Blogger Caveat

Looks like today is my monthly blog-bashing moment. USA Today has a somewhat superficial piece by an author who occasionally contributes to the HuffnPuffPost, but this doesn't appear to be one of the arm-waving wannabes who infest that particular site. Bruce Kluger notes:

Lieberman's boomerang reminds us that voters represent a meager percentage of the total populace — and that bloggers are an even tinier subset of that group. Consequently, what appears to be a coast-to-coast juggernaut on a 17-inch monitor is, in the real world, simply an elaborate PC-to-PC chain letter — enthusiastic, but not necessarily the national mindset.

"There isn't much point in detailing the chest thumping of the various blognut extremists," wrote Time's Joe Klein in his analysis of the Lamont victory. "Their reach is minuscule."

For those who think Klein is underestimating the power of the blog, I have four words: Howard Dean for president.

Among the Kossack "blognuts" and the Hollyweirdos on HuffnPuff, there are enough cockamamie demonstrations of grandiosity, egomania and shrill hysteric mass psychosis to fill Comintern or Walpurgisnacht. Now cable TV has a failed sportscaster shrieking that Rumsfeld is a fascist for calling Islamofascists fascist! But sensible Joe Klein, who writes at the Brewster Women's Library right down the road from our place on Cape Cod, sums it up correctly with "Their reach is minuscule." Kluger compares the Kossacks and Hollyweirdos [and their far-right counterparts] in terms of child-rearing:

Ever since the first smarty-pants posted his first unsolicited opinion on the Internet, Americans have become captivated by blog-o-mania — for good reason. For once, we own and operate our own public medium. Power to the people. Vox populi. Yadda-yadda.

And yet, as the scrambling suits at Lamont headquarters....now know, it's easy to be seduced by one's own hype, especially when that hype is preceded by a "www." Now it's time to play catch-up ball. Lamont's handlers will have to face a candidate who will surely try to have it both ways on the campaign trail.... That's the way the blog bounces.

As an occasional blogger myself, I'm still wary of the phenomenon. On one hand, it can be liberating to log on and spout off, unencumbered by editorial oversight.

On the other hand, as August 2006 clearly demonstrates, bloggers can just as easily get it wrong. That's worth remembering.

The whole thing reminds me of child-rearing. As the parent of any toddler can tell you, the younger the child, the louder the screams for attention — and quite often, the degree of the crisis is in reverse proportion to the decibels of the bellows.

To that end, it's important to remember that the blogosphere is still in its infancy, and like any kid, it needs to be watched very carefully.

I disagree if this means monitoring for violations of PC or censorship for vulgar or obscene language. Bloggers are as various and diverse as the general population. For every dozen bloggers on the left, there are close to a dozen on the right. It's the old "marketplace of ideas" pushed to the ultimate individualism of American democracy. Or Leibnizian monadism, if you wish a continental nuance.

Blogging should be monitored only for the sort of plots and conspiracies uncovered by the Canadian police when they found twenty-three "normal, average Canadian citizens" [who coincidentally all had Muslim names] conspiring to blow up the Toronto HQ of the National Police and some government buildings in Ottawa.

But perhaps I am confusing chat rooms with blogging. Unlike the paranoids on the civil liberty barricades, I believe some monitoring [not supervising] by government authorities is okay. So NSA wiretaps for national security are also okay by me, as long as they have some basis in blocking terrorism or apprehending criminals.

In these cases, the common good supersedes individual rights of privacy.

Simul-spew/dump on MSNBC Attracts Few Viewers

Yesterday I was chasing links when one led me to a PuffHost arm-waving howler about how FOX has diminished in viewership 25% over a year and CNN & MSNBC have increased viewers during the same period. The chest-pounding triumphalism in the Puff-piece was vintage Twisted Sister Kossack waving of red banners and one could metaphorically hear the faint "we shall overcome" motif.

Then I linked to the TVNewser site and found that, whereas FOX had TWICE the news viewers COMBINED of CNN/MSNBD last year, now it only has ONE AND A HALF TIMES the total viewership of the southpaw channels [Oh, and by the way, MSNBC "increased" a whopping 6% from near-zero]. What a glorious triumph for the left as they imitate the UN echo chamber, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

All this serves as an introduction to a rant last night by the unwatched [one-sixth of O'Reilly's viewers mano-a-mano] Keith Olberboy who, as even the Moderate Joe Gandelman notes, surpassed himself in simultaneously soiling and wetting himself on air spewing from all orifices as he boiled over concerning Rumsfeld. I'm not going to link any of the self-parodying autistic whack-jobs exulting what a triumph Olberboy scored.

Just to note that, unless in the unlikely case that NBC decided to parade the Olberboy spew/dump on its other outlets in cable and broadcast, nobody except perhaps 500,000 Dead-Heads will have seen Keith [whom Dan Riehl calls "too stupid to broadcast sports, which says it all"] do his all-orifice simul-dump on-air.

While over 3 million watched O'Reilly on his 8 & 11 PM shows.

So let the revelry on the portside continue. Their party is on the Ship of Fools.

Mark Steyn and Canadian Professors' "Flights of Fancy"

Mark Steyn has moved to the United States, but his article in Macleans, the Canadian version of Time, with Newsweek and USNews thrown in, has got to be the most rollicking spanking of nutty professors ever put into print. Read what a U. of Western Ontario Biology Prof says and scratch your head how "sports of nature" proliferate like rabbits north of the border:

Who is A. K. Dewdney? He's an adjunct professor of biology at the University of Western Ontario, and he has pieced together the truth about what happened on 9/11. You may be familiar with the official version: "To account for the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush White House has produced a scenario involving Arab hijackers flying large aircraft into American landmarks," writes the eminent Ontario academic. "We, like millions of other 9/11 skeptics, have found this explanation to be inconsistent with the facts of the matter."

Instead, he argues, a mid-air plane switch took place on three of the jets. "The passengers of one of the flights died in an aerial explosion over Shanksville, Pa.," he writes, "and the remaining passengers (and aircraft) were disposed of in the Atlantic Ocean." Most of us swallowed "the Bush-Cheney scenario" because we were unaware that, when two planes are less than half a kilometre apart, they appear as a single blip on the radar screen. Thus, the covert switch. Instead of crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the flights were diverted by FBI agents on board to Harrisburg, Pa., where the passengers from all three planes were herded onto UA Flight 175 and flown on to Cleveland Hopkins and their deaths. By then, unmanned Predator drones had been substituted for the passenger jets and directed into their high-profile targets. The original planes and their passengers were finished off over the Atlantic.

Maybe A.K. should stick to the birds and the bees, and let the sci fi writers pursue improbably dramatic scenarios that make sense to the initiated, but might stretch credulity to the merely educated adult. But wait, there's more!

But what about all those phone calls, especially from Flight 93? Ha, scoffs Dewdney. "Cellphone calls made by passengers were highly unlikely to impossible. Flight UA93 was not in the air when most of the alleged calls were made. The calls themselves were all faked." Michel Chossudovsky, of Quebec's Centre for Research on Globalization, agrees: "It was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft travelling at high speed above 8,000 feet."

So all the "Let's roll" stuff was cooked up by the government spooks. So, presumably, were the calls from the other planes. Flight 175 passenger Peter Hanson to his father: "Passengers are throwing up and getting sick. The plane is making jerky movements." This at a time when, according to professor Dewdney, Flight 175 was preparing to land smoothly at Harrisburg. Or Flight 11 stewardess Madeline Sweeney: "We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low. Oh my God, we are way too low." Two minutes later, Flight 11 supposedly crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center -- though, as professor Dewdney has demonstrated, by then the plane wasn't even in the state. These so-called "calls" all used state-of-the art voice modification technology to make family members believe they were talking to loved ones rather than vocally disguised government agents. In the case of Todd Beamer's "Let's roll!" the spooks had gone to the trouble of researching and identifying individual passengers' distinctive conversational expressions.

In the end, says Dewdney, Flight 93 was shot down by a "military-looking all-white aircraft." It was an A-10 Thunderbolt cunningly repainted to . . . well, the professor doesn't provide a rationale for why you'd go to the trouble to paint a military aircraft. But the point is, several eyewitnesses reported seeing a white jet in the vicinity of the Flight 93 Pennsylvania crash site, so naturally conspiracy theorists regard that as supporting evidence that the plane was brought down by the U.S. military rather than after a heroic passenger uprising against their jihadist hijackers. "It was taken out by the North Dakota Air Guard," announced retired army Col. Donn de Grand Pre. "I know the pilot who fired those two missiles to take down 93." It was Maj. Rick Gibney, who destroyed the aircraft with a pair of Sidewinders at precisely 9:58 a.m.

Sadly, and one must read the argumentation of a new book debunking the debunkers to understand why, such flights of fancy [literally!] simply don't reach lift-off velocity for Steyn:

Just for the record, I believe that a cell of Islamist terrorists led by Mohammed Atta carried out the 9/11 attacks. But that puts me in a fast-shrinking minority. In the fall of 2001, a coast-to-coast survey of Canadian imams found all but two insistent that there was no Muslim involvement in 9/11.

Oh, well. It was just after 9/11, everyone was still in shock.

Five years later, a poll in the United Kingdom found that only 17 per cent of British Muslims believe there was any Arab involvement in 9/11.

However, Steyn does have an explanation for the rag-enshrouded brains of Brit Muslims and their Canadian cousins' shredded thought-patterns:

Ah, but it's a sensitive issue over there, what with Tony Blair being so close to Bush and all.

Professor Dewdney's plane-swap theory?

Come on, if you already live in Canada, it's not such a leap to live in an alternative universe.

Finally, Steyn sums up the lunacy with a couple of paras of limpidly lucid clarity:

the overwhelming nature of the evidence is, to the conspiratorially inclined, only further evidence of a cover-up: "One forum posting that has multiplied across the Internet includes a long list of the physical evidence linking the 19 hijackers to the crime: the rental car left behind at Boston's Logan airport, Mohammed Atta's suitcase, passports recovered at the crash sites, and so on. 'HOW CONVENIENT!' the author notes after each citation. In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose logic of conspiracism, there is no piece of information that cannot be incorporated into one's pet theory."

When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that's one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:

"I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don't think I could still live here. I'm not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?"

Over to you, Col. de Grand Pre, and Charlie Sheen, and Alan Colmes.

But the perpetrators continue to hide in plain sight, and the conspiracy-mongers pushing for new lunacies overlook the fact that if Bush & Company really wanted to blow something up in Manhattan, the planes would have flown into the United Nations and blown away something truly obnoxious to right-thinking Americans! [h/t: Dr. Frank Roselione]

Steyn ends the Maclean piece with a bit of Real-politik:

The sad reality is that never before has an enemy hidden in such plain sight. Osama bin Laden declared a jihad against America in 1998. Iran's nuclear president vows to wipe Israel off the map. A year before the tube bombings, radical Brit imam Omar Bakri announced that a group of London Islamists are "ready to launch a big operation" on British soil. "We don't make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents," he added, clarifying the ground rules. "Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value."

Our enemies hang their shingles on Main Street, and a University of Western Ontario professor puts it down to a carefully planned substitution of transponder codes.

Steyn 1, Perfessors 0

UN Takes Side of Hezbollah---Again!

The Financial Times has an article in which UN Functionary Jan Egelund calls Israel "immoral" for dropping cluster bombs on South Lebanon.

Of course, UN moral outrage is not applied to the thousands of Katyusha rockets---packed with ball bearings to inflict casualties---fired on Israeli civilian population centers.

Nor has UN moral outrage descended on Hezbollah for refusing to disarm according to UNSC Res 1559 enacted over a year ago, even though other Lebanese militias complied with the UN.

Nor did the selective UN moral outrage ever notice that Hezbollah had built extensive underground installations just a few yards from UNIFIL observation towers---making those UN posts possible targets in case of hostilities.

Nor did the UN get angry when Syria said that monitoring its border for armament shipments to Hezbollah after the ceasefire would be considered "a hostile act."

Nor did the UN reprimand UNIFIL for broadcasting IDF positions in the clear in real time during the hostilities, giving Hezbollah military intelligence on the position and movements of IDF forces. Curiously, UNIFIL broadcast nothing about Hezbo militia movements and military positioning.

One does not need to be a G2 genius to understand how the UN has sided with the Hezbo and Hamas terrorists consistently during the recent kidnappings and subsequent military exchanges.

And now Annan and the outraged Egelund want Israel to make "the first gesture" according to FT:

Mr Olmert and Mr Annan had earlier held talks on the implementation of resolution 1701.

But after the meeting Mr Olmert did not respond to the secretary-general’s call for a lifting of the air and sea blockade that the UN official had called a humiliation for the Lebanese.

UN officials travelling with Mr Annan said later he was still optimistic that Israel would reconsider its position, and repeated his call for a first gesture to be made by lifting the air blockade of the country.

"The government of Lebanon is one we wish to support," said Ahmad Fawzi, the secretary-general’s spokes?man. "By continuing this blockade we are not doing so. On the contrary, we are undermining this government."

The Israelis are also still insisting that the expanded UN force, which Mr Annan said would soon double to 5,000, must deploy along the Syrian-Lebanese border and at Lebanon’s sea and airports to prevent weapon supplies reaching Hizbollah.

Mr Annan said the Lebanese authorities had assured him they were serious about enforcing the arms embargo.

Israel still has troops in southern Lebanon and Amir Peretz, defence minister, told Mr Annan: "Israel will pull out once there is a reasonable level of forces there."

If I read this right, the UN is asking IDF troops to pull out even before the UNIFIL reinforcements arrive because "the Lebanese authorities had assured him they were serious about enforcing the arms embargo."

Since when have the Lebanese demonstrated an ability to enforce any arms control in their own country?

If the UN can't enforce its own UNSC Resolutions in Lebanon because of its fear that Hezbollah, a terrorist group, might be offended, should the UN be taken seriously as some sort of moral arbiter in any way, shape or form?

Oh, wait! Why doesn't the UN trot out Mr. Mallakh Brown in one of his pink ties to throw a fit of high moral dudgeon at a news conference in NYC?

He could accuse the US of complicity in Israel's refusal to take UN statements at face value and wouldn't that impress the lefty bloggers that Bush and the Israeli backers are wrong and right is on the side of the kidnapping terrorists, both Hamas and Hezbollah?

Therefore, you could include Bush-bashing in with the Jew-bashing that Iran is engaging in and perhaps even achieve a Trifecta if you throw Tony Blair into the mix. For a Brit UN dudgeon specialist like Brown, that would make his month!

Carter and "Can't we just talk?"

Captain's Quarters has the best take on meddlesome senescent busybody Carter's latest foray into imbecilic showboating.

Carter believes in dialogue so much that he did nothing else when Khatami's movement seized power in Teheran 27 years ago, and when Khatami and his fellow revolutionaries seized and held the American embassy and over 50 of our representatives for 444 days. Carter's belief in dialogue did not extend to the revolution's preceding government, the Shah, which Carter undermined for its human-rights violations. The fall of the Shah set off a chain reaction of Islamist momentum, creating competing radical Arab/Persian visions for a new Caliphate which not only exponentially increased human-rights violations but resulted in a wave of state-sponsored terrorism from the Islamic Republic.

Carter's belief in dialogue mirrors the utopian vision of the Left, a moral-relativist existence where all people are reasonable and all conflict results from simple misunderstandings. Carter has never understood the nature of evil, even while confronted with it in office; his post-presidential career has not provided him with an education, either. Years of diplomatic and economic engagement with Iran by the EU has not brought about a moderation of its policies, despite his sanctimonious statement on "talking to people who you have problems with".

This freaky little geek is hooked on sincerely mindless kumbayeh-era fecklessness. As Morissey notes with North Korea, airhead Jimmy edged marginally retarded Clinton into an agreement that Kim Jung-Il violated immediately, while pocketing billions of dollars from gullible Peter-Pan-can-fly Clintonistas. Now N. Korea has the bomb and Carter moves to Iran to foster more anarchy and nuclear proliferation, while mouthing the do-gooder twaddle this carny geek always peddles. Remember this moral monolith banished the neutron bomb from the US arsenal in line with his Pollyanna world view. Morissey continues:

Iran has made it clear, through the mullah's latest mouthpiece Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that they intend on eliminating Israel from the Middle East. Their new president talks about it constantly and has demanded that his trading partners in Europe carve out some of their own territory to house the Israelis before Iran fulfills its pledges. Khatami and his moderates have not spoken a word against these constant statements, nor have they lifted a finger to end the grip of the radical mullahs on Iranian government. None of these actions require American dialogue, and none of them would benefit from it as long as that dialogue seeks accommodation with radical nihilists.

GHWB and Gerry Ford have the best philosophies of ex-presidents: first, do no harm and stay out of politics.

Too bad Carter and Clinton violate both those rules, proving their post-presidencies just as ridiculous as their time in office---which for Carter especially, is a great achievement, almost impossible to imagine!

Carter's philosophy reminds me of Dutch cineaste Theo Van Gogh's last words as he lay on the sidewalk with bullet wounds gushing his lifeblood: "Can't we just talk about this?"

The terrorist's answer to Van Gogh was a knife in his heart.

So much for dialogue with Islamists, Jimmy.

SF Mass Murderer Wannabe Another Muslim Terrorist?

The SF Chronicle perhaps is the single worst PC-garbage rag unfit for human toilet paper in the USA. Once, when I was in SF giving a speech to the World Affairs Council, the paper had a front-page map of Libya with a borderline marked "Line of Death" without quotation marks, as if Qaddafi's daffiness was just okay by the SF Chron's miserable journalistic guidelines.

Now, of course, a fellow with two Arab surnames kills one person and critically injures several with an SUV, aping a similar incident in North Carolina at a university earlier this year, where many students were injured by a Muslim student run amok. And of course, in Seattle last month, a crazed [are there any other kind?] Muslim shot up the Jewish Community Center while yelling something about hating Jews and being a Muslim.

It took the similarly retarded Seattle Post-Intelligencer days of pondering in print about the motives of the self-proclaimed Muslim Jew-hater, with the moronic editors fixating on a "hatred of women" as the prime suspect.

Now we can expect the clinically back-ward imbecilic twaddle-meisters at the SF Chron's editors' desks to come up with some sort of excuse for another whacko-Muslim mass-murder attempt. Without, of course, mentioning the retarded nature of Islamic thinking and the fanatical hatred it seems to engender everywhere it blights the cultural and political landscape of advanced civilized countries not under despotic strongman rules of Muslim Saddam-wannabes. Like Europe, East Asia, and North America.

It seems these patriarchal cretins believe they are entitled to rule the world, and when that just doesn't happen, they flip out and commit horrific crimes. The Jewish Community Center and a Jewish neighborhood were the targets of this mindless criminal hit-and-run one-man hate squad.

But Bush and the Republicans are on to their terrorist modus-operandi, and to admit that this "Omeed Aziz" character might have acted as GWB and company predicts, well that has to be explained away.

And you can bet the Left Coasters and their pliant brain-dead MSM will try to invent some new alibis for the latest Muslim terrorist [three in the last three months or so], to try to kill lots of Jews and their fellow citizens.

Hitchens Spanks Wilson-Plame-Corn-Isikoff & Unmasks Tenet

Christopher Hitchens has mercilessly spanked the new book Hubris in which two reporters who relentlessly pushed the phony Plame case in the first place now, like Roseanne Roseannadanna, have to admit "Never Mind." Hitchens has heretofore unmasked and discredited Wilson, who overlooked glaring evidence of a 1999 trip by Iraq's "Vatican" ambassador to heavily-Catholic Chad in his "report" on Iraqi uranium quests[!?!] Joe Wilson lied and the NYT went after the bait, hook line and sinker. Hitchens knows this game all too well as he long ago wrote for The Nation, Corn's rad-rag often known to instigate wild-goose chases and red-herring hunts. Then the mainstream pedestrian MSM, epitomized by the pious censorious NYT, in turn plods after the story in its PC fashion using ham-handed journalism based on political biases. Although in their Chutzpah book, Corn and Isikoff never admit wrongdoing, between the lines is ample evidence their own contribution was what the French call a "Coup de Pouce."

Who supplied the "thumb touch" that started the snipe hunt of the Fitzgerald Special Prosecutor fiasco? Hitchens, whose mastermind genius leaves journeymen "radicals" like Isikoff and Corn far back in the dust, has a very interesting theory. Read the piece to get context, but I'm going to be a spoiler and reveal the punchlines:

...the CIA can, in theory, "refer" any mention of itself to the Justice Department to see if the statute—denounced by The Nation and the New York Times when it was passed—has been broken. The bar here is quite high. Perhaps for that reason, Justice sat on the referral for two months after Novak's original column. But then, rather late in the day, at the end of September 2003, then-CIA Director George Tenet himself sent a letter demanding to know whether the law had been broken.

The answer to that question, as Patrick Fitzgerald has since determined, is "no." But there were plenty of senior people who had known that all along. And can one imagine anybody with a stronger motive to change the subject from CIA incompetence and to present a widely discredited agency as, instead, a victim, than Tenet himself? The man who kept the knowledge of the Minnesota flight schools to himself and who was facing every kind of investigation and obloquy finally saw a chance to change the subject. If there is any "irony" in the absurd and expensive and pointless brouhaha that followed, it is that he was abetted in this by so many who consider themselves "radical."

The entire Plame episode leaves everybody looking bad. The MSM will absolve itself by underreporting its numerous mistakes. And will go after the next Bush-bashing opportunity with the same gusto.

But why Tenet asked to apply a spurious law, badly conceived and often poorly applied [in this instance Plame had been non-covert for more than the five years required in the poorly-crafted statute], to the issue will remain just another question in the Plame blame-game that ensued when partisan politics began replacing foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East. Rumsfeld and L. Paul Bremer were already supplying the supervisory mismanagment and clumsy policy decisions which indicated that this might be a longer haul than originally anticipated. Tenet probably heard the train coming down the tracks in his direction and decided to switch to a siding.

One thing is for sure. "Slam Dunk" will never be used again as a foreign policy metaphor.

Exorcism: Embarassment or Uncomfortable Reality?

Exorcism and other marginal areas of Catholic belief [and those of some other Christian beliefs] have always been an embarassment in polite company, not the sort of thing one discusses in post-modern trendy discourse.

However, my on-again, off-again Catholic practice [as of now re-relapsed] has allowed me to meet one witness and even two practitioners of the craft of exorcism.
For five years I studied as a Jesuit novice and studied at St. Louis U's Philosophate. As a novice, I had lunch with a possible relative [we share the same last name] Jesuit priest who taught Theology at Mundelein in Chicago and was the Archdiocesan Exorcist. He only told me that there are a lot of things that he's seen that he didn't want to talk about.

At St. Louis U, the brilliant "Daddy Wade" was a sparkling philosophy teacher whose Jesuit past had included the soon-to-be-famous case in Mt. Rainier MD which moved to suburban St. Louis. Fr. Wade, SJ, was a deacon in the late '40s when he participated in the St. Louis site where the exorcism was finally completely. Wade told me and some other Jesuit wannabes that when he carried the bottle of holy water for the ritual, it flew out of his hands, through a screen door, up a flight of stairs, did a 180degree turn and smashed against the door of the room where the afflicted child lay in bed. Wade said something like "...don't know about the devil, but I sure know about the power of holy water!"

It seems that the Jesuits handled this particularly grisly episode which began at Georgetown U. and ended in St. Louis U., both Jesuit schools. The kid who was exorcised graduated from Gonzaga High in D.C., an excellent Jesuit high school. The author Peter Blatty was a Georgetown grad.

Strangely, when I saw the movie in Denver CO, I came back out to the snow-filled parking lot and found a near-perfect representation of the fist-sized so-called "idol" lying next to my car---it was a red squeeze-doll for dogs, but looked exactly like the small accursed object in the movie. Synchronicity, I thought, as I was in a Jungian phase at the time.

While I was living in Europe working for the State Dept, another FSO told me she was in a church in southern Italy where she claimed---she was not Catholic---to have seen a possessed person vomiting a gigantic pile of nails onto the floor. Onlookers told her this afflicted person would climb walls and even across the ceiling of the church!

I myself was walking the streets of Sana in North Yemen in the '70s when I came across a small crowd watching a young boy biting his hand and moaning. I asked the onlookers and they told me the boy was "majnuun," [the Arab word for 'bejinned' or possessed.]

Whatever the cumulative result of the above, I still have a vaguely credulous feeling about the "miracles" and other supernatural or at least paranormal phenomena of the world which post-modernists attribute to mental perceptions and not to reality, which they claim to have a monopoly on.

Like Daddy Wade, I may not believe completely in Satan, but have to wonder about the power of holy water!

NYT Caught Again Favoring Terrorists

The New York Times is the flagship of the Hate America and Bash Bush crowd, releasing all sorts of highly classified USG materials in order to assist the terrorists in avoiding apprehension. And assisting US lawbreakers who leak these secrets by giving them anonymity.

But the NYT, going back to its Walter Duranty mode of praising human monsters and protecting their plans and apprentices, the Times does not publish a story on terrorists due to their tender deference to British legal restrictions.

Hot Air has more on this shambles, including a pious quote from Jill Abramson, whom I knew when she was at the Wall Street Journal.

"It’s never a happy choice to deny any reader a story," said Jill Abramson, a managing editor at The Times. "But this was preferable to not having it on the Web at all."

Yes, the New York Times decrying having to withhold news from some overseas readers because of silly legal restrictions. But she and her bosses never complain about giving terrorist groups the heads-up on financial transfers or NSA wiretapping.

Double Standard. Same old story: the enemy of America is the NYT's friend. Duranty had his Pulitzer for excessive adulation of Stalinist purge trials pulled. Hopefully, some day Risen and Lichtblau [and fellow traveller Dana Priest at the Post] will suffer the same indignity.

No people deserve it more.

American Modernism versus White Guilt

Shelby Steele remarks with admirable clarity how the current standoff in the Middle East throws a spotlight on the central struggle of our time, the battle against modernity:

In Europe, there are cells of self-invented middle-class terrorists living modern lives by day and plotting attacks on modernity by night. And around these cells there is often a nourishing atmosphere of fellow traveling. Then there are the radical nation-states in league with terrorism, Iran and Syria most prominent among them. From nations on the verge of nuclear weapons to isolated individuals--take the recent Seattle shootings--Islamic militancy grounded in hatred of Israel and America has become the Muslim world's most animating idea. Why?

When I lived in the Middle East throughout most of the seventies, the local intellectuals I talked with spoke of adopting western economies without acquiring modern values. As if becoming up-to-date were like learning how to drive or dressing like a European. But of course, this was superficial and there were hidden forces at work deep inside the Muslim psyche:

I don't believe it is because of the reasons usually cited--Israeli and American "outrages." No doubt Israel and America have made mistakes in the Middle East. Certainly, Israel was born at the price of considerable dislocation and suffering on the part of the Palestinians. And yes, there will never be a satisfying answer for this. Yet every Israeli land-for-peace gesture has been met with a return volley of suicide bombers and rockets. Palestinians have balked every time their longed-for nationhood has come within grasp. They have seemed to prefer the aggrieved dignity of their resentments to the challenges of nationhood. And Hezbollah launched the current war from territory Israel had relinquished six years earlier.

There is a sort of Death Wish which is manifesting itself especially in parts of the Arab world, but elsewhere among Muslims as it becomes apparent that there is an essential conflict between Islam and modern western values, at least in the brand of Islam preached in mosques in underdeveloped countries like Pakistan and Indonesia [compared with the relatively stronger track record of their non-Muslim neighbors India and Singapore]. Steele sees this war as symbolic of the deep inability of Muslim grievances to deal with reality:

If this war makes anything clear, it is that Israel can do nothing to appease the Muslim animus against her. And now much of the West is in a similar position, living in a state of ever-heightening security against the constant threat of violence from Islamic extremists. So here, from the Muslim world, comes an unappeasable hatred that seems to exist for its own sake, a hatred with very little actual reference to those it claims to hate. Even the fighting of Islamic terrorist groups is oddly self-referential, fighting not for territory or treasure but for the fighting itself. Standing today in the rubble of Lebanon, having not taken a single inch of Israeli territory, Hezbollah claims a galvanizing victory.

Pure Jimmy Carter-type symbolic victory! But wait, there's more Carter-type cringing in the offing:

At the center of today's militant Islamic identity there is a passion to annihilate rather than contain Israel. And today this identity applies the anti-Semitic model of hatred to a vastly larger group--the infidel. If the infidel is not yet the object of that pristine hatred reserved for Jews, he is not far behind. Bombings in London, Madrid and Mumbai; riots in Paris; murders in Amsterdam; and of course 9/11--all these follow the formula of anti-Semitism: murder of a hated enemy as self-realization and service to God.

Hatred and murder are self-realization because they impart grandeur to Islamic extremists--the sense of being God's chosen warrior in God's great cause. Hatred delivers the extremist to a greatness that compensates for his ineffectuality in the world. Jews and infidels are irrelevant except that they offer occasion to hate and, thus, to experience grandiosity. This is why Hezbollah--Party of God--can take no territory and still claim to have won. The grandiosity is in the hating and fighting, not the victory.

And death--both homicide and suicide--is the extremist's great obsession because its finality makes the grandiosity "real." If I am not afraid to kill and die, then I am larger than life. Certainly I am larger than the puny Westerners who are reduced to decadence by their love of life. So my hatred and my disregard of death, my knowledge that life is trivial, deliver me to a human grandeur beyond the reach of the West. After the Madrid bombings a spokesman for al Qaeda left a message: "You love life, and we love death." The horror is that greatness is tied to death rather than to achievement in life.

The West is stymied by this extremism because it is used to enemies that want to live. In Vietnam, America fought one whose communism was driven by an underlying nationalism, the desire to live free of the West. Whatever one may think of this, here was an enemy that truly wanted to live, that insisted on territory and sovereignty. But Osama bin Laden fights only to achieve a death that will enshrine him as a figure of awe. The gift he wants to leave his people is not freedom or even justice; it is consolation.

White guilt in the West--especially in Europe and on the American left--confuses all this by seeing Islamic extremism as a response to oppression. The West is so terrified of being charged with its old sins of racism, imperialism and colonialism that it makes oppression an automatic prism on the non-Western world, a politeness. But Islamic extremists don't hate the West because they are oppressed by it. They hate it precisely because the end of oppression and colonialism--not their continuance--forced the Muslim world to compete with the West. Less oppression, not more, opened this world to the sense of defeat that turned into extremism.

The West looks to blame itself for its own success and replicate the Muslim self-loathing with its own guilt-stained psyche. And in order to abase itself, the guiltiest portion of the guilty in the west seek a particular target:

But the international left is in its own contest with American exceptionalism. It keeps charging Israel and America with oppression hoping to mute American power. And this works in today's world because the oppression script is so familiar and because American power cringes when labeled with sins of the white Western past. Yet whenever the left does this, it makes room for extremism by lending legitimacy to its claim of oppression. And Israel can never use its military fire power without being labeled an oppressor--which brings legitimacy to the enemies she fights. Israel roars; much of Europe supports Hezbollah.
Over and over, white guilt turns the disparity in development between Israel and her neighbors into a case of Western bigotry. This despite the fact that Islamic extremism is the most explicit and dangerous expression of human bigotry since the Nazi era. Israel's historical contradiction, her torture, is to be a Western nation whose efforts to survive trap her in the moral mazes of white guilt. Its national defense will forever be white aggression.

But white guilt's most dangerous suppression is to keep from discussion the most conspicuous reality in the Middle East: that the Islamic world long ago fell out of history. Islamic extremism is the saber-rattling of an inferiority complex. America has done a good thing in launching democracy as a new ideal in this region. Here is the possibility--if still quite remote--for the Islamic world to seek power through contribution rather than through menace.

Amen.

Swedish Socialism Moves to Middle America

Tim Worstall has a good piece on Swedish economics that jibes well with what I've been reading in the Financial Times from day to day. It turns out that the Swedes have an election coming up [the FT tells me} that might install a Center-Right moderate in place of the sempiternal Center-Left coalition that has been in charge for more than a decade. Worstall doesn't mention this. What he does is notice what the US liberal leftists overlook:

I will admit that I do find it odd the way that only certain parts of the, say, Swedish, "miracle" are held up as ideas for us to copy. Wouldn't it be interesting if we were urged to adopt some other Swedish policies? Abolish inheritance tax (Sweden doesn't have one), have a pure voucher scheme to pay for the education system (as Sweden does), do not have a national minimum wage (as Sweden does not) and most certainly do not run the health system as a national monolith (as Sweden again does not). But then those policies don't accord with the liberal and progressive ideas in the USA so perhaps their being glossed over is understandable, eh?

So Swedish "socialism" with its sixty percent taxation doesn't exactly fit into the socialist mold that Americans on the far left expect. You really have to check the link at the top to get the full thrust of the piece, but the bottom-line is that the poor in the US live about as well as the poor in the EU, and the rich in the US live a lot better than the EU rich. So perhaps a lot of the whingeing on the left derives from pure green jealousy? Worstall again notes that the EU reports' conclusions do not coincide with the nanny-state lamentations of the wanna-tax, no school voucher, higher minimum wage fingerpointers:

If we accept (as I do) that we do, indeed, need to have a social safety net, and that we have a duty to provide for those incapable or unlucky enough to be unable to do so for themselves, we need to set some level at which such help is offered. The standard of living of the poor in a redistributionist paradise like Finland (or Sweden) seems a fair enough number to use and the USA provides exactly that. Good, the problem's solved. We've provided -- both through the structure of the economy and the various forms of taxation and benefits precisely what we should be -- an acceptable baseline income for the poor. No further redistribution is necessary and we can carry on with the current tax rates and policies which seem, as this report shows, to be increasing US incomes faster than those in other countries and boosting productivity faster as well.

As I said above I'm sure this isn't quite what the EPI actually wanted to tell us. But there it is, from their own report. Which is why I rather enjoy my working life -- sad case that I am -- because I get to read all those reports that really don't tell us what the authors think they are telling us.

Yep, the social-engineering elites in the USA simply march to an economic drumbeat that will lead the US economy over a cliff.

Methinks that, like most victims of academicide, these ivory-tower types would rather bring down the rich than raise up the poor.

Ace and TigerHawk have comments on the Horatio Alger haters among the ink-stained academics and class-war politicians.

WaPost: Dems WalMart-bashing Stupid Politics

Sebastian Mallaby has an intelligent OpEd on just how herd-like Wal-Mart bashing may backfire on Dems eager to curry favor with unions.

It turns out that a Grocery Workers' Union is very powerful in Iowa. Hmmm.....

Senators Dumb and Dumber are caught entangled in their own contradictory statements:

Hillary Clinton and Sen. John Kerry have attacked Wal-Mart for offering health coverage to too few workers. But Kerry's former economic adviser, Jason Furman of New York University, concluded in a paper last year that Wal-Mart's health benefits are about as generous as those of comparable employers. Moreover, Clinton and Kerry know perfectly well that market pressures limit the health coverage that companies can provide. After all, both senators have proposed expansions in government health provision precisely on the premise that the private sector can't pay for all of it.

Mallaby nails the problem the Democrat Party seems to be unable to avoid.

The truth is that none of these Democrats can resist dumb economic populism. Even though we are not in a recession, and even though the presidential primaries are more than a year away, the DLC crowd is pandering shamelessly to the left of the party -- perhaps in the knowledge that the grocery workers union, which launched the anti-Wal-Mart campaign, is strong in the key state of Iowa.

For a party that needs the votes of Wal-Mart's customers, this is a questionable strategy. But there is more than politics at stake. According to a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Jerry Hausman and Ephraim Leibtag, neither of whom received funding from Wal-Mart, big-box stores led by Wal-Mart reduce families' food bills by one-fourth. Because Wal-Mart's price-cutting also has a big impact on the non-food stuff it peddles, it saves U.S. consumers upward of $200 billion a year, making it a larger booster of family welfare than the federal government's $33 billion food-stamp program.

How can centrist Democrats respond to that? By beating up Wal-Mart and forcing it to focus on public relations rather than opening new stores, Democrats are harming the poor Americans they claim to speak for.

The Democrats are against capitalist efficiency. And Wal-Mart pays at the same rates as Sen. Mark Dayton's [Dem. MN] Target pays. Yet Target, with big Dem names like James A. Johnson and Richard Holbrooke on its board, gets off unscathed. Where are those so-called investigative journalists at the MSM?
Bullwinkle says the Dems are starting to get their class war fixes early, to slake their addiction to old-timey socialist mantras. They clothe their divide-and-conquer agenda with populist sloganeering.
Blue Crab Boulevard has links to previous posts on Wal-Mart bashing and Dem relapses into old bad habits.

Last week, even the Los Angeles Times had an editorial scolding the Dems for bashing WalMart.

But even though the WaPost and LAT have joined the reality-based community, I'm not holding my breath waiting for the NYT to kick its addictions.

Wooden Lying Al: "I lost, Democracy in peril"

Chicken Little Gorebot continues his campaign against the electoral system that pulled down his pants, spanked him publicly, and cast his internet-inventing earth-tone garbed political cadaver into the outer darkness, where he gnashes his teeth in public railing about the weather and the media [read Fox, which is growing by leaps and bounds] and whatever else he can pontificate about.

He lost an election he was front-loaded to win and it's got to be the system's fault.

His new TV network is going nowhere and it's got to be big media crushing democratic "dialogue," which in his "network's" case means YouTube liberal rants.

Thank goodness he says he's not running in 2008, but remember this is lyin' Al.

He says Bush is "not unintelligent." Of course, Al's grades were not good enough to get his sorry ass into Harvard, and his emotional collapse during college kept him from even getting into Vanderbilt in his home state with his daddy as a Senator. Bush's grades and IQ projected from his SAT scores make GWB smarter than either Kerry or dropout Gorebot, according to those who measure such things.

Gore says GWB is incurious and has a "puzzling lack of curiosity."

Hmmm.... Maybe Gore himself is a frivolous dilettante who flutters from teaching journalism to global warming to running a TV network to posing as a political pundit with the attention span of a housefly and the IQ of a butterfly.

Or maybe he's just a sore loser.

Tim Blair and Daily Pundit have suitably derisory comments on this serial whinging by a classic whiner.

Let's put it this way. Al was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.


UPDATE: Greg Richards at THE AMERICAN THINKER:
Gore - ever more unhinged[my emphasis]

Agence France Presse reports on a speech Al Gore gave in Edinburgh Sunday at the International Television Festival in which he says "democracy is under attack."

Does he mean by Osama, or by Ahmadinejad, or by Nasrallah (Hizballah)? You know he doesn’t! He means here in the good old US of A! Why? Because the media is "more controlled and centralized!"

Uhhhh…..Al. I think you may have missed the blogosphere. You should have paid attention after you invented the internet. I think you may have missed Fox News. I think you may have missed the decline in subscribers at all the major MSM newspapers. I think you may have missed the new reality that the MSM can’t get away with making up the narrative any more, whether it is Dan Rather and the Texas Air National Guard or Reuters and fauxtography in Lebanon.

The real danger to democracy in the U.S., to the extent that it exists, is campaign finanace reform which is pushing the Democratic Party into the hands of left-wing billionaire extremists, as documented in David Horowitz’ and Richard Poe’s new book Shadow Party. Trust Al to get it completely backwards. Who says the US of A isn’t lucky?

Yes, the US is very lucky this stone slacker blew an overwhelming lead to lose---largely because Billy Jeff and his Attorney Gen Janet Reno, a Florida native, managed to cut the Cuban vote in Florida from 35% Dem in 1996 to 20% in the year 2000---all to please Dem-favorite dictator Fidel Castro.

Gore did his best to eff-up his campaign, but the Elian Gonzalez debacle really flushed his lying exaggerations and strange debating strategies to a place where they are still lying in segregated septic isolation.

The question still remains: who is more unhinged, the wet-eyed wooly-minded geek Jimmy Carter or the ChickenLittle/SkyisFalling Gorebot?

Ponder and ponder: guess it depends on whether you prefer imbecilic bantamweight to raving whinge-machine or vice versa.

UNIFIL May Have Aided Hezbo Forces in Lebanon War

UNIFIL may have aided Hezbollah in the recent war by publishing Israeli positions in near real-time while not posting any information about Hezbo positions and military movements at all.

If true, this puts another nail in the coffin of so-called UNIFIL "neutrality" and removes a lot of reasons Israel should respect the UN troops when they finally assume their positions sometime next month.

Add the Weekly Standard article to the British newspaper TimesOnLine concerning the supply of weapons to Hezbo via Syria---Annan will do nothing to stop it---and any pretense disappears of the UN actually enforcing or even attempting to enforce UNSC 1559 which calls for disarming Hezbollah.

The UN has proved under the latest tests of its utility to be completely without leadership. With Iran and its IAEA subsidiary, the UN has proved feeble and even permissive in allowing Iran to attain nukes. In South Lebanon, UNIFIL will not attempt to stop the re-arming of Hezbo terrorist cadres.

And now, the latest evidence that UNIFIL has been serving as an intelligence arm of Hezbollah by tracking Israeli military positions and movements.

What do these several factoids all have in common? They are anti-Israeli and anti-US. The miserable little incompetent Annan has caused almost a million to die in Rwanda and subsequently in Darfur. Now perhaps he wants to achieve a Trifecta of brain-dead fecklessness by allowing Iran to become more powerful in the Middle East?

When is the US going to realize that the UN is nothing but a useless relic from a bygone era?

Meathead Reiner Spouts Gibson Gibberish

Okay, anyone who goes 85 in a forty with an open bottle of tequila at 3AM is terminally daft to begin with, but now Gibson is attacked by a bigger loser than he is, the no-talent politico-wannabe Meathead Reiner whose gift for politics is as absent as his ability to be an A-List Hollyweird talent.

So Meathead now attacks Gibson for a movie that grossed more than any Cruise movie this decade just to keep the lubricants in his well-oiled jawbone of an ass moving so he won't become the
Tin Man instead of a meathead, which is what he is and evidently always will be in the public's mind.

Gibson will never be forgiven for making an accurate movie of the Passion of Christ and having it become a worldwide success---at least by B-List has-beens like Reiner.

Madonna Has Africa Charity Hype, Never Been to Dark Continent

You may has suspected somewhere way deep down inside that Madonna had a fraudulent bone or two in her body. Now Time notes that she is plumping for a charity in Malawi despite never even having visited the continent.

Madonna is not the only one to come up with a frisking. Gwyneth Paltrow declares "I am an African," appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, and gets a publicity bump. Brangelina has a baby in Namibia.

They call it tinseltown, but it's more like the "herd of independent minds!"

Pelosi Puff Piece Lets Slip "Airhead" Phrase

Time Mag has a superficially positive piece on Pelosi that slips in the lede way down several paragraphs into the story:

Pelosi carries a chip on her shoulder, believing that fellow Democrats and media elites have constantly underestimated her political ability, dating back to her unsuccessful effort to become head of the Democratic National Committee in 1985, when she was called an "airhead" by a labor-union official. She will talk about those political battles only vaguely but told me the Democratic establishment in Washington "couldn't control me, so they needed to take me down" and "They can't even believe the fact that I'm going to become Speaker, but they're getting used to it."

Pelosi as Speaker would be the gift that will keep on giving for the Republicans. This true airhead bimbo wanted to have the Dems run this year on the slogan "A Contract on America" until someone with a triple digit IQ informed this Italian gramma that the phrase would sound like a "mob hit."

This specimen has moved the Dems so far left that were they to accede to power, two years would be enough to convince a confused electorate that the Dems and their triple threat: airhead Pelosi, girlie-man Reid, and maniac Dean---were all a menace to political comity as the country is accustomed.

Another McGovern moment appears to be in the offing. Let's hope this dodo-woman gets to be Speaker and demonstrates to the country why the far-left is in thrall to a mass psychosis.

Blair Criticized by Carter

The Telegraph has a good piece on Tony Blair. It must be positive because Blair is being criticized by serial chronic fool and the most incompetent US president in the twentieth century, a wooly-brained moron named Carter.

I love Tony for the enemies he has made. The Telegraph actually says the Carter tirade shows how far apart British Labour is from its traditional American ally the Democrat Party.

I don't think a lot of Democrats want Carter, whose many blunders have now become American legend, to represent their party. Except, of course, the wooly-brained feminized crack-brains infesting its left wing!

UN "Peacekeeping" Becomes a Stupid Joke.

Kofi Annan is either an incompetent fool or an impotent nitwit or a treacherous coward.

I pick all three. Read this story why his treachery may be his anti-Israeli bias.

Armitage Responsible for Plame Kerfuffle?

Tom Maguire has more about the vast left-wing MSM hype-fest concerning a second-rate petty functionary sent by his wife to cover-up for Saddam's uranium-quest in Africa.

Daniel Boorstin wrote long ago about the American invention of the "pseudo-event" which can be defined in several ways. I contend that the entire long wasteful and ridiculous Special Prosecutor's snipe-hunt is a pseudo-event.

Back in January, I picked Armitage out of a notional line-up because he had a long-standing reputation for being an interagency polymath, the sort of fellow who knows everrything and whose memoirs will be much more interesting than the earnest or self-serving pap of most senior officials---earnest Cyrus Vance, for instance, or egomaniac Henry Kissinger.

The entire Fitzpatrick investigation was spurious. Plame was hardly a high-level operative and had been out of a covert job for over five years and hence was not even covered by the law Libby was being prosecuted for breaking. Wilson had become a Democrat supporting John Kerry and was obviously fishing for some sort of post in a Democrat administration. The whole affair smacked of a partisan payback by Democrats for Karl Rove's deftly outmaneuvering their every ploy at regaining one of the bodies of Congress or the Presidency.

Oh well. Isikoff and other ink-stained wretches have to manufacture news if it doesn't actually happen.

"Forced Conversion"

Jules Crittendon of the Boston Herald has the best reaction to the release of the two FOX-News reporters today in Gaza.

The revulsion every decent human being must feel when one reads about being forced to "convert" to Islam by gunpoint should alert us to just what the West faces with these primitive atavistic knucklewalkers, whose idea of morality is to clothe women in masks/tents and chop off limbs of convicted felons. Or heads.

I can't wait for some Anglican bishop to approve of forced conversion as a sign of "multiculturism."

Italy: Land of Cheery Dysfunction

La Bella Figura is the name of a book reviewed by the NYT on the Italians. Long ago, I read a book by a famous writer named Barzini called The Italians and learned much reading his deep insights into the Italian character and history. Also, I found reading Pinocchio a good lesson---until my busybody wife took it back to the bookstore behind my back!

Despite being robbed twice by break-ins into my car and also having an auto accident at 3AM in the morning---luckily I was driving Ambassador Volpe's son home at the time---actually the Rome Municpal Police and the Carabinieri arrived simultaneously after a small crowd had gathered to kibitz!---there is something dramatic and comedic about being in that country that makes it my favorite.

No one goes to Italy because the trains run on time.

FSO Busted in Visa Scam, Jewelry Testimony on 9/11

JunkYardBlog has a great story of visas for sale! As a Former Vice Consul, I must say this sux:

"A U.S. Foreign Service Officer in Canada got busted Friday for an alleged visas-for-jewelry bribe case. 22-year State Department veteran Michael O’Keefe was indicted along with an international jewelry hotshot named Sunil Agarwal, who allegedly
gave O’Keefe jewelry, other gifts and a job reference, the indictment said. In exchange, O’Keefe helped expedite visa requests for employees of Agrawal’s company, STS Jewels Inc. He issued visas to 21 people sponsored by Agrawal.

Junkyard Comments: "Security risk? Oh yeah. I’m just glad it was Americans who found this guy out and not someone else who could blackmail him into granting visas. But what he did is bad enough.

At one point, O’Keefe overruled a co-worker who wanted to deny a visa to an Agrawal employee out of concern that al Qaeda uses the jewelry industry to raise money. "Needless to say I overruled the decision and explained to them that major gem importers such as STS are not being used by al Qaeda," said the e-mail written by O’Keefe to Agrawal.

Well, O’Keefe is DEAD WRONG about Al Qaeda, and about STS Jewelers:

The tanzanite market is suffering due to "bad press" and an oversupply of material. Prices were already weak before the Wall Street Journal and ABC News stories. Tanzanites at this year’s show were being offered at a 30-50% discount from last year… In more bad news for this gemstone, a wrongful death lawsuit has been filed by wives of Cantor Fitzgerald employees, a New York police officer and the father of a New York firefighter against dealers of tanzanite. The suit alleges ties between the trade of the gemstone and Osama Bin Laden. Filed in federal court in Manhattan on February 14, it seeks an injunction banning New York dealer STS Jewelers, Inc. from selling tanzanite and forcing the company to donate past tanzanite proceeds to a September 11 relief fund. The suit also seeks $1 billion in compensatory damages from several other defendants, including the Tanzanite Mineral Dealers Association (TAMIDA).

Surprised the Post didn’t catch that about STS. P.S. Bonus lurid detail:
between 2004 and 2006 Agrawal gave round-trip airline tickets to O’Keefe and two exotic dancers to travel to New York and Las Vegas.
UPDATE: STS Jewels had the 9/11 lawsuit against it dismissed with prejudice in 2002. But now I’m curious about the evidence against it in the first place. (I didn’t see this when I googled STS jewelers the first time, but it appears the business is actually called "STS Jewels."

HOLY SH** FLAMING-SKULL DRUDGE-SIREN UPDATE! Did Mike O’Keefe’s statements help get this lawsuit kicked out of court? And was he involved in the pronouncement that there is no connection between the Tanzanite trade and Al Qaeda?

Because bin Laden masterminded the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the suit also contends the tanzanite dealers are also liable for the attacks.
This is despite the fact that U.S. State Department officer of East African Affairs, Mike O’Keefe stated that while there is no doubt that there was an Al Qaeda operative selling tanzanite to finance the embassy bombing in 1998, there is absolutely no new connection between the tanzanite trade and smuggling in support of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

"We have seen no evidence that Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group is currently using tanzanite sales to finance its efforts to launder money," O’Keefe said to an audience at the AGTA Gem Fair, Feb. 8. When asked by reporters about the Wall Street Journal’s article (that allegedly linked tanzanite to the terrorist network and which the newspaper cited as the inspiration for the law suit), O’Keefe suggested that while all of WSJ research seemed correct, the State Department and U.S. intelligence came to a much different conclusion. "And we have considerably more investigative power than the Wall Street Journal."

Actually, I suspect that O’Keefe was telling the truth about the Tanzanite industry being clean—if the statement were false, it would draw suspicion from his co-workers. What may have happened is that Agarwal and STS were very grateful for O’Keefe’s help in getting them off the hook for a billion-dollar suit and things just got closer and closer from there—when O’Keefe moved to Canada he kept in contact with Agarwal and did him another favor.

On the other hand, if O’Keefe took a bribe to help Agarwal (who is also under indictment) with his employees’ visas in 2004-2006, he may also have been corrupt in 2002 and helped STS avoid its liability in the 9-11 suit. If O’Keefe was involved in the investigation of Al Qaeda’s links to the Tanzanite industry (which looks likely given his bailiwick in East African Affairs), then that investigation ought to be reopened and the links re-examined.

FINAL UPDATE to this post: O’Keefe was desk officer for Madagascar and Tanzania when the Tanzanite report came down. He was almost certainly involved in its production. What’s more, others in the State Department disagreed with O’Keefe’s assesment, and told the media as much.

Hitchens Flips the Bird at Maher's Audience

The Lefty Airhead Braindeads in Maher's audience received their just deserts from Christopher Hitchens after the supercilious dorkboy Bill compared GWB with Amadildojihad. In the words of a commenter to the Newsbusters site above:

YES!! WISH I COULD HAVE JOINED HIM! If it's good enough for Christopher Hitchens, it's good enough for me. Yeah, F. Bill Maher! What a total pompous ass. No talent, not funny, narcissistic, obnoxious, 3 lbs.-of- make-up-for-t.v. Maher?, and he has the bollox to call our president an idiot? Wow, what an amazing wit! Rain man has more insight and originality. His audience is a bunch of syncophantic kool-aid drinkers. Our president cannot be compared with that subhuman president of Iran, unless you're the idiot! It's unbelievable. If I was president, they'd be a whole lot of deporting going on, and I mean the likes of those gobshites. off to Cuba, France, Gaza and anywhere else you think is better than America.[kathleen irish]

Wish I'd written that!

Hezbocrats Attack Wal-Mart!

Herman Cain has an excellent column on the shameless pandering the "Hezbocrats" are doing for their union special interests by attacking Wal-Mart.

Want to bet that this will backfire on the human metronomes nodding and bowing at the beck and call of the Democrat Party's vast array of special constituencies? Cain thinks so:

Two organizations, Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart, are responsible for organizing the Iowa rallies and similar rallies across the country. As the old political adage reminds us, follow the money. Wal-Mart Watch is funded by the Teamsters Union and the Service Employees International Union. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union funds Wake Up Wal-Mart. Why would Big Labor Unions organize a fight against Wal-Mart? Because employees at the nation’s largest employer do not belong to labor unions.

Hezbocrat opposition to Wal-Mart is akin to their opposition to legislation that would have increased the minimum wage because it also contained a provision to scale back the estate tax. They pay no mind to the raft of economic benefits Wal-Mart brings to employees, customers and communities. All the critics see is that Wal-Mart has not succumbed to Big Labor Union – and Big Labor Union, pillar of the Hezbocrat Party, is not happy.

The Hezbocrats risk a huge political backlash by drawing horns and a tail on Wal-Mart’s trademark yellow happy face. They say that Wal-Mart treats its employees poorly, but who is complaining? In January, 25,000 people applied for 325 available jobs at a proposed Wal-Mart store outside of Chicago. According to Wal-Mart, over 75 percent of its store managers started with the company as hourly workers. Wal-Mart’s prices save the average American household over $2,300 per year. The company is so unpopular that over 127 million customers shop at its U.S. stores each week.

When you vote this November, remember which party places unionizing the largest private employer’s workers over jobs and low retail prices for the communities and families who need them the most. It is unfortunate, and telling, that with all the threats to our national security abroad, the candidates for president from one of the two major political parties have instead chosen to declare war on a private company right here at home.

Most voters shop Wal-Mart and don't care a fig about Wal-Mart's wage policies, which are right in line with other retail chains [contrary to what confabulators like Biden would have you believe].

Almost all the "audience" of the speeches the various panderers have made are union members assembled for a peanut-gallery camera photo-op.

Meanwhile, real terrorists are trying to blow up planes flying to our shores and the Democrat Party seems unaware of the threat.

LAT Editorial Makes Sense on Wal-Mart!

It is so seldom that a Lotus-Eater crib sheet like the ultra-libhttp://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-walmart23aug23,0,2463162.story?coll=la-opinion-center">Los Angeles Times has a sensible editorial that this one is worth reprinting in full.

Democrats' Shameful Wal-Mart Demonization
Presidential hopefuls only hurt themselves when pandering to unions by bashing the country's largest employer.

WITH ONE EYE ON 2008 and one on their labor union base, Democratic luminaries are canvassing Iowa and other states this summer to campaign against the nation's incumbent … retailer. They obviously see Wal-Mart as this season's Enron, the one corporation that represents all that is wrong with America.

Too bad the party can't simply draft Costco or Target to run for president. Instead, Democratic presidential aspirants — including Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico — feel compelled to bash one company, the largest employer in the U.S., to score points with labor organizers. The candidates are so intent on gaining tactical advantage in the primary season that they risk alienating possible supporters in the general election.

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Most Americans do not want their politicians ganging up on one company. Wal-Mart may be a behemoth that employs 1.3 million people in this country and earned $11 billion in profit last year, but it still looks like bullying when politicians single out one business to scapegoat for larger societal ills. And when they start passing laws aimed at their scapegoat — as the Maryland Legislature did when it passed legislation forcing Wal-Mart to spend a certain amount on employee healthcare — the judiciary rightly balks. A federal judge struck down the regulation, holding that it violates laws requiring equal treatment of employers.

But there is no stopping the campaign rhetoric. At an anti-Wal-Mart rally last week in Iowa, Biden noted that the retailer pays people $10 an hour, and then asked: "How can you live a middle-class life on that?" It's clearly the company's fault, at least from a skewed senatorial perspective, that all Americans cannot live a comfortable middle-class life. How dare it pay prevailing retail wages? Bayh, who appeared at another rally, was quoted as saying that Wal-Mart is "emblematic of the anxiety around the country." That may be true. But if it's the emblem he's worried about, he should stay in Washington and work to make healthcare more affordable for working families.

The gusto with which even moderate Democrats are bashing Wal-Mart is bound to backfire. Not only does it take the party back to the pre-Clinton era, when Democrats were perceived as reflexively anti-business, it manages to make Democrats seem like out-of-touch elitists to the millions of Americans who work and shop at Wal-Mart.

One reason the Democrats may have a tin ear on this subject is demographic. Certainly most of the party's urban liberal activists are far removed from the Wal-Mart phenomenon. The retailer has thrived mainly in small towns and exurbs, which is one reason a Zogby poll found that three-quarters of weekly Wal-Mart shoppers voted for President Bush in 2004, and why 8 out of 10 people who have never shopped at Wal-Mart voted for John Kerry. Denouncing the retailer may make sense if the goal is to woo primary activists, but it's a disastrous way to reach out to the general electorate. Or to govern, for that matter.

Tin ear, tone deaf, politically regressive Democrat Party candidate-wannabes are simply stuck on pandering to constituencies and elites.

Left un-noticed by the eagle-eyed mainstream media is that Wal-Mart's nearest competitor, Target, is largely owned by the Dayton family of Minneapolis, whose scion is an ultra-left Senator from Minnesota. Plus Target's Board of Directors and banking is riddled with nomenklatura Democrats like James Johnson and Richard Holbrooke. This operation might be a Trojan Horse to benefit the Democrat hyper-elite, while throwing a bone to unionists and other cronies.

More UNIFIL Doublespeak Plus Cave-in on Iran

As the unfortunate functionary in the State Dept's International Organizations Bureau/United Nations Political office for the Middle East, I was the very first person asked to make a draft of the UNIFIL UNSC 415, which turned out to become, possibly due to Jimmy Carter's baleful streak of horrible luck and chronic incompetence, the first Security Council Resolution solely sponsored by the United States, and produced the least successful peacekeeping force in UN history. Over 250 unfortunate UN peacekeepers have died in UNIFIL's service, the record in that department, and that's not counting the foreign servicemen, including 241 US Marines and over 70 French soldiers, killed in various military attempts to suppress the Lebanese civil war.

So I understand a little of Charles Krauthammer's biting sarcasm, but cannot wholely condemn the French from a ginger approach to peacekeeping in that quasi-country.

Lebanon is an example of the other category -- multilateralism that might actually accomplish something. The United States worked assiduously with France to draft a Security Council resolution that would create a powerful international force, and thus a real buffer, in south Lebanon. However, when the Lebanese government and the Arab League objected, France became their lawyer and renegotiated the draft with the United States. The State Department acquiesced to a far weaker resolution on the quite reasonable grounds that since France was going to lead and be the major participant in the international force, we should not be dictating the terms under which the force would operate.

But we underestimated French perfidy. (Overestimating it is mathematically impossible.) Once the resolution was passed, France announced that instead of the expected 5,000 troops, it would be sending 200. The French defense minister explained that France was not going to send out soldiers under a limited mandate and weak rules of engagement -- precisely the mandate and rules of engagement that the French had just gotten us to agree to.

This breathtaking duplicity -- payback for the Louisiana Purchase? -- left the State Department red-faced. (It was offset somewhat when, last night, France agreed to send an additional 1,600 troops.) But the setback was minor compared with what we now face with Iran. Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is a major irritant, but a nuclear Iran is a major strategic threat.

But today we see the feminized Italians and the androgenous French making remonstrations that perhaps Near East Peace would be better off in sensitive EU hands than in the rough-and-ready American/Israeli pilot seat.

This reflects sensitive Americans like the two gingermen on PBS Evening News, who agree with Prodi that the US should let those politically sophisticated EU types---led by Shh-iraq and Prodi---take the wheel.

Of course, these Fifth Column types realize that actually enforcing UNSC Res 1559 with regard to disarming Hezbollah terrorist cadres would be dreadfully insensitive and go counter to the UN track record of total and complete ineffectual enforcement of its SC resolutions. Kofi wouldn't approve of total enforcement, would he? Kofi's track record from Rwanda through Darfur to South Lebanon is unmarred by any actual successes. He's a tribute to affirmative action, and not much else.

Krauthammer believes Iran will benefit from this collective lack of will on the part of the Security Council, which has written off its own Resolutions, once upon a time respected around the world, as exercises in political flimflammery. Even the US and UK, holding out for some sort of enforcement mechanism for the Non-Proliferation Treaty, must deal with the hypocrisy of India and Israel's exceptionalism, even as they complain about North Korea and Iran.

So the perpetual kabuki proceeds of bowing to UN resolutions without bothering to make efforts to enforce them if determined opposition is met. Hezbollah in South Lebanon and its bankroller/enabler Iran have learned about the hollow men in charge of the EU and the twin rogue SC permanent members.

Why should they pay heed to Prodi and Shh-iraq, both hostage to large domestic Muslim immigrant populations, and knowing these two political invertebrates lack the will to do more than lip service to UN Chapter 6 protocols?

Route to Israeli Peace Must Lead to Industrial Cooperation

Here is an excellent piece I read in this morning's Financial Times by an Israeli industrialist named Stef Wertheimer:

"For 58 years, the people of Israel thought that more land would keep them safe. And we still believe that a good army will guarantee us peace. The land and our army have given us a degree of security but, unfortunately, no peace.

"It would be instructive for us to look at what other countries have done with the question of force. Singapore decided not to use force and to focus instead on mutual interests with its neighbours. The country needed a source of water and its neighbour had a large supply, so Singapore decided to buy water from Malaysia. It could allow itself to become dependent in this way because it was at peace with its neighbour.

"In the Balkans, neighbours quarrelled. They quarrelled about – and used – force until the moment they started working towards acceptance into the European Union. Then their reality changed. They had a new challenge. Whereas force did not work for any of them, competing in the global market has brought peace to the troubled region.

"In the region called the Middle East, there are actually two distinctly different areas; one with too much oil and oil money, and the other – the Mediterranean or “near” East – with not enough of either. Any country or region with high unemployment is automatically in trouble. It can easily become a breeding ground for terrorism. The focus for governance in such areas must be about putting people to work in meaningful employment. When people have jobs, they can easily separate their religious lives from their working lives.

"During 54 years working in Israel’s Galilee region and, more recently, in Turkey, I have learnt there are limitations to using force to win a quarrel. If you have a neighbour, you had better ensure he is not hungry, not jealous and that he has a good job. In the near East – Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, the Palestinians and more – over 90m people have no appreciable oil income and need alternatives to military force. The solution is industry and jobs.

"Like many of us, the people in the near East want homes and families. To accomplish this, they need industry. Monetary aid and food does not bring peace. This area needs modern industry, jobs and better education geared to competing in the global market.

"With this in mind, I set up five industrial parks in Israel to provide employment and last year, established my first venture in Turkey. All these parks are based on the Tefen industrial park that I set up in Galilee in 1984. These parks provide opportunities for people from diverse backgrounds – Muslims, Jews, Christians and Druze – to learn and to work together as entrepreneurs, managers and employees.

"This is not a real estate story. It is about a special kind of regional economic development that promotes industrial production for export industries. The parks act as a framework for entrepreneurship. They provide the basics needed to help people start businesses with a minimum amount of money while providing assistance for a maximum effort to enter the world market. But it is not just industry – each of the parks works with an educational institution in the area to provide the park’s local entrepreneurs with the knowledge to run their businesses, and to help local people with the skills to work in the new establishments.

"The Tefen park has changed the local area and created jobs. We have made industry an important part of society. I believe that with the necessary assistance, we can multiply this basic model and, in the short run, save money, lives and nerves. Slowly, but also methodically, priorities will change and spread throughout the near East, taking the region from conflict to peace and security through jobs and industries.

"Compare the cost-benefit ratio of industry with that of a military force. It takes less money to start two industrial parks than it does to finance a fighter jet. That means that starting 100 industrial parks is equal to buying fewer than 50 fighter aircraft. Each industrial park focuses on attracting entrepreneurs, starting companies, educating workers and creating employment. After just five years, the region will begin to see results.

"To set up these industrial parks in this part of the world, we need contributing companies to establish branches in the new parks, as "seed industries." We also need the support and commitment of national governments to set up the incentives that will make investment in their countries or regions attractive to industry.

Stef Wertheimer is an Israel-based industrialist and founder of Iscar, a manufacturer of metalworking tools with operations worldwide

Route to Israeli Peace Must Lead to Industrial Cooperation

Here is an excellent piece I read in this morning's Financial Times by an Israeli industrialist named Stef Wertheimer:

"For 58 years, the people of Israel thought that more land would keep them safe. And we still believe that a good army will guarantee us peace. The land and our army have given us a degree of security but, unfortunately, no peace.

"It would be instructive for us to look at what other countries have done with the question of force. Singapore decided not to use force and to focus instead on mutual interests with its neighbours. The country needed a source of water and its neighbour had a large supply, so Singapore decided to buy water from Malaysia. It could allow itself to become dependent in this way because it was at peace with its neighbour.

"In the Balkans, neighbours quarrelled. They quarrelled about – and used – force until the moment they started working towards acceptance into the European Union. Then their reality changed. They had a new challenge. Whereas force did not work for any of them, competing in the global market has brought peace to the troubled region.

"In the region called the Middle East, there are actually two distinctly different areas; one with too much oil and oil money, and the other – the Mediterranean or “near” East – with not enough of either. Any country or region with high unemployment is automatically in trouble. It can easily become a breeding ground for terrorism. The focus for governance in such areas must be about putting people to work in meaningful employment. When people have jobs, they can easily separate their religious lives from their working lives.

"During 54 years working in Israel’s Galilee region and, more recently, in Turkey, I have learnt there are limitations to using force to win a quarrel. If you have a neighbour, you had better ensure he is not hungry, not jealous and that he has a good job. In the near East – Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, the Palestinians and more – over 90m people have no appreciable oil income and need alternatives to military force. The solution is industry and jobs.

"Like many of us, the people in the near East want homes and families. To accomplish this, they need industry. Monetary aid and food does not bring peace. This area needs modern industry, jobs and better education geared to competing in the global market.

"With this in mind, I set up five industrial parks in Israel to provide employment and last year, established my first venture in Turkey. All these parks are based on the Tefen industrial park that I set up in Galilee in 1984. These parks provide opportunities for people from diverse backgrounds – Muslims, Jews, Christians and Druze – to learn and to work together as entrepreneurs, managers and employees.

"This is not a real estate story. It is about a special kind of regional economic development that promotes industrial production for export industries. The parks act as a framework for entrepreneurship. They provide the basics needed to help people start businesses with a minimum amount of money while providing assistance for a maximum effort to enter the world market. But it is not just industry – each of the parks works with an educational institution in the area to provide the park’s local entrepreneurs with the knowledge to run their businesses, and to help local people with the skills to work in the new establishments.

"The Tefen park has changed the local area and created jobs. We have made industry an important part of society. I believe that with the necessary assistance, we can multiply this basic model and, in the short run, save money, lives and nerves. Slowly, but also methodically, priorities will change and spread throughout the near East, taking the region from conflict to peace and security through jobs and industries.

"Compare the cost-benefit ratio of industry with that of a military force. It takes less money to start two industrial parks than it does to finance a fighter jet. That means that starting 100 industrial parks is equal to buying fewer than 50 fighter aircraft. Each industrial park focuses on attracting entrepreneurs, starting companies, educating workers and creating employment. After just five years, the region will begin to see results.

"To set up these industrial parks in this part of the world, we need contributing companies to establish branches in the new parks, as "seed industries." We also need the support and commitment of national governments to set up the incentives that will make investment in their countries or regions attractive to industry.

Stef Wertheimer is an Israel-based industrialist and founder of Iscar, a manufacturer of metalworking tools with operations worldwide

Route to Israeli Peace Must Lead to Industrial Cooperation

Here is an excellent piece I read in this morning's Financial Times by an Israeli industrialist named Stef Wertheimer:

"For 58 years, the people of Israel thought that more land would keep them safe. And we still believe that a good army will guarantee us peace. The land and our army have given us a degree of security but, unfortunately, no peace.

"It would be instructive for us to look at what other countries have done with the question of force. Singapore decided not to use force and to focus instead on mutual interests with its neighbours. The country needed a source of water and its neighbour had a large supply, so Singapore decided to buy water from Malaysia. It could allow itself to become dependent in this way because it was at peace with its neighbour.

"In the Balkans, neighbours quarrelled. They quarrelled about – and used – force until the moment they started working towards acceptance into the European Union. Then their reality changed. They had a new challenge. Whereas force did not work for any of them, competing in the global market has brought peace to the troubled region.

"In the region called the Middle East, there are actually two distinctly different areas; one with too much oil and oil money, and the other – the Mediterranean or “near” East – with not enough of either. Any country or region with high unemployment is automatically in trouble. It can easily become a breeding ground for terrorism. The focus for governance in such areas must be about putting people to work in meaningful employment. When people have jobs, they can easily separate their religious lives from their working lives.

"During 54 years working in Israel’s Galilee region and, more recently, in Turkey, I have learnt there are limitations to using force to win a quarrel. If you have a neighbour, you had better ensure he is not hungry, not jealous and that he has a good job. In the near East – Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, the Palestinians and more – over 90m people have no appreciable oil income and need alternatives to military force. The solution is industry and jobs.

"Like many of us, the people in the near East want homes and families. To accomplish this, they need industry. Monetary aid and food does not bring peace. This area needs modern industry, jobs and better education geared to competing in the global market.

"With this in mind, I set up five industrial parks in Israel to provide employment and last year, established my first venture in Turkey. All these parks are based on the Tefen industrial park that I set up in Galilee in 1984. These parks provide opportunities for people from diverse backgrounds – Muslims, Jews, Christians and Druze – to learn and to work together as entrepreneurs, managers and employees.

"This is not a real estate story. It is about a special kind of regional economic development that promotes industrial production for export industries. The parks act as a framework for entrepreneurship. They provide the basics needed to help people start businesses with a minimum amount of money while providing assistance for a maximum effort to enter the world market. But it is not just industry – each of the parks works with an educational institution in the area to provide the park’s local entrepreneurs with the knowledge to run their businesses, and to help local people with the skills to work in the new establishments.

"The Tefen park has changed the local area and created jobs. We have made industry an important part of society. I believe that with the necessary assistance, we can multiply this basic model and, in the short run, save money, lives and nerves. Slowly, but also methodically, priorities will change and spread throughout the near East, taking the region from conflict to peace and security through jobs and industries.

"Compare the cost-benefit ratio of industry with that of a military force. It takes less money to start two industrial parks than it does to finance a fighter jet. That means that starting 100 industrial parks is equal to buying fewer than 50 fighter aircraft. Each industrial park focuses on attracting entrepreneurs, starting companies, educating workers and creating employment. After just five years, the region will begin to see results.

"To set up these industrial parks in this part of the world, we need contributing companies to establish branches in the new parks, as "seed industries." We also need the support and commitment of national governments to set up the incentives that will make investment in their countries or regions attractive to industry.

Stef Wertheimer is an Israel-based industrialist and founder of Iscar, a manufacturer of metalworking tools with operations worldwide

Los Angeles Times Editorial Makes Sense!

It is so seldom that a Lotus-Eater crib sheet like the ultra-libLos Angeles Times has a sensible editorial that this one is worth reprinting in full.

Democrats' Shameful Wal-Mart Demonization
Presidential hopefuls only hurt themselves when pandering to unions by bashing the country's largest employer.

WITH ONE EYE ON 2008 and one on their labor union base, Democratic luminaries are canvassing Iowa and other states this summer to campaign against the nation's incumbent … retailer. They obviously see Wal-Mart as this season's Enron, the one corporation that represents all that is wrong with America.

Too bad the party can't simply draft Costco or Target to run for president. Instead, Democratic presidential aspirants — including Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico — feel compelled to bash one company, the largest employer in the U.S., to score points with labor organizers. The candidates are so intent on gaining tactical advantage in the primary season that they risk alienating possible supporters in the general election.

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Most Americans do not want their politicians ganging up on one company. Wal-Mart may be a behemoth that employs 1.3 million people in this country and earned $11 billion in profit last year, but it still looks like bullying when politicians single out one business to scapegoat for larger societal ills. And when they start passing laws aimed at their scapegoat — as the Maryland Legislature did when it passed legislation forcing Wal-Mart to spend a certain amount on employee healthcare — the judiciary rightly balks. A federal judge struck down the regulation, holding that it violates laws requiring equal treatment of employers.

But there is no stopping the campaign rhetoric. At an anti-Wal-Mart rally last week in Iowa, Biden noted that the retailer pays people $10 an hour, and then asked: "How can you live a middle-class life on that?" It's clearly the company's fault, at least from a skewed senatorial perspective, that all Americans cannot live a comfortable middle-class life. How dare it pay prevailing retail wages? Bayh, who appeared at another rally, was quoted as saying that Wal-Mart is "emblematic of the anxiety around the country." That may be true. But if it's the emblem he's worried about, he should stay in Washington and work to make healthcare more affordable for working families.

The gusto with which even moderate Democrats are bashing Wal-Mart is bound to backfire. Not only does it take the party back to the pre-Clinton era, when Democrats were perceived as reflexively anti-business, it manages to make Democrats seem like out-of-touch elitists to the millions of Americans who work and shop at Wal-Mart.

One reason the Democrats may have a tin ear on this subject is demographic. Certainly most of the party's urban liberal activists are far removed from the Wal-Mart phenomenon. The retailer has thrived mainly in small towns and exurbs, which is one reason a Zogby poll found that three-quarters of weekly Wal-Mart shoppers voted for President Bush in 2004, and why 8 out of 10 people who have never shopped at Wal-Mart voted for John Kerry. Denouncing the retailer may make sense if the goal is to woo primary activists, but it's a disastrous way to reach out to the general electorate. Or to govern, for that matter.

Tin ear, tone deaf, politically regressive Democrat Party candidate-wannabes are simply stuck on pandering to constituencies and elites.

Left un-noticed by the eagle-eyed mainstream media is that Wal-Mart's nearest competitor, Target, is largely owned by the Dayton family of Minneapolis, whose scion is an ultra-left Senator from Minnesota. Plus Target's Board of Directors and banking is riddled with nomenklatura Democrats like James Johnson and Richard Holbrooke. This operation might be a Trojan Horse to benefit the Democrat hyper-elite, while throwing a bone to unionists and other cronies.

Hezbollah's Mythical "Victory" Pyrrhic?

Amir Taheri unmasks the so-called "victory" of Hezbollah as another fraud perpetrated by the international left media, led by deranged Bush haters like the BBC and the New York Times:

Hezbollah's position is no more secure in the broader Arab world, where it is seen as an Iranian tool rather than as the vanguard of a new Nahdha (Awakening), as the Western media claim. To be sure, it is still powerful because it has guns, money and support from Iran, Syria and Hate America International Inc. But the list of prominent Arab writers, both Shiite and Sunni, who have exposed Hezbollah for what it is--a Khomeinist Trojan horse--would be too long for a single article. They are beginning to lift the veil and reveal what really happened in Lebanon.

Having lost more than 500 of its fighters, and with almost all of its medium-range missiles destroyed, Hezbollah may find it hard to sustain its claim of victory. "Hezbollah won the propaganda war because many in the West wanted it to win as a means of settling score with the United States," says Egyptian columnist Ali al-Ibrahim. "But the Arabs have become wise enough to know TV victory from real victory."

Yes, the Arab media actually are beginning to outpace the gullible international left media cabal, always susceptible to anti-US and anti-Israeli legerdemain, in sophistication and foreign policy sagacity. The Arab media understands that Hezbollah is not even a majority among SHI'ITE political parties in Lebanon, despite huge subventions from Iran via Syria to buy votes and media support. The largely mythical "Arab Street" quoted by western media would actually favor a permanent peace with an Israel integrated into the region, but agitprop organs of the ultra left such as BBC and the US phalanx led by Pravda on the Hudson search out and give wide coverage to inflammatory hotheads one can find anywhere and then declare sententiously that that is near-unanimous Arab opinion. Taheri notes that the Hezbo-Emperor has no clothes inside Lebanon itself, which face another civil-war threat:

A claim of victory was Hezbollah's shield against criticism of a strategy that had led Lebanon into war without the knowledge of its government and people. Mr. Nasrallah alluded to this in television appearances, calling on those who criticized him for having triggered the war to shut up because "a great strategic victory" had been won.

The tactic worked for a day or two. However, it did not silence the critics, who have become louder in recent days. The leaders of the March 14 movement, which has a majority in the Lebanese Parliament and government, have demanded an investigation into the circumstances that led to the war, a roundabout way of accusing Hezbollah of having provoked the tragedy. Prime Minister Fuad Siniora has made it clear that he would not allow Hezbollah to continue as a state within the state. Even Michel Aoun, a maverick Christian leader and tactical ally of Hezbollah, has called for the Shiite militia to disband.

Indeed, the flood of possibly counterfeited US dollars to victims of the Israeli bombings of Shi'ite neighborhoods in South Beirut buys little:

Mr. Nasrallah followed his claim of victory with what is known as the "Green Flood"(Al-sayl al-akhdhar). This refers to the massive amounts of crisp U.S. dollar notes that Hezbollah is distributing among Shiites in Beirut and the south. The dollars from Iran are ferried to Beirut via Syria and distributed through networks of militants. Anyone who can prove that his home was damaged in the war receives $12,000, a tidy sum in wartorn Lebanon.

The Green Flood has been unleashed to silence criticism of Mr. Nasrallah and his masters in Tehran. But the trick does not seem to be working. "If Hezbollah won a victory, it was a Pyrrhic one," says Walid Abi-Mershed, a leading Lebanese columnist. "They made Lebanon pay too high a price--for which they must be held accountable."

Indeed, Nasrullah might have instigated the kidnappings because he was losing credibility and loyalty within Hezbollah itself! And his slavish subservience to Iran's politicized Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic's less-than-universally-admired poster boy for an "Islamic Republic," has not won Nasrullah admiration among fellow Shi'ites:

Before he provoked the war, Mr. Nasrallah faced growing criticism not only from the Shiite community, but also from within Hezbollah. Some in the political wing expressed dissatisfaction with his overreliance on the movement's military and security apparatus. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they described Mr. Nasrallah's style as "Stalinist" and pointed to the fact that the party's leadership council (shura) has not held a full session in five years. Mr. Nasrallah took all the major decisions after clearing them with his Iranian and Syrian contacts, and made sure that, on official visits to Tehran, he alone would meet Iran's "Supreme Guide," Ali Khamenei.

Mr. Nasrallah justified his style by claiming that involving too many people in decision-making could allow "the Zionist enemy" to infiltrate the movement. Once he had received the Iranian green light to provoke the war, Mr. Nasrallah acted without informing even the two Hezbollah ministers in the Siniora cabinet or the 12 Hezbollah members of the Lebanese Parliament.

Mr. Nasrallah was also criticized for his acknowledgement of Ali Khamenei as Marjaa al-Taqlid (Source of Emulation), the highest theological authority in Shiism. Highlighting his bay'aah (allegiance), Mr. Nasrallah kisses the man's hand each time they meet. Many Lebanese Shiites resent this because Mr. Khamenei, a powerful politician but a lightweight in theological terms, is not recognized as Marjaa al-Taqlid in Iran itself. The overwhelming majority of Lebanese Shiites regard Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, in Iraq, or Ayatollah Muhammad-Hussein Fadhlallah, in Beirut, as their "Source of Emulation."

Some Lebanese Shiites also question Mr. Nasrallah's strategy of opposing Prime Minister Siniora's "Project for Peace," and instead advancing an Iranian-backed "Project of Defiance." The coalition led by Mr. Siniora wants to build Lebanon into a haven of peace in the heart of a turbulent region. His critics dismiss this as a plan "to create a larger Monaco." Mr. Nasrallah's "Project of Defiance," however, is aimed at turning Lebanon into the frontline of Iranian defenses in a war of civilizations between Islam (led by Tehran) and the "infidel," under American leadership. "The choice is between the beach and the bunker," says Lebanese scholar Nadim Shehadeh. There is evidence that a majority of Lebanese Shiites would prefer the beach.

When I lived there a quarter century ago, Lebanese Shi'ites were almost universally dirt-poor and marginalized---after the Civil War ended in 1990, however, a burgeoning middle class emerged among the downtrodden and impoverished Shia Lebanese:

There was a time when Shiites represented an underclass of dirt-poor peasants in the south and lumpen elements in Beirut. Over the past 30 years, however, that picture has changed. Money sent from Shiite immigrants in West Africa (where they dominate the diamond trade), and in the U.S. (especially Michigan), has helped create a prosperous middle class of Shiites more interested in the good life than martyrdom ? la Imam Hussain. This new Shiite bourgeoisie dreams of a place in the mainstream of Lebanese politics and hopes to use the community's demographic advantage as a springboard for national leadership. Hezbollah, unless it ceases to be an instrument of Iranian policies, cannot realize that dream.
The list of names of those who never endorsed Hezbollah, or who broke with it after its Iranian connections became too apparent, reads like a Who's Who of Lebanese Shiism. It includes, apart from the al-Amins, families such as the al-As'ad, the Osseiran, the al-Khalil, the Hamadah, the Murtadha, the Sharafeddin, the Fadhlallah, the Mussawis, the Hussainis, the Shamsuddin and the Ata'allahs.

Far from representing the Lebanese national consensus, Hezbollah is a sectarian group backed by a militia that is trained, armed and controlled by Iran. In the words of Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the Iranian daily Kayhan, "Hezbollah is 'Iran in Lebanon.' " In the 2004 municipal elections, Hezbollah won some 40% of the votes in the Shiite areas, the rest going to its rival Amal (Hope) movement and independent candidates. In last year's general election, Hezbollah won only 12 of the 27 seats allocated to Shiites in the 128-seat National Assembly--despite making alliances with Christian and Druze parties and spending vast sums of Iranian money to buy votes.

Nabih Berri, the leader of Amal and Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, owns [or owned] a string of gas stations in the Detroit area. While cunning and corrupt, Berri is by no means completely in Hezbo's pocket. Lebanese president Emile Lahoud is Syria's errand-boy and may pose more problems than Berri in reaching a national resolution of Lebanon's semi-permanent sectarian rifts. The western media's Hezbollatry, as Taheri noted, largely derives from Hate America cadres in the BBC and Manhattan/LA.

As Taheri was quoted above, Arab writers both of Sunni and Shi'ite origin are unmasking Hezbollah as an Iranian Trojan Horse, aided and abetted by Syria to get the Hariri assassination pushed into the background and to keep stick-insect Assad's chronic bumbling out of the spotlight.

So when reading or watching the western MSM Hezbollatry, bear in mind that Arab observers, even Shi'ites in Lebanon, are not buying into the BS.

For some very astute comments, check out The Astute Blogger who points out that Lebanese PM Siniora believes Hezbos henceforward will not be able to launch another operation from South Lebanon.

NRO's Corner stresses that Nasrullah did not inform the two Hezbo Ministers in the Siniora government or the twelve Hezbo members in the Lebanese Parliament. Nasrullah blithely blew off Hezbo protestations by citing security considerations concerning Israeli infiltrators!

Boy, that guy has huevos!