Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

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

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

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

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

RLC

Olby's on the Case

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Self-Defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

American Dhimmis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

State of Aphasia

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

RLC

Packing the Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

The Clock Is Ticking

NewsMax is reporting that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

How Much Brain Do We Need?

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

RLC

Absolute Evil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Military Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

General Patton Speaks

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

RLC

A Man in Full

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Hoaxer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Update on Killing Christians

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

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

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

RLC

Killing Christians? (Yawn)

Here in the U.S. you may not have heard about these unfortunate people:

They are twenty three Korean Christians who went to Afghanistan to work in hospitals and among the poor who have been kidnapped by the Taliban and threatened with beheading unless the Afghan government releases a bunch of terrorists.

As Bryan at Hot Air says:

It's hard to find a more stark contrast than that between the way members of two of the world's great religions are behaving in this ordeal. The South Koreans left their safe country and traveled to Afghanistan to work in hospitals among the country's outcasts; the Taliban captured them at gunpoint and are threatening to behead them in order to gain concessions from the Afghan government en route to recapturing power in that country.

These Koreans are living out the Christian faith in ways most of us can't and won't live up to. The Talibanis are unfortunately living up to their faith in a way that's become all too common.

Bryan tells us this is the lead story around much of the world, but in the States Muslims threatening Christians with death is apparently not newsworthy. Do you suppose that's because the perpetrators are Muslims behaving as we've come to expect of Muslims or is it because the victims are Christians and therefore not deemed worthy of media concern? I wonder what our media's reaction would be to the story if the hostages were, say, twenty three French physicians from Doctors Without Frontiers.

RLC

Do's and Don'ts

P.Z.(Zarathustra) Myers gave a talk to a group of Minnesota atheists last Sunday on the topic of a materialist view of mind and soul - to wit, that there aren't any such things. Michael Engor has some fun with it here. Check it out if you're interested in neuroscience and the mind/matter debate. It's funny stuff.

RLC

Immunity for John Doe

Buried deep in a Washington Post article on the Homeland Security bill which a Senate/House conference committee reached tentative agreement on was this piece of very welcome news:

The last obstacle was cleared when negotiators crafted language to satisfy a Republican demand giving immunity from lawsuits to people who report suspicious behavior. The issue grew out of an incident last fall where six Muslim scholars were removed from a flight in Minneapolis after other passengers said they were acting suspiciously. The imams have since filed a lawsuit, saying their civil rights were violated.

Apparently the Democrats realized that by continuing to oppose this provision they were grasping a political high voltage wire. Let's hope the provision makes it into the final draft of the bill, especially in light of this:

Airport security officers around the nation have been alerted by federal officials to look out for terrorists practicing to carry explosive components onto aircraft, based on four curious seizures at airports since last September:

San Diego, July 7. A U.S. person either a citizen or a foreigner legally here checked baggage containing two ice packs covered in duct tape. The ice packs had clay inside them rather than the normal blue gel.

Milwaukee, June 4. A U.S. person's carry-on baggage contained wire coil wrapped around a possible initiator, an electrical switch, batteries, three tubes and two blocks of cheese. The bulletin said block cheese has a consistency similar to some explosives.

Houston, Nov. 8, 2006. A U.S. person's checked baggage contained a plastic bag with a 9-volt battery, wires, a block of brown clay-like minerals and pipes.

Baltimore, Sept. 16, 2006. A couple's checked baggage contained a plastic bag with a block of processed cheese taped to another plastic bag holding a cellular phone charger.

Indeed, this all does sound awfully suspicious, but we wonder: If a passenger had spotted something like this and report it to the authorities, when in fact there was nothing to it, how many Democrats would favor suing the person who reported it?

We also wonder if there was something left out of the above reports. Might there have been another common factor in these episodes? Well, I don't know what, exactly, - maybe ethnicity and religion? Is there some reason why those facts have been omitted? Are they entirely irrelevant?Are we supposed to pretend that terrorists don't fit a profile in order to demonstrate what broad-minded and tolerant people we all are?

RLC

The Turing Test and the Chinese Room

Materialists have a difficult time fitting human consciousness into their worldview, because consciousness is a phenomenon which defies material explanation.

How does it happen that mere matter can produce qualia (e.g. the sensation of red or the taste of sweet)? How does matter produce a belief, a value, a doubt, gratitude, regret, or disappointment? How does material substance produce forgiveness, resentment, or wishes, hopes, and desires? How does it appreciate (e.g. beauty, music, or a book). How does it want, worry, have intentions, or understand something? How does matter come to be aware of itself and its surroundings? These are vexing questions for a materialist view of the world, yet some materialist philosophers remain unmoved by them.

Someday, they believe, computers will be able to do all that human minds can do and then we'll have a denotative example of how matter can produce the phenomena of consciousness. Indeed 57 years ago Alan Turing suggested a test for consciousness in a machine. In the Turing test, an investigator would interact with both a person and a machine, but would be blindfolded so that he did not know ahead of time which was which. If, after interacting with both of them, the investigator still couldn't tell which was the person and which was the machine, it would be reasonable to conclude that the machine, for all intents and purposes, was just as "conscious" as the person.

Proponents of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are confident that the day when the Turing test can actually be carried out is not far off, but many other philosophers are skeptical. Just because a computer can give the same answers to various questions as a person would doesn't mean that the computer experiences what the person experiences.

Philosopher John Searle illustrates the problem that AI faces with a thought experiment he published in 1980 that he calls "the Chinese Room:"

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the book the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

Searle goes on to say, "The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have."

In other words, human minds understand, they feel and experience, computers do not. Minds, whatever they are, are conscious. Machines are not.

So the big questions are, what exactly is consciousness and where did it come from? The materialist answer is simply to deny that consciousness exists. That seems a little counter-intuitive.

RLC

Summer in the City

Journalist Michael Totten tells us what it's like being in Iraq in the summer. It sounds oppressive, but one of the points he makes in a somewhat incidental fashion drew my attention:

After having spent several days Baghdad's Green Zone and Red Zone, I still haven't heard or seen any explosions. It's a peculiar war. It is almost a not-war. Last July's war in Northern Israel and Southern Lebanon was hundreds of times more violent and terrifying than this one. Explosions on both sides of the Lebanese-Israeli border were constant when I was there.

You'd think explosions and gunfire define Iraq if you look at this country from far away on the news. They do not. The media is a total distortion machine. Certain areas are still extremely violent, but the country as a whole is defined by heat, not war, at least in the summer. It is Iraq's most singular characteristic. I dread going outside because it's hot, not because I'm afraid I will get hurt...

...Baghdad is gigantic and sprawling. It looks much less ramshackle from the air than I expected. Individual cities-within-a-city are home to millions of people all by themselves. The sheer enormity of the place puts the almost daily car bomb attacks into perspective. The odds that you personally will be anywhere near the next car bomb or IED are microscopic.

It doesn't sound nearly as chaotic in Baghdad as Harry Reid and the other cut and runners in Congress make it out to be, does it? By September it may very well seem even less so. Will the Democrats still be calling for withdrawal if it looks like we're winning? We'll learn much about their character if and when this question is answered.

RLC

Hate Speech

Some Hispanic spokespersons are pulling out one of the favorite plays in the leftist playbook: Smear those who disagree with you with the label "haters." Don't worry about evidence, the allegation itself carries all the power. Trying to build a case for the smear only weakens its force since evidence is almost always lacking anyway. Just call the opposition "haters" and the uncritical masses will swarm to your side.

The tactic is blatant demagoguery, but when evidence is not on your side, when reason is not on your side, demagoguery is often all you have and it often works:

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. - The nation's largest Hispanic advocacy group says it must come up with a strategy to combat "a wave of hate" its leaders say came from talk radio's efforts to sink the Senate's immigration bill.

"That had an extraordinary impact in the Senate, and as a nation, I don't think we should be comfortable with the fact that the United States Senate responded to what was largely a wave of hate," Cecilia Munoz, the National Council of La Raza's senior vice president for research, advocacy and legislation, told The Washington Times after meeting with NCLR affiliates to talk about a new strategy.

According to Ms. Munoz, it's "hatred" to want to control our borders, to limit who can come in, and to believe that we cannot afford to subsidize millions of poor immigrants. It's hatred to want the United States to be able to assimilate its immigrants and not to be a dumping ground for corrupt, dysfunctional states like Mexico. Ms Munoz's rhetoric is either dishonest or stupid.

I have a couple of questions for Ms Munoz and for anyone who agrees with her that opposing open borders is an act of hate. Is it hate that causes people, including probably Ms Munoz, to lock the doors to their homes or to build a fence around their property? Is it a sign of hate that people live in gated communities in retirement villages? Is it a sign of hate that people want to control who wanders into their home to avail themselves of kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom? If an indigent family in Miami were to walk into Ms Munoz home, raid the refrigerator, refuse to leave, and demand that she allow their relatives to join them, and demand that she pay their education, food and medical bills, would she call the police? Would it be "hate" if she did?

I doubt that many people would see any of this as a sign of hate, but our country is our home writ large. Just as we have a right, indeed a duty, to exercise control over who comes into our home we have a right and a duty to exercise control over who comes into our country. For Ms Munoz to claim that those who call upon Congress to effecetively exercise that right are engaging in hate talk is frivolous and asinine.

RLC