March 31, 2007

HAVE WE LEARNED NOTHING? PASSOVER 1943--2007

        Passover 2007 will occur in a world that Hitler would recognize. Nazism may be gone, but it has been succeeded by another utopian perversion, totalitarian Islam, which blames its own failings on the Jews and teaches its followers the glories of martyrdom in pursuit of a Jew free world. Its ideological leaders promise they will succeed, using nuclear weapons, where Hitler failed. Meanwhile the world, once again, bends over backwards trying to deny the threat and figuring out new ways to feed the crocodile. Now, instead of Chamberlain flying to Berlin to talk with Herr Hitler, we have Nancy Pelosi flying to Damascus to meet with the chinless opthalmologist, Basher Assad.
        Here are the words of one who refused to deny reality.
          (Horsefeathers remembers and misses the excellent blog of Arthur Chrenkoff where this interview first appeared.)

Marek Edelman is the last surviving military leader of the heroic Jewish Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. (See his account here.)He recently spoke to a Polish television channel TVN24, and the interview has been re-published in a Polish weekly "Przekroj". It's not available anywhere else in English (or for that matter electronically), so I take this opportunity to translate and publish extensive excerpts from the interview. Edelman experienced evil many times in his long and distinguished life; he has also faced it and fought it bravely. What he has to say bears listening to.
--Arthur Chrenkoff

Interviewer: Not a day seems to go by in Iraq without a terrorist attack, and in the last few days two Polish soldiers and a Polish journalist have died.

Edelman: And do you know any war where nobody dies? I don't. Alas, it's in man's make-up; there's a fatal flaw there that makes him kill, for pleasure or over some silly beliefs.

Interviewer: So this war is one over some silly beliefs?

Edelman: Now, now. Who started killing people? Americans didn't invade a wonderful democratic Iraq. There was a dictatorship there, torture, terror.

Interviewer: But there are people who say it's not our business.

Edelman: And whose business is it? Every war with fascism is our business. In 1939 there were also many people who said that the war in Poland was not their war, and what happened? Great nations fell because politicians listened to those who were saying that it's not worth dying for Gdansk [Danzig]. If only we'd intervened militarily after Hitler re-entered Rhineland we probably would not have had the war and the Holocaust.

Interviewer: Many people do understand that, but they don't understand why the Americans have to go to the other side of the world and fight over Iraq now.

Edelman: And why did they go to Europe then? Who defeated Hitler and saved Europe from fascism? The French? No, the Americans did. We thanked them then because they saved us. Today we criticise them because they're saving somebody else.

Interviewer: Returning to the question about having Polish soldier on the ground in Iraq. Many Poles don't want them there.

Edelman: If they don't want them there, let's just keep waiting and then let's see from which direction the rockets and the bombs will come from - will we in the end be lorded over by Saddam's viceroys or Bin Laden's, just as we were once lorded over by Hitler's viceroys.

Interviewer: Do you really believe in such a scenario?

Edelman: It's possible. If we will keep closing our eyes to evil, then that evil will defeat us tomorrow. Unfortunately there's more hatred in men than love. Those who murder understand only force and nothing else. And the only force that is able to stand against them is the American democracy.

Interviewer: But the Americans aren't going too well with introducing democracy in Iraq.

Edelman: That's true, but it's a difficult war. The Second World War went for five years. Democracy tends to be structurally weak. Dictatorship is strong. Hitler was able to mobilise several million people and chase another few million into gas chambers or slave labour. But only democracy saves the humanity and saves millions of lives. The more I see people getting murdered the more I believe that we need to put a stop to that. The murderers understand only deeds.

Interviewer: What about the photos from Abu Ghraib - don't they cause you to start question that American democracy?

Edelman: Well, it happened. Among several hundred thousand American soldiers there were a few perverts...

Interviewer: But the incident nevertheless seriously damaged America's standing. What to say to Polish people after the death of several more of our soldiers?

Edelman: But they died fighting for their freedom. How many thousands of people died in the Warsaw Uprising [in 1944]?

Interviewer: But those people then were fighting for their country.

Edelman: They were fighting for their world. Free and democratic. Just like those who died during the martial law [in Poland in 1981-3]. Did they die only for Poland? No. They died for the freedom of the whole Europe, for the freedom of all those enslaved behind the Iron Curtain.

Interviewer: But the Spanish withdrew their troops from Iraq after the terrorist attack in Madrid.

Edelman: Please don't tell me what the Spanish did. So what? Do you seriously think that it will save them from further attacks? No. The weak just get punched in the head. Pacifism lost a long time ago.

Interviewer: There are more and more voices saying that Poland shouldn't work so close with the Americans and that instead we should get closer to France and Germany.

Edelman: France used to be a great power, culturally and intellectually. And what happened to them? They didn't want to fight for their own democracy, they thought it wasn't really their war [in 1939]. And they lost everything, because when you bend over and take it - even once - then you're finished. And what's that whole talk about the difference between American politics and European politics? There is no other politics but international democratic politics. If we withdraw from Iraq now, what do we have left? Cosying up to Iran and Saudi Arabia? ...

Interviewer: Is it possible to introduce democracy by force?

Edelman: Yugoslavia showed that it's possible...

Interviewer: You used your own personal history and your moral authority to appeal for the intervention then.

Edelman: Yes... Those who say that you don't have to fight for freedom, don't understand what fascism is. I do.

March 26, 2007

CLEARING AWAY CANT

        Moments of utter triumph have been rare, of late. Most of the time cowards are competing with one another as to who can submit more completely to the jihadis. Hillel Neuer is one guy I'd want in the foxhole with me when the jihadis come to get us. Note the reaction of the UN castrati! Priceless.

March 25, 2007

A Post-Modern, Non-Correction Correction, By The NYTimes

        For PoMo journalists, the 'narrative' is crucial. Facts can always be selected to further the narrative. The PoMo journalist is not a grubby impartial fact gatherer, bound by truth and falsity. She has a higher calling. Sometimes that calling requires acknowledging errors. Never should such acknowledgment be understood as an apology for lying. It's never deliberate. If anything, it's understandable zealousness in pursuit of a noble story. Any correction is more like adjusting a story line than acknowledging falsehoods. In the standard liberal, left narrative, women are always victims of rapacious men who must be exposed and punished. War itself is, of course, always bad, a man's game, offering possibilities for sexual exploitation of innocent women. On March 18 the Times published one of their more or less predictable tearjerking tales of female victimization, The Women's War. The "correction" offered today is more informative than the original story, which was the usual NYTimes narrative of the plight of American women. Having run a story featuring the sexual victimization of female soldiers in Iraq, the Times discovered one little problem after the story ran--one of the women we were meant to sympathize with never actually served in Iraq, nor is there evidence she was a victim of sexual abuse. Of course, the "correction" by the good little PoMos at the NYTimes never mentions the possibility that Ms. Randall is a serial liar. Oh no, since her aims are noble she can't possibly be a sociopath. Instead the Times suggests that she honestly believed her own fabrications and only just learned, by asking another member of her unit, that she had not actually been in Iraq. We should therefore sympathize with her plight, and by extension with the NYTimes, so eager were they to help expose the seamy side of war that they just didn't bother with the trivial matter of fact checking before they ran the story.

"...On March 12, three days after the article had gone to press, the Navy called The Times to say that it had found that Ms. Randall had never received imminent-danger pay or a combat-zone tax exemption, indicating that she was never in Iraq. Only part of her unit was sent there; Ms. Randall served with another part of it in Guam. The Navy also said that Ms. Randall was given the medal with the insignia because of a clerical error.

Based on the information that came to light after the article was printed, it is now clear that Ms. Randall did not serve in Iraq, but may have become convinced she did. Since the article appeared, Ms. Randall herself has questioned another member of her unit, who told Ms. Randall that she was not deployed to Iraq. If The Times had learned these facts before publication, it would not have included Ms. Randall in the article."
        Anyone foolish enough to believe Ms. Randall convinced herself she'd been to Iraq will very likely believe the NYTimes is a legitimate 'newspaper', rather than an organ of propaganda for the Bush hating left. I guess that's what the editorial board is hoping.

March 17, 2007

THE NYTIMES: ADVANCING POST-MODERN LIBERAL IDEOLOGY, ONE GENDER AT A TIME

       A key part of contemporary liberalism's utopian agenda is the elimination of the differences between the sexes. Gender, they inform us, is "socially constructed" hence we can deconstruct the differences between the sexes and create new post-modern selves, not limited by biology. Biology itself is a creation of the patriarchy designed to enslave women.
        The official propaganda organ of Post-modern liberalism, the New York Times, loves to print heart tugging stories of the unfair treatment of BLGT's (bisexuals, lesbians, gays and transgenders). These are usually intended to create guilt in men, and feelings of grievance in women against the 'patriarchy' for insisting on real, biologically derived differences. The great day when men have been completely feminized may still be off in the future, but the Times is always on the alert to celebrate the softer, weepy, side of the metrosexual empaths they call 'men'. Now even male athletes are expected to be acutely aware of and communicative about their feelings. The master of the feigned feeling, Bill Clinton, rode to the Presidency on his ability to shed crocodile tears while feeling your pain.
        It had slipped past Horsefeathers that there is another way to eliminate the differences between the sexes. Even the Times was a bit slow on the uptake, but now they've discovered new cause for celebration. While men are being feminized, women can be masculinized. Hooray for equality! Here's a heartwarming story of girl weightlifters who have rejected the 'stereotype" of the female body, in favor of accumulating the necessary poundage, grotesque musculature and freakish appearance of male weightlifters. The Times breathlessly reports on this latest cultural advance of liberalism. They quote the weightlifting coach of the 261 lb. team leader: "...it’s a great way to get girls involved for gender equity..." Ain't social progress grand?
See the entire story (don't miss the fetching photograph) here.

March 10, 2007

DOES BIN LADEN HAVE A DIRECT LINE TO ALLAH: HORSEFEATHERS REVIEWS THE LOOMING TOWER

Once every few hundred years an individual is born who single-handedly, for good or ill, changes the world forever. Jesus was one such individual, Hitler, another. These individuals are endowed with exactly the right set of personal characteristics which will combine with the exactly right set of accidental opportunities to create a transcendant event, immutable and irreversible. Perhaps Osama Bin Laden was such an individual. So suggests Lawrence Wright in “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11.”

“One can ask, at this point, whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it. The answer is certainly not. Indeed…history [was] promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world; however, the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest…. Al-Qaeda depended on a unique conjunction of personalities, in particular the Egyptians—Zawahiri, Abu Ubaydah….But without bin Laden, the Egyptians were only…parochial. At a time when there were many Islamist movements, all of them concentrated on nationalist goals, it was bin Laden’s vision to create an international jihad corps. It was his leadership that held together an organization that had been bankrupted and thrown into exile. It was bin Laden’s tenacity that made him deaf to the moral quarrels that attended the murder of so many and indifferent to the repeated failures that would have destroyed most men’s dreams. All of these were qualities that one can ascribe to a cult leader or a madman. But there was also the artistry involved, not only to achieve the spectacular effect but also to enlist the imagination of the men whose lives bin Laden required.”

Wright’s book is about others—Zawahiri and John P. O’Neill, the heroic G-Man who was killed on 9/11 at the World Trade Center; and also about the outrageous struggle between the CIA and FBI to keep each from getting important information which might have prevented the catastrophe. But the central focus of the book is on the evolution of Al-Qaeda and bin Laden as an international terrorist.

Wright is a master storyteller endowed with the integrity and conscience of a historian, resulting in a trustworthy and compelling narrative.

Bin Laden’s story begins with his father, Mohammed bin Laden. “One cannot understand the scale of the son’s ambition without appreciating the father’s accomplishment. Remote and powerful but humble in manner….He presented a formidable model to a young man who idolized him and hoped to equal, if not surpass, his achievements.”

Mohammed bin Laden, an illiterate but clever young man, fled a severe drought in Yemen to go to Arabia in the early thirties, before oil had been discovered. At that time it was a poor and desolate place where the economy had to survive on the few tourists who might make their once-in-a-lifetime visit to Mecca. In 1931, bin Laden could find work only as a dockworker in Jeddah. But soon after oil became a major interest in the country he became a bricklayer for Aramco. He was quickly recognized by American engineers as a hard-working, exacting builder of projects too small for the major contractors, and was supported by Aramco in his entrepreneurial efforts.

Gradually and in small increments bin Laden’s reputation grew and he became increasingly close to the royal family by responding to their special needs and palatial whims. Eventually his loyalty was rewarded when a British contractor defaulted on a project to build a highway between Jeddah and Medina; the contract was given to bin Laden at the same fee that would have been paid to the foreign company.

In the following years—the fifties—there were countless building projects—highways, major mosques, palaces, the bureaucracies at the new capital city of Riyadh—resulting in a consortium of bin Laden companies collectively known as the Saudi bin Laden Group, one of the largest construction companies in the world.

Although he became immensely wealthy and was on close terms with the Royal Family and all of the important people in the Kingdom, he lived quietly and unpretentiously in Jeddah in a large ramshackle house with his many wives and 57 children. Although most of them yearned for his companionship, he saw them infrequently and when he did he was distant and frugal in his communications.

Osama was especially frustrated in this respect for bin Laden divorced his mother when he was four or five and he went to live with his new stepfather not too far from the large house where his 25 brothers lived. Perhaps this circumstance had to do with the fact that even though Osama was sent to the same fine school as his brothers, he did not do well there and in fact left school. His brothers went on, succeeded educationally and went into the family business while Osama remained to some degree alienated from the rest of his sibs and their interests.

Wright can only provide a fragmented picture of bin Laden’s childhood and youth, barely enough to suggest connections between his past and his role as apocalyptic leader.
He saw himself, early on, as an authority in his immediate family—perhaps even superseding his stepfather. Everyone around him felt his self-confidence and charisma. He was often lost in his own thoughts and fantasies, which probably contributed to the fact that he was not a superior student in school and unlike his brothers dropped out of college. At about age fourteen he became extremely pious, excessively religious and anxious about matters of sexuality. This soon led to a preoccupation with the puritanical spirit of radical Islam and to his studying the works of Sayyid Qutb. It was a short step from there to his joining the Muslim Brotherhood, which at that time had more benign political aims than its successors eventually adopted.

What stands out from the fragments of information from that period of his life is his unswerving dedication to his own beliefs and views, and his incapacity to be influenced by others.

Al-Qaeda did not spring suddenly from bin Laden’s imagination. He is not an instigator, an entrepreneur of terror; if anything, he is a capitalist of terror, the supporter of schemes. Al-Qaeda emerged gradually out of the struggles among a number of radical Islamic groups, beginning with the Muslim Brotherhood, and between them and the various governments hostile to their theocratic aims. After the withdrawal of the infidel Soviets from Afghanistan in 1988, many of these splintered Jihadist groups tried to unify themselves into an effective group which came to be known as Qaeda—the base. There were several leaders among these groups, but bin Laden was thought to be the central figure because of his wealth and contacts in Saudi Arabia; also important was Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, who is now deputy leader of Al-Qaeda but in the early days was the leader of an anti-Egyptian terror group and had clear ideas for a jihadi strategy which included the murder of even innocent muslim women and children—a jihad notion known as takfir. And although there were others opposed to Zawahiri, the latter saw bin Laden as the carrier of his own ideas. He would supply the direction to the movement and bin Laden would be the nominal leader—the Sheik—and supply the money. So Al-Qaeda came into being in 1988 as an attempt to unify the splintered radical Islamists, but without any articulated antagonism yet against America or the West. Each of the various factions was primarily interested in bringing a purer form of Islam to its respective country.

For the next three or four years bin Laden hibernated in Sudan, where he kept his little army—paid well by his great fortune from his family’s assets—engaged in various forms of failed business enterprises, prayer, and bootcamp-style training. Typical of bin Laden, he could not formulate a mission or plan without another individual to inspire him.

In 1992 his close friend and Imam Abu Hajer performed the role of instigator. He and bin Laden, persuaded that American power and influence were moving into the area, not only in a military base in Saudi Arabia, but using the excuse of the famine in Somalia to occupy the Horn of Africa. Now it seemed to them that America was expanding its influence into the whole Islamic region.

At the end of 1992, they discussed the threat of the expanding U.S. presence, and saw that America was the locus of Christianity—not the increasingly secularized Europe—especially the evangelizing American kind. Says Wright, “Viewed through the eyes of men who were spiritually anchored in the seventh century, Christianity was not just a rival, it was the archenemy. To them the Crusades were a continual historical process that would never be resolved until the final victory of Islam. They bitterly perceived the contradiction embodied by Islam’s long, steady retreat from the gates of Vienna, where on September 11—that now resonant date—in 1683, the king of Poland began the battle that turned back the farthest advance of the Muslim armies.”

It was on Abu Hajer’s authority that Al-Qaeda was permanently transformed from the anti-communist Islamic army that bin Laden originally envisioned into an international terrorist organization with America as its target. Now “Al-qaeda would concentrate not on fighting armies but on killing civilians,” according to the principle of takfir.

The Quran explicitly states that Muslims shall not kill anyone, except as punishment for murder.The killing of Muslims is an even greater offense. Sayyid Qutb, the philosopher of modern Arabic terrorism, found a way around these Quranic strictures. He asserted that a leader who does not impose sharia law on the country must be an apostate. This is based on a well-known saying of the Prophet that the blood of Muslims cannot be shed except in three instances: as punishment for murder, or for marital infidelity (of the wife), or for turning away from Islam. It was only a step or two to extending the principle of takfir to apply to any modern behavior. And this is what the new radical Islamists have done. Explains Wright, “The new takfiris…extended the death warrant to encompass, for instance, anyone who registered to vote. Democracy, in their view, was against Islam because it placed in the hands of people authority that properly belonged to God. Therefore, anyone who voted was an apostate, and his life was forfeit….The new takfiris believed that they were entitled to kill practically anyone and everyone who stood in their way; indeed, they saw as a divine duty.”

Thus, the bombing of the American Embassy in Kenya in 1998, the first terrorist attack unambiguously attributable to Al-Qaeda, which killed and maimed mostly Africans and Muslims and which was greeted by horror by Muslims all over the world, was only the first in Al-Qaeda’s terror agenda. It was quickly followed by the Khobar Towers blast in Saudi Arabia, and then the even bolder attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000.

Wright’s discussion of how Al-Qaeda actually accomplished the 9/11 attack is disappointing. Perhaps we will never know the operational details. But we do know a few things. We know that although it was not bin Laden’s idea to use planes as missiles, he did actually believe that America could be destroyed by bombs in select places. In one of his sermons he is quoted as saying, “America is a great power….but all this is built upon an unstable foundation which can be targeted, with special attention to obvious weak spots. If it is hit in one hundredth of those spots, God willing, it will stumble, wither away and relinquish world leadership.”

We know too that among all of the supposed vast army of recruits Khaled Sheik Mohammed, the operational commander of the 9/11 attack, had to choose from, he could find only four familiar enough with the language and ways of America to lead the four hijackings. These four were the best they could find, and even these seemed, where it came to competence and common sense, to be hanging on by their fingertips. The most famous one, Mohammed Atta, grim, dark eyed, unsmiling, “constantly demonstrated an aversion to women, who in his mind were like Jews in their powerfulness and corruption. His last will states that: ‘No pregnant woman or disbelievers should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals.’ The anger that this statement directs at women and its horror of sexual contact invites the thought that Atta’s turn to terror had as much to do with his own conflicted sexuality as it did with the clash of civilizations.”

Wright has much to say about the fractured intelligence system that made it possible for 9/11 to occur. The basic story is well known; he only excites our rage with details. It is clear that had the intelligence services cooperated in the investigations prior to 9/11 there is a good possibility that 9/11 could have been prevented. No doubt the audacity of the scheme and the element of surprise were largely effective in its success. But so many things could have gone wrong for these ignorant, barely competent young Arabs—a hundred things—and the nineteen were not great geniuses or great warriors. But they were very, very, lucky in three of the four planes. All it needed was a sharp intelligence service that could have cooperated to find or create more errors among the anxious terrorists.

Right after 9/11, when we ordinary citizens first began to hear of bin Laden, he came as a package wrapped in considerable mystique, making him into something with magical attributes and formidable beyond our powers to contain him. And although Wright can give us little insight into the way bin Laden’s mind works, it is possible to speculate along certain lines based on some facts, sketchy as they may be, about what bin Laden’s strengths and especially what his weaknesses may be.

Among one of his greatest strengths as a leader in the radical Islamic movement is his mythical reputation, developed during the Soviet-Afghan war when he brought a small Arab army with him to fight against the “infidels.” He came with much money and supplied his men with equipment, religious support, and inspiration. And even though he was not considered an important or valued ally by the Afghani mujahedeen who actually prosecuted the war against the Soviets, bin Laden created for himself and his little army a myth that he had been instrumental in defeating the Russians. This myth was perpetuated and spread in the Arab world.

Part of the strength of his mystique and the myth of his power had to do with his access to vast amounts of wealth—at first supplied by his family’s wealth, but lately from other unknown sources. If you can pay and equip hundreds of men from impoverished families then you do have real power, at least for as long as you pay them. For a period of time when he was disowned by his family and his access to that wealth was removed, many of his “loyal” followers disappeared in search of other forms of income.

In addition to his access to vast amounts of money, he apparently has contacts in the Arab world who continue to believe in his mission and his leadership. At least among those who welcome the rise of radical Islamism, he appears to be still a player.

Certain other personal characteristics play a part in his ability to hold power over his followers. He has a large and imposing physical presence which always plays a part in casting a psychological spell over people. He tends to speak ex cathedra, as though he had some legitimate power, and knowledge that he has special access to. This kind of charismatic quality can be very effective with unsophisticated and unempowered followers.

Among the weaknesses which bin Laden may have and of which we may be fortunate beneficiaries in the future is his serious tendency to deny reality in making judgments about his mission to destroy America and the West. He imagines that his views of America are true, and that as long as he believes them his plans will come to pass. He is a visionary, a dreamer who takes his dreams as messengers of truth. He has lost millions of dollars in projects that were unrealistic or in which he failed to acknowledge their complexity. And he has very grandiose fantasies about his own place and power in the world, and is a poor judge of people whom he delegates to carry out his grandiose missions.

It is probably not an accident that America has not been victimized again since the attack in 2001. We could have been victims of a thousand individual suicidal bombers wearing explosive belts like those there have been in Israel and even London. But it would be highly unlikely that bin Laden—leader of the only terror group that would seriously target the U.S.—would authorize a piddling, unimportant attack in his name. It would have to be big time and iconic, something even the Arab street would hear about—something sufficiently aggrandizing for him to be satisfied and not humiliated by. It would not be enough to blow up a bar mitzvah at the Carlyle, even if it killed a hundred people. But a “dirty bomb” attack in front of the Empire State Building which killed only 6 people and messed up the local streets with low-level radiation that required weeks to clean up would be acceptable to bin Laden because it could be spun by the Arab press into something grand—“Atomic Bomb Explodes at Empire State Building—Al Qaeda claims responsibility.” That’s more like it.

Bin Laden and his minions have been very, very lucky; we have been asleep, and our defenders have been at war with each other. Now that we are awake, more assertive and unified, let us see whether they’re so lucky.

PS

After finishing writing the above, I attended a performance in an off-off-Broadway theater (Culture Project) of author Lawrence Wright’s one-man “play”titled “My Trip to Al-Quaeda.” It was something of a surprise.

Soft-spoken, informally dressed, and seemingly as objective in tone as his book, Wright appeared on a near-bare stage occupied only by a desk, a bulletin board, and a screen on which photographs and film clips illustrating his talk were projected. Toward the end of his performance, if such it was, he seemed to lose the objectivity that characterized his impressive feat of history/reportage in “The Looming Tower” and offer some narrative tidbits that his New York downtown avant-garde audience ate up. An earlier silence was broken by laughter and occasional applause as he referred to being questioned by a couple of FBI agents he made sound like buffoons (they asked if he knew Caroline Wright. Of course, she was his daughter, and was not a terrorist despite having gone to school with Jenna Bush); showed pictures of naked prisoners at Abu Gharib being confronted by dogs (as though this were the common treatment of prisoners rather then an anomaly, compared, say, to the lives of detainees at Guantanamo, probably the most comfortable, if not the most pampered existence they have ever known); showed excerpts from his 1998 movie “The Seige” in which Denzel Washington makes an impassioned plea for refraining from actions that would make us Americans just like our enemies—in which case, what are we fighting for?). At the end, Wright repeats the exhortation of his screenplay hero. In our humiliation of others we are becoming like them. We must guard against becoming them. Not, one might suggest, the kind of thinking that would enable us to defeat those who would, as they make perfectly clear in much of what he has quoted and illustrated, destroy us. In the last few minutes of his presentation, Wright has segued from being a reporter we can trust to being another spokesman for the “savvy” (Culture Project’s founder’s word) intellectual left embodied by his New Yorker colleagues and editor and his theatrical director. It is probably hard to resist being taken to the bosom of such eloquent voices of the bien-pesant. Too bad.

March 02, 2007

CONGRESS: WHAT DOES IT DO WHEN IT'S NOT HELPING OUR ENEMIES?

        Tim Marchman explains how our political leaders are trying to 'help' the great American game--baseball.
        "...The influence of Congress on baseball is uniformly wicked and lamentable as it neglects what needs attention and gives its attention to the most trivial affairs, and most every politician who opens his mouth on the subject comes across as uninformed or as a charlatan..."
See the rest here.

March 01, 2007

HARVARD: CREATING EDUCATED LEADERS

        Reading the following email, sent to all Harvard freshmen by the Dean, Horsefeathers almost regrets missing out on contemporary Ivy League "education"! It's comforting to know that our educated elites welcome "every gender", and that they'll all emerge from Harvard with something worth fighting for: the right to a great sex life.

Hooking Up: Hot Hints For Making Your Harvard (or Future) Sex Life Great
Thursday, March 1
7:00 PM
Ticknor Lounge

"Want to know more about how to access pleasure, how to communicate your desires and how to make sure that you're getting what you want and need from your partner? Do you have questions about sex or sexuality that you've never had answered? You won't want to miss this!

Join us for a scintillating and sexy talk with Amber Madison, author of the recently released book "Hooking Up: An All-Out Guide to Sex and Sexuality," before her appearance on the Today show the following day! Amber will share helpful advice and crucial information about having a gratifying sexual life now, or later! You'll also have the opportunity to submit a question anonymously to have answered during the session.

In addition to sexxxxxy suggestions, come enjoy chocolate covered strawberries and HOT chocolate. Other snacks and opportunities to win prizes (including Amber's book), as well as other great "stuff' will be included.

ALL students of every gender are welcome!"

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