While interviewing with Charlie Gibson, Sarah Palin was asked about her thoughts on the Bush Doctrine. Her answer revealed exactly how qualified she is to be the next Vice President of the United States. Take a look:


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This man has no conscience. He didn't care to get Osama bin Laden for seven long years and now the Times Online in the UK is reporting Bush is putting on the pressure to get Osama before he leaves office. He wants it for his legacy. It was never about those people who died on September 11th. This has always been about George Bush's terrible and despicable ego. It's easy to see why the country is repulsed by this man:




Here are the quotes where Bush said he didn't care about getting Osama bin Laden. He wasn't concerned about him. How did the country and the press let him get away with that? Imagine if a Democrat had said that?

The press claims they're better now after the lessons they learned from how they covered the lead-up to the Iraq War. In fact, they've learned nothing. Today, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba said the Bush administration committed "war crimes." War crimes!

Imagine if a Democrat was accused of that? Now, how do you think the press is going to cover this (with the obvious exception of McClatchy Newspapers, whose coverage has been exemplary)? I guarantee you'll hardly hear a peep.

The Bush administration soiled the good name of America. Their ought to be a price for that. But they are just going to walk out of that White House as if they did nothing wrong. If that doesn't make you angry, you're not paying attention.

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A few days ago I debated Michael Shermer at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville. Shermer was his usual affable self and the mostly-Christian audience both liked him and treated him respectfully. I didn't feel bad about putting Shermer before a largely religious audience. The last time we debated I was in hostile territory at Cal Tech. The Cal Tech debate was sponsored by Shermer's Skeptics Society and most in the audience were on his side. The debate was moderated by Christian radio host Janet Parshall. She conducted it in a format similar to the presidential debates, in which the moderator poses questions to each side.

On July 12, a few months from now, I have a rematch with atheist Christopher Hitchens. This is in Las Vegas at the large libertarian annual conference called Freedom Fest. This is one of the liveliest political conferences in the country, and I invite readers of this blog, whatever your religious or political persuasion, to attend. Each year the libertarians have invited me to debate, and each year they tell me, "Well, next year we're going to find someone who can take you on." The first year I went I debated libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne. The next year, former Congressman Bob Barr. Last year, presidential contender Ron Paul. This time organizer Mark Skousen has decided to focus the main debate on the God v. atheism issue. So Hitchens and I will enter the arena. You can find out more information and sign up here.

April 25 I'll be debating the notorious Peter Singer at Biola University near Los Angeles. This is another event worth attending, although I also intend to post the debate on the web. When Singer was hired by Princeton University some years ago it caused a big stir. Singer is a champion not only of infanticide and euthanasia but also of animal rights! This may seem to be anomalous, even absurd, but Singer is an avid Darwinist who sees himself as following the logic of Darwinism to its unavoidable conclusion.

Man, Singer argues, is on a continuum with the animals. Unfortunately through the influence of Christianity man has raised himself onto a pedestal, invested himself with all kinds of bogus rights, such as the "right to life," and consigned beasts to a life of subordination to human interests. Singer argues that once we get rid of God we must accept our Darwinian position, and this means giving up the values that Christianity brought into the world. Ultimately human beings must be pulled down a notch, and animals raised up a notch, to restore the biological order of things. I've been reading Singer's books which are always thoughtful and eloquent; he is far superior to some of the new atheists who have gotten far more attention in the last couple of years. I look forward to taking him on next month.

Also in April: I'll be debating philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong April 21 at Dartmouth, where he teaches and where I attended. Our topic is whether it is possible to be good without God. On April 22 at Harvard I'll share the podium with Dan Barker. Barker is a former evangelical minister who is now an outspoken atheist. He is currently head of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a kind of atheist ACLU. We keep hearing from atheists that they are not a movement and that "atheism is not a belief system" but merely the denial of a belief in God. So isn't it interesting that we now have atheist books, atheist magazines, atheist conferences, atheist organizations, atheist Sunday schools, an atheist radio show, and so on? Quite clearly atheism has become an ideology and our atheist friends cannot escape criticism by inanely proclaiming that their position doesn't constitute a position. Perhaps one of these days these characters will stop living in denial and prove worthy of the rational realism that they claim to uphold.

Some atheists have emailed me asking me if I've accepted Sam Harris' offer to a written debate. A few months ago Harris proposed such a debate, and I agreed, but also proposed to Sam that we have an oral debate in the classic format. Written debates strike me as a bit wimpy, since both debaters can get advice and assistance from various experts. The advantage of a face-to-face encounter is that it compels each side to think on its feet and make its best case before a live audience. Having himself proposed the written debate, Harris hasn't responded to my counteroffer.

Given that Richard Dawkins has already wimped out, proving himself an intellectual invertebrate, I'm beginning to wonder whether some of the world's best-known atheists are losing the courage of their convictions. One of my former professors now calls me Joe Louis, in reference to the boxer who knocked out so many "bums of the month" that he eventually had trouble finding worthy opponents. Although modern atheism is very belligerent in its writings--angry missives issued from the security of academic offices--it seems that some of our leading advocates of unbelief are positively timorous when it comes to standing up and debating their core convictions.

MEDIA UPDATE: I'll be on Hannity & Colmes on the Fox News Channel tonight, discussing election issues. I am scheduled for two segments, beginning around 9.30 pm Eastern time.

Hillary Clinton presents herself as the candidate of "experience." So far this isn't helping her. Why? Because most people realize that her experience is mainly in screwing up.

We all know about Hillary's arrogant attempt to take over one-sixth of the U.S. economy through her nationalized health care scheme. Americans rebelled against this, and Bill Clinton wisely dropped the idea.

Hillary doesn't talk much about that, but she does talk about her foreign policy experience. This is puzzling, because the New York Times reported a few months ago that Hillary didn't have a security clearance and virtually never attended any foreign policy meetings.

But let's say she did. What experience can she claim? Well, the radical Muslims launched a series of devastating attacks against U.S. targets in the 1990s. They bombed the Khobar Towers facility in Saudi Arabia, they attacked two U.S. embassies in East Africa, they launched a suicide attack against the U.S.S. Cole. And what did the Clinton administration do in response? Basically nothing.

Between 1996, when he declared war on America and moved from the Sudan to Afghanistan, Bin Laden was a public figure. He lived in a house provided by Mullah Omar and preached in the local mosque. He granted interviews to the British journalist Robert Fisk, to Peter Arnett of CNN, to John Miller of ABC news, to the Pakistani journalist Abdel Bari Atwan. The Clintons have been saying that they did everything in their power to get Bin Laden, but how could all these journalists so easily locate Bin Laden while the Clinton administration couldn't?

Experience counts when it points to a record of accomplishment. Hillary's experience, to the degree that she was involved at all, has been one of neglecting the threat of radical Islam and consequently emboldening Bin Laden to strike us on 9/11.

If you want to read more about the political and cultural roots of 9/11, my book The Enemy at Home is out in paperback this week.

Two well-established non-profit journalism organizations did a study of Bush administration statements before the Iraq War. Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism, found that there were 935 false statements about Iraq by Bush officials in the two years following September 11, 2001.

Here's an Associated Press summary of the study:

It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

"It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida," according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. "In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."

Bush himself led with 259 "false statements." Obviously, they're being polite by calling it "false statements." They mean he lied. And, of course, this was no small matter. When Bush lied, people died. Over 150,000 Iraqis and nearly 4,000 Americans, to be specific.

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What unites the 9/11 hijackers, the Columbine killers, the school shooters, the suicide bombers and the Nebraska shooter? One word answer: fame. They're all literally dying to become famous.

The kid who did the shooting in Nebraska this week summed up best in one line on his suicide note: "Now I'll be famous."

That captures the Muslim suicide bombers, the school shooters and unfortunately, so much of our culture in one succinct statement. Sometimes, it's less extreme and takes the form of Britney Spears showing her private parts to the press. Sometimes it's someone like Kim Kardashian who is so desperate to get famous that she does a semi-professional porn tape (don't get me wrong, if you're going to pick any route to get famous, I vote for this one).

And sometimes, tragically, it's a young kid who can't find any other way of attaining success in the world who decides he is going to get famous by murdering a bunch of people. We have to got to find a way to understand this problem, so that we can begin to fix it. This mad pursuit of fame is beginning to kill us.

Tragic Shooting In Nebraska Mall

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Quoting the New York TImes quoting Jake Halpern about his book "Fame Junkies":

"31 percent of American teenagers had the honest expectation that they would one day be famous and that 80 percent thought of themselves as truly important. (The figure from the same study conducted in the 1950s was 12 percent.)"

So, what happens when they find out as the kid in Omaha did last week that they are not going to make it. There will be no fame for them and that there is some chance that they will not become "truly important." Unfortunately, too often these days, the answer has been seeking infamy as an easy substitute for fame.

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According to a news item on JustPressPlay.com, there are rumors floating around movie land that Morgan Spurlock, the director of Super Size Me, will be revealing something significant in his new documentary, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden?

The item reads: Earlier this year at the Berlin International Film Festival, Morgan Spurlock made waves because he unveiled 15 minutes of footage from his mysterious documentary about Osama Bin Laden that was only shown to about 50 potential studio buyers after they had signed confidentiality agreements.

After a bidding frenzy, the Weinsteins bought it, and since then there's been rampant speculation that Spurlock presents information about where Bin Laden is.

I'll be open and honest, I am not a fan of Rudy Giuliani, now I know it's the beginning of a long political year for America and the last thing you voters need is an opinion from a 26 year old stoner Canadian, but I will try anyway. Not too long ago I posted a video clip on AOL that talked about the whole Giuliani-Fox News saga, it was late at night and within minutes I got some pretty unwelcoming feedback, including ones that accused me of attempting to "swiftboat," I hated those swiftboaters. In reality I didn't know much about the case and was simply attracted to the sexy headline, my conscience got the best of me and I pulled the post before dawn broke.

Today is a new day.

It simply blows my mind that Americans appear to love this guy, he is always at the top of polls and he is treated like a national hero despite the fire fighters efforts to set the record straight. Sometimes Americans should look beyond their National media to learn about how the world is looking at these candidates. Just yesterday, on videosift.com in the Election 2008 channel, an 8 Minute report from UK's Channel 4 hit the front page. This clip argues that Giuliani is loved because of the emotional attachment Americans have with him. That emotional attachment appears to trump the reality of Giuliani's record (which would explain the 9/11 card he plays almost always.) This clip below includes an interview with another former NY mayor who would argue that Rudy was not solely responsible for reducing crime in NY, It also touches on the Mafia ties, the private elevator in the WTC (to sneak his mistress in) and a laundry list of complaints from 9/11 rescue workers and fire fighters. The list goes on, check out this detailed wikipedia entry and wonder if American could do better..Just watch it and pass it along to your friends who are voting for Rudolph.

Pat Robertson has endorsed Rudy Giuliani. And Giuliani is very proud of this endorsement. So, we have to ask -- does Giuliani agree with Pat Robertson's interpretation of why we were attacked on 9/11:



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Many people think Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world. Not true. Islam is growing fast, but Christianity is growing faster. Indeed there are twice as many Christians as Muslims in the world today and the gap is becoming larger. Moreover, Christianity has become the world's only religion that is truly universal.

Islam too has a wide reach, but Islam has only a small presence in the United States, Canada, Central and South America, and Australia. Christianity, by contrast, is strong everywhere in the world except the Middle East. Islam is growing mainly through reproduction, which is to say by Muslims having large families. Christianity is growing both through reproduction and through conversion.

All the propaganda you hear now from the government against Iran is just plain, old marketing. They want to sell you a war and they know just how to do it. It's easy enough to do this against almost any country. There are plenty of things that Iran's religious theocracy does that can be used against them in a marketing campaign and plenty of vague insinuations you can throw in there for a little spice as well.

Watch the short video below to see how they could do the same exact thing to start a war with Saudi Arabia:



The question isn't whether the targeted country has done something egregious. It's whether we want to attack them in the first place or not.

Saudi Arabia can be linked to many more attacks against us than Iran. For example, a little thing called 9/11, where 15 out of the 19 attackers were Saudis and the man who organized it, Osama bin Laden, is Saudi. The 9/11 connections to Iraq (or Iran) were nonexistent by comparison (actually they were nonexistent, even if you don't compare them to Saudi Arabia). And did you know that 8% of the attacks against our troops in Iraq might be coming from Iran but that 80% of the attacks against our troops in Iraq are funded by ... Saudi Arabia. You know who concluded that? The Iraq Study Group led by Republican stalwart James Baker.

So, why aren't we focusing on the country that is responsible for ten times as many attacks against us in Iraq and almost single-handedly caused 9/11?

Why has the government focused only on Iran and not on Saudi Arabia at all? And why has the media gone along with this farce? Why have we been sold a war with Iraq, and now Iran, and not one with the Saudis?

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After he did this, he went even further and said that he took the absurd phone call from his wife in the middle of his NRA speech (see the video on that here) also because of 9/11. Come on, how much can this man abuse 9/11? It's his excuse for every damn thing he does. It's really sickening.

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Rudy Giuliani has long been suspected of using & abusing the tragedy of 9/11, but this story takes the cake. At a Giuliani fund raising party, participants were urged to donate $9.11 (for Rudy.) It didn't sit well with the NYC Fire Department:

"It is nothing short of disrespectful to the legacy of the thousands of civilians and 343 brave firefighters who died at Ground Zero," said Harold Schaitberger, IAFF president.

Comically, nobody wants to admit who's idea it was.

A Giuliani campaign spokesman said the idea was selected without the campaign's knowledge. But the host of the party, Abraham Soefer, also said the theme was not his responsibility, and referred other questions to Mr Giuliani's campaign team, the Associated Press reports

Either way, it's nothing really new from the Giuliani campaign. I'd like to hear why people actually buy this guy? Is it really the 9/11 thing that makes him so special?

For your viewing pleasure, yesterday Stewart presented us with this fun segment about "Rudy's 9/11 tourette's."

"I don't think we should be in the business of blaming anybody for 9/11," Bill Clinton recently said. Yes, you read that right. Clinton was speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, and his comment is quoted in the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly. So is Clinton trying to say that Bin Laden and the radical Muslims didn't do it? Actually, Clinton's point is that he himself bears no responsibility for the attacks. That's because he did everything--everything--to capture and kill the world's number one terrorist. He even warned Bush about him, Clinton says, but unfortunately Bush was far too obsessed with Saddam Hussein. Having said we shouldn't blame anyone for allowing Bin Laden to attack us, Clinton proceeds to blame Bush for doing just that.

"I was obsessed with Bin Laden," Clinton says. "We dealt with him four or five days a week, every week, for the last four years I was president." So what happened? "We tried to mount a CIA operation to go in and take him out; they couldn't do it. We contracted with tribals to try and take him out; they couldn't do it." Pretty elusive guy, Bin Laden.

Here's the problem with this account. Between 1996, when Bin Laden moved from the Sudan to Afghanistan, and early 2001, when Clinton left office, Bin Laden was frequently interviewed by media sources around the world. He granted two separate in-person interviews to British journalist Robert Fisk. He was interviewed one-on-one by Peter Arnett, then of CNN News. He met with the Pakistani journalist Abdel Bari Atwan. He was interviewed by John Miller of ABC News. He met with the BBC and Al Jazeera. He even held a press conference in the town of Khost where Chinese and Middle Eastern journalists were present. So how come all these people could find Bin Laden but not the Clinton administration?

Clinton gives us a hint of the answer when he says, "I would've attacked him at the end of my presidency...but the CIA and FBI had not jointly certified that he was responsible for the U.S.S. Cole bombing, even though we all knew it." So now the clouds part and our Prevaricator-in-Chief starts to come clean. It wasn't that the CIA and the Northern Alliance couldn't find or couldn't get Bin Laden. CIA analyst and author Michael Scheuer says Clinton had at least 10 chances to kill Bin Laden and took none. Turns out Clinton was waiting for both the CIA and the FBI to give him bureaucratic confirmation of something he already knew. Bin Laden had declared war on America four years earlier, in 1996, and he was the known mastermind of a series of attacks on U.S. targets. Yet Clinton as late as 2000 was still waiting for a joint CIA-FBI certification before he would act.

Imagine if Clinton had taken one of those 10 chances sometime before 2000, when Bin Laden went into deep hiding. In that case 9/11 would not have happened. So I can see why Clinton eagerly maintains that we shouldn't be in the business of blaming anyone for 9/11. That gets him off the hook, doesn't it?

In 2004, a leading critic of the Bush administration issued a stinging critique of the U.S. government's war on terror. He charged that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Bush continued reading to children "a little girl's story about a goat and its butting." The critic insisted that Bush invaded Iraq because of "oil and more business for his private companies." Bush knew Iraq posed no security threat but "the black gold blinded him." As a consequence, "Bush's hands are coverd with blood" and Iraq has become a "quagmire." Yet Bush refuses to change course because of "the enormity of the contracts won by large corporations like Halliburton." Moreover, in the name of fighting terror, Bush has "brought tyranny and the suppression of liberties" through such measures as "the Patriot Act."

Michael Moore? Al Franken? Nancy Pelosi? Actually, it's Bin Laden in his address to the American people on the eve of the 2004 election. In his latest video Bin Laden is at it again, doing his best Michael Moore imitation. Remove the Koranic references and exhortations to convert to Islam and Bin Laden sounds indistinguishable from Moore. He attacks Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the neocons, and he denounces the role of money in politics. (Alas, he forgot to mention that Guantanamo captives get better health care than 9/11 survivors.) Now think of how odd this is. Imagine if Hitler had issued regular missiles during World War II in which he praised a group of Americans and cited from their writings and repeated their arguments with such precision that it would be hard to tell his words from theirs. The reaction in America, I'm sure, would be one of unmitigated outrage!

So what's going on here? My book The Enemy at Home has the full story, but we get a hint of the answer from Bin Laden himself. In his latest video he says that there is a twofold solution to defeating Bush's war on terror. "The first is from our side...and the second is from your side." The first part lies with his jihadists, who he says are doing their part to create the terror. The second part lies with the American left, which is expected to use the terror to demoralize the American people and urge them to retreat. Bin Laden specifically directs our attention to the writings of folks like Noam Chomsky, whom he praises as offering a correct (i.e. Bin Laden's own) view of the situation. So Bin Laden is trying to sway American public opinion by mouthing the arguments of the American left--including calls for campaign finance reform!--and he is also counting on leftists like Moore and Chomsky to convince the American people to retreat from Iraq and give up on Bush's war on terror.

So far the Bin Laden strategy is working beautifully. But given all the leftists and Bush-bashers that Bin Laden has cited by name (Robert Fisk, William Blum, Michael Scheuer, Noam Chomsky), I wonder if Moore is a little upset that Bin Laden isn't giving him enough credit.