Investigate Fitzgerald

Clarice Feldman has mailed today (9/19/06) the following letter to the Department of Justice, Office of Professional Responsibility regarding the conduct of Patrick Fitzgerald, in the matter of the prosecution Lewis “Scooter” Libby. With her permission, we reproduce it in its entirety.

H. Marshall Jarrett, Counsel

Office of Professional Responsibility

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Suite 3266

Washington, D.C. 20530

Re: Patrick Fitzgerald’s handling of the Plame Case

Dear Mr. Jarrett:

I am writing to suggest that if one is not underway yet, it is long past due to undertake an investigation into the circumstances of the appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald and the way in which he has conducted this matter.

Read the whole thing...

Rove Didn't leak Plame? Never Mind Then.

The American Journalism Review has a rather lame summary of the reason the MSM dropped “Plamegate” like a hot potato after it was revealed that it was not a White House plot after all.

As any number of people who have been slimed by the creatures of the press has asked, “where do I go to get my reputation back?” Malicious gossips can be ostracized. But if the malicious gossips are hired by newspapers, magazines and TV networks, they have the opportunity to change the subject and never suffer the opprobrium that real people suffer for spreading lies.

Because the people who wear the filthy badges of the MSM are not real people. They are, like the creatures in Tolkien’s books: orcs. You can see them and read them daily. They are creatures without conscience. They can print faked pictures during wartime, photograph murders at high noon and receive bonuses for it, they proudly tell us that if they witnessed American troops heading into an ambush they would keep quiet and keep filming. And for this they are lavishly rewarded by their creators in Mordor.

Am I being unnaturally harsh? Not at all. Read this apologia by Rem Reider of the American Journalism Review and see how he ends.

What Happens When A Blind Man Blunders Into a Fight? Meeting engagment

Belmont Club comments on the lengths to which the Left in the West (and the so-called Moderate Wing of Islam) delibertely try to hide that which is in plain sight, the violence that deep Islamic faith engenders.

The worst place for a leader to be is behind those he seeks to lead, desperately calling out to a crowd that is increasingly outdistancing him, in a vain attempt to shift them this way or that. Sometimes opinion "leaders" put themselves in a retrograde position by ignoring what everyone around them plainly sees. Here's an example: writing in the context of the controversy generated by Pope Benedict XVI's remarks, ABC News says the 'Day of Rage' is not a day of rage.....

These hilarious semantic contortions are not the fault of Muslims, who are pretty straightforward about what they believe in, so much as the willful obtuseness of the politically correct Western cultural elite, which feels the need to interpret the world for a perfectly literate public, like some pedant who insists on reading out a poster to his students....

It is a failure which will sooner or later lead to what military historians call a "meeting engagement" in which two forces, each possessed of its own momentum, blunder into each other with catastrophic results. A false kind of tolerance has abolished the fence between the piggery and mosque, the adult video store and the cathedral, the flaming match and the stick of dynamite and called it progress. It is no such thing. It is called stupidity.

IN THE WAR ON TERROR, LIBERALS ARE MORE DANGEROUS THAN MUSLIMS - A 9/11 meditation

Don Feder has some thoughts on Liberalism as a Fifth Column.

In a recent commentary, former New York Mayor Ed Koch - a Democrat with at least half a brain (which makes him the leading intellectual light of his party) - asked rhetorically, "Why do so many Americans refuse to face the fact that our country is at war with international terrorism?"


Because they're liberals?


During the Spanish Civil War, as the climactic battle for Madrid approached, Nationalist leader Francisco Franco told a reporter: "I have four columns marching on Madrid and a fifth within the city ready to rise at my call."


Franco's comment gave rise to the World War II-era expression "fifth columnist" - a subversive, the enemy within who works covertly to sabotage a nation or cause. That pretty much sums up the part liberals play in the war on terrorism - except many of them are open in their admiration for Muslim murderers.


If anything, liberals are even more dangerous than Islamacists. The terrorist attacks with bombs and bullets. The liberal saps our will to resist. He rationalizes evil. In the name of civil liberties, he constantly seeks to undermine national security and make it impossible to safeguard our people from another 9/11.


One of the nation's foremost liberal institutions, Harvard has trained generations of the best and brightest to subvert our republican institutions, corrupt the culture and destroy representative government.


Is anyone shocked that former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami will address Harvard's Kennedy School of Government tonight? Khatami helped to create Hezbollah, and calls his handiwork "a shining sun that illuminates and warms the hearts of all Muslims."


When challenged on this bizarre observance of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, David Elwood, dean of the Kennedy School, wrapped himself in the mantle of the free exchange of ideas. "Do we listen to those we disagree with and vigorously challenge them, or do we close our ears completely?" Elwood sniffed.


Good old Crimson - let every voice be heard and all that. Well, not quite every voice. When he dared to suggest that, regarding scientific aptitude, there may be inherent differences between men and women, the feminist jihad issued a fatwa on then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who was eventually driven from his post.

Read the rest.

There is a horrifically evil force in the world today,

and that force is the movement that seeks to spread Islam by the sword. Pope Benedict XVI is the spiritual and moral leader of a great religion the members of which that movement would either forcibly convert or murder. Recently, he called out that evil, related it to what plainly is its origin, and declared it "incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul."

All of this is too much for E.J. Dionne. "Why did Benedict take his shot at Islam?", Dionne asks, as if he didn't read the Pope's words (and as if he's been asleep for the last five plus years). And "why didn't he pause to acknowledge that at various mements in history Christians, including Catholics, have themselves been guilty of inappropriate uses of violence?" Maybe because he was focused, as Dionne should be, on the evil that confronts us today, not the evil that was current 500 years ago. As I said, Pope Benedict is the moral and spirtual leader of a great religion that (along with the rest of us) is under attack. He's not an editorial writer for the New York Times. I hope that, unlike Dionne, most Catholics are looking for moral clarity, not mindless moral equivalency, from their leader (unfortunately, the Pope has flirted with the latter in his subsequent "clarifiations").

Dionne contends that "those who are hoping for a liberalized Islam should take Benedict to task" because "religious dialogue will not progress very far if it starts off with a slap in the face." Captain Ed puts this argument to the sword (so to speak):

Any liberalized version of Islam has to afford people the right to criticize Islam without resorting to intimidation and violence in response. How can Islam reform when the entire world enables its temper tantrums? Does appeasement ever work? One would hope that a newspaper columnist, operating under the freedom of the First Amendment, would understand that. To reframe the issue on Dionne's terms, does he believe that silence in the punditry would result in a more open government, or a more oppressive and abusive one -- and if he believes the former, then why does Dionne bother to write his column?

From Power Line.

The CBS Ambush

By Austin Bay:

Remember the "Arab street," that riot-in-the-road featuring flammable Israeli flags, Saddam Hussein posters, clenched fists and chants threatening "Death to America"? The street may have lacked pavement and a fire hydrant, but it had beaucoup television cameras.

Flames, clenched fists and death threats -- a heart-pounding collage of sensational imagery and rhetoric. What more could a TV exec need to attract audience eyeballs?

Recall the talking heads who told us in 1990, after Saddam invaded Kuwait, that "the Arab street" was going to rise en masse, as an ur-proletariat, which would support Saddam against the West. If you need documentation, check out a few old PBS "NewsHour" transcripts.

But the mass rising didn't happen. Why? Because the Arab street was, to a great extent, the creation of television cameras. Political operatives -- no doubt many on Saddam's payroll -- knew they could attract the sensation-hungry camera crews and use the media to project the operatives' preferred "image of anger."

Twenty-first century Islamo-fascist terrorists, however, have refined the model and moved beyond an image of anger to a new form of prepared global ambush that integrates murder, terror and instant media.

The ambush technique coordinates blood-spilling violence with sensational imagery and rhetoric using a dispersed network of media operatives, guerrillas and terrorists. Networked, Coordinated Blood-spilling plus Sensationalism -- hence the technique's acronym: the CBS ambush.

Since May 2005, we've seen the CBS ambush employed effectively on three notable occasions, the latest being Pope Benedict's remarks at Regensburg University.

In May 2005, Newsweek ran its phony Guantanamo Bay prison "Koran flushing" story. Violent riots broke out in several predominantly Muslim countries. The riots in Afghanistan attracted particular attention. Indian military analyst Bahukutumbi Raman wrote that those riots were incited by "well-organized agents of the Hizb ut-Tahrir terror gang."

The Newsweek story gave the terrorists an emotion-laden "grievance trigger." The ambush consisted of violent riots and a prepared deluge of anti-American propaganda. The vicious riots not only attracted further global media coverage, but also intimidated Muslims who oppose terrorist organizations and their violent interpretation of Islam.

In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of editorial cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad. The cartoons attracted political protests and several violent threats, but the cartoons were no international cause celebre. In fact, an Egyptian newspaper published several of the cartoons in an article condemning the Jyllands-Posten.

But in January 2006, waves of orchestrated, coordinated violence broke out in predominantly Muslim nations and in Muslim neighborhoods. The terrorists and political operatives promoted a "clash of civilizations" propaganda line, with the cartoons as the "grievance trigger."

Pope Benedict's Regensburg ruminations provided another CBS ambush trigger.

Benedict -- in a speech that examined historical relations between Muslims and Christians -- quoted the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, a ruler whose empire consisted of little more than the city of Constantinople. Muslim Turks had all but dismembered his realm. Manuel II, engaged in a dialog with a Muslim Persian scholar, challenged the Persian to show him "just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

An imprudent quote by a man on a global podium? Yes -- particularly since popes blessed several sword-bearing Crusades. It is, however, a defensible quotation in the context of an academic lecture. The pope pointed out the dialog between Manuel II and the Persian examined "the truth of both (religions)." But context doesn't matter when triggering a CBS ambush, only the superficial trace of historical grievance and the energy of emotional slight. The "distributed" violence following the media magnification of the pope's remarks included firebombing Christian churches (in several Muslim countries) and the execution-style slaying of a Catholic nun who worked in a hospital in Somalia. A hospital administrator said her murder was "not a random act."

Executing a CBS ambush requires the implicit cooperation of sensationalist media -- media that delight in emotional slights and rarely probe beyond the superficial. Until that implicit cooperation ends, the Islamo-fascists will continue to exploit this productive stratagem, achieving propaganda victories designed to ignite a "clash of civilizations" and brutally intimidate their Muslim and non-Muslim opposition.

Jonah Goldberg on the Pope's Speech

Jihad Enablers
The pope, the protesters & White Guilt.

By Jonah Goldberg


Before you can discuss the manifest seriousness of the latest controversy involving the pope, you have to acknowledge its hilarity. Pope Benedict XVI, in an austere philosophical address, invoked Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, the 14th-century ruler who offered a harsh assessment of Islam. While the Koran says, “There is no compulsion in religion,” Manuel couldn’t help but notice that Muslims were setting up more franchises in his neighborhood than Starbucks — and they weren’t doing so by selling the best darn Mocha Frappuccinos on his side of the Bosphorus Straits.


“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new,” Manuel complained sometime around the siege of Byzantium, “and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Why Pope Benedict quoted Manuel is hotly debated. But one explicit reason was to enunciate the Church’s opposition to using faith to justify violence or intolerance.

And this is where the hilarity comes in. A Pakistani foreign-ministry spokeswoman responded: “Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence.”


[snip]

This week, French President Jacques Chirac explained that everyone in the West must avoid everything that sparks tensions. In other words, we must forever be held hostage by the tactical outrage of a global mob. There’s nothing funny about that.

Colorado State professor disputes global warming is human-caused

Via Drudge we learn that some climate scientists deny that global warming is an anthropological event.

Global warming is happening, but humans are not the cause, one of the nation’s top experts on hurricanes said Monday morning.

But the climate scientists who are not afraid to say it no longer have to worry about that their peers may say, or who their next grant is coming from.

Gray, who is a professor at Colorado State University, said human-induced global warming is a fear perpetuated by the media and scientists who are trying to get federal grants.

Read the whole thing.

Cardinal Pell: Pope Rage "showed the link for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational argume

From Jihad Watch:

...Cardinal George Pell says "the violent reactions in many parts of the Islamic world" to a speech by Pope Benedict justified one of the very fears expressed in that address. "They showed the link for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments, but only with demonstrations, threats and actual violence," Cardinal Pell said in a statement yesterday.

Ratzinger's zinger

From Roger L. Simon:


In a BBC News article concerning the current crisis over the Pope's words about Islam, we find the following:

The BBC's David Willey in Rome says Pope Benedict, a theologian who has led a sheltered life in the Vatican for more than two decades, may not have understood the potential implications of his remarks.

Oh, really? The sheltered life here may be Wiley's, as it seems to be often with his Beeb cronies. [Is everything "projection" to you?-ed. Well, not everything, but close.] I think Ratzinger knew perfectly well what he was saying and what he was saying is true. Violence is structured into Islam, because Islam dictates scripturally that the world must be Islamic via jihad (as opposed to Christianity, which says "Render unto Caesar... etc.") and has never reformed on any level that is remotely permanent.

The near-irreparable breach

From the Belmont Club:

But it would be untrue to say the recent controversy over the Islamic world's reaction to the Pope's remarks have no effect. Just as the public will probably read the Pope's sorrow for the reaction to his remarks as being sorry for his remarks -- that is, as an apology-- much of the simple public will probably regard the apology as as the product of a bullying Islamic world as abetted by the liberal establishment, of which the nun's recent death is an example. And while such sentiments are unlikely to manifest themselves in any large shift in the political proportions of Western countries, it will have the effect of hardening the attitudes of those who suspect they are being sold down the river by the liberals and the left. Not by any great measure, but by some small increment. Added on to the context of train bombings, airline scares and the ceaseless belligerence of militant Islamic preachers in the West, it will make unctuous remarks at how carelessly and insensitively the Pope has treated Islam just that much more nauseating. The New York Times for example says "Because the world listens carefully to the words of any pope, Benedict XVI needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology for his hurtful speech." The NYT may be playing to an audience, but not since the phrase "let them eat cake" has there been such an unwitting example of contempt for those outside the charmed circle. We have learned less from Pope Benedict's words then we have discovered from the reaction to them.

Hot Air: The Religion of .....?

Riots on film

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals

Sam Harris on the LA Times (Pigs fly):

Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the outset. I'd like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received in the last six years — especially with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.

But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.

Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government.

Read the whole thing...

The Case of the Missing Crime. The CIA leaker has been found. No law was broken. Why is the prosecutor still going after Scooter Libby?

Clarice Feldman in the Weekly Standard provides an outstanding summary of the Wilson/Plame/Libby case.

He begins:

The New York Times and Washington Post are hard at work airbrushing history to obscure their role in promoting Joseph C. Wilson's incredible tale of his Mission to Niger and subsequent fantasy of martyrdom at the hands of Karl Rove. Both add insult to injury. While minimizing their own responsibility for the three-year witchhunt for an imagined White House conspiracy, they still suggest that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby--Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff and the only man indicted in the case--committed a crime for which he must be held accountable.

Really? It would appear that the Fourth Estate has been as inattentive to the criminal case as it was to the facts that led up to it. The case against Libby is as weak as the basis for the investigation was, and the animus that impelled it so distorted the investigative process as to make its continuation a travesty. It's long past time for Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to do the right thing and drop the charges.

We now know that the July 2003 leak that launched this case came from the State Department, not the White House. Columnist Robert Novak wondered (as did many in Washington) why such an acid critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy as Joe Wilson--not a spook but a retired foreign service officer and Clinton NSC staffer--had been chosen by the CIA to investigate Saddam Hussein's interest in Niger's uranium. So at the end of an hour-long interview with Colin Powell's top aide at the
State Department, Richard Armitage, Novak put the question to him. Armitage replied, in so many words, here's a good nugget for your column: It was Wilson's wife's idea to send him, she works at the CIA. Novak confirmed the gossip and included it as a detail in his next column. It was, in many respects, a routine Washington transaction between a political columnist and a well-placed source. All these details, in their essentials, were known to the Justice Department by October 2003. Why, then, was a special prosecutor unleashed two months after that? Why were reporters subpoenaed, compelled to testify, even jailed? Why is Libby still under indictment and threatened with prison in a trial expected to begin next January? Let's review the origins of this sorry story.

Read the whole thing.

A brief summary of Islamist reaction to Pope Benedict's lecture

Little Green Footballs gives us these stories:

ROPs Iraq Branch Threatens Pope with Suicide Attack

Misogynist Medieval Murderers Want Pope to Apologize

London Arabic Paper: Pope = Bin Laden/Hitler

Saudi Grand Mufti: "These Are All Lies"

Somali Cleric Calls for Pope's Death

Alykhan Velshi said this just a day or two ago:

...maybe I should agonise over it more, but somehow I don't. With respect to my religious faith, I agonise more over memorising difficult prayer verses and singing religious songs in tune.I don't however agonise over whatever it is that bothers the violent jihadists.

Which is more important: memorization exercises, singing in tune, or watching members of your religion - these are "your people" - threaten death to the Pope? If this were the public face of Christianity, I would be agonizing over my association with it.

Belmont Club: "Book 'em Danno "

The government of Pakistan has released thousands of Taliban fighters.

Via Belmont Club we get this from the Telegraph News

Pakistan's credibility as a leading ally in the war on terrorism was called into question last night when it emerged that President Pervez Musharraf's government had authorised the release from jail of thousands of Taliban fighters caught fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan.

The mass release of the prisoners has provoked a stern rebuke to the Musharraf regime from the American government. "We have repeatedly warned Pakistan over arresting and then releasing suspects," said a US diplomat in Islamabad. "We are monitoring their response with great concern."

Click on the link to find who was included in the release.

But Richard Fernandez asks:

Some of these individuals may never have been charged or prosecuted in a way that would satisfy "International Law". By that standard, they should be released. Grant the premise, grant the conclusion. What I want to know is how this prisoner release is different in principle from the policy advocated by critics of Guantanamo prison. I am sure there must be some difference. But the question remains. How should prisoners captured on the terrorist battlefield be treated and how long should they be detained?

I know what my opinion is of this release, but I am afraid that that ACLU has an opposite opinion.

Funny take off on unusually offensive NY Times Editorial regarding the Pope and the usual Islamic riots.

Click on the link.

Yahoo News: Anglican church in Gaza firebombed

Via Michelle Malkin.



Item: Sheikh Abubakar Hassan Malin's fatwa:

"Whoever offends our Prophet Muhammad should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim."

Item: Iraqi jihadi threat:

"We swear that we will destroy their cross in the heart of Rome ... and that their Vatican will be hit and wept over by the Pope," said Jaish al-Mujahideen (the Mujahideen's Army) in the statement, whose authenticity could not be confirmed.
The statement lashed out at "Zionised Christians and loathsome crusaders" and was accompanied by six films showing attacks against US military targets in Iraq, which it said were "dedicated to the dog of the crusaders (an apparent reference to the Pope) in retaliation for his remarks".

"We will not rest until your thrones and your crosses have been destroyed on your own territory," said the group, which has claimed many attacks against US and government forces in Iraq.

How Bad Is the Senate Intelligence Report? Very Bad.

Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard:

According to a report released September 8 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Saddam Hussein "was resistant to cooperating with al Qaeda or any other Islamist groups." It's an odd claim. Saddam Hussein's regime has a long and well-documented history of cooperating with Islamists, including al Qaeda and its affiliates.

As early as 1982, the Iraqi regime was openly supporting, training, and funding the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization opposed to the secular regime of Hafez Assad. For years, Saddam Hussein cultivated warm relations with Hassan al-Turabi, the Islamist who was the de facto leader of the Sudanese terrorist state, and a man Bill Clinton described as "a buddy of [Osama] bin Laden's."

Throughout the 1990s, the Iraqi regime hosted Popular Islamic Conferences in Baghdad, gatherings modeled after conferences Turabi hosted in Khartoum. Mark Fineman, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, attended one of the conferences and filed a story about his experience on January 26, 1993. "There are delegates from the most committed Islamic organizations on Earth," he wrote. "Afghan mujahedeen (holy warriors), Palestinian militants, Sudanese fundamentalists, the Islamic Brotherhood and Pakistan's Party of Islam." Newsweek's Christopher Dickey attended the same conference and wrote about it in 2002. "Islamic radicals from all over the Middle East, Africa, and Asia converged on Baghdad," he wrote, "to show their solidarity with Iraq in the face of American aggression. . . . Every time I hear diplomats and politicians, whether in Washington or the capitals of Europe, declare that Saddam
Hussein is a 'secular Baathist ideologue' who has nothing to do with Islamists or terrorist calls to jihad, I think of that afternoon and I wonder what they're talking about. If that was not a fledgling Qaeda itself at the Rashid convention, it sure was Saddam's version of it."

Iraqi leaders frequently touted their Islamist credentials. "We are blessed in this country for having the Islamic holy warrior Saddam Hussein as a leader, who is guiding the country in a religious holy war against the infidels and nonbelievers," said Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of Saddam's top deputies, in an address to the terrorist confab. On August 27, 1998, 20 days after al Qaeda attacked the U.S. embassies in Africa, Babel, the government newspaper run by Saddam's son Uday Hussein, published an editorial proclaiming Osama bin Laden "an Arab and Islamic hero."

None of this is a secret, as the press coverage attests. But the authors of the Senate report seem determined to write it out of the history. On what basis do the authors claim that Saddam Hussein was "resistant" to cooperation with Islamists? The finding is sourced to "postwar detainee debriefs--including debriefs of Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz." Well then, that settles it.

But why take Saddam's word for it? This is, after all, the same man who claims that he is the president of Iraq. Even assuming the man isn't a pathological liar, isn't it the case that detainees interrogated by a government fighting a global war on terror might have an incentive to understate their complicity in global terror?

Read the rest.

Coverage Of 9/11 Was Too Wimpy (Mark Steyn On The Feminized 9/11 Remembrance Fetish Alert)

A lot of the 9/11 anniversary coverage struck me as distastefully tasteful. On the morning of Sept. 12, I was pumping gas just off I-91 in Vermont and picked up the Valley News. Its lead headline covered the annual roll call of the dead -- or, as the alliterative editor put it, "Litany of the Lost." That would be a grand entry for Litany of the Lame, an anthology of all-time worst headlines. Sept. 11 wasn't a shipwreck: The dead weren't "lost," they were murdered.

So I skipped that story. Underneath was something headlined "Half a Decade Gone By, A Reporter Still Cannot Comprehend Why." Well, in that case maybe you shouldn't be in the reporting business. After half a decade, it's not that hard to "comprehend": Osama bin Laden issued a declaration of war and then his agents carried out a big attack. He talked the talk, his boys walked the walk. If you need to flesh it out a bit, you could go to the library and look up a book.

But, of course, that's not what the headline means: Instead, it's "incomprehensible" in the sense that, to persons of a certain mushily "progressive" disposition, all such acts are "incomprehensible," all violence is "senseless." Unfortunately, it made perfect sense to the fellows who perpetrated it. Which is what that headline writer finds hard to "comprehend" -- or, rather, doesn't wish to comprehend. The piece itself was categorized as "Reflection" -- dread word. No self-respecting newspaper should be running "reflections" anywhere upfront of Section G Page 27, and certainly not on the front page. But it has exactly the kind of self-regarding pseudo-sophistication the American media love. The proper tone for 9/11 commemorations is to be sad about all the dead -- "the lost" -- but in a very generalized soft-focus way. Not a lot of specifics about the lost, and certainly not too many quotes from those final phone calls from the passengers to their families, like Peter Hanson's last words before Flight 175 hit the World Trade Center: "Don't worry, Dad. If it happens, it will be very fast." That might risk getting readers worked up, especially if they see the flight manifest:

"Peter Hanson, Massachusetts

"Susan Hanson, Massachusetts

"Christine Hanson, 2, Massachusetts"

No, best to stick to a limpidly fey, tastefully mopey, enervatedly passive prose style that suggests nothing very much can be done about the incomprehensible lost. This tasteful passivity is the default mode of the age: Five years ago it was striking, even in the immediate aftermath, how many radio and TV trailers for blood drives and other relief efforts could only bring themselves over the soupy music track to refer vaguely to "the tragic events," as if any formulation more robust might prove controversial.

Passivity is far slyer and more lethal than rabid Bush hatred. Say what you like about the left-wing kooks but they can still get a good hate on. Sure, they hate Bush and Cheney and Rummy and Halliburton and Fox News and Rush Limbaugh rather than Saddam and the jihadists, but at least they can still muster primal emotions. Every morning I wake up to a gazillion e-mails from fellows wishing me ill, usually beginning by calling me a "chicken hawk" followed by a generous smattering of words I can only print here peppered with asterisks, and usually ending with pledges to come round and shove various items in a particular part of my anatomy. There's so much shipping scheduled to go up there I ought to get Dubai Ports World in to run it.

The foaming leftie routine seems to be a tough sell to a general audience. I see that, a mere three weeks after I guest-hosted for Rush, the widely acclaimed and even more widely unlistened-to Air America is going belly up. Coincidence? You be the judge. But I doubt the "liberal" radio network would be kaput if anti-Bush fever were about to sweep the Democrats to power this November. I think I said a few months back that the Dems would be waking up to their usual biennial Wednesday morning after the Tuesday night before, and I'll stick with that.

But there's more to the national discourse than party politics. And, whoever wins or loses, the cult of feebly tasteful passivity rolls on regardless. As part of National Review's fifth anniversary observances, James Lileks wrote the following:

"If 9/11 had really changed us, there'd be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there's a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors. The Empire State Building took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again, but we don't. And we don't seem interested in asking why."

Ray Nagin, New Orleans' Mayor Culpa, is a buffoon but he nevertheless had a point when he scoffed at the ongoing hole in the ground in Lower Manhattan. And whatever fills it is never going to include those "stern stone eagles." The best we can hope for is that the Saudi-funded Islamic Outreach Center will only take up a third of the site. But in our hearts we know whatever memorial eventually stands on the spot will be rubbish -- tasteful rubbish, but rubbish all the same. Last year, I criticized the Flight 93 memorial, the "Crescent of Embrace," whose very title is a parodic masterpiece of note-perfect generically effete huggy-weepy blather. And in return I received a ton of protests pointing out that the families of the Flight 93 heroes had "approved" the design. All that demonstrates, I think, is how thoroughly constrained our society is within its own crescent of embrace: The cult of passivity has insinuated itself deep into our bones. Behind those "IMAGINE PEACE" stickers lies a terrible failure to imagine.

At what point does a society become simply too genteel to wage war? We're like those apocryphal Victorian matrons who covered up the legs of their pianos. Acts of war against America have to be draped in bathetic music and uncomprehending reflections and crescents of embrace. We fight tastefully, too. Last week one of America's unmanned drones could have killed 200 Taliban big shots but they were attending a funeral and we apparently have a policy of not killing anybody near cemeteries out of sensitivity. So even our unmanned drones are obliged to behave with sensitivity. But then, these days the very soundtrack to our society is, so to speak, an unmanned drone.

LECTURE OF THE HOLY FATHER

The Pope's speech at the University of Regensburg.

In case you are the kind of person who is interested in the truth instead of the headlines.

Very deep and very interesting.

A DEADLY KINDNESS

RICHARD MINITER writes in the New York Post:

AT GITMO, PC RULES LET QAEDAS PLOT ON

The politically correct regulations are unbelievable. Detainees are entitled to a full eight hours sleep and can't be woken up for interrogations. They enjoy three meals and five prayers per day, without interruption. They are entitled to a minimum of two hours of outdoor recreation per day.

Interrogations are limited to four hours, usually running two - and (of course) are interrupted for prayers. One interrogator actually bakes cookies for detainees, while another serves them Subway or McDonald's sandwiches. Both are available on base. (Filet o' Fish is an al Qaeda favorite.)
...
And they can make weapons from almost anything. Guards have been attacked with springs taken from inside faucets, broken fluorescent light bulbs and fan blades. Some are more elaborate. "These folks are MacGyvers," Harris said.

Other cells pass messages from leaders in one camp to followers in others. How? Detainees use the envelopes sent to them by their attorneys to pass messages. (Some 1,000 lawyers represent 440 prisoners, all on a pro bono basis, with more than 18,500 letters in and out of Gitmo in the past year.) Guards are not allowed to look inside these envelopes because of "attorney-client privilege" - even if they know the document inside is an Arabic-language note written by a prisoner to another prisoner and not a letter to or from a lawyer.

That's right: Accidentally or not, American lawyers are helping al Qaeda prisoners continue to plot.

There is little doubt what this note-passing and weapons-making is used for. The military recorded 3,232 incidents of detainee misconduct from July 2005 to August 2006 - an average of more than eight incidents per day. Some are nonviolent, but the tally includes coordinated attacks involving everything from throwing bodily fluids on guards (432 times) to 90 stabbings with homemade knives.

One detainee slashed a doctor who was trying to save his life; the doctors wear body armor to treat their patients.

"Anyone Who Describes Islam As Intolerant Encourages Violence"

Click on the link, but here's the picture:

This Just In: Muslims Furious

In other news: the sun will set in the west.

Since When Has Geneva Protected Our Troops?

Read Captain's Quarters.

And according to the recent press briefing by Tony Snow the much discussed common Article III has NEVER been applied to US troops. That's why it's vague provisions need defining.

Day By Day

New Jersey Switcheroo

From the WSJ (excerpt)

For pure entertainment value, not much can compete with the blood sport of New Jersey politics. Last week federal investigators launched a probe into whether U.S. Senator Robert Menendez illegally benefited to the tune of more than $300,000 from a rental-income deal he had with a nonprofit agency that received millions of dollars in federal contracts. Even liberal good government groups agree that the relationship may have violated congressional conflict-of-interest rules.

The allegations have sparked a mini-panic among state Democratic operatives, who not so long ago thought Mr. Menendez -- who was appointed by Jon Corzine to complete his Senate term after being elected Governor in 2005 -- had the November election in the bag. Now they see Republican Tom Kean Jr. surging into a lead. If Republicans were to pick up a seat in this deep blue state, Democrats' chances of winning control of the Senate would be all but slammed shut.


That's why, as reported by the Newark Star-Ledger, there's now widespread speculation that the party brass may decide to throw Mr. Menendez overboard and replace him with an alternative

Ten Things About Gitmo

The Pentagon successfully avoided being on David Letterman's Top Ten list for many years. So this week Secretary Donald Rumsfeld 's speechwriters tried to help, sending out "Ten Facts About Guantanamo" to highlight what a nice place it is.

The first fact notes that the inmates include some truly nasty terrorist trainers and bombmakers. The second says "More money is spent on meals for detainees than" on U.S. troops stationed there. "The average weight gain per detainee is 20 pounds."

"The Muslim call to prayer sounds five times a day," we are told, and arrows point "toward the holy city of Mecca."

The prisoners receive free medical, dental and psychiatric care, and in 2005 "there were 35 teeth cleanings." The other 400 or so housed there will have to wait awhile.

Fact No. 5 notes that the Red Cross visits "every few months" and that there's regular contact between the terrorism suspects and their families.

Read the rest

Alykhan Velshi Responds to Robert Spencer and I Respond to Him.

Alykhan Velshi was kind enough to reply to my post and to direct me to his reply to Spencer. I don't know if - or whether - Mr. Spencer will reply, but here's my two cents:

Essentially, Robert challenges me, as he does all moderate Muslims, to "renounce definitively, the elements of Islamic theology that jihadists are using to wage war against non-Muslims around the world."

I do.

Before I say anything else, let me say that this is a basis on which we can all get along. I rejoice in every Muslim that stands for life and against terror; who stands for freedom of religion and freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

Though the ease with which I do so will probably dissatisfy Robert Spencer.

I don’t think that Spencer has any real problems with you as an individual. I don’t really believe he thinks of you as a “reformer.” His problem is with Islam’s would-be Martin Luthers who should be horrified at the things Muslims are doing and saying in the name of Islam. But there do not seem to be many of those who reach the world stage. Those that are, are threatened with death or go into hiding or flee their countries like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Robert wants me to admit there is a problem with Islam. Of course there is - thousands, possibly millions, are willing to commit suicide in its name.

Let’s stop right there. This is an example of what I (I won’t speak for Spencer) find troublesome about the way moderate Muslims pose the problem. The problem is not that “thousands, possibly millions, are willing to commit suicide in its name.” Committing suicide in protest is done in many societies. Remember the Buddhist monks immolating themselves during the Viet Nam war? (Probably not. You were not even born before the Viet Nam war ended – and the real killing began). Hunger strikes or suicide are designed to obtain the moral upper hand. I would view Muslims who choose suicide benignly. Be my guest, just don’t leave your blood on my rug. But suicides kill only themselves.

To suggest that the problem the US faced on 9/11, that occurs daily in Iraq, via car bombers, or that was planned for the flights from London is a “suicide” problem is to stretch the use of euphemism way past the breaking point. Bring that term before a jury and you’ll get laughed out of court.

Let’s be honest and say that there are thousands, possibly millions who are willing to KILL tens of thousands and tens of millions and don’t mind losing their lives in the attempt.

That's a very serious problem. But admitting there is a problem doesn't mean I'm agonising at the (minor) epistemological leap it took for me personally to renounce violent jihad. I think Robert Spencer and people who support him consistently trumpet the most violent interpretations of Islam, and then go on to make it seem as though those Muslims who are not violent are somehow betraying the essence of the faith.

I’m glad that you renounced violent jihad although I’m a little troubled that it was something that you had to renounce. Is this something every Muslim has to do? Christianity has no analog. We are supposed to avoid sin and when we sin – as we all do - we are supposed to seek forgiveness from God through Jesus. But the concept of violence against non-Christians is not part of our culture, at least not now.

The reason that Robert Spencer focuses on the violent aspects of Islam is because that is the part that is causing the violent deaths of literally millions of people. When a religion – perverted or not - is the cause of that much violence, it is neither wise not prudent to shut our eyes to its teachings and to understand the “essence of the faith.” I'm not the scholar Spencer is but I will give long odds that he can find at least 10 leading Islamic clerics who will say you are betraying the essence of your faith.

And if you maintain that you are right and they are wrong that makes you a minority and theirs a majority view.

Although I concede that those who advocate violent jihad point to actual texts in the Quran and early and subsequent Islamic practice, I believe their interpretation is wrong and the historical examples they cite are opportunistically chosen. This doesn't mean I'm denying the violent aspects of Islam that come from a literal reading of religious texts, just that I, as Muslims have for centuries, reject that literalism is the only way to interpret religious documents - in fact, I'll readily admit that the bin Ladenists aren't creating doctrine out of thin air, but they are distorting what is there considerably through their weirdly post-modern focus on literalism, which has less of a basis in Islam than common intuition would suggest. I don't want to get into the weeds of Islamic history and Quranic exegesis on a Friday evening, though.

I hope my response still satisfies Robert: I admit that there is much violence and intolerance inherent in verses in the Quran and elsewhere (although I disagree that it's as bad as Robert says it is) - still, I "renounce [it] definitively."

Than you, again for your decision to eschew violent jihad.

I can't speak for other Muslims - indeed, I refuse to do so, cherishing as I do my individuality and respecting theirs - but I can say that the doctrines of my particular subsect of Islam, the Shia Ismailis, make it easy for me to renounce violent jihad. I don't know - maybe I should agonise over it more, but somehow I don't. With respect to my religious faith, I agonise more over memorising difficult prayer verses and singing religious songs in tune.I don't however agonise over whatever it is that bothers the violent jihadists.

I too, cherish my individuality and – since no one elected me – I don’t claim to speak for others. And there are billions of us in this world. Even in a war, most of the people are bystanders trying their best to stay alive by keeping their heads down. It’s not a dishonorable thing to be a civilian in a war zone.

But it does underscore one thing. You appear to be unconcerned about being attacked, kidnapped or beheaded by rampaging Presbyterians on their way home from Sunday church services. This despite Presbyterians never renouncing either jihad or crusade. It’s no small thing. Please think on it.

UPDATE: Jihad Watch visitors please look around and make yourself at home

UPDATE 2: Robert Spencer has responded HERE

With respect, sir, maybe we do need a bit more agonizing, in the sense that we need more active challenges to the jihadists from Muslims who claim to reject their deeds and perspective. I hope we will see more in this vein from you in the future, and in the meantime I thank you for taking the time to write this reply, which in itself suggests that you have modified your earlier erroneous view that I leave Muslim reformers and would-be reformers no "wiggle room."

Ralph Peters vs. Robert Spencer

There is quite a little spitting contest going on between retired Colonel Ralph Peters and Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch.

To read Peters’ article in the NY Post “Islam-Haters: An Enemy Within” you find yourself nodding your head if you have read web sites which notoriously attract extremists keyboard warriors. But Peters’ language is intemperate and at the end he is not persuasive since he refuses to name names or cite sources. Thus, he is able to set up straw men and knock them down with ease.

Is he claiming that mainstream critics like Robert Spencer are (and I quote): “the really ugly "domestic insurgency" ... among right-wing extremists bent on discrediting honorable conservatism.

Well those are fighting words. And Robert Spencer is not taking them lying down. He responded to an e-mail Peters sent to CaliforniaRepublic with this "fisking" of Peters' screed. And I have to say that Peters' reputation does not survive unscathed.

Examples:

[SPENCER] Ralph Peters has followed up his mudslinging attack on no one in particular with a stinging email to California Republic, in response to an invitation to reply to my recent article about him. In this email, he names me and makes a number of false accusations. For the record, I will correct them here.

[PETERS] Thanks. No, I don't intend to reply to Spencer, Bostom and Co. Replying only gives them what they crave so desperately: Attention. Bostom, for example, has been panting for attention for his book and his views in my columns for years (he doesn't mention that, does he?). I'm tempted to publish some of the sycophantic e-mails this crowd has sent me over the years--just to let their groupies know how little integrity they have.

[SPENCER] In fact, I have never sent even one email to Ralph Peters, sycophantic or otherwise. I do not even have his email address.

[PETERS] But this shouldn't be a personal matter--it's about ideas, about freedom, about defending our country, about getting it right. And I simply don't find close-minded loonies helpful--so I don't respond to their pleas for my time.
By the way, that's why I didn't "name names." First, it would have given them attention. And, second, it's my belief that it's okay to attack those more powerful than me by name, but it's ungentlemanly to attack the weak as individuals. And you shouldn't exaggerate the reach of these guys. The blogosphere inflates the image of a lot of little men, from the Timothy McVeigh Fan Club to pedophiles. If their views had genuine merit, they would be widely published in forums where they have to get past the editorial gates. But they're not widely published because they don't pass the quality or sanity tests. Their stuff is just self-important net-dweller hate-porn. And in a nation of 300 million, they'll be able to find a good number of fellow haters.

And please note that my attack was on their positions--their attacks (very poorly written, by the way) have been on me personally...on my integrity, my military services, etc.

[SPENCER] It's interesting that he calls the work of those he hates "self-important net-dweller hate-porn" and then claims to take the high road. But again, he is making false statements. And if we are indeed the ones he meant in his column, and we are so insignificant, why did he see fit to spend a Post column attacking these shadowy evildoers at all?

There remains the very real question how to react to Jihad. It does not seem wise to antagonize over 1 billion Muslims. It is not a good idea to create a billion enemies if you really only have a few thousand (or a few million) people who want to kill you.

On the other hand, we have seen nothing of the “moderate” Muslim world except studied indifference and defensive - and increasingly silly – claims that Islam is a religion of peace.

Is Islam similar to the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, and are we hoping its Martin Luther will appear? Has Peters found that vast majority of peaceful Muslims who will help us eradicate the jihadists, but is he keeping it a secret?

I realize the last comment was a bit sarcastic, but rather than denounce “right wing bigots” who –so far – have not blown up, beheaded or kidnapped any Muslims, I would like to hear from Peters how he views the transformation of Islam. Because in terms of interpreting Islam’s official teachings Spencer seems more persuasive than Peters.

After reading both Peters and Spencer on this subject, I have to conclude, regretfully (I have liked Peters in the past) Peters comes across as the name calling extremist and Spencer as the reasonable voice.

Alykhan Velshi and Mahathir Mohamad on moderate Muslims (and the Pope)

Jihad Watch has a dialog between Alykhan Velshi ( a “moderate” Muslim) and Robert Spencer regarding the Pope’s speech on Muslims. Here is the key part of Levshi’s argument:

The problem with Benedict's speech, and it's illustrated perfectly by the quotation I cited above, is that it gives moderate Muslims no option other than to renounce our faith.

And here is the key part of Spencer’s reply:

What I have asked again and again of Muslims who identify themselves as moderate is this: that they acknowledge to exist, and renounce definitively, the elements of Islamic theology that jihadists are using to wage war against non-Muslims around the world. Instead, most of those who are known as moderates simply deny that these elements of Islam exist at all. I'm sorry, but that is not reform. That is deception. In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformers didn't say, "The Church has never taught Transubstantiation and anyone who says otherwise is a hatemonger." They said, "The Church teaches Transubstantiation and it should stop doing so." Why is something like that, mutatis mutandis, too much to ask from Muslim reformers today? Why is it too much to ask that they say, "Jihad violence and the subjugation of unbelievers has been a continuing part of Islam, and we now reject it," instead of denying, in the teeth of the evidence, that these things are true at all?

And one of the comments to the post made a point that needs to be made regarding Muslim leaders:

"Velshi's contention that "Muslim" need not be modified by "moderate" because it is redundant amounts to an assertion that Islam itself is moderate, i.e., peaceful and tolerant. It is interesting to note that Mahathir Mohamad, the "Jews-control-the-world" former Prime Minister of Malaysia, has just made essentially the same assertion: "There is no such thing as a moderate Muslim," he said. "We are fundamentalists in Malaysia. We follow the true teachings of the religion and the true teachings do not teach us to bomb and kill people without reason."

The last two words in that dissertation give lie to the so called religion of peace. If you are not Muslim, or if you refuse to allow Islam to rule you, or if you say something they don't like, that gives them the reason they need to justify your killing. Whenever Muslims make these statements and add these types of qualifiers, they should be asked to explain in detail so we can see the differences.

Read the whole thing.

Victor Davis Hanson: Those Saudi Students. It’s not irrational to be wary of this deal

Bill Press Shows How Conspiracy Theorists Work

When you are a conspiracy theorist, nothing – literally no-thing – will convince you that you are wrong. New information is simply fitted into you worldview or dismissed as part of the conspiracy to discredit your ideas.

When Osama releases a video showing him congratulating the 9-11 hijackers, to the committed conspiracy theorist, it’s a movie produced by the Evil Bush Administration to fool the people.

And it’s not just Bush, wasn’t it the Chinese government who claimed that the moon landings were actually filmed on a sound stage in Hollywood?

So now we have Bill Press, one of the true believers in the “Rove Conspiracy to Out Plame” What is his reaction to the admission that Richard Armitage was the source of the original leak? Why it proves to him that the conspiracy was wider than even he though!

Not kidding, read here:

So where’s my apology to Karl Rove?

That’s what many readers want to know: Having accused Karl Rove of leading a conspiracy within the Bush White House to reveal the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, don’t I owe Rove an apology now that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has admitted that he, not Rove, was Novak’s primary source?

Well, here’s my answer: Hell, no! Armitage’s involvement doesn’t disprove the Rove conspiracy. It only proves it was a lot wider than we originally thought.

Terror Flicks: Movies do a better job covering the war than the news media do.

From the Opinion Journal by Dan Henninger:

"An event of this consequence is very hard to understand." The event former Congressman Lee Hamilton was describing earlier this week is September 11, 2001. But of course September 11 itself is not hard to understand. They came, they killed.

For many people this is sufficient understanding of 9/11. They believe the job now is simple: Resist and stop more of their killing. However, unlike the proponents of apocalyptic Islam, most normal people in time seek a degree of understanding, even of an enemy who fights by the rules of pre-civilization. Mr. Hamilton, the vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, was commenting on ABC's now-controversial movie, "The Path to 9/11." The hard-to-understand path to which Mr. Hamilton alluded is obviously not a single event but the origins and organization of the Islamic terrorist movement that began years back and besets the U.S. and the world today.

One can only agree with Mr. Hamilton. The war on terror is more complex, nuanced and indeed more interesting than the general public has been given to believe.

For instance, one oft-cited benchmark of its progress is the status of Osama bin Laden. That he is presumably still alive and at large is taken to mean that President Bush's offensive against the post-9/11 terrorists has "failed," as John Kerry noted this week on the eve of September 11. The Bush administration, Mr. Kerry told CNN, "failed to capture and kill Osama bin Laden when they had him in the mountains of Tora Bora. And that's why we are more threatened today with an al Qaeda that has reconstituted itself in some 65 countries."

This is the Alien vs. Predator model of fighting terror. Bin Laden himself has picked up on the tendency of our political culture to reduce complexity to melodrama. For 9/11, al Qaeda released a propaganda documentary on al-Jazeera this week, depicting masked men training, while Bin Laden walks among them. The New York Times described bin Laden in the 9/11 tape as "looking almost regal."

As to the war in Iraq, daily readers of first-line Internet news services such as Yahoo News know that this event has been reduced simply to body-count headlines. Yahoo News's homepage at mid-day Wednesday: "Bombings, mortar attacks kill 39 in Iraq."

If this is the available public context, then serious people have to assemble an understanding of terror as best they can. It isn't easy. In his comment on the ABC movie, Lee Hamilton said that "news and entertainment are getting dangerously intertwined." But given the alternative, it makes sense to me if people seek a better sense of the obsessions and compulsions inside Islamic terrorism in movies such as "United 93" or ABC's remarkable "The Path to 9/11."

Read the rest.

Cassandra has a term for media people who should be reporting on Joe Wilson’s lies: AWOL.

She gives us chapter and verse about when, why an in what venue Wilson lied. Read the whole thing, but she conludes thus:

In other words, Wilson's little junket to Niger was worthless to the CIA. He learned nothing of value, the White House, despite his accusations to the contrary, never requested that he go there, and never saw his report.

And it is becoming very clear that this whole thing was a setup from day one.

Wilson lied about who arranged for him to go, about what he found when he got there, about who saw his report (and really, how would he ever have access to CIA distribution lists anyway? This is WAY above his wife's pay grade, and even if it weren't she would be violating the terms of her employment by sharing that information with him and he would be violating the law by publishing that information in the New York Times, now wouldn't he?). Wilson also lied about what those 16 words in the SOTU address were based on. And he lied about the forgery thing - the "dates and the names were forged" - as he admitted under oath, he never saw those dates and names.

So why have the New York Times and the Washington Post carried his water all these years?

Why is the Post - my hometown paper - still running a grossly inaccurate "Wilson Report" that lies by omission, when not one, but TWO bipartisan Senate Select Intelligence Committees have now concluded that Joseph Wilson IV lied to the American people?

UPDATE:
BizzyBlog says:
AP Reporter Obscures Truth about “The Sixteen Words”

AP reporter Matt Apuzzo was way too clever in his article about Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson adding Richard Armitage to their lawsuit. The second-last paragraph reads:

Wilson discounted reports that then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon. Such a claim wound up in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address.

Very cutely done. One might think that the “discounted” “claim” didn’t belong in Bush’s 2003 SOTU. It’s pretty clear to me that Matt Apuzzo WANTS us to think not only that it didn’t belong, but that it wasn’t, and isn’t true.

Read the rest.

The New Desecraters

The 9/11 conspiracy theorists (or "truthers") were out in force at Ground Zero

How the False Interpretation of “Separation of Church And State” Corrodes Freedom of Speech

Some provocative thought from Vic Rubenfeld.

My review of the Darwin chapters in Ann Coulter's new book is getting a lot of pageviews. At the moment, a Google search for "Ann Coulter Darwin" lists this site as the second entry.

And the comments posted with the review are fascinating. Here's one, from Doc Duke:


I received my Bachelor and PhD degrees from MIT and Princeton, respectively, and am familiar with these arguments, having read the sources some years ago. Ann has done her readers a great service by presenting succinct, humorous, well-documented prose for her readers, of which there are happily very many. I agree with her, and think you have well summarized her arguments (and those in her cited literature), Vik.

I have two children in a public High School, and spend a considerable amount of time evenings and weekends making sure (1) that they know the other side if I don't trust what they are being taught, and (2) ensuring that they know to keep their mouths shut so that this knowledge does not have a negative impact on their grade-point averages.

You will seldom hear from (employed) scientists on this subject, because they to not wish to follow, even in a small way, the path of Natan Sharansky in Russia. Consult his "The Case for Democracy" to see where we could be headed without effective voices such as yours, Vik.

Doc, thanks very much for the good words.

What I can't get over is that not only does Doc have to check what his kids are being taught and personally give them the alternative view when necessary -- since the schools aren't doing so -- but he also has to tell them not to let on at school, that this is happening. This looks to me as though free expression at school is not only not permitted, it's actually being punished. There's the state-approved view of things, and discussing of alternative views is punished. Even thinking about alternative views is dangerous if discovered. This is showing some of the characteristics of a state that lacks freedom of speech.

Designs for Buildings to Replace the World Trade Center Towers

Click on the link to see pictures of the new designs.

Quick, Someone Tell the Intelligence Committee!

The Senate Intelligence Committee has issued Saddam a clean bill of health, as far as international terrorism is concerned. That is, they say he had no relationship with al Qaeda. But Iraq's deputy prime minister, Barham Salih, begs to differ:

"The alliance between the Baathists and jihadists which sustains Al Qaeda in Iraq is not new, contrary to what you may have been told." He went on to say, "I know this at first hand. Some of my friends were murdered by jihadists, by Al Qaeda-affiliated operatives who had been sheltered and assisted by Saddam's regime."

Rosie O'Donnell Says Christians are Dangerous; Michelle Malkin Takes Her On.

According to Rosie Radical Christianity is just as dangerous as Radical Islam.

See here for the video and the "Hot Air" response.

09/14/06 FOX News Poll: 2006 Election Is All About Iraq(51% Support Iraq war)

Don't know if this is an "outlier" but I believe part of the frustration with the war in Iraq comes not from the Left who believes that we should not be there at all, but from the middle and the right who believe that we are not fighting hard enough and our leaders are not getting their message out. When Bush goes to the people, as he has done in the last two weeks, his poll numbers go up dramatically.

Inspirational Iraqi War Vet Speaks in Westminster, MD

This is worth noting:

ANNOUNCEMENT:

Inspirational Iraqi War Veteran to Speak in Westminster, Maryland.

"Christian Bagge Day at North Carroll Community School"

I read a story about this young man, Christian Bagge, earlier this summer.

The summarized version is that Christian was a member of the Army, (Alpha Company, 3rd Battalion, 116th Cavalry). He was seriously injured during a clearing mission near Kirkuk when an IED exploded under his HUMVEE.

Unfortunately, as a result of this tragedy, Christian lost parts of both of his legs. He was sent to Walter Reed Medical Center to recover and receive prosthetic legs, which he also had to be trained to use. While recovering Christian had an opportunity to meet and speak with President Bush and he requested an opportunity to run with the President when he was able.

He accomplished this on June 27th, 2006. He story is very inspirational!

Christian will be speaking at a school in Westminster Maryland this Friday, September 15th, 2006. While it has been difficult preparing for this event in such a short period of time, NCCS would like to welcome any members of the public and we are preparing for this event as though we will receive 200 to 300 visitors.

The nature of Christian's talk will be age appropriate for children 1st through 8th grade, and I expect that anyone who comes will have an opportunity to meet with him personally, as well.

"Christian Bagge Day at NCCS in Westminster"

North Carroll Community School 531 Old Westminster Pike Westminster, MD 21157

12:30 PM to 3:00 PM

BumperStickerist: Just One Minute (Bush is a Lucky B*stard)

I finally admitted to a liberal friend the obvious truth - I voted for Bush because he's both pure evil *and* the luckiest bastard on the face of the earth. I mean, seriously, look at just a couple key events:

Bush joins the Texas ANG - Kerry joins the Navy Reserves.

Bush completes TANG training for jets, flies jets, volunteers for Vietnam only to be told that the pilot skills he has aren't needed.

Kerry joins the Swift Boats at time they were patrolling off the coast - the duty changes to river patrolling; Kerry gets shot at by people intent on killing him and his crew. Kerry leaves by choice after three months.

Advantage: Bush

Bush skates through the last two years of his TANG duty, but does so with such foresight as to bury almost all traces of his duty record leaving only notes from a dental record exam.

Kerry works as an admirals aide for the balance of his active duty stint - but manages to get caught on tape during a meeting where assassination is discussed, travels to Vietnam while on Reserve status to meet with the enemy, has his Silver Star citation amended twice times, publishes an anti-war book that's later debunked.

Advantage: Bush

Bush: Sat for 6.5 minutes after hearing about the 9/11 attacks in a room with a bunch of kids, a teacher, and a camera crew.

Kerry: Sat for an hour, stunned to the point of inaction, in a room full of adult elected officials with no camera present.

Advantage: Bush

Bush: Able to surround himself with a cadre of people able to engineer election fraud on a massive scale in Democratic-controlled precincts undetected, destroy two huge buildings in the middle of a major US city without any actual, you know, evidence left behind, destroy our basic Constitutional rights in pursuit of his neocon vision of a Unitary Executive and still have the energy to clear brush from his ranch while on vacation.

Kerry: Can't get the balloons to release on cue.

Advantage: Bush

There comes a point where you just marvel at the timing of events in favor of Bush and the way the Democrats clusterfuck their way through life and decide 'fuck it - Bush'

Seriously, if the Left can't defeat the Evil that is Bush, how the hell can they be trusted to defeat actual Evil?

Cashin's Comments for 9/14/2006

September 14, 2006
CASHIN'S COMMENTS
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2006

[AN ENCORE PRESENTATION]

On this day in 1812, a very valuable piece of real estate committed suicide - - or at least that's the way it seemed to the guy who had just acquired the property.

His name was Napoleon Bonaparte and the property in question was called Moscow, a metropolis of some cultural and governmental note in the Russian Empire. On this day, Nappy and his boys entered the city to find it virtually deserted by its nearly half million citizens.

As he set up headquarters in town, awaiting the surrender of Czar Alexander (and the Empire) his staff brought him reports of scattered building fires. Napoleon at first thought the fires were the result of his own troops carelessly looting abandoned buildings. He gave the order to shoot looters and put out the fires. But as soon as the fires were put out, the buildings (and others) were in flames again.

What the "Little Corporal" did not know was that the Czar's generals had ordered all the prisoners’ dungeons be unlocked. And they promised freedom and land to any prisoner who stayed behind and set fires in the city. Soon 90% of Moscow was on fire, and Napoleon had to flee his headquarters through streets that one of his general's said looked like "the entrance to HELL!"

The Czar's boys liked the results so well that over the next three weeks they burned barns, stables and grain bins all around Napoleon. And, when the snows came, within a month, Nappy found himself with an army that was ill fed, ill clothed and ill-equipped. Thus one of history's great military minds lost both a campaign and his army. (Of the 500,000 men Napoleon led toward Moscow only 30,000 survived to return home, a nearly 95% casualty rate.)
____________________________________________________________________

The bears escaped the heavy casualties they had suffered in Tuesday’s rally but they did not come near mounting a counterattack. On the other hand the Bulls kept the pressure on with another up day but it lacked the energy and assertiveness of the prior day’s rally.

Stick With The Program Please! – The day was dominated by the program traders trying to start a new parade to the upside. But, although the drums beat and the horns blared they never actually stepped out. To underscore my “program driven” contention, let me note that the Dow closed up 0.4%. The S&P closed up 0.4%. The NASDAQ closed up 0.5%.

As I have noted time and again over the years, indices weighted differently, computed differently and peopled by vastly different components should not show that unique kind of symmetry by accident or coincidence. It was the program button pushers, we contend, that produced such a dead heat.

Despite the unusual parallelism, there was noticeable strength in some of the chips and techs. When rallies narrow down to that group, floor traders tend to fly the caution flag. We’ll see, in the next few days, if the old rule of thumb still has potency.

Today – There should be lots of focus on Retail Sales (8:30). Lagging auto sales may drag the combined number into mild negative territory. Ex-autos there may be a slight plus tick.

Import prices are guessed to rise about 0.3%, a bit of a relief from July’s +0.9%.
Business inventory growth is also expected to slow a bit.

Markets – Bonds produced about half of Tuesday’s rally and most of Wednesday’s. Traders will check off on rates once again.

Consensus – Triple witch weeks are always whacky. They are still pushing against top of range but with slightly weaker internals than back in May.

Art Cashin

LGF: Bush vs. Lauer

It’s President Bush vs. empty suit Matt Lauer, in a serious verbal beat-down. (Hat tip: Sticky Notes.)

Former Head of Washington Islamic Center on Iranian TV

From Little Green Footballs:

Appearing on an Iranian TV 9/11 special, the former head of the Islamic Center in Washington DC, Muhammad Al-Asi, accused the US government of carrying out the September 11 attacks. (Video courtesy of MEMRI TV.)

Have you ever noticed that virtually all of these people seem to be fat? And they say that the US has an obesity problem.

Tony Blair on A Global Alliance for Global Values

Worth a read.

IF ONLY BIN LADEN HAD A STAINED BLUE DRESS ...

If you wonder why it took 50 years to get the truth about Joe McCarthy, consider the fanatical campaign of the Clinton acolytes to kill an ABC movie that relies on the 9/11 Commission Report, which whitewashed only 90 percent of Clinton's cowardice and incompetence in the face of terrorism, rather than 100 percent.

Islamic jihadists attacked America year after year throughout the Clinton administration. They did everything but blow up his proverbial "bridge to the 21st century." Every year but one, Clinton found an excuse not to fight back.

The first month Clinton was in office, Islamic terrorists with suspected links to al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center.

For the first time ever, a terrorist act against America was treated not as a matter of national security, but exclusively as a simple criminal offense. The individual bombers were tried in a criminal court. (The one plotter who got away fled to Iraq, that peaceful haven of kite-flying children until Bush invaded and turned it into a nation of dangerous lunatics.)

Read the rest...

Heather Wilson on How to Catch Terrorists

That measure, sponsored by Rep. Heather Wilson, R-New Mexico, and endorsed by the GOP chairmen of the Judiciary and Intelligence committees, would require the administration to wait until a terrorist attack to open an electronic surveillance program

Read the whole thing.

I wrote Heather a nice note:

Dear Heather,

I'm sure you are a nice person. Just read about your proposed legislation requiring the administration to wait until AFTER a terrorist attack before monitoring terrorist communications.

Since the terrorists are presumably dead by this time, what purpose would this achieve? And if the terrorists wait for at least 45 days, we have to turn off the surveillance and wait for the next attack?

Would you consider modifying your proposal to allow the President to begin monitoring 5 minutes BEFORE the attack?

That would not make your proposal less ridiculous, but there would be so many more ways we can have fun at the way people in Washington think.

I would appreciate your reply for my blog where your original proposal is being featured.



I'll let you know when Heather writes back. She is such a kind and considerate person, I just know she will. Here's her website and her picture:

The Media Use of Modifiers

You get used to it after a while and you catch yourself grinning as you see the descriptive adjectives that are used to “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” tell you what to think about a fact.

Here are two very recent examples.

The first is from Back Talk blog which is edited by a self described: “professor at a major research university, a registered Democrat, a liberal by most measures, but a radical conservative relative to the large majority of my colleagues.”

He has followed an reported on casualty figures in Baghdad month-to-month and predicted that the earlier, erroneous reports of a 50% drop in deaths was not accurate. But he notices one other thing:

Subtly Shaping your Perception of Iraq
Here is a new story on August casualties in Iraq, which is a topic that I have posted on several times before (e.g., here and here, for example):
U.S. omitted key casualty details

By Patrick Quinn
Associated Press
Published September 12, 2006

BAGHDAD -- The American military did not count people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks, including suicide bombings, when it reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders in the Baghdad area last month, the U.S. command said Monday.

The story includes this paragraph, which is what I'd like to focus on:

But the types of slayings, including suicide bombings, that the U.S. excluded from the category of "murder" weren't made explicit at the time. That led to confusion after Iraqi Health Ministry figures showed that 1,536 people died violently in and around Baghdad in August, nearly the same number as in July.

Nearly the same as July? Let's look at how the media hysterically reported the apparent increase in casualties that occurred in July compared to June:
The July morgue toll of 1,815 marked a big jump over the 1,595 in June and is the largest since the aftermath of the February bombing of the Shiite Golden Mosque of Samarra, which triggered an explosion of sectarian violence.

Oh, I get it. The reported increase from 1595 to 1885 that occurred from June to July (290 additional deaths) is a "big jump," but the reported decrease from 1885 to 1536 from July to August (349 fewer deaths) is negligible because the two numbers are "nearly the same."

And there you have it. That's how our media subtly influences how you feel about what is happening in Iraq.

The second is from MSNBC.

Remember those poll numbers from spring and summer when Bush’s poll numbers were always accompanied by the adjective “plummeting?” Well they got pretty low, around 32% approval rating in some polls as I recall. And as they hung around that number (not going lower) the term “plummeting” was still being used. Well, guess what, Bush’s approval rating is now at 42% in the NBC/Journal poll. How does Mark Murray, political reporter for NBC News phrase it?

Slight Bush uptick.

To be fair to Murray, it appears that the NBC/Journal poll appears to have Bush bottoming out at 36% approval.

Going from 32% to 32% approval means Bush’s ratings were plummeting. Going from 32% to 42% and this is a “slight uptick.”

Bradley A. Smith: Yes, senator, McCain-Feingold does censor political speech

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., takes issue with The Examiner’s editorial criticism of the McCain-Feingold bill and its “ban” on certain broadcast ads. The indignant senator responds that the law “doesn’t ban or censor any speech.”


Feingold’s position is disingenuous. For just a few sentences after telling us the law “doesn’t ban or censor any speech,” he tells us that McCain-Feingold was necessary to prevent some voices from being “drowned out” by others. As McCain-Feingold does nothing to affirmatively create or encourage speech — it offers no subsidies or platform for political speech — the only way it can prevent anyone’s voice from being “drowned out” is through the suppression of other speech — and that is indeed what McCain-Feingold does, as the senator must know.

It is true, as the senator notes, that an organization can still use a political action committee to run ads critical of members of Congress. Of course, most citizens groups — including many large ones, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Bar Association — do not have PACs.

Even when organizations have PACs, they are a poor substitute for direct political speech. PACs are subject to a great deal of regulation, including limitations on who may be solicited for contributions. As a result, most PACs lack the funds to run serious broadcast campaigns.

Read the whole thing

Lt. Smash Interviews Code Pink

IT’S FRIDAY NIGHT, and I’m trolling for interviews at the Code Pink protest outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. But this time, Bruce “The Bouncer” Wolf makes it clear that I am persona non grata.

As Goes Harvard...

Excerpt:

....In a recently published book on the decline of Harvard, Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education,1 he cites the excuse offered by one member of the faculty committee: “the committee thought the best thing was to put a row of empty bottles up and see how the faculty wanted to fill them.” Lewis responds, acidly:

The empty bottles could be filled with anything so long as the right department was offering it. . . . But there is absolutely nothing that Harvard can expect students will know after they take three science or three humanities courses freely chosen from across the entire course catalog. The proposed general-education requirement gives up entirely on the idea of shared knowledge, shared values, even shared aspirations. In the absence of any pronouncement that anything is more important than anything else for Harvard students to know, Harvard is declaring that one can be an educated person in the 21st century without knowing anything about genomes, chromosomes, or Shakespeare.

North Korea: The Natural Death of North Korean Stalinism

L:ong but worth it if you're interested.

Jonah goldberg on America the Treacherous: The seditious dementia of conspiracy theories.

Worth reproducing in full:

There is a virulent form of unpatriotism festering in America today. Like an algae bloom that deprives life of oxygen, it starves democracy of the air of reason. It now thrives on what we call the far Left, but like a dead zone off the coast, it moves with the tides.

I am referring to the seditious dementia of conspiracy theories, the death of faith not in some mere administration or Congress but in America itself.

Haven’t you heard? The U.S. government blew up the World Trade Center. Oh, sorry, that’s not right. The planes did knock down those buildings, but the White House was in on it. Oh, no, sorry again, that’s not what happened. It was the Jews. They razed it without leaving any fingerprints — save for the 4,000 Zionist co-conspirators who were tipped off in advance — in order to frame the peace-loving Muslims of al Qaeda. (Those crafty Hebrews are always coming up with clever ways to make Islamic fanatics look bad, like getting blown up.) Bin Laden’s admission that he did it? Well, of course. He’s in on it.

Presumably, Bush’s demolition experts applied the same expertise to the levees in New Orleans. That’s another theory in wide circulation today thanks in no small part to Spike Lee, who gave it a fair airing in an HBO documentary.

The metaphysical, ontological stupidity of all this defies rational rebuttal. It would be like proving I didn’t have unicorn for dinner in late December of 1987.

Here’s a question: How is a president willing — and able! — to bring down the World Trade Center, murdering nearly 3,000 Americans without inspiring a single whistle-blower or attracting a solitary eyewitness, somehow morally or logistically incapable of planting some exculpatory WMDs in Iraq?

As for Spike & Co., what took Bush so long? Why wait for a hurricane? Oh, how he must have yearned, his men and equipment long in place, to cleanse America of the Big Easy. Oh joyous St. Katrina’s Day! And yet, Bush failed to plan for the aftermath in a way that wouldn’t defenestrate his poll numbers.

Stupidity isn’t the right word for these dark imaginings, because some of these conspiracy theorists are very smart people. Nor is it fair to say they are all left-wingers. Indeed, two prominent 9/11 conspiracy theorists — Morgan Reynolds and Paul Craig Roberts — worked in Republican administrations and have strong conservative credentials. And let us not forget that in the 1990s, sweaty fingers pointed right-to-left. Under Clinton, it was the United Nations — with its satellite office at the Rose Law Firm — that imposed order with its fleet of black helicopters.

“Conspiracy theorist” isn’t quite right either. These are priests of the Church of Conspiracy, a heresy of Gnostic heresy which holds that man is the ruler of history, the demiurge of all events that befall us. Powerful and unseen forces lurk in the shadows. The conspiracy theorists know they’re out there, even as the enemy’s name changes almost daily: Big Oil, capitalists, Republicans, or perhaps those eternal pullers of mankind’s puppet strings, the Jews.

The masons of dementia build upon a bedrock of one absolute truth: Bad things happen, and someone must be responsible. Upon this bedrock they pile convenient and selective facts like bricks. Contradictory facts are clever lies. When Popular Mechanics debunked 9/11 hokum, the immediate response from conspiratorialists was “cover-up!” and “CIA front!” because in this perverted faith, denying the ultimate truth must be proof of a lie.

This rough beast slouches toward sedition because it assumes not that our leaders are knaves or even mere criminals, but that they are murderous Supermen with no loyalty to nation, decency or law. Our Constitution is a fraud, a charade for the rubes some of us naively call citizens. If you disagree, you’re either fool or “in on it.” In his 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter demonstrated that this fever of the mind is as old as America itself and its outbreaks flare up across the ideological landscape. What is so sad and frightening is that this diseased thinking is reaching epidemic proportions. More than a third of Americans believe the U.S. government was likely to have been involved in 9/11.

In the past, when these outbreaks occurred on the political right, liberal hand-wringers fretted about incipient fascism and rising McCarthyism. Today, the best we get from them is a bemused and sterile chuckle.

The Daily DimWit: The Unbearable Spinelessness of the Lamestream Media

I always enjoy Villanous company. In this one she takes poor

Jack Shafer's positively catty review of fave New Republic editor-in-chief Marty Peretz' new blog, The Spine

Read the whole thing

Tony Jones speaks with author and commentator Christopher Hitchens

The Belmont Club:

One of the reasons people like Christopher Hitchens do so well in talk show interviews is that they are utterly unintimidated by media personalities. Not that they'll get up and throw a chair at their interviewer, which has happened on some occasions on the cheesier shows, but that they'll verbally reach out and pull their interlocutors ideas out of the speech bubble, twist them into pretzels and hand them back for the whole audience to see. After this treatment , their interviewers, who are normally accustomed to controlling the discussion by and by find themselves, in spite of everything, on the wrong end of the microphone. Here's Christopher Hitchens being grilled by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Tony Jones.

Click on the link for the interview.

One more YouTube: It's in the Koran

"YouTube" Trained Gold Fish

Do your goldfish do that?

"YouTube" Trained Gold Fish

Do your goldfish do that?

YouTube: Angry Subtitles

Another funny.

YouTube: Is This The Way To Al-Jazeera (BBC London Spoof)

Funny.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar Reported Captured

Good news for the Afghan people.

Age of terror, age of illusions

Robert Sibley writes - in the Ottawa Citizen - something that I also feel: a great anger (God forgive me)

toward the intellectuals of our time, the cosmopolitans and sophists who, unwittingly or not, contributed to all that destruction through their sophisticated hostility towards the mores and traditions of western civilization.

He talks about watching people jump from the burning buildings of the Word Trade Center

I still see bodies falling. Standing at my hotel window, overlooking Ground Zero, it's not hard to visualize the flaming towers and the bird-like figures of human bodies plummeting through the air. I especially remember a couple leaping hand in hand into emptiness. In their flapping clothes they looked like big clumsy birds, desperate to fly.

There were others, of course. Dozens. According to one estimate, some 200 people jumped from the North and South Towers in the hour-and-a-half the buildings remained standing after the planes hit the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Clerks and executives, cooks and waiters, patrons and clients; they leaped in a continuous stream from the four sides of the buildings, from the office windows of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading firm, from the Windows on the World restaurant that occupied the 106th and 107th floors, from the offices of the insurance company Marsh & McLennan. Writer Tom Junod, in a recent article in Esquire magazine, described the jumpers in heartbreaking imagery: "They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when ceilings fell and the floors collapse; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died."

Some clearly hoped they wouldn't die. They used drapes and tablecloths as parachutes. It did no good. The force of falling tore the makeshift parachutes from their hands. And so they fell, bodies arcing and wheeling and tumbling through space, dropping at an ever-increasing a rate of 9.8 metres per second. In the 10 seconds or so it took to reach the ground they were moving at more than 200 km/h. At that speed their clothes were shredded and stripped from their bodies.

...

I return to my chair and the book I had been reading -- Samuel Dill's Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire. At the time, Christianity was displacing the old pagan religion and the empire was under frequent attack from barbarians. The great weakness, though, as Dill recounts, was the empire's effete elites. He describes the period as a time when the ruling class -- politicians, bureaucrats, intellectuals, artists -- were cocooned in lifestyle luxury, unwilling to respond to the barbarian threat on the borders. "This self-centred contentment with the material pleasures of life, this rather vacant existence, gliding away in ease and luxury, and a round of trivial social engagements ... is the real reproach against the character of the upper class of that age ... Faith in the stability of the Empire and Roman culture is perfectly untroubled. There is not a hint of those dim hordes, already mustering for their advance ..." It was, Dill concludes, an "age of illusions."

A long read, but defintely worth while.

'A struggle for civilization'

From the Washington Times:

President Bush yesterday led the nation in silent remembrances for the almost 3,000 victims of the September 11 attacks, hugging family members and standing solemnly for each moment of silence at the three sites where terrorists crashed four hijacked planes that sunny Tuesday morning five years ago.

After the stops in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, the president addressed the nation last night, reminding Americans that ever since the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, the United States has been at war in "a struggle for civilization."

"America did not ask for this war, and every American wishes it were over. So do I. But the war is not over, and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious," Mr. Bush said. "We are in a war that will set the course for this new century and determine the destiny of millions across the world."

Mallard Filllmore

I Refuse to Marry Angelina Jolie

Under any circumstances, gay marriage or not.

Pictures of 9/11

Click on the link to begin