Pig Herder

How do you tell a fact from a distortion? 9/11 was a FACT. It was planned and funded by Al-Qaeda and carried out by Islamic terrorists. These are FACTS. The widespread belief among Muslims that the Jews are behind 9/11 and that they did it so that the blame would fall on Muslims is a DISTORTION, which comes from DENIAL of the facts; and represents a PSYCHOLOGICAL PROJECTION. It is a PSYCHOLOGICAL PROJECTION because many Muslims want desperately to believe that Islam is a peaceful religion and prohibits such acts, despite what is said in the Qu'ran, and what is practiced in the real world.

Here is another example. The CBS documents that Dan Rather used in his 60 Minutes story were forged. Therefore they CANNOT BE REAL DOCUMENTS. The BELIEF that what the forged documents contained is true (e.g., the "fake but true" argument) is only a BELIEF, not a fact. The statement that Karl Rove is responsible for leaking the documents in order to embarass Dan Rather/CBS/the Democrats when it was discovered that they were forged--is a BELIEF, based on PROJECTION.

Many people were overjoyed to have something that suggested their beliefs about President Bush were accurate and are angry that their belief was debunked. They felt angry, embarassed and humiliated for believing a hoax. Rather than admit they were foolish/unprofessional/acting on their emotions, they prefer to believe that someone very powerful must have set them up. This new belief makes them feel better about themselves; and simultaneously does exactly what they hoped the forged memo would do--embarass the Bush Adminsitration. Then like a true,
arrogant paranoid individual, they pat themselves on the back at their heroic, courageous, and "principled" stand that their BELIEF trumps any facts. Note that their BELIEF in the truth of this will not be responsive to any facts to the contrary.

"Every Bush hater you meet in New York is engaged in an inner struggle of how much to let go of the past," writes [noted lefty, Tina] Brown. "Liberals don't want to be left spreading the grumpy notion that liberty can't travel," she tells us, "even if it turns out to be true." Huh? "Cognitive dissonance," as [New York magazine writer, Kurt] Andersen tells us, is indeed rife in Manhattan, or at least in the tonier neighborhoods. Brown goes on: "If all the fake rationales and pigheaded ideology and bungled management that took us into the debacle of the war end up with the vibrant images we saw . . . at the Iraqi polls, then, well, maybe there's something to be said for the blank slate of the president's historical memory." Is that clear now? A pigheaded debacle led straight to a shining and wonderful moment. Is there something wrong with this thought?

"Critics of the Bush Administration can take comfort in the fact that the apparent success of the Iraqi election can be celebrated without having to celebrate the supposed wisdom of the Administration," sniped Hendrik Hertzberg in a recent "Talk of the Town" column. "Iraq is still a very, very long way from democracy. And even if it gets there, the cost of the journey--the more than ten thousand (so far) American wounded and dead . . . the billions of dollars diverted . . . the lies, the distraction from and gratuitous extension of the 'war on terror' . . . will not necessarily justify themselves. But, for the moment at least, one can marvel at the power of the democratic idea. It survived American slavery; it survived Stalinist cooptation . . . Cold war horrors like America's support of Spanish Falangism and Central American death squads. Perhaps it can even survive the fervent embrace of George W. Bush."

Phew. Will someone run next door, please, and borrow a large cup of nuance? Without it we can't take this in. Let's see: The elections succeeded in spite of the one man who caused them, and BECAUSE of the people whose publications and candidates had fought Bush every step of the way. Or, put another way, the elections were a success and a great moral victory; but the ideas that led up to them were the purest examples of bone-headed bungling; and the man who thought them all up was a dunce. But when bone-headed blundering produces success not once but thrice over, we may find that we want a whole lot more of it, much as Lincoln once said that the Union needed more drunken generals like Ulysses S. Grant.

Claiming credit in retrospect for things you opposed at the time is a new high in chutzpah, or, if not that, in delusion. But delusion is what people retreat to when reality is much too traumatic. "Here's the great fear that I have," said comedian Jon Stewart once the Iraq elections were over. "What if Bush, the president, ours, has been right about this all along? I feel that my world view may not sustain itself, and I may, and again I don't know if I can physically do this, implode." Why does one feel that he speaks for the Browns, and the Hertzbergs, and beyond them, for millions of others? "We wait to see if Democrats can find a way to talk about the Iraqi elections that isn't madness personified," The Note, the political newsletter of ABC News, said after two weeks of this madness. And so do we all.

It takes one's breath away to watch feminist women at work. At the same time that they denounce traditional stereotypes they conform to them. If at the back of your sexist mind you think that women are emotional, you listen agape as professor Nancy Hopkins of MIT comes out with the threat that she will be sick if she has to hear too much of what she doesn't agree with. If you think women are suggestible, you hear it said that the mere suggestion of an innate inequality in women will keep them from stirring themselves to excel. While denouncing the feminine mystique, feminists behave as if they were devoted to it. They are women who assert their independence but still depend on men to keep women secure and comfortable while admiring their independence. Even in the gender-neutral society, men are expected by feminists to open doors for women. If men do not, they are intimidating women.

Thus the issue of Summers's supposedly intimidating style of governance is really the issue of the political correctness by which Summers has been intimidated. Political correctness is the leading form of intimidation in all of American education today, and this incident at Harvard is a pure case of it. The phrase has been around since the 1980s, and the media have become bored with it. But the fact of political correctness is before us in the refusal of feminist women professors even to consider the possibility that women might be at any natural disadvantage in mathematics as compared with men. No, more than that: They refuse to allow that possibility to be entertained even in a private meeting. And still more: They are not ashamed to be seen as suppressing any inquiry into such a possibility. For the demand that Summers be more "responsible" in what he says applies to any inquiry that he or anyone else might cite.

Of course, if you make a study of differences between the sexes with a view to the possibility that some of them might be innate, no violence will come to you. You will not be lynched. But you will be disliked, and you will have a hard time getting appointed at a major (or a minor) university. Feminists do not like to argue, and they consider you a case if you do not immediately agree with them. "Raising consciousness" is their way of getting you to fall in with their plans, and "tsk, tsk" is the only signal you should need and will get. Anyone who requires evidence and argument is already an enemy because he is considering a possibility hurtful to women.

This fear [on the part of the university], whether real or pretended, is an impressive demonstration of the power of Political Correctness, a compound of legal menace, the threat of extralegal action and of retaliatory vilification that is not some figure of speech but an actual, material force. Even if Churchill is 'bought out' at $10 million -- should he stoop to accept such a beggarly sum -- he will have unambiguously demonstrated the value of leftist protection. That he could have survived repeated exposure as an ethnic identity thief, academic fraud and art forger; that he could have assaulted a newsman on television and withstood the personal opprobrium of the Colorado Governor, only to receive a fortune in compensation, can only add to his fame.

"Virtuous motives, trammelled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness.... The cheers of the weak, well-meaning assemblies soon cease to echo, and their votes soon cease to count. Doom marches on."

"This provided comfort for everyone..... who wished to be humbugged."

"It is a fact that whereas "appeasement" in all its forms only encouraged their aggression and gave the Dictator[s] more power..... any sign of a positive counter-offensive.... immediately produced an abatement of tension."

Tread softly, because Rove's roots run deep and crooked. For every real clue you find, BushCo has planted two to lead you down a blind alley.... Stop being so naive. So far you're just another sucker huckstered Into Rove's Machiavellian Texas Funhouse of Mirrors. If you want to find the exit, listen for the carnies that aren't barking.

Those CBS conveniently forged, yet entirely accurate documents? Obviously the handiwork of Karl's West Wing elves. But if you think "Gannon" was the conduit to Mapes you are barking up the wrong homo, my friend. Karl has more than a few panicked moles inside Black Rock hoping to throw you off the scent. Let's just say you may want to start "connecting the Dotties," because the plot is about to thicken like a TANG-y sweet salad dressing. Remember: the truth is out there. Buried below a modern 64,000 square foot plant in Duncan, Nebraska.

Seeing a pattern? Rule #1 in the Rove Matrix is careful who you trust. That website with the impeccable progressive credentials could easily be a Rove / GOPig front operation -- draining millions of dollars from credulous liberal dupes and throwing it away on doomed campaigns. If your instincts tell you someone to trust somebody, then run. He's probably a plant, and the voices could be from Rove's mind control drones.

# posted by mds : 9:21 AM  0 comments

Prudence was denounced as warmongering.

"The French Government, which was in ceaseless flux in the fascinating game of party politics, and the British Government, which arrived at the same vices by the opposite process of general agreement to keep things quiet, were equally incapable of any drastic or clear-cut action, however justifiable both by Treaty and by common prudence."

British hesitancy to act when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia set a dangerous precedent, carefully observed by Hitler.

"If ever there was an opportunity to strike a decisive blow in a generous cause with a minimum of risk, it was here and now. The fact that the nerve of the British Government was not equal to the occasion can be excused only by their sincere love of peace. Actually it played a part in leading to an infinitely more terrible war."

"His Majesty's Government had imprudently advanced to champion a great world cause. They had led fifty nations forward with much brave language. Confronted with brute facts Mr. Baldwin [Conservative prime minister, Stanley Baldwin] had recoiled."

The fecklessness of good men is one of the great themes of the history [Churchill's History of World War II], and most British men prided themselves on their goodness then.

"Virtuous motives, trammelled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness. A sincere love of peace is no excuse for muddling hundreds of millions of humble folk into total war. The cheers of the weak, well-meaning assemblies soon cease to echo, and their votes soon cease to count. Doom marches on."

It marched into the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, and found no one to offer any resistance. Hitler declared the occupation to be a symbolic one, although the land and the people overrun were real enough.

"This provided comfort for everyone on both sides of the Atlantic who wished to be humbugged."

A violation of the Treaties of Versailles and of Locarno, the invasion also took advantage of the Allied evacuation that had taken place years before they were required to do so. The response was typically weak-kneed.

"If the French Government had mobilised the French Army, with nearly a hundred divisions, and its air force (then still believed to be the strongest in Europe), there is no doubt that Hitler would have been compelled by his own General Staff to withdraw, and a check would have been given to his pretensions which might well have proved fatal to his rule.... More than once in these fluid years French Ministers in their ever-changing Governments were content to find in British pacifism an excuse for their own."

[Later], after Neville Chamberlain's meeting with Hitler at Munich, he (Chamberlain) reported, "I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word." Such remarks moved Churchill to a metaphor of jellied ineptitude in the face of metallic ruthlessness:

"The British and French Cabinets at this time presented a front of two overripe melons crushed together; whereas what was needed was a gleam of steel."

Mr. Chamberlain thought that Hitler would appreciate a man of his mettle.... Those hopeful of turning enemies into friends with nothing more than a show of eager friendliness find their hopes disappointed.

"It is a fact that whereas "appeasement" in all its forms only encouraged their aggression and gave the Dictators more power with their own peoples, any sign of a positive counter-offensive by the Western Democracies immediately produced an abatement of tension. This rule prevailed during the whole of 1937. After that,
the scene and conditions were different."

Despite such local variations, the scene and conditions that Churchill presents are really pretty well permanent.... What guides the man who guides nations is honor.... In the political world love does not conquer all; indeed it doesn't conquer much, and tends to take it in the teeth. Hope on its lonesome is mere dust.

"The Sermon on the Mount is the last word in Christian ethics. Every one respects the Quakers. Still, it is not on these terms that Ministers assume their responsibilities of guiding states.... [It is honorable] for a nation to keep its word and to act in accordance with its treaty obligations to allies.... It is baffling to reflect that what men call honor does not correspond always to Christian ethics."

They choose death over life; attention over anonymity; the ecstasy of violence over the frustrations of daily life—and view other human beings as stage props in a drama in which they play the starring role. In short, they exhibit a narcissism so malignant it seems to consume their egos in a monstrous will-to-power. Rejecting human limitations, they desire instead the infinite, the omnipotent, the transcendent. Seeking the unlimited, they embrace death.

Promulgated in cyberspace, this 21st century Islam is a “dream that finds on the internet its virtual existence. Websites and chat rooms compensate for the lack of real social roots.” [From French scholar Olivier Roy, in his recent book Globalized Islam: the Search for a New Ummah.] Recruiters of suicide bombers look precisely for these young men and women: confused but secretly grandiose souls who find fulfillment in a never-never land of pure Islam—or an Islam realizable only on the web, where the boundary between the limited self and infinite cyberspace identity is increasingly blurred. Add to this the supremacy complex and it makes for some an irresistible temptation to slip the bonds of ego for the paradise of immortality.

But why violence? Because without limits, channels, cultural and traditional restrains, narcissism turns to power, power to domination and violence. When Bonelli stood in that New York mall, armed with an assault weapon—did he not feel for a moment like God, bestower of life and death? When a suicide bomber sits on a crowded bus and contemplates his soon-to-be victims, does he not feel an exhilarating power over the fate of so many people? What sense of godhood flitted through Mohammad Atta’s mind as the World Trade Center came into view? That the Bonellis, Klebolds and Harrises act out of a sense of resentment while the shahadah justifies his or her actions in the name of Allah makes no difference. In the end, both extremes meet in the void beyond the human ego. The Arabs, in fact, have a word for this: haram. It means at once the divine and the obscene, and implies the worst possible of all desires: to become God.

I can't count the number of emails we've gotten from Democrats on the Jeff Gannon "story." For the most part, they drip with venom and irrational hatred. I'd like to believe that there is some kind of a respectable left in this country, but where is it? It sure isn't showing up in our email inbox.

This missive, which came in this morning, is typical:

I guess you "holier-than-thou moral values conservatives" don't have a problem with gay male prostitutes who pose as conservative reporters as long as they are republican, huh? Hypocrites. If there is a god, you hypocrites are all going to hell. (I don't think God will forgive you, even if you ARE republican.)

The stupidity of these people, as well as their malice, is mind-boggling. Can anyone discern what this guy, and the dozens if not hundreds of Democrats who have sent more or less identical emails, are talking about? Why are liberals obsessed with the fact that Jeff Gannon was once a gay escort? Beats me. Why does this character think that as conservatives, we are duty-bound to hate gay escorts? Beats me. We've done close to 10,000 posts on this site, and I doubt that we've ever mentioned gay escorts one way or another. Would I want my son to be one? No. Do I think that having once been a gay escort should disqualify Jeff Gannon from becoming a reporter, or entering any other occupation? No. Why do liberals find this so hard to understand? And how on God's green earth does this make us "hypocrites"?

Of course, what we've criticized the left-wing blogs for is posting nude photographs of Gannon. How does the twisted "logic" manifested by these emailers justify that contemptible practice? Once again: beats me. The only conclusion I can come to is that a great many liberals are so consumed by hate that they have gone stark raving mad.

UPDATE: The meltdown continues. Here is the latest from our email inbox: Jeff Gannon and Karl Rove are secretly lovers! I'm not making this up; not only have we heard about this theory via hate mail from lefties, a reader (a sane one, that is) also says this is popping up all over AOL's political discussion sites. It's just about time for the men in white coats to intervene, I think.

Paradoxically, dogmatism is rooted in relativism more than in the belief that real truth is discoverable. For as long as the truth is believed to be "out there"; it will be sought. When its existence is doubted none will venture into the dark. Under those conditions, we get exactly what Peretz describes: an illogical attachment to old formulations of the 1960s, which can be uttered only because they are hallowed.

It's much easier, more comfortable, to do the old refrains. You can easily rouse a crowd when you get it to sing, "We Shall Overcome." One of the tropes that trips off the tongues of American liberals is the civil rights theme of the '60s. Another is that U.S. power is dangerous to others and dangerous to us. This is also a reprise from the '60s, the late '60s. Virtue returns, it seems, merely by mouthing the words.

But when the world changes -- and it is no longer the 1960s -- Liberalism finds it that cannot, dares not utter anything new; and that is dangerous because it means inaction. Peretz scathingly describes how Liberals attitudes have buried themselves in a time capsule where blacks are forever to be maintained as objects of pity to be defended from Bull Connors. And where no real black Americans can be found to fit the bill, a mountebank will be produced.

The biggest insult to our black fellow citizens was the deference paid to Al Sharpton during the campaign. ... To him can be debited the fraudulent and dehumanizing scandal around Tawana Brawley (conflating scatology and sex), the Crown Heights violence between Jews and blacks, a fire in Harlem, the protests around a Korean grocery store in Brooklyn, and on and on. Yet the liberal press treats Sharpton as a genuine leader, even a moral one, the trickster as party statesman. ...

It is typologically the same people who wanted the United States to let communism triumph--in postwar Italy and Greece, in mid-cold war France and late-cold war Portugal--who object to U.S. efforts right now in the Middle East. You hear the schadenfreude in their voices--you read it in their words--at our troubles in Iraq. For months, liberals have been peddling one disaster scenario after another, one contradictory fact somehow reinforcing another, hoping now against hope that their gloomy visions will come true. I happen to believe that they won't.

One senses in Peretz the momentary triumph of intelligence over loyalty. He understands the symptoms of the Liberal disease, but his uncertainty over the location of the tumor makes him hesitate to press down on the scalpel. But this does not stop him from denouncing the fake cures offered up by others.

And it is a condition related to the desperate hopes liberals have vested in the United Nations. That is their lodestone. But the lodestone does not perform. It is not a magnet for the good. It performs the magic of the wicked. It is corrupt, it is pompous, it is shackled to tyrants and cynics.

Paradoxically, the only hope for Liberalism is to reject Liberalism itself. It must regain the idea that the truth is discoverable and not a matter of political correctness; and then a whole succession of insights will follow: who the enemy is; how he may be beaten; what the sound of children playing in the yard really means.

In the past three weeks I’ve seen a number of foreign policy editorialists become sudden fathers– success has many fathers. But track back on their columns you’ll find many of them they had the police blotter perspective, usually offered with a “quagmire” chaser and disdain for President Bush.

Don’t expect Jacques Chirac and Ted Kennedy to apologize for their defeatism– Chirac’s a crook, Kennedy a perpetual cad. But do take note that Senator Hillary Clinton now thinks Iraq is “functioning quite well.”

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - As 55 people died in Iraq on Saturday, the holiest day on the Shiite Muslim religious calendar, Sen. Hillary Clinton said that much of Iraq was “functioning quite well” and that the rash of suicide attacks was a sign that the insurgency was failing.

Clinton, a New York Democrat, said insurgents intent on destabilizing the country had failed to disrupt Iraq’s landmark Jan. 30 elections.

“The concerted effort to disrupt the elections was an abject failure. Not one polling place was shut down or overrun,” Clinton told reporters inside the U.S.-protected Green Zone, a sprawling complex of sandbagged buildings surrounded by blast walls and tanks. The zone is home to the Iraqi government and the U.S. Embassy…

…The fact that you have these suicide bombers now, wreaking such hatred and violence while people pray, is to me, an indication of their failure,” Clinton said.

Guys, guys … it doesn’t matter what Hillary really thinks or what her record is. What matters is that a politician who is the soul of opportunism, and one who has the ear of the MSM (and, frankly, is much brighter than Kerry or Kennedy), is calling Iraq a success. When politicians like HRC start flocking to Iraq to bask in the light of its success, then you know that the corner has been turned. Consider this a sign of better times to come.

The highlight of the report is when some 52 year old Democrat threw a shoe at Richard Perle while screaming "mother f****** liar" numerous times as the police dragged him out of the debate hall.

I saw a bit of the debate between Howard Dean and Richard Perle. I must say that I find Howard entertaining, but he is a dreadful politician in one sense -- the ability to win over those on the other side (I don't think Perle is particularly distinguished at this either, but he's not running for any office that I know of or acting as a party official). Dean is the opposite of Clinton in that regard or even of Bush, who up close seems to be better than his reputation at coopting his opposition. I'd like a guy Dean for a drinking partner, but not on my side if I were trying to get something done.

# posted by mds : 1:25 PM  0 comments

The Daily Demarche links to a Miami Herald piece focusing on the car-bombing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Harari, showing how the law of unintended consequences sharpens -- always tends to sharpen -- the issues along the fault lines of the underlying conflict.

The Law of Unintended Consequences warns us to expect the unexpected. Prepare, then, for the unexpected to take shape as the shockwaves pushing out from the smoldering crater in Beirut recast crucial relationships around the world. Whoever orchestrated Hariri's assassination imagined the explosive event would produce results in accordance with a master plan. It is unlikely, however, that the master plan included strengthening the bonds between the United States and France. But closer ties between Paris and Washington will undoubtedly result from the Hariri murder.

The Daily Demarche observes that as each side blunders into each other in their own ways the nature of their antagonism is reshaped in the encounter. The vortex expands and acquires its own dynamic.

Message from the Syrian regime to Washington, Paris and Lebanon's opposition: "You want to play here, you'd better be ready to play by Hama Rules - and Hama Rules are no rules at all. You want to squeeze us with Iraq on one side and the Lebanese opposition on the other, you'd better be able to put more than U.N. resolutions on the table. You'd better be ready to go all the way -- because we will. But you Americans are exhausted by Iraq, and you Lebanese don't have the guts to stand up to us, and you French make a mean croissant but you've got no Hama Rules in your arsenal. So remember, we blow up prime ministers here. We shoot journalists. We fire on the Red Cross. We leveled one of our own cities. You want to play by Hama Rules, let's see what you've got. Otherwise, hasta la vista, baby.

Well, Mr. Summers is right that Chomsky is ignored in the academic journals, and he has come up with a rather elegant explanation of why that might be. But there's a much simpler and sensible answer: Chomsky is ignored because his work is not serious work. It has nothing do with Chomsky's faux-anarchism or his discomfiting aging tenured radicals--and I would remind Mr Summers that Chomsky does his work from a comfortable tenured perch at a major university--and has everything to do with the fact that Chomsky's works are not scholarly works of history or politics, but deceptively-written propaganda masquerading as scholarship. Basically, large chunks of them are fiction, and so the journals don't review his books for the same reason they don't review comic books or Danielle Steel novels.

Mr. Summers says he began recently to read Chomsky "seriously." But there's the rub: Chomsky can't be read seriously, because Chomsky himself pays no attention to even basic rules of evidence or argument. If he needs to invent material to support an argument, he does, and then audaciously creates an empty footnote to make it appear as though he's done his homework and is referencing an actual fact. In his article, Mr. Summers lauds Chomsky's scholarship, but I defy him to do what I did in The Anti-Chomsky Reader, and actually try to follow some of Chomsky's footnotes. As every scholar knows, the whole point of references are to allow other scholars to replicate your research and thus confirm or debate your interpretation, but Chomsky's references are meant to obscure the fact that he's basically making stuff up. When you have, for example, footnotes that support important and controversial points by referencing four or five books in their
*entirety*--including, most often, Chomsky's own books--that's not only lousy scholarship, it's a terrible insult to the reader.

So, in my view, Chomsky's invisibility in the academic world has nothing to do with his politics or his views on "power," and everything to do with the fact that his books are really fundamentally silly and not worth the time or attention of a serious reviewer. I've written a lot of book reviews in my career, and as we all know, they take a lot of time and intellectual energy. Since Chomsky doesn't bother to respect his readers--and I have come to suspect that Chomsky knows that most of his readers are not intellectually equipped to really evaluate either his arguments or his methods anyway--why should serious readers bother to respect his works or treat them as though they were written in a true spirit of scholarly inquiry, which they so obviously were not?

Belief in a higher power is not always the starting place for a leftist in recovery. For some, it is intellectual honesty. Most recently, the Iraqi election came under attack from the far left in the United States and abroad. British Prime Minister Tony Blair rightly opined that anyone believing in liberty and self-rule could not possibly oppose the election. But leftists were able to do so because of intellectual dishonesty and their belief in ends-justify-the-means politics. Since a successful election in Iraq means a victory for the hated Bush and a vindication of the military, the left must oppose it.

But in opposing Iraqi self-rule, the left must abandon one of its core positions: freedom from tyranny for the oppressed. Those on the left cannot have it both ways, and in continually trying to do so, they expose themselves as the intellectually bankrupt people they really are. Leftists ready to recover must use what recovering alcoholics call rigorous honesty to rid themselves of the habit of “dual think.” The fourth step in AA is a fearless moral inventory, and the folks on the far left who dare to take a fearless intellectual inventory will realize that their dual-think positions are untenable.

A.O. Scott of the New York Times, who called it "the best movie released by a major Hollywood studio this year," went on to praise it in particular as "a work of utter mastery that at the same time has nothing in particular to prove." Nothing to prove! It has nothing but something to prove, and something that Hollywood proves so routinely that it has by now become rather a bore for me, at least, to see proved again -- namely that our lives are our own to do with as we please. God and any of God's putative "laws" don't come into it. Clint Eastwood's libertarianism becomes cosmic in its dimensions, an existential demonstration of human freedom as the only response to our loneliness in the universe. It is a venerable movie theme, to be sure, and the very foundation of the noir cinema of the 1940s, where it also had a strongly political dimension -- although then it was more Marxist than libertarian, and not marred by the cheap sentimentalism of Clint's essay in the form.

But the denial of any political content is a long-standing strategy of the cultural left in America, one going back to the days of McCarthyism when committed and believing Communist screenwriters were hauled before Congress to justify themselves and claimed, in the words of their apologist, the late Arthur Miller, that "they wrote not propaganda but entertainment, some of it of a mildly liberal cast, but most of it mindless." Miller, of course, backed up such a preposterous claim by writing The Crucible -- a play which is still being read and performed in American schools by your children and mine, and treated with the same reverence that Miller himself was in a spate of recent obituaries and encomia -- in order to pretend that there were no more Communists in America in 1953 than there had been witches in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Ever since then, it has become customary to greet any criticism of leftist politics in the movies or other works of drama or fiction with similar charges of right-wing paranoia.

Our victory in Fallujah has had enormous consequences, first of all because the information we gathered there has made it possible to capture or kill considerable numbers of terrorists and their leaders. It also sent a chill through the spinal column of the terror network, because it exposed the lie at the heart of their global recruitment campaign. As captured terrorists have told the region on Iraqi television and radio, they signed up for jihad because they had been told that the anti-American crusade in Iraq was a great success, and they wanted to participate in the slaughter of the Jews, crusaders, and infidels. But when they got to Iraq — and discovered that the terrorist leaders immediately confiscated their travel documents so that they could not escape their terrible destiny — they saw that the opposite was true. The slaughter — of which Fallujah was the inescapable proof — was that of the jihadists at the hands of the joint coalition and Iraqi forces.

Thirdly, the brilliant maneuvers of the Army and Marine forces in Fallujah produced strategic surprise. The terrorists expected an attack from the south, and when we suddenly smashed into the heart of the city from the north, they panicked and ran, leaving behind a treasure trove of information, subsequently augmented by newly cooperative would-be martyrs. Above all, the intelligence from Fallujah — and I have this from military people recently returned from the city — documented in enormous detail the massive involvement of the governments of Syria and Iran in the terror war in Iraq. And the high proportion of Saudi "recruits" among the jihadists leaves little doubt that the folks in Riyadh are, at a minimum, not doing much to stop the flow of fanatical Wahhabis from the south.

Thus, the great force of the democratic revolution is now in collision with the firmly rooted tyrannical objects in Tehran, Damascus, and Riyadh. In one of history's fine little ironies, the "Arab street," long considered our mortal enemy, now threatens Muslim tyrants, and yearns for support from us. That is our immediate task.

Here are the rules: Don't serially slander the military as assassins and torturers, and you can say whatever you want at Davos. Don't pass off obviously forged documents as super-"Scoops!" in the middle of a presidential election, and you can intone all the absurd "anchor" sayings you want. Don't cover for plagiarists, and you can be the off-the-cliff lefty editor for as long as you want. Don't say the memory of Christmas-Eve-in-Cambodia is "seared, seared" in your memory and then say "oops," you were mistaken, and folks won't question your credibility on other war-stories. Don't appear to endorse segregation, and you can be the
Leader. These aren't high bars. Cross them.

Once upon a time the simultaneous accusations of too much preparation and too little; not enough bribery and too much; a surfeit of strength and a want of it could be made without much trouble. If being on the Left meant never having to say you're sorry; not being on the Left meant being guilty without effort. You could be a Filipino cook jumping from a 110 storey building and still be a "Little Eichmann". The miracles of the saints were as nothing to the transubstantiations of the Left. But the trouble came with memory. The Internet. And with remembrance the dim recollection of betrayal.

1) An unemployed waitress in Berlin faces the loss of her welfare benefits after refusing a job as a prostitute in a legalized brothel.

2) A British court has ruled that a suspected terrorist from Algeria cannot be detained in custody because jail causes him to suffer a ''depressive illness.''

3) Seventeen-year-old Jeffrey Eden of Charlestown, R.I., has been awarded an A by his teacher and the ''Silver Key'' in the Rhode Island Scholastic Art Awards for a diorama titled ''Bush/Hitler and How History Repeats Itself.''

The waitress forced into prostitution by the government pimp is, at one level, merely an example of the unintended consequences that follow every legislative initiative. But, at another, it's the logical reductio of the modern secular welfare state.... When you cede to the state the responsibility for feeding, clothing, housing yourself, for your parents' retirement and your own health care, it's hardly surprising they can't see what the big deal is about annexing your sex life as well.... The government forcing women into prostitution is merely the latest example of the internal contradictions of the modern secular state.

SIAC, the United Kingdom's anti-terrorist court, found in 2003 that the 35-year-old Algerian male in question had ''actively assisted terrorists who have links to al-Qaida.'' But he was released from Belmarsh Prison because of his ''depressive condition.'' I'd be in a depressive condition if I were a terrorist: The Afghan camps are gone, the Great Satan's liberated Iraq, and Osama re-emerges from his three-year sabbatical only to release a floppo ''Vote Kerry!'' video recycling a lot of lame Michael Moore gags. The more Islamists in a depressive condition the better. Maybe if they get sufficiently depressed they'll stop being terrorists and become trainee accountants or male hairdressers.... But this surely illustrates the impossibility of fighting terror as a law enforcement operation. By Western standards, every Islamic terrorist is ''depressive'' -- for a start, as suicide bombers, they're suicidal. Sen. Kerry, you'll recall, thought terrorism should be like prostitution: a nuisance.

[W]hen Chariho Regional High School art teacher Lynn Norton set her pupils the task of expressing an idea three-dimensionally, Jeffrey Eden immediately thought of a diorama comparing Bush to Hitler. You might think that ought to be disqualified on the grounds that characterizing Bush as Hitler is about as two-dimensional as you can get, and it's less of a diorama than the diarrhea of leftist rhetoric, as poured forth by millions of moveon.org drones and nude Marin County feminist protesters and European activist puppeteers.... Well, Jeffrey's 17. One day, with a bit of luck, he'll realize Bush isn't Hitler.... But what are we to make of everyone else in this sorry story? The art teacher who gave him an A. The 15 judges in the Rhode Island Scholastic Art Awards who awarded him their ''silver key.'' The proprietor of Alperts Furniture Showroom in Seekonk where the winning ''art'' work is proudly on display. Are there no grown-ups left in Rhode Island?

I'm not worried about Iraq. As they demonstrated on Jan. 30, they'll be just fine. The western front is the important one in this war, the point of intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilization just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides. It's not that young Eden knows nothing, but that neither his teachers, judges nor furniture showroom proprietors do. By contrast, our enemies know us very well, at least when it comes to courtroom strategies and canny manipulation of the fetish of ''tolerance.''

It's an open question whether the West will survive this twilight struggle: Europe almost certainly won't, America might; on the other hand, the psychosis to which much of the culture is in thrall may eventually reach a tipping point into mass civilizational suicide. And then the new barbarians will inherit, and young Master Eden will end his days pining for the rosy-hued nostalgia for the Bushitler tyranny.

Ward Churchill is a faker and liar beyond caricature. But modern academia's notion of "academic freedom" is so hollow and useless that it extends even to him. Notice that the entire discussion about Churchill is framed in terms of "his rights," as if universities exist primarily to provide platforms for jobless grifters to feed students lies. Forming students in truth -- a very quaint notion at this point, I know -- is supposed to be the organizing principle of a university. So shouldn't ensuring that students aren't taught by liars be the first, not the last, consideration here?

That embracing dumb ideas is the cornerstone on which universities are now built explains why those who exercise reason and demand the observance of rational standards are treated as the only real threats to academic freedom. It explains why tenured professorships are meted out not on the basis of intelligence but its absence -- on a kind of promise not to use one's mind should it conflict with reigning academic dogmas. Playing dumb is now an academic job requirement. Literally dumb: you must not say or see certain things.

In the face of a nihilist like Ward Churchill, self-respecting professors in the past would have said: either he goes or we go. Now before a barbarian like this, professors and craven university administrators are speechless. When they do finally manage a few words, the only phrase that dribbles out is "academic freedom," a rhetorical reflex triggered by tremors in the spine.

They have only things to destroy, and all those things are personified in the US, in its very existence. They may, outwardly, fight for some positive cause: save the whales, rescue the world from global heating and so on. But let's not be deceived by this: they choose as their so-called positive causes only the ones that have both the potential of conferring some kind of innocent legitimacy on themselves and, much more important, that of doing most harm to their enemy, whether physically or to its image.

This newly ever-growing Western left, not only in Europe, but in Latin America and even in the US itself, has a clear goal: the destruction of the country and society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago. But it does not have, as in the old days of the Soviet Union, the hard power to accomplish this by itself. Thanks to this, all our leftist friends' bets are now on radical Islam. What can they do to help it? Answer: tie down America's superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones, political ones, with propaganda and disinformation etc. Anything and everything will do.

As their old false Gods have withered, the Left has turned to irrational anger to prop up their failed Leftist ideology. BDS [Bush Derangement Syndrome]is what fuels their total denial. Without BDS, the Left would have to admit that they were WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING - Vietnam; Reagan; low/flat tax rates; welfare; quotas; gun control; etc.. And that's a pretty tough thing to do - I know: I was part of the Left once. But I urge my old Leftie friends to try to abandon their old shibboleths - admit they were wrong, as I did - and join me and Bush in the good fight! IT'S VERY LIBERATING! (Pun intended!)

And [....] people who'll never see themselves as country-club Republicans, who vote Bush because he's really the free radical, concerned with the welfare of human beings, while the 'common man' his enemies care about is the common man that exists as a route to power. Like the 30s Marxists who'd gulag mama for the cause, the cause being, 'Let Me Rule'.