"A member or supporter of Hezbollah who calls himself Al Ghaliboon appeared in my comments and completely dominated the thread. Normally I don't let somebody show up and do that, but it's not every day that a group of Americans gets to argue with someone like him."

"I have since had the chance to read about 500 or 600 messages. Almost all of them politely phrased (I exempt one from "the Riordan family" who evidently have not forgiven the long history of British depredation in Ireland) and almost all of them appending the list of college degrees as well as of medals and citations held, these letters show a very deep and interesting rift in which Mr. Kerry plays only a secondary part. Many of my respondents agreed that his words may not have meant or intended quite what they first seemed to mean, but they also felt that the klutziness was Freudian, so to speak, in that the senator's patrician contempt for grunts and dogfaces was bound to come out sooner or later."

"In 1821, with truly remarkable foresight, Mr. Jefferson wrote in a letter to Macon that 'our Government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation first [i.e., centralisation] and then corruption, its necessary consequence.'"

"If the country is about to re-embrace Scowcroftian realism, we’re about to realize a hard lesson about that policy’s limitation. And if the military is going to return to worrying about the enemies it chooses instead of the enemies that choose us, we’ll have bigger troubles still."

""The Republicans lost and the Democrats won for the same reason -- they distanced themselves from their base. "

That's the sentence of the year, in my opinion."

"Hamas has now called for Moslems around the world to attack America. In the past, Hamas has not done this, mainly because the U.S. was the major contributor of aid to Palestinians. But most of this aid has been cut off since Hamas won the election to run the Palestinian territories. Hamas refused to back off on its call for the destruction of Israel, so, by law, American aid was stopped. Apparently Hamas does not believe the aid will ever be restored. [ Oh, how can that be? Why we'll pull out of Iraq and everything will be just fine. I'm just SURE of it. LOL -ed. ] "

Warren On Point Again...

"Why did it evaporate? For the same reason then as now. The “alternative America”, ruling from its ivory towers in academia, the media, and the entertainment industry, could not understand why anyone should die for any cause at all; could not distinguish between freedom and tyranny; and instinctively sided with any enemy of what they fancifully imagined to be “American imperialism”.

My 21st birthday happened to coincide with the final evacuation of Saigon. From my modest experience on the ground in that country, I knew what was coming next. The boat people were no surprise to me. I think that was the day I fully realized, in adult terms, that evil often prevails in this world. So this is nothing new.

The fate that will befall all those millions of courageous Iraqis, showing the dye on their fingers after they had voted -- in defiance of all the terror threats -- will not come as a surprise to me, either. They are being sold out, as the Vietnamese were before them. But the consequences of abandoning Iraq will come home to the United States and the West, in a way Vietnam never touched us. [ A new variant of "Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it" looms: "Those who remember propaganda but mistake it for history, are condemned to ... some very nasty surprises..." -ed. ] "

""When Republicans worry more about staying in government than about limiting government, they get thrown out of government." [ Of course, they lose the other way too since then they're not giving anything away. Hard medicine is rarely appreciated and never popular... -ed. ] "

"Then, turning to his mentor, the major 20th-century philosopher Eric Voegelin, Prof. Sandoz expounds his account of the underpinnings of reason, religion, and social order -- using Voegelin’s deep grasp of the re-emergence of Gnosticism in postmodern public life. For at the root of apparent “new-age” decadence, are very old heresies about the nature of man and God, which have again captured the imaginations of the fanciful, so many centuries after having been seemingly slain by the triumph of Catholic Christianity.

Finally, returning to the present, Prof. Sandoz begins to suggest that the very challenges to the old Western project -- of founding our liberty in religious truth -- are rekindling it. Under the pressure of events, including the unfolding of Islamic jihadism, men and women are recovering “public consciousness of truth about the transcendent divine Ground of our being”. (Unlike the Romans, we have something to fall back on.)"

"Most people knew this would happen, including some I think, who called most loudly for a ceasefire. Not because they were malevolent but because of a deep-seated human desire to avoid a present unpleasantness even if it means worse in the future. We all know the feeling. Fly now, pay later. Get a new suite of furniture. No interest until 2010. When images of bombs falling and the pictures of people dying were printed in the papers during the recent war in Lebanon what was more natural than to want to make it go away? Even for a while. Even for a very little while.

So now hello darkness our old friend. We've come to talk to you again. As we knew we would."

"The Provost of Erfurt, Elfriede Begrich, told reporters that Weisselberg’s widow had said that he killed himself because he was alarmed at the spread of Islam and the Church’s stance on the issue.

She described Weisselberg as an erudite man who had addressed repeatedly the Church’s position on Islam in meetings over the past three to four years. He had written to her, urging her to take the matter more seriously, she said.

The Protestant Bishop of Saxony, Axel Noack, said the suicide had shocked the community and that he hoped it would not hurt relations between Christians and Muslims."

Reminder: Time To See Obsession

The New Buckit has made it easy. There's even a 12 minute version... GO. WATCH. NOW.

"Quote of the Day - [Iraqi] Judge to Ramsey Clark: "You are ridiculing the Iraqi people. You have come here from America. Get out.""

"Here is something you won't hear reported in the mainstream mix... Here is the body count since the War in Iraq began in 2003 compared to when Saddam was waging his own war on the Iraqi people:"

All You Need To Know About Politics Today

"WASHINGTON — The grainy black-and-white images appear on television, while ominous music plays in the background. It's another in a blizzard of negative political ads and before you consciously know it, the message takes hold of your brain.

You may not want it to, but it works just about instantly.

In fact, the ad's effects on the brain "are actually shocking," says UCLA psychiatry professor Dr. Marco Iacoboni.

Iacoboni's brain imaging research from the 2004 presidential campaign revealed that viewers lost empathy for their own candidate once he was attacked.

Scientists around the country are logging the emotional and physical effects of negative political ads. Iacoboni tracked parts of the middle brain that lit up in brain scans when people watched their favorite candidates get attacked. Other scientists hooked up wires to measure frowns and smiles before the meaning of the ads' words sunk in. Mostly, researchers found that negative ads tend to polarize and make it less likely that supporters of an attacked candidate will vote.

"Everyone says, 'We hate them, they're terrible,'" said psychology professor George Bizer of Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.

However, he added, "They seem to work."

And politicians know it because the latest figures show that by nearly a 10-to-1 ratio, political parties are spending more money on negative ads than positive ones."

"But all this is separate from the political decision to put this on the Kerry website after insisting that he didn't intend on casting aspersions on the intellectual capacity of the troops. If he really didn't mean to call them lazy and uneducated, then why did he go out of his way to host an editorial on his site that does exactly that? [ "Jon Carry" -- the gift that keeps on giving... -ed. ] "

More proof that the military just loves Kerry... And who would have guessed that he's such a uniter after all? Well, of the services that is...

Chinia: To The Last Islamist Proxy

Of course, our democracy needs a bit of work also:

"In my view, Iraqi participation in elections, sometimes at great personal risk, goes a long way towards answering those who say there's something in the Iraqi (or Arab) DNA that is incompatible with the administration's democracy project. Unfortunately, though, more was required of the Iraqi peoople than just voting. The situation called on them to elect leaders who would work in good faith for national reconciliation, rather than tilting substantially in the direction of one sectarian faction. The Iraqis failed to do this when they voted in the Shia-militia-friendly Malacki government, thereby making it difficult, if not impossible, for the U.S. to work with the current government to curb sectarian violence.

The Iraqis, of course, are not the first people to make a very bad decision at the polls. The fact that they did so is not necessarily evidence of some national "genetic" flaw, much less a demonstration that democracy can't work in the Middle East. It just means that the Iraqi people did less than what a difficult situation required, and that we must face up to and deal with the consequences. [ And of course, any discussion of Iraq that ignores the pandemic role of Isamlism and its remaining state sponsors including Iran, Syria (Irania together to my view), Pakistan (having malignant A.D.D., the press seems to hardly notice that Afghanistan is not going well either because of you-know-who in spite of supposedly being the "good war" to Iraq's "bad war") and many other Arab states like the Saudis (15 of the 19 hijackers, how soon we forget) and Egyptians in at least some role. Along that line, Vanity Fair's interviews with the most vilified neocons is interesting. While there's a lot of good insight from them, I notice that the word "Iran" has been carefully edited out of this preview. Most conspicuously from Michael Ledeen who rarely speaks or writes a paragraph without the name "Iran" in it; and I notice that this quote -- while a good insight nonetheless -- probably consists of the only two sentences he uttered without Iran as the subject: -ed. ]

Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.""

Just as in Korea and Vietnam, if we got serious and really wanted to win we would end up fighting the Chinese and Russians more and more directly, so today the situation is the same but the proxies have changed. Now Chinia (China+Russia) has decided to fight us to the last Islamist -- and the Islamists are mostly happy to do so given our alignment with Israel. If you can't understand this from China's ridiculous stringing us along on the NorKorComs (the WMD and delivery system supply proxy to speed the Islamists along) and Russia's ludicrous statements that they believe that Iran's nuclear program is peaceful, I have many bridges to sell you...

""Of course Americans should vote Democrat," Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group..."

Having it both ways, part 7,865,907:

"The defining characteristic of partisan attacks on President Bush has been their unthinking and indiscriminate nature. For example, Bush is to blame for not halting the development of nukes by Iran and North Korea, but he's also to blame for toppling Saddam Hussein due in part to his concern that Saddam was interested in and capable of developing nukes. Critics point to Iran's rise as evidence that Bush misplaced his focus on Iraq but they don't consider how Saddam would have reacted to Iranian nuclear progress.

The New York Times now has carried unthinking Bush-bashing to a point beyond caricature. Today, as Tiger Hawk notes, it quotes with apparent approval "experts" who say that Saddam was as little as a year away from building an atom bomb. [ "beyond caricature" would be an understatement now, wouldn't it? -ed. ] The Times does so in order to show that the Bush administration acted recklessly when it published captured Iraqi documents that describe that country's WMD programs, because those documents might be used by another country in furtherance of building WMD. [ Can you say A - D - D? -ed. ]

Did the Times just say that Saddam's Iraq was a year away from building a nuclear weapon? I guess so. Good thing Saddam's no longer in power."

"It's gratifying to see Ikle's book noticed somewhere else. It was the subject of a Belmont Club post a few days back. And the frightening thing about its thesis, in common with Huntington's thesis about the clash of civilizations, is that the probelem he describes is built into the fabric of our modern world. It is neither Clinton's nor Bush's fault. It's not anyone's fault. The risk of destruction is the price of harnessing the power of technology. I suppose we knew that already. We are our own blessing; and our own curse."

"Mr. President, just the other night, I went out with my family for dinner to a restaurant in Herzliya, the city named after Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl, who foresaw the need to establish a safe haven for the Jewish people. Our waitress was an attractive and cheerful young lady who moved to Israel 16 years ago at the age of four from her native Lithuania, where her family had suffered anti-Semitism and persecution.

But when we asked her if she was happy living here in the Jewish state, the smile on her lips quickly faded. Glumly, she answered us with the following words: "That Ahmadinejad of Iran, he scares me. It is a very scary situation." And indeed it is, Mr. President, because my people are in danger once again. It was just six decades ago that the Europeans tossed us into Hitler's ovens and turned 6 million Jews into ashes. Now, with no shame, they stand by silently as Iran seeks to do the same."

"A better example of gutter politics is focusing on the religion of a candidate's mother, something the Post did with aplomb in the Virginia Senate race."

Dear John,

"And before that were those baseless attacks by those 200-some veterans, paid off by Karl Rove in l970, on the chance that 34 years later he'd be running George W. Bush for president and needed to soften you up. Everyone knows they had no case whatsoever (beyond the fact you were calling them rapists and killers), just as everyone knows how tasteless it is to mock your lifestyle. Everyone knows how hard you work for your money, how much you deserve it, and how hard to must be to find not one, but two women with quite so much dough. (If you were only a woman, people would see your story as the fairy tale it is.)

Even worse, it is mean, false, and mendacious to say that you were trying to call our brave men in Iraq and in uniform mentally challenged, when it was clear as day that you meant this to apply to the president, who ran rings around you when you last met in electoral combat; and whose grades in college were higher than yours."

OTOS (On The Other Side), A Reminder

So after Kerry's little "mis-speak", we get this analysis from Demosophist:

"Yes he misspoke, almost certainly, but does that make a difference?

There are, after all, only two ways one can interpret what was said.

1. Smart, intelligent, hard-working people opposed the war from its inception; while stupid, uneducated, slothful people supported it. We'll ignore for the moment that he initially supported it. By his own admission this statement closely paraphrases what he intended to say.

2. Those who serve in Iraq are stupid, uneducated, slothful people. He claims that he didn't intend to convey that message.

The problem is that most of the men serving in Iraq supported the war from its inception, and still do. So even if he didn't intend to say 2. that message still follows from 1. as long as one is smart enough to make an elementary inference. Even worse, the second statement is a fair characterization of what the Democrats have been saying about the military for a number of years, claiming that the modern service is mainly composed of people too dumb and too vulnerable to avoid the song and dance of the military recruiter."

But of course it gets worse. If Kerry was just talking about Bush being stupid (more shocking Victicratic behavior -- not) then that's the reason why Dems are always calling Elephants stupid while simultaneously denying any validity to grades or intelligence tests.

Because of course Bush got better grades at Yale than Kerry did ...

"And this is the problem with “progressives” in general, whether political or religious. You might think that Christian fundamentalists are “conservative,” but you would be very wrong. Rather, this is a thoroughly modern movement that has detached itself from oral tradition, inspired commentary, and the testimony of various superhuman saints and sages, to produce a largely manmade, exteriorized version of Christianity. It is no different than political progressives who twist a part of the Constitution in order to create a new political religion that finds justification for their own desires. Roe vs. Wade is just one example, but one could cite dozens more, most notably, the belief that the Constitution somehow sanctions racial discrimination or is hostile to religion. These leftist ideas are human inventions that have nothing to do with the message of the founders."

"The liberal press has a story line for this election, and John Kerry's exposing how the left really feels about the military isn't it. This story illustrates, I think, the rift between this country's two media cultures."

"I'll be honest with you. I realize my opponent will get 100% of the pedophile vote. But unlike my opponent, I want the votes of Americans who love freedom and our country. I want the votes of people in my district who work hard and pay taxes, and who remember the $12 million in federal funding I secured last year to put up highways signs directing tourists to our district's famous Ear Wax Museum. That's a really great museum, and now tourists aren't going to get lost trying to find it. Empowering the American people to find their way; that's what this campaign is all about, and everything my opponent stands against."

"The child of whatever age remains close to the paradise not yet fully lost, “and it is for that reason that childhood constitutes a necessary aspect of the integral man: the man who is fully mature always keeps, in equilibrium with wisdom, the qualities of simplicity and freshness, of gratitude and trust, that he possessed in the springtime of his life” (F. Schuon). [ But then check out this comment:

A young couple with a newborn and a three year old daughter do not know what to do. Their three year old is insisting that she have some time alone with the newborn while the baby is in his crib.

The parents are naturally worried about issues of sibling rivalry, displacement and the like. But, they have a intercom monitor in the baby’s room and decide that will listen to the monitor intently while they allow the older sister some time with her new brother.

As the parents listen, they hear their little girl approach the baby’s crib. They hear her breathing for awhile. And finally she says to her infant brother: “Please tell me about God. I’m beginning to forget.” -ed. ] "

""It is ultimately better to march openly against beliefs contrary to their convictions instead of waiting until the last moment to unfurl their banners."

At the very moment they want to unfurl their banners, they will be forced at scimitar-point to make their banners into burquas and put them on. [ Well. That captures it quite nicely don't you think? -ed. ] "

"MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Tuesday it believed Iran's nuclear program was peaceful, and a political dialogue, not sanctions, must be used in talks with Tehran.

"We do not have information that would suggest that Iran is carrying out a non-peaceful (nuclear) program," Russian Security Council Secretary Igor Ivanov told a news conference in Moscow. [ Or could it just be more "Gramscian Damage"? D'oh... -ed. ] "

"If European governments fail to improve the anemic economic performance described by Tyler, and remain unable to assimilate Muslim immigrants effectively, there is a real chance that voter frustration will increase, and the far right or far left will successfully exploit it and eventually come to power in one or more major European nations - with potentially disastrous results. Many of those Europeans who vote for extremist parties are probably just "protest voting" and do not actually endorse their platforms in full. But the same was probably true of many of the Germans who "protest-voted" for the Nazis and Communists during the Weimar Republic (as Richard Evans suggests in this recent book). The results this time around probably will not be as bad as what happened in the 1920s and '30s, but neither will it be pretty.

[ Which brings to mind the following from Tom Wolfe: "For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here," he said. "You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."

Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, "You really don't have so much to worry about." He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: "You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!"

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe. -ed. ] "

"It may be, though, that al Qaeda's religious ideology of armed jihad means that it cannot lay low even if it might be advantageous. It cannot merely engineer the US withdrawal, it must be known to have done so. So it keeps bombing and shooting.

Except now it may have actually developed a strategy to fight America. This strategy is very simple and has excellent potential that is already being realized.

1. Target American news media, not for attack but for propaganda.

2. Through the media, buttress the idea in the minds of American politicians that Iraq is lost and there is no reasonable recourse but to begin withdrawing as soon as possible.

I would submit that al Qaeda is significantly accomplishing this strategy, so obviously so that I need not offer cites. And let it be remembered that now the calls for withdrawal do not come from only one party."

"Or, in another take: " A Democratic congressman told ABC News Tuesday, 'I guess Kerry wasn't content blowing 2004, now he wants to blow 2006, too.'"

Indeed. Or are the Karl Rove mind-control rays just that overpowering?

FINALLY: Here's a big roundup on this story, from Pajamas Media. And Chip Mathis reminds us that Kerry's grades at Yale were worse than Bush's. This explains a lot . . . ."

"But all demands for an evacuation are based on the fantasy that there is a distinction between "over there" and "over here." In a world-scale confrontation with jihadism, this distinction is idle and false. It also involves callously forgetting the people who would be the first victims but who would not by any means be the last ones."

"The cravenness and condescension of John Kerry make me sick."

"The Europeans apparently have begun to discover the futility of UNIFIL, a futility that many pointed out when the UN Security Council passed UNSCR 1701. It would have been better to form a new force, one that had UN-dictated terms of engagement and one that had the authority to enforce 1701. Instead, the Germans have found themselves between three entities which have never accepted the terms of 1701 and have no intention of abiding by it for very long. The Israelis did not get their soldiers back, and because the UNIFIL contingent has no real authority, no one can certify that Hezbollah has not begun to re-arm. Hezbollah wants their weapons for their next effort against the Israelis. The Lebanese government has sent its army to the sub-Litani region for the first time in decades, but it won't stop Hezbollah from re-establishing themselves in opposition to them.

The Germans will have to decide whether to continue its participation in this charade, seeing as how the three principals have long since given it up."

""You say it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom; when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your customs. And then we will follow ours."

Maybe it's time for Europe and others to begin building a few metaphorical gallows in order to protect their culture from those who don't mind taking advantage of their system but refuse to accept their values and culture and assimilate.

As James C Bennett said: "Democracy, immigration, multiculturalism. Pick any two"."

"Poor bomb design, or low quality components, have caused fizzles in the past. In 1998, several of Pakistan's nuclear weapons tests failed in a similar fashion to the current North Korean one. It may be that design that was sold to North Korea by the Pakistani nuclear scientists that, at that time, were running an illegal nuclear weapons sales business on the side."

"CNN broadcasts 30 minutes of meaningless static you say? How can you tell?"

"According to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Bob Woodward had eight hours with the president. Did he ever ask if we were at war with Iran? Given the explosive evidence provided in State of Denial, he certainly should have. But if he did, there is no record of it in his book.

Perhaps the question was not asked for the same reason the policymakers and spooks didn’t want it known that Iran was waging war on us: fear of the consequences. For once you put the Iranian question in that context, it’s really impossible to pretend that our “issues” with the mullahs consist of trying to convince them to help freedom in Iraq and Lebanon, and getting them to cooperate in dismantling their nuclear program. Once you are forced to address the facts, all sorts of “issues” drop into the background."

"The heart sinks. Can anyone — let alone the president — possibly believe that the mullahs might help Iraq succeed? The only “success” they are interested in is the humiliation of America and the domination of Iraq. Can anyone possibly believe that Iran might help the Lebanese government? The only thing they care about is the destruction of that government, the slaughter or domination of the Maronite Christians, and the creation of an Islamic Republic under the thumb of Hizbollah. And finally, how can anyone possibly believe that the “big issue” is whether or not Iran will get nukes? The issue is American lives, now being taken in Iraq and Afghanistan by Iranian weapons, killers, and managers. This is not new; it has been going on for 27 years, and we have yet to respond."

"There is a word for this, but we don't use it regularly -- it's archaic except in Old English and early Middle English. The word is frith*. It's interesting for two reasons:

1) It neatly captures the concept the fellow is looking for, and,

2) It is linguistically linked to several modern English words, including "friend," "free," and "freedom."

When the term was in common use, the idea was that free men remained free only as long as they remained friends -- devoted to each other's common defense. These frith bonds were what allowed the tribe to create a space out of the chaos of the world, in which they could establish the order they prefer. [ Is the west in danger of becoming "frith free'? No, wait. That isn't quite right... -ed. ] "

It's Better To Be Raped???

"The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (12 October) that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: “We are watching the world of yesterday.”

Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. “I am too old,” he said. However, he urged young people to get out and “move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable.”

Many Germans and Dutch, apparently, did not wait for Broder’s advice. The number of emigrants leaving the Netherlands and Germany has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in. One does not have to be prophetic to predict, like Henryk Broder, that Europe is becoming Islamic. Just consider the demographics. The number of Muslims in contemporary Europe is estimated to be 50 million. It is expected to double in twenty years. By 2025, one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families. Today Mohammed is already the most popular name for new-born boys in Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and other major European cities.

Broder is convinced that the Europeans are not willing to oppose islamization. “The dominant ethos,” he told De Volkskrant, “is perfectly voiced by the stupid blonde woman author with whom I recently debated. She said that it is sometimes better to let yourself be raped than to risk serious injuries while resisting. She said it is sometimes better to avoid fighting than run the risk of death.”"

"Is anyone thinking about what it really means to change Western foreign policy to make the Islamic world happier?"

"Apart from that horrific Molotov cocktail attack on a bus that sent a woman to the hospital with burns over 60% of her body, the French Interior Ministry says last night was relatively calm.

“Relatively calm,” in this case, means that only 200 cars were burned by disenchanted youths. [ Youths should be in quotes of course... -ed. ] "

"Let me make it really, really clear. Why should anyone trust you with the keys to the country when you don't love it enough to stay and fight to make it better? And why should anyone pay attention to the notions of someone who thinks - seriously - that we're looking down the barrel of a fascist state here in the United States?"

"An analysis of state-wide records by the Poughkeepsie Journal reveals that 77,000 dead people remain on election rolls in New York State, and some 2,600 may have managed to vote after they had died. The study also found that Democrats are more successful at voting after death than Republicans, by a margin of four-to-one, largely because so many dead people seem to vote in Democrat-dominated New York City. (Link via Ed Still's VoteLaw.) [ The Republicans are the party of corruption? The only one? Really? -ed. ] "

Today's Risible NYeT Update

"Oct. 27, 2006—This week’s exchange with the New York Times isn’t the first time the Department of Defense has expressed concern about inaccuracies in a Times editorial. A September 7 editorial (“A Sudden Sense of Urgency”) asserted that, with the transfer of 14 high-value terrorist suspects to Cuba, “President Bush finally has some real terrorists in Guantánamo Bay.” In fact, those held prior to the transfer included personal bodyguards of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda recruiters, trainers, and facilitators. Another individual held at Guantánamo was Mohamed al-Kahtani, believed to be the intended 20th hijacker on September 11th.

The Times declined to issue a correction, noting that “the phrase in question was meant to be somewhat lighthearted in tone and not literal."

POWER LINE NOTES: Right. The Times is "lighthearted" about Guantanamo Bay. Note, too, the Times's standard in refusing to make a correction here: it's unnecessary because no one will believe what we wrote. [ Well, yes. Anyone who has more than a passing interest in reality would have stopped reading them long ago. But of course the few thousand readers that are left swallow this risible sedition as if it were gospel... -ed. ] "

"What Italy needs today is competition, privatisation of grossly inefficient state-sponsored utilities, deregulation of the financial system and changes in labour laws. Such reforms can be hard to implement even in a booming economy. In a stagnant or declining one, they will become impossible.

To make matters worse, Italy will be tightening its budget at the same time as Germany implements the biggest tax increases in its modern history — also in deference to the Maastricht Treaty, if not under quite such direct compulsion from the EU. These simultaneous fiscal blunders in Italy, Germany and Eastern Europe will almost mean another “lost year” for the euro zone, with economic performance falling far behind America, Britain and Japan. But the long-term consequences could be more far-reaching.

At some point the people of Europe will realise that there is something rotten in a political system that leaves them forever in the world economy’s slow lane — and which cannot be changed by any democratic process, regardless of how people vote."

"Under these circumstances, unless our military genuinely believes that it can quell the anarchy in Baghdad, it seems unwise to attempt this. The better course may well be to focus on areas where a true insurgency exists, and to keep training Iraqi security forces to the point that they can secure most of the country and, should prospects improve there, effectively police Baghdad one day, as well."

"A young woman is near death in Marseilles tonight, after a group of "youths" fire-bombed this bus... [ Pray for her. The tipping point may be soon in France... -ed. ] "

"What Mrs. Cheney and before her Chairman Hunter focused on is the outrageous decision by an American network to show a film provided to it by the enemy with the hope on the enemy's part that it would be shown on American television and around the globe.

If Nazis had provided CBS film of SS killing Americans, would CBS have shown that during WW 2?

Would ABC have run agitprop provided by North Korea during the Korean War?

Would NBC have aired Viet Cong movies made during the Tet offensive of American GIs and Marines being gunned down? [ Ah, yes. There's where the cart went off the road didn't it? The NVA lost approximately 45,000 of 90,000 men committed and yet the Tet "victory" is a liberal shibboleth to this day, no? -ed. ]

Wolf Blitzer asserts that "of course, is we want the United States to win."

Mrs. Cheney replies "[t]hen why are you running terrorist propaganda?" [ Crickets chirping... -ed. ]

There is no answer to this question, and Blitzer does not attempt one, but disputes the premise, although moments later he concedes that the film was in fact "propaganda."

And here we arrive at the central issue: You cannot want the United States to win the war and yet take actions that help the enemy. Doing what the enemy asks --in this case airing the enemy's propaganda-- helps the enemy."

"So, then, why isn't the Nashville news media covering the 21st district race between Bob Krumm and Sen. Henry?

The only answer seems to be the lack of negative attack ads.

That doesn't reflect positively on the news media."

"For about one hour, he heard some tough inquiries, answered without notes, kept his cool, and talked analytically rather than in platitudes. I was impressed, and came away thinking that being a conservative governor in Massachusetts must have sharpened his debating skills and given him insights about dealing with the therapeutic mindset. I don’t know what he thought of us, but most of us thought him quite impressive. [ Victor Davis Hanson on spending time with Mitt Romney... -ed. ] "

Glenn: I think that Allah captures both sides of this story best, with two passages. First: "Have we actually reached the point where Senate seats now turn on the sex scandals of fictional characters?"

But also: "If George Allen had written this book, not only would the left be going berserk, they’d be circulating lists of characters in his other books whom they suspect of being gay."

Yes, it's that bad.

"In politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal public relations (PR) campaigns which seek to create the impression of being a spontaneous, grassroots behavior. Hence the reference to the "AstroTurf" (artificial grass) is a metaphor to indicate "fake grassroots" support. [ Duped again... -ed. ] "

"These three incidents, coming over a space of a few days, have torn wide open a fissure which became visible for the first time, when Member of Parliament Jack Straw, until last month a stout devotee of multiculturalism suddenly wrote an article in his local paper. Jaws dropped all over Britain when Straw wrote his defense of the reasons he has begun asking Pakistani women constituents who visit his office to discuss problems to remove their veils. His point, of course, is that it is difficult to talk to someone whose facial expressions one cannot judge. Tony Blair has also now admitted that the veil makes him uneasy. With the bandwagon gathering pace, London mayor and keen adherent of multiculturalism "Red" Ken Livingstone, knocked the population of London over with a feather when he said on BBC's Radio 4 that he would like to see Muslims giving up the veil, although he didn't think this should be imposed "from the outside".

Wearing the veil accords the wearer what British columnist Melanie Phillips refers to as a "radical imbalance of power" in that it gives the veil-wearer the advantage of reading the facial expressions of others, while keeping her own reactions hidden. It is beginning to be viewed in Britain not as a symbol of female subjugation, but as a weapon of aggression and radical Islam. The British-born mothers of these young Pakistani-heritage veil-wearing women did not wear the veil. [ The veil is BOTH a symbol of female subjugation AND a weapon of aggression. Never mind that recent abductees in the Gaza report being shuttled around concealed under hijab. What a surprise. It's a religious "obligation" that's only obligatory for their enemies to treat as one -- not for the "believers". That's the beauty of it for the Islamofascists of course... -ed. ] "

"If only."

"It so happens that everything that is stupid is not unconstitutional."

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

- C.S. Lewis"

Qutb and Greeley Again

Wretchard swings for the rafters and connects:

"After Sayyid Qutb was scandalized by Harry Truman's America [ That would be the church ladies just down the road from here in Greeley, CO; my aunt Audora missed being one of them by about 60 miles in actuality but of course she was one in spirit. It's a good thing that he never heard Mom, Audora and Luther sing on the radio or we'd all be dead already... -ed. ] he was later brutalized by Gamal Abdel Nasser's prisons. It may have been the low cut dresses of American women that first planted the seed which was to grow into al-Qaeda's ideology but it was the blood shed by Marxist torturers that watered it. Qutb and later Osama bin Laden saw Marxism and secularism as agencies of the Devil; but to destroy them it was first necessary to destroy the world's system administrator: the USA. One of the real ironies of the War on Terror is that the most hated targets of al-Qaeda, the culturally liberal — the gays, feminists, entertainers, civil libertarians, artists and novelists — are its most vocal critics. It is only slowly dawning on al-Qaeda's pet hates that the Global Jihad is exactly about them and their whole belief system. Salman Rushdie knows it; Sayyid Qutb knew it. Some parts of Europe are beginning to know it; most will never admit it even to the second the blade is drawn across their throats. But the second greatest irony that the surviving non-Muslim believers in Europe — the Christians, Buddhists and Jews — have not only had to bear the intellectual brunt of defending liberalism up to now, but are now being asked to give up the public profession of their own faith in order to preserve it."

And there you have it.

"If the West hopes to live it must find a shelter within its own heart from which to resist an Islamism that has outlasted the centuries. “The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said French police spokesman Bruno Beschizza. For that reason the thing that must change for everyone in the face of this challenge is that they be determined to survive. Only then can job programs, education or police crackdowns have any effect. Or maybe they will never have any effect; but simply give us something to do until the plague goes away."

"However, Dr Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, said "This is a good quality study but I don’t think it tackles the issue.

"If you’re using your phone for four hours a day, presumably it is out of your pocket for longer. That raises a big question: how is it that testicular damage is supposed to occur?"

He said mobile phone use may be a marker for other lifestyle factors known to affect sperm quality.

"Maybe people who use a phone for four hours a day spend more time sitting in cars, which could mean there’s a heat issue. It could be they are more stressed, or more sedentary and sit about eating junk food getting fat. Those seem to be better explanations than a phone causing the damage at such a great distance" he added."

"Here is the uncomfortable truth facing Islam’s Western apologists: Politically correct concessions to the Islamic community, instead of encouraging moderates, have only empowered the extremists."

"This is the way our secretary of state chooses to characterize the nation that has been our steadfast friend for 60 years (brutal occupying power), to demonstrate her devotion for a people who celebrated the slaughter of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 by dancing in the streets of Ramallah."

"The left constantly repeats the slogan that "the Bush tax cuts benefited the rich" when in actuality the Bush tax cuts have soaked the rich. Revenues to the Treasury have increased every year since the tax cuts went into effect in 2003 and have reduced the deficit- the exact opposite of what liberal politicians originally predicted."

"What would Ernie Pyle or any other great war correspondent of the past think of CNN’s decision to air video showing snipers targeting U.S. troops in Iraq?"

"Panic will peak between now and November 7, and then subside when it no longer serves an immediate political interest. Remember al Qaqa? In the meantime, it's no surprise if the Iraqis have come to doubt the reliability of their chief allies."

"The owl acknowledges unreservedly Europe's aging populations, its decreasing population growth and its need for migrants — but also sees that selection of migrants is not always based on who is useful for the economy.

The owl sees that Islam is not Christianity and that not all Muslims understand or want to share in any European future based on European values of freedom, tolerance and an attitude of live and let live.

The owl sadly looks on as poor kids are taught to view themselves as victims, and the society in which they live as the enemy. He can't help but notice that Muslim migrants are receptive to the seduction of the Islamist movement. Even worse, there are now natives converting to this brand of totalitarianism.

Nor can the owl ignore the growth of the extreme right-wing movements and parties. He fears that the debate on pluralism in Europe will be hijacked by two uncompromising extremes: whites' power fascism and Islamic fascism.

The owl thinks that the ostrich is right: We should always look on the bright side of life. But he also thinks we should be careful not to get delusional."

"Everywhere else, for the most part, they've taken the advice of Myers and that think tank in Vermont. In America, there are 2.1 live births per woman. In 17 European countries, it's 1.3 or below -- that's what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility, a rate from which no society has ever recovered. Spain's population is halving with every generation. These nations are doing what Myers and the Vermont "sustainability" junkies would regard as the socially responsible thing, and having fewer babies. And as a result their countries are dying demographically and (more immediately) economically: They don't have enough young people to pay for the generous social programs the ever more geriatric Europeans have come to expect."

"Surveillance of communications is often used as a means of gathering. How this is done is not talked about often. This is because the information that is acquired is often very good. Surveillance of enemy communications was one of the biggest factors in the American victory at Midway in 1942, and many other operations since. In 1943 Ten months later, a similar surveillance led to the mission in which Tom Lanphier shot down the plane carrying Isoroku Yamamoto. Communications intelligence also played a major part in defeating the U-boats in the Atlantic as well.

A lot of the methods used to gather intelligence in World War II (particularly codebreaking) were kept classified for decades after the Japanese surrender ended the war in 1945. Similarly, the Venona project stayed secret in the 1950s, even when information from that project could have defused controversies over the prosecution of the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss.

In the war on terror, this is equally important. Not just for breaking up attacks, but also for mapping out the networks through a process known as traffic analysis. This can be done with just phone records (the leak of the NSA's request to various phone companies managed to tell terrorist which companies cooperated, and who company didn't). This is vital in terms of building an organizational chart of any enemy capabilities, but only if the enemy doesn't think that others are listening."

""This is an especially telling admission from the Times 'ombudsman,' who, in theory at least, is supposed to be the most objective journalist in the Times organization. But a 'vicious criticism' (what? did GWB forget to call you the world's greatest newspaper?) is enough to warp your objectivity enough to print a story that did major damage to the safety and security of the United States?""

"New York Times ombudsman Barney Calame, often referred to as “The Empty Suit,” finally gets around to admitting that the Times was wrong to reveal the SWIFT program that monitored terrorist banking.

He also admits that no person’s private data was misused, and that the program was not illegal. [ He's always been Bendict Lichtblau to me... -ed. ] "

""You do sometimes wonder what goes on in their little minds, don't you?" said Private Al Hartley. "You'll just see, like, one bloke pop up and start shooting at you, and you'll go like that. Ph!" He shrugged. "There's, like, 30 of us and he's standing in the middle of a field, not trying to get into cover, just actually shooting at us, because, in his mind, all he wants to do is kill English soldiers.""

"The figures are stark. An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France so far this year and there have been 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services. Nearly 3,000 police officers have been injured in clashes this year. Officers have been badly injured in four ambushes in the Paris outskirts since September. Some police talk of open war with youths Islamic terrorists who are bent on more than vandalism.

“The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said Bruno Beschizza, the leader of Synergie, a union to which 40 per cent of officers belong. Action Police, a hardline union, said: “We are in a civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists.”"

"Call me crazy, but is someone who was impeached and removed for bribery a good choice for leadership on the Intelligence Committee? And is somebody who thinks so a good choice to head the House Democrats?"

"Nay, it is a proxy war between the US and Iran. It is being fought on multiple fronts. Iraq is another. We are going to have to blow Iran up and soon. [ The carrier groups are getting congested in the Persian Gulf as we ponder... -ed. ] "

"So on one side of broad pathway through of history we have the nightmares of the left, while on the other side we have the naughty Moors of the right, i.e., the Islamists who believe that time is a big mistake and that we need to undo it and return to the Golden Age of 1267. But that too is a caliphate worse than death, because you cannot undo time without destroying a lot of genies and the bottles they came in. Tenured clowns to the left of me, armed and dangerous jokers to the right, stuck in the middle are the Jews.

Yes, the Jews, because the Jewish prophets discovered history as we know it, which is to say linear history, which is to say irreversible time, which is to say evolution, which is to say the anti-entropic nature of the whole existentialada as the river of time flows toward its nonlocal deustinocean. And yet, at the same time, no human group has been more diligent about preserving and recollecting the primordial tradition that connects us to our source and makes us human, i.e., revelation. Perhaps a rabbi will correct me, but I believe it would not be treffling with scripture to say that, on a spiritual level, Torah is analogous to DNA, in that it represents not just our human blueprint, but the blueprint of creation itself."

"It has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. --Matthew 13:11-13"

POST_HTML:
"It is vain to say: "Well, if they come here, they must conform with British society and its easy ways." Muslims will not do that. Their religion forbids it.

Why do we suppose India had to be partitioned?"

"They were a bunch of New Left, ethnic-identity, progressive communitarian kind of kids.

Why did they want to make this decision? Because it would mean $50K a year more for their organizing budgets; $50K more in pork they could carve up in the hopes of building their perfect communitarian future.

Now I don't know about you, but I have a hard time imagining anything more keyed to a progressive communitarian future than a cooperatively owned bicycle store. I mean, how much better does it get? Nonprofit. Cooperatively employee owned. Bicycles, for chrissakes. If you really wanted to educate people in alternatives to the "mass consumerist repressive capitalist paradigm" (I think I got the buzzwords right), wouldn't that be a good way to do it?

But reality couldn't stand a chance against the cold need for this elected group to make sure that they and their friends were rewarded."

"With so few cluster points, it is highly unlikely the Johns Hopkins survey is representative of the population in Iraq. However, there is a definitive method of establishing if it is. Recording the gender, age, education and other demographic characteristics of the respondents allows a researcher to compare his survey results to a known demographic instrument, such as a census.

Dr. Roberts said that his team's surveyors did not ask demographic questions. I was so surprised to hear this that I emailed him later in the day to ask a second time if his team asked demographic questions and compared the results to the 1997 Iraqi census. Dr. Roberts replied that he had not even looked at the Iraqi census.

And so, while the gender and the age of the deceased were recorded in the 2006 Johns Hopkins study, nobody, according to Dr. Roberts, recorded demographic information for the living survey respondents. This would be the first survey I have looked at in my 15 years of looking that did not ask demographic questions of its respondents. But don't take my word for it--try using Google to find a survey that does not ask demographic questions. [ This is what happens when ideology is more important than smarts in academic selection criteria. D'oh. -ed. ] "

What's worse than Tet? Something almost inconsequential compared to Tet is made by the Enemedia to seem worse than Tet -- that's what:

"The recent upsurge of violence in Iraq in no way resembles the Tet offensive. At Tet, the Vietnamese new year, the North Vietnamese People's Army simultaneously attacked 40 cities and towns in South Vietnam, using 84,000 troops. Of those, the communists lost 45,000 killed. No such losses have been recorded in Iraq at any place or any time. The Tet offensive proved to be a military disaster for the Vietnamese communists. It left them scarcely able to keep up their long-running, low-level war against the South Vietnamese government and the American army.

Indeed, insofar as Tet was a defeat for the United States and for the South Vietnamese government, it was because the American media decided to represent it as such. It has become a cliché to say that Vietnam was a media war, but so it was. Much of the world media were hostile to American involvement from the start, particularly in France, which had fought and lost its own Vietnam war in 1946-54. The defeat of Dien Bien Phu rankled with the French and there were few who wanted to see the Americans win where they had failed. [ Once more my level of shock could seem to rise no higher... -ed. ]

It was, however, the American rather than the foreign media who decided on the verdict. The American media had begun by supporting the war. As it dragged on, however, without any end in sight and with the promised military victory constantly postponed, American newspapers and — critically — the evening television programmes began to treat war news as a bad story."

"So is the left side of aisle more concerned with image than with substance, that is with the opinion of others rather than the interior compass of the self? It seems to me to be so. I am not saying that, politically speaking, the right side of the aisle evinces no such conerns - pundits love to wax eloquent about how all politicians need to make sure they are attractive to the base of their party. But it does seem to me that the left side overall acts more within honor/shame frameworks than the right side. If so, it also helps explain why the left side is pretty fast to sympathize with the aggrieved feelings of Muslims generally when it comes to US policy: accusations are more important than evidence."

"JERUSALEM (AFP) - Hezbollah fired cluster munitions into northern Israel during this summer’s 34-day war with the Jewish state, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report. [ Well those and the unguided rockets filled with pointy scrap metal... -ed. ] "

"Now, if you adopt a strictly Darwinian, materialistic view, then the answer to this question is obvious: a healthy person is simply one who survives, because that is the whole point of natural selection. Thus, Stalin was more healthy than the 20 to 40 million people he murdered, just as Hitler was clearly more healthy than the 6 million Jews he slaughtered. Survival of the fittest is the final arbiter in nature. You may think that I am being a bit polemical, but this was the philosophy of one of the forerunners of postmodernity, Nietzsche, who believed that the whole idea of “God” was a pathological meme that simply protected the weak and infirm from the harsh judgment of nature."

"Our enemies in the Muslim world are our enemies precisely because they are sick men from sick societies who wish to spread their disease to the rest of the world. But in our own world, approximately half of the population suffers from a soul pathology that prevents them from making judgments on, or even perceiving, the soul pathology of our external enemies. Thus, there are no feminist groups who have rallied behind George Bush, who has liberated more Muslim women than perhaps any other human being in history. Likewise, I know of no leftists who celebrate the achievements of the great liberator Ronald Reagan, who gave millions of victims of a satanic ideology the opportunity to become human again. For if leftists were to acknowledge these achievements, they would no longer be leftists. They would be cured."

"Someone one wrote that "pacifism is the process of extending war to its greatest possible duration". That's unfair to pacifists. It's the process of of extending the war to its greatest possible duration in the hope that it will become more humane."

"Abdul Rahman, you may recall, converted from Islam to Christianity and was spirited to Italy when Afghanistan's brave new democratic government determined to obey Muhammad's command to kill those who leave Islam (cf. Bukhari 4.52.260). Now jihadists in Afghanistan are demanding his return in exchange for a kidnapped Italian journalist.

And meanwhile, Islamic apologists in the U.S. blandly claim that Islam has no death penalty for apostasy, and call me "Islamophobic" for pointing out that it actually does (Salam Al-Maryati of MPAC did this to me on the Medved show not long ago, and it has happened elsewhere also). This illustrates the hollowness of the arguments we hear all the time about how we must support self-proclaimed moderate Muslims by refraining from noting the flimsiness and weakness of their presentations. While we're being polite to alleged "reformers," Muslim hardliners are cheerfully implementing the elements of Islamic law that we're nodding our heads and agreeing don't exist."

"“One CIA pilot told me that in the mid 1990s, when Clinton was president, that the lawyers began to take over. Previously, they used to take CIA planes into hangars all the time, re-spray them, and come out with a different tail number. That way none of the tracing of CIA planes I’ve been doing since 9/11 would have been possible. The idea of flying around with one tail number for three years would have been thought completely nuts,” Grey told me. “But [Clinton-era] lawyers said they needed to stay legal. They even insisted that, to comply with FAA regulations, they needed stewardesses.”

Yes, stewardesses on CIA planes."

"Not surprisingly to me but shocking to many, the President obviously knows more history than his interviewer. When President Bush "accepts" the analogy of the surge in violence in Iraq to the Tet offensive in Vietnam, he is not "accepting" that Iraq is an unwinnable struggle against a noble enemy. He is saying that victory or defeat in Iraq will not be a function of the amount of violence that the enemy is able to do during any given period, but our will to keep fighting notwithstanding that violence. In that one regard, Iraq is dangerously similar to Vietnam, which fact the mainstream media would know if the typical editor read military history instead of the journalism puerile fascifist inanity pretending to be history that fills the bestseller lists. [ Sometimes, even Tigerhawk needs to be corrected ;) -ed. ] "

"Statesmen. Bi-partisan. National interest. All words and phrases which, if the trend continues, will eventually end up as obsolete terms. And when they do, "American" may not be far behind.

Makes you want to shout, "keep up the good work", doesn't it?"

"Nothing makes me more certain of the victory of our ideas than our success in the universities. --Adolf Hitler [ Fascism ... the same as it ever was... -ed. ] "

"Stein goes on to soften his critique by informing us that Hulon stays “up nights worrying about Al Qaeda.” Personally, I’d prefer he stayed up nights doing a little reading so he wouldn’t be operating under such a cloak of ignorance.

GEORGE W. BUSH, DONALD RUMSFELD AND DICK CHENEY are routinely excoriated for not taking every pronouncement from our intelligence community as if it were wisdom handed down directly from Mt. Sinai. I go in the other direction – if the people making the decisions of life and death actually care what these clueless intelligence analysts are saying, shame on them.

One of the many turf-wars Donald Rumsfeld has fought during the last six years has been over his desire to create a new intelligence service that would work under him at the Department of Defense. Is there any wonder why he would feel the old services are broken beyond repair?"

"(Name the true man who said it: “God has created [the United States] and brought us to our present position of power and strength” in order to defend “spiritual values--the moral code--against the vast forces of evil that seek to destroy them.” Answer* at bottom.) ... ... ... ... --Harry Truman"

"People like Reid, Hastert, Pelosi are complete mediocrities who should be at much lower levels in our society. Something is fundamentally wrong on both sides of the aisle if they are the upper leadership of our Congress."

UPDATE: And check out the ending of this comment: "So, more and more people, generations now, grow up in symbol manipulating and think reality is an inconvenience, at best. They live in a dream. They think their lives are fake and TV is real. And they have no clue how everything was made and how we got here, and how it can slip away, fall apart, be gone by inattentive erosion or in a flash. And, for all of my life, the left has ripped at every single, boring institution, and the hum drum work a day values that built it all." Wow. Looks like he just read David Warren not far below...

"What time is it in Russia? Twilight, Yakovlev’s memoir seems to tell us."

"As I’ve written before, Iran and North Korea, which are active partners in the development of nuclear weapons and missiles, take turns in creating crises that put the U.S. and allies in a game resembling “monkey in the middle”. Just as the heat is rising against the one, the other will perform an outrageous, attention-getting stunt. But China quietly and happily benefits from their cooperative effort to keep Western eyes off the Chinese ball.

This picture I am giving of world affairs may seem over-simple, and pessimistic. I wish it were. Postmodern man -- who votes, and swings the opinion polls, in the constitutional democracies -- is remarkably unable to cope with the reality of evil in the world around him. He has an attention span too short to assimilate even a sustained challenge from a single source, let alone multiple challenges. He knows little history, and what he does know tends to be seriously wrong. More deeply, he lacks tradition -- the kind of wisdom that could operate on his instincts, even when his rational mind were neither well-trained nor well-informed. Yet he is also poorly informed about current events, and his native ability to reason is vitiated by cheap and disintegrative “relativist” ideas. He is personally a coward, and a voluptuary: he lives for the day, and for pleasure, even in the absence of satisfaction or joy. His role models in popular culture are all narcissists. He is the pure consumer of morally poisonous entertainment. He lives selfishly; yet in his own loveless, self-regarding world, he avoids thinking of his own death."

"A JoongAng newspaper poll, several days after the reported nuclear test Monday, found 78 percent of respondents thought South Korea should revise its policy, and 65 percent said South Korea should develop nuclear weapons to protect itself.

Protesters have held nightly candlelight vigils, and some have burned North Korean flags."