The BBC has told its journalists not to call Abu Qatada, the al-Qaeda preacher, an “extremist”. In order to avoid making a “value judgment”, the corporation’s managers have ruled that he can only be described as “radical”…A British court has called Qatada a “truly dangerous individual” and even his defence team has suggested he poses a “grave risk” to national security…Daily Telegraph, journalists were told: “Do not call him an extremist –- we must call him a radical. Extremist implies a value judgment.”

For what it’s worth, nineteen audio cassettes of Abu Qatada’s sermons were found in the apartment of one Mohamed Atta some years back.

they noticed what appeared to be a uniformed Transportation Security Administration officer holding a leashed police dog. “He just loosened the leash on the dog, and the dog came over to check me out,” Vetter said. Standing on the platform above Vetter were three other officers who appeared to be wearing bullet-proof vests…The Vetters had encountered VIPR — special TSA Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams…

The program has 15 teams and is expanding to get access to 12 new teams…officers include plainclothes and uniformed team members — some of them armed — who arrive without telling passengers in advance. Officers in the joint operations then randomly ask travelers for permission to search their bags for explosives.

To prevent accusations of profiling, searchers choose a random number — eight for example — and then search the bags of every eighth passenger…local and federal authorities insist the searches are not mandatory. But passengers who refuse are not allowed on the train…

Police Chief Christopher Trucillo, who works regularly with VIPR teams, acknowledged that the search system isn’t perfect. Potential attackers carrying explosives who refuse searches are free to simply drive to the next station on the line and board there…

A high-profile example of VIPR’s growing pains, transit officials say, is a VIPR-assisted passenger screening a year ago at Amtrak’s station in Savannah, Georgia. Instead of screening passengers as they boarded trains — which is standard security procedure — officers were screening passengers as they were getting off trains. Security experts know that makes no sense

Let’s count the ways that this totally unnecessary government intrusion into citizens’ lives is offensive and ridiculous. It’s expensive, ineffective because of its randomness, clueless in that it searches people getting off trains, and inane because all a hypothetical bad guy would have to do is drive to the next station. But be warned: better not tweet anything about Marilyn Monroe — or else!

Spengler:

The rush out of the Egyptian pound is so rapid that Egyptian investors refuse to hold debt in their own national currency, even at a 16% yield. After Islamist parties won more three-quarters of the seats in recent parliamentary elections – 47% for the Muslim Brotherhood and 25% for the even more extreme al-Nour Party – the business elite that prospered under military rule is counting the days before exile. The first reports of actual hunger in provincial Egyptian towns, meanwhile, are starting to trickle in…

It seems unlikely that Egypt’s central bank will be able to prevent a banana-republic devaluation of the Egyptian pound, and a sharp rise in prices for a population of whom half barely consumes enough to prevent starvation. The difference between Egypt and a banana republic, though, is the bananas: unlike the bankrupt Latin Americans, who exported food, Egypt imports half its caloric consumption. Meat imports have already fallen by 60% over the past year…

Nearly half of Egyptians are functionally illiterate. Nine-tenths of adult women have suffered genital mutilation. Almost a third of Egyptians marry first or second cousins, the fail-safe indicator of a clan-based society. Half of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day, and must spend half of that on food…It should have been no surprise that the Islamists swept the parliamentary elections, given the desperation of the people and the cupidity of the political system. The Wafd Party, Egypt’s oldest secular political entity, polled just 9% of the vote.

Delusional as it was to expect Egyptians to support secular liberal parties that never existed and offered no solution to their desperation, it is all the more delusional to expect the Islamists to stabilize Egypt. The Islamist victory in the first round of voting last year almost certainly prompted the jump in capital flight in December, and the consolidation of Islamist power. Egypt’s middle class will leave and tourism, down by a third over the past year, will virtually disappear

We saw this sort of thing coming a year ago. But the wise ones said, “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.”

the president’s biggest failures have been his own ideas….Obama arrived in office afire with the ambition to create a Palestinian state within two years. But his diplomacy was based on a twofold misunderstanding: that the key to successful negotiations was forcing Israel to stop all settlement construction — and that the United States had the leverage to make that happen.

Veterans of the Middle East “peace process” shook their heads in wonderment as what at first appeared to be a rookie error evolved into a two-year standoff between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There was only one possible explanation for this persistence in futility: The president himself was fixed on it.

Obama’s next big project was global nuclear arms control — an initiative so impressive to Norwegians that it won him the Nobel Peace Prize before he could act on it. Yet the results to date hardly seem prizeworthy. The New Start nuclear arms agreement with Russia merely ratifies warhead reductions already underway in Russia, while imposing a modest cut on the U.S. arsenal. More ambitious multilateral initiatives by Obama — to control nuclear materials, for example — have made little progress, despite an elaborate summit the president hosted in 2010.

Here again there appears to be a disconnect between Obama’s 1970s-vintage ideas and the real world of the early 21st century. There’s nothing wrong, and modest good, in extending Cold War nuclear conventions with Russia, or extracting highly enriched uranium from Ukraine and Chile. But the most dangerous proliferation threats emanate from countries that don’t attend summits or sign international treaties, such as North Korea and Iran. In terms of nuclear capability, both are ahead of where they were in 2009.

This brings us to Obama’s most distinctive — and most ill-fated — idea, and the one most identified with his 2008 campaign: the determination to “engage” with U.S. adversaries such as Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. Obama promised “direct diplomacy” — even one-to-one meetings — with the likes of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Kim Jong Il. More broadly he made the case that the United States could benefit by reaching out to autocratic regimes…

In his first year Obama dispatched two letters to Khamenei while keeping his distance from the revolutionary Green movement. He shook hands with Hugo Chavez. He launched a “reset” of relations with Russia’s Vladi­mir Putin and dispatched envoys to reason with Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. He delivered a sweeping address to the Muslim world from Cairo.

The results have been meager. Khamenei spurned the U.S. outreach. Relations with Putin warmed for a time but now have grown cold again. In Egypt and across the Middle East, the president’s popularity is lower today than when he gave the Cairo address.

The Post offers no explanation for the litany of failures it cites. Remarkable enough that a Democrat wrote the piece. We’ll leave it to VDH to provide a rationale: “American foreign policy is now becoming an extension not of classically liberal values, but of progressive suspicions of constitutional government, capitalism, and the historical role of the United States in particular and the West in general. The bowing to foreign potentates, the sad historical fabrications in the Cairo speech, the self-serving nonsense that arose in the first Al-Arabiya interview, and the so-called ‘apology tour’ were simply superficial manifestations of a deeper ambiguity about America.” He’s being charitable.

it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting…as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto…

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Egypt is a country with no democratic tradition, over 40% illiteracy and grinding poverty. Terrible unemployment and underemployment. And a 65% vote in favor of more of the same. So who is closer to understanding Egypt, the Tom above or the NYT’s Tom?

the Islamist parties — the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour Party — just crushed the secular liberals, who actually sparked the rebellion here, in the free Egyptian parliamentary elections, winning some 65 percent of the seats. To not be worried about the theocratic, antipluralistic, anti-women’s-rights, xenophobic strands in these Islamist parties is to be recklessly naïve. But to assume that the Islamists will not be impacted, or moderated, by the responsibilities of power, by the contending new power centers here and by the priority of the public for jobs and clean government is to miss the dynamism of Egyptian politics today.

Flashback: “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.”

The Guardian’s front-page headline this morning was ‘NHS cuts have affected patient care say four out of five doctors’. So just how severe are these ‘cuts’? Ten per cent of the budget? Five? Here are the official figures from the Department of Health. At a time when other ministries are indeed under pressure, spending on the NHS will continue to grow year on year throughout the parliament – as it has almost uninterruptedly since 1948. Expenditure will rise from £103.8 billion to £114.4 billion in 2015. It’s true that, once inflation is factored in, the increase is slight – around 0.4 per cent. It’s true, too, that there is a reallocation of funds within that budget from administration to the actual provision of healthcare. Still, in no system of mathematics does this represent a ‘cut’. What, then, is the Guardian talking about? Read far enough and you’ll see that the whole story is based an online survey of, er, 664 self-selected respondents

Middle East Forum:

Consider the New York Times’ coverage, as reported by Adam Nossiter, in an article titled “Nigerian Group Escalates Violence With Church Attacks”: The sect, known as Boko Haram, until now mostly targeted the police, government and military in its insurgency effort, but the bombings on Sunday represented a new, religion-tinged front, a tactic that threatens to exploit the already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims…

This sentence is fraught with problems. For starters, Boko Haram has been terrorizing Nigerian Christians for years, killing thousands of them, and destroying hundreds of their churches. Considering that just last Christmas Eve, 2010, Boko Haram bombed several churches, killing nearly 40 Christian worshippers, the New York Times’ characterization of these latest attacks as “represent[ing] a new, religion-tinged front” is not only unconscionable, but unprofessional.

Boko Haram — whose full name in Arabic is “People of Sunna for Da’wa [Islamization] and Jihad [Holy War]” — has, for a decade, been representing a very “religion-tinged front,” that is, an Islamic front, one that is hostile to all things non-Muslim, with Christians at the very top. In just the last couple of months, Boko Haram has carried out attacks on dozens of other churches, bombing some, torching others. In one instance, they opened fire on a congregation of mostly women and children, killing dozens; they executed two children of an ex-terrorist because he converted to Christianity

A cut is properly defined as an inadequate increase. A clear religious-political strategy of violence is properly defined an unfortunate religion-tinged tactic that might result in some random man-caused disasters. What about clear writing don’t these whiners understand?

1968 was a tumultuous year, really awful in some ways, hardly what you’d call the good old days. Yet it had its moments, including the first human spaceflight to leave the earth’s orbit. Merry Christmas from the three astronauts of the Apollo 8 mission.

Last Saturday, violent groups of Islamic-Salafi radicals burned the famous scientific institute established by Napoleon in Egypt after its first encounter with the West. Some historians consider it the start of modern times in the Middle East. The site, L’Institut d’Egypte, held some 200,000 original and rare books, exhibits, maps, archeological findings and studies from Egypt and the entire Middle East, based on the work of generations of western researchers. Most of the artifacts were lost forever, burned or looted…

In 1258, the Mongols burned the immense library in Baghdad known as the “House of Wisdom.” It held rare writings that have disappeared forever, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and the other cornerstones of Western civilization. All we know today is that these books existed, yet following the terrible fire in Baghdad they were burned forever. The Mongols sought to secure the same objective as Egypt’s Salafis: Erasing the past and keeping only their present.

Earlier this year: “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.” Yeah, right.

The one above is from 1789. Here’s one from 1863. Can you imagine anything of the sort being written today?

On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered “the great disappointment” when it didn’t happen. In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children’s Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn’t, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery. In 1898 the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years, went into the Battle of Omdurman armed with swords believing that they were impervious to bullets. They weren’t, and they were mowed down by British Maxim guns.

A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global warming alarmists. They have an unshakable faith that man-made carbon emissions will produce a hotter climate causing multiple natural disasters. Their insistence that we can be absolutely certain this will come to pass is based not on science — which is never fully settled, witness the recent experiments that may undermine Einstein’s theory of relativity — but on something very much like religious faith. All the trappings of religion are there.

– Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.

– The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system that will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.

– Ritual, from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.

– Indulgences, like those Martin Luther railed against: private jet fliers like Al Gore and sitcom heiress Laurie David can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.

– Corporate elitists, like General Electric’s Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not too. And if you’re clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.

– Believers in this religion have flocked to conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto and Copenhagen, just as Catholic bishops flocked to councils in Constance, Ferrara and Trent, to codify dogma and set new rules.

But like the Millerites, the global warming clergy has preached apocalyptic doom — and is now facing an increasingly skeptical public. The idea that we can be so completely certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves in the meantime seems increasingly absurd.

Take a fishbowl and place 10,000 blue marbles in it. Take out just one little blue marble and replace it with a green marble. You have now illustrated to yourself how much additional CO2 has increased in the atmosphere in the last several hundred years. Predicating doom on such a truly trivial event is not science. Barone has explained it very well indeed.

In Benghazi, on the main square where it all started, they were slaughtering camels in celebration. There they sat, eight of them, feet tied so they could not move, quivering with fear as they were beheaded one by one. As soldiers fired rifles in the air, members of the cheering crowd held up the severed heads as trophies. They daubed their hands in the camel-blood, and gave the V-for-victory sign with dripping fingers. But away from the square, the birthplace of the revolution was not in party mood. The streets were fairly quiet. And in the cafes, people were watching TV pictures -– more graphic than any shown in Britain –- of a bloodied Gaddafi dragged along and beaten, feebly protesting, before a gun was put to his head. The picture then cut to the dead ex-leader being rolled onto the pavement, blood pooling from the back of his skull.

An “inclusive and tolerant and democratic Libya”? Time will tell.

We didn’t show the first picture from the Return to 1968 Festival in NYC. It kind of sums things up, however. Maybe this does too: “God bless them for their spontaneity,” Pelosi told reporters. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.” Yeah, good luck with that. How effective? Just watch this scene from Atlanta’s dramatization of Orwell’s Animal Farm:

How creepy is all that chanting in unison? Ginning this up was a terrible idea on the part of those who wanted to create an anti-tea-party. We’d say Go For It! — but there’s something a little scary about the behavior of these mind-numbed robots. HT: Powerline

No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward

Here is a thoughtful response from the real world to the comments. And here is what Warren has been doing since graduating from Rutgers law school in 1976:

Academic Appointments

Harvard Law School. 1995-present: Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law; 2001-02, Radcliffe
Fellow; 1992-93: Robert Braucher Visiting Professor of Commercial Law

The University of Pennsylvania Law School. 1990-1995: William A Schnader Professor
of Commercial Law; 1987-1990: Professor of Law

The University of Texas School of Law. 1986-87: Jay H. Brown Centennial Fellow in
Law; 1983-1987: Professor of Law. 1985-86: Conoco Faculty Fellow in Law; 1981-82:
Visiting Associate Professor of Law

The University of Texas at Austin. 1983-87: Research Associate, Population Research
Center

The University of Houston Law Center. 1981-83: Associate Professor of Law; 1978-80:
Assistant Professor of Law; 1980-81: Associate Dean for Academic Affairs

The University of Michigan. 1985: Visiting Professor of Law

Rutgers School of Law (Newark). 1977-78: Lecturer in Law…

Research Grants

2007 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Research Grant for Empirical Study,
“Homeownership in a Time of Financial Peril”

2006 American Association of Retired Persons, Research Grant for Empirical Study, “The
Changing Demographics of Debt”

2004 Kauffman Foundation, Research Grant for Empirical Study, “Entrepreneurial Financing
and the Bankruptcy System”

2004 Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr, “Chapter 11 Outcomes – A Critical Update”

2004 American College of Bankruptcy, Research Grant for Empirical Study, “Expanding the
View of Business Bankruptcy”

2004 Annie E. Casey Foundation Research Grant for Empirical Study, “Growing Financial
Risks Facing Families With Children”

2001 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Research Grant for Empirical Study, “Medical
Bankruptcy: A Study of Financially Catastrophic Illness”

2001 Ford Foundation, Research Grant for Empirical Study, “Home Ownership and Financial
Distress: The Interplay of Tax, Real Estate and Bankruptcy Law”

1994-1998 National Bankruptcy Conference, Research Grant for Empirical Study of Business
Bankruptcy

1993-1998 National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges, Empirical Study of Business Bankruptcy

1995 Scholar in Residence, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Italy

1995-1998 Small Business Administration, Research Grant for Empirical Study on Small Business Failures

1993 Moller Research Chair in Bankruptcy Law and Policy

1992 Research Foundation, University of Pennsylvania

1991 National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges, Empirical Study of Consumer Debtors

1988 Public Policy Research Initiative, University of Pennsylvania

1997 John M. Olin Foundation, Institute for Law and Economics, University of Pennsylvania

1986 American Bar Foundation, Meyer Research Grant

1986 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, HD #06160-15 16

1984-1986 National Science Foundation, Grant # SES 8310173 – Consumer Choices in
Bankruptcy: Statutory Intentions and Statutory Consequences

1985-1986 Texas Bar Foundation, Grant for Research on Bankruptcy Demographics

1985 Policy Research Institute, Grant # 30-3239-4850

1979 Research Initiation Grant, University of Houston

(That 1995 stint in Italy courtesy of the Rockefeller Foundation is a nice touch.) Like so many of her colleagues over the past few years, Mrs. Warren is innocent of any personal experience in the private sector. Easy to be so dogmatic when you don’t know what you’re talking about.

UPDATE: there’s an effective response to Mrs. Warren.

Tom Friedman in the NYT some months back: “to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.” Note: the author of that comment called Rick Santelli an idiot on CNBC. (For those of you who don’t understand the photo, read this)

This year’s Republican primary season offers us an important opportunity to confront our scruples about the privacy of faith in public life — and to get over them. We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans.

Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird…

Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity, which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.

I honestly don’t care if Mitt Romney wears Mormon undergarments beneath his Gap skinny jeans, or if he believes that the stories of ancient American prophets were engraved on gold tablets and buried in upstate New York, or that Mormonism’s founding prophet practiced polygamy (which was disavowed by the church in 1890).

Every faith has its baggage, and every faith holds beliefs that will seem bizarre to outsiders. I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ.

Comments: (1) we don’t recall the NYT’s interest in exploring odd churches in 2008; (2) the author of this piece was a member of the same church as Mr. Santorum, whom he criticized above; and (3) we might just vote for a Zoroastrian if he could deliver the top line of this chart broadly throughout the country.

He occupies the cultural and intellectually empty heartland of the Republican Party. He vows to diminish Washington’s influence — a conservative applause line but a moronic policy. What America desperately needs is more, not less, Washington — more economic stimulus and more national education standards…What does create jobs — well-paying jobs, in fact — is education…He says the federal government needs to stop “dictating” school policy when this is precisely what needs to be done. He says “government doesn’t create jobs,” when in fact it can and does. He blasted the stimulus programs, yet without them the American economy and its financial institutions would be much worse off. He repeats bromides about small business

Mr. Cohen is undoubtedly a fine fellow, but his bio does not indicate that he has ever worked in the private sector — unless you think that writing stories about politicians and government for the establishment newspaper in Washington DC since 1968 is your idea of a private sector job. He ably lays out the government-centric case. He feels it in his bones. He believes in it sincerely and deeply, as do many of his like-minded associates.

But his beliefs have failed him, catastrophically. The optimist in us says, good!, now we can have a bracing debate about the right way to fix things. It shouldn’t be all that hard if everyone keeps an open mind, because the solutions are obvious and not all that difficult. But that’s not how deeply held beliefs usually change, is it? We quote Charles Darwin and Max Planck:

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 stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine…but 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)

Those who counsel caution and delicacy in the debate on America’s future path are wrong, and it is particularly offensive when it comes from the Republican side. It’s not for the likes of Mr. Cohen, his confrères in the media, or senior congressmen and administration officials, that this debate is being held. There’s no changing their minds; they’ve lived in the government / media complex too long. As Holman Jenkins noted in the WSJ, this is “the same old crisis of forgetting what works” that we had in the late 1970′s, except that Washington is twice as big, twice as old, and twice as ossified now. If they take offense, who cares? How else, except by clarity, do you engage and educate the Americans of the future?

what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!…When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again…There’s no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea!…It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the goddamn word climate. It is not acceptable. They have polluted it

The lad is upset that no one seems to be paying attention to the planetary emergency. We have an idea about where this fellow might better use his righteous anger: make him ambassador to Syria.

“Froma Harrop, a member of The Journal’s editorial board and a syndicated columnist, has been named president of the National Conference of Editorial Writers. The NCEW is a 64-year-old professional organization. Its members include editorial writers, editors, broadcasters and online opinion writers. One of its new missions, the Civility Project, endeavors to improve the quality of political discourse.” — Providence Journal, April 15

“Make no mistake: The tea party Republicans have engaged in economic terrorism against the United States — threatening to blow up the economy if they don’t get what they want. And like the al-Qaida bombers, what they want is delusional…Americans are not supposed to negotiate with terrorists, but that’s what Obama has been doing…That the Republican leadership couldn’t control a small group of ignoramuses in its ranks has brought disgrace on their party…The GOP extremists would ask Obama for his firstborn, and he’d say, ‘OK.’ So they think, why not ask for his second-born, to which he responds, ‘Let’s talk.’ ” — Froma Harrop syndicated column, Aug. 2

More of the same. What can they possibly think that this offensive talk will accomplish?

The Republican “Taliban wing,” as some Democrats dub the rabid Tea Party militants, was determined to break up any budding Obama-Boehner bromance.

This is but one example in a series of similar comments about jihad, Hezbollah, Taliban, suicide bombers, etc. (here and here) in the NYT and Politico. What do these slurs have in common? Are we observing a rather nasty pattern of religious bias among the so-called enlightened commentators? HT: BOTW

tens of thousands of Egyptians poured into Tahrir Square on Friday for a day that had been billed as one of unified protest against the interim military government. But the turnout was lopsided, dominated by members of religious movements, ranging from the most conservative, the Salafists, to the relatively moderate Muslim Brotherhood…demonstrators called out, “The people want to implement Sharia,” a strict code of Islamic law…blogger and activist Nora Shalaby wrote on Twitter that the Salafists were “diverting us from the real demands of the revolution bc of their selfishness.”

Yeah, right. As we noted back in February when the media found its latest fleeting Utopia, Egypt is a country where 84% of the population thinks apostates should face the death penalty. Twitter indeed.

Martin Frost is a former congressman. We remember having lunch with him and giving him a check from our firm’s PAC in the 1980′s. He was a mild-mannered guy. Here he is today. Politico:

Ten years ago, the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed two gigantic figures of Buddha, carved into a hillside 18 centuries before. The world was aghast at this barbarian act taken in the name of religious purity. But was powerless to stop it. We now have a group of U.S. politicians seeking political purity, who seem to have much in common with the Taliban. They are tea party members; and because of blind adherence to smaller government, they seem intent on risking destroying what American political leaders have constructed in more than two centuries of hard, often painful work. Like the Taliban, they see compromise as an unacceptable alternative…there is no need to blow up centuries old religious statues — or two centuries of American government.

Take that! Rick Santelli for your terrorist ways. And while we’re at it, aren’t you one of those angry suicide bombers, Mr. Glenn Reynolds? We’re not sure that it is a wise political strategy for the White House and its allies to insult average Americans in this way. But it is clarifying, isn’t it?

the Tea Party. It is so lacking in any aspiration for American greatness, so dominated by the narrowest visions for our country and so ignorant of the fact that it was not tax cuts that made America great but our unique public-private partnerships across the generations. If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission.

It’s hard to understand why Mr. Friedman would be upset at the Republican Party’s self-destruction.

Some previous pearls of wisdom from Mr. Friedman: “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.” Or this: “A simple, straightforward carbon tax would have made much more sense than this Rube Goldberg contraption. It is pathetic…It stinks. It’s a mess. I detest it. Now let’s get it passed in the Senate and make it law.” And: “Detroit…You want my tax dollars? Then I want to see the precise production plans and timetables for the hybridization of all your cars and trucks within 36 months.”

Some signal facts 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 perhaps 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 at the end of an era; soon, 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 easily 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 hope we are not romanticizing a world we have lost; it is common enough, as well as wrong, to excessively mythologize the past. 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 some form of return to a isolationist’s vision of a manufacturing economy. However, we are saying that it is fit and proper 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 very unlike 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, change, and hope, thinks itself superior to all those who have come before. Such flummery is also as destructive as it is common.

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.

Today those who style themselves the most learned among us often live in a bubble we sometimes characterize as the university/media/political complex. Their dire predictions are often downright silly. However, they hold these views not only with a fervent passion, but with the conviction that they have the right to impose their fatuous and expensive notions on the rest of us. Like the ancients, we Americans have to return ad fontes, for if we forget the past we leave the future to the fabulists and utopians. That would be a tragic outcome for both America and the world.

Steven Chu, the Energy Secretary who came into office saying “we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe“, has now offered up another soundbite for our times. On Friday, he defended the ban on Edison’s iconic incandescent in economic terms: “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”

As if CFL’s were any kind of answer. It’s really become very annoying that these smart people with advanced degrees, who have never worked a day in their lives outside the political/university complex, think they are entitled to run other people’s lives.

One of the great issues of our time is how to undo the damage inflicted by the political/media/university axis. But how do you undo religious beliefs?

World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third…A peak in temperatures in 1998 coincided with a strong El Nino weather event…Natural cooling effects included a declining solar cycle after 2002…”It has been unclear why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008,” said the study…

Smoke belching from Asia’s rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming…The paper raised the prospect of more rapid, pent-up climate change when emerging economies eventually crack down on pollution…A U.N. panel of climate scientists said in 2007 that it was 90 percent certain that humankind was causing global warming.

We get the feeling that we’re going to be seeing ever more arcane explanations as the darn facts seem not to fit the theory as well as first thought. Remind you of anything?

Johnston’s note to his wife on the 29th said: “It is by no means certain that you will be compelled to leave Atlanta. The enemy may not attempt to cross the Chattahoochee at present.”

June 28 was another hot day. The hundreds of corpses between the armies swelled and turned black. They were covered with flies and emitted a stench that nauseated the men in their trenches. On the morning of June 29 the commanders along the angle agreed to cease fire so that Federal soldiers could bury their dead. Unarmed soldiers of boith armies were supposed to keep away everyone except burial details, but crowds of men gathered atop the trenches to watch the work and to see each other. Shallow graves were dug where the men had fallen…

Confederate generals came out to look at what their men had done in the battle. General George Maney, whose name was still attached to the brigade that held the angle, was elegantly dressed; Cheatham looked like a farmer. Cleburne and Hindman joined the group. Federal officers shared their whiskey with the Confederate generals, and the southerners asked officers of the 14th Michigan Regiment about friends and relatives in Tennessee whom the Yankees had seen recently.

While the officers talked and drank, soldiers swapped canteens, exchanged newspapers, and traded coffee for tobacco. Federal soldiers gathered around Cheatham and Hindman to get autographs. Two large men, a Northerner and a Southerner, held a wrestling match, which the Yankee won.

The mounds of the hasty cemetary, extending about 100 yards across the front, were finished in the afternoon. The soldiers went back behind their entrenchments, and a single shot was fired, ending the truce. The strange silence lasted a few minutes longer. Then the familiar sound of steady small-arms fire broke out all along the line.

Today we also live in a house divided. You can draw Venn diagrams of where Left and Right stand on different religions, AGW, taxation, the proper role of government, CFL’s, oil drilling, etc., and for the most part each side is relatively tightly grouped behind its entrenchments. Since you can’t break the Iron Law of Arithmetic, we have a feeling we know which side will ultimately triumph — the great unknown being whether the solution is more authoritarian or more free. But in any event, even with all the shouting, this isn’t 1864 in Atlanta.

her 95-year-old mother was detained and extensively searched last Saturday while trying to board a plane to fly to Michigan to be with family members during the final stages of her battle with leukemia. Her mother, who was in a wheelchair, was asked to remove an adult diaper in order to complete a pat-down search…

Wheelchairs trigger certain protocols, including pat-downs and possible swabbing for explosives, Koshetz said. “During any part of the process, if there is an alarm, then we have to resolve that alarm,” she said…Koshetz said the procedures are the same for everyone to ensure national security.

You may view the photo of the terrorist here. Note the government’s judgment: “We have reviewed the circumstances involving this screening and determined that our officers acted professionally and according to proper procedure.”

There was no reason that Athens at 338 B.C. needed to lose to Philip of Macedon at the battle of Chaironeia, or even that the loss there meant the end of the freedom of the Greek city-states. Macedonian forces were a fraction of the size of a far larger Persian force that had swept down from the north into a far weaker Athens a century-and-half-earlier in 480 BC, and were soundly defeated.

In terms of culture, no law in stone decreed that drama of the quality of the Orestia, Oedipus, Ajax, Bacchae, and Medea had to give way to the lesser sitcoms of Middle and New comedy of the fourth century BC. Complacency and collective loss of confidence, brought on by affluence, leisure, and poor leadership far better explain retrenchment than environmental catastrophe, foreign invasion, or financial implosion…

If Rome was supposedly “doomed” by the 5th century AD, why did the Eastern Empire at Constantinople last another 1,000 years?…

why did a bombed out Frankfurt and Tokyo (200,000 incinerated in March 1945 alone) rather quickly out-produce a less damaged Liverpool (4,000 killed in the blitz) or another former industrial hub at Manchester? Between 1945-1949, the United Kingdom chose a path of deliberate retrenchment, redistributive large government, high taxes, and socialism that a once flattened, and suddenly desperate Germany and Japan did not…

We live in a most peculiar time. The possibilities for this nation are greater than they have ever been, and we have a gang in Washington — often on both sides of the aisle — who appear to embrace decline. For no good reason at all. HT: PL

it’s time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies…how about they are forced to buy property on low-lying islands, the sort of property that will become worthless with a few more centimetres of ocean rise, so they are bankrupted by their own bloody-mindedness? Or what about their signed agreement to stand, in the year 2040, lashed to a pole at a certain point in the shallows off Manly? If they are right and the world is cooling — ”climate change stopped in the year 1998” is one of their more boneheaded beliefs — their mouths will be above water…As Cate Blanchett put it this week: ”I can’t look my children in the face if I’m not trying to do something in my small way and to urge other people.”

Pardon us for being repetitive, but we just can’t get excited about such a minuscule increase of a benign gas in the atmosphere. How can these people get so worked up?

It will take business experience and common sense to fix this economy. This crew in Washington has no business experience, and as for common sense, you be the judge of that.

There are many easy parts of the fix (avoid punitive taxation, decrease regulatory burdens, etc). We must take steps to stop making offshoring jobs the best choice for American business. Fixing the economy is not rocket science, as we’ve been saying for a long time now, but it gets more urgent every day.

Keynesian pump-priming is a dead end of course in a world where domestic stimulus creates jobs in China, and we are borrowing from China to do the stimulus spending in the first place. But it’s awfully hard to convince the true believers in the media and the academy that their ancient beliefs don’t work. Come to think of it, those are places that also lack business experience and common sense. HT: PL

under the dictatorship, political repression went hand in hand with social modernity. Women’s rights are among the most advanced in the Arab world. Alcohol is freely available, divorce is easier than in some parts of the EU and thousands of half-naked Western tourists line the coast every summer.

By the standards of the region, Tunisia is highly developed. With its boulevards and cafes, its trams and shopping centres, Tunis, the capital, looks like a dustier Marseille. But Ennahda draws support from the less prosperous interior…At an April 17 rally organised by Ennahda, Tunisia’s largest Islamist party, a speaker called for Bouzid to be “shot with a Kalashnikov”. The audience, which included a senior Ennahda leader, responded with cries of “Allahu Akbar”…

“People are feeling the pressure. Women come up to me and say, what about Ennahda -– they’re going to make me wear a veil,” said Maya Jribi, secretary general of the main liberal party, the PDP, Ennadha’s main rival, and one of Tunisia’s top female politicians…Mokhtar Trifi, head of the country’s human rights league, says that manifestations of Islamic radicalism -– forced veiling, forced prayer, and condemnations for apostasy -– are rising, too, all over the country.

We’re reminded of the so-called “Twitter revolution” in Egypt, where 40% of the population is illiterate and a majority lives on a few dollars a day. It is not a surprise that the allies of modernity are often autocrats, and that a plurality of the people would support “one man, one vote, one time.” In general, we’re less optimistic than Walter Russell Mead seems today on a number of these issues.

We prefer clarity to verbal mischief-making in matters of war and peace. Fortunately the two enemies whose fate is being discussed by their betters are pretty clear where they stand. Our view is that the so-called “peace process” is a huge waste of time and a distraction. More government savings to be had in firing people whose job description includes the phrase “peace process”.

“The nation does not need a lesson on democracy from Obama,” said Hamas spokesman in the Gaza Strip, Sami Abu-Zuhri. “Rather, Obama is the one who needs the lesson given his absolute endorsement of Israel’s crimes and his refusal to condemn Israel’s occupation…We will not recognize the Israeli occupation under any circumstances”

The government of Israel:

Palestinians will have to accept some basic realities. The first is that while Israel is prepared to make generous compromises for peace, it cannot go back to the 1967 lines — because these lines are indefensible…before 1967, Israel was all of nine miles wide. It was half the width of the Washington Beltway. And these were not the boundaries of peace; they were the boundaries of repeated wars, because the attack on Israel was so attractive…

Israel cannot negotiate with a Palestinian government that is backed by Hamas…President Abbas has a simple choice. He has to decide if he negotiates or keeps his pact with Hamas, or makes peace with Israel…

The third reality is that the Palestinian refugee problem will have to be resolved in the context of a Palestinian state, but certainly not in the borders of Israel. The Arab attack in 1948 on Israel resulted in two refugee problems — Palestinian refugee problem and Jewish refugees, roughly the same number, who were expelled from Arab lands. Now, tiny Israel absorbed the Jewish refugees, but the vast Arab world refused to absorb the Palestinian refugees. Now, 63 years later, the Palestinians come to us and they say to Israel, accept the grandchildren, really, and the great grandchildren of these refugees, thereby wiping out Israel’s future as a Jewish state. So it’s not going to happen. Everybody knows it’s not going to happen. And I think it’s time to tell the Palestinians forthrightly it’s not going to happen.

Sometimes when a leader charts a course that is roundly rejected by both sides, he is a bold visionary. Then again sometimes there are leaders who are so caught up in their ideology or relf-regard that they don’t know much and don’t care much about the history that informs our time. Feel free to choose what the story is here.

Army dogs wage war on illegal Palestinian workers…Palestinians desperate for work in Israel will go to extremes to sneak past the West Bank barrier, but now they face a new hurdle — army attack dogs sent to sniff them out. Workers say the use of dogs to hunt down anyone trying to enter Israel illegally

Why is it a news story that a country tracks down people who enter it illegally? (Perhaps this is just a weak follow-up to Nakba, but it’s really sort of pathetic.)

Mamet was delivering a frontal assault on American higher education, the provider of the livelihood of nearly everyone in his audience. Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom — “Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever” — and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting…view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”

This led to a full-throated defense of capitalism, a blast at high taxes and the redistribution of wealth, a denunciation of affirmative action, prolonged hymns to the greatness and wonder of the United States, and accusations of hypocrisy toward students and faculty who reviled business and capital even as they fed off the capital that the hard work and ingenuity of businessmen had made possible. The implicit conclusion was that the students in the audience should stop being lab rats and drop out at once, and the faculty should be ashamed of themselves for participating in a swindle — a “shuck,” as Mamet called it.

Like many conservatives, Mamet underwent a conversion experience. His came while he was writing a play on politics. A lifelong Democrat of our acquaintance had his when, in attempting to vote for Jimmy Carter in 1980, his arm refused to pull the lever. However, it’s hard to imagine many such conversions in a university setting, where the social, economic and other practical disincentives are great. So what is to be done? HT: Powerline

The passengers sat stunned as they watched a man walk quickly toward the front of American Airlines Flight 1561 as it was descending toward San Francisco. He was screaming and then began pounding on the cockpit door…

Marty, 35, recalled Monday that she and other passengers on the plane were stunned when they saw Almurisi walking down the aisle. She said a woman in a row across from her who speaks Arabic translated that Almurisi said “God is Great!” in Arabic. Wai, 27, also remembered on Monday that the wife of one of the men who took Almurisi down later said Almurisi was yelling “Allahu Akbar.”…

Almoraissi said he could not imagine what may have caused his cousin to act as authorities allege he did…”He might have seriously mistaken the cockpit for the bathroom,” Almoraissi said. “He’s only been on three planes in his whole life.” Almurisi was taking classes in California to learn English but was not happy with his progress

Remember what we’re told by our betters — this shouting is completely normal and is just what some people do. The “pit” referred to above incidentally in the one that journalism has fallen into and can’t seem to crawl out of.

Everything was over-the-top, like a cartoon action movie about the White House. Except it was the cast of Jacques Brel reading lines from The Searchers. The cringe-making adulation from the media and the administration itself only added to the inauthentic feel. There comes a point in life where you’re better off just being who you are, or, if that’s not possible for a politician, there are always acting lessons. Either option would be an improvement over what we’ve got now.

The Pakistani security establishment lives to a very large degree in what, to American eyes, looks like a dangerous and delusional imaginary world. As I’ve written before, Americans (and virtually everyone else in the world who looks at this question) sees Pakistan locked into a profoundly dysfunctional combination of misguided security ideas and comprehensive domestic failure. Pakistani strategists embrace these seemingly destructive policies out of some very deeply-held beliefs and in response to what they see as existential questions of national identity and cohesion. They will not be lightly diverted from this long-established and cherished course, however suicidal…

As US-Pakistan tensions rise, the Pakistanis have looked to China as an alternative great power backer. The Pakistani argument to China is that Pakistan offers an offset to India…

for the Chinese, who have so far flirted with Pakistan but never come close to giving the Pakistanis the support they desperately crave, there are three very big catches. First, Pakistan looks as bent on self-destruction to China as it does to everyone else in the world; why put your money on a such a weak horse?

Second, if China becomes the partner of Pakistan’s dreams, it wrecks its relationship with India and drives India into America’s arms. A closer relationship with Pakistan might be necessary for China in the event that the US and India developed a tight alliance aimed against China, but China’s best strategy now is to prevent the US-India relationship from turning into an anti-China alliance. Flirting with Pakistan makes sense as a way to keep both Washington and Delhi on their toes, but anything more would be a costly mistake.

And third, there are the same questions of competence and trust that give Washington pause. Can Pakistan really be trusted on the subject of ‘Islamic’ terror? The Pakistani defense establishment is totally fixated on maintaining links with terror groups and radical groups to advance its interests in both Afghanistan and India. China doesn’t like this very much; none of the great powers with interests in Central Asia have much sympathy

It was only 3 years ago that Pakistanis staged that gruesome attack in India. Now it is seen to have harbored OBL and no doubt there will be some information forthcoming about who in Pakistan was abetting him. It’s hard to see this situation becoming more favorable, or even more stable, anytime soon. And there’s that other troubling thing about Pakistan.

Senator Obama opposed tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, preventive detention, Predator-drone attacks, the Iraq War, wiretaps, and intercepts — before President Obama either continued or expanded nearly all of them, in addition to embracing targeted assassinations, new body scanning and patdowns at airports, and a third preemptive war against an oil-exporting Arab Muslim nation — this one including NATO efforts to kill the Qaddafi family.

And what about the waterboarding that senior administration officials say was effective? It’s nice to know that when it comes to many international policies, the mainstream left and right have apparently now found themselves on the same page.

What accounts for the media and so many on the left now enthusiastically celebrating the policies of the previous administration? Perhaps it is the subtlety with which university types wage war. HT: Powerline

After bin Laden was killed, the military sent a message back to the White House: “Geronimo EKIA” — enemy killed in action…Loretta Tuell, staff director and chief counsel for the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, said Tuesday it was inappropriate to link Geronimo, whom she called “one of the greatest Native American heroes,” with one of the most hated enemies of the United States. “These inappropriate uses of Native American icons and cultures are prevalent throughout our society, and the impacts to Native and non-Native children are devastating,” Tuell said.

Well, that was quick. Iowahawk needn’t have worried. We’re back to PC in a flash.

We never liked the WTC much, though we used to have dinner fairly often at Windows on the World. The elevators were large insubstantial boxes that felt unstable as they jostled back and forth at high speed. The view of the Brooklyn Bridge from the restaurant was spectacular, but the place gave us a bit of vertigo to tell you the truth. Being up there early in the morning with young children a couple of years before 9-11 reminds us just how easy it is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It’s evident that some political forces have been superimposed on the OBL sortie. Andrew Malcolm’s send-up of the scene captures a good bit of it. It seems to us that a lot of our friends on the left are getting out of their comfort zones in lavishing praise on this operation, since the special interrogations and JSOC they once despised seem to have played an important role. Sending the president to Ground Zero on Thursday is bad judgment by political operatives in our opinion, but of course they can make any campaign commercial they like. Perhaps it’s just us, but we prefer restraint and remembrance over a misplaced triumphalism, no matter how tastefully the speechwriters choose the words on the teleprompter.

Abbottabad is essentially a military cantonment city in Pakistan, in the hills to the north of the capital of Islamabad, in an area where much of the land is controlled or owned by the Pakistan Army and retired army officers. Although the city is technically in what used to be called the Northwest Frontier Province, it lies to the far eastern side of the province and is as close to Pakistani-held Kashmir as it is to the border city of Peshawar.

The city is most notable for housing the Pakistan Military Academy, the Pakistan Army’s premier training college, equivalent to West Point. Looking at maps and satellite photos on the Web last night, I saw the wide expanse of the Academy not far from where the million-dollar, heavily secured mansion where bin Laden lived was constructed in 2005. The maps I looked at had sections of land nearby marked off as “restricted area,” indicating that it was under military control.

It stretches credulity to think that a mansion of that scale could have been built and occupied by bin Laden for six years without it coming to the attention of anyone in Pakistan’s Army. The initial circumstantial evidence suggests the opposite is more likely — that bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control…

Mullah Omar and Al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman Al-Zawahiri probably also enjoy refuge in Pakistan. The location of Mullah Omar, in particular, is believed by American officials to be well known to some Pakistani military and intelligence officers; Omar too, they believe, is effectively under Pakistani state control.

Meanwhile, Marc Ambinder has a surprising amount of information on what went down:

“it might have been a routine mission for the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, but known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru. This HVT was special, and the raids required practice, so they replicated the one-acre compound. Trial runs were held in early April.”

So we took out #1, but so far have left #2 and a sort-of #3 intact. Indeed, it seems probable that #1 may have been sold out by some of his benefactors, given the detailed knowledge that DevGru possessed. So many more questions than answers. We wonder what, if any, agreements have been reached among the US and Pakistan for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan starting next year. Could #1 have been the trophy kill that enables the US to declare mission accomplished and leave, much to Pakistan’s relief?

Osama bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan on Sunday, was a son of the Saudi elite whose radical, violent campaign to recreate a seventh-century Muslim empire redefined the threat of terrorism for the 21st century…he had become a hero in much of the Islamic world, as much a myth as a man — what a longtime C.I.A. officer called “the North Star” of global terrorism. He had united disparate militant groups, from Egypt to Chechnya, from Yemen to the Philippines, under the banner of Al Qaeda and his ideal of a borderless brotherhood of radical Islam…

He waged holy war with distinctly modern methods. He sent fatwas — religious decrees — by fax and declared war on Americans in an e-mail beamed by satellite around the world…He styled himself a Muslim ascetic, a billionaire’s son who gave up a life of privilege for the cause…For Bin Laden, as for the United States, the turning point came in 1989, with the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan…Bin Laden…saw the retreat of the Soviets as an affirmation of Muslim power and an opportunity to recreate Islamic political power and topple infidel governments through jihad, or holy war…

he built his own legend, modeling himself after the Prophet Muhammad, who in the seventh century led the Muslim people to rout the infidels, or nonbelievers, from North Africa and the Middle East. As the Koran had been revealed to Muhammad amid intense persecution, Bin Laden saw his own expulsions during the 1990s — from Saudi Arabia and then Sudan — as affirmation of himself as a chosen one. In his vision, he would be the “emir,” or prince, in a restoration of the khalifa, a political empire extending from Afghanistan across the globe. “These countries belong to Islam,” he told the same interviewer in 1998, “not the rulers.”…

Bin Laden had been educated — and, indeed, steeped, as many Saudi children are — in Wahhabism, the puritanical, ardently anti-Western strain of Islam. Even years later, he so despised the Saudi ruling family’s coziness with Western nations that he refused to refer to Saudi Arabia by its modern name, instead calling it “the Country of the Two Holy Places.”…

he began earning a degree at King Abdulaziz University in Jidda. It was there that he shaped his militancy. He became involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of Islamic radicals who believed that much of the Muslim world, including the leaders of Saudi Arabia, lived as infidels, in violation of the true meaning of the Koran.

And he fell under the influence of two Islamic scholars: Muhammad Quttub and Abdullah Azzam, whose ideas would become the underpinnings for Al Qaeda. Mr. Azzam became a mentor to the young Bin Laden. Jihad was the responsibility of all Muslims, he taught, until the lands once held by Islam were reclaimed. His motto: “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogue.”

On the other hand, “Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader,” according to some Americans. Of course that’s from the crew that says things like this about the reported 17,000 violent little incidents over the last number of years. We suppose it depends on whom you ask.

growing numbers of Syrians have been gathering in cities and towns across the country to demand political freedom — and the security forces of dictator Bashar al-Assad have been responding by opening fire on them. According to Syrian human rights groups, more than 220 people had been killed by Friday. And Friday may have been the worst day yet: According to Western news organizations, which mostly have had to gather information from outside the country, at least 75 people were gunned down…

The administration has sat on its hands despite the fact that the Assad regime is one of the most implacable U.S. adversaries in the Middle East. It is Iran’s closest ally; it supplies Iranian weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip for use against Israel. Since 2003 it has helped thousands of jihadists from across the Arab world travel to Iraq to attack American soldiers. It sought to build a secret nuclear reactor with the help of North Korea and destabilized the pro-Western government of neighboring Lebanon by sponsoring a series of assassinations…

the Obama administration has effectively sided with the regime against the protesters. Rather than repudiate Mr. Assad and take tangible steps to weaken his regime, it has proposed, with increasing implausibility, that his government “implement meaningful reforms,” as the president’s latest statement put it. As The Post’s Karen DeYoung and Scott Wilson reported Friday, the administration, which made the “engagement” of Syria a key part of its Middle East policy, still clings to the belief that Mr. Assad could be part of a Middle East peace process; and it would rather not trade “a known quantity in Assad for an unknown future.” As a practical matter, these considerations are misguided. Even if his massacres allow him to survive in power, Mr. Assad will hardly be a credible partner for Israel.

A large part of effective foreign policy is simply standing stalwart by your allies and opposing at most every turn your enemies. The US hasn’t been doing that for quite a while now. We have no idea what the administration intends to achieve by its improvised and incoherent foreign policy. Do you?

We are at war with violent extremists who would kill Americans. And some of those people might be Muslim, they might be white supremacists, they might be people who would kill at abortion clinics. They might be of any description…We don’t stop at one particular group. We are trying to stop Americans from any extremist group; Muslim, Christian, Jewish, any kind

A presidential advisor said this to high school and college students in Washington: “The entire planet, the children of all species, are counting on you.”

And another politician said this: “There are climate change deniers in Congress and when the economy gets tough, sometimes environmental issues drop from people’s radar screens…But I don’t think there’s any doubt that unless we are able to move forward in a serious way on clean energy, that we’re putting our children and our grandchildren at risk.”

It is not surprising that those interested in political power are often knaves and fools and the lowest of the low. It continues to surprise us (though it shouldn’t) that there are so few adults of sound judgment in the media establishment that nonsense and pipedreams go forever unchallenged. Imagine the US with a 50/50 media instead of a 12-to-1 media. Nice thought.

More Qurans were burned in the course of their protests than by Terry Jones. The demonstrations, which started peacefully, quickly turned violent, killing at least nine people and injuring scores in Kandahar City alone. And as protesters vandalized a girls’ school and set fire to shops, Qurans also inadvertently went up in flames. “If they burn a shop, there is a Quran in every shop, so this is a big problem,” says Azizullah Aziz, a perfume and soap salesman in Kandahar City.

There are 140,000 American military personnel in Afghanistan. Does that make sense?

Thanks in part to Gen. Napier, suttee was virtually ended in India. But in Afghanistan, we’re doing next to nothing to advance our values. Just two months ago, the Karzai government was planning to hang Said Musa, an Afghan Red Cross worker, for the “crime” of converting to Christianity.

“We should have imagined that to be the case under the Taliban,” said Carl Moeller, president of the Christian aid group Open Doors USA. “But here is the government, in a nation we fought in and our boys and girls died for [doing the same thing]. That’s crazy to me that this is going on.”

After Mr. Musa’s plight was publicized worldwide, he was released quietly and spirited out of the country. But if it could have been done in secret, the Karzai government would have executed him.

Abdul Rahman redux.

arguing about government spending in the abstract favors Republicans. People do not believe in (or, I would put it, understand) Keynesian economics. So arguing that spending cuts inherently jeopardize the recovery is a losing proposition.

University-based faith at work. Hard to argue with a man’s religion, even if it’s wrong.

the ailing 87-year-old king of Saudi Arabia probably isn’t getting much sleep. Abdullah, this Sunni monarch of monarchs, custodian of the holy mosques of Mecca and Medina, can see the flames of instability and turmoil licking at all his borders. In the south, Yemen is imploding, to the advantage of his al-Qaeda enemies. In the east, Bahrain’s Shiite majority has been in such a state of revolt that Abdullah has already sent armed forces to prevent Iran from establishing a “cat’s paw” on the Sunni Arab side of the Persian Gulf. In the north, Abdullah sees Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government as nothing more than a front for the hated Persians. In the west, a Palestinian majority is demanding that the Hashemite king of Jordan become a constitutional monarch. Meanwhile, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, that other Sunni pillar of regional stability, has already been overthrown.

Historically, in times of trouble, Saudi kings have depended on American presidents to guarantee their external security. But at this moment of crisis, Abdullah views President Obama as a threat to his internal security. He fears that in the event of a widespread revolt, Obama will demand that he leave office, just as he did to Mubarak, that other longtime friend of the United States. Consequently, Abdullah is reportedly making arrangements for Pakistani troops to enter his kingdom should the need to suppress popular demonstrations arise.

This presents the Obama administration with a particularly thorny dilemma. Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest oil producer and the only one with sufficient excess production capacity to moderate rises in the price of oil. Instability in Saudi Arabia could produce panic in the oil markets and an oil shock that could put an end to America’s economic recovery (and the president’s hopes for reelection)…

the Saudi system is fragile. Power is concentrated in the hands of the king and his brothers, who are old and ailing. The Saud family’s legitimacy depends in significant part on its pact with a fundamentalist Wahhabi clergy that is deeply opposed to basic political reforms, such as equal rights for women. The deep structural tensions generated by a 21st-century Westernized elite existing within a 15th-century Saudi social structure have been papered over for decades by oil wealth.

If there is a clearer argument for drill, baby, drill, we don’t know what it is. Saudi Arabia’s relations with America are troublesome and complex under the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances. Frankly, it’s mind-boggling just how many things this administration seems to get utterly backwards simultaneously. It is deeply worrisome that achieving greater short-term insulation from oil supply and price shocks is not a #1 priority for the administration, along with jobs and getting the federal budget under control.

The United States may consider sending troops into Libya with a possible international ground force that could aid the rebels, according to the general who led the military mission until NATO took over. Army Gen. Carter Ham also told lawmakers Thursday that added American participation would not be ideal, and ground troops could erode the international coalition and make it more difficult to get Arab support for operations in Libya. Ham said the operation was largely stalemated now…

he noted that, in a new tactic, Muammar Qaddafi’s forces are making airstrikes more difficult by staging military forces and vehicles near civilian areas such as schools and mosques. The use of an international ground force is a possible plan to bolster rebels fighting forces loyal to the Libyan leader, Ham said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Perhaps George Bush’s Iraq war looked this crazy and improvised to observers on the left. If it did, we can begin to understand why they thought George Bush and his team were knaves and fools who hadn’t a clue about what they were doing or how incoherent they sounded.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., refers to the Libyan rebels as part of a “pro-democracy movement.” Perhaps they are. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., must think so. Serving, as usual, as Sancho Panza to Sen. John McCain’s Don Quixote, Graham said last Sunday (on “Face the Nation”), “We should be taking the fight to Tripoli.”

But not (yet) to Yamoussoukro, capital of the Ivory Coast. Members of the Congressional Libyan Liberation Caucus — it does not formally exist (yet) — presumably subscribe to the doctrine “R2P.” That is the accepted shorthand for “responsibility to protect.” This notion is central to humanitarian imperialism, a project that certainly promises to provide steady work.

The Libyan venture is coinciding with a humanitarian disaster in the Ivory Coast, where corpses are piling up by the hundreds and the fighting is producing displaced persons by the hundreds of thousands. They will have to make do with U.N. and French interveners until America’s humanitarian imperialists can get around to them…

As Calvin Coolidge, who knew his depth, was leaving the presidency in March 1929, he said, “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.”

Meanwhile, “Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s air force evaded the NATO-enforced no-fly zone on Thursday and destroyed three rebel tanks parked along a key highway here, triggering a rebel retreat that seemed to pave the way for a full pro-Gadhafi assault on the city of Ajdabiya.” We don’t understand what’s going on either with this slapdash US foreign policy. Do you?

Brokaw said that Defense Secretary Robert Gates “will face some tough questions in this region about the American intentions going on now with all this new turmoil, especially in an area where the United States has such big stakes politically and economically. And a lot of those questions presumably will come from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. I was told on the way in here that the Saudis are so unhappy with the Obama administration for the way it pushed out President Mubarak of Egypt that it sent high level emissaries to China and Russia to tell those two countries that Saudi Arabia now is prepared to do more business with them.”

We agree with the Saudis on this one. But who gave Brokaw this damaging information that clearly seemed sufficiently credible for him to broadcast?