Fred Thompson Smacks Down UN Denial of Right to Self-defense.

The Volokh Conspiracy lays bare the attacks on Fred Thompson for daring to assert American sovereignty over its own legal system concerning gun ownership and the right to defend oneself when attacked by others.

One-World enemies of the US Constitution such as Kevin Drum defend the UN and insult Thompson for asserting American sovereignty. Drum quotes a paid shill for the UN named Mark Goldberg approvingly. Here's TVC's nutshell:

It's rather telling that the UN's American defenders fail to directly address an indisputable fact: U.N. Human Rights Council's subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights has endorsed a report denying the existence of a human right of self-defense, and the subcommission, pursuant to the report, has declared that all national governments are required by international human rights law to implement various gun control provisions--provisions which, by the UN's standards, make even the gun control laws of New York City and Washington, DC, into violations of international law because they are insufficiently stringent. (See page 14 of the draft BYU article.)

Forget about states like Florida asserting their jurisdiction over individual rights. Nutjob libtards like Drum want the US itself deprived of jurisdiction over its own legal system.

And the UN would be the kindly overseer of American law and order!!!

Shi'ite Bahrain Fears Iran is Building Nukes

Bahrain's Crown Prince has gone public in his belief that Iran is working for the bomb. This is particularly apropos because Bahrain is over 60% Shi'ite and is ruled by a Sunni family related to the Saudi Royal Family.

Bahrain has always been in Iran's crosshairs as a target of opportunity, even in the Shah's reign, and one can only surmise that Bahrain's ruler-to-be is voicing the sentiments of every Arab country bordering the Arabian/Persian Gulf.

Including Iraq.

Randi Rhodes Sock-Puppet KO & Arianna Caught Lyin' Again!

Keith Olberboy has to watch as O'Reilly on Wednesday almost hit 3 million viewers while his unwatched loony-tune silliness languished in the shadows. He's hemorrhaging viewers due to his non-existent ethics and questionable fact-checking. Not to mention his brilliantined stick-insect charm. ["brilliantined stick-insect" is a reference to John Cleese's portrayal of a know-it-all inept moron in Fawlty Towers---Cleese's character's resemblance to KOlberboy is eerie.]

Of course, KO & his makeover sidekick Arianna [anyone remember her wandering around in front of Schwartenegger looking for a mike a few years back when she was running for something?] was caught lying multiple times about a Rudy Giuliani quote---no surprise there, as lies are Keith's staple fare. Arianna just helps feed the beast. Check the link for the latest slime from MSNBC.

Immigration/Border Control the Key to Republican Victory

RINOs everywhere should behold the fate of Sen. John McCain. The few sensible Democrats on this issue are telling the Party symbolized by a jackass that one of their recent polls demonstrated that a:

poll finding this week that shook Democrats came in a survey conducted by Democracy Corps, a consortium organized by party consultants Stan Greenberg, Al Quinlan and James Carville. It asked voters to pick two from a list of seven problems that explained "why the country is going in the wrong direction."

The survey found that among independent voters, 40 percent -- by far the largest group -- picked this option: "Our borders have been left unprotected and illegal immigration is growing."

By contrast, a lack of action on health care was named by only 24 percent of independents as a core problem, and Iraq by 23 percent.

So Huckabee and McCain and Giuliani should get out of the way or start preaching old-fashioned law and national security.

Let the Democrats commit what certifiable weenie E.J. Dionne called "License to be killed" by defending the indefensible lack of border protection and immigration control.

Read the links above to see how E.J. defends the "Dream Act" to understand that there's no way the Democrats are ever going to get it.

And sadly, the RINO stampede leftward may squander ITS ONLY opportunity to win the White House next year, unless a stalwart like Thompson is nominated.

Which ain't gonna happen, as it appears at the moment.

Even Harvard Finds Media Bias to Left

Harvard has come out with a study showing that the MSM has a massive bias toward the Democratic candidates in the '08 election race. Don't expect to see this on your evening news!
This bias is a badly-kept secret, but not from not the MSM's lack of trying to hide this perpetual perennial of the political landscape. Even media-magnets like Giuliani have to fight for oxygen in the leftist MSM waterboarding of conservatives.

A couple of years ago, the UCLA/U of Missouri journalism schools' conclusions per the media were that the MSM, with the sole exception of FoxNews, is at at a minimum sixty on the ADA scale, including the Wall Street Journal and Drudgereport, which one would expect to be at fifty or below. FoxNews is right on the fifty-yard line, proving it is fair and balanced, and the rest of the media tilts left all the way to CBS News, surprise, and the New York Times, around seventy-something! The pdf is somewhere in my data-base, and it makes for interesting reading. The results are well-nigh irrefutable---as the two institutions are among the top half-dozen journalism schools in the country and the study covers decades.

And of course, the phenomenon of Ross Perot levitating into a contender in '92 after inane and inappropriate remarks that would have sunk any other third-party candidate remains a stain on the MSM, which to this day has never investigated itself over the travesty of the Perot candidacy.

Could that be because other journalism schools mimic the Columbia SoJ whose students CHEATED on an OPEN-BOOK ETHICS exam last year and were unaccountably not held accountable?

Where is accountability in the MSM?

Hillary 's "Grim Polka," Obama "Born to be Mild"

Peggy Noonan elegantly dissects the sad collection of Democrats at the most recent debate:

The story isn't that the Democrats finally took on Hillary Clinton. Nor is it that they were gentlemanly to the point of gingerly and tentative. There was an air of "Please, somebody kill her for me so I can jump in and show high minded compassion at her plight!"

Barack Obama, with his elegance and verbal fluency really did seem like that great and famous political figure from his home state of Illinois--Adlai Stevenson, who was not at all hungry, not at all mean, and operated at a step removed from the grubby game. Mr. Obama is like someone who would write in his diaries, "I shall point out Estes Kefauver's manifold inconsistencies, then to luncheon with Arthur and Marietta."

The odd thing is it's easier to be a killer when you know exactly what you stand for, when you have a real philosophy. The philosophy becomes a platform from which you can strike without ambivalence. Mr. Obama seems born to be mild. But still, that's not the story.

Nor is it that John Edwards seems like a furry animal on a wheel, trying so hard, to the point he's getting a facial tic, and getting nowhere, failing to get his little furry paws on his prey, not knowing you have to get off the wheel to get to the prey. You have to stop the rounded, rote, bromidic phrases, and use a normal language that cannot be ignored.

The story is not that Mrs. Clinton signaled, in attitude and demeanor, who she believes is her most dangerous foe, the great impediment between her and an easy glide to the nomination. Yes, that would be Tim Russert.

The story is that she talked about policy. Not talking points, but policy. In talking about it she seemed, for the first time, to be revealing what's inside.

It was startling. It's 1993 in there. The year before her fall, and rise.

I spent a day going over the transcripts so I could quote at length, but her exchanges are all over, it's a real Google-fest. Here, boiled down, is what she said.

Giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses makes sense because it makes sense, but she may not be for it, but undocumented workers should come out of the shadows, and it makes sense. Maybe she will increase the payroll tax on Social Security beyond its current $97,500 limit, to $200,000. Maybe not. Everybody knows what the possibilities are. She may or may not back a 4% federal surcharge on singles making $150,000 a year and couples making $200,000. She suggested she backed it, said she didn't back it, she then called it a good start, or rather "I support and admire" the person proposing such a tax for his "willingness to take this on."

She has been accused of doubletalk and she has denied it. And she is right. It was triple talk, quadruple talk, Olympic level nonresponsiveness. And it was, even for her, rather heavy and smug. Her husband would have had the sense to look embarrassed as he bobbed and weaved. It was part of his charm. But he was light on his feet. She turns every dance into the polka. And it is that amazing thing, a grim polka.

Although Billy Jeff's inadequacies are legion, they do not extend to a lack of political fast footwork. Billy Jeff can smile or joke or "How Dare You" out of any situation. If GWB had one-tenth Billy Jeff's charm or candlepower, he wouldn't be languishing in the low double-digits in the polls. [On the other hand, we probably would have been attacked a few more times by violent Islamic reactionaries whom the Democrats seem to favor because they both share a hatred of America.] But ol' BJ would chuckle when caught and bite his lip and do a self-deprecating double-clutch shuffle and all would be forgiven.

But Peggy senses that Hillary is different. Bill is an elitist with populist moorings, but Hillary is an elitist's elitist:

But the larger point is that her policy approach revealed all the impulses not of the New Centrism but the Old Leftism. Her statements were redolent of the 1990s phrase "command and control." They reflect a bias toward the old tax-raising on people who aren't rich, who aren't protected, the old "my friends and I know best, and we'll fill you dullards in on the details later."

For a few years now I've thought the problem for the Democrats in general but for Mrs. Clinton in particular is not that America is against tax increases. They've seen eight years of big spending, of wars, of spiraling entitlements. They've driven by the mansions of the megarich and have no sympathy for hedge fund/movie producer/cosmetics empire heirs. They sense the system is rigged toward the heavily protected. They sense this because they're not stupid.

The problem for Mrs. Clinton is not that people sense she will raise taxes. It's that they don't think she'll raise them on the real and truly rich. The rich are her friends. They contribute to her, dine with her, have access to her. They have an army of accountants. They're protected even from her.

Peggy divines that Hillary is an upper-class elitist who wants to turn the lower classes [note my Marxian categorizations] into a vise that will squeeze the usual suckers---the vast Middle Class America that constitutes our tax base and our moral backbone:

But she can stick it to others, and in the way of modern liberalism for roughly half a century now one suspects she'll define affluence down. That she would hike taxes on people who make $150,000 a year.

But those "rich"--people who make $200,000 and have two kids and a mortgage and pay local and state taxes in, say, New Jersey--they don't see themselves as rich. Because they're not. They're already carrying too much of the freight.

What Mrs. Clinton revealed the other night was more than an unfortunate persona. What I think she revealed was that her baseline thinking has perhaps not changed that much since the 1990s, when she was a headband wearing, power suited, leftist-who-hadn't-been-wounded-yet. It seemed to me she made it quite possible to assume you know who she'll be making war on. And this--much more than the latest scandal, the Chinatown funny money and the bundling--could, and I think would, engender real opposition down the road. The big chink in her armor is not stylistic, it is about policy. It is about the great baseline question in all political life: Whose ox is being gored?

Finally, Peggy points out that the Clinton Collective has perfected since the era of "bimbo eruptions" the ability to skate, evade, juke and feint around the myriad bundlings, Chinatowns, and other funding scandals:

In a funny way she's protected by her reputation. It's so well known it's not news. It doesn't make an impression anymore. People have pointed out her ethical lapses for so long that they seem boring, or impossible to believe. "That couldn't be true or she wouldn't be running for president." This thought collides with "And we already know all this anyway." Her campaign uses the latter to squash the latest: "old news," "cash for rehash."

Peggy thinks this time Hillary might have gone an equivocation too far. But I disagree. Some of the huge corporate tax-cows are betting on her socking it to the Middle Class and keeping them in her corner. They are betting on her by unbundled contributions that keep her even with Obama, who does appear to have a populist constituency.

Hillary's constituency remains the Mainstream Media, which can't wait to get the viewer/reader magnet Billy Jeff back into the White House, by hook or crook or via the kitchen entrance.

A Clockwork Orange

Just received Kubrick's DVD movies in the mail and immediately watched Clockwork Orange again. Anthony Burgess wrote the book in '62 & I read it at the U. of Michigan in the late '60s. I was blown away by the linguistic genius of adopting Russian slang into standard Cockney cadence. Indeed, "queer as a clockwork orange" is an old Cockney rhyme-slang saying, though Burgess served in Malaya during the bloody uprising and may have based it on the Malay word "orang" as in "orangutan" meaning "man," thus "mechanical man."


The book was one chapter longer in the UK than in the US, and Kubrick made the book on the US version, which leaves out the happy ending [in the UK version, the Catholic Burgess has Alex walking into Christmas shops and realizing that evil is stupid and a teen-age phase and something to grow out of. In the US version of the book on which the movie is based, Jewish Kubrick leaves out the "New Testament" last chapter and leaves Alex "unredeemed" and back in thrall to his old ways.] The movie is a sort of pinnacle of Kubrick's crazy numerological obsessive-compulsive world which he had more or less created in all his films. My own apotheosis came when I saw it in France and was wearing the same underwear Alex wears in the movie, while the numbers 23, 114, & 258 figure in the movie, as they were figuring again and again in my own life at the time. Then I got a computer, ran the three numbers back to back and then did the square root, which came out to 337.9, or the 338 that had occurred in Hong Kong earlier and that added up 3 X 38 = 114. Kubrick also was particularly obsessed by that number. Alex is given Experimental Serum 114, a phonetic play on the CRM-114 radio seen in Dr. Strangelove. The number 114 also appears in other films by Stanley Kubrick, including Eyes Wide Shut and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The people who made the movie said that Kubrick insisted on particular numbers in everything he did, including the number of the haunted hotel room in Shining, which was the number of Marilyn's boss, Sen. Sarbanes. Kubrick also was adamant about Alex's prison number 655321, which I haven't figured out yet! Although the two former-droogs, now-police at the end of the movie are numbers 665 $ 667 dragging
Alex between them. You figure it out!

The crazy thing is that Burgess originally wrote the book as the result of his first wife's brutal rape, as a sort of catharsis, something I only learned from an accompanying DVD with Damien Hirst, Camille Paglia, and other film greats and Brit govt functionaries explaining how the film spilled over into real life afterwards.

When stalkers began to walk up to Kubrick's farm in Hertfordshire north of London and try to give him their own connection to the film [I'm not nuts enuf to do that!], Because Kubrick was a certified paranoid, among other aspects of his genius, he asked Warner to yank the film from British distribution or showings in any form until after his death, though many commentators thought he also did this to heighten the mystery surrounding the notoriety of the film.

Yet during these years, the film was shown and distributed in the rest of the world. This is the only time that has ever happened, according to movie critics and historians.

Every critic does agree on one thing, A Clockwork Orange is a great film that could not be made today, with all the PC pieties one must now observe and all the special interests and constituencies one must satisfy [such as the disabled Patrick Magee being vicious in his revenge on Alex]. And the film influenced dozens of films after Clockwork Orange, such as Reservoir Dogs, which was close to a direct copy, and Taxi Driver [which also had consequences in real life, as a nutjob tried to kill President Reagan to "impress" Jodie Foster].

Warner is sending out DVDs of Kubrick's films, however I only received five of the advertised ten films in the $60 promotion on www.rottentomatoes.com. Still waiting for Killers, Spartacus, Paths of Glory, Barry Lyndon, and Dr. Strangelove.

Saudi King Makes Awkward Accusation to UK

King Abdullah certainly differs from King Fahd. During my days in the US Embassy there, Fahd was always regarded as a smooth operator, while Abdullah was a bit of the odd-man-out among senior royals. While the Embassy political officer and resident Arabist, I accompanied Ambassador John West to the Saudi National Guard encampment in Ha'il. Crown Prince Abdullah was the head of the "White Army" which was the tribal counterpart to the national armed forces, a bit like the Carbonari in Italy.

As it happened, there was no Saudi translator for the Ambassador's meeting with the Crown Prince and I was dragged into translation duties. Abdullah has a pronounced stutter, so Arabic to English was easy, but my own Arabic had deteriorated into a version of Sudanese kitchen Arabic and Abdullah, after a polite interval, said he was unable to get the gist of my version of Amb. West's words. Suddenly, Turki Faisal, then the head of Saudi intelligence, appeared and said, "That's okay, Dave, I'll handle it." Which he did.

The reason that I bring up these memories is that King Fahd, whom I attended several meetings with, would not have done the same [either with the translation goof-up or with mentioning the Brit intelligence oversight]. Fahd's English was actually quite good and on one occasion, he broke into a short English conversation with me, although I had the fly-on-the-wall demeanour befitting a low-ranking functionary. But Fahd was informal and invariably polite, except for one famous meeting with Amb. Hume Horan in 1988. Back then, Abdullah was less self-confident and more formal.

King Abdullah is straightforward and, on occasion, clumsy. The main reason for his chiding of the Brit intelligence on the London bombings is probably the fact that the Brits allow prominent Saudi dissidents to publish and be interviewed on TV and radio without restrictions. The British value political freedom of speech above flawless relations with a country which can give them rich contracts. Also, there are several incidents of Brits behaving badly in recent [and even long ago] bilateral relations. And the Saudis as well have not allowed Brits imprisoned for accused crimes very much support or legal leeway. As when I served in the Kingdom, human rights and corruption remain front and center in bilateral relations with Saudi Arabia:

Vince Cable, the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, the third largest party in Britain, said he would boycott a banquet held by Queen Elizabeth II in honour of the Saudi king, citing Riyadh’s “absolutely appalling” human rights record.

Campaigners demanding a revival of the SFO inquiry, meanwhile, will demonstrate on Tuesday as the king rides towards Buckingham Palace.

Riyadh was said to have put pressure for an end to the investigation by threatening to withdraw security co-operation and terrorism and intelligence sharing. The abandonment of the investigation paved the way for Saudi Arabia’s agreement to buy 72 Eurofighter Typhoon warplanes, part of a contract that could reach £20bn ($41bn, €29bn) in value.

The Saudis’ attitude is that the investigation is an internal British issue and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the national security adviser who has denied accusations that he benefited from the arms deal, is one of the ­senior officials in the king’s delegation.

“What happened 20 years ago is a British issue. Our aim is to look at the future,” Prince Mohammed, the Saudi ambassador, told reporters.

Although I never met Mohammed, his father Nawwaf lived just down the street from my residence in Jeddah and my Sudanese houseboy would keep me apprised of the Senior Prince's journeys and sojourns [Nawwaf was influential in the Royal Court on matters dealing with the Emirates and the Arabian [Persian] Gulf.

And knowing Bandar, who would not have dared fiddle with US contracts, the Brit Tornado contract may have been just too enticing to allow to pass without a bit of skimming.

Milton Friedman + Estonia = BALTIC TIGER

Foreign Policy magazine has the reality while tired 20th century economists [Krugman, Surowiecki] peddle 19th-century fossil Marxism.

Milton Friedman would be at home in Estonia. That’s because the small former Soviet republic has put many of the late Nobel Prize-winning economist’s ideas to the test. The result? Estonia, having shaken itself free from its communist-era shackles, may now qualify as the first Baltic Tiger; it debuts this year at number 10 in the index.

In keeping with Friedman’s free-market philosophy, the country’s government has moved aggressively to open itself up to the outside world. For all practical purposes, Estonia has no corporate income tax, and shareholder dividends are subject to a simple flat tax. Bureaucracy isn’t a problem, either; the government just steps aside to let investors do their thing. The World Bank ranks Estonia 17th among 175 economies in ease of doing business, and sixth in ease of trading across borders. Additionally, the government places no restrictions on foreign ownership of real estate, which has fueled a property investment boom among overseas buyers.

Although the index ranks Estonia 21st in technological connectivity, the country seems poised to pounce higher. The country, dubbed by some as “E-Stonia,” has launched a large online government initiative and even declared Internet access a fundamental human right. In March, it held the world’s first general election that allowed e-voting over the Web.

Former Prime Minister Mart Laar, who stepped down in 2002, is widely credited with introducing most of the policies that have helped his country roar ahead of the pack. But among his many awards and accolades, one seems particularly apt: the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize.

I'll bet lil tsarevitch Putin is seething with envy, as he attempts to reinstate a Soviet-style foreign policy over the former minions of atheistic communism. The Foreign Policy piece on globalization shows a remarkable correlation between freedom of communication and economic prosperity. China & Saudi Arabia are lagging in both---or will be down the road---as their political/religious barnacles slow the progress of economic development.

FSOs "Drafted" to Serve in Iraq?

As a retired Arabist FSO, I was offered a Political Development project director job in Iraq in 2004, but my health was not up to the specs and pressures of the job. This link to a Washington Post story mentions the last time that FSOs were sent en masse to a difficult post, my FSO class called the "Fighting 89th," all of whom where sent to Vietnam in 1969. I myself had been in SDS and an anti-war member of Gene McCarthy's 1968 National Staff in his unsuccessful attempt at the presidency in '68. But the Washtenaw County Sheriff, I was told, was on my tail for my VW microbus's being suspected [wrongly] of being used to sell drugs and illegal weapons. So I swallowed hard and went to DC to be sworn in as an FSO. Later, I found out that my scores were extremely high on the FSO exams and that I would have been called into a later class [only 200 of 20,000 had even PASSED the test!] But I had to split town from Ann Arbor in a jiffy!

The current situation in Iraq is bad enough, but the Foreign Service, according to friends of mine close to the game, has become a visa/travel/reporting job for the most part, peopled by affirmative-action-guideline recipients with few language or other foreign policy skills.

O tempora, O mores!

Asst. Secretary for the Middle East David Welch is still a friend, and a few other State employees remain in contact, as well as some former Arab diplomats and other foreign diplomats. But all my ex-colleagues such as April Glaspie, ruined by the cowardly craven backstabber James Baker, who fired her as a scapegoat for following his instructions, and Tom Warrick, whose two-year study of post-victory Iraq was shelved by ignorant Donald Rumsfeld and then subjected to mismanagement by the PA subsequently by L. Paul Bremer, a Europeanist toady of Henry, Herr Perfesser, Kissinger---all my Arabist friends were ignored and the subsequent disaster lies at the hands of Rumsfeld/Cheney.

I snicker when an attack on Iran is discussed, given the track record of Middle East mismanagement by this crew of second-raters and in the case of Rumsfeld, a wrong-headed moron.

America's War on Fire

IMAO has a good piece about America's War on Fire and how we are losing it. Also good comments on "chickenhosers" that are worth checking out!

My Crush on Catholicism from Jewcy.com

Aaron Hamburger has a nice piece on something that I have noticed in my three-score-and-five years wandering the planet. Jews and Catholics tend to hit it off better [at least in the USA] than they do with other perhaps more closely related faiths. My daughter went to a Christian prep school, but almost all her friends turned out to be Jewish! And she from Joan of Arc grade school!

I think it all goes back stateside to the phenomenon that the longest-running Broadway play, Abie's Irish Rose, pointed out. Rather than marry a drunken Irish hubby or an Italian or Pole, a nice Irish girl would marry a hard-working ambitious young Jewish male, at least in NYC, and have nice smart good-looking kids. Debra Messing looks like she might have sprung from this phenomenon, and James Caan, though there are a lot of different genes in the NYC pool. When I was living off-and-on in NYC, nice red-headed Jewish girls would come onto me, with my Irish traits, so it works both ways gender-wise.

Finally, I can remember listening more than once to the life-confessions of young Jewish males when an RA at Michigan, or a foreign-policy type in DC. Confession is good for the soul, and the spirituality of Catholicism---Joseph Campbell is a good example---attracts a lot of people bored with empty ritual or soulless materialism.

But then there's the numerous midges in the ointment---meat on Fridays and Latin Mass, then no longer necessary. And that eternal damnation versus reincarnation.

I, for one, want a second chance.

NYT Funniest Newspaper in the World

Patricia Cohen at the NYT has written the [unintentionally] funniest article about neo-nepotism in the silly paper's history:

But to others the decision reeks of the “old nepotism,” in which the only credential that matters is the identity of your father — in Mr. Bellow’s cosmology, less like the Roosevelts than like Tori Spelling getting an acting job because her father was Aaron Spelling.

WSJ commentor James Taranto responds appropriately to clueless ditz Cohen's spew:

Ultimately, what may be the biggest challenge facing Commentary has nothing to do with the genealogy or scholarship of its editor, but the threat of a dwindling readership, now about 34,000. Once a source of ideas and personnel for the Reagan and current Bush administrations, Commentary, said [writer Jacob] Heilbrunn and a number of conservatives, has become less of a must-read in recent years.[quotes Cohen]

with this doozy of a question:

Some have argued that the New York Times has become less of a must-read in recent years, since Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. succeeded Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger Sr. as publisher in 1992. Did Pinch comply with the iron rule of merit, or is he the Tori Spelling of newspapers?

What Hath God Wrought? De Tocqueville & Dickens

The generations after the American Revolution have interested me as a sort of test-tube study of human nature. And the ability of the political and social fabric of a new country to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. A few years ago, I bought Joyce Appleby's Inheriting the Revolution as an adjunct to De Tocqueville. Then I read Charles Dickens rather uncomplimentary American Notes in an anthology. Now Daniel Walker Howe’s new book, “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848” has come out.

I read Walden Pond back in the sixties and then married a woman whose parents live right on the Lincoln/Concord town border about a half-mile from Walden Pond. I went many times to Walden and imagined Henry David Thoreau's little hut and all the transcentalist-wannabes and abolitionists who paid him a visit. And I learned the local lore on what a ne'er-do-well HDT was considered in Concord, where his mother did his laundry while he swanned in his pond-side hovel. Concordites [?] even accused him of stealing fresh-baked pies from their window sills, a most unneighborly crime! And one can't help noticing the railroad tracks near the pond, and I more than once saw a train back in the day trundle noisily past HDT's garden patch. I would remember his maxim: "we don't ride on the train, it rides on us."

Thoreau was a Luddite much as the global-warmers now ascribe rises in temp exclusively to man's meddling with nature. Emerson knew better, and eventually

Emerson lost patience with his peculiar friend. When Thoreau died, in 1862, Emerson delivered an ambivalent eulogy, regretting Thoreau’s limited compass: “Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!”

Jill Lepore's review points out many of the momentous ideas abounding that Emerson was talking about that HDT probably missed, such as the beginning of the women's suffrage movement and the beginning of the end of the institution of slavery. While Thoreau was growing beans, America was growing into an empire.

Islamofascism Awareness Week Observed by Hitchens

Slate has an intriguing piece by Christopher Hitchens demonstrating his wide-ranging knowledge and understanding of the political phenomena underlying the most extreme elements of terror in Islam.

The term Islamofascism was first used in 1990 in Britain's Independent newspaper by Scottish writer Malise Ruthven, who was writing about the way in which traditional Arab dictatorships used religious appeals in order to stay in power. I didn't know about this when I employed the term "fascism with an Islamic face" to describe the attack on civil society on Sept. 11, 2001, and to ridicule those who presented the attack as some kind of liberation theology in action. "Fascism with an Islamic face" is meant to summon a dual echo of both Alexander Dubcek and Susan Sontag (if I do say so myself), and in any case, it can't be used for everyday polemical purposes, so the question remains: Does Bin Ladenism or Salafism or whatever we agree to call it have anything in common with fascism?

I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

Christopher is a Europeanist and back in the day when I knew him, a not-so-crypto Marxist whose template always looked to Europe for historical antecedants. And fascism sprung from Garibaldi's nationalism as well as Marxism's communal solidarity, with a nod to vested feudal interests as well. So he has a post-9/11 view deriving from his Road to Damascus conversion both from leftism and from a pro-Arab tilt.

There isn't a perfect congruence. Historically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure. There isn't much of a corporate structure in the Muslim world, where the conditions often approximate more nearly to feudalism than capitalism, but Bin Laden's own business conglomerate is, among other things, a rogue multinational corporation with some links to finance-capital. As to the nation-state, al-Qaida's demand is that countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia be dissolved into one great revived caliphate, but doesn't this have points of resemblance with the mad scheme of a "Greater Germany" or with Mussolini's fantasy of a revived Roman empire?

Technically, no form of Islam preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race. But in practice, Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the "pure" and the "exclusive" over the unclean and the kufar or profane. In the propaganda against Hinduism and India, for example, there can be seen something very like bigotry. In the attitude to Jews, it is clear that an inferior or unclean race is being talked about (which is why many Muslim extremists like the grand mufti of Jerusalem gravitated to Hitler's side). In the attempted destruction of the Hazara people of Afghanistan, who are ethnically Persian as well as religiously Shiite, there was also a strong suggestion of "cleansing." And, of course, Bin Laden has threatened force against U.N. peacekeepers who might dare interrupt the race-murder campaign against African Muslims that is being carried out by his pious Sudanese friends in Darfur.

Christopher errs in designating the Hazara as ethnically Persian, as they have unmistakable Mongol antecedants with some Tadjik perhaps thrown in. But there is certainly a kind a "master religion" if not uebermenschen quality to the extreme brand of Wahhabi/Salafi purity that Usama bin Laden preaches. And the utter patriarchal character of this Al Qaeda bigotry prevents their women from being little other than sexual household appliances.

This makes it permissible, it seems to me, to mention the two phenomena in the same breath and to suggest that they constitute comparable threats to civilization and civilized values. There is one final point of comparison, one that is in some ways encouraging. Both these totalitarian systems of thought evidently suffer from a death wish. It is surely not an accident that both of them stress suicidal tactics and sacrificial ends, just as both of them would obviously rather see the destruction of their own societies than any compromise with infidels or any dilution of the joys of absolute doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus, while we have a duty to oppose and destroy these and any similar totalitarian movements, we can also be fairly sure that they will play an unconscious part in arranging for their own destruction, as well.

At the same time that we condemn extreme versions of Islam as totalitarian and suicidal, we should still remember that our Arab allies should not be regarded as hostile or even dangerous even though they may occasionally adopt ambiguous policies in their attempts to get a two-state solution in Palestine, for example. The Saudis, Jordan, the Iraqi government and Egypt, as well as President Abbas on the West Bank remain our allies and should be regarded as friends rather than opponents in the search for a lasting peace in the Middle East.

Krugman Book Lambasted in NYT Review!

David Kennedy shreds Paul Krugman, former Enron consultant, and his book into tiny pieces:

A fuller and more nuanced story might at least gesture toward the role that environmental and natural-resource issues have played in making red-state country out of the interior West, not to mention the unsettling effects of the “value issues” on voters well beyond Dixie. And as for national security — well, as Krugman sees things, it was not Democratic bungling in the Iranian hostage crisis or humiliation in Somalia or feeble responses to the first bombing attack on the World Trade Center or the assault on the U.S.S. Cole, but the runaway popularity of the Rambo films (I’m not making this up) that hoodwinked the public into believing that the party of Carter and Clinton (not to mention McGovern and Kucinich) might not be the most steadfast guardian of the Republic’s safety.

There's a lot of lathering and slithering among nanny-staters on the lefty fever-swamp vapor front. Take a glance at memeorandum and hear the moonbat squeaks amid the noisier shrieks of academicide victims.

Mauritius Best Among African Business Venues

The Economist has a ranking of African countries' business conditions and coincidentally today I just got a phone call from Mauritius, from the wife of Tony Hodges, a former colleague at IRIS and our houseguest a couple of years ago for a couple of weeks. His wife Sylvette and young son are constantly inviting us to go, so sooner or later, we have to make the trip [my Australian citizen brother lives on the Great Australian Bight, but he and family are currently working in Sumatra at Banda Aceh, so it would be hard to cobble that destination into our itinerary.

Unfortunately the link only shows the top and bottom countries, without Zimbabwe in the bottom ten---so I wonder how the data methodology was put together.

Islamicists Search for the Bomb

David Ignatius has a sobering article in Real Clear Politics concerning the Muslim extremists, both Shi'ite and Sunni, quest to acquire nuclear weapons.

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is paid to think about the unthinkable. As the Energy Department's director of intelligence, he's responsible for gathering information about the threat that a terrorist group will attack America with a nuclear weapon.

With his shock of white hair and piercing eyes, Mowatt-Larssen looks like a man who has seen a ghost. And when you listen to a version of the briefing he has been giving recently to President Bush and other top officials, you begin to understand why. He is convinced that al-Qaeda is trying to acquire a nuclear bomb that will leave the ultimate terrorist signature -- a mushroom cloud.

We've all had enough fear-mongering to last a lifetime. Indeed, we have become so frightened of terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001, that we have begun doing the terrorists' job for them by undermining the legal framework of our democracy. And truly, I wish I could dismiss Mowatt-Larssen's analysis as the work of an overwrought former CIA officer with too many years in the trenches

But it's worth listening to his warnings -- not because they induce more numbing paralysis, but because they might stir sensible people to take actions that could detect and stop an attack. That's why his boss, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, is encouraging him to speak out. They don't want to anguish later that they didn't sound the alarm in time.

Mowatt-Larssen has been gathering this evidence since a few weeks after 9/11, when then-CIA director George Tenet asked him to create a new WMD branch in the agency's counterterrorism center. He helped Tenet prepare a chapter on al-Qaeda's nuclear efforts that appears in his memoir, "At the Center of the Storm." Now that the uproar over Tenet's mistaken "slam dunk" assessment of the Iraqi threat has died down, it's worth rereading this account. It provides a chilling, public record of al-Qaeda's nuclear ambitions.

Mowatt-Larssen argues that for nearly a decade before 9/11, al-Qaeda was seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. As early as 1993, Osama bin Laden offered $1.5 million to buy uranium for a nuclear device, according to testimony presented in federal court in February 2001. When the al-Qaeda leader was asked in 1998 if he had nuclear or chemical weapons, he responded: "Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so."

Even as al-Qaeda was preparing to fly its airplane bombs into buildings, the group was also trying to acquire nuclear and biological capability. In August 2001, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met around a campfire with Pakistani scientists from a group called Umma Tameer-E-Nau to discuss how al-Qaeda could build a nuclear device. Al-Qaeda also had an aggressive anthrax program that was discovered in December 2001 after bin Laden was driven from his safe haven in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda proclaimed a religious rationale to justify the WMD attacks it was planning. In June 2002, a Kuwaiti-born cleric named Suleiman Abu Ghaith posted a statement on the Internet that "al-Qaeda has the right to kill four million Americans" in retaliation for U.S. attacks against Muslims. And in May 2003, at the same time Saudi operatives of al-Qaeda were trying to buy three Russian nuclear bombs, a cleric named Nasir al-Fahd issued a fatwa titled, "A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels." Interrogations of al-Qaeda operatives confirmed that the planning was serious. Al-Qaeda didn't yet have the materials for a WMD attack, but it wanted them.

Most chilling of all was Zawahiri's decision in March 2003 to cancel a cyanide attack in the New York subway system. He told the plotters to stand down because "we have something better in mind." What did that mean? More than four years later, we still don't know.

After 2004, the WMD trail went cold, according to Mowatt-Larssen. And many intelligence analysts have concluded that al-Qaeda today doesn't have nuclear capability. Mowatt-Larssen argues that a more honest answer is: We don't know.

So what to do about this spectral danger? The first requirement, says Mowatt-Larssen, is to try to visualize it. What would it take for al-Qaeda to build a bomb? How would it assemble the pieces? How would the United States and its allies deploy their intelligence assets so that they could detect a plot before it happened? How would we reinvent intelligence itself to avert this ultimate catastrophe?

A terrorist nuclear attack, as Tenet wrote in his book, would change history. If we can see how this story might end, perhaps we can deflect the arrow before it hits its target.

Zawahiri may have the last laugh from his hotspot deep in hell.

Mad Men Or Mad[e] Men? Uptight Sopranos on Madison Avenue

Last night, I watched the finale of the intriguing period set-piece AMC drama Mad Men and have as many questions about the ending---which has a bit of "Who Shot JR?" ambiguity---which will presumably be answered next Summer when a new edition of the show will air. I went to Nikki Finke and found this link dated to last July:

The series was created by an ex-Sopranos writer/producer, Matthew Weiner, who actually got the gig at HBO’s mob series on the basis of his years-old Mad Men pilot script. It’s not hard to see why, either, since Weiner has an affinity for both the everyday coarseness and psychological shadings in a clubby male society. (And of course, working on a juggernaut like Sopranos ensures you’re as good as a made guy in television, which probably explains why Mad Men — add “e” to that first word, perhaps? — was snapped up by AMC so quickly afterward.) But Weiner also aims to channel the sadness of the time. Imagine a television series created by American literature’s preeminent gray-flannel-nightmare chronicler, Revolutionary Road author Richard Yates, and you get the idea.

I had a long conversation with Richard Yates while he was my sister-in-law's mentor at Boston U. He was a lugubrious chain-smoker with no literary swagger and a genuine interest in other people. He never went to college and was a literary auto-didact. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was his chief champion and one of his novels about Cold Spring Harbour is sticking in my mind as I write this. Nothing flashy nor metaphysical---not a phony bone in his body---that's the Yates I remember.

One thing that is entirely predictable---Dan Darling [Jon Hamm] will become a sort of hunky paradigm for the final cut on the Grey Flannel Suit. The end of Robert Abele's insightful review is good:

this isn’t a show that generates its mojo from getting you to fall in love with its characters — which was ironically what led to the Sopranos disconnect between David Chase’s icy existentialism and gangster-genre aficionados who wanted “closure” — but rather from the clinical charge of observing them moved around like lab creatures in a booby-trapped maze. (Although I can predict fan worship developing for the behind-the-scenes visual team, which includes production designer Dan Bishop, set decorator Amy Wells, prop guy Scott Buckwald and costumer Katherine Jane Bryant, who should all start clearing their awards mantels now.) There’s a surprise reveal at the end of the pilot episode intended to deepen our grasp of semi-conscionable Dan Draper’s complicated world, and while it probably won’t shock anyone, it shows that Weiner has a strategy for the way he develops his characters. Mad Men may thrive on a certain heartless suspense, but it’s definitely got a brain, one that’s interested in how our lives are a battle between the narrative we imagine for ourselves and the path we happen to be on.

Weiner has an uncanny knack the myriad details that evoke an age that now feels centuries ago. But at heart, there is no heart in the series, which makes it timeless in a test-tube sort of way.

Bhutto Return Met with Violence

Benazir Bhutto's long London exile ended literally with a bang as bombs almost killed her as she wended her way through Karachi's streets to Jinnah's tomb to make a speech. I've been to Karachi several times and know the neighborhood around the tomb. Back alleys and warrens of homes and hovels, I once got lost nearby going to a dentist in an emergency for a broken tooth right in the area---Bhutto herself should have flown to the tomb via helicopter despite her desire to let the crowds see her. Now over 100 are dead because of her misjudgment.

My "sponsor" in Pakistan on three of my visits during the '80s was a Bhutto family ally, though he was of Punjabi origin. His wife was connected to a powerful political family and between them had political connections in Punjab, Karachi, and the NW Frontier Province. Pakistan is an absurdly complex mixture of ethnic linguistic religious complexities far more tangled and troublesome than the comparatively placid USA. My sponsor told me that Benazir's mother was an Iranian beauty---so Ms. Bhutto is at least bi-national in her personal heritage.

Her father was executed by General Zia, who was in turn was killed along with my friend Ambassador Arnie Raphel in a tragic assassination when the plane stopped in Multan to pick up crates of mangoes, the best in the world come from Multan, one of which apparently held a bomb which exploded after takeoff, killing all aboard. Multan is in Sind, Bhutto's home province, so the mango-bomb might have been simple vengeance for Zia's relentless pursuit of Benazir's father. Her two brothers also died in suspicious circumstances lending to theories of political assassination. One story I heard even speculated that it was fratricide, with one brother killing the other over a political/monetary squabble. Pakistan is non-stop soap opera.

My sponsor got me a meeting with the Deputy Head of ISI, the shadowy intelligence organization suspected of supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan before the US invaded after 911. There are even rumors that ISI kept Osama's hidden lair in NW Pakistan from US retaliation by feeding the CIA bogus information. The Deputy insisted the ISI was no more than an FBI rather than the international CIA.

One evening at a diplomatic function in Islamabad, the Soviet Ambassador invited me back to his residence for more drinks and conversation. I have no clear recollection of the subject matter, but I'm sure we may have touched on the Soviet's incursion into Afghanistan, in a friendly way. I think I did tell him about Dan Rather's phony "sneak" into A-gan when Dan actually hired a Paki son-et-lumiere outfit from a movie studio to do special effects and shot the breathless commentary right outside Peshawar a hundred miles from Afghanistan. Phoney Dan had a lot of tricks up his sleeve, said the CBS stringer who originally told me the story. But I digress....

Bhutto and Musharraf are seasoned veterans at manipulation and deception, but need each other for the time being. My guess is that Washington may soon figure out that Musharraf needs DC more than vice-versa, and that Bhutto might eventually become the de facto numero uno rather than Perez. Then he may go back to employing the Army as the de facto SCOTUS of Pakistan.

Besides the best fish and best mangoes, Karachi has the worst Taliban-infested slums in the sub-continent. For Bhutto's motorcade to proceed through the teeming slums was tempting fate. For over 100 unfortunates, her choice was fatal.