Mark Steyn:
Your car can't run on Congress' hot air

I was watching the Big Oil execs testifying before Congress. That was my first mistake. If memory serves, there was lesbian mud wrestling over on Channel 137, and on the whole that's less rigged. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz knew the routine: "I can't say that there is evidence that you are manipulating the price, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not."

Had I been in the hapless oil man's expensive shoes, I'd have answered, "Hey, you first. I can't say that there is evidence that you're sleeping with barnyard animals, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not. Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence and prima facie evidence, lady? Do I have to file a U.N. complaint in Geneva that the House of Representatives is in breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?"

But that's why I don't get asked to testify before Congress. So instead the Big Oil guy oozed as oleaginous as his product before the grand panjandrums of the House Subcommittee on Televised Posturing, and then they went off and passed 324-82 the so-called NOPEC bill. The NOPEC bill is, in effect, a suit against OPEC, which, if I recall correctly, stands for the Oil Price-Exploiting Club. "No War For Oil!," as the bumper stickers say. But a massive suit for oil – now that's the American way.

"It shall be illegal and a violation of this Act," declared the House of Representatives, "to limit the production or distribution of oil, natural gas, or any other petroleum product ... or to otherwise take any action in restraint of trade for oil, natural gas or any petroleum product when such action, combination, or collective action has a direct, substantial, and reasonably foreseeable effect on the market, supply, price or distribution of oil, natural gas or other petroleum product in the United States."

Er, OK. But, before we start suing distant sheikhs in exotic lands for violating the NOPEC act, why don't we start by suing Congress? After all, who "limits the production or distribution of oil" right here in the United States by declaring that there'll be no drilling in the Gulf of Florida or the Arctic National Mosquito Refuge? As Rep. Wasserman Schultz herself told Neil Cavuto on Fox News, "We can't drill our way out of this problem."

Well, maybe not. But maybe we could drill our way back to $3.25 a gallon. More to the point, if the House of Representatives has now declared it "illegal" for the government of Saudi Arabia to restrict oil production, why is it still legal for the government of the United States to restrict oil production? In fact, the government of the United States restricts pretty much every form of energy production other than the bizarre fetish du jour of federally mandated ethanol production.

Nuclear energy?

Whoa, no, remember Three Mile Island? (OK, nobody does, but kids and anyone under late middle age, you can look it up in your grandparents' school books.)

Coal?

Whoa, no, man, there go our carbon credits.

OK, how about if we all go back to the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, and start criss-crossing the country on wood-fired trains?

Are you nuts? Think of the clear-cutting. We can't have logging in environmentally sensitive areas such as forests.

Rep. Wasserman Schultz believes in "alternative energy," which means not nuclear (like the French) but solar and wind power. At the moment, solar energy accounts for approximately 0.1 percent of U.S. electricity production, most of which is for devices that heat swimming pools. So if there was a tenfold increase in swimming pool construction you might be able to get it up to 1 percent, but the only way all those homeowners would be able to afford to build their new swimming pools is through the kinds of economic activity that depend on oil, gas and other forms of federally prohibited energy.

So, instead, Congress hauls Big Oil execs in for the dinner-theatre version of a Soviet show trial and then passes irrelevant poseur legislation like the NOPEC bill. The NOPEC bill is really the NO PECS bill – a waste of photocopier paper passed by what C.S. Lewis called "men without chests."

The New Yorker ran a big piece the other day called "The Fall Of Conservatism." Indeed. This November isn't going to be pleasant for those of us of a right-wing bent. Many conservative voices in the media say: This is the way it is, get used to it. Voters want the government to "fix" health care and "fix" gas prices and "fix" the environment and, if all you're offering is the virtues of small government, you too sound small – and mean and uncaring about the real issues in real people's real lives. Standing athwart history yelling "Stop!" was a cute line from William F. Buckley, but it's not a practical position for a political party that wishes to stay in business. "The fact of change is the great fact of human life," writes my National Review colleague David Frum in "Comeback," his thoughtful critique of the conservative movement.

Frum is right. Change is a constant. You're a big railroad baron,and things are going swell, and then someone invents the horseless carriage and a big metal bird that holds hundreds of people and you never saw it coming – because you thought you were in the train business rather than in the transportation business. That kind of change is the great exhilarating rhythm of American life.

But government "change," Obama change, NOPEC change is nothing to do with that. In fact, it obstructs real dynamic change. On energy, on environmentalism, on health care, government "change" generally does nothing more than set in motion the next crisis that the next change-peddling pol has to pledge to address.

So we complain about $4-a-gallon gas, and our leaders respond with showboating legislation like NOPEC and feel-good environmental regulatory overkill like putting the polar bear on the endangered-species list, while ensuring that we'll continue to bankroll every radical mosque and madrassah on the planet. In Britain, new "green taxes" do nothing to "save" the planet, but they are estimated to cost the average family about $6,000 a year. That's change you can believe in.

©MARK STEYN

From National Review Online:
Barack Clinton Obama
What's “change” is old again.
By Peter Wehner

Barack Obama is increasingly embodying the “old politics” he says he will overturn.

The most recent example is his campaign’s effort to distance Obama from comments he made last July. When asked if he would be willing to meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea “without precondition” during the first year of his administration, Obama famously answered, “I would.” It’s a commitment he repeated throughout the Democratic primary.

But now Obama’s top advisers like Tom Daschle are saying, “I would not say that we would meet unconditionally. Of course, there are conditions that we [would] involve in preparation in getting ready for the diplomacy. . . . ‘Without precondition’ simply means we wouldn’t put obstacles in the way of discussing the differences between us. That’s really what they’re saying, what Barack is saying.” And Obama himself insisted that he didn’t necessarily have President Ahmadinejad in mind when he said he’d meet with the leader of Iran — and, anyway, “this obsession with Ahmadinejad is an example of us losing track of what’s important.”

This explanation is Clintonian. As Robert Novak helpfully pointed out in his column on Thursday, last September Obama was asked at a press conference whether he still would meet with Ahmadinejad. Obama replied, “Yeah . . . I find many of President Ahmadinejad’s statements odious. . . . But we should never fear to negotiate.” And in November, on NBC’s Meet the Press, Obama defended “a conversation with somebody like Ahmadinejad.”

Rather than admit he made a mistake, however, Obama now blames us for our “obsession” with Ahmadinejad. And as is so often the case, any criticism of Obama, on any grounds, is causing us to “lose track of what’s important.” One senses that Obama and his supporters, while happy to pound his opponents, believe criticism of him is indecorous and even illegitimate.

There is yet more in the Obama oeuvre of old politics.

In October 2007, Obama and not his critics made the American flag pin on his lapel an issue by saying it had become a “substitute” for “true patriotism.” He proudly declared, ”I won’t wear that pin on my chest.” That pledge has apparently become inoperative. Obama has been wearing the American flag pin on his lapel at campaign events. Apparently it’s no longer a substitute for “true patriotism.”

In his speech on race, Obama said “I can no more disown [the Reverend Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” But after Wright’s comments a few weeks later at the National Press Club, the Reverend Wright found himself not only disowned but tossed under the bus — not so much because of Wright’s critical comments about America but because of his critical comments about Obama.

Senator Obama has claimed as president he’ll be able to rise above partisan politics — yet he has done very little to work with Republicans on major, controversial issues. Obama is not only the most liberal person in the Senate but also one of the most reliable Democratic votes. He has voted against such outstanding Supreme Court nominees as John Roberts and Samuel Alito. No person who is serious about acting in a “post-partisan” manner would have cast those votes or acted the way Obama has during his Senate career.

Obama repeatedly speaks about the corrupting influence lobbyists have on politicians — yet he seems rather less vocal about his close association with Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who is on trial on 24 counts of corruption. Rezko was among the first people to support Obama’s maiden campaign, was a key fundraiser for all of Obama’s campaigns, and Rezko and his wife helped the Obamas buy their house by purchasing the lot next door.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, in June 2005 Obama and Rezko purchased adjoining parcels. Obama paid $1.65 million for a home while Rezko paid $625,000 for the adjacent, undeveloped lot. Both closed on their properties on the same day (the Obama’s were able to purchase their parcel for $300,000 less than the asking price while Rita Rezko, the wife of Tony Rezko, paid the full price). And in January 2006, Obama paid Rezko $104,500 for portions of his land. The transaction occurred at a time when it was widely known that Rezko was under investigation. And according to ABC News, Rezko contributed more than $120,000 to Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign — much of it at a time when Rezko was the target of an FBI investigation. “It surprised me that late in the game [Obama] continued to take contributions from somebody who was under a rather dark cloud in the state,” according to Cynthia Canary of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, a group that has worked closely with Obama and supported his legislative efforts.

* * * *

Is Barack Obama’s record on these matters unprecedented for a politician? No. Has he acted in ways that are dishonorable or that call into question his basic integrity? Not in my judgment. But they matter because they go to the core of his campaign, which is to present Obama as a figure who is different, and better, than those who have come before him. He is a man who will bring “change” to Washington, cast aside the “old politics,” and heal deep divisions. We are led to believe that he is a transcendent figure, more high-minded and unstained than, well, just about anyone in American politics.

But reality is now shattering the myth. Obama turns out to be a Chicago politician — highly ambitious, extremely talented, and neither untainted nor uncompromised. Maybe it’s time for the national media, many of whom (like Newsweek and MSNBC, for starters) are enraptured by Obama, to acquaint themselves with the real man. Is that too much to ask when selecting our next president?

— Peter Wehner, former deputy assistant to the president, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

From Human Events:
Post-Christian America

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted 05/23/2008 ET

"A Victory for Equality and Justice," blared the headline above the editorial. "Momentous," "historic," "a major victory for civil rights," "a scrupulously fair ruling based on law, precedents and common sense."

This was the ecstatic reaction of The New York Times to the California Supreme Court's declaration that homosexuals have a right to marry and have their unions recognized as marriages.

Now there may be hugging around the newsroom at the Times, where one senior writer said, a few years back, three-fourths of the folks who make up the front page are gay. But this is just another streetlight on America's darkening path to perdition as a society and republic.

To declare that homosexuals can marry is patently absurd. The very definition of marriage is the union of a man and woman, first and foremost, for the procreation of children.

To say two men who live together and engage in sex can be married renders the idea and ideal of marriage meaningless. The court may declare it, but it cannot redefine an institution that nature and nature's God have already defined. As they say in Texas, you can put lipstick and earrings on a pig, and call her Peggy Sue, but it's still a pig.

"What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder," Christ taught. Through the Old Testament and into the epistles of St. Paul, homosexual sodomy is an abomination leading to personal destruction and damnation, one of the five sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance. How, then, can four judges declare it to be integral to the sacrament of marriage?

Well, we don't believe all that rot, comes the reply.

Fine, but Christianity is the cornerstone of Western Civilization. Since the fall of Rome to our own time, nations have believed and acted on the belief that marriage and traditional families are the cinderblocks on which a society must be built. When these cinderblocks crumble, the society collapses. The truth has been born out in our own time.

With a third of all children born out of wedlock -- 50 percent of all Hispanic kids, 70 percent of black kids -- and half of all marriages ending in divorce, the social indicators have recorded explosions -- in crime, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, dropout rates, gang membership, and jail and prison populations.

The correlation between prison inmates and broken homes, or homes never created, is absolute. What armies of social scientists with six-figure salaries today tell us, 12-year-olds knew 50 years ago.

Setting aside the risibility of the court's conduct, consider what it says about us as a democratic republic.

We are supposed to be a self-governing people. "Here, sir, the people rule." Elected representatives write our laws.

Yet, no Congress or state legislature ever voted to declare homosexual unions a marriage. The idea has everywhere been rejected. Wherever it has been on the ballot, same-sex marriage has been voted down. In the 13 states where it was on the ballot in 2004, it was defeated by 58 percent to 85 percent -- the last figure rolled up in Mississippi, where black Christian pastors told their flocks to go out and vote down the abomination.

Californians have consistently expressed their opposition and voted against recognizing the idea of homosexual marriages and granting the benefits of married couples to same-sex unions. What is bigotry at the Times is common sense to most Americans.

Homosexual marriage is not in the California constitution, else someone would have discovered it in 160 years. Where, then, did the state Supreme Court find this was a right?

Four of seven justices unearthed this right by consulting what Orwell called their "smelly little orthodoxies." They then decided to overturn the expressed will of the voters, declare their opinion law and order the state of California to begin recognizing homosexual unions as marriages. And they did it because they know the Times types will hail them as the newest Earl Warrens.

Not long ago, a governor of California would have laughed at the court and told the justices to go surfing, and ordered state officials not to issue the marriage licenses. The voters would have put the names of the four justices on the ballot in November and thrown them off the court, as they did Chief Justice Rose Bird, a generation ago.

We used to have executives and legislators like that.

Thomas Jefferson came into office and declared the Alien and Sedition Acts null and void, released all editors from jail, and refused to prosecute any more or to enforce the law. Andrew Jackson said of the great chief justice: "John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it."

In 2004, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom handed out marriage licenses to thousands of homosexuals. Today, conservative mayors in California, if there are any, might engage in similar civil disobedience against this latest judicial usurpation of the legislative power that belongs to elected representatives and the people.

What's sauce for the goose, etc.

From www.townhall.com:
Cal Thomas: God Bless Ted Kennedy

Thursday, May 22, 2008

These days, people on "one side" of the political spectrum are not supposed to cooperate, much less have a personal relationship with anyone on the "other side." Siding with "the enemy" can get you branded a compromiser, a sellout, or fool. While it is true that on too many occasions, conservatives have had their ideological pockets picked by liberals whose favor they curried, that is no excuse for hating people because of their political beliefs.

In the case of my 25-year relationship with Sen. Edward Kennedy, our ideological pockets have remained secure, but our friendship has been something I have treasured.

It began in 1983 when I received a call from a Washington Post reporter. I was working for the Moral Majority at the time and a computer had spit out a membership card for Sen. Kennedy and then inadvertently sent it to him. The reporter asked if I wanted the card back. "No," I said. "We don't believe anyone is beyond redemption. In fact, I hope Sen. Kennedy comes and speaks at Liberty Baptist College (now Liberty University)," the school founded by the late Jerry Falwell.

A few days later, I received a call from Kennedy's chief of staff. "The senator accepts your invitation." I was stunned and so was Falwell, but Kennedy came and was well received. He spoke on faith, truth and tolerance and his remarks are as relevant today as they were when he uttered them. (See and read them here).

While some might disagree on the way he applies such notions to the liberal policies in which he believes; few would contest most of the principles he articulated that night.

Kennedy said: "I am an American and a Catholic; I love my country and treasure my faith. But I do not assume that my conception of patriotism or policy is invariably correct, or that my convictions about religion should command any greater respect than any other faith in this pluralistic society."

What student or advocate of the First Amendment would disagree with that? Is that not what the Founders had in mind when they prohibited a federally established religion while simultaneously guaranteeing its free exercise? Kennedy continued, "When people agree on public policy, they ought to be able to work together, even while they worship in diverse ways. For truly, we are all yoked together as Americans, and the yoke is the happy one of individual freedom and mutual respect."

Again, not bad. He added: "Separation of church and state cannot mean an absolute separation between moral principles and political power. The challenge today is to recall the origin of the principle, to define its purpose, and refine its application to the politics of the present."
The issues outlined in Kennedy's speech still resonate today, except now it is the Democratic presidential candidates who are talking more about faith and public policy, not the Republican candidate.

Getting to know Sen. Kennedy that night and being with him on many subsequent occasions, helped me understand him on a level far different from TV images and direct-mail appeals that ask for $25 dollars to keep him from doing things that will "ruin" America (the Left sent out similar appeals for money to save America from my side).

I came to see Sen. Kennedy not as a symbol, but as a fellow human being who does not get up in the morning seeking ways to harm the country. I know of things he has done for the poor and homeless on his own time and in his own way without a press release or a desire for public approval. I know of other hurts and concerns about which I would never speak.

In our poisoned political atmosphere, there are few friendships like this, at least few anyone can speak of publicly for fear of political ruin. It ought to be a privilege (it is certainly a command) for my conservative Christian friends to pray for Sen. Kennedy that he might be healed and restored to health. It is certainly mine and I don't care who on "my side" knows it.

Bush Plays the Hitler Card
by Patrick J. Buchanan

"A little learning is a dangerous thing," wrote Alexander Pope.

Daily, our 43rd president testifies to Pope's point.

Addressing the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel's birth, Bush said those who say we should negotiate with Iran or Hamas are like the fools who said we should negotiate with Adolf Hitler.

"As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement. ..."

Again, Bush has made a hash of history.

Appeasement is the name given to what Neville Chamberlain did at Munich in September 1938. Rather than fight Germany in another great war -- to keep 3.5 million Germans under a Czech rule they despised -- he agreed to their peaceful transfer to German rule. With these Germans went the lands their ancestors had lived upon for centuries, German Bohemia, or the Sudetenland.

Chamberlain's negotiated deal with Hitler averted a European war -- at the expense of the Czech nation. That was appeasement.

German tanks, however, did not roll into Poland until a year later, Sept. 1, 1939. Why did the tanks roll? Because Poland refused to negotiate over Danzig, a Baltic port of 350,000 that was 95 percent German and had been taken from Germany at the Paris peace conference of 1919, in violation of Wilson's 14 Points and his principle of self-determination.

Hitler had not wanted war with Poland. He had wanted an alliance with Poland in his anti-Comintern pact against Joseph Stalin.

But the Poles refused to negotiate. Why? Because they were a proud, defiant, heroic people and because Neville Chamberlain had insanely given an unsolicited war guarantee to Poland. If Hitler invaded, Chamberlain told the Poles, Britain would declare war on Germany.

From March to August 1939, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. But the Poles, confident in their British war guarantee, refused. So, Hitler cut his deal with Stalin, and the two invaded and divided Poland.

The cost of the war that came of a refusal to negotiate Danzig was millions of Polish dead, the Katyn massacre, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, the annihilation of the Home Army in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and 50 years of Nazi and Stalinist occupation, barbarism and terror.

In that same speech to the Knesset, Bush dismissed the idea we could ever successfully negotiate with Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them that they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before."

But did not Ronald Reagan's negotiations with the Evil Empire, as he rebuilt America's military might, bear fruit in a reversal of Moscow's imperial policy and an end to the Cold War?

Richard Nixon went to China and toasted the greatest mass murderer of them all, Mao Zedong, when Maoists were conducting a nationwide purge: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Yet, Nixon ended a quarter century of implacable U.S.-Chinese hostility. Was Nixon's trip to China useless?

Three years after Nikita Khrushchev drowned the Hungarian revolution in blood, Ike had him up to Camp David. John Kennedy ended the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, by negotiating with that same Butcher of Budapest.

Were Ike, JFK and Nixon all deluded fools? For the dictators they negotiated with -- Khrushchev and Mao -- were far greater mass murderers and enemies of America than is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Bush's father negotiated with Syria's Hafez al-Assad, the Butcher of Hama, and made him an American ally in the Gulf War.

Was President Bush's father a deluded fool?

The president's own diplomats negotiated an end to the nuclear program of Col. Gadhafi, who was responsible for the air massacre of American school kids over Lockerbie.

Bush's own diplomats are negotiating with Kim Jong-il's North Korea, a state sponsor of terror. Ambassador Ryan Crocker is negotiating with Iranians in Baghdad. Egypt is negotiating on behalf of Israel with Hamas to retrieve a captured Israeli soldier. Are they all deluded fools?

Bush refused to talk to Yasser Arafat because he was a terrorist. But four Israeli prime ministers negotiated with Arafat. Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin shared a Nobel Prize with him. "Bibi" Netanyahu ceded Hebron to him. Ehud Olmert offered him 95 percent of the West Bank.

Were all four Israeli leaders deluded fools?

True, the Chamberlain-Hitler summit at Munich proved a disaster, as did the FDR-Churchill-Stalin summits at Tehran and Yalta, and the JFK-Khrushchev summit in Vienna. But JFK's diplomacy in the missile crisis may have averted a nuclear war. And Eisenhower, Nixon, Gerald Ford and Reagan all met with foreign dictators with blood on their hands, without loss to America, and sometimes with impressive gains.

What has Bush's refusal to talk to Hamas, Hezbollah, Damascus and Tehran done to make either Israel or America more secure?

From The Duke Chronicle:
Summa cum loony
By: Kristin Butler

Posted: 5/15/08

It seems anyone can get a college degree these days-especially if they go to North Carolina Central University.

Standards of integrity there have long been dismal: This is, after all, the school that gave violent felon Solomon Burnette a diploma in 2007. Burnette, you may recall, robbed two Duke students at gunpoint in 1997.

After finishing a 13-month prison sentence, he had the audacity not only to enroll in Arabic classes on our campus in April 2007; Burnette also penned a column I and many others interpreted as inciting physical violence against white Dukies in his student newspaper.

Unfortunately, however, 2008 marks a new low... even for NCCU.

Just this month, the university graduated Crystal Mangum, the drug-addled, mentally unstable prostitute who falsely accused three lacrosse players of raping her two years ago.

Mangum is an accomplished liar and criminal, and a credible school shouldn't have allowed her within 50 miles of its graduation ceremony.

Indeed, this is a woman who has maintained for more than two years that 20, five, and finally three Duke lacrosse players violated her orally, vaginally and anally in a bathroom the size of a broom closet. In her final version of the "assault," Mangum claimed this was possible because she was magically suspended in midair (by hooks and pulleys, perhaps?) as the three men attacked her.

In reality, Mangum-who arrived at the lacrosse players' party so drunk and high she could barely stand-may have feared another psychiatric commitment the morning of March 14, 2006, and so she accused three men of rape to garner sympathy.

As an aside, if anyone at NCCU still believes her story, I would invite them to review court records indicating Mangum had DNA from two unidentified men in her rectum; two more in her pubic region; one man in her vagina; and four to five men on her panties-none of whom were lacrosse players (a physical impossibility because Mangum said her attackers wore no condoms during the "rape").

And although her bold-faced lies ruined three young men's lives, they were a jackpot for Mangum: Within days, she was already using the "assault" to hustle pain meds from emergency room doctors, claiming "excruciating pain from the... beating." Sensing a lucrative civil settlement on the horizon, Mangum even bragged to a security guard at her strip club that she was "going to get paid by the white boys."

Unsurprisingly, those actions constitute flagrant violations of NCCU's honor code, which prohibits: "lewd, indecent or obscene conduct (whether public or private)"; "violation of the alcohol policy, including binge drinking, use or personal possession of alcoholic beverages by undergraduate students;" and the real doozie, "knowingly making in public a false [oral or] written or printed statement with the intent to deceive and/or mislead or injure the character or reputation of another."

NCCU also touts itself as a "drug-free academic community," a claim that's hard to take seriously when one of the college's own students admits to turning tricks and getting high four or five nights per week. In fact, Mangum had overdosed on flexeril and booze when she was first picked up by police the night of March 14.

And that's what makes Mangum's latest milestone so infuriating: It demeans the accomplishments of thousands of hard-working, law-abiding Eagles who also graduated this May.

A Duke student committing even a fraction of those crimes would have been summarily expelled; being accused of them would be enough for an emergency suspension.

Because of the university's blatant refusal to enforce its own rules, I will never again take an NCCU degree seriously, and neither should any other self-respecting Dukie. NCCU's "seal of approval" no longer guarantees good character, and it's just too hard to tell the thugs and liars (like Burnette and Mangum) apart from the high-performing majority.

Now to be fair, NCCU is hardly the first public institution to give Mangum a pass. Durham police, prosecutors and even Attorney General Roy Cooper all opted not to indict her for filing false police reports, reasoning that she was too crazy to stand trial. (No word yet on how many legally insane people maintain a 3.0 GPA at a nationally accredited university.)

Still, NCCU's actions are morally bankrupt and far eneath the dignity of a nationally recognzed university. The damage that NCCU has done to its reputation is very serious, and it insults thousands of upstanding alumni.

With three kids, a nasty drug habit and psychiatric and criminal histories longer than my arm, Crystal Mangum probably needs all the good fortune she can get. But until she owns up to her malicious lies, she deserves no special favors-least of all from a publicly funded university.

Crystal Mangum is not a victim, and her actions meant two other former members of the Class of 2008 (their names are Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty, for the record) didn't graduate last weekend. Mangum's lies stole a year of their college careers, and it makes me sick to think of her celebrating her achievement while they (along with millions of legitimate rape victims harmed by her dishonesty) struggle to piece their lives back together.

Crystal Mangum may now have a signed and sealed police psychology degree, but she'll always be Public Enemy No. 1 in my book.

Kristin Butler, Trinity '08, is a former Chronicle columnist.

Obama's Unique Appeasement Style
By Caroline Glick

Spin doctors were relabeled "strategists" in the early 1990s. And as Mark Steyn wrote last week in National Review, "Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies."

The latest attitude to be flouted as policy is indignation. Specifically, Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama's furious indignation at President George W. Bush's address before the Knesset last week where he celebrated Israel's 60th anniversary and extolled the US's alliance with Israel. Beyond praising the Jewish people's 4,000 year-old devotion to the Land of Israel and to liberty, Bush used the speech to warn against those who think that Iran and its terror proxies can simply be wished away through appeasement.

As the president put it, "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided. We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

To Israeli ears, Bush's words were uncontroversial. Israel is beset by enemies who daily call for its physical annihilation and while doing so, build and support terror forces who attack Israel. For most Israelis, the notion that these enemies can be appeased is absurd and deeply offensive.

The only strong reaction that Bush's remarks provoked in Israel was relief. In spite of the Bush administration's own participation in the six-party talks with North Korea, its support for the EU-3's feckless discussions with the mullahs, its paralysis in the face of Hizbullah's takeover of Lebanon, and its support for the establishment of a Palestinian state run by Fatah terrorists dedicated to Israel's destruction, at the very least, standing before the Knesset, Bush effectively pledged not to allow Iran to acquire the means to conduct a new Holocaust.

From an Israeli vantage point then, it was shocking to see that immediately after Bush stepped down from the rostrum, Obama and his Democratic supporters began pillorying him for his remarks. Most distressing is what Obama's reaction said about the Democratic presidential hopeful.

OBAMA'S RESPONSE to Bush's speech was an effective acknowledgement that appeasing Iran and other terror sponsors is a defining feature of his campaign and of his political persona. As far as he is concerned, an attack against appeasement is an attack against Obama.

Obama and his supporters argue that seeking to ease Iranian belligerence by conducting negotiations and offering military, technological, military and financial concessions to the likes of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who refers to Israel as pestilence, daily threatens the Jewish state with destruction, and calls for the eradication of the US while claiming to be divinely instructed by a seven-year-old imam who went missing 1100 years ago is not appeasement. Indeed, Obama claims that conducting direct face-to-face negotiations with the likes of Ahmadinejad is the right way to be "tough."

But is this true? Obama recalls that US presidents have often conducted negotiations with their country's enemies and done so to the US's advantage. And this is true enough. President John F. Kennedy essentially appeased the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when he offered to remove US nuclear warheads from Turkey in exchange for the removal of Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba.

But there are many differences between what Kennedy did and what Obama is proposing. Kennedy's offer to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was made secretly. And the terms of the deal stipulated that if its existence was revealed, the US offer would be cancelled. More importantly, Khrushchev was open to a deal and was ready to give up the Cuban nuclear program. And - most importantly of all - Kennedy deployed military forces and went to the brink of war to make the alternatives to negotiation credible.

Obama has repeatedly stated that unlike Kennedy, if he is elected president, he will not openly threaten war while being open to private talks. Instead, Obama intends to surrender the war option while conducting direct, public negotiations with the mullahs. So from the very beginning, he wants to undermine US credibility while giving Ahmadinejad and his murderous ilk the legitimacy that Kennedy refused to give Khrushchev.

Far from exerting force to strengthen his diplomatic position, Obama has pledged to withdraw US forces from Iraq where they are fighting Iranian proxies, cut military spending and shrink the size of the US nuclear arsenal.

SINCE THE definition of appeasement is to reward others for their bad behavior, and since the US has refused for 29 years to reward the Iranians for their bad behavior by having presidential summits with Iranian leaders, Obama's pledge represents a massive act of appeasement. And since it is Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program that would bring a President Barack Obama to the table, his policy would invite nuclear blackmail by other countries by signaling to them that the US rewards nuclear proliferators.

But even if Obama and his supporters were right and negotiating with the ayatollahs was not by its nature an act of appeasement, the question remains whether it would be possible to reach a deal with them that would not endanger US interests or US allies a la Neville Chamberlain at Munich.

Since the EU-3 began negotiating with the Iranians four years ago, the Iranians have made clear at every opportunity that while they welcome negotiations, they will never give up their nuclear program. Over the weekend, Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei again repeated that there is no deal that anyone can offer Iran that would move the regime to give up its nuclear aspirations and nascent arsenal. So there is no deal to be had.

Iran's support for terrorism and its nuclear aspirations make confrontation with the US inevitable. Since there is no way that in the midst of presidential negotiations the US would confront Iran, by pushing for such summitry, Obama is conceding to Iran the US's right to choose when and how the confrontation will begin.

IN MANY ways, Obama and his allies call to mind the influential American newspaperman H.L. Mencken. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Mencken was the most influential writer in the US. He was an anti-Christian and anti-Semitic agnostic, a supporter of Germany during World War I, and a fierce opponent of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. He also opposed American participation in World War II.

In his biography of Mencken, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, Terry Teachout argues that the reason Mencken did not think it was worth fighting Hitler's Germany was because Mencken simply couldn't accept the existence of evil. He could see no moral distinction between Roosevelt, who he despised, and Adolf Hitler who he considered "a boob."

There are strong echoes of Mencken's moral blindness to Hitler's evil in the contemporary Left's refusal to understand the nature of the threat posed by Iran and its terror proxies. And Bush made this clear in his speech to the Knesset when he said, "There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong."

Obama's supporters seek to silence these echoes by pointing to Obama's life story as Obama told it in his two autobiographies, Dreams From my Father and The Audacity of Hope. His supporters‚ argue that since his life story is unique, his decision to appease the Iranians is uniquely wise. Yet the most interesting aspect of his life story is how little is actually known about it.

As the New York Times noted in an article Sunday about Obama's career as an autobiographer, "In the introduction [of Dreams from my Father], Mr. Obama acknowledged his use of pseudonyms, composite characters, approximated dialogue and events out of chronological order."

That is, the man who is supposedly uniquely qualified to appease, adopted an attitude of indignation at Bush's condemnation of those who seek to cut deals with evil men, is also rather cavalier about facts. Justifying Obama's fast and loose treatment of the truth about his past, his editor Deborah Baker explained that Obama's attitude was more important than the facts or, in her words, "The fact is, it all had a sort of larger truth going on that you couldn't make up."

LIKE HIS life story, Obama's policies are not based on facts, but on his attitude. And his attitude, like Mencken's in the 1930s, is based on a naïve and arrogant belief that the worst thing that can happen is to have someone who talks about evil in the White House.

Peter Osnos, Obama's former publisher told the Times that Obama's meteoric rise to the pinnacle of politics is due in large part to his gift as a storyteller. In his words, "It's almost all based on these two books, two books not based on a job of prodigious research or risking one's life as a reporter in Iraq. He has written about himself. Being able to take your own life story and turn it into this incredibly lucrative franchise, it's a stunning fact."

Indeed, it is stunning. And frightening. It says that in a world in which evil men are combining and preparing for war and genocide, good men are preparing for pleasant chitchat with their foes because they have come to prefer attitude to substance. It is a world in which indignation can be summoned as readily (and perhaps more easily) for partisan political attacks as for delusional dictators‚ open preparation for genocide. And it is a world in which it is more important to discuss "healing" emotional wounds than devising policies capable of coping with an ever-more-dangerous international coalition of murderers.

LIBERTAS REVIEW: Redbelt

What writer/director David Mamet does better than anyone is to take you on a tour deep into the rancid heart of an American subculture. A Mamet world isn’t an exotic, faraway place; it‘s one you pass most everyday without noticing: The weathered storefront; the broken down sales office; the university; the boat shop; the movie set. Behind those nondescript locations, Mamet reveals the savage human drama of that subculture mainly through small, desperate men entirely too caught up in contests of wills that are completely meaningless.

But that’s why we watch. Because we can relate. Has there ever been a more pathetic creature than Al Pacino’s salesman in Glengarry Glen Ross? After all, this is a man who lets himself be defined by his position on a real estate sales grease board; a man who puffs up like a peacock when he’s on top. But we understand that, don’t we? We understand because we’ve let it happen in our own worlds, in our own subcultures. Whether we inhabit Hollywood or a roomful of cubicles we’ve let our position on some grease board hold entirely too much power over who we are. Redbelt is more of this from Mamet, but with one striking difference.

Redbelt explores what happens behind the dirty window of that storefront jiu jitsu academy you pass everyday on your way to work. And while it’s still a world populated with desperate men doing the unthinkable for a buck and defining themselves by that which means nothing, here Mamet finds someone new: a hero. Not an anti-hero; not a thief with an honor code (he‘s had those before) — but a real hero. One who stands for something bigger than himself and who Mamet will put through hell just to be sure he means it.

Mike Terry (Chiwetom Ejiofor) is a Los Angeles martial arts instructor both deep in debt and married to a woman grinding him over it. She’s ambitious, trying to get a fabric business off the ground out of their cramped apartment. He’s hiding, avoiding a real life he knows will eventually rob him of the purity of the honor he jealously protects within the small confines of his storefront business.

A desperate but honest attorney (Emily Mortimer) who sideswipe’s Terry’s car and a chance encounter with a movie star (Tim Allen) in need of a martial arts instructor, opens up opportunities for Terry and his wife neither ever expected. But if it all seems too fast and too easy, that’s only because it is.

Mamet’s plot-turns are audacious, to say the least, but he’s such a skilled mechanic at setting the pieces in place you don’t notice until you’re writing a review. The goal is that of most Mamet films: to strip men bare and see what they’re made of. Terry’s no exception but it eventually takes wilder and wilder coincidences to achieve that goal. While the story never loses our emotional engagement (no small thing), it does end up asking too much from our ability to suspend disbelief.

Ejiofor as our protagonist is simply outstanding. Up till now, his most memorable turn was in the under-appreciated Dirty Pretty Things (2002). With Redbelt, Mamet directs Ejiofor into a full-fledged movie star. He carries the movie without resorting to a single trick thanks to a believable performance and a natural ability to hold the screen. With a serenity borne of confidence and a fierce intelligence he seems reluctant to unleash, Ejiofor draws us in with characters we want to know more about. Mamet writes to these strengths dropping hints about Terry’s past without ever going into detail. Knowing Terry has a past is enough.

Like his direction of Steve Martin in The Spanish Prisoner (1997), Mamet works the same magic on another screen comedian — this time Tim Allen who may not have a large role, but does have a pivotal one. With little screen time, Allen immediately defines his character with a melancholy seediness to go along with the normal movie star trappings we’ve seen before. The genius of his character is that he has no arc — he doesn’t grow — he doesn’t change. A fascinating decision on Mamet’s part crucial to where he plans to take things.

Redbelt has two major problems — and they’re not small ones. The first is the climax which reminded me of Rocky V (1990) and rang just as false. The second are the fight scenes. For you mixed martial arts fans there are a number of encounters, but they’re not terribly well shot. Too much hand-held makes it difficult to hold onto the geography of what’s happening and too much editing makes it difficult to keep up.

Populated with a solid supporting cast, many of them Mamet regulars, Redbelt’s number one appeal are the performances and that well-rhythmed Mamet patter they speak so well. But there’s also a strong theme about a purity of honor you don’t see much anymore which is fascinating when you consider Mamet’s sixty-years-old. That’s when most of us have lost our idealism not found it. But there Mamet is, finally shining a light into the dark heart of his small world to tell us, for a change, what does matter.

Mark Steyn:
Obama an appeaser? How dare you

"That's enough. That – that's a show of disrespect to me."

That was Barack Obama, a couple of weeks back, explaining why he was casting the Rev. Jeremiah Wright into outer darkness. It's one thing to wallow in "adolescent grandiosity" (as Scott Johnson of the Powerline Web site called it) when it's a family dispute between you and your pastor of 20 years. It's quite another to do so when it's the 60th anniversary celebrations of one of America's closest allies.

President Bush was in Israel the other day and gave a speech to the Knesset. Its perspective was summed up by his closing anecdote – a departing British officer in May 1948 handing the iron bar to the Zion Gate to a trembling rabbi and telling him it was the first time in 18 centuries that a key to the gates of the Jerusalem was in the hands of a Jew. In other words, it was a big-picture speech, referencing the Holocaust, the pogroms, Masada – and the challenges that lie ahead. Sen. Obama was not mentioned in the text. No Democrat was mentioned, save for President Truman, in the context of his recognition of the new state of Israel when it was a mere 11 minutes old.

Nonetheless, Barack Obama decided that the president's speech was really about him, and he didn't care for it. He didn't put it quite as bluntly as he did with the Rev. Wright, but the message was the same: "That's enough. That's a show of disrespect to me." And, taking their cue from the soon-to-be nominee's weirdly petty narcissism, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Co. piled on to deplore Bush's outrageous, unacceptable, unpresidential, outrageously unacceptable and unacceptably unpresidential behavior.

Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. Here's what the president said:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

It says something for Democrat touchiness that the minute a guy makes a generalized observation about folks who appease terrorists and dictators the Dems assume: Hey, they're talking about me. Actually, he wasn't – or, to be more precise, he wasn't talking onlyabout you.

Yes, there are plenty of Democrats who are in favor of negotiating with our enemies, and a few Republicans, too – President Bush's pal James Baker, whose Iraq Study Group was full of proposals to barter with Iran and Syria and everybody else. But that general line is also taken by at least three of Tony Blair's former Cabinet ministers and his senior policy adviser, and by the leader of Canada's New Democratic Party and by a whole bunch of bigshot Europeans. It's not a Democrat election policy, it's an entire worldview. Even Barack Obama can't be so vain as to think his fly-me-to-[insert name of enemy here]concept is an original idea.

Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies. It's one thing to talk as a means to an end. But these days, for most midlevel powers, talks arethe end, talks without end. Because that's what civilized nations like doing – chit-chatting, shooting the breeze, having tea and crumpets, talking talking talking. Uncivilized nations like torturing dissidents, killing civilians, bombing villages, doing doing doing. It's easier to get the doers to pass themselves off as talkers then to get the talkers to rouse themselves to do anything.

And, as the Iranians understand, talks provide a splendid cover for getting on with anything you want to do. If, say, you want to get on with your nuclear program relatively undisturbed, the easiest way to do it is to enter years of endless talks with the Europeans over said nuclear program. That's why that Hamas honcho endorsed Obama: They know he's their best shot at getting a European foreign minister installed as president of the United States.

Mo Mowlam was Britain's Northern Ireland secretary and oversaw the process by which the IRA's Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness became ministers of a Crown they decline to recognize. By 2004, she was calling for Osama bin Laden to be invited to "the negotiating table," having concluded he was no different from Adams: Stern fellow, lots of blood on his hands, but no sense getting on your high horse about all that; let's find out what he wants and give him part of it.

In his 2002 letter to the United States, bin Laden has a lot of grievances, from America's refusal to implement Sharia law to Jew-controlled usury to the lack of punishment for "President Clinton's immoral acts." Like Barack Obama's pastor, bin Laden shares the view that AIDS is a "Satanic American invention." Obviously, there are items on the agenda that the free world can never concede on – "President Clinton's immoral acts" – but who's to say most of the rest isn't worth chewing over?

This will be the fault line in the post-Bush war debate over the next few years. Are the political ambitions of the broader jihad totalitarian, genocidal, millenarian – in a word, nuts? Or are they negotiable? President Bush knows where he stands. Just before the words that Barack Obama took umbrage at, he said:

"There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously."

Here are some words of Hussein Massawi, the former leader of Hezbollah:

"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."

Are his actions consistent with those words? Amazingly so. So, too, are those of Hezbollah's patrons in Tehran.

President Reagan talked with the Soviets while pushing ahead with the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. He spoke softly – after getting himself a bigger stick. Sen. Obama is proposing to reward a man who pledges to wipe Israel off the map with a presidential photo-op to which he will bring not even a twig. No wonder he's so twitchy about it.