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One of the most striking things about this unusual war is the lack of doubt among U.S. troops about why they are in it. This may be the first U.S. military deployment since World War II in which almost no one questions the reason for it.
Only the mandarins at WaPo, NYT, and other citadels of elitist certainty would find this difficult to understand. Yet even though they manage to print the obvious reason for this "striking...unusual" development, they are apparently too thick to understand their own reporting:
During the battle, said Maj. Brad Herndon, a 10th Mountain fire support officer, one of his soldiers placed on a rock on the battlefield a photo of a friend who had been killed at the World Trade Center. The soldier then took a photo of the scene. Herndon's conclusion: "Their feeling is that they are doing the right thing, and they are doing it for the country. It's not vengeance, it's justice."
Speaking of Lucianne.com, there is a huge discussion underway there over what should be done with the WTC site. I favor some combination of rebuilding, memorial, and those two spectacular towers of light, (although I'd settle just for the lights) but the thoughts being expressed are as varied as the posters themselves.
The NYT prints one of those wacky thumb-suckers that "reveals" a shocking truth that any observer with an IQ higher than, oh, the NYT's Editorial Board, ought to be able to figure out with no more than two or three seconds of thought. In this case, the NYT is shocked, shocked to discover that Nevada has a higher percentage of problem gamblers than any other state. What next? The revelation that NYC, home of Wall Street, has a higher number of stockbrokers than any other city?
Top Egyptian cleric Sheikh Mohammed Sayyid Tantawi says Palestinian suicide bombers are martyrs even if attacks on targets like Jewish settlements inadvertently kill women and children, Egypt's official news agency reported yesterday.
Whoever blows himself up among aggressors who wreck houses and kill men, women and innocents, and who violate the dignity of our brothers in Palestine ... is a martyr because he blows himself up in the midst of an enemy who is raping his land, violating his dignity and killing his people," Tantawi said.
Sheikh Mohammed Sayyid Tantawi is the "grand sheikh of Cairo's al-Azhar mosque and university and a major leader of Sunni Islam." Sunni is by far the largest sect of Islam.
My wife and I live on the West Coast, south of San Francisco. I haven't been to New York City since I was a kid. If I were going to New York City tomorrow, or if I had gone anytime since September 11, I would want to see Ground Zero. I want it to be burned into my mind. I want to be reminded, unforgettable as it is, why men and women, many of them half as old as me, are volunteering to defend our country and are being sent to fight and maybe to die half-way around the world.
I've talked to friends and family who have been in New York City since September 11 and yet they didn't go to Ground Zero. Some thought it would be too much for their junior high school children to bear. Some without children didn't want to see it and acted like my inquiry about it was tactless, and that going to see it is like gawking at a car wreck on the freeway.
Well, it's not too much (or shouldn't be too much) for teenagers to see what happened to our country, and to understand the magnitude of it and the reasons for our counter-attacks. And it's not the same as rubber-necking on the freeway. This was an attack on our country, on fellow citizens, civilians, and foreign visitors to this country who were working in their offices on a sunny morning in September. And we should never forget it.
Something else interesting about this post is the reaction to it. One poster named Ori in the comments section urges Craig to:
Drive to SFO, get on a plane, and fly to NYC. No excuses. You need to see Ground Zero. Like most of America, I watched the images on T.V. They were at once horrifying and riveting -- for once, I understood why motorists rubberneck at accidents. I'm no New Yorker but I felt an immediate kindship to the city. Terrorists attacked America, not just NYC and D.C. But back to my point: I had the chance to go to NYC for work in November. Others passed; I jumped at the chance. Of course, I went to Ground Zero. Nothing could prepare me for the images and the feeling. It wasn't T.V. -- it was real life. I've tried to explain it to people since but the point is I can't. You have to be there to appreciate it. So, please, Craig. Go to NY. Consider it a pilgrimage. Convince your friends to go. You'll thank me. And America will remember.
Could it come to this? Could Ground Zero become an American Pilgrimage? Perhaps so.
My rational, libertarian head says that as long as no laws were broken in the handling of the corpses, then the opinions of the eight million paying customers should be paramount, since we are talking about an issue of free expression. But my irrational heart is appalled and disgusted by this awful display.
Mickey Kaus blogs this NYT article about Pim Fortuyn: Proudly Gay, and Marching the Dutch to the Right. Kaus jokingly warns his pal Andrew Sullivan not to get any big ideas, but why not? The blogosphere is already pushing the Professor toward the idea of running for office, so why not another one of our luminaries? Picture the entertaining chaos of Sullivan running against, oh, Hillary Clinton. Would Justin Raimondo have a nervous breakdown, or what?
And the rest of us could have enormous fun writing about it all.
"It never once occurred to me that it would be taken seriously and that I would get a certificate and be issued a registration number," Buckley said. "It never crossed my mind that they are that incompetent there."
Any bureaucracy founded on the notion that gun control will lessen crime is more than incompetent enough to do almost anything.
Okay, it really, really, really is wholesale plagiarism:
"If somebody takes a third of somebody's book, which is what happened to me, they are lifting out the heart and guts of somebody else's individual expression," said McTaggart, who says she interviewed more than 100 people for her Kennedy book.
Last month Goodwin admitted that what she called her accidental borrowing was far more extensive than she had indicated, and said her researchers had found scores of additional quotations and paraphrases in the Kennedy book that came from other authors. She also announced that publisher Simon & Schuster planned to destroy remaining paperback copies of the book and reissue a corrected version.
Goodwin, 59, has seen her career suffer since the disclosures. She has taken indefinite leave from her job as a pundit on PBS's "Newshour with Jim Lehrer," withdrawn from this year's Pulitzer Prize judging panel and seen some speaking engagements canceled.
A former janitor at the Robert Taylor Homes sued movie star Eddie Murphy in federal court in Chicago on Friday, claiming that a character in Murphy's animated TV series, "The PJs," was strikingly similar to him.
Editor -- Regarding the convictions of Marjorie Knoller and Robert Noel in the dog-mauling death of Diane Whipple: Well, it's official. We do not have courts of justice -- we have courts of punishment. I am appalled at the editorial, "A well-deserved verdict" (March 22). If we are going to start imprisoning people for "irresponsibility" and lack of "common sense," or worse yet for being unattractive personalities, we had better get started on building yet more prisons. I believe we should only incarcerate people who are a clear and continuing threat to others. To lock a woman away for 15 or more years for what was an accident, with no motive and no malice, seems to me very wrong. Surely, as a civilized society, we can do better. VALERIE LATHROP Orinda
Yes, Valerie Lathrop, we do have courts of punishment, because justice is often more than hand-holding, kumbaya, and rehabilitation. Sometimes it involves punishment, too. In the real world, stupidity - especially murderous stupidity - is usually punished, one way or another. Noel and Knoller weren't convicted for irresponsibility or a lack of common sense, or "worse yet," being unattractive personalities. (Though they were all of those). They are going to jail because they arrogantly and knowingly kept dangerous pets in such a way that a woman was savagely mauled to death. I suspect you'd support sending to jail a drunk driver who killed an innocent family in an "accident with no motive and no malice." Why is this case any different?
James Miller at the Conservative Economist observes:
There are some terrorists who don't want a truce. If you stop truce talks after suicide bombings then you give these terrorist more even incentive to kill.
Well, that would be the case if the goal were successful truce talks. But I don't believe it is. I believe the process now underway is designed to pave the way for the fall of Arafat - one way or another. And one piece of that particular puzzle is unsuccessful truce talks.
Arafat's bet is that he can cause Israel more pain than Israel can endure. But that has always been his bet, and it is predicated on the idea that the world opinion and, ultimately, the United States, will restrain Israel from moving decisively against him. Up till now, he's won that bet. But it's always been a side bet on the outcome of the game between Israel and the PA.
Now the United States has entered the game directly: Arafat is not charged with satisfying Ariel Sharon or Israel: he is charged with satisfying General Zinni, the Bush Administration, and the United States. I don't believe Arafat understands the difference or, if he does, that he gives a damn. He may be an old dog no longer able to change his terrorist stripes.
If so, this entire charade is an endgame designed to remove the last shreds of legitimacy Arafat may be able to call upon - most importantly here in the United States, (with off-year elections in the offing) since the Bush administration clearly doesn't worry too heavily about European concerns. And if that is the case, the Bush gamble is working: 52 Senators have just petitioned Bush not to treat with Arafat. Significantly, major Democratic figures:
Dianne Feinstein of California, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Bob Graham of Florida, John Breaux of Louisiana, and Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton of New York...and Majority Leader Tom Daschle signed [the petition].
This outcome gives Bush sufficient political cover to do what he wants with Arafat - and what I think Bush wants to do with Yassar Arafat is to destroy him.
Thirty years ago, the notion of directly treating viruses in the human body was considered as mostly in the realm of science fiction. We still haven't reached the point where attacking viruses is as simple and effective as attacking most bacteria - ie., we haven't found the viral equivalent of antibiotics yet [and may never do so -ed.], but given the terror-fueled worries about smallpox, this has to be considered good news.
It also continues to be humorous to watch people spend their time being annoyed by “blogging."
Yes, and there is still a fair amount of mainstream bitching going on. What I wonder about is why? Much as I love the blogosphere, even I am not so besotted as to believe that the mass of the American public turns to blogs each day as its primary news source. Any mainstream journo who feels threatened because he thinks this is the case needs to get out a bit more.
So what is the source of all the scribbler/babbler angst? I suspect it's that journos really don't get out much. Their world is constricted to certain places, news sources, thought patterns, ideologies, and biases: in short, the punditosphere. And the P-Sphere is fascinated, absolutely fascinated, with blogs. Hence, because blogs are such a big deal in that world, and that world is the only real world to most journos, they perceive blogs as having effect and influence far greater than they actually do - at least directly.
Some time back, I expressed the suspicion that what influence blogs did have sprang from mainstream journos mining the blogosphere for ideas, attitudes, and buzz. For a guy or gal faced with filling empty paper on a daily basis, the blogosphere might well be a godsend.
I still think there may be some truth to this thesis. And it fits well with the notion that the reason the mainstream journalism world is so fascinated with - and anxious about - the blogosphere is because all of them read it every day. And by the iron protocols of journalistic self-regard, that makes it a Very Big Deal.
Several leaders, arguing that helping poor nations is in rich countries' best interests, described extreme poverty and the growing gap between rich and poor as a major motivation for terrorism.
Actually, this is an extortion note couched in diplo-speak. Translated, it simply means, "Give us money or we'll keep sending mad bombers in your direction."
I think those days are over. We've moved on to a different class of solutions since 9/11.
I've always thought the notion of strip-searching everybody who wants to board an airliner was faintly ridiculous, but a Finn? Actually, this article doesn't offer many details beyond noting that the would-be bomber was a "Finnish national," whatever that means. If he turns out to be a Finnish national named Abdul al-Kaboombul, that would be one thing. Otherwise, white-bread bomb shakedowns suddenly start to look a little bit better.
The repulsive leftist scribbler Eric Alterman starts a fight with Andrew Sullivan. In reply, Sullivan initiates the demolition process. If I were you, I'd keep an eye on this one. It could get pretty good, pretty quick.
UPDATE: Just try the main link here. Something is busted with Sullivan's links.
I presume that in the same spirit of lofty integrity with which the Democratic Party pursued the latest iteration of Campaign Finance Reform, they will be turning down these obscene soft-money donations?
"We will take immediate and required steps to put an end to these actions and those who stand behind them. We will spare no effort in doing so," Arafat said in a statement to reporters at his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah. "We will continue with our efforts to make the mission of General Zinni succeed," he added.
The raddled old liar is lying again. He thinks he can face down Dick Cheney and the Bush administration. He's wrong.
My mother suffered from a stroke syndrome like this, which began for her when she was about the same age as Baroness Thatcher. It eventually destroyed her mind, and then her life. My heartfelt sympathies go out to Margaret Thatcher and her family. Another mighty figure passes from the world stage.
There have been a lot of extremely weird Bush jokes circulated about the Internet, but this one is about as strange as anything I've seen. (Via the excellent Reprobates).
This is a typical SF Bay Area reaction: Worries about restrictions on the "liberty" to allow your pet to run free and menace - or at least annoy - everybody else. The first word in the lexicon of every Bay Area left-liberal is "rights." The last word is "responsibilities." We are, for the most part, a region of spoiled brats, and San Francisco itself is ground zero for the phenomenon. ["ground zero" had a specific meaning well before it was applied to the WTC terror attacks, and is used here in that sense -ed.]
Editor -- Cheers and bravo to Stephanie Salter for her column about sex and Republicans ("Just say no to Big Government," March 20). She is so right to point out that Republicans are complete hypocrites in claiming to hate Big Government. I believe that if they could get away with it, they'd make gay and lesbian sex illegal throughout the entire country. I hope Salter continues to write about the Bush administration's draconian programs in the area of health and sexuality. As an HIV counselor at City College of San Francisco, I can assure you that there is already a huge amount of ignorance in this area among young people. Of course, maybe that's exactly what the Republicans have been hoping for. MARK RAYMOND San Francisco
Yes, Mark Raymond, you clever devil, the secret plan of the Republican Party's Hidden Masters is to keep young people ignorant about HIV so they'll all get themselves infected, progress to AIDS, and die in agony. So sharp of you to have figured it out. Nobody else yet has discovered this plot. I wonder why?
Remember those tragic videos of the little Palestinian kid cowering with his dad next to a wall as bullets whizzed by overhead? He was supposedly killed by Israeli soldiers. Now, Jay Zilber reports that evidence has surfaced that the perpetrators were much more likely Palestinian. So far, the story isn't getting much play in the West, but even so, no doubt more than it will in the Arab press.
Remember when people still told Polish jokes? And you wondered who the Poles made fun of? Well, they laughed at the Russians. Guess who San Franciscans laugh at? Berkeley.
Undocumented immigrants do these jobs that everybody needs, no one wants to do and few people appreciate. If the Immigration and Naturalization Service deported everyone who got into this country without the nightmare bureaucracy of getting a visa, we would have a national disaster of overflowing toilets, moldy dishes and tomatoes left to go rotten.
There are a couple of problems with this story. First, they aren't "undocumented immigrants." They are illegal aliens.
Second, the notion that if we don't tolerate a massive influx of such illegal aliens, our "dirty work" won't get done, is not just bad economics, it's silly. If every illegal alien were to return to his country of origin tomorrow, toilets would still get unstuck, dishes would be washed, tables bussed, cars washed, and all the rest. You might pay a bit more for it, but that's the nature of markets. Employment is a market, you know, a market in which labor is bought and sold. If there is a shortage of certain types of labor, the price paid for it (wages) will rise until the shortage ends and an equilibrium is reached.
Unless, of course, the government intervenes, in which case all manner of weird disasters usually occur.
Grasshoppa links to a report that Geoff doesn't think will make the NYT, and he's probably right. Remember that bunch of Israeli Defense Force reservists who refused to serve in the territories you heard so much about a few weeks back? Well, seems another bunch of reservists has volunteered to serve in their place. Apparently, they think the refuseniks are jerks. Fancy that.
Happy Fun Pundit isn't at all happy, or funny, in this item about Canadian troops fighting shoulder to shoulder with their south of the border Yank brothers. What HPF is, is compelling. My opinion of the Canadian fighting man has skyrocketed. My opinion of Canada's leaders has plummeted even further - if that's possible.
KEWL BLOG DEPARTMENT: ColdFury.com. And you can get your Fighting Whities sports jersey here, a much better deal than the original (which gets no linky love from me).
I don't know how I've so far managed not to find davidwarrenonline.com , but thanks to VodkaPundit, I've rectified the omission. I fervently hope that every word of this column turns out to true. Take a look, and see if you don't agree.
I love my dog, and I feel terribly sorry for the two animals who did this awful thing, but I have no sympathy for the owners who were so arrogantly negligent in this case.
The brutal attack stunned and angered residents of historically pet-friendly San Francisco and prompted hundreds of calls to the district attorney's office and to animal care and control officials.
You bet it did. I live about ten blocks from the location of the mauling death, and every day I run across huge dogs frolicking about off-leash, with their idiot owners ambling along a block behind, oblivious as posts to what their pets are doing. For about a week after the killing, some of the worst offenders in my Russian Hill neighborhood actually leashed their dogs, but they quickly relapsed to their previous bad habits.
Animals are animals. Humans know better - or they should. Knoller and Noel are going to jail. I think that's just fine.
For some unaccountable reason, Richard Bennet slips and reveals top secret information about France's crack Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, soon to be infiltrating Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan. No surrender eating monkey cheese here.
[I wrote this article, entitled "The Left and its Discontents," for the Harvard Independent of October 11, 2001. I got lots of fan mail for this piece. One note: I realized, about two months after I wrote the piece, that the phrase "wellspring of idiocy" that I used wasn't wholly my own. I realized I half-lifted the construction from a Byran Appleyard piece in the Sunday Times, where he used the great phrase "wellspring of malevolence." Pretty minor stuff, and wholly unconscious, so I hope I don't get thrown into the Ambrose/Goodwyn crowd.]
This sort of worry is an example of the sort of over-reach one can arrive at by using popular press and opinion as a yardstick.
Speaking as a much published writer, and one who makes my entire living from the craft, I say that there is no way any sort of "plagiarism" charge could be brought by the author of the words "wellspring of malevolence" against the author of the phrase "wellspring of idiocy." There is a basic misunderstanding of what plagiarism is at work here. It is not the coincidental use of similar or even identical words - it is the lifting of recognizeable passages from someone else which are then passed off as one's own.
Harvard's extensive plagiarism policy notwithstanding, let's not go overboard.
Coyote at the Dog Show feels ghettoized by finding himself on the blogspot side of some blogs's lists of permalinks, even though he accepts my explanation for why I make the distinction. What he doesn't know is that if my bandwidth usage keeps climbing, I'm going to have to move back to blogspot myself, because shortly I won't be able to afford the tariff at my current location.
Stephen Green at VodkaPundit draws some interesting non-parallels between South Africa, Zimbabwe, and the outcome of the 2000 elections in the United States. His conclusion: sub-Saharan Africa is growing more fucked by the moment.
Gary Farber has been doing some excellent work lately on the Supreme Court's attempts to remove all vestiges of Bill of Rights protections for anybody under the age of 18.
Glenn Reynolds makes clear his not-so-subconscious prediliction for small-el libertarianism. I'm with you, Glenn. Keep the bastards the hell out of my bedroom and my gun cabinet.
"Secretary of State Powell took action to designate the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade as a foreign terrorist organization on March 19. We notified Congress of the Secretary's decision yesterday ... and we're working very closely with Congress to expedite this process," Reeker told a news briefing.
The al-Aqsa gunnies are Yassar Arafat's hard boys. So are the Israelis still required to negotiate with the leader of an officially US-certified terror organization?
Does this mean we'll be opening talks with Osama bin Laden shortly?
Witness the effects of Mutually Assured Destruction, carried out on a Senatorial scale. Fine with me. In general, the less these people manage to do, the happier, as a libertarian, I am.
Most of their home countries don't want the Gitmo detainees back. Saudi says it does, but my guess is that's the last thing they really want: it puts them in something of a bind. If they do get their terrorists back, they have to try them. If they give them slaps on the wrist to placate their Islamofascist nutbag demographic, the US will have yet another reason to be displeased with the hypersensitive Princes. If they fry them to placate the US, their own nutbags will be annoyed. If they let them rot at Gitmo, they don't have to piss anybody off. Which is what I expect is exactly what they will do.
In case you were wondering, not only has this invitation to unintended consequences and perverse outcomes not gone away, it has been passed by the House.
This meeting isn't getting much play yet, but it is of crucial importance:
The understandings also include an Israeli commitment to exhibit restraint during any U.S.-led war against Iraq. The sources said the commitment regards a series of scenarios raised by Washington. "The U.S. discussions are meant to coordinate with Israel any response to such scenarios," a diplomatic source said. "The Bush administration wants to prevent a massive Israeli retaliation that could derail any U.S. military effort against [Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein. A key understanding by Israel is that the war against Iraq essentially takes precedence over anything else."
Let's assemble some pieces of this puzzle, shall we? First, Stephen Den Beste on tit-for-tat game theory:
By the same token, something like that can happen in war, and it's one reason to fear doomsday weapons. In the "war" game, I deter you from using poison gas by having poison gas of my own. But if you're near losing the war, and if there's no tomorrow, then there's no longer any deterrent to keep you from using gas against me. That's why it is dangerous to invade nations with weapons of mass destruction; when all is lost, there is now a rational game-theory incentive for them to blast you with them.
Second, Victor Davis Hanson's excellent article on Israel's situation in the Middle East, which (crucially) notes:
But there is one final consideration for those smug utopian architects in our state department and Europe that is completely forgotten in all this. There will be no second Holocaust.
Third, the reason there will be no repeat of the Holocaust, in which Jews march submissively, without resistance, to the ovens their enemies have prepared for them (from a Janes report):
This is more than other reports state and supports indications that the Israeli arsenal may contain as many as 400 nuclear weapons with a total combined yield of 50 MT.
What do all these pieces mean in terms of Israel, the US, Irag, and any military action involving them?
The United States has overwhelming military power. Any military confrontation between the US and Iraq will result in Iraq's defeat, which will place Iraq into Den Beste's "no tomorrow" game theory scenario in which restraint against the use of weapons of mass destruction no longer exists for Saddam Hussein.
The likely result of such a scenario is an all-out assault on Israel by Iraq, since Iraq cannot reach the United States with a similar level of force, and would likely settle for the destruction of the US's primary client in the region. But such an assault would threaten Israel's very existence and, as Hanson notes, there will be no second Holocaust.
Faced with a doomsday threat from Iraq, Israel (also responding to the "no deterrence" game theory) will strike first, and their capabilities of mass destruction are on a par with a modern European nation - in other words, they have the ability to transform Iraq into a sea of molten glass. Which they will do if they perceive that as the only alternative to their own destruction.
All of this makes ludicrous the notion that "A key understanding by Israel is that the war against Iraq essentially takes precedence over anything else." America's war against Iraq most emphatically will not take precedence over Israel's survival, and any policy predicated on the notion that it will is not just criminally stupid, it is insane.
Short answer, then: The US's only option in the matter is to destroy Iraq's capability to launch such an attack against Israel before Iraq finds itself in the "no deterrence" game theory zone. And this may have a lot to do with the recent leakage about the use of tactical nuclear weapons against weapons of mass destruction. From the US point of view, it may be far better to use small tactical nukes against Saddam, rather than endure a scenario in which Israel destroys Iraq entirely, with the tens of millions of casualties that will entail.
Editor -- I was poignantly moved by Danielle Steel's article, "We failed Andrea Yates" (Open Forum, March 19). Steel bravely, beautifully and truthfully exposed the tragically scant care for the mentally ill in this country. Mental illness is as blatantly serious as any terrible physical illness, but most health insurance companies offer a starvation-level of coverage for it. The malignant obviousness of Andrea Yates' insanity also screams out for profound changes in the justice system. WILLIAM ARBONIES San Francisco
In San Francisco, romance novelist Danielle Steele is what passes for expert opinion on mental illness, as the Oprahfication of our local culture (some say the stupidification of it) continues apace.
If the Hewlett-Packard Compaq merger actually goes through, five years from now the institutions who pushed it through will be long gone, and shareholders will be picking through the bones of what remains. The invisible hand always punishes stupidity with utmost harshness.
Pretty big coverage of yesterday's expected Local 1199 health care workers union endorsement of New York Gov. George Pataki, but readers with a more national bent should note this quote from sage Pataki adviser Kieran Mahoney, who secretly revealed the Rove strategy for getting Bush re-elected: "This campaign will take place inside the Democrats' base. It's our Brezhnev Doctrine: What's mine is mine and what's yours, we will talk about."
It isn't George Bush the Donks have been underestimating. It's Karl Rove.
WaPo runs an article about a favorite left-liberal shibboleth of a few years back, the so-called "digital divide" that would leave the "disadvantaged" parts of our society out in the cold as far as computer competencies, without massive government intervention to close the gap. Well, it turns out all the hysteria was mostly bullsh - er, balderdash [thanks -ed.]. (Via Media Minded).
I suppose the reaction to this was to be expected:
The United States wants to question 3,000 more foreign nationals who recently came to this country, Attorney General John Ashcroft said on Wednesday, even though a report on the first round of interviews found few had any information about the Sept. 11 attacks.
James Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute, said he was "stunned" by the announcement.
Zogby's stunned, all right, mostly at the realization that his bogus attempt to categorize any investigtion of the likeliest pool of potential terrorist in the United States as "racial profiling" has met with a noticeable lack of either sympathy or success.
You can make the barest logical argument that all those who board an airliner should be searched, since it is at least conceivable that a terrorist might be - or use an accomplice of - a non-Arabic or Islamic extraction or appearance. (Did that phrase do sufficient dancing?)
That cannot be said for simply asking voluntary questions of certain types of immigrants. It should not be forgotten that every single hijacker was of Arab extraction who entered this country as an immigrant or other type of visitor. To pretend otherwise for the sake of political correctness is stupid. If, as is the growing fear, there is a concerted effort on the part of international terrorists to unleash weapons of mass destruction in the United States, it will likely be attempted through an infrastructure already in place, an underground of visitors or immigrants, likely of Islamic Arab extraction.
Six months down the road, there has been no nationwade backlash or other persecution against Muslims or Arabs - and not because of any efforts by the likes of Zogby and his ilk. In fact Zogby has lost, not gained, credibility with most Amercans, simply by virture of his knee-jerk refusal to countenance any investigations that center on Muslims or Arabs. You'd think he'd figure that out. Evidently not.
I hope lots of blogs link to this item at VodkaPundit. It conveys a message we haven't seen enough of, and one that needs to be emphasized a good bit more than it has so far.
In fact, now that I consider, it seems there's quite a bit we haven't seen enough of. We aren't supposed to view the stomach-churning sight of those poor people jumping from the burning World Trade Center. Too sensational. In fact, we are no longer even supposed to see shots of the towers themselves collapsing. That's too disturbing.
We aren't supposed to read about the Saudi Wahhabist police who murdered fifteen innocent girls by burning them to death. Too upsetting. Nor are we to be appraised of the Islamic newspapers who pushed the blood libel about Jews mixing the blood of Muslim and Christian children into the Purim bread. Too disgusting.
Nothing about Petty Officer Neil Roberts, either. Too inflammatory.
I'm not even going to claim a bias here. This is all to be expected from the nanny-state mentality. It doesn't even have to be a conscious consideration. Doesn't everybody know that one thing nanny never, ever does is upset the children?
Earlier, I made mention that I wanted to reclaim the term "liberal" to describe a politics and ideology that would be more familiar to the American Founders, who would have used the term to describe something far different than the Big Statism espoused by modern-day "liberals" like Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Barbara Lee, and Hillary Clinton. I proposed calling folks like these "left-liberals."
Several readers quite sensibly said, "Why not use the term "leftists" instead? This gave me pause, and I had to spend some time examining my own prejudices in order to understand why I hadn't made this simple choice from the beginning. The answer goes back to my college days when I was a leftist myself. This was in the sixties, and we "leftists" worshipped at the altar of Che Guevara, the PLP, Mao, the Peace and Freedom Party, SDS, and the Weathermen. We hated liberals even more than we did conservatives. Conservatives, we would tell ourselves, were at least honest enemies, out in the open where we could counter and attack them. Liberals, on the other hand - and yes, this meant people just like Boxer, Kennedy, and Feinstein - were sneaky fellow travelers, likely to betray us - and the revolution! - at a moment's notice.
David Horowitz may call the Feinsteins of the world leftists today, but back in his own lefty days, I doubt that he did. Now, parsing these ideologies this way may seem an exercise in futility, but I still like "left-liberal." I'd reserve "leftist" for the real McCoy - avowed Commie Ted Rall, for instance. The leftists want the revolution and blood in the streets. Left-liberals merely want universal medicaid.
They didn't show any women in the voluntary testing while also telling us that the machine might be used only when an anomaly presents itself. Let's be perfectly candid here. You are a security screener bored out of your mind and suddenly here comes Dolly Parton trying to catch a flight to Nashville. I would imagine that she would constitute an anomaly. Can you imagine the cottage industry of movie star X-ray vision photos that would start up?
Just think how much good might be accomplished if the Islamofascist nutbags could somehow communicate their comfort with modern technology to the benighted denizens of the Arab street and their anti-modern fundamentalist religious masters.
Gary Farber sums up my libertarian suspicions about bigness better than I could:
The fact is, I still believe that corporations aren't inherently evil, but that every large organization has tendencies and potential to do harm and needs to be watched: for harm to employees, to the communities they affect, and in the way they do business. Just as government so needs to be watched, and just as any instiution with power needs to be watched.
In the hierarchy, though, I'd watch government first, and then business. In general, governments can shoot you, while businesses don't tend so much in that direction.
Editor -- The church massacre in Islamabad is a bitter taste of the price Americans will undoubtedly increasingly pay for a government that has chosen to rely on violence to fight violence and eschews building a just world through international cooperation. TOM MILLER Oakland
Fine, Tom Miller. You want us to build a just world through international cooperation. Could we have a few concrete details, please, rather than simple-minded hand waving? What sort of international cooperation for a just world, for instance, would have prevented 9/11 or that church massacre you just cited? Or are you one of those ludicrous ninnies who believe Osama bin Laden and the rest of the Islamofascists are attacking us for withdrawing from Kyoto, the ABM treaty, and the Durban Conference of Racists?
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