NYT Op-Ed Writer Makes Sense on Iraq!

Steve Sailer steered me to this great op-ed on just why Iraq seems so intractible to some sort of overarching democratic solution to its myriad inner conflicts. Along with David Brooks, John Tierney is just about the only sensible NYT Op-Ed writer, although like a broken clock, Thomas Friedman occasionally lurches into sane commentary: Here is an excerpt that Sailer quotes from the NYT behind-the-curtain Op-Ed writer:

Rampant individualism is not the problem in Iraq.

The problem is that they have so many social obligations more important to them than national unity. Iraqis bravely went to the polls and waved their purple fingers, but they voted along sectarian lines. Appeals to their religion trumped appeals to the national interest. And as the beleaguered police in Amara saw last week, religion gets trumped by the most important obligation of all: the clan.

The deadly battle in Amara wasn’t between Sunnis and Shiites, but between two Shiite clans that have feuded for generations. After one clan’s militia destroyed police stations and took over half the city, the Iraqi Army did not ride to the rescue. Authorities regained control only after the clan leaders negotiated a truce.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq, American optimists invoked Germany and Japan as models for their democratization project, but Iraq didn’t have the cultural cohesion or national identity of those countries. The shrewdest forecasts I heard came not from foreign policy experts but from anthropologists and sociologists who noted a crucial statistic: nearly half of Iraqis were married to their first or second cousins.

Unlike General Thurman and other Westerners, members of these tightly knit Iraqi clans don’t look on society as a collection of individuals working for the common good of the nation. “In a modern state a citizen’s allegiance is to the state, but theirs is to their clan and their tribe,” Ihsan M. al-Hassan, a sociologist at the University of Baghdad, warned three years ago. “If one person in your clan does something wrong, you favor him anyway, and you expect others to treat their relatives the same way.”

These allegiances explain why Iraqis don’t want to give up their local militias. They know it’s unrealistic to expect protection from a national force of soldiers or police officers from other clans, other regions, other religions. When the Iraqi Army ordered reinforcements to go help Americans keep peace in Baghdad, several Iraqi battalions deserted rather than risk their lives defending strangers.

Instead of trying to transform Iraqis into patriots and build up national security forces, the U.S. should be urging decentralization. The national government should concentrate on defending the borders and equitably distributing oil revenue, ideally by distributing shares of the oil wealth directly to citizens.

Oil is the curse that just keeps on cursing, as Venezuela and Algeria, both retards compared to their petro-starved neighbors Colombia and Morocco, have learned. Nothing keeps a kleptocracy alive or populists raving more than oil---the Saudis and other Gulfies are the exception.

When the Iraqis find a way to divvy up fairly their bonanza proceeds, I personally will rejoice, because it has hardly ever been done before, anywhere, anytime. Ask the Ibos in Nigeria.

Germany Set to Revamp Military Policy

The Germans are beginning to assume a wider role in peacekeeping and anti-terrorism activities as Kanzler Merkel is about to unveil a new Bundeswehr set of guidelines on engagement and deployment under UN and international cooperative norms.

According to the Financial Times:

The paper, which will be endorsed at a special cabinet meeting in the defence ministry, is the product of a review – the first of its kind since 1994 – begun by Angela Merkel, chancellor, after she won office last November. It will see Germany’s military officially abandon its primary postwar task of defending the country’s borders in favour of a more robust role for German troops on international missions.

The military’s most sensitive international deployment since the second world war came this month when the German navy took control of patrolling Lebanese waters to stop weapons smugglers. The military has taken part in other international missions in Afghanistan and Kosovo, for example, but has largely avoided direct involvement in war zones.

The 133-page strategy paper argues that the capacity of the Bundeswehr must be expanded to allow for the deployment of a total of 14,000 troops to five international missions simultaneously.

This will be achieved by drawing troops previously deployed on national defence into units involved in staffing or supporting overseas missions.

The Bundeswehr has about 250,000 military personnel, including about 50,000 conscripts. About 9,000 troops are currently overseas in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Congo and elsewhere.

Conscription will be retained, according to the FT sources.

Perhaps this is jockeying for an eventual German seat in the UN Security Council, which would allow the two WW II Axis Powers some sort of international status reflecting their economic heft.

As both Japan and Germany begin to discard their postwar anti-military policies, they should be two helpful allies in the perpetual peace-keeping the UN faces in an increasingly fractious international climate.

Unhinged Cacique Chavez Supports Narco-State as UNSC Replacement

The Coca-Czar of Bolivia said that "Comandante" Chavez has just called him to say that the Venezuelans are throwing their immoral authority behind Bolivia as a "compromise candidate" in the long-running election battle between Guatemala and the Venz for a UN Security Council seat. The UN General Assembly has been unable to get a two-thirds majority for either one, and Guatemala is still about forty votes in the lead in the interminable balloting.

For Latin America to okay putting a country which has just elected a narcotics grower as a populist president into a UNSC member would make this section of the UN look very bad. Recall if you will that forty years ago, world economists believed that Latin America, which at the time had 25% of the GNP of the USA, would be the next burgeoning economic region in the world economy. Today it is 20% of the US economy while East and South Asia make giant strides to First World status. Only Chile has done well, with Colombia and Brazil and Argentina lagging far behind the high expectations once held for their political economies.

Magical realism, miracle cures, populist caudillos, ethnic caciques, elitist kleptocracies have all done their worst, and Castroism's dead hand has been an anchor on some economies.

The Latin American caucus must decide on which candidate to put forward. Chile might be an acceptable compromise choice for the US, for Chile does not have the reputation of being an American satrapy that Guatemalans are sometimes called. And at the same time, Chile detests the populist gibberish spouted by "comandantes" like Chavez and narco-lords like Evo Morales, the Bolivian president.

Sadly, most Latin American countries, like Brazil, will perpetually be the "country of the future."

MSM Mighty Wurlitzer Needle Stuck on Iraq

If you go back that long ago, you will remember your annoyance when the needle on a 45 would keep skipping back a notch and replaying the same groove again and again, until you bumped the victrola or kicked the juke box. The MSM has done a bit of the same trick on Iraq, portraying daily bombings and indiscrimate slaughter without context. Yes, I know that self-exploding maniacs are hard to fit into any context, but yesterday Gen. Casey and Amb. Khalilzad gave a largely-overlooked press conference to explain that the positive aspects of the war are not being explained and context is lacking in the MSM's constant battering of terrible images.

The Al-Jazeera local network stateside, CNN, thought it journalistic to show a propaganda video of US soldiers being in a terrorist sniper's crosshairs. No real US mainstream media commentary on just how inappropriate the rogue CNN network, which considers itnelf "international," was to show inflammatory videos that were meant by insurgents to be propaganda. Imagine the outcry if FOX-News, a much more responsible network, showed the sniper deaths of terrorist insurgents! You get the picture.

The Wall Street Journal attempts to set the record into a different perspective, as the MSM pulls out all the stops on its pipe organ to activate an electorate to vote Democratic.

A measure of rationality at least came yesterday out of Baghdad, where General George Casey and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad tried to put the violence in some larger context. The Iraq government is in fact "functioning," as Iraqis continue to get their food rations, and as more than a million civil servants, Iraqi security force members and teachers continue to show up for work every day and get paid. Just this weekend, Iraq's oil minister announced that production had surpassed pre-war levels.

"Economically, I see an Iraq every day that I do not think the American people know about--where cell phones and satellite dishes, once forbidden, are now common, where economic reform takes place on a regular basis, where agricultural production is rising dramatically, and where the overall economy and the consumer sector is growing," said Mr. Khalilzad, who for this attempt at hopeful realism will be derided in some quarters as a Pollyanna.

WSJ's editorial piece goes on to note the obvious:

And while every terrorist success is broadcast far and wide, acts of bravery by Iraqi forces go unheralded. Only 10 days ago, insurgents staged a huge attack on government and police offices in Mosul, but it was successfully repulsed by Iraqi forces. Dozens of insurgents were killed or captured, and one heroic Iraqi police officer gave his life successfully defending others against a suicide truck bomber.

Last night, Bill O'Reilly noted that when he asked David Letterman whether Letterman wanted the US to "win" the war in Iraq, Letterman was silent. As was Rosie O'Donnell when O'Reilly asked her the same question on The View. There is a broad segment of America-haters on the two coasts who simply want the US to lose this war.

WSJ goes on to inject rational discourse into the panic-button MSM responses to the current difficult straits in Iraq.

The truth is that the Sunni insurgents are still capable only of hit-and-run attacks, are slaughtered whenever they gather en masse, and have held down no permanent territory since Fallujah was cleaned out in late 2004. Nor have they been successful in their other goal of keeping their fellow Sunnis out of the political process. Sunnis continue to sit in the current government and parliament, despite being labelled "collaborators" and marked for death.

As General Casey observed yesterday, "we've seen the nature of the conflict evolving from what was an insurgency against us to a struggle for the division of political and economic power among the Iraqis." One of the main challenges now is to reassure the Sunnis that it is safe to compromise with Shiite and Kurdish leaders on issues such as the distribution of oil revenue and the shape of Iraqi federalism. Mr. Maliki must also demobilize--or at least neutralize--the militias that grew in his own Shiite community in response to Sunni violence.

But the political truth is that none of this will happen any sooner if Americans look like they are heading for the exits. Timetables and deadlines may sound like realpolitik, but they only feed suspicions that the U.S. will abandon Iraq's leaders once they have walked out onto a political limb. Iraq is not yet in a state of "civil war," and it has a functioning, if imperfect, government. If changes of tactics or force levels are needed, by all means make them. But what Iraqis most need from Washington is reassurance of support for the tough decisions and battles that lie ahead.

Casey and Khalilzad are right, and the delirious hysterics on the left have always been wrong.

The leftist MSM simply wants the US to lose because its secular-progressive agenda at home will be advanced, in its warped and cynical vision, by a disastrous military misadventure abroad. The Democrats might seize control of Congress and eventually the White House, instead of merely controlling whack-job judiciaries making law by omission and subtraction as the Dems are doing now. They would throw their first-born into the fiery furnaces of Moloch if it will advance their take-over. American honor and credibility should not be cast overboard because frivolous newsies and cloud-cuckoo celebrities want us to lose in Iraq.

It all brings to mind Barry Goldwater's prescient quote some forty years ago, when the now-celebrated Arizona Senator noted: "When treason rules the land, none dare call it treason."

RINO Bush Reluctantly Makes Public Fence Signing

The perpetually flummoxed-on-immigration RINO Bush has finally, reluctantly, agreed to insistent demands by Republicans wanting to make it an election issue, a public signing of the Enforcement Only Fence Bill.

The Washington Times describes some of the hand-wringing GWB has been going through, telegraphed by his aides, as 80%-plus polling shows that the US public wants a fence first and discussion of amnesty/legalization of ILLEGAL immigrants later, if at all.

While Bush's party is floundering in the polls around him, the single most popular issue with conservatives has been practically pocket-vetoed by the stymied P0TUS. He constantly mistakes stubbornness for resolve, and the one thing above all others that honest poll-takers seem to find the American people resolved about is stopping the torrent of illegal immigrants right away, before they infest the country with crime and other bad habits. And he believes that by not enforcing the laws on the books, he can somehow convince the unwashed hordes of potential security threats to turn themselves into good, tax-paying, civic-minded, God-fearing Republicans?

GWB thought he could turn Iraq into an orderly democracy. But some peoples do not have the temperament nor the inclination to solve their differences through rational debate conducted under legal restraints.

Mexico is teetering on the brink of becoming another Iraq, albeit only in the crime, corruption, and kleptocratic departments. Plus drug-trafficking across our borders enforced by organized crime militias protected by Mexican authorities. At least they're not religious!

Why should we assume that Latin American immigrants, who in their homelands revert to magical realism, miracle cures, and hyperventilating populism on a regular basis, will suddenly adopt European manners and mores in their new American surroundings? Maybe they will, but the utopian fantasies of leftist cloud-cuckoos, who shout racist at people who only want to enforce laws on the books, that somehow these undereducated peons will quickly adapt to the English-speaking world are controverted in California, which has huge barrios where English is not spoken and barely understood.

And a lot of these uninvited guests are already chanting about a reconquista to take back the lands ceded by the Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo to the Kleptocracy to the south.

The safer bet is to build a fence and enforce the laws. GWB's dreams will have to wait.

Cindy Sheehan to Sue over Cybersex?

Serially unattractive Cindy, whose emotional and moral collapse has led to a Victimhood Hall of Fame, now says she's going to sue another Gold Star mother, this one not a Canonized Whiner, "for every nickel they have." Cindy, whose mourning was deemed above reproach by no less a moral authority than Maureen Dowd, apparently has been documented as having several hundred hours of cybersexual conversations with a certain unidentified male. But CNN nixed an interview with Glenn Beck under threat of a lawsuit from alleged cybersex-addict Cindy.

Of course, First Amendment issues are not important to Jon Klein, Eason Jordan's successor after Eason was forced to resign after making unsubstantiated allegations of American troops targeting journalists at a Davos enclave where he thought he would not be overheard. Klein seems to be following Eason's footsteps in caving to anti-American sentiments rather than braving a possible lawsuit.

Jon is a CYA artiste in avoiding journalism at all costs. CNN goes by the motto: When facts contradict the legend, print the legend.

Global Warming Hoax Defended by Newsweak

Newsweak has a hilarious article that is unself-consciously ironic and satirical as the dubious mag flogs the spurious doctrine of Global Warming while admitting it was wrong thirty years ago about a coming Ice Age! You just can't make these things up!

The clowns at Newsweak insist their new doctrine is infallible, while jesuitically concocting arguments that their past journalism wasn't wrong in the sense of, well, you be the judge:

The implication [Sen. Inhofe] draws is that if you're not worried about being trampled by a stampede of woolly mammoths through downtown Chicago, you don't have to believe what the media is saying about global warming, either.

But is that the right lesson to draw? How did NEWSWEEK—or for that matter, Time magazine, which also ran a story on the subject in the mid-1970s—get things so wrong? In fact, the story wasn't "wrong" in the journalistic sense of "inaccurate." Some scientists indeed thought the Earth might be cooling in the 1970s...

The writers of Newsweak surely have their tongues in cheek when they continue with adverbial assurance that this time they are right because of "vastly," "incomparably," and "infinitely," yadda, yadda, yadda.

predictions of global cooling never approached the kind of widespread scientific consensus that supports the greenhouse effect today. And for good reason: the tools scientists have at their disposal now—vastly more data, incomparably faster computers and infinitely more sophisticated mathematical models—render any forecasts from 1975 as inoperative as the predictions being made around the same time about the inevitable triumph of communism.

But isn't Newsweak still working for the triumph of Communism? And aren't the Dems sharing that same dream? And aren't Newsweak and the Dems both convinced in the infallibility of Big Science and the absence of a higher power?

"Widespread scientific consensus" sounds like a majority vote, because Inhofe cites hundreds of studies and thousands of scientists who have not signed onto the latest scientific hoax, even though the fellow who invented the internet, Al Gore, insists that Global Warming is a fact!

Just so.

St. Louis/KC Dem Machines Avert Poll ID Threat

A long time ago, I was very active in grass-roots politics in St. Louis, MO, and I personally canvassed the vertical plantations of the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects, before they were dynamited as infectious sources of crime and social instability. Today, the Wall Street Journal has a column on the Missouri Supreme Court overthrowing a requirement for photo ID at the polling stations. That reminds me of the quaint habit the St. Louis Democrat Machine had of giving $5 bills to voters coming to the booths, back in my day.

It's no secret that Democratic machines did control and probably still control the politics of Kansas City and St. Louis. St. Louis has had massive polling infractions in the past, like Milwaukee, in a state with many parallel political problems, with which I am familiar. The two cities are two of the most corrupt jurisdictions between the two coasts, with the possible exception of Detroit, of which I am also familiar because of political work for the Dems way back before I grew up and acquired a set of frontal lobes [i.e., became an independent conservative].

The Supreme Courts of Missouri and Wisconsin are in the tank for the Democrats, who have committed massive fraud in both jurisdictions during the last two presidential elections. In Milwaukee, the fraud extended to violence. In the last two presidential elections, Wisconsin has gone Democratic by 5000 and 10000 votes, largely because of unexamined vote fraud in Madison and Milwaukee.

Missouri is headed down the same course of massive institutionalized fraud if it doesn't get reformed by SCOTUS. Here's a quote from the WSJ article linked above:

there's a reason that Democrat partisans are more interested in raising the specter of Jim Crow than in protecting the integrity of the voting process. And here's a clue: While the Missouri Supreme Court was preparing its decision earlier this month, the Kansas City Star and St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran front-page stories about the thousands of fraudulent voter registrations submitted by Acorn, a national left-wing group financed in part by organized labor.
According to the Star, Acorn's voter registration drive generated some 35,000 applications, "but thousands of them appear to be duplicates or contain dubious data." The report went on to note that "[n]ear the top of the fishy list would be a man named Mark who apparently registered seven times over a three-day period using his mother's home address and phone number." Mom told the paper he hadn't lived there in six years.

Acorn and its affiliates have been among the most active and vocal opponents of voter ID laws in Missouri and nationwide. Now we know why.

The Dems are trying to outlaw photo IDs across the country, and are using crooked judiciaries using specious Jim Crow arguments to overthrow legislative mandates. The Dems used to be the Party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion. Now the Democrats stand for Drugs, Atheism, and RICO-Kleptocracy.

Wilson Grifters Heading to Santa Fe: There Goes the Neighborhood!

Although Truthout and Jason Leonard may still be insisting that they were right about Karl Rove being indicted in a double-secret highly-classified indictment for outing the scam Boy Joey did with a visit to Niger that managed to overlook the Iraqi Vatican Ambassador's visit to "study Christianity" in Niamey [just made that up!]

But Drudge has the pair of scammers moving from D.C. to New Mexico to escape the incessant demands on their time and people seeking to exploit their star-power celebrity. [Oops, made that up too!]

Like grifters always say, when the well runs dry, it's time to Move On.

I'm sure Bill Richardson will be thrilled to soak up their foreign policy expertise and perhaps elder statesman Joe will deign to instruct Bill on the nuances of statecraft at the highest levels!

Vlad the Impaler Finds a New Lapdog

The Financial Times has an article in its morning paper concerning the meeting of EU nabobs with Vlad the KGB Prez. The major confrontation came with the EU leaders demanding that Putin put his energy contracts on a long-term practical economic basis. Putin swatted back the powerless Eurocrats on this issue.

On another issue, Poland, Estonia, and Denmark went beyond what the FT called "pre-agreed limits" of criticism of Putin to press him on human rights and his hyper-aggressive policies against Georgia [which the Western MSM press, including FT, doesn't recognize as an energy issue, but the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline goes through Georgia from Azerbaijan, skirting Russian and Iranian ally Armenia. Cutting off or controlling this pipeline would be another grip on Europe's energy jugular.]

Well, I'll give you one guess who jumped in Putin's lap [hint: it's a chien in his own tongue] licking the ring of the Russian crimelord. Let's use the FT language in today's paper, which in response to EU complaints about Russian bullying of Georgia, said the following:

Mr Putin reacted to claims that his overreaction to Georgia's military build-up near Russian-controlled Abkhazia and south Ossetia was heading for "bloodshed" by glowering across the table.

That prompted France's Jacqques Chirac, an ally of Mr. Putin, to peel away the facade of European unity, arguing that the Georgia dispute should not stand in the way of long-term EU-Russia relations. "Chirac hung Georgia out to dry," muttered one furious EU diplomat.

Chronic craven coward Chirac has never missed an opportunity to show disloyalty, amend promises, or break allied ranks in order to curry favor with an opponent.

France's snuggle-up last month to Armenia and opposition to Turkey's EU accession, after long support, are recent examples of this senile dementia victim who still thinks he may run next year again for President [though his near-single-digit popularity percentage may convince even this over-the-hill prima donna that his preening days are over.]

Yesterday, his own boy Friday, the long-time Chirac go-fer and poetaster PM Dominique de Villepin, declared he was no longer considering a run for President next year [sensible, as his popularity is barely above Chirac's].

The French like to claim expertise and dabble in Proche-Orient politics. Ever since French was the lingua franca, they played games taking sides with the Ottomans against the rest of Christian Europe [as they took the side of the Protestants in the Prot/Catholic Thirty Years War.] They seem to have a trahison gene in their national DNA. Now they are siding with Russia/Armenia and possibly soon Iran in the musical chair game; BP and American big oil own and manage the pipelines, so French dabbling can perhaps once again get them the rooster-crow bravado their national symbol so aptly evokes.

Napoleon once said of the Italians that they never finish a war on the same side as they started, except on occasions, of course, when they change sides twice.

Looks like the French are the new Italians!

Complacency or Paranoia: Dems Can't Decide

Froth-at-the-mouth bow-wows are starting to howl at the moon more than two weeks before the election---we've got it wrapped up and if we lose, it's not our fault! It's those voting machines {that Dems insisted be installed after the 2000 fiasco when one of their own designed a "butterfly ballot."

Of course, the herd of independent minds on the far left is splashing across the river of forgetfulness like those wildebeest Animal Planet loves to depict in full throttle---crocs gorging on the not-so-lucky as the rest mindlessly emote in mindless terror. Rove is the croc in these paranoid fantasies.

Here's a little walk on the wild side by a PuffHost commenter:

All week I've been reading in disparate sources from Drudge to US News and World Report about Bush, Rove and Cheney being overly confident about the midterm elections. Even Republican strategists are increasingly concerned because the White House doesn't have a plan if they lose. This lack of planning shouldn't surprise anyone, but if you really think about it a creepy, crawly feeling grows in your gut.

Here are some questions: Are these guys simply narcissistic idiots Rove-ing around in some never-never land bubble or do they know something we don't? Have they planned a grab bag nose punch of an October/November surprise? Or have Diebold, ES&S, and local state secretaries assured them that they will do "whatever it takes" to get a Republican Congress elected again? . . .

Whether it is hubris, loony tunes, or both, the White House's freakish calm about the elections makes me as nervous as the hell we seem to be headed for. Therefore we should all be on alert. If for whatever reason we don't win back Congress in November the only real answer will be to take to the streets.

This off-her-meds emotional basket-case is projecting her own narcissistic idiocy onto the Other---in this case, the other party.

I postulate that the hubris and looney tunes reside inside the skull of this deranged possibly overmedicated creature of the left.

And she could use some transference getting that "freakish calm" of her leaders in the White House internalized in her apoplectic hyperventilating moon-howling.

Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Hungarian Revolution: Back When Thirst For Freedom Counted

The Wall Street Journal has a moving article about the 1956 Revolt in Hungary. I remember hearing about it on a snowy day in Milwaukee riding in the car with my father to Marquette High School, on the way to work. I recall my feelings of fear and elation, as the era of hiding under one's desks during Civil Defense drills was in my recent past. Cardinal Mindzenty held out against the Soviet monster, led by a bloodthirsty criminal named Andropov, who crushed the Hungarian quest for freedom with tanks and mass executions.

Oh, yeah, that reminds me.

It was while Andropov was General Secretary of the USSR in 1983 that our senior lying pol from Taxachusetts sent his skirt-chasing buddy Sen. Tunney of California to Moscow to ask Andropov to interfere in a US presidential election.

KGB docs prove this, and even name the useful idiots in the MSM who would parade to Moscow to praise the Soviets for their peace-loving devotion to humanity: Barbara Walters [Castro's Girl Friday], Old Uncle Walter the Dupe, and some ABC execs.

But KGB docs and ample evidence that Jimmy Carter begged the Russians for help on another occasion just don't make it to newsworthy when there are e-mails to Congressional pages and Valerie Plame's career and other grave issues threatening America's national security!

Thomas Sowell said it best in an article last February: "The Fourth Estate is the Fifth Column" for the enemies of the US.

And the Dems don't mind crimes against humanity by their overseas comrades, and I use that word in the full amplitude of its connotations and denotations.

MSM Bias: Crime is Okay if You Are Environmentalist

James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal fisks and frisks the article linked above from the ultra far-left Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

"Jennifer Kolar and Lacey Phillabaum seem unlikely criminals," declares an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Well-educated young women passionate about environmental causes, they share a love of the outdoors and similar backgrounds.

Then we get some background on them. Both attended the same high school in Spokane, Wash. Phillabaum was "bright, outspoken, sometimes in-your-face but never dull." Kolar, who studies science, "had the makings of a good scientist, her adviser said, but her heart seemed elsewhere."

Then we get to what they did:

The women were concerned about what was going on around them--the logging of old-growth forests, the slaughter of animals for sport. Like many Northwest activists, they pushed for change.

But their activism morphed into something more dangerous--and now both are headed to prison.

Before dawn on May 21, 2001, Kolar cut the glass that allowed fellow Earth Liberation Front members to sneak into the University of Washington office of professor Toby Bradshaw, who was studying the genetics of fast-growing hybrid poplar trees. Phillabaum's role is still unclear, but she was also on the scene, court documents show.

Bradshaw and other researchers at the UW Center for Urban Horticulture would be arriving within hours, so the ELF squad must have worked quickly to plant the firebombs--plastic buckets of fuel rigged with cheap digital timers, assembled in someone's garage. Their goal: destroy the research on genetic engineering of poplars to avert an "ecological nightmare" for native forests.

Mostly the piece is more puffery--we learn that Phillabaum "was socially conscious even as a teenager," that she had "a strong mind of her own," and that she once worked for a nonprofit where she was "an exemplary employee. Kolar is a bit less appealing: "bright and skilled but distracted" while in college, "passionate about animal rights." Her doctoral adviser says, "It's not the least bit surprising to me that she carried her passions that far."

But here's a question for you: Suppose this pair were "pro-life" rather than "environmental" activists. Suppose they had firebombed not a research lab but an abortion clinic--or, for that matter, suppose they'd firebombed a lab that conducted embryonic stem-cell research.

Would an establishment newspaper ever give them such favorable treatment?

Whenever the words "passionate," "feisty," or "vibrant" occur in a piece, my BS detector goes off wildly.

You can bet that those three Pavlovian words set lefty hormones rocketing skyward in a feminized flood of neuropeptides!

NYT Ombudsman Admits He and Paper Wrong on

The perpetually lame Byron Calame says he now thinks that the NYT's gratuitous disclosure of the SWIFT surveillance may have aided America's enemies---oops! guess again. His feelings for the underdog made him make a mistake, and he now realizes that

......The lack of appropriate oversight — to catch any abuses in the absence of media attention — was a key reason I originally supported publication. I think, however, that I gave it too much weight...

Who elected the NYT to administer an oversight program?

Nobody, and the NYT might have considered asking the Bush Administration whether this might affect national security if the NYT were truly "impartial."

The Ombudsman buried his second-thoughts mea culpa deep into an article on NYT magazines, hoping that in the words of one reader, only his mother would notice.

He said "vicious attacks" by the Bush Administration affected his news judgment and caused him to support the NYT unethical and possibly illegal disclosure of USG surveillance activities.

This fellow is a fully-fledged weasel, and his employers are completely against America's successful prosecution of a war on terrorism, which they think is a law and order issue.

There were no vicious attacks, or rather the only viciousness displayed was by Dem lawmakers and useful idiots like the ACLU who were trotted out to scream the administration was "violating the freedoms Americans falsely believed they could take for granted."

Bush called the revelations by the NYT of a useful tool to combat terrorism "disgraceful," a term which can be used at least bi-weekly to describe the NYT's factitious reporting and tendentious law-breaking---always to hinder what the possibly criminal cabal of Keller and Sulzberger consider the Bush Administration's Global War on Terror.

The Ombudsman would have a daily column if he actually took the NYT's ethical, journalistic, and legal misdeeds seriously enough to truly investigate their depth and scope.

The SWIFT affair was simply another example of the NYT's war against the war on terrorism.

UPDATE:Jules Crittendon has a good column about the NYT "holier-than-thou" pose needing frequent defrocking.

NFL Ruined by Refs

I just finished watching the end of the first half of an NFL game in Miami where the zebras disallowed a successful 55-yard field goal because of a defensive penalty before the snap, then disallowed a 40-yard FG because of an offensive penalty. Finally, they ruled that somehow time had run out even though the clock had a few seconds left; they ruled the half was over and the teams left the field.

College football is also suffering from zebritis, or overzealous officials, but the NFL has a big problem with the increasingly intrusive influence that refs have on games. The rules have become so arcane and wrong-headed, incidents like the Miami end-of-half don't even draw comment from the jaded play-by-play commentators.

Why don't they simply let the guy kick, instead of taking it to a rulebook that sometimes turns into game-deciding by judicial fiat.

The elephant in the living room of this whole problem is the heavy amounts bet on pro football games and the possibility of refs shaving point spreads or otherwise getting into illegal activities.

Isn't that what's wrong with Congress and the White House being superseded by a bunch of activist busybodies on the bench?

And the new rules to speed up college football need a review, as the rapidity of the clock now puts too much pressure on a game that was originally designed to be good clean fun. Does anyone remember that anymore?

BBC Admits it Hates US, Loves MultiCultism, and Disdains UK

The BBC has done an internal audit/navel-gazing exercise in which it finds itself guilty of a number of unforced errors, indeed, tendentious factitious disinformation. USS Neverdock has a good summary of the results of the BBC's introspection, along with some trenchant well-deserved down-putting observations of his own.

In the USA, we have PBS and NPR, both tilting left and occasionally far left. But the completely open editorializing of creepy sports of nature like Orla Guerin and her crew on the Middle East is suffused with hate for Israel and cheerleading for Hezbollah, Hamas, and other terrorist organizations.

Orwell foresaw all this, and 1984 is behind schedule, but with the BBC as the Ministry of Truth, the UK will eventually arrive at life under Big Brother.

N. Korea as a Nuclear Power

Newsweak has a long article riddled with inaccuracies and omissions which tries to blame Bush for the N. Korean bomb. Like senile dementia victim Selig Harrison, the article blames the N. K. nuke on Bush's unwillingness to talk one-on-one with the perfidious liars in Pyongyang, rather than in the six-member contact group.

The article omits the fact that N. Korea was almost certainly pursuing bomb development during the Clinton years, which Billy Jeff conveniently ignored by not even allowing an NIE [remember those?] during his eight years mismanaging US foreign policy.

And hilariously, the article ends with a true howler concerning Winston Churchill:

In Bush's Oval Office sits a bronze bust of Winston Churchill, who served both in the government and at the front in the war Kaiser Wilhelm started partly out of pride in 1914. Churchill's was a long life: a veteran of the trenches,

Yadda, yadda, yadda. Newsweak has fact-checkers even worse than the New Yorkers, who recently let "Saudia Arabia" into one of their polemical diatribes. Sir Winston was First Lord of the Admiralty, and was busy designing the disaster at Gallipoli rather than serving "at the front" near "the trenches." The whole article reeks of amateurish tendentious factitious nonsense like the above.

The self-absorbed autistic mindset of the MSM is exemplified by Newsweak's article.
By transference, these self-important second-raters make the US the center of whatever is wrong, and Bush responsible for N. Korea developing a nuke.

The miniature mini-me would have built one come hell or heavy water.

Putin Gets Away With Murder

Condi Rice is being interviewed today by the Russian newspaper that Anna P., murdered on Putin's birthday as a bizarre present to the autocrat, worked for as she wrote investigative exposes on the new mini-Stalinism being imposed on Russia. A Weekly Standard article by Anders Aslund is worth reading in full. One nugget:

Yeltsin believed in free and fair elections and free media. Putin, by contrast, is a secret policeman. In his book First Person, made up of in terviews, he marvels at his own skillful repression of dissidents.

Putin talks about dem ocracy while systematically destroying it, as Berkeley political scientist Steven Fish has detailed in Democracy Derailed in Russia. Putin has mostly destroyed press freedom, deprived both par liamentary chambers of power, undermined free elections, eliminated the election of regional governors, and seized control over the courts. Where Boris Yeltsin boldly and peacefully dissolved the Soviet empire, giving its peoples freedom, his successor has publicly complained that this was the "greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century."

Yeltsin believed in private enterprise. He has been criticized for privatizing the Russian economy in the only way that was possible, rather than leaving a larger share in the hands of the state. Putin is currently undertaking the greatest re-nationalization the world has seen.

Yeltsin regarded both himself and Russia as part of the free and democratic Western world, while Putin does not. He criticizes both the United States and the E.U. in ever more paranoid and conspiratorial language, while praising China more and more. Unlike Westerners, the Chinese do not ask nosy questions about authoritarianism, corruption, and money-laundering, questions for which Putin has no good answers.

The West is busy committing slow-motion suicide like some sort of samurai carving out his guts with his ornate sword. But when countries like the Ukraine want NATO membership to guard against Russian expansionism, is the U.S. going to fold? What to do?

On a few points, the United States has got its policy toward Russia right. First, the United States and the E.U. stood up for democracy during Ukraine's Orange Revolution, and Putin accepted defeat. Second, the West protested loudly against the restrictive Russian draft legislation on nongovernmental organizations, which was softened. Third, the Western outcry over Russia's cutoff of gas supplies to Ukraine last January led to an immediate resumption of deliveries. Putin was upset, but he changed his policy. And the recent U.S. embargo against the Russian state arms export agency Rosoboronexport and the military aircraft producer Sukhoi because of their deliveries of sophisticated arms to Iran is another step in the right direction.

The lesson is that Putin only responds if protests are loud, public, and backed up by threats. Rather than talking about the Cold War being over (which is true), we should remember that the most successful policies toward the Soviet Union were those of Ronald Reagan.

And not one writer or commentator notes that Russia's impending invasion of Georgia is ALL ABOUT OIL, as the new pipeline from Baku to Turkey goes through Georgia. Does anyone in the craven cowardly international press, busy beating and bashing Bush, remember that Putin is using energy as the edge of the wedge in re-establishing Russian hegemony over its former satellites? Including East Germany? And control of the Georgian pipeline would further choke off EU energy supplies? Aslund ends his piece on a sour note:

Right now, Russia is apparently preparing for a war against the independent former Soviet republic of Georgia. With no justification whatsoever, Putin personally has accused Georgia of state terrorism. He likened the arrest of four senior Russian military spies in Georgia to the acts of Stalin's henchman Lavrenty Beria. Russia has evacuated its diplomats and citizens from Georgia and imposed a nearly complete embargo. Major Russian military maneuvers are under way.

Most analysts draw parallels to Yeltsin and argue that Russia's actions are meant only to frighten. I doubt that. Putin is a warrior. He won his presidency on a very dubious war, the second war in Chechnya--the region whose agony Anna Politkovskaya covered at the cost of her life. Putin won his reelection and authoritarian rule with his war against the oligarchs, especially his confiscation of the Yukos oil company. It is a logical next step to illegally prolong that rule by starting a war against Georgia.

It couldn't be plainer that the United States needs a serious policy toward Russia and needs it fast.

For the Democrats on the cusp of power, whose past penchant for detente and whose DNA is jam-packed with cowardice genes, the hand-wringing and eagerness to make concessions [or do backroom deals, as KGB docs reveal Carter, Teddy the drowner, and other Dems tried in '84] will doubtless lead to the cynical Putin pulling a Kim Jung-Il and taking US money while steadfastly pursuing his own goals.

Let's see if he abrogates the Russian Constitution and runs for a third term in 2007. That should be a clue as to whether Russia once again has a czar and not a president.

Don't Forget About Jimmy Carter And His Russian Pals

The worst US president of the twentieth century is probably Jimmy Carter, who packed a lot of malfeasance, incompetence, and downright wrongheadedness into four years that saw Iran kick out the Shah, the elimination of the neutron bomb, the invasion of Afghanistan [due to Sov impressions of Carter's weakness], the hostage crisis, the Panama Canal virtually given away [the Chinese are thanking us now], and creating a general "malaise" that descended on the US when the country collectively realized it was being run by a complete eff-up. Don't forget his seven economic plans that led to a 17% interest rate while we tote up this creepy little cretin's red-ink ledger.

Now Siggy of Sigmund, Carl and Alfred points out that the crazed dwarf was also slinking around the Soviets in 1984 seeking to return the discredited Dems to the White House:
Soviet diplomatic accounts and material from the archives show that in January 1984 former President Jimmy Carter dropped by Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin's residence for a private meeting.

Carter expressed his concern about and opposition to Reagan's defense buildup. He boldly told Dobrynin that Moscow would be better off with someone else in the White House. If Reagan won, he warned, "There would not be a single agreement on arms control, especially on nuclear arms, as long as Reagan remained in power."

Using the Russians to influence the presidential election was nothing new for Carter.

Schweizer reveals Russian documents that show that in the waning days of the 1980 campaign, the Carter White House dispatched businessman Armand Hammer to the Soviet Embassy.

Hammer was a longtime Soviet-phile, and he explained to the Soviet ambassador that Carter was "clearly alarmed" at the prospect of losing to Reagan.

Hammer pleaded with the Russians for help. He asked if the Kremlin could expand Jewish emigration to bolster Carter's standing in the polls.

"Carter won't forget that service if he is elected," Hammer told Dobrynin.

It's always good to be reminded, as the MSM tries desperately to bury the fact, that the Democrats have morphed from the Party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" to the Party of "Drugs, Atheism, and Treason!"

Like Teddy the drowner, Jimmy the fibber will never really be held accountable for all the outrages to America's national interests he committed both in office and afterwards, most recently in N. Korea, where he gave Kim Jung-Il the cover to produce a nuke while being paid for ostensibly halting production. The Nobel Committee realized true ineptitude and gave Carter the Peace Prize the year after Guinness inept champ Kofi Annan and the UN received this dubious distinction. And Clinton went along with the Korean charade, while Clinton's dubious licensing arms sales to China were equally as foolish as his agreeing with Carter to pay N. Korea to clandestinely develop nukes and ballistic missiles. Carter, Teddy, & Billy Jeff were a true Trifecta of fellow-travelling dupedom.

But a compliant mainstream media owned and published and managed by neo-Marxist elitists will continue to cover a multitude of sins and crimes on the left, including treason. Ann Coulter was and is on to something.

Kennedy & Dems Outed by KGB Doc: Anti-Reagan Plot in '84

The news is not surprising that Sens. Kennedy and his fellow Senator/skirt-chaser Tunney were in communication with the Andropov regime to mount a PR campaign countering Reagan's aggressive foreign policy. Dr. Sanity in Ann Arbor, a town with thousands of America-haters, has the best summary I have come across. Nut-quote on the old-timey MSM participation:

...if the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y. V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interview. Specifically, the board of directors of ABC, Elton Raul and the television columnists Walter Cronkite or Barbara Walters could visit Moscow. The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side. (emphasis mine)

Yep, Baba Wawa had already earned her Comintern badge with Castro, Uncle Walter was a known Comsymp, and ABC had a whole raft of ultra-lefties when I worked on 20/20 for a while in 1981-2. Dr. Sanity also has good spew from paranoid whacko Gore Vidal towards the end; guess insanity runs with the family "Gore."

Of course, the major media will not touch this inflammatory information with a stick, just as they wouldn't out a homosexual because of their leftist values: Oops!
Tom Maguire has a good take on the Kennedy treason evidence and of the Dems getting busted trying to leak the NIE document, which involves Cong. Jane Harmon in two separate scandals, as she is implicated in the Larry-Franklin FBI treason case with leaking documents to AIPAC.

My guess is that the MSM is now going to call all these revelations "October Surprises" and write them off. Already, a WaPo article is trivializing the concept, in an effort to inoculate the Dems concerning any new revelations.

As one reader noted in a comment: At least in the Kennedy failure to get the Sovs involved in US elections, no one drowned.