From The UK Guardian:
Purveyor of perfect punk
Jon Dennis pays tribute to Johnny Ramone, the man whose determination kept seminal band the Ramones going for 22 years
Thursday September 16, 2004
For fans, the death of Johnny Ramone yesterday is all the more shocking, coming so soon after those of Joey (2001) and Dee Dee (2003).
Joey was the geeky frontman, the shy misfit every awkward suburban teenager could identify with. Dee Dee was the creative Ramone, the genuine street punk whose manic energy electrified the band's stage performances.
As far as the Ramones' cartoon image goes, Johnny, the guitarist, provided the menace - he was the thug. But thuggishness was an essential component of punk. And, in any case, fans have much else to thank Johnny for: it was largely his single-minded determination and work ethic that kept the band going for 22 years.
It was Johnny who insisted that they never mess with the brilliant formula, displayed so perfectly on their 1976 debut album (often cited as the first, and best, punk album), that made the Ramones one of the most influential bands of their generation.
Their best material was witty, catchy, fast and loud. The songs' subject matter ranged from sexual fear and frustration (I Don't Want to Walk Around With You); an ironic-moronic rejection of boring progressive rock (Teenage Lobotomy); shocking violence (Beat on the Brat) and casual drug-taking (Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue).
But their urban rebel music and cartoon punk image - forever clad in skinny blue jeans, leather jackets and white T-shirts, with shaggy bowl haircuts obscuring their faces - belied a love and knowledge of rock's best traditions. Johnny always professed a love for Elvis and the Beatles, and the Ramones even took their name from Paul Ramone, a pseudonym used by Paul McCartney.
Nevertheless, Johnny was a controversial figure even within the punk world. He lived and worked among left-leaning liberals, but was a lifelong Republican who praised George Bush when the Ramones were inducted into the Hall of Fame a couple of years ago.
The rest of the band penned Bonzo Goes to Bitburg, an attack on the then-president Ronald Reagan. When the guitarist found out what the song was about - some time after having recorded it - he refused to perform it on stage.
Many testify to Johnny's honesty and integrity. He could be nasty. He bullied the rest of the band away from their drugs and booze and onto the next gig, penny-pinching from the long-suffering but devoted road crew. But he kept the show on the road - a remarkable achievement considering how dysfunctional the Ramones were. After Joey's fiancee, Linda, left him for Johnny, the two band-mates did not speak for 15 years.
In 2004, the Ramones' stock has never been higher. Their debut album is a regular fixture in "best album of all time" lists. And the feature-length documentary about the group, End of the Century, has been hailed at this year's film festivals as the cream of a new crop of rock films.
Despite their relative lack of commercial success, and the fact that now all the key members have Gone Down to the Basement, the Ramones' future is assured.
For connoisseurs, they are the group by which all other punk bands - all other rock bands - must be judged. They distilled rock'n'roll down to two-minute teenage thrills, always delivered with maximum force and speed and minimum fuss and embellishment. In other words, just as it should be
Saturday, September 18, 2004
From The Western Standard, September 13th 2004
POLYGAMY. COMING SOON.
by Mark Steyn
The better advocates of gay marriage are an ingenious crowd, full of artful arguments to support their claim. Initially, most of us on the other side found it hard to believe a countervailing argument was necessary, and by the time it became clear that neither “Oh, come off it, you can’t be serious” nor “Well, I dunno, it just don’t sound right” were going to suffice, the gays were already on their way to victory in the only arenas that matter – the media and the courts.
But the activists’ intellectual rigor only goes so far. If you suggest, as some defendants of “traditional marriage” do, that gay marriage is the slippery slope to polygamy and bestiality, the activists roll their eyes and go into “Oh, come off it, you can’t be serious” mode. Like the chichi gay couple from New York who’ve built their dream home in rural Vermont, they don’t want any other incomers muscling in. Gay marriage, they assure us, is the merest amendment to traditional marriage, and once we’ve done that we’ll pull up the drawbridge.
Sorry, but it’s not going to work like that. If you can get ‘em past the don’t-be-so-ridiculous stage, the gays point out that there are no constituencies clamoring for polygamy and bestiality. That’s true in the latter case. There aren’t many “zoo couples” (as they’re known) demanding their rights. Offhand, I can think only of Phillip Buble of Maine, who petitioned the Piscataquis County Superior Court a couple of years back to allow his spouse to attend a hearing with him. (“I’ve been informed your personal permission is needed given that my wife is not human, being a dog of about 36lbs weight and very well behaved.” The letter ended with his signature and a paw-print, and underneath them the words “Phillip and Lady Buble”.)
But there’s a very obvious constituency for polygamy and it says something about the monumental self-absorption of the gay marriage crowd that they seem unaware of it. Indeed, it’s already here. Earlier this summer, Le Monde leaked a government report revealing that polygamy was routinely practiced in Muslim ghettoes in France. Anecdotal evidence suggests things aren’t so very different in the Islamic communities of Ontario: as The Christian Science Monitor airily put it, polygamous unions “are being performed by the same religious figures adjudicating matters under sharia” – ie, under the province’s Muslim-friendly Arbitration Act.
Another clue to what’s going on comes in the invaluable British publication Pensions News, which had an interesting item about a hitherto arcane point of law. Contracting marriage with more than one spouse simultaneously is a crime in the United Kingdom. However, if a polygamous marriage is entered into abroad in a jurisdiction permitting polygamy, that marriage is regarded as valid under English law. Hence, the interest of Pensions News. Previously, spousal inheritance was a relatively simple matter: you kick the bucket and your wife gets a big payout. Now it’s relatively less simple, relative-wise: trustees of pensions funds were concerned that, under new anti-discrimination regulations which came into effect in Britain last year, they’d be obligated to payout to more than one widow, thus doubling, trebling or quadrupling their liability. For the moment, they’ve been reassured that they’re unlikely to have to pay full widow’s benefits automatically to every relict of a polygamous marriage, but that what benefits are paid out have to be shared between all the widows.
But you see how easy it is to start talking about polygamy in a nuts-and-bolts, incremental, utilitarian, legal-harmonisation partners’-benefits insurance-agent kind of a way. It’s not a hypothetical issue: apparently many British subjects marry one spouse in Leicester or Bradford and then, while on a trip back to their homeland, marry another. Given immigration patterns in Canada and given the number of legal residents with dual citizenship, I wouldn’t expect things to be so very different over here. And, if so, it’s inevitable that at some point, in Vancouver or Toronto or Halifax, a local version of Puspo Wardoyo will turn up.
Mr Wardoyo owns 34 grilled chicken restaurants throughout Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country but one in which polygamy was suppressed under the Suharto dictatorship. Now Mr Wardoyo has taken it up eagerly: he has four wives, is having a swell time of it, and wants to spread the word. On the menu at his eateries, he offers a “polygamy stir-fry” washed down with a “polygamy juice”, a mélange of four crushed fruits. In Canada, the fruits will be crushed to hear it, but once you’ve accepted the argument that the gender of the participants is no longer relevant to the definition of marriage, it’s hard to see why the number of participants should be.
One day, a Canadian Wardoyo will emerge, and the game will be on. How do you think our courts and media will react? If the push for polygamy came from the white male elders of that breakaway Mormon sect in Bountiful, BC, it’d be dead in the water: all you’d get from the Globe and the CBC and Maclean’s would be a lot of stories about the abuse rumours, and shots of stern Old Testament patriarchs, and comments from various Grits and NDPers about how this is not compatible with “our Canadian values”. If you’re one of Bountiful’s nubile nymphettes and you make it across the town line, you can write your own ticket on The National; they’ll put you down for one of those major multi-part documentaries that takes up 52 minutes of the show for an entire week.
But, if it’s not horny stump-toothed white guys from the backwoods, what’s the betting then? Once it gets all multicultural, the media back away from the in-depth investigations, happy to take the spokespersons for the relevant lobby groups at their word. If it’s a Muslim who finally makes it to the Supreme Court of Canada with a polygamy case, I’d reckon their lordships will rule that forbidding it is an unwarranted restriction of Charter rights. And I’d wager a few of those justices will be happy to license polygamy if only to prove that their demolition job on “traditional marriage” was legally grounded rather than mere modish solidarity.
Think that sounds ridiculous? Well, look at what happened in Dublin a couple of months ago: The Irish Government decided to make Muslim men who apply for citizenship sign an affidavit that, if they’re single, they’ll take no more than one wife and, if they’re already married, that they’ll take no additional wives. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties immediately denounced the move as offensive, racist and discriminatory.
Imagine the same thing here. You can’t. No Canadian Government would propose making certain groups of immigrants sign affidavits on any wedding plans they might have. When it comes to fainthearted officialdom, Canadian polygamists are more fortunate than Irish ones. And, as the ICCL’s reaction suggests, one of the lessons of the world since September 11th is that on the left counter-tribalism trumps all: if it’s a choice between a traditionally restrictive view of marriage or polygamy, the lefties will go with the imams. The same progressive groups who objected to the Iraq war on the grounds that Saddam was a secular leader who’d never make common cause with Islamic fundamentalists didn’t seem to notice that, for the purposes of opposing Bush and Blair, they themselves, as impeccably pro-gay pro-feminist western bien pensants, had had no trouble making common cause with the women-enslaving sodomite-beheading Islamists. It hardly seemed fair to require greater intellectual coherence from Saddam than from themselves, and indeed the bizarre western-left/Islamist-theocrat alliance of convenience looks like becoming a permanent feature of the post-9/11 world.
In France, where the courts uphold the central government’s enforcement of French identity, polygamy will remain in the shadows. But in Canada for years now the philosophers of the Liberal state have acknowledged – and, indeed, even boasted – that immigration changes our country. In the cheap-anti-monarchism of a John Manley or Brian Tobin, the well-worn line is that an immigrant from Latvia or China can’t be expected to relate to the House of Windsor. In other words, we have accepted the principle that immigration involves not the immigrant assimilating to his new land but his new land assimilating to him. That being so, what share of the population has to be Muslim for the prohibition on more-than-two-person marriage to be, in Manley-Tobin logic, indefensible? We’re closer than you think.
POLYGAMY. COMING SOON.
by Mark Steyn
The better advocates of gay marriage are an ingenious crowd, full of artful arguments to support their claim. Initially, most of us on the other side found it hard to believe a countervailing argument was necessary, and by the time it became clear that neither “Oh, come off it, you can’t be serious” nor “Well, I dunno, it just don’t sound right” were going to suffice, the gays were already on their way to victory in the only arenas that matter – the media and the courts.
But the activists’ intellectual rigor only goes so far. If you suggest, as some defendants of “traditional marriage” do, that gay marriage is the slippery slope to polygamy and bestiality, the activists roll their eyes and go into “Oh, come off it, you can’t be serious” mode. Like the chichi gay couple from New York who’ve built their dream home in rural Vermont, they don’t want any other incomers muscling in. Gay marriage, they assure us, is the merest amendment to traditional marriage, and once we’ve done that we’ll pull up the drawbridge.
Sorry, but it’s not going to work like that. If you can get ‘em past the don’t-be-so-ridiculous stage, the gays point out that there are no constituencies clamoring for polygamy and bestiality. That’s true in the latter case. There aren’t many “zoo couples” (as they’re known) demanding their rights. Offhand, I can think only of Phillip Buble of Maine, who petitioned the Piscataquis County Superior Court a couple of years back to allow his spouse to attend a hearing with him. (“I’ve been informed your personal permission is needed given that my wife is not human, being a dog of about 36lbs weight and very well behaved.” The letter ended with his signature and a paw-print, and underneath them the words “Phillip and Lady Buble”.)
But there’s a very obvious constituency for polygamy and it says something about the monumental self-absorption of the gay marriage crowd that they seem unaware of it. Indeed, it’s already here. Earlier this summer, Le Monde leaked a government report revealing that polygamy was routinely practiced in Muslim ghettoes in France. Anecdotal evidence suggests things aren’t so very different in the Islamic communities of Ontario: as The Christian Science Monitor airily put it, polygamous unions “are being performed by the same religious figures adjudicating matters under sharia” – ie, under the province’s Muslim-friendly Arbitration Act.
Another clue to what’s going on comes in the invaluable British publication Pensions News, which had an interesting item about a hitherto arcane point of law. Contracting marriage with more than one spouse simultaneously is a crime in the United Kingdom. However, if a polygamous marriage is entered into abroad in a jurisdiction permitting polygamy, that marriage is regarded as valid under English law. Hence, the interest of Pensions News. Previously, spousal inheritance was a relatively simple matter: you kick the bucket and your wife gets a big payout. Now it’s relatively less simple, relative-wise: trustees of pensions funds were concerned that, under new anti-discrimination regulations which came into effect in Britain last year, they’d be obligated to payout to more than one widow, thus doubling, trebling or quadrupling their liability. For the moment, they’ve been reassured that they’re unlikely to have to pay full widow’s benefits automatically to every relict of a polygamous marriage, but that what benefits are paid out have to be shared between all the widows.
But you see how easy it is to start talking about polygamy in a nuts-and-bolts, incremental, utilitarian, legal-harmonisation partners’-benefits insurance-agent kind of a way. It’s not a hypothetical issue: apparently many British subjects marry one spouse in Leicester or Bradford and then, while on a trip back to their homeland, marry another. Given immigration patterns in Canada and given the number of legal residents with dual citizenship, I wouldn’t expect things to be so very different over here. And, if so, it’s inevitable that at some point, in Vancouver or Toronto or Halifax, a local version of Puspo Wardoyo will turn up.
Mr Wardoyo owns 34 grilled chicken restaurants throughout Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country but one in which polygamy was suppressed under the Suharto dictatorship. Now Mr Wardoyo has taken it up eagerly: he has four wives, is having a swell time of it, and wants to spread the word. On the menu at his eateries, he offers a “polygamy stir-fry” washed down with a “polygamy juice”, a mélange of four crushed fruits. In Canada, the fruits will be crushed to hear it, but once you’ve accepted the argument that the gender of the participants is no longer relevant to the definition of marriage, it’s hard to see why the number of participants should be.
One day, a Canadian Wardoyo will emerge, and the game will be on. How do you think our courts and media will react? If the push for polygamy came from the white male elders of that breakaway Mormon sect in Bountiful, BC, it’d be dead in the water: all you’d get from the Globe and the CBC and Maclean’s would be a lot of stories about the abuse rumours, and shots of stern Old Testament patriarchs, and comments from various Grits and NDPers about how this is not compatible with “our Canadian values”. If you’re one of Bountiful’s nubile nymphettes and you make it across the town line, you can write your own ticket on The National; they’ll put you down for one of those major multi-part documentaries that takes up 52 minutes of the show for an entire week.
But, if it’s not horny stump-toothed white guys from the backwoods, what’s the betting then? Once it gets all multicultural, the media back away from the in-depth investigations, happy to take the spokespersons for the relevant lobby groups at their word. If it’s a Muslim who finally makes it to the Supreme Court of Canada with a polygamy case, I’d reckon their lordships will rule that forbidding it is an unwarranted restriction of Charter rights. And I’d wager a few of those justices will be happy to license polygamy if only to prove that their demolition job on “traditional marriage” was legally grounded rather than mere modish solidarity.
Think that sounds ridiculous? Well, look at what happened in Dublin a couple of months ago: The Irish Government decided to make Muslim men who apply for citizenship sign an affidavit that, if they’re single, they’ll take no more than one wife and, if they’re already married, that they’ll take no additional wives. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties immediately denounced the move as offensive, racist and discriminatory.
Imagine the same thing here. You can’t. No Canadian Government would propose making certain groups of immigrants sign affidavits on any wedding plans they might have. When it comes to fainthearted officialdom, Canadian polygamists are more fortunate than Irish ones. And, as the ICCL’s reaction suggests, one of the lessons of the world since September 11th is that on the left counter-tribalism trumps all: if it’s a choice between a traditionally restrictive view of marriage or polygamy, the lefties will go with the imams. The same progressive groups who objected to the Iraq war on the grounds that Saddam was a secular leader who’d never make common cause with Islamic fundamentalists didn’t seem to notice that, for the purposes of opposing Bush and Blair, they themselves, as impeccably pro-gay pro-feminist western bien pensants, had had no trouble making common cause with the women-enslaving sodomite-beheading Islamists. It hardly seemed fair to require greater intellectual coherence from Saddam than from themselves, and indeed the bizarre western-left/Islamist-theocrat alliance of convenience looks like becoming a permanent feature of the post-9/11 world.
In France, where the courts uphold the central government’s enforcement of French identity, polygamy will remain in the shadows. But in Canada for years now the philosophers of the Liberal state have acknowledged – and, indeed, even boasted – that immigration changes our country. In the cheap-anti-monarchism of a John Manley or Brian Tobin, the well-worn line is that an immigrant from Latvia or China can’t be expected to relate to the House of Windsor. In other words, we have accepted the principle that immigration involves not the immigrant assimilating to his new land but his new land assimilating to him. That being so, what share of the population has to be Muslim for the prohibition on more-than-two-person marriage to be, in Manley-Tobin logic, indefensible? We’re closer than you think.
From The Winston Salem Journal:
Blue Heels
UNC football continues to struggle, with fans beating the drums for Bunting's firing
By Lenox Rawlings
Carolina blues and other notes: Some North Carolina football fans can't see straight right now, and it has nothing to do with the rain. It has everything to do with the outpouring of spitting-mad criticism after a 56-24 debacle at Virginia.
You can hear the downbeat drumbeat everywhere: "They're terrible, fire the coach."
As the emotional reactions spread, Coach John Bunting's chances for surviving decline. The Tar Heels (2-10) finished dead last in the ACC last season. They rallied past Division I-AA William & Mary in the opener and gave up 549 yards against a Virginia team that drove for seven touchdowns on its first seven possessions and added a 100-yard kickoff return to the insult. Marquis Weeks did the same thing two years ago, against the same team.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that influential Rams Club members are accelerating their campaign for change in the athletics department. The big dates include a meeting today, a home game against Georgia Tech on Saturday and another home game against Louisville the next weekend. Bunting could soften voices with two wins, but Carolina will enter the subsequent five games as prohibitive underdogs capable of implosion.
Outsiders consider Bunting's dismissal inevitable, but the Carolina administration often defies convention and occasionally operates in a vacuum. Donors who want something done yesterday express frustration over the mutual-admiration society ruled by Chancellor James Moeser and Athletics Director Dick Baddour. They are insulated by contracts that will take Moeser to retirement and Baddour through the 2006-07 academic year, when he would presumably retire.
Despite objections, Chapel Hill trustees backed Moeser's recommendation to extend Baddour's contract for three years. Baddour has supported Bunting and vowed to avoid a weekly referendum on the coach's future. Moeser supports Baddour and favors calm waters.
Baddour's detractors - perhaps a majority of Carolina voters, if they could vote - blame the boss for letting Mack Brown get away, for failing to hire Jim Donnan or some established coach in 1997, for promoting assistant Carl Torbush under pressure from players, for firing and unfiring Torbush one season before ultimately dumping him in 2000, for failing to sign Frank Beamer or another experienced coach, for hiring Bunting out of desperation and for generally fumbling his oversight of a program ranked No. 4 when Brown departed.
Carolina's leaders could ignore events and deflect lobbying longer than most administrators, but both require contributors to keep the machine running. Chancellor Moeser has said he needs to raise $1 million a day. Baddour controls a $40 million budget that didn't produce a single male team champion in 2003-04, the first such shutout in 51 ACC years. Baddour might wind up with a half-empty football stadium or worse and reluctant patrons if the losses keep mounting.
Bunting inherited a mess, and he still has a mess. Carolina has lost 17 of its past 21 games. Carolina hasn't intercepted a pass since picking off two against Wisconsin in the third game last fall - the only two interceptions of the entire season.
The Tar Heels tackle like alligators. They also pursue like alligators, which infuriates the embarrassed residents of the Tar Heel everglades. There are no simple answers. If Carolina fires the coach, does it have Plan B worked out? Will Plan B work? Baddour's track record suggests not. In football, the climb back is long and tedious. Just ask Maryland or Clemson.
Blue Heels
UNC football continues to struggle, with fans beating the drums for Bunting's firing
By Lenox Rawlings
Carolina blues and other notes: Some North Carolina football fans can't see straight right now, and it has nothing to do with the rain. It has everything to do with the outpouring of spitting-mad criticism after a 56-24 debacle at Virginia.
You can hear the downbeat drumbeat everywhere: "They're terrible, fire the coach."
As the emotional reactions spread, Coach John Bunting's chances for surviving decline. The Tar Heels (2-10) finished dead last in the ACC last season. They rallied past Division I-AA William & Mary in the opener and gave up 549 yards against a Virginia team that drove for seven touchdowns on its first seven possessions and added a 100-yard kickoff return to the insult. Marquis Weeks did the same thing two years ago, against the same team.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that influential Rams Club members are accelerating their campaign for change in the athletics department. The big dates include a meeting today, a home game against Georgia Tech on Saturday and another home game against Louisville the next weekend. Bunting could soften voices with two wins, but Carolina will enter the subsequent five games as prohibitive underdogs capable of implosion.
Outsiders consider Bunting's dismissal inevitable, but the Carolina administration often defies convention and occasionally operates in a vacuum. Donors who want something done yesterday express frustration over the mutual-admiration society ruled by Chancellor James Moeser and Athletics Director Dick Baddour. They are insulated by contracts that will take Moeser to retirement and Baddour through the 2006-07 academic year, when he would presumably retire.
Despite objections, Chapel Hill trustees backed Moeser's recommendation to extend Baddour's contract for three years. Baddour has supported Bunting and vowed to avoid a weekly referendum on the coach's future. Moeser supports Baddour and favors calm waters.
Baddour's detractors - perhaps a majority of Carolina voters, if they could vote - blame the boss for letting Mack Brown get away, for failing to hire Jim Donnan or some established coach in 1997, for promoting assistant Carl Torbush under pressure from players, for firing and unfiring Torbush one season before ultimately dumping him in 2000, for failing to sign Frank Beamer or another experienced coach, for hiring Bunting out of desperation and for generally fumbling his oversight of a program ranked No. 4 when Brown departed.
Carolina's leaders could ignore events and deflect lobbying longer than most administrators, but both require contributors to keep the machine running. Chancellor Moeser has said he needs to raise $1 million a day. Baddour controls a $40 million budget that didn't produce a single male team champion in 2003-04, the first such shutout in 51 ACC years. Baddour might wind up with a half-empty football stadium or worse and reluctant patrons if the losses keep mounting.
Bunting inherited a mess, and he still has a mess. Carolina has lost 17 of its past 21 games. Carolina hasn't intercepted a pass since picking off two against Wisconsin in the third game last fall - the only two interceptions of the entire season.
The Tar Heels tackle like alligators. They also pursue like alligators, which infuriates the embarrassed residents of the Tar Heel everglades. There are no simple answers. If Carolina fires the coach, does it have Plan B worked out? Will Plan B work? Baddour's track record suggests not. In football, the climb back is long and tedious. Just ask Maryland or Clemson.
Published in the Asbury Park Press 9/17/04
Patti Scialfa shares sweet memories during her tour kickoff
By CHRIS JORDAN
Singer Patti Scialfa had sold sweets at the Paramount Theatre before.
During her tour kickoff Wednesday night at the Asbury Park stage, Scialfa,
who grew up in Deal, told an endearing little story about her first job,
selling Turkish taffy at the Paramount and the adjacent Convention Hall.
Scialfa was fired, the denim-clad redhead told the receptive crowd, when she
showed up for work with a sunburn.
That's so Jersey Shore, and Scialfa is the quintessential Jersey Shore Girl,
who despite a wealth of musical talent, does not try the patience of the
listener by showing it off. Instead, like the former candy girl she was,
Scialfa offered sweet memories and warm feelings Wednesday night.
The memories came courtesy of her new album, "23rd Street Lullaby," which
recalls Scialfa's time in New York City as a struggling musician. The new
songs are midtempo ballads and jangly rockers, and along with numbers from
her 1993 debut album, "Rumble Doll," the combined effect echoed the music of
the 1960s and '70s. There were plenty of '60s era girl group "sha la las"
throughout the set, and Scialfa's voice evoked the jazzy sass of '70s star
Rickie Lee Jones on the song "23rd Street Lullaby," and Ronnie Spector's
vocal coquettishness on "Baby Don't."
Speaking of Scialfa's voice, it's truly an instrument to behold. She
uniquely combines a warm, velvety high-end with a expansive vibrato, over
which she demonstrates remarkable control.
But those in the audience of the not-quite-sold-out show at the Paramount
knew this. Scialfa's the local kid who had gigs like singing backup with the
Shore's Cats on the Smooth Surface before she hooked up with the fabled E
Street Band in 1984. Eventually, Scialfa hooked up with the E Street Band's
lead singer, Bruce Springsteen, and now they are married with three
children.
Wednesday night, Springsteen did make a short appearance on two songs late
in the set, playing guitar. Scialfa wanted to dispel potential Internet
postings that Springsteen will be a part of her tour.
"I've got kids to watch!" Springsteen barked into the microphone.
It wasn't the E Street Band playing behind Scialfa. But it was a crisp,
soulful and very able group backing her that included "23rd Street Lullaby"
producer Steve Jordan on drums, E Street Band member Nils Lofgren on guitar
and E Street Band touring member Soozie Tyrell on violin and backing vocals.
The sound mix was impeccable.
Besides Scialfa, it also was Tyrell's time to shine, as the two played off
each other throughout the night, much like Springsteen and fellow E Street
Band member Steven Van Zandt. Tyrell's full vocals richly complemented
Scialfa's voice and her violin added a mournful and resonant tone.
Mind you, there were one or two misses along the way. "In My Imagination"
from "Rumble Doll" was a mishmash of a Bo Diddley beat and neo-Middle
Eastern rhythms with a clunker of a guitar solo by Lofgren thrown in.
Lofgren was seemingly trying to mimic the reverse tape-loop solo of the
album version. He shouldn't have tried.
Oh well. If you want the Turkish Taffy, you have to get a little sunburn,
too.
Patti Scialfa shares sweet memories during her tour kickoff
By CHRIS JORDAN
Singer Patti Scialfa had sold sweets at the Paramount Theatre before.
During her tour kickoff Wednesday night at the Asbury Park stage, Scialfa,
who grew up in Deal, told an endearing little story about her first job,
selling Turkish taffy at the Paramount and the adjacent Convention Hall.
Scialfa was fired, the denim-clad redhead told the receptive crowd, when she
showed up for work with a sunburn.
That's so Jersey Shore, and Scialfa is the quintessential Jersey Shore Girl,
who despite a wealth of musical talent, does not try the patience of the
listener by showing it off. Instead, like the former candy girl she was,
Scialfa offered sweet memories and warm feelings Wednesday night.
The memories came courtesy of her new album, "23rd Street Lullaby," which
recalls Scialfa's time in New York City as a struggling musician. The new
songs are midtempo ballads and jangly rockers, and along with numbers from
her 1993 debut album, "Rumble Doll," the combined effect echoed the music of
the 1960s and '70s. There were plenty of '60s era girl group "sha la las"
throughout the set, and Scialfa's voice evoked the jazzy sass of '70s star
Rickie Lee Jones on the song "23rd Street Lullaby," and Ronnie Spector's
vocal coquettishness on "Baby Don't."
Speaking of Scialfa's voice, it's truly an instrument to behold. She
uniquely combines a warm, velvety high-end with a expansive vibrato, over
which she demonstrates remarkable control.
But those in the audience of the not-quite-sold-out show at the Paramount
knew this. Scialfa's the local kid who had gigs like singing backup with the
Shore's Cats on the Smooth Surface before she hooked up with the fabled E
Street Band in 1984. Eventually, Scialfa hooked up with the E Street Band's
lead singer, Bruce Springsteen, and now they are married with three
children.
Wednesday night, Springsteen did make a short appearance on two songs late
in the set, playing guitar. Scialfa wanted to dispel potential Internet
postings that Springsteen will be a part of her tour.
"I've got kids to watch!" Springsteen barked into the microphone.
It wasn't the E Street Band playing behind Scialfa. But it was a crisp,
soulful and very able group backing her that included "23rd Street Lullaby"
producer Steve Jordan on drums, E Street Band member Nils Lofgren on guitar
and E Street Band touring member Soozie Tyrell on violin and backing vocals.
The sound mix was impeccable.
Besides Scialfa, it also was Tyrell's time to shine, as the two played off
each other throughout the night, much like Springsteen and fellow E Street
Band member Steven Van Zandt. Tyrell's full vocals richly complemented
Scialfa's voice and her violin added a mournful and resonant tone.
Mind you, there were one or two misses along the way. "In My Imagination"
from "Rumble Doll" was a mishmash of a Bo Diddley beat and neo-Middle
Eastern rhythms with a clunker of a guitar solo by Lofgren thrown in.
Lofgren was seemingly trying to mimic the reverse tape-loop solo of the
album version. He shouldn't have tried.
Oh well. If you want the Turkish Taffy, you have to get a little sunburn,
too.
Old media's disproportionate interest in Bush past
David Limbaugh
What does it say about the Old Media that they are wholly uninterested in gravely serious and highly relevant charges against John Kerry yet investigate to death relatively minor and largely irrelevant claims against President Bush?
They have uncovered every rock for years and could never find anything but disputed, ambiguous innuendo against President Bush about an issue that pales in comparison to the charges against John Kerry and for which there is much more credible proof.
Even if we assume as true all the Democrats' allegations about the president's guard service -- he used his family connections to avoid Vietnam and to shirk certain duties and orders -- they shouldn't really amount to that much to liberals. I've never met a liberal who disapproved of anyone doing his best to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War, which liberals uniformly believed was immoral.
We also know that President Bush, by his own admission, was a little more carefree when he was younger, but that around age 40 he had a religious conversion. Since then, by all accounts, he's been a changed person in many respects and has built an impressive resume, including his little stint as president and commander in chief.
In short, all of these stories about President Bush, even if true -- which I seriously doubt -- are mostly irrelevant to the question of his fitness to continue as commander in chief because we've already witnessed his performance and character in that very job the last four years.
The allegations against John Kerry are infinitely more serious. We know -- despite the dissembling of the media on this issue as well -- that he, too, tried to avoid the war, only "volunteering" when he was about to be drafted. But he also is said to have embellished and lied about his service to enhance his resume and to get an early out, perjured himself in Senate testimony, suborned similar perjury from others, and slandered his fellow soldiers, which served as fodder for the enemy to torture POWs. He hung out with murder-contemplating anarchists, negotiated with the North Vietnamese enemy and lobbied vigorously for a course of action that would lead to a bloodbath in Vietnam.
And the claims against the two men are not only qualitatively different in substance, but there is also no comparison in the level of proof between the two cases.
In support of the charges against President Bush we have forged documents, the disputed hearsay testimony of a deceased superior, the marginally corroborative testimony of an 86-year-old secretary who admits young Bush was a nice guy even if a bit insubordinate, and a malcontent Democrat hack or two who served in the Guard with him.
Weighing against the charges we have proof that young Bush amassed more service points than were required of him, the family members of the deceased officer who contradict the secretary, the contradictory testimony of the daughter of one of the Democratic hacks and common sense. We are expected to believe Cmdr. Killian allowed young Bush to openly disobey orders and merely wrote a whining memo to himself for the file? That wouldn't have happened in the Guard I served in -- not in a million years.
In support of the charges against young John Kerry we have 250 Swift Boat veterans of all political stripes, many of them decorated, who have firsthand knowledge of what they describe. Far, far fewer of those who served with Kerry support him and/or his version of the events. And as for the more damning charges -- that he slandered the troops and nation under oath and confessed to his own crimes -- we have our own eyes and ears. Many of us have watched his Senate testimony and the Dick Cavett debate, and we know what he said.
Moreover, Kerry has never retracted, nor apologized for what he said. He has never explained why he shouldn't have been punished for his self-confessed war atrocities. He has never explained why he trashed his fellow soldiers and why he was integrally involved with a group contemplating assassination.
This is a sordid past. And, contrasted to President Bush, John Kerry has never changed his colors in the last 30 years. He has remained adamantly anti-defense and remains the arrogant elitist he always was.
As to the respective charges against Bush and Kerry, it's undeniable that those against Kerry are far more serious, supported by much stronger evidence and much more relevant to the question of fitness for commander in chief.
Yet the Old Media ignores the claims against Kerry and investigates to death the ones against President Bush. The Old Media richly deserves its diminishing fate.
David Limbaugh
What does it say about the Old Media that they are wholly uninterested in gravely serious and highly relevant charges against John Kerry yet investigate to death relatively minor and largely irrelevant claims against President Bush?
They have uncovered every rock for years and could never find anything but disputed, ambiguous innuendo against President Bush about an issue that pales in comparison to the charges against John Kerry and for which there is much more credible proof.
Even if we assume as true all the Democrats' allegations about the president's guard service -- he used his family connections to avoid Vietnam and to shirk certain duties and orders -- they shouldn't really amount to that much to liberals. I've never met a liberal who disapproved of anyone doing his best to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War, which liberals uniformly believed was immoral.
We also know that President Bush, by his own admission, was a little more carefree when he was younger, but that around age 40 he had a religious conversion. Since then, by all accounts, he's been a changed person in many respects and has built an impressive resume, including his little stint as president and commander in chief.
In short, all of these stories about President Bush, even if true -- which I seriously doubt -- are mostly irrelevant to the question of his fitness to continue as commander in chief because we've already witnessed his performance and character in that very job the last four years.
The allegations against John Kerry are infinitely more serious. We know -- despite the dissembling of the media on this issue as well -- that he, too, tried to avoid the war, only "volunteering" when he was about to be drafted. But he also is said to have embellished and lied about his service to enhance his resume and to get an early out, perjured himself in Senate testimony, suborned similar perjury from others, and slandered his fellow soldiers, which served as fodder for the enemy to torture POWs. He hung out with murder-contemplating anarchists, negotiated with the North Vietnamese enemy and lobbied vigorously for a course of action that would lead to a bloodbath in Vietnam.
And the claims against the two men are not only qualitatively different in substance, but there is also no comparison in the level of proof between the two cases.
In support of the charges against President Bush we have forged documents, the disputed hearsay testimony of a deceased superior, the marginally corroborative testimony of an 86-year-old secretary who admits young Bush was a nice guy even if a bit insubordinate, and a malcontent Democrat hack or two who served in the Guard with him.
Weighing against the charges we have proof that young Bush amassed more service points than were required of him, the family members of the deceased officer who contradict the secretary, the contradictory testimony of the daughter of one of the Democratic hacks and common sense. We are expected to believe Cmdr. Killian allowed young Bush to openly disobey orders and merely wrote a whining memo to himself for the file? That wouldn't have happened in the Guard I served in -- not in a million years.
In support of the charges against young John Kerry we have 250 Swift Boat veterans of all political stripes, many of them decorated, who have firsthand knowledge of what they describe. Far, far fewer of those who served with Kerry support him and/or his version of the events. And as for the more damning charges -- that he slandered the troops and nation under oath and confessed to his own crimes -- we have our own eyes and ears. Many of us have watched his Senate testimony and the Dick Cavett debate, and we know what he said.
Moreover, Kerry has never retracted, nor apologized for what he said. He has never explained why he shouldn't have been punished for his self-confessed war atrocities. He has never explained why he trashed his fellow soldiers and why he was integrally involved with a group contemplating assassination.
This is a sordid past. And, contrasted to President Bush, John Kerry has never changed his colors in the last 30 years. He has remained adamantly anti-defense and remains the arrogant elitist he always was.
As to the respective charges against Bush and Kerry, it's undeniable that those against Kerry are far more serious, supported by much stronger evidence and much more relevant to the question of fitness for commander in chief.
Yet the Old Media ignores the claims against Kerry and investigates to death the ones against President Bush. The Old Media richly deserves its diminishing fate.
From washingtonpost.com:
Cash and Questionable Change
By Thomas Boswell
BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich.
Phil Mickelson took cash over country. Lefty rolled the dice. It may prove the worst gamble of his risk-taking career.
Of course, with about $80 million of Callaway Golf's money under his pillow, maybe Phil will sleep like a baby.
When the Ryder Cup resumes Saturday morning, Mickelson, perhaps the best golfer in the world, will be on the bench for the American team, kicked out of the lineup in shame by disgusted captain Hal Sutton.
At sundown, after the worst day in the history of the U.S. Ryder Cup team, Sutton was asked if Mickelson's switch in equipment from Titleist to Callaway just two weeks ago might have contributed to the two stunning defeats that Mickelson and Tiger Woods suffered at the hands of two European pairings. Sutton mulled the idea.
What thoughts came back to him? In the second match, playing alternate shot, Mickelson drove erratically on the sixth, eighth, 12th and 14th holes, and then, on the 18th tee of a tied match, he hit the ball 60 yards off line to the left and against a fence, effectively losing the most crucial match of the day with one horrible stroke.
"We'll all be left scratching our heads on that" Sutton said, placing blame, and surely scapegoat horns as well on the man who won the Masters, then finished second at the U.S. Open and third at the British Open. "We'll all want answers to that. But the most important person that's going to have to wonder about that is going to be Phil Mickelson.
"It's not going to cause us any grief in the morning because he's going to be cheering instead of playing."
While Mickelson is doing penance, maybe he can go to the range here at Oakland Hills and practice with his new Callaway driver and his new Callaway 3-wood while he pounds buckets of his new Callaway balls. Then, if Sutton lets him play in the afternoon, maybe Phil can replace the little U.S. flag on the back of his shirt with a Callaway logo.
Asked if he would ever have changed clubs -- a huge shift for almost any player -- a week before a Ryder Cup, Sutton said, "I didn't do that. And it will never be debated whether Hal Sutton could have done that."
But would you have done it? "No, I wouldn't have done it. But I'm not Phil Mickelson, and I'm not in his shoes."
Well, they're expensive shoes, you can bet on that.
"You know what? Phil is capable of playing good golf with anything," Sutton said. Lest anyone think that this is just an intramural squabble between endorsers of rival equipment, let it be noted that Sutton represents Callaway.
How could Mickelson do such a thing? Easy. For the same reason that Sutton broke every Ryder Cup rule of match-making common sense and unnecessarily paired his two top players together, risking exactly the sort of needless disaster that befell Mickelson and Woods on Friday. To both of them, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Unless the United States pulls out this Ryder Cup, Sutton may beat his Shrek-like skull on many a wall asking, "Why? Why? Hell, Phil and Tiger don't even like each other."
As for the enormously popular Mickelson, he is flirting with the very fan adoration that so often fuels him. On a hot streak all season, he figured he was playing so spectacularly that he could have it both ways. He could go for the endorsement payday of a lifetime. Granted, most players are terrified by such a basic change in their high-tech tools. Going for the big bucks -- a transition that usually takes months to ingrain, if it works at all -- has derailed plenty of hot careers.
But Mickelson made the change just one week before he would be playing with his peers and for his country in the most pressure-filled event in golf and perhaps in sports. In the Ryder Cup, superstars collapse down the stretch. Any edge, anything that provides the slightest comfort level, is treasured.
"We have to support Phil right now," one of Mickelson's teammates said to me. "But you certainly don't."
By the way, don't ask what Mickelson and Woods thought about their day of misadventures. They couldn't be bothered to speak with TV or the print media.
The U.S. team has done a burn ever since it realized that Mickelson wasn't waiting until after the season to do his switch, like most players. Instead, Callaway was going to get all that marvelous "exposure" during the Ryder Cup.
So how's that exposure going so far? Here's a new slogan: "Callaway, we make the equipment that even Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods can't overcome."
By day's end, Sutton epitomized the stunned atmosphere that hung over the whole golf world. If Woods and Mickelson had won their matches as expected, this Cup would be close. Instead, a rout is possible.
"Who could have seen that coming? . . . You could have owned me today if you had wanted to take that bet because I bet it all. I bet the ranch," Sutton said. "How much would you have bet when they were 3-up in the afternoon match? We'd all have been broke. Tiger and Phil would have bet on it, too."
Especially Phil.
It sometimes seems the Ryder Cup was reinvented so that American professional golf could find ever newer and more original ways to humiliate its rich, pampered self. The Europeans are the event's darlings, even to many American fans, because they usually seem more "American" than the U.S. team. Even when the U.S. team comes from behind to capture a Cup it should have dominated, they break so many rules of etiquette that they are still apologizing five years later. This week looks like it may just extend the trend.
The sulking demeanor of Woods and Mickelson merely underlined the U.S. team's problems.
"They just were not matching up well. They saw when you pair two stars, there is usually good karma or bad karma," Sutton said. "They went south in the middle of that second round, and it was pretty evident from the expressions on their faces."
Sutton's dubious decision to pair the two, for which he has yet to accept any blame, will be an interesting subplot. For now, Sutton seems content to excuse his own choices and instead beat on his team with a two-by-four.
"Oh, yeah. We're going to have a team meeting tonight," Sutton said. "I may have to put [my] cowboy hat back on. . . . When I get really mad at myself, I don't want somebody patting me on the back and loving on me. I can assure you, I'm not gonna' be loving on them."
© 2004 The Washington Post Compan
Cash and Questionable Change
By Thomas Boswell
BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich.
Phil Mickelson took cash over country. Lefty rolled the dice. It may prove the worst gamble of his risk-taking career.
Of course, with about $80 million of Callaway Golf's money under his pillow, maybe Phil will sleep like a baby.
When the Ryder Cup resumes Saturday morning, Mickelson, perhaps the best golfer in the world, will be on the bench for the American team, kicked out of the lineup in shame by disgusted captain Hal Sutton.
At sundown, after the worst day in the history of the U.S. Ryder Cup team, Sutton was asked if Mickelson's switch in equipment from Titleist to Callaway just two weeks ago might have contributed to the two stunning defeats that Mickelson and Tiger Woods suffered at the hands of two European pairings. Sutton mulled the idea.
What thoughts came back to him? In the second match, playing alternate shot, Mickelson drove erratically on the sixth, eighth, 12th and 14th holes, and then, on the 18th tee of a tied match, he hit the ball 60 yards off line to the left and against a fence, effectively losing the most crucial match of the day with one horrible stroke.
"We'll all be left scratching our heads on that" Sutton said, placing blame, and surely scapegoat horns as well on the man who won the Masters, then finished second at the U.S. Open and third at the British Open. "We'll all want answers to that. But the most important person that's going to have to wonder about that is going to be Phil Mickelson.
"It's not going to cause us any grief in the morning because he's going to be cheering instead of playing."
While Mickelson is doing penance, maybe he can go to the range here at Oakland Hills and practice with his new Callaway driver and his new Callaway 3-wood while he pounds buckets of his new Callaway balls. Then, if Sutton lets him play in the afternoon, maybe Phil can replace the little U.S. flag on the back of his shirt with a Callaway logo.
Asked if he would ever have changed clubs -- a huge shift for almost any player -- a week before a Ryder Cup, Sutton said, "I didn't do that. And it will never be debated whether Hal Sutton could have done that."
But would you have done it? "No, I wouldn't have done it. But I'm not Phil Mickelson, and I'm not in his shoes."
Well, they're expensive shoes, you can bet on that.
"You know what? Phil is capable of playing good golf with anything," Sutton said. Lest anyone think that this is just an intramural squabble between endorsers of rival equipment, let it be noted that Sutton represents Callaway.
How could Mickelson do such a thing? Easy. For the same reason that Sutton broke every Ryder Cup rule of match-making common sense and unnecessarily paired his two top players together, risking exactly the sort of needless disaster that befell Mickelson and Woods on Friday. To both of them, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Unless the United States pulls out this Ryder Cup, Sutton may beat his Shrek-like skull on many a wall asking, "Why? Why? Hell, Phil and Tiger don't even like each other."
As for the enormously popular Mickelson, he is flirting with the very fan adoration that so often fuels him. On a hot streak all season, he figured he was playing so spectacularly that he could have it both ways. He could go for the endorsement payday of a lifetime. Granted, most players are terrified by such a basic change in their high-tech tools. Going for the big bucks -- a transition that usually takes months to ingrain, if it works at all -- has derailed plenty of hot careers.
But Mickelson made the change just one week before he would be playing with his peers and for his country in the most pressure-filled event in golf and perhaps in sports. In the Ryder Cup, superstars collapse down the stretch. Any edge, anything that provides the slightest comfort level, is treasured.
"We have to support Phil right now," one of Mickelson's teammates said to me. "But you certainly don't."
By the way, don't ask what Mickelson and Woods thought about their day of misadventures. They couldn't be bothered to speak with TV or the print media.
The U.S. team has done a burn ever since it realized that Mickelson wasn't waiting until after the season to do his switch, like most players. Instead, Callaway was going to get all that marvelous "exposure" during the Ryder Cup.
So how's that exposure going so far? Here's a new slogan: "Callaway, we make the equipment that even Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods can't overcome."
By day's end, Sutton epitomized the stunned atmosphere that hung over the whole golf world. If Woods and Mickelson had won their matches as expected, this Cup would be close. Instead, a rout is possible.
"Who could have seen that coming? . . . You could have owned me today if you had wanted to take that bet because I bet it all. I bet the ranch," Sutton said. "How much would you have bet when they were 3-up in the afternoon match? We'd all have been broke. Tiger and Phil would have bet on it, too."
Especially Phil.
It sometimes seems the Ryder Cup was reinvented so that American professional golf could find ever newer and more original ways to humiliate its rich, pampered self. The Europeans are the event's darlings, even to many American fans, because they usually seem more "American" than the U.S. team. Even when the U.S. team comes from behind to capture a Cup it should have dominated, they break so many rules of etiquette that they are still apologizing five years later. This week looks like it may just extend the trend.
The sulking demeanor of Woods and Mickelson merely underlined the U.S. team's problems.
"They just were not matching up well. They saw when you pair two stars, there is usually good karma or bad karma," Sutton said. "They went south in the middle of that second round, and it was pretty evident from the expressions on their faces."
Sutton's dubious decision to pair the two, for which he has yet to accept any blame, will be an interesting subplot. For now, Sutton seems content to excuse his own choices and instead beat on his team with a two-by-four.
"Oh, yeah. We're going to have a team meeting tonight," Sutton said. "I may have to put [my] cowboy hat back on. . . . When I get really mad at myself, I don't want somebody patting me on the back and loving on me. I can assure you, I'm not gonna' be loving on them."
© 2004 The Washington Post Compan
Friday, September 17, 2004
From Human Events:
'Europe Will Be Islamic by the End of the Century'
by Robert Spencer
How quickly is Europe being Islamized? So quickly that even historian Bernard Lewis, who has continued throughout his honor-laden career to be strangely disingenuous about certain realities of Islamic radicalism and terrorism, told the German newspaper Die Welt forthrightly that "Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century."
Or maybe sooner. Consider some indicators from Scandinavia this past week:
* Sweden's third-largest city, Malmø, according to the Swedish Aftonbladet, has become an outpost of the Middle East in Scandinavia: "The police now publicly admit what many Scandinavians have known for a long time: They no longer control the situation in the nations's third largest city. It is effectively ruled by violent gangs of Muslim immigrants. Some of the Muslims have lived in the area of Rosengård, Malmø, for twenty years, and still don't know how to read or write Swedish. Ambulance personnel are attacked by stones or weapons, and refuse to help anybody in the area without police escort. The immigrants also spit at them when they come to help. Recently, an Albanian youth was stabbed by an Arab, and was left bleeding to death on the ground while the ambulance waited for the police to arrive. The police themselves hesitate to enter parts of their own city unless they have several patrols, and need to have guards to watch their cars, otherwise they will be vandalized."
* The Nordgårdsskolen in Aarhus, Denmark, has become the first Dane-free Danish school. The students now come entirely from Denmark's fastest-growing constituency: Muslim immigrants.
* Also in Denmark, the Qur'an is now required reading for all upper-secondary school students. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but it is unlikely, given the current ascendancy of political correctness on the Continent, that critical perspectives will be included.
* Pakistani Muslim leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed gave an address at the Islamic Cultural Center in Oslo. He was readily allowed into the country despite that fact that, according to Norway's Aftenposten, he "has earlier make flattering comments about Osama bin Laden, and his party, Jamaat-e-Islami, also has hailed al-Qaeda members as heroes." In Norway, he declined to answer questions about whether or not he thought homosexuals should be killed.
Elsewhere in Europe the jihad is taking a more violent form. Dutch officials have uncovered at least fifteen separate terrorist plots, all aimed at punishing the Netherlands for its 1,300 peacekeeping troops in Iraq. And in Spain, Moroccan Muslims, including several suspected participants in the March 11 bombings in Madrid, have taken control of a wing of a Spanish prison. From there they broadcast Muslim prayers at high volume, physically intimidated non-Muslim prisoners, hung portraits of Osama bin Laden, and boasted, "We are going to win the holy war." The guards' response? They asked the ringleaders please to lower the volume on the prayers.
What are European governments doing about all this? France is pressing forward with an appeasement campaign to free two French journalists held hostage by jihadists in Iraq. The Swedish state agency for foreign aid is sponsoring a "Palestinian Solidarity Conference," which aims, among other things, to pressure the European Union to remove the terrorist group Hamas from the EU's list of terrorist groups -- despite Hamas's long history of encouraging and glorifying the murder of civilians by suicide bombers.
What Europe has long sown it is now reaping. Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, the institutionalized oppression of non-Muslims in Muslim societies, chronicles in her forthcoming book Eurabia how it has come to this. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication before Islam in pursuit of short-sighted political and economic benefits. She observes that today "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitude,' i.e., Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society with its traditional Judeo-Christian mores rapidly disappearing."
After the Beslan child massacres, however, there are signs from Eastern Europe that this may be changing. Last Sunday Poland turned away one hundred Chechen Muslims who were trying to enter the country from Belarus. This is the sort of measure that the countries west of Poland have been so far unwilling to take. But since one cannot by any means screen out the jihadists from the moderate Muslims, and the moderates are not helping identify the jihadists either, what choice did the Poles have?
It might not be too long before they will have to turn away entrants from Scandinavia and France as well.
Mr. Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing -- a HUMAN EVENTS sister company) and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).
'Europe Will Be Islamic by the End of the Century'
by Robert Spencer
How quickly is Europe being Islamized? So quickly that even historian Bernard Lewis, who has continued throughout his honor-laden career to be strangely disingenuous about certain realities of Islamic radicalism and terrorism, told the German newspaper Die Welt forthrightly that "Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century."
Or maybe sooner. Consider some indicators from Scandinavia this past week:
* Sweden's third-largest city, Malmø, according to the Swedish Aftonbladet, has become an outpost of the Middle East in Scandinavia: "The police now publicly admit what many Scandinavians have known for a long time: They no longer control the situation in the nations's third largest city. It is effectively ruled by violent gangs of Muslim immigrants. Some of the Muslims have lived in the area of Rosengård, Malmø, for twenty years, and still don't know how to read or write Swedish. Ambulance personnel are attacked by stones or weapons, and refuse to help anybody in the area without police escort. The immigrants also spit at them when they come to help. Recently, an Albanian youth was stabbed by an Arab, and was left bleeding to death on the ground while the ambulance waited for the police to arrive. The police themselves hesitate to enter parts of their own city unless they have several patrols, and need to have guards to watch their cars, otherwise they will be vandalized."
* The Nordgårdsskolen in Aarhus, Denmark, has become the first Dane-free Danish school. The students now come entirely from Denmark's fastest-growing constituency: Muslim immigrants.
* Also in Denmark, the Qur'an is now required reading for all upper-secondary school students. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but it is unlikely, given the current ascendancy of political correctness on the Continent, that critical perspectives will be included.
* Pakistani Muslim leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed gave an address at the Islamic Cultural Center in Oslo. He was readily allowed into the country despite that fact that, according to Norway's Aftenposten, he "has earlier make flattering comments about Osama bin Laden, and his party, Jamaat-e-Islami, also has hailed al-Qaeda members as heroes." In Norway, he declined to answer questions about whether or not he thought homosexuals should be killed.
Elsewhere in Europe the jihad is taking a more violent form. Dutch officials have uncovered at least fifteen separate terrorist plots, all aimed at punishing the Netherlands for its 1,300 peacekeeping troops in Iraq. And in Spain, Moroccan Muslims, including several suspected participants in the March 11 bombings in Madrid, have taken control of a wing of a Spanish prison. From there they broadcast Muslim prayers at high volume, physically intimidated non-Muslim prisoners, hung portraits of Osama bin Laden, and boasted, "We are going to win the holy war." The guards' response? They asked the ringleaders please to lower the volume on the prayers.
What are European governments doing about all this? France is pressing forward with an appeasement campaign to free two French journalists held hostage by jihadists in Iraq. The Swedish state agency for foreign aid is sponsoring a "Palestinian Solidarity Conference," which aims, among other things, to pressure the European Union to remove the terrorist group Hamas from the EU's list of terrorist groups -- despite Hamas's long history of encouraging and glorifying the murder of civilians by suicide bombers.
What Europe has long sown it is now reaping. Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, the institutionalized oppression of non-Muslims in Muslim societies, chronicles in her forthcoming book Eurabia how it has come to this. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication before Islam in pursuit of short-sighted political and economic benefits. She observes that today "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitude,' i.e., Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society with its traditional Judeo-Christian mores rapidly disappearing."
After the Beslan child massacres, however, there are signs from Eastern Europe that this may be changing. Last Sunday Poland turned away one hundred Chechen Muslims who were trying to enter the country from Belarus. This is the sort of measure that the countries west of Poland have been so far unwilling to take. But since one cannot by any means screen out the jihadists from the moderate Muslims, and the moderates are not helping identify the jihadists either, what choice did the Poles have?
It might not be too long before they will have to turn away entrants from Scandinavia and France as well.
Mr. Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing -- a HUMAN EVENTS sister company) and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).
From The Spectator.co.uk
Why I’m backing Bush
by Iain Duncan Smith
Iain Duncan Smith denounces Bush-bashing Tory ‘sophisticates’ and says that the President offers a radical agenda of hope at home and abroad
Politics in the United States is as polarised as I can remember in my lifetime. November’s election is shaping up to be as close fought as the 2000 contest, but with war and global Islamic terrorism mixed into the brew, we all feel as involved as the American public. The whole world is dangling on a hanging chad.
While the majority of Europeans and the entire Labour party minus Downing Street are rooting for Kerry, what is more disquieting is the support of some British Conservative MPs for the Democrat candidate.
Some Conservative opposition to the American administration is historic, of course. There is a quietist tradition in our philosophy which fights shy of foreign policy adventurism. There is a post-imperialist, pro-European tradition which fears American hegemony and wishes it counterbalanced by the EU. There is an Arabist tradition which cannot tolerate the President’s support for Israel. But these principled objections are, I feel, mere rationalisations; there is a more fundamental objection, which is cultural and psychological.
Quietists, Europhiles and Arabists share with the social democratic Left a particular mindset: they are all sophisticates. Proud of their education, their Olympian detachment and their cultural broad-mindedness, they sneer at the garbled syntax and simple moralisms of George W. Bush. Most of all, they resent his adoption of an aggressive ‘transformation’ agenda, and his assumption — so misguided to the sophisticate —that progress can be effected by conviction, courage and force. The result is a critique of George Bush and his administration which owes more to demonology than to ideology. Remember that the reinvention of Labour and the Democrats earned them the positive, fresh-sounding prefix ‘new’; the conservatives were dubbed ‘neo’, with its deliberate and sinister echo of ‘neo-fascism’.
This ‘sophisticated’ critique of Bush, however, says more about his critics than it does about him. Indeed, European derision of presidents with thick accents and unprepossessing demeanours has a long history. Abraham Lincoln was a backwoods lawyer from nowhere, derided internationally for his homespun suits and his moral fervour. But Lincoln abolished slavery, united the States and founded the modern Republican party. Harry Truman was a conservative, small-town Democrat following in the large footsteps of a born communicator, FDR. But no president ever made more momentous decisions for his country and the world, dropping the A-bomb on Japan, relieving the besieged Berlin by air, launching the Marshall Plan and sending troops to Korea.
Forty years later another unsophisticated president, Ronald Reagan, was derided as a ham actor, a Midwestern faux-cowboy who demanded his presidential briefs on a single sheet of paper. Well, the single sheet was enough. Reagan resolved to break the détente with Moscow. The stance took courage, and the president was widely denounced for ‘megaphone diplomacy’. To the dismay of sophisticates everywhere, Reagan responded to the Soviet deployment of SS20 medium-range ballistic missiles across Eastern Europe in terms the Russians understood: cruise and Pershing. The eventual result was the collapse of communism in Europe and central Asia.
The sophisticates’ forgetfulness of history is dangerous. When there is no Lincoln, Truman, Reagan or Bush, who is there? There is Bill Clinton and the European Union. An attitude of supine indifference, glossed as multilateralism, was the fertile seedbed of Osama bin Laden and led directly, through outrages of escalating daring, to September 11. And the claim that in the absence of a strong America the EU can mount an effective response to genocide was, surely, for ever disgraced on the killing fields of Srebrenica. Let those two events stand as testament to the outlook of the liberal Left, and shame the deluded fans of Michael Moore.
The protesters who marched through New York two week ago under the banner of Michael Moore were united solely by a negative. The Bush-haters have neither a plan nor a purpose. Their sophistication has become sophistry. Their panacea for global politics is to pray-in-aid the United Nations, the body which for 12 years stood by as Saddam Hussein flouted its every resolution, and whose officials — as now appears — were engaged in the systematic corruption of the oil-for-food programme, channelling funds into the pockets of Saddam’s own relatives. This outrage has gone scarcely reported, while Michael Moore makes lucrative hay with some disconnected allegations, pointing in contradictory directions, about the Bush family’s business interests.
The UN is an institution with a genius for inaction. It cannot lead nations: nations must lead it. But to the Michael Moore Bush-haters ‘leadership’ is cant for oppression and exploitation, and the rudderless UN is the institutional image of themselves — a camp whose pompous self-regard is in inverse proportion to its achievements and its vision. As Nick Cohen recently concluded in the New Statesman, ‘There is no longer a Left with a message of hope for the human race. The audiences at Michael Moore’s films ... have no policy to offer. The noise of their self-righteous anger is merely a cover for an indifference bred of failure.’
The Right, by contrast, has a strong message of hope. As a result, it is the driving force of US politics. And driving the Right is a group much misunderstood in Britain: the ‘neocons’. They earned the prefix not only because they have applied a new twist to conservatism, but because they are new conservatives themselves. The original neocons — the intellectuals like Myron Magnet and Marvin Olasky — were former liberals and leftists who, as is famously said, were ‘mugged by reality’. The left-liberal remedy has not worked, and a new one must be tried.
This is most apparent on the domestic front. The neocons believe that their mission is to take their creed into the no-go areas. Their conservatism isn’t restricted to questions of tax and defence. They match a commitment to the war on terror with a commitment to a more effective war on poverty. The dream of LBJ’s Great Society — the huge expansion of state welfare in the 1960s — delivered a nightmare of alienation, ghettoisation, broken families, drug addiction and welfare dependency. Under the influence of the neocons a new approach has been adopted. In New York Rudi Giuliani showed what happened when conservatism is applied at street level: petty crime is not tolerated, and major crime falls. Nationally, Republicans showed what can be done when work, not welfare, is expected of citizens: unemployment and teenage pregnancy fall and enterprise and marriage increase.
Conservatism in America is not the philosophy of stasis, resistance to change and the slow management of national decline. The Republicans have become the party of radical solutions to deep-seated problems. Yes, there are contradictions and discrepancies in American conservatism which were on full display in New York. The neocons are only one among many strands in the Republican coalition, which embraces figures as diverse as Schwarzenegger, Giuliani, Cheney and McCain. Yet differences are worn openly, and lightly. Dick Cheney, for instance, disagrees with the President over homosexual marriage — yet this is accepted as a principled disagreement, not a cause for infighting. Young and old, black and white Americans from all corners of the country agree and disagree in the full knowledge that it is within the Republican fold that the decisions will be made which will determine the future — that it is Republicans who make the intellectual running.
So the election is Bush’s to lose. But its closeness is also a reflection of the nation’s disappointment that he has not yet fulfilled enough of the promises he made four years ago. Domestically, the administration has lost focus and has not pressed hard enough to reform American government and society. The President has delivered nothing that can stand comparison with Rudi Giuliani’s zero-tolerance policing or the 1996 Republican welfare reforms. The early promise of the ‘school choice’ programme has not been fulfilled.
George Bush has secured his most significant advances internationally. The American HIV/Aids initiative caused Bob Geldof to declare that Bush was doing more for Africa than any other world leader. The innovative Millennium Challenge Accounts, which tie foreign aid to institutional reform in the recipient countries, represents a bold new assault on the poverty and tyranny that afflict so much of the world. And of course, though so much remains to be done, the overthrow of the cruel regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq was the first step towards bringing those countries into the club of civilised nations.
These initiatives, at home and abroad, are a standing challenge to oversophisticated British complacency. Our parliamentary system, once the democratic inspiration to the world, is now encompassing its own decline. It crushes optimism and impedes change. Certain issues dare not even raise their heads, though they sit at the centre of our social and spiritual problems. Visiting some of the poorest communities in Britain, I am always struck by how the issues they regard as central to their lives are given scant attention in Westminster.
Take the great crime of drug abuse, which is ripping vulnerable communities apart. In Westminster drugs are regarded not as a horror to be ended but merely as a problem to be controlled. The young victims are left languishing and forgotten, for (say the sophisticates) we have lost the war on drugs and should sue for peace. In the same communities, family breakdown is endemic. Yet in Westminster the whole subject of family formation is off-limits, though families are the building blocks of society and the health of families determines the health of the nation. Marriage, in particular — the one institution which holds families together — is regarded as just one among a range of lifestyle choices, between which it would be invidious to comment. So no comment is made.
In America, by contrast, these are live issues which are debated openly, if often raucously and sometimes violently. Real debate leads to real solutions. American politics is rough-hewn, whereas ours is so smooth and stylised that no one beyond Westminster pays it any attention anymore.
The recent media flurry about cancelled invitations to the White House obscures a very simple fact. Michael Howard is challenging British political inertia in the same way that the Republicans have in America. His record as home secretary and his recent speech on crime have clear echoes of Giuliani. These are steps towards a strategy of change in Britain which will give hope to people beyond Westminster.
As the Economist writers John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge point out in their new book The Right Nation, in America ‘conservatism is a progressive creed’. Today it is the Democrats and their European avatars who are reactionary and backward-looking. The great lesson of the Republican success story is that people respond to hope, not hate. I want George W. Bush to win in November not only because Britain’s future is entwined with America’s, and because the war on terror must be fought and won by a resolute president. I also want him to win because I hope the Republican message will rub off on my own party — so that we too can be the party of optimism, and the party of change.
Why I’m backing Bush
by Iain Duncan Smith
Iain Duncan Smith denounces Bush-bashing Tory ‘sophisticates’ and says that the President offers a radical agenda of hope at home and abroad
Politics in the United States is as polarised as I can remember in my lifetime. November’s election is shaping up to be as close fought as the 2000 contest, but with war and global Islamic terrorism mixed into the brew, we all feel as involved as the American public. The whole world is dangling on a hanging chad.
While the majority of Europeans and the entire Labour party minus Downing Street are rooting for Kerry, what is more disquieting is the support of some British Conservative MPs for the Democrat candidate.
Some Conservative opposition to the American administration is historic, of course. There is a quietist tradition in our philosophy which fights shy of foreign policy adventurism. There is a post-imperialist, pro-European tradition which fears American hegemony and wishes it counterbalanced by the EU. There is an Arabist tradition which cannot tolerate the President’s support for Israel. But these principled objections are, I feel, mere rationalisations; there is a more fundamental objection, which is cultural and psychological.
Quietists, Europhiles and Arabists share with the social democratic Left a particular mindset: they are all sophisticates. Proud of their education, their Olympian detachment and their cultural broad-mindedness, they sneer at the garbled syntax and simple moralisms of George W. Bush. Most of all, they resent his adoption of an aggressive ‘transformation’ agenda, and his assumption — so misguided to the sophisticate —that progress can be effected by conviction, courage and force. The result is a critique of George Bush and his administration which owes more to demonology than to ideology. Remember that the reinvention of Labour and the Democrats earned them the positive, fresh-sounding prefix ‘new’; the conservatives were dubbed ‘neo’, with its deliberate and sinister echo of ‘neo-fascism’.
This ‘sophisticated’ critique of Bush, however, says more about his critics than it does about him. Indeed, European derision of presidents with thick accents and unprepossessing demeanours has a long history. Abraham Lincoln was a backwoods lawyer from nowhere, derided internationally for his homespun suits and his moral fervour. But Lincoln abolished slavery, united the States and founded the modern Republican party. Harry Truman was a conservative, small-town Democrat following in the large footsteps of a born communicator, FDR. But no president ever made more momentous decisions for his country and the world, dropping the A-bomb on Japan, relieving the besieged Berlin by air, launching the Marshall Plan and sending troops to Korea.
Forty years later another unsophisticated president, Ronald Reagan, was derided as a ham actor, a Midwestern faux-cowboy who demanded his presidential briefs on a single sheet of paper. Well, the single sheet was enough. Reagan resolved to break the détente with Moscow. The stance took courage, and the president was widely denounced for ‘megaphone diplomacy’. To the dismay of sophisticates everywhere, Reagan responded to the Soviet deployment of SS20 medium-range ballistic missiles across Eastern Europe in terms the Russians understood: cruise and Pershing. The eventual result was the collapse of communism in Europe and central Asia.
The sophisticates’ forgetfulness of history is dangerous. When there is no Lincoln, Truman, Reagan or Bush, who is there? There is Bill Clinton and the European Union. An attitude of supine indifference, glossed as multilateralism, was the fertile seedbed of Osama bin Laden and led directly, through outrages of escalating daring, to September 11. And the claim that in the absence of a strong America the EU can mount an effective response to genocide was, surely, for ever disgraced on the killing fields of Srebrenica. Let those two events stand as testament to the outlook of the liberal Left, and shame the deluded fans of Michael Moore.
The protesters who marched through New York two week ago under the banner of Michael Moore were united solely by a negative. The Bush-haters have neither a plan nor a purpose. Their sophistication has become sophistry. Their panacea for global politics is to pray-in-aid the United Nations, the body which for 12 years stood by as Saddam Hussein flouted its every resolution, and whose officials — as now appears — were engaged in the systematic corruption of the oil-for-food programme, channelling funds into the pockets of Saddam’s own relatives. This outrage has gone scarcely reported, while Michael Moore makes lucrative hay with some disconnected allegations, pointing in contradictory directions, about the Bush family’s business interests.
The UN is an institution with a genius for inaction. It cannot lead nations: nations must lead it. But to the Michael Moore Bush-haters ‘leadership’ is cant for oppression and exploitation, and the rudderless UN is the institutional image of themselves — a camp whose pompous self-regard is in inverse proportion to its achievements and its vision. As Nick Cohen recently concluded in the New Statesman, ‘There is no longer a Left with a message of hope for the human race. The audiences at Michael Moore’s films ... have no policy to offer. The noise of their self-righteous anger is merely a cover for an indifference bred of failure.’
The Right, by contrast, has a strong message of hope. As a result, it is the driving force of US politics. And driving the Right is a group much misunderstood in Britain: the ‘neocons’. They earned the prefix not only because they have applied a new twist to conservatism, but because they are new conservatives themselves. The original neocons — the intellectuals like Myron Magnet and Marvin Olasky — were former liberals and leftists who, as is famously said, were ‘mugged by reality’. The left-liberal remedy has not worked, and a new one must be tried.
This is most apparent on the domestic front. The neocons believe that their mission is to take their creed into the no-go areas. Their conservatism isn’t restricted to questions of tax and defence. They match a commitment to the war on terror with a commitment to a more effective war on poverty. The dream of LBJ’s Great Society — the huge expansion of state welfare in the 1960s — delivered a nightmare of alienation, ghettoisation, broken families, drug addiction and welfare dependency. Under the influence of the neocons a new approach has been adopted. In New York Rudi Giuliani showed what happened when conservatism is applied at street level: petty crime is not tolerated, and major crime falls. Nationally, Republicans showed what can be done when work, not welfare, is expected of citizens: unemployment and teenage pregnancy fall and enterprise and marriage increase.
Conservatism in America is not the philosophy of stasis, resistance to change and the slow management of national decline. The Republicans have become the party of radical solutions to deep-seated problems. Yes, there are contradictions and discrepancies in American conservatism which were on full display in New York. The neocons are only one among many strands in the Republican coalition, which embraces figures as diverse as Schwarzenegger, Giuliani, Cheney and McCain. Yet differences are worn openly, and lightly. Dick Cheney, for instance, disagrees with the President over homosexual marriage — yet this is accepted as a principled disagreement, not a cause for infighting. Young and old, black and white Americans from all corners of the country agree and disagree in the full knowledge that it is within the Republican fold that the decisions will be made which will determine the future — that it is Republicans who make the intellectual running.
So the election is Bush’s to lose. But its closeness is also a reflection of the nation’s disappointment that he has not yet fulfilled enough of the promises he made four years ago. Domestically, the administration has lost focus and has not pressed hard enough to reform American government and society. The President has delivered nothing that can stand comparison with Rudi Giuliani’s zero-tolerance policing or the 1996 Republican welfare reforms. The early promise of the ‘school choice’ programme has not been fulfilled.
George Bush has secured his most significant advances internationally. The American HIV/Aids initiative caused Bob Geldof to declare that Bush was doing more for Africa than any other world leader. The innovative Millennium Challenge Accounts, which tie foreign aid to institutional reform in the recipient countries, represents a bold new assault on the poverty and tyranny that afflict so much of the world. And of course, though so much remains to be done, the overthrow of the cruel regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq was the first step towards bringing those countries into the club of civilised nations.
These initiatives, at home and abroad, are a standing challenge to oversophisticated British complacency. Our parliamentary system, once the democratic inspiration to the world, is now encompassing its own decline. It crushes optimism and impedes change. Certain issues dare not even raise their heads, though they sit at the centre of our social and spiritual problems. Visiting some of the poorest communities in Britain, I am always struck by how the issues they regard as central to their lives are given scant attention in Westminster.
Take the great crime of drug abuse, which is ripping vulnerable communities apart. In Westminster drugs are regarded not as a horror to be ended but merely as a problem to be controlled. The young victims are left languishing and forgotten, for (say the sophisticates) we have lost the war on drugs and should sue for peace. In the same communities, family breakdown is endemic. Yet in Westminster the whole subject of family formation is off-limits, though families are the building blocks of society and the health of families determines the health of the nation. Marriage, in particular — the one institution which holds families together — is regarded as just one among a range of lifestyle choices, between which it would be invidious to comment. So no comment is made.
In America, by contrast, these are live issues which are debated openly, if often raucously and sometimes violently. Real debate leads to real solutions. American politics is rough-hewn, whereas ours is so smooth and stylised that no one beyond Westminster pays it any attention anymore.
The recent media flurry about cancelled invitations to the White House obscures a very simple fact. Michael Howard is challenging British political inertia in the same way that the Republicans have in America. His record as home secretary and his recent speech on crime have clear echoes of Giuliani. These are steps towards a strategy of change in Britain which will give hope to people beyond Westminster.
As the Economist writers John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge point out in their new book The Right Nation, in America ‘conservatism is a progressive creed’. Today it is the Democrats and their European avatars who are reactionary and backward-looking. The great lesson of the Republican success story is that people respond to hope, not hate. I want George W. Bush to win in November not only because Britain’s future is entwined with America’s, and because the war on terror must be fought and won by a resolute president. I also want him to win because I hope the Republican message will rub off on my own party — so that we too can be the party of optimism, and the party of change.
From HobbsOnline:
Memogate: Fake But Accurate Fake AND False!
by Bill Hobbs
The last remaining shreds of Dan Rather's credibility just went up in smoke. ABC News has just within the last 15 minutes or so posted an exclusive report based on exclusive interview with Col. Walter Staudt, the retired former brigadier general of the Texas Air National Guard. ABC News reports that Staudt is refuting CBS News' assertions (based on those now-infamous forged documents) that Staudt pressured others in the TANG to help cover for George W. Bush during his stint in the TANG. Staudt also says Bush didn't get preferential treatment to get into the TANG, and nobody pressured him to accept Bush into the Guard. Here's an excerpt from the story, which was actually reported on Free Republic and RatherGate.com before ABC News posted its story...
Retired Col. Walter Staudt, who was brigadier general of Bush's unit in Texas, interviewed Bush for the Guard position and retired in March 1972. He was mentioned in one of the memos allegedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian as having pressured Killian to assist Bush, though Bush supposedly was not meeting Guard standards.
"I never pressured anybody about George Bush because I had no reason to," Staudt told ABC News in his first interview since the documents were made public.
The memo stated that "Staudt is pushing to sugar coat" a review of Bush's performance.
Staudt said he decided to come forward because he saw erroneous reports on television. CBS News first reported on the memos, which have come under scrutiny by document experts who question whether they are authentic. Killian, the purported author of the documents, died in 1984.
Staudt insisted Bush did not use connections to avoid being sent to Vietnam. "He didn't use political influence to get into the Air National Guard," Staudt said, adding, "I don't know how they would know that, because I was the one who did it and I was the one who was there and I didn't talk to any of them."
'Highly Qualified'
During his time in charge of the unit, Staudt decided whether to accept those who applied for pilot training. He recalled Bush as a standout candidate. "He was highly qualified," he said. "He passed all the scrutiny and tests he was given."
Staudt said he never tried to influence Killian or other Guardsmen, and added that he never came under any pressure himself to accept Bush. "No one called me about taking George Bush into the Air National Guard," he said. "It was my decision. I swore him in. I never heard anything from anybody."
Dan Rather's bizarre "Fake But Accurate" defense of the story CBS built around the forged memos has now utterly and completely collapsed. As I demonstrated yesterday, if you take all references to and discussion of the memos out of the original 60 Minutes report, there's meat left in the sandwich, just a series of unsubstantiated charges by two known anti-Bush partisans.
Staudt's statements to ABC News fit with the known facts about Bush's entry into the Texas ANG. The "Bush was AWOL!" crowd claims Bush needed preferential treatment to leapfrog more than 100 people on the waiting list to get into the Guard, but that is false - the waiting list was for those seeking to enlist for weekend-warrior slots, while Bush, with his Yale degree and his willingness to spend the first two years of his 6-year hitch in full-time pilot training, entered as a commissioned officer. Various TANG officers of that era have stated that there was no waiting list for those slots.
Dan Rather should not resign immediately. He should be fired. Right after apologizing to the American people and President George W. Bush live on the CBS Evening News.
But that won't happen. Instead, CBS will say Staudt is not to be believed because he is an admitted Bush supporter. In the bizzaro world now inhabited by Dan "Fake But True!" Rather, only people who oppose Bush can be considered credible.
ABC News deserves praise for sticking the knife into CBS on this one. Now, ABC, please go find out if the F in the John F. Kerry campaign stands for FORGER.
Memogate: Fake But Accurate Fake AND False!
by Bill Hobbs
The last remaining shreds of Dan Rather's credibility just went up in smoke. ABC News has just within the last 15 minutes or so posted an exclusive report based on exclusive interview with Col. Walter Staudt, the retired former brigadier general of the Texas Air National Guard. ABC News reports that Staudt is refuting CBS News' assertions (based on those now-infamous forged documents) that Staudt pressured others in the TANG to help cover for George W. Bush during his stint in the TANG. Staudt also says Bush didn't get preferential treatment to get into the TANG, and nobody pressured him to accept Bush into the Guard. Here's an excerpt from the story, which was actually reported on Free Republic and RatherGate.com before ABC News posted its story...
Retired Col. Walter Staudt, who was brigadier general of Bush's unit in Texas, interviewed Bush for the Guard position and retired in March 1972. He was mentioned in one of the memos allegedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian as having pressured Killian to assist Bush, though Bush supposedly was not meeting Guard standards.
"I never pressured anybody about George Bush because I had no reason to," Staudt told ABC News in his first interview since the documents were made public.
The memo stated that "Staudt is pushing to sugar coat" a review of Bush's performance.
Staudt said he decided to come forward because he saw erroneous reports on television. CBS News first reported on the memos, which have come under scrutiny by document experts who question whether they are authentic. Killian, the purported author of the documents, died in 1984.
Staudt insisted Bush did not use connections to avoid being sent to Vietnam. "He didn't use political influence to get into the Air National Guard," Staudt said, adding, "I don't know how they would know that, because I was the one who did it and I was the one who was there and I didn't talk to any of them."
'Highly Qualified'
During his time in charge of the unit, Staudt decided whether to accept those who applied for pilot training. He recalled Bush as a standout candidate. "He was highly qualified," he said. "He passed all the scrutiny and tests he was given."
Staudt said he never tried to influence Killian or other Guardsmen, and added that he never came under any pressure himself to accept Bush. "No one called me about taking George Bush into the Air National Guard," he said. "It was my decision. I swore him in. I never heard anything from anybody."
Dan Rather's bizarre "Fake But Accurate" defense of the story CBS built around the forged memos has now utterly and completely collapsed. As I demonstrated yesterday, if you take all references to and discussion of the memos out of the original 60 Minutes report, there's meat left in the sandwich, just a series of unsubstantiated charges by two known anti-Bush partisans.
Staudt's statements to ABC News fit with the known facts about Bush's entry into the Texas ANG. The "Bush was AWOL!" crowd claims Bush needed preferential treatment to leapfrog more than 100 people on the waiting list to get into the Guard, but that is false - the waiting list was for those seeking to enlist for weekend-warrior slots, while Bush, with his Yale degree and his willingness to spend the first two years of his 6-year hitch in full-time pilot training, entered as a commissioned officer. Various TANG officers of that era have stated that there was no waiting list for those slots.
Dan Rather should not resign immediately. He should be fired. Right after apologizing to the American people and President George W. Bush live on the CBS Evening News.
But that won't happen. Instead, CBS will say Staudt is not to be believed because he is an admitted Bush supporter. In the bizzaro world now inhabited by Dan "Fake But True!" Rather, only people who oppose Bush can be considered credible.
ABC News deserves praise for sticking the knife into CBS on this one. Now, ABC, please go find out if the F in the John F. Kerry campaign stands for FORGER.
From City Journal
Time to Take Illegal Immigration Seriously
The newsweekly dramatically breaks with elite orthodoxy
by Heather MacDonald
The cover says it all: two fists ripping a hole in the American flag. And with that striking image, Time magazine just may have started a revolution in the mainstream press’s attitude towards illegal immigration.
For decades, public outrage over illegal immigration met only scorn or indifference from the elite media. The New York Times recently dismissed opponents of border trespassing as the
“ ‘what part of illegal don’t you understand’ crowd.” But with its September 20 cover story, WHO LEFT THE DOOR OPEN?, Time magazine has crossed over to the other side. The 9,000-plus-word article meticulously documents the destruction wrought by illegal aliens. More important, it seethes with indignation at the Bush administration’s unwillingness to stop that destruction. The story’s tone—calling border trespassers “invaders,” who seek to “mask their unlawful presence”—was once confined to the ghetto of talk radio. No longer. And if Time—that venerable voice of the establishment—can fume that it is “outrageously easy to sneak in,” maybe politicians will start to pay attention when the public voices the same complaint.
WHO LEFT THE DOOR OPEN? explodes every myth that open-borders proponents churn out. The most crucial one is the “we can’t turn off the flow” myth. According to this lie, the border invasion is an unstoppable fact of nature that has nothing to do with government action or inaction. The only solution, say the apologists, is to legalize illegality.
Time is having none of it. “Who’s to blame for all the intruders?” the magazine asks. “The problem is one of the U.S.’s own making. The government doesn’t want to fix it.” The biggest cause of border trespassing, argues Time, is the government’s decades-long refusal to enforce the law against employing illegal aliens. Simple solutions—like a fraud-proof Social Security card—have never been tried.
Second biggest myth of the open-borders advocates: illegals take jobs Americans spurn. Wrong again, says Time. It’s bottom-of-the-barrel wage rates, not hard work, that American workers reject.
Third myth: illegal aliens are an economic plus for the country because they cheerfully provide inexpensive services that raise everyone’s standard of living. Give me a break! guffaws Time. WHO LEFT THE DOOR OPEN? catalogues the costs to the public: increased risk of terrorism; local hospitals driven out of business by border interlopers demanding free care; police forces and county jails reeling under the burden of illegal-alien rapists, murderers, bank robbers, and car thieves; Southwestern ranchers and homeowners who daily face “revolting mounds of personal refuse” on their property, not to mention broken fences and missing property; and a corrosive assault on the “U.S. tradition of encouraging legal immigration.”
Fourth myth: the demonization of Proposition 187. No lie is dearer to the elite press than the charge that only a nativist bigot would object to illegals’ exploitation of America’s public largesse. So California’s 1994 passage of Proposition 187—denying taxpayer-funded goods like free education and free hospital treatment to illegal aliens—has until now been characterized as one of the darkest moments in America’s long history of racism towards “people of color.” And along comes Time and actually sympathizes with public anger over the illegal capture of benefits. The government’s failure to enforce immigration laws “breeds anger and resentment among citizens who can’t understand why illegal aliens often receive government-funded health care, education benefits and subsidized housing,” says the magazine. Presumably, Time is not joining the assault on a current Arizona referendum to require proof of citizenship for voting and welfare receipt—a cheeky populist demand to obey existing law.
Time’s groundbreaking story shreds the Bush administration’s justification for its recent amnesty proposal: we’ve tried enforcement of entry laws, and it doesn’t work. No, responds Time: neither yours nor any previous administration has ever tried enforcement. And what is worse, notes the magazine, the recent amnesty proposal has served only to double the rate of illegal entry.
The lock on elite opinion has been broken. Let the debate begin.
Time to Take Illegal Immigration Seriously
The newsweekly dramatically breaks with elite orthodoxy
by Heather MacDonald
The cover says it all: two fists ripping a hole in the American flag. And with that striking image, Time magazine just may have started a revolution in the mainstream press’s attitude towards illegal immigration.
For decades, public outrage over illegal immigration met only scorn or indifference from the elite media. The New York Times recently dismissed opponents of border trespassing as the
“ ‘what part of illegal don’t you understand’ crowd.” But with its September 20 cover story, WHO LEFT THE DOOR OPEN?, Time magazine has crossed over to the other side. The 9,000-plus-word article meticulously documents the destruction wrought by illegal aliens. More important, it seethes with indignation at the Bush administration’s unwillingness to stop that destruction. The story’s tone—calling border trespassers “invaders,” who seek to “mask their unlawful presence”—was once confined to the ghetto of talk radio. No longer. And if Time—that venerable voice of the establishment—can fume that it is “outrageously easy to sneak in,” maybe politicians will start to pay attention when the public voices the same complaint.
WHO LEFT THE DOOR OPEN? explodes every myth that open-borders proponents churn out. The most crucial one is the “we can’t turn off the flow” myth. According to this lie, the border invasion is an unstoppable fact of nature that has nothing to do with government action or inaction. The only solution, say the apologists, is to legalize illegality.
Time is having none of it. “Who’s to blame for all the intruders?” the magazine asks. “The problem is one of the U.S.’s own making. The government doesn’t want to fix it.” The biggest cause of border trespassing, argues Time, is the government’s decades-long refusal to enforce the law against employing illegal aliens. Simple solutions—like a fraud-proof Social Security card—have never been tried.
Second biggest myth of the open-borders advocates: illegals take jobs Americans spurn. Wrong again, says Time. It’s bottom-of-the-barrel wage rates, not hard work, that American workers reject.
Third myth: illegal aliens are an economic plus for the country because they cheerfully provide inexpensive services that raise everyone’s standard of living. Give me a break! guffaws Time. WHO LEFT THE DOOR OPEN? catalogues the costs to the public: increased risk of terrorism; local hospitals driven out of business by border interlopers demanding free care; police forces and county jails reeling under the burden of illegal-alien rapists, murderers, bank robbers, and car thieves; Southwestern ranchers and homeowners who daily face “revolting mounds of personal refuse” on their property, not to mention broken fences and missing property; and a corrosive assault on the “U.S. tradition of encouraging legal immigration.”
Fourth myth: the demonization of Proposition 187. No lie is dearer to the elite press than the charge that only a nativist bigot would object to illegals’ exploitation of America’s public largesse. So California’s 1994 passage of Proposition 187—denying taxpayer-funded goods like free education and free hospital treatment to illegal aliens—has until now been characterized as one of the darkest moments in America’s long history of racism towards “people of color.” And along comes Time and actually sympathizes with public anger over the illegal capture of benefits. The government’s failure to enforce immigration laws “breeds anger and resentment among citizens who can’t understand why illegal aliens often receive government-funded health care, education benefits and subsidized housing,” says the magazine. Presumably, Time is not joining the assault on a current Arizona referendum to require proof of citizenship for voting and welfare receipt—a cheeky populist demand to obey existing law.
Time’s groundbreaking story shreds the Bush administration’s justification for its recent amnesty proposal: we’ve tried enforcement of entry laws, and it doesn’t work. No, responds Time: neither yours nor any previous administration has ever tried enforcement. And what is worse, notes the magazine, the recent amnesty proposal has served only to double the rate of illegal entry.
The lock on elite opinion has been broken. Let the debate begin.
From The Wall Street Journal:
60 Minutes of Fame
If Dan Rather's source turns out to be a partisan, say goodbye to CBS's reputation.
BY BERNARD GOLDBERG
On Feb. 12, 1996, I picked up a phone at CBS News in New York and called Dan Rather, who was in Des Moines covering the Iowa caucuses. It was a call that I--then a CBS correspondent--wasn't anxious to make. I'd written an op-ed for this page about liberal bias in the news that was going to run the next day. I knew I had to give Dan a heads up. "I wrote a piece for the Journal, Dan, and my guess is you won't be ecstatic about it." I hadn't given him any details yet, so he had no idea what the op-ed was about. Dan was gracious; he always was when we spoke. "Bernie," he said, "we were friends yesterday, we're friends today, and we'll be friends tomorrow. So tell me about it."
I did, and the more I told him the more tense the conversation got. After listening for a while, Dan told me, "I'm getting viscerally angry about this" and the call soon ended. And then the man who was my friend yesterday, today, and tomorrow told a number of our colleagues that he'd "never" forgive me for what I'd done.
What I'd done was not simply to say that there really was a problem with liberal bias in the news (if it matters, I'd never voted Republican in my life), I'd also broken a taboo, doing what no mainstream journalist (to my knowledge) had ever done: I'd given ammo to "the enemy" by very publicly saying, in effect, that the conservatives had been right all along.
As if that weren't bad enough, it was becoming apparent that by writing about bias, which Mr. Rather over the years had repeatedly said was a phony issue, I had (at least in his mind) also called into question the thing he holds most sacred--his integrity. That wasn't my intent. I was just writing about bias in the news, not about Dan Rather. But if Dan thinks his reputation has been attacked, understandably, he gets hotter than an armadillo at a Fourth of July picnic, as you know who might put it.
That's why in the midst of this Bush memo scandal, you have to wonder: Now that Dan's credibility really is taking a beating, why won't he blow the whistle on his source, the one who slipped him the documents that almost certainly are fraudulent and got him into this mess?
He doesn't have to give us the guy's name and address, just tell us what motivated him to leak the documents to CBS News. It's a common journalistic practice, after all, to shed as much light on an unnamed source as possible. That's why we often read "a source close to the administration" or "a police source involved in the investigation" said such and such. No name. But enough info so the news consumer understands, as they say, where the source is coming from. In the case of the leaked memos, does the source have any connection to the Democrats? How about the Kerry campaign? If Dan told us that, he'd still be faithful to his source, but at least as importantly, he'd be showing good faith to his viewers by giving them a clue as to the source's motives, whatever they might be.
Instead, Dan and CBS News do what they'd never tolerate in a crooked politician: They circle the wagons. First we get a statement about how there's no internal investigation going on at CBS; then we get a bunch of stories by CBS News backing up the original "60 Minutes" piece that are so one-sided they'd get a junior-high journalism student an "F" for lack of balance; then on "60 Minutes" we did get a former secretary, "a credible voice" as Dan Rather put it, who told him that "she believes the documents we obtained are not authentic. But . . . she told us she believes what the documents actually say is exactly as we reported." Put plainly: The memos may be fake, but "We stand by our story."
We're the ones who have a right to be angry with CBS News, but it turns out that Dan Rather is the one who's really fuming. Not at the source who got him into all of this, but at those "partisans" who are fanning the flames. The Washington Post quotes him as saying: "I don't cave when the pressure gets too great from these partisan political forces." He's absolutely right that some of his critics are partisans. But how about Dan's source? Is he also a partisan?
Now it's possible that the mystery man (or woman) is someone who lives in Denmark or Tibet and somehow got his hands on genuine documents that make the president look bad in the middle of a race that might turn out to be tighter than the rusted lug nuts on a '54 Chevy. But I doubt it. I'm betting he lives a lot closer to home, and, who knows, he might indeed turn out to be a "partisan political force" himself. And this is precisely Dan's problem. This is why, I suspect, he isn't coming clean, despite the damage to his reputation. Because Dan Rather may be protecting not just his source, but himself; because, if the source turns out to be a partisan, then Dan wasn't just taken for a ride, but may have been a willing passenger.
And then Dan, and CBS News, can kiss their reputations goodbye.
Mr. Goldberg, a correspondent with CBS News from 1972-2000, is the author of "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News," and, most recently, of "Arrogance: Saving America from the Media Elite" (Warner, 2003).
60 Minutes of Fame
If Dan Rather's source turns out to be a partisan, say goodbye to CBS's reputation.
BY BERNARD GOLDBERG
On Feb. 12, 1996, I picked up a phone at CBS News in New York and called Dan Rather, who was in Des Moines covering the Iowa caucuses. It was a call that I--then a CBS correspondent--wasn't anxious to make. I'd written an op-ed for this page about liberal bias in the news that was going to run the next day. I knew I had to give Dan a heads up. "I wrote a piece for the Journal, Dan, and my guess is you won't be ecstatic about it." I hadn't given him any details yet, so he had no idea what the op-ed was about. Dan was gracious; he always was when we spoke. "Bernie," he said, "we were friends yesterday, we're friends today, and we'll be friends tomorrow. So tell me about it."
I did, and the more I told him the more tense the conversation got. After listening for a while, Dan told me, "I'm getting viscerally angry about this" and the call soon ended. And then the man who was my friend yesterday, today, and tomorrow told a number of our colleagues that he'd "never" forgive me for what I'd done.
What I'd done was not simply to say that there really was a problem with liberal bias in the news (if it matters, I'd never voted Republican in my life), I'd also broken a taboo, doing what no mainstream journalist (to my knowledge) had ever done: I'd given ammo to "the enemy" by very publicly saying, in effect, that the conservatives had been right all along.
As if that weren't bad enough, it was becoming apparent that by writing about bias, which Mr. Rather over the years had repeatedly said was a phony issue, I had (at least in his mind) also called into question the thing he holds most sacred--his integrity. That wasn't my intent. I was just writing about bias in the news, not about Dan Rather. But if Dan thinks his reputation has been attacked, understandably, he gets hotter than an armadillo at a Fourth of July picnic, as you know who might put it.
That's why in the midst of this Bush memo scandal, you have to wonder: Now that Dan's credibility really is taking a beating, why won't he blow the whistle on his source, the one who slipped him the documents that almost certainly are fraudulent and got him into this mess?
He doesn't have to give us the guy's name and address, just tell us what motivated him to leak the documents to CBS News. It's a common journalistic practice, after all, to shed as much light on an unnamed source as possible. That's why we often read "a source close to the administration" or "a police source involved in the investigation" said such and such. No name. But enough info so the news consumer understands, as they say, where the source is coming from. In the case of the leaked memos, does the source have any connection to the Democrats? How about the Kerry campaign? If Dan told us that, he'd still be faithful to his source, but at least as importantly, he'd be showing good faith to his viewers by giving them a clue as to the source's motives, whatever they might be.
Instead, Dan and CBS News do what they'd never tolerate in a crooked politician: They circle the wagons. First we get a statement about how there's no internal investigation going on at CBS; then we get a bunch of stories by CBS News backing up the original "60 Minutes" piece that are so one-sided they'd get a junior-high journalism student an "F" for lack of balance; then on "60 Minutes" we did get a former secretary, "a credible voice" as Dan Rather put it, who told him that "she believes the documents we obtained are not authentic. But . . . she told us she believes what the documents actually say is exactly as we reported." Put plainly: The memos may be fake, but "We stand by our story."
We're the ones who have a right to be angry with CBS News, but it turns out that Dan Rather is the one who's really fuming. Not at the source who got him into all of this, but at those "partisans" who are fanning the flames. The Washington Post quotes him as saying: "I don't cave when the pressure gets too great from these partisan political forces." He's absolutely right that some of his critics are partisans. But how about Dan's source? Is he also a partisan?
Now it's possible that the mystery man (or woman) is someone who lives in Denmark or Tibet and somehow got his hands on genuine documents that make the president look bad in the middle of a race that might turn out to be tighter than the rusted lug nuts on a '54 Chevy. But I doubt it. I'm betting he lives a lot closer to home, and, who knows, he might indeed turn out to be a "partisan political force" himself. And this is precisely Dan's problem. This is why, I suspect, he isn't coming clean, despite the damage to his reputation. Because Dan Rather may be protecting not just his source, but himself; because, if the source turns out to be a partisan, then Dan wasn't just taken for a ride, but may have been a willing passenger.
And then Dan, and CBS News, can kiss their reputations goodbye.
Mr. Goldberg, a correspondent with CBS News from 1972-2000, is the author of "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News," and, most recently, of "Arrogance: Saving America from the Media Elite" (Warner, 2003).
From The New York Daily News:
WHY SHAKEUP WON'T SAVE KERRY
By DICK MORRIS
JOHN Kerry's recent shakeup of his campaign illus trates his larger problem: He is playing a simple game of checkers, while President Bush is playing a subtle game of chess.
Edging aside Bob Shrum and promoting former Clinton spokesmen Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart to key positions in the campaign replaces a flawed strategist — Shrum — with two able, but limited, tacticians. Both McCurry and Lockhart are good at handling evolving crises and keeping the media well fed and happy. But two press secretaries do not equal one strategist.
Kerry's basic problem is that he has no overview of how he's going to win. His consultants and staff confuse a pile of ammunition with a strategy.
Their basic idea is to hit Bush with everything and anything they can find. But throwing negatives at a sitting president is like punching a pillow. It feels good and keeps the base happy — but it doesn't help to win the election. By the time a man has served four years as president, negatives that pre-existed his tenure are largely irrelevant.
People are keenly interested in the character strengths and flaws of a challenger; they want keys to how he'd do in the top job. But once they've had a chance to observe how a person actually functions as chief executive, what he did in his youth matters not at all.
And it is particularly true that after a person has been commander-in-chief, we could care less if he disobeyed an order to have a physical when he was a kid.
With their eye on the cheering section, not on the playing field, Kerry's people are throwing negatives because they enjoy it. An anonymous aide even said that it makes their candidate look good to be fighting back. But it accomplishes no political purpose and doesn't close the gap in the polls. For that, you need a strategy.
But beyond the basic question of whether to run a positive or a negative campaign, Kerry has not solved the core conundrum that has haunted him from the day he won the nomination: whether to run as a hawk or a dove.
His failure to resolve this crucial issue stems from the inherent contradictions of his own candidacy. He is a liberal running in a time of war, a posture that forces him first to tack left and then right to keep both sides of his base in line.
Bush, playing chess, has co-opted the winning turf, vowing toughness on terror and staying the course in Iraq. Half of Kerry's supporters, according to the Fox News poll, want to pull out of Iraq, but one-third agree with Bush on the war, so Kerry is sunk whichever position he takes.
He's trying to straddle the issue just like Richard Nixon did on Vietnam during the 1968 election. But he won't be able to get away with it, not through three face-to-face debates (which Nixon avoided in 1968). In the words of Joe Louis, Kerry will be able to run but he can't hide.
Others, supposedly including Bill Clinton, have urged Kerry to stress domestic issues and raise their saliency so that he can exploit the innate Democratic edge on these topics. But here, too, Bush has Kerry in check. The issues the Democrat wants to use are being solved even as he speaks about them. Each month brings better economic news. Bush's prescription-drug program is just beginning to kick in, reducing the viability of the health-care issue. And even as Kerry talks about education, Bush's historic education reform is upgrading schools across the country.
Lockhart and McCurry face the same problem that Shrum encountered before them: They have a candidate who can't figure out why he's running. Kerry doesn't have a strategy because he don't have an agenda or even clear issue positions.
Bush has no such problem. His voters all agree with his clearly laid-out positions, and his opinions about Iraq and terror tap into a broad swath of the American electorate — including many now voting for Kerry. All the president has to do is to articulate his positions clearly and compellingly and he will likely prevail.
Meanwhile, Kerry has to figure out who he is and why he's running. By late September, you'd better be playing chess, not checkers, if you want to win.
WHY SHAKEUP WON'T SAVE KERRY
By DICK MORRIS
JOHN Kerry's recent shakeup of his campaign illus trates his larger problem: He is playing a simple game of checkers, while President Bush is playing a subtle game of chess.
Edging aside Bob Shrum and promoting former Clinton spokesmen Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart to key positions in the campaign replaces a flawed strategist — Shrum — with two able, but limited, tacticians. Both McCurry and Lockhart are good at handling evolving crises and keeping the media well fed and happy. But two press secretaries do not equal one strategist.
Kerry's basic problem is that he has no overview of how he's going to win. His consultants and staff confuse a pile of ammunition with a strategy.
Their basic idea is to hit Bush with everything and anything they can find. But throwing negatives at a sitting president is like punching a pillow. It feels good and keeps the base happy — but it doesn't help to win the election. By the time a man has served four years as president, negatives that pre-existed his tenure are largely irrelevant.
People are keenly interested in the character strengths and flaws of a challenger; they want keys to how he'd do in the top job. But once they've had a chance to observe how a person actually functions as chief executive, what he did in his youth matters not at all.
And it is particularly true that after a person has been commander-in-chief, we could care less if he disobeyed an order to have a physical when he was a kid.
With their eye on the cheering section, not on the playing field, Kerry's people are throwing negatives because they enjoy it. An anonymous aide even said that it makes their candidate look good to be fighting back. But it accomplishes no political purpose and doesn't close the gap in the polls. For that, you need a strategy.
But beyond the basic question of whether to run a positive or a negative campaign, Kerry has not solved the core conundrum that has haunted him from the day he won the nomination: whether to run as a hawk or a dove.
His failure to resolve this crucial issue stems from the inherent contradictions of his own candidacy. He is a liberal running in a time of war, a posture that forces him first to tack left and then right to keep both sides of his base in line.
Bush, playing chess, has co-opted the winning turf, vowing toughness on terror and staying the course in Iraq. Half of Kerry's supporters, according to the Fox News poll, want to pull out of Iraq, but one-third agree with Bush on the war, so Kerry is sunk whichever position he takes.
He's trying to straddle the issue just like Richard Nixon did on Vietnam during the 1968 election. But he won't be able to get away with it, not through three face-to-face debates (which Nixon avoided in 1968). In the words of Joe Louis, Kerry will be able to run but he can't hide.
Others, supposedly including Bill Clinton, have urged Kerry to stress domestic issues and raise their saliency so that he can exploit the innate Democratic edge on these topics. But here, too, Bush has Kerry in check. The issues the Democrat wants to use are being solved even as he speaks about them. Each month brings better economic news. Bush's prescription-drug program is just beginning to kick in, reducing the viability of the health-care issue. And even as Kerry talks about education, Bush's historic education reform is upgrading schools across the country.
Lockhart and McCurry face the same problem that Shrum encountered before them: They have a candidate who can't figure out why he's running. Kerry doesn't have a strategy because he don't have an agenda or even clear issue positions.
Bush has no such problem. His voters all agree with his clearly laid-out positions, and his opinions about Iraq and terror tap into a broad swath of the American electorate — including many now voting for Kerry. All the president has to do is to articulate his positions clearly and compellingly and he will likely prevail.
Meanwhile, Kerry has to figure out who he is and why he's running. By late September, you'd better be playing chess, not checkers, if you want to win.
Has George W. Bush Killed Off Conservatism?:
by Andrew Ferguson
Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Am I the only one who sensed the spectral presence of Bill Clinton (pre-bypass) hovering over George W. Bush as he delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention?
The speech, or at least its second half, has been widely praised as a stirring justification for the country's continued vigilance in the war on terror -- along with Bush's subtle conflation of ``continued vigilance'' with ``my re-election.''
But that's not the half of the speech that reminded me of Clinton.
The first half, in which Bush outlined his domestic agenda, received less praise -- a ``laundry list,'' critics called it -- but it was much more interesting, and its political significance, I'll wager, will be farther-reaching.
For in it Bush declared the death of American conservatism. As a guide either to governing or to politicking, conservatism is over, finished, kaput. The hovering presence of Clinton looked pleased.
And well he might have. The ``laundry-list'' technique that Bush used in that long first half was perfected by Clinton. And it is more than a rhetorical trick. The laundry-list speech, consisting of brief summaries of one program after another, is uniquely suited to a style of governing, and a philosophy of government, that Bush has happily embraced.
Not Really Over
Call it the omnicompetent state. Clinton didn't invent it, of course, but he was its pre-eminent salesman, even when he announced, as he did in his 1996 State of the Union address, that the ``era of big government is over.''
Before Clinton, White House speechwriters were bedeviled by the State of the Union speech, which every president, with much pomp and pretense, delivers annually. The speech must be ``thematic,'' they were told, lest it disintegrate into a laundry list of unrelated items and bore the audience.
Clinton rejected the conventional wisdom. He wrapped his meaty arms around the laundry list. For 70 minutes or more he would describe, seemingly at random and with a few sentences each, dozens of different programs that were fitted to every conceivable frustration or annoyance citizens might feel, no matter how niggling -- from the lack of discipline at their kid's school to the gridlocked traffic on their morning commute.
Just for You
Not surprisingly, the speeches were rhetorically loose- jointed and uninteresting. If you listened long enough, however, sooner or later you heard about a federal program just for you.
Clinton always pretended that his programs were somehow revolutionary -- that government, in his catch phrase, had been ``reinvented'' to meet the unprecedented pace of social change roiling his audience. And his audience was more than receptive.
Wowing focus groups, drawing huge TV ratings, Clinton's laundry lists were the most successful State of the Union addresses in history.
While announcing its demise, Clinton in fact saved big government, by disaggregating it and aiming each piece at a particular constituency who might come to rely on its generosity.
Clinton was so successful that by 2000 the Republican presidential nominee -- that would be Bush -- had abandoned the traditional conservative premise that an overweening government often stood in the way of a free and self-reliant citizenry.
Big Spenders
Thus Bush's spending on domestic programs has vastly outstripped Clinton's. His recent Medicare expansion alone, by some estimates, will cost $2 trillion over the next 20 years. And several speakers at this month's Republican convention -- including Education Secretary Rod Paige and retired General Tommy Franks -- boasted that for many programs (special education and veterans affairs among them) Bush had spent more in four years than Clinton had in eight.
Those Democrats are such tightwads.
After opening his convention speech with a promise to ``restrain federal spending, reduce regulation'' and create a ``simpler, fairer'' tax code, Bush promised, in the next paragraph, to ``double the number of people served by our principal job-training program and increase funding for community colleges.''
In the paragraph after that, he said he would create ``opportunity zones'' by adding new provisions to the tax code.
Then he said he would ``offer a tax credit to encourage small business'' and ``provide direct help,'' also known as money, to low-income Americans to buy health insurance.
Promises
Also, he'll build health centers in every community in America, and 7 million more homes in the next 10 years, and ``provide a record level of funding'' for education.
Don't forget Pell grants for the middle class, and early intervention programs for kids. And a new reform -- medical savings accounts -- that will further complicate the tax code.
Then he promised to simplify the tax code again.
At the end of his laundry list, Bush made an artful pivot. He attacked his opponent, John Kerry, for ``proposing more than $2 trillion in new federal spending.''
Those Democrats are such spendthrifts.
Like Clinton, Bush pretends all this frenetic governmental activism is revolutionary -- uniquely adapted to our unprecedented new era. (Every era thinks it is unprecedented.) There is much talk about ``expanding choice.'' Underlying it, however, is an idea that's not new at all: the citizen as client, a consumer who fulfills himself by coming to rely on the blandishments of government.
For reasons that aren't clear, Bush insists on calling his approach ``conservatism.'' Surely we can find a more accurate term. Has ``Clintonism'' already been taken?
by Andrew Ferguson
Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Am I the only one who sensed the spectral presence of Bill Clinton (pre-bypass) hovering over George W. Bush as he delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention?
The speech, or at least its second half, has been widely praised as a stirring justification for the country's continued vigilance in the war on terror -- along with Bush's subtle conflation of ``continued vigilance'' with ``my re-election.''
But that's not the half of the speech that reminded me of Clinton.
The first half, in which Bush outlined his domestic agenda, received less praise -- a ``laundry list,'' critics called it -- but it was much more interesting, and its political significance, I'll wager, will be farther-reaching.
For in it Bush declared the death of American conservatism. As a guide either to governing or to politicking, conservatism is over, finished, kaput. The hovering presence of Clinton looked pleased.
And well he might have. The ``laundry-list'' technique that Bush used in that long first half was perfected by Clinton. And it is more than a rhetorical trick. The laundry-list speech, consisting of brief summaries of one program after another, is uniquely suited to a style of governing, and a philosophy of government, that Bush has happily embraced.
Not Really Over
Call it the omnicompetent state. Clinton didn't invent it, of course, but he was its pre-eminent salesman, even when he announced, as he did in his 1996 State of the Union address, that the ``era of big government is over.''
Before Clinton, White House speechwriters were bedeviled by the State of the Union speech, which every president, with much pomp and pretense, delivers annually. The speech must be ``thematic,'' they were told, lest it disintegrate into a laundry list of unrelated items and bore the audience.
Clinton rejected the conventional wisdom. He wrapped his meaty arms around the laundry list. For 70 minutes or more he would describe, seemingly at random and with a few sentences each, dozens of different programs that were fitted to every conceivable frustration or annoyance citizens might feel, no matter how niggling -- from the lack of discipline at their kid's school to the gridlocked traffic on their morning commute.
Just for You
Not surprisingly, the speeches were rhetorically loose- jointed and uninteresting. If you listened long enough, however, sooner or later you heard about a federal program just for you.
Clinton always pretended that his programs were somehow revolutionary -- that government, in his catch phrase, had been ``reinvented'' to meet the unprecedented pace of social change roiling his audience. And his audience was more than receptive.
Wowing focus groups, drawing huge TV ratings, Clinton's laundry lists were the most successful State of the Union addresses in history.
While announcing its demise, Clinton in fact saved big government, by disaggregating it and aiming each piece at a particular constituency who might come to rely on its generosity.
Clinton was so successful that by 2000 the Republican presidential nominee -- that would be Bush -- had abandoned the traditional conservative premise that an overweening government often stood in the way of a free and self-reliant citizenry.
Big Spenders
Thus Bush's spending on domestic programs has vastly outstripped Clinton's. His recent Medicare expansion alone, by some estimates, will cost $2 trillion over the next 20 years. And several speakers at this month's Republican convention -- including Education Secretary Rod Paige and retired General Tommy Franks -- boasted that for many programs (special education and veterans affairs among them) Bush had spent more in four years than Clinton had in eight.
Those Democrats are such tightwads.
After opening his convention speech with a promise to ``restrain federal spending, reduce regulation'' and create a ``simpler, fairer'' tax code, Bush promised, in the next paragraph, to ``double the number of people served by our principal job-training program and increase funding for community colleges.''
In the paragraph after that, he said he would create ``opportunity zones'' by adding new provisions to the tax code.
Then he said he would ``offer a tax credit to encourage small business'' and ``provide direct help,'' also known as money, to low-income Americans to buy health insurance.
Promises
Also, he'll build health centers in every community in America, and 7 million more homes in the next 10 years, and ``provide a record level of funding'' for education.
Don't forget Pell grants for the middle class, and early intervention programs for kids. And a new reform -- medical savings accounts -- that will further complicate the tax code.
Then he promised to simplify the tax code again.
At the end of his laundry list, Bush made an artful pivot. He attacked his opponent, John Kerry, for ``proposing more than $2 trillion in new federal spending.''
Those Democrats are such spendthrifts.
Like Clinton, Bush pretends all this frenetic governmental activism is revolutionary -- uniquely adapted to our unprecedented new era. (Every era thinks it is unprecedented.) There is much talk about ``expanding choice.'' Underlying it, however, is an idea that's not new at all: the citizen as client, a consumer who fulfills himself by coming to rely on the blandishments of government.
For reasons that aren't clear, Bush insists on calling his approach ``conservatism.'' Surely we can find a more accurate term. Has ``Clintonism'' already been taken?
Thursday, September 16, 2004
From The New York Daily News. Some specifics are wrong, but this is an amazingly level headed piece by Richard Cohen.
Bush-hating goes haywire
by Richard Cohen
I live in a state of my own. It is not blue, which is to say anti-Bush. And it is not red, long the color of lefties, Commies and the like, but now somehow the color of reactionaries - the GOP and zealous partisans of the President. My own state of mind combines some of the blue with some of the red to produce my own political hue. Color me purple.
It is not the purple of rage nor the purple of royalty, and it contains a lot more blue than it does red. I was only briefly enamored of President Bush, whom I now consider to be a divider, not a uniter, and who went to war in Iraq for stated reasons that turned out to be baseless and for nonstated reasons that have yet to be publicly acknowledged. I am referring here to an entire neoconservative foreign policy agenda in which violence plays too prominent and casual a role.
I am also chilled by assertions of near-royal power in handling terrorism suspects, do not like Bush's choice of judges, his energy policy, his unilateralism or the manner in which he has intruded religion into politics. I'm looking pretty blue, no?
I nevertheless cannot bring myself to hate Bush. In fact, Bush-haters go so far, they wind up adding a dash of red to my blue, pushing me by revulsion into a color I otherwise would not have. For instance, I have just read Nicholson Baker's novel "Checkpoint," a repellent work about whether the assassination of Bush would be warranted.
I bump into these anti-Bush alarmists all the time. Just recently, an extremely successful and erudite man I much admire told me he views the upcoming election as something akin to September 1939, the time when World War II started and, among other things, European Jewry was all but snuffed out. I add that bit about the Holocaust because the man I was talking to had been born a European Jew. I could hardly believe my ears.
This is not the place to examine why Bush is so hated by some people, although the war in Iraq surely takes pride of place. But even before that particular war, I heard people denounce the one in Afghanistan, that Taliban-controlled horror that harbored Osama Bin Laden. These people are infected with a corrosive doubt about their own country.
A recent Pew poll found, for instance, that 51% of Democrats agreed with the proposition that "U.S. wrongdoing" contributed to the attacks of 9/11. (Only 17% of Republicans agreed.)
Those are astounding numbers, an indictment not really of America (for what?) but of those people who compulsively blame their own country for the faults of others. You can believe that America's support of Israel and the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia played a role in the 9/11 attacks, but the term Pew used was "wrongdoing." In this respect, these people and Bin Laden are in agreement.
The demonization of Bush is going to cost John Kerry plenty, if it has not done so already. It so overstates the case against Bush that a levelheaded listener would be excused for thinking that there isn't one in the first place. It squeezes the middle, virtually forcing moderates to pick which bunch of nuts they're going to join.
It's hard to know whom to loathe more - religious zealots who would censor my reading and deny me the fruits of stem-cell research or fervid hallucinators who belittle Saddam Hussein's crimes (or even 9/11) and wonder, in the throes of perpetual adolescence, whether the assassination of the President would not amount to a political mercy killing. It's all pretty repugnant.
But some of us cherish moderation, recoil from conspiracy theories and would like, if possible, to stick to the facts. We may dislike Bush's policies, but we do not vitriolically hate the man, think he stole the election or blame our own country for the crimes of 9/11. We are the proud Purples - once the royal color, now the tattered banner of common sense.
Bush-hating goes haywire
by Richard Cohen
I live in a state of my own. It is not blue, which is to say anti-Bush. And it is not red, long the color of lefties, Commies and the like, but now somehow the color of reactionaries - the GOP and zealous partisans of the President. My own state of mind combines some of the blue with some of the red to produce my own political hue. Color me purple.
It is not the purple of rage nor the purple of royalty, and it contains a lot more blue than it does red. I was only briefly enamored of President Bush, whom I now consider to be a divider, not a uniter, and who went to war in Iraq for stated reasons that turned out to be baseless and for nonstated reasons that have yet to be publicly acknowledged. I am referring here to an entire neoconservative foreign policy agenda in which violence plays too prominent and casual a role.
I am also chilled by assertions of near-royal power in handling terrorism suspects, do not like Bush's choice of judges, his energy policy, his unilateralism or the manner in which he has intruded religion into politics. I'm looking pretty blue, no?
I nevertheless cannot bring myself to hate Bush. In fact, Bush-haters go so far, they wind up adding a dash of red to my blue, pushing me by revulsion into a color I otherwise would not have. For instance, I have just read Nicholson Baker's novel "Checkpoint," a repellent work about whether the assassination of Bush would be warranted.
I bump into these anti-Bush alarmists all the time. Just recently, an extremely successful and erudite man I much admire told me he views the upcoming election as something akin to September 1939, the time when World War II started and, among other things, European Jewry was all but snuffed out. I add that bit about the Holocaust because the man I was talking to had been born a European Jew. I could hardly believe my ears.
This is not the place to examine why Bush is so hated by some people, although the war in Iraq surely takes pride of place. But even before that particular war, I heard people denounce the one in Afghanistan, that Taliban-controlled horror that harbored Osama Bin Laden. These people are infected with a corrosive doubt about their own country.
A recent Pew poll found, for instance, that 51% of Democrats agreed with the proposition that "U.S. wrongdoing" contributed to the attacks of 9/11. (Only 17% of Republicans agreed.)
Those are astounding numbers, an indictment not really of America (for what?) but of those people who compulsively blame their own country for the faults of others. You can believe that America's support of Israel and the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia played a role in the 9/11 attacks, but the term Pew used was "wrongdoing." In this respect, these people and Bin Laden are in agreement.
The demonization of Bush is going to cost John Kerry plenty, if it has not done so already. It so overstates the case against Bush that a levelheaded listener would be excused for thinking that there isn't one in the first place. It squeezes the middle, virtually forcing moderates to pick which bunch of nuts they're going to join.
It's hard to know whom to loathe more - religious zealots who would censor my reading and deny me the fruits of stem-cell research or fervid hallucinators who belittle Saddam Hussein's crimes (or even 9/11) and wonder, in the throes of perpetual adolescence, whether the assassination of the President would not amount to a political mercy killing. It's all pretty repugnant.
But some of us cherish moderation, recoil from conspiracy theories and would like, if possible, to stick to the facts. We may dislike Bush's policies, but we do not vitriolically hate the man, think he stole the election or blame our own country for the crimes of 9/11. We are the proud Purples - once the royal color, now the tattered banner of common sense.
From The Los Angeles Times:
Soldiers of Fortune -- at What Price?
By Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington University.
David A. Passaro was a mercenary working for the United States. A former Special Forces soldier, he was on the job for the American government in Afghanistan on June 19, 2003, when he was told to get information from a detainee named Abdul Wali. When Wali insisted that he knew nothing, Passaro allegedly beat him to death with a heavy metal flashlight.
Now on trial for murder, Passaro is described in a recent criminal indictment as "a contractor working on behalf of the United States Central Intelligence Agency … engaging in paramilitary activities."
"Contractor" is the term used by the Defense Department to avoid more pejorative terms like "mercenary" to describe Washington's growing shadow army.
While Passaro awaits trial in North Carolina, another self- described "contractor," Jonathan K. Idema, was convicted Wednesday in Afghanistan and sentenced to 10 years in a case involving charges of torture and other crimes. And in Iraq, 16 of 44 incidents of abuse at Abu Ghraib have been tied to private contractors.
In all, there are about 20,000 military contractors currently working in Iraq for the U.S. government, according to the Washington Post; that's the equivalent of three army divisions of contractors. Soldiers-for-hire like Passaro are often employed (for as much as $200,000 a year) by former generals, who retired to run clandestine operations for profit and who have, in many cases, become millionaires from the secret budgets of the CIA and Defense Department.
One such company alone, MPRI, has dozens of former generals and 10,000 former soldiers in the field, including many former members of the Special Forces. But privatization of the military comes at a price. In recent years, contractors have been linked to abuses ranging from ethnic cleansing operations in Croatia to the trafficking of sex slaves in Bosnia. They have been used to circumvent federal restrictions on the military. (For example, when Congress imposed a cap of 20,000 soldiers in Bosnia, the military simply hired 2,000 more private military contractors.)
In Iraq, they're dying just like regular soldiers. To date, roughly 120 contractors have been killed there (although some were not involved in paramilitary activities). They include Vincent Foster, a former Marine sniper who was engaged in "skirmishes" in Iraq, and Scott Helvenston, who died guarding a convoy.
The growing use of contractors and freelancers for paramilitary work has fueled an industry of mercenaries that was long in decline. Consider the strange case of Idema. On July 5, 2004, Afghan police entered the private prison run by him in Kabul. They reportedly found three men hanging from the ceiling while five others were found beaten and tied in a dark small room. Idema, also a former Special Forces member, claimed to have been working with the CIA and offered to supply proof that high-ranking U.S. officials supported his operation.
Idema's case highlights the increasingly fluid definitions of soldiers, contractors and freelancers. While officials denied any contact with Idema's operation, the Defense Department recently acknowledged it held an Afghan man in custody for two months after Idema delivered him to U.S. forces. Likewise, officials now admit that Idema sent messages and faxes to top Pentagon officials. Idema also reportedly arranged and participated in raids on homes with NATO forces in Kabul.
It is not clear whether Idema was actually employed by the U.S., but clearly he is part of a radically expanded market for soldiers of fortune, a market fueled by U.S. dollars. Unlike Passaro, Idema was conveniently left to Afghanistan. Not only was he denied the right to cross- examine witnesses, but the presiding judge, Abdul Baset Bakhtyari, dismissed his efforts to show his connections to "high-ranking military officials."
As for Passaro, the government secured a federal court order in Raleigh, N.C., barring the public disclosure of many of the facts of his case, including details of his work for the CIA.
There has never been a national debate on the use of mercenaries or on the rules governing their conduct. And, if some powerful forces in Washington have their way, there never will be. Washington's clandestine army reportedly receives billions and employs tens of thousands. It is a growing dependence that could come back to haunt us. Like many nations in history, we may find that it is far easier to hire mercenaries than to be rid of them.
Soldiers of Fortune -- at What Price?
By Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington University.
David A. Passaro was a mercenary working for the United States. A former Special Forces soldier, he was on the job for the American government in Afghanistan on June 19, 2003, when he was told to get information from a detainee named Abdul Wali. When Wali insisted that he knew nothing, Passaro allegedly beat him to death with a heavy metal flashlight.
Now on trial for murder, Passaro is described in a recent criminal indictment as "a contractor working on behalf of the United States Central Intelligence Agency … engaging in paramilitary activities."
"Contractor" is the term used by the Defense Department to avoid more pejorative terms like "mercenary" to describe Washington's growing shadow army.
While Passaro awaits trial in North Carolina, another self- described "contractor," Jonathan K. Idema, was convicted Wednesday in Afghanistan and sentenced to 10 years in a case involving charges of torture and other crimes. And in Iraq, 16 of 44 incidents of abuse at Abu Ghraib have been tied to private contractors.
In all, there are about 20,000 military contractors currently working in Iraq for the U.S. government, according to the Washington Post; that's the equivalent of three army divisions of contractors. Soldiers-for-hire like Passaro are often employed (for as much as $200,000 a year) by former generals, who retired to run clandestine operations for profit and who have, in many cases, become millionaires from the secret budgets of the CIA and Defense Department.
One such company alone, MPRI, has dozens of former generals and 10,000 former soldiers in the field, including many former members of the Special Forces. But privatization of the military comes at a price. In recent years, contractors have been linked to abuses ranging from ethnic cleansing operations in Croatia to the trafficking of sex slaves in Bosnia. They have been used to circumvent federal restrictions on the military. (For example, when Congress imposed a cap of 20,000 soldiers in Bosnia, the military simply hired 2,000 more private military contractors.)
In Iraq, they're dying just like regular soldiers. To date, roughly 120 contractors have been killed there (although some were not involved in paramilitary activities). They include Vincent Foster, a former Marine sniper who was engaged in "skirmishes" in Iraq, and Scott Helvenston, who died guarding a convoy.
The growing use of contractors and freelancers for paramilitary work has fueled an industry of mercenaries that was long in decline. Consider the strange case of Idema. On July 5, 2004, Afghan police entered the private prison run by him in Kabul. They reportedly found three men hanging from the ceiling while five others were found beaten and tied in a dark small room. Idema, also a former Special Forces member, claimed to have been working with the CIA and offered to supply proof that high-ranking U.S. officials supported his operation.
Idema's case highlights the increasingly fluid definitions of soldiers, contractors and freelancers. While officials denied any contact with Idema's operation, the Defense Department recently acknowledged it held an Afghan man in custody for two months after Idema delivered him to U.S. forces. Likewise, officials now admit that Idema sent messages and faxes to top Pentagon officials. Idema also reportedly arranged and participated in raids on homes with NATO forces in Kabul.
It is not clear whether Idema was actually employed by the U.S., but clearly he is part of a radically expanded market for soldiers of fortune, a market fueled by U.S. dollars. Unlike Passaro, Idema was conveniently left to Afghanistan. Not only was he denied the right to cross- examine witnesses, but the presiding judge, Abdul Baset Bakhtyari, dismissed his efforts to show his connections to "high-ranking military officials."
As for Passaro, the government secured a federal court order in Raleigh, N.C., barring the public disclosure of many of the facts of his case, including details of his work for the CIA.
There has never been a national debate on the use of mercenaries or on the rules governing their conduct. And, if some powerful forces in Washington have their way, there never will be. Washington's clandestine army reportedly receives billions and employs tens of thousands. It is a growing dependence that could come back to haunt us. Like many nations in history, we may find that it is far easier to hire mercenaries than to be rid of them.
From The Boston Globe:
How to steal an election
By Jeff Jacoby
A RECENT story that didn't get nearly the attention it deserved was the New York Daily News report that 46,000 registered New York City voters are also registered to vote in Florida. Nearly 1,700 of them have had absentee ballots mailed to their home in the other state, and as many as 1,000 have voted twice in the same election. Can 1,000 fraudulent votes change an election? Well, George W. Bush won Florida in 2000 by just 537 votes.
It is illegal to register to vote simultaneously in different jurisdictions, but scofflaws have little to worry about. As the Daily News noted, "efforts to prevent people from registering and voting in more than one state rely mostly on the honor system." Those who break the law rarely face prosecution or serious punishment. It's easy -- and painless -- to cheat.
I learned this firsthand in 1996, when I registered my wife's cat as a voter in Cook County, Ill., Norfolk County, Mass., and Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and then requested absentee ballots from all three venues. My purpose wasn't to cast illegal multiple votes but to demonstrate how vulnerable to manipulation America's election system has become.
It was a simple scam to pull off. "Under the National Voter Registration Act -- the `Motor Voter Law' -- states are required to accept voter registrations by mail," I wrote at the time. "No longer can citizens be asked to make a trip to town hall or the county office. No longer do they have to provide proof of residence or citizenship. In fact, they don't have to exist. Motor Voter obliges election officials to add to the voter list any name mailed in on a properly filled-out registration form. Anyone so registered can then request an absentee ballot -- by mail, of course. The system is not only open to manipulation, it invites it."
As journalist John Fund shows in an alarming new book, "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy," the United States has an elections system that would be an embarrassment in Honduras or Ghana. It is so unpoliced, he writes, that at least eight of the 9/11 hijackers "were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations."
How fouled up are the voter rolls? So fouled up that in some cities there are more registered voters than there are adults. So fouled up that when the Indianapolis Star investigated Indiana's records a few years ago, it discovered that hundreds of thousands of names -- as many as one-fifth of the total -- were "bogus" since the individuals named had moved, died, or gone to prison. So fouled up that when a Louisiana paper filed 25 phony voter registration forms signed only with an "X," 21 were approved and added to the voter list.
Illegal aliens have been registered, too, since under Motor Voter, any recipient of government benefits can sign up to vote, no questions asked. Did that wide-open door to fraud cost former the GOP's Robert Dornan his seat in Congress? An investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service following Dornan's 1996 defeat by Democrat Loretta Sanchez found that 4,023 noncitizens may have cast ballots in that election. Dornan lost by 984 votes.
It shouldn't take a degree in rocket science to fix a system this sloppy and chaotic. But not everyone wants to fix it. Some operatives don't mind cheating if it brings more of "their" voters to the polls. Fund cites the findings of Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson and political scientist Larry Sabato, co-authors of a recent book on corruption in American politics. Some liberal activists they interviewed go so far as to justify voter fraud on the grounds that such "extraordinary measures" compensate for the weaker political clout of minorities and the poor.
One simple fix -- requiring every voter to show ID when registering and voting -- would seem to be a no-brainer. Opinion polls show that the vast majority of Americansfavor such a reform. After all, ID is required when boarding an airplane or buying liquor. Why not when voting?
Yet, incredibly, powerful political interests have long fought to block an ID requirement. The NAACP and La Raza liken it to the poll tax that Southern states once used to keep blacks from voting. A Democratic Party official says that "ballot security" and "preventing voter fraud" are simply code for voter suppression. That willingness to play the race card is not merely dishonorable; it is undemocratic. For as Fund notes, "when voters are disenfranchised by the counting of improperly cast ballots, their civil rights are violated just as surely as if they were prevented from voting."
The drift toward Third World-caliber elections in the most advanced democracy in the world is scandalous. Then again, if Americans can't be bothered to scrub the voting rolls or to make sure that voters are properly ID'd, maybe they've got the election system they deserve.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
How to steal an election
By Jeff Jacoby
A RECENT story that didn't get nearly the attention it deserved was the New York Daily News report that 46,000 registered New York City voters are also registered to vote in Florida. Nearly 1,700 of them have had absentee ballots mailed to their home in the other state, and as many as 1,000 have voted twice in the same election. Can 1,000 fraudulent votes change an election? Well, George W. Bush won Florida in 2000 by just 537 votes.
It is illegal to register to vote simultaneously in different jurisdictions, but scofflaws have little to worry about. As the Daily News noted, "efforts to prevent people from registering and voting in more than one state rely mostly on the honor system." Those who break the law rarely face prosecution or serious punishment. It's easy -- and painless -- to cheat.
I learned this firsthand in 1996, when I registered my wife's cat as a voter in Cook County, Ill., Norfolk County, Mass., and Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and then requested absentee ballots from all three venues. My purpose wasn't to cast illegal multiple votes but to demonstrate how vulnerable to manipulation America's election system has become.
It was a simple scam to pull off. "Under the National Voter Registration Act -- the `Motor Voter Law' -- states are required to accept voter registrations by mail," I wrote at the time. "No longer can citizens be asked to make a trip to town hall or the county office. No longer do they have to provide proof of residence or citizenship. In fact, they don't have to exist. Motor Voter obliges election officials to add to the voter list any name mailed in on a properly filled-out registration form. Anyone so registered can then request an absentee ballot -- by mail, of course. The system is not only open to manipulation, it invites it."
As journalist John Fund shows in an alarming new book, "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy," the United States has an elections system that would be an embarrassment in Honduras or Ghana. It is so unpoliced, he writes, that at least eight of the 9/11 hijackers "were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations."
How fouled up are the voter rolls? So fouled up that in some cities there are more registered voters than there are adults. So fouled up that when the Indianapolis Star investigated Indiana's records a few years ago, it discovered that hundreds of thousands of names -- as many as one-fifth of the total -- were "bogus" since the individuals named had moved, died, or gone to prison. So fouled up that when a Louisiana paper filed 25 phony voter registration forms signed only with an "X," 21 were approved and added to the voter list.
Illegal aliens have been registered, too, since under Motor Voter, any recipient of government benefits can sign up to vote, no questions asked. Did that wide-open door to fraud cost former the GOP's Robert Dornan his seat in Congress? An investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service following Dornan's 1996 defeat by Democrat Loretta Sanchez found that 4,023 noncitizens may have cast ballots in that election. Dornan lost by 984 votes.
It shouldn't take a degree in rocket science to fix a system this sloppy and chaotic. But not everyone wants to fix it. Some operatives don't mind cheating if it brings more of "their" voters to the polls. Fund cites the findings of Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson and political scientist Larry Sabato, co-authors of a recent book on corruption in American politics. Some liberal activists they interviewed go so far as to justify voter fraud on the grounds that such "extraordinary measures" compensate for the weaker political clout of minorities and the poor.
One simple fix -- requiring every voter to show ID when registering and voting -- would seem to be a no-brainer. Opinion polls show that the vast majority of Americansfavor such a reform. After all, ID is required when boarding an airplane or buying liquor. Why not when voting?
Yet, incredibly, powerful political interests have long fought to block an ID requirement. The NAACP and La Raza liken it to the poll tax that Southern states once used to keep blacks from voting. A Democratic Party official says that "ballot security" and "preventing voter fraud" are simply code for voter suppression. That willingness to play the race card is not merely dishonorable; it is undemocratic. For as Fund notes, "when voters are disenfranchised by the counting of improperly cast ballots, their civil rights are violated just as surely as if they were prevented from voting."
The drift toward Third World-caliber elections in the most advanced democracy in the world is scandalous. Then again, if Americans can't be bothered to scrub the voting rolls or to make sure that voters are properly ID'd, maybe they've got the election system they deserve.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
C-BS
by Ann Coulter
Why do TV commentators on CBS' forgery-gate insist on issuing lengthy caveats to the effect that of course this was an innocent mistake and no one is accusing Dan Rather of some sort of "conspiracy," and respected newsman Dan Rather would never intentionally foist phony National Guard documents on an unsuspecting public merely to smear George Bush, etc., etc.?
I'll admit, there's a certain sadistic quality to such overwrought decency toward Dan Rather. But how does Bill O'Reilly know what Dan Rather was thinking when he put forged documents on the air? I know liberals have the paranormal ability to detect racism and sexism, but who knew O'Reilly could read an anchorman's mind just by watching him read the news?
What are the odds that Dan Rather would have accepted such patently phony documents from, say, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?
As we now know, CBS' own expert told them there were problems with the documents – the main one being that they were clearly fakes dummied up at a Kinko's outlet from somebody's laptop at 4 a.m.
According to ABC News, document examiner Emily Will was hired by CBS to vet the documents. But when she raised questions about the documents' authenticity and strongly warned CBS not to use the documents on air, CBS ignored her. Will concluded: "I did not feel that they wanted to investigate it very deeply."
Within hours of the documents being posted on CBS' website, moderately observant fourth-graders across America noticed that the alleged early '70s National Guard documents were the product of Microsoft Word. If that wasn't bad enough, The New York Times spent the following week hailing Rather for his "journalistic coup" in obtaining the documents that no other newsman had (other than Jayson Blair).
By now, all reputable document examiners in the Northern Hemisphere dispute the documents' authenticity. Even the Los Angeles Times has concluded that the documents are fraudulent – and when you fail to meet the ethical standards of the L.A. Times, you're in trouble.
In Dan Rather's defense, it must be confessed, he is simply a newsreader. Now that Walter Cronkite is retired, Rather is TV's real-life Ted Baxter without Baxter's quiet dignity. No one would ever suggest that he has any role in the content of his broadcast. To blame Dan Rather for what appears on his program would be like blaming Susan Lucci for the plot of "All My Children."
The person to blame is Ted Baxter's producer, Mary Mapes. Mapes apparently decided: We'll run the documents calling Bush a shirker in the National Guard, and if the documents turn out to be fraudulent we'll:
a) Blame Karl Rove;
b) Say the documents don't matter.
But if the documents are irrelevant to the question of Bush's Guard duty, then why did CBS bring them up? Why not just say: "The important thing is for you to take our word for it!"
Interestingly, the elite (and increasingly unwatched) media always make "mistakes" in the same direction. They never move too quickly to report a story unfavorable to liberals.
In 1998, CNN broadcast its famous "Tailwind" story, falsely accusing the U.S. military of gassing American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War. (This was part of liberals' long-standing support for "the troops.") The publishing industry regularly puts out proven frauds such as: "I, Rigoberta Menchu" (a native girl's torture at the hands of the right-wing Guatemalan military), "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" (a liberal fantasy of a gun-free colonial America), "Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President" (a book by a convicted felon with wild stories of George Bush's drug use), and the unsourced nutty fantasies of Kitty Kelley.
In a book out this week, Kelley details many anonymous charges against the Bush family, such as that Laura Bush was a pot dealer in college, George W. Bush was the first person in America to use cocaine back in 1968, and he also regularly consorted with a prostitute in Texas who was then silenced by the CIA.
Kelley backs up her shocking allegations with names of highly credentialed people – who have absolutely no connection to the events she is describing. No one directly involved is on the record, and the people on the record have never met anyone in the Bush family. In other words, her stories have been "vetted" enough to be included on tonight's "CBS Evening News" with Dan Rather.
The New York Times review blamed Kelley's gossip mongering on "a cultural climate in which gossip and innuendo thrive on the Internet." Kelley has been writing these books for decades, so apparently, like the Texas Air National Guard, Kelley was on the Internet – and being influenced by it – back in the '70s. As I remember it, for the past few years it has been the Internet that keeps dissecting and discrediting the gossip and innuendo that the major media put out.
Curiously, all this comes at the precise moment that speculation is at a fever pitch about whether Kitty Kelley is in the advanced stages of syphilis. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: "Approximately 3 percent to 7 percent of persons with untreated syphilis develop neurosyphilis, a sometimes serious disorder of the nervous system."
Dr. Jonathan Zenilman, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, has found there is an "inter-relationship" between STDs and truck routes in Baltimore. I'm not at liberty to reveal the names of my sources, but there are three or four highly placed individuals in the publishing industry who say Miss Kelley or someone who closely resembles her is a habitue of truck routes in Baltimore.
While opinions differ as to whether Miss Kelley's behavior can be explained by syphilis or some other STD, people who went to Harvard – and Harvard is one of the top universities in the nation – say her path is consistent with someone in the advanced stages.
Amid the swirling dispute over her STDs, there is only one way for Kelley to address this issue: Release her medical records. As someone who would like to be thought of as her friend said anonymously: "For your own good, Ms. Kelley, I would get those medical records out yesterday." This doesn't have to be public. She may release her medical records to me, or if she'd be more comfortable, to my brothers.
Since TV commentators have assured me that Dan Rather is an equal opportunity idiot, Kelley had better clear all this up before someone slips this column to CBS. As a precaution, I've written this on a 1972 Selectric typewriter
by Ann Coulter
Why do TV commentators on CBS' forgery-gate insist on issuing lengthy caveats to the effect that of course this was an innocent mistake and no one is accusing Dan Rather of some sort of "conspiracy," and respected newsman Dan Rather would never intentionally foist phony National Guard documents on an unsuspecting public merely to smear George Bush, etc., etc.?
I'll admit, there's a certain sadistic quality to such overwrought decency toward Dan Rather. But how does Bill O'Reilly know what Dan Rather was thinking when he put forged documents on the air? I know liberals have the paranormal ability to detect racism and sexism, but who knew O'Reilly could read an anchorman's mind just by watching him read the news?
What are the odds that Dan Rather would have accepted such patently phony documents from, say, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?
As we now know, CBS' own expert told them there were problems with the documents – the main one being that they were clearly fakes dummied up at a Kinko's outlet from somebody's laptop at 4 a.m.
According to ABC News, document examiner Emily Will was hired by CBS to vet the documents. But when she raised questions about the documents' authenticity and strongly warned CBS not to use the documents on air, CBS ignored her. Will concluded: "I did not feel that they wanted to investigate it very deeply."
Within hours of the documents being posted on CBS' website, moderately observant fourth-graders across America noticed that the alleged early '70s National Guard documents were the product of Microsoft Word. If that wasn't bad enough, The New York Times spent the following week hailing Rather for his "journalistic coup" in obtaining the documents that no other newsman had (other than Jayson Blair).
By now, all reputable document examiners in the Northern Hemisphere dispute the documents' authenticity. Even the Los Angeles Times has concluded that the documents are fraudulent – and when you fail to meet the ethical standards of the L.A. Times, you're in trouble.
In Dan Rather's defense, it must be confessed, he is simply a newsreader. Now that Walter Cronkite is retired, Rather is TV's real-life Ted Baxter without Baxter's quiet dignity. No one would ever suggest that he has any role in the content of his broadcast. To blame Dan Rather for what appears on his program would be like blaming Susan Lucci for the plot of "All My Children."
The person to blame is Ted Baxter's producer, Mary Mapes. Mapes apparently decided: We'll run the documents calling Bush a shirker in the National Guard, and if the documents turn out to be fraudulent we'll:
a) Blame Karl Rove;
b) Say the documents don't matter.
But if the documents are irrelevant to the question of Bush's Guard duty, then why did CBS bring them up? Why not just say: "The important thing is for you to take our word for it!"
Interestingly, the elite (and increasingly unwatched) media always make "mistakes" in the same direction. They never move too quickly to report a story unfavorable to liberals.
In 1998, CNN broadcast its famous "Tailwind" story, falsely accusing the U.S. military of gassing American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War. (This was part of liberals' long-standing support for "the troops.") The publishing industry regularly puts out proven frauds such as: "I, Rigoberta Menchu" (a native girl's torture at the hands of the right-wing Guatemalan military), "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" (a liberal fantasy of a gun-free colonial America), "Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President" (a book by a convicted felon with wild stories of George Bush's drug use), and the unsourced nutty fantasies of Kitty Kelley.
In a book out this week, Kelley details many anonymous charges against the Bush family, such as that Laura Bush was a pot dealer in college, George W. Bush was the first person in America to use cocaine back in 1968, and he also regularly consorted with a prostitute in Texas who was then silenced by the CIA.
Kelley backs up her shocking allegations with names of highly credentialed people – who have absolutely no connection to the events she is describing. No one directly involved is on the record, and the people on the record have never met anyone in the Bush family. In other words, her stories have been "vetted" enough to be included on tonight's "CBS Evening News" with Dan Rather.
The New York Times review blamed Kelley's gossip mongering on "a cultural climate in which gossip and innuendo thrive on the Internet." Kelley has been writing these books for decades, so apparently, like the Texas Air National Guard, Kelley was on the Internet – and being influenced by it – back in the '70s. As I remember it, for the past few years it has been the Internet that keeps dissecting and discrediting the gossip and innuendo that the major media put out.
Curiously, all this comes at the precise moment that speculation is at a fever pitch about whether Kitty Kelley is in the advanced stages of syphilis. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: "Approximately 3 percent to 7 percent of persons with untreated syphilis develop neurosyphilis, a sometimes serious disorder of the nervous system."
Dr. Jonathan Zenilman, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, has found there is an "inter-relationship" between STDs and truck routes in Baltimore. I'm not at liberty to reveal the names of my sources, but there are three or four highly placed individuals in the publishing industry who say Miss Kelley or someone who closely resembles her is a habitue of truck routes in Baltimore.
While opinions differ as to whether Miss Kelley's behavior can be explained by syphilis or some other STD, people who went to Harvard – and Harvard is one of the top universities in the nation – say her path is consistent with someone in the advanced stages.
Amid the swirling dispute over her STDs, there is only one way for Kelley to address this issue: Release her medical records. As someone who would like to be thought of as her friend said anonymously: "For your own good, Ms. Kelley, I would get those medical records out yesterday." This doesn't have to be public. She may release her medical records to me, or if she'd be more comfortable, to my brothers.
Since TV commentators have assured me that Dan Rather is an equal opportunity idiot, Kelley had better clear all this up before someone slips this column to CBS. As a precaution, I've written this on a 1972 Selectric typewriter
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
THE JIHAD GOES MAINSTREAM
by Mark Steyn
What would happen if “al-Qa’eda” (for want of an easier shorthand) produced a Yasser Arafat figure?
That’s to say, imagine America’s enemies with a figurehead who gets treated as Arafat does – emissaries from the Vatican and the EU routinely make pilgrimages to his compound and get photographed beaming alongside him at that desk of his with the big unchanging pile of paperwork and the curiously omnipresent box of baby wipes. He’s received at the UN, EU, Arab League and (depending on the occupant) even the White House as a head of state whose lack of a state to head is a mere technical detail. I see a country called “Palestine” got to march in the 2004 Olympics parade as if it were no different from New Zealand or Denmark.
If you persist, as many do, in arguing the comparative threats of rogue states and stateless actors, Arafat offers a unique perspective: a stateless actor for whom the world created a rogue statelet. For all that paperwork on his desk (requisition slips for suicide-bomber belts?) Arafat seems to have little interest in government. Unlike other politicians of one’s acquaintance, he has as far as I’m aware no affordable prescription drugs plan for seniors nor any views on outsourcing. Thirty years ago, he was head of a movement of killers – killers, indeed, of several prominent Americans. Today, he heads a more diffused movement of killers – the intifada – and all that’s changed is the innovativeness of their depravity. One thinks, for example, of the suicide bomber with vials of HIV Positive blood in his belt, with which he hoped to infect fatally those who survived the initial blast. And yet no matter what he does his European cheerleaders refuse to fall out of love with a vain, unreformable terrorist whose incompetence and thuggery can apparently never dent the Palestinians’ inviolable status as “victims” of Israeli “occupation”.
What if that happened to the broader jihad? Already, there’s a palpable longing to make the Islamists just a regular common-or-garden terrorist movement, like the IRA or the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Mo Mowlam, formerly Britain’s Northern Ireland Secretary, oversaw the process by which the IRA’s Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness became Ministers of a Crown they decline to recognize. And she figures, if you can pull that off, what’s the big deal with al-Qaeda? Earlier this year, she called for Osama bin Laden to be invited to “the negotiating table” – a difficult trick: what’s left of the late Osama would fit in the salt cellar. But, putting such technicalities aside, Ms Mowlam’s main point was that the whole “war on terror” approach was all wrong. “If you go in with guns and bombs, you act as a recruitment officer for the terrorists,” she said.
Well, she’s a Labour leftie, what do you expect? But Michael Ancram, Deputy Leader of the British Conservative Party, isn’t sounding so very different. He’s proposed a Grand Congress of Reconciliation which would sit in Istanbul with representatives of the world’s Muslim nations plus America, Britain, Russia, Europe and Australia (what? no Canadians?) to thrash out areas of difference and produce a Declaration of Reconciliation detailing the appropriate compromises. For example, many mainstream imams want to stone adulteresses to death, behead all sodomites and kill all the Jews. Maybe the Grand Congress of Reconciliation would thrash out a compromise whereby we lightly pebble-dash adulteresses, merely castrate sodomites and kill only some of the Jews, just the troublemakers, maybe ten per cent.
Alas, the other side isn’t interested. Hussein Massawi, the Hezbollah leader behind the Beirut barracks bombings 20 years ago, put it at its pithiest: “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.”
But suppose that changed. Suppose a kind of political wing evolved parallel to the suicide bombing, like Sinn Fein and the IRA, with some Saeb Erekat-type spokesperson who plays well on CNN. The Arab League would anoint them as the sole legitimate representatives, and the EU would almost certainly agree to meet with them, and even in America the likes of Senator Patty Murray, who famously hymned Osama for “building day care facilities, building health care facilities”, would probably be eager to tour their nurseries and seniors centers. A large chunk of the west is almost begging for some fellows on the other side to sit down and talk with, because sitting down and talking is what they do best, even with folks who want to blow them up.
Given the growing Muslim populations in Europe and the remarkable success hitherto obscure Muslim lobby groups have had in constraining certain aspects of the war on terror, it seems almost certain that Islamist political parties will arise on the Continent within the next decade. And, given the very few degrees of separation between very prominent western Muslims – ambassadors, princes, professors – and the terrorists, it seems likely that many prominent figures in these parties will be broadly supportive of the terrorists’ ends if not necessarily their means. And, given the governing principle of multicultural society – that western man demonstrates his cultural sensitivity by pre-emptively surrendering – it seems to me that any savvy Islamist, surveying the Madrid bombing and the aftermath, might be contemplating the benefits of a twin-track strategy. In the years ahead, the urge by weak-willed allies to “politicize” the war on terror will be one of the biggest challenges for Washington.
National Review, September 13th 2004
by Mark Steyn
What would happen if “al-Qa’eda” (for want of an easier shorthand) produced a Yasser Arafat figure?
That’s to say, imagine America’s enemies with a figurehead who gets treated as Arafat does – emissaries from the Vatican and the EU routinely make pilgrimages to his compound and get photographed beaming alongside him at that desk of his with the big unchanging pile of paperwork and the curiously omnipresent box of baby wipes. He’s received at the UN, EU, Arab League and (depending on the occupant) even the White House as a head of state whose lack of a state to head is a mere technical detail. I see a country called “Palestine” got to march in the 2004 Olympics parade as if it were no different from New Zealand or Denmark.
If you persist, as many do, in arguing the comparative threats of rogue states and stateless actors, Arafat offers a unique perspective: a stateless actor for whom the world created a rogue statelet. For all that paperwork on his desk (requisition slips for suicide-bomber belts?) Arafat seems to have little interest in government. Unlike other politicians of one’s acquaintance, he has as far as I’m aware no affordable prescription drugs plan for seniors nor any views on outsourcing. Thirty years ago, he was head of a movement of killers – killers, indeed, of several prominent Americans. Today, he heads a more diffused movement of killers – the intifada – and all that’s changed is the innovativeness of their depravity. One thinks, for example, of the suicide bomber with vials of HIV Positive blood in his belt, with which he hoped to infect fatally those who survived the initial blast. And yet no matter what he does his European cheerleaders refuse to fall out of love with a vain, unreformable terrorist whose incompetence and thuggery can apparently never dent the Palestinians’ inviolable status as “victims” of Israeli “occupation”.
What if that happened to the broader jihad? Already, there’s a palpable longing to make the Islamists just a regular common-or-garden terrorist movement, like the IRA or the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Mo Mowlam, formerly Britain’s Northern Ireland Secretary, oversaw the process by which the IRA’s Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness became Ministers of a Crown they decline to recognize. And she figures, if you can pull that off, what’s the big deal with al-Qaeda? Earlier this year, she called for Osama bin Laden to be invited to “the negotiating table” – a difficult trick: what’s left of the late Osama would fit in the salt cellar. But, putting such technicalities aside, Ms Mowlam’s main point was that the whole “war on terror” approach was all wrong. “If you go in with guns and bombs, you act as a recruitment officer for the terrorists,” she said.
Well, she’s a Labour leftie, what do you expect? But Michael Ancram, Deputy Leader of the British Conservative Party, isn’t sounding so very different. He’s proposed a Grand Congress of Reconciliation which would sit in Istanbul with representatives of the world’s Muslim nations plus America, Britain, Russia, Europe and Australia (what? no Canadians?) to thrash out areas of difference and produce a Declaration of Reconciliation detailing the appropriate compromises. For example, many mainstream imams want to stone adulteresses to death, behead all sodomites and kill all the Jews. Maybe the Grand Congress of Reconciliation would thrash out a compromise whereby we lightly pebble-dash adulteresses, merely castrate sodomites and kill only some of the Jews, just the troublemakers, maybe ten per cent.
Alas, the other side isn’t interested. Hussein Massawi, the Hezbollah leader behind the Beirut barracks bombings 20 years ago, put it at its pithiest: “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.”
But suppose that changed. Suppose a kind of political wing evolved parallel to the suicide bombing, like Sinn Fein and the IRA, with some Saeb Erekat-type spokesperson who plays well on CNN. The Arab League would anoint them as the sole legitimate representatives, and the EU would almost certainly agree to meet with them, and even in America the likes of Senator Patty Murray, who famously hymned Osama for “building day care facilities, building health care facilities”, would probably be eager to tour their nurseries and seniors centers. A large chunk of the west is almost begging for some fellows on the other side to sit down and talk with, because sitting down and talking is what they do best, even with folks who want to blow them up.
Given the growing Muslim populations in Europe and the remarkable success hitherto obscure Muslim lobby groups have had in constraining certain aspects of the war on terror, it seems almost certain that Islamist political parties will arise on the Continent within the next decade. And, given the very few degrees of separation between very prominent western Muslims – ambassadors, princes, professors – and the terrorists, it seems likely that many prominent figures in these parties will be broadly supportive of the terrorists’ ends if not necessarily their means. And, given the governing principle of multicultural society – that western man demonstrates his cultural sensitivity by pre-emptively surrendering – it seems to me that any savvy Islamist, surveying the Madrid bombing and the aftermath, might be contemplating the benefits of a twin-track strategy. In the years ahead, the urge by weak-willed allies to “politicize” the war on terror will be one of the biggest challenges for Washington.
National Review, September 13th 2004
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
