LOVE YOUR FREEDOM? THANK A VET.

[Take a deep breath. Start again.... Despite having had my hands on a computer for several years now, what I know about the beasts could fit into a thimble, with room to spare. So periodically the dog eats my homework. (See Friday’s post.) It’s called a SAVE button—I’m told they’re very useful.]

So Veterans’ Day (called Remembrance Day in Britain and Canada, which has a nice ring) was two days ago, and most of what’s worth saying about it has probably already been said.

My own cyber-vaporized remarks included some development of my ongoing frustration with President Bush—but apparently he got wind of my disapproval and addressed my complaints in his speech to military personnel in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania. It’s a ten-pager, if you print it out—quite a mouthful. I guess that’s what comes of trying to do about two years’ worth of damage control in one afternoon.

I gave myself a surprise one night last week when I was watching the news— Bush came on, giving an unrehearsed response to the news of some terrorist incident or other, and before he got ten words out, I grabbed the remote and switched the television off. The response was so quick and deliberate that it could only remind me of what had become my habit between 1993 and 2001, hitting the kill-switch every time the face of William Jefferson Clinton appeared.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate— for one thing, I still tend to switch him off to this very day; also,the reflex didn’t really kick in until 1995. Whereas the need to look away from Bush is born mostly of sheer exasperation (combined with that reluctance we all have to watch someone invite public scorn— like when we lower our eyes when an untalented child, drunken uncle, or manifestly unqualified Supreme Court candidate mounts the stage) -- my Clinton reflex is born of profound visceral disgust, and I can name the day and place it began: June 6, 1995, Normandy, France.

There was never any question that President Clinton must attend the ceremonies marking the 50^th anniversary of D-day. This was compulsory, by virtue of his office, and his personal suitability was not an issue. Too bad nobody told him that. It is testimony to the monumental self-absorption which he has never ceased to exhibit, that he managed to make the D-day commemorations all about him, never missing an opportunity for the well-rehearsed lip-tremble to be captured in the endless photo-op.

Never did he show a milli-second’s acquaintance with the humility which would have been appropriate to a man, raised to the world’s most powerful position, who had evaded serving his country in Vietnam by sending written supplications to influential people who shared his professed loathing of the military. Never could we detect that the heroes of D-day— ordinary Americans who sacrificed their lives in acts of extraordinary courage— inspired in Bill Clinton one instant’s blush of much-deserved shame.

The pinnacle of this revolting display was Clinton’s “solitary” stroll down a section of the broad beach dubbed “Omaha” – followed at a discreet distance, of course, by the cameras. At one point the president squatted down and fiddled in the sand, leaving behind, for the benefit of the paparazzi, a small cross made of pebbles— his spiritual meditation on this historic place.

Later the word went out that this was all a set-up, arranged by his advance-men, because there are no pebbles on Omaha Beach— an accusation so extreme it was hard to imagine it being made if there were no substance behind it. But that assumption is what the authors of smear-jobs always rely on (the “Bush lied” mantra being the prime current example), so I reserved judgment at the time. (It is also alleged that presidential staffers knocked over gravestones near the D-day beaches so Clinton could be seen re-erecting them.) The whole D-day pageant had afforded quite enough to be disgusted about without worrying over pebbles on a beach. I was moved to write a short poem on the subject, a parody of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”

Eight years later I walked Omaha Beach—lots of it. I can confirm: you’d have to go for miles out on the sands (where Mr. Clinton and his micro-cairn were photographed) before you found enough pebbles to put into a line. His Kodak moment had been a fraud.

While we're on the subject of that particular beach: public ignorance of just about anything to do with history is abysmal and frightening-- everybody knows that. No doubt there are millions of Americans whose total understanding of the events of D-day has been derived from Saving Private Ryan-- and frankly, that's not half bad. The film as a whole was founded on a stupid, very 1990's premise, but the first 25 minutes are so good that I think Spielberg ought to have gotten some kind of medal for it.

However, they are no substitute for a trip to the site itself. And no trip to the Normandy Beaches is complete without visits to (a) the American cemetery, and (b) every museum you can find, large and small (with the possible exception of the new Canadian one at Juno Beach, which is AWFUL-- Canadians are remembered in several other museums much much better than they are memorialized at their own-- it's a scandal).

Our trip there was a graduation gift to our eldest son, before he officially joined up with the Marines. He wanted to see major sites for both World Wars, so we travelled to Normandy, Belgium, and the Marne, especially Belleau Wood, where the Marines came into their own in 1918 holding off the advance that got within a few miles of Paris, and further forging their reputation as the Kick-ass Few and Proud.

This was June of 2003-- just a few months after the invasion of Iraq, when Americans were (ahem) not too popular in France. (There had even been some grave desecration.) We went there with some trepidation, prepared to be met coolly if not with hostility. We were not prepared for the greeting we got.

To this day I can't tell anyone about it without choking up-- the American and Allied flags, not just in "official" locations (we arrived on June 8, and there had been the annual ceremonies) but still hanging on the balconies of private homes; the permanent sign, in English, painted on a restaurant window: "We welcome our liberators"; the 20-something museum guide who, when thanked for his presentation by several American vets (probably of Korea), looked them square in the eyes and said, "No-- thank YOU." Apparently in France, at least in Normandy, parents still tell their children the important facts of their history.

Here are some of those important facts:

American casualties, June 1 - September 14, 1945: 30,000 dead - 110,000 wounded (minimum)

French civilian casualties (over roughly the same period): 15-20,000 killed or missing

Apparently there are French people who think it was worth it.

Those of us who grew up during the Vietnam war, and were in high school while class-mates were still being drafted for it, had a pretty clear notion of what it meant to have headed for the National Guard, and I have no illusions about George Bush’s or Dan Quayle’s motives for pursuing that option. (May I refer anyone who is still confused about Mr. Bush’s service record to the definitive chronologies, here and here.) But regardless of where or why or for how long you carry it out, it takes gonads of steel to fly a fighter jet, and Mr. Bush did it well.

It also took steel gonads for Bush to do what the previous president and his partisans in Congress had balked at doing: to acknowledge that war had been declared against the United States (August 1996) and certainly by September 11, 2001,it was time to make answer. There is a case to be made that it takes steel gonads to persevere with a war that is increasingly unpopular, especially when that unpopularity is due to selective, manipulative, biased, and occasionally treasonous reporting, in the media and in the halls of government.

Unfortunately it seems to be the president’s view that remaining mute in the face of outrageous abuse and slander from America’s elected representatives, and their “527” accomplices, is also an exercise in flexing those gonads. If that's what he thinks, he is dead wrong.

It’s the gonads of steel that are truly AWOL now—and have been for months, maybe years. What Bush has been exhibiting is a fatally misplaced sense of purity, that makes him reluctant to dignify the slanders with a response and to get down in the dirty trenches of political warfare to defend his vision. He did have one. Some of us remember what it was, and still believe in it. But let it be clearly understood—it has never been about believing in him.

It is one of Bush’s critical flaws—one that has probably always been characteristic of him (and might make him underqualified to be president) is the degree to which his method of operation is deeply personal. This was an asset to a governor of Texas (the least powerful governorship in the 50 States). But it makes for scales on the eyes of a president.

There is nothing unusual about a president bringing his inner circle with him to Washington— Clinton brought half of Arkansas. But Clinton’s people were there because they shared his keen and ruthless political instincts (except for Vince Foster, apparently— whatever the facts are on that mystery, he was clearly a fish out of water in Washington). By contrast, Bush’s inner circle got there mostly on loyalty. They are not without talent, but they seem to get jobs unrelated to the talents they have.

Oh Scott McClellan. The Anchoress called him a “milquetoast.” She is entirely too kind. One hears many different things about Ari Fleischer, not all of them flattering, but as the guy facing the wolverines in the Washington press corps every day, he was a master. It was distressing to learn that he was leaving, and when McClellan stepped in I was convinced this had to be a temporary measure until a grown-up could be hired. From day one McClellan has struck me as the worst possible choice for his job, with the look of a sweaty, dough-faced prep-school prefect living in perpetual fear of being wedgied in the boys’ john and stuffed in a locker.

He’s supposed to be the president’s goalie, for cripes sake—the guy sent out with mammoth pads, huge gloves, a giant stick (way bigger than everyone else’s), and a helmet/mask decorated with the fangs of some wild animal. Scott McClellan stands in the goal-crease wearing mittens and wet pants. But some of this mystery was cleared up recently— I found out he’s an old hand from Texas. Spare us another unqualified crony.

All the real evidence suggests that George Bush in not unintelligent or incapable. But I think David Frum (former Bush speech-writer, who basically admires him) was right on the money in his 2003 book The Right Man, to see Bush as “impatient, quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic, often uncurious, and as a result ill-informed . . .” — and we can now add to that excessively reliant on instinct, personal ties and loyalty rather than dispassionate rational judgment.

Frum went on in the above-quoted sentence to say that “outweighing the faults are his virtues: decency, honesty, rectitude, courage, and tenacity," and Frum stands by that assessment (or at least he did prior to the Harriet Miers debacle, against which Frum led the most organized revolt). Well, he knows better than I do— but the well-founded charges of cronyism, coupled with Bush's personal tardiness in responding to Hurricane Katrina and his breathtaking tardiness in responding to the Democrats’ slanders of both his administration and our armed forces in the field, speak to me of a kind of mental laziness, which is just inexcusable.

We’re all grateful that the president went on the much-belated attack on Veterans’ Day against the tsunami of lies which has threatened to sweep away all that remains of his moral authority (which was once quite considerable, and well-deserved). I for one am tired of making excuses for the inexcusable, and of the painful prospect of watching him bumble through another press conference regarding issues and events about which any fully engaged person should have one or two good rhetorical punches always to hand. The idea that the Bush administration is in some way inherently evil continues to be one of the stupidest things any left-wing partisan could believe in—evil is so much more clever than any of these people.

Though Veterans' Day may be past, the season is still ripe for paying tribute to our men and women in uniform. They deserve vocal support, and not just from my Iraqi and Iranian house-painters!

And there's a certain Frenchman who could put many Americans to shame-- I'm thinking of our guide at Belleau Wood, Gilles Lagin, a young family man, mechanic by day, who spends every spare moment (and no small amount of cash) studying and preserving the legacy of the Marines who fought for the soil on which he was raised.

We spent seven (!) fascinating hours in his company, covering the battles from every angle, walking amid the trenches on the pivotal hill-top (where Marines had dug in 85 years to the day before we got there), and pausing at the beautiful cemetery and awe-inspring chapel in the valley below. Gilles has built his own museum of period military artefacts (and often contacted the descendants of the missing whose dog-tags or other identifiable items he has found), and has cultivated an ardent admiration for the United States Marine Corps since he was 9 years old.

What's French for OO-RAH?

Once you’ve finished Mac Owens’ salute to his fellow Marines and their 230^th birthday, have a closer look at the Corps from here:

Marines home page
Leatherneck Magazine
From the Hall to the Shores -- milblog
Scuttlebutt and Small Chow-- a great history of the Corps, and one of the most beautifully designed websites you'll ever lay eyes on

From the parents: Marine parents, Moms, and more Moms
And even though they're Army, take a look at Some soldier's Mom and Keep My Soldier Safe

Want to know the TRUTH about what's going on in the Big Sandbox? Check here:

Arthur Chrenkoff-- Blog has now ceased, but he's the pioneer in Good News From Iraq/Afghanistan (scroll down to "The Rest of the Best"). Until you read this, you have no business even having an opinion about the war, much less expressing one.

Chrenkoff's mantle taken up by Good News from Iraq (good sounds too)

Michael Yon -- self-embedded reporter (you can support his work through pay-pal)-- gritty, on the ground, this is the REAL THING

The late (murdered by terrorists in Iraq) Steven Vincent reported from In the Red Zone (also his book title)

U.S. Central Command

Military History and a keen eye to the present from Victor Davis Hanson

Military weblogs (active and retired):
Lance in Iraq
The Mudville Gazetter
The guys at the Fourth Rail
Blackfive

Civilan Support Groups (GIVE! GIVE! GIVE!):
- California businessman Jim Hake got the ball rolling with Spirit of America-- building the future of Iraq, winning hearts and minds
- Film and TV star Gary Sinise co-founded Operation Iraqi Children, which he supports through his Lt. Dan Band -- he doesn't just write the checks, he's been there
- Valour IT gets lap-tops for disabled veterans
- Make contact and provide needed stuff to troops in the field by being a Soldiers' Angel
- Reading material for troops at Books for Soldiers and Books for Baghdad
- Snacks and personal need items through Treats for Troops
- Homes for disabled vets -- help build a new Fisher House for military families to be near their wounded soldier's hospital
- Get special gifts to a wounded soldier

America Supports You is a Department of Defense initiative, but civilian-driven

I just spent five hours writing a fantastic Remembrance Day post with dozens of links to things military, and lots of hugely insightful thoughts about the last two presidents, AND MY COMPUTER ATE IT.

I feel like I've been shot.

If I have the heart I'll reconstruct it. Meanwhile, Happy Birthday Marine Corps (230 years) as celebrated by Mac Owens at NRO.


And we'll give the annual nod to Major John McRae with the least heeded words of his poem:

If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

There's a whole lot of "breaking faith" happening now among American leftists who would gladly throw away the lives of their military and of hundreds of thousands of victims of jihadist oppressors, if it meant they could administer the fatal blow to George W. Bush's regime. Fortunately, whether they believe in it or not, there is an afterlife and a final judgement. Not that we should have to wait that long for them to be dealt with.

A Jarhead on "JARHEAD"

Sometimes my baby boy still does what I tell him.

He's the one in Marine flight school (just about to get "winged," having just passed his big instrumentation test) and I told him he had to get out and see Jarhead ASAP so I could hear what real Marines had to say about it. Apparently they made up about 90% of the audience in attendance down there in Pensacola-land. His general comment was "thumbs sideways" sporting a fashionable khaki "neutral"-- he puts it best in his own words (I keep telling him to be a military journalist).

Money quotes (PETA discretion advised):

The training scenes (apparently borrowing the formula of Full Metal Jacket) were reminiscent of my own experience at TBS ...I don't know if I buy the machine gun shooting live rounds right over the Marines' heads. On the other hand, we participated in several live-fire exercises at TBS which, despite all our safeguards, are inherently dangerous. As for the paintball-guns: we used those. (And they're the most fun you can have without setting a small animal on fire).

But what about the soul of the story? What was it trying to tell us? I was never sure... Was it trying to tell us of the monotony of warfare? That's nothing new: Roman legionaries could have told us the same thing... Though when it comes to Marines being deadly, brutal, and somewhat insane, I'll let you all in on a little secret: true or not, we cultivate that image because when it comes time to go into battle and Abu Musab Whoever learns that he's got Marines charging toward him, he's already half-terrified. And if he's scared, we've already beaten his mind, which makes beating his body that much easier and much less costly for us.

Ooh-rah. (And, no, they don't say it every other sentence.) And that business about "already half-terrified"? Oh yes-- confirmed from many sources, over many wars.

Duly noted: My other baby boys occasionally do what I tell them too. All this is pretty amazing, since it's a very long-distance affair, receiving their Canadian-based orders, as they do, in:

Providence






and

Inner Mongolia

THE FRENCH DISEASE

The first place-name reported as the fires erupted in suburban Paris was "St. Denis", a name which means only one thing to me: the birthplace of what we now call "Gothic" architectural style.


The abbey church there, today sadly marooned among warehouses and other inglorious structures, was once home to a Benedictine monastic community whose 12th-century Abbot, Suger, masterminded the overhaul of the existing Romanesque church to embody his new theology of the meaning and power of light as an image God, by incoporating all the latest ideas and construction technologies of his age. Under his supervision (really his micro-management, it's fair to say) St. Denis became the model for architectural innovation all over Europe, its style transported almost immediately to Canterbury, England, among other places.


Ironically (it now seems), St. Denis was the first building in Christian Europe to fully exploit the structural possibilities of the pointed arch -- a feature borrowed from the architectural wonders of Moorish (Islamic) Spain.


So I think about St. Denis, and the Jihad-fuelled rage now literally inflaming the Muslim ghettos around it, and in cities across France-- and I whisper through clenched teeth, "Don't you dare. Don't even think about it."

Rose Window

KRISTALLTAG in Argentina

Slap me on the head and call me stupid, but I wish someone would explain to me how the smashing of shop-windows and burning of a telephone booth on the streets of Mar Del Plata, Argentina, constitutes anything resembling a statement about the imagined evils and lies of George W. Bush, much less something resembling action taken to bring the evils to an end.

From my armchair it looked like a bunch of wild animals, too well-dressed to be residents of a local barrio, wreaking mindless destruction upon a fairly upscale urban shopping area-- an act that can have only one consequence, which is to drain the local economy (apparently in some distress already) even further by the cost of compensation and reconstruction for business owners who are not, as best I can tell, George W. Bush or any of his relatives or employees.

There was a time when many people (especially in the western press) were prepared to believe that this kind of madness was founded in genuine complaints about specific issues. But even the media are beginning to notice a difference between the peaceful assembly of anti-war demonstrators (who themselves are comically dissipated into a thousand wacko causes for which peace demo's are magnets now) and the violent rioting-for-fun of itinerant professional anti-globalist anarchists.

The impotence of the Argentinian police in the face of these savages was particularly sad. You would think we've seen enough of this now for local authorities to plan a way to capture the offenders-- like forming anti-riot barricades, of the sort seen in the news video from Mar Del Plata, but placing them at various streets on the perimeter of the action, and then marching them towards each other until the maximum number of rioters are boxed in-- at which point they are fire-hosed and then extracted one by one into waiting police vans. There isn't a single one of them who should be allowed to escape arrest for being accessories, if not perpetrators, of vandalism and assault on a grand scale.
There were any number of media people on the rioters' side of the barricade, who, in my view, were also accessories and probably stimulated the rioters into "performing" before the cameras. They should also be swept up in the arrests, with their fate dependent upon their willingness to contribute, through film and testimony, to the prosecution of the vandals.

People on the political left tend to enjoy indulging in setting up "moral equivalencies" between things that aren't even in the same universe (like Abu Ghraib and Auschwitz), so I'll borrow a page from them and set up at least a theoretical parallel between the automatic-reflex rage and impotent demonstra-stunt of the anti-globalist rent-a-mob, and the invoking of Rule 21 by the Senate Democratic leadership.

Both represent a wildly flailing tantrum by people seriously detached from reality. There are ways to make political change, and the battles can be waged aggressively, with even the occasional whack below the belt-- but it helps to actually be punching at your opponent, using gloves and the muscle you've built from disciiplined training. With their obsessive fantasy that Bush is evil incarnate, that the White House is packed with his satanic familiars, and that Karl Rove carries the One Ring that Rules Them All, the Democrats continue to punch at shadows and waste their energy on mindless verbal vandalism, too absorbed in indulging their emotions to ever marshal their troops or their arguments into marching toward a goal, a program, something, anything!

At what point does quadruple jeopardy kick in? How many times will they investigate the same information in hopes of reaching their desired conclusion about the use or misuse of intelligence, and finding that one scribbled note among the hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper which will send Karl Rove to the electric chair? This is NOT an exaggeration of the state of the Democratic partisan mind at this moment in history. Someone, please, circulate Einstein's definition of insanity -- "doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results" -- among the Senate Democrats and tell them to look in the mirror for further clarification.

And to what end is all this insanity? There is no undoing of what has transpired, there is NO responsible argument to be made for pulling out of Iraq, and out of the wider world which is now exploding in Jihadist wrath (the sole and undiminished rationale for our military interventions) in places where national policy has been consistently friendly to (and profited from) Arab/Islamic interests. And no matter how highly place your position in government, you cannot make it a crime to be surprised by history. It's actually kind of unfortunate that, even with a majority in both houses of congress, most state governments, and the voting public, Republicans cannot make it a crime for Democrats to demoralize and slander our American military in the field. If they could, most of the Senate leadership would be wearing orange jumpsuits.

I had one eye to the television the other night as I was washing some dishes, and tuned in to the last half-hour of the first episode of "Band of Brothers"-- the brilliant 2001 mini-series that follows the path of Easy Company of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, from their training in England to the Normandy landing in 1944, through the Battle of the Bulge to the capture of Hitler's mountain retreat in 1945. At the end of episode one, a somewhat rag-tag collection of citizen soldiers, drawn from every walk of life, mostly draftees, some barely old enough to shave every day, are boosted into a rattling airplane and fly off to save the world.

Well, what could I do but burst into tears? Partly in the knowledge that thousands-- that's THOUSANDS-- would die in a single day. Partly in the knowledge that they achieved their goal-- they did save the world, each and every one playing his part, even if he didn't survive June 6. (I've walked the cemetery above Omaha Beach -- it is devastating to see how many crosses bear that date.)

But part of what brought me to tears was the knowledge that these men get to be heroes-- these men who were dropped in the wrong place, often to be slaughtered before they hit ground, or smashed up when their canvas-and-toothpicks gliders slid into the fortified bocage hedges that no one had bothered to study and plan for-- these men who signalled each other in the dark with a child's toy, the tin "cricket" clicker-- these men who were sent like a tsunami to wash over enemy territory into they-knew-not-what, for who-knew-how-long and at what cost-- these men get to be heroes. And well they should.

But our soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen today -- the most educated, fit, highly trained and disciplined, most flexible, most humanitarian fighting force in human history-- they get to be compared to Nazis; they get to be embodied in Lynndie England; they get to star (posthumously, and without consent) in a slick tv ad now being run by Operation Truth, dressed only in their anonymous, flag-draped coffins. There are roughly 150,000 troops in Iraq at any given time, with tens of thousands more who have been there and are rotated out. Membership in Operation Truth is about 600 veterans (not all of OIF). Who speaks for our soldiers?

Worst of all, our troops in Iraq get to be commanded by a Secretary of Defense, under a Commander-in-Chief, who both seem completely incapable, and not overly interested, in informing the American public, in any specific and measurable way, that our troops have given their all, and some their lives, for what history will show is a monumental victory on every level. The impotent railing in the mainstream network and print news (the "old Europe" of the information industry), in the streets, and in the Senate, will not win the war against the truth, no matter how much assistance they get from the Bush administration!

Now please go somewhere quiet and read Psalm 90/91 for all our military around the world.

BONUS: Time on your hands? Take the Abu Ghraib quiz.

RIP: Theo van Gogh, Rosa Parks

THEO VAN GOGH
Francis Fukuyama reminds us at OpinionJournal that Theo van Gogh, Dutch filmmaker with impressive artistic bloodlines ("radical libertarian, ... television producer, talk show host, newspaper columnist, and all-around mischief-maker," as described by Daniel Pipes) was executed one year ago yesterday for the "crime" of making a controversial documentary exposé about the difficult life of a Muslim woman in Europe.

The execution was not state-sanctioned, of course-- it was a cold-blooded daylight murder on the streets of Amsterdam, which left no ambiguities about its motive, since the Morroccan/Dutch jihadist who killed Van Gogh left a five-page raving screed pinned to the victim's chest with one of his knives (the other having been used to perform the near-decapitation that followed repeated bullet-wounds, inflicted as Van Gogh pleaded for his life). One of the most notable aspects of this murder is how the Hollywood Left-- those freedom fighters for tolerance and the right to speak our minds-- met the news with a massive collective yawn.

Kathy Shaidle (who also has a short piece on Van Gogh) once boiled down that special brand of Hollywood hypocrisy to this unforgettable one-liner: "If George Bush is Hitler, why isn't Bill Maher a lampshade?"

That was in reference to Maher's recent outrageous throw-away line comparing Laura Bush's love for her husband to Hitler being loved by his dog. But for Maher's name in the above question, read in Michael Moore (speaking of all-round mischief-makers), Barbra Streisand, Cindy Sheehan, Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill, Juan Cole, Markos Moulitsas, Jimmy Carter, and Senators Kennedy, Leahy, Durbin, Pelosi, Boxer, Byrd, Rangel, Reid, blah, blah, blah-- and countless others who would be easy candidates for an obscure shallow grave if George Bush were really the fanatical dictator of the fascist state that the extreme left has painted in their common rhetorical excess.

If Bush is more dangerous than Hitler (as an unbelievably large chorus of voices would have it), where are the ovens? Where are the death trains? If he's really more of a threat to the world than Saddam ever was, where are the mass graves? Where are the parched marshlands and the burning oil wells? Why are CBS and CNN and the New York Times still in business? Why is Michael Moore not lying on a Manhattan street with Project for a New American Century memos stabbed into his chest? (PNAC is a nefarious neo-con plot so secret that it has a massive website where every position paper is published in full.)

Why? Because the "Bush-is-Hitler/no-better-than-Saddam" accusation is, not to put too fine a point on it, INSANE. And it could only be made by people who are benefitting from the fact that it is a LIE. The Hollywood Left and the traditional megaliths of the press would be well-advised on this particular day to figure out where the real enemy to their freedom is, and to update the famous retrospective of Pastor Martin Niemöller: "First they came for Theo van Gogh, and I didn't give a damn..."


ROSA PARKS
Maybe we know who Rosa Parks is because of one of those strange accidents of history. You see, she's not the first black woman in the 50's to have refused to get out of a "whites only" seat on a bus.

That may have been Martha White of Baton Rouge, Louisianna, in June 1953, whose manhandling by a bus driver when she tried to make use of a hard-won provision of a city council ordinance (allowing blacks to take front seats if they weren't being used) touched off a bus boycott in Baton Rouge. The boycott lasted less than two weeks, probably because it had been preceded by effective leadership (Rev. T. J. Jemison of Mt. Zion Baptist Church) working the system for months, to change local laws and restore reasonable bus-fares, and it took place within a municipality that was clearly less committed to institutional racism than was Montgomery, Alabama.

And in Montgomery itself, young Claudette Colvin had endured the same indignity as Rosa Parks would nine months later, being arrested when she refused to surrender her seat. But Colvin was a somewhat foul-mouthed teenager, pregnant by a married man, and not the ideal choice for a community icon.

But in Rosa Parks, Montgomery and the nascent civil rights movement found the inspiration it needed-- a dignified working woman "of a certain age" who radiated something more than mere beauty (though she certainly had that, and retained it through the decades). There are those who say that Parks was consciously pariticipating in a "test case" which had been pre-arranged to push the movement into high gear. That doesn't make what she did any less courageous, or the way she did it any less inspiring. She had no way of knowing whether she would survive the arrest with even her life, much less her well-being and her principles intact, or the birth of a new freedom to her credit.

The turmoil of the civil rights movement-- marches and fire-hoses and burning churches-- was a pageant of the strange for those of us who observed it from the distance of a white suburb in the peaceable kingdom of the American Pacific northwest. I remember at a very young age asking my parents who Martin Luther King was and what he was up to. The reply was rather unforgettable: "He's a man who broke the law." Whatever the merits of his arguments may have been, his association with civil unrest was very disturbing to people like us, especially my parents who had come from the midwest and mingled with all races on the buses of south Chicago. They just couldn't see how it had come to this. As a young woman my mother had been offered bus seats by old black ladies and refused them-- it would have violated the natural order of things to do otherwise.

On the other hand, my mother often told the story-- mindboggling to me now (I was there, but too young to remember) -- of how when we lived in north Florida in the late 50's, there were two Catholic churches in our community of Fernandina Beach: one for the whites (where blacks could sit in the back), and one for the blacks (where such whites as there might chance to be were expected to self-segregate to the back as well).

In an effort to be fair (!) the Mass times alternated: one week it was 9:00 a.m. at the black church and 11:00 at the white one, and vice versa the next week. Well, our family never was much for early rising, so on the weeks where Mass at our church was at 9:00 we might very well be late. If my mother had one principle about Mass attendance all her life, it was that when you're late you don't parade down the aisle to the front and create a distraction-- you take seats at the back without disturbing anybody. That's what we did-- the race of our pew neighbours was of no concern to our family (of damn Yankees, I suppose).

My mother remembers a white usher coming up to our pew at the back and placing his hand on her shoulder. As he leaned over and whispered, "Wouldn't rather sit up front?" he deftly attempted to more or less re-arrange her rotator cuff muscles with his well-placed fingers. She replied in no uncertain terms, "No, I would not!"

When we lived in Florida my mother employed the only domestic help she ever had in her life-- it was cheap, and everybody did it. My parents paid the minimum wage-- 50¢ an hour-- and we ate lunch in the kitchen with the cleaning lady. Nobody did either of those things. Big faux pas.

Some people would call my parents' behavior heroic, and maybe the same people would call my parents' attitude deplorable. (My sister's long-ago attempt to date a black guy did not succeed-- "these things take time..."-- and they still grouse about Martin Luther King getting his own holiday). I suspect that many Americans whom the extreme left would characterize as complicit in "systemic racism" are just people like my family, growing up within our traditional communities, acting pretty much with justice and charity on a person-to-person basis but struggling to understand or justify the sometimes violent collision of movements and collective identities.

For better or for worse, there have been many figures in the civil rights movement over the decades who have staked a claim upon the collective identity, and the voice, of American racial minorities. Rosa Parks has always stood a little apart from all that-- her voice was seldom raised, and we know her as an individual, while the collective swirled about her. She remained a woman of faith and exemplary character. She survived being attacked and robbed in her own home, at age 80, by a black youth who recognized her face, and then struck it-- an incident from which she drew no wrathful conclusions and exhibited no bitterness. These qualities are part of why we know who Rosa Parks is, and it's hard to imagine that this was an accident.

For my part, I heartily endorsed Martin Luther King getting a calendar holiday (though I think Washington and Lincoln should still each get one too)-- we need reminding of how he prayed that race would stop being the measure of all things. And when I heard that Rosa would lie in state in Washington, like the presidents and selected heroes before her, I thought that was great news too-- it would have violated the natural order of things to do otherwise.

Memo to Prince Charles:
Latest newsflash from peaceful and civilized Islamic state

Here's what happens to 8-year-olds who steal bread in Iran.

[as seen on Bareknucklepolitics, via the Anchoress]

VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED!!!
Not for the faint of heart, weak of stomach, or anyone under 14.
But highly advisable viewing for Idiotarian Moonbats with bleeding hearts, and Itinerant Heirs to Once-Great Monarchies (especially Heirs who are also Idiotarian Moonbats).

Sports Report

Last night in a game against the Buffalo Bills, a player for the New England Patriots was penalized for "An unnatural act not common to the game."

No explanation was forthcoming, and there was no instant replay.

Call in the Wardrobe Malfunction police.
Appoint a Special Prosecutor.
Damn that Patriot Act! Bush lied!

David Cronenberg could not be reached for comment.

LIBBY LIED-- INDICT HIM /
WILSON LIED-- INVITE HIM /
(for book deals, cocktails, interviews, photo-ops)

Atticus Finch is no further ahead.
It is apparent, but not confirmed, that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has just spent two years investigating who did not commit a crime, or maybe who committed a non-crime.

He has decided that when the testimony of a powerful White House official contradicts that of a print or television journalist, the journalist is to be believed and the official must be lying. And/or that lyiing to a journalist about how much you know is an indictable offense. Or something like that.

Lewis "Scooter"Libby, top assistant to the Anti-Christ (or the Vice Anti-Christ, or something like that) has been indicted for doing some needless, idiot verbal tap-dance in the process of giving testimony that should never have been necessary had the most basic question about the Plame Name Blame Game been answered expeditiously-- was she covert? If not, no crime. No crime, no reason for a prosecutor to continue prosecuting, regardless of his low opinion of the players or the perceived dangers of being reckless with classified names. This does not mitigate the fact that lying under oath is criminally stupid and stupidly criminal, and if done, should be punished. That's why Oliver North was (temporarily) convicted. That's why Hillary Clinton was indicted and Bill Clinton went to jail-- oh, wait, that never happened.

The mysteries lurking on every side of the circuitous path by which we have arrived at the Libby indictment are legion, and well-covered by a host of wide-awake observers. Stephen F. Hayes at the Weekly Standard (author of The Connection, a blow-by-blow exposé of the long and intense relationship between Saddam Hussein's one-man government and Al-Qaeda) wrote a 13-page blow-by-blow account of the Wilson-Niger-Plame saga just before the indictment came down, which lays it all out clearly. This was followed by a close examination of how a "spooked White House" went knock-kneed in the face of a CIA leak-fest to deflect attention from its own Iraq intelligence failures. Hayes also provides a treatment of the CIA's general practice of "CYA" leaking (and possible prosecutions that could arise therefrom), as well as some well-deserved scrutiny of the once-Honorable Joseph C. Wilson the freakin' Fourth's own propensity for the Big Fib. Read Hayes because, as the song says, nobody does it better.

In his 13-pager on the path to prosecution, Hayes mentions a New York Times article on July 22 of this year which included a 19-point timeline of the (selected) major events in the story. Money quote from Hayes:

But there is one curious omission: July 7, 2004. On that date, the bipartisan Senate Select Intelligence Committee relased a 511-page report on the intelligence that served as the foundation for the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq. The Senate report includes a 48-page section on Wilson that demonstrates, in painstaking detail, that virtually everything Joseph Wilson said publicly about his trip, from its origins to his conclusions, was false. (emphasis added)

Or, as Hayes writes more succinctly on an earlier page, "It should be clear by now that the only one telling flat-out lies was Joseph Wilson."

Reflect on this: Hayes and other writers are prepared to state, in print, in widely circulated media outlets, that Joseph Wilson is a liar. Not "mis-statements", not "mis-speaking", not "inconsistencies"-- LIES. They have been writing about Wilson in these terms over much of the two years that this story has been under investigation. And Wilson, who has surfaced constantly in the effort to keep his name and victimhood on the front pages, has never taken legal action against a single one of those who have branded him LIAR. That's because when they do so, the journalists do not just toss out labels-- they have the goods, and they make the case.

One of the many things we have been waiting for as the Plame Name Blame Game has unfolded is the full story on what, if anything, will be the consequences for the first publication of the The Name by Robert Novak. Nothing, apparently. Novak has been fairly close-mouthed about his role in the investigation, but we now know that he testified early on and seems to have satisfied prosecutor Fitzgerald that it wasn't his job to keep this information under wraps. In my view, perhaps it was not Novak's legal obligation, but, based on his own version of the story, I think it was his moral obligation not to reveal Plame's name.

Novak has described how CIA official Bill Harlow warned him, in somewhat vague terms, that Valerie Plame "probably never again would be given a foreign assignment, but that exposure of her name might cause 'difficulties'." There seems to be a widely held perception that Plame's curtailed foreign career might be a result of Novak's revealing her name, but in fact Valerie Plame had been withdrawn from foreign service in 1997 because it was believed by the CIA that her identity was already compromised-- there was reason to fear that she had been 'outed' by traitor Aldrich Ames, who had been paid millions by the Russians to inform on Russian counter-spies (25 of whom were executed without trial, shot in the head while on their knees), and on numerous American under-cover operatives and their projects.

Novak seems to think that Harlow's warning was insufficiently serious to compel him to suppress Plame's name, especially since anyone seeking information about the subject of his article (Joe Wilson) would find his wife's name in publicly available sources like "Who's Who". Novak could also have mentioned Wilson's lengthy biography on the website of the Middle East Institute, a Saudi-funded think-tank, where Wilson was listed as an "adjunct scholar", and his wife was mentioned by name.

(In both cases she was "Valerie Plame"-- no one ever called her "Valerie Wilson" until well into the leak investigation, when she was getting more press coverage than her husband-- hmmmm. By the way, in the interim between the breaking of this story and the present, the Middle East Institute has re-done its website, where Wilson's bio is now considerably shorter, and Plame is no longer named. Too late, Joe.)

Nevertheless, as a moral question, I think Robert Novak should have erred on the side of caution regarding the name of anyone working for the CIA. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may have been a little melodramatic about it (and his Libby indictments perhaps reflect a slight excess of that) but he is correct in saying that you're not going to get good people to work in this vital security area if they cannot be guaranteed a reasonable degree of protection-- not just by the government, but by the citizenry at large.

The name of Valerie Plame was of no significance whatever to the substance of Novak's original article-- which was (it is often forgotten) a kid-gloves handling of Joe Wilson's claims, because as an isolationist/conservative Novak was also against the Iraq war. He was clearly interested in Wilson's case as possible evidence that the war was as lousy an idea as Novak had long been saying. All of this could have been accomplished without naming Plame's name-- Novak should have let somebody else put two-and-two together, with the help of "Who's Who", if they really wanted to. On general principles, it was wrong. Even if Plame had been covert, and a crime had been committed, Novak would not be the guilty party. But what he did was wrong anyway. It needs to be said.

As the Leakin' Libby drama plays out, it will be a task to keep the central immediate question in focus (Was Valerie Plame covert?) as well as the now-distant seminal question (Just how big a liar IS Joe Wilson?). I was a Sunday New York Times subscriber when Wilson's op-ed first appeared, and I admit I found his claims alarming-- I remember bringing attention to them in conversation, and wondering what the fall-out would be.

But I also remember being struck by the false note in the Wilson chorus-- that crap about "I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people". Even as my brow furrowed about his accusations, I thought this tea-business sounded like some girlie travel diary entry, the sort that would be followed by something like, "It was all too, too exciting! I was simply nackered and could barely decide which shoes went with today's frock!"

Just how seriously did Joe Wilson investigate the single 1999 Iraq-Niger transaction attempt he was sent to confirm or deny? James S. Robbins was on the case two years ago at NRO, placing Wilson's moves under the microscope of Robbins' national security expertise, and issuing a withering critique.

Money quotes:

In 1981, Seyni Kountche, president of Niger, said that his country would "sell uranium even to the devil." He made good on his word, doing business with both Libya and Iraq, and funneling billions in profits into private slush funds to prop up his corrupt regime...it is useful to remind people, in an age of short-attention spans, that Niger and Iraq were part of a nuclear family dating back to the 1970s.

[Wilson] spent most of his time at the hotel — a fourth-floor suite at the Gawaeye, one report said. He was very open about his mission and its object, and began to take meetings near the pool...It is unclear with whom Wilson met. No Nigerien officials have admitted to attending those meetings. El Hadj Habibou Allele, who runs COMINAK, the major uranium-mining concern, stated he was never contacted. (emphasis added) For their part, the staff at the Gawaeye thought Wilson was a nice guy, and they nicknamed him "Bill Clinton" after his former employer.

It hardly seems credible that Wilson could have single-handedly investigated every aspect of the Niger-Iraq connection spending "eight days drinking sweet mint tea" and talking to people. If Niamey were nurturing such a relationship with Baghdad it surely would have been highly secretive. Uranium trade with Iraq was illegal after all; you could not expect to get a straight answer from anyone involved in it.

Wilson came away with no evidence that the 1999 uranium sale had taken place...this very narrow finding has been taken as proof that Iraq never even tried to obtain uranium. That was not the question Wilson was sent to Niger to answer, and his investigation certainly never came close to being that thorough.

Dr. Robbins is a senior fellow in national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council, and a Professor of International Relations at the National Defense University in Washington, DC. He worked briefly for the Pentagon in communications, because of his talent for communicating many things briefly, but left when a giant bureaucracy kept hitting him in the face.

PRINCE CHARLES TO LECTURE AMERICANS ABOUT WHERE TO FIND GAUDIER TIARAS FOR BEAUTY PAGEANTS

Actually, we're told he intends to visit the U.S. for the first time in decades to lecture Americans about tolerance of peace-loving Islam. But the accompanying photograph in Britain's Telegraph newspaper would indicate that there has been some interest in bringing royal ceremonial jewelry more in line with the unspeakable tackiness associated with Miss America and friends. (The Crusty the Clown hair arrangement is pretty effective too.)

Over my 34-odd years living as an American in Canada I have at various times entertained the possibility of applying for citizenship, especially after it became possible to hold dual citizenship (I believe that came in under Clinton, who was always mindful of how nice it would be to collect the taken-for-granted Democratic votes of immigrants who didn't want to give up their connection to Mexico or wherever else they came from). At one point I even favoured this course because I thought it would be kind of cool to take an oath of allegiance to the Queen.

I got over that, as I watched her low-brow children assume their high places in society and contract ridiculous marriages they had no intention of preserving (or, in Andrew's case, a ridiculous marriage he would probably love to have preserved, but his mother, Defender of the Faith, won't allow him to reconcile with his tramp of choice, despite their being perfectly suited to each other).

So with each passing year, and each passing anti-American tantrum on the part of Canadian public officials, I become less inclined to undergo even a pro-forma Canadian citizenship ritual. (Not long ago I met an American woman married to a Canadian, who figured it would be best all round if she took out dual citizenship-- she said she wept with grief through the entire ceremony!)

Anyhow, it looks like Americans, especially those in the Washington receiving line, now have the prospect of having to hold down their cookies while being preached at by the under-achieving heir to the English throne about what a superior thing it is to oversee (or at least "tolerate) your national identity's slow death by a thousand cultural cuts, as official Britain systematically grovels to Muslim hyper-sensitivities about the customs of their adopted home.

(Yes, many a Muslim was in fact born in the United Kingdom, so it's not in that sense "adopted", blah, blah, blah-- bottom line: Britain is an ancient land whose history pre-dates the invention of Islam by eons, and its laws and institutions are what they are because of its Western Christian culture. If you don't find them desirable, move somewhere else where Western Christianity hasn't been so influential. I understand Indonesia has a few vacancies where a few school-girls' heads used to be.)

Perhaps the hapless prince will also try to export Britain's latest exercise in tolerance, the banning of all public representations or other detectable presence of PIGS, in deference the Islamic discomfort at the very thought of the little swine. In case you haven't been following it, Kathy Shaidle at Relapsed Catholic is a clearing house for the "Free Piglet" campaign. Intrepid Middle East chronicler Michael J. Totten has a few choice comments on the subject too, though, as always, Mark Steyn has the last word (and it is "Pooh").

Peaceful Islam update: Best accessed through Little Green Footballs-- exciting tales of tolerant beheadings of little girls in Indonesia, peaceful riots in Paris, profoundly spiritual compulsory head-scarves for non-Muslim women in Malaysia, hypothetical hangings of stock market players in Tehran, just capital punishment** for a 14-year-old in Saudi Arabia. Well, I guess that's only fair in countries that were part of that imperialistic Coalition of the Willing that invaded Iraq-- oh, no, wait, that was somebody else.

**(heck, even peacekeeping Canada was prepared to do that once!)

PRIORITIES: WAR AND JUSTICE

Historian Victor Davis Hanson has some advice for President Bush at NRO today:

It is also time to step up lecturing both the American people and the Iraqis on exactly what we are doing in the Sunni Triangle. We have been sleepwalking through the greatest revolutionary movement in the history of the Middle East, as the U.S. military is quietly empowering the once-despised Kurds and Shiites — and along with them women and the other formerly dispossessed of Iraq. In short, the U.S. Marine Corps has done more for global freedom and social justice in two years than has every U.N. peacekeeping mission since the inception of that now-corrupt organization.

(emphasis added)

Hanson, once a full-time farmer, is a Classics scholar and prolific author of books and articles, with a unique dual emphasis on matters military and agricultural. Now a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, he established the Classics Department at California State University, Fresno, and has taught at Stanford University and the U.S. Naval Academy. My impression is that he is an expert in keeping his head when all about are losing theirs. Attention should be paid.

That means you, Mr. President. Fight the war, strengthen the court-- what you do in these two arenas will be a matter of national life and death long after you yourself are unemployed and then dead. Everything else is footnotes.

For Courting's a pleasure, and parting is grief....

There are a hundred versions of that old song (of British origin, and much-changed by the time it got over the ocean and became "On Top of Old Smokey). The words just popped into mind at news of the withdrawal of Harriet Miers from nomination for the US Supreme Court. After all this angst, she's not the only one suffering withdrawal. A collective "Wphew!!!" has just gone up from all corners of the Last Remaining Superpower. This particular episode of the OK Corral was not going to be pretty.

Paul Begala (author of one of the worst pieces of yellow journalism in American history, and I mean ALL of American history-- his attempt to link Bush and "Red-state" America to the red blood of Matthew Shepard, James Byrd. and the Oklahoma City bombing victims) said to Wolf Blitzer on CNN this morning that the withdrawal of nominee Miers will be seen as a sign of weakness in Bush, making him a lame duck (a dead duck if his guru Rove is indicted). I couldn't help but remember what was touted as one of Bush's worst moments in the 2004 election "debates"-- where at the townhall-type forum he was asked if he could name a few mistakes that he had made as president. Bush's reply was as lame as much of the rest of his debate performance-- he said he regretted a few appointments he had made. (Heh!)

The response to this from the left was that an inability to admit mistakes is one of Bush's greatest character faults-- of course, they had a very specific list of what he should consider to be his mistakes, the first of which (after his having the temerity to get up and draw breath every morning) was the invasion of Iraq. Back when they were holding him up as the antithesis of the nuanced and sensitive perfections of John Kerry, Bush could have risen in their esteem if only he were to demonstrate an awareness of his errors in judgement, and reverse them. This would be a sign of humility and open-mindedness.

Now it's a sign of weakness that will bring the President to his knees. Begala (whose continued employment in the news business, as if he were a person of any respectability instead of a bigoted hack) tried, as always, to disguise his wishful thinking as pundit speculation. No sale. The President screwed up. Charles Krauthammer (God bless him) gave him an exit strategy and he took it. It could not have been easy, but it was wise.

Prior to the announcement of Miers' withdrawal, Kate O'Beirne, a fine lady who is heard from too seldom in National Review, composed an open letter to her, advising her to get out of the bubble and seek counsel with some friend who was willing to tell her the truth. "Harriet, the hearings are going to be an embarrassing disaster...The smart money is betting you won’t be confirmed. (Are you being told that?) Your decision to accept the nomination was ill-considered. If you accepted owing to your desire to help the president, you should know that nomination has only damaged him. "

Ouch, ooch. But the truth, and O'Beirne (who does not apparently know Miers personally) is one of the best friends she has in Washington just now.

The sad thing about all this is the Bush himself does not appear to have any such friends of his own. He seems to be in a bubble that almost no one can penetrate, except people (like Karl Rove, Andy Card, and Karen Hughes), who should at least be sharing his ear with others who have differing views. It's friends like these three who insulate him from the humility that would have prevented the mess he just got himself into. (And who stood by as he went into the above-mentioned campaign debates so absurdly under-prepared.) His next nominee will say a lot about whether he got the message-- whether he has true friends, or just bubble polishers.

ABOUT THAT 2000th IRAQ FATALITY
Two things: military casualty counts are not simple things, which is why the military doesn't trade in them anymore. (Tommy Franks is often quoted, with disdain, as saying, "We don't do body counts," like he was trying to hide something. What he meant was that we don't use enemy corpse numbers to signal victory, as Robert Incredibly Stange McNamara did during Vietnam.)

Here are a couple of people absolutely in the know about these matters, who can show why it's a mistake to be simple-minded about them:
Lt Col. Steve Boylan (thanks to Powerline and Michelle Malkin)
James Robbins at NRO

And JD at Faces from the Front has one of those comments that tell the salivating peaceniks why they should just shut the hell up.

As for the salivating simple-minded, don't let anyone tell you they're not happy to see the Grim Milestone soldier die-- just look at their faces.

Back on track--
after a wonderful family week, culminating in the first wedding among the amazing cousins-- in a society where children are the most endangered species, having achieved a bizarre status suspended somewhere between "life-threatening burden" and "self-actualizing status symbol," my generation (just one sister and me) have between us produced seven knock-out fabulous kids, whose tight circle has just stretched to include an eighth, and will be welcoming a ninth in a couple of months.

The song that kept going through my head all week (as a sort of preparation for what I figured would happen on the day) was the dance "hostesses" lament from the musical "Sweet Charity"--

I always weep at weddings / I'm a soggy creep at weddings...
I walk into a chapel / and get happily hysterical.

But there really wasn't much of that, since I am finding in my old age that historic events which express themselves in appropriate readings from Scripture (and boy did we have a bunch of those!) take on a majesty which suppresses and transcends mere sentimentality. Like, it's all just so cosmic, man-- and I mean that.

WASSUP
Have spent hours the last two days just catching up on events in the world. (My sister has no internet at home-- AAAAAAAAAAAGHH!!!!) Here's a little sampling of what apparently took place while I wasn't looking:

It's GRIM MILESTONE Day, round two

A round of complimentary kleenex for our friends on the left to help them catch their drool as the tote board chalks up the 2000th military death in Iraq. Official channels have been fuzzy as to when or whether this number was reached, but it seemed likely that today would be the day.

Never ones to let the recently placed cemetery sod grow under their feet, Democrats in the Senate were primed for this moment, and trotted out the re-worked versions of their Grim Milestone I (1000 deaths) speeches. Vermont's scintillating Senator Patrick Leahy informed one and all that we will never beat the insurgents (news, I'm sure, to the fighting men who have been pounding them into the desert dust with considerable success lately) and must now concentrate solely on that noble goal of just "extricating ourselves"-- by God! That's the stuff that made America great!

West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, looking every inch the senior statesman with every Klan-white hair in place, was feeling distinctly Halloweeny as he intoned, "Too much blood!" several times (who does he think he is? a special effects guy on a Cronenberg film?). How much is too much, Bob? How much is too little? How much is just right to be spent on freeing 25 million brown-skinned slaves? Aye, there's the rub...

Powerline forwards a report from their contact "Major E" in Baghdad, who joins the massive chorus of military voices expressing their total astonishment at what passes for news back home, and how the mainstream American press (among others) has created some kind of parallel universe in their reporting of life and events in the combat zone (not to mention the fact that they never report anything at all from the 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces which are NOT combat zones).

...seemingly every person knows of Fallujah and remains aware of the high casualties taken by the Marines who secured the city late last year. Yet no one seems to know that just last week, an estimated 70,000 Fallujans voted in the referendum. That is a dramatic increase over voter turnout last January, when essentially zero votes were cast because the lack of security made it too dangerous to establish polling stations.

Money quote: "Many Americans seem to know the bad news from last year, but not the good news from last week."

MORE HEROES

That special set of Greatest Generation Heroes, the surviving Tuskegee Airmen, are on their way to Iraq to bring both encouragement and admiration to the heirs of their proud company designation, the 332nd Air Expeditionary Group. To no one's great surprise, they seem to recognize what really counts in the evolution of race relations in America (a refreshing change from the insidious race-baiting that continues to issue forth from high-profile maggots upon the body politic like Sharpton, Farrakhan, Belafonte, Rangel, Jackson, and the good doctor of white extermination Kamau Kambon)

Money quote from Ted Johnson, 80, who graduated from the Advanced Flight School in 1945:

It was the Tuskegee Airmen who made America come to its senses, that individuals should be judged on their accomplishments, rather than their ethnicity and color.

James Taranto responds at Best of the Web (OpinionJournal)

That last comment is one of the wisest things we've heard anyone say in a while about race in America. What's so inspiring about the Tuskegee Airmen is that they served their country, and had faith in it, at a time when the country had not yet earned it.

HERO NO MORE

New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been de-canonized by her employers, who had elevated her to sainthood when she went to jail rather than reveal the source who had waived confidentiality a full year before she put on the orange jumpsuit.

Apparently she is now demoted to Bush-administration-WMD-shill and drama -queen-in-residence (the latter is probably accurate). Washington Post regular Robert Kagan has the gall to remind the public that the Old Gray Mare Times was one of the biggest WMD shills in history during the Clinton administration, fervently endorsing Slick Willie's mini-bombing of Iraq, and raising equally fervent alarums over the appointment of Hans Blix to oversee weapons inspections, due to his "decade-long failure to detect Iraq's secret nuclear weapons program before the Gulf War." Etc., etc., etc., year in and year out from 1998 onwards.

Kagan doesn't let his own employer off the hook, reminding readers that the Washington Post weighed in on Jan. 29, 2001, taking the outgoing president to task for leaving his successor what the Post amusingly termed a "booby trap" in the Middle East:

...none is more dangerous -- or more urgent -- than the situation
in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf, [including] intelligence photos that show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.

Somebody said "facts are stubborn things." Unfortunately their stubbornness often goes unnoticed when it is kept locked in a closet, bound and gagged, by the wilfully amnesiac mainstream press.

WHERE IS ATTICUS FINCH WHEN WE NEED HIM?

This week should see the climax of the two-year Plame Name Blame Game, and what a farce it has become. (Well, it's always been a farce, but the crazed left has ratcheted up the whole farce quotient in recent weeks.)

Where we need to bring in Atticus Finch is in the matter of his most basic question in the To Kill A Mockingbird courtroom where black sharecropper Tom Robinson was about to be railroaded by an all-white jury on a charge of rape (of a white woman-- verdict never in doubt). At any point in the process, wondered Atticus, was it ascertained by a doctor that this crime had ever been committed? The answer in this fictional case was "NO". But Tom got convicted anyway, because that jury knew in its all-white bones that "these people just do this kind of thing-- that's how they are."

This is precisely the same thing we have going on in the alleged "outing" of an allegedly "covert" CIA agent's identity. At no point in the process has it been established with certainty that any crime was committed at all. The whole investigation is likely about a case as fictitious as the Mockingbird novel (though the costs, financial and political, are all too real.) But that hasn't stopped MSNBC's Chris Matthews from expanding the list of possible indictees to include Mary Matalin and a few other names which have played NO PART whatsoever in the speculations of the last two years. (One blog comment entry describes Matthews of late as being "off his meds"!)

It hasn't stopped anyone in the left-wing lynch-mob from gutting the White House staff down to the President and a janitor because everyone else will be in jail. And at no point does the mob (which knows nothing about anything that has transpired before the Grand Jury) clarify that an indictment is not a conviction. They just shout gleefully, "Hang 'em all! Because we know that these people just do this kind of thing-- that's how they are. Screw the evidence-- hang 'em all."

We're still watching the righting of wrongs done 50 years ago when juries convicted or acquitted on no other grounds than race. It's sad to see that the presumption of innocence is still at the mercy of tabloid yellow journalism and the frothing madness of the lynch-mob.

The truth is, many of the people most closely surrounding President Bush make my skin crawl-- and that's a totally shallow judgement based on vague impressions, mostly looks. If they are half as sleazy as left-wing speculation suggests, I'd be happy to see them sent packing. But at this moment there are only a handful of people with any real knowledge of whether that is so, and they aren't talking yet. (Unless someone on Fitzgerald's staff has been leaking things, in which case they should be the first in line to be "frog-marched away in handcuffs", to borrow the unspeakably sleazy Mr. Plame's own words.)

Ambassador Joseph Wilson the freakin' Fourth has been proved to be a publicity hound, a public liar, and the one person most responsible for any of us knowing anything about his wife. I wonder if he's also the guy responsible for his wife's suddenly being referred to as "Ms. Wilson" when her maiden name and professional profile shoved his off the front pages. As somebody famous once said (was it Oscar Wilde?), "The suspense is killing me. I do hope it will last."

SPEAKING OF WMD SHILLS, East London MP George Galloway, the famously bloviating, self-loathing, homicidal tyrant-loving gas-bag who blew off the Senate Sub-Committee investigating the gargantuan UN Oil-For-Food scandal, and then copiously dis-gusted at Christopher Hitchens in their ballyhooed Grapple in the Big Apple "debate", seems to have been caught with his well-manicured hand in the petroleum cookie jar. Smoking gun evidence is on the table that:

* Galloway personally solicited and was granted eight oil allocations totaling 23 million barrels from the Hussein government from 1999 through 2003;

* Galloway’s wife, Dr. Amineh Abu-Zayyad, received approximately $150,000 in connection with one allocation of oil;

* Galloway’s political campaign, the Mariam Appeal, received at least $446,000 in connection with several allocations granted under the Oil-for-Food Program;

* Illegal “surcharge” payments in excess of $1.6 million were paid to the Hussein regime in connection with the oil allocations granted to Galloway and the Mariam Appeal; and

* Galloway knowingly made false or misleading statements under oath before the Subcommittee at its hearing on May 17, 2005.

[Hat tip: Powerline]

As David Warren is fond of tapping out in his more malicious private musings: BWA-HA-HA-HA!!!! Can't wait for the next chapter on this one.

Speaking of totally partisan schadenfreude, is there any prospect more delicious than that of Al Gore and John Kerry refusing to accept their respective terminal diagnoses and insisting on making another run for President in '08? This is the best news for Republicans in years, especially since there is no credible prospective GOP candidate ANYWHERE on the horizon at this moment. (I will never vote for George Allen's hair, which seems to be a foreign occupying army on his head.)

RIGHT vs. LEFT vs. BUSH

Criticism of President Bush from his putative allies on the right is making lots of news these days, but it is, in fact, nothing new.

Throughout his administration Bush has been subject to stinging conservative criticism in spades, on all sorts of issues, like steel tariffs, immigration chaos, federal education policy, prescription drug benefits, politicization of the war on terrorism, refusal to fire anybody ever (the hapless Michael Brown being the inexplicable exception), and baffling wimpiness in the face of the left-wing truth-bending machine-- that source of Orwellian distortions of the Kay and Deulfer reports, sagas of defeat in Iraq, the 9/11 Commission whitewash, bizarre conspiracy fantasies about the Katrina aftermath, and shameless race-baiting, not to mention the worst Democratic candidate in living memory coming within a few points of beating Bush in 2004.

The Harriet Miers nomination is simply the last straw for many of Bush’s conservative critics and the rhetorical temperature has shot up noticeably. So it’s worth examining the right-wing criticism, and contrasting it to its opposite number.

From the Right—Reasonable partisans (as well as the sometimes less reasonable constituencies) who are generally supportive of the President and his administration, analyse decisions and policies and support them— or not— on their merits. The political right is the real “big tent” and does not march in lock-step on any important issue. Criticism focuses on policy rather than personality. The Miers nomination controversy is all the demonstration one needs that the conservative “movement” and Republicans as a group are not in any respect held hostage by the “religious right” – they are, in fact, voicing strong objections to the use and influence of religious considerations in this process.

From the Left—Partisans who were once reasonable have gone mad, and have either embraced or bowed to the power of their most irrational constituencies. They are entirely held hostage by the Moveon.org, Democratic Underground, Code Pink, ANSWER, Chomsky-ite Acolytes of Juan Cole, abortions-for-everybody crowd. Dissent is unwelcome because the radical factions will make life miserable for (and take all George Soros’s money away from) those who don’t toe the line. Criticism of the President and his administration is personal, crude, trite, spitefilled and infantile, offering neither substance nor alternative ideas. Democrats have become a party united by hate, differing only in degree. This is political suicide.

The Right has proven that there are plenty of substantive complaints to be made about five years of Bush “strategery”. Don't get me started!!!! (Actually, I'd be happy to start with Rumsfeld.)

The Left chooses to be impotently wedded to the rabid carping of: Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Teddy Kennedy, Carl Levin, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Joe Biden, the shameless race-baiters (see above) and the Hollywood America-haters (Al Franken, Alec Baldwin, Barbra Streisand, the Sarandon-Robbinses, weeping Canadian Donald Sutherland, and all that jazz)-- all hopelessly enmired in vacuous, ad hominem attacks in embarrassingly extremist rhetoric, thus ensuring that the majority of voters will not be taking their party seriously at any point in the foreseeable future. Whereas criticism from the right is about policy, the left seldom rises above "stupid, fascist, greedy, war-mongering, AWOL, religious fanatic, ugly-like-a-chimp, and his daughters are tarts." Pathetic.

From the Right—It is held universally by all straight-thinkers that a sitting President has a right to nominate whomever he wishes to sit on the Supreme Court—it is a privilege that goes with having been elected by the American people. Call it “stacking the Court” if it makes you feel better, but it’s the President’s right, which is why you see lefty ideological judges like Ruth Ginsberg getting confirmed with 98 votes.

From the Left—When a Republican picks a righty ideological SCOTUS nominee, it is undemocratic stacking of the Court, (in the present case by a President who stole two elections so his executive privilege doesn't really exist anyway). When Democrats stack the Court, enlightened progressive public policy becomes a way of life.

Fact, not opinion:
When Republicans stack the court our elected representatives get their workload increased, since they, and not the judges, are charged with setting public policy. Democracy thrives.

When Democrats stack the Court, our elected representatives have less work to do, because policy is set by unelected judges. Democracy sleeps.

P.S.-- On the "Chimp" thing: Yet another study recently confirmed that human beings share 96% of their DNA with chimpanzees. Morphing the face of George W. Bush into that of a chimp takes NO TALENT WHATSOEVER. Any caricaturist worth his salt should be able to do that convincingly with any living human being. Steve Bell of Britain's left-wing Guardian newspaper has written an essay and illustrated the evolution of his caricature of Bush as Chimp, as if this was somehow an inspiration born of a lengthy artistic sweat. Puhhleeze. Cartooning 101, folks. Nothing to see here.

Another Day, Another Earth-shaking Historic Turning Point
Iraq votes to ratify its Constitution-- Iraq VOTES -- a predominantly Muslim country in the Middle East VOTES a Constitution to shape a government for which they VOTED and will VOTE again in December.

Don't see that every day!

It's clumsy, it's tin-eared, it's one step forward and two steps back, but sometimes it does the job, the one that needs doing the most. Another world historical, making your planet a better place to live turning point, brought to you by the Bush Administration.

No big woop.


On Hiatus, as they say in TV-land

Away to Texas for a week (marrying off the niece) --blogging ceases till the 24th.
Have a little Newfoundland scenery for contemplation.