Howie Kurtz: Newspapers flagging; Blogs rising.

Howie Kurtz has two components to his analysis of the news media in today's WaPo.

First, the inexorable fact that large newspaper chains and the big three broadcast networks are hemorrhaging circulation and viewers. As a result, reporters are being let go and, as Kurtz lets his bias show:

But the decline in the number of reporters, especially at newspapers, means less digging into the affairs of government and business.

Gee, Howie, what about digging into the takeover and destruction of our public school systems by AFTA and NEA? Or the murder of unborn children by a righteous horde of angry women? Or the asinine exemption of the academic world from accountability, manageability, and common sense? Would mentioning them get you by your managing political commissar [oops, I meant editor]?

Another indication of the bias of either Kurtz or the study, which Howie does not link:

The median prime-time audience for cable news was up 4 percent last year, driven mostly by growth at Fox News. But the study faults cable news for focusing mainly on a handful of breaking stories each day, sometimes creating "an odd hyperbole in which anchors endeavor to create a sense of urgency about small things."

Maybe the agitprop of the MSM exempt media drives them away? Not examined by this study or by Kurtz.

Howie segues to his set of paragraphs about bloggers. A picture accompanying the Kurtz column depicts the NY Times columnist who predictably looks like an insufferable dweeb. Kurtz fairly gives some bloggers contacted by the NYT hack some time, including one of my favorites, Marquette Warrior's Jim McAdams:

Eight days ago, says Milwaukee blogger Jim McAdams, New York Times reporter Michael Barbaro called him and was "pretty irate."

"Do you get your jollies out of this?" McAdams recalls Barbaro asking.

What McAdams did was to scoop Barbaro on his story about how Wal-Mart was sending tips and information to sympathetic bloggers as a way of getting its message out. Barbaro, who maintains he was not irate, says he was "disappointed" that McAdams and other bloggers would "post what it is I was reporting on" after he sent them e-mails seeking comment -- with a request that the e-mails not be publicized. The online chatter enabled the Wall Street Journal to publish a short piece the same day as the Times.

McAdams, who teaches political science at Marquette University, says he had no obligation to keep confidential the fact that a reporter had sent him an e-mail. "You're talking about a bunch of conservative, pro-business bloggers who are sympathetic to Wal-Mart," he says. "This isn't really news. Wal-Mart is simply doing with bloggers what flacks have been doing with broadcast and print media for decades." In his posting, McAdams listed all the e-mails he had gotten from Wal-Mart's PR firm, Edelman, saying he used some and ignored others.

Crazy Politico's Rantings had another comment to make and was quoted by Kurtz:

the story was "more negative" than he expected and "made it sound slightly dirty" for bloggers to use material from Wal-Mart.

As an NYT reader for over forty years, I know from experience that the prissy, menopausal, politically correct Grey Lady editorializes endlessly in its "news" section and editorially against diversity it dislikes and always makes new business methods seem "slightly dirty."

The NYT is against bloggers who are pro-business and who support traditional cultural values. Pure and simple. Don't look to the NYT for "fair and balanced" news.

NYT gets it right, then flubs up again.

The New York Times has a piece on GWB's evolution toward globalization. Stripped of the usual sanctimonious, prissy, obligatory spin toward nanny-spank, the David Sanger article is positive in substance:

His new theme is different, because it is all about interdependence. Two of his aides say the near defeat of the Central American Free Trade Agreement in Congress last summer — it passed by one vote, after arm-twisting by the president brought just enough Republicans back into the fold — jolted Mr. Bush into recognizing a new retreat from the world by his own party.

For the State of the Union address, Mr. Bush instructed his speechwriters to make global engagement a major theme, a big change for a man who ran in 2000 under the banner of a "humble foreign policy." In the speech, he warned that "the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting — yet it ends in danger and decline."

Strata-sphere has an excellent Ayrab-phobia Continues its Ugly March condemning Congress's headlong rush to protectionist, xenophobic, racial-profiling chauvinism.
Of course, it wouldn't be an NYT article without at least one laughably ridiculous ignorant piece of disinformation. Sanger is a member of the MSM media nomenklatura, so his nonsensical description of William Buckley as a neo-conservative is par for leftish agitprop.

Tom Maguire catalogues many facets of Sanger's silliness, as does the Corner.

Yale "Froot Loops" rival Harvard's FAS nonsense.

The Wall Street Journal has an article by John Fund on why not to send a donation to the $15 billion Yale Fund this year.

You have to read the whole article to begin to understand the vast abyss separating top educational institutions' managements like Harvard's and Yale's from common sense and political realities. Or, as Ben Stein says about admitting a senior Taliban official to Yale:

"It's extremely discouraging. It's as if Yale had admitted a largely unrepentant SS man after World War II on the theory he would help rebuild Germany." He told me. "Yale is being run by Froot Loops and is wacky."

The Washington Post reports on the sad fate of the American "peace activist" who was tortured and murdered.

His Christian Peacemaker Teams sponsor blames, who else?, the USA for his terrible fate.

"We believe that the root cause of the abduction of our colleagues is the U.S.- and British-led invasion and occupation of Iraq."

Sadly, these delusional nitwits are unaware that the real reason for the abduction and murder of their colleague lies in the fact that he was a "human shield" who was there merely to satisfy his own misguided naive self-absorbed nitwittery.

Gina Cobb notes:

"Ironically, the torture victim, Tom Fox, 54, of Clear Brook, Va., was a member of the very same group of Christian Peacemaker Teams that went to Iraq to investigate allegations that U.S. and Iraqi forces had abused detainees.

But now Doug Pritchard and Carol Rose, leaders of the same activist organization, are calling for the terrorists not to be "vilified" or "demonized" for the death of Tom Fox."

Cobb points out the slight imbalance in Pritchard's mental state:

The United States of America and the fledgling democracy of Iraq get all sorts of "vilification" and "demonization" from "peacemaker" Doug Pritchard. Here are two examples:

"We were the first to publicly denounce the torture of the Iraqi people held by occupation forces," CPT co-director Doug Pritchard told the BBC. (BBC News, 11/30/05)

"Much of the goodwill that came with the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime has been thrown away by the brutality of the US occupation,” said Doug Pritchard, co-director of Christian Peacemaker Teams . . . . (Ekklesia, 1/17/06)

That's right. This bunch of activists have no problem with vilifying and demonizing the United States by claiming that it "tortures" the "Iraqi people" and is engaging in "brutality" and "occupation."

Cobb finally asks these Kierkegaardian half-wits to do the following:

let's learn to distinguish between genuine evil and basic decency with room for improvement.

Attempts to embarrass detainees at Abu Ghraib by U.S. soldiers who were subsequently court-martialed and penalized for it: Basic decency with room for improvement.
Kidnapping innocent civilians off a Baghdad street, releasing a threatening video, torturing and killing one of the civilians and throwing his body in the street: Genuine evil.

I believe that the feckless nincompoops and hypocrites at CPT should examine their own premises before blaming the USA for the torture-death of their hapless hostage to fortune.

Five Best Comic Novels by Roger Kimball

The Wall Street Journal has an Op-Ed online piece by the redoubtable editor of The New Criterion:

1. "Leave It to Psmith" by P.G. Wodehouse (Doran, 1924).

May I begin a survey of superb comic novels by offering the collected works of P.G. Wodehouse--100 volumes, give or take? No? Well, how about "Leave It to Psmith"? Everyone knows about Bertie and Jeeves. Allow me to introduce Rupert Psmith. The "P" is silent, he explains, "as in phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan." But the comedy is uproarious in this tale of an impecunious though impeccably turned out dandy who impersonates the modern poet Ralston McTodd--a scaly specimen--in order to cadge an invitation to Blandings Castle so that he can pursue the beautiful Eve Halliday. The plot is stuffed with improbable twists, farcical turns, breath-stopping complications and one of the greatest predawn flowerpot-throwing scenes in literature.

2. "Scoop" by Evelyn Waugh (Little, Brown, 1938).

"Scoop" is Waugh's funniest book and the best (and most savage) satire of newspaper journalism in English. William Boot is the retiring author of "Lush Places," a nature column in the Daily Beast, the brash flagship of Lord Copper's gargantuan publishing empire. He is not to be confused with John Courtney Boot, the ambitious novelist eager to get away from London and his girlfriend. A helpful friend, the mesmerizing Mrs. Stitch, invites Lord Copper to a lunch party, wraps him around her little finger and has everyone at the table regale him with the exploits of young Boot, "the Prime Minister's favorite writer." "Get Boot," Lord Copper commands, and his underlings buzz into action, producing the wrong Boot, of course, who is promptly outfitted and sent to the godforsaken African hot spot of Ishmaelia to cover the impending revolution. The rest is farce--or just journalism.

3. "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" by Eric Hodgins (Simon & Schuster, 1946).

\Perhaps you've seen the movie "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" (1948), with Myrna Loy and Cary Grant. It's charming, and the scene where Loy instructs the painter about the colors she wants is comic perfection ("match the little rosebud next to the delphinium--not the one near the hollyhock leaf"). But the movie is nothing compared with the novel by Eric Hodgins. If you've ever thought about engaging an architect to fix up that beautifully sited if slightly ramshackle old place you saw in the country one weekend, read this book. You'll laugh till you cry, and you'll think twice about embarking upon an adventure in real estate or house construction.

4. "Lucky Jim" by Kingsley Amis (Doubleday, 1954).

The academic novel has become a subgenre of its own. There are some very good ones, but the best is also one of the first, Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim." An instant sensation when it was first published, "Lucky Jim" tells the story of Jim Dixon, an anxious young history don at a small, aggressively undistinguished provincial university. Dixon has just managed to produce--but not yet publish--a scholarly article called "The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485." It was, Dixon thought, "a perfect title, in that it crystallised the article's niggling mindlessness, its funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems." You can see why "Lucky Jim" is, even today, regarded as an important source of information about university culture.

5. "The Belles Lettres Papers" by Charles Simmons (Morrow, 1987).

Ostensibly a history of Belles Lettres, "the most powerful literary magazine in the world," this book is in fact a satire of the passions and personalities of the people who run a famous New York weekly book review. Curious readers might like to know that Charles Simmons was formerly an editor at the New York Times Book Review. One of the best characters is Newbold Press, a ghastly and thuggish philistine who is brought in as editor to clean house. He comes a cropper, but not before entertaining us with a stupendous exhibition of stupidity and bad judgment. My only question is whether this splendid book should be filed under fiction or documentary.

Fiction or documentary is always the key question in our age of folly.

Kurd Card Playable?

The Washington Post has an article by Charles Krauthammer on the "Kurd Card," noting something the MSM has typically skirted past in their hyping a civil war and other negatives in Iraq.

The lede is that the Kurds have merged their 25% Parliamentary minority with the 25% Sunni minority because of "Gucci Guerilla" PM Ibrahim Al-Ja'afari's general incompetence and overall brutish political persona. Krauthammer notes:

Not all parts of the Shiite coalition are happy either with Jafari's ineffectiveness or with his political dependence on Sadr. Splits are already appearing in that uneasy alliance. But the most important challenge to Jafari is the Kurds. They are wary of Sadr and unhappy with Jafari, under whom everything -- services, security, trust -- is deteriorating.

Admittedly, part of their calculation is sectarian. This is, after all, Iraq. Jafari has impeded Kurdish claims on Kirkuk and infuriated the Kurds by traveling to Turkey (which opposes all Kurdish ambitions) without their approval and with a traveling party that did not include a single Kurd.

The Kurd-Sunni-secular bloc wants a new prime minister who will establish a national unity government. Because the United States wants precisely the same outcome, the Kurd defection is very good news in a landscape of almost unrelenting bad news. The other good news is a split in the Shiite bloc, with a near-majority that favors a more technocratic prime minister and is chafing at Sadr's influence. Additionally, the Sunni insurgency is in the midst of its own internecine strife between the local ex-Baathists, who are not particularly religious and want power, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's foreign jihadists, for whom killing Shiites combines sport and religion and who care not a whit for the future of the country. There are numerous reports of Sunni tribes declaring war on these foreign jihadists and of firefights between them.

Krauthammer sums up by hoping that a two-thirds of parliament will agree on a national-unity government that foreswears sectarianism, which is corrosive in general and destructive when militias supplant the police and Army.

Professor Juan Cole thinks Ja'afari's current woes are a result of Sunni-Kurd and Sunni-Arab hostility, but the evidence is strong that PM Ja'afari is weak and feckless and not the man to unite Iraq.

USA FOLLOWS FRENCH FOOTSTEPS INTO INSANE ECONOMIC CHAUVINISM

The Wall Street Journal demonstrates why it is morally, ethically, journalistically and nationalistically superior to MSM dinosaur NYT. Let's see Pinch, Keller and their merry band of hustlers top this:

The New Protectionists
How to create a real security crisis.

Dubai Ports World finally threw in the kaffiyah on its American operations yesterday, agreeing to sell them "to a U.S. entity." We hope that entity turns out to be Halliburton, if only for the torment that would cause certain eminences on Capitol Hill.

Dubai Ports was susceptible to this political stampede because it was an Arab-owned company buying port operations, which Democrats have played up as uniquely vulnerable. But this is also the second such mugging of a foreign investor in recent months, following last year's demagoguery against a Chinese company's bid to buy Unocal, a middling American oil company. If Members of Congress want a real security crisis--a financial security crisis--they'll keep this up.

What's especially dangerous here is that we're seeing the re-emergence of the "national security" protectionists. They were last seen in the late 1980s, when Japan in particular was the target of a political foreign-investment panic. The Japanese were buying Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center, and so America was soon going to be a colony of Tokyo. A Japanese bid for Fairchild Semiconductor of Silicon Valley was seen as a threat to American defense. Those fears seem laughable now. But here we go again, with new targets of anxiety.

Going well beyond Dubai, House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter (R., Calif.) says he wants Congressional oversight of all foreign purchases of "critical infrastructure." Mull over that one for a minute. If you think corruption on Capitol Hill is bad now, wait until foreigners need approval from Congress for every multi-billion-dollar investment. The current investment review process was designed by the Reagan Administration to be discreet, and to keep Congress out, precisely to avoid such politicization.

In recent weeks Members of Congress have suggested that the foreign-ownership ban should apply to: roads, telecommunications, airlines, broadcasting, shipping, technology firms, water facilities, buildings, real estate, and even U.S. Treasury securities. If this keeps up, we'll soon arrive at France, where even food and music are "protected" from foreign influences as a matter of national survival.

The larger truth is that the flow of foreign investment into the U.S. is a sign of economic strength, not weakness. For 25 years pro-growth economic policies including monetary stability, steep tax-rate reductions on capital and freer trade have created a giant in-sucking sound of some $4 trillion of global investment into America. Economist David Malpass of Bear Stearns recently calculated that U.S. GDP grew by 100% between 1992 and 2005 while world GDP growth measured in dollars grew by only 70%. Over that same period, the U.S. created four times the number of new jobs as Europe and Japan combined.

To be sure, these capital inflows mean that the U.S. is also running a trade deficit of equal magnitude. But all of that has contributed to a rising standard of living. As the attached chart shows, the increase in America's current account deficit (the flip side of a capital investment surplus) has coincided with an unprecedented increase in U.S. net wealth that was $51 trillion by last September and is now closer to $55 trillion. If a capital deficit were virtuous, meanwhile, Argentina would be the promised land.

Another term for this foreign investment is "insourcing." Foreign capital creates wealth and jobs here, rather than in India, China or Japan. Thanks to net foreign investment, about one-in-twelve American manufacturing workers are now employed by a foreign-owned firm. Toyota recently invested $800 million in a new plant in San Antonio that will employ 2,000 workers.

A study by the Organization for International Investment finds that about 5.3 million Americans are directly employed by foreign-owned firms with wages averaging $63,000 a year, or about 50% more than the average U.S. wage. Foreigners are not buying up America's stock of wealth; they are investing in ways that add to it.
More broadly, U.S. economic and defense security are intertwined. Imagine the threat to American well being if investment capital were trying to flee the U.S. because it believed opportunities were better elsewhere. Meanwhile, the interdependence that comes with foreign investment also gives those investors a stake in both American success and security. Are the Gulf emirates more, or less, reliable as U.S. allies because they invest their petrodollars in American assets? We'd say more. And, of course, foreigners who invest in the U.S. also help finance the military that keeps us safe.

The Dubai episode has been a debacle of the first order, and while the Beltway is toting up winners and losers, the rest of the world is shaking its head and wondering what's going on. The world's largest economy and its ostensible political leader seems to be sneering at the very foreign investment that has been crucial to its prosperity. Let's hope it was a momentary hallucination, and not the start of a larger protectionist binge.

If we let the crooks in Congress meddle with this process, like the still unindicted William Jefferson Democrat of Louisiana who tried to get 7% of a Nigerian phone contract, Duke Cunningham will be followed to the slammer by the Duncan Hunters and Tom DeLays of the House.

If Bush doesn't wake up and make the Presidency a 24/7/365 committment, he will spend the last two years of his term with a hostile Congress and possible, though ridiculous, impeachment charges.

Dubai Caves and adopts Ledeen Option?

The Hill has a report filed before the Dubai compromise that the UAE could retaliate, not openly, but by buying Airbuses instead of Boeings for their excellent Emirates Airline, and by ratcheting down cooperation with the US military and with intelligence agencies in the Middle East.

This whole seamy episode has exposed an Ugly America populated by Ugly Americans. Fareed Zakaria was in India when the brouhaha erupted and said the Indian street was unanimous in that it was sheer race hatred on the part of the American public. For Chrissakes, the Chinese Red Army runs the Panama Canal and the PRC owns the port facilities in LA as well as Singapore elsewhere on the West Coast. But they do not have skins as brown as A-rabs, and the relentless media representations of rioting violent Muslims in the Levant and Iraq make the public think "They're all the same."

The political sluggishness displayed by an obviously exhausted Bush White House reveals the rapid entropy this Administration is experiencing. Protectionist xenophobic Americans carried the day, given that the security problems could have been worked out. And the Islamophobes will now regard high dudgeon as a tool to elicit support for extremist positions. Hell, even the Israelis wanted this deal to go through.

But to see the USA start to adopt the protectionist stance now all the rage in France and Spain against foreign acquisitions [read ft.com free all this week] is a retrograde move with manifold implications, almost all of them bad. Clinton and Carter backed GWB on this, as well presumably as Bush 41.

Sadly, the Ledeen solution should have been adopted long ago [hat tip to Mickey Kaus]. Namely what skullduggery king Michael Ledeen recommended Feb 19th:

There is a clean way to handle things such as the port operations, and it still astonishes me that it wasn't done properly. It's been done thusly for many years, actually many decades:

1. Create an American company to handle the matter (if foreigners wish to buy in, or even buy it, that's ok);
2. Wall off the foreign investors/owners. They are silent partners. They have no say in the actual operation;
3. Create a "classified Board" composed of people with security clearances and experience in sensitive matters;
4. Appoint a CEO and other top executives with experience and clearances.

We do this all the time with, say, foreigners who want to buy companies that manufacture parts for weapons sytems, etc. It seems the obvious solution here. Dubai would get prestige and whatever profits are generated. Americans run the thing and guarantee, so far as is possible, security. Looks like a win/win solution. For that matter, we should have done the same sort of thing with the British owners, and we should do the same thing with the Chinese and others who now have access to all kinds of potentially dangerous information thanks to their buy-ins.

For once I agree with Ledeen, whose spotty record in US foreign policy has more negatives than pluses.

Brownback in 2008: The Economist takes a look.

The Economist devotes its "Lexington" section on America this week to a Senator whom the ultra-left love to malign as the most ignorant and backward of the presidential candidates the Republican Party might nominate in 2008. [Unless you consider Rick Santorum as a possibility!] They are both conservative Roman Catholics, so the unbelievers on the sinister side of the aisle and the MSM naturally regard these two as the ne plus ultra of right-wing extremism. The name of the Brownback article is called The Wilberforce Republican, after the famous British advocate of ending slavery and entitled "Sam Brownback is redefining the Christian right"

THESE days the closest thing that liberal America has to a civic religion is "tolerance". Emit the merest whiff of prejudice against Welsh-Americans or "the transgendered community" and you risk committing social suicide. Deliver a succession of windy speeches on the wonders of "diversity" and you are likely to end up as the president of an Ivy League university. However, as conservatives always point out, one group of people has been conspicuously exempted from this cult of tolerance: heart-on-the-sleeve Christians. In many of the more politically correct parts of America you can say anything you like about the God squad—dismiss them as poor, uneducated and easily led; ridicule their leaders as money-grubbing Neanderthals; hint that they spend most of their spare time dressed in white sheets—and you will still be welcomed in polite society.

Any liberal American who believes these stereotypes should spend some time studying an outside bet for the Republican nomination in 2008. Sam Brownback, the senior senator from Kansas, ticks all the right Christian-conservative boxes. He is strongly opposed to both gay marriage and abortion. He won his Senate seat back in 1996 by campaigning on the "three Rs"—reduce (the size of government), reform (Congress) and return (to traditional values). He hails from a state that liberals regard as embodying everything that has gone wrong with America. To cap it all, Pat Robertson regards him as "outstanding."

Yet the more you study Mr Brownback the more surprising he becomes. He may represent a landlocked state in the Midwest, but his biggest interest lies in foreign policy—and in particular in fusing diplomacy and humanitarianism. He is second-to-none in Congress in campaigning against the horrors that have been unfolding in Darfur in western Sudan, and in pleading the case for addressing HIV and malaria; he has been a relentless critic of the North Korean regime {"if hell is the absence of God," he once said, "I think you can see North Korea is the closest place to that on earth"); and he has sponsored legislation against sex trafficking. And these sermons are based on experience: he is a frequent visitor to some of the world's most troubled places, urging people to take their holidays (or "impact trips", as he calls them) in Rwanda rather than Europe.

Which is not to say that his compassion begins at the ocean's edge. Mr Brownback is a leading campaigner for reforming America's prisons, particularly the rehabilitation of ex-cons (he notes that faith-based programmes are much better at keeping prisoners on the straight and narrow because they are better at providing them with a support network when they leave). He helped sponsor a new museum of African-American history: now he wants an apology for Native Americans. Even some of his most “hard right” positions, such as his support for marriage, have a soft component: he produces reams of social science research about how marriage is "a leading poverty reducer."

Mr Brownback's politics is rooted in his religious faith. He was raised an evangelical Protestant, a son of Osawatomie, a longstanding hotbed of Kansas evangelism (and a centre of the abolitionist movement before the civil war). But a few years ago a brush with cancer changed his life, persuading him to put religion at the forefront of his political persona. He was particularly moved by reading a biography of William Wilberforce, a British anti-slavery agitator. He also became a Roman Catholic. He now attends two services every Sunday—mass and also one with his family, who remain evangelical Protestants.

Mr Brownback's enthusiasm for mixing God and politics has left him with lots of strange bedfellows. He co-sponsored legislation against sex trafficking with the late (and near socialist) Paul Wellstone and co-sponsored the North Korea Refugee Act with Ted Kennedy. He frequently rubs shoulders with feminists and black activists. Indeed, he is arguably today's champion of liberal internationalism, the baton having been passed from the Clintonites (who are now out of power) and from human-rights groups (who are divided over things like sex trafficking).

Mr Brownback is not the only "Wilberforce Republican." A growing number of people on the Christian right think that America's role in the world is to go out and slay dragons, whether they be in the form of religious persecution or prostitution. Plenty of young conservatives have turned their attention away from the domestic culture wars that their parents obsess about to more global issues like the environment and poverty.

What's gone right in Kansas?
All of which makes Mr Brownback an intriguing candidate for 2008. His political challenge will be how to avoid becoming a prisoner of the hardline Christian right—Mr Robertson et al might help him win a few primaries but doom him to marginalisation. Mr Brownback should be able to sidestep that trap. His enthusiasm for saving children in Darfur as well as fetuses in Kansas makes his social conservatism more acceptable to moderates (so does his mellifluous manner).

The bigger problem is that his compassionate foreign policy comes across as hopelessly naive. The neoconservatives' enthusiasm for spreading democracy in the Middle East is often lampooned nowadays, but at least they tried to link American idealism with American interests (in bringing peace and prosperity to the world's main source of both oil and terrorism). Mr Brownback's idealism is unconstrained by anything so vulgar as the national interest and power politics. Marvellous though it is to hear him denounce North Korea as hell on earth, presidents have to head off conflict with rogue states and advance America's trading interests. Americans are growing weary of a born-again president who wants merely to transform the Middle East. They will need a lot of convincing to back a man who wants to abolish suffering wherever he can find it.

Litigious Florida Woman Sues because She Wants Privacy!

The Wall Street Journal's in-house satirist James Taranto has a piece in his on-line journal about a Palm Beach woman who claims "she is intensely private and can't help but feel stigmatized for needing medication to feel normal."

This woman who is terribly afraid she will be called "CrAzY" and a "psycho" gives an interview to the newspaper as well as having her lawyer and a therapist give long interviews to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel laying out the reasons for her lawsuit against Walgreens.

This "intensely private" person's describes her long battles with alcohol and drugs, her relapses, and hints strongly that she may be in AA, or some other rehab program. She did not ask to remain anonymous. I expect to see her on local TV explaining why the employees who thought she was a nut case are wrong! Get the following paragraph from the newspaper interview:

"employees would loudly call Karp's name and make reference to her medications. It would make Karp cringe."

"A person has the right to have whatever medications they're taking to be private," she said. "I'm so private that I never talk about my medications and now they're telling me that I'm psycho, crazy."

And you are so private that you are telling the world you aren't. How about the dog who barked too often? This new arrival from the Northeast US appears to have the same syndrome of many who fetch up down here from NY or New England. Blatantly money-grubbing gold-digger NE types sue if someone looks at them sideways down here.

Taranto took the rich material for satire in the way this "intensely private" person who appears ethically and socially challenged has managed to spread her story all over South Florida [and now via the WSJ, around the world] and reminded us of the following Monty Python skit:

(A number of men and women are sitting around in an area by the counter where there is a large sign saying "Dispensing Department." A cheerful chemist appears at the counter.)

Chemist: Right. I've got some of your prescriptions here. Er, who's got the pox? (nobody reacts) Come on, who's got the pox. Come on. (a man timidly puts his hand up.) There you go. (throws bottle to the man with his hand up) Who's got a boil on the bum--boil on the botty. (throws bottle to the only man standing up) Who's got the chest rash? (a woman with a large bosom puts up hand) Have to get a bigger bottle. Who's got wind? (throws bottle to a man sitting on his own) Catch.

(Caption on the screen:"THE CHEMIST SKETCH--AN APOLOGY")

Voiceover: The BBC would like to apologize for the poor quality of the writing in that sketch. It is not BBC policy to get easy laughs with words like bum, knickers, bony or wee-wees. (laughs off camera) Ssssh!

But I guess the "intensely private" Janey Karp doesn't mind outing herself to the world, while all the time howling in true victim fashion:

SHOW ME THE MONEY!!

MORE DISCORD ON THE LEFT

[I'm watching the Big East tournament as my red-hot alma mater Marquette and Georgetown square off just after Syracuse beat number one NCAA-ranked Conn, so this blog will be cursory.]

The New Republic has a blog called The Plank and this day Jason Zengerle gets exercised about the clueless scattershot emotionalism of the liberal blogosphere, where "passion" masquerades as committment and heat for light:

MORE ON THE FUTILITY OF THE LIBERAL BLOGOSPHERE:

Kevin Drum and Laura Turner are taking issue with
my post about liberal bloggers' latest losing campaign. Specifically, both object to my notion that Ciro Rodriguez's defeat is a defeat for Kos et al's "ideology of winnerism." [Also, JZ notes the "chest-thumping" Kossacks 0 for 14 batting average in their races] Turner writes:

Doesn't Zengerle posit there might be, like, a reason the blogs launched themselves behind Rodriguez that might have to do with ideology, in the sense that Cueller is (and he really is) a very bad Democrat? If Kos and Atrios just wanted a win for somebody with a D behind his name, they probably would have stayed out of Texas-28, which already gurantees such an outcome given that the GOP doesn't even run candidates in the district (somehow the Republican revolution never took hold there). The blogs took a chance on the underdog Rodriguez. Isn't that the opposite of a blind Democratic "winnerism"?

To the extent he talks about it at all, Zengerle chalks the blogs' preference for Rodriguez up the fact that Cueller hugged Bush after the SOTU. But, in fact, the liberal bloggers' complaints went far beyond, and are far more substantial than, that incident. In fact, most of the librerals' complaints with Cueller are ones Zengerle and his colleagues at TNR probably share. Or does TNR secretly like the Club for Growth? Obviously the majority of the masthead doesn't, but by so blatantly mischaracterizing Kos and other online Rodriguez-supporters, Zengerle is begging to be similarly mischaracterized himself.

Look, I don't dispute that Cuellar is a bad Democrat and that there were good ideological reasons to oppose him. But let's face it: If he hadn't hugged Bush at the State of the Union, the liberal blogosphere never would have gone after him. As far as I can tell, the first time Kos ever mentioned Cuellar was the morning after the State of the Union, under the headline, "Cuellar sat on Republican side of aisle at SOTU." Atrios was similarly late to the game. It was only after the blogosphere declared war against Cuellar that it realized that, in addition to committing the cardinal sin of hugging Bush, he was a bad Democrat on substantive grounds.

In fact, the liberal bloggers' involvement in the Cuellar-Rodriguez race--sparked as it was by a hug--struck me as an exercise in juvenile pique. Which is their right, of course, except these very same bloggers are constantly claiming they aren't juvenile or fevered and are in fact cold-blooded tacticians and strategic grandmasters. But is it really all that strategically smart to enter a campaign (about which you know virtually nothing) a mere month before election day? Aren't you basically setting yourself up for failure? Isn't it even possible that you risk helping the other guy by creating a backlash (a la all the Orange-hatted, out-of-state Dean volunteers who ticked off Iowa voters)?

Now, in the wake of Rodriguez's defeat, these bloggers are talking about how they drew a line in the sand and sent a message, etc., etc. One of them, Chris Bowers at MyDD, is even proclaiming, "If Cuellar makes fewer appearances with Bush, then we will have succeeded." And some success that will be!

Again, I don't dispute that, on the merits, Rodriguez wasn't a better candidate than Cuellar. I just think that the blogosphere's involvement in the race was indicative of the scattershot, emotional, sometimes almost counterproductive approach it takes to politics. Drum, while acknowledging the liberal bloggers' terrible batting average, notes that "Rome wasn't built in a day." True enough. But, Kos et al's grand pronouncements to the contrary, I don't think that they're building Rome.
--Jason Zengerle

[Actually, it's more like making the rubble bounce over there in the Kossack steppe country. Kos' grandiose pronunciamentos and manifestoes belie his pitiful scorecard.]

Kossacks = paper pussycat.

Lunatic Clowns or Sorry Stooges?

The Financial Times has a truly hilarious Op-Ed by Slate editor Jacob Weisberg deconstructing the Axis of Weasal-Wuss-Whiners Pelosi & Reid & Dean. Please bear in mind that Weisberg is a HUGE non-fan of GWB and most Republicans:

Ms Pelosi is a conventionally liberal congresswoman from San Francisco who serves as House minority leader. The quite conservative Mr Reid, who comes from a small town in Nevada, is the Senate minority leader. Mr Dean, who seemed headed for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination until he yodelled in Iowa, chairs the Democratic National Committee. Since assuming their positions after the last election, the three have appeared somewhere between useless and disastrous as party leaders. Individually, they lack substance and policy smarts (Ms Pelosi); coherence and force (Mr Reid); and steadiness and mainstream appeal (Mr Dean). Collectively, they convey an image of liberal elitism, disarray and crabbiness.

Indeed, liberal-elitist Pelosi's family owns a spa ranch winery hostel in Napa Country that keeps any and all unions away, as does her chain of family restaurants. Such a team player! But Weisberg hasn't finished with his analysis:

Ms Pelosi epitomises this problem. Here is a typical Bush-bashing quote of hers: "The emperor has no clothes. When are people going to face the reality? Pull this curtain back." She dismisses people who disagree as hoodwinked or stupid, though she is not exactly Hillary Clinton. A five-minute interview is usually sufficient to exhaust her knowledge on any topic. When Jack Murtha, a Democratic congressman, proposed a pullout of US troops from Iraq last November, Ms Pelosi’s first reaction was negative. "Mr Murtha speaks for himself," she said. But after a drubbing from leftwing bloggers and her anti-war constituents, she announced she supported Mr Murtha after all.

Which put her fellow House Dems in the position of being questioned whether they agreed with their House Leader or not. This was not appreciated by House Whip Steny Hoyer, who ostentatiously stood up in the well of the House and said he did not agree with Ms. Pelosi. Sort of a bitch-slap! Weisberg goes on to say let's not replace Tweedledumb with Tweedledumber:

Mr Reid’s flaws are mostly the opposite of Ms Pelosi's. A Mormon convert from a working-class family, he does not dabble in Hollywood politics. He voted for the Iraq war resolution and is anti-gun control, anti-gay marriage and – most shocking for a Democratic figurehead – anti-abortion. But as a leader, he is both colourless and erratic. His innate greyness is punctuated by spasms of random aggression; he has called the former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan a "hack" and President Bush a "loser". Mr Reid’s own pork-barrelling and lobbyist-courting activities suggest that making him majority leader would merely replace the Republican hackocracy in Congress with a Democratic hackocracy.

Among the lobbyists Reid got a lot of indirect money from was Jack Abramoff, and when confronted with that fact, denied that he was accountable and said that it was a "Republican scandal." Yessir, Pleassir, if you say so, sir. Finally, Weisberg notes that the smartest of the three has an Emotional IQ of about 10, as in ten years old:

Mr Dean is smarter than either Ms Pelosi or Mr Reid and clearly does stand for something. Unfortunately, in most minds, it is for incandescent rage and upscale socialism. Mr Dean has an unfortunate knack for making himself the issue. His injudicious comment about the Republicans being the party of white Christians was followed by his statement that "the idea that we’re going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong". Such gaffes lead to endless debate about Mr Dean, rather than about how Mr Bush is failing. Building on the work of a DNC pollster, Mr Dean a few months ago took to referring to his party’s base as "merlot Democrats". With the likes of Mr Dean and Ms Pelosi in charge, this is becoming truer all the time.

As these three careen from wall to wall trying to craft a message, ANY message, for the mid-term elections in November, there is a lot of scepticism among the harder-headed Dems out there that this Troika of Airhead-Dimwit-Dunceyodeller can assemble coherent planks for the national party. As Mary Katherine Ham @ Hugh Hewitt relates with a hat tip to All Things Beautiful [and the WaPo]:

The Democratic leaders in Congress -- Pelosi and Sen. Harry M. Reid (Nev.) -- are the party's chief strategists and architects of the agenda, which they view as a way to market party ideas on energy, health care, education and other issues. They have held countless meetings to construct the right list, consulting with governors, mayors and just about every Democratic adviser in town.

"By the time the election rolls around, people are going to know where Democrats stand," Reid said.

But many in the party have their doubts. On Feb. 27, Reid and Pelosi appeared before the Democratic Governors Association. At one point in the conversation, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, noting that the two leaders had talked about a variety of themes and ideas, asked for help. Could they reduce the message to just two or three core ideas that governors could echo in the states?

According to multiple accounts from those in the room, Reid said they had narrowed the list to six and proceeded to talk about them. Pelosi then offered her six -- not all the same as Reid's. Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski said later: "One of the other governors said 'What do you think?' and I said 'You know what I think? I don't think we have a message."

Weisberg ends his piece with another "merlot" castigation:

But more important than what the three stooges do wrong is what they cannot seem to do at all, namely articulate a positive agenda. Voters have grown disenchanted with Mr Bush’s mishandling of the war in Iraq and the country’s finances, and with the evangelical tilt of many of his policies. But there remains a baseline mistrust of Democrats on security, the economy and values issues. For a sweep big enough to recover Congress, they need an affirmative message as well as a negative one. Democrats have to demonstrate they will not just cut and run from Iraq, that they see security as more than a civil liberties issue and that their alternative to tax cuts is not just to spend more on flawed social programmes.

Thus far, Ms Pelosi, Mr Reid and Mr Dean have been unable to develop such a pitch for the party’s congressional candidates. Not just a good message – any message. The "legislative manifesto" they promised for November has been delayed again and again. If it eventually appears, one can expect something benign and insipid. In 1994, Mr Gingrich had the revolutionary "Contract with America." In 2006, Democrats will have another glass of merlot.

I hope Chris Matthews has Jake Weisberg on Hardball, which is becoming fairer and balanceder[!?!] every day. Steny Hoyer should take over the House Minority Leader Job, IMHO.

As noted in my blog yesterday, Pelosi's choice for a campaign slogan is "Contract on America" which implies either a contract to sell out to the highest bidder or a mafia hit. Choose your poison.

NEW YORKER: Where are your fact-checkers?

The New Yorker has a piece by Hendrick Hertzberg lambasting Dick Cheney from toe to top concerning the Veep's 18% approval rating.

Then, in a classic MSM mis-statement of fact, the ultra-left Hertzberg writes:

That same CBS News poll put President Bush’s favorability rating at twenty-nine per cent, also a personal worst.

Now a CBS Poll has been widely cited recently, although it happened to get a lot of methodological criticism for asking a much larger percentage of Democrats than Republicans, that Bush has a 34% approval rating.

Now Hertzberg has every right to exaggerate in the text, but when he cites a poll "released last Monday" that says 29%, he is playing fast and loose with facts, something the MSM accuse bloggers of doing at every opportunity.

Where are the famed New Yorker fact-checkers? Or is the New Yorker just a magazine version of "A Million Little Pieces?"

Dean's Grifters Outflanked by Ickes, Soros

Hard on the heels of E.J. Dionne's article yesterday about the Democrats' problems with getting a single message across comes today's piece by Thomas Edsall about a new Data Mining project launched by Harold Ickes and George Soros. Harold Ickes was my boss in my troubleshooting days in New York at the time John Podesta worked for me. Ickes is heads, shoulders, and upper torso above John Dean and his busy band of grifters trying to take over the DNC get-out-the-vote operation.

The basic gist of the piece is in the last paragraphs, with the lede buried at the end:

In addition to Soros's support, Ickes has the financial backing of some of the wealthy participants in a new fundraising group called the Democracy Alliance. He and Quinn, who will be chief executive of Data Warehouse, have hired technology specialists from internet retailer Amazon.com and a Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer project.

Quinn had worked on the voter file program under McAuliffe, but Dean brought in his own people after he took over in early 2005.

These included former Dean presidential campaign workers who formed a company called Blue State Digital, now under contract with the DNC.

The reason Hillary, whom the article describes as the eminence grise moving the chess pieces incognito, wants Ickes and Soros group in position is for her 2008 presidential try.

It's no secret that DNC Chief Dean is regarded as incompetent by many leading Democrats, but his posse taking over the DNC operation hints at his own ambitions and also a backdoor to make money for himself.

But Hillary's move gives Karl Rove something else to obsess about!

SECRET ARCHIVES OF THE VATICAN

I am breathlessly turning page after page of a book written over thirty-five years ago entitled The Secret Archives of the Vatican by Maria Luisa Ambrosini.

Read the review on this British site for a good soupcon of what lies in store for the curious reader.

The book was written a decade before the accession of John Paul II to the Papacy, a reign which changed world history for the better in just about every way imaginable. [Unless, of course, one was/is rooting for the other side.]

Here is an excerpt from a reviewer:

dozens of wonderful little historical sketches and vignettes: the monks of Western Ireland who cast themselves off into the Atlantic in coracles with a few days' supply of food and water only, and the possibility that the almost unique wheel on an Incan child's toy was the work of one of these; the Emperor Heliogabalus racing an elephant-drawn quadriga on Vatican Hill; the scarlet-edged bindings of Napoleon's L'Infer in the Biblioth?que Nationale; enquiries back home to the let-us-do-your-thinking-for-you office from missionaries to China as to the suitability of a native convert's praying to a crucifix secretly concealed in a shrine; the transfer of the Archives to Paris after Napoleon's Italian victories, and the eventual selling of large quantities of these for cardboard and wrapping paper to Parisian merchants; a fascinating mini-history of Savanarola's Florentine reign (the intolerance and absolute Protestant self-conviction of this are very instructive).

A delightful digression from the dreary drab platitudes of today's Savonarolas, who are just as self-righteous and sanctimonious.

Pelosi's Preposition Proposition

California Conservative has the scoop on the Democrats' big plan to take over the House and Senate this Fall. Clueless crone Nancy Pelosi, whose angry antics are part of the Democrats' leadership problem, has probably overreached a preposition too far. Read the CC:

"We took a good concept that offered bad policies, and brought our progressive ideals to it," said Rep. Pelosi. "We wanted a name that capitalized on the success of the previous plan, but made it clear that our goals are quite different."

The Democrat 'Contract on America' will be launched within the next several weeks, she said, “and it’s destined to pull our party together, give a us a sense of mission and meaning, and to inspire some really amazing bumper stickers and buttons."
Mrs. Pelosi said the key difference between the old 'Contract with America', and the new 'Contract on America' is captured in the preposition.

The always tone-deaf Pelosi probably never even dreamed of what an alert CC reader noticed when he/she said that it "sounds like a mafia hit." You just can't make this stuff up, as the press blurb continues:

The phrase was suggested by progressive linguist [as in a "Fool's Progress"?] George Lakoff, the U.C. Berkeley professor who consults with Democrats on "how to say what they mean without using traditional, culture-bound words that people understand."

Good, the Democrats are going to convey meaning without using words people understand? Sure, I get it.

"The word 'on' in the 'Contract on America' denotes something positive and active," said Mr. Lakoff. "It indicates that Democrat ideas are not off, they’re right on. It’s much stronger than the word 'with', which always sounded passive. The 'Contract on America' says Democrats are progressively leading America onward in a single, inevitable direction."

As in that sensationally successful MoveOn.org campaign?

Maybe the learned professor is simply too brilliant for mere mortals like me to comprehend, but it still smacks of a contract to sell out America. Did this untrammelled genius foresee the fodder he is providing to Jon Stewart, Steve Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, David Letterman, and, oh yeah, Jay Leno?

That even an occasionally loyal acolyte like Bill Maher might take liberties with the multiple connotations the Berkeley don obviously foresaw when he deconstructed the mindset of the average American?

By the way, if the direction is "inevitable," why do we need the Democrats to lead us that way? Maybe their social engineers can remove the speed bumps? Or wisely guide us with a not-so invisible hand? Like a clenched fist?

Oops, a little too much Marx in this "inevitable" march?

Dionne looks for an answer

E.J. Dionne attempts to offer the Democrats advice on their perennial problem---party discipline. I am aware of the difficulties first-hand because in the not-so-recent-past I worked at what the Dems called a "troubleshooter" in several states where the party's internecine strife was hurting its performance. John Podesta, now in the exalted position as head of the Center for American Progress, used to work for me in these long-ago forays into the maelstrom of clashing egos.

But I digress. Dionne is always sensible and witty, but today overlooks a serious problem the Democrats refuse to admit they have:

The Democrats' real problem is that they have failed to show how their critique of the Republican status quo is the essential first step toward the alternative program they will owe the voters in the presidential year of 2008.

This failure has made it easier for Republicans to cast anti-Bush feeling (aka, "Bush hatred") as a psychological disorder. The GOP shrewdly makes the president's critics look crazed and suggests that opposition to Bush is of no more significance than, say, the loathing that many watchers of "American Idol" love to express toward Simon Cowell, the meanest of the show's judges.

The problem is that Dionne falls into the same mental fallacy that CNN correspondents recently did when they complained, along with Bill Plante of CBS News, that the White House made the WH Press Corps "look foolish" after the uproar about Cheney's accident.

The American Public looks at the White House Press Corps making fools OF THEMSELVES. Scott McClellan merely provides them the space, as in the old science of ju-jitsu, to have their histrionic theatrics and unruly and impolite behavior get broadcast nationwide. Their behavior makes them look foolish, not the White House.

The Democrats and their allies in the MSM suffer from a lack of accountability for their personal actions----although Kathryn Seelye's recent NYT column shows they are aware of their mental disorder because they all, herd-like to a fault, appear to use the same shrink to diagnose their mental problems.

But the "helping professions" cannot remove what the public sees again and again from the "angry" left---personality and character disorders they attempt to mask by the sobriquet of "passion."

The Democratic blogs' responding to Dionne say that the recipe for a Democratic victory in 2006 and 2008 lies in more "anger."

The "angry left" only confirms most American adults' suspicion that the hard left suffers from what the American Thinker calls "mass psychosis." And the soft left is being encouraged to join that delusion that more heat will produce more light. This entire cast of mind is a throwback to the tactics and strategy of the Communist-left and Fascist-Right of pre-WWII Europe, calling for agitation and propaganda, agitprop in a word.

What the Democrats need now is more light and less heat, or they will continue in their "angry" mode for two more years.

Sir Anthony Hopkins' Observations on Hollywood

Sir Anthony Hopkins is a human treasure trove of wisdom and stagecraft lore, as a recent session with Charley Rose convinced me.

Here he is, basically telling Hollywood what a pack of fools they are, with a few exceptions, as well as Jon Stewart did the other night at the Oscars.

Just out of curiousity, an intrepid investigator might just be able to track back Sir Anthony's recent films to discover the two trailor recluses he did a recent movie with. I sure would be interested in the political opinions of two so very, very important people.

Wal-Mart et alia

Been having some problems recently with Blogger, but here goes:

The New York Times piece on Wal-Mart enlisting bloggers to tell its side of the story has the usual sanctimony-vibe attached. The Old Grey Whore for the Left has been picked up by young pimps on CNN, notably Andrew Serwer, who is associated with anti-Bush ranter Cafferty on their clueless business program.

So the MSM is starting to crank up its mighty Wurlitzer against bloggers, or at least bloggers who attack leftish businesses like Target and who support Wal-Mart, which values consumer pricing more than political hanky-panky.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have received messages from Marshall Manson, but have used him as a link resource, not a cut-and-paste treasury. Good for Marshall; although he will be castigated by the MSM as outside the pale, who wants to be inside their pale?

As an obiter dictum on the Oscars the other night, CNN said that TV ratings for this orgy of self-congratulation were down, and then CNN added a dig at Jon Stewart, mentioning that the ratings were lowest during the first half hour during his monologue.

Of course, his “monologue” did not last that long. CNN was probably miffed because this collection of creatures who get high sniffing their own flatulence was roasted by Stewart, who also committed the sin of omission of not roasting Bush at all, and only one small quip about Cheney.

For laughs, check out Drudgereport for another run at the illiterate dunce Streisand’s misspellings, all of which are made while the dodo robo-sow knocks GWB for his C-average during college!

Civil War, What Civil War?

Ralph Peters writes in the New York Post that the NYT campaign of disinformation concerning a civil war in Iraq, intended to encourage its Dem readership, is just another one of the BIG LIES the pre-eminent mainstream media PRAVDA disseminates on a daily basis. Peters starts with tongue in cheek:

I'M trying. I've been trying all week. The other day, I drove another 30 miles or so on the streets and alleys of Baghdad. I'm looking for the civil war that The New York Times declared. And I just can't find it.

Maybe actually being on the ground in Iraq prevents me from seeing it. Perhaps the view's clearer from Manhattan. It could be that my background as an intelligence officer didn't give me the right skills

Peters is not so kind with his NYT journalist colleagues:

So why were we told that Iraq was irreversibly in the throes of civil war when it wasn't remotely true? I think the answers are straightforward. First, of course, some parties in the West are anxious to believe the worst about Iraq. They've staked their reputations on Iraq's failure.

But there's no way we can let irresponsible journalists off the hook - or their parent organizations. Many journalists are, indeed, brave and conscientious; yet some in Baghdad - working for "prestigious" publications - aren't out on the city streets the way they pretend to be.

They're safe in their enclaves, protected by hired guns, complaining that it's too dangerous out on the streets. They're only in Baghdad for the byline, and they might as well let their Iraqi employees phone it in to the States. Whenever you see a column filed from Baghdad by a semi-celeb journalist with a "contribution" by a local Iraqi, it means this: The Iraqi went out and got the story, while the journalist stayed in his or her room.

Maybe the reason John Burns doesn't get as many bylines now in the NYT lies in the fact that his reporting is much more positive and factual, two of the Grey Lady's no-no's in reporting from Baghdad, unless the facts are negative, of course! You see, the political commissars at the NYT have an agenda:

And the Iraqi stringers have cracked the code: The Americans don't pay for good news. So they exaggerate the bad.

And here is the bottom line, something you would not read in the tabloid-level NYT:

Instead of a civil war, something very different happened because of the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. The fanatic attempt to stir up Sunni-vs.-Shia strife, and the subsequent spate of violent attacks, caused popular support for the U.S. presence to spike upward.

I hope the blogosphere bumps this up into the national dialogue, because the US MSM are a Fifth Column for Islamic Terrorism's victory over democracy.

FACELESS a big audio podcast download hit

My favorite female newsperson, Lisa Daniels, had an interesting talking-head interview with the newest thing on the global circuit, an anonymous voice-mail student with a baiser & tell-all penchant named
"Faceless".

As you can see if you google a bit, Faceless certainly is a latter-age Bridget Jones with multiple obsessions. Harvard Law Grad Daniels, no mean looker herself, described the shrouded Faceless, who remains anonymous, but consented with all sorts of negotiating and skullduggery arrangements to be interviewed behind a veil with voice modulation, as "drop-dead gorgeous" and wonders if she has a career after she comes out of sequestration.

Anyhow, she is a marketing triumph for a London DJ and the most popular audio download in the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, and can Canada be far behind?

BLACK NOLA Congressman Uncharged

Congressman Jefferson of the Second District of Louisiana has been caught in a bribery scandal over a bribe from a Nigerian cell phone company. However, the left-wing MSM simply DOES NOT REPORT this fact, which died as soon as it hit media-land. A week ago, I was listening to NPR when they announced this joker from the most corrupt city [his office is right in downtown NO] in the USA was going to be interviewed. Wonder if they asked him about the bribery charges? I'll bet those assiduous journalists at NPR may have forgotten to do so.

Meanwhile, Vietnam War Hero Duke Cunningham is rightly going to jail.

What is the DOJ doing with black caucus joke Jefferson? Same thing it's doing on the NSA leaks. I can remember my amazement when GWB responded to a question about prosecuting the NSA leaks, he said he ASSUMED the DOJ was on the job on the case.

This and his recent ignorance of the DP World port issue makes me think his "hands off" style of management is more like hear no, see no, speak no evil.

Wobbly just like his daddy.

UPDATE USAToday actually wrote about the criminally suspicious behavior of "Congressman A" back in January.

RESULT--a complete MSM blackout on the Congressman Jefferson scandal since Jan 11th and all sorts of hue and cry about Abramoff, Cunningham, and Cheney's hunting accident.

Midget Meddler Carter Against USA

Jimmy Carter's delusional state has now reached a level where he imagines he is still president. Some people relayed his latest weirdness to the NY Sun:

Mr. Carter said he made a personal promise to ambassadors from Egypt, Pakistan, and Cuba on the U.N. change issue that was undermined by America's ambassador, John Bolton. "My hope is that when the vote is taken," he told the Council on Foreign Relations, "the other members will outvote the United States."

While other former presidents have tried to refrain from attacking the sitting chief executive, Mr. Carter's attacks on President Bush have increased. The episode he recounted yesterday showed how he tried to undermine officials at lower levels in an effort to influence policy.

Also, for the historical record, this wind-up meddler went to N. Korea during Bill Clinton's Administration to negotiate without authority. Isn't that against the law?

But this backwoods philosopher now tries to undermine US policy-making by calling Administration underlings and trying to undermine UN Ambassador Bolton. That makes him a hero on the psychotic fringes of the hard left, but persona non grata in the State Department and NSC [and just about everywhere else in DC except Barbara-Boxer-land].

The story, as Mr. Carter recalled, began with a recent dinner for 17 he attended in New York, where the guests included the president of the U.N. General Assembly, Jan Eliasson; an unidentified American representative, and other U.N. ambassadors from "powerful" countries at Turtle Bay, of which he mentioned only three: Cuba, Egypt, and Pakistan. The topic was the ongoing negotiations on an attempt to replace the widely discredited Geneva-based Human Rights Commission with a more accountable Human Rights Council.

"One of the things I assured them of was that the United States was not going to dominate all the other nations of the world in the Human Rights Council," Mr. Carter said. However, on the next day, Mr. Carter said, Mr. Bolton publicly "demanded" that the five permanent members of the Security Council will have permanent seats on the new council as well, "which subverted exactly what I have promised them," Mr. Carter said.

Wow! Last I checked, this geek was voted out of office for a real man in 1980 and has not had a real job since. As usual, the peanut farmer manque was on the wrong side of the issue:

Publications not known for their support of the Bush administration or Mr. Bolton, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, recently backed the ambassador's policy on the Human Rights Council, saying in editorials that the compromise hashed out by Mr. Eliasson is an inadequate fix for the existing structure.

Mr. Bolton's spokesman, Richard Grenell, told The New York Sun yesterday that it is "naive" [emphasis mine] to think that Mr. Bolton has "a different position than the rest of the United States government on this issue."

"Naive" is a nice term for the sort of meddlesome and muddled twaddle that this former prez who thinks he still has some sort of moral authority regurgitates on cue.

Carter defines "stuck on stupid," as evidenced by his recent monitoring of elections in Ethiopia, which he immediately pronounced valid and then forthwith left the country while the rest of the UN and other monitors were left with the murderous riots that ensued because, in fact, the elections were rigged.

I personally heard Carter in a symposium in Atlanta in 1982 claim that on Middle East issues, he was in the dark and outmaneuvered, as I recall. Later the rumor came about that he blamed Israel for his 1980 election defeat, since Teddy Kennedy was sicced on him in the primaries as well as John Anderson in the primaries and in the general election.

So now he spends his time bashing Bush, which always gets a big hand in NYC, but makes Jimmy look even more foolish nationwide. And he bashes Israel and Bush in the same substitute for thought that kumbayeh types prefer---preachy putdowns:

Asked yesterday about his views on religion, Mr. Carter said, "The essence of my faith is one of peace." In a clear swipe at Mr. Bush's faith, and to a round of applause, he then added, "We worship the prince of peace, not of pre-emptive war." Mr. Carter then went on to attack American Christians who support Israel.

He also reiterated his known view that most of the problems in the Israeli-Arab front derive from Israel's settlement policies and its building of a defensive barrier in what he insisted on calling "Palestine."

His next pronouncements will be that terrorism is okay, as the Oscar nominated movie directorHany Abu Assad attests and I'm sure Hollyweird will agree at the Oscars when he will possibly get an award to a standing ovation. Munich puts a warm glow on terrorism too, so pretty soon the imbecile from Plains will be mumbling his praise for suicide bombers.

Can't wait for the next episode of "what is wrong with Jimmy Carter?"

Jon Stewart Asks Larry King: Are You Insane?

Daniel Henninger notes in WSJ that Larry King suggested to Jon Stewart that the current low ebb of the Democrats and Republicans was good for Mr. Stewart's business.

King: So, in a sense you're happy over this.
Stewart: No.
King: This gives you fodder.
Mr. Stewart replied that if government "began to solve problems in a rational way rather than just a way that involved political dividends, we would be the happiest people in the world to turn our attention to idiots like, you know, media people, no offense."
King: So, you don't want it to be bad?
Stewart: Did you really just ask me if I want it to be bad?
King: Yes because you--
Stewart: What are you--I have kids. What do you think? I want things to corrode to the point where we're all living in huts?
King: You don't want Medicare to fail?
Stewart: Are you insane?

Anyone familiar with their educational backgrounds and Larry King's book reviews does know that Stewart, a grad of William & Mary, occasionally blurts out the truth. And the truth is that Larry King may have a thought once or twice a month, but it's not recorded in on-air media time. Sort of a very dumb Don Imus. And insane.

Insane? Spend too much time close to politicians nowadays and suddenly that's a good question. This week the New York Times in the course of deconstructing the bad relationship between the Bush White House and the pressies who shout questions at it quoted a clinical psychologist who claimed to have had as patients several White House correspondents--all suffering from what she calls "White House reporter syndrome." Something about being "emotionally isolated."
This story already has plenty of clowns, so by all means, send in the psychiatrists.

It is not my intent to plumb the possibility of mass psychosis in Washington, but nonetheless we must come to grips with the phenomenon of the world's most powerful capital spending so much of its intellectual energy chasing nightmares of its own imagining. Exhibit A here would be the fascinating case history of Scooter Libby and Valerie Plame.

Henninger then comes to the prime mover, the fable that "Bush lied" about WMD:

Rational problem-solving generally requires adhering to the rules of the game, and in politics those rules are often informal. One such rule in Washington is that a politician is as good as his word. Perhaps nothing has been more destructive to Washington's current ability to function than the belief that "Bush lied" about WMD, most notably Joe Wilson's foundational charge in the New York Times that Mr. Bush lied about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium from Niger.
This persistent belief that George Bush committed a major moral crime, which was refuted by the Robb-Silberman Commission, had consequences. It has led many people in Washington's standing institutions--Congress, the press, the intelligence and foreign-policy bureaucracies--to think they've been released from operating inside the normal boundaries that allow political Washington to function, that allow partisans to do business, whether on foreign policy, Social Security or homeland security.

Over the Bush years that code has been displaced by a new ethos that to resist policies that flowed from such a "lie," anything goes--such as leaks about the most sensitive national security programs or published "dissents" by recently retired CIA officials like Paul Pillar. Compare this ethos to that of the U.S. intelligence community that ran the Venona program, producing invaluable signals intelligence on Soviet espionage activities from 1943 onward without any participant revealing its existence. No such achievement is imaginable now.

Instead every issue that emerges becomes an illegitimate extension of the original "lie"--the NSA wiretaps, the Guantanamo detentions, Abu Ghraib, terrorist interrogation techniques, the Plame affair. This is a dangerous game. Raised to this level, policy becomes a super-heated moral Armageddon that makes mere politics impossible to manage. One then might ask: Do you want this government to fail? To which a tragicomic response is appropriate: Are you insane?

There's an interesting parallel between cosmic egomaniacs Joe Wilson and Howard Dean: both spent many years as ski bums before getting a "legitimate" job. But I digress.

Actually, there is evidence that Saddam Hussein removed the WMD to Syria and Lebanon almost a year before Bush invaded. But the left-leaning media, led by media Agitprop Czar NYT, never reports the fact that these allegations exist. The media might get hoist by its own petard, as the leaks to James Risen were on a crime level ten times more serious than anything about Wilson spouse Plame.

The truth is that the Bush White House is running scared, and the Democrats sense through Scott McClellan's mute inability to retort to the ridiculous pie-throwing contests of the White House Press, that GWB is as wobbly as his Daddy when it comes to standing up for something when the going gets tough.

Why doesn't the DOJ prosecute the NYT for the NSA leaks? GWB is ending with a whimper, not a bang.

FSO killed in Karachi

After a bit of a search on Google News, I found the name of the FSO killed in Karachi, although I found it in the Toronto Star after a fruitless search in US journals and sites.

The hapless FSO was David Foy, FMO, Financial Management Officer. I have not been back to the State Dept for a while, but I wonder if Mr. Foy will make it to the marble wall of FSOs who died in the line of duty which is in the main lobby of the "General Hospital" [what now King Abdullah called the State Dept building 20-plus years ago in perhaps the only memorable phrase he has heretofore uttered] in Foggy Bottom.

Foreign Service Officers get pretty short shrift nowadays and the Service has been attenuated by ambitious programs like the "Mustang" program which allowed Foreign Service Staff to upgrade into full Officer status. Wendy Chamberlain, whom I knew in the Dept when she worked as a staff officer, eventually became US Ambassador to Pakistan.

Back to the "wall of memory." A friend of mine was Arnie Raphel, who was Ambassador to Pakistan when he was killed along with the country's President, General Zia, in a plane blown up by a terror-bomb in the 1980s, is certainly on the wall.

Also, when I was in Vietnam, a USAID volunteer named Fred Abramson was killed a couple of years before, in the late '60s, and somehow I ended up with his impressive collection of books. Abramson was a Stanford grad, as I recall, and it brings to mind a lost generation of Peace Corps and Development volunteers. I don't recall if Abramson made it onto the wall.

Actually, I recall having once visited the Karachi Consulate General during the '80s, when a Westerner needed no special protection or bodyguards. I met a relative of Benazir Bhutto, [whose mother was Iranian, I was told] and the poisoning of one of her brothers in a family feud. Bhutto's father was the wildly popular PPP Party chief who rose to be President and then was convicted and hanged by a military junta. I once finished off a bottle of vodka with the Russian Ambassador to Islamabad, as he explained to me that the invasion of Afghanistan was "all a misunderstanding."

Nowadays the madrasas are churning out young Wahhabis steeped in aggressive fundamentalist Islamic doctines. Indeed, Pakistan is a country that is simmering in all sorts of tensions, including when one senior Pak official in Peshawar asserted to me that the western half of the country's wish to secede and associate with Iran, something you don't read about in the foreign policy universe, would occur in the near future. [That was twenty years ago, but maybe many people still feel the same way.]

I stayed in a Shi'a district for a week in Azad Kashmir [where the recent quake occurred or nearby] and got a sense of how gigantic the country is, with a minority of Shi'a living precariously on mountain slopes while the cities like Lahore, one of the most beautiful cities in Asia, now teem with angry Muslims, mostly Sunnis. [The Kipling Museum in Lahore is worth a detour.]

My daughter wants to become an FSO, but I do not support her wish wholeheartedly. Too much danger out there nowadays.

Democrats sell heritage for mess of pottage?.

Peter Beinart has an excellent article in the New Republic concerning Democrats' reversing their free-trade globalization civil libertarian stripes into protectionist racial-profiling nationalist stars.

Beinart's article bases its argument on a book by Walter Russell Mead, who divided American foreign policy into four headings: Wilsonian, Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, and Jacksonian. Beinart expounds:

Mead described Bill Clinton's foreign policy as a coalition between Wilsonians and Hamiltonians. Wilsonians saw the post-cold-war world as a golden age for democracy. Hamiltonians saw it as a golden age for free trade. When human rights and moneymaking clashed--over China, for instance--the Wilsonians and Hamiltonians split. But they agreed on something fundamental: The best thing for America was to make the rest of the world as much like us as possible.

While Bubba Bill was making kumbayeh multicultural nice around the globe and neglecting to snatch Osama bin Laden in Sudan when the Sudanese government offered ObL on a platter [too many legal obstacles, including Jamie Gorelick]:

Jeffersonians and Jacksonians, by contrast, spent the 1990s bitter and out of power. Jeffersonians like Ralph Nader and the libertarian Cato Institute believed that U.S. efforts to refashion the world were making it an empire unaccountable to its own citizens. Jacksonians in the Republican Congress transferred their nationalist antagonism from the Soviet Union to the United Nations and other international meddlers who were encroaching on America's right to run its own affairs.

So when GWB resoundingly defeated the Gorebot by 537 votes in Florida, what did the tyro Texan stay-at-home do with his baseball card collection? This mini-41st responded to 9/11 in a way guided by his Jacksonian/Hamiltonian mentors:

This hypernationalism, combined with Bush, Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld's corporate orientation, seemed to herald a new foreign policy alliance: between Jacksonians and Hamiltonians. In late 2001, with nation-building still low on Bush's agenda, Wilsonianism seemed to have little future.

Oops, something went terribly wrong when George Tenet's famous "slam-dunk" boomeranged back off the rim:

when it turned out Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, the Jacksonian rationale for war collapsed. The Hamiltonian one--that we needed Iraq's oil because we could no longer rely on a decaying Saudi Arabia--dared not speak its name. So Bush drifted in an increasingly Wilsonian direction. By 2005, freeing the Middle East had become his central rhetorical thrust. And, ever since, Bush's foreign policy has had three characteristics: Wilsonian (the crusade for democracy), Hamiltonian (securing oil), and Jacksonian (doing "whatever it takes" to defeat the terrorists, civil liberties and international opinion be damned).

Three out of four seemed nationalist nirvana, but then came the Port debacle:

But, for Jacksonians, it is never worth sacrificing concrete U.S. interests to make foreigners feel better. A couple of years ago, that was the dominant sentiment in Bush foreign policy. Today, however, with Cheney's influence waning, Condoleezza Rice trying to mend fences with U.S. allies, and Bush obsessed with spreading freedom, the administration's Wilsonianism seems to be eclipsing its Jacksonianism.

Considering that Jacksonianism has been Bush's political trump card since September 11, this is a big change. And it has created exactly the opening that Mead envisioned at the end of his book: for Jacksonians to make common cause with Jeffersonians and turn the foreign policy coalition of the '90s on its head

So now Hillary Clinton is poles-apart from her Pepsi Generation spouse:

....nationalism tinged with xenophobia makes Democrats uncomfortable. And that's where Jeffersonianism comes in. Jeffersonians have long worried that foreign policy crusades threaten American liberty, and they have a particular fear of government-corporate collusion. The Bush administration has stoked both fears. So, in opposing the port deal, many liberals have turned to classically Jeffersonian rhetoric. As a blogger on the website MyDD.com put it, "President Bush and the Republican Congress have shown they believe in one thing above all: the primary role of government is to make the business of corporations--American or not--easier."

In liberal circles, in other words, Jeffersonianism is giving Jacksonianism intellectual cover. But make no mistake: Jacksonianism is where the votes are. For Democrats, stealing the Bush administration's populist, unilateralist thunder would be a remarkable coup. And it would be a remarkable historical irony, since Jacksonianism in Jeffersonian clothes--civil libertarian, anti-globalization, uninterested in transforming the world--inverts the foreign policy of the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton

Liberals being hypocrites? Cognitive dissonance, the mind boggles, but I'll give Beinart the last word:

Politically, the opportunity is clear. There's just one catch: Is this really what Democrats believe?

Howard DEAN: the gift that keeps on giving

Howard Dean has slightly modulated his characteristic screech/scream into simple nonsensical sentences:

The Democrats have a better idea. First we will conclude the negotiations with the Chinese and the North Koreans to disarm North Korea. Secondly, under no circumstances will a Democratic Administration ever allow Iran to become a nuclear power. Three, we will kill or capture Osama bin Laden and four, the authority and the control of the ports of the United States must be retained by American companies.

James Taranto of the WSJ points out that Dean is aping Joe Biden by plagiarizing Brit sources for his political speeches, in this case Monty Python's Flying Circus:

Alan (John Cleese): Well, last week we showed you how to become a gynecologist. And this week on "How to Do It" we're going to show you how to play the flute, how to split an atom, how to construct a box girder bridge, how to irrigate the Sahara Desert and make vast new areas of land cultivatable, but first, here's Jackie to tell you all how to rid the world of all known diseases.

Jackie (Eric Idle): Hello, Alan.

Alan: Hello, Jackie.

Jackie: Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvelous cure for something, and then, when the medical profession really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be any diseases ever again.

Alan: Thanks, Jackie. Great idea.

Who says the Deaniac wing of the Dem Party doesn't have a knack for foreign policy?

POPE AND REAGAN OFFED THE USSR

You won’t read this in the NYT/Or see it on PBS [which had a segment on the Lehrer NEWS tonight on Birmingham AL in the sixties. Bet it didn’t refer to Condi Rice. That would be soooo....JOURNALISTIC!]

snarksmith also takes us down memory lane:

Was the USSR behind the assassination attempt of Pope John Paul II? An Italian report says it was. (Almost makes me wish Graham Greene were still alive, just to see him reconcile allegiances.)

"This commission believes, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the leaders of the USSR took the initiative to eliminate Pope Karol Wojtyla," the report said.

Soviet leaders "communicated this decision to the military secret service in order that it carry out the necessary operations", it continued.

The commission said the Soviet Union felt the Pope was a danger because of his support for the democracy-linked Solidarity labour movement in Poland, his native country.

The trail went hot thanks to the KGB archive spirited into the West by Vasily Mitrokhin, a character even John Le Carre couldn't invent if he tried. --Michael Weiss

[Mitrokhin’s book SWORD & SHIELD about the KGB is must reading if you want to find out why Ann Coulter is so outraged by US Hollywood liberals' denials of complicity with the USSR]

According to one protein wisdom reader, the following paragraph will "drive barking moonbats mad with rage." Jeff Goldberg says:

From a strategic standpoint, the Soviet attempt proved prescient—as Pope John Paul’s reign helped bring about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
But that the attempt failed gave the Pope even more power—and, when coupled with Reagan’s military and ideological pressure—may have even expedited the collapse that not many though would occur so suddenly and resoundingly.

That's a thought that the NYT and PBS will avoid even trying to negate. They just wish their lefty past would dissolve like the USSR did.

Do Manners Matter?

Peggy Noonan has a follow-up op-ed piece on her epic saga at West Palm Beach International Airport she recounted last week.

I guess that Peggy herself can serve as a definition the word "classy," as in "classy lady," a term that is withering from disuse and abuse by the new barbarians who have taken over the groves of academe and the media.

The absence of what used to be called "common courtesy" is striking here in South Florida, filled with refugees from the Northeast where civil behavior has become rare or south of the border where in some places it has barely ever existed.

Peggy has a few examples of how the twisted obsessions of berserk social engineers have entered even a Catholic environment. The wreckers of values on the left believe that insulting the beliefs of believers is not rude or even impolitic, but the exercise of a so-called civic right.

"Work is the curse of the drinking classes" has now been replaced by "Rudeness is the right of working classes," or at least those at the TSA with a cushy government job and benefits to match. Yes, patting down people all day long is not exactly enjoyable, but what gives an employee the "right" to treat respectable citizens on an airline trip like guilty criminals until proven innocent by electronic wand?

There is a hilarious and grungy subscript to this whole West Palm Beach Airport turkey-shoot.

Scripps Institute recently decided to move to South Florida from its San Diego HQ. The final choice boiled down to Jupiter, FL in northern Palm Beach County and Boca Raton at its southern end.

The northern venue of Jupiter was chosen by the Palm Beach County Commissioners for a number of reasons, but one was reportedly that if Scripps were located in Boca Raton, many of the visitors to the Institute would fly into Boca via the much more commodious [and better behaved, from my limited experience] Ft. Lauderdale Airport.

Therefore, count on West Palm Beach Int'l getting even more crowded [and impolite, verging on insulting] in the future!

The worst is yet to come!

Patriarchy: Menschen or Maniacs?

Foreign Policy has a provocative article by Philip Longman of the New America Foundation. He starts with a commonplace observation:

For more than a generation now, well-fed, healthy, peaceful populations around the world have been producing too few children to avoid population decline. That is true even though dramatic improvements in infant and child mortality mean that far fewer children are needed today (only about 2.1 per woman in modern societies) to avoid population loss. Birthrates are falling far below replacement levels in one country after the next—from China, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, to Canada, the Caribbean, all of Europe, Russia, and even parts of the Middle East.

Longman has a lot of observations that patriarchy has evolutionary advantages along the following theme:

Patriarchal societies come in many varieties and evolve through different stages. What they have in common are customs and attitudes that collectively serve to maximize fertility and parental investment in the next generation.

Anticipating brickbats from the usual suspects, Longman notes:

Today we associate patriarchy with the hideous abuse of women and children, with poverty and failed states. Taliban rebels or Muslim fanatics in Nigeria stoning an adulteress to death come to mind. Yet these are examples of insecure societies that have degenerated into male tyrannies, and they do not represent the form of patriarchy that has achieved evolutionary advantage in human history. Under a true patriarchal system, such as in early Rome or 17th-century Protestant Europe, fathers have strong reason to take an active interest in the children their wives bear. That is because, when men come to see themselves, and are seen by others, as upholders of a patriarchal line, how those children turn out directly affects their own rank and honor.

Today, we know what is occurring worldwide:

once a society grows cosmopolitan, fast-paced, and filled with new ideas, new peoples, and new luxuries, this sense of honor and connection to one’s ancestors begins to fade, and with it, any sense of the necessity of reproduction. "When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard 'having children' as a question of pro’s and con's," Oswald Spengler, the German historian and philosopher, once observed, "the great turning point has come."

Longman cites some interesting research:

In Europe today, for example, how many children different people have, and under what circumstances, correlates strongly with their beliefs on a wide range of political and cultural attitudes. For instance, do you distrust the army? Then, according to polling data assembled by demographers Ronny Lesthaeghe and Johan Surkyn, you are less likely to be married and have kids—or ever to get married and have kids—than those who say they have no objection to the military. Or again, do you find soft drugs, homosexuality, and euthanasia acceptable? Do you seldom, if ever, attend church? For whatever reason, people answering affirmatively to such questions are far more likely to live alone, or in childless, cohabitating unions, than those who answer negatively.

The great difference in fertility rates between secular individualists and religious or cultural conservatives augurs a vast, demographically driven change in modern societies. Consider the demographics of France, for example. Among French women born in the early 1960s, less than a third have three or more children. But this distinct minority of French women (most of them presumably practicing Catholics and Muslims) produced more than 50 percent of all children born to their generation, in large measure because so many of their contemporaries had one child or none at all.

Statistics will out:

Meanwhile, the descendants of parents who have three or more children will be hugely overrepresented in subsequent generations, and so will the values and ideas that led their parents to have large families.

Will the Revolting Generation of '68 replicate itself?

Today, by contrast, childlessness is common, and even couples who have children typically have just one. Tomorrow’s children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents’ values, as always happens. But when they look around for fellow secularists and counterculturalists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.

Unfortunately, Longman neglects to put "all other things being equal" into his last two paragraphs:

Advanced societies are growing more patriarchal, whether they like it or not. In addition to the greater fertility of conservative segments of society, the rollback of the welfare state forced by population aging and decline will give these elements an additional survival advantage, and therefore spur even higher fertility. As governments hand back functions they once appropriated from the family, notably support in old age, people will find that they need more children to insure their golden years, and they will seek to bind their children to them through inculcating traditional religious values akin to the Bible’s injunction to honor thy mother and father.

Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and submit to father.

Almost sounds biblical, doesn't it?

European Social Model: Stuck on Stupid!

The Financial Times has a brilliant piece of writing [regrettably pay-for-view] by its most readable and thoughtful commentary artist, Martin Wolf, who more in sorrow than in anger deconstructs the Nordic model using a Swedish think-tank as his mentor.

The statistics, overall, have Swedish government services declining in quality in the two areas that the maternal state-model the feminized Europeans prefer should excel in: health and education.

But Wolf goes much further, pointing out that all across Europe, the welfare state is beginning to destroy itself by its own internal contradictions. For instance, job security laws lower willingness to hire, which makes workers hang onto their jobs and not switch, and makes economic changes, especially imports, more threatening. [France's search for an indigenous "energy champion" when faced with a foreign buyer stands out as an example].

The lede of the story:The European state is maternal. It is protective, but also infantilizing in its services, which are available to all, but mediocre and inflexible.

High employment entry barriers, high wages and high taxes generate high levels of unemployment, leading to large blocs of unassimilated, unemployed immigrants who turn to criminality, rioting and social disorder.

Finally, the welfare state is a substitute for a committed father, depriving men and women of a motive for producing children who might provide for them in their old age. This leads to a reduced posterity on which the sustainability of the welfare state depends.

The results of the entire system are etched in total clarity: Europe caught up to the US in 1995 in average living standards, but has fallen back 20% in the last ten years.

The three countries investing least in percentage of public spending are also among the top four in the OECD in productivity growth in the last TEN years. [Ireland, S. Korea, USA]

You won't read about this in the New York Times or other US publications dedicated to the establishment of a welfare state on the European social model.