If you needed another reason (besides the Iraq debacle) the Bush administration has been such a disgrace to those who voted for it:

Racial profiling for dollar$
By Michelle Malkin

August 24, 2005

The Bush administration supports racial profiling -- as long as it's lining the pockets of the right people.

 Bean-counting government bureaucrats are free to take race, ethnicity and gender into account when doling out public funds to non-white-male contractors.

 But God help law enforcement officers, air marshals and border agents who try to use those same factors to combat terrorism and protect American lives.

 What Bush Department of Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta stubbornly refused to do in the name of enhancing homeland security, he'll gladly continue to do under the guise of boosting politically correct "diversity."

 This week, Mineta announced the appointment of one Roger Minami to head DOT's Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, which "helps small, minority owned, women owned and other disadvantaged businesses compete for DOT and DOT-assisted contracts and grants." Secretary Mineta informs us that Minami "brings to DOT a strong recognition of the potential of small businesses to help us build a safer, more efficient and more reliable transportation system."

 What are Minami's qualifications to determine which contractors will make our highways, airports and mass transit safe, efficient and reliable? He comes from a family farming background, has a degree in communications, was "active in a number of Japanese American charitable and community-based groups," and is the first Asian American to serve in his new position. Mineta's press release also notes that "Minami helped create and produce Central Coast Seniors, a weekly news and information television program for active older adults living in Santa Barbara and nearby coastal communities in California." Swell.

 Minami's only relevant professional experience consists of serving in a similar affirmative action post at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he "helped small and disadvantaged businesses find more opportunities in the food industry by negotiating agreements between representatives of the firms and large food-service companies."

 Translation: He's an ethnic shakedown artist and a political activist crony of Mineta's. And if you dare question his credentials, you'll be knocked down with the race card faster than a high-speed Acela Express train (when it's functioning).

 As I've reported before, the DOT's Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program, adopted by states and cities across the country, is one of the most atrociously corrupt government endeavors in existence. Scam artists of all colors have used the federal racial set-aside program to win billions of dollars' worth of federal contracts for themselves and their friends under the blanket presumption that racial/ethnic minority equals aggrieved victim equals government entitlement.

 The Bush administration defended this discriminatory scheme before the Supreme Court, which gives firms owned by certified minorities and women automatic special preferences for being "disadvantaged" -- even if they have never suffered discrimination in the conduct of transportation-related business. The result is a taxpayer-funded racial spoils system that enshrines different rules for different races -- strict, race-based preferences for higher-bidding minorities over lower-bidding, white-owned firms.

 Abuse by white- and minority-owned firms colluding to rip off taxpayers is routine:

 In May, two Denver construction firms were nabbed in a scheme to set up a Latino-owned "pass-through" firm to satisfy federal DBE minority hiring requirements.

 In June, Shamsud-din Ali was convicted in Philadelphia of racketeering and fraud related to an airport concession minority-owned subcontracting business set up as a front.

 In July, former Miami City Commissioner Art Teele and an electrical contractor were indicted on charges of conspiring to defraud Miami-Dade County of millions of dollars in minority contracts at Miami International Airport under the federal DBE program. (Teele committed suicide last month in the lobby of the Miami Herald newspaper offices.) Businesses and politicians in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans and Massachusetts have been implicated in similar schemes. Industry observers tell me such fraud is the rule, not the exception.

 September 11 was supposed to have "changed everything." But for Bush and his Clinton holdover, Norm Mineta, it's business as usual at the Transportation Department. You can profile for profit, but not for public safety.

 Homeland security? What homeland security?

Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and maintains her weblog at michellemalkin.com

A July '05 post from the blog View From The Right:

The war against Islam and the War of the Ring
By Lawrence Auster

Paul Cella writes, in an important article at Tech Central Station:

The people of the free nations of the world, the citizens of the West, or her descendents if in fact the West is no more, are now confronted with sufficient evidence that the efforts to call totalitarian Islam into existence in every free nation are well underway; that such efforts will be materially supported from the home bases of totalitarian Islam, and may be spiritually supported by the very nature of Islam as such; and that those efforts can, at least to some degree, be encouraged or discouraged by the actions of our own governments.

We are indeed facing such a global threat from Islam. Yet just before reading Mr. Cella's article this morning, I had by chance (or rather by Jungian synchronicity) been reading the chapter on the "Council of Elrond" in The Fellowship of the Ring. The two are deeply connected.

Here I need to backtrack a bit. A year and a half ago I read for the first time The Fellowship of the Ring, and initiated a huge thread at VFR about the Ring trilogy. Many VFR readers are great Tolkien fans and have much of interest to say about him. Despite the warm assurances from several commenters that I was in for the greatest reading experience ever, I did not continue reading Tolkien at that time. However, last week, something drew me back to him. It happened this way. A friend had raised the question, how is it that the gods in Wagner's Ring Cycle face destruction, and this led me to re-read Edith Hamilton's discussion of Norse and Germanic mythology, which I hadn't read since I was a kid. Hamilton explains how in Norse mythology, unlike in any other, the gods are doomed, and that the task of Odin, the leading god of the Norse pantheon, is to stave off that doom as long as he can, through guile and the willingness to endure great suffering. This was very striking. It seemed to capture something of the essence of the German and Northern spirit. And this same insight suddenly made Tolkien understandable, revealing the profoundly Germanic aspects of Tolkien's myth, the tragic sense of fighting off a perpetual threat to one's whole civilization. (I don't know why the Germans developed such a world view, though I've read somewhere that it came from the experience of being driven back by the Huns in the early centuries A.D., the event which began the Volkerwanderung, the wanderings of the peoples.) And this in turn drew me to rent the DVD of The Return of the King last week. And indeed the Germanic side of it is evident, as when Aragorn says to his men before the great battle: The day when we are finally destroyed will come, but this is not that day, this is the day for us to fight and win. I then wrote at VFR about the tragic nature of the The Return of the King, and about the similarity between resurgent Mordor and resurgent Islam. All this in turn got me to re-open the pages of Tolkien early this morning for the first time in a year and a half.

My point in all this is: I had never been attracted to Tolkien decades ago, when everyone I knew was a fan of his. What I heard about the Ring trilogy from other people made it sound like a hippiesque fantasy, which didn't particularly appeal to me. No one I knew gave any hint of the dark and tragic quality of the stories. Even the cover illustrations of the paperback edition of Tolkien (of which I sold hundreds of copies in my days working in a bookstore in Aspen, Colorado) had something of an "escapist fantasy" look, not a tragic look.

So the first point is the tragic element, which in the movie version only comes fully to the fore in The Return of the King. But the second point is the Germanic, civilizational element, the heroic staving off of a recurrent threat from the East, from Mordor, and how this connects with the deepest themes of European civilization, namely how the West has repeatedly faced extinction at the hands of barbarians emerging from the East, first the Germanic barbarians themselves in the fourth and fifth centuries, then the Huns and the Slavs, then the Muslims in the eight century, then the Mongols in the thirteenth century, then the Muslims again in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then, in the twentieth century, the Germans again in the two World Wars. (The Germans at different times have thus played the two opposite roles in this drama, both as the defender against the Eastern barbarian, as when they were driven into flight by the Huns in the fourth century and fell upon the Roman empire, and as the barbarian invader against whom peoples who lived further to the West had to fight, an irony captured by the English calling the Germans "Huns" during the Great War, giving them the name of their own ancient enemies.) And now we are facing yet another of these recurrently arising storm clouds from the East--resurgent Islam, and, moreover, not as an external invader, but, unbelievably, as a citizen of the West, whom the West, in the greatest fit of absent mindedness in history, freely permitted to settle by the millions inside its own borders. Just as men had defeated the forces of Sauron in the past, but not destroyed them, and they have now returned, the West has defeated Islam in the past, but not destroyed it, and it has now returned.

Thus, far more than when it was a cult classic in the Sixties and Seventies, Tolkien's timeless myth with its Germanic and tragic elements is directly relevant to our time. Consider Aragorn's speech at the Council of Elrond, in which he talks about the hard life of the Rangers (who are the remnants of a lineage of kings almost wiped out millennia ago by the forces of Sauron), how they wander about, saving the people of the civilized lands from dread dangers which they, in their comfort and simplicity, know nothing about. Aragorn in this scene has something of the grim, hard-bitten quality of Odin in his perpetual struggle to fend off the ever-encroaching destruction of the world. The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo's anguished quest to destroy the source of Sauron's power, the gathering together of the peoples of Middle Earth to drive back and defeat Sauron's fiendish hordes, this is the struggle to which we are now called, we men of the West.

Posted by Lawrence Auster on July 24, 2005

Redford and Newman may pair up again on screen
By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Robert Redford may soon be reunited on screen with Paul Newman but don't expect a sequel to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" or "The Sting," which paired one of Hollywood's most popular double acts three decades ago.

"All these years went by and nobody came up with any ideas that were anything but corny and kind of low grade so we just decided probably that wasn't going to happen," Redford said.

"But now there's something rolling around that we're talking about it, and the real question is whether he can remember his lines or not," the 68-year-old Redford said in a dig at Newman who turned 80 this year.

Media reports earlier this year suggested the two would pair up in an adaptation of Bill Bryson's travel book "A Walk in the Woods," the story of the author's hike through the American wilderness with a friend.

Redford said he was superstitious about discussing details of projects that were not finalized.

"I think Paul and I are probably alike in that we're reluctant to talk about something that is not real yet, but we are talking about it," he told reporters in New York while promoting his new film "An Unfinished Life."

Redford said it was surprising considering Hollywood's penchant for remakes that nothing had come to fruition since the mob and gambling film "The Sting" in 1973 and the 1969 hit "Butch Cassidy," about two bank robbers who flee to Bolivia.

"The stuff that came to us wasn't any good," Redford said. "(They said) can you do a sequel to 'The Sting?' No, leave that one alone ... don't try to milk it."

"What about a sequel to 'Butch Cassidy?' Well the guys died in it, what is it going to be, a spiritual film? Well how about a prequel? That's pretty desperate."

One film that he is planning a sequel to is "The Candidate" from 1972, in which he played a Democratic Party candidate for the Senate who has no hope of winning and who finds his ideals compromised by the realities of politics.

Redford said in the sequel he will play the same character 30 years on, who is now president of the United States.

"Right now I'm frightened for my country," he said in one of several political asides during a news conference by the actor who makes no secret of his liberal leanings.

"Actors have every right to speak out but they carry more responsibility to know what they're talking about," he told Reuters in an interview, adding that he enjoyed "lobbing grenades from a distance."

But he said he had no intention of stepping into active politics like action star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is now governor of California.

"I would have to be just consumed with ego and self-absorption. When you enter the political arena it's so full of compromise and so full of knots, you tie yourself up," he

From the blog View From The Right: Lawrence Auster posts a reply to a Sam Karnick article on Front Page magazine (excerpted within the post below), and also engages Karnick in dialogue. It's becoming necessary for those who would support Bush's Iraq adventures to mischaracterize their opponents, misrepresent their opponents beliefs, and adopt a pie-in-the-sky attitude toward Islam.

Changing Islam: is it a question of culture versus nature?

Following my exchange with Barbara Gilbert about Islam and female genital mutilation, S.T. (Sam) Karnick at the Reform Club website posted a critique of it, and more broadly, of my view (and Spencer Warren’s view) of President Bush’s Muslim democratization program. He then sent the article to an e-mail list and the following discussion ensued between us. It may seem like slow going at first, especially in my long opening e-mail, where I’m trying to figure out what Mr. Karnick is saying, but the issue gets clarified as the discussion proceeds. (Also, the discussion has been extended since I posted it last night.)

Basically Mr. Karnick thinks that reforming Islam is a matter of nature vs. nurture. The Muslims’ culture represents a distortion of human nature and it is therefore antithetical to a democratic liberal society founded on natural rights. But, he continues, if Muslims’ circumstances were changed, their culture would change. I argue that such an analysis is irrelevant to the case at hand. To know whether it’s possible for Muslim societies to become liberal democracies, we must understand what Islam itself is. Abstract ideas about nature versus nurture do not help us do that. And (to speak of the particular nature that really matters here) Islam by its very nature is and will always be incompatible with democracy.

Here’s the discussion:

Lawrence Auster:

While I appreciate Sam’s thoughtful critique of my views about Islam and democratization (though I am not on the anti-war right, as he labels me), I must say I find his arguments overcomplicated and bewildering. He believes in common human nature, and in cultural differences, and he says my anti-democratist argument (which I base on Muslims’ differences from us) is ineffective because I don’t place enough emphasis on the common human nature (!), but then he explains this is terms of common human nature plus cultural differences. (Are you confused enough yet?)

To try to clarify this confusing situation, I’ll quote Sam’s last three paragraphs where he sums up his critique:


In arguing, from conservative premises, against Western projects of nation-building in the “developing world,” conservatives such as Auster and Warren (and Buchanan, etc.) face a huge dilemma: their belief in a common human nature (though one that certainly permits a wide variety of human customs and organizing beliefs) is a strong argument against radicalism of the left, but it is not useful in refuting the logic of projects based on a belief in a common human nature, as Bush’s nation-building action in Iraq most certainly is. From a classical liberal point of view (which is one that accepts the belief in human nature), it appears that antiwar conservatives would make much more headway by two means:

1. Accept the idea that the Bush administration is reasoning from what conservatives believe to be a valid premise (that all human beings share commonalities through what is called human nature) when the administration argues that the people of Iraq have the potential to live democratically. (By the way and to make it perfectly clear, I personally consider the commonalities of human nature to a rock-solid truth based on science, strongly confirmed by modern insights in sociobiology.)

2. Argue that the mission the administration has set itself conflicts with human nature, specifically the persistence of cultural notions that, however perversely, accomplish certain things necessary to human existence (such as the need for physical and emotional security, etc.).


So, Sam is saying that President Bush and I have the same assumptions about a common human nature. Therefore I’m on weak ground in disagreeing with Bush’s democratism.

The first problem is the abstractness with which Sam approaches the issue, which ends by missing the actual contents of these respective points of view. Bush’s supposed appeal to classic natural rights is actually a perversion of it. A classic view of human nature would say that people can potentially fulfill their nature, in democracy for example, but they have to do it. They have to make it happen. Others can’t make it happen for them. Bush has turned this around by saying that all human beings “deserve” freedom and democracy. He has turned natural rights into a global welfare state in which he bestows the means of achieving democracy on other peoples. Of course, no one deserves democracy and freedom, any more than they deserve their own jet plane; they have to create the complex set of conditions, an entire civilization, in fact, that can carry democracy. Do the dwellers in a shanty town in West Africa “deserve” democracy? No, they simply aren’t at a civilizational level for that.

And it’s not just a matter of “level” but of type of consciousness. As Voegelin said, a key condition of democracy is that the individual be seen as a potential knower of truth. But Muslims don’t believe that, they believe the individual must be submitted to Allah and not think. Shi’ite Iraqis are a clan people. They do what their imam tells them. That’s their religion and their culture. The individual with his individual conscience is not the core of their culture, as with the West; the mosque, the clan, the tribe is the core of the Muslims’ culture. This makes democracy, or even civil society itself, out of the question.

Next there is the inferior place of women: polygamy, female genital mutiliation. Cultures that treat half the human race as inferiors in this way obviously cannot be democratic.

Then there is sharia, which sacralizes the inferiority of non-Muslims. Again, democracy is out of the question.

Now, do Muslims, as Sam says, have the potential to live democratically? Maybe, but only if they renounce Islam. But they’re not going to renounce Islam, and we can’t make them do it, short of some totalitarian crushing of an entire people. Therefore the whole question of their becoming democratic is ridiculous, absurd, not a matter of serious discussion. And therefore using human nature as the basis of this discussion doesn’t help at all. The point that matters is the actual ways, beliefs, religion, habits of the Muslims.

But then, in his last paragraph, Sam turns around and makes my argument for me, saying that democratization “conflicts with human nature, specifically the persistence of cultural notions that, however perversely, accomplish certain things necessary to human existence.”

So after all this, Sam’s position is practically identical to mine! He also believes that Muslims are too different from us, and that their differences are too deeply ingrained, for them to become liberals or democrats. But that’s what I’ve been saying all along. So what is the point of Sam’s tortured excursion into natural rights theory? And what is the basis of his criticism that my argument must remain ineffectual so long as I don’t acknowledge the similarity of my views to those of Bush?

What it comes down to is, Sam seems to be saying that my argument would be more effective if I said something like this:

“There is a common human nature which is the basis of human rights. This human nature requires humans to form themselves into discrete cultures and societies in order to organize life and give it order and meaning. These cultures and societies are going to be different from each other, in some cases, radically, incompatably different. Therefore, the fact of a common human nature leads to actual differences between different peoples that have profound significance politically, since some cultures will not be amenable to our culture and will not be able to create or maintain liberal democratic polities based on natural rights. Their culture prevents the true fulfillment of their nature.”

That, I gather, is what Sam wants me to say. But again, other than sticking in the point about a common human nature, which is immediately counteracted by the assertion of mutually incompatible cultural differences, how is he adding to or improving my argument?

Sam Karnick:

What you would need to add, Larry, is the possibility that some cultures are perversely antithetical to certain crucial aspects of human nature. Certainly you agree with that. And then, as a consequence of that belief (and the obvious fact that cultures are at least somewhat mutable), you must entertain the possibility—not the inevitability by any means, but simply the possibility—that by changing the circumstances in which people live, the culture in which they live will change significantly, given time. (Certainly history demonstrates that to be true, as in the changes in Germany, Japan, Korea, etc., since World War II. And that type of leadership-effect on a nation’s culture is the crux of your argument against the changes in America that have occurred since World War II: they have changed the culture in many ways you correctly see as deleterious.) Then, once we accept that social and political conditions can change culture, the matter in any particular case becomes a question of whether the changes instituted are such as will ultimately result in a significant change in the culture. Regarding Iraq, you say no, and Bush says yes. I see no reason to think that either position is either a logical necessity or a logical impossibility. The deficiency I see in your argument is this: you see human nature as being real (with which I strongly agree) but believe that cultural factors thoroughly overcome human nature in every individual. The deficiency I see in Bush’s argument is the same thing but with the terms “cultural factors” and “human nature” reversed. It’s analogous to the old “nature versus nurture” argument, with you giving overwhelming predominance to nurture and Bush giving overwhelming predominance to nature. I don’t find either position convincing, Larry. Best w’s, Sam

LA:

Ok, then I have understood you and we’re on the same page if not in agreement. Here is where I think you go wrong. You write:


The deficiency I see in your argument is this: you see human nature as being real (with which I strongly agree) but believe that cultural factors thoroughly overcome human nature in every individual. The deficiency I see in Bush’s argument is the same thing but with the terms “cultural factors” and “human nature” reversed. It’s analogous to the old “nature versus nurture” argument, with you giving overwhelming predominance to nurture and Bush giving overwhelming predominance to nature. I don’t find either position convincing, Larry.


You’re treating this matter as though it were to be resolved on the basis of some general idea about the relative importance of nature and nurture. That is totally irrelevant to this case. To resolve this question, what we must understand is ISLAM. The particular doctrinal and historical facts about Islam, especially having to do with jihad and dhimmitude and sharia: that’s what matters. And I respectfully suggest that don’t sufficiently grasp these matters, otherwise you wouldn’t be approaching the issue from the point of view of some general proposition about human nature and human culture. Such ideas can’t help you here. You need to know about Islam. And the bottom line is that, as long as people are Muslims, they are not going to be amenable to democracy. Approaching this topic from any other point of view than the concrete nature of Islam is an escape from reality, an ivory tower game.

As a final point, let me quote a recent blog entry where I quote a remarkable article from 1935 dealing with Britain’s earlier efforts to do in Islam what we’re trying to do. And note that the constitution that British helped create in the 1930s was MORE advanced and liberal than ours, as it was not a sharia-based constitution.

SK:

Thanks, Larry, for the follow-up. Actually, I do recognize the unhappy truths about Islam, but I also recognize that there are variations within that faith. Your claim that NO Muslim can truly accept principles of representative government and limitations on government action is simply not true. Many do, all around the world, and many of these live in the most repressive Muslim nations, as you are well aware. You may say that these individuals are not good Muslims, but then you would only be agreeing with the jihadists. As to the British case, the fact that the British society at home became demoralized and abandoned its empire is a more obvious cause of the failure of Western principles to take root in Iraq. Giving up was not a good strategy then, and it is an interesting matter for debate as to whether it is a good strategy now. That is, one could quite reasoanbly take the very opposite lesson from the case you cite. Hence, I remain agnostic on the matter. Best w’s, Sam

LA:

You write:

“Your claim that NO Muslim can truly accept principles of representative government and limitations on government action is simply not true. Many do, all around the world, and many of these live in the most repressive Muslim nations, as you are well aware.”

This misses the point. The issue is not individual Muslims. The issue is Islam. There can be moderate Muslims. There cannot be moderate Islam. Islam by its nature is a totalitarian political faith seeking totalitarian power over the whole world. That is what it is. People can be indifferent or ignorant Muslims. But to the extent that they are devout Muslims, the Koran is their authority, Allah is their God, Jihad is their path, sharia over the whole earth is their goal. If they don’t have the power to wage jihad, they won’t wage it. The Muslim world stagnated for centuries. But as soon as they have the power to wage it, they will wage it.

The fact that you would center the argument around individual Muslims and their feelings evidences a common misunderstanding of Islam. Westerners tend to think of Islam as just a “religion,” something that people can practice in private, or not practice, something that doesn’t have public significance. They assume that when Muslims come to the West, they’ll drop the religion or moderate it so that it becomes relatively unimportant, as happened with many Christians and Jews. But this is incorrect. Islam is not only a religion. Islam is also a political/military crusade for world dominance. That is what it was under Muhammad and the Caliphs, and that is what it is today. Again, there are weaker Muslims, indifferent Muslims, non-believing Muslims, less consistent Muslims. But a consistent Muslim must be a jihadist seeking to impose sharia on the world. That’s what God commands.

There’s another fallacy connected with this notion that it’s a matter of what individual Muslims “feel” and “believe.” The idea is that, if they assimilate, they’ll drop their “extreme” feelings and their “hate” and become “like us.” This is totally wrong. Muslims don’t have these views because of some personal “hate” that they carry. They have these views because that is what their religion commands. As long as the religion exists this will be the case.

And that is why, as I’ve said before, the only way to live in the world with Islam and maintain our own liberty is to weaken, contain and isolate Islam so that it can have no influence or power over us.

SK:

Larry, Islam as a crusade has no effectiveness whatever without the loyalty of millions of individuals. Hence, changing the culture that breeds such persons makes sense even if we cannot be certain that it will transform those societies fully. It’s certainly much better than punting altogether. The other alternative, a Holy War of the West to destroy Islam, is simply not going to happen.

LA:

You’ve just conceded my main point. You say the answer is to change their culture so as to remove the loyalty of a billion Muslims to Islam. But if you remove their loyalty to Islam, they’re no longer Muslims. Now I agree that making Muslims to be no longer Muslims would solve the problem of Islam. This is what is said in the school of apostates, represented by Ibn Warraq, who says Islam can’t be reformed, the only solution is for people to leave Islam. But getting a billion Muslims to renounce their faith would be the greatest social engineering project in history, dwarfing Ataturk, dwarfing Soviet Communism. In fact it would require a world war since devout Muslims and jihadists would see that what they have feared all along has come true: that America is seeking to destroy them. Ironically, you say that my approach leads to a “Holy War of the West to destroy Islam,” when in fact you’re the one proposing such a war to destroy Islam, while I only seek to contain and isolate Islam, leaving it free in its own lands so long as it doesn’t threaten us.

Meanwhile, your ameliorative scheme will fail, after years of effort, and in the interim we would have poured our national life blood into that doomed “cultural peace process,” at home.

SK:

Larry, Leaving Islam free in its own lands does threaten us, as it cannot be contained there. Yes, Western multiculturalism is partly to blame for the infection coming to our shores, but even without it, the jihadists would come after us. In addition, I don’t accept the premise that a Muslim must be a jihadist in order to be a true Muslim: that’s exactly like saying that a person has to give up all his possessions in order to be a true Christian, and equally untrue. The existence of Islamic moderates proves that such a position is possible. Finally, I don’t argue that we have to remove the loyalty of Muslims to Islam, just to jihadism. Strengthening moderate strains of Islam, which I know you deny exist, is therefore a plausible way to reduce the effectiveness of jihadists. We know for a fact that there are plenty of Islamic moderates around and about, and a policy intended to increase their number is therefore by no means intrinsically unjustifiable. Sam

LA:

Ok, you don’t seek to turn them into non-Muslims, you seek to turn them into moderate Muslims. That is still the most ambitious social engineering scheme in history. You believe that that scheme is readily possible, but you don’t believe that containing Islam is possible. It would be possible, if the non-Muslim countries recognized the common threat they face and took consistent action to forestall it. That’s not impossible at all, it simply means an increase and systematization of what already is done, namely, not allowing immigrants of certain classes to enter. Also, deportations and expulsions of peoples have been done throughout history, so that is not a pie in the sky proposal either. Transforming the whole nature of Islam, is.

As for your rejection of the idea that a Muslim must be a jihadist in order to be a true Muslim, all I can say is that you have yet to confront the basic facts about Islam. For starters, see my article, “The Centrality of Jihad in Islam,” where I discuss how all 55 Muslim countries signed the Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, which subordinates all notions of human rights to sharia. I find this a definitive expression of the Muslim world because it is the official statement of all the Muslim countries acting together (including the “moderate” Turkey—and this was in 1990, over a decade before an Islamist party was elected in Turkey). You could not find a more authoritative expression of Islam as Islam than this. This is the way the world of Islam represents itself to itself, that it is under sharia. It has no other way of representing itself. And jihad is commanded by sharia. In fact, sharia is a stage of jihad, in which non-Muslims, having been defeated by jihad war, are placed in permanent inferior status under sharia law.

Sharia and jihad are the eternal “default” positions of Muslims. They may be indifferent to or uninvolved in their faith for a long time, but when they become lost and look for guidance, when they return to the fold, there is this one unchanging law. And because the only authoritative sources in Islam command this, the moderates will ultimately lose any debate with the radicals, because it’s the radicals who are basing themselves on the authoritative texts, while the moderates are basing themselves on nothing but their own wishes. Why do you think that no terrorists have been declared apostates? Why have their been no fatwas against bin Laden? It’s because the terrorists are good Muslims. As long as a person is a good Muslim he cannot be expelled.

This is why it’s fatuous to say, “The existence of Islamic moderates proves that such a position is possible.” You do not even respond to my earlier point, that the existence of moderate Muslims does not prove the existence of moderate Islam. You just keep pointing to some individual moderates. But the moderates are powerless individuals who have no authority in Islam.

I would not trust the advice of persons who are not aware of these fundamental realities of Islam, any more than I would, say, trust someone during the Cold War who told me that “Marxism is caused by poverty. Get rid of poverty, and Marxism will go away.” Such a person did not understand the nature of Marxism, and he could not be trusted to lead us against Marxism. In the same way, someone who says that you can remove Muslims’ belief in jihad while not disturbing their belief in Islam, simply does not understand the nature of Islam. I see no sign that you have taken in the important writings on jihad and dhimmitude by people such as Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, Raphael Israeli, and Andrew Bostom. Furthermore, as I show in my article, “The Search for Moderate Islam, Part I,” even Daniel Pipes, the best known proponent of the moderate Islam idea that you are presenting here, admits throughout his writings that such moderate Islam has never existed, and that the doctrinal and historic nature of Islam has been jihadism. In that article, I referred solely to Pipes’s own articles. I showed how he himself inadvertently admits that his hopes for a moderate Islam are not based in any religious or historical reality, but just on his hopes that it be so.

If you had shown some sign of at least having wrestled with these arguments prior to or during this discussion, I might take your position more seriously. But as it is, it seems that the ultimate source for your position is the nurture versus nature argument, which, as I said, does not help us understand the actual realities of Islam.

Republicans know they can't 'stay the course' in Iraq
- E. J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post Writers Group

Friday, August 26, 2005

Sydney -- HISTORY REPEATS itself in strange ways. Consider two statements.

"A slogan like 'stay the course' is inadequate ... a slogan like 'stay the course' is unacceptable."

And: "Stay the course is not a policy."

The first quotation goes back to October 1982, when a Republican candidate for governor of New York named Lewis Lehrman complained about his party's national slogan during that year's midterm elections. "Stay the course, " insisted Lehrman, who eventually lost narrowly to Democrat Mario Cuomo, was a lousy theme in the face of a 10 percent national unemployment rate.

The second quotation is of more recent, though still Republican, coinage. Last Sunday, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska laid into the Bush administration's policy in Iraq. Hagel insisted that remaining in Iraq over an extended period -- staying the course -- "would bog us down, it would further destabilize the Middle East, it would give Iran more influence."

President Bush continues to insist, at least in public, on doing what he's doing. "We will stay, we will fight and we will win the war on terror," Bush said in Idaho on Wednesday. But staying and fighting in Iraq looks increasingly antithetical to winning the war on terrorism. What is a superpower whose power has been dissipated by a deeply flawed policy to do?

There was an electrifying moment here last week when a longtime friend of the United States spoke up during a meeting of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, a group I've been part of for several years. Kim Beazley, the leader of the Australian Labor Party and a former defense minister, proposed an alternative that would admit the errors of the past by way of salvaging America's influence for the future.

Beazley, who elaborated on his off-the record address in an interview, argued that the war in Iraq, like the Vietnam War 35 years ago, was "sucking the oxygen out of American foreign policy." The United States, he said, needed to engage in "a phased extraction" from Iraq while bolstering the war on terrorism elsewhere. He used the unlikely role model of Richard Nixon, who gradually withdrew American forces from Vietnam while engaging China and forcing the Soviet Union into arms negotiations.

Beazley's metaphor was an arresting way of showing how mistakes in Iraq need not permanently dent the United States' influence -- provided America recognizes its mistakes.

Beazley proposed the redeployment of American forces to Iraq's borders with Syria and Iran on the road to departure. At the same time, Washington needs to "refocus attention on Afghanistan," particularly the border areas with Pakistan, where he sees the real war on terror being waged. And the United States must turn its attention to the Iraq War's perverse effect, which has been to "advance Iranian power."

"It's repositioning," says Beazley. "It's keeping a sense of proportion in America's engagements. You're not going to let the United States get bogged down in a disproportionate engagement of its forces in Iraq. In both the context of the global war on terrorism and its other global commitments, the U. S. has more fish to fry than Iraq. And no matter what it says, it can only have a limited effect on Iraqi political outcomes. Ultimately, Iraqis will have to do the deals."

While I will admit a personal bias in Beazley's favor -- he has been a friend for more than three decades -- the fact is that his comments seized the attention of all the Americans in the room. Here was someone willing to lay out an alternative strategy aimed at freeing the United States from an all- consuming mess in a way that could leave its influence intact. "You have to win, you know," said Beazley. "You cannot lose the war on terror."

To pursue anything like the Beazley strategy, Bush would have to admit that his policy hasn't worked -- to himself, if not to the public. Could Bush's willingness to embrace the flawed Iraqi draft constitution be a signal that the president is radically scaling down his expectations (and ours) in preparation for the "repositioning" that Beazley describes?

It's hard for any president, especially this one, to acknowledge mistakes. But recall that reference to those long ago midterm elections. Republicans know in their guts what Hagel is willing to say publicly: Iraq is a mess and staying the current course means a disaster abroad that could turn into political disaster at home. Don't be surprised if more Republicans start echoing a politician from Down Under.

Bush's way: discipline, dollars and deceit
Jonathan Chait

August 26, 2005

IT WAS LESS than a month ago that President Bush and his Republican allies were celebrating a string of legislative triumphs, once again demonstrating Bush's near-infallible ability to get his way. This seems so strange because a virtual consensus has developed that the administration has been utterly incompetent in its planning and execution of the war in Iraq.

So, what gives? How can an administration be so masterful in the way it campaigns and shepherds its legislative agenda, yet so blundering in its conduct of a war?

The answer is that Bush's political successes all have three main elements in common, none of which translates well into fighting a war.

The first is massive partisan discipline. Bush's ability to persuade fellow Republicans to swallow their misgivings and back his agenda is uncanny. Fiscal conservatives may balk at huge spending hikes like his 2003 Medicare bill, and deficit hawks may blanch at repeated tax cuts in the face of deficits. But when the vote is on the line, they always capitulate.

In 2003, Ohio Sen. George Voinovich, a traditional fiscal conservative, asserted that rising red ink would "undermine our economy instead of stimulating it," and then proceeded to support a $350-billion tax cut. And even that concession was soon nullified. Republicans bragged about how easy it was to cook the books to comply with Voinovich's limit — "Numbers don't mean anything," scoffed Tom DeLay — and yet Voinovich remained on board anyway. In 2001, one GOP representative, Robin Hayes of North Carolina, actually cried after the leadership forced him to vote for a trade bill he disdained.

ELEMENT NO. 2 is massive giveaways to well-organized lobbies. Bush's string of midsummer triumphs — the energy bill, the transportation bill, CAFTA — were larded with special provisions for sundry lobbyists. The same holds for Bush's tax cuts, Medicare bill, farm subsidies and various other elements of his agenda. It's easy to get things done if you're willing to empty the federal Treasury and enrich everyone who can afford a K Street lobbyist.

The third element is — how should I put it? — lying. The corollary to No. 2 is that a platform of massive tax and spending giveaways to the rich and powerful does not have wide public appeal. Therefore, Bush and his allies have had to systematically misrepresent basic facts about their policies.

Bush insisted that the majority of his tax cut would go to the lowest-earning taxpayers, which is untrue by any definition. He and his administration have repeatedly low-balled the cost of their initiatives. One Bush flunky threatened to fire a government actuary who wanted to release the true cost of the Medicare bill. Thus many Republicans voted "yes" on the strict assurance the bill would not cost a penny more than $400 billion, while the administration knew the real price tag would be about double that.

Alas, none of these tools work as well in Baghdad as they do in Washington. Promising to build a bridge in Muqtada Sadr's district or funnel cash to his campaign is unlikely to mollify the Shiite strongman. Iraqi democracy, in its primitive state, has yet to develop the equivalent of K Street.
When it comes to crafting policies that are good, rather than policies that merely seem good to an inattentive public, the Bush administration turns out to be awful. You can insist that 125,000 troops are enough to reconstruct Iraq, just as you can insist that $400 billion is enough to pay for the Medicare bill. The difference is, the effects of higher federal debt can be obscured for a long time. But when Iraqi reconstruction has essentially halted, some two-thirds of the population lacks employment and terrorists and other armed thugs are roaming freely throughout Iraqi cities, lies can get you only so far.

A condensed essay from the provocative Thomas Fleming:

America: not a Christian country
Thomas Fleming

Rockford, Illinois

America has always been a strange place, even to Americans. While most countries are content merely to exist, America is supposed to have a project, a destiny, a divine mission. New England Puritans suffered from the delusion that their little settlement was a ‘city on a hill’, and Cotton Mather, who played a key role in the Salem witch trials, thought New England was plagued by witches because, before the arrival of white European Calvinists, the continent had been a playground for devil-worshipping Indians and idolatrous Catholics. President Lincoln went so far as to describe the United States as ‘dedicated’ to a proposition, and secular Americans speak glibly of America as ‘an experiment’ — a grisly idea, if ever there was one. Even today patriotic conservatives believe that ‘God’ has blessed our nation as a reward for our virtue and our piety. As H.L. Mencken observed in a more candid age, ‘No one ever went broke underestimating ...the American people.’

Small wonder that so many Europeans are afraid of the United States and its messianic approach to foreign policy. The good news is that all our exceptional virtue and piety is so much buncombe, as Mencken would have said. Despite the many myths of American ‘exceptionalism’, most Americans have always been just as content to muddle through as if they had been born among the unredeemed heathens of London and Paris.

In fact, America’s lack of genuine piety has aroused the ire of some excitable Catholic intellectuals who regard the United States as a masonic conspiracy. After pointing out the masonic symbols on the dollar bill (to say nothing of the masonic design of the national capital), they will go on to cite the fact that the constitution (drafted by leading freemasons) never mentions Christianity. This omission is aggravated by the doctrine of ‘the separation of church and state’ — a notion unacceptable to some traditional Catholics. This historical interpretation (apart from the bit about the masonic conspiracy) is utter nonsense. Christianity is not mentioned in the constitution because it is a treaty of union, not an ideological declaration. In a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional union, the best way to avoid religious conflict was for the national and state governments to be neutral towards competing Christian sects.

Conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, insist that the founders of the republic were all pious Christians. In fact, few of the men who led the revolution or drafted the constitution could be described as pious or even orthodox. Washington was an ordinary Anglican, which even in the 18th century meant very little, while John Adams was a Unitarian, Jefferson a mildly anti-Christian deist, and Ben Franklin a sceptical freemason as well as a rake. America —alas, it is all too true — has been swept periodically by revivals and cult crazes. Many of the cultists went west and ended up in California, the last stop of the rootless and disaffected before falling into the Pacific.

I have lived 60 years in the United States, the first 25 of them as an atheist, the last 35 as an increasingly reactionary Christian. I have never witnessed the great piety and deep spirituality which I have heard described in 4 July addresses and in semi-scholarly tomes on American religion. We are a practical people, above all else, and, as I have heard repeatedly from business and political leaders, religion makes good sense: the man who goes to church also goes to work, takes care of his family, pays his taxes. This is religiosity, not Christianity.

For American Christians, what they say they believe does not always translate into concrete actions or even into support for Christian moral positions. They complain, occasionally, about the prohibition of prayer in school and resent media attacks on religion, but they seem unaffected by the pervasive blasphemy of television commercials and by the barbaric post-Christian morality of everyday life in these United States. This is a country, remember, where Britney Spears was a spokesbimbo for the Episcopal Church. Many evangelical and Catholic Christians actively supported the philandering, lying Bill Clinton, and many traditional Catholics, in defiance of both the Vatican and the Church’s teachings on just war, support George Bush’s war in Iraq. In March 2003 Pope John Paul II, who described his opposition to the war as ‘unequivocal’, sent Cardinal Pio Laghi to dissuade President Bush from attacking Iraq. The President told Cardinal Laghi, ‘We’ll be quick and do well in Iraq.’ As Cardinal Laghi, who calls the invasion ‘tragic and unacceptable’, points out, ‘Bush was wrong.’

But warmongering Catholics are no match for the Revd Pat Robertson. Mr Robertson has gone beyond deflecting hurricanes and denouncing Ariel Sharon for turning Jewish settlers out of land that God gave them. Now he has called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the troublesome president of Venezuela. In defiance of both logic and Christian ethics, Robertson recently said: ‘If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.’

When foreigners speak of American piety, they usually have in mind some form of evangelical Protestantism. But that is a very broad category, which includes austere and disciplined Calvinists in the South as well as clownish TV preachers and the megachurches fitted out with rock bands and wall-sized video screens. Imagine a luxurious sports complex with Elvis, in his sequinned powder-blue Vegas jumpsuit, crooning ‘How Great Thou Art’ to a mob of hysterical middle-aged women writhing in the aisles. This is not ‘that old-time religion’, unless the ‘old time’ in question is the heyday of the Münster anabaptists. Perhaps I am biased: as a pure-minded young atheist I was arrested for mocking a travelling evangelist who healed the sick and raised the dead with wirework that anticipated Hong Kong martial arts movies.

The United States was never a ‘Christian country’ in a confessional sense, though it was once a nation of mostly Christians. Today, it is a nation with a weak-kneed Christian majority that elects, year after year, an actively anti-Christian political class that encourages divorce, protects abortion and pornography, and banishes prayer and Christian symbols from public places. Republican leaders, it is true, pander to their Christian constituents, but they have never and will never lift a finger to advance the cause of Christian morality, much less Christian faith.

Most Americans say they ‘believe in God’, and Americans do attend religious services more frequently than Europeans, or at least they tell pollsters they do, though when the numbers of an ABC poll are broken down, weekly churchgoers tend to be women, Southern, Republican, and old. In western Europe, far fewer people go to church or profess any religious faith, but, from what I have seen, observant Catholics in Italy and France are a good deal more serious than their counterparts here in the land of ‘In God We Trust’.

To compare apples with apples, the most prominent conservative Catholics in the United States are the so-called neoconservatives. They are indifferent or hostile to the traditional liturgy, defend the discovery of democratic capitalism as an event of ‘incarnational significance’ (Michael Novak), and have routinely defended US foreign policy against explicit statements of John Paul II. Catholic neoconservatives represent the triumph of ‘Americanism’ in the Church. They are more Republican than Catholic, more loyal to George Bush than to any Pope. In secular, anti-Catholic France, a Catholic has to be resolute, even courageous; in America, he just goes with the flow.

European leftists can breathe a sigh of relief. A typical American may go to church too often to be respectable, but when he walks out on the street he is either a little liberal or else a little conservative. If there really were a ‘Christian America’, Hollywood would be broke, and the ashes of both political parties would be reposing quietly in the dustbin of history.

Thomas Fleming is editor of the conservative monthly Chronicles and author most recently of The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition (University of Missouri Press).

From Touchstone magazine's Mere Comments:

<On Not Feeding the Bears
By James Kushiner

Yesterday I saw Werner Herzog's latest film, Grizzly Man. It's a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, the failed-actor who discovered his life's vocation living 13 summers among grizzly bears in the Alaskan peninsula. It's a very provocative, and cleverly made, film by a director who takes strong exception with his subject's view of nature. Treadwell, indeed, seems mentally imbalanced by the end of the film, living in a narcissistic fantasy world that seems right out of a wonderful world of Disney's talking animals that Treadwell takes for reality. He tells bear after bear, "I love you."

Herzog effectively uses portions of 100 hours of videotape that Treadwell shot on location, and mixes it with his own footage of interviews with people who knew Treadwell before he and his girlfriend were eaten by one of his grizzlies and interviews with others, such as the coroner who examined the audio-only tape of Treadwell's demise along with the remains of Treadwell and his girlfriend, both extracted from the grizzly's stomach after it was killed by a team of "rescuers."

None of the carnage is shown, nor is the audio tape played. Even the question of playing the tape or listening to it is a subject of interest. Herzog talks to one of Treadwell's former girlfriends (she heads up Grizzlypeople.com) and tells her not to listen to it. We see Herzog with earphones on, listening to it, then handing the tape to her to be destroyed. I do not recall a moment in a film that so effectively raises the question of what is "obscene" and best left "off the stage," as the word means.

The film is rated R for language (especially one of Treadwell's last speeches), and probably for a brutal bear fight that makes the "fur fly" literally. Despite the seriousness of the subject, and the tragic ending (which is disclosed very early in the 103-minute film), I found it taxing to supress hard laughter at some of the irony, stupidities, and delusional dialogue.

Grizzly Man, does, however, raise some very serious issues, sometimes obliquely, and perhaps in some cases unintentional. It raises topics such as sex (Treadwell says that he wished he were gay, because it's "easier"; Herzog mentions bear "fornication"), whether or not there are fixed lines in nature that should be respected (a Native Alaskan talks about native respect for grizzlies), and the narcissism of celebrity culture (Treadwell makes it on to the David Letterman show). Was Treadwell a product of his culture? Partially, I suppose: he would not have done what he did without the media.

Yet at the film's center is the question upon which Treadwell's fate hangs: what is the nature of nature? Is the universe benign, harmonious? Herzog doesn't think so, and thinks Treadwell naive, if not ultimately at war with civilization itself. Herzog's most memorable "shot" for me was his choice to zoom in on the eyes of a grizzly bear: is this a friendly "child of the universe" or an indfferent appetite looking for its next meal?

Pehaps unintentionally, Herzog also made me think some time after the movie about the differences between men and women: the responses of the men and women in the film to the life and especially the death of Treadwell are worth contrasting. And finally, Treadwell's well-intented but delusional solicitude for the bears matured into a full-fledged messianic perversion: in one scene he "prays"; he loved the bears and would, as he said often into the camera, always protect them and even "die for the bears" if he had to. He died, but not for them.

It's a film I will likely watch again, when it comes out on DVD.

From Spectator.co.uk: Steyn on Sheehan...right as always.

Hold your tears
Mark Steyn

New Hampshire

Is it only five years since the White House press corps was spending its summers traipsing round Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons watching Bill Clinton hang with Carly Simon and Steven Spielberg? Since the Bush terror, alas, they’ve been condemned under a little-known provision of the Patriot Act to confinement in Crawford, Texas for one whole month a year. Crawford is where George W. Bush has his ranch and, other than that distinction, it is (as I wrote here in August 2000) ‘a dusty crossroads in the middle of a drought-stricken, sun-broiled plain, population 690 — with five churches but not a single hotel’. Since the annual influx of journalists, they may have added a hotel but also no doubt half a dozen more churches just to wind up the godless hordes of the Fourth Estate.

Sadly, the media don’t seem to enjoy the annual joke. So, with no showbiz types to hand in the Greater Waco area, someone had the bright idea of importing a little entertainment. These days, come August and the cry goes up, ‘Hey, let’s do the show in George W. Bush’s barn.’ When it comes to political theatre, Crawford now finds itself playing host to the nation’s most critically acclaimed summer stock.

Last year it was former Georgia Senator Max Cleland, who took up residence outside the Bush ranch and demanded the President come out and denounce the Swift Boat veterans. Cleland, also a Vietnam vet and a triple amputee, was outraged that anyone would impugn Senator Kerry’s war record and was impugning Bush for not impugning the Swift vets for impugning Kerry. Anyway, the President never did come out to meet Cleland. He may still be there for all I know.

This year’s performer in residence is Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq last year. Mrs Sheehan is now very anti-war and has pledged to stay camped out in Crawford all August until the President has the guts to come out and see her for a face-to-face meeting. So far he’s sent his national security adviser and deputy chief of staff out to see her, but that’s like Clinton sending Janet Reno and Sidney Blumenthal to Carly Simon’s party. These no-name stand-ins were trying to ‘bullshit us into submission,’ complained Mrs Sheehan.

Her son’s loss — like Max Cleland’s wounds — is supposed to put her beyond reproach. For as the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd informed us, ‘The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute.’

Really? Well, what about those other parents who’ve buried children killed in Iraq? Linda Ryan lost her son, Marine Corporal Marc Ryan, to ‘insurgents’ in Ramadi: ‘George Bush didn’t kill her son,’ says Mrs Ryan. ‘Her son made a decision to join the Armed Forces and defend our country.... George Bush was my son’s commander-in-chief. My son, Marc, totally believed in what he was doing.’

There are, sadly, hundreds of Linda Ryans across American: parents who buried children killed in Iraq and who honour their service to the nation. They don’t make the news. There’s one Cindy Sheehan and she’s on TV round the clock. She may not be emblematic of bereaved military families, but she’s certainly symbolic of media-Left desperation.

Still, she’s a mother. And, if you’re as heavily invested as Ms Dowd in the notion that those ‘killed in Iraq’ are ‘children’, then Mrs Sheehan’s status as grieving matriarch is a bonanza. I agree with Mrs Ryan: they’re not children in Iraq; they’re thinking adults who ‘made a decision to join the Armed Forces and defend our country’. Whenever I’m on a radio show these days, someone calls in and demands to know whether my children are in Iraq. Well, not right now. They range in age from five to nine, and though that’s plenty old enough to sign up for the jihad and toddle into an Israeli pizza parlour wearing a suicide-bomb, in most advanced societies’ armed forces they prefer to use grown-ups.

That seems to be difficult for the Left to grasp. Ever since America’s all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterise them as ‘children’. If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that’s her decision and her parents shouldn’t get a look-in. If a 21-year-old wants to drop to the Oval Office shagpile and chow down on Bill Clinton, she’s a grown woman and free to do what she wants. But, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year old is serving his country overseas, he’s a wee ‘child’ who isn’t really old enough to know what he’s doing.

I get many emails from soldiers in Iraq, and they sound a lot more grown-up than most Ivy League professors and certainly than Maureen Dowd, who writes as if she’s auditioning for a minor supporting role in Sex and the City. The infantilisation of the military promoted by the Left is deeply insulting to America’s warriors but it suits the anti-war crowd’s purposes. It enables them to drone ceaselessly that ‘of course’ they ‘support our troops’, because they want to stop these poor confused moppets from being exploited by the Bush war machine.

So, when Cindy Sheehan came into view, Bush-disparagers from Washington to Hollywood cried ‘Bingo!’ ‘Cindy Sheehan is my hero,’ says Christine Lahti, former star of TV’s Chicago Hope. ‘You can run, Bush, but you can’t hide. Her courage is waking up America.’ Evidently it woke up motion-picture personality Viggo Mortensen, who flew to Crawford on a pilgrimage to Mrs Sheehan. For the press corps, it’s not exactly the Spielberg/Clinton summer summit in the Hamptons, but it’s as close as they’re going to get.

I resisted writing about ‘Mother Sheehan’ (as one leftie has proposed designating her), as it seemed obvious that she was at best a little unhinged by grief and at worst mentally ill. Start with her insistence on a face-to-face meeting with Bush. Even if you don’t think the President should see her, you can sympathise with the demand, born out of her anger and pain. But it turns out she’s already had a face-to-face meeting with Bush. Her son Casey was killed in April last year and in June the President met the Sheehans to offer his condolences. The story appeared in the 24 June 2004 edition of the Reporter, their hometown paper in Vacaville, California:

‘“I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis,” Cindy said after their meeting. “I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he’s a man of faith....”

‘For the first time in 11 weeks, they felt whole again. “That was the gift the President gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together,” Cindy said.’

Mrs Sheehan wants a second meeting with Bush because she no longer feels the way she did at the first one. Instead of gratitude for ‘the gift the President gave us’, she now says her son was ‘murdered by the Bush crime family’.

Also: ‘We have to impeach George Bush down to the person who picks up the dog shit in Washington! Let George Bush send his two little party animals to die in Iraq.’

Also: ‘You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana.... You get America out of Iraq, you get Israel out of Palestine.’

Well, OK, cut the lady some slack: a lot of folks get a bit overheated about Bush, and neocons, and Jews and so forth. But how about this? ‘America has been killing people on this continent since it was started. This country is not worth dying for.’ That was part of her warm-up act for a speech by Lynne Stewart, the ‘activist’ lawyer convicted of conspiracy for aiding the terrorists convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

You can see why Lynne’s grateful to Mrs Sheehan. But why is Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Kerry’s running mate, sending out imploring letters headlined ‘Support Cindy Sheehan’s Right To Be Heard’? The politics of this isn’t difficult: the more Cindy Sheehan is heard, the more obvious it is she’s a kook to whom most Americans would give a wide berth.

Don’t take my word for it, ask her family. Casey Sheehan’s grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins put out the following statement:

‘The Sheehan family lost our beloved Casey in the Iraq war and we have been silently, respectfully grieving. We do not agree with the political motivations and publicity tactics of Cindy Sheehan. She now appears to be promoting her own personal agenda and notoriety at the expense of her son’s good name and reputation. The rest of the Sheehan family supports the troops, our country, and our President, silently, with prayer and respect.’

Ah, well, they’re not immediate family, so they lack Cindy’s ‘moral authority’. But how about Casey’s father, Pat Sheehan? Last Friday, in Solano County Court, Pat Sheehan filed for divorce. As the New York Times explained Cindy’s ‘separation’: ‘Although she and her estranged husband are both Democrats, she said she is more liberal than he is, and now, more radicalised.’

Toppling Saddam and the Taleban (Mrs Sheehan opposes US intervention in Afghanistan, too), destroying al-Qa’eda’s training camps and helping 50 million Muslims on the first steps to free societies aren’t worth the death of a single soldier. But Cindy Sheehan’s hatred of Bush is worth the death of her marriage. Watching her and her advanced case of Bush Derangement Syndrome on TV, I feel the way I felt about that mentally impaired Aussie concert pianist they got to play at the Oscars a few years ago.

It was suggested by the columnist Cal Thomas that Bush should agree to a (second) meeting — in public. Cindy Sheehan could let rip, but there would also be other bereaved moms of soldiers who don’t feel as she does, and maybe some bereaved Iraqi moms to tell of their gratitude for the liberation of their country from a psycho regime. It’s a fine idea, and I’m sure the reason Bush won’t do it is because he understands that Mrs Sheehan is having a mental breakdown in public and it would be cruel to take advantage of that. If only the Michael Moore Left had that much decency.

But in the wreckage of Pat and Cindy Sheehan’s marriage there is surely a lesson for the Democratic party. As Cindy says, they’re both Democrats, but she’s ‘more liberal’ and ‘more radicalised’. There are a lot of less liberal and less radicalised Dems out there: they’re soft-left-ish on healthcare and the environment and education and so forth; many have doubts about the war, but they love their country, they have family in the military, and they don’t believe in dishonouring American soldiers to make a political point. The problem for the Democratic party is that the Cindys are now the loudest voice: Michael Moore, Howard Dean, moveon.org, and Air America, the flailing liberal radio network distracting attention from its own financial scandals by flying down its afternoon host Randi Rhodes to do her show live from Camp Casey. The last time I heard Miss Rhodes she was urging soldiers called up for Iraq to refuse to go — i.e., to desert — and entertaining theories that 9/11 was Bush’s Reichstag fire.

On unwatched Sunday talk shows you can still stumble across the occasional sane responsible Dem. But, in the absence of any serious intellectual attempt to confront their long-term decline, all the energy on the Left is with the fringe. The Democratic party is a coalition of Pat Sheehans and Cindy Sheehans, and the noisier the Cindys get the more estranged the Pats are likely to feel. Sorry about that, but, if Mrs Sheehan can insist her son’s corpse be the determining factor in American policy on Iraq, I don’t see why her marriage can’t be a metaphor for the state of the Democratic party.

Casey Sheehan was a 21-year-old man when he enlisted in 2000. He re-enlisted for a second tour, and he died after volunteering for a rescue mission in Sadr City. Mrs Sheehan says she wishes she’d driven him to Canada, though that’s not what he would have wished and it was his decision. As to whether he died in vain, the Associated Press reported this week:

‘The capital’s Sadr City section was once a hotbed of Shiite Muslim unrest, but it has become one of the brightest successes for the US security effort. So far this year, there has been only one car bombing in the neighborhood, and only one American soldier has been killed.’

Cindy Sheehan is a woman whose grief has curdled into a narcissistic rage, and the Democrats cheering her on are cheering their own marginalisation. Most Americans will not follow where she’s gone — to the wilder shores of anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-Iraq, anti-Afghanistan, anti-Israel, anti-American paranoia. Casey Sheehan’s service was not the act of a child. A shame you can’t say the same about his mom’s new friends.

From The Chicago Tribune: 30 years on...

The long run with Springsteen
Bruce is The Boss of the road and our dreams

By Louis P. Masur, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Institutions and Values at Trinity College

Thirty years ago, Bruce Springsteen's album "Born to Run" thundered onto the American scene to remarkable reviews. Greil Marcus of Rolling Stone declared "You've never heard anything like this before, but you understand it instantly, because this music ... is what rock 'n' roll is supposed to sound like."

In The New York Times, John Rockwell praised the songs as "poetry that attains universality. ... You owe it to yourself to buy this record." Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times would later observe that "`Born to Run' breathed with the same kind of discovery that made Elvis Presley's `Sun Sessions' and Bob Dylan's `Highway 61 Revisited' the two most important American rock albums before it."

The album immediately elevated Springsteen to a cultural icon, and he was hailed as the savior of rock 'n' roll. That October, he appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek during the same week, and his image--laughing, scruffy, guitar pointed ever upward--perfectly reinforced the message of his music: Life is a continuous journey in search of salvation and love.

On the album cover, a smile lights up Springsteen's face as he leans on his saxophonist Clarence Clemons, whose image carries over to the back. Attached to his guitar strap is an Elvis Presley fan club pin. Springsteen once observed that Presley freed our bodies and Dylan freed our minds. For my generation, Springsteen freed our souls.

I turned 18 in 1975, when Presley was a Vegas lounge act, and the rock revolution ushered in by Dylan's appearance at the Newport Folk Festival and the recording of "Like a Rolling Stone" was a decade in the past. Bruce belonged to us; we were part of the legend from the start. No more older siblings bragging that they saw the Beatles at Shea Stadium or attended Woodstock. I first heard Bruce in 1973, and I followed him and the band to clubs and small theaters, where I soaked in long sets that left me feeling exhilarated.

"Born to Run" gave voice to my dreams of escape and search for meaning. Of course, taking to the road to find yourself is a classic American theme. Bruce and Clarence on the cover are part of a cultural history that includes Herman Melville's Ishmael and Queequeg at sea or Mark Twain's Huck and Jim lighting out for the territory. But each generation conducts its search in its own way and out of its own imperatives.

Mine was something of a post-heroic generation, too young to have participated fully in the cultural rebellions of the 1950s and the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, yet socialized and politicized by those impulses and seeking direction. Richard Nixon resigned, the Vietnam War ended, and I ached to get away from home. Somehow, national and personal malaise mixed.

In the opening track, "Thunder Road," Springsteen sings "So you're scared and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore." The line was written by a 24-year-old, and it resonated among teens who feared what all youth fear: boredom, emptiness, meaninglessness. Redemption and love were to be found out on the road, away from "a town full of losers." "Climb in," the narrator insists, "I'm pulling out of here to win."

The song "Born to Run" opened the second side of the album. In this day of single downloads and sideless CDs, it is worth remembering that the best albums of the 1960s and 1970s had movement and drama: We listened to all the cuts and thought about the sequence. Those first few notes invite us on a journey to "get out while we're young" from a town that is "a death trap," "a suicide rap." Suburban comfort and social conformity sapped the soul. "Tramps like us, baby we were born to run," Springsteen declares. The chugging guitar and pounding bass lead us away.
He is striking the same cultural chords as any number of artists: Walt Whitman, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac, to name a few. But Springsteen has made the highway and the American dream his own. The recording, which took three months in the studio to get pitch perfect, still sounds immediate and vital. Asked recently to identify the one song that embodies his ideals, Springsteen named "Born to Run."

If "Thunder Road" and "Born to Run" offer promises of escape, others songs are less hopeful. Springsteen understands that tragedy stands alongside triumph as a central riff in American culture. On "Backstreets," the summer is "infested," and the characters are "filled with defeat." In "Jungleland," "the street's on fire in a real death waltz," and "lonely-hearted lovers struggle in dark corners."

The themes of love and heroism are reprised throughout, in the poetic words and the soaring arrangements. Those themes re-emerged with new poignancy on Sept. 11, and Springsteen was struck by the references to his work in the Times'
"Portraits of Grief." After the service for one victim, mourners sang "Thunder Road" and remembered their friend who "taught us all a lesson in unconditional love." I wonder how many of my generation have left instructions, as I have, for Springsteen to be played at their funeral services.

We may not find everlasting love, and we may turn out not to be heroes. Each of us is "a scared and lonely rider" seeking connection.

"Born to Run" ponders whether somewhere out there "love is wild, ... love is real" and if we keep searching we may eventually "get to that place where we really want to go and we'll walk in the sun." Until then--and pump your fist as you shout it--baby we were born to run.

From Steyn Online:

A DEATH ON THE TUBE REVISITED

Few columns I've written have generated as much hostile mail from generally supportive readers as this one - about Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian shot dead by British police on July 22nd. My point was a simple one, and based on my own experience of the London Underground: Too many Tube passengers could have found themselves in his situation for us to regard with equanimity his death. As I wrote:

Although I've had a ton of e-mails pointing out various sinister aspects of his behaviour - he was wearing a heavy coat! he refused to stop! - it seems to me there are an awful lot of people on the Tube who might easily find themselves in Mr de Menezes's position.

Readers strongly disagreed: The police made a tough call, but the right one; we shouldn't second-guess them, etc.

We now know everything Sir Ian Blair and his Keystone Kops told us wasa crock : He wasn't wearing unusual clothing. He didn't jump the barrier. He used his Tube card. He behaved in other words like a normal Underground commuter - like you or I would have. This wasn't just an act of gross incompetence, but something rather worse. My characterisation - a public execution in cold blood - now seems to be unarguable.

I'm often accused of playing Monica Lewinsky to Bush and Blair on the war on terror. In fact, I've never thought supporting the war means blindly supporting every idiotic act of the many mediocrities who happen to have a piece of government ID in their wallets. Ever since the weekend after 9/11, I've criticised the FAA, INS, CIA, FBI, State and Justice Departments and many others. I've been a long-time critic of policies of the British Home Office and British police. On the other hand, I'm not a hysterical ninny about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

But what happened at Stockwell Tube station was a disgrace. You don't inaugurate a shoot-to-kill policy of which the public are not even aware by killing an innocent man for no good reason. There should be severe consequences at all levels of the Metropolitan Police for this disgusting act.

As I put it in that original column:

The pathetic public execution of an innocent man on July 22 joins the events of July 21 and July 7 as a reminder of why a narrow, reactive law-enforcement approach to terrorism will always penalise the populace more than the terrorists.

Supporters of the war should understand what that real support means: It means sustaining popular will for a difficult existential struggle against very patient enemies and supple long-term trends that will require us to take difficult and brutal action against our enemies. That cause will not be helped by cheering on mindlessly every security-state bozo who thinks he's got carte blanche on the streets of London or any other western city.

From The American Spectator: Still more testimony as to George Bush's feckless management of his useless war.

Global War on Terror Is It?
By Jed Babbin

Today is Day 1 of the President's 5-day campaign to counter growing public opposition to the war in Iraq. Public confidence in Mr. Bush's conduct of the war has sunk so low, he needs to undertake more than a five-day campaign with a built-in withdrawal date. Just as this war will outlast his presidency, so must the momentum toward victory he creates by his leadership. In this, the President is failing. Regardless of the political consequences, he must reassert the leadership he has shown before.

Almost four years ago President Bush said we were in a "global war on terror," which -- in the inevitable Pentagon acronym -- became the "GWOT." Mr. Bush was transformed, even in the hostile media, into a wartime president, a role he seemed to relish. But since his reelection, Mr. Bush hasn't acted like a wartime president and the "GWOT" has been reduced in the public's mind to fighting terrorist insurgents in Iraq. If it's just Iraq, it's not a global war. If it's only to be fought -- in Mr. Bush's formulation until the Iraqis "stand up" and we "stand down" -- then it is not a war that will affect the lives of those Americans who aren't serving in the military or have a family member or friend who is. The President should credit Americans more than that. They understand, just as the President does, that the goal of the Islamic terrorist states is to destroy our way of life. He takes for granted our continued understanding and support when he should, instead, be buttressing it every day against the unremitting anti-war onslaught.

Every wartime president must perform tasks his peacetime counterparts need not. A president must, while listening to his military advisers, be the final decision maker on war planning. Mr. Bush is performing this task unevenly. His resolve seems to wax and wane. In this war, much more than those that came before it, war plans must achieve publicly demonstrable results. Americans are willing to make sacrifices if they understand what is bought with their blood and treasure. But this war, which is being fought openly in Iraq and Afghanistan and covertly elsewhere, has been reduced to the same sort of routine daily horror that Vietnam became. Iraq, from what the public can see, is all pain and no gain.

Wartime presidents must lead their people. In this, Mr. Bush has fallen flat. It's not enough to say we must complete the mission. It's not nearly enough to repeat the truism that our soldiers are performing bravely, with skill and humaneness not seen before in history. As important as those facts are, they pale in comparison to what we aren't told: What is the mission? Who are our enemies, and where are they? How are we going to attack and defeat them? What, specifically, are they trying to do and how are we going to stop them? We know none of those things from the President. To say what he says again and again -- without saying much else -- leaves wartime opinion-making to Vladimir Putin, Russell Feingold, Chuck Hagel and Cindy Sheehan.

Wartime presidents have to tell our people what is going on, and why. They have to ask people to make sacrifices and explain, in compelling terms, why those sacrifices are essential to the future of the nation. And though he is not failing in the war planning task Mr. Bush is on the road to making as much of a hash of it as LBJ did in Vietnam.

FOR THE PAST WEEK, America has been deluged with the overheated rhetoric of one mother who has lost her son in this conflict. Whatever you think of Cindy Sheehan, she has been an effective voice for those who condemn President Bush for the war in Iraq, and are so consumed with rage at Dubya that they are incapable of thinking about anything else. And their incapability is infectious so long as the President isn't inoculating us against it. Is there such a thing as the GWOT, or is it just another rhetorical tool? Forget Cindy Sheehan. Listen to Rosemary Palmer.
As the Washington Post reported last Wednesday, "The day after burying their son, parents of a fallen Marine urged President Bush to either send more reinforcements to Iraq or withdraw U.S. troops altogether. 'We feel you either have to fight this war right or get out,' said Rosemary Palmer, mother of Lance Cpl. Edward Schroeder II." What Ms. Palmer says now is precisely what our professional military has said about every war since World War II. They are saying it now but only quietly, in confidence, and almost exclusively to each other. They know that this war needs to be fought -- hard, fast, and effectively -- to be won at the least cost in American lives. They will do that, and win, if they are allowed to do the job as it must be done. If.

In a meeting a couple of weeks ago, a senior DoD official said that in Iraq, "we're not winning yet, but we're holding our own." How can that be, two years into the fight, unless we are hobbling our forces politically? The objective in Iraq is not a Nixonian "peace with honor" but victory. And victory cannot be achieved in Iraq alone. Back in June, I asked another senior DoD official a question that obviously discomfited him. It was simple enough. I began with the fact that we have mensurated (i.e., three dimensional, accurate within a yard or two) targeting coordinates for the terrorist sanctuaries in Syria. (The fact that Syria is a sanctuary for terrorists who kill Americans in Iraq has not been disputable for more than a year.) I asked why, then, weren't we attacking the sanctuaries? He gave an answer that -- from the look on his face -- made him even more uncomfortable than the question. He said, "There are nations with which we don't want to go to war now." And therein lies the rub. President Bush must not write the plans for the GWOT on a palimpsest of Vietnam.

Whatever the effect may be on the 2006 and 2008 elections, the war must be prosecuted with all the speed and force we can muster -- and that is more than we now use -- toward victory. The President needs to explain to us, in detail, what defeat would mean to us and the rest of the civilized world. He needs to tell us where we are fighting, and how. We need not know every covert operation that may be going on, but we need to be told how many nations we fight in, and why. He needs to say that the fight continues, under many covert guises, and that we mean to defeat the enemy wherever he may be, whichever regimes must be destroyed, and by whatever means, fair or foul, we must use to achieve the defeat of Islamic terrorism. And when the President tells us these facts, they must be accompanied by decisive action that carries out these intents.

The time for Mr. Bush to do this grows short, because there is a whiff of defeatism in the air. Some congressional Republicans, fearing the impact of the war in 2006, are breaking openly with the President. Last week Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel repeated his charges that the administration is disconnected from reality on Iraq, and that we're losing the war there. If we listen to those such as him, his judgment will become reality. Yesterday, Trent Lott added fuel to the fire by implying, on Meet the Press, that Mr. Bush had made the decision to go to war in Iraq in early 2002, long before the President took the Iraq case to the U.N. There will be more defections as the clock ticks down to the 2006 election. After that, Mr. Bush will -- formally -- be a lame duck. And it will be too late.

Because Mr. Bush is allowing the anti-war left to dominate public debate, America is being led to believe that victory in Iraq is the only goal in the war, and that such a victory is impossible to achieve. Both beliefs are false. But it is not enough for Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld to go about stating the obvious truths. There is no substitute for personal leadership by the President. Actually, there is: leadership by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CBS News. None of them received 53 million votes last November. So where is the guy who did? We need him, right now and for more than the next five days.

Not sure that I agree that the ending of the movie is dead perfect, or that Broken Flowers is a remarkable film, but this still is a pretty good commentary on the movie.

So Far Away
In Broken Flowers, Jim Jarmusch and Bill Murray deadpan for gold.
By David Edelstein

Deadpan can be a spiritual state, a kind of serenity, as in the acting of Buster Keaton, but it can also be emotional cowardice masquerading as cool. It's often the latter, I think, in the early work of the director Jim Jarmusch and the actor Bill Murray. That's not meant to be dismissive. I treasure Murray's ironic (and hilarious) detachment in Stripes and Ghostbusters and Jarmusch's static frames in Stranger Than Paradise, a masterwork in which itty-bitty form and itty-bitty content coalesced into something that captured an '80s East Village anomie that had saturated the culture. But there's only so far you can go in that direction before you run out of variations—before that immaculate little room begins to feel like a prison.

While neither man has forsaken deadpan altogether (it's in their creative DNA), both continue to evolve. In Jarmusch's work in the visionary neo-Western Dead Man and in Murray's gorgeous performance in Lost in Translation, a still protagonist is surrounded by frenetic activity: The deadpan suggests a profound alienation from a world that makes no sense. In their new collaboration, Broken Flowers (Focus Features), Jarmusch and Murray have transcended their limitations. They've made a deadpan movie that quivers with feeling.

Broken Flowers is Jarmusch's most conventionally entertaining film, but it's still visually rigorous, swimming in pregnant silences, and un-filled-in in a way that's tantalizing. The movie is a haunted meditation on solipsism that's full of extraneous life, that hints at a world elsewhere. Murray is Don Johnston (that's John-ston, as he always has to remind people), a guy who made a pile of money in software but whose hobby was girlfriends, one after another. On the day his latest squeeze (Julie Delpy) decamps because he can't, you know, commit, Don sits watching The Private Life of Don Juan on his widescreen TV on his leather sofa in his huge, soullesss house; and then this aging Don Juan (or is it Don Juan-ston?) opens a letter from an ex of 20 years ago with no return address or postmark. It says Don has a 19-year-old son who has run away to find his father.

It's likely that a man like Don would "forget" about the letter, but his pal and neighbor Winston—an expansive Ethiopian played by that soulful chameleon Jeffrey Wright—won't let him. Winston lives in a house that's brimming with kids and pets and stuff. He also has a passion for solving old-fashioned Sherlock Holmesian mysteries. For all kinds of reasons, Winston pushes Don to go out into the world and find the letter writer. He even books the airline tickets, motels, and rental cars. He orders Don to bring flowers.

Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton, Frances Conroy, and Sharon Stone play the recipients of those flowers. What a group, huh? They respond to Don's surprise visits in different ways, but every sad, awkward, and bitterly funny meeting gives Don a glimpse of someone he damaged, a life he didn't build, a love forsaken.

Sharon Stone is impossibly delightful. She plays Laura, a widow who organizes closets for a living—a "together" activity if ever there was one. Yet there's something heartbreaking about that cheerful façade, about her obliviousness to the underlying mess and to the nymphet tendencies of her daughter (named Lolita, and buoyantly played by Alex Dziena) who parades before Don in the buff. That's an example of Jarmusch's technique: He takes an obvious joke and lets it hang until you squirm. That's also a dividend of his noncommittal style. He's king of the have-it-both-ways, of the funny and the forlorn.

Conroy is Dora, a former hippie love child who's now a fragile, neurasthenic prisoner of pre-fab McMansions that seem to mock her utopian dreams. The camera holds on her pinched features, and on her look of dread at the feelings that Don elicits—and then we see a snapshot of her easy, happy, Earth-mother young self and want to cry. Her most vivid scene, a dinner with Don and her real-estate husband (Christopher McDonald, who's peerless at this sort of hearty insincerity), is an essay in agony—screamingly funny agony. This is familiar ground—Alexander Payne mined it in About Schmidt. But in Broken Flowers, there's a sense of mystery, a feeling of souls struggling beneath the too-placid surface.

Lange plays Carmen, an animal therapist, apparently in hiding from the verbal deception of humans and protected by a hotcha (lesbian?) guard-dog receptionist (Chloe Sevigny). It's a troubling sequence, made more troubling by the way in which Lange has aged. I'm afraid it has come to this with regard to actresses these days: You think, "Nature? Cosmetic surgery? Bad cosmetic surgery?" Only her plastic surgeon knows for sure. But until we have sexual parity (Why should Murray be credible with Julie Fucking Delphy?), we're going to have to grapple with the problem of great actresses whose faces have gone slightly haywire. It's not an issue for the still-youngish Tilda Swinton, whose rural biker-chick Penny is an essay in rage. Her encounter with Murray's Don is ferociously brief.

There's something a tad egocentric about Broken Flowers' scenario. We'd like to think we left a mark on our ex-lovers, but most if not all are probably fully engaged by their present lives and glad to be rid of us. As glimpses of unfulfilled dreams and roads not taken, though, these scenes are small miracles of pain and longing. They have a comic surface and a riptide of despair. When Don passes young men in airports or on the street, they hold his gaze. The world is full of sons he never knew. In the last scene, there's an encounter with a kid played by an amazingly hypersensitive young actor named Mark Webber (last seen in Todd Solondz's Storytelling and the sadly unseen Winter Solstice) that is as momentous in its monosyllables as anything Jarmusch has done.

This is the crowning performance in what I call Bill Murray's Loneliness Trilogy, which consists of Broken Flowers, Lost in Translation, and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. In his melancholy, he's funny; in his funniness, he's at sea: The ironic hipster clown has become God's loneliest man. Jarmusch holds on Murray's face—and, in truth, it's not the face of a great actor. In some ways, Murray is still an amateur. As an actor, he's not fully broken in: His features don't always conform to his emotions. But that clearly resonates with Jarmusch, who doesn't go for emoters. Nothing can be too plain.

In Broken Flowers, the roads that Don Johnston drives all look the same—anonymous, like his inner life. The music, especially a jazz tune called "Yerkemo Stew" by Mulatu Astatke, suggests a private-eye movie in which the gumshoe is going in circles. Will we get the Sherlock Holmes resolution that Don's friend Winston craves? I'll tell you this: The ending is madly unsatisfying—yet dead perfect. This is a remarkable film.

From ProfessorBainbridge.com: More reflections about how the Bush administration has betrayed conservatives and squandered an historic opportunity in pursuit of its ill-considered, unrealistic Middle Eastern goals.

What might have been

It's time for us conservatives to face facts. George W. Bush has pissed away the conservative moment by pursuing a war of choice via policies that border on the criminally incompetent. We control the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and (more-or-less) the judiciary for one of the few times in my nearly 5 decades, but what have we really accomplished? Is government smaller? Have we hacked away at the nanny state? Are the unborn any more protected? Have we really set the stage for a durable conservative majority?

Meanwhile, Bush continues to insult our intelligence with tripe like this:

"Our troops know that they're fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to protect their fellow Americans from a savage enemy," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

"They know that if we do not confront these evil men abroad, we will have to face them one day in our own cities and streets, and they know that the safety and security of every American is at stake in this war," he said.

I guess that's all he has left. After all, if Iraq's alleged WMD programs were the casus belli, why aren't we at war with Iran and North Korea? Not to mention Pakistan, which remains the odds-on favorite to supply the Islamofascists with a working nuke. If Saddam's cruelty to his own people was the casus belli, why aren't we taking out Kim Jong Il or any number of other nasty dictators? Indeed, what happened to the W of 2000, who correctly proclaimed nation building a failed cause and an inappropriate use of American military might? And why are we apparently going to allow the Islamists to write a more significant role for Islamic law into the new Iraqi constitution? If throwing a scare into the Saudis was the policy, so as to get them to rethink their deals with the jihadists, which has always struck me as the best rationale for the war, have things really improved on that front?

The trouble with Bush's justification for the war is that it uses American troops as fly paper. Send US troops over to Iraq, where they'll attract all the terrorists, who otherwise would have come here, and whom we'll then kill. This theory has proven fallacious. The first problem is that the American people are unwilling to let their soldiers be used as fly paper. If Iraq has proven anything, it has confirmed for me the validity of the Powell Doctrine.

Essentially, the Doctrine expresses that military action should be used only as a last resort and only if there is a clear risk to national security by the intended target; the force, when used, should be overwhelming and disproportionate to the force used by the enemy; there must be strong support for the campaign by the general public; and there must be a clear exit strategy from the conflict in which the military is engaged.

Powell based this strategy for warfare in part on the views held by his former boss in the Reagan administration, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and also on his own experience as a major in Vietnam. That protracted campaign, in Powell's view, was representative of a war in which public support was flimsy, the military objectives were not clear, overwhelming force was not used consistently, and an exit strategy was ill defined.

Sounds a lot like Iraq doesn't it? Public support for the war is sliding. We're not using a fraction of our military potential, and there seems to be no clear viable long-term goal or exit strategy. {Update: On the issue of whether we're using our full military potential, Victor Davis Hanson observes: "throughout this conflict the United States has been apprehensive that it was becoming too brutal in its effort even as the Islamic fascists were convinced that we were too weak to fight such a war."}

The second problem is that the fly paper strategy seems to be radicalizing our foes even more. For every fly that gets caught, it seems as though 10 more spring up. This should hardly come as a surprise to anybody who has watched Israel pursue military solutions to its terrorist problems, after all. Does anybody really think Israel's military actions have left Hezbollah or Hamas with fewer foot soldiers? To the contrary, the London bombing suggests to me that it is only a matter of time before the jihadists strike in the US again, even though our troops remain hung out as fly paper in the Augean Stables of Iraq. {Update: The news that Scotland Yard foiled a gas attack on the House of Commons, for which the Yard deserves mega-kudos, doesn't change my mind. As the climax of Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor suggests (and I still wonder of that inspired 9/11), the terrorists only need to win once. Conversely, the latest news about that rocket attack on a US Navy ship in Jordan seems to confirm my concerns: "The Abdullah Azzam Brigades -- an al-Qaida-linked group that claimed responsibility for the bombings which killed at least 64 people at Sharm el-Sheik in July and 34 people at two other Egyptian resorts last October -- said in an Internet statement that its fighters had fired the Katyushas, bolstering concerns that Islamic extremists had opened a new front in the region." Indeed, the NYT reports that: "The possible involvement of Iraqis and the military-style attack have raised fears that militants linked to Iraq's insurgency may be operating on Jordanian soil."}

While we remain bogged down in Iraq, of course, Osama bin Laden remains at large somewhere. Multi-tasking is all the rage these days, but whatever happened to finishing a job you started? It strikes me that catching Osama would have done a lot more to discourage the jihadists than anything we've done in Iraq.

What really annoys me, however, are the domestic implications of all this. The conservative agenda has advanced hardly at all since the Iraq War began. Worse yet, the growing unpopularity of the war threatens to undo all the electoral gains we conservatives have achieved in this decade. Stalwarts like me are not going to vote for Birkenstock wearers no matter how bad things get in Iraq, but what about the proverbial soccer moms? Gerrymandering probably will save the House for us at least through the 2010 redistricting, but what about the Senate and the White House?

In sum, I am not a happy camper. I'm very afraid that 100 years from now historians will look back at W's term and ask "what might have been?"