March 29, 2005

ADVANCES IN PALESTINIAN RESEARCH

Horsefeathers recommends three year Adjustable Rate Mortgages.

Koran scholar: US will cease to exist in 2007
By KHALED ABU TOAMEH
Jerusalem Post 3-29-2005

"A thorough analysis of the Koran reveals that the US will cease to exist in the year 2007, according to research published by Palestinian scholar Ziad Silwadi..."
See the rest here.

March 28, 2005

MITHRIDATES, HE DIED OLD: KING ABDULLAH STAYS ALIVE

"...There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more.
He sampled all her killing store:
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
--I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old."
--A.E. Housman from Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff

        While much has changed in the Middle East, human nature has not. In order to hold power and survive, tyrants must become masters of treachery and duplicity. For years, the late King Hussein of Jordan played a skillful double game: pretending in the West to be a "moderate" while siding at home with our enemies and currying favor with other Arab tyrants like Saddam Hussein. Now his son Abdullah is cooing sweet nothings in the ears of the Bush administration, while doing everything possible to derail the freedom train in Iraq. Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post makes the comparison between Abdullah and the late, unlamented Yasser Arafat: "...as Arafat did, Abdullah works against U.S. interests in Iraq and elsewhere while pretending otherwise. The youthful Jordanian autocrat pulls the wool over the eyes of a Republican president as the deceased Palestinian revolutionary did with Bush's Democratic predecessor..." See the rest here.

March 25, 2005

THE GRAVE'S A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE/BUT NONE I THINK DO THERE EMBRACE: TERRI SCHIAVO AND OUR OWN MORTALITY

        The torrent of cant from politicians and lawyers in the case of Terri Schiavo has rendered Horsefeathers silent---until now. Now that the politico-legal proceedings are just about over, one fact seems to have been consistently ignored: no one, neither Michael Schiavo, nor Terri's parents, none of the lawyers and pundits, not even the patient herself, knows what she feels, thinks or wants, or even if she is capable of feeling, thinking or wanting. The legal efforts to determine the "facts" of what she wanted 15 years ago are utterly absurd and irrelevant to her present state. The offhand comments of a healthy young woman are about as relevant to the reality of her situation many years later as the dorm room musings of an inexperienced adolescent about the meaning of life. This is not a Million Dollar Baby situation where Clint Eastwood can nobly help a patient carry out her clearly expressed wish to die. Given Mrs. Schiavo's current state of severe brain damage rendering her incapable of knowing and communicating, we are left with everyone else's fantasies- projections of our own anxieties, fears and hopes onto the blank slate she presents. Death, our own deaths, the ultimate affront to our narcissim, is what each of us sees, fears, and wants to escape. We each have our own way of dealing with this painful inevitability. Many turn to religious faith in an afterlife free of suffering, to which this life, full of trials and tribulations, is merely a precursor. Interestingly, some religious conservatives favor Terri's assisted death precisely because they are persuaded the afterlife will be kinder to her than her present condition. David Frum and Neil Boortz(here)take this position. Others, like Horsefeathers, put faith in the scientific method which argues that no convincing evidence of an after life exists. Consolation for us comes in the form of poetry, like Philip Larkin's Aubade in which he addresses the fear of death thusly:

"...This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear--no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round..."

        Horsefeathers' faith in the scientific method leads us to conclude that death is final; indeed, it is"the anesthetic from which none come round", and it is this finality which makes us extremely wary of terminating a life, even one as limited and constricted as Terri Schiavo's. We don't believe there is a better world to which she is going. At the same time, we do not fool ourselves into thinking she will recover. While there are some neurologists who differ, we accept the weight of medical judgment that the brain damage is too extensive to allow for recovery. We ourselves think we would want to have the plug pulled in similar circumstances, not because we'd prefer death to life, but because we'd want our relatives and loved ones to get on with the process of mourning so they could be free to live their own lives.
        Having said that, once we acknowledge the projected, personal nature of our speculations about Mrs. Schiavo's inner life, we are left with two irreducible facts: 1)Mrs. Schiavo's parents' desire to keep their severely damaged daughter alive, and 2)Mr. Schiavo's desire is for her to die. We think Terri's parents' wishes should trump his. We can understand Mr. Schiavo's position, even though we doubt his assertion that he is compassionately representing Mrs. Schiavo's wishes to be dead. It is much more plausible and understandable that he has moved on to create a new family, with a new 'wife' and children, and wants to be done with the past. Removing the feeding tube and letting Terri starve to death would mark a clear ending to that relationship. Terri's parents, on the other hand, want to take care of their severely damaged child in order to feel they've fulfilled the responsibilities they assumed when they brought her into the world. Horsefeathers regrets that these clashing personal wishes and needs were not worked out among the family members years ago. How sad that they were never able to bridge their differences. At this point though, one other important fact is clear: the Schiavos are personally willing to assume responsibility for their daughter's care. On the other hand, Mr. Schiavo is not willing to personally assume responsibility for ending Terri's life. He has left that to others: lawyers and health care workers have been the instruments through which his personal wishes have been expressed. Had he gone to the hospice and personally removed the feeding tube, or had he administered a morphine overdose, we would respect him for putting his money where his mouth is. We come down on the side of Mrs. Schiavo's parents. They have, it seems to us, earned the right to assume the burdens of caring for their daughter. They can't move on to find another daughter, as Mr. Schiavo can move on to find another wife. This is ultimately not about Terri but about the needs of the survivors.
        One additional point: as physicians we know there are many times when health care providers assist terminally ill people to die quickly. This is done after talking and listening to the family. We think this is a good thing, a function performed by physicians since time immemorial. Government already has too large a role in private health care decisions. This time the federal government may have intervened to keep a patient alive, but next time it may decide and direct health care workers to terminate unwanted lives. In Ray Bradbury's futuristic dystopia Fahrenheit 451, firemen no longer put out fires, but start them. We don't want the state employing and encouraging health care providers to become angels of death.

March 22, 2005

ON EDUCATION: BY RITA KRAMER

In an article (see below) in the New York Sun, Andrew Wolf discussed the continuing relevance of Rita Kramer's book, Ed School Follies. Horsefeathers is pleased to offer(following the Wolf article) Mrs. Kramer's current thoughts on a crisis that has worsened in recent years.

Education School Crisis

BY ANDREW WOLF
March 21, 2005

My erstwhile Bronx High School of Science classmate, Arthur Levine of Columbia University Teachers College, was in the news last week. He is the author of a three-part report on the state of the nation's education schools, the first part of which was released last week. It focuses on the programs designed to educate school leaders. Mr. Levine rejects every existing program as "inadequate and appalling."

Financing this four-year project is a laundry list of the usual suspects, the foundations behind every hare-brained educational "reform." Their ideas have taken American schools from among the world's best to a solid position among the world's most mediocre. Mr. Levine is not wrong about the uselessness of the current programs to train school leaders. He wants to eliminate the doctorate in education, and require a new master's degree in educational administration for principals and other school system administrators. He charges, accurately, that many of the graduate courses required of teachers and principals, upon which increases in salary depends, are a waste of time.

There is already predictable resentment among the education schools that largely follow the Teachers College educational philosophy and are now being told that what they do doesn't work. Bruce Cooper, chairman of the Division of Educational Leadership at Fordham University, said of Mr. Levine to the Westchester/Rockland Journal News, "I think he's in a funny position, because he hasn't cleaned up his own act."

The problem is that Mr. Levine may question the programs and structure of the education schools, but never challenges the underlying ideology that drives these institutions. Everything we need to know about the problems surrounding the education of teachers and administrators has been said in a book that is now nearly 15 years old, but still as fresh as if it was written yesterday.That book is "Ed School Follies," by Rita Kramer, the author of many books on education, child rearing, and historical subjects. She spent a year traveling, checking out schools of education in every corner of our nation. She visited the top schools (including Teachers College), private colleges, state universities, and church affiliated schools. At the end, having interviewed scores of professors, students, and educators, and sat in on many classes at each of the schools she discusses, Ms. Kramer painted a uniformly disturbing picture.

According to Ms. Kramer, prospective teachers are taught little of practical classroom strategies and little academic content. There is much discussion about the ills of society, racism, and sexism, almost always slanted to the left, usually to the far left. There is a lot of hand wringing about testing, and how it destroys the self-esteem of our children.

Ms. Kramer points out that "where the purpose of the educational system is to promote 'self-esteem' regardless of actual accomplishment, substitutes for accomplishment must be found. In the current political climate the chief substitute for measurable individual achievement has become emphasis on the (superior) characteristics of the racial or ethnic subgroup to which one belongs. As a result, the emphasis is shifted from the common values of the larger society to identification with the special interests - and perceived grievances - of this or that racial or ethnic group."

Testing is to be avoided not just for the supposed ill effects on the children, but because "no one wants to know the actual results of these policies - whether they really help poor students, how they affect the bright and the gifted. The ed school establishment is more concerned with politics - both academic and ideological - than with learning."

Departure from this value system is not permitted. Those who dare question the prevailing wisdom of cooperative learning strategies such as the "workshop model" mandated in all New York City classrooms, risk being called elitist or racist. In this perverse world, high performance is not the goal, but something that is actually to be avoided.

Since this book is based on research done more than 15 years ago, one might hope that perhaps things have changed for the better since then. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case.

The enduring validity of Ms. Kramer's conclusions was driven home to me recently when I participated in a panel discussion on progressive education at the Fieldston School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. I was joined on the panel by a professor from the Bank Street College of Education, one of the city's leading educational schools, whose president, Augusta Kappner, was appointed by Mayor Bloomberg to the Panel on Educational Policy.

The Bank Street College professor's presentation, frequently punctuated with concerns about peace and justice and racism, might have been taken right out of Ms. Kramer's book, yet another chapter in her distressing narrative. As I listened to him just last month, it became instantly clear to me just how fresh "Ed School Follies" remains.

The value system promoted in the ed schools has fully infected our school systems, as evidenced by the unfortunate curriculum choices and inflexible instructional mandates of the Department of Education here in New York. The last place reform will come from are those responsible for perpetuating these wrong-headed ideas in the first place.
---Andrew Wolf
__________________________________

An author is supposed to feel gratified when a book continues to be relevant years after it was published, but I confess to mixed feelings in this case. “Ed School Follies” was intended to let a wider public in on what went on in the institutions that trained the teachers for our children’s schools. It was not the only expose of its kind in the years after the National Commission on Excellence in Education published its report entitled “A Nation at Risk.” That widely publicized 1983 report characterized America’s schools as threatened by “a rising tide of mediocrity” and went on to declare that “If an unfriendly foreign power attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war” [but] “we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.” The report brought the shocking news that while we spent more per pupil on public education than any other nation, our students were consistently among the lowest scoring on international tests of academic achievement, especially in math and science.

It would be gratifying to be able to report that the many subsequent books and articles describing the dismal situation of American education finally changed things, but while there is greater awareness of the problems in our schools, and more efforts to solve them by offering parents choices outside the state system through charter schools and vouchers, the educational establishment goes on throwing more money into the system despite the fact that student achievement remains abysmally low.

What does it say that books like “Ed School Follies,” published more than a decade ago, still describe the current situation? It means, for one thing, that teachers are trained in the context of an ideology that has succeeded in redefining the goal of the public schools. Understanding the history of our democratic institutions and our inherited culture has been replaced by the attempt to turn the schools into agencies of social change. Striving for excellence has been replaced by the push toward egalitarianism that denies differences in abilities, discourages hard work, and fosters a “self-esteem” that has more to do with the politics of group identity than accomplishments earned through effort.

The strategies taught to our future teachers, few of whom have mastered any body of knowledge, any specific subject, include an emphasis on a multiculturism that makes all cultures equal, downplaying the Western tradition underlying this country’s distinctive character and achievements. A panoply of education-school fads have grown out of the theory that children “construct” their own knowledge, that teachers should not present themselves as authorities but as “facilitators.” These pedagogical fashions include the “whole language” method of teaching reading by word recognition rather than by phonics and the “fuzzy math” that encourages children to “construct” their own ways of dealing with numbers to arrive at their own answers, in the hope that they will get the concept if not the recognizably right solution. The advantages of these bizarre tactics for learning are said to be that they do not stifle the young mind with rote learning, drills, or even what have been described as “mere facts.” What the disadvantages are can be seen in the constant lowering of standards, evisceration of curricula, failure to encourage brighter students with more challenging opportunities, and—perhaps worst of all—failure to meet the needs of the students most at risk. While most children from middle-class families, read to and stimulated in various ways from their earliest days, manage to deal with the non-systematic approaches to letters and numbers, the children of poverty and broken homes who get their first taste of learning when they come to school are left behind, fail to thrive, and drop out in large numbers. This despite the fact that over and over it has been demonstrated that they learn better in programs based on the tried and true methods—phonics, memorization, and active instruction by authoritative teachers who impose discipline and convey clear expectations.

Between the destructive effects of the ideology-driven education-school establishment and the self-interest of the teachers’ unions protecting mediocre and even inadequate performance, there seems to be little hope for the schools unless the public-school monopoly gives way to some form of competition. When parents become aware of alternatives to the systems that are failing their children and demand the right to choose their schools, books like “Ed School Follies” will no longer be read. And as the author, I won’t mind.
--Rita Kramer

March 20, 2005

THE LITTLE BIRD THAT KEPT SO MANY WARM

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
--Emily Dickinson

Don't miss this from an Iraqi blogger. You won't find anything like it in the MSM, where freedom's success constitutes disaster.

"...I dont care what your news tells you, what your television and newspapers say, this is how we feel. Despite all that has happened. Despite all the hurt, the pain, blood, sweat and tears. These two years have given us hope we never had.

Before March 20, 2003, we were in a dungeon. We did not see the light. Saddam Hussain was crushing Iraq's spirit slowly, we longed for his end, but knew we could not challenge him, or his diabolical seed who would no doubt follow him and continue his generation of hell on Earth.

Since then, we now have hope. Hope is not a tangible thing, but it is something, it is more than being blinded by darkness, by being stuck in a mental pit without any future..."
See the rest here.

March 14, 2005

THE NEW YORKER BIDS TO RESTORE ITS REPUTATION FOR HUMOR

        It is a long time since Horsefeathers turned to The New Yorker for high quality comic writing. Truth be told, we rarely read it any more. The weekly anti-Bush rants of Jimmy Carter's speech writer, Hendrik Hertzberg, finally caused our eyes to glaze over once too often. However, in the wake of the Presidential election, the New Yorker's strenuous efforts to raise the spirits of their liberal elite readership is producing some hilarious comic writing. The New Yorker shares the view that the Democrats lost because they didn't seem tough enough. So the task is to make them look (rather than be) tough! No need to consider their message of nuanced, metrosexual, multilateral UN worship; no, it was nothing but a failure to effectively convey their inner toughness. They were so much smarter, so much deeper in their understanding than the dumb cowboy. What message could possibly have misled the public into their resounding verdict on the Dems- the guys who leave the barroom when the fight begins? It's got to be time for a makeover. Jeffrey Goldberg sets out to remedy the problem by offering up a lengthy portrait of a real tough Democrat--none other than the camera hogging, blow dried plagiarist Joe Biden! Biden's preening, coiffed presence suggests he really could kill---for camera time. Watch out Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden may trample you in a race for face time on Meet The Press.
        The whole Goldberg article is amusing. Did Goldberg mean to leave the reader with the impression of Biden the fool, a blowhard who tries to convey his toughness by liberal use of curse words? Goldberg first establishes Biden's limited geopolitical intelligence by quoting his assessment of Bush's policies towards Yasser Arafat. No mention of Bush's break with the longstanding policy of cozying up to the old terrorist, and instead isolating him and rendering him politically impotent. No, “This is a very lucky President,” Biden said. “Why did Arafat die on his watch? I mean, give me a break.” That last, "give me a break" is particularly rich. Yes, Joe it's all about you and we'll try to give you a break. Another instance of his deep understanding came in his pompously condescending advice to Condeleeza Rice: “For God’s sake, don’t listen to Rumsfeld. He doesn’t know what in the hell he’s talking about on this.” Of course, Joe knows. But it remains for Biden to establish his toughness credentials with the sympathetic interviewer. He does so by letting fly a string of obscenities reminiscent of a loud mouthed schoolyard bully. This is Senator Biden's assessment of his Republican colleagues who differed with him over policy towards Bosnia. "What is so transformational in the last four years is that these assholes who wouldn’t give President Clinton the authority to use force” have now become, he said, moral interventionists. “Give me a fucking break.” This time Joe asks not just for "a break" but for a "fucking break". What a guy! I'd really want him next to me in a foxhole. He'd probably curse his fate and blame the Sec'y of Defense for getting him into the predicament.
For the rest of the article see here.

TICK TOCK, TICK TOCK: THE KERRY CLOCK

The tall tales of our own Baron Munchausen, John Kerry, continue to exfoliate. We learned after the election that he ran guns to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Additionally, he promised to sign the SF180 that would release all of his military records. Horsefeathers suspects that this will happen on the day that our dog signs his contract to pitch for the Yankees. The zeal by the MSM to follow up on this promise has not been discernible. However, Polipundit has the daily countdown here.

March 12, 2005

GETTING ON BOARD W.'s FREEDOM TRAIN

        Here's an amazing report from the Arab world, by one of the President's most consistent critics, Youssef Ibrahim. Next thing you know the cafes of the Upper West Side of Manhattan may be hearing similar whispered concessions. Oh well, no need to despair, they can still revile W. for 'destroying social security'.

"...His talk (Bush's) about democracy is good," an Egyptian-born woman was telling companions at the Fatafeet (or "Crumbs") restaurant the other night, exuberant enough for her voice to carry to neighboring tables. "He keeps hitting this nail. That's good, by God, isn't it?" At another table, a Lebanese man was waxing enthusiastic over Bush's blunt and irreverent manner toward Arab autocrats. "It is good to light a fire under their feet," he said.

From Casablanca to Kuwait City, the writings of newspaper columnists and the chatter of pundits on Arabic language satellite television suggest a change in climate for advocates of human rights, constitutional reforms, business transparency, women's rights and limits on power. And while developments differ vastly from country to country, their common feature is a lifting -- albeit a tentative one -- of the fear that has for decades constricted the Arab mind.

Regardless of Bush's intentions -- which many Arabs and Muslims still view with suspicion -- the U.S. president and his neoconservative crowd are helping to spawn a spirit of reform and a new vigor to confront dynastic dictatorships and other assorted ills. It's enough for someone like me, who has felt that Bush's attitude toward the Mideast has been all wrong, to wonder whether his idea of setting the Muslim house in order is right..."
See the rest here.

IS DAVID BROOKS BECOMING A MALE MAUREEN?

        Working in the Church of Liberalism, the NYTimes, seems to be transforming Op-Ed writer David Brooks into a male version of Maureen Dowd. Once upon a time, Brooks was a thoughtful writer and deft critical thinker. Something has happened since he became an Op-Ed page regular at the NYTimes. Of course he has been garnering a 'strange new respect' amongst the Bush loathing readership of the paper. Still, no one expected to see him transformed into a metrosexual pundit for whom gesture, pose and feeling would substitute for ideas. No way would he ever become a self absorbed narcissist like Maureen Dowd. Oh well, another illusion shattered. Today's column (see here)reveals the infectious effect of chatting around the water cooler and hanging out down the hall from Dowd. It has many of the hallmarks of a typical Dowd column: false profundity displayed by making sweeping and meaningless generalizations ("...we are living in a pusillanimous age...").It's simultaneously incoherent and trivial, straining for humor, preoccupied with the most trendy aspects of pop culture--foody division. Brooks is confused about whether we're too moralistic or too self indulgent. Mostly however, this column is one extended exhibitionistic self referential display of David Brooks's sad struggles to endure a sybaritic feast at Antoine's in New Orleans, while lamenting that "...Now we lead lives in which everything is a pallid parody of itself: fat-free yogurt, salt-free pretzels, milk-free milk. Gone, at least among the responsible professional class, is the exuberance of the feast. Gone is the grand and pointless gesture..." How sad. Life is truly a bitter mystery.
        Mr. Brooks, the meal you describe was itself a grand and pointless gesture, but your column about it is only pointless. Perhaps, though, this column is really a plea for help, to be read as a message from a hostage desparate for freedom. Won't somebody rescue Brooks from the clutches of the NYTimes before it's too late.

March 09, 2005

THE LIBERAL MIND AND THE SEA OF FAITH

        There is nothing so rigid as a secular faith. One of the benefits of such faith for the true believer, is that it creates a sense of specialness, intelligence, strength, even invulnerability. When faith is shaken the consequences can be severe, for it is a faith without a God to provide sustenance in times of difficulty. Only gradually, if at all, can a new reality be acknowledged after the old one is destroyed. In recent years Liberal utopian faith has been shaken to its very foundations. The therapetic belief that all human conflict is caused by unfairness, inequality and deprivation, that all hatreds can be resolved by verbal reasoning, and Clintonian empathy, that institutions like the UN and the EU are noble ventures, that signed agreements and professions of good will can eliminate war, that the martial virtues are obsolete-- all these beliefs are threatened. The horrors of 9-11 weakened the multi-cultural relativism that sustains the Liberal Mind. The initial reaction to those terrible events was not to question the Liberal faith, but instead we saw the timeless reaction of true believers: seek scapegoats. Search out and attack the followers of Satan who must be to blame. These of course were the evil Jewish neo-cons and their Cowboy puppet, George Bush. Faith, when threatened, will initially turn on the un-believers rather than question the grounds of its own beliefs. The main house of Liberal worship, the UN, was revealed as an utterly corrupt enabler of tyrants and rapists. Political correctness, the catechism of Liberalism, had to accomodate the fact that it was our firemen, policemen and soldiers who sprang to the country's defense at the risk of their lives, not pampered Ivy Leaguers who were much too busy easing the bathroom conflicts of bisexuals, lesbians, gays and transsexuals.
        The pillars of Liberal faith were further shaken by the re-election of the President. It wasn't supposed to happen when such a paragon of multicultural, multilateral virtue as John Kerry was the Democratic candidate. Very often the initial reaction to a shock to one's belief system is denial followed by attempts to restore the old order. The church of Liberalism truly believed it would reestablish its rightful role as pursuer of the true and good with the election of Kerry.
        Try arguing a delusional person out of his belief that the earth is the center of the universe. He will become furious, accuse you of malice, ignorance and stupidity. If you mention that perhaps he enjoys feeling that he possesses a truth that enhances his own sense of self by putting him at the center of the universe, one that makes him smarter than even Einstein, he'll initially insist that you are insane and should be hospitalized. Slowly, very slowly, however, with appropriate understanding of how small and insignificant he really feels, the delusion may become unnecessary and fade away. It's a gradual process, requiring restraint and we should therefore try not to rub reality in the face of those Liberals who are showing glimmers of recognition. The church organ of Liberalism, the New York Times, (see here) is struggling to come to grips with the painful reality that the policies they fought so hard have accomplished a tremendous amount already, and more good seems on the way. How can this be? The use of force, the waging of war to bring about the liberation of millions of people? The very things the neo-conservatives argued for, happening? The horror! Yet here is Joe Lieberman in the NYTimes: "Look, this moment in the Middle East has the feel of Central and Eastern Europe around the collapse of the Berlin Wall,..."It's a very different historical and political context, and we all understand that democracy in the Middle East is in its infancy. But something is happening."
        Mr. Lieberman said Mr. Bush deserved credit for at least two things: the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the continued American military presence in Iraq, which he said showed "the proven willingness of the United States to put its power behind its principles."

        Such real events might even throw into question the central dogma: Liberalism's intellectual superiority. My God, what if liberals are not as intelligent as they believe? These are difficult times and we should understand the melancholy gripping the Liberal Mind. As Matthew Arnold put it in his poem Dover Beach,

"...The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world..."

        Here is the latest New York Times effort at self-healing. While it still clings to some shreds of hope for future disasters, it has taken the first few steps in a multi-step process towards acceptance of the world as it is, rather than as it exists in the dreams of Gail Collins's editorial board. We should all encourage these forays into the real world and perhaps the NYTimes editorial board will one day breathe free. If liberation can come to Kabul, Baghdad and perhaps to Beirut, surely one day it will come to W. 43d St. and the New York Times.

March 05, 2005

FIGHTING THE WAR OF IDEAS: THE NYTIMES RETREATS AND COUNTERATTACKS

        The buzzing in the liberal hive continues. How to account for the recent favorable changes in the Middle East? Having spent months promoting John Kerry as a subtle internationalist, by contrast with the simpleton George Bush, Roger Simon of the NYTimes, like Gail Collins and the Editorial Board, now pivots to endorse the changes occurring in the Arab world. Not that neo-conservative policy or George Bush had anything to do with it, other than to ignorantly impose change by brute force. Such an acknowledgment by Simon that Bush was correct, with its tacit admission of his own wrongheadedness would be intolerable, too much of a blow to the narcissistic self-regard that is crucial to membership in the church of Liberalism.

        Read this article carefully to discern the efforts of the Liberal mind to come to grips with the positive results of neo-conservative policies they fought tooth and nail for years. Some like Doris Kearns Goodwin argue that Bush has succeeded, to the limited extent she can admit, by dumb luck. Recent changes, though certainly related to our actions in Iraq, according to Simon, present dreadful new dangers. We can see that, despite the wrongheadedness of the NYTimes over many months, their newly evolving position is that we need their insights more than ever. In fact the new dangers require liberal nuance and subtlety to rescue us from hubris and Bushian triumphalism. Truth is, however, an alliance exists between NYTimes liberals like Roger Simon and our totalitarian enemies. They both fear and detest freedom. Freedom of ideas, which they both fight, one in the name of Islam, the other in the name of politically correct liberalism, might allow non-liberal ideas to prevail. Horror of horrors. Roger Simon sums up the modern liberal faith when he warns of the danges of Democracy. The following paragraph sums up the current state of the Liberal Mind: "President George W. Bush has argued that America's ideals are now synonymous with its interests; the spread of freedom will drain the frustration and rage on which terrorism feeds. The argument is beautiful in its simplicity. But it is precisely in democratic Europe that Mohammed Atta, a mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, lived for about a decade, and it is from Britain, scarcely a stranger to liberty, that Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber of American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami, hailed. Democracy can open the way for many things including illiberal opinion..."("Illiberal opinion= any opinion differing from the NYTimes politically correct utopianism)

        In one short paragraph, we're informed that Bush is simple mindedly naive, and that liberals like Cohen are far more sophisticated. Really Cohen's 'sophistication'is absurd. He seems to think that the fact that Mohammed Atta and Richard Reid lived in the West disconnects their Islamist fanaticism from its Middle Eastern sources. With sophisticated liberal thinkers like Cohen, we don't need enemies. Read it all here.

March 01, 2005

MR. SULZBERGER TEAR DOWN THE NYTIMES WALL

        Like Hosni Mubarak, Bashar Assad and Moammar Qadaffi, the editorial board of the NYTimes is quite suddenly, running scared. They never thought the dumb cowboy in the White House might know what he was doing. What if they were wrong all along and because of their Liberal faith, utterly missed the signs of Bush and America's success in spreading freedom? Now they are scrambling for safety while their months of unrelenting doom and gloom efforts to undermine the President are shoved down the memory hole. George Orwell once observed that pacifists in the 1940's were 'objectively' on the side of the Nazis because weakening the will of the allies helped our enemies. The New York Times has been 'objectively' on the side of Islamo-fascism, hoping to force President Bush to abandon his aggressive forward strategy of change in the Middle East. Reading today's editorial (See below. Horsefeathers comments in italics) is like visiting an alternate reality. It is as if the NYTimes's own history began yesterday. Nowhere in it do Gail Collins and Co., acknowledge that the successes they now discern are the outcome of policies they fought tooth and nail, policies promoted by the President they condescended to for years. The discerning reader will note, however, that this editorial must have been written with all the enthusiasm of someone dining on well done crow. Horsefeathers confesses to schadenfreude at the troubles of Middle Eastern tyrants and their New York Times enablers. We will even indulge ourselves in the fantasy that Arthur Sulzberger is feeling the heat a la Mubarak, Assad, and their fellow tyrants. Let Freedom Ring--from Beirut to Damascus to 223 West 43d Street.

Mideast Climate Change
Published: March 1, 2005

It's not even spring yet, but a long-frozen political order seems to be cracking all over the Middle East. (Just a natural and inevitable process, like the changing of the seasons. At this point in the editorial no hand of Bush can be discerned)Cautious hopes for something new and better are stirring along the Tigris and the Nile, the elegant boulevards of Beirut, and the impoverished towns of the Gaza Strip. It is far too soon for any certainties about ultimate outcomes. In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes for headlines with post-election democratic maneuvering. Yesterday a suicide bomber plowed into a crowd of Iraqi police and Army recruits, killing at least 122 people - the largest death toll in a single such bombing since the American invasion(not a multi-lateral effort, but an 'American invasion', and don't bother mentioning that it was an invasion designed to accomplish something, the overthrow of a brutal and dangerous tyrant. No it was just a de-contextualized U.S. 'invasion')nearly two years ago. And the Palestinian terrorists who blew up a Tel Aviv nightclub last Friday underscored the continuing fragility of what has now been almost two months of steady political and diplomatic progress between Israelis and Palestinians.
Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share (as opposed to an unhealthy share? How about acknowledging that military action, war and the use of overwhelming, killing force after years of diplomatic dithering, of Clintonian apologies, was the ONLY change of policy that mattered?)of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq,(here's the real giveaway--"all the negative consequences"--this is what all the Times's whining and carping over our alienating our friends, the UN, the Muslim world, the cause of multilateralism, etc. has been reduced to, and one can practically hear a senior editor shouting "no mas".) there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power. (No shit Sherlock! And who would have been in power in Iraq if the Bush administration had paid attention to Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd, Nick Kristof, Paul Krugman and the never ending parade of op-ed critics?) Washington's challenge now lies in finding ways to nurture and encourage these still fragile trends without smothering them in a triumphalist embrace.("triumphalist embrace" tr.: please don't be too aggressively masculine and rub it in by pointing out what metrosexual wimps we are.)
Lebanon's political reawakening took a significant new turn yesterday when popular protests brought down the pro-Syrian government of Prime Minister Omar Karami. Syria's occupation of Lebanon, nearly three decades long, started tottering after the Feb. 14 assassination of the country's leading independent politician, the former prime minister Rafik Hariri.

If Damascus had a hand in this murder, as many Lebanese suspect, it had a boomerang effect on Lebanon's politics. Instead of intimidating critics of Syria's dominant role, it inflamed them. To stem the growing backlash over the Hariri murder, last week Syria announced its intentions to pull back its occupation forces to a region near the border - although without offering any firm timetable. Yesterday, with protests continuing, the pro-Syrian cabinet resigned. Washington, in an unusual alliance with France, continues to press for full compliance with the Security Council's demand for an early and complete Syrian withdrawal. That needs to happen promptly. Once Syria is gone, Hezbollah, which has engaged in international terrorism under Syrian protection, must either confine itself to peaceful political activity or be shut down.

Last weekend's surprise announcement of plans to hold at least nominally competitive presidential elections in Egypt could prove even more historic, although many of the specific details seem likely to be disappointing. Egypt is the Arab world's most populous country and one of its most politically influential. In more than five millenniums of recorded history, it has never seen a truly free and competitive election.

To be realistic, Egypt isn't likely to see one this year either. For all his talk of opening up the process, President Hosni Mubarak, 76, is likely to make sure that no threatening candidates emerge to deny him a fifth six-year term. But after seeing more than eight million Iraqis choose their leaders in January, Egypt's voters, and its increasingly courageous opposition movement, will no longer retreat into sullen hopelessness so readily. The Bush administration has helped foster that feeling of hope for a democratic future by keeping the pressure on Mr. Mubarak. But the real heroes are on-the-ground patriots like Ayman Nour, who founded a new party aptly named Tomorrow last October and is now in jail. If Mr. Mubarak truly wants more open politics, he should free Mr. Nour promptly.

It is similarly encouraging that the terrorists who attacked a Tel Aviv nightclub on Friday, killing five Israelis, have not yet managed to completely scuttle the new peace dynamic between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel contends that those terrorists were sponsored by Syria, but its soldiers reported discovering an explosives-filled car in the West Bank yesterday. The good news is that the leaders on both sides did not instantly retreat to familiar corners in angry rejectionism. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, have proved they can work together to thwart terrorism and deny terrorists an instant veto over progress toward a negotiated peace.

Over the past two decades, as democracies replaced police states across Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, and a new economic dynamism lifted hundreds of millions of eastern and southern Asia out of poverty and into the middle class, the Middle East stagnated in a perverse time warp that reduced its brightest people to hopelessness or barely contained rage. The wonder is less that a new political restlessness is finally visible, but that it took so long to break through the ice.(The real wonder is that it has taken so long for the New York Times to begin, oh so tentatively, and self protectively, to awaken from its utopian slumbers. From the Times's Walter Duranty lying on behalf of the noble Uncle Joe Stalin, to the editorialists who defended Yasser Arafat, the Times has been steadfastly in thrall to totalitarians who cooed noble dreams in the ears of reporters.)

        Like the Times editorialists, we will conclude with a reference to Spring: the baseball season is soon to begin. It took 86 years for Red Sox fans to experience the joy of triumphing over the Yankees. It has been 73 years since Walter Duranty got the Pulitzer Prize for reporting the glorious triumphs of Communism. Perhaps the time is coming, hopefully in less than 12 years, when the mighty Sulzberger edifice will go the way of Ozymandias. Meanwhile, we'll be rooting for the New York Sun.

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