Saddam, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye...

He's gone. (See it on video below.) Not a moment to soon, and a good many too late.

Although I'm somewhere in the middle on the death penalty in most cases, and I can't deny feeling the whole build up in the media was a bit macabre, this one was a pretty clear-cut. There will probably be an upswing in violence, but my guess is it will be temporary.

Of course the multi-sourced insurgents won't simply go away now that Hussein is gone, but it's hard not to think that fewer of ours might have perished had they shot him in the spider hole and been done with it.

A bone to pick: Hey, Drudge, do you really think your headline, "Hussein Video Grips Iraq; Attacks Go On..." matches the following story's content? (quoted in full from the NY Times only to show how misleading Drudge's headline is):

December 31, 2006

On the Gallows, Curses for U.S. and ‘Traitors’
By MARC SANTORA

BAGHDAD, Dec. 30 — Saddam Hussein never bowed his head, until his neck snapped. His last words were equally defiant.

“Down with the traitors, the Americans, the spies and the Persians.”

The final hour of Iraq’s former ruler began about 5 a.m., when American troops escorted him from Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, to Camp Justice, another American base at the heart of the city.

There, he was handed over to a newly trained unit of the Iraqi National Police, with whom he would later exchange curses. Iraq took full custody of Mr. Hussein at 5:30 a.m.

Two American helicopters flew 14 witnesses from the Green Zone to the execution site — a former headquarters of the Istikhbarat, the deposed government’s much feared military intelligence outfit, now inside the American base.

Mr. Hussein was escorted into the room where the gallows, with its red railing, stood, greeted at the door by three masked executioners known as ashmawi. Several of the witnesses present — including Munkith al-Faroun, the deputy prosecutor for the court; Munir Haddad, the deputy chief judge for the Iraqi High Tribunal; and Sami al-Askari, a member of Parliament — described in detail how the execution unfolded and independently recounted what was said.

To protect himself from the bitter cold before dawn during the short trip, Mr. Hussein wore a 1940s-style wool cap, a scarf and a long black coat over a white collared shirt.

His executioners wore black ski masks, but Mr. Hussein could still see their deep brown skin and hear their dialects, distinct to the Shiite southern part of the country, where he had so brutally repressed two separate uprisings.

The small room had a foul odor. It was cold, had bad lighting and a sad, melancholic atmosphere. With the witnesses and 11 other people — including guards and the video crew — it was cramped.

Mr. Hussein’s eyes darted about, trying to take in just who was going to put an end to him. The executioners took his hat and his scarf.

Mr. Hussein, whose hands were bound in front of him, was taken to the judge’s room next door. He followed each order he was given.

He sat down and the verdict, finding him guilty of crimes against humanity, was read aloud. “Long live the nation!” Mr. Hussein shouted. “Long live the people! Long live the Palestinians!”

He continued shouting until the verdict was read in full, and then he composed himself again.

When he rose to be led back to the execution room at 6 a.m., he looked strong, confident and calm. Whatever apprehension he may have had only minutes earlier had faded.

The general prosecutor asked Mr. Hussein to whom he wanted to give his Koran. He said Bandar, the son of Awad al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court who was also to be executed soon.

The room was quiet as everyone began to pray, including Mr. Hussein. “Peace be upon Mohammed and his holy family.”

Two guards added, “Supporting his son Moktada, Moktada, Moktada.”

Mr. Hussein seemed a bit stunned, swinging his head in their direction.

They were talking about Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric whose militia is now committing some of the worst violence in the sectarian fighting; he is the son of a revered Shiite cleric, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, whom many believe Mr. Hussein ordered murdered.

“Moktada?” he spat out, mixing sarcasm and disbelief.

Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser, asked Mr. Hussein if
he had any remorse or fear.

“No,” he said bluntly. “I am a militant and I have no fear for myself. I have spent my life in jihad and fighting aggression. Anyone who takes this route should not be afraid.”

Mr. Rubaie, standing shoulder to shoulder with Mr. Hussein, asked him about
the killing of the elder Mr. Sadr.

They were standing so close to each other that others could not hear the exchange.

One of the guards, though, became angry. “You have destroyed us,” the masked man yelled. “You have killed us. You have made us live in destitution.”

Mr. Hussein was scornful: “I have saved you from destitution and misery anddestroyed your enemies, the Persians and Americans.”

The guard cursed him. “God damn you.”

Mr. Hussein replied, “God damn you.”

Two witnesses, apparently uninvolved in selecting the guards, exchanged a quiet joke, saying they gathered that the goal of disbanding the militias had yet to be accomplished.

The deputy prosecutor, Mr. Faroun, berated the guards, saying, “I will not accept any offense directed at him.”

Mr. Hussein was led up to the gallows without a struggle. His hands were unbound, put behind his back, then fastened again. He showed no remorse. He held his head high.

The executioners offered him a hood. He refused. They explained that the thick rope could cut through his neck and offered to use the scarf he had worn earlier to keep that from happening. Mr. Hussein accepted.

He stood on the high platform, with a deep hole beneath it.

He said a last prayer. Then, with his eyes wide open, no stutter or choke in his throat, he said his final words cursing the Americans and the Persians.

At 6:10 a.m., the trapdoor swung open. He seemed to fall a good distance, but he died swiftly. After just a minute, his body was still. His eyes still were open but he was dead. Despite the scarf, the rope cut a gash into his neck.

His body stayed hanging for another nine minutes as those in attendance broke out in prayer, praising the Prophet, at the death of a dictator.

Ali Adeeb and Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from
Baghdad.

Video of Saddam Hussein being executed

Why are these idiots taunting him? They don't know the world is watching?

Bill Maher's Idiocy

Just ran across this Maher rant, barely contained by Joe Scarborough, on impeaching President Bush:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXbv6OuOl88&NR

Here's one of the comments:

Scarborough can be a dope, but he's right on this one. What a stupid argument Maher makes for impeaching President Bush -- or ANY president. When Scarborough mentions that the president was waiting for instructions, a point well beyond the pretentious Maher, he meant Bush as waiting for instructions regarding his own security, as he should have.

I understand the desire to see the president rise to his feet and know, somehow, just what to do. But what happened that day was disorienting for everyone.

Here's how I think of it: You know what the flight attendants say on airplanes? To secure your own air mask first before assisting others? I think the prez had a responsibility to keep his head screwed on straight so he could keep functioning as the president.

Keith Ellison: Muslim Representative

The Detroit Free Press writes the following on newly elected Congressman Keith Ellison's recent speech:

Speaking in Dearborn late Sunday night, the first Muslim elected to Congress told a cheering crowd of Muslims they should remain steadfast in their faith and push for justice. (read the rest)

If this article is accurate, Ellison is flat out delusional.

According to the story, Ellison addressed a Muslim conference in Detroit by saying, "Muslims, you're up to bat right now [...] How do you know that you were not brought right here to this place to learn how to make this world better?"

Aside from Ellison's ironic and ridiculously in-apt use of a baseball metaphor in this speech, this comment seems halfway reasonable.

But according to the reporter, paraphrasing Ellison, the Congressman-elect also said that "Muslims can help teach America about justice and equal protection."

That's preposterous. If the reporter's paraphrase is even close to being on target, then Ellison's perception of reality and/or veracity is way, WAY off. As the Middle East has shown for years and years now, Muslims with a persecution complex have nothing to teach anyone, anywhere, about justice or equal protection.

He's trying to manufacture Muslim's supposed "plight" into the Next Great Civil Rights Cause. That's mendacity with a capital M.

Global Warming Claims First Inhabited Island (Again)

Just in time for Christmas, the Indian island of Lohachara has been baptized into the climate change religion.

According to the environmental editor at the Independent (UK), which published the fast-breaking news today (12/24/06), Lohachara has disappeared beneath the waves--thanks to global warming, he presumes:

Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island

For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas. Environment Editor Geoffrey Lean reports

Published: 24 December 2006

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true. (read the rest here)

How Mr. Lean knows beyond the faintest doubt that the rising waters are "caused by global warming" he never explains. Nonetheless, the island is now submerged, and that's a real-life disaster.

Yet so is the journalism. The problem is, Calcutta's Telegraph published a story on Lohachara's submersion on October 30 of this year. Mr. Lean is at least some two-months late, which wouldn't be so bad if he came out with it up front and didn't represent it as breaking news. It also wouldn't be so bad if, as Kolkata Newsline reported (also on October 30), the deluge of Lohachara occurred 22 years ago.

But Lean's agenda is to build the hype for climate change, not report the news.

And unlike Mr. Lean's piece, neither the Telegraph's nor the Newsline's articles claim special knowledge about the cause of the island's submersion. Climate change comes up, as well it should, but so do other ideas. They don't take global warming as dogma. A good illustration is the concluding section of the Telegraph artilce, entitled "Underlying truth":

From the very beginning, the islands have been a subsiding delta. A 1962 record with the West Bengal government — the first working plan of the department of forests — says fragments of ‘ceriops’, a mangrove variety, were found below the sea level during excavation around George’s Dock in Calcutta. “But the recent changes in sea level seem more severe,” Hazra warns.

The more literate islanders are worried that no national policy safeguards the envirogees. “What do the new National Disaster Management Policy and the West Bengal government’s disaster management department have for people facing environmental disasters like these,” asks Jateswar Panda, among the few residents of the Sundarbans who went to college.

The country’s natural disaster management revolves around instant calamities like earthquakes, landslides, flash floods and, more recently, drought. “What about slow onset disasters like arsenic or vanishing islands,” he exclaims.

According to some estimates, at least one lakh people will have to be evacuated from the 12 threatened inner estuary islands of the Sundarbans in the next decade if the present rate of submergence continues. The scientists feel it would be wise to plan a gradual shift to safer places like the adjoining North and South 24-Parganas districts rather than wait for a demographic disaster to happen.

The West Bengal government says the JU study is insufficient to prove climate change. Says Atanu Raha, director of the Sunderban Biosphere Reserve, “Accretion and erosion are natural phenomena.

Things like a rise in temperature or an increase in sea level have to be studied over hundreds of years. A 30-year study is not enough to come to a conclusion that the climate is changing.”

Raha, who has studied satellite images of the last 20 years, says just as some islands have gone down in the sea, vast land areas like Thakuran char and New Island have emerged out of the sea because of silt deposits.

Read the whole Telegraph article here.

See Tim Blair's blog on this subject here.

Liberal Mendacity

I've been thinking about the mendacity of Democratic politicians for a long time -- their mendacious behavior flat drove me away from the party.

Finally, someone else mentions it in connection with the liberal press. See Alicia Colon's excellent article in the NY Sun:

The Mendacity Of the Liberal Press

The first time I heard the word "mendacity" was in the film "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." I loved the way Burl Ives's character spits out the word as something vile and unacceptable.

Unfortunately, we live in a society where untruthfulness is routinely accepted and even mandated by politicians, union leaders, and members of the press. New York is the headquarters of the biggest producer of mendacity, the New York Times. Fortunately, it's also the home of the antidote, Lucianne.com.

I pity the Americans who do not have the computer expertise to access the exposés of lies of corrupt politicians and gullible television anchors, biased newspaper headlines, and anything from the Associated Press. If it were not for the Internet and Lucianne Goldberg's Web news forum, I would never learn the truth behind the Times headlines as pitched by the Drudge Report.

Read the rest...

"For Warophobes" II (a clarification)

I got this sizzling response to my original "Warophobes" post.

Hey Bismarck [I guess he thinks I love war],

Learn to frame a syllogism. You’re begging the question. It's obvious that you've never served in the military, and are just another repressed gay chicken-hawk. I know the big mean terrorist have scared you, but try and act like a man anyway – ok? - anonymous

I know that's you, Senator Kennedy! You got me! Your non sequitur certainly proves that I am a "gay chicken-hawk."

But seriously, my hunch is that Mr. Anonymous missed a day or two in his logic class.

In addition to the "repressed gay chicken-hawk" non sequitur is the equally fallacious and cliched claim that those who have not served in the military have no basis for arguing in favor of military action. That claim is an example of the disingenuous, inconsistent "ethics" that views military service in purely emotional terms. So, one who has never been a firefighter has no ethical authority to call the fire department, is that it?

Regardless, I am not trying to prove the existence of warophobes. Their existence is self-evident. But for the record, I'll give the syllogism Mr. Anonymous thought he detected missing:

A) Congress members who work against U.S. efforts to achieve victory can be called "warophobes."
B) Some Congress members are working against efforts to achieve victory in Iraq.
C) Some Congress members can be called warophobes.

See? No questions begged.

My hunch is that the "warophobes" term is what offended Mr. A. I guess I can see why. It's true I adapted it from terms like "homophobes" and "xenophobes," and I did, I confess, intend it pejoratively.

But I've miscommunicated to Mr. A. For the sake of clarity, let's refine the point.

First, in calling certain Congress members warophobes, I don't mean they or anyone ought to love war. No one should love war. I sure don't.

Second, I don't even think they hate or fear war itself, necessarily. It's that they hate the war in Iraq because they fear President Bush's success. As a result, these Congress members have put themselves in the reprehensible, disgraceful position of fearing and/or hating the idea of U.S. victory. Their actions and rhetoric suggest that they prefer losing the war to winning it, whatever the cost may end up being.

Maybe a better term would be victoryophobes. How about defeatophiles?

Mr. A, go ahead and hate war. But hate defeat even more.

And thanks for being helpful, even if it was unintentional.

CDC Getting (Climate Change) Religion

The National Environmental Health Conference just ended in Atlanta. I had the chance to attend a few sessions and heard Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) address the conference of some 1500. I heard an awful lot of predictable Democratic Party gloating (re: the last elections) and much worse, given that it's coming from the CDC, a troubling lack of critical thinking when it comes to global climate change.

It was amazing and worrisome to see such an educated, smart group of people sit there passively absorbing projections of looming catastrophe with little more than a nod of the head. There's a terrible pressure to conform to the current thinking and a serious intolerance of any sort of dissent.

In my case, my "dissent" is not an argument against the conclusions. I'm arguing against the means by which they are being reached.

I have seen first-hand the evidence used to demonstrate climate change drastically misrepresented, while contrary evidence is either dismissed out of hand or scoffed at as "biased"--by many of the same public health professionals who, truth be told, have an unacknowledged stake in fomenting an anti-global-climate-change "industry" of grants and government programs. They also have their professional reputations at stake. Not to sound like a conspiracy nut, but let's be critical-minded here: if they don't have a vested interest in creating (and perpetuating) concern about global climate change, who does?

While a case can be made that CDC and the rest of the US government must be prepared for the worst-case regarding global warming, we have to be careful. Millions and millions of tax dollars are going to be spent in preparing for the worst-possible scenario. I'm not an expert on the science, and most scientists, according to what I've seen, agree that warming is happening. But evidence exists that the worst-possible scenario is less than likely.

Preparedness is certainly wise; misdirecting millions of dollars in pursuit of what MAY be hobby-horse hysterics, however, is not. Let's make sure we get it right. To do that, these scientists must honestly consider evidence that doesn't suit their pre-drawn conclusions. To do otherwise is to ignore scientific method.

When I bring this up, I'm told either that "well, the Director believes it and that's good enough for me," or they demand the counter evidence, as if I'm arguing that climate change isn't happening. This is a transparent bit of changing the argument, and it's intellectually dishonest.

Is it too much to ask scientists to stick to scientific method?

Dear Max: Good decision.

I don't where I've been (stuck at a conference for two days), but I heard this news tonight on Politics1.com:

Politics

FRIDAY NEWS UPDATE.
Former US Senator and disabled
Vietnam War hero Max Cleland (D-GA) said Thursday he will not seek a rematch in 2008 against US Senator Saxby Chambliss (R), who defeated him in 2002. Many leading Dems had urged Cleland to run ... COMMENTS (398)

Cleland has made a fool of himself since his loss, sorry to say. This is a good decision.

(http://politics1.com/blog-1206.htm#1201)

Let the Free Market Change Higher Education

Here we are well into the college application season, and trips to the mailbox have become anxiety-drenched. Sure, it’s exciting—and the arrival of that fat acceptance envelope from some Ivy League school will be a dream-come-true for many.

What many of those admission letters don’t say is that they are also tickets to extended left-wing conventions disguised as education. True, a number of professors, administrators, discussion-board contributors, and bloggers continue loudly to deny it. Some even claim that recent interest in this issue—spearheaded by David Horowitz and Frontpage Magazine—only proves that the REAL conspiracy is to “silence” dissent.

But the truth about faculty abuses continues to spread: too many faculty at American institutions of higher education regularly use classrooms—and hiring committees—to propagate far-left ideology, and they routinely try to discredit conservative/traditional thought and opinion.

As a former professor myself—even at the decidedly humble Christian institution in the South where I once taught—I have witnessed both. I have also been ostracized for questioning liberal political dogma. Call it “political harassment.”

How did our institutions, particularly our “elite” schools, get this way? The more relevant question is, how do they stay this way? Two reasons jump to mind.The first is that many on and beyond the academic left honestly do not perceive their views as out of the mainstream. For some, it is true, radical-ness is a source of identity, one they wear like a graying (or thinning) ponytail or drive like a bumper-stickered old Volvo. Radical-ness marks their supposed non-conformity and their status as an “intellectual.” And many have the old "60s-generation" thing going and just can't let go of it.

But even the well-intentioned others would be reluctant even to grant that they’re much left-of-center. If they acknowledge being out of the mainstream at all, it’s always with the self-congratulatory rationale that goes something like this: “Civil rights were once ‘out of the mainstream,’ too.”

Fear of the Mainstream

Unfortunately, such reductive thinking leads to utterly irrational fear. When they encounter the actual mainstream, the left sees swastikas and burning crosses. When they hear some express faith in God, they hear fire-and-brimstone preachers. Or the "gullible" audience of a TV evangelist. They react not to real people, but to the caricatures they have come to fear about conservatives and their ideas. For them, conservatism equals or invariably leads to oppression. Conservatives are presumed guilty of bigotry until proven innocent. Indeed, for many, virtually any belief system more conservative or traditional than their own looks like “right-wing (or religious) extremism”—which they equate with ignorance.

To be fair, stamping out ignorance is the natural trade of the academic. Many of the genuinely good people I’ve worked with have expressed a variation of the same idea: If we could just educate and enlighten “those rednecks” (that is, their conservative students), this place (our school, their classes, the country, etc.) would be so much better. If we teach them and they still don’t get it, well then, they’re hopelessly deluded, blind, and potentially evil.

Sounds a lot like left-wing analyses of the 2004 election and anyone who raises the slightest question about Al Gore's Global Warming Death Knell: "Those &%$^*@# rubes just don’t get it! How could they be so stupid?"

The other reason our colleges and universities continue down this road is far more simple: We put up with it. Not only that, we perpetuate it.

Can regular people change these institutions? Or at least mitigate their powerful influence on our culture? You bet. Here’s how.

Let the free market do its work, and be faithful about participating in it. The market has a chance to change higher education now perhaps more than any other time in recent history because today’s institutions are stretched. It’s true that elite universities and colleges are somewhat insulated from market forces by enormous endowments. Witness Yale’s utter stonewall after admitting former Taliban spokesman Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi. Even so, conservatives and moderates perpetuate and enable the power and destructive radicalism of such institutions by attending these schools in the first place, and by pursuing and privileging their graduates in the second.

Sellers and Buyers

If, for the sake of the argument, we can think of higher education as a “product,” we have to ask ourselves, why do we keep applying for the opportunity to buy something our objective reasoning tells us we don’t want?

Parents and students routinely spend life savings or run up enormous debt (or both) to attend these places. In doing so, they support the elite academy as it is. Certainly something can be said for changing a system from within. Gain admission, agitate, effect change. That’s tried and true leftist methodology. But university administrations and faculty know that they will still be on campus long after most students are long gone. So unless an enormous group of parents and outstanding conservative/moderate students organize and apply en masse to targeted institutions, for an extended period of time, this approach is unlikely ever to be unsuccessful. Not to mention expensive.

Much more can be said by the same parents and students voting with their tuition money—namely, by sending it elsewhere.Why don’t we do so already? Why on earth would a parent send a child to be taught by a faculty that explicitly, sometimes spitefully, undermines many of the beneficial values the child has been taught? I don’t just mean just religious beliefs here—I’m talking about such other fundamentals as what ideas like family, marriage, good, evil, loyalty, love, hate and even America mean.

Let’s consider a couple of reasons. First, there’s legacy: “My Dad went there, and so did my grandmother….” “Legacies,” as they are called, have a generational stake in the place. I wasn’t a legacy student myself, but far be it from me to argue against family tradition. But what about the students, perhaps the first- or second-generation college students in their families, who scramble to assemble admissions and financial aid applications in the hopes of being deemed worthy of attending? Aside from hopes of improving the family pedigree, there’s the market-based reason: obviously, elite schools—the Ivies, along with their non-Ivy brethren (Duke, Stanford, NYU, etc.) and even a few publics, enjoy high-end marketplace esteem.And this carries into the culture at large. The quickest way for a screenwriter to establish a character’s high-powered qualifications? Have another character mention that X went to Harvard. As in other areas of commerce—and higher education is a kind of commerce, let there be no doubt—we have bought into the “branding” concept as much as we ever did with our Nikes and Rolexes.

"Downstream" schools pay special homage to the elites through their hiring committees. Public flagship universities as well as second and third-tier institutions know, or believe, that they become more attractive to parents, students, each other, and potential endowers when they line their faculty rosters with Ivy. While in some places an elite pedigree might actually hurt the candidate, these instances are not the norm.

In short, the degree, usually for the better, gets one noticed because it is shorthand for all things good. It means the holder is “in,” that he or she has passed a certain muster. What Skull and Bones is for Yale, Yale and its brethren are for the rest of the country.

None of this is news, and so, understandably, even conservative students want to buy a piece of this prestige for themselves. They want to align themselves with the school’s status and to develop the fraternal bonds (not to mention the valuable alumni network) that go along with it. So they endure the disdain and mistreatment and the assaults on their values—even public reprimands in the classroom—because they perceive that the degree itself, that line on the résumé, furnishes them something they (or their parents, at least) think worth the price.If a Tree Falls in the Forest…But this arrangement is not inevitable. The value of elite degrees, at least in terms of the market, is in part a function of perception and consent. That is, they mean what they mean in our culture because we as a society agree that they do. We all play along. Like a twenty dollar bill, a particular diploma has almost no intrinsic value—unless the person who has it and the person who wants it agree on a value.

Of course, some diplomas really are better because the educations they represent are better. My point, however, is that the market value of such diplomas—their greater worth as compared to others—is not inscribed on a stone tablet somewhere deep below Cambridge or New Haven or Palo Alto. Rather, it floats on a long-established reputation for superiority. Moreover, this perception has been carefully crafted by these institutions’ marketing departments, alumnae, and—and again, don’t forget our own complicity—by the culture.

And for proof of their worth, we look at our leaders. Unsurprisingly, quite a few graduated from elite schools: both the President and the recent President-reject, Senator Kerry, for instance, are Yale graduates. We have been told—and we have told ourselves—that the people at these elite places are “better” (i.e., better educated, better suited to lead us, etc.) so often that we now believe it as if it were an unchangeable fact.But we know that the facts have changed. In good ways and bad, these are not the same schools they were when the ivy was planted.

People who care not just about education, but about our country, must vote with their tuition dollars. Our culture’s failure to understand our ability to influence our institutions is beginning to have real costs.

To be fair, probably all but the most militantly tolerant, power-distrusting, zealously anti-Western Civilization, politically correct-or-else multiculturalists, at least those I’ve known personally, have good intentions. They want to empower the powerless and to live in a theoretically coherent, just (read “socially and economically reallocated”), peaceful and just (read “weakened America”) world. They want everyone to play nicely.Unfortunately, they have no realistic clue how to make it so. To be sure, none of their academic conferences or journals will ever be able to show them how. To perfect the world, they can think of little beyond starting various far-left-wing incubators in the guise of “[Fill-in-the-blank] Studies” programs. That, and to tear at the foundations of the society in which they find themselves—no matter what it costs the rest of us.

Until Horowitz and his group came along, most have tended to laugh off radical professors as clueless “professor-types,” amusing and (mostly) harmless, and to get on with their lives. We tell ourselves that the academy isn’t the “real world” and doesn’t matter. It’s like the Las Vegas commercial: what happens in college, we tell ourselves, stays in college.

Nonsense. Consider our K-12 schools’ fixation on self esteem and tolerance as the only ultimate values. Consider the elites’ willingness to flirt with socialism and communism—even treason—in the name of mindless open-mindedness. This example and many others demonstrate that the continued patronizing of elite schools, both by students and by hiring committees, has already cost the U.S. Big time. To continue on as we have, blindly trusting or blithely laughing off our institutions, we will have to distrust or dismiss our own perception that many of these places have gone screwy.

Much worse, we will be abdicating our responsibility and judgment in educating our kids. What a terrible injustice to those who will come after us. Our children, indeed our whole society, will suffer from our weakness and from the influence of the well-intentioned, wrongheaded people we continue to support even as we complain about their thinking.

I’m not saying don’t send your kids to college. I’m saying, send them somewhere else.

The people who list the headlines really ought to reconsider which ones they pair together. These from Reuters this AM:

1) Peace is Possible: Caritas Internationalis Supports International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People on 29 November

2) Gaza Strip: Two Italian Red Cross delegates abducted

Wow! Who knew that Caritas Internationalis supports abductions?

AP Omits Key Details About Nuclear Smuggler

How interesting. Note the small detail the AP leaves out in the story about a potential terrorist:

Airport Arrest Turns Up Nuclear Info

Nov 16 9:36 AM US/Eastern

A man was arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after officials say they found him carrying more than $78,000 in cash and a laptop computer containing information about nuclear materials and cyanide.

Sisayehiticha Dinssa, an unemployed U.S. citizen, was arrested Tuesday after a dog caught the scent of narcotics on cash he was carrying, according to an affidavit filed in court.

When agents asked him if he had any cash to declare, he said he had $18,000, authorities said. But when agents checked his luggage, they found an additional $59,000. When they scrolled through his laptop, they said they found the
mysterious files.

At a court hearing Wednesday, Dinssa was ordered held in custody until at least until Monday at the request of prosecutors.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Leonid Feller argued Dinssa was a potential risk to the community and federal agents want to get a warrant to search his computer more thoroughly, The Detroit News reported Thursday. U.S. Magistrate Donald Scheer approved Feller's request to detain him.

Dinssa, who is from Dallas, arrived in Detroit from by way of Amsterdam and was headed for Phoenix, Feller said. He is charged with concealing more than $10,000 in his luggage, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, the Detroit Free Press reported.

A message seeking comment was left Thursday with his lawyer, Leroy Soles.

[see the original here]

Sounds like great coverage of a possible national security matter, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, it isn't. Here's the relevant section of the same story from AP's source, the Detroit Free Press (which for some reason doesn't list the story as national news):

A 34-year-old Dallas man was arrested at Detroit Metro Airport on Tuesday, carrying $78,883 in cash and a laptop computer containing mysterious files about cyanide and nuclear materials.

Authorities said Sisayehiticha Dinssa, a U.S. citizen who was born in Ethiopia, was arrested after getting off an airline flight from Amsterdam. They said he had spent four months in Nigeria on unspecified business.

Something funny going on here. Clearly, and mysteriously, AP neglects to mention at least two huge points:

1. Mr. Dinssa was born in Ethiopia.
2. He was in Nigeria for four months on "unspecified business."

Isn't it nice that AP assures us first that he is a U.S. citizen -- as if that means something. The trouble is, AP doesn't just leave out the info about Mr. Dinssa being born in Ethiopia and spending an extended length of time in Nigeria -- they cut it out. Perhaps it doesn't mean anything that he was born in Ethiopia, but why conceal the facts?

Michelle Malkin has more here.

Food for Thought: Diversity's Unacknowledged Costs

Thomas Sowell wrote an interesting piece in OpinionJournal.com today. Not sure what all of the ramifications are, either for the war in Iraq or for the usual way "diversity" gets slopped around in our culture as if it's an unquestionable value. But here it is:

Diversity's Oppressions: Why Iraq has proven to be so hard to pacify.

BY THOMAS SOWELL

Monday, October 30, 2006 12:01 a.m.

Iraq is not the first war with ugly surprises and bloody setbacks. Even World War II, idealized in retrospect as it never was at the time--the war of "the greatest generation"--had a long series of disasters for Americans before victory was finally achieved.

The war began for Americans with the disaster at Pearl Harbor, followed by the tragic horror of the Bataan death march, the debacle at the Kasserine Pass and, even on the eve of victory, being caught completely by surprise by a devastating German counterattack that almost succeeded at the Battle of the Bulge.

Other wars--our own and other nations'--have likewise been full of nasty surprises and mistakes that led to bloodbaths. Nevertheless, the Iraq war has some special lessons for our time, lessons that both the left and the right need to acknowledge, whether or not they will.

What is it that has made Iraq so hard to pacify, even after a swift and decisive military victory? In one word: diversity.
That word has become a sacred mantra, endlessly repeated for years on end, without a speck of evidence being asked for or given to verify the wonderful benefits it is assumed to produce.

Worse yet, Iraq is only the latest in a long series of catastrophes growing out of diversity. These include "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan, the million lives destroyed in intercommunal violence when India became independent in 1947 and the even larger number of Armenians slaughtered by Turks during World War I.
Despite much gushing about how we should "celebrate diversity," America's great achievement has not been in having diversity but in taming its dangers that have run amok in many other countries. Americans have by no means escaped diversity's oppressions and violence, but we have reined them in. [...]

Amish Tragedy

Dear Swine,

Sorry about your baby daughter. All would have grieved for and with you. Now you've separated yourself from her forever.

I hope there is a hell. Burn.

And to the rest:

If you're going to kill yourself, have some guts and kill JUST yourself.

Sean Penn's Political Science

Eleanor Ringel Gillespie's review of Sean Penn's "All the King's Men" in the usually sad Atlanta Journal-Constitution takes Penn and his performance out to the woodshed. And whacks the hell out of them.

It also unwittingly highlights a larger truth about Penn and his Bush-is-Evil kind. Gillespie catches it perfectly when she writes, "This isn't acting. It's caricature. Instead of Willie Stark, we get Foghorn Leghorn."

Penn plays Willie Stark, but what he is really acting out is his one-dimensional, Foghorn-Leghorn understanding of southern whites. And tellingly, it sounds a lot like his and other liberals' cartoonish ideas about George Bush and Karl Rove. The opening scene, Gillespie tells us, "introduces us to a Willie already in full monster mode — ruthless, dealing dirty and determined to get his way, no matter what, or who, it takes."

Add to this the arrogant accusation that the President is an "idiot," and voila--we have a fair picture of the ideas we hear about Mr. Bush from the likes of Penn, George Clooney, Ted Kennedy, and--in the U.N. just this week--Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The problem is, this idea muddies their thinking and makes them think people like Chavez and Fidel Castro are their "brothers," as actor Danny Glover put it. As Gillespie continues, what she writes about the film's bad story telling identifies why the Bush-bashers seem so thick-headed. After starting with Willie in "full monster mode," she writes, "the movie travels back to five years earlier," and only then do we see Willie in a more favorable light. She continues: "But it's too late. Our head is already too full of what he becomes to take Willie as he once was. This crucial misstep happens at the very start."

I have a friend who began his personal understanding of Bush's "story"--his presidency--the same way. I noticed it just after 9-11. My friend wondered aloud how "Bush and his machine" would "use" what happened to their advantage. My friend, like Penn and many others, began by seeing Bush in "full monster mode." After all, they supposed, Bush had "stolen" the 2000 election. Having framed the President's "story" that way in his mind, he and much of the hostile, often irrational Left have never been able to see anything but this story.

It's too bad. Our countrymen and women are wasting a lot of brain power on trying to see a monster that fits their pre-conceived narrative. They are like the person who sees a ghost because he went to the graveyard expecting (or afraid) to.

But we're not just talking about harmless tricks the mind plays on itself. As I told my friend just after 9-11, my blood boiling, this is not the time for people like him (or Penn, or Chavez, or Chomsky, or....) to prove how smart they are, how much smarter they are than the rest of us because they are thinking "critically," how too smart they are to be "fooled" by the schemes of the "Republican machine." We needed to pull together. How? By trying hard to believe the best about our country. By resisting the cheap gratification and self-congratulations of the pseudo-intellectual's favorite poses: distrust and cynicism. Sure, be skeptical, but not of everything.

And now, back to our movie...

For Warophobes, It's All About Them

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.--John Stuart Mill

Mill's quote in the context of the War on Terror raises an interesting question: Are the Iraq Warophobes more interested in protecting their own safety than anything else?

The answer hardly needs explaining, particularly in the case of Kennedy-Reid-Pelosi-Murtha-Durbin & Company. If the Republican President's political survival (and conversely their own) weren't tied so closely to the war, one wonders, could they manage to muster at least a show of support?

["But - but - if his own political fortunes weren't at stake," KRPMD&C would shout, "Bush would do the right thing and pull out!" Perhaps, but then again, he isn't a candidate in 2008. Topic for another post: Maybe the two-term limit rule should be revisited because it makes the second-term president unaccountable and, often, less effective. Americans deserve better.]

As for the rest of the mush-brained masses, Mill's point about self-preservation puts their protests in a sickening light. The Curse of the Me-Generation strikes again.

From the Anchoress in March of this year:

Mockery more effective than reason

I see, thanks to Michelle Malkin that conservative women are officially fighting back in addressing The Vagina Monologues.
Well…have at it, if you must, ladies, and God’s best to you. But I’m convinced that to address that play or Eve Ensler with anything approximating seriousness and deliberation is to give the whole Vagina Endeavor a patina of credibility and seriousness it simply does not deserve.
Eve Ensler’s foul-mouthed, talking, raspberry-blowing,”goodraping,” hiccupping, whining, slobbering, sloppy drunken vagina of a play really, really deserves nothing but your scorn and your cheerful, energetic mockery.
Someday, I’d like to organize a group of conservative women to go see a performance of The Vagina Monologues. We would go equipped with kazoos, and every time a vagina spoke, we would kazoo a sad or happy tune, depending on the vagina’s story.
Because whenever I think of Eve Ensler’s Talking Vaginas, all I hear are…kazoos! Tootoootoooot! Bahtooot! Bahtoot!
Breeders Infected with FeedersMaxed Out MamaMyra Bradwell and Eve Ensler’s Stomach

Dear Cynthia McKinney: Remember 1998?

Watch the apology here.

I live in McKinney's district, which is generally east of Atlanta. She's an embarrassment, and I thought so before now. She doesn't play the "race card"; for her, it's the whole game.
Her position in all of this has been preposterous. And then she adds to her absurdity by describing his apprehending her as inappropriate touching--as if to imply he molested her.

Perhaps even more ridiculous: McKinney seems to have forgetten that, in July 1998 (she was in office back then), a gunman did in fact enter the Capitol and kill two officers.

In the present incident, she seems to have given the Capitol Police all the regard she might give to mall security guards or card-checkers at Sam's Club or Costco. But these were real police officers with real authority and real responsibilty to protect the people in that building. What did she expect? For them to salute and blow her kisses?

The sad truth is that she is locked into habitual ways of interpreting and portraying white people, men in particular, as the enemy. If she weren't, perhaps this wouldn't have happened. (Then again, she might not be in office, either. She has a following here, and a big one, because MANY people are stuck in that view.)

While articulate and passionate, McKinney clings to the issues that drove her to power in the first place. It's in her interest to portray these issues as if they're still fresh. It lets her imagine, and construct the illusion, that she's doing cutting-edge work.

I know that racial incidents really do happen. But as Vincent noted at USA Today's On Deadline, McKinney's accusations dilute and distract from real racial issues.

The irony in this case is that it's McKinney who is the real racist here.

Inheritance and Legacy

Hugh Hewitt, writing about his book tour in a March 30 post, mentions in passing that "The prospect of Democrats in control in time of war means a replay of the Vietnam War endgame."

He's right, and of course he's not the only one to give reasons why the US must not walk away in Iraq. Let's begin with the usual: 1) to help make the U.S. more secure and 2) to help the Iraqis and avoid civil war there if we can.

But there's another reason, a serious one. It's that we don't want to hand our youngest citizens what the baby boomers handed us: crippling self doubt about our country.

Oh yes, we post-boomers have all had our brains washed to think that learning to be suspicious about the U.S.--its history, its motives, its accomplishments--is the same as "critical thinking," that genuinely valuable liberal arts skill. "We won't get fooled again," we tell ourselves.

Unfortunately, all we've received is this suspicion. We haven't received the national myth, the positive image of America, intact. All the suspiciousness we've been taught was not presented within a context that might achieve a truly balanced perception. Instead, the idea of patriotism was mocked and declared untenable if not downright naive.

The problem is what I call the "Indestructible Virtue Fantasy" (more on this another time, by which point I hope to think of a better term for it). Liberal educators and other influential people imagine that when they attack tradition or traditional values, they're merely tearing away at some phony, worthless practice. All the while they fantasize that the virtues of our culture, the one's of which they so ostentatiously approve, will survive their assaults, no matter how violent.

Yet anyone who has ever seen or been a gifted child constantly criticized or reprimanded, sometimes sharply, by a well-intentioned parent or coach knows this behavior. The parent imagines they are only perfecting the gift while sculpting away the extraneous. But they don't wind up with a perfect kid; they wind up with an insecure and self-persecuting kid. The tragedy is, they often end up undermining or distorting the very thing they were trying to perfect.

This situation has an analogy on the political left. Those liberal educators and influential others seem bent on sculpting a perfect America by violently chipping away any material they find inconvenient or uncomfortable. And they call this chipping "dissent" and vigorously (and lamely) defend, in their self-aggrandizing way, as the very essence of patriotism.

In this case, too many try to perfect the gift, the America they imagine might or should be, by savaging the allegedly distorted myth of America, America the Good -- the America emblemized by the Statue of Liberty, the one that saved Europe in WWI, the one that saved the world in WWII.

Is this image a fiction? Yes, partly. In terms of sterile facts it is not the full truth. But myth is not, by definition, a compendium of sterile facts. Myth captures a larger truth through broadstrokes; it is impressionistic, more coherent or even more beautiful when beheld at a distance. But this image is a not a contemptible illusion just because it must be viewed a few steps back. What it conveys is a broad truth, but it is a truth nonetheless. And this truth is not diminished because one standing up close is unable to see it all, or because, at extremely close range, he sees flaws in the brushstrokes.

What they've really delivered us is another, opposite, perhaps even more distorted myth: America the Horrible. There's no "balance," but rather toxic imbalance.

Writing on immigration and assimiliation, Peggy Noonan makes a similar point (much more elegantly) in March 30's WSJ. Here's the second half:

What this all got me thinking about, the next day, was . . . immigration. I know that seems a lurch, but there's a part of the debate that isn't sufficiently noted. There are a variety of things driving American anxiety about illegal immigration and we all know them--economic arguments, the danger of porous borders in the age of terrorism, with anyone able to come in.
But there's another thing. And it's not fear about "them." It's anxiety about us.

It's the broad public knowledge, or intuition, in America, that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don't do that, you'll lose it all.

We used to do it. We loved our country with full-throated love, we had no ambivalence. We had pride and appreciation. We were a free country. We communicated our pride and delight in this in a million ways--in our schools, our movies, our popular songs, our newspapers. It was just there, in the air. Immigrants breathed it in. That's how the last great wave of immigrants, the European wave of 1880-1920, was turned into a great wave of Americans.

We are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically now. We are assimilating them culturally. Within a generation their children speak Valley Girl on cell phones. "So I'm like 'no," and he's all 'yeah,' and I'm like, 'In your dreams.' " Whether their parents are from Trinidad, Bosnia, Lebanon or Chile, their children, once Americans, know the same music, the same references, watch the same shows. And to a degree and in a way it will hold them together. But not forever and not in a crunch.

So far we are assimilating our immigrants economically, too. They come here and work. Good.

But we are not communicating love of country. We are not giving them the great legend of our country. We are losing that great legend.

What is the legend, the myth? That God made this a special place. That they're joining something special. That the streets are paved with more than gold--they're paved with the greatest thoughts man ever had, the greatest decisions he ever made, about how to live. We have free thought, free speech, freedom of worship. Look at the literature of the Republic: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist papers. Look at the great rich history, the courage and sacrifice, the house-raisings, the stubbornness. The Puritans, the Indians, the City on a Hill.

The genius cluster--Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, Franklin, all the rest--that came along at the exact same moment to lead us. And then Washington, a great man in the greatest way, not in unearned gifts well used (i.e., a high IQ followed by high attainment) but in character, in moral nature effortfully developed. How did that happen? How did we get so lucky? (I once asked a great historian if he had thoughts on this, and he nodded. He said he had come to believe it was "providential.")

We fought a war to free slaves. We sent millions of white men to battle and destroyed a portion of our nation to free millions of black men. What kind of nation does this? We went to Europe, fought, died and won, and then taxed ourselves to save our enemies with the Marshall Plan. What kind of nation does this? Soviet communism stalked the world and we were the ones who steeled ourselves and taxed ourselves to stop it. Again: What kind of nation does this?
Only a very great one. Maybe the greatest of all.

Do we teach our immigrants that this is what they're joining? That this is the tradition they will now continue, and uphold?

Do we, today, act as if this is such a special place? No, not always, not even often. American exceptionalism is so yesterday. We don't want to be impolite. We don't want to offend. We don't want to seem narrow. In the age of globalism, honest patriotism seems like a faux pas.

And yet what is true of people is probably true of nations: if you don't have a well-grounded respect for yourself, you won't long sustain a well-grounded respect for others.

Because we do not communicate to our immigrants, legal and illegal, that they have joined something special, some of them, understandably, get the impression they've joined not a great enterprise but a big box store. A big box store on the highway where you can get anything cheap. It's a good place. But it has no legends, no meaning, and it imparts no spirit.

Who is at fault? Those of us who let the myth die, or let it change, or refused to let it be told. The politically correct nitwit teaching the seventh-grade history class who decides the impressionable young minds before him need to be informed, as their first serious history lesson, that the Founders were hypocrites, the Bill of Rights nothing new and imperfect in any case, that the Indians were victims of genocide, that Lincoln was a clinically depressed homosexual who compensated for the storms within by creating storms without . . .

You can turn any history into mud. You can turn great men and women into mud too, if you want to.

And it's not just the nitwits, wherever they are, in the schools, the academy, the media, though they're all harmful enough. It's also the people who mean to be honestly and legitimately critical, to provide a new look at the old text. They're not noticing that the old text--the legend, the myth--isn't being taught anymore. Only the commentary is. But if all the commentary is doubting and critical, how will our kids know what to love and revere? How will they know how to balance criticism if they've never heard the positive side of the argument?

Those who teach, and who think for a living about American history, need to be told: Keep the text, teach the text, and only then, if you must, deconstruct the text.

When you don't love something you lose it. If we do not teach new Americans to love their country, and not for braying or nationalistic reasons but for reasons of honest and thoughtful appreciation, and gratitude, for a history that is something new in the long story of man, then we will begin to lose it. That Medal of Honor winner, Leo Thorsness, who couldn't quite find the words--he only found it hard to put everything into words because he knew the story, the legend, and knew it so well. Only then do you become "emotional about it." Only then are you truly American.

Hispansylvania - the 51st state?

Rossputin suggests that claims about a “cultural reconquest” may be a tipping point in opinion on immigration. Illegal immigration makes that issue even more urgent.

According to most estimates, the number of illegal aliens in the U.S. is at least 11,000,000.

That's a lot. Hard to imagine.

For perspective, here's a list of the populations for the seven most populous U.S. states:

California - 35,484,453
Texas - 22,118,509
New York - 19,190,115
Florida - 17,019,068
Illinois - 12,653,544
Pennsylvania - 12,365,455
Ohio - 11,435,798
(source: http://geography.about.com/cs/censuspopulation1/a/2003estimates.htm)

In other words, the number of illegal immigrants, put all together, would make up at least the seventh or eighth largest state in the union. That's if the 11,000,000 is accurate, and it probably isn't.

Were the U.S. to adopt the Senate's recent bill, which proposes allowing illegals already in the country the opportunity to "earn" citizenship--while doing next to nothing to stop more from coming in--we would in effect be admitting a 51st state, one larger than at least 43 existing states, into the U.S.

And this new state would be made up entirely of people who began their lives in the U.S. by flouting its laws, and many of whom refuse to assimilate. How much longer until something is done to curb illegal immigration? How many more Ohio's do we want to add?

The International Criminal Court

A friend sent me the article below, posted at the Global Policy Forum. I was sorry to see that it was immersed in some really skewed logic:

As the International Criminal Court came into being on July 1, 2002, ratified by 90 nations, the United States took many steps to undercut it, complaining that the new court would subject US nationals to politically-motivated international justice. The US insisted that the Security Council adopt an omnibus resolution exempting all UN peacekeepers from the jurisdiction of the Court or, at least, that each new renewal of peacekeeping operations would include an exemption provision. Under threat of a US veto of all UN peacekeeping missions, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1422 in July 2002, granting Washington a twelve-month blanket immunity from the ICC. The US again used its veto power and successfully renewed its immunity arrangement a year later. However, with widespread outrage over US treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Washington was unable to garner support for further exemption agreements in 2004. Since then, the US has not openly lobbied for any yearly provisions, but makes its position clear by routinely placing its opposition on the agenda and seeking ad-hoc immunity.

US unilateralism provokes strong opposition from most other nations. Security Council members hold that the Council should not be used to override international treaties and they expressed shock that the US would be willing to wreck UN peacekeeping missions in order to demonstrate its objections to the Court. By forcing the Security Council to arbitrarily defer prosecutions, the United States is striving to do exactly what it seemingly denounced: it is creating a multi-tiered standard of justice. But the battle has wider significance than the jurisdiction of the ICC alone. It may prove a defining moment in the relations between the superpower and the rest of the international community, creating hostility and counter-alliances to challenge the domination of the US hegemon. ("The ICC in the Security Council"; my italics).

This misrepresentation of the situation notes that the US wants exemption for “all UN peacekeepers” and then contradicts itself by accusing the US of trying to create a “multi-tiered standard of justice.” You get the implication, of course: The US wants one standard for itself and another for the rest of the world.

This claim is transparently nonsense. First, the US wants what the rest of the world wants — that is, it wants not to have outsiders impose their ideas of justice. Second, it’s not as if the US came up with the plan for the ICC and is now, hypocritically, trying to get others to commit to an agreement without subscribing itself. The idea came from others. The US just isn’t buying into it. Third, the US isn’t forcing any other nation to sign on. It’s only insisting that its own sovereignty not be compromised.

Because the UN rejected the exemption for all peacekeepers, the US is bound to do precisely what the supposedly united “rest of the international community” is already doing: looking after its own interests. The writer seems to think the UN is a theoretical world-civics exercise, in which philosophical coherence and “fairness” (translation: equal power for all) are the ultimate values. But this isn’t the way the UN, or the world itself, works.

But let’s play along for a moment. Let’s think of fairness. From the outset, the ICC arrangement would be unfair to the US, if you want to put it in those words, in two ways:

1) As the superpower, the US would theoretically be most involved in peacekeeping. Therefore, it would expose itself to a disproportionate level of liability; and
2) The US would have to surrender much more of its power relative to the rest of the world than others to achieve whatever good might come of it.

I can understand the argument that the US should surrender authority over its own citizens unilaterally out of virtue. Yet it’s too easy by far to rhapsodize about doing so “for the greater good.” Other nations don’t want the ICC for some greater good. They want it for their own good — which, perversely, they suppose to be a weakening of American power. It’s easy to see why: it’s a net gain for them. They surrender some sovereignty, but they leverage over the US and other nations. The US, however, loses power in this exchange because the result is a net loss of American sovereignty. For the US, then, the problem is this: what’s the upside? And is whatever good that might come of such an arrangement worth the price?

To date, supranational government has yet to prove viable, or even virtuous.

It’s not hard to see the point the article is trying to make. In a sense, its implicit claim may be true, in that the US insists that it be the one to choose and enforce its own standard of justice on its own military.

So?

Given the prosecutions that have followed Abu Ghraib and other situations, it looks to me as if the US military can police its own without the ICC’s help.

Strategy: Iran (and N. Korea) May Explain Iraq

Rev. Joseph Lowery's WMD comment at the Coretta Scott King's funeral -- and the audience's applause at it -- bring up a question we keep coming back to: why Iraq?

Here's a possibility:

In the 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush identified Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as part of an "axis of evil." Of these, which of the three was weakest militarily? Which of these three could the U.S. attack with the least cost to our military and the in-country civilian population?

The answer to both is Iraq. Add to these Iraq's own role in fighting its way to the front of the line by

• defying numerous UN resolutions, leading up to November 2002's Resolution 1441.
• shooting at coalition planes over the no-fly zones
• subverting UN sanctions
• maniplulating the Oil-for-Food program, and
• loudly rattling its own sabers.

All this, plus the President's repeated assertions that the US had to "take the fight to the enemy," suggest that the larger strategic reason for attacking Iraq, whatever the short-term, tactical reasons given at the time (and they were not just WMDs, as is so often claimed), was in part to serve as a warning to the two larger threats, Iran and North Korea.

The peace-at-any-cost mob's cynical argument that the US should not have gone into Iraq because North Korea and Iran pose far greater threats only underscores the point: attacking either of these states, at least from the inevitably flawed vantage point the US had in 2003, would have had (and may yet have) far higher human, military, and political costs than overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

In short, perhaps the US calculated that a relatively easy victory in Iraq could remove Saddam AND accomplish two other key goals: (a) show rogue regimes worldwide that it meant business; and (b) avoid having to invade Iran and North Korea.

True, the victory has not come as easily as hoped. And Iran nor North Korea keep shaking their fists at the world, and especially the US. Still, from a strategic standpoint, given the information at hand at the time, the decision to go into Iraq -- assuming my speculation is right -- may not look all bad.

Ah, C'Mon Hillary!

AP reports the following on Hillary R. Clinton:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday accused Republicans of "playing the fear card" of terrorism to win elections and said Democrats cannot keep quiet if they want to win in November. (http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/02/08/D8FL4DNO6.html)

Ah, c'mon Mrs. C. -- since when have the Democrats EVER been able to "keep quiet"?

The real problem is that they don't keep quiet enough. It's all the squawking that gets them into trouble. Maybe all the exhortation to keep speaking up -- most likely born of the left's nostalgia for the 60s and the fantasy that their protests improved America by forcing it to abandon Vietnam -- explains the rise of the far left's rising hegemony within the party.

As extremists so often are, they are quite simply the loudest shriekers at the table.

Shaming Coretta

The funeral for Coretta Scott King yesterday was in many ways dignified and worthy of the woman whose life it celebrated. But some of the speakers and the guests -- at certain points -- shamed themselves and soiled the occasion they came to celebrate.

The worst was Rev. Joseph Lowery, who tried to embarrass President Bush by claiming, "We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction over there." We know no such thing. All anyone can claim is that we haven't found any. In fact, all who actually know anything about it agree that there were indeed WMDs "over there" at one point. The question is, where are they now?

And even if he was right, how about exhibiting a little of Mrs. King's famous class instead of using the woman's own funeral to make such a cheap, cliched point?

And then there was former President and current Panderer-in-Chief James Earl Carter, whose knack for embarrassing himself without apparently realizing it is getting hard to watch. He said that the ceremony was not only to commemorate Coretta and Martin's lives, but to "remind us that the struggle for equal rights is not over." For proof, says he, "We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi... Those who were most devastated by Katrina know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans."

Does he mean that if only these people would have been white, Mayor Naggin would have fired up the idle school buses and evacuated them? Although it was indeed heart-breaking to see such suffering, must Carter and Company continue to humiliate the poor by suggesting that they are too inept--or too black--to work their way out of poverty, despite plenty of evidence (e.g., the city's own mayor) to the contrary?

Besides, their poverty doesn't prove anything about the state of equal opportunity in the U.S. -- but it does testify to the lack of guaranteed equal outcomes, a state of affairs that apparently annoys Carter to no end.

Equally disgraceful was the crowd's reaction -- sustained applause -- to both of these stunts. It made them look rude and misinformed, if not brainwashed.

Pettiest yet saddest of all, and I hate to say this, was the Reverend Bernice King's claim that sexism is still a problem because the audience didn't sufficiently cheer her comparison of her mother to the biblical Joshua. Maybe they were too dazed by Bernice's barely concealed grab for her parents' legacy to respond.