Ultimate Laugher: NYT Pronounces Paper Unbiased Toward Liberalism

The NYT Ombudsman solemnly tries to refute centrist studies that paint the NYT as leaning so far left that their coverage is very biased. Here's the article:

FOUR weeks ago, I criticized The New York Times for overplaying an article on an investment made by Ann Romney’s blind trust. The article was but one installment of the intense campaign coverage scrutinizing Mitt Romney as he bids for the Republican presidential nomination. During this period, we haven’t heard as much from The Times about President Obama’s re-election effort. There is precedent for the disparity. The Republican primary fight is a prelude to the general election season. Eight years ago, The Times offered comparably scant campaign coverage of the incumbent, George W. Bush, even as it blanketed readers with articles about Senator John Kerry and others competing for the Democratic nomination. Now, though, the general election season is on, and The Times needs to offer an aggressive look at the president’s record, policy promises and campaign operation to answer the question: Who is the real Barack Obama?

There follows the punchlines or rather the lede, which for once is not buried when the Times' integrity is questioned. Although the ombudsman's contributions often end up at the bottom of page 18.

Many critics view The Times as constitutionally unable to address the election in an unbiased fashion. Like a lot of America, it basked a bit in the warm glow of Mr. Obama’s election in 2008. The company published a book about the country’s first African-American president, “Obama: The Historic Journey.” The Times also published a lengthy portrait of him in its Times Topics section on NYTimes.com, yet there’s nothing of the kind about George W. Bush or his father. According to a study by the media scholars Stephen J. Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter, The Times’s coverage of the president’s first year in office was significantly more favorable than its first-year coverage of three predecessors who also brought a new party to power in the White House: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. Writing for the periodical Politics & Policy, the authors were so struck by the findings that they wondered, “Did The Times, perhaps in response to the aggressive efforts by Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to seize market share, decide to tilt more to the left than it had in the past?” I strongly doubt that. Based on conversations with Times reporters and editors who cover the campaign and Washington, I think they see themselves as aggressive journalists who don’t play favorites.[a total crock of BS] Still, a strong current of skepticism holds that the paper skews left. Unfortunately, this is exacerbated by collateral factors — for example, political views that creep into nonpolitical coverage. To illustrate, Faye Farrington, a reader from Hollis, N.H., wrote me earlier this year in exasperation over a Sunday magazine article about “Downton Abbey,” the public television series, in which the writer slipped in a veiled complaint about Mitt Romney’s exploitation of the American tax code. “The constant insertion of liberal politics into even the most politically irrelevant articles has already caused us to cancel our daily subscription,” Ms. Farrington wrote, “leaving only the Sunday delivery as I confess to an addiction to the Sunday crossword.” The warm afterglow of Mr. Obama’s election, the collateral effects of liberal-minded feature writers — these can be overcome by hard-nosed, unbiased political reporting now. Mr. Farnsworth, the media scholar, who is a professor at the University of Mary Washington, suggested to me that “more vigilance” is what The Times needed to keep out bias. He advocated a “wider range of sources and greater openness to perspectives that may not be the way the reporter thought of the story at the outset.” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, is a co-author of “The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election.” I asked her what she thought The Times should do to wring out bias in its 2012 coverage. Among other things, she said, “Don’t play a sex scandal out when you don’t have any evidence,” a reference to The Times’s controversial 2008 article on John McCain’s relationship with a lobbyist.

When the NYT put out a story on McCain on how he was wooing an innocent bimbo named Victoria Iseman, it was a sure indication to all the pilot fish presses and newsies who look to the Times like Stalinist newsies looked to Pravda back in the day that the book could be thrown at the hapless McCain with impunity. And the vilification of Sarah Palin was and remains an enduring stain on the hard left, which is guided by the Times. Sarah had more qualifications to be POTUS than the three senators who had never had a civilian job in their lives. Sarah had led the difficult negotiations with several big oil pipeline operators---more than SecState had ever successfully negotiated in her professional career.

Going forward, she said, The Times should examine Mr. Obama’s record and campaign promises; monitor campaign messaging for deception; emphasize substantive policy matters over petty rhetorical combat; scrutinize the newly powerful “super-PAC” groups, and take care not to let polls overdetermine the coverage. These are the right priorities. To date, The Times has delivered some clear-eyed coverage of the administration’s mixed record on the housing crisis, banks, the economy, Afghanistan and other issues. Now is the time to shift to a campaign coverage paradigm that compares promises with execution, sheds light on campaign operations and assesses the president’s promises for a second term. I asked Richard Stevenson, the political editor overseeing campaign coverage, about these matters, and he offered a detailed e-mail response, noting that “we take very seriously our responsibility to report without favoritism.” He added, “We remind ourselves every day of the need to provide readers — voters — with as much news, information and context as possible about the candidates, their records, their characters, their positions and the influences on them, including their campaign donors.” On covering Mr. Obama’s record, he cited as an example a Feb. 27 article about the president’s decision not to pursue recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles commission on debt reduction — a move the article said had contributed to undercutting “a central promise of his 2008 campaign, to rise above the rancor.” Mr. Stevenson promised that the Obama campaign’s use of his powers of incumbency, along with his “political style, character and learning curve,” will all be targets of Times coverage.

What a complete hoax! I haven't heard a bleat from the Times when Obama flies across the country on Air Force One claiming that he's attending ribbon-cutting ceremonies or church breakfasts for official reasons. James Taranto daily points out absurd pompous pronunciamentos about the NYT, including his always hilarious "Two newspapers in One!" reports. And this piety by Brisbane is followed by another howler:

On the question of campaign finance, Mr. Stevenson cited several articles that The Times has already done: one on the Obama campaign’s acceptance of money from a questionable source, another on the link between campaign contributions and White House access, and a third on Mr. Obama’s decision to use super-PACs to support his campaign, reversing an early policy. On the campaign operations side, he pointed to a March 8 article about the “largely secret” operation in Chicago where data specialists are cooking up ways to rebuild the vaunted support base of four years ago. I applaud The Times’s stated commitment to doing these kinds of stories. Readers deserve to know: Who is the real Barack Obama? And The Times needs to show that it can address the question in a hard-nosed, unbiased way.

The aggressive Murdoch has boosted the Wall Street Journal's paid circ to more than 2 million while the NYT continues to hemorrhage readers by the thousands. Now the real Times paid circ is around 800,000, although they claim the new revenue stream from readers paying to get beyond the new internet block has reached very high numbers. Given the Times' legendary dishonesty, I strongly doubt they will be around in 10-15 years given the way their paid circ has plunged in the last two decades.

The Government Is Biggest Drag on US Economy

Read this and weep. The "Bad Goldilocks" effect is busy wrecking the American Economy.

"Bad Goldilocks" means the recovery is neither hot enough to inspire confidence nor cold enough to drive Fed intervention. Fear of the policy quandary is keeping many investors on the sidelines.

And quantitative easing is about to embark on a third round:

Let's say the United States economy is going into a recession or maybe even worse than a recession and you are the chairman of the federal reserve and you have to do something about it. well, the first thing that you would do is that you would lower the federal fund's rate, and that's the rate that banks lend to each other overnight and they way that you lowered if the banks don't do it on their own after you say you wanna lower it is that you print money as the federal reserve, you use it to buy usually short term treasury securities and that money gets deposited in banks. so, the demand for reserves because that what these things are, the demand for reserve goes down, the supply goes up, and the federal funds rate should go down, but what happened if you keep doing this and you keep lowering the federal funds rate all they way down so that the overnight borrowing rate is approximately 0%, what do you do then if the economy still looks like it's a bit of tailspin. well, you could still print money. you can still print money, but using that money to buy short term debt won't help any because they are not gonna lower the short term overnight interbank interest rate anymore. so, you can go out and buy other things. you could buy other things, and those other things can be longer term treasuries, or it could be other types of securities. it could be-- you could buy mortgage box securities. you could buy commercial debt and this idea of printing money not just for target interest rate, but essentially to get that money into circulation and maybe to affect other parts of the market. this is called quantitative easing and in bernanke's, although that's exactly what he's doing, he's printing money to buy other things and what the fed traditionally does when it carries about the overnight borrowing rate, he calls it not necessarily quantitative easing, but credit easing and in his mind, even though mechanically, they are the same thing. in his mind, he's saying look, i'm printing this money not just for the sake of printing the money and putting it into circulation. i'm printing money so that i can buy particular assets where it seems like there might be a log jam in the credit market because with just printing money and buying government securities, maybe the interest rates on government debt goes down, but maybe because of panic or crises interest or the prices on these things don't behave properly. so, in order to fix that credit easing in the bernanke sense would be to go out and buy this type of asset.

Got it? Looks like a scam and knowing the Obama Administration, it probably is. Looks like the recession, like a Bactrian Camel, will have two humps! Government has become its own worst enemy when it comes to the economy, with public spending putting a damper on growth that otherwise continues at a steady if unspectacular pace.

Friday's gross domestic product report confirmed what a drag government can be: While consumer spending grew at a 2.9 percent clip, state and local governments cut back spending by 1.2 percent on an annualized basis and the federal government pulled back by 5.6 percent. As a result, the GDP number showed just a 2.2 percent improvement. The report disappointed economists, some of whom had the number as high as 3 percent and beyond, and cast an uncertain future on a stock market dependent on Federal Reserve stimulus for growth. "None of this is all that surprising, so where is the miss?" wondered Brown Brothers Harriman global currency strategist Marc Chandler, after noting some fairly pedestrian and in-line quarterly growth results. "Contrary to what passes as conventional wisdom, the main drag is coming from the government itself." Before anyone starts thinking that Washington suddenly has gotten religion on spending, the bulk of the federal government cuts came from defense spending, which plunged 8.1 percent. State and local governments, facing the necessity to balance their budgets against declining revenue (not to mention the specter of Meredith Whitney's muni bond default forecast) likely will continue to cut, though that's not as certain with their federal counterpart. Washington's drop in spending came after a 19.1 percent decrease in the fourth quarter of 2011. "The government spending plunge is unlikely to repeat for a third quarter (in 2012 at least) and an inventory drag in 2Q only masks moderate demand gains," Citigroup economist Steven C. Wieting said. "But the 1Q GDP data should limit remaining optimism that U.S. economic growth will accelerate significantly this year." So what does this all mean? Investors are watching the Federal Reserve closely for signs that the U.S. central bank might step in and provide more stimulus once Operation Twist ends in June. The Fed currently is buying long-dated bonds and selling shorter-dated notes in an effort to stimulate risk and drive down lending costs. At the same time, it is rolling over the $2.8 trillion already on its balance sheet in the form of Treasurys as well as mortgage and other debt. Some are hoping that Chairman Ben Bernanke and Co. will be willing to step in with a third round of balance sheet expansion — quantitative easing — to keep goosing the market through the economic trudge. But the GDP progress, halting as it is, likely will forestall if not completely derail QE3 prospects. It's all part of "Bad Goldilocks" phenomenon, in which the economy doesn't grow quickly enough to inspire confidence but moves just enough to keep the Fed at bay. Central bank critics worry that all the liquidity efforts will spur inflation, not to mention uncertainty over what happens once the Fed has to start unwinding all that debt it is holding. Also remember: Out there not so far in the future is the "fiscal cliff" of which Bernanke has warned will appear if Congress cannot agree on deficit reduction and thus face an automatic round of steep spending cuts and tax increases at the end of 2012. "Enthusiasm for equities is likely to be curbed by a turn in the US profit cycle, an absence of additional unconventional monetary stimulus from the Fed and a renewed flare-up of the crisis in the euro-zone," John Higgins, senior market economist at Capital Economics, said in a note. "The latter should weigh particularly heavily on stock markets in the region, even though valuations are now low from a historical perspective and relative to the US," he added. Indeed, there's a lot not to like about an economy that relies on government spending as its primary growth engine. Just ask anyone in Europe. Ostensibly, the U.S. economy is consumer-driven, with private spending amounting to 70 percent of GDP. But several economists doubted that the robust 2.9 percent spending increase in the first quarter could last, raising further questions about where we go from here. "We assumed that growth would be driven primarily by final demand, but, inventories contributed 0.6 (percentage points) to GDP, putting real final sales at a weak 1.6 percent annualized growth rate," said Neil Dutta, U.S. economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "Moreover, the strength in consumer spending and contribution from motor vehicle output look unlikely to repeat in future quarters." Government policymakers, then, face a dicey dilemma: Continue spending and risk falling further into the fiscal abyss, or cut back and deal with a prolonged future of uninspiring GDP numbers. "The dagger (from the GDP letdown) came from a second straight steep drop in federal government spending due to plunging defense outlays," observed Pierpont economist Stephen Stanley. "Boy, wait until these budget cuts start to kick in."

As Bette Davis said in that film in the '30s about an airplane & a difficult situation: "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride."

How McCain Occasionally Gets it Right!!!

John McCain may have messed up his own campaign in 2008, but the grizzled old warhorse still has some piss & vinegar in him. Behold his proclamation of something the bashful Mitt would demurely avoid saying:

"Shame on Barack Obama for diminishing the memory of September 11th and the killing of Osama bin Laden by turning it into a cheap political attack ad. This is the same President who once criticized Hillary Clinton for invoking bin Laden 'to score political points.' "This is the same President who said, after bin Laden was dead, that we shouldn't 'spike the ball' after the touchdown. And now Barack Obama is not only trying to score political points by invoking Osama bin Laden, he is doing a shameless end-zone dance to help himself get reelected. "No one disputes that the President deserves credit for ordering the raid, but to politicize it in this way is the height of hypocrisy. "The Obama campaign asks whether Mitt Romney would have made that decision. Of course they want to focus on this one tactical decision because the other decisions this President has made have harmed our national security. "He turned his back on the people of Iran when they rose up to end their tyrannical, terrorist-supporting, Holocaust-denying government, giving them no assistance as they were crushed in the streets. "He has repeatedly thrown our ally Israel under the bus and jeopardized our shared security interests. "He tried to bring Khaled Sheikh Muhammed, the mastermind of 9/11, and other Al-Qaeda terrorists into the middle of New York City to stand trial in a civilian court. "He disregarded the advice of his military commanders and pulled all of our troops out of Iraq, and Al-Qaeda is making a comeback there as a result. "He disregarded the advice of his military commanders again by telling our enemies that we are leaving Afghanistan and then putting our mission and our troops at risk by short-changing our commanders on the ground. "He watches passively while the Assad regime in Syria, Iran's closest ally, kills thousands of its own people in an unfair fight, and his response to this mass atrocity is to create an 'Atrocities Prevention Board.' "With a record like that on national security, it is no wonder why President Obama is shamelessly turning the one decision he got right into a pathetic political act of self-congratulation."

Sadly, the wooden stick figure of Mitt Romney hasn't got the campaign equipment to deliver a direct attack on the feckless moron in the White House. Perhaps for all, it's best to retain his dignity and let feisty John-boy do his heavy lifting. Perhaps Mitt will hit stride later. If he doesn't, the First Clown will win again.

John King Interviews Ajami on Middle East

Fuad Ajami rented my apartment for a year after I was married around 30 years ago and before that lived as my houseguest a year earlier when he first arrived at SAIS from Princeton. He is the most cogent man I've met on the Middle East. Here's what he says about US policy towards Syria in a CNN piece:

Fresh reports of violence follow news that more U.N. observers are arriving in Syria. The U.N. Security Council recently authorized sending up to 300 monitors to Syria for 90 days. They are tasked with observing a cease-fire that was supposed to have begun April 12. They're also charged with monitoring the implementation of U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan's peace plan, which calls for the government and the opposition to end the bloodshed, provide access to the population for humanitarian groups, release detainees, and start a political dialogue. But why is the violence continuing, and what chance does a peace plan have in Syria? CNN's John King spoke with Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of the soon-to-be released book "The Syrian Rebellion." Here's an edited version of their conversation: Emergency meeting in Cairo over Syria Snipers continue fierce assault in Syria Report: Syrian killings after U.N. visit Syria's deadly lies to U.N. monitors JOHN KING: Kofi Annan, the former U.N. secretary-general, filed a report essentially with the U.N. Security Council Monday that says, guess what, Syria is still violating the cease-fire, still breaking its rules. As soon as the monitors leave town, (security forces are) going in and killing people. And Annan says he's "going to lodge his objections," meet with the Syrian people "at an appropriate time." Do you see any urgency, or is it -- as you wrote in the "Wall Street Journal" -- you view this Annan mission as essentially cover for al-Assad? FOUAD AJAMI: Well over 1,000 people have been killed since the beginning of the Kofi Annan mission. The Kofi Annan mission -- to be blunt about it -- is really a lifeline to the Bashar regime. And you know, people in (there), people in distress, they know things very clearly and state it very clearly. One city stuck a note on one of the land cruisers of the observers and said the following: "The butcher kills, the observers observe, and the people go on with the revolution." There is nothing new in that Syrian nightmare. KING: I know the U.S. ambassador to United Nations, Susan Rice, is quite frustrated. She had said that Russia and China have blood on the hands because they won't accept a tougher proposal. But the United States is among those who have backed this Kofi Annan mission. When you hear the reports of further crimes against the (protesters) and then you say, we'll be touch with them at the appropriate time; at what point does the United States for its own credibility need to walk away from that process? AJAMI: We bear our own moral responsibility. And we know, for example, that we can say unequivocally that Russia and China are responsible. We can say that they aid and abet the Bashar al-Assad regime. But what about American culpability? We went to the United Nations when anyone would have told you that the Russians and Chinese were going to veto any resolution that would aid the Syrian people. So at some point in time ... we have to accept our own responsibility. We can't say such terms as "the violence in Syria is unacceptable." We are accepting it. It goes on day after day. And the United States itself is doing nothing about it. KING: Do you see any evidence that there's a change of heart, or is this going to go on and is the killing going to continue while the world talks, but does nothing? AJAMI: Well, I think there's one beat that you know very well, more than the rest of us, I believe. You observe and understand the game in Washington very, very well.Nothing will happen: That's my own prediction, my own fear, my own sense. Nothing is going to happen before the November election in 2012, before the bid of President Obama for a second term. I spent some time in Turkey. I spent some time in the refugee camps in Turkey, and even just simple people, simple people, unschooled, unlettered, they will tell you, no cavalry is coming to the rescue, and that Washington has pretty much looked away and averted its gaze from this terrible slaughter. And everyone, the Arabs, the Turks, are waiting on the Obama administration, and the rain of mercy has not come.

Readers of this blog recall that about a week or so ago I predicted the failure of the Annan truce. My many visits to Syria when I was an American diplomat convince me that the Alawite sect that Bashar Al-Assad belongs to will never relinquish power voluntarily. Neophytes like Annan might have known that had they a feel for the Levant and the many warring sects, including Druze & Christian, who live in Syria. Also, the Alawite sect is closest to Shi'ite doctrine and belief, so Iran will always be there giving Al-Assad & his sect money and equipment. Oh, well.... Anyway, I'm looking forward to buying Fuad's book.

Krauthammer on Why Biden is Greatest Foreign Policy Imbecile Ever

RealClearPolitics has a short article outlining some of the Vice POTUS's most egregious examples of stupidity on broad & important issues of American Foreign Policy. I'm not talking about run-of-the-mill silly factual errors as when he averred that the US had "kicked Syria out of Lebanon" at a time when Syria & its cat's paw Hezbollah had just taken over complete power in Lebanon. Aside from his silly gaffes supporting Obungler, e.g. "the President has a big stick," here are what Krauthammer thinks are his greatest unforced errors over the decades that this moron has infected the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

The Vice President has been over the last 30 years holds the American record for wrong on the most issues in foreign affairs ever. And the list starts with the nuclear freeze in the early ’80s against Thatcher and Reagan and Cole which is one of the follies of the era. He supported it. He was against aid to the Nicaraguan Contras which in the end brought democracy and ended the Sandinista rule at the time. He was against Reagan’s expansion of the defense budget, which bankrupted the Soviet Union and led to the end of the Soviet Empire. He was against Reagan on Strategic Defenses, which is the big advantage that we have now in the missile age. And look at where he was on Iraq. He opposed the first Iraq War, the Gulf War that liberated Kuwait that everybody agrees was a good thing. He supported the Iraq War which he, not I, he says was a terrible mistake. And then when the surge happened, he opposed the surge in Iraq which rescued a losing war and ended with our leaving with our heads held high and some promise in the future.

To think that this blockhead is still one heartbeat away from being POTUS. No wonder Osama bin Ladin thought that assassinating Obama & having the egregious cretin Biden as President was the best way to grease the skids to America's downfall!!! UPDATE Reading the above after I'd published it on my blog, I noticed that the transcript of Krauthammer's verbal sallies on FoxNEWS were spelling German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's name as "Cole," a mistake that the RCL transcribers made, but that the erudite Charles would never commit.

John Dean shows How Not to Write

CounterPunch.org has a total fruitcake leftoid mutant named Alexander Cockburn infecting its masthead. Here's the latest abomination from the forgotten, but not gone turncoat John Dean's keyboard, about the guv of my native state, Scott Walker, who should stay guv of Wisconsin:

In my prior column, drawing on the work of Bob Altemeyer and others, I listed traits that are consistently revealed by social dominators, or authoritarian leaders. To earn this label, a person must show four key traits: (1) they seek to dominate others, (2) they oppose equality, (3) they are desirous of personal power, and (4) they are amoral. News accounts of Scott Walker reveal that he possesses all four of these defining traits, not to mention others in the longer list I set forth in my prior column. Here, however, I will merely note the evidence for Walker’s having a defining social-dominating disposition. (1) Domination. Authoritarian leaders seek to control others; in short, they are social dominators. This is the story of Scott Walker’s life. By age 7, Walker had formed a “Jesus USA” club, which was a mix of his father’s Baptist ministry and his attraction to patriotism. By age 8, he had undertaken a door-to-door fundraising campaign to take charge of purchasing a flag for the village hall of his small Iowa town. As a teen, Walker sought leadership posts, which provide some control, in Boys State and Boys Nation, and became an Eagle Scout. He attended Marquette University (but has no college degree from there or any other school). At Marquette, he was elected to the student senate, and twice sought but failed to get elected president of the student body. He ran for the Wisconsin State Assembly the same year that he lost his bid to be student president at Marquette, losing the Assembly race as well. Since then, Walker has never stopped running. In 1993, he was elected to the State Assembly, where he remained until 2002. In 2002, he sought the post of Milwaukee County Executive, and he held that post until he was elected Governor in 2010. This is the behavior, writ large, of a dominator. {Huh?] (2) Opposition To Equality. The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology(which is searchable) further defines social dominators as “hard, tough, ruthless, and unfeeling toward others, as opposed to compassionate, generous, caring, and altruistic.” There are many examples of Walker’s harsh and uncaring treatment of those whom he does not believe to be entitled to equality. None is more glaring than his intolerance of gays and lesbians. For example, as Governor, he has worked to end Wisconsin’s recognition of the rights of same-sex couples. He fired the law firm defending the state’s domestic-partnership law. And he appointed a woman to the state’s Labor and Industry Review Commission who believes that gays can be harassed in the workplace. One attorney familiar with Walker’s thinking states, “Governor Walker is ideologically opposed to equal rights for gay and lesbian and transgendered people as is everyone in his administration as far as I can tell and they will probably want to take steps to ensure that gay and lesbian and transgendered people do not have equal rights. Everything that Governor Walker is doing is ideological; I don’t see that his administration has any particular respect for the law per se.” [And this attorney's name is?] (3) Desirous Of Personal Power. Scott Walker has been seeking personal power his entire life, and has never stopped reaching for it. Note how Walker has worked not merely to reach higher offices, but also to enhance his power in these offices when he occupied them. For example, as governor, Walker sought to remove civil service jobs, in order to make them political appointments, and thus subject to his control. Most strikingly, he has sought to undercut the public-employee unions so that he would not have to deal with them, thus increasing his power. Often overlooked in Walker’s infamous union-busting “budget-repair bill“ is the power grab to fill three dozen civil-service jobs with political appointees. For instance, the bill politicized and placed under Walker’s control functions like open-records requests, the selection of general counsels for key agencies, and the selection of communications spokespeople in key departments. He has increased his personal power over some fifteen state agencies, and I suspect that he is (or was, depending on the recall vote) just getting started. Walker’s move to break public employee unions is his most notorious personal power play. To try to prevent the union-busting law’s passage, Democratic state senators left Wisconsin, so that the GOP-controlled legislature could not do Walker’s bidding and ram it through. But nevertheless, using dubious parliamentary ploys, the bill was passed by the Senate, making it a done deal. Walker’s push to get this legislation, known as Act 10, passed into law was done in about as authoritarian a fashion as you will ever see, outside of a dictatorship. Part of Act 10 has already been struck down by a federal judge, and, as I noted earlier, the wisdom of Walker’s power play will be tested in the June 5th recall election. (4) Amorality. To be amoral, of course, is to be insensitive to moral matters. A politician like Scott Walker will wrap himself in a cloak of morality, while, in fact, acting anything but morally. Needless to say, Walker’s policies that attack poor women by cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood; his slashing of education budgets while giving tax breaks to wealthy corporations; and his pursuit of similar radical Republican actions all raise serious moral issues. But different people have different moral standards and views of such activity, so I have excluded these matters from this discussion. Similarly, I have set aside the fact that a growing number of Walker’s closest aides are being criminally investigated and several have been charged with, or pled guilty to, crimes stemming from actions that occurred during Walker’s tenure as Milwaukee County Executive. Walker has hired several high-powered criminal defense lawyers and is building a legal defense fund, but this, too, is not relevant at this time, for little is known of this secret “John Doe” grand jury proceeding. Walker has not been charged. The grand jury proceeding simply remains a dark cloud following him, and no conclusions can or should be drawn from it. Nonetheless, Walker’s amorality is conspicuous. It is found in his history of ethics violations and the record of his lying. A lengthy article could (and should) be written about both, but suffice it here to note that his ethics problems go back to his Marquette University days, when the college newspaper called him “unfit” for student office. Later, in the Assembly (in 2005), Walker would earn the distinction of receiving the second-highest fine for an ethics violation in Wisconsin history. His lying is notorious. Politifacts Wisconsin (which I am told is more reliable than most of these sites) finds Walker to be an accomplished falsifier. With respect to 44 statements that Politifacts examined, Walker was found to have been truthful only on six occasions. The fact that 38 statements were pants-on-fire false, false, mostly false, or half-truths is stark evidence of amorality. I watched a video of a Walker speech at the Goldwater Institute. He’s slick: Fast-talking, confident, and dishonest—I watched him distort facts with which I was familiar. He spoke in mostly half-truths, and certainly not with the kind of candor that the late Senator Goldwater expected from political figures. Clearly, Walker has all the traits of a social dominator and authoritarian leader. More strikingly, it is also clear that he is, in fact, what social scientists term a “double high authoritarian.”

John Dean was Legal Counselor in the Nixon White House. Since then, he has held no position other than inconsequential gadfly who occasionally popped up on left-wing TV such as PMSNBC. Methinks the has-been doth protest too much! P.S. I thought they taught law students how to write in law school!

Obama Donors' Spirits Start to Flag....

Don Surber notes that although the AP loyally spews the DNC party line about Obama's bundlers assembling giant amounts of campaign cash, the NYT begs to differ slightly, noting that said bundlers and donors are less enthusiastic for the First Clown's second rodeo. Perhaps that's why the First Swindler and Kickbacker accepts Maher's money without a qualm and still has swindler Corzine bundling for him even in March. Given the First Imbecile's track record... Figures!!!

Two Poems: Apples into Roses

The apple & the rose are two members of the same family of Rosacea. The rose is the final version of the apple and the end of Citizen Kane with its enigmatic sign on the sled thrown into the fire, "rosebud," could mean the failure of a gifted man to develop his gifts into full fruition. As a postscript, T.S. Eliot had an image of a rose enveloped in flames on his tombstone.

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS [W B Yeats]

I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lads and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

TO THE ROSE UPON THE ROOD OF TIME

i{Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!}
i{Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:}
i{Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide;}
i{The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,}
i{Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;}
i{And thine own sadness, where of stars, grown old}
i{In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea,}
i{Sing in their high and lonely melody.}
i{Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate,}
i{I find under the boughs of love and hate,}
i{In all poor foolish things that live a day,}
i{Eternal beauty wandering on her way.}

i{Come near, come near, come near -- Ah, leave me still}
i{A little space for the rose-breath to fill!}
i{Lest I no more bear common things that crave;}
i{The weak worm hiding down in its small cave,}
i{The field-mouse running by me in the grass,}
i{And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass;}
i{But seek alone to hear the strange things said}
i{By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,}
i{And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.}
i{Come near; I would, before my time to go,}
i{Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:}
i{Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.}

To Yeats as to James Clarence Mangan, author of the poem Dark Rosaleen, the rose stood for Ireland.

[Ending of] Little Gidding [T S Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

"the fire and the rose": The rose is a traditional symbol of English royalty, and therefore represents England, and Western civilization beyond it— and it also stands in mediaeval literature for divine love and mercy, and in this poem for the garden (sc. Eden) where the children (Adam and Eve) hide (and they reappear here). Fire is the flame both of God's judgment and wrath, and of the Spirit who purifies, warms, and enlightens.

Why institutions favor liberals

h/t to Dennis Mangan & "Daybreaker"

"Liberals dominate institutions because liberals want to dominate institutions. Conservatives want a school to be a place for learning or a garden club to be a place for gardening."

Some Points About Liberals & "Intelligence"

One, liberalism is a collective strategy (sometimes with a collectivist ethnic thread in it), and modern "conservatism" is individualist. In social conflicts of all kinds, collective strategies are exceedingly powerful in competition with individualist strategies. Elaborate theories of how everyone is supposed to thrive through individual competition fail instantly as individuals confront teams and duly lose. "Every man for himself" rapidly becomes "let save (himself) who can".

On the simplest level, liberals can advance through the institutions by favoring each other. Feminist networking rationalizes self-interested mutual back-scratching as "empowering women" and this produces career spoils that both advance lefties in bureaucracies and cements loyalty through patronage. What is the "conservative" equivalent? It doesn't exist.

Two, if you're smart (and not barred from promotion by ethnic nepotism or quota issues) you may get to a "managerial" position where you get to make decisions. The first time you make a decision and you are asked to rationalize it, you will basically have these options:
* Argue a non-liberal rationale for your decision. Congratulations moron, you have just killed your career. And you are likely to suffer social ostracism too.
* Argue a liberal rationale for a liberal outcome. Good! Even if the policy does not work, you are unlikely to be blamed, as nobody can admit what's wrong. (And of course you are a liberal, and to live with yourself you need to make yourself believe liberal dogma, if you can, or if you can't you at least need to make yourself forget how wrong you know you are.)
* Argue a liberal rationale for a conservative outcome. This is risky. There's more chance that the policy will be beneficial, but there's no special payoff for you for that. And there's more effort in contriving your paradoxical rationale, and more chance that you will be found not to have acted in the right spirit if things go wrong. (And of course you are a "conservative," and you need to get your thoughts firmly grooved within the bounds of liberal rationalizations to stay safe. Which will in the long run limit how "conservative" your results will be.)

People who reach managerial positions and like intellectual elegance are likely to be liberal."

I for one worked in TV at NBC, ABC & CBS as well as PBS. I worked as an FSO for more than a decade at the least incompetent [with the possible exception of the CIA] agency in the US government, the Dept of State. Job security in large institutions is rather stable, but in TV news & the entertainment world [the two are now not far apart!], there is little job security. State is full of petty functionaries with a lifer mentality while Hollyweird has insecure people looking to stay in the loop by aping the Penns & Clooneys in their political outlook. Academia blocks alternative POVs in an autonomic fashion---the key meme is "No fault on the Left" unless one is talking about a Stalin or a Saddam Hussein [the Baath Party in Iraq & Syria are both socialist in their ideology]. Bashir Assad may be the next "leftist" to join the club of libtard reprobates.

However, in my five years in a Jesuit seminary, I met some of the most intelligent people in my life---so no standard deviation is without its exceptions!

Annan Plan Collapses---Predictably---in Syria

Kofi Annan holds the record as the single most incompetent UN SecGen in the tormented history of that cave of winds. His ham-handed handling of the Rwanda catastrophe, including his failure to head off the massacres, denotes a singular incapacity to lead or even negotiate in any complex situation.

Syria is another area where Annan has dropped the ball. Sadly, this arrogant oaf doesn't learn by experience.
UPDATE
QED: Annan fucks up, just as I predicted months ago!

How Marxism is Obama's Key Ideology

Barry Rubin is a longtime friend who now lives in Israel. Read his erudite analysis to understand how Obama and his cohorts are corrupting America with their dishonest policies and fraudulent promises.

DC's Marion Barry Another Argument Against Statehood

Marion Barry is a confirmed crackhead whose love of crime & criminals makes him the worst mayor in DC history, and that's saying something!

Read the attached if you can stand a black racist POS ranting about Asians who are hard-working, tax-paying entrepreneurs...!

"Clever Sillies" and the Problem of High IQ Absent-Mindedness

Bruce Charlton has an interesting explanation of "nerdiness" which I submit to you with a hat tip to Dennis Mangan's blog:
Summary

In previous editorials I have written about the absent-minded and socially-inept ‘nutty professor’ stereotype in science, and the phenomenon of ‘psychological neoteny’ whereby intelligent modern people (including scientists) decline to grow-up and instead remain in a state of perpetual novelty-seeking adolescence. These can be seen as specific examples of the general phenomenon of ‘clever sillies’ whereby intelligent people with high levels of technical ability are seen (by the majority of the rest of the population) as having foolish ideas and behaviours outside the realm of their professional expertise. In short, it has often been observed that high IQ types are lacking in ‘common sense’ – and especially when it comes to dealing with other human beings. General intelligence is not just a cognitive ability; it is also a cognitive disposition. So, the greater cognitive abilities of higher IQ tend also to be accompanied by a distinctive high IQ personality type including the trait of ‘Openness to experience’, ‘enlightened’ or progressive left-wing political values, and atheism. Drawing on the ideas of Kanazawa, my suggested explanation for this association between intelligence and personality is that an increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-solving, and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved behaviour which could be termed common sense. Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. And since evolved common sense usually produces the right answers in the social domain; this implies that, when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas, and therefore to believe and behave maladaptively. I further suggest that this random silliness of the most intelligent people may be amplified to generate systematic wrongness when intellectuals are in addition ‘advertising’ their own high intelligence in the evolutionarily novel context of a modern IQ meritocracy. The cognitively-stratified context of communicating almost-exclusively with others of similar intelligence, generates opinions and behaviours among the highest IQ people which are not just lacking in common sense but perversely wrong. Hence the phenomenon of ‘political correctness’ (PC); whereby false and foolish ideas have come to dominate, and moralistically be enforced upon, the ruling elites of whole nations.

And as everyone knows, the moderately intelligent always want to ape their more intelligent "betters" in the IQ department, so that PC among the dominant elites is quickly assimilated among the less-mentally cogent. The rub is that the traditional "common sense" of those instinctive and spontaneous forms of behavior are often the butt of jibes by those slightly smarter, but socially more inept, eventual losers themporarily higher up the so-called social ladder, often a step-pyramid resulting in human sacrifice such as Stalin's vicious purges of the so-called "elites" are a prime example!

Arthur Koestler's depiction in Darkness at Noon of the Communism of the thirties which in the USA often used the highest ideals of human progress to mask the duplicities of a Hiss or the barbarism of Stalin's NKVD is a salutary lesson of the "clever sillies" that ruling elites in Europe & the USA are now giggling about.

May political correctness, born of Lenin's NEP in the early 1920s, die an ignoble death before its centenary.

March Madness Rulz

Even tho my grad school Michigan got bumped off 1st round, the Marquette Warriors (no PC for me!) & the Billikens of St Louis are 2 schools I did attend who are still alive! Plus Creighton is a school that a lot of buddies attended. Two other Jesuit scoops still in the mix r Georgetown & Xavier & Gonzaga put up a fight in the 2nd round after creaming W. VA in unfriendly Pittsburgh.

The Badgers r also in the sweet 16 as well as 5 schools from Ohio & 2 from Ky, making more than half from those 3 states! Florida & FSU (ugh!) are still around while The Big Ten has 4 left.

Hope either MU Warriors or Badgers get to Final Four!

Taranto Exposes Jesuitical Liberal Philosophy

Taranto simply destroys the hypocrisy and tyrannical tendencies of the leftist literati and illuminati Stanley Fish, who along with Charles Blow, brings the NYT editorial page to a low lower than ever before:

In an essay for the New York Times website, literary theorist Stanley Fish offers a justification for the left's denunciations of Rush Limbaugh for "misogyny" and its tolerance of the same from the likes of Bill Maher and Ed Schultz.

The charge of hypocrisy, he notes, is based in "the political philosophy of enlightenment liberalism," which emphasizes procedural fairness à la the Golden Rule. He urges liberals to take an alternative approach:

If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal--that is, non-formal--perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?
There is no answer to that question once you step outside of the liberal calculus in which all persons, no matter what their moral status as you see it, are weighed in an equal balance. Rather than relaxing or soft-pedaling your convictions about what is right and wrong, stay with them, and treat people you see as morally different differently. Condemn Limbaugh and say that Schultz and Maher may have gone a bit too far but that they're basically O.K. If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. "Fair" is a weak virtue; it is not even a virtue at all because it insists on a withdrawal from moral judgment.

As exhortation this is redundant, but as description it is revealing. Fish's colleagues on the New York Times editorial page behave exactly as he urges, and we're quite sure they are imbued with an unshakable sense of their own virtue.

Yet even if fairness is overrated as a virtue, what Fish misses is that it is useful. A disregard for fairness tends to alienate those who don't already agree with you, and the attempt to consider the other side's arguments fairly makes one's own arguments more robust. If the Times were to reject the Fish Rule and actually make an effort to give the "bad guys" their due, it might be easier to find a documented case of someone changing his mind after reading a Times editorial.

White House wine list hidden from taxpayers

Obama spends like a drunken sailor and has driven the US deficit from $10 trillion to $15-plus tr. in less than four years, so the wine list in the Bloomberg article above is hidden in the opaque BS this fool in the Oval Office is accustomed to employ. Remember when the Obungler promised "the most open administration in history?" I do.

Obummer is turning into the Lord of the Flies.

US Interests in Egypt vis-a-vis the Muslim Brotherhood

Here's an essay I penned about a year ago for a magazine article. Parts are overcome, of course, by the so-called "Arab Spring"


Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda Versus American Security

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood was founded by Hassan Al-Banna in 1928 in Cairo to resist the secularization of Egyptian politics and to contribute to the Palestinians who were rioting in then-Palestine. Along with sharing many of their salafist religious views, Al-Banna based some of his operational skills on the Wahhabi Ikhwan under the contemporaneous command of Ibn Saud in the Arabian Peninsula. Al-Banna himself described the Brotherhood as “a Salafiya message, a Sunni way, a Sufi truth, a political organization, an athletic group, a scientific and cultural union, an economic enterprise and a social idea.” [Hiro, p. 61]

The religious duty of Jihad to Al-Banna was a mass-based movement based on “The Quran is our constitution.” [Kepel, p. 12] with a broad-brush conception of “jihad” containing elements of Sufism and other heterodox strains which repelled purists like Sayyid Qutb. Banna’s loose concept of “jihad” resembled more a passive aggression against secularism [Peters, p. 161] than the later violent extremism of Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, who started as a Muslim Brother, but was a leader of Al-Jihad when it killed President Anwar Sadat.

My thesis is that relatively peaceful movements like the Egyptian Brotherhood will continue to serve as a seedbed for germinating more radical and terror-minded zealots who may eventually migrate to organizations like Al Jihad and Al Qaeda. The difference in the beliefs in Jihad between the original Egyptian Brotherhood and its offshoots like Al Jihad, inspired by Sayyid Qutb, whose Salafist writings inspired the Egyptian Al Jihad and its eventual partner-in-terror Al Qaeda, are very wide and deep. [Kepel, p. 226] Their differences also separated the Brotherhood systems from the Al-Jihad/Al Qaeda dramatically in the view of the rest of the Arab world. Outside the purview of this paper, Al Qaeda had spawned imitators in Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, perhaps Nigeria and has executed attacks on India and on foreign tourist spots in these countries to demonstrate that the original doctrines of takfir and other exclusive Hanbali traditions under the Salafist code remain active.

The “so what?” question vis-à-vis US policy would normally intrude, but the 9/11 events [starting in 1993] and their aftermaths have made American foreign policy decisions contingent to some extent on arcane interpretations of Islamic theology and religious practices. This isn’t a logical progression, but it is a sort of reaction which takes place when a protean non-governmental underground attacks a statist entity like the U.S.A. As when anarchists were assassinating Europe and America’s leaders around the beginning of the twentieth century, there naturally ensues an impulse to know one’s enemy if only to learn how to stop its advocates from gaining new recruits. Therefore touching on inconsistencies in American foreign policy as they concern sectarians such as the Wahhabi movement and its Al Qaeda offshoots as well as the Egyptian Brotherhood and its offspring such as Al Jihad can be relevant to understanding past mistakes and mapping future policy. As an apt example, American troops should not be based in Saudi Arabia ever again.

Indeed, the overall problem is far more complex than mere adjustments in American policy. Sadat’s assassination in 1981 was portrayed by its perpetrators as a being caused by Camp David, but probably had its proximate cause from Sadat’s harsh crackdown on religious and political dissidents only months prior to Sadat’s death. And in a parallel manner, perhaps, the murder of 241 Marines in Beirut by Hezbollah were manifestations of a Syrian/Hezbollah joint operation with control of Lebanon as its aim rather than related to Israel, at least as a primary goal. An intelligence agency’s reach often exceeds its grasp in the intricate and shadowy underworld of the raw material of constructivist theory. And think tanks and academics rarely concern themselves with the sordid pettiness of sectarian factions and ethnic clumpings in a country like Lebanon. Or Sufi rivalries and clan feuds in Egypt or Syria. Or any number of the powderkegs which historians always infer from their post-mortems on events like 9/11. The Middle East is like tomorrow’s weather, only less predictable the further out one projects the future. An observation made in the early ‘90s puts the problem this way: “the reassertion of Islam in the social and political sphere came to world attention as one of the most unpredicted movements of modern times……eviscerat(ing) the models used by a confident America to predict the future in the aftermath of victory in Word War II… [This] is attested to by the fact that between the end of World War II and the onset of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978-79, a bare handful of books about contemporary Islam were written by Americans….[here he cites Richard Mitchell and Morroe Berger as exceptions]…..Muslim assertiveness did not develop out of sight of non-Muslim observers; the observers simply failed to see. [Bulliet, opp.193-4] .” I believe that American policy in the Middle East can be placed in the realist camp since World War II, or rather the foundation of Israel, with few sincere efforts to change the balance of forces in the region, which since Israel’s victories over the Arabs has largely favored American interests to such a degree that America was blinded to alternative paradigms to its own hegemony.

The only two major idealist exceptions to US policy’s benign neglect have been The Camp David Accords of the late ‘70s and the Idealist shift by the G.W.Bush administration after the military victory in Iraq, although Condoleeza’s Rice’s insistence that Hamas participate in the 2006 Palestine Authority elections might be considered a third. [This miscalculation followed the Israeli miscalculation in the early ‘80s when they set up Hamas as a religious-based movement to counter the secular PLO!]. In Iraq, after post-victory chaos brought about an insurrection based on sectarian and ethnic divisions, Wilsonian idealism was conveniently unpacked to engage in what G.W. Bush ‘s inner circle had previously derided as “nation-building.” In Iraq, this invasive and intrusive methodology has led to democratization and the liberation of Shi’ite and Kurdish minorities [although the Shi’ites actually comprised a demographic majority of Iraqi citizens.] The Shi’ites, along with America and Israel, are one of the three top “enemies” of the Arab Umma in Osama bin Laden’s bogus “fatwa.” [Wright, pp. 47-48]. In the funhouse mirror perceptions of the Al-Qaeda/Al-Jihad worldview, the Shi’ite ascent in Iraq would increase their paranoia and that of the mindset of their Sunni Islamicist allies post-9/11.

But as Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and in this and many other respects, American regional policy toward the Middle East has differed sharply from country to country and from U.S. administration to administration with regard to supporting democracy, human rights, and other basic freedoms in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and environs. The American hands-off policy has led to the prolonged continuation of the Egyptian Brotherhood’s domestic suppression and a lack of any democratic progress in Saudi Arabia, leading to underground movements seeking on the one hand, a more free and open democratic government in Egypt [the Brotherhood], and on the other more strict elimination of kufr in the Islamic shar’ia enforcement in Saudi Arabia [Al-Qaeda].

Finally, the strong and steady support which the United States has given Israel since its foundation as a state in 1948 has built up a strong anti-American bias among the average Arab on the street, varying widely from country to country. For Osama bin Laden and his Al-Jihad partners in Afghanistan, Israel was and remains the focal point of outrage which justifies terrorist acts against the West and America, the convenient puppeteer manipulating everything from backstage. Twisted and un-Islamic as most of Osama bin Laden’s uncanonical “fatwas” may be, they fall on a receptive audience. This paper cannot do more than outline the problem facing US policy, but it can attempt to describe the Islamicist garden and some of its bitter fruit.

“The Wahhabi revolution in the 18th century…marks the first withdrawal of consent from Ottoman Turkish supremacy. Although without any conscious or explicit Arabism, it was a movement of Arabs away from the predominantly Persian and Turkish ideas and practices that had reshaped Islam since the Middle Ages. Although the ….. full Wahhabi doctrine found few converts in the Middle East, the religious revivalism it brought influenced Muslims in many lands and infused them with a new militancy….”[Lewis,p. 103] After a dormancy of the Saud-Wahhabi alliance through much of the 19th century, Abd al Aziz bin Saud in the early 20th century employed it in the process of stitching together the constantly feuding and warring tribes outside Ottoman jurisdiction by encouraging tribal conversion to Wahhabism. Ibn Saud did this to suborn what was left of the Ottoman Empire’s rule in Arabia and turn the tribes’ plundering ways against the Saud family’s other enemies. This led to Ibn Saud’s establishing of around 200 Ikhwan “colonies” averaging 2000 inhabitants and controlled from Riyadh through tribal notables held as hostages. [Helms, p. 131]

The height of Ibn Saud’s long string of successes from 1928-35 in establishing himself as unquestioned ruler of most of the Arabian peninsula coincided with the foundation and rapid expansion of the Muslim Ikhwan in Egypt under Al-Banna’s leadership. At the same time, Ibn Saud’s ‘Asir’s conquest, ratified by the Treaty of Taif [Wilkinson, p. 161] in 1935, included many ancestral Yemeni lands and clans of Yemeni settlers. This loss of ‘Asir and other Yemeni lands to Ibn Saud’s family rule was to present one of the significant grudges that much later Osama bin Laden [along with many other Saudi “citizens” of Yemeni heritage] was to hold against the Saudis, whom he considered the invaders of Yemen, his ancestral family’s homeland. Later Osama bin Laden would center his global network through Yemen by having his operations center in Sana through which he directed Al-Qaeda worldwide from Afghanistan. He would intermarry with young Yemeni tribal notables’s families a la Ibn Saud [Wright, p 338]. As a sidebar to the entire 9/11 fiasco, the NSA would intercept these Yemen-op center messages and refuse to share them with either the CIA and FBI or the NSC in the White House, one of the many great blunders leading to 9/11’s “success.” [Wright, pp. 283]

The conservative brand of Islam that stimulated Egyptian Brotherhood martyr Sayyid Qutb to write “Milestones” was based on Islamic theology of Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) who originated the strict takfir theology which Mohammed Al-Wahhab preached as the original political theory of the Arabian Ikhwan, [Peters, pp. 43-44] Ibn Taymiyya influenced to a lesser degree the Ibadis of Oman and the Zaydis of Yemen. These strains of fundamentalist Islam were based on the writings of the Hanbali School of Islamic theology, the most conservative of the four schools. All three only recognized shar’ia law and considered all other legal and political systems as degrees of kufr [unbelief]. The Wahhabis were the most stringent in that all who did not submit to shari’a law were considered guilty of shirk [polytheism]. Indeed, it was through this kind of fundamentalist indoctrination that Ibn Saud had raised an army of fanatical soldiers who extended the rule of the Saud family throughout the greater part of the peninsula by military force backed by religious zealotry. [Hiro, pp.108-116]

Hasan Al Banna’s organization, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun or Muslim Brotherhood “should not be confused with the Brotherhood of Saudi Arabia although the groups had similar views on many issues.” [Munson, p. 76] Among the shared views were the liberation of the Islamic state from all foreign powers and rule by shari’a law. But the Egyptian Ikhwan did not consider those disagreeing with their strict interpretations as being apostates and thus worthy of death. The Wahhabis did so.

Al-Banna’s assassination in 1949 broke up the Brotherhood’s unity, which at its peak had over 500,000 male members throughout Egypt. The Free Officer’s Movement under Nasser soon threw the chief Brotherhood members into prison where Sayyid Qutb composed a simple lucid exposition of how and why the western-influenced Arab secular states were in jahaliyya, or a polytheistic pre-Islamic condition, and must be overthrown through revolution by true Islamic believers. Qutb’s book Milestones, written while he was a political or rather religious prisoner, became vastly influential after his execution in 1966 [Wright, pp. 7-40].

In 1996, Zawahiri and Bin Laden and their companions were expelled from Sudan after a failed assassination attempt on Mubarak. Finally, Al-Jihad formally combined in Afghanistan with Al-Qaeda in 1998. [Wright, pp.268-9] In a sense, Egyptian competence and worldly skill-sets were allied with the Arabian peninsula’s visionary millenarianism to form a deadly underground movement.

Dr. Al-Zawahiri as the Egyptian head of Al-Jihad, considered Egypt as the lynchpin of the entire Al Qaeda enterprise. However, Osama bin Laden was a visionary thinker and set several plots underway against the United States, including attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as well as an attack on the US Cole in Aden harbor in Yemen.

Osama’s chief strategist and organizer of the attacks on the USA, which bin Laden obsessively blamed along with Israel & Shi’ites for all the ills of the Islamic world, was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was a gifted organizer and enlisted an Egyptian engineer named Mohammed Atta as spearhead of Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, which KSM’s nephew Ramzi Yousef had severely damaged in 1993 more or less outside the Al Qaeda organization.

But Osama’s preoccupation, one might say obsession, with overthrowing the Saudis or setting them against what he regarded as their American puppet master led to the WTC operation being staffed mainly by 15 young “martyrs” carrying Saudi passports. Of those fifteen, at least 10 were of Yemeni origin by heritage or birth, like Osama bin Laden. [Wright, pp. 304-315]

After the astounding success of the World Trade Center attack, Al Qaeda leapfrogged over the secular leftist Arab organizations such as the PLO and Ba’ath Parties as the most effective opponent of western hegemony over the Middle East. Because he had actually attacked and succeeded, he was an immediate icon. Yet as an underground organization, Al Qaeda had no home address other than Afghani caves and its membership there was decimated immediately after 9/11 with the US B-52 attacks on Tora Bora. [Wright, p. 371] Bin Laden was one of the few survivors as was Zawahiri, and lives a furtive medieval existence now in Pakistan’s Tribal Territories. He apologized to the ruling Taliban for inciting the American invasion just before they themselves were violently removed from power in Afghanistan.

With 9/11 and the Pentagon attacks, America’s sense of itself felt violated, but its foreign policy had lashed out in a 20th century military-first manner. Although G. W. Bush made the immediately politically popular responses, only his invasion of Afghanistan had broad long-lasting international support. And despite Clinton’s pulling off a Bosnian war without UN sanctions, Iraq was a harder sell and only a few NATO allies supported the attack on Saddam, which was largely discredited after the lack of WMD and nuclear bomb development materials.

Soon after the 9/11 attacks, the world was to later discover the mushrooming of other underground franchises more or less spontaneously in various Arab countries, particularly ones like Egypt where normal political participation is denied to the Muslim Brotherhood, the main political party. In the past, just belonging to a formally banned party like the Brotherhood registered one’s Islamic cred, so to speak. But now it appeared in Egypt, a sort of tectonic shift which formerly made Brotherhood membership a symbolic protest against secularism was now deemed somehow insufficient for full alignment with one’s religious beliefs. As Albert Hourani noted in his epilogue: “As a political movement, the [Egyptian] Brothers were more like a nationalist movement than Mahdism or Wahhabism: their object was to generate popular energy in order to seize power rather than to restore the rule of Islamic virtue. [Hourani, p. 360]

In addition, corner-grocery terrorist cells were formed of Muslim expatriates living in Europe, sometimes highly-educated skilled Arabs like Mohammed Atta who were underemployed or without any job whatsoever. Arab and Pakistani students in Germany and other generous amnesty countries were also invited to join cells which sought “jihad” to mimic the 9/11 attacks in a scaled-down manner. Mosques in France, the UK and Germany also were recruiting grounds. [Wright, 306-07]

Other acts of planned terror by Al Qaeda and its clones have been nipped in the bud by good police and intelligence work in the US and Europe. [Thiessen, pp. 409-437 Appendices II, III] In Europe, horrific “successful” acts of indiscriminate terror in London and Madrid have often been on symbolic anniversaries of previous acts of terror, an Al-Qaeda trademark even if Al Qaeda had no hand in organizing the mass murders.

Although the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Al Qaeda’s virtual physical neutralization in neighboring Waziristan have largely shut down the operational aggressive function of Al Qaeda itself, the absence of any successful attacks on the United States since 9/11 does not mean that there is not a continuing threat, as the capture of the unsuccessful underwear bomber in Detroit on Christmas, 2009, demonstrated. As a sort of Johnny Appleseed of death, Osama bin Laden still influences American political, military, and symbolic values. [And after his death, this snake's poison is still lethal.]

The overarching problem that the current international deadlock in the Middle East presents is the inability of any Islamic political party to succeed on a trans-national basis without employing the extraordinary religious militancy peculiar to the region. Coupled with this is an American policy of gradual disengagement as practiced by the Obama administration. Morocco, Kuwait, and Jordan do allow Egyptian Brotherhood sister parties to function openly as loyal opposition. Otherwise, with the exception of the diplomatically-isolated enclave of Gaza, where the Egyptian Brotherhood’s sister party, Hamas, exerts a tyrannical grip and an uncompromising stance vis-à-vis Israel, all parties affiliated with or sharing the shar’ia state goals of the Egyptian Brotherhood have been vigorously suppressed, and in Algeria at the cost of a long bloody civil conflict after the secular government overturned an Islamic victory at the polls.

American foreign policy may be waning in influence over the region’s politics compared to what it had under previous administrations such as Clinton, Carter, Reagan and the two Bushes. As long as Mubarak is in charge in Egypt and the Saudis remain in a feudal monarchy, there is little hope for movement unless another completely unexpected turn of events occurs. If Iran is any prologue, a “White Revolution” attempting broad reforms might turn bloody at the first sign of weakness in the leadership of either country. And as Iran demonstrated, the US would be relatively helpless at crisis management in such a situation.

Useful Books I would suggest are:
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright
Muslim Extremism in Egypt, Gilles Kepel
Arabia’s Frontiers, John C. Wilkinson
Islam and Revolution in the Middle East, Henry Munson, Jr.
Holy Wars: The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism, Dilip Hiro
The Cohesion of Saudi Arabia, Christine Moss Helms
Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam Rudolph Peters
The Arab Predicament Fouad Ajami
The Dream Palace of the Arabs Fouad Ajami
Courting Disaster Marc A. Thiessen
The Shaping of the Modern Middle East, Bernard Lewis
Islam, the View From the Edge, Richard W. Bulliet
Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1789-1939, Albert Hourani

Robert Kagan on American Decline as Foreign Hegemon

Robert Kagan wrote Balkan Ghosts and I have read parts of several other of his books on American Exceptionalism.

The link above is to an article in the WSJ which scared Obungler so much that when he heard that Kagan was Mitt's foreign policy advisor, he pissed himself and rewrote the SOTU address. It's in the link and shows once again how The FIRST COWARD is a trembling shadow of GWB, who at least had the stones to call for a surge. No stones in the First Coward.

California Slides into Bankruptcy AKA California's Demographic Revolution

Heather MacDonald has a very long article in City Journal on the inevitable debacle of California's sad suicidal ending as a functioning polity.

Certain policies may help avoid a future of growing income inequality and social decline. One is to stop the emigration of California’s best talent. The state should meet the demand for college-educated workers by making itself attractive to the highly educated, not by trying to dragoon all students into college. California cannot hope to retain the entrepreneurs it still has and to attract others unless it radically revamps its business climate and lowers its taxes (a course made more difficult, though, by the demands on government social services imposed by the growing Hispanic population). Congress could help California stay globally competitive by letting foreign-born Ph.D. students in science and technology automatically obtain green cards to work in the U.S. after completing their degrees.

California should also create a robust vocational-education system. The fashionable prejudice against vocational education will end up bankrupting the school and college systems by forcing students into academically oriented classrooms that hold no interest for them and for which they are not qualified. Further, the blue-collar skilled trades are desperate for workers and pay much better than many a service-sector job (see “Wanted: Blue-Collar Workers,” Autumn 2011). Only 55 percent of Hispanic male students graduated from California high schools in 2007, reports the California Dropout Research Project; many of the dropouts would undoubtedly have welcomed the opportunity to learn a trade. At the same time, California must stop decimating what remains of its manufacturing sector with business-killing regulations (see “The Long Stall,” Autumn 2011).

And Washington should institute an immigration pause for low-skilled immigrants. In 1970, the average Southern California Latino spoke only English and had assimilated to Anglo culture, according to the Pepperdine study. Since then, even though California’s Hispanic population has expanded outside its traditional enclaves and spread across the state and nation, the acculturation process has slowed. In 1988, when accountant and entrepreneur Martha de la Torre began El Clasificado, a free Spanish classified-advertising newspaper, she assumed that the demand for Spanish-language publications would last only a few decades; instead, the market for El Clasificado has grown far beyond its original base in Los Angeles, even as similar English-language publications have gone bankrupt. “I’m surprised by how people in some communities try not to change,” she observes. Teachers, service employees, police officers, and ordinary private-sector workers report that many California residents now expect to be addressed in Spanish.

The reason for this assimilation reversal is our de facto open-borders policy, argues Michael Saragosa, a public-relations consultant who oversaw Latino outreach for Meg Whitman’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign. “We need to allow people who are already here to grow into the American Dream over generations,” he says. “That can’t happen when they have a steady flow of people behind them.” Illegal immigration, which did not drop in California during the recession, should be reduced, and legal immigration should be reoriented toward high-skilled immigrants rather than the family members of existing immigrants.

My own experiences with the Mexican & Venezuelan "economies" taught me that the first thing a Latino or Hispanic acquires when climbing the socio-economic ladder are the traditional hidalgo avoidance of manual labor. Of course, there are always exceptions to this rule, but California's ceaseless lurch toward statist socialism will only increase the percentage of sinecures that an expanding state govt. will provide, and that on a proportional basis.

Heather has a solid article, but she overlooks some of those eternal verities that don't disappear over mere decades in historical evolution.

Super Bowl Half Time show & ads = "Mourning in America?"

Richard Spencer in Altright has a good piece on Clint Eastwood's ad for Chrysler. Worth a read. Here's the punch line:

In 1984, the Reagan-Bush election team announced that it was “Morning in America.” Socionomically speaking, for the GOP middle-class base, this meant that run-away inflation was over; the Dow Jones was in a secular bull market; companies were hiring; and Americans could feel proud again.

“Half Time” is something like “Mourning in America.” In terms of the Kübler-Ross Stages of Grief” schema, it suggests that, collectively, Americans are somewhere between Depression and Denial.

Chrysler must have recognized that it couldn’t advertise its cars with a “We’re #1!” rock anthem. It must be true to the time. But “Half Time” is, nevertheless, a world of illusions and wishful thinking. A nation-state doesn’t “come back” from public and private indebtedness amounting to 350 percent of GDP—from a financial oligarchy bent on stripping the country bare—from a demographic transformation into a Third World nation—and more. To reformulate F. Scott Fitzgerald, there will be no second half for America. The sooner the Founding stock comes to grips with this fact—and begins charting a different destiny—the better.

SNL also parodied the ad, ending it with the line from Grand Torino: "Get off my lawn!"

In the previous text of Spencer's article which mentions Highland Park, a former prestigious suburb of Detroit, the full meaning of Eastwood's words in the flick are revealed.
UPDATE National Review's Rich Lowry has an entire article on the dishonesty of the Chrysler ad and Obama's deceptive and manipulative policies to deceive a gullible public through a compliant media:

...Congress never approved the bailouts. Given the option to do so explicitly, it declined. The Bush and Obama administrations acted on their own, diverting TARP funds to Detroit regardless of the letter of the law. In Eastwood’s telling, a legally dubious act of executive highhandedness qualifies as patriotic collective action.

By this standard, any initiative of government must be a stirring exercise in people’s power. Remember when we all pulled together to back the solar-panel maker Solyndra to the tune of $500 million? Right now, we are all pulling together to try to force Catholic institutions to pay for contraceptives and morning-after abortifacients for their employees. See? There’s nothing we can’t do — together.

What Chrysler and GM desperately needed in their extremity was to go through Chapter 11 reorganization to pare down wages and benefits, shed uneconomical dealerships, and ditch unnecessary brands. When the government got its hooks in them, it politicized this process and threw some $80 billion at the companies. Since we’ll never get an estimated $23 billion back, we all must be “pulling together” behind Detroit still.

Amid all the patriotic piety, Eastwood neglects to mention that Chrysler is now 58.5 percent owned by Fiat, an Italian company. The heart-tugging images of Turin, Italy, apparently were left on the cutting-room floor.

Syria Approaches a Death Spiral into Assad's Black Hole

Syris is a beautiful country which I've visited several times, most recently in the mid-90s. When I was an Entry-Strategy Exec for Amoco, the Syrian Oil Minister turned up the volume on the TV and began to whisper to me how to identify the various kinds of secret police, a black art necessary to aficionados living in Damascus, one of the oldest and nastiest cities in the world.

The Economist has a good article on the complexities of the internal and foreign position of the many minorities threatened by the predominantly Sunni majority:

Most independent observers in Damascus believe that indeed, in the short term, the Syrian regime’s savage offensive may succeed in containing most forms of armed resistance. But if Deraa is any indication, Mr Assad has little chance of long-term survival. As in a vampire film, citizens go through the motions of daily life, fearful of contact with officials. In the eyes of most, the government is totally discredited, at best an evil to be suffered. The cold fury that clearly burns in many homes, linked now in many hearts to religious fervour, may flare at any time.

Even with the army’s offensive at its peak, flash protests are frequently breaking out across Syria, including in the security-infested heart of Damascus. Over a recent weekend, protesters staged some 400 separate demonstrations. Israel’s military-intelligence chief reported in a recent public briefing that only a third of conscripts answered the latest call-up for Syria’s compulsory military service. He also cited intelligence of cracks in Syria’s command structure, with officers speaking of the need to replace Mr Assad and his clan.

This may be disinformation, designed to dismay Israel’s enemy, Iran. But in economic terms Syria is pitching into a deepening crisis. The central bank’s reserves are believed to have topped $20 billion before the uprising. Since then they are thought to have fallen by as much as two-thirds. Syria’s currency has slipped by nearly 50% in the past few weeks, stoking already fierce inflation. Power cuts and fuel shortages are common, and many of the country’s factories have closed. The tourist industry is all but dead. Syria’s modest oil exports, the staple of government revenue, have virtually dried up.

Many Syrians are convinced that, eventually, Mr Assad will go. What worries them is how. Few expect the opposition to seize Russia’s bait and engage in talks with the regime. Nor do they see Mr Assad retiring willingly. On the other hand, few expect much help from the outside world either. Those who can are leaving the country. Those who cannot are waiting, resigned to their fate.

The problem with Syria is that as long as the bloodbath goes on, the ultimate butcher's bill will lengthen when, as in Iraq, the final toting up after a majority victory eventually takes place and mass murders [no outsider will intervene as in Iraq] ensue.

In 1958 the rioters in Baghdad dragged the King and the Prime Minister's bodies through the street and in the end, all that were left were fingers and other torn flesh. Assad may try to escape, but eventually this London-trained optometrist may meet a similar fate. And from what events in Syria seem to predict, he will have richly deserved it.

Santorum an Iron Bar in Mitt's House of Cards?

The Economist thinks so. Could Rick's strength in the Middle West impede Romney's relentless march to a nomination in November in Tampa?

Murray's New Book Irks Economist Leftist

The Economist has been slowly lurching leftward over the last decade or so. I believe this article in Lexington was written by Washington correspondent Ip. Yes that's his name.

Read the final section to see how the Marxist Ip does a buzz-kill on any rational appreciation of Murray's book or those who believe that the white majority in America have ruined the country by their church-going, tax-paying, patriotic ways. Here's the first few paras which are sane enough---Ip goes off the rails in the last section on noblesse oblige.

JUST because he belongs to it himself does not make Newt Gingrich wrong when he grumbles that America is run by an out-of-touch elite. If you want evidence, the data can now be found in a book published this week by Charles Murray, the co-author in 1994 of “The Bell Curve”, which became controversial for positing a link between race and intelligence. That controversy should not deter you. “Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010” brims with ideas about what ails America.

David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, thinks it will be the most important book this year on American society. And even if you do not buy all Mr Murray’s ideas about what ails America, you will learn much about what conservatives think ails America, a subject no less fascinating. Though it does not set out to do so, this book brings together four themes heard endlessly on the Republican campaign trail. They are the cultural divide between elite values and mainstream values (a favourite of the tea-partiers); the case for religion and family values (think Rick Santorum); American exceptionalism (all the candidates); and (a favourite of Mitt Romney’s) the danger of America becoming a European welfare state.

Mr Murray starts by lamenting the isolation of a new upper class, which he defines as the most successful 5% of adults (plus their spouses) working in managerial positions, the professions or the senior media. These people are not only rich but also exceptionally clever, because America has become expert at sending its brightest to the same elite universities, where they intermarry and confer on their offspring not just wealth but also a cognitive advantage that gives this class terrific staying power.

This new elite is not just a breed apart. It lives apart, in bubbles such as Manhattan south of 96th Street (where the proportion of adults with college degrees rose from 16% in 1960 to 60% in 2000) and a small number of “SuperZips”, neighbourhoods where wealth and educational attainment are highly concentrated. These neighbourhoods are whiter and more Asian than the rest of America. They have less crime and more stable families. They are not, pace Mr Gingrich, necessarily “liberal”: plenty of SuperZips voted Republican in 2004. But they are indeed out of touch.

In the 19th century Alexis de Tocqueville marvelled that in America the opulent did not stand aloof from the people. That, says Mr Murray, is no longer true. He assumes (perhaps too blithely) that this class runs America, but makes decisions on the basis of atypical lives. A great cultural gap separates the elite from other Americans. They seldom watch “Oprah” or “Judge Judy” all the way through. In fact they do not watch much television at all. They eat in restaurants, but not often at Applebee’s, Denny’s or Waffle House, chains that cater to the common taste. They may take The Economist, with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and perhaps the New Yorker or Rolling Stone. They drink wine and boutique beers (and can discuss them expertly) but only in moderation, and they hardly ever smoke cigarettes.

A lot of American commentary about the elite is suffused with a creepy resentment (Mr Gingrich), or exercised by inequality (Occupy Wall Street) or “fairness” (Barack Obama). In contrast, Mr Murray has nothing against this class of good parents and good neighbours. He just wants it to know and care more about the rest of America. And instead of handing over more of its money, he would like it to teach the rest of America its values.

Murray's book is especially timely because he writes about the floundering white majority when it has lost much confidence---largely because of the illegal usurpation of the legislative functions from Congress to the White House [the "czars" and proliferation of "administrative laws" which are frankly risible] and by rogue courts below the Supreme Court such as the zany 9th Circus Court.

9th Circus [pun intended] Court overturns CA voters

The zany moonbats on California's 9th Circus Court have overturned Proposition 8, a CA referendum on same-sex marriages. Once again, the rights of the majority have been challenged by an activist court, whose living fossil Carter-appointee Reinhardt wrote, in order to keep the gay Demonrats happy.

When referenda and other direct-action mechanisms for voters to express their will over corrupt legislatures were instituted back in the beginning of the 20th century, no one dreamed that a band of crazy ueber-left judicial freaks, led in CA by a creep whose private porn site was accidentally included in his online website, would busily overturn the will of the people through chicanery and sick-twisted BS.

California has become the joke of the country, as sane people stream out of the so-called "Golden State" to more sane locations where business isn't persecuted by left-wing taxaholics who seek to impose horrific obstacles to thwart the private sector. I can remember when CA was the land of the future. Now it has become the land of the futile.

Brilliant Eccentric Historian Norman Davies on "Half-Forgotten Europe"

Norman Davies lost an historian's chair at Stanford due to his over enthusiasm for Poland, which he exalted to the point of deeply discounting their anti-Semitism during World War II.

Davies' thick tome on Europe, named appropriately Europe is a delightful excursion through the dozens of dusty corridors of that cramped little continent. It is one of my favorite reading materials for when I am at stool. Here is a bit of the excellent review of Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe

Sometimes the most compelling history is the kind that falls between the cracks of the chronicles and subverts fondly-held foundational myths. The ‘official’ history of Europe is variegated enough to give any number of historians lifetimes of employment, but now the 72 year old Slavonic specialist Davies has produced fifteen case studies dating from the fifth to the twentieth centuries to suggest that a great deal of what we take for granted about Europe’s past is “narrative colonization” which ought to be unlearned. He ends with a short chapter, “How states die”, which seeks to formulate “a typology of vanished kingdoms”.

This all makes for an engrossing, evocative and original contribution to European historiography. There will be few who will not unearth some new insight to challenge conventional, convenient versions of events—the flattering histories which Napoleon famously dismissed as “a fable agreed upon”. The “Europe of a hundred flags” wished for by the Breton nationalist Yann Fouéré is more like a Europe of a thousand flags. “The past is not only a foreign country that we half-knew existed” Davies observes—“it is hiding another concealed country behind it, and behind that one, another, and another, like a set of Russian dolls”.

Davies is a melancholic and romantic, and his intellectual interests have been influenced by his Welshness, chapel-going and early encounters with Heraclitus and Gibbon. He also possesses a Polonism so pronounced that he has (unjustly) been accused of understating historical Polish anti-Semitism and downplaying Jewish suffering during World War Two. This may have cost him a tenured position at Stanford in 1986, something he clearly still broods upon, despite claiming on his (typo-full) website that

. . . he remembers the episode stoically—as evidence of academic small-mindedness and of [the] fate awaiting anyone who confronts entrenched opinions and prejudices.

It cannot have helped that he is strongly anti-communist. His website entry on his 2006 book Europe at War explains his view that communism was the moral equivalent of nazism:

[T]he war in Europe was dominated by two evil monsters, not by one . . . The liberators of Auschwitz were servants of a regime that ran still larger concentration camps than those they liberated . . . The outcome of the [war] was at best ambiguous. The victory of the West was only partial, its moral reputation was severely tarnished and, for the greater part of the continent of Europe, ‘liberation’ was only the beginning of more than fifty years of further totalitarian oppression.

The most recent of his shipwrecks of history is the Soviet Union itself. There were many factors responsible for the USSR’s dissolution, but the problems were fundamental:

[T]he Soviet system was based on extreme force and extreme fraud. Practically everything that Lenin and the Leninists did was accompanied by killing; practically everything they said was based on half-baked theories, a total lack of integrity and bare-faced lies.

He maintains that Gorbachev was probably taken by surprise by the events he expedited—and observes that glasnost, which was invariably rendered in the Western press as “openness”, actually means “publicity”. The subsequent inglorious events traumatized all Russians, and even now feed nationalistic dislike of the oligarchs and the Balt, Turkic, and Chechen separatists of Russia’s near abroad—and of course America. Putin’s rhetoric about the alleged glories of the USSR is coloured by “a strong sense of bafflement” and “pangs of corporate guilt” that he and other insiders did not forestall this degrading dissolution

Davies' account of the USSR closely follows Conquest, Pipes, Solzhenitsyn, Martin Amis, and other brave opponents of the Leftist Leviathan threatening civilization even to this day.

UPDATE Here is a Wall Street Journal article three weeks later on Davies' latest chef d'oeuvre,

Nocera of NYT Blasts Obama & Tree-Huggers on Keystone

Imbecility has rarely been more clearly demonstrated than by a certain Michael Brune, ExecDir of the Sierra Club who intones:

“The effort to stop Keystone is part of a broader effort to stop the expansion of the tar sands,” Brune said. “It is based on choking off the ability to find markets for tar sands oil.”

Nocera is not sparing in his condemnation of Brune's utter incomprehension of any goals or issues outside his tiny cosseted POV buttressed by retarded males and a bunch of little old ladies in tennis shoes:

This is a ludicrous goal. If it were to succeed, it would be deeply damaging to the national interest of both Canada and the United States. But it has no chance of succeeding. Energy is the single most important industry in Canada. Three-quarters of the Canadian public agree with the Harper government’s diversification strategy. China’s “thirst” for oil is hardly going to be deterred by the Sierra Club. And the Harper government views the continued development of the tar sands as a national strategic priority.

Thus, at least one country in North America understands where its national interests lie. Too bad it’s not us.

Read the entire article to understand how the Obungler is a cowardly misfit in the Oval Office, especially on energy issues. Solyndra isn't the only criminal act perpetrated against the American economy. The Keystone Debacle is an equally heinous crime against the American taxpayer and the American economy.

New England loses.....again!!!

Contemptible insufferable twerp Eli Manning and his crew of despicable dolts beat the New England Patriots after Wes Welker turned briefly into Jermichael Finley, the Packer who set a new Lambeau record for ball-drops about a month ago.

Tom Brady played ALMOST as well as twerp Manning in the third and fourth, but the Pats couldn't recover THREE fumbles, or rather recovered one at the enemy's five yard line only to discover that Belichek's exquisite coaching skills allowed TWELVE men on the field, so the recovered fumble was erased. And that's the way this cursed game proceeded, with G-men miscues that the Pats refused to capitalize on.

As a long-suffering Packer fan whose second team is the Pats, I've seen both go down to the team with the most obnoxious fan base on the planet. There's always next year.....