Happy St. Patrick's Day!
Check out fair Eire from far above, in high-resolution imagery courtesy of NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission.
Then, if you can stand it, listen to Sinn Fein terrorist mouthpiece Gerry Adams interviewed on NPR, which will apparently give him a platform for blatant lying when even gasbag Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Ireland West) will not.
President Bush met instead with the courageous McCartney sisters.
President Bush welcomed the family of slain Belfast man Robert McCartney to the White House on Thursday in a St. Patrick's Day event at which he also shunned Sinn Fein, political ally of the IRA.The five sisters and fiancee of McCartney went into a White House reception planning to tell Bush how they think the killers are eluding justice under the cloak of the Irish Republican Army. McCartney, a Roman Catholic, was stabbed to death in January outside a bar by a gang that included known IRA members.
Savvy Jim Hoagland sizes up the situation and finds value in the act of shunning Adams:
The savage acts by IRA members -- and the organization's open "contempt for the rule of law," in the words of a Kennedy spokesman -- should not be portrayed as a failure of the Northern Ireland process. This eruption of lawlessness underlines the importance of such talks -- when they are managed with clear-eyed realism and a willingness to call a killer a killer.Posted by Alan at March 17, 2005 11:33 AMAs in daily journalism, timing is everything in the peace-process business.
Violent "revolutionary" movements attract criminals and psychopaths as well as idealistic justice-seekers and sincere nationalists. The longer the revolt continues the more likely it is to become a criminal enterprise essentially devoted to self-perpetuation. That clearly has happened to the IRA, as it did to the Palestinian movement under Arafat.