Times must be a bit stressful these days for Hillary Clinton, as she's faced with the nuisance of gaining reelection in New York next year while biding her time for a presidential run in 2008. Yesterday she defended her pro-war vote in the attempt to maximize her standing with "moderates," while at the same time doing the best she could to position herself for a retreat from her position if necessary.

"I take responsibility for my vote, and I, along with a majority of Americans, expect the president and his administration to take responsibility for the false assurances, faulty evidence and mismanagement of the war," the New York senator said in a lengthy letter to thousands of people who have written her about the war.

At the same time, she said the United States must "finish what it started" in Iraq.

Same old tired rhetoric. How many times can we rehash the fact that Democrats made the exact same claims about Saddam while her husband was cavorting around the Oval Office? And I particularly like the part where she blames Bush for "mismanagement of the war." What mismanagement, exactly, Senator? Are mistakes not made in war? Or is it simply convenient to pretend we could fight one without making any?

This is the kind of stuff that doesn't sit well with the majority of Americans. Criticize if you will, but you'd better share some specific examples. And does Hillary - or anyone - truly believe the president actually manages this war? Any war? While he is the ultimate arbiter of significant decisions, the everyday management of any war is conducted by generals and commanding officers on the ground - who, by almost all accounts, are exhibiting unbelievable skills and making unparalleled strides under unforgiving circumstances. To take a swipe at the president about his management of the war is to directly insult those actually fighting it. I'd love to see her try to weasel her way out of that comment, but of course we all know the media would never press her on something like that.

Here's more:

The debate has also put Clinton in a tight spot: generally viewed as pro-military, the former first lady is the most-watched member of a party that is increasingly turning against the war.

In her letter to voters, the senator cited prewar assurances from the White House that the United States would use the United Nations to resolve the issue of Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction.

"Based on the information that we have today, Congress never would have been asked to give the president authority to use force against Iraq," she said. Clinton stopped short of saying her vote was a mistake, the political path chosen by two other potential Democratic candidates former vice presidential candidate John Edwards and Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.

Generally viewed as pro-military? Few people are more contemptuous of the military than Bill and Hillary Clinton. It's much more accurate to say that Hillary's generally viewed as someone who will cast a vote depending on the direction the political winds are blowing.

And might we remind the good senator that mere mortals do not typically possess clairvoyance. The primary reason we finally do have the information we have today is because we invaded.

The most pathetic thing of all about the Democrats' incessant carping and undermining of the war effort is that I actually think Al Gore would have done the exact same thing Bush has done had he been elected in 2000. Such statements make me feel like I need to run for the shower, but it's worthwhile to point out that the majority of information collected on Saddam was done while a Democrat was in the White House. And as we know, there was no shortage of tough talk from leading Dems back in the late nineties. Considering that the only wars Democrats are willing to fight are those for humanitarian reasons, it's almost laughable to suggest that a Gore administration wouldn't have used 9/11 as an excuse to run to the rescue of the Iraqis.

So perhaps that's the rub. Republicans have actually acted on all the baseless threats Democrats made for years. It's probably a little humiliating when people find out you never had a big stick to go along with all that tough talk.

Cindy Sheehan will be speaking tonight at the State University of New York Campus at Oneonta.

ONEONTA — The State University College at Oneonta has booked a Fox News Channel military analyst to counter a lecture tonight by anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan.

Lt. Col. Scott Rutter, who retired from the Army in November 2003 after leading a mechanized infantry battalion into Baghdad, will give a presentation sponsored by the student-run College Union Activities Council at noon Friday in the Hunt Union Square.

The College Union Activities Council, which has an annual budget of $37,500 this year, will pay Sheehan almost one-third of its entire coffer - $11,000 - to spew her anti-war venom on campus, while Lt. Col. Rutter will only be paid $600.

Campus coordinators insist Rutter is being paid what he asked for, but this huge disparity is hardly the best part of the story:

Sheehan’s lecture will be given in the Hunt Union Ballroom, which has a capacity of 800 people. Rutter will give his presentation in the 75-person capacity Hunt Union Square.

So this is Oneonta's idea of political "balance": The university is willing to dish out taxpayer-subsidized stipends at an almost 20:1 ratio to attract leftist anti-war speakers, and even when it's willing to invite someone with opposing viewpoints, he's allowed to speak to one-tenth the audience.

I sure hope New York taxpayers are paying attention.

Legacy journalism is caught up in a trap of its own making: trying to write contemporary alternative history fantasy.

A fascinating scholarly endeavor is the “what if?” of alternative history writing. What if the South had won the Civil War? What if Japan had not bombed Pearl Harbor? What if Hitler had not invaded Russia?

When well informed by seasoned research into the actions and causes of turning points, and then by deep knowledge of the social and political terrain of the contenders, the different outcomes appear plausible, and sometimes scary.

The writing of alternative history entertains while stimulating deeper consideration and appreciation about much that, in retrospect at least, we take for granted.

Sometimes there were real choices that might have actually been made, that may have spun a much different present.

Alternatively, alternative histories can founder into fantasy when deep trends are slighted, these having created overwhelming momentum from which there was no turning away, or where determined or divided leaders arising through the process of those trends are personally immovable, or where the writer is imposing speculation or bias upon the facts that are well documented.

Contemporary journalists engage in the tough task of reporting what is now occurring, and the reasons why. Inevitably, they must select what’s germane and verifiable. Their reports are both an influence upon the present unfolding of events, as well as a source for future historians to – perhaps with the benefit of retrospective scholarship and dispassion – track what happened in the past.

When journalists do not hold to established standards to ensure reasonable credibility – factuality and relevance -- their product is rightfully subject to criticism. Errors happen.

When crucial trends or interpretations are ignored or downplayed, even in the face of confirming events, or contradictory evidence, the journalist’s product is rightfully subject to ridicule as unprofessional.

When these journalistic failures are repeated, form a pattern, their product is not reporting but a prejudiced abuse of journalism, and of the public’s right to know, which directly undermines and attacks a central foundation of democracy. Such is professional propaganda.

Journalists’ fault may be excused at times by deadline pressure cutting short full inquiry, or by the subjects of their reports being mealy mouthed. But, when the product is time and again shoddy, these reasons become excuses for laziness or camouflage for bias.

A generation ago, during the heated debates over Vietnam, newspapers and networks reflected on their mission to inform. Newspapers launched op-ed pages and networks launched debate programs to broaden the range of viewpoints. Newspapers, also, hired ombudsmen to, from within, press for higher journalistic standards.

Both have had some success. A broader range of viewpoints is presented via op-eds and talk-argument shows, although some papers and networks cast too narrow a net. Occasionally an ombudsman reveals, and management agrees to correct, errors in reporting. More often ombudsmen act as lackeys who proffer thin excuses for their fellows, or who avoid their primary responsibility by either selecting some strawhorse reader’s letter to launch into the ombudsman’s own screed or use their column space to write opinions on subjects unrelated to journalism.

The issues of partial journalism – partially factual, partially unprofessional or biased – continue. Indeed, they seem to have increased over the past generation.

Several reasons have been put forth, and somewhat documented by data and by insider and analysts’ exposures. The proportion has increased dramatically of mainstream journalists sharing a common worldview and politics that is more left-of-center than the public. This is inevitably reflected in shared selection of foci and attitudes that inadequately treats alternatives. At the same time, the number of field and foreign journalists and bureaus has decreased markedly. This reduces the pool of diversity and of frontline informed reporting that factually challenges incestuously poorly researched and slanted opinions masquerading as reporting.

In effect, much, too much, of mainstream journalism is engaged in writing alternative history, and much of that so strays from careful knowledge and analysis as to be fatally fantastical.

The primary current example involves Iraq. For months, the leading media frontpaged and repeated every current, politically exploitive charge from leading Democrats that they had been deceived over the decision for the United States to go into Iraq. It was not until the administration forced focus upon these very same Democrats’ stentorian speeches in the ‘90’s through 2003, and their access to the same intelligence reports as the administration, that more factual reporting occurred. And, even then, the counter was characterized as an attack rather than a belated, necessary corrective response, in order to demean the administration.

Every frontpage for months highlighted the president’s relatively low “approval” rating as evidence that Americans reject our Iraq involvement, not mentioning that as many administration critics were unhappy with excess spending or with inadequate response to the Democrat jeremiads. Page 4 of the Washington Post, on November 27,
reported a poll (also reported at Townhall, with some more detail) from a respected bipartisan source that 70% said Democrat criticism of the war hurts troop morale. Only 30% believe the Democrats’ are doing so to help U.S. efforts in Iraq; 52% see it as “trying to gain partisan advantage.” Only 16% “support immediate withdrawal, regardless of the circumstances.” The public sees through the transparency of Democrat and legacy media alternative history fantasies.

The Los Angeles Times’ lead political reporter, Ron Brownstein, without blushing, similar to so many others of his ilk, doesn’t even bother to fact-check former Senate Democrat leader Tom Daschle’s echo of John Kerry’s infamous vivid memory imagination of being in Cambodia. “Tom Daschle…remembers the exchange vividly,” that he asked President Bush on September 18 to delay the Iraq war authorizing vote in September 2002 “so we could depoliticize it.” RealClearPolitics blog went to Google to fact-check this “dirty revisionism.” Indeed, on September 17, before meeting the president, Daschle said the opposite, Democrats wanting the vote then to get it out of the way before the 2002 election that they opposed forceful measures to deal with the international threat brought home to voters by 9/11.

The Associated Press two days ago called “Iraq a Tricky Issue for Dems Eyeing 2008.” “Any position they take is a gamble given the uncertain terrain in Iraq and the United States in three years.” Politically exploitive considerations trump war-making will, the ultimate determinant of success, not to mention trumping the fate of freedom for tens of millions in the MidEast or the national security of the United States.

Lorie Byrd gets to the heart of the matter: “[T]he actions of the Democrats over the past three years have exposed them as incapable of governing in today’s world of global Islamic terrorism.” One might add that the actions of the mainstream media over the past three years have exposed them as incapable of practicing journalism in today’s world of global dangers.

The repeated theme of an intransigent enemy, so all is fruitless, is belied by insurgents wanting to negotiate. And, on and on, across almost any theme pressed by the leading frontpages and networks.

The primary fatality of the leading media’s alternative fantasy history is seen in the rapid erosion of readership and viewership of legacy mainstream newspapers and TV networks, as the customers of information seek alternatives. This reduction in common venues for civic discussion is harmful to civil democracy and discourse, as more readers and viewers become ensconced in highly partisan cul de sacs.

The primary beneficiary is the internet blogs, presenting broader ranges of professional research and informed views – among the many that aren’t. Experienced, honest reporters have learned how to quickly reference the internet to fact-check and gain added perspective. Those who continue to believe they can get away with slip-shod work, or with partial reporting, or outright slants, are quickly revealed by the internet ombudsmen.

New aggregators of internet news and information are emerging to cull the huge internet flows, largely through the peer review that usually works so well in science. New opportunities to collect contemporary reporting by topic are emerging to ease fact-checking and test partiality of self-serving memory. Attrition by confrontation with this public ombudsman calls to task those in journalism who believe they can escape or ignore standards, and aids the conscientious to better serve their craft and customers.

Thus, the future of quality journalism is rosier than one might expect from hearing those bemoaners who fear losing their comfy sinecures and fringes, or from hearing the roars of furious advocates or partisans.

There will always be a need and a market for mass venues of information, and an efficiency and an effectiveness of scale and resources that only mass venues can achieve.

It may well be smaller than in the past, and less remunerative, but that is the creative destruction faced by all industries, and a process that none can escape behind protective walls.

Mainstream journalism is facing the same process faced by our heavy industries. More, higher quality steel is being produced in America, with far fewer workers and plants, but more competitors, than decades ago. More, higher quality autos are being produced in America, with far fewer workers and plants, but more competitors, than decades ago. In all cases, there is far less pollution, and the inflation adjusted prices are considerably less.

Few in 1960 could accurately chart these developments in heavy industry. Few in 2005 could accurately chart the development of mass journalism. At least not if one focuses on what exists.

One must focus on what the customers expect and demand: quality and reasonable accessibility. Any new media contender will have to offer, and will be measured by, better responses. Politicians will increasingly be measured by and held to account for their veracity. Democracy and America can only benefit. History will judge alternative history fantasies harshly.

Via CNNMoney:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Federal Communications Commission is expected to suggest that cable companies could best serve their customers by allowing them to subscribe to individual channels instead of packages of several stations, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The newspaper said that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is expected to announce Tuesday that the commission will soon revise the conclusion it reached in the report it issued last year on "a la carte" pricing in the cable industry.

Citing an FCC official familiar with the revised report, the Journal said the report will conclude that buying individual channels could be cheaper for consumers than bundles and that themed tiers of channels could be economically feasible.

I get a queasy feeling in my stomach every time the government "suggests" the "best" ways for private individuals and companies to conduct their own business. That's usually because such "suggestions" mysteriously transform into official policy via government coercion.

Here's a novel concept: Perhaps cable companies actually know better than a federal agency what their own customers prefer. What business is it of the FCC to determine the costs of cable television service? If it were cost-effective for, say, Comcast to allow customers to pay only for the stations they're interested in watching, it would already be company policy. Government interference through regulation will only result in higher cost of service and deteriorated service.

I have a suggestion: How about the federal government allow the American taxpayer to selectively pay - you know, "a la carte" - only for those government agencies we're really interested in having around?

Debunked.

[HT: Ed Lasky.]

Appearing before New York's Asia Society yesterday, Virginia governor Mark Warner said that the U.S. needs to focus on winning the war in Iraq, not on setting a firm withdrawal date.

"This Democrat doesn't think we need to re-fight how we got into (the Iraq war). I think we need to focus more on how to finish it," Warner said.

"To set an arbitrary deadline or specific date is not appropriate," he said. "... It is incumbent on the president to set milestones for what he believes will be the conclusion."

I believe the president and the military have been setting milestones for ultimate victory since the war began. And I'm inclined to take Warner at his word, but the nature of politics dictates that the Virginia governor, who's interested in a presidential run in 2008, is now virtually forced to take the position he has considering the recent House vote that overwhelmingly rejected an immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

American traitor Ramsey Clark returns to Baghdad to defend Saddam Hussein.

BAGHDAD -- Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. Attorney General and antiwar activist, arrived here yesterday and was expected to try to show up at the reopening of Saddam Hussein's trial in Baghdad today, but a U.S. government official warned that he was not officially registered with the court.

[...]

Mr. Clark, who has defended former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, has advised the defense team and questioned the impartiality of the court, set up while Iraq was under U.S. control.

"Our plan is to go to court in Baghdad on Monday morning representing the defense counsel as defense support. A fair trial in this case is absolutely imperative for historical truth to justice obviously," Mr. Clark told Reuters news agency in Amman.

"Fair trial" concerns, my patoot. Wherever the United States chases its enemies, from North Vietnam to the sands of Iraq, you can be sure to find Ramsey Clark rushing to defend them.

Heh.

[HT: Lorie Byrd.]

Too good to resist department………

The London Telegraph [HT: American Future] reports today that, “Jacques Chirac's presidency hit a new low yesterday when a poll revealed that most voters think he now has little or no influence over events at home or abroad.” Seventy-two percent consider his influence over what happens in France as “weak,” 67% consider his clout on the world stage “feeble,” 64% consider his influence on Europe not significant, with his party members only slightly less negative.

The director of the CSA institute, which conducted the poll, commented: "Unless some spectacular event occurs, the 17 remaining months of his mandate are likely to be very tricky."

Chirac responded with his characteristic strategy, developed through the oil-for-bribes venture: sell out.

The inimitable Iowahawk has the exclusive: “Sears/Kmart Acquires France.” Excerpts:

[T]he acquisition of embattled European cheesemaker France (NASDAQ: FROG)….will position Sears/Kmart/France as the world's third largest retailer and 15th ranked military power…."Attention Kmart shoppers! The glory of France, she is born anew," crowed France CEO Jacques Chirac, who will continue as head of the corporation's Northeast regional merchandising division…. Under terms of the deal, Sears and Kmart will operate separately each with a distinctive brand identity. France will be given dedicated floorspace within each retailer, near housewares, complete with its own airspace, currency, language rights, and pay toilets. "Like Martha Stewart or Jacklyn Smith intimate apparel, we believe France will be a valuable brand for attracting and retaining new customers to Kmart," said Kmart spokeswoman Jill Carpenter. "Our research shows that retail consumers are increasingly seeking convenience, value, and obnoxious shitty-smelling sales clerks."… Founded in 1107, France was once a marketing powerhouse in Europe, commanding a 27% share of the continent as recently as 1775. However, a series of strategic miscues have sent the once-thriving cheesemaker into a steep two-century decline…. Many analysts remain skeptical whether the three way deal between Sears, Kmart and France will yield any short-term benefits to investors. "Frankly, I'm worried that France has some serious productivity issues," said Kaplan. "They could probably address these with a round of layoffs, but we don't have any evidence that anyone actually works there."… Whatever strategic moves may be in the future, Dennis Beezley of Glenn Rauch Securities says that he expects the corporate transition to be smooth. "If you look at their history, one thing is certain," he said. "France is used to hostile takeovers."

This is disgusting.[HT: Michelle Malkin.]

Further proof that accusations that President Bush has "spurred the spread of terrorism" are just plain stupid. To believe such nonsense one would have to admit that murdering innocent men, women, and children is justified no matter what. If terrorists would murder innocent Iraqis with the U.S. in town, they'd murder them even if we weren't.

Unbeknownst to Midge Decter, until last year, although having children of her own to raise, she has been my spiritual mother since I was 20. Midge Decter’s writings, on the nexus of culture and politics, the guide of the values we have at home to those we practice in the world, are rooted in the life experiences and concerns of a Jewish mother for the survival and success of her family. America is Midge Decter’s extended family.

As I was completing college, I was moved by what Midge Decter -- then editor of Harper’s Magazine -- wrote there in April 1968:

“Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studied contemplation but an action, even if only an inner action. Their acquisition obligates a man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. They dictate where a man must concentrate his vision. They determine his moral and intellectual priorities. They provide him with allies and make him enemies. In short, ideas impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable.”

Instead of continuing to the graduate school that had admitted me, I enlisted in the Marine Corps, my priority “beyond the realm of the merely reasonable” having to be my personal contribution to our mission in Vietnam.

As my regular readers know, that led to my organizing the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace in 1971, to rebut the outrageous charges made by John Kerry and his small band of fake and disaffected Vietnam veterans, trumpeted by an anti-war media, that we were a criminal country with blood-lust crazed troops. John O’Neill joined me. Thirty-three years later, we and Vietnam veterans arose from our middle-age like Minute Men to finish the internment of Kerry’s lies and deceptive presentation of himself, to avoid the national disaster of this mendacious maggot in the Oval Office. By those who know, our Vietnam veterans’ revolt is credited with the decisive margin for the 2004 election.

It was then, through a mutual friend I was graced to meet during the campaign, that I sent Midge Decter an email about her quote from 1968 and its effect on my life. She responded, overgraciously, but only as a proud mother can, that my contribution saved the country. A son was never prouder.

Her husband, Norman Podhoretz, the Don of Neoconservatism and diviner of sense to a generation of intellectuals and, even, into the White House, is better known. However, Midge Decter’s sense is closer to the core of sensibilities that have led and documented a generation’s movement from centrist liberalism to the core of America’s leading defenders.

From the post-WWII example of the Congress for Cultural Freedom of intellectuals around the world banding to combat the surge of Soviet threat, Midge Decter formed and led the Coalition for a Democratic Majority in the 1970’s, and then the Committee for the Free World.

Midge Decter’s activist life began in 1972, as she wrote in her memoir. (Excerpt here.)

“McGovern’s candidacy signaled the capture of the Democratic Party by the hard left, who had taken control of it through a lethal combination of radical opposition to the war in Vietnam, the radicalization of the civil rights movement, and women’s liberation.”

By 1980, she and fellow liberals “had by then lost all interest in saving the Democratic Party, not only because it had not changed but because we had....For in the end you cannot defend American democracy without defending the economic system that is its necessary underpinning. And you cannot truthfully defend that system without accepting a number of other propositions, perhaps the principal one being that government should be restricted from interfering in lawful economic activity.”

Midge Decter felt responsible for what had happened to America, as only a mother can:

“For me in particular, what I had seen moving in the culture of this country beginning in about 1965 had been like an arrow aimed at my nervous system: because the preparation of this explosion from the decade before was something I myself had had a hand in. Or if it seems too self-aggrandizing for me to put it that way, I will just say that the preparation for the sixties explosion was something I had all too carelessly embraced, as a way, it strikes me now, of continuing to assert my membership in the gang of bad kids who refused to mind their mothers. My children were small then, and I had recklessly failed to make any connection between the fun of playing around in my head with certain profoundly radical ideas about life and their future well-being. By the time the older ones reached adolescence, it began to dawn on me that there were marauders out there just waiting to ruin their chances of enjoying a satisfying adulthood. Those marauders were also out to bring down the country that was so generously giving them houseroom, and all around me were fine liberal people hemming and hawing and surrendering. Put it all together, the politics and the culture, and it spelled warfare.”

In May 2004, Midge Decter updated her maternal reflections:

“Many people think the need of so many Americans to feel they are doing good is childish, but I for one love and admire my fellow ordinary Americans for it. The question now, however, is, how do they, or how will they, feel about Iraq? And the answer, I am afraid, is not yet in. The antiwar forces here at home who accounted themselves, and rightly, the real victors in Vietnam are out and about once more exhibiting their strength, or at least their capacity to make a good deal of noise. (Three days into the Iraq war they were already joyfully proclaiming it lost.) How much power these forces have left is yet to be determined. At least this time they are meeting serious opposition, both in the White House and in the culture itself.

On November 21, Midge Decter addressed the Heritage Foundation. Only the sweeping multi-generational insight of a mother could date the beginning of our culture war as July 8, 1839, the birthdate of John D. Rockefeller.

“The result, as we know and experience for ourselves down to this day, was a positive explosion of wealth: the private wealth of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and their fellow adventurers, to be sure, but way beyond that, there was the wealth, the belief in self, the venturesomeness, inventiveness, openness to the new that before too long came to be characteristic of the country as a whole.”

The response of our chroniclers of popular history:

“Were these men in their own time blessed, celebrated, honored for their achievement by America’s thinkers and writers? Need I ask? Look in any history book; and look at the writings of the time: These men were then, and have continued to be, designated the “Robber Barons”—with no admiration, let alone gratitude, intended.”

And who were these chroniclers?

“The designated cultural authorities of a century ago were made up of a combination that will not seem so very unfamiliar to anyone in this room: the high-born of old pedigree, the elite colleges, the literary establishment, and those institutions of the press that took their cue from their presumed betters.”

Such coastal looks down the nose from a culture of snobbery at those who accomplish grandly spread to those who accomplish daily decency:

“Anyway, back to the late 19th–early 20th century: The cultural elite grew as the country grew, and expanded its range of targets. The “Robber Barons” began to share pride of place as villains and vulgarians with certain other kinds of Americans, particularly those living in the small cities of the Middle West, whose life was now being depicted in celebrated novel after celebrated novel as petty, mean, spiritually impoverished, and ultimately a kind of living death.”

The saving grace for America from these pampered elitists?:

“It is, after all, one of the saving blessings of this society that the overwhelming majority of people tend to go about their daily lives caring for their own families and neighborhoods and minding their own business.”

With the failure and collapse of the Soviet Union, the socialist elitists’ counter-American instincts finds new deities:

“In the end, of course, the stench of Soviet Communism was too much for all but the most die-hard, and they found a variety of substitutes for their totalitarian heroes in a spate of movements: the anti-war movement, for instance, or the Greens or all the others whose driving purpose has been to cripple the American economy for the sake of some higher virtue.”

The tension mounts, as these counter-cultural elites expand their power in academia:

“Still, the wild expansion of the academy has been successful enough to create a serious cultural crisis. For a century and a half, it has been the case that the arbiters of culture have refused to bless the American system, both its government and its economy. That is to say, the country went one way and its privileged aristocracy and thinkers and artists went another.”

As Midge Decter concludes her lecture to her children, “The Never-Ending War: The Battle Over America's Self-Meaning”:

“Thus, without the resistance to the will to power of the country’s cultural elite—the resistance that is supplied by most people’s blessed habit of tending to their own business along with the conscious resistance of the country’s determined and active patriots—you—we might be, as they say, in the soup.”

Who does she look to, to lead the future of America’s resistance to the self-loathing poisoning by such counter-culturalists:

“But I remind myself, on the other hand, that there are those kids in Iraq, who are reintroducing into the public consciousness the virtues of bravery and determination and love of country so long forgotten by a people grown stale in its blessings and privileges. May their tribe increase.”

This mother of sense, mine for almost 40-years, now extends her apron of motherly blessing and lessons to the next generation of America’s defenders. Just as those who served extend our faith, solidarity and hands to them.

With Midge Decter as their spiritual mother, a latter day lady of liberty, how can they go wrong! Thanks Mom.

On October 20 the U.N.'s cultural wing, UNESCO (the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization), adopted an insidious treaty to preserve the world's "cultural security" — a locution concocted by U.N. Chinese delegates in support of the proposition that culturally weak nations should be able to protect against the influence of culturally powerful ones by barring cultural imports and subsidizing their own culture. The vote in Paris was 148-2, with only the United States and Israel opposed.

This latest French- and Canadian-instigated folie by UNESCO, with its history of corruption and anti-Americanism, could ignite the mother of all culture wars and shackle free cultural interchange. The agreement also presents yet another challenge to the sovereignty of democratic nation-states, insofar as it advances the illiberal principle that a collective of governments knows and may determine what is best for humanity at large.

The pact, disingenuously titled the "Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions," is larded with doublespeak, which columnist George F. Will has deciphered. Cutting to the quick, Will observes that the treaty in fact enables countries to " 'protect' their 'cultural expressions' against diversity arising from cultural imports that can be stigmatized as threats to social cohesion. . . ." Thus it gives the prestigious U.N. seal of approval to what Louise Oliver, the U.S. ambassador to UNESCO, cites as the "cultural exception" promoted in recent years by some nations: the notion that cultural goods can be exempted from free-trade agreements.

To justify such protectionism, the treaty declares that "cultural activities, goods and services" must not be viewed "as solely having commercial value." On a loftier note sounded by France's culture minister, as quoted in the Oct. 14 Wall Street Journal, "Works of art and the spirit must not be considered to be goods."

Of course the cultural goods actually targeted for exclusion are those of the culturally prolific, exuberant, and contagious U.S., and the agreement gives standing to nations to restrict or thwart competition from American cultural imports, such as movies, TV programs, CDs, print publications — or even such products as California wines.

But trade decisions based on cultural insecurity, xenophobia, and opportunistic metaphysics can cut any number of ways. All cultural hell — a chain reaction of retaliation and counter-retaliation involving multiple nations — could break loose. August French "works of the spirit" might not be considered worthy of import by, say, China or Iran. And what if the films, for instance, of Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese were forbidden in French and Chinese theaters? Why would the U. S. not counter with a blackout, on the American screen and cable TV, of the work of Olivier Assayas and Eric Rohmer, or Zhang Yimou and Wei Yuming?

Zut alors! The mind reels with the potential of a Planetary-Wide, Multi-Media Neo-"Book-Burning" to add fire to the flames of existing international conflict.

Historically viewed, cultural trade barriers could also cause civilizational anemia. "Trade," as the editors of the New York Sun noted zestily, "meant Plato wasn't restricted to Greece, Algebra to the Middle East . . . and . . . why Brazilian music, French wine, and African costumes can all be found in downtown Brooklyn."

Moreover, freedom itself is spawned by unfettered trade, from which people learn about individual liberty and rule of law. This pact abets tyranny, for as the Sun warns, it gives cover "to the world's monarchs, theocrats, and dictators to ban access to materials speaking of freedom and rights in the name of protecting their culture."

The agreement also corrodes political process: That is, it furthers the long-range transformation of world governance favored by those whom Hudson Institute fellow John Fonte calls "transnational progressives" (U.N. and other NGO international bureaucrats, activist officials and academics within nation-states, global corporate heads, et al.). In his aptly named National Interest essay "Democracy's Trojan Horse," Fonte shows how these elites, neither elected by nor accountable to any self-governing citizens, work in tandem to establish a "transnational regime."

This brave new world order is being established via "global governance," the adoption by organizations such as the U.N. of a vast overlay of political arrangements that transcend national borders, such as international agreements, rules, and laws. (One such arrangement currently being promoted by the U.N. and EU, similar in thrust to the cultural diversity pact, could result in the regulation and censorship of the U.S.-created Internet by foreign powers.)

The grand transnational project is fundamentally coercive, for its modus operandi is to bypass and to constrain — gradually to devitalize entirely — the national sovereignty of liberal democratic states. Indeed, the advance of transnational rule, as embodied in the adoption of this cultural diversity convention, could give rise to a new totalitarianism of unfathomable scope.

Free people everywhere must reject this duplicitous pact. UNESCO bureaucrats and their cohort have no right to decide which cultural goods are worthy of acceptance, and which are alien and invasive; nor may they be permitted surreptitiously to subvert freedom and to co-opt the democratic processes within nation-states that ensure individual liberty.

Although the U.S. delegation steadfastly opposed this convention, it should have walked away from the conference when the treaty was approved, as recommended by the Heritage Foundation. In addition, America should now withdraw altogether from UNESCO, as it did once before in 1984. It is perverse for this country to donate the noose to its hangmen. Far better uses can be found for the many millions of dollars the U.S., as UNESCO's largest benefactor, has been pouring into the organization since the Bush Administration led America to rejoin it.

To the barricades, against transnational cultural tyranny and anti-democratic politics!

I have read no better article than this report from Iraq, which was sent to The Washington Times from an anonymous Marine via his father. In it the Marine discusses our troops' preferred equipment, enemy strategy and competence, and the need for more boots on the ground to close off the borders with Iran and Syria.

Simultaneously humorous and sobering, this report is not to be missed; it's the kind of information we'll never hear from our reporters. The entire piece is worth its weight in gold, but I've excerpted just a few of what I consider to be the most important parts.

Bad guy weapons: Mostly AK47s. The entire country is an arsenal. Works better in the desert than the M16 and the .308 Russian round kills reliably. PKM belt-fed light machine guns are also common and effective. Luckily, the enemy mostly shoots like s***. Undisciplined "spray and pray"-type fire. However, precision weapons are more and more common, especially sniper rifles. Fun fact: Captured enemy have apparently marveled at the marksmanship of our guys and how hard they fight. They are apparently told in jihad school that the Americans rely solely on technology, and can be easily beaten in close quarters combat for their lack of toughness. Let's just say they know better now.

[...]

The insurgent tactic most frustrating is their use of civilian non-combatants as cover. They know we do all we can to avoid civilian casualties, so therefore schools, hospitals and especially mosques are locations where they meet, stage for attacks, cache weapons and ammo and flee to when engaged. They have absolutely no regard whatsoever for civilian casualties. They will terrorize locals and murder without hesitation anyone believed to be sympathetic to the Americans or the new Iraqi government. Kidnapping of family members, especially children, is common to influence people they are trying to influence but cannot otherwise reach, such as local government officials, clerics or tribal leaders, etc.

[...]

According to [name redacted], morale among our guys is very high. They not only believe they are winning, but that they are winning decisively. They are stunned and dismayed by what they see in the American press, whom they almost universally view as against them. The embedded reporters are despised and distrusted. They are inflicting casualties at a rate of 20-1 and then see s*** like "Are we losing in Iraq?" on television and the print media.

For the most part, they are satisfied with their equipment, food and leadership. Bottom line, though, and they all say this: There are not enough guys there to drive the final stake through the heart of the insurgency, primarily because there aren't enough troops in-theater to shut down the borders with Iran and Syria. The Iranians and the Syrians just cannot stand the thought of Iraq being an American ally -- with, of course, permanent U.S. bases there.

If President Bush is wise, he will begin sharing this type of stuff with the American people during press conferences at least twice a month.

I'm thankful for the United States military, for fighting and winning a war so bravely and effectively that, apparently, so many of us can afford to spend more time complaining about it than worrying about being killed at the hands of our enemies.

And I'm especially thankful for our World War II veterans, without whom our military would look quite different from what it does today.

Take some time to listen to the song, "Before You Go," which honors those who fought in this country's worst and greatest war.

Thanksgiving, that's Giving Thanks Day, is tomorrow. Most of us remember to do so every day. G-d, Honor, Country, is an appropriate theme. Adding in the fundamental Brotherhood of humanity is another.

Sure, there are exceptions in our or others' behavior or thoughts. We should remember to treat them as exceptions, and to strive for better.

Add in that in America we value and protect Civil Discourse, the anvil of Democracy without which we cannot and would not continue to be Americans and hammer out together our Shining future.

Give truth, and your gift will be paid in kind,
And honor will honor meet;
And a smile that is sweet will surely find
A smile that is just as sweet.

Mary Ainge De Vere: Life's Mirror

Via ABC News:

Nov. 21, 2005— Iran has built, with the help of North Korea, dozens of underground tunnels and facilities for the construction of nuclear-capable missiles, according to Alireza Jafardazeh, a Washington D.C.-based consultant and former spokesman for the National Council of the Resistance of Iran, an Iranian opposition group.

Speaking this morning at the National Press Club, Jafarzadeh described an "extensive large-scale operation" for the development of nuclear-capable missiles "in the most sophisticated, hidden way" in tunnels in a mountain range east of Tehran. Jafarzadeh named several Iranian entities involved in Iran's missile program, overseen by the Hemmat Industries Group. He said that eyewitnesses describe the facilities, begun in 1989, as an "underground township." Jafarzadeh added that, in addition to work on the Shahab family of missiles, Hemmat is overseeing work on a new long-range missile, Ghadar, which is still in development and has a projected range of 1,300 to 1,900 miles.

Atlas Shrugs reminds us of this comment by an Iranian member of parliament back in September:

Rice is a liar and one cannot count on what liars say. We Muslims understand the necessity of saying hello back. Americans are dreaming if they think they can force themselves on us by saying simple hellos and being affable.

We're dropping bombs in Iraq for less than what appears to be going on in Iran, and these people are worried about us forcing ourselves on them with ... hellos??

Carrie Lukas highlights the state's repugnant war on Wal-Mart, and explains the likely outcomes if it's successful.

Mark Tapscott points us to a study today that is not to be missed.

It may not get much play in the MSM, but the Catalogue for Philanthropy's latest National Generosity Index finds a clear majority of the most generous states are in the Bible Belt where evangelical Christianity is strongest and household income is lowest. The least generous states are mostly in areas in which evangelicals are least common, but household incomes are highest.

You can check out for yourself the thorough anaysis that Mark has provided, but it's quite telling that the ten most philanthropic states were carried by Bush in 2004, while nine of the ten least generous went for John Kerry.

As the old saying goes, it's easy to be charitable with other people's money - a mantra with which the Left will forever be associated.

Via FoxNews:

TAMPA, Fla. — A Florida reading teacher charged with having sex with a minor pleaded guilty on Tuesday to two counts of lewd and lascivious behavior as part of a plea deal that does not include any jail time.

I'm no legal scholar, but how does Lefave get away with charges of "lewd and lascivious behavior" when a male teacher almost certainly would have been charged with statutory rape if he had sex with a 14-year-old girl?

And I don't object to a plea that doesn't include jail time if that's what both sides agree to, but I almost can't believe this:

"To place an attractive young woman in that kind of hell hole is like putting a piece of raw meat in with the lions," Lafave's attorney, John Fitzgibbons, said in July of the possibility of jail time. "I'm not sure she would survive."

Well, boo hoo. This guy can't really think criminal punishment should be applied in direct proportion to gene structure. Can he?

Don Boudreaux republishes a letter from Bob Higgs, briefly explaining that the FDA does not do what it claims to do.

I think it is very important in discussing this topic not to be diverted in mere speculations about how a market order might deal with quality assurance for health-care products. It is far more telling to insist that the market already supplies this assurance.

Read it all.

Andy Roth pointed to this related commentary by Derek Lowe yesterday, who argued that aspirin wouldn't even make it to market if it had to be approved by the FDA today.

Even more from John Stossel.

Not even close. More great photos from Michael Yon, who writes so succinctly, "These children and their families are our allies."

No truer words.

***Keep scrolling for updates***

I was just getting ready to comment on a Washington Post headline in this morning's online version of the paper that read "Iraqi Leaders Call For Pullout," only to mention that the actual article reads "Iraqi Leaders Call For Pullout Timetable" - obviously, two very different things. But the editors have just changed the headline to read "Iraqi Leaders Call For Withdrawal Timetable," which gives a much more accurate first-glance impression of the meeting that took place yesterday in Cairo.

UPDATE (10:14): I also want to mention that it seems the Iraqi people are taking this war more seriously than we are. A recent poll suggests that Americans are much more pessimistic than ever about a positive outcome in Iraq, with over 60 percent believing that democracy and stability will never come to Iraq.

Though yesterday's meeting at the Arab League suggests that Iraqis are divided over the timing of U.S. withdrawal from the country, as recently as this past summer a majority of Iraqis were concerned about an immediate U.S. withdrawal. However, almost all Iraqis agree that U.S. forces will need to leave the country in order for Iraq to operate as a sovereign nation. But despite the fact that there is still much tension between Sunnis and Shi'ites, some leaders see light at the end of the tunnel. According to VOANews.com:

The main demand of Sunni Arabs is for the announcement of a date for the withdrawal of coalition troops from Iraq. Shi'ites and Kurds, who were long oppressed by Saddam and his ruling Baath Party, are demanding that Baath Party members be excluded from Iraqi society. Most Baath Party members were Sunni Arabs and many now stand accused of actively supporting the country's insurgency.

A Kurdish professor at the University of Baghdad, Abdul Jabbar Ahmad, says the key to reconciliation may lie with the country's Shi'ite Muslims, who dominate the current interim government and are expected to hold a majority in the next government.

"If the Iraqi government negotiates with the resistance, with the support of the U.S.A., I think stability will happen in Iraq. But if we are going to treat all of them as terrorists, I think whether the U.S. stays or withdraws from Iraq, the situation will be a mess," he said.

On Sunday, Iraq's Kurdish interim president, Jalal Talabani, said that he was willing to open a dialogue with former Baath Party members. But he ruled out including any member in the talks who is still actively supporting the insurgency.

According to the AP, yesterday's meeting concluded with Arab leaders drawing a distinction between "legitimate resistance" and terrorism, and calling for "an immediate end to arbitrary raids and arrests without a documented judicial order."

Though it's uncertain how such a communique will be received by the White House and American military commanders, such demands with regard to raids and arrests, which could severely inhibit our troops' prosecution of the enemy, at the very least indicate that Iraqis seem to be committed to a rule of law, however premature such demands could turn out to be.

One thing appears to be certain, however: Iraqi leaders seems to be as concerned with taking control of their country as we are with getting our guys back home. Regardless of our views of the war from the beginning, calls for an immediate withdrawal are unwise, as even Sunnis and Shi'ites agree that a specific date for U.S. withdrawal is less important than a well-timed departure.

UPDATE (2:42): NRO's Andrew Stuttaford:

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Leaders of Iraq's sharply divided Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis called Monday for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces in the country and said Iraq's opposition had a ``legitimate right'' of resistance. The final communique, hammered out at the end of three days of negotiations at a preparatory reconciliation conference under the auspices of the Arab League, condemned terrorism, but was a clear acknowledgment of the Sunni position that insurgents should not be labeled as terrorists if their operations do not target innocent civilians or institutions designed to provide for the welfare of Iraqi citizens.

My emphasis added, and if the AP has understood this communique correctly my reaction is unprintable.

UPDATE (5:50): Okay, I've been trying all day to get back to this business of the Arab League drawing a distinction between "legitimate resistance" and terrorism, which is why I at least posted Andrew Stuttaford's reaction above. Mine was pretty much the same when I first read the article this morning, but I admit I wasn't quite sure how to take it.

Are Iraqi and other Arab leaders going to encourage those who are "legitimately resisting" to slap on a uniform? If not, they're still terrorists. Are they going to demand that they carry their weapons in full view of U.S. and allied forces, and stop hiding in mosques and among the civilian population? If not, they're still terrorists, and they should be treated as such.

So far as I know, Saddam's Republican Guard had a legitimate right to engage coalition troops because they differentiated themselves from everyday civilians. "Insurgents" who do not openly announce their opposition via the aforementioned means are not legitimate soldiers, do not deserve to be treated as such, and deserve no provisions under the Geneva Conventions.

I hope this signifies that Iraqi leaders and their counterparts will not accept terrorist activity in Iraq. But if this was a cheap stunt intended to greenlight terrorist attacks, or nothing more than a ploy to keep American forces guessing at the enemy, the Bush administration should come up with a few choice suggestions as to where these guys can shove their communique.

Dana, at his blog appropriately named Common Sense Political Thought, points out that for President Bush to have lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it would have required the largest international conspiracy ever. Not only would all the members of his administration, the leadership of the CIA and Defense Department, have to had risked their honor and careers knowing they would be found out within months of entering Iraq, but the leaders and intelligence services of Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, and other countries, would have had to have similarly conspired. Further, Bush would have had to been quite stupid, being able to run in 2004 off his victory in Afghanistan, to engage himself in a deception that would have been revealed before the election.

Instead, as Vice-President Cheney said at the American Enterprise Institute:

“All of us understood…that for more than a decade, the U.N. Security Council had demanded that Saddam Hussein make a full accounting of his weapons programs. The burden of proof was entirely on the dictator of Iraq – not on the U.N. or the United states or anyone else. And he repeatedly refused to comply throughout the course of the decade.” Indeed, the massive international lie was Saddam’s that he had WMD’s, to deter what he perceived as a timid West.

The big lie is actually being perpetrated by the Democrat Party and its leadership. As a mainstream press ally, Eleanor Clift in Newsweek, wrote this week:

“Democrats gave Murtha a standing ovation behind closed doors, but most kept their distance in public. ‘It’s a trap,’ explained a Democratic strategist. ‘If the party comes out for a unilateral six-month withdrawal, that would become the issue for ’06, and they [Republicans] would kill us again.”

Some propose that another vote be held in the House, and in the Senate, using Rep. Murtha’s words, and that Democrats’ willingness to engage in spineless backalley slander spread by a willing media be so exposed time and time again for what it is. Such repeated public pillorying might be fun, but I believe most Americans of any sense already got the point, and it would distract from the Congress getting on with its other important work, hopefully, to quickly confirm a full Supreme Court and to cut pork from the budget that would provide added public confidence that they have a government that governs responsibly.

Some suggest that the Democrats want to garner some of the credit for Iraq reaching the turning point where U.S. troop levels may be reduced by 20% or so during the next six-months. Again, only those already blind to or convinced by the Democrats’ perfidy and puerility would be so swayed.

Only those with an utter disregard and disrespect for the innate wisdom of the American people would expect otherwise. If that’s what the Democrats think, the wool can be pulled over most Americans’ eyes, they will be enabled in that fantasy by media allies, once again to be disabused of the notion at the ballot box.

Project 21, an arm of The National Center For Public Policy Research, is well-known for advocating economic and social conservatism and elevating leaders within the black community to the national stage. With the Democratic Party's near hegemony over the black vote, Project 21 is a crucial voice in America.

Its latest press release, however, is a little over-the-top. Project 21 is on the right side of the ANWR debate, but instead of focusing primarily on the importance of increasing domestic oil drilling for purposes of expanding the free market and reducing our dependency on foreign nations, the group instead takes the traditional liberal approach to painting the picture of minorities as victims of high energy prices, shivering in their rundown tenements during the winter.

The document, titled "High Home Heating Bills Disproportionately Harm Minority Households," reads in part:

"Home heating bills are expected to be higher than usual this winter. People can choose not to drive their car when fuel prices are high, but they shouldn't have to choose not to turn on the heat to keep their family warm," said Project 21 member Deneen Moore. "Low-income households unable to afford rising heating bills might resort to unsafe alternatives. Drilling in ANWR, for example, would be essential to helping alleviate the high cost of energy in the U.S., create jobs and help America become less dependent on foreign oil."

[...]

"The prospect of keeping warm this winter costing so much more than the rate of inflation should offend every American family, but its impact on this country's working poor borders the criminal,” said Project 21’s John Meredith, who is active in several community-based non-profit groups. "How can a nation so rich and powerful justify forcing families to choose between staying warm and eating? We can't. Opening ANWR to exploration is the only humane thing to do."

If minorities make proportionately less money than non-minorities, any increase in prices, whether in regard to oil or food or clothing or school supplies, will disproportionately affect them; such depictions simply smack of Democrats' and liberals' portrayal of the elderly as so helpless as to have to choose between eating and buying their prescription drugs. In other words, resorting to such hysteria might tug at the heartstrings, but it does little to address the true problem.

Minorities would be much better served if Project 21 would combat government interference in and of itself, from restrictions placed on the oil industry to the minimum wage to its regulation of the welfare state to its collection of income taxes - all of which contribute more to the poor staying poor than slight increases in energy bills ever will.

The Washington Post reported last Friday that the Army has put an end to call-ups of inactive soldiers.

Despite intense pressure to fill manpower gaps, Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey said the Army has no plans for any further call-up of the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) beyond the current level of about 6,500 soldiers. The IRR is a pool of about 115,000 trained soldiers who have left active-duty or reserve units for civilian life, but remain subject to call-up for a set period.

The Army also announced, in a memo released this week, that it will no longer involuntarily mobilize from the IRR an estimated 15,000 Army officers who have already completed their eight years of required military duty, stating that under a new policy it will offer them a chance to resign instead.

[...]

One of the most contentious issues involves thousands of Army officers who have completed their eight years of military duty but have been kept in the reserve pool indefinitely because they have not formally resigned their commissions -- a requirement some officers say they knew nothing of.

Unfortunately, however, the Army has no plans to recall soldiers who have served their time but have already been deployed.

[For some], the shift came too late. The Army will allow officers who fall under the policy to resign if they are still in the United States. But if they have already left for Iraq or other assignments, they will have to stay for the entire deployment. "If they have already been deployed, they'll be required to fulfill the terms of their mobilization orders," said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army personnel spokesman.

I was unaware that the Army was even pulling from its IRR list until one of my best friends found out two weeks ago that he was to be deployed to Iraq for a year and a half. However, the problem doesn't seem to be that soldiers no longer attached to active-duty or reserve units have been called up so much as those who are no longer even required to be on IRR status apparently have never been so informed.

Such was the case for my friend, a West Point graduate, who only last week found out that his service to the Army - including any obligation to remain on IRR status - was fulfilled in 2003 and thus was able to officially resign his commission. As he explains it:

Some people on the [IRR] list still have service obligations (e.g., their initial contract was for 5 years active and 3 years on the IRR, they have served say 6 years and have to stay on the list for 2 more years). The issue is that after those two years are up no one takes them off the list or lets them know that they can get off the list. Hence a bunch of officers (i.e. me) were no longer required to be on IRR (they started counting my obligation in 1994) but we didn't know that we were past our MSO (mandatory service obligation).

It's my understanding that soldiers on IRR have traditionally only been activated when the Army needed to fill specific needs, like staffing doctors, dentists, or perhaps in a war of this type, chemical engineers who may need to analyze seized weapons. But pulling everyday soldiers from IRR who've settled into civilian life, in many cases beginning new careers, building houses, and starting families - much less those who have already satisfied their service requirement - may not be the wisest way to attract new volunteers to the armed forces.

Thankfully the Army has made the smart decision to try to keep better tabs on those who have nobly served their country.

A few minutes after I posted "Cowardly Congressional Snipers" below, John O'Neill and I were on the phone chuckling about how we still think alike 34-years after we first joined to bring truth to John Kerry's lies. John has a great op-ed in today's New York Sun, "Summer Soldiers." It all must be read and spread widely. Hopefully, RealClearPolitics will get permission to get the link from behind the New York Sun's subscription barrier, so you can archive this very important piece.

NEW YORK SUN November 21, 2005 Edition > Section: Opinion

Summer Soldiers

By JOHN O'NEILL
November 21, 2005

Senator Kerry, supposedly defending Rep. John Murtha, said, "I won't stand for the Swift-Boating of Jack Murtha!" As one of the 254 members of Mr. Kerry's unit in Vietnam who belonged to Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth, I found Mr. Kerry's comments most ironic.

To us, Mr. Kerry's comments meant that no one should do to Mr. Murtha that which Mr. Kerry did to all of us and our fellow Vietnam veterans, living and dead. Mr. Kerry's disgraceful comments on many occasions in 1971 (while we were locked in combat), claiming falsely that we were "murdering" hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and committing rape and mayhem on a daily basis, are a part of the public record for which he has never apologized. This might be called "Kerrying" our soldiers.

In his own strange way, in his recent comments, Mr. Kerry was trying by implication to compare himself to Mr. Murtha - the gravest of insults to Mr. Murtha, who was given a standing ovation by the House of Representatives (which then properly buried his immediate pullout suggestion 403-3). Mr. Murtha's long military record stands in stark contrast with Mr. Kerry's continuous self-promotion of his short and controversial service in our unit. More importantly, Mr. Murtha has never compared our troops in the field - now or then - to the "Army of Genghis Khan" or claimed our adversaries, whether the bloody communists and Khmer Rouge or the butchers of Al Qaeda, were simply democratic reformers. Can anyone - even in the cocoon of Washington or the incestuous world of Mainstream Media - imagine either side of the aisle spontaneously rising to clap for anything that Mr. Kerry ever did or said?

Mr. Murtha's distinguished military record does not mean he is not wildly and completely wrong in his pullout proposal. Despite Mr. Murtha's effort to present himself as speaking for our troops, all serious data is to the contrary. Thus, for example, an Army Times poll of October 3, 2004, found Mr. Bush beating Mr. Kerry among active duty troops by 74% to 18%. Other polls were similar. While there are a few active duty or retired personnel like Mr. Murtha on the pullout side, they are not as numerous as, say, Yankee fans in Boston. It is abundantly clear that the vast majority of military personnel simply wish to be left alone by the Kerrys and other politicians to finish a job which they believe is nearly done and which they know the John Kerrys and Nancy Pelosis of Washington are totally incompetent to direct and even understand.

The Democratic Party (notwithstanding its cynical expressions of concern for the same troops it periodically seeks to label as engaged in widespread crime) is regarded with intense distrust by many active duty and retired military personnel. They have been Kerried once too often. It was once the majority party that stopped the Nazis, Fascists, and North Koreans and that in words of a far different Kennedy summoned us "to fight any battle" for freedom. Sadly, the party of Henry Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt has become the party of retreat - from the Iranian Hostage Crisis to the retreat from Mogadishu; to opposition to the 1991 Gulf War; to the failure to avenge the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or the USS Cole bombing or the murder of our own troops and embassy personnel around the world. Indeed, this past Thursday night, the nation watched the bizarre spectacle of a Democratic Party speaking in favor of immediate withdrawal but too afraid to even cast a vote recording for posterity these convictions. And the drift from American values to the party of Mr. Kerry and Michael Moore has been matched by its shrinking base. Recent polls, for example, show vastly lower approval ratings - in the low 20s - for Congressional Democrats than even the low rating of Mr. Bush. As for many veterans and military personnel, they remember well the politicians who voted to send us to war then "Kerried" us while we were locked in combat, dishonoring both our service and our dead.

And they ask - is this all to happen to our soldiers again? Are the politicians like Mr. Kerry who led the campaign to send our kids to war (when it was popular) now to withdraw support while they are locked in combat and apparently succeeding because the task is difficult or unpopular? Will Mainstream Media "Kerry" our troops by portraying Abu Ghraib or isolated cases of prisoner mistreatment as the rule to demoralize our troops and nation, while ignoring the beheadings and butchery of those peacefully praying in Mosques or shopping in a Bazaar? Will the press's selective glorification of isolated figures such as Cindy Sheehan, Mr. Kerry, or Mr. Murtha drown out the actual voices of the large majority of our servicemen? I hope not. We pay our troops little and subject them to considerable danger. We can at the very least support them with stability of mission and honesty of reporting.

Likewise, we ought not to "Kerry" our troops with after-the-battle second-guessing. The fog of combat produces in any war mistake and folly. Both World War II and the Korean War began with wholly avoidable military disasters - Pearl Harbor and the retreat to Pusan. Likewise, the Iraq War has had its share of mistakes and miscalculations (along with brilliant successes). But it simply Kerries our troops in the field to elevate network newsmen (who have likely never even spent a night in a tent) or self-promoted Congressional military heroes with two months of 35 years ago combat in a much different world into armchair Napoleons. That is why we rely instead upon the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the best professional military establishment in the world (when they are left alone). And we should remember the words of Thomas Dewey declining to make Pearl Harbor a campaign issue in 1944: "I would rather lose the presidency and win the war than the reverse."

On December 23, 1776, with Washington's army freezing in tatters at Morristown, Thomas Paine in "Common Sense" wrote, "These are the times that try men's souls." He noted many mistakes by the American army, but noted that "tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered" and that heaven charges a high price for freedom because it is so precious. It was a time when "the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot shrink ... " but those who stood firm would someday receive the love and appreciation of the nation.

Our nation and our soldiers, who have shown their courage, decency, and worth in desperate fighting on dozens of battlefields, deserve our support for their mission and themselves. They deserve infinitely more than summer soldiers, sunshine patriots, and armchair Napoleons, whose determination and purpose melts with the first winter storm.

Mr. O'Neill, an attorney in Houston, Texas, coauthored the no. 1 bestseller, "Unfit for Command." After graduation from the Naval Academy, he served as a Swift Boat officer in Vietnam, and later, as a law clerk to Justice William Rehnquist.

In May 1970, I and my fellow Marines in Vietnam gathered around our shared radio to listen to what I still consider one of President Nixon’s great speeches, why American and Vietnamese armed forces were entering Cambodia to root out the sanctuaries from which the North Vietnamese had virtually free rein to attack us and South Vietnam. We all there in our hootch cheered.

I sent off a letter to Time magazine, about the only way we might be heard, and got on with my job.

The next week, this young Corporal was, as every morning, standing at attention – holding my map pointer -- before the 1st Marine Division general staff for its daily intelligence briefing. The presenting Major interrupted to read:

“I had lost hope of the survival of even a spark of political courage in Washington. No longer. My one gut reaction is, it’s about goddam time! Let us work for peace in the only way possible: by defeating and containing aggression against helpless nations. Some of us do this by serving here in Viet Nam. The rest of America must do it by vociferously drowning out the anti-Americans and petty despots of the fanatic left fringes, and providing backbone for our misled legislators.” (Time magazine, May 25, 1970)

The Major then turned to me, told the general staff who the author was, and they stood to applaud me -- maybe a first by a general staff for a Corporal unless receiving a medal for valor.

Over the next weeks, as news arrived from home in America, we Marines were all dumbfounded and saddened by reports of giant protests against our cleansing the Cambodia sanctuaries.

Fast forward to April 1971.

Back in Brooklyn, awaiting entering grad school, I was again dumbfounded and saddened by seeing John Kerry and a small scruffy group of real and fake Vietnam veterans headlined as heroes of protest against a “Genghis Kahn” America and its armed forces. I got mad, and did something about it.

I phoned Vietnam veteran friends across the country, and organized the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. The anti-war but fair, seasoned journalist and historian, who ran the New York Times’ op-ed page, Harrison Salisbury, ran my piece on May 13. I said, “I am sure the overwhelming majority of Vietnam veterans and Americans bitterly resent the charge from the left that we are all war criminals.”

Vietnam veterans flocked to the banner. We set up a press conference at Washington’s National Press Club for June 1. A few days before, a just mustered out Navy Lieutenant, John O’Neill, contacted me to join, in frustration that the Kennedy-Fulbright Senate Foreign Relations Committee propaganda fest provided to John Kerry refused to hear his rebuttal, although he served in the same unit.

Our press conference received fair and prominent coverage in the mainstream media. We proceeded over the next several months to get the word out. Kerry and his band of bluffers receded from the newspages. We returned to our lives.

Little did we expect we’d be called out of our middle-age to finish the job in 2004, but we all volunteered again for the front, and tilted the election’s margin of victory by exposing again John Kerry’s self-created false-front of patriotic valor.

Fast forward again, to now.

Hugh Hewitt correctly summed up the doings in Washington, as only three members of the House had the guts to go on record and vote in accord with what their Democrat Party leaders had been sniping through their allies in the mass media.

Thanksgiving conversation “should also dwell on the profound hypocrisy of the left and its Congressional representatives…The Democrats took their walloping last year and instead of resolving to return to D.C. as an opposition party that would work to craft alternatives to domestic policies while remaining supportive of the GWOT and of the troops, have spent a year digging deeper and deeper into anti-war conspiracy theories and committing themselves to Vietnam Syndrome 2.0.”

Ronald Brownstein, the L.A. Times’ reporter of conventional liberal takes on the news, recognized the Democrat strategy for what it is: “Many Democratic political strategists and foreign policy analysts have long believed the party can benefit more from criticizing Bush’s handling of the war than from specifying an alternative.”

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld – via a round of the talk shows -- yesterday reminded that war critics should “think about the troops that are there and how it sounds to them.” Rowan Scarsborough reports:

“Commanders are telling Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that ground troops do not understand the generally negative press that their missions receive, despite what they consider significant achievements in rebuilding Iraq and instilling democracy….they relate comments from troops asking, ”What the heck is going on back here’…”

Stephen Hayes reports from his visits to Iraq:
“Talk to senior American diplomats and military officers in Iraq today and they will tell you that the insurgents closely monitor the debate here in the United States. As domestic support for the war dwindles, the insurgents increasingly believe they can win; they fight harder, they raise more money, they gain new recruits. If these U.S. officials are correct, then continuing to make the case for the war in Iraq – to remind people with specifics, not platitudes, why we’re fighting – is not a distraction but a central component of fighting to win.”

That’s now what should be the foremost task of every American who cares about America’s and the world’s security and future peace.

The soldiers and Marines in Iraq now do not have to just send a letter off to Time magazine, as I did in 1970. They have the Internet to get out the facts and truth of what’s happening where poolside pundits in Baghdad, or on the Potomac or Times Square, dare not go. Those following the milblogs get it, but the mainstream media virtually ignores their frontline reporting.

Guess what? They’re coming home. And they are pissed off. Democrats who undermine their efforts for petty, and transitory, current electoral advantage, will be brought to task. We of Vietnam waited until 2004 to do so. The veterans of Iraq, and Afghanistan, will not have to wait so long, and won’t.

Cafe Hayek's Don Boudreaux has a hilarious post today that challenges the absurd notion that rising gasoline prices indicate nothing more than oil executives' "greed."

The price of 87-octane gasoline here in southern Maryland has been $2.09 for almost two weeks now, and this relative consistency is no surprise to people like me and many others who understand that prices fluctuate with supply and demand.

Incidentally, one term that I've heard thrown around a lot down here is "normal" - i.e., that prices have returned to "normal." This is inaccurate. All prices are normal so long as they are determined by market forces (as opposed to extraneous factors such as government-induced price controls). After Hurricane Katrina, a cost of $3.39 per gallon of gas was no less normal than $2.09 is now, now that the volatility caused by the instant reduction in refining capacity has been stabilized.

Alas, it's unlikely that this will be acknowledged anytime soon by talking heads in the media or other critics of private enterprise. Just today Roger Friedman pens a review of George Clooney's new movie "Syriana," which, if a recent trailer is any indication, is certain to be an eye-roller for anyone not of the Michael Moore mold. Indeed, as Friedman writes:

[T]he actors are so uniformly good from the start that they all seem very real, as does the situation. This is "Fahrenheit 411," meaning full of urgent information that rings true in every scene. Liberals and conservatives all have to put gas in their cars. One look at the prices, and you know that "Syriana" is not far off base.

It should be telling that Friedman has acknowledged similarities to Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which to anyone but die-hard leftists was nothing but a propaganda piece due to such widespread absence of contextualization. If I remember correctly, the "Syriana" trailer asks its potential audience to imagine what it would be like to have to pay $20 a gallon for gas. Whether this is a major theme of the movie or an underhanded jab at "greedy" oil companies is beyond me; I think I'll be passing on this movie.

If Roger Friedman really thinks current gas prices are so absurd, it's no surprise that he thinks "Syriana" isn't too far off base. But as much as I'm inclined to disagree with his assessment, this movie probably isn't even as off base as Friedman's understanding of economics.

The Washington Post again leads today in raising national consciousness of sanity. Its editorial, “The Internet at Risk,” addresses the so-called compromise reached last week at the U.N. conference in Tunisia on the Internet. The editorial reminds those who may get lost in theory, or in approval of thrusts against democracy by U.S. adversaries, “In an ideal world, unilateralism should be avoided. But in an imperfect world, unilateral solutions that run efficiently can be better than multilateral ones that don’t.”

The full editorial is one to read and clip for its lucid internment of the contending viewpoints, at least as regards the Internet.

CNET’s report of the results in Tunis is a useful summary of the doings. Endorsed in the “Net détente” with the U.N. was creation of an Internet Governance Forum, which will begin meeting in 2006, to continue “global discussions” of everything Internet. As CNET reports, this “effectively postpones a long-simmering dispute over the future of Internet management.” U.S. ambassador David Gross put the positive spin on: We have “no concerns that it would morph into something unsavory.” U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan put his spin on, more representative of the views of most U.N. members, saying the agreement supports “the need for more international participation in discussions of Internet governance issues.” Aside from the U.N. members wishing greater censorship of views they see as undermining their despotism, the U.N. and some in Europe look at the Internet as a source of tax revenue, even on emails, another way to suppress the free exchange of ideas. The Prime Minister of Mozambique called U.N. control of the Internet “a matter of justice and legitimacy that all people have a say in the way the Internet is governed.”

The Washington Post editorial rejoinder:

“The job of assigning domain names offers huge opportunities for abuse. Whoever controls this function can decide to keep certain types of individuals or organizations offline (dissidents or opposition political groups, for example). Or it can allow them on in exchange for large fees. The striking feature of U.S. oversight of the Internet is that such abuses have not occurred….Indeed, governments’ ample ability to regulate the Internet has already been demonstrated by some of the countries pushing for reform, such as authoritarian China.”

The Washington Post recognizes that the battle over Internet freedom has not been won, just is on intermission, awaiting the mustering of more pressure from those who wish its restriction and, perhaps, a more “multilateralist” administration.

Bob Goodlatte is the Congressman from Virginia who serves as the co-chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus. In the Augusta Free Press newspaper from there that also publishes my column, he points out: “An Internet that is fractured and censored is not one that can support the economic and social uses that consumers and businesses alike have come to expect.” Goodlatte co-sponsored House Congressional Resolution 268 that on November 16 garnered a 423-0 (obviously bipartisan for those who prefer to think all measures Congressional are or need be bitterly partisan) endorsement of the House’s sense that “the administration of the Internet should remain in the U.S. under private control.” It has been forwarded to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, whose members hopefully read today’s Washington Post editorial.

Judith Klinghoffer of Rutgers, at the History News Network, offers a brilliant analysis of “Why are liberals so weak in Middle East?” It all has to be read, the reader gaining the detailed insight necessary to even begin to understand the strategic setting in the Middle East.

A taste:

“Democracy fails to make headway in the Middle East not because it appears ‘imposed’ but because it is mercilessly persecuted. Islamism is making headway because it is carefully nourished. Writing articles praising tyrants for the newfound freedoms enjoyed by Islamists is aiding and abetting the enemy. Giving 2 billion dollars to Egypt means giving 2 billion dollars to the man who leads the fight against the American struggle to make the Middle East safe for democracy. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise.”

The Washington Post’s editorial today demonstrates why it has replaced the New York Times as the nation’s lead serious newspaper. “Irresponsible on Iraq” points out that the past two weeks’ debate over Iraq, as to who lied, – the administration about the reasons for getting into Iraq, or the Democrats saying the administration did by conveniently forgetting their agreement with the information at the time on doing so – “is a shameful exercise in demagoguery and name calling.” The editorial says, “It sounds like the final days of a bitter, mud-slinging political campaign….Which raise the question: Is their priority to win in Iraq – or in next year’s midterm elections?”

The Washington Post editorial concludes with the stark stakes:

“If there is to be any chance of that war being won, the United States will have to commit its own forces to the fight for years, though perhaps not at current levels. The alternative is to risk defeat that would be devastating to U.S. security. That’s a hard truth to face. It can’t be done amid a partisan free-for-all.”

That the United States can lose by war weariness may be the spoken consensus. That the United States can’t win is the largely unspoken undercurrent from, on the one hand, opponents of U.S. goals or defeatists at accomplishing anything noble or grand and, on the other hand, by retrospective analyses from those frustrated by slow, costly or incomplete results.

Those who would have the U.S. more or less quickly withdraw ignore that on the ground there the opposition is vastly weakened and the Iraqi capabilities increasing, although both positive trends are slow.

Beneath the heat of debate on whether or how much or how long the U.S. military should be engaged abroad, that is the dangerous weariness consensus emerging that too many are ignoring. Most responsible commentators and, more importantly, the bulk of Americans also recognize that we can’t win unless the Iraqis provide their halting progress toward their critical contribution.

Some who advocate an explicit timetable for withdrawal make the rational argument that it would motivate Iraqis to cooperate with each other more if they are less able to count on an American umbrella. What’s ignored is the rational conclusion that would be drawn by more Iraqis: accommodate and hedge to the invigorated insurgency.

What one analyst calls the “Three Year Rule” is what runs contrary to the impatience with the difficult process of developing the essential Iraqi contribution to their own security and stability. “In all of America’s wars, popular support for the war effort sharply declined after three years.” fn Further, even when ultimately victorious, we tend to withdraw to our own domestic interests, allowing freer reign to seeding future challenges to which we must respond. For example, the popular demands for immediate American demobilization after World War II contributed to a weaker post-war posture vis a vis the Soviet purposefulness in Europe, dominating the East, supporting civil strife in Greece or electoral thrusts in Italy and France.

Take all the heat, what the Washington Post calls the “demagoguery and name calling,” or the domestic electioneering, out of the national discussion and one is still left with this core issue.

America is neither a scheming imperium, as its most avid critics charge, nor an inept one, as those critical of reaching strawhorse standards of supposed U.S. efficiency charge. America is a reluctant imperium, at most, usually late to do so in hope of others acting, once conditions have worsened that make the job tougher, that at best can focus to apply its superior strength and wealth and then for too short a time relative to long-term problems.

Polls show about 19% of Americans in favor of an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Thus, the overwhelming majority of Americans recognize the perils. Meanwhile the pessimism, if not the willingness to yet withdraw, of liberal-centrist elites is much higher. Over time, the collapse of public opinion leaders – whether out of impatience with the ways of war, partisanship, or having other priorities -- does erode public support.

Overwhelmingly negative reporting, whether driven by contrary purpose, the news cycle, or ignorance, doesn’t help. Neither did the White House strategy of letting Iraq recede from its public utterances, expecting that would reduce the erosion of public support for the war, this tactic now belatedly abandoned in recognition of Democrats exploiting it to increase the volume and intemperance of their accusations for petty electoral gain.

Surely, we’re told, better planning for post-Saddam would have yielded less opposition and more reconstruction progress. The Pentagon does now recognize this, by elevating the role of “stability operations” in military planning, and this can only be helpful, particularly as State and other U.S. agencies have not been very useful. In another theatre, where they’ve led in reconstruction, a long established U.S. agency, the Agency for International Development, and conduits through established specialists in non-governmental organizations, has not yielded especially praiseworthy or effective results in Afghanistan.

Surely, particularly at first, a much larger U.S. occupying and pacifying armed force would have been at hand to counter the surprising to most size and determination of the insurgency. Still, the very asymmetry of guerrilla tactics would have been at play in its disruptiveness, and even the exceptional flexibility of U.S. military tacticians would still have been playing catch-up. And, the refusal of most Sunni to easily yield their decades of control over the majority Shia and Kurds would still have needed to be dissuaded by force and by the slow, painful process of building a new civic culture that had not existed before.

And, after a decade of spending the post-Cold War “peace dividend”, it takes a generation of far heavier spending and development to build the significantly larger armed forces that would have allowed a much larger force to be sent to Iraq. No one can rightly accuse Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld of being less than blunt in saying one fights with the military one has.

In other words, even if the U.S. had not committed the grave retrospective errors that most recognize, the U.S. would still have faced a large long term armed commitment.

Post-Vietnam, military strategists recognized the difficulty of sustaining public support for such long, painful commitments. The primary response was to lessen pressure from public opinion due to the draft bringing the commitment into most Americans’ homes, a more professionalized and lethal armed forces operating more purposefully to bring swift battlefield victory, and reducing costs and homefront peacetime pressures by shifting more reliance upon a more ready reserves.

Outside of that, no one has met or found the solution to the core dilemma of how to fight a necessarily long war. Regardless of how Iraq turns out, that will remain the core challenge facing America, Americans, and those who might ally with or depend upon us.

In all the brouhaha during the past month about Supreme Court nominee Miers, and the Congressional addiction to pork, the frustration by conservatives has been unleashed against those Republicans either less conservative-media party line, more liberal, or more focused on maintaining an electoral majority big tent to avoid more Democrat interference or retreat from our vital national security interests in adequately fulfilling our mission for a more benign MidEast. That immaturity of prioritization in the midst of a war, literally over time for the very survival of Western civilization, is both irresponsible and unhelpful toward unifying the majority behind the sacrifices and patience needed for the long war we are in and from which there is no escape or avoidance. The United States is center target.

There’s more to it than this, but even the strategically visionary Winston Churchill made many serious errors during World War II, and was turned out of office to be replaced by international weaklings at its end. War weariness and self-crippling divisiveness are nothing new, nor are the results.

Regardless of immediate electoral advantage, regardless of pettier frustrations, those who are responsible must focus on building greater unity of resolve, not on diminishing allies.

____________
footnote: See, John E. Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion. New York: Wiley, 1973, for analysis of American public opinion from World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam.

This report in The Buffalo News today might just qualify as the most worthless in media history. Maki Becker goes through the trouble of outlining the abject horror that many elderly Western New Yorkers must endure when it comes to criminals who prey upon them, but nowhere in the article does the author report on the most meaningful measure these folks can take for self-defense: possessing handguns.

In fact, Becker only mentions guns when reporting specific crimes committed against the elderly that have involved criminal misuse of firearms.

Early Wednesday in Cheektowaga, two robbers broke into an 80-year-old woman's home, cut her phone line and ransacked her house for hours. A month earlier on the same street, an 82-year-old man and his 72-year-old wife were the victims of a home-invasion robbery in which they were tied up and held at gunpoint for three hours until they told their captors where their money was.

Also on Wednesday, in Amherst, a 71-year-old man getting money out of an ATM machine at a bank on Kensington Avenue was robbed of $200 and his ATM card by a man holding a fake gun.

A week earlier, a 74-year-old Buffalo man was set upon by a gang of six to seven men armed with baseball bats on Gittere Street on the East Side. While they didn't use the bats on him, they punched him in the face and kicked him until a neighbor opened her door, prompting the assailants to flee.

This is only a sample, and you can read the rest of the article for yourself. But it's patently absurd that a reporter would go through the motions of detailing such horrendous displays of humanity without even bothering to cite any of the numerous statistics suggesting that the most effective mean of prevention of such atrocities in the first place is the legal possession of a handgun for self-defense.

Reporters everywhere love to talk about the various responsibilities private corporations have to the community, but it's apparently out of bounds to use the power of print if helping the public - in this case, saving lives - means suggesting politically incorrect solutions to our problems.

With "reporting" like this, the elderly can only expect further suffering.

Brilliant guerrilla misdirection is now revealed. Much of the world’s attention was distracted by Mao’s “Little Red Book,” waved by aspiring student ersatz revolutionaries to emphasize their seriousness at anti-Vietnam rock and folk rallies. The real handbook of how to defeat the United States was the 1954 bestseller by Leonard Wibberley, in 1959 made more popular by Peter Sellers with the movie version of “The Mouse That Roared.”

Read and watched around the world, a generation aroused from their own countries’ rulers self-imposed squalor and corruption, or aspiring to impose their own, adopted this ostensibly satirical work from Western cultural imperialism to lay the groundwork for the strategy of North Vietnam, al Quaeda, Baathist and radical Muslims to have their way.

The beneficence by the United States to its former World War II foes in rebuilding their war-shattered economies leads the Duchy of Grand Fenwick to declare war on the U.S. and invade Manhattan with some archers. Their objective? After the Duchy’s defeat it can also receive U.S. aid funds. By twist of fate, the archers arrive during an air raid drill, so are unopposed. They then capture a scientist with his super-lethal Q-bomb. Grand Fenwick proceeds to impose its will – fortunately benign -- upon the superpowers, to eliminate nuclear weapons.

The lesson of America’s ordinary good motives and rational conduct, of being unprepared for attack, of compromising or backing down against what appear as determined foes, was learned.

In a 1990 interview with historian Stanley Karnow, North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap failed to give credit to Wibberley and Sellers, but recognized their inspiration: “We were not strong enough to drive out a half-million American troops, but that wasn’t our aim. Our intention was to break the will of the American government to continue the war.” As an American ally, Mark Rudd, who led the Manhattan front at Columbia University, said recently, “We helped stop a war of aggression by our own country.”

Following the retreat from Beirut after bombing our Marines’ barracks, the tepid response to bombing our embassies in Africa and our warship in Yemen, and a decade of bluster without thorough follow-through in Iraq, what other lesson could al Quaeda and Saddam garner but that the U.S. could be faced down by a mouse in steroid rage.

To the surprise of both, and the surprise of Americans, the U.S. president elected by a cat’s whisker in 2000 isn’t playing by the mouse’s rules, and swatted them across the desert. Reelected by a larger margin in 2004, their hope was dashed for the kind of tamer puddie-tat in Washington to which they’d become previously accustomed.

After all, the other limpingly-left elite scaredy-cats liked their fellow feckless feline.
That same gang is around that for a generation played by the mouse’s game plan: the Kennedy-Kerry-academia brigade of buffoonery, treated seriously by their shills in media. And, they are enabled by the far left who consciously abet -- from Vietnam to today -- by denigrating the character of America and its servicepeople.

Nevermind, as in Vietnam, on the battlefield our foes are rooted out by our armed forces and increasingly irate and proficient Iraqis, that isn’t the warfront depended upon. It’s in Washington. Instead of seeking Western aid, they are enriched with our shiploads of dollars in return for their oil. And, enemies needn’t invade Manhattan to acquire the power of the big bomb to impose their will, less benign than the Fenwickians. Saddam almost did. The Iranians are close, and have the missile that can deliver it across the MidEast and most of Europe.

Hail Grand Fenwick!

There once was a time when it was easy for me to separate art from politics. But after 9/11 that all changed. I find that over the last four years I've made a conscious effort only to watch movies and television shows starring actors I can respect on a personal level: people like Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, Vince Vaughn, Gary Sinise.

Maybe I'm narrow-minded, maybe I'm not. But if it comes down to either George Clooney or Bruce Willis, it ain't even a competition.

The Club for Growth's Andy Roth has the scoop, and he's listed the names of 14 RINOs who voted against the spending cuts.

Interestingly, Andy wonders why Ron Paul, who's no moderate, voted against this bill. My guess is that the congressman from Texas didn't think cutting $49.5 billion from the fiscal year's $2.4 trillion tab was worth stripping provisions that would have allowed for crucial oil drilling in ANWR and the Gulf of Mexico.

If my math is correct, this bill, which should make any fan of limited government happy, still only cuts overall spending by a measly 2%. In other words, Rep. Paul may wish to avoid comparisons to late Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, who virtually gave away Babe Ruth to the Yankees in what would become one of the worst business decisions in history.

Former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's Foundation for Social Analysis and Studies issued an incredible report this week proposing that NATO re-align its mission for the 21st Century threat of terrorism. It's a report that should be heeded by the Department of Defense and the State Department.

His report is endorsed by the Committee on the Present Danger, of whom De