Self- Promoter Gore in Clawing Your Way to the Nobel Peace Prize

Slate has a cute piece on the Nobel Peace Prize by Timothy Noah named "Clawing Your Way to the Nobel Peace Prize." Punch lines make fun of a lot of candidates, but the Goracle is the Crown Prince of Flatulence as he takes multiple hits:

It was looking very good for Al Gore. Then the opposition started rioting, and the judges snatched it away. That's the story of the 2000 presidential race, and if my hunch is correct that's going to be the story of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Noah overlooks the irony that once again, it may be Buddhist monks that present an obstacle to the Gorebot's Emmy/Oscar/Nobel Hat-Trick. Remember his lame excuses for his trip to the temple somewhere out west.

Is it Karma? Or is that a Hindu specialty? Noah does note an additional irony:

The smart money still says Gore will win, but what chance does a former vice president of the United States—one who, while more or less running environmental policy for President Clinton, yapped endlessly about the problem and sacrificed not a penny of political capital to help solve it—have against thousands of bald-headed guys waving empty bowls over their heads?

Gore is good at yapping, and at overselling, as his Emmy speech called his unseen network "the fastest growing in history" just like other amazing feats this ginormous multi-tasker has said that he pulled off, then retracted his statement that he pulled it off----stuff about information superhighways and being the inspiration for a novel/movie. Who can keep track?

I'll just take a flyer on Oprah at Oprah Winfrey—50/1. I'm sure the bookie is still taking bets.

Sino-Indian Border Issues Involve US

PINR has a long intelligence analysis of the manifold issues regarding the two largest-population nations in the world. The US is part of the bilateral relationship:

there are.....more fundamental reasons behind the recent chill in Sino-Indian relations. Apparently, the strategic consequences of India's economic resurgence coupled with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's offer in March 2005 to "help make India a major world power in the 21st century" have greatly bothered the Chinese. This offer, and the long-term India-U.S. defense cooperation framework and the July 2005 U.S.-India nuclear energy deal that followed soon after, have been compared by Chinese strategic analysts to "the strategic tilt" toward China executed by former U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1971 to contain the common Soviet threat. Claiming that these developments have "destabilizing" and "negative implications" for their country's future, China's India-watchers have started warning their government that Beijing "should not take India lightly any longer."

Chinese leaders were led to believe that China's growing economic and military might would eventually enable Beijing to re-establish the Sino-centric hierarchy of Asia's past as the U.S. saps its energies in fighting small wars in the Islamic world, Japan shrinks economically and demographically while India remains subdued by virtue of Beijing's "special relationships" with its South Asian neighbors. However, a number of "negative developments," from Beijing's perspective, since early 2005 -- the Indian and Japanese bids for permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, the formation of the East Asia Summit that includes India, Australia and New Zealand, the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal, India's ability to sustain a high economic growth rate of eight to nine percent and the strategic implications of India's "Look East" policy -- have apparently upset Chinese calculations.

Therefore, after a hiatus of a few years, Chinese media commentaries have resumed their criticism of Washington's "hegemonic ideas" and for drawing "India in as a tool for its global strategic pattern." Some Chinese analysts express serious reservations about U.S. efforts to draw "India in as a tool for its global strategic pattern," arguing that "India's DNA doesn't allow itself to become an ally subordinate to the U.S., like Japan or Britain." Nonetheless, most see India as a "future strategic competitor" that would be an active member of an anti-China grouping due to the structural power shifts in the international system and advocate putting together a comprehensive "contain India" strategy based on both economic tools (aid, trade, infrastructural development) and enhanced military cooperation with "pro-China" countries.

The Chinese still have a "Middle Kingdom" mentality which regards the rest of the world as stage props for its own expansion into the pre-eminent world power. And these props can be obstacles to that expansion:

The Chinese are concerned that the U.S.-India nuclear deal and related agreements would bring about a major shift in the power balance in South Asia that is currently tilted in China's favor. The recent strengthening of China's strategic presence in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar and overtures to the Maldives should, therefore, be seen against this backdrop. Despite protestations to the contrary from India and the United States that New Delhi is unwilling and unlikely to play the role of a closely aligned U.S. surrogate such as Japan or Britain, China's Asia strategy is based upon the premise that maritime powers such as the U.S., Japan, Australia, and India would eventually form an informal quadrilateral alliance to countervail continental China.

But despite these Risk Game geopolitics, the major issue between China and India is Tibet. Tibet is still resisting being Sinicized and Hu, the president, was hand-picked by Deng largely on the merits of Hu's performance in crushing the Tibetan revolt in the '80s.

The PINR briefs are occasional reminders that the world does not revolve around inside-the-DC-Beltway geopolitics, and that the US may be being distracted from some paramount issues by its concentration on the Middle East.

Ecrasez l'infame---BBC Gets Just Desserts

The BBC has evolved from the world's best overseas news organization to just another propaganda arm for post-modern gibberish and socialist tropes. Its reporting from the Middle East during the border strife between Israel and Hezbollah last summer was openly pro-Islamist and anti-Semitic, so scurrilous were the one-sided allegations and photo-shopped pictures the BBC put forward as "news." Now it is time for the collection of drones and ideologues to pay the piper:

The BBC is poised to cut at least 12 per cent of its workforce, with the brunt of more than 2,000 redundancies falling on factual programming, senior staff have been told.

The final tally of job losses, which will have to be approved by the BBC Trust, could approach 2,800, according to one person familiar with the situation.

Mark Thompson, the corporation’s director-general, is seeking cuts amounting to 6 per cent of its £3bn-plus annual budget over each of the next five years. A below-inflation licence fee settlement in January left him £2bn short of the funds he had sought for the period.

BBC executives are believed to have resisted calls to close one or more services, such as BBC Three, and opted instead for cuts within existing services. The BBC employs 23,000, of whom 18,000 work in its core public service broadcasting activities rather than BBC Worldwide or the World Service.

Its factual output, which ranges from flagship programmes such as Planet Earth and Panorama to populist output such as Top Gear and Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, is understood to be particularly hard hit by the proposed cuts.

A BBC spokesman did not return calls for comment. Mr Thompson is expected to put the plans to a meeting of the BBC Trust on Wednesday, October 17. The cuts would be a blow to morale at the BBC, which has suffered from the licence fee negotiations falling far short of Mr Thompson’s hopes and a succession of incidents undermining the broadcaster’s image as the benchmark of television probity.

Peter Fincham, the controller of BBC1, resigned last week over the publicity surrounding an independent documentary production. A clip of the Queen was misleadingly edited by an independent producer to make it appear that she had stormed out of a photography session at Buckingham Palace.

Other incidents included 10 occasions on which production staff falsified the identity of winners on phone-in programmes. Three senior producers have lost their jobs so far.

Mr Thompson already faces a growing tide of resentment from staff, led by middle-ranking managers, who are concerned at the management’s handling of the crises and are discussing strike action in protest against the cuts.

It is the second major cull of jobs in less than three years, with 3,780 staff cut in March 2005. Critics say Mr Thompson faces a challenge to convince the workforce of his desire to reduce the number of repeats and increase quality and originality while making economies of this magnitude.

A series of other measures being implented, including moving departments to the north- west of England, have also proved extremely unpopular.

Some prominent BBC journalists have spoken out against the proposed cuts, with Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman warning in August that such savings were “unsustainable”.

Ship them all up to Blackpool or perhaps Northumberland; the ones who refuse to go can be at the top of the list for early RIF.

Hopefully, the strike and non-compliance with transfer orders will be the dagger in the heart of this journalistic dragon, and the days of leftist agit-prop at the BBC may at last be ending.

PSYCHIC INCOME, UTOPIAN PATRIOTISM, AND THE INFANTILE NARCISSISM THAT FUELS THEM

Dr. Sanity remains one of the pre-eminent bloggers attempting to address the root causes of our rapidly descending political and social culture. Here late at night are some large blocs of her own thinking interlaced with appropriate observations by outside writers:
Michael Barone touches on the higher educational wasteland in trenchant irony.

I am old enough to remember when America's colleges and universities seemed to be the most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions in our society. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America's colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society.

Colleges and universities today almost universally have speech codes, which prohibit speech deemed hurtful by others, particularly those who are deemed to be minorities (including women, who are a majority on most campuses these days).

They are enforced unequally, so that no one gets punished when students take copies of conservative alternative campus newspapers left for free distribution and dump them in the trash. But should a conservative student call some female students "water buffaloes," he is sentenced to take sensitivity training -- the campus version of communist re-education camps. The message comes through loud and clear. Some kinds of speech are protected, while others are punished.

Where did speech codes come from? There certainly weren't many when I was in college or law school. So far as I can tell, they originated after college and university administrators began using racial quotas and preferences to admit students -- starting with blacks, now including Hispanics and perhaps others -- who did not meet ordinary standards. They were instituted, it seems, to prevent those students from feeling insulted and to free administrators from criticism for preferential treatment -- treatment that arguably violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (although Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the swing vote in the 2003 Supreme Court case on the subject, said they could continue another 25 years).

Racial quotas and preferences continue to be employed, as a recent article on UCLA makes clear, in spite of state laws forbidding them, and university administrators seem to derive much of their psychic income from their supposed generosity in employing them. This, even though evidence compiled by UCLA Professor Richard Sander suggests they produce worse educational outcomes for their intended beneficiaries and even though Justice Clarence Thomas makes a persuasive case in his book "My Grandfather's Son" that they cast a stigma of inferiority on them.

Of course, college and university administrators insist they aren't actually using quotas when in fact they are, as O'Connor's decisive opinion in 2003 invited them to do. The result is that one indispensable requirement for being a college or university administrator is intellectual dishonesty. You have to be willing to lie about what you consider one of your most important duties. So much for open inquiry and intellectual rigor.

This is not the only way the colleges and universities fall far short of what were once their standards. Sometime in the 1960s, they abandoned their role as advocates of American values -- critical advocates who tried to advance freedom and equality further than Americans had yet succeeded in doing -- and took on the role of adversaries of society.

The students who were exempted from serving their country during the Vietnam War condemned not themselves but their country, and many sought tenured positions in academe to undermine what they considered a militaristic, imperialist, racist, exploitative, sexist, homophobic -- the list of complaints grew as the years went on -- country.

English departments have been packed by deconstructionists who insist that Shakespeare is no better than rap music, and history departments with multiculturalists who insist that all societies are morally equal except our own, which is morally inferior.

Economics departments and the hard sciences have mostly resisted such deterioration. But when Lawrence Summers, first-class economist and president of Harvard, suggested that more men than women may have the capacity to be first-rate scientists -- which is what the hard data showed -- then, off with his head.

This regnant campus culture helps to explain why Columbia University, which bars ROTC from campus on the ground that the military bars open homosexuals from service, welcomed Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government publicly executes homosexuals. It explains why Hofstra's law school invites to speak on legal ethics Lynn Stewart, a lawyer convicted of aiding and abetting a terrorist client and sentenced to 28 months in jail.

What it doesn't explain is why the rest of society is willing to support such institutions by paying huge tuitions, providing tax exemptions and making generous gifts. Suppression of campus speech has been admirably documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The promotion of bogus scholarship and idea-free propagandizing has been admirably documented by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. It's too bad the rest of America is not paying more attention.

Then Richard Fernandez [AKA Wretchard] tackles fake patriotism:

Patriots of the first kind owe their loyalty to the nation they hope the current one may some day become. The second sort is prepared to accept and defend the nation that is. Both elements are normally present in the patriotism of an intelligent, well-educated person. Every nation is compounded of aspiration and reality; and that consequently we owe our duty to something that is partly here and partly to come. No country is so perfect that it can be liked entirely for what it is. But no man is so abstract that he can limit his loyalty only to what might become.

We exist in the present; so do our friends, neighbors, home, the family pet, etc. They all occupy the time we call Today. Actual love and loyalty have no field except Today. Without a minimum regard for what surrounds him Today it's hard for any person to claim a full role in his society. That minimum must include a commitment to keep the ordinary population safe and to "do no harm"....

Therein lies the problem in claiming that "real patriotism" consists exclusively in a commitment to dissent; in an obsession with rebellion and in a total rejection of the present. Those who go to that extreme forgo all love for the present for the exhilaration of allegiance to the country of their fantasy.

Then the good Doctor herself goes on to describe this fantasy:

What Barone and Fernandez are both writing about is the triumph of narcissism in our academic institutions and in our culture at large. The academics Barone writes about and Fernandez' "patriots" both live in a make-believe country of the mind where transient fame and cheap glory are easily purchased by self-righteously bashing of America and displaying a casual contempt for the values that this country and Western civilization stand for.

Such behavior is everywhere in our society. We see it in entertainment; we see it in politics. We even see it, as Thomas Sowell points out in another piece at Real Clear Politics, in the cheap shots taken by former presidents and presidential candidates; (and in military generals and lesser personnel that are trotted out by the political left to shore up their patriotic bona fides) that are self-serving and completely focused on temporary self-aggrandizement.

Those who engage in the behavior, spend a lot of time rationalizing it, too. That is why the most blatant examples are so sensitive to any comments about their patriotism.

Patriotism, for them, is always 100% compatible with their narcissistic sense of entitlement.

They bash America because they love America--or, rather, they love their own personal and private image of what America should be.

In their child-like minds, America should behave as they imagine "The Perfect Parent" does. Completely and without exception totally responsive to their childrens' needs at all times and in all circumstances. A parent who never allows anything bad ever to happen to anyone anywhere; who can control the weather; who can control the behavior of everyone threatening or dangerous; who is completely selfless and willing to endure any degree of abuse; and willing to suffer the daily temper tantrums of their narcissistically preoccupied children.

God help America if it doesn't live up to the demands of those children 24/7. That unleashes their destructive narcissistic rage. It also provokes the rabid sense of victimization and dramatic feelings of ill-usage that are always just below the surface.

neo-neocon in a recent post stated it this way:

To the child, the parent is omnipotent, and perfection is demanded and easily achievable. Everything that goes wrong must be the parent's fault, that much is clear; otherwise, the world would become a much more frightening place.

Because the truth is that if the parent is not omnipotent, or can't ever become perfect, then the child is exposed to truly frightening dangers that he/she is unequipped to handle. So it's far better to preserve the myth of parental omnipotence and perfection, and to get angry at a parent who, after all, (at least ordinarily, in the absence of major pathology) loves the child and is not about to retaliate harshly against that child.

The child knows the parent is strong enough to absorb the blow, so it's safe to direct the blame and the anger where it won't be dangerous to do so (if the US were really as bad as extreme leftists say, they'd all be in jail or worse). It's a win-win situation for the child, who gets to "vent," and to feel that the world isn't such a dangerous place, knowing the parent will not strike back and harm the child.

I'm not saying leftists--or those liberals who join the "blame America first, often, loudly, and last" chorus--are children. They are not. But in their relationship to their own government they seem to be acting out a similar dynamic.

The pursuit of these infantile fantasies provides a constant stream of psychic income needed to sustain their dysfunctional and narcissistic behavior.

You regularly see Hollywood elites, for example, patting themselves on the back for the brave, valiant behavior of standing up against BushHitler, even as they snuggle up to real despots and tyrants, engaged in real oppression and consolidation of power (e.g., Hugo Chavez for instance).

You can also see the pursuit of this cheap psychic income in the sneering contempt they display toward those who are willing to defend freedom in the real world--instead of the fantasyland that exists only in the windmills of the leftist mind.

Meanwhile, in that real world, real evil exists, as well as real threats to freedom and human dignity. People are being killed every day pursuing the freedom of speech that the likes of Lee Bollinger bravely extends to their murderers. People are being slaughtered and oppressed for even desiring freedom and democracy and the right to pursue their own individual happiness.

Standing up against those real world villians, though, is far too frightening for the narcissistically preoccupied academics and utopian patriots (why, they might get hurt! And they want to make sure they stand on the correct side of history, after all).

It is much much easier to bask in the cheap glory; and to keep on raking in all that feel-good psychic income from their fantasy world; all the while ignoring, denigrating, or mocking anyone who possesses the real courage to stand up and defend the values of America with their lives and their honor.

As Wretchards notes, "A person who loves only his vision of the future can only love himself."

But that is exactly the point of all these utopian and patriotic fantasies, isn't it? To have a never-ending source of psychic income with which to buy self-esteem futures.

Fox and the Chicken Coop: Narcokleptocrat calls US "Racist"

The silly second-rate ex-President of Mexico, one of the failed nation-states which rivals Zimbabwe in its economic acumen, has called those opposing the wave of dispossessed criminals fleeing his mis-managed country "racists."

What does he call his own country, which treats Guatemalans trying to cross the southern border of his failed kleptocracy who are systematically robbed, raped, and thrown back over the border by the criminals subsisting on these poor folks [the Mexican "Border Police."]

I guess Fox is in New York to manage his bank accounts from the criminal graft and corruption that is the rule among Mexico's chiefs-of-what-you-might-call-a-state.

The misrule and corruption in his own narco-state is the reason so many of its citizens flee elsewhere to avoid unemployment and in some cases starvation.

Now we know what it feels like to be lectured to by a real fake president, not a fake fake-president like Ahmedinejad.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali PNG'd by Dutch Government

Anyone familiar with the history of occupied Europe during World War II knows thatAnne Frank was hardly the only Jew turned in by Dutch snitches and sent to an early doom in the death camps. Indeed, a recent Financial Times article [sorry, no link] outlined the deep difference between Denmark, which managed to protect or export to Sweden nearly all its Jews in hiding from Nazi extermination squads, and the Netherlands, which had the worst record, worse even than occupied France, in protecting Jews in hiding.

Anne Applebaum wrote the magisterial Pulitzer-winning study Gulag, a tome that should be made mandatory reading by every education system in the West.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now safe stateside, in a country which does protect First Amendment rights of Free Speech much more than the perfidious Dutch apparently do. But the href="http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/johann_hari/article2496657.ece">path toward cowardly appeasement of violent Islamic reactionaries is not solely a Dutch phenomenon.

The craven soft Euro-sissies appear to have never met an Islamist before which they did not cringe.

Jimmy Carter: The Perfect Fool?

In his relentless pursuit of making himself a completely obnoxious media whore, Jimmy Carter may have reached a new level of nincompoopery never before attained by an ex-US president. From The New Republic:

The ex-president wanted to visit a refugee camp in South Darfur, according to the Associated Pres, "but the United Nations mission decided that such a visit would be too dangerous. Carter than flew to North Darfur where he was supposed to meet with other refugees. None showed up. Maybe they didn't know who Carter was...or Tutu. They certainly did not know who Richard Branson was or Graca Machel, Nelson Mandela's wife. African refugees ordinarily don't know the names of celebrities.

What did the celebritard Jimmy then proceed to do as his august international persona was dissed by non-recognition?

A different tour was mobilized for Carter and his comrades, called "The Elders." But that also ran into trouble. Still pursuing frightened refugees, Carter was stopped by Sudanese security officers, including their local chief, Omar, who shouted, "You can't go -- it's not on the program."

Carter shouted back: "We're going to anyway. You don't have the power to stop me." But the officer did have the power to stop him, and he did not go.

So mini-me had his media showtime thwarted by local Sudanese government officials, and then proceeded to render his imperial-sounding judgment on the whole affair:

Hobbled on his visit, Carter rendered his judgment on the situation nonetheless. It is not genocide, he announced. It's just a crime against humanity. These are the differences that count.

Sounds like John-boy Edwards has a competitor for compleat Phoney-of-the-Century.

Fourth Estate Filler is Anti-News, or "Fark."

Slate has an article about a book by Drew Curtis worth reading. The reason I'm blogging on this is that I just was reading a New Yorker article on Jena by Steve Coll, best known for his Pulitzer book "Ghost Wars" on Afghanistan, in which Coll quotes "one recent study" as predicting that one out of three black males will end up doing "jail time" without identifying the study or comparing it with other studies.

This shoddy sloppy lazy exuse for journalism prevails whenever a writer intends to startle rather than inform. Curtis has a site called Fark.com which has hundreds of news items that serve as space fillers in print or electronic media.

Due to its high percentage of nutty inhabitants and the presence of Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter, perhaps, Florida has its own section on Curtis's web-site. Due to lightning, hurricanes, exotic wildlife [Florida is the only place on the planet where crocodiles and alligators co-habit the same environment, e.g.], sinkholes, not to mention eccentric human behavior and a high media profile, the Sunshine State appears to have as much or more "fake news" as California with its earthquakes, forest fires, Hollyweird antics, etc.

This constant barrage of bizarre studies, polls, questionaires, and academic or scientific "opinion" about upcoming disasters may be part of what Bill O'Reilly is talking about, or one aspect of it, when he rants and rails against the "corrupt media."

O'Reilly has a point that much of the MSM is rotten, and The New Yorker's just the highbrow end of a journalistic community unable to police itself or inform the public in an honest straightforward fashion.

So it employs what Drew Curtis calls "fark."

What is the Nanny State Anyway?

The Moderate Voice has a nice little summary of just what the nanny-state might entail as Oprah prepares a cottony cocoon for us all. Click on the link for all the answers to questions you might not even have had.

German Courts Adopt Sharia Exceptionalism, Is Canada Next

There is a very interesting piece in today's Independent, a British newspaper normally leaning toward multicultural socialist tropes, but it appears that the sensile British are now beginning to understand that things may be getting out of hand on the Continent.

Dr. Sanity has an interesting week-end piece on how compliant Western jurists are allowing barbarous human-rights atrocities to go unpunished because of some sort of Muslim "exceptionalism" in Europe and, if it can be believed, on the way to being adopted in Canada Here is Dr. Sanity's eminently sober and sane take on how the new dispensation of Islamic exceptionalism will fit into the already brokered sociopolitical sacred cows regarded as 'exempt" from normal legal and cultural restraints because of past oppression or victimhood or other factor. When Dr. Sanity uses the term "socialists," she refers to the paramount position of post-modern exigencies in the humanities and "helping-professions" best exemplified in the nannification or Oprahfication of our sociatal norms and mores. With Dr. Phil as the Enforcer of these behavioral paradigms:

Ever wonder how the socialists decide which of their special victims' groups will prevail when there is a conflict between them?

We see a hint of how their food chain is constructed today in this [Independent article linked above] by Johann Hari:

Do you believe in the rights of women, or do you believe in multiculturalism? A series of verdicts in the German courts in the past month, have shown with hot, hard logic that you can't back both. You have to choose....

In Germany today, Muslim women have been reduced to third-class citizens stripped of core legal protections - because of the doctrine of multiculturalism, which says a society should be divided into separate cultures with different norms according to ethnic origin....

Indeed, in the name of this warm, welcoming multiculturalism, the German courts have explicitly compared Muslim women to the brain-damaged. The highest administrative court in North Rhine-Westphalia has agreed that Muslim parents have the "right" to forbid their daughter from going on a school trip unless she was accompanied by a male family member at all times. The judges said the girl was like "a partially mentally impaired person who, because of her disability, can only travel with a companion".As the Iranian author Azar Nafisi puts it: "I very much resent it when people - maybe with good intentions or from a progressive point of view - keep telling me, 'It's their culture' ... It's like saying the culture of Massachusetts is burning witches." She is horrified by the moves in Canada to introduce shariah courts to enforce family law for Muslims.

This application of 21st century socialist "justice" has been on the rise since the socialist remnants from the last century began to stage their comeback from a well-deserved near-extinction. This socialist revival and the strategies they are now using to achieve world domination has many important implications for humanity--not the least of which is described in the above article.

To understand their logic, we must examine the socialist food chain.

Other behaviors of the unrepentantly socialist dictators suggest that, while there are many victim groups, some groups are far more important than others. As the example above shows, the culture or religion's status as "victimized" allows (nay, it demands)the suppression of the various uppity victim classes within it (e.g., Women or Gays) who try to rise above their rightful place in the utopia.

From the perspective of the socialist utopian, what matters more than Women's rights or Gay Righs are the rights of a designated culture. The dogma of multiculturalism trumps the dogma of women's superiority. This is probably because for the socialist utopian, might makes right and the needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few--and the few better remember that fact, or else. In the socialist utopia, there is no room for individuality or personal preference; or tolerance for differences. You always must subsume yourself to the collective; and the bigger the collective, the more power victimization can be exploited.

For example, we know from experience that blacks, women and gays lose their cherished victim status if they dare to become Republicans; and, to a lesser extent, if they choose to be Christian (except for most Episcopalians, who have seen the secular light).

Being black trumps being a woman or gay (i.e., there is more "social justice" mileage to be squeezed out of the oppression of blacks, i.e., racism, than there is from the oppression of women (sexism) or even gays (homophobia). Just ask Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.

The oppression of Jews is completely ignored because of the animus the "enlightened" have toward Israel; and anti-semitism, which in past times would have had a ranking up close to the level of dark-skinned people (probably because those who founded the Jewish state were dedicated socialists--unfortunately, they soon realized that in real life, their ideology didn't work too well); but anti-semitism no longer is a compelling issue for the socialists. In fact, they are among its worse practitioners as socialism has spread throughout the Middle East.

So far, we have established that the culture (except for Western culture, which is uniquely evil and oppressive) is very high up on the food chain, and can eat and kill with impunity. Is there any group that trumps the culture?

Again, there are hints of how socialist logic deals with this. The needs of the nation will trump a protected/victim culture for the same reason that being an independent woman, black or gay person loses their victim status: they act independently of the socialist gestalt (i.e., they refuse to stay in their pre-determined place in the food chain and dare to be different).

Thus, Saddam the socialist Ba'athist could rightly gas the Kurds and no one payed much attention to it. Even genocide is acceptable to the socialist logician, who must always take into account the following factors: 1) which group is larger (oppressed nations or religions > cultures > sub-cultures > small groups, e.g., "Democrats", > individuals, e.g., blacks, women, and gays; 2) When there is a conflict among groups at the same level of the chain, then precedence is given to the "purer" victim--i.e., those who know their place in the chain, are willing to remain victims for all eternity, and take no actions to stop being victims.

Thus for example, the Palestinians' as a group (considered an oppressed nation for reasons that elude me) have such a high victimization quotient, they can freely and "justly" oppress or kill any members of their own society that are not considered "good" Palestinians, as well as anyone outside their society with impunity (i.e., Israelis). Because the Israelis have such a low quotient, they are not even permitted to kill in self-defense. The same dynamic occurs when Muslim extremists (the extremely oppressed variety of Muslim) kill other Muslims (just ordinary oppressed Muslims) ; or when they kill Christians; or when they kill just about anyone in their usual indiscriminant manner. But Americans who take extraordinary precautions in war as in peace not to kill innocent people are damned to hell when they attack even the extremist Muslims who repeatedly try to kill them and state their intent at regular intervals.

Islamic fanatics can behead and mutilate non-combatant men and women at will. Americans are prohibited from humiliating Islamic fanatics or even frightening the poor dears (it is called "torture") ; Moderate Islamics can prohibit Westerners living in Islamic societies from owning a Bible; and punish them severely if they do; but Americans are not permitted to show any disrespect, let alone spit on a Koran even in America.

Clearly, if you are NOT one of the designated victimized or oppressed cultures, nations, or groups, then you and your non-victim-designated members are at the bottom of the socialist food chain and anything bad that is done to you by those above you in the food chain must be your own damn fault. This includes those who are Western, American/Israeli, Caucasian, Republican, conservatives, Rich, Capitalist, Christian, male, heterosexual and so on down the chain.

Dr. Sanity has links to a book called "Postmodernism" by Stephen Hicks, which graphically describes the nihilistic attack on western cultural values being waged by professors, psychologists, entertainers and even some ultra-left politicians. Nietzsche called it the "Revolt of the Artistes" and said that the motivation for this "creative destruction" leading to a sort of nihilistic starting point for remaking civilization was "ressentiment."

Anyone who misses the contant refrain that class-warfare advocates insinuate into the US's political dialogue should listen more closely---it's called "ressentiment."

Muslims are the edge of the wedge to further advance the special status of victimized oppressed minorities [or majority, in the case of women] in the acrid political environment our academics, mass media, and cultural gurus are preaching and excoriating with the zeal of Savonarolas or Jonathan Edwards---only in a hyper-secular Anti-Bible indoctrination.

As the Hicks book elucidates, evidence for Socialism's historical failures are everywhere, which appears to motivate the creed's snake-oil salesmen even stronger.

What is Your Formula?

Danny Kahneman has the funniest, Richard Dawkins the most authoritarian [reminds me of a Catholic bishop], and Steve Pinker the most whimsical of the "formulas, equations, algorithms" of super-geniuses posted at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Following the article is a review by Marc D. Hauser of a book called On "Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion" by Jonathan Haidt. Dawkins is dismissed as too apodictic in his authoritarian pronunciamentos, but other critics claim Haidt pushes a belief-system religion too far as an alternative explanation to science, the true religion.

And so it goes....

The link is worth checking out just to see Kahneman's "The Secret of Regression to Mediocrity."

Musharraf and Bhutto Reach Agreement on Sharing Power

Pakistan may have averted a political crisis as Former PM Benazir Bhutto agreed to participate in a power-sharing agreement with Gen. Musharraf. This would stave off difficulties with religious parties and was strongly encouraged by Washington.

The agreement, announced by the Pakistani government and Ms. Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, provides an amnesty for politicians who served in Pakistan between 1988 and 1999, effectively clearing Ms. Bhutto of the corruption charges that forced her into exile eight years ago.

The deal takes some of the pressure off Gen. Musharraf ahead of a presidential election scheduled for Saturday, a vote that Ms. Bhutto had earlier threatened to rob of credibility by pulling her MPs from parliament.

It came after a day of frantic negotiations in Islamabad and in London, where Ms. Bhutto, a two-time former prime minister, held talks with key members of her party...
Benazir Bhutto has given her assent," said Railways Minister Sheikh Rashid, a confidant of Gen. Musharraf.

Although Gen. Musharraf was closer to gaining an ally, it was unclear yesterday whether the presidential election in the two national houses of parliament and four provincial assemblies will go ahead as planned, as the Supreme Court is hearing fresh challenges to the President seeking re-election while still head of the army.

The court is expected to rule today on whether to order the postponement of a vote that Gen. Musharraf, who came to power in a coup eight years ago, looks sure to win even without Ms. Bhutto's support. He will, however, benefit from Ms. Bhutto's backing ahead of a general election due in January.

Gen. Musharraf 's coalition is expected to fare badly because of anger over rising prices, mounting insecurity and resentment over military rule and an alliance with the United States.

For a short refresher on Pakistan's importance as a key ally of Washington, read this PINR Intelligence Report.

Saudi Women Undergo Harsher Restrictions

Saudi Arabia's Royal Family has had a rough time with liberating women from the stranglehold of Wahhabi Sunni male dominance in the harshest patriarchy in any advanced economic country in the world, with the possible exception of Shi'ite Iran, which recently executed by public hanging a sixteen-year old girl for "her sharp tongue," in the words of the Iranian judge.

Back in the '70s, while Political Officer at the US Embassy in Jidda in Saudi Arabia, I was sent by Ambassador Porter to investigate the Shi'ite presence in Eastern Province. While in Dhahran, I was invited to the home of Bandar bin Sultan, then Commander of a Fighter Wing in the SAAF flying F-5s [F-15s came later]. Amid hours of fascinating revelations during an eight-hour conversation after dinner, some of which had been unknown to even the CIA or State Dept, Prince Bandar described the difficulties facing women's education. The secularizing Royal Family faced strong opposition in even allowing girls to go to special female schools when Prince Fahd, later to become King, was Minister of Education in the late fifties and early sixties. Strict Wahhabi interpretation of the Sharia was against education for women. Bandar said that the opposition to the very idea of female education was so strong that all schoolbuses had their windows blacked out so that buses with girls going to the new female schools would not be stoned by irate religious conservatives. After much political and social turmoil, the idea of women's education gradually gained a foothold.

However, in the seventies, as the Kingdom was rapidly modernizing and many social reforms continued, the religious conservatives made a bargain with the Royal Family. The Ulema would drop objections to many modern innovations and social policies if they were given control over elementary education. Higher education would be under a separate ministry. However, the somewhat dated [end of 2003] article in Le Monde notes, another shift subsequently took place:

The shift occurred toward the end of the 1980s and the early ’90s, notably during the war to liberate Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion in 1991. A group of young women dared to take the wheel as a protest for the right to drive. Their audacity provoked the ultraconservatives to close ranks and denounce their behavior as scandalous and sinful. Fingers were pointed at the university for fostering such decadence. The women professors who had participated in the protests were dismissed; the university rector created a Department of Islamic Higher Studies and implemented the total segregation of the sexes. From then on, all male teachers taught their female students remotely, via closed-circuit television screens.

Actually, my understanding was that women had learned via closed-circuit when male professors were teaching since the inception of the female higher education. But that is a quibble and as King Fahd's health became weaker, his support of secular education for women waned as well:

In the absence of any secularizing interference from the government, the religious extremists were free to do as they pleased. One student noted the link between the political and religious powers that be. “When the former weakens, the second grows stronger.” Little by little, dogmatic rigor reached the point of absurdity. Abusive religious interference is the norm, even in the smallest details.

If there is one truism among all the Saudis I have met, it is their contempt and derision for the mutawaa, the universally disliked "religious police" who carry out the Ulema's increasingly onerous and frankly silly religious ukases. These are the moronic nitwits who kept a bunch of female students inside a burning school a while back because they deemed the girls not appropriately garbed to escape the flames in the view of some males who may have been scandalized. Several of the girls perished because of these imbecilic Pecksniffian prigs. This is the sort of religious lunacy prevalent in Iran also, in the Shi'ite version of Wahhabi puritanical hypertrophy.

The Saudi Royal Family now faces a population of young unemployed males due to the burgeoning baby boom in Saudi since the seventies, when a private census counted about seven million native-born Saudis. Now there are over twenty-five million and young men without jobs catch the religious bug easily, as religious universities will grant a degree for simply studying religious dogma and interpretation, with barely any secular skills necessary to graduate. These young men are eager to accomplish something, anything, and sneaking into Iraq or Afghanistan to become a martyr for Islam is better than being an unemployed drone.

So the Taliban in Afghanistan and AQ in training camps somewhere have a steady stream of Saudi males hoping to do something to make life meaningful, even if it means blowing oneself up in an act of "martyrdom" that takes many other lives with you.

So despite the harsh restrictions on Saudi women, they may live longer than their male counterparts.

Richardson Best of the Dem Candidates?

Bill Richardson has a very good interview by Charlie Gibson on ABC-TV news blog linked above. Although I tend toward the Conservative side of the political ledger, I like Bill because he is extremely smart, extremely likeable, and despite a tendency to commit gaffes, extremely competent.

I know Bill personally since marrying a woman he dated at Tufts and whom he helped get a job as a Legislative Assistant for Sen. Paul Sarbanes. Bill was an FSO then worked for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, one of the hardest and brainiest jobs to get in DC. When he went off to his native New Mexico to run for Congress, his fellow staffers laughed at him, or so he told me.

Marilyn & I gave a fund-raiser for Bill at our DC home over twenty years ago & Bill stayed on afterwards to talk in our back garden under a flowering magnolia, one of the most magnificent in the neighborhood of Wesley Heights. Bill was frank & candid when he told me that he wanted eventually to become a Senator from New Mexico. He also told me, during the era of the Cold War, that the single most important foreign threat to the USA was illegal immigration.

Well, Bill's career henceforward took him into some much more interesting areas than being a mere Senator from N.M. would have taken him. As UN Ambassador, Sec'y of Energy, and Governor of N.M., he's certainly poved himself a jack of all trades and a master diplomat.

Check out the link on his interview for a good reason why he should be the Dem VP candidate.

Don't Question Dhimmitude?

Democrats habitually see things as half-empty, believe the media because of their defective educations [lib perfessers indoctrinate Humanities students as a matter of a passing grade] and regard ambivalent situations through a lens of fear in the "Flight or Fight" reflex.

For twenty years, I worked for Democrats on and off and their reflexive retreat-gene kept asserting itself, until the only way they could win elections would be by flukes [Jimmy Carter over a bumbling Gerry Ford] or media fluff-piece selectiveness [Bill Clinton's draft-dodging overlooked, Ross Perot's zany paranoia unexamined, Billy Jeff's philandering uninvestigated.]

In this poll, 19% of self-identified Democrats believed the world would be better off were the US to lose the war in Iraq, and an astounding 20% of Democrats "don't know" if it would or wouldn't. That means that in this very random instance, forty percent of Democrats are simply unaware of the US as a bulwark of sanity against what will be an avalanche of terror and self-aggrandizing expansionist insanity among the very impressionable Middle East types. They see things in zero-sum terms and would regard a US defeat as a victory for Bin Laden and a justification for 911.

Why don't forty percent of Dems and over 20% of Independents recognize the danger to western civ were our oil supplies to fall under a tyrannical bunch of religious nutjobs? Could it be what Bill O'Reilly accurately calls a corrupt media which continues to encourage a witch hunt against a talk-radio host?

A corrupt media which when I was young, inveighed incessantly about the evils of Joe McCarthy and his Big Smear tactics and Blacklisting Hollyweirdos with connections to the Communist Party. But now this media and nutjob Democratic Senators are calling for Limbaugh's removal from Clear Channel. With customary inaccuracy, Dingy Harry Reid, a true coward and cut-and-runner who said the surge was not working before all the surge-troops had even been deployed, says Rush's audience is "diminishing." Over thirty million and diminishing? Don't think so, little Harry.

And what a brainstorm to trot out mental defective Tom Harkin, who campaigned on his non-existent Vietnam experience---a proven liar. Only Dingy Harry could have cooked up such a soup of moronic self-deception.

The Dems are counting on their stranglehold over the MSM & Hollyweird to get them into the WH in '08. That'll give them four years at least to cover the Roving Ambassador husband of Hillary, who will make Gary Hartpence [oops, Hart] look celibate in comparison.

Obama Follows Katie Couric is Dissing the Flag.

As Obama slips farther behind Hillary down to where he is almost descended to John-boy Edwards' level of single-digit support---he keeps digging himself deeper into an intractable nullity at the polls.

How does a guy who says he will invade Pakistan and talk with Iran find an even sillier statement to make? Obama keeps on trying for political zero-hood, and he's approaching it as we speak.

I wonder how the leftie spinmeisters will turn this turnip into a pomegranite?

Craig Should Back Out Gracefully---Oops!

"Wide stance" Larry Craig should remain busted. He should resign and back out of his position to let another more electable Republican run next year. But his silly little escapade pales before the scofflaw Teddy Kennedy, who should have been vigorously prosecuted for DWI, fleeing the scene of an accident, and manslaughter. Those are real crimes, much more important than Craig's idiotic adventure, for which Craig should pay a price.

For the Dems, breaking the law and getting away with it appears to be a game. The reason Jimmy Carter and the Dems want ex-felons to vote is that 90%-plus would certainly vote Democrat if they ever bothered to vote. But their relatives do, and a large percentage of Democrat constituents have a friend or relative who's had brushes with the law. When I worked for the Democrats in St. Louis and later in a national capacity, that was an insider joke among guys like John Podesta & Harold Ickes---which dates my Demo allegiance.

Anita Hill Speaks with Forked Tongue

Anita Hill was always a cracked vessel. Her Yale law degree was good for openers, but her record at a DC law firm was spotty, to be generous. She would disappear when crunch time on a case occurred, hid in the firm's library, and had the least billable hours of any lawyers in the firm. All this was out in the mid'90s, after extensive research by lefties trying to climb the Bolshie ladder found she was less than a superstar. Of course, by ratting out Thomas with ten-year old allegations trumped up by a feverish MSM, she earned a lifetime of dining out on the CIRCUIT, as Joe Wilson, another spectacular liar, has been doing for the last few years. He also will probably get a sinecure perfesser job after his spool runs out of thread. Here's James Taranto:

Remember Anita Hill? She was a lawyer who worked for Clarence Thomas in the early 1980s. When Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1991, Judiciary Committee Democrats tried to block him by claiming he was a scary right-winger. This failed, so they trotted out Hill, who claimed that years earlier Thomas had made some dirty jokes. People didn't believe her, and he was confirmed. End of story--until now.

Justice Thomas has a new book out, "My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir" (buy it from the OpinionJournal bookstore). Yesterday found us at the Heritage Foundation, which hosted a dinner for Thomas and some two dozen journalists and bloggers. We can't remember if the Hill kerfuffle came up during the conversation; certainly it was not central to it. But it is mentioned in the book, and a result, the media have trotted out Hill, now a professor of "women's studies."

Today she appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America," where interviewer Robin Roberts invited her to apologize to Justice and Mrs. Thomas. She refused. Hill also has an op-ed in today's New York Times in which she defends herself against what the Times headline writer characterizes as a "smear." We did not expect to be persuaded, but even we were surprised to find that her defense actually reinforces Thomas's description of her. She writes:

Justice Thomas's characterization of me is also hobbled by blatant inconsistencies. He claims, for instance, that I was a mediocre employee who had a job in the federal government only because he had "given it" to me. He ignores the reality: I was fully qualified to work in the government, having graduated from Yale Law School (his alma mater, which he calls one of the finest in the country), and passed the District of Columbia Bar exam, one of the toughest in the nation.

So Hill's answer to Thomas's assertion that she was a mediocre employee is to cite her law degree from Yale. In his book, Thomas describes an incident in which she similarly mistook credentials for competence. It happened in 1983, when Thomas's chief of staff at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sought a transfer (pages 172-73):

I knew I needed to replace him with someone who had a strong background in equal-employment opportunity policy, and I thought at once of Allyson Duncan and Bill Ng. Neither one had asked to be promoted, though it was obvious that they were the most qualified candidates on my personal staff. Instead it was Anita who approached me about the job, telling me that she deserved it because she'd gone to Yale Law School. (Allyson had gone to Duke University, Bill to Boston College.) It would have been hard for her to come up with an argument less likely to sway me, and it confirmed my feeling that she wasn't cut out to be a supervisor.

And if, as Hill claims, Thomas has ever said that Yale Law is "one of the finest in the country," you wouldn't know it from reading his book. Thomas writes that he had trouble finding work in law firms after graduation--because, he believes, of the stigma of "affirmative action." He finally found a job in the office of Missouri's Attorney General John Danforth. From pages 99-100:

I'd learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for white graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it; I couldn't do anything about that now, but I had a feeling that winning real cases in court would be a better demonstration of what I could do than a law school transcript. As a symbol of my disillusionment, I peeled a fifteen-cent price sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I'd made by going to Yale. I never did change my mind about its value. Instead of hanging it on the wall of my Supreme court office, I stored it in the basement of my Virginia home--with the sticker still in the frame.

Another of Hill's claims is contradicted by the book:

In a particularly nasty blow, Justice Thomas attacked my religious conviction, telling "60 Minutes" this weekend, "She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed." Perhaps he conveniently forgot that he wrote a letter of recommendation for me to work at the law school at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa.

In fact, he discusses the letter of recommendation on pages 171-73. He writes that Hill "had been nagging me to write" it, even as he was mourning his beloved grandparents, "and the sooner I did it, the sooner she'd be out of my hair."

It seems clear that before writing this op-ed, Hill didn't even bother reading the book. Having a law degree from Yale doesn't mean you no longer have to do your homework. We have no way of independently evaluating her performance at EEOC, but to call her a mediocre op-ed writer would be generous.

As she was in her legal work before being anointed by the lyin' left, she is sloppy and dishonest. But she is an entitlement child and thus a perfesser at Brandeis.

No homework for her.

Five Worldwide Population Trends: All Scary

Foreign Policy has some demographic news that some readers of this blog are already acquainted with, but other news that scares the bejezuz out of me.

"The South Explodes" in population and "the South Heads North" are really scary. But "Too Many Grooms, not Enough Brides" in both India & China mean that a lot of dudes will have testoserone urges, and that often means war. With two nuclear billion-plus nations in a bellicose frame of mind, I'm hoping they fight each other and leave my kids alone.

Finally "Europe and the Far East Turn Gray" is sort of old news. The good news is that even the white folks in the USA are at about 1.8 reproduction rate, which along with Australia makes the two English-speaking countries unique. And it's the conservatives who are procreating, not the urban chattering illuminati. So all we have to do is fix the awful educational system in the USA to keep our country from going Bolshie.

Friedman Listens to Those Voices in His Head & Writes Them Down

Tom Friedman is surely aching to get verbally abused about the head and shoulders by writing gibberish, now that he has reappeared from behind the Gamelan screen of TimesSelect his imbecile minder, the Pinch of NYT fame, had kept him for so long. Here is the smackdown of smackdowns, delivered by James Taranto:

A classic column from the New York Times's Thomas Friedman begins by quoting a story the Onion titled "Giuliani to Run for President of 9/11." Friedman then says, "Like all good satire, the story made me both laugh and cry, because it reflected something so true--how much, since 9/11, we've become 'The United States of Fighting Terrorism.' "

Like some bad writing, this made us laugh. Does "all good satire" really make Friedman "both laugh and cry"? If so, he either judges satire by impossibly high standards or is highly emotionally volatile.

Friedman continues:

Times columnists are not allowed to endorse candidates, but there's no rule against saying who will not get my vote: I will not vote for any candidate running on 9/11. We don't need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12. I will only vote for the 9/12 candidate.

What does that mean? This: 9/11 has made us stupid.

Here is an example of how 9/11 has made "us" stupid:

You may think Guantánamo Bay is a prison camp in Cuba for Al Qaeda terrorists. A lot of the world thinks it's a place we send visitors who don't give the right answers at immigration. I will not vote for any candidate who is not committed to dismantling Guantánamo Bay and replacing it with a free field hospital for poor Cubans. Guantánamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.

Who is most stupid:

* America, for detaining terrorists at Guantanamo Bay?

* "A lot of the world," for imagining that "it's a place we send visitors who don't give the right answers at immigration"?

* Thomas Friedman, for recommending "dismantling Guantánamo Bay and replacing it with a free field hospital for poor Cubans"?

We report, you decide. Friedman then veers off into an Andy Rooneyesque list of gripes that have little to do with terror policy:

Look at our infrastructure. It's not just the bridge that fell in my hometown, Minneapolis. Fly from Zurich's ultramodern airport to La Guardia's dump. It is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.

It's even worse than that. Try flying form Zurich to La Guardia, and you'll find it can't be done. La Guardia is not an international airport!*

Friedman continues:

I still can't get uninterrupted cellphone service between my home in Bethesda [Md.] and my office in D.C. But I recently bought a pocket cellphone at the Beijing airport and immediately called my wife in Bethesda--crystal clear.

We're not sure, but it seems quite possible that if Friedman investigated why his cell phone service is spotty, he'd find it's because liberal NIMBYs in places like Silver Spring and Takoma Park have blocked the construction of cell phone towers. In any case, it hardly seems reasonable to suggest that China is outpacing America because there you can get a cell phone signal in an airport.

Amid all this nonsense, Friedman does make some reasonable points. For example, he notes that Microsoft recently opened a facility in Canada rather than the U.S. because our restrictive immigration policies make it difficult to bring in skilled workers.

But why is it necessary to diminish 9/11 and pooh-pooh the continuing terrorist threat? Our guess is that Friedman, ignored by the world for the past two years during which his paper kept him hidden behind TimesSelect, is saying outrageous things because he is starved for attention. We hope this item is enough to satisfy his appetite.

*To be precise, it is an international airport only inasmuch as Canada is a nation.

And here is Taranto tying the lubricious idiot who was our 42nd POTUS into knots:

....When he was inaugurated, Mr. Clinton was 46--a year younger than Barack Obama will be on Jan. 20, 2009. Maybe those wanting a Clinton reprise would be better off with Obama than with Mr. Clinton's soon-to-be-sexagenarian better half.

The Bloomberg wire service reports on Mr. Clinton's effort to distinguish his younger self from Obama:

"There is a difference," Clinton said in an interview with Bloomberg Television's "Political Capital With Al Hunt" that [aired] this weekend. "I was the senior governor in America. I had been head of any number of national organizations that were related to the major issue of the day, which is how to restore America's economic strength." . . .

Bill Clinton, 61, said Obama's experience today is closer to his own in 1988, when he decided not to pursue a White House run. "I came within a day of announcing, because most of the governors were for me and I had been a governor for six years," Clinton said in the interview taped in New York. "And I really didn't think I knew enough and had served enough and done enough to run."

Obama has the added difficulty that the international situation is more complicated today, with the threat of terrorism and the war in Iraq, than it was in 1992, Clinton said.

At that time, the most pressing international issue "was how to build a post-Cold War world," he said. "We didn't have the terror threat. We didn't have the troops in Iraq. We didn't have the Afghan issue hanging fire."

So Mr. Clinton acknowledges that in 1992 he was experienced enough to be president only because the job was less demanding in those peaceful times.

But wait. How peaceful were they? Clinton says "We didn't have the terror threat" in 1992. Yet by the time he was elected, the following acts had already occurred:

* The November 1979 invasion of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the holding of hostages, who were not released until Inauguration Day 1981.

* Hezbollah's 1983 bombing of U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241.

* The holding of American hostages, and murder of some, in Beirut throughout the 1980s.

* The 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait.

* The 1985 bombing of a Madrid restaurant frequented by American soldiers.

* The 1985 Hezbollah hijacking of TWA flight 847 and murder of a U.S. Navy flier on board.

* The 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship, in which an American passenger was murdered.

* The 1986 bombing of TWA flight 840, which killed four Americans.

* The 1986 bombing of a disco in Berlin, which prompted a retaliatory strike on Libyan targets.

* The 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270.

Clinton had been in office barely a month when terrorists first tried to destroy the World Trade Center, killing six. His term saw the following attacks on American interests overseas:

* The 1995 car bombing of U.S. military headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five servicemen.

* The 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, killing 19 Americans.

* The 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224.

* The 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, less than a month before the election of Mr. Clinton's successor, killing 17 American sailors.

Then of course came 9/11, less than eight months after Mr. Clinton left office. How can anyone, looking back in 2007, claim "we didn't have the terror threat" in 1992?

It would be accurate to say that we, meaning most Americans, didn't understand the gravity of the terror threat back then. But this points to an inconvenient truth about Mr. Clinton--namely that this failure of understanding continued throughout his presidency. As we saw last year, Mr. Clinton is extremely touchy, to the point of belligerence, about this aspect of his legacy.

Experience is valuable only if we are able to learn from it. At the next debate, someone should ask Mrs. Clinton if she agrees with her husband that in 1992 "we didn't have the terror threat."

Taranto also deconstructs Bill Richardson on the same page, but like T. Friedman, I'm both laughing and crying....but in this case, crying from laughing so much!