WaPo and Wacko Blogress

The WaPo has a lot of feedback from a piece they did on a delirious chainsmoking drunk blogress recently [Oh, BTW, she calls herself "My Left Wing" and flies in circles commonly known as a downward spiral:

Lots of bloggy talk out there about this Washington Post profile of the woman behind the My Left Wing site. Sample paragraph:

"She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers 'malevolent,' a 'sociopath' and 'the Antichrist'? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as 'Satan,' or about Karl Rove, 'the devil'? Should it be about the 'evil' Republican Party, or the 'weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving' Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says 'I have a special place in my heart. . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned'?"

Maryscott O'Connor responds on her blog:

"I do not consider, nor have I ever promoted myself as the Spokesperson for the Angry Left. The fact that I have been designated or implied as such by two members of the corporate media is beyond my control; I deny such a claim, I repeat that I speak only for myself, and that is the best I can do. To those who would advise me that I should eschew the media altogether, I can only reply that it is an absurd suggestion. I blog because I want to be heard; when offered the opportunity to be heard by increasingly large numbers, I accept it.

"If anyone is offended by the very idea of my speaking my opinions into a larger megaphone than theirs, they are free to say so, but it is not for them to tell me what I may and may not do. To suggest, as someone actually did, that I ought to have asked permission of the left blogosphere to go on television and be profiled in a newspaper as a liberal blogger, is the height of surreal arrogance.

"I chose to allow a reporter into my home to observe and listen to me, and to report what he heard and saw in a major newspaper. I was under no illusion that I might be portrayed flatteringly or maliciously. I believed he would report the truth, and that, he did."

Marty Kaplan huffs about the piece at HuffPost:

"It's a reminder that the press loves to cover politics the way it covers religion: it's all dogma, darlings. We report; you decide. And if not as religion, then as psychodrama: since, insanely, it's taboo to assess the validity of the claims being made, the media tell us everything about the motives behind the claims, and nothing about their merits.

"The psychodiagnosis this Post piece offers of Maryscott O'Connor, it also extends to the whole lefty comment-o-sphere. (That means you.) But in making that diagnosis, the article inadvertently holds up a mirror to the sad pathology of contemporary journalism itself.

"In the article, we learn seemingly everything about Ms. O'Connor the person; it's a Dr. Phil-worthy bio that enables us to attribute her political anger to her past. Her blogging against Bush, her chain-smoking, her former drinking to excess? Ah, her father, we learn, was 'a 25-year-old Marine who died fighting in Vietnam three months before she was born, which she thinks helps explain the . . . the alcohol, the cigarettes and the very first piece of writing she ever published online, a rant against the war in Iraq that began, "Every single millisecond of my life was directly affected by the nightmare that was Vietnam."'

Um, it's a profile in which the woman gets to explain herself, not an opinion piece designed to examine whether her arguments against Bush are accurate.

The right also trashes the piece, with Chickenhawk Express seeing a hidden agenda:

"My question is why the Washington Post felt it appropriate or even necessary to profile a blogger that is, in her own words, 'insane with rage and grief.' Was it to promote blogging as a way to vent anger? Was it an attempt to discredit bloggers? I think it was nothing more than an easy way to get another negative Bush message in print using a far left over the edge blogger as the article's focus."

The original article is chock-full of nitwittery about how intemperate the right-wing blogosphere was compared to the left and Newt Gingrich et. al. But the Wall Street Journal online thanks the lord that a wacko hypersplenetic shrew like the crone covered by WaPo made it front and center in national consciousness.

The mindless opportunism of politicians of the left like Kerry and Dean allow them to inflate their boundless afflatus on lefty blogs, which an amoral, unprincipled, mentally unstable seething mass of Bolsheviks on the far left amplify endlessly with even more ridiculous nitwittery.

Of course, spineless degenerates like Kerry and Dean veer leftward playing leader by following the crowd. As the Dems go leftward, their already endless squabbling and internal divisions assert themselves. Then, to repair the damage, they nominate some centrist-moderate to lead the ticket in '08, sparking an avalanche of gibberish on the leftist blogs.

The right has to hope that the collective psychosis that characterizes the Far Left continues its descent into absurd tropes taught only in the graduate schools of departments of social science at institutions of higher education in America by clueless victims of academicide. [Sorry for the overwritten description of the overwrought Ultra-Left!] Then the trendy left will commit echolalia of these
drone-hive denizens, which will filter into the Dem mainstream as "creative alternatives" and "new thinking"----leading to Democratic overreach in mistaking its base for the noisy partisans of institutionalized mental illness.

Oh well. Voluntary institutions can still thrive as long as Free Speech prevails, but I have an inkling that the Duke and Northern Kentucky episodes might mean that politics overrides the law and due process.

Tabloid left dominates Pulitzers

Howie Kurtz reports on the awards of the Pulitzers without noting that a total fraud like Robin Givhan of his own paper is among the awardees, presumably for trashing John Roberts' children in his swearing in as Chief Justice.

Anybody notice any but leftoid Bush-bashing MSM outlets getting Pulitzers?

I personally know Kai Bird, a committed ultra-leftist, who won a prize for a book on Robert Oppenheimer, a man of the left now lionized despite flirtations with treason. His father, Eugene Bird, worked with me at the American Embassy in Jidda and is a committed anti-Zionist.

Geraldine Brooks may qualify for MOR, but her book seems to be one of the favorite subjects of the rabid left, seeking out the evil episodes of American history.

Looks like the CJR triumphs again and the leftward tilt of the MSM becomes absolutely near-vertical. The Givhan award especially reveals the frivolous nature of the loony left.

Arabian-Iranian Insanity Becomes Suicidal

Terrorist regime Hamas vows support of Iran while calling suicide bombers "legitimate self defense." Coincidentally, today is prisoner's day in the pathology lexicon of the PA. I suggest Israel take around 800 of its 8000 Palestinian prisoners and shoot them in the head, one hundred for every 1 innocent bystander killed in Tel Aviv this morning.

Oops, I forgot. Unlike terrorist entities like Hamas and Iran [re: Khobar Towers & Pan Am 007], Israel is a country ruled by laws.

This is one reason why the West is fighting terrorism with one hand tied behind its back. The US should carefully note which Arab countries support the suicide-attack in Tel Aviv and deal with them with extreme prejudice.

Anglican World Communion Faces Schism.

The New Yorker has an article on the Episcopal Church's schism between the lazy ("affirmative") moral relativism of non-Christian "Bishops" like Spong and Griswold and the gay Gene Robinson versus the transformative {read traditional) World Communion which rightly regards the American "Church" as a social club for "I'm okay, you're okay" flakiness-purveyors.

Peter Boyer is the author and has a clear bias toward the gay Bishop Robinson [remind you of the Graduate in drag?] who believes that homosexuality, like Portnoy's Complaint, is who he is, no ifs, ands or buts and forget about scripture [which Bishop Spong explains is something he and other illuminati have long since "evolved" beyond].

You may catch a hint of bias in my brief rendition of the thesis/antithesis above. I did not think that Pope Ratzinger would be very good for the RC Communion, but after reading Boyer's roughly-balanced argument, I'll take the Papist route rather than the exciting existential twists and turns of making it up as I go [the ECUSA or Episcopal Church USA route] that promises to split the North American Communion asunder. Bishop Duncan, the anti-gay antagonist of Robinson, has taken many parishes/churches out of the national communion, but the crew headed by Bishop Griswold [who claims one of his ancestors helped kill Thomas a Becket] has been confiscating the Church property and a slew of lawsuits has ensued.

So much for scandalizing the Faithful, but the ECUSA has seen a steady hemorrhage of communicants over the last decades and is down to 2.5 million from nearly 4 million back in the 20th century.

Tucker Carlson, who is the son-in-law of the headmaster of my daughter's school, does a good job excoriating the William Sloane Coffin ["Are You Running With Me, Jesus"] types who occasionally populate his MSNBC Show. Boyer does not mention in his article the large numbers of Anglican priests who were ordained as RC priests and given a celibacy dispensation allowing them to keep their wives.

The Showdown will come at the world Lambeth Conference in London in a couple of years; by then the ECUSA should be in full disarray. The creative destruction of postmodernism is destroying the oh-so-social remnants of an already fading phenomenon of the American Scene.

Prayer may be the answer. In the meantime, Boyer summed it up when he described that the ECUSA's only heresy is that heresy exists. Better to form another set of committees and kick the can down the road, leaving the scut work to the lawyers.

Neil Young and the Politics of Fried-Brain Leftism

I just had to convey a reply to E&P's vacuous piece on Neil Young, son of an unidentified "famous Canadian journalist," and his new album calling to impeach Bush. E&P's replies indicate a more thoughtful audience than its own editorial stance, generally pro-left just like the MSM, would merit.

Did I miss something? Neil Young now wants to "impeach the President for Lyin'". Is he just a brazen hypocrite or was he too high on dope during Clinton's term to be conscious? As every American who was remotely aware of public discourse during the 90's knows, lying "doesn't rise to the level of impeachment", according to liberals. I hate to disappoint the "It's all about sex" crowd, but the actual charges against Clinton were Perjury (Lying under oath), Obstruction of Justice, etc... When did the rules of conduct change? Is Mr. Young saying that liberals can lie but conservatives can't? Does he expect a higher level of conduct from conservatives than he does from liberals? That alone speaks volumes. By the way, how does "believing" the intelligence produced by national and international agencies of several different countries constitute "lying", anyway? Shouldn't we be impeaching the President for "believing", instead? Using that logic the presidents of a dozen other nations should also be impeached, since they all believed the intelligence. Neil Young should stick to entertaining pot-heads that can't think their way out of a bag, and forget about politics.

Thomas L. Shimek
Brigham City, Utah

Recently, chronic drunk Alec Baldwin actually rebuked Bush in a HuffNPuff piece for being a reformed alcoholic. Like Teddy Kennedy, Baldwin is a committed lush who never rises far above his substance-abuse---including food to judge from his waistline---regimen except to shriek drunkenly for Henry Hyde's head on a platter. I guess Clinton's lying under oath and obstructing justice is okay because he let UbL go in Sudan when that terrorist was offered on a platter.

Oops, "no fault on the left," as the Bolshevik mantra maintains.

GWB Should Let Rumsfeld Go.

Is it time for Donald Rumsfeld to go? Read David Ignatius's article in today's Washington Post for a sensible and balanced view.

It now seems clear that President Bush can't erase the Iraq credibility gap on his own. He has been trying to rebuild consensus for the war for months, in a series of speeches and strategy papers. But the poll numbers keep going down. His job approval ratings have fallen below 40 percent in all the latest polls, with Post-ABC News at 38 percent, CNN-USA Today-Gallup at 37 percent and Fox-Opinion Dynamics at 36 percent. Support for the war has crumbled even more sharply. The latest Post-ABC poll found that 58 percent of the country now feels the war wasn't worth fighting, compared with 27 percent back in April 2003.

Perhaps Chuck Hagel from Nebraska would be the best choice for Rumsfeld's successor, but since the oafish bull-headedness at the top of this administration admires loyalty more than competence, Rumsfeld will have to pull his own plug, or as Ignatius says:

Rumsfeld is a stubborn man, and I suspect the parade of retired generals calling for his head has only made him more determined to hold on. But by staying in his job, Rumsfeld is hurting the cause he presumably cares most about. The president, even more stubborn than his Pentagon chief, is said to have rejected his offer to resign. If that's so, it's time for Rumsfeld to take the matter out of Bush's hands.

The administration needs to look this one clearly in the eye: Without changes that shore up public support in America, it risks losing the war in Iraq.

Ignatius is one of the few commentators in the MSM without an obvious ax to grind and has vast knowledge of the region. L. Paul Bremer rather than Rumsfeld, Cheney & Bush deserves the lion's share of the butcher's bill, but they gave this incompetent the leeway to parlay military victory into political defeat. Unless GWB gets smarter soon, his party may become a casualty of the Middle East mess.

Moral Rot versus Religion

Daniel Henninger has a thoughtful opinion article on the new Pope and his crusade against the moral rot, aka "dictatorship of relativism," that infects the suppurating sores of Western Europe and its petits fonctionnaires in Brussells. Apropos of these Kafkaesque Nibelung-armies, George Weigel says:

"Ratzinger has been thinking about Europe for 25 years," Mr. Weigel told me. "He needs to address the problem of a Europe in which consciences are being coerced by transnational institutions. This is the cash-out of what he means by the dictatorship of relativism. It's a real issue with real world consequences."

This Good Friday, I am reflecting on the news that my poker pal's son is entering a Protestant seminary and my daughter's brilliant English teacher, with an Ivy League PhD, is entering a Catholic seminary. Her teacher is in his mid-twenties and tells his class that the hurdles to entering a seminary are now high---the Church actually hires the FBI to give the postulants, whatever, a security clearance.

Larry King showcased some Catholic seminarian wannabees last night who are starring in a new reality program called "God or the Girl," which shows the struggles some virile young men who have girlfriends have in deciding whether to embrace a life of chastity.

The Henninger article also mentions an increase in vocations, in of all places, Italy. College-educated women entering cloistered religious orders. I'm sure they are not all arts-majors who want to contemplate the sometimes-stunning masterpieces inside cloister walls in Tuscany, for instance.

A moral revival has to confront the activist blasphemy of MTV, owned by ViaCom and the odious Sumner Redstone, which is celebrating Easter by vicious attacks on Christianity and morality. Since ViaCom owns CBS, that puts that network off my watchlist, even though Bob Schieffer beats ABC and NBC right now for anchor news.

The Christians appear to be stuck in a "turn the other cheek" mode. Perhaps the murderous attacks in Nigeria will begin to awaken the slumbering one billion Roman Catholics from their reveries and perhaps this Pope will help them to realize that civilization itself is under attack by fanatical levellers and Luddites who wish only "creative destruction," or rather destruction and let's think about creation later.

Henninger's realism is a sort of antidote to the pious ramblings of others, who accept God's Providence without realizing St. Ignatius's maxim that "you must work as though it depends on yourself and pray as if it all depends on God" or words to that effect.

Pope Ratzinger even got Jurgen Habermas to admit that there are things about Christianity worth saving. His visit to a newly revivified Germany during the World Cup summer should be memorable. Read Henninger's article for an interesting excursion into the realm of possibilities.

Dean vs. Ahmedinejad: Who's the Looniest Loon?

Howard Dean's quest for fulfillment rivals Ahmedinejad's desire for the Hidden Imam's return. The New Republic's Noam Scheiber examines how Dean may singlehandedly prevent the Democrats from retaking the House and Senate in 2006. Is he aiming for 2008 instead? No, think 2020, because, as Howard the former ski bum describes himself, he's a man of "big ideas." As Scheiber starts out, Dean is a gifted amateur, but may not be ready for prime time:

"Last year, a major Democratic donor from the 2004 presidential campaign received a call from some operatives at Howard Dean's Democratic National Committee (DNC). Dean was coming to town in a few days, they told him, and they wanted to schedule a meeting. Political fund-raisers normally make such calls a month in advance, and so the seat-of-the-pants approach didn't go over well. "You can't call me the week before and say, 'Hey ... we'll be there Monday, want to hang out?'" says the donor. "They had all these fucking hippies.... These are people that are great to raise a few $500 checks, plan a party at a nightclub. But they're not the folks you need to give you [the resources] to do the things you want to do."

Way back in the day, I was a Dem fund-raiser of the $100-check variety. I worked with John Podesta and Howard Ickes before they were even state-wide players. The job of a DNC chair must be unimaginably trying, as Scheiber describes the gymnastics of Dean's predecessor Terry McAuliffe, a veritable ATM for the national campaign who famously wrestled a [large] alligator to get money from a Florida Indian tribe. Scheiber goes on to describe Dean as, eeriely enough, a reincarnation of Gee=mah Carter:

But, of course, we all knew Howard Dean wasn't going to spend his afternoons sipping Bloody Marys with the Diners Club set. In a sense, that was exactly the point. This was a man who, after all, based his insurgent presidential campaign on bashing the party's Washington mandarins. What's so remarkable about Dean's brief tenure at the DNC is not that he's stayed true to his populist roots. It's that he's actually turned the most insider institution in all of Democratic politics into a weapon in his battle against the party establishment.

He spends his days in Vermont weaving webs and staying in DC a day or two a week. His penchant for pronunciamentos on the "Republicans-are-evil" theme and quick-fix nostrums aren't a good fit for winning converts from the moderate middle. You'd think the Dems would realize that a three-headed monster is not what the Dems need for retaking the legislative branch. The DNC Chair should be subordinate to the party panjundrums, not a policy instigator.

Part of the problem lies in the less than stellar qualifications of Reid and Pelosi to capture the national imagination, or even craft an alternative policy. The Wall Street Journal today has an excellent article on how Delay's departure has enabled Appropriations Chair Jerry Lewis, a California spendaholic, from ruining the National Budget to keep his 13 cardinals flush with earmark goodies. Hastert is ineffective and Bush preoccupied with foreign policy demons. As a result, both parties effectively support signing checks on a grander and grander scale, only the Democrats promise to raise taxes to pay for part of the deficit.

So this Fall, the voters face a Hobson's Choice of worse and worser---choose your poison---at the ballot box. Howard Dean is only the most vocal of the reasons for a voter to scream for sanity at the top of the US leadership pile.

A Friendly Fence, not a Berlin Wall

Steve Sailer has the most cogent idea on how to fix at least part of the Immigration enigma, the common-sensical obvious one staring everyone in the face:

The fence-couldn't-work meme: One of the strangest bits of conventional wisdom in the media is that no fence along the Mexican border could possibly work. These pronouncements are often made by people who have paid a lot of extra money to live in gated communities[my emphasis]. Within America, there are countless miles of high-security fences and walls around prisons, nuclear power plants, armories, warehouses, factories, target ranges, airports and the like. All in all, it works quite well. This isn't nanotechnology. It's something we know how to do.

Similarly, the Israelis have found their fences around the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to be quite effective at keeping out suicide bombers, who are, by definition, highly motivated. The Israeli economy is about 1/200th of ours, but they've succeeded in effectively fencing off a border about 1/10th as long as ours with Mexico. Here's a diagram of the Israeli fence.

Link to Steve's website for a Mechanics Illustrated schematic of what a fence would look like.

The continuing security threat of a porous open border with a violent, corrupt nation to the south with no real institutionalized rule of law [Have they found the drug cartel bosses who ordered the killing the RC Cardinal in Guadalajara yet?]vividly demonstrates the feckless nitwittery of those who regard this as a problem soluble by domestic "politics as usual" and especially those who condemn the rule of law in the USA as bigotry and prejudice.

The impeached perjorer whom GWB succeeded hasn't spoken out on this issue, but his loathesome spouse has begun to do the obligatory Clinton 180-U-Turn on immigration. Like Jacques Chirac, the Clintons combine poor judgment and lack of principle [opportunism] to a remarkable degree.

The patrician Republican Senators will predictably wring their hands while the House addresses the problem with sometimes overly-blunt insensitivity. The Democrats once again screwed the Republicans when the Senate Minority Leader backed out of the Compromise. You can almost bet that Bush, who has been batting .000 except for SCOTUS appointments [and he tried to botch that with Harriet Miers], will do the wrong thing by ignoring the obvious solution---a Fence and then deal with the 11 million lawbreakers already inside the USA.

Like his father, Bush is wobbly in the backbone department.

Iran: Use Nukes to prevent Nukes?

Sy Hersh's New Yorker piece raises a lot of questions that have no simple answers. Indeed, the logic of preventing a presumed former terrorist like Ahmadinejad to develop a nuke is unassailable. After getting past the obligatory kowtowing to liberal sensibilities by asking what the Pentagon planners are smoking, Hersh gets serious:

The President’s deep distrust of Ahmadinejad has strengthened his determination to confront Iran. This view has been reinforced by allegations that Ahmadinejad, who joined a special-forces brigade of the Revolutionary Guards in 1986, may have been involved in terrorist activities in the late eighties. (There are gaps in Ahmadinejad’s official biography in this period.) Ahmadinejad has reportedly been connected to Imad Mughniyeh, a terrorist who has been implicated in the deadly bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983. Mughniyeh was then the security chief of Hezbollah; he remains on the F.B.I.’s list of most-wanted terrorists.

Robert Baer, who was a C.I.A. officer in the Middle East and elsewhere for two decades, told me that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues in the Iranian government "are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles—you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off."

Under Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guards have expanded their power base throughout the Iranian bureaucracy; by the end of January, they had replaced thousands of civil servants with their own members. One former senior United Nations official, who has extensive experience with Iran, depicted the turnover as "a white coup," with ominous implications for the West. "Professionals in the Foreign Ministry are out; others are waiting to be kicked out," he said. "We may be too late. These guys now believe that they are stronger than ever since the revolution." He said that, particularly in consideration of China’s emergence as a superpower, Iran’s attitude was "To hell with the West. You can do as much as you like."

Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is considered by many experts to be in a stronger position than Ahmadinejad. "Ahmadinejad is not in control," one European diplomat told me. "Power is diffuse in Iran. The Revolutionary Guards are among the key backers of the nuclear program, but, ultimately, I don’t think they are in charge of it. The Supreme Leader has the casting vote on the nuclear program, and the Guards will not take action without his approval."

The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said that "allowing Iran to have the bomb is not on the table. We cannot have nukes being sent downstream to a terror network. It’s just too dangerous." He added, "The whole internal debate is on which way to go"—in terms of stopping the Iranian program. It is possible, the adviser said, that Iran will unilaterally renounce its nuclear plans—and forestall the American action. "God may smile on us, but I don’t think so. The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen."

The multivalent tendencies of Iran to have several policies at once are well known to Foggy Bottom and other analytic veterans. I have even heard an Iranian-American wish for the US to use nukes, and not because this Iranian was a lover of the Shah.

If Iran uses a nuke, it would probably be in a covert fashion, probably snuck over to Hezbollah, the gents who invented suicide bombers, to employ against Israel by submarine or suicide tractor-trailer.

Why, a rational actor would ask? The chiliastic messianic end-of-days return of the Hidden Imam would suffice, perhaps, in the gleaming eyes of Ahmadinejad. No rhyme or reason, just "rapture" fever.

But Fred Kaplan over at Slate has a good summary of the game-theory options that might be playing themselves out inside the Beltway. And Rick Moran at the RightWingNuthouse gives a nice briefing memorandum, after dousing the moonbats twittering and shrieking with cold water, of the various possibilities out there in the real world, where moonbats imitate the French with pre-emptive surrenders.

Hersh's article ends with quotes from anonymous "diplomats" that a US climbdown to sit at the negotiating table with Iran may be the least bad of the options facing American strategists. This will not go down well with Cheney and Rumsfeld, and I doubt if GWB is amenable to even ping-pong diplomacy in this day and age.

France Defeated in its Own Capital

Jacques Chirac effectively has completely undermined the authority of his chosen successor, the fop poetaster Dominique de Villepin [I dated a French female doctor named Dominique who was even cuter than the PM!], and given the trade unions and the post-modern layabout students a victory.

Brilliantined stick-insect PM Dominique has just done a compleat abject submission on French television, but is it enough?

Speaking in a live television address, Mr de Villepin said the president had accepted his proposed changes. Mr de Villepin has seen his popularity fall during the crisis. The prime minister said he was convinced that the only way of addressing joblessness in France was a better balance between flexibility for employers and security for employees.

"For some time the action of the government had been guided by one objective, to provide thousands of young people from our society with opportunities for jobs," he said. I wanted to act very quickly because the dramatic situation and the despair of a number of young people warranted it. This was not understood by everyone, I'm sorry to say," said Mr de Villepin, who saw his poll ratings plummet during the two-month crisis.

The BBC's Alasdair Sandford in Paris says it is a significant climbdown for the French government and is particularly humiliating for Mr de Villepin who had staked much of his personal credibility on the measure.

But one must remember that it is exam season and the students who don't feel like all-niters and cramming may now call the shots.

Student leader Julie Coudry called for protesters to lift blockades at dozens of universities so students could prepare for their end-of-year exams.

"The CPE is dead, the CPE is well and truly finished," she said.

But some students appeared unwilling to abandon their protest. Many had wanted the entire law to be revoked, not just the article introducing the employment contract.

"Our demands have not really been met," Lise Prunier, a student at the University of Paris-Jussieu told the Associated Press.

It appears that the slackers and thrill-seekers may want more adrenaline and less lucubrations that might give them a better grade and, hence, better shots at a real job.

But those familiar with the ossified French educational establishment know that the only schools worth graduating from in France are the elite "grandes ecoles," which assure their grads BOTH a good education and access to high-level applications inside and outside France. "Les Grandes Ecoles" are top-flight and provide real educations on a par or better than Harvard or Oxford. But only a few thousand qualify.

The others are condemned to be grads of the post-modernist diploma-mills like the Sorbonne and Nanterre which give their grads plenty of attitude and social poses to assume, but little training for jobs in France's booming private sector. But, of course, the millions of jobs for state petits fonctionnaires must also be filled, and these rad wingnuts are chaise-fodder for lifer numbnut bureaucratic cubbyholes.

But Jacques and Dominique have been dressed down and humiliated before the eyes of France and "tout le monde." These two jackals deserve even more pain and suffering for their cowardice and general nitwittery, but the CPE fiasco will do for now.

Saudis to build fence; Why can't USA?

The sensible Saudis are planning to emulate the Israelis and build a wall separating their Kingdom from terrorist-ridden Iraq next door.

Why can't the US do the same on our fractious borderline with Mexico, where druglords and terrorists infiltrate along with thousands of illegal workers? The US does not have the political will, no..... courage to defend itself that more sensible and less leftist countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia can muster.

Remember the terrorist stopped at the Canada/Washington border crossing who was going to blow up LAX to welcome in the New Millenium? Our memories are so short in the US that we are setting ourselves up for another massive attack, somewhere, someday.

Islamist Threats in Memphis

Yale is not the only university to follow the urge to mollycoddle Muslim extremist students. Read how Brigitte Gabriel, of Lebanese origin, was treated at the University of Memphis, where extremist Islamist radicals tried to disrupt her speech after this largely unreported incident took place right in the Mississippi River Valley:

Unknown to me, a Muslim student attending the University of Memphis was arrested weeks prior to my lecture for, among other things, possession of DVD’s on pilot training and charts on the layout of the Memphis airport. They found links on his computer to sites associated with a radical Sunni Muslim organization in Iraq, and searches for information on how guns and bombs can be smuggled past airport security. After witnessing the Muslim reaction to my lecture and what happened few weeks ago at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when an Iranian Muslim student drove into, for Allah’s sake, innocent students gathering on university grounds, the Memphis police were not going to take any chances.

In any event, there was an attempt to disrupt the presentation. Betsy's Page quotes Brigitte:

Based on what happened to me in Memphis, I think its time for Americans to wake up as to what is occurring within their very midst. It is time to be energized and empowered to stand up and fight to take back our universities. Its incidents like this that spurs speakers like me to defend our civilization and everything it stands for.

Betsy continues: "Have we really reached the point when radical Islamicists at a university in the United States can try to prevent someone from speaking with a message condemning jihad and the murder of innocents in the name of Allah? If so, we have truly reached a sorry state."

Yes, and from the Ivy League to the Mid-America Conference, this country is not protecting the civil liberties of moderates, only of radicals.

Steele to replace Sarbanes?

Michael Steele is interviewed by James Taranto of the WSJ concerning the Senate race for Paul Sarbanes' soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat. Since this is a possible pick-up by the Republicans, the Democrats are already beginning to panic and, yes, as Cynthia McKinney demonstrated to the non-admission of the national media, play the race card.

My wife worked for Paul Sarbanes as a Legislative Assistant for two years and despite my conservative bias, I have to admit that Sarbanes is both honest and intelligent, but also a party-line liberal, which contradicts the previous two adjectives. Suffice it to say that at my wedding, my best man sat next to the Senator at the post-wedding dinner and that the Senator was completely unaware of major issues on the Middle East, where my best man had been a negotiator. In fact, Sarbanes was so uninterested in the Middle East that he refused to see a group of Greek Orthodox Palestinians from Ramallah, because his Jewish foreign policy minder kept their religious affiliation, which was the Senator's own, from his attention.

As a reward for his complete non-interest in Middle East issues, he was awarded the job of head of the Middle East subcommittee on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But Sarbanes' main interest was in keeping the Greek 7-10 security assistance relationship with Turkey alive, and his [dis]information on the Middle East came mainly from AIPAC, who made sure his campaign coffers had plenty of contributions from Maryland and national sources interested in supporting their positions on Israel and the Middle East.

I call Sarbanes "honest" because his net worth outside his Senate salary was basically his home in Baltimore, so he did not take advantage of his position to enrich himself, unlike many Senators attempt to do. His unworldly habits were the stuff of legend among his staffers.

Unfortunately, "intelligent" is a relative term and Sarbanes was intelligent as a University prof is intelligent. His son at Princeton gained the highest score in the Classics test the school has run for over two hundred years. So "brainy" rather than intelligent might be the apt term. I say this because the Sarbanes/Oxley provisions passed by the Senate and signed by the President have proved to be a major burden on corporate paper requirements. This may have been the goal of political interests unfriendly to business----the big government left, for instance. But the government does not have the resource-capability to handle, let alone monitor, the requirements of S/O mandated oversight.

My Thursday blog on Michael Steele left out the salient fact that Steele comes from a Catholic background, which could count for a larger percentage in Maryland, which has a large number of Catholics. Hopefully, the Dems will run Mfume as Steele's opponent, and give the "Free State" a choice between democracy and leftist-authoritarianism.

But Steele raises another point which has been the problem blacks have had with Republicans, namely the so-called "Southern Strategy" which delivered the former "Solid South" solidly to the Republicans in '68 and increasingly thereafter, as the Republicans wooed conservative white voters to vote GOP:

Mr. Steele is equally forthright about his own party's troubled racial history. Most analysts date the GOP's estrangement from black America to 1964, when Sen. Barry Goldwater, an opponent of the Civil Rights Act, was the Republican nominee for president. But Mr. Steele says the turning point came in April 1963, when Martin Luther King was arrested in Birmingham, Ala. "No one bothered for a few days to call, until [President] Kennedy called. Republicans were urged to be vocal and supportive, and their historic civil rights legacy was recounted to them. But they were in the throes of developing . . . a 'Southern strategy.' . . . When we [Republicans] so soundly ignored that civil rights call . . . blacks said, 'That relationship . . . is no more.' They were freed of that particular plantation."

To win back black voters, Mr. Steele says, Republicans must acknowledge that "this is a relationship that we blew up. We dropped the ball--we Republicans. . . . My hope is, now, that the black community responds in kind, by listening."

Since the Dems start beating the tom-toms of racial solidarity every time a Republican black runs for office, this mindset will be difficult to overcome.

Since the ideological wing of the Democratic Party is anti-traditional Catholic and also deadset against black Republicans, Steele will face a lot more opposition from the Dems besides the smears they have attempted so far. Stealing Steele's credit records may just be the first act of desperation the desperado Dems apply to keeping their Maryland Senate seat.

Bush Declassifies & Dems Try to Criminalize Politics

JustOneMinute points out another instance of hyper-flake Andrew Sullivan veering to port inaccurately among other instances of the leftist MSM baying at a crescent moon while trying to criminalize any politicization of the Iraq War.

Sullivan replies to Tom Maguire with an oh-so-fretful observation:

"But it seems to me that a president who routinely decries leaking of classified information has now been revealed as someone who purposefully and with premeditation leaked classified information, gave his veep special clearance to do so, and did so during a very heated debate about possible malfeasance with respect to pre-war intelligence handling."

Let's do a fisking of Sullivan on this one. Wilson goes to Niger, puts an Op-Ed on the NYT asserting that Iraq did not seek uranium [asserting incorrectly that VP Cheney had called for the trip] and Bush should not counter this unauthorized public release of classified info by authorizing [which is totally within his executive privileges] material to counter that unauthorized leak. And Sullivan does not answer Maguire's questioning of Sullivan's presumption that the Cheney leaks were done to embarrass Wilson and Plame, and done with premeditation, as Sullivan said before with this quote:

We have a missing link. No, I don't mean the post-fish. I mean the Bush connection in the Plame leak. It turns out that, according to Libby, it was the president who first sanctioned the leak of the NIE data to discredit Joseph Wilson.

[emphasis mine]
Yes, the Plamaniacs are set in their lying ways. Not that Plame was even subject to the law they claim the Bush Administration broke. Once the MSM has a mantra, as with WMDs and talks between UbL & Iraqis pre 9-11, the Kossack groupies froth at the mouth and the sputum flecks their beards with endless ravings and reiterations of discredited dogma. The Left knows it is The Big Lie that gets remembered, not the corrections.

Carter, McKinney & her bodyguard: Georgia strikes out with Three bad Swings.

James Taranto under the title "Smug Alert" scores the supercilious, condescending, blatherful and ultra-smug Ex-Peanut Farmer and Winner of the Nobel Prize along with Arafat Gee-mah "Jimmy" Carter for being a prudish, prissy prig and self-righteous to boot! Here's his limp-wristed commentary to an imaginary question:

Carter fittingly used a parable to illustrate how he'd like to see the political/religious debate unfold.

"I was teaching a Sunday school class two weeks ago," he recalls. "A girl, she was about 16 years old from Panama City [Fla.], asked me about the differences between Democrats and Republicans.

"I asked her, 'Are you for peace, or do you want more war?' Then I asked her, 'Do you favor government helping the rich, or should it seek to help the poorest members of society? Do you want to preserve the environment, or do you want to destroy it? Do you believe this nation should engage in torture, or should we condemn it? Do you think each child today should start life responsible for $28,000 in [federal government] debt, or do you think we should be fiscally responsible?'

"I told her that if she answered all of those questions, that she believed in peace, aiding the poor and weak, saving the environment, opposing torture . . . then I told her, 'You should be a Democrat.' "

It must be the water, or an epidemic of brain death, but Georgia also got a hat tip from Taranto in the form of describing its civics-lesson Atlanta Congressperson through the eyes of a liberal press outlet:

Facing the possibility of criminal charges, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, she "apologized for her role" in the incident. But in fact if the AJC's quotes are accurate, she did no such thing:

"There should not have been any physical contact in this incident," McKinney, surrounded by a handful of lawmakers, said.

"I am sorry this misunderstanding happened at all and I regret its escalation and I apologize," McKinney said, drawing applause from the partially-filled chamber.

"There should not have been any physical contact . . . this misunderstanding happened . . . I regret its escalation." It does not appear that she expressed any remorse whatever for her actions. What's more, the paper suggests that an employee of hers then proceeded to impersonate a policeman:

Even as McKinney appeared to be trying to put the issue to rest, a bodyguard she hired--reportedly a former Georgia state trooper--was raising another furor when he threatened a television reporter trying to interview McKinney outside the Capitol just minutes before she appeared on the House floor. When the reporter from Cox Broadcasting tried to ask McKinney about the grand jury, the bodyguard told him, "I'm going to put your ass in jail. I'm a police officer," a videotape of the incident shows. Asked if he worked for Capitol police, the man said, "I work for Miss McKinney."

The Hill reports that before the "apology," members of the Congressional Black Caucus were distancing themselves from McKinney:

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil-rights pioneer and the senior member of the Georgia Democratic congressional delegation, told Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) to stop making political hay out of her scuffle a week ago with a U.S. Capitol Police officer.

"I told her she needs to lower the temperature and stop holding the press conferences," Lewis said, recounting his conversation with McKinney on the House floor yesterday. "I don't think it had any impact because she is still going on all the TV shows."

Lewis said other members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) had also told McKinney to back off, adding that she had little support in the group. It held an emergency meeting last night to discuss the issue, a House source said.

Maryland Senate Seat may go Republican

Booker Rising has a nice comment on the Washington Post article outlining Maryland's black Republican Lt. Gov. Michael Steele's popularity among Maryland's black voters, citing an internal poll by a Democratic consultant that gives Steele a 44% slice of Maryland's large black population.

Booker Rising notes:

"This explains everything," said Lt. Gov. Steele, about the DNC report. "They're afraid of what I represent. They're afraid of the fact that African American voters have options, and I'm one of them." I guess that explains how white Democrats working for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee illegally got his credit report, which later resulted in a conviction. Not to mention the break-in of his campaign office not too long ago. Can't have black folks voting across party lines, now can we? Lest coloreds start to get ideas that we should not be so tied to partisanship. And Mr. Bositis fails to account for the possibility that there may be increased black support for Lt. Gov. Steele since his race four years ago.

More US Secret Tech to China via Israel

China has developed its own version of the Patriot anti-missile system, according to a Chinese-owned Hong Kong newspaper.

The ground-to-air guided missile system is part of China's air shield that is similar to U.S. Patriot missiles, the March 29 Wen Wei Po reported.

US officials confirm that:

China covertly obtained Patriot anti-missile system technology from Israel during the 1990s, according to U.S. officials.
U.S. intelligence agencies discovered the Israel-China Patriot technology transfer in March 1993.

The transfers came from U.S.-made Patriots sent to Israel to counter Iraqi missile attacks during the Persian Gulf war.

The report described the system's command and control system, vehicles and interceptors.

In 1993, then-CIA Director Robert Gates told The Washington Times, "There is some indication that they [the Chinese] have some of the technology."

This is not the first instance that Israel has illegally transferred US Secret technology to China. In the late 1980's, Saudi Arabia was discovered to have bought Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles from China. The US was outraged that the Saudis had made such a purchase without US knowledge, but the Saudis made the US Ambassador persona non grata and, subsequently, the US discovered that the Chinese ballistics had been acquired from Israeli sources who pirated the technology from American security assistance to the IDF.

Winning in Iraq: Numbers Don't Lie

Wretchard at the Belmont Club has some hopeful auguries of a downturn in Iraqi-insurgency effectiveness. Tried to link Myelectionanalysis and Mudville Gazette without success:

81, 76, 50, 49, 43, 25

What are these numbers? This week’s Powerball winners? ... No, they’re the number of troops that have died in hostile actions in Iraq for each of the past six months. That last number represents the lowest level of troop deaths in a year, and second-lowest in two years.

But it must be that the insurgency is turning their assault on Iraqi military and police, who are increasingly taking up the slack, right?

215, 176, 193, 189, 158, 193 (and the three months before that were 304, 282, 233)

Okay, okay, so insurgents aren’t engaging us; they’re turning increasingly to car bombs then, right?

70, 70, 70, 68, 30, 30

Civilians then. They’re just garroting poor civilians.
527, 826, 532, 732, 950, 446 (upper bound, two months before that were 2489 and 1129).

My point here is not that everything is peachy in Iraq. It isn’t. My point isn’t that the insurgency is in its last throes. It isn’t. My point here isn’t even to argue that we’re winning. I’m at best cautiously-pessimistic-to-neutral about how things are going there. ... My only point is that ... I was unequivocally shocked when I saw this. Completely the opposite of what I’d expected. My non-scientific sample of three friends, all of whom are considerably more bullish about the prospects in Iraq than I am, revealed three people similarly surprised by these numbers.

Myelectionanalysis expected to find the reverse of the actual numbers, as you would be led to think if you confined your reading to the International Crisis Group, who in their February 15, 2006 report, entitled "In Their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency" describe an insurgency that is going from strength to strength.

This report, based on close analysis of the insurgents’ own discourse, reveals relatively few groups ... whose strategy and tactics have evolved (in response to U.S. actions and to maximise acceptance by Sunni Arabs), and whose confidence in defeating the occupation is rising. ... The emergence of a more confident, better organised, coordinated, information-savvy insurgency, ... has survived, even thrived, despite being vastly outnumbered and outgunned, suggests the limitations of the current counter-insurgency campaign.

But it's hard to reconcile the International Crisis Group's report with the second link. An Armed Forces Journal article entitled "It will be better when you leave" says it has become so comparatively quiet in former Iraqi hotspots that the troops are wondering what to make of it.

There are more than 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, 23,000 of whom are Marines. But even in the most insurgent-infested places in Iraq, the troops aren’t doing much. The Fallujahs and Mosuls and Tall Afars are history. The insurgents seem to be lying low. They’re not coming out in great numbers to confront U.S. troops. They’re not mounting as many effective IED attacks.

Sometimes it seems the American forces are searching for things to do — going on patrol for the sake of going on patrol. At some point that patrol is going to hit an IED — it’s a numbers game. But it’s unlikely that a patrol was specifically targeted. It’s just bad luck.

Could the insurgents be executing a similar strategy to the Taliban in Afghanistan? As Sean D. Naylor reported in the February issue of AFJ, Special Forces officers who work closely with tribal militias in Afghanistan’s most remote provinces warn that the former regime that protected al-Qaida is lying in wait, marshalling resources for the day America leaves.

George Packer has a good piece in this week's New Yorker "Why the Pentagon ignores its Own Success Story," concerning the "pacification" of Tel Afar employing Counter-Insurgency Tactics first invented in Malaya during the Communist insurrection of the 1950's.

Packer's "theme" is that Rumsfeld and Cheney were so much in love with their electronic warfare souped-up to destroy the enemy without really engaging the enemy that they forbade the use of the word "insurgency" because that would imply the need for Counter-Insurgency methods, time-tested and traditional, with a lot of hands-on engagement of US assets on the ground.

Packer contrasts the Tal Afar success, where US forces remain on the ground and do not allow insurgency forces back after an engagement, with the "search and destroy" methods of Fallujah, which kicked out insurgents with a high death toll, only to see them return after US forces departed.

Packer says that Rumsfeld just wants to get out of Iraq so his highly-expensive upgrading of armaments can continue, or he implies that strongly. The on-the-ground success of the Counter-Insurgency tactics means that a new textbook on CI is being written and will be ready next year, "just in time for the last GIs leaving Iraq to get a copy as they board the plane going stateside" as one cynical US commander notes.

Once again, the last war [Gulf War] was refought in Iraq, and the lessons learned in the war before that one [Vietnam], were disregarded as doctrine prevailed over intelligence [both G2 and brain-based].

France Topsy-Turvy at Chirac's ""calamitous fin de r?gne"

The Economist has a good overview of the state failing PM de Villepin finds himself---confused and hemorrhaging authority as his polls go in free fall along with those of his loathed---in America---mentor, President Chirac. The Economist does not spare the irony and poorly-hidden glee at the pompous fop's downfall:

FOR a country that prides itself on its Cartesian logic, France has recently taken a decidedly baroque turn in its politics. First, President Jacques Chirac intervened in the country's bitter eight-week-long clash over a new job contract for young people under 26. His bizarre solution? To permit the controversial bill creating the new contract to go into law, but to urge his fellow citizens to pay no attention to it until it was amended.

Next, and equally baffling to a French public that has grown used to seeing parliament treated as a mere rubber stamp, Mr Chirac handed authorship of a new law to amend the contested one not to the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin (above, right), but to the UMP party, whose leader is the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy (left)."It is time," the president concluded in a televised statement watched by some 21m viewers, "to resolve the situation."

By the middle of this week, that promised resolution had bred only confusion. The stand-off between the government and protesters continued in the streets. On April 4th, in another day of strikes and demonstrations, 1m-3m people—as many as the week previously—marched around the country. They are continuing to demand the complete withdrawal of the contrat premi?re embauche (CPE), designed by Mr de Villepin in a bid to encourage job creation. This was the law that Mr Chirac decided to promulgate, after the Constitutional Council, France's highest court, had ruled that it was perfectly constitutional.

Political authority in France is now in a state of flux. A resolute Mr de Villepin continued to insist this week that he "will not give up." But his position has been seriously undermined. He is no longer in charge of the law he originally drew up. Bernard Accoyer, head of the parliamentary group of the UMP, along with his counterpart in the Senate, is now drafting a new one to meet Mr Chirac's two main demands for change: a halving of the CPE's two-year probation period, and a requirement that employers must justify any redundancy. In a dramatic power shift, it was Mr Accoyer who this week invited union leaders to talks. Mr de Villepin did not even attend. "Mr prime minister, who governs France today?" taunted Jean-Marc Ayrault, leader of the Socialist group in the National Assembly.

The humiliation for Mr de Villepin is acute. By promulgating the law, Mr Chirac hoped to help his prime minister to salvage some credibility. He may also have been trying to thwart any thoughts of resignation: if the street brought down a government only a year before the next presidential election, it could crush the rest of his presidency as well as the prospects for the political right. Yet it is hard to see how Mr de Villepin can push any other reforms in the run-up to the 2007 presidential election, let alone plausibly mount his own bid. His popularity has fallen by 14 points over the past month, to just 28%, says a BVA poll for L'Express. As for Mr Chirac, 62% of those who watched his TV address judged it “unconvincing”. A "calamitous fin de r?gne", commented Le Monde.

Who will emerge strengthened from this saga? Top of the list stands the trade-union movement. In the past, it has been split by fratricidal disputes. The previous government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin managed to push through a pension reform against union resistance largely because it won the support of the CFDT, a more moderate group. This time, the five main unions, along with those representing students, have been rock solid in insisting on the withdrawal of the CPE, which is now part of French law but which many deputies already refer to as dead.

Indeed, flush with their success, some union leaders (as well as the opposition Socialists) are now demanding the abolition of another more flexible job contract previously introduced by Mr de Villepin. The Socialists too have been capitalising on the government's troubles; in the past month alone, they have signed up an extra 18,000 members.

The biggest uncertainty, however, concerns Mr Sarkozy, Mr de Villepin's main rival as presidential hopeful for the centre-right. As head of the UMP, he seemed to interpret this week's shift of power to the parliamentary party as carte blanche to take charge. No sooner had Mr Chirac spoken than Mr Sarkozy reminded the public that "for several weeks, I've been calling for a compromise." To the consternation of the prime minister's supporters, he spent the weekend telephoning union leaders personally, urging them to return to negotiations. "Sarkozy, the other prime minister," ran a banner headline at Le Parisien.

Mr Sarkozy may yet be hauled back into line. But, so far, public opinion seems to approve of his efforts. While 70% told a CSA poll that Mr Chirac had emerged from the crisis weakened, and 75% thought Mr de Villepin had, only 30% felt the same about Mr Sarkozy. If he can help to bring about an end to the street protests, his stock could rise still further. On April 5th he called for constitutional change in response to what he described as the exhaustion of France's political system.

The big difficulty for Mr Sarkozy will be to square the impression of yielding to the street with his advocacy of a "rupture" with the bad old ways. In the past, Mr Sarkozy has consistently pushed for an even bolder liberalisation of the labour market than Mr de Villepin has even dared to propose. Indeed, he favours a single, more flexible job contract for all, to bring an end to France's two-tier labour market. If the new law ends up rendering the CPE meaningless, with no concessions extracted from the labour movement in return, it will hardly amount to a convincing demonstration of his reformist credentials.

Sarkozy can exploit the dementia-addled Chirac's jettisoning his chosen successor, the fop poetaster de Villepin only so far. The Socialists have an attractive Hillary Clinton type named Segolene Royal who could be formidable if she is nominated for Socialist candidate for President. Sarkozy has to square the circle of resolving the CPE riddle and maintaining his economic-liberal credentials that the "rupture" with the social model stands for.

Meantime, it is nice to see de Villepin, who ambushed Colin Powell at the UN after pledging his support in 2003, get bushwhacked in return by his own boss and mentor! It's good to see the contempt most Americans feel for Chirac and Villepin reflected in the French people.

Now if only the Brits liked Blair as much as the Yanks do!

Basic Instinct 3: Show Us the Money!

Delusional Hollyweird iconess Sharon Stone wants to direct the NEXT BI? BI2 is Box Office Poison.

Doesn't a franchise have to show promise of profitability to be named a "franchise?"

US Should give Iraqis Space.

David Ignatius has an interesting article in The Washington Post today that puts up the caution light on Iraq's endless dithering over forming a new government. The US impatience with the pace of events in Iraq has been a systemic one dating from the first days of the Iraq invasion three years ago.

I am reading Cobra II and one of the cardinal themes recurring throughout the tome is American impatience, as if a war can be segmented into quarterly reports and supervised by hypertrophic bureaucrats in the WH and Pentagon [read Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld]. Yes, Jafari is a Gucci-Guerrilla dolt with no leadership capacity; but he is supported by Moqtada Al Sadr who has 30-odd seats in Parliament and a well-armed militia. As David Ignatius quotes the very wise Saudi Ambassador, "America came to Iraq uninvited. You should not leave uninvited."

The whole Iraq operation has a "hit-and-run" feel to it; sober institutional memories of experienced soldiers are over-ruled by the martinet-in-charge [Rummie] and his mountebank superior [Cheney]. These two geopoliticians obviously have forgotten their Kipling----pretty soon if leadership of the Cheney-Rumsfeld variety persists in its attempts to impose inside-the-Beltway constructs onto the messy reality of Baghdad, the US will have to recite a "Recessional" of its own.

Synchronicity: What, if anything does it Mean?

For a long time, from once in a while to an occasional sequence, I have occasionally experienced bizarre coincidences. I have read a number of books by and about Carl Gustav Jung who wrote concerning this phenomenon, which he dubbed "synchronicity." I also read a couple of books by Arthur Koestler on the same phenomenon, in which Koestler enumerated a few sequential occurrences which seemed to have meaning for him and Koestler philosophized on whether or not these situations had meaning.

I had a couple of strange coincidences happen to me last night and this morning, and will simply give you the facts.

At about midnight last night, I began watching a Discovery Channel program called "Dangerous Catch," which highlighted in great detail the perilous job of fishing for Alaskan King Crab in the Bering Sea. The program was extremely vivid concerning the dangers of fishing in terrible weather, and I watched fascinated for about forty-five minutes. While watching, I remembered that the son of a former State Department colleague of mine, Ambassador Robert Barry, was tragically killed while working on a fishing boat in Alaskan waters. I watched and remembered this terrible accident, which deprived a very talented young man out on a summer's job earning a lot of money of a promising life.

I went to sleep around 1AM and subsequently had very vivid dreams of Ambassador Barry and also of another colleague who worked with Barry at the State Department. The other FSO was Ambassador Thomas Niles, whom I knew well enough to visit his home and meet his family, and he and I once went to a Washington NBA game together, as we were both Bullets fans. My long and vivid dream was about both Ambassadors Barry and Niles.

At 7AM this morning, I was awakened by my daughter, whom I drove to school. I picked up the Financial Times on my driveway, and there on the Op-Ed page of the FT was an Opinion piece co-authored by Thomas Niles entitled "Sustainable fisheries serve a common interest." Ambassador Niles is the Vice Chairman of the United States Council for International Business and writes about the potential collapse of ocean fisheries. The tie between the TV program "Dangerous Catch," my dream linking Barry and Niles, and the Op-Ed on fisheries might qualify for synchronicity or for skeptics, terminal weirdness. But it is bizarre when it happens, as serial-linkage has to me on several occasions in the past.

I guess this might be what Robert Graves called "proleptic thought" when he wrote the classic White Goddess, concerning his paranormal experiences which he claimed inspired him to write this "historical grammar of poetic myth." Strangely, I had what might be called another strange synchronicity-event in the Library of Congress in DC when a young woman walked up to me asking for the subtitle of Graves's weird chef d'oeuvre. Which I immediately gave her.

Pensioners' Party wins Seven Knesset Seats

The Pensioners' Party has come out of nowhere to win seven seats to the Knesset under the leadership of Rafi Eitan, a well-known figure in Israel's turbulent history, who at 79 years old is playing his third act in a lifetime full of skullduggery.

Eitan was the mastermind of the kidnapping of Adolph Eichmann from Argentina, resulting in that Nazi war criminal's trial and execution for war crimes during the Second World War.

Then, in a less glorious episode, Eitan set up Jonathon Pollard as a spy who stole US secrets which informed observers say Israel subsequently traded to the USSR for spy info on its enemies in the Middle East. This was the reason that recently-deceased Caspar Weinberger reportedly gave for ordering Pollard to be kept in a maximum-security facility for life with no hope of parole or early release.

Reports that Rafi Eitan has a document that Israel never handed over to the Americans after Pollard's conviction is not likely to lead to Pollard's release, say these sources. The case for keeping Pollard in prison lies not only on his extensive spying for Israel, but also on the allegations that

Pollard's information led to revealing the identity of American spies operating in the Soviet Union.

There are reports that other information that the Israelis handed the USSR was also harmful to American foreign policy interests and that the harm done has led to the US's tough stance on Pollard's imprisonment.

Meanwhile, Rafi Eitan [no relation to the former head of the IDF who made the famous statement that the Palestinians would be sequestrated "like roaches in a bottle'] has a shot at becoming a minister in Ehud Olmert's new government, as may Shimon Peres, the elder statesman of the Labor Party, which will participate in the Kadima coalition.

Pray and Live Longer!?!

LiveScience has an article that purports to show that Church attendance prolongs life. This can be anecdotally proven by my mother, who prays daily and is sprightly at about nine full decades into her existence.

Roman Catholics no longer require Sunday Mass attendance after the age of eighty, but it's okay to go, thus hedging one's bet given the new "scientific" data! I myself pray the rosary, just like a lot of people, including Garry Wills, the noted writer and leftish commentator. Wills was a Jesuit seminarian and never lost the soothing relaxation which prayer bestows.

The Muslims are aware of this and recite the ninety-nine attributes/names of Allah on their 33-bead prayer beads. Good for the nerves and for longevity, perhaps.

Dems Thrilled about McKinney Fracas!

The Democrats keep getting reminded that some of the looniest members of Congress show up to defend the dizzy Brillo-pad fashion-icon from Georgia.

The latest scofflaw to show support is Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who when elected to her non-voting post, was discovered not to have paid income taxes for nearly a decade. Of course, in that respect, she is a perfect representative for a large number of her constituents.

Even Minority Leader Pelosi, who has to suffer a lot of fools in her political family, cannot abide this weird fashion icon with the amazing eye make-up. The Atlanta area was hit so hard by Katrina that this uninvited moron showed up for hearings, embarrassing the grown-up reps in her party who were actually delegated to sit in on the panel.

Hopefully, the House of Representatives will eventually be dislodged of this embarrassment, just as Tom DeLay was edged out by a constituency of responsible voters in Sugarland, TX. Don't know if the Atlanta area is well-endowed with sane voters, however.

Tale of Two Frances

The Economist has an interesting essay this week on just what the malaise afflicting France consists of---the problem is that there are two Frances, one of elite schools which are incredibly competitive and world class---the other is the rest of the educational apparatus:

The majority of students attend universities that do not select on entry and are virtually free (fees are currently under ?200 a year). Any school-leaver with the baccalaur?at is granted a place. Students are packed into overcrowded lecture halls: France spends less per undergraduate each year than it does per high-school pupil. Lecturers are civil servants, employed by the national Ministry of Education. Universities have little autonomy. And much research is done elsewhere, at the national research institutes. Little wonder that France's undergraduate drop-out rate is about two-fifths and that, in the latest global ranking by Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, not a single French university appeared in the top 40.

If the grandes ?coles students have little to worry about, university students are right to be fearful. Young French people not only face a woefully high unemployment rate, they also find it difficult to break out of a cycle of back-to-back short-term contracts. Over 64% of French 15-24-year-olds in work are on temporary contracts one year after leaving education. The reason that these jobs are the best on offer is that permanent jobs are so protected, with complicated and uncertain redundancy rules, that employers hesitate to hire. This is precisely why Mr de Villepin wanted to loosen the firing rules for the young.

The potential trade-off—between less security and more jobs—is not the way the students see it. Nor does public opinion: polls show a majority against the CPE. Many of this week's demonstrators carried banners denouncing not just the new contract, but other liberal evils, such as globalisation and the free market. “I have never felt France so tense and tormented,” said Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister and head of the ruling UMP party. This fear for the future is what distinguishes today's student-led rebellion from that of a generation ago. “May '68 was an offensive movement, carrying a positive vision of the future,” Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the 1968 student leader turned Green Euro-politician, told Paris-Match magazine: “Today's protests are based on the defensive, the fear of insecurity and of change.”

Why do the French seem to fear capitalism? The country's republican revolutionary history bequeathed faith in a strong dirigiste state as a civic religion. Today, nearly 5m French workers, or one-quarter of all jobs, are still in the public sector. Left-leaning intellectuals, with a romantic communist heritage, are not derided but treated as national treasures. There is a lingering culture of suspicion of profit, and a demonisation of business leaders, encouraged by a mainstream left that still equates efficiency with injustice.

The Socialist Party, for instance, is committed to renationalising Electricit? de France (EDF), the state electricity utility, which was partly floated last year. The Communist Party, with its hammer and sickle flag and its grip on the biggest trade union, the Conf?d?ration G?n?rale du Travail, is considered part of the mainstream left. Only assorted Trotskyites and Revolutionary Communists earn a place on the fringe. As Fran?ois Bayrou, a centrist political leader, once put it: "France has never been properly d?Marxis?."

The real world of France is much more complicated, and the weight of the nineteenth century and the dead hand of Marxism are just one-half of the French economic/political puzzle:

Within the private sector, the rules of globalised capitalism are well accepted. France is less unionised than America, and very few days are lost to strikes. Per hour, French workers are more productive than their American counterparts—though they lose out on overall productivity because, thanks to the 35-hour week, they work so few hours. And young French people snap up the loosely protected jobs in bars and caf?s in London, the sort that are being protested about so vigorously in Paris.

Who then is to blame for the gap between the rhetoric and the reality? The short answer is a political class that has repeatedly failed to explain to the French what is at stake and why things need to change. For the past 20 years, the mainstream political choice has been between a form of socio-Gaullism embodied by President Jacques Chirac (who last year described liberalism as a greater threat than communism) and an archaic socialism that fails to understand, or at least to explain, that wealth needs to be created before it can be shared. Such reforms as France has carried out tend to have been introduced by stealth, both by the left and the right. Lionel Jospin, a Socialist ex-prime minister, for instance, managed to privatise whole swathes of industry without ever using the word.

The result, however, is that the credibility of the political word has been undermined. As Michel Camdessus, a former IMF director and author of a devastating criticism of the French model in 2004, put it: “Reform in our country still moves forward with its face masked. Certainly we take action, but we never say why.” So when Mr de Villepin promised last year to keep a 70% holding in Gaz de France (GDF) as a condition of its partial flotation, employees disbelieved him. Instead, they took to the streets to contest what they suspected was a first step towards privatisation. Sure enough, when Suez, a private French company, faced an expected hostile bid from an Italian firm in February, Mr de Villepin stepped in and orchestrated a merger with GDF—even though that will shrink the state's share to about a third.

Where was the politician ready to argue that a Franco-Italian merger could create a new European energy giant, rather than fend off outsiders at any cost? Why was there not a murmur when BNP Paribas, a French bank, marched into Italy earlier that month and picked up an Italian one? Or when L'Or?al, a cosmetics giant, recently snared Body Shop, an iconic British chain. Capitalism, judging by the rhetoric, is for the French only when it suits.

Were all this simply political theatre, it might be little more than a distraction. But the failure to explain is also a failure to create the consensus needed for reform. And the longer reform is postponed, the more painful it will be. The weight of the state, which raises too many taxes, to pay too many civil servants and implement too many rules, is already a drag on economic growth. The French government's overall tax take is 44% of GDP, next to a euro-zone average of 39.5%. The economy grew by a mere 1.4% in 2005, and is only slowly picking up this year. All the while, France is piling up unsustainable debt to prop up its sprawling welfare system. Michel P?bereau, chairman of BNP Paribas, pointed out in a government-commissioned report that if nothing is done about the government debt, it will soar from 66% of GDP today to 100% in 2014. The net result will be a "foreseeable reduction of our capacity to create jobs and wealth."

Reform cannot be accomplished by the ham-handed methods that the never-elected-to-dogcatcher Dominique de Villepin employed when forcing the CPE laws down the union/socialist throats without negotiation. This Napoleon-wannabee is an anachronism in a France which absolutely must undergo the pain of reform to overcome its addictions to an outdated social model that might work in Scandanavia, but is untenable in a nation of 60 million people. So the ruling UMP might find itself defeated by Socialists if they cannot resolve their internal strife while attempting a real change in the national political/economic environment.

Supporters of Mr Sarkozy, who like Mr de Villepin is an aspirant candidate at next year's presidential election (and who preaches a "rupture" with France's social model), tend to regard this as a fruitless trial run that is not worth the political capital. Mr Sarkozy has been careful to distance himself from the prime minister, calling early on for the CPE to be put on hold while negotiations take place.

Had the parliamentary party, and the government, been united behind the prime minister, this stand-off might have been avoided. But underlying the bungled CPE affair is the corrosive power struggle that pits the prime minister against his number two. Mr de Villepin's desire to force through the CPE was guided by his need to establish himself as a man of action, not just of letters, and therefore as a potential candidate for 2007.

Appointed only last May, he had little time to put his plans into place, and in his haste he failed to prepare public opinion or the unions for what he was trying to do. By treating parliament as a plaything, to be dropped at whim, and the unions as optional, he has ended up looking like yet another in a line of aloof political leaders exploiting a system of highly centralised power to impose their way.

Naturally, Mr Sarkozy has lost no opportunity to remind the French that he would have handled things better. "It is not change that the French refuse," he declared in a speech this week, "but reform that they consider unfair." As both men's popularity sink in the polls, however, the greater threat to both is not each other. It is that their self-destructive rivalry enfeebles the political right, and that, in 2007, the Socialists end up victorious.

If the Socialists gain the Presidency, there is a good chance that protectionist barricades against any and all globalization or even Europeanization will prevent France from being part of Europe or the world in any positive fashion. Sarkozy is negotiating with the unions, which refuse to deal with the imperious de Villepin. Chirac is effectively self-neutered. Tomorrow the demonstrations will restart and the next act in France's street theatre will commence. The future of Europe might eventually hang in the balance. Can France reform or fall back into the addictive patterns of its past? Any student of French history will affirm: "Plus ca change....etc."

Gore Flips Out, Calls GWB Neville Chamberlain vs. Hitler [Global Warming[!

Conservative Blogger rips the Gorebot as he rails mindlessly against Bush's GWOT and typically compares GWB as Neville Chamberlain against Hitler [Global Warming].

Seems Gore has the hyper-invective, hyperbole hysteria that infects the mindless Ultra-hard-Left which he espouses now that the right and center and center-left and even left-left regard him as [choose one or more of the following]: a dangerous mountebank, cynical charlatan or deranged imbecile.

So compare Global Warming to Hitler and see how far it gets you, LOSER!

BTW: I chose ALL OF THE ABOVE!

Bug-Eyed Bimbo Blames Capitol Cops

Anti-Semitic Congressman McKinney blames Capitol Police for "assault" after passing by a checkpoint without displaying her Congressional ID. She has long been an object of ridicule for preposterous statements about Jews and the state of Israel, and now blames "racism" for the fact that she was nailed by the over-worked Capitol Police by behaving----like a pompous ass!

Even liberal bloggers are upset that this caricature of an arrogant legislator is playing the race and female card to excuse her misbehavior. Maybe this overweight bimbo doesn't know that displaying ID is important during a GWOT, but she probably hates the USA like a lot of her left-wing moonbat congressional companions and secretly wouldn't be unhappy if it gets attacked again.

If the Capitol Police doesn't prosecute this scofflaw, then contempt of Congress will become one's public duty.

Dutch Porn Movie Director Blames Bush for Basic Instinct2 Box Office Bust!

Porn Director Paul Verhoeven blames the "current conservative climate" for the poor box office of porn films recently. His 1996 classic "Showgirls" was the first porn flick to tank and is now regarded as a camp "so-bad-it's-good" classic.

Verhoeven's remark reminds one of Berthold Brecht's comment after the East German government upbraided the German people as "being unworthy of Communism" after Berlin riots in the early fifties. Brecht's trenchant observation "Perhaps the Government should get a new People" also holds true with Dutch porn king Verhoeven. Perhaps he should peddle his smut where people actually pay for public porn, like his native land full of legal dope dens and public prostitution stalls.

Kossack Apparatchiki Hinder Dems

Adam Nagourney has an article in the NYT concerning the Internet and bloggers:

Bloggers, for all the benefits they might bring to both parties, have proved to be a complicating political influence for Democrats. They have tugged the party consistently to the left, particularly on issues like the war, and have been openly critical of such moderate Democrats as Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut.

The wild, intemperate swaggering self-importance of these echo-chambers have little influence outside their million or so aficianados. They serve to pump up airbags like Howard Dean and deflate any moderate Dems like Steve Elmendorf, who has been blacklisted by these Kossacks.

Hopefully, the sensible center of the Democrats will prevail.

The Land of Oz Points the Way

Mark Steyn lets us know why the Aussies are America's favorite allies, although Tony Blair is America's favorite politician. First, Mark starts out with the obligatory razzing of the feckless pompous imposters from Hollywood and environs. These people are traitors who want the US to lose and be destroyed. Only Freud or someone similar can explain these thespians' Death Wish:

If I were an anti-war leftie, I'd be very depressed by the Iraq anniversary protests. A few hundred people show up hither and yon to see Cindy Sheehan get arrested for the 15th time that week, or Charlie Sheen unveil his critically acclaimed the-World-Trade-Center-was-a-controlled-explosion conspiracy theory. The "Hot Shots! Part Deux" star is apparently an expert in that field, and he'd never seen commercial property break up that quickly since Heidi Fleiss' hooker ring. Anyway, Susan Sarandon's going to play Cindy in the movie, or maybe she's playing Charlie, or both -- either way, they might as well give her the Oscar during the opening titles.

But, while Charlie Sheen is undoubtedly a valiant leader, you couldn't help noticing it was followers the anti-war crowd seemed to be short of on the third anniversary. The next weekend half a million illegal immigrants -- whoops, sorry, half a million fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community-- took to the streets, and you suddenly realized what a big-time demonstration is supposed to look like. These guys aren't even meant to be in the country and they can organize a better public protest movement than an anti-war crowd that's promoted 24/7 by the media and Hollywood.

Well, OK, half the anti-war crowd aren't meant to be in the country either, if they'd kept their promise to move to Canada after the last election. But my point is there's no mass anti-war movement. Some commentators claimed to be puzzled by the low turnout at a time when the polls show Iraq increasingly unpopular. But there are two kinds of persons objecting to the war: There's a shriveled Sheehan-Sheen left that's in effect urging on American failure in Iraq, and there's a potentially far larger group to their right that's increasingly wary of the official conception of the war. The latter don't want America to lose, they want to win -- decisively. And on the day's headlines -- on everything from the Danish cartoon jihad to the Afghan facing death for apostasy -- the fainthearted response of "public diplomacy" is in danger of sounding only marginally less nutty than Charlie Sheen.

Yes, the Jimmy Carter gene is rampant and rambunctious among the limp-wristed left:

The line here is "respect." Everybody's busy professing their "respect": We all "respect" Islam; presidents and prime ministers and foreign ministers, lapsing so routinely into the deep-respect-for-the-religion-of-peace routine they forget that cumulatively it begins to sound less like "Let's roll!" and too often like "Let's roll over!"

Mark goes on to roll his eyes a bit concerning Jack Straw, whose name sort of symbolizes his notochord-status:

Government leaders are essentially telling their citizens: Who ya gonna believe -- my platitudinous speechwriters or your lyin' eyes?

Mark even brings up Sir Winston C to make his point:

To win a war, you don't spin a war. Millions of ordinary citizens are not going to stick with a "long war" (as the administration now calls it) if they feel they're being dissembled to about its nature. One reason we regard Churchill as a great man is that his speeches about the nature of the enemy don't require unspinning or detriangulating.

Then Steyn points out why the Aussies are men and the French are meretricious women:

If I had to propose a model for Western rhetoric, it would be the Australians. In the days after Sept. 11, the French got all the attention for that Le Monde headline -- "Nous sommes tous Americains" -- "We are all Americans," though they didn't mean it, even then. But John Howard, the Aussie prime minister, put it better and kept his word: "This is no time to be an 80 percent ally."

John Howard speaks the truth and does it in a trenchant manner, ala Churchill:

Marvelous. More recently, the prime minister offered some thoughts on the difference between Muslims and other immigrant groups. "You can't find any equivalent in Italian or Greek or Lebanese or Chinese or Baltic immigration to Australia. There is no equivalent of raving on about jihad," he said, stating the obvious in a way most political leaders can't quite bring themselves to do. "There is really not much point in pretending it doesn't exist."

In a nation of immigrants like Australia and the US, if you want to live under a special code of laws and be exempt, either become an MSM outlet and publish leaked national security materials, or go back to your god-forsaken hellhole of a homeland:

Unfortunately, too many of his counterparts insist on pretending (at least to their citizenry) that it doesn't exist. What proportion of Western Muslims is hot for jihad? Five percent? Ten, 12 percent? Given that understanding this Pan-Islamist identity is critical to defeating it, why can't we acknowledge it honestly? "Raving on about jihad" is a line that meets what the law used to regard as the reasonable-man test: If you're watching news footage of a Muslim march promising to bring on the new Holocaust, John Howard's line fits.

Is it something in the water down there? Listen to Howard's Cabinet colleagues. Here's the Australian treasurer, Peter Costello, with advice for Western Muslims who want to live under Islamic law: "There are countries that apply religious or sharia law -- Saudi Arabia and Iran come to mind. If a person wants to live under sharia law these are countries where they might feel at ease. But not Australia."

And the Australian Foreign Minister is even more of a man's man than, er..., Condi:

You don't say. Which is the point: Most Western government leaders don't say, and their silence is correctly read by a resurgent Islam as timidity. I also appreciated this pithy summation by my favorite foreigner minister, Alexander Downer: "Multilateralism is a synonym for an ineffective and unfocused policy involving internationalism of the lowest common denominator." See Sudanese slaughter, Iranian nukes, the U.N.'s flop response to the tsunami, etc. It's a good thing being an Aussie Cabinet minister doesn't require confirmation by John Kerry and Joe Biden.

Then, finally, Steyn says it. What we need in the War on Terror is another Reagan:

My worry is that the official platitudes in this new war are the equivalent of the Cold War chit-chat in its 1970s detente phase --when Willy Brandt and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter pretended the enemy was not what it was. Then came Ronald Reagan: It wasn't just the evil-empire stuff, his jokes were on the money, too. In their own depraved way, the Islamists are a lot goofier than the commies and a few gags wouldn't come amiss. If this is a "long war," it needs a rhetoric that can go the distance. And the present line fails that test.

In the meantime, the Hollyweird types can emigrate to Canada and France and make room for the teeming multitudes from South of the Border! At least the bracero hordes don't want to put the US under religious laws! Or nutty post-modern wackjob kumbayeh modes.

Condi Wows Them in the UK

The Telegraph has a long piece on Condoleeza Rice and how she has bedazzled the Brits and even WackoJacqu-o Shh-Iraq on her travels around the globe.

Of course, the MSM spokesblog Editor & Publisher does its counterpoint in turn, with approving junkie-nods from lefty bloggers. Turns out classical pianist Condi hummed the wrong tune from Sgt. Pepper when asked to sing "4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire" in Jack Straw's home town. The AP and Reuters, two Bush-hating wires services, really went to town on that one, and E&P nods in approval of their jabs.

The Telegraph article contains a clue as to the AP's hatred for Condi:

A few hours earlier, Mr Armstrong had been declaiming the war in Iraq in forceful tones in front of the nation's media. Now, he appears to have undergone a quasi-religious conversion. But you can't blame him. This, it seems, is quite simply the Condi effect.

Nothing draws the hatred and scorn of the left more than being proven to be frauds and imposters, as the wires and E&P often are by Condoleeza.

Book Review by Ideologue in NYT

Vertically-challenged Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has one of those clueless book reviews only the NYT seems to churn out like junk food. Reviewing a book called "Fair Trade for All," Reich ends the review by noting:

they fail to acknowledge that within richer nations free trade is already disproportionately benefiting the best educated and best connected. The wealthy are growing much wealthier while the middle class is being squeezed. In fact, the adjustment mechanisms the authors find lacking in most developing economies — good public schools, modern infrastructure and adequate social safety nets — are coming to be less and less available even in America.

First: why the authors should treat affairs within rich nations' economies as a subject of a book on international trade is something the four-foot eleven-inch Berkeley prof doesn't address. Second, how is the middle class "being squeezed?" Third, why doesn't the good prof note that the public schools are being hyper-administered by a unionized mafia of dumbed-down teachers while parochial and private schools do much better education with much less money? Fourth, why does he start a diatribe on America's domestic "social safety nets" in a book review about fair trade? Could it be that this tiny professor's perspective is even smaller than his physical size?

Just more left-wing rubbish and nonsense from the ranting NYT, America's most rapidly declining MSM icon.

A Fool's Poll by Mickey Kaus

Mickey Kaus smacks the far-left Time with a multiple bitch-slap frenzy in the following April Fool's article in Slate.com:

Saturday, April 1, 2006

Do They Know What Day It Is? Time Magazine has released a poll purporting to show that

a lopsided majority of the American public, 72%, favor a "guest worker" program in a head-to-head match-up over a House bill that would criminalize illegal immigration. [Emph. added]

Here is the question Time asked:

TWO DIFFERENT APPROACHES HAVE BEEN SUGGESTED TO DEAL WITH ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS. PLEASE TELL ME WHICH COMES CLOSEST TO YOUR VIEWS ...

MAKE ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION A CRIME AND NOT ALLOW ANYONE WHO ENTERED THE COUNTRY ILLEGALLY TO WORK OR STAY IN THE UNITED STATES UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES [25%]

ALLOW ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS TO GET TEMPORARY WORK VISAS SO THE GOVERNMENT CAN TRACK THEM WHILE THEY EARN PERMANENT RESIDENCE AFTER SIX YEARS IF THEY LEARN ENGLISH, PAY A FINE, PAY ANY BACK TAXES, AND HAVE NO CRIMINAL RECORD [72%]

P.S.: April Fool's! ... Correction: Oh wait. I was going to do an April Fool's item in which I parodied Time's comically biased wording, but I accidentally printed the the actual wording they used. I apologize for the error. ... Maybe Mystery Pollster will correct me, but this seems not close to being a fair poll question. The polltakers make the editorial case for one side after describing the other side with language that's extreme ("anyone," "under any circumstances") and probably inaccurate. (Are there really no circumstances in which someone who entered illegally could stay in the country under the House bill?) I doubt many actual politicians, with their careers on the line, will believe Time. ... It's almost as if they poll-tested the words they used in the poll to make sure they'd get the desired respectable result. ... P.P.S.: Emphasis on comic bias words added ... P.P.P.S.: The question is such a special confection it apparently hasn't been asked by this polling organization before. Those questions that have been asked before seem to reveal a mild 2-6% movement in the Bush/guest worker direction over the past three months. But they also show a 69% majority in favor of denying illegals driver's licenses, and a 56% majority in favor of a "2,000 mile" fence--and even a near-equal 47-49 split on "deporting all illegal immigrants back to their home countries"! ... P.P.P.P.S.: The Time poll also seems to show substantial backlash after last week's demonstrations. By a roughly 3-1 margin eople say they were moved to oppose the marchers' cause. But if that were the case you'd think it would be reflected in the results. ...

More: It's also hard to jibe Time's "guest worker" result with this two-week old Hart/McInturff NBC/WSJ poll, featuring more balanced wording, that found a 59-37 majority against allowing illegals to "apply for legal, temporary worker status." (See question 22a, and also 22b). ... 3:14 P.M. link

PM Villepin on the Ropes?

This weekend's Financial Times has a good piece on France's poetaster fop Prime Minister which is pay-per-view and suitably disrespectful.

But the most massive dissing of a French official comes from Oxford Chancellor [and former EU potentate] Chris Patten who reviews a book on China by James Kynge, China Shakes The World, which I reviewed a fortnight back on evidently worth the price of a few bucks judging from Kynge's descriptions of China's Latest Greatest Leap Forward. Patten, apropos of western economic nationalism, gets the giant dig in at PM de Villepin's master/mentor

Jacques Chirac, the French President, always a good weathervane of the most ignorant forms of populist protectionism, has already moved from expressions of "brotherly love" for China to assaults on the import of Chinese bras, though he does not try to justify this by any expressed concern for, say, human rights.

I'm sure that Chirac's catamite PM will feel the same way when WackoJacque-o ditches him once the street tumult in Paris gets on the crotchety old Prez's nerves. De Villepin got a temporary reprieve, but the CGT smells [lizard] blood and is employing its kiddie corps of student-rads to keep the heat on the feet of the elite!

Oh so soon, Chirac will predictably jettison his chosen successor to demonstrate further, if any proof were needed, that his backbone has gone the way of his moral courage, long sacrificed to la gloire de lui-meme. As De Gaulle would have said of this faux Sun King, "le chienlit, c'est lui!"

Class Warfare Threatens Paris?

Last week I mentioned the fact that hooded thugs attacked students marching against the unemployment law. These hoods broke store windows and were identified as being from the banlieues where North African and Subsaharan "guest workers" dwell in unmitigated barren high rises like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. Yesterday, the TimesOnLine followed up with a story on the abduction of a French Jewish boy who was tortured to death in a ritual killing by these banlieu dwellers.

Forget the French idyll portrayed in such books as A Year in Provence. France is being forced to confront her dark side as details emerge of horrific crimes in the suburbs.

Testimony from this grim underbelly, the immigrant banlieues — literally "places of banishment" — has fortified the elite’s view of young immigrants on the wrong side of the Paris ring road as “barbarians at the gate”.

For years the Parisian establishment has quaked at the prospect of angry hordes invading their affluent heartland and last week that nightmare came true as gangs of hooded youths robbed and bludgeoned white students attending anti-government demonstrations.

Disquiet about the spread of barbarism across the boulevard p?riph?rique....evoked the sadistic moral universe of A Clockwork Orange, the novel by Anthony Burgess, with a dose of anti-semitism thrown in.

France, the UK, the Dutch and other EU countries are paying dearly for their "mission civilitrice" 19th century colonial adventures, which have brought the barbarians inside their gates and infect their "social models" with a sort of cancer of the unemployment index.

Add to this the fact that France remains perhaps the most anti-Semitic country in the EU and the moral conundrum becomes even more susceptible to good French cinema verite.

I'm waiting for that movie!

Abortion Clinic on SD Reservation

Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux Reservation may open an abortion clinic if the South Dakota state law forbidding abortions except under extreme circumstances passes.

In the 1960's, I spent several weeks at St. Francis and was "principal" of a summer school there. This was prior to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and subsequent publicity made the Reservation a national byword.

In a recent Senate election, the Republican candidate in SD was narrowly ahead until a boxful of votes from the Reservation arrived and happened to be almost all Democratic, changing the outcome of the election. So Pine Ridge is either all-Dem or related to the Daley Cook County apparatus in Illinois!

When I was there, the average life expectancy was below forty for males, as alcoholism and driving at high speed across the hilly expanse of the large reservation ended the lives of many boys in their teens. Although St. Francis School was run by the Jesuits, few Indian grads ever went to college. Perhaps that has changed, but the dreary lives on Pine Ridge did not entice kids to move off the Reservation.

The clinic on reservation land seems to be a PR stunt, as SD women wanting an abortion would travel less far to Minneapolis or Omaha than to Pine Ridge from any SD population centers! Maybe the female "chief" is running for higher office?