as cruelly as any army could possibly have. In Okinawa, they made it clear that they would murder their own people before admitting military defeat, and they had even less compunction about murdering civilians in other nations, as the Chinese and Filipinos can attest.

Faced off against that kind of enemy, the US had no choice but to use the most powerful weapon in its arsenal to avoid the inch-by-inch massacre of an invasion of the main island. The Japanese refused to surrender, still believing in their megalomaniacal mission to rule Asia to the very end. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were significant cities for Japan's war effort, and the US warned Japan that we would target them with a terrible new weapon if they did not surrender. And as Kyuma notes, the Soviet Union had finally declared war on Japan, and they would have been more than interested in carving up the islands as they were with Germany and eastern Europe.

Kyuma has no reason to apologize. The Japanese should pull their heads out of the darkness and start acknowledging that their brutality and bloodthirstiness in a decade of war in Asia led to the inevitable in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The dropping of the atomic bombs was tragic, but Kyuma was correct when he said it prevented greater bloodshed and the entry of the Soviet Union into the Asian sphere of the war. It prevented the Japanese from becoming another Soviet satellite, trapped for 50 years.

Now We Can't Even Celebrate Jamestown

The PC police have struck again. This time, they are attacking the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown.

Use of the word "celebration" is being banned at this year's special events ordered by Congress to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of settlers in Jamestown, 13 years before the Plymouth Pilgrims appeared on America's shores, because it was an "invasion" that resulted in a "holocaust," organizers say.

"You can't celebrate an invasion," Mary Wade, an influential Jamestown 2007 Commemoration planner and Indian activist, has stated. After all, Indian tribes "were pushed back off of their land, even killed. Whole tribes were annihilated. A lot of people carry that oral history with them, and that's why they use the word 'invasion,' because it truly was an invasion, and I'm sure some of the Indian people will probably want to tell that as a part of the story of 400 years."

The attack upon Western culture, including the founding of colonies in America is a disgusting trend.