After reading Jim Treacher's site and Zonitics, (sorry about not giving the links. It's late and I'm tired.) and I've decided that I'm being too serious about all of this blogging stuff. Maybe I should change the name to BipolarBlogger.

The Columbia Political Review's Blog is called with strange irony "The Filibuster." I guess to the paranoid, the rest of the world looks paranoid as well. There's an odd tone of triumph in the way these people pounce on any hint that this war could go beyond Iraq, into Syria or Iran. One item is headlined histrionically "J'Accuse".

Aha! Josh Marshall's suspicions that this war is really about going after international terrorism ARE TRUE! They knew it! They just knew it!

What's the proof? Rumsfeld's warning yesterday that if Syria continues to supply military technology to Iraq, it will be considered a hostile act.

I'm waiting for him to give the same warning to the White House Press Corps.

Why am I not surprised that this photo is on Reuters? (if the link expires, it's a close up of student wearing a headband reading "Kill Jews") Both the message and the messenger are scum.

Julie Burchill kicks butt in the Guardian, of all places. It's not just good, it's Lileks screeds good.

Could we be this lucky? Saddam's bodyguard shows up at a government briefing without Saddam.

Here are a couple of editorials and letters to the editor I want to respond to. I'm putting my comments here, because I already send too many letters to the editor and I don't want to be a pest. If you read this blog, you asked for it.


No.1

Invaders are hypocrites

I keep wondering how our soldiers have the audacity to express anger over Iraqi tactics when the United States is the renegade, aggressor nation. Our country has shown that it has no deference for the world community or the United Nations mission of peaceful resolution and adjudication of the world's problems.

So, why should the Iraqis show any respect for the rules and conventions that were set up to govern the behavior of war? American patriots were quite "rude" in their civilian-clothed attacks, from the cover of trees, when those poor Brits had to stand in line and be slaughtered. That was the etiquette of 1700's war.

I loathe the idea of Americans dying and loathe the idea of Iraqi casualties as well. But invaders are rarely seen as the righteous.

Michael Robinson

Sandy

I guess this is just the latest example of Second Timothy 3:1-7, the last verse of which is: "Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." Ah, the foolish consistency!


No.2

Protect Free Speech

First of all, just to lay down my biases, I am a Gulf War veteran who supports the current action in Iraq. I believe if we do not take action now against Saddam Hussein, we will regret it later.


Recently, filmmaker Michael Moore made some comments at the Academy Awards that could most delicately be described as "unfortunate." Even liberals have called his comments "boorish." However, when someone says, "They should drop him in the conflict and make him one of OUR human shields," it concerns me greatly. If we discourage free speech through intimidation or belligerence, we are going down the wrong path. The speech most important to protect is that which is unpopular or controversial.

In truth, our freedom is even more important to defend than our lives. We "on the home front" have a duty to defend that freedom by supporting the principles of free speech � even when it turns our stomachs.

James Knowlton

Provo

If I though Michael Moore was being intimidated, I might agree. But sometimes people need a little belligerence to express their feelings. Michael Moore is a repulsive creep. Those young men and women fighting in Iraq ARE our human shields. They just have more sense than to go over there without protection. The thought of Michael Moore being drafted, however, doesn't appeal to me. He couldn't cut it, and I wouldn't trust him with a gun.


No. 3

(Introduction: Brigham Young University is a private university owned and run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have two degrees from there. When you're accepted as a student, you sign an agreement that you'll follow the church's standards, which are pretty strict by modern standards. But when I was there in the 60s and 70s there were always students who tried to claim that the code they had agreed to uphold was somehow a violation of their rights. The problem is that it is a legal contract. If you don't keep your end, you're not entitled to remain at the university. This kid violated the code by committing a federal misdemeanor. Now he may be expelled, which has been played up in the local media as a free speech case. Hence this editorial, with which I agree. He's lucky he's not my son.)

BYU case not about free speech

Deseret News editorial

We don't know whether BYU administrators will expel Caleb Proulx, the student who was arrested earlier this week for blocking the entrance to a federal building as part of an anti-war demonstration. Officials at BYU don't even know that yet. The case is under review.

But regardless of their eventual decision, BYU administrators ought not let the people who would turn this into a free speech issue influence the decision.

Some have suggested that a decision to expel Proulx would be carried worldwide by media outlets as a blow against the First Amendment at the private, religiously owned university � a First Amendment that also guarantees the religious freedom that allows the university to exist. If so, it will be because of grossly inaccurate reporting.

BYU has allowed free speech when it comes to discussions and debates about the war in Iraq. Proulx, who never made any secret about his anti-war stance, created silk-screened armbands expressing his views. He and several other students wore them around campus without any reaction from school officials. Classes and official forums have aired both sides of the war issue. Earlier this month, this newspaper quoted Proulx as saying, "I do believe BYU's administration wants to have discussions on the war. There's no restriction on free speech."

But when he blocked the entrance to the federal building, he took his protest to a different level. BYU's honor code requires obedience to laws. Proulx signed the code voluntarily. He understands what it means and, at least at one time, felt it was important enough to agree to follow for four years.

Some have called this form a civil disobedience a time-honored tradition in America. Perhaps it is. But like all acts, it carries consequences. Proulx understood this. He has said he knew he would be arrested, and he had weighed the consequences � on his schooling and his future employment prospects � carefully. In the end, he felt his cause was more important than those things. So be it.

BYU has an impressive record of enforcing its honor code in spite of how it might affect athletic teams or outside opinions. It also has a much less known record of showing compassion and forgiveness to students who make mistakes, decisions that rarely get any publicity.


This case could go either way. But its outcome should be seen only one way � as a private university's enforcement of an honor code.

My brother noted that he never noticed any engineering majors at anti-war rallies. They were too busy studying.

Heard James Lileks call into the Hugh Hewit show last evening. Two guys I feel like friends with. Lileks sounds about like I had imagined, not like Kevin._____ or Jesse Ventura, or Garrison Keillor. No scandanavian lilt, no Minnasoda, just another friendly guy.

The day before I heard a clip of Glenn Reynolds on NPR. I had wondered if he had a Southern accent. Yes, but it's one of those genteel "impordant" accent. I think of Southern sccents as a continuum ranging from Cletuz from the Simpsons, to Billie Carter, then Jimmy, so on until you get to Midwest standard, with an occasional Ya'll thrown in. I'm aware that southern accents are more complex than that, with identifiable variants in the Carolinas (Andy Griffith), Georgia, Tennesse, Kentucky,Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas. But I'm not sophisticated enough to have them pinned down.

Utah has its own accents, inherited from British and Scandanavian immigrants. My dad had a distinct tendency to convert words like horse and lord to harse and lard.
As a little kid, I remember a reciprocal shifting of words like car to cor. My dad's grandparents were from Northern England, and I imagine that's where this accent came from.

I lived in Springville, near Provo, until I was nine. We then moved to Ames, Iowa where my Dad studied for his masters degree in Animal Nutrition. Then we moved to Gurnee, Illinois when I was twelve. I came back to Utah to attend college at BYU, and stayed here. One of my sisters still lives in Waukegan, Illinois and has acquired Chicago/Milwaukee accent most noticeable when she says "daller" for "dollar." My younger brother settled in Sydney, Ohio. I have an older sister who lives in Provo and an older brother who lives in Mesa, Arizona.

When I hear myself on tape, I'm struck by my hard r and mumbling, but I can't say I have a distinctive accent. Neither do my two boys, but I wouldn't expect them to, their mother being from Libertville, Illinois via Edina, Minnesota.

I

Mike Tobin, Fox News Correspondent at Centcom in Qatar, had an interesting report on Brit Hume's show this evening about how journalism works:

There's been a real thirst in the press corps here to write something saying that the battle plan is off track. When the news came out that a 100,000 plus more troops were being sent, it was first being viewed as a desperate reach for more reinforcements. It was later learned that was part of the plan all along. And when this quote came out from Lt. General Wallace saying the battle plan was taking a little longer than expected, Brigadier General Brooks, who does the briefings regularly, was peppered with questions from an impatient press, trying to get him to cough up a sound bite saying that they had underestimated their opponent. (Clip of several correspondents asking essentially the same leading questions.)

He ended with clips from Al Jazeera demonstrating its "pro-Arab anti-American agenda." Hint. Hint.

But Brooks has stayed true to his message that the battle plans are going like clockwork.

This sure doesn't look like an objective search for truth, or even an effort toward interpretation. They all seem to have their stories written and are just looking for something to support them. Funny, too, how the stories are all the same, building on a quote from the New York Times.


The Times quotes General Wallace,

"The enemy we're fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against, because of these paramilitary forces.. . . We knew they were here, but we did not know how they would fight.. . .

"Technical vehicles with .50-caliber weapons � any kind of weapon � leading the charge," the general said, incredulous. "They were charging tanks and Bradleys." He termed such behavior "bizarre." . . .


Asked whether the fighting of recent days increased the chances of a longer war than forecast by some military planners, General Wallace said, "It's beginning to look that way."

This has been the talk all day long. Brit Hume put it to his "All-Stars' like a good cross-examiner, bringing out the point that Wallace's remark was being treated like an admission that the war had become bogged down in "quagmire," when it meant no such thing. General Brooks said that things are still still consistent with their original plan, so the whole story is now about the spin.

It has turned into a meta-issue of who raised expectations, and the administration has been badgered into going after the targets in Baghdad regardless of the civilians Saddam as placed around them. The atrocities of innocent civilians being killed will be furnished by Saddam whether we actually hit any or not, so maybe it doesn't matter, but it seems a little bloodthirsty on the part of these correspondents. It makes you wonder who the warmongers here are.

This morning the White House press corps were trying to impute some kind of dishonesty to the administration. Bill Plant from CBS started out complaining in accusatory tones to Ari Fleischerthat he had done "very little to lower expectations, in the run up to this. Even if you didn't raise them yourself, you did nothing to lower what we were hearing from the Pentagon, and from other outside pundits about how well, how quickly this war would go." Fleischer then respondes with quotes proving just the opposite.


What gives? Can't these people take responsibility? They get highly insulted that they are considered biassed and anti-American, but when you see stuff like this, how can you think anything else? One reporter (possibly Terry Moran of ABC) suggested to Fleischer that the Fedayeen Saddam weren't really thugs, but patriots and freedom fighters.


As always, Mara Liasson tries to defend her associates, but is unpersuasive, blaming it on the fact that these press conferences are broadcast live. Maybe that's why courts are worried about televising trials. These people were like a room full of Johnny Cochran clones.

I'm starting to gain some insight into the world of journalists, and I think that the world of lawyers might be more honest.

Brit Hume is in a position to critique his profession and he's doing so in a very Socratic way.

"Distinguished Egyptian journalist Hani Shukrallah" writes, "My little niece received a baptism of fire of sorts last Friday: her first police beating."

What is he distinguished for? Stupidity? That's not so distinguished. Our universities are full of people as stupid as this. The headline of his piece is "We are all Iraqis now". Sorry, Mr. Shukrallah, but we can only liberate one country at a time, and right now we're not at war with Egypt.

Start the celebration! R.. W. Apple has compared Iraq to Vietnam. Can victory be far behind?

Memo to the WaPo and Alan Sipress:


If you don't like the briefings at Centcom, don't attend them. The people there have better things to do than coddle snotty journalists. Go embed yourself.

Canada wants to try Saddam for war crimes. Would they have had this vote if there hadn't been a war?

I'm sure they think this will set a good example for the U.S. on how "civilized" people handle these things, but I have to wonder who they're going to send to arrest him.

Den Beste discusses initiation ceremonies and how they bind people to groups, which may explain why anti-war protests so often involve humiliating and degrading behavior. The interviews documented by Evan Coyne Maloney seem to bear this out. The protesters knew the slogans but they didn't seem to have a clue when they were asked to defend them.

I think that rock concerts and festivals like Woodstock or Grateful Dead concerts have a similar effect.

Initiations have been around as long as there have been people, because we are a social species, like so many others, and we find security in groups. Many of these, like organized crime "families," involve blood oaths.

Anyone familiar with the Book of Mormon will recognize the phrase "secret combinations."/br

Michael Ledeen details the French and German blackmail of Turkey to keep it from assisting the U.S. prosecute the war in Iraq. It has cost Turkey the most. I say follow the money. The conventional wisdom, that this behavior is just resentment of the leadership of the U.S., doesn't make sense to me. It has to be desperation to avoid the disclosure of criminal behavior by prominent officials in the Old Europe. I hope we are looking into this, because Chirac deserves to go to jail. Blood for French oil concessions, blood for money. The absolute corruption of this "diplomacy" only makes sense if political leaders in these countries have more at stake than mere national prestige.

MEMRI delivers the word from an Egyptian economist that the obstructionism of the Axis of Weasels was not due to jealousy of the USA's preeminence in power, but to plain old fashioned graft. They need to cover up their treachery and trading with the enemy, in violation of U.N. sanctions. So we know how much attention THEY pay to international law.

I've become a regular listerner to Hugh Hewitt's radio show over the net. Yesterday he got into a real argument with Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at USC, over a column Chemerinsky had in the L. A. Times on Tuesday (registration required), claiming that our complaints about Saddam's violation of the Geneva Convention it the treatment of our POWs was hypocritical or invalid because the U.S. has violated international law in our treatment of the internees at Guantanamo and because this war is illegal. Hugh reamed him on the grounds that he was furnishing arguments and excuses to the Iraqi regime.

Personally, I think that "international law" is only valid as long as governments consent to and obey it. It certainly didn't stop France, Germany and Russia from trading with Saddam in violation of U.N. sanctions, and then hamstring the U.N. Security Council when it turned out that we were serious about Resolution 1441.

I think that a lot of academics and liberals are in love with the idea of International Law and the U.N. as its embodiment partly because it is inhabited by smart people like themselves who don't have to be elected by anything so plebian as populations. Nearly everybody who works for the U.N. are the the New York Times sort of people, who resent the very idea that someone like George Bush could be elected President of the United States.

The problem is that laws passed by organizations without the power to enforce them are about as effective as the U.N. has been at dealing with Saddam. So, to cavil about the "legality" of this war shows a certain impracticality that one associates with the ivory tower of academia.

A lot of very bright people are adept at memorizing legal theories and cases, but have no sense of what works in the real world. International law doesn't. To argue that our treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo in any way shape or form legitimizes the atrocities committed against Americans taken captive by Iraqis, is casuistry that only a law professor whose life has been spent working for Appellate Court judges could do with a straight face.

James Carroll, Paul Krugman, Josh Marshall--they all have education, but not wisdom. How else could they have written such utter drivel? Marshall takes Michael Ledeen to task for calling the mistreatment of our POWs "terrorism," as though semantics should trump reality. Having made such laughable arguments, they should slink away in shame and try to rebuild their careers under assumed names, but as long as they work for editors and administrators who think the same way, there's no need for them to worry.

My letter to the NYTimes:

What would we say to a major American newspaper hiring Lord Haha or Tokyo Rose during World War II? Yet the New York Times keeps on publishing the drivel of Paul Krugman. He compares the destroying of Dixie Chicks's cds to Kristallnacht?

The Boston Globe prints a column by James Carroll comparing the palaces and ministry buildings of Saddam Hussein's regime to our Capitol, Whitehouse and Pentagon.

What is wrong with you people? Are you so overcome with outrage over your own impotence that you have lost all sense of proportion and logic? Krugman's scribblings have ceased to resemble reasoned commentary and turned into the verbal equivalent of the vomitus spread by protestors in San Francisco around the federal building there to symbolize their opposition to the war.

This must be the dreaded sophistry offensive that I had heard would certainly follow commencement of hostilities in Iraq, but I thought that sophistries were supporsed to persuade. These screeds and the more sophomoric word games of Maureen Dowd are just screwy. It's as though you were comparing the boycotting of French wine to the genocide in Bosnia.

This would be a good time to put your editorial pages on hiatus while your columnists undergo som anger management training. I'd miss Bill Safire, to be sure, and he's pretty non-vehement most of the time and doesn't need it, but we can't be discriminatory.

The New York Times is ceasing to be the newspaper of record and beginning to read more like an alternative weekly. It's too bad. Where will NPR turn to be told what's news?

I wonder how anyone could stomach to vote in such a way as to lead to another Tom Daschle victory statement to the press. That reedy passionless recitation of "great victory" leaves me thinking that sitting listening to prepared statements all day in committees must do some damage to the higher brain functions.

The great victory is that Congress will be able to keep the gravy train running. We wouldn't want too much money bein dumped into the economy all at once. That might lead to irrational exuberance. I'm no economist, but it seems quite apparent to me that meeting the demands of medicare and medicaid and social security won't be accomplished by keeping revenues and taxes at their present levels. The only thing that will do that is gearing up the economy. We need more wealth to do that, but government does not create wealth. It siphons it off. It's an economic tapeworm. Private capital creates wealth. We can excoriate the excesses of corporate CEOs, but no how much they get paid, they mostly create more real wealth than the most powerful senator. I'd like to see shareholders take back the control of their corporation from the management, who usually choose the Boards of Directors, but mostly I'd like to see more investment, and more profits on which to pay dividends, and raise everybody's tax bracket.

The 1990's was a powerful illustration of this, but it was built on a bubble, not real profits, but on the huge incomes generated by stock options combined with mad speculation. What we need is real growth based on real production of wealth, and that comes from real investment.

Clint Black answers the Blixie Chicks,

"I RAQ AND ROLL"

Words and Music by Clint Black and Hayden Nicholas

YOU CAN WAVE YOUR SIGNS IN PROTEST
AGAINST AMERICA TAKING STANDS
THE STANDS AMERICA'S TAKEN
ARE THE REASON THAT YOU CAN

IF EVERYONE WOULD GO FOR PEACE
THERE'D BE NO NEED FOR WAR
BUT WE CAN'T IGNORE THE DEVIL
HE'LL KEEP COMING BACK FOR MORE

SOME SEE THIS IN BLACK AND WHITE
OTHERS ONLY GRAY
WE'RE NOT BEGGING FOR A FIGHT
NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY

WE HAVE THE RESOLUTION
THAT SHOULD PUT'EM ALL TO SHAME
BUT IT'S A DIFFERENT KIND OF DEADLINE
WHEN I'M CALLED IN THE GAME

CHORUS
I RAQ, I RACK'EM UP AND I ROLL
I'M BACK AND I'M A HIGH TECH GI JOE
I PRAY FOR PEACE, PREPARE FOR WAR
AND I NEVER WILL FORGET
THERE'S NO PRICE TOO HIGH FOR FREEDOM
SO BE CAREFUL WHERE YOU TREAD

THIS TERROR ISN'T MAN TO MAN
THEY CAN BE NO MORE THAN COWARDS
IF THEY WON'T SHOW US THEIR WEAPONS
WE MIGHT HAVE TO SHOW THEM OURS

IT MIGHT BE A SMART BOMB
THEY FIND STUPID PEOPLE TOO
AND IF YOU STAND WITH THE LIKES OF SADDAM
ONE JUST MIIGHT FIND YOU

CHORUS II
I ROCK, I RACK'EM UP AND I ROLL
I'M BACK AND I'M A HIGH TECH GI JOE
I'VE GOT INFRARED, I'VE GOT GPS AND I'VE GOT THAT GOOD OLD FASHIONED LEAD
THERE'S NO PRICE TOO HIGH FOR FREEDOM
SO BE CAREFUL WHERE YOU TREAD

BRIDGE
NOW YOU CAN COME ALONG
OR YOU CAN STAY BEHIND
OR YOU CAN GET OUT OF THE WAY
BUT OUR TROOPS TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE
FOR THE GOOD OLD U.S.A.


I ROCK, I RACK'EM UP AND I ROLL
IN THE USA
I ROCK, I RACK'EM UP AND I ROLL
I'M TALKIN' ABOUT THE USA

Way to go, Clint! It sent chills through me.

Today's Diversity Moment

The Jerusalem Post reports that Palestinians are celebrating Saddam's power:

"Saddam has once again proven that he is a great leader, a defender of Arab rights. His men are brave. They have been able to teach the American and British dogs an unforgettable lesson. The Iraqis are much better at war because they have more experience. The American and British soldiers are cowards and spoiled kids."

Today's lesson, Arabs have a different view of honor and bravery than we do. They consider false surrender, use of human shields and murder of POWs "brave" and clever. We have to remember this and recognize that their values are not better or worse than ours. We should not be judgmental, except when it comes to Republicans and the military, who everyone knows are the worst kind of evil there is.

The Muslim people around the world must be very proud of their brethren fighting for Saddam. Fox News is reporting: Some troops are faking surrender and ditching their uniforms and fighting as guerillas.

The Fedayeen in Basrah are trying to suppress a popular uprising, and using Shiites as human shields in fighting the coalition troops.

In Naseriah, the Iraqi paramilitary took over a hospital and were firing from behind the protection of the Red Crescent
signs.

Some Iraqi troops are donning American uniforms and when their comrades try to surrender, shoot them.

There are sporadic reports of Iraqi troops fragging their officers so that they can return home.

Basrah is the second largest city in Iraq. It is out of food and water, and food shipments are being held up by Iraqi mining of Umm Qasr.

I wonder if anything could be done by dropping rations and water from the air. I wish there were something we civilians could do to get relief to themould do from he

At this afternoon's press briefing the White House Press Corps are being particularly obnoxious. It boils down to "Why hasn't the administration turned over the planning of this war to the NYTimes and the WaPo?" Why aren't you unloading food in Umm Qasr instead of sweeping for mines. I'm beginning to think we should embed these jerks with the Fedayeen.

I'm shocked, shocked to learn that our Russian friends, who opposed our efforts to enforce Resolution 1441 in the U.N. Security Council, turn out to have been selling Saddam's regime night vision equipment, and electronics for jamming our GPS targeting systems.

What'll be next? France? Germany?

Oh, No! the mimes are protesting the war. Will this erode Bush's support?

The coalition is broader than I had thought. We now have interspecies support. Of course, PETA will feel betrayed.

Look at this and then look at this. Now tell me which one is more gruesome.

Michael Moore, that pompous sanctimonious tub of guts, picked up an Oscar (registered trademark) tonight, butwas booed and drowned out by the orchestra when he started in on an anti-war diatribe.

I see the bodies of young men brutally tortured and murdered, and I think of King Lear's lines upon the death of Cordelia "No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all?" I think of the pain their families are suffering, and ask myself how I'd feel to see my sons be murdered like this. The only consolation I could feel is that they were there to serve others, and true to their duties. In the words of Tony Blair, "These were brave men who, in order to make us safer and more secure, knew the risks, faced the risks and had the courage to serve their country and the wider world."

I'm sure someone will make a movie about the young men and woman who were taken as POWs by Saddam's mafia. I won't watch it and I won't pay to see it. I didn't see "Blackhawk Down." Now I don't know if I ever want to see another war film. To make millions from the sacrifices of men and women whose pay is pocket change to the ghouls of Hollywood is immoral, especially when that money then goes to support opponents of defending freedom.

I suppose that Saving Private Ryan is an exception, because it illustrates the reasons why we honor these heroes, but I still think I'd rather send the money to something like Operation Uplink.

Mark Steyn's website is wonderful! It's especially nice to find all his columns at one site. The link is to his Letter of the Week from Mark Mike which contains a truly astounding quote from Kofi Annan in 1999:

To those for whom the greatest threat to the future of international order is the use of force in the absence of a Security Council mandate, one might ask - not in the context of Kosovo - but in the context of Rwanda: If, in those dark days and hours leading up to the genocide, a coalition of States had been prepared to act in defence of the Tutsi population, but did not receive prompt council authorization, should such a coalition have stood aside and allowed the horror to unfold?

As important as the Council's enforcement power is its deterrent power. Unless it is able to assert itself collectively where the cause is just and where the means are available, its credibility in the eyes of the world may well suffer.

If the collective conscience of humanity - a conscience which abhors cruelty, renounces injustice and seeks peace for all peoples - cannot find in the United Nations its greatest tribune, there is grave danger that it will look elsewhere for peace and justice. If it does not hear in our voices, and see in our actions, reflections of its own aspirations, its needs, and its fears, it may soon lose faith in our ability to make a difference.

Call in the Warthogs!

SF Demonstrators can no longer claim to be patriots or peaceful. They're terrorists.

I wonder what they'd say if someone carried a sign calling for the cops to shoot to kill anti-war marchers. Have you noticed that people like this wrap themselves in the Bill of Rights if anyone else uses his freedom of speech to challenge them? They don't seem to mind wasting the money and time of the city employees they require to keep them from rioting, but if someone released a bioterror weapon in SF during one of their tantrums, they'd be screaming that the government was responsible.

What if find so weird is that when they go out and demonstrate, they think that government is supposed to drop everything and obey them. When it doesn't, they complain that this isn't really a democracy. I wonder how many of them vote, or how many of them could make a coherent, let alone cogent, argument for their views.

Fine, let them have their free speech, but when they carry stuff like this, I wouldn't blame the cops for averting their eyes when some veteran takes them and their sign apart with a baseball bat, and if he got arrested, I'd recommend a presidential pardon.

This article about a new imperialism leaves me unconvinced, expecially in its use of Kiplings' "The White Man's Burden" and its racist overtone. Empire suggests that, like Rome, and most European powers who took Rome as their great model, all of the provinces are governed by appointed adminstrators from the center. If the U.S. were an empire, we wouldn't have had to worry about France and Germany's votes on the U.N. Security Council, or any other country's vote, for that matter. There wouldn't be a U.N. The U.S.S.R. was the last true empire.

Citizens of the U.S. would be overjoyed to bring home troops from Japan, Korea and Europe, but we tried isolationism before WWII. We have become the only Superpower left, not because we sought to rule the world, the opinions of Noam Chomsky notwithstanding, but because we didn't want to repeat the world wars of the 20th Century and because following WWII we were the only power capable of standing up to the Soviets while our allies were rebuilding.

If we were an empire, none of the European nations would have become socialist. It's ironic therefore that so many of the socialists here and abroad and to the north, blame us for the failure of their own economies to match ours. It is the same excuse which has been sold to the Arab nations, as well. The failure of Islam in those nations to keep up with the West has made the Arabs hate Western civilization all the more, because, according to the fundamentalist religionists, this wasn't supposed to happen. Islam was supposed to sweep the earth and turn it into a Muslim paradise. There are only two explanations for such failure: a lack of sufficient righteousness (hence Wahabism) or the inconceivable, Islam is not the truth. No one who has given his life to study of the Koran and the Hadith, and owes his power and position to that knowledge, is going to admit the second possibility. Democracy would mean the abandonment of Sharia, and is therefore out of the question. So these countries have either become subject to the Ayatollahs, the Mujahadeen and Talibans, or to fascist dictators.

Islam was supposed to be the ultimate empire, ruled from Mecca and Medina, but it has failed, not only because the West outpaced it technologically, militarily and economically, but because the Arabs are incapable of uniting. The first four caliphs were killed, either by religious radicals or by treacherous underlings. It took the Turks who were converts to Islam to createe the Ottoman Empire, whose greatest strengths were its pursuit of science and culture and toleration of other religions of the Book.

America is an Anti-empire, just as it began as a federation of independent states who freed themselves from colonialism. Their success eventually resulted in home rule and independence for all of Britain's former colonies. Whenever it conquered another country it has set about restoring its independence on democratic principles.

Of course, those who believe in Marxism as mankind's ultimate destiny, will hate that, and insist that spreading freedom and democracy around the globe is just another sneaky way to centralize U.S. power.

Call it Jefferson's Burden, if you want to, because we believe that democracy and a Bill of Rights (including, not incidentally, secular government recogniizing religion but disallowing any one sect from wielding political power) is the best thing for all mankind, but that is evangelism, not empire.

James Lileks' description of the BBC's snotty attitude for all things American isn't limited to the BBC. Fox News Channel's "sisiter network" Sky News, has some pretty cheeky chaps too, who seem determined to point out that our complaints that torture and execution of POWs is a violation of the Geneva Convention are equivalent to similar claims in the Islamic world about our treatment of terrorists taken to Quantanamo.

I guess I missed the filmed interrogations of these inmates on national television and the televising of the corpses after we tortured and executed them. But I seem to recall that none of these captives from Afghanistan and al Qaeda were in uniform or part of the armed forces of any signatory to the Geneva convention. Call me a nitpicker.

If not otherwise attributed, I followed links on InstaPundit.

This article about a new imperialism leaves me unconvinced, expecially in its use of Kiplings' "The White Man's Burden" and its racist overtone. Empire suggests that, like Rome, and most European powers who took Rome as their great model, all of the provinces are governed by appointed adminstrators from the center. If the U.S. were an empire, we wouldn't have had to worry about France and Germany's votes on the U.N. Security Council, or any other country's vote, for that matter. There wouldn't be a U.N. The U.S.S.R. was the last true empire.

Citizens of the U.S. would be overjoyed to bring home troops from Japan, Korea and Europe, but we tried isolationism before WWII. We have become the only Superpower left, not because we sought to rule the world, the opinions of Noam Chomsky notwithstanding, but because we didn't want to repeat the world wars of the 20th Century and because following WWII we were the only power capable of standing up to the Soviets while our allies were rebuilding.

If we were an empire, none of the European nations would have become socialist. It's ironic therefore that so many of the socialists here and abroad and to the north, blame us for the failure of their own economies to match ours. It is the same excuse which has been sold to the Arab nations, as well. The failure of Islam in those nations to keep up with the West has made the Arabs hate Western civilization all the more, because, according to the fundamentalist religionists, this wasn't supposed to happen. Islam was supposed to sweep the earth and turn it into a Muslim paradise. There are only two explanations for such failure: a lack of sufficient righteousness (hence Wahabism) or the inconceivable, Islam is not the truth. No one who has given his life to study of the Koran and the Hadith, and owes his power and position to that knowledge, is going to admit the second possibility. Democracy would mean the abandonment of Sharia, and is therefore out of the question. So these countries have either become subject to the Ayatollahs, the Mujahadeen and Talibans, or to fascist dictators.

Islam was supposed to be the ultimate empire, ruled from Mecca and Medina, but it has failed, not only because the West outpaced it technologically, militarily and economically, but because the Arabs are incapable of uniting. The first four caliphs were killed, either by religious radicals or by treacherous underlings. It took the Turks who were converts to Islam to createe the Ottoman Empire, whose greatest strengths were its pursuit of science and culture and toleration of other religions of the Book.

America is an Anti-empire, just as it began as a federation of independent states who freed themselves from colonialism. Their success eventually resulted in home rule and independence for all of Britain's former colonies. Whenever it conquered another country it has set about restoring its independence on democratic principles.

Of course, those who believe in Marxism as mankind's ultimate destiny, will hate that, and insist that spreading freedom and democracy around the globe is just another sneaky way to centralize U.S. power.

Call it Jefferson's Burden, if you want to, because we believe that democracy and a Bill of Rights (including, not incidentally, secular government recogniizing religion but disallowing any one sect from wielding political power) is the best thing for all mankind, but that is evangelism, not empire.