Loury's Lament

Glenn Loury's recent article in the Boston Review of Books surpasses even his own past writings in its racial silliness. Indeed, he says so many wonderfully inane things that it's difficult to decide what to talk about and what to pass over. Since the gravamen of the piece is the high number of prison inmates in U.S. penal institutions and the disproportionately high number of African-Americans among them, perhaps we should start with that:

[O]ur incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

So what is to be concluded from this? That we should let people out of jail? That we are incarcerating people unjustly? Mr. Loury lets the facts hang unexplained, but it seems reasonable to think that if we have such a high incarceration rate it's because we have a more serious crime problem in the U.S. than do the other countries he cites.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens.

What does he mean by this innuendo? Does he mean to suggest that the U. S. is unjust because we imprison so many people? But, if so, what is inherently unjust in keeping criminals off the streets? If they're guilty of crime, if they're a threat to the well-being of their communities, then why shouldn't they be in prison? Loury doesn't tell us.

Despite a sharp national decline in crime, American criminal justice has become crueler and less caring than it has been at any other time in our modern history. Why?

Why is it cruel? What makes it so? Well, it appears it's cruel because so many inmates are black.

The question has no simple answer, but the racial composition of prisons is a good place to start. The punitive turn in the nation's social policy-intimately connected with public rhetoric about responsibility, dependency, social hygiene, and the reclamation of public order-can be fully grasped only when viewed against the backdrop of America's often ugly and violent racial history: there is a reason why our inclination toward forgiveness and the extension of a second chance to those who have violated our behavioral strictures is so stunted, and why our mainstream political discourses are so bereft of self-examination and searching social criticism. This historical resonance between the stigma of race and the stigma of imprisonment serves to keep alive in our public culture the subordinating social meanings that have always been associated with blackness. Race helps to explain why the United States is exceptional among the democratic industrial societies in the severity and extent of its punitive policy and in the paucity of its social-welfare institutions.

Ah, yes. For a certain sort of thinker race defines everything. The fact that we have so many black males in our prisons is a result of our nation's racist heritage, opines Mr. Loury. One might be forgiven, however, for suspecting that blacks are disproportionately represented in our prisons because they are disproportionately responsible for crime, and that they're disproportionately responsible for crime because of the corrosive effect that liberal social policies instituted in the 60s and 70s has had on the American underclass, especially underclass families. But Mr. Loury seems disinclined to consider this possibility since it's nowhere mentioned in his essay.

As for second chances, surely Mr. Loury knows that very few people in prison today are there for a first offense unless it was a felony. Almost every one of today's inmates has been given a dozen chances before they were sentenced to serious time in prison, but chances to go straight are, in the eyes of many criminals, merely chances to commit more crime. So they continue their felonies and misdemeanors until finally the judicial system wearies of their sociopathology and sentences them to jail, at which point the Mr. Lourys of the world wail about the lack of second chances.

High drug-usage rates in white, middle-class American communities in the early 1980s accounts for the urgency many citizens felt to mount a national attack on the problem.

Now this raises an interesting point. We attacked the problem of drug abuse only, Loury suggests, because white communities were suffering. Perhaps so, but what does that mean? Perhaps it means that white communities, seeing the threat to their well-being, took action to try to end the threat. They mobilized to pass laws and ordinances to reduce the scourge of drugs in their neighborhoods.

There's nothing stopping black communities from doing the same thing. Mr. Loury apparently thinks that blacks are helpless by themselves and need white action to solve their problems. Unless the impetus for change starts in the neighborhoods of those most affected by crime it will only fester and worsen. Unfortunately, those communities beset by the ravages of drugs are precisely those communities which are so dysfunctional in other ways that they have simply acquiesced to this plague as well. It has nothing inherently to do with black and white. It has everything to do with values.

Incarceration keeps them away from us. Thus Garland: "The prison is used today as a kind of reservation, a quarantine zone in which purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety."

And this is bad? Who is it that black criminals are quarantined from? It's people in the black communities who must otherwise live in fear of these thugs, brutes, and savages. Ask the people who would be most affected whether they want predators hanging out on their street corners till all hours of the morning. I suspect most of them are pretty darn glad there's a quarantine zone.

Our society-the society we have made-creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

Here's another popular meme: It's not the fault of the people who commit crimes, it's society's fault. We've made them to be what they are by creating the conditions which spawn criminals. Well, perhaps he's not entirely wrong about this. The welfare state, by destroying families and replacing fathers with the government sugar-daddy all but guaranteed that two generations of young males would grow up fatherless and with no positive male guidance in their lives. The one trait that almost all criminals in our prisons share in common is not race, it's fatherlessness.

Add to the welfare state the effect of no fault divorce, relaxed standards of sexuality, the widespread acceptance of cohabitation and the erosion of the restraints of traditional religion and we have precisely the ingredients for the "criminogenic" society Mr. Loury deplores. If Mr. Loury is really outraged at black incarceration rates he should be writing to blast the Left for the legacy bequeathed us by the social experiments of the sixties and seventies.

So put yourself in John Rawls's original position and imagine that you could occupy any rank in the social hierarchy. Let me be more concrete: imagine that you could be born a black American male outcast shuffling between prison and the labor market on his way to an early death to the chorus of nigger or criminal or dummy. Suppose we had to stop thinking of us and them. What social rules would we pick if we actually thought that they could be us?

This is easy. Give me the same social rules and constraints we had before LBJ's Great Society. Give me policies which strengthen families, value fathers, and support churches and most of the "criminogenic conditions" will shrink and shrivel to below post-WWII levels. Meanwhile, put those who persist in committing crimes in jail and keep them there. That's what I would want were I placed behind the Rawlsian "veil of ignorance," and I can't imagine how else anyone would answer that question.

RLC

Spoofing American Consumerism

The New York Times did a good spoof of the i-phone craze earlier this month that serves just as well as a parody of our entire consumerist, materialist culture, and our religious devotion to things. It's pretty funny.

RLC

Young Korean Hostages Update

The fate of the kidnapped South Korean Christians in Afghanistan is as yet unknown, but there have apparently been rescue operations launched as the Taliban's deadline has passed and another of the young missionaries has been murdered for the glory of Allah.

The young man at the bottom left of the photo is the latest victim. The pastor of the group at the far right was the first:

Meanwhile the American press, unable to cognitively process that the fate of Christians, much less Asian Christians, is worth their attention, remain engrossed by the really important developments surrounding Lindsay Lohan, Michael Vick and the race between Hillary and Obama.

I wonder if we could work out a trade - say, 500 MSM journalists in exchange for the remaining twenty one missionaries. The difficulty would be in convincing the Taliban, or anyone else for that matter, that 500 liberal journalists are anywhere near equal in value to those 21 young Koreans.

RLC

Re: Absolute Evil

Byron offers some comments on our post titled Absolute Evil. You can read his thoughts on our Feedback page.

RLC

Paging Ray Bradbury

Of course not all Darwinians are childish, ignorant and officious, but this one, and a bunch of her commenters, sure are.

The woman, who calls herself Shandon, boasts about walking into a Barnes and Noble bookstore and taking it upon herself to remove Michael Behe's Edge of Evolution from the science section and placing it with religious fiction. This bit of callow Darwinian hilarity is evidently a big hit with a lot, but not all, of her readers.

I doubt very much that the self-righteous Shandon has taken the trouble to read any of the book she so glibly dismisses as religious fiction, but when you just know you're right, being intellectually fair is optional, and imposing your views on others is obligatory.

Maybe instead of "Shandon" she should have called herself "Montag" after the fireman in Fahrenheit 451 who burned books for a living.

HT: Denyse O'Leary.

RLC

The Skunk at the Garden Party

The first thing to understand is that this article was written by two members of the Brookings Institution (Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack) which is a very liberal think-tank, and their op-ed appeared yesterday in the New York Times, which is perhaps the most liberal mainstream newspaper in America.

The second thing to understand is that it sounds as if it were written by White House speech writers:

Viewed from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration's critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily "victory" but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated - many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services - electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation - to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began - though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.

In Ramadi, for example, we talked with an outstanding Marine captain whose company was living in harmony in a complex with a (largely Sunni) Iraqi police company and a (largely Shiite) Iraqi Army unit. He and his men had built an Arab-style living room, where he met with the local Sunni sheiks - all formerly allies of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups - who were now competing to secure his friendship.

In Baghdad's Ghazaliya neighborhood, which has seen some of the worst sectarian combat, we walked a street slowly coming back to life with stores and shoppers. The Sunni residents were unhappy with the nearby police checkpoint, where Shiite officers reportedly abused them, but they seemed genuinely happy with the American soldiers and a mostly Kurdish Iraqi Army company patrolling the street. The local Sunni militia even had agreed to confine itself to its compound once the Americans and Iraqi units arrived.

We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly rapid American departure from Iraq. All across the country, the dependability of Iraqi security forces over the long term remains a major question mark.

But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq).

In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. The Iraqi Army's highly effective Third Infantry Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45 percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab.

In the past, few Iraqi units could do more than provide a few "jundis" (soldiers) to put a thin Iraqi face on largely American operations. Today, in only a few sectors did we find American commanders complaining that their Iraqi formations were useless - something that was the rule, not the exception, on a previous trip to Iraq in late 2005.

The additional American military formations brought in as part of the surge, General Petraeus's determination to hold areas until they are truly secure before redeploying units, and the increasing competence of the Iraqis has had another critical effect: no more whack-a-mole, with insurgents popping back up after the Americans leave.

In war, sometimes it's important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.

These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to the Americans for security and help. The most important and best-known example of this is in Anbar Province, which in less than six months has gone from the worst part of Iraq to the best (outside the Kurdish areas). Today the Sunni sheiks there are close to crippling Al Qaeda and its Salafist allies. Just a few months ago, American marines were fighting for every yard of Ramadi; last week we strolled down its streets without body armor.

Another surprise was how well the coalition's new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working. Wherever we found a fully staffed team, we also found local Iraqi leaders and businessmen cooperating with it to revive the local economy and build new political structures. Although much more needs to be done to create jobs, a new emphasis on microloans and small-scale projects was having some success where the previous aid programs often built white elephants.

In some places where we have failed to provide the civilian manpower to fill out the reconstruction teams, the surge has still allowed the military to fashion its own advisory groups from battalion, brigade and division staffs. We talked to dozens of military officers who before the war had known little about governance or business but were now ably immersing themselves in projects to provide the average Iraqi with a decent life.

Outside Baghdad, one of the biggest factors in the progress so far has been the efforts to decentralize power to the provinces and local governments. But more must be done. For example, the Iraqi National Police, which are controlled by the Interior Ministry, remain mostly a disaster. In response, many towns and neighborhoods are standing up local police forces, which generally prove more effective, less corrupt and less sectarian. The coalition has to force the warlords in Baghdad to allow the creation of neutral security forces beyond their control.

In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still face huge hurdles on the political front. Iraqi politicians of all stripes continue to dawdle and maneuver for position against one another when major steps towards reconciliation - or at least accommodation - are needed. This cannot continue indefinitely. Otherwise, once we begin to downsize, important communities may not feel committed to the status quo, and Iraqi security forces may splinter along ethnic and religious lines.

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

Well, Senator Reid, what do you say to that? The distinguished gentleman and many of his Democratic colleagues have just been telling us in the last couple of weeks that the war is lost, the surge isn't working, Iraq is in chaos, and that we must pull out ASAP. Surely, though, the Democrats know what the writers of this column know. Why then, have the Dems been saying what they have? Why put the worst possible construction on things? Could it be that they're actually willing to risk the lives and well-being of millions of Iraqis for short-term political advantage? Let's honestly hope not, but how else do we explain their behavior?

Of course, nothing in the op-ed is news to those who've been following developments in Iraq (or reading Viewpoint), but like a skunk at the Democratic garden party, it'll certainly send a lot of The Last Helicopter crowd scurrying for cover. It'll also pull a few wayward Republicans back from the brink of rebelling against the President's effort to make the surge work in Iraq, and it will earn O'Hanlon and Pollack the undying hostility and hatred of their erstwhile comrades in the left-wing blogosphere.

See here for updates and video.

RLC

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

Master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, one of the greatest artists in cinema history, died yesterday at his home on an island off the coast of Sweden. He was 89.

Bergman made two of my favorite films: The Seventh Seal (1957) and Winter Light (1962), both of which featured Gunnar Bjornstrand and Max von Sydow. The Seventh Seal is about a knight (von Sydow) and his squire (Bjornstrand) returning home from the crusades. Along their journey several philosophical and theological perplexities, especially the problems of death and evil, receive fascinating attention. Most engrossing is the psychological struggle between the knight and the angel of death.

Winter Light is about a Lutheran pastor (Bjornstrand) who has lost his faith after the death of his wife. Bergman does a wonderful job of depicting the sterility of the European state church whose Christianity is merely a formality. The dialogue in Winter Light is as moving as it is spare. Two soliloquies, one by the pastor's girlfriend and the other by the church sexton, are simply riveting.

Every thoughtful, intelligent person should watch these two films and discuss them with their friends. There are very few movie-makers who pack as much meaning onto celluloid as did Bergman in these two works.

RLC

Olby's on the Case

Left-wing media icon Keith Olberman offers some possible reasons why the administration hasn't been completely forthcoming on the death of army ranger Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. With about three minutes left in the video Olberman throws this out to his listening audience:

"Cpl. Tillman held a number of personal views that were unpopular within the context of the Bush administration, perhaps also within the army. He reportedly favored John Kerry...We know he opposed the invasion of Iraq, he thought it illegal. He had plans to meet with Noam Chomsky...."

Let's see, in Olberman's world the military may have covered up a soldier's death because he voted for John Kerry and planned to visit with Noam Chomsky. Makes sense to us.

Heck, maybe Bush even put the contract out on Tillman because the former NFL player thought invading Iraq was illegal. We wouldn't be surprised if such a nefarious deed was instigated by the White House, and neither, of course, would Olberman. After all, they outed Valerie Plame, didn't they? They spy on terrorist phone calls don't they?

Keep after 'em, Keith. We think there's something really stinky here - especially that visit to Chomsky business. If that's not a motive for having a guy whacked, what is?

RLC

Self-Defense

Here's another story of a man who would probably be dead today if those who wish to take away a citizen's right to self-defense have their way:

An elderly man beaten unconscious by an assailant wielding a soda can awoke and shot the man during an attempted robbery, police said.

Willie Lee Hill, 93, told police he saw the robber while in his bedroom Wednesday night. Hill confronted the man and was struck at least 50 times, police said. He was knocked unconscious.

Covered in blood, Hill regained consciousness a short time later and pulled a .38-caliber handgun on his attacker. The suspect, Douglas B. Williams Jr., saw the gun and charged the man, who fired a bullet that struck Williams in the throat, police said.

"I got what I deserved," Williams, 24, told police when they arrived, officers said. Investigators reported finding, among other items, a Craftsman drill bit set, three pocket knives and two hearing aids inside his pockets.

Actually, Mr. Williams didn't get what he deserved. What he deserved was for the bullet to have hit him a couple of inches higher. Nevertheless, Mr. Hill is alive today because he had a weapon at hand. There's a lesson in that for those who would take that right away if they could.

RLC

American Dhimmis

You can burn the American flag. You can spit on the Bible. You can put a crucifix in a jar of urine. You can throw dung on a picture of the Virgin Mary. You can say that the 9/11 victims deserved it. All of that is free expression and art. But don't you dare throw the Koran into the commode. That's a hate crime:

A 23-year-old man was arrested Friday on hate-crime charges after he threw a Quran in a toilet at Pace University on two separate occasions, police said.

Stanislav Shmulevich of Brooklyn was arrested on charges of criminal mischief and aggravated harassment, both hate crimes, police said. It was unclear if he was a student at the school. A message left at the Shmulevich home was not immediately returned.

The Islamic holy book was found in a toilet at Pace's lower Manhattan campus by a teacher on Oct. 13. A student discovered another book in a toilet on Nov. 21, police said.

Muslim activists had called on Pace University to crack down on hate crimes after the incidents. As a result, the university said it would offer sensitivity training to its students.

So now it's not just rude, boorish, disrespectful or insensitive to treat with contempt that which others revere, it's also against the law. But only, evidently, if the others are Muslims. You're still free in the U.S. to treat that which is sacred to Christians and anybody else with as much contempt as you like. The government, which is not supposed to show any favoritism among religions, certainly has decided, in New York, at least, to favor Islam.

And at Pace University the line of academics queuing up to kiss the feet of the closest Muslim is already several city blocks long.

RLC

State of Aphasia

President George Bush (sort of) gives the State of the Union address. The guy has the President down pretty well, unfortunately.

RLC

Packing the Court

Jean Edward Smith is upset that the Supreme Court has entered a "political thicket" (i.e. it's rulings are not such as Mr. Smith approves). His solution, offered in a New York Times op-ed piece, is to expand the Court's size to ten or eleven Justices so that a more liberal president could change the Court's direction without having to wait for resignations, retirements or deaths.

This is a variation on the standard liberal reaction to a stymied agenda. When the representatives of the people are not with you, then resort to the courts. If the courts are not with you then change the courts until they are. This was FDR's strategy in the 1930's, and Mr. Smith believes it has again become necessary today.

He tacitly recognizes that the vacuousness of liberal ideas persuades only the true-believers, thus those ideas, if they are to prevail, must be imposed by judicial fiat. This proposal amounts, of course, to an abrogation of representative democracy and the implementation of a judicial oligarchy.

Perhaps the biggest irony in Smith's suggestion is that he calls Roosevelt's effort to get a Court more amenable to his policies a "scheme," a "subterfuge," and "chicanery." Yet he's forthrightly proposing that the Democrats do precisely the same thing that Roosevelt did:

Roosevelt's convoluted scheme fooled no one and ultimately sank under its own weight.

Roosevelt claimed the justices were too old to keep up with the workload, and urged that for every justice who reached the age of 70 and did not retire within six months, the president should be able to appoint a younger justice to help out. Six of the Supreme Court justices in 1937 were older than 70. But the court was not behind in its docket, and Roosevelt's subterfuge was exposed. In the Senate, the president could muster only 20 supporters.

Still, there is nothing sacrosanct about having nine justices on the Supreme Court. Roosevelt's 1937 chicanery has given court-packing a bad name, but it is a hallowed American political tradition participated in by Republicans and Democrats alike.

If the current five-man majority persists in thumbing its nose at popular values, the election of a Democratic president and Congress could provide a corrective. It requires only a majority vote in both houses to add a justice or two. Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative colleagues might do well to bear in mind that the roll call of presidents who have used this option includes not just Roosevelt but also Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and Grant.

It would be interesting to ask Mr. Smith precisely which "popular values" are being nose-thumbed by the present court. I doubt that he could answer that question. In other words, his justification for packing the Court is weaker even than FDR's

Anyway, can you imagine the caterwauling that would be echoing through the liberal press, including the NYT, if Republicans had suggested doing what Mr. Smith advises when they still controlled the Congress? Their outrage would have been volcanic.

RLC

The Clock Is Ticking

NewsMax is reporting that:

The U.S. is retrofitting its B-2 Stealth bombers with massive bunker-buster bombs - a move that could be a prelude to an attack on Iran and its nuclear facilities.

Iran has refused to comply with international demands that it stop its nuclear weapons programs.

Experts have noted that a U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear program could be difficult due to the large number of installations - some of which are buried deep underground in hardened bunkers.

Northrop Grumman announced last week in a little noticed release that the company had begun integrating on the B-2's a new 30,000-pound-class "penetrator bomb" or bunker buster.

"The U.S. Air Force's B-2 Stealth bomber would be able to attack and destroy an expanded set of hardened, deeply buried military targets" using the monster bunker buster, the company said in its release.

The new Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), which is being developed by the Boeing Co., is a GPS-guided weapon containing more than 5,300 pounds of conventional explosives inside a 20.5-foot-long enclosure of hardened steel. It is designed to penetrate dirt, rock and reinforced concrete to reach enemy bunker or tunnel installations.

The B-2 is capable of carrying two MOPs, one in each weapons bay.

Taken together with the fact that there are now, or soon will be, four carrier battle groups in the waters within striking distance of Iran, one gets the feeling that Ahmadinejad doesn't have much time left. The clock is ticking and he must either change the course of his support for global terrorism and his determination to build nuclear weapons with which to strike Israel and, ultimately, the U.S. or it looks like there will be war.

RLC

How Much Brain Do We Need?

The conventional wisdom is that brain injury unavoidably results in impairment, but Denyse O'Leary has a post up that strongly suggests that this is not necessarily so. I don't know if the inferences she draws from the data are warranted or not (She thinks the evidence she discusses refutes materialism by demonstrating that the mind and the brain are different entities), but it's fascinating reading nonetheless.

RLC

Absolute Evil

I am at a loss for words to describe the savagery of people who would kill their own daughter because she left a forced marriage:

A Kurdish woman was brutally raped, stamped on and strangled by members of her family and their friends in an "honor killing" carried out at her London home because she had fallen in love with the wrong man.

Banaz Mahmod, 20, was subjected to the 2-1/2 hour ordeal before she was garroted with a bootlace. Her body was stuffed into a suitcase and taken about 100 miles to Birmingham where it was buried in the back garden of a house.

Last month a jury found her father Mahmod Mahmod, 52, and his brother Ari Mahmod, 51, guilty of murder after a three-month trial. Their associate Mohamad Hama, 30, had earlier admitted killing her.

They believed Banaz had brought shame on the family by leaving her husband, an Iraqi Kurd she had been forced to marry at 17, and falling in love with Rahmat Suleimani, an Iranian Kurd.

Her former unnamed partner had raped her as well as repeatedly beating her, the court heard.

Hama, who prosecutors said had been a ringleader in the murder, was caught by listening devices talking to a friend in prison about the murder.

In the recordings, transcripts of which were relayed to the court, Hama and his friend are heard laughing as he described how she was killed with Banaz's uncle "supervising".

"I was kicking and stamping on her neck to get the soul out. I saw her stark naked, only wearing pants or underwear," Hama is recorded as saying.

There are terribly brutal murders in the United States all the time, to be sure, and Americans must recognize that we live in a diseased culture. Even so, we have not yet descended to the place where whole families laugh at torturing and killing a daughter because she has embarrassed them by leaving a marriage she had no say about in the first place.

And where are the feminists who have over the years repeatedly condemned the White House for denying funding for abortions in third world countries because that denial allegedly oppresses women? Where is their outrage at a culture that treats women as lower than dogs? Why are they silent?

RLC

Military Update

Here's a good update from Bill Roggio on military progress in Iraq. Also check out this site for information on Iraq that the lefties don't want you to have. As the summer wears on there has been a subtle shift in the news from that forlorn region. It seems clear that the coalition forces are gaining momentum and that as long as the voices of defeat and retreat in the media and Congress are not allowed to prevail, there is reason to be confident that the situation on the ground will be considerably improved, especially in Baghdad, by October.

We can save Iraq and effect a monumental change in the direction of history but only if we ignore the negativism of those who fear the loss of their own credibility and political power more than they fear the impact defeat would have on the future of our nation.

Some will ask how many lives we should be willing to sacrifice to bring stability to that region. My answer is that the stakes are so high that we should heed the words of John Kennedy at his inaugural about paying any price and bearing any burden. The cost of fighting in Iraq is high, but the cost of surrender would be astronomical. It's not the Iraqis for whom we fight, although they certainly benefit, but for the entire world and especially for ourselves.

We have lost 632 Americans in Iraq so far this year. That is a terrible price, but it doesn't follow that we should therefore abandon that mission. Two hundred thirty two Americans have been murdered in one city alone so far this year - Philadelphia, and the media shrugs, perhaps because Philadelphia is run by their party.

It may add a little perspective to note that more Pennsylvanians have been killed this year in almost every city in that state than have been killed in the entire country of Iraq. And I'm sure this is true for just about every state in the U.S.

In any event, casualties must be measured against the stakes, and the stakes in Iraq couldn't be higher.

RLC

General Patton Speaks

Jason links us to Mike Kaminski doing an updated George C. Scott doing General George Patton from the movie "Patton." It's pretty good but the Last Helicopter crowd won't like it.

RLC

A Man in Full

"We have a lot of work to do. The president already has the mark of the American people - he's the worst president we ever had. I don't think we need a censure resolution in the Senate to prove that." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Perhaps not but you at least need an argument, and the senator, of course, offers us none. Reid, who has led a congress whose approval ratings have sunk to less than half of those of President Bush, is like the skunk criticizing the horse because he smells. The fact of the matter is that George Bush is far from the worst president in history (worse than Kennedy? Johnson? Nixon? Carter?) and may even turn out to be one of the best. Harry Reid, however, will be forgotten the day he leaves office.

Bill Kristol makes the case that we've been making, only not so well as he, for the fact that history will view George Bush's presidency much differently than current approval ratings would indicate. There are still two years to go, but Bush is on track to be regarded as a successful, perhaps even outstanding, president.

Those who get their opinions from the MSM, the opposition journals or Senator Reid will recoil from such a claim in shock, but I think it's true.

Here's part of what I wrote in October of 2005. I think it still holds today:

The economy is growing steadily. Note that the Democrats rarely refer to the economy anymore by way of criticizing the president. Yet our economic health is the most crucial issue, as the Dems insisted in 1992, in determining which party will prevail in an election. If the Democrats could use our economic condition against Bush they would be doing it, but they can't so they aren't. If the economy continues to grow - and with gas prices falling to less extortionist levels there's reason for optimism in this regard - the public will forget the troubles of the last two or three months like one forgets a dream upon waking.

Iraq seems to be progressing steadily toward a historically unprecedented Arab democracy. Despite the steady drizzle of left-wing criticism and negativity, Bush's strategy in Iraq might well ultimately succeed. It's still unclear if it will, of course, but if it does, history will hail his effort, and that of our military, as an astonishing political, strategic, and human rights achievement, perhaps the greatest that any president or world leader ever accomplished. Success in Iraq will reverberate and ramify throughout the entire region and around the globe for generations. It's very difficult to overstate the significance and importance of such a consummation.

With the withdrawal of Harriet Miers the president has been given an unusual second chance to appoint someone of the very finest timber to the Supreme Court. Miers may have been a good appointment, but there was cause for serious skepticism. Mr. Bush can now name someone about whom there is no doubt. Another conservative justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia, as we were promised in the campaign, and the legal course of this country could be altered for the good for the next thirty to fifty years. Such a nomination would also unify the president's base and make him much more politically formidable.

Assuming there are no further indictments, the Scooter Libby affair will scarcely register on the historical record. On the other hand, it could serve, as did Katrina, as a prod to rouse the administration from complacency. There are signs that this is already happening. We're beginning to hear noises about getting the budget and our borders under control. Success breeds success. If the administration recovers its legislative momentum it may even try again to reform social security. If by 2008 just some of these things are happening, or at least appear to be under way, George Bush, to the everlasting chagrin of the portside media, will be regarded as surpassing even Ronald Reagan and FDR.

This is not to say that the President hasn't tried to undo the legacy he's building. His immigration reform proposal was awful, but it lost and will consequently be forgotten, just like the Harriet Miers fiasco has been forgotten now that Samuel Alito is on the Supreme Court, if real reform is eventually enacted.

Add to all this the failure, so far, of terrorists to strike again within our borders and the fact that European elections have thrust into office in both France and Germany leaders much more compatible with Bush than their predecessors and all, or many, of the ingredients necessary to be regarded as a successful president are in the pot.

If it should happen that Bush's presidency comes to be highly regarded Harry Reid will probably have to be carried out of the Senate in a straight jacket, twitching and muttering, like Inspector Dreyfus in the old Pink Panther movies.

RLC

Hoaxer?

The New York Times asks just who is the "Baghdad Diarist"? Is he legit or is The New Republic, and its readers, being scammed again? Here's the NYT story:

It is a question that many people are asking The New Republic, the Washington political magazine that has been running articles attributed to an American soldier in Baghdad.

The author, who used the pen name Scott Thomas, has written three articles for the magazine since February, describing gruesome incidents in Iraq. Last week, The Weekly Standard questioned the veracity of The New Republic articles and invited readers with knowledge about the military or Baghdad to comment.

Since then, several readers and a spokesman for the base where the soldier is supposedly based have written in, raising more questions.

"Absolutely every piece of information that's come out since we put that call up has cast further doubt on that story," said Michael Goldfarb, the online editor of The Weekly Standard. "There's not a single person that has come forward and said, 'It sounds plausible.'"

Franklin Foer, the editor of The New Republic, will not reveal the author's identity but says the magazine is investigating the accuracy of his articles. In the late 1990s, under different editors, the magazine fired an associate editor, Stephen Glass, for fabrications.

The diaries have described some shocking incidents of military life, including soldiers openly mocking a disfigured woman on their base and a private wearing a found piece of a child's skull under his helmet.

The magazine granted anonymity to the writer to keep him from being punished by his military superiors and to allow him to write candidly, Mr. Foer said. He said that he had met the writer and that he knows that he is, in fact, a soldier.

It will be interesting to see if the liberal press has once again fallen victim to their own preconceptions, prejudices and wishful thinking. When you just know that our soldiers are cruel and callous killers then reports which confirm what you already know just have to be true. We'll see.

RLC

Update on Killing Christians

The Taliban have executed one of the twenty three Korean hostages they've been holding. In so doing they show the world once again the contrast between modern Islam (which is actually pretty primitive) and modern Christianity.

Pastor Bae Hyung-kyu (on the right in the photo below), following Christian tenets to their logical conclusion, traveled to Afghanistan to serve the Afghan people in any way he could. The Taliban, following Islamic tenets to their logical conclusion, show themselves to be blood-thirsty savages, reminiscent of J.R.R.Tolkien's orcs, for whom killing is a pastime. A more pellucid picture of the contrast between good and evil would be hard to imagine.

The next time Muslims go off in a frenzy over cartoons that they say make Muslims look bad someone should ask them how fiercely they protested the murder of Bae Hyung-kyu. My guess is they'll just make excuses for it.

RLC