Now What Would Dinah Sing?

From today's New York Times:

President Obama owes American taxpayers and voters a candid and detailed explanation of the government’s goals and the levers it intends to use to achieve them. He should make clear that the overarching objectives are to create a profitable company that makes cars that people want to buy, and that are more fuel-efficient. (“Owning G.M.”)

Which I think calls for a new version of an old theme:

"See, the USA Now Runs Chevrolet"
(To the melody of “See the USA in Your Chevrolet,” with verve, and plenty of MMWAH!!)

See, the USA now runs Chevrolet
Because GM was just too big to fail
Next year’s GMC runs on battery
Your dealer has the greenest cars for sale!

From Manhattan, or in a Harvard tower:
“Small cars seem neater, they make the air sweeter
So build’em cramped & light without much power!”

So in your Chevrolet made by USA
You’ll be coasting towards a new Green Day!

First Draft of History, Revised Version

From the Associated Press today:

Obama's balancing act on Iraq withdrawal strategy

By JENNIFER LOVEN – 1 hour ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama leaned heavily toward field commanders' preferences in setting a time frame for an Iraq pullout, as he weighed the fervent desires of anti-war supporters who propelled him into office and the equally strong worries of war generals. . . .

At stake was the promise that most defined Obama's presidential bid: to bring all combat troops home — effectively, to end one of the nation's longest and most controversial wars — 16 months after taking office.

This isn’t the way I remember it. It wasn’t the anti-war activists who propelled President Obama into office. Propulsion was provided by the much more prosaic means of organized labor, the Democratic machines in urban America, a locked-down black vote, the mainstream media taking an active role in campaigning for him, and a poorly-run campaign by Senator John McCain that had nothing to attract swing voters drifting into the Obama current.

Nor was ending the Iraq war the promise that most defined Obam's campaign. The promise that most defined Obama’s presidential bid--if we exclude the slogan “hope & change” from the definition of “promise”--was that he would dramatically increase the government’s taxation and regulatory role in American lives.

For the most part Obama avoided talking about the war, especially as the news from Iraq got better and better as the campaign progressed. He also avoided the biggest mouths of the anti-war movement, and we know he dumped his friendship with people like antiwar icon Bill Ayres. Obama wanted to win bad and he knew those folks would turn him into Eugene McCarthy if they could.

I am relieved that Obama is listening to his commanders, and did not initiate the kind of hell-for-leather rout that some of us feared he might. I can’t quite give him credit for being smart about the Middle East, though: I still think he’s a foreign-policy disaster. But he’s too much a political animal to want to lose a major war during the first few weeks of his presidency.

But as I discussed in another post, the media giving him credit for ending the war is pure BS. As far back as a year ago January Bush’s successes in Iraq were pushing the war off the list of top campaign issues. “Instead,” reported the New York Times on January 3, 2008, “candidates are being asked about, and are increasingly talking about, the mortgage crisis, rising gas costs, health care, immigration, the environment and taxes.” (“Domestic Issues Now Outweigh Iraq”).

Weeks before the election, commentators were already discussing post-war Iraq and redeployment of Iraqi troops to Afghanistan, like this from October: "'On Iraq, no matter who wins, the arrows are clear,' said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. 'The U.S. presence is coming down.'” ("Iran & Iraq: No Longer Hot-Button Issues in Campaign 2008").

I know we were already discussing the war in Iraq as nearly over in October, too, here, and here.

In January 2008 Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh reported that the status of forces agreement Bush was starting to negotiate with the Iraqi government was going to be what determined the future of American forces there. The SOFA “would then replace the existing Security Council mandate authorizing the presence of the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq, [and] will become a sworn obligation for the next president.” The upshot of that agreement, Hirsh pointed out, was that “the next president, Democrat or Republican, is likely to be handed a fait accompli that could well render moot his or her own elaborate withdrawal plans, especially the ones being considered by the two leading Democratic contenders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.” (“Sorry, Barack, You’ve Lost Iraq./Bush's efforts to negotiate a long-term U.S-Iraq pact may remove troops as an '08 election issue for Obama, Clinton.”)

Just something to keep in mind as Obama supporters fan out across the airwaves to trumpet Obama's principled and heroic decision to end the war in Iraq that Bush and Petraeus had already won.

'You Cannot Interpret the Signs of the Times'

Yesterday's New York Times article announcing the Vatican’s appointment of Archbishop Timothy Michael Dolan to preside over the Archdiocese of New York contains an obligatory dig at him as “a genial enforcer of Rome’s ever more conservative writ.” (“A Genial Enforcer of Rome’s Doctrine”).

In other words, the Times doesn’t approve of the choice, as the archbishop is obedient to the See of Peter.

To underline the sinister effect, reporter Michael Powell sets it all up this way:

For a few deeply unpleasant days, the Rev. David Cooper found himself in the crosshairs of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

It was 2003, and the priest had opined to a reporter that women should be ordained. Faraway bishops rumbled about censure. Then he picked up the telephone and heard the baritone of Milwaukee’s archbishop, Timothy Michael Dolan. Father Cooper immediately offered to resign.

No, no, the archbishop replied, we just need to repair the damage. “He was very pastoral and caring,” Father Cooper recalled.

And how was it resolved? “Oh, I agreed to recant,” he said. “He effectively silenced me.”

(That is, if agreeing to recant insincerely only to keep your job is recanting. And if being quoted in the Times is being silenced.)

Given the comparison of Archbishop Dolan doing his pastoral duty with placing some poor bastard in Rome’s “crosshairs,” Times readers are invited to understand that for all his outward geniality and care for his flock, he’s still just an enforcer sent to kill the buzz of America’s most with-it Catholics (that is, the ones who defy Church teaching on abortion, who think all religions are equally valid, (except Catholicism, which they’re ashamed of), and who actually give a shit what the Times thinks of them).

But here’s the most silly bit of the piece. Powell writes:

On matters of doctrine, the archbishop 59, adheres to the line laid down by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict, including firm opposition to abortion, birth control, divorce, gay marriage and any crack in the wall of priestly celibacy.

If anyone is interested in doing some of the fact-checking the Times dispensed with for this article, I invite you to search out any moment in the 2000-year history of the Catholic Church when she did not preach firm opposition to abortion, artificial contraception, divorce, or did not condemn homosexual practices (“gay marriage” is a recently invented euphemism), nor when, say, in the past 15 centuries, she ever entertained abandoning her rule on the practice of priestly celibacy.

My point is that these fundamentals of Catholic moral teaching and practice were not a line “laid down” by John Paul II and Pope Benedict: putting it that way strongly suggests that before JPII became Pope in 1979 the Church’s line was pointing somewhere else. The fact is, the line the Times sneers at leads right straight right back to the first century. (There are valid questions as to whether the celibacy rule was in effect universally in the first century, but there is no question that once it was adopted formally in the Latin Church, in ancient times, it has never been abandoned: it certainly was not part of a line first "laid down” by JPII).

Even John XXIII, whom Democrat Catholics fondly remember now as a fellow liberal because he was fat, jolly, and foisted Vatican II on the Church, laid down the identical “conservative” line, or he would have, surely, had he foreseen how many silly priests and theologians were going to try to erase it.

I suppose every Times story, looked at through the cracked political lens they use for everything, appears as a struggle between “conservative” reactionaries and “liberal” freedom-loving intellectuals. But applied to church matters, this distorted view is most insidiously misleading.

As the decay of American Catholicism since 1965 has proved beyond doubt, once decouple the Church’s moral teachings and doctrine from essential Catholic identity and you can convince Some of the People of God All of the Time that the Church only teaches what she does because of that one stubborn old priest in Rome who doesn’t know anything about sex.

Catholics were scolded by smug religious teachers for forty years that the Church has got to change, and then left them with no more substantial means of understanding the whys and hows of "change" than to assume it was identical with popular demand. That’s democracy, isn’t it? We Are the Church, aren’t We? Didn't we in America "vote for change" and elect Obama when we grew weary of the Bush tax cuts and all this gloomy talk about terrorism? And lickety-split we had higher taxes, more lobbyists in high office, and a foreign policy we can conduct from our hands and knees? Same deal goes for the Church, right? Get a new Pope, get new doctrines.

Hell, maybe we'll even be popular again.

As John Paul was growing visibly weaker there really were a lot of older “Vatican II” Catholics who consoled one another that once he was dead God would finally be able to rebuild His Church in accordance with the yellowing plans moldering in abandoned convents since the 1960s. When that new day arrived, they said, then we’d have our women priests, our ecclesiastically blessed condoms, and a harmless runny-in-the-middle gospel with all the pith and punch of Mike Brady lecturing Greg and Marcia about sharing the bathroom. But John Paul died and then B16 came along, and like a lightning flash it became clear to all at once that the Heavenly variances needed for the old sixties updates had been denied, and that project was being shut down for good.

And the New York Times saw that it was bad.

Fortunately for humanity the Holy Spirit, Whom the Lord promised would lead His Church into all the truth, uses other criteria for selecting her leaders. He is especially rigid on that promise about the gates of hell not prevailing.

That promise is why we have someone like Josef Ratzinger in Peter’s Chair instead of someone like (God help us), Rembert Weakland or Thomas Gumbleton.

The real miracle of the Catholic Church, if you care to look for one, is that, as Chesterton said somewhere, she’s right when everyone else is wrong–and at this moment everyone else is really, really wrong about a whole lot of things. We’re getting things wrong that we shouldn’t be missing by a mile, like whether lesbian hook-ups should be glorified with taffeta and white veils, or how many lives you count when you see a man and a pregnant woman together. That is why, when even gutsy stand-up guys like George Bush and Tony Blair still can’t quite exactly tell the truth on Islam, Benedict steps up and points out how that ancient heresy has always been a chaos of violence and unreason. He should know. His predecessors were holding the line six centuries before the whirlwind escaped from Arabia.

When it comes to the Catholic Church the New York Times has always clung to its editorial commitment to side with the gates of hell. In some ways, maybe that signifies nothing more than a historical leftover of eastern WASP bigotry. Maybe it's something deeper, something that is now causing Archbishop Dolan to find himself in the crosshairs of the enforcer of the Eastern Establishment. No matter. Even if it's something like that, we know their side will not prevail.

The Obama Honeymoon: Can We Still Go Home to Mother?

I think I was doing okay with the transition. But once Inauguration Day got here, what with the triumphalism of the media coverage, the bad grace and mediocrity of the inaugural address, the booing of Bush and Cheney by jamulks who have now achieved representative status as “the people of this country,” the second wind liberals got to resume their attack on the now concluded Bush administration, and so on, and so on—well, I’m in a right foul mood.

Larry Elder wrote today that when someone asked him when President Obama’s media honeymoon will end, he answered:

. . . It won’t.

Oh, sure, every relationship experiences peaks and valleys. But the "mainstream media" wanted Obama to win, and helped him do so. If Obama were a stock, the media would be "fully invested."

During the Bush administration, we saw many "Big Stories" of "Bad Actions." Let's liken these stories to crimes. If Bush committed no crime, they reported an infraction. If he committed an infraction, they reported a misdemeanor. If he committed a misdemeanor, they reported a felony. If he committed a felony, they reported a capital offense. With Obama, the media reverse the procedure. Any future capital offense will get reported as a regular felony, a felony as a misdemeanor and so forth. (“Obama: The Endless Honeymoon?”).

I may also add that even when Bush committed no infractions, they still managed to report a capital offense.

Be that as it may, the historical evidence for an endless honeymoon is strong. We saw it during the Clinton years. The media were also fully invested in him, even if their boy forced them—simply forced them by his antics--to occasionally report his more scandalous behavior.

Still, the media never lost its loyalty for Clinton. Almost. The press loved Clinton--until Obama was revealed from on high and they dumped the First Black President. And then it became clear that the media’s puppy love for Clinton was nothing compared with the media's man-sized love for Barack Obama.

Remember that Romeo first was ga-ga for the cold Rosaline, whom he forgot the instant he glommed Juliet, and then it was: “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!/It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night/Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear.”

And then as Alvy said in Annie Hall when Annie asked if he loved her: “love is too weak a word. . .I luurv you.”

The media’s love for Clinton was merely earthly, as Clinton himself, after all, was only a man (but O what a man!). That wasn’t really a media honeymoon, more of a liason, more of a shack-up.

This thing with Obama is a Sacrament.

Unlike Clinton, Obama is no man. He is certainly supernatural, probably immortal, and he’s got half the atheist reporters at NPR paying off bar bets that there was no proof for the existence of a Supreme Being. This isn’t love, it’s Luurv.

Which means President Obama will be unchecked by the two institutions most necessary to slow up a runaway executive: Congress, and especially, the press.

Since Election Day a lot of optimistic folks on our side have been saying the media loves Obama now, but just wait until the economy falls apart, or terrorist attacks grow worse, or the new health care plan turns out to be a mess—No! Not going to happen. They may as well say, “maybe the cops didn’t show up when your car was stolen, but just wait till you call in a home invasion with armed robbers and shots fired, then they’ll do their job!”

None of that will matter. The media aren’t going to do their job later because they’ve already been given new jobs. The media wasn't just reporting uncritically all Obama’s rhetoric about hope and change, even as they were exaggerating every flaw in every one of his opponents: (“Brian, is it just me, or have you ever noticed that Hillary Clinton is a cold, ambitious bitch?”). They were amplifying Obama’s rhetoric a thousand times by repating it as their own rhetoric. They didn’t just report his victorious campaign, they worked for his victorious campaign; and when he won, they cheered for him like all the rest of his volunteers.

Which is why they can never turn on him. That would require turning on themselves, and they aren’t going to do that. They haven’t just “lost objectivity,” like some shine has come off their skills. They’ve lost objectivity the way a vampire’s victim loses blood—to the very last drop. And that means the only function they can serve now is to put all that Pulitzer-prize talent to work broadcasting propaganda.

Even when he treats them like this, and like this.

And because President Obama, as he showed us last Tuesday in his unworthy inaugural address, and this week in his appeasement talk on Arab TV, and when he told the Republican leaders “I won,” and when he sneered at believers with his talk of restoring “science to its proper place”--because, I say, he is not going to pleasantly surprise all of us that he is wiser, classier, or more principled than we believed during the campaign—I’m in a pessimistic mood.

As Elder writes:

The major news media saw former President George W. Bush as a villain and themselves as sheriff. Obama, on the other hand, enjoys their support. To the news media, Obama represents a combination of Martin Luther King, Gandhi and rock star. They will downplay errors, explain away mistakes, and -- if efforts fail to achieve the desired results -- they can always blame Bush.

Exactly.

Ask Not at Whom They Throw Soles--They Throw Soles at Thee

Around the Arab world, if you want to escalate a situation, by saying for example "I'm going to thump you", add the words "with a shoe" and you're literally adding insult to injury, at least the threat of injury.

It's that cultural significance that has added real sting to assault by an Iraqi journalist against US President George W Bush at a Baghdad news conference.

In Arab culture it's considered rude even to display the sole of one's shoe to a fellow human being.

Certainly, crossing one's legs ankle-on-knee style should never be done in a public place for fear of offending the person next to you.

The sensitivity is related to the fact shoes are considered ritually unclean in the Muslim faith. In addition to ritual ablutions before prayer, Muslims must take off their shoes to pray, and wearing shoes inside a mosque is forbidden.

Shoes should either be left at the door of the mosque, or carried (preferably in the left hand with the soles pressed together).

But beyond the Islamic significance, the dirty and degrading implication of the sole of a shoe crosses all religious boundaries in the Middle East. (“Bush shoe-ing worst Arab insult”).

See how much we can learn from the BBC?

Read any of the thousands of articles published today explaining the Islamic significance of throwing your shoes at someone, and you would think the Western media had a mission to educate kuffars on the fine points of Muslim antagonism towards infidels.

Far from it. The AP, The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, and the rest are only piling on because they imagine they’re on the same side as Muntadar al-Zaidi. They have passively-aggressively denominated this ungrateful son of a bitch a hero by unanimous republication of Arab press propaganda calling him a hero. These media people are the journalistic equivalent of those white guys in the audience at Def Jam, laughing their asses off every time some comic in Timberlands starts off, “you ever notice how white people always…?”

As we well know around here, those same news organizations have made it their solemn duty to mention as little as possible about what they know about the worldview and motivations of Islam. Mumbai terrorists shouting “Allahu Akhbar” are “gunmen”, or even “alleged gunmen.” The mission and motivations of jihadist murderers are passed over in delicate silence by the media, the way Victorians are supposed to have refused uttering even the politer names for female body parts.

Reuters banned the word “terrorist” years ago. And read mainstream reports of suicide bombings, massacres, and beheadings and we learn only that they’re committed by a variety of “militants”, “insurgents”, and “freedom fighters” sharing no ideology in common except their apparent hatred of the Republican Party platform.

Had the BBC spent this much time explaining to their audience the Islamic significance of

--cutting off Daniel Pearl’s head, (he was a Jew)

--or the meaning in the Muslim world of the 9/11 attacks, (bin Laden: “Jihad against the Kuffar in every part of the world, is absolutely essential” )

--or the Islamic significance of the Khomeinist revolution, (“Death to America”)

--or how the Koran invited the cartoon riots, (because insults against Allah must be avenged)

--or the mission of the Muslim Brotherhood and its kind (submission of the whole world to Islam by force)

--or the Islamic mission of Hamas (no solution to Palestinian question except the obliteration of Israel through jihad)

--or what the Saudi-funded Wahhabist madrasses teach kids (militant jihad against infidels is the summit of Islam)

--or the Qu’ran’s teaching about freedom of religion (apostates must be killed)

--or the Prophet’s opinions of unbelievers, (infidel lives are of no value)

--or the imams’ religious theories about Jews (they are the offspring of apes and pigs),

who knows how much better of we'd all be now.

There are many things that the audience of the BBC and CNN, and the readers of the New York Times don’t know about Muslims, things far more important than what a good job ungrateful Arabs are doing right now insulting George W. Bush. As it is, Times readers and NPR listeners are still foggily mistaken that what’s been going on the past seven years has been Bush’s war, rather than Our War.

They carelessly credit Muntadar al-Zaidi with hating George W. Bush for the same reasons they all hate him: for being an evangelical, for cutting taxes, for being pro-life, for being the anti-Clinton, for not giving a flying bleep what the Europeans or the editorial board at The New Republic think of him.

But that's not who al-Zaidi was throwing shoes at, or why. He will think no more highly of Obama when his time comes. And even if Obama bows and scrapes to the Muslim world, as some of us fear he will, the al-Zaidis will hate him all the more for being weak, as bin Laden despised America under Clinton. They've hated every American president since at least Jefferson. I clearly remember them burning Carter in effigy in Tehran, too. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

But these fools in the media think that because Muslims also hate George W. Bush, that they share a common brotherhood of peace and progressive values.

The fools.

Meanwhile, I am disgusted at the thought of how long the footage of George W. Bush ducking shoes will be replayed deathlessly in our childish media.

But regardless, no one can take this away from Bush: he at least had the sound instinct to duck, and did duck, in fact, without a trace of shock or flinching, smiling all the while.

While these boobs at the Times and BBC don't even know they have shoeprints all over their faces.

Setback for Bush?

From the New York Times:

In Setback for Bush, Korea Nuclear Talks Collapse

WASHINGTON — A final push by President Bush to complete an agreement to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons program collapsed Thursday, leaving the confrontation with one of the world’s most isolated and intractable nations to the administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Personally, I’d say this qualifies as a setback for all of us.

What If They Won a War and Nobody Knew It?

The slow dismantling of the concrete walls is the most visible sign of a fundamental change here in the Iraqi capital. The American surge strategy, which increased the number of United States troops and contributed to stability here, is drawing to a close. And a transition is under way to the almost inevitable American drawdown in 2009. (“As Fears Ease, Baghdad Sees Walls Tumble”)
--The New York Times, October 10, 2008.



Here's a bit of news to think over during the current national crisis over an Alaskan governor firing her Commissioner of Public Safety.

From the October 10, 2008 American Thinker:

Not just good news - really good news from Iraq

Rick Moran

One of the reasons for the success of the surge in Baghdad was the construction of blast walls that separated Sunni and Shia neighborhoods. These walls gave a certain level of security to both sides who had been ravaged by sectarian violence for months.

The walls come a tumblin' down. ..

Market by market, square by square, the walls are beginning to come down. The miles of hulking blast walls, ugly but effective, were installed as a central feature of the surge of American troops to stop neighbors from killing one another.

"They protected against car bombs and drive-by attacks," said Adnan, 39, a vegetable seller in the once violent neighborhood of Dora, who argues that the walls now block the markets and the commerce that Baghdad needs to thrive. "Now it is safe."

Slowly, and not without some fear, the Iraqis are beginning the process of taking responsibility for their own internal security:

On Oct. 1, the Sunni-dominated Awakening movement, widely credited with helping restore order to neighborhoods that were among the most deadly, passed from the American to the Iraqi government payroll in Baghdad. There is deep mutual mistrust between the new employer and many of its new employees, many of whom are former insurgents.

Another element of the transition, which has attracted far less notice than the Awakening transfer, is the effort by the Iraqi Army to begin turning over neighborhoods to the paramilitary National Police. In the future, its officers, too, will leave and be replaced by regular police officers.

All three moves mark a transition to an era in which Iraq's Shiite-dominated government seeks more control over its own military and sway over America's.

"The Iraqi security forces are now able to protect Iraq," said Joaidi Nahim Mahmoud Arif, a National Police sergeant in Dora, in southern Baghdad. "They will depend on themselves above all."

It really is just about over. There may be some backsliding as the bitter enders seek to make a statement thinking they can affect the American election. And there is still a very long way to go to build a society where the past is forgotten and forgiven so that Sunnis and Shias can live together in peace.

But it is the Iraqi's problem now. There is very little the American military can do from here on out. They've done quite enough, thank you. They've won the war.
#

More on the Palin Report

As noted, the media is going to be chanting "abuse of power" for the next little while regarding the "Troopergate" report.

A more accurate re-statement of the Palin report’s conclusions would be to say that Governor Palin acted well within her authority as governor, broke no laws, and the worse thing that could be said is that her efforts as governor to get rid of a state trooper happened to be based in part upon her personal knowledge of Wooten--personal knowledge she had because her sister had been married to him, and because Wooten Tasered her nephew. and had threatened to kill Palin’s father, among other things.

The only nefarious object ever identified in the report was Sarah and Todd’s desire to get Michael Wooten off the Trooper force. That is, they weren’t motivated by kickbacks, political ambition, loyalty by ACORN, a payoff to powerful interest groups, or anti-American instincts, which is to say, the panel didn’t find that Governor and Todd Palin went so far as to behave like Democrats.

After banging on for several paragraphs about what Todd did and Governor Palin “allowed” Todd to do, the most the Times has to say about just what it was about Wooten that had the Palins so concerned was that: “As a result of several complaints against Trooper Wooten, he was suspended from the state police force for five days.”

Doesn't sound so bad. But we can be more specific than that:

• Mike Wooten, 35, has been a trooper since 2001. He has been married and divorced four times. One of his marriages was to Palin's sister, Molly McCann, with whom he had two children. That marriage ended in 2006. His behavior leading up to the divorce led Palin's and McCann's father, Chuck Heath, to file a formal complaint about him to the state police.

• Heath and Sarah Palin, who was not yet governor, said that Wooten had threatened to kill Heath — telling McCann that Heath "would eat a f***ing lead bullet" if he hired a lawyer for her. They also charged that he had used a Taser on his own 11-year-old stepson, had drunk beer in his patrol car and had shot a cow moose without a license (the latter a crime in Alaska, where such licenses are not easy to come by).

• The state police investigated these charges and substantiated all of them. Col. Julia Grimes, then head of the Alaska State Troopers, suspended Wooten for 10 days. . . . (“About That Trooper”).

When Palin became governor, she knew Wooten was still on the force. Apparently, the fact that she knew the bad guy personally meant she was supposed to recuse herself and leave the decision to her insubordinate Commissioner of Public Safety, Walt Monegan. Well, she did that, and he didn’t do his job. Which is why they make executives, like Palin, to do what needs doing. Which in this case meant getting rid of the commissioner, Monegan, who was serially insubordinate on other matters, as well. Wooten is still a state trooper. (Doesn't matter. Someone likee Whoopi Goldberg will still accuse Sarah of slamming Wooten into Gitmo).

The damning finding in this 263-page report reads this way:

“I find that, although Walt Monegan’s refusal to fire Trooper Michael Wooten was not the sole reason he was fired by Governor Sarah Palin, it was likely a contributing factor to his termination as Commissioner of Public Safety.”

Not the sole reason. That's it. That's what all the headlines are about.

But by tomorrow morning Democrats will be demanding her resignation and accusing her of "high crimes."

The condensed version of the New York Times story on this in this morning’s Detroit News is a hoot. “Panel: Palin abused authority in firing”.

The article leads off this way: “Gov. Sarah Palin abused the powers of her office by pressuring subordinates to get her former brother-in-law, a state trooper, fired, an investigation by the Alaska Legislature has concluded.”

But within four paragraphs of this lead, announcing the new “abused her powers” Democrat talking point, the NYT reporter writes this:

The document concludes that Palin both acted upon her public interest in seeking the firing of Wooten and created a conflict of interest by forcing subordinate employees to choose between doing her bidding or not. [Ed. note: So having to do what your boss wants instead of what you want is now a "conflict of interest"? TR].

It says: "Gov. Palin's firing of Commissioner Walt Monegan was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional and statutory authority to hire and fire executive branch department heads."

It cites the Alaska Constitution, which says "the governor may discharge department heads without cause" and that department heads "serve at the pleasure of the governor."

"In light of this constitutional and statutory authority, it is clear that Gov. Palin could fire Commissioner Walt Monegan at will, for almost any reason, or no reason at all."

Then after these four paragraphs, detailing how far within her rights the Governor actually was in doing what she did, what comes next?

"I feel vindicated," Monegan said.

So Governor Palin did nothing wrong, but Monegan is vindicated? And the report makes clear that Governor Palin could fire Monegan at will, and yet, the reason for this witchhunt was that she fired Monegan?

How do they get away with this stuff?

'Tax Paid in Lieu of Being Slain'

The official Newspaper of Record has taken notice of an integral Islamic principle in its treatment of non-Muslim minorities and conquered peoples--the charging of the jizya, the poll-tax on non-Muslims, a tax “paid in lieu of being slain.”

The Times was reporting on the fate of the murdered Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho in Mosul, slain after he stopped paying “protection money” to "a man who had threatened to kill him and his entire congregation." (“For Iraqi Christians, Money Bought Survival”):

As priests do everywhere, Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, the leader of the Chaldean Catholics in this ancient city, gathered alms at Sunday Mass. But for years the money, a crumpled pile of multicolored Iraqi dinars, went into an envelope and then into the hand of a man who had threatened to kill him and his entire congregation.

“What else could he do?” asked Ghazi Rahho, a cousin of the archbishop. “He tried to protect the Christian people.”

But American military officials now say that as security began to improve around Iraq last year, Archbishop Rahho, 65, stopped paying the protection money, one sliver of the frightening larger shadow of violence and persecution that has forced hundreds of thousands of Christians from Iraq. That decision, the officials say, may be why he was kidnapped in February.

Two weeks later, his body was found in a shallow grave outside Mosul, the biblical city of Nineveh.

The Times’s explanation of the jizya is misleading, suggesting jizya was being misused “Mafia-style” by insurgents to fund their activities. But there is this unusual moment of clarity in the article's account of jizya's history:

For more than 1,000 years, northern Iraq has been shared by people who for the most part believe and worship differently: Turkmen, Kurds, Yazidis, Sunni and Shiite Arabs, and Assyrian Christians — of whom the Chaldeans are the largest denomination. (The Chaldean Church, an Eastern Rite church, is part of the Roman Catholic Church, but maintains its own customs and liturgy.)

Since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, Muslims in the Middle East permitted that diversity in part through a special tax on Jews and Christians. The tax was called a jizya — and that is the name with which the insurgents chose to cloak extortion, Mafia-style, from Christians.

Officials say the demands could be hundreds of dollars a month per male member of a household. In many cases, Christian families drained their life savings and went into debt to make the payments. Insurgents also raised money by kidnapping priests. The ransoms, often paid by the congregations, typically ran as high as $150,000, several priests and lay Christians said.

Andrew G. Bostom at American Thinker picks up the thread the New York Times is too bashful to follow. Rather than being merely an ancient "tax payable to permit diversity," Bostom explains that jizya, in its very etymolology, was always meant to be extortionate and punitive, indeed, a Koran-imposed "tax paid in lieu of being slain." Far from the recent case being a Mafia-style misuse of jizya as a "cloak" for extortion, from Mohammed's time the jizya was always intended to lay low its subjects:

Here is a classical formulation of the jizya -- the cornerstone of the repressive system of jihad-imposed dhimmitude -- from, coincidentally, a seminal Baghdadian jurist, al-Mawardi (d. 1058). In his monumental The Laws of Islamic Governance, al-Mawardi examined the regulations pertaining to the lands and infidel populations subjugated by jihad. This is the origin of the system of dhimmitude. The native infidel "dhimmi" (which derives from both the word for "pact", and also "guilt" -- guilty of religious errors) population had to recognize Islamic ownership of their land, submit to Islamic law, and accept payment of the Koranic poll tax (jizya)-the tax paid in lieu of being slain-based on Koran 9:29. Al- Mawardi notes that:

"The enemy makes a payment in return for peace and reconciliation... Reconciliation and security last as long as the pavment is made. If the payment ceases, then the jihad resumes."

The "contract of the jizya", or "dhimma" encompassed other obligatory and recommended obligations for the conquered non-Muslim "dhimmi" peoples. Collectively, these "obligations" formed the discriminatory system of dhimmitude imposed upon non-Muslims -- Jews, Christians, [as well as Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists]-subjugated by jihad.

Some of the more salient features of dhimmitude include: the prohibition of arms for the vanquished dhimmis, and of church bells; restrictions concerning the building and restoration of churches, synagogues, and temples; inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims with regard to taxes and penal law; the refusal of dhimmi testimony by Muslim courts; a requirement that Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims, including Zoroastrians and Hindus, wear special clothes; and the overall humiliation and abasement of non-Muslims

It is important to note that these regulations and attitudes were institutionalized as permanent features of the sacred Islamic law, or Shari' a. The writings of the much lionized Sufi theologian and jurist al-Ghazali (d. 1111) highlight how the institution of dhimmitude was simply a normative, and prominent feature of the Shari'a:

...the dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or His Apostle.. .Jews, Christians, and Majians must pay the jizya [poll tax on non-Muslims]...on offering up the jizya, the dhimmi must hang his head while the official takes hold of his beard and hits [the dhimmi] on the protruberant bone beneath his ear [i.e., the mandible]... They are not permitted to ostentatiously display their wine or church bells...their houses may not be higher than the Muslim's, no matter how low that is. The dhimmi may not ride an elegant horse or mule; he may ride a donkey only if the saddle-work is of wood. He may not walk on the good part of the road. They [the dhimmis] have to wear [an identifying] patch [on their clothing], even women, and even in the [public] baths...[dhimmis] must hold their tongue.

The practical consequences of such a discriminatory system were summarized in A.S. Tritton's 1930 The Caliphs and their Non-Muslim Subjects, a pioneering treatise on the status of the dhimmis:

...[C]aliphs destroyed churches to obtain materials for their buildings, and the mob was always ready to pillage churches and monasteries...dhimmis...always lived on sufferance, exposed to the caprices of the ruler and the passions of the mob...in later times..[t]hey were much more liable to suffer from the violence of the crowd, and the popular fanaticism was accompanied by an increasing strictness among the educated. The spiritual isolation of Islam was accomplished. The world was divided into two classes, Muslims and others, and only Islam counted...Indeed the general feeling was that the leavings of the Muslims were good enough for the dhimmis.

S.D. Goitein, in essays published three to four decades later (i.e., 1963, and 1970), highlighted the economic and other adverse social consequences of both the jizya itself, and the attendant regulations of the system of dhimmitude:

..consideration [of] the immense extent of poverty and privation experienced by the masses, and in particular, their persistent lack of cash, which turned the 'season of the tax' into one of horror, dread, and misery. An Islamic state was part of or coincided with dar al-Islam, the House of Islam. Its treasury was mal al-muslumin, the money of the Muslims. Christians and Jews were not citizens of the state, not even second class citizens. They were outsiders under the protection of the Muslim state, a status characterized by the term dhimma, for which protection they had to pay a poll tax specific to them. They were also exposed to a great number of discriminatory and humiliating laws...As it lies in the very nature of such restrictions, soon additional humiliations were added, and before the second century of Islam was out, a complete body of legislation in this matter was in existence...In times and places in which they became too oppressive they lead to the dwindling or even complete extinction of the minorities.

Ignoring the expected New York Times bowdlerization of the actual doctrine and history of this brutally imposed blood ransom [note to New York Times: the Mafia analogy is completely consistent with doctrinal and historical reality, and not some sort of modern aberration], the non-editorial information provided illustrates clearly, in real time, the horrors of the system of jihad imposed-dhimmitude as applied across the length and breadth of Islamic societies, since the advent of Islam.
(“Jizya, Jihad, and the Murder of Archbishop Rahho”)

Media Still Confused About Who the Enemy Is

Jeffrey Imm at Counterterrorism Blog has written about how the refusal of America's free press, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, have failed to define the jihadist enemy in a clear, consistent way, with the result that much of the the public is still confused, six years after 9/11, with whom we're fighting. ("Jihad, Islamism, and the American Free Press").

Without a precise definition of the enemy by American political leadership, major segments of the American free press have made their own foreign policy decisions as to who is and is not an enemy, made their own decisions on what terms like "Islamism" and "Jihad" mean (if they use such terms at all), and provided mostly "isolated incident"-style reporting on such subjects, with the exception of the largely anti-war colored reporting on Iraq.

The result, he writes, is that

instead of much of the American free press being used to largely address and confront enemy anti-freedom ideologies and their adherents, such media has been manipulated by editorial managers, publishers, and Islamist groups to focus their investigative reporting on the American government's reaction to Islamist terrorism. As much of American government actions are based on a reaction without a defined enemy, there has been plenty of source material for press critiques and for press managers to gain political points against an unpopular administration.

But as made clear last week in speeches by leaders of the Washington Post and the Associated Press, the larger issue of "Islamism" itself, its role as the root of "Islamist terrorism" (as defined in the 9/11 Commission Report), and coherent news reporting on the continuing global links between political Islamism and such Islamist terrorism is not even an objective of much of the American free press. The reactive political sniping agenda by much of the American press' reporting not only misses the larger issue, but also fails to understand that anti-freedom ideologies like Islamism are a threat to a free press itself.

Imm explains how basic and definable terms such as "Islamism" and "jihad," terms even Al Jazeerah uses, are unacceptable terms to the media now:

On March 3, Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, gave a speech at the University of California Irvine (UCI) on Journalism and Islam, where it was reported that he believes the media is responsible for confusion about Islam, which is due to the lack of Muslims in American newsrooms (in his opinion). The Daily Pilot, a local newspaper, also reported that Washington Post's Philip Bennett stated that the term "Islamist" is something that the Washington Post editors still have not decided whether to add it to their style book. In Mr. Bennett's speech, he didn't even consider to qualify the need to have greater numbers of anti-Islamist Muslims represented in American newsrooms, because he and his Washington Post editors have not even decided whether to recognize political Islamism as a term they can use, let alone an anti-freedom ideology to be confronted.

Apparently, the Washington Post editors have not yet read the 2004-released 9/11 Commission Report where "Islamist Terrorism" is defined as a component of "Islamism". In 2008, nearly four years later, the Washington Post is still considering whether the very term "Islamist" is acceptable. Even Al Jazeera uses the term "Islamism", but over six years after the 9/11 attacks, the Washington Post is still thinking about it. Rather than being embarrassed by such mental paralysis in news reporting, the Washington Post's managing editor is proud of this failure and discusses this failure in speeches to universities. Moreover, when real investigative groups such as The Investigative Project challenge Islamist individuals and groups, the Washington Post's response is exemplified by its reporting on Esam Omeish, reporting the accusations of known Stalinists accusing IPT reports on Omeish as those of "right-wing anti-Muslim bigots".

Such deliberate unwillingness among American media to address the ideology of Islamism and its links to Islamist terrorism or Jihad is not limited to the Washington Post. As early as October 2001, the Society of Professional Journalists provided guidelines to the American free press that jihad was to be defined as "to exert oneself for the good of Islam and to better oneself".

This desire by "mainstream media" managers to "filter" and "shape" the news by deliberate ignorance of ideologies, language, and connections between events continues to be an ongoing threat to our free press - one that has largely necessitated the explosion of Internet blogs to simply provide a vehicle to report the news.

Read the rest of this well-researched and excellent analysis here.

What's the Matter with 'Youths' These Days?

What is it about French “youths” that gives them the impulse to riot and attack policemen?

Maybe it’s all the rich sauces.

Today the New York Times reports 80 French police officers were injured in clashes last night with “youths,” (“77 Police Officers Injured in Paris Riots”), some “youths” using “hunting shotguns as well as more conventional guns, fire bombs and rocks.”

The only clue the Times provides as to who these youths are is to say the clashes are happening “in a working- and lower-class suburb north of Paris.”

A couple days ago Jihad Watch noticed the situation brewing.

"Youths" rioting again in Paris suburbs

"A brother of one of the dead teenagers, Omar Sehhouli, said the rioting 'was not violence but an expression of rage.'" Right.

Omar Sehhouli. Typical French Catholic youth, I suppose. Note the non-specifics about the perpetrators, and the frequent recourse to passive voice.

"Riots break out in Paris suburbs," from the BBC (thanks to all who sent this in):

Youths have damaged police stations, shops and cars in two Paris suburbs, following the deaths of two teenagers whose motorbike hit a police car.

Police said 21 officers were injured in the rioting in the northern suburbs of Villiers-le-Bel and Arnouville.

The Villiers-le-Bel police station was set ablaze and another in Arnouville was pillaged, police say. At least seven people were arrested.

The violence - reminiscent of riots in 2005 - lasted for more than six hours.

In 2005, the deaths of two youths in nearby Clichy-sous-Bois led to France's worst civil unrest in more than 40 years.

Clashes broke out on Sunday night after two teenagers - aged 15 and 16 - were killed when the motorcycle they were driving collided with a police car.

Police sources said the two were riding a stolen mini-motorcycle, and that neither was wearing a helmet.

The police car was on a routine patrol and the teenagers were not being chased by police at the time of the accident, police said. The collision wrecked the front of the car and smashed the windscreen.

Burning cars

Witnesses have accused the police of leaving the scene and of preventing local people from trying to help the youngsters as they lay in the road. The brother of one of the victims has called for the officers involved to be convicted.

After the accident, dozens of youths went on a rampage, setting the police station in Villiers-le-Bel on fire, ransacking the Arnouville police station and torching two petrol stations.
Riot police were sent to the area, but youths blocked their way with burning cars.

French media report that the rioters also damaged the Arnouville-Villiers-le-Bel railway station and nearby shops.

The mayor of Villers-le-Bel, Didier Vaillant, appealed for calm and said he would ensure there was "an impartial investigation, for full light to be shed" on the accident.

A brother of one of the dead teenagers, Omar Sehhouli, said the rioting "was not violence but an expression of rage".

Our Paris geography isn’t quite good enough to recognize if the clashes are taking place in one of the “The 751 No-Go Zones of France.”

The Great Blackout of 2007

“The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t happenstance. It’s a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever.”

Thus the New York Times’s Frank Rich in July 2006, in an op-ed column with the handy recyclable title of “The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq.”

Though I avoid the overused term, “irony,” I do really find Rich’s complaint about a “steady falloff in Iraq coverage” ironic, because we’re in the middle of a much more substantial falloff in coverage right now. Who knows but that it may be studied years hence as the Great Blackout of 2007, ranking in enormity, perhaps even surpassing, the phantom “blacklisting” of Hollywood Reds during the McCarthy era.

Rich’s thesis in July 2006 was that the Iraq war was getting less and less news coverage because the American people were tired of watching it, suggesting, illogically, that news coverage decisions instantly track audience demand, nor even reflect it.

The truth is, and it's remained the case especially when it comes to trumpeting bad news from Iraq, that the news media shows their public exactly what they want them to see, for exactly the reasons they want them to see it, regardless of audience demand. No one ever asked for a year of coverage of Abu Ghraib. No one will ever learn about Medal of Honor winners nor stories of battlefield heroism from the nightly news.

And contrary to what Rich was griping about last summer, the falloff on coverage isn’t a “barometer of the scope of the tragedy” of the Iraq war, (nor was it last year--Rich’s Bush-hatred has made him a lunatic; compare his analysis of Iraq just this September). The present falloff is a barometer of the media’s embarrassment and chagrin at the strategic turnaround, and approaching triumph in Iraq, the good outcome the media had gambled everything on being utterly impossible.

As the Left never tires of saying about the Bush administration, the media has no Plan B if the quagmire/endless war/failed strategy version of events turned out to be, well--so WRONG.

The press’s response to this unexpected turn of events, (though it may slowly be giving way now), has been to emphasize the most negative stories they can find, and carefully avoid reporting the blaring good news of progress.

A case in point. Where we live in southeastern Michigan, the formerly great daily, The Detroit News, has done everything it could since early November to avoid reporting the dramatic improvement in Iraq, and especially in Baghdad.

On November 7, The Detroit News ran a prominent story headlined, “U.S. troop deaths set record in Iraq/Six fatalities push the total for 2007 to 853, making this the bloodiest year of the war.”

By the date it ran this story, The Detroit News already knew that there was a trend in Iraq of steadily decreasing fatalities, because it was reported in this very same article, far below the lead:

“The No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, said last week that there had been a sharp decline in the number of explosively formed projectiles found in Iraq over the past three months. At the time, he and Gates said it was too early to tell whether the trend would hold.

“The noticeable drop in U.S. and Iraqi deaths in recent months follows a 30,000-strong U.S. force buildup, along with a six-month cease-fire order by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, among other factors. There were 39 deaths in October, compared with 65 in September and 84 in August.”

Even this story outlined an unmistakeable downward tredn in violence and fatalities. But the News instead chose to lead with the “grim milestone” angle, even though, in this context, it was meaningless--in fact, misleading. They liked these numbers so much they ran them again the next Saturday, with no explanatory context whatever:

Quick Read

Numbers in the news

853: Number of U.S. troops killed so far this year in Iraq, making 2007 the deadliest year of the war for American forces since combat began in March 2003. A total of 3,858 troops have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since the wars began.

On November 8, the day after the prominent "grim milestone" article, The Detroit News did actually report the profoundly historic announcement that U.S. forces had all but driven the last vestiges of al Qaeda from Baghdad. By "reporting" it, I mean they buried it in a 65-word News Brief paragraph, which I quote in its entirety:

Baghdad free of al-Qaida, U.S. says

BAGHDAD -- American forces have routed al-Qaida of Mesopotamia, the Iraqi militant network, from every neighborhood of Baghdad, allowing American troops involved in the "surge" to depart as planned, Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil Jr., commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, said Wednesday. "Murder victims are down 80 percent from where they were at the peak," and attacks involving improvised bombs are down 70 percent, he said.

That's it. And to immunize their readers against even this small germ of good news, they ran a prominent 585-word piece, with a photo, a smooshy soft-news thing proclaiming, as the “Toll of War”: “Advocates fear surge of homeless veterans”). You can decide for yourself if the article makes the case that the Iraq War is a shortcut to homelessness for returning veterans.

Since then, as the news from Iraq has only gotten better, (or the information, anyway, as the news media won’t cover it), The Detroit News’s own stubborn emphasis in its Iraq coverage is revealed in these headlines of related Iraq-articles:

More on this topic

Pakistan rebuffs U.S.
Blast kills Iraqi children, U.S. soldiers
Senate blocks measures to fund Iraq, Afghanistan wars
Roadside blasts decline
Peace group to award anti-war activist Sheehan at Cobo
Report: 14 of 17 Blackwater shootings unjustified
Dems: U.S. wars cost family of 4 $20,900
Guards kill Iraqi taxi driver
Iraq soldier's wife turns her worries into comedy
Peace returns to Baghdad district
Mich. native Woodruff, Springsteen honor military wounded
Easing unrest renews Iraq's taste for booze
U.S. troop deaths set record in Iraq
Bombs kill five U.S. soldiers in Iraq
Ranks of people displaced in Iraq swell, relief group says

Another clearly negative story not in this list included, on November 17, “Stressed GIs desert posts.”

So, out of 16 stories, 13 emphasize bad news from Iraq, and even the favorable ones have misleading headlines. For instance, “Roadside blasts decline: Military says explosive devices down by more than half from March high, but still considered significant.” Of course any roadside bombs are significant. But not as significant, at this point, as the dramatic decline. News people are supposed to be able to recognize the real story out of jumbles of facts.

In fairness, I note that last Tuesday, the News did run a prominent AP story, “U.S. begins troop reductions”, fairly huge news, I’d say, considering that troop reductions are the only thing the Left has left to scream about.

But then again today’s big Iraq story, “U.S. agrees to further talks with Iran about security in Iraq,” is another red herring, an insubstantial piece reporting talks about talks, none of which is relevant to coalition progress in Iraq right now. Rather, it only reflect the nostalgia of the editors for the days when the Left still thought they could browbeat the administration into seeking peace terms on Iranian terms.

And look over today’s Iraq-related headlines from the News:

More on this topic

Stressed GIs desert posts
Dems tie Iraq funds, withdrawals
U.S. begins troop reductions
Levin says wars will tax future generations
State Dept. may phase out use of Blackwater
Blackwater scrutinized
Firms in Iraq face court jurisdiction
Congress grills Blackwater CEO
Dems push tax to pay for Iraq war
Report: Blackwater out of control
Levin keeps pushing Iraq policy changes
Iraq shootings scrutinized
War funds fight looms
Al-Maliki: Shooting tests Iraq autonomy
Iraq: U.S. company 'guilty' in shootings

One favorable story out of 15.

If I were a casual reader of the News, I guess I'd conclude that today, November 21st, all that's going on in Iraq is that soldiers are deserting their posts by the thousands, Blackwater is still running daily shoot-em-up tours through Iraqi villages, a brave Congress is valiantly trying to curb overspending on the war, and Carl Levin is still relevant. Oh, and I might notice that maybe a few troops are coming home.

The Detroit News has plainly decided that, if they can’t find bad war news, they'll report on Blackwater, the war tax on “future generations,” and alleged war crimes.

No question these profesional journalists are working very hard at all this. But are they doing their jobs?

Does This Count?

Women walk through Baghdad's Zawra Park. (NYT)

I wonder if it’s official enough when the newspaper of record reports that we're prevailing in Iraq.

In today’s New York Times, we’re given a picture of returning normalcy, freedom of movement, and defiant hope by returning Iraqi exiles, and Baghdad residents enjoying the return of peaceful neighborhoods. (“Baghdad Starts to Exhale as Security Improves”).

This is all thanks to the surge, by the way, as even the Times reporters eventually acknowledged, with conditions, in paragraph seven.

Iraqis are clearly surprised and relieved to see commerce and movement finally increase, five months after an extra 30,000 American troops arrived in the country. But the depth and sustainability of the changes remain open to question.

Open to question, that is, by the New York Times.

Nor is it only Iraqis who are clearly surprised. I’ll bet they are less surprised than the New York Times staff, and the rest of anti-war media who made a solemn pact not to report any progress.

Not two weeks ago on November 7th the Times editorial board (which monitors the nation’s pulse from Times Square, NY, NY), had this message to Congress from “the Heartland”:

Iraq War: The Heartland Speaks

By

The Editorial Board

How does middle America feel about the Iraq War? Yesterday’s election gave a good indication, in the results of two referendums in Montana.

In Helena, voters backed a referendum – by a 5,032 to 3,108 margin — “urging the Congress of the United States to authorize and fund an immediate and orderly withdrawal of the United States military from Iraq.” That’s nearly 62 percent of the vote.

A referendum asking Congress to “fund our military forces totally and without conditions in the global war on terror” went down to defeat.

In Missoula, a referendum asking Congress “to authorize and fund an immediate and orderly withdrawal of the United States military from Iraq in a manner that is fully protective of U.S. soldiers” won with nearly 65 percent of the vote.

The question now is what Congress intends to do about it.

We’re all for the Big Sky state. But is Montana, which has a population lower than 1 million, (all patriots, I'm sure), really the heartland?

And as for what Congress intends to do about it, and did do about it, they launched yet one more Iraq funding bill with withdrawal strings attached in complete detachment from reality of what's happening in Iraq.

Since taking the majority, they have forced 40 votes on bills limiting President Bush’s war policy. Only one of those has passed both chambers, even though both are run by Democrats.

That one was vetoed by Bush.

I don’t think you rack up a 40-0 record when you know the heartland is behind you.

In any event, today’s Times article proceeds, by fits and starts, to report on what are clearly significant signs of returning normalcy in Baghdad:

“Today she is home again, cooking by a sunlit window, sleeping beneath her favorite wedding picture. And yet, she and her family are remarkably alone. The half-dozen other apartments in her building echo with emptiness and, on most days, Iraqi soldiers are the only neighbors she sees.”

Reporters Damien Cave and Alissa J. Rubin use a lot of this kind of cautious language. Moreover, I think they do some imputing onto their interviewees of their own real difficulties believing that they could have gotten it so wrong--the liberation of Iraq, the battle against Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Shia insurgents, the surge. This kind of thing wasn't supposed to be possible, ever, ever again:

Mrs. Aasan, 45, a Shiite librarian with an easy laugh, is living at the far end of Baghdad’s tentative recovery. She is one of many Iraqis who in recent weeks have begun to test where they can go and what they can do when fear no longer controls their every move.

The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.

As a result, for the first time in nearly two years, people are moving with freedom around much of this city. In more than 50 interviews across Baghdad, it became clear that while there were still no-go zones, more Iraqis now drive between Sunni and Shiite areas for work, shopping or school, a few even after dark. In the most stable neighborhoods of Baghdad, some secular women are also dressing as they wish. Wedding bands are playing in public again, and at a handful of once shuttered liquor stores customers now line up outside in a collective rebuke to religious vigilantes from the Shiite Mahdi Army.

The Times reporters tell us, “Iraqis sound uncertain about the future, but defiantly optimistic.” And who exactly are the pessimists they're defying?

“Many Baghdad residents seem to be willing themselves to normalcy, ignoring risks and suppressing fears to reclaim their lives. Pushing past boundaries of sect and neighborhood, they said they were often pleasantly surprised and kept going; in other instances, traumatic memories or a dark look from a stranger were enough to tug them back behind closed doors.”

And yet, from what we read here, the traumatic memories are only that--memories--and the perceived “dark looks” aren’t real--strangers aren’t bothering them now. The story nowhere mentions where any returning Iraqi, or any Baghdad resident daring to cross into the other sect’s territory, or venturing out after dark, finds out that the thing he fears happening actually does happen.

These Baghdad residents aren’t “willing themselves to normalcy”; they're re-discovering that the conditions of normalcy--or many of them--have returned, and are willing themselves to take their neighborhoods and lives back. Willing it even in spite of these buzzkill reporters who undoubtedly keep suggesting to them that this progress--that the media has long since declared could not possibly happen--is happening, has happened. That in spit of many signs to the contrary, this may not be “only a temporary respite from violence,” something the reporter cannot possibly know.

Time and again the reporters run across residents who refuse to be the terrified victims Times readers have been promised. Instead,

“They can joke because they no longer fear that the violence will engulf them.

“In longer interviews across Baghdad, the pattern was repeated. Iraqis acknowledged how far their country still needed to go before a return to normalcy, but they also expressed amazement at even the most embryonic signs of recovery.”

What pattern was repeated? The pattern of "longer" interviews with unsinkably cheerful Iraqis. The only thing a reporter wants is a good quote, then he's done. Prolonging an interview means he hasn't got what he wants yet. These interviews that had to be prolonged so realistic (and much smarter) journalists could wear these poor Iraqis down with suggestions that all this apparent progress may seem good now, but has its “limits,” lor lacks “depth and sustainability,” or is only “tentative.”

No matter.

Cave and Rubin may as well be Tom Cruise telling his sob story to that little kid in "Jerry Maguire": it's hard to be serious when the other party can't stop laughing from sheer joy. (And see how the reporters do report the Iraqi reactions with something like pity mixed with awe.) In spite of lenghty interviews, the interviewees continue to express amazement with how well things are going. Amazement even at these “most embryonic signs of recovery.”

But hey. I have to remind myself these are Times reporters, after all. They're hard-wired not to see anything amazing in the "embryonic." Nor have they any concept of the tell-tale signs of victory, even when they're reporting it for themselves.

When War Is Necessary

The New York Times can’t stand it that there's a public-TV war documentary on that isn't centered on America losing.

In TV critic Alessandra Stanley's review of Ken Burns's "The War," ("What So Proudly We Hailed"), she complains, (on whose behalf it isn't clear), that

World War II didn’t happen just to us.

But it would be hard to glean that from Ken Burns’s 7-night, 15-hour tribute to the greatest generation that ever bought war bonds, joined the Marines or tightened rivets on a B-17 Flying Fortress.

I watched the first episode last night, and found this not to be the case at all.

The opening minutes of the documentary make very clear that, compared to the devastation the war visited on most other participating nations, America never suffered the destruction of her cities nor the high toll of civilian deaths, indeed, our mainland population was never really in danger of significant attack throughout the war. Even the staggering number of American combat deaths was much lower than those suffered by the other main participants in Europe, the USSR, and Japan.

Yet Stanley isn’t really unhappy that Burns’s series suggests that World War II happened only to us. She’s unhappy that, in delivering “almost everything viewers care to know about wartime America; [he’s] also telling that this is the only tale he wants to tell.”

“The war was necessary,” she writes, “but is this approach?”

Nothing in art is necessary. That's why it's a creative enterprise. And Ken Burns as a documentarian is nothing if not an artist. Why shouldn't he be free to use this approach to tell his tale?

Because obviously it’s not the tale Stanley wants him to tell. Too Americo-centric, and all. Stanley writes:

The tone and look of Mr. Burns’s series…is as elegiac and compelling as any of his previous works, but particularly now, as the conflict in Iraq unravels, this degree of insularity — at such length and detail — is disconcerting. Many a “Frontline” documentary has made a convincing case that the Bush administration’s mistakes were compounded by the blinkered thinking of leaders who rushed to war without sufficient support around the world or understanding of the religious and sectarian strains on the ground. Examining a global war from the perspective of only one belligerent is rarely a good idea.

Now we see. Burns’s mission, as a trusted PBS producer, is to adopt Frontline’s “case” against the Bush administration and the Iraq war. PBS has a duty because "Americans are growing more hidebound and parochial," unlike the way Americans were, say, in small towns in the early 1940s, when they went to war to serve the global community.

Ms. Stanley no doubt means to suggest that, if one is going to make a 15-hour documentary about World War II, it should at least be used to show how this administration’s war on terror and the prosecution of the war in Iraq are even greater failures than we already know them to be, when compared to the political and strategic decisionmaking of a Churchill, a Roosevelt, and of the Allied generals.

Yet I can't think of any historical treatment of the Second World War that portrays Allied responses to the Axis as examples of advanced planning, tight exit strategies, and unblinkered “understanding of the religious and sectarian strains on the ground.”

If anything,the opposite was the case. Just the first episode of Burns’s documentary describes tragic mistakes and disasters that--if judged by contemporary standards--would have ended Roosevelt’s administration and caused pitched rioting by members of the press.

First, Pearl Harbor was caught unprepared in spite of advanced warning that a major Japanese attack was being planned. Then the government withheld information about the number of dead and the extent of the damage to the fleet. Then the President ordered the internment of Japanese Americans living along the West Coast. Then the US Army in the Philippines was scandalously undersupplied, and finally abandoned to capture by a brutal enemy--leading to the deaths of thousands of servicemen. The British and American leaders argued about whether to attack the Third Reich first on the European Continent or in North Africa. (Burns didn't explore whether any Hollywood actresses made broadcasts plaintively asking Americans "What did the North Africans ever do to us?").

As for "insularity," the individual soldiers upon whom the documentary focuses don't even describe themselves as fighting for flag and country. The soldier caught in the Philippines tells about volunteering for that posting to avoid the war he expected against the Germans. After the Japanese attacked the Philippines he told about not knowing what to expect from the enemy army, about which they knew so little. When he saw his buddy bombed to bits in a slit trench and the pilot who’d just done it grinning, he had all the insight into the enemy he would need.

For today’s antiwar proponents, World War II should either be left alone or used as an object lesson to instruct on the wisdom of abstaining from all warmaking--the one lesson that cannot be drawn from World War II.

What makes World War II so formidable is that it really was a necessary war, and for the generation who fought it, both civilians and military, its necessity arose from the enormity of the enemy we faced, not from the cold, slow, deliberative weighing of the pros and cons safely guarding the nation from "rushing into war." World War II simply wasn’t a masterpiece of planning, nor the result of careful calculations, nor entailed a methodical assembling of Allies, nor had the benefit of a carefully worked out exit strategy, all of which then finally added up to an “unblinkered” concensus of political and military leaders that beating Hitler and Tojo was “doable.”

It was the result of there not being any choice but to fight. That’s what the word “necessary” means.

One doesn’t cavil about “political” or “military” solutions when the object of the fight is survival.

The Left doesn’t believe the war against Islamist fascism is necessary, because they themselves are blinkered as to the enormity of this enemy. They think that fighting jihadism is a matter of choice, and it's a stupid choice when one can just as easily dismiss the threat of terror states that don't threaten us directly every day. After all it isn't American women who are being executed by Ahmadinejad, or having their genitals mutilated in Sudan. They aren't American families being blown up in market squares by suicide bombers. In other words, it's a very insular view. Nothing else can explain the childish reaction by the media and the Left to the visit to New York by Ahmadinejad.

Burns said he began making "The War" before 9/11, and never had any purpose of using it to comment on the war on terror. (If he had been any other PBS producer with that attitude, he'd now be a former PBS producer). That means that he's letting World War II speak for itself. When that war speaks for itself tends to say that some evils are so irrational and deadly that they must simply be stamped out, whatever the cost.

I suppose that message, repeated at such length over so many nights, is why Ms. Stanley has to find something to dislike in this documentary. So she writes that “’The War’ gives generous voice to a wide variety of remarkable people, but they are all American voices.”

More likely, she just can't see the use of showing so many graphic photos of death and destruction where the bad guys are so unmistakably not the American military. If it shows us being the good guys, the documentary must be unbalanced, “insular,” or (GASP!) leaving someone out.

A well-produced and heavily-watched series like this can undo years of media brainwashing. Let's hope it does. We can use some help at this point.

Harry Reid's Quagmire

According to the New York Times this Thursday night, “A proposal to cut off money for military operations in Iraq fell far short in the Senate this afternoon, a day after Democrats lost their best chance of changing the course of the war.” (“Bid to Cut Off Iraq War Funding Fails”).

Perhaps the Democratic desire to lose battles becomes a habit. The Russ Feingold-Harry Reid resolution to cut off funding, Vietnam-style, for the Iraq war, was body-slammed in the Democrat-controlled Senate by a vote of 70-28.

The New York Times admits the bid “failed,” but tries to blame the loss as the failure to cut off the Republican filibuster, thus:

Legislation sponsored by Senators Russell D. Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat who has been one of the fiercest critics of the Bush administration’s war policy, and Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, received only 28 “yes” votes, 32 fewer than needed to cut off a Republican filibuster.

“A majority of the House and a majority of the Senate want to change the direction of the war in Iraq,” Mr. Reid said in a meeting with reporters beforehand. “We have voted accordingly on more than one occasion, in fact on many occasions. But the House having done their job, they come to the Senate and the Senate Republicans, the vast majority of them will not allow us to change the direction of the war in Iraq.”

The vast majority of Republicans? In order to get a 70-28 trouncing, more than a vast majority of Republicans have to vote “nay.”

Is it time yet for Reid to admit that his misguided mission to force American defeat in Iraq has failed, that he and the Democrats have lost, and they need to withdraw immediately?