Jeremayakovka

An American In Israel During The War In Gaza

Fred Siegel of the Progressive Policy Institute and notable contributor to City Journal (whom NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez calls "a prince of a guy") remarks about time he spent in Israel during the Jewish State's offensive against Hamas.

From the TELOSscope Blog:

The (2005) withdrawal from Gaza had produced a new moral clarity. And the Hamas coup against Fatah meant that there was no ambiguity about the options at hand to halt the rocket fire. The BBC, which had usually been taken seriously by Israeli doves, was mocked for talking about how Hamas had come to power democratically.

* * *

Fred btw was never fooled by Barack Obama -- whom he termed "an extraordinary performance artist" -- as this piece from a year ago attests:

(Obama's record) appeals to Ted and Caroline Kennedy and the aging MoveOn.org boomers who have long nursed hopes for a renewal of Camelot. But now as then, a charismatic political personality carries more dangers than benefits. The “politics of meaning,” which emerged from the Kennedy years and has now resurfaced with Obama as its empty vessel of hope, is doomed to disappoint because it asks more from politics than politics can deliver.... The banality of Obama’s campaign is exceeded only by his unwillingness to challenge liberal orthodoxy.... It’s when Obama tries to show that he can also be tough that he most fully reveals his limitations....

Zogby Poll - Many Obama Voters Poorly or Uninformed

The text beneath the asterisks is Zogby poll data copied verbatim from the web site How Obama Got Elected. HOGE's founder, John Ziegler, is making a documentary about the disastrous impact of mainstream media coverage of the recent president election. (See video clip in previous post .)

Related: In an LA Times article today, Peace Action's Executive Director Kevin Martin is "expressing concern" over "so much Obama hero worship."

* * *

512 Obama Voters 11/13/08-11/15/08 MOE +/- 4.4 points

97.1% High School Graduate or higher, 55% College Graduates

Results to 12 simple Multiple Choice Questions

57.4% could NOT correctly say which party controls congress (50/50 shot just by guessing)

71.8% could NOT correctly say Joe Biden quit a previous campaign because of plagiarism (25% chance by guessing)

82.6% could NOT correctly say that Barack Obama won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot (25% chance by guessing)

88.4% could NOT correctly say that Obama said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket (25% chance by guessing)

56.1% could NOT correctly say Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground (25% chance by guessing).

And yet.....

Only 13.7% failed to identify Sarah Palin as the person on which their party spent $150,000 in clothes

Only 6.2% failed to identify Palin as the one with a pregnant teenage daughter

And 86.9 % thought that Palin said that she could see Russia from her "house," even though that was Tina Fey who said that!!

Only 2.4% got at least 11 correct.

Only .5% got all of them correct. (And we "gave" one answer that was technically not Palin, but actually Tina Fey)

# # #

Many Obama Voters Are Like Oakland

There isn't any "there" there. OTOH, here's evidence of the deleterious effects of the mainstream media's objectively biased 2008 election coverage. In their own words: the MSM's giddy boosterism.

Straight Talk With Sarah Palin

I try to keep it so simple by reading the [Constitution of the State of Alaska] and believing in it and living it. I get chided all the time, especially in the campaign. It was funny -  people got so sick and tired of me quoting the Constitution. It's my Bible in governing. It's a simple Constitution. It's short and sweet. It was providential. It was written by very wise minds fifty some years ago. Some of these crafters of our Constitution, they're still alive today. They're my mentors, they're my advisers. I get to meet with these folks and say, "What did you mean by this provision in our Constitution." They get to tell me what they meant and what the intention was and they make so much sense. And if more of our lawmakers knew what it says about equality: inherently it's the people who have the power - it's not the elected officials - it's the people who have the power in Alaska. And when we develop these God-given resources of ours it's to be for the maximum benefit of Alaskans.

- Governor Sarah Palin

Before the election one liberal commenter suggested I was "naive and sentimental" in my support for Sarah Palin. Far from it. Yes, I welcomed her to the ticket and, yes, last week I voted for her. I also had the good fortune to meet one of her former neighbors and constituents from Wasilla. That was a refreshing antidote to the mainstream media's/entertainment industry's/netroots' relentless assault on her character. Much as I feel about Obama, she's lived a great American life; and as Joe Lieberman suggested about Obama in his RNC speech, she may one day make a good national executive. Voters this year decided Obama's chance would come sooner. Fine.

Still, Palin didn't overly impress me in the places where she had to most - her high-profile media interviews and her one debate. In the former, her awkwardness revealed the weaknesses of being merely a regional reformer and not a Machiavellian, cloak-and-dagger operator. In the latter, her winks into the camera were more worrisome, even offensive, than any on-stage knuckle-bumping. What I, and I think many others, would have appreciated would have been more opportunities to hear straight talk from Sarah Palin.

Back in June 2007 Dimitri Vassilaros of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review sat down for an inquisitive one-on-one with her. The stakes were low then which, sadly, may be why the conversational quality is high. Palin's got a bunch to say about financing Wasilla's sports complex, her critical hindsight about beauty pageants, her conservative principles, her legal perspective (as an executive) on gay marriage and school choice, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and more. Listen to the audio while it's still available.

One of the best questions is near the very end: 

DV: When will you be running for president?
SP: President of the PTA, maybe!... I can't answer that.... Life happens.
DV: So she didn't answer No. OK, great.

Global Caliphate Forces Anticipate, Interpret Obama's First Iraq Moves

From the Islamic Republic of Iran's Press TV: Taji Mustafa of the international, pro-global caliphate Hizb ut-Tahrir Party of the United Kingdom (!) is trying to cool somebody's jets in this recent, post-American election commentary.

Says Mustafa: Barack Obama is not Vladimir Lenin. He's not a revolutionary who has come with a new system to Washington DC, planning to overthrow the current system and turn everything upside-down.

Who? What rabble? To what revolutionary squads, cadres, kooks, and thugs is Mustafa speaking?

Thankfully, Jamie Kirchick  articulated the pro-American perspective. Note very well, in the final minutes, the confrontation between Kirchick and Mustafa. Kirchick, whom I respect for going on camera there, was way too polite (calling him, "Sir") - he should have tore Mustafa's (rhetorical) head off and spit his (rhetorical) brains into the camera....

(H/T Jamie)

Don't Join The Swarm

Michael Ledeen's thoughts on the mainstream media and Election 2008:

For years now, most thoughtful Americans have known they were being misled by the MSM.  But they didn’t know exactly where to go to get the real news.  Over time, many of them learned to read blogs, to listen to talk radio, and to read the few good journalists who still believe they should report, and let the people decide.  It’s only natural that the Dems should want to shut down these outlets and those reporters, and I think that’s going to be a very big battle in the very near future, whoever wins tomorrow.

It follows from all this that there’s another thing that has my dander flying:  the snooty treatment of Palin.  It’s as if that old New Yorker cover–the one that shows Manhattan occupying most of the map of the United States, then the Mississippi River and fly-over country in a small strip, then San Francisco and Los Angeles in a larger area–has now become the template for all proper thinkers.  I’m sure lots of folks in fly-over country are enraged by this, but many others want to have a seat at the table, want to join the celebrities, want to be thought of as serious thinkers.  And so they join the swarm.

American exceptionalism rests upon independent thinking, pride in community and heritage, and disdain for ivory tower intellectuals combined with admiration for self-help and achievement.  My greatest fear is that these values are going to be trashed over and over again the next few years, and we will have to fight it very fiercely.

* * *

Professor Ledeen, whom (along with his Anbar Province/Marine vet son) I had the privilege of meeting last summer at a San Francisco luncheon, is definitely a "neoconservative" - when asked whether the Iraq invasion was (perhaps?) a mistake, he replied: Yes. We should have invaded Iran.

Fox News Captures The Significance Of Obama's Election

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I can't think of another country in the world where you would have a significant minority that was once so maligned and so oppressed finally have one of its sons rise to this level. This is - you know, I don't care how you feel about him politically - on some level you have to say, "This is America at its grandest." The potential, the possibility - and what it says for our children, black and white - the image of Barack Obama and those little girls in the Rose Garden in these years to come I think is just stunning.
Agreed, Juan. Agreed.

"Now reality must intervene."
Agreed there, too, Jacob.

John McCain - America's Fifth Lost Man

I don't think about John McCain, because he's part of the old world, the dead America.
- The rapper Nas, “Q&A Nas,” Rolling Stone, July 10-24, 2008.
 

A post at Gay Patriot yesterday speculated that the mainstream media has largely accepted Obama's life-narrative and worldviews because they figure this is their shot to be a part of history. Certainly that's been the heady message which Obama's supporters have internalized. They're so sure of it, they can't imagine anything else coming close. My comment to that post said as much.

That said, it's been a GOP truism that Obama can't be beaten on image, and instead can be beaten only on issues, facts, character. Obama is an extreme liberal (not "post-partisan"); Obama is a ruthless and tainted, Chicago-bred machine pol (not an "idealist"); Obama not only enjoys the enthusiastic support of most of the world's "Jamal the Plumbers," he enjoys (and occasionally cultivates) support from the anti-American, anti-liberal, and anti-Zionist demagogues who rule them (hence, he lacks " judgment"). All of the above are objectively true, and have been amply demonstrated - by conservative bloggers generally, of course, rather than by the mainstream media.

But what if John McCain's presidential bid were just as historic as Barack Obama's? Shouldn't anyone coming so far to gain a major party nomination deserve to be esteemed on that merit alone? What if John McCain - the life-narrative of John McCain - were upheld, admired, revered even (as his Democratic endorser, Lynn Forester de Rothschild declared on CNN)? What if John McCain's life were already historic? What if a John McCain presidency fit squarely in a great and already-established American historic tradition, one which should be apparent to all Americans?

The lost story of this presidential election is that John McCain's life and potential presidency already are historic. Sadly, however, what makes them so are not on the tip of people's tongues. They should be. Our media and cultural powerbrokers hardly see this as worthy of mention, let alone worthy of inquiry, admiration, and cause for pause and reflection. These people are not even capable of conceiving of McCain's virtues, I venture. (When his age is mentioned it's as a liability exclusively, not as a source of wisdom and moderation.) So few of today's cultural powerbrokers - including his opponent - have ever risked anything close to what John McCain risked (and lost) to earn them. Risked not just for his country, but for another, far-off country. For them to conceive of John McCain's virtues, and then to inform the public of them would be highly inconvenient. It would get in the way of their being a part of the election of Barack Obama.

* * *

It wasn't always that way, and it doesn't have to be that way.

Curiously, the following excerpts from a Thomas Wolfe short story, "The Four Lost Men," shed light on this situation. The story appears (in its abridged version) in the collection From Death to Morning. (Click here for discussion of the original, long version.) Set in June 1917, shortly after the US had entered WWI, Wolfe contrasts his 16 year-old sensitivities to his aged father's undying esteem for post-bellum Republican presidents - all of whom were veterans of the American Civil War. Wolfe's special power in this tale is to imagine these men's minds, not as elder statesmen, but as young wartime leaders passionately enamored with life and death, with duty and nation, with hope and wonder and agony and loss.

The lessons, concerns, and even obsessions which Wolfe visits are as timely today as they are undying - just like the historic life of John McCain. Here's just one excerpt. Please click through and read them all in sequence.

[My father] spoke then with familiar memory of the lost Americans – the strange, lost, time-far, dead Americans, the remote, voiceless, and bewhiskered faces of the great Americans, who were more lost to me than [ancient] Egypt ... – and whom he had seen, heard, known, found familiar in the full pulse, and passion, and proud glory of his youth: ... the proud, vacant, time-strange, and bewhiskered visages of [post-bellum Republican presidents] Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes.

The first vote I ever cast for president,” my father [said] ... “I cast in 1872, in Baltimore, for that great man – that brave and noble soldier – U. S. Grant! And I have voted for every Republican nominee ever since.... [In 1893] the Democrats were in and we had soup kitchens. And, you can mark my words,” he howled, “you'll have them again before these next four years are over – ... before that fearful, that awful, that cruel, inhuman and bloodthirsty Monster [i.e., President Woodrow Wilson] who kept us out of war [from 1914 until 1917],” my father jeered derisively, “is done with you – for hell, ruin, misery, and damnation commence every time the Democrats get in. You can rest assured of that!” he said shortly, cleared his throat, wet his thumb, lunged forward violently and spat again.

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Barack Obama's Hidden Selves

Numerous categories of information and documents would have enabled the public to form a truer and more accurate assessment of the Democratic nominee, including:

1. Occidental College records -- Not released
2. Columbia College records -- Not released
3. Columbia undergraduate thesis  -- Not released
4. Harvard College records -- Not released
5. Selective Service registration -- Not released
6. Medical records -- Not released
7. Illinois State Senate schedule -- "Not available"
8. Law practice client list -- Not released
9. Certified Copy of original birth certificate -- Not released
10. Embossed, signed paper Certification of Live Birth -- Not released
11. Harvard Law Review articles published -- None
12. University of Chicago scholarly articles -- None
13. Baptism record -- Not released or "Not available"
14. Illinois State Senate records --"Not available"

15. US Senate record -- the most liberal by far.

CONFIRMED - Major News Networks Trick McCain, Treat Obama

A Center for Media and Public Affairs study, posted on the Internet by the Associated Press at 9:20PM EST on Friday night, Halloween (assuring a minimum of instareadership), proves what every professional journalist and/or principled blogger has been asserting for months: the major news networks have been tilting their election coverage against McCain and for Obama.

A recent survey of 2,011 people regarding 979 news major network items that appeared between August 23 and October 24 turned up the following:

ABC recorded 57 percent favorable comments toward the Democrats, and 42 percent positive for the Republicans. NBC had 56 percent positive for the Democrats, 16 percent for the Republicans. CBS had 73 percent positive (Obama), versus 31 percent (McCain). Hume's telecast [on Fox] had 39 percent favorable comments for McCain and 28 percent positive for the Democratic ticket.

It was the second study in two weeks to remark upon negative coverage for the McCain-Palin ticket. The Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded last week that McCain's coverage has been overwhelmingly negative since the conventions ended, while Obama's has been more mixed.

More: CMPA Press Release (Oct. 14), "Obama Leads The Media Race As Well"

The horror. The horror.

Rewind No Evil, Replay No Evil, Reject No Evil

* UPDATE (11/03) * Link to an audio file of a 1979 interview with Khalidi, with extensive commentary by Martin Kramer

In the closing days of the presidential election, the LA Times sits on 2003 video footage of Barack Obama at a public dinner honoring his longtime friend, staunch Palestinian nationalist Rashid Khalidi.  The Times culled quotes for an article earlier this year, but interest is rife to examine the evening's entire program (which included explicit endorsements of Palestinian terrorism).

Speaking in 2007 at Portland State University, without missing a beat Khalidi compared the politics of Fateh (i.e., Arafat's once-dominant PLO faction) to Chicago, Democratic Party, machine politics. Khalidi needed a frightening, American analogy to the PLO - to make vivid its corruption, patronage, and intimidation (which Khalidi saw firsthand as a PLO spokesman in Lebanon in the 1970s and 80s). So he reached for how things are done in his - and Obama's - city. Describing Fateh, he said, would make your hair turn white.

What, then, about Obama's (and Khalidi's) career would make your hair turn white?

* * *

Meanwhile Israeli news networks, having broadcast excerpts of an interview with Yitzhak Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir, are now refusing to air the bulk of their half-hour footage. A pariah to many Israelis, Amir says that he did not regret the murder and that he had more respect for Palestinian terrorists than he did for some Israelis.

What are these media people hiding? What - or Who - are they afraid of?

"Objective Journalism ... Is Stone Cold Dead"

Sacrificed on the altar of service to Barack Obama.... The AP, once the gold standard of unbiased “hard news,” is now just another voice in the Spin Room.... A new study by the Pew Research Center found that, while 71 percent of Obama’s recent media coverage has been “positive” or “neutral,” almost 60 percent of McCain’s coverage over the same period has been “decidedly negative.”....

My friends in the Partisan Press, your reputation has now fallen lower than both President Bush (25 percent) and the Democratic Congress (18 percent). Journalistic integrity now ranks along side communicable diseases and nuclear mishaps.

Obama will likely be the next president. He will use that power to do things both good and bad. But when Americans look for tough, honest journalists to challenge him, where will we find them?

Read all of Michael Graham's piece in the Boston Herald.

Wasilla Remembers Sarah

* Welcome, Conservative Grapevine and Little Green Football readers! *

Yesterday evening I had a remarkable encounter with a man here in California (let's call him “Hank”) who had been a resident of Wasilla, Alaska during the years when Sarah Palin served as city councilwoman and then mayor. He and I chatted for half an hour, completely off the cuff. More than most mainstream media stories about her life and career, Hank's memories, impressions, and opinions – of Wasilla as much, actually, as of Sarah Palin – are indeed a breath of fresh air. They lend credence to the persona that the McCain-Palin campaign is projecting: a frontier, hockey mom with “a servant's heart.”

First, Hank said that most Americans will find it difficult to understand many particulars of Alaska small-town life. Wasilla is small by head count, but it's spread over a wide area with many miles between it and the nearest cities. Yes, it has “sprawl,” but growth merely peppers (not plasters) its way toward adjacent boroughs. (“Boroughs”: the category for unincorporated land outside the city proper.) Out there neighbors often live at a distance from each other, but these individuals also learn to make do with each other -- and especially with nature -- out of non-negotiable need, not choice.

Hank never mentioned “environmentalism” or “hunting,” but instead spoke of “game management.” Area game (or, if you prefer, wildlife) seems to coexist with the citizenry in a pragmatic, managed equilibrium. Certain technology, he said, tracks the number of moose or fish that pass through certain areas. The environs can only support so many number of this or that animal, so often it's a good (and prudent) thing that hunters and fishers are issued more licenses, and get out and bring in big catches. Never forget that many Alaskans count on outdoor kills for basic sustenance. This includes roadkill – when a big animal goes down on a road or highway, a local church will receive a call and then send out members to haul and properly strip the carcass. This has to do with sustenance and community service, not with sport and spoils. Teddy Roosevelt would be proud.

This also has to do, as Hank described it, with a “pay-as-you-go” way of life. Since there are few state taxes, Alaska government remains small and usually in the background, even if services are scarcer and more expensive. For example, the state university is relatively expensive as state universities go, but that's because only students pay in to it. More bureaucratized states like California and New York fund their state universities by taxing the entire populace. Hank also wanted me to note that there's a fair amount of home schooling in Alaska. (I have to add, the tenor of these remarks reminded me of an old Dinesh D'Souza anecdote: Ronald Reagan, back in the 80s, received D'Souza as a guest at the White House. Reagan pointed out the window to a large structure, not too far off. “You see that building?” he asked. “Yes.” “That's the Department of Education. Do you know what they do over there? “No,” D'Souza acknowledged, "I don't." “Neither do I,” Reagan declared.)

Back in Wasilla, during Palin's time in office an effort took hold to incorporate his outlying borough, but Hank was wary because he knew that the city wouldn't be able right away to keep up roads and provide fire department services as he'd been used to. It was a trade-off, but one brokered in open (if close) quarters. Just as former Alaska senator, Democrat Mike Gravel recently said, Hank said he didn't always agree with her decisions, but he tended to respect them. He said she always carried herself confidently, as when she had Wasilla's chief of police replaced.

In this and other ways, Hank said, he formed over the years strong, up-close impressions of Sarah (whom he always referred to as “Sarah”). As Sarah gave birth to new children, the town paper ran items about them. She and her husband gave them funny, marvelous names – “Piper,” he explained, is named after the piper cub airplane (a fixture in long-distance Alaskan transportation). Sarah typically attended Wasilla's high school's graduation ceremonies, including his own child's graduation. Her mayor's office was “a shack.” When years later she put a former governor's plane on eBay, he said it didn't surprise him one bit. Did Hank watch her recent vice-presidential nomination acceptance speech? “It was 100% her,” he said, without hesitation nor undue emphasis.

Now that I think about it, I didn't even ask Hank whether he's registered to vote with any party, nor whether he is planning to vote for McCain-Palin in November. It doesn't much matter, since his opinions and input regarding Sarah Palin are based mostly on her no-nonsense fulfillment of two non-partisan offices. What a world of difference this is from the dozens, even hundreds of liberal journalists and Democratic operatives who – like Kremlin commissars dispatched to quell defiant Soviet republics – have descended upon Alaska to try to destroy, by any means necessary, the hard-earned, hard-nosed reputation of America's most popular vice-presidential nominee, the woman who will forever be remembered by her former municipal constituents as “Sarah.”

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Things To Do In Denver When You're A Dead Jihadist

A Canadian Muslim ... having entered the country illegally ... is found dead in a Denver hotel room ... with a pound of cyanide crystals ... two weeks before the Democratic National Convention.

More on this disturbing, almost Manchurian, story - so far, virtually ignored by the MSM - here and here.

Rush's Caucus Night Roundup

Short takes on the long picture. Phoned in last night to Fox.

Huckabee is tapping in to a sentiment of someone who is a straight-talker, or who appears to be ....

Found at Political Party Poop.

Solzhenitsyn For A New Year's Sermon

To usher in the New Year, anti-Communist Titan Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1979 Harvard Commencement Address. Some excerpts:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable, as well as intellectually and even morally worn it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and with countries not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists. Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?

* * *

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale than the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses. And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.

* * *

The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

* * *

The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media.) But what sort of use does it make of this freedom? Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to his readers, or to his history -- or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? It hardly ever happens because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist usually always gets away with it. One may -- One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none -- and none of them will ever be rectified; they will stay on in the readers' memories. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press -- The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus, we may see terrorists described as heroes, or secret matters  pertaining to one's nation's defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "Everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era. People also have the right not to know and it's a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls [stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk.] A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary. And one would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?

* * *

But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger -- 60 years for our people and 30 years for the people of Eastern Europe. During that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting characters than those generally [produced] by standardized Western well-being....

After the suffering of many years of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music. There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen.

* * *

The American Intelligentsia lost its nerve and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. Your shortsighted politicians who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however, a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over you. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation's courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?

* * *

Western thinking has become conservative: the world situation should stay as it is at any cost; there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society which has come to the end of its development. But one must be blind in order not to see that oceans no longer belong to the West, while land under its domination keeps shrinking. The two so-called world wars (they were by far not on a world scale, not yet) have meant internal self-destruction of the small, progressive West which has thus prepared its own end. The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilization forever.

Facing such a danger, with such splendid historical values in your past, at such a high level of realization of freedom and of devotion to freedom, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself?

* * *

Read the whole thing along with a full-length audio clip of the speech.
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Lesbian Tammy Bruce Calls Today's Mainstream Media A "Gestapo"

Whitewash - The Most Important Book Yet About Ms. Rodham Clinton

** Second Update **

The liberal Northeastern media were criminally complicit in enabling [her].... [T]here's definitely something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign.... by Camille Paglia. Plus her short (in fact, critically constructive) piece, "The World's First Drag Queen" (1996)

** Update **

Former Clinton Sec'y of Labor Robert Reich is miffed at Ms. Rodham Clinton's campaign tactics.
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I can't remember a serious question or follow-up question to her from the mainstream media. Of course, she takes no questions from anybody else.
-- Tony Blankley, as quoted in Whitewash

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Gentle Reader, rarely does JMK recommend a book as I recommend Whitewash by Brent Bozell (with Tim Graham). Of the stack I've read about her of late -- and I've read some good ones, by critics and supporters alike -- this one's going to remain on top and propped open as long as Ms. Rodham Clinton is running for any office.

Whitewash is a trim 250-page expose of the mainstream media's fully knowing, all-too-willing role in artificially (and unethically) creating, then sustaining, the public estimation of the woman from Hope New York DC Arkansas Illinois. From Hillarycare to bimbo eruptions, from Whitewater to Hillaryland, this book should make any principled political consumer mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Whitewash is for folks who value truth, humility, and transparency above lies, mendacity, and obfuscation. It's destined to become the Rightosphere's not-so-secret playbook in getting to the truth about her record in order to get it out in time to the voting public. The book deserves to play a similar role among her opponents on the Left as well (of whom the sharper and/or more principled will study up on Whitewash).

From the author's recent interview with Amada Carpenter:

The media are packaging her the way she wants to be packaged. She wants to be a moderate because it advances her presidential aspirations.... When you’ve got an “F” from the National Taxpayers Union, a zero from the National Tax Limitations committee, an eight from Citizens Against Government Waste, a twelve from the American Conservative Union, an “F” from the Gun Owners of America, how are you moderate? When you’ve got a 95 from the ADA, when you’ve got a 100 from the Brady campaign against guns, a 93 from the AFL-CIO, a 100 from the State and County Municipal Employees, that doesn’t make you a moderate!

From his own recent article:

What makes the media’s coverage of Hillary Clinton even more deplorable are the recurring examples of noncoverage. Over and over they have refused to cover Mrs. Clinton’s staggering number of personal, political, and financial scandals, ignored her leftist political agenda, and dramatically downplayed her significant political failures. Plain and simple, they have whitewashed her record to turn her into the formidable presidential candidate we’re all assured she is.

(Mind you, what's so refreshing about this book is that one of the things that first got me excited about politics at all was that women could have great aspirations. I've always welcomed, sometimes enthusiastically, that women can properly and commandingly assert themselves in the public sphere. When I was a teenager I volunteered on Walter Mondale's campaign -- on the strength, mostly, of his choice of Geraldine Ferraro as running mate. Later, when I get involved in third party politics, the attraction had significantly to do with women (and lesbian) candidates, including a candidate for president. So my bona fides are in, as far as I'm concerned.)

If conservatives succeed in sinking her presidential aspirations, it'll be because we've a) done our homework, b) applied the lessons, and c) done a complete end run around the mainstream media. If we don't succeed, then I can already picture the book that would duly be written about us -- Hillarywhipped.

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Oh! And I was going to have some comments about the other Democratic presidential candidate, Ms. Rodham Clinton, but it turns out that under a Hillary Administration you could be audited by the IRS if you use the word "dyke."
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The Passion Of The Death Threats Against Jerry Falwell

** Welcome, Conservative Grapevine and Political Party Poop readers. **
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In the early 1980s homosexual savages* [scroll to the end], inspired by 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn bar, made death threats against this influential opponent of gay civil rights, over 100 pages of recently released FBI files suggest. From the Washington Post's "Investigations" blog:

[Jerry] Falwell's FBI file contains a 1983 letter sent to his television ministry that concluded with the words, "Hoping you will die soon." It was accompanied by a small plastic box containing a live scorpion. One threat involved calls to Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg in 1983, warning that a $10,000 reward had been offered for Falwell's "assassination" and that it was to be carried out by "gays in Cincinnati." One caller advised, "I know this is true, because my brother is one of them." Said another, "I intend to be the one to collect that money."

As disturbing as these threats (and one attempt, if you count the scorpion) is that WaPo phrases the item (and frames the issue) in banality bordering on the fickle and the reckless. Called simply, "Exclusive: Jerry Falwell's FBI File," the blogpost begins:

The Rev. Jerry Falwell , founder of the Moral Majority, stirred up passions with his attacks on abortion and homosexuality. Now, the FBI's confidential file on Falwell, who died in May at age 73, reveals that he also stirred up death threats....[emphases added]

Think about it. No matter how much authority the verb "to stir up" implies, only something pre-existing can be set in motion. Which is to say that neither Falwell nor the Devil made those ostensibly "passionate" homosexuals do it. (Granted, the Reverend might have disagreed with my take on the Devil's role in the matter.) People prone to passion will be found on each side of any debate, but making death threats catapults one beyond the pale of what is acceptable (indeed, of what is possible) as civil discourse. Because death threats destroy civil discourse. Like the bullying which taunts and torments another who is perceived to be "different," death threats against a public personality convey an aggressive contempt for the targeted individual. They also convey a cowardly disdain because they attempt -- always in futility, I should add -- to coerce through terror what one shrinks from achieving through debate.
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Unfortunately WaPo's "stirred up" phrasing suggests that deficient from Falwell's manner were reason, civility, and a certain love that dare not speak its name in the mainstream media, Christian love. Yet among the first news reports after his death was, from Falwell's most prominent public opponents, testimony to the contrary.

Pornographer Larry Flynt:

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person ... Jerry Falwell and I became good friends.  He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.

Openly-gay activist Rev. Mel White cried at news of the death of this adversary whom he also considered "a friend": 

"It breaks my heart," he said. "I feel sorry for his family. He had a huge presence in this town [White lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the vicinity of Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church] and the country."... He said while Falwell often condemned him from the pulpit, he would say hello every time he saw him around Lynchburg.... White said if anyone needs to learn anything from his and Falwell's relationship, it's that people should get their private and public lives in sync.

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Should WaPo's 400-word blogpost take pains to refer to Flynt's and White's statements? Probably not, Gentle Reader, but I feel I have to, even if it takes three times as long. Because the way WaPo reports those death threats accommodates their intellectual violence, which compromises the information conveyed. Why does the blogpost state in its short space twice that no assassination attempt had been made? If any had, then the attempt(s) would already be public knowledge, and even part of the public lore. Long ago they would have boosted Falwell's visibility; vividly they would have been evoked during our public remembrances. Obviously none had been attempted. So why does WaPo overstate the obvious? To understate what it intends to be less obvious: that gay radicals are a philosophically violent lot with latent and at times overt tendencies.

Sometimes this violence turns against their own. Many Americans, for example, know that two assassination attempts were made against President Gerald Ford. Not many know that one of them was thwarted by Oliver Sipple, a man who happened to be gay (and closeted). Gay radicals, including Harvey Milk, urged the compliant mainstream media to out him, which they did. That led directly to Sipple's estrangement from his family, and indirectly to his precipitous health decline and premature death. Even a framed letter from the White House didn't help him much (not in this life, anyway). The lesson to be learned here is not the insidiousness and ubiquity of "homophobia," but that any movement desperate for heroes is also a movement desperate for martyrs.

Sipple's heroic intervention on behalf of President Ford (indeed, on behalf of the country) had been back in 1975. Responding in 1983 to one of the assassination threats against Reverend Falwell, the FBI managed to locate an "informant" within Cincinnati's gay community. The facts he provided, quoted verbatim in the blogpost (grammatical errors included), read as sardonic mockery of the Bureau's interest and ability in obtaining any relevant information, whether about attested assassination threats or about the gay community generally. The quoted passage concludes, Source restated the general dislike for Falwell within the Cincinnati area, before the blogpost paraphrases another document, [T]he informant led the agents through the history of New York City's Stonewall riots -- a watershed in the early gay rights movement.... Even without access to any of the 100+ pages of Falwell's FBI file (a portion available here), an inquiring mind would figure that the ones WaPo references are not those most relevant to unearthing who, exactly, was behind these assassination threats. For example, spelled out in at least one other document (imaged above) is that one potential assassin had been a candidate for Congress in Santa Cruz, California in 1982. Surely that deserves further attention.

Instead of sifting through the most salient details of these assassination threats -- including, in fairness, asking whether any were made by heterosexuals (or even closeted gays) seeking to defame LGBTetc. people -- the Washington Post's "Investigations" blog cultivates in the reader's mind the image of a presumably "powerless" homosexual presumably "speaking truth to power." Whatever the ideological or agitational purposes that might serve, serving them up in a disorienting sentimentality ignores, if only temporarily, real evidence of crime and real clues as to the crime's origin and magnitude. The contemporary LGBTetc. movement would call this "queering" the profession of journalism. It's also what that movement would call "queering" the civic duty of cooperating with the FBI. The effect of all this "queering" is to make WaPo refrain, counter-intuitively and unprofessionally, from asking hard-hitting questions about a number of blood-thirsty, presumably merry gay homosexual pranksters -- and potentially murderous plotters.

WaPo, WaPo, why hast thou forsaken truth?
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[*]: Some readers have expressed apprehension at the phrase "homosexual savages."

It recalls a point Robert Bork makes early on in Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline: Every new generation constitutes a wave of savages who must be civilized by their families, schools, and churches. (Chapter 1, "The Vertical Invasion of the Barbarians.") Whether "families, schools, and churches" civilize our young regarding LGBTetc. issues, or rather how they do so, is obviously a crucial dispute in "the culture war." Certainly anyone with an appetite for violence needs to be civilized.

I also have in mind two French films of the 1990s, Les Nuits fauves (Savage Nights) and, to a lesser extent, Les Roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds). The latter, a slow-paced, art house triumph, is the delicate coming-of-age tale of four adolescents, one of whom is just recognizing his homosexuality. Savage Nights on the other hand is about a young bisexual man, HIV-positive, hellbent on avoiding maturity and mortality. Its succes de scandale was enhanced when writer-star-director Cyril Collard died of AIDS just three days before the film took home four Cesar awards (the French Oscars).

One of Savage Nights's more irksome moments is when it snatches a line from the notoriously homoerotic writer Jean Genet. Collard acknowledges who wrote the line while ignoring where it originally appeared. It's from "Violence and Brutality" (included here), an essay which has nothing directly to do with the story of Savage Nights, and which is, in fact, an apology for terrorism: Violence alone can put an end to the brutality of man....  

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As American Thanksgiving Approaches, Think About The Islamic Colonization of Europe

From "Fjordman's Farewell to Little Green Footballs":

The [European Union’s] policy of deliberately Islamizing the European continent represents one of the greatest betrayals in the history of Western civilization. There is no other continent on the planet today where the indigenous peoples are being systematically deprived of their heritage, displaced in their own cities and subject to violence and abuse with the active involvement of their own authorities, yet where this is celebrated as a good thing in the media....

Later in the same post:

Islam isn’t reformable. The only possible solution then, apart from a global war to the death which nobody wants, is to separate ourselves from the Islamic world as much as possible. And by “we” I mean non-Muslims in general, not just Westerners. This entails completely and permanently stopping Muslim immigration in any form. However, in the USA, Canada and Australia, and certainly in Europe, simply stopping Muslim immigration is no longer enough. Some of the Muslims who are already here need to be expelled. There is no way around this. No, I have never suggested expelling all of them, but the most hardcore ones who push for implementing sharia laws here need to be deported, yes.

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A related discussion underway across the Atlantic: In NYRB Ian Buruma critiques Norman Podhoretz and World War IV.

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And some Norweigian backbone:

As Europe’s Islamization proceeds apace, the gap widens between ordinary folks’ growing recognition of the outrages that are going on all around them and the movers and shakers’ cynical insistence on pretending that everything’s just hunky-dory....

Fortuyn’s murder should have put an end to the character assassinations of the advocates of freedom. Nope. Instead they’ve only grown more sophisticated.

While Other Candidates Talk Tough On Border Security (And Act Gently), Tom Tancredo Gets Tough (And Talks Gently)

* Updated (11/16) *

"Open borders" = Closed minds

Hopefully the recent Tom Tancredo presidential campaign ad will compel not just Republican presidential candidates, but all the presidential candidates, to take complete responsibility for American borders and for laws and policies that govern all entry points into the United States.

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Note how Wolf Sheep Blitzer plays the "fear" card -- tossing out a loose noose for Tancredo to trip upon -- rather than acknowledging that his stern response to plausible and documented terrorist threats is worthwhile on its merits.

All the candidates should be held responsible for their positions on immigration and border security, no matter how much responsibility they take (or refuse to take). When Giuliani made a San Francisco appearance last summer, that's along the lines of what I tried to ask him.

Related: What would "Ann of Arc" do?

What is Western Civilization all about? and, Are we willing to defend it?
-- Tom Tancredo
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* Update (11/16) *

Diana West, "Tancredo's Raw Truth":
Yes, there is something surreal about the commercial, but not because of the content. What is surreal is the hysteria that has greeted it. After 9/11, 3/11, 7/7, Amman, Amsterdam, Baghdad, Bali, Beslan, Davao, Hadera, Haifa, Jakarta, Jerusalem, Nairobi, New Dehli, Sharm al-Sheik, Tel Aviv, Tunisia and more, what dolt doesn't wonder if and when jihadist cowards will attack our own trains, markets, hotels and restaurants? Tom Tancredo has only taken the mature and responsible course -- not coincidentally, also the politically incorrect course -- by raising this deadly serious issue with the American people. But for this he is castigated as a "fear-monger."

"They Are Ruining My Life"

Palestinian-born Nonie Darwish came to Berkeley, California to tell the truth about the blight of Islamofascism (click link for video). The only visual media organizations which covered her appearance were Incorrect University and Al-Jazeera.

Seven Things To Know About The Clintons

Here are the bullet points from Emmet Tyrell's "Seven Things To Know About The Clintons":
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1. Every Clinton scandal of the 1990s had a precedent in the Clinton governorship of the 1980s in Arkansas.

2. For years, the Clintons have bullied the press, political opponents, prosecutors and those women who caught Bill's eye.

3. Rumors of Sen. John McCain's temper have haunted his campaign. Hillary's temper is even more widely documented, by disaffected Secret Service agents, military aides, Arkansas state troopers and others.

4. Hillary is given to what the historian Richard Hofstadter termed "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

5. The Clintons have, to use the words of President Harry Truman -- who, while president, scrupulously insulated the White House from fundraising and, in retirement, refused speaker's fees -- "commercialized the presidency."

6. Very little of this has escaped the notice of journalists and of Democratic leaders. Yet after every scandal, they forget their public denunciations of the Clintons.

7. The media have been lax in reporting the Clintons' unprecedented record of ethical failings and outright corruption.


When you come across a liberal or undecided voter (especially an ideologically moderate white woman) who is cool to or untrusting of Ms. Rodham Clinton -- and who can't quite put his finger on why -- be sure to forward him "Seven Things To Know About The Clintons." Then let the facts speak for themselves.

Cop Killings On The Rise, How Many Killed By Illegal Immigrants?

The Yahoo!/Time article, "A Surge in Cop Killings," won't ask that question. To wit:

There just seems to be that there's a greater willingness on the part of these bad guys to take out a police officer, Miami Police Chief John Timoney told TIME.

This indicates heightened contempt within the social (or asocial) fabric toward police officers and/or greater desperation generally on the part of criminals.

[S]ome gang initiations now include the express targeting of police - such as in April of 2004, when California Highway Patrol Officer Thomas Steiner was randomly shot outside a Pomona courthouse by a teen trying to prove himself to a local gang. Other experts and activists cite the desensitizing effect of popular culture, most notably violent video games, as a key reason that more young people have no compunction about opening fire on a man or woman in uniform.

What else could "desensitize" someone? Hmm, someone here illegally, maybe? Someone who ignores, resents, reviles (North) American authority? Who knows that a run-in with the law could be especially complicated? Nary a word from Yahoo!/Time on the subject, though. Yahoo!/Time preaches confusion, indecision, and complacency.

Other than giving them more firepower, police departments around the country don't think they have a lot of other bright ideas to combat the recent spike in cop killings.

Here are some ideas: clamp down on the southern border; deport without possibility of appeal all illegals convicted of  felonies; and study up on the illegal immigrant violent crime wave that we all live with (and some of us die from). Since most violent crimes are committed by men between the ages of 18 and 30, maybe allow men who are over 30 only into the U.S.? That might sound absurd or arbitrary, but something's got to change.

AP on Laura Mansfield, Citizen Anti-Cyberjihadist

"Laura Mansfield" (a pseudonym) monitors the internet for al-Qaeda and other jihadist activity, reporting findings to the feds and writing four books along the way. The AP's Sagar Meghani made a short news video about her for Yahoo!. It's very good news, but then he caps off his coverage by referring to "the jihadist community" not being too happy about her work.

No kidding, Sagar. People who have declared war on all of us, who are not just dedicating but consecrating their time, energy, wits, money, and other resources to break any laws in order to kill or subdue non-Muslims are not "a community." They are an enemy.

Even if a case is to be made for non-violent, intellectual (or reformist) jihad, that phrase obscures and prevents it. Forget the AP, go to the source: LauraMansfield.com.

Bring It On! - The Milblogs, That Is

* Update (09/20) *
Milblogger Sgt. Eddie Jeffers - KIA September 19, 2007

In a piece of pure good news, President Bush met for an hour this past weekend with several top military bloggers in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

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Says WaPo, "President Reaches Out to a Friendly Circle in New Media." In what is (thus far) our generation's defining military effort it only makes sense that those with the most direct experience, expertise, and contacts in military operations and affairs have assigned themselves the mission of getting the stories and getting them right. "Friendly circle," I suspect, doesn't begin to describe this group. For one thing, I'm sure they didn't have time for many pleasantries or politesse.

In these times ferociously antagonistic liberal blowhards like MSNBC's Keith Olbermann pontificate, generalize, exaggerate, and slander for a living while these dedicated men are providing a great public service. With nary a dime to show for their efforts, they cast through the blogosphere some of the sacred honor that is the spiritual glue binding our armed forces together. It's a sacred honor that should bind all the branches to the people, and vice versa.

Muslim Terrorist MDs Livin', Schoolin', Tranin' in the USA

* Updated * Wayne St. U. blog's pro-Hezbollah post

Islamic terror, an equal opportunity killer, is also an equal opportunity recruiter. And American medical schools are extending high-quality professional training and credentials to these killers and recruiters. Debbie Schlussel deserves a headline for this one (her post has several links and images):

Houssein Zorkot was caught, Sunday, in Dearbornistan's Hemlock park, armed with an AK-47 assault rifle and dressed in black clothing with camouflage paint covering his face. He was apparently training for some sort of terrorist attack on behalf of Hezbollah and its various Shi'ite splinter groups in Lebanon, all of whose "martyrs" he honors on his website....

[Zorkot's web site] is a pro-Hezbollah, pan-jihadist recruitment site for Jabal Amel and Zrarieh (apparently two Hezbollah offshoots), based right here on our soil and in my backyard.

Reminds me why I despise nerds who escape into comic books and science fiction to simulate adventure and heroism. The opportunity for the real thing is right here under our noses -- with evil enemies named "Zorkot."

Were stories like Zorkot's featured in Newsweek's cover story this past summer, "Islam in America"...? See "al-Newsweek" for critical takes.

Soon it will be revealed: Muslim Terrorist MDs Born in the USA.

The Untold Story of Delta Flight 1824

Two "credible security risks" discovered on Delta flights last week. Any word about it in the news? (H/T Degree of Madness) According to the Northeast Intelligence Network:

Based on a thorough inspection of all the luggage belonging to these Middle Eastern passengers, authorities also found multiple strands of electrical wire with the ends stripped of the insulation, thus exposing the copper wire, small eyeglass screw drivers, clocks, cocoa butter, 2 tubs of butter, batteries of various sizes and types, a computer laptop, and multiple bottles of hydrogen peroxide – 144 ounces in all.

Even more disconcerting, TSA and security officials observed that two of the Middle Eastern men intended for the flight had smeared Vaseline on their arms and neck areas – a common tactic among hand-to-hand fighters who want the advantage in the event someone tries to grab them or put them in a headlock. Covered by the greasy agent, they are better able to extricate themselves during close-quarters, hand-to-hand fighting.

A closer inspection of the identification possessed by the Middle Eastern passengers determined that three-(3) of the men possessed false or fraudulent credentials. In fact, one of the Middle Eastern men possessed 2 passports with his picture on both, but the passport information was different on each one.

According to reports from officials speaking on condition of anonymity, a similar incident occurred at the Orlando airport at approximately 1:00 p.m. on the same day – at the same security checkpoint. On this occasion, it was a female who reportedly possessed some of the same items in her luggage as the previous passengers. In fact, she was a member of the same family, added this source.

Where Have You Gone, Anita Bryant?

* Updated *

A day without Anita Bryant is like a day without sunshine.

Anita Bryant is like Rodney Dangerfield -- she don't get no respect. Not in elite cultural circles, that is, and not even on the internet. Her myspace page seems to be the only unabashedly affectionate web page out there. If you read it you'll learn that she toured overseas with Bob Hope to perform for American troops, sung "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" at the Super Bowl, recorded several pop albums, and wrote several books. All this while being pretty, articulate, and charming -- not at all by being sleazy or profane or by parading some gyrating sexual suggestiveness.

Yet because Ms. Bryant uncompromisingly and successfully took a public stance, consistent with her Christian beliefs, against gay rights legislation she found herself the target of death threats, assault, career-ending boycotts, and wholesale vilification. [* Update * Note, e.g., the film short, "The Assassination of Anita Bryant," (1976) (whose director died of AIDS in 1992).] Like Ann Coulter, she said it as she saw it and did not back down -- the result was almost complete banishment from the entertainment industry and an almost insurmountable reputation as a purveyor of "hate."

Note the video, below (found at her myspace page). It's made entirely from footage taken this past July in Ms. Bryant's native state of Oklahoma, at a commemorative benefit for victims and survivors of the battleship named after it, the USS Oklahoma. (The Oklahoma was sunk by the Japanese in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941; 429 servicemen died; no memorial has yet been established for it, or them.) Note about 2 minutes into the clip the pledge Bryant steadfastly makes and the song she proudly performs. If you don't, Gentle Reader, no one else will. The scene is too old-fashioned -- too simple, too kind-hearted, too regional, and too patriotic -- to draw attention, even grudging attention, from the MSM or any major cultural institution.
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In the 60s Simon & Garfunkel rode the the folk-pop wave, packaging baby boomer "angst" by singing Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. After watching Anita Bryant sing for USS Oklahoma vets and survivors, you'll wonder Where have you gone, Anita Bryant....? But don't ask her; Ms. Bryant doesn't have to answer for anything.  She never left America. America -- or rather, left-wing America -- left her.

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Further: Buried on page 9 of Google hits for "Anita Bryant" is Anita Bryant Ministries International, located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Previous: "I Believe You, Anita!" "A Pie For A Pie Makes Whole World Blind, Deaf, Dumb"

Related: A "gay patriot" and an "ex-gay journalist" walk into a bar.....

Fringe Left Filmmaker Makes Case for War With Iran

Left-wing "guerrilla filmmaker" Roger Greenwald, whom I first heard of when reading Byron York's The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, has compiled a series of clips from Fox News Channel with all manner of talking heads warning of the threat Iran poses to the West and its regional neighbors. Greenwald's purpose is to mobilize the nutroots to pressure other MSM networks to slant their news coverage against any possibility of intervention against Iran. The funny thing is, he ends up of conveying a reasonable case for waking up to the dangers Iran poses.

Talk about a broken clock being right twice a day. Thanks, Roger.
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Berkeley Suffocated

Per Berkeley Breathed's own web site, this Opus comic strip mocking Islamic chic (not sheik) is set to be withheld from print publication, including in the Washington Post.

Writes BB: Note to Opus readers: The Opus strips for August 26 and September 2 have been withheld from publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including Opus' host paper The Washington Post. The strips may be viewed in a large format on their respective dates at Salon.com.
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Cowards.

It's not that it's "a harmless expression of free speech" or some such. It is harmful -- or rather, contentious -- in terms of its content (going after self-hating Americans) and its publication (the possibility of CAIR-generated Islamic lawsuits or Islamic violence).

Cowards.

What other newspapers have thus far decided not to run it?

Send your letter of discontent to the WaPo editor here and in the meantime do your part to make the cartoon viral.

(H/T My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy)

6 Fire Trucks Quell Mosque Fire In Under 30 Minutes, CAIR Fans Flames By Claiming "Terror"

* Update below: Politics is history in the present tense *

* Update (8/21) * Remember the Bob Marley lyric?
'Cause I feel like bombing a church
Now that I know that the preacher is lying.
-- "Talkin' Blues"
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In a late-breaking story yesterday, the San Francisco Chronicle, despite itself, reported that a fire set in an Antioch, CA mosque was extinguished rapidly and effectively by 6 great American fire trucks who responded promptly to the one-alarm incident. True to form, the Chron led with the following CAIR-centric headline: "Muslim leaders call Antioch mosque fire 'act of terror.'" (Click here for more about the implacable, pro-Islamic propagandists of CAIR.)

A local Islamic spokeswoman, speaking in predictable Islamic victimese, claimed the fire was "an act of terror." Cliche-stuffed article & video, told with a feminist angle, about the full-time Islamic activist here. This site captures (alongside irrelevant, postmodern Jewish blather about understanding the Other) her not inaccurate statements that Islamic terror kills Muslims, too. Unfortunately, because of taqiyya and jihad, we can never, never ever trust Muslims to speak truthfully about Islam. [Scroll halfway through "Islam 101" for summary of taqiyya (religious deception) --Thanks for the link, Carpe.]

Was the mosque fire vandalism? Harassment? Intimidation? Yes, it could be. Also possible is that Muslims set the fire in order to test first responders and garner media attention and sympathy. (You never know, that's why you have to ask -- a duty which the Chron abdicated.) But terror? No way, Hussein! Americans and Israelis and the occasional Brit, Dane, Pole, and Spaniard die every day to stop terror and the local CAIR rep cries "Victim!". How much are they paying her, anyway?

Fortunately, the Chron online version allows readers' comments to its articles. Here's the best one I saw out of the lot. If his take proves correct, then the fire definitely was not "terror" -- more like "sloppy counterjihad.":

I wouldn't do anything like this but a lot of people have had enough of the Muslim shakedown. In countries around the world ( Holland 50 % of births are Muslim - scarves in France - drivers licenses with veils - 5 time praying in schools that never had it before) alls we hear is how you hate us and want to destroy us. I use to go by the mosque in San Diego every day. If I'd of known what was going on in there - terror training for 9/11 ).....I would of burnt it down myself. People are very very mad. Muslims have come to our culture and tried to change us. You bring violence hate, destruction and despair. We gave you Iraq...only Muslims ( but you despise each other and slaughter ). The real truth is most of us thinks your nuts. Control your own or this is just going to escalate...Sorry those is the facts....

As the mosque's president said quite aptly, regarding previous incidents of harassment, Our praying has become a symbol of terrorism. No kidding.

What are you going to do about it!? Until Muslim terrorism is stopped, no amount of prayer -- Muslim, Jewish, or Christian -- will, by itself, do anybody any good.

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* Update: Politics is history in the present tense *

1. The Syrian ambassador recently described Dearborn, Michigan as a Lebanese city. (Syria, which has occupied swaths of Lebanon for decades, which is widely believed to have engineered the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister....) 

2. Remember the liberation of Antioch (Syria). Among the earliest seats of Christianity, it was one of the earliest objectives of Crusades. Here's a passage from the account left by Peter Tudebode, describing events in 1097 Anno Domini. :

In the meantime the Antiochian Turks, those enemies of God and holy Christianity, after learning of the absence of Lord Bohemond and the Count of Flanders, swarmed out of the town and contemptuously moved to attack us. With their knowledge of the absence of some of our most experienced knights, they probed the weakest spots in our siege forces and discovered on Tuesday that they could strike and resist us. The accursed barbarians stealthily approached and, striking viciously the unwary and foolish Christians, killed many knights and footmen.  On this bitter day, the Bishop of the Cathedral of the Holy Mary of Le Puy lost his seneschal, the carrier and protector of his banner.  In fact, if the river had not flowed between us, the Turks would have struck our men more often and would have inflicted greater damage upon us, for to the camp our men fled in wild flight.

Hillary Generates Buzz

I gotchya "spirited debate" -- right here. H/T Kesher Talk

Another Gem From the MSM

Breaking headline:

Minn. bridge toll far less than feared

By HENRY C. JACKSON, Associated Press Writer 19 minutes ago

MINNEAPOLIS - Authorities searching the rubble of an interstate bridge collapse lowered the number of people believed missing Friday to eight....

A Tree Grows In Marin

Once in a while, the print media deserves acknowledgment for a story well told -- or at least for not bruising or burying an important story.

The top headline in Saturday's Marin Independent Journal reported the first ever organizational meeting -- in this swank, liberal, suburban San Francisco county -- of the nation's leading anti-illegal immigration organization. Paul Liberatore's (nice name, btw) "Minutemen Backers Come to Marin" only barely scratches the surface of the frustration and determination that fuels longtime local and legal residents. At least these concerned citizens are now on the map in the mostly plush, affluent area that is home to hordes of SUV-driving environmentalists (scroll down in link) and, before he skipped out the Middle East to pursue Islam, John Walker Lindh.

The groundbreaking meeting of this "do-it-yourself border control" organization was met by a protest from strident, inarticulate illegal immigration activists who accused the lawful civil gathering of the politically correct, intellectually fallacious  pseudo-crime of "hate."

All this is far from the "tree of heaven" of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but admitting that one of America's dreamiest places to live ain't quite that heavenly is just the right way by which to introduce this contentious issue.

The Taqiyyic Calm Within The Jihadist Storm

I love my native city more than my soul.
-- Niccolo Macchiavelli
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This from midtown Manhattan, Pamela waxes lionesshearted in "Waiting for Abu Godot":

I clock the war. It's what I do. I watch, I report and observe - I tell you when it's an observation. I distinguish between the actual news and my opinion. Something the mainstream media stopped doing long ago. They abdicated their role as public servant in delivering the news.... The crisis of our time is so pressing, so imminent, it has seized me. To my very core. I walk the streets of New York and feel as if I am walking the garden of the Finzi-Continis....

When I saw The Garden of the Finzi-Continis the first thing I thought of were those trimmed, magisterial residences of Fifth and Park Avenues and East End Avenues. Including, for that matter, Gracie Mansion.

How well I remember Manhattan's Upper East Side on hot summer weekends when the foot and street traffic dips 30+% because residents have skirted off to their second homes, time shares, etc. on the Island, in Rochester or Putnam County, on MV (that's Martha's Vineyard, for those not in the know) and beyond. At 4:00PM on a Saturday afternoon on Madison Avenue anywhere above 72nd St. you don't just hear a pin drop -- you see it drop.

How shady was my concrete canyon! [*]

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And this from Site Meter, someone (from undetermined motivations) pines to learn more about "kill Americans":

Domain Name		comcast.net ? (Network)
IP Address		69.136.82.# (Comcast Cable)
ISP		Comcast Cable
Location		Continent : North America Country : United States (Facts) State : Delaware City : Wilmington Lat/Long : 39.7592, -75.5664 (Map)
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Microsoft WinVista
Browser		Internet Explorer 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; InfoPath.2)
Javascript		version 1.3
Monitor		Resolution : 1280 x 800 Color Depth : 32 bits
Time of Visit		Jul 26 2007 11:28:22 am
Last Page View		Jul 26 2007 11:29:20 am
Visit Length		58 seconds
Page Views		1
Referring URL		http://www.google.co...&hl=en&start=70&sa=N
Search Engine		google.com
Search Words		kill americans
Visit Entry Page		http://jeremayakovka...if_a_muslimamer.html
Visit Exit Page		http://jeremayakovka...if_a_muslimamer.html
Out Click		Islamic Evil http://kenlydell.typ...ad.com/islamic_evil/
Time Zone		UTC-5:00
Visitor's Time		Jul 26 2007 2:28:22 pm
Visit Number		49,059

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*: Cf. the title and last line of dialogue from How Green Was My Valley (novel 1939; film 1941, trailer here)

Boot And Bennett On Success Indicators In Iraq

Max Boot, author of the forthcoming War Made New: Technology, Warfare and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, due out in paperback next month (reviews etc. here and here), was a guest on Bill Bennett's "Morning in America" radio program, podcast through Townhall.com. Listen to Boot and Bennett:
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BB: What's going on over there?

MB: There are some pretty astonishing measures of success ... in Anbar province, Baghdad, and in Baquba, and elsewhere as well.... The early signs are certainly positive. But unfortunately some of the progress that is being made on the ground is being undermined by the incessant calls for withdrawal from home, which basically signal a lack of resolve to our enemies in Iraq, and suggests to a lot of them that they can wait us out -- not the message we want to be sending at the very time that our troops are engaged in very high risk operations that have a decent chance of success.

BB: Is the screechiness and the volume of the calls for withdrawal getting more intense because people sense -- Is there actually maybe some sense of panic on the part of some people that we might actually be turning this thing around? I said a long time ago that it's a very odd place to be, with a number of the Democrats almost being in a position of having to root against success. If we're showing success, does this in some way explain the kind of histrionics we're seeing? [emphases added]

MB: ....The news coverage back home basically suggests that the surge is a failure.... Some of the gains that are being made on the ground, that is not part of the normal discourse of the news media. And so I think kind of casual browsers of the news media, including a lot of the people on Capitol Hill, they think that the surge has already failed.

BB: Why is it you're on to this and other people aren't?

MB: Well, there's no real secret to it.... The indicators are there if you read the benchmark report that was released by the White House last week. And I also keep pretty close touch with folks in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, and pay attention to what's going on. You have to look at the underlying trends and you can't be mesmerized by the story that there was a bombing yesterday -- terrible as it was -- or the story that three U.S. soldiers -- awful as it was -- were killed yesterday. And I think we tend to lose sight of the underlying trend which, over the past six months, with some setbacks, has been largely positive.

BB:  What's the consequence of what the Senate's debating right now -- if we pulled out and moved everything to Afghanistan?

MB: Well, for a start I think what you would see is that Afghanistan would deteriorate very quickly because al Qaeda would be able to shift resources from fighting us in Iraq to fighting us in Afghanistan. And they would be emboldened to do so because they would have this example of having defeated this superpower in Iraq. And just as they were emboldened by defeating the Russians in Afghanistan they are going to want to repeat the same trick with us in Afghanistan. So I think you would very quickly see the situation getting worse in Afghanistan as well as around the world where the jihadists would be on an upsurge. So I think if we just left right now, it would be a disaster. Oddly enough even the New York Times, which thinks that we should leave, even they have written in their editorials about what the consequences would be, and they would be pretty dire.

BB: The UN head yesterday, the Secretary General, Mr. Ban, has said that it would be a disaster.

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* Update * AEI's Michael Rubin's recent Congressional testimony on prospects for success in Iraq.

Victor Hanson Fisks Every Single Word Of NY Times Editorial Demanding Immediate US Withdrawal From Iraq

.Every single word.
.(H/T Seraphic Secret)

The Media At War, At War With the Media

Two strong pieces at National Review Online about American journalists' devastating role, whether inadvertent or deliberate, in undermining American war efforts.

Then (Vietnam):

When the American intelligentsia became disillusioned with Vietnam during the late 1960s, [David] Halberstam and [Neil] Sheehan abandoned support for the U.S. defense of South Vietnam. Like many journalists today, they avoided reporting on American military heroism in the belief that reports of American valor would increase support for the war in the United States and would put servicemen in a more favorable light than those who did not serve.
-- Mark Moyar, author of Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954-1965
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And now (Iraq):

After spending some time with the mainstream media, it’s not hard to understand why the coverage coming from Iraq is, as Staff Sergeant Rodriguez from the 4-9 cavalry out of Texas put it, “Completely wrong . . . in my opinion.”

The media has a conflict of values. A successful insurgent will always get more recognition than a successful infantryman — no matter how many successful infantrymen there are. In an arm-wrestling match between progress and propaganda, the reward of media coverage for bad behavior has a Pavlovian effect on attention-seeking terrorists....

Unlike any other player on the board, the press has no oversight, no mandate, few penalties, and even fewer consequences. [emphasis added]
-- Matt Sanchez, Marine reservist, Jeane Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom honoree, and embed reporter in Iraq. Matt blogs about Iraq and other topics here.
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Previous: "The Media Will Win Or Lose Iraq"

Hamas's Mahmoud Zahar - The Face of A Fanatic

Here's the one and only video clip I've seen where a Western reporter presses a Hamas representative to stick to questions, to quit invoking "occupation" as an excuse for suicide (homicide (martyrdom)) bombings, to live in reality and not jihad (i.e., war). It dates from 2003 and is made possible by the ballsy, consistent questioning of Tim Sebastian of the BBC. Watch the whole thing.

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
-- Winston Churchill

Get a clue, Alan!

Coulter Blows Her Nose With Liz Edwards's Hankie

Ann responds to Liz here, in one part, quoting Democrat strategist Bob Shrum in his new book, No Excuses:

[Kerry] was even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he'd never told anyone else — that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before — and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn't pick Edwards unless he met with him again.

Previous: "Boo Frickin' Hoo, Liz"

Boo Frickin' Hoo, Liz

* Updated *

(7/4) Brent Bozell: "Elizabeth Edwards Favors 'Rage'"
(7/1) "Edwards Eye For The Straight Guy"
(6/28) The AP  does the Edwards' and DNC's dirty work, gets fisked (see below)
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This is news?

Yesterday Elizabeth Edwards publicly appealed to Ann Coulter to stop couching political criticism of her and her family in the form of personal attacks. She appealed as the mother and the wife that she is, although not as the lawyer and seasoned national campaigner that she is -- and as the First Lady that she would like very much to become.

Contending that Coulter's criticisms diminish the level of political debate, Edwards attempted to single out one of the most -- perhaps the most -- widely-read and influential political satirist of our generation for being better at what she does than just about everyone else in the business. As usually happens when she's on the MSM's hot seat, Ann's ripostes were downplayed or ignored.
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Let's get a few things straight, Liz:

* Ann's a satirist -- she does what she does with humor, hyperbole, and invective. That's her job, her duty, her calling, her raison d'ecrire.

* Ann's not running for office, doesn't hold office, has never held office. She has no real, enforceable political power -- not the kind of power that you and your husband are seeking and have already (during his term as Senator) enjoyed. Your style and your ruses should be of more concern to the public than Ann's, starting with your soft Southern voice whose posed politeness positions itself as if beyond reproach. I didn't describe your face in a previous post as "equal parts Mona Lisa and Joseph Stalin" for nothing.

* The faggot "rehab" joke from last March, the one referencing your husband, was a deft comic intervention having to do with the (ab)use of language and with shabby moral standards that permit a self-incriminating gay-hater (actor Isaiah Washington) to skirt the consequences of his actions by trying to pin the blame on "alcoholism." (Mark Foley did something similar when his sins went public. Both stink for it.) But a conservative who draws attention to the general state of our political culture can't count on receiving even-handed treatment alongside a liberal who appeals for sympathy when it's suggested he shares traits with one or another "identity group" -- can she?

* Since you don't like the attacks Ann directs at you and your family, Liz, you're demanding she perform her punditry as if strict laws against libel existed here in the U.S. the way they do, say, in Great Britain. Those laws don't exist here, not because our political culture presumes we will conduct ourselves with the restraints they impose. Those laws don't exist here so that we are free to act without their restraints. I venture that if American libel laws so permitted, you'd leap at the chance to try Ann in court. But you can't try her in court, so you're attempting to try her in the court of public opinion.

* Earlier this year when career leftwing pundit Molly Ivins died -- Molly Ivins, who had pilloried the president in two bestsellers, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush and Bushwhacked -- Molly Ivins, who succumbed to breast cancer, which you've been diagnosed with -- Bush made sure to praise her quick wit and her commitment to her political beliefs, to the point where they would be missed (!). The target of Ivins's calls for impeachment said that he respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase. Liz, if you and your husband think you have what it takes to be presidential, take a cue from someone who has experience at it.
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Previous:
"'Ann of Arc' and 'International Ann Coulter Day'"
"Elizabeth Edwards Awareness Month"

Related:
Josef K's 8-minute video deploring John Edwards's epithet "bumper sticker" to describe the war on terror.

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* Update *

The MSM is as boring as it is annoying.

The AP's Nedra Pickler gets a byline for reporting Coulter's suggestion that she wished [Edwards] would be "killed in a terrorist assassination plot." and that this supposed incivility is directly boosting contributions to the Edwards campaign.

The AP glosses over the fact that Ann did not express a specific desire of hers that Edwards be assassinated. While referring to specific, demonstrated desires by those who so loathe the Bush Administration that its officials be assassinated, she implied clearly that should she demonstrate such a desire towards a Democrat she would, in terms of precedent, be doing nothing out of place or egregious. She did so to make a sarcastic point that surpasses the limits of what our current political culture permits (or does not permit) her (or anyone) to say when criticizing John Edwards, but which it permits in criticsms of Dick Cheney and of the president.

Expressed desires to assassinate have become so common in our political culture that the MSM  -- those paid professionals who set, or should set, our political culture's tone -- routinely ignore them as unworthy of scrutiny or censure. Assassination desires against this Bush Administration have been extolled as cinema and as rap music and have been attempted at least twice by real terrorists, as well as by the one who tried to have an ex-president (this president's father) assassinated. No doubt they will be expressed by those who would like to see the next and/or soon-to-be former President of the United States assassinated, regardless of his (or her) political party.

While drawing sensational attention to herself, Ann was also calling substantive attention to our political culture. It's one that has allowed the expression of such -- not just criminal but evil -- desires to become acceptable. Regardless of the direction in which her invective was aimed, she was giving active expression to the passive frustration people of all political stripes feel at an American political culture which has forsaken its obligation to identify and insist upon such standards -- standards which should hold for all of the people all of the time.

It's unfortunate that liberals can't get (let alone enjoy) the humor in Ann's recent defense of herself and her work. Even President Bush from time to time laughs at himself in front of liberals, including when he's sitting at the same table as his most dogged critics. There just seems to be no point in sharing humor with liberals. As Christopher Hitchens has said, if you have to explain why it's funny, then it's no longer a joke.

After throwing their remote controls at their TV sets and after electronically donating to the Edwards campaign, liberals should thank Ann for her dedication (no matter how ironically, provocatively, and even negatively expressed) to fairness, intelligence, and morality in American politics -- specifically in American political commentary and even more specifically in the MSM.

If the Edwards campaign is so lagging in fundraising that it has to rely on compromised reporting about Ann Coulter for cash influxes, how tired and exhausted must it be? Yowza! Yowza! Yowza! They shoot silky ponies -- I mean, horses -- don't they?

Were Orwell alive today, would he shake Ann Coulter's hand? Of course not! He'd be too busy applauding her.

Oh! And I was going to have some comments about that other Democratic presidential candidate,  Hillary Rodham Clinton, but it turns out that were she to become president you might expect to be audited by the IRS if you use the word "dyke."

Who Is Naser Khader?

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Gates of Vienna must be your lucky stars because you can thank them for informing you (because PBS won't) as to why Naser Khader deserves not just your curiosity but your friendship. (via Fausta).

"The Battle of Algiers" - A Black & White Blueprint For Full-Color Fauxtography

* Updated * (Naomi Ragen emails that Frida Ghitis confirms this post with "How the Media Partnered With Hezbollah: Harvard's Cautionary Report")
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Last night I screened The Battle of Algiers for the first time since last summer's (unfinished) war between Israel and Hezbollah. Gillo Pontecorvo's Academy Award-winning masterpiece is in some ways a great dramatic record of the tragically implacable, anti-colonial war that ravaged Algeria's people and countryside for nearly a decade while leading directly to the downfall of France's Fourth Republic. The definitive English-language history of this 1954-62 conflict, Alistaire Horne's worthwhile A Savage War of Peace, is so titled for good and terrible reason. (Horne, btw, is on record chiding America's forward strategy of toppling Saddam Hussein.)
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Similar to Picasso's Guernica which had become (after the damage was done) lionized as Europe's definitive objet d'art commemorating all victims of fascist aggression, La Battaglia di Algeri became in the succeeding generation something similar: Europe's definitive objet d'art, extolled in the service of (perceived) anti-colonial, (perceived) aspirations.  With still panel and flickering image attempting to refract war's gory horror through prisms of unblinking moral lucidity, it's no surprise that director Gillo Pontecorvo chose to depict his subjects in black & white. Within that, however, are also many shades of gray. Thus we see in The Battle of Algiers artistic expression of necessary aspirations for independence, self-determination, and peaceful coexistence among all peoples. At the same time, it directly inspires the cult of armed revolution which in turn has spawned endless apologias for the exceedingly and unfailingly cruel list of tin-pot genocidal masters -- from Ernesto Guevara to Idi Amin to Pol Pot to Yasser Arafat to Saddam Hussein to Robert Mugabe -- not to mention independent Algeria's road to its own, homegrown, and precarious socialism. Uncritical screenings of this objet d'art , then, screen damage that continues to be done by dictatorial movements, both the aspiring and the realized.
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In terms of the poster art, note how the above image seems handily handspun from otherwise disparate, but equally strident, visual styles of inter-war Social Democratic pacifist Käthe Kollwitz and post-war Marxist-Leninist Huey Newton. Are the politics of The Battle of Algiers marching forward to socialism? Retreating backward from barbarism? Going round and round in the night consumed by fire? Reflecting neoconservative concerns, are its politics somehow now, nearly two generations later, marching backward to barbarism -- which is to say, retreating forward to socialism? The latter-day result is that -- from street agitators to the academiklatura and minds in between -- the Left adores The Battle of Algiers, to the point where it has elevated (that is, reduced) it to cult status. One thing I'll propose is that the West's inability (or refusal) to arrive at clear determinations about its own history -- and the attendant, staggering spiritual uncertainties -- have created an intellectual vacuum which postmodernism now most ponderously, with a kind of diffuse determination, fills.

* * *

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In the meantime, a mental note I took during last night's screening. In one of several fauxtography scandals during last year's Israel-Hezbollah war, the New York Times published advertised a demonstrably staged photo-op of the devastation effected by Israel's aerial bombardment of southern (i.e., Hezbollah-headquartered) Beirut (below). By a kind of visual verbatim, the pose in the news image seems not just staged but copied from images of a sequence halfway through the The Battle of Algiers. It's right after colonial police, acting under an exacerbated but concentrated authority, have blown up a building in the Arab casbah, and its residents (to paraphrase Jim Morrison) bring out their dead (above). Real warfare, real damage, real suffering, and real reportage aside, the latter-day result is neither drama nor journalism, but melodrama -- and melojournalism!

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See Michelle Malkin's substantive post for in-depth treatment of this and other recent fauxtography scandals.

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The dead speak: Poor mountain folk, poor students, poor young people -- your enemies of tomorrow will be worse than those of today.
-- Mouloud Feraoun (1913-1962)

Bonus: Leonard Lopate's sensitive, informative interview of U. of Nebraska prof James Le Sueur re Mouloud Feraoun. (Prof. Le Sueur has written a methodical and highly readable introduction to the French-Algerian War, which appears within his introduction to Mouloud Feraoun's Journal 1954-1962.)

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Defining the enemy, at home and abroad, that's our first task.

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Previous: "Hezbollah, Mon Amour" "Lesbollah"

Cho Seung-Hui - Not Beneficent And Not Merciful

* Update (Giovanni taught Seung-Hui poetry) *
* Update (Students feared Seung-Hui based on his plays) *
* Update (Screenwriter Robert Avrech deplores the media's attention to this mass murder) *
* Update (Seung-Hui inspires Muslims who rejoice in America's corruption, anticipate its destruction) *
* Update (Cho Seung-Hui and mental illness) *
* Final Update * (Muslim academic official forbids Muslim prayers for Seung-Hui's victims unless the prayers also are for the victims' conversion to Islam)
* Final Final Update * Pat Buchanan gets the last word (via Matt Sanchez): If there is a lesson to be taken away from this horror, it is that we, as a society, are becoming too tolerant of the aberrant.

Here are some comments on a recent AP wire article on Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui. At this point I say we can eliminate the possibility that the killer was a devout Muslim at the time of the murders. That is, he did not commit his atrocity, as the saying goes, in the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.... In the name of what, then, did he commit his atrocity?

No one should overlook that Seung-Hui provided, strategically provided, ample evidence of what we can term pop jihad or copycat jihad or secular jihad or mental illness jihad [see the most recent update (below)]. The killer had a gradual and irreversible breakdown of Judeo-Christian ethics -- if he ever had them in the first place. He then adopted rhetoric, costume, gestures, and victimology that have much in common with jihadists' homegrown ones, ones that have enjoyed much currency since 9/11 in the MSM, the Arabic-language media, and (albeit with intense scrutiny) the blogosphere. In addition, his rage against inherited wealth -- but without any responsible awareness that, as a VT student, he was at the same time inter pares -- was loud and clear. We may also be seeing echoes of the emptiness of someone who, in his moral and cultural deformation, suffered from a breakdown of Korean or, more generally, East Asian social (even martial) values -- again, if he ever had them in the first place.

Call me a D'Souzian, but all this, imho, points to an indictment of contemporary American (so-called) culture (and perhaps contemporary Korean and East Asian cultures) at least as much as an indictment of Islam.

Knowing that Seung-Hui was an English major, and having spent half my undergraduate time in and around lit departments, I am intensely curious as to what constituted his course cirricula, assigned readings (esp. postmodern critical writing), chosen paper topics, and any other of his formative undergraduate influences and experiences, in and out of the classroom and in terms of professional preparation (club and team membership, counseling, grad school options, etc.).
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* Update * The New York Times depicts Nikki Giovanni as the front line of moral decency because she allowed Seung-Hui's violent "poetry" to intimidate over 60 students into dropping her exclusive writing workshop at Virginia Tech. Then she devoted time to work with him in a one-on-one setting. In terms of the consequences, this outdoes Norman Mailer's advocacy for Jack Henry Abbott (the convicted murderer Mailer helped spring from prison on the basis of his writing promise -- the murderer who immediately murderered again). "The Professor Who Said 'Not In My Class'," harrumphs the Gray Lady. "... 'Not in my class, but in my office hour'," it should read. Thus he pursued his preoccupations, there and elsewhere, and over 30 students -- none of whom Giovanni had devoted one-on-one time to -- are dead. And what a disgusting choice of photo by the Times (above, right), given the subject. The literary Left's fascination with, facilitation of, and refusal (or inability) to discriminate against evil is truly deadly. [Virginia Tech alumn Gabe at Social Foundations sets the pace for the heavy lifting that remains to be done regarding -- how should I phrase it? -- Giovanni's classroom. Read: "Nikki Giovanni's Violent 'Poetry'" and "Bad Poetry".]

* Update * A Virginia Tech student reports: When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. Read "Richard McBeef" and "Mr. Brownstone" by Cho Seung-Hui (warning: graphic content).

* Update * From "The Killer and the Mainstream Media: A Love Story" (at Seraphic Secret): He is, of course, the ultimate, narcisisst, wallowing in too much self-esteem. Our sin? We did not recognize his greatness. NBC has done a great disservice by acting as the killer's PR machine.

* Update * Basharee Murtadd, a self-described "apostate of Islam" who testifies that "there is no deity but the Truth," provides a round-up of some internet-based Islamic reactions to Cho Seung-Hui's mass murder. The script on this image translates as: A Product of American [democracy + nationalism]. As Muslims, our real condolences to you is to help you absolutely destroy your criminal democracy. By the vulnerable people in the Earth.
That's not "closure" -- them's fightin' words.

* Update * It is widely suggested that Seung-Hui a) had some degree of severe mental illness and b) as this link indicates, had in the past received some attention from the (euphemistically termed) "mental health system." This brings into play numerous considerations as to the public and professional (mis)diagnoses and (mis)perceptions of mental illness, plus considerations as to the sufferer's (or rather, patient's) own responsibility in monitoring and managing his condition. In addition to the scrutiny I am trying to bring to bear on the cultural and political consequences and context of his mass murder, specific medical and legal issues seem to be germaine to understanding its cause. Keeping all these considerations in mind all the time is the best way to reflect -- with a surpassing beneficence and mercy -- on what came to pass on April 16. (Also, Sigmund, Carl and Alfred insists that the presence of mental illness does not obviate what should be regarded obviously as terrorism.)

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Now you can read for yourself what I originally read, and draw your own conclusions (emphases added):

Va. Tech gunman sent material to NBC
By MATT APUZZO, AP National Writer 1 hour, 56 minutes ago

BLACKSBURG, Va. - Midway through his murderous rampage, the Virginia Tech gunman went to the post office and mailed NBC a package containing photos and videos of him brandishing guns and delivering a snarling, profanity-laced tirade about rich "brats" and their "hedonistic needs.

"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui says in a harsh monotone. "But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."

NBC said the package contained a rambling and often-incoherent, 1,800-word video manifesto, plus 43 photos, 11 of them showing him aiming handguns at the camera.

He repeatedly suggests he was picked on or otherwise hurt.

"You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience," he says, apparently reading from his manifesto. "You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people."

The package arrived at NBC's headquarters in New York two days after Cho killed 32 people and committed suicide in the deadliest one-man shooting rampage in modern U.S. history. It bore a Postal Service time stamp showing that it had been mailed at a Virginia post office at 9:01 a.m. Monday, about an hour and 45 minutes after Cho first opened fire.

That would help explain one of the biggest mysteries about the massacre: where the gunman was and what he did during that two-hour window between the first burst of gunfire, at a high-rise dorm, and the second fusillade, at a classroom building.

"Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats," says Cho, a South Korean immigrant whose parents work at a dry cleaners in surburban Washington. "Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything."

Some of the pictures show him smiling; others show him frowning and snarling. Some depict him brandishing two weapons at a time, one in each hand. He wears a khaki-colored military-style vest, fingerless gloves, a black T-shirt, a backpack and a backwards, black baseball cap. Another photo shows him swinging a hammer two-fisted. Another shows an angry-looking Cho holding a gun to his temple.

He refers to "martyrs like Eric and Dylan" — a reference to the teenage killers in the Columbine High massacre.

The package was sent by overnight delivery but did not arrive at NBC until Wednesday morning. It had apparently been delayed because it had the wrong ZIP code, NBC said.

An alert postal employee brought the package to NBC's attention after noticing the Blacksburg return address and a name similar to the words reportedly found scrawled in red ink on Cho's arm after the bloodbath, "Ismail Ax," NBC said.

NBC News President Steve Capus said that the network received the package around noon and notified the FBI. He said the FBI asked NBC to hold off reporting on it so that the bureau could look at it first, and NBC complied, finally breaking the story just before a police announcement of the package at 4:30 p.m.

Capus said it was clear Cho videotaped himself, because he could be seen leaning in to shut off the camera.

State Police Spokeswoman Corinne Geller cautioned that, while the package was mailed between the two shootings, police have not inspected the footage and have yet to establish exactly when the images were made.

# # #

Quick Fisk Of Reuters's Take On The Fate of French Hostages Held By Taliban

* Updated *

Scanning headlines over at Yahoo! France turned up this Reuters story which was news to me: "Les Français enlevés par les taliban menacés d'être décapités" ("Two French Citizens Kidnapped by the Taliban Threatened with Decapitation"). This is the first I've heard of their plight, even though they were kidnapped nearly two weeks ago. CBS, it seems, also chose to run the story now, yet provides only the AP's report which is nearly identical to that of Reuters.

I translated the story for this post. As you read it, please consider the following interrogations of how Reuters reports this awful news. (And please add questions of your own which you want to see answered to the comments section!)

[* Update * Last week Ed Morrissey started to ask the right questions about the Italian and Afghan governments' decisions to cut a deal with the Taliban during a recent, similar hostage situation. In that case, as you will read, Afghan captives were beheaded but an Italian journalist was released in exchange for five imprisoned Taliban fighters.]:
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Why didn't Reuters specify the precise identities of the aid workers? Surely a representative from Terre d'Enfance (A World For Our Children) can confirm this? If not, then with news of their kidnapping nearly two weeks old already, wouldn't the captives' relatives, knowing that their kin had been volunteering deep in provincial Afghanistan, have come forward by now or otherwise be accessible?

Surely some French, Afghani, Terre d'Enfance and/or other NGO individuals or representatives are alarmed for the hostages' welfare and might be making appeals to the press or to their own governments? From the way this article is strung together, you would never know whether that were the case.

The description of the video relates its content summarily but does not pose a single challenging question about the video - not just about its content, and neither about its origins nor how exactly it was transmitted to journalists. Regarding this latter matter: Did the video simply arrive over the transom? Was it delivered through established contacts to a news bureau's office or journalist's hotel? Isn't it justified to ask whether a corrupt complicity exists between some Taliban middlemen and individual Western  journalist(s) or even entire news agencies? After all, how come their plight is headline news only after the Taliban decide to release a video seeking publicity for their demands?

Since, as the article reports, other recent Taliban hostages were recently beheaded -- in order to extort concessions from the Afghan government, concessions the Afghans granted -- why didn't news agencies and mainstream media networks sound an alarm earlier? Is "the news" that these French aid workers' kidnapping and dire danger are conveyed with an insistent humanitarian concern for their safe release? Or is "the news" that their kidnapping and danger are conveyed with a supine acquiescence to publicize the Taliban's terrorizing tactics and extortionist demands and to do so in a time and a manner that suits the Taliban? O Gentle Reader, What is the news behind the news?
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Two French Citizens Kidnapped by the Taliban Threatened with Decapitation
Saturday April 14, 7:08pm [French time, presumably (EST +5)]

Kabul (Reuters) - Two humanitarian workers kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan have issued a call for help to the French government, under the threat, they assert, of being decapitated and of seeing their heads shipped to France.

"Please do what they ask!" begs one Frenchwoman who is presented under the name Celine on a video recording, a copy of which Reuters obtained Saturday.

"Do what they ask because if not they've said that they would kill us. They'll do it, they'll cut off our heads and will send them to France."

Celine is wearing a white scarf in this black and white film which runs just over three minutes. The two French hostages are speaking in English. The woman is speaking while crying.

According to Taliban rebels, the recording was filmed Friday and the inscriptions scratched on the CD date from Friday.

Celine and her companion Eric, who work for the non-governmental organization A World For Our Children, were kidnapped April 5th with three Afghan employees in the Nimroz province, located between Iran and the central province of Helmand in the heart of the poppy-growing region.

The Taliban have not presented a ransom demand and the two French citizens did not specify the kidnappers' demands for obtaining their release.

Three Afghan prisoners can also be seen in the video, crouching and blindfolded. According to the French citizens their names are Hazrat, Rasoul, and Hashim. A man is in the foreground, his face hidden under the traditional black and white Afghan scarf, gun in hand.

Eric, his face pale and the lower part of his face covered with a light beard declares, "I ask the Prime Minister, Parliament, and the President to meet all the Taliban's demands."

"If you don't do so, they will kill us."

THE ITALIAN PRECEDENT

In Paris, French authorities let it be known Saturday that they were in the process "of analyzing" the video of the two humanitarian aid workers kidnapped in Afghanistan.

"I have become aware of the existence of a videotape in which our two fellow French citizens and their three Afghan companions appear. We are in the process of analyzing these images and I will not make any other comment on this subject," declared French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy in a statement.

"We are remaining in contact with the humanitarian association 'A World For Our Children' which these five people work for and through it with their families," specified Douste-Blazy.

"We are remaining entirely mobilized.... More than ever our objective is to bring them back safe and sound," he emphasized.

"In this film, the two French hostages ask the government and French parliament to accept the mujahideens' demands so that they would be freed," notes a message broadcast in Arabic on an internet site.

According to the statement, the video document was distributed Friday to journalists in Kabul.

The kidnapping of two French citizens comes after that of an Italian journalist, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, fell into the hands of the Taliban last month in the neighboring province of Helmand.

Under pressure from Italy, the Afghan government obtained Mastrogiacomo's release at the end of two weeks in exchange for the release of five Taliban leaders. The journalist's driver had been beheaded and the Taliban then announced that they had killed her Afghan interpreter.

Last week Afghan President Hamid Karzai refused future prisoner exchanges with the Taliban who are holding five Afghan leaders from the health sector and are calling for the release of other rebels in custody.

Jacques Chirac telephoned Hamid Karzai Thursday to ask his support in order to guarantee the release of the two French aid workers.

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"Fear Is A Complete Waste Of Time" - Tony Snow

Blogbuddy GM Roper was contacted last year by Tony Snow after GM revealed, bravely and humbly, that he'd been diagnosed with cancer. GM reposted the email on his site, which Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) linked to, and which Michael Barone (USN&WR) has linked to. Now Tony has revealed that his cancer has returned.

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GM, Tony, Glenn, and Michael are four of the classiest guys you'll ever come across -- in this case, where the blogs, the MSM, and even the White House meet.

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Previous on GM:

"Tune In Online To Hear 'The Polar Express'"
"Kids"

The Media Will Win Or Lose Iraq

That's the gist of Fausta's interview with experienced, informed "embed" reporter, military veteran, and blogger Michael Fumento. He talks about his work reporting on the ground in Iraq, about the MSM's electronic insularity over there, and about Army bureaucracy.

The Jihadist Internet

* Updated (below) *
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Without a doubt the internet is the single-most important venue for the radicalization of Islamic youth.
-- Brigadier General John Custer (U.S. Army), who appears in the online news story "Jihad.com"
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Yahoo! News seems to be catching up with the jihad, or rather with the counter-jihad. Click over to all the clips: "Terror online", "Terrorist 007", "Online Defeat", "Dangerous Games", etc. while they're still available. In "Terror Chat Room", Rita Katz has to work at a secret location -- in professional hiding -- to track what could be called "Myspace for terrorists." In "Internet Warrior", Aaron Weisberg disrupts their sites, calling himself "a rodeo clown." Wake up, Aaron, you're not a clown, you're a mensch!

In "Terrorspeak", General Custer warns: As this process matures you'll start to see the jihadist internet in English ... so that more and more Westerners can participate.

One jihadist recruiter preaches, in English: Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood.

Curious, isn't it, Gentle Reader, not that two of the leading counter-jihadists are patently Jewish, but that Yahoo! and 60 Minutes gloss over the obvious fact that they are.

Take a minute and let Yahoo! know what a good job they've done by producing "Jihad.com" by clicking over to their free and easy Feedback Page.

Of course, the follow-up story to "Jihad.com" should be:
Hey, Yahoo!, 60 Minutes: What took you so long?
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* Update *  Instant corroboration!

"Man Blows Himself up in Internet Cafe"
-- by John Thorne (AP) Mon Mar 12, 7:37 PM EST

CASABLANCA, Morocco - A man with explosives hidden on his body blew himself up in an Internet cafe after the owners prevented him from looking at terror Web sites, the Interior Ministry said Monday.

The man was killed and four people were injured in the Sunday night blast in a Casablanca slum, said ministry spokesman Abderrahman Achour. One of the wounded was the dead man's companion, who was hospitalized with burns and a throat injury.

Both men were carrying explosives. But officials believe the cybercafe may not have been their target and that the explosion was an accident ....
[What and Who were they targeting for?]

Moroccan police have been cracking down on suspected Islamist extremists since suicide bombings in Casablanca in 2003 killed 45 people and woke the North African kingdom to the threat of Islamic terrorism. The dead man was identified as Abdelftah Raidi, who was convicted of suspected terror links and sentenced to five years in prison before being pardoned in 2005.... [Pardoned? By whom? Why?]

C'mon Hillary, It's ... Chinatown

A few days ago Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign committed a blunder in San Francisco by refusing journalists from the Chinese-American outlets Sing Tao, World Journal, and China Press admittal to her fundraiser at the posh Sheraton Palace Hotel. A dropped ball and a technicality led to the insulting standoff, for the campaign had failed to send out appropriate press advisories and then the reporters arrived mere minutes after the time specified for press admittance.

Why do they call us foreigners, even [when] we have a local address on our business card? asked World Journal's Portia Li, who was frustrated, upon arriving five minutes late, at being required to produce identification at the door before still being turned away. Let the conversation begin, Hillary proclaimed last month in her campaign's lauch vlog. Not quite, it seems.

The San Francisco Chronicle wasted no time in reporting the story, as well as the local CBS affiliate, liberal-busting blogger Michelle Malkin, and the ethnic media site New America Media. In an editorial last Sunday World Journal went so far as to demand a formal apology from Hillary's campaign.

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While this appears to be a case of logistical carelessness rather than racist recklessness -- a New York Times reporter was similarly turned away from the Sheraton Palace fundraiser, and Hillary's representatives did publicly apologize for the incident -- it's a bad foot for Hillary to get started on in her California campaign.

California has always been a financial breadbasket for political fundraising, and especially Democratic fundraising. Now that California's presidential primary has been moved up to February 8, 2008, however, every candidate's stop in the state is undeniably a campaign stop as well. No candidate can commit snafus like the one that occurred last week and count on coming out on top on primary day. This is true of Hillary even more than of her opponents. Since California is home to some of the fringiest, most extreme and most absurd elements of the Democratic Party, a centrist like her has very little wiggle room to work within while strategizing to capture her party's primary. With several states moving their primaries up to February 8, that's a day on which both parties' eventual nominees may effectively be decided. Hillary will be counting on the Chinese-, other Asian-American, and other ethnic communities for their solid support between now and next February, while the several ethnic communities will, for their part, be counting on having free access to Hillary and to all the candidates.

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Just for the record, Bill Clinton is remembered with exceptional fondness in much of San Francisco's Chinatown. For a decade he has literally been an icon at the historic Eastern Bakery at 720 Grant Street. Eastern is the very first Chinese bakery established in San Francisco's Chinatown, a fact of which its owners are very proud -- just as they are very proud of the former president's personal visit there. According to 101 Cookbooks:
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The walls are highlighted with poster-size portraits of Bill Clinton. They looove Bubba at the Eastern Bakery. There are little notes all over the Presidential posters that share with you all the details of his visit. We learn President Clinton tasted a genuine lotus paste mooncake, and that he visited the bakery nearly ten years ago. Other note-worthy text: "He shook hands with everybody inside our bakery. All of us, our customers and employees were thrilled, and it was just like a short but big, exciting and memorable party!!!" [emphases added]
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Hillary's going to have to work harder and smarter in order to not squander the legacy her husband left in Chinatown (a legacy which should be hers for the taking). Don't be surprised if during a future campaign stop in San Francisco she spends less time dining at the swank Sheraton Palace and more time doing damage control at the Eastern Bakery eatery.