From Asia Times:
Putin for US president - more than ever
By Spengler

If Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin were president of the United States, would Iran try to build a nuclear bomb? Would Pakistan provide covert aid to al-Qaeda? Would Hugo Chavez train terrorists in Venezuela? Would leftover nationalities with delusions of grandeur provoke the great powers? Just ask Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili, who now wishes he never tried to put his 4 million countrymen into strategic play.

In January I urged Americans to draft the Russian leader to succeed George W Bush (Putin for president of the United States, January 8, 2008). Putin's swift and decisive action in Georgia reflects precisely the sort of decisiveness that America requires.

Thanks to Putin, the world has become a much safer place. By intervening in Georgia, Russia has demonstrated that the great powers of the world have nothing to fight about. Russia has wiped the floor with a putative US ally, and apart from a bad case of cream pie on the face, America has lost nothing. The United States and the European community will do nothing to help Georgia, and nothing of substance to penalize the Russian Federation.

Contrary to the hyperventilation of policy analysts on American news shows, the West has no vital interests in Georgia. It would be convenient from Washington's vantage point for oil to flow from the Caspian Sea via Georgia to the Black Sea, to be sure, but nothing that occurs in Georgia will have a measurable impact on American energy security. It is humiliating for the US to watch the Russians thrash a prospective ally, but not harmful, for Georgia never should have been an ally in the first place.

The lack of consequences of Russia's incursion is a noteworthy fact, for never before in the history of the world has the world's economic and military power resided in countries whose fundamental interests do not conflict in any important way. The US enthused over Georgia's ambitions to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and encouraged Saakashvili to overplay his hand. Once it became clear that Russia would not tolerate a NATO member on its southern border, however, Washington had nothing to say about the matter, because no fundamental American interests were at stake.

Washington looks all the sillier for its failure to anticipate a Russian action that Moscow signaled months in advance. After the US and its main European allies recognized the independence of Kosovo from Serbia in February 2008, Russia warned that this action set a precedent for other prospective secessions, notably South Ossetia.

There is no longer any reason to put up with the tantrums of long-redundant tribes. If 3.7 million ethnic Georgians have the right to break away from the 142 million population of the Russian Federation, why shouldn't the 100,000 Ossetians living in Georgia break away and form their own state as well? Most of them have acquired Russian passports and want nothing to do with the Georgians. The Ossetians have spoken their variant of Persian for more than a millennium and had their own kingdom during the Middle Ages.

If the West is going to put itself at risk for 3.8 million ethnic Georgians, roughly the population of Los Angeles, or 5.4 million Tibetans, or 2 million Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, why shouldn't Russia take risks for the South Ossetians, not to mention the 100,000 Abkhaz speakers in Georgia's secessionist Black Sea province? Once the infinite regress of ethnic logic gets into motion, there is no good reason not to pull the world apart like taffy.

Forget the Kosovo Albanians, the South Ossetians, the Abkhazians, Saakashvili and the Dalai Lama. These are relics of an older world that might deserve their own theme park, but not their own state. Precisely what are 3.8 million freedom-loving Georgians supposed to contribute to American strategic interests with its US$2 billion a year of exports consisting (according to the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook) of "scrap metal, wine, mineral water, ores, vehicles, fruits and nuts"? Georgia's hope was to lever its geographical position on the Russia border by making itself useful to the American military.

If it had not been for America's insistence on installing a gang of trigger-happy pimps and drug-pushers in Kosovo, Russia might have responded less ferociously to the flea bites on its southern border. Make no mistake: the American-sponsored Kosovo regime is the dirtiest anywhere in postwar history. Writing in the Spiegel magazine website last April 24 , Walter Mayr described Kosovo as "a country ruled by corruption and organized crime". For example, Mayr reports,

Ramush Haradinaj is a former KLA commander who later became prime minister of UN-administered Kosovo. His indictment in The Hague consisted of 37 charges, including murder, torture, rape and the expulsion of Serbs, Albanians and gypsies in the weeks following the end of the war in 1999. Carla Del Ponte, former chief prosecutor of the UN War Crimes Tribunal, called him a "gangster in uniform". He returned to Kosovo this spring, after his acquittal on April 3. [1]

America's wag-the-dog war against Serbia in 1999 over alleged ethnic cleansing of Muslim Albanians in Kosovo won the undeserved support of Republicans as well as Democrats, to the extent that too many people on all sides of Washington politics risked their reputation to admit that the whole business was a stupid mistake. Washington has simply dug itself in deeper, joined at the hip to a government less savory than any banana republic dictatorship that enjoyed American favor at the depths of the Cold War (See The inconvenient Serbs, Asia Times Online, April 17, 2007.)

America remains so committed to the myth of moderate Islam that it is prepared to invent it. Kosovo, like the Turkey of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, supposedly embodies a moderate, Sufi-derived brand of Islam that will foster an American partnership with the Muslim world. The US intelligence community knows perfectly well that the networks that traffic prostitutes through Albania into Italy and the rest of Europe also move narcotics, weapons and terrorists from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Grozny in Chechnya to Tirana in Albania and Pristina in Kosovo.

The Russians know better. As I wrote in my January 8 endorsement of Putin for president of the United States:

Putin understands how to exercise power. Unlike Iraq, the restive Muslim province of Chechnya now nestles comfortably in Putin's palm, albeit with about half the people it had a decade ago. Russian troops killed between 35,000 and 100,000 civilians in the first Chechen war of 1994-96, and half a million were driven from their homes, totaling about half the population. But that is not what pacified Chechnya. Putin bribed and bullied Chechen clans to do Russia's dirty work for it, showing himself a master at the game of divide-and-conquer. Working from a position of weakness, Russia's president is the closest the modern world comes to the insidious strategic genius of a Cardinal Richelieu. That is the sort of strategic thinking America needs.

Half the world's population now resides in the world's three largest countries, namely China, India and the United States. These are not multi-ethnic, but rather supra-ethnic states, whose identity transcends tribe and nationality. There is no "clash of civilizations", for Confucian, Hindu, American and Orthodox civilization cannot find grounds for a clash. As for the European community, its global ambitions succumbed to geriatric disease a generation ago.

The number of flashpoints for violence in the world has grown in inverse proportion to their importance. The world is full of undead tribes with delusions of grandeur, and soon-to-be-extinct peoples who rather would go out with a bang than a whimper. The supra-ethnic states of the world have a common interest in containing the mischief that might be made by the losers. China, which has an annoying terrorist problem in its Westernmost province, has plenty of reason to help suppress Muslim separatists.

Unfortunately, modern weapons technology makes it possible for a spoiler state to inflict a disproportionate amount of damage. China recognized this when it cooperated with the United States to defuse the North Korean nuclear problem. The most visible prospective spoiler in the pack remains Iran. If America wants to recover from its humiliation in the Caucasus, it might, for example, conduct an air raid against Iran's nuclear facilities, and justify it with the same sort of reasoning that Russia invoked in Georgia. Contrary to surface impressions, Moscow wouldn't mind a bit.

Note
1. See The Slow Birth of a Nation Der Spiegel Online, April 24, 2008.

From The Arizona Republic:
50-year anniversary of
George Harrison's career with Beatles
by Ed Masley

Aug. 29, 2008 03:43 PM

It was 50 years ago this very weekend -- Friday, Aug. 29, to be exact -- that a no-account skiffle group from Liverpool, the Quarry Men, took what, in retrospect, would be one giant step toward world domination with the acquisition of a baby-faced guitarist Paul McCartney had met on the bus home from Liverpool Institute.

As John Lennon would later recall his decision to welcome George Harrison into the fold, "We asked George to join because he knew more chords, a lot more than we knew. We got a lot from him."

To say the Beatles got a lot from George would be, if anything, an understatement. Often overshadowed by the untouchable songwriting prowess of Lennon-McCartney, George's contributions to the Beatles legacy were actually quite huge, from his guitar work to the original songs he was able to carve out a space for in the Beatles' catalog.

Here's a look at some of George's most enduring contributions to the Beatles' legend.

1962 - At the Beatles' audition for Parlophone Records, producer George Martin asks the band, "Is there anything that you're not happy about?" As George Harrison later recalls in The Beatles Anthology, "We shuffled about silently, then I said, 'Well . . . I don't like your tie!" The rest is only history because, as fate would have it, Martin shares the youngest Beatle's sense of humor.

1963 - Having taken ill in a hotel room, George makes the most of a bad situation, penning his first Beatles song, Don't Bother Me. Appearing on the Beatles second album, With the Beatles, it's much darker and surlier - some would say more Lennonesque - than anything Lennon-McCartney had written at that point. George's girl has left him and he's gone all emo (years ahead of schedule), warning visitors, "Don't come around, leave me alone, don't bother me." Years later, George himself dismisses his first effort as a "fairly crappy song," but what does he know? Don't Bother Me is also featured in the Beatles' film debut, A Hard Day's Night, in 1964.

1964 - George gets off the opening shot of the coming folk-rock revolution with that freaky 12-string Rickenbacker chord that ushers in A Hard Day's Night. Rolling Stone magazine later declares it "the most famous chord in all of rock and roll," while Guitarist Magazine chimes in with the following bit of rock-crit poesy: "A hijacked church bell announcing the party of the year." Even Joey Ramone recalls that first chord as a "wake-up call," which doesn't necessarily mean we have to credit George with having sown the seeds of punk that day, but someone somewhere more than likely has.

1965 - George adds a sitar to Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), the first Western musician to play the traditional Indian instrument on a pop song. Although he'll later study sitar with the legendary Ravi Shankar, at this point, he's pretty much feeling his way around an instrument he'd picked up on the cheap after being intrigued by the sound it made while filming Help! As he'll later recall in The Beatles Anthology, "I hadn't really figured out what to do with it. But when we were working on Norweigan Wood, it just needed something. It was quite spontaneous. . . . I just picked it up and found the notes . . . and it just seemed to hit the spot." That same year, George contributes two amazing songs to Rubber Soul - the folk-rock classic If I Needed Someone and Think For Yourself, a tough-love self-help anthem fueled by fuzz-bass, psychedelic harmonies and self-righteous contempt for someone "telling all those lies about the good things that we can have if we close our eyes."

1966 - In a clear sign that George has come into his own as a writer, he opens Revolver with a jagged blast of stinging social commentary, Taxman. Bizarrely, the blistering backwards guitar lead turns out to be Paul. But the lyrics couldn't be more George: "Now my advice for those who die/Declare the pennies on your eyes," goes one memorable dig at The Man. Revolver also finds George coming into his own on the sitar with a song he's written on the instrument, the mesmerizing Love You To, while reinventing rubber soul with a distinctly Eastern feel on the surprisingly McCartneyesque I Want To Tell You.

1967 - After the strides he'd made at infiltrating his own band on the Revolver sessions, it has to be a bit disheartening for George to place only one song on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the year's most celebrated album. But at least he gets a long one - Within You Without You, which charts George's further foray into the world of Indian classic music, written on harmonium this time instead of sitar. He's the only Beatle featured on the track, joined by Indian session players. That same year brings George's Blue Jay Way, a spooky psychedelic classic written on a Hammond organ, to the Beatles' only underrated album, the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour. He sings about a fog upon LA and sounds as though he's lost in one. But that just makes it feel more psychedelic.

1968 - After being held in check on Paul McCartney's special project, Sgt. Pepper, George is free to flex his writing muscles on the band's self-titled double album, which everyone soon takes to calling The White Album. While My Guitar Gently Weeps is the one people gravitate to, even more so today. But George gets four songs, one per album side, and clearly makes the most of it, abandoning the Eastern flavor of his recent output in the process. Piggies is a darkly comic slice of social commentary from the Taxman school, a baroque-flavored gem that spoofs the upper crust in lines like, "In their sties with all their backing, they don't care what goes on around. In their eyes, there's something lacking. What they need's a damn good whacking." That last line was written by his mum, but still, it's funny. So is Savoy Truffle, his tribute to sweets and the damage they do to your teeth ("You'll have them all pulled out after the Savory truffle"). Long Long Long isn't nearly as funny, a haunting meditation on his reconnection with a great lost love, which may or may not be the sweet lord he would sing about on My Sweet Lord.

1969 - George contributes two songs to the soundtrack for the animated feature Yellow Submarine. On It's Only a Northern Song, he paints a bitter psychedelic portrait of the way his songs are treated in the Beatles universe ("It doesn't really matter what chords I play, what words I say or time of day it is"). The punch line is the seemingly disoriented orchestration. But It's All Too Much is the revelation. Recorded before Sgt. Pepper and held back from Magical Mystery Tour, its utter brilliance only underscores the exact point It's Only a Northern Song was striving to address. Who lets a song like that sit on a shelf for two turbulent years until the psychedelic majesty, ushered in on a wave of Hendrixian feedback, that would have seemed so cutting edge in 1967 feels like what it is - an outtake? Fortunately, George's contributions to the Beatles' other, more important 1969 release, Abbey Road, are shown the respect they deserve. The heartfelt ballad Something marks the first time any George song had been chosen as an A-side for a Beatles single (even if it is a "double A-side," backed with Come Together). Either way, it soars to No. 3 here in the States and tops the U.K. charts while Lennon hails it as his favorite song on Abbey Road. And while it isn't chosen as a single, the gorgeous, acoustic guitar-driven Here Comes the Sun would emerge as a radio staple.

1970 - There's one classic moment in the documentary Let It Be where George responds to Paul's "suggestions" about how to play his guitar with a withering, "I'll play whatever you want me to play, or I won't play at all if you don't want me to play. Whatever it is that'll please you, I'll do it." George contributes two song to the soundtrack - I Me Mine, an impassioned attack on the ego that would have been easy to read as a swipe at McCartney, and the lighter-hearted For You Blue, a playful blues romp best remembered for him egging Lennon on during a lap steel guitar solo with "Elmore James got nothing on this baby."

From New York magazine: Great book excerpt...
‘Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses’
By Stephen Davis

As Axl Rose purportedly makes final preparations to put out Chinese Democracy any minute now, Stephen Davis, the esteemed rock biographer behind 1985's classic Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, is releasing his long-awaited Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses via Gotham Books today. In it, Davis traces GN'R's illustrious history all the way back to Rose's origins as a disaffected Indiana kid named Bill Bailey. (Below) in an exclusive excerpt from the book's introduction, Davis discovers the inspiration behind the band's best-loved hit.

Some think the legend of Guns N' Roses began in the nighttime Los Angeles of 1985, a distant echo of West Hollywood's neon-lit Sunset Strip. Others think it should begin ten years earlier, at the confluence of two Indiana rivers, the Wabash and the Tippecanoe, in the 1970s. But in this telling, the GN'R saga begins in gritty New York, in upper Manhattan, on a sweltering, run-down street in the late afternoon of a summer day in 1980.

Actually it could begin way below the actual city street, in the deeply recessed concrete canyon of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which is where the two young hitchhikers from Indiana decided to get out of the car. It had been a good ride until then, a straight shot from the Ohio line across I-80, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. Bill Bailey and his friend Paul, both eighteen, had left central Indiana via I-65 thirty hours earlier and were making good hitching time toward their first visit to New York City.

The Ford Econoline van that had packed them up crossed the Hudson over the majestic George Washington Bridge. They were on I-95 now. Crossing on the upper deck, looking south, they could see the Empire State Building and the twin towers of the World Trade Center shimmering in the summer haze. Bill Bailey looked up and saw they were passing a sign that said LAST EXIT IN MANHATTAN. He said, "Hey, man. Let us off, OK?"

"I can't pull over," the driver said. He was an electronics salesman on his way to Providence. They were now headed east in the deep-walled pit of the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Bill asked, "Where's the next exit?"

"Way the hell up in the East Bronx."

The hitchers looked at each other. All they had were their backpacks and maybe thirty bucks between them. "Let us off here," Bill said.

"Man, are you sure? It'll be hard to get out of here."

"Yeah, let us out." Just then, traffic slowed into the constipation typical of I-95 as it crosses New York City. The boys jumped out. Cars honked at them as they inched along the sheer walls, looking for a way out. Drivers laughed at them, told them they were fucking insane. A trucker blasted his air horn and they jumped at the sound. The walls of the roadway were at least a hundred feet high, and all they could see were the tops of the buildings up at street level.

After a while they found the service ladder and scaled the wall, a thousand horns blaring far below, emerging into immigrant New York City, circa 1980: Calcutta on the Hudson.

To Bill and his friend, it was bedlam, a Caribbean neighborhood in Washington Heights with a funky street scene of bodegas and shouting kids playing under open hydrants, crones yelling out of windows in Spanish, idlers under shop awnings, hustlers working the corners of 177th and Broadway. Bill and Paul, from Tippecanoe County in Indiana, were the only white faces in a sea of black people, Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Dominicans, Muslim women in veils, Haitians, Hindus, Chinese shopkeepers, and lots of kids immediately picking up on two white boys who'd just climbed out of the hellish Cross Bronx like hayseed mountaineers in cowboy boots, blue jeans, and very long straight hair. The boys just stood and gaped, checking out this scene. "Rapper's Delight," bass-heavy hip-hop, blasted out of a bodega speaker. Lurid graffiti covered every flat surface. Kids were busting moves — break dancing — on the sidewalk. Bill Bailey had never seen this before. Basically, there weren't any black people in his part of Indiana, so they might as well have been in Senegal.

Now an old man limped over to them. He gave them the once-over, seeming to linger over Bill's cowboy boots. Bill was becoming uneasy now, his friend noticed, which was never a good thing, because, when agitated or upset, Bill's behavior could get a little out there. Finally, the old man spoke, or rather squawked, in a high-pitched shriek.

"DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?"

The boys, taken aback, just looked at him.

"I SAID, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?"

Bill Bailey said, "Uh, we're just trying to get to…"

"YOU'RE IN THE JUNGLE, BABY!"

Bill Bailey — the future W. Axl Rose — just stared at him in wonderment. And then the little old man wound himself up to his full fury and told these white boys what they could expect from New York City at the tail end of the seventies: years of bankruptcy, endemic crime, corruption, decadence — the gateway to the eighties and the scourge of AIDS. He told it to them straight from the gut:

"YOU'RE GONNA DIE!"

Sometimes, legends come from true stories, and this is one of them.

Welcome to the jungle.

From HotAir.com:
Desperation from Democrats
by Ed Morrissey

posted at 9:56 am on August 30, 2008

Now that almost a full day has passed since John McCain has named Sarah Palin as his running mate, we can already see the themes his political opponents will take in criticizing her. Irony runs through a number of these arguments, as most of them apply more to their own ticket than to the Republicans, and one in particular is just so despicable as to drop the jaw to the ground. Let’s take a tour of these, shall we?

It’s a desperation pick — he didn’t make up his mind until Thursday!

McCain did make his selection on Thursday, but apparently well before the Barack Obama speech that supposedly spooked him into foregoing Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty. What of it? When did Barack Obama make up his mind about Joe Biden? Biden had told reporters, “I’m not the guy” just days before finally getting picked as the running mate. Obama was desperate for anyone with foreign-policy gravitas after stumbling through the Caucasus crisis on his own. Paul Begala noted that it appeared Vladimir Putin had picked Obama’s running mate.

Besides, why would McCain be “desperate”? Most Republicans run well behind their Democratic opponents in the summer; McCain gained enormous ground on Obama and was ahead in polls of likely voters before the convention.

Why would he put a small-town mayor a heartbeat away from the presidency?

This is a real laugher. By the same logic, why would the Democrats make a state legislator the actual president? The answer is that Obama is a US Senator of three years experience, and Palin is a governor of 20 months’ experience. Only Barack Obama has spent two of those three years not in the Senate doing his job but running for President. Before starting his bid, he had a grand total of less than 150 days in session in the Senate. Palin, on the other hand, has run her state for more than triple that time.

And let’s remember that Obama is running for the top job, while Palin’s running for VP.

McCain can’t talk about experience any more — he’s shot himself in the foot!

Unfortunately for the critics, this argument doesn’t hold water, either. All four principals are running for the highest executive position in the federal government — indeed, the position in charge of the entire executive branch. How much executive experience does Obama have? None; he’s worked in corporate law, community organizing, and has eleven years as a legislator at various levels. Biden? He’s been a lawyer for three years and a Senator for 35 years, and has no executive experience at any level of government.

McCain at least has executive experience as a squadron commander in the US Navy, but Palin has the actual executive track record that the others lack. She has governed Alaska for 20 months, negotiated a pipeline deal with Canada (which gives her more formal diplomatic experience than either Obama or Biden), was commander-in-chief of Alaska’s National Guard, and so on. Even her more local-level experience is more applicable than Obama’s: she served two terms as mayor, an executive position, cutting taxes and running a small city. Obama served in the state legislature, with no executive responsibilities at all.

Troopergate!

This, at least, qualifies as a legitimate concern, at least legitimate enough that the state legislature has decided to investigate it. Supposedly Palin fired the commissioner of public safety because he wouldn’t fire her brother-in-law, a state trooper who had becomed estranged from Palin’s sister. Mike Wooten only got a suspension, and last month, she allegedly dismissed Walt Monegan over his handling of the case. Palin says that wasn’t the reason, the legislature noted that Monegan’s was a political appointment and he served at the pleasure of the governor, and they have also stated on the record that Palin has been so cooperative that they will not need to issue subpoenas — which hardly sounds like a cover-up.

So what did Wooten do, anyway?

Troopers eventually investigated 13 issues and found four in which Wooten violated policy or broke the law or both:

• Wooten used a Taser on his stepson.
• He illegally shot a moose.
• He drank beer in his patrol car on one occasion.
• He told others his father-in-law would “eat a f’ing lead bullet” if he helped his daughter get an attorney for the divorce.

Excuse me, but any of these four should have been a firing offense, let alone having done all four. He Tased his stepson? He threatened to shoot Palin’s father? No wonder the Palins hired their own investigator and pressed the issue so hard. But if this was the reason Palin cashiered Monegan, why did she bother to wait eighteen months after taking office to get rid of him?

Palin’s pick insults more qualified Republican women like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Elizabeth Dole, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, etc etc etc.

I doubt any of these women feel “insulted” by McCain’s choice, but even if they did, so what? McCain didn’t want a Washington insider as a running mate. None of the known short-listers came from DC with the exception of Joe Lieberman, and Lieberman would have been a special case anyway. He wanted a partner for real reform, someone with a track record of taking risks to pursue change and to clean up politics. All of these women are insiders, and most of them have no executive experience at all — and all of them are Senators. Why copy the Biden pick?

Sarah Palin wasn’t REALLY pregnant — it’s her daughter’s child.

This popped up on a Daily Kos diary and has unfortunately been repeated by bloggers who should know better. The rumor is a weird reversal of the John Edwards story, only this time, critics refute Palin’s maternity. Supposedly, so the story goes, the baby really was their eldest daughter’s (currently in high school), and not hers. The proof? At six months, Palin didn’t “look pregnant”, and supposedly her daughter had mono and took some time off from school. That’s it.

This is, simply, despicable. Babies born to teen mothers rarely have Down’s Syndrome anyway, whereas the possibility for that with a mother in her 40s is about 1 in 20. Athletic women sometimes do not show until late in the pregnancy. The whole rumor rests on the notion that the state’s most visible woman could carry out a fake pregnancy in front of the press while simultaneously hiding her daughter, and then pull a switcheroo — and for what possible purpose? To cover up a teen pregnancy, in this day and age? Give me a break.

The picture below was published at the end of February, and she certainly appears to be significantly wider than we saw yesterday on the dais.

If this is what the opposition comes down to, McCain made the wisest possible choice, and in the process exposed the opposition in a way that could never have been possible with any other running mate.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin talking to Sgt. Dewey Green, of Nome, Alaska, during her visit with soldiers
of the Alaska National Guard's 3rd Battalion 297th Infantry Regiment at the Life Support Area in Kuwait
Tuesday, July 24, 2007.
From The Corner: Nice to have Steyn back....
The hostess with the moosest
[Mark Steyn]

Over in the Frumistan province of the NR caliphate, our pal David is not happy about the Palin pick. I am - for several reasons.

First, Governor Palin is not merely, as Jay describes her, "all-American", but hyper-American. What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.

Second, it can't be in Senator Obama's interest for the punditocracy to spends its time arguing about whether the Republicans' vice-presidential pick is "even more" inexperienced than the Democrats' presidential one.

Third, real people don't define "experience" as appearing on unwatched Sunday-morning talk shows every week for 35 years and having been around long enough to have got both the War on Terror and the Cold War wrong. (On the first point, at the Gun Owners of New Hampshire dinner in the 2000 campaign, I remember Orrin Hatch telling me sadly that he was stunned to discover how few Granite State voters knew who he was.) Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth. She's done the stuff he's merely a poseur about. Post-partisan? She took on her own party's corrupt political culture directly while Obama was sucking up to Wright and Ayers and being just another get-along Chicago machine pol (see his campaign's thuggish attempt to throttle Stanley Kurtz and Milt Rosenberg on WGN the other night).

Fourth, Governor Palin has what the British Labour Party politician Denis Healy likes to call a "hinterland" - a life beyond politics. Whenever Senator Obama attempts anything non-political (such as bowling), he comes over like a visiting dignitary to a foreign country getting shanghaied into some impenetrable local folk ritual. Sarah Palin isn't just on the right side of the issues intellectually. She won't need the usual stage-managed "hunting" trip to reassure gun owners: she's lived the Second Amendment all her life. Likewise, on abortion, we're often told it's easy to be against it in principle but what if you were a woman facing a difficult birth or a handicapped child? Been there, done that.

Fifth, she complicates all the laziest Democrat pieties. Energy? Unlike Biden and Obama, she's been to ANWR and, like most Alaskans, supports drilling there.

Sixth (see Kathleen's link to Craig Ferguson below), I kinda like the whole naughty librarian vibe.

So It Begins
[Kathleen Parker]

Naughty Alaskan librarian.

08/29 12:20 PM

From The Weekly Standard:
Let Palin Be Palin
Why the left is scared to death
of McCain's running mate.
by William Kristol

09/08/2008, Volume 013, Issue 48

A spectre is haunting the liberal elites of New York and Washington--the spectre of a young, attractive, unapologetic conservatism, rising out of the American countryside, free of the taint (fair or unfair) of the Bush administration and the recent Republican Congress, able to invigorate a McCain administration and to govern beyond it.

That spectre has a name--Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska chosen by John McCain on Friday to be his running mate. There she is: a working woman who's a proud wife and mother; a traditionalist in important matters who's broken through all kinds of barriers; a reformer who's a Republican; a challenger of a corrupt good-old-boy establishment who's a conservative; a successful woman whose life is unapologetically grounded in religious belief; a lady who's a leader.

So what we will see in the next days and weeks--what we have already seen in the hours after her nomination--is an effort by all the powers of the old liberalism, both in the Democratic party and the mainstream media, to exorcise this spectre. They will ridicule her and patronize her. They will distort her words and caricature her biography. They will appeal, sometimes explicitly, to anti-small town and anti-religious prejudice. All of this will be in the cause of trying to prevent the American people from arriving at their own judgment of Sarah Palin.

That's why Palin's spectacular performance in her introduction in Dayton was so important. Her remarks were cogent and compelling. Her presentation of herself was shrewd and savvy. I heard from many who watched Palin--many of them not predisposed to support her--about how moved they were by her remarks, her composure, and her story. She will have a chance to shine again Wednesday night at the Republican convention.

But before and after that, she'll be swimming in political waters infested with sharks. Her nickname when she was the starting point guard on an Alaska high school championship basketball team was "Sarah Barracuda." I suspect she'll take care of herself better than many expect.

But the McCain campaign can help. The choice of Palin was McCain's own. Many of his staff expected, and favored, other more conventional candidates. The campaign may be tempted to overreact when one rash sentence or foolish comment by Palin from 10 or 15 years ago is dragged up by Democratic opposition research and magnified by a credulous and complicit media.

The McCain campaign will have to keep its cool. It will have to provide facts and context, and to hit back where appropriate. But it cannot become obsessed with playing defense. It should allow Palin to deal with the charges directly and resist the temptation to try to shield her from the media. Palin is potentially a huge asset to McCain. He took the gamble--wisely, we think--of putting her on the ticket. McCain's choice of Palin was McCain being McCain. Now his campaign will have to let Palin be Palin.

There will be rocky moments. But they will fade if the McCain campaign lets Palin's journey take its natural course over the next two months. Millions of Americans--mostly but not only women, mostly but not only Republicans and conservatives--seemed to get a sense of energy and enjoyment and pride, not just from her nomination, but especially from her smashing opening performance. Palin will be a compelling and mold-breaking example for lots of Americans who are told every day that to be even a bit conservative or Christian or old-fashioned is bad form. In this respect, Palin can become an inspirational figure and powerful symbol. The left senses this, which is why they want to discredit her quickly.

A key moment for Palin will be the vice presidential debate, to be held at Washington University in St. Louis on October 2. One liberal commentator--a former U.S. ambassador and not normally an unabashed vulgarian--licked his chops Friday afternoon: "To steal an old adage of former Secretary of State James Baker .  .  . putting Sarah Palin into a debate with Joe Biden is going to be like throwing Howdy Doody into a knife fight!"

Charming. And if Palin holds her own against Biden, as she is fully capable of doing? McCain will then have succeeded in combining with his own huge advantage in experience and judgment, a politician of great promise in his vice presidential slot who will make Joe Biden look like a tiresome relic. McCain's willingness to take a chance on Palin could turn what looked, after Obama's impressive speech Thursday night in Denver, like a long two months for Republicans and conservatives, into a campaign of excitement and--dare we say it?--hope, which will culminate on November 4 in victory.

From CNN.com:

Palin is brilliant, but risky, VP choice
By Ed Rollins

NEW YORK (CNN) -- John McCain's brilliant but risky "Hail Mary pass" choice for vice president, Alaska Gov. Sarah "Barracuda" Palin, has the political world saying first: Who? And then: Why?

The "who" is a young, articulate, smart, tough, pro-life woman who is the governor of our northernmost state. She is conservative and a mother of five, including a son in the Army who is set to be deployed to Iraq on September 11. Her youngest child has Down syndrome.

The "Barracuda" nickname came from her aggressive basketball play on the state championship basketball team. She is a hunter, pilot and lifetime member of the NRA.

She is blunt, outspoken and charming. And don't assume she can't stand toe-to-toe with Joe Biden. She is a great debater. And she was runner-up for the Miss Alaska title, won Miss Congeniality in that contest and plays the flute.

She also has a compelling story and is a most interesting choice. She will be known by all in 24 to 48 hours in this instant media world, and I am betting she will be well-liked.

The "why" is she is a governor and outside the Beltway. Conservatives love her, and she shares John McCain's value system. She is also known for taking on the establishment and ethics is her forte.

She defeated the longtime senator and Republican governor in a primary and then went on and defeated the former Democratic governor.

I don't believe people vote for vice president but only for president. That said, I think she is every bit as good a choice as Biden. Alaska has three electoral votes, and so does Delaware, so that part ends up being a wash.

I think the potential for her to attract women voters is immense. And I am betting, win or lose or draw, she is a future star of a party in desperate need of young people and women role models. iReport.com: Ouch McCain! That hurt

And by the end of this campaign, she too will be a celebrity, and her life will never be the same again. I hope that's all for the good.

Speaking of celebrities, Barack Obama proved why he is one at Invesco Field, home of the Denver Broncos, last night before 85,000 crying, cheering adoring fans. And what's wrong with that? He is a real talent, and he excites and inspires his supporters.

Those of us who are not supporters need to step back and quit watching in awe and prepare for battle. Obama's natural and developed speaking style is unchallengeable.

I've been in politics for 40 years. I had the privilege of serving Ronald Reagan as his White House political director and campaign manager, and during those years, I heard him give hundreds of speeches.

And no one was ever better. His words enlightened, gave comfort, inspired and made Americans feel good about themselves again. He also had a core of beliefs developed over a long period of time that led to a very effective agenda.

The Democrats now have their own version of an RR orator. And, like Reagan, Obama's speeches are his own words. Whether he will be elected president or will have the accomplishments RR did, only time will tell. But his gifts of speech and ability to inspire his supporters are impressive and should not be underestimated.

Saying all that, and putting the emotion of "mile-high Denver" euphoria aside, Ronald Reagan became a great president because of his many other skills. He knew where he wanted to take our country and had the courage to stick to his beliefs. iReport.com: 'Best governor we've had'

We still don't know what Obama and the Democrats want, other than George Bush back in Crawford Texas, and their party controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

We now know the tickets: Obama-Biden, McCain-Palin.

Biden is an asset as a foreign policy adviser. Palin will be an asset on domestic and energy issues. All have compelling stories. But ultimately, this race is about McCain's experience and world view and Obama's ability to excite his base.

We have one more exciting convention (now with a new player in Gov. Palin) and then 60-plus days to go at full speed. The winner gets the toughest job in the world, with the most difficult agenda we as a nation have faced in decades.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.

The Perfect Stranger
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama is an immensely talented man whose talents have been largely devoted to crafting, and chronicling, his own life. Not things. Not ideas. Not institutions. But himself.

Nothing wrong or even terribly odd about that, except that he is laying claim to the job of crafting the coming history of the United States. A leap of such audacity is odd. The air of unease at the Democratic convention this week was not just a result of the Clinton psychodrama. The deeper anxiety was that the party was nominating a man of many gifts but precious few accomplishments -- bearing even fewer witnesses.

When John Kerry was introduced at his convention four years ago, an honor guard of a dozen mates from his Vietnam days surrounded him on the podium attesting to his character and readiness to lead. Such personal testimonials are the norm. The roster of fellow soldiers or fellow senators who could from personal experience vouch for John McCain is rather long. At a less partisan date in the calendar, that roster might even include Democrats Russ Feingold and Edward Kennedy, with whom John McCain has worked to fashion important legislation.

Eerily missing at the Democratic convention this year were people of stature who were seriously involved at some point in Obama's life standing up to say: I know Barack Obama. I've been with Barack Obama. We've toiled/endured together. You can trust him. I do.

Hillary Clinton could have said something like that. She and Obama had, after all, engaged in a historic, utterly compelling contest for the nomination. During her convention speech, you kept waiting for her to offer just one line of testimony: I have come to know this man, to admire this man, to see his character, his courage, his wisdom, his judgment. Whatever. Anything.

Instead, nothing. She of course endorsed him. But the endorsement was entirely programmatic: We're all Democrats. He's a Democrat. He believes what you believe. So we must elect him -- I am currently unavailable -- to get Democratic things done. God bless America.

Clinton's withholding the "I've come to know this man" was vindictive and supremely self-serving -- but jarring, too, because you realize that if she didn't do it, no one else would. Not because of any inherent deficiency in Obama's character. But simply as a reflection of a young life with a biography remarkably thin by the standard of presidential candidates.

Who was there to speak about the real Barack Obama? His wife. She could tell you about Barack the father, the husband, the family man in a winning and perfectly sincere way. But that only takes you so far. It doesn't take you to the public man, the national leader.

Who is to testify to that? Hillary's husband on night three did aver that Obama is "ready to lead." However, he offered not a shred of evidence, let alone personal experience with Obama. And although he pulled it off charmingly, everyone knew that, having been suggesting precisely the opposite for months, he meant not a word of it.

Obama's vice presidential selection, Joe Biden, naturally advertised his patron's virtues, such as the fact that he had "reached across party lines to ... keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists." But securing loose nukes is as bipartisan as motherhood and as uncontroversial as apple pie. The measure was so minimal that it passed by voice vote and received near zero media coverage.

Thought experiment. Assume John McCain had retired from politics. Would he have testified to Obama's political courage in reaching across the aisle to work with him on ethics reform, a collaboration Obama boasted about in the Saddleback debate? "In fact," reports the Annenberg Political Fact Check, "the two worked together for barely a week, after which McCain accused Obama of 'partisan posturing'" -- and launched a volcanic missive charging him with double cross.

So where are the colleagues? The buddies? The political or spiritual soul mates? His most important spiritual adviser and mentor was Jeremiah Wright. But he's out. Then there's William Ayers, with whom he served on a board. He's out. Where are the others?

The oddity of this convention is that its central figure is the ultimate self-made man, a dazzling mysterious Gatsby. The palpable apprehension is that the anointed is a stranger -- a deeply engaging, elegant, brilliant stranger with whom the Democrats had a torrid affair. Having slowly woken up, they see the ring and wonder who exactly they married last night.

And If Obama Loses?
By Patrick Buchanan

DENVER -- After the phony roll call vote was taken here to formally nominate Barack Obama -- a roll call that did not remotely reflect the true delegate strength of Hillary -- the media exploded in an orgy of celebration about the historic character of the moment to which they had just been privileged to be witness.

"The first black presidential nominee ever of a major party in history!" was proclaimed. Coming on the 45th anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, Barack's nomination is being hailed as the last great step forward in the long march to equality and justice in America.

The moral pressure to join the march of history is enormous.

Nor is it unfair to say that some journalists here are obsessed with the issue of race in this campaign. There may be wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rising tensions with Russia, a falling regime in Pakistan, and reports of U.S. and NATO warships headed for the Persian Gulf, but here it is all about the first black ever nominated for president.

During the primaries, Bill Clinton was charged with racism by liberal Democrats for saying that Barack's claim to being consistent on Iraq was a "fairy tale" and for implying that Barack's victory in South Carolina was no big deal because Jesse Jackson had carried the state twice.

Here at the convention, the media watched Hillary and Bill's speeches with a commissar's care -- to ensure they not only embraced Barack but "validated" his credentials to be president. Should they not go all out for Obama, we are told, the Clintons are dead in the party.

The psychic investment in Barack's candidacy is immense.

So great is the moral pressure to conform that John Lewis, the young hero of Selma Bridge, buckled and recanted his endorsement of Hillary. And that act of disloyalty and betrayal, a capitulation to race solidarity, is regarded as praiseworthy.

Black radio has become a cheering section for Obama. Every GOP ad mocking Obama is inspected for racial motives. Campaign books that portray Obama as a radical or phony are denounced by people who have not even seen them. The thought police are out in force.

Michelle Obama's speech about her upbringing and beliefs -- crafted by Barack's hires -- is said to be the last word on what a mainstream patriotic woman she is. But why, then, would she have taken her two lovely daughters to be baptized by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and to listen on Sundays to his racist rants against America?

Abroad, we are told, Europe and the Third World are awaiting the moment when America turns her back on her racist past and elevates this black man to the presidency. The subtext is that this is not just a political contest, but a moral test for America.

Indeed, many have begun to see this election in solely racial terms, an issue of whether racism once again triumphs in America, or racism is buried one and for all.

Questions arise. With this immense moral and emotional investment in a Barack victory -- by 94 to 1 in one poll black America is behind him -- what happens if the nation decides he is too radical, too inexperienced, too callow, too risky to be president?

What happens if the American people reject their marching orders and say no to Barack and black America? What happens if all the hopes and dreams, hype and hoopla, end in disillusionment?

Would the defeat of Barack Obama be taken as an affront to black America? Could we be in for a time of deepening racial division rather than healing? Could we be in for a long, hot autumn like the long, hot summers some of us recall from 40 years ago?

One black preacher here suggested as much to me.

Should that happen, the people who have framed this election as a contest between morality and racial justice on one side, and the clammy hand of America's racist past on the other, will bear the same moral responsibility as did the advocates of mass civil obedience for the racial riots of the 1960s that followed.

Barack has just shot 6 points ahead of McCain. But he has not yet closed the sale. And to prevent his closing of the sale, the GOP must raise doubts in the public mind as to whether he is really a man of Middle America or the closet radical of the Rev. Wright's congregation who said of Pennsylvanians that they are bitter folks, who cling to their Bibles, bigotries and guns because the world has left them behind.

No candidate has ever been nominated by a major party with fewer credentials or a weaker claim to the presidency, or more doubts as to his core beliefs. If Obama wins, the country could be in real trouble. And if he loses, the country could be in real trouble.

What the media celebrate today, they may rue tomorrow.

From The Corner at NRO:
Bill Ayers: Unrepentant LYING Terrorist
[Andy McCarthy]

In that Fox interview that Rich linked to, Ayers preposterously claimed that he and his fellow Weather Underground terrorists did not really intend to harm any people — the fact that no one was killed in their 20 or so bombings was, he said, "by design"; they only wanted to cause property damage:

Between October 1969 and September 1973, the Weather Underground claimed credit for some twenty bombings across the country, in which no one was harmed — save the three cell members who perished in a Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970, when one of their creations detonated prematurely. Ayers claimed the fact that no other individuals were killed as a result of the Weathermen’s actions was “by design.”

In his autobiography, Fugitive Days: A Memoir, Ayers recalled, he posed the question: “How far are you willing to take that step into what I consider the abyss of violence? And we really never did, except for that moment in the townhouse.… I actually think destroying property in the face of that kind of catastrophe is so — restrained. And I don’t see it as a big deal.

Right.

First of all, "that moment in the townhouse" he's talking about happened in 1970. Three of his confederates, including his then girlfriend Diana Oughton, were accidentally killed when the explosive they were building to Ayers specifications (Ayers was a bomb designer) went off during construction. As noted in Ayers' Discover the Networks profile, the explosive had been a nail bomb. Back when Ayers was being more honest about his intentions, he admitted that the purpose of that bomb had been to murder United States soldiers:

That bomb had been intended for detonation at a dance that was to be attended by army soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Hundreds of lives could have been lost had the plan been successfully executed. Ayers attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, "tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too."

In fact, Ayers was a founder of the Weatherman terror group and he defined its purpose as carrying out murder. Again, from Discover the Networks:

Characterizing Weatherman as "an American Red Army," Ayers summed up the organization's ideology as follows: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents."

Now he wants you to think they just wanted to break a few dishes. But in his book Fugitive Days, in which he boasts that he "participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972," he says of the day that he bombed the Pentagon: "Everything was absolutely ideal. ... The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them."

And he wasn't singular. As I noted back in April in this article about Obama's motley collection of radical friends, at the Weatherman “War Council” meeting in 1969, Ayers' fellow terrorist and now-wife, Bernadine Dohrn, famously gushed over the barbaric Manson Family murders of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and three others: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” And as Jonah recalled yesterday, "In appreciation, her Weather Underground cell made a threefingered 'fork' gesture its official salute." They weren't talking about scratching up the wall-paper.

A Weatherman affiliate group which called itself "the Family" colluded with the Black Liberation Army in the 1981 Brinks robbery in which two police officers and an armed guard were murdered. (Obama would like people to believe all this terrorist activity ended in 1969 when he was eight years old. In fact, it continued well into the eighties.) Afterwards, like Ayers and Dohrn, their friend and fellow terrorist Susan Rosenberg became a fugitive.

On November 29, 1984, Rosenberg and a co-conspirator, Timothy Blunk, were finally apprehended in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. At the time, they were actively planning an unspeakable bombing campaign that would have put at risk the lives of countless innocent people. They also possessed twelve assorted guns (including an Uzi 9 mm. semi-automatic rifle and an Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun with its barrel sawed off), nearly 200 sticks of dynamite, more than 100 sticks of DuPont Trovex (a high explosive), a wide array of blasting agents and caps, batteries, and switches for explosive devices. Arrayed in disguises and offering multiple false identities to arresting officers, the pair also maintained hundreds of false identification documents, including FBI and DEA badges.

When she was sentenced to 58 years' imprisonment in 1985, the only remorse Rosenberg expressed was over the fact that she and Blunk had allowed themselves to be captured rather than fighting it out with the police. Bernadine Dohrn was jailed for contempt when she refused to testify against Rosenberg. Not to worry, though. On his last day in office, the last Democrat president, Bill Clinton, pardoned Rosenberg — commuting her 58-year sentence to time-served.

These savages wanted to kill massively. That they killed only a few people owes to our luck and their incompetence, not design. They and the Democrat politicians who now befriend and serve them can rationalize that all they want. But those are the facts.

From City Journal:

Fire in the Night

The Weathermen tried to kill my family.
By John M. Murtagh

30 April 2008

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.

In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we’d call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and, with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved multiple lives that night.

I still recall, as though it were a dream, thinking that someone was lifting and dropping my bed as the explosions jolted me awake, and I remember my mother’s pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE PIGS.

For the next 18 months, I went to school in an unmarked police car. My mother, a schoolteacher, had plainclothes detectives waiting in the faculty lounge all day. My brother saved a few bucks because he didn’t have to rent a limo for the senior prom: the NYPD did the driving. We all made the best of the odd new life that had been thrust upon us, but for years, the sound of a fire truck’s siren made my stomach knot and my heart race. In many ways, the enormity of the attempt to kill my entire family didn’t fully hit me until years later, when, a father myself, I was tucking my own nine-year-old John Murtagh into bed.

Though no one was ever caught or tried for the attempt on my family’s life, there was never any doubt who was behind it. Only a few weeks after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The same cell had bombed my house, writes Ron Jacobs in The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. And in late November that year, a letter to the Associated Press signed by Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife, promised more bombings.

As the association between Obama and Ayers came to light, it would have helped the senator a little if his friend had at least shown some remorse. But listen to Ayers interviewed in the New York Times on September 11, 2001, of all days: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Translation: “We meant to kill that judge and his family, not just damage the porch.” When asked by the Times if he would do it all again, Ayers responded: “I don’t want to discount the possibility.”

Though never a supporter of Obama, I admired him for a time for his ability to engage our imaginations, and especially for his ability to inspire the young once again to embrace the political system. Yet his myopia in the last few months has cast a new light on his “politics of change.” Nobody should hold the junior senator from Illinois responsible for his friends’ and supporters’ violent terrorist acts. But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates, and friends, and for showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred they have demonstrated for this country. It is fair, too, to ask what those choices say about Obama’s own beliefs, his philosophy, and the direction he would take our nation.

At the conclusion of his 2001 Times interview, Ayers said of his upbringing and subsequent radicalization: “I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.”

Funny thing, Bill: one night, so did I.

John M. Murtagh is a practicing attorney, an adjunct professor of public policy at the Fordham University College of Liberal Studies, and a member of the city council in Yonkers, New York, where he resides with his wife and two sons

From National Review Online:
The Election From Hell
I won’t be watching either of the party conventions.
By John Derbyshire

August 25, 2008

How quickly time passes! It has been a mere year and a half since the first candidate debates, and the party conventions are upon us already. Next week, the Democratic-party convention in Denver — “Most Diverse in Party History” boasts the website. The following week, the Republicans in Minneapolis-St. Paul — “Twin Cities Promise Double Fun for GOP.”

Fun? Melancholy spectacles both, in this writer’s opinion, for this is the most disastrously awful choice Americans have ever been offered for the post of chief executive.

It is true that no election season reaches this point without much grumbling from commentators about the poverty of choice on offer. “Who else have you got?” asks pollee of poller in the famous Paul Conrad cartoon … which dates from the 1964 campaign. There are grounds to believe that this election’s choice is quite exceptionally bad, though.

I can’t say that I ever felt much warmth for either John McCain or Barack Obama. The first struck me as a burned-out Senate seat-warmer (term limits! oh please, term limits!) who had shown outstanding courage as a young warrior but considerable wrong-headedness as a politician — a category of persons with which history has, after all, been well supplied. Obama I have never seen as anything but a bag of wind, possessed of great political guile, but steeped in the faddy, solipsistic notions of post-1960s college leftism.

That these two men are much worse than I thought only became apparent to me at the Saddleback interviews conducted by Baptist minister Rick Warren in front of 5,000 of his parishioners. Here the truth came out. These are not merely two different specimens of mediocrity, as is usual in presidential campaigns; they are two different specimens of love-the-world romantic fantasist.

Perhaps there is at least — I am clutching at straws, dear reader — some tiny element of choice in the fact that McCain and Obama are methodologically different in their desires to spend as much of America’s resources as they can get their hands on to lift up foreign peoples in foreign places. In accordance with their youthful experiences, McCain sees the task in warlike terms: “evil must be defeated.” To Obama it’s more a matter of community organizing: “building public health infrastructure around the world.”

Both men are determined to set this planet to rights, though, and hang the cost. Doesn’t the United States have infinite resources? Of course it does. Eliminator of All Evil, or Welfare Agency to the World; Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper or Albert Schweizer; you just have to choose. Can we afford it? Yes, we can! (That faint sound you hear? That’s the clink-clink of devaluing dollars — just ignore it.)

One hardly knows where to start with this gibberish. With eliminating evil, perhaps.


Warren: How about the issue of evil? … Does evil exist and if so, should we ignore it, negotiate with it, contain it or defeat it?

McCain: Defeat it. … Of course evil must be defeated …


Warren didn’t raise a peep. This is a Christian church? Hasn’t anybody present heard of original sin? The only way to eliminate evil is to eliminate the human race. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that McCain’s policies will have that result, but if it’s the result he intends, he ought to tell us.


Warren: There are 148 million orphans in the world, 148 million kids growing up without Mommies and Dads. … Would you be willing to consider and even commit to doing some kind of emergency plan for orphans like President Bush did with AIDS?

Obama: I think it’s a great idea. … I think that part of our plan though has to be how do we prevent more orphans in the first place and that means that we’re helping to build the public health infrastructure around the world …


Heaven forbid that people in Nigeria, Nauru, Norway, or Nicaragua should build their own clinics and hospitals, without any help from Uncle Sam and his limitless bounty! Heaven forbid they should take care of their own orphans, and we of ours!

But then, as John McCain says: “America’s greatest moral failure has been, throughout our existence, perhaps we have not devoted ourselves to causes greater than our self-interest.” Except, of course, that nations are supposed to devote themselves to their self-interest, and to nothing else. That’s what sane people want their nation to do. That’s what all the other nations of the world do do.

As individual human beings, of course, all but a small minority of us routinely devote ourselves to “causes greater than our self-interest.” We gladly yield up our time, our money, and occasionally our very lives, on behalf of such causes — family, union, professional association, church, political party, neighborhood softball league, nation. Those of us who have deep religious convictions often go way beyond the norm, helping strangers in foreign lands. All good acts, all noble acts … by individual human beings.

A government, however, is not a human being. This rather elementary point of ontology seems to have escaped all three principals in Saturday’s gathering. Governments don’t go to the bathroom; governments don’t date; governments don’t catch cold. As a human being, John McCain is free to give up time and money to causes above his personal self-interest, and would be right to feel pleased with himself for having done so. As chief executive of our federal government, however, during his working hours he should attend to America’s national self-interest, AND TO NOTHING ELSE AT ALL.

Rick Warren didn’t even ask the two men about the Census Bureau report, released two days before, a a topic of much commentary. (Though not by me. I had already said what I had to say when the previous report came out in May 2007.) Possibly this omission was in deference to Saddleback’s location down there in southern California. Perhaps Pastor Warren feared that if he mentioned demographics, viewers might find themselves wondering if the 5,000 people present at this forum are the last 5,000 left in Orange County who can understand English. More likely Warren just believes, in common with most genteel Americans, including for a certainty both candidates, that only wicked people talk about demographics.

So I won’t be watching either of the party conventions. Both parties’ choices of nominee are appalling to me. I contemplate the next four years with dread.

I don’t want either of these men in charge of the federal government, neither the crazy old fool nor the simpering sophomore. I don’t want either the moralistic imperialism of John McCain or the welfare-state-to-the world sentimentalism of Barack Obama. I don’t want my country represented by either a Compassionate Crusader or by Oprah Winfrey in drag. (Possibly in person, too, if the rumors we’re hearing about Obama’s plans for Ms. Winfrey are true.)

Even if I wanted either of them, I do not believe, as both candidates apparently do, that our country has the nigh-infinite fiscal resources required to fund their lunatic world-saving schemes. The effort to rid Iraq of evil has cost us working stiffs a trillion dollars so far; say $7,000 a head. Population-wise, the world has 260 Iraqs. So I’m in for two million bucks? John, hate to tell ya, but I don’t have that kind of money. And this is the “conservative” candidate!

What a disaster! What on earth has happened to us? Nothing yet as bad as what will surely happen if either of these two gibbering numbskulls gets his hands on the levers of supreme executive power.

From Goldmine.com:
Head to ‘Drag City’
45 years later with Jan and Dean
by David M. Beard

August 21, 2008

In late 1963, Jan & Dean’s Drag City album tapped into a complete feel unlike any other of its time. As the album opened and the title track revved its way into pure machismo car bliss, you were literally taken to the drag strip with Jan & Dean. But, how they got there was a pretty story.

The success of Jan (Berry) & Dean (Torrence) in the early 1960s isn’t that unusual, or for that matter, that difficult to understand or figure out. They had created a successful following with their doo-wop material, and as they continued to record, they continued to improve.

By the time fate would pair them up with The Beach Boys they were an established act. But, still, their predominant demographic was teenage girls. Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with that; it was working for them, but in spite of their success, they found themselves wondering what would be their next musical direction/sound.

They had yet to make the next logical step. This was — in part — because they weren’t sure which way they should turn. Why make the change? Simple. The duo had enjoyed only modest success as a doo-wop act, with their material being overtly banal and somewhat bland. Once they signed with Liberty Records, the future began to look a little brighter, because they had a bigger budget. But, due to their contract obligations with Aldon Music, they were limited to mostly substandard recordings for single releases.

After the initial release of Golden Hits Volume 1 (which contained doo-wop crossover pop tunes like “Barbara Ann”), they were slowly finding their niche with the modest success of “Linda.” By this point, Jan & Dean had met The Beach Boys; a friendship was born.

“Once we felt comfortable with the tunes we were doing, and our partnership with Lou Adler, we started feeling really confident about [what] we were doing and the direction we were going,” relates Torrence, “Once we met Brian Wilson and had the songs to work with … we knew we had the technology; now we were getting the songs. The songs were something we were very comfortable doing. We kind of knew that we were finally in a place that was totally and uniquely ours. Jan & Dean Take Linda Surfin’ was released and included two Beach Boys covers: “Surfin’,” and “Surfin’ Safari.”

Both tracks included some of The Beach Boys on backing vocals. The Take Linda Surfin’ LP cover featured Jan & Dean with a blonde model in front of a woodie (the car) with surfboard in hand. The image was forming, but the album’s visual packaging was contrived at best.

Dean recalls, “When we met up with Brian we started thinking about doing more masculine subject matter. At that particular point, we were in full bloom (in terms of) knowing what our California imagery was supposed to be.”

It was clear that they were better, much better. Berry continued to thrive in the studio as a part of the creative team that he helped build with Adler. Now, Jan was a part of the Artie Kornfeld and Brian Wilson team. Now that they figured out what they were “supposed to be,” the next logical step would fall on their proverbial laps.

Two Girls For Every Boy
Recording at a fast and furious pace, they were hungry for bigger and better. The beach photo shoot with the woodie would provide the perfect visual for their next single, the #1 hit, “Surf City.”

At the time, it captured the California lifestyle as well as any other musical act around… including The Beach Boys. As it turned out, “Surf City” was co-authored by none other than Beach Boys helmsman Brian Wilson.

Initially, Jan & Dean were actually more interested in a different song than the one Wilson was working on — namely, “Surfin’ U.S.A.” Brian wasn’t willing to hand that track over, however he had a second song that he played the duo at his piano. The song was initially titled “Two Girls For Every Boy,” but once Jan (along with Dean) tweaked it and finished it up, it became “Surf City.” Thus was a born a songwriting partnership between Berry and Wilson.

In 1997, Berry remembered, “‘Surf City’ was the first song that Brian and I worked on together. I went to his apartment, and we sat side by side at an upright piano. I put together the arrangements on that while Brian played along … I overdubbed my voice on the lead microphone and had Tony Minichiello (of The Matadors) and Brian singing in the background. The vocals on that were done in unison… but Brian was such a joy to work with, because he concentrated so hard when it came time to work, and he was such a nice guy to be around.” Wilson recalled, “I remember Jan as being a really funny guy with a lot of talent. He had a great attitude. We picked up things from one another (in the studio). ‘Surf City’ took a little bit longer, probably because it was the first time we worked together.”

It wouldn’t be the last.

The success of “Surf City” prompted a follow-up recording, “Honolulu Lulu.” Then, hastily, Liberty Records released Jan & Dean — Surf City and Other Swingin’ Cities with a total of two — that’s two — surf-related tracks, “Surf City” and “Honolulu Lulu.” Stranger still, the B-sides — “She’s My Summer Girl” and “Someday (You’ll Go Walking By)” — were left off the LP.

When the Surf City LP was released the concept was lost on Torrence.

“Surf City — at the very least — (included) a picture with a surfboard and woodie. The company who put our packages together [Studio Five] decided that the picture shouldn’t dominate the whole cover. I don’t know why,” says Dean. “All the songs weren’t about surfing, so on the other hand (I thought) it would be misleading to have that picture on the cover, but there weren’t that many songs written about surfing yet. We couldn’t fill up a whole album with surf songs… we didn’t have enough of them. I rationalized that, but at least we got the photo session done and a little picture of us with the woodie and a surfboard.”

Surf City did mark a concept of sorts, but “Honolulu Lulu” was not a “swingin’ city.” Had the “suits” thought a little harder they could have included “Surfin’,” and “Surfin’ Safari” from Jan & Dean Take Linda Surfin’ to add some oomph to the duo’s image. It wasn’t to be. But it wouldn’t matter, because the next step would prove to be their best.

Burning Up That Quarter Mile
Jan & Dean always sang about things that they either were into doing themselves or found to be interesting. Whether it was through their ever-growing persona of tongue-in-cheek humor or their basic interest in the pastimes of young men, they were becoming unique and were finding their stride.

As the concept for the next Jan & Dean LP came together — thanks in no small part to the success of The Beach Boys’ hits “409” and “Little Deuce Coupe,” respectively — Berry and Torrence made a decision. They wanted to do an entire album about the car industry. Torrence emphasizes, “(The) Drag City LP was the first time we could get out of the studio — and have pictures taken on location — about a place that you’re actually singing about… what a concept! Tying the visuals into actual songs, so the continuity was finally there. I felt really, really good about that. That was the breakthrough!”

Another very important element of the material that they began to compile was lyricist Roger Christian. Christian was a vital piece to the songwriting team. Of the 12 songs to appear on the Drag City LP, Christian co-wrote 10 of them, chief among them The Beach Boys’ “Little Deuce Coupe.” With Brian, Roger, Jan and Artie, the sessions commenced in September 1963 and wrapped in late November. As a new and innovative artist, Wilson was learning from Berry, and they were grooving on Christian’s entire car vibe. It worked to everyone’s benefit.

While Jan was thriving in the studio with his group of newfound collaborators, the packaging/imagery/concept of whom Jan & Dean were had yet to refine itself into a single comprehensive idea. This was where Dean began to really flourish.

A natural comedic talent, Torrence identified with all the hobbies of the day. Whether he was racing go-carts with Beach Boy drummer Dennis Wilson or speeding through the streets and hills of L.A. in his latest set of wheels, Dean’s amiable and friendly, “aw shucks” personality was the perfect counter-measure to Jan’s often abrasive tactical approach, but the pairing worked extremely well. Dean became Jan’s “other voice” so to speak and was always pushing for cross-marketing/packaging.

Listen to ’em
whine, whine, whine
In November 1963, the boys released the thunderous-sounding, foot-tapping “Drag City” single, with the B-side’s punch-the-clock comedic turn, “Schlock Rod (Part 1)” (led by Dean’s purposely boyish goofiness).
Like “409,” the song begins with a revved-up engine taking off down the drag strip. The single’s picture sleeve shows the boys working on their hot rod (covered in grease). They actually went to the drag strip and worked on cars, and it wasn’t bullshit; they knew what they were doing.

As for the Studio Five album art, “We got the whole cover, and every song on the record was about the car industry and the California lifestyle, which was totally, totally unique. At that particular time it had not been done. That’s pretty dang neat!” declares Torrence.

In fact, Drag City is so coherent in its album structure that the musical lineage is (to quote a Marx Brothers film title) “A Day at the Races.” “Drag City,” “I Gotta Drive,” “Sting Ray,” “Hot Stocker” and “Drag Strip Girl” all take place at the drag strip, while “Surfin’ Hearse” [as a huge Laurel & Hardy fan, Jan incorporated T. Marvin Hatley’s “Dance of the Cuckoos” as the introduction] and “Surf Route 101” take us to the beach, and “Popsicle [Truck]” and “Dead Man’s Curve” embody the California fun-in-the-sun outdoor life attached to street racing.

As for “Schlock Rod (Part 1)” and “Schlock Rod (Part 2),” their offbeat comedy was getting noticed. All this on one album! The release marked a very definitive direction — cool and fun with a bit of comedy thrown in for good measure.

Something else (albeit, more important) happened during the recording process of the album: a formula for recording was established that would remain the duo’s modus operandi for the remainder of their Liberty music output.

Torrence explains, “Normally we worked on the better ideas first. Songs that were good from the get-go. We’d work on those first. Then there would be the marginal ones [and] then the rest. It was kind of like a treadmill. ‘Schlock Rod’ was at the end of the treadmill; it was supposed to be a song. It would have been a silly song anyway. We were tired, running out of time and because we had that comedic point of view… it was more of a function of being tired and absolutely out of time at this particular point to sing the song like we were originally going to do. So it wasn’t anything we planned; it was totally spontaneous.”

Dean continues, “Our shtick became favorites [first], fillers [second] and then your spontaneous, eclectic little bit of a left-turn thing [last]. That kind of encompassed it all. Each album had really strong produced tracks, then the more thematic songs, and your ‘What in the world was that?’ cut.”

Jan & Dean music was an integral part of California lifestyle and mythology in the early- to mid-1960s. They never pretended to be anything they weren’t. They were established and knew their audience.

In their doo-wop days it was typically teenage girls, but now they were hip. They surfed, they raced cars (whenever and wherever they wanted) and knew how to work on hot rods, etc. Jan & Dean were more than a viable music act. They truly were of the subject matter of which they performed. They were now choosing the material to use as a tool to define them. As one of the best producers of his time, Jan Berry’s capacity for understanding technical and musical arrangements was astounding!

Now, coming up on the 45th anniversary of this unique and musically dynamic album, it’s pretty easy to understand why Drag City — with the Berry-Wilson-Christian-Kornfeld team — is one of the truly great car industry albums of all time!

David M. Beard is a Beach Boys Scholar /Jan & Dean photo archivist & scholar, journalist, designer, and editor & publisher of Endless Summer Quarterly, ESQuarterly.com.

Big time Pelosi smackdown:
STATEMENT OF HIS EMINENCE,
EDWARD CARDINAL EGAN

CONCERNING REMARKS MADE BY
THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Like many other citizens of this nation, I was shocked to learn that the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America would make the kind of statements that were made to Mr. Tom Brokaw of NBC-TV on Sunday, August 24, 2008. What the Speaker had to say about theologians and their positions regarding abortion was not only misinformed; it was also, and especially, utterly incredible in this day and age.

We are blessed in the 21st century with crystal-clear photographs and action films of the living realities within their pregnant mothers. No one with the slightest measure of integrity or honor could fail to know what these marvelous beings manifestly, clearly, and obviously are, as they smile and wave into the world outside the womb. In simplest terms, they are human beings with an inalienable right to live, a right that the Speaker of the House of Representatives is bound to defend at all costs for the most basic of ethical reasons. They are not parts of their mothers, and what they are depends not at all upon the opinions of theologians of any faith. Anyone who dares to defend that they may be legitimately killed because another human being “chooses” to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name.

Edward Cardinal Egan

Archbishop of New York

Pushing Russia Into the Cold
by Patrick J. Buchanan

08/26/2008

A year after taking power, in June 1934, Adolf Hitler made his first visit abroad -- to his idol Benito Mussolini in Venice.

Babbling on incessantly about "Mein Kampf "and the Negroid strain in Mediterranean peoples, the Fuhrer made a dismal impression.

"What a clown this Hitler is," Mussolini told an aide.

Two weeks later, Hitler executed the Roehm purge and murdered scores of old Stormtrooper comrades. In late July, Austrian Nazis, attempting a coup, assassinated Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, a friend of Mussolini whose wife and child were then his guests.

Il Duce ordered four divisions to the Brenner Pass and flew to Vienna to vent his rage and disgust with Hitler. He called a summit at Stresa with Britain and France to agree on military action should Hitler make any new move in violation of Versailles.

At the time, however, Il Duce was also plotting revenge on Abyssinia for a bloody border clash with Italian Somaliland.

Mussolini thought his Allies would understand if he invaded the Ogaden to add an African colony to his new Roman Empire, just as the British and French had so often done in previous decades.

Mussolini miscalculated. Morally outraged, Britain and France went before the League of Nations and had sanctions imposed on Italy that were too weak to defeat her but punitive enough to insult her.

Friendless, isolated and condemned as an aggressor by Europe, Italy and Mussolini had nowhere to turn now but Hitler's Germany.

Thus, over the fate of an Abyssinian slave empire, Britain drove her faithful World War I ally into the arms of a Nazi dictator Mussolini loathed and had wished to confront beside Britain. And Abyssinia was overrun.

Are we making the same mistake in the Caucasus?

Mikheil Saakashvili started this war with his barrage attack and occupation of South Ossetia. Russia's war of retribution was far less violent or excessive than the U.S. bombing of Serbia for 78 days over Kosovo, or our unprovoked war on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which has brought death to scores of thousands, or Israel's 35 days of bombing of Lebanon for a border skirmish with Hezbollah.

Yet, declared John McCain of Russia, "In the 21st century, nations don't invade other nations." Even Dick Cheney must have guffawed.

Russia must get out now, adds Bush, for South Ossetia and Abkhazia belong to a sovereign Georgia. But when did Bush demand that Israel get off the Golan Heights or withdraw from the birthplace of Jesus, which Israelis have occupied for 41 years, as he demands that Russia get out of the birthplace of Joseph Stalin, which Russia has occupied for two weeks?

As Israel was provoked in 1967, so, too, was Russia provoked.

Russians died in Saakashvili's attack, as American died in Pancho Villa's raid on New Mexico in 1916. We sent "Black Jack" Pershing, future Gen. George Patton and a U.S. army 300 miles into Mexico to kill Villa. Was this proportionate?

If we proceed on a course of isolating Russia from the West, keeping her out of the World Trade Organization, throwing her out of the G-8 and ending cooperation with NATO, where do we think Russia will go? Where did Il Duce go, when he was excommunicated from the West?

Condi Rice compares Vladimir Putin's action in Georgia to Leonid Brezhnev's crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. She raced to Warsaw to ink a deal to put 10 anti-missile missiles and U.S. Patriot missiles manned by Americans into Poland.

Does the Stanford provost have any idea where the end of this road lies, upon which she and Bush have started the United States?

What do we do if Russia responds to our Patriots in Poland with the Russian S-300 anti-aircraft system in Iran and Syria?

If the United States intends to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO and arm them to fight Russia, why should Russia not dissolve the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe and move her tank armies into Belarus and up to the borders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania?

Would we send U.S. troops into the Baltic republics to signal that we will fight Russia to honor our NATO war guarantees? Which NATO allies would fight alongside us against a nuclear-armed Russia?

If we bring Ukraine into NATO, what do we do if Russified east Ukraine secedes and Russia sends troops to back the rebels? Do we send warships into Russia's bathtub, the Black Sea, and commit to fight as long as it takes to restore Ukraine's territorial integrity?

In March 1939, Britain pledged to declare war and fight Germany to the death to guarantee the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Poland. How did that one turn out for Britain and Poland?

Before we start down the road of isolating and encircling Russia with weak NATO allies, let us think through Gen. Petraeus' question in 2003 about Iraq, "Tell me, how does this thing end?"

But, then, these folks never seem to think anything through.

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."