The Chronicle Shills for Hamas

When the residents of the West Bank and Gaza made the terrorist organization, Hamas, the majority party in the parliament of the Palestinian Authority, leaders from around the world reacted with shock. Both the United States and the European Union have since suspended aid to the government of the region now also known as "Hamastan".

Condoleeza Rice summarized the position of the Bush administration in this way: "Hamas has got to make a choice. If it is going to govern, it is going to have to govern on internationally acceptable standards and that means. [Hamas must] renounce violence and terrorism." Indeed, even the liberal Los Angeles Times, reacting to a recent suicide bombing, stated that, "If there was any lingering doubt that the U.S. and Europe were right to ostracize the Hamas government and cut off economic aid, it has been dramatically dispelled.

It certainly would appear that our media and our government may have finally come to their senses regarding "Palestine" and the "Peace Process". But this is only an appearance, as we shall see when we consider closely what amounts to an appalling example of pro-Hamas propaganda that appeared on the front page of the print edition of The Houston Chronicle today. Just beneath a picture of a young child in a hospital bed is the following tear-jerking paragraph.

Dr. Jumaa al-Saqqa was in a meeting discussing the problems facing Shifa Hospital when a nurse burst in. Cancer patients were being sent home because there was no more medicine for chemotherapy.

"Surely this will shorten their lives," al-Saqqa said in a quiet voice. "If you need six doses of radiotherapy and you only get one, the tumors will be more aggressive and metastasize all over the place. This is a disaster. We are completely unstable -- we don't know what tomorrow will bring."

This is indeed sad. Why is it happening? After lamenting that "It is a terrible time to get sick in the Gaza strip," the article goes on to explain that there has been a "U.S-led boycott" of foreign aid to the Hamastanis for the past two months, and that it is "causing severe hardships ... [for] nearly 4 million Palestinians, many already in poverty, fac[ing] a total breakdown in government services." And all this suffering is "designed to force Hamas, the militant Islamic group that won elections in January, to renounce terrorism and recognize Israel."

Buried several paragraphs into the story, and ensconced in a description of the dire straits of the Hamastanis, is the briefest possible explanation for why the United States (meaning you, as a taxpayer) is not sending as much money to enable a people (the ones who elected Hamas into office and fire home-made rockets into Israel) to continue to live (and so, for example, drive next to packed buses with bombs, killing and injuring passengers by the dozen).

The entire story continues in this vein, painting its portrait of human suffering in Gaza, while giving short shrift to the carnage wrought in Israel by Hamas, whom the "Palestinians" support. For example, reporter Gregory Katz, goes through great pains to outline how the government's inability to pay its employees has trickled down to cause a small businessman to have no calls for the past two weeks.

And yet, somehow, Katz did not see fit to paint a similarly humanizing portrait of, say, an Israeli family trying to make ends meet after losing its breadwinner in a terrorist attack. The businessman, obviously having failed to learn anything so far (and apparently confident he has a sympathetic ear), offers no apologies to Israel, saying instead, "[N]ow I have no work because the world doesn't want Hamas in power." One would think that that this man expects the West to relent -- even in a time of war -- upon hearing of his plight.

One would be correct. In fact, Katz quotes no less than six Hamastanis in his story. Several speak as if Hamastan is somehow entitled to Western aid, but not a single one aplogized for what Hamas -- his government -- has done to Israel. Indeed, the entire focus of the article is on the suffering of the Hamastanis, as if that fact negates all other considerations, and as if that fact is a legitimate claim to the mercy and treasure of the United States!

This would seem to be a spectacular act of evasion on the part of Katz, were it not for the fact that the government of the United States has already indicated that it follows the same moral code, altruism, as he does. After all, it has, in fact, not cut off all aid to Hamastan. Condoleeza Rice summarized the hypocrisy of the United States government in this way: "We are funding, however, very extensively, humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people because we do not have an argument (!) with the Palestinian people."

No argument?!?! These people freely elected Hamas, a terrorist organization and, ipso facto, an enemy of America during a war! Our government's feeble response -- to reduce their welfare payments -- to the fact that a people have chosen to ally themselves with our enemies and continue to attack a wartime ally is shameful.

The last time our government waged a war properly, during World War II, we would not have heard our Secretary of State saying "We have no argument with the Japanese people", or sending them humanitarian aid. What we did instead was to wage war ruthlessly. As President Truman put it:

The result of the futile and senseless German resistance to the might of the aroused free peoples of the world stands forth in awful clarity as an example to the people of Japan ... Following are our terms. We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay ... We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces ... The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.

We should be proposing similar terms for the Hamastanis now. They accept the aggressive, militaristic code of jihad as a moral ideal. This was evidenced on September 11, 2001 when they danced about in the streets, passing candy around after we were attacked by their al Qaeda "heroes". This has been evidenced during decades of terrorist attacks on Israel, including a bus bombing by Hamas, before the Hamastanis elected it to power, and by a bombing in Tel Aviv recently. This is evidenced now by a complete failure by the Hamastanis to own up to the fact that, whatever misery they may be suffering now, due to America's half-hearted boycott, they have caused much worse for much longer to Israel.

Gregory Katz, a reporter obviously sympathetic to Hamastan, knows that if he can stir up enough anger at the American government in America, it will probably relent. Why? Because both he and the Bush administration agree on moral fundamentals: that human suffering outweighs all other considerations -- be they the responsibility of a barbarous people for their crimes, or our national self-interest -- and that sacrifice is a moral ideal. A slap on the wrist -- which is what our sanctions amount to -- is not going to cause what is required for peace in the Middle East, which is the unconditional surrender of the Hamastani people, and their unequivocal rejection of jihad.

The picture of the boy in this article is sad, but the blame is misplaced. It lies squarely on the shoulders of the Palestinian people, who have earned much more than the "end" of foreign aid to Hamas, and who have caused carnage far worse than the suffering they endure now.

-- CAV

Updates

5-1-06: Made a few stylistic corrections.

Quick Roundup 51

Woo-Hoo! (For the Most Part)

I went to Barnes and Noble the other day to spend some accumulated gift cards and left with copies of Glenn Reynolds's An Army of Davids, and Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy. I had to order Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics, by Tara Smith, and James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics.

I'm about halfway through the Reynolds book, getting to read it only in fits and starts. Tara Smith's book arrived yesterday in the same box -- the same box! -- with Barbara Branden's hatchet job, The Passion of Ayn Rand. So I'll have to stop by Barnes and Noble to return it and have them send me the right book.

Word to the wise: When ordering Valliant's book, be careful that some sloppy clerk doesn't just enter the first part of the title and let some auto-"complete" function on his computer send you the wrong book.

Or you could just order it from The Ayn Rand Bookstore.... And now that I've gotten curious, I see that they do indeed offer gift certificates. It looks like the folks at Barnes and Noble may have just lost some sales.... Oops!

Atlas Shrugged to Hit the Silver Screen ...

... for, oh the thousandth time. Every few years, someone makes a big deal out of plans to bring Ayn Rand's master work to screen, only for all the hype to turn out to be just that. In fact, it's something of a running joke to me. One of the biggest problems would be this: What would you cut to turn this into a decent, standard-length movie with some modicum of faithfulness to the book? The best Idea I've heard floated on this would be to make it into a miniseries or a series of movies.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from the link I got via Matt Drudge.

Lionsgate has picked up worldwide distribution rights to "Atlas Shrugged" from Howard and Karen Baldwin ("Ray"), who will produce with John Aglialoro.

As for stars, book provides an ideal role for an actress in lead character Dagny Taggart, so it's not a stretch to assume Rand enthusiast Angelina Jolie's name has been brought up. Brad PittBrad Pitt, also a fan, is rumored to be among the names suggested for lead male character John Galt.

"Atlas Shrugged," which runs more than 1,100 pages, has faced a lengthy and circuitous journey to a film adaptation. [links dropped]

Color me cautiously optimistic, but don't color me blue. I won't be holding my breath for this to pan out.

Somewhat amusingly, today's Randex -- a site that lists media references pertaining to Ayn Rand -- has a distinctly tabloid-like feel with all its mentions of Hollywood figures, especially in the way it is displayed in my news aggregator. Here that is, complete with links.

• A life filled with drama, by Rich Copley - Lexington Herald-Leader (KY). On actress Patricia Neal. [She co-starred in the movie adaptation of The Fountainhead. --ed]
• John Fund vs the truth: How liberty lost, by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster - OpEdNews. On the Wall Street Journal editorial page editor and columnist.
• Atlas shrugs for Angelina, by Josh Tyler - Cinema Blend.
• Pitt, Jolie may join Atlas, by Paul Davidson - IGN FilmForce.
• A gouging market, by Matthew Rothschild - The Progressive. Commentary in favor of government intervention to reduce gasoline prices.
• Pitt and Jolie to team up for "Atlas Shrugged"? - New York Post. Lionsgate Films has bought the rights to the film version of the 1957 novel, considered in many polls to be one of the most influential books in history.
• A paper trail to the White House, by Lorraine Ahearn - News & Record (Greensboro, NC). On the appointment of Tony Snow as White House spokesman.

Greg Perkins has further thoughts at Noodle food, if you haven't been there already.

State to Metastasize to "Fight Cancer"

Texas has just moved a little closer to passing a one dollar per pack cigarette tax.

Why not just ban tobacco outright? That would be too obvious an assault on freedom. Then why not eliminate such "sin taxes" altogether? Because that would stick everyone with the bill for the cancer caused by the fact that, presumably, more fools who choose to smoke.

If we want to continue to remain free, more of us have to reject the notion that it is okay for the state to make us pay for the foolishness of others. Until this happens, their foolishness is our foolishness and, for supporters of such notions, justifiably so.

Recycled Ideas

And speaking of foolishness....


I love this Cox and Forkum cartoon on "The Real Recycling Problem"! It isn't that more of us need to recycle. It's that fewer of us ought to listen uncritically to the recycled ideas that emanate from the left.

Graduate School vs. Passion

Toiler has a very interesting link on why so many lovers of literature are staying away from graduate school in droves. One of my undergraduate majors was English Literature. While my decision not to pursue this in graduate school was based on many other things, I would certainly stay away now for such reasons. And I do sometimes wonder how my life might have been different were our educational system not afflicted from top to bottom with so many empty enthusiams standing in the stead of actual education....

Mesmerizing

Follow the links to see a video loop of a busy, chaotic intersection in India at which, somehow, no one gets killed! I'll never complain about driving in Houston again, and that's saying something!

-- CAV

Would that be "Always"?

There's a Jeff Jacoby piece at the Boston Globe on "When parents' values conflict with public schools" that spends too much time on the "culture wars" aspect of whether and when to teach children about homosexuality, and too little (read: none) on whether we should have public education at all.

Most of the article focuses on the fact that Kerry Healey, the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts (and a gubernatorial candidate), said, in the way of explaining why she sends her children to private schools, "I want my kids to be in an environment where they can talk about values ... in a way that you can't always do in a public school setting."

The article then notes the divide between liberals (one of whom claims that Healey is "out of touch with the lives of regular people") and ordinary citizens (who are shocked, for example, at their second grade children being read a story that ended in a gay marriage in class).

Although polls show that a slight majority of Americans favor civil unions for gay couples, I think that the article is probably correct that most Americans would be unhappy about such a matter being introduced to their children at such a young age.

In fact, although I regard homosexuality to be a moral issue about on a par with hair color, I would prefer to at least know beforehand how the matter was dealt with in school for children that young. Indeed, I am not so sure children that young should have to think about sexual matters at all. As a parent, I would really appreciate the government butting out and letting me make up my own mind how and when to introduce my children to this subject.

So the article gets one issue right....

But homosexuality and gay marriage are not like subtraction or geography; they cannot be separated from questions of morality, justice, and decency. No matter how a school chooses to deal with sexual issues, it promotes certain values -- values that some parents will fervently welcome and that others will just as fervently reject. And what is true of human sexuality is true of other issues that touch on deeply felt religious, political, or ideological values. [bold added]

... while completely missing a more important point.

When it comes to the education of children, there is always an agenda -- and those who don't share that agenda too often find themselves belittled, marginalized, or ignored. Perhaps it was true, as Thomas Reilly says, that the public schools his children attended "reinforced the values of our home." But as the Parkers and Wirthlins in Lexington can testify, other families have a very different experience. When Kerry Healey says she wants her children "to be in an environment where they can talk about values ..... in a way that you can't always do in a public school setting," many public-school parents will know exactly what she means.

Great. You've defended Kerry Healey. But it is not some politician's choice to send her children to private schools that needs defending. It's the right of every parent not to have money taken from him for the purpose of indoctrinating his children (or at all) that needs defending!

The only way to avoid having the government screw up large numbers of children at once by exposing them to things they aren't ready for -- or, conversely, to teach the mores of, say, a specific religious faith -- is to privatize the schools.

And I could be mistaken in my view that young children should not be exposed to the concept of homosexuality. So what if I am? The government has no business imposing any ideology (even a correct one), be it a theory of psychological development, a political ideology, or a religion. This necessarily means that the government has no business being involved in education.

For even the theories on such things as how best to educate children, what constitutes proper subject matter, and how best to arrive at knowledge in the first place are all based on some ideological perspective by their very nature.

I should not be forced to endorse any of these, have my children used as guinea pigs for any of these, or be involved in making children captive audiences to ideas I oppose.

Jacoby discusses some big issues in his piece, but the biggest one is this: Why is it that in the very state Paul Revere called home, it has come to pass that a candidate for office is being held to account for doing something that is her right? And why is that same right is made more difficult for everyone there to exercise by the taxation required to support the public schools?

-- CAV

Jurists for Reform in Egypt

In Egypt, there is an encouraging movement among members of the judiciary, which has some popular support, seeking greater independence from the government.

The judiciary not being independent is, of course, bad in itself. However, if you needed any further proof that the government of Egypt does not regard itself as being in the business of protecting the rights of its citizens, you got it today. According to The New York Times:

Thousands of riot police officers sealed off access to the High Court on Thursday, beating and arresting protesters who had turned out to support two judges facing a disciplinary panel because they had accused the government of election fraud.

Police beat and arrested protesters who turned out to support two judges brought before a disciplinary panel in Cairo.

The huge show of force, appearing larger even than what was deployed in the Sinai after four bombings there this week, seemed to signal that President Hosni Mubarak's government had reached a breaking point over shows of dissent.

The focus was a relatively small demonstration over the treatment of the two judges and in support of more than 80 others who had been staging a sit-in for more than a week at the stately old Judges Club to demand an independent judiciary. [link dropped, bold added]

Read the rest. 7,000 of Egypt's 9,000 judges are pressing for reforms, including the right to monitor elections.

-- CAV

First Mo, then the Saudi Flag

The Weekly Standard has a very good post mortem -- including a concise summary of the South Park episodes that indicated our defeat -- on the cartoon wars. Its verdict, delivered as the subtitle to the article, is that we lost.

"Ever since those cartoons in Denmark, the rules have changed. Nobody shows an image of Muhammad anymore." When a character on the animated TV show South Park made that avowal a few weeks ago, he could easily have been speaking for media outlets across Europe and North America. This past winter's Cartoon Jihad occasioned far fewer robust defenses of press freedom than it did craven surrenders to the threats of radicals. Now, even South Park, Comedy Central's irreverent powerhouse, has felt the backlash.

Recent events would seem to confirm that verdict. We can look at Germany to see what is in store for us if we do not reverse the sorry trend started by our willingness to self-censor mere cartoons. A couple of weeks ago, I briefly noted that a hotel in a German resort town was taking down pictures of naked women from its health spa, for fear of "offending" its expected Saudi overlor-- um customers.

A closer look at the article shows that it wasn't just the hotel, but the whole town, and it wasn't just the removal of a few pieces of artwork glorifying the human body that was being done. It is worthwhile to reproduce part of the story here, for only in doing so can I convey the true extent of Germany's voluntary self-degradation and the unlimited appetite for domination in some quarters of its Moslem population. The nation, once known as "the land of poets and philosophers", is all but prostrate at the feet of barbarians.

"There are 20 tasteful portrait photos, but out of courtesy there will be no skin and no breasts," [hotel manager Michel Prokop] added.

There are also five art nouveau paintings hanging in a theatre in the park that belongs to the hotel. The paintings by Wilhelm Kleukens feature naked boys wearing wings - and will come down.

"We're following some basic 'do's and don'ts'. The whole staff is taking cross cultural training sessions to make them aware of the differences of Germany and Saudi Arabia."

Prokop, who lived in Egypt for two years said all 123 hotel staff members have been taking eight-hour courses in sensitivity training and on top of that are learning some basic Arabic phrases such as "Hello", "Welcome" and "Have a nice day".

"Among the things they're learning is about dress codes, that skirts should not be too short," he said, using words last heard in Germany in the 1960s.

"To avoid all problems, all women staffers are going to wear trousers instead of dresses."

...

"We will leave the Pay-TV on in their rooms but the porn movie channels will of course be turned off," said Prokop, 47.

"All the alcohol will be removed from the mini bars and replaced with soft drinks," he added.

...

With the help of the local Islamic community, the hotel will set up a separate prayer room and will also remove bibles from Saudi rooms.

...

"We're very excited to be hosting Saudi Arabia," said Prokop. Saudi Arabia flags will be hoisted atop about 30 public buildings in the town in honour of the visitors. [bold added]

The article makes it clear that the obsequiousness stems in part from the fact that the town has historic commercial ties to the desert kingdom. But really: If Arabs are so easily offended, why would you want to revive such ties? Hell. Why would you want anything to do with them?

By itself, the town's festooning itself with Saudi flags would not really be such a big deal. Heck, it is conceivable -- even in this day and age -- that some backward hamlet somewhere might even do that very same favor for the U.S. of A. were it to host our national team.

And even in the context of the above laundry list of things the Saudis will profess to disdain, but indulge in on the sly, my choice to mention the flags may seem over the top.

But it isn't. Via the Belmont Club, Tigerhawk notes a story that indicates that the German town of Bad Nauheim -- even in flying the Saudi flag -- may be playing with fire! He quotes an article from Spiegel Online.

A German brothel seeking to drum up business during the World Cup has been forced to remove the national flags of Saudi Arabia and Iran from an array of flags on its facade after threats from Muslims saying it was insulting their faith....

A giant poster covering the side of the seven-story, 126-apartment building showed a friendly-looking blonde woman lifting up her bra above the slogan "A Time to Make Girlfriends", in a play on the World Cup's official slogan "A Time to Make Friends." Right beneath her pink panties were posters of the flags, including those of strictly Islamic Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Pascha's manager Armin Lobscheid had also erected real flags of all the World Cup nations on another side of the building.

The campaign provoked excitement, but not the kind the management was hoping for. Men from the Muslim community came to the door complaining that showing the flags of Saudi Arabia and Iran was an insult to the Prophet Muhammad. Later, some returned in masks.

"On Friday evening we were threatened by 11 masked men who demand that we take down the Saudi Arabian flag," Lobscheid told the [Koelner] Express, a local newspaper. Not wanting any trouble, the brothel obliged and removed it and the Iranian one. But that still left the flags printed on the poster.

"On Saturday night there were 20 masked men armed with knives and sticks. They threatened to get violent and even bomb the place unless we black out the Iranian and Saudia Arabian flags on the poster as well," said Lobscheid.

There is a picture of the poster, with a blacked-out flag, over at Tigerhawk.

Tigerhawk's commentary narrowly misses nailing it on why this has come to pass.

First, if it is blasphemous in the minds of Muslims to denigrate the flag of Iran, how will Muslims the world over react to Western criticism of the government of that country? Yes, we have always expected that Muslims will to some degree naturally rally to the side of Muslim governments that stand up to the United States. What will we do if large numbers of Muslims living in the West claim that criticism of Muslim governments is blasphemous? Will that fact undermine the ability of the West to contain Iran and other Muslim powers?

Second, what are the implications of this for the American legal system, particularly civil rights laws? For better or for worse, American law usually defines discrimination according to the sensitivities of the plaintiff. If an employer expresses the political opinion that "We should bomb Iran to kingdom come," has he just created a hostile work environment for his Muslim employees, actionable under U.S. law? Under the logic of the brothel vigilantes, why not? [This is happening already. See below. --ed]

Third, the German Muslim vigilantes did not seem to care that Iran is Shiite and Saudi Arabia is Sunni. Both national flags were seen as a proxy for Islam the religion. If disaffected European Muslims take this point of view, why should we assume that other radicals won't? Beware the claims of Western analysts that Sunnis and Shiites won't work together, at least in the confronting of non-Muslims.

Fourth, if the perspective of the brothel vigilantes are not uncommon in the Muslim community, what does this say about the claimed distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? If the denigration of the flags of Muslim nations is equivalent to insulting Muslims, how can it be that denigration of Israel is not equivalent to anti-Semitism? [bold added]

Legally, the problem is that discrimination, although it is immoral and stupid, should not be illegal. Why? Because the law should protect individual rights, which are ultimately based on man's nature as a rational animal and his need to be free from the initiation of force by others to use his mind to survive.

Being "offended" in no way makes someone less able to survive. Indeed, when the law punishes someone who has merely "offended" someone else, it necessarily infringes upon his right to freedom of expression. And it may violate other rights as well. Furthermore, since we can't read minds, the notion of "offense" lends itself very nicely to abuse.

And the fact that "offense" has been enshrined into law in the West, often for laudable if misguided reasons, has opened to door for barbarians to take advantage of that fact -- by using the legal system to attack actual rights. CAIR is well-known for doing just this, after the example set for it by America's corrupt "civil rights" establishment.

Worse still, the doctrines of multiculturalism remain very influential even after such events as last year's London subway bombings drew attention to its role in weakening the cultural confidence of the West in the face of Islamic barbarity. Recall the following post-bombing exchange between Salman Rushdie and George Galloway.

[Galloway] said: "You have to be aware if you do [offend people's beliefs] you will get blowback. You should do it very carefully, especially if you are a public service broadcaster."

"Is that a threat?" asked Rushdie during the debate at the Media Guardian Edinburgh international television festival.

Describing Mr Galloway's argument as "craven", the author said: "The simple fact is that any system of ideas that decides you have to ringfence it, that you cannot discuss it in fundamental terms, that you can't say that this bit of it is junk, or that bit is oppressive ... we are supposed to respect that?"

And now, consider this recent incident (HT: TIA Daily), which shows the synergistic effects of multiculturalism and America's legal environment to stifle freedom of speech.

A Michigan State University professor who referred to Muslims as "brutal and uncivilized" and urged Islamic students to return to their "ancestral homelands" came under fire from a civil rights group on Monday.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations called engineering professor Indrek Wichman's remarks "Islamaphobic" and issued a statement quoting the e-mail that prompted the controversy.

"The university needs to take appropriate disciplinary action in this case to demonstrate through its actions that anti-Muslim bigotry will not be tolerated on campus," said Dawud Walid, head of the rights group's Michigan chapter.

...

A spokesman for MSU said Wichman had been warned that any further comments of a similar kind could prompt a formal complaint under the university's anti-discrimination policy.

...

Wichman said his remarks were meant as a defense of free speech. "It's not a call for mass deportation or vigilantism," he said. "I just care deeply about the First Amendment and the right to say what you think."

His suggestion that Muslims uncomfortable with America's open culture should leave was not unreasonable, Wichman said, adding that he hoped the controversy would die down soon.

Thanks to the pervasive influence of multiculturalism, it is CAIR here which sounds more mainstream, and Professor Wichman, the lone voice of reason in the wilderness, who sounds -- by comparison -- like a loose cannon!

And thanks to misguided legislation and institutional policies that have been on the books for decades in some cases -- and to which the American public is used, if not favorably disposed toward -- the legal and institutional machinery already exists to basically steamroll the good Professor.

First, silly cartoons of Mohammed, and now the flags of intolerant Saudi Arabia and genocidal Iran are to be treated -- by Westerners -- as if they are holy relics! And, as I noted this morning, this pattern of escalation is wholly consistent with that on other fronts in the Islamic War Against Civilization.

Hmmm. Yasser Arafat harasses Israel with murder and mayhem for decades -- and gets them to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza. So is it really any big surprise that Iran is building nukes and threatening to launch them at Israel -- and calling for them to withdraw from Israel altogether?

And so it will be with our rights, which are, by the way necessary for us to live at all, let alone live lives proper to man.

How much more of this will we have to take before we fight back on more than just a military front? How much more can our civilization take? So far, it looks like, "too much" and "too little" are the answers to these questions.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Nick Provenzo is organizing a freedom of speech rally in DC. If you can't actually attend, consider donating. It sounds like such things can be expensive.

Around the Web on 4-26-06

Song of the Day: Taps

Diana Hsieh has a very lengthy, but extremely worthwhile post on her long and systematic betrayal by Chris Sciabarra. This passage, I think, best characterizes his modus operandi.

As Chris says, the "fundamental differences" between us "on many, many significant questions" are fairly obvious. However, my views on important particulars, such his "dialectical" interpretation of Ayn Rand, are not at all obvious to bystanders. Moreover, I did not choose to remain silent about those particulars because I regarded them as unworthy of discussion, but out of concern to honor my prior friendship. Chris knows that. He also knows that our friendship was based upon his deceptions and manipulations. He knows that he's been whispering unjust lies about me behind my back. Yet he's content to keep me bound and gagged by my promise to him. A semi-honorable man would have released me from that promise in this blog post, so that we could duke out our differences in the open. Then again, a man with genuine confidence in the value of his work would not have accepted that promise in the first place.

As someone who has been betrayed, she has my sympathy; as a writer, my respect. And as one whose opinion, that "promoting the highest standards of objectivity in scholarship on Ayn Rand and Objectivism is ... of particular pressing importance", is essentially the same as my own, she has my thanks.

And be sure to peruse the comments. Nick Provenzo makes a particularly good point about how such opponents of the Ayn Rand Institute so frequently paste supporters of ARI with the charge that they demand "loyalty oaths". I think this fits in quite well with an observation on Diana's part that some of Sciabarra's behavior towards her was a form of psychological projection.

I look forward to reading her eventual critique of Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical.

And what do I mean by the title of this section? You may have to dig a little. Dig?

Alida Valli, RIP

Via Randex, I have learned that the actress who played Kira in the bootleg movie version of Ayn Rand's We the Living made in Fascist Italy, has died.

Gas Fumes


Cox and Forkum very nicely sum up the hypocrisy of every American who complains about the oil companies raising prices for gasoline.

I vaguely recall reading an economist somewhere who lamented the fact that the word "wage" is used instead of the less-loaded phrase "labor price". That four-letter word certainly does provide a convenient cover for statists who seek to increase government interference with the economy when prices for other commodities go up.

24

Help my shipmate! Willy Shake has a cat whose weight is "the same number of pounds as the title of a popular TV show on Fox".

I have a cat with a similar problem, but with the added twist that I have an older cat who needs food around all the time. So my advice to Willy, if he doesn't already do this, is to give his cat limited quantities of food twice or three times a day.

So if anyone has any ideas he -- or I -- can use, leave a comment or drop a line, and thanks in advance.

Soviet Submarine Base Pictures

There's one and links to more over at The Stupid Shall Be Punished. Sez Bubblehead: "The pictures at Fun Mansion really look like the base was straight out of a James Bond movie..." I agree.

Iran is the New PLO

Hmmm. Yasser Arafat harasses Israel with murder and mayhem for decades -- and gets them to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza. So is it really any big surprise that Iran is building nukes and threatening to launch them at Israel -- and calling for them to withdraw from Israel altogether?

The president of Iran, depending on what moment it is, will deny the holocaust, threaten Israel with one, or tell the Germans to "let go of [their] anti-Judaism". Read the whole thing and ask yourself why the hell anyone at all would seriously consider negotiating with (which entails speaking with) this regime. It is incredible that this has gone on for as long as it has.

How do you say ...

... "without a clue" in Portuguese?

Contradiction Required

Mike's Eyes quotes from a Q&A from the Sunday print edition of The Detroit News.

Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac to prove his faith, and he did so without knowing that God would send an angel to stay his hand at the last moment. In order for Abraham to pass this ultimate test he had to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. He had to believe that the God of love and justice would never ask him to sacrifice his innocent, beloved son, but he also had to believe that the God who gives life deserved to be obeyed completely. In holding both beliefs, Abraham passed the test and was not required to sacrifice Isaac. [Mike's italics]

I'd say that it was his mind -- though not in so many words -- that Abraham was asked to sacrifice.

Being Intoxicated is No Excuse

I've been meaning to point to this for awhile. The General quotes from a very good legal opinion.

The rationale behind our long-standing rule as to voluntary ingestion of intoxicants and drugs is apparent. An individual who places himself in a position to have no control over his actions must be held to intend the consequences. Such a principle is absolutely essential to the protection of life and property.

Read more if you want to see a legal opinion which actually uses the phrase "inestimable gift of reason"!

Note that if this was an April Fool's joke, it was posted 11 days too late!

Archivist to Speak at NYU

Mike at Passing Thoughts notes that there is to be an interesting talk by an ARI archivist on "The History of the Objectivist Campus Club Movement" to be held, ironically enough, at NYU, which recently would not permit its campus club to display images of my blog's mascot.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Fixed some bad HTML.

Glassman Nails Bush to the Wall

There's an excellent article up by James Glassman over at TCS Daily that you should read, in which he rightly slams George Bush -- an oilman for Pete's sake -- for not standing up to the gas price demagogues today. Although Glassman focuses on Bush's weaknesses on energy policy, it is worth noting that his piece reiterates many of the points I made recently when I asked whether Bush was "less than or equal to Carter".

First, we'll get his good ideas out of the way since he immediately undercut them with his idiotic "addiction" analogy -- after first timidly offering them in diluted form, as Glassman points out in the last paragraph below.

[The President's] best ideas were to urge Congress to cut the red tape involved in building new refineries and expanding old ones (he pointed out that a new refinery hasn't been built here in 30 years) and to call for fewer boutique fuel mixtures (condemning an "uncoordinated and overly complex set of fuel rules") and for a slowdown in the timetable for mixing ethanol with gasoline, again to meet government mandates. It's clear that shortages and price spikes are the result of an inability to move ethanol, whose production is still a cottage industry, around the country.

Bush also made a forthright plea to open up a small part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for exploration, pointing out that, if such a move had been made 10 years ago, we'd be producing a million extra barrels a day (the U.S. uses about 16 million, of which roughly two-thirds is imported), and he said that "we can find crude oil in our own country in environmentally friendly ways."

But these ideas were mainly rhetoric. The right approach would have been to end the boutique fuels and ethanol nonsense once and for all. He should have pinned the blame where it belonged -- on Congress, for refusing to take steps to encourage drilling on the Continental Shelf and for pandering to the ethanol (that is, corn) lobby by forcing drivers to use a pricey fuel with little environmental value. [bold added]

Glassman then ticks off a few more important things after he first quotes himself to point out that, "America is no more addicted to oil than it is addicted to bread, to milk, to paper, to water, to computers or, in the immortal words of the late Robert Palmer, to love." To which I can only add -- by quoting myself:

Our country needs energy. To call our extensive use of oil an "addiction" from which we must "recover" is disingenuous and should be stopped at once. When a schoolyard bully steals your milk money, you don't let him keep taking the money while you recover from your "milk addiction". You don't give him money, while trying to smuggle in more milk money. You don't smuggle in powdered milk. You don't waste a bunch of time looking for "milk substitutes". You take the bully on, enlisting the aid of your friends if need be. You whip his ass and then you go right on drinking milk.

The "bully" in my essay was foreign governments who steal private property (i.e., oil fields) unchallenged -- and their domestic sympathizers in the environmentalist movement and other leftist quarters who keep on throttling the oil industry at home.

Glassman also rightly slams the whole idea of the government scapegoating -- I mean, "investigating" -- private industry for the price increases.

After talking about addiction, the President said he was going to crack down on price gouging -- that old bugaboo. He said he had asked the Justice and Energy departments to find out whether the rising price of gas was partly the result of manipulation. This is absurd. The gasoline market is broad, fragmented and highly competitive. Price gouging has been studied many times, to no effect. Gas prices are rising because crude oil prices are rising.

All Bush has to do is read Chapter 11 of his own "Economic Report of the President," which concludes, first, that "the prices that consumers...pay for gasoline depend heavily on the prices that petroleum refiners pay for crude oil," and, second, that "crude oil prices have risen steadily over the past several years due to growing world demand."

In addition, this has been a tough year for geopolitical risk -- which tends to boost oil prices in the futures markets. Chad, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela -- all have been subject to real or potential supply disruptions. And the Persian Gulf remains a dangerous place. [bold added]

Did I read that right? Chapter 11? Well, Bush is intellectually bankrupt....

I would add to Glassman's observation that Bush, as an oilman, knows better than to babble about price gouging, that Bush, as a wartime President knows why our foreign supplies are a wee bit shaky. This pandering to the economically illiterate and the Democrat base not only fails to make the case for his good ideas, it sets the stage for the Democrats, leading up to the mid-term elections, to propose far worse measures than Bush's "war on oil addiction" or "war on price gouging" or whatever he wants to call it. And the Dems will look more sincere when they do it, too.

And then Glassman points out that any talk of taxing the so-called (by Jimmah Carter and his Republican soul-mate, Arlen Specter) "windfall profits" will discourage further domestic oil exploration.

Imagine you're the CEO of an oil company today, listening to Specter talk about a windfall profits tax, the President go on about "addiction" or Frist about "price gouging." Your main job as CEO is to allocate capital, to decide where to put your shareholder's money for the long term. Are you encouraged to make "strong re-investment [of] cash flows" in this environment? I doubt it. Maybe the best idea is to stash the cash in Treasury bills or buy a retail chain or give the money back to investors. [bold added]

If politicians truly want oil companies to invest in drilling and refineries, the best tactic is to recognize that these firms are not villains. Gosh, maybe they're even heroes.

On that last point, maybe the President could begin to refresh his memory by watching "Oil, Sweat, and Rigs" some time.

Will Bush come to his senses before Glassman comes off sounding like a prophet? Will the congressional Republicans? Will there be a revolt among the small-government conservatives? Or will the GOP act like the Democratic Party until the real thing takes office in November?

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 50

This "quick" roundup, unlike yesterday's, has lived up to its name!

A Warning from Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer recently penned a column that contained the following excellent point concerning the six retired generals who have been denouncing the Bush administration and calling for Rumsfeld's head.

... These generals are no doubt correct in asserting that they have spoken to and speak on behalf of some retired and, even more important, some active-duty members of the military.

But that makes the generals' revolt all the more egregious. The civilian leadership of the Pentagon is decided on Election Day, not by the secret whispering of generals.

We've always had discontented officers in every war and in every period of our history. But they rarely coalesce into factions. That happens in places such as Hussein's Iraq, Pinochet's Chile or your run-of-the-mill banana republic. And when it does, outsiders (including the United States) do their best to exploit it, seeking out the dissident factions to either stage a coup or force the government to change policy.

That kind of dissident party within the military is alien to America. Some other retired generals have found it necessary to rise to the defense of the administration. Will the rest of the generals, retired or serving, now have to declare which camp they belong to?

It is precisely this kind of division that our tradition of military deference to democratically elected civilian superiors was meant to prevent. Today it suits the antiwar left to applaud the rupture of that tradition. But it is a disturbing and very dangerous precedent that even the left will one day regret. [bold added]

Great. While most of us are asleep, the Left is undermining something else -- subordination of our military to civilian leadership -- that we seem to take for granted.

I guess Prager will have to shut it, now....

Dennis Prager, whose columns are usually masterpieces of evasion, writes one on a subject I recently blogged here. The other day, I discussed the similarities between today's Left and religion. Prager tries to tackle the question, "Why are so many Jews liberal?" and basically summarizes my whole point, which is that there is no rational basis for choosing any particular religion. He just says so in a more roundabout and serendipitous way.

After simply asserting that Jewish "preoccupation" with "this world" necessarily entails leftism, Prager lays this self-descriptive beauty on us.

Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every "ism" of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism. Jews involved in these movements believe in them with the same ideological fervor and same suspension of critical reason with which many religious people believe in their religion. It is therefore usually as hard to shake a liberal Jew's belief in the Left and in the Democratic Party as it is to shake an evangelical Christian's belief in Christianity. The big difference, however, is that the Christian believer acknowledges his Christianity is a belief, whereas the believer in liberalism views his belief as entirely the product of rational inquiry. [bold added]

So, which is it, Dennis? Are your religion and political views (just) "beliefs", or are you, unlike "many religious people", somehow not guilty of a "suspension of critical reason"? Are your beliefs "the product of rational inquiry"? If so, deomonstrate to me the existence of your God, the lynchpin of your worldview. Oh. I didn't think you could. And since you just admitted that you see no rational basis for your political beliefs, does this mean you'll stop lecturing everyone else about them? Oh. But that would, in and of itself, be rational....

You said it, not me, although I heartily agree.

Why are mushroom clouds not in Tehran's forecast?

Via Thrutch come the following chants from an "Islamic Thinkers' rally" near the Israeli consulate in Manhattan.

The mushroom cloud is on its way! The real Holocaust is on its way!

Islam is the only solution, Islam will dominate the world.

One side in this war has a press that calls a mindless gathering of thugs a "thinker's rally" and leaders who call diplomatic standoffs with two "axis of evil" nations who are developing nuclear weapons a "war". This would be very funny if I weren't on the side which has forgotten that words have meanings.

Visit Thrutch for links to more, including footage. (Note: There is a long intro which cannot be completely skipped before the button Amit Ghate refers to shows up.)

-- CAV

Yale to Hire a Blogger!

John Fund continues his outstanding coverage of Yale's betrayal -- via the enrollment of a Taliban official with an elementary school education -- of academic standards, its proud history, and its country.

Being an academic who will blog under a pseudonym for the foreseeable future thanks to advice from none other than The Chronicle of Higher Education (HT: Noodle Food), I was rather amused and amazed at the twist that the story has taken.

Fund, after he first reports that Yale appears to be looking for a way to bow to pressure (without appearing to bow to pressure) to "lose" the Taliban official, notes that the university is apparently getting ready to "stick it" to alumnus, George Bush, in another way -- by hiring far-left moonbat blogger Juan Cole!

Mr. Cole's appointment would be problematic on several fronts. First, his scholarship is largely on the 19th-century Middle East, not on contemporary issues. "He has since abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary," says Michael Rubin, a Yale graduate and editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Mr. Cole's postings at his blog, Informed Comment, appear to be a far cry from scholarship. They feature highly polemical writing and dubious conspiracy theories. [bold added]

Compare this to what the Chronicle says about the usual shift given to bloggers who apply for academic positions. I present the two things most pertinent to the case of Juan Cole.

The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.

A blog easily becomes a therapeutic outlet, a place to vent petty gripes and frustrations stemming from congested traffic, rude sales clerks, or unpleasant national news. It becomes an open diary or confessional booth, where inward thoughts are publicly aired.

Worst of all, for professional academics, it's a publishing medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor. The author is the sole judge of what constitutes publishable material, and the medium allows for instantaneous distribution. After wrapping up a juicy rant at 3 a.m., it only takes a few clicks to put it into global circulation.

...

It would never occur to the committee to ask what a candidate thinks about certain people's choice of fashion or body adornment, which countries we should invade, what should be done to drivers who refuse to get out of the passing lane, what constitutes a real man, or how the recovery process from one's childhood traumas is going. But since the applicant elaborated on many topics like those, we were all ears. And we were a little concerned. It's not our place to make the recommendation, but we agreed a little therapy (of the offline variety) might be in order. [bold added]

So let's pretend we're on a hiring committee at Yale and ask ourselves why, exactly, we'd like to hire someone whose blog expresses agreement with a paper even Noam Chomsky won't touch with a ten-foot pole....

Mr. Cole says that he is often unfairly attacked for being anti-Semitic, when in reality he claims he is only critical of Israeli policy. But Michael Oren, a visiting fellow at Yale, notes that in February 2003 Mr. Cole wrote on his blog that "Apparently [President Bush] has fallen for a line from the neo-cons in his administration that they can deliver the Jewish vote to him in 2004 if only he kisses Sharon's ass." Mr. Oren says "clearly that's anti-Semitism; that's not a criticism of Israeli policy." (Exit polls showed that 74% of the Jewish vote went to John Kerry.)

Mr. Cole appears to be the only prominent academic in America to have embraced "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," a highly controversial paper by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard. Mr. Cole told the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday that the paper argues the "virtually axiomatic" point held by the rest of the world that a "powerful pro-Israel lobby exists." The result is that "U.S. policy toward the Middle East has been dangerously skewed."

But the paper has been roundly attacked for sloppy generalizations. The two authors claim that "neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for Israel." Even Noam Chomsky, a far-left critic of Israel, wrote that we "have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion." But Mr. Cole praises the two professors for seeking "to end the taboo [on discussions of the "Israel lobby"], enforced by knee-jerk accusations of anti-Semitism." [bold added]

Are these merely Cole's "unfiltered thoughts" -- or are they his professional opinions? Does Yale want a loose cannon or a crackpot, and why? And how will having hired someone like this undo the damage that Yale has already done to itself by enrolling that Taliban fellow?

And consider Cole's respect for freedom of speech.

Mr. Cole wants to enforce his own taboos on free expression. In February, he told the Detroit Metro Times that the federal government should close the leading cable news channel. "I think it is outrageous that Fox Cable News is allowed to run that operation the way it runs it," he said in summarizing his view that Fox "is polluting the information environment." He went on to claim that "in the 1960s the FCC would have closed it down. It's an index of how corrupt our governmental institutions have become, that the FCC lets this go on." [!]

Appointing someone as hotheaded and intolerant as Mr. Cole to a prestigious appointment at Yale wouldn't seem to make any sense. The drive to hire him can be explained in part by the same impulses that prompted Yale to admit Mr. Hashemi. "Perhaps the folks who still want to let Taliban Man into the degree program are also thinking Cole would make a great faculty advisor for him," jokes Mr. Taylor, the alumnus leading the NailYale protest. [bold added]

To the contrary, it is an "index" of how far our culture has declined that a prestigious university is seriously considering Cole for employment, and that he furthermore has employment in higher education in the first place! Of course, Yale probably thinks it will get away with this, considering how common people like Cole are on university faculties these days.... Perhaps, in bringing this little matter up, Yale has unwittingly brought it to the table for a public debate. Lord knows, it's about time.

This hire would be an even worse sin than the prior one, for Cole, as a faculty member, would have the chance to shape the next generation of students from Yale. If nothing else, credit them for philosophical consistency: If they can't have an actual participant in a regime that stifled free speech, they'll settle for an advocate of the same thing.

I hope the folks who are up in arms over Hashemi seize this opportunity to take this battle to the next level. If they do, Yale will have opened a can of worms that has been sitting on the shelf for, oh, about forty years too long.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 49

Touchdown?

Although I was very busy at the end of last week, I was up early Friday morning to post. So why didn't I? One of the worst thunderstorms I've seen in quite a while was going on basically directly overhead. I figured that rather than sit around at my keyboard waiting to lose power, get zapped, or both, I'd get some extra sleep while it rolled over.

Don't believe me? Being a Southerner, I know thunderstorms. This one sounded positively awful, and it included high winds (and may have spawned a tornado) that ripped the roof off a school within twenty minutes of where I live, in addition to causing power outages at others.

Blogger Down

And I was getting ready to post this morning when I noticed that Blogger wasn't cooperating. This affected comments as well. And, in case you're expecting updates here or at other blogs hosted at blogspot.com, it won't be happening today during the hour beginning at 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time.

[Update: I wrote the above during my second attempt to post this roundup, at lunch. I have only now gotten back to working on this post 13 hours after I started it!]

Trailblazing Pilot Passes Away

Reader Hannes Hacker marked some sad news: the recent death of the great test pilot, Scott Crossfield.

Record-setting test pilot Scott Crossfield, who helped pave the way for space exploration, has died in a north Georgia plane crash.

Crossfield, 84, of Herndon, Va., was alone in his single-engine, 1960s-era Cessna 210A when he crashed in rural Gordon County after leaving Prattville, Ala., bound for Herndon, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said. There were thunderstorms and hail reported in the area.

Crossfield made history on Nov. 20, 1953, when he became the first pilot to reach twice the speed of sound.

Lots of 'em are Democrats

Paul Hsieh's entry on the "Waiter Rule" is a must-read.

How can a busy CEO determine if one of his employees is genuinely nice or is a jerk merely pretending to be nice in order to suck up to the boss? According to this article, the most reliable test is how he or she treats the waiter....

He goes on to note that the jerks "view others (either above or below them on the ladder) as merely a means to an end, and the key attribute they focus on with respect to other people is the power relationship". This type is merely annoying to observe. They are insufferable as superiors and should be avoided if at all possible. So go read the post if you haven't already. It's advice I could have used years ago.

Kinda reminds me of John F. "Don't you know who I am?" Kerry....

Landmark Bridge in Rhode Island Demolished

Lubber's Line, who was reminded of his Navy days by a recent post of mine on the Antarctic, coincidentally recently reminded me of one of my past lives. His news of the demolition of the Jamestown Bridge prompted me to refresh my Rhode Island geography a bit.

Way back when I was just out of college and making my way through Naval Officer Candidate School, it was located in Newport, Rhode Island, adjacent to Narragansett Bay, and therefore in plain sight of a very high suspension bridge which everyone used as a metaphor for the sixteen weeks we had to endure. I distinctly remember the Chief in charge of our company having us chase off a flock of geese in a field -- by marching straight at them -- before he called us to a halt and had us look at the bridge for a moment. He helpfully reminded us that we were scarcely an eighth of the way across "the bridge" (i.e., in week two of the sixteen) before making us do push-ups among the bird droppings. We'll just say that geese lay more than one kind of "egg", and leave it at that....

OCS is, I am pretty sure, no longer in Newport, having moved, I think to Orlando, Florida and then perhaps to Pensacola. But is "the" bridge still there? I don't remember what the bridge was called, but Lubber's Line says that the Jamestown Bridge, which serves state route 138, crosses the "west passage of Narragansett Bay", which is clearly not the side closest to where OCS was.

Perhaps if Lubber's Line happens by, he can confirm that I am right, that "the bridge" I remember still stands -- or at least congratulate me on being lucid enough to remember what I did, and spry enough to type it all out!

-- CAV

Bush: Less than or Equal to Carter?

A few days ago, I saw a Dick Morris column whose warning was sound, but whose advice to Bush was lousy. Its title was, "Bush is turning into a Republican Jimmy Carter."

In the column, Dick Morris, usually an astute observer of the political scene, notices a symptom of something I have often complained about at this blog. The symptom:

Bush has truly become the Republican equivalent of President Jimmy Carter, out of control, dropping in popularity, unable to resume command.

Is he too tired or lazy to do so? Does he not believe in government doing very much in the first place? Or is he so preoccupied with Iraq that he can't divert his attention to new issues?

Even when he seeks to develop an issue, his approach is half-hearted and ineffective. It seems that on any issue other than taxes and terrorism, he has attention-deficit disorder.

The cause? Bush is a pragmatist. That is, he is someone for whom philosophical principles are floating abstractions, divorced from reality, and therefore irrelevant.

The principle of "consent of the governed", which he wrongly conflates with "democracy", a term which actually refers to "unlimited majority rule", is the animating force of his foreign policy in the MIddle East. His tenacity would be laudable if his implementation were guided consistently by a better appreciation of the full context in which "consent of the governed" becomes a principle of good government.

Namely, a nation that votes for tyranny has shown that it is indifferent at best to the notion of consent and the rational political discourse that the concept makes possible. And so we have Afghanistan being liberated so that it can threaten a convert from Islam to Christianity with death, Iraq making Islamic law a foundation of its political system, and Palestine electing a regime of our enemies, and not getting what it deserves in return: carpet bombing and a total blockade. All three places are, at best, candidates for a post World War II, Germany or Japan style of occupation.

The woozy notion of an "ownership society", by which Bush seems to imply some sort of endorsement of capitalism, he has betrayed by passing minor income tax cuts, while not trimming down the welfare state, or even reigning in its expansion, but greatly expanding it with his prescription drug benefit program. Whether or not spending cuts would have popular support, Bush, as the nation's most powerful Republican, has the bully pulpit -- the chance to at least make a case for them. He has not, with any regularity or consistency.

But where the weaknesses of Bush come together most egregiously is precisely at the point where I diverge from Dick Morris: Bush's bizarre (for wartime) state of the union address, which completely lacked direction, populated as it was with one microinitiative after another. Apropos of nothing, Bush introduced one item after another from a long laundry list in a speech most memorable for its denunciation of America's "oil addiction".

The entire speech struck me as attempt by Bush to be all things to all people, particularly Democrats. Dick Morris, for the rest of his column, basically advises Bush to take the Democrat agenda by the horns and show "leadership" in implementing it. This may or may not save his party from mid-term ruin in the short term, but this is terrible long-term advice. Why? It erases whatever few ideological distinctions exist between the two parties, and will cause the Democrats to look principled by comparison. Long-term, this advice will lead to Bush handing the Democrats his party's head on a platter just as surely as his current aimlessness will.

What else might Bush do to right the listing craft of his Presidency? This is pure fantasy, but he might perhaps consider standing up consistently for individual rights. This would entail an end to his mouthing of Democrat pieties and an offensive launched from the bully pulpit.

Consider again that phrase "addicted to oil". What has Bush done while taking cover under that powerful, but totally inappropriate, metaphor? For one thing, he has allowed the environmentalist crusade against the use of petroleum to replace a principled foreign policy of self-interest. (I outline this in some detail at the above link.) Rather than, say, taking over the oil fields of (at least) any country that supports terrorism, he has caved to the Democrats, who would hold that the oil in a given country belongs "to the people" -- not to the ones whose knowledge got it out of the ground, but to the ones whose ancestors happened to live there, which in practice means to their government.

Domestically, Bush has done no better. As Walter Williams points out, America is the world's third largest producer of oil -- and yet Bush has not once stood up to the environmentalists who have caused us to stop drilling in Alaska, off California, and in parts of the Gulf of Mexico. He once timidly brought up a plan to drill in the ANWR, and that went nowhere.

Our true supply problem is of our own doing. Large quantities of oil lie below the 20 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

The amount of land proposed for oil drilling is less than 2,000 acres, less than one-half of one percent of ANWR. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are about 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil in ANWR. But environmentalists' hold on Congress has prevented us from drilling for it.

They've also had success in restricting drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and off the shore of California. Another part of our energy problem has to do with refining capacity. Again, because of environmentalists' successful efforts, it's been 30 years since we've built a new oil refinery. [bold added]

And that bit about America having not built any new refineries in decades brings up another of Bush's failures. In addition to our crude supplies being made unreliable by weak foreign and domestic policies, environmentalists, never opposed by Bush, but for a temporary post-Katrina suspension of air quality regulations, have caused us to be squeezed yearly by inefficient use of what refining capacity we still have! As Brian P. Simpson points out in another column:

Although there are other causes of high gas prices, such as high gasoline taxes, the primary cause is environmental regulation. For example, environmental regulation significantly restricts drilling for oil in Alaska and on the continental shelf. More drilling could considerably increase the gasoline supply (up to 20% from greater Alaskan drilling alone) and thus lower prices.

Further, there are currently eighteen different gasoline formulations in use across the U.S., making it much more costly to produce and distribute gasoline. These blends aren't needed due to requirements of automobile engines, nor are they required by oil companies. The blends, including different ones used at different times of the year and in different states and cities, are forced on Americans by environmental regulations. [bold added]

But we haven't heard anything about that from our President or the Republican Party. Indeed, Republicans are hopping onto the "global warming" bus in droves! Aren't we at war? So why aren't we busy securing plentiful and reliable supplies of petroleum?

About the only thing Bush hasn't done (yet?) is impose Carter's silly price (read: supply) "controls". But we probably will get those when the Democrats take advantage of Republican silence and me-tooing to trounce them in the mid-term congressional elections.

Note the following news story: "Democrats Eager to Exploit Anger Over High Gas Prices".

Officials at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which advises House candidates, said they sent a memorandum to candidates on Thursday offering guidance on using the issue to their advantage. The memorandum includes a "sample statement" that recommends telling voters, "Americans are tired of giving billion-dollar tax subsidies to energy companies and foreign countries while paying record prices at the pump."

Increasing gasoline prices have put Republicans on the defensive at a time when they are counting on the economy to help offset the myriad other problems they face, starting with the Iraq war.

Republicans say they have spent years advocating policies that would reduce the reliance on imported oil, largely by promoting more domestic energy production, and they point to the energy bill that President Bush signed last August as a step in that direction. They said that the law encouraged conservation and greater use of ethanol in gasoline and that it would have done more for domestic oil supplies if Democrats had not fought so hard against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Republicans control both houses and the Presidency. So why aren't we drilling in the ANWR and talking about repealing the myriad environmentalist regulations favored by the Democrats by now? We are furthermore now faced with the prospect of the Democrats successfully pasting the Republicans with the blame they deserve even more, and getting into a position to cause more of the same!

The Republicans, by accepting the absurd notion that our nation's use of oil -- merely the most economically feasible energy source at the moment -- is like a drug addiction, are playing into the Democrats' hands, courting electoral defeat or making their own victory as good as an electoral defeat.

Our country needs energy. To call our extensive use of oil an "addiction" from which we must "recover" is disingenous and should be stopped at once. When a schoolyard bully steals your milk money, you don't let him keep taking the money while you recover from your "milk addiction". You don't give him money, while trying to smuggle in more milk money. You don't smuggle in powdered milk. You don't waste a bunch of time looking for "milk substitutes". You take the bully on, enlisting the aid of your friends if need be. You whip his ass and then you go right on drinking milk.

The Islamists, the Chavistas, and their intellectual "chickenhawk" alies in the Democratic Party are making it much more expensive for Americans to drive than it should be. Stand up to them, Mr. President. It's your job.


I voted for George Bush because he would, I thought, at least fight back against the Islamists. But as his second term wears on, his failure to adjust his policies during the war and his dismal domestic policy have made me very unhappy. Minus the idiot grin, the above picture and the remarks that went with it remind me of Jimmy Carter more than any other President I can remember.

(At best, Bush is refusing to impose price controls. This is very good. But why not go on the offensive? Why not make it clear once and for all that our problems are being greatly exacerbated by an irrational domestic energy policy? There is no need whatsoever to be on the defensive here!)

Less maliase, less government regulation of the ecomony, and more principled support of individual rights, please. This means less economic intervention at home and more military abroad.

At least try to make me think more of Ronald Reagan. Coming from me, that isn't asking much.

-- CAV

Three Must-Reads on China

As China's President visits America, it might be worthwhile to consider who the President is dealing with.

At FrontPage Magazine is this general overview of China's extensive and growing sphere of worldwide influence. Given our current nuclear confrontation with Iran, our long-running game of "six-party appeasement talk tag" with North Korea, and Iran's cozy relationship with Venezuela, three paragraphs are of particular interest. Here they are, in order:

(1) In the volatile Middle East, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran have become close energy partners with Beijing. In December, Kuwait, an important regional U.S. ally, signed a multi-billion dollar energy agreement with China to invest in the country's refinery and petrochemical infrastructure. At approximately the same time, Beijing began high-level discussions with OPEC to secure energy supplies from the organization's suppliers. Another U.S. ally, Saudi Prince Abdullah, visited China in January and signed several bilateral agreements to assist China in the development of its strategic reserves and refinery capacity.

Of particular concern to the West is China's close relationship with a nuclear obsessed Iran, borne from China's need for energy to run its growing economy and Iran's need for cheap manufactured goods for its young, Western-leaning population. With a $100 billion, 25-year investment by China's state-run energy enterprise Sinopec and an agreement to develop Iran's lucrative Yadavaran oil field, Beijing's continued presence in the country is virtually assured.

(2) ... Beijing continues to support a nuclear North Korea without hesitation or regret. The country's leadership role in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), comprised of member states Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, has raised fears among Western observers that the arrangement is a modern day "Warsaw Pact." The announcement this month by SCO secretary general Zhang Deguang that Mongolia, India, Pakistan and Iran would become permanent members in the near future has heightened concern.

(3) ... Venezuela's leftist agitator Hugo Chavez has become a close ally of China, regularly visiting Beijing and hosting high-level dignitaries from the country. "China offers the best option for breaking 100 years of U.S. domination," Chavez noted last year. In its haste to gain Beijing's favor, Caracas pledged to ship 300,000 barrels of crude a day to China in February, placing U.S.-Venezuela relations in a state of severe disrepair. Last month, U.S. Army General Bantz J. Craddock told a Senate Armed Services Committee, "More and more Chinese non-lethal equipment has been seen in Latin America and military officers from the region have become frequent students of Chinese military training."

And China's actions have not been limited to countries foreign to the United States. In addition to China's operating an extensive espionage network here, and possibly attacking an American citizen in his own home, its military has recently been implicated in a missile-smuggling case!

Wu told the undercover agent that the plan for getting the missiles out of China involved the help of a "corrupt customs broker" in China and falsified export papers, the statement said. The deal involved a "Gen. Wang" in China who was to supply the weapons.

China's military has been linked to past illicit arms deals, including the attempted sale of AK-47 assault rifles to Los Angeles street gangs.

This isn't that surprising to me. What surprises and disappoints me is that this is the first I've heard about the Chinese military attempting to sell weapons to our criminal element!

And finally, via TIA Daily, is an article whose title says it all: "Confront China's Support for Iran's Nuclear Weapons".

-- CAV

Snarling from the Religious Right

Via Rob Schumacher, I have learned of a column by Doug Giles in Townhall.com that is one of the most explicit endoresements of theocracy I have ever seen from the religious right. The whole thing has to be read to be believed.

Giles starts out slowly enough, merely reiterating his incorrect thesis -- that one cannot be a Christian and a liberal at the same time -- a few times, before he really gets going, more like a raving dipsomaniac than anything else.

His basic "argument" is pretty much the same that of as many other social conservatives, most notably Dennis Prager. Namely, he evades the many fundamental similarities between Christianity and socialism, while damning secularism through the proxy of the most outrageous excesses of the New Left. And his "conclusions" are 180 degrees from the truth. His biggest sin by far is that he basically equates separation of church and state with persecution of Christians!

As I summarized in a recent post (the last link):

The leftist's desire for a free lunch trumps the need to discover what about man requires him to have a moral code and what that moral code should be. And so the religionists, knowing that altruism also means that people may be commanded to give out these free lunches, egg on people like Richard Stallman. The desire to throttle capitalism makes any shred of pseudoscientific evidence in favor of "global warming" a cudgel by which the left can whip the public into a froth of panic -- during which legislation to ruin the economy can be passed. The religionists, seeing the opportunity to shackle independent minds everywhere, jump on the global warming bandwagon and even try to drive it themselves. The left preaches that objectivity is not really possible to man in any field, including science. The religionists take them at their word, call them heretics, and act as if they alone ever marshal facts and evidence for their beliefs.

The left, in abandoning reason, has made the choice between itself and religion into a choice between two religions, and has sold reason down the river in the process. It will be up to others to ensure that reason is offered again in the marketplace of ideas.

Thanks to the loony left, Giles feels quite comfortable making the standard fraudulent claim that America was somehow founded on "Christian principles" -- by men who took such great care to separate church and state that it was their official position that, "[T]he Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion".

And, lest someone like Giles get away with dismissing the Treaty of Tripoli as an aberration, it might be worthwhile to recall the wording of the Statute for Religious Freedom -- written by Thomas Jefferson and made into law.

We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities. [bold added]

Recall these words as we consider just a few points from this blasphemy against our forefathers that Doug Giles has penned.

1. Christianity to be scrubbed from government and whatever turf the government owns. Thanks to the liberals, the Ten Commandments have about as much acceptance in our government and their properties as Rush Limbaugh would at Al Franken's family reunion. The Judeo-Christian principles that formed the rock-solid foundation of this great American Experiment are now aggressively and consistently attacked by the lascivious left.

If . . . if . . . the secularists continue to stay behind the wheel of this American bus, you can kiss all semblance of Christianity good-bye in this heretofore God-graced government. Saint, you might as well say farewell to our government's recognizing Christmas and adios to Good Friday if you're going to vote the liberal ticket. If the secularists have it their way, Easter will be behind your keister, and you can kiss the Cross good-night as an acceptable public symbol that represents your faith and our nation's recognition of Christ's atoning work. [bold added]

In other words, it is not good enough to Doug Giles that he be free, as he is, to practice his faith. No. He must also have the government shoving it -- his faith -- down everyone else's throats. My principles are attacked from the left and the right on a daily basis, but you don't hear me screaming "persecution" and crying for Big Brother's protection. I counter the attacks with arguments. Perhaps it is because Giles has none of these that he needs the state to officially sponsor his views....

Has this man ever heard of Thomas Jefferson? Of Ethan Allen? Of any number of his forefathers who were familiar with religious persecution and saw that the only way to stop it effectively was to keep religion out of the state? Is he so foolish to believe that a Christian theocracy would not somehow find his faith heretical and un-Christian?

Does Doug Giles not know of these aspects of our nation's (and mankind's) history? Or does he not care?

2. Secularism to be continually mainlined into our public school system. Thanks to rabid, vapid secularism, our public schools and universities would rather you be a Rocky Horror super freak than a Christian. If your beliefs run to the bizarre or the banal; or if you want to smoke the same philosophical crack that Caligula, Nero, Castro or Lenin freebased, they'll accommodate you.

Our schools are totally open to anyone and to anything, unless, of course, you're a Christian. And if that's the case, then you're likely to get more sympathy from a badger with minimal sleep than you will from liberal educators who are hard at work making your life hard. Let me repeat: A vote for the secular left is a vote for Christianity to continue to be officially vilified on campus and for Christians to be ostracized in campus life. [bold added]

I, too, am unhappy with the use of government funds to indoctinate children with leftist propaganda at my expense. But unlike Giles, I do not work to make sure the government indoctrinates children with views I find more agreeable. Instead, I support the abolishment of public education, which would both make it easier for parents to afford to educate children as they see fit and impossible for a state bureaucracy to establish a state religion -- secular or otherwise.

But it is persecution of Christians, by Giles's dim lights for there not to be state-run religious schools. Just as the present freedom of college students everywhere to privately observe their faith using their own resources is "persecution" in his mind.

3. Public officials, employees and appointees to be pressured to hide their faith in the closet and suppress their public displays of belief in God lest they be grouped with Hitler, Osama, or Mussolini and then fired. Not only will the liberals aggressively work to prohibit the State from green lighting and recognizing Christianity as a legitimate and positive force in our land, they will also attempt to stifle Christians from influencing the path of government. [bold added]

Well, saint, that's the very height of gall!

Just what is Osama bin Laden trying to do? Establish an Islamic theocracy. As Doug Giles might put it, bin Laden would like to make Islam "prominent in the public square".

And given that there is no way for men to objectively communicate about religious matters, how, exactly, does Giles intend to demonstrate to me why his theocracy will somehow be better?

He can't. And this is why, as Ayn Rand once put it, "Anyone who resorts to the formula: 'It's so, because I say so,' will have to reach for a gun, sooner or later." This -- and not which sect is in charge -- is what is wrong with theocracy as such. This is why when anybody in government feels free to say, "It's so because I say it's so," the result is invariably bloody and repressive.

The reasons, Mr. Giles, that public officials whose personal beliefs are at odds with individual rights feel pressure to leave those beliefs out of their professional lives, are twofold. (1) Their pronouncements will appear to have the backing of the government, which is the only social institution for whom the use of force is permitted or appropriate. This would constitute an implied threat to anyone of a differing opinion. (2) If they act against individual rights, they are failing to uphold their oaths of office. In short, such officials are acting, more or less like Osama bin Laden. In that sense, what you decry as "persecution" is, in fact, justice.

4. Public attacks on churches and Christians and attempts to restrict them in the private sector. Consider this, Christian pastor and Christian lay person looking to vote for the ludicrous left: the secular Mafioso's intent is to make your ministerial life difficult, your evangelistic work taxing and your voice minimized. And good luck, pastor and church committee, in trying to buy property and get zoning with the anti-Christian libs at the helm. [bold added]

Attacks? Does Giles mean that churches should be exempt from the same laws that govern everyone else, or that they should be the ones making them? How is the law applied to churches an "attack" against religion? I can only conclude that Giles sees anything other than subordination of the state to the church as an "attack" on religion.

It is highly instructive that Giles has nothing to say on the matter of how zoning and restrictions on the purchase of property by private parties are violations of individual rights and should be opposed on grounds more general than religious freedom, which is only a subset of individual rights.

5. The continued media endorsement of the same putrid, hedonistic stuff that sunk ancient civilizations. With the liberals in place, expect more weird crap in movies and on television. Expect to see more paintings of Christian symbols and saints smeared with elephant dung. Expect Christianity to be bashed and vilified and Christians made out to be buckled-shoed morons with three teeth and an IQ of 50. Expect the culture to coarsen. Expect your kids to continue to be exposed to things that only rock stars see backstage with groupies. A vote for a liberal is a vote to see Christians continue to receive special ridicule and be flogged more than a pinata during a Cinco de Mayo festival. [bold added]

Other than the attempt to achieve outright censorship, what could voting possibly have to do with what appears in media such as movies and television?

I don't like a lot of what's going on in pop culture, either, but government censorship -- the irrational, oppressive stuff that sinks modern civilizations -- is not an acceptable answer to the problem. And goodness, with someone like Giles at the helm, I think we'd be better off if the censors were "buckled-shoed morons with three teeth and an IQ of 50". At least they'd be easy to sneak ideas into "the public square" around so they could be debated before Giles would stop them.

This essay is truly amazing and directly pertains to two quotes I can think of off the top of my head by that patron saint of the religious right, Ann Coulter.

First, compare Giles's deep respect for individual rights with that of Ann Coulter's when she publicly urged George (or Jeb) Bush to ignore the judical branch of the government when it became apparent that it would fail to chuck American legal precedents in favor of her religious beliefs.

President Andrew Jackson is supposed to have said of a Supreme Court ruling he opposed: "Well, John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." The court's ruling was ignored. And yet, somehow, the republic survived.

And then, just as Giles pretends that public officials who lord their faith over the public are somehow not like Osama bin Laden, Ann Coulter pretends that there is no religious right in her book, Slander!

Considering the invective constantly being heaped on the "religious right", it is probably not surprising that few people identify themselves as members. "Religious right" is always something somebody else is, like "son of a bitch". A LexisNexis search of the phrase "religious right" mostly turns up lots of people denying that they belong to it. This could be because there is no such thing as the "religious right". (177)

Indeed. No one will identify himself as a member of the "religious right" for the same reason that al Qaeda terrorists are trained to "blend in": They need to be seen as accepting the norms of civilized behavior for long enough to accomplish their goals.

This is why Moslem fanatics wear western clothes even as they board airliners on suicide missions, and this is why the likes of Doug Giles wrap themselves up in the flag while preaching in favor of the very evil, tyranny, our forefathers fought so valiantly against.

-- CAV