Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Ever since the day after the election despondent Democrats have been casting their aspersions far and wide across Red America. Bush voters, we're told, are "stupid" and "ignorant". A headline in the London Daily Mirror asked the question that many American Democrats were asking, "How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?". Kerry voters by contrast are "reality-based" i.e. they are too sophisticated and smart to embrace all that religious hokem that the Bush people in their unbelieveable stupidity actually think is true. The spin on the election is that there are just too many dimwits out there voting for Bush and not enough of the enlightened crowd who voted for Kerry. The spin, however, collapses as soon as we start asking some questions about it.

Let's ask who's more stupid and who's more grounded in reality.

Is it those who believe that Kerry would have made a good leader, or is it those who in vain searched his twenty year record in the Senate for some scintilla of evidence of a predisposition to lead and an ability to do so?

Is it those who took him at his word when he claimed to have a plan for every contingency, economic, social and military, or those who asked to no avail to see those mysterious plans or to be told how, exactly, the plan differed significantly from what the President was already doing?

Is it those who believe he would stick it out in Iraq until the insurgents were defeated, or those who believed that since Kerry said that it was wrong to ask a man to die for a mistake in Vietnam and since he believes that Iraq is also a mistake, he could not be expected to ask soldiers to continue to die in Iraq any more than in Vietnam?

Is it those who believe Kerry would've been able to persuade the French and Russians to join us in killing the goose that was dropping golden eggs into their avaricious and unscrupulous hands, or those who believed that if something is right to do then it's right to do even if you have to do it by yourself?

Is it those who believed that Bush would end Social Security for the elderly, reinstate the draft, and suppress the black vote, or those who demanded evidence that any of these allegations was true?

Is it those who believed that Kerry could lower the deficit, keep all his spending promises, and yet not raise taxes on the middle class, or those who believed that this was all political posturing and flummery?

Is it those who believed Kerry's claims to piety, or those who thought these claims just as phony as his Ohio goose hunt?

Is it those who believed John Edwards' claim that he and Senator Kerry would have quadraplegics up and walking within a few years of being elected, or those who laughed in derision at such asininity?

Is it those who didn't believe any of the Senator's twaddle but voted for Kerry anyway knowing he didn't mean a word of it, or those who didn't believe it and refused to vote for someone who was so obviously untrustworthy?

Is it those who believe that anyone who refuses to go along with their sage plans to reform American society and culture is an intolerant bigot, or those who believe that it's wiser not to tinker with millenia-old institutions whose stability is crucial to our social and individual well-being?

Is it those stuck in menial jobs earning less than $30,000 a year who voted overwhelmngly for Kerry, or those who have the talent and drive to earn over $50,000 a year who voted overwhelmingly for Bush?

Is it those who received their education in blue counties where schools are often abysmal and drop-out rates are the highest in the nation, or those who received their education in red counties where public schools are often excellent and drop-out rates are low?

Is it those who paid money to see Michael Moore's patently dishonest and spiteful movie and came away thinking they'd just learned something profound, or those who saw the movie for what it was?

Is it those who based their vote on hate and spite for a candidate, or those who based their vote on respect and admiration?

Is it those who saw Teresa H. Kerry as a potentially impressive first lady, smart and sassy, or those who saw her as a self-absorbed whiner who's pretense at profundity was evidently delusional?

Is it those like George Soros who saw millions of dollars of his personal fortune spiral down the toilet of his foolish hatreds?

Is it those like Dan Rather, who, in his obsession to unseat the President, got taken in by an amateurish fraud, and, like Ahab in pursuit of the great white whale, sacrificed whatever credibility and integrity he had as a journalist that he might heroically slay George Bush's candidacy with forged documents?

Is it those who are so despondent and angry that they've cancelled family visits because their families live in red states?!

We here at Viewpoint may not be the brightest lights on the Christmas tree, but we don't think it's hard to see in this instance who's smart and who isn't and who's been grounded in reality in this past election and who hasn't.

Success of the Simpletons

Mark Steyn favors us with another enjoyable column on the Democrat's seemingly invincible inability to face up to the fact that the reason they're rapidly fading into oblivion is that their message is frozen in the 1960s like a wooly mammoth in the arctic permafrost.

Steyn writes:

I had a bet with myself this week: How soon after election night would it be before the Bush-the-chimp-faced-moron stuff started up again? 48 hours? A week? I was wrong. Bush Derangement Syndrome is moving to a whole new level. On the morning of Nov. 2, the condescending left were convinced that Bush was an idiot. By the evening of Nov. 2, they were convinced that the electorate was. Or as London's Daily Mirror put it in its front page: "How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?"

Well, they're British lefties: They can do without Americans. Whether an American political party can do without Americans is more doubtful. Nonetheless, MSNBC.com's Eric Alterman was mirroring the Mirror's sentiments: "Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the 'reality-based community' say or believe about anything." Over at Slate, Jane Smiley's analysis was headlined, "The Unteachable Ignorance Of The Red States.'' If you don't want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: "F--- MIDDLE AMERICA."

Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that "MIDDLE AMERICA" has "F---ed" you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton -- or "Neanderthal," as Teresa Heinz Kerry described those unimpressed by her husband's foreign policy. In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't.

The rest of the piece is just as good.

Iran's Options

The Monterey Institute of International Studies offers an analysis of difficulties and consequences of an Israeli or American preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities and concludes that the negative long-term liabilities of such a strike would negate any short-term benefit. It's the best argument we've seen for essentially doing nothing about Iran's imminent nuclear weapons capability.

The problem is that many of the dire consequences the above report cites as reasons for declining to attack Iran's nuclear facilities are already upon us. They argue, for example, that Iran would certainly work hard to undermine the nascent democracy in Iraq and bring our efforts there to grief, but as this article makes clear, Iran is already doing pretty much whatever it can to destablize Iraq.

It seems likely that whatever Iran can do to hurt and thwart the United States it will do whether or not we take out its weapons-making capability.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the tip.

Yasser, We Never Knew Ye

We never would have guessed, but apparently it's an open secret that Yasser Arafat is homo/bi-sexual and is currently dying from AIDS. The cause, if it is the cause, of his grave condition is shrouded in secrecy because such a lifestyle, and such a denouement, would be an intolerable affront to Muslim piety. If word got out that Arafat was a homosexual it would severely tarnish his image in the Arab world. There is, nonetheless, considerable evidence that he is, in fact, dying from AIDS. See here for the scuttlebutt, so to speak.

The Assault Begins

The assault on Fallujah has begun. For analysis of events visit Adventures With Chester:

The New York Times is reporting that the hospital was seized by the 36th Iraqi Commando Brigade in conjunction with US Special Forces. This is important in that it shows the high initial involvement of Iraqi National Forces.

NYTimes also reporting (same article) that thousands of Marines are moving from their base to a point north of Fallujah. Their base is likely Al-Taqqadam airfield, and they are likely moving across the western bridge they just seized. This makes sense; a large armored force will now be positioned on the eastern side of the Euphrates, and north of the city. That means it can either rapidly move along the highway toward Baghdad in pursuit of insurgents, or it can use the same highways to position itself on three different sides of the city, with the Euphrates on the fourth.

There's much more at his site.

The Coming European Civil War Pt. II

Readers who thought that perhaps Viewpoint was overstating the case somewhat when we expressed our concern that Europe is hurtling toward a religious civil war might wish to check out a pair of AP articles in the Washington Times. The first is titled Netherlands Braces For 'Jihad' and the second covers some of the same ground but provides a little more detail.

Europe, like the United States and Israel is confronted with an implacable enemy which believes that it is doing the will of God by destroying Western civilization. Those who see the war in Iraq as disconnected from the war against Islamic terror do not see things the way the Islamo-fascists do. For them there is only global jihad. They do not think in terms of national boundaries which are, in any event, artificial constructs imposed upon them in a time of weakness by the infidel nations of the West. Amsterdam and Fallujah, Madrid and New York are just different theaters in the global war that all Muslims everywhere are obligated to wage against the infidels.

One of the shortcomings of Senator Kerry's candidacy for the presidency was that he showed no indication that he grasped this crucial fact. His insistence that the war in Iraq is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time reinforces the impressison that he is oblivious to the Islamic threat to the West. He seemed to think that terrorism is merely the product of difficult or unjust economic "root causes", and that the way to end terror was to negotiate better living conditions for poor Muslims. This would reduce terrorism to the level of a "nuisance". The Senator's plan, of course, is as naive as Neville Chamberlain thinking he could negotiate peace with Adolf Hitler by conceding Czechoslovakia.

As Bernard Lewis, perhaps the foremost scholar on Islam today, reminds us, for Muslims there is only Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam in which Muslim law prevails and Dar al-Harb, the House of War, which is the rest of the world. In Dar al-Harb jihad will continue, interrupted only by temporary truces, until all the world either adopts Islam or submits to Muslim rule.

The Netherlands has long been regarded as one of the most tolerant of nations. It will be instructive to see how far their tolerance can be stretched.

Those Horrid Christians

NewsMax.com reminds us that religious bigotry is alive and well in America, but except for a few marginal folks no one listens to, the bulk of the hostility comes not from the right, but from the left and is directed specifically at Christianity and Christians.

Catholic League president William Donohue has compiled the following examples from newspapers and Internet sites after Bush's victory. Viewpoint thinks it appropriate to note that we don't think that all of these are examples of religious intolerance. Several of them evince an intolerance of common sense, perhaps, and others simply seem to be merely the ravings of the paranoid left, but here they are with our comments:

* In the Wichita Eagle, Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press wonders if President Bush understands that "he was not chosen god, bishop, rabbi or high priest?"

We're sure he does, Mr. Albom, so you're free to wonder about something a little more weighty, like why, as a reporter, you don't exert yourself a little more to understand better the people you write about.

* The publisher of Harper's magazine, John R. MacArthur, blasts President Bush and Sen. John Kerry for advertising "their subservience to Jesus Christ and the Christian god, without the least concern about whether it might offend me" and others like him.

Why should Mr. MacArthur be offended because George Bush and John Kerry claim to be subservient to Christ? And why should Mr. MacArthur's tender sensibilities be permitted to exercise a veto over a Christian politician's right to acknowledge that subservience when asked? And who is Mr. MacArthur that he thinks a man's religious freedom should be constrained by what he personally finds offensive?

* Ex-seminarian Garry Wills writes in the New York Times, "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?" He ends by saying that "moral zealots" will scare moderate Republicans with their "jihads."

Perhaps most people find a miracle engineered by a Divine mind to be much more plausible than a miracle engineered by Chance and mindless matter. The fervency with which the former is believed has nothing to do with how "enlightened" one is but rather with the implications of the belief. If the virgin birth did in fact occur it suggests that Jesus was in some sense divine. If evolution, or macroevolution, which is what Wills has in view here, did occur, it suggests that God is superfluous, life is a meaningless accident, death is the end for both individuals and ultimately the human race, moral obligation is a delusion, and nothing really matters. It may be "enlightened" to believe all that, but people can hardly be faulted for not being overly fervent about the depressing consequences of the belief.

* Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist who hates Bush, says the president "ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq."

If someone can explain what this means please be so kind as to explain it to us via our Feedback Forum. Meanwhile, we recommend Ms Dowd limit herself to decaf for a couple of days.

* Dowd's colleague Thomas Friedman accuses Bush's base of wanting "to extend the boundaries of religion" and of promoting "intolerance."

Imagine. Wanting to extend the boundaries of religion. How unspeakably insensitive and ignorant these yokels must be. And how tolerant of Mr. Friedman to refuse to tolerate it.

* Without providing one example, Margaret Carlson opines in the Los Angeles Times that Catholic bishops "demonized" Kerry's supporters by warning them that "they could go to hell just for voting for him."

We feel we're given a taste of hell whenever we're subjected to Ms. Carlson's tortured cogitations and witless slanders on CNN's Capital Gang. Sartre said that "hell is other people." We suggest that hell would be having to read the confused outputs of Ms Carlson's ruminations for eternity.

* Sheryl McCarthy of Newsday accuses Bush of "pandering to people's fears, petty interests and prejudices" against gays and others.

How so, Ms. McCarthy? How is it pandering to people's fears and prejudices to propose a constitutional ammendment that would codify what "enlightened" people have believed for over two thousand years, that marriage is a union of one man and one woman? Why is it somehow all of a sudden now disreputable for people to be concerned about the consequences of tinkering with the institution of marriage? Presumably Ms McCarthy would praise the president if he were to recognize the legitimacy of people's concerns about, say, corporate outsourcing of jobs. Why does she think it shameful of him to recognize people's concerns about the state of perhaps the most important institution in our cultural and social life?

* Sidney Blumenthal, writing in Salon, nervously claims that the new Senate majority is "more theocratic than Republican."

We need to thank Mr. Blumenthal for clearing this up. We had been led by the "old media" to believe that "theocratic" and "Republican" meant the same thing.

* In the same spot, Sean Wilentz embarrasses his fellow Princeton faculty by saying "religious fanaticism" has "seized control of the federal government."

Again, we stand corrected. We thought John Ashcroft had planned to resign.

It may be that some of the new senators have made some rather intemperate comments in the past, but this is not anything new in American politics. The problem for the secular left is that they are terrified of anyone who takes their faith seriously unless it is faith in the superstitions of the left such as the inherent justice of high taxes and the salutary effects of government regulations on small businesses, etc.

The lefties are in a panic over the prospect that there may be a couple more prayer groups and Bible studies on Capitol Hill now that a few more of the dreaded Christians are moving in. They recoil in horror from the nightmarish future they imagine these evil dolts have planned for us. Imagine the obscenity, they cry, of not being able to kill one's child as it's being born, or of not being able to marry however many people one wishes. Imagine how ghastly it will be if manger scenes turn up in the public square this Christmas and people start praying again at high school football games. The Republican jihadis doubtless have an odious secret plan to uphold their standards of decency on television. The trend toward cutting edge performances like that of Justin and Janet will surely be reversed. Creativity in the arts will be suffocated. Ads for male enhancements will lamentably no longer be able to provide essential and explicit information about how long their particular effects might be enjoyed. Women will no longer be portrayed as sex objects in beer commercials if these horrid Bible-thumpers have their way. The very thought of all this stifling, regressive censorship is enough to make one resolve to move to Canada, or France. Anywhere one can get away from people so stupid and ignorant as to actually believe in God, for heaven's sake.

Promises, Promises

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.com includes this in an article she writes on despondent democrats who plan to move to Canada in the wake of George Bush's reelection:

"If the country votes for Bush, then 51 percent of the people in this country are psychos," one Colorado resident told the Denver Post before the election. He'd already opened a bank account in British Columbia.

Last week's Ottawa Citizen reported that Scott Schaffer-an assistant professor of sociology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania - had already lined up an immigration lawyer and was applying for jobs in Quebec.

We also heard that Robert Redford had promised to move to Ireland if Bush won. Unfortunately, these people are no more likely to leave the country than were Alec Baldwin and Barbra Streisand who promised us in 2000 that a Bush win would cause them to take up residence elsewhere. These people are secular liberals and keeping one's word is not a trait one associates with secular liberals. It's too bad.

Stupid Voters

Slate.com has been running a series of very interesting essays written by Democrats on the topic of what their party needs do to gain back some political clout. Some of these, like the ones by Timothy Noah and Katha Pollitt are quite perceptive. They acknowledge that in fact there's not much the Democratic party can do without prostituting itself. For example, as Pollitt observes, the party simply can't try to win over pro-lifers without alienating the pro-choicers that comprise so much of its base. They can't sidle up beside the anti-gay marriage folk without causing serious distress among the gay rights crowd from which they draw economic and electoral sustenance. Nor can they become more hawkish on foreign policy without earning the ire of the Michael Moore/Howard Dean wing of the party. Noah and Pollitt acknowledge that the party is in a very bad way.

Then there are other essays in the series, like that which emerges from the pen of novelist Jane Smiley, a screed which reads like something from a rejected Saturday Night Live script. One suspects at first that it is a parody until it becomes gradually clear that Ms. Smiley is, to put the best face on it, non compos mentis. Perhaps the polite course is to avert one's eyes while she delivers herself of one embarrassing fatuity after another, but since she apparently insists on being taken seriously let's resolve to wade through her sophomoric rant wherein she delivers claims like the following:

The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry.

Here is how ignorance works: First, they put the fear of God into you-if you don't believe in the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell. Of course, the literal word of the Bible is tremendously contradictory, and so you must abdicate all critical thinking, and accept a simple but logical system of belief that is dangerous to question. A corollary to this point is that they make sure you understand that Satan resides in the toils and snares of complex thought and so it is best not try it.

The history of the last four years shows that red state types, above all, do not want to be told what to do-they prefer to be ignorant. As a result, they are virtually unteachable.

We see the outcome now - Cheney is the capitalist arm and Bush is the religious arm. They know no boundaries or rules. They are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant. Lots of Americans like and admire them because lots of Americans, even those who don't share those same qualities, don't know which end is up. Can the Democrats appeal to such voters? Do they want to? The Republicans have sold their souls for power. Must everyone?

Red state types love to cheat and intimidate.

In other words, conservatives are stupid, dishonest, and cruel. Let's set aside the fact that she offers no empirical support for her allegations. She simply asserts them and expects her readers to accept them uncritically, an expectation which demonstrates that she attributes to her leftist audience precisely the same intellectual weakness for which she condemns conservatives.

But as we said, let's not dwell on the logical incoherence of her piece. Let's look instead at the three vices she imputes to the political right. She accuses them of being ignorant and stupid, but take a moment to study the vote-by-county map here. Even a cursory examination shows that Democratic strength in the United States is concentrated in precisely those sectors of the country where schools and education are the worst, where the population is the most poorly educated and often barely literate. This is the Democratic base. Remember, it wasn't Republicans who couldn't figure out how to use a ballot in Florida in 2000.

She alleges, further, that conservatives are dishonest. Apparently, she is unaware of the howlers Senator Kerry's supporters tried to fob off on the public during the campaign. Almost everything they said, from their candidate's war service to their charges that the Bush team had banned stem cell research, planned to take away social security from the elderly, suppress the black vote, and reinstate the draft, was a total fabrication. Likewise the Democrats' allies in the media, like CBS, did not hesitate to press fraudulent documents into service to discredit the president. ABC's Mark Halperin urged his staff to abandon objectivity and tilt toward Kerry in their political coverage. No one in the MSM ever bothered to ask the Senator why he refused to release his military records so that the controversy over his service could be laid to rest. Evan Thomas at Newsweek wrote that the media would be worth 15 points to Kerry on election day and they probably were. When it comes to dishonesty the Republicans are light years behind the competition.

In the middle of her muddled piece Ms. Smiley launches into an extended discursion on the wild west, and, to the extent that her point can be deciphered, it seems to be that people in red states are mean. Perhaps the reader can bring more exacting exegetical skills to bear on the relevant paragraph and offer an alternative interpretation. Here it is:

Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states. There used to be a kind of hand-to-hand fight on the frontier called a "knock-down-drag-out," where any kind of gouging, biting, or maiming was considered fair. The ancestors of today's red-state voters used to stand around cheering and betting on these fights. When the forces of red and blue encountered one another head-on for the first time in Kansas Territory in 1856, the red forces from Missouri, who had been coveting Indian land across the Missouri River since 1820, entered Kansas and stole the territorial election. The red news media of the day made a practice of inflammatory lying-declaring that the blue folks had shot and killed red folks whom everyone knew were walking around. The worst civilian massacre in American history took place in Lawrence, Kan., in 1862-Quantrill's raid. The red forces, known then as the slave-power, pulled 265 unarmed men from their beds on a Sunday morning and slaughtered them in front of their wives and children. The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America. Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are-they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence. The blue state citizens make the Rousseauvian mistake of thinking humans are essentially good, and so they never realize when they are about to be slugged from behind.

This sounds like the maunderings of a drunken sot, but to the extent that there is some allegorical significance buried in the text, she seems to be implying that conservatives are a violent and brutal lot. Yet where is there any evidence to substantiate such a libel? Whatever evidence there is from the last campaign points the finger in the other direction. Almost every instance of campaign thuggery that occurred over the last several months was perpetrated against Republicans. It is not Republicans who hoped for "a thousand Mogodishus" in Iraq. It wasn't Republicans who made a movie about how to assassinate the president. It wasn't Republicans that pined for Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley "now that we need them". It wasn't Republicans who've been arrested in Michigan for slashing the tires of their own GOTV vans, and on and on.

The Democrats are in a tough spot. They're stuck with an ideological message that does not resonate with the majority of the population. They can either abandon their message, or they can try to convert enough people to their message that they become a majority, or they can follow Ms Smiley's example by taking leave of their senses and accuse 59 million people of being stupid, dishonest, and cruel.

Fortunately for the public perception of the Democrats, not all of the essays in the series are so mindless. Some of them are very thoughtful. Viewpoint will take a look at some of those in the days ahead.

The Kind of Fighting Lying Ahead

More insight into what the Coalition is, and has been, facing in and around Fallujah can be found at the Strategy Page:

What kind of fighting will occur in Fallujah? It will be a game of wits, as well as weapons. The most professional and experienced anti-government gunmen are in Fallujah, and they have developed many countermeasures for the coalition advantages. A major disadvantage is the coalition control of the air, and the constant presence of UAVs, aircraft or helicopters. Too many gunmen have seen their buddies ambushed, or jumped by unexpected coalition troops, to ignore the possibility of a UAV above sending live video of the battlefield to coalition commanders. So the gunmen try to set up movement routes that cannot be seen from the air.

Rugs or sheets are spread across alleys to make this possible, and sometimes even short tunnels are dug. The downside of this is that movement is inhibited. In fact, American troops do not always have a vidcam equipped UAV over the battlefield. But Department of Defense public affairs people like to distribute videos of such operations. The implication that American troops can "see everything" is meant to intimidate the enemy. It does, and slows down enemy movements, often fatally so.

Fighting in Fallujah will be a war of surprise and ambush. Whoever first figures out what the other side is up to will have an edge. The smart money is on the Americans. For while the "insurgents" have received lots of positive press for their unequal struggle, they have by far gotten the worst of it. In thousands of little battles, the anti-government forces are almost always defeated. Most of the time they just flee, but all too often they are killed or captured. Coalition intelligence officers know who they are fighting, and how they fight.

There's more at the link.

The Coming European Civil War

Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, a descendent of the famous artist, was shot and stabbed to death on a Netherlands street last week by a young Dutch Muslim because Van Gogh was an outspoken critic in his films of Islamic misogyny and bigotry. His murderers pinned a note to his body with a knife. It read in part:

I know for sure that you, Oh America will go under; I know for sure that you, Oh Europe, will go under; I know for sure that you, Oh Holland, will go under; I know for sure that you, Oh Hirsi Ali, will go under; I know for sure that you, Oh unbelieving fundamentalist, will go under.

The note concludes by threatening several Dutch politicians with death.

As Andrew Sullivan asks, "What part of that do we not understand?"

More pertinently, perhaps, what part of that doesn't the left, both in Europe and in the American media, understand?

Power Line cites the New York Times opinion on the murder and highlights the Times' penchant for turning the wrong way on every one way street. Power Line writes:

Here is how the New York Times responded today to the horrific murder of Theo Van Gogh and the ensuing arrest of nine Islamic militants:

"Something sad and terrible is happening to the Netherlands, long one of Europe's most tolerant, decent and multicultural societies."

Yes, that is true. Van Gogh was shot, and then, while still alive, he was stabbed repeatedly and his throat was cut. The murderer then stuck a five-page letter to Van Gogh's body with the knife; the letter threatened certain Dutch politicians. That is indeed "sad and terrible," although we would be more inclined to rage than sadness.

But what does the Times propose to do in response to this terrorist murder?

"Urgent efforts are needed to better manage the cultural tensions perilously close to the surface of Dutch public life. The problem is not Muslim immigration, but a failure to plan for a smoother transition to a more diverse society. One very real danger is that the public trauma over the van Gogh murder may lead to a clamor for anti-Muslim policies that could victimize thousands of innocent refugees and immigrants. The challenge for Dutch political leaders is to find ways to reverse this disturbing trend of politically motivated violence without making it harder to achieve cultural harmony."

Notice how blame for Van Gogh's murder rests not with the killers, but with the Dutch government's "failure to plan for a smoother transition to a more diverse society." Whatever that means. And, of course, in the Netherlands as in the United States, the Times' chief fear is that popular outrage at Islamic terrorism might lead to "victimization" of innnocent immigrants. Let me just hazard a guess here: there won't be any innocent immigrants having their throats cut. Except, perhaps, for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others who have been threatened with death by the Islamist terrorists.

The Times concludes with a wistful plea for "cultural harmony." I think harmony went out the window some time ago; the Times just wasn't paying attention. At this point, the goal should be not so much "cultural harmony" as rounding up the terrorists before more innocent people get killed.

Power Line has more here, and there is a Dutch blog which is focussing almost exclusively on this episode here.

The New York Times' pleas for cultural comity notwithstanding, the fact is that unless moderate Muslims soon start speaking out against the radicals in their midst, unless they soon begin to purge their mosques and communities of these savages, there will result a war of extermination in Europe and perhaps even in North America.

In Europe one of two situations is likely to obtain given the evident indifference of the larger Muslim community to the cancer in its midst. Either the European people will be so cowed by the terrorists that, emboldened by the weakness of their prey, the Islamists will launch a holy war on European soil to hasten the Muslim eschaton of world Islam, or the Europeans, in an uncharacteristic fit of resolve in the face of evil, will begin mass deportations and violence against the Islamic communities within their borders. Such aggressive self-defense will itself precipitate a violent reaction from the Muslims and religious civil war would likely ensue.

Given the silence of the "moderate" Muslims, if such there be, and the aspirations of the radicals, one of these two outcomes is almost inevitable. To paraphrase George Orwell, if you want a picture of the future as the Islamists see it, imagine a knife sawing at a human throat, for ever.

Inside the Kerry Campaign

Inside glimpses of the Kerry campaign are starting to leak out. My brother Bill passes along this one by Tim Reid of the U.K. Times Online. Here are a few interesting excerpts:

JOHN KERRY constantly squabbled with his difficult and hypochondriac wife, ran a campaign team riven by internal feuding, and repeatedly begged the Republican senator John McCain to become his running-mate, according to a riveting inside account of his doomed presidential bid. The Massachusetts senator was so obsessed with getting advice from a multitude of rival advisers that one aide confiscated his mobile telephone. His wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, became such a moody distraction that in the closing weeks of the campaign another aide instructed her to stop whispering advice in his ear and back off.

One of the untold stories of the presidential campaign was the erratic behaviour of the candidate's wife, the Heinz heiress Mr Kerry married in 1995, according to Newsweek. She drove her Secret Service detail mad with her chronic lateness, constantly demanded attention, including her husband's (who seemed to tread on eggshells when around her). She even sent him off on errands, such as fetching bottles of water. She clashed with Mary Beth Cahill, Mr Kerry 's campaign manager, and Mr Kerry was caught in the middle.

Mr Kerry...grew increasingly frustrated. After a faltering press conference by Mr Bush in April, and with Iraq in turmoil, Mr Kerry exclaimed: "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot".

During the early summer, Mr Kerry implored Mr McCain, the maverick Republican who ran against Mr Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries, to become his running-mate, meeting him seven times. He even offered to expand the vice-presidency to include running the Pentagon. "I can't say this is an offer because I've got to be able to deny it," Mr Kerry told Mr McCain. "But you've got to do this."

Mr McCain told him he was out of his mind, and went on to embrace Mr Bush. "Goddammit," a furious Mr Kerry said to an aide. "Don't you know what I offered him? Why the f*** didn't he take it?"

James Carville, Bill Clinton's former strategist [joined the campaign]. So appalled was he by the chaos inside the campaign, and so desperate to see Mr Bush defeated, that in early September he decided that Miss Cahill had to be ousted, and Joe Lockhart, Mr Clinton's former spokesman, inserted as manager. When he called a meeting with the pair, he was so worked up, he began to cry, screaming to Miss Cahill: "You've got to let him (Mr Lockhart) do it!"

None of this is very flattering to either the Senator or his campaign. There's more at the link.

De-elect Arlen Specter

John Miller of The National Review wrote an article last spring which concluded that Arlen Specter is the worst Republican Senator in the Senate. His reasons were numerous, but chief among them, perhaps, was the fact that Arlen Specter joined Teddy Kennedy in killing the nomination of Robert Bork. Even so, at a time when Specter was fighting for his political life last spring in a tough primary fight against Pat Toomey, President Bush weighed in to lend his support to Senator Specter.

Specter ran the President's endorsement in his ads over and over, but once he had defeated Toomey, solely because the endorsement of the president and his fellow Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum persuaded a lot of Republicans to ignore their better judgment, Specter never again identified himself with George Bush. His gratitude to Bush didn't extend to mentioning the President in any of his ads for the general election. Having exploited the President's endorsement to garner him a win in the primary, he didn't wish to risk defeat in the general election by being too closely identified by liberals with the despised George Bush.

For some reason that we'll leave to the psychiatrists to fathom for us, Republican voters reelected him to the Senate and now he shows his true character by essentially warning the President that sending up pro-life judges to the judiciary committee he is in line to chair would be pointless. He as much as told the president that he will personally kill the nomination of any judge who might be less than enthusiastic about Roe v. Wade. This is as incredible an arrogation of power as it is a monumental act of political ingratitude. One Republican senator is threatening to thwart the will of 59 million Americans who voted for President Bush's agenda.

His arrogance has created a storm of criticism and he has subsequently backtracked, but the man is not to be trusted. Once he is ensconced in his chairmanship he can do pretty much whatever he wants. He needs to be prevented from being elected to the chair in the first place.

The Republican caucus may vote on committee chairmanships as early as next week. If you feel the same about Senator Specter as does Viewpoint you can do something about it by contacting your senator (if you have a Republican senator) by phone or e-mail (check here for numbers and e-mail) and tell them you believe Arlen Specter is unsuited to be chairman of the judiciary committee. If you don't have a Republican senator, (or even if you do), contact Bill Frist the Senate majority leader and make your concerns known to him. Let them know that this is a very important matter to those of us who comprise the base of the Republican party.

There's a lot more on Arlen Specter at NRO's The Corner.

How Bad Can it Get?

This Reuter's report pretty much puts the kibosh to the left's complaint that the economy under George Bush is in such miserable shape:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New U.S. jobs soared at the sharpest rate in seven months in October, the government reported on Friday, helped by a surge in construction activity as hurricane-battered areas in the Southeast were rebuilt.

A surprisingly strong 337,000 jobs were added to payrolls last month -- twice the 169,000-job growth that Wall Street economists had forecast and the strongest since March when 353,000 jobs were created, the Labor Department said.

Still, the unemployment rate edged up to 5.5 percent from 5.4 percent in September, but that was because more people joined the search for employment, a potentially hopeful sign.

Not only was October a strong month but the number of jobs created in the two prior months was revised up -- to 139,000 in September instead of 96,000 and to 198,000 in August instead of 128,000.

The dollar, which has been under pressure, strengthened broadly on the news while bond prices weakened in the expectation that a resurgent labor market may foster higher interest rates and that investors may favor stocks.

"It looks like the job situation is improving and that this will support consumer spending going into the holidays and offset some of the drag caused by high oil prices this year," said economist Gary Thayer of A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. in St, Louis, Missouri.

If things get any "worse" under the evil Bush we'll have to bring our troops home just to guard our borders to keep the rest of the world from pouring in.

Analyzing the Election

If you're a political science type or just a junkie you'll find Jay Cost's analysis of the recent election well worth reading. You can read it at Horserace Blog here

The Clock is Ticking

Chester at Adventures With Chester explains how we are shaping the battlefield in Fallujah. An excerpt:

Folks, many of the psychological aspects of the battle are starting to become clear. Let's see what we end up with when we try to calculate the overall effect on the enemy that the following combination of military and political events will have:

1. Bush has won re-election in the US with a clear victory that is unchallenged. This shows unity in the American populace.

2. Four Arab-language media outlets have been forced from Fallujah by the insurgents for refusing to display stock footage of civilian casualties. This is a huge plus for us, especially when we learn that Iraqi journalists are being embedded with US forces. Remember how well embedding worked for us during the invasion? No reason it won't work again in swaying Iraqi public opinion. Note that the article states that Al-Jazeera declined to embed a reporter. If the battle goes well for the US, and Iraqis and other Arabs watch it go well on their TVs, but Al-Jazeera reports negatively, the US can publicize AJ's "no thanks" to being included to AJ's detriment. Another note: I bet the US has some very solid signals intelligence, or other human intelligence that many of the fighers in Fallujah are not Iraqi. Being able to show them on TV as the US assaults will be a huge plus for Allawi. I don't think he would take this risk if he didn't know for sure.

3. There is a British report that the Black Watch will be patrolling the outskirts of Fallujah. The article states that the Brits are based in Camp Dogwood. If that's the case, then the idea that they are patrolling the outskirts of Fallujah is spin, pure and simple. Camp Dogwood is a good 50 miles as the crow flies from Fallujah. The Brits are serving as a blocking force, and are going to be watching one of the high-speed avenues of approach running north-south from Baghdad to Iskandriyah (I can't find the name of this highway at the moment) to clean up any fleeing insurgents. I bet the US will leave them one avenue of escape. This is because:

a) it will definitely be very bloody if all the jihadi's have nowhere to go and fight to the finish in the city, b) if they flee, we can attrit them from the air very effectively (a highway is a relatively open battlespace), and c) the British, maybe coupled with US Army units, will be in a position to bat cleanup as the bad guys move toward them.

The analyses we've seen point to a commencement of battle within days if not hours.

The Current Civil War

There's a lot of buzz on talk shows and the internet about how Christian Evangelicals turned out in big numbers to swing the election for George Bush. Something like 25% of Ohio voters, for example, identified themselves as Evangelical Christians and they voted three to one for George Bush. Similar numbers prevailed throughout the country, and the Democrats are now commencing an extended season of self-examination to determine why so many of these people, especially in states which had been traditionally Democratic, have defected to George W. Bush.

The very fact that they have to ask the question, of course, reveals part of the problem. Democrats, at least liberal Democrats, which is almost all of them in the leadership, are tone deaf when it comes to religion and morality. They just don't get it. They can't understand why people who hold a Christian worldview, especially one which is theologically conservative, would feel alienated by the Democratic party. In an act of graciousness in the wake of victory Viewpoint offers them the following brief tutorial.

There is a second Civil War taking place in this country, not a war fought with guns but a war fought with ideas and the artillery of culture. Indeed, it is a culture war, a war that has riven this nation more deeply than anything since the first Civil War, and surprisingly, some people on both sides are just now coming to realize it. For at least three generations the secular left, the "progressives", concentrated in Hollywood, the academy, the television and music industries, and in the legislatures and judiciaries of government have been assiduously undermining and assaulting the traditional values that much of the rest of the country holds dear. The traditionalists, for their part, have complained about these attacks on their values but felt impotent to do much about them. The progressives controlled the levers of power and it just seemed to many, especially among the progressives, that their ultimate victory is inevitable. Maybe it is, but in this election the traditionalists finally felt they had an opportunity to stand against the tide, if only for a moment, and shout "enough."

Now the political organ of the progressives, the Democratic party, is stunned. They had fallen victim to an overweening confidence in their own inevitability, concocted in equal parts by their past success and their present ideological incestuousness. They are astonished that there are still so many people out there who can't see the obvious rightness of their cause and who were able to muster sufficient political energy to thwart them on their way to establishing a completely secular polity. What some Democrats are beginning to realize, as if awakening from a slumber, is that their party has sold its soul to the ideological far left and is in thrall today to the Michael Moores and Al Frankens of the world. It has become the party of rich and powerful men like John Kerry, John Edwards, Ted Kennedy and George Soros who patronize and pander to the working class but who have nothing in common with them. It is the party of academics and intellectuals who see the masses of people only as an abstract entity residing in remote frontiers that they themselves have only personally observed from an altitude of 35,000 feet. It is the party of those who hold in contempt the values and religion which that 25% of the voting public cherishes and which an even greater number respects. And now this party sits in wonderment at their repudiation by the heartland of this nation.

Concerned Democrats might do well to reflect on the fact that their party has had exactly two presidents in the last thirty years. One was an unabashed Evangelical, Jimmy Carter, and the other, Bill Clinton, at least made a pretense of being devout. John Kerry's awkward attempts to appear pious were transparently phony and, in any event, his high church style of piety did not much impress the Christian conservatives who turned out for Bush.

So the political post-mortems are concentrating quite a lot on the party itself and questions are being raised about how Democrats can regain some purchase among the people on the moral values issue. Pundits are asking why there can't be some unity between left and right on core values. The assumption seems to be that there must be common ground somewhere and that it's just a matter of finding it. What so many don't seem to understand is that there is no common ground. The relentless advances of secularism and our silly infatuation with "diversity" and "tolerance" have swept it away.

In our grandparents' day most people, whether they were Christian or not, accepted the moral authority of the Church and of the Bible. They may not have lived by it, but they somehow knew they should. There was a shared platform upon which to stand to discuss and debate moral issues and disagreements. That is much less the case today. Today the platform has been razed to the ground in the interest of "maximizing a diverse mosaic" of views and consequently we're like people adrift on rafts that have floated away from each other and are too far apart for us to join hands, to reconnect.

People on one raft base their values upon the Bible and/or Christian tradition, while the another raft is occupied by people who are, at the very least, skeptical of those as sources of moral authority. Many on that raft are openly hostile to the Christian worldview. Much, if not most, of the gulf between the red staters and the blue staters has resulted from this fundamentally disparate way of grounding moral truth. Since the two sides lack a common vision of what is ultimately right, their goals and means will rarely converge. Indeed, those who ground their values in God's revelation are seen by the secularists as superstitious fools whose benighted ideas deserve to be sent to the nearest landfill.

It is not that we simply disagree about the best way to get from A to Z . The two sides disagree about whether Z is where we should go at all. Traditionalists see marriage, for example, as a sacrament ordained by God. The left scoffs at this and views marriage as an oppressive, undesirable social structure evolved by ancient man and obsolete in today's world. Traditionalists believe that we should protect marriage from innovations and inroads, like easy divorce and gay marriage, which would eventually prove its undoing. The left sees any rules that would limit people from doing whatever they want to do as unjust and confining. There is no common ground here upon which a debate can be held. The only course is to resort to the exercise of power by one side over their antagonist and to secure for their values the force of law. The progressives have been doing this for fifty years, and the traditionalists have been fighting a rear-guard action against them, trying to preserve their way of life until they could amass sufficient political and judicial clout to undo some of the damage.

Lacking a common set of metaphysical assumptions upon which to base our moral judgments, both political parties have long ago given up trying to convince their opponents by argument and logical persuasion. They have realized, if only subliminally, that if we aren't starting from the same basic assumptions we'll never wind up at the same end point. Thus the parties find themselves engaged now in a mining operation, trying to extract votes from people who already agree with them, but who typically don't vote. The Republicans registered millions of people in this election over the age of 40 who were voting for the first time in their lives. But what neither party will be able to do with any significant success, in our opinion, is convert many voters. The politicos may fool the uninformed into believing that they're on the same side of the worldview divide as the people are, but, because there is so little common ground between the party elites and those whose worldview they disdain, they won't be successful in convincing those people to change their minds about what they believe. They will continue to just talk past each other. Better to spend one's resources on energizing those who already agree with you.

If this is true the prospects for national comity between red state/blue state folks are dim. The civil war will continue, perhaps in an increasingly uncivil fashion, and the gulf between the two groups will only widen as resentments are nourished and reinforced by new outrages. It is an interesting coincidence, perhaps, that the electoral strength of both sides lies pretty much along the same lines as the national division in 1860. Senator Kerry's blue states lie almost completely north of the Mason Dixon Line (Maryland and California are exceptions) and George Bush's electoral college strength lies predominantly south of it. Let's hope that this is indeed a coincidence and not a portent.

A Plea For Graciousness

Megan McArdle at Instapundit has some good advice for all of us who are delighted with Bush's victory:

A DEMOCRATIC FRIEND OF MINE JUST GOT A PHONE CALL from a Republican she doesn't speak to that often, allegedly to "say hi" but transparently to gloat. This is my plea to Bush voters to give peace a chance. If we have any chance of ending the sniping and bitterness that characterise the current political scene, it's going to start with Republicans being gracious winners. If you have to indulge your schadenfreude, do it silently by lurking on Democratic websites and reading hair-tearing left-wing editorials, not by alienating people with whom we'd like to eventually build a better America.

Having endorsed Ms McArdle's plea for civility Viewpoint has to confess that we did, though, laugh at Glenn Beck's riff on the radio this morning. Beck is, in our mind, the most talented, the most entertaining, talk radio host on the air and that includes Limbaugh and Hannity. If you can find him on the dial give him a listen. In the Harrisburg, PA area he's on WHP 580 at 9:00 a.m. Sometimes you just have to laugh even though you know you shouldn't.

Random Thoughts

Yesterday's election brought the Republicans a coup of four net Senate seats, including that of Tom Daschle, which puts the count at 55 R, 44 D, and 1 Independent. There are two things about this that bode well for Bush's agenda.

First is that it will now be much more difficult for the Democrats to stonewall Bush's judicial appointments, most importantly to the Supreme Court, on which there may be as many as four vacancies over the next four years. This will reverberate through our polity for the next two generations. Secondly, some Democrats may well lose enthusiasm for serving in the minority for the foreseeable future and may soon choose to retire (or even switch). This could well produce an even larger Republican majority in 2006 and 2008.

Eleven states had a referendum on the ballot yesterday that would amend their constitutions to ban gay marriage. The measure won in all eleven states bringing to seventeen the number of states whose constitutions prohibit legal recognition of such unions.

Californians approved a $3 billion measure to fund stem cell research. How a state which teetered on the brink of insolvency a year or two ago will pay for this is not yet clear.

George W. Bush received the highest vote total ever awarded to a winner. He is the first candidate to win over 50% of the vote since his father did it in 1988. The Clinton years are looking more and more like an aberrational interruption of an otherwise steady march toward a political hegemony of traditional and conservative values that began with Reagan in 1980. The long march through the institutions continues, and there is still a long way to go, but it's conservatives which are doing the marching and it's the left which is finding itself on the wrong side of history. At least we can hope.

Winners and Losers

With word that Senator Kerry is prepared to concede the election to George Bush, Viewpoint sees a number of winners and losers in the aftermath of this national exercise in democracy. Perhaps readers might wish to add some of their own (or delete one or more of ours:

Winners:

The American People

The People of Iraq and Afghanistan

Israel

The Republican Party

Compassionate Conservatism

The Swift Vets

Hillary Clinton

The New Media (Talk Radio, Blogosphere, Fox News)

Civil and Optimistic Political Rhetoric

Political Honesty

Losers:

Jacques Chirac and Old Europe

Islamist Radicals and the Axis of Evil

Palestinian Terrorists

The Democrat Party

Leftism/ Liberalism

George Soros, Michael Moore, and Hollywood Glitterati

Terry McAuliffe

Mainstream Media (esp. CBS, ABC, AP, NYT, WaPo, LA Times)

Hate and Pessimism

Political Lies and Fraud

Exit Polls, Presidential Debates, Trial Lawyers, NEA/PSEA, Gay Marriage

The Coming Israeli Strike

A brief respite from the election coverage takes us to the Strategy Page which predicts a preemptive series of strikes by Israel against Iran in the not too distant future. Some excerpts:

Since 1979, Iran has been run by Islamic radicals who, among other ambitions, wants to see Israel destroyed. Logically, it would make no sense for Iranian Islamic radicals to nuke Israel. It's well known that Israel has nuclear weapons, and several ways to deliver them. A nuke from Iran would risk several in return from Israel. And one or two Iranian nuclear warheads would not destroy Israel, while several nuclear weapons would cause enormous damage to Iran. Israel has made it known that if Iran gets close to having a nuclear weapon, Israel would launch air strikes and bomb dozens of industrial sites that are part of the Iranian nuclear program.

All of the Iranian targets are within 2,000 kilometers of Israel. Israeli air power is strong enough to overfly Jordan, and deal with any Jordanian opposition. In Iraq, the only anti-aircraft missiles are American, and it is doubtful that they would be fired at Israeli aircraft. Even if they were, Israel probably has the means to defeat the missiles (as Israel uses the same anti-aircraft missiles, and knows exactly how they work.) Israel has no problem getting jet bombers over Iran.

Neither Europe nor the United States wants Iran to have nuclear weapons, but neither Europe nor the U.S. would resort to bombing. They don't have to. Israel is the obvious first target of Iranian nukes, should it ever come to that. So Israel would be the first to attack Iran's nuclear program. And Israel is best qualified to make such an air strike.

The major unknown is; would Iran attempt to use their nuclear weapons on Israel? Iranian public pronouncements make it clear that such a rash move is seriously considered. Should Israel hold it's fire on the assumption that even the Iranian Islamic radicals would not be so foolish as to start a nuclear war?

Another question is what reaction would an Israeli strike against Iran elicit from the Islamist extremists in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and elsewhere? And what effect would it have on public opinion in Europe and the U.S.? There's probably no way to answer these, but these questions don't really matter anyway. The only important question is should the world stand by and let the mad mullahs in Tehran start churning out nuclear weapons. If the answer to that is "no" and if negotiations fail to dissuade the Iranians from building these weapons, as they almost certainly will, what other options are there?

Early Report

Exit polls during the day were showing a big move toward Kerry, but evidently they were very misleading. To get better analysis try HorseRace Blog and Kerry Spot throughout the evening.

The early good news is that Tom Daschle appears to be sinking in South Dakota.

Good Military Site

Readers interested in the military tactics being used in Iraq, and especially those which will be employed in the impending takedown of Fallujah, might want to bookmark The Adventures of Chester. In his current post Chester gives his reasons why he believes the fight for Fallujah will last less than two weeks. It's very informed and very informative stuff.

Osama's Choice

Yigal Carmon, the president of the highly respected Middle East Media Research Institute, calls our attention to the correct translation of bin Laden's words on the video which was made public last Friday:

The tape of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera on Friday, October 29th included a specific threat to "each U.S. state," designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming election against George W. Bush. The U.S. media in general mistranslated the words "ay wilaya" (which means "each U.S. state") to mean a "country" or "nation" other than the U.S., while in fact the threat was directed specifically at each individual U.S. state. This suggests some knowledge by bin Laden of the U.S. electoral college system. In a section of his speech in which he harshly criticized George W. Bush, bin Laden stated: "Any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security."

The Islamist website Al-Qal'a explained what this sentence meant: "This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, 'Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice,' it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy.

By this characterization, Sheikh Osama wants to drive a wedge in the American body, to weaken it, and he wants to divide the American people itself between enemies of Islam and the Muslims, and those who fight for us, so that he doesn't treat all American people as if they're the same. This letter will have great implications inside the American society, part of which are connected to the American elections, and part of which are connected to what will come after the elections."

Another interesting aspect of the speech is the fact that while bin Laden made his specific threat to each U.S. state, he also offered an election deal to the American voters, attempting to influence the election by these means rather than influencing it through terrorist attacks.

In other words, bin Laden joins Kim Jong Il and a host of other tyrants, terrorists, and lesser whackos around the world in telling Americans that it is in our interests to elect John Kerry as our president. Vote for Kerry, the terrorists' choice.

One of the most interesting aspects of MEMRI's analysis is this:

Another conspicuous aspect of the tape is the absence of common Islamist themes that are relevant to the month of Ramadan, which for fundamentalists like bin Laden is the month of Jihad and martyrdom. Noticeably absent from the Al-Jazeera tape was his usual appearance with a weapon, and more importantly the absence of references to Jihad, martyrdom, the Koran, the Hadith (Islamic tradition), Crusaders, Jews, and the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad on the duty to wage Jihad against the infidels. For the followers of the Al-Qa'ida ideology, this speech sends a regressive and defeatist message of surrender, as seen in the move from solely using Jihad warfare to a mixed strategy of threats combined with truce offers and election deals.

This strongly suggests that George Bush's strategy for fighting terrorism is working. Al Qaida is demoralized and hoping to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat by effecting a change in the way the United States is fighting the war against him. Their best hope, evidently, is to get John Kerry elected. Good grief.

Will We Be What We Have Been

Charles Krauthammer refreshes our memories regarding one of the greatest feats of liberation in the history of world civilization. We refer to the victory over the exceedingly repressive regime imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Krauthammer writes that:

In 2001, we had nothing there. What had the Clinton administration left in place? No plausible military plan. Virtually no intelligence. No local infrastructure. No neighboring bases. The Afghan Northern Alliance was fractured and weak. And Pakistan was actively supporting the bad guys.

Within days of Sept. 11, the clueless airhead president that inhabits Michael Moore's films and Tina Brown's dinner parties had done this: forced Pakistan into alliance with us, isolated the Taliban, secured military cooperation from Afghanistan's northern neighbors, and authorized a radical war plan involving just a handful of Americans on the ground, using high technology and local militias to utterly rout the Taliban.

President Bush put in place a military campaign that did in two months what everyone had said was impossible: defeat an entrenched, fanatical, ruthless regime in a territory that had forced the great British and Soviet empires into ignominious retreat. Bush followed that by creating in less than three years a fledgling pro-American democracy in a land that had no history of democratic culture and was just emerging from 25 years of civil war.

This is all barely remembered and barely noted. Most amazing of all, John Kerry has managed to transform our Afghan venture into a failure - a botched operation in which Bush let Osama bin Laden get away because he "outsourced" bin Laden's capture to "warlords" in the battle of Tora Bora.

The liberation of Afghanistan is quite literally an astonishing feat, one that could not have been accomplished apart from force of arms, a fact that those on the left who say that war never settled anything might do well to ponder. Nor could it have been accomplished without extraordinary leadership from the Commander-in-Chief on down. It is almost impossible to imagine this achievement, for which Americans should be extremely proud, having occured under a Kerry administration. Senator Kerry's whole approach to terrorism and his disdain for the military make an expedition such as the Bush team put together in Afghanistan quite unthinkable under a President Kerry.

Krauthammer's essay, which has a lot more to say than the excerpts quoted above, implicitly reminds us of how much is at stake in tomorrow's election. Tomorrow we will decide what kind of nation we will be for the next decade. Will we continue to be the hope of oppressed peoples everywhere as we were under Ronald Reagan and as we have been under George Bush or will we be a nation fashioned after the image of Michael Moore? Will we continue to be the hope of those who live in fear of Islamo-terrorism as we have been under George Bush or will we withdraw from the fray and become a reactive force, as John Kerry has suggested he prefers, rather than the proactive force we have been under President Bush? Will we continue to be a nation that does what is right even if others refuse to join us or will we be a nation which must pass John Kerry's "global test", i.e. get approval from the French, before we can act to oppose terrorism and other threats against our security? Will we be a nation whose president has the endorsement of most of the world's worst tyrants and anti-semites, will we be a nation whose president is the man Osama Bin Laden has recently tacitly endorsed, or will we be a nation whose president is a threat to tyrants and terrorists everywhere? We'll know in thirty six hours.

Why Not Kerry

Saint Augustine speaks in his Confessions of his eagerness to meet and hear the Manichean hero Faustus who had a great reputation for eloquence. Upon finally hearing him explain the Manichean philosophy, however, Augustine was disappointed, not in Faustus' agility with the language, but rather in his ideas. He writes:

"[Faustus' ideas] seemed to me no better merely because [they] were expressed better, nor true because eloquent....[People] thought him wise simply because they liked his speaking....[Yet] a thing was not bound to be true because uttered eloquently, nor false because the utterance of the lips is ill-arranged....plain or beautiful language may clothe wisdom or folly indifferently."

These words come to mind as we reflect upon the political campaign which is heading for its denouement this Tuesday. John Kerry has said much these last twelve months and much of it he has delivered with great oratorical flourish and skill. President Bush, on the other hand, will never be considered to be the second coming of Demosthenes. Even so, eloquence has nothing to do with either truth or wisdom, and we shouldn't be blinded to the import and truth of one's words by the raiment in which they are attired.

To assess whether Senator Kerry has the "Right Stuff" to be president one needs to attend not merely to what he says or how seductively he says it, but rather to what he has accomplished in his public life.

In the early seventies the young John Kerry played a significant role in getting the United States to abandon the South Vietnamese to the armies of Ho Chi Minh resulting in the slaughter or imprisonment of tens of thousands of people who had placed their hope and trust in the U.S. to defend them. John Kerry's efforts to end our involvement in the war included defaming the American military and indirectly making life worse for the P.O.W.s being held in North Vietnam. For his contribution to an eventual N.V.A. victory he has had his photograph placed on a wall of honor in a North Vietnamese war museum.

We may argue about the quality of his judgment, or whether his behavior was actually treasonous or not. But what seems to be beyond dispute is that the North Vietnamese saw him as an ally, or, in Lenin's terms, at the least a "useful idiot", in their struggle against the United States.

Moreover, Mr. Kerry saw that war as a colossal mistake, a tragic blunder, and his prescription was to pull out immediately. Today we're engaged in another war which Senator Kerry regards as a colossal mistake and a tragic blunder. He says that as president he will nevertheless prosecute it until we win, but what in his record gives us reason to believe he's being truthful? If he was right about Vietnam he has no reason to treat Iraq any differently, and if he now thinks he was wrong about Vietnam he has never said so. If personal history is a reliable guide, a President Kerry will pull our troops out of Iraq as soon as he can, and the Iraqi people will be at the mercy of the brutal thugs who circle like hyenas waiting for the opportunity to destroy the Iraqi experiment in freedom and all who have put their trust in America to see that experiment through.

In the eighties Mr. Kerry was elected to the Senate where he compiled a record noteworthy only for it's un-noteworthiness. After twenty years of service he has no significant legislation to his credit, he has served in no real leadership capacity, he amassed a voting record that has placed him among the most left-wing members of the Senate, and his attendance at committee meetings has been abysmal. He voted consistently to raise taxes, diminish the military, and weaken our intelligence gathering capabilities. There is nothing in his tenure in Congress which exhibits the grain of presidential timber, which is doubtless why his acceptance speech at the convention last July doted so lovingly on his Vietnam service and hardly at all on his Senate career.

Since the convention he has spent the campaign blaming George Bush for everything from vaccine shortages to alleged missing explosives in Iraq, as if Bush worked in the lab that produced the vaccine and was himself standing guard at al Qaqaa. His campaign has been marked by charges and allegations which have either a very tenuous hold on, or are completely divorced from, reality. He has faulted "this president" for a terrible economy despite the fact that unemployment is lower now than it was during the Clinton years. He has faulted "this president" for invading Iraq without the blessing of the French, even though the French had been bought by Saddam and nobody could have persuaded them to join the coalition that was about to derail their oil-for-food gravy train. He faulted this president for botching the post-war in Iraq even though the Iraqi economy is strengthening almost daily, Iraqis are on track to hold the first democratic elections in their history in a few months, and 25 million of them are free of state terror for the first time in generations. Moreover, the insurgency in Iraq is in its death throes as the Iraqi military and police gain in competence and numbers and assume the delicate task of killing the Islamo-terrorists without antagonizing the Muslim citizenry.

Mr. Kerry's attempts during the campaign to appear pious and "manly" seem contrived and spurious. He has made it a point to attend church services every Sunday the last few months, but this is in stark contrast to the pattern he has established throughout his adult life. His goose-hunting foray was made risible by his purchase of the required license when he asked a clerk if he could "get me a hunting license here."

He repeatedly gives the impression of being willing to say or do anything in order to squeeze an extra vote or two out of his audience. His eagerness to castigate the President over the al Qaqaa story without knowing whether the reports were true or not is but the latest example of a reckless opportunism that goes back at least to his military days.

The Senator has manufactured crises where no crisis exists. He has accused this administration of blocking stem cell research, of planning to suppress the minority vote, of planning to deprive the elderly of social security, of planning to reinstate the draft, but none of these allegations is even remotely true, or even plausible. Similarly untrue are claims he has made for himself such as the claim to have met with the members of the Security Council for in-depth discussions prior to the invasion of Iraq, a claim flatly denied by the relevant U.N. representatives.

John Kerry himself promises us that he has a "plan" for every ill besetting our polity, but either his plan looks very similar to what the President is already doing, as in his plan for Iraq, or the numbers in his plan don't add up, as in his plan to rollback the Bush tax cut and to use that revenue to pay for all the programs he has promised. Or, most often, the plan goes unarticulated and remains a mystery.

Mr. Kerry can lay claim to only a single qualification for the presidency, if it even be a qualification: He is an eloquent and persuasive speaker. But as Augustine pointed out over 1600 years ago, eloquence has nothing to do with truth. Nor does it have anything much to do with leadership. Like pumice stone which gives the appearance of possessing weight, but which, upon hefting, one is surprised to find so airy, John Kerry's rhetorical graces mask an inner lightness that is totally inadequate for the stresses and tests which lie ahead of our nation.

In these times we need a president who has demonstrated both leadership and character. George Bush is not perfect, but he possesses those two particular virtues in abundance. John Kerry, by contrast, is a "hollow man" who has never evinced either. He offers no compelling reason to elect him and numerous reasons to blanch at the thought of a Kerry presidency. Viewpoint urges its readers not to base their votes on Tuesday upon superficial eloquence but rather upon each man's character and the capacity each has demonstrated to lead us in the continuing war against Islamo-fascist terrorism.

Why Not Kerry

Saint Augustine speaks in his Confessions of his eagerness to meet and hear the Manichean hero Faustus who had a great reputation for eloquence. Upon finally hearing him explain the Manichean philosophy, however, Augustine was disappointed, not in Faustus' agility with the language, but rather in his ideas. He writes:

"[Faustus' ideas] seemed to me no better merely because [they] were expressed better, nor true because eloquent....[People] thought him wise simply because they liked his speaking....[Yet] a thing was not bound to be true because uttered eloquently, nor false because the utterance of the lips is ill-arranged....plain or beautiful language may clothe wisdom or folly indifferently."

These words come to mind as we reflect upon the political campaign which is heading for its denouement this Tuesday. John Kerry has said much these last twelve months and much of it he has delivered with great oratorical flourish and skill. President Bush, on the other hand, will never be considered to be the second coming of Demosthenes. Even so, eloquence has nothing to do with either truth or wisdom, and we shouldn't be blinded to the import and truth of one's words by the raiment in which they are attired.

To assess whether Senator Kerry has the "Right Stuff" to be president one needs to attend not merely to what he says or how seductively he says it, but rather to what he has accomplished in his public life.

In the early seventies the young John Kerry played a significant role in getting the United States to abandon the South Vietnamese to the armies of Ho Chi Minh resulting in the slaughter or imprisonment of tens of thousands of people who had placed their hope and trust in the U.S. to defend them. John Kerry's efforts to end our involvement in the war included defaming the American military and indirectly making life worse for the P.O.W.s being held in North Vietnam. For his contribution to an eventual N.V.A. victory he has had his photograph placed on a wall of honor in a North Vietnamese war museum.

We may argue about the quality of his judgment, or whether his behavior was actually treasonous or not. But what seems to be beyond dispute is that the North Vietnamese saw him as an ally, or, in Lenin's terms, at the least a "useful idiot", in their struggle against the United States.

Moreover, Mr. Kerry saw that war as a colossal mistake, a tragic blunder, and his prescription was to pull out immediately. Today we're engaged in another war which Senator Kerry regards as a colossal mistake and a tragic blunder. He says that as president he will nevertheless prosecute it until we win, but what in his record gives us reason to believe he's being truthful? If he was right about Vietnam he has no reason to treat Iraq any differently, and if he now thinks he was wrong about Vietnam he has never said so. If personal history is a reliable guide, a President Kerry will pull our troops out of Iraq as soon as he can, and the Iraqi people will be at the mercy of the brutal thugs who circle like hyenas waiting for the opportunity to destroy the Iraqi experiment in freedom and all who have put their trust in America to see that experiment through.

In the eighties Mr. Kerry was elected to the Senate where he compiled a record noteworthy only for it's un-noteworthiness. After twenty years of service he has no significant legislation to his credit, he has served in no real leadership capacity, he amassed a voting record that has placed him among the most left-wing members of the Senate, and his attendance at committee meetings has been abysmal. He voted consistently to raise taxes, diminish the military, and weaken our intelligence gathering capabilities. There is nothing in his tenure in Congress which exhibits the grain of presidential timber, which is doubtless why his acceptance speech at the convention last July doted so lovingly on his Vietnam service and hardly at all on his Senate career.

Since the convention he has spent the campaign blaming George Bush for everything from vaccine shortages to alleged missing explosives in Iraq, as if Bush worked in the lab that produced the vaccine and was himself standing guard at al Qaqaa. His campaign has been marked by charges and allegations which have either a very tenuous hold on, or are completely divorced from, reality. He has faulted "this president" for a terrible economy despite the fact that unemployment is lower now than it was during the Clinton years. He has faulted "this president" for invading Iraq without the blessing of the French, even though the French had been bought by Saddam and nobody could have persuaded them to join the coalition that was about to derail their oil-for-food gravy train. He faulted this president for botching the post-war in Iraq even though the Iraqi economy is strengthening almost daily, Iraqis are on track to hold the first democratic elections in their history in a few months, and 25 million of them are free of state terror for the first time in generations. Moreover, the insurgency in Iraq is in its death throes as the Iraqi military and police gain in competence and numbers and assume the delicate task of killing the Islamo-terrorists without antagonizing the Muslim citizenry.

Mr. Kerry's attempts during the campaign to appear pious and "manly" seem contrived and spurious. He has made it a point to attend church services every Sunday the last few months, but this is in stark contrast to the pattern he has established throughout his adult life. His goose-hunting foray was made risible by his purchase of the required license when he asked a clerk if he could "get me a hunting license here."

He repeatedly gives the impression of being willing to say or do anything in order to squeeze an extra vote or two out of his audience. His eagerness to castigate the President over the al Qaqaa story without knowing whether the reports were true or not is but the latest example of a reckless opportunism that goes back at least to his military days.

The Senator has manufactured crises where no crisis exists. He has accused this administration of blocking stem cell research, of planning to suppress the minority vote, of planning to deprive the elderly of social security, of planning to reinstate the draft, but none of these allegations is even remotely true, or even plausible. Similarly untrue are claims he has made for himself such as the claim to have met with the members of the Security Council for in-depth discussions prior to the invasion of Iraq, a claim flatly denied by the relevant U.N. representatives.

John Kerry himself promises us that he has a "plan" for every ill besetting our polity, but either his plan looks very similar to what the President is already doing, as in his plan for Iraq, or the numbers in his plan don't add up, as in his plan to rollback the Bush tax cut and to use that revenue to pay for all the programs he has promised. Or, most often, the plan goes unarticulated and remains a mystery.

Mr. Kerry can lay claim to only a single qualification for the presidency, if it even be a qualification: He is an eloquent and persuasive speaker. But as Augustine pointed out over 1600 years ago, eloquence has nothing to do with truth. Nor does it have anything much to do with leadership. Like pumice stone which gives the appearance of possessing weight, but which, upon hefting, one is surprised to find so airy, John Kerry's rhetorical graces mask an inner lightness that is totally inadequate for the stresses and tests which lie ahead of our nation.

In these times we need a president who has demonstrated both leadership and character. George Bush is not perfect, but he possesses those two particular virtues in abundance. John Kerry, by contrast, is a "hollow man" who has never evinced either. He offers no compelling reason to elect him and numerous reasons to blanch at the thought of a Kerry presidency. Viewpoint urges its readers not to base their votes on Tuesday upon superficial eloquence but rather upon each man's character and the capacity each has demonstrated to lead us in the continuing war against Islamo-fascist terrorism.

It's The Final Countdown

Belmont Club has two excellent posts up. The first is an analysis of the recently released UBL tape. Wretchard at Belmont Club observes:

It is important to notice what he has stopped saying in this speech. He has stopped talking about the restoration of the Global Caliphate. There is no more mention of the return of Andalusia. There is no more anticipation that Islam will sweep the world. He is no longer boasting that Americans run at the slightest wounds; that they are more cowardly than the Russians. He is not talking about future operations to swathe the world in fire but dwelling on past glories. He is basically saying if you leave us alone we will leave you alone. Though it is couched in his customary orbicular phraseology he is basically asking for time out.

The American answer to Osama's proposal will be given on Election Day. One response is to agree that the United States of America will henceforth act like Sweden, which is on track to become majority Islamic sometime after the middle of this century. The electorate best knows which candidate will serve this end; which candidate most promises to be European-like in attitude and they can choose that path with both eyes open. The electorate can strike that bargain and Osama may keep his word.

The other course is to reject Osama's terms utterly; to recognize the pleading in his outwardly belligerent manner and reply that his fugitive existence; the loss of his sanctuaries; the annihilation of his men are but the merest foretaste of what is yet to come: to say that to enemies such as he, the initials 'US' will always mean Unconditional Surrender.

In the second post Wretchard teams up with Chester for an analysis of the order of battle shaping up in Fallujah. It looks like there will be an assault sometime next week, probably soon after the polls close, and it doesn't look good for the insurgents. There's good stuff to be found on the military situation in Fallujah at both of these links.

Imposing Our Views Upon Others

A friend recommends this article in Commonweal for readers interested in John Kerry's position on abortion (at least as of today). The article is actually a critique of Mario Cuomo's 1984 Notre Dame speech on the subject which has taken on the authority of holy writ for many Democratic politicians, most notably John Kerry.

The article is authored by Ken Woodward, long time religion editor at Newsweek, and is an excellent analysis of the Cuomo/Kerry argument that one can be personally opposed to abortion, that one can accept the Catholic teaching that abortion is a ghastly crime against human life, and still strive heroically to do everything one can to prevent this offense from being restricted or ended.

There is a link to a reply by Cuomo to Woodward's essay at the end of the piece. In Viewpoint's opinion Cuomo's response, though articulate and tart, falls short of being a satisfactory defense of his position. We'll leave it to the interested reader to pursue the arguments for him or herself, but the general theme of the Cuomo/Kerry apologia is the oft-heard claim that no one has the right to impose his/her morality on another person. This concern, however, being founded on several errors, is quite misplaced.

We'll mention only in passing Woodward's point that it's difficult to name legislation which does not impose somebody's morality upon the rest of society. Everything from desegregation to affirmative action to welfare regulations to environmental regulations to laws prohibiting gambling, prostitution, public lewdness, drug use, capital punishment, bribery, and so on all presuppose moral values that might not be shared by many of those who are subject to the pertinent laws.

Beyond this objection, however, there are a couple of other difficulties with this concern about saddling others with one's moral values or one's religious views. First, it is a concern, oddly enough, that only theists can logically express. If an atheist were to object to a theist that he should not impose his beliefs on others the appropriate reply would be to ask "Why not?"

If the atheist is correct in believing that we live in a world without God then a man has a "right" to try to do whatever he wishes. In a world without God might makes right, so anything one is able to do one has a "right" to do. If the atheist objects to this, he might be asked what it is, exactly, upon which he bases his conviction that I have no right to impose my values. Is it the law? But if I can change the law then that objection fails. Is it that a right to impose one's will upon others robs the other of his worth and dignity as a human being? But in a world without God human worth and dignity are arbitrary and chimerical. They have no real existence in the first place, and even if they did, why would it be wrong to deprive someone of them?

The fact is that the only constraint upon anyone's "right" to do whatever he is able to do is God's proscription, but for the atheist that limit does not exist and for the secularist it is illicit to invoke it. In a Godless universe, or in the naked public square, we are all morally autonomous, free to do whatever we have the power to accomplish.

A second problem with the affirmation that it's improper to seek to impose our beliefs upon others is that the claim itself is a moral assertion. The person who makes it believes that it is wrong to engage in the particular behavior he is condemning. But the problem with this is that he is himself seeking to impose upon others his moral conviction that it is unjust to impose one's moral convictions upon others. In other words, he's violating his own principle in the very act of voicing it. He is attempting to inflict this particular moral principle on the rest of us.

The truth of the matter is that few people who argue that it transgresses some moral standard to impose one's beliefs upon others really believe it deep down. What they believe is that it's wrong to have others foist convictions and values with which they disagree upon them. They have no trouble burdening others with their own values, and that's why Cuomo and Kerry sound so insincere on the question of abortion. They claim to believe that abortion is a sin, but they are prepared to fight tooth and nail to perpetuate it. It is not, mind, that they promise to adopt a stance of political neutrality on the issue. It is that they promise to do everything in their power to see that neither legislatures nor courts nor any expression of the popular will diminishes a woman's right to kill her unborn child.

Surely this is an odd position to take. They certainly wouldn't suffer similar psychological dissonance over slavery. They would hardly say that they believe slavery is an offense against God and man, but since many people disagree with them about this, they promise as President to only appoint pro-slavery justices to the Supreme Court. If such reasoning is unthinkable with respect to the issue of slavery, why is it not equally unthinkable with respect to abortion?

When someone says they don't want to impose their values on others, they're really just trying to walk on both sides of the political street simultaneously. They are tacitly acknowledging that they're really not committed to at least one of the values they claim to hold. If Cuomo and Kerry really believed the Catholic Church's teaching on abortion they would scarcely oppose efforts to end it, much less would they actively fight to keep it legal.

Stories and Non-stories

ABC has in its possession a videotape made by an English-speaking terrorist who threatens an impending attack on the U.S. which will make 9/11 seem insignificant by comparison. ABC has, as of this writing, chosen not to run the tape giving as their reason that it's too close to November 2nd, and that releasing this horrifying threat might have a disruptive effect on the election.

We may interpret this to mean that since the threats will probably drive voters to push the Republican lever on Tuesday, ABC deems it imprudent to show it. If the tape had somehow made Bush look bad, if it was a tape, say, of new abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, does anyone think that ABC's scruples would cut the same way? To see the salient parts of the tape and some analysis of it go here.

Meanwhile, the MSM is full of reports about missing explosives from al Qaqaa. It's hard to understand what relevance this story, which has been known for a year and a half, has for the election. There is no reason to believe that the explosives were looted under the noses of American troops since the logistics involved would be daunting, but even if they were, how on earth would George Bush be culpable? Senator Kerry is trying to wring every drop of campaign advantage he can out of this story, but he's stretching so far he risks incurring a political hernia.

Indeed, if there's any political lesson in the whole al Qaqaa matter it is that Senator Kerry is willing to defame both our troops and the President without having any proof or even strong evidence that his charges are true. This shows a recklessness and indifference to truth that reflects poorly on a man who would be president. It also calls into question (again) his credibility on everything else he has said during this campaign.

The left seems to think that real news should not be reported but non-news should be hyped for a week. It seems disingenuous, but perhaps that's part of the job description for being a member of the MSM or of the Democratic party.

Dick Cheney's Former Company

The news brings word that Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, is being investigated by the F.B.I. Apparently, Dick Cheney's former company, which is Halliburton, may have been awarded contracts improperly. Cheney himself is not under investigation, but it is his former company and he used to be an executive at H-A-L-L-I-B-U-R-T-O-N so he may be implicated.

Halliburton, with which Vice-President Cheney used to be very closely associated, and probably still is, may have overcharged taxpayers for fuel and services in Iraq. There is a suspicion that the Bush administration of which Dick Cheney is Vice-president, of all things, showed favoritism to Dick Cheney's former company, HALLIBURTON!!!

The connection between Dick Cheney and HALLIBURTON is well-known in Washington circles. Wendy Hall, a Halliburton spokeswoman who may or may not be indebted to Dick Cheney for her job, said the company is cooperating with various investigations, but she dismissed the latest revelation, somewhat naively, as election politics.

Liz Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney who is a former executive at HALLIBURTON, said today on the Glenn Beck radio show that when her father resigned from Halliburton, his former company, he was given eight million dollars in options and other reimbursements (allegations that these were compensation for anticipated favoritism have not yet been proven. Yet.).

Ms Cheney confirmed Beck's report that her father gave the entire sum to charity. The news of this astounding gift will doubtless be soon displayed all over the MSM so that everyone will know what sort of man Mr. Cheney is. Or not.