New Job As Managing Editor

I've been invited to be Managing Editor/Moderator of a new centrist-conservative blog called The Minority Report. Please hit the link which will hopefully transport you to check out our new enterprise. We are still in a launch mode, but hopefully will get up to speed shortly.

Brace yourselves for 10 Muharram tomorrow

The Muslim feast of
Ashura
is January 30, and my bet is that the large collection of bad hombres killed yesterday near Najaf were in a staging area for a big terrorist attack on Shi'ite pilgrims going to Najaf or Kerbala, the two great Shi'a pilgrimage sites, for this gruesome festival commemorating the death of Husayn, the son of 'Ali. While living in Lebanon, I saw an Ashura street demo in South Beirut with a very mild public version of the terrific penitential self-flagellation and cutting that takes place in Shi'ite mosques.

Even NPR hints that the horrific attack on the Samarra mosque and Zarqawi's assaults on Shi'ites in Sadr City and elsewhere are instigated by an Al Qaeda campaign to foment civil war and boost the ranks of defeatists in the USA. The brunt of the attacks on Najaf and Kerbala may have been thwarted by yesterday's news of hundreds of casualties among the Sunni insurgents, but the good tidings of an Iraqi military success has been put on the back pages of the MSM outlets and TV news. East-to-get video of terror-bombings in Baghdad make front-page, top of the broadcast news. Successes in out-of-the-way places are duly noted, but buried by lurid tales of insurgent nastiness and funerals of stateside families mourning their heroic dead. At one point a few days ago, I switched from ABC to CBS to NBC and all simultaneously [I believe it was Friday night's weekend wrap-up] had stories of berieved families. AQ Agitpreppie Brian Williams had his usual shallow commentary, and the MSM campaign to discredit victory in Iraq continues...

Yes, Bush and his lieutenants botched the job, but that doesn't mean walking away before the job is finally finished. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow the Al Qaeda will still be on the job, whether we walk away or not.

Putin Fingerprints on Poisoned Teapot?

ABC has more news on the poisoning of Litvinenko, with a teapot at the aptly-named Millenium Hotel now the suspected vehicle for delivering a fatal dose of radioactive beverage by czarevitch Vladimir Putin. The glow-in-the-dark teapot was circulating in the hotel for weeks afterwards before the MI-6 super-sleuths picked up its radiation.

Former senior KGB operative Putin's role in the polonium-210 poisoning of a leading critic of his regime will doubtless never be uncovered. One of the first things this pocket-rocketeer did upon election was to close down access to Soviet archives, so like the Venona eye-peep before, we had only a small glimpse subsequent to Russification at the nefarious political culture under Lenin, Stalin and the derisory "detente" that ended with the invasion of Afghanistan. Now it appears that malicious culture may unfortunately have been reborn in the Kremlin with the FSB now acting at the behest of 'lil czarevitch Vlad to eliminate his newspaper critics and political threats.

I am reading John O'Sullivan's excellent book on The President, The Pope, and the Prime Minister which has a short sub-chapter on the suspected Soviet complicity in the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. Despite the acquittal in an Italian court of a Bulgarian KGB operative in '81, the Italian Mitrokhin Commission in '86 discovered subsequent well-nigh conclusive evidence that the East Bloc was behind this wretched assassin's attempt on the Pope's life, though the deluded hit-man probably did not know just whom he was working for. KGB water-cooler talk in Moscow had Directorate S of Bureau S, the double-secret KGB unit in charge of political assassins, as the prime mover in the attempt, which was probably sanctioned verbally by Brezhnev. [The Sovs were oh-so-delicate about bureaucratic paper-trail evidence in these kill-squad forays.]

The world accepts Sov and East Bloc disinformation as urban legend nowadays, such as the dissemination of Pope Pius XII's collaboration with the Nazis by East German Stasi disinformation operatives, when indeed, the Pope had been decorated by the state of Israel for saving hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing the Holocaust.

But don't look for the compliant MSM to pick up the poisoning of a Russian dissident and run with it. Too much research and tiresome journalism involved, though to give Brian Ross at ABC credit, he is the excepti

GHWB blames media for persecuting GWB

Not that the MSM are ever going to admit an unfair bias towards the left, which a UCLA/U of Missouri three-year study demonstrated an average of a 70 ADA rating on the top twenty mass-media outlets, including far above seventy for the NYT and CBS. That would be journalism, and old-fashioned facts are not the chief fodder that the beasts of the MSM masticate. They like
bias and Poppy is now talking back to his TV set about it.

This is a short intro to a C-Span show given by The Corner, NRO's mildly influential beat for centrist news with a rightie vibe. Five vets of the culture wars, incl. O'Beirne, Ingraham, Charen, Malkin and Kathryn Lopez kept fielding questions from a live audience on why the media hates the USA so much. Or appears to do so.

One questioner with a sense of history [remember these are conservatives and have a perspective beyond the last few years, Vietnam, and Watergate] asked why Hollyweird can't put out a series of flicks on "Why we are fighting?" as the WWII series was entitled.

Given the present media obsession with bomb blasts in Baghdad, something like the Kasserine Pass disaster would have had the result of our having this conversation in German, so defeatist and loser-oriented the current MSM appear to be.

But then I watched Leno last night, and he kept zinging Billy Jeff with stuff like "what will he be doing living in the WH again?" The answer: "Just like the first time, cheating on his spouse."

And certifiable defeatist David Letterman even had a couple of positive things to say about Clint Eastwood's flicks on Iwo Jima. Guess David is selective in his pacifism.

So the media isn't solely anti-war or anti-Bush, but Poppy does have a right to yell at his TV set.

Thoughts out of Season

Some Right-Wing Bloggers have put Gingrich on top of their Christmas List for '08, but more level-headed types are looking to national recognition candidates.

It all depends on whom the Denver Convention nominates, IMHO.

If Hillary is nominated, the Repubs should consider Condi, but more importantly, give Lieberman a real good look. Over Christmas, I had a long cocktail conversation with Repub Palm Beach County Chair who told me that Clay Shaw lost because his opponent was Jewish and Jewish Republicans will vote for a Jewish Democrat in the solitude of the voting booth. Another Repub elected pol at the same party opined that the reason the Florida electoral vote was so close in 2000 was the presence of Lieberman as VP on the ticket. Otherwise, Billy Jeff's swamp creature AG had bagged the Cuban vote for the Repubs with the Elian G fiasco and it would have been a cakewalk for the Repubs, as it was in 2004. These ward-heelers estimate a half-million S. Florida Jews, and at least 200,000 are Repubs, so do the math.

McCain or Giuliani and Lieberman, the Repubs can dance to the Homecoming Crown in '08, or Giuliani and Condi. [The Catholic vote for Giuliani will be less than thunderous, but the same principle that got Irish Catholic Dems to become Reagan Repubs applies for Giuliani a bit---Kerry was a total loss as an RC because of his chameleon camouflage.]

Carter 'Fesses Up: I'm Stupid and Punching Above My Weight

UPDATE: Please check resigned Carter Center official Kenneth Stein's long analysis of the faults and foibles of a guy over his head. Nut quote:

"The gap between many American Jews and Carter grew during his presidency as Carter increased pressure on Jerusalem. In the 1980 general election, Carter received a lower proportion of Jewish votes than any Democratic presidential candidate since 1920."

Although anyone with functioning frontal lobes in their cerebral cortex knows that superbantamweight
Jimmy Carter has been punching above his weight since he came to DC in '76 in the most regrettable [even to George McGovern and his wife, who both voted for Gerry Ford] electoral misstep the American people made in the twentieth century, Carter himself may be getting a glimmering of what everyone to the right of twittering moonbats have known for decades.

Carter suddenly had an epiphany at Brandeis in front of a potential mob of pitchfork-wielding hostiles concerning a passage in his laffer of a book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid which says:

"It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel."

Now you can see why Sadat and Begin held this diminuitive dweeb in such contempt at Camp David, as the passage implies that terror is just fine with Jee-mah until Israel signs on to his own version of what they should sign onto [oops, that's another matter, as international laws are nearly as contemptible as Carter's diplomatic skills]. Even the short-hitter Jee-Mah agrees, admitting that the passage was "worded in a completely improper and stupid way."

This freak-show has been on the road ever since his peanut farm was baled out of bankruptcy many years ago by unknown benefactors [Mr. Soros, are you there?]. After his disastrous exit from the private sector, the bantamweight [or perhaps super flyweight] has been inserting himself into all sorts of situations he doesn't understand and preening and mincing for the cameras with his bug-eyed drawl while real NGO experts fume at his high-minded amateurism and simple-minded generalizations. [Ethiopian elections last year were a case in point where he said the elections were free and fair, after which he flew out of town leaving NGO election monitors to deal with the massive fraud and subsequent violence that actually occurred. One more flop from the fool from Plains.]

No one grilled the simpleton about his purloined map from Dennis Ross's book, a book written by an actual expert and not a censorious media-whore. But Alan Dershowitz disposed of the discredited candidate for a UN Special-Olympics diplomacy seat in the following manner:

"You heard the Brandeis Jimmy Carter today, and he was terrific," Mr. Dershowitz said. "I support almost everything he said. But if you listen to the Al Jazeera Jimmy Carter, you'll hear a very different perspective."

Carter represents an unsound mind in a vertically-challenged body. He is like every other short person [Chavez, Ahmadodojihad, Dear Leader] who wants to mix it up with the heavyweights.

Outclassed and punching above his weight.

David Gregory a Liar?

We know that Mr. Gregory is bucking for a battlefield commission in NBC's war against the Bush Administration, but the silly Libby snipe hunt reveals how far this ambitious
Kerry-clone [he married well to use as a springboard to higher pay grades] might have gone in a Tom Maguire vignette [h/t: Mickey Kaus].

Hitchens Makes Mincemeat of Old Left Radicals

The Perfessoriat, the BBC, and George Galloway all come under the withering fire of the redoubtable Christopher Hitchens, reviewing Nick Cohen's book, What's Left? How the Liberals Lost Their Way. CH as usual eviscerates with a sharp scalpel all the frauds on the far left who still love to hate Bush/Blair/democracy.

Some choice cuts:

...there are thousands and thousands of middle-aged lefties for whom their once-revolutionary "credentials"” are all they have left to show for a lifetime of "activism," and who could not face their friends — or, perhaps, their students — if they found themselves endorsing a war fought by British or American soldiers. (I myself remember repressing a twinge of annoyance at the idea that the assault on civilisation represented by the 9/11 attacks would drive my anti-Kissinger book from the front page where I still believe it belonged.) But Cohen goes further: "I wanted anything associated with Tony Blair to fail, because that would allow me to return to the easy life of attacking him."”

It is this sentence, and its implications, that make his book an exceptional and necessary one. Cohen has no problem with those who are upset about state-sponsored exaggerations of the causes of war, or furious about the bungled occupation of Iraq that has ensued. People who think this is the problem are not his problem. Here’s his problem: the people who would die before they would applaud the squaddies and grunts who removed hideous regimes from Afghanistan and Iraq, yet who happily describe Islamist video-butchers and suicide-murderers as a “resistance”. Those who do this are not “anti-war” at all, but are shadily taking the other side in a conflict where the moral and civilisational stakes are extremely high.

Treason on the left is not new, but has become the media shibboleth with Dysfunctional-Bush-Hatred and Global Warming the new armaments in the long leftist war against free enterprise and political freedom. Of course, no one dissects these walking talking cadavers better than Hitchens, himself a veteran Man of the Left.

It’s all here: from the pseudo-radicals who said there was nothing to choose between Nazi imperialism in Europe and British rule in India, through the supporters of the Hitler-Stalin pact, all the way to those who defended Slobodan Milosevic as a socialist and those who took, quite literally took, money from the bloody hands of Saddam Hussein. Just in the past decade or so, had this “anti-war” rabble had its way, we would have seen Kuwait stay part of Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo cleansed and annexed by “Greater” Serbia, and the Taliban retaining control of Afghanistan. You might think that such a record would lead its adherents to be dismissed as a silly and sinister fringe, but instead it is they who pose as the principled radicals and their opponents who are treated with unconcealed disdain in the universities and on the BBC.

This betrayal (because there is no other word for it) has been made possible in part by a degraded version of multiculturalism. The hard left has junked its historic secularism, to say nothing of its principles of equality for females and homosexuals, to make common cause with Muslim outfits some of which are associated in other countries with the extreme right. It has done this by the use of nonsense terms such as “Islamophobia”, which are designed to give the no-less nonsensical impression that Islam is some kind of persecuted ethnicity. But the vile attacks by Islamists on the Jews (Britain’s oldest minority) and on India (Britain’s most important democratic ally after the United States) show the truly reactionary and hateful character of the opportunist alliance between failed ex-Stalinists and fanatical theocrats. For Cohen, as for some others of us, this is no longer a difference of emphasis within the family of the left. It is the adamant line of division in a bitter fight against a new form of fascism, at home no less than abroad.

I think he is right to identify the opening of this crisis with the events in Bosnia and Kosovo, because in that instance it was America (pushed by the supposed “poodle” Blair) that used force to prevent the annihilation of a Muslim community. Those who opposed that rescue operation, and who yet denounce the fight against Bin-Ladenism and its allies as “targeting” Muslims, have given the game away and shown that they hate only Anglo-American policy, to a degree that results in blindness. Meanwhile, Israel is always and everywhere to be denounced (and not always wrongly) while the other product of British partition policy during 1947-48, the part-rogue and part-failed state named Pakistan, is never indicted in the same way for its numberless bigotries and aggressions. This is bad faith, and needs to be unmasked as such. Cohen’s book is an admirable example of self- criticism and self-examination, using intellectual honesty as a means of illuminating a much wider canvas.

Like St. Paul who was a sort of one-man Mossad for the Orthodox Jewry of his day, CH has had the scales fall from his eyes and recognizes the shallow, superficial twaddle purveyed by the High Priests of the Liberal Left, be it useful idiots like Gore on GW or former-rightie opportunists like Arianna Puffington and her attendant Host twittering at the moon as they flutter skyward above the darkling plain.

CH ends with a recommendation to read another book:

Do not feel that you have to be a leftist or liberal to read it, because it engages with an argument that is crucial for all of us, and for our time.

Read on... books:
Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman (Norton £9.99)
A huge influence on Cohen’s ideas

The long demise of a defunct intelligentsia continues, but as their moral authority erodes, the shrill hysteria increases, so leftists are left to tabloid issues like the Plame fiasco or pseudo-heroism by barely literate actors and other showmen.

Hitchens Eight Point Proposal

Christopher Hitchens damns Mark Steyn a bit by faint praise in his review [in the City Journal no less] of Steyn's America Alone. Hitchens is the only challenge Steyn has left standing for the most brilliant polemicist on the planet in any language I'm acquainted with.

You should read the entire piece to savor the delicious irony of Christopher's defense of his friend Martin Amis against some of Steyn's jabs. And the very last [eighth] point of CH's proposals has the Cypriot clincher. Read to the end and again get ready for a great punchline. Here is Hitchens' 8-point riposte to Steyn's 10-point list at the end of America Alone:

1. An end to one-way multiculturalism and to the cultural masochism that goes with it. The Koran does not mandate the wearing of veils or genital mutilation, and until recently only those who apostasized from Islam faced the threat of punishment by death. Now, though, all manner of antisocial practices find themselves validated in the name of religion, and mullahs have begun to issue threats even against non-Muslims for criticism of Islam. This creeping Islamism must cease at once, and those responsible must feel the full weight of the law. Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.

2. A strong, open alliance with India on all fronts, from the military to the political and economic, backed by an extensive cultural exchange program, to demonstrate solidarity with the other great multiethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism. A hugely enlarged quota for qualified Indian immigrants and a reduction in quotas from Pakistan and other nations where fundamentalism dominates.

3. A similarly forward approach to Nigeria, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the other countries of Western Africa that are under attack by jihadists and are also the location of vast potential oil reserves, whose proper development could help emancipate the local populations from poverty and ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

4. A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.

5. Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that seismologists predict in its immediate future. Millions of lives might be lost in a few moments, and we would also have to worry about the fate of secret underground nuclear facilities. When a quake leveled the Iranian city of Bam three years ago, the performance of American rescue teams was so impressive that their popularity embarrassed the regime. Iran’s neighbors would need to pay attention, too: a crisis in Iran’s nuclear underground facilities—an Iranian Chernobyl—would not be an internal affair. These concerns might help shift the currently ossified terms of the argument and put us again on the side of an internal reform movement within Iran and its large and talented diaspora.

6. Unconditional solidarity, backed with force and the relevant UN resolutions, with an independent and multi-confessional Lebanon.

7. A commitment to buy Afghanistan’s opium crop and to keep the profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such time as the country’s agriculture— especially its once-famous vines—has been replanted and restored. We can use the product in the interim for the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

8. We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less scrupulous—Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind—that we know that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq without bearing this in mind. Some years ago, the Pakistani government announced that it would break the international embargo on the unrecognized and illegal Turkish separatist state in Cyprus and would appoint an ambassador to it, out of “Islamic solidarity.” Cyprus is a small democracy with no armed forces to speak of, but its then–foreign minister told me the following story. He sought a meeting with the Pakistani authorities and told them privately that if they recognized the breakaway Turkish colony, his government would immediately supply funds and arms to one of the secessionist movements—such as the Baluchis—within Pakistan itself. Pakistan never appointed an ambassador to Turkish Cyprus.

When they push, push back.

Australia Steps Up to the Plate

Any political agenda, religious sect or other collection of individuals seeking radical change by direct action should heed what Australia has done to keep radical groups disguised as religious zealots from agitating for violent or non-parliamentary constitutional change.

They're telling them to "clear out."

Must be nice living in a country where the political leadership is actually willing to enforce the laws of the land.

A Modest Proposal

There is a petition circulating to restore Greek Orthodox religious services to Hagia Sophia [Holy Wisdom] Cathedral in Istanbul. The EU has supposedly promised to make this plea to the Turkish government if one million signatures can be collected.

My modest proposal is that the EU promise the restoration of Islamic services in The Grand Mosque of Cordoba, AKA Mezquita Cathedral, as a quid pro quo to the Turkish government. This would be a face-saving device at least allowing the Turks to consider the proposal as something other than outright blackmail.

Both houses of worship have suffered the same architectural vandalism by the conquering faith. Hagia Sophia is disfigured by large Koranic inscriptions while the Cordoba Mosque suffered the insertion of a cookie-cutter gothic nave which serves as the Catholic Cathedral, an inclusion which ruined the original architectural integrity.

There will be objections from pious Catholics, but the trade-off by a secular-humanist Spanish government might be easy. In Cordoba, my understanding is that the Muslims have asked only that they be allowed to conduct Friday services in the non-consecrated Islamic section of the prayer grounds.

However, my sense is that rising Islamist fervor in Turkey would probably nix any political decision to allow use of Hagia Sophia as a place of worship by Christians, even on an occasional basis.

It's worth running up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes.

"Climate Scientists" Oversell Anthropogenic GW?

The Houston Chronicle buries the lede in almost the last paragraph of a story on how some reputable young climatologists are feeling that their older colleagues may be overselling anthropogenic global warming. In particular, the connection between hurricanes and GW touted by Al Gore has most reputable scientists scratching their collective head. Other scary prognostications are also worst-case fear-mongering, they believe.

Everyone knows that tenure and grants are the lifeblood of academic careers, and the most ethical scientists have been warning for decades about the sirens of "Cargo Cult Science," as Richard Feynman dubbed the rush for money and perks by institutional Big Science. Here's the nut quote from the Chronicle story:

"I can understand how a scientist without tenure can feel the community pressures," says environmental scientist Roger Pielke Jr., a colleague of Vranes' at the University of Colorado. Pielke says he has felt pressure from his peers: A prominent scientist angrily accused him of being a skeptic, and a scientific journal editor asked him to "dampen" the message of a peer-reviewed paper to derail skeptics and business interests.

Read the story and see how scientists are tempted to follow Pied Piper Al Gore just like lemmings with the same destination as Gore's political career.

On the rocks at the bottom of a cliff.

UPDATE: More on Big Science and the International Left at here

Turkey Ready for EU?

Sadly, a journalist who crusaded for Armenian-Turkish community peace was murdered in Istanbul, an act which perhaps puts another obstacle in front of Turkish entry into the EU.

Shades of Van Gogh in Holland, and this fellow was campaigning for Christian/Muslim peace, not making movies offensive to Islamic fanatics!

Another post on PJ media points out a Kurdish perspective, perhaps the major fear of Turkish hyper-nationalists.

Still another POV, this from a journalistic angle.

Idiocracy Worth Renting

It's a shame that the Mike Judge flick Idiocracy never went into theaters, but the takedown of FoxNews in the movie might have been too much for the Fox execs to handle. The shame of it all is that this cautionary tale, though filled with strains on one's suspension of disbelief, should serve as a red flag to the chattering nomenklatura that their days as an elite are numbered.

Not that they'd watch a movie which graphically depicts how the failure to "cull the herd," extremely politically incorrect language to begin with, will lead in a few centuries to a moronic dumb and dumber civilization where the "average" Luke Wilson is the smartest man in America.

Hat tip to Steve Sailer for touting this flick, though the carping critic in me keeps wondering how a bunch of dummies could keep electricity running if they use Gatorade for irrigating their crops. Look at Baghdad's grid problems today!

Idiocracy isn't quite as good as Mike Judge's Office Space, already a cult film which my 17-year old daughter turned me onto early last year---her boyfriend is a high IQ pre-med student at U. Miami and watched it for the umpteenth time with us.

But the defunct WASP aristocracy will be closely followed by the present oh-so-socialist LDLs in the ash-heap of history if they don't improve their breeding skills---pace the professoriat that wants to convert college kids to intellectual and procreational sterility.

Adam Gadahn Got California State Funding before Defecting to AQ

The New Yorker has a long narrative on Adam Gadahn, Dr. Zawahiri's American PR chief who is high in AQ's hierarchy, and who is, as the FBI says, the ultimate "home-grown" US Islamic terrorist, a breed very little studied and poorly understood, as the article proceeds to make clear.

The narrative of Gadahn portrays him as a sort of Phil Spector wannabe, a nerdy, brilliant, alienated second-generation dropout who was the home-schooled son of a '70's era hog-farm [in this case, goats] commune dweller. Adam had an isolated childhood in Riverside County and Oregon on a goat farm, and morphed into a "death-metal" tyro impresario until he collided with Islam, after which he switched his death fetish toward killing infidels.

The story of Gadahn's conversion and immersion in The Islamic Society of Orange County is convoluted and depressing, but suffice it to say that Gadahn got angry at a fellow named Bundakji, a Jordanian Sunni married to a Shi'ite who called himself "Sushi" and was reviled [called "Danny the Jew"] for his moderate views by the extremist infiltrators of the ISOC. They seceded along with Gadahn, ironically a man with Jewish antecedants, after trying to take over the organization. As he tells his tale, the article's author buries some interesting nuggets about three quarters of the way through this long article:

In the late nineties, the National Security Council, concerned about possible terrorist attacks around the millennium, asked a team of private terrorism analysts to investigate Deek and Diab’s [Gadahn's extremist mentors] activities. Rita Katz, who is now the director of the SITE Institute, a nonprofit group that monitors jihadi communiqués on the Internet, led the investigation. (Katz showed me a videotape of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman’s 1992 lecture at the Islamic Society.) Katz knew that Deek had obtained American citizenship, and she learned from intelligence reports that he had connections to a terrorist cell based in Montreal. (The cell included Ahmed Ressam, who was involved in the millennium plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport.) Katz suspected that Deek was working as a coördinator for Al Qaeda groups in the West. She discovered that he had collaborated with Diab in California; the two men had set up a bogus nonprofit group, called Charity Without Borders, in Diab’s name, and Diab had even managed to obtain grants for it from the state. (Gadahn is listed as "crew member" in the charity’s official documents.) Deek and Diab paid the rent on the apartment where Gadahn lived.....

[comments and emphasis mine]
So the State of California helped pay the rent for Islamic terrorists planning to blow up LAX, a tidbit one would think worthy of highlighting, or at least comment, were The New Yorker a more reliable publication concerning national security affairs. No irony there.....

Just another terrorist organization subsidized by the state whose Ninth Circus [oops] Circuit Court has recently honored Ahmed Ressam's appeal by throwing out parts of his conviction for planning to blow up the state's biggest airport. Yawn....

The story moves on as Adam fell into the baddest crowd in the neighborhood and emigrated to Pakistan in the late '90s, where he quickly picked up Arabic and a smattering of Pushtu, and the rest unfolds like a bad novel. The author goes on to generalize about the big question why:

.....former C.I.A. case officer...Marc Sageman..after September 11th, while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to examine the process of Islamic radicalization in a way that had not been done before, empirically.....Sageman discovered that most Al Qaeda operatives had been radicalized in the West and were from caring, intact families that had solidly middle- or upper-class economic backgrounds. Their families were religious but generally mainstream. The vast majority of the men did not have criminal records or any history of mental disorders. Moreover, there was little evidence of coördinated recruitment, coercion, or brainwashing. Al Qaeda’s leaders waited for aspiring jihadists to come to them—and then accepted only a small percentage. Joining the jihad, Sageman realized, was like trying to get into a highly selective college: many apply, but only a few are accepted.

Perhaps his most unexpected conclusion was that ideology and political grievances played a minimal role during the initial stages of enlistment. “The only significant finding was that the future terrorists felt isolated, lonely, and emotionally alienated,” Sageman told the September 11th Commission in 2003, during a debriefing about his research. These lost men would congregate at mosques and find others like them. Eventually, they would move into apartments near their mosques and build friendships around their faith and its obligations. He has called his model the “halal theory of terrorism”—since bonds were often formed while sharing halal meals—or the “bunch of guys” theory. The bunch of guys constituted a closed society that provided a sense of meaning that did not exist in the larger world.

Sageman examined scholarship on other revivalist movements and found important parallels. He learned that doctrine played a negligible role for new converts to the Reverend Moon’s Unification Church, for example. “Many moved into the Moonie commune because of their attachment to group members while still openly expressing rejection of the Moon ideology,” Sageman wrote in his book, “Understanding Terror Networks,” which was published in 2004. But, once the converts experienced the social benefits of their new community, accepting their friends’ beliefs was much easier. Later, when asked by researchers about their conversion, most Moonies spoke of the irresistible appeal of the church’s religious outlook, and had forgotten their initial skepticism about the faith.

Within the “bunch of guys,” Sageman found, men often became radicalized through a process akin to oneupmanship, in which members try to outdo one another in demonstrations of religious zeal. (Gregory Saathoff, a research psychiatrist at the University of Virginia and a consultant to the F.B.I., told me, “We’re seeing in some of the casework that once they get the fever they are white-hot to move forward.”) Generally, the distinction between converts and men with mainstream Islamic backgrounds is less meaningful than it might seem, Sageman said, since “they all become born again.” Many Muslims who accept radical Salafist beliefs consider themselves “reverts.” They typically renounce their former lives and friends—and often their families.

Sageman’s model provides clues to how radicalization unfolds, but it cannot explain why one person embraces extremism and another does not. (As a former senior intelligence analyst told me, “It’s not something you can plot on a graph and study.”) Two of Gadahn’s siblings are in college, and the third is an aesthetician; why was Adam the one to join Al Qaeda?

So a young man from a counter-cultural goat farm in Southern California promises to America from Pakistan to "make the streets of America run red with blood" and the state that produced Jonestown cadavers to the tune of 908 and Hale-Bopp cometeers to the order of the high thirties sees this as business as usual in the multiculti broth simmering as a sort of Sargasso of Lunacy just west of Nevada. One could go on, but multiplying the defects of Panglossian nitwittery just bores sophisticated liberals who wave their arms as much as Gadahn while yammering on Huffington and elsewhere...

"Charity Without Borders" is an appropriate bogus group for this endlessly deluded State of Mindset to donate dollars toward its own destruction.

Follow-up on Tragic Murder

My ex-webmaster, who tells me he's joining the Marine Corps, says that thebest coverage of the Lincoln-Sudbury murder is at the link above.

The murderer has Asberger's Syndrome, a semi-severe form of autism combined with bipolar behaviour. Word of mouth also says the victim was also in "special education" for a severe disorder.

Our prayers go out for everyone connected to this tragedy.

Et in Arcadia Student Murder

My two webmasters for the site Dave's Blog are students at Lincoln-Sudbury High School where a 16-year old is being held on adult murder charges for stabbing a freshman to death after an altercation in what CNN calls "the boy's room."

I'll see if I can get the skinny from my two web-czarevitches. Keep posted.

Adam Gadahn Got California State Funding before Defecting to AQ

The New Yorker has a long narrative on Adam Gadahn, Dr. Zawahiri's PR chief who is high in AQ's hierarchy, who is, as the FBI says, the ultimate "home-grown" Islamic terrorist, a breed very little studied and poorly understood, as the article proceeds to make clear.

The narrative of Gadahn portrays him as a sort of Phil Spector wannabe, a nerdy, brilliant, alienated second-generation dropout who was the home-schooled son of a '70's era hog-farm [in this case, goats] commune dweller. Adam had an isolated childhood in Riverside County and Oregon on a goat farm, and morphed into a "death-metal" tyro impresario until he collided with Islam, after which he switched his death fetish toward killing infidels.

The story of Gadahn's conversion and immersion in The Islamic Society of Orange County is convoluted and depressing, but suffice it to say that Gadahn got angry at a fellow named Bundakji, a Jordanian Sunni married to a Shi'ite who called himself "Sushi" and was reviled [called "Danny the Jew"] for his moderate views by the extremist infiltrators of the ISOC. They seceded along with Gadahn, ironically a man with Jewish antecedants, after trying to take over the organization. As he tells his tale, the article's author buries some interesting nuggets about three quarters of the way through this long article:

In the late nineties, the National Security Council, concerned about possible terrorist attacks around the millennium, asked a team of private terrorism analysts to investigate Deek and Diab’s [Gadahn's extremist mentors] activities. Rita Katz, who is now the director of the SITE Institute, a nonprofit group that monitors jihadi communiqués on the Internet, led the investigation. (Katz showed me a videotape of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman’s 1992 lecture at the Islamic Society.) Katz knew that Deek had obtained American citizenship, and she learned from intelligence reports that he had connections to a terrorist cell based in Montreal. (The cell included Ahmed Ressam, who was involved in the millennium plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport.) Katz suspected that Deek was working as a coördinator for Al Qaeda groups in the West. She discovered that he had collaborated with Diab in California; the two men had set up a bogus nonprofit group, called Charity Without Borders, in Diab’s name, and Diab had even managed to obtain grants for it from the state. (Gadahn is listed as "crew member" in the charity’s official documents.) Deek and Diab paid the rent on the apartment where Gadahn lived.....

[comments and emphasis mine]
So the State of California helped pay the rent for Islamic terrorists planning to blow up LAX, a tidbit one would think worthy of highlighting, or at least comment, were The New Yorker a more reliable publication concerning national security affairs. No irony there.....

Just another terrorist organization subsidized by the state whose Ninth Circus [oops] Circuit Court has recently honored Ahmed Ressam's appeal by throwing out parts of his conviction for planning to blow up the state's biggest airport. Yawn....

The story moves on as Adam fell into the baddest crowd in the neighborhood and emigrated to Pakistan in the late '90s, where he quickly picked up Arabic and a smattering of Pushtu, and the rest unfolds like a bad novel. The author goes on to generalize about the big question why:

.....former C.I.A. case officer...Marc Sageman..after September 11th, while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to examine the process of Islamic radicalization in a way that had not been done before, empirically.....Sageman discovered that most Al Qaeda operatives had been radicalized in the West and were from caring, intact families that had solidly middle- or upper-class economic backgrounds. Their families were religious but generally mainstream. The vast majority of the men did not have criminal records or any history of mental disorders. Moreover, there was little evidence of coördinated recruitment, coercion, or brainwashing. Al Qaeda’s leaders waited for aspiring jihadists to come to them—and then accepted only a small percentage. Joining the jihad, Sageman realized, was like trying to get into a highly selective college: many apply, but only a few are accepted.

Perhaps his most unexpected conclusion was that ideology and political grievances played a minimal role during the initial stages of enlistment. “The only significant finding was that the future terrorists felt isolated, lonely, and emotionally alienated,” Sageman told the September 11th Commission in 2003, during a debriefing about his research. These lost men would congregate at mosques and find others like them. Eventually, they would move into apartments near their mosques and build friendships around their faith and its obligations. He has called his model the “halal theory of terrorism”—since bonds were often formed while sharing halal meals—or the “bunch of guys” theory. The bunch of guys constituted a closed society that provided a sense of meaning that did not exist in the larger world.

Sageman examined scholarship on other revivalist movements and found important parallels. He learned that doctrine played a negligible role for new converts to the Reverend Moon’s Unification Church, for example. “Many moved into the Moonie commune because of their attachment to group members while still openly expressing rejection of the Moon ideology,” Sageman wrote in his book, “Understanding Terror Networks,” which was published in 2004. But, once the converts experienced the social benefits of their new community, accepting their friends’ beliefs was much easier. Later, when asked by researchers about their conversion, most Moonies spoke of the irresistible appeal of the church’s religious outlook, and had forgotten their initial skepticism about the faith.

Within the “bunch of guys,” Sageman found, men often became radicalized through a process akin to oneupmanship, in which members try to outdo one another in demonstrations of religious zeal. (Gregory Saathoff, a research psychiatrist at the University of Virginia and a consultant to the F.B.I., told me, “We’re seeing in some of the casework that once they get the fever they are white-hot to move forward.”) Generally, the distinction between converts and men with mainstream Islamic backgrounds is less meaningful than it might seem, Sageman said, since “they all become born again.” Many Muslims who accept radical Salafist beliefs consider themselves “reverts.” They typically renounce their former lives and friends—and often their families.

Sageman’s model provides clues to how radicalization unfolds, but it cannot explain why one person embraces extremism and another does not. (As a former senior intelligence analyst told me, “It’s not something you can plot on a graph and study.”) Two of Gadahn’s siblings are in college, and the third is an aesthetician; why was Adam the one to join Al Qaeda?

So a young man from a counter-cultural goat farm in Southern California promises to America from Pakistan to "make the streets of America run red with blood" and the state that produced Jonestown cadavers to the tune of 908 and Hale-Bopp cometeers to the order of the high thirties sees this as business as usual in the multiculti broth simmering as a sort of Sargasso of Lunacy just west of Nevada. One could go on, but multiplying the defects of Panglossian nitwittery just bores sophisticated liberals who wave their arms as much as Gadahn while yammering on Huffington and elsewhere...

"Charity Without Borders" is an appropriate bogus group for this endlessly deluded State of Mindset to donate dollars toward its own destruction.

NIMBY: SF Libs Show true humanism toward Habitat for Humanity

"We're humanists. Stay away!"

Check out the link to see how the languourous lotus-eaters of
Marin County, home of renowned social activist Barbara Boxer, northern Cal's answer to Streisand, regard Habitat for Humanity. What if Condi Rice moved in to the four-unit project? Wonder if Barbara would start slinging her fecal material in Condi's direction.

UN Official Indicted for Saddam Bribes; Chirac Bagman Interior Minister as well

UN Oil-for-Food Chief Bevan was indicted by a US Federal Court the day GWB is scheduled to meet the new UN Security Council Chief Ban Ki-Moon. The BBC had the nuts on this story in 2004, with a petite final line:

But other oil revenue came from selling certificates allowing the holder to sell on oil rights and charge a per-barrel commission on them.

Some of these certificates, the investigators said, went to groups such as the Mojahideen-e-Khalq, a group aiming to overthrow neighbouring Iran, and to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Others went to journalists or foreign officials, [emphasis mine] the investigators said.

The chief foreign official implicated might be French President Jacques Chirac, whose former Interior Minister [and tuyau] Charles Pasqua was indicted in a double-secret journalistic cover-up published in Le Monde in April of last year. The Bush-hating MSM won't touch this story with a ten-meter pole because it implicates Chirac, whom they love and who cannot by French law be prosecuted while in office. Here is the article in Le Monde which could barely stifle a yawn as it buried the story of the indictment of former French Interior Minister Pasqua on page 14 in a tiny article dominated by Pasqua's quotes defending himself. Below is the text of the Le Monde Watch blog and the link for francophone blog visitors. My entire April Fool's Post outlines the ironies of having Le Monde hyperventilate emotionally about the Plame non-event on page 4 while burying the implication of its President's being involved in Oil-for-Food scandals to a a miniscule piece below the fold on page 14. Don't Bush wish he was prez of this kleptocracy!

While Vice Consul in Lyon, I heard multiple stories of the gold-smuggling across the Swiss border at Geneva, where a Saddam half-brother was a bit later Iraqi Ambassador to the UN [funny how UN and corruption seem to converge in their evolution!] Anyone familiar with French kleptocrats knows that the elite thrives on gold napoleons d'or easily fungible in Paris and available by the millions in Geneva. The diplomatic pouch from Geneva to Paris via diplomatic courier must have been lugged by a power-lifter!

But back to Bevan, whose interlocutor bag-man was former UN SecGen and Paris-educated Boutros Boutros-Ghali's brother-in-law! Just a coincidence, I'm sure! Don't look to our own Le Monde, the ostrich-head-in-the-sand New York Times, to expose its pet project UN whose own kleptocrats are roaming the world keeping peace, molesting kids sexually, and kicking back big-time while Bevan enjoys extradition-free retirement on Cyprus in his aunt's apartment, whom he says gave him the Oil-for-Food monies just before she was discovered at the bottom of an elevator shaft, conveniently leaving her apartment vacant for his rest and recreation.

Just like Kofi's son Kobe demonstrates, the UN is all about family values.

O'Reilly gets Fouled, Strikes Back and gets Called for Second Foul

Howie Kurtz at the Washington Post bemoans the condemnation and wrath Bill O'Reilly has displayed against NBC, which has scuttled leftward with the political winds. Kurtz knows his inside-the-Beltway audience shares NBC's leftish tilt, and panders to its delusion that NBC is "centrist" while he tries to deconstruct O'Reilly in his usual soft-pedaling manner.

He brings up Keith Olbermann, whose rants called "special comments" have been put on the blogosphere's most prominently ultra-left "media blogs" as audience-boosting ploys for the farthest reaches of the fever swamps.

As an obiter dictum, isn't it interesting that the favorite POLITICAL columnists of the loony left are failed Broadway critic Frank Rich, former Enron-consultant professor Paul Krugman and TV ex-sportscaster KOlbermann, who flunked out at his sports outpost by reportedly outlandish behavior and insufferable arrogance. Perfect job description for a ultra-left political observer, including the poor soul whom Kurtz chided O'Reilly for calling a lunatic, a New Age poster girl named Sansura Taylor whose mother must have had some bad acid while carrying little Sansura in the womb. Sansura's demented solecisms betray a City-by-the-Bay mindset so deranged that O'Reilly can't help himself and keeps inviting her on his show. Her IQ is such that he could be chided for cruelty to animals.

Kurtz's entire article is slanted pro-NBC and against O'Reilly, going so far as to quote:

Olbermann says O'Reilly's latest offensive "reeks a little bit of an attempt to get some attention," though the former sportscaster admits he started the feud as a way of raising his profile.

Just burying the lede as a final dependent clause, which is Kurtz's manner of writing. Let's say O'Reilly shook off the small dog biting his ankle as a more appropriate trope for the situation.

Kurtz quotes Joe Scarborough extensively, as though this recanted GOP congressman were a "conservative." Joe is tacking with the prevailing winds, though his cultural conservatism is still hostile to what he calls "Hollyweird."

Without defining the previous "layer of farce," Kurtz takes a cheap shot at BOR:

Adding an extra layer of farce, O'Reilly now regularly features a body-language expert, who said that Mitchell displayed "high level of uncomfortability" during her appearance on the show.

The fact is that O'Reilly did not condemn all of NBC as Kurtz deceptively implies, and actually praised the Today Show and Mitchell and some other relatively objective or centrist commentators. Though you wouldn't know this from Kurtz's hit-piece drive-by substance hidden by his soothing style.

But although Chris Matthews gets a free pass at saying Cheney "never passes up a chance to kill," an SF blogger can start a campaign against free speech from the left without any objection from the MSM, who will call right-wing comments that resemble Matthews' senseless rant against the VP "hate speech" and call for its abolishment---hang the First Amendment. Watch this blogger get on MSM and garner praise for trying to limit talk-radio, which is an outlet that entertains tax-paying working people on the job, obviously not a left-wing constituency.

Remember Alec Baldwin calling for Henry Hyde to be assassinated on network TV back during the height of the Clinton Impeachment for lying under oath? I do, but Orwell's memory hole has swallowed that up too.

And to switch from the prophetic 1984 to Animal Farm put it, some animals are more equal than others.

PM Blair Blames Media for Anti-War Mood

The British PM voices out loud the crime being committed on US and UK national security by their own media, whose dedicated and lurid coverage of all the mishaps and carnage of the Iraq War without a balancing positive side prejudices the average viewer with their drumbeats of negativity and defeatism. Blair's eloquence transcends the bleats of the MSM "boneless wonders:"

"[Islamic terrorists] have realized two things: the power of terrorism to cause chaos, hinder and displace political progress especially through suicide missions; and the reluctance of Western opinion to countenance long campaigns, especially when the account it receives is via a modern media driven by the impact of pictures.

"They now know that if a suicide bomber kills 100 completely innocent people in Baghdad, in defiance of the wishes of the majority of Iraqis who voted for a non-sectarian government, then the image presented to a Western public is as likely to be, more likely to be, one of a failed Western policy, not another outrage against democracy."

The Independent article has a subtitle "blame the messenger." In many cases, the MSM messengers consciously align with terrorism and brutality to score domestic political gains and scorn the democratic right to free speech that allows them to impugn the motives of their elected leaders.

Their true colors were displayed after Saddam's execution, which the NYT absurdly criticized. I'd love to see what Saddam would have done to Pinch Sulzberger and his gang of forty leakers.

They Just Can't Help Themselves!

Remember all the rhetoric about "a culture of corruption" emitting from Dem House Speaker Pelosi. She wasn't talking about minimum-wage omissions for American Samoa, where Star-Kist, owned by Del Monte, a San Fran-based food consortium, because that would look like a special favor for a very huge constituent---and machined-based Dem politics she grew up with in Baltimore and the Italian-run SF machine just thrive on doing special favors for constituents.

The Washington Times points out the tiny oversight of American Samoa being omitted from the minimum-wage hike, and Barney Frank's furious reaction when an alert Rep Congressman asked for a vote to omit stem-cell research on American Samoa as well! BTW, the Republican leadership does not look much improved from the comatose Denny Hastert level, as the W Times notes:

Some Republicans who voted in favor of the minimum-wage bill were particularly irritated to learn yesterday -- after their vote -- that the legislation did not include American Samoa.

Of course, Pelosi rushed the legislation through without enough time to study it, but shouldn't alert Rep staffers have noticed this BEFORE it came to a vote?

And even the New York Times gagged on Sen. Reid's attempt to hide earmarks and had the following lede:

After campaigning for months on a promise to tighten ethics rules, Senate Democratic leaders tried unsuccessfully Thursday to block a measure that would shine a light on the shadowy practice of earmarking federal money for lawmakers’ pet projects.

Of course, the MSM should have suspected as much when they found Reid's extended family working out of his Senate office as lobbyists! But they were too busy chasing down Mark Foley for inappropriate e-mails. The NYT notes:

After the move to block it failed, Mr. Reid and Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat, argued vigorously against the measure, saying it could have unintended effects.

"Earmark disclosure will be a major change in the way the Senate works," Mr. Reid said. "We should adopt the Reid-McConnell version rather than the House version in the DeMint amendment. If we need to revisit the issue later, we can do that."

Mr. DeMint argued that if the original bill was not strengthened, "the public’s going to know from Day 1 that the idea of being open and transparent is just a scam."

Reid obviously overlooked the unintended irony of his remark that "Earmark disclosure will be a major change in the way the Senate works" because that was a large part of why the Republicans lost the Senate. Reid figured that his family firm recently moved out of his offices could still make hay because of "the way the Senate works," evidently, and that all that earmark-bashing would soon be forgotten after the election. Ditto Durbin.

DeMint's got a future, unlike McConnell and the Hastert-gang in the House, who are still asleep as they get snookered by Pelosi and her SF corporate Family.

Jeffrey Goldberg on Hillary, two other Dem wannabes

The New Yorker has a good piece by Goldberg, who avoids the fever swamps of the left as he pursues the Peter Beinart/Michael Lind search for sane Democrats on foreign policy.

Hillary Clinton comes off well in Goldberg's rendition, making even Paul Wolfowitz look un-demonized in her well-informed "tour d'horizon." She appears to harbor little bitterness from perceived Republican unfairness on Bosnia and Kosovo, and has what Goldberg describes as a "precinct captain" acquaintance with Hamas/Fatah rivalries in Gaza/West Bank feuding.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, is clearly not yet up-to-speed on the intricacies of foreign policy and demonstrates this both in his feel-good kumbayeh book and his conversation with Goldberg. He is Orwellian in his double-speak as quoted by JG:

"It’s not a great bargain for the next President to take over the mess in Iraq," Obama told me last month. "But there is as much pressure in both the Republican and Democratic camps, because both have genuine concern for the troops and the families and the budget. It won’t be good for congressmen of the President’s party if we’re still spending two billion dollars a week in Iraq in two years."

Edwards appears willing to play the Gore/Kerry card of plunging into the fever swamps to get the Democratic nomination, then emerge to go centrist in the general election. This Gresham's Law drives out thoughtful centrists like Evan Bayh, whom JG quotes in the beginning of the article.

Edwards is bashing Wal-Mart to get union support and clearly sees domestic politics verging on class-warfare as his meal ticket. On Iraq, he is succinct: "Let's start leaving now," withdrawing 40.000 troops right away. On the overall foreign stage:

In his announcement speeches, Edwards called for "getting America and the world to break our addiction to oil" but did not mention counterterrorism as a top priority, which sets him apart from the current Democratic field. Rather, he emphasized universal health care, ending poverty, and combatting global warming.

Although Clinton describes herself "in the lonely middle," she sounds almost hawkish compared to the other two leaders in polling run-ups to the Iowa caucuses. Her lawyerly caution may not play well in the Dem primaries, where miasmal swamp things appear behind Cindy Sheehan on cue and interrupt candidates not sufficiently deluded on Iraq and foreign policy in general. Jimmy Carter may again appear to upbraid in his censorious manner anyone less demented than himself.

But if the Dems are going to take themselves seriously in '08, they will require a candidate whose foreign policy pronouncements are more sophisticated than getting out of Iraq, eliminating AIDS, fighting global warming, and ending genocide in Darfur---the last three being the runner-up foreign policy picks of a recent poll on Dems' long-range international priorities.

The Rottenest Generation: What Has Posterity Done for Me?

Paul Samuelson has a good article on the Baby Boomers, who are going to begin to hit sixty-five en masse soon. As a Medicare recipient, I can't blame them, but a little like the Euros, the future generations are going to pay the bill for the retired Boomers.

Strange how the Greatest Generation could produce what might be the Rottenest like Yin produces Yang. Or whatever.

NYT Quotes Taxi Driver For Headline on Somalia

The New York Times knows it is unaccountable in American media circles, so its headline "Airstrike Rekindles Somalis’ Anger at the U.S." is based on the quotation of "Deeq Salad Mursel, a taxi driver" who sees the US gunship attacks on Al Qaeda suspects as revenge for Blackhawk Down in 1993. NYT sleuthy newsman Gettleman [a well-known local beer in Milwaukee] also gets a cellphone conversation from an Islamist Minister of Health who claims the gunships killed cattle and kids, in that order of importance. But Gettleman notes he has no proof his telephone interlocutor was actually a Minister.

However, in their rush to blame the US for destroying potential sworn enemies, the NYT dropped one of its cardinal PC rules:

The last remnants of the Islamist forces fled to Ras Kamboni, an isolated fishing village on the Kenyan border that residents said had been used as a terrorist sanctuary before. Starting in the mid-1990s, they said, the Islamists built trenches, hospitals and special terrorist classrooms in the village and taxed local fisherman to pay the costs.

Oops, the managing editor on duty will be reprimanded sternly by Larry Keller and Pinch S for use of the "T" word.

Alternatively, Gettleman had no idea his quote from an angry taxi driver would be the headline for his article, and it was inserted by a Bush-hating senior editor at the NYT. Could this be possible? At a "newspaper of record?"

Crime and Prisons [h/t Taranto]

The Chicago Tribune has an editorial that demonstrates the absolute nuttiness of left-wing thinking, of that oxymoron is not obvious on the face of it. The Tribune notes:

No one theory explains why crime rates have declined in Illinois and around the country since the early 1990s. A decline in drug and alcohol abuse has been a welcome contributor. Community policing has been effective in many places. Crime tends to be an occupation of the young, but the population is aging. More people have been locked up and kept off the streets. The economy has been strong, unemployment low. All have been factors in a welcome reduction in crime.

But then the editorial loses its mind in the next sentence.

What's harder to explain is why, though crime has fallen so sharply, prison admissions have continued to rise.

Does the glaringly obvious fact that criminals may not choose to commit crime because the enforcement has stiffened not occur to the double-digit IQs on the Trib editorial board?

Giuliani started prosecuting ALL CRIMES and presto! the crime rate diminished and prisons were bulging with perps. Wannabe perps were actually discouraged by strict enforcement.

The rest of the Tribune editorial could be written by Oprah, it is so vacuous and vapid and devoid of any knowledge of the laws of cause and effect. Check the link above for yet another example of how, when something is working, busybodies on the left have to tinker with it until it is broken again. The specious spurious sophisticated double-talk of the Trib editorial writers should be inscribed above the prison door at Joliet!! Or as Taranto puts it:

OK, here's a wild, outside-the-box idea. Maybe the reason crime has fallen is that so many criminals are in prison, where it's harder for them to commit crimes. When you think about it, it almost makes sense!

Berger Not Exonerated

The Republican Committee on Oversight and Government Reform harshly upbraids the whole 9/11 Commission Findings as skewed because of Felon-wannabe Sandy Berger's bungled burglary.

While that accusation might be a bit of a stretch, the inability of the Archives staffers to discover which documents Berger disposed of and what the original hand-written notes might have disclosed remains another example of US government incompetence.

The lack of any real media uproar over an obvious attempt to cover up and destroy evidence of Clinton's NSC demonstrates total MSM subservience to the Democrats.

And of course, the monstrous screechings over the Plame affair demonstrate the MSM's rabid bias against the Bush Administration.

Berger gets a slap on the wrist for a real crime, a felony of destruction of government property, and Scooter Libby gets mouse-trapped on supposedly lying or deceiving under oath, still a crime, but a crime of procedure.

Ever notice that the Dems are obsessed with process and procedure, and clueless when it comes to "reality-based" policy?

McCain-Lieberman in '08?

I was talking to my neighbor, a four-term Republican state-representative in the Florida House, about politics last week and broached the possibility of a McCain-Lieberman ticket for the GOP in '08. This decades-long participant in state politics came back with a story. He said the proportion of Jewish Republicans to Jewish Democrats in Florida is roughly 40/60. He had a lot of long-time Jewish supporters, but in 2000 while campaigning, he was assured of strong support by his Jewish friends, but when he brought up "my good friend George Bush and his running-mate, his Jewish friends were silent. He then jump-switched to telling me that he had told our neighbor, the Repub Party chief for Palm Beach County, that Clay Shaw was going to lose. The reason: ethnic pride often spurs Republican Jews to vote for a Jewish Democrat. He avers that the Florida vote in 2000 was so close because of this phenomenon.

Now Newsmax is beginning to feel the vibes that long-time political observers feel is a sure-fire winner in '08. A McCain-Lieberman ticket would likely spur the same phenomenon in the opposite direction, and cinch some Northern states where the Jewish vote is normally much more Democratic than in wealthy Republican Florida. Whether the ethnic pride would work on Dems is debatable, but remember that the so-called "Reagan Democrats" were usually Irish Catholics who recognized Reagan, though Protestant, as one of theor own spiritually and psychologically.

A lot of things can happen in the next twenty months between now and presidential elections. If the Saudis do allow oil prices to decline because increasing production might take the wind out of Iranian sails, the US economy would continue to prosper and all the class-warfare politics the Dems propound would fall on deaf ears. Americans are too sophisticated for European-style politics of envy, and too realistic to allow Islamic extremists overseas to expand their influence with victim politics and demographic population-boom politics.

If McCain's health remains steady, the Dems would be hard-pressed to find any ticket that could withstand the broad appeal of McCain-Lieberman as a centrist ticket forcing the Dems to the left.

Another Kerry or Gore-type Dem might even produce a Republican landslide.

Hissy-Fit Cat-Fights Continue Via Apple-Polishers on WaPo

One of the columnists from the Washington Post burnishes her credentials with Nancy Pelosi by anonymously quoting "A former House member" who knows both women well said Harman "really needs to grow up" and "she's not simply entitled to a chairmanship."

Then the obsequious brass-polishing Romano sticks in the knife herself, instead of using anonymous sources:
"As for Pelosi . . . she has clearly moved on."

Remember the feminist mantra that women were better suited emotionally for handling complex emotional political situations? Neither do I, but Romano and her squabbling gender-siblings are walking proof that that's not going to happen soon.

Romano may have other axes to grind. At the very bottom of her column, she submits the following firecracker to the world:

"George McGovern, the liberal 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, dropped a little bombshell to Larry King the other night: He voted Republican in 1976, for Gerald Ford.

McGovern said he finally told his wife, Eleanor, that Thanksgiving. Her reply: "So did I."

Join the rest of the world in claiming not to have voted for the worst president of the twentieth century.

Apocalypto More Factual than Native-Americans Like

Dennis Mangan has an interesting caption to this article that Pizarro and Cortez were liberators, and theNew York Times link is very thought-provoking.
The Jesuit Relations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries detail innumerable instances of elaborate torture-to-death rituals among Northeast Indian tribes and confederations among themselves, and of course, the hapless French or English colonist who might fall into their hands. These Mohawk, Huron, and Iroquois butchers didn't have power drills or chainsaws, but could match any Iraqi sectarian extremist in grisly torture resulting in prolonged painful death. The movie "Blackrobe" had the slightest hint of what the Jesuits spelled out in detail.

The same bettering of conditions which abolished human sacrifice, albeit replacing it with forced-labor slavery in some cases, might also have occurred in the black slaves imported from Africa, whose descendants live in relative freedom and prosperity compared to their distant kin in Old World Africa today.

Mark Steyn on the Belgian Sheeple, Udo Schuklenk, and Boy-babies

The only thing more fun than savoring the incredible wit of Mark Steyn is to appreciate the final point which usually skewers leftist pinheads, in this case Prof. Udo Schuklenk, professor of "bioethics" at an obscure Scottish school and Martina Navritilova who is now re-inventing herself as a group-identity icon for pervs.

Read Steyn for his relentless creative spanking of clueless Belgians [sorry for the tautology] and the non-Scottish possibly Belgian "bioethics" professor who blames the US for, what else, homophobia in an experiment designed to prevent gay sheep and thus promote more sacrifice animals for Islamic mass-slaughters in downtown Brussels.

And then get to his point:

if that happens, at what point will a woman's right to choose intersect with a farmer's right to ewes? Under Beijing's one-child policy, Chinese women exercised their "right to choose" the sex of their baby so radically that they now have the most gender-lopsided demographic cohort in history: millions of surplus boys for whom all the girl babies were aborted. Professor Schuklenk is right: "Homophobic societies" may well choose to de-gay their offspring. After all, much abortion practice is already explicitly eugenicist: If a woman can decide she doesn't want to carry a baby with Down syndrome or a cleft palate or because she only wanted one of the triplets, why should she be obliged to accept his orientation? Once you've redefined pregnancy in the radically individualist terms that abortion absolutists have, why should the modish pieties of political correctness prove any more effective a restraint than conventional social and religious morality? In 2005, responding to a highly hypothetical possibility of parental screening for a "gay gene," a Maine state representative introduced a bill for the protection of unborn gays. But it's hard to see why, in liberal abortion theology, unborn gays should be any worthier of protection than unborn straights.

Which brings us back to the streets of Brussels. Ann De Greef, a Belgian animal-rights activist, does not enjoy the annual Eid massacre. "It's not normal to have thousands of sheep slaughtered like this in the middle of a major European city," she complained.

Au contraire, it is. And, given Islam's demographic advantage, it's going to get ever more normal. Muslims pay Belgian farmers about 250 bucks to acquire a sheep for the ritual sacrifice, which suggests they're pretty serious about it. Indeed, given Islam's political muscle, it's more likely that the remaining restrictions on ritual sacrifice will be rescinded. Tired of standing in line at crowded slaughterhouses, many Brussels Muslims sacrifice the sheep at home -- which is illegal under Belgian law but which the state already turns a blind eye to.

The left carelessly assumes that the various factions in their identity-group coalition are allies in perpetuity who can be rounded up like sheep and pointed in the same direction. They're not. The Belgian sheep story is about demographic advance, the Oregon sheep story is about technological advance. But the most potent combination is technology yoked to demography: In other words, how much demand will there be for the latest innovation? Abortion for genetic abnormalities? Quite a lot in America. Abortion to decrease unwanted daughters? An awful lot in China and India.

And a patch to de-gay your baby?

We're poor little lambs who have lost our way. Baa-baa-baa.

Who can top that for an ending?

Environmental Taliban Use Taxation to Curb Travel

The Daily Telegraph has an article by Janet Daley on how green taxes are starting to become even more absurd than before:

"a recent columnist in this paper who pointed out that over 300 million have died from Malaria since Environmentalists forced the banning of DDT which might otherwise have wiped out the insects that carry the disease. Now air travel is their target.

But it is not just air travel for the poor that the green tax lobby is engineering: it is a restriction on any mobility. Clamping down on one form of movement, as the glib reformers have discovered, simply creates intolerable pressure on the others.
Londoners had just become accustomed to the idea that they would have to pay an £8 congestion charge to drive into their own city when they discovered that the fares on commuter rail and underground services had been hiked up with the intention of driving away customers from the public transport system - now grossly overcrowded as a result of people having been forced off the roads by the congestion charge.
The only solution - and I am just waiting for the politicians to recommend it explicitly - is for none of us to go anywhere. Stay at home and save the planet.
The logical conclusion is a retreat from all the things that make metropolitan existence worthwhile: all the social, professional and cultural interactions that free mobility makes possible - and which, since the Renaissance, have made great cities the centres of intellectual progress.

The eco-snobs are, like proponents of illegal immigration, are using government to keep the middle classes and by-the-hour salaried workers in their place, which is not travelling by air or train and is competing for jobs with undocumented immigrants who keep wages down and unions weak.

Anything that keeps the chattering and whimpering classes a notch above the millions competing for the scarce slots in the highest levels of social and political and financial influence. These nouveau-snobs are regular Taliban about restricting debate on "the consensus" on anthropogenic global warming, as the august Senators Rockefeller and Snowe [no pun intended] recently did by threatening oil companies with retribution for financing studies that conflicted with the august Senators' "consensus." Ditto those liberals who call enforcing the laws keeping our borders secure "racism" and calls for a real wall "a Berlin Wall," forgetting, as foolish liberals are wont to do, that the Berlin Wall kept the workers from leaving their socialist workers' paradise, while the Border Fence keeps illegal immigrants OUT of what liberals call a "slave economy" of a million impoverished Wal-Mart employees working without what these liberals call union protections. Anyone who has been a member of a union, as I have, may learn to know that unions are a group of racketeers who use politicians [and vice-versa] to strong-arm and buffalo small businesses into bankruptcy and big businesses into low dividends for shareholders.

A reader to Daley's article is a bit harsh on the newly-hatched "climate scientists" who form this "consensus" politicians are just aching to find a way to tax:

Then you should point out that it is "consensus" only among "climate scientists", principally the several hundred odd on the IPCC, which is like saying that it is universally agreed by Priests that God exists, therefore He must! This "consensus" ( on either issue ) is not shared by the millions of other ( I am tempted to say "real" ) scientists: physicists, chemists, astronomers, whose work impinges directly upon the issue of climate change and is only vaguely comprehended by the average "climate scientist".

Ah, yes, those disinterested guardians of human wisdom, the "climate scientists" who thirty years ago were clamoring and whimpering that the planet was freezing over and that the onset of a new Ice Age was upon us. Then the Sun heated up or some other solar phenomenon pushed temps up a degree or so, and it's the fault of humans! Especially prosperous capitalist countries! No one thought to inflict the mindless silliness of Kyoto on India or China, which between them spew more effluent pollutants skyward than the entire continents of Latin America or Africa or Australia. That would be sooo unfair. So they get a pass and the US is the usual ogre, punished for its hideous and obscene PROSPERITY.

So even though it is a polluted capitalist hellhole, the Eurotrash and Mexican kleptocrats snipe at us for enforcing our own border laws while they busily keep Turkey at bay and capture boats full of undesirables in the Mediterranean, even capsizing them if no one is looking. But they're socialist nanny-staters, and therefore, immune from MSM criticism.

Now that the tax-loving Dems are in charge of Congress, watch for RINOs like Snowe join actual caucus-attending Dems like Rockefeller to try to tax big business because the eco-Taliban want vengeance against those who succeed in the capitalist way of doing business.

Re-Reconquista of Spain Momentarily Thwarted

The mission creep of resurgent Islam has divined that its population pressures at home and frightful inability to manage employment in population-boom countries like Morocco and Algeria, to name only two, can be mitigated by mass emigration to Europe.

Absent Turkey's accession to the EU, where it would serve as a bridge for Muslims to enter the Euro-job market by sneaking across the Turkish borders, the Muslims have perhaps correctly picked
Spain as the site where, pace Churchill, the true "soft underbelly" of Europe resides. But even though the Socialist government of Spain would love to polish the Saudis' apples, Cardinal Rouco and a Spanish terrorism effort beg to differ.

The obvious way to respond to a request to open a mosque to be built by Saudi money is to ask for reciprocity, the right to build a church or synagogue in Saudi Arabia.

As the Pajamas Media article points out, the real soft underbelly of Europe is the country of Mark Steyn's ancestors, the supine prone supplicants of the country of Belgium, who are so delighted that outsiders actually want to live and work in their charmless land that Catholic bishops implore Muslims to worship in their churches and put blankets over statues of the saints [including the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is mentioned in the Quran].

Now there's a country where host and guest most closely approximate each other!!!

Both Libs & Conservs "Stuck on Stupid?"

Arnold Kling has a libertarian take on the fundamental hypothesis that only about 10% of the population invest any real energy in politics. And of that decimal, each of the paired-off opponents tend to give their own predilections an overwhelming bias in sorting out new information. As Kling succinctly sums up:

The masses' strategy for avoiding truth is to make a low investment in understanding; the elites' strategy is to make a large investment in selectively choosing which facts and arguments to emphasize or ignore.

So we have Matthew Arnold's "ignorant armies" on a "darkling plain." Or do we?

I believe in democracy because I distrust the elites. I distrust the elites because I believe that self-deception is widespread, and the elites are particularly skilled at it. Accordingly, I believe that it is important for those in power to have the humility of knowing that they may be voted out of office.

Others believe in democracy because they are hoping to see the triumph of a particular elite. Many liberals want to see sympathetic technocrats manipulating the levers of government, nominally for the greater good. I see government technocrats as inevitably embedded in a political system that inefficiently processes information. The more they attempt, the more damage they are likely to do.[MY EMPHASIS] Many conservatives want to see government used for "conservative ends." However, I believe that the more that government tries to correct the flaws of families, the more flawed families will become.

"That government governs best which governs least," said Honest Abe, before the onset of the colossal catastrophe which post-war American government has become. I thank God daily for Medicare, but a single-payer system would be Iraq times ten, a catastrophe which would make Canadian wait-times move from months to years, just to take one example.

I worked for the US government for over a decade, and dealt with it in one way or another for three on a working basis. The bigger government is, the worse it operates. When I was a Beltway Bandito working with Booz Allen Hamilton, I learned of an unpublished study concerning the Pentagon which had been sponsored and paid for by the military itself. It concerned how best to cut back the size of the military bureaucracy. [This was in the early days of the Reagan presidency.] My fellow consultant-informant told me that the study had suggested that ANY WAY that personnel would be cut back would be preferable to the overpopulation of military technocrats and bureaucrats now functioning in the DC area. Indeed, the suggestion was made in the study [never published] that in the interests of efficiency and economy, it would be better if one out of every three names, regardless of rank or position, would be randomly selected out of the Pentagon phonebook and dismissed from their job than it would be to let the bloated payroll/personnel size be maintained at previous levels. This was obviously meant to make a point and not to be carried out, but the study never saw the light of day. I wonder why and who killed it?

Urban legend?

"And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Welcome to the post post-modern world.

Poisoned Russian Accused of Blackmail

Drudge has a report of a 60 Minutes piece by Bob Simon that implicates murdered Brit citizen Litvenenko in a blackmail scheme, using one source, a Russian grad student in London.

This smacks of classic Russian Sov-style disinformation, of the type that had the East-European Comintern disseminate the deliberate lie that Pope Pius XII helping Hitler catch Jews---absolutely contrary to historical fact [indeed, the Pope was awarded Israel's highest medal for his protection of Jews during the war]. US liberals have been the most avid purveyors of such claptrap, and in the case of the unfortunate Pope Pius, defrocked parricide-wannabes like James Carroll spread the poisonous lies with the fervour of black-mass practitioners in another age.

The Russian agitprop machine has many defenders and while Simon is one of CBS's best reporters, this 60 Minutes piece may be dust in the air to keep Putin's name from being solidly linked to Litvenko's death. Deniability material.

Putin and his KGB crew know all the tricks to throw the hounds off the scent.

Saddam and Sura 105 [The Elephant]

The Economist has a useful short-bio obituary in its latest edition titled The Blundering Dictator.

I can remember talking to Dr. Issam Chalabi, the Iraqi Oil Minister at the OPEC meeting in July 1990, and he assured me that Saddam was just blustering when he threatened Kuwait because it demanded repayment of the Iran-Iraq War loans. Saddam had concocted a story that Kuwait had horizontal rigs sucking Iraqi oil from across the border in Kuwait. That sounded crazy. No one expected Saddam to invade Kuwait.

Saddam explains it in this paragraph:

he blew it all by invading Kuwait, the small, rich neighbouring emirate, on August 2nd 1990. Asked in later years, following his capture in a "spider hole" by American invaders, why he had done this, Saddam first blustered that it was because Kuwait was rightfully Iraq's 19th province. Then, in his slightly nasal whine, he growled, "When I get something into my head I act. That's just the way I am."

Perhaps apocryphal or for religious consumption, he did claim in the nineties that he discovered that George Herbert Walker Bush's Republican Party had the Elephant as its symbol, and his mind was drawn to Sura 105 of the Quran referring to The Elephant of Ethiopian invaders being attacked by small birds dropping stones or clay shards which defeated the Ethiopian expedition against Mecca. This purportedly happened the year of Muhammad's birth.
And so Saddam invaded Kuwait.

Who knows what Saddam was smoking or drinking, but he got this into his head and believed that he could defeat the awesome US Armies [the Elephant] with the birds.

Actually, that didn't work out in Kuwait, but symbolically it can be said that thousands of insurgent atrocities are having the cumulative effect of overcoming a militarily invincible US Army. But armies don't lose wars by battlefield defeats, as generals since Hannibal have been discovering on a regular basis.

Saddam may have been right in the end, but his timing, as usual, was off a bit.

Associated Press has more Problems than Just Sources

The AP
has many problems that stem from being a monopoly protected by the First Amendment. A recent one is concerning stories which are sourced to an Iraqi named Jamail Hussein who evidently doesn't exist and is employed by AP's pro-insurgency stringers to justify bogus reporting about alleged Shi'ite and American atrocities in Iraq. But this fallen-on-hard-ethical-times collection of ink-stained wretches overdid it on New Year's Eve, which I first noticed in Drudge[h/t WSJ]:

Here are a couple of Associated Press headlines:

"AP Poll: Americans Optimistic for 2007"--Dec. 30

"Poll: Americans See Doom, Gloom in 2007"--Dec. 31

Guess what, folks? It's the same poll![my emphasis] Half of Americans polled think the glass is half-empty, while half think it's half-full. Or something like that. From the "optimistic" version:

Seventy-two percent of Americans feel good about what 2007 will bring for the country, and an even larger 89 percent are optimistic about the new year for themselves and their families, according to the poll.

That fits with a long-term trend suggesting that Americans are generally an optimistic lot. Polling over recent decades is replete with optimism, and with a tendency for people to feel more positively about their own situations than that of the country overall.

From the "doom, gloom" version:

Six in 10 people think the U.S. will be the victim of another terrorist attack next year, more than five years after the Sept. 11 assault on New York and Washington. An identical percentage think it is likely that bad guys will unleash a biological or nuclear weapon elsewhere in the world.

There is plenty of gloom to accompany all of that doom.

Seventy percent of Americans predict another major natural disaster within the United States and an equal percentage expect worsening global warming. Fewer than one-third of people, or 29 percent, think it is likely that the U.S. will withdraw its troops from Iraq.

The pessimistic version also notes that "one in four, 25 percent, anticipates the second coming of Jesus Christ." But if they're Christians, wouldn't that make them optimists?

Taranto and the WSJ are to be commended for once again pointing out the spurious specious level journalism in the USA has descended to. However, overseas the situation is probably worse, and the Mexicans still look to north of the border for stories about their own country that are not tainted by libel and apple-polishing.

However, the arrogance and unspeakable insufferable complacency of AP is reflected inthis article by Editor & Publisher which has a third-rate hack named Carroll refusing to even read a report questioning the AP's use of sources.

Like Pogo, AP has met the enemy, and it is AP.

C-Span: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

A couple of sessions watching C-Span confirmed my bias toward conservative commentary as based on grammar, logic, and common sense. First, I watched the measured and immensely learned John O'Sullivan hold his own and more in explaining his new book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister, which I am in the midst of reading and heartily recommend. O'Sullivan's interviewer was a Brit named Martin who was friendly, but seemed to have a bit of a Bolshie streak.

O'Sullivan has an encyclopedic command of the decade of the eighties, as an advisor to Thatcher and an admirer of Pope John Paul II, he recounts the extraordinary effect these two had on shoring up the cultural hegemony of capitalism and religion when they were almost overwhelmed by the TUC and atheistic communism. He also knows the Reagan era, including sidelights like Teddy Kennedy's beseeching help from the Kremlin in avoiding Reagan's re-election in 1984. Treasonous peanut farmer Carter also approached the Evil Empire for assistance, two episodes totally blacked out by the MSM and thrown in an Orwellian memory hole.

O'Sullivan treats his subject with scholarly concise phrases and a detached demeanour which impart a sense of deep knowledge and detailed precision.

Switching over to an hilarious half-hour with Karen Armstrong, formerly a Catholic nun, whose book Mohammed, A Prophet for Our Time was being touted by the Arab interlocutor as a profound and detailed indictment of the West, or some such hyperbole.

In fact, the entire Armstrong presentation had her swinging her arms ala Huffington and making outrageous statements about Jack Straw's problems with the veil as betraying some deep hatred of diversity and so on.... She kept saying "it's obvious" and "it's so simple" concerning very counterintuitive thoughts, such as prohibition of a veil making women pant after the Hijab.

FOX-News and conservative columnists were simply maligned as a shibboleth by Armstrong and her Arab host at the National Press Club. He obviously had a bias far to the left of the ultra-left Armstrong, who had body language that resembled Rosie O'Donnell in highest dudgeon.

I wish I had the link, but Armstrong and her Arab friends insistent hectoring of conservative bugaboos reminded me of something a fellow named
Mgrdechian said in a Frontpage interview:

When you look closely at all the things leftists do and say, you can’t help but notice that they almost always have one very obvious thing in common -- a need to bring others down. A need to undermine, a need to obstruct, a need to get in the way and a need to make themselves feel good by doing and saying superficial things that make no sense on any logical, practical or rational level.
Unfortunately, one of the best ways for them to deflect criticism or justify these sorts of behaviors is to hide behind some sort of guise. Disguise their attack against one group as an effort to help another. Disguise their hatred as outrage. Disguise their failure as oppression. Disguise their real agenda in any way they possibly can in order to make the viciousness of it seem as though it was actually meant to be benign.

Armstrong was far more incensed and outraged by Tony Blair and Guantanomo and GWB and Jack Straw and the French refusal to allow the veil in public schools than she was promotional of Muhammed's value-system and religious beliefs, or even some sort of uplifting power of diversity toward a multiculti beau ideal.

They were playing to a home-team crowd of DC journalists from foreign countries who are not afraid of the US and thus in their cowardly way, lash out because there is no downside to doing so. Try that in France and all sorts of bureaucratic problems appear for your foreign journalist, so the ink-stained wretches go along to get along. Only the US and UK seem to inspire journalists with open contempt, perhaps because of their shame at previous compromises in previous postings in countries where an unfriendly article would bring quick retribution.

I read a recent book by Armstrong on mythology and found it very thin. I'm afraid we see another writer resting on past laurels and coasting along while the tide is coming inward.

As O'Sullivan demonstrated, the tide also reverses and The Evil Empire of the USSR is in the dustbin of history, and its outliers in N. Korea, Iraq, Cuba, are less one socialist dictator thanks to GWB. Hopefully, the N.Korean and Cuban gulags will also soon crumble.

Thanks to God's Providence and the miraculous escape of all three from assassination [The Pope's was almost certainly inspired by KGB assets through Bulgaria], the world is a freer and happier place.

Unlike what Armstrong and her hateful Arab host at the National Press Club would bring about, given the world enough and time.