WHAT A GREAT TRIFECTA!

OKLAHOMA AGAIN
It was a different script, but the same story at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. Freshman sensation Adrian Peterson rushed for 225 yards and the Sooners defense shut out the Longhorns, as Oklahoma won its fifth Red River Shootout in a row 12-0.

YANKEES AGAIN
The Twins just can't beat the Yanks. Cruising for most of the time, Game 5 seemed inevitable for the Twins. But then the bullpen took over. The Yankees tied the game in the 8th inning and scored in the 11th to advance to the ALCS with a 6-5 win.

CAROLINA BEATS STATE
North Carolina's much-maligned defense stopped T.A. McLendon inches short of the end zone with 6 seconds left -- after a touchdown by McLendon on the previous play was disallowed -- and the Tar Heels hung on to beat North Carolina State 30-24 on Saturday night.

Shame, Shame, Shame
Many of you just don’t care about this war.

We should have let sanctions work longer. We should have given inspections another try. The WMDs weren't there so we shouldn't have gone to war. It's a mistake. A grand diversion. The wrong war, the wrong place, at the wrong time.

by Jonah Goldberg

Shame on all you people.

I don't mean those of you who opposed the war at the time and I don't mean those of you who think Bush bungled the job after the fact. I mean you and you and you — and most especially John Kerry and John Edwards. Shame on you both.

You voted for this war but you voted against the peace you say is so important to win merely because you decided that toppling the tyranny of Howard Dean's high poll numbers was worth paying any price, bearing any burden.

But forget all that. I just watched John Kerry preen in front of the cameras about how "good diplomacy" would have prevented the mistake he voted for. "Good diplomacy" in John Kerry's world would have let French and Russian politicians continue to line their pockets in the name of keeping Saddam in power so he could rape and murder and torture until "good diplomacy" welcomed him back into the "international community" and gave him the weapons he sought. I suppose in John Kerry's world good diplomacy lets the boys in the back of the bar finish raping the girl for fear of causing a fuss.

Okay, that was unfair. It just seems everything old is new again. Bush "lied" because he believed the same intelligence John Kerry believed. Bush "lied" even though John Edwards called the threat from Iraq "imminent" — something Bush never did. No one bothers to ask how it could be possible that Bush lied. How could he have known there were no WMDs? No one bothers to wonder why Tony Blair isn't a liar. Indeed, no one bothers to ask whether the Great Diplomat and Alliance Builder believes our oldest and truest allies Great Britain and Australia are lead by equally contemptible liars. Of course, they can't be liars — they are merely part of the coalition of the bribed. In John Kerry's world, it's a defense to say your oldest friends aren't dishonest, they're merely whores.

Oh, one more thing no one asks. How could Bush think he could pull this thing off? I mean, knowing as he did that there were no WMDs in Iraq, how could he invade the country and think no one would notice? And if he's capable of lying to send Americans to their deaths for some nebulous petro-oedipal conspiracy no intelligent person has bothered to make even credible, why on earth didn't he just plant some WMDs on the victim after the fact? If you're willing to kill Americans for a lie, surely you'd be willing to plant some anthrax to keep your job.

And speaking of the victim, if it's in fact true that Bush offered no rationale for the war other than WMDs, why shouldn't we simply let Saddam out of his cage and put him back in office? We can even use some of the extra money from the Oil-for-Food program to compensate him for the damage to his palaces and prisons. Heck, if John Edwards weren't busy, he could represent him.

I'm serious. If this whole war was such a mistake, such a colossal blunder, based on a lie and all that, not only should John Kerry show the courage to ask once again "How do you tell the last man to die for a mistake?" but he should also promise to rectify the error. And what better, or more logically consistent, way to solve the problem Bush created? Kerry insists it was wrong to topple Saddam. Well, let's make him a Weeble instead. Bush and Saddam can walk out to the podiums and explain that his good friend merely wobbled, he didn't fall down. That would end the chaos John Kerry considers so much worse than the status quo ante. And if the murderer needs help getting back in the game, maybe the Marines can cut off a few tongues and slaughter a couple thousand Shia and Kurds until Saddam's ready for the big league again. That will calm the chaos; that will erase the crime.

Yes, yes, these are all cheap shots, low blows, unfair criticisms. I know. Good and nice liberals don't want Saddam back in power. Sweet and decent Democrats shed no tears for Uday and Qusay. These folks just care about the troops who were sent to die based on a lie. I care about the troops too. But despite John Kerry's insistence that he speaks for the American Fighting Man, some of you might consider that a sizable majority of Americans in uniform will vote for Bush, according to surveys and polls. And since the Kedwards campaign continues to tell us that men who fight and serve cannot have their judgment questioned, that should mean something. Oh, wait, I'm sorry. I forgot. Only fighting men who served for four months on the same boat with John Kerry are above reproach or recrimination. Even if you served in the next boat over, you're just a liar.

Damn, that was another cheap shot, another low blow — one more Dick Cheneyesque distortion. We soulless warmongers sometimes forget ourselves. I realize now that you forces of truth and light are nothing like me. If only Bush had justified this war in the high-flown language of liberty and justice he uses now, then you better angels of the American nature would have supported the toppling of Saddam.

Of course, Bush did exactly that. He spoke of the lantern of liberty lighting the Middle East long before the Iraqi Statue of Tyranny fell down in that Baghdad square. But he was lying then, of course. He only said that stuff to please those bloodlusting neocons who didn't care about Bush's vendetta to avenge his father and were too rich from their access to Zionist coffers to care about the Texas oil man's plot to capture the Iraqi oil fields and earn Halliburton the worst publicity any corporation has received in American history. Of course these neocons knew Bush was lying about democracy and WMDs alike, but they too didn't care that they would be found out. After all, that's a small price to pay for Mother Israel, where Jewish-American loyalties check in but don't check out.

Damn. Once again the gravity of Bush's villainy has pulled me off the trajectory of honest debate. I'm not making any sense. I'm not consistent in my "rationales." Indeed, John Kerry said it so eloquently when he noted that George W. Bush has offered 23 rationales for the war. Heaven forbid the International Grandmaster of Nuance contemplate that there could be more than a single reason to do something so simple as go to war. Let's not even contemplate that the ticket that says this administration hasn't "leveled" with the American people should have to grasp that sometimes leveling with the public requires offering more than one dumbed-down reason to do something very difficult and important.

Ah, I know. The problem isn't that Bush has offered more than one reason, it's that he's changed his reasons. That is the complaint of those who would otherwise support the war. Alas, that's not true, he's merely changed the emphasis. After all, what is he to do when he discovers there are no WMDs? Violate the "Pottery Barn rule" and simply leave a broken Iraq to fester? But let's imagine for a moment that he has "changed the rationale." Isn't that what Lincoln did when he changed the war to preserve the Union into the war to free the slaves? Isn't that what the Cold War liberals did when they changed a value-neutral stand-off into a twilight struggle between the human bondage and the last best hope of mankind?

Ah, but in the Cold War we never fought the Soviets, we merely leveled sanctions. Couldn't we have done the same to Iraq, since Saddam was no threat to America? I'm sure all of the people asking this asked it already of Bill Clinton when we toppled Slobodan Milosevic, a man who killed fewer people, threatened America less, and violated fewer U.N. sanctions than Saddam ever did.

I'm tired now. But the sad news is I could go on.

I'm not saying there are no good arguments against the war. I am saying that many of you don't care about the war. If Bill Clinton or Al Gore had conducted this war, you would be weeping joyously about Iraqi children going to school and women registering to vote. If this war had been successful rather than hard, John Kerry would be boasting today about how he supported it — much as he did every time it looked like the polls were moving in that direction. You may have forgotten Kerry's anti-Dean gloating when Saddam was captured, but many of us haven't. He would be saying the lack of WMDs are irrelevant and that Bush's lies were mistakes. And that's the point. I don't care if you hate George W. Bush; it's not like I love the guy. And I don't care if you opposed the war from day one. What disgusts me are those people who say toppling Saddam and fighting the terror war on their turf rather than ours is a mistake, not because these are bad ideas, but merely because your vanity cannot tolerate the notion that George W. Bush is right or that George W. Bush's rightness might cost John Kerry the election.

I get e-mails from you people every day and I see your candidate on TV every night. Shame on you all.

More Jeter from Bronx Banter:

And Another Thing

I talked to a lot of people yesterday about the final play of Wednesday night’s Game Two between the Yanks and Twins. Here is Joe Sheehan’s salient take from his latest column for Baseball Prospectus:

The final play of the game has been the subject of a lot of debate, with the consensus being that Jacque Jones screwed up. I don’t know that it’s so easy to grill him. Upon catching Hideki Matsui’s line drive, Jones was on his heels. He appeared to focus more on getting rid of the ball quickly rather than making a good throw, and as such becomes the first player in history to be criticized for hitting the cutoff man.

It’s a split-second choice—set up for a good throw or just fire—and I don’t know that I can ride Jones for the decision he made. What we do know is that Jeter made his own decision, to put his head down and run. That, as much as Jones’ poor throw, was the key part of the game-ending play. It’s not easy to score from third on a fly ball to right field in Yankee Stadium. Jeter did, displaying the excellent baserunning skills that are a hallmark of his game.

From the great Yankee blog, Bronx Banter:

The Man Some Love to Love and Others Love to Hate
By Rich Lederer

Derek Jeter? I have no reason to like him, and I have no reason to dislike him. I’m not a Yankee fan by any means, but I’m not a Yankee hater either. What I am is a baseball fan.

I also pride myself on being non-partisan when it comes to evaluating, comparing, and ranking players. I believe statistics can tell us a lot about a player’s value, but I don’t subscribe to the theory that numbers can tell us everything.

Look, I’m not here to make excuses for Derek Jeter. His numbers stack up with the very best shortstops in the game today, and he is on pace to rack up career totals that will likely place him among the top ten at his position in almost every important category by the time he retires.

You want numbers? OK, try this on for size. Jeter was one of just four players this year to hit 20 home runs and steal 20 bases at a success rate of 85% or better. (Bobby Abreu, Carlos Beltran, and teammate Alex Rodriguez were the others.) Only 36 players in the history of baseball have put together such a combination of stats in a single season. Moreover, there are just eight players who can say they have performed this feat more than once

Derek Sanderson Jeter is one of those elite eight. The others? How ‘bout Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Rickey Henderson, Bobby Bonds, Eric Davis, Kirk Gibson, and Carlos Beltran. Not a bad list by any means, huh? However, did you notice something? Of the eight players, all but one was an outfielder. The lone exception? That *$%^!@# overrated Yankee shortstop!

I realize Jeter’s defense doesn’t measure up to his offensive production. But I don’t think it is quite as bad as his harshest critics in the sabermetric community would lead you to believe. Yes, he has a slow first step when moving to his left and, as such, covers less ground than the average shortstop. But he is also athletic and posseses a strong arm, and this combination makes up for some of his deficiencies. I think what annoys the studious fan is the fact that Jeter has a habit of making easy plays hard and hard plays easy.

Jeter dives into the stands and catches foul balls and gets criticized. He catches pop flies over his head with his back to the infield and on the run and gets criticized. He sprints across the diamond, cuts off an errant throw, and tosses it to the catcher to nail a runner trying to score at a critical moment in a postseason game and his critics point to his low UZR.

On Wednesday, Jeter tags up from third and scores the winning run on a shallow line drive to right field in a situation in which at least half of the players in the majors would not have had the sense, the guts, or the speed to not only challenge the throw but to beat it. Where does that heads up play show up in the alphabet soup of stats?

The guy is a winner. He plays hard. He plays everyday. He has great instincts and smarts. He is well-liked by his teammates and respected by his opponents.

Finding fault in Jeter’s game is similar to finding fault with Ichiro Suzuki. Jeter can’t field and Suzuki can’t hit for power. Don’t mind the fact that Derek can hit for average, hit for power, and steal bases. Forget the fact that Ichiro can hit for a very high average, steal bases, and field and throw with the best of them. Let’s concentrate on what they can’t do rather than what they can do. It’s kind of like looking at the Mona Lisa and questioning the slight smile rather than the overall beauty and elegance of the portrait.

From The Weekly Standard online:

Oops . . . They Did It Again
The Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Elfriede Jelinek:
sensationalist, communist, and anti-American hack.
by Stephen Schwartz

THE INFAMOUS SNOBS of the Swedish Academy, brooding in the land of military cowardice, interminable winter, and one of the highest suicide rates in the world, have returned to their habit of awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to an unknown, undistinguished, leftist fanatic: The 2004 prize has gone to Elfriede Jelinek, of Austria. This time they got a two-fer shot at destroying literary standards, since Jelinek's writings mainly verge on gross pornography.

Ms. Jelinek's main recent work is a play, Bambiland, described as "a strident attack" on the U.S. intervention in Iraq. Published in Austria in 2003, it has been translated into English and will doubtless soon appear on the Anglo-American stage. Swedish Academy representative Horace Engdahl, laboring under the belief that the whole world can be fooled forever, disingenuously announced that the award should not be considered a political one. "When that play came out, this decision was--if not already made--then well under way," he said.

But Engdahl went on to describe Bambiland as showing "how patriotic enthusiasm turns into insanity," adding, "she's completely right about that." The Swedes are big experts on patriotism--they sold iron ore to the Nazis while claiming to be neutral in World War II. But you already knew that.

The New York Times--the Racing Form of the Nobel Prize competition--noted that Jelinek was a member of the Austrian Communist party from 1974 to 1991. One must know something of the history of European Communism to realize how despicable such a political option would appear to Austrians. The Austrian Communist party was the only one in the continent never to attract a noticeable following, and never to play a significant role in any historic event. After Soviet troops were withdrawn from the occupation zone of Austria in 1955, the Austrian Communist party was little more than a KGB network.

How interesting that Jelinek quit the party just when Moscow turned off the financial spigots to such efforts. The organization made her prize a banner headline on its website--finally, they're on the map.

But the Nobel Prize is bestowed for writing, and one must therefore address Jelinek's publications. In 2002, her novel The Piano Teacher was produced as an Austrian/French film starring Isabelle Huppert. Peter Rainer wrote of it, in New York magazine "Isabelle Huppert plays Erika, a stiff-backed piano instructor at a prestigious Viennese conservatory whose lust for her adoring student Walter (Benoit Magimel) exposes her deeply guarded sadomasochism. 'Do I disgust you?' she asks him after he reads a long letter from her outlining her most depraved fantasies." The novel also features voyeurism and self-mutilation with a razor. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, according to Reuters, "publisher Alexander Fest said [Jelinek's] writing showed 'great courage and huge savagery.' "

Sexual titillation makes a comparison between Elfriede Jelinek and, say, Britney Spears, fair--though any normal person would doubtless prefer the latter's company.

In bestowing the Nobel laurels on this Viennese virago, the Swedish Academy has confirmed that it must always compensate for its correct judgments with an atrocity. Last year the Nobel for Literature went to J.M. Coetzee, a serious and talented author; the year before to Imre Kertesz, a survivor of the Holocaust who, if little known outside his native Hungary, is nonetheless a writer of great eloquence and moral force; in 2001, it went to the controversial but respected V.S. Naipaul. In 2000, the prize was given to a Chinese, Gao Xingjian, although many of his compatriots, and experts in that country's literature, believed it should have gone to Ba Jin, a long-lived classic and dissident--however, Gao had the advantage of having been translated into Swedish.

But prior to then, Stockholm produced an outstanding run of scandalous Nobels in literature: scolding lefty turned Nazi-nostalgic Gunter Grass, in 1999; Jose Saramago, a vulgar enemy of religion and former Communist censor in revolutionary Portugal, in 1998; and the repellent Dario Fo, an Italian playwright specializing in denunciations of capitalism, in 1997. The prize for Jelinek is obviously a replay of the Fo foolishness; if America will hate it, then it rates with the Swedes.

Other Nobel stars have included Claude Simon (1985), a Stalinist who defamed George Orwell; Castro-lover Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982); Pablo Neruda, Stalinist secret police agent (1971); and Soviet plagiarist and propagandist Mikhail Sholokhov (1965).

One would be tempted to say the Nobel recognition to an Austrian ogress proves that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the only decent thing to come out of that Alpine land in the last two decades. But one should also add that the Nobel Prize for Literature, which includes a check for $1.3 million, each year increasingly diminishes in moral, if not in financial worth.

From The Boston Globe:

The Islamic iron curtain
By H.D.S. Greenway  

A MOST chilling glimpse into the future recently came from Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, who recently warned that "action must be taken before an iron curtain finally descends between the West and the Islamic world." "Iron curtain," those two iconic words of Winston Churchill's, came toward the end of Churchill's famous Fulton, Mo., speech in the spring of 1946. "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind it lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe."

It was a time when some still thought that the Soviet Union could be accommodated instead of confronted and contained. But as he had against the Nazis, Churchill issued his dire warning against the forces of international communism, which before the decade was out would consolidate and expand its control of Eastern and Central Europe as well as China in the Far East. The next 46 years of the 20th century would be consumed in this epic struggle.

Today we are engaged in another struggle between the same ideals that the West maintained against communism and the forces of a militant and radical Islam that seeks to lower an iron curtain so that they can gain control of that vast band of countries that have Muslim majorities, from Rabat on the Atlantic to Surabaya in the Java Sea.

Musharraf, who is in a life-and-death struggle between his own more-tolerant version of the faith and the forces of militant Islam, chose to echo Winston Churchill in order to underscore his warning. "We may be scoring victories against terrorists, but we are in danger of losing the ultimate war if the world does not rally to resolve the injustices in the Muslim World," he said before the United Nations.

"The tragedy of Palestine is an open wound on the psyche of every Muslim," Musharraf said. "The US can and must play the role of a just broker of peace."

The warriors of Al Qaeda may not give a hoot about Palestine, but they can use an obvious injustice to grow their maggots in traumatized flesh. In an era of instant communications, Muslims around the world are aware of another open wound in Kashmir, which both Pakistan and India are working to heal. And, of course, Iraq -- which may yet prove to be the most grievous open wound of all, alienating Muslims in their hundred of thousands, rallying militants to the terrorist cause.

Muslims around the world had to take note of the expressions of joy on the streets of Kabul beamed around the world in 2001. There was, perhaps, a moment when Iraq and the Muslim world might have seen the United States as a liberator in Iraq, but that was lost when an incompetent administration lost control of security all over the country after Saddam Hussein fell. The image of Saddam's statue coming down has been superseded in the Muslim mind by images of Abu Ghraib prison, which is seldom even mentioned in the United States anymore. And when the United States sends planes to bomb the heart of the Iraqi capital, the message of brute force against helpless Muslim civilians is reinforced.

President Bush sees himself as a Churchillian figure, standing up to Saddam the way Churchill did to Hitler, but what the Bush administration failed to fully realize from the beginning was that the threat came from militant Islam -- an idea, not a nation state. Saddam may have been a potential threat down the road, but the lesson of 9/11 was that the clear and present danger lay with Al Qaeda, not Iraq.

Bush today speaks of only a "handful" of Iraqis who oppose America's plans, but the truth is that there is a deep and growing insurgency sucking up Iraqis who hated Saddam worse then we did.

It is resurgent and militant extremism that the West and the more-tolerant Muslim societies of the East must face today. And like the Cold War, it could take half a century of effort. Afghanistan, which should have been a model for the moderates, has been marginalized by America's misadventure in Iraq. And in Iraq, Islamic extremism has found fresh and unplowed soil to set down its roots. Iraq is on its way to becoming a national tragedy for the United States, degrading the security of East and West together.

BUST TRUSTER
Russ Meyer, 1922-2004
by Mark Steyn

In his book Adventures In The Screen Trade, William Goldman pours scorn on the "auteur theory", at least as it applies to Hollywood: Spielberg isn't an "auteur", nor is Hitchcock, nor is John Ford. Goldman continues:

Is there then no American auteur director? Perhaps there is one. One man who thinks up his own stories and produces his pictures and directs them too. And also serves as his own cinematographer. Not to mention he also does his own editing. All of this connected with an intensely personal and unique vision of the world. That man is Russ Meyer.

Meyer, whose "intensely personal and unique vision" gave us Wild Gals Of The Naked West, Eroticom, Eve And The Handyman, Common Law  Cabin, Mud Honey, Vixen, The Supervixens and Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens, died last week. If Ziegfeld dedicated his life to "glorifying the American girl", Meyer preferred to specialize: he dedicated his to glorifying the American breast. He liked them big and he liked them round, but he had no time for implants. "They miss the whole point," he said - which is a good way of putting it. He liked those magnificently cantilevered 1950s women in the pointy bras and tight sweaters - but he liked them better without the sweaters and bras.

His first hit, The Immoral Mr Teas (1959), was filmed in four days in Meyer's home town of Oakland, California and now has an honoured place in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The protagonist is a man who delivers false teeth - mainly because Meyer had a friend who was a dentist - but more importantly he also had X-ray eyes which enabled him to see through ladies' clothing to the lush nubile form underneath. Hitherto, if you wanted to see naked women in American movies you were pretty much stuck with the naturist genre - earnest types wandering around nudist camps with an annoyingly laboured wholesomeness about them. Meyer really was an auteur: he was the first to recognize the advantages of plot to nudity. No doubt others would have stumbled on it eventually, but it was Meyer who pioneered the genre: Mr Teas spawned 150 cheap knock-offs within a year and is the granddaddy of all those soft-porn Euro-movies of the Seventies where the bisexual countess discovers the new stable-girl sleeping naked in the hayloft and takes her shopping to the accompaniment of elevator music. "That pipphole bra rilly suits you, ja?"

Meyer was better than that. Cherry, Harry And Raquel (1969) was the first film with an underwater lesbian scene, which the director shot himself in between coming up for gulps of air. "You don't see Otto Preminger doing that," he pointed out. He eschewed the anonymous interiors of most soft-porn, opting for the lyrical vistas of his native state, the deserts and the mountains. If you can overlook the naked women in the foreground, which admittedly is rather difficult when they're a double-F, his landscapes are beautiful, very clean and crisp. Of course, the topography inevitably comes second to the top-offgraphy: His second film Eve And The Handyman starred his wife Eve, whom he'd photographed for one of Playboy's earliest centrefolds, as a hitchhiker on the highway, gradually disrobing in an effort to get a ride.

Roger Ebert, Meyer's screenwriter for Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (1970), says the director was never very interested in any of the lower bits and pieces. For one thing, he wanted to play regular movie theatres and clean up at the box office, rather than get shunted into porno houses and have to split it with the mob. But there were artistic considerations, too. "Frankly," Meyer told Ebert, "what goes on below the waist is visually not that entertaining." Very true. It would be interesting to commission a study on whether directors' efforts to make it more entertaining have changed the nature of sex. I was once told that in the waning days of Communism the beleagured citizens of the Warsaw Pact suddenly got a flood of western porn videos and were amazed by the athleticism of the sex scenes. Nobody ever did it just lying on top of one another. Instead, there were all these remarkable contortions and angles - designed for the benefit of the camera. But to Communist audiences it was the final insult: not only did the decadent capitalists have bigger homes and more money but they got better sex, too. It's said there was an enormous strain placed on Soviet chiropractors and similar facilities by locals who made the mistake of trying it at home.

Meyer found sex too funny to go in for any of that slo-mo grinding. He preferred to cut away to a rocket blasting off or two cars colliding. It was, he believed, the perfect formula: big bazongas plus slapstick gags - Keystone Kups. If he hadn't been so hung up on massive racks, what might he have accomplished? Well, he was an army photographer during World War II and filmed the original "Dirty Dozen" - 12 GIs convicted of capital offences but promised pardons if they went into France on a dangerous mission. Unlike the Hollywood version, they skipped out once they'd landed on French soil and were never heard of again. But Meyer had a hell of a story and got a credit in E M Nathanson's novel of the incident. He loathed Robert Aldrich's 1967 movie.

William Goldman's own "auteur theory" holds that once you're hailed as an auteur your work goes to hell. Look at Hitchcock. Things were going great till they told him he was a genius, and then came Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy. Russ Meyer nearly went the same way. His basic plot - rapacious amazonian women, submissive men - caught the eye of feminist scholars who hailed him as "the first feminist director". The homicidal go-go dancers of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! were hailed as "empowering". Meyer let himself be talked into doing a "serious" film, The Seven Minutes (1971), which is about as long as it lasted in theatres. "I made the mistake of reading my reviews," he reflected. "What the public wants are big laughs and big tits and lots of 'em. Lucky for me that's what I like, too." He understood his limitations but within them - about 42D to 48FF - he was the master.

Farm Boys vs Frat Boys
... Agony, Ecstasy, and BS!
by Bob Lee Swagger

Farm Boys vs Frat Boys …. dungarees vs khakis …. Deano vs Jimmy V …. Amedeo’s vs The Rat …. Frankin vs Hillsborough …. 1982 vs 1983 …. Red vs Blue …. Law vs Engineering …. Mario vs Julius …. Blue Bloods vs Red Necks …. Fairgrounds vs Pine Trees …. Brickyard vs Old Well …. DT vs MJ …. Homosexuality vs Beastiality …. Arrogance vs Paranoia …. Weejuns vs Red Wings …. Case vs McGuire …. And when its all said and done, whatcha got?

   It’s “Big Game against our Rival” Week and that’s what college sports should be all about … and still is for many of us.  The outcome of Saturday night’s “Big Game” will, of course, go down in the annals of recorded history along with “the first sneeze” and “who invented the shoe lace” … but don’t tell Wolfpackers and Tar Heels until it’s over.  OK, it’s really NOT a Big Rival game for either school because …
(1)     Carolina’s “Main Rival” is a fluctuating issue based primarily on whomever UNC is currently enjoying dominance over.  It USED to be either Duke, UVa, or “Moo U” but is currently tied between William & Mary or East Carolina.  NEVER claim a rivalry with whoever is spanking your butt with any regularity … leaving, albeit, a very short list at the moment.

(2)     NC State’s current “Era of Dominance” over UNC (that’s a two year “era” and counting for those of you in Pittsboro) has sent it looking for more worthy “Big Rivals”.  Current choices are FSU, Maryland, North Korea, The Steel Curtain Steelers of the 70s, and Richmond County.

   The above infallible reasonings notwithstanding, I still prefer to enjoy the concept of “the rivalry” because it is so simple to contrast.  On color alone it qualifies.  Duke blue and Carolina blue and even UVa blue are “shades of difference”.  Red and Blue is “contrast”.

   Liberal Arts vs Land Grant is oh so stereotypical.  My standing challenge is to drop me anywhere within Division 1-A and I can tell you the prevailing insults between respective fan bases of Liberal Arts and Land Grant institutions.  “How many (____) does it take to change a light bulb?” … “How can you tell if a (____) coed is “easy” or not?” … “A rabbi, a priest, and a (____) fan were adrift in a lifeboat …”.  There are five basic joke gendres in this rivalry war, everything else is a variation on those basic themes.  The last original insult between either fan base was uttered at Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration ball.

    EVERY incoming UNC freshman is “pre-law” or “pre-med” … EVERY ONE.  EVERY incoming NCSU freshman is a budding Engineer or Architect … EVERY ONE.  The %s drop by 90% in both cases by 2nd semester of the sophomore year in favor of “graduating with a degree in something”.

    Is it more of a challenge to conceptualize, design and build a skyscraper or a mainframe OR to write an ironclad contractural agreement covering every contingency between two parties each looking to screw the other? 

   What contributed more to mankind … the agri-scientist who eradicated the boll weevil OR Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel? 

   Who would you rather your daughter bring home to “meet my parents” … Chris Washburn or Nakhtar Ndjiae?

   Liberal Arts schools are characterized by “deep thinkers” who extol the virtue of navel contemplating as originally outlined by Leon Trotsky.  Land Grant schools require each student, male or female, to carry a Skoal can in their back pocket and be able to parallel park a tractor.

    Is an MD curing a 6 year old of whooping cough MORE NOBLE than a DVM delivering a breech birth calf?

   Any debate of comparative relevance/irrelevance between UNC and NCSU partisans is the equivalent of two 5 y/o boys standing on a tree stump having a pissing contest.  The rest of Western Civilization waits breathlessly for the results of these ongoing urination duels ... NOT!

   Saturday’s game has the potential to cover the spectrum.  UNC is not as Gawdawful as its two routs by UVa and Louisville.  NCSU is 2-3 plays from being 1-3 rather than 3-1. 

   A quick review of recent history … UNC’s 17-9 W in 2001 was in doubt until the last 2 minutes.  NCSU’s impressive victory differentials in both 2002 and 2003 are both contrasted by the halftime scores in both cases.  Key plays early in the 3rd quarters decided each Pack victory.

   On “paper” the Pack wins this game 28–10 based on a suffocating defense and a still evolving offense.  UNC’s “secret weapon” if they have one, is that this is DEFINITELY John Bunting’s 11th hour appeal from the Governor.  He is “a dead coach walking” with good ol’ Rita From Chester operating a candlelight vigil outside the Kenan Football Center.  “Gipper speeches” … “Rudy” … “grab on to the rope” … a Bill Dooley pre-game speech … Dawn Bunting challenging each players’ manhood …. Clueless Moe playing Nebraska’s fight song on a harmonica …. The Dickster cutting off his own thumb with a hawkbill knife to prove he is a tough Little Prince. 

   Yo, Coach Tranquil, do you have any trick plays other than that muddle huddle fake punt?  If so, DON’T SAVE’EM FOR THE UTAH GAME!

   Regardless of the outcome of the actual game … we can all be assured of the following:

   A Wuffie Win regardless of the on-field dominance will NOT humble the average Carolina fan one iota; or increase his respect for “those no-count redneck son-of-a-bitches”. The only increase will be his unmitigated rage toward a certain little white-haired Director of Athletics.

   A Wuffie Win regardless of the on-field dominance will NOT diminish the average Wolfpacker’s paranoia that he and his school will NEVER receive the respect it deserves.  The vivid memory of Dudley Bradley stealing the ball from Clyde Austin will not dim one iota.

Memo To Chuck Amato ... Chuck, IF you do dominate the game, and your team simply goes about its "business" in a first class fashion without the thuggery and "Greg Golden esque taunting crap" ... it might even improve the image of your program and of your school.  Just a thought, Chuck! 

   GUARANTEE:  I’m going to pre-game tailgate with a series of UNC and NCSU good friends and aquainti.  I am going to “grab my left one and squeeze” for John Bunting to get that “stay of execution” call.  The two most important people in my life … The Mizzus and Kid … don’t even know “who does Carolina play this week?” Bless their hearts!

From The Guardian:

Loose definitions
by Glenn Reynolds

The religious streak running through US politics makes it hard to say what conservative means

The Guardian thinks I'm a Republican and a conservative. I shouldn't let on that this belief is based on somewhat shaky ground, because this column is a sweet gig, and - well - why rock the boat?

But in truth, I'm neither - or at least, whatever I am sheds some light on how useful (or not) such labels are. The reasons I don't fit in very well on either the left or right sides of US politics shed some light on that divide, too.

I'm certainly not a Republican, although I will very probably - actually, almost certainly - vote for George Bush this time. But I have been a card-carrying member of only two parties, the Democrats and, when I grew disenchanted with them, the Libertarians.

I broke with the Democrats because, under President Clinton, they seemed to have abandoned their traditional support for civil liberties: Clinton's 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act was, in many ways, a more sweeping assertion of government power than Bush's Patriot Act, which was really just about plugging some holes in the Clinton legislation.

As for conservative - well, I don't know what that word means any more. I certainly don't fit in with the religious right. I support gay marriage, drug legalisation and abortion rights. I am in favour of stem-cell research, and against prayer in school.

Nevertheless, some people call me a conservative because I support President Bush's war on terror, which is really (although Bush is too diplomatic to say so) a war on fundamentalist Islamist terror. I also oppose gun control (you can read a rather lengthy discussion of my views on the right to arms under the American constitution here, and a much shorter treatment here).

Does that make me a conservative? To paraphrase Clinton, it depends on what the meaning of conservative is. As I posted on my weblog recently: "I'd be delighted to live in a country where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons."

Is that a conservative belief? Perhaps, if the notion is the traditional strain of American belief that government should mind its own business, and that what goes on in our bedrooms, or our closets, is none of its business.

Meanwhile, religiosity - something often associated, especially by Europeans, with American conservatism - is also a staple of the US left. Just look at that icon of US liberalism, Hillary Clinton. The north-eastern style leftism associated with her is sometimes frankly, sometimes implicitly, religious. As Michael Kelly noted in a profile of her, reprinted in his book Things Worth Fighting For:

"The politics of Hillary Rodham Clinton are indeed largely liberal (although, the post election evidence indicates, no more so than those of her husband), but they are of a liberalism derived from religiosity. They combine a generally 'progressive' social agenda with a strong dose of moralism ...

"They are, rather than primarily the politics of left or right, the politics of do-goodism, flowing directly from a powerful and continual stream that runs through American history, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Jane Addams to Carry Nation to Dorothy Day, from the social gospel of the late 19th century to the temperance-minded Methodism of the early 20th century to the liberation theology of the 1960s and 1970s, to the pacifistic and multi-culturally correct religious left of today ...

"It is concerned not just with how government should behave, but with how people should. It is the message of the preacher, a role Hillary Rodham Clinton has filled many times delivering guest sermons from the pulpits of United Methodist churches."

And, actually, the roots of this do-goodism are ultimately in New England Puritanism, which had many characteristics associated with today's left. Among them were a hostility to wealth - illustrated by sumptuary laws - a belief that the welfare of the community trumped the rights of individuals (Hillary combined both these aspects in her famous recent statement: "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good"). Puritans favoured dense settlement in towns over spread-out farmers - they were, in a sense, the first opponents of "sprawl".

Even the most stereotypical aspect of the Puritans is not as out of place as you might think. Puritans were, of course, notoriously hostile to sex, but the modern left has threads of those sentiments, too - witness the anti-sex screeds of Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin. In fact, Puritans, who were actually quite enthusiastic about marital sex, may actually have been less Puritanical in this regard than some modern feminists.

Not all leftwingers in the US are as frankly religious as Hillary Clinton, and many don't even realise that the ideas that they champion have deep religious roots. But even for these people, being leftwing has itself become a sort of religion, with those who disagree viewed as sinister, almost demonic forces, rather than simply as individuals holding different views.

The language of righteousness and sin, if not that of redemption and grace, remains a hallmark of the purportedly secular left, though I find it no more attractive than the language of the religious right.

I don't fit into the religious right or the religious left. But, in America, you don't get to choose a major political party that does not have some sort of religious strain to it.

And it strikes me that one reason why politics in the US have become so much more bitter over the past couple of decades is that two rather different threads of religiosity have come to dominate the two major parties in distinct fashion, where each party had previously incorporated major components of both. This has turned political battles into quasi-religious ones.

Not being a devotee of either strain of American politico-religious faith, I find this rather tiresome, and more than a bit disturbing - but I think it's likely to represent the state of things for the foreseeable future.

Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, runs the instapundit.com US political blog

From The Hill:

The gall of Gaul: 300 years of Franco-American relations
By Jeff Dufour

“These proceedings are rapidly rendering the name of Frenchmen as detestable as once was dear to Americans and if suffered by their Government to be continued, total alienation will be inevitable.”

Those words were uttered not by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 but by Secretary of State Charles Pickering in 1796, on the occasion of yet another French ship firing on yet another American merchant vessel. This puts the lie to the notion that only now is some great tradition of Franco-American respect and cooperation unraveling. On the contrary, such a tradition has never existed.

That is precisely the point of John J. Miller and Mark Molesky’s engaging new book, Our Oldest Enemy, from which the above quote is taken. In this highly readable historical overview, Miller, a reporter for National Review, and Molesky, a history professor at Seton Hall University, set out to prove that the current enmity between America and France is by no means new. The two nations have a rich legacy of distrust — fueled primarily, in the authors’ eyes, by 300 years of French fecklessness and duplicity.

If this book were a political ad in a campaign for world opinion, its opponents would surely dismiss it as a negative attack. But like the best negative attacks, this slender volume is relentlessly effective, scoring point after scathing point not just against a series of French leaders but by extension an entire nation.

After French fortunes began to decline after Napoleon, the authors argue, the country’s animating impulses have been jealousy, entitlement and a misplaced arrogance: The French cannot yet accept that they are a people “whose greatest general was a foreigner, whose greatest warrior was a teenage girl, and whose last great military victory came on the plains of Wagram in 1809.” Our Oldest Enemy is peppered with such incendiary statements.

The authors best succeed in making their case not through such well-known shameful episodes as the XYZ Affair and the debacle of the Treaty of Versailles as engineered by French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau but by debunking the “myths” of Franco-American comity during other periods.

During the Revolutionary War battle of Flamborough Head, which made John Paul Jones famous, a French vessel that had supposedly come to the rescue of Jones’s sinking ship first fired on Jones in hopes that he would sink. The goal was to turn its fresh crew on the British ship and hoard the day’s glory.

Ally would become enemy again in 1942, as U.S. soldiers attempting to land in North Africa were strafed by Vichy French forces. Even as Allied troops were preparing to liberate France on D-Day, future president Charles de Gaulle refused to broadcast a radio message to the French people.

It was during another period of supposed Franco-American goodwill — the Cold War — when French ideas were the enemy. The authors reserve a special degree of scorn for 20th-century French intellectuals who worshiped “at the altar of” Stalinism. For Miller and Molesky, it is no accident, nor should it be overlooked, that many of the century’s greatest murderers, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot chief among them, studied in Paris.

To be sure, the book views history through a narrow prism, suggesting that France was responsible for every foreign-policy crisis in our history. While on the whole it may overstate this case, it nonetheless demonstrates France’s involvement — often deleterious — in so many episodes.

The weakest support for this may be in the beginning, in which Miller and Molesky discuss French behavior during the French and Indian Wars of the 18th century.

Because France at the time was in competition for colonies in the New World with Great Britain, this period’s place on a timeline of Franco-American distrust is debatable. It does, however, surely help to reinforce the authors’ low opinion of French national character.

The authors’ chief example is an Indian massacre of British settlers at Fort Edward in upstate New York in 1757. “According to several accounts,” they write, the French, who were allied with the Indians, “did nothing to stop the bloodbath.”

Apart from a history of France’s questionable status as our ally, the book tells the story of U.S. accommodation of French antics. Eisenhower repeatedly gave in to de Gaulle’s petulant and self-serving demands during World War II “in the interests of Allied harmony.”

After the war, the United States was footing 80 percent of France’s expenses in Vietnam, a colony that the French were incapable of holding and that would soon become our problem. In 1965, U.S. Marines were sent to the Dominican Republic to help quell a civil war. Even while de Gaulle publicly castigated America for the intervention, he privately asked LBJ to protect the French embassy, which the president did. And today, America pays lip service to working with France against terrorism, while we tolerate its deals with terrorist regimes.

Should our attitudes and our policies toward the French change accordingly? This book should give comfort to those who would answer in the affirmative — and give pause to those who do not.

Book reviewed:
Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France
By John J., Miller and Mark Molesky
294 pages; $24.95
Doubleday, 2004

DEER IN THE HEADLIGHTS
By DICK MORRIS

LAST night John Edwards went from seeming to be like JFK to emulating Dan Quayle in the space of 90 minutes. Confronted with Dick Cheney's obvious competence, incisive parries to his charges and devastating rebuttal of his phony statistics, Edwards looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights.

Normally, vice presidential debates are not significant. But this confrontation should serve President Bush well. With Edwards parroting Sen. John Kerry's line in last week's presidential debate, Cheney gave the answers Bush should have offered but failed to articulate.

If the first presidential debate was a contrast of Bush's substance and Kerry's style, the vice-presidential debate gave Cheney a chance to emphasize the president's positions and Kerry's contradictions without tripping over his own words.

Cheney looked like a man and Edwards looked like a boy.

On the attack, the North Carolina senator to this observer seemed, surprisingly, to be a shallow lightweight, almost transparent in his absence of heft and gravitas. Cheney looked like the authority, the wise one, the arbiter of facts and statistics.

If Edwards acted like a lawyer, Cheney acted like a judge. The Democrat proposed, but the vice president disposed. There was no doubt as to who was in charge.

The highlight of the debate came when Cheney said that he had presided over the Senate as vice president on almost every Tuesday and noted that the first time he met John Edwards was last night.


And when the vice president zeroed in on Edwards' poor Senate attendance record, the Democrat couldn't parry that he only missed the votes because he was running for president. Why? Because virtually all he has done in the Senate has been to run for president. Having served only 51/2 years in the Senate, Edwards has been seeking the presidency — and missing votes — for half of his tenure in office.

The Al Gore vice presidential candidacy of 1992 was the beginning of a process of choosing a VP who will provide a metaphor to help us grasp the essence of the presidential candidate. Whereas formerly one sought balance in the ticket by naming a person who was one's opposite, Bill Clinton chose Gore to emphasize the generational aspect of his candidacy and to stress its moderate mid-south roots.

Cheney is not a metaphor for Bush. He's older, wiser and more articulate. But Edwards served as a poor metaphor for Kerry. His lack of substance and glib inexperience made one wonder about John Kerry. Edwards' inability to go beyond his talking points — the same ones Kerry had already used — illustrated his limitations and, by inference, suggested that Kerry suffered from similar problems.

Even when the debate swung to domestic issues, Edwards found himself trying to climb out of questions on gay marriage and trial lawyers.

It was only when he could lapse into biographical stories and trial-lawyer hokum that Edwards showed himself to advantage. His canned stories and rehearsed closing statement stood in contrast to his plasticized rendition of his talking points for the balance of the debate.

Dick Cheney helped Bush get well from a poor performance. John Edwards made it look like the Democratic ticket was out classed and out gunned.

From washingtonpost.com:

Small Government Is So 1990s
By Anne Applebaum

Try, if you can, to screen out the memories. Forget the cover stories, the "Angriest Man in America" profiles, the revolutionary rhetoric, the million-dollar book contracts. Whether you loved him or hated him, forget how he infuriated you. Look at him now as neutrally as you can and I think you'll come to the obvious conclusion: Seen from the perspective of the 108th Congress, which is stumbling to the end of its ignominious session this week, Newt Gingrich is a towering historical figure.

By that I don't mean Gingrich was a paragon of virtue, or that Gingrich was a great unifier of men. I mean that Newt Gingrich, as speaker of the House, tried to do what no one has done before or since. Ten years ago this autumn he set out, quixotically, to control Congress's apparently insatiable urge to spend the nation's money. He tried to limit the terms of the all-powerful committee chairmen, who had so skewed the appropriations process to the advantage of their constituents. He assailed what he called the "East German socialist" farm subsidy programs that had gone unchallenged for a half-century. He even managed to pass a line-item veto, which would have allowed then-President Bill Clinton to cut pork from the then-Republican Congress's legislation, had it not been declared unconstitutional.

Never mind his methods or his style: At least he made an effort, which is more than can be said of anyone in the current congressional leadership. Back in the last decade, Gingrich's rants against the Democratic congressional establishment and its penchant for spending were perceived as partisan Republican attacks. But nowadays, the Republicans themselves -- in control of the House, the Senate and the White House -- bear the greatest responsibility for the apparently unstoppable expansion of government.

Just look at the numbers. According to the president's fiscal 2005 budget, discretionary federal spending -- meaning money nobody is being legally forced to spend -- has risen 29 percent over the past four years and is growing even faster than spending on Medicare and Social Security. According to a Cato Institute study, the increases for 2002, 2003 and 2004 constitute three of the five biggest annual increases in the past 40 years. Contrary to popular belief, not all the money has been spent on the military: Spending on everything besides defense will increase by more than a third during President Bush's first term. Nor is it all going to homeland security. The Education Department, once slated for abolition, has experienced a huge spending boost. So has the Energy Department, whose creation was once greeted with skepticism. In fact, many of the programs that Republicans promised to eliminate in the mid-1990s -- the dubious public-private partnerships, the extraneous commissions, the grants for pet causes -- now have larger budgets than ever.

Judging from the record of this Congress, whose members are right now leaving Washington to ask us to reelect them, the growth isn't going to stop, either. Partly this is because no one particularly cares. Partly it is because members will no longer allow any measure to become law unless they are bribed with billions of dollars of pork for their districts. The energy bill that nearly passed last fall would have contained some $23.5 billion in tax breaks for the oil and gas industries -- three times what the president asked for -- not to mention more billions for ethanol (on behalf of farm-state legislators) and coal producers (on behalf of coal-state legislators). The Medicare bill -- even leaving aside what could be trillions of dollars for prescription drugs over the next decade -- contained some $25 billion for rural doctors, on behalf of congressmen from rural states. A $5 billion corporate tax bill emerges with $150 billion in extras attached to it. A highway bill turns out to fund parking lots and museums, and costs billions more than it should.

Yet, while there is campaign talk about tax cuts and the resultant deficit, mostly from Democrats, I hardly hear anyone from either party crusading against the government spending that is equally responsible for the deficit and that will, if unchecked, force taxes up again anyway. With a few oddball exceptions, no one talks about what happens to the national economy when more activity is controlled by the government.

It's as if campaigning against big government has become passé: It's so old, so dull, so 1990s. It's impossible to believe that Gingrich ever tried it, impossible to believe anyone ever will again. You'd have to be an anti-establishment nut even to want to reform a system that keeps everyone comfortable. Indeed, you'd probably have to be a provincial history teacher with a love of spy novels and futurology, a gift for causing offense and a fondness for the word "radical" even to think of it at all.

applebaumanne@washpost.com

The Subject About Which Kerry Dare Not Ever Speak
by Roger L. Simon

No, it's not gay marriage or tax hikes, it is the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program because it is that scandal at the heart of our most prominent international institution, more than anything I can think of, that makes Kerry's continuing mantra of "consulting with our allies" into a complete and utter farce. Even what we know of Oil-for-Food right now... and there's undoubtedly a lot more to come... shows us that these same allies - notably the French, Russians and to a lesser extent the Germans - were, throughout the run-up to the War in Iraq, nothing but profiteers off Saddam. They were and to a great extent still are, as Orwell put it in an only slightly different context,"objectively pro-fascist."

So when I read Kerry's latest apologia pro vita pin-striped suit in which the Senator tries to set the record straight on what he means or meant by a "Global Test," all I could think of was has this man who claims to be a liberal, to be an enemy of fascism, ever read anything about Oil-for-Food, ever investigated it? What does he know about it? Back on March 12, the Washington Times, a paper he no doubt despises, began a two-part series on Oil-for-Food this way, trying to call the Senator's attention to the subject:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry complains that President Bush pursued a unilateralist foreign policy that gave short shrift to the concerns of the United Nations and our allies when it came to taking military action against Saddam Hussein. But the mounting evidence of scandal that has been uncovered in the U.N. Oil For Food program suggests that there was never a serious possibility of getting Security Council support for military action because influential people in Russia and France were getting paid off by Saddam. After the fall of Baghdad last spring, France and Russia tried to delay the lifting of sanctions against Iraq and continue the Oil for Food program. That's because France and Russia profited from it: The Times of London calculated that French and Russian companies received $11 billion worth of business from Oil for Food between 1996 and 2003.

More recent analyses have even connected the Oil-for-Food money to Al Qaeda via a Kuwaiti company, which means the UN itself may actually have been financing terrorism. What do you have to say to that, Senator Kerry? Which side are you on - the liberal or the totalitarian?

The tragic part of all this is such a small percentage of the American public knows about Oil-for-Food, although it may have more to tell us about the international balance of power than any other current scandal. Many liberal friends of mine are completely ignorant of these events because they have been relegated, for the most part, to the back pages of The New York Times, therefore invisible. And Paul Volcker's internal UN investigation has had the paradoxical result of pushing the scandal even further from view, its conclusions hidden from the public until long after the coming election. Even Kerry would have been forced to comment about that. And don't look for the press to ask him about it. Those few who might be interested won't have the chance.

From The Washington Times: Just when you're starting to be convinced that Iraq might really be about fighting terrorism. Nice job, White House. Now make up some new stories about why over 1000 have died there. Bastards.

House told to alter intelligence bill
By Stephen Dinan

The White House has told House Republicans that it wants them to remove provisions in their intelligence-overhaul bill that would crack down on illegal aliens' obtaining drivers' licenses, allow easier deportation and limit the use of foreign consular ID cards.
    The Senate's bill lacks those provisions, and as the two chambers race toward trying to pass a bill before the Nov. 2 election, the measures are a potential stumbling block.
    The White House wants those provisions out, according to a congressional source familiar with the bill.
    "They have expressed desire to kill some of the immigration provisions and gut some of others," the source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
    Rosemary Jenks, a lobbyist for stricter immigration controls for the group NumbersUSA , who has been tracking the bill, said White House policy officials met with Republican staffers to urge them to remove the provisions, even though White House officials initially had signed off on those same provisions before the bill was introduced officially.
    "The White House was involved in the negotiations before the bill was introduced, and now, for some reason, it has come back and decided to insist that the main provisions, the most effective provisions of the bill, be gutted," she said.
    She said House Republican leaders appear to be standing firm in refusing the White House demands. A White House spokesman did not return a call for comment yesterday.
    Peter Gadiel, spokesman for 9/11 Families for a Secure America, said his organization will drop its endorsement of the bill if the immigration provisions are removed.
    "This goes to the very heart of the entire conspiracy of 9/11," he said. "These people entered the country, got driver's licenses, used those driver's licenses to obtain the services they needed, and then used those driver's licenses to get on the plane."
    The House bill restricts federal employees' acceptance of consular identification cards issued by other nations, which the Government Accountability Office said last week helps illegal aliens evade immigration law.
    The bill also would set standards for driver's licenses that would make it much more difficult for illegal aliens to obtain them and for temporary visitors to keep licenses past their visa expiration.
    The legislation also would expedite deportation of immigrants who have entered the United States illegally in the past five years and curtail court reviews of deportation proceedings even when the person faces torture when returned home.
    Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, said adding those amendments is an attempt to sink the entire bill.
    "The piling on of unrelated legislative pet projects, especially by the Republican Party's anti-immigration wing, could throw the carefully reasoned, bipartisan recommendations of the 9/11 commission to the curb," she said.
    Members of the National Commission for Terrorist attacks upon the United States held a press conference last week to complain about some of the House provisions and praise the Senate bill as it now stands. Commission Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton singled out some of the House immigration provisions as particularly problematic for commission members.
    The White House also has issued a statement praising the Senate bill.
    But Mr. Gadiel said removing the immigration provision would be breaking Congress' promise to pass all of the September 11 commission's recommendations.
    He said senators should be warned: "If you really have the nerve to kill a final bill -- ignore all the recommendations of the 9/11 commission and spit in the faces of the 9/11 families because the final bill [includes] all of the recommendations, not just the ones you find palatable, go ahead, kill the bill. See what the American people feel in November."

From washingtonpost.com

Iraq and Averages
By Robert Kagan

We all make a common logical error that cognitive psychologists call the "availability heuristic." It means making judgments about the future based not on a broad body of historical evidence but on recent, vivid events that skew our perceptions. My favorite recent example, for reasons that will be apparent, concerns this baseball season and the era's finest sportswriter, The Post's own Thomas Boswell.

In May Boswell wrote a column about the misfortunes of the New York Yankees, particularly Derek Jeter, then in a horrendous slump. Sure, Jeter might come out of it, Boswell admitted, but maybe after eight great seasons the league had found a fatal flaw, namely, Jeter's tendency to swing at too many bad pitches. "Can a hitter completely reverse a characteristic so basic? And once pitchers have recognized it, will they forget?" Boswell also ruminated on other Yankee problems. Gary Sheffield had "a tiny three homers in 43 games," a paucity Boswell attributed not to a bad streak but to Yankee Stadium's capacious left field. Sheffield had averaged 35 homers a year for the five seasons before he joined the Yanks and had boasted, "No park can hold me." But Boswell was dubious: "Big home parks change power hitters' swings." These and other observations led Boswell to contemplate a year when the Yankees, with the biggest payroll in history, might yet miss the playoffs -- and that, he added, would be "delicious."

Four months and 75 wins later, the Yankees have taken their division for the seventh straight year. Derek Jeter finished the season batting .292, below his lifetime average, to be sure, but with a career-high 44 doubles, 23 home runs (one shy of his career high), and 111 runs scored in what will go down in the record books as a fine season indeed. No one will remember that Jeter was hitting below .200 at the end of May. Sheffield, meanwhile, had 36 home runs and 121 RBI and is far and away the Yanks' most valuable player.

Boswell, being human, fell prey to the availability heuristic, partly because of something I'll call its "rooting interest" corollary. Boswell hates the Yankees. Or rather, he hates George Steinbrenner's fat wallet (and who doesn't, other than me and a few million other Yankee fans?) He was rooting for the Yankees to fall flat on their big, overpaid faces. This affected his normally perfect judgment and led him to imagine that the bad news of April and May could well be extrapolated through the end of the season. But the key Yankees hit close to their lifetime averages, which is sort of the point about lifetime averages, and the team took its $180 million payroll to the playoffs for the 10th straight year. And, by the way, hasn't Boswell seen the typical Gary Sheffield home run? No park can hold him.

Now if Thomas Boswell can make this kind of mistake, imagine the mistakes the mortals who write about foreign policy can make. Few possess the historical knowledge of their subject that Boswell has of baseball. And during an election season, especially this election season, they can't help succumbing to the rooting-interest corollary to the availability heuristic.

And so for the past few months it has become common wisdom that the war in Iraq is lost, based on what any historian will tell you is far too little evidence to make such a final judgment. Not only that, but the entire approach to foreign policy that has been called the "Bush doctrine" is, therefore, finished. Another fine Post reporter, Robin Wright, wrote at the end of June that the Iraq war had undermined or discredited the four central planks of President Bush's foreign policy: preemptive action to "prevent strikes on U.S. targets"; a willingness "to act unilaterally, alone or with a select coalition, when the United Nations or allies balk"; a policy to promote democratic reform in the Middle East, sparked by democratic progress in Iraq; and Iraq as "the next cornerstone in the global war on terrorism." I'm not sure what the last one means exactly, so I'll give it to her. As for the other three, is it really likely that they are dead as principles of U.S. foreign policy?

Democracy promotion? This may come as a shock to many people, but George W. Bush didn't exactly invent the idea that the United States should promote democracy abroad. It wasn't even original with Woodrow Wilson. Anyone looking at the broad sweep of American history would have to say that urging democracy upon other nations, often after invasions undertaken for other purposes, is more the norm than the exception.

As for unilateralism, acting alone or with a "select coalition," that really has been the historical norm. The Cold War system of alliances was an aberration, a welcome one, no doubt, but heavily influenced by geopolitical circumstances that no longer pertain.

And preemption? Not only has this been a prominent feature of U.S. foreign policy for two centuries, as historian John Lewis Gaddis has pointed out, but everyone from Michael Walzer to Henry Kissinger to Kofi Annan to John Kerry agrees that preventive action is an unavoidable part of doing business in a world of proliferating weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism. The question is not whether preventive military actions will be taken but how they will be sanctioned by international bodies.

Now, the United States could conceivably lose in Iraq, just as Jeter could some day hit under .200 for a whole season. But the odds are against it, and it is certainly far too early to make that judgment. And as for the effect of such a loss, the strategic and moral disaster would be enormous, and America would pay a huge price. But the fundamental course of American foreign policy would not change. Over the past two decades, the United States has launched nine significant military interventions abroad, about once every two years. That's a more significant predictor of the future than the events of the past four months. And the United States will remain involved in the Middle East for decades to come, trying to protect its security by promoting democracy. The history of U.S. foreign policy, our "lifetime average," suggests it is a mistake to write off key elements of the "Bush doctrine," especially those that Bush only inherited from his predecessors.

The writer, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes a monthly column for The Post.

One of the best analyses of the costs of the Iraq adventure I've read.

The economics of war
By Lou Dobbs

Last week's presidential so-called debate hardly advanced the public knowledge of the political and economic realities of policies pursued by our government. The high cost of extending this country's political and military policies abroad requires an energetic examination of why our political leaders choose specific policies and not others, and the cost to the nation.

It is certain that the price of regime change in Iraq has been high in both blood and treasure. More than 1,000 American troops have been killed in Iraq, and almost 8,000 others have been wounded. We've spent nearly $150 billion fighting the war so far, and the president is expected to request an additional $60 billion in supplemental funding after the election, no matter which candidate the voters decide in November should hold that high office.

None of the supplemental appropriation that will be requested of Congress will be used to defend our soil against a terrorist attack. In fact, our porous borders, open ports, roads, and railways remain all but unprotected. The truth that has so far been ignored by both parties is that tens of billions of dollars more will be required to secure our borders and to recruit and train hundreds of thousands of police officers and paramedics.

Our government has chosen to allocate our principal defense resources to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While we're spending more than $200 billion in Iraq, we will spend just over $30 billion on homeland security. More than three years after September 11, as many as 3 million illegal aliens will enter the United States this year, some from countries that wish us great harm. Only 5 percent of the 7 million cargo containers that annually come through our ports are properly inspected for dirty bombs and weapons of mass destruction. Yet outlays for border and transportation security are about $5 billion less this year than last, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

What happened to the comprehensive, balanced approach to fighting the war on terrorism that the president promised after 9/11? "We found that there are quite a few programs on the military side of the budget that could be scaled back in order to provide funds for the higher priority, nonmilitary programs," says Marcus Corbin, senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information. Corbin recommends decreasing funding for Cold War-era weapons and instead funneling that money into additional homeland security measures.

Most of what we're currently spending to protect our transportation systems has been limited to aviation. Since 9/11, in fact, about 90 percent of the nation's $5 billion annual investment in transportation security has gone to aviation, according to the 9/11 commission. While the commission conceded that civilian aircraft are still targets for terrorists, it wrote, "Opportunities to do harm are as great, or greater, in maritime or surface transportation."

Small change. The Bush administration has proposed only $46 million for port security grants for 2005, a 63 percent decrease from this year. The Coast Guard estimated that it would take $7.5 billion over 10 years to meet the requirements of the 2002 Maritime Transportation Security Act, which aims to protect our ports and waterways from attack. To protect our railways, the government has so far provided only one-half cent per passenger. The American Public Transportation Association says that $6 billion is needed for transit security.

But as Texas Rep. Jim Turner points out, nowhere is the gap between rhetoric and reality greater than along our southern border. Turner, ranking member of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, last month proposed the Secure Borders Act, which would allocate money, manpower, and new technology to enhance border security. "We have a very porous southern border," Turner told me. "It represents a very severe threat to the security of our country, and, with all of the reports that we're getting about al Qaeda intending to use the southern border as an access point, this kind of security gap must be closed immediately." He added, "We've got to get serious in this country about really fighting a real war on terror and about securing our homeland."

The fog of war should not extend from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to Capitol Hill and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And voters have a right to know how the government could spend a quarter of a trillion dollars and still leave our citizens so vulnerable to terrorist attack at home

W's wrong—freedom can't grow in Iraqi soil
by Zev Chafets

During Thursday's presidential debate, President Bush told the American people his goal in Iraq is to spread liberty and freedom.

The President believes the majority of Iraqis yearn for democracy and will express this by taking part in free elections and defending a representative government. This idea is Bush's main justification for the invasion of Iraq. It is the heart of his broader Middle Eastern policy. And regrettably, it is entirely wrong.

There are 22 member states in the Arab League, and not one of them is remotely democratic. Some, like Egypt, Syria and Libya, are military dictatorships. Others, such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia, are ruled by hereditary monarchs who base their claim on religious legitimacy.

A few, like Sudan and Somalia, are so chaotic as to be barely sovereign states at all.

What these countries share is an Arab civic culture that is authoritarian, repressive and rooted in Islam.

The Arab League's official Web site makes the connection clear. It calls Islam "more than just a religion; it is the focal point of Arab society, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, permeating [Arab] culture at every level — political, social and economic." According to the Arab League, the Koran instructs its followers "in all fields of life, whether they be social, economic or political," and "provides the Muslim with all he or she needs to know to live a good and pious life."

Arab society raises its children to unquestioningly accept authority. Islam, after all, means "submission." Father knows best. Tribal loyalty is prized. God's laws (and those who interpret them) must be honored. Blasphemy is a life-threatening offense. In this conformist world, democracy is both unknown and unnatural. Individual choice offends the divine order of society. Gender equality is an invitation to moral madness. Infidels are obviously inferior to believers. Locating ultimate sovereignty in "the people" instead of the Koran is a mockery of God.

For a long time, I assumed that Bush knew all this, that his talk about implanting liberty in the Arab world was merely a cover for the real task of replacing fascist regimes with pro-American ones. But on Thursday, he sounded sincere. And that's a problem. Elections will doubtless take place in Iraq in January; the U.S. will see to that. People will brave bombs to go to the polls. But they won't be there, as Bush supposes, out of a love of liberty or Iraqi democracy. On the contrary, they will vote to further the fortunes of their own narrow tribes and sects.

This doesn't mean Bush was wrong to invade Iraq. After 9/11, no Mideastern dictator as hostile and unhinged as Saddam Hussein can be left to his own devices. Saddam had to go and so, sooner or later, will the fascist government in Syria and jihadist regimes of Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The U.S. has an obvious preference for pro-American rulers. It should encourage them in Iraq and beyond. But that's a luxury. National security dictates only that the U.S. create and enforce a set of rules: no supporting terrorism, no invading neighbors, no acquiring weapons of mass destruction, no threatening the flow of oil.

This is not too much to ask (and demand). What is too much is to expect an ancient society to embrace values and practices it neither understands nor approves of. If success in Iraq means enticing people to renounce a civic culture that flows from their deepest Islamic beliefs, then failure is guaranteed.

From Chronicles website:

THE PRESIDENT WE DESERVE
by Thomas Fleming

“Bush wins first debate—and reelection” should be the headline of every newspaper today. Yes, I know, most people think Kerry got the better of Bush, but that is because most people today think of sports as a contest to be judged on points. Muhammad Ali used to dance around scoring points all over bruisers like Sonny Liston or George Foreman, but could he punch? Who knows? The Liston fights, at least, were fixed. In the same way, every presidential debate is rigged in favor of the leftist Democrats who control the media.

What really happened Thursday night? Kerry won many points, of course. He was tall, forceful, commanding; Bush was hunched over and goofy. Kerry was polished, articulate, and coherent; Bush speaks English as a second language. (What’s his first language? Moronese.) But during the whole long weary exercise in rhetorical futility, Kerry failed to deliver the knock-out blow that would restore his failing candidacy.

Everyone in America, Republican or Democrat, already knows what our President is like. We didn’t need this debate to show that he cannot pronounce foreign names or frame a simple sentence without losing his way. His supporters know and forgive; his detractors—who would never vote for him anyway—ridicule him; the undecideds obviously don’t care or they would not still be undecided. To win the debate, Kerry had to appear to show up the President as a fool, as the Democrats claimed Jimmy Carter did in his debate with Ford, or reveal himself as presidentially regal, as Ronald Reagan did against Carter, persuading people that he was not simply an actor who had got lucky in California. Kerry did neither.

Kerry failed for the same reason that so many Republicans fail when they take on liberal Democrats. He failed because he does not really disagree with Bush on any fundamental issue. All the President had to make plain is that Kerry agreed with him on the war and now, showing himself to be the 60’s leftist he is, he is willing to bail out, once the going gets tough—as the liberals bailed out on the war they started in Vietnam.

Yes, it is true that some small majority of Americans realize there is no connection between Saddam Hussein and the events of September 11, and many people are dimly aware that Saddam did not have an arsenal of WMD’s that could actually threaten the United States. But that same majority is frightened. They want a leader who will take charge, right of wrong, and, if he makes mistakes, will not come on television to share his mental anguish with us. We are a simple, stupid people, dumb enough to be snookered by Bill Clinton twice, and we are certainly dumb enough to repeat the mistake of voting for Bush.

John Kerry can pronounce the names of foreign leaders correctly. Hell, John Kerry knows French and is not ashamed to admit it. But if mental agility and a cultivated accent counted in elections, Stevenson would have beaten the pants off Eisenhower in ’52, and I would be mayor of Rockford for life instead of the crooks and clowns of both parties that have so disgraced the position. Americans want leaders that are no better than they are. It’s nice if the leader is smart like Clinton or glamorous like Reagan, but only if they are as folksy as Reagan or as trashy as Clinton.

I have always remembered an elderly black woman who called up a Charleston radio show, complaining about segregated lunch counters. I was completely on her side and used to play the tape I made as a student, but her punch line should be made the national motto: “Ain’t no damn body better than me.” If I thought I could make such a statement and mean it, I think I would cut my throat.

Kerry is a good debater. It is a skill he developed in college and honed on the floor of the Senate. Americans are not, however, voting for the captain of the debating team, which is why senators hardly ever get elected to the presidency. Kerry’s articulate delivery and cool aplomb remind me of a Jerry Butler song that was popular in 1960, the last time a slick-talking Democratic senator (also from Massachusetts) won—or rather stole—a presidential election.

He uses all the great quotations.
Says the things I wish I could say,
But he’s had so many rehearsals,
Girl, to him it’s just another play.

The refrain, in case you have forgotten, goes: “He don’t love you, like I love you,” and what the American people want—to quote another song—is somebody to love. George Bush loves the booboisie, and enough of them love him to guarantee his reelection.

Kerry, Captive
An anatomy of flip-flopping.
by Victor Davis Hanson

There is a logic to Senator Kerry's flip-flopping that transcends his political opportunism: He is simply a captive of the pulse of the battlefield, without any steady vision or historical sense that might put the carnage of the day into some larger tactical, strategic, or political framework. As was true over a decade ago during Gulf War I, he contradicts himself when good news from the front makes his prior antiwar stance look either timid or foolhardy. But when the casualty rate rises or CNN is particularly vivid in airing the latest beheading or car bomb he returns to his shrill pessimism and denounces the war.

In 1991, when in-the-know pundits warned of horrific losses, Kerry spoke against going into Kuwait. When 100 hours brought unforeseen victory, he retroactively supported Desert Storm. Finally, he returned to his previous opposition when Kurds and Shiites were left hanging in the victory's aftermath. The larger issue was never whether Saddam should rest atop a stolen, oil-rich country, but rather what exactly 51 percent of the voters seemed to favor on any given day.

Now we see a repeat performance, driven by the same opportunism: Kerry publicized his previous sanctioning of the war as Saddam's statue fell and Iraqis rejoiced. Then, as the looting spread, he reiterated his longstanding worries. He solved the dilemma of sorting out the chaos by talking about voting for and then against appropriations — after all, it remains unclear whether the evening news will bring forth the last gasp or the new wave of Iraqi terror, and Americans meanwhile seem equally divided on the wisdom of the entire campaign.

In this regard, the senator is one with the majority of citizens — at least if the mercurial polls are any indication. Remember the ups and downs: Public support for taking out Saddam was strong on the eve of the war; after the three-week victory, it rose to overwhelming approval, but news of the lootings and terrorism caused it to plunge. It recovered a little with the capture of Saddam and the hand-over of power to the Iraqi interim government, but now it is eroding as the Sunni Triangle sends forth its daily death counts.

Lost in all this political calculus is a consistent belief that it was and is a very difficult but good thing to rid the world of a mass murderer like Saddam and leave consensual government in his wake, thus turning a volcano of death into an island of sanity in the strategic Middle East.

GOOD AND BAD WAR LEADERS
Almost no one compares the present disturbing costs to previous American sacrifices at the Argonne, Guadalcanal, or the Bulge, much less preventable American miscalculations at Pearl Harbor, the Kasserine Pass, Schwienfurt, and the Yalu River, all of which sent thousands of Americans to their deaths but nevertheless did not lead to strategic defeat. In our present folly, if we are not perfect, then we are failures — war being not the age-old tragic choice between bad and worse alternatives, but a therapeutic alternative of either achieving instant utopia at little cost or calling it quits forever.

The problem with Mr. Kerry's understandable mutability, however, is that real leaders are supposed to some degree to expect and then endure these bouts of public skepticism as the inevitable wage of seeing their vision through. Thucydides' famous encomium of Pericles centered on his ability to withstand the fury of the people — and through forbearance, unshakeable will, and patience allow his constituents to return to their senses.

The same steadfastness seems to have been central to Lincoln's and Churchill's successes. Neither blinked after disasters such as Antietam, the Wilderness, and Cold Harbor, or descended into panic or depression following news of horrific losses at Singapore and Dunkirk. Pericles was fined; Lincoln faced defeat in 1864; and Churchill, after staving off early censure, was finally removed from office — but only after it was clear that his leadership had assured victory.

By contrast, Nicias, McClellan, and Chamberlain were slaves to public opinion. What vision they had was cobbled together from a sense of what the people wished in any given week — and thus constantly subject to modification and contradiction as the collective mood soared or plummeted, predicated on the people sensing that things were either going well or worsening. Such leaders are flip-floppers not simply because the god of public opinion is volatile, but because in war the battlefield itself is unpredictable and unfathomable — if one examines it in terms of hours, days, or weeks rather than months or years.

To this day, Americans have no idea whether Kerry thinks the entire Iraq operation was a flawed idea from the start or approves of the strategy but faults Bush on matters of tactics — not being tough enough on looters, disbanding the Iraqi army, allowing Fallujah to fester. That these are mutually exclusive positions bothers him little when he collates the daily punditry and creates some slightly nuanced new position for the present hour.

A GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE
If these annoying political campaigns are in fact valuable training grounds for the presidency, then the chaos of the Kerry crusade bodes ill for us all.

Why bring up Vietnam as an exemplar of principled service when tapes exist of past slurs against the troops in the field? Why slander George W. Bush's record when such attention will only invite commensurate investigation of one's own controversial wartime service? Why transmogrify past antiwar activism into solid support for American military engagement when such recasting only recalls one's similar contemporary metamorphosis, replete with the same old calls for withdrawal timetables, multilateral solutions, and the accustomed slanders against a sitting president?

Teresa Heinz Kerry charges "un-Americanism" and alleges plots to produce Osama bin Laden on the eve of the election — all the while producing howlers such as suggesting that hurricane-devastated refugees "go naked" and quipping "Who cares?" about what happens in Arizona. She does so because, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan's outburst in the 1980 campaign, she really is "paying for this."

Populism is the Democratic mantra, but in the postmodern age it requires a disciplined candidate who, for just a few months, can be weaned from appearing in trendy aristocratic garb snowboarding and windsurfing only to do glum penance the next day in the mandatory jeans and hunting vest. One can't have an assault rifle and not an assault rifle anymore than he can own and not own an SUV. But then, are those in Michigan with whom he's not comfortable more numerous than the Cambridge crowd with whom he is?

The volatility on the part of Kerry's handlers descends even to the superficial — we do not know whether the candidate will appear pale, tan, or now orange. His hair may be black, gray, or salt-and-pepper, his lines smoothed or creased — radical changes in appearance that transcend even the wear and tear of the campaign and become a metaphor for his fluctuating message. Windsurfing, orange dye on the epidermis, whitened teeth, hair tint, and teenager runabout clothes — these are not the things that captivate auto workers, farmers, miners, and welders. So everything else Kerry has done in this disastrous campaign has only added to the image that he is an undisciplined and contradictory thinker without either strong beliefs or the moral courage to risk offending critics in pursuing his ideals.

KERRY'S IRAQ?
Kerry must either tell us why this war was a mistake and reconcile his previous conflicting statements or, in the tactical sense, criticize the present administration for allowing a stunning three-week victory to turn into a messy occupation. He must offer the American people clear correctives that suggest his initial support was wise and that the war deserved better execution.

But he has done neither — because he does not know what the American people quite think, and doubts that his own pacifist inclinations will play well with the electorate. Railing about "them" is easy when you're a young Vietnam-veteran activist, and even perhaps as one of 100 senators; but it's quite a different thing when you must craft a positive policy to lead the world's only superpower.

In truth, the only sober course in Iraq is to correct the tactical lapses (lax security during the looting, porous borders, unguarded arms depots, undisturbed terrorist sanctuaries, harassing but not eradicating Islamic fascists) in continual pursuit of larger strategic successes. The sanctuary of al Qaeda is drying up in Pakistan while its money sources from Saudi Arabia are under new audit. Libya has flipped. Iran is now under global examination. Syria is apprehensive. Afghanistan is free of theocracy. All this shrinks the world of the Islamic fascists, which before 9/11 was expanding.

Kerry should remind us that none of these recent positive developments are sustainable unless the actual fighting on the ground in Iraq results in clear-cut victory, which is tragically obtained by the sacrifices of America's superb military. But this he will not or cannot do, either because he does believe in it or because he long ago bartered his wisdom to obtain support from the Howard Dean Left.

So Kerry flip and flops like a fish out of water, suggesting that his heart is with Howard Dean while his mind concurs with George Bush — and thus his schizophrenia is on the verge of leading his party to a landslide defeat in the electoral college, and the loss of all branches of government with it. Americans simply have never voted for leaders who insult their allies on the battlefield, claim that their soldiers are losing, and shrug that the war is about lost. And they surely won't this time either.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.