The Persian Gulf & the Reality of Big Oil

Walter Russell Mead gives a thoughtful disquisition on the daunting complexities of the US and its dependence on Big Oil, though not, as urban legend and MSM cant would have it, on Middle East oil.

Few subjects matter as much as oil, the Persian Gulf and American foreign policy. But few subjects are less well understood. Even relatively sophisticated observers will attribute American interest in the Persian Gulf to Uncle Sam's insatiable thirst for crude, combined with an effort to gain lucrative contracts for American oil firms. The U.S. on this view is something like a global Count Dracula, roaming the earth in search of fresh bodies, hoping to suck them dry.

True, the security of America's oil supply has been an element in national strategic thinking at least since Franklin Roosevelt met with King Abdul Aziz in the waning days of World War II. And true, the U.S. government has never been indifferent to the concerns of the major oil concerns. But the security of our domestic energy supplies plays a relatively small role in America's Persian Gulf policy, and the purely commercial interests of American companies do not drive American grand strategy.

The U.S. today depends on the Middle East for only a small portion of its energy supplies. Still the world's third largest oil producer and holding large coal reserves, America is significantly less dependent on foreign energy sources than the other great economies. Imports account for 35% of U.S. energy consumption versus 56% for the European Union and 80% for Japan. Nearly half the oil and all the natural gas imported by the U.S. comes from the Western Hemisphere; sub-Saharan Africa supplies most of the balance. Only 17% of U.S. oil imports and less than 0.5% of our natural gas come from the Persian Gulf; 80% of Japan's imports come from the Gulf, and by 2015 70% of China's oil will come from the same source.

While U.S. import needs are projected to grow significantly, U.S. dependence on Persian Gulf energy is not, thanks largely to expected production increases in the Western Hemisphere and sub-Saharan Africa. U.S. energy imports from the Persian Gulf are expected to remain below 20% of total consumption. The oil market, of course, is global, and if something were to happen to the Middle Eastern supplies, prices would rise world-wide, and the U.S. economy would be seriously disrupted. But domestic supply is not the key to American interest in the Gulf........

Mead goes on to explain how the price of world oil is a key component, and the most important commodity component, of the world's economy. Then he stresses that American dependence on relatively inexpensive oil means that Persian Gulf security is paramount to keeping a monster-spike increase in oil prices from occurring due to
Islamist religious Luddites eager to harm the advanced industgrial economies and heedless of the damage to Arab & other Muslim economies.

The end of America's ability to safeguard the Gulf and the trade routes around it would be enormously damaging--and not just to us. Defense budgets would grow dramatically in every major power center, and Middle Eastern politics would be further destabilized, as every country sought political influence in Middle Eastern countries to ensure access to oil in the resulting free for all.

The potential for conflict and chaos is real. A world of insecure and suspicious great powers engaged in military competition over vital interests would not be a safe or happy place. Every ship that China builds to protect the increasing numbers of supertankers needed to bring oil from the Middle East to China in years ahead would also be a threat to Japan's oil security--as well as to the oil security of India and Taiwan. European cooperation would likely be undermined as well, as countries sought to make their best deals with Russia, the Gulf states and other oil rich neighbors like Algeria.

America's Persian Gulf policy is one of the chief ways through which the U.S. is trying to build a peaceful world and where the exercise of American power, while driven ultimately by domestic concerns and by the American national interest, provides vital public goods to the global community. The next American president, regardless of party and regardless of his or her views about the wisdom of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, will necessarily make the security of the Persian Gulf states one of America's very highest international priorities.

The high price of oil is the reason Vladimir Putin was Time's Man of the Year. Historians have neglected the fact that King Fahd's decision to go off the two-tier pricing system in the mid-eighties to allow oil prices to subside to $18/bbl was as important as Afghanistan in bringing the USSR to its economic and military knees.

Mead's glancing allusion to FDR's meeting with King Abdul-Aziz was also an indication that a continuing close relationship of America with Saudi Arabia will be a most important element of stability & security in the Persian Gulf.

Huck & Obama Start Party Civil Wars

Amazing is the feeling I had when I saw Huckabee's acceptance speech quoting G.K. Chesterton, the Catholic ueber-guru, with the line "I do not fight against an enemy in front of me because I hate them, I fight because I love the people behind me" or words to that effect. Huck comes across like an EST inspiration-coach I had 30 years ago, a fellow from Oklahoma. But a glance at the Church census map demonstrates how Huckabee was clever to insert Catholic Chesterton's quote about love, because Huckabee's tone was religious-inspirational. Love conquers all.

Obama's speech was simply "electrifying" in its inspirational intensity. He jabbed at Edwards with "there are not two Americas rich & poor, blue & red, but one United States of America." He didn't go through a laundry list [as Hillary & her tired cohort did on C-Span while Obama lit up the oratorical skies] of social bromides and programmatic to-do post-its. He comes across as a combination of JFK and Abe Lincoln in one package, at least rhetorically. Powerful stuff and Hillary won't be able to compete on that level---she honestly looked and sounded twenty-five years older than Obama's young forty-five.

I am in the course of re-reading David Hackett Fischer's classicAlbion's Seed and noticed today that both Rush Limbaugh and Huckabee come from Arkansas/southeastern Missouri where three separate speech traditions [Lowland South, Upland South, Midland Delaware Valley] all converge, giving people from that area three out of the four speech patterns intermingled [New England is the fourth tradition/argot]. Bill Clinton had the same Baptist origins, but was really a classic manipulator with a Jesuit education---again that Baptist/Catholic mix.

As Edwards' class warfare and Hillary's programmatic management seminar approaches appear trumped by Obama's religious/patriotic/rhetorical skills, so does Huckabee's religious/populist/good-old-boy skill set undermine the patrician CEO approach of Romney. McCain may still have the energy to head Huck off in NH & Romney may resurge, but Thompson is hanging on by a thread and he just comes across as not relaxed, but tired. The guy is 65 & may have a Tsongas-type illness gnawing away at him. Or the fire is not very stoked in his belly. He is the one TRUE conservative, but the MSM are writing him off, unfairly, but understandably. They hate true conservatives and have never forgiven themselves for letting Reagan slip in under the radar.

It's 4AM and I suppose a way to end this screed is by pointing out that the US is still a religious nation, as a read of Albion's Seed makes abundantly clear, and that the deeply-ingrained religiosity of Americans that Huck & Obama exude will usually trump the political commissar approaches of an Edwards/Clinton we-know-better perspective. Obama understands this. He is a sort of cafe-au-lait "secularized" Billy Graham with an exotic tincture of Afro-Asian mystery.

Huckabee unfortunately is a stylistic reminder of Billy Jeff & the pietist moronic Jimmy Carter in one package. But his aw-shucks down-home approach seems unimprovably brilliant---Larry the Cable Guy in the Oval Office. Sadly, his foreign policy ignorance is encyclopedic. He's got to find out what an NIE is, or Susan Estrich WILL be dancing at the Inaugural Ball---if she can wangle an invitation from Obama!

Tribalism, Osama bin Laden & Waziristan

Stanley Kurtz> has an outstanding piece on the WSJ opinion page concerning Akbar Ahmed's perspectives on tribalism & Waziristan.

A.S. Ahmed wrote an early book The Tribal Areas recounting his experience in the N.W. Frontier Province. I haven't read that book, but James W. Spain, former US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, whom I worked with in the '80s and who gave me a copy of his book The Way of the Pathans[which he kindly inscribed to me "To David Mangan, another frontier devotee"] mentions Sir Olaf Caroe as the best expert who wrote on the subject. I was lucky enough to find his map-filled masterpieceThe Pathans: 550BC-1957AD, whose original St. Martin Press 1958 edition I was lucky enough to buy in an old London book shop. It is absolutely absorbing on Waziristan, and has great trivia, such as the fact that Airman Shaw [AKA Lawrence of Arabia] was stationed at Miranshah airfield deep in Wazir territory, living as usual on the margins of imperial destiny, in the late '20s, early '30s. Caroe spoke the Wazir & Mahsud dialects fluently and endlessly discusses fine points of the various dialects.

Back to Stanley Kurtz & his discussion of A.S. Ahmed's works and positive take on approaches to Islam.

Foreign journalists are now banned in Waziristan, and most local reporters have fled in fear for their lives. Because scholars have long neglected this famously inhospitable region, Waziristan remains a dark spot, and America remains proportionately ignorant of the forces we confront in the terror war. Yet an extraordinary if neglected window onto the inner workings of life in Waziristan does exist--a modern book, with deep roots in the area's colonial past.

The British solution in Waziristan was to rule indirectly, through sympathetic tribal maliks (elders), who received preferred treatment and financial support. By treaty and tradition, the laws of what was then British India governed only 100 yards on either side of Waziristan's main roads. Beyond that, the maliks and tribal custom ruled. Yet Britain did post a representative in Waziristan, a "political agent" or "P.A.," whose headquarters was protected by an elite military force, and who enjoyed extraordinary powers to reward cooperative maliks and to punish offenders. The political agent was authorized to arrest and jail the male kin of miscreants on the run (particularly important given the organization of Waziristan's tribes around male descent groups). And in special cases, the political agent could blockade and even destroy entire settlements. After achieving independence in 1947, Pakistan followed this British scheme, indirectly governing its many tribal "agencies" and posting P.A.s who enjoyed the same extraordinary powers as under the British.

Actually, several windows into the region, including diplomat Jim Spain's who still lives in DC and Caroe's masterpiece, give perspecgtive, but Kurtz obviously likes his fellow academe Akbar Ahmed. But despite his admiration, Kurtz ends thus:

In a sense, global Islam is now Waziristan writ large. Mr. Ahmed rightly spots tribal themes of honor and solidarity throughout the Muslim world--even in places where tribal social organization per se has receded. Literally and figuratively, Waziristan now seeks to awaken the tribal jihadist side of the global Muslim soul. This has effectively thrust the leaders of the Western world into the role of British and Pakistani P.A.s (a famously exhausting job, Mr. Ahmed reminds us). With technological advance having placed once-distant threats at our doorstep, the West may soon resemble South Waziristan's perpetually besieged encampment at Wana. Perhaps it already does. Yet Waziristan was ruled indirectly, without ordinary law or policing. Preventing terror plots and the development of weapons of mass destruction requires a more active hand.

Muslim society will have to reform far more profoundly than Akbar Ahmed concedes if the worst is to be avoided. Our best option may be to reintroduce somehow the Aligarh University tradition of liberal learning and merit-based employment (independent of kinship ties) to the Muslim world. With our strategy in Iraq now reinforcing tribalism, the obvious front to try this is Europe, where concerted efforts must be made to assimilate Muslims to Western values. Globalization may then work for us, as cultural changes bounce back to the Middle East.

Even in the best case, we face a long-term struggle. Simmering tensions between modernity and Muslim social life are coming to a head. Yet all our present recent schemes are patchwork. And someday, perhaps at the peak of a post-emergency civil war between the army and the Islamists in Pakistan, the military steamroller may be called upon to settle the Waziristan problem once and for all. Who knows if, even then, it will work.

Obama's off-the-cuff solution that US military should march into Waziristan just won't cut it, and the complexity of the problems defies any simple solutions.

Saudi Blogging Under Threat

Fouad AlFarhan may be in trouble for being one of the most popular bloggers in Saudi Arabia. Farhan was hauled into the Interior Ministry, spokesman Gen. Mansour Al-Turki said, “The violation is not a security matter. He is not being jailed. He is being questioned, and I don’t believe he will remain in detention long. They will get the information that they need from him and then they will let him go.”

When I was internal political officer at the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia, Mansour Al-Turki was my liaison with the Ministry of the Interior. I recall from our frequent conversations that he himself is a soft-spoken, friendly "good cop" who discusses things on background in an intelligent manner. However, his boss, Minister of the Interior Prince Naif bin Abdul-Aziz is, in my personal experience, NOT so nice. He and his full-brother Ahmed run the Ministry in a very strict fashion.
He was almost openly unfriendly when I and the US Ambassador paid him a courtesy visit. This is very un-Saudi, and his full brother King Fahd was as friendly and cordial as any VIP I've ever met. The present King Abdullah is also personally warm, though less congenial and more businesslike than his predecessor.

Farhan's problem may be not that he called the Saudi government a liar, but that he accused them of lying about certain arrested persons being "terrorists." This is a hyper-sensitive subject, as Naif has not been openly cooperative with the US in the past with the hunt for the Khobar Barracks bombing, for instance. The fact that Farhan accuses the Ministry of the Interior of playing a double game and arresting opponents under the guise of terrorism is okay in the First Amendment environment of the USA, but might not even pass muster in other western countries, where libel suits could ensue.

The international ramifications increase when it is remembered that the US had been very angry that monies from wealthy Saudis are somehow finding their way into the coffers of anti-US terrorists in Iraq. Now that the US has patched up with the Sunni Sheikhs of Iraq, there are fewer conduits and in-country terrorists to funnel funds to. Sunni Al Qaeda is severely diminished in Iraq and Iranian IEDs are no longer finding their way to insurgents and terrorists in Baghdad. The Saudis are already on the hot-seat for the 15 passport holders [most of Yemeni extraction] in the 9/11 attack, a clever move by Osama bin Laden to put a wedge between the US & Saudi Arabia. And the flow of religious Saudis into Iraq as suicide bombers was a major irritant, but now has evidently ebbed.

Farhan denies that he is taking up the cause of the political prisoners:

“The issue that caused all of this is because I wrote about the political prisoners here in Saudi Arabia, and they think I’m running an online campaign promoting their issue,” the letter continued, saying that Mr. Farhan had been asked to sign a statement of apology. “I’m not sure if I’m ready to do that,” he wrote. “An apology for what? Apologizing because I said the government is a liar when they accused those guys to be supporting terrorism?”

Complicating things is that Fouad Al Farhan may be a member of the Al Farhan cadet branch of the Royal Family, meaning that he could have buddies in his own extended family and perhaps other branches like the Thunayyan and bin Jiluwi or Saud al Kabir who sympathize with the opponents to the direct line of descendents of King Abdul-Aziz. At least his name has a ring of nobility in Saudi readers' eyes who have some knowledge of the complex Royal Family geneologies, a family that could comprise way over 100,000 members.

Also increasing the affair's complexity is the support of Robert Lacey, who wrote an excellent book The Kingdom, which along with The House of Saud by David Holden is one of the two best books, IMHO, by westerners on Saudi Arabia. I've had the privilege of having extensive conversations with both Lacey and Holden [whose 1976 tragic murder in Egypt remains a mystery, though the Saudi CIA station chief told me Holden was killed for getting too deep inside the PLO, and a PFLP Syrian murderer killed him using the PFLP's signature machine-pistol with multiple shots between clavicle & shoulder-blade vertically downward into the heart].

Lacey is updating The Kingdom and is soliciting international support for Al Farhan, something which might give him problems getting a visa back into Saudi Arabia!

More later, as this story may still be in its early stages of development!

Fox Sux: Faux News Has No News About Thompson, No News About Rielle

Samizdata sums up my feelings about the short shrift Fred Thompson is getting even from the only non-Bolshie network in the cable/broadcast universe.[h/t: Instapundit]
Meanwhile, I go to Mickey Kaus whenever I need a dose of reality:

Heed the Undernews! Just a note to the tiny unrepresentative minority of Iowa voters who are going to participate in the Democratic caucus later today: If you want to vote for a Democrat who will actually make it to the White House, you have to think not only about their issue positions and their rhetorical skills and their personality but also about the scandals that might surface, even distasteful scandals you'd rather dismiss. This concern would be a subset of the oft-mentioned "electability" issue. You obviously don't want to pick someone the GOPs might blow out of the water in late August, right after he or she gets the nomination.

If you read this blog you know I think John Edwards is facing an unaddressed (or insufficiently addressed) potential scandal in the person of Rielle Hunter, about whom the National Enquirer has made some sensational allegations and about whom the Edwards camp has behaved very strangely. (Relevant denials included in the second Enquirer link.) I'm not worried that this scandal will surface in August after the convention. I think the scandal will surface in a matter of days or weeks should Edwards win in Iowa. Right now the MSM is giving him a pass because--hey, why bring it up and hurt his wife if he's going to lose anyway.

Because he's gotten a pass, Edwards has had weeks to figure out the best way to defuse any press coverage--or, if any of the accusations prove to be accurate, how to play them, The worry, then, is that Edwards might stave off a scandal effectively enough to get the nomination from the sympathetic party faithful, but be a far weaker general election candidate for it.

(I admit, I also think he'd be a terrible president. He can give an effective, heart-tugging closing argument. If governing were a trial, he'd be a good bet--though he did manage to lose a debate with Dick Cheney in 2004. But is there any evidence he actually knows how to run a large, bureaucratic organization? Some of his ideas, like his fake-tough plan to demand that congressmen give up their own health plan if they don't support his universal plan, suggest he either doesn't know where the federal government's pressure points are or else he's cynically trying to fool equally clueless voters. I vote for 'cynical fooling,' but either way, the idea that President Edwards will actually be able to enact a big national health insurance plan seems a little far-fetched to me--even compared to the also-inexperienced Obama and the mal-experienced Mrs. Clinton.. If Edwards does somehow talk his way into the White House, I think the public will see through him--and he'll be ineffective--within six months.. ...

But even if you disagree with this analysis, Rielle Hunter is a potential problem to consider! Please read the Enquirer story and decide if you think the semi-official pro-Edwards line about who is the father, etc. seems convincing to you, despite it's contradictions. I don't trust the Enquirer, but they've gotten some big stories right in the past.)

I have faith that you will make the right decision. ... Actually, no. I have zero faith that you will make the right decision. You thought Kerry was electable! Iowa caucusers have a track record as miserable judges of political horseflesh. I'm counting on New Hampshire, a real primary where more than a super-motivated minority actually does the deciding.

If you think that Fred Thompson or a Repub would have got an even break like ambulance-chaser Breck-girl, Mickey asks that you think again:
Why are "Thompson campaign ... sources" stabbing him in the back by telling reporters he may drop out ... just as a poll (OK, Zogby, still) shows him surging a bit in Iowa? Is currying favor with reporters that important? ... P.S.: I've always been suspicious of some Thompson "advisers." George W. Bush wasn't wrong about everything....

John Hawkins' Forty Most Obnoxious Quotes of '07

Right Wing News has some preposterous boo-boos from the usual clowns like Rosie, and bottoms out with the venomous hatred of the loathesome Ted Rall.

It's a free country, and stupid is as stupid says...

The MEGO [Mine eyes glaze over] prize for the most fatuous inappropriate twaddle of the year, as usual, goes to the worst president of the 20th century:

32) "And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world." -- Jimmy Carter castigates the British for cooperating with his own country

Like the title of Goldwater's famous book, "None Dare ............. [T-word]"

Happy Americans Unhappy About Country

Dan Henninger has an article in the Wall Street Journal that reminds me of an election in Australia two or three decades ago. The Aussies were the beneficiaries of a spectacularly growing economy and everything seemed to be going there way under an adrministration that had been in power for over a decade.

Suddenly, the Land of Oz elected an opposition government. One bloke candidly admitted "We just felt like the other guys should get a chance."

In the UK in '45, war hero Winston Churchill was voted out of office to allow a cringing socialist, Clement Attlee [a victim of one of Churchill's immortal lines: "a sheep in sheep's clothing,"] to begin Britain's slow decline, only arrested by Margaret Thatcher thirty-five years later.

On New Year's Eve, Gallup's poll delivered unto us the good news that 84% of Americans say they are satisfied with how things are going for them personally. What Woody Allen might say about that phenomenal datum of good cheer one can only guess. One then has to account for the darker data Gallup released two weeks earlier: Some 70% of those responding believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction.

Let's see what the Queen of Hearts loons who believe in impossible things say:

Explanations for this paradox would fill screen after screen of comments on Internet blogs, written no doubt by the 16% who can never be satisfied with "how things are going." Sample: It's the 46 million uninsured, stupid!

The Queen of Hearts crowd doesn't really care about the 46 million, they just want to eliminate the opposition. Cut off heads. Democracy doesn't work for an irreducible minimum in every country, who are "bad seed," as a Taylor Caldwell novel was once named. When I was in SDS, I met a dude named Mark Rudd who stayed in my apartment in Ann Arbor. He smoked all my ganga & told me the immortal line: "Dare to cheat, dare to win."

I googled him the other day. Like most of the '68 radicals, he is a loo-zer living in the past. I met Diana Oughton back then, a radiant presence who was hanging out with bad companions. Less than a year later, she blew herself up in a Greenwich Village townhouse down the street from Dustin Hoffman & my aunt/second-cousin's townhouses. Dead in her '20s. "Only the good die young." Henninger elaborates:

If the possibility of human progress strikes you as so much background noise to the higher calling of political street-fighting, turn immediately to today's installment of Mitt versus Mike. Don't get me wrong, it is great theater. The perfect last act to a year spent living out of suitcases in Iowa was the irrepressible Elizabeth Edwards's verbal poke Monday to the eye of Michelle Obama. The Democratic candidates are kind of boring compared to their spouses.

None of this is to suggest that what is at stake in the election doesn't matter, or that those deeply invested in it are mis-allocating life's limited days. It matters.

It is to suggest that the never-off eye of modern political media leaves the impression that nothing good is possible. If progress happens, as with the surge in Iraq or a new therapy for cancer, it must be diminished by "analysis," listing four things that could "go wrong." As a way to absorb the way the world works, this is depressing. Good things happen. Get over it.

Class warfare doesn't work except as a corrosive Nietzchean scream of self-destruction. It is a cancer of the brain. Here's more good news the media will bury in its penchant to accentuate the negative:

In 1980, deaths per 100,000 U.S. children aged 5 to 14 was 30.6; by 2004, that number fell to 16.8. Some 25 years ago, daily cigarette smoking among 12th graders was about 21%; in 2006 it was about 12% for both males and females. Childhood immunizations are rising steadily.

In August, the Centers for Disease Control noted that the death rate in 2004 fell by 3.8% in a year, "a record low historical figure." Life expectancy for men and women at birth in 1940 was 63 years; it is now nearly 78 years. We, or someone, must be doing something right.

Many people think that the war in Iraq was a mistake. It indeed contributes to the belief that the U.S. is on the wrong track. This will be argued more deeply when just two candidates are running, and millions of voters will weight Iraq heavily in their November choice. So be it.

That said, the remarkable 12-month progress of the surge strategy demonstrated it is not beyond the ability of "the system" to respond to seemingly overwhelming problems. Credit is due to Gen. David Petraeus certainly, but an infrastructure of U.S. military brains went into designing the Army's Counterinsurgency Manual, published in 2006. Its bibliography includes many studies published since 2003. As such it represents the U.S. military's "best practices" on fighting a modern enemy like al Qaeda, and the surge's success showed we are not helpless before this latest form of nihilism. This to some may be bitter progress, but it is so.

Evil exists and some people actively promote it. "Born under a bad sign..." "Born to be wild..."

One needs reminding, amid a presidential election as wide open as this, that however other nations wrestle with their wrong directions, we use the system that the Founding Fathers left for us. What's worth remembering is that they knew politics piles up retarding levels of animosity, and so created a political system that would let us both vent spleen and move forward. Our progress, though, would nearly always be slow and by increments. Sometimes, it's hard to notice.

There are hateful people out there and they enjoy hating.

It will continue to be the case here that people are going to kvetch over corners of the culture--over immigration and national identity, or over relative wage levels, even as the rest of the world's poor finally start to join the middle class through globalizing trade channels (suppress those trade flows, as Congress is threatening, and you'll discover the real meaning of wrong direction). And not least there will be--and should be--concern over whether the progress I've described has the time or space in its good life for a sturdy spiritual soul.

The New Year demands an admission that some good has been achieved, not by the wave of a politician's magic wand but through many daily hands at work in the nation.

Eighty-four percent of Americans are self-declared "happy" people. America is the only nation founded on the principle of "the pursuit of happiness." Sounds like a success story to me.

But the media will give you the many reasons why I'm wrong.

Redstate Claims Credit for 'Earmarxist'

The NYT neologism list for 2007 contains a lot of cutsie new words that are simply dotty, but a few deserve Honorable Mention for possible "sustainability," to use a word that has become as phony as "cognitive" over the last few years. Here they are and you choose your poison:

astronaut diaper n.

A garment worn by astronauts when they’re in pressure suits and can’t get to a toilet. “We call them urine collection devices,” Mike Mullane, a retired astronaut, told The New York Times. The term was brought to popular attention when the astronaut Lisa M. Nowak was said to have been wearing one in February while she was driving across five states to confront a love rival. She denied she wore the diaper.

bacn n.

Impersonal e-mail messages that are nearly as annoying as spam but that you have chosen to receive: alerts, newsletters, automated reminders and the like. Popularized at the PodCamp conference in Pittsburgh in August.

boot camp flu n.

An adenovirus that is usually innocuous but in its latest strain has led to pneumonia and death. The virus often occurs among military recruits, who are susceptible to it because they live in close quarters under stressful conditions.

boom n.

Left of boom describes the “before” strategy of the United States military, including efforts to root out insurgents and prevent military attacks; right of boom describes the military’s “after” strategy, including efforts to minimize the effect of attacks with battle-hardened equipment and improved medical care.

chief sustainability officer n.

A business executive hired to meet environmental regulations and to find ways to profit through environmentally friendly products and services.

colony collapse disorder n.

A disease that has killed millions of pollinating bees nationwide and threatens to harm the nation’s agricultural output. Suspected culprits are a virus, mites and insecticides.

crowdsource v.

To use the skills or tools of a wide variety of freelancers, professional or amateur, paid or unpaid, to work on a single problem.

drama-price v.

To lower the price of a house so as to attract the attention of buyers. Also a noun.

e-mail bankruptcy n.

What you’re declaring when you choose to delete or ignore a very large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in reading and responding to them. This often includes sending a boilerplate message explaining that old messages will never receive a personal, specific response. Although the Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig is often credited with coining this term, at best he can be said to have popularized it. Its first use was in 2002, two years before Mr. Lessig publicly declared his own e-mail bankruptcy.

earmarxist n.

A member of Congress who adds earmarks — money designated for pet projects — to legislation.

exploding ARM n.

An adjustable rate mortgage with rates that soon rise beyond a borrower’s ability to pay.

forever stamp n.

A United States postage stamp that will cover a first-class letter regardless of future price increases.

FTW interj.

For The Win. A bragging exclamation of approval, as in “K-Fed got the kids FTW,” or “I was able to open the file with Photoshop. FTW!!!” Originally part of the patter of the game show “Hollywood Squares” and later found in online games like World of Warcraft. Now largely used ironically and sarcastically.

global weirding n.

An increase in severe or unusual environmental activity often attributed to global warming. This includes freakish weather and new animal migration patterns.

gorno n.

A genre of movies that are gory almost to the point of being fetishistic. A blend of “gore” and “porno.”

-hawk suffix

Indicates a haircut similar to a mohawk. Sanjaya Malakar, a contestant on “American Idol,” sported what he called a ponyhawk. Shawn Andrews of the Philadelphia Eagles described his haircut as a brohawk, something akin to a short mohawk on a black man. An older use is fauxhawk, in which the hair is styled in a vertical strip but none is cut.

hypermile v.

To take extraordinary measures toward achieving maximum fuel efficiency in an automobile. The term dates to 2004.

I-reporter n.

CNN’s name for citizen journalists who submit their own photographs and reports about news events.

kinnear v.

To take a candid photograph surreptitiously, especially by holding the camera low and out of the line of sight. Coined in August by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee of the Yarn Harlot blog when she attempted to take a photograph during an encounter with the actor Greg Kinnear at an airport.

life-stream v.

To make a thorough, continuous digital record of your life in video, sound, pictures and print.

lolcat n.

On the Internet, an odd or funny picture of a cat given a humorous and intentionally ungrammatical caption in large block letters. Originally called a cat macro.

make it rain v. phr.

To drop paper money on a crowd of people, especially in strip clubs, nightclubs or casinos.

maternal profiling n.

Employment discrimination against a woman who has, or will have, children. The term has been popularized by members of MomsRising, an advocacy group promoting the rights of mothers in the workplace.

mobisode n.

A short version of a full-length television show or movie, suitable for playing on a mobile phone or other hand-held electronic device.

mom job n.

Also known as a mommy makeover, this is a package of cosmetic surgery procedures that will reduce the visible effects of childbirth, like stretch marks or sagging.

multi-dad v.

Said of a woman who has children by more than one man. First popularized in Britain.

Navy shower n.

A very short shower in which you turn off the water while lathering up. This old term is also known as a G.I. bath, but it’s new to many in the drought-stricken Southeast. Its antonym is the Hollywood shower, a long, wasteful one.

Ninja loan n.

No Income, No Job or Assets. A poorly documented loan made to a high-risk borrower.

nose bidet n.

A neti pot or nasal irrigator, said to help with allergy symptoms.

pap v.

To take a photograph of someone or something, usually used to refer to paparazzi, from which the word is derived. Also as a noun.

post-kinetic environment n.

In military jargon, the site of an explosion, severe gunfire or a destructive engagement.

Super-Duper Tuesday n.

Feb. 5, 2008, the day that 23 states will hold primary elections. Also known as Tsunami Tuesday.

truther n.

Someone who espouses a conspiracy theory about the events of 9/11.

tumblelog n.

A Web site or blog that is a collection of brief links to, quotes from, or comments about things a person has encountered while Web browsing. It is a sort of digital commonplace book.

vegansexual n.

A person who eats no meat, uses no animal-derived goods and prefers not to have sex with non-vegans.

wide stance, to have a v. phr.

To be hypocritical or to express two conflicting points of view. When Senator Larry Craig was arrested in a public restroom and accused of making signals with his foot that the police said meant he was in search of anonymous gay sex, Mr. Craig said it was a misunderstanding and that he just had a wide stance when using the toilet. The incident also popularized the derogatory term “toe-tapper,” meaning a gay man.

walkshed n.

The area that can be conveniently reached on foot from a given geographic point. Compare with foodshed, the area sufficient to provide food for a given location, and viewshed, the landscape or topography visible from a given geographic point, especially one having aesthetic value. All are patterned after watershed.

Nasty KO Lie List Compiled, Pared down to Top Ten

ESPN had its Sportcenter flashback parade yesterday and Keith Olbermann was prominent in doing something he was much more qualified to do: BS about sports.

Instead, prodding by the seething hatred of his ESPN colleagues [reportedly only Dan Patrick would even talk to him], this serial prevaricator jumped ship and professions, aping play critic Frank Rich & economist [!?] Paul Krugman in a role for which all three are spectacularly unsuited---political commentators.

Of course, Keith Olberboy does reflect his core audience, degenerates of the ultra-left, so there are in a nation of 300 million perhaps a few hundred thousand hopeless cases who watch this preening Stick Insect get high each night sniffing his own farts.

Check the link for additional links on the hilarious self-parody this clueless bigot spews every night.

The Unexamined Life? Or 'Je ne regrette rien?'

New Year's Resolutions always contain "Regret, with a dash of bitters," in a surprisingly non-shallow NYT article on how we look back on our lives.

Which we all do to some extent this time of year.

I've been reading a lot of biographies recently, including two about Joseph Stalin by Simon Montefiore, about people who were very talented but apparently allowed their resentments to overcome other countervailing tendencies---the result was disaster both for themselves and for others who happened to get in their way or just were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

However, most of us do not fall into that trap, but into a less self-destructive, but what an NYT writer calls a "corrosive" syndrome. Thus about morning-after self-examination of a life where "the saddest words of tongue or pen are only these, what might have been:"

Ghosts roam around down there, after all, and they are the worst kind — alternate versions of oneself. The one who did not quit graduate school, for instance. The one who made the marriage work. Or stuck with singing, playwriting or painting and made a career of it.

Lost possible selves, some psychologists call them. Others are more blunt: the person you could have been.

Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets — large and small, recent and distant — affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown, convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an emotionally corrosive exercise. The common wisdom about regret — that what hurts the most is not what you did but what you didn’t do — also appears to be true, at least in the long run.

When I hit sixty-five last year, I sort of fell into this rear-view window mode.
My life had had some good luck---a strong family background---and some spectacular highs: The Chicago Convention in '68, where I played a weird backstage role as a Gene McCarthy national staffer by throwing stuff out the Hilton Hotel window onto the Chicago Police below, with 'disastrous consequences."

More than a decade in the Foreign Service, living in Vietnam, France, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia. Then a short stint working as John Anderson's Middle East adviser, then a marriage to a lovely supportive woman still at my side, and eventually a lovely daughter who is my favorite human being.

All career paths have their downs, but I ended up at Amoco as an entry-strategy specialist and met a lot of interesting politicos, including the [now] presidents of Israel and Azerbaijan. Then a terrible health emergency, which caused an early retirement and living on a disability insurance income.

Along the way, I got to meet & get to know a bit some great human beings, some of them famous and near-famous and others just great. I also ran across some duds, but I have more or less flushed them from memory. In retrospect, I have to concur with my mentor in these matters:

"l am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot, forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest."

Young Stalin: The Child is Father to the Criminal Genocidal Monster

Young Stalin follows on my reading of Robert Service's A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin [or rather interrupts it] which in turn was begat by Stalin: In the Court of the Red Tsar, one of the great history books of this or any century.

Montefiore & Service rapidly availed themselves of a window into KGB archives & other Russian treasure troves of information on arguably the most violent history any western country has undergone in the last millenium.

And if Montefiore is correct that Vladimir Putin has Stalin's library of 20K volumes, full of the autodidact's marginalia in multi-colored crayons, the Wolf Among Men [Stalin would doodle wolf-heads, like his colleague in genocide Adolf Hitler, while in long Committee meetings] will continue to affect Russian history. Indeed, Montefiore in his scary article in Time's "Man of the Year" article on Vladimir, stresses that Vlad's interest in poisoning, among other oddities, may stem from Stalin's mastery of the arcane art that Georgians picked up from their Iranian masters in the 18th century.

But Young Stalin amazes with its sourcing, something which could dry up instantaneously if Russia reverts to its characteristic autocratic secrecy & closes its archives. But Montefiore has already painted word pictures of a titanic force of nature whose poetry is printed in one wonderful Ode to the Moon, evokes Guillaume Apollinaire, another forceful artist, IMHO. Stalin had his moon ode published in an anthology of Georgian poetry in 1916 under a nom de plume of Soselo. After attaining Politburo membership, he suppressed his poetry, but had a reverence for artists such that he phoned Pasternak to ask if Mandelstam was "a genius" before exiling Osip to an early death!!! He saved Pasternak from the Terror, calling him a "Cloud Dweller."

Again and again, weird parallels with Hitler, from wolf-fetishism to artistic skills/sponsorship to murderous rages all make for an uncanny biography. Every page reveals what a colossal crime spree Bolshevism inflicted on the Russian people---largely due to this young man's fanatical quest for power & self-education.

If Stalin continues to fascinate Putin as Montefiore avers, we should read both Montefiore & Service to get a glimpse of the future----and IT DOESN'T WORK!!!

Huckabee's Self-Inflicted Foot Wound Matches Hagel's

Mike Huckabee is weirder than Bill Clinton---maybe it's in the prenatal Hope, AK expereience, or something, but his stunt in front of reporters matches Sen. Hagel's moronic move to announce that he's not announcing for president---just yet, that is.

Mike Huckabee is holding a press conference right now in which he was supposed to unveil a new negative ad against arch rival Mitt Romney.

But Mr. Huckabee came to the press conference and announced he’d had a change of heart and would not be broadcasting the ad after all.

But wait! It gets better.

He then broadcast it for a room crammed with reporters, photographers and television cameras.

The assembled media found the display hilarious and at several points laughed out loud.

Telling you what’s in the ad, of course, plays into Mr. Huckabee’s strategy of getting his message out — Mr. Romney is bad — while being able to say his hands are clean.

Is this vaudeville or slapstick?

Iowa Caucuses: Much ToDo About a Fix

John Fund lets out the dirty little secret about Iowa and its cockeyed Hawkeye cauci [h/t: Rush Limbaugh].

Mickey Kaus also has characteristically trenchant observations on Iowa, quoting Ohio's Gov. Strickland letting the cat out of the bag:

Strickland said the Iowa caucuses make "no sense." He called the GOP and Democratic caucuses "hugely undemocratic," because the process "excludes so many people." Anyone who happens to be working or is sick or too old to get out for a few hours Thursday night won't be able to participate, Strickland said.

"I'd like to see both parties say, 'We're going to bring this to an end,'" Strickland said, adding that he has no problem with the New Hampshire primary Jan. 8, because "at least it's an election."

Fund notes that the Democrats have as usual the most undemocratic, twisted, and anarchic methods in their selection process:

Then there are the problems of reporting the results on election night. At least the Republican caucus is a one-man, one-vote affair where people write their preferred candidate's name on a slip of paper, and whoever gets the most votes wins.

Democrats have a mind-numbingly complex system in which participants divide up into "candidate preference groups" by standing up. No paper ballots are used. Those candidates who don't get support from 15% or more of those attending a local caucus are deemed not to be "viable," and their supporters have to realign with some other candidate.

"That's when it gets kind of crazy," says Mark Daley, a former spokesman for the Iowa Democratic Party. "There will be people screaming back and forth . . . and senior citizens with calculators trying to do the math." Only after all this are county convention delegates allocated among the candidates and the results phoned in to the state Democratic Party. Delegates aren't actually allocated until the Democratic county conventions in March.

Not all local caucuses are equal. The "entrance" polls of voter preferences that you will see reported Thursday night are likely to be from urban areas, which may shortchange candidates like John Edwards, Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson, who have campaigned more heavily in rural areas. "It's entirely possible that John Edwards could come in a stunning second when all the votes are in, but the country will have gone to bed thinking he only took third place," says Howard Fineman of Newsweek.

Rural Iowa matters for another reason in the Democratic contest. In order to encourage candidates to campaign in farming areas, state Democrats have tilted the delegate allocation so that rural areas are disproportionately represented in the final results. This sometimes can lead to bizarre results. As Roger Simon of Politico.com notes, "the turnout in some precincts is so small that a single family--let's say four people--can determine the winner. In other precincts, only one person will show up and win for his candidate by being the only person in the room." In small-turnout caucus meetings, ties are resolved by a coin toss or drawing lots. In 2004, four precincts saw literally no one show up to vote in the Democratic caucus.

Fund goes on to enumerate even more weirdness on the Democrat side, which is my experience when I worked for weeks to get votes in Michigan for a Democratic National Convention [Chicago, '68]. Democrats have a long tradition of saying that they will show up to vote at a meeting and then not doing so. It's why the more-disciplined Republicans tend to win elections---they're honest and hard-working.

But Mickey has the funniest, most appropriate, and really on-the-money approach, as I recall my short stint in SDS before the State Department invited me to join the Foreign Service [!?!]

Letting the presidential nominee be picked by the Iowa caucusers is like letting your antiwar tactics be picked by the last people left at the end of a 4-hour SDS meeting in 1970. The result: the leftist radicals win! [But you were all leftist radicals. It was an SDS meeting--ed Oh, right. I mean, the most committed partisans who have nothing better to do with their time win! In Iowa these people are proven fools, remember.]

Indeed they are, Mickey. Indeed, they are.

Disloyal Opposition Caught Lying in Public

The New York Post has a great collection of the hysterics that leftist maniacs display on a frequent basis.

"When I watched [former President Bill Clinton] at Mrs. King's funeral, I just have never seen anything like it . . . There are times when he sounds like Jesus in the temple. I mean, amazing ability to transcend ethnicity - race, we call it, it's really ethnicity - in this country and, and speak to us all in this amazingly primordial way." - Chris Matthews, MSNBC's "Hardball"

Autodidact Matthews never did go to college, but he does like that rhetorical blahblah. Treason is okay if it's a lefty moron like Bill Maher:

"I'm just saying, if he did die, other people, more people, would live. That's a fact." - Bill Maher, HBO's "Real Time," discussing complaints by left-wing bloggers that an attempt to kill Vice President Dick Cheney in Afghanistan had failed

If you want stupid mindless twaddle, The View gives a daily dose, none more vapid, stupid & idiotic than the mirthless "Joy" Behar, a blubbery motormouth without a brain:

"Is there such a thing as a man-made stroke? In other words, did someone do this to him? . . . I know what this [Republican] party is capable of."- Joy Behar, on ABC's "The View," discussing Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson's illness

Any list that does not contain the walking sandwich-board proof that lesbianism rots the mind irretrievably into a maggot-stuffed mush:

"I just want to say something: 655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists? . . . If you were in Iraq and the other country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?"- Rosie O'Donnell, on ABC's "The View"

And any list without the biggest phony in the entire US media complex, electronic or print, would be incomplete. Here's the DUI king of Vermont, where this specimen of lying hermaphroditic cowardice slithers about when he's not spewing on PBS:

"As we saw in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the plantation mentality that governs Washington turned the press corps into sitting ducks for the war party, for government, and for neoconservative propaganda and manipulation. . . . I can't tell you again how many reporters have told me that it just never occurred to them that high government officials would manipulate intelligence in order to go to war. Hello?" - PBS' Bill Moyers, in a speech to a conference on "media reform"

Check the Post link above for more garbage and lies from the folks who think they're smarter than you & in Moyers' case, use YOUR TAX MONEY to abuse the truth on public television!

Dick Morris on Billy Jeff's Sucking Oxygen From Hillarious

Dick Morris knows the Clintons better than any political analyst or adviser, or if he doesn't, at least tells the truth about this deceptive, manipulative, dishonest couple who want to extend their dynasty another eight years.

At first [this year], his appearances were novel and politically helpful. But then they came to underscore her weakness.

It was as if Dennis Thatcher had stood up for Maggie as she faced down the Argentine junta in the Falklands war. Now, Bill's oversized presence on the national stage raises an even more profound question: Is he using his wife's candidacy to seek a third term in office, prohibited him by the 22nd Amendment?

Increasingly, he seems like former Gov. George Wallace, who put his wife Lurleen into the Alabama State House after he was forced from office by term limits. (Or, in a more recent example, like Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, who stepped aside only to have his wife, Christina Fernandez Kirchner, take power.)

In '90, Hillary Clinton faced a similar problem when she flirted with the idea of running for governor of Arkansas. Bill, determined to seek the presidency in '92, was weighing whether to run for another term as governor or to step down and seek the presidency as a private citizen.

Key to his decision was whether Hillary could take his place, both to keep the seat warm for him should he lose the presidential race and to stop any unwanted revelations from surfacing while he was off campaigning.

But the polls I took at the Clintons' behest found that voters saw Hillary merely as an extension of Bill, not as an independent political figure. Arkansans saw her possible candidacy for governor as an attempt to be a placeholder for her husband.

When I likened the public reaction to Hillary's candidacy to that of Alabama voters to Lurleen's years before, Hillary and Bill exploded in shock and indignation (more his than hers) at the metaphor; they even asked me to do a second poll to confirm the results.

Hillary thereupon began a 20-year effort to differentiate herself from Bill and craft an independent identity.

Morris points out the big problem that Hillary faces as her megalomaniac hubby begins to loom over her campaign like a mad Cagliostro.

now the merger is working against her. Voters are wondering for which Clinton they will be voting when they pull the lever.

Could it be that "two for the price of one" still misrepresents reality? Does Bill so dominate the stage that he'd overshadow his wife were she elected? As Bill campaigns all over all the time, Americans are wondering, Whose presidency will it be, anyway?

Perhaps the voters in Iowa might be asking themselves the same question, as they make their 'second choice' after their first choice is eliminated in the elaborate caucus rituals?

Wired Mag's Top Ten Scientific Breakthroughs

Wired has two dinosaur discoveries among its top ten discoveries of 2007.

The most cognitive dissonance is caused by the genetic similarity between T-Rex and, yes, the common chicken.

That would be one drumstick that'd last a while.

Feral Cats Rid LAPD of Rat Problem

A bon rat, bon chat goes the French saying. Feral cats are now being employed by the LAPD to eliminate rats that have been chewing and burrowing into their equipment.

We have three cats running our household and I was unaware that the mere presence of cats & the smell of their urine drives rats out of town to another location, sort of like a gunslingin' Sheriff.

Now the rodent problem the LAPD have to deal with is merely the human one!

Charlie Wilson's Real War---From My Beltway Foxhole

Denis Neill was my entree into the skullduggery that caused Charlie Wilson to get his Obsessive/Compulsive manic energies mobilized. Denis was/is a man who helped Charlie persuade, cajole, and [yes] bribe his fellow Democrats into supporting Reagan's covert security assistance to the Afghan Mujahideen.

I worked for Denis Neill on the Pakistan front [as well as on Jordan & Sudan & Morocco] on a project mentioned in "Charlie Wilson's War" and actually worked with Wilson on a low-level, but important project that netted Pakistan $450,000,000 [$500million in the movie] in much-needed military aid [with the help of Dem. Senators Kerry & Dodd---I personally delivered the check!!!] I had raised #50,000 which Denis had put into a cashiers check that I delivered to freshman Senator John Kerry's rep at the DNC for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Denis Neill himself paid the Committee a couple thou and John Kerry another thou the same year [1988]. One of history's little ironies is that Kerry & Dodd voted with the minority Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a result of that check, or so Denis told me three months later at the Office Christmas Party with Charlie Wilson beaming approvingly at me [and holding a Scotch on the rocks, appropriately]. Denis then poured me a generous single malt Scotch & lit me a Cuban cigar as we partied while the USSR retreated across the border....!

I had visited Peshawar's refugee camps and had spent an evening drinking with the Soviet Ambassador in Islamabad---he thought I was some sort of American agent, perhaps? One of my assistants on a TV production project told me he was part of Dan Rather's production team which famously went across the Afghan border with Dan wearing his funny cap. Actually, phony Dan had his team go out to film the "dangerous" scenes with a Pak movie crew & actors---TV News from CBS hasn't changed much!

In the movie, the camps resembled Darfur, but in reality, they were run by northern European missionaries and the Afghans were so handsome they appeared to be movie actors playing the role of refugees.

I had a couple of hairy escapes from death on the kill-or-be-killed Pak roads filled with drivers high on ganga or some illegal non-alcoholic substance. Once an Army truck I hitched a ride in the back of almost fell off the Karakoram Highway into the Indus River a thousand feet below. I looked down and saw the gigantic rapids below swollen with winter rains.

May not have been the greatest memories, but it sure beats Arthur Schlesinger's cocktail party patter...!

Edwards Throws Stones in his 40K sq ft Glass House

Obama is being called ugly by a frog, as pretty-boy John accuses Sen. Obama of living in Never-Never-Land.

Working-class hero John kept his secret hottie sequestered in a gated NC community as she entered her third trimester. His hard-earned ambulance-chasing monies garnered by tricking simple rural folk in juries is also tricking simple farmers and isolationists in Iowa, a state where farm animals outnumber people at least 50/1. Edwards tells ABC:

Edwards also detailed his conversation with Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf from Thursday in which he told that country's leader he needs to allow "independent international inspectors into Pakistan to determine the facts of what happened around the former prime minister's assassination.

Like Ramsey Clark? Or the numbnuts in the UN? Al Qaeda said they were going to kill Benazir Bhutto, has had a congratulatory message to the AQ perps from Zawahiri intercepted, and continues publicly to take credit for the murder. Perhaps John-boy, with his keen forensic skills, knows better? But this legal beagle & CSI wizard is also an economist:

the candidate argued that his aggressive populism is necessary for the country, a message that he summed up as: "We have to stop the corporate greed that's killing the middle class in America."

Mere facts like the stats demonstrating that the Middle Class this class-warfare agitpreppie weeps for is actually INCREASING its income and buying power don't faze the hair-and-makeup sub-prime mortgage hedge fund genius. Besides a half-million consulting fee, this financial guru invested $18 million in the Fortress Fund, which preys on poor "middle-class families" trying to keep their homes as ARMS permit Fortress to initiate foreclosure proceedings. About 50 Katrina victims in New Orleans are among Edwards' sub-prime victims---talk about a one-two hit topped by incredible hypocrisy. Of course, the socialistic MSM doesn't hammer Edwards as it would a Republican, using the "malefactor of great wealth" trope. John-boy with his sequestered wench [living down the block from the dude who claims to have knocked her up, with his wife & kids taking it all calmly]. No pressure from the MSM on that front either. But Rudy & other Repubs take the heat for multiple marriages.

Read on....

Edwards repeated his implicit criticism of Obama, saying any candidate who thinks he or she can invite corporate America to the table and achieve real results for Americans "is living in never-never land."

So he believes Barack Obama lives in never-never land?

"If he believes that, yes," Edwards said. "It's a little hard for me to tell sometimes based on the way he talks about this. I've heard him say he would give stakeholders a seat at the table. I assume he's talking about oil companies, drug companies and insurance companies."

Of course, Edwards himself has advocated the same thing, as Obama's people point out:

In response, the Obama campaign pointed to an interview Edwards gave to the liberal website MyDD.com in Feburary, where Edwards was asked if he'd bring into the healthcare debate "both corporations and labor and healthcare groups and doctors" and he responded "I think you try to bring everybody to the table. You want their participation, you want to make the system work for everybody."

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said, "Edwards is ramping up his attacks as the caucus draws near but his new rhetoric on 'not negotiating or compromising or working with the powerful interests' is a sharp u-turn from what was once a quite conciliatory view towards those same powerful interests."

Asked during the interview if he thought Obama or Clinton would be better at bringing about change were he not in the race, Edwards indicated his preference was Obama.

"One of them believes change is necessary and the system doesn't work, and the other defends the system," he said.

But Edwards actually demonstrates that he has a smidgeon of common sense and prudent wisdom---COMPARED TO HIS FELLOW DEMOCRATS, which is not really saying much:

Edwards also dismissed comments from another Democratic presidential hopeful, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who Friday called for Musharraf to step down from power. "Some of my Democratic opponents have misplaced faith in Musharraf," Richardson said. "Like the Bush administration, they cling to the misguided notion that Musharraf can be trusted as an ally to fight terrorism."

"I haven't misplaced faith in Musharraf," Edwards said. "Musharraf has lots of problems, as we all know. And we have to keep the pressure on him. But I also think that a serious presidential candidate in a moment of crisis like this needs to show calm … and not be thinking about the politics of this."

Richardson has busily been self-destructing as he abandons his foreign policy experience [I held a fund-raiser for him in DC at my home & he is/was level-headed and thoughtful in private---he seems to have veered sharply leftward for tactical reasons & now is perched with Kucinich in the other-worldly branch of Dem natsec & fonpol nutjobs].

Who's Your Daddy....?

His campaign bus, the Mainstreet Express, was met in Dubuque by a hometown favorite, the first lady of the state of Iowa, Mari Culver, who has endorsed Edwards.

Does that mean Gov. Chet Culver is secretly supporting Edwards? He wouldn't say.

"I'm not gonna touch that," he said laughing, as he walked off.

And Rielle sits untouched as her little boy/girl/twins gestate. Wonder who the baby will take after? Inquiring minds want to know...!

Schlesinger Journals: Autistic Solipsistic Narcissism

P.J. O'Rourke is the most accomplished graduate of National Lampoon, which he edited in its heyday in the early '70s. He reviewed Arthur S. JR or rather, claims he didn't.

Naturally we cannot expect a man with credentials such as Arthur's to be merely a jerk; he's an idiot, too. The quickest riffle through Journals is enough to prove it. Said Arthur, after a 10-day visit to the USSR in 1982: "I fear that those who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse are kidding themselves." It just so happens that I was in the USSR myself for about 10 days in 1982. I was an ignorant, neophyte foreign correspondent on my first overseas assignment. But I did notice that the Soviet Union was on the verge of economic and social collapse.

Arthur wrote one book worthy of reading: The Age of Jackson. I read it back when I
still suffered from delusions of leftism---now I see it as merely mainstream liberal lucubrations that victims of academicide inflict on themselves in the "Publish or Perish" sweepstakes.

I saw him once on an East Side sidewalk---he was about five feet tall, if that. A hero worshipper and Nixon hater, JUNIOR exemplifies on how wrongheadedness combined with narcissistic self-regard times knee-jerk liberalism leads to suffocating silliness.

Max Boot on the REALLY REAL Pakistan

Pakistan is a place I have visited a dozen times over the last two decades and remains a source of endless fascination tempered by a bit of fear.

Max Boot points out some of the many paradoxes of this sprawling country of more than 150 million people. While 46% of Pakis polled say they like Osama bin Laden, 63% said they liked Bhutto. Only nine percent liked Bush. What gives?

Based on my experiences, the Paks like Osama as a paragon of Islam standing up against the West---they don't want Al Qaeda ruling the country with patriarchal backwardness.

The Paks like Bhutto because she represents some form of democratic representation & enlightenment compared to the clannish tribal feuds that constitute government in large swathes of the country.

They don't like Bush because he & America have supported military dictators like Musharraf while professing a desire for democracy. That hypocrisy in their eyes disqualifies Bush as a desired ally.

The cardinal basic fact of Pakistani politics is that the Army rules everything that isn't tied down. If a politician like Benazir's father gets in the way of the Army, he is executed on trumped-up charges.

Another cardinal fact is that corruption rules whatever the Army doesn't rule [although the Army itself is corrupt] and that peculation and venality are rampant, even among religious authorities.

The overarching fact is that only FOUR PERCENT of Pakis polled would consider voting for a religious party. Secularism still rules supreme in political life, though religious considerations affect voting for particular parties.

Finally, the ISI [who serve as a combination CIA/FBI according to a senior ISI official I talked to] has all sorts of spies and informers everywhere. When you read spurious blogs like Newshoggers who claim ISI is infected with religious agents, it is simply a misapprehension based on the fact that ISI infiltrates some religious organizations, and may perhaps have double-agent problems within its organization---sort of like Aldrich or other turncoats in the CIA or FBI.

Pakistan is many countries bundled into one, with the four major provinces [NWFP, Punjab, Sindh, & Baluchistan] all subdivided into various areas. Azad Kashmir is independently administered due to hostilities with India. Lahore & Karachi & Quetta & Peshawar are as different as the capitals of various Latin American countries. The languages differ, though Urdu is the unifying tongue & English widely spoken.

Benazir Bhutto always had a foolish streak of grandiosity which probably led to her sad tragic death---she should have kept her head down as she left the tightly-secured campaign speech area & entered the streets of Rawalpindi----a security nightmare at the best of times [I actually witnessed a riot in 'Pindi in the late '80s]. She knew she was an AQ target and she should have kept her populist instincts in check---like her father, she always liked to push the edge of the envelope.

That is permissible in advanced democracies, but Pakistan still has a long way to go before the fissiparous tendencies in the country begin to subside enough for rational campaigns without the threat of violence.

French Scientist Calls Gore "Crook," Greens "Religious Zealots"

Cargo Cult Science by hysterical meteorologists & "climatologists" are beginning to see their frantic ravings contradicted by real scientists who reject the UN IRCC science-by-committee. Even in France, notoriously susceptible to fads and superficial trends:

The most conspicuous doubter in France is Claude Allegre, a former education minister and a physicist by profession. His new book, ``Ma Verite Sur la Planete'' (``My Truth About the Planet''), doesn't mince words. [``Ma Verite Sur la Planete'' is published by Plon/Fayard (240 pages, 18 euros).]

He calls Gore a ``crook'' presiding over an eco-business that pumps out cash. As for Gore's French followers, the author likens them to religious zealots who, far from saving humanity, are endangering it. Driven by a Judeo-Christian guilt complex, he says, French greens paint worst-case scenarios and attribute little-understood cycles to human misbehavior.

Allegre doesn't deny that the climate has changed or that extreme weather has become more common. He instead emphasizes the local character of these phenomena.

While the icecap of the North Pole is shrinking, the one covering Antarctica -- or 92 percent of the Earth's ice -- is not, he says. Nor have Scandinavian glaciers receded, he says. To play down these differences by basing forecasts on a global average makes no sense to Allegre.

He dismisses talk of renewable energies, such as wind or solar power, saying it would take a century for them to become a serious factor in meeting the world's energy demands.

NUKES ARE THE ANSWER?
France has taken another path: Almost 80 percent of its electricity comes from nuclear reactors. What's more, France has a talent for eating its cake and having it, too: Although it signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the country is nowhere near meeting the agreed targets. As with almost all others who signed.....

Jean de Kervasdoue, a health expert, also stresses the benefits of nuclear power, noting that it emits only a small fraction of the greenhouse gas that comes from burning coal, oil or gas. His pet peeve, though, is genetically modified food. In ``Les Precheurs de l'Apocalypse'' (``The Doomsday Preachers''), Kervasdoue decries how shrill and sometimes violent campaigners have prevented GM foods from gaining a foothold in Europe. They way they talk, he says, ``it sounds as if Martians are attacking the Earth.''

Kervasdoue goes on to note that many genetically modified products are in everyday use around the world.

In fact, genetically modified organisms have proved highly beneficial to mankind, he argues, pointing to insulin, an artificially created hormone that has saved the lives of countless diabetes sufferers. A much greater danger to health and life expectancy, he says, is obesity -- even though the food that European fatsoes ingest is ``natural.'' Kervasdoue also has politically incorrect things to say about asbestos and Chernobyl. The motto of his book comes from Marcel Proust: ``Facts don't enter a world dominated by our beliefs.''

Richard Feynman warned that "Cargo Cult Science" was a looming threat to the integrity of the scientific process of testing and verification before publishing. Nowadays, self-proclaimed "sciences" like "climatology" are used to make doomsday predictions in order to achieve unrelated political goals, like raising taxes to cover so-called carbon emissions [like breathing!] if you live in a rich country like the USA. Curiously, poorer countries are exempt.

The UN is already pushing for the abolition of the right of self-defense. The new religion of climatology wants to tax the air we breathe...!

Wonder Land and American Politics: Left versus Less Leftist

The WSJ's Dan Henninger has a thoughtful piece based on Freud's famous conundrum "What do women want?" And then extrapolates it to the American voter.

Of course, the real answer to Freud's original question is: "They don't know, or rather, they know and then change their minds about what they want."

The American voter is less fickle and changeable, but not by much [being comprised of 50% females]. Henninger's answer as to the US voter:

The nasty paradox of the modern, data-dumped media age is this: The more we know, the less we know. Weirdly, in a world of total data, people barely know what they want from politics--for themselves, for the country or the presidency.

Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair on his way out of office identified a truism for our times: With the rise of the Web, judgment has fallen because less time is available to think. So one was struck during Sen. John McCain's visit to the Journal editorial page a few weeks ago, when he remarked that campaigns aren't adjusted day to day now, but "hour to hour."

It may be that a Web-stoked media has demoted the office of the presidency itself as an animating idea and elevated the mechanics, the sport, of elections. The unpopularity of the Bush presidency aside, note how a presidential election, now entering its second year, has become a national obsession, which like most obsessions tends to induce disappointment.

The entire nominating process has turned into a two-year horse race, with handicapping on a daily basis depending on polls, many of which, like the CNN You Tube "Debates," heavily skewed by manipulative questioning to obtain the desired result. Since the mainstream media is almost entirely left-tilted, the polls invariably tilt left in their "answers," which are the GIGO product of a dishonest press/media. But Henninger makes another observation:

We are passing through a largely ideological age, exacerbated by the Web on the left and right. The left doesn't want to do politics with the other side but merely wants to eliminate it, and then run the country. The religious right, by and large, mainly wants someone to pay attention to them and acknowledge their legitimacy. None of this has much to do with finding a candidate who will make more right than wrong calls during four years in the Oval Office.

The ultra-left blogosphere and Dem politicians are starting to veer back to the Bolshevik template that socialist governing entities often adopt when their "policies" and "programs" are revealed to be the same as those which have not worked in the past in our country, any other country [except perhaps a couple of Scandanavian mini-states with miniscule populations], and have usually devolved into authoritarian templates: Kim Jung-Il, Mugabe, Saddam's & Assad's Ba'ath, Castro, and of course the failed totalitarian monster entities of Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, & Stalin [all of which caused the death of significant percentages of the country undergoing "the transition from socialism to communism. Pol Pot holds the % record with about 40% of his countrymen slaughtered in a few short years]. So remember well DHenninger's sentence:

"The left doesn't want to do politics with the other side but merely wants to eliminate it, and then run the country."

We're not talking about centrists like Hillary & Obama, we're talking about mindless hypocrites like Edwards and Kucinich & the Kossack/C&L/Olberman choir of spew machines infecting political discourse with dishonest deceitful lists of lies & pseudo-events like Plamegate. Henninger finishes with a sad conclusion:

It may well be that, as so often before, voters starting in Iowa next week will in the aggregate find the right reasons to choose the winner in November. Little wonder, though, that their mood is sour. More than ever, the electorate is being ill-served, and knows it.......terrorism's many addresses, the shameful images of Darfur, the dollar in decline, a Congress in which there is next-to-no confidence. Amid this comes a campaign running 24/7 unto eternity, even as people madden themselves trying to penetrate deeply enough to get a fix on the candidates and make the right call on the presidency. Freud also said, "Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity." In American politics, ambiguity is all you get. Our voters are not neurotic. They are just deeply annoyed.

The outright lies of the left, the dissembling of the centrists, and the timid fear of real conservatives to grasp the nettle of difficult issues like illegal immigration and defense of the country against terrorism all annoys and dismays the electorate, as dishonesty, doubletalk, and gutlessness all compete for the ennui trophy in 2008.

Go see Charlie Wilson's War. [Spoiler alert: Aaron Sorkin's screenplay is a bit "West-Wing Whackjob in its bias.] For all his numerous imperfections, Charlie was a guy who had the balls to stand for something and worked single-mindedly to achieve it.

Benazir Bhutto Dead

Bhutto was killed at the same spot as a previous Paki PM, Liaqat Ali Khan, in Rawalpindi.

The most likely culprit is Al Qaeda. Zawahiri has vowed to kill Bhutto whom AQ considers an American agent & a feminist dead set against AQ male patriarchies. The tragedy is that Musharaff might have been betrayed by ISI elements sympathetic to AQ extremists who want to keep Pakistan off balance—which keeps their hand in the game.

There is no way that Musharaff wanted Bhutto dead and gone—but his enemies [and Pak destabilizers] did.

This terrible crime will throw a spotlight on the American candidates for President and may reverse the domestic tilt that success in Iraq has enabled the candidates to stress over the last couple of months. Foreign policy expertise will once again come to the fore as a necessary qualification for a nominee of a major party. This may also temporarily derail a third party bid by Bloomberg or Ron Paul.

Sadly, Bill Richardson has already soiled his underwear in public by demanding Musharraf's immediate resignation, something even seasoned moonbats are too clever to call for. At a time of instability, this would be foolish at best and probably insane.

Is this fellow a serious candidate for POTUS? He is rapidly losing any credibility in foreign affairs by his intemperate announcements.

Nanny-State Nincompoops Commit New Nitwittery

Merrie Olde England has evidently gone soft in the head, at least if the Warwickshire Constabulary are an example of how a nanny state operates.

A woman who suffered a break-in robbery in which she lost some valuable antiques worth "thousands" has been told she could face a significant liability if she beefs up her home's security, and a returning robber would be injured.

"If I have got to live behind locked doors for the rest of my life, I hope the rest of my life isn't very long," the woman, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Rugby, England, Advertiser.

"But why would I want my house safe for these people? It's crazy," she said.

The robbery victim had been told that she might be subject to prosecution if future robbers were injured by barbed wire or other protection devices on her property.

The woman had antiques and personal items worth "thousands" stolen from her home during her absence to attend to the needs of her brother, suffering with cancer.

The invaders smashed through a security gate and broke windows in order to get inside, police reports said.

During their investigation, Rugby police provided her with a crime-fighting booklet that discusses home security.

But she told the Advertiser when she asked about putting in a new security fence and upgrading its capabilities, she was told the laws on liability meant she risked a police investigation herself if any trespassers hurt themselves climbing it.

She had wanted to add barbed wire to the fence in order to reduce the ease with which the robbers apparently gained access to her home.

But the Warwickshire Police "Operation Impact" booklet, which gives victims information on crime-fighting, suggested she could risk a prosecution herself if someone would be hurt.

"I respect that if the postman or the gas man calls, they don't expect to hurt himself. But I was speechless – you couldn't make it up. I think these laws show we have gone soft in the head," she told the newspaper.

This type of thinking goes along with recent UN decrees which declare that self-defense may be considered a violation of international law.

Stay tuned, as the Oprahfication of the planet's former centers of civilization turns them into petting zoos for criminals.

Why You Don't Want to Win a Writer's Prize Anymore

IDF Soldiers are guilty of NOT raping Palestinian girls because, and READ THIS CAREFULLY:

"the lack of organized military rape is an alternate way of realizing [particular] political goals."

The next sentence delineates the particular goals that are realized in this manner: "In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be seen that the lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences - just as organized military rape would have done."

Now do you think George Orwell was wrong when he announced the arrival of "doublethink."

Here's more:

The paper further theorizes that Arab women in Judea and Samaria are not raped by IDF soldiers because the women are de-humanized in the soldiers' eyes.
The paper was published by the Hebrew University's Shaine Center, based on the recommendation of a Hebrew University professors' committee headed by Dr. Zali Gurevitch.
"I do not have the entire text in front of me," Gurevitch said, when contacted by Arutz-7, "and I don't think we can jump to conclusions based on partial sentences, but I can say the following: This was a very serious paper that asked two important questions: Is the relative lack of IDF rapes a noteworthy phenomenon, and if so, why is it that there are so few IDF rapes when in similar situations around the world, rape is much more common?"

An interlocutor asked the distinguished Herr Perfesser Gurevitch

"Can't it just be that Israeli soldiers come from a culture that very much condemns rape? And why not mention the much-touted 'purity of arms,' i.e., the high moral conduct, of the Israeli Army?"

Then it gets, if this is possible, even more absurd:

Gurevitch said that observers do not have the right to demand a particular explanation to a given phenomenon. He said that the researcher had done a serious job, based on interviews with 25 soldiers and other accounts, and that the right-wing should not jump to the conclusion that this was simply another "secular, left-wing" generality.

Makor Rishon editor Amnon Lord, who first publicized the story, wrote that not only did researcher Nitzan not consider Jewish tradition as an explanation, but neither did she "raise the possibility that her initial assumption - namely, that the situation in Judea and Samaria is just like any other situation of conquest - may be wrong."....
"It is noteworthy," Lord concludes, "that Palestinian propaganda around the world frequently accuses Israelis of murder and rape. Such that this situation is unique: An army is found blameworthy of rape, and is also blameworthy of not raping."

I think this is the clearest example of "damned if you do and damned if you don't" that I've seen in the year 2007---even with Harry Reid and Nancy Pee-loosely making pronunciamentos from time to time.

Academicide will always produce the most flaming examples of sheer moronic stupidity anywhere, but this exertion actually WON A WRITERS' PRIZE!

I wonder what the other entries looked like....! [h/t Moe Lane at Redstate]

State Dept Leftists Halt Rice at Every Opportunity

John Bolton correctly notes that the professional Nomenklatura in the State Department are playing the same role today as the CIA "professionals" played in Charlie Wilson's War, where the Islamabad Station Chief fights tooth and nail to keep Gust & Charlie from helping Zia help the Mujahideen---because, you see, we were playing a game of bleeding the Sovs dry rather than fighting them more directly.

Bolton said that the CIA shared the State Department’s opposition to doing anything overtly or covertly to undermine the Iranian regime, and faulted Secretary of State Rice for getting “co-opted” by the bureaucracy.

“Secretary Rice has adopted the prevailing view within the bureaucracy, which have been reflected in our deference to the Europeans and the exclusively diplomatic approach for four years,” he said.

This approach is particularly dangerous because the U.S. intelligence community has almost always been wrong in its estimates of when Iran could acquire nuclear weapons capability, Bolton said.

One of reason for the inability to get Iran right is an unwillingness to talk to Iranian defectors. “Since World War II, the Intelligence community has disliked exiles and dissidents, claiming they are unreliable because they have a political agenda. This is just self-blindness,” he said.

As a result of such prejudices, “[o]ur lack of reliable intelligence inside Iran is substantial… Every day the military option is postponed makes it riskier that we will actually use force but fail to achieve our objectives.”

State & Langley are always going to want to play the loser-game wait-and-see that led the CIA to so vastly underestimate the weakness of the Soviet Union, or of the Shah of Iran, for that matter. A State friend of mine, Stan Escudero, was actually punished by the State Dept for reporting that the Shah was much weaker than the CIA & State Nomenklatura were saying he was---indeed, the Senior Apparatchiki were proclaiming the Shah's resilience and power at the same time he was planning a coward's exit!

Clowns like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. played the same game with the Soviets, reporting that the Soviet system was economically strong because he could tell from visiting the shops in Moscow within walking distance of the Kremlin!!

The willful blindness of the State perennials does NOT mirror the UK's permanent Whitehall staff, who are urged to think outside the box & develop alternative scenarios---or they were back when I was an FSO. While I disagree with Bolton on certain tactical bases, he is certainly better than the Clintonian appeasers like a weirdo named Vann Van Diepen:

Bolton has long been an advocate of muscular diplomacy. When he served as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and Nonproliferation during the early years of the Bush administration, he frequently crossed swords with arms control advocates who were viscerally opposed to imposing sanctions on proliferators.

In his recent book, “Surrender is Not an Option,” Bolton names one such official, Vann Van Diepen, who refused to act on direct orders to apply nonproliferation sanctions.

As Newsmax revealed on December 4, Van Diepen was one of three former State Department officials who authored the much-disputed recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.

The arms controllers are also trying to rewrite history on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Bolton warned.

During negotiations in 2002, the North Korean government admitted that in addition to its plutonium production reactor at Yongbyon, it also had a clandestine uranium enrichment program.

For once, Bolton said, “all of the intelligence community agreed that North Korea had embarked on procurement for a uranium enrichment program.”

And yet today, the arms controllers are trying to walk back that conclusion and “rewrite history” in order to cover-up North Korea’s lies and dissembling, Bolton said.

Bolton also was critical of the Bush White House for not doing more to name and retain strong conservatives in the administration.

When his nomination to become the permanent U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was submitted to the Senate, for example, the administration ran a confirmation battle, whereas the Democrats engaged in a full-fledged political campaign. “Given that, the outcome was predictable,” Bolton said.

The consequences of allowing the shadow warriors run the government instead of Bush loyalists have been dramatic, since they have succeeded in “turning the President’s policy in effect in a 180-degree U-turn” in North Korea and other areas, Bolton said.

The Iranian NIE is probably as accurate as the CIA prediction that the Soviet economy was prospering and would continue to do so in the mid-'80s.

And George W. Bush's management of his administration's policies mitigates strongly against another president with a Harvard MBA!!!

Methane Hydrate Beds Cure for Energy Woes?

Japan is planning to mine frozen seabed methane on an industrial scale. The massive beds of frozen natural gas exist in many parts of the world, including offshore under the US East Coast. Indeed, undersea landslides might be one of the causes of Bermuda Triangle ship disappearances, as a sudden release of methyl hydrate underwater causes the sea to bubble and produces a complete loss of buoyancy.

Commercial exploitation of methane hydrate is economically viable when oil trades above $54 a barrel, Japan's government estimated two years ago. The trade ministry is targeting 2016 to start production, corresponding with the scheduled completion of the 16-year government-led test project.

While governments are attracted to an abundant clean fuel, drilling risks disturbing the seabed and triggering an uncontrolled release, says Matsumoto of the University of Tokyo.

``A mass release of methane into the sea and the atmosphere is a risk for global warming,'' he says. ``Massive landslides at the ocean floor must be avoided when drilling at the Nankai Trough.''

The econutjob lobby in the US will predictably oppose mining off the Carolinas & Georgia where giant seabed methane deposits could be profitably extracted. However, the same whackjobs who oppose ANWR in Alaska & offshore in the US will eventually destroy the American economy unless sane citizens elect sane representatives.

It's up to us. All we sane Americans.

US Realpolitik versus Euroweenie weasalhood

Robert Kagan is the author of an Xmas gift I'm going to enjoy Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. Here's one review:

A book version of the essay that sparked a great debate on both sides of the Atlantic in 2002. In this tour de force, Kagan argues that today's conflict between the United States and Europe is not simply a result of passing policy disputes or the Bush administration's foreign policy style. Rather, it reflects a more profound estrangement rooted in American power and European weakness. The old Atlantic partners live today on different planets. America's preeminent global position has thrust it into a Hobbesian world of lurking threats and made it more willing to use force, whereas Europe seeks peace through law and diplomacy. Kagan is best in describing Europe's postwar project of taming the dangers and instabilities of power politics in a democratic, Kantian zone of peace. Thanks partly to the U.S. security guarantee, Europeans have devised a political order in which power is subdued and the use of force banished. Yet Europe has also made itself weak, Kagan charges, as its nations remain unable to confront the anarchical dangers of the wider world. Kagan argues that America's realpolitik view is not only a feature of Republican administrations but a deeper expression of American power (after all, Bill Clinton was willing to bomb Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan). The result is a growing divergence in strategic views and eroding solidarity.

Nutjob Ron Paul Says Stop Provoking Osama bin Laden

Terminal mental basketcase Ron Paul

has argued that the US must stop provoking Al-Qaida if Americans are not to be attacked and killed and that Washington's close ties with Israel and Pakistan are annoying the terrorist outfit.

"Read what Osama bin Laden said. We had a base in Saudi Arabia that was an affront to their religion, that was blasphemy, as far as they were concerned," Texas Congressman Ron Paul said.

He also said the US was bombing Iraq for 10 years. "We've interfered in Iran since 1953. Our CIA has been involved in the overthrow of their governments. We're, right now, in the process of overthrowing that nation," Paul said.

"We side more with Israel and Pakistan, and they get annoyed with this."

Hmmm.... This joker makes Mike Huckabee, who asked "What NIE on Iran?" look like Henry Kissinger!!!

Blair Converts to Catholicism

Tony Blair's conversion to Roman Catholicism comes at a time when the Catholic Church is experiencing a boom in old Anglican/Protestant England.

NYT's John Burns has a longish article about Blair without mentioning that fact, as to be expected from the anti-religious former "newspaper of record." However, Burns' article mentions that

Mr. Blair has spent much of his time since resigning as prime minister on his work as the envoy of the so-called Middle East diplomatic quartet — comprising the United Nations, the European Union, the Russian Federation and the United States — from a base at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem.

I stayed in the American Colony back in the day, and was shown the room where Churchill & "Lawrence of Arabia" divided up the Middle East into roughly its borders of today, all in a long afternoon.

Most British dailies are sardonic or openly scornful of Blair's personal move.

In an interview recorded for a three-part television documentary broadcast last month on the BBC, “The Blair Years,” Mr. Blair acknowledged the importance of his religious beliefs in guiding his years as prime minister and also the care he had taken not to talk about those beliefs in public.

“You know, if I am honest about it, yes of course it was hugely important,” he said.

But he added that while politicians could speak freely about their faith in the United States, it was hard to do so in Britain because “you talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter.”

Which says more about the British themselves, whose godless nanny-state mentality is projected onto the very few SANE people in the UK as though the sane were "nutters."