Democrats Start Pushing Panic Button

The clueless Dhimmitude of the Democrats is not solely due to their foreign policy shortcomings. A weirdo from Emory named Drew Westen has now been elevated to guru status by the meth brigade at Firedoglake, which does not accept comments from people who disagree with their ultra-left fever-swamp hallucinations. David Brooks elaborates:

Between 2000 and 2006, a specter haunted the community of fundamentalist Democrats. Members of this community looked around and observed their moral and intellectual superiority. They observed that their policies were better for the middle classes. And yet the middle classes did not support Democrats. They tended to vote, in large numbers, for the morally and intellectually inferior party, the one, moreover, that catered to the interests of the rich.

How could this be?

Serious thinkers set to work, and produced a long shelf of books answering this question. Their answers tended to rely on similar themes. First, Democrats lose because they are too intelligent. Their arguments are too complicated for American voters. Second, Democrats lose because they are too tolerant. They refuse to cater to racism and hatred. Finally, Democrats lose because they are not good at the dark art of politics. Republicans, though they are knuckle-dragging simpletons when it comes to policy, are devilishly clever when it comes to electioneering. They have brilliant political consultants like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, who frame issues so fiendishly, they can fool the American people into voting against their own best interests.

This literature was never taken seriously by sophisticated Democrats, but it thrived nonetheless. Still, you’d think it would be pretty much extinct now that Democrats are winning and Republicans are in the midst of a historic meltdown.

But I worked for two Democratic National Presidential Campaigns on the National Staff level. The Democrats have an emotional instability gene built into their political template, and a credulous belief that their own good intentions trump common sense. So now they're going for the jugular, believing that the American people can be conned into thinking Far Left is the middle----as the KKKossacks propound---or that Hollyweird is full of thoughtful social commentators like Harry Shearer and Alec Baldwin, as the Puffington Host keeps intimating. Brooks slaps this Westen fellow silly:

This thesis raises some interesting questions. First, why did someone with so little faith in rational inquiry go into academia, and what does he do to those who disagree with him at Emory faculty meetings, especially recovering alcoholics?

Second, the states of upper New England and the Pacific Coast regularly used to vote Republican in presidential elections but now they generally vote Democratic. Did people in those states become less emotional, and therefore more amenable to the Democrats’ rational appeals over the past few decades? If so, has this led to a drop in Valentine’s Day purchases, at least compared with people in passionate states like Nebraska?

Third, how did John Kerry beat Howard Dean in the Democratic primaries? Was it because of his Oprah-esque displays of emotional intensity?

Fourth, is it possible that substance has something to do with the political fortunes of parties? Could it be that Democrats won in the middle part of the 20th century because they were right about the big issues — the New Deal and the civil rights movement? Is it possible Republicans won in the latter part of the century because they were right about economic growth and the cold war? Is it possible Democrats are winning now because they were right about whether to go to war in Iraq? And if substantive policies correlate with political fortunes, what does that say about the human mind?

Finally, if voter decisions are driven by the sort of crude emotional outbursts Westen recommends, and if, as he writes, “a substantial minority of Americans hold authoritarian, intolerant ideologies driven by fear, hate and prejudice that are fundamentally incompatible with Democratic (and democratic) principles,” then shouldn’t we abandon this whole democracy thing? Shouldn’t we have a coup, led perhaps by the Emory psychology department, which could prevent the brutish and hate-filled from ever gaining control?

It’s rare that one comes across a book that raises so many questions. Of course it’s rare that one comes across a book that so avidly flatters the prejudices of its partisan readers.

The dim bulbs of the fever swamp think their meth-fueled delirium tremens will carry the day, because they translate their grandiosity and hysteria into superiority on a moral and intellectual level. This is called mass psychosis by most social observers with a modicum of objectivity. McGovern & Co. believed a "student body left" Hail Mary pass would gain the White House, as the student movements totally misread their influence on the American body politic. Brooks ends with a soothing lullaby to the squalling kiddie-korps running Kossack/firedog/HuffinPuff:

emotions are produced by learning. As we go through life, we learn what cause leads to what effect. When, later on, we face similar situations, the emotions highlight possible outcomes, drawing us toward some actions and steering us away from others.

In other words, emotions partner with rationality. It’s not necessary to dumb things down to appeal to emotions. It’s not necessary to understand some secret language that will key certain neuro-emotional firings. The best way to win votes — and this will be a shocker — is to offer people an accurate view of the world and a set of policies that seem likely to produce good results.

This is how you make voters happy.

Don't count on the far-left to get any messages from people who disagree with their apodictic manifestoes. Like firedoglake, they don't take outside calls.

Greek Fires Might Have Political Origin

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis has declared that the spate of forest fires breaking out all over Greece might be criminal arson:

"So many fires breaking out simultaneously in so many parts of the country cannot be a coincidence," Karamanlis said a nationally televised address. "The state will do everything it can to find those responsible and punish them."

Indeed, elections are just three weeks away, and

the devastating fires are certain to become a political issue. The government has come under criticism for its response to previous fires, which killed 10 people.

Given the fact that the ultra-leftist PASOK Party was put out of power because of widespread unpopularity of the incumbent PASOK government led by Costas Simitis (a party that had been in power between 1981—1989 and from 1993—2004)partly because PASOK was caught by the EU faking Greek economic statistics in order to join the Eurozone and get the economic boost such assession would bring. PASOK has no problem resorting to illegal methods in order to return to power. I had dinner with a member of the Papandreaou family long ago who told me he hoped to help cure PASOK of its criminal ways.

But Karamanlis is clearly implying that the fires responsible for the Greek deaths are possibly being set for political motivation, and given the shady ethics and dishonest practices of Simitis and PASOK in the past, many Greeks might tend to agree.

I'm looking forward to see what Christopher Hitchens has to say about these fires.

Russia Threatens Georgia: 8000 lb Elephant is Oil Pipeline

Russia is reverting to its old bad habits, although alcoholism and AIDS no longer drive Russian paranoia and grandiosity. Its booming economy should start to sober up the regime of Vlad the Empoisoner and his putative successor Ivanov. But in the meantime, Russia is lobbing missiles and making night attacks into Georgia using its traditional brutal tactics to blackmail Georgia into submission.

Without getting into details, the WSJ article does bury the lede in para 20 or something:

"When Russia cut off gas supplies, we had to work on developing new sources. So we're developing hydro-power and coal and nuclear energy. Next year, we'll be fully supplied by Azerbaijani power. . . . Everyone said we'd never survive but our success gives confidence to everyone else."

Mr. Saakashvili notes that his country had to diversify its markets anyway. "Georgia's natural strength is its role as a crossroads both culturally and geographically. It was always a kind of bridge on the old Silk Road. So we're building up our highway system; we're completing our rail link from Batoumi to Istanbul through to Europe; we've got the new international airport there.

"Eastwards we're connecting all the way to China via a ferry across the Caspian. It will offer an alternative to the trans-Siberian railway. And of course, the same goes for pipelines such as the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline which goes through Georgia."

Energy and its availability from Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan is the chief motive driving Russia's strong-arm tactics, and its traditional "light-touch diplomacy" as with the threat last week on Czech anti-missile installations will remain the Russian style as long as pint-size czarovitch Putin is in command---which will be beyond his stepping down as president next year.

If he does.

John Edwards Vows to Sell His Foreclosure Fund Assets

The New York Post has a nice article on the biggest fraud to run for President since.....John Kerrey! Instead of three fake Purple Hearts, this "populist" makes money on kicking poor flood victims of Katrina out of their homes.

The populist candidate - who has denounced such lenders - invested $16 million of his $30 million in assets in Fortress Investment Group. The Wall Street Journal reported that 34 New Orleans homeowners struggling to overcome Katrina's aftermath faced foreclosure suits from subprime-lending units of Fortress.

Yesterday, the red-faced Democratic candidate vowed to remove from his portfolio any Fortress funds that have a stake in those lender units.

"I will not have my family's money involved in these firms that are foreclosing on people in New Orleans," he said while on the campaign trial in Des Moines, Iowa.

When Fortress' connections to subprime lenders were reported in May, Edwards said he was unaware of it and would ask the company to help Katrina victims faced with losing their homes.

Let's see, we're supposed to entrust the presidency to a fellow who claims he was UNAWARE of Fortress' subprime policies, after the same fellow

worked for the firm as a senior adviser after his losing 2004 race as Sen. John Kerry's vice-presidential running mate. He was paid $479,512 for part-time work last year, records show.

Uh, huh. Maybe he was "kept out of the loop" and invested $16 million in ignorance, in the which case, should he be running for anything other than dunce of the year? How do you get paid half-a-mil for "part-time work" and not know anything about the predatory loans the company made? And there's this tiny asterisk:

Fortress executives also have donated more than $150,000 to Edwards' campaign during the first six months of the year.

To help him study poverty, fo'sho'. John just has no shame, perhaps.
Asked yesterday if his investments damaged his image as a poverty fighter, Edward's said: "No. Everyone knows I am completely committed to eliminating poverty in this country." [Especially his own, Ed. note]

The mortgage flap was the second embarrassing disclosure this month involving Edwards and his finances.

Edwards demanded that his Democratic rivals give back any money they received from Rupert Murdoch and boycott Murdoch's Fox News.

But two weeks ago it was disclosed that Edwards had been paid $800,000 for a book published by a subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corp., which also owns The Post. In response, Edwards said he gave $500,000 to charity and used the rest for researchers and other expenses, although he did not provide records.

Or perhaps, could John Edwards be overseeing the death throes of a campaign conceived in hypocrisy, suckled by hedge funds soaking the poor, and fueled by populist rhetoric repeatedly contradicted by his own sharp practices and misleading disingenuous statements? Does anyone believe anything he says anymore?

My guess is yes and no.

UPDATE: Illegal Alien Crime: the Biggest MSM Cover-Up of All

Heather MacDonald has a piece in the City Journal on alien perps. The media keeps saying [creepy liar Geraldo Rivera AKA Jerry Rivers bleats this daily on FoxNews of all places] that the illegals commit less crime than average. Duh... They commit no white collar crime to speak of and the crimes they do commit are usually very violent, given their nasty temperament---[Mexicans, anyway, who refuse to shake hands after being defeated in national sporting events with other countries, which is virtually ALL THE TIME for these inbred low-life LOOOZERS]. Guatemalans and other Central Americans, including Cubans here in FL, are generally not associated with crime gangs like MS-13---so it is Mexicans and El Salvadoreans who are the nastiest of the nasty. Jamaicans are also a nasty violent sub-group---I found five of them in our living room last year at mid-day. They were a gang doing our entire neighborhood, The Colonnade here in Boca. The Boca cops refused to do much, as they're generally scared of Jamaicans, but a couple of detectives who are very brave tracked them down in Liberty City in Miami-Dade.

One of my gentle readers requested some information on crime among illegal aliens. Of course, the Feds and DOJ have stopped collecting such info [GWB & his WSJ pals using brain-dead AG Alberto Gonzales to cover up crime] and here's a note from my native state of Wisconsin:

In fact, the MSM seems to go out of its way to hide criminal activity committed by illegal aliens. Here in Wisconsin, it's no secret that the vast majority of Hispanic/Latino residents are residing here illegally. In my area, their population has doubled in the past five years, because the mantra here is "Celebrate Diversity!"

When a crime is reported in the local newspaper, committed by someone with an obviously Hispanic/Latino name, no mention is made of the culprit's immigration status. When I phoned the local police station, to ask about statistics relating to crimes committed by illegal aliens, I was told that they don't keep such statistics. When I asked why not, I was told that they were not asked to do that, when filing crime reports at the state level.

I went to the next level and contacted the state law enforcement authorities in Madison, in order to pursue my inquiry there. It turned out that they didn't gather information on crimes committed by illegal aliens, either, because it wasn't requested by federal authorities.

In fact, they no longer collected data on crimes committed by Hispanics/Latinos, because that had been determined to be an ethnic group, not a racial group. Hispanics/Latinos were now counted as whites. The other racial group classifications are black, Asian, and native American Indian. (I couldn't help thinking that people way up the law enforcement organizational chart must have decided they want that kind of information buried.)

Fortunately, a number of congressmen requested that the General Accountability Office (GAO) investigate and report information on criminal aliens incarcerated in federal and state prisons and local jails. The resulting GAO report, published in April 2005, revealed that illegal aliens make up 27% of the prison population. (The oft-cited figure of 12 million illegal aliens in the country means that they make up just 4% of the general population.)

Since illegal aliens are unlikely to be committing white-collar crimes, that figure likely underestimates the amount of violent crime committed by illegal aliens. Using the GAO report, Representative Steve King of Iowa points out that 25 Americans, on average, are killed by illegal aliens every day (about evenly split between motor vehicle accidents and outright murder).

Do the math: That works out to more than 9,000 deaths per year, or more than 36,000 deaths over the past four years. That's more than ten times the number of Americans killed in Iraq over the past four years!

Oddly, I've seen people in my hometown protesting against the war in Iraq, but I've never seen anyone protesting against the illegal alien invasion that is killing tens of thousands of Americans right here on our own soil.

Here in Florida, an especially heinous crime was committed in Delray Beach by an obviously foreign dude, raping and attempted-murder on a local girl, and all the local media dodged any questions about his status, until a local TV reporter noted parenthetically that the perp had "recently arrived from the Bahamas" and had been hiding among the local black community. I'm sure this criminal didn't go through customs, probably was dropped off by a fishing boat, and yet the MSM didn't mention it in dozens of stories both local and national---it was especially brutal.

This crime spree, especially from our narco-state kleptocrat neighbor Mexico, has got to be recognized and stopped. And sanctuary cities have got to be punished for being scofflaws. And get a new AG, GWB!
UPDATE The Collection of Criminals Known as the Mexican Senate rebuked the US for tossing back the trash that had ended up somehow in Chicago. There should be a RICO-statute for failed-state legislative bodies that derive the largest part of their income from bribes and kickbacks----but then we'd have to look closely at the collection of creeps led by Harry '"My kids are lobbyists living in my basement" Reid, or Mitch McConnell, who vies desperately to keep up the Republicans' rate of peculation at least even with the Dems. Ditto Hastert and Pelosi, and good riddance to Hastert, the crookedest Speaker of the House in the history of Congress until Nancy came along!

Sarkozy Gets Mixed Reviews from FT, A+ from Amir Taheri

The Financial Times gives French President Sarkozy generally good reviews, damning him with faint praise a bit.

....for France’s long-starved reformers, who saw Mr Sarkozy as the country’s best hope for a redynamised economy, the first three months have been something of a disappointment. He may have tried to free the labour market by abolishing tax on overtime, but he has bought peace with unions by compromising on a pledge for minimum service in public transport during strikes. He has given France’s flagging university system much-needed autonomy, but has surrendered to union resistance on student selection and fees. For the critics, such compromises bode ill for the dramatic rupture Mr Sarkozy himself said was needed to put France’s over-regulated economy back on the path of strong growth.

Amir Taheri in the Gulf News is much more positive towards Sarkozy and takes a backhand slap at Chirac:

[Foreign Minister] Kouchner's visit, full of symbolism, shatters one of the key points in Al Qaida's analysis: that the Western powers will never find enough unity to develop a common strategy against terror.

At one point, when Chirac invited German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Russian President Vladimir Putin to a gathering to forge an anti-American triple alliance, Al Qaida's analysis appeared to have some basis in reality.

Now, however, both Chancellor Angela Merkel and Sarkozy understand the stark fact that the perception of Western disunity may be one of the factors that prolongs the conflict in Iraq.

Taheri also refers to one of the worst kept secrets in Europe, that Chirac was in the tank with Saddam Hussein, who paid him handsomely for Chirac's backstabbing the US policy through Saddam's half-brother who was Iraq's Ambassador to the UN in Geneva:

One of the key promises that Nicolas Sarkozy had made during his presidential election campaign last spring was to "correct" foreign policy "mistakes" made by his predecessor Jacques Chirac.

Chief among these was Chirac's desperate efforts to prevent the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussain's regime of terror.
Chirac failed to save his friend's regime but managed to do serious damage to relations with the US, Great Britain and more than 40 other nations that joined the coalition of the willing to liberate Iraq in 2003.

Sarkozy's moves to correct the mistake started even before his election when he met President George W. Bush at the White House in 2006 and described Chirac's policy as "arrogant".

The surprise visit paid to Iraq by France's new Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner this week is another move by Sarkozy to shed Chirac's disastrous legacy.

No better man than Kouchner could have been chosen to signal France's change of policy. For Kouchner is one of a handful of people in the West who recognised the murderous nature of Saddam's regime and called for its overthrow as early as the 1980s.

It will be interesting if Chirac's peculations and behind-the-scenes treachery will ever be revealed by the US foreign policy community, dominated by the Bush-hating CFR and Carnegie Soros-oriented rags like Foreign Policy. Gold Napoleons d'or buys a lot from Chirac who first hooked up with Saddam during his first and only trip to Europe, when Chirac was a young nuclear affairs minister. It was Chirac who was behind Osirak, the Iraqi reactor that the Israelis bombed in '81, thus preventing Iraq from eventually building a nuclear device.

Supposedly the bags of gold French coins came to Chirac via the diplomatic pouch from Geneva's Iraqi UN mission.

Who says the UN doesn't play a role in Middle East diplomacy?

Russia to Resume Building Civilian Aircraft?

Not that the clueless imbeciles at the world's collection of dumbest journalists, The Guardian, would know about these things, but they are also unintentional humorists.

Mr Putin said Russia would also resume the large-scale manufacture of civilian planes. "Russia has a very important goal which is to retain leadership in the production of military equipment," he said.

The Russian civilian planes might be on the Ilyushin model, and when I was stationed at the American Embassy in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, we were always trying to organize scuba diving expeditions on the several Ilyushin planes in the Red Sea offshore Jidda. Through a baleful combination of Egyptian pilots and Russian aeronautics, at least three Ilyushins were within diving and boat-trip distance from the Saudi city.

I'm sure the Dhimmi-crats and other cowards are quaking at the prospects of Russian civil and military aircraft, but their record since mid-20th century has not been truly world class in either department.

Tenet Gets Heat From CIA Report

The CIA report by IG Helgerson tries to dodge the major issue in the run-up to 911.

First, the reason Israeli officials called Tenet "grease ball" was because he threatened to resign if Clinton released Jonathon Pollard at Netanyahu' behest at Wye.

Tenet was a family friend and gave me his CV back in the mid-90s while he was Senate Intell Cte Chief. He wanted to work for Amoco in Chicago and get out of DC because it was full of a**holes, in his trenchant phrase. Instead, shortly afterward he was vaulted into the NSC job, then DDCI, then DCI.

Tenet detested Sandy Berger, calling him a "trade lawyer" and a shill for the Israelis, among other choice observations. Sandy is hiding the Clinton smoking gun on BJ's feckless efforts to get AQ. Tenet is also responsible, as is CTC under its various chiefs, including Cannistraro, who is now Larry Johnson's pal signing letters of condemnation of Tenet.

Tenet was right. DC is full of a**holes.

Kate O'Beirne at The Corner has the real scoop.

"recounting of the CIA's inexcusable failure to report to the FBI that two known al Qaeda associates (who were 9/11 hijackers) had traveled to the U.S. comes awfully close. The summary concludes: "Informing the FBI and good operational followthrough by CIA and FBI might have resulted in surveillance of [the "UBL associates"]. Surveillance, in turn, would have had the potential to yield information on flight training, financing, and links to others who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks." The review team recommends assessing the performance of two chiefs of the counterterrorism unit with respect to their management of the watchlist program and of three managers for failure to ensure prompt action on the known al Qaeda members in the U.S. "

No amount of CIA bobbing and weaving and juking will avoid its inexcusable oversight/turf-war crime in not sharing the two AQ operatives' arrival in San Diego in the late '90s. Read Lawrence Wright for how Ali Soufan almost caught AQ despite the CIA attempt to cover AQ's operations in the USA---unintentionally, of course, but as effectively as if the CIA were an arm of Islamic terrorism.

Pat Schroeder Weeps About Books

Pat Schroeder is one of those airheads that give even liberals a bad name. This creature used to put smiley-faces next to her name when in Congress. She gained notoriety when she wept as she gave up an ill-considered attempt at the Presidency. What happened to empty-headed liberals happened to her---a faineant job for an incompetent idiot who never did do a decent day's work in her life. Wonder what they pay this ancient fossil for insulting readers of conservative books? But then, this association probably has zero influence anywhere and is now in the minus-column as to leadership with this bozette in charge.

This prattling smiley-face LOOOOZER says liberals read a lot more than conservatives---citing exactly one poll to back up her errant nonsense. Mary Matalin gently lets this PMS gasbag off the hook:

"As head of a book publishing association, she probably shouldn't malign any readers," said Mary Matalin, a GOP strategist who oversees a line of books by conservative authors, Threshold, at Simon & Schuster. Matalin said conservatives and others aren't necessarily reading less, but are getting more information online and from magazines.

Schroeder, like many other preening ninnies who style themselves "liberals," get high sniffing their own flatulence.

And Schroeder, best known for her fatuous tears, now also is known for bashing part of her own constituency as the head of a non-profit.

And getting high sniffing her own farts.

Or We'll Send You Shipments of Polonium Tea?

With their characteristic light touch, the Russians employed the 39th anniversary ofPrague Spring to warn the Czech government not to erect anti-missile defenses against "rogue states" on its soil.

I don't know about the average Czech, but I'd take offense if that were someone coming to my country and saying that. Of course, maybe the Russian military czar is counting on liberal Democrats to be elected states-side. Remember Jimmy Carter and Teddy Kennedy in '83 sneaking off to Moscow to get help opposing Ronald Ray-gun?

Didn't think you did, as the media covered up both episodes for their Dhimmi-crat clients.

Hope the Czechs have more spine than liberals.

Mark Steyn: Where Our Sanctuary From Criminals?

Leftist hypocrisy is excoriated by Mark Steyn in this excellent screed on the two Left Coasts' relentless indifference to REAL CRIMES if they are committed by exempt, protected categories of the MSM pantheon of legitimate crimes. Steyn starts by noting the killing of a gay kid in Wyoming's getting Frank Rich and other illuminati incensed.

By contrast, there's been a succession of prominent stories with one common feature that the very same pundits, politicians and lobby groups have a curious reluctance to go anywhere near. In a New York Times report headlined "Sorrow And Anger As Newark Buries Slain Youth," the limpidly tasteful Times prose prioritized "sorrow" over "anger," and offered only the following reference to the perpetrators: "The authorities have said robbery appeared to be the motive. Three suspects – two 15-year-olds and a 28-year-old construction worker from Peru – have been arrested."

So, this Peruvian guy was here on a green card? Or did he apply for a temporary construction-work visa from the U.S. Embassy in Lima?

Not exactly. Jose Carranza is an "undocumented" immigrant. His criminal career did not begin with the triple murder he's alleged to have committed, nor with the barroom assault from earlier this year, nor with the 31 counts of aggravated sexual assault relating to the rape of a 5-year-old child, for which Mr. Carranza had been released on bail. (His $50,000 bail on the assault charge and $150,000 bail on the child-rape charges have now been revoked.) No, Mr. Carranza's criminal career in the United States began when he decided to live in this country unlawfully.

Jose Carranza isn't exactly a member of an exclusive club. Violent crime committed by fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community is now a routine feature of American life. But who cares? In 2002, as the "Washington Sniper" piled up his body count, "experts" lined up to tell the media that he was most likely an "angry white male," a "macho hunter" or an "icy loner." When the icy loner turned out to be a black Muslim named Muhammad accompanied by an illegal immigrant from Jamaica, the only angry white males around were the lads in America's newsrooms who were noticeably reluctant to abandon their thesis: Early editions of the New York Times speculated that Muhammad and John Lee Malvo were being sought for "possible ties to 'skinhead militia' groups," which seemed a somewhat improbable alliance given the size of Mr. Muhammad's hair in the only available mug shot. As for his illegal sidekick, Malvo was detained and released by the INS in breach of their own procedures.

The Orange County Register should soon overtake the lagging LAT in circulation, seeing as the OCR actually addresses the main threat to Southern California---Mexican criminals aided and abetted by MSM journalists playing ostrich. More Steyn on how Newark is an eastern outlier of the crime-zone called LA County:

Newark is the logical end point of these policies. It is a failed city: 60 percent of its children are being raised in households without fathers. Into that vacuum pour all kinds of alternative authority structures: Mr. Carranza is alleged to have committed his crime with various teenage members of MS-13, a gang with origins in El Salvador's civil war of the 1980s that now operates in some 30 U.S. states. In its toughest redoubts, immigrants don't assimilate with America, America assimilates to the immigrants, and a Fairfax, Va., teenager finds himself getting hacked at by machete wielders.

One could, I suppose, regard this as one of those unforeseen incremental consequences that happens in the darkest shadows of society. But that doesn't extend to Newark's official status as an illegal-immigrant "sanctuary city." Like Los Angeles, New York and untold others, Newark has formally erased the distinction between U.S. citizens and the armies of the undocumented. This is the active collusion by multiple cities and states in the subversion of U.S. sovereignty. In Newark, N.J., it means an illegal-immigrant child rapist is free to murder on a Saturday night. In Somerville, Mass., it means two deaf girls are raped by MS-13 members. And in Falls Church, Va., it means Saudi Wahhabists figuring out that, if the "sanctuary nation" (in Michelle Malkin's phrases) offers such rich pickings to imported killers and imported gangs, why not to jihadists?

If the Repubs can get away from the Bush-WSJ immigration debacle and address these issues, perhaps they can brave the charges of "racism" and "nativism" and clean up the cities of America by tossing out the human sewage like Carranza & the gangs of MS-13.

That would require testicles far larger than any on the scurvy crew running for POTUS.

Pilgrimage toward Sanity: Andrew Anthony

Christopher Hitchens was my drinking partner when he first arrived in DC in the early '80s, and he was at our home for many occasions, including one Christmas, while his first marriage started to disintegrate [we had met him through Eleni Meleagrou, his first wife]. He filled me with endless anecdotes of the British left, plus his own elaborate explanations of Watergate and the Greek CIA that sometimes still make sense....[when I'm under self-administered medication!]

But he was to the left of Trotsky back then, and a committed leftist, as I was myself. I introduced him to the Mondale Campaign, where I worked at National HQ back in '84, and the Dems were too straight for CH.

However, 9/11 and the relentless anti-Semitism of the liberal left removed the scales from Hitchens' eyes. At the same time, another committed leftist who had been my renter after I moved into my wife's condo, Fouad Ajami, began a pilgrimage to the sanity of real-world Realpolitik. I was his landlord, but he helped me realize much earlier than Hitchens that the left hates America and works against the US national interest on many levels. Here is Andrew Anthony in the Guardian on his metanoia as the cocoon began to split and his flight toward reality began:

The scale of the suffering, the innocence of the victims and the aims of the perpetrators barely seemed to register in many of the [MSM]comments [on 9/11]. Was this a sign of shock or complacency? Or was it something else, a kind of atrophying of moral faculties, brought on by prolonged use of fixed ideas, that prevented the sufferer from recognising a new paradigm when it arrived, no matter how spectacular its announcement?

In the end I reached the conclusion that 11 September had already brutally confirmed: there were other forces, far more malign than America, that lay in wait in the world. But having faced up to the basic issue of comparative international threats, could I stop the political reassessment there? If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true? I tried hard to suppress this thought, to ring-fence the global situation, grant it exceptional status and keep it in a separate part of my mind. I had too much vested in my image of myself as a 'liberal'.

The Soros sub-contractors, the KKKossacks, and the Puffington Host should avail themselves of this Pilgrim's Progress from the Slough of Despond of liberalism to a Peggy Noonan vision of morning in America. Ha Ha! Fat Chance! More on "the mugging of 9/11 and how it didn't sink into sick minds here and here.
Kudos for the Guardian for publishing such a thoughtful memoir-in-the-making.

Identical Quads Born in Montana: Oops, Parents are Canadian!

The AP Buries the Lede in a story about identical quads born to a Canadian couple. About a dozen paras into the article is the tiny paragraph:

The Jepps drove 325 miles to Great Falls for the births because hospitals in Calgary were at capacity, Key said.

How Sicko!

KKKossacks Eat Democratic Young

Steven Colbert humiliated diminuitive chest-thumper Markos Moulitsas the other night on TV when he tricked him into giving a Nazi salute to an improvised triskele made out of a K that looked close to being a swastika. "How high is a dog, a pony, a horse? And MMZ raised his hand to get caught in a simulated Sieg Heil.

Kimberley Strassel notes today that the Kossacks are making another pass at nominating a McGovern rather than a Clinton. But 2006 belies the Nutroot contention that they are the edge of the wedge in Democratic gains, as Henry Cuellar avows at length to WSJ. However, Strassel warns:

Don't take this to mean that the liberal juggernaut hasn't shifted the debate. Some moderate Democrats, while reticent to admit it, are tacking left in hopes of dodging further assaults. Ms. Tauscher, long known for her national security credentials, has toned down her hawkish impulses, voting against the recent surge and taking a harder line on missile defense. Even Mr. Ford's DLC these days seems a little more comfortable talking about "trade enforcement" than it does "free trade." Mr. Cuellar admits that while some centrists are willing to say "who the . . . blank-blank do [these Internet groups] think they are," others don't want "to be the center of the attraction."

In a match-up on "Meet the Press" this past weekend, the Daily Kos's Mr. Moulitsas extolled those who use his site to trash thoughtful folks such as Mr. Cuellar as a shining example of "democracy." In the same breath he then commanded the DLC's Mr. Ford to "control" his moderate members, and force them to stop disagreeing with liberal Democrats. If you get that logic, you might just be a Daily Kos reader.

Mr. Cuellar, for his part, doesn't show much of an inclination to be controlled by anything other than his own principles. And he's trumped the hungry liberals--so far.

Anyone who peeks at the loathesome garbage this tiny martinet purveys on his hate-site knows that civil discourse is abandoned once the far left [and very occasionally the far right] enter the fray. Be prepared for F-bombs and bad grammar, and the thinking is worse than the language and syntax. Luckily, most leftist sites do not permit comments from other than committed crazies, through elaborate vetting procedures to weed out sane commenters.

So I'm not tempted to do anything except observe, as Londoners used to do in the 18th century with diversionary trips to Bedlam.

Catching Predators: Good Ratings Trump Bad Journalism?

To Catch a Predator was riveting TV when it first came out, but recently Chris Hansen's international fraud ID theft series has been much better. ABC 20/20 is now investigating "Predator" and may find that there was a very cozy relationship between Dateline's producer[s] and law-enforcement & On-Line Crimestoppers. Or Both.

I for one believe that online entrapment is GOOD when it concerns catching child molesters, but like any procedure, is itself in danger of being overdone. Still, it does give me some guilty pleasure to see the monotonously similar statements made by the same silly goof-ball losers when they get caught.

"This is the first time I ever tried this."

[When caught with condoms and booze] "I didn't come here to have sex, only companionship...."

"This will ruin my career, family life, reputation, [pick one or more]"

And the rabbi who was nabbed did show a bit of spunk, but then ruined it by afterwards actually threatened Hansen, perjured himself and got a much longer sentence, or so Hansen says. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy!

Immaculate Conception Quake Nothing like Lisbon 1755

The deaths from a Church collapse in Peru during a Holy Day of Obligation for Catholics reminds one of the horrific event of November 1, 1755 when All Saints Day was being celebrated in Lisbon, the capital of a vast world empire largely spread by a mixture of commercial greed and religious zeal. The churches of Lisbon shook for ten minutes at 10AM and 70,000 people were killed, many during the Holy Day High Mass, as a British observer notes as he:

climbed over the ruins of St. Paul's Church to get to the river's side, where I thought I might find safety. Here I found a prodigious concourse of people of both sexes, and of all ranks and conditions, among whom I observed some of the principal canons of the patriarchal church, in their purple robes and rochets, as these all go in the habit of bishops; several priests who had run from the altars in their sacerdotal vestments in the midst of their celebrating Mass.

Like San Francisco, much of the damage came from later fires, but a huge tsunami also caused extensive fatalities in Lisbon. Wikipedia hardly exaggerates the immense influence the Lisbon catastrophe had on European thought:

The earthquake strongly influenced many thinkers of the European Enlightenment. Many contemporary philosophers mentioned or alluded to the earthquake in their writings, notably Voltaire in Candide and in his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne ("Poem on the Lisbon disaster"). Voltaire's Candide attacks the notion that all is for the best in this, "the best of all possible worlds", a world closely supervised by a benevolent deity. The Lisbon disaster provided a salutary counterexample. As Theodor Adorno wrote, "[t]he earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz" (Negative Dialectics 361). In the later twentieth century, following Adorno, the 1755 earthquake has sometimes been compared to the Holocaust as a catastrophe so tremendous as to have a transformative impact on European culture and philosophy.......Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also influenced by the devastation following the earthquake, whose severity he believed was due to too many people living within the close quarters of the city. Rousseau used the earthquake as an argument against cities as part of his desire for a more naturalistic way of life.

Peru's temblor has nothing on Lisbon, but again devout Catholics attending late afternoon Holy Day Masses were punished for their devotions.

The Ginger Man & Red Hair

JP Donleavy's Sebastian Dangerfield inspired me back in the '60s when I first read it with its rollicking randy Irishness. Up there with Portrait of the Artist in my 'umble view.

All this random "musing" was spurred by the piece last night on Nightline & then later on the Afterhours News at 2AM concerning people with RED HAIR, which the British call "gingers." There is a strong prejudice against red-haired people, which the ABC piece obliquely mentions might be due to the high ratio of Scottish and Irish genes in the Brit genepool. The old Sassanach/Celtic civil struggle continuing under the sheets.

Of course, even Prince Harry has red hair, as did his aunt Fergie, wildly popular in the USA but frowned upon by the lugubrious Saxon Teutons who comprise most of the snobs in Britain's elites. Harry is called "ginge bullet magnet" by his soldier-mates.

But it's useful to recall that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are of Scottish descent, and Sunny Jim Callaghan & Harold Wilson and a drink-sodden lush named Brown in the mid seventies were all Celtic in background, and some were even of Irish blood---Tony Blair converted to the Papist faith just as he left the Prime Ministership.

The old tug-of-war between Low Church puritans and High Church lushes continues in British life, and the prejudice against redheads simply masks a deeper rivalry between the old Celtic mythology of King Arthur and the triumphant Saxon/Danelaw which makes Britain a northern European nation.

All of which I discovered while living in France, where the Gallic strain is the most anti-English [not British] in that nation.

And the largest percentage of redheads I encountered in the Old World was not in Europe, but driving through southeastern Turkey in the old Anatolian area of Galatia, famous for St. Paul's letters. Plenty of gingers here, remnants of the Celtic expansion which conquered Rome in 390 BC and Delphi, Greece in 273 B.C. Some tribes made it to the edge of the Levant, and their descendants still sport the reddish hair and beard that Irish and Scottish do a thousand miles west.

Don't get me started on Arthur Koestler's Thirteenth Tribe and the Turkic Khazars who converted to Judaism. That's been in and out of the Jewish Encyclopedia more times than pictures of Trotsky were in the old Soviet yearbooks!

GWB Ups the Ante in Showdown Poker with Pasdaran

Iran's Revolutionary Guards were the spawning grounds of many Iranian terrorists, including the diminuitive President Ahmedinejad, whom several US hostages have identified as one of the original American Embassy takeover terrorists.

The Revolutionary Guards/Pasdaran is a heavily-armed paramilitary organization along the lines of the Saudi National Guard or the Italian Carbonari---only semi-accountable to the elected leaders of Iran. Like other such para-governmental organizations in Iran, it has extensive businesses that operate in-country and overseas. And its Quds unit is instrumental in

the growing flow of explosives, roadside bombs, rockets and other arms to Shiite militias in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Quds Force also lends support to Shiite allies such as Lebanon's Hezbollah and to Sunni movements such as Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Pasdaran is also instrumental in developing Iran's nuclear program---which the feckless UN ninnies such as the IAEA's Baradei and American enabler organization outliers keep insisting can be slowed or halted by diplomacy, despite a half-decade of Iranian slithering.

China and Russia are likely to block any UN resolution, but with 323 House co-sponsors and a bi-partisan Senate backing, GWB has a very strong motive for going unilateral, despite the squawking which will predictably emit from the fever swamps of the Far-Left such as Puffington Host and the Kossack horde. Not to mention anti-Semitic haters of Israel in Europe and the Carter Center.

We haven't heard an eruption from the mouth of the sage of Plains for a month or two, so it's time for another gaseous emission, as vulcanologists say.

Understanding Human History, by Michael Hart

Steve Sailer spanks hopeless prescriptivist ideologue Jared Diamond in reviewing Michael Hart's new book Understanding Human History.

Diamond's scrupulously PC screed never allows empirical reality to interfere with his Euro-Marxist take on human development. It's all about sideways variables and has nothing to do with inbred intelligence which theologian Diamond rules as "racist."

But Steve's review linked above says more than I ever could to express the point above. I'm out to get Hart's book tout de suite.

God As a SimCity Webmaster?

John Tierney has an intriguing What If? in today's NYT Science section. Tierney says:

I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

I took a Metaphysics Course and a Logic Course in college and the problem of evil always loomed as the ultimate conundrum. "Peace is boring, dude" is as good an explanation as I have ever heard for why things blow up in our faces.

And that explanation that the Big Bang was an explosion in someone's garage in an Alternative Parallel Universe still intrigues me. Wish Richard Feynman was alive so he could explain it all to us!

Narrative on Iraq is Right, but those darn FACTS keep Changing on Us!

The New York Times allows that after preliminary signs that the Surge is having a serious positive effect on diminishing number and scale of the bloody events in Baghdad & Anbar Provinces, some crow, disguised as exquisite haute cuinsine, appears to be in the process of being consumed in a very low-key sotto voce manner. Here is James Taranto's WSJ notations on this process:

For a long time, the media have presented a defeatist narrative about Iraq, and Democratic politicians have obediently followed, demanding that America flee immediately. Now, with a presidential election approaching and Gen. David Petraeus's new strategy showing signs of success, a counternarrative is developing, and the Dems are changing their tune. Consider this astonishing report from yesterday's New York Times:

Even as they call for an end to the war and pledge to bring the troops home, the Democratic presidential candidates are setting out positions that could leave the United States engaged in Iraq for years.

John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, would keep troops in the region to intervene in an Iraqi genocide and be prepared for military action if violence spills into other countries. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York would leave residual forces to fight terrorism and to stabilize the Kurdish region in the north. And Senator Barack Obama of Illinois would leave a military presence of as-yet unspecified size in Iraq to provide security for American personnel, fight terrorism and train Iraqis.

These positions and those of some rivals suggest that the Democratic bumper-sticker message of a quick end to the conflict--however much it appeals to primary voters--oversimplifies the problems likely to be inherited by the next commander in chief. Antiwar advocates have raised little challenge to such positions by Democrats.

What a change from January, when Mrs. Clinton, arguably the least unrealistic of the major Democratic candidates, was petulantly demanding that the president " 'extricate our country' from Iraq by the time he leaves office in 2009," as the Times put it at the time.

What about the Times's statement that "antiwar advocates have raised little challenge to such positions by Democrats"? There is certainly some truth to it. Markos "Kos" Moulitsas, the Angry Left's answer to the Htoo twins, was seen temporizing on "Meet the Press" yesterday:

We're not going to get out while we have George Bush as president. I mean, so if we say we want to be out in three months, clearly we could be out yesterday, I'd want to be out yesterday. I also understand, as a veteran who worked in logistics, that you can't pull out 150,000 troops overnight or even in three months. So, yes, there's an ideal situation, which is let's get them out as quickly as possible, so that the poll questions in that regard I think are very much moving in semantics. But I do agree with Harold [Ford] the, that we, we do need to work together, and I hope you'll be at next year's YearlyKos conference . . .

On the other hand, as blogger Jules Crittenden quips, "NYT, meet Cindy Sheehan." As the Associated Press reported, three days before that Times piece ran, Sheehan announced that she plans to run against Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, because Pelosi has not moved to impeach the president over Iraq's liberation.

It may be said that the Times was right to ignore Sheehan. After all, she is a fringe figure, an America-hating crackpot whose race against Pelosi is utterly quixotic and futile. But all this was equally true in the summer of 2005, when Sheehan camped out in Crawford, Texas, and became a media cause célèbre by issuing a series of demands for the president of the United States.

But back then, as a journalist recently said in another context, the narrative was right, even if the facts were wrong.

Evan Thomas at Newsweak may have invented the liberal mantra of the twenty-first century---narratives are essential, facts are tangential. Or who cares about the baby, the bath water must go and everything with it! Sorta like"we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Or as Taranto puts it:

The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong." This is reminiscent of the "fake but accurate" defense of CBS's Bush National Guard hoax. If Thomas were giving a plainer account of what happened, he would have said something like this: Our reporting was guided by our prejudices, and even though the story turned out to be false, we stand behind our prejudices.

Last night on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, William Kristol was the grinning punching bag for JS on Iraq, not mentioning to JS and his anti-Bush peanut gallery Dick Durbin's half-hearted admission that things might be going better than the Dems thought they would. Kristol might have noted that Harry Reid called the Surge a failure and our mission in Iraq a "defeat" a couple of weeks after it was announced back in the end of March. But he demurred and let Stewart do his rain-dance rant.

But Kristol did finally end by noting that we should let the facts speak for themselves---something the liberals rarely do, even when they on occasion recognize facts for what they are: REALITY.

Let's hope Petraeus has more good news to report when he finally gets back to DC in September. Because facts-on-the-ground have a way of changing during wartime even after Truth has become a casualty.

Plante versus Gergen: Drunk versus suck-up

I worked for ABC TV's 20/20 & Nightline for a while and after our cavorting during the day, we would often retire to Georgetown for a little 19th-hole action at F. Scott's. This waterhole would invariably have a few other newsies, among them Bill Plante, whom I saw lurching for the exit the few times when I actually left before he did. Other times he must have closed the place down.

Now this lush yells at the President about Karl Rove [see link above] and keeps the "Tiffany Network" mired in last place with his vacuous commentary.

Gergen on the contrary was a health nut & I ran across him on the long Virginia bike path on a couple of occasions. He styles himself as "advisor to three presidents," but truth be told, he was more a PR flack than a substance guy like Rove, who actually had INFLUENCE over policy & election strategies, not an "advisor" except in the sense that he was at some meetings where policy might have been discussed.

In DC, flacks come in all shapes and sizes and alcohol contents. Plante is a short Wild Turkey and Gergen a large Chardonnay.

Competitive Birthing

Publix at Regency Square is adjacent to Woodfield & St.Andrew's, two of the wealthiest gated communities in Boca Raton. {German golfer Bernhard Langer lives in Woodfield next to a good friend of GWB, who hosts fund-raisers for the Prez when he's in Boca]. Just yesterday I was there marvelling at the hyper-wealthy mothers with multiple kids, what in Boston are called "Irish twins [kids born a year apart or so]. Here in Boca, the kids pile into the Range Rover for the short ride home.

We moved southward to Boca from Winnetka, where my daughter went to a school with dozens of "Irish twins" born of very wealthy extended families who collectively owned the Tribune, Cubs, Bears, and seemed in a competition to procreate at a very numerous rate [the wife of the owner of Dixie [or is it Solo?] cups had just had her eleventh child before we departed for Boca. The Scholl family of foot fame also had a few kids. My daughter was offered a ride in the Batmobile by Jimmy Murphy, nephew of the O'Donnell who played Robin in a Batman movie of the late nineties. O'Donnell himself had seven siblings, I believe, and numerous relatives going to Faith, Hope & Charity, the school my daughter attended.

I got the link to the NPR article above from a whining liberal, who called these progeny "piglets" because they were born into wealthy families. Liberals are still stuck on class warfare and other Marxist tropes they're too stupid to think their way out of, preferring to wallow in self-pity and nasy aspersions about people smarter than they are.

I'm wondering if the USA is the only country where many rich people have as many kids as they can Is this a trend and what does it derive from? Traditional American optimism, a Christian impulse to fill heaven with souls? Or just the urge once you get a 20K mansion like John Edwards to fill it with kids, lots of kids?

Confessions of a BBC liberal UPDATE

Anthony Jay wrote "Yes Minister" and looks back at his early deformation as a BBC employee. When I was in Lebanon, I listened daily to the BBC based in nearby Cyprus for Middle East news from an unbiased perspective. That was before the BBC began to support Hezbollah and Hamas and any terrorist organization as long as it was against Israel. Living in London years later during the last days of Thatcherism, I watched BBC News and found it tendentious and tilted very far leftward. Here is part of Jay's very arch take on BBC foibles & fibs.

'In the past four weeks there have been two remarkable changes in the public attitude to the BBC. The first and most newsworthy one was precipitated by the faked trailer of the Queen walking out of a photographic portrait session with Annie Leibovitz.

"t was especially damaging because the licence fee is based on a public belief that the BBC offers a degree of integrity and impartiality which its commercial competitors cannot achieve.

"But in the longer term I believe that the second change is even more significant. It started with the BBC’s own report on impartiality that effectively admitted to an institutional “liberal” bias among programme makers. Previously these accusations had been dismissed as a right-wing rant, but since the report was published even the BBC’s allies seem to accept it.

....."The growing general agreement that the culture of the BBC (and not just the BBC) is the culture of the chattering classes provokes a question that has puzzled me for 40 years. The question itself is simple – much simpler than the answer: what is behind the opinions and attitudes of this social group?

"They are that minority often characterised (or caricatured) by sandals and macrobiotic diets, but in a less extreme form are found in The Guardian, Channel 4, the Church of England, academia, showbusiness and BBC news and current affairs. They constitute our metropolitan liberal media consensus, although the word “liberal” would have Adam Smith rotating in his grave. Let’s call it “media liberalism”.

It is of particular interest to me because for nine years, between 1955 and 1964, I was part of this media liberal consensus. For six of those nine years I was working on Tonight, a nightly BBC current affairs television programme. My stint coincided almost exactly with Harold Macmillan’s premiership and I do not think that my former colleagues would quibble if I said we were not exactly diehard supporters.

But we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were antiindustry, anti-capital-ism, antiadvertising, antiselling, antiprofit, antipatriotism, antimonarchy, antiempire, antipolice, antiarmed forces, antibomb, antiauthority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place – you name it, we were anti it.

Although I was a card-carrying media liberal for the best part of nine years, there was nothing in my past to predispose me towards membership. I spent my early years in a country where every citizen had to carry identification papers. All the newspapers were censored, as were all letters abroad; general elections had been abolished: it was a one-party state. Yes, that was Britain – Britain from 1939 to 1945........
So how did we get from there to here? Unless we understand that, we shall never get inside the media liberal mind. And the starting point is the realisation that there have always been two principal ways of misunderstanding a society: by looking down on it from above and by looking up at it from below. In other words, by identifying with institutions or by identifying with individuals.

To look down on society from above, from the point of view of the ruling groups, the institutions, is to see the dangers of the organism splitting apart – the individual components shooting off in different directions until everything dissolves into anarchy.

To look up at society from below, from the point of view of the lowest group, the governed, is to see the dangers of the organism growing ever more rigid and oppressive until it fossilises into a monolithic tyranny.

Those who see society in this way are preoccupied with the need for liberty, equality, self-expression, representation, freedom of speech and action and worship, and the rights of the individual. The reason for the popularity of these misunderstandings is that both views are correct as far as they go and both sets of dangers are real, but there is no “right” point of view.

The most you can ever say is that sometimes society is in danger from too much authority and uniformity and sometimes from too much freedom and variety.

In retrospect it seems pretty clear that the 1940s and 1950s were years of excessive authority and uniformity. It was certainly clear to me and my media liberal colleagues in the BBC. It was not that we in the BBC openly and publicly criticised the government on air; the BBC’s commitment to impartiality was more strictly enforced in those days.

But the topics we chose and the questions we asked were slanted against institutions and towards oppressed individuals, just as we achieved political balance by pitting the most plausible critics of government against its most bigoted supporters.

Ever since 1963 the institutions have been the villains of the media liberals. The police, the armed services, the courts, political parties, multi-national corporations – when things go wrong they are the usual suspects.

But our hostility to institutions was not – and is not – shared by the majority of our fellow citizens: most of our opinions were at odds with the majority of the audience and the electorate. Indeed the BBC’s own 2007 report on impartiality found that 57% of poll respondents said that “broadcasters often fail to reflect the views of people like me”.

There are four new factors which in my lifetime have brought about the changes that have shaped media liberalism, encouraged its spread and significantly increased its influence and importance.

The first of these is detribalisation. That our species has evolved a genetic predisposition to form tribal groups is generally accepted as an evolutionary fact. This grouping – of not more than about five or six hundred – supplies us with our identity, status system, territorial instinct, behavioural discipline and moral code.

We in the BBC were acutely detribalised; we were in a tribal institution, but we were not of it. Nor did we have any geographical tribe; we lived in commuter suburbs, we knew very few of our neighbours and took not the slightest interest in local government. In fact we looked down on it. Councillors were self-important nobodies and mayors were a pompous joke.

We belonged instead to a dispersed “metropolitan media arts graduate” tribe. We met over coffee, lunch, drinks and dinner to reinforce our views on the evils of apartheid, nuclear deterrence, capital punishment, the British Empire, big business, advertising, public relations, the royal family, the defence budget – it’s a wonder we ever got home.

The second factor that shaped our media liberal attitudes was a sense of exclusion. We saw ourselves as part of the intellectual elite, full of ideas about how the country should be run. Being naive in the way institutions actually work, we were convinced that Britain’s problems were the result of the stupidity of the people in charge of the country...This ignorance of the realities of government and management enabled us to occupy the moral high ground. We saw ourselves as clever people in a stupid world, upright people in a corrupt world, compassionate people in a brutal world, libertarian people in an authoritarian world.

We were not Marxists but accepted a lot of Marxist social analysis. We also had an almost complete ignorance of market economics. That ignorance is still there. Say “Tesco” to a media liberal and the patellar reflex says, “Exploiting African farmers and driving out small shopkeepers.” The achievement of providing the range of goods, the competitive prices, the food quality, the speed of service and the ease of parking that attract millions of shoppers does not register on their radar.

"The third factor arises from the nature of mass media. The Tonight programme had a nightly audience of about 8m. It was much easier to keep their attention by telling them they were being deceived or exploited by big institutions than by saying what a good job the government and the banks and the oil companies were doing.

"The fourth factor is what has been called “isolation technology”. Fifty years ago people did things together much more. The older politicians we interviewed in the early Tonight days were happier in public meetings than in television studios.

"In those days people went to evening meetings. They formed collective opinions. In many places party allegiance was collective and hereditary rather than a matter of individual choice based on a logical comparison of policies.

"These four factors have significantly accelerated and indeed intensified the spread of media liberalism since I ceased to be a BBC employee 40 years ago.

"But let’s suppose that I had stayed. Would I have remained a devotee of the metropolitan media liberal ideology that I once absorbed so readily? I have an awful fear that the answer is yes.

We are becoming monads and isolated and narcissistic and subject to Orwellian groupthink.

The genius who wrote Yes, Minister understands the liberal mindset of the BBC & its American cousins all too well. The biggest threat to political freedom in the west are these well-meaning monster-egos who call "fairness in media" depriving talk radio as a forum for discussion while leaving bureaucratic behemoths like the BBC & US TV networks spread socialist twaddle unchallenged.

Nobel-class Charlatan Edwards Accuses Others of Exploitation

Hair-and-makeup Champion Edwards has what Jews call chutzpah, only in the hypocritical WASP version. After making half-a-million "studying poverty" by consulting for a sub-prime offshore hedge fund, this running joke now claims Rudy Giuliani is exploiting 9/11.

This from someone who has exploited his own son's premature death and his wife's cancer.

Does the left even notice that most Americans NOTICE when a fraud and an imposter like Edwards and his wife [who "hates" her neighbor whom she never met, for having a Giuliani sign in his yard] start throwing stones in their own 28K sq. ft. GLASS HOUSE!

Russians Accuse Georgia of "Bioterrorism"

Georgia was the former home of Soviet dictator Youseff Vissarionovich Djugashvili, and this gentleman's henchman Lavrenti Beria also hailed from that Caucasus redoubt.

So the Russians look particularly askance when their former republic accuses them of launching a missile in their direction, and then is accused itself of "bioterrorism" because dead pigs infected with African swine flu were thrown in a river which would reach Russian-controlled territory.

Isn't it a bit ironic that the Polonium 210 Londoners were exposed to by Russia's tiny czar Vlad the Empoisoner has not been considered a "bioterrorism attack" whereas pigs floating down a river are so considered by the controlled state media?

Just asking.

Evan Thomas and "Flooding the Zone"

Evan Thomas has written some very good books and I'm re-reading one right now called "The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared" about the early days of the CIA. And listening to Rush while shuttling between doctor's appointments today, Limbaugh mentioned John Leo's piece about Evan Thomas in which ET is quoted making the following incredible statement in Newsweak, which Rush read on-air:

"The narrative was right but the facts were wrong"

Leo goes on to say:

—[this] is destined to become a popular exhibit, right up there with "we had to destroy the village to save it."

This is exquisitely timely because it follows another grotesque skewing of journalistic "ethics," Scott Thomas Beauchamp and the New Republic's second recent being defrocked when a liberal spewing hateful lies about conservatives [in this case, military in Iraq] is uncovered as a hoax.

The first is when Stephan Glass gave an account of a group of brutally stupid young conservatives cavorting at a conference. This was later shown to be a fabrication and invention. Howell Raines' accelerated exit from the NYT occurred partly as a result of being gulled by a black reporter feeding the agitprop Masthead Chief just what he wanted to hear. And remember that Pulitzer yanked from a Washington Post reporter for faking a story about a three-year old heroin addict?

All this fits in very well with the Columbia School of Journalism having to cancel an OPEN-BOOK ETHICS EXAM last semester when its best & brightest students found a way to CHEAT at an open-book exam. Obviously very clever little journalistic sociopaths in the making---mimicking Dana Priest and Mr. Risen who used classified materials to gain Pulitzers [which of course are given out by the CSJ]. And the same holds true with Nobel Peace Prizes, as Mr. Leo notes:

When Rigoberta Menchu's account of class and ethnic warfare in Guatemala was revealed to be largely false, many professors and critics said this didn't matter much because her book contained emotional truth.

Let's segue to today's Pew Report which comes out with a study that href="http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070809222839.jzdcwmy8&show_article=1">"More than half of Americans say US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don't care about the people they report on."

Finally, when I had a nice hour with Evan Thomas in his Newsweak office about a decade ago, he was the model of charm and civility and intelligent interest in the Middle East. But it is apparent that Evan and his colleagues inside-the-left-closets are more concerned with the "appropriate" agitprop line than any search for journalistic truth. So the Duke rape story had to fit

"the newsroom view of the lacrosse players as privileged, sexist, and arrogant white male jocks was the correct angle on the story. It wasn't. According to Duke's female lacrosse team and other women on campus, the male players are solid citizens who treat women well. Many players volunteer to tutor poor children in Durham. Some players are privileged, but most come from ordinary middle-class homes. There is no evidence of a racist team culture.

And that might be why The Pew Research Center finds that Evan Thomas, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and a lot of other print & electronic media to be biased, pure and simple.

My Sentiments, Exactly, About the Phony Silk Pony

The Wall Street Journal captures the unique essence of John Edwards:

"Brad Warthen, editorial page editor of the State, a newspaper in Columbia, S.C., has a telling story about John Edwards, who visited the State's editorial board in January 2004, hoping to win a primary endorsement. A week later Howard Dean came by:

"Isn't [Dean] a nice man?" said our copy editor (the fan). I agreed. Then came the revelation: "Unlike John Edwards," observed the administrative assistant. What's that? It seems that when she alone had met then-Sen. Edwards at the reception desk, she had been struck by the way he utterly ignored the folks in our customer service department and others who had hoped for a handshake or a word from the Great Man. He had saved all his amiability, all his professionally entertaining energy and talent, for the folks upstairs who would have a say in the paper's endorsement.

It's another bit of evidence that Edwards's populist persona is utterly phony. Blogger Roger Simon explains why this matters:

People like Edwards are more than just fakes--they are actually dangerous. By parading around like a popinjay for the poor, he actually hurts them, making a mockery of genuine of [sic] problems. Everything is about Edwards and his glory. It's not about anything else.

Meanwhile, Edwards's wife, Elizabeth, tells CIO Insight why her lesser half is at a disadvantage against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: "We can't make John black, we can't make him a woman. Those things get you a lot of press, worth a certain amount of fundraising dollars."

Well, OK, they can't make John a woman, but that doesn't mean they can't try!"

He is definitely a she-male in transition, Lord knows which direction!

Brooklyn Bay Ridge Twister Brings back Memories

Brooklyn had its first recorded tornado this AM in Bay Ridge, the home of my wife's godparents and where I ran a campaign operation in 1968 along with John Podesta, younger brother of my campaign buddy Tony Podesta, trying to get Gene McCarthy over Hubert Humphrey in the NY state primary that June[?]. When John & I met again in the nineties, he recalled our storefront operation as one of his happiest political memories. He was about to be named Bill Clinton's WH COStaff.

Bay Ridge was well-known in political lore for being the only State District to vote for Goldwater in '64 and also for having the largest population of Norwegians outside Oslo.

I hope my wife's godparents survived unharmed and unscathed. No casualties reported that I have come across.

Cordesman on Iraq: No Arbitrary Benchmarks Necessary

Tony Cordesman is hardly an optimist. But he does see some sort of light at the end of the tunnel that is not a train coming in our direction. Two years of L.Paul Bremer and his gang who couldn't shoot [the sacking of Gen. Jay Garner is the subject of a new flick on Iraq] are finally being overcome by competence and that most intangible of destiny's playing cards: luck. But luck comes to those who work hard and the Iraqi politicians who continue to bicker and play corrupt parlor games are the biggest obstacle, perhaps, to some sort of honorable ending in Iraq. My fear is that the Democrats do not seek an honorable ending and are too heavily invested in defeat, though there are glimmerings that Hillary, Inc. might be the new Nixon. Cordesman's CSIS cover sheet ends thusly:

"Luck, however, is not something that can be ignored, and there is a window of opportunity that could significantly improve the chances of US success in Iraq if the Iraqi government acts upon it. The US also now has a country team in Iraq that is far more capable than in the past, and which may be able to develop and implement the kind of cohesive plans for US action in Iraq that have been weak or lacking to date. If that team can come forward with solid plans for an integrated approach to a sustained US effort to deal with Iraq’s plans and risks, there would be a far stronger and more bipartisan case for strategic patience."

Strategic patience does not exist on the hysteric left. Let's hope a centrist can find a way out of what one US official calls "playing three-dimensional chess in the dark while someone's shooting at you."

Cats are Becoming humaner

Between rants on the perfidy of the left, I am soothed by the presence of our three cats [and irritated by the barking of our muttoid, a pure-bred barking machine called a Bichon Frise.] Our immense Maine Coon follows me like a dog & constantly sits beside me purring and begging to be petted. Come nightfall, however, Dumpling, our 20-furball of love, has to go outside and do a Hulk transformation into a predator.

But the Florida night is full of Cane Toads, whose poisonous oozings killed the Siamese of the previous owner of our house. And the mosquitoes carry feline heartworm & other diseases. Finally, other cats, including Dumplings 30-pound daddy, are padding about the neighborhood. The cats talk to them in their peculiar rutting voice, unlike the melodious meows they constantly talk to humans with. Her is the Daily Mail on feline evolution:


"The lifestyle of cats is changing. They are tending to eat too much, gain weight and take less exercise.

"Unfortunately, just like people, cats will over-eat if they are offered too much tasty food, particularly if they are bored and have little else to do.

"While cats would naturally exercise outside, many cats are now housebound - perhaps because they live in a flat or because their owners feel that it is too dangerous to let them out - so they have little to do all day but eat, sleep and gain weight."

In addition, stressed-out Britons are increasingly relying on cats for companionship.

Professor Gunn-Moore said: "Cats are now the number one pet, they are more popular than dogs. People get in late and they don't want to walk the dog.

"They want the cat there as a companion and if it's outside chasing mice, it's not going to be there as a companion."

So our huge Dumpling stays indoors at night, though he often manages to open unlocked doors by his brains & bulk----both of which are considerable.

NYT Can't Believe its Poll Sees Number of Americans Increasing Who believe Iraq was Right Thing to Do

the Political Commissars in Pinch Sulzberger's mini-Kremlin HQ were amazed when

the number of Americans who think it was right for the United States to go to war in Iraq rose from 35 percent in May to percent 42 percent in mid-July

, so amazed that THEY NEGLECTED TO PUBLISH THE RESULTS OF SAID POLL.

As the Times' Janet Elder wrote Sunday, the increased support for the decision to go to war was "counterintuitive" and because it "could not be easily explained, the paper went back and did another poll on the very same subject."

To the intense dismay of the NYT apparatchiki,

Round Two found that 42 percent of voters think America was right to go into Iraq, while the percentage of those polled who said that it was wrong to go to war had fallen from 61 percent to 51 percent. The headline for Elder's piece read, "Same Question, Different Answer. Hmmm." But it should have read: "America's Paper of Record Out of Touch With American Public."

The Mass Psychosis on the Left simply cannot abide being wrong, when it is convinced that Bush must fail and that victory in Iraq would prove they are the miserable losers that their activities against the war imply.

On Monday, the Times also ran an opinion piece, "A War We Just Might Win," by war critics Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, which has prompted Beltway biggies to notice that the surge is paying off.

Well, not everyone inside the Beltway. Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., dismissed the piece as "rhetoric." "I don't know what they saw, but I know this, that it's not getting better," Murtha told CNN. Since this war began, there always have been people rooting for failure.

Dr. Sanity has a few observations that I find apropos:

The antiwar crowd and their media whores are very worried, you see. What will happen to them and their cause, if "the unthinkable" happens? That is to say, if things start to improve in Iraq.

Imagine how frightening it must have been back in March to learn that Iraqis are "optimistic"; and that they "don't believe their country is in the middle of a "civil war".

With things going fairly well to date regarding the surge (as much as they can in any war); and with some of their own people even beginning to recognize that fact, the leftist template for Iraq is in danger of being cracked wide open.

Even Barack "I never voted for the war" Obama, is getting his ducks in a row to prove that he isn't your typical Democratic/leftist antiwar wimp on matters military and that he is a strong supporter of military force--just not anywhere Bush would be likely to use it.

Both the opposition to the Iraq war and its supporters are completely invested in their respective narratives; with the political left invested in a narrative of defeat; while Bush and his allies are invested in a narrative of success.

This esteemed psychologist and psychiatrist for NASA goes on to encapsulate the fear that the New York Times has that it may have to some day face an American success, if not a total victory in Iraq, after all its misleading and inaccurate reporting [except for John Burns, a rock of integrity among NYT pygmies and cowards]:

Is it really any wonder that the official propaganda outlet of the left is stunned that the American people's support for Bush and Iraq could be swinging the other way? After all their hard work to make Iraq seem like a hopeless quagmire run by a group of incompetents?

As usual, Dr. Sanity is worth reading through in its entirety.

Quick Survey on How Global Warming May Not Be Our Fault

Evidence that AGW is cooked up by lefty Luddites & Socialists out to destroy Capitalism can only be inferred by the Cargo Cult Science constantly emitted by empty-headed media types, often meteorologists afflicted by grandiosity and news commentators, like the fact-challenged Trent Lott Jr. named Shep Smith on Fox TV.

The link above has a myriad articles and loads of evidence that, contrary to what a famous loser once said in 1992, "The science is not settled." The loser had already invented the internet & went on to invent the lockbox.

"Hillary with Estrogen" Edwards Atwitter About Fox

Mr. Elizabeth Edwards has appeared on Fox News shows over thirty times, but now wags his finger at Democrats who have accepted contributions from Rupert Murdoch.

The Far-Left likes to declare those consorting with the middle as heretics, and this rapidly-declining feminazi-male now tries to out mau-mau the Kossacks in his Inquisition.

Lotsa luck, and your split-ends are looking shaggy. Better get a haircut.

UPDATE:Hair-and-Makeup John-boy is now calling for reversal of the First Amendment.

James Taranto gives the impudent lad the verbal spanking his ill-considered remarks deserve.

On the Silken Locks Laddie, Hillary is observing Napoleon's admonition never to interfere when an enemy is in the process of destroying himself. She should do the same for Obama.

Sarkozy Vacations at Lake Winnepesaukee

The French President will take two weeks on beautiful Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire, near where I and my wife honeymooned. Although the link above says there are no great French restaurants in the area, I do remember a restaurant with wonderful Swiss fondu that helped us get through the culinary landscape up there. I hope Sarkozy goes there, if that excellent restaurant still exists.

Obama Rules Out Nukes

The strange odyssey of B.Hussein Obama to second place behind Chillary may be a short-lived trip---he continues to make strange unprovoked statements of policy that betray a simple, gullible ["frankly naive" in the Chill-response] understanding of foreign policy.

Perhaps the most bizarre statement of all was when he opined that he was the best qualified candidate because of an Indonesian sojourn in early youth and a Kenyan genetic streak. Is this fellow hitting a sort of tailspin moment that may precede a full-fledged flaming descent? He'd better get a minder other than Jimmy Carter, cuz that's the foolishness level that his pronunciamentos are beginning to approach.

The Soviets invaded Afghanistan when they saw what a feckless oaf Carter was on foreign policy. Iran only cemented Jimmy's loser-reputation. And now his Arab/Israeli observations reveal what may be an anti-Semitic streak.

I am reading Olaf Caroe's formidable masterpiece "The Pathans 550BC-1957AD" on his chapter on Waziristan [pp.390-415]. My wife and I visited the NW Frontier Province as the guest of one of its chief ministers in the 1980s and all he could say about the tribal territories was "Don't ever try to visit there." We went close to the Khyber on the main road from Peshawar, but prudently returned without touristic side-trips.

Is Obama going to follow that give-away-the-store school of Dhimmi-tude toward the Islamist radicals? Or will his proposed invasion of Waziristan, a nook of mountainous terrain neither British nor Pakistani military have been able to subdue over the last 150 years, be resolutely non-nuclear?

A Bridge Too Weak?

The "St. Anthony" Bridge appears to have been some sort of accident waiting to happen, according to the link above.

I lived in the Twin Cities area for four years & do recall that the high bridge right next to the I-35 bridge was where poet John Berryman leaped to his death in the early '70s. Those Minnesota winters can get to you.

I'd be interested to know what other bridges are rated as "structuraliy deficient" as this one was. I wonder why the ratings for bridge safety are not public knowledge.

Why Babe Ruth was the Greatest Hitter Ever

A psychologist friend sent me this link after I told him I was reading "The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs" by Bill Jenkinson, acknowledged as perhaps the greatest expert on long-ball hitters among baseball historians.

A couple of items from the Columbia U. 1921 study [coincidentally the year in the title of the book] struck me, including the fact that Babe hit balls at the knees on the outside corner the best in tests. Jenkinson's book, without citing this source, makes much of the fact that an abnormally large percentage of Ruth's homers came in left-center field, where a low-outside corner pitch would be likely to go with a left-handed batter.

Also, the Columbia study shows that Babe, even though tired from a very long day & still in his uniform from a game at Polo Grounds nearby, performed extremely well on hand-eye-brain tests although in a state of fatigue. They point out that Babe held his breath while swinging, a habit which actually lowered his available strength and bat-speed. Also, they noted that he used a 54-ounce bat, much heavier than a 33 ouncer used today by sluggers. Jenkinson goes into detail on how a heavier bat would drive a ball farther, but would be slower than a 33-ouncer. So that the moderns, with their technological advantages, might have the edge over Ruth.

Why then was Babe Ruth such a phenomenal athlete? Given the juiced-up stats of today's sluggers and the sober regimen they follow to stay in shape, what would Babe's stats have looked like had he taken care of himself---he was a notorious binge eater and drinker and not played endless exhibition games which sapped his strength and shortened his career by perhaps a half-decade or more? The same might be asked about Walter Johnson, whose win totals would have probably surpassed Cy Young's had he been pitching for a team with even average hitters in the lineup. Ruth, Johnson, and Lou Gehrig were all legendary athletes whose careers were foreshortened or diminished by unfortunate circumstances, though Ruth still had a long career for a person of such untrammeled appetites and endless public relations appearances.

The Columbia study above, one of the first of its kind, notes that the Babe's stats would have been much more impressive had he started out as a full-time hitter instead of concentrating on pitching the first five years of his career. At that, he was one of the finest pitchers in baseball during an era of wonderful throwers!

Unfortunately, I have been unable to find Harry Stein's famous article with the most famous ethnic teams in baseball, but both Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner, two of the top five all-time Hall-of-Fame initial initiates, were German-language speakers. Gehrig was also of German extraction, so the Dutchman team has a pretty good shot at being as good as any other group---at least in hitting.

Is Hell exothermic or endothermic?

Subject: Exothermic or endothermic?
The following is an actual question given on a University of
Washington Chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well:

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic
> (absorbs heat)?
>
> Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law
> (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some
> variant.
>
> One student, however, wrote the following:
>
> First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So
> we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the
> rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume
> that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls
> are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at
> the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these
> religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you
> will go to Hell.
>
> Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do
> not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls
> go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the
> number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.
>
> Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because
> Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in
> Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand
> proportionately as souls are added.
>
> This gives two possibilities:
>
> 1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls
> enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase
> until all Hell breaks loose. 2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster
> than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure
> will drop until Hell freezes over.
>
> So which is it?
>
> If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman
> year that, "It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,"
> and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then
> number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic
> and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that
> since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any
> more souls and is therefore, extinct......leaving only Heaven,
> thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why,
> last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God!"
>
> THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A"

Tom Snyder Dies at Age 71

Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show was a staple of late-night TV in the not-so-distant-past, but I recall Tom as a disk jockey in the 1950's at WRIT AM when he was doing an intro into harder news. Tom was a Marquette High/Marquette U grad like myself & his radio station was adjacent to the Marquette High Sophomore football team's practice field. I recall going to the station once in the late '50s to see Tom, but don't recall any success. Perhaps he wasn't in. At any rate, he sort of erased his DJ stint from his resume & RIP, Tom, for some good teen memories way back in the Day.

Arab Conquests Revisited

The Economist has a review of a new book by Hugh Kennedy. Strangely, the theme of his book reflects the Introduction of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which describes how the Semitic heartland of the Arabian peninsula has periodically over millenia welled over with an outpouring of military fanatics who conquered Mesopotamia and Syria. In 1800, the Saudi-led Ikhwan were at the gates of Baghdad and Damascus and were only defeated by Muhammed Ali who invaded Arabia and destroyed the Saudi capital of Riyadh in around 1811. In the 1920s, the Ikhwan led by Prince Faisal conquered Yemen and annexed most of Yemen in the Treaty of Taif in 1930. Ever since Sargon led his Semitic-speaking Akkadian hordes out of the peninsula in 2300 BC to conquer Sumerian city-states, the pattern has repeated itself again and again. Here is a summary of Hugh Kennedy's version:

An aggressive Bedouin horde, drunk on religion, sweeps out of the Arabian peninsula—on the way burning the great library of Alexandria—and, through wholesale massacre and forced conversion, imposes Islam on a vast area stretching from Spain to the fringes of China. If this is your mental picture of the rise of Islam, dimly remembered from some long-ago history lesson, take note: it is in almost every respect wrong.

Hugh Kennedy sets out to explain an historical puzzle. How could Arab forces, relatively small in number and with no particular superiority in weaponry, have pulled off such an apparently impossible feat? In the century that followed the death of the Prophet in 632, they challenged two established empires (the Byzantine and Sasanian). They conquered Syria in eight years, Iraq in seven, Egypt in a mere two and Spain and Portugal in five. At the same time, they pushed deep into Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. How did they do it? Why did they not meet stronger and more sustained resistance? And, no less of a mystery, how did the empire they created endure?

By painstakingly reconstructing the series of Arab conquests, Mr Kennedy paints a picture strikingly at odds with the popular clichés. “The Muslim conquests”, he writes, “were far from being the outpouring of an unruly horde of nomads.” The Bedouin of Arabia were tough and highly mobile, fired by tribal honor and love of booty as well as by zeal for Islam. They were led by intelligent men from the Meccan elite who knew they had to channel the "frenetic military energies of the Bedouin" outwards, or else face a real risk of implosion.

These leaders also seem to have grasped that to have based their conquests on mass killings and conversion by the sword would have been a fatal mistake. There were massacres, but they were not the norm. If conquered peoples paid tribute and did not make trouble, they were largely left alone.

Local people were incorporated into the new administrative class. Existing religions—Christianity in Syria and Egypt, Zoroastrianism in Persian-ruled areas, Hinduism and Buddhism farther east—were not persecuted. Large-scale conversions came much later; at the time there was little or no pressure on the conquered people to convert. As for the sack of the Alexandrian library, that, says Mr Kennedy, is a discredited myth.

The Arabs were also lucky in their timing. Mr Kennedy speculates that, had they got going a generation earlier, success would probably have eluded them. As it was, disarray within the Byzantine and Sasanian empires helps to explain why the Arabs met little serious resistance there.

But this was not everywhere the case. The early Muslim armies met their fiercest opposition from the Turks of Central Asia. And, on the other side of their empire, they conquered the Berbers of North Africa but alienated them through the brutalities of the slave trade, which sparked the great Berber rebellion of 741.

Mr Kennedy tells a remarkable tale with skill and authority. Perhaps occasionally he is too much the conscientious professional historian. The general reader must get used to constant cautions (“As usual the actual course of the campaign is confused”). But there is an important point here. The historical sources are confused and contradictory, sometimes written long after the events they describe.

Besides, as so often, history is written by the victors. Arab accounts are full of self-serving bravado, eulogising the virtues of the simple, egalitarian Bedouin in contrast to their elitist and effeminate Persian foes. Mr Kennedy uses Arabic sources, but critically, and tries to balance them by giving voice to the conquered.

The book's subtitle (“How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In”) is not directly addressed. Perhaps Mr Kennedy and his publisher thought its truth to be self-evident. The Arab conquests dramatically transformed the world in which they took place. But for today the lesson is different. It is the loss of that early power that torments Muslim hearts and minds, producing anger, humiliation—and eventually the vengeance of al-Qaeda.

The most recent uprising was in the early '30s when the Ikhwan after their Yemeni victory began attacking Kuwait and the Al-Hasa oasis to cleanse the evil Shi'ites from the Holy Land of Arabia, but King Abdul-Aziz [known also as Ibn Saud] led his army in one last campaign to suppress the Ikhwan and institute the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Al Qaeda is a remnant of the 1930Saudi conquest of Yemen, the 9/11 "Saudi" component of 15 hijackers were about 75% Yemeni in heritage carrying Saudi passports. Osama bin Laden is distantly descended from Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonians after they were chased out of Babylon by Assyrian military might around 600 BC and settled in the southern part of Yemen, whence they parlayed their considerable merchant and other skills into the Himyaritic kingdoms and far-flung trade empires of Zanzibar and Indonesia. Julius Caesar was getting ready for a trip to Yanbu in 44BC to conquer Felix Arabia's rich Yemeni kingdoms when he was assassinated by Brutus and the gang.

I'm sure Hugh doesn't touch on these extraneous topics. The rich tapestry of Middle Eastern history is not confined to the Islamic world. The Jahaliyya that preceded it was most interesting, as Maxim Rodinson in his Marxist treatise on Mohammed displays with impressive scholarship and shaky ideology.

Pat Tillman Death Scoped out by Kossack Sleuth

The truth about Pat Tillman, the American NFL Ranger killed by "friendly fire" [one of the oxymorons most moronic of all] may not be clear to all, but the lunatics at the Kos site have no illusions---Pat was going to meet with Noam Chomsky and was offed for his prospective metanoia, it's oh so clear & pass the thorazine, nurse!

And, of course, this is even more lucidly defined by what Mark Steyn called "moral poseurs still congratulating themselves on their stance of three or four decades" who made sure that "millions of faraway peasants died in order that pampered parochial narcissist buffoons could preen as heroes in their commencement addresses?

Perhaps we are too harsh on our patronizing condescending moral intelligentsia. Pinch and his pilot-fish posse still shine Walter Lippmann's beacon through the fog of ignorance surrounding the US government and lesser mortals like ourselves.

We should be grateful instead of demonstrating our peevishness at "their stance of three or four decades" because we suspect them of autistic solecisms devoid of insight and sincerity.

Or should we bitch-slap them verbally at every opportunity? Can't make up my mind.

Suspicions Confirmed: French Petit fonctionnaire lacks brain

The French bureaucrat with a compressed brain syndrome reportedly had/has an IQ of 75, and as this link notes, the jokes more or less write themselves.

Judging from the TSA & FEMA morons in the recent press, the French fellow has more candlepower between his ears than most GS wage slaves here in Florida----a visit to Ft. Lauderdale International yesterday convinced me in person about TSA. I'm certain my readers have pretty much the same experiences, though occasionally my air travel is brightened by a thoughtful & compassionate TSA employee.