The Unblinking Eye

Interesting details on the Zarqawi affair by Sean Naylor at Army Times:

In the end, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi could not escape Task Force 145's "unblinking eye."

TF 145 is the latest name for the shifting collection of U.S. and British special operations units that has hunted the most wanted terrorist in Iraq for three years, and "the unblinking eye" is what its members call the fusion of intelligence and operations that allowed them to relentlessly peel away the layers of Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq organization until the terror mastermind was left defenseless and almost alone.

When that moment came, at 6:15 p.m. on June 7, a hidden Delta Force reconnaissance and surveillance team from TF 145 watched as two 500-pound bombs dropped by an Air Force F-16 pulverized the safe house near Baqubah, in which Zarqawi; his spiritual advisor, Sheikh Abd Al Rahman; and four other people had taken refuge.

The house, located in a tiny farming hamlet called Hibhib, was leveled by the blast. Rahman, another man and three women are believed to have died in the strike, but Zarqawi was still breathing when Iraqi police arrived at the scene, Army Maj. Gen. Bill Caldwell said during a June 9 briefing from Baghdad. However, the terrorist leader died within moments.

Caldwell said earlier reports that a child also had been killed in the bombing were incorrect. Zarqawi's death marks a high point in the history of Joint Special Operations Command, which provides most of the units that comprise TF 145, and is a serious - perhaps fatal - blow to Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist group.

But observers say it is too soon to judge the impact on the wider war in Iraq, which includes a Sunni insurgency separate from Zarqawi's group and several Shiite militias vying for power.

"Things are not going to go away now," said Vali Nasr, a Middle East expert at the Naval Postgraduate School. "But it's now not as likely that we'll see an attack on Ayatollah Sistani or Najaf," he said, referring to Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric and its holiest Shiite shrine.

The strike that killed Zarqawi was the culmination of "a very long, painstaking, deliberate exploitation of intelligence, information-gathering, human sources, electronic, signal intelligence ... over a period of time," Caldwell said.

Rahman, Zarqawi's spiritual adviser, was the key. "He was identified several weeks ago ... through military sources from somebody inside Zarqawi's network," Caldwell said. "They were able to start tracking him, monitoring his movements and establishing when he was doing his link-ups with Zarqawi."

The capture of Sheikh Ahmed al-Dabash in Baghdad's Mansour district May 29, described by U.S. Central Command as "a major financier and facilitator of terrorism in Iraq," may have been another critical breakthrough, multiple sources said.

"You follow the money - and he was the money man," said an officer familiar with special operations in Iraq.

TF 145 tracked Rahman to a safe house about five miles west of Baqubah in the tiny hamlet of Hibhib, an isolated cluster of about 300 buildings, most of them made of sub-baked mud, and surrounded by miles of farms, orchards and fields.

Hibhib, which has seen a fair amount of insurgent activity, is almost 100 percent Sunni and is home to at least three prominent families who would have gladly given sanctuary to a man like Zarqawi, said Army Maj. Kreg Schnell, former intelligence officer for 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, which spent a year in Baqubah starting in February 2004.

Zarqawi "obviously had friends in the area who gave him meals and a place to sleep," Schnell said. Indeed, U.S. intelligence had confirmed that Zarqawi would meet Rahman in Hibhib. A reconnaissance-surveillance team from Delta Force's B Squadron infiltrated the area to get "eyes on" the house, said a source in the special operations community. Sources said a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle was also overhead.

After slipping through coalition fingers on several occasions in the past three years, Zarqawi was now in the sights of U.S. forces.

It was, Caldwell said, "the first time that we ... had definitive, unquestionable information as to exactly where he was located," in a place where he could be hit "without causing collateral damage to other Iraqi civilians and personnel in the area."

Senior U.S. military leaders in Iraq discussed whether to launch a ground assault, but decided "they could not really go in on the ground without running the risk of having him escape," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters June 8 in Brussels, Belgium.

That left an airstrike as the only option. Two F-16C Fighting Falcon jets were in the air on a routine on-call mission due to last four or five hours over central Iraq when the decision was made to launch the mission, Air Force Lt. Gen. Gary North, Central Command's air component commander, told reporters in the Pentagon on June 8.

The jets carried a mixed load of laser-guided and satellite-guided bombs and LITENING targeting pods equipped with laser designators to mark targets, as well as video cameras.

Caldwell said June 9 that at the time the order was given to launch a strike on the house, one of the two F-16s was receiving fuel from an airborne tanker, so only one aircraft made the bombing run.

The pilot knew there was a high-value target in the building, North said, but he declined to say whether the pilot was told that target was Zarqawi.

North also refused to name the pilot, the unit or the base from which the mission was flown. For the past year, most F-16Cs flying over Iraq have been staged out of Balad, a sprawling Army and Air Force complex about 50 miles north of Baghdad. The Air Force typically has the equivalent of two F-16 squadrons at Balad.

Flying at "medium" altitude - at least 20,000 feet - the pilot circled the safe house, noting how it was built, setting targeting coordinates and deciding which bombs to use. The pilot set his fuses so the bombs would explode inside the house, rather than on contact with the roof, in order to collapse the structure.

At 6:15 p.m., the F-16 dropped a 500-pound laser-guided GBU-12 bomb on the house, causing a massive explosion.

Using the cameras in the LITENING pod, the pilot peered through the smoke to observe the damage and decided a second bomb was needed. About 30 seconds later, the pilot released a 500-pound GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munition that was guided by Global Positioning System satellite signals. That also hit the home, leaving the building a smoking pile of rubble.

Iraqi security forces were the first to arrive on the ground - and found Zarqawi still alive, Caldwell said. They had placed the terrorist leader on a stretcher just as U.S. troops from Multi-National Division-North rolled in.

Zarqawi tried to get off the stretcher. Troops again secured him and attempted to start medical treatment, but he died within minutes, Caldwell said.

Coalition forces took Zarqawi's body to an undisclosed secure location, where his identity was confirmed by scars and tattoos he was known to have, and by his fingerprints, Caldwell said.

TF 145 was responsible not only for gathering the intelligence that led to Zarqawi, but also for acting upon it swiftly, creating a cycle in which each set of raids yielded more intelligence, which in turn drove more raids.

Made up of a rotating set of units from Joint Special Operations Command, the task force, based at Balad, includes squadrons from the military's two "direct action" special-mission units - the Army's 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, better known as Delta Force, and the Navy's SEAL Team 6, also known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group, as well as other Army and Air Force special operations elements and a variety of intelligence organizations.

The June 7 attack culminated about six weeks of focused effort.

"We had clear-enough evidence about a month-and-a-half ago that allowed us to start [getting] down to the point where we were able to prosecute the action ... against that safe house," Caldwell said, showing a slide that listed eight men in Zarqawi's organization captured or killed between April 6 and May 31.

But judging from Central Command's own press releases, Caldwell's slide only scratches the surface of TF 145 operations in recent weeks.

On April 16, a force of SEALs and Rangers attacked an al-Qaida in Iraq safe house in Yusufiyah, 20 miles southwest of Baghdad, killing five terrorists and capturing another five. On June 2, "wanted al-Qaida terrorist" Hasayn Ali Muzabir was killed near Balad.

Between those two missions, "coalition forces," the phrase often used by Central Command to disguise the participation of TF 145, captured or killed more than 100 members of al-Qaida in Iraq. Indeed, in a prophetic remark, Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch told reporters in Baghdad on May 4 that the coalition was "zooming in" on Zarqawi.

In Iraq, U.S. special operations forces have captured former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, tracked his sons Uday and Qusay to a hide-out where they were killed, and killed Zarqawi - who, because of the perception that his terrorist organization was such a massive obstacle to peace in Iraq, had become arguably the highest-priority individual target for the U.S. in the world.

The question is whether al-Qaida in Iraq can withstand the loss of its iconic leader, who earned grudging respect from U.S. special operators for his willingness to lead from the front.

One candidate may be Abu Ayyub al-Masri, an Egyptian whom Caldwell said met Zarqawi in Afghanistan in 2001 or 2002. U.S. operators have intelligence indicating al-Masri has had close contacts with Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's chief deputy.

Caldwell said al-Masri "helped establish maybe the first al-Qaida cell that existed in the Baghdad area." Analysts generally agree that although Zarqawi was the focus of heavy U.S. combat and propaganda efforts, he and his group were a relatively small facet of the Iraq insurgency and mounted a relatively small number of attacks.

Those attacks had a disproportionate effect, both in their violence and their political and sectarian aftermath, though Zarqawi's death may reduce the likelihood of his ultimate goal: igniting a massive civil war between Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority and the Shiite Muslims who control political life.

Within hours of Zarqawi's June 7 death, 17 simultaneous raids were carried out in and around Baghdad, yielding "a tremendous amount" of information and intelligence that is "presently being exploited ... for further use," Caldwell said.

Another 39 operations were conducted the night of June 8, Caldwell said. "This is a big oak tree that got shaken, so there's stuff falling all over the place," Schnell said.

The unblinking eye cannot afford to rest yet.

Laying Zarqawi to rest may not be the end of al-Qaeda in Iraq but exploiting the trove of intelligence material that was recovered from the house may be.

If It's Too Loud, You're Too Old

If you're going to bang on someone's door and threaten him maybe you should ascertain first what he's holding in his hand:

A man shot his next door neighbor Monday evening, the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office reported. Under Florida law, he may never be charged. Investigators said the two had an ongoing argument over a messy yard and loud music. It came to a head when one neighbor shot the other outside his house.

Investigators say a few minutes after he arrived home, Kenneth Allen, 58, heard a banging at his front door. It was his neighbor, Jason Rosenbloom, 30. A verbal confrontation followed. "During the exchange, Allen told Rosenbloom to leave his property," said Mac McMullen, spokesman for the Sheriff's Office.

"Allen then shut the front door. Allen told deputies he then went to a room and retrieved a 9mm semi-automatic handgun, returned to the front door and opened the door."

"Rosenbloom then came towards Allen in what Allen told deputies was a threatening manner," he said. "Allen then told deputies he fired two rounds at Rosenbloom as he began to enter his residence." According to Allen, Rosenbloom fell to the ground after being shot, then got up and walked to his home. His wife called 911 to report the shooting.

Rosenbloom was taken to Bayfront Medical Center by air ambulance and was reported in stable condition. Allen was not charged with the shooting, McMullen said. Investigators will file their report with the State Attorney's Office for review. Under Florida law, a person cannot be charged with shooting another if he thought his life was in danger.

I wonder if Mr. Rosenbloom will henceforth keep the volume turned down.

Where's the Beef?

So why are these guys still being put through this ordeal:

The second dancer in the Duke lacrosse case told police early on that allegations of rape were a "crock" and that she was with the accuser the entire evening except for a period of less than five minutes. The second dancer, Kim Roberts, made that statement when she was first contacted by Durham police one week after the party where the first escort service dancer said she was gang raped by three men.

Roberts' statements and notes of the detectives in the case were made public today in a court filing by lawyers for one of the defendants, Reade Seligmann, 20, of Essex Falls, N.J. Seligmann's lawyers said police omitted important facts contradicting the accuser's story when they obtained an order to photograph and take DNA samples from the players, including Roberts' statements to police.

Investigator Benjamin Himan first contacted Roberts on March 20, one week after the lacrosse party that ended in the early hours of March 14. "She heard that (the accuser) was sexually assaulted, which she stated is a 'crock' and she stated that she was with her the whole time until she left," according to Himan's notes. "The only time she was alone was when she would not leave and that time period was less than five minutes."

Now there is this development:

The exotic dancer who has accused three Duke lacrosse players of gang-raping her was drinking while taking medication that night, and had sex with at least four men and a sexual device in the days immediately leading up to the off-campus party, according to court papers filed Thursday.

And despite what Durham police have contended, a medical examination showed no signs of the sort of sexual or physical attack of which the dancer complained, according to the motion filed by defense attorneys for Reade Seligmann.

Among other previously undisclosed details, the motion says the woman at one point accused her female dance partner of helping the lacrosse players rape her and of stealing her money. And she told one medical staffer she drank at least 44 ounces of beer, and told another she took a powerful muscle relaxant and drank beer before going to the party at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. on March 13.

Lawyers Kirk Osborn and Ernest Conner contend in the motion that police Investigator Benjamin Himan and the Police Department illegally and deliberately withheld those and other details that were damaging to their investigation.

For example, they say, Himan knew but did not mention in a probable-cause affidavit that two examining physicians said the dancer complained only of vaginal rape, even though some charges in the case are linked to allegations of oral and anal penetration.

Himan also neglected to note that the accuser told one doctor she was not hit and did not complain of any pain, or that she told the sexual assault nurse examiner she was not choked, according to the documents. That conflicts with statements from police that the woman was kicked, strangled and beaten while being sexually assaulted.

Police officials wouldn't respond Thursday to questions about the documents. "The Durham Police Department is not commenting on any specifics of the Duke lacrosse case," said police spokeswoman Kammie Michael.

The defense lawyers say the omitted information is critical to the case. Had it been included, they contend, police may not have gotten permission to perform a photo lineup that led to charges against three team members. As a result, the lineup and any identifications obtained from it should be thrown out, Osborn and Conner argued.

The paperwork filed Thursday includes lengthy, handwritten statements from the second dancer and from the alleged victim's "driver," along with insights into the accuser's medical condition on the night in question. Among numerous revelations, the documents say the alleged victim performed with a vibrator for other spectators before going to the North Buchanan Boulevard house late on March 13.

Defense lawyers said the vibrator, rather than a rape, might have caused "signs or symptoms of vaginal penetration."

In addition, the dancer told her driver she was "involved in some sexual manner with at least four different men" between March 10 and 12, and she admitted to a physician the next day that "she was drunk and had had a lot of alcohol that night," according to the documents.

The accuser's medical records were among nearly 1,300 pages of documentation defense lawyers got last month from District Attorney Mike Nifong.

In other words the prosecutor has had this information all along and still chose to bring charges against these young men. Every time we hear more about this story it seems that the District Attorney has no case and that he and the usual assortment of race hustlers are just using these guys as pawns in a powerplay to advance his political ambitions and their standing in the black community. The accused are rich, white males and the alleged victim was a poor, black female, and that happy juxtaposition gives the DA a golden opportunity to pick up some votes among the leftists on Duke's campus and among resentful blacks in Durham. All he has to do to secure those votes is publically crucify these young men and destroy their lives. For people with political ambitions that's not much to ask.

It really is hard to say who the biggest sleazes are in this sordid tale: the woman, who is obviously a moral and psychological basket case; the athletes, who sound themselves like moral and emotional midgets; the police, who seem to have compromised and corrupted their ethical and professional responsibilities; or District Attorney Nifong, who gets our vote for "biggest slug" in the case since he is willing to destroy lives and imprison people when there is no evidence that they did anything illegal, just so he can elevate his standing among a political constituency.

Unless Nifong has some secret blockbuster videotape of the alleged assault occuring, he deserves to be politically ruined and sued for defamation. Even if he has such a tape he deserves the same fate since it's incumbent upon him to disclose to the defense all the evidence he has against the athletes and he hasn't.

Be Careful What Your Kids Watch

The Motion Picture Association of America uses its rating system to warn parents that some of the content in a given movie may be sleazy, violent, vulgar, pornographic, or worse ....Christian:

The Christian moviemakers behind a low-budget film called "Facing the Giants" were stunned when the MPAA pinned a PG rating on their gentle movie about a burned-out, depressed football coach whose life, on and off the field, takes a miraculous turn for the better. "What the MPAA said is that the movie contained strong 'thematic elements' that might disturb some parents," said Kris Fuhr, vice president for marketing at Provident Films... Provident plans to open the film next fall in 380 theaters nationwide...

Which "thematic elements" earned this squeaky-clean movie its PG?

"Facing the Giants" is too evangelistic.

The MPAA, noted Fuhr, tends to offer cryptic explanations for its ratings. In this case, she was told that it "decided that the movie was heavily laden with messages from one religion and that this might offend people from other religions.

"It is kind of interesting that faith has joined that list of deadly sins that the MPAA board wants to warn parents to worry about."

Overt Christian messages are woven throughout "Facing the Giants," which isn't surprising since the film was co-written and co-produced by brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who are the "associate pastors of media" at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga.

"Facing the Giants" cost $100,000 and resembles a fusion of the Book of Job and a homemade "Hoosiers," or perhaps a small- school "Friday Night Lights" blended with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association movies that used to appear in some mainstream theaters. Sherwood Pictures used local volunteers as actors and extras, backed by a small crew of tech professionals.

The movie includes waves of answered prayers, a medical miracle, a mysterious silver-haired mystic who delivers a message from God and a bench-warmer who kicks a 51-yard field goal to win the big game when his handicapped father pulls himself out of a wheelchair and stands under the goal post to inspire his son's faith. There's a prayer-driven gust of wind in there, too.

But the scene that caught the MPAA's attention may have been the chat between football coach Grant Taylor _ played by Alex Kendrick _ and a rich brat named Matt Prader. The coach says that he needs to stop bad-mouthing his bossy father and get right with God.

The boy replies: "You really believe in all that honoring God and following Jesus stuff? Well, I ain't trying to be disrespectful, but not everybody believes in that."

The coach replies: "Matt, nobody's forcing anything on you. Following Jesus Christ is the decision that you're going to have to make for yourself. You may not want to accept it, because it'll change your life. You'll never be the same."

That kind of talk may be too blunt for some moviegoers, said Kendrick, but that's the way real people actually talk in Christian high schools in Georgia. Sherwood Baptist isn't going to apologize for making the kinds of movies that it wants to make.

"Look, I have those kinds of conversations about faith all the time and I've seen young people make decisions that change their lives," he said. "The reason we're making movies in the first place is that we hope they inspire people to think twice about their relationships with God.

"So we're going to tell the stories that we believe God wants us to tell. We have nothing to hide."

We don't think the MPAA has gone far enough, actually. We've always thought that movies have become too explicit for kids, and now something like this comes along to confirm our fears. What if impressionable young people watch this and actually get the idea that God can change their lives? What if a movie like this motivates some kid to join a church or throw away his Marilyn Manson albums? Look, sex and violence are inappropriate for little children, maybe, but at least they're not religion. We say it's time the film industry cleaned up its act. We think that if this movie encourages wholesome living and following Christ then it should be given an R-rating so that parents will know how dangerous it really is.

Guilty Unless Proven Innocent

Michael Rubin at NRO paints a very unflattering picture of Duke president Richard Brodhead. It seems he's prone to rushing to judgment and abetting the destruction of people's reputations, having done both while serving as dean of Yale College. Here's the salient part of Rubin's indictment:

On December 4, 1998, senior Suzanne Jovin was found stabbed to death and left at an intersection in a neighborhood adjacent to the Yale campus which housed many Yale professors and graduate students.

When Jovin was murdered, justice took a backseat to damage control. Within days New Haven police and Yale officials publicly fingered political scientist James Van de Velde, Jovin's senior essay adviser. He was a star lecturer and had been a residential college dean. He was also a former White House appointee under George H. W. Bush and a member of the U.S. Naval Intelligence Reserves. Most Yale professors lean to the left of the student body; few in the political - science and international-relations departments have real - world experience. Van de Velde was the subject of personal jealousy and political animosity. Many faculty members - including Brodhead - looked askance at his desire to emphasize practical policymaking over theory. Some questioned, for example, his willingness to help Jovin write - in 1998 - about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden to the U.S. to be unscholarly. From an academic point-of-view, Van de Velde was a black sheep.

Yale administrators did not care that there was neither evidence nor motive linking Van de Velde to Jovin. Her body had been found a half-mile from his house. Just as at Duke, Brodhead spoke eloquently about the principles of due process, but moved to subvert it. Citing the New Haven Police Department's naming of Van de Velde among "a pool of suspects," Brodhead cancelled Van de Velde's spring-term lecture, explaining that "the cancellation of the course doesn't follow from a judgment or a prejudgment of his hypothetical involvement in the Jovin case." As at Duke, Brodhead insisted that due process would prevail. Despite Van de Velde's stellar student reviews and distinguished record, Brodhead then let his contract lapse. Van de Velde left New Haven, his career in shambles.

Brodhead's willingness to offer up a sacrificial lamb undercut justice in other ways. Three days after the murder, New Haven police spoke to Van de Velde, but declined his offers to let them search his home, take a DNA sample, or take a polygraph exam (they did dust his car for fingerprints; their findings provided no link).

They did find Jovin's fingerprints on a plastic soda bottle found at the crime scene. The soda bottle also had someone else's fingerprints-not Van de Velde's. But, having a suspect, why process evidence? The Fresca bottle was crucial. She did not have the bottle when last seen alive on the main campus by a fellow student. That was a half hour before she was found dying almost two miles away. That particular brand of soda was sold in only one store on campus. By the time the police visited it-months later-that store's surveillance tape had been erased. Nevertheless, her likely presence there turned the half-hour timeline upside-down, and raised the probability that her attacker(s) had forced her into a vehicle, attacked her, and then dumped her - not the type of news Yale parents want to hear. Jovin may also have fought off her attacker.

Subsequent tests of material taken from beneath her fingernails revealed DNA that did not match Van de Velde's, that of her boyfriend, any other friend or acquaintance, or any emergency worker who tried to save her. Neither Yale nor the New Haven police have explained why it took two years to test the scrapings. Nor have they explained why they ignored eyewitness accounts of a tan or brown van seen parked at the crime scene at the time of the crime. Van de Velde drove a red Jeep Wrangler.

Brodhead has never apologized. In March 2000, a Yale spokesman dismissed press inquiries saying that more attention to the case "can only hurt Yale" (he would later deny he said it). Public relations trumps justice. Today, Jovin's murder remains unsolved.

Perhaps part of the qualification for being a university administrator is that you have to lack a conscience. At least one might infer that from the actions of Richard Brodhead, both at Yale and now at Duke.

Her Abortion is Bush's Fault

The existentialists would call this Bad Faith. The writer, one Dana L., blames George Bush because she just had to abort an unwanted pregnancy, don't you see, and the reason she had to abort was that, because of George Bush, there is no morning after pill available to her, or something like that:

The conservative politics of the Bush administration forced me to have an abortion I didn't want. Well, not literally, but let me explain. I am a 42-year-old happily married mother of two elementary-schoolers. My husband and I both work, and like many couples, we're starved for time together. One Thursday evening this past March, we managed to snag some rare couple time and, in a sudden rush of passion, I failed to insert my diaphragm.

Concerned that she might conceive, which she did, she tried to get hold of Plan B:

...the emergency contraceptive pill that can prevent a pregnancy -- but only if taken within 72 hours of intercourse. As we're both in our forties, my husband and I had considered our family complete, and we weren't planning to have another child, which is why, as a rule, we use contraception. I wanted to make sure that our momentary lapse didn't result in a pregnancy.

But she couldn't get it because the FDA, for unspecified but no doubt insidious religious reasons, had not yet approved it for over-the-counter sales.

Meanwhile, I hadn't even been able to get Plan B with a prescription that Friday, because in Virginia, health-care practitioners apparently are allowed to refuse to prescribe any drug that goes against their beliefs. Although I had heard of pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control on religious grounds, I was dumbfounded to find that doctors could do the same thing.

Moreover, they aren't even required to tell the patient why they won't provide the drug. Nor do they have to provide a list of alternative sources. I had asked the ob-gyn's receptionist if politics was the reason the doctor wouldn't prescribe Plan B for me. She refused to answer or offer any reason, no matter how much I pressed her. By the time I got on the phone with my internist's office and found that he would not fill a Plan B prescription either, I figured it was a waste of time to fight with the office staff. To this day, I don't know why my doctors wouldn't prescribe Plan B -- whether it was because of moral opposition to contraception or out of fear of political protesters or just because they preferred not to go there.

In any event, they were also partly responsible for why I was stuck that Friday, and why I was ultimately forced to confront the decision to terminate my third pregnancy.

Imagine the injustice of it all. A doctor is allowed to follow his conscience and not prescribe certain drugs which he/she feels to be immoral. This religious freedom business is just going too far. Now this woman, who consented to unprotected sex, is forced, forced to have an abortion, and it's not her fault. It brings us to the brink of tears to read this. But her tale grows even more tragic:

After making the decision with my husband, I was plunged into an even murkier world -- that of finding an abortion provider. If information on Plan B was hard to come by, and practitioners were evasive on emergency contraception, trying to get information on how to abort a pregnancy in 2006 is an even more Byzantine experience.

On the Internet, most of what I found was political in nature or otherwise unhelpful: pictures of what your baby looks like in the womb from week one, and so on.

Calling doctors, I felt like a pariah when I asked whether they provided termination services. Finally, I decided to check the Planned Parenthood Web site to see whether its clinics performed abortions. They did, but I learned that if I had the abortion in Virginia, the procedure would take two days because of a mandatory 24-hour waiting period, which requires that you go in first for a day of counseling and then wait a day to think things over before returning to have the abortion. Because of work and the children, I couldn't afford two days off, so I opted to have the procedure done on a Saturday in downtown D.C. while my husband took the kids to the Smithsonian.

The hidden world of abortion services soon became even more subterranean. I called Planned Parenthood two days in advance to confirm the appointment. The receptionist politely informed me that the organization never confirms appointments, for "security reasons," and that I would have to just show up.

I arrived shortly before 10 a.m. in a bleak downpour, trusting that someone had recorded my appointment. I shuffled to the front door through a phalanx of umbrellaed protesters, who chanted loudly about Jesus and chided me not to go into that house of abortion.

All the while, I was thinking that if religion hadn't been allowed to seep into American politics the way it has, I wouldn't even be there. This all could have been stopped way before this baby was conceived if they had just let me have that damn pill.

Or if you had used your damned diaphragm, Dana. It's worth noting the tacit assumption that is being made here: The only people who care about innocent life, evidently, are religious people. All that the non-religious care about, we may suppose, is their own convenience.

After passing through the metal detector inside the building, I entered the Planned Parenthood waiting room; it was like the waiting room for a budget airline -- crammed full of people, of all races, and getting busier by the moment. I was by far the oldest person there (other than one girl's mom). The wait seemed endless. No one looked happy. We were told that the lone doctor was stuck in Cherry Blossom Parade traffic.

He finally arrived, an hour and a half late. The procedure itself took about five minutes. I finally walked out of the building at 4:30, 6 1/2 hours after I had arrived.

It was a decision I am sorry I had to make. It was awful, painful, sickening. But I feel that this administration gave me practically no choice but to have an unwanted abortion because the way it has politicized religion made it well-nigh impossible for me to get emergency contraception that would have prevented the pregnancy in the first place.

Or, let's see, maybe she could have had the child, but that option probably never occured to Ms L. She prefers to blame her plight on everyone except the one who is really responsible for it.

This is not about whether abortion should be legal or illegal. It's about how this self-centered woman demands not only a right to abortion, but demands that everyone else do all they can to facilitate it, to make it as easy as possible for her, and throw their principles out the window in order to accommodate her and compensate for her own recklessness.

Her essay is a monumental piece of self-indulgent narcissism.

No Big Deal

A number of commentators seeking to minimize the accomplishment of killing Abu Zarqawi and to emphasize AZ's minor status as a terrorist leader point to the fact that he seems to have been fingered by some of his al Qaeda colleagues. I'm skeptical. Somebody may have spilled inadvertant information about him under interrogation, but whether he was deliberately "ratted out" is purely speculative.

A more plausible explanation, I think, is that the military has intentionally planted an ambiguous story that allows for the inference that AZ may have been betrayed by al Qaeda insiders. They did this, if they did, in order to create confusion and distrust within the organization on the assumption that if nobody trusts anybody else, al Qaeda will quickly lose its ability to function. Perhaps our military has deliberately planted this little disinformation meme in the media consciousness in hopes it will replicate across the globe and cause a little consternation and paranoia among the al Qaeda cadres.

Another related trope that's been making the rounds is that since AZ wasn't really all that important there's no reason to be particularly relieved that he's gone. Somebody else, we're being told, will soon take his place and the killing will continue.

I'm reminded of a local story from last week when a convicted violent sex offender escaped the custody of a constable and was roaming the county at large for a day or so. A lot of people were nervous and felt relieved when the man was reapprehended. Imagine someone saying when the criminal was caught that people shouldn't feel relief since somebody else will soon take his place and be preying on the weak and innocent again. His words, though perhaps true, would still be at best thought to be a little strange. Just because we'll always have killers among us is no reason not to be relieved when one of them is removed.

And then there's this excerpt from a Washington Times story which makes Rep. Pete Stark (D) look like a real dunce:

Some Democrats, breaking ranks from their leadership, today said the death of terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi in Iraq was a stunt to divert attention from an unpopular and hopeless war.

"This is just to cover Bush's [rear] so he doesn't have to answer" for Iraqi civilians being killed by the U.S. military and his own sagging poll numbers, said Rep. Pete Stark, California Democrat. "Iraq is still a mess -- get out."

Stark apparently thinks Bush possesses the God-like power to orchestrate Zarqawi's demise at a time and place of his choosing, and that he's been waiting to do it at a time when it would afford him maximum political benefit.

This is a standard example of Bush Derangement Syndrome. It has the same psychotic effect on left-wingers as LSD - especially when, as it seems in Stark's case, the two are taken together.

At the Cuckoo's Nest

Al Zarqawi's meeting with some aides and associates was peremptorily adjourned this morning around 3:00 a.m. our time by a couple of 500 pound munitions lobbed into the meeting room by the U.S. Air Force. The whole world should be rejoicing and in Iraq they are (see photos here), but not everyone in the U.S. is happy.

A lot of the glum lefties at Democratic Underground just can't bring themselves to rejoice that a major terrorist is gone if it means that George Bush gets the credit.

Here are a few sample comments:

Very curious. I wonder how this plays into neocon plans to attack Iran?

Everything he's [Bush] done over the past 6 years can now be forgiven and forgotten. He will go down in History as the man who rid the world of the elusive yet lethal Al Zarqawi. All the freedom hating Americans on DU need to now fall over each other trying to praise Mr. Bush like the Dems did when Saddam was captured. Of course in the process we'll dutifully ignore the fact that Al Zarqawi and King George have much in common. I suspect they both loathe gays and wide ranging personal liberties. Both have an infatuation with violence and torture and both believe that they are in acting in accordance with God's will. Oh great day!!

Convenient too that this would happen now....guess we should just all forget about that Haditha mess, the fact that we are approaching 2,500 dead and the fact that our economy is in big trouble.

Sorry. Don't buy it.

I find it disturbing that people STILL fall for this crap.

This won't help Bush as much as Rove would like. It is just a desperate stunt in an attempt to prop up Bush's poll numbers and boost the popularity his failed war by feigning the killing of one of the psyop program's main character. But by next week they'll have thought up another one to take his place. This is a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. And what better way to shut down the story of Bush's bisexuality that were picking up a "head" of steam?

If anything, this news will simply fan the flames of the hell that is Iraq today.

And on it goes at the cuckoo's nest. Denial and paranoia. Two symptoms of mental illness. It's not that these people are just skeptical and want to wait until more confirmation comes in that we really got Zarqawi. Rather it is that a) they don't believe there is a Zarqawi, that he is an invention of the military, and b) even if there is a Zarqawi they don't believe that the military really got him because they don't believe the miltary can do anything right, and c) if the military did get him it won't make any difference in Iraq anyway.

In other words, for the left, nothing that is good for America and the Iraqi people is good news for them.

Canadian Blindness

This article by Patrick Poole at FrontPage Mag is fascinating reading:

One of the faces in the crowd (or more accurately, one of the pair of eyes seen through the slits in the burqa) was none other than Zaynab Khadr.

She was amongst the crowd of relatives gathered at the Toronto-area courthouse this past Saturday waiting for the appearances of 17 Canadian Muslims busted last Friday in Toronto. The accused were nabbed in a terrorist sting that authorities say prevented them from carrying out a plot to blow up various sites around Toronto with three tons of ammonium nitrate.

The name Zaynab Khadr may not be familiar to many Americans, but it is to terrorism analysts. Ms. Khadr, who appeared Saturday at the courthouse to advise and support the families of the accused along with well-known jihadist preacher Aly Hindy, is a member of what Daniel Pipes has called "Canada's First Family of Terrorism."

Her father, Ahmed Sa'id Khadr, was one of Osama bin Laden's closest lieutenants and a top al-Qaeda financier who received $325,000 from the Canadian government from 1988-1997 for his "charitable work" in Afghanistan. He was also involved in the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan, was arrested by Pakistani authorities, and released only through the intervention of then-Canadian Prime Minister Jean-Paul Chr�tien. Immediately after his release, he enrolled several of his sons in al-Qaeda operated terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. He was killed in a gun battle with Pakistani troops in 2003 near the Afghan border, during which his son (Zaynab's brother), Abdul, was also shot and paralyzed. Abdul and his mother live in Toronto.

But Zaynab shouldn't be judged for the sins of her family; she has her own activities to answer for. When she returned to Canada last year, Royal Canadian Mounted Police anti-terrorist officers seized her laptop, cell phone, and other documents which proved to be a rich treasure-trove of al-Qaeda intelligence. In response, she vehemently denied that the family had any ties to al-Qaeda and said that the information found in her possession wasn't hers.

At 26, Zaynab Khadr is a twice-divorced single mother. One former suitor was none other than a Sudanese terrorist who purchased one of the trucks used in the 1995 Egyptian embassy bombing in Pakistan. She has been accused by Canadian intelligence authorities of formerly helping her father funnel money for various al-Qaeda and for helping her brother, Abdullah, run an al-Qaeda training camp.

Osama bin Laden was also amongst the guests at her 1999 wedding, and her family lived in bin Laden's compound in Afghanistan. But, of course, her family doesn't have any al-Qaeda ties, Khadr insists.

When she isn't helping the families of terrorism suspects, Khadr spends her time pressuring the Canadian government to obtain the release of her youngest brother, Omar, who currently resides at Guanatanamo Bay. At 17-years-old, he is the youngest person in U.S. custody related to terrorist activities. When he was 15, he was the sole survivor of a battle between non-Afghan al-Qaeda fighters and the 19th U.S. Special Forces Group at Ayub Kheyl, Afghanistan. After the battle ended, Sergeant First Class Christopher J. Speer, a Special Forces medic, was attending to the wounded when Omar jumped up from between two mud-brick buildings, threw a grenade at Sgt. Speer, killing him. Omar was shot twice (non-fatally), and was found surrounded by a large cache of grenades, ammunition, and automatic weapons.

After Omar's capture, the National Post (one of Canada's largest circulation papers), wrote a glowing portrait of Omar, including quotes from his doting sister Zaynab, entitled "The Good Son."

The long ordeal of Canada's accommodation of the Khadr family perfectly illustrates the utter inability or unwillingness for our northern neighbors to deal with their internal terrorist threat. As recent days have shown, many Canadians are content to let their potentially fatal immigration policies and lunatic multiculturalism slowly asphyxiate their society. The suicidal intentions of our Canuck friends and neighbors would be all well and fine if it didn't also threaten to have homicidal consequences for America, as well.

It might be worth mentioning that brother Omar is one of the "children" incarcerated at Guantanamo that the left is demanding be released.

Finally!

The Sheik of Slaughters is now cavorting with his seventy two virgins:

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida leader in Iraq who waged a bloody campaign of suicide bombings and beheadings of hostages, has been killed in a precision airstrike, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Thursday. It was a long-sought victory in the war in Iraq.

Al-Zarqawi and seven aides, including spiritual adviser Sheik Abdul Rahman, were killed Wednesday evening in a remote area 30 miles northeast of Baghdad in the volatile province of Diyala, just east of the provincial capital of Baqouba, officials said.

"Al-Zarqawi was eliminated," Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said.

At the White House, President Bush hailed the killing as "a severe blow to al-Qaida and it is a significant victory in the war on terror."

Our only regret is that he probably never knew what hit him unlike Nicholas Berg whose head Zarqawi slowly cut off from his neck. An instant death is better than he deserved.

Read the details here.

Stepping Over the Line

I often enjoy Ann Coulter's refusal to bow to the liberal priesthood and genuflect to their pieties, but I cannot defend some of her statements in her new book Godless. In the book she allegedly says about some of the widows of 9/11 victims, in the words of Claudia Parsons at MyWay News, that they are:

...millionaire "witches" reveling in their status as celebrities.

"I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much," Coulter writes in her book "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," published on Tuesday, referring to four women who headed a campaign that resulted in the creation of the September 11 Commission that investigated the hijacked plane attacks.

Coulter wrote that the women were millionaires as a result of compensation settlements and were "reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis."

If all this is true Ann has stepped over the line. I admire her desire to be outrageous and provocative. I admire her willingness to shatter politically-correct protocols and sensibilities, but she has, in this instance, made herself look cold and churlish. It is one thing to criticize these women for the political positions they have taken, but to call them witches because their politics are at variance with one's own and to assert that they are enjoying their husbands' deaths is simply wrong. Nor is Coulter displaying good sense or taste in saying that they are revelling in their celebrity status unless she has some proof that this is so.

In any event, the opinions the women express are fair game, but accusing them of callously exploiting their families' tragedy for personal gain requires that some evidence be adduced. As far as I can tell from the MyWay article, though, Coulter simply makes the assertion and leaves it hang unsupported in mid-air.

This is despicable when the left does it. It is no less so when those one usually agrees with do it. If this is indeed what she does in the book [and I confess to not having read it] she should either produce the evidence or apologize.

Partly Right

Charles Krauthammer, on a recent broadcast of Brit Hume's Roundtable, talking about gay marriage and the attempt to amend the Constitution to prevent it:

Well, obviously in part it's politics, but changing the definition of the oldest social institution in the human race, one that has been a man and a woman in every society for a long, long time, is a big deal. And if it's happening in a country, it's a legitimate issue and I think there is a legitimate issue here in that the president is right that judges have abrogated this decision which ought to be left to people either acting in referendum or in -- through their representatives. And that -- there are states, like Massachusetts in which it's been imposed and states like Georgia and Nebraska, where there has been a constitutional amendment where the people have spoken in large numbers and been stopped, stymied, by a judge.

But I think the answer is not a constitutional amendment, which would be in the name of the popular sovereignty, but ironically, it takes it away, because if you ever had a state in which a majority wanted to institute gay marriage, it would not be allowed to under this constitution. So it's a little bit contradictory, to act in the name of popular sovereignty and to pass a law which would extinguish.

The way you do it is change the ethos of the judiciary so that if you get the Defense of Marriage Act, which he spoke about earlier, at the Supreme Court, it's upheld and that it keeps it in one state and doesn't spread it all over the country. And having a president who nominates a guy like Sam Alito is a way in which we change that culture rather than changing the constitution.

Krauthammer is partly right. Ideally, the question of gay marriage, just like questions of abortion and assisted suicide, should be resolved in state legislatures. Unfortunately, liberals will not accept the verdict of the democratic process and are using compliant judges to, in effect, override the will of the people. There is no guarantee that the "ethos of the judiciary" would ever change, or ever change permanently. A constitutional amendment is a terrible resort, but it is the only way the people have of protecting themselves from activist judges who use their power to impose their will on everyone else.

If we were guaranteed that the Supreme Court picks for the next fifty years would be of the caliber of the last couple Krauthammer's argument would have more purchase. But given that the next several justices could be appointed by a President Hillary or Gore or Kerry, the argument that we should entrust the preservation of democracy to the Supreme Court loses all its appeal.

Re: Overdoing the Outrage

Our friend Byron is critical of my use of the word "silly" in a post titled Overdoing the Outrage in which I refer to Andrew Sullivan's concerns about disregarding part 1c of Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on torture as "silly hyperventilating". Byron, whose admonishments I value and whose opinions I deeply respect, urges me to consider that I'm demeaning people who have a noble moral objection to the use of torture when I call their concerns silly. By's criticism can be read on our Feedback page, and I would like to say a few things about it here.

What I labelled silly (a word I prefer because it is gentler than stupid) was this passage from Sullivan's blog:

The United States is a rogue nation that practices torture and detainee abuse and does not follow the most basic principles of the Geneva Conventions. It is in violation of human rights agreements and the U.N. Convention against torture. It is legitimizing torture by every disgusting regime on the planet. This is a policy mandated by the president and his closest advisers. This is the signal being sent from the commander-in-chief to his troops: your enemy can be treated beyond the boundaries of what the U.S. has always abided by. When you next read of an atrocity of war-crime or victim of torture by the U.S., just keep in mind who made this possible.

Sullivan makes these extremely derogatory claims about the U.S. because the administration has decided that any provision which may prevent our interrogators from yelling at, insulting, questioning the courage of, placing in solitary confinement, or even shackling or incarcerating terror suspects or other enemy combatants is an absurd restriction on our interrogators. I agree with that, and I think that it is literally silly, as in unserious or lacking in sense, for Andrew Sullivan to assert that we are a rogue nation because we think it appropriate to treat these detainees as something less than visiting dignitaries. To claim that our reluctance to accept the unreasonable constraints of 1c "legitimizes torture by every disgusting regime on the planet" is arrant nonsense as is almost everything else he says in the paragraph above.

Those who object to the use of genuine torture are certainly not silly people. Indeed, I am one of them, although for reasons I've discussed on this blog I think we must stop short of absolutizing our objection. But those who would call it torture if an interrogator says mean things to a terrorist, certainly are silly, and those who would say what Sullivan says because we reserve the right to offend the sensibilities of those who try to kill us truly are unserious. Go to Overdoing the Outrage to read the full discussion on Sullivan.

Rumination on Race

This is a column I wrote for the local paper awhile back that I thought might be worth posting here on Viewpoint:

Periodically matters of race intrude themselves into our public discussions and often the conversation turns toward what some perceive to be a widening rift between races in this country and is accompanied by genuine agonizing over what can be done about it. Perhaps I'm naive, but I can't help wondering how much of the apparent gulf between Americans is a function of race and how much of it is actually a function of class. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but I suspect that for many people of all colors, the great social fault line in our nation runs between classes; classes as defined not by one's income, but as defined by the moral principles which inform and govern an individual's life and conduct. And surely Americans of every hue populate both sides of this divide.

Unfortunately, use of the word class distresses some who complain that it is an insidious code word for race, and that when people try to justify distinctions based on class they're really trying to rationalize old-fashioned racial bias. This criticism is valid, however, only in the unlikely event that all members of a given race hold identical moral convictions so that to mention their race is to identify their morals. Failing that, the objection reduces to the rather disingenuous ploy of defining another's words to mean whatever one wants them to mean.

Other critics will point out that in our politically correct post-modern world "everyone knows" that no individual's values are any better than anyone else's and to think otherwise is to be guilty of elitism; to which the appropriate response is: So what. In The Moviegoer, novelist Walker Percy puts it somewhat differently if no less bluntly when he has a Louisiana matriarch named Aunt Edna address herself to this very issue. She says:

"I'll make a little confession. I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people in my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a group and blackmail the government. We do not prize mediocrity for mediocrity's sake....Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal....They say out there that we think we're better. You're damn right we're better and don't think they don't know it."

This proud woman wasn't about to apologize for the obvious political incorrectness of her "elitist" sentiments. Neither should anyone else. Elitism based upon moral principle, so far from being some awful sin, is in fact a virtue, a salutary antidote to the epidemic of moral relativism currently infecting our culture. This may scandalize those who feel that nobody should be so chauvinistic as to think his principles to be actually better than the next person's, but the irony needs to be noted that those who feel this way evidently believe their own moral egalitarianism to be preferable to other people's moral elitism.

Aside from those enumerated by Aunt Edna, though, what exactly are the virtues which distinguish her "better" class of people? Without attempting an exhaustive list, it's probably correct to say for starters that, no matter what their race, men and women of this class take a great deal of pride in their work, their property, and their character. They assume responsiblity for their actions. They strive to be cordial, courteous, and considerate of others. They're dependable, trustworthy, and temperate, willing to defer short-term gratification for long-term benefit. They're frugal, faithful to their spouses, and committed to the well-being of their families. They are mindful of the fact that children do not raise themselves very well and that properly ushering a child into adulthood requires an enormous investment of time, energy, and self-sacrifice. They enjoy and appreciate excellence, especially in the arts and other forms of entertainment. They esteem education, especially for their children, and possess at least a modest appreciation for the life of the mind.

Why should anyone shrink from affirming the pre-eminence of these qualities and from regarding those who share them to be of superior moral timber to those who don't? And why should the social levellers among us be allowed to succeed in making people feel there is something wrong with choosing to avoid the society of those whose lives and habits are the very antithesis of these values?

It must be emphasized that this is not a matter of race or economics. People of all colors and incomes cherish these virtues and feel uncomfortable around those who don't. Indeed, it is perhaps true to say that many people who share them feel more comfortable in each other's company, regardless of their ethnicity, than they do in the company of members of their own race who don't share them. The extraordinary transracial enthusiasm for Condaleeza Rice, and Colin Powell before her, is, at least in part, an instance of this.

When people are made to feel guilty, however, for believing their convictions to be more noble than their contraries, or when substantial numbers are persuaded that the precepts one lives by are merely arbitrary preferences, none of which is any better than any other, then, as with money, the worse will inevitably drive out the better. The lowest moral classes will eventually succeed in establishing the behavioral norms of the culture, and the principles, or lack of them, which govern their own lives and which are in large measure responsible for their being lower class in the first place, will eventually percolate upward, like some toxic gas, through the rest of society. The denouement will be a social unravelling or disintegration that will substantially diminish the quality of life of everyone.

Three cheers, therefore, for Aunt Edna.

Overdoing the Outrage

Andrew Sullivan is beside himself:

The United States is a rogue nation that practices torture and detainee abuse and does not follow the most basic principles of the Geneva Conventions. It is inviolation of human rights agreements and the U.N. Convention against torture. It is legitimizing torture by every disgusting regime on the planet. This is a policy mandated by the president and his closest advisers. This is the signal being sent from the commander-in-chief to his troops: your enemy can be treated beyond the boundaries of what the U.S. has always abided by. When you next read of an atrocity of war-crime or victim of torture by the U.S., just keep in mind who made this possible.

What has precipitated this outpouring of outrage? The administration has come to the common sense conclusion that part 1c of article 3 of the Geneva Conventions was too vague and restrictive. Specifically, it forbids "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."

The administration has wisely decided to omit this provision from the military field manual because it leaves "humiliating and degrading treatment" undefined. It in effect prohibits everything from yelling at a detainee to questioning his courage to calling him names.

The L.A. Times article which triggered Sullivan's spasm of indignation says this:

Another defense official said that Article 3 prohibitions against "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" could be interpreted as banning well-honed interrogation techniques.

Many intelligence soldiers consider questioning the manhood of male prisoners to be an effective and humane technique. Suggesting to a suspected insurgent that he is "not man enough" to have set an improvised explosive device sometimes elicits a full description of how they emplaced the bomb, soldiers say.

The Pentagon worries that if Article 3 were incorporated in the directive, detainees could use it to argue in U.S. courts that such techniques violate their personal dignity.

"Who is to say what is humiliating for Sheikh Abdullah or Sheikh Muhammad?" the second official asked. "If you punch the buttons of a Muslim male, are you at odds with the Geneva Convention?"

Military officials also worry that following Article 3 could force them to end the practice of segregating prisoners. The military says that there is nothing inhumane about putting detainees in solitary confinement, and that it allows inmates to be questioned without coordinating their stories with others.

Human rights groups have their doubts, saying that isolating people for months at a time leads to mental breakdowns.

"Sometimes these things sound benign, but there is a reason they have been prohibited," said Jumana Musa, an advocacy director for Amnesty International. "When you talk about putting people in isolation for eight months, 14 months, it leads to mental degradation."

[Professor]Jinks, of the University of Texas, contends that Article 3 does not prohibit some of the things the military says it wants to do. "If the practice is humane, there is nothing to worry about," he said.

But how does Professor Jinks define humane? If isolating prisoners is inhumane, what isn't? Serving them institutional food? Denying them access to al-Jazeera? Certainly it could be argued that imprisoning a detainee in the first place is degrading and inhumane and there are no doubt a legion of lawyers out there waiting for the opportunity to make that argument in court.

The administration did the right thing to reject this provision, and Andrew Sullivan's reaction is just silly hyperventilating.

The Long View

Great stuff from Michael Barone:

Two weeks ago, I pointed out that we live in something close to the best of times, with record worldwide economic growth and at a low point in armed conflict in the world. Yet Americans are in a sour mood, a mood that may be explained by the lack of a sense of history. The military struggle in Iraq (nearly 2,500 military deaths) is spoken of in as dire terms as Vietnam (58,219), Korea (54,246) or World War II (405,399). We bemoan the cruel injustice of $3 a gallon for gas in a country where three-quarters of people classified as poor have air conditioning and microwave ovens. We complain about a tide of immigration that is, per U.S. resident, running at one-third the rate of 99 years ago.

George W. Bush has a better sense of history. Speaking last week at the commencement at West Point -- above the Hudson River, where revolutionary Americans threw a chain across the water to block British ships -- Bush noted that he was speaking to the first class to enter the U.S. Military Academy after the Sept. 11 attacks. And he put the challenge these cadets willingly undertook in perspective by looking back at the challenges America faced at the start of the Cold War 60 years ago.

"In the early years of that struggle," Bush noted, "freedom's victory was not obvious or assured." In 1946, Harry Truman accompanied Winston Churchill as he delivered his Iron Curtain speech; in 1947, communists threatened Greece and Turkey; in 1948, Czechoslovakia fell, France and Italy seemed headed the same way, and Berlin was blockaded by the Soviets, who exploded a nuclear weapon the next year; in 1950, North Korea attacked South Korea. "All of this took place in just the first five years following World War II," Bush noted. "Fortunately, we had a president named Harry Truman, who recognized the threat, took bold action to confront it and laid the foundation for freedom's victory in the Cold War."

Bold action: the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in 1947, the Berlin airlift in 1948, the NATO Treaty in 1949, the Korean War in 1950. None of these was uncontroversial, and none was perfectly executed. And this was only the beginning. It took 40 years -- many of them filled with angry controversy -- to win the Cold War.

The struggles against Soviet communism and Islamofascist terrorists are of course not identical. But there are similarities.

"Like the Cold War, we are fighting the followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has territorial ambitions and pursues totalitarian aims," Bush said. "And like the Cold War, they're seeking weapons of mass murder that would allow them to deliver catastrophic destruction to our country."

The New Republic's Peter Beinart argues that Bush, unlike Truman, has shown no respect for international institutions. But the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan were unilateral American initiatives, and Truman used the United Nations to respond in Korea only because the Soviets were then boycotting the Security Council. Otherwise, he would have gone to war, as Bill Clinton did in Kosovo, without U.N. approval. Bush did try to use the United Nations on Iraq, but was blocked by France and Russia, both stuffed with profits from the corrupt U.N. Oil for Food program.

But as Bush pointed out, we have worked with 90-plus nations and NATO in Afghanistan and with 70-plus nations on the Proliferation Security Initiative. We're working with allies to halt Iran's nuclear program.

"We can't have lasting peace unless we work actively and vigorously to bring about conditions of freedom and justice in the world," Harry Truman told the West Point class of 1952. Which is what we're trying to do today -- in Iraq and the broader Middle East, in Afghanistan, even Africa.

Reports of Bush's West Point speech noted that Truman had low job ratings -- lower than Bush's, in fact. But does that matter now? Bush, as Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has written, has changed American foreign policy more than any president since Truman, and like Truman he has acted on the long view.

"The war began on my watch," Bush told the class of 2006, "but it's going to end on your watch." Truman might have made the same point, accurately as it turned out, to the class of 1952. We're lucky we had then, and have now, a president who takes bold action and braves vitriolic criticism to defend our civilization against those who would destroy it.

One big difference between Truman's era and the present one is that people back then, having been taught self-discipline and self-denial and the benefits of deferred gratification by the severities of the depression and subsequent wars, generally accepted the long view. Today, Bush has to convince three generations of self-indulgent instant gratification-seekers weaned on television stories in which difficulties are resolved in the span of an hour or at most a viewing season, to stay the course.

The long view is not a particularly congenial concept to many Americans, but it is to our enemies for whom the grievances leading to the present conflict have their roots in the crusades which began over 900 years ago. Their patience in this struggle is not in question, but ours sure is.

Criminals and Idiots

John Kerry met recently with a number of liberal bloggers some of whom reported on the discussion:

At the urging of Pamela Leavey of The Democratic Daily blog, Sen. John Kerry sat down and charmed more than a half-dozen liberal bloggers after his speech Thursday to the Pacific Council on International Policy in Century City. Kerry asked that the conversation be off the record, but some of the invited bloggers posted his remarks anyway. Hollywood Liberal writes that Kerry "agreed completely with someone's assessment that everything that Bush does is solely for the purpose of looting the country. He basically said that Bush and his cohorts are criminals" and that "at some other point he referred to Supreme Court Justices Alito, Scalia, and Roberts as 'Idiots.'"

This is classic. John Kerry - graceless, pompous and arrogant as ever - calling Bush a criminal and three of the brightest minds in our judicial system idiots. Tell us, Senator, what was your undergraduate GPA? A 76%, you say? Wow, that's impressive. I wonder what those cretins sitting on the Supreme Court earned. Certainly they didn't score that high. I mean a 76% is a C average. That's awesome.

What, Us Baffled?

The Washington Post has an interesting article about origin of life researcher Robert Hazin. Among other things, the writer of the article says:

There is a tendency to think of science as a series of established facts and consensual theories -- "a bunch of things we know, to be memorized," in the words of Robert Hazen, the science popularizer and researcher into the origin of life.

What Hazen will tell you is that science is actually a very human enterprise. It's full of unknowns and uncertainties, of raging controversies, of passions and prejudices. Of all the great unknowns, the origin of life is particularly daunting. Direct evidence of the origin is essentially nonexistent: It happened too long ago, in too subtle a way. There's no fossil of the First Microbe. If there were, some skeptical scientist would surely raise a ruckus, saying: That's just a blob of mud.

The field has attracted people with strong personalities. They argue. They grumble. They snipe. Their debates are much more intense, and more grounded in the rules of science, than the much-hyped debate about evolution and intelligent design.

They are wrestling with basic questions: What is life, exactly? Does it always require liquid water and those long Tinkertoy carbon molecules? Does life require a cell? Did life begin with a hereditary molecule or with some kind of metabolic chemical reaction? Where did life begin on Earth? Was there a single moment that could be described as the "origin of life," or did life sort of creep into existence gradually?

All that is very much in play. In the words of George Cody, an origin-of-life researcher, "No one knows anything about the origin of life...."

Now you can see how all this might get a bit delicate given the current debate about intelligent design. Hazen knows that by exposing the backstage bickering on the origin of life, he may give ammunition to the critics of the scientific community: "Anything I say that shows any uncertainty or doubt, they will use as evidence that scientists are baffled."

No wonder. The article sure makes them sound baffled.

He believes that the universe is hard-wired for the emergence of life. "Emergence" is his buzzword, much more than "evolution." What he sees is inevitable progress from the simplest elements to more complex chemistry, then to life, then to consciousness, and finally to creatures who can comprehend the cosmos. "And if that isn't meaning and purpose, I don't know what is."

This all raises a number of questions. For one, how did the universe get "hard-wired for life"? And if it is, what is it about the universe that makes Hazen think that it is? If the universe shows evidence of being the sort of place that is finely-tuned for the emergence of life, if the laws and field strengths, etc. of physics are such that conscious life is inevitable, then what is the difference between what Hazen believes and what the intelligent design people are saying? Does Hazen believe that cosmic fine-tuning is just a coincidence? If so, then why would he think the universe has "meaning and purpose"? If he thinks that the universe is deliberately "front-loaded" to give rise to conscious life then he's deluding himself if he thinks he's somehow staking out a position contrary to intelligent design.

One of the peculiarities of the intelligent design controversy is that many of the scientists and philosophers who try to distance themselves from ID adopt views the logic of which leads them right back to it.

Thanks to Telic Thoughts for the tip.

Hillary's Not a Shoo-In

Question: When was the last time a sitting senator from the northeastern part of the country was elected president?

Answer: 1960 (John Kennedy). Before Kennedy we had northeastern presidents, but, though many have tried, only one other man has moved directly from the Senate to the White House (Warren Harding).

The point is that it is very difficult to make that move. Kennedy managed it largely because he was a physically attractive war hero from a wealthy and infuential family married to a glamorous woman. And his opponent was Richard Nixon whom he barely defeated (indeed, some question remains as to whether he actually did beat him).

So why mention all this? A lot of people are telling us that Hillary Clinton has a virtual lock on her party's nomination for president. If she runs, we're told, she'd have a very good chance of winning. Before conservatives start looking for bridges to jump off of, however, they should reflect on the history of American elections. Not only is Hillary a northeastern senator, she is not a male, she is not a war hero, she is not from a wealthy and influential family, she is not universally regarded as attractive, and her marriage to Bill Clinton may be more of a liability than an asset outside her Democratic base. In other words, many of the advantages enjoyed by the only person who has pulled off the feat she aspires to duplicate, she lacks.

It's not known yet who her Republican opponent would be, but if its a southern (or western) governor, or at least someone with charisma, a sterling war record and a glamorous wife, Hillary would, if history is a reliable guide, probably lose. For this reason there may even be a lot of opposition to her getting her party's nomination. The Democrats will not want to suffer through another lost presidential election. Their problem, though, is, if not Hillary then who?

Al Gore.

Beautiful Words

Reflect for a moment upon these beautiful words from Pope Benedict XVI:

"And only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him."

The Pope, unlike many of the academics in his flock, is not much of a Darwinian. It puzzles me that Catholic scientists, clergy and others could have such deep difficulties with the idea that God intervened in the world to bring about His creative will. After all, these people believe, or purport to believe, that God was in Christ, that Christ was born of a virgin, turned water to wine, and rose from the dead. They also believe that God performs the miracle of transubstantiation every time the eucharist is served. Yet they wax indignant over the claims of those creationists who hold that God also created life from non-life and that He created man specially and distinct from other anthropoids.

One wonders why one set of miracles is humbly accepted while the other is so vigorously resisted.

Reviving Panspermia

The idea that life began elsewhere in space and subsequently "seeded" the earth is apparently making a comeback. This idea, called panspermia, is the scientific equivalent of a Hail Mary pass in football, but the interesting thing about such theories of life's origin is the unstated reason for adducing them.

It's believed by advocates of panspermia that life must have originated elsewhere because it's just too difficult to construct a plausible materialistic scenario for the origin of life here on earth, given the terrestrial conditions that were believed to have prevailed 3 billion years ago. In other words, panspermia is the materialist's way out of a philosophicaly desperate situation. If life could not have arisen on earth without some extra-cosmic help then in order to avoid the conclusion that life's appearance is evidence for an intelligent agent involved in its origin, it is proposed that life must have originated somewhere else where conditions might have been more propitious.

If the cosmos shows no signs of life anywhere else besides earth, however, and if the genesis of life on earth remains an intractable problem, a lot of people are going to wonder if there may not be something else involved in its production besides purely physical forces and processes.

For a good read on the difficulties any theory of materialistic abiogenesis, whether terrestrial or extra-terrestrial, needs to overcome pick up Paul Davies' The Fifth Miracle.

Good, Mosque-Going Terrorists

Alvin Chand, a brother of suspect Steven Vikash Chand (one of 17 suspected terrorists arrested in Canada on Saturday), said outside the courthouse that his brother was innocent .... "He's not a terrorist, come on...," Chand said. "The people that were arrested are good people, they go to the mosque...."

Well, that pretty much settles that, I'd say.

The Book Of Job

I think fewer books in the Bible have challenged the reader more to understand the Divine message to be had than the book of Job. The Book of Job by Ethelbert W. Bullinger goes a long way to remove the mystery and confusion. It's available at Amazon.com but way too expensive as it is out of print and people that have it are sharking it for obscene prices. I picked it up for $11.00 a couple weeks ago. If anyone is interested in the book, I'd suggest waiting until another used book vendor offers it for sale at a reasonable price. I recently saw it offered here for $13.75 but don't know if it's still available.

From the book:

As the lost son confessed "I have sinned". As Joseph's brethren acknowledged "We are verily guilty". As David said "I have sinned against the Lord". As Isaiah confessed "I am undone...unclean". And as Daniel declared "my comeliness was turned into corruption". So must Job be brought to say, "I am vile. I abhor myself. I repent in dust and ashes".

This is the end of the Lord for the Lord Himself must be the teacher of this Divine lesson. Man may be used by God to bring it about but God alone can be the bringer near of His own salvation, and the bestower of his own righteousness.

All this is quite apart from mere "religion," as such. Job was religious, just as the heathen may be "very religious". Religion is the attempt of man to become righteous by morality and ordinances, but, the moment God produces a broken heart and a contrite spirit, the sinner is lifted completely out of the region of religion, and becomes the possessor of the "righteousness of God" Himself.

The book of Job, therefore, as we have said, is the illustration and the spiritual enlargement of the oldest lesson in the world as first taught in Gen. iv. 1-5. It is an object lesson which exhibits before our eyes the Divine answer to man's great question - the question of this book: "How shall mortal man be just with God?"

...

The first time the Lord God speaks to man after the Fall, He sets forth in his brief question, "Where art thou?" the lost and helpless condition of man. This is the first great lesson which man has to learn; and his attempt to answer this great question is that which forms the first step in his attainment of true "wisdom".

The first question of the Bible is intended to reveal to man his lost condition; and when he has discovered this, he asks the first question in the New Testament, intended to express this conviction, when he cries "Where is He?" (Matt. ii. 2) Where is the Savior whom Thou hast provided for lost sinners? Where is the Savior whom Thou has given and sent?

Unless we recognize this, as the "end" and design of the book, we shall never understand it, or learn the lesson for ourselves.

Simpleminded in Seattle

According to Betsy at Betsy's Page the Seattle Public Schools employ a person with the title of Director of Equity and Race Relations. Among this individual's duties, evidently, is the task of enlightening the taxpayers of the district as to the true nature and definition of racism. The Director's definition, distilled to its essence, is simply this: Something white people are guilty of. She words it rather differently, but what she says amounts to the same thing:

The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites). The subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society."

This is the sort of addle-pated nonsense a Director of Equity churns out to justify her paycheck? What is "equitable" about this definition?

Question: If a poor white is oppressed by a wealthier black who hates whites because of their race, would the black be racist? Answer: No, because the black belongs to a racial group that is socially and economically inferior to the group to which the white belongs. Thus no matter how much power an individual black wields over an individual white, and no matter how much he uses that power to harm the white, he is innocent of the taint of racism because he is a member of the virtuous race of blacks who are untainted by the original sin of racism.

The Director of Racial Equity also assays to develop a taxonomy of racism for those of us who may not understand the sociological arcana involved. Cultural racism, for instance, is:

Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as "other", different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

Is it racist to point out that this might be the dumbest thing ever to be written on the subject of race? Madame Director of Equity and Race Relations manages to cram more stupidity into a single paragraph than one might have thought humanly possible. To take just a couple of examples:

It is cultural racism, by her definition, to be oriented toward the future, to pay into a retirement account, to show up for work every day and on time in order to secure a paycheck at the end of the week, to save for one's children's college education or a new house, to discipline oneself with regard to the pleasures of food, drink, and/or sex in order to secure the long term benefits of a healthier body and a more stable marriage. If this is racism, and if only whites are racist, it's no wonder the African American community is in such desperate condition.

It is cultural racism, we're given to understand, to value the rights of the individual. Madame Director of Equity and Race Relations should spend an evening or two with Atlas Shrugged, but assuming that she would not be inclined to read Ayn Rand - a white woman, after all - she might at least look around the globe at those societies which promote the collective over the individual and take note of what kind of communities they are. She might do well to compare predominately white nations built on the concept of the importance of individual rights versus non-white nations which are not, and ask herself which she would prefer she and her children live in.

It is cultural racism, the lady avers, to define one form of English as the standard for all citizens. Madame Director would do well to undertake a study of the countries of the world that have the greatest and the least social cohesion and assess whether there doesn't seem to be a correlation to language in these societies. In nations in which there are a plurality of languages there is often stultifying economic inefficiency and deprivation as well as cultural division. One of the surest ways to isolate people from each other, after all, is to encourage them to speak different languages. The best way to unify people is to give them a common tongue. Madame Director defines as racist the desire that we, as disparate races, be as unified as we can be through a common language. Very odd.

It is cultural racism to identify only whites as great writers or composers. One wishes Madame Director would give an example of someone who actually does this with regard to contemporary artists. If her complaint is that people tend to consider only whites to be great composers of classical music, or great writers prior to, say, 1920 perhaps that's because only whites were composing music during the classical era and writing literature prior to 1920 (with the exception of W.E.B. DuBois). Would it constitute cultural racism to say that historically only whites were great mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, or philosophers if only whites were doing this sort of work before the twentieth century?

One last question: Why are the Seattle taxpayers paying good money to employ someone as a Director of Equity and Race Relations in the first place, especially if the person employed is doing more to damage race relations than she is to help them?

Out of the Closet

Last Fall an accomplished geneticist at Cornell named John Sanford came out of the closet. Having harbored doubts for some time about what he calls the "Primary Axiom" of biology (i.e. neo-Darwinism) he could no longer keep his skepticism to himself. Braving the howls and execrations of his peers he has written a book (Genetic Entropy & and the Mystery of the Genome, 2005) wherein he lays out his doubts about the ability of Darwinian mechanisms to explain human genetics. He also discusses the path that led him to his apostasy. Here's a portion:

In retrospect, I realize that I have wasted so much of my life arguing about things that don't really matter. It is my sincere hope that this book can actually address something that really does matter. The issue of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going seem to me to be of enormous importance. This is the real subject of this book ....

Modern Darwinism is built on what I will be calling "The Primary Axiom". The Primary Axiom is that man is merely the product of random mutations plus natural selection. Within our society's academia, the Primary Axiom is universally taught, and almost universally accepted. It is the constantly mouthed mantra, repeated endlessly on every college campus. It is very difficult to find any professor on any college campus who would even consider (or should I say - dare) to question the Primary Axiom ....

Late in my career, I did something which for a Cornell professor would seem unthinkable. I began to question the Primary Axiom. I did this with great fear and trepidation. By doing this, I knew I would be at odds with the most "sacred cow" of modern academia. Among other things, it might even result in my expulsion from the academic world.

Although I had achieved considerable success and notoriety within my own particular specialty (applied genetics), it would mean I would have to be stepping out of the safety of my own little niche. I would have to begin to explore some very big things, including aspects of theoretical genetics which I had always accepted by faith alone. I felt compelled to do all this - but I must confess I fully expected to simply hit a brick wall. To my own amazement, I gradually realized that the seemingly "great and unassailable fortress" which has been built up around the Primary Axiom is really a house of cards.

The Primary Axiom is actually an extremely vulnerable theory - in fact it is essentially indefensible. Its apparent invincibility derives mostly from bluster, smoke, and mirrors. A large part of what keeps the Axiom standing is an almost mystical faith, which the true-believers have in the omnipotence of natural selection. Furthermore, I began to see that this deep-seated faith in natural selection was typically coupled with a degree of ideological commitment - which can only be described as religious. I started to realize (again with trepidation) that I might be offending a lot of people's religion!

Read the rest of Sanford's account of his backslide from the one true faith here.

The True Believers

Richard John Neuhaus at First Things (subscription required) notes that in the introduction to the book From the Gulag to the Killing Fields by Paul Hollander there appears a list of eight ways in which all extremist groups, whether of the right or left, are similar. All extremist mass movements are typified by the following beliefs or attitudes:

1. Extreme hostility toward "outgroups." You are either for us or against us and any dialogue or civil conversation with the "enemy" is betrayal.

2. Complete submissiveness to "ingroups." Our party and its leaders are to be supported without question. Criticism of our side is breaking ranks and breaking ranks is treason.

3. All relationships are subordinated to the criterion of what will advance the "cause."

4. The most important thing to know about the world is that it is divided by the conflict between them and us.

5. Purely theoretical ideas which do not serve the cause are to be repressed.

6. The extension of sentiment is a sign of weakness.

7. We and our group can only survive by the manipulation of others, who are there to be manipulated.

8. The triumph of our cause will result in a harmonious world without conflict.

Communism and Naziism exhibited most or all of these traits in the twentieth century and together they made that period the most murderous in all of human history. Islamo-fascism exhibits the same traits today, and, if it is allowed to thrive, it'll do to this century what the Marxists and Nazis did to the last, or worse.

Iraqis Are Safer Than Americans

Iraq is in chaos. Death and destruction are everywhere. It's the most dangerous place on the planet. That's the message we have drilled into us every day by the American media. Things may not be quite as the media reports them, however. Andrew Walden at FrontPage Mag has the data:

Iraqi civilian death statistics compiled by Rep. Steve King, R-IA, indicate that, contrary to the impression made on the evening news, Iraq actually has a lower civilian violent death rate than Washington, D.C., and pre-Katrina New Orleans. Iraq is also substantially safer than several foreign countries. After seeing media coverage of Iraqi violence King said: "I began to ask myself the question, if you were a civilian in Iraq, how could you tolerate that level of violence. What really is the level of violence?"

King calculates an annualized Iraqi civilian death rate of 27.5 per 100,000 based on U.S. military and independent statistical sources.

Ironically, Venezuela has 31.5 violent deaths per 100,000 - 14.5 percent higher than Iraq.

Venezuela is not alone in suffering at the hands of left-wing dictators or wannabe dictators: Columbia, hounded by leftist narco-guerrillas, every year loses 61.7 of its citizens to violence per every 100,000.

South Africa, led by an increasingly corrupt African National Congress loses 49.6 per 100,000 to violent deaths every year. In Jamaica-ruled for decades by the socialist People's National Party-it is 32.4.

In Russia, as the Soviet system disintegrated, the count of violent deaths-outside the Gulags-soared. In 1998 there were 30.6 homicides per 100,000 population. Three years after end of Saddam's socialist dictatorship Iraq is actually more peaceful than was Russia seven years after the end of socialist USSR.

But high murder rates are not limited to overseas leftist-ruled countries.

In Washington, D.C., it is 45.9 violent deaths per 100,000. This means civilians living in Washington D.C. .... are 63.5 percent less safe than Iraqi civilians.

Other American cities with higher violent civilian death rates than Iraq include:

Detroit: 41.8 per 100,000

Baltimore: 37.7 per 100,000

Atlanta: 34.9 per 100,000

St. Louis: 31.4 per 100,000

The American city with the highest civilian death rate was New Orleans before Katrina-with a staggering 53.1 deaths per 100,000-almost twice the death rate in Iraq.

Hudson makes the point that the foreign countries with high death rates are all ruled by leftists and the American cities with such terrible rates are all governed by Democrats. Be that as it may, it will come as a surprise to most Americans that an Iraqi is safer in his city than an American is in his. Who'd have thought that would be the case after watching the evening news.

Bio-Machines

Here's a cool site for anyone interested in cell biology. The thumbnails link to animations of the operation of several different molecular machines. I don't know which is more incredible, the structure and function of these nano-machines or the fact that there are people brilliant enough to figure them out.

Most incredible of all (literally) is that these bio-machines are the product of nothing other than blind, purposeless forces.

Thanks to Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent for the tip.

Giving the Church a Black Eye

With Pat Robertson in full voice the Church doesn't need any more nitwits feeding ammo to its detractors, but evidently that's exactly what has recently emerged. It's a sad day for the Church if things are as Jonathan Hudson at Talk to Action claims them to be here. In a follow-up post Hudson says:

A top aide to mega-church pastor Rick Warren is advising the makers of a children's video game in which characters kill New Yorkers while shouting "Praise the Lord." When children tire of converting or killing New Yorkers, they can switch sides and command the demonic armies of the AntiChrist, and kill the conservative Christians. The real-time strategy game, slated for release in October 2006, is based on the best selling series of Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. The web site of Left Behind Games states the involvement of Mark Carver on its Advisory Board. This web-based marketing tool also highlights his role as Executive Director of Mr. Warren's Purpose Driven Church. What appears to be going on here is an old-fashioned business practice called "endorsement by association."

We await pastor Rick Warren's (author of The Purpose Driven Life) response to attempts to associate him and his ministry with what is apparently a truly execrable video game.

Santorum's Slide

A recent Rasmussen poll shows incumbent Rick Santorum slipping well behind challenger Bob Casey in the race for the Pennsylvania senate seat, and people are wondering why. There are several reasons which come to mind, not the least of which is that Pennsylvania is a blue state which is nevertheless pro-life. In other words, a pro-life Republican running against a pro-choice Democrat will attract a lot of pro-life Catholic Democrats, but Casey is also pro-life and that neutralizes much of Santorum's cross-over appeal. Casey will get pro-life votes that Santorum would otherwise have received if any other Democrat were running.

Another major factor in Santorum's decline is that he's only getting the support of 67% of Republicans. This is an astonishing figure, but it makes sense when we remember that Santorum endorsed liberal Arlen Specter in his primary race against conservative Pat Toomey in 2004. This angered a lot of conservatives and convinced them that Santorum is not a reliable political ally. Later, Santorum voted against Tom Coburn's bill that would have substantially reduced a lot of wasteful and unnecessary spending and this further antagonized those Republicans who pay attention to such things.

There's not much Santorum can do to win the allegiance of pro-life Democrats, but he can woo back disaffected Republicans. He's only got five months to do it, though, so he better get started.

The Second Fifty

John T. Miller at NRO has been swamped with more suggestions for conservative themed rock songs, and he lists the latest recommendations here. The top fifty can be viewed here.

I think the second group may be even better than the first although I was disappointed that I didn't see Where Did Our Love Go by the Supremes or Cat's in the Cradle by Harry Chapin on the list. Maybe they don't qualify as classic rock.

Advice For Hugo

Lowell Ponte has an outstanding article at FrontPage Mag which lays out for the reader precisely what sort of man Hugo Chavez is and where he's taking Venezuela. After Iran, and perhaps North Korea, Venezuela under Chavez is perhaps the most troublesome country on the globe. Ponte explains why. His essay is an education. Here's a piece of it:

Democracy has ended in Venezuela, replaced by blatantly rigged elections and strong-armed Chavista mobs and spies in the streets. Venezuelans now face the presence in their midst of perhaps 20,000 of Castro's secret police and an epidemic of soaring violence and crime committed by keftist thugs who know the regime seldom makes arrests for the robbery and murder of bourgeois victims. Caracas, reports The Times of London, "now has the world's highest murder rate per capita."

Chavez has turned Venezuela into a police state in which the press is intimidated and vague new "Social Responsibility" sedition laws make it a crime to criticize the government. Those who speak out or sign petitions challenging Chavez's dictatorial rule and his "Bolivarian Revolution" are blacklisted and risk losing their jobs or becoming targets of government harassment and mob attacks.

Hugo Chavez now rules by decree and via a rubber stamp legislature and judiciary. He has indicated he might not step down when the Constitution's term limits would end his presidency. This May he said he might seek "indefinite" re-election, i.e., the de facto position of "dictator for life," through a referendum.

Like Napoleon, Chavez wants no other gods above himself. He has expelled Christian missionaries from Venezuela, putting Cuban "teachers" in their place to proselytize for the pagan religion of Marxism. In this predominantly Roman Catholic country he has called this church's leadership a "tumor." Venezuelan Cardinal Rosalio Castillo Lara accused Chavez of leading the country towards dictatorship.

But Catholic "Liberation Theologians" and others on the religious ultra-Left have treated socialist Chavez like "Saint Hugo." One poster popular with Chavistas depicts Hugo Chavez as a holy figure riding at the side of an approving Jesus Christ. And Chavez seems to delight in his Marxist "Cult of Personality."

This wouldn't threaten us as greatly if Hugo Chavez were imposing his egomaniacal Marxist dictatorship on a poor Third World nation. Venezuela, however, is the fifth largest oil producer in the world and a major supplier to the United States.

We have two words of advice for Mr. Chavez which we hope he'll take under advisement: Manuel Noriega.