the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts. Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade — indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections — suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted — or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before — for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired

The list of heretics is getting pretty long now.

May was another normal month in the war against Islamism. At home, a delusional Rosie O’Donnell was back at it. She reminded her viewers that the United States has killed over 600,000 innocents in Iraq. And in an impassioned plea, she and her cohorts reminded us dullards that zealous jihadists must have some understandable reason for being so, well, zealous. Perhaps she meant in the same way that the zealous Waffen SS must have had some legitimate reason for its strong feelings? Jimmy Carter was also plugging another book on his Christian piety by slandering a president at war for mixing religion and politics…

Critics who deplored the effort to depose a genocidal Saddam Hussein were urging the United States to do something to stop the genocide in Darfur — but of course always with the U.N. or EU (of Rwanda and Kosovo fame); a familiar formula: our Marines, their diplomats. Democrats who claim we took our eye off al Qaeda when we went into Iraq won’t explain how getting out will allow us to put both our eyes back on them when they’re in a nuclear Pakistan. Democrats who assure us that the war is “lost” and the surge hopeless will not cut off funding for it, damn its architect Gen. Petraeus, or explain how in good conscious they can send more soldiers into harm’s way for a war they assure us we can’t possibly win…

In spite of this all, given the power and wealth of the United States and its cloning mechanism we call globalization, the world shrugs and goes on. I suppose the idea is that we are in a sort of Cold War containment mode with radical Islam. In other words, we try to ensure that jihadists cannot do too much damage to the world order, and that in time we will simply smother them the way we did the earlier Soviet fraud.

So we fight the worst in Afghanistan and Iraq, try to ensure that Iran doesn’t get the bomb, hope that Israel is alive one more day, and then put out these small brush fires that burst out at weird places like Fort Dix or a London mosque. In the meantime, our own counterassault continues. Oprah, iPods, the 300, the Internet, and everything else from jailbait Paris Hilton to the ghost of Anna Nicole just chug on, and do the their own small parts in undermining and coopting the 7th-century world of Dr. Zawahiri.

Is it working? In some sense, yes. Poor Dr. Zawahiri, after all, is still ranting about the Kyoto accords from his mud-brick enclave, his cave notes full of cribbed ideas from Al Gore and Noam Chomsky. If he keeps declaiming, Jon Stewart or Bill Maher will do a link-up soon.

But most serious nations, it seems — those in the West, China, Japan, India, and Russia — have come to some sort of unspoken, politically incorrect consensus about the radical Muslim world, its unearned oil profits, and its very practiced terrorism. I guess they think watching radical Islam is akin to watching a nursery full of ill-tempered infants fighting over hand grenades — the key being to keep them in, and you out of, the playpen when their adult toys periodically go off.

If Professor Hanson’s thesis is correct, there seems to have been an evolution in the Western world and elsewhere to seeing this struggle as an ideological war. If so, the world has come a long way in the last half-decade.

The expertly done mashup’s creators are, at this writing, anonymous. However, the Hollywood savoir faire and elan of the commercial may be no accident, in our opinion. There is an anti-Hillary movement in the corridors of media power:

Looking for a new political love, Mr. Geffen hosted a small dinner in 2005 for Mr. Obama at his mansion, attended by Mr. Katzenberg and a few other friends including Warren Beatty. Shortly after, Mr. Geffen called Mr. Obama and pledged to support the senator if he ran for president, according to someone familiar his thinking. Messrs. Geffen and Katzenberg rushed to put together the Feb. 20 fund-raiser, wanting to be the first in town to hold a political event for Mr. Obama. Following the cocktail party for 400 at the Beverly Hilton hotel, Mr. Geffen hosted an intimate dinner at his nearby mansion for 40 people, many of whom had raised at least $46,000 for the event. In total, the funds raised at that event could account for about 10% of the total Sen. Obama is expected to raise nationwide in the first quarter…

The Old Media of the Left are divided in their loyalties and their preferences, but the Left’s New Media are united in a disdain for Senator Clinton:

Senator Clinton garners only 3% in the Kos poll, while Obama is at 26%. There are still many adults in the US, but it would be unwise to underestimate the kids, whom the New Media may suck in (and sucker) as voters.

Prosperity has been around for such a long time in this country that great foolishness might be in store, in politics and in policy. We’re due, there’s no question about it. The last two generations of Americans have known no serious economic privation and little warfare broadly involving the population. Moreover, the Illustrious Dunderheads have been at work during all of this time filling the minds of the young and affluent with all sorts of claptrap. Therefore, all sorts of nuttiness just might be in our future. “We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control” — we don’t dismiss it out of hand as an unofficial campaign slogan of the anti-war, global-warming party in 2008.

Slowly, in the course of almost one thousand years of intellectual confrontation and violent wars fought on battlefields, Christian fundamentalism lost its power and attributes until the notion of the lay state and freedom of conscience broke through. Left along the road were millions of corpses and an awful history of barbarity and injustice that reached the peak of abjection and fury with the Inquisition, the burning of witches and the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. The intention is very good, and Liberal International’s strategy is correct. But the possibilities of success in the short or middle run are very limited. A truly liberal Muslim would have to:

• Fight for the equality of women and for an end to the use of the Koran as the fountain of the law, especially by eliminating its function as a penal code.

• Face the brutal fatwahs of imams who condemn dissenting writers to death.

• Denounce the warmongering nature of a religious creed that consecrates the virtue of the jihad (at least to the fundamentalists) and separates the world into two halves: the half that already has submitted to Islam and the half that must be conquered. (But not even those heroic battles constitute the hardest part of the immense task facing liberal Muslims. The bitterest swallow, but an inevitable test, is to:)

• Lead the defense of Israel’s right to exist as an independent and peaceful nation alongside an equally free and peaceful Palestinian state.

Hey, it only took Christianity a thousand years to achieve the overthrow of fundamentalism, according to Mr. Montaner. So lok on the bright side. Surely with the speed of the Internet age, the Islamic Reformation can be accomplished in less than half that time.

We have said that perhaps the biggest unreported story of the last decade is that a Great Depression did not occur after the Great Stock Market Crash that began in the year 2000. As you can see in the chart above, when the Internet Bubble burst, the NASDAQ plummeted from its high of 5100 to a low of 1100.

And nothing happened. When a very similar Crash happened in 1929 to the NYSE, the country suffered the worst economic calamity in its history, GDP fell precipitously, unemployment hit 25%, and the stock market didn’t recover for a quarter century — until 1954. We thought that the non-Depression in the US following the bursting of the Internet Bubble was a huge story. In our view, the non-Depression was caused by Alan Greenspan’s adoption of a expansive monetary policy, so significantly at odds with the awful performance of the Fed in the 1929-1933 time frame (and other structural issues such as the lack of deposit insurance). However, we never saw that story in print until yesterday.

Yesterday we read a piece in the WSJ called Why Money Matters, which included the following chart and analysis:

The prosperous ’20s in the U.S. were followed by the most severe economic contraction in its history. In our “Monetary History” (1963), Anna Schwartz and I attributed the severity of the contraction to a monetary policy that permitted the quantity of money to decline by one-third from 1929 to 1933. Since 1963, two episodes have occurred that are almost mirror images of the U.S. economy in the ’20s: the ’80s in Japan, and the ’90s in the U.S. All three episodes were marked by a long period of rapid economic growth, sparked by rapid technological change and the emergence of new industries, and accompanied by a stock market boom that terminated in a crash. Monetary policy played a role in these booms, but only a supporting role. Technological change appears to have been the major player.

These three episodes provide the equivalent of a controlled experiment to test our hypothesis about what we termed the Great Contraction. In this experiment, the quantity of money is the counterpart of the experimenter’s input. The performance of the economy and the level of the stock market are the counterpart of the experimenter’s output, i.e., the variables whose relation to input the experimenter is seeking to determine. The three boom episodes all occurred in developed private enterprise market economies, involved in international finance and trade, and with similar monetary systems, including a central bank with power to control the quantity of money. This is the counterpart of the controlled conditions of the experimenter’s laboratory…

The results of this natural experiment are clear, at least for major ups and downs: What happens to the quantity of money has a determinative effect on what happens to national income and to stock prices. The results strongly support Anna Schwartz’s and my 1963 conjecture about the role of monetary policy in the Great Contraction. They also support the view that monetary policy deserves much credit for the mildness of the recession that followed the collapse of the U.S. boom in late 2000.

It was good to finally read this story that it was monetary policy that indeed had made much of the difference in the outcomes of the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Crash of 2000. It took a while, but it was worth the wait. It struck us as well that the author was following up on analysis that he had done 43 years earlier — that in itself is a pretty unusual bit of follow-up, after such a long period of time. But what was perhaps most amazing was that the same day that the author’s article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on the op-ed page, his obituary was the WSJ’s lead editorial.

Milton Friedman has received no shortage of tributes after dying at age 94 this week. However, it is hard for us to imagine many blessings in life greater than being actively engaged in work and the world of ideas into one’s tenth decade. The WSJ obituary of Professor Friedman included this comment of his on the role of the public intellectual:

“We do not influence the course of events by persuading people that we are right when we make what they regard as radical proposals. Rather, we exert influence by keeping options available when something has to be done at a time of crisis.”

Crises of course recur with some regularity. The hard part to achieve is the long, engaged life of a Milton Friedman. It is just one of many ways in which he stands as an inspiration.

the United States has supported fledgling democracies in Afghanistan Iraq and the Palestinian Authority. We have proudly assisted in making free and fair elections possible in these places…each of these new democracies has produced constitutions that enshrine Islamic law.

Because Islamic law, known as “sharia,” does not permit equality between the sexes or among religions, it is anything but what we in American consider “democratic.” Indeed, sharia law endows Muslims, and Muslim men in particular, with a superior position in society. It also outlaws words and deeds that oppose this inequitable power structure for being “un-Islamic.” From this same Islamic legal tradition comes the mandate for jihad (holy war, usually against non-Muslims) and dhimmitude, the official state of inferiority of non-Muslims under Islam.

With their devotion to Islamic tradition, then, these new democracies have, in effect, peacefully voted themselves into the same doctrinal camp as the many terror groups that violently strike at the non-Muslim world in the name of jihad for the sake of a caliphate — a Muslim world government ruled according to sharia.

So be it. What I mean by that is, it is neither in the national interest nor in the national will for the United States of America to attempt to reshape such a culture to conform to our notions of liberty and justice for all. It is neither in the national interest nor in the national will to attempt to reform a belief system that animates this culture to conform to our notions of freedom of worship. It is, however, in our national interest, and must become a part of our national will, to ensure that Islamic law does not come to our own shores, whether by means of violent jihad terrorism as practiced by the likes of Al Qaeda or Hezbollah, or through peaceful patterns of migration, such as those that have already Islamized large parts of Europe.

We wrote on this topic months ago, when we said that it was irresponsible for the President not to specifically identify our new Cold War in the West — the long war against Islamic sharia. Now, in our opinion, there is a strong undercurrent of this still un-PC belief in America — and the recent election results may be evidence of it. One difference between the free world and the sharia world: in our world, teenage boys play video games where they behead prople; in their world, teenage boys behead people who play video games.

[T]asteful passivity is the default mode of the age: Five years ago it was striking, even in the immediate aftermath [of 9-11], how many radio and TV trailers for blood drives and other relief efforts could only bring themselves over the soupy music track to refer vaguely to “the tragic events,” as if any formulation more robust might prove controversial.

Passivity is far slyer and more lethal than rabid Bush hatred. Say what you like about the left-wing kooks but they can still get a good hate on. Sure, they hate Bush and Cheney and Rummy and Halliburton and Fox News and Rush Limbaugh rather than Saddam and the jihadists, but at least they can still muster primal emotions. Every morning I wake up to a gazillion e-mails from fellows wishing me ill, usually beginning by calling me a “chicken hawk” followed by a generous smattering of words I can only print here peppered with asterisks, and usually ending with pledges to come round and shove various items in a particular part of my anatomy. There’s so much shipping scheduled to go up there I ought to get Dubai Ports World in to run it….

At what point does a society become simply too genteel to wage war? We’re like those apocryphal Victorian matrons who covered up the legs of their pianos. Acts of war against America have to be draped in bathetic music and uncomprehending reflections and crescents of embrace. We fight tastefully, too. Last week one of America’s unmanned drones could have killed 200 Taliban big shots but they were attending a funeral and we apparently have a policy of not killing anybody near cemeteries out of sensitivity. So even our unmanned drones are obliged to behave with sensitivity. But then, these days the very soundtrack to our society is, so to speak, an unmanned drone.

It’s not only the Left that’s Angry. A lot of conservatives are pretty angry too. Now if they all could get angry about that same thing, what a day that would be for America.

UPDATE

Bret Stephens has some observations as well on the Angry Left.

We have chronicled on several occasions the finding that a significant portion of America has wanted the US to use much greater force in Iraq and elsewhere against our enemies. We are hearing that this sentiment has grown even greater in recent days. We hear American patience wearing thin, as many Americans think it is absurd for the world’s mightiest power to be hamstrung by Lilliputians without and weak politicians within. We think that is happening for a variety of reasons. The provocations from Iran continue, including their deadly nuclear program and proxy Shiite war in Iraq. (The comparisons of Iran with 1930′s Germany continue to multiply.) The Hezbollah war shows that weak responses are of limited value. And the Iraqis themselves — at least so far — seem unable or unwilling to live as a peaceful society, even though they have had plenty of time to do so; America has had to up its troop strength to do for the Iraqis what they can not or will not do for themselves. Meanwhile, Islamic killers everywhere demonstrate every day that they care as little for Muslim lives as they do for infidel lives. We hear a feeling of: screw them all.

In the broader struggle against al Qaeda and its allies, we sense a similar frustration. Why are we all putting our shoes through airport detectors rather than putting our Muslim enemies’ feet to the fire? Why are we not profiling and identifying the terrorists and likely future offenders and removing them from civil society? Why do we have to put up with politicians and a seditious MSM that pretend that Muslim terrorists in our midst, who kill our fellow citizens, are anything, anything but the Islamic killers that they claim they are?

Americans are by nature not imperialists. Americans do not want to rule foreign countries. But neither do they want to feel threatened by them. We hear this from conservatives, moderates and even some liberals: the rhetoric of democracy from President Bush was okay, but it has worn out its welcome, just as the embarrassing, strangely apologetic sucking-up about peaceful religion has. America does not need five years to wipe out this unworthy enemy. America does not have to put up with Islamofascists who intimidate our government from even calling them the Islamofascists that they are. We hear again and again from Americans who are sick of politicians who lie, kowtow and demonstrate weakness. (This point goes for controlling the border as well.)

Americans spend, give or take, half a trillion dollars on the military every year. They are also sick of a lousy return on investment. We hear this from our fellow citizens: why on earth are we monkeying around with a pipsqueak like Ahmedinejad and his little country with their teeny-weeny military that is a mere 1% of America’s? Why are we not kicking ass and taking names?

It’s more than that; we hear that patience with the “moderate Muslim” world to deal with the problem of their fundamentalists has pretty much worn out. Even though President Bush has been for the most part MIA on the ideological aspect of the war against Islamic fascism, the people have come to understand a fair bit about the enemy in the last five years. The American people understand that the enemy considers it a religious duty to wage war against America, and will not be satisfied until we are all converted or killed. For five years, Americans waited patiently for the moderate Muslim world to rise up in outrage about the atrocities being carries out in the name of their religiion. Instead, Americans have heard virtual silence about the outrages. It’s been an appalling performance. Worse still, what Americans have heard is absurd accusations of racism and whining about civil liberties from community spokesmen and lawyers, and this has worn out the patience of many Americans. It was asked of Don Rumsfeld some time ago if America was creating more Muslim fanatics and terrorists than were being killed in the war: we hear that the answer for many Americans has become, who cares? Kill as many as need to be killed. For many people the theoretical questions of who is right and who is wrong have lost their meaning; the question has become who will live and who will die — and we hear that Americans want to live.

Many Americans simply do not care what the French or the Russians or the Germans or even the English think of us — let alone the Islamic world. We want to be left in peace, and unmolested by third world enemies with their various complaints. Many Americans do not care if Najaf and Fallujah or Baghdad or Teheran continue to exist as places on a map. They just want to be left alone. And they want the people threatening not to leave us alone impotent or dead. We hear disgust at the notion that Americans have to sit around waiting for whatever it is Ahmadinejad will unleash whenever he has the capability — if he’s the new Hitler, don’t wait: get rid of him and his capabilities. Waiting is simply a formula for a million dead Americans before we take him out.

To many Americans, it appears as simple as a formulation from a US president a century ago. As TR put it: Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead, No more pussyfooting around. That’s what we hear as a larger theme in the so-called anti-war sentiment of our time.

We hear this, even from conservatives: in a certain sense, President Bush has indeed failed America. But it is not by his bellicose ways. He has, in fact, not been warlike enough, according to the wishes of many Americans. There seems to be a view that you only have a limited time to prosecute a war with a national consensus behind you, so you better make that time count, and President Bush has not adequately done so. According to this view, the United States of America should have made it plenty clear over the last five years that the last people on earth that Muslim terrorists or Islamofascist ideologues want to screw around with is us — by overwhelming, and brutal, uses of force. (The complete destruction of Fallujah might have been helpful and instructive, for example; putting Marines on trial on the word of the enemy is exactly the wrong message to send.) To many Americans, the need for overwhelming, merciless force is the lesson of this war, as it should perhaps have been the lesson of Vietnam. Americans are impatient, and they will not tolerate being in a “state of war” indefinitely. Wars are meant to be won, not endured.

We hear from many Americans who now have a terribly itchy trigger finger versus America’s declared enemies. That may be a good thing, or it may be a very bad thing, from the standpoint of making policy for a great power. Nonetheless, it is a sentiment to be ignored by politicians at their peril.

UPDATE

It would be a very fair question to ask: just how do these sentiments translate into action or policy, and we don’t know that we have an answer to that question. But we have the feeling that soon enough, the frustration we sense may well translate into the mother of all disproportionate responses after some enemy provocation. We’re not there yet, but we are nearer the tipping point than ever.

The coming of Eurabia in a couple of generations is among the latest projections of the Malthusian sort. Originally conceived as a political term, Eurabia has taken on a flavor of demographic inevitability in recent years, with the mathematical projection of ever-increasing European Muslim populations and declines in the Christian population. This has led to well-credentialed commentators warning of a “Muslim Oxford” and such things sometime in this century. No doubt if present trends continue unabated, Eurabia will emerge as predicted. The question is whether the straight-line projections are accurate.

We would do well to treat such projections with skepticism for a couple of reasons. For one thing, a cheery reason, as Spengler has pointed out, Muslim birthrates tend to decline sharply everywhere when women’s literacy rates rise. For a darker reason, consider that the Muslim populations of Germany, France and England are pretty small at present. How might the Christian and secular populations of Europe react at some point if economic conditions in Europe plummet, jobs become scarce, and these populations feel far more put upon than they do today?

There are no guarantees in life, and there are no guarantees in mathematical projections either. The vast secular and Christian populations of Europe are not uniformly represented by their vapid and cowardly elites, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out almost three decades ago at Harvard: “The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.” Neither are the populations of Europe entirely represented by the images of the MSM, who are the lickspittles and vassals of the elites. There are soccer thugs and soccer thugs in-waiting all over Europe — remember: virtually no one in Germany in 1930 imagined Germany in 1940.

The vast secular and Christian populations of Europe appear pretty docile at present. But how much of that is an illusion, or a result of the unsustainable welfare benefits of the decaying European economic machine? What happens if times get tough?

You see, there are some mathematical facts that are worth paying attention to, and they underscore the possibility of a very different future. For many years now, Europe has taken on characteristics of an economic fantasy land. Structural unemployment has increased to terrible levels, and vast sums of GDP are channeled through government (57% in France — 3x USA) in order to maintain huge welfare benefits to the people of Western Europe.

So far Europe has been bailed out of its coming problems by the massive productivity increases of the last several generations, the willingness to live with unsustainable levels of government spending, and the importation of cheap labor. Projecting that trend indefinitely is risky. As we have pointed out regarding the US’s own Social Security system, it has precisely the structure of a Ponzi scheme — what happens if the bubble bursts, or the wheel stops, even if only for a few years? It’s happened before; don’t say it can’t happen again — discontinuities are the hardest things of all to forecast, but they happen all the time.

The projections of Eurabia are based on assumptions about the underlying docility of the supposedly enervated populations of Western Europe. That assumption of docility is in turn, in our view, based on potentially questionable projections of economic growth and prosperity. Our point is this: Europeans have among the nastiest histories of brutality, barbarism and genocide on the planet. From the 1790′s in France, through the 1930′s in Germany, and, to pick a tiny example, 1290 – 1656 in England, Europeans have shown themselves to be every bit as bloodthirsty and ruthless as anyone on the planet. It is unwise to assume that these characteristics can be bred out of peoples so quickly, no matter what the doddering elites and their court jesters in the MSM seek to portray.

Eurabia may well emerge. It is, however, our expectation that upheavals far worse than anyone is currently forecasting lie ahead for Europe and America in the intervening years.

Through most of the 20th century, American exceptionalism has been the creed of both of our major parties. Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, for all their sophisticated knowledge of foreign cultures, were exceptionalists just as much as Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Among voters, transnational attitudes were espoused by only a very few, in the odd corners of university faculty clubs, investment-banking firm dining rooms and the councils of shop floor socialist intellectuals.

Now it’s different. In 2004, pollster Scott Rasmussen asked two questions relating to American exceptionalism: Is this country generally fair and decent? Would the world be better off if more countries were more like America? About two-thirds of voters answered yes to both questions. About 80% of George W. Bush voters answered yes. John Kerry voters were split down the middle, with yeses outnumbering nos by small margins. That’s reminiscent of the story about the Teamster Union business agent who was in the hospital and received a bouquet of flowers with a note that read, “The executive board wishes you a speedy recovery by a vote of 9-6.” Not exactly a wholehearted endorsement. [we wrote about this here -- ed.]

The Connecticut primary reveals that the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has moved, from the lunch-bucket working class that was the dominant constituency up through the 1960s to the secular transnational professional class that was the dominant constituency in the 2004 presidential cycle. You can see the results on the map. Joe Lieberman carried by and large the same cities and towns that John F. Kennedy carried in the 1960 presidential general election.

Ned Lamont carried most of the cities and towns that were carried by Richard Nixon. In Stamford, where Joe Lieberman grew up the son of a liquor-store owner, and where there are still sizeable blue-collar and black communities, Mr. Lieberman won with 55% of the vote. In next-door Greenwich, where Ned Lamont (like former President George H.W. Bush) grew up as the scion of an investment banker family, and where the housing values are now among the highest in the nation, Mr. Lamont won with 68% of the vote. If Mr. Lamont wins in November, he will be just one of several members of a Democratic caucus who have made, inherited or married big money.

The working class Democrats of the mid-20th century voted their interests, and knew that one of their interests was protecting the nation in which they were proud to live. The professional class Democrats of today vote their ideology and, living a life in which they are insulated from adversity, feel free to imagine that America cannot be threatened by implacable enemies. They can vote to validate their lifestyle choices and their transnational attitudes.

In the mid-20th century the core constituencies of both the Democratic and the Republican Parties stood foursquare for America’s prosecution of World War II and the Cold War. Today, as the Connecticut results suggest, it’s different. The core constituency of the Republican Party stands foursquare for America’s prosecution of the global struggle against Islamofascist terrorism — and solidly on the side of Israel in its struggle against the same forces. The core constituency of the Democratic Party wants to stand aside from the global struggle…

America’s super-affluent professionals have increasingly come to live in a dream world. They do jobs which are often sorts of meta-jobs, two or three or five layers up from anything that seems real. Imagine if your family got its vast income from your litigating logo infringement cases in India and China, for example (no insult intended to international logo-infringment litigators, mind you). These New Elite are a different sort of bird, different from the Organization Man, or the Lonely Crowd. They are newer and older: they live in Aristophanes‘ fantasy world cloud cuckoo land. We think their defining characteristic is this: like aristocrats, they feel entitled to much, but deep down they also feel that they do not truly deserve the lives they lead.

We have discussed their utopian views and their narcissism on many occasions. We have railed against the utter ignorance of the super-affluent and their disconnection from how life was in America a mere 130 years ago.

Education might be a good long-term medicine for the problem that affluence carries within it the seeds of decay. But it is not the medicine that the super-affluent might taste first. Our enemies, like Iran, aim at dealing the US economy mortal blows. They are working feverishly on the means to do so, and we have no doubt that they would use them if they deem it in their eschatological or political interests. In such a scenario, exotic positions in finance, law and related fields would be among the most vulnerable, and perhaps the hardest hit economically. When faced with their own personal riches-to-rags stories, these super-affluent may well suddenly become the most fervid hawks. We’ll see.

This kind of scary hatred, my dad used to tell me, comes only from the right wing — in his day from people such as the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with his tirades against “communists and their fellow travelers.” The word “McCarthyism” became a red flag for liberals, signifying the far right’s fascistic tactics of labeling anyone a “communist” or “socialist” who favored an active federal government to help the middle class and the poor, and to level the playing field.

I came to believe that we liberals couldn’t possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us. And in recent years — with the deadly combination of sanctimony and vitriol displayed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage — I held on to the view that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right.

Now, in the closing days of the Lieberman primary campaign, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong. The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony.

Davis’s sentiments are notable, less because he has discovered the way the Left views its opponents, but for what they reveal about him. Notice that he felt, and still apparently feels, very superior to people of a conservative orientation. This is quite telling. Ann Coulter is deliberately provocative, and Michael Savage continues to be the third rail of conservative talk radio, but Mr. Limbaugh is nothing if not an utterly mainstream GOP conservative, with an informed and educated audience. He’s kind of a middle America Republican everyman — and Davis is still caught in the old “racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe” mindset. Talk about out of touch with what’s been going on in electoral politics over the last dozen years!

Perhaps Mr. Davis still has more in common with those on the Left who currently upset him than he cares to acknowledge still.

As Barone said, “These numbers would have been astonishing 50 years ago and surprising 20 years ago….Left-wing anti-Israel sentiment is not confined to a few odd corners of the academic world; it has become a mass constituency in the Democratic Party.”

We also recall Bill Kristol’s statement: “the Democratic party doesn’t really want to fight jihadism. It’s just too difficult.” Unfortunately, Mr. Kristol, it appears to be worse than that. Those Americans who are pro-Israel and pro-the-fight-against-jihadism may increasingly find, like Joe Lieberman, that they do not have a natural home in the Democratic Party.

In what the Pew Global Attitudes Project called one of the survey’s most striking findings, majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, and Turkey – Muslims countries with fairly strong ties to the United States – said, for example, that they did not believe that Arabs carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

This was just one finding illustrating the chasm in beliefs between the two groups…

This characterization of Muslim denial as a “chasm in beliefs” is rubbish. The Muslim world may now deny that Arabs did 9-11, though many sure celebrated at the time, and that denial may come from the fact that truth is a not the highest value in an honor-shame society, or it may come from an ingrained sense of victimhood taught as part of religion, or from some other cause. But the denial is ridiculous on its face. It is a symptom of big trouble for the world that people think those responsible for 9-11 is a matter of dispute, when we know all about the hijackers’ identities and the origins of the plot — and when the plotters have explicitly claimed responsibility. People might be ignorant, demented, or in denial, but they are not entitled to facts that are totally at odds with reality. Water does not flow uphill, even if you fervently wish, or pray five times a day, that it were so.

But what is even worse than the ridiculous denial of reality in the Muslim world is its inexcusable mirror-image in the well-educated elites of the MSM. How dare the MSM dignify the demented speculations of misled people as a “chasm in beliefs.” “Belief” has no business in the matter. We know reality, and those who choose to deny reality are foolish, misled, insane, culturally blinkered, or otherwise hobbled in their understanding of reality and the world. For the MSM to dignify unreality rather than to state what is is clearly (and condemn it, for that matter) is unacceptable. It plays to the worst in the enemy, and it debases the traditions of the Enlightenment, practicality and common sense on which the Western world relies for its existence and legitimacy.

Yet to the MSM, there is a “chasm in beliefs.” One opinion is just as good as the other. No judgment here. What would the MSM base such a judgment on, after all? Has there really ever been “proof” that 9-11 happened? Were you on the planes? Didn’t those Jews miss work that day? Weren’t there explosive charges in the WTC basement? One opinion is as good as the next, and mightn’t those tapes of Osama been doctored? And can you speak Arabic by the way, to tell what was definitively said by that “Osama” on the tape? It was a CIA put-up job, wasn’t it — them and the Mossad?

Here’s a chasm in belief for you: there are those who think the MSM are good and trustworthy, and there are those who believe that they must be stopped before they get us all killed. Which side of that chasm are you on?

Slowly the West has been going through a transformation. Slowly the West has come to understand militant Islam. The process is not yet complete, but it has come a long way. We wrote about this previously. The West went through its “religion of peace” phase in the days immediately after 9-11, and its “fantasy ideology” phase for the next year or two, when the enemy were reckoned in small numbers. Then came Iraq, with its daily bombimgs surpassing the wildest totals in Israel. Some saw this as all Bush’s fault, and though there are no doubt those who still sincerely believe this, that number diminishes every day — in part because almost no one in the world actually thinks that if the US left Iraq tomorrow, religious and totalitarian violence would cease because of the US departure.

Then came the election of Hamas, the rise of Ahmadinejad, and in between all the bombings and killings and plots in Bali and Egypt and Jordan and Darfur and Nigeria and Afghanistan and Turkey and Somalia and the US (UNC, LAX, Beltway Snipers, and thwarted plots) and England and Spain and France and Canada and Denmark and the Netherlands and elsewhere. And then the Cartoon Riots and more bombings and embassy burnings and all the threats to behead — not to mention the actual beheadings of Nick Berg and Danny Pearl and Ken Bigley and Eugene Armstrong and Paul Johnson and all the rest. And it’s Allahu Akhbar all the time with these guys, like in that video of the Iraqi insurgent sniper drawing a bead on a US soldier; Allahu Akhbar, Allahu Akhbar and on and on and on. All the time, Allahu Akhbar. And then the MSM worthies come on the TV and say none of it has to do with religion.

There’s really only so much of this a person of average intelligence can stand. And so we have begun to see the different perspective emerge, as people begin to face what they were afraid to face, and they begin to insist that all people live by the standards of the civilized world, or else. The ‘or else’ hasn’t been fully developed, of course, but that is most likely just a matter of time as critical mass is created on both sides of this conflict. Our way of measuring progesss in this cultural and critical evolution in the West has several elements, including this: what number of Muslims do people in America and the West think are actual or potential problems for America and the West? This went from almost zero on 9-12, to numbers that are quite startling today, at least to us. We heard Mary Mataliin the other day estimate the number of deranged and dangerous Muslims at anywhere from 140 million to 200 to possibly 300 million. Today we heard John LeBoutillier use the figure 1 billion with regard to Muslims with strange practices or are somehow out-of-control. We don’t mean particularly to single out these two estimates, just to make the point that it is totally uncontroversial today for people to remark in casual conversation that a very large percentage of the entire Islamic world is possessed of very big problems with violence and ideological madness that are of their own making. This was anathema a few years ago, but no one seems to notice anymore these days — outside of those institutions which have to formally abide by the strictures of political correctness.

We certainly hope there won’t be a widespread war, but it seems pretty much inevitable, does it not? If the militants, with their gangs of violence-ready juvenile delinquents, do not change their program in London and Paris and Amsterdam and Copenhagen, what are the alternatives? A millet system? D’himmitude? Mass arrests? Repression? Civil War? The list seems rather short to us. If Ahmadinejad says he will destroy Israel in one storm and the US or Israel destroys his nuclear capability to do so, will there not be a terror war waged throughout the Middle East and Europe and the US? You tell us what the scanario for peace is — we’d genuinely and enthusiastically prefer it to the dark vision that lies before our eyes.

Maybe things will change and get better. That would be nice. Maybe Iraq will become, in the nick of time, a working model for what can be achieved in the Arab Islamic world, and the theology of militant Islam will alter itself in the space of years, not decades or longer. That would be fantastic, and we hope it occurs. And on the other hand, maybe Europe wants to become Muslim and will just chuck all this modern business — as we’ve said, it might save on women’s clothes and car insurance. Conflict and war are not inevitable, after all, since people are not apples and don’t have to obey Newton’s First Law. They can always reverse course on their own and simply surrender.

We feel like we’re stuck in the movie Tora! Tora! Tora!, waiting for the implications of FDR’s oil embargo on Japan to play out. Just waiting and watching as events unfold. One of the most unpleasant aspects of this waiting is our belief that the cowardice and Leftism of the MSM, and the institutional bias of government towards accommodation and order, will combine to try to repress those who see and speak clearly as events approach a breaking point. Let’s just hope that we will be proven wrong about that, as well as about every other thing in this little essay.

UPDATE

The UK has been something of a laggard in seeing and speaking clearly. An exception is this piece in the Telegraph by Simon Heffer:

[T]here has been a dichotomy in mainstream British society. With varying degrees of clumsiness, honesty and transparency, the Government has identified and admitted a threat to our way of life from a small minority of radical Islamists.

In opposition to this view are pacifists, anti-racists, radical Marxists, anarchists, anti-Blairists and others of varying degrees of conviction and opportunism who see any attempt by the state to try to limit the incidence of terrorism as an assault on civil rights. They have branded the two brothers in the Forest Gate raid “victims” – a word used by the chairman of their press conference yesterday. It is a word that is clearly losing its force in our language. There seems to be a pursuit of moral equivalence with the more usual idea of a “victim” of terror.

Miss [Melanie] Phillips’s contention is that we were, and still are, a country in denial about the threat from radical Islam. The reaction to the recent raid exemplifies this. First, we failed to implement basic border controls.

Then we tolerated extremism for years, before public opinion finally forced the authorities into action. She quotes several already well known examples of radical clerics who incited murder and other forms of violence while the British authorities, notably the Crown Prosecution Service and senior politicians, turned a blind eye.

Supporters of radical Islam such as George Galloway and Ken Livingstone are elected to public office: the latter’s well documented hostility to Israel seems hardly to count against him. As recently as this year, the police went easy on those who used the publication of offensive cartoons about Islam as an excuse to call for murder.

For years, those who came here to incite violence were supported by a generous welfare state and enabled to continue their activities with the support of new human rights legislation. They have become the tool – sometimes willingly, sometimes unwittingly – of white political agitators and extremists, who have for years manipulated the anti-racist and multicultural causes for their own ends.

A climate has been created in which the police hardly dare to act on the basis of convincing intelligence, and are forced into a state of defensiveness. There is a widespread presumption across the intelligentsia, which leaks into the media, that the prime victim of this is the Muslim community. Any suggestion that it might be the entire population – including innocent Muslims who might one day find themselves on a Tube train filled with poison gas or blown to bits – who stand to be the real victims is treated with disdain. And those who try, like Miss Phillips, to argue that the evidence supports greater vigilance are treated as pariahs.

We shall find out in the space of a few years just how suicidal the West really is.

UPDATE II

We note this paragraph from the review of Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept by Andre Zantonavitch in the American Thinker:

Among the nightmare statistics cited by the book are these: 1. 80% of the women in Oslo’s shelter system are Muslims fleeing abusive families, husbands, and boyfriends; 2. Danish Muslims make up 5% of the population but 40% of the welfare rolls; 3. refugee-friendly Switzerland is already 20% Muslim; 4. the world’s most wonderful city (in my view) Amsterdam is now majority Muslim; 5. 70% of all French prisoners are Muslim; 6. the four London bombers that killed 56 in July of 2005 received almost a million dollars in welfare benefits.

It seems to us that there is a meaning to the Mosaic Commandment not to take God’s name in vain that goes far beyond taking false oaths or swearing, namely this: doing evil acts while specifically invoking the name and authority of God is profoundly evil. Doing so is truly and completely taking God’s name in vain, if God is good. It is, indeed, an utter perversion of the idea of religion, if religion is something that humans should hold in any regard. Something is very wrong with religion if it permits invoking God’s name for the killing of innocents, or does not even recognize that this is an evil thing.

There doesn’t seem to us much on earth more evil than deliberately targeting and killing children, with the exception of killing children specifically on behalf of God and religion. That is why we found the story so disturbing and horrific of the 21 Shiite children who were executed by 15 other Muslims, all “in the name of Islam.”

Well, you point out to us, what about all the terrorists in Israel with their pre-suicide videos, or the beheaders of Danny Pearl or Eugene Armstrong with all their taped ‘Allahu Akbar’s, or those jolly fellows who wanted to decapitate the Canadian prime minister? What about the beltway snipers, or the North Carolina SUV crasher, or the Egyptian gunman who killed those people at the El Al counter at LAX? What about the London subway bombers or the murder-threatening Cartoon Rioters or the men who wanted Abdul Rahman’s death? What about the Bali and Jakarta bombers and the Beslan massacre? For that matter, what about Sirhan Sirhan, or Munich 72, or the Marines in Lebanon, or the Cole of Khobar Towers, or the African embassies; what about the hijackers of United 93? They were all Muslims praying to and invoking the name and authority of their God. What is special about the killings of the 21 Shiite kids?

One answer is that the killing of these kids seems particularly pointless and random, and hence all the more evil to us. But there are other answers too. In many of the murders mentioned above, it is possible to let the sheer evil of the acts get diluted by some political change the murders supposedly are intended to bring about. That seems less obvious here. And the senseless murders of these Muslim children make a point that cries out to the world: these killers will not stop, even if every Jew and Christian were to vanish from the face of the earth. The Muslim killers are going to keep finding innocents to kill in the name of Islam and their God.

There were sound reasons for making war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we wholeheartedly support those campaigns in our long war. Beyond their practical aspects, however, there is a genius in these engagements in the Islamic world, a total change in mind-set that they have brought about. On September 11, 2001 not one in a hundred Americans understood what was happening, why such ridiculous and terrible attacks were taking place. When newsmen quoted from bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war, it all sounded so crazy, like some fantasy ideology. Osama was an outlier, not the pattern; now that has all reversed. Today we can see that the snake has many heads. Bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, Zawahiri, Zarqawi, and all their mini-me’s from Canada to Indonesia, from the UK to North Carolina, and every day in Afghanistan and Iraq. The problem is worldwide and large.

The execution of 21 Muslim children by 15 Muslim men in the name of Islam underscores that something is very wrong near the heart of Islam, and we are capable of hearing that message today only because we have come to be engaged with the Islamic world over the last five years in ways that most Americans never imagined possible. (That was not the intention of the MSM of course. They have largely thought that, by featuring the daily atrocities and car bombings, they were feeding an anti-war agenda; what they have unintentionally accomplished is to highlight the massive problem we face, and to make themselves look ridiculous. Similarly, the Western apologists who say that various murders and plots have nothing to do with Islam have made themselves look absurd, when the murderers and plotters proudly announce that they make Jihad at the command and in the name of God and Islam.)

The world faces a profound problem when men do not feel shame at muder, but instead proudly announce that they murder in the name of and at the behest of God. We understand the matter differently when it is not Crusaders versus Muslims, but Muslim men murdering Muslim boys in the name of Islam. The last five years has given us the context to understand the systemic nature of this problem. That is not a solution, but a necessary pre-condition to bringing about a solution. In our view, the big part of this war is still to come. World War II would not have made sense to anybody without watching the rise of German and Japanese ideologies and militarism in the 1930′s. We have now had our 1930′s.

UPDATE

We note some related elements in a piece by Shrinkwrapped.

Abdul Haq Baker was the mosque’s chairman and became Moussaoui’s friend and confidant. Mr Baker remembers Moussaoui as an affable individual with a sense of humour which attracted him to others, but also an admirable seriousness about his faith. “He wanted to revive his roots which were in Islam. He wanted to be a good Muslim, a knowledgeable Muslim, who wanted to know how to implement the tenets of Islam…”

Seems about right to us.

UPDATE

The Archbishop of Sydney, George Cardinal Pell, would, we think agree with us that Moussaoui has been doing his best to be a religious man:

“Considered strictly on its own terms, Islam is not a tolerant religion and its capacity for far-reaching renovation is severely limited,” he said….”In my own reading of the Koran, I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages.”

We’re beginning to see some sort of pattern here, but the picture still appears a little fuzzy. After all, didn’t our leaders tell us to believe that “Our enemy doesn’t follow the great traditions of Islam. They’ve hijacked a great religion.” If so, it has been the most successful hijacking in history.

UPDATE II

P J Nasser helpfully reminds us that the irenic suras in the Koran mostly come from Mohammed’s time in Mecca, and the bellicose ones (later, hence more authoritative) from Medina.

“What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence…”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922, Introduction, p. 3

Wittgenstein was a philosopher who in the Tractatus proposed a flawed theory of language. George Bush is not a philosopher, and often garbles his language. Nonetheless, that phrase of Wittgenstein’s keeps coming back to our mind when we think of the things George Bush talks about, and those conspicuously absent from discussion. George Bush says some things quite clearly, and others he passes over in silence.

There are three things we note that George Bush does not much speak of: (a) the ideological war against sharia; (b) the inevitability of decisive military action to prevent Iran from getting WMD; and (c) effective control of the US border with Mexico. The reasons for these things probably have nothing to do with each other. The President may not talk about our ideological war because he does not want to further inflame passions in the Islamic world, or the situation in Iraq is too dicey, or because he does not think in such terms. He may keep quiet about Iranian WMD because none were found in Iraq, which surely seems to be sufficient reason. He may not talk or act about enforcement of the border with Mexico because he is in the pocket of big corporations, or there is a conspiracy of the New World Order, or his pollsters have said to do so is unwise electorally, or he strangely believes that a welfare state can have open borders. No doubt you can list many more reasons, both sensible and absurd, yourself.

To underscore how radically different George Bush’s current silence on Iran is from his talk on Iraq, we’ll go back to the fall of 2002, courtesy of Peoples Daily and the detailed, bellicose and provocative things the President said in his October speech:

Saddam and his “nuclear holy warriors” are also building a nuclear weapons program, Bush said in a rare evening address. “If we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed,” the president told civic group leaders at the Cincinnati Museum Center. “Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression.” “He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East. He would be in a position to threaten America. And Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists,” Bush said….

“The time for denying, deceiving and delaying has come to an end,” Bush said. “Saddam must disarm himself or, for the sake of peace, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.” Bush warned that an Iraqi military facing destruction “may attempt cruel and desperate measures” and that Iraqi commanders may be considered war criminals if they follow Saddam’s orders. “There is no easy or risk-free course of action,” Bush said. “Some have argued we should wait, but that is not an option. In my view, that is the riskiest of all options because the longer we wait, the stronger and bolder Saddam Hussein will become.”

The things that George Bush was saying about Saddam and WMD and their possible use by Iraq or terrorists are all far more overtly brandished and threatened by Iran itself. Yet there is barely a peep from the President about Iran, certainly nothing like the rhetoric of a few years ago. As for the control of the Mexican border, it is obvious that this is a major, virtually uncontrolled pipeline for smuggling human beings into the United States; it’s as though the Rio Grande had a big neon sign above it saying: Terrorists Welcome! Finally, the President’s backing of the ports deal with Dubai, the mealy-mouthed response to the Cartoon Riots and the Afghanistan apostasy case, and his silence on the disasters that are Islamic sharia societies appear at odds with the way the US handled the ideological front in the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

We are certainly willing to entertain the notion that the President is just out of it, that five years of the 9-11 environment have been too much for the man. Or perhaps he has a tin ear politically, and simply has a ‘screw-you’ attitude towards the base (and a majority of Americans) regarding the priority of effective border control over amnesty, guest-worker programs, or anything else. And maybe the administration really is outsourcing Iran policy to the EU and the UN, and the administration plans to figure out what it is really willing to do to stop Iran a year or two down the road.

Maybe, but what if?

What if it all hangs together, however? What if the President’s reticence on our ideological war is all about maximizing cooperation in the Arab and Islamic worlds for a massive operation against Iran, which might involve not only the assistance of the ports-deal UAE, but countries like Saudi Arabia, with basing, overflight and oil export elements in play? What if a major element in the Bush softness on the southern border is to attract Iranian and other infiltrators to use well-established and well-penetrated coyote channels to track these people — they’re going to get in somehow, why not in through venues where the US has active intelligence assets? And as for the the back-seat role the US is playing in Iranian diplomacy, what if one purpose is to stall for time and to egg on — through relative silence and passivity — the loudmouth millenarian thug Ahmadinejad to greater and greater excesses of rhetoric and action, potentially tricking him into sufficient offensive action so that America’s hitting Iran can be seen as a defensive response?

We recognize we are probably trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and that we are engaging in wishful thinking, since we hope there might be a clever strategy behind what appears to be utterly feckless behavior. However, it is fair to say that George Bush has been fixated on the war since 9-11, and on protecting the United States. And while it is also fair to say that the President may not be the sharpest theoretical tool in the shed, he has mastered the art of letting his opponents overextend themselves by silently, apparently cluelessly playing rope-a-dope, as Thomas Lifson has shown.

It has been obvious for a long time that Iran was going to build a nuclear arsenal come hell or high water; no diplomacy was going to stop them — the very thought is laughable. Therefore, and this is the crucial point, George Bush, the Decider, has already made the decision about how he will handle the matter. He will either let them get the bomb or he will not. No competent CEO, faced with a circumstance as potentially devastating as Iran’s getting and using the bomb, would take the position that “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” when planning the actions to stop it and to deal with the consequences of that new war, takes years. Therefore, in our opinion, George Bush has already made the fundamental go / no-go decision about whether he will permit Iran to get the bomb. If he has decided not to let Iran get the bomb, there are a number of decisions that flow from that. These include deferring the timing of a strike as long as possible, getting as much intelligence within Iran as possible, trying to foment conditions within Iran to stop Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, preparing battlefield and diplomatic conditions for a strike, using Iran’s belligerency against itself, and preparing in depth for the counter-attacks that will be unleashed by Iran in that new war. At least that’s what we’d do if it were our responsibility.

So there is a some case to be made that there is method to what appears to be madness in certain policy positions and in the silence of the Bush administration on certain important issues. If it turns out that George Bush may again demonstrate with Iran that he is a master poker player, there is still one great and overarching mistake he could make: when the time comes for an attack, he could choose moderation. If America were to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability, it needs to wipe out its ability to make conventional and terrorist war as well. It would be the highest folly not to do so, and planning to comprehensively destroy Iran’s terror capability is perhaps the thing that takes the most planning of all.

So maybe there is grand strategy at work by George Bush and his administration. On the other hand, as Wittgenstein said, (and Bill Kristol and many others believe) maybe their silence comes from having nothing to talk about.

When supporters of illegal immigration threaten to boycott all stores, it makes me feel like shopping. When I see TV reporters interview demonstrators, who announce that they are undocumented, I can only surmise that illegal immigrants have nothing to fear from immigration authorities.

When demonstrators say that Americans should welcome them because they are willing to work at low wages, I notice that they have depressed wages for other low-skilled workers and made it harder for less-educated Americans to earn a living wage. I salute anyone who wants to work hard, but I cannot feel good about the fact that they do so by dragging down other people’s ability to earn a decent living.

When I read Mexican American Political Association flyers for the May 1 event that demand “immediate legalization without conditions,” that tells me activists don’t want the earned citizenship in the Senate Judiciary Committee immigration bill, because it requires would-be citizens to learn English, attend civics classes, pay a fine and back taxes, and pass a criminal background check.

When I read, “no escuela” (no school) on MAPA flyers, and that the Los Angeles Times reported that in Southern California some 40,000 students may have skipped school to join in past protests, I think of the 18 percent of Latino high school seniors who have not yet passed the state exit exam.

When I read, “no trabajo” (no work), I see activists who are ready to stick it to their most potent lobby, American employers, which makes them ingrates.

Then, when MAPA President Nativo Lopez calls for “no employer sanctions and no guest-worker programs,” that tells me he wants no laws whatsoever governing who can come to and work in America….

I can only say that when I read, “no trabajo” and “no escuela” and “no compra” (no shopping) and “no venta” (no selling), my response is: “No mas.” No more.

We sense American outrage growing and becoming louder, over things that seem to us obviously outrageous, but heretofore passed over in silence or low tones. Is it us, or is there change in the air?

UPDATE

Polipundit sees precisely the opposite phenomenon in the MSM.

Today in America, however, many young people haven’t a clue what it signifies to reap what you sow, or what reap or sow mean. They don’t know why you make hay while the sun shines; they may not even know what hay is. They don’t know about early birds or birds of a feather or eggs in one basket or counting chickens. For that matter, how can you look a gift horse in the mouth if you’ve never seen a horse up close?

Maybe we’re too persnickety. After all, adages come and go, just like buggy whip makers. Every generation has its greatest invention since the printing press, the light bulb, or sliced bread; life moves on. And today’s adages, from Godwin’s Law to the Dilbert Principle, aren’t bad at all.

UPDATE

We would like to have concluded this piece on that light note above, but we just can’t. We have repeatedly said that we can’t afford to let our bridges to the past crumble, and that is more important than ever. In our perilous times, some adages shouldn’t be forgotten. William L. Shirer, in the epigraph for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, quoted George Santayana’s famous dictum from 1905: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Shirer went on to say in the Foreword on page xii: “In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button.” That’s too long to be an adage. However, Shirer does seem a bit prophetic about the millenarian Ahmadinejad and his new Aryan nation, not to mention an entire generation of Islamic suicide-murderers, doesn’t he?

We in the West take the idea of progress for granted, as we have previously discussed. But what if your society doesn’t march to that drumbeat? What if your society has no concept of ‘progress’, only of ‘submission’? What if your society is rather zero-sum in nature, referring all things — including really trivial concepts like charging interest for a loan — back to a 1400 year old book? What if your society is further built around the idea of always pleasing higher authority? What if your society authorizes you to have contempt or disregard for those lower than yourself? What would we call such a society?

Well, that society would seem to resemble some aspects of feudal Europe and medieval Christianity. To blogger orangeducks, that society is the Islamic world of Iraq — and he has the business experience to back it up. It is a society where lying to superiors with good news is expected, certainly one form of ‘submission’, and lying to inferiors in order to gain or maintain advantage is taught from birth.

– Example I, the Lease: The Art of the Deal in Iraq is to figure out, not if someone will try and screw you, but how and when. The focus is always on not getting caught over a barrel by the other guy, and to try to get the other guy over that barrel, using deception, lies, misinformation, lies, misdeeds, lies, and finally, more lies. The Agreement, that poor casualty of the desert sands, is considered to be a first step, not a final arrival, on the long march to screwing the “other guy.”

A few days ago, I was called point blank and to my face a “thief” and a “liar” by an 85-year-old Iraqi from whom we are leasing a house. I wrote the lease agreement, including clearly stating the price for the first 6 months, and then a discount price for the second 6 months. These prices were based on verbal (read:painful) negotiations that had lasted for days. Once completed, I gave the lease contract to the gentleman, and he had it for 2 days. He contacted me a couple times to change a few minor details, which I did. He then signed it, and I signed it, and then I sent it off to our offices in the US for payment processing.

The day after we signed, the gentleman was beside himself and putting on all sorts of theatrics. With full-blown indignation, he said the price was too low, and “the person” who wrote that wretched lease was trying to trick him and was a thief and a liar!

– Example II: the Order. In addition to trying to screw each other, there is the opposite condition of trying to avoid embarrassment — to “save face” or keep one’s “honor” in front of each other. Under this cultural imperative the lies fly, efforts die, but the Muslim, forever, keeps his head held high.

So, for example, when you are talking to a company president about delivery progress of a critical item by his company to a location, he’s getting his information from his assistant, who is getting it from the field supervisor, who is getting it from the guy who is related to the guy who is friends with the guy who owns the trucking company, who gets it from the dispatcher, who gets it from the truck driver (who also happens to be the company president’s nephew, but that’s another story).

Each and every one of these guys, all the way through the chain, will lie to the guy above him when asked about the delay in shipment (and there IS a delay — always). In order to save face, each will say whatever they think is good news, no matter how false and misleading it actually is. By the time you talk to the boss, who is also trying to save face with you, there is no relationship between what you are being told and what is really happening — none.

I had steel prefabricated buildings to construct at project sites throughout Iraq. They were to be ordered from a factory in Kuwait, fabricated, loaded, and trucked to sites in Iraq in 11 weeks. I inquired as to progress at least weekly. I was told when they were ordered, when manufacturing began, when they were completed, when the buildings were staged, when they were loaded on to trucks, and when the trucks were waiting at the Iraq border. Everything was communicated with exact details every step of the way.

The trucks were held up at the border for several days, then a week, then two weeks. Excuses abounded. I finally sent a Westerner down to the factory in Kuwait, only to find that the first step — the order — had not yet been placed….

The stories are endless (even more endless than the length of this post!) At first we were all offended at being lied to so much. But after a while, you stop taking it personally, and you just start giving credit where credit is due: They can’t build anything, can’t manufacture anything, and can’t fix anything that breaks. But at least they are good at one thing: lying their asses off all day, every day. Think about this the next time Uncle Mah starts talking about using his nukes to provide electricity

Orangeducks puts his extensive personal experience into an overall concept of the society he has been dealing in:

Muslims, like the stick bug and the chameleon and the stone fish, have developed, to an amazing extent, the ability to deceive….They hone these deceptive traits by practicing on themselves, first and foremost, by perfecting the art that most Westerners would call “lying.” But to them it’s not really lying. To them, lying is simply the most effective means at their disposal for saving face, being clever, getting ahead, and trying to appear superior. Remember, deception is the Muslim’s most developed trait; their secret weapon. Its constant exercise is not a matter of shame, it’s a matter of pride.

And they absolutely drool at the site of an unsuspecting Westerner who waltzes into their midst, like the juicy beetle oblivious to the chameleon, with his Christian-based ideas of “Truth” and “honesty” and “ethics” and “integrity.” From Alexander the Great to the 101st Airborne, the first thing the Arabs saw was not our frightening array of weapons, but the big “Tootsie Pop” signs stenciled on our foreheads.

The Iraqis don’t seem like a bad lot, but it is critical to our victories, our expectations, and our tactics to understand the cultural straitjacket they wear. It is even more important for Americans to recognize the cultural blinders they have been wearing for decades now.

Somewhere in our library we have a world history from a century ago. It describes Russians as “a cruel people with an enormous capacity to endure suffering.” Such writing is unthinkable today. Over the course of the last hundred years, Americans have lost the capacity for such generalizations — for understandable and good reasons as well as bad ones. Yet all this has gone way overboard; we this week witnessed the case of a student who was severely reprimanded for noticing — correctly — that the students excelling in mathematics in a class were Asian. This is a trivial but poisonous example of the war on the home front that must ultimately be waged to defeat militant Islam around the globe.

The good news for America is this: many people are only pretending not to see what they see, in order to avoid the censure of their PC overlords. If the flare goes up, the PC will go down. It can’t happen too soon. (HT: Larwyn)

Focusing on the interpretation of religious texts, Charles told his audience: “We need to recover the depth, the subtlety, the generosity of imagination, the respect for wisdom that so marked Islam in its great ages …”What was so distinctive of the great ages of faith surely was that they understood, that as well as sacred texts, there is the art of interpretation of sacred texts – between the meaning of God’s word for all time and its meaning for this time.”

Prince Charles’ attempt to hijack Saudi Islam by injecting a little metaphor into its dreary, oppressive literalism was profoundly unsuccessful. In Saudi Arabia it is apparently literally true that some things never change; the paranoia in the second paragaph is also a nice touch:

Initial reactions to the speech from students interviewed by Reuters were far from encouraging. “Charles and the west don’t understand the true Islam,” said one student, Maher al-Sehili. “There’s nothing to change,” said another. “Islam can adapt to any era and any place, but there are no two interpretations to its sacred texts,” said a third.

A 21-yer-old student called Abu Dijana added: “He (Charles) should remember that the Qur’an is sacred. I don’t trust them (westerners) and the Qur’an says it clearly – Jews and Christians will not be satisfied until you follow their path.”

It’s also unlikely that the Prince’s words will generate much wider debate in Saudi Arabia if the Saudi Gazette is anything to judge by. Its report of the speech consisted of vague generalities without a single quote. Not entirely surprising, considering that the reporter assigned to the task was a woman and women were barred from attending.

Well, that was a good try by the Prince, and a dreary, predictable, annoying and tedious response from the mind-numbed Saudi robots, which inspires us to a question. Which is more annoying and tedious: (a) watching fundamentalist Islam head for its nervous breakdown as the modern world refuses to cease its existence in the face of the religious demands that it must; or (b) listening to adminstration functionaries prattle on about the “religion of love and peace.”

If the ports deal had come up six months ago, it probably would have gone through. There was no opposition to the deal for the first two months after its annoucement in November 2005. If the Cartoon Riots had not occured during the approval process, the deal likely could have concluded quietly.

At the end of January (us or MM), the Cartoon Riots began, and continued unabated (us or MM) up through and beyond February 13, when the ports deal approval was reported. The visceral disgust at the Cartoon Rioters provided the emotional power that fueled American opposition to the ports deal. The Cartoon Riots changed Americans’ perceptions of the fundamental nature of the war; no longer was it simply a war of “insurgents” and “al Qaeda” against US soldiers. The image of our enemy became this — people in London and the world over who wanted to kill us or convert us:

Muslims from all over the globe reacted to little cartoons — which they had never even seen — with threats to “behead” this one and “annihiliate” that one. They burned buildings and killed people. In London, they shouted strange Arabic chants, and even stranger English chants (“take Danish wives as war booty“). As we said recently: “the Islamists have contrived to make themselves and their religion look repugnant…mobs with primitive bloodlust killing people over drawings, like something out of anthropology class. These riots, making Islamist rioters look like savages, and making the mute among their co-religionists look even worse in their silence, have also brought renewed focus to the atavistic and revolting beliefs of the Islamists about art, the status of women, and their real plans for the Infidels. Many Americans have begun to ask: who would want to have anything whatsoever to do with Islam after watching such violent, threatening, irreligious behavior?” People who riot over drawings are either evil, primitive or mentally unstable; people who riot over drawings for “religious reasons” are all that and deadly dangerous too.

(Meanwhile, the MSM took one look at the violent Brownshirts of our time and their neo Nazi book burnings, and couldn’t begin to bow and scrape fast enough before them, making every kind of excuse for the mobs and their violence and threats; but the people are not as craven or obtuse as the elites.)

In a pre-Cartoon Riot world, the rationale for the ports deal was a plausible one: we need good allies in the Arab and Muslim world to help us defeat insurgents in places like Iraq, and Al Qaeda terrorists worldwide. In a post-Cartoon Riots world, this rationale doesn’t cut it anymore; it is insufficient. Americans now see that Islamists worldwide are arrayed against them, and these Islamists seem vastly more interested in killing Americans than converting them. In such a world, silent Muslims are potentially viewed as unindicted co-conspirators. Places such as the UAE and Dubai suddenly have come to be judged by a higher standard: prove to us Americans that you are on our side, and that you are not sympathetic to our enemy.

Worldwide radical Islam has been at war with the United States at least since the events in Iran in 1979. With the Cartoon Riots, it may be true to say for the first time that Americans have begun to understand and reciprocate.

UPDATE

For a more pessimistic view of what conclusion the America people may have silently drawn from the Cartoon Riots, see David Warren in RCP. He says that there may be a fundamental flaw in the WWII template seemingly applied by the Bush administration to our current conflict. According to Mr. Warren, in President Bush’s view,

we are dealing with what amounts to a planetary civil war, between those who accept the state-system descended from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and an emergent Islamist ideology that certainly does not. To Mr Bush’s mind, only legitimately-elected governments, presiding over properly-administered secular bureaucracies, can be trusted to deal locally with the kind of mischief an Osama bin Laden can perform, with his hands on contemporary weapons of mass destruction.

But Mr Bush was staking his bet on the assumption that the Islamists were not speaking for Islam; that the world’s Muslims long for modernity; that they are themselves repelled by the violence of the terrorists; that, most significantly, Islam is in its nature a religion that can be “internalized”, like the world’s other great religions, and that the traditional Islamic aspiration to conjoin worldly political with otherworldly spiritual authority had somehow gone away. It didn’t help that Mr Bush took for his advisers on the nature of Islam, the paid operatives of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic Relations, the happyface pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong, or the profoundly learned but terminally vain Bernard Lewis. Each, in a different way, assured him that Islam and modernity were potentially compatible.

The question, “But what if they are not?” was never seriously raised, because it could not be raised behind the mud curtain of political correctness that has descended over the Western academy and intelligentsia. The idea that others see the world in a way that is not only incompatible with, but utterly opposed to, the way we see it, is the thorn ever-present in the rose bushes of multiculturalism. “Ideas have consequences”, and the idea that Islam imagines itself in a fundamental, physical conflict with everything outside of itself, is an idea with which people in the contemporary West are morally and intellectually incapable of coming to terms. Hence our continuing surprise at everything from bar-bombings in Bali, to riots in France, to the Danish cartoon apoplexy.

If David Warren is giving voice to what those repelled by the Cartoon Riots have come to silently believe, then the sea change in American attitudes we have observed is far greater even than we have written.

Lately it has seemed to me that something has to give, either Islamist fundamentalist exegesis of the Koran, or the modern world. Fundamentalist Islamism is just about played out in reality. It is economically bankrupt, producing terrible and unnecessary poverty (aside from oil), it produces nothing of value in science and technology (as you noted from my patent piece), it has little art (blowing up statues and forbidding orchestral music), it has little literature (and very few Western books are translated into Arabic); in short, it has nothing to offer the world, and yet these people are taught that they should be in charge of everything and everyone as a matter of theology. It’s as though a whole people were having a nervous breakdown from the completely incompatible messages being delivered from their religion and the world.

Is this not analagous in some way to Holocaust denial — the desperate clining to a sick fantasy in the teeth of the evidence? Is it any wonder that Ahmadinejad himself takes this view?

One man with a sick fantasy like Irving is not a big deal to me. Perhaps I’m wrong, but there you are. However, we now have millions of people, indeed governments, in such a cosmic state of denial about the failure of their religion to deliver the promised goods, that they are willing, anxious to sign on to the strangest and most extravagant fantasies to explain that their problems are really not caused by a flawed belief system.

If a guy like Irving is not treatable to get his worldview to comport with reality, what does this say about the prospects for dealing with the violent and hysterical world of the Islamists, which is based on Koranic exegesis that over and over, every day and minute of the week, the real world demonstrates to be utterly bankrupt?

I’m afraid I just don’t see this having a good end, but maybe I’m missing something. I suppose if there were hope for a David Irving, that might be a different story.

The question may have been rhetorical, in that Shrinkwrapped has in many ways already provided his answer here.

UPDATE

So far, Lileks speaks for us on the port issue. In the immediate aftermath of the cartoon riots featuring hysterical, bloodthirsty and deranged Arabs and Muslims from around the globe — whose actions are either endorsed by or uncontrollable by their governments — the ports fiasco is, at a minimum, a reason the President should watch more TV.

Precisely because Republicans cannot easily pander to black grievance, they have no need to value blacks only for their sense of grievance. Unlike Democrats, they can celebrate what is positive and constructive in minority life without losing power. The dilemma for Democrats, liberals and the civil rights establishment is that they become redundant and lose power the instant blacks move beyond grievance and begin to succeed by dint of their own hard work. So they persecute such blacks, attack their credibility as blacks, just as they pander to blacks who define their political relationship to America through grievance. Republicans are generally freer of the political bigotry by which the left either panders to or persecutes black Americans.

No one on the current political scene better embodies this Republican advantage than the current secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. The archetype that Ms. Rice represents is “overcoming” rather than grievance. Despite a childhood in the segregated South that might entitle her to a grievance identity, she has clearly chosen that older black American tradition in which blacks neither deny injustice nor allow themselves to be defined by it. This tradition, as Ralph Ellison once put it, “springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done.” And, because Ms. Rice is grounded in this tradition, she is of absolutely no value to modern liberalism or the Democratic Party despite her many talents and achievements. Quite the reverse, she is their worst nightmare. If blacks were to take her example and embrace overcoming rather than grievance, the wound to liberalism would be mortal. It is impossible to imagine Hillary Clinton’s “plantation” pandering in a room full of Condi Rices.

This is why so many Republicans (including Laura Bush) now salivate at the thought of a Rice presidential bid. No other potential Republican candidate could–to borrow an old Marxist phrase–better “heighten the contradictions” of modern liberalism and Democratic power than Ms. Rice. The more ugly her persecution by the civil rights establishment and the left, the more she would give liberalism the look of communism in its last days–an ideology long since hollowed of its idealism and left with nothing save its meanness and repressiveness. Who can say what Ms. Rice will do. But history is calling her, or someone like her. She is the object of a deep longing in America for race to be finally handled, not by political idealisms, but by the classic principles of freedom and fairness.

Seems about right to us.

In lectures, recordings and writings, the imam said Adolf Hitler had been sent into the world to punish the Jews. Repeatedly, said the prosecutor, Abu Hamza told his followers they must fight for Allah and such fighting involves a religious mandate to murder Jews, kuffars (nonbelievers in Islam) and “apostates,” such as leaders of Arab nations like Egypt. Abu Hamza has pleaded innocent to all 15 charges, including nine counts of solicitation of murder, four counts of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior intended to incite racial hatred and two counts related to the possession of offensive sound recordings and possession of a copy of the Encyclopedia of the Afghani Jihad.

The talks and written materials are not only about war. Abu Hamza also delivers diatribes about Britain’s licensing laws, the use of additives in food, adultery, the role of women and the “evils” of democracy. Abu Hamza repeatedly defines “jihad” as an avenue for establishing a caliphate, or Islamic state, which would be governed by the most radical interpretation of Sharian religious law.

Here’s the defense, via the Times of London:

Edward Fitzgerald, QC, for the defence, said that Abu Hamza’s interpretation of the Koran was that it imposed an obligation on Muslims to do jihad and fight in the defence of their religion. He said that the Crown case against the former imam of Finsbury Park Mosque was “simplistic in the extreme”. He added: “It is said he was preaching murder, but he was actually preaching from the Koran itself.”

It is depressing that still so few people seem willing to face the logic of this situation. But the logic will force itself upon the West eventually. Ever so slowly, we get closer to naming the enemy.

We have devoted quite a few hours and posts to thinking about the subject, among which are these:

The narcissism of the godless Left
The ruined dictatorship of the intellectuals
Hysteria
Utopia and its enemies
The personal feeling of oppression of people on the Left

We want to make a rather modest observation, but one which we feel has some potential explanatory meaning. In the world of conservative thought, somebody else is often in charge. For the businessman, it is the markets; for the religious person, it is God; for the deciding of important issues, it is the will of the people as expressed in elections and referenda; for the general roles of men and women in the world, it is human nature.

In the world of conservative thought, somebody else is often in charge, and that is just fine; in the world of the Left, if somebody else is in charge, that is the problem.

We often note on the Left: the need to make human nature conform to certain behaviors through speech codes and political correctness; the insistence on numerical quotas and the erasing of differences between men and women; the idealizing of the Supreme Court; the dissmissing of the markets and the attributing of evil intent to corporations; the conclusion that voters are stupid or elections are rigged if results do not go their way. And each of these problems has the same solution: that the man or woman of the Left be put in charge to make the rules for us all.

We are not saying, by the way, that the problems identified by the Left are not real problems; in many cases they are. But often the solution for the Left is not the markets, or God, or elections, or letting human nature sort itself out; it is rather to put the Left in charge so that they can create the best of all possible worlds.

We observe that on the Left, the need to be the smartest person in the room and the need to be in control have a different quality from what we observe on the Right. Don’t misunderstand: we are not saying that people on the Right are any better; nor are we saying that conservatives do not love wealth and power every bit as much as do those on the Left (who often hide these desires), and are often willing to do very unscrupulous things in order to achieve and maintain them.

We are not equipped to give a definitive description of why many on the Left are this way, though we are pretty sure that it begins with an inner feeling and works its way out to the world. We think that many on the Left have a deep, personal sense of oppression, that there is something very wrong with the way the world is set up. The oppressor takes the form of the corporation, or Christianity, or racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, or some other -ism of which they are the victim. Things will not be right until the man or woman of the Left is In Charge! — what they fail to understand is that things will not feel better when they are in charge, but that is another matter. They feel driven to gain the power to impose their will and their vision on others.

That the craving is so raw is evidenced for us by the need of many on the Left to conceal their motivations. By now everyone knows that when a cause is “for the children” they had better grab their wallets and run. How much more pathetic is it when a man like Dan Rather, who achieved the pinnacle of success in his industry, insists to this day that his fake memos are real, and that people won’t pay attention to the truth of the underlying story.

Nobody likes to lose power, and the MSM and the Democratic Left have been losing power for well over a decade now. That is maddening enough. However, we believe we are witnessing something more dramatic in 2005. For example, the attacks on America’s Iraq policy have become completely unhinged, portraying a decent, potentially incredible, victory as a humiliating defeat. The smart thing would be to climb on board the victory train, but the Left and the MSM cannot bring themselves to do so.

What happens when people who feel oppressed and crave power over others see that power slipping irretrievably away? That perhaps is something we shall be able to observe, first-hand, in 2006.

Addendum

It is not suprising, given this analysis, that many on the Left would come to admire the authentic men of violence like Yasir Arafat and Fidel Castro. They are the direct, unashamed men who kill their enemies in the name of the oppressed. To many an intellectual of the Left, such men are a kind of role model, though in reality if such a dictator came to power, the intellectuals would be the first people taken out and shot.

The Christian Renaissance and Reformation were full of men and society embracing their new perspectives. We have written of Masaccio and the rediscovery of artistic perspective, and what that might mean for today. More on point for today’s discussion is Martin Luther’s radical reinterpretation of Romans 1:17, which says “The one who is righteous will live by faith”. Luther had always been plagued by feelings of inadequacy, since he felt he could never be adequately righteous to be saved; however, in an explosive moment, he turned the text on its head so that it was God’s gift of faith that bestowed righeousness to Luther, and made it no longer something he had to earn. Thus was the Reformation born by Scriptural re-interpretation, as described by Internet Encyclopedia:

Luther finally found the assurance that had evaded him for years. The discovery that changed Luther’s life ultimately changed the course of church history and the history of Europe. In Romans, Paul writes of the “righteousness of God.” Luther had always understood that term to mean that God was a righteous judge that demanded human righteousness. Now, Luther understood righteousness as a gift of God’s grace. He had discovered (or recovered) the doctrine of justification by grace alone. This discovery set him afire.

In 1517, he posted a sheet of theses for discussion on the University’s chapel door. These Ninety-Five Theses set out a devastating critique of the church’s sale of indulgences and explained the fundamentals of justification by grace alone….

We see some of the same forces at work today in Islam and particularly in Iraq. Islamic theology contends that the Koran is literally true, having been given in revelation to Mohammed by the angel Gabriel. This would be perhaps of limited interest to non-Muslims, except that sharia or Islamic law is meant to govern all aspects of a Muslim’s life, and sets forth governmental rules, including civil and criminal jurisprudence; and that further, (particularly critical for Islamists) Muslims everywhere in the world should have Islamic rule. This scenario spells trouble for the infidels everywhere, and that’s what we have seen played out worldwide in recent years.

As long as the argument is framed as believers versus infidels, there really is no chance for a satisfactory resolution (speaking as an infidel), since the there is no basis for debate between truth and ignorance or blasphemy, both of which we infidels excel at. We infidels are just plain wrong, and we need to submit to the truth, the precise, literal truth of the Koran.

What happens however, when the two main strains of Islam, each of which views the other as heretical in important ways, have to co-exist in the cutthroat give-and-take of parliamentary politics? What happens when different interpretations of the same sacred texts and traditions, each claiming truth, have to make decisions when fundamental beliefs come into conflict? Maybe you get war until one side achieves its tyranny of ideas, but maybe you get something new. Maybe you get a theology that adapts better to the realities of the world.

Luther didn’t think he was creating any kind of new Christianity. He thought he was clearing away the detritus of past clerical abuses to reveal a meaning that had existed all along. You will recall also that Luther had a civic aim in his 95 theses: he was aiming to clean up organizational corruption in church government in the selling of indulgences for profit. So don’t tell us that theological changes can’t have their foundations in practical problems of government, money and corruption. It happened that way in Christianity, and perhaps it can happen again in Islam.

First there is change, then the noticing of the change, then (if you are lucky) the embracing of the change, and finally a rationale so that the change really wasn’t a change after all. That is what we call progress.

In any case, Margaret Friedenauer, a reporter from Alaska, confirmed our notion that there is a bad movie running in the heads of the MSM when she chanced to question her basic assumption today in Iraq:

Think about everything you’ve heard about the conditions in Iraq, the role of U.S. forces, the multi-layered complexities of the war. Then think again. I’m a journalist. I read the news everyday, from several sources. I have the luxury of reading stuff newspapers don’t always have room to print. I read every tidbit I could on Iraq and the war before coming.

Everything I thought I knew was wrong. Maybe not wrong, but certainly different than the picture in my head. I liken it to this; It was real struggle for me to choose to see the Harry Potter movies. I had read the books and loved the pictures I had in my mind of the details I read. I didn’t need to see a movie; I had a movie playing in my head of exactly how I perceived the stories. I had similar notions about Iraq, Mosul, the war and what exactly soldiers do…..

I still haven’t seen U.S. troops engaged or encounter car bombs or explosives. But I did see them play backgammon with some local police and Iraqi soldiers. I saw them take photos with more locals and make jokes mostly lost in translation. They gave advice and expertise to local troops on how to conduct a neighborhood patrol. They drank the local customary tea, and many admitted they’ve become addicted to it. They know several locals by name. I didn’t hear one slight or ridicule of a very distinct culture. One soldier mentioned it might be a good idea to clean up the trash around one polling place, and another commented on the status of women in the culture, but they were nothing but respectful, friendly and buddy-buddy with the Iraqis they mingled with today. And this is good stuff….

But I have a slight hesitation; I need to keep balanced. I can’t be a cheerleader, even if I have a soft spot for the hometown troops, especially after the welcome they’ve shown me. I still need to be truthful and walk the centerline and report the good or bad.

But then I realize it’s not a conflict of interest. If I am truly unbiased, then I need to get used to this one simple fact; that the untold story, might in fact, be a positive one.

This is what change looks like, though, as with all conversion experiences, the question is whether the old template wins in the end or the new knowledge is accepted. (HT: Instapundit)

Here is the signal fact of our progress in the last century. If you were born in 1900, your life expectancy was in the forties, and GNP per capita was about $4000. If you are born today, your life expectancy in about eighty, and statistically, as an average American, you are ten times richer. In reality you are a hundred or a thousand times richer, if you factor in your ability to be in Paris tomorrow for $500, your ability to watch events from fifty years ago as they actually happened, etc. – not to mention that your toddler’s severe pneumonia can be reliably cured in 48 hours or so. Only a little of this has to do with government.

Mostly it is because far more than 50% of everything ever invented in the history of humanity was invented in the last 130 years, and perhaps 50% of that was invented by Americans. Milton Hershey invented the candy bar, Carrier invented the air conditioner for a tire plant, Sears invented catalogue distribution, Henry Ford invented cheap cars, some guys from Texas Instruments invented the transistor. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the invention and wide use of brand names, which communicate the quality and dependability of every product we buy. This alone deserves the Nobel Prize. And it was a large and growing market, the availability of risk capital, the development of standardized accounting principles, and protection of intellectual and personal property by the courts that made this possible.

We are coming to the end of an era, the time when there will be no one in America who remembers what life was like without telephones, running water, indoor plumbing, cars, airplanes, central heating, or electric lights; for our purposes here, we’ll include the children and grandchildren of these men and women as participating in a chain of continuity to those old days. One of our favorite quotes from Henry Adams is apt: “The American boy of 1854 stood closer to the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Soon, almost no one in America will have a visceral understanding of what 1854 was like, and what the heck Adams was talking about.

It is even worse than that. The transistor was invented in 1947 and patented shortly after, and since that time devices of all sorts have been getting smaller, smarter and less mechanical. There is another loss happening because of this, and Americans — including us — have no idea what it means for the future, though we think it is, on balance, bad:

A typical boy of 1854 knew what farming was like and may well have worked on a farm, knew horses and other animals, and learned how to maintain and fix things, from houses to wagons to furniture. A typical young man of 1947 had been in the army, knew people who lived on farms, could tune and maintain his own car, and could change the fan belt on the refrigerator and refill it with Freon. Both the boy and the young man had some feel for the technologies that were developing and changing around them, since the technologies were often sized on a human scale and involved mechanical processes that they had some acquaintance with.

To an important extent, this is no longer true. You can’t fix an iPod the way you can fix a record player; indeed you can’t even open up an iPod to understand it, as you could unscrew the turntable cover to figure out how 33 1/3 rpm became 45 rpm. Nor can you fool around with a Toyota Prius the same way you could try to replace a 283 with a 327 in a ’57 Chevy.

We are not trying to be gooey and sentimental. We are not romanticizing The World We have Lost. Far from it. Today’s technology provides far greater health and wealth to a vastly larger world population than existed in those other times. We love refineries, steel mills, job shops, machine tools and oil rigs, but we are not suggesting, like Mao, a steel mill in your back yard or, like some current political nativists, some form of return to a manufacturing economy. However, we are saying that it is necessary to understand such things.

We hypothesize that, to some extent, the microchip culture we have now, where miraculous tiny things just somehow work, without moving parts, has produced a form of magical thinking in our country. (We also blame the Hollywood Utopians for this too — their creations often seek, not to mirror or enhance reality, but to create rather harmful alternative realities, but that is another matter.) Americans complain about gas prices, but they don’t like refineries, and they oppose oil drilling in godforsaken wastelands; yet somehow the gas is supposed to be readily available at low prices: this is but one example of a sort of magical thinking that seems to us the exact opposite of the way Americans thought in 1854 or 1947.

We think it is urgent for our future that Americans understand and teach our young people about the enormous developments that have happened since the nineteenth century. So far, such efforts seem to us to be largely centered on self-congratulatory sociological claptrap, where the current generation, with all its “diversity,” is superior to all those who have come before. Such thinking is worse than nonsense; if unchecked, it is a steppingstone to the downfall of the country.

In some small way, we think that standing on its head the thinking of Charles Eliot is what is required today. Harvard President Eliot was a great educator and thinker who changed the classical curriculum to make it more suitable for fast-developing America, through increased specialization. (Eliot began teaching at Harvard in that year of 1854, by the way.) We quote him via an unusually well-written entry in Wikipedia:

“As a people, we do not apply to mental activities the principle of division of labor; and we have but a halting faith in special training for high professional employments. The vulgar conceit that a Yankee can turn his hand to anything we insensibly carry into high places, where it is preposterous and criminal. We are accustomed to seeing men leap from farm or shop to court-room or pulpit, and we half believe that common men can safely use the seven-league boots of genius. What amount of knowledge and experience do we habitually demand of our lawgivers? What special training do we ordinarily think necessary for our diplomatists? — although in great emergencies the nation has known where to turn. Only after years of the bitterest experience did we come to believe the professional training of a soldier to be of value in war. This lack of faith in the prophecy of a natural bent, and in the value of a discipline concentrated upon a single object, amounts to a national danger.”

We agree with Eliot of course that the modern world needs specialization, but it needs anew the inculcation of a general understanding of and feel for the development of our technologies and businesses and how we came so far as a people so fast. There is no argument for Americans’ being as cut off from the world of 1854 or 1947 as they are today; only harm can come from such ignorance.

Pew has been using the same methodology for its study since at least 1993; you can see the summary here and the complete report here. Pew chose the same “opinion leader” types in 1993 that they did in 2005, despite the fact that some of those opinions have been in rather pronounced decline. It looks like they failed to note that a number of things changed in 1994, and that conservative thought and electoral success have been in somewhat of a bull market since then, as we have written. So we can perhaps pardon them for simply doing again what they have always done. A couple of quotes from Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which we cited in a previous piece, might be apt:

In a sense I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. (p. 150)….The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced….

Darwin, in a particularly perceptive passage at the end of his Origin of Species, wrote: “Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume…, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are shocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine….[B]ut I look with confidence to the future, — to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to look at both sides of the question with impartiality.”

And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” (p. 151)

Of course we are talking about politics, not science, but it is surely true that most people keep believing and practicing the things they have always known; change is a difficult and slow process. We’ll conclude with a quote from Roger Simon which captures both the idea of stubborn allegiances and the possible momentousness of change when it happens. He was writing of the November 2004 election results:

The Democrats lost in the last election much more seriously than is commonly understood. A swing of three million votes is gigantic in our society where party allegiances are formed in childhood and reinforced by an omnipresent media. We can see the primitiveness of these allegiances in the remaining popularity of Howard Dean, a man who a very few years ago presented himself as a pro-gun centrist, jumping around like a re-upped version of Jerry Rubin to appeal to a segment of the Democratic Party that hasn’t changed one view about anything in thirty-five years. But… and here’s the crux… these people are not that exceptional. Few of us change our views over a lifetime.

Yet, three million did.

We started this piece with the intention to cut Pew some slack. It does not appear intentional that they cited as opinion leaders people who immediately raised red flags for conservative commentators. Pew simply applied the same methodology that they have for years to an opinion survey. However, we’ll cut them only limited slack. It is not unfair to ask a polling and public opinion organization to note when significant changes occur, and make appropriate adjustments to those who count as opinion leaders. After all, public opinion is their business.

“The American boy of 1854 stood closer to the year 1 than to the year 1900.”
—Henry Adams

We have lost a great deal in the last 100+ years, particularly in the last two generations, even though our lives have doubled in length and we are ten or a hundred times richer. We do not have to give up these good things to reclaim the old; but we risk the good things if we do not reclaim the old.

Spengler argues that Islam is undergoing a crisis because of the failure of the religion to accommodate to the realities of the modern world. Modern consumerist society is contrary to the rather ascetic, sharia-ruled, usury-forbidden societies favored by the Islamists. Unfortunately for them, consumerist societies are awfully rich, and the ones they favor are awfully poor — in part precisely as a consequence of their religious principles. He sees the crisis as coming to a head because of the ageing of the population:

Muslim countries face breakdown. America now has a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of US$40,000 and a diversified economy. Iran has a per capita GDP of just $7,000 and depends on oil exports for the state subsidies that keep its population fed and clothed – and Iran will no longer be able to export oil after 2020, according to some estimates.

America can ameliorate the impact of an aging population by raising productivity (so that fewer workers produce more GDP), attracting more skilled immigrants (and increasing its tax base), and, in the worst of all cases, tightening its belt. American life will not come to an end if more people drive compact cars instead of SUVs, or go camping for vacation instead of to Disney World. But the Islamic world is so poor that any reduction in living standards from present levels will cause social breakdown.

In 2002, the United Nations’ Arab Development Report offered a widely-quoted summation of the misery of the present position of the Arab World, noting:
– The average growth rate of per capita income during the preceding 20 years in the Arab world was only one-half of 1% per annum, worse than anywhere but sub-Saharan Africa
– One in five Arabs lives on less than $2 per day
– Fifteen percent of the Arab workforce is unemployed, and this number could double by 2010
– Only 1% of the population has a personal computer, and only half of 1% use the Internet
– Half of Arab women cannot read.

Negotiating the demographic decline of the 21st century will be treacherous for countries that have proven their capacity to innovate and grow. For the Islamic world, it will be impossible. That is the root cause of Islamic radicalism, and there is nothing that the West can do to change it.

Among the Muslim states, Iran has seen the future most clearly, and drawn terrible conclusions. President Mahmud Ahmadinejad understands that life as Iranians know it is coming to an end, and has proposed drastic measures commensurate with the need.

In a program made public on August 15, Iran’s new president proposed a pre-emptive response to the inevitable depopulation of rural Iran. He plans to reduce the number of villages from 66,000 to only 10,000, relocating 30 million Iranians out of a population of 70 million. In relative terms, that would be the biggest population transfer in history, dwarfing Joseph Stalin’s collectivization campaign of the late 1920s. A generation hence, Iran will not have the resources to provide infrastructure for more than 50,000 rural villages inhabited mainly by elderly and infirm peasants. In response, Iran will undertake the biggest exercise in social engineering in recorded history, excepting perhaps Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

Spengler, as might be expected, is a pessimist and practitioner of dark humor. (Check out his Dear Abby responses to letters from heads of state, for example; President Bush should be happy to be the “leper with the most fingers.”) What Spengler predicts could come to pass; none of us know. But these sorts of gloomy long-term predictions are more of use as indicators of which variables are important than as predictors of outcomes. Just ask Malthus.

Changes in worker productivity, longer working lives for people, disease, war, euthenasia programs, radical Islamic reform, or changes yet unimagined could set a far different course than the one Spengler charts. What struck us most in the piece were two points: (a) some radical changes will undoubtedly occur in the next two generations in order that the demographic trends be accommodated — we just don’t know what they are; and (b) we have nowhere seen until today any reference to the rather frightening program announced in Iran, which plan suggests a dangerous, meglomaniacal streak in Mahmud Ahmadinejad. That is a situation we should perhaps worry a lot more about than what will happen by 2100.

The image we have is of a two year old standing in a crib, shouting “Bush lied” at the top of his lungs while covering his ears with his hands.

These people have been losing elections and losing their control of government at every level for a decade, and it has driven them nuts. They live in a country which is 3 to 2 conservative over liberal and they can’t deal with it. They are losing their last lever of government power — the Supreme Court — in real time. This is what denial looks like. You’d be crazy too if it was happening to you.

UPDATE

As further evidence of the derangement of many Democrats, there is the fact that they based a strategy on their wish that the Fitzgerald investigation would be about Bush’s lies and would result in a media circus trial of Karl Rove. Harry Reid, as quoted in Human Events: The episode involving Libby and Wilson, summed up Reid, “is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the President.” Is it rational to base an electoral strategy on the wish for a third party to do harm to your opponent? How nutty is that?

We, on the other hand, are making no predictions. Possibly these gentlemen are correct, and the big, bad Democrat bears will scamper back to their caves after some loud growling. Huh? Is that Armageddon?

If Alito sails through in the way predicted by these pundits, it would appear to be a very big deal for a number of reasons: (a) it means that the nomination of a stealth nominee such as Miers may have been a waste of time; (b) it means that the overheated, canned outrage of the Democratic Party has stopped working, at least on other Senators; (c) it would appear to be a defeat for the MSM, who cheerlead the broadcasts of the outrage!; etc.

The most important implications of the swift, relatively bloodless confirmation of Alito are two. First, the disgraceful behavior of Ted Kennedy in Borking Robert Bork has stopped working. As Podhoretz wrote, quoting Chuck Shumer:

“The real question today is whether Judge Alito would use his seat on the bench, just as Rosa Parks used her seat on the bus, to change history for the better or whether he would use that seat to reverse much of what Rosa Parks and so many others fought so hard and for so long to put in place,” Schumer said.

Now, it’s one thing for a senator to say that Alito should not be confirmed because he is too conservative. That’s been Schumer’s stance on GOP judicial nominations, pure and simple, and while it may be wrong-headed, it’s not disreputable. It’s quite another for Schumer to oppose a conservative jurist by suggesting his views are implicitly segregationist. That’s just a lousy and rotten thing to do.

Even more embarrassing for Schumer: His slander is just a cheap carbon copy of the real thing. That was Ted Kennedy’s stunning 1987 evisceration of Robert Bork — you remember, when Kennedy took to the floor of the Senate mere minutes after Bork’s nomination to say he would return America to a time when “blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters.”

Kennedy’s words ushered in a new era in American politics. It would be difficult to capture just how shocking that attack was. Nothing like it had ever been said by an elected official about someone who was not an elected official — unless he was speaking about the leader of an enemy country.

It would be an important and very constructive change in American politics if the hateful rhetoric of Kennedy and Shumer could be finally eliminated from political discourse on these matters.

However, even more important in our view is that a defeat as described by Hewitt, Podhoretz and Frum would perhaps force the Democratic Party leaders and backers to consider themselves as losers and outsiders, possibly for the first time. They rejected being losers in 2000. The war was an excuse in 2002 — plus their inability to get their message out. John Kerry’s weak candidacy was to blame in 2004, though Kerry was not a weak candidate: he straddled the pro-war and anti-war factions of the Party as perhaps no other candidate could do.

You may say that a defeat in the Senate is one thing, an election is another. Perhaps. But an easy Alito win would mean that conservatives — the conservative wing of the Republican Party — can legitimately see itself as a majority force in American politics, with power and agenda-setting ability exercised across the three branches of government. The Left of the Democratic Party would be impotent, out in the cold in terms of the ability to control anything, a decline that began near the time of the Borking of Bork (and which in our opinion many of them still fail to understand).

It is one thing to think of yourself as a winner-suffering-temporary-setbacks. It is quite another to see yourself as a loser. This is a psychological journey most people do not want to make, and will use every trick of denial and distortion of reality to avoid. In our view, the ramifications of a relatively-easy Alito victory might force some nasty self-examination that the Democratic Party has shown that it wants to avoid. Therefore, our counsel in this matter is: be prepared for anything. And if Alito is confirmed as these fine pundits predict, the political times promise to get even more interesting.

Not so uplifting is her piece today in the WSJ. She senses that there is something seriously wrong in the country, and that the elites in America — presumably conservatives as well as liberals — have lost their faith in our future:

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, “I got mine, you get yours.”

We’re not as pessimistic as Ms. Noonan. We think she may be witnessing the demise of an old “establishment.” As we have written, the Democratic Party had 60% market share in 1964; today that has fallen to 37%. Similarly, the MSM’s audience for evening news was 60 million a quarter century ago; today is is 27 million or so and still falling. With the passing of these majorities and dominant mind-sets, it seems to us inevitable that a lifeboat mentality would grip members of an elite whose time is fading.

Conservatives outnumber liberals 3 to 2, and have for quite a while now. Yet the MSM paradigm, and the institutional paradigms at the other entities cited by Noonan, have continued to be reliably liberal. By and large this will not change, or change only very slowly. Institutions retain their cultures for a long time, even in the face of decline, as we have written on many occasions. Similarly, most people don’t change; as we noted in a post about Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, they tend to just die out rather then alter their lifelong beliefs.

Conservatives outnumber liberals 3 to 2, but until today they really have not acted like they believed they are the majority, even though their bull market began with the rise of the New Media in 1988 and the election of 1994. That minority mindset appears to have changed. We agree with Rush Limbaugh that the Miers debate, which he refers to as a Conservative Crackdown, is a sign of strength, not weakness. Weakness seems to us to be largely on the side of the Left, and has been perhaps best shown in the utter hysteria of its mouthpiece, the MSM, over the last four years. From Enron to Halliburton, Abu Ghraib to Club Gitmo, Durbin to Kennedy, Bill Burkett to Cindy Sheehan, WMD to flushed Korans, al Qa Qaa to Rathergate, Richard Clarke to Joe Wilson, Katrina! to Valerie, the MSM has fired everything in its arsenal against a Republican president and congress, to little effect.

Well, that’s not quite true. The MSM, with its relentless negativity, has brought down the president’s polling numbers. But, as James Carville has noted, the Democrats have sunk as much or worse. The Left, with its allies in Hollywood and the MSM, has created a culture of gloom in America, and we think this is what Noonan is observing in particularly intense form in the Beltway.

When will the culture of gloom officially end? When someone with a mainstream conservative viewpoint like Rush Limbaugh anchors the CBS Evening News. When someone with a mainstream conservative viewpoint like Jonah Goldberg is editorial page editor of the New York Times. (We are not suggesting these actual men for these actual jobs.) Consider it this way: what Dan Rather or Gail Collins think of the “normal” and “non-controversial” outlook is the liberal outlook, on issues like defense, civil rights, abortion, etc; we conceive of a time when the normal and non-controversial outlook is that of mainstream conservatives like these gentlemen.

Unthinkable? Consider this: the current dominance of conservatives in numbers and in thought was unthinkable a mere 17 years ago, when the New Media began. The Old Establishment is passing, and a New Establishment surely will fill that vacuum.

If the vetting process is any indication, per John Fund, the Miers nomination was characterized by improvisation, shortcuts, and unexamined assumptions:

The Miers pick had its origin in the selection of John Roberts last July. Ms. Miers was praised for her role in selecting him and the wildly positive reaction. At that point, a senior White House official told the Washington Post that William K. Kelley, the deputy White House counsel who had been appointed to his post only the month before, stepped in. The Post reported that Mr. Kelley “suggested to [White House Chief of Staff] Andy Card that Miers ought to be considered for the next seat that opened.” To most people’s surprise, that happened with stunning swiftness when Chief Justice William Rehnquist died Sept. 3. Judge Roberts’s nomination was shifted to fill the vacancy for chief justice, thus opening up the seat of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. A quick political consensus developed around the White House that the nominee should be a woman.

Even though several highly regarded female lawyers were on Mr. Bush’s short list, President Bush and Mr. Card discussed the idea of adding Ms. Miers. Mr. Card was enthusiastic about the idea. The New York Times reported that he “then directed Ms. Miers’ deputy . . . to vet her behind her back.” For about two weeks, Mr. Kelley conducted a vetting he has described to friends as thorough. It wasn’t. A former Justice Department official calls it “barely adequate for a nominee to a federal appeals court.” One Texas lawyer called by the White House was struck by the fact “that the people who were calling about someone from Texas and serving a Texas president knew so little about Texas.”

Both Fund and John Dickerson of Slate note that the White House decided early on that the O’Connor seat was a woman seat, for reasons unexplained, and perhaps on assumptions unexamined. We think it is likely that someone’s logic, perhaps Card’s, was that such a choice was a way to eliminate friction in the confirmation battle. Indeed, one only has to look at the beginning of the statement the President made in nominating Miers to see the theme of eliminating friction, the choice of a woman on Harry Reid’s list of suggested candidates:

It is now my duty to select a nominee to fill the seat that will be left vacant by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Once again, I considered a wide variety of distinguished Americans from different walks of life. Once again, we consulted with Democrats and Republicans in the United States Senate. We received good advice from more than 80 senators. And once again, one person stood out as exceptionally well suited to sit on the Highest Court of our nation.

A woman, just like O’Connor. Check. No paper trail like Roberts. Check. On Harry Reid’s list. Check. An evangelical, Check. Who is personally close to Bush. Check. Hey, that’s the perfect nominee! It is certainly conceivable to us that a micro-analysis of the Gang of 14 or the 5 or so GOP sob sisters was never undertaken, once a low friction (or so they thought) nominee was identified. (This is not to say that the White House didn’t have indications from the weak-kneed folks where they might come out on a strong, well-documented conservative, but early posturing is not dispositive.)

An inevitable moment

We don’t feel that strongly about Miers, by the way. We have been for her, we have been against her, but really, in a country which is 3 to 2 conservative over liberal, this nomination is hardly the end of a road, no matter which way it goes.

The controversy over the stealth nominee versus the paper-trail conservative nominee was bound to happen. It just blossomed with the Miers nomination, and it is not going away. It is part of the growing pains of the GOP, and conservatives within the GOP, feeling that they should call the shots. You will notice on potentially divisive social issues, from abortion to illegal immigration to calling radical Islam by its name, the Bush administration has consistently gone out of its way to avoid fights and to speak in the most moderate of tones, and let the debate move along among the people. This is arguably wise policy in a country in which the MSM still have influence on the vast moderate middle. Eventually, on issue after issue, however, consensuses often form, and sometimes you may have observed that the administration’s rhetoric has then changed. This has happened on the issue of radical Islam from 9-11 to today. A change is surely coming on the issue of illegal immigration, though it has not happened yet. And the administration has just had the apparent ill fortune to have triggered the acute phase of the judiciary debate by the Miers nomination.

No one on the conservative side should be discomfitted by the emergence of these debates. They are evidence of the paradigm shift, and the difficulties of that shift, as majority opinion makes its way from the liberal consensus of two generations ago to a conservative consensus today.

We are here to point out that these black leaders have chosen in their rhetoric and actions a foolish poitical strategy. Here are the statistics as calculated by James Taranto:

The chart is a little hard to read, but the upshot is this: 59.8% of the American people believe that Bush cares about the fate of African Americans in New Orleans, and did not slow or hamper relief efforts because the recipients were black. Therefore: even if the black leaders convinced 100% of African Americans that Bush and the GOP were racist, it would not change majority opinion. Taranto’s point is that for playing the race card to work politically, it not only has to convince blacks, it has to influence white voters — and this is not happening.

Our point is somewhat different: the extreme and surreal rhetoric chosen by the African American / Democratic leadership is increasingly failing to influence its target audience in the black community. As the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies pointed out in October 2004, the number of African Americans who said they were willing to vote for George Bush soared to 18% in the most recent election cycle:

In a surprising contradiction, more African Americans say they are willing to vote for President George W. Bush on November 2, even though his favorable rating is lower now than it was four years ago, according to a new poll released today by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. In the Joint Center’s 2004 National Opinion Poll – Politics, 18 percent of African Americans say they would vote for President Bush, doubling the nine percent that said they would support him in the Joint Center’s pre-election 2000 poll. However, Senator John Kerry still beats President Bush among African American voters (69 to 18 percent).

Rich Lowry in NRO says that, according to exit polling, Bush’s numbers only inched up in 2004 over 2000. Whether the difference between in-person polling and telephone polling influenced the results is impossible to tell, but in any event the direction was clear and it was positive for the GOP:

The numbers fell off on Election Day. According to the exit polls, Bush’s support among blacks nationally inched up only slightly from 9 percent in 2000 to 11 percent in 2004. But the kind of dramatic movement in the pre-election Joint Center survey showed up in the battleground states where the GOP invested the most resources to woo black voters. Bush went from 7 percent of the black vote in Florida in 2000 to 13 percent in 2004. In all-important Ohio, Bush’s support among blacks rose from 10 percent to 16 percent.

In the near term, the Republican Party has no chance with the 72% of the African American population who say that he does not care about black people. But the GOP has clearly been making inroads in the other 28%. As Thomas Lifson has pointed out in the American Thinker, Bush’s performance in 2004 marked a 37.5% increase in black votes for him, very important in a voting bloc that accounts for roughly a quarter of national Democratic vote totals.

We prefer to see the glass as not mostly empty. If the glass goes from 8% full to 11% full, as it has, and holds the prospect of reaching 18% or 28% full, that would be incredible progress.

In the course of our travels, we have met politicians, media people and regular folks who just know, deep down in their bones, at the level of instinct, that there is something wrong with George Bush. They feel this at a deep level, powerfully, compellingly, in a way that rational denial of the feeling is useless. Is it that Chimpy is stupid, evil, dishonest at his core, a dry drunk, duplicitous, trapped by irrational ideological blinders? — this and more. Many of the terms these folks use to describe Bush are not quite precise; the terms seem to circle the problem. We think what these people sense is precisely this: danger.

We see and identify danger every day. We cross the street to avoid that guy with a certain look coming down the sidewalk. We scan the park where our toddlers play to see if anyone is out of place. Have you boarded a plane lately, or taken the subway? People are watching other people, profiling. We respect our instincts regarding danger, and rightly so.

Charles Krauthammer famously defined the phenomenon we are discussing as “Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.” We will quote a long passage from Jonathon Chait’s famous and eloquent TNR piece on the matter:

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I’m tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism–”I inherited half my father’s friends and all his enemies”–conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage. He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school–the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks–shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks–blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing– a way to establish one’s social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche.

We have come to the conclusion that both Krauthammer and Chait are, at least in important part, wrong. With all due respect to Dr. Krauthammer, “derangement” does not pay enough respect to the honestly-held feelings of the “otherwise normal people” he describes. As for Chait, “hate” is really too mild a feeling what what he seems viscerally to be experiencing.

After all, it is possible to hate someone and admit their occasional truthfulness or correct policy choices. But time and again, we observe something most peculiar with the Chaits of this world. We have met very smart people — MBA’s, PhD’s, MD’s, professors, distinguished lawyers and the like — whose feelings are so intense that they constantly get the facts wrong: it is as though they are looking for a peg on which to hang the cloak of their intense feelings. So they get it wrong on Rathergate, SwiftBoatVets, 16 words, and other matters where the facts are simple and demonstrable. The Rathergate memos were cheap frauds, immediately identifiable as such to even the casual observer. The SwifBoatVets were correct, starting with Christmas in Cambodia and through episodes both serious and funny. The 16 words in the State of the Union address were and are correct; Bush certainly wasn’t lying. (Captain Ed has a funny post about an encounter with an MSM dupe — we don’t know her politics, but we can guess.) Here’s our point: these people just know, deep down in their bones, that Bush is a bad guy, so the scandals are true, even if they’re not. Heck, Dan Rather continues pathetically to insist that his story of September 8. 2004 was true.

These media and political people all know that something very dangerous is going on with George Bush — and that it is happening below the surface. Grasping at the SwiftBoatVets, Rathergate, and similar stories is an attempt to get a handle on something deeply malevolvent that they feel is going on. We will identify what is going on for them.

We believe that Bush opponents, whose instincts tell them that he is a very dangerous man, have instincts which are functioning correctly. Bush is a very dangerous man. His mission is no less than to destroy the Democratic Party as a plausible majority institution in America, to fracture it beyond easy repair, and to take 10-20% of Democrats and make them functionally Republicans. His plan has been to exploit the twin clefts in that Party — on military matters and social issues — that make a sizeable minority of the Party more Green than Democrat. It is not beyond our imagination that Bush cynically signed McCain-Feingold understanding that, as unconstitutional as that law should be, it moved the energy and fundraising away from Party control into the leftist 527′s, further abetting the splintering of the Party.

Moreover, the modern Democratic Party is, in many ways, the Party of Government: the spokes are various interest groups, and the hub is the federal government. Bush has notably, and again, perhaps cynically, sacrificed traditional Republican tenets of small government to demonstrate that the GOP can operate the government larder as extravagantly as the Democrats. Presumably this is to be repaired at some future date.

For all his aw-shucks mannerisms, Bush has proceeded methodically and ruthlessly down a path of attempting to destroy the Democratic Party as an institution representing a majority at any level of government. As we have written, so far he has succeeded. It seems entirely appropriate to us that this should trigger the responses inherent in the survival instinct for some Democrats who are paying attention. They know a dangerous enemy when they see one.

The truth, as we are reminded so often in this present conflict, is that usually in war there are no good alternatives, and leaders must select between a very bad and even worse choice. Hiroshima was the most awful option imaginable, but the other scenarios would have probably turned out even worse.

The movie men are right: the best way is not to choose war. But Hanson is also right: once war is on, the path to swift victory is usually the right choice. We are still hanging fire until after the Iraqi constitution, but many on both the Left and Right are questioning whether the Bush administration has chosen the path to swift victory.

From the LAT:

For two hours, members of the audience of blacks, whites and Latinos spoke with a vehemence usually reserved for the dinner table — or late-night talk radio shows. They publicly aired views that are often muttered in L.A. but not spoken out loud. Councilman Bernard C. Parks, who sat on the meeting’s panel, voiced the view of many in the city’s political elite: “We should not pit groups against each other. Why do we have to look at it as blacks lose, Hispanics win? No one wins in this city without a coalition.”

But the audience of about 80, almost evenly divided among the three groups, had already formed a coalition — of anger. People would heckle Parks for the rest of the evening. Terry Anderson, a radio host who has long opposed illegal immigration, was one of several panel members who blamed illegal immigrants for, in their opinion, stealing jobs from blacks and crowding schools and neighborhoods to unbearable limits. “We have been invaded; there’s no other word for it,” Anderson said. The audience clapped and cheered.

Debbie Hernandez, a white member of the audience, said: “Blacks are losing their middle-class status because of illegal aliens. I am willing to go to the streets with my brothers and sisters over this.” Sherrie Johnson, a resident of Torrance, told Parks, “You aren’t taking a stand for the right side of the argument. “I believe the purpose of going through the steps to become a citizen is because it protects the country,” she said…..

Members of the audience repeatedly asked one panel member, Richard Alonzo, a district superintendent in the Los Angeles Unified School District, to reveal the number of students in L.A. schools who are illegal immigrants or to find out. He said the district doesn’t collect that information.

One questioner asked him for budget numbers, insisting they would prove that educating Latinos was more expensive than teaching other students. It’s a premise that Alonzo said was wrong. The numbers matter, Peterson said, because black students attend schools overcrowded by those who have no right to be there. Peterson, who moderated the discussion, is well known in the conservative media, appearing on Fox television talk shows as well as his own syndicated radio program.

“A lot of black boys and girls are dropping out, and it’s because their classes are overwhelmed with illegal Hispanics,” Peterson said. “Black children are mad about that; black parents are mad about that.”

As these citizens make clear, it’s not about race; it’s about Illegality. (HT: Polipundit)

Car bombings, al-Qaida’s specialty, have fallen from (a record high of) 170 in April to 151 in May to 133 in June, with less than 100 so far in July. (Journalists describe this as a “worsening” trend.) Al-Qaida could be storing up for an offensive when the new Iraqi constitution is unveiled next month. We’ll know soon enough.

The targets have shifted in emphasis from American forces to Iraqi forces to Shiite civilians to, most recently, Sunni Arabs who are cooperating with the government. This does not suggest growing capability or rising support. Nor do the increasing number of gun battles between al-Qaida and its ex-Baathist allies in the insurgency suggest harmony in the resistance. Suicide attacks have been successful in gaining headlines, but have not slowed enlistment in the Iraqi armed forces, or prevented prominent Sunnis from taking part in the writing of the constitution….

Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-D.C. -based think tank, has been pessimistic about Iraq. He returned from a recent visit singing a different tune: “If current plans are successfully implemented, the total number of Iraqi military and police units that can honestly be described as trained and equipped should rise from 96,000 in September 2004, and 172,000 today to 230,000 by the end of December and 270,000 by mid-2006,” he said.

Strategic Forecasting, a private American intelligence service, thinks al-Qaida is engaged in the terrorist equivalent of the Tet Offensive: “launching a series of attacks — some significant, others mere psyops — in an effort to turn the tide in a war it has been losing.”

Well, if it is Al Qaeda’s Tet Offensive, it can’t work. First of all, the famous call for retreat from Vietnam was issued by Walter Cronkite on February 27, 1968, and the US didn’t fully engage until seven years later. Too late, Zack.

Second, a remarkable shift has taken place in Western thinking after the London bombings, and it is certainly not the one prayed for by Al Qaeda. A few years ago, connecting terrorism to Islam in any way was completely forbidden in the polite company of the elite media. It was all tortured niceties like the ones still coming from Condi Rice: “They want to kill in the name of a perverted ideology that really is not Islam, but they somehow want to claim that mantle to say that this is about some kind of grievance.” However, now we read over and over and over again in the Mainstream Media about Dar al-Harb, Dar al-Islam and cause and effect. In other words: Al Qaeda’s bet that the West would agree that “this is all about Iraq,” and do a Madrid, isn’t playing out as scripted. There is a lot of inquiry suddenly going on in the West about “root causes,” and that is very bad news for Al Qaeda and its breeding grounds. Great news for the West and bad news for Zack and his Al Qaeda colleagues.

The first example is from the enemy side, from Hani Al-Siba’i, head of the London Center for Islamic History, as reported by MEMRI, and previously mentioned here. It is a fascinating discussion of how Muslim radicals see the world, their “pure” version of Islam, and the killing of innocents, and you should read it all. In this passage, he is responding to a comment about some clerical assembly in Saudi Arabia that was engaged in splitting hairs, forbidding some killings of civilians while expressly saying “Jihad in Iraq is allowed against soldiers.” Hani wants nothing to do with half-measures:

The term “civilians” does not exist in Islamic religious law. Dr. Karmi is sitting here, and I am sitting here, and I’m familiar with religious law. There is no such term as “civilians” in the modern Western sense. People are either of Dar Al-Harb or not.

Dar al-Harb, Dar al-Islam. You either live in the house of war or the house of submission to Islam. Ibn Warraq has a brief primer on those nasty things said in the Koran and the Hadith to be permitted to be done to those who reside in the lands ruled by unbelievers. If you begin your thoughts with the understanding that the Koran is literally the word of God as passed from Gabriel to the Prophet, and that the mission of the religion is to conquer and rule the world with a very specific set of laws outlined in the book and sayings of the Prophet and the sharia legal tradition, and that the submission of the world may be accomplished by Jihad or Holy War, then you must come to the conclusion that our enemy is not deranged, but logical. If the means seem barbaric at times, who are you to question the will of God rather than submit to it? If you think that the killing of civilians is wrong, then perhaps that is because you have, consciously or unconsciously, a Judeo-Christian concept of good and evil. That concept is from a worldview totally and utterly different from that of Mr. Hani: your subjective feelings about what is good or bad are irrelevant to submission to the will of God.

The second passage is from The Mesopotamian blog, and it was quoted early this month by Roger Simon. It concerned whether it was theologically correct for the new head of the Iraqi government to than President Bush for the liberation of Iraq. Since Bush is an Infidel, would it not be contrary to the Koran for a believer to abase himself in front of a Kafir?

The occasion for this discourse is the “theological problem” raised by some of the 21st century pious against Dr. Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, the Head of the Government, The gist of this problem is this: ‘ It is not permissible for the believer to humiliate himself to the Kafir [the unbeliever in Isalm]; and the thanks that Jaafari has given to President bush is demeaning oneself to the Kafirs, as they believe ‘ ….”

You need to read the whole passage with its theological arguments for and against thanking Bush to understand the depth to which such debates are taken. We’ll give away the punchline here:

“ ….. Thus I was rejoiced and my sad heart filled with happiness when the head of our government pronounced the words of thanks and gratitude towards the noble American people and the magnificent president Bush. I do not reaveal a secret when I say that I was mesmerized in front of the TV screen during the press conference of President Bush and Dr. Jaafari, despite the fact that I knew beforehand the prepared words that Mr. Al Jaafari was to say …… that he has shown to some members of his cabinet before the trip, …….. I was afraid that our man might hesitate to pronounce what has been agreed ….. and that he might improvise something else in the last moment as he has been known to do often …….. Doubt began to creep on me and I feared that he was not going to do it. And I began to ask myself: what if Al Jaafari behaved as a pious islamist, and not as Head of Government, and did not thank those who saved our people and liberated us from the Baathists?

This question of thanking Bush and America is discussed with utter seriousness, and illustrates something very important. Religion has both a role and a reach in Islamic life that it simply does not have in the West, among both our enemies and our friends. The first part of this has to do with what Muslim kids are brought up to believe. Irshad Manji in a piece about the London bombings:

We Muslims, including moderates living here in the West, are routinely raised to believe that the Koran is the final and therefore perfect manifesto of God’s will, untouched and immutable…..I stand with those who insist that certain Koranic passages are being politically exploited. Damn right, they are. The point is, however, that they couldn’t be exploited if they didn’t exist.

Manji discusses what she calles the “superiority complex” of Islam, from the belief in the literal truth of the Koran. We wish to point out here the depth of involvement of the religion in everyday life. If the Judeo-Christian tradition has ten commandments, sharia has a million commandments regulating daily life, marriage and family structure.

For any Muslim who is paying attention, Islam is not the hour-on-Sunday deal that Christianity is for quite a few Christians. The template that we have for religion by living in Dar al-Harb is inappropriate for understanding Dar al-Islam, both that of our friends as well as our enemies.

In England the thugs also kill people, but the plot has been updated and perverted. The crime bosses turn out to be guys dressed up in clerical garb who spout mumbo-jumbo about it being the thugs’ sacred duty to destroy the society they live in. And the plot is further perverted: the cops don’t throw the crime bosses in the hoosegow; instead, otherwise sensible people want to try to be sensitive and understand the feelings of a “lost generation.” They want to explain to the thugs that the thugs own belief that their killing will be rewarded with riches and girls is based on an “outrageous falsehood.” Yeah, fat chance that’ll work when their crime bosses (and spiritual leaders) are telling them just the opposite.

Imagine how great it must be today to be one of these 20 year old punks in England. You get to blow up things and people, and the better classes seek to understand you. Imagine how much greater it is to be one of the crime bosses. Just say “Iraq” or “Afganistan” or “unemployment” or “Palestine” or “right of return” or “discrimination” or “Andalusia” or whatever strikes your fancy, and you’ll get a conference to study your grievance and a government stipend. Sweet!

We have been critical at the silent or cooperative attitude of many Muslims in the face of their neighborhood being taken over by organized crime. But really, what do we have a right to expect when the infidels are so craven themselves?

We believe that many on the Left feel deeply and personally oppressed as they go about their daily lives in America, that they feel there are malign forces behind the scenes which are manipulating events to evil result. To explore this thought, let’s begin with what we are really up against in our war, and the strange fantasy view of the war on the Left. For the latter, we use VDH’s excellent synopsis of the Left’s alternative narrative of the War from NRO.

What we’re up against in reality

Amir Taheri, as quoted here previously:

[T]his enemy does want something specific: to take full control of your lives, dictate every single move you make round the clock and, if you dare resist, he will feel it his divine duty to kill you.

The ideological soil in which alQaeda, and the many groups using its brand name, grow was described by one of its original masterminds, the Pakistani Abul-Ala al-Maudoodi more than 40 years ago. It goes something like this: when God created mankind He made all their bodily needs and movements subject to inescapable biological rules but decided to leave their spiritual, social and political needs and movements largely subject to their will. Soon, however, it became clear that Man cannot run his affairs the way God wants. So God started sending prophets to warn man and try to goad him on to the right path. A total of 128,000 prophets were sent, including Moses and Jesus. They all failed. Finally, God sent Muhammad as the last of His prophets and the bearer of His ultimate message, Islam. With the advent of Islam all previous religions were “abrogated” (mansukh), and their followers regarded as “infidel” (kuffar). The aim of all good Muslims, therefore, is to convert humanity to Islam, which regulates Man’s spiritual, economic, political and social moves to the last detail.

But what if non-Muslims refuse to take the right path? Here answers diverge. Some believe that the answer is dialogue and argument until followers of the “abrogated faiths” recognise their error and agree to be saved by converting to Islam. This is the view of most of the imams preaching in the mosques in the West. But others, including Osama bin Laden, a disciple of al-Maudoodi, believe that the Western-dominated world is too mired in corruption to hear any argument, and must be shocked into conversion through spectacular ghazavat (raids) of the kind we saw in New York and Washington in 2001, in Madrid last year, and now in London.

The Left’s fantasy narrative of the war, by Victor Davis Hanson

Ever since September 11, there has been an alternative narrative about this war embraced by the Left. In this mythology, the attack on September 11 had in some vague way something to do with American culpability. Either we were unfairly tilting toward Israel, or had been unkind to Muslims. Perhaps, as Sen. Patty Murray intoned, we needed to match the good works of bin Laden to capture the hearts and minds of Muslim peoples.

The fable continues that the United States itself was united after the attack even during its preparations to retaliate in Afghanistan. But then George Bush took his eye off the ball. He let bin Laden escape, and worst of all, unilaterally and preemptively, went into secular Iraq — an unnecessary war for oil, hegemony, Israel, or Halliburton, something in Ted Kennedy’s words “cooked up in Texas.” In any case, there was no connection between al Qaeda and Saddam, and thus terrorists only arrived in Iraq after we did.

That tale goes on. The Iraqi fiasco is now a hopeless quagmire. The terrorists are paying us back for it in places like London and Madrid. Still worse, here at home we have lost many of our civil liberties to the Patriot Act and forsaken our values at Guantanamo Bay under the pretext of war. Nancy Pelosi could not understand the continued detentions in Guantanamo since the war in Afghanistan is in her eyes completely finished.

In this fable, we are not safer as a nation. George Bush’s policies have increased the terror threat as we saw recently in the London bombing. We have now been at war longer than World War II. We still have no plan to defeat our enemies, and thus must set a timetable to withdraw from Iraq. Islamic terrorism cannot be defeated militarily nor can democracy be “implanted by force.” So it is time to return to seeing the terrorist killing as a criminal justice matter — a tolerable nuisance addressed by writs and indictments, while we give more money to the Middle East and begin paying attention to the “root causes” of terror.

That is the dominant narrative of the Western Left and at times it finds its way into mainstream Democratic-party thinking. Yet every element of it is false.

Part of the explanation is Western Guilt

He then commences a tedious but necessary point-by-point refutation of each element of the Left’s worldview. Hanson says this later in the piece by way of explanation for the strange world these people inhabit, which we might have called on another occasion, the world of the 32% percent:

These articles of faith apparently fill a deep psychological need for millions of Westerners, guilty over their privilege, free to do anything without constraints or repercussions, and convinced that their own culture has made them spectacularly rich and leisured only at the expense of others.

Hanson is undoubtedly correct in his laying some blame on irrational Western guilt for our freedom and luxuries; as we have said, that is one reason for the religion of Global Warming — secular man wants to propitiate his gods, even if he is an atheist. But guilt only goes so far as an explanation of the Left’s obsession with America as bad. Guilt maight cause you to give to charity, to support increased foreign aid, to adopt a child, to make a burnt, or in the case of Global Warming, unburnt offering. Guilt doesn’t want to make you try to burn down the house while you are inside. That is a different phenomenon at work.

Many on the Left feel personally oppressed in America

That phenomenon in our view is the feeling of being oppressed by life itself. It is in part a feeling of powerlessness, being a cog in the machine, dragged along without many real choices in life — and it matters not if you are a janitor or a partner in a big law firm. We are not going to attempt a diagnosis in this piece, but, rather, offer an observation or two.

Note the pervasiveness of the phenomenon of feeling oppressed by a malign power structure. The narrative begins in our public school educations, and gets worse in college. Adults who should know better — Kennedy, Pelosi, Durbin, Dean, etc — fail to act like adults by condemning lives of perpetual narcissistic adolescence. And the popular culture has embraced and fostered the idea that there is a secret power elite in America controlling lives and ruling with unchecked evil power.

Often the malign power structure is hidden, but sometimes it is out in the open. Think of virtually every movie about the US military in the last 30 years: Platoon, Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket — the military and the government behind it are evil. Why do you think Dick Durbin’s comments came so trippingly off the tongue? It’s in the fabric of our culture. And the portrayals of the military are just the most obvious and focused example of this. Much of popular drama is all about finding the sinister secret behind the scenes, and then fighting the power (The Matrix, All the President’s Men, etc).

The seriousness of the problem: 32% of Democrats see the US as a bad country

Things have reached a very low point, after these decades of indoctrination by the madrassas of the Left and the popular culture. The figures tell the tale:

82% of Republicans see the USA as a generally “fair and decent” country; shockingly, only half — 50% exactly — of Democrats think America is generally fair and decent. Need we give the most basic history lesson about our country, its progress over just the last century or so. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again:

Here is the signal fact of our progress in the last century. If you were born in 1900, your life expectancy was in the forties, and GNP per capita was about $4000. If you are born today, your life expectancy in about eighty, and statistically, as an average American, you are ten times richer. In reality you are a hundred or a thousand times richer, if you factor in your ability to be in Paris tomorrow for $500, your ability to watch events from fifty years ago as they actually happened, etc. – not to mention that your toddler’s severe pneumonia can be reliably cured in 48 hours or so. Only a little of this has to do with government.

Needless to say, knowledge of such basic facts — let alone the stirring words of our forefathers — are not required for a high school diploma, and are in fact probably disqualifications for tenure at our elite universities.

Where are we heading?

The signs are pretty good on balance, are they not? A major co-incident indicator, control of the elective branches of government — has been trending conservative and pro-American for over a decade. A major leading indicator of popular culture — Hollywood — is currently in decline. Hollywood’s first cousins in the MSM have been in decline for a generation; nothing indicates better the loss of their power than their hysterical coverage of the “Rove is Watergate” non-story.

Much remains to be done of course. Unless the public education system overcomes its structural impediments to change, it will continue to lose market share. Reform is to be much preferred. Hollywood, which thinks it is anti-Bush but is actually anti-American, is a much tougher situation. The country needs its media to support it. There is a huge unfulfilled market demand for a pro-America Hollywood, similar to the market opportunity afforded Fox News by the tunnel vision of the nets.

The lagging indicators are none too good — the courts and the universities. But they are lagging indicators precisely because they employ a system of tenure, so they really measure the status quo of a generation or more ago. They change slowly, but they change.

Democratic leaders project their feelings onto the nation to the good of no one

The most serious situation seems to us to be that of the Democratic Party itself. A party that has a third of its members thinking the country is unfair and indecent has no future, unless the country is itself in the process of committing suicide. Moreover, the party has only itself to blame for this. Are there no adults whatsoever in positions of authority in the Democratic Party? Here’s the nub: going through life feeling oppressed, seeing yourself as a victim, is a choice. It is a narcissistic, adolescent, non-grown-up choice, but it is a choice. It is a ridiculous, irrational choice in the richest, freest country on the planet, with immigrants literally dying to get in — but it is a choice. Senior Democrats — Kennedy, Pelosi, Durbin, Dean, etc — empower this choice through their words endorsing victimhood as a legitimate way of thinking. They are projecting their feelings about the loss of their power in Washington onto the country writ large, and it is doing them, their party, and their country no good. We’re waiting for them to hit bottom.

To be sure, Radosh grasps that greater forces have been at play in the disintegration of the left in the United States and in the world. There are the basic facts that socialism doesn’t explain intrinsic social and economic behavior and that, as a blueprint for the organization of polity and society, it has literally everywhere been a dismal failure and, in many of these places, unbelievably cruel besides. Alas, one cannot argue with much of this….

Here is what Stalinists (no, a Leninist was no better) lied about: the police state, the show trials, the deliberate famines, the repression of the peasantry, the massive ethnic transfers, the executions, the great terror, the Gulag, the systematic and murderous anti-Semitism, the squelching of free thought, the Trotsky plot against the revolution (no, a Trotskyite was no better, either), the perversion of the judiciary, the Hitler-Stalin pact. According to them there were no “widows of the revolution,” in David Remnick’s affecting phrase. And, if circumstance happened to catch them in flagrante, they would lapse into that hoariest of justifications, “historical necessity.” These are the atrocities which the blacklisted denied or defended or asserted were forced on the Kremlin by the West, the flabbiest of excuses. These men and women lived by a tissue of fabrication, and they passed that tissue–like a genotype–on to their children. Instead of being an apologist for Stalin, Richard Dreyfuss shilled for Arafat.

The “alas” speaks volumes.

Then Jonathon Mirsky, formerly a great admirer of Mao, according to Scott Johnson, who knew him at Dartmouth:

Not long ago I wrote an enthusiastic review of “Mao: The Untold Story,” the new biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. The June issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review, in which my review appeared, was promptly barred from China…..Mao Zedong died in 1976. Why is it that almost 30 years later, in a China where freedom of speech is said to be on the rise, attacking the Chairman remains taboo?

Chang’s and Halliday’s biography is a nothing-is-sacred act of demolition. Chang says of Mao, “He was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as much damage to mankind as they did.” The authors assert that Mao was responsible for upwards of 70 million peacetime deaths, including at least 37 million in the 1959-1961 famine that arose from Mao’s harebrained economic policies.

On one level, recognizing evil as evil, and shucking off the romantic and sentimental attachments of youth, ought not to be that big a deal. Yet we see that time and again it is. Therefore, we continue to admire those who do it.

We’ve watched September 11 drift from unity of purpose to unhinged vituperation. The partisanship is easy to dismiss, but I believe the Bush team’s deep disdain of a hostile opposition media has caused it to miss–until now–the need to organize a home front to support the remarkable sacrifice in Iraq. This failure may prove to be the one unforgivable thing.

EJ Dionne says that Democrats have tuned out the President, no matter what he might say:

The most striking poll findings after the president’s speech to the nation on Tuesday concerned who watched Bush in the first place. According to a Gallup Poll for CNN and USA Today, 50 percent of those who chose to listen to Bush were Republican, 27 percent were independents and only 23 percent were Democrats….

In recent weeks, administration loyalists have repeatedly expressed alarm that Americans are forgetting “the lessons of 9/11.” That is not the case. It is the administration that has forgotten those lessons. They had to do with the country’s capacity to come together in the face of a common threat and Bush’s choice for several months afterward to act as a national leader rather than a party leader.

Nonsense: the current disunity in the country has nothing to do with squandering the good will of 9-11. There is simply no way of uniting the country right now, no matter what Bush might say or how he might say it. In what way could the Bush administration reach out to people who say that Republicans are evil, have never worked a day in their life, and call them all white Christians. There are two completely different perceptual frameworks operating. Just take a look at attitudes toward the MSM:

61% of Democrats think that Dan Rather is giving them the straight, unbiased story, and 65% of the GOP thinks he is not. Or how about this: 62% of GOP members think that national security is the number one issue, and an equivalent amount — 62% — of Democrats think it is not.

63% of Democrats — including that 32% who think that the USA is evil or bad — appear to be defeatists, according to the next question on Iraq. They do not believe that America can succeed, and many of them think America deserves defeat. 63% of Democrats think Iraq is doomed to failure, even though the conquered and occupied Germany and Japan were huge beacons of success:

Finally, we’d point out that the Democratic pessimism runs deep and is not subject to rational argument. One half of Democrats thought that the January 2005 Iraq elections would not take place or did not know what would happen — a scant four months before the elections took place:

Conclusion

Acording to the polling data, a significant number of Democrats don’t believe in the ability of America to succeed, or only believe in the America painted by the MSM. A third of them believe America is bad, and a majority of them think the war is not that big a deal, and in any event, America can’t win. The pessimism of these Democrats runs so deep that half of them were incapable of believing what was long-promised (the Iraq election) and was only a few months away; they couldn’t believe in something right under their nose that was a success for America.

EJ says these Democrats have tuned out from President Bush, and our attitude is: thank goodness. We prefer mindless apathy to mindless opposition. The opposition is losing “their” country, and it’s about time.

Let’s hasten their demise: Janice Rogers Brown for the Supreme Court, and Condi Rice for President! As Howard Dean would say, yeeeaaaghhhh!!!

Leon Trotsky is said to have remarked of the New York intellectual Dwight Macdonald, “Everyone has a right to be stupid, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.” During its seven-and-a-half year Oslo folly, the Clinton administration abused the privilege consistently.

This comparison to Lincoln and the Civil War is no joke. Take a look at this chart from Pat Sanity, and tell us that perceptions of reality today, from Left and Right, are not as violently incompatible as were those of North and South a century and a half ago:

In our view, the divisions today are as serious as almost any in the history of the Republic. In arriving at this opinion, we take it as given that the statements of Dr. Dean and others are meant literally, and are not a figurative gesture, based on the Democrats’ frustration at their decade long loss of power.

I remember a French embassy official during Britain’s last referendum on the EU in 1975 (when only the Shetlands voted no). He warned me that “France will be European as long as Europe is French”. When that ceased to apply, “France will dispense with Europe. It will destroy it”. Last week he was proved right. France embodies the nation as saboteur.

The Netherlands result seemed to require a different reading. At an informal seminar in a Concertgebouw cafe on Thursday, I heard a group of Dutch writers gasp at what their countrymen had done. A loyal European state that once viewed the EU as a bulwark of prosperity and security in a hostile world had voted a massive “nee”.

This outcome once seemed inconceivable. Every political party, every newspaper, every trade union, the entire Dutch establishment, had campaigned for yes. Over Amsterdam’s central square, the Dam, towers a royal palace filled with the emblems of world trade. Yet Holland had gone for what was in truth a chauvinist rebellion. Nor were there any fancy excuses. The pundits agreed that the people were voting not just against an unpopular prime minister but against the euro, immigration, the loss of the Dutch veto and Europe in general. This was new.

The Dutch government had tried to scare them into a yes. It used television footage of Auschwitz and Srebrenica to imply that a no vote meant war. It said that electricity would fail and lights would go out. The economics minister, Laurens-Jan Brinkhorst, took leave of his democratic senses and declared the referendum stupid because the Dutch people “are being allowed to vote on an issue they know nothing about”. The prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, pleaded with the electorate not to “humiliate me when I go to Brussels”, an invitation no red-blooded democrat could refuse.

Three years ago the Dutch gave their leaders a warning by flirting with the gay anti-establishment politician Pim Fortuyn, since dead. Now they let rip. As the columnist Leon de Winter remarked: “The Dutch people looked at what was on offer and immediately smelt a rat.” The referendum was “Pim Fortuyn part two”.

The Who’s Who of the Netherlands voted, pleaded, cajoled, and entreated unanimously for the EU Constitution. In response, the Dutch people turned out in a record 63%, and voted 62% against the Dutch elite from every walk of life. And they weren’t just the Crazy Dutch who voted no, since they were ratifying the stunning ten point defeat of the Constitution in France a few days earlier. The Constitution died on a Sunday; the funeral was held on Wednesday.

The metaphor is apt. The Euro-politicos are in a state of shock, proposing tinkering with this or that element of the document and its approval process (Economist); the Telegraph has put forward a proposal for a charter for an EU Commonwealth. Slow down. There will be plenty of time for those steps. As for now, it is important to get past denial. Doesn’t the Euro-budget fund grief counselors?

Uh, no. Chimpy is regarded rather differently. Former Timesman Youssef M. Ibrahim, writing in the WaPo, via Taranto:

“His talk about democracy is good,” an Egyptian-born woman was telling companions at the Fatafeet (or “Crumbs”) restaurant the other night, exuberant enough for her voice to carry to neighboring tables. “He keeps hitting this nail. That’s good, by God, isn’t it?” At another table, a Lebanese man was waxing enthusiastic over Bush’s blunt and irreverent manner toward Arab autocrats. “It is good to light a fire under their feet,” he said.

From Casablanca to Kuwait City, the writings of newspaper columnists and the chatter of pundits on Arabic language satellite television suggest a change in climate for advocates of human rights, constitutional reforms, business transparency, women’s rights and limits on power.

Chimpy done good. As for Boy Assad, here’s the thanks he’s gotten (via Captain Ed):

They must be mightily heartened by recent events — the Beirut demonstration yesterday drew 1-2 million people, for example, in a country with a population of 3.8 million. How unbelievable is that?

Calls for a protest were made in every town and village in the country on Sunday, urging people to descend on Beirut on Monday to demand the truth about who killed al-Hariri along with 17 others in the bombing on a Beirut seafront street.

Many people answering the calls have been particularly offended by the reinstatement of Karami, who resigned amid opposition protests on 28 February but was brought back to office 10 days later by President Emile Lahud after the pro-Syrian, pro-government camp flexed its muscles. Karami last week said his supporters had the majority in parliament and with the people, a reference to last Tuesday’s “Thank you Syria” rally organised by the Shia Muslim group Hizb Allah in which hundreds of thousands participated. “It was a massive demonstration that asserted our legitimacy in the Lebanese street,” Karami said on 10 March in accepting the invitation to form the next government.

So people were urged by email and mobile phone messages to turn out on Monday to prove Karami wrong, show loyalty to al-Hariri and to Lebanon.

Here’s what it looked like:

Reuters adds: “Unlike previous anti-Syrian opposition protests since a bomb blast killed Hariri on Feb. 14, many Sunni Muslims joined Druze and Christians in taking to the streets. Hariri was a Sunni.” The AP on crowd size: “There was no official count of Monday’s crowd, but it appeared to reporters on the scene to be easily bigger than last week’s pro-government, anti-U.S. rally called by Hezbollah, which was estimated by The Associated Press at 500,000 people.” Publius, who covers democracy movements, has lots more.

Reforms in religious doctrines and institutions take a long time and are very painful. Christianity took centuries to accommodate scientific truths, and it has not yet fully accommodated economic truths — and Christianity’s view of the role of reason and conscience is more theologically helpful to a Humanist perspective than, arguably, is Islam’s. Therefore, don’t expect a quick transformation.

Christianity, science and capitalism

Philosophy retreats along the border advanced by science. So does theology, as Copernicus and Galileo have shown. This is not a knock on theology; it is merely to state that religion accommodates to many of the realities of the world, and among these, the least compromising are scientific realities. This didn’t bother religious men like Newton and Einstein, and it shouldn’t bother you.

A more recent reality than the rise of the scientific mind and the Enlightenment is Capitalism’s creation of unprecedented longevity and wealth in the last century. As we have outlined in various posts, if you were born at the beginning of the last century, your life expectancy was in the forties and GNP per capita was $4000; if you were born today, you live twice as long and are numerically ten times richer, and in communications and mobility, thousands of times richer.

Christianity adapted to Copernicus and Galileo, though the Catholic Church first rejected them. Indeed, Galileo’s book on the Copernican system was published in 1632, but was banned by the Church and not removed from Rome’s notorious Index until 1822. The Catholic Church, which still toys with nonsense like Liberation Theology from time to time, still hasn’t quite gotten around to accepting Capitalism as the astounding, er, miracle that it is, but in a few hundred years no doubt Holy Mother Church will do so; we would like to see Communism officially a sin.

Our point it this: religious reform takes centuries, even for relatively straightforward matters. Moreover, it take centuries even if the intellectual groundwork has been carefully laid, as the following example shows.

The Scholastic tradition

The greatest of all Christian refrorms was the eponymous Reformation, for which the date 1517 will serve. That was the year that the severe Augustinian monk Martin Luther got mad as hell, and indicated he wasn’t going to take it any more by nailing his 95 theses of indictment of the Catholic Church to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral. That act had been centuries in the making.

We contend that the revival of learning of the ancient Greek philosophers, which reached its theological zenith with Thomas Aquinas and Scholasticism around 1250, was critical to the empowerment of the individual conscience over the Church, as manifest by Luther. One early step on the journey was Aquinas’ claim that there was not necessarily a conflict between the observations of the ancient philosophers and Church teaching:

… it should be noted that different ways of knowing (ratio cognoscibilis) give us different sciences. The astronomer and the natural philosopher both conclude that the earth is round, but the astronomer does this through a mathematical middle that is abstracted from matter, whereas the natural philosopher considers a middle lodged in matter. Thus there is nothing to prevent another science from treating in the light of divine revelation what the philosophical disciplines treat as knowable in the light of human reason. (Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 1, a., ad 2)

The idea that man’s observations and logic can discern God’s rational and mathematical design of the universe, as does revelation, is ultimately very subversive: what happens when the two disagree? Appeals to authority over observation and ratiocination are ultimately bound to fail, which is what happened with Galileo and Luther. We are very well aware that we are doing no justice to the Augustinian tradition, Scholasticism, and the rich, complex changes from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, but we believe this simple model we are sketching has some heuristic value.

So what of Islam?

We have said previously that Islam began its Reformation on January 30, 2005, with the Iraq vote. No less an authority than AQ chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi agrees with us that the exercising of the Humanist impulse in democratic elections is anathema to Islamist fundamentalism:

“We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology,” the speaker said. “Anyone who tries to help set up this system is part of it” – a clear warning to both candidates and those who choose to vote. The speaker warned Iraqis to be careful of “the enemy’s plan to implement so-called democracy in your country.” He said the Americans have engineered the election to install Shiite Muslims in power…..

“Four million Shiites were brought from Iran to take part in the elections to achieve their aim of winning” most of the positions, the speaker in the tape said. He railed against democracy for supplanting the rule of God with the rule of man and the majority, saying it was based on un-Islamic beliefs and behaviors such as freedom of religion, freedom of expression, separation of religion and state and forming political parties.

Arab Islam has started this great or odious Humanist journey without the support structure that Christianity had at its time of Reformation. Reinterpreting submission to the will of God as presented in the Koran in an allegorical or anagogical way is a task of Reformation quite a bit more difficult than the ones faced by Christianity — and the Christian Reformation was itself a long and bloody affair.

We should expect no better of the Islamic Reformation.

However, there are two little points we’d like to add.

First, note this piece in the WSJ by Quin Hillyer from the Mobile Register, which states that Bill Pryor has a lot of broadbased bipartisan support in his home state of Alabama. Contrast that with this hysterical Action Alert from the NAACP or the hysterical threat by Chuck Shumer to block all Bush judicial nominations. Now, we understand of course that Pryor is a particular bete noire because of his clear and outspoken condemnation (York) of Roe v. Wade. But what is interesting to us is this: if you are a moderate Democrat in Alabama, you count for nothing. The national party couldn’t care less about your opinion. So don’t look for a Democratic resurgence in the South any time soon.

Second, we think that hysteria is a perfectly appropriate reaction to developments in the judiciary. The Democrats have been on a ten-year losing streak in electoral politics, and nothing points to that ending soon. The monopoly of the Old Media, with its powerful megaphone, to reinforce Democratic voting preferences, is destroyed: it lies in the ruins of SwiftBoatVets and Rathergate. The losing streaks of the Party and its media wing are about to be extended to the judiciary.

The leading indicator of political change was the Gingrich revolution in 1994, as we have written. The coincident indicator of change was the loss of 3-4 million Democrats to Bush in 2004. The lagging indicator of change is the rear-guard actions taking place in those institutions shielded by tenure from popular opinion, namely the universities and the federal judiciary. Ward Churchill is going down hard, and he will take a lot of other frauds with him. Similarly, we hope for a Democratic filibuster, and for the Supremes to modify the Pledge of Allegiance and take the jackhammers to the Ten Commandments — these would make the coming changes happen a little faster.

Today we forget that the use of perspective in art was lost for more than a millenium, possibly rediscovered around the time of Giotto, a century before Masoccio, by artists trying to display the Euclidean structure of God’s creative process (Edgerton). So Masaccio created, not the flat paintings of the middle ages, but ones in which the solidity of Adam and Eve was unprecedented.

Many writings on the Renaissance deal with either the artistic or geopolitical sides. The artistic side traces the Renaissance’s stirrings to the classical interests of Dante and Petrarch, to the rediscovery of ancient Greek texts, and a desire to return ad fontes in learning and in art. Geopolitically, the Renaissance got a great boost from a great defeat, the fall of Constantinople to the Muslims in 1453, which resulted in a significant number of Greek scholars relocating to Florence, where in 1462 the Platonic Academy was opened in Florence under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici.

The rediscovery of perspective is perhaps the best metaphor for the Renaissance. Masaccio used math given in ancient Greek texts to create the perspective of human vision in his frescoes. Nor was the power to create limited to art. The innovations of Florentine banking, the spread of knowledge through the invention of the printing press, and the fall of Christian Constantiople to Muslims with superior technology of cannon and gunpowder — these all empowered the Humanist persepctive, for good and for ill.

When we speak of the possibility of an Islamic Reformation today, we see parallels to the time of Reformation in the West. Martin Luther did not consider himself a Humanist, but rather sought to restore a more ideal Christianity from the past. Yet his legacy is one where the individual conscience is declared more important than a great institution.

Likewise, in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, millions wish only to vote as good Muslims. Yet, as the head-choppers correctly say, the very act of voting recognizes and validates the Humanist impulse. That is why democracy itself is the essence of the Islamic Reformation.

Having been indoctrinated in the postcolonialist, self-loathing school of multiculturalism, I thought America was the root of all evil in the world. Its democratic form of government and capitalist economic system was nothing more than a machine in which citizens were forced to be cogs.

Cinnamon came a long way in a short time because of 9-11. The strange nature of her former allies became jarring:

The pro-Palestinian sympathies of the left had led to a bizarre commingling of pacifism, Communism and Arab nationalism. So it was not uncommon to see kaffiyeh-clad college students chanting Hamas slogans, graying hippies wearing “Intifada” T-shirts, Che Guevera backpacks, and signs equating Zionism with Nazism, all against a backdrop of peace, patchouli and tie-dye.

It is a very nice piece, and it stands in for many others as an expression of wonderment at how the world has been turned on its head, with the Left as today’s reactionaries, and conservatives as radicals. Here’s another article of hers; this piece is on a speech by Daniel Pipes at Berkeley last year:

– When Pipes brought up the need to support moderate Muslims over those who subscribe to militant Islam, they booed.
– When he brought up the need to improve the status of women in Islamic countries, they booed.
– When he warned that peace in the Middle East would never be achieved as long as the Palestinians continued to subscribe to a ”cult of death,” they booed.
– When he mentioned Middle East Studies professors who have been arrested under terrorism charges, they booed.
– When he discussed the need to combat Islamic terrorism, they booed.
– When he referred to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks as subscribers to militant Islam, they booed and shouted ”Zionism”–no doubt a reference to the myth that Jews were behind the attacks.
– When Pipes brought up CampusWatch.org, the website he founded to provide a voice for students feeling oppressed by their leftist professors, they shouted out ”McCarthyism” and of course ”racist” yet again.
– And when he mentioned Iraqis’ ”liberation” from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, they booed even louder.

Hard times for the Old Left after January 30.

New Yorkers think we are smarter than other Americans, that the richness and difficulty of life here give our intelligence a kind of hard-won depth and nuance and sensitivity to contradictions and ambiguity. We feel we are practically French. Most New Yorkers are also liberals. And most liberals, wherever they live, believe that they are smarter than most conservatives (particularly George W. Bush)…..

Like most New Yorkers, I disagree with the Bush administration politically, temperamentally, and ontologically most of the time.

Huh? How can you “disagree ontologically?” Only, we reasoned, if you are of a different species. Google says we’ve stumbled on a neologism, apparently created by Andersen. (The only prior use of the phrase appears to be here, and we can’t figure out what Herder has to do with it.)

But could Andersen be serious? We consulted another of his pieces, People Like Us, and the answer appears to be yes. Andersen:

For me, the equivalence between Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism seems plain. For me, both are unfathomable and scary. But, of course, to Evangelical Christians in South Dakota or Tennessee, my own New York godlessness and casual acceptance of wholesale perversion (homosexuality, pornography) as well as mass murder (abortion) are equally unfathomable and scary.

Which is to say, our great bright-blue metropolis has more in common with red America than we would probably prefer to think. They march in lockstep, close-minded and self-righteous? Us too, dudes.

We mean this piece to be light-hearted, so we are not going to drag it down by too much philosophizing. But Andersen really has a point. A significant number of the red-blue arguments today are precisely ontological arguments, if not the original ontological argument. Our own views on this subject have been well-summarized in a couple of posts.

Jordan

The sphere is abuzz with the Eason Jordan claim that American soldiers are killing journalists. Try LGF for a taste. I’ve commented on it previously (adding Bill Moyers and Sy Hersh to the mix), and have a post from April 2003 with excerpts of Jordan’s NYT op-ed. The justaposition of these two sets of statements is startling and revealing. Jordan fantasizes a thing — American oppression and murder — and complains about it, and meanwhile, he permitted real people to be killed for many years by Saddam Hussein, and said nothing about it until Saddam had been dispatched by the US military.

Jordan was perfectly to contented to be a real victim of a dictator (though he could have stopped it by removing his people from Iraq), and, when not a real victim, makes up outlandish tales that portray him as a victim.

The GW crowd

Global warming is real. But then again, so is global cooling. That is why you have, in the space of 30 years, both a greenhouse! crisis and an ice age! crisis. In the last forty years, carbon dioxide has increased dramatically from 316 parts per million to 376 ppm, because of America! — how dare you say that’s not a crisis? Um, just why am I supposed to believe that the almost undetectable increase of 60 parts per million in CO2 has any meaning in an atmosphere with 780,000 parts per million of nitrogen and oxygen is 210,000 parts per million. Go read The Skeptical Environmentalist or the popular State of Fear and let’s talk.

The GW crowd are, in their minds, victims of some inchoate oppression of the great and evil god of America who is going to do something really bad to them in a future in which the cataclysm is always conveniently thirty or fifty years down the road. They are victims in Volvos.

The Islamists

the Islamists are victims of modernity itself and all the fabulous wealth being spread across the globe by American capitalism. Here’s what the Wahhabi losers are printing up at San Diego mosques (from the New York Sun via LGF):

The mosques maintain libraries or racks of literature for parishioners, and often run religious schools for Muslims. The doctrine they teach is one of unending conflict. “It is basic Islam to believe that everyone who does not embrace Islam is an unbeliever and must be called an unbeliever, and that they are enemies to Allah, his Prophet, and the believers,” reads one document published by the Saudi government and available to worshippers at a San Diego mosque. “That is why the one who does not call the Jews and the Christians unbelievers is himself an unbeliever.”

As we’ve pointed out, this fantasy ideology is almost meaningless in today’s world, even if the United States ceased to exist. The pathetic Arab countries (soon not to include Iraq in the pathetic catergory — yay!) have 500 million people and a non-oil GDP less than Finland. Yet they think they are going to impose a 7th century caliphate (Singapore’s PM Goh Chok Tong) around the world. As we’ve written previously: what are they going to do when all the infidels are rich? Americans, with our $11 trillion GDP don’t want any of their nonsense, the billion plus Chinese with their $6.5 trillion GDP aren’t buying it, nor the billion Hindus in India, and so on. No wonder they focus on a sliver of the world’s 13 million Jews; it keeps their challenges bite-sized.

The uniting factor

What unites these men is a religious belief, but it is not a positive religion. They believe rather in their own sacred victimhood. The world isn’t going their way, and therefore the world is wrong. Imagine how sick your soul must be to allow actual murders but fantasize made-up murders to elevate your moral view of yourself. Imagine spending your life masochistically fantasizing about cataclysms and disasters a century down the road during the time in which American capitalism has produced the greatest prosperity, longevity and cleanest environment in human history. Imagine the sick satisfaction of the motorcycle gangs of Islamism when they see their bloodlust and head-chopping televised by Jordan’s network.

Choosing to see yourself as a victim is profoundly wrong, both psychologically and morally. You abdicate moral responsibility by doing so, and are able to justify any abuse you inflict on others. Further, you can never grow up to be a man, or woman, if you insist that unseen forces, such as America, capitalism or the Jews and infidels, are the cause of all your problems. Finally, you can never be happy in such a life. In the end, happiness is a choice. It is a choice that begins with gratitude toward God for your life and its many blessings.

Making a golden calf of yourself and your victimhood is enormously destructive. Maybe that’s why it appeared in number one on Moses’ list.

Deregulation inevitably results in lower costs, higher quality and more choices for the consumer, when it is properly done, in industry after industry, not just in the media, and its track record is long and successful.

– The airline industry, deregulated in 1978 through the work of Alfred Kahn, has seen accident rates halved and prices dramatically lowered through new entrants like Southwest, Jet Blue, WestJet, and others.

– The telecommunications industry deregulation began on January 1, 1984 as the result of the Judge Harold Greene’s settlement of a government lawsuit against AT&T, and led to the reduction of long distance rates by 80% and the dramatic growth of the RBOC’s, MCI, Sprint, and other choices for consumers.

– The express delivery inustry was potentiated through Senator Thomas Eagleton’s 1979 creation of an “urgent letter” exemption to the USPS’s (Post Office’s) monopoly on mail delivery. Today, FedEx alone, which barely existed in 1979, has sales of over $25 Billion.

Deregulation is not a friend to the former monopolies or oligopolies once protected by government fiat. Once they are subject to the creative destruction of capitalism and competition, they generally suffer long and painful declines. TWA, United, Continental, US Air, PanAm, Eastern all filed bankruptcy, some twice. AT&T, a shadow if its former self, was booted from the Dow Industrials this year, and replaced by one of its former subsidiaries, Baby Bell Verizon Communications. The US Postal Service is a perennial story of cost-bloat and revenue squeeze.

Note that the legacy players in each industry have had decades to get their acts together to compete in the deregulated environment, but in case after case, they fail to do so. The reason for this is primarily cultural: heavily regulated and monopolistic companies become risk-averse, slow moving, complacent, arrogant and insular, and over a long period of time, they attract and promote managements who are comfortable in this atmosphere. When faced with a radically new and competitive environment, they have little way to implement an institutional response to the upstart competition, and they are often dismissive of the upstarts. I have written at length on this topic here.

Deregulation of Conservative Political Speech

The deregulation of conservative political speech occurred in 1987 with the FCC’s repeal of the so-called “fairness doctrine,” which required that controversial viewpoints on one side of an issue be balanced with an opposing perspective. The fairness doctrine’s constitutionality had been tested and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark 1969 case, Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC (395 U.S. 367), but was fairly consistenly weakened in subsequent rulings prior to 1987.

As a result of deregulation, on August 1, 1988, Rush Limbaugh began the creation of the modern talk radio industry, when he debuted on over 300 radio stations in his syndicated program. Today, Limbaugh estimates that his audience comprises over 20 million listeners a week on over 600 stations. More importantly for the spread of conservative discussion, there are now over a dozen large synidicated conservative programs, as well as many more local ones, spanning the hours of 6am Eastern through 9pm Pacific. I have estimated the audience for conservative political talk radio at over 80 million listeners, though the primitive data collection methods of Arbitron make estimates very difficult.

Whether the number is more or less than 80 million does not matter; in any event the number is very large compared to the previous outlets for conservative thought such as National Review, whose circulation is 150,000. Moreover, talk radio is a participatory environment, with much agreement but also much debate, and this is the key to Limbaugh’s accomplishment. Conservative talk radio is a national, virtual community of certain ideas and values, for people who had often previously felt themselves to be disenfranchised from the national debate as it was framed on the network news programs.

Telecommunication deregulation has sparked all sorts of innovations, which increase the power, intelligence, coverage areas and portability of communications devices. So it has been with the deregulation of conservative talk radio. It is no accident that that talk radio is often discussed as part of a larger network including Fox news and the internet. The center-right blogosphere is an extension of the community created 16 years ago, though of course it is not co-terminous. However, if I said that some “environmentalist wacko” called a politician a “racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe” or if I used the phrase “talent on loan from God,” the blogosphere would know the source. For the purpose of our discussion here, a community began to grow a decade an a half ago who knew just what to expect from spokesmen for the Democratic Party “and their willing accomplices in the media.”

Deregulation of political speech has been a boon to Republicans and conservatives over the last decade, gaining majorities at every level of government, as I have noted elsewhere. By contrast the legacy elite broadsheets have seen their circulations decline in the 10-15% range over that period. As with other industries like airlines and telecommunications, the legacy media are mad about their loss of power and efficacy, but they find it impossible to understand that their competition is simply delivering a product in greater demand than theirs.

The Blogosphere and the Acceleration of the Legacy Media Meltdown

The political influence of the blogosphere emerged in the Trent Lott affair in December 2002, which, even the New York Times noted, was driven by bloggers like Andrew Sullivan as well as the conservative punditocracy. The blogosphere came of age as a political force a year and a half later with John O’Neill’s Unfit for Command and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

In a brilliant marketing campaign that will be a business school case study in years to come, O’Neill created enormous buzz for his book among an audience of millions for practically zero dollars. First, O’Neill got Drudge to send out a “red alert” on August 3, and posted a devastating ad on August 4, as well as making a limited buy for the spot in three markets. O’Neill was on Hannity and Colmes that night, as Jonathon Last notes, and the ad was viewed and discussed at Polipundit, Instapundit, Powerline, Tom McGuire, and other sites. By August 5, the Kerry campaign was adding fuel to the fire with a campaign of legal intimidation, against which distinguished plaintiff’s counsel O’Neill had pre-emptively acted. Importantly too, Rush Limbaugh devoted his entire hour two monologue and caller discussions to the book on August 5. On August 6, the Christmas in Cambodia chapter was made available for download, and within a few days Glenn Reynolds posted the “seared…..seared” portion of the 1986 Congressional Record on his site. The revelations, comparisons with Tour of Duty and past press articles, and speculations increased exponentially thereafter.

On August 19, two weeks into the story, Kerry came out to condemn the SwiftBoatVets, though not to challenge their factual assertions. As Last noted:

[S]uddenly the story was news. The numbers are fairly striking: Before August 19, the New York Times and Washington Post had each mentioned Swift Boat Veterans for Truth just 8 times; the Los Angeles Times 7 times; the Boston Globe 4 times. The broadcast networks did far less. According to the indefatigable Media Research Center, before Kerry went public, ABC, CBS, and NBC together had done a total of 9 stories on the Swifties. For comparison, as of August 19 these networks had done 75 stories on the accusation that Bush had been AWOL from the National Guard.

After Kerry, the deluge. On August 24, the Washington Post ran three op-eds and an editorial on the Swifties; other papers expanded their coverage as well. But, curiously, they didn’t try to play catch-up with the new media in ascertaining the veracity of the Swifties’ claims. Instead, they pursued (or rather, repeated) the charge Kerry made: that Bush was behind Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. It was a touch surreal–as it would have been if Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe’s criticism of Bush’s National Guard record had prompted the media to investigate Terry McAuliffe.

As of this writing, it has been over five weeks since John Kerry gave a press briefing regarding these matters. He has not responded personally and on the record to the charges levelled by the SwiftBoatVets.

Trying to Change the Subject, but Failing

This writer believes that the CBS News 60 Minutes II interview of Ben Barnes and the production of the Killian memos that are negative towards Bush are the essence of the Kerry campaign’s reposnse to the SwiftBoatVets. (We discuss in other posts Ben Barnes’ scandal-plagued past, and Rather’s possible conflict of interest problems in his interview of Barnes.) The idea was to change the subject back to the preferred Bush-AWOL line, or at least provide a parallelism in Bush and Kerry scandals so that Kerry would have the trump card of saying that at least he had been in harm’s way.

The media are as much as 12 to 1 for Kerry and Evan Thomas boasted of the 15 point advantage they could give the candidate. CBS has previously featured Richard Clarke, Bob Woodward, Paul O’Neill and Joe Wilson taking shots at Bush. Dan Rather has a long history of ideological and financial support for Democrats. So, as reported by the Spectator, the DNC or the Kerry campaign gave the Killian memos to Rather to use against Bush. In the old days this might have worked, but not today.

CBS’s Strategic Errors stem from its Blindness as an Elite, Legacy Media Corporation

In adopting the strategy of trying to change the subect, CBS has committed two critical errors that arise from its status as an elite legacy media company. It has utterly failed to grasp the changes that have come about through the technological innovations of its conservative competitors. Here is what CBS fails to see:

(1) the legacy elite media no longer solely control the news agenda
(2) falsehoods are often easily exposed within a single news cycle, so they don’t work as well anymore.

In the old days, the news agenda has been set by the New York Times, and to lesser extent the Washington Post and the networks. NYT stories in the morning would form the template for evening network news reports. Sometimes stories would migrate from TV to the elite broadsheets, like the Bush memos. Conservative talk radio for the most part consisted of commentary on what the papers said this morning or what the TV news said last night. Hence, despite their declining power, insititutions like the New York Times , the Washington Post, or CBS could still set the agenda for a day’s news cycle — with appropriate caveats for breaking news, storms, crises, etc.

The SwiftBoatVets v. Kerry saga shattered this paradigm. Over the course of two weeks, a story that the legacy media absolutely did not want to cover became the #1 political story in the US, until the NYT and WaPo were forced to cover it. The elite legacy media still has not figured out how this happened. (One excellent example of how the migration occured is shown in the Powerline/Star-Tribune controversy.)

Moreover, the legacy media’s trick of falsely reporting a story on page one or in prime time, and then printing a retraction later, has been blown away by the incredibly short cycle time of the blogosphere. (60 Minutes has done it in the past, the AP tried it with the “boos” story, among others, and the Boston Globe tried it without success yesterday.)

The Blogosphere had the story deconstructed by dinner time of the first day

The phony Bush TANG memos are perhaps not the best example for figuring out the cycle time of the blogosphere, because they are such flagrantly inept forgeries, but they are instructive just the same. Within 49 minutes of the posting of the NYT story at 8:10 PDT on 9/8/04 on Free Republic, they were exposed as probable frauds based on the proportional fonts they used. When Powerline began anew in the morning with a 5:51am PDT 9/9/04 post, the blogosphere went wild.

Within a few hours of the initial Powerline post, a dozen new issues had been raised by citizen-editors for new investigations, and had been appended to that initial post. These included: the miniature superscripts, wrong paper size, wrong Air Force procedures, wrong Air Force formatting, incompatability with other 1970′s documents, wrong signatures, costliness and unavailability of potentially suitable IBM machines, the issue of kerning, the retirement date of General Staudt. The story matured fast enough for Stephen Hayes to have produced a Weekly Standard piece on it by 4pm, and for Fred Barnes to use that summary on Special Report.

Initially the blogosphere acted as reporters, investigating and fact checking the allegations as made by CBS. While doing so, the blogosphere noted other inconsistencies and problems with the documents, and put in process their investigation. In other words, while CBS was sleeping, unaware that it had to deal with credibility problems #1, proportional spacing and the raised “th,” Powerline’s editors and reporters had already moved on to phase two stories about kerning, paper size, etc.

Meanwhile, within the same 24 hours of the first Powerline story, phase three investigations were begun. These included Killian’s relatives, how CBS got the phony memos, and pretty serious forensic investigations by people with decades of experience in the desktop publishing industry. Meanwhile, CBS was still in phase one, focusing on miniature superscripts, and hypothetical composing machines from the 1970′s, as well as misleading use of a handwriting expert, and misuse of a Boston Globe interview, among many others (Hugh Hewitt has posted a list of 19 problems, many of which are individually lethal for the memos).

As of this writing, it appears to be only a matter of time before CBS has to make a retraction of its use of the memos, or face continuing and mounting controversy. Indeed, CBS seems alredy to be doing so, but in stages. This is the main link to the documents story on the CBS website, and the story date continues to be 9/6/04, but the story keeps changing and weakening regarding the documents. So CBS may be pioneering something new, after all: the non-retraction retraction, the process of saying you stand behind your story, while backing away from many of its most important details.

Where do we go from here?

First, the little picture: (1) Dan Rather is unlikely to apologize, though there may be some concession ultimately that some document or other was questionable; (2) CBS is already cleverly both standing by “its overall story”, while constantly revising the story within the same url with the 9/6/04 dateline; (3) the Bush-AWOL story is in its 5th telling now and has no legs, since, as Mark Steyn said, no one cares “whether George W. Bush failed to show up for his physical in the War of 1812;” (4) it is unclear whether John Kerry can get away with not answering questions about his Magic Hat and VC the Wonder dog, just because he tells Karen Tumulty, regarding Vietnam, that, “I’ve answered all the questions I’ll answer.”

Regarding the bigger picture, the futures of the elite legacy media companies, past business history may be instructive. AT&T tried to deal with upstart competition by introducing a low-cost long distance service under a different brand name. It failed. The legacy airlines have tried restructuring, with only limited success. They tried to create low-cost airlines within their corporations, like CALite, the United Shuttle, and others. To date, they have failed. The Postal Service tried to set up an operation to rival FedEx. It failed.

It is notable that the airlines’ restructurings, the only limited success story above, began with a frank admission by those companies that they had serious problems. There is no apparent acknowledgement of serious problems at CBS, nor at the other elite legacy media companies. While we can probably expect a few cosmetic changes — a little better fact checking, fewer misleading quotes from sources — to prevent the corrections page from working overtime under the yoke of the blogosphere, substantive changes are unlikely, based on the experiences of companies in other industries. Based on history, we would expect long, ugly declines in the fortunes of the legacy media companies.

A word of caution to CBS is in order, however, because of its particularly egregious dishonesty in the matter of the phony Bush memos. Haydn’s Symphony “La Reine” got its name from Marie Antoinette in 1787, but it was only a few years later that she was in no position to listen to it. Downfalls can sometimes be abrupt and painful.