Mobilizing the nation in defense of America and our ideals is the #1 issue of our times. This conviction was the basis for the following essay, documenting lectures by Professor Gerald Matacotta that I wrote for the latest issue of Queens Village Eagle, invoking Lincoln and the Civil War as an appropriate parallel narrative for our times. It will be sent along with a memo from Professor Matacotta, from America’s oldest Republican Club, to the GOP presidential candidates to utilize a unique historical perspective in their campaigns and debates.
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The Peace Democrats and the Party of Lincoln

The War on Terror, or to be more precise, the war against Islamofascism is a war of bullets and a war of ideas. As Phillip Sica says in the Presidents Message on page 3, “Al Qaeda and its sympathizers are the ideological successors to the most dangerous tyrannies of the 20th century, Nazi fascism and Soviet communism.” We are winning the war militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan, but losing the war of ideas on the home front, where American strength and principles are being eroded in Congress on a daily basis. In resolution after resolution, proposal after proposal and speech after speech, the Pelosi-Reid Congress and Democratic presidential candidates have shown their determination to abandon Iraq and surrender to the jihadist enemies who are killing Iraqis and Americans in order to spread their medieval vision of Islam to the world.

In 2002, Congress voted unanimously for the authorization to use military force in Iraq. Senator John Kerry and other congressional Democrats made impassioned speeches supporting authorization. The battle to topple Saddam Hussein took three weeks but the War in Iraq turned out to be a longer, harder struggle than imagined. The next few years saw the increasing influence of anti-war extremist groups infiltrating the Democratic Party, which nudged them to change direction on the war, purge their ranks of pro-war voices, such as Joe Lieberman’s, and to resolve to swiftly end the war, withdraw the troops and even to oppose the successful troop surge, in order to accommodate their burgeoning sources of funds. The executive director of the radical peace group MoveOn.org revealed their financial control over the Democrats, boasting, "Now it's our party. We bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back." Showing allegiance to MoveOn, over their country’s military forces, Democratic candidates failed to distance themselves from the vile MoveOn ad smearing General David Petraeus as a traitor.

These are the “Peace” Democrats of today, cut from the same cloth as the Copperheads, the traitorous Northern Democrats, who sympathized with the South during the Civil War. At the last club meeting we were treated to a stirring address on “Lincoln and the Copperheads” by History Professor Gerald Matacotta, a speech that President Sica said must be documented and sent to the candidates. The Professor warned that history is repeating itself as the Democratic Party succumbs to the vocal influence of radical anti-war groups, and Copperhead traitors in Congress emerge. To win the War in Iraq, we need to go back to the time of Lincoln and revive the founding principles of our nation.

The events of the Civil War run parallel with the War in Iraq starting with the short lived optimism after the easy capture of Baghdad. Originally seen as a rebellion by Confederate insurgents that would be easily put down by Federal armies, Northerners were distressed to find that the war was going to be a much longer, and bloodier struggle than they imagined, after the devastating defeat of the North in the first Battle of Bull Run. After continuous bitter defeats over the next few years, Union victory seemed impossible and two separate nations appeared to be the likely outcome. An unpopular war and an even more unpopular President were reflected by such quotes from editorials in the New York Times: “Of what use are all these terrible sacrifices? Shall we have nothing but defeat to show for all our valor?”* The Copperheads, or Peace Democrats, came out like venomous snakes to strike the nation without warning. They sought to compromise with the South to end the war. Some declared the war was illegal and un-winnable. Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham, an outspoken Copperhead, sought peace at any cost even advocating dialogue with Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, to end the madness of “thirty millions butchering each other.” Even after the turning point at the battle of Antietam in 1862 and victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg the following year, the Peace Democrats declared the war a failure and demanded immediate efforts to bring the troops home without the restoration of the United States.

After Lincoln was elected to his second term in 1864, the Union armies victorious, and the healing process began, the Democrats were defeated at the polls for the next 50 years, failing to get a presidential candidate elected until Woodrow Wilson. The Peace Democrats of today are in the same precarious position. They are aware that if we win in Iraq, they will lose power perhaps for decades to come. Democrat House Majority Whip James Clyburn confessed that a positive report from General Petraeus “would be a real big problem for us.” Entrenched in a ‘peace at any cost’ platform due to dependence on financial support from anti-war groups, they have put partisan politics over the best interests of their country. Investing their political careers in our military defeat in Iraq, they have surrendered to the terrorists and broadcast the collapse of American strength and principles to the free world.

According to Professor Matacotta history holds all the answers to this shameful state of affairs. First we need to rise above partisan politics. Democratic candidate Stephen Douglas opposed Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860, but he became Lincoln’s greatest ally after the Civil War broke out. Famed as a brilliant orator from the Lincoln Douglas debates, he now campaigned vociferously to rally the northern Democrats to the Union cause. Urging the Democrats to forget about politics, he explained why country must be placed over party, delivering the message: “There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots – or traitors.” Our country is now in a war and can no longer be divided into two political parties, Democrat or Republican, or imaginary red or blue states. We are either patriots or traitors.

Next, all Americans, not only our troops need to make sacrifices. Lincoln expressed the need to sacrifice lives not only on the battlefield in order to save the nation, but also to suspend our civil liberties in time of war. The traitorous Vallandigham was arrested along with anti-war legislators and pro-Confederate editors, and newspapers that gave away military secrets were seized. Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus empowering military authorities to arrest civilians suspected of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, without specifying charges. To some the Patriot Act and the detention of prisoners at Guantanamo are unlawful, but in Lincoln’s time as in America today, these extraordinary measures would cease with the conclusion of the war and a “more perfect union” would be restored. There will be no constitution or freedom if we lose the War on Terror.

Finally we have to drive home the principles we are fighting for. After the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, casualties on both sides numbered almost 50,000. Lincoln came to Gettysburg Cemetery and honored those who died on the battlefield, that they did not die in vain. He proclaimed the “new birth of freedom” they fought and died for, in the stirring words of the Gettysburg Address. Now Anbar Province in Iraq is the scene of a military victory and the expulsion of al Qaeda. It is a victory for freedom and democracy for the citizens of Iraq and the free world. The death of thousands of Iraqis and American soldiers has not been in vain. Neither was the tragic murder of Sheikh Abu Risha, a courageous tribal sheikh who sided with American forces in order to run al Qaeda out of Anbar. Although we can never repay the loss, “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced” as Lincoln stated at Gettysburg. The unfinished work is the “new birth of freedom” and democracy in the midst of tyranny in the Middle East, which we must continue to build.

* Steven M. Gillon, 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), p. 80

I admit to not blogging much on the site out of disappointment for the American Democracy Project -- for the failure by America's leaders to recognize the importance of establishing governments in the Middle East and elsewhere that promote self-rule (best embodied in the candidates for the Democratic Party's nominees for president), and the failure by the Bush Administration to get this effort right.

As a strong supporter of the Administration's effort to promote democracy globally, but yet a reluctant skeptic about how it has chosen to do it (more on this below), I have turned to books such as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Age of Jackson for insight on how the Bush Administration and its intellectual supporters, such as this site, in the future can promote policies that will lead to peace, prosperity, and self-government in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Interestingly, in the closing paragraphs of The Age of Jackson, Schlesinger -- who is widely considered one the great thinkers of American liberalism -- states the following, which would seem to contradict the current worldview by the realist naysayers in the Democratic Party and their strange Paleo-Conservative bedfellows about the Bush Administration's efforts to promote democracy in Iraq:

"The Jacksonian attitude presumes a perpetual tension in society, a doubtful equilibrium, constantly breeding strife and struggle: it is, in essence, a rejection of easy solutions, and for this reason it is not always popular. One of the strongest pressures toward the extremes, whether of socialism or of conservatism, is the security from conflict they are supposed to insure (ed. note a good example of this is outlined here in a review of a book by conservative theorist Russell Kirk). But one may wonder whether a society which eliminated struggle would possess much liberty (or even much stability). Freedom does not last long when bestowed above. It lasts only when it is arrived at competitively, out of the determination of groups which demand it as a general rule in order to increase the opportunities for themselves. To some the picture may not be consoling. But world without conflict is the world of fantasy; and practical attempts to realize society without conflict by confiding power to a single authority have generally resulted in producing a society where the means of suppressing conflict are rapid and efficient.

"'Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself,' said Jefferson. 'Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him?' 'The unfortunate thing,' adds Pascal, 'is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.' The great tradition of American liberalism regards man as neither brute nor angel."

It's true that conflict is endemic to democracies, particularly democracies in their infancy. Remember the Jacobins of the French Revolution? While the great conservative thinker Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France expressed grave doubts about democracy after witnessing the crude events of the French Revolution, I would encourage the modern leaders of the Democratic Party to follow in the intellectual footsteps of Schlesinger and recognize that matters in Iraq and Afghanistan are not going to be perfect overnight. On the flip-side, the Bush Administration should not have been making statements that American boots on the ground would be viewed as liberators, when there was plenty of social science thinking that tipped us off to the fact that America would not be viewed as liberators inside a predominantly Muslim country. Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington writes in his classic, yet very controversial book, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order:

"In the post-Cold War world, the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural . . . People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations."

As evidence of this, Huntington notes:

"On April 18, 1994, two thousand people rallied in Sarajevo waving the flags of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. By flying those banners, instead of U.N., NATO, or American flags, these Sarajevans identified themselves with their fellow Muslims and told the world who were their real and not-so-real friends."

Perhaps what is needed is a dose of realism by both parties: the Democrats need to recognize that just because there is conflict in Iraq does not mean that progress isn't being made, nor that the citizenry there was better off under Saddam. On the other hand, those of us considered neo-conservatives should realize that men are not angels, and that perhaps Huntington was and is right about the fact that people across the globe are self-identifying with tribal affiliations, and cultural traditions, rather than embracing Western modernity.

Contrast the statements made by Schlesinger in The Age of Jackson to the statements made by some of Schlesinger's modern-day equivalents:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: "I believe ... that this war [in Iraq] is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week," Reid told journalists last April.

Party Chairman Howard Dean: "President Bush couldn't be more wrong," said Dean. "Last week, our own intelligence agencies reported that after Bush's escalation of the war in Iraq six months ago, violence remains high, sectarian conflict is raging, and the Iraqi government is failing to make political progress. American troops are doing their jobs honorably but it's up to the Iraqis, not the U.S. military, to achieve political progress in Iraq.

"The fact of the matter is the war in Iraq has diverted attention from the real war on terror, making America less safe and giving Al Qaeda time to rebuild. It is time for President Bush and his Republican allies to take a hard look at the situation in Iraq, listen to the will of the American people, and change course. But if they refuse to do so, electing a Democratic President next year will be the only way to end the Republicans' failed Iraq policy."

Senator and Leading Presidential Contender Hillary Clinton: Today President Bush will speak once again to the nation about Iraq. Our message to the President is clear: it is time to begin ending this war. Not next year, not next month, but today. We have heard for years that as the Iraqis stand up, our troops will stand down. Every year we hear about how next year, they may start coming home. Now we are hearing a new version of that very familiar song from the President. He claims that we can, with slight adjustments, stay the course."

It's time for Democrats to actually stand by their namesake and believe in democracy as suggested by the quote from Schlesinger. It may be messy and untidy, but all persons have the right to self-government. The question of course, is what is the proper role of the United States in promoting such an effort. As the bill for the War in Iraq's bill exceeds $200 billion with the next supplemental budget request by the President, perhaps we should ask whether if we had spent that same amount on a campaign to support the peaceful toppling of totalitarian regimes in countries like Iraq, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere, whether we would have better success. This is the theory behind this blog's Advisory Board Member Mark Palmer's book, Breaking the Real Axis of Evil, and the ADVANCE Democracy Act (which was inspired by Mark's book) now being considered in Congress. The purpose of the ADVANCE Act, which I co-authored, is to make the State Department's primary mission the support of peaceful efforts to topple totalitarian regimes worldwide by giving them the tools necessary to create a groundswell of popular support: through television ads, underground newspapers, websites, etc.

One of the problems in Iraq, is the United States did not have anybody it could trust when in came time to hand over the reins of government to the Iraqis. By supporting democratic movements across the globe, there will be a natural and inevitable leader to step in and run the country, just as there was in the Czech Republic with Vaclav Havel, and the same is true with Poland and the ascendency of Lech Walesa to the presidency in that country.

If the Democrats want to live up to their namesake and the great traditions of American liberalism, as embodied in Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson, then these candidates would be well-served by advocating the reduction in numbers of totalitarian regimes globally. The ADVANCE Democracy Act is the perfect way for Democrats to live up to their values of support for basic human rights and peace, while promoting America's security.

The debate over enlargement of the federal SCHIP program -- which adds funds to enroll more children and adults in government programs through relaxing income standards -- has not engaged a core issue that should be addressed: Differences in costs of living do vary widely, in large part due to state government actions. But, higher than federal poverty level costs of living are so widespread that the Bush administration is on the losing side of the argument, as evidenced by the large majority of Congress supporting the enlargement.

The administration’s arguments have correctly revolved around budget affordability, subsidizing a shift of many who ostensibly can afford it from self-responsibility for coverage to subsidized government-care, and the intent of many supporters to use SCHIP as a step toward nationalized health care. However, these more technical points pale compared to the more rousing argument by SCHIP enlargement proponents that many in America are economically struggling at working and even middle class income levels, while facing escalating health care premiums.

The detail at issue is whether those families earning 200%, 250%, 300%, or 400% of poverty level should be included in the federal SCHIP program, which provides about two-thirds of SCHIP’s funding. In most states, 200% or 250% of federal poverty level is a minimally adequate income level for a family. However, the substantially higher cost of living in coastal California, the Northeast corridor, and some other cities requires a higher minimal income, and these areas contain most of our population. Although some higher-cost states can and have received dispensation for a higher cut-off, the SCHIP enlargement proponents want all states to have a higher cut-off. The administration is left holding the bag for a drier accountant’s posture based upon national averages that is overwhelmed by the number of Americans in higher-cost areas.

In the face of federal spending on many other domestic programs increased significantly during the past decade, including for health care, and other middle and upper-class tax subsidies, as for the mortgage deduction, the accountant’s posture is further weakened. The matter of state responsibility for increased costs of living is barely mentioned in the debate, and probably wouldn’t get much resonance, as the causes are many and often technical. The vastly enlarged role of the federal government in more and more spheres of our lives hasn’t been a serious issue among our politicians for the past generation.

Too late in the debate, and weakly, the administration’s supporters pushed less excessive remedies, more targeted to those actually in need. They are, again, correct, and there may be just enough members of the House – 1/3rd – to sustain a presidential veto.

Nonetheless, the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress were not focused or united earlier in pushing these remedies, and now Republican electoral prospects and our national economics are to pay the price to the opportunity for irresponsible grandstanding by ascendant Democrats and pass-the-buck governors.

UPDATE:
See David Brooks NYT’s column, “Leave it to the entitlement people,”

The S-chip bill takes money from these relatively poor, politically immobilized people and shifts it to those making up to $62,000 a year. Nobody is raising a tax on wine consumption or gasoline consumption to pay for this benefit. Instead, Congress is taxing the weakest possible group in order to shift benefits to others, some of whom are middle class.

There’s always been trickery in budgeting and sin taxes are far from new, but somehow over the decades there’s been a revolution in morals. Deficits, obfuscations and trickeries that were once unthinkable are now the norm.

Below is a press release from the Middle East Forum, of which Campus Watch, which I direct, is a project. Please send this notice to anyone you think might be interested. Like Democracy Project, the Forum advocates for a reasoned approach to the topics it addresses, and promotes American interests in the Middle East.

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Press Release
Middle East Quarterly Student Writing Contest
September 28, 2007

The Middle East Quarterly is pleased to announce the Albert J. Wood Student Writing Contest. It will award $1,000 for the best university student writing in Middle East studies in a given year, plus the opportunity to be published in the journal.

The contest is named after Albert J. Wood, the founding chairman of the Middle East Forum who had a special connection to the Quarterly.
What the Quarterly Seeks

The Quarterly covers a geographic area from Morocco to Afghanistan but concentrates on the area from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. It seeks to bridge the academic and policymaking worlds. Articles should be both relevant to policymakers and break new ground intellectually. This implies a tension: articles need to be cutting edge (to interest the specialist) and accessible (to attract the general reader). They should be scholarly, yet written clearly, and with a point of view. The thesis should be advanced through reasoned argument rather than bellicose prose. For a full explanation of MEQ objectives, see Author Submission Guidelines on the MEQ website.
Submissions

Submissions should be original, unpublished work of 4,000-7,000 words with full scholarly references.

Entrants must be full-time undergraduate, graduate, or professional (law, medicine, etc.) school students, and must provide proof of full-time status.

Please submit your article as an MS Word document or in Rich Text Format. Please do not submit a PDF or hard copy.

E-mail submissions by midnight May 31, 2008, to the editors at MEQ@MEForum.org. Please enter "Student Writing Contest" in the subject line.
Prizes

* First: $1,000 plus publication in the Middle East Quarterly
* One-year subscriptions to the Middle East Quarterly for five runners up.

No, it’s not one of George Carlin’s. The word is “rationing.”

At the core of the debates over healthcare in the United States, those who argue for some version of a national health care scheme, while promising all sorts of illusory cost advantages, are really pushing rationing of health care.

Britain’s National Health Service, according to a survey of readers of Doctor magazine, is increasingly relying upon rationing.

Rationing of NHS treatments is becoming more widespread, a survey of GPs and hospital doctors suggests.

Doctor magazine asked readers about rationing. Of 653 answering questions on consequences, 107 - 16% - said patients had died early as a result.

More than half - 349 - said patients had suffered as a result. This compared with one in five in a similar survey conducted nine years ago….

Dr Michael Dixon, chairman of the NHS Alliance, which represents NHS trusts, added: "Rationing is the great unspoken reality.

"The only people who refuse to mention the 'r-word' are the media and the politicians, who continue to want to promise everything for everyone in order to win elections."

It’s much the same on this side of the Atlantic. Has anyone heard any politician lay out the facts that we have a choice between widely getting the best of medical care, which costs plenty and will continue to, or instead rationing care?

The U.S.’s Kaiser Foundation published a report on health care costs last August, that deserves much wider distribution and discussion.

U.S. health costs are high and rising due to the U.S. being wealthier than other countries, which leads to higher consumption and to increased costly technological advances, our population is aging, insurance coverage has increased dramatically over the past 40-years, and Americans have less personal stake in healthcare costs as their share of out-of-pocket costs has declined from 40% in 1970 to 15% in 2005.

If no one making promises dare speak the word, it won’t make the dire realities of rationing go away.

UPDATE: USEFUL DISTINCTIONS
Don Luskin, SmartMoney columnist, economics blogger extraodinairre at Conspiracy To Keep You Poor And Stupid, initiator of yours truly into blogging, and valued corrector of my and others’ loose language, just emailed me this comment:

Actually, these schemes promise GOVERNMENT RATIONING as opposed to MARKET or PRICE RATIONING.

All scarce things, that is, anything of value, is rationed somehow. It’s just a question of how.

The advocates of nationalized health care want it rationed by bureaucratic fiat. Free-market people want it rationed by price.

But lest this make it seem as though the two positions are equal, consider that in the former doctors are slaves and in the latter they are merchants.

I replied,

Correct distinction.
With one further: Doctors aren't just merchants, but also experts, and they're face-to-face with the patient. Bureaucrats are neither.

San Francisco, through which hundreds of thousands passed in World War II to the Pacific’s bloody battles, now doesn’t have space either for the USS Iowa, which it refused in 2005 to provide anchorage for a naval museum, and is moving toward exiling the Blue Angels from its skies, nor now for the U.S. Marine Corps’ world famous silent drill team to film.

The Bay Area’s ABC affiliate reports that San Francisco’s film commission Executive Director, Stefanie Coyote, denied permission for the drill team to film a recruiting commercial. She claimed that it would interrupt traffic.

Police Captain Greg Corralles, who commands the traffic bureau that works with crews filming commercials, reminds Ms. Coyote that, “the Film Commission often approves shoots for rush hour.” Corrales, a Marine veteran and father of a son serving his fourth tour in Iraq, adds of Ms. Coyote’s action, “It’s insulting, it’s demeaning.” Corrales also said that, "Ms. Coyote's politics blinded her to her duty as the director of the Film Commission and as a responsible citizen."

Instead,

The U.S. Marine Silent Drill Platoon performed Monday morning in New York's Times Square. They filmed part of a recruitment commercial through the start of the morning rush hour -- something they could not do in San Francisco on the anniversary of 9/11.

Stefanie Coyote’s stellar background as an actress in Village of the Damned seems appropriate to her current behavior, as is her marriage to anarchic actor (now enjoying suburban comforts outside San Francisco) Peter Coyote whose view of America expressed in his piece in the January 2004 marijuana magazine High Times she seems to echo.

Not only did we as a generation not stop Imperialism and unfettered capitalism, but, we have been surrounded, seduced, subsumed, and sucked off, to some degree or another, by materialism on a global scale.
…
If today’s outlaws have any task clearly before them, it is to use their wits, skills, anarchic energy and passion to stop those so hypnotized by power and greed from perpetuating this ‘death-producing’culture.

The costs of filming in San Francisco has decimated its once thriving cinema industry. Sanity now also gone, the Coyotes gnaw on the remains of its credibility or respectability.

Vietnam passions ran high in the mid-1960’s when I attended the then highly-ranked, and needless to say predominantly liberal, Brooklyn College of C.U.N.Y. Nonetheless, there was a community that took a broad common liberal arts curriculum, delving into basic texts and knowledge. Political disagreements were strong but civil, the right of all to speak being without question. The most popular prof of the History of Economic Theory was an open Marxist, who was respected for his proven depth of knowledge and fair presentations.

Santa Cruz is a pleasant town, south of San Jose, and home to a University of California campus. It’s often jokingly called a cultural throwback to the ‘60’s.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, compared to today, as an editorial in its newspaper just demonstrated, “As We See It: Campuses hurt by elitists.” While strongly disagreeing with those on the Right who may exaggerate the campus’ leftward tilt, the Santa Cruz Sentinel says,

UC Regents this week rescinded a speaking invitation from former Harvard President Lawrence Summers after a group of UC professors signed a petition protesting his appearance.

This is what higher education comes down to here in 2007: if a self-appointed cabal of elitists whose leftist views differ with others, they spring into action to deny people the right to speak….

But others now don't think that Summers has the right to even speak before the regents at a dinner.

Even some of those who opposed Summers at Harvard are aghast at the UC reaction. According to the Harvard Crimson newspaper, professor Judith Ryan — a critic of Summers — said the authors of the petition "have fallen prey to a simplification that became widespread in media reports... . [W]e should be able to listen to views with which we don't agree, and to debate them in a civil way."

As we non-academics say: "Duh."

Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of our country, our society and, at one time, on our college campuses. Sadly, that's no longer the case….

This is not a tough one. Those who live a life of the brain owe the world a free-flowing exchange of ideas. From the left. From the right. From wherever.

The self-appointed cabals are playing with fire. They make a good living from taxpayers who are willing pay big dollars to keep our universities thriving.

But they won't thrive much longer if they continue with their politically correct censorship.

Former Harvard arts and sciences and now George Mason law professor Peter Berkowitz wrote an important piece recently, “Our Compassless Colleges.” (Behind Wall Street Journal subscription wall, but available here.) He decries the substitution of fragmented values-driven multidisciplinary liberal arts curriculums and of ethnic curriculums for primary introduction to the basics, particularly in the humanities. The weak foundation provided by lack of a common core curriculum in the basics encourages partisan approaches to knowledge. Berkowitz says:

Such a core is at best an introduction to liberal education. Still, students who meet its requirements will acquire a common intellectual foundation that enables them to debate morals and politics responsibly, enhances their understanding of whatever specialization they choose, and enriches their appreciation of the multiple dimensions of the delightful and dangerous world in which we live….

Admittedly, reform confronts formidable obstacles. The major one is professors. Many will fight such a common core, because it requires them to teach general interest classes outside their area of expertise; it reduces opportunities to teach small boutique classes on highly specialized topics; and it presupposes that knowledge is cumulative and that some books and ideas are more essential than others.

One of the areas of conflict on campuses revolves around outside challenges to some of those professors who are particularly blatant in their partisanship in the classroom, or whose credentials and writings are particularly flaky. Some within academia resent such challenges, and countercharge that they are immune to outside criticism. A focal point is in many campuses' Middle East studies departments.

Daniel Pipes, founder of Middle East Forum and of Campus Watch, replies:

Academics criticized by Campus Watch generally respond by calling it names, caricaturing its purpose, and presenting themselves as victims, hoping thereby to render our work illegitimate. Remarkably, I recall not a single case when the meticulously documented and mildly presented work of Campus Watch has met with a serious and substantive rebuttal. So much for the marketplace of ideas….

That said, the field's basic problems remain in place: analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students….

We’ve come a long way from the ‘60’s campuses I knew, to one I don’t want to know, but must since my sons will face them, and I will financially pay heavily and our civil society sadly for that privilege. What happens on campus does not and cannot stay on campus.

My friend Larry Bailey wrote the below after-action report on his organization’s week in Washington, D.C. The Gathering Of Eagles and other patriotic organizations countered the failed culmination to the Left’s so-called “Iraq summer” meant to undermine America’s support for success in Iraq. Bailey, a retired Navy Captain, former Commanding Officer of the Naval Special Warfare Center, where SEALs undergo training, demonstrates why no one can beat a SEAL. You'll also note that no one can beat a man with a hearty sense of humor. Here’s the after-action report:

Gathering of Eagles (GOE), a 501(c)(4) organization, was formed earlier this year to counter the influence of leftist organizations trying to force the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. It has just completed a major effort to meet and combat A.N.S.W.E.R., the principal anti-Iraq War group, both in the streets of Washington and on Capitol Hill.

GOE first conducted “Task Force Eagle,” a combined press conference/congressional visit, on Monday, 9/10, which perfectly coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before Congress. The press conference was attended by CNN, NBC, the Washington Post, and others, and the resulting coverage was eminently fair (for a change).

From that event, the thirty or so Eagle participants spread out to visit congressional and senatorial offices in an effort to encourage troop-supporting officials, and some 86 offices were visited. GOE personnel had extremely productive meetings with Senators Lieberman and McConnell in their offices, where both men expressed their appreciation for what GOE continues to do to support the troops and their missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Friday, 9/14, Eagles assembled on Georgia Avenue outside the entrance to Walter Reed Army Hospital, where they vociferously supported the wounded troops and hounded the handful of bedraggled Code Pink demonstrators standing in the next block.

GOE III, the third Eagles assembly in Washington this year, was held on the morning of 9/15 on the National Mall, where an enthusiastic crowd heard patriotic music and a dozen inspirational speakers before dispersing to their pre-planned “haranguing positions” along three blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue, where they waited patiently for the much-delayed A.N.S.W.E.R. march to Capitol Hill for its much-heralded die-in.

Its 10,000 or so marchers were preceded by a hardy band of GOE heralds warning onlookers that they were about to observe leftist marchers trying to undermine the morale of American troops in combat. These Eagles were successful in mocking the protestors all the way to the foot of Capitol Hill, and the marchers did not appreciate their company.

The Eagles on the sidewalks on both sides of the march taunted the leftists without mercy, and there were several near-punch-ups along the route. A Blue Star mother, pushed by a belligerent leftist female, punched out that unlucky individual! (Names are withheld to protect the guilty.)

To state that GOE interfered with A.N.S.W.E.R.’s attempt to influence the Iraq War debate would be to grossly understate the case. Along with sister organizations like Move America Forward, Protest Warrior, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, Familes United, and others, GOE hounded Cindy Sheehan and her minions every step of the way, much to the latter’s displeasure.

The much-ballyhooed A.N.S.W.E.R. “die-in” turned out to be laughable, as GOE aided the Capitol Police in forcing the “dying” from their intended “graveyard” to a paved area well away from their selected site.

On Saturday night, a group of Eagle activists led by National Director Chris Hill paid a visit to Code Pink’s DC headquarters, where Chris literally knocked on the door and confronted Medea Benjamin, the hard-core communist co-founder of that group of harridans. To say that Chris gave better than he took is highly accurate, although quotes would be inappropriate in this medium. Suffice it to say that Miss Medea is unlikely to send a Christmas card to Chris!

Having learned that Code Pink, an A.N.S.W.E.R. constituent and radical-left organization, was going to picket NBC’s DC headquarters to protest Senator John McCain’s appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning, 9/16, thirty or so Eagles and Protest Warriors assembled on Nebraska Avenue outside NBC to neutralize their efforts.

Doubtless because Code Pink learned of the pro-troop opposition, they did not show, so the latter spent a great couple of hours waving flags and showing GOE and “support-the-troops” signs to passersby. Not a single thumbs-down or negative signal was observed by participants; contrarily, many drivers waved, rendered thumbs-up signals, and leaned on their horns in support of the Eagles.

Senator McCain, who was debating Senator Kerry on the Iraq War inside the studio, emerged and warmly greeted and complimented the Eagles on what they were doing. Some ten minutes later John Kerry’s SUV came up the NBC driveway and stopped at the entrance to Nebraska Avenue. Not expecting to see Kerry, an Eagle suddenly realized that Kerry was literally one foot away from him, whereupon he did what many red-blooded Americans would do, given the same opportunity: he fired “The Bird” at the not-so-good senator!

Kerry’s vehicle turned left on Nebraska and was about thirty yards down the street when he noticed several GOE ladies innocently waving flags and showing their signs on the curb. Kerry did what any America-hating leftist senator would do--he raised his middle finger in their direction! His action was a repeat performance of his response to a group of anti-Kerry activists (and current Eagles) in Florida in 2006. He is a master of the digital put-down.

Given that Eagles’ work is never done, some fifteen of them launched a recruiter-protection mission on Monday, 9/16, when A.N.S.W.E.R. announced that they were going to do something that would get them arrested at the DC Recruiting District Headquarters on L Street downtown. Led by a couple of Iraq Veterans against the War, the leftists failed to get through GOE’s lines, which were behind a formidable police presence. They finally gave up and went away, leaving GOE’s forces in control of the field. Deborah King-Lile, Florida GOE Coordinator, led the effort with determination and force.

A perfect ten days of pro-America activism was climaxed on Tuesday, 9/17, when a number of Eagles joined Vets for Freedom, Families United, Blue Star Mothers, Gold Star parents, and others for breakfast on the South Lawn of the White House. President Bush spent at least two hours mingling with the crowd and having his photo taken with hundreds of individuals.

Jim Diehl, Eagle extraordinaire from Belize, Central America, greeted the president with a handshake, a GOE patch, and a GOE challenge coin fabricated from a 1923 US silver dollar. Mr. Bush told Jim that he knew of GOE and really appreciated what they were doing.

Gathering of Eagles finished the campaign with a declaration of victory, as A.N.S.W.E.R. was vigorously opposed in a most public manner. GOE will be back in DC or anywhere else any time Cindy Sheehan shows her face.

Take a look at GOE: http://gatheringofeagles.org. Get involved!

While the major media gave plaudits to Congress passing a Potemkin ethics reform bill, which still shelters from public view and allows the potentially corrupting and often wasteful personal earmarks add-ons to funding bills, flying beneath the media’s sensitivity to corruption are the new Democrat majority’s turning away from government investigations of charities’ and unions’ abuse of their contributors’ funds.

In 2006, Democrat Senator Max Baucus assumed chair of the Senate Finance Committee. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports on an August interview that “he does not give high priority to cracking down on charitable abuses or imposing new regulations on nonprofit groups such as hospitals.” Senator Baucus told the Chronicle, “That’s not at the top of my list…I haven’t got time.” Charity abuse had been a priority of his predecessor, Republican Senator Charles Grassley.

Similarly, the Chronicle reports that the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight chair, former civil rights marcher Georgia Democrat John Lewis, “dropped that investigative theme [what nonprofits do to “help the poor and elderly”] in favor of generally lightweight discussion topics.”

Similarly, again, the Department of Labor’s Office of Labor Management Standards, which investigates union financial malfeasance, and which found much, had its already relatively miniscule budget trimmed from a recommended $57-million to $45-million.

Contributors to charities and to union coffers through dues deserve better, as do taxpayers who are expected by Democrats in Congress to pay more to offset the tax revenue losses caused by abuse of tax-exempt status by some organizations.

A Republican controlled Congress imposed multi-billion costs upon private industry in Sarbanes-Oxley, to prevent corruption. The Democrat controlled Congress stands in stark contrast regarding its constituencies and campaign contributors.

From the beginning, I’ve been highly skeptical of the charges against the Marine squad involved in Haditha killings. At the least, the “evidence” highlighted in the media’s initial rush to judgment appeared clearly tainted or ambiguous. So far, this has been borne out by the Article 32 hearings, the hearing officers’ reports, and the decisions by LtGen Mattis to dismiss charges against several.

On the other hand, I’ve pointed out that the Marine Corps takes leadership responsibilities very seriously, that both the Marine Corps and LtGen Mattis lead in taking the “softer” side of counterinsurgency seriously in dealing with the local population, and some Marines in leadership positions may be more harshly judged for deemed failures of follow-up. Thus far, although I’d doubt that the charges against LtCol Chessani would survive a court martial, he is the sole Marine recommended to proceed to court martial. LtGen Mattis hasn’t yet decided.

In a similar vein, the hearing report hasn’t yet been issued for SSgt Wuterich, whether he is to be recommended to proceed to court martial.

The reason to suspend premature expectation that Chessani and Wuterich may not proceed to court martial is that LtGen Mattis was central to the action by the Department of the Navy to censure three senior officers for failure to quickly investigate the incident. Also, yesterday’s dismissal of charges against the company commander in return for immunity in testifying at others’ proceedings may indicate that more proceedings are to be expected.

Contrary to this speculation, however, these may only indicate that the Marine Corps and LtGen Mattis make a distinction between command reporting and investigation responsibilities and the battle itself, and make a distinction between the responsibilities of more senior and junior Marines, and demonstrate that Marine justice is clear headed and self-responsible.

In either case, the fact-finding integrity of the Marine Corps senior leadership is without question, compared to the spectacle of Congressman Murtha’s defamatory statements against all Marines involved at Haditha and his now refusal to even retrospectively recant or temper his extremist accusation.

Hillary Clinton’s latest campaign pledge on health care reform is another of the chicken-in-every-pot variety we get from almost all politicians: Everyone in the United States will have top-flight, affordable medical care and it won’t cost us more (unless one includes taxpayers, and those deemed “affluent” by Democrat standards).

This Plan covers every American - finally addressing the needs of the 47 million uninsured and the tens of millions of workers with coverage who fear they could be one pink slip away from losing their health coverage - with no overall increase in health spending or taxes.

She proposes tax subsidies to individuals and small employers to offset the costs of insurance, which will be required of all. She doesn’t mention the high penalties that would be needed to enforce mandated coverage.

She proposes that Bush’s tax cuts be rolled back, but doesn’t mention the corresponding roll back in productivity and tax revenues that results from reduced incentive to succeed.

She proposes expansion of existing government programs to guaranteed coverage for all, but doesn’t mention that the states that have instituted guaranteed coverage regardless of health condition, and community rating to provide the same premium regardless of age, location or condition, have seen sharp escalation in premiums for the younger and healthier, increased government costs, and have not reduced the number of uninsured. (See this multi-year study.)

She proposes that costs of health care won’t increase because she will accomplish more than the current major efforts to increase efficiencies and effectiveness of health care delivery:

Most Savings Come Through Lowering Spending Due to Quality and Modernization: Over half the savings come from the public savings generated from Senator Clinton’s broader agenda to modernize the heath systems and reduce wasteful health spending.

She proposes that all this will not come at increased government regulation, but ignores that her proposals would gut the private insurance industry while placing the remainder under tight government controls, in effect establishing a semi-private sham for nationalized health care.

She, also, doesn’t mention the uniformity, sluggishness in keeping abreast of the latest developments and the squelching of the incentives to develop them, and ultimately treatment rationing that is inevitable when the overwhelming costs come due of the promises.

But, by then, the promises' hollowness although seen and suffered will be virtually irreversible as the private market no longer exists.

Oh, and she doesn’t mention that her and others’ figure of 47-million uninsured is inflated by at least double, as it includes a majority who are here illegally or who can afford coverage but choose not to be self-responsible.

Even nationalized health care apologist Ezra Klein notes that all her promises almost sound like she “washes your car.”

The devil will be in the details, if Hillary, and others, ever get down to presenting complete honest analyses rather than stump rhetoric.

Hillary keeps repeating the word “choice” in describing her plan. The New York Times' politics blog comments:

Her choice of words also reflects her evolution and her recognition that she needs to appeal to a broad spectrum of people who don’t want their most personal decisions to be decided for them, and to try to assuage (or at least hold at bay) some critics. The “choice” word will be perceived as code, in an effort to address the absolute balking of people who don’t want their personal physicians — even in the wake of health-maintenance organizations and beyond — taken from them.

Over at the blog of Campus Watch, I've taken note of a remarkably sloppy post by Marjorie Cohn, the president of the National Lawyers Guild.

Writing at Huffington Post in defense of Erwin Chemerisnky, the once, past, and future dean of the new law school at the University of California, Irvine, Cohn makes several erroneous charges against Campus Watch, ACTA, and other organizations, and I rebut them. Cohn assumes more than she knows about CW and ACTA, and she gets it wrong time and again.

Worse than Cohn's left-liberalism is the intellectual carelessness exhibited in her post. With only a modicum of research, she could have avoided her errors, which include charging that CW blacklists professors (no); she is also apparently ignorant of ACTA's defense of Chemerinsky--a defense that did more to ensure his eventual appointment than anything Cohn did.

And, as I note at CW, if this is typical of her legal work, I'd rather act in my own defense in a court of law than rely on her to represent me as my attorney.

The tenure battle of Nadia Abu El-Haj, an assistant anthropology professor at Barnard College, has been heating up in the New York news media recently, although no one outside the hallowed walls of Morningside Heights seems to know what is really happening. Karen Arenson, the education writer for the New York Times, discusses the warring camps of Barnard alumni and outsiders, on the one hand, claiming that El-Haj’s scholarship is shoddy, politically driven and based on misrepresentation of data, while on the other hand, supporters charge that she is the target of an “’orchestrated witch hunt’ by those trying to shut down legitimate intellectual inquiry.” Arenson also quotes outgoing Barnard President Judith Shapiro stoically defending the secretive tenure process stating: “This case will be no different, both in its rigor and freedom from outside lobbying.”

The other day, a news story in the New York Sun, highlighted the protests against El-Haj’s tenure bid and the hysterical reaction from her supporters. Professor Laurie Brand, former Middle East Studies Association (MESA) president, is one of her supporters who stated that protests coming from outside the walls of academia are “just preposterous.” She said that tenure decisions should be based on the opinions of experts, not on critics who want to silence her because they disagree with her conclusions, implying the opposition is composed of dishonest and bigoted critics trying to shut her down.

As an “outsider” who “lobbied” President Shapiro, and as someone who is personally acquainted with the downfall of Colombia and Barnard from world-class status, which I’ll touch on later, I have a stake in the outcome of this tenure case. There is good reason for “outsiders” to be vigilantly involved with the frivolities behind the hallowed walls and closed-door tenure process. The so-called experts and administrators cannot be trusted and the public demand for more transparency and an open door policy to tenure proceedings must be met. The closed fortress of academia must be opened and held accountable to the public and the current tenure case is a good reason why.

The imminent tenure grant for this professor of questionable qualifications is a perfect example of how academic standards of peer-reviewed research and verifiable fact are being trumped by biased political ideologies. The sum of El-Haj’s scholarly work and the basis of the tenure decision is her book, Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, which is based upon her premise that the historical connection of the Jews to the land of Israel is a “pure political fabrication,” and charges Israeli archeologists with manufacturing evidence to legitimize the “modern nation’s origin myth.” She exhibits a postmodern disdain for such empirical facts as archeological evidence of ancient Israelite kingdoms, which she casts as the perpetuation of a myth to serve the interests of the colonial powers. Much to the dismay of academic insiders, many more alumni, donors and concerned outsiders are noticeably getting involved in the protest, including over 2000 signatories to an online petition initiated by Barnard alumnus, Paula Stern, against El-Haj’s tenure. She started the petition after all other efforts to communicate her concerns to the Barnard administration were ignored and President Shapiro brushed her off as an “outsider.” Stern urges all to sign, whether Barnard/Columbia alumni or not. If you haven’t as yet signed the petition, you may do so, here.

A brief recap of recent developments in the ongoing protest leading up to the petition is in order. Not too long ago, a group of scholars calling themselves the Va’ad ha-Emet (Truth Committee), wishing to remain anonymous out of fear of repercussion for openly going public, appealed to former SUNY Trustee and academic standards advocate Dr. Candace de Russy to publicize their findings. They found that El-Haj’s book failed to meet minimal academic standards, repudiated verifiable evidence, and slandered distinguished Israeli archaeologist, David Ussishkin, and upon that basis she should be denied tenure. Upon further investigation, de Russy found that some of the tenure committee members, as well as much of the Columbia faculty, largely share a similar disdain for evidence-based scholarship and a predilection toward promoting their own pet political agendas under the guise of scholarship. One of the committee members is Barnard Professor of Art History Keith Moxey, who, according to his book, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History, exhibits the postmodern view that history should be liberated from the real world of verifiable facts and figures and acknowledges “that historical arguments will be evaluated according to how well they coincide with our political conviction.”

Following the publication of the Va’ad ha-Emet statement, more people outside the Barnard community became enraged and involved, including my own letter to President Shapiro and subsequent email discussions. In one message she fumed at the way outside pressure “is being mobilized,” and “the level of hysteria it is generating,” and even cast El-Haj as the victim of “death threats from those opposed to her work,” which have so far been proven unsubstantiated following an unanswered inquiry by Campus Watch director, Winfield Myers, for Shapiro to produce evidence.

Ever since the mounting involvement of Barnard alumni protesting El-Haj’s tenure and the online petition, Columbia and Barnard have erected a wall of silence and huddle in fear of publicity deep in their hallowed chambers crying “censorship” and “witch hunt.” Rather than participating in an open and honest public debate over the issues, they choose to stonewall and conceal themselves in their ivory bunkers safe from public scrutiny and interference from the unwashed “outsiders.” Their silence speaks volumes to the resentment of outsiders who are growing increasingly outraged over the wall of silence. After I blogged my email correspondences with Shapiro, making them public, she exploded with a venomous reply, which according to my subsequent letter of apology I promised not to post. In my letter, which was not answered, I reiterated my position that “higher education is on a public stage” and administrators shouldn’t insist on maintaining their archaic status quo as defenders of “a sacrosanct ‘gentlemen’s club,’” in response to a series of long-winded admonitions to keep my nose out of private academic business.

As I mentioned before, I have a personal interest in the outcome of this tenure battle, among other critical issues at Columbia. Ever since I experienced a rude awakening several years ago at a lecture held at Columbia Law School, I have been following the alarming downward spiral of intellectual integrity and academic standards at what was once considered an esteemed institution. As part of a series of outside speakers sponsored by the Law School, this lecture featured the controversial pro-Palestinian activist, Alison Weir. In meticulous detail for over an hour, she compared the State of Israel, armed and funded by the U.S., to the Nazi regime, now perpetrating a holocaust of its own on the Palestinian people, bombing villages and murdering Palestinian children. She received thunderous applause and approval from the audience as she appealed to them to join her in petitioning the U.S. government to stop funding this atrocity. During the question and answer session when I stood up to question her revisionist perspective on the Holocaust and why Arafat was living large, and wealthy Arab neighbors swimming in oil money, while the Palestinian people were dirt poor, the audience, composed of a couple of hundred students, faculty, and activists shouted me down. Before I could continue, a student stood up and asked me, “What holocaust are you talking about?” to accompanying hoots and hollers from everyone in the room. As I left in bewilderment, an embarrassed law student approached me to apologize on behalf of the Law School for the animal behavior of the students and urged me to return for future lectures. In retrospect, I can now attribute the causes of this horror show of intellectual disintegration to "bloody-minded professors...running amok in politics,” in the inimitable words of Peter Viereck.

Subsequent incidents at Columbia University have been all too frequent and often proved ruder than the previous ones. Shortly after this lecture, an antiwar demonstration saw thousands of students and professors cheering to Professor Nicholas De Genova’s remarks calling for “a million Mogadishus” and the defeat of the U.S. military forces that had just entered Iraq. A prior event in 2002, which seemed to set the tone for all others to come, deemed a “path-breaking conference” and subsequent book, advised by Columbia history professor Eric Foner, was entitled: Taking Back the Academy, History of Activism, History as Activism. The theme of the conference was to change the mission of higher education to be one of advocacy and social change. It featured a presentation entitled "Teaching Student Activism," calling campuses battlefields to incite student unrest in order to bring “students out of their classrooms and into the streets.”

These events and incidents, inside and outside of the classroom, continued ad nauseam, leading up to the recent violent mob attack to silence guest speaker Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, by Columbia students who charged the stage and started a brawl. Apparently they learned their lessons well on “student activism.” I wrote a letter to President Bollinger, imploring him to “take swift action to bring the student perpetrators to justice” and to assure us that “future events sponsored by the Columbia College Republicans (will) have adequate security to fully protect the expression of diverse opinions” even those which don’t always jive with the Columbia “mission” for social change. The letter went unanswered and nothing but lip service was paid to the reign of student anarchy and hostility to freedom of speech and conscience that prevails at Columbia.

I invite President Shapiro, President Bollinger, Professor Brand, and other supporters of El-Haj to respond publicly, especially with regard to the current tenure case, which Shapiro has assured me “depends upon just that kind of public, professional speech” that concerned alumni and others have initiated. I will post legitimate intellectual replies if they rise above the level of innuendo and personal insults of the sort comparing me to Mr. Collins from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. But please spare us the “censorship” and “orchestrated witch hunt” nonsense. There is a great difference between “public, professional speech,” in which we are engaged, and mob violence to shut down a speaker with whom one disagrees.

Sometimes, the less said by way of introduction, the better. Army reserve chaplain Maj. Jim Higgins, from Atlanta, Georgia, wrote this from Iraq back on May 14, 2007.

Soldiers

I recently attended a showing of "Spiderman 3" here at LSA Anaconda. We have a large auditorioum we use for movies as well as memorial services and other large gatherings. As is the custom back in the States, we stood and snapped to attention when the National Anthem began before the main feature. All was going as planned until about three-quarters of the way through the National Anthem the music stopped.

Now, what would happen if this occurred with 1,000 18-22 year-olds back in the States? I imagine there would be hoots, catcalls, laughter, a few rude comments, and everyone would sit down and call for a movie. Of course, that is, if they had stood for the National Anthem in the first place.

Here, the 1,000 Soldiers continued to stand at attention, eyes fixed forward.

The music started again. The Soldiers continued to quietly stand at attention. And again, at the same point, the music stopped. What would you expect to happen? Even here I would imagine laughter as everyone sat down and expected the movie to start.

Here, you could have heard a pin drop. Every Soldier stood at attention. Suddenly there was a lone voice, then a dozen, and quickly the room was filled with the voices of a thousand Soldiers:

And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air,

gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,

o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

It was the most inspiring moment I have had here in Iraq. I wanted you to know what kind of Soldiers are serving you here.

It's hard not to compare what's going on in Washington, D.C., with what this chaplain saw at LSA Anaconda. The old saw, "You get the government you deserve," may be true, but I can't help wondering if we get better soldiers than we deserve.

See Maj. Higgins' blog for more.

The Rabbi at my local Reform temple is quite liberal, as is most of Reform Judaism, and quite well-versed and grounded, as well as sincere, in his arguments. Although we often disagree, he’s a pleasure to listen to and discuss with about various issues. Our discussions are civil and fact-based, and we both come away with added appreciations, ones that make us a community that can be and work together.

His Rosh Hashanah sermon’s theme was how does our community, heretofore centered on sad lessons of the Holocaust and strong defense of emergent struggling Israel, reach a new generation who haven’t experienced those tragedies and hard-won triumphs, for whom it’s a history book, when the new generation – schooled in values of decency -- is confronted with increased attacks upon Israel on campuses by those who use Israel’s faults or problems to further an agenda of Israel’s destruction.

The Rabbi suggests that there are wide and open disagreements expressed within Israel on how to deal with the Palestinians, Iran, common culture, how to remain decent and continue its scientific leadership and economy’s success in the environment of existential threats from its neighbors, so there should be similar here among American Jews and their organizations and not just automatic support of Israel’s government under any circumstances. Increased realism, he argues, will increase the American Jewry’s new generation’s ability to understand what is happening and to counter extremists. He openly recognizes that these are almost intractable dilemmas, which Israelis and we must struggle with, even if unfair burdens.

His points are good ones, but miss at least three important points:

1. Reform Judaism’s hierarchy is usually aligned with the so-called “progressive” movement among Democrats, their newspeak for extreme Leftwing. While Reform has become more “traditional” in its religious observances, coming closer within the mainstream that has sustained Judaism across thousands of years, it is increasingly active on Leftist causes and allied with its elements. Consequently, Reform loses whatever credibility it might have for moderation within American Judaism and among policymakers by tolerating open and thinly veiled anti-Semites and radical pro-Palestinian advocates in the “progressive” fold. Reform cannot stand as a moral force when its actions and alliances are so often immoral and contrary to survival.

2. The “progressive” new leftists dwell upon a revisionist history of seminal events here and around the world that place overwhelming fault upon those who contest radicals and extremists, even brutal terrorists. They employ deceptive concepts to tar. The accusation that Israel within or in the occupied territories imposes an Apartheid comparable to or worse than South Africa’s is contrafactual, ignores the actual improved living conditions among Palestinians brought by moving from under Arab to under the Israeli flag before their Intifada destroyed the economic progress, and is solely intended to rob Israel of the legitimacy to exist. Yet, many among Reform’s leadership are coming to use this hoary term to describe the minimal but disruptive and uncomfortable security measures made necessary only by terrorist Palestinians. American Reform cannot constructively contribute to new appreciations to move forward on Israel’s dilemmas by sinking into radical anti-Israel historical revisionism. It, again, can only marginalize and discredit itself, while undermining Israel and strengthening its mortal enemies. Barriers can only be removed under conditions of security, not as acts of blind faith or unilateral disarmament.

3. Lastly, but at least for the foreseeable future and of central importance to Israel’s survival, as the wishful and incompetent lack of adequate preparation by and execution of Israel’s forces demonstrated last year in Lebanon, a major commitment and willingness to do what’s necessary to win is essential to Israel’s survival. Whether among Israelis, many of whom have become complacent, wishful, or selfish in urban comforts, or Americans or others in the world with similar obtuseness, it must be recognized and respected that all measures required of survival are critical and to be supported. The new leftists actively work to obscure and destroy the clarity of unified resolve upon which preparedness and forceful action depends. Their focus upon problems and faults, to extremes, and exclusion of facts, is aimed at division and weakening of morale, focus and strength. Who will fight, and why, when some leaders create excuses for avoidance of realities, and who will mourn when such irresponsibility leads to results that are tragic and irreversible.

If Reform’s leadership truly wants to play the constructive role that it aspires to in helping forge a new and realistic consensus, that both inspires and motivates to greater solidarity and success, it must first reform its own misalliances, misbehaviors and misconceptions.

Just put a beautiful brisket in the oven, in a favorite Hawaiian marinade, for Erev (first night) Rosh Hashanah dinner, took a break at the computer, and found out to celebrate the Jewish New Year there’s a new calumny to rank up there with other lethal inanities.

Cannabis legalization advocate, Clare Short, former British minister for international development who quit Tony Blair’s cabinet because the UN wasn’t in charge of Iraq post-Saddam, consistent with her earlier stance for withdrawing from Ireland during its “troubles,” may have been on the weed when attending the anti-Israel International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace, held in Europe.

From the Wall Street Journal’s report:

Claiming that Israel is actually "much worse than the original apartheid state" [South Africa] and accusing it of "killing (Palestinian) political leaders," Ms. Short charged the Jewish state with the ultimate crime: Israel "undermines the international community's reaction to global warming." According to Ms. Short, the Middle East conflict distracts the world from the real problem: man-made climate change. If extreme weather will lead to the "end of the human race," as Ms. Short warned it could, add this to the list of the crimes of Israel.

I don’t know all these 500 scientists who’ve found global warming to be a natural solar event. Maybe Ms. Short will next charge they must be on Israel’s payroll or part of some such Jewish conspiracy to confuse delusion with reality.

Another commentator on Ms. Short, writing in England’s Telegraph, lists some of the other global catastrophes wrought by the Jews:

The litany of world conflicts and problems down through the ages that are supposedly due either to Israel or the Jews is astounding - the Black Death, communism, capitalism, World War I, World War II, the genocide in Darfur, 9/11, the Iraq war and the 2005 Tsunami.

My best New Year’s wishes to Ms. Short for finding sanity. Start by staying out of the maddening sun.

Wednesday night, Rosh Hashanah begins a week when we Jews study our souls and sins, vow to correct them, and build a better year and life to come.

A physician friend sent me this note, to share with you.

As 5768 Approaches.... This week we Jews will begin our 5768th year on this earth! Who would have believed this possible? If anyone had told Abraham that his people would be around this long he probably would have been astounded.

Imagine, we did this without beheading anyone on TV, without a single suicide bomber, without kidnapping and murdering school children, without slaughtering Olympic athletes, and without flying airplanes into skyscrapers.

We lasted this long despite 400 years as slaves in Egypt, 40 years of wandering in the desert, the mighty Roman army who nailed us to ten thousand crosses; despite the best efforts of fervent Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition, Hitler's Third Reich, Stalin's gulags, Arab wars of annihilation and terrorism and hundreds of hate-filled UN resolutions.

How did we Jews do it? We survived by concentrating our efforts on education, love of family, hard work, helping one another and a passionate dedication to life no matter what evil befell us.

We hung in there in hope that the rest of the world would one day overcome it's hatreds, jealousies and violence and would join us in a life of cooperation and mutual respect.

We're not there yet, but we're still hopeful. And when so many of us enter our places of worship this week, this is what we'll pray for with all the strength in our hearts.

Best wishes for a New Year filled with health, happiness, laughter, success, joy, and kindness and may this coming year bring peace and security to Israel, to the Jewish communities in the Diaspora and to our planet.

After watching and listening to small portions of General Petreaus' remarkable testimony over the past couple of days, for its sheer endurance alone, before the House and Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees, I was reminded of Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which is also a fitting reminder as we memorialize the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

After watching the testimony today, a couple of the greatest successes of the War on Terror (and Iraq, specifically) were never discussed by Petreaus:

1) That the War in Iraq has had the effect of bringing the fight to the enemy, of creating a brushfire in the Middle East with which to engage the terrorists (as evidenced by the sky is falling reports by Left-leaning outlets that the war is causing more terrorists to be recruited, I say better there than here).

2) There has not been a terrorist attack since September 11, 2001 --Knock on wood). However, six years of peace is an excellent track record for a President that is constantly being barraged by harrasing editorials and an unappreciative Congress for implementing strategies that has protected America's security.

As Aristotle said in Nichomachean Ethics:

"We . . . make war that we may live in peace."

For those so anxious to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and to end many of the other programs that have kept our nation safe, they best beware of the consequences, which could be catastrophic.

Cold War scholar Thomas Maddux just counted 396 books at Amazon studying President Truman, in Maddux’s intro to a roundtable on the latest about Truman’s “almost day by day” coping with being thrust into fateful decisions about which he knew little to begin with, “as doubts and debate swirled around him.”

Sixty-two years after the end of World War II, even as now open archives provide insights formerly unavailable, many scholars still disagree on the extent to which a traditional view is correct that the U.S. haltingly -- sometimes or often stumbling through the dark of partial information -- learned to respond to Stalin’s post-war ambitions.

A few others, largely discredited except among fellow extremists although potent in academia, attempted to revise history to contend that anything wrong in the world always bears the U.S. stamp, was the result of U.S. ambitions and plans to run the world, and virtually ignore the overwhelming evidence of the learning curve or of Soviet culpability.

In short, the learning curve continues decades after their occurrence, about events and thoughts largely documented, from both sides of the Cold War.

But, at least, no one denies there was a Cold War, a new global war, which stretched through ups and downs for over 40-years after World War II, and almost all recognize that U.S. policies were largely, and usually reluctantly, reactive.

Although Muslim extremist states and Islamist groups have been increasingly attacking the U.S. and Europe for a quarter-century, and we’ve learned much, there still isn’t much of a consensus that we’re even in another long war, not to mention what it’s about.

On this anniversary of 9/11, a telling, bestirring, fateful, but intermediate step in this escalating attack on the West, two seasoned scholars of history and of Islam put forth reflections that must be read to gain footing on where we are.

Norman Podhoretz, who coined calling our current global challenge World War IV, reflects on his own awakening in the 1960’s from facile Leftist illusions to recognize that many of its perpetrators were actively at war against the West, which is why he wasn’t so optimistic that the surge in patriotic talk from the Left after 9/11 would last long.

As a veteran of the political and cultural wars of the '60s, I knew from my own scars that no matter how small and insignificant a group the anti-Americans of the left might for the moment look to the naked eye, they had it in them to rise and grow again….

For a short spell, the spectacular success of that campaign dampened the nascent antiwar activity on at least a number of campuses. But I felt certain that, as other fronts were opened--with Iraq most likely being the next--opposition not only would grow but would become more and more extreme.

I turned out to be right about this, and yet even I never imagined that the new antiwar movement would so rapidly arrive at the stage of virulence it had taken years for its ancestors of the Vietnam era to reach. Nor did I anticipate how closely the antiwar playbook of that era would be followed and how successfully it would be applied to Iraq, even though the two wars had nothing whatever in common.

To be sure, this time, mainly because there was no draft, there would be no student protesters and no massive street demonstrations. Instead, virtual demonstrations would be mounted in cyberspace by the so-called netroots and these, more suited to the nature of the new technological age, would prove an all-too-effective substitute.

Podhoretz ends on the optimistic note that characterizes honest men of ideas, that truth will prevail over the Vietnam syndrome fixations of the Left.

Well acquainted though I am with its malignant power, I still believe that it will ultimately be overcome by the forces opposed to it in the war at home. Even so, I cannot deny that this question still hangs ominously in the air and will not be answered before more damage is done to the long struggle against Islamofascism into which we were blasted six years ago and that I persist in calling World War IV.

Podhoretz is certainly correct about the persistent virulence of the “America the Ugly” meme and its adherents. They have added to our confusion and division, and both directly and indirectly distracted our leaders and restrained our resolve.

Nonetheless, the purposefulness of President Bush has not been weakened, and he has been in full command – for better and worse – of the mission, resources committed, and operations conducted. The anti-war Left didn’t get us into the perplexities we are now. It’s mostly the failures and frustrations we’ve faced, many self-created.

That so often Bush did not foresee the determination and machinations of our new enemies can be understood. That the U.S. was inadequately prepared for a new long war’s escalation can also be understood in light of his and his predecessors’ lack of foresight to build the forces we need, military and civilian. That no responsible leader can afford to bug out, regardless of how we got to here, is indisputable by all except extremists at the Left of the Democratic Party. And, most honest observers, here and abroad, see much cause for optimism if we do persist.

Still, however, in our understandable focus upon Iraq, the bigger issue of what future we’re to face remains murky. Middle East scholar Dan Pipes provides a succinct and responsible, even optimistic, analysis, that although our learning curve is slow and steep we’re moving forward in our understanding, and ultimate cohesion.

[A]n atmosphere of gloom predominates….This negativism reflects twin realities: Islamism (outside Iran) is waxing everywhere, while the civilized world is making profound mistakes — blaming itself for Muslim hatred, underestimating and appeasing the enemy….

But there is also good news in the war, and it concerns the deepening education and spreading awareness of growing numbers of Westerners, especially on the right, about the nature of the war and the enemy. Americans are reading books, watching documentaries, keeping up with the news, and getting actively involved….

More broadly, the ongoing and intense public debate about Islam has created a far more informed citizenry. Few Americans before September 11 knew such terms as jihad and fatwa, much less ijtihad, dhimmitude, or burqa….

The outcome of the "war on terror," I submit, will have less to do with breakthroughs in avionics or intelligence coups than with the degree to which civilized people understand the nature of their enemy and join together to fight it. That means liberals remembering, as Canada's Salim Mansur put it, that "Liberal democracy is no less an armed ideology than [is] Islamist ideology." What does the future hold: 2001's slogan of "United We Stand" or more of today's deep fracturing?

The answer may well be decisive. The historical record gives me some reason for optimism, as until now the Western democracies have prevailed. For that to happen again, learning about Islam and Muslims will be part of the requisite preparation.

That doesn’t take nor require fanatic or hateful attitudes or responses by ourselves, but does require the steady resolution to persevere. Polls show that most Americans criticize our past failures, as well they should, while most Americans recognize the dimensions of the threats and the consequences of trying to ignore or hide from the challenges.

We can expect the Left’s virulence to continue. These self-important defeatists and enemies of Western civilization will be relegated to the sidelines and discredited by our moving forward with steady resolve. They, and our foreign enemies, will only be encouraged to further mortal excess by irresolution from our leaders.

Long wars are not neatly charted nor run a smooth course, because that’s the way history works. Revisionism, on the other hand, is contra-history, and must fall of its own lack of foundation in reality.

Last weekend, while at the neighborhood playground with my young boys, I met a pleasant mother, about 40, with her two boys.

She described how she taught colonialist history at major NYC and northern California colleges, and was a focused advocate of extreme leftist revisionism.

Now, she’s out of academia, a homemaker, and while still quite liberal she realizes how out of touch and focus she was, reinforced by the academic environment. Her views of history and life are now much broader, and more real. And, she’s much happier, not getting over-exercised at the latest cause to sweep campus.

After we parted, I thought what a shame one has to leave academia to get sane.

Behind a semantic disagreement between Charles Krauthammer and Max Boot lays important distinctions about the potential futures in Iraq.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Charles Krauthammer is a genius at applying logic to the unintelligible caterwauling from the Left. In his Friday Washington Post column he points out that, “Iraq is being partitioned -- and, like everything else in Iraq today, it is happening from the ground up.”

Krauthammer isn’t necessarily pessimistic about this: “The lines today are being drawn organically by self-identified communities and tribes. Which makes the new arrangement more likely to last.”

Another bright analyst and piercer of ignorance, with more personal exposure to conditions on the ground, Max Boot takes semantic issue at Commentary’s Contentions blog. Within the semantics, however, are very important distinctions, with very different portents for the future of Iraq and the region. Which, or what else, will come to pass remains to be seen. It’s my view that Boot may be closer to evolving reality.

Question: Is America “partitioned” into 50 states? By the loose definition of “soft partition” that some (like Krauthammer) use, you could say yes. After all, the federal government doesn’t provide most basic services, from welfare to policing to education; at most it supplements locally provided services (e.g., the FBI backs up or supplants local law enforcement in a few instances) and provides funding (e.g., “block grants”) to pay for locally provided services. While you could describe this arrangement as a “soft partition,” the more commonly accepted term is “federalism,” and it is a good description of what is happening in Iraq.

Pretty much everyone agrees that there should be some degree of decentralization in Iraq, with the central government in Baghdad taking care of a few responsibilities (such as the army, foreign policy, and splitting oil revenues) and the rest of the governance functions delegated to provinces and municipalities (with funding provided from Baghdad). The chief success of American troops in the past year in Anbar and other provinces has been in beefing up local law enforcement functions, within a framework of a larger Iraqi state. For instance, the Iraqi army, composed of Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites, is actively working with Sunni militias and local Sunni-dominated police forces to fight al Qaeda.

That hardly constitutes vindication, to my mind, of those who advocated partitioning Iraq into three new states composed exclusively of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. That is a “solution” still rejected by most Iraqis: it would be almost impossible to implement without tremendous bloodshed because most of Iraq’s eighteen provinces have mixed populations. Federalism, on the other hand, is a way that Iraq can remain a single state while still recognizing great differences between different provinces. Why this should be called “partition” is a bit of a mystery.

Six years after South Vietnam fell to the invasion from the North, a former sailor in South Vietnam’s navy and his young family managed a daring escape by boat into the South China Sea. Outrunning Vietnamese patrol boats, the engine then seized and they drifted for days into the Gulf of Thailand.

Being adrift in those seas was treacherous enough. But twice they were boarded by pirates who stole valuables, tossed food and water overboard and raped some of the girls at gunpoint.

Annapolis, Maryland’s Capital Online tells us what happened next.

The night after the last marauders attacked, Mr. Chau saw faint lights on the horizon. He used a searchlight to signal an SOS. Two ships passed by but then the last, the USS Lang, responded to Mr. Chau's last-ditch alert. The ship looped off course and picked them up.

The USS Lang, launched in 1968, carried forth the nickname “Lucky” Lang for its namesake, a World War II destroyer that survived many sea battles in the Pacific unscathed. “Lucky” also applies to the Chau family.

They settled in the United States, worked hard in a convenience store, became citizens, and put their 8-year old daughter and younger brothers through college and on to successful careers.

They didn’t forget the sailors of the USS Lang. The now grown pharmacist daughter and her mother traveled from Texas to attend the first reunion of the Lang’s sailors, to personally express their gratitude.

"My father kept a folder with information given to him on the USS Lang," Ms. Chau-Pun told those at the dinner. "Once in a while he would pull out the folder and remind us not to forget those that saved our lives. 'Make the USS Lang ... proud of you,' he said."…

"Thank you for saving our lives and giving us the chance to live the American dream," she told the 50 veterans and their families. "You are all true heroes."

As one of the sailors at the reunion said, "There was not a dry eye in the house."

Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese perished escaping their Northern overlords. The Chau’s were indeed lucky.

We’re, also, lucky to have them as US citizens.

Still, let’s work and pray that their story, and the stories of those who died before or while escaping, won’t be repeated by a new bug-out from our responsibilities and interests in Iraq.

When those who cry for higher funding for social causes instead fail to reduce the corrupt and self-serving tax drain by those who support them politically, that’s not charity but charitable abuse and political abuse.

In an otherwise informative, long article, “Big Gifts, Tax Breaks and a Debate on Charity,” the New York Times colors the debate over the the ends to which the tax deduction for charitable contributions is used as another case in its crusade against what it considers unfair inequality.

Two views are presented: donations to help the domestic poor versus to build university or concert halls (of course, named in the donor’s honor). There, a legitimate debate can and should occur, indeed broadened, over whether the charitable tax deduction should be so broad as to include many edifices that could otherwise be funded, if really needed at all, and whether many other deductible causes – usually cloaked as “educational” but too often political causes – should be subsidized by taxpayers.

The NYT’s outlines some of the more extreme uses of the deduction:

What qualifies for that tax deduction has broadened over the 90 years since its creation to include everything from university golf teams to puppet theaters — even an organization established after Hurricane Katrina to help practitioners of sadomasochism obtain gear they had lost in the storm.

Criticism also comes from the Right of the use of tax exemptions that do not provide benefits to the poor, a concern echoed by the IRS Commissioner about nonprofit hospitals:

At the other end of the political spectrum, Grover G. Norquist, whose Americans for Tax Reform lobbies for lower taxes, suggests taxing nonprofit hospitals that cannot demonstrate that they provide significant care for the poor.

The NYT’s can’t resist expending considerable focus on the greater tax benefit that the more affluent gain, due to their higher tax brackets, from charitable deductions than those tax benefits the less affluent gain.

What the NYT’s does not address in this article is the extent to which charities are ill-governed, with exorbitant administrative expenses, excessive executive compensation, and often corrupt waylaying of funds. These are concerns that the IRS has repeatedly brought before Congress, and requested additional funds to investigate. Former Senate Finance Committee Chair Charles Grassley was supportive. His Democrat replacement, Max Baucus, however told the interviewer from the Chronicle of Philanthropy (August 2007) that “he does not give high priority to cracking down on charitable abuses.”

How unwelcome would Senator Baucus, or the NYT’s reporters, be at Manhattan cocktail parties populated by highly paid arts and educational foundation leaders if they did give high priority to cracking down on charitable abuses, which are really abuses of those who do pay taxes to subsidize their excesses?