Don’t you hate it when David Brooks uses his New York Times perch to remind his readers that life is full of unexpected turns, expecially ones that reflect well on BushHitler?

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.

Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence he never would have overruled his generals. … The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others.

Yep. (This also applies to Brooks, by the way, who referred to the Iraq war as “a disaster” many times during what he now refers to as “the dark days of 2006.”) He’s not humble enough to acknowledge his own previous cocksureness and foolishness. But he’s out there on the cutting edge of what should be opinion right now. We’ll see how it plays.

Brooks sets the stage:

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson [about orthodox thinking] during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

It’s unlikely that there will be many such souls, but count me among those who grudgingly (grudgingly because we are of a certain [anti-Vietnam War] age) admit that Bush’s stubbornness has, on balance, been a good thing for America in the immediate wake of 9/11. Many of America’s cocksure enemies have stood down in the wake of Bush’s cowboy-like cocksure aggressiveness. Bush himself has said he regrets the language he used; I didn’t hear him say that he regrets his “going on offense” against America’s enemies, as indeed he shouldn’t.

Something else has been gained in these long seven years. Brooks doesn’t mention it, but I will:L Islamism now has many respectable enemies—including several of Britain’s most famous public intellectuals and novelists.

The New York Times doesn’t quite approve of such heterodox thoughts as this one expressed by Ian McEwan, the author of Atonement:

“As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark skinned, he who criticizes it is racist.” He added: “This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on — we know it well.”

The Independent, a British paper, referred to McEwan’s words as

an astonishingly strong attack on Islamism

and pointed out that these words could,

in today’s febrile legalistic climate, lay him open to being investigated for a “hate crime”.

Despite adding to the “febrile” climate surrounding this issue, at least the Independent is honest enough to give a full airing to McEwan’s views, which I reprint here with some emphasis [e.a.]:

McEwan – author of On Chesil Beach and the acclaimed Atonement and Enduring Love – has spoken on the issue of Islamism before, telling The New York Times last December: “All religions make very big claims about the world, and it should be possible in an open society to dispute them. It should be possible to say, ‘I find some ideas in Islam questionable’ without being called a racist.”

But his words in the Corriere interview are far stronger, although they do fall short of the invective deployed by Martin Amis. He has said “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order”, and told The Independent’s columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a Muslim, in an open letter: “Islamism, in most of its manifestations, not only wants to kill me – it wants to kill you.”

McEwan’s interviewer pointed out that there exist equally hard-line schools of thought within Christianity, for example in the United States. “I find them equally absurd,” McEwan replied. “I don’t like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don’t want to kill anyone in my city, that’s the difference.”

But McEwan’s specific irritation is reserved for those who find ideological grounds to condemn his and Amis’s views. “When you ask a novelist or a poet about his vision regarding an aspect of the world, you don’t get the response of a politician or a sociologist, but even if you don’t like what he says you have to accept it, you can’t react with defamation. Martin is not a racist, and neither am I.”

Thank you, Ian McEwan. And may others join you in perpetrating the “hate crime” of speaking out in favor of freedom of expression, even (perhaps especially) when your ideas are out of favor with “expert and elite opinion” [Brooks's phrase].

The conventional wisdom of the media elite, crystallized today by David Brooks, says that Hillary Clinton cannot possibly win.

Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance.

Five percent.

It would be way too tiresome to provide the dozens of links that support Brooks’s point of view. It’s much more interesting to link to the news side of things at the New York Times, where someone is (finally) asking the important question: can a “progressive” win the White House?

Of course the NYT doesn’t frame the question quite like that. Instead, the sly headline writer asks: “Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?”[ e.a.]:

the Obama campaign is challenging the fundamental political premise that has prevailed in Washington for more than a generation: that any majority coalition must be carefully centrist, if not center-right. Bill Clinton ran in 1992 as a candidate willing to break with liberal orthodoxy on many issues, including crime and welfare, and eager to move the party — which had lost five of the six previous presidential elections — to the middle. Mr. Clinton’s New Democrats assumed a certain level of conservatism among voters.

Mr. Obama and his allies are basing his campaign on a different bet: that the right-leaning political landscape Mr. Clinton confronted has changed. Several major Democratic strategists, and outside analysts as well, argue that the country has shifted to the left because of the Iraq war, the economy and seven-plus years of President Bush, and that it has become open to a new progressive majority.

Further down, we hear once more this claim about a new political climate that is favorable to Obama:

[M]any of Mr. Obama’s supporters say he has recognized this new political climate in a way that Mrs. Clinton has not. They say he is ready for a new, self-assured era in which progressives (few have returned to using the word “liberal”) make no apologies about their goals — universal health care, withdrawing troops from Iraq, ending tax breaks for more affluent Americans — and assume that a broad swath of the public shares them.

That’s an interesting assumption, but I fear it’s not rooted in fact. Indeed, the NYT quotes TNR in a most interesting way:

As The New Republic recently put it, “Clintonism is a political strategy that assumes a skeptical public; Obamaism is a way of actualizing a latent ideological majority.”

If skepticism is Clintonian, call me a Clintonite. A latent ideological majority? In what universe?

Currently, despite the party establishment’s wanting to give her (and the centrist voters who are loyal to her) the bum’s rush, she is neck and neck in votes with her messianic Democratic opponent. Call me skepetical, but I say this more or less ensures that in a general election, Obama will be buried in a match-up with McCain. And that when the voting is finally over, the dreamers’ “latent ideological ‘majority’ ” will represent an even smaller but more hysterically vocal minority.

Only by then, they will have (conveniently for their enemies) labeled themselves as a proudly out-of-the-mainstream political party. A neat trick, that.

Peter Brown, writing at Real Clear Politics, fills in some details of an emerging picture:

Any realistic scenario in which Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wins the Democratic presidential nomination assumes that the party bosses will have both the will and the power to stop Sen. Barack Obama’s nomination.

But there is one good reason why they might not try, even if she is able to string together a series of primary and caucus victories: Call it liberal guilt, or call it fear of reprisal from the party’s powerful black base.

He also clarifies the sharp leftward turn of the Democrats:

The once moderate-conservative wing of the party has virtually disappeared, with millions following Ronald Reagan to the Republican Party or, these days, given the disillusionment with President Bush, calling themselves independents.

Today’s Democratic leaders are the reformers who seized control of the party decades ago — and their ideological children. … [I]f too young to have been part of the civil rights movement, [they] embrace it as one of the Democratic Party’s crowning achievements. They see enhancing the rights and opportunities of minority Americans as an integral part of their role in government, even though only Lyndon Johnson in 1964, among Democratic presidential candidates since Franklin Roosevelt, has carried the majority of white voters.

Being part of an effort to deny Obama, who has a white mother and an African father, the nomination makes them very uneasy, especially when to do so they will have to overrule the verdict of the primaries and caucuses.

Remember, these superdelegates are elected officials and members of the Democratic National Committee — people invested in their own political future and that of the Democratic Party.

The threat of a revolt among African-Americans, not to mention among young voters of all races, if Obama is denied the nomination by the superdelegates might be enough to discourage even those who see Clinton as the better general election candidate.

You don’t hear this kind of controversial analysis on television, and it goes much further than Geraldine Ferraro went.

Will Olbermann demand that Brown renounce his opinion, too?

Where will the demand for renunciation stop?

Here’s the one I want:

If you’re planning a suicide-bombing mission, however, this one might appeal to you:

You can see the entire spring/summer/fall/winter line here.

The headline says it all:

Geraldine Ferraro: Don’t call me a racist, you racist!!

What a bunch of jerks they all are—the campaigns, the advocates, the supporters, the talking heads, the whole lot of them. This is devolving into something very nasty, and a lot of people are getting hurt. It goes way beyond the usual circular firing squad behavior of the Democrats. I mean, they’ve all forgotten about how much they hate Bush and they are intent on destroying one another.

It makes it very easy for me to appreciate David Mamet when he writes:

Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal‘

Allow me to quote:

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. “?” she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.”

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

——————-
Wanna know how pigs fight?

To understand why potbellied pigs become aggressive, we need to understand their herd instincts. In the wild, pigs travel in herds. Wihin this herd structure, there is a very defined heirarchy, similar to a pecking order in chickens. When two pigs meet for the first time, they fight — often viciously. This fighting may include posturing and frothing at the mouth; the hair on the back of the neck may stand up and the tail may point straight out and wag. A fighting pig will position him or herself so that his head aligns with the other pig’s shoulder. The pigs will slam their heads into each other’s shoulders, cutting with their tusks and wiping the foam from their mouths onto the other pig. This foam contains the pig’s scent, and marks the other pig with the smell. The fighting will continue until one pig admits defeat and runs away. A pig fight to establish dominance in the herd heirarchy can take hours.

Pigs appear to have very little concept of size. An adult pig will fight with a piglet a tenth his size, or with a farm pig ten times his size. Smaller pigs are frequently more agile and it can be difficult for larger pigs to catch them.

We have also observed behaviors such as tail biting, leg biting and ear biting. Although we know of only one pig who has ever lost a tail during a fight, it is common for major damage to occur to the ears. During a fight, pigs’ ears can be split in two or a portion may be completely ripped off. When this type of injury occurs, the hurt pig will immediately submit to the dominant pig and search out mud with which to coat his injury. By covering the injury in mud, the pig prevents insects from accessing the wound.

The Daily Mail attacks the British Olympic Association for its ourtrageous coddling of the Chinese with a vivid reminder of Britain’s shame and dishonor in the run-up to World War II:

National disgrace: In a picture from a German archive never before published in Britain, the England football team give Nazi salutes in Berlin in 1938  [e.a.]

Here are the facts, from the Mail:

British Olympic chiefs are to force athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China’s appalling human rights record – or face being banned from travelling to Beijing.

The controversial clause has been inserted into athletes’ contracts for the first time and forbids them from making any political comment about countries staging the Olympic Games.

It is contained in a 32-page document that will be presented to all those who reach the qualifying standard and are chosen for the team.

From the moment they sign up, the competitors – likely to include the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips and world record holder Paula Radcliffe – will be effectively gagged from commenting on China’s politics, human rights abuses or illegal occupation of Tibet.

Here’s the argument against, from David Mellor, also writing in the Mail:

The Chinese have no right to a free ride this summer. And it isn’t just because China isn’t a democracy or that basic human rights and fundamental freedoms are denied to its citizens.

China is a menace to the civilised world for many other reasons, ranging from its support for renegade regimes such as the government of Sudan, who used Chinese weaponry to commit the Darfur massacres, to its shameless emergence as the number one polluter.

The Chinese deserve as much criticism over their contributions to global warming as over their suppression of human rights.

Long live the British tabloid media!

[reposted to correct a typo in the title] 

Will sharia come to Britain? The notion certainly has a lot of people up in arms.

Ali Eteraz makes the case against (in case you need to hear it).
As for me, I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon. For one thing—though it’s not PC to bring this up, but it does reflect reality—there most certainly is a supernationalist streak in Britain, most obviously represented by its soccer hooligans. Potentially violent, uncontrollable “Islamophobia” is a real concern among this demographic, and it is not to be ignored.

Perhaps it was those, er, “blokes” who the otherwise sharia-loving (and enemy of culture) Tariq Ramadan was thinking of when he nixed the Archbishop’s idea:

“These kinds of statements [about the addition of sharia in Britain] just feed the fears of fellow citizens. I really think we, as Muslims, need to come up with something that we abide by the common law and within these latitudes there are possibilities for us to be faithful to Islamic principles.”

For another thing, on one side of the front page of its website, the Daily Mail tears to shreds the sharia-embracing Archbishop of Canterbury:

Officials at Lambeth Palace told the BBC Dr Williams was in a “state of shock” and “completely overwhelmed” by the scale of the row.

It was said that he could not believe the fury of the reaction.

On the other side of its front page, the Daily Mail goes about its business, advertising its other typical features:

Femail

Bedraggled and bra-less: Britney back to her old tricks after hospital release
A spell in a psychiatric hospital seems to have done little to change Britney’s lifestyle - or her dress sense

Cheek to Cheeky…the girls bare all for a good cause
Cheeky Girl Gabriela Irimia has never much cared for the twinset-and-pearls image of an MP’s consort - but this pose with her identical twin sister Monica - is risque by even her raunchy standards

Rehab star Amy is all smiles after getting her teeth fixed ahead of Grammy performance tonight
Amy Winehouse is all smiles these days after finally being granted a US visa - and getting her teeth fixed

‘Sadistic Wife Swap nearly cost me my sanity’ says TV presenter Anna Courtenay
On last week’s Channel 4 show Wife Swap, businesswoman Anna Courtenay, 42, was seen trading her privileged expat life in Marbella for nine days with another family on an ‘eco-friendly’ tugboat. She was not prepared for the lengths to which producers were prepared to go in the name of entertainment

When the Mail is forced to clean up its lurid act, let me know. Likewise, satellite TV in Europe (which is a mixture of lecturing imams and soft-core pornography). Then I’ll get nervous about sharia.

In the meantime, I take comfort from the sensible attacks on the mental defective masquerading as the Archbishop of Canterbury:

The most damaging attack came from the Pakistan-born Bishop of Rochester, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali.

He said it would be “simply impossible” to bring sharia law into British law “without fundamentally affecting its integrity”.

Sharia “would be in tension with the English legal tradition on questions like monogamy, provisions for divorce, the rights of women, custody of children, laws of inheritance and of evidence.

“This is not to mention the relation of freedom of belief and of expression to provisions for blasphemy and apostasy.”

In Britain, there is no more Islamic terrorism. Instead, there is “anti-Islamic activity.”*** And it is criminal behavior.

Jacqui Smith: New language

Ministers have adopted a new language for declarations on Islamic terrorism.

In future, fanatics will be referred to as pursuing “anti-Islamic activity”.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said that extremists were behaving contrary to their faith, rather than acting in the name of Islam.

Security officials believe that directly linking terrorism to Islam is inflammatory, and risks alienating mainstream Muslim opinion. …

The strategy emerging across Government is to portray terrorists as nothing more than cold-blooded murderers who are not fighting for any religious cause.

Al Qaeda inspired terrorism is instead being described by key figures as “more like a death cult”.

Yes, and the British government will be imposing very intrusive-sounding measures to track down not only members of the death cult but also its potential members.

In her speech, Miss Smith said extremists who use the internet to radicalise young children would be pursued in the same way as paedophiles.

She will meet members of the online industry in the next few weeks to decide how to crack down on Al Qaedainspired sites.

Illegal material will be tracked down and removed using tactics already deployed against online paedophiles. Those guilty of grooming youngsters for terrorism could face prosecution under incitement laws.

Miss Smith said: “If we are ready and willing to take action to stop the grooming of vulnerable young people on social networking sites, then I believe we should also take action against those who groom vulnerable people for the purposes of violent extremism.”

Her plans also include a new unit to sift through intelligence gathered by police and security agents.

The unit will be told to “identify, analyse and assess not just the inner circle of extremist groups, but those at risk of falling under their influence”.

Young people found to be falling under the spell of potential terrorists will be targeted for help by community leaders and the authorities.

And you thought the Patriot Act here in America was bad? Ha! Never fear, though. There’s a bit of good news in Britain [e.a.]:

Last night the Home Office stressed that no phrases have been “banned”.

Not officially. Not yet.

I hate to say it, folks, but this is “liberal fascism”: a Western democracy imposing an official terminology on its society, to be used about one group of people in its midst, a group of people who will also be spied upon by police and other intelligence officers in real life and by other professionals scouring the Internet.

But I suppose all this is okay—including the fact that all of these measures specifically target British Muslims for suspicion—just because the government is no longer using the term “Islamic extremism”?

It’s okay to pursue and hound British Muslims as long as you don’t make them feel bad by calling attention to “Islamic terrorism”?

That, folks, is the fear of terrorism speaking. And it has caused our Cousins across the Pond to lose their marbles. 

—————

***  It sort of begs the questions “Is the British government in favor of pro-Islamic activity?” “Is the government planning on criminalizing ‘anti-Christian activity’? ‘anti-Jewish activity’? ‘anti-Hindu activity’? If not, why not?

Following up on my post earlier today, here’s a story from TNR that provides evidence of the sick, treacly rot—the insane PC obsession with hurt feelings, as if it is words and not hurtful, harmful, obscene, illegal, immoral, and unconscionable actions that they should be worried about—that is eating away at progressives, Democrats, and what’s left of the left:

The latest maiming of the historical record and elementary historical logic has come over Martin Luther King, Jr., Lyndon B. Johnson–and the presidential primaries of 2008. The media echo chamber is now booming with charges that Senator Hillary Clinton has disparaged Dr. King, praised President Johnson in his stead, and thereby distorted the history of the civil rights movement. …

Now, Representative James E. Clyburn, the most prominent African-American elected official from South Carolina, has picked up the ever-changing story and implicitly accused Senator Clinton of denigrating Dr. King and the civil rights movement. “We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics,” Clyburn told The New York Times.

[e.a.]

Do we? Who is “we”? And Why?

What matters is the truth, not the tender feelings of the hypersensitive. And the truth is that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a massive hero to millions and millions and millions and millions of Americans, black and white.

He was strong, tough, honorable, noble, and unbending in the face of hideous real-life persecution. He shamed bigots throughout America and ennobled an entire nation. His accomplishments will not soon be matched by another human being.

Why do we have to be careful about talking about his era? Why?

There’s a fascinating (but very poorly edited) piece in the Science section of today’s New York Times, about the treacherous habit of self-examination after the fact: “The New Year’s Cocktail: Regret with a Dash of Bitters”:

Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets - large and small, recent and distant - affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown, convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an emotionally corrosive exercise. The common wisdom about regret - that what hurts the most is not what you did but what you didn’t do - also appears to be true, at least in the long run.

Yet it is partly from studies of lost possible selves that psychologists have come to a more complete understanding of how regret molds personality. These studies, in people recently divorced and those caring for a sick child, among others, suggest that it is possible to entertain idealized versions of oneself without being mocked or shamed. And they suggest that doing so may serve an important psychological purpose.

What the author, Benedict Carey, is trying to say here (but what he makes unnecessarily confusing by inserting shame into the equation) is that not blaming yourself (exclusively) for whatever went wrong helps you move on. He does describe—very gingerly—various coping strategies that people adopt for dealing with the past:

Researchers find that people think about past foul-ups or missed opportunities in several ways. Some tend to fixate and are at an elevated risk for mood problems. Others have learned to ignore regrets and seem to live more lighthearted, if less-examined, lives. In between are those who walk carefully through the minefield of past choices, gamely digging up traps and doing what they can to defuse the live ones.

Finally, he gently suggests that time heals all such wounds, if you allow time to do its thing:

With age, people apparently detoxified their regrets by reframing them as shared misunderstandings, a retrospective touching-up that in many cases might have been more accurate.

As for me, one of the best decisions I ever made was to bail on grad school. Every time I read stuff like this, I’m reminded of the fact that I have absolutely no regrets about my decision.

The Modern Language Association frequently helps out its critics with provocative session titles and left-leaning political stands offered by its members. …[I]n moves that infuriated the MLA’s Radical Caucus, the association’s Delegate Assembly refused to pass those resolutions and instead adopted much narrower measures. The [MLA] acknowledged tensions over the Middle East on campus, but in a resolution that did not single out pro-Israel groups for criticism. And the association criticized the University of Colorado for the way it started its investigation of Ward Churchill, but took no stand on whether the outcome (his firing) was appropriate.

Imagine that: in the name of academic freedom, academics who consider themselves “progressive” demand the right to promote one one point of view and to single out only one group for criticism.

The resolution as [Grover Furr] wrote it said that some who criticize Zionism and Israel have been “denied tenure, disinvited to speak … [or] fraudulently called ‘anti-Semitic.’” The resolution called this a “serious danger to academic study and discussion in the USA today” and then resolved that “the MLA defend the academic freedom and the freedom of speech of faculty and invited speakers to criticize Zionism and Israel.” The resolution made no mention of the right of others on campus to embrace Zionism or Israel or to hold middle-of-the-road views or any views other than being critical of Israel and Zionism.

The substitute resolution, adopted by a vote of 63-30 said:

“Middle East is a subject of intense debate,” ….[and that] it was “essential that colleges and universities protect faculty rights to speak forthrightly on all sides of the issue,” and urged colleges to “resist” pressure from outside groups about tenure reviews and speakers and to instead uphold academic freedom. Nelson’s resolution did not identify one side or the other as victim or villain in the campus debates over the Middle East and said that academic freedom must apply to people “to address the issue of the Middle East in the manner they choose.”

This was considered too even-handed by critics. But supporters from the health majority of MLA members who voted have got the right idea:

[T]hey argued that the MLA shouldn’t be picking sides, and that the principles behind defending Israel’s critics should apply to its supporters as well. One professor said: “Academic freedom is meaningless unless it applies to all points of view.” Another said that even if 95 percent of disputes over academic freedom and the Middle East relate to one side of the argument, the principle of academic freedom should be paramount, not helping those 95 percent over the 5 percent. [e.a.]

Really? Ya think? 

That the painfully obvious bottom line about freedom of speech (that it’s for me and for thee) needs to be spelled out to 33% of the members in good standing of the MLA is a sad commentary on the American academy.

The good news is that the hard-core ideologues on college campuses are finally being challenged. 

Philip Weiss discovers anti-democratic extremism.

I was shocked by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Any fool knew it was coming, that is the not the point. It was the pure evil infamy of it. They hate democracy. Who hates democracy? Well, some elements of radical Islam. When David Axelrod of Obama’s campaign yesterday hinted that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible because she voted for the Iraq War, I thought, Don’t be an idiot. …

After the Cold War, Susan Sontag famously said that the National Review was more reliable than the Nation on the Soviet Union. This time around the left must show that it is more reliable than the Weekly Standard and the New Republic about “the war on terror”. We are winning this ideological battle because we have not overstated the threat, and they have, and we do not ignore the fact that the Palestinian situation is a red flag across the Muslim world. Yet we can’t forget: there are forces of darkness out there.

The sewer rats in his comments section are none too pleased about Weiss’s revelation:

We liked you better when you blamed everything on the Jews.

Posted by: Realist | December 28, 2007 at 07:57 AM

For his cheerleading of those other blamers of the Jews, Weiss made a Top Ten Moonbats of 2007 list:

Weiss has become an “Israel Lobby” fundamentalist. In his eyes, to question the scholarship of Walt and Mearsheimer is to question truth. Every page of their book is gospel. Any negative review of their work is automatically dismissed as a “smear,” and every day that passes without an expose of the “Israel Lobby” on “60 Minutes” or the cover of Time magazine is further evidence of Jewish control over the media.

This mild critique doesn’t do Weiss justice. He has to be read to be believed. I’ll give you all the pleasure of finding out for yourselves, but I won’t provide another link.

Munira Mizra does an admirable job of defending contemporary art against the bogus charge that it is left-wing:

It’s very easy to be anti-Bush these days, but try being anti-recycling. You’ll be branded a heretic and lose your friends in high places very quickly. Indeed, there is hardly any artistic critique or satire about environmentalism, even though the majority of people in surveys feel deeply ambivalent about being hectored about flying, carbon footprints and so on. Never mind Jerry Springer: The Opera, or even ‘Mohammed the Opera’ (if any artist would dare to do such a thing), Al Gore is practically crying out for his own musical! The artist Mark McGowan is one of the few artists who has managed to spoof environmentalism. … Why isn’t there more of this in our age of supposed irreverence and playful postmodernism?

Good question!

In my own view, most art—and I use the term reservedly, for the general culture—is politically incoherent, and dumb. Very unsophisticated stuff. Tired. Lacking in ways to explain the world we live in today.

Or are our artists, as Mizra suggests, simply afraid to go there?

[T]here’s plenty of anti-war art out there …, but where’s the pro-war art? It’s a minority view, but it’s intriguing that for all its spirit of experimentation and shock, no one in the arts is prepared to explore this argument further. And with all this concern for community art, there are a few communities that never seem to get much airtime. In the 1980s there were lots of agitprop plays about the impact of mine closures on working-class communities, so where are the plays about the end of foxhunting in the countryside? Most obviously, where is the satire about radical Islam or the ultimate attack on political correctness? When an issue so dominates in the media (and has, potentially, so much comedy value), why hasn’t anyone really touched it?

Another very good question, and I commend Ms. Mizra for raising it even if the larger artistic (and critical) community in the West, such as it is, does not.

Oh! I forgot! They’re too busy disapproving of Salman Rushdie!

According to TAPPED, Nancy Pelosi held an intimate breakfast this morning with some friendly journalists. Among the other topics mentioned was immigration. Pelosi outlined her strategy regarding this “new” hot-potato that is dividing her party.

Her solution? To get the correct-sounding talking points:

Calling herself a “devout Catholic,” the Speaker said she’s been talking to members of the clergy about modeling from the pulpit respectful ways of speaking about immigrants.

[e.a.]

Ya know, voters aren’t like kindergarteners or religious congregations. They don’t want moral instruction about respect—or moral instruction about anything else—from their political representatives. I thought that’s what the antipathy of us secularists toward the religious right was all about: we don’t want moral instruction from anyone’s God or the self-proclaimed representative of anyone’s God. Correct?

Well, I don’t know anyone who’s yearning for a religious-themed left. So why is Pelosi looking to the Catholic Church for “modeling” a message for Democrats on immigration?

If you’re interested in understanding more about the Democrats’ looming problems with immigration, you can read Fred Siegel in Contentions:

Clinton’s definitive “no” [at last night's debate on driver's licences for illegal immigrants] took her partly off the general election hook. But with nearly 80 percent of voters opposing driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, her party, as represented by Obama and Bill Richardson, is still in the hot seat on this issue. Led by liberal Democrats, seventeen states have opposed a national standard for driver’s licenses. (In eight of these states, licenses are already being issued to undocumented workers.) This has led Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac Poll to analogize that, like affirmative action for racial minorities—an issue that badly damaged the Democrats in the 1970’s and 1980’s—today’s immigration issue has split the party’s working class supporters from its liberal activists. And as with affirmative action, liberal activists are quick to deride their opponents as racists.

Brown is right about the broad similarities. But there are also significant differences. Affirmative action and racial quotas pitted middle- and lower-middle-class white male Democrats against African-Americans and liberal activists. But on immigration, the remaining white working-class Democrats are aligned with most African-American voters, who are often those most directly in competition with low cost illegal immigrant labor.

No amount of “modeling” respectful ways of speaking about immigration is going to allay the fears of working-class Democrats, or to bring together the two disparate strands of the Democratic party—the elites vs. the hoi polloi. The fight is on. It cannot be papered over.

The NYT’s Alessandra Stanley finally notices that there’s a not-so-subtle assault on political correctness in TV entertainment, and claims that this is a new phenomenon.

Jokes about race and racial tensions are suddenly all over television, or more precisely, all over comedies that pride themselves on tweaking convention and political correctness. Certain belittling jokes about gays and women are found on even the most mainstream sitcoms like “Two and a Half Men” on CBS or “Back to You” on Fox, but those shows are much more skittish about race.

“The Office” and “30 Rock” on NBC, “Family Guy” on Fox and, of course, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on HBO are leading a backlash against lingering inhibitions. On a recent episode of “30 Rock,” a Watergate-era comedy writer suggests that the staff write a skit in blackface because “race is the last taboo.” The show’s head writer, Liz Lemon, played by Tina Fey, is aghast. “You can’t do race stuff on TV,” Liz says. “It’s too sensitive.”

Obviously it isn’t any more.

In case anyone gets the idea that any of this stuff is entertaining, Stanley also clarifies the stakes [e.a.]:

Not all comics are equally funny, and what works for Mr. David or Ms. Fey could be awful from the mouths of less sophisticated and less self-aware comedians. Defying political correctness comes with a risk: It could embolden genuine racists to join in the fun.

In this formulation, political correctness is the only shield that protects our nation from racism (and, it is suggested, all the other ills that plague us). Thus, free speech is restricted to those who pass some kind of “sophistication” and “self-awareness” test. Only those who pass the test are allowed to toy with convention in public, especially on TV.

Spare me. Please.

The role of art—in this case, let’s say for the sake of the argument that television is “art”—is precisely to give voice to what is hidden in society, in our personal relationships, in our political systems, in our social intercourse, and in our souls.

Here’s to a lot more edginess—and honesty—and an American population liberated from the obscene constraints of political correctness.

The University of Delaware recently came under fire from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, for its “diversity” program, in which students are educated by 7,000 RAs in oppressors vs. oppressees. Attendance at their res-life re-education sessions was mandatory, until FIRE struck and the university immediately caved.

Here’s an excerpt from the University of Delaware Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Training document [e.a.]:

“A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)” - Page 3

Is our children learning?

 David Brooks elaborates:

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Welcome to Drexel University, the site of tonight’s Democratic presidential debate. Let’s get started with Senator Barack Obama. Senator, you’ve vowed to spend this entire debate standing on Senator Clinton’s windpipe while reducing her to a quivering mass of jelly. How do you plan on doing that?

SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: Well, Brian, as you know the goal of my campaign is to make this country as noble as I am. But without casting aspersion or criticism in any direction, I have noticed that Senator Clinton, probably without meaning to, has not fully contextualized her discourse, which has had the effect of diffusing the national conversation we must have about the tremendous challenges we face.

WILLIAMS: Senator Clinton, I’m going to give you a few seconds to recover from that mauling.

SENATOR HILLARY CLINTON (quietly weeping): Thank you, Brian.

TIM RUSSERT: Senator Edwards, let’s turn to you. Four years ago, you vowed to run an entirely positive campaign. Now you’re running a negative one. What changed?

JOHN EDWARDS: My convictions, Tim. …

Gee, I wonder where Brooks got the idea that Obama is a gushing fountain of “correct” ideas and language [e.a.]:

Senator Barack Obama says he would “engage in aggressive personal diplomacy” with Iran if elected president and would offer economic inducements and a possible promise not to seek “regime change” if Iran stopped meddling in Iraq and cooperated on terrorism and nuclear issues. …

Mr. Obama said that Iran had been “acting irresponsibly” by supporting Shiite militant groups in Iraq. He also emphasized that Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program and its support for “terrorist activities” were serious concerns.

Yes, of course: Iran has made errors of judgment, and if it doesn’t behave, it definitely needs a time-out, helpfully outlined by Wikipedia:

1. Decide what type of behavior warrants a time-out (such as fighting, arguing or throwing tantrums), and try to enforce this fairly and consistently. All adults involved with the child should follow similar guidelines when using a time-out.
2. Designate a corner (hence the common term corner time) or similar space where the child is to stand during time-outs. Never use their bed.
3. Use an age appropriate time length for the time-out. For a short time-out, approximately one minute per year of age is reasonable; that time may be doubled if necessary if the child pushes their limits during the time-out.
4. Have an incentive for completing the time-out without arguing. This may for instance be a loss of a privilege until the time-out has been completed.
5. The time-out should always have verbal warnings before the discipline to allow the child to make appropriate choices. If their bad behavior continues, they should have an explanation for the time-out as they are being escorted to that area. Even one-year olds understand when they have reached their parental limit, but the explanations should be age appropriate.
6. Afterwards both the parent and the child should try to leave the incident behind.

See how easy it is?

Here’s the background to the Norman Mailer–Norman Podhoretz “feud” that Andrew Sullivan so generously alluded to and so stingily failed to provide the context for. (Every story has at least two sides.):

In taking a critical stand on the Berkely [Free Speech Movement] uprising, we did not deny the reality of the grievances against the university that had presumably caused the trouble. Nor did we deny the need for changes in the way Berkeley, and the American educational system in general, operated. That would have been the conservative or right-wing position. What we did deny was that the situation had become so bad that nothing less than revolution could possibly do any good. We thought that Berkeley was a fundamentally sound institution that should and could be improved without resort to “tactics of force and disruption” and the rhetorical violence that always seemed to accompany tactics of that kind. …

[We were served notice] that to deviate from [the Movement party line], then, even gently, was at a minimum to risk abuse and to open oneself up to the most insulting interpretation of one’s motives.

This too was reminiscent of the experience of our intellectual elders in the thirties….
In the sixties things were a bit different, but what s ome were later to think of as the “terror” also came into play then. The word “terror,” like everything else about the sixties, was overheated. No one was arrested or imprisoned or executed; no one ws even fired from a job. … The sanctions of this particular reign of “terror” were much milder: one’s reputation was besmirched, with unrestrained viciousness in conversation and, when the occasion arose, by means of innuendo in print. People were written off with the stroke of an epithet—”fink” or “racist” or “fascist” as the case may be—and anyone so written off would have difficulty getting a fair hearing for anything he might have to say. Conversely, anyone who went against the Movement party line soon discovered the likely penalty was dismissal from the field of discussion.

Seeing others ruthlessly dismissed in this way was enough to prevent most people from voicing serious criticisms of the radical line, and—such is the nature of intellectual cowardice—it was enough in some instances to prevent them even from allowing themselves to entertain critical thoughts. The “terror,” in other words, could at its most effective penetrate into the privacy of a person’s mind. But even at its least effective, it served to set a very stringent limit on criticism of the radical line on any given issue or at any given moment. A certain area of permissible discussion and disagreement was always staked out, but it was hard to know exactly where the boundaries were; one was always in danger of letting a remark slip across the border and unleashing the “terror” on one’s head. …

They were afraid of what might be said about them … and not only to their faces but behind their backs when they would be unable to defend themselves and when, as they knew all too well from their own reluctance to defend others against such insulting charges, there would be no one else to stand up for them either. …

Of course one could recant and be forgiven; or alternatively one could simply speak one’s mind and let the “terror” do its worst. Yet whatever one chose to do, the problem remained. …

[In 1968] the new radicalism was riding so high that it was in no mood for anything but allegiance, praise, and flattery. This had been enough, and more than enough, to frighten William Phillips. but what was more surprising, and more significant, it was even enough to intimidate Norman Mailer, whom Phillips commissioned to write the piece for Partisan Review about Making It.

The author of these words is Norman Podhoretz. This is from his book Breaking Ranks (1979).

I would add two things:

One: Norman Mailer has said (I can’t find the reference, but I will) that judging a man by his politics is like looking at him from the perspective of his asshole. He and Podhoretz were friends, and that Mailer tried to keep up the friendship after this, Podhoretz reports. Under the circumstances, the friendship withered.

Two: Podhoretz went on to have a magnificent career, and a profound impact on two generations of thoughtful, politically engaged Americans—as did Norman Mailer.

This commenter to Ann Althouse’s post about the Jena 6 *** gets at what I was trying to say earlier about MoveOn’s revolting tactics:

My own interest has remained subdued for other reasons. White men are by definition now oppressors, so having any other opinion than that white people are evil is condemned. Any comment contrary to this prescription is also, by definition, racist. So why bother saying anything at all?

Like 100% of Soviets voted for Brezhnev and 100% of Cubans vote for Castro, when I am asked, I say that I vote for jailing every white person involved in this event.

But generally I do what folks in the sixties did when over-the-top leftists and demonstrators and race-baiters made endless demands: I’ll stay quiet, and vote for Nixon. [e.a.]

The Democrats in general, and MoveOn specifically, seem not to realize that in order to deliver politically correct votes, you need to do a lot more than kneecap people into spouting politically correct attitudes in the public square. You can lead a horse to water, etc.
My point about Rudy Giuliani was that he knows a lot about the kind of public political correctness that elects a “fascist” to a second term in a huge victory in decidedly not-”fascist” New York City.

THE 1997 ELECTIONS: THE OVERVIEW; GIULIANI SWEEPS TO SECOND TERM AS MAYOR

Rudolph W. Giuliani last night [November 4, 1997] became the second Republican in 60 years to be elected to a second term as Mayor of New York City, defeating Ruth W. Messinger, a fixture of Manhattan’s [liberal] Upper West Side …

[A] survey of voters leaving polling sites showed that his support crossed party lines…

He won the support of 4 out of 10 Democrats and people who identified themselves as liberal, better than he did against Mr. Dinkins four years ago. He also won the support of about half the women who voted. And he won the support of one in five black voters, the survey found — about four times better than he did against Mr. Dinkins four years ago.

And in what was an unpleasant coda to this election for Ms. Messinger, Mr. Giuliani even won in one of the Assembly districts that make up what has been her political base for 25 years: the Upper West Side district now represented by Scott M. Stringer.

Several political analysts suggested that Mr. Giuliani’s victory over Ms. Messinger was a final verdict by voters on the status of liberalism in New York City, a school of thought with which she has been identified since she first ran for a local school board in 1974. [e.a.]

That 1997 obituary to liberalism in New York City was more than a bit premature. Certainly, political correctness rules here. But to say that liberalism is thriving here—or anywhere in America except the blogosphere and the commentariat—would be a gross overstatement. It is political apathy that thrives here, as elsewhere in America.

Giuliani isn’t Nixon, but it is dangerous for Democrats to underestimate his appeal to disaffected liberals, more of which MoveOn and its ilk are creating every day.

————-

***(a case I knew virtually nothing about before reading the informative comments to Althouse’s post, and about which I still do not consider myself informed enough about to comment, except that I shudder to hear about nooses hanging from trees in the South just as I shuddered when Bonnie Prince Harry dressed up in Nazi garb for a costume party)

A new day has dawned: the words "Muslim" and "terrorism" may not be uttered in the same breath by officialdom in Britain, where—thank goodness!—the War on Terror is no more.

Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in ­connection with the ­terrorism crisis.

The Prime Minister has also instructed his team – including new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith – that the phrase “war on ­terror” is to be dropped.

The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more “consensual” tone than existed under Tony Blair.

Blair, for his part, was rather more pointed in his language on the eve of his departure from office last week (but hasn't been heard from since the new round of terrorist incidents in London and Glasgow, as far as I can determine):

'The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don't have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you've got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,' Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton, who presents the documentary.
'The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."'

Not content to blast Islamist-inspired faux grievances, Blair also took aim at the biens-pensants of Britain:

 'When I'm trying to change the law in order to make it easier to deport people who engage in terrorism - the idea that that's an assault on hundreds of years of British civil liberties is completely absurd. Some of what is written on this is loopy-loo in its extremism.' 

And some of what is said by British officialdom is "loopy-loo" in its bland, bored generalizations about those "criminals" who commit terrorist acts, and its craven gratitude toward the "community leaders" who condemn those acts:

Let us be clear: terrorists are criminals whose victims come from all walks of life, communities and religious backgrounds. Terrorists attack the values that are shared by all law-abiding citizens. As a Government, as communities and as individuals we need to ensure that the message of the terrorists is rejected. I very much welcome the strong messages of condemnation that we have heard throughout the weekend from community leaders across the country. It is through our unity that the terrorists will eventually be defeated.

As Gateway Pundit reports, the AP is equally straightforward in its reporting on the terrorists:

Diverse group allegedly in British plot
By DAVID RISING, Associated Press Writer

Young Muslim immigrant medical professionals in Britain—a very diverse group indeed!

Ido Hevroni bucks up his Israeli colleagues who are upset by the British teachers’ union vote to boycott Israeli academicians:

[N]o need to worry, my friends - after all, the weather in England is not the best, and they are rather tightfisted when it comes to scholarships.  …

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate some overjoyed far-left Israeli academicians … You managed to make the world hate us, you managed to completely twist the truth regarding our difficult battle with Palestinian murderers, and you managed to find a scapegoat for a world that sees fit to ignore the genocide in Darfur, the cutting off of hands in Saudi Arabia, and executions in the Palestinian Authority. Perhaps now you will even get a tempting offer from a leading Islamic college. …

[P]ersonally I’m not moved by the by the boycott call. I do not mean to underestimate the value or achievements of British academia, but I don’t care about it. When those entrusted with freedom of thought and human research fail to grasp how distorted their ideas are as a result of a mental illness, known as anti-Semitism, there is nothing left to do but feel sorry for them.

And for our modern world and what it has come to.

No, not him

LAWRENCE OLIVIER AS ARCHIE RICE, LONDON, 1957, photo by Snowden

I mean him:

Really, it’s too delicious. First, in May 2006, Andrew Sullivan introduces America to the crisis of “Christianism”:

 So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

 (though I note that the concept was introduced a year and a half earlier, in November 2004, on the Daily Kos)

However, there is another movement in this nation, which I refer to as Christianism.  The term is dervied from “Islamist” — or those people who claimed to be followers of Islam, but are nothing more than terrorists who do not follow the principles of Islam.  There are those “Christians” who do not seem to be following the principles of Christianity — thus the term “Christianist”.

Then today, having hysterically hyped a bogus concept for more than a year, Sullivan, finding himself uncomfortably off-message, asks: “Is Christianism Peaking?” His lede is a closeup of this dude,

the Big Bad Wolf who stared down the “Christianists” who got Sullivan’s knickers in a twist.

I won’t bother to copy and paste anything from Sullivan’s furious backpedaling. Just five days ago, he was claiming that Christianists were taking over the military and preying on innocent Orthodox Jewish kidney-stone sufferers—the horror! the horror! (I made fun of him here.)

He is left to bleat incoherently about his politics, religion, and moral code—not that I’m paying attention. I’m fascinated by the fact that he abandoned his year-long anti-Christianist crusade just like that. Stopped on a dime.

Yglesias slapped him about it. But it looks like the very influential Frank Rich is the one who made him back off.

The new bosses are not quite like the old bosses, eh?

Using the royal “we,” Al Sharpton proclaims himself the judge and jury of what will be permissible in and from the American media [e.a.]:

“We will not stop until we make it clear that no one can denigrate based on sex,” said Sharpton, after the CBS announcement. “We need to open up the media world. There are far too many media companies where there are far too much exclusion of women and people of color… We don’t have to be misogynist and racists to be creative in this country.”

Sharpton said he was planning a rally for Saturday, adding that he would sooner go to jail than back down from an issue he felt passionately about.

“We are going to be looking around the television and music industry; there is no one that gets a pass here,” Sharpton continued. “Women should be respected, blacks should be respected, and whites need to be respected.”

Are we all comfortable with that?

Radar outs the Imus “Loyalists” and “Defectors” … and then updates with the news that CBS dumped him.

I guess we know the real name of the game now: Gotcha!

Compared to this, Ann Althouse has had it easy with only five or six episodes of Bloggingheads devoted to her one-minute reaming-out of Garance Franke-Ruta.

Knowing that I am virtually alone, I’ll go on the record and say that I sympathize with Ann, because the same thing happened to me recently … except that it happened in real life. With a friend, who recoiled. Literally.

Face it, Ann. They’re just not that into you. If they read me, they wouldn’t be into me, either. Fuck ‘em.

Speaking of Ann, she’s got this right:

Imus fired, ushering in a new era, where racist talk will no longer be tolerated in mainstream entertainment media.