Anti-Bush or Pro-Treason?

It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference.

Unclaimed Territory – by Glenn Greenwald (as he modestly calls his blog) gets snippy in a post about “right wing” bloggers. (Patriots are safer targets when they’re called “right wingers.”) The post (dated July 16) is “Journalists: It’s time for some articles on the pro-Bush blogosphere.” Greenwald expends a couple of updates ranting about Little Green Footballs and Michelle Malkin. Their sins? Greenwald speaks:

UPDATE: Helpfully right on cue, LGF has a post today entitled “The Media are the Enemy” — a title which really summarizes one of the principal points made on a daily basis by the blogs maintained by Powerline, Instapundit, and Malkin. Today’s treasonous act is that a NYT photographer took photographs of a member of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army engaged in combat with American forces. Apparently, taking a photograph of someone engaged in a war is the same as aiding and abetting them and being on their side and rooting for them to win. Hence, photographers who take photographs of the enemy are themselves “the enemy.” . . .

UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin’s post today is entitled “In the Company of the Enemy” and she pointedly says: “Which side are they on? The New York Times settles the question definitively” — both with an editorial that criticizes the Leader and with the photographs found by LGF. She then links to John Hinderaker at Powerline, who cleverly observes that there was nothing courageous about the photographer taking those photographs because there was no “likelihood that a member of the Iraqi “insurgency” would regard a representative of the New York Times as an enemy.”

This photographer-as-traitor lunacy spreading among them like wildfire may make it seem like I fortuitously picked a good day to highlight the extremism and treason-obsession of the pro-Bush blogosphere. But today is nothing new. This goes on every day with the right’s largest blogs. Every day, a new traitor, more treason, more journalists and Democrats who deserve to be hanged.

It smacks of nothing but treason to take a photograph of a sniper taking aim on the soldiers of your own country instead of telling the soldiers of your own country where the sniper is located. But Greenwald doesn’t try to explain why the act wasn’t treasonous — as if he could. He merely attacks those who call it treasonous. Why? Because they’re “pro-Bush.”

Being for the defense of this nation and against treason isn’t a pro-or-anti-Bush issue. (Well, it shouldn’t be one, anyway.) The problem we have here isn’t with the likes of LGF, Michelle Malkin, and Powerline. No, the problem is with the likes of Glenn Greenwald, who reflexively defends anyone and anything that seems opposed to the policies of the Bush administration, even treasonous newspapers.

The New York Times treasonously publishes classified information that aids terrorists. But that’s all right with the Greewalds of this world, as long as it goes against the wishes of the Bush administration. The fact that publishing such information undermines the war on terror doesn’t matter to a Greenwald, as long as you’re anti-Bush.

All of that is lost on Greenwald. He is wedded to the notion that his anti-Bush stance is a courageous one because he harbors the delusion that he is part of a beleaguered minority. For example, in a reply to a commenter he says that

[t]he left-wing blogosphere performs functions for liberals which no other venue is performing, while the right-wing blogosphere is largely redundant and arguably unnecessary in light of Fox News, right-wing radio, Townhall, Drudge and other similar venues.

It’s as if ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, NPR, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, etc., etc., etc., were objective sources of information rather than megaphones for the anti-Bush, anti-war (because it’s anti-Bush) crowd. Greenwald is a fish in water. In his distorted view of reality, anti-Americanism is the norm and patriotism is an aberration.

More Takes on the New York Times

Michael Barone asks — and answers — the question “Whose side are they on?“

Ann Coulter opens with this question: “When is the New York Times going to get around to uncovering an al-Qaida secret program?”

The Wages of Publicity

From the Devil’s handmaidens at The New York Times:

Group Tries to Block Program Giving Data to U.S.

By DAN BILEFSKY, International Herald Tribune Published: June 27, 2006

BRUSSELS, June 27 — A human rights group in London said today that it had lodged formal complaints in 32 countries against the Brussels-based banking consortium known as Swift, contending that it violated European and Asian data protection rules by providing the United States with confidential information about international money transfers.

It speaks for itself.

The New York Times: A Hot-Bed of Post-Americanism

Proof, if any were needed, that The New York Times‘s publication of details of classified defense programs is politically motivated:

The New York Times, 9/24/01

by Hugh Hewitt

The New York Times, editorializing a long time ago, when the Trade Center ruins were still burning:

The Bush administration is preparing new laws to help track terrorists through their money-laundering activity and is readying an executive order freezing the assets of known terrorists. Much more is needed, including stricter regulations, the recruitment of specialized investigators and greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities. There must also must be closer coordination among America’s law enforcement, national security and financial regulatory agencies….If America is going to wage a new kind of war against terrorism, it must act on all fronts, including the financial one.

(HT: LegalXXX who posted this in June, 2004, and to e-mailer Mary Beth S. who pinged me as to the existence of the editorial, which she found on this FreeRepublic thread.)

Permalink

What has changed since September 24, 2001? Only this: The New York Times has become ever more partisan — so much so that the Times feels compelled to oppose and undermine the war on terror simply because Bush is commander-in-chief. How post-American.

ADDENDUM: From WorldwideStandard.com:

Courtesy of The New York Times

From the International Herald Tribune:

BRUSSELS Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt of Belgium has asked the Justice Ministry to investigate whether a banking consortium here broke the law when it aided the U.S. government’s anti-terrorism activities by providing it with confidential information about international money transfers.

The group, known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or Swift, has come under scrutiny following a report last week by The New York Times….

Heather MacDonald and Gabriel Schoenfeld explain the recklessness of the New York Times here and here.

Posted by Daniel McKivergan on June 27, 2006 12:10 PM | Permalink

But why worry, if you’re a post-American? The terrorists surely will spare the Times. Hah!

Post-Americans and Their Progeny

What are post-Americans? Mark Krikorian, writing at NRO, explains:

Let me be clear what I mean by a post-American. He’s not an enemy of America — not Alger Hiss or Jane Fonda or Louis Farrakhan. He’s not necessarily even a Michael Moore or Ted Kennedy. A post-American may actually still like America, but the emotion resembles the attachment one might feel to, say, suburban New Jersey — it can be a pleasant place to live, but you’re always open to a better offer. The post-American has a casual relationship with his native country, unlike the patriot, “who more than self his country loves,” as Katharine Lee Bates wrote. Put differently, the patriot is married to America; the post-American is just shacking up.

Now, there are two kinds of post-American. David Frum, in his “Unpatriotic Conservatives” article for NR last year, highlighted what I think is the less important kind: Those who focus on something less than America, whether white nationalists or neo-Confederates, etc. The second, more consequential and problematic kind are those who have moved beyond America, “citizens of the world,” as the cliché goes — in other words citizens (at least in the emotional sense) of nowhere in particular.

What does post-Americanism lead to? Among other things — such as The New York Times‘s deliberate efforts to sabotage the war on terror) — it breeds home-grown al Qaeda wannabes. Consider this, by Jim Wooten (ThinkingRight):

So who’s surprised, then, that we see the emergence of the well-fed, well-clothed, no-worry wannabes, bored and “angry,” willing to join al-Qaida in worldwide revolution? “They were persons who for whatever reason came to view their home country as the enemy,” said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in announcing the seven arrests.

We live in a country where immigrants are invited to have dual loyalties, where a liberal’s “highest form of patriotism” is trashing the President and the nation’s military efforts in Iraq, where being “worldly” is granting no favoritism, nor making any distinction, between dictators and democracies, or considering a room that’s too warm and terrorist butchery to be equally-condemable forms of “torture.” All the recordable anger of the Left is directed inward, not at themselves, but at this country.

That’s because the post-American Left is just waiting for a better offer. But it will never come. We “buried” Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Tojo, Krushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Ulbricht, Jaruzelski, Ceauşescu, Saddam, etc., and we will “bury” Castro, Putin, the Chinese cabal, Kim jong-il, Osama and his supporters — and all the rest of Hitler and Stalin’s spiritual heirs — as long as we do not succumb to post-Americanism.

Related posts:
Getting It Wrong: Civil Libertarians and the War on Terror (A Case Study) (05/18/04)
The Illogic of Knee-Jerk Privacy Adocates (10/06/04)
Treasonous Blogging? (03/05/05)
I Dare Call It Treason (05/31/05)
Shall We All Hang Separately? (08/13/05)
Foxhole Rats (08/14/05)
Treasonous Speech? (08/18/05)
Foxhole Rats, Redux (08/22/05)
The Faces of Appeasement (11/19/05)
We Have Met the Enemy . . . (12/13/05)
More Foxhole Rats (01/24/06)
Calling a Nazi a Nazi (03/12/06)
What If We Lose? (03/22/06)< A Political Compass (03/24/06)
Moussaoui and “White Guilt” (05/03/06)
In Which I Reply to the Executive Editor of The New York Times (06/25/06)

In Which I Reply to the Executive Editor of the New York Times

UPDATED THROUGHOUT, 06/26/06

From The New York Times, Sunday, June 25, 2006. Reproduced in its entirety. My comments in brackets and italic boldface. The underlying story is here.

June 25, 2006

Letter From Bill Keller on The Times’s Banking Records Report

The following is a letter Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, has sent to readers who have written him about The Times’s publication of information about the government’s examination of international banking records:

I don’t always have time to answer my mail as fully as etiquette demands, but our story about the government’s surveillance of international banking records has generated some questions and concerns that I take very seriously. As the editor responsible for the difficult decision to publish that story, I’d like to offer a personal response.

Some of the incoming mail quotes the angry words of conservative bloggers and TV or radio pundits who say that drawing attention to the government’s anti-terror measures is unpatriotic and dangerous. (I could ask, if that’s the case, why they are drawing so much attention to the story themselves by yelling about it on the airwaves and the Internet.) [Because, you idiot, you’ve already let the cat out of the bag. The damage is done.] Some comes from readers who have considered the story in question and wonder whether publishing such material is wise. And some comes from readers who are grateful for the information and think it is valuable to have a public debate about the lengths to which our government has gone in combatting the threat of terror. [A public debate that divulges the details of a classified anti-terror program that has been effective? Anyway, you forgot to mention the Lefties — yourself and your staff included — who simply want to shut down the war on terror because it offends your sensibilities.]

It’s an unusual and powerful thing, this freedom that our founders gave to the press. Who are the editors of The New York Times (or the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and other publications that also ran the banking story) to disregard the wishes of the President and his appointees? And yet the people who invented this country saw an aggressive, independent press as a protective measure against the abuse of power in a democracy, and an essential ingredient for self-government. They rejected the idea that it is wise, or patriotic, to always take the President at his word, or to surrender to the government important decisions about what to publish. [But it is neither wise nor patriotic to undermine the government’s lawful efforts to prosecute a war, and that is precisely what the Times and other publications have done.]

The power that has been given us is not something to be taken lightly. [But you have done just that in your zeal to sell newspapers, win Pulitzer prizes, and push your writers’ books.] The responsibility of it weighs most heavily on us when an issue involves national security, and especially national security in times of war. I’ve only participated in a few such cases, but they are among the most agonizing decisions I’ve faced as an editor. [Because your “agonizing” always seems to lead to the same conclusion (publish), I doubt that it’s really agonizing at all.]

The press and the government generally start out from opposite corners in such cases. [Why should that be, unless you place the Times’s interests — don’t give me that baloney about “pubic interest” — above the nation’s.] The government would like us to publish only the official line, and some of our elected leaders tend to view anything else as harmful to the national interest. [Strawman alert!] For example, some members of the Administration have argued over the past three years that when our reporters describe sectarian violence and insurgency in Iraq, we risk demoralizing the nation and giving comfort to the enemy. Editors start from the premise that citizens can be entrusted with unpleasant and complicated news, and that the more they know the better they will be able to make their views known to their elected officials. Our default position — our job — is to publish information if we are convinced it is fair and accurate, and our biggest failures have generally been when we failed to dig deep enough or to report fully enough. After The Times played down its advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy reportedly said he wished we had published what we knew and perhaps prevented a fiasco. [Irrelevant. Kennedy was second-guessing his failure of nerve. He was responsible for the Bay of Pigs fiasco.] Some of the reporting in The Times and elsewhere prior to the war in Iraq was criticized for not being skeptical enough of the Administration’s claims about the Iraqi threat. The question we start with as journalists is not “why publish?” but “why would we withhold information of significance?” We have sometimes done so, holding stories or editing out details that could serve those hostile to the U.S. But we need a compelling reason to do so. [This entire paragraph is off the point. What the government might have liked — or not liked — in various cases isn’t in question. What is in question is why the Times and other media outlets have chosen to divulge very real, very secret, and probably very effective measures, such as the surveillance of international communications and the tracking of financial transactions.]

Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff — but it’s the kind of elementary context that sometimes gets lost in the heat of strong disagreements. [In other words, those who are enraged by the Times’s actions are nothing more than right-wing hotheads.]

Since September 11, 2001, our government has launched broad and secret anti-terror monitoring programs without seeking authorizing legislation and without fully briefing the Congress. [The government has acted in accordance with already existing legislation.] Most Americans seem to support extraordinary measures in defense against this extraordinary threat, but some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to the Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government’s actions and over the adequacy of oversight. [So, the Times favors disgruntled leakers over national security. Well we knew that, and the reasons for it, namely, the Times’s zeal to sell newspapers, win Pulitzer prizes, and push its writers’ books.] We believe The Times and others in the press have served the public interest by accurately reporting on these programs so that the public can have an informed view of them. [Actually, your purpose — among others not so lofty — was to discredit a Republican administration by running scare headlines.]

Our decision to publish the story of the Administration’s penetration of the international banking system followed weeks of discussion between Administration officials and The Times, not only the reporters who wrote the story but senior editors, including me. We listened patiently and attentively. We discussed the matter extensively within the paper. We spoke to others — national security experts not serving in the Administration — for their counsel. [Yeah, but you knew all along what you were going to do, didn’t you?] It’s worth mentioning that the reporters and editors responsible for this story live in two places — New York and the Washington area — that are tragically established targets for terrorist violence. The question of preventing terror is not abstract to us. [Oh, play that violin! New York and Washington aren’t the only potential targets, you narcissistic jerk. By your words and actions you have revealed that the question of preventing terror is abstract to you.]

The Administration case for holding the story had two parts, roughly speaking: first that the program is good — that it is legal, that there are safeguards against abuse of privacy, and that it has been valuable in deterring and prosecuting terrorists. And, second, that exposing this program would put its usefulness at risk.

It’s not our job to pass judgment on whether this program is legal or effective, but the story cites strong arguments from proponents that this is the case. While some experts familiar with the program have doubts about its legality, which has never been tested in the courts, and while some bank officials worry that a temporary program has taken on an air of permanence, we cited considerable evidence that the program helps catch and prosecute financers of terror, and we have not identified any serious abuses of privacy so far. A reasonable person, informed about this program, might well decide to applaud it. That said, we hesitate to preempt the role of legislators and courts, and ultimately the electorate, which cannot consider a program if they don’t know about it. [If they don’t know about it, it’s for a very good reason: Loose lips sink ships. Wars aren’t won by discussing battle plans in town meetings.]

We weighed most heavily the Administration’s concern that describing this program would endanger it. The central argument we heard from officials at senior levels was that international bankers would stop cooperating, would resist, if this program saw the light of day. We don’t know what the banking consortium will do, but we found this argument puzzling. First, the bankers provide this information under the authority of a subpoena, which imposes a legal obligation. Second, if, as the Administration says, the program is legal, highly effective, and well protected against invasion of privacy, the bankers should have little trouble defending it. The Bush Administration and America itself may be unpopular in Europe these days, but policing the byways of international terror seems to have pretty strong support everywhere. And while it is too early to tell, the initial signs are that our article is not generating a banker backlash against the program. [No, but it does give the bad guys — and potential bad guys — better information about how to avoid the tracking of their banking transactions.]

By the way, we heard similar arguments against publishing last year’s reporting on the NSA eavesdropping program. We were told then that our article would mean the death of that program. We were told that telecommunications companies would — if the public knew what they were doing — withdraw their cooperation. To the best of my knowledge, that has not happened. While our coverage has led to much public debate and new congressional oversight, to the best of our knowledge the eavesdropping program continues to operate much as it did before. Members of Congress have proposed to amend the law to put the eavesdropping program on a firm legal footing. And the man who presided over it and defended it was handily confirmed for promotion as the head of the CIA. [Off the point again. You fail to mention the bad guys and how your stories helped them avoid detection. Or don’t you care about them?]

A secondary argument against publishing the banking story was that publication would lead terrorists to change tactics. But that argument was made in a half-hearted way. [Who says? Are you into reading body language?] It has been widely reported — indeed, trumpeted by the Treasury Department — that the U.S. makes every effort to track international financing of terror. [But not precisely how.] Terror financiers know this, which is why they have already moved as much as they can to cruder methods. [How do you know that? How can anyone know that? All one can do is track what can be tracked, but you’ve probably told terrorists more than they knew about how their money is tracked.] But they also continue to use the international banking system, because it is immeasurably more efficient than toting suitcases of cash. [Though they may use it less than before, or in more devious ways, thanks to you.]

I can appreciate that other conscientious people could have gone through the process I’ve outlined above and come to a different conclusion. But nobody should think that we made this decision casually, with any animus toward the current Administration, or without fully weighing the issues. [Regardless of your smug justifications, you did come to the conclusion that it was your right and responsibility to endanger American lives by exposing programs that help track terrorists. The First Amendment gives you the right to publish; it doesn’t say that you must publish. Use your head, if you can retrieve it from the orifice at the other end of your torso.]

Thanks for writing.

Regards,
Bill Keller

[P.S. I pay the President to defend the country, not you. If you want the job, run for it. Until you’ve been elected and inaugurated, keep your mitts off the war effort. You’re on a par with a drunk who aspires to direct traffic, and about as qualified for the job.]

ADDENDUM: See this excellent fisking of Keller’s letter by Hugh Hewitt.

ADDENDUM 2: See this “indictment” by Mark Henry Holzer of the Times and the leakers who have been passing classified information to the Times since 9/11.

ADDENDUM 3: Michelle Malkin has a roundup of blogospheric reactions.

ADDENDUM 4: Michael Barone asks (about those gentle folk of the Times) why do they hate us?

ADDENDUM 5: The American Spectator Blog reports that Keller has been caught lying about the amount of contact the NYT had with the White House and the vehemence of the government’s objections to the story.

ADDENDUM 6: Treasury secretary John Snow piles on (in effect repeating some of what I say above).

Sunday Grab Bag

These are some things I’ve bookmarked in the past month. The subjects are global warming, rooting for the other side, and “Crunchy Cons.”

Arnold Kling has had more to say about global warming:

Much, much more of the human activity that would cause global warming has occurred in the last 20 years than took place between 1900 and 1940. Also, much, much more of the greenhouse gas layer on earth consists of either water vapor or pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide.

Thus, the link between human activity and global warming depends not on simple, obvious relationships in the data. It depends entirely on climate models of how these tiny (relative to the overall volume of greenhouse gases) human activities produce “feedback loops” on the rest. They are models of how much less than one percent of a phenomenon affects the entire phenomenon. They are much more faith-based than empirical.

It is possible that the models underestimate human-caused global warming. However, I believe that this is far less likely than that they over-estimate the human causal factor.

I believe that average temperatures have been rising. I have no reason to believe that they will stop rising. However, the most sensible position an empiricist can take is that human activity is not going to make much difference to global warming, one way or the other.

(An archive of related posts by Kling is here.)

Mike Rappaport wrote about the immorality of rooting for the other side:

[T]he more important point from [Michael Barone’s] article is how strong a case he makes for the moral impropriety of the Democrats’ behavior. Here is Barone’s description [redacted by LC]:

A substantial part of the Democratic Party, some of its politicians and many of its loudest supporters do not want America to succeed in Iraq. . . .

Successes are discounted, setbacks are trumpeted, the level of American casualties is treated as if it were comparable to those in Vietnam or World War II. Allegations of American misdeeds are repeated over and over; the work of reconstruction and aid of American military personnel and civilians is ignored.

In all this they have been aided and abetted by large elements of the press. . . .

. . . One or two instances of American misconduct are found equal in the balance to a consistent and premeditated campaign of barbarism.

. . . I am not saying that all critics of the war or the Bush Administration fall into this camp. There are many legitimate criticisms of the war. But such legitimate criticisms do not include rooting for the other side — including rooting that one does internally but does not admit to most other people.

There was plenty of this during the Cold War, which was reprehensible enough, but at least those people had convinced themselves that communism was not really bad. Few on the left believe that Islamo Facism is desirable.

There was plenty of rooting for the other side during the Vietnam War, as well. And look where it got us. An (initially) unnecessary war was (unnecessarily) lost, and thus America continued its downward spiral into defeatism, from which it has yet to recover fully.

Related to that, read this, by Austin Bay, about the publication by The New York Times and other papers of classified information about the war on terror. Bay concludes:

[S]ome headlines hurt – they damage our government’s Job One: national security. Perhaps the Times’ editors don’t believe we are engaged in a global counter-terror war against Islamo-fascism. We are. At one time there was hole in south Manhattan they could not ignore. . . . For America’s economic and media elites the war has been easy. . . . The US military has served with great distinction, despite major media attempts to “My Lai” Abu Ghraib and now Haditha. Moral compromise in war is inevitable; compromising legitimate intellgence operations is not. History may well conclude this is a war that didn’t need America’s media elites, and perhaps that suspicion curdles the gut of a couple of New York Times bigshots.

Jeffrey Tucker reviewed Rod Dreher’s book Crunchy Cons. Here are excerpts of Tucker’s review:

Dreher seems untroubled by serious issues of economics and politics. He has not put much thought into the political or the economic implications of what he writes. He is not the slightest bit curious about what his vision for his life and yours means for society at large. Though he imagines himself as a rebel against mass consumption, he seems completely unaware that he is purchasing his lifestyle choice just like everyone else, and that the market he loathes is precisely what makes his choice possible.

For those who haven’t read about this new approach to conservative living, here is a quick primer. Dreher follows in a long line of writers dating back to the Industrial Revolution — and a certain strain of post WW2 conservative writers — who loath consumer culture, believe that mass production for the masses is sheer corruption, that free trade is deracinating us all from praiseworthy national attachments, that machines destroy souls, and that capitalism is the enemy of faith because it fuels change and progress. Dreher reports with disgust that America has become one big shopping mall populated by people driven by spiritually barren materialist motives who buy buy buy goods and services of shoddy quality to feed their frenzied desire to live decadently while eschewing friends, community, family, and faith.

And make no mistake: it is the free market that is his target. He even says that “the place of the free market in society” is precisely where he departs with regular conservatives (who he wrongly assumes love the market).

We should go another way, says he. We should cook at home, turn off the television, have kids, educate them at home, buy organic veggies, eat free-range chickens, bike not drive, buy from small shops and never Wal-Mart, live in cottages rather than gated communities, buy old homes and fix them up, and you know the rest of the story. . . .

It never occurs to the author that his crunchy way of living is a consumable good — nay, a luxury good — made possible by the enormous prosperity that permit intellectuals like him to purport to live a high-minded and old-fashioned lifestyle without the problems that once came with pre-capitalist living. . . .

[W]hat we have here is a grab bag of weakly argued policies to support his particular lifestyle, which he is not content to live on his own but rather wants to see legislated as a national program. Never mind whether any of this stuff is consistent or what the consequences would be.

For more about “Crunchy Conservatism,” try these links, which I’ve been hoarding:

The “Crunchy Con” manifesto

A (defunct) blog by and about “Crunchy Cons”

Three posts at Right Reason (here, here, and here)

A review of Crunchy Cons at RedState

A three-part series at The Remedy (here, here, and here) about how “Crunchies seem to misunderstand the relation and distinction between politics and culture; they seem to misunderstand the true principles and ends of the American regime in which they live.”

I Wish I’d Said That

A few choice bits from today’s reading:

Skating on the floor of the roller rink is an example of what Friedrich Hayek called spontaneous order. The process is beneficial and orderly, but also spontaneous. No one plans or directs the overall order. Decision making is left to the individual skater. It is decentralized.

— Daniel B. Klein, “Rinkonomics: A Window on Spontaneous Order,” The Library of Economics and Liberty

Killing the #2 man in al Qaida just means everybody in the organization moves up one notch. The former #3 guy is the new #2 guy, the former #10 guy is now the #9 guy, and the new #48 guy is Howard Dean.

Just so you know, I’m ashamed that the Dixie Chicks are from America.

— Ann Coulter, in an interview at FrontPageMag.com

If the fact that a man who regards his son’s butcher as a better man than the American president is rewarded with a party’s nomination to Congress does not tell you all you need to know about the morally twisted world of the Greens, nothing will.

— Dennis Prager, writing of Michael Berg, the father of Nick Berg, at FrontPageMag.com

The beauty of doing nothing is that you can do it perfectly. Only when you do something is it almost impossible to do it without mistakes. Therefore people who are contributing nothing to society except their constant criticisms can feel both intellectually and morally superior.

“”We are a nation of immigrants,” we are constantly reminded. We are also a nation of people with ten fingers and ten toes. Does that mean that anyone who has ten fingers and ten toes should be welcomed and given American citizenship?”

— Thomas Sowell, “Random thoughts,” Townhall.com

After the London tube bombings, Angus Jung sent the Aussie pundit Tim Blair a note-perfect parody of the typical newspaper headline:

“British Muslims fear repercussions over tomorrow’s train bombing.”

An adjective here and there, and that would serve just as well for much of the coverage by the Toronto Star and the CBC, where a stone through a mosque window is a bigger threat to the social fabric than a bombing thrice the size of the Oklahoma City explosion.

— Mark Steyn, “You can’t believe your lyin’ eyes,” Macleans.ca

Just Say When

Left-wing dingbat Jeralyn Merritt has a problem with the successful anti-terrorist operation that led to the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi:

It was an act of retaliatory terrorism. By our government. And I don’t want it to be in my name. Even if he was, as we’re told, the devil incarnate. Violence begets violence. It’s time for the war and the killing to stop.

I guess she wouldn’t want U.S. forces to rescue her if she were being held by terrorists, if it meant that terrorists had to die as a result.

If you bother to read Merritt’s post, you must also read this one.

Moussaoui and "White Guilt"

UPDATE 05/05/06 @ 10:52 am: Read this, by Gerard Vanderleun, and this, by Daniel Henninger.

UPDATE 05/04/06 @ 9:20 pm: Read this, by Peggy Noonan.

UPDATE 05/09/06 @ 11:45 am: Read this, by Mark Steyn.

REVISED 05/04/06 @ 9:45 am

It seems that the jury in Zacarias Moussaoui’s sentencing trial has opted to spare the slimeball’s life. Nevertheless, he’ll be dead meat within a year if a fellow prisoner gets a shot at him.

What really bothers me is that, according to an AP story, “the jury was not convinced that Moussaoui, who was in jail on Sept. 11, deserved to die.” The jury’s verdict is yet another sign of what Shelby Steele calls “white guilt.” Steele, writing recently at OpinionJournal, observes that

[t]here is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.

For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along–if admirably–in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one–including, very likely, the insurgents themselves–believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy. . . .

Today words like “power” and “victory” are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, “might” can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today’s atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so. . . .

Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem–win a war, fix immigration–they lose legitimacy.

To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger.

The best way to deal with a problem is . . . to deal with it. Being “nice” doesn’t make an enemy any less dangerous; it only encourages more acts of aggression against Americans. That should have been the lesson we learned when we ended the war with Japan so decisively.

Moussaoui is an enemy of the United States who was prepared to kill Americans by committing an act of war against them. He should be treated as we used to treat enemies, decisively and terminally. The jury in Moussaoui’s case has opted instead to let him linger — at least until a fellow prisoner decides to do what the jury should have ordered done. Until then, the sentence handed to Moussaoui will be seen, rightly, by our enemies as yet another sign of weakness.

Hang Her High

UPDATED BELOW

(If she’s guilty, of course.)

CIA Officer Fired for Leaking Classified Info to Media

P.S. to Bush-bashers: A leak is an unauthorized disclosure of information. The head of the executive branch is authorized to authorize disclosures.

P.P.S. (from Wizbang!):

[T]he CIA officer’s name is Mary McCarthy. She worked at the Inspector General’s office and testified in front of the 9/11 Commission.

Intelligence sources tell NBC News the accused officer, Mary McCarthy, worked in the CIA’s inspector general’s office and had worked for the National Security Council under the Clinton and and George W. Bush administrations.

The leak pertained to stories on the CIA’s rumored secret prisons in Eastern Europe, sources told NBC. The information was allegedly provided to Dana Priest of the Washington Post, who wrote about CIA prisons in November and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for her reporting.

Sources said the CIA believes McCarthy had more than a dozen unauthorized contacts with Priest. Information about subjects other than the prisons may have been leaked as well.

Update II: The Jawa Report says that McCarthy gave $2,000 to Kerry’s 2004 campaign [emphasis mine, all mine].

MY UPDATE (04/22, 1:15 PM):

McCarthy may have been a serial leaker, and — hah! — she may have been caught in a sting operation.

Hanging Separately

Norman F. Hapke Jr. has an insightful post at The American Thinker. In “The Antiwar Crowd Forgets We’re All in This Together,” he writes:

Wellington is reputed to have said, “A great nation cannot fight a small war.” His country’s success in the 19th century belied that idea for Great Britain, but our experience in Viet Nam and Iraq lends some credence to the phrase. In neither place were we ever in any danger of losing militarily, but in each our adversaries have focused on the real center of gravity, our self-confidence and will-to-win.

Our enemies are vile and heartless but they are not stupid. There is a direct bright line from the Buddhist monk’s self-immolation in Saigon in 1963 through Somalia in 1998 to Abu Ghraib and every suicide bomber driving the streets of Baghdad today. They know we are susceptible to what the media, by its institutional imperative, wants to show us, and they exploit our openness. That fact of our society is a given.

What is not a given is how our elites have reacted. . . .

Our elites and politicians have failed to realize that the best chance we have of winning this war quickly and with minimum losses is if our adversary sees a united, resolute America putting its disagreements aside so that it can bring maximum power and ingenuity to bear on achieving its objectives. If we foreclose the only avenue they have of ever coming close to defeating us, the war will soon be resolved. We can argue the origins of the war, the faulty intel, and all those presently irrelevant issues when our boot is on the bloody neck of the last terrorist. Until then we should concentrate on winning. No one on this planet can defeat us. We can only defeat ourselves.

Precisely. I concluded “Shall We All Hang Separately?” with these thoughts:

The Left has, by its words and deeds over the decades, seceded from the mutual-defense pact of the Constitution. The Left has served notice that it will do everything in its power to weaken the ability of those Americans who aren’t post-patriotic to prepare for and execute an effective mutual defense.

Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” And Lincoln was right, but he was able to reunite the “house” by force. That is not an option now. The Left has more effectively seceded from the Union than did the Confederacy, but the Left’s secession cannot be rectified by force.

And so, those Americans who wish “to provide for the common defence” are forced to share a foxhole with those post-patriots who wish to undermine “the common defence.”

If the Left’s agenda prevails, we shall indeed all hang separately.

What If We Lose?

Today’s featured article at OpinionJournal is “What if We Lose? The consequences of U.S. defeat in Iraq.” It’s a good reminder that those who clamor for withdrawal from Iraq haven’t thought through the consequences of their position. They want the “benefits” — no more American casualties (though the Americans are volunteers), a smaller defense budget, and the “good will” of “allies” like France — but they fail to address the costs. The OpinionJournal piece does a pretty good job of addressing the costs.

A Test of Morality

Anyone who opposes the death penalty for terrorist scum and favors euthanizing innocent life is depraved.

Dealing with Moussouai

Almost a year ago

Zacarias Moussaoui pleaded guilty . . . to taking part in a broad al Qaeda conspiracy that resulted in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, saying Osama bin Laden personally instructed him to fly an airplane into the White House.

It now seems possible that Moussaoui may not be sentenced to death. (You can follow all the action here.) There must be options; for example:

1. Imprison Moussaoui but do not sequester him.

2. Drop him off outside the gate of a U.S. military encampment in Iraq, armed with an empty Uzi — and wearing his orange jump suit.

3. Announce that he will be released from custody at Ground Zero at a certain time, and that he will be wearing his orange jump suit (with leg-iron accessories).

It would only be fair to let Moussaoui choose from among the options.

Calling a Nazi a Nazi

UPDATED, 03/18/06

Steven Pinker (quoted by AnalPhilosopher) says:

The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National Socialism is not fanciful. Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in 1913, and may have picked up from him a fateful postulate that the two ideologies would share. It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. . . . It doesn’t matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin.

So say I:

Hitler was “conservative.” The canard that will not die. Hitler was a statist Leftist who would have been at home in today’s Democrat Party.

Do I exaggerate about Nazism’s affinity with the Democrat Party? The common ground between Nazism and Democrats spans eugenics (Democrats: abortion and euthanasia), class/race warfare (Dems: reverse racism, “soak the rich”), state control of business (Dems: if it moves, regulate it; if it doesn’t move, tax it), the suppression of opposing views (Dems: campus speech codes, disruption of conservative speakers, efforts to muzzle the blogosphere). Those strike me as rather fundamental similarities.

Consider this quotation about the founder of the modern Democrat Party and today’s regulatory-welfare state:

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President in 1932. Faced with the Great Depression — a depression which had been caused by government itself — Roosevelt’s “solution” was to implement the socialist-fascist economic system under which Americans now suffer. Under the banner of “saving America’s free-enterprise system,” FDR was directly responsible for the abandonment of America’s 150-year history of free enterprise.

Arguing that the American people could no longer be trusted to be charitable to others, FDR claimed that government — the organized means of coercion and compulsion — was needed to help those in need. And to effect this claim, he secured the passage of his New Deal for Americans. Roosevelt used the disastrous results of one governmental intervention — political manipulation of money — to justify another — the socialist ideal of using government to steal from those who have in order to give the loot to those who need. . . .

[I]t was through the income tax and the power to expand money and credit that Roosevelt was able to accomplish effectively his political plundering and looting, not only from the rich but from everyone in all walks of life.

But Roosevelt did more than just enshrine into the American political and economic system the ideas of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin (the mass murderer FDR affectionately referred to as “Uncle Joe”). Greatly admiring Benito Mussolini’s fascist system in Italy, Roosevelt proceeded to implement the same type of economic system in the U.S. For example, his National Recovery Act gave him virtually unlimited dictatorial powers over American business and industry. And any American citizen who did not do his “patriotic” duty by supporting the NRA and its “Blue Eagle” soon found himself at the receiving end of FDR’s vengeance and retaliation.

And it was during this period of time that such alien schemes as the Social Security Act, the FDIC, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Emergency Banking Relief Act the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Federal Securities Act, and the National Labor Relations Act came into existence — all with the aim of taking control of people’s lives as well as absolving them from responsibility for errors and foolhardiness by giving them the political loot that had been stolen from others. . . .

And what was the reaction of the American people to the evil, immoral, and tyrannical acts of FDR? Like people in other parts of the world who were suffering under dictatorial rule — Russians, Germans, and Italians — most of them reacted like sheep — meekly going along with their own slaughter and, in many instances, ardently supporting it. . . .

For several years, the U.S. Supreme Court, led by four justices — Sutherland, Butter, Van Devanter, and McReynolds — declared FDR’s socialist and fascist New Deal policies in violation of the United States Constitution — in violation of every principle of individual liberty and limited government on which this nation was founded.

But the end came in 1937. In what many judicial scholars say was a result of Roosevelt’s disgraceful and pathetic attempt to pack the court with some of his cronies, a fifth justice — Owen J. Roberts, whose vote had helped to invalidate much of the New Deal — shifted his vote in favor of Roosevelt’s policies. And with Roosevelt thereafter being able to replace dying and retiring justices with ones who would do his bidding, the era of American economic liberty came to a sad and tragic end.

More than economic liberty came to a sad and tragic end under FDR:

[E]conomic and personal liberty are inseparable: We engage in economic activity to serve our personal values, and our personal values are reflected in our economic activity. When the state restricts economic liberty, it necessarily restricts personal liberty, and vice versa. The state simply cannot make personal and economic decisions more effectively than individuals operating freely within an ever-evolving socio-economic network.

FDR didn’t believe that. Neither did Hitler or Stalin. Neither do a lot of Democrats.

I am sick and tired of hearing Leftists (i.e., a lot of Democrats) call conservatives and libertarians “fascists” and “Nazis.” It’s time to call Democrats what they (or a lot of them) are: Hitler’s (and Stalin’s) brothers and sisters under the skin. Fascist, Socialist, Communist, Nazi, Leftist — they’re all pretty much the same thing as far as I’m concerned. Different in degree, perhaps, but not in kind.

UPDATE: David N. Mayer says that

those people on the left-side of the traditional left-right political spectrum who call themselves and their policies “progressive” are abusing the word. Progressive, according to most dictionaries, means “favoring or advocating progress, change, improvement, or reform, as opposed to wishing to maintain things as they are,” “making progress toward better conditions, employing or advocating more enlightened ideas,” or “going forward or onward.” Rather than being truly “progressive,” those who label themselves by that word are, in fact, reactionaries: they adhere to, and they advocate a continuation and expansion, of the failed policies of the 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state.

There’s nothing “progressive” about the socialist, paternalistic policies that American leftists advocate. The 20^th-century regulatory/welfare state they want to expand was itself based on the 19^th-century statist policies of Germany’s Otto von Bismarck; and Bismarck’s statism was the old European wine – the paternalism that for centuries had been the dominant public policy of the feudal monarchies of Europe – rebottled in 19^th-century packaging. Like the conservatives (those on the right side of the traditional left-right political spectrum) whom they claim to oppose, left-liberal “progressives” are really advocates of paternalism and collectivism. Left-liberals and conservatives differ only in the type of 19^th-century paternalism they want to continue or expand. Conservatives (paternalists/collectivists of the right) seek generally to use the coercive power of government to impose Victorian-era morals, while their brethren on the left seek generally to use the coercive power of the government to redistribute wealth. Both sides would willingly sacrifice individual freedom and self-responsibility in order to advance their collectivist agenda, their notion of the so-called “common good” of society.

That’s just the beginning. There’s a long bill of particulars. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s mostly on target. Go read it.

The Adolescent Rebellion Syndrome

AnalPhilosopher makes a good point in “Childishness on Campus“:

Academics are in a state of arrested emotional development. They have no real-world responsibilities, so they can—and do—revert to childishness. Their students, who are in adolescent rebellion against their parents and other authority figures, are all too happy to emulate them. They absorb the jargon, the modes of thought and feeling, and the attitudes of disrespectfulness and incivility. These students are in for a rude awakening when they enter the working world, where seriousness, respectfulness, discipline, and civility are not just encouraged but required.

In fact, he echoes my thoughts about adolescent rebellion and other forms of intellectual immaturity, which are to be found mainly — but not exclusively — among “artists,” academicians, and the Left generally:

The truth is that in art — as in “serious” music — the best work that could be done had been done by about 1900. That left Picasso, Braque, and their ilk — like Schoenberg, Berg, and their ilk — with two options: Create new works using the tools that had been perfected by the masters who came before them, or disown the tools in a fit of adolescent rebellion. The artists and “serious” composers of the 20th century, in the main, took the second option. (07/24/04)

* * *

If you can’t defend Clinton on his own merits, make up an absolutely silly reason to discredit his opponents [as Paul Fussell does:]

“Conservatives know that I cannot be trusted… I hate them in general, I grew up in that atmosphere, my father was a corporate lawyer and always voted Republican — that’s one reason I decided not to. It’s a standard boy’s reaction. If your father’s a dentist you either become a dentist or you ridicule dentists for the rest of your life.”

At least he admits that his liberalism arose from adolescent rebelliousness, which I have contended is a primary source of liberalism. (08/04/04)

* * *

There’s surprisingly little chatter in the libertarian-conservative segment of the blogosphere about this:

About 70% of voters agreed to add this sentence to the Missouri Constitution: “To be valid and recognized in this state, a marriage shall exist only between a man and a woman.”

. . . Stanley Kurtz at The Corner adds this:

Apparently, …Democrats outnumbered Republicans at the polls. That makes the already dramatic 71 percent vote in favor of the Missouri marriage amendment all the more impressive. The Post-Dispatch also notes that gay marriage advocates outspent opponents, and launched a major television ad campaign to boot….

In a post that predates the Missouri vote, the usually sensible Virginia Postrel opines that:

People support abortion rights out of fear. They support gay marriage out of love.

A lot of “people” support abortion rights and gay marriage simply because it’s the politically correct thing to do — a litmus test of one’s open-mindedness and liberality — and a form of delayed adolescent rebellion against moldy reactionaries and religious fundamentalists. (08/04/04)

* * *

It’s obvious that Osama favors a Kerry victory. Why else would he go to such lengths to try to discredit Bush and remind American voters that the “choice” is ours?

Does that equate Osama and the American left? It would by the left’s vilely strident, anti-war, anti-Bush rhetoric. But I won’t stoop to the left’s level of illogic. I’ll say only that some on the left sympathize with Osama’s ends and means because they’re essentially acting out a form of adolescent rebellion. (10/30/04)

* * *

[A]lthough Ward Churchill and his ilk are despicable human beings, I don’t care what they say as much as I care that they represent what seems to pass for “thought” in large segments of the academic community. Clearly, universities are failing in their responsibility to uphold academic standards. Left-wing blather isn’t knowledge, it’s prejudice and hate and adolescent rebellion, all wrapped up in a slimy package of academic pretentiousness. (02/28/05)

* * *

The Left will bitterly oppose any nominee for the Supreme Court if the Left finds in that nominee a scintilla of opposition to legal abortion.

What I want to know is why that issue is of such great importance to the Left. What is it about abortion (or the “right” to have one) that seizes the passions of the Left? Is it the notion of self-ownership, that is, the “right” to do with “one’s body” as one will? If the Left were consistent about self-ownership it wouldn’t also encourage government to take money from others in order to provide “free” programs, ranging from health care to bike trails.

The Left’s selective embrace of self-ownership indicates that its elevation of abortion to sacramental status has deeper, more psychological roots. The Left is in an arrested state of adolescent rebellion: “Daddy” doesn’t want me to smoke, so I’m going to smoke; “Daddy” doesn’t want me to drink, so I’m going to drink; “Daddy” doesn’t want me to have sex, so I’m going to have sex. But, regardless of my behavior, I expect “Daddy” to give me an allowance, and birthday presents, and cell phones, and so on.

“Daddy,” in the case of abortion, is government, which had banned abortion in many places. If it’s banned, the Left wants it. But the Left — like an adolescent — also expects government to cough up money (others’ money, of course) to quench its material desires.

Persons of the Left simply are simply unthinking, selfish adolescents who want what they want, regardless of the consequences for others. The Left’s stance on abortion should be viewed as just one more adolescent tantrum in a vast repertoire of tantrums. (07/21/05)

* * *

The effort to portray conservativism as an aberrant psychological disorder goes back to the publication in 1950 of The Authoritarian Personality, about which I was instructed by Prof. Milton Rokeach, author of The Open and Closed Mind (related links). Here is how Alan Wolfe, who is sympathetic to the thesis of The Authoritarian Personality, describes its principal author:

Theodor Adorno, the senior author, was a member of the influential Frankfurt school of “critical theory,” a Marxist-inspired effort to diagnose the cultural deformities of late capitalism.

Hmm. . . . Very interesting. . . .

How does Rokeach’s work relate to Adorno’s? Here’s Rokeach, in his own words:

The Open and Closed Mind grew out of my need to better understand and thus to better resist continuing pressures during my earlier years on my intellectual independence, on the one side from orthodox religion and on the other side from orthodox Marxism-Leninism.

Research as a continuation of adolescent rebellion? Hmm. . . . I wonder what Dr. Freud would make of that? (02/01/06)

* * *

The point is that liberty and happiness cannot be found in the abstract; they must be found in the real world, among real people (or totally apart from them, if you’re inclined to reclusiveness). Finding an acceptable degree of liberty and happiness in the real world means contending with many subsets of humankind, each with different sets of social norms. It is unlikely that any of those sets of social norms affords perfect liberty for any one person. So, in the end, one picks the place that suits one best, imperfect as it may be, and makes the most of it. . . .

[But t]here is a kind of pseudo-anarcho-libertarian who asserts that he can pick and choose his associates, so that his interactions with others need consist only of voluntary transactions. Very few people can do that, and to the extent they can do it, they are able to do it because they live in a polity that is made orderly by the existence of the state (like it or not). In other words, anarcho-libertarian attitudes are bought on the cheap, at the expense of one’s fellow citizens. (03/02/06)

Yes, radical libertarians tend to be just as jejune as their counterparts on the Left.

Whiners — Left and Libertarian

I have come to the conclusion that the well-spring of whining is a cosseted existence. Thus the American Left (in particular, the rich-to-ultra-rich-Left) — which reaps the economic benefits of liberty under the rule of law — has the luxury of denigrating capitalism, celebrating terrorism, and pushing a degenerate agenda that threatens the social cohesion which is necessary to ordered liberty.

Over on the “libertarian” side there are many (too numerous to link) who seem to equate almost any preventive effort to detect and defeat terrorists as a threat to liberty — even as a form of “enslavement,” for example. And yet . . . there has been no “chilling” of free speech (far from it), American citizens (except a couple of known enemy combatants) have not been held incommunicado, and Americans are not being rounded up and made to show their “papers.”

In short, life proceeds apace, except in the fevered imaginations of libertarian purists and their brethren of the Left. Their ideal world has no room in it for the dirty, day-to-day business of preserving liberty. Liberty is something that simply must exist effortlessly, experience to the contrary. Nothing less than a world of perfect liberty will do — in the perfect stateless world of libertarian purists, and in the perfect (and self-contradictory) state-designed world of Leftists.

What rich Leftists and libertarian purists have in common is their detachment from reality. They take for granted the degree of liberty that they enjoy because of the rule of law. Rich Leftists don’t have to live in the real world. When they choose to go there they are only slumming (with bodyguards), and they can leave when they wish. Libertarian purists may encounter the real world, but its orderliness deludes them. They object to the state when it inconveniences or offends them, but they fail to remark that the state (not its absence) is what enables most of them to survive the real world.

In sum, the worldviews of rich Leftists and libertarian purists are delusions made possible by the ordered liberty in which they live. They are like rebellious adolescents who accept the largesse bestowed on them by the very parents whom they disdain, despise, and even reject.

AnalPhilosopher: Richard A. Posner on Utopianism
Moi: The Fatal Naïveté of Anarcho-Libertarianism, A Dissonant Vision

Negotiating with Fanatics: Part II

Iran negotiator announces:
We duped West on nukes
Top Tehran negotiator tells Islamic clerics,
academics talks convinced EU nothing afoot

To repeat (from 02/19/06):

“If you reward cruelty with kindness, with what do you reward kindness?”
–Hillel

Related: Rick Moran’s piece at The American Thinker about how “The left hasn’t learned a damned thing from 9/11.”

(Thanks to Dr. Helen for the quotation from Hillel.)

Quick Takes

Attempted murder or terrorism? You decide. But I will not call it a “hate crime.”

Why we must steadfastly reject economic interventions by the state. (The price of interventionism? Read this.)

More good reasons to reject hostility to religion, which are consistent with my reasons.

It is hard to fight a war while you’re carrying a lawyer on your back. It’s even harder when you’re carrying the Left, the press, the punditocracy, many members of Congress, and a bunch of cosseted anarcho-capitalists on your back.

Contrary to nit-picking statisticians and pseudo-libertarians, a community is what it expects and enforces.

Speaking of pseudo-libertarians, it is wise to reject the tempting tenets of Objectivism, saith he. And so say I.

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The New York Times, 9/24/01

by Hugh Hewitt

Courtesy of The New York Times

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