What has happened to rational debate in this country?  Recently this page printed a specious letter from a local left-wing “Moon Bat” calling for Vice President Cheney & President Bush to be thrown into the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and today the S-T featured a propaganda article on “American Hegemony” excerpted from the Beirut Daily Star which inferred an equal level of standing between President Bush and President Ahmadinejad of Iran.. The letter culminates by calling our elected leaders a “bunch of crazies“..

Mr. Unger, the editor of this paper, has written several op-ed pieces claiming the purpose of this page is to promote rational discussion and advance the level of debate..

Repeatedly omitting pertinent information as to the religious background and immigration status of suspected criminals or would be terrorists, printing salacious articles which distort the actions of the Bush administration and this countries military as well besmirching our friends the Israeli's belies that notion and seems to suggest that both Anti-Americanism and stoking the fires of anti-Zionism are the Standard Times real objectives..

The Standard Times shows true hatred for Israel by making no attempt to remind its readers that Israel's actions last summer were the direct result of Hezbollah’s firing countless rockets into Northern Israel from Southern Lebanon, as well as the, still unresolved, kidnapping of an Israeli soldier..(as a note: Hezbollah is actually a proxy military force funded largely by Iran for the purpose of advancing Iran's imperial ambitions)

Apparently according to the Lebanese newspaper, the U.S. should now take its cue on international diplomacy from one of the most marginalized, feckless, international bureaucrats ever to walk the planet.. I am referring to the head of the International Atomic Energy Commission Mohamed El-Baradei..

I say feckless because it was El-Baradei who said, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal last week, that trying to stop Iran's outlawed nuclear enrichment program was futile and the best we, (the international community), can hope for is to cap Iranian enrichment at its current levels..

Question for Mr El-Baradei--  Exactly when did the Wests existing military options, (including low yield nuclear strikes), get taken off the table?

To the reader who may think I'm being a bit draconian here:

 Iran has one of the worlds largest supplies of Yellow Cake Uranium and at its current levels the 3,000 cascading centrifuges Iran now employs can produce enough highly enriched uranium from one or two Nuclear weapons annually.. The planned addition of 5,000 more cascading centrifuges by years end means Iran, which uses the so called “short cut” to enrich its uranium, will have enough material to create several nuclear bombs a year.. This is especially important considering the Shahab-3 Missile Iran uses has a range of about 1,200 miles.. That means not only Israel, but most of Europe will soon be in the nuclear cross-hairs of the Theocratic Mullahs in Tehran..  

Indecently, the short cut that Iran employs to enrich uranium has no peaceful applications and its sole purpose is to create weapons grade uranium..

There are a couple of good books on the issues I've written about above.. One is “Because they Hate” by Brigitte Gabriel a Maronite survivor of the Lebanese Civil War.. The other is “Countdown to Crisis, (the coming nuclear showdown with Iran) by Kenneth Timmerman..

Of course you, the reader, can always choose to keep your head buried in the sand.. If you decide that is the route you want to go , it's quite obvious the Standard Times will happily provide you with both more sand and bigger shovels.. A word of caution though, when your head is buried in sand you rear-end makes an excellent target..

Human Pride World-Wide

Bob Grant Jr.