When Caesar's Wife Gets a Pass

What would you think if I told you that the press had detailed information that Todd Palin, spouse of the former governor of Alaska, had over a course of years: been involved in several public fistfights, had drawn national attention for throwing adolescent tantrums that disrupted public meetings, had insulted a government official over being a cancer patient, insulted another, a widow, because she "needed to get a man," told members of the public they had no right to petition the government because their race was different from his, had been charged and pleaded guilty to taking bribes to influence the awarding of government contracts and other favors, and pilfered mored than $21,000 in computers and other electronic equipment from government offices?

Love her or hate her, you couldn't help but think, Sarah Palin is toast.

I believe it's safe to say the media fireball would not die down until some time in 2012. Or should that be 2112?

Sarah Palin would finally meet the total career--and perhaps personal--destruction her many bitter enemies have been casting spells for lo these many months. (They'd pray for it, but that sounds like something Her Hateableness would do. EEEEeeeeeww?). And it would all be a result of the media rejecting every benefit of any doubt that Todd's misdeeds could have been unknown, and unconsented to, by his famous wife, the Governor, Sarah Palin.

Besides, Caesar's wife must be above reproach. Especially if Caesar belongs to the GOP.

Do you think the same folks who criticized Palin for not forcing her daughter to get an abortion (because a daughter who's an unwed mother would obviously ruin Palin's vice presidential campaign), would cut her any slack for not kicking Todd to the curb? Hell, they condemned her for not getting rid of Trig just because he's going to make them feel lousy for slaying their hale and healthy babies. The same folks could be counted on to condemn her for not denouncing Todd loudly, and leaving Todd flat, rather than let him wreck her political career.

Todd didn't do any of those things.

But with that in mind, notice how every new story we hear in Detroit about Monica Conyers's misdeeds is loaded with silence about her husband, Congressman John Conyers?

Typical is a report in the Free Press today about how Monica swiped $21,000 worth of electronic toys from her City-Council Building office before she left. It wasn't even spite. She'd been stealing this stuff for years.

But as for her husband, that pharisee Inspector Javert hounding Bush and Cheney until his dying breath (Conyers was born during the Johnson administration: the first Johnson administration), he enjoys Teflon, Teflon II, and Scotchguard protection against that Republican-seeking word, "hypocrite."

The Freep story, and it isn't atypical, mentions only that Monica is "wife of U.S. Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat from Detroit," in paragraph 20 of a story about Monica's kleptomaniacal approach to public service. The national press doesn't even know Conyers's wife pleaded guilty and faces five years in the joint for selling her votes.

Thus the blanket of immunity thrown over the Left by the media. Its advantages can't be underestimated.

Cheney Unbound

I’ve been happy to see Dick Cheney taking the lead in contradicting the presidential/media libels about torture and the enhanced interrogations of the al Qaeda terrorists. For years I wished the Bush administration would put Cheney out there as a spokesman to explain Iraq and what we were doing to stop domestic terrorism, but it never happened.

For all the partisan emotion he draws from the left, Cheney is an outstanding speaker. Better, forensically, than President Obama, who speaks in airy generalities and is allergic to facts. For example, Obama said about Gitmo, “We are cleaning up something that is quite simply - a mess - a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges.”

Which really is just so much bullshit. The mess was created when Obama paid off an I.O.U. to Daily Kos by ordering Gitmo closed within a year. Even Senator Jim Webb, who hates Bush’s guts, said Gitmo was an “appropriate facility” that should stay open to try these cases.

When Cheney speaks, in contrast, he puts out the facts, always quite specifically, then he links them together with airtight logic. That's why they want him to shut up.

Here’s a sample of what Cheney said during his AEI speech last week:

Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.

I might add that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about “values.” Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11. We know the difference in this country between justice and vengeance. Intelligence officers were not trying to get terrorists to confess to past killings; they were trying to prevent future killings. From the beginning of the program, there was only one focused and all-important purpose. We sought, and we in fact obtained, specific information on terrorist plans.

Ever since President Obama released the interrogation memos, the media has gleefully been embroidering its tapestry of legends drawn from the “torture memos,”or more accurately, from the idea of the “torture memos,” which the media can be confident hardly any one will actually read. The legends tell of how the Bush administration commanded its minions in the Department of Justice, the CIA, and the Pentagon to abandon law and institutional morality in favor of a torture regime limited only by the imaginations of its cruellest practitioners.

One idiotic example of, literally, hundreds I have seen in the past few weeks, is Brian Dickerson in the Detroit Free Press this weekend, declaring that “It's true that Cheney. . . has been defending the unbridled use of torture since 2001.”

Think about that for a moment. What would torture look like, what has it looked like, where it’s been “unbridled”?

Apparently, for one of Dickerson’s rose-petal soft conscience, the unbridled use of torture runs the range between being yelled at by interrogators at the easier extreme to being waterboarded at the harsher extreme: waterboarded, by the way, after being medically cleared for fitness by a physician and then having it explained to you in advance that the interrogators have no intention of killing you. No wonder Zubaydah could take 83 doses.

You want unbridled torture? I ran across this passage from Solzhenitsyn describing only some of the techniques practiced by the Stalinists in Russia:

In the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed with iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (“the secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to the insane asylum.

In our American drama, it’s not the detainees but the media who’ve gone off to the insane asylum, whence they submit their turgid editorials about how America lost her values at Guantanomo but might regain them if we accept queer marriages.

That's when I have to keep reminding myself, these are the people who’ve had forty years to define when human life begins and still haven’t gotten started, or who bled barrels of ink about a “Duke rape case” where there was no rape, and about the lynching victims know as the “Jena Six” who not only weren’t lynched, but committed attempted murder against a kid they didn’t know because he was white.

I’m not one of those guys trying to suggest that the enhanced interrogation techniques aren’t horrible, even brutal. I don’t care for Hannity trying to minimize waterboarding by offering to submit to it for charity. There’s no question these techniques are tough examples of the use of force against known enemies. Still, considering that other examples of the use of force include being shot dead by a Marine rifle squad or getting a cruise missile down your chimney, I have to say KSM and his fellow waterboarding alumni got off pretty easy.

The only question is whether or not the enhanced techniques are unlawful torture. And as usual the media has left that question in the dust in their stampede for the higher ground from which they’ll sermonize the rest of us. And answering that question for a concerned CIA was the whole purpose behind drafting the interrogation memos. The hell of it is the only guys in the country who actually made the effort to answer the critical question whether or not these techniques were torture or not--I’m talking about the Office of Legal Counsel attorneys--now have the cloud of prosecution hanging over them.

Meanwhile, moral paraplegics like Dickerson and Maureen Dowd and hundreds of others get to throw around expressions like “torture” and “broke the law” as if they’ve actually defined those terms--which they haven’t, and dare not.

Which is why they want Dick Cheney to shut up.

Fortunately, he's got eight years of shutting up to make up for.

Free Press Cartoonist Tortures the Truth

Detroit Free Press editorial cartoonist Mike Thompson gives us a two-fer this Sunday by both blogging and illustrating his feelings about what he terms “CIA torture.”

Maybe we can call this treatment of readers, "inkboarding." I know I often have the feeling I'm drowning in deliberately misleading journalism.

On his Freep blog he writes:

This country thought it important enough to investigate and prosecute a president for leaving his DNA all over some intern's dress, but will take a pass when it comes to investigating and prosecuting illegal acts of torture and potential war crimes?

What is wrong with us?

I don't know about "us," but as for Thompson, what is wrong with him--if his cartoon is any indicator--is he lacks a serious enough grasp of the most basic facts to be trusted with "investigating and prosecuting" anybody.

Sure, artistic license is okay when you draw political cartoons. Sometimes you have to exaggerate the truth to make it easier for some people not to miss it. But when you track back that exaggeration, it has to go back to an actual truth. Especially when the cartoon is intended not so much to poke fun or ridicule, but to accuse actual persons of "war crimes."

Spattered blood, burning coals, tongs, chains, rotting skeletons? (OK, maybe Conyers does dress up that way, but I wouldn't know).

Now you may happen to hold the high moral view that waterboarding is the pinnacle of human cruelty, the descent to which, regardless of the urgency of circumstances, earns the United States automatic excommunication from that greater community of decent nations that includes Cuba, the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, France, and China. But your high moral view doesn't give you the right to simply make up facts because they match the emotional shock you claim to feel.

That Thompson believes he can simply insert any image he wants to illustrate the term "torture"--no matter how barbaric an image and outside the wildest charges ever concocted by critics of the war against jihad--is exactly why the Left can never be trusted to fairly go at "investigating and prosecuting." They aren't interested in investigating, only prosecuting.

The truth is that the Left has been shouting, and reporting, and especially misreporting, about U.S. "torture" of terrorist detainees since 2003. The Democratic Congress has been threatening war-crimes trials since 2006. Almost every pertinent detail about the handling of these few al-Qaeda terrorists has been disclosed, reported, decribed, analyzed, and digested. I know because I've been following it every step of the way. As have some exceptionally smart people like Andrew McCarthy. There is really nothing left to investigate.

But when the Democrats don't get the result they want, they just keep repeating demands for more investigations. Believe me, if Ford hadn't pardoned Nixon, there'd still be a sitting Watergate Committee.

And it isn't only the "CIA torture" that Thompson's misnformed about. He still thinks repeating that "Clinton was impeached for having sex" is a going argument. (What am I saying? It is still a going argument! A poll of C-SPAN callers found this the second most likely thing to be said by Democratics, closely following "Bush lied us into this war.")

As should be obvious by now, the release of no amount of information will actually change the minds of any of the stooges, like Mike Thompson, who actually believe there is evidence of medieval-era torture dungeons with bloody walls, racks, and breaking wheels. To minds so willing to believe only the worst, and so incapable of processing what actually happened, investigations are a waste of time, and an invitation to criminalizing political opinions that vary from those on the Left.

Henry Payne

I'm just beginning to realize that editorial cartoonist Henry Payne at the Detroit News is about the best thing going from either of the Detroit dailies, although I still enjoy reading The Lockhorns.

Or should we now be calling the News and Free Press sub-dailies?

Payne's got a good one about Barney Frank today. Check him out here:

It All Adds Up

This Sunday's Detroit Free Press editorial:

Now's time to discuss global warming

Time's short for planet; we need the right national response, and quickly



This Monday's Detroit Free Press headline:

London shuts down amid its biggest snowfall in years


LONDON — The British capital ground to a halt today after the worst snowstorm in 18 years caused hundreds of flight cancellations and virtually shut down public transportation.

Shops, schools and courts shut down and long trails of commuters trudged through the streets, looking for scarce taxis or ways to work after more than four inches of snow fell overnight.

"We're not in Russia here," said Guy Pitt, a Transport for London spokesman. "We don't have an infrastructure built for constant snow."

CAIR Takes Stand Against Consciousnessness-Raising

As we noted briefly a couple weeks ago ("All One Community?"), there has been a minor kerfuffle about the distribution, as a free DVD in newspaper ad inserts, of the documentary "Obsession," a 2006 film that attempts to illustrate, according to filmmaker Raphael Shore, that "there is a war being waged against America by radical Islamic extremists."

Now the kerfuffle has become local, thought not losing its kerfuffle scale. According to Detroit News Islamic Affairs Correspondent Gregg Krupa, the DVD, "mailed to tens of thousands of households in Macomb and Oakland counties and distributed as advertising in local newspapers is being decried as bigotry by some Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders, who say it portrays radical Islam as a demonic force bent on world domination." ("Interfaith leaders call 'Obsession' DVD hateful").

Disclaimer: I haven’t managed to see this documentary, and I didn’t get the insert, because we get the Detroit News at our house. As seen in the article, both the Detroit News and Free Press decided not to distribute this piece of advertising for unstated reasons. (I’ll state them. They're afraid of being mau-maued by Dawud Walid, CAIR, and the ADC--probably with unannounced drop-in visits right before lunchtime). But I know the documentary was shown on both CNN and Fox News Channel in prime time, and I have no reason to doubt that the documentary is an informative and accurate piece of work. And my opinion includes Krupa's article, which nowhere calls into question the factual accuracy of "Obsession." [TR].

One Dearborn doctor complains about the documentary this way:

"What the movie is doing is trying to label all Muslims as supporting terrorists," said Mir Asghar of Dearborn, a doctor and a Muslim. "There is a small group of extremists, like al-Qaida and the Taliban, and we are 100 percent against them and behind all efforts against them. But we are 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide and we are a voice of moderation."

And the "interfaith" angle of the opposition sounds something like this:

Robert Bruttell, an adjunct professor of religion at the University of Detroit and a member of Interfaith Scholars, which is part of the Michigan Roundtable for Diversity & Inclusion, said, "The movie is appalling, a piece of the most blatant sort of pernicious propaganda. We have formed a task force to see what we can do to countervail against it."

Cool! A task force!

Task Force Agenda:

Idea Number One: Employ censorship tactics to countervail against Islamo-critical information.

Idea Number Two: Create a countervailing documentary, (e.g., "Islam Means 'Peace'"), richly illustrated with example after example of the numerous, unequivocal, public, denunications of Islamist terrorism by Islamic political, religious, and cultural leaders, and examples of the uniform condemnation of violent Islamist attacks from within the greater Muslim community across the globe. . . .what's that? We don't? There aren't? We can't??

OK. Then as I was saying, returning to Idea Number One. . . .

Among the "distortions" the documentary is alleged to be spreading is that "[t]he sacred Islamic principle of jihad -- a personal or community struggle against evil -- is misidentified as a commandment to Muslims to make war against the United States and Europe."

But the most interesting bit to me is this:

The Council on American Islamic Relations has asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether the nonprofit group that distributed it is a "front" for pro-Israel groups aiming to affect the presidential election. A liberal Jewish organization, Tikun Olam, has asked the Internal Revenue Service to review the tax-free status of the Clarion Fund, questioning whether it is independent and nonpartisan, as required of nonprofits. . . .

. . . Muslims and others point to the targeting of swing states like Michigan, Virginia and Missouri and areas like Macomb and Oakland counties by the Clarion Fund. Those critics say it is an attempt to influence the election by scaring the electorate, so voters are more likely to vote for the candidate they think will best defend national security.

Let’s think about this, because I think this is what's really going on here. The objection to “Obsession” by “Muslims and others” is that it might scare voters into voting “for the candidate they think will best defend national security.” But isn’t it a good thing to select the candidate who will better defend national security? And don’t Obama, and McCain both claim to be the better candidate to defend national security?

What’s really going on here is that the DVD--which mentions neither McCain nor Obama, Democrats nor Republicans--and which was made long before anyone knew who the party nominees would be--really is effective at raising “awareness of the threat of radical jihadism.” And on that issue there really has been a distinctive difference between the two parties on this issue both before and after 9/11, but especially after.

Which leaves this question:

Why do CAIR and the ADC care so much that voters select the president in November with a lower awareness of that threat?

Defeat of Terrorism Actually Mentioned in Section A!

Who says there's no progress on Iraq? Time was when a claim we'd defeated terrorism there--or even dealt it a serious blow- wouldn't have made it into the front section of the Detroit Free Press at all.

Not that it was front page news today, either. That was dedicated to huge story of a pattern of sexual harassment lawsuits at the Jeep Assembly Plant in Toledo. Then of course there's a timely story about the price of gas.

But then there it was, down at the bottom of page 4A:

Terrorism defeated in Iraq, leader says
ASSOCIATED PRESS • July 6, 2008

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraq's prime minister said Saturday that the government has defeated terrorism in the country, a sign of growing confidence after recent crackdowns against Sunni extremists and Shi'ite militias.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched the crackdowns to extend the authority of the government over areas in Baghdad and elsewhere that largely have been under the control of armed groups since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

"They were intending to besiege Baghdad and control it," al-Maliki said. "But thanks to the will of the tribes, security forces, army and all Iraqis, we defeated them."

He was speaking at ceremonies marking the fifth anniversary of the 2003 assassination of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, a leading opponent of Saddam Hussein who was killed in a truck bombing in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf after returning from exile in Iran.

Such attacks plagued Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion, but violence in the country has now fallen to its lowest level in four years. The change has been driven by the 2007 buildup of U.S. forces, the Sunni tribal revolt against Al Qaeda in Iraq and al-Maliki's crackdowns, among other factors.

So Happy Birthday, President Bush.

CAMERA's Steven Stotsky shows how refutation of misleading opinion pieces is done. From Monday's Detroit Free Press:

History does not support claims of massacres by Israelis

June 23, 2008

On May 22, the Free Press published an op-ed column, "No time to celebrate as Palestinians still suffer," by Barbara Harvey and David Finkel of the Jewish Voice for Peace. The essay falsely accused Israeli-armed forces of committing massacres.

By publishing the spurious column, the Free Press provided a platform to a group that spreads misinformation and publicly defames the soldiers who served in the falsely accused units.

The authors cited an alleged Israeli massacre of 200 Arabs on May 22, 1948, in the village of Tantura by the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade. This allegation came from a graduate thesis by Theodore Katz, a student at the University of Haifa. After his allegations were publicized, surviving members of the battalion sued Katz for libel. His own notes and recorded interviews were used as evidence to refute his claims. He apologized and published advertisements disavowing the massacre claim.

The authors cited another alleged massacre in the village of Dawayameh. Their account seems to be directly copied from a book by revisionist historian Ilan Pappe, who bases his account on a "UN report from 14 June 1949." He gives no citation and, having found the report, it is evident why. It's not a "UN report" at all, but a report submitted to the United Nations by something called the Arab Refugee Congress of Ramallah, and based entirely on the account of an Arab official from the town. Israeli historian Benny Morris discusses the allegation and denials that any massacre took place in "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem" and notes that a UN investigation found "no evidence of a massacre."

The authors also cite the "infamous massacre at Deir Yassin," while keeping from readers the fact that what occurred in Deir Yassin is disputed. Some Arab residents of the village have claimed there was no massacre.

The authors also accuse Israel of deliberately starving Gazans. Numerous UN and NGO reports keep tallies of supplies sent into Gaza to sustain the population. Gazans suffer hardship, but starvation is not occurring.

CAMERA recognizes that newspapers present a range of opinions and that the editorial page is a venue for provocative opinions. But there should be no place for publishing unsubstantiated accusations. While the Free Press did publish several letters rebutting the broader issue of Israeli responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem, the false allegations in the original editorial have not been addressed and the factual errors remain uncorrected.

Steven Stotsky

Senior research analyst

CAMERA -- the Committee for Accuracy
in Middle East Reporting in America
Boston

Bush Hater Blames Obama Flap on Hate

Everyone heard about the two Muslim women who were disinvited from sitting behind Obama at his rally last Monday because they wearing the hijab. Then we all heard how Obama apologized to the two women personally. (“Obama apologizes to Muslim women; apology accepted”).

I didn’t think this was that big of a story, compared with other things the world is facing: global jihadism, a nuclear Iran, polar bears invading Iceland.

The story was slightly funny, slightly ironic. Michigan CAIR--in the person of its leader Dawud Walid, did, (in defiance of our prediction), make a half-hearted stab at characterizing Obama’s campaign as unacceptably Islamophobic, but now on his blog he's running four headlines trumpeting that Obama had apologized, (versus one headline mentioning the insult).

It’s a funny thing about the Left: apologies work for them like flipping circuit breakers. A few seconds of darkness, power's restored, it's all forgotten. But anyone who runs afoul of the Left, to missaply a quotation from the New Testament, he “never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.”

(Compare Don Imus, whose apology met this response from National Association of Black Journalists and the editor of Ebony and Jet magazines: “But his apology was too little, too late. No matter how contrite, his words hurt so many so deeply that after 40 years in the radio business, it is time for him to go.” And Trent Lott, whose apology was never enough: (“Fat Joe, Talib Kweli: Trent Lott's Apology Not Enough").)

So Obama messed up in Islam's biggest city outside the Middle East, and then he apologized. That will be the end of that. In the long run, CAIR, and Walid, and Islamic supporters generally want Obama in the White House, not McCain, so principles aren't going to be as strictly hewed to for now.

I don't care that much. As I said, it was never that big of a story.

But then the Detroit Free Press’s Rochelle Riley had to glean out the “bigger story” of her Man Obama's foo-poo, which is that the whole thing is the fault of, I guess, people like me. (Conservatives, Republicans, critics of jihad, any of the rest of that class of low-lifes who do not believe in Obama, Change, and Hope). (“Rochelle Riley: Hate is the real issue”).

The bigger story of the disinvited hijabis, writes Ms. Riley, “is that hateful extremists who used to exist on the fringe of society are now taking over and too much is being done to appease them instead of ignore them.”

Say what?

The Obama volunteers, (who made a mistake, Ms. Riley admits, but they apologized), didn’t really do anything wrong, not really. The only reason they “chose to let hate-mongers dictate their actions and hurt the women's feelings,” is because the campaign volunteers didn’t want “to provide fuel for rumors that Obama is a secret Muslim.”

Now I get it. Huh?

“The bigger story is how the 2008 presidential campaign is giving more power to bigots, spigots and the hateful fringe than ever.”

Okay. How’s that again? WHAT?

Where in this story have any of the persons, the ones customarily slandered by Democrats as bigots and hatemongers, had a thing to do with Obama’s campaign slighting Muslim women?

Not satisfied, I guess, that the Obama supporters will shame the media sufficiently to let the story die quick, Ms. Riley feels she has to report the fact (she’s a journalist, after all, claiming to be telling the bigger story), report the fact that the whole thing was not the fault of Obama or his campaign.

Whaaaaat?

Ms. Riley speaks truth when she says that hate is the issue. And Ms. Riley hates George W. Bush–as a reading of her article makes painfully clear. She hates President Bush so much she has no idea that he–in spite his faults, (and blaming everything on his subordinates and his longtime associates--a vice second nature to Barack Obama–is not one of them), anyway, for all Bush’s faults–he had nothing to do with this!

Not God DAMN Reverend Wright, God BLESS Reverend Wright

[Author’s Note: After the following was posted, an informed reader sent me a correction regarding Charlene Reynolds, namely that I misidentified her as being black, when in fact she is white. I’ve reviewed the post, and decided that removing the erroneous description detracts very little from my intended point. But I have made the correction and done some minor edits to close up any gaps. At DU we do NOT consider identifying someone as black to be a defamatory statement, so for that I feel no need to apologize. But we try to be accurate, and I apologize for any confusion. TRC]

Here’s a summertime activity that’s cheap, fun, and doesn’t burn gasoline:

Let’s all have a conversation about race!

I know what you’re thinking. Remember we did that one year, and what a lousy time we had all had!

But I’m here to tell you, the whole country’s going to be having this conversation one way or the other, whether we like it or not. (Okay, we’re not going to like it). So why not get started now?

Because something big is changing in race relations in America. And it’s high time.

But it’s not going to be pretty. And it sure won't be fun.

But it will be for the best.

And that's on account of this new conversation we’re all going to have--the one not being controlled by the same people who’ve been controlling it these last forty years. I don’t think when it comes it’s going to be controlled by anybody. It isn't Obama's idea. That was an accident. It's not Rev. Wright's idea. He's a classic controller of the ancien regime.

That’s all over. Done with. Finito. That's a page that's been been turned. Turned by accident. But turned nonetheless. And forever.

By way of illustration I ask you to consider Detroit Free Press columnist Stephen Henderson. He’s black, a self-admitted Obama euphoriac who sees Obama’s nomination as a sign of progress and falling “racial barriers.”

In his Sunday column Henderson was hard at work for his candidate, fretting that the a lot of the right kind of voters are failing to dig Obama the way he does. (“Racial attitudes that Obama must address”). Henderson specifically was worried about a woman named Charlene Reynolds, and “lots of people just like her.”

It seems Ms. Reynolds had written a letter to the Free Press in response to another black columnist, declaring, “I would not vote for Obama because he is inexperienced, has not earned the right to my vote, and he is black.”

Plain enough. Detroit’s full of racists, right? Or so we’ve been told for forty years. More than likely Ms. Reynolds is just an outspoken Republican, that other party that's made up 99 and 44/100% of Klansmen, and people who plan vacations around dragging black guys behind pickup trucks.

The strange thing is, Ms. Reynolds is a Democrat. And what's more, she’s “a retired civil servant and union member living in western Wayne County. She voted for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, and twice for Gov. Jennifer Granholm. She's against the Iraq war, fed up with economic stagnation, thinks there should be broader access to health care.” Put another way, she’s supposed to be what Henderson calls a “gimme” for Obama.

Instead, he uses his column to call Charlene Reynolds an ignorant, bigoted, racist. He even went and met her in person after reading her letter, so he could accuse her of racism with even more authority. Sure enough, after finding her commendably honest in person, he wrote, “I find her bigotry is more complicated and nuanced -- but no less ignorant -- than the overt, cross-burning racism that gets portrayed as prototypical. Reynolds has reasons for her racism, she told me.”

(Now I seriously doubt that Ms. Reynolds described her own reasons to Henderson as “racism.” But Henderson had to fall back on paraphrasing Ms. Reynolds's actual thoughts. The Free Press refused to run Ms. Reynolds’s letter verbatim, out of fear, Henderson says, that “running it without any context would have sent the wrong message about this newspaper, and the discussion we're trying to cultivate in. [sic].”)

Henderson writes that Ms. Reynolds specifically refused any suggestion that she’s been “duped into her racial estrangement, she said. She's not some uneducated redneck who thinks blacks are dirty or stupid or inherently unequal. She comes by her views from experience.”

Ms. Reynolds spent her working career as a state employee, working first for several years as a case worker for the welfare department, and then as a probation officer. In any other context, she would be given the latitude of having come by her attitudes honestly.

Yet I think the problem arises when, as a prominent black columnist and, ergo, a voice for the lesser-voiced Detroit black community, Henderson sees himself as a gatekeeper for discussions on race. The duties of race gatekeeper are simple. If you’re white, and want to talk about race, the gate stays closed. In fact, how dare you? You don't talk--you just listen! (Characters like Fr. Pfleger are the rare exceptions--but only because they are the white equivalent of Stepin Fetchit, mocking their own whiteness in craven exchange for approval--but never the respect--of blacks. The Trinity Choir and Peanut Gallery in the Pfleger video aren’t laughing with him --they’re laughing at him.) But then if you’re black, and are critical at all of the "black experience," or any of the usual black leaders, or any of the tried-and-failed solutions of forty years of black liberal politics—then the gate also stays closed. This isn't exactly the narrow gate spoken of Elsewhere that few enter--it's much more restrictive.

This is gatekeeping, old school. Which is why Henderson just knew he had to shut the gate on Ms. Reynolds for daring to hold opinions like this one: “She believes middle-class blacks can be ‘normal’ in mixed company, but resort to conspiracy-laden anti-white rants when they're among other blacks; even educated blacks, she says, just don't trust whites.”

Henderson’s reaction is straight by the book: “Reynolds' generalizations aren't worth dignifying with a response.” And doggone it, he doesn’t respond. Instead he just burns up a lot of column inches calling his fellow black an ignorant, racist, bigot.

And that, friends, is why the racial conversation in America has gone No Place in an ever-tightening circle for forty years. Say something the gatekeepers don’t like, and the conversation is over.

Now I happen to think Ms. Reynolds’s point is worth dignifying with a response. Otherwise, the conversation Obama wants us all to have isn't going to last long, is it? Not every response has to be in agreement. Henderson could respond without agreeing. He could engage, persuade, he could offer contradictory facts. Isn’t that what columnists spend their time doing?

But Henderson skips all that, simply throwing up his hands and asking, “How on Earth do you refute what for Reynolds is a lifetime of encounters that have led her -- wrongly -- to her broad but firm conclusions?”

Well, how do you refute anything? By refuting it. (If you can.) Certainly you don't refute anything by telling someone whose conclusions are based on a lifetime’s observations that she arrived at her conclusions “wrongly.” How, if a lifetime of encounters led her to those conclusions, could she have been led there “wrongly”? Isn't that the meaning of the word, "experience"?

As a matter of fact, when Ms. Reynolds makes her observation that “middle-class blacks can be ‘normal’ in mixed company, but resort to conspiracy-laden anti-white rants when they're among other blacks; even educated blacks, she says, just don't trust whites,” she’s not even expressing anything that some blacks haven't said before, and recently--blacks who weren't called ignorant racists for it.

For instance, here’s Barack Obama during his Philadelphia race speech in March discussing the same point:

Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.

For the men and women of Rev. Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.

That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table . . . . And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Rev. Wright's sermons . . . .

“Those blacks who did make it” is a reference to the black middle class. And the surprising anger in Rev. Wright’s sermons was disturbing because it took the form of a bitter, conspiratorial mistrust—even hatred—of white people. And then how many times did liberal defenders of Trinity and Wright point out that the congregation includes some of the most prominent and successful people in Chicago’s black community? Obama was making the identical point as Ms. Reynolds, when she said, “even educated blacks . . . just don't trust whites.”

Yet Henderson isn’t calling Obama a bigot for acknowledging how blacks harbor secret bitterness that they try to shield from whites, or that they mistrust whites, or how the “resort to conspiracy-laden anti-white rants”-- illustrated so vividly in Rev. Wright’s sermons--is a reflects that very anger and bitterness. Even liberal white columnist, (and Wright admirer), New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, says he thinks what’s happening now “is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation — and they are thunderstruck.” (“Obama and Race”).

(Some of us have known about the anger for a lot longer than that. But we haven’t been free to discuss it, don’t you see.)

So why is it Henderson is so hard on Ms. Reynolds and “lots of people just like her”? Aren’t they all just pointing out a social/racial rift that’s only going to be more widely obvious from here on out --the awful stalemate we're all living with between black anger on the one side and the rapidly depleting resource of white guilt on the other?

I think it's that Henderson's still locked in to the old racial regime, the rules of engagement of forty years, the ones that reject all criticism as bigotry per se, even if it comes from within the black community. Those rules don't converse, don't discuss--they only shut people up. Under those old rules all Henderson the gatekeeper can do is try to declare that Ms. Reynolds’s “generalizations aren't worth dignifying with a response.” The same rules that poisonously insist that conservatives who vote against Obama for his liberal politics are motivated only by his race.

But the gatekeepers aren’t stopping everybody as easily as they once could. More and more people are finding other ways in. Gates are being ignored, walls scaled. The scene will soon resemble that toked-up mob when they started ripping down the cyclone fences around Woodstock. (“This is a mind f***er of all times, man.”)

There are differences already. Slightly more than a year ago Al Sharpton was still hearing confessions from the likes of Don Imus. Now, after the race enforcers tried to rub out Geraldine Ferraro by calling her a racist, instead of languishing in exile, she's getting more face time now than she’s had since 1984. She’s even fighting back, sounding, if I may so, every bit like a “typical white person” or maybe even Obama’s grandma:

" 'Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up,' Ferraro said. 'Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?'...”

(And speaking of old-school black gatekeepers, Bob Herbert responded to Ferraro’s remarks this way: “Geraldine Ferraro’s rants are sad and not worth responding to.” Ha!)

WCHB even canceled Sharpton’s show last week. (Yes, Detroit is now an official No Justice, No Peace Zone). The listeners, apparently, demand more "inspirational" programming.

It's a new day. The race discussion's going to be open to anyone now, or soon will be. One side will no longer have to cringe silently through hectoring, uninformed lectures on the “legacy of slavery” and the “lessons of Katrina,” while social pathologies rage through entire communities immunized by race politics. The other side, if all goes well, will have the freedom to demand better leaders, better solutions, more choices, a better legacy.

Not that it's going to be pretty. It won't be. And it won’t be nice. But everyone, Black, White, American Samoan, or Other, will benefit.

This is long, long overdue.

Free Press Clarifies Obama's Radical Position on Abortion

In Sunday's Detroit Free Press, there was a two-page spread setting out the respective positions on critical issues between Obama and McCain various. ("One Will Lead U.S.", DFP, June 8, 2008).

The Free Press has long been incapable of dealing with abortion accurately. Now that Obama is reaching out to wobbly Catholics and other voters who ought to know better, the Free Press is helpfully fudging Obama's views on abortion, probably because Obama's views happen to be the most radical of anyone in the Senate. "Rated 100% by NARAL on pro-choice votes in 2005, 2006 & 2007. (Jan 2008)"

Here's the Free Press's complete statement explaining Obama's position:

Abortion

He has said a woman’s right to decide how many children to have and when to have one is one of the nation’s most fundamental freedoms. He opposes a constitutional amendment or federal law banning abortion.

Isn’t this the strangest thing now? I'm pro-life, but I also happen to believe that “a woman’s right to decide how many children to have and when to have one is one of the nation’s most fundamental freedoms,” not to mention a God-given fundamental human freedom. I’m sure most pro-lifers would agree with it. Even the Pope. That’s why we pro-lifers detest so much the Chinese “one-birth” policy, which interferes with a woman's choice about having children, and is frequently imposed by means of forced abortions.

Besides, American women already enjoyed the right to decide how many children to have and when to have one before Roe v Wade.

But what’s that got to do with abortion? Abortion isn’t about “deciding how many children to have and when to have one.” The abortion issue has nothing to do with either forcing women to conceive, nor denying them the opportunity to conceive. Abortion is about a mother choosing to kill the unborn baby in utero, the unborn baby she has already conceived.

And Obama's position is, and has consistently been, that there should be no limits on that, any time, any where, of any kind. Up through the date of natural birth. And even after birth, if a child manages to survive a botched abortion and get itself born alive. ("Obama More Pro-Choice Than NARAL").

Memorial Day 2008

I was grateful to see this story in Friday's Detroit Free Press:

Iraq war veteran from Michigan describes blast that cost her a leg

BY CHRIS CHRISTOFF • FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU CHIEF • May 23, 2008
LANSING --

"Ladies and gentlemen, freedom is not free."

With that, tearful Michigan National Guard veteran Sgt. Michelle Rudzitis ended an emotional address to the state Senate, in which she recounted losing her right leg to a roadside bomb in Baghdad, Iraq, on Jan. 22, 2007.

Rudzitis, who turns 33 on Monday, which is also Memorial Day, was the keynote speaker for the Senate's annual Memorial Day service. She told of coming back to her Army base after a day off and a shopping spree. Her Humvee was the only vehicle in a convoy struck by a bomb that hurls a piece of molten copper through steel.

Two in the crew were killed and two were injured, including Rudzitis, whose right leg was severely damaged. Rudzitis, a former Farmington Hills resident who lives in Traverse City, said the Humvee's extra armor had been removed because it was to be refitted with new shielding.

Her description of the injuries -- her eyelashes were fused by the blast so she could not open her eyes, and she woke up in a hospital with her leg amputated -- brought many in the Senate chamber to tears.

A nine-year veteran of the National Guard, Rudzitis called her service the most important thing she'd ever done. She asked that families who spend Memorial Day gathering for barbecues "please, just take a moment and remember what this day means, and to remember all the servicemen and women who are no longer with us."

She said she spent more than seven months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., recuperating from the blast.


What's so refreshing about Sgt. Rudzitis's testimony is the way she describes her sacrifice and suffering as a triumph, instead of a tragedy--

"Rudzitis called her service the most important thing she'd ever done."

Let's hope that America on Memorial Day 2009 still deserves the likes of her.

Detroit's Divine Kwamedy

The shiny black Escalade pulled to the curb in front of Detroit's 36th District Court.

Plainclothes police officers began assuming positions as if they were going to protect their very important passenger, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

Someone sitting in the backseat was wearing a stylish fedora, just like the mayor.

But the scene on Madison Avenue on Tuesday afternoon was not what it appeared.

The Escalade was a decoy.

The person in the backseat was a body double.

A body double?

Yes, a body double, just like the one used by U.S. President Henry Ashton in the current film thriller, "Vantage Point."

While the faux Kilpatrick rolled up in front of the courthouse, the real mayor entered from the rear. (“Mayor's security pulls rare ruse/Body double tactic seldom used by U.S. city leaders”).

They say that every comedy ends up relying on a case of mistaken identity. I don’t know if that’s always true, but Detroit’s mayoral comedy was a case in point just the other day, when His Honor was scheduled to show up at 36th District Court to be arraigned on 8 felony counts. The courtroom activity was televised, naturally, and the news crews were waiting out front on Madison for the Kingpin’s arrival. Those of you goldbrickers who were watching it, like I was, know all about the 3-4 minute wait after the Escalade rolled up, only to find--fooled ya!-- Kwame was already standing in the courtroom in front of the judge.

DU has been unable to confirm what we’re told by sources close to the Kipatrick defense team that Kilpatrick’s lead attorney, Dan ("Dream Weaver") Webb, actually had to argue Kwame out of walking into court through the front door. It turns out Kwame had been rehearsing one particularly stylish shoulder-rolling, knee-popping perp walk for weeks, hoping to impress potential jurors with it. It’s the same one he uses when he arrives at church, so he doesn’t get to use it much.

Still, (we're told), Webb insisted on the decoy operation. But not just to spare the Mayor an embarrassing encounter with pushy reporters in front of Steve Wilson’s camera crew. Rather, Webb's already planning now how the decoy operation will play a key role later in the Kilpatrick trial strategy.

We've watched for weeks as Defendant Kilpatrick has flatly denied, (pretty unconvincingly), that he did any of the things that all the evidence shows him doing. Webb's strategy is to have his client just come right out and level with the jury:

“Ladies and gentlemen, the reason I say I never did those things, is because all those things were done by my body double.

“It was my body double who was holding Christine Beatty’s face in his hands while he ‘sang whatever song it was;’ it was my body double snuggling up with the Jamaican chippie in that Russell Woods barbershop; it was my body double lolling in a North Carolina hot tub with ‘Carmen Slowski.’”

In fact, if push comes to shove, the Mayor is prepared to swear under oath that it was his body double partying at the Manoogian Mansion the night the First Lady sent Tamara Greene to the ER, or who told all those lies in court during the whistleblower trial, or who signed the secret agreement.

And what possible reason, you may ask, could Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick offer a jury that might explain why he would ever send a pinch hitter in to do his God-given off-hours pinching, or to seize his divinely-ordained opportunities to hit it?

To protect his family, that's why.

It was the only way this desperate, put-upon Mayor could save his family from all the threats made against him by hostile non-Detroit Wayne County residents , and all these other people who “don’t care about us,” as Reverend Horace Sheffield III describes them--the ones who spend every waking hour trying to figure out ways to harm Detroit's very own "God's Guy."

'A Man Needs an Education These Days, If He Ever Hopes to Blow Up Some Jews'

Speaking of high-tech terrorists, the Free Press ran some comments Talal Chahine, the fugitive owner of the extinct La Shish restaurant chain, made in 2006. He made his comments from his Lebanese fastness, in answer to federal prosecutors claiming he has links with Hezbollah. (“Chahine's response to Hizballah claims”).

Chahine denies supporting terrorism, of course. He was only participating in a fundraiser for al- Mabarrat, to help out the orphans. (The orphans of suicide terrorists, that is). But Chahine doesn’t seem to believe there is much terrorism out there, anyway. It's exaggerated, like Communism during the Cold War.

"The war on terror is becoming the modern-day equivalent of McCarthyism. I strongly believe that the war against terrorism will not be won with a bullet, bomb or missile but by somehow giving hope to those people in the world who are without hope, and this can only be achieved by better communication and education."

We hear this a lot. Impoverished Msulims from throughout the Middle East, Africa, and sout Asia leave home and trek to Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq to blow themselves up in an act of depseration over their living conditions back home. Cure poverty, and you'll cure terrorism, it's said.

Yet it keeps turning out that better communication, education, and literacy don't seem to be quieting things down.

Chahine may not have heard, for instance, about Al Qaeda’s al-Sahab production company, the one that’s garnered such impressive notice from AP writer Kathy Gannon. (“AP Writer Bullish on Al Qaeda”).

It’s not poor people without hope or education joining up at all, (it never really was), but computer-savvy PhDs and professors. And as for better communication, that’s exactly how Al Qaeda’s winning recruits over--with slick videos.

Instead of using all this literacy and education and high-quality communication to win the war against terrorism, terrorists are using all these tools to recruit even more fighters to win their war against the West.

'Secret Document Man', starring Kwame Kilpatrick

This animation by Detroit Free Press editorial cartoonist, Mike Thompson, won't win any awards for technical excellence, but does get its point across in a fun way.

Have a look.

Kwame's Minima Mea Culpa Points Out His Most Grievous Fault

In Detroit for the last two weeks both major daily newspapers have formed a solid front against the to-be-expected counteroffensive of lies coming from the Kilpatrick administration. The counteroffensive has come, and any wavering on the part of the media will risk Kilpatrick slipping past and revising history overnight.

Today’s editorial “Quick Hit” in the Detroit News, ("Kilpatrick recognizes why he's in mess"), is a worrisome crack in that solid front. Referring to the Mayor’s hour-long radio interview with Frankie Darcel on MIX 92.3 Friday, the editorial asks readers to, “Give the mayor credit for continuing to recognize that it was he who triggered the chain of events that now has him defending himself against allegations of a cover-up.”

Continuing to recognize his responsibility? That’s what we’re all still waiting for him to start doing. The Mayor has never recognized his role in the scandal that now engulfs him (it's his own fault 100%--the philandering, the misuse of city resources, the targeting of honorable cops for destruction, the wasting of city funds, and the cover-up). Nor was his Friday interview any different from his other self-serving public statements since the scandal of the text messages broke. His staged apology from church the Wednesday before allowed to him to take credit for nothing in particular--except caring too much for the city he loves.

Here are only a few of the statements Kingpin made in his Friday interview. Not only is Kilpatrick not continuing to recognize his responsibility, (because he never begins) he manages to cast the blame for his current troubles on one judge for illegal activity, on another for overthrowing Michigan law and the Constitution, on the jury (and the enitre SE Michigan region) for being racist and vindictive against him because he's black, (as were the plaintiffs), on the attorneys, and especially on the Detroit Free Press, whom he repeatedly charges with criminal activity by obtaining the text records "illegally.":

• the recent things is the text messages, which were, you know, illegally obtained from the Free Press and, you know, now the whole paper now is covering up their illegal act with a lot of criminal activity and collusion in writing these reports.


• MS. DARCELL: Was there a cover-up? MAYOR KILPATRICK: Oh, no. MS. DARCELL: Is there a cover-up by your administration? MAYOR KILPATRICK: Absolutely not.
  
• I went to court and fought on the employment issue that this was not a whistleblower action. I lost. The $9 million dollars, or 8.4 million dollars comes from the jury. It's like I gave 9 million -- the jury decided the biggest settlement -- remember the makeup of the jury, remember the political nature of this case, they decided that that -- it was the plaintiff's decision, not me.


• the Free Press after the case was over, they obviously had some meetings, and I think that they ought to answer to.


• There cannot be any legal process that gave them records. And lastly -- lastly, the only person who legally had these records was the judge.


• MS. DARCELL: That has become a question. Are you suggesting then, Mr. Mayor, that they obtained the documents illegally --MAYOR KILPATRICK: Absolutely.
  
• Yes, yes. If they got them from the judge, both of those things are illegal.


• They're throwing out a lot of issue in the front page of their paper to get these things public so they can have justification for their illegal activities.


• There was no secret deal.,,, The reason why it's public now is because the Free Press, I don't want people to lose sight of this, the Free Press illegally obtained some very private phone conversations…. And so what they have now done is illegally obtained some information, and so what they're trying to do now is muddy everything up together, so they can have justification for going after that illegally. And if people are not watching this, then they can go after your stuff in the same way. Send in a legal subpoena, go in the back room with the judge, go to a lawyer's office.

• [Judge Colombo’s decision to release secret agreement and the text files] violates every Michigan Court Rules that's ever been known to man, and we think it's wrong….I mean, this is one of the most protected processes under the law, and we need to keep that it way. Because Kwame Kilpatrick is a political figure that a lot of folk don't like, you can't violate the Constitution, the Michigan Court Rules, and everybody else.

• my constitutional rights were violated, at best. At worst, and some of the other things it means, is that there's some real serious federal and state laws that have been violated here. There's a serious breach of contract issue with the plaintiff's attorney that is at issue here.


• And let me just say one more thing about that civil documents. This is a very serious issue. Because it's not about Kwame Kilpatrick. It puzzles me. Councilwoman Joanne Watson has been doing all of those protests against the Wayne County Circuit Court, the jury pool, the judge's decision, how they operate over there, but when it comes to me it's a little different. There's some serious questions about how that court is run, about how Detroiters get justice at that court, and I believe that at the end of this, I just believe with all of my heart that God didn't bring me here to leave me here.


• Because you've got to learn from not only your own mistakes, but the mistakes of others. And I made plenty, I'm not putting that the side. But at the same time, there's some things that I have to stand on as truth. And so I feel like, yeah, they finally got me, but they got me because of me. They got me because of me. And so this particular pickle that I'm in right now, for lack of a better expression, yeah, I do share some accountability in it, but there are some things that have been done by people who want to violate laws, want to do illegal things, violate court rules, that have never been sanctioned, never been questioned, violate constitutional rights, civil rights, do illegal things, and that has to be checked. Because at the end of the day it's not about me only. It's about the people of this community, make no mistake.


• I think the way that we get off the front page now is the Free Press has to start being honest with the people who purchase it.


• I don't think the media has been unfair. I think the Free Press has committed a crime, I believe they committed a crime. I think that they are -- and now, I read the editorial today from Steven Henderson, he's lumping everything together, so now their paper is involved in covering up their criminal activity. And so that's what I believe.
  
• What I don't expect is our paper to be in collusion with whomever to bring people down with illegal activity. I don't expect that. I don't expect two reporters, Schaefer and Elrick, to go out and go in backroom deals and meet. I don't expect for them to obtain illegal information to try to use it to bring people down illegally. I expect that there's something in the newspapers at least to guide the ethical rules that we have to follow, and if you have questions based on that, we'll come and answer it. What's happening now with our Free Press is something that I've never seen before. And I believe it's a national story.
  
• MS. DARCELL: How do you respond to people who say that relative to the jury's award and the 9 million? How do you -- you know, when you say something you're responsible for, do you feel responsible for that? MAYOR KILPATRICK: I don't. I don't. I feel that the jury erred, I feel that the case was not decided on any facts based in employment law, any facts based in the whistleblower. It is what it is. That case could have been up to $11 million dollars if it would not have settled.
  
• The jury substantially erred….The court trial was never about that, and it was decided based on no legitimate facts dealing with any material issues, but it was about me, Kwame Kilpatrick, and the relationship that that jury and this region has with me.

Kwame's always ready to admits he's guilty of unspecified mistakes, (hey, nobody's perfect), for which he should be promptly forgiven and immediately allowed to resume his Divine assignment without further questions asked. At the same time, his perceived enemies are guilty of illegal activities, judicial malfeasance, and crimes, for which there must be a full divine accounting. It would be hilarious if he weren't actually going to get people to believe him.

Begg Badly Whooped By Free Press Readers

The Detroit Free Press is an extremely biased newspaper. Rather obvious, I know, but it needs saying again and again.

And the fact of the bias at the Free Press is why it’s so interesting that this Sunday’s Free Press letters page was so remarkably one-sided against Victor Ghalib Begg’s December 6 column calling for all Americans to be offended by “anti-Muslim bias.” (“Battle bigotry: Anti-Muslim bias should offend all Americans”).

Not a single letter takes Begg’s side.

Is it possible that the letters editor simply couldn’t find a letter from someone who actually took Begg’s article seriously? Or maybe even the letters editor was insulted by Begg's theme that America is in the grip of the "rapidly advancing disease" of Islamophobia.

Take a look through these letters, and you’ll see universal denunciations of Begg for his gall in calling for an end to Islamophobic intolerance while the Muslim community itself refuses to criticize the intolerant and bigoted actions of their own co-religionists all over the world every American sees reported every single day. Nor did it help Begg to have his column published within days of the Mohammed Teddy Bear prosecution in the Sudan, and while a Saudi court was reviewing the sentence of a gang-rape victim.

We Americans do have our problems with being too PC. Yet these letters encourage me that people just aren't buying the propoganda points of of Begg and CAIR that anyone taking a dim view of Islamist terror and barbarism must be an “Islamophobe” and a bigot.

And that’s a good thing.

Republican Debate Comes to Dearborn

(Photo by KIMBERLY P. MITCHELL at the Detroit Free Press).

This progressive mommy believes it's never too early to get started on your daughter’s political education, even if you're still focused on the campaign of 2004--before your daughter was born. Fortunately, the tyke is already conversant with the concept of “erectile dysfunction.”

Free Press Discovers a Patriarchy It Approves Of

Niraj Warikoo’s Detroit Free Press feature article on Tuesday about the increase in Muslim women wearing headscarves in metro Detroit (“A return to tradition: More Muslim women in metro Detroit defy stares and prejudice by wearing head scarves”) is more of interest to me for what I expect it will not do, than what I expect it ever will do.

What it will not do, is call down a storm of protest from feminists, defenders of women’s rights nor the usual critics of the injustices endemic in patriarchal society. I will be shocked if there is anything less than a category five hurricane of silence.

According to Mr. Warikoo’s article, the decision by Muslim women to go about in public wearing the hijab “comes with a price”: reactions of “stares and prejudice” from non-Muslims, and the usual tongue-wagging ignoramuses (ignorami) who reportedly cruise Dearborn’s streets endlessly searching for Middle Easterners to jeer at.

Mr. Warikoo quotes one young lady on the price she pays:

“Some "look at us, smirk, stick out their tongues or shout out the window, 'Why do you have that on?' " said Arrwa Mogalli, 29, of Dearborn, who has worn hijab since she was 11. "You have nuns totally covered ... and no one questions it. But when a Muslim does it, we're from outer space."

As a ten-year Dearborn resident and a longtime Catholic, I have a point of difference with Ms. Mogalli on whether she often sees “nuns totally covered” in or around Dearborn, since any such spectacle was swept from every American diocese years before Ms. Mogalli began wearing hijab, or was even born. American nuns now march around waving their “NO WAR” signs in modest J.C. Penney pantsuits, and generally despise veils as reactionary, pre-Vatican II mummery.

But speaking on my own account, the religious sisters who tried to educate me all those years ago still wore habits and uncomfortable veils, and it’s true we did not question it, and I have never questioned the logic of Islamic women wearing veils up until now. The sisters wore their veils for the same reason that Islamic women wear them now (that is, when they're wearing them without compulsion and with a free will, and not under orders from the religious police)--for reasons of female modesty.

But Mr. Warikoo is kidding us if he thinks that the big challenge of Muslim young girls and women wearing hijab is that they have to do it in defiance of curious outsiders.

As he quotes from one Roleen Nawwas, in the theme sentence he sandbags till the end of his story, “the underlying concept [of hijab] is…‘A woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.’”

Which of course is a completely revolutionary idea. Or, to go back to my comment about the nuns, it is not revolutionary, but reactionary. The Islamic hijab, and the entire concept of female modesty, no less than the concept that a woman is a priceless thing that must be protected and hidden away, are so nakedly alien and contradictory to western values and ideas about equality and the relationship between the sexes as to be practically a return to the 12th century. Or, what is probably even more upsetting, practically a return to the 1950s.

I wouldn’t know how to begin documenting how enthusiastically the Detroit Free Press, for the forty years or so I’ve been reading it, has championed (under the generic heading of “women’s rights”) things like unrestricted abortion, no-fault divorce, the Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX entitlement for female athletes, compulsory sex education, liberal access to contraceptives for minors, government-subsidized child care, and that whole thing generally known as the “sexual revolution,” and the whole thing that has been called “equality for women.”

At the same time, the Free Press has staunchly opposed any social or legislative scheme that sought, or could even be accused of seeking, to impose “traditional”, regressive ideas about the sexes, the family, marriage, sex, or society on the rest of the masses yearning to breathe free. I've seen the Free Press shown such a consistent antipathy to traditional Catholicism that I have come to believe they have a shadow job title of Anti-Catholic Issues Editor.

Of course the Detroit Free Press was just one of thousands of liberal publications, read by, and responding to millions of like-minded readers through the years. They don't invent this stuff. They just repeat it in their pages. Endlessly. By now we can all recite the prevailing philosophy backwards and forwards.

For instance, we know now that a woman’s social equality with a man is best manifested when she competes with men in the workplace, and is least apparent when she submits herself to “traditional,” “patriarchal,” ideas of home and family that condemn her to remaining only a housewife and mother, in other words, being a loser.

We also have learned that a woman’s sexual equality with a man is best manifested when she is just as free as a man to choose engaging in guilt-free, uncommitted sexual relationships with men (or, for extra credit, other women); a healthy female begins this career no later than her mid-teens, and abstinence and chastity are nothing more than holdovers of stupid repressive religions invented by men to keep women down.

Only on June 8 the Free Press ran an editorial taking the, for them, unremarkable position of opposing abstinence-only sex education. (“Teach sex education for the real world”). And why not? Liberal, sophisticated, unshackled by arbitrary rules and guilt trips, the Free Press understands that young people cannot be expected to abstain from sex, and, when they don’t abstain, there isn't anything wrong with that, except perhaps for the health angle. Only tight-assed fun-killing repressive religious nuts think otherwise. The creeps.

Yet now here we are with a front-page story that takes this whole philosophy and upends it into the nearest trashcan. To wit: “The purpose of hijab: preserving modesty”, “the underlying concept [of hijab] is…‘A woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.’” Not only does the point of view uncritically praise the virtues of sexual modesty, but, even worse, it unapologetically endorses female subservience in a traditional stay-at-home role.

It is describing, as the headline boldly claims, and again without a word of apology, a "return to tradition." And we know the term "tradition" itself is dirtier to most liberals than any four-letter word, and that the notion of returning to the past is absolutely verboten to any self-respecting, right-thinking, progressive. One doesn't progress by going backwards, does one?

And just imagine how much more hated he would have been, (if it is possible to imagine he could have been hated more), if Jerry Falwell, in life, had made a public statement that “A woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.”

Or imagine if Lawrence Summers, in addition to pointing out to his Harvard professors that innate differences may have explain the fact of fewer female professors in math and science, claimed "it was all good, anyway" because “a woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.” (“Summers' remarks on women draw fire”).

Rather than being fired and allowed to drive out of town at the wheel of his own Volvo, Summers would surely have been carried out of town on a rail, after being tarred and feathered, and the Free Press editorial board would have looked on, approving.

The issue of Islam and its treatment of women is a huge one, and I'm not even trying to tackle it here. Suffice it so say that neither traditional sexual roles, nor modesty and chastity, are exclusive to the religion of Islam.

But we do know that, regardless of what I may think about traditional sex roles and modesty symbolized in the hijab or the nakoor, those virtues in much milder form are utterly obnoxious to an entire society full of ordinarily outspoken and indignant feminists, liberals, freethinkers, and progressives of all kinds.

But they won’t speak out. They never do. Not if the women are Muslim, and not if the reactionary force is Islam.

I don't know exactly why this is, whether it is hypocrisy, fear, or a hatred for Islam's enemies that is greater than hatred for the West's heritage. But it is as certain as sunrise that the Left will not decry in Dearborn's headscarves what it despises in a much more light-handed form in America's Christian colleges, churches, and schools.