Newsweak Interviews Hamas Terrorist-in-Chief

Khaled Meshal is largely responsible for the Gaza rocketings and this moral coward cowers in Damascus while his goon-squads beat up their Fatah counterparts and Palestine devolves into gangsta land anarchy. AND IT'S ALL BUSH'S FAULT!

Actually, Khaled adores Jimmy Carter, that architect of Middle East comity whose anti-Semitism doesn't quite rank with Meshal's, but Carter's moral compass is perhaps equally skewed as the Hamas terrorist, only with an airhead Southland twist.

Read the entire link as the master terrorist praises Brzezinski and the Dem Party for pumping up Hamas morale. It's clear that Hamas is simply biding its time waiting for their ascension to the Oval Office, when a Get Out of Jail Free card will be given to all terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and of course, Al Qaeda, which got its head start by outfoxing the Clinton duo of Reno/Gorelick at the DoJ.

Coulter on France, Germany, Canada Turning Right

Ann Coulter is as sassy and disrespectful of the Democratic icons and mantras as ever, but this piece starts out with a show-stopper:

With Nicolas Sarkozy's decisive victory as the new president of France, the French have produced their first pro-American ruler since Louis XVI.

Actually, Clemenceau as a youth was a newsman in Wisconsin and other parts of the Midwest and was a big fan of the USA, but the overall rivalry between France and the USA for legimate bragging rights for founding democratic government has often resulted in silly name-calling interspersed with intermittent lovefests.

When I was Vice Consul in Lyon, France, I learned that Lyon was the only city in the world outside the US to celebrate the Fourth of July, in honor of their being liberated from the Nazis in 1944. I celebrated one Fourth there with Gen. Donaldson, Cinc of NATO at the time, and helped escort him to a battle site in Bourg-en-Bresse where he as a young lieutenant helped knock out several German tanks. The Lyonnais never forgot and gave exhibitions of American Pro Football with NFL teams, a feat Paris has yet to accomplish!

And the food at the Yankee holiday in Lyon was the best in the entire world, bar none!

Cheney's Trip to Saudi Very Important

Although it is fashionable among the mainstream media to trivialize VP Cheney, David Ignatius in the Washington Post has a thoughtful article outlining the serious nature of Cheney's latest jaunt to Riyadh.

As the Ignatius article notes, King Abdullah is very unhappy with Iraq, and has disdain for Nouri Al-Maliki, who is feckless and a virtual pawn in the hands of multiple factions within the Shi'ite community. Thereby, Al-Maliki becomes an unwitting or unwilling asset for Iran within the Iraqi government.

Unfortunately, Allawi whom Ignatius says is Abdullah's candidate for replacing the present PM, carries baggage of his own---not the least of which is that he was [or still is] an asset of the CIA.

But King Abdullah, who had a favorite wife who was Lebanese and who travelled to Beirut often, is as concerned with Iran's aims in Lebanon through its cats-paw Hezbollah, as he is with Iraq. If Hezbollah grasps control in Lebanon, the whole region may erupt in a cataclysm that will make Iraq look pale in comparison.

And the King's obsession with Yemen is no joke. I was told that in 1990 Cheney was told by Prince Bandar to bring aerial reconnaissance photos with him to persuade King Fahd to allow American planes and troops into Saudi territory. When Cheney and Powell met the King, Bandar took the photos with jets on the runway and said they were Iraqi jets in Yemen ready to pounce on Saudi Arabia [Cheney was told to bring generic photos with jets parked at an airport]. This spooked Fahd, who remembered that 40% of the people living in Saudi were of Yemeni origin or descent, and he promptly okayed the US troops into Saudi. Thereby starting a chain of consequences that drove Osama bin Laden around the bend. [The Yemenis are fierce fighters who drove the Egyptians out of their country in the '60s with aid from JFK and the Saudis].

Finally, Syria is a country from which King Abdullah's mother descends with the Shammar tribe living in the Syrian desert. He detests the detestable Boy Assad, but knows that he must sup with the devil to keep the Iranians from completely dominating this not-smart son of a very smart father.

Which in the final analysis, makes the Saudi King an ally with the Israelis, whose dislike of Hezbollah even exceeds King Abdullah's

Is Demography Political Destiny?

Michael Barone is the savviest political guru of overall trends with the possible exception of Kevin Phillips, who has slipped recently. Barone's political bible The Almanac of American Politics is ubiquitous in DC and if Barone were a Democratic pundit, he would be invited onto every Sunday morning talkfest bar none. In today's WSJ, Barone does some future mapping that is bad news for the Democrats.

The gist of Barone's analysis is that the southward and westward internal migration of the previous decades has been altered to migrations from the East and Left Coasts inland. The link above has the details.

Domestic inflow has been a whopping 19% in Las Vegas, 15% in the Inland Empire (California's Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, where much of the outflow from Los Angeles has gone), 13% in Orlando and Charlotte, 12% in Phoenix, 10% in Tampa, 9% in Jacksonville. Domestic inflow was over 200,000 in the Inland Empire, Phoenix, Atlanta, Las Vegas and Orlando. These are economic dynamos that are driving much of America's growth. There's much less economic polarization here than in the Coastal Megalopolises, and a higher percentage of traditional families: Natural increase (the excess of births over deaths) in the Interior Boomtowns is 6%, well above the 4% in the Coastal Megalopolises.

He goes on to say that Florida will probably have the same number of electoral votes in 2012 as New York, Arizona will have 12 to sixteen for Barone's native state of Michigan. All in the last sixty years. And besides domestic inflow, the "natural increase" of children being born is far higher in the internal heartland areas which are predominantly Republican.

Finally, a quibble. Barone puts Miami in the coastal megalopolis category, but Miami has an outflow of 2% and an inflow of 8%, making it perhaps the only coastal city to thrive over 2000-2006. Since they switched parties in the past decade, Florida and Texas are fast becoming natural Republican bases, if Barone's analysis is correct and voting patterns persist. And both will get more CDs---hence electoral votes---when the 2010 census verifies the various data bases Barone employs for his article.

Meantime, I am looking for the latest edition of Barone's Almanac of American Politics which is the single best book for understanding the rich variety of America's political base.

Eating my way through France

According to an exhaustive worldwide survey, the No. 1 spot for dining in the world is France's La Maison Troisgros in Roanne, France, which respondents to the survey said was "worth a visit" just for dinner. Long ago, I was lucky enough to get a chance to dine at the best restaurant in the entire world.

Le Troisgros is in central France inside the Lyon consular district where I was Vice Consul back in the seventies. I was lucky enough to have a deposition in Roanne to attend where a US government official was required, and the eldest brother Michel was kind enough to schedule a room for me above the restaurant in the auberge attached for out-of-town diners.

It turned out that I needed the room, as the signature dish of the house [a fantastic Norwegian salmon in a rich sauce beyond verbal description] gave me a classic crise de foie which means your entire body shuts down even though chief chef Michel Troisgros was dousing me with marc de bourgogne to cut the sauce into digestible consistency as it attacked my liver.

I was almost carried up the stairs to the rustic-style attic hotel which is mentioned in a food blog I googled. I was groggy for almost three days and had the ultimate French experience, a genuine "crise" that was payback for one of the finest dining experiences I ever had. It was the only genuine crise de foie I ever underwent, although a couple of times at Paul Bocuse's I came away groggy for a couple of hours.

I Knew George Tenet Way Back When...........

The extremely agile little fellow named Scheuer
accurately says in the Washington Post:

"It's impossible to dislike Tenet, who is smart, polite, hard-working, convivial and detail-oriented. But he's also a man who never went from cheerleader to leader."

Then Scheuer, who has wrote a book supporting Bush on Iraq in 2002 and since issued a second edition of his book with a rewritten screed AGAINST the war, accuses Tenet of moral cowardice! Talk about being called ugly by a frog!

But Tenet did have a lotta 'splainin' to do, especially because a book is coming out this week.

Did George explain that the CIA's hands were tied when the two hijackers were detected in San Diego because Jamie Gorelick and Ogress Reno at the DOJ said terrorism was a crime to be FBI turf, not a national security concern on CIA turf? [This was the over-lawyered view from the tag-team of lawyers inhabiting the White House named Clinton and Clinton.] No

Did George note that the internecine rivalry between his Agency and the FBI might have something to do with the news of two known terrorists arriving in San Diego ending up in a CIA file unseen by the FBI, who by the DOJ eff-up, was in charge of domestic terrorism? Nope, that dog-fight continues and GT doesn't mention it.

Does he even note the fib when CBS far-left stooge Pelley says the White House outted Plame even though it was Armitage in the State Dept? Nope, George goes with the flow....

Pelley is an objectionable little fart who could smell up a waste management facility, but George only responds when it comes to loyalty issues---not to issues having to do with competence or attribution of blame.

I learned about loyalty from George back in the early '80s when he attended my wedding. George had worked for my wife at the Hellenic Affairs Council and been fired by a maniac named Gene Rossides, landing in a girl's dorm at Mt. Vernon where his lovely wife Stephanie was a house-mother. They had a very young baby boy. George got a job with Senator Heinz, then worked for Sen. Leahy after Heinz's death. Then worked for the Senate Intelligence Cte, where Sen. Boron of Oklahoma picked him out of the back row to be chief of staff. George and Stephanie would come to our house occasionally and he was an avid sports fan, attending all Georgetown basketball games and backing the NY Giants fanatically. When I suggested that I supported the Redskins after long allegiance to the Packers, George went apoplectic---accusing me of high treason. He used to bounce Middle East stuff off me and I turned him on to Fouad Ajami, whom I used to hang out with when a bachelor and whose work is great.

After I moved to Chicago with a good job in foreign affairs with Amoco, I used to have lunch with him up at the Mykonos Restaurant on Capitol Hill. He would buy me lunch and give me a cigar for afterwards. After about three years of episodic lunches, George who by then was in the Clinton NSC, gave me his resume, telling me that he hated DC and the inside-the-Beltway b***shit and would move to Chicago if that was what it took to get a job with Amoco and get out of the DC septic tank. [Chicago has the largest population of ethnic Greeks in the US.]

After GT took over at the CIA, I interviewed with John McLaughlin for the job of Chief Press Officer, but an insider at the Agency got the job. To be expected. Then George fell out of touch except for Xmas cards.

George is right about the dishonorable conduct of Cheney/Perle. And he demonstrates why the working stiffs at Langley liked him so much, and why loathesome maggots like Larry Johnson don't.

Tenet's biggest lapse if true is what Scheuer accuses him of when GT was informed that Scheuer's Bin Laden unit had ObL cornered and Tenet said back that the NSC nixed the activation of the para-military units involved. Did Tenet back his own people or did he downplay the possibility? Here is Scheuer:

Since 2001, however, several key Clinton counterterrorism insiders (including NSC staffers Richard A. Clarke, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon) have reported that Tenet consistently denigrated the targeting data on bin Laden, causing the president and his team to lose confidence in the hard-won intelligence....The hard fact remains that each time we acquired actionable intelligence about bin Laden's whereabouts, I argued for preemptive action. By May 1998, after all, al-Qaeda had hit or helped to hit five U.S. targets, and bin Laden had twice declared war on America. I did not -- and do not -- care about collateral casualties in such situations, as most of the nearby civilians would be the families that bin Laden's men had brought to a war zone. But Tenet did care. "You can't kill everyone," he would say. That's an admirable humanitarian concern in the abstract, but it does nothing to protect the United States. Indeed, thousands of American families would not be mourning today had there been more ferocity and less sentimentality among the Clinton team.

When Tenet blames Rice for not activating a giant pre-emptive attack on Afghanistan in July 2001 during a period that he saw President Bush every morning and could have quietly lobbied to have emergency preventive measures taken, is simply beyond credibility. Why attack Afghanistan? Why not take immediate emergency steps here in the USA?

Which is sad, because Tenet also says that an attack on the NYC subway system was called off at the last minute in 2004 by Zawahiri. Any connection with the Presidential elections that year?

And there WAS evidence that Al Qaeda and Saddam's Iraq were in contact in numerous ways, but the artful language of Tenet and others denies documentary evidence recently come to light from translations of documents found in 2003.

And the evidence that Saddam shipped the thousands of barrels of WMD to Syria just before the war just as Saddam had flown his air force to Iran in 1991? Bashar Al-Assad presumably wasn't asked by Grandma Pelosi about that during her trip to Damascus.

The media will froth about this coming to its pre-determined conclusions as this country thrashes out its demons---demons from both sides of the ideological firewall.

Why NBA Watching can be a Chore

A good article on how the NBA has gone Hollywood is in Slatemagazine. But it's not enough to keep the viewer transfixed, and I discovered the Slate article during an interminable time-out in the Miami Heat/Chicago Bulls game this afternoon.

Personally, following the NBA for me has been over fifty years of observing athleticism trump values and discipline disappear before flashy spin moves and no-look passes and slam dunks that fabulous TV coverage can now catch for highlight replays.

I first watched the NBA back in the fifties when the Milwaukee Hawks drafted Bob Pettit who became one of the leading scorer/rebounders in the NBA almost instantaneously [he averaged over 20 a year in both categories during his splendid career]. [Trivia: the name "Hawks" is derived from "Black Hawks," whose eponymous Sauk ancestor was from the area near the Quad Cities in Illinois/Iowa where the team got its start. Thus Blackhawk is the only human whose name is appended to a pro sports franchise, and it's two franchises, the Chicago NHL and the Atlanta NBA teams.]

Then I followed the Hawks to St. Louis where I used to watch future NBA Hall of FamerLenny Wilkinsat the St. Louis U. gym practice with the his Hawks team after my own intramural games were over.

In DC, I became a fan of the old Washington Bullets, formerly the Baltimore Bullets, who changed their name because of the obvious association with Dodge City on the Potomac the nickname elicited. I used to play and put together an intermural team with some buddies at the State Dept, including a fellow who played with Bill Bradley on the Princeton Tigers team. One of our practice sessions, who walked in to shoot a few practice shots but Moses Malone! A very big large dude.

Moving to Chicago, I arrived about the time of the Bulls' reign as a legendary franchise built around MJ, the best player I've ever seen play. The only playoff game with the Bulls I watched was with tickets given to me by Ilham Aliyev, whom I was escorting around Chicago for Amoco Corp and who is now President of Azerbaijan.

Now I'm a Miami Heat fan in my dotage and I began this blog while the Heat were missing free throws at a pace worse than a high school B-team. I watched one-armed Dwyane Wade, a Marquette U. product and possible MJ successor, falter with seven turnovers. DW hit his free throws, but it looks like a sad denouement for NBA All-Stars like Shaq, Zo, Gary Payton, Jason Williams and Antoine Walker. Also Posey might be trade bait, as his play was erratic and his arrest during the playoffs a distraction. Shaq may remain, but will he and Dwyane and Jason and Kapono and Haslem, who also played poorly, be enough to build a team around? And is Haslem up to the task? Is Jason, who also committed multiple turnovers, still a prime time player?

Finally, will Pat Riley, who was out for part of the season along with almost every Heat player, up for years of rebuilding?

Also, the NBA game style is becoming very boring. NBA players do not practice free throws, nor do they consider the backboard part of scoring opportunities. Offensive rebounds, including hanging around to see if the second free throw makes it, are becoming too onerous for the average NBA player. No blocking out or other offense/defense basics appear to be important. Bounce passes have disappeared, palming the ball and often carrying the ball are okay, the officiating sucks and sometimes looks like point-shaving to the cynical. A dozen times, Ben Wallace, notorious for not taking flops, fell backward any time Shaq got near him and Shaq got the foul call from the refs, who might have been told to keep the larger media market of Chicago in the mix.

Also, the NBA markets itself as a glamorous celebrity magnet, with frequent cutaways to Jack Nicholson on the sidelines for Lakers games [No Knicks games are broadcast nationally, so Spike Jones is not seen so often]. The fact that Kobe Bryant was accused of rape and mysteriously the case went away, with only a loss of a couple of endorsements, but then came back stronger than ever, with fellow-non-championship ringholder Charles Barkley cheerleading him as "the best basketball player in the world," which autistic remark being repeated by the ESPN chorus as frequently as possible.

Question: if Kobe is the best B-ball player, why don't the Lakers have any rings since he signed on?

Now that the Heat are out, the Suns are my next bet. Nash is a TEAM PLAYER and an MVP player and Barbosa and Co. are exciting to watch. I'll take either one over "the best basketball player in the world" every day of the week.

In Memoriam: David Halberstam

Although I never met Halberstam himself, I had a strange coincidence concerning him when I stayed with a UN diplomat friend's apartment on Turtle Bay on the East Side back in 1979 while reading David H's book The Powers That Be, a bestseller at the time concerning how much the mass media had become influential in politics. It turns out that my UN diplomat buddy lived in the house owned by Blair Clark, whom I had met while I was on Gene McCarthy's national staff in his 1968 campaign and Clark himself was the national campaign manager. I talked with him during the famous Chicago Convention. Blair vaguely recalled me and we had lunch on the back veranda of his apartment, which overlooked a common backyard garden area where Katherine Hepburn, whose apartment was directly across the garden from Blair's, could be seen puttering from time to time.

As we reminisced about the '68 Campaign, I mentioned The Powers That Be to Clark, whose name appeared many times in the book because of his tenure as head of CBS News. I asked about the quotes Halberstam attributed to Blair in the book. Clark chuckled and said that when Halberstam conducted the interviews, Clark noticed that he was not taking notes and that he did not have a tape recorder either. Clark asked Halberstam how he remembered everything and DH responded that he had a perfect memory for conversations and never took notes nor made recordings.

Then I asked Clark again about the half-dozen quotes and their accuracy and he replied: "Every one of them was completely wrong, inaccurate, or off-base." or words to that effect. We switched to another topic of conversation and that was that.....

[Clark was a friend to the great and near-great, starting as JFK's roommate at Choate, I believe, and before that Robert Lowell's friend at St. Mark's School. I asked him where the family fortune came from, and I recall he said "buttons." Clark lived across the street from Kurt Vonnegut Jr., whom my wife once spotted going through the rubbish bin in front of his doorstep looking for writing materials, perhaps. Much later in Sag Harbor one summer, I buttonholed KV and we had a hilarious conversation fueled by gin on the rocks about his research techniques and other matters, including his novels. Quite a neighborhood BC lived in.]

Moyers: The Ass That Keeps on Braying

Bill Moyers is the biggest hypocrite in PBS's stable of leftardo spavined nags. [link H/T: Del Dolmonte@Newsbusters] This throwback to the sixties, like a herpes infection, re-emerges just often enough to remind you of how screwed up you and he were back then. Only he hasn't changed!

"Bill Moyers, who regularly complains about the coziness between industry and politicians and the corporate influence on the media, attended a party for one of his interviewees which a liberal Senator also attended.

Newspaper stories on Tuesday, about the appearance in a Vermont courtroom on Monday by Bill Moyers after his arrest for drunk driving, revealed that when arrested he had just left a birthday party for television producer and liberal activist Norman Lear which was also attended by Vermont’s liberal Democratic Senator, Patrick Leahy. (Moyers pled guilty to the lesser charge of "negligent driving.")

On July 5, 2002, Lear appeared on PBS’s Now with Bill Moyers and Moyers proposed to Lear: "Did your heart leap with joy last week when the federal court in California said that the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional because that phrase 'one nation, Under God' violates the separation of church and state?"

Moyers and PBS have an unalloyed allegiance to Team Blue, and the evidence just piles higher and higher. Why do my taxes go to support programming for policies and viewpoints I despise and detest?

New Yorker on French Elections

The New Yorker under David Remnick is as far left and as afflicted with Bush Derangement Syndrome as a mainstream publication pretending to be "objective" can possibly be. And it comes as little surprise that European TNY mavenette Jane Kramer pushes some of the usual leftish tropes that make her coverage of the elections tomorrow in France an exercise in nose-in-the-air ninnyhood.

But Jane is too clever to avoid being reality-based and thus gets in numerous digs on the dysfunctionality of France, which even the New Yorker can hardly overlook:

France is in trouble. Everyone agrees on that. There is so much contempt for the country’s old political class that the three main candidates, for all their differences, speak to the same malaise......And they are all, in their own way, running on promises to fix the system in place before it crashes. Their most obvious challenge is economic. The country has stalled. Its growth is minimal. Its protectionist policies are disastrously out of touch with the global reality, let alone with the realities of the European Union, which it helped to found and enlarge (and then to undermine, in 2005, when it voted against an E.U. constitution). Its business, beyond the realm of luxury labels and designer clothes that the rich will always pay for, is not competitive. Its fear of the market is endemic, although, to be fair, that fear involves a reluctance to import the kind of social attrition it sees in America now. Attrition, of course, takes many forms, and the French form can be just as punishing: an unemployment rate of more than eight per cent, and as much as forty per cent in the big housing projects and immigrant neighborhoods where most of the country’s five or six million Muslims, the majority of them second- and third-generation French citizens, live.

My theory is that only the Renseignements Generaux really have a good fix on the number, which in Lyon in the seventies was 500,000 just for that prefecture.

Surprisingly, Kramer appears in the article to damn Segolene Royal with faint praise [Kramer describes how Royal refused an interview and this may be a bit of the Pelosi/Harman dynamic in play]. Le Pen is not even set up as a straw man to be knocked down. He simply is ignored, a symptom of leftist dysfunction The New Yorker shares with France. But Kramer is strangely very positive in her tone and language concerning Centrist Bayrou, who she says:

...thinks that the country has been lost in a fantastical dream of French power and French status and would feel much better about itself, and possibly even feel more “French,” if it started looking for a reasonable path to prosperity instead.

Bayrou has a plan to assemble a grand rassemblement of Left and Right in a broad coalition, but in his heart appear, Kramer hints, that everything in France is too politically brokered and subject to cabals by unelected elites to achieve a French New Deal. Kramer then says that Bayrou is not capable of doing any real reform. In a throw-away line, she says:

Sarkozy has been the only candidate willing to admit that the country will have to accept layoffs in the private sector, and reduce a massive public sector that eats up nearly forty-five per cent of the national budget.

And gets to her partly-hidden agenda, which is that Sarkozy may be the only way out of the impasse dead-end that France appears to be stuck in.

Will it be "Waiting for Godot" or "Huit Clos?"[No Exit]

If Godot ever arrives, he may look like Sarkozy.

Treason Now and Then

The Party of Rum, Romanism and Rebellion had a whole incarnation as a nest of poisonous snakes called Copperheads [h/t: James Taranto] Here is a bit of history now and then starring respectively Senate Majority Reid and the Party Platform of the Dhimmicrat Party circa 1864 during our nation's bitterest conflict.

* "I believe . . . that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week."--Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, April 19, 2007

* "Resolved, that this convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretence of military necessity, or war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the States or other peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace may be restored on the basis of the federal Union of the States."--1864 Democratic platform

This corresponds to the ancient philosophical adage:

"Winners never quit, quitters never win."

The Dhimmicrats are obviously not the party of winners. Else there would be no USA today, would there?

Feminishness

Although she fails to spotlight hypertrophic abominations of the disease of Feminishness such as Nancy Grace and Wendy Murphy on the Duke "Ghost Rape" Scandal, Dr. Sanity has an excellent commentary on observations Mark Steyn and John Derbyshire make on "feminism" has become "feminishness."

Steyn's comments on the Montreal mass-murder of female students a few years ago by an Arab male while Canadian "males" and their "professor" meekly watched is a classic on The Great White North, though it must be noted that the weaklings may have been French-Canadians and thus suffered a double-bind on cowardice. Here is Dr. Sanity:

tend to agree with John Derbyshire about the origins of this passivity, which is a direct result of the overhyped, feminist agenda pervasive in today's culture. This agenda is the foundation of the insidious and disastrous "political correctness" that now threatens all of society and our most valued freedoms. Feminism has become a tool of those who wish to further the Marxist/Socialist agenda. Where once it promoted equal rights for women, it now exists solely to maintain and nourish women's victimhood status.

Let me be perfectly clear. I am not saying that there were not injustices that needed to be addressed with regard to equal opportunity for women in this country. There were, and to a minor extent there still are some issues that need to be addressed and corrected. But the war was won some years ago; and what remains today is a constant whine emanating from the intellectual quagmire of ongoing feminist victim-mongering. This new culture of female victimhood has been created for the sole purpose promoting and maintaining the illusion that women are simultaneously victims diabolical white male oppression, and yet somehow vastly superior to it.

Needless to say, this hateful insanity has taken its toll on the male of the species as well as the female.

In fact, the feminishness of it all is slowly but surely bringing America-- and all Western democracies-- to their knees under the burden of its utopian tyranny; and it is preparing them further for submission to the fanatical bullies of the world.

Additionally, it has deeply poisoned male/female relationships at almost every level; since the PC mentality thrives on identifying eveyone as either "the oppressors" or "the oppressed", based entirely on identity (i.e., gender or race); and not on actual behavior. Hurting someone's feelings has become the greatest sin anyone in society can commit; and the pursuit of moral superiority through victimhood the greatest virtue.

Meanwhile, our new feminist bullies/overlords make common cause with all the other "oppressed" bullies of the world to insure peace, sisterhood and submission.

Indeed, today's feminists have much to answer for in terms of the evil they have been enabling and appeasing; but they are generally too busy swooning and whining to be able to engage in any serious discussion of the irrationality of promoting eternal victimhood.

As Derbyshire suggests, we are a culture out of balance. Far too much yin and definitely not enough yang.

Alec Baldwin: What a Mensch!

I don't usually blog on Hollyweirdo eccentricities except politically; last night I brain-lapsed common-sense and judgment while watching 30 Rock and told my wife Alec Baldwin was so hilariously self-demeaning in his corporate character that he can't be such a bad guy in real life.

How wrong could I be? Read the comment/excerpt from TMZ.com about this prince of a fellow:

Heres a little alec baldwin story for you all - my parents used to live in the same luxury bldg in NYC as he did when he was w Kim. One day Im in the lobby w my 2 young daughters trying desperatley to get a cab. Finally the doorman sees one and signals to us to come out. All of a sudden rite past me strides Mr. Baldwin and he gets rite into the cab, knowing full well this dad w a 4 and 6 yr old are waiting. Another taxi happened to pull up rite afterwards or I would have gone off on him. PS - the doorman looked at me and shrugged like "hey what can you do, thats who he is."

Hook onto the link for a few thousand comments on this jerk and his parental skills.

Where are all the Grown-Ups?

Evil exists and all the mealy-mouthed gibberish in the world about the failures of "safety-nets" can't eradicate the problem of evil. Not even the MSM.

Now a Mirror article in the UK tells something the risk-averse ethics-hobbled US media will avoid---young Cho was diagnosed as autistic soon after he arrived as an eight-year old in the US.

THE grandfather of Cho Seung-Hui said yesterday: "Son of a bitch. It serves him right he died with his victims." Kim Hyang-Sik, 82, said he had a doom-laden dream of Cho's parents the night of his murderous rampage - and woke to hear the news of the massacre and his grandson's death. He watched Cho's sick video of himself holding a gun to his head.

His sister Kim Yang-Sun, 85, who also saw it, told the Mirror that afterwards her brother was so distraught he had "gone away for a few days to calm himself down and avoid more questions". She too repeatedly referred to the killer as "son of a bitch" or "a***hole" and said his mother Kim Hyang-Yim had problems with him from infancy.

Yang-Sun revealed the eight-year-old was diagnosed as autistic soon after his family emigrated to the US. She said: "He was very quiet and only followed his mother and father around and when others called his name he just answered yes or no but never showed any feelings or motions. "We started to worry that he was autistic - that was the big concern of his mother. He was even a loner as a child. "Soon after they got to America his mother was so worried about his inability to talk she took him to hospital and he was diagnosed as autistic."

It's probably clear that the degenerate MSM don't want to indict "autistic children" by tarring them with this example. Read the whole article for an exercise in Korean common sense, scraping enough money to send their children to the US, only to have the grandkid fall into the cracks. The kid was a genius-IQ autism victim, who should have been treated, but who functioned as normal except for social autism. His sister went to Princeton---demonstrating the level of intelligence he might have shared.

Peggy Noonan runs down the list of ridiculous responses from "the helping professions" and NBC News, which called Cho's tape a "multi-media manifesto," a phrase for which nasal Brian W. should be dragged out and water-boarded for. Here is Peggy's article, which should be given a Pulitzer for telling the truth.

I felt people were stricken because they weren't stricken. When Columbine happened, it was weird and terrible, and now there have been some incidents since, and now it's not weird anymore. And that is what's so terrible. It's the difference between "That doesn't happen!" and "That happens."

Actually I thought of Thoreau. He said he didn't have to read newspapers because if you're familiar with a principle you don't have to be familiar with its numerous applications. If you know lightning hits trees, you don't have to know every time a tree is struck by lightning.

In terms of school shootings, we are now familiar with the principle.

Dennis Miller the other night said something compassionate and sensible on TV. Invited to criticize some famous person's stupid response to a past tragedy, he said he sort of applied a 48 hour grace period after a tragedy and didn't hold anyone to the things they'd said. People get rattled and say things that are extreme.

But more than 48 hours have passed. So: some impressions.

There seems to me a sort of broad national diminution of common sense in our country that we don't notice in the day-to-day but that become obvious after a story like this. Common sense says a person like Cho Seung-hui, who was obviously dangerous and unstable, should have been separated from the college population. Common sense says someone should have stepped in like an adult, like a person in authority, and taken him away. It is only common sense that if a person like Cho leaves a self-aggrandizing, self-celebrating, self-pitying video diary of himself to be played by the mass media, the mass media should not play it and not publicize it, not make it famous. Common sense says that won't help.

And all those big cops, scores of them, hundreds, with the latest, heaviest, most sophisticated gear, all the weapons and helmets and safety vests and belts. It looked like the brute force of the state coming up against uncontrollable human will.

But it also looked muscle bound. And the schools themselves more and more look muscle bound, weighed down with laws and legal assumptions and strange prohibitions.

The school officials I saw, especially the head of the campus psychological services, seemed to me endearing losers. But endearing is too strong. I mean "not obviously and vividly offensive." The school officials who gave all the highly competent, almost smooth and practiced news conferences seemed to me like white, bearded people who were educated in softness. Cho was "troubled"; he clearly had "issues"; it would have been good if someone had "reached out"; it's too bad America doesn't have better "support services." They don't use direct, clear words, because if they're blunt, they're implicated.

The literally white-bearded academic who was head of the campus counseling center was on Paula Zahn Wednesday night suggesting the utter incompetence of officials to stop a man who had stalked two women, set a fire in his room, written morbid and violent plays and poems, been expelled from one class, and been declared by a judge to be "mentally ill" was due to the lack of a government "safety net." In a news conference, he decried inadequate "funding for mental health services in the United States." Way to take responsibility. Way to show the kids how to dodge.

The anxiety of our politicians that there may be an issue that goes unexploited was almost--almost--comic. They mean to seem sensitive, and yet wind up only stroking their supporters. I believe Rep. Jim Moran was first out of the gate with the charge that what Cho did was President Bush's fault. I believe Sen. Barack Obama was second, equating the literal killing of humans with verbal coarseness. Wednesday there was Sen. Barbara Boxer equating the violence of the shootings with the "global warming challenge" and "today's Supreme Court decision" upholding a ban on partial-birth abortion.

One watches all of this and wonders: Where are the grown-ups?

I wondered about the emptiness of the phrases used by the media and by political figures, and how pro forma and lifeless and cold they are. The formalized language of loss hasn't kept up with the number of tragedies. "A nation mourns." "Our prayers are with you." The latter is both self-complimenting and of dubious believability. Did you really pray? Or is it just a phrase?

And this as opposed to the honest things normal people say: "Oh no." "I am so sorry." "I'm sad." "It's horrible."

With all the therapy in our great therapized nation, with all our devotion to emotions and feelings, one senses we are becoming a colder culture, and a colder country. We purport to be compassionate--we must respect Mr. Cho's privacy rights and personal autonomy--but of course it is cold not to have protected others from him. It is cold not to have protected him from himself.

The last testament Cho sent to NBC seemed more clear evidence of mental illness--posing with his pistols, big tough gangsta gonna take you out. What is it evidence of when NBC News, a great pillar of the mainstream media, runs the videos and pictures on the nightly news? Brian Williams introduced the Cho collection as "what can only be described as a multi-media manifesto." But it can be described in other ways. "The self-serving meanderings of a crazy, self-indulgent narcissist" is one. But if you called it that, you couldn't lead with it. You couldn't rationalize the decision.

Such pictures are inspiring to the unstable. The minute you saw them, you probably thought what I did: We'll be seeing more of that.

The most common-sensical thing I heard said came Thursday morning, in a hospital interview with a student who'd been shot and was recovering. Garrett Evans said of the man who'd shot him, "An evil spirit was going through that boy, I could feel it." It was one of the few things I heard the past few days that sounded completely true. Whatever else Cho was, he was also a walking infestation of evil. Too bad nobody stopped him. Too bad nobody moved.

Peggy is a national cultural gem. She harks back to the values of "The Greatest Generation" that have disappeared from our national discourse. Too bad the specimens of generational decline in the MSM like Brian Williams and Steve Capus at NBC are spineless degenerates [ditto Moran, Obama, Boxer] closer to the level of the VT shooter than to Noonan.

Osama Bin Laden: Descended from Frankish Crusaders?

I'm finally getting into Lawrence Wright's magnificent The Looming Tower and have an interesting theory to
put forward based on a strange travel experience. I was driving my BMW Bavaria from London to Beirut back in 1974 when at the Syrian border, two officials asked if I could give them a ride to Latakia, a hundred miles down the coastal road. Although the border station whispered to me in French that the gentlemen were secret police, I concurred and we drove along the most spectacular coastal scenery outside the Amalfi Coast or Big Sur that I have personally driven through. As we entered Latakia, I noticed that most of the male inhabitants on the street were tall, blonde, and blue-eyed. The secret police escort in my car explained they were Alawites descended from the original Crusaders.

Lawrence Wright mentions that Osama's mother, Alia Ghanem, was an Alawite from Latakia, and her cousin whom he married was extremely tall. Could it be that the mysterious Alawites contain a large component of Crusader genetic material, including perhaps Masahiyiin who didn't want to return to Europe after living for decades in the Levantine paradise north of Latakia and refusing to convert to the Sunni Muslims, may have become Alawi or Nusayri as the secret police told me way back in the mid-seventies? Given the climate and beauty of the Syrian coast, perhaps Crusaders converted, or over the centuries, intermingled with the Alawite majority on that coast.

The only reference a quick googling came up with was "In 1097, Crusaders initially attacked [the Alawites], but later allied with them against the Ismailis." Since the Alawites are secretive and do not openly intermarry with outsiders, this would be counter-intuitive to mainstream Orientalist analysis, but the practice of taqiyya or dissimulation might cover the fact that the very western-looking inhabitants of Latakia have genetic sources from Frankish warriors.

The northern European genes from his mother may explain why ObL is of above-normal height, since his father was rather diminuitive. As the Alawites are thought to believe in reincarnation, perhaps deep inside somewhere ObL believes he has some connection to the original assault on the Levant by armed Christian warriors.

Anyway, Lawrence Wright's book is well worth the price of admission and is even better than Ghost Wars and The Assassin's Gate, two books I am in the middle of reading at the moment.

French Elections this Sunday

The Economist calls the election in the race for France's presidency the most significant in the last fifty years. After decades of drift and a stagnant economy, the French are faced with stark choices. Read the link above for an overall view and note that the most recent follow-up has more or less personal attacks on Sarkozy by Segolene Royal, who stresses maternal values, and the obnoxious Le Pen, who notes Sarkozy's "immigrant" [for Le Pen, read part-Jewish] background. So Nanny-State Royal and "Man of the Land" Le Pen bash Sarkozy, who stresses work and traditional values. The scariest bit comes from France's toned-down version of Stasi:

According to a leaked report from the Renseignements Généraux, the domestic intelligence service, the existence of which it later denied, Mr Le Pen could again make it into the second round, against Mr Sarkozy.

And what if Royal and Le Pen reach the final duo? Another Chirac, although this time actually wearing skirts instead of hiding behind them?

PBS Revisionist Disinformation Continues Tonight

Last night the first episode had its debut on PBS with a special based on a book I'm currently reading called "The Looming Tower" by Lawrence Wright. It went back to the famous book Arabic text "Milestones" written by Sayyid Qutb whom Nasser hanged in 1966.

At the time Osama bin Laden was an undergrad at King Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah under Sayyid Qutb's charismatic brother Mohammed Qutb, I was going there while studying Arabic as a Second Language back in 1975. Suffice it to say that the atmosphere I personally felt on the campus was virulently anti-Western. ObL picked up his radical bent during his studies under the KAAU professor Qutb, according to the tendentiously pro-terrorist PBS special last night "America at the Crossroads."

Some of the "journalism" displayed last night on the PBS agit-prop resembles the Pro-Hezbollah cant that mouth-breathing Brit journalists exhaled in unison during the Lebanon border war last summer. Robert Fisk is chief among the terror apologists, but another such type surfaced on PBS last night.

The knuckle-walker in question is Gwynne Roberts, a mouthpiece for ObL who was on PBS last night singing AQ's praises, in case anyone stained their eyeballs watching Roger MacNeil, a pint-sized Lord Haw Haw whose camera angles make him look tall [I met him when I worked for PBS on a Middle East project and he's five-four max], and a failed bureaucrat named Scheuer who was chief of the Osama bin Laden task force in the CIA for eight years with results we all know.

In manner, atmosphere, and intonation both MacNeil and Scheuer echo shill Gwynnie-boy in vying to be ObL's tea-boys. The first episode of this controversial [more on that in another post] series hums if not sings the praises of Islamic terrorism and impugns the US every possible chance.

Hobbit-like Scheuer actually supported the Iraq invasion and the AQ/Saddam connection before the war, then issued a new self-negating fatwa a few months later giving a differentversion of where he stood when the tide in Iraq began to turn in the other direction. Here is an excerpt from the Weekly Standard:

Michael Scheuer, the one-time head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, also used to be certain that Iraq and al Qaeda were working together. Scheuer's first book on al Qaeda, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, which was published in 2002, went into elaborate detail about the support the Iraqi regime was providing to al Qaeda. Among the areas of concern was Iraq's ongoing support for al Qaeda's chemical weapons development projects in the Sudan.

Remember Churchill's line about not taking courage to rat? More on the tricky lil Hobbit:

n 2004, after fashioning a career as a critic of the Bush administration, Scheuer did an about face. He suddenly claimed that there was no evidence of a relationship. He even decided to re-write history--literally. He revised "Through Our Enemies' Eyes" to be consistent with his newly formed opinion by claiming he was simply mistaken. The bottom line is that members of the CIA, including the Agency's director, certainly believed in 2002 that there was a relationship between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda.

Canadian leftists like MacNeil recruit US allies like the Hobbit to furnish a veneer of credibility, and tonight's episode on Iraq is sure to give the American people more revisionist disinformation on PBS, compliments of you and me and everyone who pays taxes for CPB.

Brit NUJ Condemns Israel---Palestinians Kill BBC Journalist

Stranger than fiction describes a session by third-rate ink-stained hacks who are in a journalist's union have voted to "boycott" Israeli goods and services. The same journalists killed a measure to condemn Israel for its "pre-planned attack on Lebanon last summer."

Hmmm..... I have a vague memory of several Israeli soldiers being killed and two kidnapped in a hostage-grabbing maneuver, like the one recently in which the Royal Navy displayed that Britannia no longer rules the waves.

The state of British whores and pimps with accreditation is beneath contempt. These must be the slaves that the song refers to in the next line of Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves.

And if the reports are true, journalism lost another hack over the weekend, according to an Al-Qaeda affiliate. One of the BBC sycophants for terrorism was murdered in Gaza, and I will love to see the coverage of that in the Brit terror-loving media. But one sane voice does speak out against idiocy among the slave corps of Janissery journalists in perfidious Albion.

It will be all the Jews' fault, and Israel will be the main culprit. The sweet victim Palestinians kill a Beebie cry-baby, then notch one more encomium from the Beeb whose hackocracy grabs its ankles for the AQ terror-bombers.

Trial for a President of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry f

Here is another trial that will not be reported in the national media. Can you imagine if this person were a parish priest instead of President of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry? The Lost Angels Times would fall all over itself.

Dr. William Ayres is an esteemed child psychiatrist who was president for two years of the AACAP. His trial for "14 felony counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14—---adolescent boys to be more specific. According to prosecutor Melissa McKowan, 21 men accused Ayres of molesting them when they were children under his care, but because of the state’s ten-year statute of limitations, only three cases could be prosecuted" has been under the radar of the national media. Wonder why.

One of those California judges ruling from the bench near the seat of the Ninth Circus
Court is scratching her head:

Margaret Kemp, a San Mateo County judge who referred troubled youth to Ayres between 1978 until 2004, said, "I never had reason to question him... When we had kids who were charged with sex offenses, we would send them to him for evaluation." Kemp referenced the irony of her words about Ayres, noting, "Every time we saw someone charged with child molestation, family and friends would stand up in court—even after the person had pleaded guilty—and say there had to be a mistake, he wouldn’t do such a thing."

Kemp added, "I hear echoes of that in what I’m saying to you. Oftentimes, child molesters, particularly middle-class, educated people, are completely unsuspected by people who live with them or work with them.

I watched To Catch a Predator last night and saw a Jewish rabbi irate in being caught by Chris Hansen. The Rabbi was sentenced especially harshly to eight years in jail because the judge caught him lying under oath during his trial. Wonder why that rabbi wasn't in the Washington Post above the fold? If it were a priest, that's where the hateful MSM would have put the case.

The so-called "helping professions" all have bad apples and these rotten specimens should be sentenced. But when the vast majority of Americans fall into a victim category where for some reason or another they are exempt from full media scrutiny [Jews, Muslims, Blacks, Asians and other minorities, women and gender-confused individuals], then the only non-victims left are white Christian evangelicals and Catholics, for all practical purposes. This is an unannounced media agenda that the under-the-radar trial of Dr. Ayres, a member of the "helping professions," who betrayed the trust of the community. Dr. Ayres was in some sort of pedophile heaven, getting confused kids sent to him for treatment. One might speculate that Dr. Ayres betrayed his trust even more than bad priests---since the troubled kids sent to him were subjected to his tender ministrations far more than the authorities suspected.

The link above has other monstrosities taking place across the country, including the fairy tail weddings at DisneyWorld/Orlando later this month for same-sex partners. Or the "soulfarce" buses full of gays and trannies going to Christian colleges ala freedom riders to preach how religion persecutes young people.

BBC, PBS and demassification

TCS has a good piece by Ed Driscoll, Jr. giving the details of how the machinery of Marxist malevolence operates in the UK media. "Demassification" means de-centralization, in Alvin Toffler Future Shock-Speak. Or devolution.

It appears that Bernie Goldberg isn't the only former liberal TV journalist who has seen through the ultra-left Marxian multiculti gibberish of the exempt-Pravda-on-the-Hudson wannabes. A British journalist with gumption and spine, two elements lacking among the "sports of nature" pontificating at the Brit state-subsidized Ministry of Truth called the BBC, named Robin Aitken is now subject to the same sort of campaign of derision, disdain, and personal hatred as Bernie Goldberg underwent stateside once his book Bias which depants and spanks heartily the MSM, became a New York Times best-seller. Aitken is now in hedgehog mode, but alleges that he saw a poster in a key BBC newsroom comparing Bush to Hitler and Driscoll gives this disturbing reason why:

Aitken believes that Bush's strong religious faith is one reason. "His overt Christianity is something that BBC by and large, finds intolerable in politicians. Certainly no British politicians would open themselves up to the accusation that they were religious. Tony Blair has felt the backlash from the BBC. The BBC hates any hint at all that politicians have some sort of religious hinterland. It despises that as a sort of superstition."

By that comparative index, Stalin would be better than Hitler because he was more atheistic?

Aitken has a good take on the Middle East:

"My view is that the Palestinians and the Palestinian leadership is the architect of its own misfortune in many ways. Whereas, what comes across from the BBC's presentation of events in Palestine and the Middle East generally, is that in some ways, the Palestinians are a put-upon victim minority, and it's the beastly Israelis who are doing the dirty to them.

"And you know, that is not a fair presentation of the position. Because the Israelis are militarily strong and successful, and the Palestinians aren't, I think the BBC allows that too much to play at its judgment, so that what comes across is too much sympathy, if you will, for the Palestinians, too little appreciation of the rights of Israel, and also too little recognition of the fact that Israel is a functioning democracy in a way that Palestine isn't, and nor is any Arab-dominated Middle Eastern state, and not enough credit is given for that in my view."

Similarly, another BBC bias is obvious from their tone of Iraq War coverage....."I think it took a clear editorial view, from the very first, that the Iraq War was mad, bad, and dangerous," and thus filtered that opinion to its millions of listeners, all the while, feigning objectivity.

As I noted in a recent blog the American counterparts to the BBC, CPB and PBS, share in the same biased attitude that Muslim terrorism doesn't exist, the Palestinians are persecuted, Iraq was a bad idea executed badly and the surge can't work.

This feigning objectivity jives very well with the newest instructions that the nomenklatura organs in the USA have distributed to their apparatchiki to disseminate arguments for the deconstruction of the Electoral College. Superannuated agitpreppie Hendrik Hertzberg, whose New Yorker column contains constant lapses of fact-checking, spelling, and grammar, is beginning to tout. As one of David Remnick's tea-boys, Hertzberg is among the West Side illuminati who with bad spelling ["Saudia Arabia" is a recent solipsism by Ricky-boy] and atrocious statistics [Bush at 29% approval is his constant mantra] continues to promote disinformation to advance an unconstitutional ultra-left project. Look for PBS with Jim Lehrer, a drawling low-key Goebbels for the left, to tout the electoral college trial balloon before the weekend.

Others like Dennis Kucinich are beneath five-feet tall and contempt as they insist that "Fairness" means that right-thinking radio hosts cannot have bigger audiences than sinister types---the absurdly-named "Fairness Doctrine" means "free speech for people who think like us." This means Air America might have another lease on life, despite being ignored by actual listeners. And Rush Limbaugh obviously violates no-fault-on-the-left dogma by reaching roughly 20 million listeners every day.

Suddenly the Kossacks and Smokin'BiyotchFeverSwamp are alleging a conspiracy between Limbaugh and Vice President Cheney to promote dissing Pelosi's Middle East trip. As though it were not ridiculous on the face of it! Pelosi and Holocaust-survivor Lantos are now panting to go to Teheran to pluck at the hem of the robe of the world's most rabid anti-Semite. All in the interests of "dialogue." You'd think Neville Chamberlain's experience at Munich might have taught the world the final lesson on dialogue with a madman.

If she is Munich/Tehran bound, Ms. Pelosi better get another Botox workover---although her resemblance to Skeletor in that shawl was scary enough.