Last Times story I'll ever read?
To read the inside story about the resignation of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, I actually went to the NY Times website. I may never do that again, without going through another site. I just don't get my first-rank news from the Times website. Their obvious bias makes it so irritating that I have no reason to go there unless someone else says they saw some good reporting there. In other words, I no longer rely on the Times to put good stories in their paper. They do some good reporting. Virginia Postrel insists that the Times-bashing has hurt some good people. But I can't trust them. So if Instapundit or Sullivan or DenBeste or Lileks or someone else I trust links to them, even Drudge, I will look at the article. But the paper has lost its primary position as not just a news source but a fount of judgment about what IS news.

What WAS he thinking?
Or was he thinking at all? Let's see. You have outstanding warrants. You're late for your plane. But at least you haven't called attention to yourself. So what do you do? Sure. Call in a bomb threat so you won't miss your plane. It's a once-every-two-weeks overseas flight, right? Nope. A shuttle. And your excuse is what? So what happens?

The man was held on outstanding, unrelated criminal charges and (is) being questioned by the FBI

You were expecting maybe flowers? Heck, why not just saunter up to the counter and ask, "Hey, has that plane I called in the bomb threat on been brought back to the gate yet? I'm ready to go now." Also, "the suspect was not immediately identified". Which makes suspicious me suspect his name has got an "al-" something in it. But that's just me.

Wolfowitz wows 'em
This is more than "interesting" (via Instapundit). It could be a world-historical moment. I've been reading Tom Paine lately. The feeling of 1778 and 1779 is not so far from what I'm feeling today.

Beware!
Al Qaeda has threatened Norway. But the descendants of Vikings are of course not worried, although they've certainly been in the appeaser camp. There is another menace which does seem to have them anxious and depressed, though. Their dogs are too fat. It's obviously Bush's fault. Somehow.

Outlived his usefulness
Maybe it's premature, but I suddenly find myself less than interested in whether W gets reelected in 2004. The policies I approve of have been implemented and locked in pretty well. Tax cuts, effective war on terrorism, spiking class war rhetoric, they're all important to me and they've all been acted on by the W folks. They can't really retreat from them now. Unfortunately, on some other issues W has sounded and acted more like a statist than some of the Democrats. These include the drug war, the "environment"{ptah!} minimum wage laws, regulation of business, welfare and corporate welfare. For the rest of his tenure, I fear that W will push the parts of the Republican program that I disagree with. My problem is that the Democrats are no better on any of these topics than the Republicans are and are worse on most. So my fallback position is to hope for gridlock, with one party pushing measures I disagree with and the other party blocking such measures only because they don't go far enough. For instance, what is the likelihood that W will try to reduce the influence of the EPA and OSHA, which are handcuffing American business? What are the chances of drug legalization? What effective political force can be seen to push effective reform of immigration laws to keep criminals and terrorists out but to let anyone who is willing to work in, with no welfare guarantees to bring in more freeloaders? The Republicans want to keep everyone out. Pat Buchanan and the labor union Democrats want to keep everyone out, too, but to protect "American" jobs, as though jobs belonged to people. Democrats want to let everyone in who will vote Democratic, but they can't be trusted to effectively keep criminals and terrorists out. Perhaps the only hope is that if, as looks likely, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate grow larger in 2004 on the coattails of a triumphal W, government spending in general can be cut back following traditional Republican fiscal principles - smaller government and a bigger private economy. But given the record under Reagan and Bush 41, I'm not going to be holding my breath. Looks like I'm not going to be voting again in 2004.

Truth from Tehran
Whoever thought that Abu Mazen, the supposed new head of the Palestinian Authority, was out from under the authority of the pig Arafat (ptah!) should read what the Iranians have to say:

"Arafat is at the top of the (Palestinian) Authority. He's the man to whom we refer, regardless of the American or Israeli view of him," Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, said in an interview with Egypt's semi-official Al-Mussawar weekly.

Did anyone really doubt this? Why is such a public statement not more widely reported? Hello, LGF?

Update
Albawaba has the report too. And it reports Abu Mazen is to meet with Hamas. To "try to convince Hamas to stop carrying out attacks against Israel." Of course. Just like Arafat would do and has done so many times in the past. Just because when they switch to Arabic they congratulate Hamas on the number of Israeli civilians they kill doesn't mean their statements in English were insincere. Does it?

Undoing Clinton
It will take at least four years to undo the damage Clinton and his fools did to US prestige and effectiveness abroad, especially on the terrorism front. Louis Freeh should know and now he is laying out just some of the evidence. Isn't there a treason indictment in here somewhere? Patience. Clinton's victims, including those of Waco, Ruby Ridge, Mogadishu, Khobar Towers, the SS Cole, 9/11/2001, can't be brought back to life, but steps can be taken to make sure nothing like his disastrous eight years happens again.

Said unsaid
Frontpagemag.com has an interesting commentary by actual professors at the University of Washington on the sad career of Edward Said, the pseudo-Palestinian comparative lit guru at Columbia who just can't stop lying. But after all, as with Michael Moore, Chomsky and the other monsters of the pomo left, it isn't the lies that count, it's the amount of money people will pay to hear you say them over and over again. I'm just amazed that professors at a US college are still allowed to think. Or students. It will be a great day when Sharon is invited to Baghdad to sign a peace treaty. Maybe Said can think up a lie or two to explain why that really won't happen and when it does happen, it didn't really happen because the intellectual elite refused to acknowledge that it happened. As for the unity of the Palestinian people against the colonialist oppressors, I think I see a straw in the wind blowing from Baghdad. And from Lebanon. Yes, I love Little Green Footballs.

Agree
This analysis of Al Qaeda's latest "soft-target" attacks seems spot on. When I see something I agree with, I link to it so people who read this blog will know it's saying something that is very much like what I would have said if I had gotten it down first. I simply copy the URL, paste it into my blog and then the readers can go to it right from here and read it for themselves. It's as logical and easy as, say, pulling your chair towards a table. (Both via Tim Blair)

Update
This article from National Review Online sets out the "soft-target" thesis clearly. I agree particularly with this part of the analysis.

One theory is that these attacks were undertaken by freelancers-al Qaeda cells that are acting without central direction or without any overriding strategy. That would certainly account for their apparent self-destructiveness by choosing targets in countries where they have bases or at least government tolerance. But if this is true, it only further emphasizes that the organization's leadership is unable to exert overall strategic control, or perhaps even communicate with its operatives.

That's one problem with the "insulated cells" feature of any secret terror organization. It means you can't organize more than one attack at a time in widely separated areas without either exposing the hierarchy to detection or letting members of the cells communicate with each other. Just the fact that the Saudi regime now admits that it has a terrorist problem is a major advance in the war on terror.

Zapp!!
Lightning hit my house last Friday, so I've been net-deprived for a whole weekend. Lost a TV, DVD player, three computers, a cable modem, a network router and, oddly, a clothes dryer. And I had a major gout attack, so I spent a lot of time sleeping. Which ticks me off. I've been on a certain gout medicine for like six years now and it never works without making me terminally sleepy. Haven't the evil drug companies come up with something better for what is after all an ancient disorder? I should be able to plug a wire into a jack on my hip and send a signal to the gout-affected joint that will dissolve the uric acid crystals that cause the insanely intense pain. But no. I have to take weird chemicals and wait for two hours and slog around like a zombie for the rest of the day. Not fun. And now I have to buy all this stuff. It's one way to get new computers, I guess. Wish I could afford a Titanium laptop from Apple.

Soiez effrayé, soiez très effrayé!!
Looks like Rummy is on the trail of the Frog turncoats who sold out their NATO partners for a mess of pâte. The evidence will come out sooner or later. And the best thing is there isn't a dang thing they can do about it. Somebody should be watching for reservations on flights from Paris to North Korea or maybe Iran, although I'm not sure either surviving member of the Axis of Evil wants to play host to the leader of the Axis of Weasels. Trial lawyers representing the families of Americans killed in Iraq should be petitioning courts everywhere to freeze French assets in anticipation of litigation.

Shock and awe, indeed!
The seismic shift in the Middle East was so great that it apparently reached all the way to New Hampshire. As a New Hampshireman for many years - I went to prep school, college and law school there - I have to say it's a bit of a shock to realize that the next time I head up through Franconia Notch the Old Man won't be there looking over my shoulder. On the other hand, maybe it's like the Olympics in ancient times. When a resident of a Greek city-state won in the Olympics, the people of the town tore down the walls to say, we don't need them any more since we have a great champion to protect us. So George W's butt-kicking of the Taliban and then Saddam must have convinced the Almighty that his particular protection was no longer necessary for the USA. But what will replace the Old Man as New Hampshire's symbol? A mall? A tourist from Taxachusetts rendered penniless? At least we've still got "Live Free or Die".

Dirty Canadians!
So it's capitalism that pollutes the environment, eh? The Canadians in their socialist glory apparently have a little problem with pumping poisons into their - and America's - air. Say, you don't think it could be prosperity, brought on by that nasty capitalism, that allows people to clean up whatever messes they make, do you? Nah. The Russians and Chinese have always put pristine cleanliness ahead of materialist values such as production of limousines for the elites. Haven't they? The story didn't even mention the "greenhouse gases" that must be churned out by "the largest single air polluter in North America." But wait a minute. Didn't Canada sign the Kyoto Accords? And nasty old US didn't? And yet:

Murphy reports that a recent study found that while air pollution is on the decline in the U.S., it's on the rise in Canada.

I'm confused.

About time
Plans to pull US troops out of Germany seem to be real. Considering that I first went to Germany at the age of three when my father was assigned to Wiesbaden as part of the occupying force and that in a couple of months I will become an official senior citizen, this action is coming not a moment too soon. And aren't we all sad at the prospect of not being able to funnel billions of US taxpayers' dollars into the German economy any more? Maybe Poland or Bulgaria won't betray us the next time we need support in the War on Terror. It's odd. I used to see announcements like this and figure, "Sure, like that's going to happen." But ever since W came to power, I hear and I believe. It sure is good to have someone in the White House whom I can trust to do what he says he will, even if I don't always agree with the "compassionate" (ick!) side of his agenda.

Unpredicted consequences
None of the US media seem to have picked up on this story from Britain about the shocking results in local council elections. One might have expected that the glorious results in the Iraq war would have given a boost to Labour prospects, since Blair is the Labour leader. Quite the contrary. The Tories gained hundreds of seats, and even the third party Liberal Democrats gained many more seats than expected. The fourth party British National Party, described as "right wing", known informally as "British Nazi Party", gained significantly, mostly at the expense of Labour. The gains were so significant that Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative leader, "guaranteed" that the Tories would win the next general election. BBC, of course, emphasized the Labour gains in Wales and the BBC's roundup of how the papers in Britain treated the election emphasized that all parties had some gains in various places. The BBC refuses to recognize what looks to me like a (an? or is that too self-consciously Anglophile?) historic victory for the Tories.
So why did the Conservatives gain so much, when the leader of Labour is just coming off a huge foreign policy coup? First, the Tories were much more solidly behind the liberation campaign than the Labour Party. The split in Labour was gaping. And the traitor Galloway is a Labourite. Those stories could not fail to have been lost on the electorate. Of course these were local council elections, so something must have been going on at the grass roots, too. Perhaps the locals are just finally fed up with closet - and not-so-hidden - Socialism. Maybe it was the in-town tax in London that showed the electorate where Labour was heading, maybe the proliferation of cameras everywhere, maybe Blair's fondness for the Euro and the Continent, when the French and Germans turned out to be less than staunch when it came time to act on Iraq. Labour must have been seen as the party of big government, favoring encroachment on traditional British freedoms. Whatever the reason, a political turning point seems to have been passed. Years from now we may look back on the liberation of Iraq as the event that triggered many much-needed changes. We may have escaped dystopia by the skin of our teeth.

Having a bit of a tough slog
I'm being besieged on all sides over on Light of Reason. I've taken a bit of a provocative stance on homosexuality and the hounds are in full cry. Here's the stance:

I don't know how to say this gently, so I'll just say it. I simply don't comprehend how you can say:

In order to gain the toleration of someone like Santorum, I would have to go back to the view I had of being gay in the 1960s: that it is something fundamentally wrong about me, that I should never act on it, and that I should do absolutely anything to try to change it. If that's not an attack on who I am as a person, then what on earth would be?

You have obviously considered that homosexuality may be wrong and rejected that view. But haven't people with other sexual proclivities said exactly the same thing about their "disorders", however obviously mad they may be? I know that one doesn't just trust one's own reason about a matter. That's not reasonable. You may, after all, be wrong. The social judgment about the harmfulness of homosexuality may be changing in the West, but in many cultures across the globe it's not. The climate may be becoming even more repressive with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. And even in the West, many, like Santorum, doubt the wisdom of "tolerating" anything and everything. I just don't understand how you, as an Objectivist, can be so sure, just because of your deep feelings that homosexuality is "part of you as a person", that practicing homosexuality is moral or advisable. Feelings are no basis for behavior. Is the prevalence of promiscuity, drug and alcohol abuse and misery among homosexuals due only to "repression" or is it something inherent in what, again, brutally, may be seen as imitation heterosexuality?
For what could be more inherent in what it means to be a man than to function as a man with a woman? And how could failure or inability - however seemingly 'hardwired' - to function as a man be anything but destructive to mental balance? And to think and act as though rejection of one's genetic role as a man should and will incur no psychological costs is simply to deny reality. You are not a "person", infinitely malleable and undefined. You are a man.

And here's my comment at the (present) end of the onslaught:

Hmm. "Stupid" "homophobe" "baffled" "must get out more" "want Wahhabism to take over the world" I'm taking notes so I can improve myself. I wonder if I'll ever be right. I think I am right about the misery that is homosexuality, though not because of some "oppression" by the "straight" tyranny we live under, but by its very nature.
It's odd to hear Objectivists defending priestly celibacy and saying people just ARE one way or another, that they can't control their behavior. Sounds like victimology to me. Because it's behavior we're talking about here, not skin color or gender. I don't think I have a "solution" for homosexuality, any more than I have one for shyness or alcoholism or child abuse or murder. I'm just trying to define what Rand meant by "man qua man". Thanks, all, I think I might be a little closer. By the way, yes, Sean, I do know there are women who behave homosexually, but I have long ago given up trying to understand how women's minds work.

I'm not a troll, really I'm not. I can control my commenting behavior any time I want. The opinions I have I don't just take out of the air. I have been sharing them with Andrew Sullivan, too. I think he's getting a little exasperated at how dense I'm being about how homosexuality is just fine and just like any other kind of sexuality. But wait, wasn't that Santorum's point, in part at least? That sexuality is controlled by the state because it's bad, and homosexuailty is just like the other kinds of bad sexuality? He may be wrong but he's at least consistent. And who would deny that sex is, after hunger and thirst, the strongest drive we have? And how do laws get made except by taking the pulse of the people? My whole point is really that one needs to take a much closer look at behavior before pronouncing it as beyond criticism like skin color or gender. Point made. How come I can't stop? How about this: having second thoughts about the wisdom of social legitimation of homosexuality is not an attack on a man but on his behavior. Could that be more obvious? But, wait, again, didn't Santorum say that too? Uh-oh, I'm becoming a gay-basher.

The Lessons of Operation Iraqi Freedom

Now that Iraq has been delivered from the hands of the Ba’athists and most of the killing and dying and destruction has stopped, we can step back and consider what we know that we didn’t know on March 20th.

First, we know that Saddam was a paper tiger. As most, but certainly not all, military analysts had predicted, his Russian arms and rigid military hierarchy just plain didn’t work. The only part of his apparatus that surprised US military thinkers was the Fedayeen Saddam, a good part of whom turned out to be foreign terrorists. Their tactics, reminiscent of Stalin’s political police in their brutality and utter disregard for the lives of soldiers and civilians, managed to kill a small number of US troops and may have slowed down the advance to Baghdad, if only by a few days.

And we know that the Iraqi people were not deprived by sanctions or US bombing, but by Saddam. The contrasts between Saddam’s palaces and the starving people, especially in the South, prove beyond a doubt that UN oversight of the Oil-for-Food Program was, typically, non-existent and that Saddam never gave a moment’s thought to his people’s well-being, especially if they were Sunnis or Kurds. It’s important to remember how much traction the “sanctions are killing children” lies got before the war and to look around and hear the deafening silence now.

We also know that Saddam was running Terror Central. The boxes of documents we’ve uncovered will provide ammunition for years to keep the lid on terror organizations around the globe. The Left will never admit it, but the victory over Saddam was crucial to the War on Terror. The links to AlQaeda seem indisputable. The wackos among us even think links to Timothy McVeigh may surface. It's a euphoric time. The Weapons of Mass Destruction still are proving elusive, but I have a feeling they will turn up, too. After all, as I've seen a couple of places on the blogosphere, if Saddam didn't have WMD, why did he fight? He could have just laid out the disposition of the WMD that were documented after the Gulf War and probably survived the muted outcry about the Al Samoud missiles that had longer ranges than allowed. He was temporizing and resisting the inspectors for a reason. And to those who say, well, why didn't he use them in extremis then?, I say that he may very well have tried to but could find no one to carry out his orders. Or he shifted them to Syria or to Tikrit or Western Iraq at the last moment, hoping to conduct a fighting retreat and got caught by surprise, perhaps killed, when his armies folded. I will admit that exact scenario is cloudy right now. But we're still learning.

We know France, Germany and Russia are not reliable allies. Britain is. I don’t know why there hasn’t been more publicity about the overwhelming evidence of Russian double-dealing and outright hostility to US goals in Iraq. They supplied weapons, trained Iraqis and diverted intelligence. France and Germany did many of the same things, but Russia’s behavior seems, so far, to have topped them both. France seems to be taking all the heat at the moment, but I have a feeling Russia’s turn will come. I feel Putin is frozen in fear, knowing more will be revealed that will deepsix friendly relations with the US for a long time. He's almost totally dependent on IMF loans right now and cannot survive politically - perhaps physically - if the US blackballs him. The Russian arms salesmen are putting a brave face on the arms situation, touting the performance of their Cornett (sp?) anti-tank system. They don't seem to realize that's like waving a red flag to George W.

And that's another thing we know. George W. is a mensch. Sure he garbles words a bit, smiles at perhaps not quite the right time. But he means what he says and now the whole world knows it and knows the US armed forces are solidly behind his every word. That's an inestimable advantage and a huge change from Clinton. US citizens will feel safer anywhere they go. Governments around the world will respect our flag and our passports because they will know they mean something. And governments will look at the UN and know there's no "there" there. The there's in Washington, not New York. I am overcome with how different, how exactly opposite all these new bits of knowledge are from the predictions of the antiwar crowd. It's almost like war meets antiwar and peace results. A real peace this time, a just peace, a true victory.

Haiku time
Loud cars
Hippos bellow
"This river has crocodiles"

Paperwork
Leaves catch in my hair
Time for a fire

Lunchtime
The wildebeest dragged down
Lions line up

Israel as Islam in microcosm
Another tidbit I picked up from Lewis: Israel is a real puzzle, an infuriating, inexplicable conundrum for Muslim intellectuals. For millennia, since the Diaspora in about 70 A.D, Jews have lived in the Middle East and other lands that in the seventh through tenth centuries became Islamic. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, many more came to live in the Middle East and North Africa. The status of the Jew was laid out in the Koran, along with that of other unbelievers. They were generally tolerated, although nowhere did they have as many or as secure rights as Muslims. Jews continued to live alongside Muslims until the establishment of Israel in 1948. Then, most were expelled from Islamic lands like Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Libya, among many others. This movement of over a million Jews can be seen as the mirror image of the Palestinian "Naqba", when, for whatever reasons (I'm not getting into all that!) many Arabs who had lived in what is now Israel left. Other Jews, of course, came from Europe to Israel.
The frustrating fact for the Arab intellectual is that when the Jews who for millennia had lived in the Islamic world came to Israel, they prospered on the whole as well as the Jews from the West. And even the over a million Arabs who stayed in Israel did much better than their brethren who left and went to UN-sponsored terrorist nests in the West Bank and Gaza or to other Islamic lands. So it isn't contact with Islam, growing up in an Islamic society, race or religion that makes Islam so poor compared to the shining city on a hill that, despite the best efforts of the terrorists, Israel has become. It's not being in the Middle East, or being persecuted by the West - who was more persecuted than the Jews by Europeans? Judaism had been regarded with "contempt", Lewis says, by the Islamic world, even though the faith followed and provided much of the tradition of Islam. It just wasn't as developed as Mohammedanism. Mohammed as the "last prophet" had gone beyond Moses, Abraham and especially Jesus and had brought religion to its final perfection. So why then does the Islamic world seem powerless today? In Israel the West and the East had met and successfully synthesized a powerful and wealthy society, based on a religion chastised by Mohammed as imperfect! Why could the same process not work in Egypt, in Syria, in Iraq? Perhaps it can. Perhaps the Islamic world's mistake is in not taking Israel as an example rather than a reproach. We in the US should not be hesitant to play the role of the new Mongols, shaking things up and allowing the consideration of such heretical ideas as religious equality, capitalism, and separation of church and state if that intervention can bring the Islamic world to a better place. No guarantees!

What's going right
I just finished reading Bernard Lewis' "What Went Wrong?", a survey of the relative decline of the Muslim world. What a time to read such a book! I'm reminded that the border between present-day Iraq and Iran was for centuries the border between the Arab caliphate and the Persian world. Baghdad, at least until the last time it was conquered, in 1258, was the outpost, marking the extent of Islamic power to the rest of the world. With the conquest by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the later expansion by the Turks into the Persian and Arab lands, Baghdad became less important. Looking through Muslim eyes, a conquest of Baghdad can be expected to have consequences. Also looking through Muslim, and especially fanatical Muslim eyes, the toppling of the statues of Saddam takes on an importance not much remarked on in the West. The modern, quasi-Fascist regimes of Saddam in Iraq, the Assads in Syria, Pahlevi in Iran and, to a lesser extent, Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak in Egypt, have been blamed for much of the weakness of the modern Islamic world, especially after the cataclysmic losses to Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982 and the continuing failure of the Palestinians to push the Jews into the sea. In classic Islam, statues were forbidden. Even portraits were not considered kosher (ha!), although, as Lewis points out, that stricture was much ignored, especially by the Ottomans. Few Americans realize how much modernization was attempted by the authoritarian Islamic regimes and how much these measures, such as the education of women and the introduction of infidel science, were resented in the Muslim world. The Iranian revolution in 1979 gave us a clue. The Shi'ite resurgence in Karbala and Najaf last week is another sign of that deeply conservative strain. So, to topple a statue is not just a rejection of the regime of Saddam, who did after all have a Koran written in his own blood. It's also a rejection of Westernism and infidel ideas such as statues. The discovery of pornographic paintings and liquor in Saddam's henchmen's hideaways would have reinforced this impression. To hear the Shi'ites cry "Down with Saddam" and then in the next breath, "Down with America" seems to say the least ungrateful. But it's perfectly consistent. The fall of Saddam is a gift of Allah, a conquest over modernity and the infidel. It is not surprising that Allah used the Americans and the British to accomplish this. Didn't he use the infidel Mongols in 1258 to sweep aside the Persians? Did not this conquest lead to the expansion of Islam? Looking from Isfahan and Qom, it might seem that the tide has turned against the Sunni, thanks to the M1A1 and GPS-guided bombing. It's a funny world.