"To live with lies spun by regimes that were brutally clinging to power"

Were their meals not served on time, Tiny and Baby would want the truth about why we had failed to deliver on our promises. Above, on high alert in the anxious moments of the countdown to supper this afternoon.

"It's a revolutionary idea for people who have had to live with lies spun by regimes that were brutally clinging to power," wrote the WaPo's David Ignatius re Lebanon's Cedar Revolution last year:

People want the truth about who killed [Lebanese PM] Hariri last week, but on a deeper level they want the truth about why Arab regimes have failed to deliver on their promises of progress and prosperity.

Only five, ten, fifteen minutes . . .

Good God. The same could be said of every regime clinging to power, every fear society -- heavy or lite -- that's ever come down the pike, from head-chopping Islamist tyrannies on down to the thought-controlling PC regimes of our own MSM and academia. Checking out our blogging of the Cedar Rev last year, we came upon something huge we'd forgotten all about, a Mark Steyn City Journal "must read" [Aren't they all? --ed]:

As Communism retreated, radical Islam seeped into Africa and south Asia and the Balkans. Crazy guys holed up in Philippine jungles and the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay who’d have been “Marxist fantasists” a generation or two back are now Islamists: it’s the ideology du jour. At the point of expiry of the Soviet Union in 1991, the peoples of the central Asian republics were for the most part unaware that Iran had even had an “Islamic revolution”; 15 years on, following the proselytizing of thousands of mullahs dispatched to the region by a specially created Iranian government agency, the Stans’ traditionally moderate and in many cases alcoholically lubricated form of Islam is yielding in all but the most remote areas to a fiercer form imported from the south.

After their own suppers have been tucked away, whatever is in Tuck's bowl is fair game. Above, a well-timed Baby paw focusses the fork.

As we observed in our Mark Steyn post last April:

Those "thousands of mullahs dispatched" by the ayatollah to convert the citizens of the former Soviet Union gave us the willies and reminded us of "the Gramscian underpinnings of the Soviet Union's insidious infiltration of our own elite institutions last century, not to mention Ibn Warraq's assertion that in the aftermath of The War to End All Wars, Islam was seen as a counterforce to the Communist threat. There's a reason the left and jihadis are finding themselves in bed together. Both subscribe to totalitarian, collectivist ideologies whose bottom line is "I know what's best for you. Sit down, shut up, and do as you're told. Or else." [Yessum, Miss Hillary.]

GW was on the case last year when he called for complete withdrawal of Syrian military forces and intelligence personnel from Lebanon:

Syria as well as Iran has a history of supporting terrorist groups. The time has come for Syria and Iran to stop using murder as a tool of policy . . . Arab states must end incitement in their own media, cut off public and private funding for terrorism, stop their support for extremist education and establish normal relations with Israel . . . Each country will take a different path of reform, and every nation that starts on that journey can know that America will walk at its side.

Back to you, Mark Steyn:

Our failure to understand Iran in the seventies [Yes, you, Jimmah] foreshadowed our failure to understand the broader struggle today.

"What's next? Do you bomb the Beirut-Damascus highway?" Shepherd Smith is asking a Middle East expert at Fox News this evening. Well, yes. After bombing the Beirut airport tarmac and blockading Lebanon's ports in response to outright acts of war carried out by Syrian/Iranian clients Hezbollah and Hamas in the last couple of days, our Israeli confreres are on the road to Damascus. As our imail correspondent writes, "Israelis ROCK!"

Ongoing roundup of WW IV at Pajamas Media.

Update: Ongoing roundup of animals, with and without backbones, at Modulator's Friday Ark #95.

Comments

[Laura Lee Donoho]

I love the photo essay. It's so uniquely Sisu. Those cats have to be some kind of royalty. Baby almost appears to be instructing Sir Tuck on how to properly hold a fork.

[Scott]

Another adorable Baby shot - keep 'em coming!