This summer, the folks in Dayton, Tennessee no doubt at least recognized, if they didn't celebrate, the eightieth anniversary of the Scopes Trial, sometimes popularly dubbed the “monkey trial”, which, largely because of the mythology that has been built around it by Hollywood and the larger than life personalities who were involved, has become the ultimate historical confrontation between the “evolutionists” and the “creationists”. Most people probably don’t remember that the prosecution won the case, and Mr. Scopes was found guilty of violating Tennessee law by teaching Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species. What is vivid with most people as the mythology of the trial has grown and been embellished is its caricature of the buffoonery of the argument of the case made on behalf of the state by the “creationist” counsel, William Jennings Bryan. And for the past eighty years, the relative positions have been solidified in the public mind and in the culture war—the evolutionists as the progressives, enlightened by the scientific method and unburdened by faith-based biblical creation myths, versus the creationists, retrograde medievalists who would roll back the scientific revolution and infect the teaching of biology with religious mythology.

In fact, in this confrontation, as with much else in our public square today, the two camps are talking past each other, because both arguments have long ago become much more about worldviews than about science, and worldviews, as someone before me has said, are essentially all about how one feels about two things—human origins and human consciousness. Tell me what you believe about how we got here and how human consciousness was developed and I will tell you what you believe about the large majority of the hot button social issues that permeate today’s public debates. How do Americans divide on these questions? The closest proxy for an answer comes from a series of polls conducted by the Gallup organization from 1982-1998, which asked people which of the following statements best describes their point of view: (1) Creationist: believes God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years, (2) Theistic Evolutionist: believes that God guided the process of evolution over millions of years, or (3) Darwinist: believes that God played no role in evolution. The poll results remained virtually unchanged over this period, as follows: Creationists – 44%, Theistic Evolutionists – 39%, Darwinist – 10%, Don’t Know/Other – 7%.

Whatever your personal view of human nature or human origins, it is pretty well accepted that Darwin rejected the traditional view that had been dominant in Western thought for many centuries before him, which is that man significantly differs in kind, not in degree, from all other animal life. Since his time, with the enormous advances in the biosciences, it has become popular to note that, at the level of DNA, humans and chimpanzees differ by only 1%. But it is more than just a little obvious that this seemingly small difference accounts for an enormous gulf in the respective potentialities of humans and the other animals. Why? As Mortimer Adler has so clearly explained over the years, it boils down to man’s intellect, which in simplest terms is the exclusively human attribute that allows man an imagination, or as Adler put it, “to understand what certain kinds of objects are like both (a) when the objects, though perceptible by the senses, are not actually perceived, and (b) also when they are not perceptible at all, as with the conceptual constructs we employ in physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. There is no empirical evidence whatsoever that such concepts are present in animal behavior. Their intelligence is entirely sensory”.

Russell Kirk approaches the question from a slightly different direction: “The moral imagination is the principal possession that man does not share with the beasts. It is man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the chaos of many events. It is a strange faculty—inexplicable if men are assumed to have an animal nature only—of discerning greatness, justice, and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest”. Obviously, what we have known as Western Civilization would have been impossible without this human capability that Kirk describes.

Many may continue to wonder and debate about the source of this human consciousness, but we’re all still waiting for either evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology to satisfactorily explain it within a strictly materialist worldview, and I'm sure we will be waiting for a long while yet.

Hollywood is grumbling about the slump in summer ticket sales, with movie executives perplexed about why Americans aren’t flocking to the movies in the same way to see Forty-year Old Virgin, Wedding Crashers, or the purposely foul-mouthed The Aristocrats. While the first-two movies are definitely hits, they pale in comparison to movies such as last year’s The Passion of the Christ, which raked in a box office of over $370 million, and an equally impressive $270 million in DVD/Video sales.

Chalking up the remarkable ticket sales for The Passion of the Christ as “anomalous,” the Village Voice and the Tinseltown elite – despite assertions to the contrary – failed to understand that Gibson’s tour de force is exactly the type of picture Red America will flock to see. Sadly, rather than produce better movies about more substantive topics like the life of Christ, or other religious figures such as Moses, King David, or even Mohammed, Hollywood reaps what it sows by producing big-budget movies that nobody wants to see.

But of course, most moviemakers are not the types who believe or much less understand the market forces of supply and demand. Because of their innate selfishness and inability to live in the world, many moviemakers would rather produce schlock that nobody cares about and blame the public when it fails for not appreciating their “artistic vision.”

Some of America’s greatest exports are products of its culture: from television to movies to music no other country in the world singularly dominates the arts. Yet, despite the success of conservatives in gaining electoral offices at the federal, state, and local level through the creation of educational and training organizations such as the Young America’s Foundation or the Federalist Society, there are no organizations financed by the likes of the Harry and Lynde Bradley Foundation for the purpose of training young conservatives in how to be filmmakers, music producers, or novelists – all of these fields are dominated by the Left.

This is why I find puzzling and misplaced the call by my friend Austin Bramwell in the August 29 issue of The American Conservative for the formation of an “elitist” group of conservative writers who “do not expect that their ideas will be popular.” Austin continues:

This elitism, perhaps an electoral handicap, is an intellectual strength. Original thinking often flourishes under conditions of intellectual marginality. Unfortunately, the conservative movement, having discovered a mass audience, risks squandering the intellectual marginality that once made it so interesting and daring.

Indeed it’s true that conservatism’s inherent rationality and honesty drew the masses to it. But the winning ideas of the likes of Buckley and the old National Review crowd were also at the core and in the hearts of the American people. The United States has always been a conservative country as was manifested by the election of Eisenhower in the 1950s, and the House Un-American Activities hearings, and much earlier in the writings of Tocqueville. Yet, the era of television, phones in every home, and mass circulation magazines made Americans aware of the dangers associated with liberalism. Liberalism’s ill effects were masqueraded by the concentration of the Left in the East, whereas most Americans lived on the family farm during Roosevelt’s presidency.

However, when our countrymen learned about the destructiveness of the New Deal because of magazines like National Review, or through television programs such as The Firing Line, or the publication and wide distribution of books like The Conscience of a Conservative, they weren’t pleased with what they heard and they demanded change.

Certainly, the current state of conservatism leaves much to be desired, particularly as magazines such as National Review are frankly less interesting, and the policies of the Republican Party are focused less on reducing the size and burden of government. However, what a new elite of conservatives, particularly “techno-skeptic” ones, will add to solving these problems beats me.

As Austin mentions in his article, there are already niche publications galore such as Critical Review, or the less-elite The American Conservative, which no doubt speaks to the so-called elite of representative elements of the conservative movement, i.e. paleo-cons. In his article he also laments the uniformity of ideas found among conservatives:

[C]onservatives lost interest in internal debate 30 years ago, when the nature of American conservatism remained an open question. Since then, the possibility of a “crack-up” has grown more remote, not less. Fresh debates among right-wingers still occur, but rarely at the highest theoretical level. Gone are the days when [Wilmoore] Kendall could accuse [Richard] Weaver of “ill-tempered name-calling” or [James] Burnham could call [Frank] Meyer “the perfect ideologue.”

No, now the Editor Emeritus of The American Conservative, Patrick J. Buchanan, just makes a complete ass of himself. How’s that for spirited debate? While conservatives during the post-War period certainly disagreed with each other, few were ever so stupid to assert that the Soviet Union was not a fundamental threat to American survival. Things have definitely changed. Now, there are a group of conservatives such as Buchanan, and some of his paleo-conservative brethren, who are bold enough to assert that after September 11, we should do nothing but retreat into ourselves.

Most Americans could careless about names such as Kendall, Weaver, or Burnham, but they do enjoy music, movies, and television. If conservatives are to win the war of ideas, we must take the path less-traveled and infiltrate pop culture, just as we did, however imperfectly, politics. This means investing similarly in the creation of highly trained young people who are steeped in conservatism’s fundamentals, but also are up to the challenge of weaving conservative themes into cultural arts - a new Hollywood "elite", if you will.

Instead of asking where our modern-day Burnham’s or Weaver’s are, the better question might be where are the 21st Century’s Ayn Rand, Robert Penn Warren, or Walker Percy?

Update: Bruce informed me of a piece in Monday's Washington Post by Boston college's Martha Bayles diagnosing the illnesses that result from American pop-culture exports that don't necessarily represent the people's values: Middle Eastern backlash of the United States.

No doubt you're following the disastrous effects of Hurricane Katrina at all the major blogs, but if you haven't read about this already, bloggers are readying to coordinate a Blog for Relief Day fundraiser tomorrow, Sept. 1, for victims of the hurricane.

Along with N.Z. Bear at The Truth Laid Bear, Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin have already put together some great lists of aid organizations if you'd like to join in the effort. Be sure to make their blogs a mainstay tomorrow in order to follow the campaign, and it looks like La Shawn Barber will be staying on top of it as well. She's linking today to some of the smaller blogs that are covering this tragedy, so you'll likely be able to weave between both the big- and small-timers to find your preferred charity.

Folks, blogs obviously have provided an invaluable service to the country the past few years, especially when it has come to connecting Americans and communicating the truth around election time. In short, they've made an impact and a difference. But I can't think of a more important service they could provide at the moment than helping to raise as much money as possible to support the victims of Katrina and, quite literally, help to get these people back on their feet.

Please do what you can to help.

I met my friend and fellow blogger, Mark Safranski of http://zenpundit.blogspot.com, during a debate thread at H-Net’s Diplo channel. Mark’s wide ranging historical and strategic knowledge have led him into fascination with Thomas Barnett’s concepts for defining America’s challenges and proposed pro-active measures. At his blog, Mark and fellows in favor and critical of Barnett carry on lively explorations of its nuances and applications. Mark gets into many other subjects, with usual brilliance and incisive language.

Personally, I find Barnett rather too theoretical, and impractical in some respects. Nonetheless, theory often shapes perceptions, and then actions, and needn't be taken in whole to advance understanding. As you will see below, being familiar with Barnett is essential to understanding an important strand of U.S. defense thinking.

If nothing else, Barnett’s prominence provides beleaguered ROTC and active military graduate students with a significant, academically respectable theme about which to write term papers and with which to defend themselves against scholarly antiwarriors who’ve never been in military service. I am told that Barnett is quite giving of his time and helpful to such students.

Now, I’ll let Mark briefly outline Barnett’s thinking:

October will see the release of Blueprint For Action, the second tome of former Defense Department strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett and the logical continuation of the ideas laid out in his first book, the bestselling The Pentagon’s New Map.

The influential Dr. Barnett has already briefed a sizable percentage of the U.S. military’s new active duty flag officers, captured the attention of Donald Rumsfeld and watched the Pentagon grasp at his idea of “ System Administration” in the new Quadrennial Review. Michael Barone called Barnett someone who “…may turn out to be one of the most important strategic thinkers of our time” while David Ignatius of the Washington Post has raised comparisons to “Tom Friedman and Karl von Clauswitz”.

What is this man’s “grand strategy”, who holds no official post and spreads his message by word of blog and from an editorial perch at Esquire magazine? What are the implications of “PNM” for promoting democracy?

PNM strategy advocates the United States forging a new, non-zero sum, international security “Rule-set” linked to the realities of globalization designed to “shrink the Gap”. Barnett divides the world into Core, Seam and Non-Integrating Gap states depending on their level of “connectivity” to the global economy. Old Core states are the advanced, mostly liberal, capitalist democracies of the West and Japan while New Core countries like India, China and Russia have charted course toward economic liberalization and integration. Gap states, by contrast, are a Hobbesian nightmare of isolation and cruelty. Typified by sub-Saharan Africa, North Korea and much of the Mideast, the Gap is ruled by dictators, racked by civil wars, major humanitarian disasters and state failure. The Gap exists mostly outside the world economy except for tightly controlled governmental or transnational criminal channels and has populations that are generally desperately poor and unfree. Seam states ride the fence between these two worlds, nations in transition.

Security challenges for the Core revolve around four Core-Gap “ flows”:

· Migration of people from the Gap to the Core
· Movement of energy from the Gap to the Core.
· Movement of money from the Old Core to the New Core
· The export of security from the Core to the Gap – that only America can provide.

For the hardest cases of intervention, Barnett proposes two inter-related armed forces:
“Leviathan” – the mostly American, overwhelmingly destructive, high tech military; and “ System Administration”, a Core-wide, robust, nation-building force for reconstruction, peacekeeping and post-conflict “connecting-up” to the global economy.

Is this vision good or bad for promoting democracy overseas? In Blue Print For Action, Barnett states that “Democracy is not a means, but an end” but how pro-democracy activists will interpret PNM will have much to do with their own time-horizons. Longitudinally, Barnett’s strategy to “shrink the Gap” by promoting connectivity creates a global strategic environment supportive of fragile democracies and hostile toward violently anti-democratic regimes like North Korea. Moreover, the Core Rule-set that Barnett wants to see exported to the Gap is the liberal, democratic, market model.

There is a fairly ruthless streak of utilitarianism that runs through Barnett’s strategy that will unnerve those who care passionately about democracy in a particular country – this describes many activists - rather than about making changes systemically that help democratization everywhere. Barnett would boldly cut many a sharp corner in order to lock-in the major powers like India, China, Russia, and Japan into an “Asian NATO” and irrevocable commitment to greater liberalization, political reform and economic integration. To his critics who would protest his pursuing connectivity before democracy, Barnett offers a supreme confidence that making globalization irreversible will also make dictatorship untenable.

Thank you, Mark, for an excellent capsule.

Marriage and family expert Maggie Gallagher points us to a new book, Education Myths, by Manhattan Institute scholar Jay Greene that aims to debunk time-honored myths about public education.

What kind of myths? Everything from schools are underfunded ("the money myth"), to schools are much worse than they used to be ("the myth of decline"). Since 1970, we've doubled per-pupil spending (after inflation), yet test scores and graduation rates have remained essentially flat. Schools aren't worse, but billions of dollars haven't made them any better, either.

Or take class size, for example. One random-assignment research study showed that smaller class sizes produced a modest academic benefit for students. But six years after California hired 50 percent more teachers to reduce class size, a Rand Corp. study found that test scores were increasing just as much in large classrooms as smaller classes and concluded smaller class sizes made no academic difference.

Or take teacher quality. Research shows that high-quality teachers are very important, but certified teachers are not, especially. Greene points out that of the 33 best-designed studies, not a single one showed any impact of teacher credentials on student performance. Academic ability matters. Diligence, motivation, enthusiasm probably matters. Master's degrees in education simply do not.

Or take the persistent myth that teachers are underpaid. At $30.75 an hour (not counting benefits), the average grade school teacher's hourly pay compares favorably to architects ($26.64), economists ($27.84), chemists ($30.68), biologists ($28.07), editors and reporters ($22.38) and social workers ($17.21). Of course, teachers, unlike most other professionals, face a hard ceiling in pay: They cannot translate better performance into either higher pay or higher status. Teachers get paid like union workers, higher salary for more years on the job, not for greater professional excellence. That's discouraging to both the teachers we have and the high-quality teachers we might recruit.

First impressions suggest that Education Myths will be an interesting read, and though it probably won't shed much new light on what critics of public education already know, it stands to provide a tremendous public service to public school teachers and administrators who aren't yet too jaded to consider the evidence with an open mind. Educators aside, however, I'm hoping all taxpayers -- especially those with children in public schools -- will take an interest in this book. Only when we demand that government relinquishes its monopoly over public schools by allowing parents to choose their kids' schools will we begin to see improvements.

Allow me to address some of the topics cited by Gallagher in her review:

The idea that public schools are underfunded would be comical if it didn't lead to more and more taxpayer waste every year. It's hard to believe the average public school often can't do with $9,000 per student what many private schools have to do with one-third the revenue. As Mona Charen pointed out in her book Do-Gooders, public schools spend almost half their budget on administrative costs, i.e. not on students.

"Reducing class size" may sound like a good idea, but that's assuming schools actually intend to discipline students in the first place. Lack of discipline is the disease that encourages us to fight the symptoms that manifest themselves in regular size classrooms when we allow three or four students to control a class of 30. It hardly matters how small a class is if you're unwilling to remove those who prevent instruction from occurring.

As far as teacher certifications are concerned, any honest person who's ever taken such an exam will tell you they are in no way an accurate indicator of potential teacher quality, despite the fact that this is the impression schools hope to give by requiring them. As I wrote in a recent column, certification exams are most effective at keeping many talented teachers out of the profession in the first place. Private schools nationwide are filled with accomplished mathematicians, historians, and musicians who find enjoyment in schools that place more value on expertise and achievement than on meaningless certification exams they simply refuse to take.

Perhaps the biggest myth about public education is that most teachers who leave do so because of "low pay." Certainly any socialist salary schedule that rewards teachers equally for time served instead of job performance will provide neither the incentive for accomplishment nor the potential for immediate increase in salary such achievement demands. As Greene calculates, when adjusted for the number of hours teachers actually work relative to other professions, the pay isn't so bad. (As the old joke goes, What are the three best things about being a teacher? June, July, and August.) And teachers who decide to leave after only a few years in the system knew going in that they didn't stand to make much money, especially right off the bat. So what causes them to leave? My own experience leads me to believe that most teachers -- especially those who know they can command more money for their talents in private industry -- simply become frustrated with the bureaucracy of teachers unions, the emphasis placed on social engineering instead of on academic instruction, and the widespread lack of discipline in schools and in many cases the complete disrespect given teachers nowadays by students, parents, and even school administrators.

Greene's book should strike a nerve, and with any luck it will contribute to efforts now underway to erode the hegemony our public schools hold over the rest of us.

I’m the father of 5-year old and a 8-month old sons. Hopefully they will be smart enough, and kind enough to my budget, to go on to the University of California.

If you are reading this, you were probably strong-minded enough to resist indoctrination in extremism while you were in college. You probably also know others who weren’t, or who were socially or verbally coerced into conformity with liberal or far left doctrines.

That alone should be reason enough to support those who fight for greater academic balance and fairness.

But, it has gone beyond that verbal coercion at some campuses, to physical coercion. This is particularly so in acts of physical intimidation and violence against identifiable Jewish students or those who strongly support Israel, as the furthest left and the most radical Islamists combine to enforce their views. See, for example, David Horowitz’ book, Unholy Alliance.

There is a movement in California and other states to have the legislature pass the Academic Bill of Rights, which reinstates some of the rules eliminated in 2003 , so that “faculty shall not use their courses or their positions for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.” For more info, start here and click around the site for many other articles about it.

In the meantime, more focused, is the petition by the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, a broad-based group of scholars, to the Governor of California, University of California and California State University Officials. The petition urges a review of course descriptions and materials to ensure that there is presentation of the “full range of scholarly views about Israel and Zionism.”

Yes, it has gone that far down hill that such a petition by concerned scholars needs to be signed by concerned Americans. The Scholars for Peace in the Middle East is trying to get 10,000 signatures immediately, with more to follow. Timing is important because press attention can most easily be drawn to the problem as the academic year begins.

Please click on this petition link and sign, and forward to every one you know of good conscience. You and they need not be California residents to have a say, as out-of-state students attend California colleges, and all Americans have a keen stake in what happens in the state containing 10% of the U.S. population.

Paraphrasing Jimmy Durante: My father thanks you; my mother thanks you; my children thank you; and I thank you.

It's the mainstream media.

Scott Johnson's piece in The Daily Standard points out that the MSM can only see the war in Iraq through casualty counts and the Vietnam lens.

Many have noted the media's efforts to portray the the current war in Iraq as a replay of Vietnam. These efforts date back to R.W. Apple's invocation of Vietnam on day 24 of the campaign in Afghanistan:

Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word "quagmire" has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad. Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam?

This drum of defeatism has not stopped beating. This past week, for example, Knight Ridder reporter Tom Lasseter portrayed the situation in Iraq's Anbar province as a repeat of Vietnam. Lasseter 's article is a troubling piece with relevant quotes from officers in the thick of the action.

...

If only one could put Lasseter in touch with the Power Line reader who served in Vietnam and last week wrote in from his current post in Iraq. He finds only one similarity: "[T]he deplorable way the mainstream media with their left-leaning bias have reported the two wars."

This is especially appropriate when read alongside Arthur Chrenkoff's latest installment of Good news from Iraq. I encourage everyone to read this, but I'll note that you'll need to set aside a good hour to really absorb it all.

How many "liberals" would ever believe there's an hour's worth of good news on this war?

Protests against the U.S. role in Iraq seem to have grown during the hot days of August. The thousands of articles that have appeared in the old media on Cindy Sheehan’s camp-out gave that impression.

Yet, in the latest AP-Ipsos poll last week, as the Associated Press reported, overall attitudes about the war “haven’t changed dramatically through the summer. A solid majority, 60 percent, want U.S. troops to stick it out until Iraq is stable,” even though the frustration with the reported pace of progress has a majority critical of the conduct of the war. As even Democrat critic Senator Biden observes, according to the L.A. Times, “ ‘the vast majority’ of Democrats believe that the consequences of leaving Iraq unattended justify continued American involvement” even though the anti-Iraq protestors are Democrats.

The key question, then, is who are the protestors?

As I observed (in my post of August 20) when watching a local protest in Encinitas, California, most are middle-aged, repeating their Vietnam era slogans. Across the country, in Staunton, Virginia (in the beautiful Shenandoah area that has drawn so many D.C. retirees), a protestor observed, “It’s people who lived through Vietnam and saw what it did to our country, who are leading this movement.” Compensating for the paucity of youthful faces at their rallies, this protestor continues, “It’s harder for the president and his administration to dismiss this as the efforts of a bunch of college kids.”

Unlike the real or feigned idealism of the youthful protestors of the ‘60’s, it is possible now to trace the sordid extremist track record of the aged leaders of today’s protests. One of the easiest sources to reference when encountering a leader or organization’s name in an article is at the web site of DiscoverTheNetworks.org , A Guide to the Political Left.

Celebrity has-beens like Joan Baez can only attract 200 to her free concert at Crawford, by the count of an observer. Going on to analyze the numbers claimed to attend protests or come to Crawford, this observer finds the counts quite inflated, and unquestioned by the mass media cooperating in “one gigantic photo-op staged for the benefit of the press whose seeming indifference to some of the truly kooky things Sheehan has said (not to mention the nauseating anti-semitic rants of Mother Sheehan and her supporters) is almost beyond comprehension.” San Francisco Bay Area ABC TV reports on the “small group of professionals skilled in politics and public relations who are marketing Cindy Sheehan’s message,” including large PR firm Fenton Communications funded by Ben Cohen’s Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream money, and leadership from Democrat National Party Chair Howard Dean’s organization and wild left Code Pink.

This post of photos at Little Green Footballs blog, “How Phony Can They Get?”, exposes the falsity of protest groupie Al Sharpton’s visit and the complicity of the press in how it was reported. Paralleling this disgrace, while her magic bus is being readied to run on vegetable oil, Jane Fonda is lending her faded visage to provide intros to far-out extremist George Galloway’s U.S. tour sponsored by, for example, International Socialist Review and the National Council of Arab Americans.

How does the reaction to them differ from the ‘60’s?

As Wall Street Journal deputy editor Daniel Henninger points out: “It may be that the current infatuation with anti-Bush, anti-Iraq sentiment is again missing a political current flowing beneath the surface of the news, just as the media missed the silent majority 40 years ago and the values voters in the 2004 election….These people are organized and they are pro-active….If the Democratic left does levitate another antiwar movement, it won’t be the unanswered opposition of the Vietnam years.”

An example of the results of “dueling rallies” in a small town far removed from Crawford: “The antiwar event drew two dozen demonstrators to downtown Staunton. The support-the-troops rally held the next day counted more than 125 participants.” The master of ceremonies for the troop support rally said the event and those like it across the country are “important for our troops, and are especially important for those of us who served during Vietnam, and saw a different tenor in America.” Another Vietnam era veteran added, “Most of us swore then that we could not let what we saw then happen again.”

The Dallas-Fort Worth Star Telegram reported that 3,000 to 4,000 people attended a pro-Bush rally in Crawford last Saturday, two to four times the height of those drawn to Crawford by the major PR and press campaign of the anti-Iraq forces. A couple who drove for six-hours to get there said, “The left had so much publicity, and we have sat back and done nothing.”

But, no longer. As during the 2004 campaign, the mass media misreading that Vietnam veterans and Americans would be gulled by John Kerry’s false self-hagiography is being repeated in its misreading of our spine and response now.

It's virtually impossible nowadays to go to the office or out to a bar on the weekend without hearing people complaining about the rising price of gasoline. So I thought I'd do a little comparative analysis in the attempt to assuage the delicate sensibilities of those among us who are inclined to take offense at the free market.

For starters, I may as well go on record and say that the rising prices of gasoline are nothing more than simple supply and demand. As Thomas Sowell wrote recently, "With the economies of huge nations like China and India developing more rapidly, now that they have freed their markets from many stifling government controls, more oil is being demanded in the world market and there are few new sources of supply."

And as Larry Kudlow wrote in his latest column, "Rising gas prices and home values represent the forces of good, not evil." I have several good friends who are in the market for a new house and the prevailing mindset among many is that it's just "too expensive" to build one. In southern Maryland, it's not uncommon to have to spend $400,000 for a three bedroom, two bathroom house on half an acre of non-waterfront land. But it would behoove us to realize that this is a good problem to have, considering some alternatives. Increasing prices reflect increasing growth and prosperity, not poverty. In my hometown of Olean, New York, low land values are indicative of a sagging economy and little to no economic growth.

But back to my little project. On Friday, my friend Mike and I were hanging out at a favorite watering hole: the Tiki Bar in Solomons, Maryland. While standing on the pier we overheard a guy complaining that he just had to spend $2.49 per gallon to fill his tank. Before heading to the bar, we assumed. Where he presumably proceeded to spend at least $3.00 on the Yuengling he had in his hand.

Mike and I couldn't help but note that at $2.49 per gallon, the man spent roughly $.02 per ounce per gallon of gas, considering a gallon equals 128 ounces. Interestingly, we didn't hear him lament the fact that he'd just dropped $.25 per ounce for his can of beer.

And so we can go on and on. It's not abnormal for many couples to go out to dinner once a week. How many will order a $4.00 glass of wine? At about 5 ounces per glass, that's a whopping 80 cents an ounce!

Or perhaps a vodka tonic is more your style. A drink containing merely one ounce of Grey Goose vodka will run you at least five bucks in any restaurant or bar. That's right. That's five bucks an ounce. Your Explorer only costs you two cents an ounce today in southern Maryland.

Yes, yes, we must dump gallons and gallons of gas into our tanks, thus driving up our total cost. If you're the type of person who hits the bar, has one drink, and calls it a night, I'd likely entertain your argument for a few minutes. But the point remains, most Americans enjoy a lifestyle where it isn't uncommon to engage in deliberate frivolous spending. And why not? We work hard for our money. But it would be wise to educate ourselves in the basics of economics while we're at it.

That countries like China and India -- not to mention the former Soviet territories now democratizing in Eastern Europe -- are turning more and more to capitalism is undeniably a good thing, both economically and politically. But if we're determined to demand from our government "solutions" to the "problem" of rising gas prices that they are in no manner capable of solving, we'll surely get what we wish for -- and be ever worse off for it. Government can and should do nothing, unless that means combating the political hysteria that accompanies the cries against increasing our own production, which limits supply and only drives up prices in the face of increasing demand in the first place.

The Washington Post is reporting that the worst of Hurricane Katrina may not hit New Orleans directly, as previously feared. However, the outlook for the vulnerable city does not look good.

Katrina, which weakened slightly overnight to a Category 4 storm, turned slightly eastward before hitting land, which would put the western eyewall _ the weaker side of the strongest winds _ over New Orleans.

But National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield warned that New Orleans would be pounded throughout the day Monday and that Katrina's potential 20-foot storm surge was still more than capable of swamping the city.

Katrina, which a day before had grown to a 175-mph, Category 5 behemoth, made landfall about 6:10 a.m. CDT east of Grand Isle in the bayou town of Buras.

The storm hammered the Gulf Coast with huge waves and tree-bending winds. Exploding transformers lit up the predawn sky in Mobile, Ala., while tree limbs littered roads and a blinding rain whipped up sand on the deserted beach of Gulfport, Miss.

Katrina's fury also was felt at the Louisiana Superdome, normally home of professional football's Saints, which became the shelter of last resort for about 9,000 of the area's poor, homeless and frail.

Brendan Loy, blogging at The Irish Trojan's Blog, writes that the Superdome's roof is peeling off. He also has an updated damage report here. [H/T: Michelle Malkin.]

In all likelihood, Michelle Malkin will have updates throughout the day as well. Keep the people in harm's way in your prayers.

UPDATE: Running developments here at Nola View.

UPDATE II (11:37 a.m.): Via Michelle Malkin:

11am EDT update: President Bush may release strategic oil reserves. Announcement expected at 1pm EDT.

Eye of the storm is moving. Via National Hurricane Center:

KATRINA IS MOVING TOWARD THE NORTH NEAR 16 MPH...AND THIS GENERAL MOTION IS EXPECTED TO CONTINUE TODAY AND TONIGHT. ON THIS TRACK THE CENTER WILL MOVE OVER SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI TODAY AND INTO CENTRAL MISSISSIPPI THIS EVENING. MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS ARE NEAR 125 MPH...WITH HIGHER GUSTS. KATRINA IS NOW A CATEGORY THREE HURRICANE ON THE SAFFIR-SIMPSON SCALE. WINDS AFFECTING THE UPPER FLOORS OF HIGH RISE BUILDINGS WILL BE SIGNIFICANTLY STRONGER THAN THOSE NEAR GROUND LEVEL. WEAKENING IS FORECAST DURING THE NEXT 24 HOURS AS THE CENTER MOVES OVER LAND. HOWEVER...HURRICANE FORCE WINDS ARE EXPECTED TO SPREAD AS FAR AS 150 MILES INLAND ALONG THE PATH OF KATRINA.

1116EDT...Fox News Channel's Shep Smith reports from the scene that "The French Quarter looks very good...New Orleans got lucky again..."

Mississippi is flooding.

UPDATE III (3:42 p.m.): "Hell on earth" in Gulfport, Mississippi. CNN reports:

Authorities in Gulfport, Mississippi, told CNN's Gary Tuchman that 10 feet of water covered downtown streets.

"Because the water is so deep, boats are floating up the street," Tuchman said. "There is extensive damage here. This is essentially right now like hell on earth."

"There is intense damage," he said. "We are watching the dismantling of a beautiful town."

My Domino's pizza had just arrived Thursday night when I sat down to a date with Hannity and Colmes. I could barely stomach the video they showed of this violent gang beating of two soldiers in Seattle who had just returned from Iraq. Suffice it to say, I had a pretty light dinner.

Michelle Malkin has a thorough roundup of this heinous crime, so there’s no point rehashing what she’s already said. One note of interest, however: Michelle spent three years at the Seattle Times in the late 1990s and has firsthand knowledge of what she considers abject incompetence and recklessness of Seattle PD leadership, which doesn’t necessarily bode well for all of us who want these brutal thugs to be brought to justice as soon as possible.

It’s now been two full days since this terrible incident has gotten national media coverage, and what gets me the most is the deafening silence of race hustlers who are the first to converge on such a scene declaring a “hate crime” whenever blacks are the victims of whites, or gays are the victims of straights. From what I could tell, one of the beating victims was white and the other black. And every single assailant or onlooker (and, sickeningly, photographer) on video was black, which begs the questions: Is it impossible for blacks to hate whites? Or for blacks to hate other blacks?

There’s probably a good chance the attackers had no idea their victims were soldiers, and I’d be willing to bet they didn’t give a hoot about the color of their skin either. This alone is enough to invalidate any perceived legitimacy of “hate crime” legislation. But the point remains: Beating someone senseless and then kicking and stomping them while they lay unconscious in the street is already a crime -- it hardly matters why it occurs.

But more disturbing than these crimes is the culture our “hate crime” mentality has created, where we get the troubling if only fleeting feeling that some criminal activity is somehow justifiable, so long as our criminals are already viewed as bigger victims than those they attack.

THE International Freedom Center is still set to be housed near the 9/11 memorial at the World Trade Center. Gov. Pataki has asked the IFC to “guarantee” that its lectures, discussions and displays will never disparage America nor offend the 9/11 families. IFC assurances on this point are worthless: It has already handed primary responsibility for those programs to the higher education establishment. And higher educators are no longer able to ensure the integrity of curricula and debate on their own campuses — most egregiously so when the subject is this nation and terrorist attacks against it.

In April, the IFC designated nine universities to provide initial programs, with the goal of “[making] the Center a . . . ‘Public Square’ on hallowed ground.” “The character of a university,” the IFC intoned, “allows for this form of ‘sacred space’ . . . in which sensitive, controversial and provocative subjects can be candidly explored, yet in a manner that does not generate political distraction.”

In a July letter intended to ease fears, IFC chairs Tom Bernstein and Paula Grant Berry again invoked universities’ “time-tested mechanisms for ensuring the appropriateness of programs they offer.”

Yet the April release gave away the show when it quoted New York University President John Sexton extolling today’s campuses “as ‘modern sanctuaries [committed to] free, unbridled and ideologically unconstrained discourse.’ “ Hello. Campuses today are indeed “sanctuaries” — but almost exclusively for scholars of liberal-left-radical persuasion. Their “unconstrained discourse” is overwhelming that of rank ideologues — neo-Marxists, multiculturalists who have rejected an American identity, militant feminists and (especially strident these days) anti-American and anti-Israel ideologues. The majority of professors and administrators are no doubt capable of organizing non-politicized, distinguished programs. But these “moderates” are regularly overshadowed and intimidated by their more radical colleagues.

And campus ideologues will surely assert their right to air their partisan views at Ground Zero, a bully pulpit extraordinaire if ever there was one. No doubt they are salivating at the prospect of shaping the content and tone of the “debate” in a facility that will literally overshadow the 9/11 memorial. Picture visitors to Ground Zero moving from the memorial to IFC lecture halls. And then imagine the perorations of the following (a barest sampling) of influential radical professors, who hale from the very universities to which the IFC has assigned programming:

• Historian Tony Judt of New York University, who has famously and venomously inveighed against Israel’s mere existence. He calls the Jewish state the “leading threat to world peace,” and America “the one place where Israeli propaganda has succeeded.”
• Rashid Khalidi, professor of Middle East Studies at Columbia, has condoned the murder of armed Israelis. After 9/11, he criticized the media for what he called “hysteria about suicide bombers.”
• AbdouMaliq Simone, assistant director of the International Affairs Program at New School University, advocates “an alternative to a Western ‘way of life’” and “[bringing] America to Islam.” Although he rejects violent Islamism, he portrays this country as “hostile and dangerous to Islam,” and of 9/11 he ambivalently speculated about how “the ‘terrorists’ . . . must have found America . . . stultifying, living as they often did in vacuous suburbs with strip malls, Chuck E. Cheese and sports bars.”
• Glenda Gilmore, a Yale historian, recently commented that American action in Iraq is “the first step in Bush’s plan to transform our country into an aggressor nation that cannot tolerate opposition.” When students disagreed, Gilmore threatened lawsuits to stop them from stating their views online.
• Oxford Professor Yahya Michaux is a convert to radical Islam known for his extremist Islamist views.
• Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at the University of Cambridge, is a mainstay of “Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq,” a distinctly anti-American group. He has written prolifically against U.S. military action in Iraq.

In face of 9/11 or when other Western democracies are attacked, academics of this ilk reflexively evoke the real or invented failings of the West as justification for the attacks. Few in their ranks unequivocally denounce the terrorists responsible for 9/11, or the extremist Islamist ideology that spawned them. Indeed, so disconnected from reality are such ideologues that some of them spout our enemies’ views, while we are at war. Surely these are the poorest candidates possible to celebrate the valor of the police, firefighters and others who lost their lives trying to save innocent victims at the Twin Towers. Nor will they be able to provide at Ground Zero what John Whitehead, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., describes as “a strong positive answer to the terrorists that they will not prevail.” The academy’s ideological cancers should not be allowed to infect Ground Zero. New York’s leaders would do far better by adopting the (gloriously politically incorrect) approach proposed in these pages by Adam Brodsky: Because the terrorists targeted freedom and America’s way of life on 9/11, Ground Zero “should make a political statement — not that America is flawed, but rather that it’s a rare force for good.”

May the American people rise up and demand such a celebration, which — count on it — would indeed touch millions of hearts.

[This article ran in the New York Post on August 22, 2005.]

We are being smothered in asserted analogies between Vietnam and Iraq, between the 1968 or 1972 presidential elections’ candidates, issues and outcomes and those predicted for the 2008 election three-plus years hence, or between various mid-term Congressional elections and that of 2006. Almost all of these analogies are fairly worthless, in one or more of logic, facts, causes, knowledge, or connections. They may fill space in pundits’ columns, activists’ causes or politicos’ campaigns, but are pretty poor indicators of understanding the present and, especially, understanding a still quite unclear future.

Analogies are basically illustrations serving arguments. By drawing a picture of a previous event, and drawing a parallel picture of a current event, then inferring or pointing out the similarities, a conclusion is argued.

The logical quality of the analogy depends upon the empirical facts, or as close to that as one can get, of what is included and excluded from the past and current situations, and of the causal factors and the connections between cause and effect in each case and between cases. The persuasive power of the analogy depends upon the extent of fact-checking knowledge by and available to the listener, the relevance and appeal to the listener of the connections made, and the presentation of the analogist.

These latter “emotional” factors, naturally, are more important to the ignorant or partisan than is logical quality. Counter-arguments based on facts and logic are aimed at the more cognizant or open-minded. Counter arguments more based on the emotive factors are necessary for reaching or neutralizing the determinedly ignorant or partisan, but the arguer’s integrity depends upon taking much care to not stray into poorly defensible argumentation.

Sometimes analogies are useful to argumentation, or to begin to understand a difficult subject by using a set of different simple cases, and some actually contain high logical and persuasive quality.

More often, there are more factual and contextual differences than similarities between what is presented as the previous case in the analogy and the current case, the causal and logical connections within and between the two are even more extended than presented, and thus the conclusion argued is more tenuous than real or instructive.

I am not contesting Santayana’s famous dictum, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I am saying that it is incomplete and inadequate. The elements that can make an analogy of greater quality or worthlessness apply, of course. In any event, and even for the best of analogies, it is still essential to deal with the current and probable details and differences. Getting lost in a past event or one’s understanding of it can be as or more dangerous than not knowing the past. It can also restrict one’s imagination, thinking and planning as to the present and future actions that can result in a more favorable outcome.

Great pundits, activists and politicians recognize that the future can be made, not just repeated.

POSTSCRIPT: I received the following note from reader Bill Laurie regarding Vietnam-Iraq analogies: "They apply myth to a new situation they still do not understand. It's not a matter of comparing apples to oranges. It's a matter of comparing unicorns to dragons." Vietnam veteran Bill Laurie, together with Vietnam veteran R.J. Del Vecchio, authored the approximately 50-page "Whitewash/Blackwash: Myths of the Viet Nam War" softback, targeted at high school students. (Reprints for your area's schools can be ordered at TechConsultServ@Juno.com )

Well, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) has gotten his wish. The Base Closure and Realignment Commission voted 8-1 this morning not to go ahead with the Pentagon's plans to close South Dakota's Ellsworth Air Force base, which, in 2004 during his Senate campaign against Tom Daschle, Thune made unsubstantiated promises to protect.

In a press release issued this morning, Thune stated, "This is a tremendous victory for the people of South Dakota and America’s national security. I commend the BRAC Commissioners and their staff for listening to our arguments and recognizing Ellsworth’s military value."

I have no doubt that the thousand or so civilians employed at Ellsworth are relieved at this decision. If the reaction of employees in my DFAS office (Patuxent River, Md.) -- which the BRAC Commission voted yesterday to close -- is any indication, Kleenex sales reps won't need to worry about increasing shipments to South Dakota over the next couple months. But this decision isn't as much of a victory for the people of South Dakota or national security as it is for John Thune.

Here's an excerpt from a column I wrote on this topic back in July:

Since the release of the Pentagon’s BRAC recommendations on May 13, Sen. Thune appears to have spun into full panic mode, no doubt fearing that unless he can successfully lead an effort to thwart the closure of Ellsworth, he’ll be a one-term senator. As such, Thune has introduced legislation to delay BRAC indefinitely, has threatened to sue the Department of Defense, and announced in a June 28 press release that “the U.S. Department of Labor is granting $1 million to the South Dakota Department of Labor to help the State initiate early planning for workers who could be at risk” as a result of Ellsworth’s closure.

Such irrational behavior by Sen. Thune was immature and irresponsible, not because a senator has no obligation to his constituents, but because Thune made a conscious effort to exploit Ellsworth for his own personal and political gain during his Senate campaign.

John Thune decided to stand in front of Ellsworth AFB with Sen. Bill Frist during his campaign to give South Dakotans the impression that he had powerful friends in Washington. He chose to campaign on the grounds that a freshman Republican could command the president’s ear more easily than a seasoned Democrat. John Thune decided to take advantage of the BRAC process, which is supposed to exclude political favoritism, and he won a Senate seat. But once he realized his baseless promises backfired as Ellsworth landed on the BRAC list, Thune's true colors emerged, and he looked more like a spoiled brat than a distinguished senator.

But John Thune has sidestepped the land mine. South Dakotans are much more likely to remember the BRAC Commission's conclusion that closing Ellsworth wouldn't save any money over 20 years -- that it would actually cost the American taxpayer almost $20 million to move all its B-1 bombers to Dyess AFB in Texas -- than they are the smarmy rhetoric of an opportunistic politician.

Admittedly, it is somewhat unrealistic to believe that the BRAC process can be entirely devoid of political maneuvering. After all, like all government entities, the military answers to its citizens. We deserve to have a say in how our tax dollars are spent, and our federal representatives in Congress afford us our best opportunity to have our voices heard on the national stage.

It was not wrong for John Thune to stand up for his constituents and fight for his base, especially if he truly believes in its viability and importance. That said, I hope the BRAC commissioners made the correct decision in keeping it open, and didn't merely cave to existential pressure from influential politicians. But because no congressman wants to see jobs flee his state or district, it's nearly impossible to discern the veracity of our representatives' claims in such situations. And so John Thune was markedly out of line to make the empty promises he did along the campaign trail.

Thus the gravest disappointment of this entire fiasco: Whereas our political process could have been improved with the voters' awakening to such selfish political calculation, our system churns on largely as a machine of deceit, and Sen. Thune not only pays no political price for his dishonesty but likely will be rewarded with re-election in 2010.

UPDATE Aug. 25: National Coverage for Jason Redifer's mother, the subject of my post below:

Rhonda Winfield, whose son, Jason Redifer, was killed in action in Iraq in January, will appear on "Fox News Sunday" Aug. 28, 2005, to address her thoughts on the war. The broadcast will air live at 9 a.m. Sunday.

As the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq nears 2,000, BBC News visits a Virginia community where the death of a teenager put a face on a distant conflict. (Aug. 11, 2005)

___________________________________

All anyone needs to do to marvel at that special something in the heart of a mother is to watch any mother with her children, and the incredible sacrifices that a mother makes to raise her child. No matter what's said by comedians, or by us about them decades later on the couch, there's no gainsaying that there's nothing more special than our mothers.

Sadly, I've been near several mothers who have lost their children, including my own mother who never recovered. I'll venture no guess how she would have acted if I'd been killed in Vietnam. She was not political, but my family is liberal politically of the old-fashioned (how sad it is to say that about liberals) patriotic kind that used to always vote Democrat. I can't believe that she'd have dishonored me by lying that I hadn't volunteered for and hadn't believed in what we did in Vietnam.

There's something, also, special about a small town. The Flatbush of Brooklyn, N.Y. that I grew up in was like a small town: multi-generationally stable, everyone knew each other, with almost any type store, education or service nearby.

So, I've been fascinated with the stories done by the editor, Chris Graham, of the Augusta Free Press (a newspaper where I've had many columns) about the family and the area's mourning and reactions to the death of Jason Redifer in Iraq. Chris is certainly not a conservative, but rather one of the old-fashioned patriotic liberals that I've been so proud to associate with throughout my life.

Chris Graham has again applied his balanced reporting to a follow-up with Jason's mother regarding her feelings about another mother's loss and behavior, Cindy Sheehan. After reading that, scroll to the bottom and click on Remembering Jason for the earlier reports. Together, this reporting by Chris Graham offers a unique comprehensive narration of the loss of a son in Iraq, how it affects a family and neighbors, and the dignity provided to Jason's ultimate sacrifice.

With the conviction of a visionary, Ralph Peters dismisses the negativity of those he accuses of promulgating America’s “bizarre cult of pessimism.” In New Glory: Expanding America’s Global Supremacy, Peters’ latest soon-to-be-bestseller, the author steadfastly expresses a belief in the innate goodness of an America he describes as “the greatest force for freedom and change in history.” But New Glory is no mere paean to an idealized America. There have been mistakes. “We have stumbled forward while looking wistfully over our shoulders at the past,” he acknowledges. Unlike those consumed with the cult of guilt for past sins – real or imaginary – Peters urges readers to “set our eyes firmly on the future once again.” New Glory is a page-turning guide on just how glorious that future could be.

Of all things he has been – soldier, adventurer, historian, intelligence analyst, author, commentator – above all, Peters is a story-telling realist, a rare but unbeatable combination. He sets the stage of an America of “many revolutions” (e.g., women’s emancipation, racial integration, tolerance, family, geriatrics, and more) leading an often reluctant, hostile world into the new century. Peters also speaks to a spectrum of threats and opportunities – those we face now and those still to come. He analyzes America and the world regionally, ideologically, militarily, and in terms of potential good and ill. From there he outlines a national policy that is unapologetically pro-American and, to a degree that will surprise chronic pessimists, pro-the rest of the world, too.

Peters paints with broad strokes. He commands a remarkable breadth and depth of history, and has an exceptional ability to identify critical historic fault-lines. Unlike many Americans, Peters understands that history and destiny have a longer horizon than any single life. One of his many wise recommendations is that America “must cultivate the art of patience.” That advice, I fear, has faint chance of success in our instant gratification society. Nevertheless, Peters, unlike many contemporary analysts, refuses to let readers take the easy path. He demands that we face the bitter, blood-soaked reality of the world as it is, not as politicians, defense manufacturers, bureaucrats, or the think-tankers who serve them would have us believe. And that reality means that we will forever have enemies bent on our destruction, foes we must fight with implacable fortitude and an unwavering commitment to win.

He disdainfully rejects pacifism, which he considers an “abjuration of responsibility toward our fellow human beings,” mere “cowardice masquerading as virtue.” Peters is adamant about the importance of fighting for human rights, arguing that amelioration of gross human rights abuses abroad justifies American military intervention. This places him at odds with right-wing realpolitik types as well as the usual hard-left suspects, albeit for quite different reasons. Peters’ compelling linkage of human rights to strategic issues makes New Glory an ideal companion piece to Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy.

In addition to his impeccable analysis and crisp style – honed as a writer of non-fiction and a tireless columnist – Peters is a highly talented novelist. His story-telling abilities add drama and suspense. On a September afternoon in 1683, for example, the reader suddenly joins tall Polish hussars in a daring cavalry charge that broke the Ottoman siege of Vienna, thereby liberating a chronically ungrateful Europe from the centuries-old threat of Islam. These kinds of historical anecdotes – and their highly relevant links to present-day issues – add a wonderful flavor to the book and will leave the reader wishing for more.

While Peters has the ink of optimism in his pen, he also dips it into a highly acidic, often darkly humorous condemnation of the cynical, the fanatic, the muddle-headed, and the mad. He offers bare-knuckle analysis of current issues ranging from Islamofascism to chronic French perfidy. He brilliantly contrasts corrupt, feeble Old Europe to the untapped high-energy of the South –South Africa, Latin America, and India - and discusses the role that America must play in a future he envisions as glorious and attainable. But it is a future that comes, as do all human endeavors, with a cost. America, he insists, must be prepared to deal realistically with our enemies and shed blood of heroes in order to promote good for our people and the peoples of the world.

This is not a book to speed-read although you will want to do so. Just as aged sour mash bourbon is not for chugging, New Glory deserves thoughtful contemplation. Peters has produced a dynamic, intellectually challenging, must-read book with cutting edge applicability. It needs to be in the hands of all policy makers - and of everyone who votes for them.

[Gordon Cucullu is a former Special Forces lieutenant colonel, columnist, popular speaker, and author of Separated at Birth: How North Korea became the Evil Twin.]

Monday: COL. GORDON CUCULLU is the author of Separated at Birth: How North Korea Became the Evil Twin. Currently a farmer in upstate NY, a columnist for Tech Central Station, FrontpageMagazine, and California Republic, Gordon is a military analyst for FoxNews, New York City’s WABC-TV and WABC-radio, Linda Chavez’s radio show, and many other radio and television shows around the country.

In Vietnam, Gordon was a member of the highly classified Studies and Observation Group that conducted top-secret reconnaissance missions into Laos, Cambodia and denied areas of Vietnam. For his valor, he was awarded the BRONZE STAR.

After Vietnam, Gordon went on to become the first American to attend a mid-level Korean officer’s school. He was a charter member of a new Korean-US Combined Forces Command. From Korea, Gordon was assigned to the Pentagon, where he planned and managed military assistance to Central American countries in a volatile period. His last active duty assignment was as an exchange officer to the State Department, where he was a political-military advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Pacific Affairs, a position then held by Paul Wolfowitz. Among Gordon’s many service awards are the Defense Superior Service Medal, Defense Meritorious Service Medal (2), Joint Services Commendation Medal, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and the US Presidential Unit Commendation.

We’ll be discussing, “THE 9/11 COVERUP COMMISSION” -- the essay on ABLE DANGER Gordon co-authored with Ben Johnson for FrontPageMagazine.

Tuesday: Our discussion of “THE 9/11 COVERUP COMMISSION” continues, with Gordon’s co-author, BEN JOHNSON, another of our favorite guests here at TRUE NORTH. Ben is Managing Editor of FrontPage Magazine and the author of the book 57 VARIETIES OF RADICAL CAUSES: TERESA HEINZ KERRY’S CHARITABLE GIVING.

Wednesday: GEORGE NEUMAYR, contributing editor of The American Spectator, returns to TRUE NORTH. George’s hard-hitting, incisive analyses of the words and deeds of Senator Patrick Leahy are a refreshing change from the puff pieces offered up by Vermont’s relentlessly sycophantic mainstream media. Here’s a sample, from “Torturing Alberto”, from The American Spectator (1/06/05):

Damaging the Constitution is the official policy of Democrats like Leahy. It falls under their understanding of the Constitution as a "living" document, which just means a dead document -- a blank piece of paper on which they seek to scribble every fad and trend and invented right that appeals to them at the moment.

You can read the rest of this fine essay here.

Those who share my concern about the callousness concerning disabled children of the Right-to-Kill crowd and of Utilitarian “ethicists” like Peter Singer will especially appreciate George’s extraordinary essay, “The Humane Holocaust.” Here are some excerpts:

“In the humane holocaust, murdering undesirable unborn babies at the beginning of life, the elderly at the end of it, and the disabled in between, forms the final solution in the quest for the perfect, burden-free society. In the humane holocaust, one generation's crimes become another generation's compassion. . . . Evil is always done under the appearance of goodness. But evil renamed is still evil. And injustice to which our society has manipulated the aged and disabled into consenting is still unjust. If a man consents to slavery, does slavery cease to be wrong? If patients don't mind violations against the Hippocratic Oath, are doctors free to flout it? The engineers of the humane holocaust uses this lie of consent as moral absolution of evil, but if it can't collect the lie from its victims (as in the case of abortion where no killed child gives consent) it keeps churning anyways.

Terri Schiavo is its latest victim. May she find in God the real compassion the vile imposter gods among us denied her.

Thursday: BILL SAYRE, formerly with the U.S. Federal Reserve, now a Member of the Board of Directors of Associated Industries of Vermont; of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce; and of the Vermont Forest Products Association. A student of Milton Friedman's (among other Nobel Laureates), Bill received his MBA in economics/finance from the University of Chicago. We’ll be discussing what’s top-of-the-fold in the headlines this week.

Friday: TRUE NORTH regular JIM BEERS wasn’t due to be back on the show for another week, but given Friday’s ruling by a federal judge mandating the introduction of gray wolves into Vermont—where they may never have lived at all—I knew we needed Jim’s informed perspective on this controversy. Read “Wolf Restoration Ordered in Vermont,” from Saturday’s Free Press.

JIM BEERS, who has many fans among the listeners of True North, had a 30-year career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where he served as Chief of Operations for the National Wildlife Refuge System. A Congressional Fellow in Washington, D.C., Jim was the wildlife biologist in the National Wildlife Refuge System’s Central Office. His career ended when, during the Clinton Administration, Jim blew the whistle on $45 million of government-agency abuses, committed by government agencies in collusion with animal rights and environmental organizations. (You can read his Congressional testimony online.) Jim was rewarded for doing his job by having all work assignments taken from him, and being sent home. After nine months, Jim accepted a settlement and began a new career, as one of America’s most eloquent advocates of property rights. National audiences read him at www.allianceforamerica.org. Here in Vermont, you can read Jim’s columns in print, in one of my favorite magazines, Outdoors Magazine.

The only parallel that really holds up between the Vietnam and Iraq engagements by the U.S. is in the "anti"-movement. Many of the leaders and participants of anti-Iraq war protests are drawn from then, or are miseducated by the ‘60’s radicals and wannabes who have graduated into and predominate in academia and media. Just go here and trace some of the names and organizations, for example, here, here and here.

There are many empirical studies and surveys, and few to dispute, the dominance of the left-leaning in academia and media, so just google. Whenever Nat Hentoff speaks I listen, and his sterling liberal civil libertarian credentials should make it impossible for all but the deaf among liberals to listen. Hentoff pointedly enjoins media that, “by doing more investigative reporting on freedom of thought on campuses, the media can also be of significant help for future students, faculty and the nation as a whole. We are engaged in a war against terrorism, but also in a war of ideas between those committed to freedom and advocates of its lethal opposite.”

A major difference from Vietnam is that without a draft to avoid that interrupts their comforts and climb to affluence, the current anti-Iraq recruits from campus have been far sparser, leaving a largely middle-aged crowd, many of whom are trying to reclaim their youthful zeal or who have never stopped living the ideology formed then. I went to see a Sheehan-sympathy demonstration in my hometown, and could have cleaned up with a Geritol stand.

That youthful zeal, its memory or invented memory, the ideology of the far-left adopted then, has become almost a faith, impervious to reason. At its root is nothing else but opposition to the United States’ intervention abroad against foes of Western values and safety. RealClear Politics Tom Bevan reduces the left’s various rationalizations and camouflage of its real message, “at Daily Kos all the way to the New York Times op-ed page” to it’s core: “Taken together these requirements would seem to make it almost impossible for the left to support U.S. military action under any circumstance.”

Not just their leaders and arguments, but the anti-Iraq movement’s tactics are a replay of those used four-decades ago. During the 2004 presidential campaign, it took (as I wrote) a revolt of the Vietnam veterans to expose John Kerry’s Vietnam duplicities and remind Americans of his slanders against us then, despite the leading media’s chorus of support for him and opposition to us. Today,the same tactics, (I wrote) of slandering the American troops and character are being used. Another illustration is the World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul last June, its cast of characters and assertions, even its roots in the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, as a replay of the anti-Vietnam Bertrand Russell tribunal in Europe and its U.S. offshoot at the Jane Fonda funded VVAW Winter Soldier show trial. See here, scroll and click around, for an abundance of documentation about the Kerry-Winter Soldier fraudulence.

The lead reporter for USA Today at the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas seemingly addressed the press’ 24/7 extravaganza of countless articles on Cindy Sheehan. When interviewed at CBS MarketWatch August 17 (free signup needed to link), reporter Keen “suggested that the Bush White House played an unwitting role in sparking the Sheehan extravaganza.” Keen continued, “When the White House is not generating news for us, it leaves us to our own devices.” (Oh my! Stop me President Bush before I become a responsible journalist. Give me something to play with, er report, to justify my hotel bill in Crawford.) As Michael Barone adds to the boredom excuse for the Crawford-Sheehan reporting extravaganza, “Today, we have many in the press – not most, I think, but some at least – who do not want us to win.”

Thus far, buried within a feature story on Sheehan, the leading media has usually given a paragraph or so to one or two opposing views but not the overwhelming majority of parents of American casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan who believe differently or who oppose her. Some columnists from the political right have spoken out, for example, and some major newspapers with more balanced op-ed pages have allowed other bereaved parents to be heard.

If it’s Vietnam all over again, it’s not in Iraq. It’s in the same cast of characters reliving their anti-Vietnam, anti-U.S. faith to undermine U.S. resolve in the MidEast, and in the leading American media’s irresponsibility to allow this rerun farce of their old moth-eaten plays and ploys.

Regular readers of this blog will know that, several weeks ago, I announced that I'd accepted the position of managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine, a publication of the American Enterprise Institute. It's a grand opportunity for me, as I'll be working with superb people on an exciting magazine published by one of the best think tanks around. To say that I'm excited about it would be an understatement.

But it also means that, as of today, I'll no longer be blogging at Democracy Project. Mostly, it's a matter of time: I just can't pull off so many commitments simultaneously.

However: the blog goes on! You'll have noticed the recent contributions of Bruce Kesler, whose post yesterday was picked up by many other bloggers, including Captain Ed. We will add additional new voices in the weeks and months ahead, so please continue to visit regularly, as I honestly believe that the quality of this blog will improve with time. Brent Tantillo and Gordon Cucullu will continue to post, also, so there won't be a shortage of reading material.

When we launched in February of last year, we hoped that it would become a platform for information important to the strengthening of democracy at home and abroad. I hope that, in some small ways, we've accomplished that. While we've never tried to enter the upper echelons of the blogosphere -- frankly, we never had the time to post 'round the clock -- we have had some notable successes. From Condoleezza Rice cartoons to the FEC's efforts to limit Internet speech, on to the truth about Gitmo, Rathergate in cultural context, and the ongoing efforts to spread democracy to North Korea and the Middle East, we've covered a wide variety of topics.

All of that has been enjoyable and, I hope, useful. But, by far, the best thing about blogging is the opportunity to form friendships with other bloggers and readers from around the world. I've met a few of my new cyber friends, and in the weeks and months ahead, when I'm settled in Washington, I'll have the opportunity to meet many more. I have nothing new to say about the blogosphere's growing influence -- several of us have crowed about that time and again over the past many months. I'll add only that the warmth with which we've been received by so many other denizens of this new community has been extraordinary, and I hope we've reciprocated at least some of those many kindnesses in our own work.

Look for (or run from, if that's your preference) my work in future issues of The American Enterprise and other outlets, including newspapers, later this fall. Thank you for your loyalty and help over these past 18 months. Keep them cards and letters coming in.

And don't forget to return to Democracy Project often for new posts and new bloggers!

Any newsjunkie worth his or her salt will blow a fuse occasionally with a newspaper’s reporting. However, like avid baseball fans, we don’t really mean it when we shout, “kill the umpire.” Sometimes it’s just a bad call; baseball happens, so to speak. Sometimes, so to speak, journalism happens. Sometimes, it's not journalism but something else, as the contrast at the bottom displays.

Yesterday, I wrote the following letter to a senior editor at my hometown newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune.

“When Mr. Silverman, AP's managing editor, announced [to improve reporting on Iraq]that Robert Reid would be writing "an overview every 10 days," (NYT's 8/15) I expected more depth than this piece [regarding the difficulties in drafting the Iraqi constitution and the delay, that appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune August 17]. -- (I also expected more accuracy, as there are several errors of fact or omission that result in a failure to provide a full overview of the issues. But, that is not the reason I'm writing.)

“Curious, I checked the AP wire, and found that -- as often the case for understandable space limitations, or editing -- the full AP analysis was not in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

“However, the truncation of the final sentence in the U-T presentation, and the omission of the AP wire's last sentence, result in a very different net balance in the analysis:
“1. The U-T ended "But here, missing deadlines is nothing new." The AP wire read, "But here, missing deadlines is nothing new, and chances are the Iraqis will meet the new deadline and produce a draft by next Monday."

“2. The AP wire ended: "Think of Iraq right now as at the point of the original U.S. Constitution -- drafted in 1787 -- and whether that document, in that form, settled once and for all the question of American slavery."

“Questions: A) Is the above due to using the short version of the AP wire? B) Could the U-T have edited the long version of the AP wire to be more representative of the "analysis" and more balanced informing the reader?

“Thank you,

“Bruce Kesler

Last night I received the following reply, thorough, candid and satisfying all I asked:

“Dear Bruce Kesler:

“Thanks for your interest. As you appear to be aware, we and in general all newspapers rarely are able to run entire AP articles or articles from other wire services. On A2, when we have room for a third story, it normally squares off with the ad, and then the remaining space must be divided between two stories. The analysis was far too long for the space we had. And, unfortunately, when the story I had edited for the space allotted for it was placed on the page in the composing room, it turned out to be a little long. As a result, the clause "and chances are the Iraqis will meet the new deadline and produce a draft by next Monday" apparently got lopped off, to my and your chagrin, by an editor in the composing room after I had gone home for the day (or night, as the case may be). I personally would have cut "Bombs and bullets kill dozens across the country every day" from an earlier paragraph instead. In fact, the story as sent over had the next sentence in the last paragraph we ran, but that was trimmed, too. In defense of editors in the composing room, they often are dealing with various mini-crises on deadline such as where is the picture for this page, fixing a misspelled headline, trimming other stories, making sure the index is right, etc., and don't have the luxury of reading the story from beginning to end to find the perfect trim. I sure hope that one day we will be able to edit the entire paper on the computer so we don't have to trim stories on deadline in the composing room.

“I think the ending that got trimmed off would have been a good ending and a better one than we had, and better reflected the story. However, the story does point out, most notably in the third paragraph, that Iraq has missed deadlines before and then compromised, and the ending does not contradict that.

“When I was a journalist in Virginia, someone who worked for the Richmond Times-Dispatch who had participated in D-Day was quoted as saying something along the lines of "Putting together a newspaper is a lot like it was on D-Day -- organized confusion." This is not to say that we are confused people or that Eisenhower and Co. were confused in putting together the invasion -- you have a plan, but everything does not always come together as planned. Fortunately, we are not being killed or killing people but only writing about such events. But we do try hard each day to put together the best snapshot we can of what is happening. Yes, sometimes a paragraph gets trimmed out late at night because an ad was a little shorter, or a little bigger, or because a copy editor decided to add in some "thats" that made a story longer. (I once had a very tightly crafted column become three lines too long because a copy editor added in three unnecessary "thats".)

Sincerely,

David Gaddis Smith
Foreign Editor

I replied to Mr. Smith:

“Mr. Smith:
“THANK YOU for a very thorough, thoughtful and, most importantly, informative and satisfying reply.” Then I asked his permission to reprint his letter. Today he agreed.

By contrast to the above, to me, model of constructive discussion and learning about the practicalities of journalism, here’s an instance in which the new New York Times’ ombudsman, a respected veteran journalist, admits its readers “were poorly served by the paper’s slowness to cover official investigations into questionable financial transactions involving Air America, the liberal radio network….While it’s no excuse for such a belated response to the brewing scandal, it’s true that pieces of the unfolding story fell into the domains of three different parts of the newsroom…There was, my inquiries suggest, a lack of coordination and awareness of what the paper’s competitors across town [the New York Sun’s reporting]were writing.”

“Captain” Ed challenges some of the ombudsman’s statements, most tellingly the New York Times’ 62 stories “almost all of them positive public-relations stories about the start-up and the personalities involved in Air America and its programming. Obviously, the news desk had no issues pulling together across the beats to produce those stories, and yet when it came to looking at a scandal involving a corporation dedicated to broadcasting a liberal message, the Times suddenly became The Gang That Couldn’t E-Mail Straight? That explanation beggars belief.”

That’s why I prefer my imperfect but pretty honest newspaper, as most are, which tries to get it right, versus those newspapers that have consistent bias and, then, spit in my face and try to tell me it’s raining.

August 13, I posted at this site “The truth about supporting our troops.” The subtitle to today’s post, “The Washington Weenie”, could be “The REAL truth about supporting our troops.”

My earlier piece linked to the www.AmericaSupportsYou.mil site, for the September 11, 2005 Freedom March in Washington, D.C. honoring the victims of 9/11, America’s military, and to celebrate freedom. The Washington Post signed on to support the march through free public service announcements, rejecting criticism from the left by saying, “Our interest in the event is consistent with our past support of causes related to victims of September 11 and the veterans of wars past and present.”

Yesterday, the Washington Post withdrew its support for the Freedom March. Its Newspaper Guild union leaders(the same whose union president Linda Foley slandered America and its troops in Iraq of targeting journalists, then refused to back up her charge or to withdraw it), echoing the far-left opposition, attacked their employer for backing a “political event.” The Washington Post caved, with a circular excuse that in effect says it doesn’t want to offend those on the left who see the Freedom March as a “political event”, saying, “it appears that this event could become politicized.”

So, celebrating the United States’ mission in Iraq, its troops in harms way, the celebration of freedom, is a “political event”!? In what country’s capital does the Washington Post reside? Much of America’s academic, media and political elites seem to have forgotten where they live, and the benefits thereof, as they focus on finding every reason possible to undermine America and to support our sworn enemies. To their perspective, supporting America and Americans in war is a mere "political event" with a worthy opposing party they, directly or by opposing America indirectly, support.

Contrast Hollywood’s eminence Frank Capra in World War II to today’s Hollywood and Congressional Democrat darling Michael Moore. “The care taken by our people to avoid crude caricatures of the enemy’s culture is worthy of praise. It sets this war apart from World War II – ironically, the ‘Good War’ – when even Dr. Seuss got into the Jap-bashing act. But how sad that we’ve turned instead to making crude caricatures bashing ourselves.”

A friend recently sent me the words on the message from President Roosevelt that has hung on their wall since her husband’s two brothers were killed during the Normandy invasion. One, George King, was an MP who asked for infantry duty. His brother, Harold King, was 4F but had an operation so that he could serve. President Roosevelt wrote to the grieving family: “He stands in the unbroken line of patriots who have dared to die so that freedom could live and grow and increase its blessings. Freedom lives and through it he lives – in a way that humbles the undertakings of most men.” And, certainly of those WP Washington Weenies.

If Arthur Chrenkoff is leaving the blogosphere, we're fortunate that he hasn't quit just yet. This morning, he's posted Part 33 in his Good News from Iraq series. With news that Iraq's leaders have postponed the adoption of a new constitution, it's particularly important to remember that putting off that act by a week -- or even a bit longer -- is hardly the sign of failure that MSM are portraying it as. Today's Washington Post's headline uses the "F" word -- "Iraq Fails to Meet Constitution Deadline." The print edition of the NYT carries the sub-header, "Vast Differences Remain" and opens with these words:

"Still deadlocked after days of negotiations, Iraq's leaders decided Monday to give themselves another week to agree on the new constitution and resolve a series of fundamental disagreements over the future and identity of this fractious land."

The opening paragraph in the online edition is overtly pessimistic:

The Iraqi political process descended toward paralysis on Monday, when leaders failed to meet the deadline for completing the new constitution and voted to give themselves another week to resolve fundamental disagreements over the future and identity of this fractious land.

How about an assessment of these august papers' work that begins:

The elite American media, safely ensconced in their HQ and oblivious both to their own nation's fractious Constitutional Convention and the remarkable progress made by Iraqis in creating in their eviscerated, dictator-ruined land the beginnings of a civil society . . . .

Read Arthur, as always, for a more informed, sophisticated, and -- the liberals' favorite word this time last year -- nuanced picture of life on the ground in Iraq. That's not to say Iraqis aren't having problems, or that we can stand by idly if radical fringes try to enforce harsh Islamic law. And using our influence, including troop withdrawal timetables, to move the Iraqis along is also valid, lest our relationship with them descend into something of a welfare state-client status.

But it is to recognize that our liberal elites will never admit any progress in Iraq and will hold Iraqis to standards that they could never meet under similar circumstances. Carving a more liberal society under the rule of law from the ruins of Saddam's dictatorship is not simply a worthy goal: it's the only acceptable outcome of the war. As that process advances, haltingly but surely, we owe it to our troops, and to the Iraqis, to ignore the shrill partisans among us. A good way to do that today is to read Arthur's latest post.

In clear contravention of the Bush Administration’s public pronouncements that human rights are the pillar of democratic freedom, the Justice Department in an asylum case before the Fifth Circuit titled Xiaodong Li v. Gonzalez, made the remarkable argument that being punished by the People’s “Republic” of China for “religious activities” is different than being punished for one’s religion.

Such a position reflects the fundamental misunderstanding by the Government of what religion really is – it’s a belief system, accompanied by practices which can include hosting underground meetings where “the group studied the Bible and exchanged religious materials,” even if the persons engaged in such activities are not “characteristically” religious by wearing yamikas or veils.

Unfortunately though this is the rationale that the Fifth Circuit used to ship a man back to China to almost certain persecution, if not death, unless the Supreme Court overturns the decision. The Circuit Court Judge Carl Stewart writes:

The Supreme Court has held that persecution is “on account of” one of the protected grounds if the persecutor’s motivation to harm the victim is on account of the victim’s possession of the characteristic at issue.

The court uses the persecution of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis
as the type of “characteristic” at issue (talk about raising the bar):

The Court stated, as an example, that the Nazi regime’s persecution of Jews was not persecution on account of political opinion. Id. While, the Nazis’ persecution was part of the pursuit of their political goals, the Nazis were not motivated by a desire to overcome a political opinion held by Jews; therefore, the persecution was not “on account of” political opinion. Likewise, the Court stated that “if a fundamentalist Moslem regime persecutes democrats, it is not engaging in persecution on account of religion.” Id. The federal courts and the BIA have also recognized that an alien may demonstrate that a persecutor’s actions were on account of a protected characteristic even if a persecutor had mixed motivations; a persecutor does not have to be motivated solely by the victim’s possession of a protected characteristic. Girma v. INS , 283 F.3d 664, 667-68 (5th Cir. 2002) (holding that the alien need not prove that the persecutor was motivated by a protected ground to the exclusion of all other motivations).

Which gets us back to the age old question: Are Jews a race or a group of religious believers? My old boss at Hudson Institute, Michael Horowitz, took issue with Jews for Jesus precisely because they believed being a Jew was akin to an ethnic group. Mike argues, and I believe righly, that once an individual embraces the fact that Jesus Christ is their Lord and Savior, they are no longer Jewish, but now Christian.

Mike’s position avoids the inevitable and I believe quite reprehensible position of the Bush Administration that in order to be a “persecuted” believer one must have an inherent characteristic, like skin type or ethnic heritage, indicating one’s religious beliefs. This is precisely the reason why conservatives like me are opposed to affirmative action and its ethnic stereotyping.

If this line of reasoning isn’t absurd enough, the Justice Department’s lawyers also argue that Mr. Li’s assertions of persecution are unfounded because:

…China does not prohibit registered religions. Instead, the government contends that China’s motivation for its law that prohibits unregistered churches is tied to its desire to control religion in order to maintain social order, not a desire to persecute based on religious beliefs. The government asserts that there is not sufficient evidence in the record to compel the finding that Li’s criminal prosecution amounts to persecution on account of his religion.

But the Government is willing to stipulate to the following:

The group continued to have meetings, and the police returned in April 1995, at which time they found religious materials in Li’s home. The police advised Li that he was holding an illegal gathering, and Li responded that the Constitution gave him the freedom to practice a religion. The police arrested Li for being a reactionary. He was the only participant arrested because he was recognized as the organizer of the gathering at his home. Li was handcuffed and taken to the police station, where he was placed in a room and told to kneel. When he refused, the police beat him, kicking his leg in the back, hitting him in the head, and pulling his hair, forcing him to kneel. The police interrogated Li, seeking his admission that he was involved in an illegal gathering and had conducted an underground church, but Li refused to plead guilty. Li stated that there were two policemen in the room and one was holding a police bar, which he used to hit Li if the officer did not like Li’s responses to the questions.

After two hours of questioning, Li signed a written confession, acknowledging that he was pleading guilty to conducting an illegal gathering against the government and organizing an underground church. Li was detained with a number of other prisoners under abusive conditions for five days, until he was bailed out by his uncle. Li lost his job and the police forced him to work in the streets cleaning public toilets, without pay. He continued doing this work until he left the country.

Hasn’t Mr. Li been through enough? Isn’t he exactly the type of person with whom President Bush promised we would defend in his second inaugural address? And tell the Falun Gong and the Dalai Lama that China does not persecute based on religion. This position is a joke. Let’s remember Mr. Bush’s inspiring words in that remarkable speech:

America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies. We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people. America's belief in human dignity will guide our policies. Yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators. They are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty.

Perhaps the White House needs to send a copy of this speech to every United States Attorney to remind them that our nation stands firmly on the side of freedom? May God watch over Mr. Li.

Many of us gnash our teeth at various aspects of reporting or of particular articles as we pick up our daily newspaper. Outside of a very few large metropolitan newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, almost all newspapers rely upon news wire services for reporting outside their geographic area. The New York Times’ and Washington Post’s wire services are most often used by U.S. newspapers after the Associated Press. The AP’s 3,700 employees staff 242 worldwide bureaus to serve 1,700 U.S. newspapers and 5,000 radio and TV outlets, plus another 8,500 international subscribers in 121 countries.

Thus, what we’re often gnashing our teeth about is an article from the Associated Press. My molars are often sore.

Few subjects arouse the public more than war reporting. It’s difficult in any war. In Iraq it has been particularly difficult, as security conditions for journalists to travel about have led almost all there to restrict their purview to what they can see from their Green Zone hotel window and what they tell each other.

According to Mike Silverman, managing editor of the Associated Press, the New York Times reports today, at its July meeting of editors whose newspapers are members of Associated Press, “Some editors expressed concern that a kind of bunker mentality was preventing reporters in Iraq from getting out and explaining the bigger picture beyond the death tolls.” The AP’s Silverman announced that one of its reporters would start to “write an overview every 10 days,” and “the wire service would make more effort to flag articles that look beyond the breaking news.” The AP does not just disseminate its own articles, but sometimes sends out articles generated by its member newspapers.

This is good news, welcome in itself although years late in coming, that a major news organization will increase its efforts to get out more news about what’s happening in Iraq. Too much of what comes out of Iraq reporting now is a recap of the U.S. death toll from Centcom press releases, without context, or various Iraqi public figures in Baghdad speaking about the political evolution in Iraq. At least my morning newspaper had on page 2 an AP report about the “Sadr City Success” in pacification of Baghdad’s former den of insurgent iniquity.

What is less encouraging is that, according to the AP’s Silverman there were 700 embedded journalists in Iraq during the start of the war but just about three-dozen now. The shrinking readership of America’s leading newspapers affects the economics of maintaining reporters overseas. Yet, hundreds turn out for a celebrity’s trial, or for a dead soldier’s mother who has become a political extremist. Surely our leading media can spare a few more dollars for reporting on this war that will shape the future of the MidEast and have lasting repercussions on American foreign policy.

The leading media might have noticed that there are hundreds of bloggers among the U.S. Military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there are many knowledgeable natives of those countries with blogs. And, most are easily linkable to read from here, even from a hotel bar in Baghdad, in order to broaden coverage of what’s really happening. Further, there are freelance journalists who do roam outside the Green Zone, like Michael Yon, who could be tapped for articles.

As Peter Braestrup, former Saigon and Washington Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, wrote in his definitive 1977 published study of Vietnam reporting (Big Story), concentrating on the misimpressions conveyed about Tet ’68, there was a “prevailing accent on the negative, or on disagreement – however partisan, irrelevant, or uninformed – with the government.” Even as more accurate information emerged about the communists’ actual setback, there was a “persistent negative trend in the newspapers’ domestic reporting and commentary about Vietnam, which did not moderate.”

Peter Braestrup does not focus on overt media bias so much as its “mindset, from poor self-discipline by commentators in Washington and newsmen in Vietnam, from short attention span, from the traditional search for ‘drama.’ “

Thirty +-million Indochinese suffered during the war and after, and the severe weakening of both American will and respect for it by our adversaries contributed to additional deaths in the communist challenges elsewhere in the world post-1975. One might reasonably expect our leading media to have learned that quality reporting is a greater prize for Americans than Michael Jackson’s jury judgment, that many American and foreign lives depend upon it, and that the fate of entire regions of the world may well hang in the balance.

Imagine how thrilled I was that our crack Transportation Security Agency bureaucrats have decided to reform our nation’s highly-touted, but grotesquely complex security system that has been criticized as horrifically expensive, drastically hampered by rampant political correctness, and designed to thwart yesterday’s threat. Now that’s good news, I thought.

No longer will young, brown-skinned, Central Asian and Middle Eastern men be able to slide through the system while elderly Northern European women have their brassieres frisked. Gone will be the mindless system of “random inspections” triggered by an irascible computer that pulls out families with small children to shake down their carry-on baby seats. At last our tax dollars will focus on the identifiable human threat: Islamic men, especially those with close-cropped hair, doused with flower water, and mouthing Koranic verses.

From the very beginning the very intent of the security system – to stop airline hijackings and suicide bombing before they take place - has been fatally impeded by a lethal dose of political correctness force-fed from DoT leadership. Transportation Secretary Norman Minetta, put in place in a first-term Bush administration with the purpose of scoring a political two-fer (Democrat and Asian-American appointee), has been draconian in forbidding any kind of profiling, whether based on ethnicity, race, nationality, or proclivity to commit terrorism.

The genesis for Minetta’s obsession supposedly is that he spent time in the Manzanar detention camp as a young Japanese-American in the early WW II days when the country feared – as we have later discovered with some justification – that Japanese spies and enemy agents were hiding in their community. Could it have been handled better? Probably, since most things given the opportunity of hindsight could be improved. Has the country apologized? Profusely. So is the national mistake of 1942 sufficient justification to commit an even greater error in 2005? I don’t think so.

If it makes the troubled Secretary feel better perhaps we could recast the terms of inspection. Instead of dreaded, un-PC racial or ethnic profiling we could call it “potential terrorist profiling” that includes carrying weapons, mumbling of Islamic prayers, big coats, and some Arab-like features as part of the package. But it is not likely that Minetta would buy it. When asked on national television if a group of Muslim men were seen prior to boarding a flight praying profusely on rugs near the gate area, dousing themselves in a ritual cleansing manner, and writing notes that they left behind, deserved a second look, or a serious inspection, Minetta answered, “No, why should they?” Such an obtuse PC pinhead deserves the sack but it is unlikely that the President who seems reluctant to dismiss staff, will hand it to him. So, Granny, get ready for that full body search. That way the Secretary can sleep better at night even though we’re no safer.

What other reform would be welcome? Perhaps a greater focus on bombs. By a single act – pilots securing the cockpit door and refusing to open it under any circumstances – the modus operandi of the 9/11 hijackers has been permanently thwarted. Could hijackers still smuggle weapons aboard, kill scores of passengers, and commit mayhem? Yes, but they would be unable to steal the aircraft and convert it to a missile unless they could crash through barred steel doors, an unlikely scenario. On the other hand a bomb – particularly if detonated when the aircraft is over a densely populated area such as LAX, O’Hare, LaGuardia, JFK or scores of others, could be a WMD of sorts.

But imagine my excitement when TSA did not announce any of the above suggestions but said – hold your hats! – that I might be able to keep my shoes on during inspection. That was a biggie. Then came the announcement that we could carry “throwing disks and bows and arrows” on board the flight. Oh, the unbounded joy of sharing your seating row with the nutball who brings throwing disks and bows and arrows on board.

Or perhaps the good Secretary was simply assuring us that neither Ninja warriors nor Ted Nugent would be discriminated against at airports ever again? It would be so like him to care.