D-DAY IN VANCOUVER:
WE WILL FIGHT THEM ON THE BEACHES, DUDE!

GNARLY!

Today is the opening day of the British Columbia Human Rights Commission kangaroo court trial of MacLean's Magazine for the thought crime of publishing an excerpt from Mark Steyn's (as it were) seminal work on the demographic suicide of the West.

Canada inches closer to parallel rule by Shari'a? Follow the story as National Post reporter Andrew Coyne liveblogs from the courtroom here.


Keep up to date with the merry band at Free Mark Steyn who have nominated him an honorary Scotsman in the William Wallace mold.

Buy a tee-shirt to support Steyn's (much less affluent) fellow victims of HRC tyranny, the Canuck 6 .

DEMONSTRATE , even as we speak (8:00 a.m. Western time), oh hip and edgy Vancouverites who once prided yourselves at being part of the "revolution", northern-most bead in the demonic rosary of the left coast -- outside Robson courthouse, with the merry band from the Covenant Zone, folks bold enough to envision a new Canada where we back up and start again at Magna Carta.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE FRONT:

Presidential Hopeful Barack O'Bama visits Mt. Rushmore and asks the kind of tourist question that gets Americans mocked and deplored in the high-culture hot-spots of Europe:

"Duh, how did Cary Grant get up there?"

The day before, the Obamas resigned from their membership in Chicago's infamous Trinity United Church of .... [oh God, I can't even say it] after yet another flagrantly racist foaming diatribe was delivered, this time by guest preacher (and long-time Obama spiritual adviser, until that evening when he got scrubbed from the website) Catholic priest Fr. Michael Pfleger. Observe the following grotesque white minstrel shows:






And later the same day, at his own church, Saint Sabina:




And Mr. Obama expects us to take him at his word when he asks, "Duh, how did these racists get up there?"

Memo to Chicago's Cardinal Francis George (my dinner companion once, and a very fine man):

This is NOT ENOUGH. You must deal with this man.

I understand that the diocese has been reluctant to move or muzzle him because he's "popular and successful" in his parish. As Mother Teresa once put it: God does not ask us to be successful -- he asks us to be faithful.

Fr. Pfleger is a perverse, delusional, unstable megalomaniac in the thrall of the Evil One. Such people are often successful, and tremendously popular too!

One of the advantages of a hierarchical Church is that people in authority can act to purge those with spiritually poisonous views. I am never one to advocate kicking our worst offenders out of the priesthood, thereby loosing them on an unsuspecting society where they can do further harm under no one's authority.

I believe Fr. Pfleger (like Cardinal Law, and any number of other bad apples) should be moved to remote locations where good priests and other religious labour from dawn till dusk to minister to the truly deprived: the diseased, disabled, abandoned and impoverished of Africa, India, Jamaica, Haiti -- where every day is like the last, and tomorrow will look the same, as you bathe, clothe, feed, bandage, comfort, bless, and finally bury the poorest of the poor, day in and day out until the end of your days.

It is good work. It can redeem, even the arrogant showboater, or the craven and comfortable bureaucrat. Cardinal George, for the sake of the reputation of your wounded Church, and for the sake of the corrupted soul of your Chicago priest, deal with Fr. Pfleger, NOW.

I'M BEHIND IN MY READING....

BECAUSE:

We've been bizzy bizzy with family stuff, including and mostly, the culmination of #3 son's term at Naval Officer Candidate School in Newport. Proud moments all round, enhanced by attendance of #1 son, freshly returned from Iraq. These two book-ended #2 son, who is set to change the world in the battle for energy independence!

Triple threat, folks!

The new ensign would never sully the relationship by gushing so, but I'm sure he joins us in bottomless gratitude to the man breathlessly known to his maggots as "Drill-Instructor-Gunnery-Sergeant-Jones- United-States-Marine-Corps"-- thanks, Gunny, for turning him into a mensch.


We don't know who shot it -- and Gunny Jones would like to shoot whoever shot it -- but some freakshow went "outside the family" and posted their drill competition on YouTube. It was HOT.




ON THE BOOKSHELF

Nobody noticed much -- well, at least not the same folks who are reading What Happened* with drool running down their chins-- when former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, published War and Decision, the definitive (so far) and authoritative account of the Bush administration's path to war in Iraq. That's because the book is so detailed, exhaustively documented and footnoted that it was obviously too serious to be ground up and spat out in 15 seconds by Chris Matthews. So, like, who cares, eh?


*On the up-tipped (for lack of weight) end of the see-sawing book shelf comes the slash-and-burn memoirs of former Bush White House Press Secretary "Beam me up Scotty" McClellan, called, amusingly What Happened-- what indeed?

Seems the short and doughy one took his thumb out of his mouth long enough to apply his fingers to the keyboard, in an attempt to put the hurt on the guy who, he thinks, did him dirt.

Of course, he's a little confused about how it was that Bush did him dirt-- it wasn't by feeding him tainted wafflings, nor by relieving him of his position. The real injury inflicted on McClellan by Bush was giving him the Press Secretary job in the first place, a position for which he was manifestly unsuited from Day 1, and had improved not one whit by Day 750 or whenever it was that he was blissfully put out of our misery.

I stand by my first assessment of 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.

(the rest here) -- and I must say that he has fulfilled my highest expectations. (His book is published by folks associated with George Soros-- I'm just sayin'.) Even if one accepts the claim, now being blasted about, that McClellan's book is a pack of lies and lie-lets, Bush is still not off the hook insofar as this is yet another example of the price everybody has paid for the Texan's taste for cronyism over qualifications.

Cries of "lying Judas" seem a bit over the top in response to McClellan's oeuvre. I think "little puke" probably covers it.


FINISHED IN THREE SITTINGS.

READ THIS.

MICHAEL YON -- MOMENT OF TRUTH IN IRAQ.

Read this.

Ask politicians and pundits if they have.

Pay them no heed if they haven't.

OH HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY HERETICS!!

OH HAPPY CLAPPY CRAPPY HERETICS!!

Going viral on the 'net: the closing liturgy of the 2008 West Coast Call to Action conference, or, as it might otherwise be known, afternoon calisthenics at the seniors' home.

LOTTA gray hair in this group.

The processional hymn is SS-LO-O-O-O-W-W-W enough for our local St. Vincent de Paul, but I think we'd draw the line at the dancing. And the puppets.

[Did you hear the one about the middle-aged Martha-Graham-wannabe who got brained with a thurible?......]

HMH-361 checks in to
Marine Corps Air Station Miramar

-- reporting safe return, Sir-Yes-Sir.

Papa Bear is home.

BREATHE.












Now if he'd just report in to MOM!!!!
(waiting, waiting, waiting......)

CONFERENCE-BLOGGING FROM THE CAPITOL

The conference isn't mine -- I'm just a spousal hood ornament. We're ensconced in the old-world elegance of the [Fairmont] Chateau Laurier -- spacious grand lobby salons, tastefully dim hallways, room with 14-foot ceiling. All mod cons, conceived and acquired under the supervision of one Charles Melville Hays, then General Manager of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway of Canada, who unfortunately never spent a night in his beautiful hotel, due to his having chosen to report to Ottawa via an ocean voyage on the RMS Titanic in April 1912. Sigh.

Pleasant walk around the impressive Parliament Hill district. Not so pleasant walk around the slightly grubby tourist market area. Highlight of Day One: riding the elevator briefly with Salman Rushdie.

Day Two included some official activities, followed by my getting swept up into the flow of the annual March for Life, Canada's entry into the frustrating uphill battle against abortion. Not nearly so well-attended as its sister march in Washington, D.C. -- but this they have in common: no matter how many thousands, you won't see it reported on local or national news. It looked like this:

Also in the neighbourhood: Canada's official war memorial, the sculpture representing a scene from World War I, but built in remembrance of four major wars in which Canada has participated.

Magnificent, folks.

WHAT I'M READING:

Moment of Truth in Iraq by Michael Yon. Digests and expansions upon the dispatches of the past couple of years, spent embedded up to his eyeballs with troops in combat all over Iraq. Yon is one of a handful of self-embedded reporters, telling the facts and placing them in context (others: Michael Totten, Bill Roggio, J.D. Johannes [buy his documentary Outside the Wire]).

Cranky, melodramatic maybe -- Yon remains the Master.

WHAT I HAD FOR BREAKFAST THIS MORNING:

TOAST!!!!

JUST BECAUSE....

Kudos to anyone who's doing their bit for demographic balance, but some people obviously have more talent for it, in every way, than others. (Sheer speculation, but I don't imagine these are the sort of folks who attend Democratic fundraisers in San Francisco.)

[hat-tip: BMW, via Hugh Hewitt]

IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT,
GET AWAY FROM THE GREY-HAIRED WOMAN....

.....and if you can't cope with salty language, today is not your day to go skinny-dipping in Winefred's Well.

Time out from frothing about the Democratic candidates to assess the situation for the Republicans.

Kathy Shaidle (give her some money -- she's getting sued by Canadian fascists) has contributed what is probably the best of the "think positive" JOHN MCCAIN alternative campaign slogans:

"I don't know much about economics, but I did stay at the Hanoi Hilton once."

Very charitable of Kathy.

Here are some less positive, less charitable slogans (from IMAO), and one Consummate Redneck Triage Assessment (Hat-tip: Ms. Malkin @ HOT AIR).

MCCAIN:

---You hate him; he hates you; now lets kick some foreigner ass.

---He'll screw over terrorists even more than he screws over Republicans.

---Today's challenges require the leadership of a cranky old bastard.

---You think he cares what you blog? He didn't care when the Vietnamese were torturing him.

---If there's one issue you need your candidate to be right about, it's Iraq (which luckily is the only issue McCain is right about).

---McCain '08: The comeback grandpa!

---McCain. The Vietnam War isn't over until HE says it's over.

---McCain '08: Because the Path to Citizenship Runs Right Through Your Backyard

---We could do worse. Not much worse, but worse.

---McCain. Because these times call for blinding fits of white-hot rage.


AND JUST TO MAKE SURE THE LEVEL OF DISCOURSE DOESN'T GET TOO TOO ELEVATED--
Red State Update, comin' your way.

OH COME ON, NAT!
QUIT PUSSY-FOOTING, AND MAKE YOUR POINT!



Jazz critic, unswerving libertarian, happy atheist, and ardent pro-lifer, NAT HENTOFF, weighs in on the prospects of an
Obamanomination:




Infanticide candidate
for president

Oh.


money quote:

But on abortion, Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a professed humanist, Obama — in the Illinois Senate — also voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I have reported on several of those cases when, before the abortion was completed, an alive infant was suddenly in the room. It was disposed of as a horrified nurse who was not necessarily pro-life followed the doctors' orders to put the baby in a pail or otherwise get rid of the child.

(hat-tip Jewish World Review)

Stupid kid -- imagine having the audacity to hope for life.

TOP OF THE FOLD:

L.A. TIMES LAUNCHES DRIVE TO DECLARE DISABLED UNQUALIFIED FOR OFFICE WORK --

THE CHOICE ON JOHN MCCAIN:

EITHER HE'S TOO CRIPPLED TO BE PRESIDENT,
OR HE SHOULD LOSE HIS TAX-FREE MILITARY PENSION

Oh, and by the way, he's old, and he's had cancer.

Read all about it here and pay close attention to the Deep Thoughts of one Robert Schriebman, a senior Pentagon tax advisor and tax attorney who recently retired as a judge advocate for a unit of the California National Guard.

If McCain can hike across the Grand Canyon, then why should he be getting disability payments from the government that are tax-exempt, Schriebman asked.

Ooooooohhhh. And all those Iraq veterans seen running marathons on their prosthetic legs or wheeling through them in specialty wheelchairs -- why are these parasites getting tax-exempt payments, eh? Are there no prisons? Are there no work-houses?

Same goes for this parasite, Marine vet Eugene Roberts, who has run across the United States [for Jesus, no less] on two buggy-springs where his legs used to be until a little contretemps in Vietnam. What would he need a pension for anyway?






L.A. Times -- first on the ground to, um, doggedly pick up the news. No wonder this kind of crap is referred to as a "scoop".

HIATUS

Winefred bugs out for a few days, to attend a certain conference:


Ooh-rah, and all that. Winefred was proudly instrumental in arranging for the keynote speaker,

this guy.... [with that chest who needs kevlar?]














... who wrote this book==>



It's a long story.

Should be fun.

Will try valiantly to wave at Pope.

Film at 11:00.

WWDD?

What would Dante do?

Where would Dante put this guy? I imagine there's a very, very special little room with his name on it.

[Fair warning -- there's foul language. Kind of a Bill Maher specialty.]


As John Paul the Great, of happy memory, was wont to say, "Be not afraid." The vile slanders and poisonous hate of Bill Maher are not new-- we have endured worse, and who remembers the slanderers? Maher will pass away, perhaps stubbornly clinging to his bitterness and fear, and we will remember and believe in the divine order which governs all creatures, especially as it has been explained by such a magister as this one:

SWEET JESU, GEORGE, WILL YOU QUIT READING PEOPLE'S EYEBALLS????

Seems the President has been at it again with the retinal scans: sees God in the eyes of Pope Benedict XVI.

Stop it -- just stop it. Listen to the holy man, read his books -- knock it off with the "turn around, bright eyes" crap. You haven't exactly knocked anything out of the park so far with this little technique.

RECENTLY PROCLAIMED
FROM ATOP MT. SINAI

(translation: recently coughed up at a San Francisco fundraiser by the Obamassiah)

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

GALLERY OF BITTER SMALL-TOWNERS

CLINGING TO GUNS....

[BANG BANG -- I GOTCHA!]






[OKAY, I SURRENDER.]

AND RELIGION

THE SPLENDOR OF TRUTH -- SMACKDOWN!

OUR INTREPID REPORTER, self-embedded war correspondent MICHAEL YON, gets a very, very, very timely op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. As usual, he produces the unexpected, perhaps even the counter-intuitive.

The Ship of Fools which is the American Congress (at least its Democratic leadership, and their lap-dogs in both parties and in the press gallery) should just give up and go home NOW, since they haven't the sense to hang their miserable heads in shame. Read it and weep, morons:

Let's 'Surge' Some More

[money quote:]

This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels. For all our successes, we still do not have enough troops. This makes the fight longer and more lethal for the troops who are fighting. To give one example, I just returned this week from Nineveh province, where I have spent probably eight months between 2005 to 2008, and it is clear that we remain stretched very thin from the Syrian border and through Mosul. Vast swaths of Nineveh are patrolled mostly by occasional overflights.

[emphasis added - as if!]

Yon remains the man. Proud to have been slippin' him cash lo these many years.

CANADA'S HUMAN-RIGHTS NAZIS
STILL HARD AT WORK

It would take an air-traffic controller to sort out the lawsuits flying back and forth over Canadian skies, in the ongoing effort to make sure that Canadian standards of civility are maintained, those standards being:

(a) No one will ever say, publish, or THINK any idea which could be found discomfiting or offensive to any Muslimist, atheist, homosexualist, or pro-abortionist person, institution, or pet rabbit.

(b) Statute (a) will apply selectively and decreasingly to Jewists, but only if they are liberalists and either atheists or secularists.

(c) If Christianists or pro-life-ists or conservatists (large or small "C") of any persuasion whatever think that any provision of Statute (a) might successfully be applied to them, they are smokin' somethin' and it ain't incense.

(d) Statute (c) goes double for Catholicists, unless they are also liberalists, pro-choicists, and fans of 1960's hymns by Marty Haugen and David Haas. (see here)

The latest victims of Human Rights Commission abuse are Canadian bloggers, one of whom is the formidable (in both Official Languages) Kathy Shaidle over at Five Feet of Fury, where all the latest developments are being monitored by the minute.

I do feel quite neglected since there are no complaints about my blog -- nor, to my knowledge, have any of the articles I wrote years ago for Catholic Insight Magazine been singled out in the multi-page (content dating to 1994) Human Rights Complaint filed against the publication last December (more here) .

Meanwhile, the complaint against columnist-to-the-world and journalistic god Mark Steyn appears to have been dropped, and the Commission just settled for a summary verdict of Guilty on one count of violating Statue (a) above.

Apparently Chief Commissioner of the Ontario HRC, Barbara Hall (at right, photographically speaking), has found the appropriate role model for the exercise of her responsibilities: The Queen of Hearts' Prime Directive --

SENTENCE FIRST! VERDICT AFTERWARDS!

Today is all about...

Petty Officer Second Class (SEAL) Michael A. Monsoor














...who will receive the Medal of Honor posthumously in a ceremony at the White House April 8, 2008. He will receive the award for his actions in Ar Ramadi, Iraq on Sept. 29, 2006. On that day, Monsoor was part of a sniper overwatch security position with three other SEALs and eight Iraqi Army (IA) soldiers. An insurgent closed in and threw a fragmentation grenade into the overwatch position. The grenade hit Monsoor in the chest before falling to the ground. Positioned next to the single exit, Monsoor was the only one who could have escaped harm. Instead, he dropped onto the grenade to shield the others from the blast. Monsoor died approximately 30 minutes later from wounds sustained from the blast. Because of Petty Officer Monsoor’s actions, he saved the lives of his 3 teammates and the IA soldiers. Monsoor also received the Silver Star for his actions during the same deployment in May 2006, when he exposed himself to heavy enemy fire to rescue and treat an injured teammate.



His tribute site here .

Blackfive was on the case when it happened -- "People you should know"



Footnote: WATCH THIS SPACE: LOST AND FOUND -- SADDAM'S WMD?

[Previously covered by Kenneth Timmerman here.]

SEE YOU IN D.C., YOUR HO-HO-HOLINESS

I'll be in the District with a slight overlap to the Papal visit -- no tickets to anything, but maybe he and I can arrange to meet at some intersection as he mobiles through town.

The city is urging those planning to attend the Papal Mass at the new Nationals stadium to buy a special Metro Pass and leave their cars at home. Their first PSA attempt looked like this (later pulled off the air -- I thought it was kinda cute):



He's no Travelocity Gnome, mind you, but has a certain charm nonetheless.

Habemus pop-star.





TOO BAD THE POPE DIDN'T GET THERE IN TIME TO ABSOLVE JAY ROCKEFELLER

Not too sure what West Virginia Democrat Senator Jay Rockefeller would LIKE to be famous for, besides his surname link to an 18-wheeler-load of oil money.

He SHOULD be more famous for his November 2005 admission that in 2002 he toured three middle eastern countries and tipped them off to the likelihood of our future invasion of Iraq -- a rank act of treason by any sane definition. But that was somewhat, uh, under-reported by the big-name press at the time.

Then there's the question of why, if the thought of war so alarmed Rockefeller that he spread the word among our potential enemies [as in "the friend of my enemy is my enemy"], he nevertheless decried Iraq as the most dangerous thing on the planet since that alien came and removed his brain, and promptly voted to authorize war. Or not. Chris Wallace reported -- you decide.

More recently Rockefeller has been in the news for having proclaimed, at maximum decibels, what will probably go down as ALL TEN of the Top Ten Stupidest Things Any Human Being Could Have Said About John McCain.

McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.

Fisking this piece of fetid political feces isn't really worth the key-strokes. (The most fun part is that the laser-guided missile hadn't been invented yet when McCain was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 -- tied for second place in fun-ness is (a) the fact that he was hit at 4,500 feet, and (b) it took him 5 1/2 years to be "long gone".)

NRO's The Corner says it so well: "Senator Jay Rockefeller, jerk." Full metal train-wreck is here.

Like somebody once said, "I love the smell of Napalm when some politician makes a meal of it."

Over at the Vets for Freedom rally yesterday, attended by Senators McCain and Lieberman, among others, the crowd was treated to this definition of "we're against the war but support the troops" by one veteran/speaker:

This is like somebody coming along, punching you in the gut, and saying, 'oh, I didn't mean that for you, I meant that for your boss.' We despise 'support' like that.

Later, the occasionally impossible Senator Lindsay Graham weighed in at the rally, addressing the assembled military folks:

You want to know who wants you to come home more than anybody? Al Qaeda, because you're kicking their ass.

Indeed.



MEANWHILE BACK AT THE RANCH...

The two biggest men on campus, General David "Peaches" Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, were competing in the javelin catch event over at the Senate Armed Services Committee struggle session. The next president of the United States was in attendance to pepper them with questions -- if we only knew who the heck it was!!!???? Mrs. Clinton seems to have put on the worst performance, but at least she didn't call the general a liar again like last time -- apparently she has grasped the fact that that would be the pot calling the kettle African-American.

Oops.

IN ECONOMIC NEWS:

New York Times/CBS poll results on American national economy: Condition of current economy?

GOOD - 1%
FAIRLY GOOD - 20%
FAIRLY BAD - 48%
STINKIN' BAD - 30%

U.S. in a recession? YES - 66% NO - 27%

National Council on Economic Education (most recent available data):

Number of states requiring one course in Economics for High School graduation -- 15

Number of states requiring one course in Personal Finance -- 7

[NCEE summary What Americans Know About Economics]

WELCOME TO MY HIT LIST


TOP EIGHT HITS:

MEET THE GUYS WHO [allegedly]
WANTED TO KILL ME & THE SPOUSE
-- AUGUST 2006 -- RETURN TRIP FROM OXFORD
AIR CANADA, Flt. 849





















NOW ON TRIAL IN BRITAIN


HANGIN'S TOO GOOD FOR 'EM.

[It's also banned in Britain -- oh well. At least we can be sure that, if convicted, these losers will do hard time in a fine British prison, with Korans, Halal food, personal imam visits, no forced exposure to Piglet, conjugal visits with one or more wives, and probably quick parole under newly enacted provisions of National Sharia Law to be passed in Parliament in the none-too-distant future. And maybe a private consultation with the current Archdhimmi of Ditherbury, Rowan Atkinson Williams.]

KABOOM: A SOLDIER'S WAR JOURNAL

Fantastic milblog discovered this evening. Lt.G has a writing career ahead of him when his gig is up. I haven't scoured enough of his back-story yet (he's only been at it since November, so I should be able to get to all of it), but I thought this one from a couple months ago was terrific. Memo to the Pentagon: this bud's for you. Lt. G writes:

The gripe: A military tradition as time-honored as dehumanizing the enemy, as expected as giving your rifle a feminine name and persona, and as innate in the soldier’s soul as feeling abandoned by the kinsmen they fight for. After all, you don’t worry about the soldiers who bitch, you worry about the ones who aren’t bitching.

Such comprehension doesn’t change the fact that bullshit always rolls downhill - or that at the platoon level, said bullshit rolls in like a crashing avalanche, steadily progressing in size and strength, arriving with a reeking stench of mundane regulations and asinine humorlessness...

Let’s just say that if LT G were Lord Protectorate G of the Desert Cavalry of Pure Raw Awesomeness, things would be a little different.

[A sample of Lt. G's gripe-based proposed reforms:]

-- (*Some*) Field grade officers would have more serious things to worry about during a war than the size of PV2 Van Wilder’s moustache, or LT G’s wear of the Army-issued fleece cap during the day while off-duty. (Hey, I’m a skinny guy. I get cold easily.) Like, oh I don’t know, ensuring that the Iraqi Police have an equal balance of Sunnis and Shi’as on their force to avoid allegations of corruption. That might a good place to start.

-- 12 hours of a bureaucratic trail of tears and papercuts would not be what sends a detainee to jail; finding a freakin’ Soviet-era sniper rifle in his backyard in a water pipe would be enough.

-- I would never go to bed weary and sore and drained, absolutely convinced that the details of me and my men’s lives were nothing more than a PowerPoint slide being passed up the chain-of-command on memory drives. Not even our own presentation. Just one little slide. This happens at least once a week.

This definition of "the gripe" is one for the books -- or at least for the notebooks of journalists and documentary-hacks who trawl the rank and file looking for discontent and then file their pre-determined stories, as if each man who exercises his military prerogative to bitch is to be taken (a) too too seriously, and (b) as representative of everybody else. [On the other hand, perhaps the brass would be well-advised not to take the gripes too too lightly -- should they ever give them an ear.]

Read the rest here, and then read to whole blog top to bottom. I like this guy.

REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Massey Lectures, Toronto, Canada 1967

A daring explanation of how we arrived at the era of
REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT

Fr. Raymond J. de Souza -- a very bright and engaging young priest with a side-career in journalism (who often colours way outside the lines of both his vocation and his expertise, but always worth a read), posits a pretty daring take on the early origins of the fork in the road of American racial politics which brought us to the point that Barack Obama's church of recent decades preaches a "gospel" (let's not dignify it with a capital "G") of anti-Americanism and anti-white racism.

In today's National Post, Fr. de Souza reflects on his reading of the recently published Lost Massey Lectures, selections from a lecture series founded in 1961 by then Governor-General of Canada Vincent Massey [yes, elder brother of tv's "Dr. Gillespie", the actor, valiant Canadian veteran of both World Wars, and naturalized American Goldwater-supporter Raymond Massey!]. Among them is the 1967 lecture by Martin Luther King, which the reader expected to be something along the lines of the noble sentiments expressed in King's most famous speech, the 1963 "I Have A Dream" oration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

What Fr. de Souza found lurking there instead, to his immense disappointment, was the germ of anti-Americanism and statist dependency now thundering from the pulpit of Chicago's Trinity United Church (just as much under its new pastor as under its conveniently retired Pastor Wright), and, by all reports, from the pulpits of many other predominantly black churches across America.

For King admirers, accustomed to his prophetic denunciations of violence and injustice, it is almost painful listening to him distinguish between the rioters' violence against property, rather than persons...

While the earlier King emphasized the virtue, discipline and community strength of black America as the means for achieving their emancipation, the later King takes a more statist tone, blaming an economic system that can only be changed by massive government spending... The Massey Lectures have the tone not of prophetic emancipation, but rather a campaign brief for the Great Society expansion of the welfare state.

In 1967, King is greatly preoccupied with the injustice of the Vietnam War, which he opposed strongly. But he has allowed himself to be seduced by the anti-Americanism that tainted the antiwar movement: "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own Government."

It is painful to read that. Whatever American sins were in Vietnam, it is impossible to justify that claim, while hundreds of millions were imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, while millions were starved off the land in the Great Leap Forward.

... in giving comfort to that view, he helped sow seeds that produced the vitriolic anti-Americanism that Reverend Wright demonstrated is now commonplace in parts of black America.

Read it all. And wonder whether anywhere south of the 49th parallel there will be journalists who dare to make this unhappy connection on the anniversary of that day [as U2 would headline it] "Thursday morning, April 4th, shots ring out in the Memphis sky."


SPEAKING OF HEADLINES

Over at Jewish World Review, Jack Kelly reads the tea-leaves on purposely ambiguous headlines about the Iraqi army's Operation Knight's Charge against Muqtada Al Sadsack's Mahdi Army, and the subsequent call (by Mookie himself) for a cease-fire. Not quite outright deception in the Cronkite-Tet tradition, but sufficiently contortionist to disguise the increasingly good news coming (or not) out of Basra.


SPEAKING OF RACE IN AMERICA,
JEREMIAH WRIGHT,
BARACK OBAMA, and all that

Ann Coulter, of all people, [I read her today so you don't have to -- I don't usually, but the headline drew me in] has been reading Obama's audacious autobiography. Well, at least one of them. We know that his 46-years have been SO remarkable that he merits TWO already!

I have my problems with Coulter, but her piece basically relates unvarnished quotations from Obama himself, and it would be hard to write anything more damning. Think he threw his white Grandma under the bus in his apologetic for Pastor Wright? [de-constructed brilliantly here by Mark Steyn] Well, he had long ago thrown Mama from the train in a much more vicious way. After reassuring his worried mother that he wasn't into drugs (was this even true?) with a pat on the hand, he goes on "to share with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people." [Coulter]

It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time.

He's talking about his mother -- like some stranger on a bus or in a shop for whom he needs to act out this soothing pantomime to check some reflexive panic generated by her own son based on his skin-tone! This is deeply twisted.

The most twisted thing about it is that one is left only two possibilities as to where this comes from. Either he has spent his entire rather privileged life as a seething vat of race-based resentment, expertly masked behind a face of moderation and benevolence (in which case we can't lay his attitudes at the door-step of Pastor Wright) -- or he has re-written a problematic but hardly agonizing, and in many ways quite ordinarily pleasant, youth into a saga of racial alienation and suffering, very much under the tutelage of the hate-mongering pastor who has regularly harangued him for most of his adult life.


Either way, Obama comes out looking bad-- he has phonied-up himself in one fashion or another. The only question is, was it for all of his life, or only the last half? A number of his school-friends say they do not recognize the angst-ridden youth of the books -- that they never had the conversations he relates which smolder with racial resentment and alienation. I'm inclined to believe them. Obama's recollections sound entirely too complicated to have been lived out in his boyhood, at least without having brought him to some kind of mental collapse or demonstration of rage long before his star rose at Harvard.

I'm inclined to think this is all post-Wright revisionism. Which is not to say that I think he really believes any of it. It may well be nothing more than the creation of a character that he thought would advance his political ambitions. Mark Steyn, as usual, has this aspect NAILED. [Listen here to his interview on Hugh Hewitt's radio show -- scroll down to #15.]