David Brooks points out the disparities between editorial positions and the facts in the WaPo and NYTimes. His first example is a report from Kabul, but the other reveals how absolutely dangerous the Anti-war-in-Iraq position is:

The real surprise for inspectors in the 1990's was how close Iraq was to producing a nuclear weapon.. . .The International Atomic Energy Agency, which led the nuclear inspections, discovered that Iraq had imported nearly 50 kilos (110 pounds) of highly enriched uranium from France and Russia.[italics mine]. . .

The inspectors destroyed the weapons they found, but with Saddam in power can we really let the matter rest?
The need to stop Iraq's chemical and biological weapons is even more urgent, because they are easier to produce and hide:

Britain said in its Sept. 24 report that its intelligence community believed that Iraq "retained some chemical warfare agents, precursors, production equipment and weapons" and could "produce significant quantities of mustard gas within weeks and of nerve agent within months."

Yet the editors of both papers and a large part of the Democratic party still maintain that we can wait for the U.N. to do something about Iraq. Is that the same U.N. that withdrew its inspectors the last time and had to be pushed kicking and screaming into sending them back? Is politics such an overarching concern that these people have to oppose everything the Bush administration proposes, regardless of the evidence?

Some interesting reactions to an OpEd by Douglas Rushkoff in Thursday's NYTimes in which he complains that Judaism is focusing too much on its racial-political identity and losing its sense of being religious:

As a Jew who cares deeply about his religion, I have come to the conclusion that our great mistake has been to forget that we are the descendants of a loose amalgamation of peoples united around a new idea, and to replace this history with the view, advanced by our enemies, that we are a race. Zionism, perhaps unintentionally, gave this race a nation to defend; Israel's hostile neighbors kept alive real and pressing questions of survival.

He ends with, "Judaism was built around the contention that human beings can make the world a better, more just place." True it may be, but I think it misses and important element of what makes a religion. For me the issue is not just being "just" or living right, but also knowing what right is. The major monotheistic religions are all founded on revelation from God to mankind, but they all reject the concept of revelation in our own time. To some extent, denying revelation is a redefinition of who God is, and it comes not from scripture, but from the intellectual intermediaries, the scribes, rabbis, mullahs, theologians, etc. In other words, men have assumed the authority to define the religions, without consulting with the originator.I am fully aware of how superstitious I sound, but that fact itself proves my point that we have lost the true religion. Many of the things that unbelievers are always holding up to believers as the shortcomings of religion are themselves evidence of apostasy. For anyone to kill or persecute others for their unorthodoxy is proof that he has failed to learn the basic tenets of Christ, Moses or Mohammed.

I am certainly not immune from the human tendency toward criticism and anger, but I also recognize that these are my sins and are not what Jesus taught me to be.

My point is that religion is not just about doing what we think is right, so much as finding out what is right from the Source of rightness and following His will, not our own or that of the worldly intellects of the day. The calling of a prophet has never been about university degrees or grounding in philosophy. Probably, such "qualifications" are more likely to prevent true revelation or inspiration.

Some interesting reactions to an OpEd by Douglas Rushkoff in Thursday's NYTimes in which he complains that Judaism is focusing too much on its racial-political identity and losing its sense of being religious:

As a Jew who cares deeply about his religion, I have come to the conclusion that our great mistake has been to forget that we are the descendants of a loose amalgamation of peoples united around a new idea, and to replace this history with the view, advanced by our enemies, that we are a race. Zionism, perhaps unintentionally, gave this race a nation to defend; Israel's hostile neighbors kept alive real and pressing questions of survival.

He ends with, "Judaism was built around the contention that human beings can make the world a better, more just place." True it may be, but I think it misses and important element of what makes a religion. For me the issue is not just being "just" or living right, but also knowing what right is. The major monotheistic religions are all founded on revelation from God to mankind, but they all reject the concept of revelation in our own time. To some extent, denying revelation is a redefinition of who God is, and it comes not from scripture, but from the intellectual intermediaries, the scribes, rabbis, mullahs, theologians, etc. In other words, men have assumed the authority to define the religions, without consulting with the originator.I am fully aware of how superstitious I sound, but that fact itself proves my point that we have lost the true religion. Many of the things that unbelievers are always holding up to believers as the shortcomings of religion are themselves evidence of apostasy. For anyone to kill or persecute others for their unorthodoxy is proof that he has failed to learn the basic tenets of Christ, Moses or Mohammed.

I am certainly not immune from the human tendency toward criticism and anger, but I also recognize that these are my sins and are not what Jesus taught me to be.

My point is that religion is not just about doing what we think is right, so much as finding out what is right from the Source of rightness and following His will, not our own or that of the worldly intellects of the day. The calling of a prophet has never been about university degrees or grounding in philosophy. Probably, such "qualifications" are more likely to prevent true revelation or inspiration.

Do people like Paul Krugman realize how stupid they sound? If I were he, I'd be ashamed to submit such drivel as this for publication. There's a kind of incestuous feeling about a lot of liberal commentary, as though they only get news from each other and accept stuff like this uncritically.

Note the way they can't concede that George Bush won the election. He was "appointed" by the Supreme Court, and therefore illegitimate. If conservatives were this thick-headed, I'd have nothing to do with them. This is why I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh.
But liberals, who like to talk about freedom, are so much like Barbra Streisand that you can't talk to them without being screamed at. Look at how Garrison Keillor lost it over Norm Coleman.

Lileks pours boiling cauldrons of disdain down on the people who want to censor the Victoria's Secret show. I watched a few minutes of it, but when they introduced Phil Collins, I felt like, "We know all you men out there are primed to drool over this nubility uncovered, but, just in case, we're going to let you stew in your own hormones and filthy imaginings for a little while longer until you're on your knees begging for it."

When my wife got a gander at the models in the dressing room and some of the "tease" shots, she made me turn it off anyway. It's a good thing, too. I had a coronary bypass just last July.

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.
The FBI is a bureaucracy, full of middle managers, all with their own agendas. If they thought that it could be whipped into shape in just one year, they were mistaken. The only way it will happen is if the incompetent and complacent start losing their jobs.

A Michigan woman is claiming justification for killing her boyfriend who assaulted her in order to cause a miscarriage, which she later had. When does a life begin for purposes of defending it? This should be recognized and distinguished from voluntary abortions, because there's a big difference between a fetus that is wanted and looked forward to and one which a woman doesn't want to carry. Politically, however, feminists will probably want to sell out women's rights to have children for the sake of maintaining the foolish contistency of claiming that fetuses aren't human.

Microsoft Bug Exposes Millions to Viruses!
And to think this used to be real news. Now it happens once a week. I think Microsoft is more like the federal airport security force than a trusted purveyor of secure software. Maybe that's why the government let MS off the hook. It was afraid the FTC would get the job of providing security.

Freedom of the press under Islam


Muslims burn down a newspaper office because they felt insulted by one of its stories. " 'They said they were protesting against a story in This Day newspaper of last Saturday which said Mohammad would have married one of the beauty queens,' a witness said."


Obviously, Mohammed wouldn't have married one of them. He's got 72 dark-eyed virgins to keep him happy.

Lileks is great today. He reports that someone brought a beachball to the Wellstone memorial. Apparently, a lot of the "mourners" thought it was a rock concert. The photos I saw of the section with Mondale, Clinton, Kennedy, etc. reminded me of the end of Animal Farm where the animals couldn't tell which were the men and which were pigs. They all looked like the Thomas Nast version of rich Republicans.



He also mentions that JFK, had he not been assassinated, would be in his eighties.

After reading the piece by Robert Dallek about his health, I doubt JFK would have lived that long. The more revelations we get about Kennedy, the more accurate Bill Clinton's emulation of him seems to be. At least Bill wasn't hiding his medical hist. . . Wait, strike that.

Kennedy had an iron will which enabled him to perform the job, but having taken a cortizone-like drug (methylprednisolone) for 15 years, I doubt that he could have held out much longer. He was also getting testosterone injections, which may account for his prodigious sexual appetite. Reading the article, I kept wondering how he was able to have sex, as bad as his back was, but it never came up in the article. (pun intended)



Next year, we'll probably learn that Bobby was a cross dresser, but it was all hushed up with his daddy's money. Wellstone would probably never be allowed to run for president if only because his personal life was too unblemished.



Update: Dallek addresses the sex issue in the interview linked above.

Q: The litany of all the different symptoms he had�fatigue, diarrhea, ulcers, and back pain�make it sound as if he should have been curled up in fetal position, whimpering. But he played tennis and football, and everyone's heard the stories about his sexual exploits.


Well, you see, they were fostering an image of vigor. And they did a brilliant job of covering his problems up.


One question that people constantly ask me is how he was able to perform these supposed Herculean feats as a sex machine, given the fact that he had serious back problems and so many illnesses. The answer may be that he carried on quite a bit in the White House swimming pool and (it's alleged) in the bathtub, and that he would practice sex in a supine position�taking the bottom position. This may explain somewhat how he was able to acquire such a reputation as a sexual athlete.


But the bottom line, I think, to so much of what I discuss in the article, is that he was really quite heroic�that he had extraordinary determination. He made a bet with himself that he could be President. Of course, one of the problems I see with this is that he did not share the gamble with the public. It could well have turned out that if the public knew about how ill he was, he never would have been elected. This is what the Kennedys themselves feared, so they made a systematic effort to hide the fact that he had so many illnesses. It was a kind of cover up.

So, was he really heroic for suffering so much without anyone knowing? I don't know. After all, his "heroism" also reveals dishonesty. Then there were his promiscuity, adultery and drug dependence. Was Elvis a hero for keeping his problems private? I think that maybe his "golden age" exists more in the minds of the people he scammed than in reality. But then, I've always thought that.

The last time I saw Garrison Keillor on CSpan, he was reading a selection from his latest book about farts, which seem to interest him more and more in recent years. His last two comments for Salon.com were every bit as gross, reeking and disgusting as that. He should have written them in the bathroom and flushed them. And then opened the window.

From Best of the Web, a column by Susan Lenfestey is a wonderful example of bathos. She's too upset by the election to write. I wish she hadn't.


The end of her piece:

Well, I'll quit with that. Looks like grief's moving to anger for many of us. I'm so sick of people saying, "It has to get worse before it gets better." Whose rule is that? Pretty silly way to run the universe, if you ask me.


The truth is, all I want to do right now is write a love letter to Fritz and tell him how his steady decency comforted us in our darkest time. How his energy lifted us. How his courage and selflessness made me proud to be a Minnesotan -- at least until that bleak Wednesday morning. And even then how his grace and dignity in defeat made me proud to be a Democrat.


I guess I'll go sit in the middle of this mossy island and listen to the woods and leave it at that.

I felt like that when Goldwater lost to Johnson, but then, I was 16 years old. After living through Carter's administration and 8 years of Clinton, I think I've grown up a bit.

So, the proof that Bin Laden is alive comes from people who would like nothing better than to have the world believe it? Are our "intelligence" people really this naive? Or do they just have some reason of their own to support the story?

I think I hit on something in a comment I posted on the TCS TCS site under an essay on global warming:

This issue only exists because of computer modeling. It is significant because environmentalists see it as a perpetual cause for alarm to drive their fundraising.


There is too much chaos involved in climate to predict anything about it with any degree of certainty. Last week it was announced that most of the recent growth in greenhouse gases came from a huge forest fire in Indonesia. Volcanic eruptions can cause global cooling.


Maybe we could get some honesty if we insisted that those who want us to cripple our economy on the basis of their models will pay a penalty equal to the losses suffered if their predictions prove to be inaccurate. But I doubt it.

Paul Ehrlich has lost a number of bets based on his predictions. He no longer bets, but his failures haven't shut him up.


If these doomsayers were actually held accountable financially or some other way, it would have a very healthy effect on the debate.

This is why people don't take the "peace" movement seriously.

Applying environmentalist risk assessment methods to the Iraq issue gives you some clues about why you shouldn't trust them on the environment. Of course, they don't do that, generally opposing any military involvement anywhere.

Saddam is also a criminal against the environment. Remember his setting Kuwait's oil fields on fire? The gassing of the Kurds did permanent damage to their soil as well as their gene pool. What would his nukes do the environment, if he gets them? Yet environmentalists almost uniformly oppose efforts to rid the world of him.

Applying environmentalist risk assessment methods to Saddam, gives you some clues about why you shouldn't trust them on the environment. Of course, they don't do that, generally opposing any military involvement anywhere.

Saddam is also a criminal against the environment. Remember his setting Kuwait's oil fields on fire? The gassing of the Kurds did permanent damage to their soil as well as their gene pool. What would his nukes do the environment? Yet environmentalists almost uniformly oppose efforts to rid the world of him.

Coments on InstaPundit.Com--


1. There's a report in France that when we enter Baghdad, the people will greet our troops waving American Flags. And the French will be offended that they aren't waving the French tricolor.


2. Black students are demanding an African American Studies department at the Universe of Tennessee as payment for some frat boys staging some stunt in blackface. I'd tell them they'll do it just after they create the English-American, European-American, and Puerto Rican Studies departments.


3. Glenn is getting flack over linking reports on male-bashing Feminazis.


All Feminism is really about is trying to make women act more like men. They think that by demeaning men, they'll get more power and money. But subjugating men would be as bad as Islam's refusal to grant rights to women. Sexual discrimination and harrassment aren't right. Neither are racial discrimination and harrassment, but that principle works both ways. If you don't want to be mistreated, don't mistreat others.