One of the more absurd aspects of multiculturalism is the way that we are in the West are now meant to revere the ‘authentic’ wisdom of those parts of the world still mired in the backward traditions of the past. We swoon at the feet of shamans – basically conmen dressed in twigs. We look for enlightenment from the cults and superstitions of societies that are tens of thousands of years late in escaping the Stone Age.

Well, from the Independent, here’s a contemporary reminder of the barbarism from which the West has emerged (warning: the full text makes very unpleasant reading), albeit imperfectly:

"The practice of muti provides a disconcerting counterpoint to the contemporary image of the new South Africa. Dr Gerard Lubschagne, who heads the investigative psychology unit of the South African police service, conservatively estimates lives lost to ritual murders at between 50 to 300 every year."

Time, I think, to dust off once again my copy of Lord of the Flies, to my mind one of the finest summaries of human nature ever written. And then there’s wise old Tom Hobbes…

One of the more bizarre aspects of the Left these days is the way that it has aligned itself with defenders of hard-line Islam. The motives for this vary – from sheer political devilry, to reflexive hatred of the West, to blind faith in multiculturalism.

Well, this disgusting piece of legislation is a reminder of the company in which today’s ‘progressives’ find themselves:

“A law banning gay sex has come into effect in Zanzibar, with homosexual men threatened with 25-year jail terms and lesbians facing seven-year sentences. "This is what we have been aspiring for. If the government takes such steps, the country will really move ahead," said Sheikh Muhammed Said, a local Islamic leader. The law was brought into effect by President Amani Karume's signature last week, the attorney general's office said. Parliament passed the bill in April. The islands, a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, are largely Muslim.”

This (according to MEMRI) is from a “journal titled "Al-Jundi Al-Muslim" (The Muslim Soldier), which is published by the Religious Affairs Department of the Saudi armed forces, published an antisemitic article in its "Know Your Enemy" section. The article was written by Ma'ashu Muhammad and was titled "The Jews in the Modern Era."

Read it if you have the stomach.

Know your enemy indeed.

Hat-tip Radley Balko, who also has a great post on what sounds like a terrific example of the finest form of country, bluegrass. Some of the most enjoyable performances of any type of music I’ve ever attended were back in the 1980s in a glorified concrete shack in downtown Nashville called the Bluegrass Inn. Sheer magic.

Hubert Davis (Davies?) and the Seasoned Travelers, if I recall.

There is one exception to the horror that is the Olympics: the delight that is beach volleyball. Who wins, who cares, just watch.

Here’s Sarah Sands in the Daily Telegraph:

”What is political genius is Blair's intuitive championing of an obscure sport that has been the darling of the Olympic Games. Early reports of the Prime Minister's interest in beach volleyball were assumed to be malicious. But volleyball has captured everyone's hearts with its good natured, youthful silliness. I arrived at the crowded port stadium just as the grinning Greek army were being bused in to watch. Beach volleyball is a combination of Club Med and MTV. Cheerleaders in orange bikinis surround the pitch and between games – sometimes between points – there are bursts of rock music (Sweet Home Alabama, Should I Stay or Should I Go etc). The Australians and Canadians in the audience were dancing on their seats. Tony Blair has spent two years as a Prime Minister of war and terror. It is inspired of him to want to bring a little beach volleyball into our lives.”

As I said, the man’s a genius.

As Athens, and other unfortunate cities, have discovered, inviting the Olympic Games to come to town makes about as much sense as praying for a plague of locusts to descend on your back garden.

London, like New York and other lemming cities, is a leader in the race to host this pestilence in 2012. Tony Blair, a shrewd politician if nothing else, is obviously coming to realize that this could mean electoral trouble.

How do I know this? From this story, that’s how:

“Cherie Blair will support London's 2012 Olympic Bid by becoming an ambassador for the project.”

Now Cherie Blair combines the charm of Lady Macbeth, the politics of Nadezhada Krupskaya, the PR skills of Leona Helmsley, the warmth of Hillary Rodham and, to wrap it up in one crystal-draped incanting package, the spiritual insight of Shirley Maclaine.

London’s bid is, therefore, now doomed.

Brilliant, Tony.

I have to confess that, like the Derb, I feel a sense of profound unease about this constant harping on what Kerry did or not do in Vietnam and, um, Cambodia. Has Kerry brought much of this on his head – and his hat – by the emphasis he himself has placed on those four months in his political resume? You bet, but even so…

That said, can we expect the New York Times to follow up its expose of the Swift Boat’s ‘connections’ to the Bush campaign with similar efforts directed at MoveOn and the other 527s on the Left and their possible connections with the Kerry campaign?

Look, I detest MoveOn.org, but I hate campaign finance 'reform' far, far more. So far as can be made out from this remarkably confusing set of comments (via Volokh) the administration seems to have been provoked by the success of the 527s into contemplating yet more restrictions on the right of voters to express themselves. Eugene Volokh is not impressed:

"I certainly hope that the Administration is not indeed calling for "an end" — a legal end, via an extension to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act — to people pooling resources to express their political views, including their views about candidates. You can call it "soft money," but it's speech, of the sort that political movements such as the antislavery movement, the temperance movement, the civil rights movement, and many other movements (good and bad) have engaged in. Without such speech, who gets to speak effectively, in the large traditional media? The media itself; the parties; and the politicians who have the infrastructure to raise hard money in $2000 chunks; and a few super-rich people (unless they're shut up, too). People who care deeply about a subject, enough to pool even tens of thousands of their dollars with others who care equally strongly, would be shut out."

He's quite right. And that would be wrong.

Of course, the irony of this whole mess is that the 527s were given their big break by McCain-Feingold, a disgraceful piece of legislation signed into law by the President because, we were told, it was a good thing - except where it was unconstitutional, and where it was unconstitutional, we were told, not to worry, the Supreme Court would throw it out, except the court didn't. Intellectually incoherent? Yes. Not really, um, presidential? Yup, that too. Should George Bush have vetoed it? Of course.

Some have argued that, veto power or not, Mr. Bush had no choice other than to sign this law, an argument that ignores the fact that at the time he did so, six months after 9/11, the President remained enormously popular. Others have turned to a different theory. According to this article from MSNBC, Bush's decision to sign was part of a cunning plan: "The increase in the hard money limits on donations to specific candidates was a major reason Bush signed BCRA into law. Republicans knew they had a bigger universe of hard money donors and they figured the doubling of the limits would help them more than it would the Democrats."

Well, if that really was the cunning plan, it was worthy of Baldrick.

The result of Mr. Bush's failure to stick to the rather basic principle that free speech is not something to be rationed by politicians is the mess in which he now finds himself.. Rather than restrict the 527s (something the FEC now appears to be trying to do), the President should call on Congress to repeal, or at least substantially modify, McCain-Feingold. Embarrassing? You bet. Difficult, certainly.

But that's what you get from not having done the right thing in the first place.

It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did, they relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.

They told their stories. At times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

A correspondent takes issue with my post earlier this week on the subject. (I see Rich Lowry has written a related article.) I'll print it here in quotes, with my responses in brackets:

"Your comments about John Edwards and malpractice are, for you, unusually
uniformed. [Thanks for the qualifier.] You cite a 2003 study as evidence that Edwards did something wrong in the early 1990's. This is wrong for three reasons:

"First, the study appears to be conducted by people with a motive to protect
their field. And even they, according to the Washington Times' description, could only 'cast doubt' on Edwards' winning theory."

[The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists may well have a motive to keep its members in business, unharassed by trial lawyers. They did, however, get the American Academy of Pediatrics to collaborate with them on the report. The report was endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and Australian and Canadian associations of obstetricians and gynecologists.

The study, meanwhile, does more than "cast doubt" on the theory that cerebral palsy is commonly caused by asphyxia due to obstetricians' failures to perform c-sections. It says, "Purely dyskenetic or ataxic cerebral palsy, especially where there is an associated learning difficulty, commonly has a genetic origin and is not caused by intrapartum or peripartum asphyxia." Dr. Murray Goldstein, medical director of the United Cerebral Palsy Research and Educational Foundation, has said that brain damage occurring at the time of delivery is "really quite unusual."

Also worth noting is the fact that the proportion of deliveries done by c-section has risen over the last 35 years, while cerebral-palsy rates have not fallen.]

My correspondent again: "Second, the doctors and their insurers had the opportunity to prove Edwards' science was inaccurate, but they lost. Could it be that Edwards had the better scientific argument? The Washington Times article gives no information about the relative strengths of each side's scientific argument. The readers have no idea how to weigh Edwards' science against the 2003 study."

[Edwards brags about these cases in his book Four Trials. The principal evidence of medical wrongdoing on which he relied came from fetal monitoring readings. The ACOG study's verdict on this kind of evidence: "use of nonreassuring fetal heart rate patterns to predict subsequent cerebral palsy had a 99% false-positive rate." Anyway, Edwards famously won a trial less by presenting scientific evidence than by channeling "messages" from the dead baby for the jury. "Weighing" the evidence from science vs. a seance is unlikely to be fruitful.]

"Third, how can Edwards be faulted in 1995 for failing to anticipate a study
announced in 2003? The legal system must resolve disputes and reach
judgments based on the best evidence available at the time. Litigants and their lawyers don't have the scientist's luxury of postponing a decision for decades for more research."

[Hey, it's not as though the doctor was suing Edwards. The burden of proof was on Edwards to prove that the doctor did wrong, not on the doctor to prove the negative. Many courtrooms would not allow Edwards' quack science and seances to be put forward--they would require that theories of causation to be generally accepted in the relevant professional community, or at least to have been peer-reviewed. The trial bar hates this kind of test, of course, and it may be that judges appointed in a Kerry-Edwards administration would seek to undermine them.]

"I look forward to watching people publicly debate Edwards' cases. If the Right makes them an issue, Edwards will probably be as persuasive with the voters and with the jurors."

[Maybe you're right. Who knows? Here's my bottom line: Edwards shook down North Carolina obstetricians for tens of millions of dollars over diseases that they did not cause and could not have caused. Those millions contributed to higher health-insurance premiums. And the lawsuits drove good doctors out of North Carolina. That Washington Times article suggests that people have died because these suits drove specialists away. In a just world, this man would be--well, let's just say that he would not be vice president of the United States.]

Here's news about an exciting new development - a machine that allows drinkers to inhale liquor instead of drinking it. And why not? I remember once (courtesy of a Finnish company that was celebrating some anniversary or other) ingesting vodka via an aerosol can. You sprayed the vodka onto the roof of your mouth. The results were good, and the knowledge that the aerosol was tearing the ozone to shreds only added to the merriment.

But for those who want to inhale their alcohol, there is a threat on the horizon, one Andrew Spano, 'county executive' of Westchester County, NY, a Democrat. He wants a ban on this technology. The rationale (oh, come on, you know what it's going to be) for this grotesque bit of nannying?

"He worries it will attract underage drinkers."

Yup, yet again, 'The Children".

--Jill McGivering: Well obviously not everyone is trying to migrate but I suppose it also brings in a philosophical question and we did have one question essentially saying basically isn't this a human right, if the quality of your life is to a major extent determined by where you're born isn't economic migration a basic human right?

--Mark Krikorian: Well if it were then the logical conclusion would be that nations are not - there is no concept of a nation state, they're not sovereign and people are free to move wherever they want and that the economic standards in the developed world need to be lowered until they reach the standards of everywhere else in the world. You can take that position, I reject it and I'd have to say that the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the developed world reject that. So it's really a question more of democracy - do the people of the United States or the EU or Japan get to decide what happens to themselves or does someone else decide what happens to their societies? And I vote for democracy, people may vote in a different way.

================================= MEMORANDUM

To: 2L and 3L Students

Re: Offered this Fall - Critical Race Theory: Race, Gender and Sexuality

Professors Mutua and Phillips

This course will explore the distinct but interrelated structures of gender and sexuality through the lens of race. It will also examine the ways in which law defines, shapes and regulates these structures.

Topics include: masculinity, gay marriage, abortion, sexuality and desire, equality and cultural/religious paradigms in the struggle for women's rights, violence, and intersectional, transsexual and transgendered identities.

Course work includes short written assignments.

=================================

I haven't taken many pictures and those I've taken aren't very good.  But here are a few to give you a sense of things. For the first couple weeks we stayed at my sister-in-law's awesome place. Here's the basic view, though picture's can't do it justice because it's so wide and I don't have the skills to do it right.

ME AND LUCY

Here's a picture of me and the wee-one. She's obscured in shadow and I've got my Frankenstein smile going. But she's having a grand time.

COSMO SAYS RELAX

And last, here's Cosmo, who's staying at the big house (the rest of us moved into a very nice cabin  -- which doesn't allow dogs. Grrrr -- after Jess and Lucy returned from Alaska). We see him every day for long walks, deer chasing etc. But it vexes us he can't stay with us. But that's a topic for another day.

Jonah, in your piece today, you talk about the chaos if the color scheme for traffic lights was changed (yes, I focussed on the big issues). In fact, during the Cultural Revolution, this was suggested by some of the more enthusiastic Red Guards. Red as the color of revolution should mean 'go', they said. Chou en Lai talked them out of it. Cunningly, he argued that stopping at red lights indicated respect for the revolutionary order. Who could disagree with that?

Just thought I would pass this on.

There has, remarkably, been a campaign for a few years now to beatify Robert Schuman, one of the two people who can be described as a founding father of what was to become the EU. Noted theologian Jacques Chirac has been pushing this idea, which now seems to have run into opposition from the Vatican. The Daily Telegraph has more, but the most interesting detail is the sinister, and, one hopes, disqualifying fact that Schuman "lived on eggs and lettuce."

For a different view of the religious significance of the EU, go here. It turns out that Brussels is "preparing the base for the prince that shall come", our old friend the Antichrist.

I knew it.

A Bush-Cheney '04 ad released Aug. 13 accuses Kerry of being absent for 76% of the Senate Intelligence Committee's public hearings during the time he served there. The Kerry campaign calls the ad "misleading," so we checked, and Bush is right.

Official records show Kerry not present for at least 76% of public hearings held during his eight years on the panel, and possibly 78% (the record of one hearing is ambiguous).

Kerry points out that most meetings of the Intelligence Committee are closed and attendance records of those meetings aren't public, hinting that his attendance might have been better at the non-public proceedings. But Kerry could ask that his attendance records be made public, and hasn't.

Aides also claimed repeatedly that Kerry had been vice chairman of the intelligence committee, but that was Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, not John Kerry.

From a great piece by Amir Taheri:

The anti-Bush sentiment of the ruling elites in the Middle East is reflected in efforts to screen "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's celluloid attack on the U.S. president. Last week, the mullahs running the Farabi Cinema complex in Tehran scrapped the season's program to screen Moore's "documentary."

"This film unmasks the Great Satan America," a spokesman said. "It tells Muslim people why they are right in hating America. It is the duty of every believer to see [this film] and learn the truth."

With the exception of Kuwait, which has banned it, Moore's film is shown or sold in pirated cassette form throughout the Arab world. Anti-American Arab television stations, including one owned by the Lebanese branch of the Hezbollah, have broadcast chunks of Moore's attack on Bush with commentaries more virulent than the original.

The accomplished composer of "The Ten Commandments" and "The Man with the Golden Arm" article has died. This paragraph strikes me as a shame though:

In addition, he scored such movie classics as "The Ten Commandments," "The Magnificent Seven," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Great Escape" and "True Grit." Other credits included "National Lampoon's Animal House," "Airplane!," "Stripes," "Meatballs," "Ghostbusters," "Trading Places" and "The Rainmaker."

Clarification: Some readers seem to have missed my point. I think it's a shame Animal House, Stripes and Meatballs don't count as "classics."

"Just over two weeks ago, Senator Kerry talked about the merits of troop realignment in Europe and Asia. 'There are great possibilities open to us,' he said. Yesterday he said it was a bad idea. The one consistency we have seen from Senator Kerry is that he is willing to take any position on any issue if he thinks it will benefit him politically. As we saw yesterday, these political calculations even include his positions on our national security."

Finally, I want to say something about the plan that the President announced on Monday to withdraw 70,000 troops from Asia and Europe. Nobody wants to bring troops home more than those of us who have fought in foreign wars. But it needs to be done at the right time and in a sensible way. This is not that time or that way.

"The overall effort of a president right now ought to be really to try to find ways to reduce the overexposure, in a sense, of America's commitments," Kerry said then. "A proper approach to the Korean peninsula, for instance, should include the deployment of troops, the unresolved issues of the 1950s and ultimately, hopefully, could result in the reduction of American presence, ultimately."

That was the title of the spoof sequel to Soylent Green from Saturday Night Live.

I watched the original Soylent Green last night and I came to a dissapointing conclusion: it's really just a terrible movie. I always loved Soylent Green growing up, but it's really dumb in every significant way. And, as a prediction of the future it couldn't be sillier. I've been reading about the obesity wars lately and to watch a movie dedicated to the notion that --supposedly around the time we are living right now -- few adults will ever have seen an apple is too funny. By the way, it's important to keep in the mind that many of the people who are today policymakers and whatnot grew up believing some of these silly Malthusian horror shows. After all, Paul Ehrlich had predicted in the early 1970s that over 65 million Americans were going to starve to death as part of the global "Great Die Off" which was going to claim over 4 billion people worldwide.

Anyway, I just thought I'd at least like Soylent Green for the campiness of it, instead it mostly just ticked me off.

NAJAF (CNN) -- Intense fighting raged Thursday afternoon around the Imam Ali Mosque, and two of the mosque's minarets have been damaged, according to a CNN producer inside the compound.

But it is unclear if the fighting signaled the start of an Iraq-U.S. offensive against the fighters aligned with Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr -- who is refusing to negotiate on the latest Iraqi government ultimatum because, an aide said, he and his forces want to deal with the Iraqi National Conference delegation and not the interim government.

Iraqi officials have threatened to "liberate" the mosque in a military offensive if al-Sadr and his forces don't leave and disarm.

The interim government said Thursday that al-Sadr must publicly and personally say he is disarming and will stand down, or Iraqi and U.S. forces will take military action against him.

This comes a day after al-Sadr issued a conciliatory statement read at the Iraqi National Conference indicating that he is willing to have his forces disarm and withdraw from the compound.

CNN Producer Kianne Sadeq, who had been inside the mosque compound with other journalists at the invitation of al-Sadr's militia, reported persistent sounds of mortars and gunfire and many explosions. There was a great deal of sniper fire as well, she said

ARE YOU FRUSTRATED THAT THE REPUBLICANS HAVE PAINTED YOU MORE THE PROTESTER THAN THE WARRIOR?

I think they’re pathetic. If George Bush wants to have a debate about what he did versus what I did, I’ll meet him anywhere in the country and we can talk about opposition to the war and fighting in the war.

I've subscribed since Digital Issue #1 and I'll keep this subscription going as long as I have a web link.

I love the digital version because I can read it at work and it still looks like I'm actually accomplishing something important. (Which, as it happens, I am!) Plus, I can download it to my IPAQ and read it anywhere.

Keep up the good work!

James E. McGreevey
Ought by now to have "former governor of New Jersey" inscribed on his C.V.
Instead, he'll be Gov.
Until Nov.

When, commenting on the recent vote in Venezuela, an editorial in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal quoted Dow Jones writer Charles Roth as reporting that that country’s National Electoral Council “didn’t allow an audit of the paper receipts allowed by the touchscreen machines…” the implication was clear.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that many states in the US will, in a sense, be even worse. Their touchscreen machines won’t even produce the paper receipts necessary for a proper recount in the first place.

Behold the islands with their kings,
And Europe her best tribute brings;
From north to south the princes meet,
To pay their homage at His feet.

There Persia, glorious to behold,
There India shines in eastern gold;
And barb'rous nations at His word
Submit, and bow, and own their Lord.

TRENTON (AP) A top gubernatorial donor who is accused of having a prostitute seduce a government witness is to plead guilty Wednesday, a federal official said.

The plea by Charles Kushner is to be taken at 11 a.m. before U.S. District Judge Jose L. Linares in Newark, an aide to the judge said Tuesday. The court calendar did not specify what charge or charges were involved, the aide said.

A federal official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the hearing would be for a guilty plea. . . .

A friend passes along this link, along with the following comment: "Finally, someone has written an article about how John Edwards made his millions by suing obstetricians for cerebral palsy in newborns – a disease that is almost always genetic and has nothing to do with the obstetrician. Edwards punished these doctors with millions in damages for the crime of delivering babies. And as the article details, they and other doctors have learned their lesson: they stopped practicing in North Carolina, creating a crisis in access to healthcare for several specialties in that state.

"Amazing. Everyone has heard about Haliburton and been told that there is something sleazy about it, even though the company won its first defense-supply contract under Clinton, and as V.P. Cheney divested himself of all stock in the company and has no financial interest in it. And at the same time, this golden-haired fraud has been shaking down baby doctors across North Carolina, creating a lack of access to specialty care and driving up North Carolinians’ premiums by at least $50 million. Now that we know as a fact that Edwards’s emotional jury arguments were based on bogus science, do you think that there’s any chance that he’ll give back his tens of millions in lawyers’ fees to the people of that state? Do you think that anyone will ever call him on it? Do you think that most people in this country will ever hear about how this con artist made his fortune?

"Edwards is easily the most disturbing vice presidential candidate since Henry Wallace. Can you imagine what kinds of people he would be influencing Kerry to put on the federal bench? Forget about even the modest limits on damage awards and junk science imposed by the Supreme Court in recent years – they won’t survive the judges picked by the Baron & Budd ’04 Fundraising/ Judicial Selection committee...."

For those who didn't catch the Baron & Budd reference, here's something I wrote about the firm.

Newsweek's Robert Samuelson on those attorney generals' and their global warming lawsuit. His conclusion:

"Any self-respecting judge will dismiss this suit—and do more. Because the only point is political self-promotion, the judge ought to require the attorneys general to pay court costs and defendants' costs from their own pockets. There's a name for what the attorneys general are making of themselves: a public nuisance."

Indeed.

Number one party school that is. Once again Davidson college is shut out.

Derb - I can't claim to have followed his career closely. But in 1993 The National Interest -- in their spectacular issue dedicated to the fall of Communism -- reprinted an essay by Levin written, I believe in 1977 or 1979 (unfortunately this reprint of the NI article doesn't say). The headline was "The One Who Got it Right." Here's how Levin predicted the End would come a full decade ahead of time:

That is how it will be done. There will be no gunfire in the streets, no barricades, no general strikes, no hanging of oppressors from lamp-posts, no sacking and burning of government offices, no seizure of radio-stations or mass defections among the military. But one day soon, some new faces will appear in the Politburo,--I am sure they have already appeared in municipal and even regional administrative authorities--and gradually, very gradually, other, similarly new, faces will join them. Until one day they will look at each other and realize that there is no longer any need for concealment of the truth in their hearts. And the match will be lit.

There is nothing romantic or fantastic about this prognosis; it is the most sober extrapolation from known facts and tested evidence. That, or something like it, will happen. When it will happen it is neither possible nor useful to guess; but I am sure it will be within the lifetime of people much older than I. And when it does happen--let us suppose, for neatness' sake, on July 14, 1989--you must, in all civility, allow me to be the first to repeat Charles James Fox's words on their two hundredth anniversary: How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! And how much the best!

Have you noticed how the press is constantly referring to "the Holy City of Najaf" as if it were its official title? This doesn't bother me that much, in the abstract. But I can't help but think that the press keeps reminding people it's a "holy city" so as to increase anxiety about American actions there and make people nervous -- sort of like constantly saying "you break it you bought it."

For example, if you search Google News for "Holy City of Jerusalem" you get four hits, all negative. Search for "Holy city of Najaf" and you get just under 7,000.

"Nashville-based singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith is taking a more personal approach in her opposition to the administration of her fellow native Texan: ''I've made a conscious decision in my life that if Kerry does not win in November, I'm leaving this country in January,'' Griffith said. ''It hasn't been an easy decision to make, because I love my country. But I think that if we have another four years of George W. Bush, we won't have a democracy.''

God is with us, God is with us, thus our brave forefathers sang.
Far across the field of battle loud their holy war cry rang.
Never once they feared or faltered, never once they ceased to sing.
God is with us, God is with us, Christ our Lord shall reign as King.

In, inevitably, the letters page of the Guardian:

"However good its tune, the real problem about I Vow to Thee My Country, like all aggressive and male-oriented hymnody, is that, in an age which has effectively relegated the second verse's heavenly ways of gentleness and peaceful paths to a fairly painless insurance policy, an emasculated dreamlike world is wheeled out to sanctify whatever current war effort. Why not keep the tunes, but with some revamped non-patriotic, non-violent lyrics?"

Yup, that says it all.

via the Susurration blog.

OPEN ON THE YOUNG GEORGE BUSH IN NATIONAL GUARD UNIFORM.

ANNOUNCER: George Bush used his father to get into the National Guard, and...

CUT TO BUSH'S NATIONAL GUARD MEDICAL FORM BEING STAMPED WITH "FAILURE TO APPEAR".

ANNOUNCER: ...when the chips were down, went missing.

CUT TO SHOT OF TV SHOWING "SWIFT BOAT" SPOT, THEN WORDS APPEAR ACROSS SCREEN, "FALSE ADVERTISING".

AUDIO

ANNOUNCER: Now, he's allowing false advertising that attacks John Kerry...

CUT TO FOOTAGE OF A YOUNG JOHN KERRY IN VIETNAM.

ANNOUNCER: ...a man who asked to go to Viet Nam and who served with dignity and heroism.

CUT TO HALF SCREEN PICTURE OF JOHN McCAIN. HIS WORDS APPEAR ON SCREEN NEXT TO HIS PICTURE.

ANNOUNCER: Here's what a true Republican war hero has to say about the anti-Kerry ad: "I think the ad is dishonest and dishonorable...I think the Bush campaign should specifically condemn the ad."
CUT TO SHOT OF BUSH AND CLOSING DISCLAIMER COPY. ANNOUNCER: George Bush: Take that ad off the air. MoveOn PAC is responsible for the content of this advertisement.

08/16/2004

NYS Senator Skelos
Albany, NY

Senator Skelos,

As you can see by the letter below, I am vehemently opposed to NYS & NYC hosting the 2012 Olympics. As you can additionally see, I have contacted the USOC and several members of the IOC.

I now read that you are going, with NYC Mayor Bloomberg, to Athens to appeal to the IOC for NYC to host the 2012 games. As you know, and have voted upon (S608), there is still the problem with A1530 http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?bn=A01530 (companion to S608 http://www.senate.state.ny.us/ ). Until this bill passes the NYS Assembly, NYC & NYS are inhospitable to our own, and other, participants in the Shooting Venue.

The Shooting Venue is the Olympic's second largest venue. It is hypocritical for NYS & NYC to consider hosting this venue here, as NYS & NYC have gone out of their way to destroy this sport at all levels within the state. Consider the facts that NYC will have NO juniors participating in any rifle events and NYS will have NO juniors participating in any pistol events.

It will be a sad day for the Shooting venue if NYS & NYC hosts the 2012 Olympics under the current Penal Law conditions.

I urge you to speak to your counterparts in the NYS Assembly and have A1530 acted upon quickly, as the NYS community needs time to create Olympic grade competitors. Currently, A1530 is in the Assembly Codes Committee, chaired by NYS Assemblyman Lentol. There was overwhelming support for the companion bill (S608, passed 60:1) in the Senate and I am sure that, except for the NYC contingent, the same is true for A1530.

Please, this is the right thing to do and our juniors deserve the opportunity to tryout and possibly participate.

Alan Chwick

One of the things which really frustrated me during the Clinton years was the way the White House was successful in portraying anyone who disliked – AKA “hated” – Bill Clinton as being unreasonable. The moment you described Clinton as a terrible president or a terrible man – or both – you were effectively written-off as “irrational.” Indeed, the phrase “irrational Clinton hater” was bandied around with the clear implication that the “irrational” part was redundant. Opposing Clinton was irrational, period.

Now, one of the reasons this was such a brilliant political strategy was that it effectively bought a big slice of the apolitical middle of this country. I tend to think that big swaths of Americans are simply turned off by overly ideological rhetoric at all. In other words, I think a lot of people disliked Clinton hatred because they disliked hearing about politics in harsh or “extreme” terms, period. In general, I think this is a healthy attitude even though sometimes it’s misguided. But Clinton exploited it brilliantly by making his opponents seem illegitimate simply by virtue of the fact they were his opponents. Of a piece was this was the brilliantly cynical use of the word “partisan.” Bill Clinton pretended that everything he was doing was “working hard” for the American people, “doing the job” etc. Anyone who disagreed with him was being “partisan” as if A) partisanship is bad and B) that only one side was partisan. Also, the whole “move on” schtick – which we now know was a cynical partisan appeal made my hardcore leftwingers – took advantage of this attitude.

It’s not clear to me that Bush has tried hard enough to exploit a similar strategy. The Bush-haters – who are just as extreme and nasty as the Clinton-haters were, and in many ways more so – offer a real opportunity for Bush. I am sure that some of the people who booed Linda Ronstadt or the Dixie Chicks were die-hard Bush supporters. But some of them, I’m sure, were merely people who detested the rudeness and arrogance of performers who thought it was their place to bad-mouth Bush and inject politics into a situation where people had every right to expect a politics-free zone. Obviously this strategy is more difficult for Bush because Clinton had much of the media and almost all of Hollywood on his side. The premise of “The American President,” “West Wing,” and pretty much every political declaration made by the Barbra Streisand crowd popularized the notion that disliking Clinton was an indication you were a weirdo, a crank, an opponent of progress. Bush-haters include many of those same people. With the exception of Fox News there’s really no mainstream outlet available for the White House to get the message out that irrational Bush hatred is not only irrational but annoying. Bush needs a way to tell the Michael Moore fans to “move on.”

I don’t know why this just occurred to me, but have you ever noticed that the actors who play the dumbest characters have a surprisingly good shot at becoming stars? For example, Vinny Barbarino – played by John Travolta – was, by my lights, the worst character on “Welcome Back Carter.” If you’d asked me who had the best shot from “That 70’s Show” to have a break-out career, I never would have guess it’d be that Ashton Kutcher guy. The main character is a vastly --vastly superior actor. Christina Applegate is now a bigger star than the rest of her “Married, With Children….” Obviously there are exceptions. Tony Danza isn’t bigger than several of his Taxi co-stars, but he was indisputably the worst actor on the show and he’s doing better than the guy who played the actor. But it’s indisputably true that Potsy from “Happy Days,” Stan 'Wojo' Wojciehowicz from Barney Miller and many others haven’t made it big. But it does seem that, statistically, you have a better shot at doing better career-wise if you start out playing a moron than if you don’t. Just look at Sean Penn, whose break-through role was in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”

And before you all say it, yes I am aware that this might explain my relative success at NR.

Update: Yes, I know. It's Kotter. Not Carter. Stoopid mistake.

LONDON (Reuters) - When it comes to American presidential elections, blue blood counts.

So say British researchers who predict Democratic challenger John Kerry will oust President George W. Bush on Nov. 2 simply because he boasts more royal connections than his Republican rival.

After months of research into Kerry's ancestry, Burke's Peerage, experts on British aristocracy, reported Monday that the Vietnam War veteran is related to all the royal houses of Europe and can claim kinship with Tsar Ivan "The Terrible," a previous emperor of Byzantium and the shahs of Persia.

we are only in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war, and Iraq is only the second front to have been opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak, of the first act of a five-act play. In World War II and then in World War III, we persisted in spite of impatience, discouragement, and opposition for as long as it took to win, and this is exactly what we have been called upon to do today in World War IV.

For today, no less than in those titanic conflicts, we are up against a truly malignant force in radical Islamism and in the states breeding, sheltering, or financing its terrorist armory. This new enemy has already ready attacked us on our own soil--a feat neither Nazi Germany nor Soviet Russia ever managed to pull off--and openly announces his intention to hit us again, only this time with weapons of infinitely greater and deadlier power than those used on 9/11. His objective is not merely to murder as many of us as possible and to conquer our land. Like the Nazis and Communists before him, he is dedicated to the destruction of everything good for which America stands. It is this, then, that (to paraphrase George W. Bush and a long string of his predecessors, Republican and Democratic alike)we in our turn, no less than the “greatest generation ” of the 1940 ’s and its spiritual progeny of the 1950 ’s and after, have a responsibility to uphold and are privileged to defend.

Maureen Dowd: "...She's [Teresa Heinz Kerry] been sort of eclipsed this week by Laura Bush, I think."

Bill Maher: "Yeah, who, ah, said she came out against the stem cell research. Why is she an expert on something so technical?"

Dowd: "Because Karl Rove thinks that if the Bush White House gets four million more evangelical votes than they did last time it ensures Bush's re-election, which means he's not his dad. And so they've dragged poor Laura Bush out to go, for this, what Lee Atwater used to call the extra-chromosome conservatives."

More, um, commentary from Bishop Stephen Lowe, interesting in its own right, but also interesting as an example of the anti-Americanism of the european left:

"There can be little doubt that the Bush administration sees itself as the upholder of world order and that its value system and way of life should be imposed, if necessary, by economic or even military means upon the rest of the world. I gather that on one section of the Great Wall of China there is now an enormous plastic statue of Colonel Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, whose contribution to American obesity is only challenged by Macdonald’s. I find this uncritical sense of superiority coming from the United States about its values and way of life one of the most frightening aspects of global life. A nation that has so much power over world order and yet threatens the future of the world by its gas-guzzling attack on the world environment seems to lack a moral conscience, yet proclaims its own rightness in all things with pride that borders on arrogance...”

Oh, whatever, Bishop, whatever.

Via blogger Christopher Johnson

”Ask an Iraqi communist or Kurdish socialist today what support they have had from the liberal left and they won't detain you for long. Apart from the odd call from the Socialist International, there has been none worthy of the name. One expects the totalitarian left to be stuffed with creeps, but the collapse of the democratic left strikes me as catastrophic. Why couldn't it oppose the second Gulf war while promising to do everything possible to advance the cause of Iraqi democrats and socialists once the war was over? Why the sneering, almost racist pretence that Saddam had no honourable opponents? The ineluctable answer is, I'm afraid, that there no longer is a left with a coherent message of hope for the human race. The audiences at Michael Moore films don't look at his propaganda images of kite-flying kiddies and pull themselves up short by thinking of what happened to their comrades in Iraq. They have no comrades. They don't support Saddam. They don't support his foes. They have no policy to offer. The noise of their self-righteous anger is merely a cover for an indifference bred by failure.”
Posted at 12:39 PM

CULTURAL SUICIDE WATCH [Andrew Stuttaford]

The latest idiocy to emerge out of the Church of England is the announcement by some idiot bishop that he has ‘banned’ the much loved hymn ‘I Vow To Thee My Country’ from services. Apparently, this wicked song has “echoes of 1930s nationalism in Germany and some of the nastier aspects of right wing republicanism in the United States." Mind you, it’s not only right wing republicanism that annoys the Bishop. “There is this view that America is the land of the free when we know it is not.”