A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murder is less to fear. 

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) spoke those words in the Roman Senate over two thousand years ago.  But his words could be addressed to Traitor John Murtha and the leadership of the Democrat Party today.

They have bet on America's defeat in Iraq.  Somehow they believe that their country's defeat will bring them personal victory in 2008 - retaining and expanding their control of Congress and regaining the White House.

It's not going to work out that way. It's going to turn out that the Democrat strategy will achieve defeat - theirs.  Root for defeat and you'll get it - yours.

The Traitor Media and their Democrat allies are so fond of chanting the mantra of "the civil war in Iraq."  Google "civil war" plus "Iraq" and you'll get 3,800,000 hits.  Barack Hussein "The Apostate" Obama and other lefty Senators condemn Bush for sending Americans to "die in someone else's civil war."

The truth is that there is no civil war in Iraq.  A real civil war is two armies or armed militias fighting each other for control of a government or country.  They fight each other.  This is exactly what Sunni and Shia terrorists are not doing.  They are engaged in committing terrorist atrocities upon each other's civilian population.

What is going on in Iraq is terrorism, pure and unadulterated.  You can call it "sectarian" terrorism and violence, but it's not civil war.  Neither Sunni-Baathist-AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) terrorists nor Shia-Moqtada terrorists are fighting to topple the elected Maliki government and seize governmental power.  Neither is fighting the other.

Meanwhile, Senators and Congressistas and the Media are all blathering on about the 21,000 extra troops to be positioned mostly in downtown Baghdad.  But that's really a diversion, a small part of the real surge.

All the CW (conventional wisdom) talk in DC here is about how the Republicans are deep in doom over their prospects for the presidency in 2008 while the Dems are high in the sky.  Don't buy it.  It's the Defeatocrats who are in deep kim-chee.

There are now 9 - nine - of them running for their party's presidential nomination:  Joe Biden, Wesley Clark, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Tom Vilsack, Barack Hussein Obama Jr, and Hillary Clinton.  Lightweight City.

Only one of them can be taken seriously, possibly two.

Kucinich is a pint-sized left-wing moonbat.  Dodd is a tall left-wing moonbat who loves Fidel Castro.  Clark is a flake on a ego-trip.  Richardson has a room-temperature IQ.  The Breck Boy (Edwards) is a Jay Leno joke (re: his rich/poor "Two Americas" campaign theme, Leno shows a picture of his $12 million mansion and quips, "We know which America he lives in").

None of them have an ounce of gravitas, political weight, heft, seriousness.

Lighter than any of them, however, is The Obamarama.  He is nothing but a media creation of hype and frenzy, stories about whom are more appropriate in the supermarket tabloids among the latest breathless revelations regarding Brad and Jen and Jolie. 

The PIAPS is as good as the Dems have got.  Now let's look at the other party's roster.

[This is the text of a speech I am giving to the Council for National Policy at Amelia Island, Florida, Friday, February 2.]

It has been my good fortune to experience a great deal of the world and get to know people from close to 200 countries.  There is a common humanity shared by most folks around the globe.  The fact that there has never been a war between two genuine democracies clearly shows that most people prefer peace to war, and simply want a decent life for their families and children.

Yet as we all know, history is full of examples of people going berserk, falling victim to some frenzied hysteria.  It can be a frenzy of paranoia, such as the lunacy we are currently experiencing over "global warming."  It can be a frenzy of greed, like the dotcom bubble or the Tulip Craze. 

The worst are frenzies of criminal insanity, like the Gulag Communism of the Soviet Union, the National Socialism of Hitler's Germany, or the barbaric imperialism of Tojo's Japan.

An entire people like the Germans or Japanese can go criminally, murderously nuts.  Such mass criminality has to be ended by whatever means necessary.  But once the frenzy is over, the people crazed by it can become normal human beings again.

Just such a mass criminal insanity has today taken over the minds of a substantial fraction of the world's Moslems.  Today, we're going to talk about how to put an end to it.

Death came quick to two of the world's most evil men recently - Sapamurat "Turkmenbashi" Niyazov, dictator of Turmenistan, dead of a heart attack on December 21, and Saddam Hussein.  It's coming slowly to a third - Fidel Castro.

Castro's medical care has been overseen by a team of physicians from Spain, some of whom are providing details of his condition to the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI), Spain's CIA.  The picture is truly horrific.

After four disastrous surgeries, he can now only be fed intravenously.  He is constantly doped-up on pain-killers like morphine.  The prolonged agony and suffering he has endured for seven months may even have exceeded that of the thousands of political prisoners he ordered tortured during the decades of his tyranny.

Castro is dying ugly.  If there is anyone who deserves such bad karma, it is him.

There is almost no way he can live for much longer - a few weeks or months at the most.  Once he goes, his brother Raul will try desperately to hold the dictatorship together, and he will fail - fast.