Last Sunday, the Iraqi national soccer team defeated–astounded is more like it–Saudi Arabia by a score of 1-0, giving the people of this war torn country something it doesn’t get very often: something to smile about.

But this is more than just a victory in a sporting event. It’s a victory for all those, especially the people who have to live there, who decry the sectarianism which is rending this country apart. Midfielder Nashaat Akram said “This is a gift to the united Iraqi people, to the different spectrums of the Iraqi people.” Laborer Muhammed Hussein said, “They (the players) showed us what the real Iraq is and how we can work hard to be something. These players are what the Iraqis are”.

It is reported that t-shirts encouraging an end to sectarianism with the slogan “I am Iraqi” have sold out everywhere.

Of course, this is still Iraq, so it comes as no surprise that the day was also somewhat marred by sporadic bloodshed. Police shot some asshole attempting to drive a car bomb into a crowd in the south Baghdad neighborhood of Sadiya. Luckily the car exploded and no one but the suicide bomber was killed, which I guess made it a good day for everyone, including the suicide bomber.

Earlier in the day police stopped two Saudi Arabian nationals attempting to detonate cars packed with explosives in the eastern neighborhood of Zayuna. And I thought Yankees fans were sore losers.

But let’s focus on the good stuff for a minute:

In the northern Kurdish city of Irbil soccer fans waved the Iraqi flag, while dancing the debka, a traditional Kurdish dance, arm in arm in the middle of the street or atop moving cars, while In Kirkuk, a northern oil city known for its melange of ethnicities, Sirwan Rasheed, 55, a Kurd, said he erected flags in the team’s honor with friends of various sects and ethnicities — Sunnis and Shiites , Turkmen and Christians. Sounds kind of like Boston in October of 2004.

What’s important here is the example being set by this soccer team. The team’s leaders include both Sunni and Shiite Muslims, who work well together and talk publicly about overcoming sectarianism. People, especially young people, look up to sports heros, and the Iraqis are no exception. At a time when sectarian tensions between Shiites and Sunnis have worsened in the Iraqi government and on the streets, the soccer team, known as the Lions of the Two Rivers, may have some part in helping Iraqis understand the benefits of putting aside sectarian hatred and working together to make their country a decent place to live. Sports heroes are role models, and Iraq certainly needs a few of those.

The strife in Iraq, and the rest of the world, for that matter, will never end until the people living there decide for themselves to choose peace over war, to choose understanding over hatred, to choose life over death. Can a handful of athletes, who seemingly have already made those decisions, be a catalyst to peace?

I believe they can. After all, I’m a Red Sox fan. I’ve already seen one miracle.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I borrowed (pardon the expression) liberally from this article for this post.)

–Smith

“taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood”–Dr. John H. Watson

Please visit my blog at murderofravens.wordpress.com

Please don’t think from my following remarks I’m a Republican apologist. I’m a Democrat whose mother headed the Democratic Women’s Club in Austin, Texas for nearly a decade and whose father worked for LBJ for many years. They were hard line conservatives until the seventies and there was a decided swing left. Hell, I was leading the charge. We became socialists no doubt about it. We tried to tear down every value system existing. It was going to be the Utopia it was supposed to be.

Then I began to see how rabid the hard liners were. Their agenda wasn’t dedicated to equality and justice, it was only about power. They were the epitome of Big Brother. Thought control and slavery to the system. I detested the religious book burners but they had nothing on the purge of intellectual thought my fellow Democrats were planning. It wasn’t the Conservatives who were so hate filled, it was us.

They hate people who oppose or have the nerve to question them in any degree and vilify every action of those they deem to be heretical. They bludgeon transgressors with the courts and increasingly shrill rhetoric and ad hominem response to any intellectual discussion. Their ultimate aim is deconstruction of the Constitution so they can seize power permanently.

It’s also about the easy money and all the ways to skim from the system. They have their friends and family create fancy sounding foundations or institutes and funnel earmarks into their pockets. They give defense and civil project money to corrupt organizations and corporations where it is funneled back to them and theirs. The republicans have a few bad apples but they are nothing near the democrats in sleeze and corruption.

The real power in the party belongs to the Clinton Machine. It has divided the USA more than any other modern dynamic. It splits the public into easily manipulated factions with race baiting, class envy and economic fear, faux science religionism and crazy ass anti-America fringe groups. The majority of the press belongs to the Clinton Machine. It is that machine, with its totalitarian agenda, that has undermined our rights and created a fascist state inside the Democrat Party and the state at large. I voted for Bill Clinton believing he would bring change. He did, now moderate voices are shouted down within the party and the courts are the new political battleground. Then the whining over “What the eeeevil Republicans have done to our rights”. If anything the Republicans have been complicit with the Clintons in turning a blind eye all kinds of insider crime and not standing up to the skullduggery of the Democrats.

The Jury’s been out on this Pres. for any rational and truthful person but time is peeling back the layers on his conducts. I hoped he would be as good a President as he was a Texas Governor but then he spent too much money trying to buy public sentiment. I marvel that the great public speaker I knew him to be has vanished. Now he appears compromised on all kinds of issues that the public elected him to address, especially immigration and energy. I still believe him to be sincere though. Not a cynic like the democratic leadership.

The only power the people still have is the vote; but what are the choices? So here I am with my eyes open and without the representation I felt I once had. The Clintons are dangerous. Wolves in sheep’s clothing. Hillary’s way or the highway.

No dissent permitted.

From Rush Limbaugh.com….

RUSH: I have a great, great editorial cartoon here. I don’t know who did this, but you’ve seen the painting of the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia at Constitution Hall, drafting the Constitution, discussing it among themselves. Benjamin Franklin is in there, all these guys. “Gentlemen, I just came up with a brilliant conspiracy,” says one of the founders to the group. “Why don’t we split from the British crown, become founders of a nation that will cause all of the world’s wars, crime, corruption, slavery, disease, torture, murder, assassinations, racism, sexism, violence, environmental destruction, cannibalism, and manmade hurricanes for all eternity? That’s the kind of country we want.”

Benjamin Franklin says, “Yeah, and then steal all their oil.”

Another Founder says, “Sounds like a plan.”

It’s a great, great, great cartoon because this is how libs see America today. It’s exactly how they see it.

h/t The People’s Cube

More from the investigative FReeper, Doug from Upland…..

In the ’60s, a Future Candidate Poured Her Heart Out in Letters The New York Times ^ | July 28, 2007 | Mark Leibovich I’ve called Mark Leibovich to give him the rest of the story, but he hasn’t returned my call.

From the above article, you learned about Hillary coming to Winter Carnival at Dartmouth in 1967. Now, here is the rest of the story. In one sentence it is that THE GUY DITCHED THE WITCH.

“She would issue a blanket condemnation of the “boys” she had met (“who know a lot about ‘self’ and nothing about ‘man’ ”) and also tell of an encounter she had with “a Dartmouth boy” the previous weekend…..

….Her letters contain no mention of any romantic interest, except for one from February 1967 in which Ms. Rodham divulges that she “met a boy from Dartmouth and spent a Saturday night in Hanover.”

In her LYING DECLARATION OF APRIL 7, 2006 Hillary claimed to not remember anything that she might have discussed with Peter Paul at the Spago lunch or Gershman tea. Oh, really, Hillary?

Actually, at the Spago lunch, she discussed on film with Peter what happened at Winter Carnival. She went there for blind date. The guy got drunk, took a surfboard to an area with some small slopes, and played on his surfboard. He ditched the witch part way through the blind date. HERE IS THE DISCUSSION ON YOUTUBE FROM THE SPAGO LUNCH

Hillary could remember none of what was discussed

I am always impressed with his brilliant mind.