The Greatest Generation Gets Some of the Blame

Tom Brokaw likes to give credit to what he calls the “Greatest Generation” for the sacrifices and the efforts they gave to survive the depression of the 1930’s and then go on to win the world’s worst war, World War II. All of that is true. It is also true that they stood behind the most magnanimous act any country has ever performed, the Marshall Plan, where, for the first time in history, the victor rescued the losers when the United States helped bring prosperity and democracy to Germany and Japan. Always in the past, losers were looted by the winners.

The problem is that this “Greatest Generation” vowed that when they got home, they would see that their children would never have to suffer the depravations and the humiliations that they had to face in childhood and young adulthood. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. My generation was in-between; I was a child during that war and experienced only a little of the deprivations of depression and war, but all that ended, and the generations that followed never knew what it was like to go hungry and to be completely powerless. From the 1950’s on, America has experienced a prosperity for the average person heretofore unknown in the history of mankind. The results have been uneven.

Unfortunately two debilitating events happened in the 1960’s and early seventies – President Kennedy was assassinated, and the Vietnam War dragged on – crushing the aspirations and frazzling the bonds between country, authority and youth. In addition, this youth was well-fed and had enjoyed a childhood of comfort and convenience – not exactly character-building experiences. Out of the Vietnam experience also developed the infusion into America’s colleges and universities of professors who had no connection with anything greater than themselves and who saw themselves as the vanguard of a new belief system – me, me, me. Grades were inflated to help students avoid the draft, and a “hate-America” philosophy began to be woven into the curriculum. That Watergate also happened was icing on the cake – further proving to them that representative government was a sham, and that all power was corrupt.

Below is an excerpt of a recent review of his book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, Dinesh D’Souza, Doubleday, 352 pages

“[W]hat has changed in America since the 1960s,” he writes, “is the erosion of belief in an external moral order. This is the most important political fact of the past half century.” He provides numerous examples of how this changed view of morality has transformed America, from the debasement of popular culture, to the rapid spread of pornography, to the widespread acceptance of what was universally regarded in the past as sexual immorality, to what D’Souza regards as the inevitable result of such changes: the breakdown of the American family.”

Now we have a situation where not only our universities contain this poison, but also our public school system is staffed with many teachers (graduates of those colleges) who seem to know nothing else but the philosophy of nihilism. They know no history but the distorted versions fed to them, they respect no values, and they teach our children what they have been taught; and the older generations, like me, look on in horror. Do they know that their country and Western culture were the first to recognize the evil inhumanity of slavery and voluntarily ended the practice? Do they know that slavery was practiced throughout history by all cultures and is still practiced in some African and Middle Eastern countries today? No, they have only been taught that previous generations of Americans enslaved blacks.

The other main criticisms we hear of American and Western culture are ethnocentrism and colonialism. Again, what is missing in the lessons taught our students is that these practices were common in all civilizations throughout history, and it is America (with some British examples) that threw off ethnocentrism by recognizing and absorbing the best from other cultures – and ended colonialism. It is the height of patronizing condescension to impose current standards of morality on people who lived hundreds of years ago, and to judge them to be deficient.

What can be done about this other than to lament its existence and predict its obvious outcome – the complete disintegration of American society and with it the joining of other once-great civilizations on the scrapheap of history? Obviously no-one would or should advocate deliberately ending our prosperity; the cure would be worse than the disease. But there is something we can do – attack the center of where the cancer is the greatest – American academia. Expose the nonsense being inculcated in our young people by the new fascists. Expose them and get rid of them, as happened with Ward Churchill, a poster boy for those out to destroy all that made us great.

Fortunately there are several organizations that have been hard at work fighting this evil – among them are: Frontpagemag.com where David Horowitz has been doing heroic work for years, the Individual Rights Foundation, Judicial Watch and Students for Academic Freedom.

Support these organizations; contribute to them and inform them of instances that you see of this anti-American lunacy we have been putting up with for far too long.

Final Note: I know this piece has been largely gloomy about our future and the fight we are in, but I actually believe that most Americans do not endorse the anti-Americanism and nonsense I have described. Most Americans support their country and understand what our Founding Fathers meant when they spoke of being “endowed by our Creator”. The problem is that the destroyers have wormed their way into our most influential bodies – our schools, our colleges and universities, our media and our entertainment industry. Their influence is much greater than their numbers.

And the fact is that there have been several “Greatest Generations” throughout America’s history. Fifty years from now our grandchildren will be calling the men and women now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan – the “Greatest Generation”.

Left-Wing Smear Campaign Brought to a Halt

This week the George Soros financed, Hillary Clinton smear machine called Media Matters was exposed for the slimy liars they are – joining the other smear machine, MoveOn.org, in the consciousness of a nation that had just listened to Ahmadinejad maintain that there were no homosexuals in Iran.

What Media Matters did is what left-wing organizations often do: they cherry pick quotes and take them out of context to try to discredit conservatives. They did it to Speaker Gingrich, Reuters did it last week to President Bush (the Mandela malarkey), and Media Matters tried to do it to Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, but they didn’t get away with it. Both men had transcripts and were able to prove what they really said – and not what Media matters said they said. What is really interesting is what a number of Democrat politicians, operatives and left-wing media like Time, CNN and MSNBC did with the Media Matters lies – they ran with them without checking or hesitating a moment.

Neither Bill O’Reilly nor Rush Limbaugh need me to defend them, but my readers might like to know some of the details. First about O’Reilly:

Williams Defends O'Reilly, Rips CNN, Captains Quarters, 9/29/07 (Excerpt)

“Juan Williams defends Bill O'Reilly against charges of racism in Time Magazine, and angrily calls out O'Reilly's critics for calling him an Uncle Tom. He charges those critics with intellectual dishonesty for pulling one quote out of context to reverse what O'Reilly really said -- and he also accuses CNN for deliberately misreporting the incident in order to eat into O'Reilly's substantial ratings lead over CNN.

It's a media meltdown!

It started with Bill O'Reilly's grandmother. And it blew up into charges of O'Reilly being called a racist and me being attacked as a "Happy Negro" (read that as a lackey or Uncle Tom)....

So, O'Reilly says to me that the reality to black life is very different from the lowlife behavior glorified by the rappers. He told me he was at a restaurant in Harlem recently and there was no one shouting profanity, no one threatening people. Then he mentioned going to an Anita Baker concert with an audience that was half black, and in sharp contrast to the corrosive images on TV, well dressed and well behaved.

I joked with O'Reilly that for him, a guy from Long Island, a visit to Harlem was like a "foreign trip." That's when he brought up his grandma. He said she was prejudiced against black people because she knew no flesh-and-blood black folks but only the one-dimensional TV coverage of black criminals shooting each other and the rappers and comedians glorifying "gangsta" life and thug cool. He criticized his grandmother as irrational for being afraid of people she really did not know.”

And as for Rush Limbaugh:
NewsBusters.org, September 28, 2007 (Excerpt)

“Not content to wait until Bill O'Reilly's hoped- for demise, the George Soros- funded Media Matters / mainstream media smear machine has added a second target: Rush Limbaugh.

And this time, the distortion of words may actually be more severe than in O'Reilly's case.

Now, Media Matters has twisted and edited Rush's words in a way that makes it appear he's insulting the troops. They've taken the false idea that he called anti- war soldiers "phony troops" and spread it across the Internet. But Limbaugh said nothing of the sort.

Maloney explains that MMA took out of context a remark Limbaugh made about "phony soldiers:"

Limbaugh's best point is this (Bill O'Reilly, take note): critics of conservative talk radio, especially in the mainstream media, never actually listen to these shows. They simply accept the Media Matters spin as gospel without actually tuning in. O'Reilly and Limbaugh cannot emphasize this point enough.

Limbaugh was actually talking about the story of Jesse MacBeth, a fake "soldier" who never made it out of boot camp, yet was utilized by the anti- war left as a "veteran" who agreed with Iraq opponents.”
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Let’s also join Rush Limbaugh’s show to get his reaction to the attempted smear:

Transcript excerpts from 9/28/07
“I want to illustrate something for you today, folks. I've done it before. I want to do it again. I call this the anatomy of a smear, and what this is is a great illustration of the liberals and the Democrat Party playbook for '08, which is underway now. The morning update on Wednesday dealt with a soldier, a fake, phony soldier by the name of Jesse MacBeth who never served in Iraq; he was never an Army Ranger.

He was drummed out of the military in 44 days. He had his day in court; he never got the Purple Heart as he claimed, and he described all these war atrocities. He became a hero to the anti-war left. They love phony soldiers, and they prop 'em up. When it is demonstrated that they have been lying about things, then they just forget about it. There's no retraction; there's no apology; there's no, "Uh-oh, sorry." After doing that morning update on Wednesday, I got a phone call yesterday from somebody, we were talking about the troops, and this gentleman said something which you'll hear here in just a second, prompting me to reply "yeah, the phony soldiers."

That comment, "phony soldiers" was posted yesterday afternoon on the famous Media Matters website, which is where all leftists go to find out what I say. I have a website, and I have a radio program that reaches far more people than Media Matters could ever hope to, but the critics of this program never listen to this program.

They never go to my website. All they do is read Media Matters and they get the lies and the out-of-context reports. They assume it's all true because they want it to be true, and then they start their campaigns. This has led to me being denounced on the floor of the House. Howard Dean has released a statement demanding I apologize; Jim Webb; John Kerry issued a statement, three Congress people went out on the floor of the House last night and said some things, and it's starting to blossom now in the Drive-By Media. So this is the anatomy of a smear, and this is how it starts. The same group is trying to get Bill O'Reilly into problems because of some innocent comments that he made about going to dinner at a restaurant in Harlem. So the illustration begins with just a sample report from MSNBC whose content is produced almost exclusively by Media Matters for America and MoveOn.org. This is this morning with the anchorette Contessa Brewer reporting on the phony soldier controversy, spawned by me.

BREWER: Some leading Democrats are attacking radio talk show personality Rush Limbaugh because he called soldiers who opposed the Iraq war "phony." Limbaugh was criticizing the anti-war movement generally and made the comment to a caller.

****************

“The truth for the left is fiction that serves their purpose, which is exactly the way the website, Media Matters, generated this story, fiction, out of context, did so knowingly. What is amazing is that after all of the examples of how this organization is simply a Democrat Party Hillary Clinton front group; how they constantly do this; how they take things out of context and embarrass themselves and get things wrong; they still have credible so-called journalists and others, members of Congress, Democrat Party, who treat what they say as gospel. Not one member of the media, not one congressman, nobody has called our office to ask, "Did you really say this? And what did you mean by it?" The reason this does not work, ladies and gentlemen, is that I have a 19-and-a-half-year record on this program of being one of the most devoted supporters of US military personnel in uniform that there is.

The effort here is simply to discredit people that they consider effective and powerful on the right ginning up, leading up into the '08 elections. They cannot beat us in the arena of ideas. They cannot challenge what we say and refute it and come out on top, so this is the anatomy of a smear. I'll show you how it works when we come back after the break. We have a bunch of sound bites here from Jim Webb, Jan Schakowsky, Frank Pallone, Democrats and senators, plus the Kerry statement that I read to you, all that coming up right after this.”

All in all, together with the news that Al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan is crumbling, this was a good week for those who care about America.

Four Remarkable Reports of Impending Victory

How quickly things can change. How remarkably the Democratic candidates reflect the new reality. How significantly the French grow close and want to help. Here are excerpts of four reports published today. Get the full flavor of these reports by going to the links and reading them through.

A Quiet Triumph May be Brewing
By Ray Robison, September 28, 2007 , The American Thinker

"There are signs that the global Islamic jihad movement is splitting apart, in what would be a tremendous achievement for American strategy. The center of the action is in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the very territory which is thought to harbor Usama, and from which Al Qaeda was able to launch 9/11. Capitalizing on existing splits, a trap was set and closed, and the benefits have only begun to be evident.

There were already signs of a split, but recent events strengthen the that trend. In March and again in May of this year I reviewed relevant South Asian media reporting to predict that the global Islamic jihad movement was cracking up. That theory focused on a split between the leadership of al Qaeda and the jihad groups that secure them in Pakistan such as the Taliban."
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Bin Laden: A Fallen Star
Tuesday 25 September 2007, Asharq Al-Awsat
The leading Arabic international paper

”Osama Bin Laden’s recent televised appearance has failed to elicit the impact he desired after a disappearance of three years in which there has been increasing speculation about him and his fate.

The image of Al Qaeda’s leader has been ingrained in the minds of his supporters as a rebel or revolutionary who is mounting a horse and brandishing a weapon, or practicing his shooting and fighting skills or the art of bombing or as a tired man due to running to and away from the Afghan mountains. Meanwhile, those who reject his violence only see the image of someone taken in by the devil in such a way that he has lost all feeling of humanity.”
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A weakened bin Laden; an Iraq as decisive front
Jonathon Last, Philadelphia Inquirer, 9/28/07 (Excerpt)

“But all of that's just icing: For those worried that the war on terror has been prosecuted, shall we say, sub-optimally, the new tape suggests that Osama bin Laden is now operating from a position of weakness.

To understand the change, you have to go back to bin Laden's two fatwas declaring war on America. His goals and grievances back then were much more expansive.

In 1996, bin Laden was primarily concerned with getting every American out of Saudi Arabia. "[T]o push the enemy - the greatest Kufr [unbelieving ingrate] - out of [Saudi Arabia is] a prime duty. No other duty after Belief is more important," he said.

In 1998, in his second fatwa, bin Laden was still torqued about Americans - not just in Saudi Arabia, but anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula - writing about "the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations." The reason the dim-witted crusaders were there, of course, was "to serve the Jews' petty state."

He concluded that fatwa by claiming that "the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual duty for every Muslim . . . in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam." Which is tricky because, technically speaking, all lands belong to Allah.

Remember, this was during the Clinton years, when bin Laden wanted, for starters: (1) all infidels banished from the Arabian Peninsula; (2) the Saudi ruling class replaced with "true Muslims"; and (3) the Zionist Entity gone from Jerusalem. To get this, he called for a battle royal, us-against-them, end-times conflict with the forces of paganism, secularism and sin (you and me) on one side and the forces of the Prophet (peace be upon him!) on the other.

Fast-forward to last week: Bin Laden now says we can all make nice if America will just pull out of Iraq.”
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Silence in Syria, Panic in Iran
By Dr. Jack Wheeler, To The Point News Sep 25, 2007 - 12:09:27 PM (Excerpt)

"Everyone in the government and military can only talk of one thing,' he reports. 'No matter who I talked to, all they could do was ask me, over and over again, 'Do you think the Americans will attack us?' 'When will the Americans attack us?' 'Will the Americans attack us in a joint operation with the Israelis?' How massive will the attack be?' on and on, endlessly. The Iranians are in a state of total panic.'

And that was before September 6. Since then, it's panic-squared in Tehran. The mullahs are freaking out in fear. Why? Because of the silence in Syria. On September 6, Israeli Air Force F-15 and F-16s conducted a devastating attack on targets deep inside Syria near the city of Dayr az-Zawr. Israel's military censors have muzzled the Israeli media, enforcing an extraordinary silence about the identity of the targets. Massive speculation in the world press has followed, such as Brett Stephens' Osirak II? in yesterday's (9/18) Wall St. Journal. Stephens and most everyone else have missed the real story. It is not Israel's silence that 'speaks volumes' as he claims, but Syria's.

Why would the Syrian government be so tight-lipped about an act of war perpetrated on their soil? The first half of the answer lies in this story that appeared in the Israeli media last month (8/13): Syria's Antiaircraft System Most Advanced In World. Syria has gone on a profligate buying spree, spending vast sums on Russian systems, 'considered the cutting edge in aircraft interception technology.' Syria now 'possesses the most crowded antiaircraft system in the world,' with 'more than 200 antiaircraft batteries of different types,' some of which are so new that they have been installed in Syria 'before being introduced into Russian operation service.' While you're digesting that, take a look at the map of Syria: Notice how far away Dayr az-Zawr is from Israel. An F15/16 attack there is not a tiptoe across the border, but a deep, deep penetration of Syrian airspace. And guess what happened with the Russian super-hyper-sophisticated cutting edge antiaircraft missile batteries when that penetration took place on September 6th. Nothing.

El blanko. Silence. The systems didn't even light up, gave no indication whatever of any detection of enemy aircraft invading Syrian airspace, zip, zero, nada. The Israelis (with a little techie assistance from us) blinded the Russkie antiaircraft systems so completely the Syrians didn't even know they were blinded. Now you see why the Syrians have been scared speechless. They thought they were protected - at enormous expense - only to discover they are defenseless. As in naked. Thus the Great Iranian Freak-Out - for this means Iran is just as nakedly defenseless as Syria.”

SFACTS on SCHIP: Two Excerpts Worth Reading

Socialized Medicine's Front Door
By Robert Novak, RealClearPolitics, September 27, 2007

“The Alice-in-Wonderland quality of legislating in Congress was typified this week. The Democratic Congress quickly passed a national health insurance bill, drafted in secret and protected from amendment, that constitutes the most important legislation of this session. While designed for a presidential veto, it is national health insurance -- through the front, not the back, door. Democrats view it as no-lose: either landmark health care will be enacted over President George W. Bush's veto, or, if overridden, they'll have a lovely 2008 campaign issue.

This outcome was previewed a week ago by Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer and Republican Whip Roy Blunt in a colloquy on the House floor. Blunt questioned the procedure under which radical expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) would be passed as a "bill that has not been debated." No matter, Hoyer replied. It will not really be a new bill because "there will be nothing, I think, in the bill that was not in the House or Senate bills" that were passed previously. Such is the sad state of congressional procedure today.

This business as usual on Capitol Hill is worth noting because SCHIP extension covers much more than the poor children originally intended to be helped. The new bill covers families with income up to $82,000 a year, threatening to crowd out the private health industry. Only Congress could conceive making families simultaneously eligible for SCHIP to help the poor and AMT (the alternative minimum tax) to punish the rich.”
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SCHIP Charade
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY. 9/26/2007 (Excerpt)

“As Democrat Charles Rangel of New York noted, when lawmakers go back to their districts, "the question is, were you with the kids or were you not?" Some Republicans won't have an answer.

Too bad. The only hope now is that President Bush will follow through on his threat to veto it. Because 290 votes would be needed to override a veto, it looks like he might succeed.

In doing so, Bush will be vilified and excoriated for being against children. But let's look at this bill without blinders, shall we?

As passed by the House, the State Children's Health Insurance Program, known as SCHIP, will create a major new middle-class entitlement even as we face looming national bankruptcy from our $50.5 trillion (yes, you read that number right) in planned spending under Social Security and Medicare.

Today, some 6.6 million kids are covered under SCHIP, at a cost of about $25 billion over five years. The new bill raises that to 9 million kids covered, at a cost of $60 billion….”

“That's the problem — SCHIP's expansion sets up perverse incentives, such as encouraging those with private insurance to dump it in favor of subsidized care. This isn't just talk. According to health care economists David Cutler and Jonathan Gruber, for every 10 children enrolled in SCHIP, six drop their private insurance.

There are other problems. For instance, far from being "about the children," SCHIP already covers 670,000 adults. The new law will increase that. Thanks to loopholes, illegal aliens are eligible too.

Add it all up, and SCHIP's costs will be much, much higher than the $60 billion forecast — just as happened with Medicare.”

Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean

The president of Columbia University, that disgusting facade that calls itself a university, that hotbed of anti-Semitism, that forum that allowed its students to physically attack an invited Minuteman speaker, that anti-American place that refuses to permit an ROTC program (whose country do they think ROTC helps defend?), tried to ameliorate the disgrace of inviting a person who has threatened the nuclear destruction of Israel and the destruction of the USA, a person some hostages claim led the hostage taking of American diplomats in 1979, a person whose country has been the leading sponsor of terrorism throughout the Middle East and is directly responsible for American deaths in Iraq on a daily basis, - yes, tried to ameliorate the disgrace by insulting Ahmadinejad and asking supposedly tough questions.

See the video of President Bollinger’s performance (I say performance because that’s what it was) and then read this excerpt from comments made by Ed Koch, former mayor of New York City, and the press release issued by the Iranian News Agency.


Bollinger Forgot to Stand Up for the U.S.
By Ed Koch, RealClearPolitics, September 25, 2007 (Excerpts)

“President Lee C. Bollinger of Columbia University and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran met Monday on a field of rhetorical battle at Columbia.

Bollinger opened the proceedings, to which he had invited Ahmadinejad, by presenting a series of sharply-worded questions. Bollinger, normally a genial, soft spoken man who is always courteous and deferential to his guests, was in a totally different mode. His voice was hectoring and bullying. He included in his litany of questions provocative and insulting statements about his guest.

Bollinger's change of style was, I believe, to blunt the enormous criticism that ensued following Columbia's invitation to Ahmadinejad to speak there. In his defense, Bollinger's supporters constantly invoke the concepts of free speech and the First Amendment. But in this case they simply don't apply.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution reads as follows: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

No government action was taken to stop Columbia and Bollinger from extending the invitation and holding the event as they did. I watched it on television, 600 people watched it from within the auditorium and thousands of Columbia students sat outside watching and listening to a giant TV screen.

The right of free speech - Bollinger and Ahmadinejad were exercising it before, during and after this controversy -- was never in question. What was in question was Bollinger's judgment. Why provide the President of Iran -- who supports terrorism and whose government provides bombs to Iraqi insurgents and terrorists who use them to kill American soldiers -- with the prestigious platform at a great American university?

Isn't it a fact that Ahmadinejad has been and will continue to be interviewed by journalists every day during his stay in America? What he got at Columbia was a special platform where he could, in an academic setting, disseminate his views to the world. Yes, the attention of the world, particularly the Islamic world, was focused on Columbia and Ahmadinejad. And what did they see? They saw Columbia University's president, Bollinger, who had invited Ahmadinejad to his school, do what should never be done - insult the person who is a guest in your home, office or shared podium and stage. Bollinger had said of Ahmadinejad, "Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," adding, "You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated." Bollinger went on, "It's well-documented that Iran was a state sponsor of terrorism." The final insult was, "I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions."

Ahmadinejad understood this immediately and referred to Bollinger's insults in his speech, saying, "I shall not begin by being affected by this unfriendly treatment."….

“Bollinger should have asked Ahmaninejad about his role in the Iranian hostage taking of American consular officials during the Carter administration. Barry Rosen, one of the hostages held for 444 days and released on January 20, 1981, the day President Reagan was inaugurated, recently wrote, "Ahmadinejad was one of those outrageous Iranians who took me and more than 50 other Americans hostage for 444 days, violating international law and making us suffer indescribable moments of terror." If Ahmadinejad were not protected by diplomatic immunity, he could be arrested for a host of terrorist and criminal activities.

As important as it was to stand up for the rights of homosexuals, who are hanged or stoned to death in Iran, standing up for the U.S. and the American soldiers being killed daily by Iranian-supplied bombs was particularly relevant and in need of greater emphasis than that given by Bollinger.

All in all, it was a fiasco for America and a blunder by Bollinger, as well as a coup for Ahmadinejad. His goal was not to respond to Bollinger, the Columbia students or Americans seeing him on television. His goal was to talk over their heads to the Islamic world and its terrorists and show how he bearded the Columbia lion in its own den.

President Bollinger, as an encore, why not invite Hugo Chavez? I think he'd come. You could provide him with a platform to enhance his reputation.” Ed Koch
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From the Iranian Republic News Aency:
"Despite entire US media objections, negative propagation and hue and cry in recent days over IRI President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's scheduled address at Colombia University, he gave his lecture and answered students questions here on Monday afternoon.

On second day of his entry in New York, and amid standing ovation of the audience that had attended the hall where the Iranian President was to give his lecture as of early hours of the day, Ahmadinejad said that Iran is not going to attack any country in the world.

Before President Ahamadinejad's address, Colombia University Chancellor in a brief address told the audience that they would have the chance to hear Iran's stands as the Iranian President would put them forth.

He said that the Iranians are a peace loving nation, they hate war, and all types of aggression.

Referring to the technological achievements of the Iranian nation in the course of recent years, the president considered them as a sign for the Iranians' resolute will for achieving sustainable development and rapid advancement.

The audience on repeated occasion applauded Ahmadinejad when he touched on international crises.

At the end of his address President Ahmadinejad answered the students' questions on such issues as Israel, Palestine, Iran's nuclear program, the status of women in Iran and a number of other matters."

Editorial Note: Are there any Columbia grads out there who could put some teeth into the protests that Bollinger is receiving?

Tom Brady Is a High Priced Bum

I’ve been a big supporter of the New England Patriots since they began playing in the old Schaeffer Stadium in the nineteen-seventies. I used to ride with one of my sons to the games on a motorcycle so we could weave through the horrendous traffic and chain the bike to the stadium fence. Until recently, Tom Brady, their brilliant quarterback, was one of my heroes; but, no more. He’s not a hero any more; he’s just a high-priced bum who just fathered another bastard into a society that is crumbling from the overwhelming number of fatherless children in our midst.

Others have noticed the phenomenon. One of my friends and fellow bloggers is John Carey, a retired, career naval officer. I have cross-posted from his site the following piece by another concerned writer. We’re not just old farts ruing change; we see it all going down the drain. We want to stop it and turn it around.

Forum: Rome had its decline as well

Civilization is not automatic. It is fragile, and can wither easily, and even die. There is a decay among us, a failure of civilization, a breakdown of the social structure essential to what we most consider our humanity.

It is not widespread, but neither is it rare. Like a disease it spreads through the social body, infecting and sickening and moving on to taint the healthy.

Civilization can be different things, depending on time and place and people. But any civilization must include certain traits to propagate and protect itself. If it lacks them, it fails. These traits are easily identifiable:

The ability to bear and rear children in a stable family environment.

The ability of individuals to support themselves.

The social ability to establish and sustain order.

The recognition of personal property.

The tendency to promote the general good.

Those things are civilization’s essential components. And for a growing number of Americans, in pockets of microculture, they do not exist.

If we don’t stop the spread of the social pathogen they represent, we will collapse as have other great societies.

Rome stopped being Rome primarily because its civilization frayed and tore, giving way to an anti-civilization, a backward savagery that brought it to its knees.

American anti-civilization is most common in our inner-cities and rural communities. From there it spreads into the vast American middle-class, happily snoozing in suburbia.

The symptoms? The failure of marriage. Not in individual divorce, but as a social institution of choice. Forty percent of children born in the United States today are born outside marriage. They never have the opportunity to truly belong to a family.

Most of their situations are flawed and even failed. They are not reared successfully, giving rise to further social pathology and destruction.

Increasingly, a class of people is flourishing which, under other circumstances, would starve to death. The dependent class, unable or unwilling to support itself materially, would naturally be self-limiting. But empowered by responsibility-deadening welfare checks, it is exploding.

The danger to civilization cannot be overstated. People disconnected from their own sustenance have lives built upon a fundamentally false premise. They are, in effect, raiders — a lifestyle that always has tended toward tribalism, not civilization.

Civilization is the subjugation of the individual or group to the interest of the civil entity or imperative. Civilized people belong to a whole, the interests of which they see as somehow both essential to themselves and yet greater than themselves.

We are breeding people in America who see the civil as their enemy, whose lifestyles are predicated upon putting something over on the larger society and its structures.

Many them have an infantile view of property. Whatever they can put their hands on becomes theirs. Thievery is one manifestation, so too is callous disregard for the property of others. Rented apartments are trashed, public places and structures are vandalized, things are broken just for the thrill of breaking them.

Finally, the general good — that which will benefit the most — is not considered. The personal good or desire is paramount in all circumstances.

Civilization in America, in those regards, truly is decaying. The infection will grow geometrically. It must be fought and stopped now.

How? Through the children and through an almost missionary like preaching of a better way.

The specific weaknesses of the growing discivilization must be explained. People must be graciously and respectfully shown the weakness of their lifestyles. Those weaknesses must not be accepted in the mistaken cause of tolerance. Society also must more quickly remove children from situations that will ruin them.

Our civilization is weakening primarily because families are dissolving or never truly forming. Children must be spared that.

Will we as a society do anything about the decay beginning to engulf us? Probably not. And our very civilization is in great jeopardy as a result.
BOB LONSBERRY
Commentator and talk show host. See boblonsberry.com.

Editorial note:
What happened in New Orleans after Katrina was an instant glimpse into America’s future if we do not convert the AFDC portion of Welfare into an occasional use, emergency help program – and begin to disband the ‘welfare class’. Mr. Lonsberry actually understates the problem: since President Johnson launched the Great Society, black fatherless births have jumped to 75% and white fatherless births have jumped to 50% of all births.

Some Sensible Thoughts on the 'Jena 6'

Not that everyone is interested in an honest look at what seems to have been happening there, but I think Reuben Navarrette comes closest.

Ugliness on All Sides in 'Jena 6' Case
By Ruben Navarrette, September 23, 2007, RealClearPolitics

When I first heard of the “Jena 6” – African-American teens in a small Louisiana town charged with beating a white classmate – my instinct was to side with those screaming for justice.

There was always the chance that the case was all about race. The high school that these kids attend appears to be boiling over. A few months before the beating, in an incident a U.S. attorney found had nothing to do with the attack, a group of white students strung nooses from a tree in the schoolyard.

The screams for justice are getting louder. The criminal case has become a cause célèbre with liberal bloggers, celebrities and black radio hosts. It's also become an issue in the 2008 presidential race.

Last week, thousands of protesters descended on the town to show support for the six defendants. And since there were television cameras there, the demonstrators included – surprise – those perennial grievance merchants, the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

But even if my heart went out to the defendants, my head told me to take a closer look. Now, I feel like screaming. Neither the authorities nor the activists come off particularly well. The former treated the defendants as if they were public enemy No. 1; the latter went so far in the other direction as to depict the young men as victims.

I wouldn't call them that. The real victim is Justin Barker, the teenager who was beaten and stomped unconscious and taken to a hospital with injuries to both eyes and ears. Even though he was treated and released the same day, his injuries weren't exactly minor.

Everyone likes to play the victim. But don't blur the lines between those who were wronged and those accused of committing the wrong.

Still, none of this lets prosecutors off the hook for the aggressive way in which they handled this case. For allegedly taking part in the attack, the teens were tried as adults and charged with attempted murder.

Attempted murder! At worst, this was assault. And given that the victim was white and the assailants were black, it could be called a hate crime. But it's not exactly a homicide gone awry.

Tell that to the jury that convicted the first young man to come to trial in this case – 17-year-old Mychal Bell.

Make that, the “all-white jury.” That's a no-no, especially in the South with its rancid history of white jurors exonerating whites accused of crimes against blacks and railroading blacks accused of crimes against whites.

If the Jena 6 are guilty of the crime for which they've been accused, they ought to be ashamed – and punished. But Bell deserved a jury of his peers, and an all-white jury doesn't cut it.

Recently, an appeals court overturned Bell's conviction – not because of the jury's racial makeup but because, the court said, he should never have been tried as an adult. Since the judge's ruling, the charges for three of the other defendants were reduced to aggravated battery.

But there is another side to this coin. Many of the activists supporting the teens haven't behaved much better. For some, even the lesser charge is too harsh. I'm part of a panel of commentators on National Public Radio's “Tell Me More with Michel Martin,” and, when we've discussed the Jena 6, an African-American colleague suggested that the appropriate punishment be community service.

What? Why not just drop all charges, buy them a steak and call it a day?

Students at Morehouse and Spellman – traditionally black colleges in Atlanta – held a rally and declared an affinity with the defendants. Some held up signs saying: “I am the Jena 6.”

Well, not if you've never been part of a mob-style beating you're not. Those college students obviously made good decisions to get where they are. The Jena 6 made a bad decision, and that's why they are in trouble with the law.

And then there's Jackson, who called the case a “defining moment” and compared it with the 1965 voting rights struggle in Selma. Jackson has also criticized Barack Obama over what he considers the presidential candidate's tepid reaction to the case and – according to a South Carolina newspaper – accused Obama of “acting like he's white.”

This was an ugly episode from the start, but shame on those who are – through words and deeds – making things even uglier now.

My Answer on the ACLU and Child Molestation

Recently I wrote in a general piece on the deterioration of American society that one problem was the position and actions of the ACLU, which, I said, defends child molesters and child pornography.

Some people seemed surprised by this reference and statement, not believing that the ACLU would countenance child molestation and pornography, and think that I am mistaken.

I was a resident of Massachusetts in 1997 when a 10 year old child, James Curley, was sexually abused and then horribly murdered by two men. When they were apprehended, it was found that these men had followed instructions published by the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) in how to seduce a child, and how to hide the evidence of the crime. NAMBLA was then sued for damages by James Curley’s parents. We were all stunned when the ACLU jumped in and defended the right of NAMBLA to publish such dangerous and vicious rubbish.

Also, note this information from the Stop the ACLU website:
“In 1982, the ACLU, in an amicus role, lost in a unanimous decision in the Supreme Court to legalize the sale and distribution of child pornography.”

The case is…: New York Vs Ferber, 458 U.S. 747

The ACLU’s position is this: criminalize the production but legalize the sale and distribution of child pornography. This is the kind of lawyerly distinction that no one on the Supreme Court found convincing. And with good reason: as long as a free market in child pornography exists, there will always be some producers willing to risk prosecution. Beyond this, there is also the matter of how the sale of child pornography relates either to free speech or the ends of good government. But most important, the central issue is whether a free society should legalize transactions that involve the wholesale sexploitation of children for profit.”

“The ACLU objects to the idea that porn movie producers be required to maintain records of ages of its performers; this would be ” a gross violation of privacy.”

From the Catholicleague.org:

“As legislative counsel for the ACLU in 1985, Barry Lynn told the U.S. Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography (of which Focus on the Family President Dr. James C. Dobson was a member) that child pornography was protected by the First Amendment. While production of child porn could be prevented by law, he argued, its distribution could not be. A few years later (1988), Lynn told the Senate Judiciary Committee that even requiring porn producers to maintain records of their performers’ ages was impermissible.”

Iraq violence lowest since '06 mosque attack

Iraq violence lowest since '06 mosque attack
By Paul Tait, Sep 20, Reuters (Excerpt)

"Violence in Iraq has fallen to its lowest level since before a 2006 mosque attack which unleashed the deadliest phase of the Iraq war, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Iraq said on Thursday.

Lieutenant-General Raymond Odierno said attacks in Baghdad had also fallen by half since January, just before Washington began pouring 30,000 extra troops into Iraq to try to drag the nation back from the brink of sectarian civil war.

"There are still way too many civilian casualties inside of Baghdad and Iraq," Odierno said, after telling a news conference the number of sectarian killings in the capital had fallen from an average of about 32 a day to 12 a day this year.

U.S. forces launched a crackdown in Baghdad in February that spread to other provinces, targeting Sunni Islamist al Qaeda and other Sunni Arab insurgents as well as Shi'ite militias.

"Al Qaeda in Iraq is increasingly being pushed out of Baghdad and the surrounding areas. They are now seeking refuge elsewhere in the country and even fleeing Iraq," Odierno said.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki this month said his government had averted civil war and that levels of violence in Baghdad and surrounding areas had fallen 75 percent this year."

Beware fake pills from abroad (and Canada)

For several years I have listened with amusement to my older friends rain on drug companies. I say with amusement because most of us would not even be alive if it were not for the wondrous drugs private companies, using funds supplied by private investors as well as publicly-funded reseach have provided. Whenever I suggested that buying drugs from Canada and other foreign countries was a double-edged sword, I was met with angry stares. Hillary Clinton has often tapped into this ignorance whenever she attacked the drug companies, sometimes profiting from her investments in a fund that sold drug stocks short at the same time.

BRYAN A. LIANG, September 18, 2007, Providence Journal

THIS SUMMER, as part of a $91 billion farm bill, House lawmakers passed a measure to legalize the importation of prescription drugs from abroad. With so many recent stories of substandard and lethal goods already invading our shores, this is terrible public policy.

Supporters of drug importation think that simply because drugs are purchased from such “safe” countries as Canada and Britain, they are actually made there and are subject to strict health regulations and oversight. But this is a dangerous misconception.

Take Canada. If drugs are not earmarked for Canadian citizens, they are not subject to the Canadian government’s safety regulations. Just label the goods “for export only,” and Canada becomes a post-office box for fake or low-quality drugs from China, India, and other countries notorious for their ineffective and lethal products — as we’ve seen with everything from toothpaste to toys. And Canadian citizens themselves have been the victims of fake drugs. In Hamilton, Ontario, a registered pharmacist was recently charged with selling a counterfeit version of the blood-pressure drug Norvasc at his drugstore. Or look to Europe, where parallel trade — a process that allows the importation and re-importation of goods across EU-member states’ borders — is the standard.

At any point, counterfeiters can place fakes into the chain and pass them off with no one knowing the difference. This year, European officials warned of problems with phony drugs after seizing a large supply of such goods that had arrived from China by way of the United Arab Emirates. And several drug recalls have taken place in the United Kingdom after bogus drugs were detected in its supply chain.

Further, the Internet is a particularly worrying source of counterfeit imported drugs. In fact, World Health Organization officials estimate that 50 percent or more of drugs purchased online are fake. And tragic cases abound. A woman in Vancouver, for example, recently died from counterfeit meds purchased over the Internet.

Internet drug pushers can and do put Canadian or British flags on their Web sites, claiming that their wares are Canadian, European, or even American in origin, regardless of the true source. It’s impossible to tell the difference — until it’s too late.

Unfortunately, the sheer number of criminal activities surrounding counterfeit-drug sales already overwhelms the Food and Drug Administration. With fewer than 17 full-time employees covering all international mail facilities in the United States, it is simply impossible for the FDA to inspect the 40,000 packages with drugs coming into Kennedy Airport, in New York, each day, let alone the millions coming into America each year at present.

Allowing importation will open the floodgates and intensify the problems posed by phony drugs. Congress should note that when we cannot address even the safety of toothpaste and toys, we should not effectively create channels to allow criminals entry into our drug-supply chain. With 3.5 billion prescriptions written each year, the U.S. is an attractive market for those who prey on the sick.

Better solutions exist to ensure access to drugs for those who face high prices, such as mandated no-cost or low-cost drug program participation for brand-name and generic drug manufacturers. But the last thing we should do is open our borders to importation. That is a prescription for disaster.

What We See and Why We See It

First, What We See:

Democrat leaders become more radicalized
Sher Zieve, September 15, 2007, Renew America, (Excerpt)

”Once long...long ago there existed a Democrat Party in the United States of America that truly believed that country should and must survive. It believed that the reasons for the country's existence were worth protecting. The members of this political party also believed that it should assist in defending that country and its citizens against all those who would attack and attempt to destroy it. They supported the men and women who enlisted in the US' citizen-military and some of them had even served in one of its branches. But, that was another time — in another reality. That political party and its members no longer exist.

Instead of the once pro-American group, a new Democrat Party emerged. This one was patently anti-American. This new Democrat Party is being directed and run by the radical leftist-funded-by-anti-USA multi-millionaires and billionaires group MoveOn.org. This group demands unwavering obedience of all Democrat politicians to its anti-war/anti-American tenets. As MoveOn.org heavily funds Democrats and their Party (claiming ownership of said party), it believes it has the right to call all of the shots. So, it has largely replaced multiple Democrat Party groups. This is the same radical group whose founder Eli Pariser said of the Democrat Party in 2004: "Now it is our Party. We bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back!" This same extremist organization has run a full-page Ad in the decidedly leftist New York Times that accuses General David Petraeus of being a traitor to his country — for doing the job and providing the report that Congressional "leaders" sent him to Iraq to affect. Congress also required that General Petraeus write and deliver a report to it on his progress.

However, because the multi-decorated General Petraeus has been successful in his mission — that of beginning the stabilization of much of Iraq — Democrats are furious. They weren't expecting it to provide information of anything less than a disaster. It appears that they didn't think even this General could or would accomplish his goals. But, he is accomplishing those goals. As the Democrats-up-for-election view any success in Iraq as a potential death-knell for them, the USA must lose this war — in order for the Democrats to win. Democrat politicians — just as all of our enemies from without and within — have now become overtly anti-American. As an example, not one of the current Democrat presidential candidates has condemned the MoveOn.org Ad. With their silence, Democrat leaders are tacitly approving of MoveOn.orgs's character assassination of General Petraeus — the same General that they had applauded and recommended fir the task just months ago. Note: To Democrats, General Petraeus' success has bred contempt within, apparently, all of them.

Leaders of the Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Zell Miller mold are no longer allowed in the increasingly fanatical Democrat Party. It is now firmly (with no hope of changing back to any semblance of normalcy) become the US political party of socialists, communists, radicals of various persuasions and even Islamist terrorists. As an example, on 7 September Al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin-Laden criticized Democrats for not doing more to stop the Iraq war so that they [al-Qaeda] could take over that country. In 2006, bin-Laden urged — even threatened — America to vote for Democrats.” Sher Zieve

Now, Why We See It:

Imagine That
By Lisa Fabrizio

Published 9/19/2007 American Spectator, (Excerpt)
“Is it any coincidence that the two entities American liberals probably hate most are organized religion and our military? Liberal groups like Moveon.org run ads disparaging military men of honor like General David Petraeus while folks like the ACLU and the "Reverend" Barry Lynn have made the elimination of God in public their life's work.

But what do these groups have in common? While they all preach a gospel of socialism, secularism and sexual worship, the main driving force behind those who denigrate our military and religious practices is egotism. They just can't wrap their minds around the concept that there is something bigger than themselves.

Soldiers, sailors and airmen voluntarily risking their lives for others and, even worse, Catholic nuns and priests throwing away their lives by consecrating them to God and their fellow men -- to the extent that they are willing to forgo the one, true purpose of life: sex -- must seem the acme of insanity to leftist naval gazers.

To them and their way of thinking, the notion that "greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends," is an incomprehensibility. Religious and military vocations have discipline and obedience at their core; an odious combination for those of the Me Generation of the 1960s. It's not difficult to see why the "never trust anyone over thirty" crowd has always been scandalized by this.

Having spurned the authority of their parents and responsibility for their country's defense, the next steps on the road to Utopia were a snap. For them, police officers were "pigs," God was dead and our armed personnel were reduced to being merely the murderous arm of the shadowy, "military-industrial complex."
Lisa Fabrizio

Looking for love in all the wrong places

Massachusetts has quite a history. Where else would transvestites have sex-change operations paid for by the taxpayers? Where else would a governor direct that phony social security numbers be issued to illegal aliens? Where else would a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without parole be given a weekend furlough? Where else would a homosexual Congressman housing a male prostitution ring be reelected, and another who sexually assaulted a young page not only be reelected, but be honored by Massachusetts residents? Where else would the following story take place?

Looking for love in all the wrong places
MARK STEYN, OC Register, 9/17/07

This year I marked the anniversary of Sept. 11 by driving through Massachusetts. It wasn't exactly planned that way, just the way things panned out. So, heading toward Boston, I tuned to Bay State radio talk-show colossus Howie Carr and heard him reading out portions from the official address to the 9/11 commemoration ceremony by Deval Patrick, who is apparently the governor of Massachusetts: 9/11, said Gov. Patrick, "was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States."

"Mean and nasty"? He sounds like an oversensitive waiter complaining that John Kerry's sent back the aubergine coulis again. But evidently that's what passes for tough talk in Massachusetts these days – the shot heard around the world and so forth. Anyway, Gov. Patrick didn't want to leave the crowd with all that macho cowboy rhetoric ringing in their ears, so he moved on to the nub of his speech: 9/11, he continued, "was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other."

I was laughing so much I lost control of the wheel, and the guy in the next lane had to swerve rather dramatically. He flipped me the Universal Symbol of Human Understanding. I certainly understood him, though I'm not sure I could learn to love him. Anyway, I drove on to Boston and pondered the governor's remarks. He had made them, after all, before an audience of 9/11 families: Six years ago, two of the four planes took off from Logan Airport, and so citizens of Massachusetts ranked very high among the toll of victims. Whether any of the family members present Tuesday were offended by Gov. Patrick, no one cried "Shame!" or walked out on the ceremony. Americans are generally respectful of their political eminences, no matter how little they deserve it.

We should beware anyone who seeks to explain 9/11 by using the words "each other": They posit a grubby equivalence between the perpetrator and the victim – that the "failure to understand" derives from the culpability of both parties. The 9/11 killers were treated very well in the United States: They were ushered into the country on the high-speed visa express program the State Department felt was appropriate for young Saudi males. They were treated cordially everywhere they went.

The lap-dancers at the clubs they frequented in the weeks before the Big Day gave them a good time – or good enough, considering what lousy tippers they were. Sept. 11 didn't happen because we were insufficient in our love to Mohamed Atta.

This isn't a theoretical proposition. At some point in the future, some of us will find ourselves on a flight with a chap like Richard Reid, the thwarted shoe-bomber.

On that day we'd better hope the guy sitting next to him isn't Gov. Patrick, who sees him bending down to light his sock and responds with a chorus of "All You Need Is Love," but a fellow who "understands" enough to wallop the bejesus out of him before he can strike the match. It was the failure of one group of human beings to understand that the second group of human beings was determined to kill them that led the crew and passengers of those Boston flights to stick with the obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures until it was too late.

Unfortunately, the obsolescent 1970s multiculti love-groove inclinations of society at large are harder to dislodge. If you'll forgive such judgmental categorizations, this isn't about "them," it's about "us." The long-term survival of any society depends on what proportion of its citizens thinks as Gov. Patrick does. Islamism is an opportunist enemy but you can't blame them for seeing the opportunity: In that sense, they understand us far more clearly than Gov. Patrick understands them.

The other day, you may recall, some larky lads were arrested in Germany. Another terrorist plot. Would have killed more people than Madrid and London combined but it was nipped in the bud so it's just another yawneroo: Nobody cares. Who were the terrorists? Mohammed? Muhammad? Mahmoud? No. Their names were "Fritz" and "Daniel." "Fritz," huh? That's a pretty unusual way to spell Mohammed.

Indeed. Fritz Gelowicz is as German as lederhosen. He's from Ulm, Einstein's birthplace, on the blue Danube, which, last time I was in Ulm, was actually a murky shade of green. And, in an excellent jest on Western illusions, Fritz was converted to Islam while attending the Multi-Kultur-Haus– the Multicultural House. It was, in fact, avowedly unicultural – an Islamic center run by a jihadist imam. At least three of its alumni – including another native German convert – have been killed fighting the Russians in Chechnya. Fritz was hoping to kill Americans. But that's one of the benefits of a multicultural world: There are so many fascinating diverse cultures, and most of them look best reduced to rubble strewn with body parts. Fritz and a pal, Atilla Selek, had been arrested in 2004 with a car full of pro-Osama propaganda praising the 9/11 attacks. Which sounds like a pilot for a wacky jihadist sitcom: "Atilla and the Hun."

Fritz Gelowicz. Richard Reid. The Australian factory worker Jack Roche. The Toronto jihadists plotting to behead the Canadian prime minister. The son of the British Conservative Party official with the splendidly Wodehousian double-barreled name. All over the world there are young men raised in the "Multi-Kultur Haus" of the West who decide their highest ambition is to convert to Islam, become a jihadist and self-detonate.

Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and twenties? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of Deval Patrick-style cultural relativism – nothing is any better or any worse than anything else; if people are "mean and nasty" to us, it's only because we didn't sing enough Barney the Dinosaur songs at them – in such a world a certain percentage of its youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something fierce and primal and implacable.

A while back, I had the honor of a meeting with the president, in the course of which someone raised the unpopularity of the war. He shrugged it off, saying that 25 percent of the population is always against the war – any war. In other words, there's nothing worth fighting for. And I joked afterward that some of that 25 percent might change their mind if Canadian storm troopers were swarming across the 49th Parallel or Bahamian warships were firing off the coast of Florida. But maybe not. Al-Qaida's ad hoc air force left a huge crater of Massachusetts corpses in the middle of Manhattan, and Gov. Patrick goes looking for love in all the wrong places.
How many people in any society think like Deval Patrick? That's the calculation to make if you want to figure out its long-term survival prospects.

As Liberals Chortle, Greenspan Turns Tables

Today the left-wing websites and blogs have been going crazy with news that Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve System, in a book just published, blamed the Iraq War on a quest for oil. These blogs and sites have been filled with comments from liberals basically saying, “Ah hah, we knew it all along”.

Unfortunately for them, Greenspan has learned of this development and decided to clarify his views, which he said were misstated and misrepresented. Instead of criticizing President Bush, what Greenspan really said was that Saddam had to be removed before he endangered all the world’s economies by renewed attempts to take over middle east oil fields.

Greenspan: Ouster Of Hussein Crucial For Oil Security
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 17, 2007; A03 (Excerpt)

“Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been "essential" to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Greenspan, who was the country's top voice on monetary policy at the time Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, has refrained from extensive public comment on it until now, but he made the striking comment in a new memoir out today that "the Iraq War is largely about oil." In the interview, he clarified that sentence in his 531-page book, saying that while securing global oil supplies was "not the administration's motive," he had presented the White House with the case for why removing Hussein was important for the global economy.

"I was not saying that that's the administration's motive," Greenspan said in an interview Saturday, "I'm just saying that if somebody asked me, 'Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?' I would say it was essential."

He said that in his discussions with President Bush and Vice President Cheney, "I have never heard them basically say, 'We've got to protect the oil supplies of the world,' but that would have been my motive." Greenspan said that he made his economic argument to White House officials and that one lower-level official, whom he declined to identify, told him, "Well, unfortunately, we can't talk about oil."

Asked if he had made his point to Cheney specifically, Greenspan said yes, then added, "I talked to everybody about that."

Greenspan said he had backed Hussein's ouster, either through war or covert action. "I wasn't arguing for war per se," he said. But "to take [Hussein] out, in my judgment, it was something important for the West to do and essential, but I never saw Plan B" -- an alternative to war.” Washington Post

Do Al Gore and Laurie David Conspire to Deceive?

Although skeptics of manmade global warming have successfully challenged many of the evidentiary claims made by the alarmists, and the alarmists have conceded errors in the “hockey stick” and in computer models, there is one important aspect of the problem that has not yet been conceded – the relationship between increases in temperature and increases in CO2 emissions. Recently a commenter, RobC, took me to task for not understanding the relationship, and directed me to a website that claimed this relationship is the “smoking gun” in favor of the alarmists.

If you graph the relationship over a few recent years, as they have done on RobC’s website, the graph is open to differing interpretations, but if you graph the analysis of ice-core samples that document thousands of years of temperature and CO2 history, the relationship becomes clear: temperature rises appear to PRECEDE CO2 emissions rises.

Perhaps the most sensible statement of the situation comes from the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change:

“In considering the findings of the several studies that have broached the question of the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature over the past half million or so years, it is clear that (1) sometimes the two parameters are totally out of sync with each other, as when one rises and the other falls, (2) sometimes one is in transit to a higher or lower level, while the other is in stasis, and (3) even when both move in harmony, temperature almost always moves first, and by hundreds to thousands of years. Clearly, there is no way these real-world observations can be construed to even hint at the possibility that a significant increase in atmospheric CO2 will necessarily lead to any global warming, much less the catastrophic type that is predicted to produce the apocalyptic consequences that are driving fear-ridden governments to abandon all sense of rationality in the current hysteria over “what should be done about” the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content… We need to look at real phenomena that have really occurred in the real world. And in spite of all the computer simulations to the contrary, we have got to realize what these real data are really telling us.”

The real problem is what some of the alarmists are doing. Both Laurie David, the wife of Larry David, one of my favorite comedians and the brains behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Al Gore have grossly misrepresented the facts:

“On page 18 of Laurie David's new children's global warming book, there is a glaring scientific error.

David tells children:
Deep down in the Antarctic ice are atmosphere samples from the past, trapped in tiny air bubbles. These bubbles, formed when snowflakes fell on the ice, are the key to figuring out two things about climate history: what temperatures were in the past and which greenhouse gases were present in the atmosphere at that time.

The more the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed. The less carbon dioxide, the more the temperature fell. You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph: (READS RIGHT TO LEFT)

What makes this graph so amazing is that by connecting rising CO2 to rising temperature scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse-gas pollution and global warming.”

What really makes their graph “amazing” is that it’s dead wrong. In order to contrive a visual representation for their false central claim that CO2 controls temperature change, David and co-author Cambria Gordon present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that falsely reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature.

The actual temperature curve in the chart was switched with the actual CO2 curve. That is, the authors mislabeled the blue curve as temperature and mislabeled the red curve as CO2 concentration. The real data show that the red curve represents the temperature changes over geological time, followed (lagged) by changes in CO2 concentrations represented by the blue curve. Thus, children tracing the properly labeled curves from right to left (from past to present) can easily see the real, science-based relationship (particularly clear in the interval between 500,000 and 150,000 years ago).

Corrected chart

Please note that the time axis reads from right to left.

The David-Gordon manipulation is critical because the central premise of the book argues that CO2 drives temperature, yet the ice core data clearly reveal temperature increases generally precede increasing CO2 by several hundred to a few thousand years. This fact may have been too inconvenient for David, who instead presented young readers with an astoundingly irresponsible falsehood. Parents and teachers of these children should be concerned.

Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth also got this wrong, saying: “The relationship is very complicated. But there is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others and it is this. When there is more CO2, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the sun …”

The David book for children, like the Al Gore film, has the relationship entirely wrong. The peer-reviewed literature is unanimous in finding that in climate records CO2 changes have historically followed temperature changes and cannot have caused them. The book is mischievous for concluding that this deceptive graph has anything to do with “discovering” a link between additional CO2 concentrations and “global warming”. 1

On page 103 of their book, David and Gordon cite the work of Siegenthaler et al. (2005), for their written and graphical contention that temperature lags CO2. However, Siegenthaler et al. clearly state the opposite:

“The lags of CO2 with respect to the Antarctic temperature over glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial cycles.”

(Siegenthaler et al., 2005, Science, vol. 310, 1313-1317)

Clearly, the responsible thing to do now is for Laurie David and publisher Scholastic Books to pulp, correct and reprint The Down-To-Earth Guide to Global Warming before a single copy reaches any more innocent school boys and girls.” Science and Public Policy.org (Excerpt)

Do We Want An Ignoramus for President?

From Hillary Clinton to Dennis Kucinich, all we hear from the Democratic candidates are petulant and childish complaints of impatience with the progress being made in Iraq. They seem to show no understanding of what is going on in Iraq or of our own history.

One of the many reasons we went into Iraq was to plant and nurture a seed of democracy and modernity into the geographic center of a world that exists in the seventh century, where disagreements are settled by cutting off heads and where little progress in science, medicine or human rights has taken place for a thousand years. This action was based on a selfish rationale, as well as a noble one, - that a modern and democratic Iraq would be a model and a magnet for the spread of cultural values that provided positive outlets for the yearnings of Arab peoples and would therefore substantially reduce their terrorist and warlike impulses. Democracies don’t usually start wars. Even with the known and also unforeseen difficulties that achieving this goal has presented, much progress has been made, and the goal is still worthwhile and achievable.

All kinds of signs and symbols of modernity are popping up in Iraq – from the succession of democratic elections to the cell phones, women’s groups, internet sites, newspaper offices and beauty contests that we see. But do any of the Democratic contenders show any signs of understanding the process that is taking place or any understanding of our own history, where it took a long time, and the putdown of many armed rebellions, to go from the War of Independence in 1775 to a united country after the Civil War ended in 1865?

The Iraqis are battling over oil and religious and ethnic differences. We battled over slavery and issues of federalism and states rights.

Why should Americans elect ignoramuses to the highest office in our land – ignoramuses who show no understanding of our own history and no ability to translate it into an understanding of the struggles facing us and the Iraqis today?

Of course, this presumes that the obstructionism taking place is due to ignorance; it may only just be a never-ending drive for political advantage at any cost - even of the good of the country. It may only be a continuation of the Bush Derangement Syndrome that has paralyzed liberal reasoning since the election of 2000. The Democrats may be well aware that a significant American military presence will be needed in Iraq for a decade.

Destruction in black America is self-inflicted

By Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe, September 5, 2007

DEBATING capital punishment at an Ivy League university a few years ago, I was confronted with the claim that since death sentences are more often meted out in cases where the victim is white, the death penalty must be racially biased. It's a spurious argument, I replied. Whites commit fewer than half of all murders in the United States, yet more whites than blacks are sentenced to death and more whites than blacks are executed each year. If there is racial bias in the system, it clearly isn't in favor of whites.

But if you choose to focus on the race of victims, I added, remember that nearly all black homicide is intraracial - more than nine out of 10 black murder victims in the United States are killed by black murderers. So applying the death penalty in more cases where the victim is black would mean sending more black men to death row.

After the debate, a young black woman accosted me indignantly. Ninety-plus percent of black blood is shed by black hands? What about all the victims of white supremacists? Hadn't I heard of lynching? Hadn't I heard of James Byrd, who died so horribly in Jasper, Texas? When I assured her that Byrd's murder by whites was utterly untypical of most black homicide, she was dubious.

I thought of that young woman when I read recently about James Ford Seale, the former Mississippi Klansman sentenced last month to three life terms in prison for his role in murdering two black teenagers 43 years ago. The killing of Charles Moore and Henry Dee in 1964 was one of several unsolved civil-rights-era crimes that prosecutors in the South have reopened in recent years. Seale's trial was a vivid reminder of the days when racial contempt was a deadly fact of life in much of the country. His sentence proclaims even more vividly the transformation of America since then. White racism, once such a murderous force, is now associated mostly with feeble has-beens.

Yet many Americans, like the woman at my debate, still seem to view racial questions through an antediluvian haze. To them, white bigotry remains a clear and present danger, and the reason so many black Americans die before their time.

But the data aren't in dispute. Though outrage over "racism" is ever fashionable, African-Americans have long had far less to fear from the violence of racist whites than from the mayhem of the black underclass.

"Do you realize that the leading killer of young black males is young black males?" asked Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan 16 years ago. "As a black man and a father of three, this really shakes me to the core of my being."

From Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement, came a similar cry of anguish. "Nothing in the long history of blacks in America," he lamented in 1994, "suggests the terrible destruction blacks are visiting upon each other today."

Happily, crime rates have declined from their 1990s peak. But it remains that the worst destruction in black America is self-inflicted.

In a new study, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics confirms once again that almost half the people murdered in the United States each year are black, and 93 percent of black homicide victims are killed by someone of their own race. (For white homicide victims, the figure is 85 percent.) In other words, of the estimated 8,000 African-Americans murdered in 2005, more than 7,400 were cut down by other African-Americans. Though blacks account for just one-eighth of the US population, the BJS reports, they are six times more likely than whites to be victimized by homicide - and seven times more likely to commit homicide.

Such huge disproportions don't just happen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously warned 40 years ago that the collapse of black family life would mean rising chaos and crime in the black community. Today, as many as 70 percent of black children are raised in fatherless households. And as reams of research confirm, children raised without married parents and intact, stable families are more likely to engage in antisocial behavior.

High rates of black violent crime are a national tragedy, but it is the law-abiding black majority that suffers from them most. "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life," Jesse Jackson said in 1993, "than to walk down the street and hear footsteps . . . then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved."
It isn't an insoluble problem. Americans overcame white racism; they can overcome black crime. But the first step, as always, is to face the facts.

Editorial Comment:

Fatherless children, the destroyer of society no matter the race, is the product of the “Great Society” and the AFDC component of Welfare. We need to sacrifice a generation to end this scourge before our society crumbles altogether. Spare me the hand-wringing. Save your pity for the murdered and maimed victims of fatherless children and for the beaten and ruined women they leave behind.

Was There Really a 9/11 Disaster?

USALC and CIA Station Chief, William Francis Buckley, 57, was kidnapped from Beirut, Lebanon on March 16, 1984 before being taken to Iran where he was brutally tortured and killed. He was held captive for 15 months before dying from the torture he had received. In 1991 his body, wrapped in blankets was dumped on a road near the Beirut airport. Mr. Buckley, we have not forgotten you.

To those who keep harping that our military response into Iraq (and even Afghanistan) was a mistake or immoral or an attempt by George Bush to grab their oil, please note that in six years:

1. there have been no further major terrorist attacks in the USA
2. there have been no further bombings of a U.S. embassy
3. there have been no further attacks on U.S. ships
4. there have been no further hijackings of U.S. airplanes
5. there have been no further kidnappings of U.S. officials
6. there have been no further murders of U.S. officials
7. there have been no further bombings of U.S. military barracks
8. scores of terrorist plots have been foiled including one to bring down 10 aircraft bound for the USA and one to bomb our military forces in Germany
9. hundreds of would-be terrorists, including Jose Padilla, Yaser Hamdi, Richard Reid, John Walker Lind, and Zacharias Mousawi, have been apprehended before they could carry out their plots to murder Americans
10. Libya and North Korea have given up the use of nuclear weapons
11. No disabled American in a wheelchair has been thrown into the sea.

This series of successes has been a great surprise to most Americans, and speaks well of President Bush’s initiatives and his management and of the Patriot Act and the surveillance programs put in place by the Bush Administration. The problem is, we are growing complaisant over the terrorist threats, but the Islamists haven’t yet abandoned their murderous plans.

The problem is, many Democrats would rather gain partisan advantage than protect the United States.

The Eye of the 9/11 Storm
By Victor Davis Hanson, September 06, 2007, RealClearPolitics

Another anniversary of 9/11 is near. It's been nearly six long years since a catastrophic attack on our shores, and we've understandably turned to infighting and second-guessing - about everything from Guantanamo to wiretaps.

But this six-year calm, unfortunately, has allowed some Americans to believe that "our war on terror" remedy is worse than the original Islamic terrorist disease.

We see this self-recrimination reflected in our current Hollywood fare, which dwells on the evil of American interventions overseas, largely ignoring the courage of our soldiers or the atrocities committed by jihadists. Our tell-all bestsellers, endless lawsuits and congressional investigations have deflected our 9/11-era furor away from the terrorists to ourselves.

All this tail-chasing comes only with the illusory thinking that the present lull is the same as perpetual peace. Have we forgotten that experts still insist that another strike will come, carried out by those already here or shortly to enter the United States?

Look back at jihadist near-misses in this country since 9/11 - along with a disturbing recent Pew poll that found one in four younger Muslim-Americans approve, at least in certain circumstances, of suicide bombing to "defend Islam" - and the dire predictions seem plausible.

Recall the jihadists arrested in Albany and near Buffalo, N.Y., or the recently uncovered plot to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey. Past foiled targets included the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Brooklyn Bridge, JFK Airport in New York and the New York Stock Exchange.

Some angry loners - mouthing jihadist propaganda or anti-American slogans - simply act on their own to try to kill Americans. Iranian-American college student Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar hit several University of North Carolina classmates with his car in March 2006. Last summer, Omeed Aziz Popal was arrested for a hit-and-run rampage in San Francisco. And Naveed Afzal Haq is charged with shooting several women last summer at a Jewish center in Seattle.

Recall also the American residents and citizens with direct connections to al-Qaida's terrorism network.

American Jose Padilla (aka Abdullah al-Muhajir) was just convicted by a jury of terrorist conspiracy. Khalid Abu-al-Dahab, a key al-Qaida recruiter, operated out of California's Silicon Valley. "Sheik" Omar Abdel Rahman advised Egyptian jihadists from his American jail cell - after his conviction for helping to plan the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. U.S. visitor and asylum-seeker Ramzi Yousef was convicted of the same crime. His partner, the indicted American citizen Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled to pre-war Iraq. Another American, Adam Gadahn, regularly narrates al-Qaida communiques.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed - mastermind of the 9/11 mass-murder and the Daniel Pearl decapitation - studied in North Carolina for a number of years. Egyptian-American and U.S. Army veteran Ali Mohamed helped plan the destruction of American embassies in East Africa. The convicted "20th-hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui attended flight school in Oklahoma.

Two things seem clear here. One: There have been, and are now, plenty of Islamic terrorists and their helpers in the United States. And two: We are dangerously shortsighted about the ongoing threat they pose.

Meanwhile, Islamic-American organizations and sympathetic civil-liberties associations file lawsuits about supposed American security excesses and illiberal vigilance.

Last fall, for example, several imams were taken off a flight from Minneapolis when the group's erratic behavior scared fellow passengers. After the incident, one of the so-called "flying imams," Arizonan Omar Shahin, called for boycotts of the involved airline and legislation to stop supposed anti-Muslim profiling.

But the brazen Shahin, it turns out, is more than just a bullied Islamic scholar; he's also helped raise funds for an organization that the U.S. government has tied to Hamas.


Our experts are too often in denial or disarray. Former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clark, former CIA operative Michael Scheuer and former CIA director George Tenet now make widely publicized strident attacks on ongoing efforts to stop terrorists and level charges against others - and each other. They rarely talk with any humility, much less apprise us of what we can learn from their own failures to stop the 9/11 jihadists during their long tenures.

In short, six years of quiet at home since 9/11 have fooled some into thinking that terrorists pose little danger here - or that we may be doing far too much rather than too little to stop such killers. No matter that this past week a jihadist plot to destroy U.S. facilities in Germany was thwarted.

Others make the mistake of endlessly re-fighting the past six years - who let al-Qaida grow?; who "lost" Osama bin Laden?; who fouled up postwar Iraq? - instead of concentrating on the storm ahead.

Before 2001, the excuse for American complacence and in-fighting was naivete. But what will be the reason for the next successful strike against us by the jihadists?

More naivete - or is it simple hubris?

I Fear We Are Losing

Why is it that I often write about such subjects as Darwinism, liberalism, and the ACLU? It is because American society is engaged in a war between those who believe that there is no such thing as right and wrong – and those who hold more traditional views. Those who believe there is no such thing as right and wrong (whom Bill O’Reilly calls Secular-Progressives or SP’s) believe that the only thing that matters is what feels good, and that their behavior is nobody else’s business.

Although many people do not make the connection, this attitude and the behavior it promotes can be traced to Darwinian theory that we are all just accidental products of random happenings – in a straight line down to the dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels and Lenin – down to the communist and Nazi writings and exploits of Stalin, Mao and Hitler – and down to the ACLU and to modern liberalism.

This is not to say that liberals are always bad or wrong or that conservatives are always good and correct, but the obvious disintegration of American society that we see before our eyes (from a traditional standpoint) is going to continue its downward spiral unless those of us who care about such matters (mostly older people) make the connections and fight harder to reverse this trend. The freedom, the security and the prosperity of our grandchildren ultimately depend on having and enforcing standards.

We know enough of our own history that life was often brutal on the American frontier and in the factories and mill towns of an earlier America, and that lawlessness and reckless behavior was the norm. But always, in the towns and cities of this great country the educated class gained ascendancy and put in place laws and standards of conduct based on common Christian and Jewish teachings that had stood the test of time. Many evil things happened, often by those hypocrites who went to church on Sunday and cheated and stole during the rest of the week, but there was a sense of shared values that were widely recognized and accepted. This is no longer true.

Today the educated class of America consists predominately of modern liberals, who are very much in the majority in our universities, our entertainment industry, our media, and possibly in our courtrooms, and they not only teach our young people that it is cool to despise our culture and our history, and that our country is not worth defending, but also that standards based on traditional values are stupid.

Since Darwinism was the most recent beginning of pure materialism, and the ACLU is today’s dominant enforcer of “anything goes in the name of free speech”, it is these twin evils that must be attacked again and again. Let us be clear. There is nothing wrong with teaching evolution in our schools; if anything, modern science has proven Darwin correct with respect to common ancestry and minor evolutionary change, but modern science has also proven that Darwin was wrong to contend that man developed accidentally from a long series of random mutations. That has been shown to be impossible.

There are many good-hearted people who believe that the ACLU is so important in upholding the freedoms that Americans hold dear that they will overlook it and continue their support even when the ACLU takes up a cause that is unfathomable to decent people. This must change. They must begin to stand back and look at American society and what it has become. Is it right to support the right of child molesters to abuse children? Is it right to destroy the Boy Scouts? Is it right to oppose teachers and administrators who try to stop school-children from wearing t-shirts with obscenities on them? Is it right to promote rap-music filled with obscenities and urging violence against police and women? Is it right that our movies and television programs are filled with pornography, extreme violence and the constant message to young women that shacking up with a man they just met in a bar is something all good little girls do today? What are we thinking?

The other thing conservatives must rally to do is to unite and support conservative candidates for political office. Yes, I know we are disgusted by the corruption, ineffectiveness and hypocrisy some of our conservatives have given us for our trouble, but the Leahy’s, the Kennedy’s, the Durbin’s, the Pelosi’s, the Clinton’s, the Kucinich’s and other liberal Democrats are the vanguard of the secular-progressive movement, and they must be defeated with whatever weapons we have at our disposal.

I want to remind Republicans, whose chances for success in 2008 have already been completely discounted by the mainstream press, what the picture was as recently as 2004. Below is a map of the counties in the USA. The red counties were Republican majorities, while the blue counties were Democrat majorities in 2004.