From The New York Post:


A DARK GLOBALISM
By MARK STEYN

October 17, 2006 -- New Hampshire-based columnist Mark Steyn is one of the most trenchant writers in the English-speaking world today. Hitting stores this week is his new book, "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" - a grim look at the West's fecklessness in the face of the threat from radical Islam. The Post is happy to give its readers a taste with this excerpt.
- THE EDITORS

THE dragons are no longer on the edge of the map: That's the lesson of 9/11.

When you look at it that way, the biggest globalization success story of recent years is not McDonald's or Microsoft but Islamism. The Saudis took what was not so long ago a severe but peripheral strain of Islam - practiced by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere - and successfully exported it to Jakarta and Singapore and Alma-Ata and Grozny and Sarajevo and Lyons and Bergen and Manchester and Ottawa and Dearborn and Falls Church. It was a strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop.

And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalized insurgency.

As a bleary Dean Martin liked to say, in mock bewilderment, at the start of his stage act: "How did all these people get in my room?" How did all these jihadists get rooms in Miami and Portland and Montreal? How did we come to breed suicide bombers not just in Gaza but in Yorkshire?

IN the globalized pre-9/11 world, we in the West thought in terms of nations - the Americans, the French, the Chinese - and, insofar as we considered transnational groups, were obsessed mostly with race. Religion wasn't really on the radar.

So an insurgency that lurks within a religion automatically has a global network. And you don't need "deep cover": You can hang your shingle on Main Street and we won't even notice it. And when we do - as we did on 9/11 - we still won't do anything about it, because, well, it's a religion, and modern man is disinclined to go after any faith except perhaps his own.

But Islam is not just a religion. Those lefties who bemoan what America is doing to provoke "the Muslim world" would go bananas if any Western politician started referring to "the Christian world." When such sensitive guardians of the separation of church and state endorse the first formulation but not the second, they implicitly accept that Islam has a political sovereignty too. Thus, it's not merely that there's a global jihad lurking within this religion, but that the religion itself is a political project - and, in fact, an imperial project - in a way that modern Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism are not.

Furthermore, this particular religion is historically a somewhat bloodthirsty faith, in which whatever's your bag violence-wise can almost certainly be justified. (Yes, Christianity has had its blood drenched moments, but the Spanish Inquisition, still a byword for theocratic violence, killed fewer people in a century and a half than the jihad does in a typical year.)

So we have a global terrorist movement, insulated within a global political project, insulated within a severely self-segregating religion whose adherents are the fastest-growing demographic in the developed world. The jihad thus has a very potent brand inside a highly dispersed and very decentralized network much more efficient than anything the CIA can muster. And these fellows can hide in plain sight.

NOT long after 9/11, I said, just as an aside, that these days whenever something goofy turns up on the news chances are it involves some fellow called Mohammad.

A plane flies into the World Trade Center? Mohammad Atta.

A sniper starts killing gas station customers around Washington, D.C.? John Allen Muhammad.

A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri.

A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed Hedayet.

A terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed.

A British subject self-detonates in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammad Hanif.

A terrorist cell bombs the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed.

A gang rapist preys on the women of Sydney, Australia? Mohammad Skaf.

A group of Dearborn, Mich., men charged with cigarette racketeering in order to fund Hezbollah? Fadi Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud, Mohammad Fawzi Zeidan and Imad Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud.

A Canadian terror cell is arrested for plotting to bomb Ottawa and behead the prime minister? Mohammad Dirie, Amin Mohamed Durrani and Yasim Abdi Mohamed.

Sophisticates object that very few of the Mohammads on the list above are formal agents of al Qaeda. But so what? There are no "card-carrying members" of this enemy: That's what makes them an ever-bigger threat: You don't need to plant sleepers. If you've got a big pool of manpower and a big idea that's just out there all the time - 24/7, flickering away invitingly like a neon sign in the Western darkness - that's enough to cause a big heap of trouble.

AND there are minimal degrees of separation between all these Mohammads and the most eminent figures in the Muslim world and the critical institutions at the heart of the West. For example, in 2003, Abdurahman Alamoudi was jailed for attempting to launder money from a Libyan terror-front "charity" into Syria via London.

Who's Abdurahman Alamoudi? He's the guy who until 1998 certified Muslim chaplains for the United States military, under the aegis of his Saudi-funded American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council. In 1993, at an American military base, at a ceremony to install the first imam in the nation's armed forces, it was Mr. Alamoudi who presented him with his new insignia of a silver crescent star.

He's also the fellow who helped devise the three-week Islamic awareness course in California public schools, in the course of which students adopt Muslim names, wear Islamic garb, give up candy and TV for Ramadan, memorize suras from the Koran, learn that "jihad" means "internal personal struggle," profess the Muslim faith, and recite prayers that begin "In the name of Allah," etc.

OH, and, aside from his ster ling efforts on behalf of multicultural education, Alamoudi was also an adviser on Islamic matters to Hillary Clinton.

And it turns out he's a bagman for terrorists.

Infiltration-wise, I would say that's pretty good. The desk jockeys at the CIA insist, oh no, it would be impossible for them to get any of their boys inside al Qaeda. But the other side has no difficulty setting their chaps up in the heart of the U.S. military, and the U.S. education system, and the U.S. political establishment, and the offices of U.S. senators and former First Ladies.

Mark Steyn was a winner of the 2006 Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism. Excerpted with permission from "America Alone: The End of the World as We KnowIt" (Regnery).

October 5, 2006

CAIR: FBI Training a Muslim Extremist?

Hussam Ayloush, leader of the Southern California branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is attending the “FBI Citizens' Academy”.

On September 7, Anti-CAIR (ACAIR) issued a “News and Analysis” titled “CAIR: Cops Training Terrorists?”

ACAIR called into question the FBIs' practice of inviting leaders from the business, religious and civic fields to attend the “FBI Citizens' Academy” and how dangerous this could be, particularly if a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) representative were to be invited.

Ayloush brags in his blog of his invite and mentions, in the first paragraph (Sept. 30):

“Through my work at CAIR, I get to interact closely
with the local FBI office, mainly on cases involving
hate crimes against Muslims or counter-terrorism.”

So, if Ayloush is correct, the FBI has worked with CAIR, a Muslim terrorist supporting organization, to help in the “War on Terror” in the field of counter-terrorism? (Ayloush didn’t mention just how he helped the FBI find Muslim terrorists, but maybe allowing the FBI to take a stroll through his blackberry helped?)

What must it be like for a newly-minted FBI agent to step into his/her first office, for their very first assignment, and look up and see Ayloush standing by to lend his “expertise” in fighting radical Islam? What would Ayloush tell the new agent? What possible constructive advice could a representative of a Muslim hate group offer? What about the veteran FBI agent, who knows the truth about CAIR and is shocked at the FBI leaderships close relationship with CAIR? What a slap in the face…

While we can’t speak for FBI agents, ACAIR can’t help but believe that J. Edgar Hoover must be spinning in his grave. Can anyone imagine the FBI holding hands with NAZI’s during World War II?

ACAIR wonders just how CAIR successfully co-opted whichever FBI agent was so clueless, so ignorant or just simply stupid enough to invite America’s leading Islamic hate group to participate in a program designed to help protect America from…Islamic hate groups.

This begs several questions:

1. When the next CAIR official is arrested on Islamic terrorism related charges, how will the FBI explain its coziness with Ayloush?
2. How do field FBI agents feel, knowing that their superiors are fawning over the very group that supports those they are fighting?
3. How many terror attacks on America, or her allies, must occur before the FBI removes its rose-colored glasses and sees the obvious for what it is, i.e., that CAIR is no friend of the FBI, never has been, never will be?

How many Americans lives are in danger, how much will the radical Islamic movement gain by having a CAIR representative help the FBI in counter-terrorism?

No amount of spin will protect the FBI from the righteous indignation of the American people when this arguably treasonous act is exposed.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is a clear and present danger to the United States, why is this news to the senior leadership of the FBI, (but not to field agents) ...?

Posted by
Andrew Whitehead

From The NY Sun:

Race Against Democratic Frivolity
BY MARK STEYN

October 16, 2006

Who is James Vicini? Well, he works for Reuters, the storied news agency. By "storied," I don't mean in the Hans Christian Andersen sense, though these days it's hard to tell. But they have an illustrious history and they're globally respected and whatnot. And last week newshound Vicini got assigned quite an interesting story:

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) — A California-born convert to Islam, accused of making a series of al Qaeda propaganda videos, became on Wednesday the first American charged with treason since the World War Two era, U.S. Justice Department officials said.

"Fugitive Adam Gadahn, 28, who is believed to be in Pakistan, was accused of treason, which carries a maximum punishment of death … "

Wow! Treason! First time in half-a-century, since the Tokyo Rose days. Since then, of course, the very word "treason" has come to seem arcane, if not obsolescent, like something some fellow in doublet-and-hose might accuse somebody of on "Masterpiece Theatre" but otherwise not terribly relevant and frankly no big deal: indeed, the campus left usually gives the impression that "treason" is little more than an alternative lifestyle, like transvestism.

Yet the Justice Department wants this fellow over in Pakistan for treason. Now why would they do such a thing? After chugging through the various charges, James Vicini got to the meat of his story:

"Justice Department officials denied the case was timed to deflect attention from the fallout over lewd computer messages sent by a former Republican congressman to young male aides, a scandal that may help Democrats seize control of Congress in the November 7 elections."

Cut out that paragraph and have it framed. Or now that the nights are drawing in, if you're at a loose end of an evening, sew it into an attractive sampler and hang it in your parlor. In years to come, you'll spend many precious moments treasuring it as the perfect summation of the 2006 US election.

"Justice Department officials denied … " What Reuters means by those words is that a reporter — possibly the great Vicini himself or his colleague ("Additional reporting by Rick Cowan") — gets the press release about this once-in-a-half-century treason thing and says to the relevant Feds, "C'mon, you guys are just nailing this dude in Pakistan to distract from Mark Foley, right?"

And the Justice Department fellow no doubt replies, "Mark who?"

And Rick Cowan (or James Vicini) goes, "The ex-Congressman. Teenage pages. Horny gay Republican predators. Hastert's notorious pedophile ring. You must have read about it. It's been in all the papers."

And the Justice guy says, "Sorry, I've been been working the fax machine to Pakistan all week, typing up the relevant indictments in triplicate, and so forth."

Originally, only the Republican Congress was covering for Foley. But, as Vicini and Cowan see it, the conspiracy now extends to the Justice Department. We should be grateful Reuters imputed merely the "timing" of the treason indictment to the "lewd computer message" scandal, not the indictment itself. After all, why would the Bush Administration have earmarked some nobody in Pakistan for a cockamamie charge of "treason" if it weren't for just such an eventuality as this? Also, notice the way the most damaging "lewd computer messages" and the toppling of Saddam both occurred in 2003: Did the neocons stage the entire Iraq war in order to set Foley up with an endless supply of fetching young Arab houseboys? As Al Jolson liked to sing, climb upon my knee, Sunni boy.

And what about that North Korean nuke? That timing's pretty suspicious, too. And in that goofy outfit of his Kim Jong-Il looks a bit like a teenage Congressional page at a slumber party. Well, from a distance and in a poor light, and if you've had a couple drinks. And how about this for convenient timing? From the BBC on Thursday:

"A man has pleaded guilty to conspiring to murder people in a series of bombings on British and US targets. Dhiren Barot, of north London, planned to use a radioactive ‘dirty bomb' in one of a series of attacks in the UK, Woolwich Crown Court heard … "

In my new book (out this week, folks: you'll find it at the back of the store past the 9/11 Conspiracy section and the Christianist Theocrat Takeover of America section and the ceiling-high display of the new Dixie Chicks six-CD box set of songs about how they're being silenced), I say that some of us looked at September 11th as the sudden revelation of the tip of a vast iceberg, and I try to address the seven-eighths of that iceberg below the surface — the globalization of radical Islam, the freelancing of nuclear technology, the demographic weakness of western democracies. Other folks, however, see the iceberg upside down. The huge weight of history — the big geopolitical forces coursing through society — the vast burden all balancing on the pinhead of the week: in this instance, Mark Foley.

Thomas Sowell says the question for this election is not whether you or your candidate is Republican or Democrat but whether you're "serious" or "frivolous." A lot of Americans, and not just their sorry excuse for a professional press corps, are in the mood for frivolity. It's like going to the theatre. Do you really want to sit through that searing historical drama from the Royal Shakespeare Company? Or would you rather be at the sex comedy next door?

In the Nineties, Americans opted for the sex comedy — or so they thought. But in reality the searing historical drama carried on; it was always there, way off in the background, behind the yuk-it-up narcissist trouser-dropper staggering around downstage. The mood of the times was to kick the serious stuff down the road so we could get back to President Lounge Act offering to feel our pain. With North Korea, the people delegated to kick the can a few years ahead — Madeleine Albright, Jimmy Carter — are now back, writing self-congratulatory op-eds about their genius and foresight. Not at all. Secretary Albright's much-touted "agreement" was a deal whereby Washington agreed to prop up a flailing basket-case state in order to enable it to buy enough time to become a serious destabilizing threat to its neighbors and beyond. Many of our present woes — not least Iran — derive explicitly from the years when Jimmy Carter embodied the American "superpower" as a smiling eunuch.

Thanks in part to last decade's holiday from history, North Korea and Iran don't have to buy any more time. They've got all they need. Life isn't a night on Broadway where you can decide you're not in the mood for Henry V and everyone seems to be having a much better time at La Cage Aux Foley. Forget the Republicans for a moment. In Connecticut, the contest is between a frivolous liberal running on myopic parochial platitudes and a serious liberal who has the measure of the times and has thus been cast out by the Democratic Party. His state's voters seem disinclined to endorse the official Dems' full-scale embrace of trivia and myopia. The broader electorate should do the same.

'These Days,' Gill is going all-out
By Brian Mansfield, Special for USA TODAY

Back during the '60s, pop and country acts thought nothing of releasing three or four albums each year.

These days, though, with singles taking longer to climb the charts and record labels pumping more money into marketing, top artists commonly wait two, even three years between releases.

This time, that just wasn't going to work for Vince Gill.

Gill, 49, initially thought he might release his most recent recordings every three or four months. He wound up putting them together in These Days, a four-CD package of new material that's unprecedented, even for an artist with 17 Grammys — more than any other country act except Alison Krauss.

"Part of me thinks this has a chance to really break down some barriers, a chance to really go places that maybe I've never gotten to before," Gill says of the 43-track set, which includes collaborations with Sheryl Crow, jazz singer/pianist Diana Krall and the Everly Brothers' Phil Everly. "At the same time, my fear is that people will say, 'You know, 11 songs would've been just plenty.' "

But 11 songs wouldn't have been just plenty. With its duets, its inside jokes and attention to detail, These Days has the markings of a landmark album. It also subtly traces the musical history of one of country music's most versatile and respected artists — a history that parallels the genre's growth over the past 20 years.

Many of its remarkable performances might never have made a single-disc release. "With a 10- or 12-(track) record, the opportunities lessen for you to do different things that you'd like to do," Gill says. "You can't afford to give up the slots."

Though many artists have issued box sets of unreleased recordings, most of them clear out archives. Johnny Cash's 2003 Unearthed box came from a decade's worth of outtakes; Bruce Springsteen's Tracks, from 1998, covered more than 20 years. Tom Waits' forthcoming Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards features 30 recordings but almost as many older tracks. Perhaps only the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's star-studded 1972 Will the Circle Be Unbroken matches These Days for size and scope — and that was mostly redone old songs.

While a handful of songs on These Days date back a decade or more, Gill wrote most of them after finishing 2003's Next Big Thing.

"Can anybody else write that many songs in a short period of time and none of them suck?" marvels Universal Music Group Nashville chairman Luke Lewis.

After a period of prolific writing, Gill began recording in August. His previous album sold less than 300,000 copies. While one of its singles won him a Grammy, another became his first regular single to fail to reach the country top 40.

"Nobody was beating my door down to get my next record," Gill says. "That allowed me to experiment."

The sessions quickly took on an air of something special.

"The session players, they wouldn't go out and get coffee after a take," notes former NRBQ guitarist Al Anderson, who played on the album and co-wrote 13 of its songs with Gill. "They'd come in (to the studio's control room) and listen really intently to what was going down on Vince's record."

After a few months, Gill had recorded 31 songs: "My mind-set was, 'Well, shoot, I'm going to have to blow up two-thirds of this stuff and not get to use it.' " He organized the music thematically — one disc's worth of traditional-sounding country, another of ballads, another of up-tempo songs with horns and bluesy guitar solos — and played them for Lewis, suggesting that each album be released a few months apart. Lewis proposed adding a disc of bluegrass and acoustic tunes and packaging them all together.

"It's all in one package, but it's four completely different records, each one trying to find its place and stay there."

Guests play a key role in These Days, not only for their musical contributions but for their relationships to Gill and his career. Rodney Crowell used to play in a band with Gill; Emmylou Harris was one of his early supporters. Guy Clark, who joins Gill for These Days' final track, Almost Home, headlined the first gig Gill played when he moved to Los Angeles in the mid-'70s.

"Some of the folks I've known for 30 years," Gill says. "We've gone through this big circle, and we're looking at it 30 years later. And a handful of people are new relationships. Diana Krall, LeAnn Rimes, Sheryl Crow — quite a few folks that I had never recorded with, so they're new friends."

The project's first single —The Reason Why, with Krauss — is approaching the country top 40. Universal has also shipped Tell Me One More Time About Jesus, a song written and sung with Gill's wife, Amy Grant, to Christian radio stations, and sent a handful of tracks to bluegrass programs. It may send the duet with Krall, Faint of Heart, to jazz stations next year.

"We've got all these different elements, reaching into different marketplaces," Lewis says. "But when he comes in with that kind of body of work, it makes it easier to take what some people perceive as a risk and do something unusual."

Is Islam the Real Problem?
By Suzanne Fields

What is Islam? Is the barbarity of September 11 rooted in the preaching of Muhammad? Or are the Islamists, the Islamic fascists bent on the destruction of all who disagree with them, merely an aberration, mixing politics, religion and violence in an appeal to the lowest psychological denominators of suicide bombers?

Historians, political scientists and psychologists are all over the place in supplying answers to these questions. Since most of the suicide bombers are young men whose minds have been drowned in propaganda, doomed to permanent adolescence, it's easy to speculate that they are a maladaptive collective of perverse minds, having become twisted twigs of humanity feeding on hate.

The historical forces at play are obvious. Bernard Lewis, a leading scholar of Islamist rage, places the fault line at the failure of the Muslim world to keep up with the West in the modern world. Diminishing Muslim power is both a humiliation and in Muslim minds a reversal of divine law, driving the losers to pick through the verses of the Koran to find justification for violence against winners. The decline of Muslim fortunes began with the fall of the Ottoman Empire and reached its nadir in recent times, encouraging the likes of Osama bin Laden, educated and wealthy, to play the David to the American Goliath.

Other scholars blame Western colonialism and imperialism, along with Judeo-Christian traditions, as contributing to the violent mentality of the extremists. These aberrations, they say, cannot be found in the teachings of Muhammad. They reason that jihad initially was aimed at an inner quest for personal not political improvement, that Islamists distorted this phenomenon for their own malevolent ends, fusing politics and religion into an all-purpose aggression for the "long-suffering victims" of Western imperial expansion.

But there's another view. "The Middle East's experience is the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior, first and foremost the region's millenarian imperial tradition," writes Efraim Karsh, a British scholar, in "Islamic Imperialism," a provocative and persuasive book. "External influences, however potent, have played only a secondary role, constituting neither the primary force behind the Middle East's political development nor the main cause of its notorious volatility."

He looks directly to the words of Muhammad, who in his farewell address to his followers ordered them to fight all men until they submit with the assertion that "There is no god but Allah." It was not coincidence that Osama bin Laden echoed these words in his glee after September 11: "I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah and his prophet is Muhammad."

Muhammad proselytized with violence and used violence to consolidate conquest. Occupying territory was as important as converting or killing unbelievers. When the Jews of Medina resisted Muhammad in the 7th century, he beheaded the men and sold their women and children into slavery. The prophet, who claimed to derive his power and authority from Allah, was not only head of the captured states but was the single religious authority. "This allowed the prophet to cloak political ambitions with a religious aura," writes Mr. Karsh, a professor at the University of London, "and to channel Islam's energies into its instrument of aggressive expansion." The ultimate goal would be for the world either to embrace Islam or live under its domination.

This goal was realized in part with the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, which allowed certain other religions to exist but not prosper. Christians who sought domination, on the other hand, never invoked the teachings of Christ to justify violence. Early Christianity made clear the distinction between God and Caesar, spiritual and earthly power, even though such distinctions were not always honored.

"If Christendom was slower than Islam in marrying religious universalism with political imperialism," says Professor Karsh, "it was faster in shedding both notions." The imperialistic impulse, rooted in the beginning of Islam, never fully retreated and is crucial today to understanding the shedding of blood now in the name of Allah. Although Muhammad forbade violence against the community of believers, it was easy in the chaos of the Middle East to initiate violence against differing sects with their different interpretations of the Koran.

The interpretation of the Islamist mentality as rooted in Muhammad's appeal to violence, and the Islamist determination for religious domination of the world, may not tell the whole story today, but it explains why, for millions of Muslims, the image of the warrior trumps the image of a prophet of peace -- if, indeed, there ever was one.

Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate

What's That Smell?
The GOP is stinking up the joint.
by P.J. O'Rourke

10/23/2006

LIKE OTHER DEEP-THINKING people, I'm full of principled, idealistic, high-minded indignation at the GOP. What a stampede of sleaze. Jack Abramoff is the world's best lobbyist--for the Federal Penitentiary System. Bob Ney was deep in the ethical rough at St. Andrew's. Randy "Duke" Cunningham's favorite weap ons system turned out to be the political suicide bomb. Tom DeLay may or may not have broken campaign finance laws, but he did his best to look like he was breaking them. He might as well have tied quail feathers to the GOP majority in Congress and sent it hunting with Dick Cheney.

Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs. Splash! There goes Mark Foley! Now the news networks are broadcasting G.O.P.U. around the clock.

Actually, the Republicans should be grateful for their lying, thieving scum. It distracts the public from the things the Republicans have done that are honestly bad. Our postwar policy is creating Weimar Iraq. And when the Islamofascist Beer Hall Putsch comes there won't even be beer.

Social Security privatization was presented to the electorate with a public relations and marketing flair not seen since New Coke. Intelligence collection has been given an additional bureaucracy to correct the problems created by too much bureaucracy in intelligence collection. "Homeland Security" sounds like a failed 1980s savings and loan. Didn't Grandma lose $20,000 when Homeland Security went under? Then there's No Child Left Behind. What if the child deserves to be left behind? What if the child deserves a smack on the behind? We have a national testing program to test whether kids are . . . what? Stupid? You've got kids. Kids are stupid.

Immigration policy will fence the border, providing economic stimulus to the Mexican ladder industry. The National Guard is stationed on the Rio Grande--U.S. troops standing be tween you and yard care. President Bush said that if illegal immigrants want citizenship they'd have to do three things: pay taxes, hold meaningful jobs, and learn English. Bush doesn't meet those qualifications.

And Republican federal budgets have shown less self-restraint than Mark Foley's instant messaging. Billions are being spent so college students will have someplace below sea level to get drunk during Mardi Gras. Hundreds of billions are being spent indiscriminately dumping Medicare prescription drugs on old people. There's a new warning on the Levitra bottle: If arousal lasts more than four hours you haven't screwed the taxpayers enough.

I am so moved by principle and idealism, so indignantly high-minded, that I'm changing sides. At least the Democrats aren't hypocritical about being scum. After Gerry Studds was censured for molesting an underaged congressional page, he was reelected six times. Therefore, in the mid term elections, I'm working to get Demo crats into office.

And work it is. There's the problem of putative speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, whose very name summons images of children coming home from day care madly scratching their scalps. Then, when you see Pelosi speak, it's impossible not to think of Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. I hope her campaign slogan isn't "A New Kick-Off for America."

There is also the problem of issues for the Democrats to run on. You're going to elect Democrats to control government spending? And you're going to marry Angelina Jolie for her brains. The privacy issue--government spying on U.S. citizens--isn't going to work. True, NSA has been collecting all our telephone information, but anyone who's answered the phone during dinner knows that every telemarketer on earth has that information already. Illegal immigration? When the Democrats were in charge, the illegal immigrants were from al Qaeda. And as for Iraq, the best the Democrats have been able to do is make the high school sex promise: "I'll pull out in time, honest."

Maybe I won't work for the Demo crats. It's too much of a job. And jobs are not something the Democratic base is famous for having. Maybe I'll just act like a Democrat and stay away from the polls on November 7 and hang around the house drinking beer. In fact, I think I'll start practicing that now, so I'll be ready on Election Day.

Opposing Republican hegemony is not without cost. It's going to cost me my marriage if I keep hanging around the house drinking beer. But I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make sure the GOP loses. And I promise to stay involved in my children's' lives, occasionally picking them up at day care as they madly scratch their scalps. It takes a village, etc.

No price is too high to pay for principled idealism. And as soon as high-minded indignation has defeated the Republicans, there will be the impoverishment from protectionism, the horror of nuke-wielding petty dictators, and the increased killings by terrorists to prove it. Deep-thinking people will be relieved that Dennis Hastert can no longer cover up misbehavior in the congressional page program.

P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

From The New York Times:

Walking the Line
By DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

JOHNNY CASH
The Biography.
By Michael Streissguth.
Illustrated. 334 pp. Da Capo Press. $26.

Long before Johnny Cash became immortalized as the “Man in Black” because he refused to wear rhinestones at the Grand Ole Opry, he was grappling with twisted visions of sin and salvation, like a soapbox preacher trying to decode God’s Plan in the public square. Gospel songs like “I’ll Fly Away” filtered through him and never left. Raised impoverished during the Great Depression, this brooding young Arkansan absorbed tall tales and hillbilly banter like a kerosene-hungry railroad lantern. At night, the dysfunctional Cash family would gather at the kitchen table and talk about Jesus Christ. By day, Johnny (or J. R., as he was called) would work the cotton fields reciting old-time Protestant hymns to ward off the tedium.

Then there were the Gene Autry movies that brought cowboy cavalcades into his imaginative life, thrilling him with romantic notions of the purple sage. By all accounts, he was the proverbial kid by the camp ring of fire, leaning forward with bated breath, absorbing his elders’ rural cadences with the attentive ears of a piano tuner. No mundane utterance passed his notice. Somehow he managed to extract the ethereal from even cornball blather. “He was the one who could express himself and his feelings more than the rest of us,” one childhood friend recalls. “He was sensitive. He thought a little deeper than the rest of us. He went way down deep inside and brought up feelings.”

Among the numerous coming-of-age anecdotes that populate the early chapters of Michael Streissguth’s richly detailed “Johnny Cash: The Biography,” however, one stands out. It involves a Texas hobo who wore a ragged blue bandanna around his neck, like the ghost of Jimmie Rodgers. Occasionally this mysterious codger, named Jim George (or so he said), would appear at the Cash homestead, eager to swap yarns for a hot meal. Because this drifter “smelled like a barnyard,” as Cash later explained, the singer’s mother would coax Jim George to wash up. But even in the bath, he wouldn’t take off his bandanna. When teased about this, the vagabond turned somber. “I don’t want you to see the rope burns,” he said. “I was hanged with some of the James Gang in 1882.”

A whopper like that, delivered during World War II by a bum, defies credibility. But Cash, even as late as 1997, seemed to take Jim George at his word. “We didn’t have any reason not to,” Cash told The Journal of Country Music. “The law was if they hanged you and you didn’t die, you were set free.”

No recent American recording artist — not even a trickster like Bob Dylan or Miles Davis — has been as proficient at male mythmaking as Cash was. Whether it was honoring the Texas gunslinger John Wesley Hardin or the alcoholic Iwo Jima veteran Ira Hayes or the country music legend Hank Williams, among dozens of others, Cash’s repertory brimmed with songs about these heroic all-American Lazaruses. The Sun Records impresario Sam Phillips once claimed that Howlin’ Wolf’s voice was “where the soul of a man never dies.” The same could be said of Cash. Hardin, Hayes and Williams may have perished as mortals, but Cash made sure their brazen exploits were remembered. Like Jim George, Cash seemed to be telling stories from the half-grave, full of roguish confessions and redemptive pleas, reporting back to listeners what it meant to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die, or scream “Hey Porter” as the Orange Blossom Special headed straight for San Quentin. For all his uplifting Billy Graham crusade performances, and there were many, it was his dark real-life travails — the horrific death of his older brother Jack by a wood-shop blade, his penchant for gobbling amphetamines, his bouts of infidelity — that inspired his most enduring art.

What makes this so valuable a biography is that Streissguth, an associate professor of English at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, debunks the myths that have enveloped Cash, in large part owing to two autobiographies, “Man in Black” (1975) and “Cash” (1997), both full of exaggerations. Although Streissguth is not the literary equal of Peter Guralnick (Elvis Presley) or Elijah Wald (Robert Johnson), he avoids the gush-and-awe prose of Rolling Stone and Spin. Still, he sometimes approaches his subject like a fastidious academic clinging to notecards. The amount of new archival material he unearths, however, is truly impressive. “When one might have expected his pen to be dulled by the demands of stardom, the fogs of drug addiction or the inadequacy of rural education, he wrote long and thoughtful letters in hotel rooms, airplanes, at home and in his office,” Streissguth says of Cash’s correspondence. “In his rounded script or pecked out on a typewriter, his letters were about his faith, his love life, his anger and ideas for his career. He wrote to Air Force buddies, his wife, his manager and his daughters. He seemed programmed to write.”

“Johnny Cash” makes the reader want to rediscover the hardscrabble troubadour’s back catalog. Besides the five brilliant albums Cash recorded with the producer Rick Rubin for American Recordings between 1994 and 2003, you’ll want to listen to “Johnny 99” (including a haunting version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman”), “Johnny Cash Is Coming to Town” (particularly Elvis Costello’s “Big Light”) and “John R. Cash” (especially Tim Hardin’s song “The Lady Came From Baltimore”) after reading this book. This is also true of Cash’s campy Highwaymen collaborations with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. The making of the Nashville neo-folk sessions with Bob Dylan in 1969 — available on bootlegs, and well worth the hunt — is explored to its natural conclusion: it led to the birth of country/folk rock.

Although much of Cash’s rags-to-riches story line is well known, Streissguth offers new revelations. The recent film “Walk the Line,” for example, ended with Cash clean and sober. In truth, although he was off drugs from 1970 to 1976, he reverted to his old ways about the time Jimmy Carter became president, creating deep stresses in his marriage to June Carter Cash for almost three decades. In public, Cash frequently portrayed his father as the epitome of a loving patriarch; Streissguth says Ray Cash was often monstrous, constantly belittling his son’s mega-success. Whenever Johnny appeared on TV, his father jealously scoffed that he was “back on the tube acting like a big shot.”

One thing is abundantly clear: Johnny Cash wasn’t a saint and was often hyper-ornery. Three of his daughters — Rosanne, Cindy and Kathy — explain in interviews what it was like having a part-time dad. And they also elaborate on his slow demise in 2003. “We didn’t want him to be in pain anymore,” Kathy says. Cash was an archangel of self-destruction to the bitter end; his entire life was based on warding off demons, so God might embrace him in the Promised Land. In death, however, Cash has proved more popular than ever. You can’t walk into a Starbucks and not hear him singing Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” or Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds.” The redemptive spirit of Johnny Cash — the American spirit — is very much alive through his music.

In “The Man Comes Around,” one of his last original compositions, Cash pondered apocalyptic rejection versus acceptance as delineated in the Book of Revelation: “Will you partake of that last offered cup / Or disappear into the potter’s ground?” The line is classic Cash: drawn to both darkness and light. That was his struggle. Either way, the songwriter Rodney Crowell was on to something when he claimed that Cash deserved to have his face carved on Mount Rushmore. Why not? At his best, he was that good.

Douglas Brinkley is a professor of American history at Tulane University and the author of “The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”

From The New York Times:

Just a Balladeer? A 43-Track Manifesto Testifies Otherwise
By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN

NASHVILLE

MOST people know Vince Gill as a sweet-voiced singer of country ballads. Some might also know him for the high tenor harmonies he lends to the records of others, while others will recognize him as a perennial winner at the Grammy and Country Music Association Awards (and, from 1992 to 2004, as the affable host of the latter). Few beyond Music Row in Nashville, however, know Mr. Gill to be a serious guitarist, a pedigreed bluegrass musician, a prolific songwriter or a performer versed in blues, jazz and rock ’n’ roll.

All of which could change with the release this week of “These Days,” Mr. Gill’s latest album for MCA Nashville. The record certainly reveals him to be a consummate musician, and in an assortment of genres. Even more impressive, it does so with four CD’s of new studio recordings and an expansive cast of collaborators ranging from pop stars like Bonnie Raitt and Sheryl Crow to the jazz singer and pianist Diana Krall.

Multidisc concert albums are of course de rigueur in rock, and scores of musicians have put out two-record sets consisting entirely of new studio material. Prince went one better, issuing a triple-CD of new work in 1996, while George Harrison, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Clash each made three-record studio albums during the heyday of the vinyl LP. But not counting the four solo records that the members of Kiss released on the same day in 1978, no major pop act has done what Mr. Gill will do on Tuesday with his four-CD box set of new original music.

His project is nothing if not ambitious, even, at first blush, bordering on an act of hubris. The set contains 43 tracks and has a running time of more than 165 minutes. All of the songs were written or co-written by Mr. Gill. “These Days” is the sort of outsize gesture people have come to expect from an inveterate self-promoter like Garth Brooks, not from Mr. Gill, a self-deprecating golf buff who by most accounts would rather be out hitting the links than holed up in a recording studio.

Skeptics will find plenty to quibble about. Mr. Gill, after all, is no Bob Dylan, who is perhaps entitled but has yet to attempt such a prodigious feat. For much of the decade Mr. Gill, who turns 50 next year, has been on the brink of becoming a “heritage act,” a euphemism used in country music circles to describe longtime radio favorites who are no longer deemed young or hip enough for airplay.

“These Days,” though, isn’t the work of an artist easing into retirement but that of someone reasserting his bona fides. The scope and reach of the album go beyond even that, suggesting that Mr. Gill is making a case for why people who don’t consider themselves fans of country music might want to listen.

“There are a lot of questions out there about how people are going to buy music in the future,” said Chris Parr, vice president of music programming at Country Music Television in Nashville. “Vince’s record shows that Nashville is still looking at innovative ways to engage the consumer. It also reminds us that the country music format is at its strongest and most dynamic when it embraces the diversity of sound you hear on his four CD’s.”

Mr. Gill, who kicks off his United States tour by bringing a 17-piece band with horns to the Nokia Theater in New York on Monday night, wasn’t necessarily out to prove such a point. “I guess I’m shedding my skin a little with this record,” he said. “And yet it’s not about me trying to convince the rest of the world that I am all these things. That’s just not in my makeup. It’s always been enough for me to know that I played guitar on my records. I bet 8 out of 10 people who walk up to me after seeing my live show go, ‘I had no idea you could play like that.’ It never bothered me because that was the most obvious place for my guitar playing to come to light.”

Mr. Gill was speaking in the den of the homey Southern manor he shares with his wife, the pop singer Amy Grant, in the Belle Meade enclave of Nashville. Barefoot and dressed in jeans and an old Sun Records T-shirt, Mr. Gill, whose sleepy eyes and tousled thatch of hair always make him seem as if he has just risen from a nap, was surrounded by vintage guitars, Grammy Awards and golf mementos. A five-hole putting green beckoned from the north lawn.

“It didn’t start out as this great big thing,” he said about his new record. “It became that. You always write a lot of songs, but you only cut so many. I didn’t want that to happen this time, so I just stayed in the studio and wound up, five or six weeks later, having recorded all these songs. Then I was like, ‘Now what are you going to do?’ ”

The solution, reached with the help of Mr. Gill’s record label of 17 years, was to group the tracks together stylistically so that the package would contain four distinct albums, each with its own title. A modest list price of $29.98 is likely to make it an easier sell, especially during the holidays, when box sets are popular gift items. There are no plans at this point for the four discs to be sold separately.

The first album in the series, “Workin’ on a Big Chill,” makes the biggest statement of the four, devoid as it is of the ballads that have been Mr. Gill’s stock in trade. Consisting mainly of Southern-style swamp pop, the record spotlights Mr. Gill’s gutbucket guitar runs as well as guest vocalists like Rodney Crowell and the former Doobie Brother Michael McDonald. One track, a risqué tête-à-tête with the country singer Gretchen Wilson called “Cowboy Up,” couldn’t be further from the heart-tugging plaints with which Mr. Gill made his name.

The second disc, a largely romantic collection titled “The Reason Why,” includes cameos from Ms. Raitt and Ms. Crow and a saloon-style duet with Ms. Krall. The third disc is an old-school honky-tonk record called “Some Things Never Get Old.” Long on shuffles, twin fiddles and steel guitar, it features collaborations with Nashville mainstays like Patty Loveless, Emmylou Harris and Ms. Grant. The last of the four discs, the bluegrass-steeped “Little Brother,” enlists the support of the Del McCoury Band, the Texas singer-songwriter Guy Clark and Jenny Gill, Mr. Gill’s daughter from his previous marriage to the singer Janis Oliver.

Not surprising for a project that strives to do so much with so many people, not all of “These Days” works. The duet with Ms. Krall is a bit stiff, and doubtless some will wish that Mr. Gill had cut back on the guitar vamping on Disc 1. Elsewhere a couple of the ballads betray the middle-of-the-road sensibility that has limited Mr. Gill’s appeal among fans of rock and harder-edged R&B. (In addition to his early work in first-tier bluegrass bands Mr. Gill was the lead singer in a late installment of the unremarkable country-rock band Pure Prairie League.)

The project’s occasional lapses aside, “These Days” is a signal achievement for Mr. Gill, a musical ecumenist who brooks few distinctions between art and entertainment. The four CD’s not only testify to his depth and range as a musician, but do so, as Mr. Gill has often done, through collaborations that smack more of mutual inspiration than of back-scratching or expediency.

Most of the people who sing or play on “These Days” are friends of Mr. Gill, 7 of whose 17 Grammy Awards have involved musical pairings with other artists. A performer who has earned considerable goodwill in Nashville over the last two decades, he has sung or played on the records of many of the guests on his new album, including stints as a guitarist in the formative bands of Ms. Harris and Mr. Crowell. Everyone from Phil Everly and Alison Krauss to the NRBQ alum Al Anderson and Buddy Emmons, the pioneering pedal steel guitarist, appears on “These Days.”

Mr. Gill says the spur for this creative abandon was a phone call he received at home two years ago from Eric Clapton, asking him to play at his Crossroads Guitar Festival in Dallas. “Here’s one of the finest musicians that will ever live, and he sees me for what I am, a musician,” Mr. Gill said. “It took all these chains and all these thoughts of what I should be and what this town was counting on me to be and said to me: ‘Hey, play what you love. If it’s jazz, let it be jazz, and if it’s rocking, turn it up.’ ”

Mr. Gill has always considered himself a guitar player first. “I think it’s because I’ve done it the longest,” he explained. “For years I was too bashful to sing. I’d just bury my head in my guitar and play.”

Fond of the old Martin guitars associated with country and folk music, Mr. Gill also prizes his Telecasters and Stratocasters, instruments linked to rock giants like Keith Richards and Jimi Hendrix. “I was a rock ’n’ roll kid too,” he said. “I was drawn to the records of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. And my brother was a blues hound. I had all these old Muddy Waters records, so there are elements of greasy, dirty blues in my playing.”

“It’s ironic,” Mr. Gill went on. “Because if you said, ‘What do I do best?’ you’d say: ‘He sings ballads. He’s a great torch singer.’ And I guess it’s been wise of me to lean on the ballads. The world’s full of great guitar players, and the country world has never really been about guitar gods like rock ’n’ roll has.”

Mr. Gill’s songwriting is another aspect of his musicianship that he feels has been underappreciated. “I took a beating for a long time,” he admitted. “People said, ‘Yeah, love his playing, love his singing, but his songs aren’t that great.’ And warranted — your best work isn’t your first work. I got better as a songwriter. I want my body of work to encompass the songwriting element as well.”

“Arrogant, isn’t it?” quipped Mr. Gill when the fact that he wrote or co-wrote all of the material on “These Days” came up in conversation.

The people of his home state, Oklahoma, certainly recognize Mr. Gill’s gifts as a songwriter. Earlier this year he and Jimmy Webb, the composer of classics like “Wichita Lineman” and “MacArthur Park,” were commissioned to write a song commemorating Oklahoma’s first 100 years of statehood. Their collaboration, “Oklahoma Rising,” is now one of two official state songs, alongside Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”

As the title and sweep of his new album attest, Mr. Gill wants to remind people, and not just those in sometimes insular Nashville, that he still prides himself on making music — all kinds of it. “I think people look at me and say: ‘He doesn’t care that much anymore. He likes to go out and play golf.’ And I go: ‘Well hang on. Sure, I like to do other things, but I’m as passionate about every note of the music I play now as I ever was.’

“We didn’t compromise or sell ourselves short,” added Mr. Gill, referring to his new record. “It got to be as twangy as it needed to be, as slick as it needed to be, as raw as it needed to be. There were no times when I felt like we had to rein something in to make it fit into some narrow little format.”

From Inside Bay Area:

For Oasis, now's a good time to stop the clock
By Tom Lanham

IF YOU PAID close attention to "Don't Believe the Truth" — last year's subtly scathing effort from Mancunian supergroup Oasis — the truth itself was obvious: Bandleader Noel Gallagher had had enough of his adopted hometown of London.

If one more obsessive fan approached him with a camera phone begging for a quick snapshot, he grumbled at the time, he would gladly dropkick said cellular straight up the street. So it's no surprise that the star has finally made his disdain official. "I've just moved out of London and back into the English countryside," Gallagher reveals. "I just moved into my new Buckinghamshire mansion."

The guitarist's bratty kid brother, Oasis frontman Liam, has just ditched his old digs, as well. "So he's living in a flat full of cardboard boxes at the moment," Noel chuckles, phoning from home. "Right now, he's in the pub'round the corner from my house, just drinking on his own. How sad is that?"

In reality, the Gallaghers were merely enjoying their post-world-tour down time, with no plans whatsoever of entering a recording studio in the near future.

But Oasis is still maintaining a high profile this fall. There's the long-overdue single release of its early B-side "Acquiesce" (which ships to radio this week), a new best-of anthology "Stop the Clocks" on Columbia and a full-length concert documentary hitting theaters, the aptly-titled "Lord Don't Slow Me Down."

Not to mention, of course, the current heavy TV/radio rotation of early chestnut "All Around the World," as heard in that steady stream of AT&T ads.

So how, exactly, does an artist of Noel Gallagher's stature suddenly change residence? Yard sales are simply out of the question when you want to jettison your belongings, he sighs.

But he hit on a unique solution. Over a laborious three-day period, he says, "I actually put all my junk and clothes and stuff I didn't need into black bin bags, we call'em, or refuse sacks. And then I called the local Oxfam, a charity shop, and I got someone else to be here when they arrived. Because if the guys had seen it was me, it would've all ended up in Sotheby's. So I gave it all to charity and nobody knows," he laughs.

"It's all out there somewhere — people are walking around in my old clothes, eating off my old plates, enjoying all the old bits that I don't need."

As he cleaned house, Gallagher stumbled on a few items he just couldn't part with. "Like loads of unmarked cassettes and CDs that didn't have any writing on'em. I'd stick them in, and a couple of'em were just me, sitting in my front room, playing acoustic guitar, just working out songs. And some of'em were songs that I've yet to record which I'd forgotten about, and that was quite special, just listening to all of those one night."

Gallagher wasn't finished rummaging. Carefully, he and his sibling combed the Oasis catalog to select the 18 classics for "Stop the Clocks."

They arrived at an interesting mix of U.S. hits ("Wonderwall," "Live Forever"), U.K. smashes ("Lyla," "Some Might Say," "Don't Look Back in Anger") and pet B-sides ("Talk Tonight," "The Masterplan," alongside the crowd-pleasing show staple "Acquiesce").

"All the choices for the album are quite obvious, so it's put together for the fans," says Gallagher. As a composer, he's most proud of his vintage "Slide Away" and "Truth's" recent "The Importance Being Idle," he says. "Simply because nobody writes songs like that anymore. I mean, 'Idle' is a song about being lazy, but it's very Kinks, very swinging'60s. And I love 'Slide Away,' because it should've been a single and never was, so it's the one song that hasn't been overplayed to death. I find big hit singles these days are all incredibly commercial. Even bands who claim to be punk like Green Day are anything but."

As Gallagher tells it, there was a three-year period shortly after the band's "Definitely Maybe" 1994 debut "where everything I wrote was fantastic."

"Acquiesce" and "The Masterplan" hail from that productive period. But if Oasis had saved those precious B-sides to release instead of its third coolly received "Be Here Now" album, he reckons, "We would've gone on to be possibly one of the biggest bands of all time. Uhhh, not that we're not anyway. But I think we would've been as big as U2."

Oasis — thanks to its media-fueled rivalry with fellow English outfit Blur — went on to launch, then practically define, the Britpop movement. Unlike Blur's chameleonesque Damon Albarn, though, Noel Gallagher never altered his trademark sound — pealing cathedral guitars propped by huge flying-buttress riffs and Liam's snippy, Lennon-inspired sneer. And persistence paid off.

The group would suffer several lineup changes, but go on to sell over 50 million records.

"All Around the World" was one of the few career coups that failed to make the "Clocks" cut. "Only because it was just too damned long and we couldn't find a place for it anywhere," Gallagher says. But thanks to AT&T, the track now receives more airplay than any other Oasis standard.

When he first heard of the offer, Gallagher quickly nixed the idea. "But Liam, bless him, said, 'Look — that song's 10 years old, we never play it, so why don't you just cash in on it?' And I said, 'How much is it again?' and the figure came back, and it wasn't a very difficult decision after that. But the advert has no presence in England at all. It's not shown anywhere. But you go to the States, and you're bombarded with our song, or the 10 seconds of it that comes on."

Oasis might be resting on its laurels this holiday season, but Gallagher himself is far from idle.

He just joined his pals Kasabian (also featured in Baillie Walsh's "Lord" flick, which follows the groups, plus Aussie upstarts Jet, on a nine-month tour) onstage at an NME-sponsored bash.

He also taped two Beatles covers for an upcoming BBC tribute to John Lennon, one with Stereophonics, another with Cornershop and Johnny Marr; as well as tracked a few new home demos, with 6-year-old daughter Anais singing along on a few. "She's got a fantastic voice — seriously!" dad enthuses. "But unfortunately, she does like Kylie Minogue, which is something that I'm not too pleased about."

Rich is the examined life, as they say. And reflecting on his illustrious career, Gallagher says, has been a quite pleasant experience indeed.

With, of course, a few minor glitches in the memory circuit.

For example, one time in Thailand in 1998. Gallagher laughs, "When we were out at some bar, and there was this incessant HI-NRG dance music playing in a bar across the street. And I was thinking 'Wait a minute! I'm sure that's a version of "Some Might Say"! So we went across the street and up to the DJ, and it was a HI-NRG disco version of our song, completely illegal, recorded by some Thai person.

"The DJ had no idea who I was. But I said 'Gimme that CD!' even though there were lots of British people in the bar going mad when he played it. And Liam and I were like, that doesn't sound like Oasis, that sounds atrocious! And that — not AT & T — is easily the weirdest place I've ever heard one of our songs."