Nattering Nabobs of Negativity

Michael Barone gets good wood on the ball in this essay on the effect that the constant negativism churned out by the Democrats and their various mouthpieces is having on voter attitudes:

"This is just to cover Bush's (rear) so he doesn't have to answer questions" about things in Iraq, said Rep. Pete Stark, second ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee. "This insurgency is such a confused mess that one person, dead or alive at this point, is hardly significant today," said Rep. Jim McDermott, formerly the lead Democrat on the House ethics committee. The deceased, said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a candidate for the 2004 presidential nomination, was a small part of "a growing anti-American insurgency." He said the United States should get out of Iraq. "We're there for all the wrong reasons." Such was the reaction of the left wing of the Democratic Party to the killing of al-Qaida terrorist Abu Masab Zarqawi in Iraq. It was not the dominant note sounded by Democrats. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry all hailed the death of Zarqawi in unequivocal terms. And if Democrats also made the point that his death probably won't end the violence in Iraq, they were only echoing what George W. Bush said.

Nevertheless the Stark-McDermott-Kucinich reaction, echoed and amplified, often scatologically, by dozens of commenters on the popular dailykos.com and myDD.com left-wing Websites, tells us something disturbing about the Democratic Party -- and provides a clue why Democrats were unable to eke out a win in last week's special congressional election in the 50th congressional district of California.

It comes down to this: A substantial part of the Democratic Party, some of its politicians and many of its loudest supporters do not want America to succeed in Iraq. So vitriolic and all-consuming is their hatred for George W. Bush that they skip right over the worthy goals we have been, with some considerable success, seeking there -- a democratic government, with guaranteed liberties for all, a vibrant free economy, respect for women -- and call this a war for oil, or for Halliburton. (emphasis mine)

Successes are discounted, setbacks are trumpeted, the level of American casualties is treated as if it were comparable to those in Vietnam or World War II. Allegations of American misdeeds are repeated over and over; the work of reconstruction and aid of American military personnel and civilians is ignored.

In all this they have been aided and abetted by large elements of the press. The struggle in Iraq has been portrayed as a story of endless and increasing violence. Stories of success and heroism tend to go unreported. Reporters in Iraq deserve respect for their courage -- this has been an unusually deadly war for journalists, largely because they have been targeted by the terrorists. But unfortunately they and the Bush administration have not done a good job of letting us know that last pertinent fact.

We are in an asymmetrical struggle with vicious enemies who slaughter civilians and bystanders and journalists without any regard for the laws of war. But too often we and our enemies are portrayed as moral equivalents. One or two instances of American misconduct are found equal in the balance to a consistent and premeditated campaign of barbarism.

All of this does not go unnoticed by America's voters. The persistence of violence in Iraq has done grave damage to George W. Bush's job rating, and polls show that his fellow Republicans are in trouble. Yet when people actually vote, those numbers don't seem to translate into gains for the Democrats. In 2004, John Kerry got 44 percent of the votes in the 50th district of California. In the April 2006 special primary, Democrat Francine Busby got 44 percent of the votes there. In the runoff last week, she got 45 percent and lost to Republican Brian Bilbray.

The angry Democratic left set the tone for the 2003-04 campaign for the party's presidential nomination, and John Kerry hoped that it would produce a surge in turnout in November 2004. It did: Kerry got 16 percent more popular votes than Al Gore. But George W. Bush got 23 percent more popular votes in 2004 than in 2000.

In California's 50th, both parties made mammoth turnout efforts, but the balance of turnout and of opinion seems to have remained the same, even though Democrats had a seriously contested primary for governor and Republicans didn't. The angry Democratic left and its aiders and abettors in the press seem to have succeeded in souring public opinion, but they haven't succeeded in producing victory margins for the Democrats. Maybe they're doing just the opposite.

Spiro Agnew famously referred to the press once upon a time as "nattering nabobs of negativity," and his felicitous formulation might well be extended to cover almost the entire liberal/left of the contemporary political spectrum.

For six years George Bush has been absorbing the most furious and vicious attacks on his competence and character that any president has had to endure since Abraham Lincoln. The constant drumbeat of derision has depressed his approval ratings among a public which hasn't any real idea of how well he's doing but which assumes that his performance must be pretty bad since everybody is saying so. Evidence that the public doesn't really know how Bush is doing can be found in polls that ask about the health of the economy. The majority of respondents say that they think the economy is doing poorly when in fact it's as healthy as it's been in decades.

Through all the punishment he has taken and all the unjust, unfair criticism the media and his opponents have fired at him, Bush has remained steadfast and determined to do what he thinks is right. For this he has our admiration and respect, even if we do wish he was tougher on illegal immigration and government spending.

Lefty Logic

Here's a good example of asserting one's conclusion and then basing the conclusion on the assertion (i.e. begging the question):

The U.S. does not approve of torture, claims President Bush. Does anyone have any doubt that Ziad Khalaf Raja al-Karbouly, the Iraqi customs inspector who turned on Zaqarwi after being arrested and held for months by the Jordanian police, talked as a result of being subjected to torture?

"Officials say Karbouly confessed to his role in the terror cell and provided crucial information on the names of Zarqawi commanders and locations of their safe houses."

So now we use information gained from torture to murder our target. What makes us different from them?

Let's walk through this: No one on the paranoid left doubts that we use torture, therefore Karbouly was tortured. Pretty convincing, wouldn't you say?

For good measure we're treated to an example of undistributed middle as well: The killing of Zarqawi is "murder". Terrorists also murder. Therefore we're no different than terrorists.

This is the sort of thinking that fills the left-wing blog sites and upon which people will be basing their votes in November. Lord, give us patience.

Londonistan

This is a must read column by Melanie Phillips at The Times Online. It contains numerous salutary lessons for us here on this side of the pond:

According to remarks attributed in the past few days to security sources, no fewer than 1,200 Islamist terrorists are biding their time within British suburbs. Yet does Britain even now fully understand the nature of the threat it is facing, let alone have the will to deal with it?

The recent report by the Commons Intelligence Committee on last July's London bombings barely scratched the surface of the failure by the security establishment. It failed to note, for example, Britain's dirty little secret: that from the 1990s, Islamist radicals had been given free rein in Britain in a "gentlemen's agreement" that if they were left alone, they would not turn on the country that was so generously nurturing them. The result was "Londonistan", as Britain became the hub of al-Qaeda in Europe.

This intelligence debacle, however, was only the tip of the iceberg. Among Britain's governing class - its intelligentsia, its media, its politicians, its judiciary, its Church and even its police - a broader and deeper cultural pathology persists to this day. Londonistan is more than the physical presence of Islamist extremists. It is also a state of mind. To a dismaying extent, the British have signed up to the false narrative of those who are laying siege to their society.

The problem lies in a refusal to acknowledge that Islamist extremism is rooted in religion. Instead, ministers and security officials prefer to think of it as a protest movement against grievances such as Iraq or Palestine, or "Islamophobia". They simply ignore the statements and signs that show unequivocally that the aim is to Islamicise the West.

In large measure, this is the outcome of a profound loss of cultural nerve. The doctrines of multiculturalism and minority rights, themselves the outcome of a systematic onslaught by the British elite against the country's own identity and values, have paralysed the establishment, which accordingly shies away from criticising any minority for fear of being labelled as bigoted.

As a result, it ignored the radicalisation of many British Muslims by extremist Islamic institutions. Worse still, "grievance culture" has meant that instead of fighting the paranoia and lies driving the Islamists' hatred of the West, British society is afflicted by the very same pathology.

Minority rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a "victim" group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the "oppressive" majority.

Britain effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or "anti-racists" who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people's livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands. So when radical Islamists refused to accept minority status and insisted instead that their values must trump those of the majority, Britain had no answer.

This was disastrous because Islamist violence is fuelled by precisely this false sense of victimisation. The mendacious message preached by Islamist leaders, that Britain and America are engaged in a war on Islam rather than a defence of their societies, is a potent incitement to terror by whipping up a hysteria that Muslims are under attack.

So any attempt by the West to defend itself against terror becomes a recruiting sergeant for that terror. The more atrocities committed against the West, the more the West tries to defend itself; and the more it does so, the more hysteria among Muslims rises that they are under attack, and the more they are thus incited to hatred and to terrorism.

The circle is completed by British fellow-travellers who promulgate the same morally inverted thinking, and thus help further to incite both Muslim extremism and Western defeatism. After the London bombings, this gave rise to the widely expressed view that the major problem was not Islamic terrorism but Islamophobia.

It is impossible to overstate the importance - not just to Britain but to the global struggle against Islamist extremism - of properly understanding and publicly challenging this moral, intellectual and philosophical inversion, which translates aggressor into victim and vice versa. For it has destabilised debate by allowing Muslims to argue that British and American foreign policy is unfair and aggressive towards the Muslim world.

So profound is the fear of being branded a bigot among British liberals that the obvious examples of illogicality, untruths and paranoia in such discourse have never been challenged.

The British Establishment also ignores this because it is in a state of denial. With few exceptions politicians, Whitehall officials, senior police and intelligence officers and academic experts have failed to grasp that the problem to be confronted is not just the assembly of bombs and poison factories but what is going on inside people's heads that drives them to such acts.

Transfixed instead by the artificial division it has erected between those who actively espouse violence and those who do not, the British Establishment rejects the idea that the hatred of Jews, Israel, America and the West that suffuses the utterances of the Muslim Brotherhood forms an ideological conveyor belt to terrorism. The result of this institutionalised denial has been that the Government has settled upon a disastrously misguided strategy. Believing that Islamist terrorism is merely about grievances, it thinks it can appease Islamist rage by pandering to extremism and inviting Muslim Brotherhood radicals into the heart of the British Establishment as advisers.

In Britain, hundreds of thousands of Muslims lead law-abiding lives and merely want to prosper and raise their families in peace. But truly moderate Muslims are finding that, through such appeasement, the host community is cutting the ground from under their feet and delivering them into the hands of the extremists. This is a deliberate policy of riding the Islamist tiger. But those who ride a tiger may get eaten.

As Phillips' essay suggests, the West simply does not understand what is driving the Islamists. We think that if we can just work out a solution to the Palestinian problem they'll be mollified, or if we can meliorate Arab poverty they'll be grateful to us. What Western liberals don't understand is that the only thing that is going to satisfy the Islamists is that we either convert to Islam or, one way or another, we disappear. They are at war with our civilization and it is a war to be fought, in their minds, until either they prevail or they're all dead. The sooner we awake to this grim reality the better chance our children have of not having a knife cutting at their throats.

Last Word on <i>Overdoing</i>

Byron gets the last word on our conversation on Overdoing the Outrage. Check out his remarks on the Feedback page.

Democrat Book-Banners

It seems that free speech is cherished by liberals only when it allows them to say what they wish to say. When the opinions expressed are of a sort they find unpalatable then calls for censorship go out across the land:

Two New Jersey Democrats are pushing to have Ann Coulter's new book "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," banned from all bookstores in their state because she criticized four 9/11 widows known as "the Jersey Girls."

In a joint press release issued Friday, New Jersey Assemblywomen Joan Quigley and Linda Stender say they want New Jersey retailers to "ban the sale of [Coulter's] book throughout the state."

"Ann Coulter's criticism of 9-11 widows, whose only desire since the attacks have been to repair their shattered lives and protect other families from the horrors they have experienced, is motivated purely by petty greed and hate," the two Democrats complained.

"Coulter's vicious characterizations and remarks are motivated by greed and her desire to sell books . . . She is a leech trying to turn a profit off perverting the suffering of others."

Quigley and Stender conclude:

"No one in New Jersey should buy this book and allow Ann Coulter to profit from her hate-mongering. We are asking New Jersey retailers statewide to stand with us and express their outrage by refusing to carry or sell copies of Coulter's book. Her hate-filled attacks on our 9-11 widows has no place on New Jersey bookshelves."

It used to be liberals who would insist, in self-righteous accents, that though they may despise what their opponents say, they'd "fight to the death" for their right to say it. That was back when liberals were campaigning to use profanity and pornography on our television shows, movies, and music, and the hazard of actually having to risk one's life was vanishingly remote.

Now that Muslims are actually killing people who utter offensive things about their religion and now that some conservatives are expressing unpleasant sentiments about liberal heroines, we haven't heard that slogan much. The sunshine soldiers who claimed to be prepared to stake their lives in defense of free speech seem to have melted away into the country-side and given way to liberal appeasers and book-banners.

Left-Wing Self-Parody

How has the left responded to the killing of Abu Zarqawi? By diving into the deep pools of self-delusion. Ben Johnson has the rundown at FrontPage.com. It's too long to copy in its entirety, but here are a few of myriad examples he gives of what passes for insight on the dyspeptic left:

Kurt Nimmo - whose article appeared in The Final Call, the newspaper of the Nation of Islam - wrote Zarqawi's death was "simply another dimension of a rather transparent psychological operations campaign run out of the Pentagon." That is, the CIA put one over on the American people. "Al-Zarqawi is little more than hype, a neocon propaganda program...in fact, it is difficult to prove 'al-Qaeda' itself actually exists." In his view, America also "engineered" the Iraqi "civil war."

Ron Jacobs also endorses the belief that Washington created Zarqawi:

"There is a likelihood that the forces of sectarian hatred have already done so much...that those hopes for a united nation without foreign occupation have been destroyed forever. Some folks even suggest that this was part of Washington's plan all along."

Jonathan Cutler, who is - surprise! - an Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies at Wesleyan University, dubbed Zarqawi the "ideological 'mirror image' of Washington's Neocons/Right Zionists." The good doctor blogs these perfidious Jews - err, "neocons" - may have lied about Zarqawi's death altogether:

"Right Zionists will not shed a tear for Zarqawi, but they may miss him when he is gone. If he is gone. For Right Zionists, Zarqawi is really an indespensible enemy."

TalkLeft floats the opposite conspiracy theory: perhaps Zarqawi had been long dead by Thursday:

"His face looks very intact for someone who was killed by two 500 pound bombs...Because this Administration has so little credibility and a history of distracting us with terror news when it is hurting politically, like now, I can't help but wonder if al-Zarqawi wasn't killed some time ago and they just decided to announce it today and tell us he was killed in yesterday's raid."

Air America host Randi Rhodes - whose program previously joked about assassinating President Bush - upbraided the troops for their inhumanity. Even al-Qaeda, she noted, asked Zarqawi to stop killing fellow Muslims. "Then you have to say to yourself, my God: Al-Qaeda is telling Zarqawi to cut the crap with the killing of the Iraqis, and yet we haven't cut the crap with the killing of the Iraqis." Her Air America colleague and rumored Ohio Democratic candidate Jerry Springer agreed, "We killed a hell of a lot more people just by the decision to go to Iraq than ever died at the hands of Zarqawi."

And on it goes. America is thoroughly evil, ergo anything America does is evil, therefore even killing Zarqawi must be shrouded in evil.

These people are a parody of themselves. There are more examples at the link.

Sucker Punching the Military

The MSM, ever-determined to focus on the cloud inside every silver lining and always ready to give our military a good swift kick in the solar plexus, has been reporting a story about a witness who claims to have seen American troops beat Abu Zarqawi to death.

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters tells us why he thinks the story is a fraud.

Anyone with any sense at all would have had serious questions about this story - questions which should have precluded its seeing the light of day. Nevertheless, the good folks at AP and elsewhere just can't help yielding to the impulse to give our troops a good sucker punch when the opportunity presents itself.

Meanwhile, Clarice Feldman at The American Thinker discusses reasons for thinking that the Marines may be the victim of a hoax at Haditha.

Allah Pundit at Hot Air is a little skeptical of, but nevertheless impressed by, Feldman's argument.

Both evidently would agree, however, that John Murtha's verdict that the marines were guilty of a deliberate atrocity was premature, unjust, pompous, and stupid.

More Overdoing

Byron is dissatisfied with my reply to his original e-mail taking me to task for my criticism of Andrew Sullivan (here). He argues (see Feedback Page) that I failed to give a satisfactory explanation for criticizing Sullivan's denigration of the administration for opting not to include Article 3:1c of the Geneva Conventions in the Army Field Manual and concludes that I owe Sullivan an apology.

I'd like to explain why I think no apology is needed.

Byron states that:

Sullivan shows that we have violated the Geneva conventions and go against international law, a fact that is commonly accepted. Do you disagree? It is this that makes us rogue, not some odd interpretation you give to his words, suggesting that he is opposed to hurting the feelings of killers.

This is somewhat misleading. Sullivan has written strongly against the alleged use of torture in the past, to be sure, but in the post to which I responded in Overdoing the Outrage he was condemning the administration specifically for its refusal to include Article 3 part 1c in the Army Field Manual. It is that particular complaint of Sullivan's I criticized, and Byron is inadvertantly changing the subject when he shifts the discussion to the broader question of torture.

He changes the subject again when he says:

But your "straw man" argument and your caricature of Mr. Sullivan's views are way off base. Mr. Sullivan did not say we ought not "question the courage of detainees" (what reasonable court could call that torture?).

But it is not torture, exactly, that is at issue in 3:1c. The Article states: ....the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons....Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.

If Byron means to ask "what reasonable court could call questioning one's courage humiliating or degrading treatment" the best answer, perhaps, is to ask him whether he would not himself find it humiliating or degrading to have his courage or manhood challenged. Most people would, especially in the presence of others and especially, for a Muslim, by a female interrogator. But don't take my word for it. The concern was raised in the L.A. Times article which initially triggered Sullivan's outrage.

Byron goes on to write that:

Mr. Sullivan simply nowhere suggests, as you put words in his mouth, that we have to treat POW's as "visiting dignitaries" or that we dare not incarcerate captured terrorists. If this possibility is why Mr. Bush scuttled the law on this, it seems pretty thin logic to me. Be that as it may, Mr. Sullivan surely was not operating with these concerns in mind: he clearly was opposing torture.

This paragraph is confusing. I didn't suggest that Sullivan himself actually said any of this, as a fair reading of my post will show. My point was that his insistence that we abide by 3:1c would lead to these kinds of absurd restrictions on how detainees can be treated, whether Sullivan thinks so or not.

Had he said what you said he said I suppose it would be right to call him silly. I simply think it is outlandish of you to suggest that his piece had anything to do with your peeve.

The only thing I can say to this is that anyone who doubts that it was the decision to drop Article 3:1c from the Army Field Manual that precipitated Andrew's diatribe against the administration should go to his blog and read the post for himself.

You slander him by implying Mr. Sullivan thinks we ought not incarcerate terrorists. He has said no such thing. If he did it would be stupid.

Of course I didn't say that Sullivan thinks this, and I don't know why Byron would accuse me of having done so. What I suggested was that the logic of his position leads to that kind of an absurdity. I'm glad Byron thinks that anything which leads to the conclusion that incarceration should be prohibited is stupid, because that's exactly what the vagueness and ambiguity of 3:1c would, or could, result in.

At first glance it would seem that the proscription of humiliating and degrading treatment is a prohibition that every nation, including ours, should respect. But in fact it's meaningless and dangerously restrictive. It is little more than a feel-good clause that allows the signatories to present themselves to the world as humane when in fact, if taken seriously, it's virtually impossible to abide by.

What determines whether an act is humiliating or degrading is more the individual's reaction to the act than the act itself. Most people, but not all, would feel humiliated if yelled at or insulted. Many, but not all, Muslims would feel humiliated if placed in a subordinate position to a woman. If we are to take the Geneva article seriously, which both Byron and Andrew Sullivan insist that we do, then we should never allow a Muslim detainee to be interrogated by a woman if he would find that humiliating. I, and I presume Byron, would find prison both humiliating and degrading. Suppose the Muslim jihadis do as well. If so, 3:1c would, if strictly followed, forbid us from incarcerating terrorists. In other words, the sensibilities of the prisoner determine what measures we can take against him. I submit that this is an absurd position to put ourselves in.

Byron suggests that I exaggerate when I claim that 3:1c would effectively proscribe incarceration, but how could it not? Does he think some forms of humiliation, like imprisonment, are acceptable to use against detainees but others are not? If so, how are we to choose between them? Who decides what's humiliating for a detainee and what isn't? The interrogator? The secretary of defense? The detainee? Byron offers no answer. He seems, rather, to conflate humiliation and torture and insists simply that we should not employ torture and, by extension, humiliation.

Even if the military would arbitrarily be permitted to degrade terrorists by confining them to a cell and depriving them of their freedom, there are lots of things they would not be allowed to get away with, and the L.A. Times article that started this discussion mentions a few of these (shouting at prisoners, questioning their manhood, and long-term solitary confinement, for example). There are numerous others: using deception to get information, giving the prisoner Western food, shackling - in short, anything the prisoner found demeaning would be proscribed by a serious reading of 3:1c.

If I am wrong about this then I welcome someone explaining to me my error because I don't see how the absurdities mentioned above can be avoided if 3:1c is to be taken literally, and if it's not to be taken literally then how can it be binding at all?

Meanwhile, in lieu of some meaningful definitions as to what constitutes humiliating and degrading treatment, adherence to 3:1c places needless restrictions on our military authorities. Interrogators and police, afraid of crossing some invisible line that could get them hauled before a war crimes tribunal, will tend to do as little as possible to elicit life-saving information from terrorist prisoners. In an environment where our kids' lives are at constant risk at the hands of those who will stop at nothing to kill them, it would be irresponsible to insist that our interrogators and police adhere to such vague guidance as 3:1c offers.

Until someone shows me how this is mistaken I will continue to maintain that it is silly for Andrew Sullivan, or anyone else, to condemn the administration for omitting this proscription from the Army Field Manual.

Mere Christianity

I recently came into possession of a book by C. S. Lewis that contains, among many of his great works, Mere Christianity. I read several of his books a long time ago and felt it was time to revisit what he had to say. (I have a great memory except that it's short.) Happening upon the following passage, it occurred to me that many people have communicated the essence of this message in the past but few have done so as eloquently as Lewis does so I thought it worth while to post here.

Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.

With all due respect to this great Christian believer, (and to brother Dick who, I believe, may be inclined to the same position), it seems to me that sufficient evidence is provided in the Word to show that, in fact, Lewis errs in his last statement. See my notes at the end of the article.

But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ's body; the organism through which He works. Ever addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them. Cutting off a man's fingers would be an odd way of getting him to do more work.

Another possible object is this. Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. I don not suppose you and I would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were marching into Germany and then announce the was on our side. God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying your are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else - something it never entered your head to conceive - comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

Now I'd like to offer a disclaimer of sorts. I'm not formally trained to expound on the Word of God and I don't believe it's something that one should undertake lightly. I can only offer what seems to me to be the truth of the matter as I perceive it from reading of His Word. Therefore, I pray that either because of me or in spite of me, the Word of God would be faithfully proclaimed here.

I'll start with some general thoughts and attempt to narrow it down to the specific:

Act iv. 12
12 Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.

I Timothy ii. 5-6
5 For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;
6 who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time.

Given these two passages (of which there are many more with a similar message) one could argue that the work of Christ has made it possible for all to have salvation. No matter what one does or what kind of life they lead, they have received a "get out of jail" card and are headed to heaven because Jesus has made it possible through his saving work on the cross.

While I personally know people who believe this, I don't because there is more to the story:

I Corinthians viii. 3
3 But if any man love God, the same is known of Him.

James i. 12
12 Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord had promised to them that love Him.

And of course:

John iii. 16-18
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

While the work of Jesus made reconciliation with God a possibility it appears to be contingent on us believing in Him and, consequently loving Him. How does someone love God without a personal relationship with Him? And is a personal relationship actually required?

Matthew vii. 21-23
21 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

This seems to be telling us that the main, if not only criteria for salvation, is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. While it appears in verse 22 that many will know Him, or perhaps more accurately, know of Him and even be able to perform "wonderful works", Jesus didn't know them possibly because there was no personal relationship with Him. An interesting observation is that if this is the case, then the works of those outside of a personal realationship with Jesus, no matter how wonderful they may appear to be, will be considered works of iniquity.

The only other group of people to be considered are, perhaps, those poor souls who have never heard of the gospel of salvation through Jesus. Here, they are referred to as "the Gentiles":

Romans ii. 12-16
12 For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law; and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law;
13 (for not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified.
14 For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves:
15 which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)
16 in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel.

If it is true that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" Romans iii. 23, then His judgment will be just and we must simply accept that. Perhaps this explains the reason for the great proclamation to preach the gospel to the world, so that those that hear it might be saved.

Finally, we read:

Matthew vii. 13-14
13 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
14 because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

There simply doesn't appear to be any other way to salvation. While God desires that all be saved, it doesn't appear that all will be saved. Those that deny His existence will get what they want, an eternity without Him. Those that acknowledge His existence but do nothing more, may very well suffer the same fate. Only those who 'enter the strait gate" and "narrow way" by, I believe, entering into a personal relationship with Him will see His salvation.

This brings us full-circle back to what C. S. Lewis stated above: "God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it."

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.