Hirsi Ali Irks Euro Nomenklatura

Those orchidaceous Dutch, who fervently collaborated with the Nazis against the Jews
dislike Hirsi Ali intensely, says Anne Applebaum, writer of the Pulitzer-winner Gulag and a world-ranking expert on group-think in a Slate piece.

You see, Hirsi has disturbed the Euros complacency about Islam, and brought an inconvenient truth [THAT IS ACTUALLY TRUE!] to the fore by her book Infidel, which trumpets Western values, a most unfashionable thing to do among Dutch intelligentsia and their Brit collaborators, like Timothy Garten Ash, who sneers at Hirsi Ali for her juvenile enthusiasm for democracy and liberal values.

The multiculturalists refuse to turn over the Islamic rock to investigate just what kind of life lives beneath, and condone honor killings and sharia law as some sort of commendably exotic eccentricity. However, a few Europeans actually criticize the sometimes violent and deeply reactionary culture that persists in the 45 signatory countries of "Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam."

Yes, there are many moderate Muslims in Europe who want to live a quiet life. Unfortunately, among them dwell a growing minority of aggressively violent conspirators who want to overthrow Western values, the ones that distinguished European academics and writers so often disparage with ill-concealed disdain.

How these sophisticated European polemicists square their hatred of the pope with their admiration of Islam continues to baffle this confused observer.

Glittering Illiterati Coronation of Inconvenient "Truthiness"

Does it matter when Nobel Laureate Sherwood calls the recent PC UN IPCC balderdash
HIGHLY UNLIKELY when a collection of high school dropouts and druggies who are members of the Academy of Motion Picture Farts votes Al Gore's concoction best documentary?

Unfortunately, even POTUS is vainly reaching for acceptance on that front as Patrick J. Michaels points out:

The Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled by every signatory, would reduce global warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius per half-century. That’s too small to measure, because the earth’s temperature varies by more than that from year to year.

The Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto — i.e., less than nothing — for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which themselves will have only a minor effect out past somewhere around 2075. (Imagine, as a thought experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to dictate our energy policy for today).

Mendacity on global warming is bipartisan. President Bush proposes that we replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with ethanol over the next decade. But it’s well-known that even if we turned every kernel of American corn into ethanol, it would displace only 12 percent of our annual gasoline consumption. The effect on global warming, like Kyoto, would be too small to measure, though the U.S. would become the first nation in history to burn up its food supply to please a political mob.

And even if we figured out how to process cellulose into ethanol efficiently, only one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation. Even the Pollyannish 20-percent displacement of gasoline would only reduce our total emissions by 7-percent below present levels — resulting in emissions about 20-percent higher than Kyoto allows.

And there’s other legislation out there, mandating, variously, emissions reductions of 50, 66, and 80 percent by 2050. How do we get there if we can’t even do Kyoto?

When it comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient. And it’s not just Gore’s movie that’s fiction. It’s the rhetoric of the Congress and the chief executive, too.

The "political mob" spurred by the MSM spurred by faulty academic sleight-of-hand [disappearing the "Middle Ages Warming Period"] has even got GWB buffaloed.

The Big Science rush to judgment and a resulting honey pot of funding at the end of the rainbow has created an alternative universe where cargo cult science replaces the real imponderable complexities that NASA fanatic Hansen wants to politicize.

There's gold in them thar icecaps!

Clinton Pardons Redux

In regard to the recent Clinton-Obama kerfluffle, there is a short reminder of the consequences of a second Clinton dynastic reign that includes a list by
Newsmax.

Geffen went ballistic when he learned that President Clinton issued pardons to wrongdoers like Rich and 139 others in his final days in office. Among the pardons that sparked the most controversy:

# Marc Rich was indicted on tax evasion, commodities fraud and other charges in 1983 and fled to Switzerland. After Clinton pardoned him, a House committee probing Clinton’s pardons sought testimony from Rich’s ex-wife Denise, who had been a major contributor to Democratic causes – including Hillary’s Senate campaign and the Clinton Presidential Library. Denise Rich invoked the Fifth Amendment.

# Almon Glenn Braswell was pardoned of his mail fraud and perjury convictions after paying about $200,000 to Hillary’s brother, Hugh Rodham, to represent his case for clemency. He later returned the payments, but he too invoked the Fifth Amendment during a Congressional hearing.

# In 2000, Clinton pardoned Vonna Jo Gregory, owner of the carnival company United Shows International, and her husband Edgar for a 1982 bank fraud conviction. After the pardon, the company gave Hillary’s brother Anthony Rodham $107,000 in "loans” that he has never repaid.

# On his last day in office, Clinton pardoned his old friend Susan McDougal, who had already completed her sentence for her role in the Whitewater scandal.

# Clinton also pardoned his brother Roger on drug charges, and former Housing secretary Henry Cisneros, who was convicted of lying to the FBI about payments to a mistress.

# Clinton slashed the prison sentences of four men convicted of stealing millions in federal grants. The men were from a community of Hasidic Jews in New Square, N.Y., which voted 1,400 to 12 in favor of Hillary Clinton in her first Senate race.

# Clinton also commuted the sentences – over the objections of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office – of 11 members of a Puerto Rican nationalist group that set off more than 100 bombs in the U.S. The large Puerto Rican community in New York City supports Democrats.

Muslim Inter-marriage

When I worked in Saudi Arabia, I was told that the almost universal marriage custom
triball
among Saudis was for a father's brother's daughter marry the son of the father. Stanley Kurtz at the NRO link above explains how this "parallel-cousin" marriage custom is almost completely restricted to Islamic countries [other close-kin societies prefer cross-cousin marriages---read the Kurtz article for details].

Read this incredibly interesting examination of why Muslims have great difficulty in assimilating---in Londonistan or France or Hamtramck or elsewhere in their diaspora---because of the "self-sealing" consequences of parallel-cousin societies.

Rundown of The Decline of the West

I'm down with the flu, but think that Jules Crittenden is the voice of sanity in a
piece on just how messed up the situation is, with the Dems reverting to their default-mode of treacherous backstabbing, although now it's on each other when they are not stabbing American national interests in the back. Plenty of interesting and instructive links in the piece above.

The French went through just such a phase in their inglorious descent from world power to their current status as craven cowards and backstabbing feminized morons. The Decline of the West, with the Democratic Party as enabler and enthusiastic cheerleader, proceeds apace.

Prince Bandar and the Bush Administration

The
Washington Post has a back-handedly complimentary article about the new spate of diplomatic initiatives Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the head of the Saudi National Security Council, has been sowing around the Middle East and in Moscow. Although the writer Jackson Diehl assumes the usual fashionable pose that Bandar is a show-off and ineffective, his factual list of Bandar's recent meetings demonstrates that the former SAG Amb to the US may be now virtually in charge of Saudi foreign policy.

Actually, this is good news, because Saud bin Faisal and his brother Turki are both ambivalent about the US and its role in the Middle East, and occasionally lean toward US opponents. Bandar, as Diehl points out, is looking out for the Saudis first, but his long and deep connection with the US predisposes him to regard the US as a tried and true protector of Saudi national interests who can be depended on. Bandar, unlike other Saudis, does remember that the US did respond rapidly to the invasion of Kuwait and fulfill its treaty obligations [The Carter Doctrine and Reagan Corollary] which the MSM in the USA now has completely consigned to an Orwellian Memory Hole.

King Abdullah is playing an interesting game with Iran over its nuclear development and aggressive foreign policy. The King holds a trump card over Iran, the ability to increase oil production and lower world oil prices, a move which would drive the chronically mismanaged Iranian economy into a tailspin. Iran is in such a permanent state of economic chaos that it must import much of its gasoline, since the country hasn't enough refining capacity. It is also using much of its oil production for domestic uses, and its export levels are declining. One more example of the curse of oil.

Here's hoping that King A, with Bandar's urging, will lower oil prices over the next year to keep the crazies in Tehran from building their doomsday machine.

Thoughts on Pres Day as Barone spanks NYT, LAT agitprop.

Despite the frantic agitprop by the New York Times and LAT to denigrate US intelligence on Iranian support for anti-US operations in Iraq,
Michael Barone has a magisterial but short rebuttal to the tabloid MSM style of these two rapidly descending outlets of anti-Bush propaganda. The link is an excursion into sane commentary about a subject clouded by the nutroot-influenced leftist MSM.

And if there is any doubt about the hysterical nature of the MSM cover-up of Iranian complicity in Iraq, Little Green Footballs has an Iranian TV photo from the Mullah-fans at the Los Angeles Times of what Iranians call US military equipment used to attack Iranian Revolutionary Guards. First of all, the photo is crudely photo-shopped from a Fars News Agency still photo and second, the photo has Russian anti-personnel equipment, which I'm sure the dolts at the LAT don't have a clue about, and would excuse as a clever US ploy to throw the MSM and Iranians off the scent.

Finally, the sanest person in the blogosphere, Dr. Sanity uses this article by Barone as a platform to observe the clinical insanity the MSM displays in her President's Day disquisition on the Bush-Derangement-Syndrome exhibited by Pinch Sulzberger's hellions and the anti-US crowd at the Los Angeles Times.

Often I am tempted to look askance at GWB, with his mispronunciations and folksy twang, but compared to the specimen of narcissistic self-centered autism shown by Bill Clinton and the shallow, dumb, dishonest hollow shells Gore and Kerry, the USA is lucky to have George Bush as president. Considering the alternative, I'm happy he's in the White House. No coke-snorting or slimeing of the Lincoln Bedroom under this administration.

FitzFong and Plame Blame Game Autopsy

Victoria Toensing dissects the mouldering corpse of the Plamegate fiasco that the MSM
fervently hoped would somehow involve Karl Rove and hit the jackpot by nailing VP Cheney in some sort of "he/she/it fingerpointing snipe hunt" that would vault Clean-Cut Eliot Ness wannabe Fitzgerald into iconic status as a possible Supreme Court nominee by a leftist president after maligning and undermining the Republican Party.

Last week, I put up a brilliant commenter's one-sentence summary of this unfunny joke and travesty of justice:

That distinction made, in the end, the whole enchilada appears to be that Joe Wilson, a State Department has-been so obsessed by his own vanity that he outed his own wife and who a year earlier said uranium was sought by Iraq in Africa before he said it was not sought by Iraq, was used as a cheap, throwaway dirty trick by the Kerry campaign to dupe lazy pseudojournalists from the NYTimes, Newsweek, WaPo, Time, and NBC, which led Senate Democratic politics-is-a-dirty-game-players like Chuck Schumer, to push for a rabid, unfettered special prosecutor like Fitzgerald, who, in a previous life bested by attorney Scooter Libby, then broke all the DOJ rules in fruitless a hunt to bring down Dick Cheney, and whose investigation immunized the wrong people and didn't follow up the simplest leads that would have lead to Richard Armitage, the original leaker of non-covert operative Valarie Plame Wilson's identity, who likely leaked Plame's relationship to several journalists because of a turf war with the CIA, an organization that, like State, also has leaked like a sieve whenever the bureaucrats disagreed with the administration, and that, like State, has yet to be held accountable by the equally irresponsible Department of Justice.

Victoria goes further and delineates all the motives of the scurvy crew that concocted this Gotcha-Game silliness:
FitzFong wanted to nail Libby for defending Marc Rich, the oil czar Clinton pardoned after wife Denise parlayed personal favors and a gazillion bucks for BillyJeff's Presidential Library. FitzFong took Libby's legal duties as Rich's lawyer as a personal affront. FitzFong also wanted to nail Judy Miller because he thought she alerted a terrorist "charity" that a FitzFong bust was in the works. And FitzFong displayed equal amounts of dishonesty and ignorance, indicting Libby for the Novak leak after he knew that Armitage was responsible. FitzFong loves limelight.

Toensing ladles out indictments to the CIA, engaging in petty interagency squabbles with State and the NSC. And to the washed-up has-been Wilson, who outted his spouse to get good tables at the best restaurants and a meal ticket to every ivory tower anti-American institution in the Ivy universe. Big money for speeches, and invites to the Vanity Fair party circuit.

Toensing reserves special scorn for the media, a mass of hypocrites hyping their own sanctimonious pietas as in multiple prevaricator Russert's "Sister Lucille told me in seventh grade to tell the truth." Here is one para exhibiting the media's shame:

As recently as a week ago, the media were displaying their prejudice in this case. On "Meet the Press," journalists lamented that the Libby trial was revealing how government officials can use their relationships with reporters to plant stories that hurt their political enemies. Where was the voice at the table asking, "Didn't Wilson also use the media with his assertions in the New York Times and The Post?"

No hypocrite in the MSM will answer that honest query.

Finally, careerists like Fleischer, Armitage, Comey, and the entire Dept. of Justice should be indicted for dereliction of duty.

And a dishonorable-mention indictment for twin louts loudmouth Mathews and motormouth Shuster whose tendentious dishonesty and outright lies made MSNBC even less responsible than usual. And, of course, a nod to Lawrence O'Donnell, for being always wrong.

"Chairman" Murtha's Not-So-Hidden Agenda

The latest Soros emanation, a group called MoveCongress.org, is caught with its fly down in an on-line flier asking folks to listen to Chairman John Murtha will describe his strategy for not only limiting the deployment of troops to Iraq,
but undermining other aspects of the president’s foreign and national security policy.

Hmmm..... That sounds like a recipe for advancing America's true national interests, an AQ mole as Chairman of the Armed Services Committee! [h/t:Mickey Kaus]

Murtha's getting more aggressive in his dotage, like the Florida geezers I see roaring around in Ferraris and Porsches thinking they have something to demonstrate. The Washington Post has an editorial today which basically uses Murtha as a demonstration that Franklin's adage "there's no fool like an old fool" is alive and well on the Armed Services Committee. When the Post thinks you're too far left, you are an old fool.

Illinois Rejects Illini Mascot

The nature of PC and its thundering-herd academicide acolytes, including the politically tone-deaf cringing clueless NCAA, reveals itself again as the
University of Illinois jettisoned its human mascot "Illiniwek" after more than eighty years of prancing across the gridiron.

Those with a smattering of any knowledge of the actual history of the Middle West know that Pere Marquette and Joliet encountered the Illini tribe in what is now northern Wisconsin in the late-1600s. The Illini told him of the existence of the Mississippi River and invited him to come south to their homeland there to preach. Fr. Marquette and Joliet did so and called the land "Illinois" territory. Decades later, subsequent explorers found that the Illini had disappeared, being exterminated as a tribal entity by fellow tribes along the Mississippi. Just one of numerous ethnic cleansings these "noble savages" employed during their halcyon days of pre-conquest bucolic bliss.

Of course, the PC program of "printing the legend" of a peaceful native-American landscape disrupted by mean colonists from Europe appears to continue marching forward. I hope that the Field Museum in Chicago does not "update" its excellent set of dioramas depicting the historical territories and cultural artifacts of tribes in the Upper Middle West, including the Miami, which edged the Winnebago out of my home town of Milwaukee in the eighteenth century, if memory serves. Of course, the Marquette University "Warriors" have long since been neutered into a wildlife trope.

How the city in South Florida got the name of a tribe which migrated from Ohio to Wisconsin defies historical logic, but I live just up the road from Miami, [and just adjacent Delray Beach, which got its name from a Detroit suburb named "Delray"].

Still, historical memory is being airbrushed, and ideology is replacing actual archeology on the fronts of political rectitude. A friend of mine told me he was part Delaware Indian, and when I congratulated him, he retorted that the Delaware were a slave tribe. We all know what happened to the Mohicans.

I still cannot fathom why native Americans permit their heritage to be hijacked by the likes of Russell Means and others pushing an agenda which includes denying any depiction of their warrior spirit. Or are they being used by manipulative politico-scholars aiming at revisionism across the board of American history?

Liberal Blogger Scolds Ultra-left Loonies re: Edwards Flap

The politically wrong-footed John Edwards has probably lost whatever momentum he might have had by stupidly delaying the jettisoning of two rabid Catholic-haters from running his blog operation. Underneath that pretty head of hair rests....not much, it seems...in the line of thinking equipment. Better for John-boy to go back to his Bigt House Old Manse in NC and start up again getting juries to buy sob stories that get him big payoffs. Maybe they'll buy his anti-corporate, class-war, Pitchfork Ben Tillman populist rabble-rousing.

The Politico reflects on the ranting rabid moonbattery that ensued from the ultra-left when Bill Donohue brought up the hate-blogs that two gender-indeterminate misfits from Edwards blog-machine had posted re the Catholic Church. Donohue was attacked ceaselessly, and the real merit of Edwards' implied insult not only to over sixty million Catholic voters, but over a hundred and twenty million other Christians was ignored, glossed over, or simply dismissed as irrelevant to the hate-vision of the ultra-left.

Read the link above, as it is a reasoned and reasonable discourse by a liberal blogger with lots of political chops. More reason to read Gerstein is to see the crazed comments from ultra-left loonies on how Gerstein "has no right" to criticize the anti-Katholic Klan Krowd because he worked for Joe Lieberman, "QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM," i.e., proving Gerstein's point completely about the ad hominem pre-pubescent exhalations and excretions of the mentally-underdeveloped KOS-Krowd.

For another view, try linking to Howie Kurtz in today's Washington Post as he interviews Michelle Malkin, my favorite American-Asian blogger. Howie as usual defers to Andrew Sullivan, who by recanting his conservative ethos has gained respectability among the MSMers [though one WaPo commenter calles Andrew "Bill Arkin with an earring!"], as the reigning Chief Justice of the Blogosphere Court, but does give Michelle her due as a dogged fighter and one who gives as good as she gets----unfortunately, she gets regularly hosed by racist bigots and feminist trolls, so her responses have the feeling of a "second foul" in basketball, the one that always gets called by the MSM leftist zebras.

Again, reading the voluminous comments to Howie Kurtz's piece is illuminating if not a bit unappetizing, as the premature excretory functions of the lefties are on full parade---a non-stop spew reminding us of why we centrist-Republicans must continue to work hard for a White House free of Lincoln Bedroom antics in 2009.

The Libby Trial, in One Sentence

Ann Althouse has a good sum-up of the farce Prosecutor FitzFong is overseeing in DC concerning the leak of the name of a petty functionary at the CIA. But the comments following Ann's comments are worth perusing, including one genius sentence that sums up the whole tawdry affair by a commenter signing as "sbw":
Grouping bloggers together reminds me of how racism was once defined -- ignorant overgeneralization. It is worth parsing out:

1) FiredogLake's live-blogging was an excellent public service [so long as you ignored the catty, ill-founded remarks in the square brackets] but the comments' tended toward dogmatic BDS (Bush-Derangement Syndrome) irrationality that added little insight.

2) Just One Minute was more interested in teasing out the facts and connections of the case, even if it eventually pointed towards Libby's guilt. The collective memory and intellect was focused, above all, on understanding -- systematically but genially dissecting BDS trolls who sought to disrupt the process.

That distinction made, in the end, the whole enchilada appears to be that Joe Wilson, a State Department has-been so obsessed by his own vanity that he outed his own wife and who a year earlier said uranium was sought by Iraq in Africa before he said it was not sought by Iraq, was used as a cheap, throwaway dirty trick by the Kerry campaign to dupe lazy pseudojournalists from the NYTimes, Newsweek, WaPo, Time, and NBC, which led Senate Democratic politics-is-a-dirty-game-players like Chuck Schumer, to push for a rabid, unfettered special prosecutor like Fitzgerald, who, in a previous life bested by attorney Scooter Libby, then broke all the DOJ rules in fruitless a hunt to bring down Dick Cheney, and whose investigation immunized the wrong people and didn't follow up the simplest leads that would have lead to Richard Armitage, the original leaker of non-covert operative Valarie Plame Wilson's identity, who likely leaked Plame's relationship to several journalists because of a turf war with the CIA, an organization that, like State, also has leaked like a sieve whenever the bureaucrats disagreed with the administration, and that, like State, has yet to be held accountable by the equally irresponsible Department of Justice.

11:12 AM
RogerA said...

Dayum, SBW--you got the whole case in one complete (albeit long) sentence. Well Done!

I agree. And of course, the MSM and a lyin' idiot named Shuster have acquitted themselves as hopeless mouthy hacks. Ditto freak-show Chris Matthews.

And that's a wrap!

Geezer Socialism

The Economist has an insert on the EU business scene I read at the local B&N last night. The summary intro above gives a bit of the drift of the Econ piece, which in its interior damns the Euros with faint praise.

Also, the Economist has a nice little piece spanking the EU on its NATO policy, basically for trying to strut on the world stage without paying the price of admission.

The Wall Street Journal has a much more sensible precis of the problem, written by 2006 Nobel Laureate Edmund S. Phelps. Phelps in a nutshell:

The values that might impact dynamism are of special interest here. Relatively few in the Big Three report that they want jobs offering opportunities for achievement (42% in France and 54% in Italy, versus an average of 73% in Canada and the U.S.); chances for initiative in the job (38% in France and 47% in Italy, as against an average of 53% in Canada and the U.S.), and even interesting work (59% in France and Italy, versus an average of 71.5% in Canada and the U.K). Relatively few are keen on taking responsibility, or freedom (57% in Germany and 58% in France as against 61% in the U.S. and 65% in Canada), and relatively few are happy about taking orders (Italy 1.03, of a possible 3.0, and Germany 1.13, as against 1.34 in Canada and 1.47 in the U.S.).

Perhaps many would be willing to take it for granted that the spirit of stimulation, problem-solving, mastery and discovery has impacts on a country's dynamism and thus on its economic performance. In countries where that spirit is weak, an entrepreneurial type contemplating a start-up might be scared off by the prospect of having employees with little zest for any of those experiences. And there might be few entrepreneurial types to begin with. As luck would have it, a study of 18 advanced countries I conducted last summer found that inter-country differences in each of the performance indicators are significantly explained by the intercountry differences in the above cultural values. (Nearly all those values have significant influence on most of the indicators.)

The weakness of these values on the Continent is not the only impediment to a revival of dynamism there. There is the solidarist aim of protecting the "social partners"--communities and regions, business owners, organized labor and the professions--from disruptive market forces. There is also the consensualist aim of blocking business initiatives that lack the consent of the "stakeholders"--those, such as employees, customers and rival companies, thought to have a stake besides the owners. There is an intellectual current elevating community and society over individual engagement and personal growth, which springs from antimaterialist and egalitarian strains in Western culture. There is also the "scientism" that holds that state-directed research is the key to higher productivity. Equally, there is the tradition of hierarchical organization in Continental countries. Lastly, there a strain of anti-commercialism. "A German would rather say he had inherited his fortune than say he made it himself," the economist Hans-Werner Sinn once remarked to me.

In my earlier work, I had organized my thinking around some intellectual currents--solidarism, consensualism, anti-commercialism and conformism--that emerged as a reaction on the Continent to the Enlightenment and to capitalism in the 19th century. It would be understandable if such a climate had a dispiriting effect on potential entrepreneurs. But to be candid, I had not imagined that Continental Man might be less entrepreneurial. It did not occur to me that he had less need for mental challenge, problem-solving, initiative and responsibility.

It may be that the Continentals finding, over the 19th and early 20th century, that there was little opportunity or reward to exercise freedom and responsibility, learned not to care much about those values. Similarly, it may be that Americans, having assimilated large doses of freedom and initiative for generations, take those things for granted. That appears to be what Tocqueville thought: "The greater involvement of Americans in governing themselves, their relatively broad education and their wider equality of opportunity all encourage the emergence of the 'man of action' with the 'skill' to 'grasp the chance of the moment.'"

The most basic point to carry away is that the empirical results related here lend support to the Enlightenment theme that a nation's culture ultimately makes a difference for the nation's economic performance in all its aspects--productivity, prosperity and personal growth.

It was a mistake of the Continental Europeans to think that they expressed the right values--right for them. These values led them to evolve economic models bringing in train a level of economic performance with which most working-age people are now discontented. Perhaps the way out--to go from unsatisfactory performance to high performance--will require not only reform of institutions but also a cultural shift that returns Europe to the philosophical roots that put it on the map to begin with.

Let Freedom Ring!

Did Russert Lie Under Oath? Yet?

Last night I watched PBS News with Jim Lehrer do a slavish eulogy of
Tim Russert and his masterful performance testifying in front of the Libby jury. A WaPo nomenklatura of the left named Carole Leonnig did a mini-hagiography of Russert while painting Libby as less than forthcoming.

Of course, the whole Plamegate fiasco started when the fraudulent huckster Joe Wilson did an Op-Ed in the NYT, immediately conferring media immunity from questioning, that left out significant parts of his CIA report that his careerist wife had put him in line to assemble, using his extensive Niger contacts. Wilson has been duly spanked and debunked by Christopher Hitchens, among others, but the media has covered up the fact that the entire FitzFong prosecution of Scooter Libby is a snipe hunt----a complete red herring which attempts to calumniate the Vice President by a process crime that depends on various peoples' memories of who told what to whom and when.

What we do know is that FitzFong knew on April 10th of 2005 that Richard Armitage was the one who leaked the Plame name, but FitzFong knew where his bread was buttered and began a paper/scissors/rock game of trying to trip up an Administration higher-up just to keep media-whore journalists like Carole Leonnig cooing his praises.

This whole fiasco is a complete frame-up from beginning to end and Joe Wilson should be prosecuted for leaking---selectively---parts of his CIA study which opposed the Administration policy on Iraq. Wilson has been around the block often enough to know that this would polish so many apples on the leftist mass-psychotic MSM that he could dine and give dinner speeches and get top-notch lefty consultancies ad infinitum if he did a John Dean impersonation.

So Russert is a folk hero to the raving fever swamp denizens and pathetic cheerleaders like Carole Leonnig. But if he told the FBI something he didn't tell the court, then he is dancing on the edge of perjury, and all the lefty three-card monte in the world won't clear him from being the male version of Leonnig.
i

Mass Psychosis Drives Global Warming Fears

How to explain the whack-a-doodle gyrations of preposterous weather-boys like pretty-locks Sam Champion of ABC, except as deliberate satire on Max Headroom or Bob Forehead or John Edwards Breck-boy templates? Or the ultra-serious CNN clown Miles O'Brien playing "let's pretend I'm a serious scientist" about Global Warming?

Dr. Sanity examines and explains some of the borderline mental disorders affecting the liberal mindset from her Ann Arbor perch, a very good neighborhood to observe whackiness about the weather at close hand. Dr. Sanity is a member of Pajamas Media "Sanity Squad" which debunks the hysteric ravings that pass for journalism and analysis by leftist political commissars:

[Recently] the [Sanity] Squad debunked a Psychology Today article asserting that conservatives are motivated by fear, while the liberal left has cornered the market on rationality and reason. Obviously, the author of that "scientific" article didn't take into account the left's preaching about the coming environmental apocalypse.

If you want to observe the abandonment of reason and the manipulation of fear, simply cconsider the incredible histrionics being exhibited by the left about global warming. Their fear-filled predictions of imminent doom and catastrophe have been going on for five decades now.

First we were going to be wiped out by Erlich's population explosion ; then the planet was definitely doomed by nuclear winter; and--was it only a few short years ago?--they were going on about global....cooling.

And how could we forget to the inevitable end of civilization as we knew it from Y2K (at least according to the United Nations Report on the matter) ?

Each of these "imminent" doomsday scenarios were described in their time as the "greatest threat that human civilization has ever known." Each amounted to absolutely nothing of consequence. Zip, Zilch, Nada.

Thankfully, none of the proposed draconian measures suggested to prevent these disasters were ever implemented. See here for a fascinating look back on the hysteria; plus a discussion about what happens when you mess around with complex systems--systems like the earth's climate, for example.

In all of these instances, the proposed solutions were always the same: BIG--really really big--GOVERNMENT. Government would rescue us! New laws would save the day and keep all of us pathetic human beings and our environmentally destructive behavior in check. Unbelievably harsh measures were always suggested--up to and including the deliberate elimination of large numbers of humans in order to accommodate the agenda of the eco-tyrants.

As Mark Twain once said, "I’ve seen a heap of trouble in my life, and most of it never came to pass."

Read the whole post and an interesting previous posting on Iraq by John Burns. Dr. Santy is my guru on the aberrations foisted on the American public by MSM and Hollyweird illusionists. She's a good antidote to the delirium on daily news concerning just about every subject.

Hagel Cranky on Stephanopoulos ABC Morning Show

The Dems have their own
problems, but two Republican Senators who may run for president were on the ABC Sunday Morning Show and though I missed most of McCain [except his somewhat impolitic endorsement of the Colts over the Bears in vote-rich Chicago], Hagel came across as querulous and defensive on his answers to GS's pointed questions about "what exactly are you for?"

Hagel almost resented the question, and when GS prodded him for specifics, started to retort in a three-octave range that made him sound like Dennis Kucinich. Truth is, Hagel has no answer to the NIE report that American withdrawal will leave Iraq and the whole region in a complete shambles and perhaps region-wide war.

And Hagel mentioned "McCain" several times in a somewhat disrespectful way, not calling him "Senator McCain," while giving other Senators their due as "Senator Clinton" and "Senator Biden." Not to mention Hagel's evasive answers to GS's points, which he answered by "read the [Levin/Hagel] proposal," without spelling out the specifics which would answer GS's queries. Methinks this gruff and unready persona won't play well in a national contest for pres, which GS asked Hagel about and which Hagel dodged. Could be a one-hit wonder.

And the Dems refuse to answer this elephant-in-the-living-room question. Yes, we are in the middle of a civil war [or several civil wars, as Iraq devolves into a Hobbesian war of all against all], but the implosion of an early American exit would bring in overt Iranian support for the Shi'ites, Saudi/Egyptian/Jordanian support for Sunnis, and a possible Turkish incursion into Kurdistan. The US "occupying forces" are now actually desired by most Iraqis, if only to avert an even worse situation. A recent poll studiously ignored by the ultra-left MSM demonstrates that most Sunnis and half the Shi'ites and all the Kurds support the US presence.

And a participant in the NIE exercise told me he spent months in hammer-and-tongs robust debate in the composition of the Estimate, classified Top Secret, only to see not only the unclassified but some highly classified material on the front page of the Washington Post on Friday morning. The Post, of course, emphasized the negative half-empty glass. For its ultra-left reasons, the Post avoided mentioning much about the catastrophe awaiting the region should the US heed the Kucinich/Edwards wing of the Democratic Party.

Brit Imam Compares UK to Nazi Germany

The London Times has a long article about a heavily-Muslim Birmingham suburb called Sparkbrook wherein

Mohammed Idrees was prepared to talk. A 37-year-old car mechanic, he was polite, friendly and utterly certain that any plot to kill a British Muslim soldier had been the work of "the Government or people hired by the Government."

Mr Idrees went on to explain that his duty as a Muslim came before his duty to Britain. He would leave the country rather than fight against a fellow Muslim in a country such as Iraq or Afghanistan.

There's the spirit of the Battle of Britain all right.

Mr. Idrees gets his paranoia from his chief imam Muhammed Naseem, Chief Imam of Birmingham where the plot was foiled. This specimen of utter ignorance opined that

the UK arrests were similar to persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.

Now I have an M.A. in European History from the University of Michigan, and I just don't recall the German Jews blowing themselves up and killing over fifty innocent Germans on the streets of Berlin in the '30s.

And it's interesting that this same ignoramus would, if asked, probably deny the existence of the Holocaust.

But Imam Naseem is a multiculti kumbayeh liberal compared to

The Markazi Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadith, on Green Lane, [who] was outraged to be the subject of an undercover television investigation last month in which a preacher was secretly filmed as he allegedly spouted hatred of Christians and Jews. Osama bin Laden was better than a thousand Tony Blairs, explained Abu Usamah, before going on to describe homosexuals as “perverted, filthy dogs” and explaining that all women have a deficient intellect.

Darn those pesky undercover TV investigations, which bust pedophiles in the US and "Islamic scholars" in the UK. May peace not be upon them!

Groundhog Punxatawny Phil Versus UN IRGC: Phil Wins!

It's Groundhog Day and the movie with endless iterations reminds us that the Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is still working overtime, as global freezing in the '70s morphs into global warming as the latest Chicken Little delirium tremens the MSM and UN scammers are foisting upon a besotted public opinion.

The attached article has the Methusaleh Groundhog evidently living since before 1886, but this old specimen of Pennsylvania Dutch folklore will almost certainly be more
accurate
than the hilarious pontifications of a super-special 113-country UN study which blames it all, like the Time Man/Person of the Year, on YOU!

So start feeling bad right now, sell the SUV, and ride a bike to the local grocery [I Tactually have two Taiwanese e-go electric bikes which I and spouse ride to the foodstore with, except both now have flat tires which are virtually impossible to re-inflate---just another design flaw]. My thoughts on Phil's commonsensical accuracy were pre-empted by Argggh! from the freezing Iraqi hinterlands. I will plagiarize myself from January 4th here:

may have ended up in the dustbin of history, but the tradition of political commissars has not ended. One with the ludicrous name of Rockefeller and the other a transgendered Republican have sent Exxon a threatening letter saying that the debate on Global Warming is hereby over.

The High Church of GW does not permit latitudinarian dalliances with the scientific method. The Holy Curia of the Royal Academicides and pseudo-scientists like the inventor of the Information Highway and also the Lockbox, Earthtones Al Bore, have declared ex cathedra that whomsoever shall disagree with their exalted opinionations shall be subject to Inquisition and even "Windfall Taxes."

What used to be a democracy in DC is now evolving into a populist revival along the lines of Malthusian prophecies, Luddite wrecking crews, etc, as the WSJ opines:

environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they've made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it's useful to have a few folks outside the "consensus" asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.

Often wrong but never in doubt, say the IPCC doctrinal heirs to political commissar Suslov in the old USSR and Cardinal Ottaviani in the ancient College of Cardinals. Or as the Wahhabis like to put it, ijtihad, their greatest enemy, as it is the Islamic struggle for the truth outside rigid categories defined by rigid strictures on independent thinking.

Actually, Canadian Prime Minister Harper may have the goods on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the science by majority, in this case a tyrannical majority, which is comprised of go-along-to-get-along "climatologists" and other bureaucrats and petty functionaries of the mind. The rest of the world, Harper divined back in 2002, hates the USA for its continuous economic ascendancy and wants to drag it back down into the pitiful Keynesian nitwittery paint-by-numbers economies in their own squalid backyards.

Free markets ala Milton Friedman would deprive these functionaries of their raison d'etre. Their government meddling and taxes are what pays them and their scientific panels to measure, calibrate and subsequently cry out that the sky is falling!

Even non-socialist crony-capitalism countries fear truly free markets. The economic growth of the USA, which is perhaps 23% of the entire world economy, is what galls the Davos crowd [h/t: Dennis Mangan] and other senior functionaries from getting their meat-claws on American assets in order to tax the squat out of them. The IPCC reminds me of the "North-South Dialogue" of the seventies, which had whinging poor countries in the southern hemisphere guilt-tripping the industrial north for all sorts of freebies and emoluments.

The other night I watched Sens. Boxer and Inhofe on Larry King and Inhofe kept referring to statistics while Boxer referred constantly to drowning polar bears and King's Man-on-the-Street outtakes had people telling the camera "how bad they feel" that Katrina was the result of AGW.

Thoughts beat feelings, and while the MSM will act as cheerleaders for the ultra-left socialist agitpreppies at Davos, Paris, and other chic Comintern gatherings, I will bet against Sens. Snowe and Rockefeller and put my money on Punxatawny Phil.

Read Consilience, by Edward O. Wilson, for why I myself am a contrarian on AGW to the "consensus" of a tyrannical majority of "scientists."

Just a feeeeling I've got!!!

Ivins: R[ewrite] I[n] P[erpetuity]

Okay, the old saying is Nil de Mortuis Nisi Bonum [Speak no ill of the dead], but leftist firebrand
Molly Ivins did have a peculiar bent for pinching other peoples' prose and metaphors, as my fave guilty pleasure "famousplagiarists.com" outlines in detail. One snippet:

"[C]urious how plagiarism seems a minor thing when the plagiarist is an ideological soulmate" ruminated a member of a listserv for editorial writers. She had been following a discussion of syndicated political columnist Molly Ivins' most recent plagiarism gaffe--copying of content from a Washington Post story which incorrectly detailed President George W. Bush's Social Security plan.

She was so lazy that she pinched INACCURATE content, and was nailed fair and square.

With his usual grace and generosity, GWB had some kind words for Molly, which proves once again that class will out, the old-fashioned, pre-Marxist kind, that is. Wish I were as kind as the President she usually called "Shrub."

UPDATE:Hilarious, as Molly Ivins, the most noted plagiarizer of Washington Post copy, who pinched an INACCURATE WPost summary of GWBs social security plan, among many of her lying and dishonest exploits, is sainted by Maya Angelou, of the kumbayeh klub, and Dionne Jr, a girlie man in retreat from reality. Guess the Post doesnt mind being plagiarized by a left-wing slattern. Ivins was a foul-mouth, a sort of shock-jock before her time, who is a Howard Stern on politics. She is not a journalist, even though she plagiarized from some good ones. Deborah Oren of the New York Post was a real journalist, something rare in the world of the NYT/WP. No obit for Deborah.