If this isn't just a ploy prior to an eventual backdoor reinstatement,
there could hardly be better news for ORU.
Embattled Oral Roberts President Resigns
By JUSTIN JUOZAPAVICIUS

TULSA, Okla. (AP) — The president of Oral Roberts University, facing accusations he misspent school funds to support a lavish lifestyle, resigned on Friday, officials said.

Richard Roberts' resignation is effective immediately, according to a statement e-mailed from George Pearsons, chairman of the school's Board of Regents.

Roberts and the evangelical university have come under fire since three former professors sued last month, alleging wrongful termination.

The lawsuit includes allegations of a $39,000 shopping tab at one store for Richard Roberts' wife, Lindsay, a $29,411 Bahamas senior trip on the university jet for one of Roberts' daughters, and a stable of horses for the Roberts children.

Roberts, son of school founder and televangelist Oral Roberts, had been on temporary leave from the university, fighting the accusations against him. The Board of Regents had ordered an outside probe of the school's finances.

In a recent interview, Roberts and his wife denied wrongdoing. He has said the lawsuit amounted to "intimidation, blackmail and extortion."

On Friday, he said in the statement that he loved the university, of which he became president in 1993.

"I love ORU with all my heart," he said. "I love the students, faculty, staff and administration and I want to see God's best for all of them."

The school will not provide additional comment until next week, spokesman Jeremy Burton said. A message left for Roberts' personal attorney wasn't immediately returned.

Gary Richardson, the attorney for the three professors, said, "Those who have seen what we have seen won't have any surprise about the fact that Richard has stepped down." He later said, "There was no option, period."

One of the plaintiffs, John Swails, said Roberts "could have spared the university and the students by going ahead and stepping down and admitting his wrongdoing."

The professors also alleged in their lawsuit that Richard Roberts required students in a government class to work on 2006 mayoral candidate Randi Miller's campaign.

Roberts publicly endorsed Miller, but said then that he was doing so as a private citizen and not as an ORU representative. He has denied the lawsuit's claims that he ordered students to work on Miller's campaign.

Professor Tim Brooker, one of the lawsuit plaintiffs, accused the school of forcing him to quit after he warned Roberts that requiring students to work on Miller's campaign jeopardized ORU's tax-exempt status.

In the weeks since that lawsuit was filed, others have cropped up, including one from a former senior accountant who alleged that the Robertses ordered him to help them hide improper and illegal financial wrongdoing from the authorities and the public.

"This is good news for the university," said Donald Vance, a professor of biblical languages and literature. "It's time for the Board of Regents to step forward with a strong choice, and I hope they will involve the tenured faculty in the process."

Two weeks ago, Vance joined the majority of tenured faculty in a vote of "no confidence" in Richard Roberts as president, regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit.

Cornell Cross II, a senior government major, said the resignation is "an excellent step to fix the university," but believes the school's most trying days lie ahead.

"This is not over, there a lot of things that need to continue," Cross said. "The culture of fear that has been allowed to fester at ORU has to be looked into.

"We still haven't heard any admission of wrongdoing or any kind of humility or contrition," he said.

The school's regents will meet Monday and Tuesday to determine action in the search process for a new president, Pearsons said in the statement.

Executive Regent Billy Joe Daugherty will assume the president's administrative responsibilities, working with Oral Roberts until the regents' meeting, the college said.

Former ORU Regent Harry McNevin, who quit the board in 1987 because of the misspending he alleged he witnessed, called the resignation "inevitable."

"You can't take the sacrifices of God's people and use them any old way," he said. "It's been 20 years that they've been doing the same things that I became aware of."

From Inside Carolina: Tiresome crotchety old liberal Bill Friday made a ridiculous statement today along the lines that Davis' pay increase in connection with his contract extension was more than the average English professor makes. If Davis was getting compensated on his fidelity to the values of Western civilization and contribution towards making his charges into better citizens than the average nutbag leftist English professor, his pay increase should have been twice what it was.

Q&A with Butch Davis
Greg Barnes
InsideCarolina.com

Nov 21, 2007

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- Following the announced contract extension, Butch Davis answered questions from reporters ...

Opening remarks:
“First of all, I want to say that I’m very appreciative of the administration, the Board of Trustees, Chancellor Moeser and Dick Baddour and their show of faith and their appreciation of the strides that we’ve made with this program this year. When Tammy and I moved here a year ago with Drew, we really fell in love with Chapel Hill. It’s some place that we wanted to be.

"We made that decision after sitting out of football for over 18 months – that this is where we wanted to live and that this is where we wanted to coach. I’m just very appreciative of the opportunity to continue to build this football program and be here for a long time. And I am very thankful for them wanting us to stay here and be a part of it.”

What kind of statement does this make about the program?
“I think it’s a very positive statement for several reasons. I think – one – from the very first time that I met with all of the people at the University of North Carolina, their commitment to really, truly make football an important part of this University and to give us the opportunity to build a program that perennially every year has a chance to be in the top-15, top-10 programs in the country.

"It all started obviously with the opportunity to hire a terrific coaching staff. Then we gained momentum with an outstanding recruiting class and then obviously the momentum continues as the University makes a commitment to expand the stadium and upgrade the facilities and I think that this is just another piece of the puzzle that certainly will help us continue that momentum going forward at the conclusion of this season."

Did you talk to Arkansas about coaching there?
"I had not."

Did any schools contact you?
"They had not."

Is stadium expansion a part of this deal?
“It is not.”

How do you explain an extension after a losing season?
"Sometimes the success at the beginning of the rebuilding of a program is difficult to measure progress and momentum and moving the meter forward by wins and losses. We're very disappointed that we didn't win more football games so far this season, but I think the strides that have been made over the last 12 months have been enormous.

"Just by the competitive nature of the games, by the atmosphere that’s been created. It's a great atmosphere to come to Kenan on Saturday - we've had five consecutive sellouts, season tickets sales were extremely high at the beginning of the season, we had a great recruiting class and we're in the midst of having another fine recruiting class. I think all of the momentum is certainly moving in the right direction, and I used this analogy a couple of weeks ago just talking to our players, that a lot of times, like in the midst of 1-15 with the Dallas Cowboys, very few people watched that 1-15 team and realized that maybe they were looking at the infancy steps of a team and a program that was on the threshold of winning three Super Bowls.

"And by the same token, at the University of Miami in 1997, unfortunately we went through the only losing season that Miami had had since 1977. People probably looked at that and said, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s the state of the union of the program?’ and a lot of people didn’t realize that in just three years that the program would compete for three consecutive national championships. So how you look at, if you just take one slice of one season, and don’t step back and look at the big picture, you get maybe a totally different perspective."

Has this been a distraction?
"It was totally no distraction whatsoever. We focused every single week on each individual game. I think when two people really, truly want something, and they both want the same thing, it's very easy. I wanted to be here and Tammy and I wanted to be here. We made that decision a year ago, that Chapel Hill is our home. I am so thrilled to be the head coach of the University of North Carolina and I want to be here for a long time."

From Wired.com:
Nov. 22, 1963:
A Magic Bullet, a Grassy Knoll, an Enduring Mystery
By Tony Long

1963: President Kennedy is assassinated as his motorcade passes through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. Texas Gov. John Connally, riding in the same car as Kennedy, is seriously wounded.

The Warren Commission, set up by order of President Johnson to investigate the assassination, concluded that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, firing from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Although the report was widely accepted at first, skepticism grew as more information concerning possible conspiracies leaked out.

Oswald denied having anything to do with the shooting at all, let alone being part of any conspiracy, but he was killed -- and silenced -- two days after the assassination while in the custody of Dallas police.

That, coupled with the FBI's miserable handling of the initial investigation, did nothing to quell the suspicions of those who believed Kennedy's assassination was the work of (pick one, or more than one): the CIA, Johnson, the mob, Fidel Castro, the anti-Castro Cubans, J. Edgar Hoover.

Whether the shooter was acting alone or as part of a bigger conspiracy may never be known. Most of the available evidence, such as the Warren Commission Report, is inconclusive.

But the other big assertion -- that Oswald (or whoever the Book Depository gunman was) had help from shooters on the ground -- has never been adequately supported by hard evidence, either.

The so-called "grassy knoll" theory maintains that there was one, and possibly two, gunmen at ground level in Dealey Plaza. A number of eyewitnesses claimed to have heard gunfire coming from the grassy knoll, but nobody actually saw a gunman and no shells were ever recovered.

The Warren Report, basing its findings on the autopsy and forensics reports, concluded that two bullets struck Kennedy. They came from the same weapon, a bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano military rifle of Italian manufacture that was later recovered at the Book Depository. Three shots were fired, all from above and behind the target. The first missed. The second, the so-called "magic bullet," passed through Kennedy and tore into Gov. Connally, causing all his wounds. The third shot, the killing one, exploded into the right side of Kennedy’s head.

Conspiracy theorists point to the impossible trajectory of the magic bullet, and to the Zapruder film, which shows Kennedy’s head snapping backwards as the fatal third shot takes off the right side of his head, as evidence that shots came from more than one direction.

Forensics experts disagree, however, arguing that the described path of the second bullet, while improbable, was not impossible and that Kennedy's head snap at the moment of impact suggests a reaction to the first bullet striking him and not the second.

Forty-four years on and we're still not entirely sure what happened in Dallas that day. All we do know is that something changed in an instant and America has never been the same country since. It’s a dark line that grows only more pronounced as the day recedes into history.

From Backstreets.com:
Magic in the Night
11/19, BOSTON
Amid rumors that Danny Federici's health would prevent him from making the trip to Europe next week, Bruce and the E Street Band closed out their North American leg with a stunner of a show in Boston. And while we believe strongly in respecting his privacy, we simply can't talk about this night without talking about Danny. His talent, the band's love for the man, the crowd's love for the man -- all were there for all to see. This show was all about Dan Federici. The setlist (and oh, what a setlist) was clearly crafted with him in mind. There were the two tour premieres -- "This Hard Land" giving Danny a stretched-out solo spot, "Tenth Avenue Freeze-out" recalling the formation of the E Street Band, of which Danny was of course a founding member (easy to forget that only he, Clarence, and Garry go all the way back). And then the three songs from those Wild & Innocent early days -- reprising the "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)"/"E Street Shuffle" two-fer from Albany, and adding "Kitty's Back" for good measure -- all of which gave Danny chances to shine.

Federici's "Kitty" solo, at Bruce's urging, went on and on. "Sandy," too, was a spotlight moment, with Danny strapping on the accordion; bringing him front and center, Bruce called out, "Ladies and Gentlemen, winner of the Ted Mack Amateur Hour!" Tossed-off ad lib that it was, that remains a significant moment to me as I think back on the show today. It was a night of good humor. It was a night of musicianship, of history, of shared history, and of the joy of making music together in the present moment. It wasn't a maudlin night. There was no overt reference to any leave of absence, certainly no mention of any health issues. What do you do in the face of those things instead? You get up there and play. And they played their hearts out. "Darkness" was ablaze. The whacked-out funk coda of "E Street Shuffle" was a killer, with Max going nuts on the drums. "The Rising" was more determined than I've heard it since '03. "Tenth Avenue Freeze-out" was a blast, and wicked tight, even with a way-loose Peter Wolf up there shakin' it with Patti.

And what else do you do? If you're Nils, you spend as much time as you can up on the organ riser, playing shoulder-to-shoulder. If you're Bruce, you head over to Danny during the bows at show's end and throw your arm around him, with a look on your face that says "godammit, I know we said we weren't going to talk about this tonight, but you can't stop me from doing this," and you bring him to the center of the pack, and he takes a bow of his own. And if you're the crowd, you chant "Danny! Danny! Danny!" It was as spontaneous as the "E Street Band" chant at Madison Square Garden on July 1, 2000 -- with fewer dry eyes, I imagine, both onstage and off.
-Photograph by A.M. Saddler

From The New York Times: It's just like the go-go Nineties all over again: The NYT Op-Ed page is free, and Maureen Dowd is slicing and dicing a Clinton. Good times.

She’s No Morgenthau
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Most of the time, Barack Obama seems like he’s boxing in the wrong weight class. But Monday in Fort Dodge, Iowa, he delivered an unscripted jab that was a beaut.

At a news conference, the Illinois senator was asked about Hillary Clinton’s attack on his qualifications. Making an economic speech in Knoxville, Iowa, earlier that day, the New York senator had touted her own know-how, saying that “there is one job we can’t afford on-the-job training for — that’s the job of our next president.” Her aides confirmed that she was referring to Obama.

Pressed to respond, Obama offered a zinger feathered with amused disdain: “My understanding was that she wasn’t Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, so I don’t know exactly what experiences she’s claiming.”

Everybody laughed, including Obama.

It took him nine months, but he finally found the perfect pitch to make a trenchant point.

Her Democratic rivals had meekly gone along, accepting her self-portrait as a former co-president who gets to take credit for everything important Bill Clinton did in the ’90s. But she was not elected or appointed to a position that needed Senate confirmation. And the part of the Clinton administration that worked best — the economy, stupid — was run by Robert Rubin. Hillary did not show good judgment in her areas of influence — the legal fiefdom, health care and running oppo-campaigns against Bill’s galpals.

She went on some first lady jaunts and made a good speech at a U.N. women’s conference in Beijing. But she was certainly not, as her top Iowa supporter, former governor Tom Vilsack claimed yesterday on MSNBC, “the face of the administration in foreign affairs.”

She was a top adviser who had a Nixonian bent for secrecy and a knack for hard-core politicking. But if running a great war room qualified you for president, Carville and Stephanopoulos would be leading the pack.

Obama’s one-liner evoked something that rubs some people the wrong way about Hillary. Getting ahead through connections is common in life. But Hillary cloaks her nepotism in feminism.

“She hasn’t accomplished anything on her own since getting admitted to Yale Law,” wrote Joan Di Cola, a Boston lawyer, in a letter to The Wall Street Journal this week, adding: “She isn’t Dianne Feinstein, who spent years as mayor of San Francisco before becoming a senator, or Nancy Pelosi, who became Madam Speaker on the strength of her political abilities. All Hillary is, is Mrs. Clinton. She became a partner at the Rose Law Firm because of that, senator of New York because of that, and (heaven help us) she could become president because of that.”

The Clinton campaign in Iowa is in a panic. Obama has been closing the gap with women and her ginning up of gender has lost her male votes. Speaking around Iowa this week, Obama made the point that his exotic upbringing, family in Kenya and years as an outsider allow him to see the world with more understanding, and helped form his judgment about resisting the Iraq war.

“I spent four years living overseas when I was a child living in Southeast Asia,” he said. “If you don’t understand these cultures then it’s very hard for you to make good foreign policy decisions. Foreign policy is all about judgment.”

President Bush is not so enamored of Obama’s foreign policy judgment. He gave a plug to Hillary on ABC News last night, calling her a “formidable candidate,” even under pressure, who “understands the klieg lights.”

Asked by Charles Gibson about Obama’s offer to meet without preconditions with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea, W. declared it “odd foreign policy.”

Laura Bush also gave Hillary a sisterly — and dynastic — plug when she told the anchor that living in the White House and meeting people everywhere would be “very helpful” to a first lady trading up.

Though he did not mention the quick “color me experienced” trip Hillary took with some Senate colleagues to Iraq and Afghanistan just before she started running, Obama might have been thinking of it when he mocked Kabuki Congressional junkets:

“You get picked up at the airport by a state convoy and a security detail. They drive you over to the ambassador’s house and you get lunch. Then you go take a tour of some factory or some school. Children do a native dance.”

Hillary pounced, knowing that her chief rival’s foreign policy résumé is as slender as his physique, once more conjuring a childish Obama. She brazenly borrowed Republican talking points, even though she accused John Edwards of “throwing mud” that was “right out of the Republican playbook.”

“With all due respect,” she told a crowd in Iowa. “I don’t think living in a foreign country between the ages of 6 and 10 is foreign policy experience.”

But is living in the White House between the ages of 45 and 53 foreign policy experience?

From The Des Moines Register:
Renew devotion to freedom, limited government
By RON PAUL

On the fourth day of July in 1776, a small group of men boldly told the most powerful nation on Earth they were free. They declared that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights.

One then has to wonder how Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin would react to our current state of affairs.

We have lost sight of the simple premise that guided the actions of our founding fathers. That premise? The government that governs least is the government that governs best.

In our early history, it was understood that a free society embraced both civil liberties and economic liberties. But our government has significantly changed from one of limited power to one of pervasive intervention.

The practice of medicine is now a government-managed system, and very few Americans are happy with it. For decades, the U.S. health-care system was the envy of the world. Not coincidentally, there was far less government involvement in medicine during that time. Good medical care is delivered when the patient and the doctor are in charge.

We must also examine our foreign policy. Our troops are spread to the four corners of the Earth and stretched too thinly, meaning we may well have difficulty defending ourselves if we are ever threatened.

The situation in Iraq reminds us that we are to go to war only after a congressional declaration of war, as required by the Constitution. A coherent foreign policy is based on the understanding that America is best served by not interfering in the internal affairs of other nations.

We should also reclaim our national sovereignty by first securing our borders. By now, many have heard about the proposed "NAFTA Superhighway." This superhighway would connect Mexico, the United States and Canada, cutting a wide swath through the middle of Texas and through Kansas City. One proposed path takes the superhighway right through Iowa. This superhighway can be built only by sacrificing family farms through eminent domain.

Any movement toward a North American Union that erases the borders between the United States, Mexico and Canada would greatly diminish the ability of Americans to influence the laws under which they live.

Our economy is another victim of intense government intervention. The gold dollar of 1900 is now nothing more than a Federal Reserve note backed only by the promises of untrustworthy politicians and central bankers. No longer is there silver or gold available to protect the value of a steadily depreciating currency. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, middle- and working-class Americans have been victimized by a boom-and-bust monetary policy.

Abolishing the Federal Reserve will allow Congress to reassert its constitutional authority over monetary policy and put the American people ahead of special interests.

We can reclaim our heritage of freedom, but it will require commitment, work and a willingness to stand firm for our beliefs, refusing to compromise with those who would continue to push for more taxes, more spending and more government solutions.

Just as devotion to freedom and self-determination brought forth our great nation, a renewed adherence to those principles can move us to new heights.

U.S. Rep. RON PAUL of Texas is seeking the Republican nomination for president.

From The Tennessean:
Al Gore is like Jim Jones,
and we're drinking his Kool-Aid
By PHIL VALENTINE

Published: Sunday, 11/18/07

Professor Roger Gottlieb, a leading proponent of religious environmentalism, spoke at Vanderbilt University this past week. Gottlieb, the author of A Greener Faith, maintains that we are to be caretakers of our planet. I certainly agree.

I'm a big fan of clean air and clean water. But this postmodernist environmental movement Gottlieb finds himself in the middle of bears little resemblance to its forerunner, the ecology movement of the 1960s. Back then, Captain Kangaroo simply told us to never throw trash out the window. Soot-belching factories and straight-pipe waste into rivers were put under the microscope. The government ultimately responded with the EPA, formed in 1970 and tasked with cleaning up the land, air and water that had been abused for so long.

Now, schoolchildren scold their parents because they haven't traded in their incandescent lightbulbs for the depressing yellow light of compact fluorescent bulbs. Environmentalism, which used to simply include anyone concerned about pollution, somehow morphed into radical environmentalism. Gottlieb and others have taken up the banner of global warming under the guise of religious responsibility. Radical environmentalism has become a religion in and of itself. Its heaven is a utopia in which we all give up our modern conveniences and technological advancement for some austere, Amish-type lifestyle.

Al Gore, the Jim Jones of this new religious cult, preaches doom and gloom from his pettifogger pulpit, all the while living the lifestyle of an energy hog. He actually uses twice the amount of electricity in one month at his Nashville home than the average household uses in an entire year. He has two homes in Tennessee, one in Virginia, at least. He flies all over the world on his Magical Hysteria Tour, sucking down resources and belching out tons of carbon, all to tell us we need to conserve. We're trying to make ends meet just to afford gas in our cars while Al Gore has a carbon footprint the size of Sasquatch. And no one seems to care.

The Branch Algorians read from the Gospel of Al and never question a word. The movement's devil is carbon dioxide, an essential component of photosynthesis and the substance we all exhale with every breath. Understand this: CO2 is not a pollutant. However, Gore and the radical environmentalists have been quite successful in convincing people that smog and CO2 are the same. They are not. CO2 has nothing whatsoever to do with the smog or haze we see over our cities. There is absolutely no evidence that CO2 has anything to do with any kind of warming.

The Gore Kool-Aid drinkers will point to "all these scientists" but can't give you one link between CO2 and any kind of climate change. As the founder of The Weather Channel, John Coleman, recently put it, global warming is the greatest scam in history.

When Professor Gottlieb is not writing a guilt-trip treatise on the environment, he's writing about Marxism and how the Soviets just didn't quite get it right.

You see, global warming is the perfect template for Marxism because it's the great equalizer. The wealthier a nation, the more CO2 it produces. To atone for its sins, it must pay carbon offsets. In other words, the producing nations pay the non-producing or under-producing nations in cash for the sin of emitting a harmless gas. It's beautiful.

The global warming movement is a way to not just confiscate money and wealth from the producers, but because of their guilt, they gladly hand it over. If Karl Marx were still alive, he'd be beaming with pride.

From chicagotribune.com:
Our history says we can't bury Bonds
By John Kass

November 18, 2007

Just about every commentator in America is busy whomping Barry Bonds against a telephone pole as if he were a rabid cat, and I don't mind joining in.

Bonds certainly deserves his media whomping. He's a heretic all but expelled from the Church of Baseball and a colossal, race card-playing jerk. Nobody believes he's not a steroid abuser and a liar who helped destroy the credibility of Major League Baseball and its sacred records. Bonds' own home-run records have five asterisks next to them now, not just one.

They stand for four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice in baseball's steroid scandal.

Yet as we're whomping him for his arrogance, shouldn't our Republican and Democratic presidential candidates step in and defend Bonds from the rest of us?

Because if you don't think Barry Bonds is part of the presidential campaign, think again.

Certainly, the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, are compelled to defend Bonds from the Democratic side, since she wants to be co-president and he hopes to return to the White House as First Laddie. Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson should pick up the cudgel from the Republican side. Let's not forget President Bush, who commuted the sentence of a convicted Republican perjurer.

Each has an obligation to defend Bonds, based on what's come out of their own mouths in the past. And that goes for all their media jesters, their pet columnists, editorial writers, cable TV screamers and partisan operatives.

White politicians defended white politicians who were busted on perjury and obstruction of justice. Democrats defended former President Clinton. Republicans defended former White House adviser I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Their jesters shook their angry rattles and barked like dogs, defending their masters, attacking their foes.

So how can they ignore a black man accused of the same crime? What's the difference, really? Is it because the suits were white and political, and Bonds is black and wore a uniform, and dared violate something so sacred as professional baseball?

I love baseball, and I loathe Bonds. But baseball isn't the Oval Office and Democratic excuses for being sexually satisfied by an intern while you're on the phone with a congressman talking about sending American troops to the Balkans. Baseball isn't a list of names of foreign operatives that can be linked to a CIA officer outed only because the Republican Bush administration didn't like her husband's politics. Baseball isn't sacred. It's a professional sport. Bookies make a living on it.

This is what happens when we abandon the principle that no one is above the law, and exchange it for the warm comforts of partisanship. It's something many Democrats did years ago for the Clintons. They prattled on that lying under oath was OK as long as it involved sex. It wasn't. It was lying under oath.

It's something many Republicans did recently for the Bush administration, saying it was OK for "Scooter" Libby to lie under oath because he wasn't the original leaker in the Valerie Plame affair. It wasn't OK. It was lying under oath.

So, by rights, and by their own words, or by their slick avoidance of the issue, every Democratic and Republican candidate for president should join a Save Barry Bonds news conference, a bipartisan gathering, on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, flanked by their eager media jesters.

Bill Clinton can hold his Bible, and wave it at the TV cameras, the way he did when he was under pressure for lying under oath. He can even bite his lip and hug an intern when nobody's looking. Hillary can flip into her terrifying Blanche Dubois accent and talk about Bonds being the victim of a vast Right-Wing conspiracy, the same one that put turtles on the top of fence posts when Bill faced his perjury heat.

Romney and Thompson can stand up and accuse the federal prosecutors of zealotry and politics, the way they did when Libby was convicted. Romney, the polished mannequin, should have no trouble flip-flopping. He's had much practice and never messes up his hair.

Thompson can set out his country cracker barrel, and jaw on about how "flies always get bigger in the summertime," as he does his impression of that character on the old "Green Acres" TV show. The character was called Mr. Haney, the country salesman.

Democratic and Republican candidates should stand at the Barry Bonds rally in front of a banner with a simple slogan:

"Barry Bonds was only lying about baseball."

You don't like that? Sorry. But if a president can do it, and a senior White House aide can do it, logic dictates that a baseball player can do it. Naturally, it follows that you can do it, and I can do it. Everybody can lie under oath now, can't we? And what happens to the rule of law then?

That's the problem with principle. Once politicians use it to wipe the dirt off their friends, once we cheer them on in their muddy wiping, we can't very well put it back in the box and pretend it's clean.

It's not clean as a baseball. And it's not as white.

From The OC Register:
World should give thanks for America
MARK STEYN

Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays.

Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: In Continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from Dec. 22 to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the rich diversity of our world.

But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. "What's it about?" an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. "Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?"

Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for.

Europeans think of this country as "the New World" in part because it has an eternal newness, which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod?

And just when you think you're on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress "Gimme a cuppa joe" and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato.

Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a Kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!

But Americans aren't novelty junkies on the important things. The New World is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany's constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy's only to the 1940s, and Belgium's goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it's not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France's, Germany's, Italy's or Spain's constitution, it's older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent's governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they're so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas – communism, fascism, European Union.

If you're going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.

Even in a supposedly 50/50 nation, you're struck by the assumed stability underpinning even fundamental disputes. If you go into a bookstore, the display shelves offer a smorgasbord of leftist anti-Bush tracts claiming that he and Cheney have trashed, mangled, gutted, raped and tortured, sliced 'n' diced the Constitution, put it in a cement overcoat and lowered it into the East River. Yet even this argument presupposes a shared veneration for tradition unknown to most Western political cultures: When Tony Blair wanted to abolish, in effect, the upper house of the national legislature, he just got on and did it.

I don't believe the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion or gay marriage or a zillion other things the Left claims to detect emanating from the penumbra, but I find it sweetly touching that in America even political radicalism has to be framed as an appeal to constitutional tradition from the powdered-wig era.

In Europe, by contrast, one reason why there's no politically significant pro-life movement is because, in a world where constitutions have the life expectancy of an Oldsmobile, great questions are just seen as part of the general tide, the way things are going, no sense trying to fight it. And, by the time you realize you have to, the tide's usually up to your neck.

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation-states. Europeans, because they've been so inept at exercising it, no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation-state underpins, in turn, Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the United Nations.

But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens – a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan – the United States can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply.

Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in – shoring up Afghanistan's fledgling post-Taliban democracy – most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base.

If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It's not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.

That said, Thanksgiving isn't about the big geopolitical picture, but about the blessings closer to home. Last week, the state of Oklahoma celebrated its centennial, accompanied by rousing performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein's eponymous anthem:

"We know we belong to the land

And the land we belong to is grand!"

Which isn't a bad theme song for the first Thanksgiving, either.

Three hundred and 14 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker's dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.

Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.

©MARK STEYN