WWII was the high point of the long Western history of war. In it the best armed forces of industrial civilization collided and fought for years, deploying the latest technologies and throwing unprecedented numbers of of men, tanks and planes into the battle. It was the kind of war never to be repeated again.

For the following decades the US and the USSR, the victors of the war, would develop increasingly better military technologies and stare across the globe at each other armed with large quantities of weapons that could never be used. Instead both sides armed smaller countries and in that way fought restrained proxy wars with each other across the world.

The UN armies in Korea and the American army in Vietnam fought as if they were refighting WW2 against another large well armed Western state, much as British armies invaded Afghanistan and fought using the same neat squares of men and cavalry charges that had served them so well in the Napoleonic wars. Great generals adapt to a battlefield, ordinary generals fight by the book resulting in terrible losses until they finally learn to adapt. This is how it was for the Americans in Korea and Vietnam and for the Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

Israeli and American soldiers emerge from a complex lineage. The American army was born from militias and Indian fighters who copied the tactics of their Indian allies and enemies, firing at the British from behind trees, moving quickly and attacking unexpectedly. Tactics the British, who relied on using large forces to seize and hold territory, could not usefully respond to. While the British took entire cities, including New York, they found that they could not control the land without hunting down and defeating the Colonial armies. Relying on their usual tactics, they paid a high price for simply trying to move armies across upstate New York. The Americans had learned to adapt and make do with limited resources and spur of the moment decisions. Their boldness and adaptability paved the way for transforming the ragged bands the British regulars had sneered at, into the army the mightiest empire in the world couldn't defeat.

The Israeli army emerged out of the original Shomrim, civilian patrols who watched farms and orange groves, carrying crude rifles, riding horses and even disguising themselves as Arabs to protect villages and homesteads from Arab raids. Refined by Orde Wingate, an eccentric officer despised by the British high command, he initiated many of the tactics the Israeli army still uses today including officers leading from the front, small units that operate off the land and use simple misdirection to strike at the enemy. These are still main features of Israel military tactics today.

From the war of 1948, the IDF increasingly adapted itself to fighting not bands of Arab fighters, but large well-armed Arab armies. The Yom Kippur War was to Israel and the Arabs what WW2 was to Europe, a massive devastating conflict that brought home the message to the Arabs that the war could not be won by large scale military assaults. Instead the fighting would be left to terrorist groups, a return to the same kind of armed bands the predecessors of the IDF had fought during the days of the Mandate. The kind of armed Indian bands that the Colonial Settlers had cut their teeth fighting.

The last two wars in Lebanon were so costly precisely because the IDF was fighting Arab bands again, though they may have been disguised with Marxist and Islamist tags, and its generals had forgotten that the key to defeating them lay in the tactics of those young men who dressed like Arabs and rode on horseback to intercept murderous groups of Arab bandits. Increasingly the last decade with the creation of a Palestinian state demanded a reeducation in the way of such a war.

When American soldiers wanted to find out how to engage in urban warfare in an Arab city, they watched Israeli soldiers operating in Jenin and put those same tactics to use in Fallujah cutting open holes in houses, blasting their way in and taking the enemy by surprise. Israel's war with Palestinian terrorists has provided much of the tactical and occasionally even technological methodology for US forces in Iraq. It's why Israeli and American casualties fighting armed Muslim bands are far smaller than that of Russian soldiers in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

Israel and America have adapted, but the essential way of war they are fighting is misguided. They may only be suffering 10 percent of the casualties relative to the enemy forces, but those are still unacceptable losses when fighting an enemy force that does not care about its losses.

Islamic terrorists in Iraq and now Lebanon have taken a severe beating but they can always replace the lower ranked canon fodder while the higher ranked terrorists are spirited from hideout to hideout and emerge afterward crowing triumphantly, much as the Viet Cong did. Israeli and American tactics allow for greater flexibility, penetration and adaptation, but they still come down to fighting modified guerrilla warfare against guerrillas and terrorists operating on their own terrain. The enemy can always just retreat and wait, carry out a handful of attacks, appeal to the world and wait till you leave.

An AP headline read, "Victory for Hizbullah May Be Survival." By contrast victory for Israel requires either eliminating Hizbullah or damaging it so badly it won't pose a threat for some time. The latter might be more possible if Hizbullah wasn't just a tool of Iran which can count on Iran to aid and resupply it the moment Israel leaves. The former would require conquering Lebanon. Similarly victory for America requires building a stable Iraqi government that can hold its own, while victory for Iraqi terrorists is as simple as preventing America from doing it.

Imagine one person trying to build a house of cards while all the other person has to do is knock it down. That is essentially America and Israel's military dilemma. The way out of that dilemma was essentially closed to them in the latter half of the 20th century and that is a massive saturation bombing campaign combined with an invasion that treats everything on the ground as an enemy. It would have been the default tactic of any military, but a domestic fifth column operating out of the press and political institutions now make that impossible. While Islamic terrorists are free to torture, mutilate and behead and still count on the world's support, every American policing action and Israeli bombardment results in shrill hysterical condemnation and media coverage.

By the Vietnam era the tactics regularly used by the UN forces in Korea were the object of horror and condemnation (not however tactics used by the Viet Cong.) Civilization had turned on itself and the intellectual elites of the Western world were occupied in enthusiastically cheering on and empathizing with its destroyers. But letting those very same people place chains on your military doctrine to ensure the approval of public opinion is utterly futile since these people will never approve and the crippling result leaves your military trapped in a bloody and futile struggle with armed bands that fade in and out of the conflict, always garnering sympathy and never providing you with an actual victory.

And the very people who chained down the military, treat your defeats as proof of the futility of solving things on the battlefield, when it is only proof of the futility of fighting wars with your hands tied behind your back.

If the West is to reverse its own decline it must abandon half-measures and when confronted with an enemy fully fight back. When the enemy hides among a civilian population there will be significant collateral damage but the reality is that the enemy could not hide successfully among the civilian population if they did not have the support of a major segment of that civilian population. German troops could not hide in French villages. Israeli soldiers could not hide in Palestinian villages firing shells. Enemy troops can hide in a location because there is sufficient sympathy and allegiance on the ground for them to operate there. That makes them part of the war and the enemy's operations and makes them valid targets. You can't win a war against guerrillas except by destroying all possible bases of support for them and their infrastructure.

It is least often that soldiers lose wars and most often generals lose wars by the extent that they tie the hands of the men in the field. It would be good to remember that the extent to which we are merciful to the enemy population is the extent to which we are cruel to our own soldiers. In war against an enemy force that hides among enemy civilians, we have a choice between their lives and ours. For a long while now we've been choosing their lives over the lives of our soldiers and our casualty rolls reflect that tragic betrayal.

Labels: War on Terror

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Friday Afternoon Roundup - America, Iran, Europe, Israel and a Great Big Kettle

If the week before was revolutionary, this week seemed more chaotic, spread between the frenzied media coverage of the World's Most Famous Pedophile, the Iranian protests were pushed to the background. So was America's Largest Tax Ever and only a little news coverage remained available for the settling of Minnesota's stolen Senate election. An unfortunate reminder of what happens when elections are decided by Democratic courts, instead of by the voters. After all this, the proper place for Al Franken to hold his victory celebration would be at a cemetery, because without all the dead voters, not to mention the voters who never existed, the clown of Minnesota would never be pulling down a six figure taxpayer funded salary.

Iran meanwhile has gone back to its two favorite targets, England and foreign embassies, with plans to try Iranian staffers from England's embassy. No word yet on whether the Newsweek staffer will be tried, but considering how England folded when its sailors were captured by Iran, it seems perfectly clear that Iran decided England was a safe target.


Meanwhile news is emerging on ousted Honduran would be dictator Zelaya's ties to cocaine trafficking.

The regime that ousted Manuel Zelaya in Honduras claimed Tuesday that the deposed president allowed tons of cocaine to be flown into the Central American country on its way to the United States.

"Every night, three or four Venezuelan-registered planes land without the permission of appropriate authorities and bring thousands of pounds ... and packages of money that are the fruit of drug trafficking," its foreign minister, Enrique Ortez, told CNN en Espanol.

"We have proof of all of this. Neighboring governments have it. The DEA has it," he added.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Rusty Payne in Washington said he could neither confirm nor deny a DEA investigation.

Honduras and other Central American nations have become major transshipment points in recent years for Colombian cocaine, particularly as Mexico's government cracks down on cartels.

The drugs arrive in Honduras on noncommercial aircraft and, increasingly, in speedboats, from Venezuela and to a lesser extent Colombia, according to the Key West, Florida-based Joint Interagency Task Force-South, which coordinates drug interdiction in region. The boats tend to make short hops up Central America's coast.

In its most recent report on the illicit narcotics trade, the U.S. State Department said in February of Honduras that "official corruption continues to be an impediment to effective law enforcement and there are press reports of drug trafficking and associated criminal activity among current and former government and military officials."

In October, Zelaya proposed legalizing drug use as a way of reducing the violence.

Now Chavez was deeply involved with the FARC narcoterrorists in Venezeula. The suborning of several Latin American nations with leaders like Zelaya who had close ties to Chavez and shared a common left wing agenda-- was meant to pave the way for drug smuggling operations into the US.

Considering that FARC had contacts with some Obama people, and Chavez is best buds with Prince Barry, it might be worth asking how much of Obama's dirty campaign cash was drug money, and if that isn't why the Obama Administration is so feverishly backing Zelaya's restoration to power, in order to keep the drug pipeline open?

All the while Michelle Obama is keeping Air Force One warm

Michelle Obama Takes her Girls to London for Fish and Chips truly change we can believe in -- or as was said during the campaign, "We are the change we have been waiting for."

Imagine Laura Bush doing this when 15,000,000 Americans are looking for a job

On Sunday, President Obama flew back to the United States on Air Force One. His wife, two daughters and her mother did a bit of shopping in Paris before taking their own Boeing 757 (C-32) over to London to do some sight seeing.

We all remember Obama’s admonishment to corporate CEO’s in February: “You can’t get corporate jets, you can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers dime.”

Apparently that doesn’t apply to his wife. The London Times opened its description of Michelle’s visit this way: Motorcycle outriders, armoured Chevrolets and bullet-headed men in raincoats crisis-crossed London yesterday as Michelle Obama and her daughters spent a second day on an unofficial visit to the capital. The Times went on to describe that when Michelle and the girls arrived at Westminster Abbey, the building was closed to tourists with people already in told to “wait against the wall.” An American visiting the Abbey said “Right then I knew it was probably someone from our ‘royal family’.”

Michelle’s motorcade shut down the London street above as the First Lady of the World and her children go for Fish and Chips at a pub in Mayfair. The entourage inside the restaurant was 15 people while dozens more wait outside. Include the dozens of Air Force personnel to fly and service the plane, embassy personnel and other staff and we are talking about a serious expenditure of tax payer dollars. Meanwhile, millions of Americans have lost their jobs and won’t be able to take their family on a summer holiday. Despite their circumstances they’ll still be expected to fork over the tax dollars to pay for Michelle’s trip.
Tell your friends about this -- it's their money being spent!!

But speaking of political scum, one of the dirtiest Congressmen, Robert Wexler, crawled out of a sewer to try and convince Jews and Israelis to back Obama's War on Settlements, by promising that the "temporary freeze" would call the Arab world's bluff, whatever that means. Of course Israel has been calling the Arab world's bluff through concession after concession for 17 years now, which hasn't helped Israel any. Maybe it should be the Arab world's turn to start calling Israel's bluff by offering up all of the Palestine Mandate territory to Israel.

As for Wexler, he might want to look at the protests happening under his own window instead.

Not to be outdone, O.J. Simpson defense attorney Alan Dershowitz popped up to try and defend Obama on Israel, while working to popularize a suggestion from American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee leader Yousef Munayyer arguing that the settlement freeze should be horizontal not vertical.

I believe there is a logical compromise on settlement growth that has been proposed by Yousef Munayyer, a leader of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League. "Obama should make it clear to the Israelis that settlers should feel free to grow their families as long as their settlements grow vertically, and not horizontally," he wrote last month in the Boston Globe. In other words, build "up" rather than "out."

First of all ,Dershowitz repurposing a suggestion from Yousef Munayyer alone should kick the stuffing out of his pro-Israel credibility. Yousef Munayyer has written op eds legitimizing Hamas, while claiming that “Abu Ghraib set the bar for obscene inhumanity”. The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has close ties to radical anti-Israel groups, including AL-AWDA. It openly supports Hamas.

Scores of senior ADC officials have expressed positive views toward terrorist organizations.

In 1994, during one of the main peaks of Hamas suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, then-ADC President Hamzi Moghrabi said, "I will not call [Hamas] a terrorist organization. I mean, I know many people in Hamas. They are very respectable. … I don't believe Hamas, as an organization, is a violent organization."

Discover the Networks notes that two years later, Moghrabi's successor, Hala Maksoud, defended the Hezbollah terrorist group.

"I find it shocking," Maksoud said, "that [one] would include Hezbollah in … [an] inventory of Middle East 'terrorist' groups."

In 2000, new ADC President Hussein Ibish characterized Hezbollah as "a disciplined and responsible liberation force."

When Israel released Hezbollah prisoners in early 2004, Imad Hamad, ADC's Midwest Regional Director, openly celebrated the freedom of "the heroes," as noted by Mideast scholar Daniel Pipes.

That's who Alan Dershowitz is taking his ideas from. (And of course Obama's old pal Rashid Khalidi is in the mix here.) Dershowitz may be given a bit of a pass, since he clearly didn't research Yousef Munayyer well enough to even get the name of his organization right, writing League instead of Committee. But that kind of sloppiness suggests that the rest of Dershowitz's article was similarly poorly researched.

But to actually address the suggestion that growth can only be vertical, "Let The Jews Live Vertically", this kind of growth would first of all require the demolition of existing homes to build new ones. That means displacing current residents and forcing them into multi-family housing.

Second of all it would be a good deal more expensive. Third of all vertical housing is much more vulnerable to missile and rocket fire from the Palestinian Authority. Fourth of all it takes a good deal more time to construct. Fifth of all, vertical housing is a poor way to accommodate natural growth by individuals, and in fact would create a far more permanent presence by Israel in the territories, making it counter-intuitive from the other side.

Sixth of all large parts of Jerusalem and larger settlements such as Maaleh Adumum are already heavily on the vertical side. Aside from demolishing them to build 60 story buildings, not much vertical growth is possible there, without horizontal growth.

Seventh of all, vertical growth will still require horizontal growth. Any half-decent city planner understands this. Vertical growth will require accompanying infrastructure to accommodate it, much of which, such as roads and utilities, will have to be vertical. In fact vertical growth drives much larger horizontal growth, which is how cities grow in the first place. You cannot have vertical growth without horizontal growth. Not in real life. Not in real towns. Not unless you deprive people of basic needs and put up barbed wire keeping them inside. Which is what Yousef Munayyer wants. It's what Obama no doubt wants, but it's not what Alan Dershowitz should want.

Eight of all, a lot of homes in the settlements have gardens and orchards. They grow their own food. It's a part of life in that setting. To American liberals it's called things like sustainability. Unless Dershowitz has a plan for making vertical orchards, it would helpful if he actually thought through the suggestions he receives from terrorist supporters before conveying them in a national forum.

Finally, if Jews should be limited to vertical growth. So should Arabs. The day Arabs are told that they can only build vertically, not horizontally, is the day we can agree to the same proposal.

Other reactions to Dershowitz's callous stupidity and ignorance can be found at American Thinker, with Laurie Regan analyzing the flaws in Dershowitz's claims about Obama's support for Israel.

Melanie Philips calling Dershowitz out on giving Obama a pass over his moral equivalence between the refugee camps and the Holocaust.

And at Yourish.com, a general roundup of reactions.

Meanwhile the New York Senate race that's getting interesting, and once again showing off Obama's political weakness in New York. After losing his appointee of choice, Princess Caroline, Obama was forced to back Senator Scumbag Schumer's pony, Kirsten Gillibrand. Obama successfully muscled out Rep Steve Israel who had considered running against her in the primary. But instead now Gillibrand will face Congresswoman Maloney in the primary.

Maloney's obvious advantages are name recognition, plus a name that people can spell, and the home field advantage in New York City. And she's got Bill Clinton headlining her fundraiser. That's not too shabby, even though Willie doesn't have quite the draw he used to, especially when Gillibrand will likely be able to call on Obama.

But Maloney now has a small lead in the polls over Gillibrand, which is fairly quick work. But then Gillibrand is viewed by many New Yorkers as a appointee of crazy dysfunctional New York Governor Patterson. Maloney by contrast comes with a solid political pedigree. To those in the know, Gillibrand looks like Schumer's puppet, and the way she has acted since her appointment only reaffirms that. Schumer has been gaining far too much influence within the party, and his ruthless assault on Martin Connor, replacing the respected longtime Democratic State Senator with one of his obnoxious junior aides, using ugly and crude campaign tactics, has won Schumer more enemies than friends in the local party establishment. After all who knows which one of them Schumer will replace next with his aide, his speechwriter or his waterboy.

Now Gillibrand is begging for donations, supposedly to stave off a Republican race against Pataki, but that doesn't seem to be happening, instead she needs the dough to face off against Maloney, and the money that Carolyn Maloney can count on as a popular NYC based Congressman. With the Republican party in the doldrums, statewide and nationwide, the real threat is from within.

Schumer, who was the puppet master behind Franken, now has to fight a civil war, and he may find a struggle within the establishment on behalf of a woman few of them know or like, a good deal tougher than destroying Coleman through outright fraud. With Rangel attacking Obama over his interference in the New York Senate primary, the entire thing has become a losing proposition for Prince Barry, who not only lost his Princess Caroline, but is scrambling to shore up support for the woman who displaced her.

Since this is a primary election, the deciding factor will be in the hands of a small number of committed registered Democrats, many of them tied up with the Democratic establishment. A disproportionate amount of those votes will be in New York City, home base for Maloney, enemey territory for Gillibrand. To top that off, Gillibrand's poorly thought out Israel bashing will create problems with Jewish voters, while her rapid abandonment of her conservative positions will alienate many upstate Democrats who might have been more committed to her.

As Arlen Specter discovered after his defection from the Republican party because its tent wasn't big enough, the Democratic party's tent is very small and packed with infighting. The civil war begun by Dean has only exploded with Obama, and its ripple effects can be seen through the party.

In the general blog roundup meanwhile, Soccer Dad shows that Netanyahu's approval ratings have been trending up, while Obama's are trending down

WND has special postcards for Obama's birthday and a Free Our Health Care petition.

Oh My Valve covers the EU reactions to Iran's staffer arrests.

Ted Belman over at Israpundit has a look at Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick's solution for Israel's woes and it begins with cutting an activist judiciary down to size.

Jihad Watch meanwhile looks at what importing Islam to America will bring for gay rights and the infamous Dr. Butt will still go on practicing, despite his Dental Office Jihad.

The New Centrist raises the question of Obama's abandonment of democracy abroad.

George H.W. Bush followed in the footsteps of Reagan. President Clinton also made democracy promotion a centerpiece of his foreign policy. Liberal pundits often conveniently forget that Clinton was a steadfast advocate of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, a U.S. law that called for regime change in that county.

Obama has made it clear that he values diplomacy and discussion over the promotion of, well, just about anything. On the topic of democracy promotion he is noticeably silent if not opposed to the concept. Example One, witness his vacillation regarding the recent events in Iran.

George H.W. Bush followed in the footsteps of Reagan. President Clinton also made democracy promotion a centerpiece of his foreign policy. Liberal pundits often conveniently forget that Clinton was a steadfast advocate of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, a U.S. law that called for regime change in that county.

Obama has made it clear that he values diplomacy and discussion over the promotion of, well, just about anything. On the topic of democracy promotion he is noticeably silent if not opposed to the concept. Example One, witness his vacillation regarding the recent events in Iran.

Rather than side with democratic institutions and the rule of law in Honduras, our president declared the state’s actions “illegal” and had Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claim, “We call on all parties in Honduras to respect the constitutional order and the rule of law, to reaffirm their democratic vocation, and to commit themselves to resolve political disputes peacefully and through dialogue”.

These statements were made less than a day after the so-called coup. Compare that to the long week of violence it took for Obama’s administration to condemn what was happening in Iran.

What these three examples show, a mere six months into Obama’s first term, is a severe break with the continuity in foreign policy of the past two decades, a break with democracy promotion as a foreign policy goal of the United States. This is the change many Americans voted for. But is it the sort of change you really believe in?

The real question though is if Obama supports Diplomacy Uber Alles, then what goal is all that diplomacy aimed at achieving, besides getting some of the world's worst dictators to like us? And what goals has it actually achieved?

With dead democracy protesters in the streets of Tehran, accelerating nuclear programs by both North Korea and Iran, continuing instability in Iraq and Afghanistan-- the answer would seem to be absolutely nothing.

Obama has not managed to get more foreign troops serving in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. He has not made any part of the world more stable. Instead he has delivered self-glorying high profile speeches such as the one in Cairo, which accomplish nothing except to burnish his own ego and image.

And that is what Obama's diplomacy really does. It hurts the US and our allies. It helps Obama.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country, and Honduras, Israel, Taiwan and pretty much everyone else, can do for you.

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What does Freedom mean Anyway?

With the 4th of July coming up, it is easy to get distracted by all the flag waving, the tricolor banners and the emphasis on national independence, to forget that the American Revolution was caused by the political abuse of power, rather than by a pure striving toward national independence. Rather than an independence movement on the grounds of national identity, the American Revolution saw British citizens revolting against incursions on their rights and freedoms by a distant and powerful government.

The 4th of July commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, not a military victory that marked the end of British rule such as the Battle of Yorktown or the anniversary of the beginning of American government with the United States Constitution or Washington's inauguration-- all of which would seem to be legitimate dates as well. Instead it commemorates a document which created no specific governmental authority, but instead lays out as its key doctrine, freedom.

The Declaration of Independence argues that rights are natural, and do not require a divinely appointed intercessor between man and G-d, in the form of a monarch. It states that the people of the United States do not derive their laws from being the subjects of a king, but from natural rights inherent in every human being, and that above all else they have the right to live, to be free and to pursue the course of their lives as they see fit.

This was a bold statement to make in a time when government received its authority from tradition and held its people as subjects, when church and state were intertwined so that the state held religious and even divine authority. The Declaration of Independence rejected the sanctity of government, instead putting forward the idea that government is nothing more than the consensual agreement of people as a tool for maintaining their affairs.

In a few short words what the 4th of July marks is a document that stated that henceforth in America, the people would not be creature of their government, but the government would be a creature of the people. The Declaration of Independence was not simply a declaration of national independence or the independence of the thirteen states-- it was a declaration of individual independence. It stated that not only did each American have rights and freedoms independent of any government, but that the government was his to make or unmake.

And yet the average American of 2009 is far more a creature of the government, than a colonial of 1769 ever was.

Thanks to the tattered remains of the Constitution the American of 2009 has managed to maintain some key political freedoms that his counterpart in 1769 did not have, but for all that his life is a tightly regimented and heavily taxed affair, overseen by a distant central government and its "multitude of New Offices" and their "swarms of Officers to harrass our people and eat out their substance" that the Declaration had complained about. Except today we call them Czars.

All this happened because Americans spent far too much time celebrating the forms of government, while forgetting the substance of their rights. Generations view the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as sacred documents, without actually understanding the fundamental principles that they embody. Meanwhile an activist judiciary has worked hard to create new "rights" out of whole cloth in the Constitution to be administered by the government, only to take away the plain rights that actually do exist in the Constitution. Government has become centralized and absolute.

We can still vote in legislators and executives, within the narrow parameters of a two party system in which both parties are absolutely committed to the expansion of government power. We cannot however vote away the bureaucracy, the "multitude of new Offices" and "swarms of Officers", who rule our lives directly, and whose numbers constantly keep growing without number.

The American political system has become a self-perpetuating interest group run by lawyers for the benefit of their supporters. A group that considers constitutional literalism to be outmoded and views government as a nanny caring for people who cannot properly care for themselves.

The British monarchy saw colonials as childlike subjects. The American government today sees them as self-destructive infants, too stupid to know what is good for them. The fundamental doctrine of tyranny in American today is no longer the divine authority of the king, but the temporal authority of the social worker. Both are premised on the incompetence and inequality of the ruled in relation to the rulers.

It is a given that people who cannot take care of themselves without help are inferior to those who care for them. And whatever pretty words it may be dressed up in, those who are cared for have less freedom and independence than their self-appointed caretakers.

And so the nanny government constantly searches for new ways to project its subjects from themselves, while finding ways to turn a tidy profit on the arrangement. Are the pesky subjects smoking? Are they eating fatty foods? Are they driving fast cars, building houses not up to code and using plastic bags? Are they gambling, drinking and using insensitive language? Don't they know it's not good for them. "There oughta be a law" and sooner or later there is.

American government began as a tool with limited power, a hacksaw or an ax, and has since become a giant power jack of all trades with 300 different drills, saws and instruments built in, but which is too heavy to actually move anywhere or do anything with. But our fascination with the tool we had drove us to do what humans always do with tools, improve them to be able to do more. And government began doing more. Year by year, decade by decade and century by century, it grew larger and more powerful. And there came a day when no one knew how to shut it off anymore.

What does freedom mean anyway? Freedom as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the 4th of July means freedom from government. The freedom to choose and shape laws and to treat government as a tool, rather than a master.

For now we still have ballots and voting booths. We can elect and unelect politicians. And when we elect the "wrong ones", the media and cultural establishment will smear them and tear them apart until we see reason and elect the men and women that they support. For now we still have that. But there were ballots and voting booths and in the USSR. There are ballots and voting booths in Iran. The key question is not simply who counts the votes, but do the votes actually count?

Democracy alone means that those who vote have a degree of control over the election of candidates. How much control they have depends on factors such as how open the nomination process is, how much influence raw money has on elections and help determine how much power vested interests exercise over the system, rather than the actual constituents.

In American politics, democracy has become a game in which winning the popular vote is the final goal. Those are the rules of the game that the various corporations, lobbies and special interest groups continue to play by in order to get what they want. For now. It is not inconceivable that they might at one date decided that they would be better served by modifying the rules of the game.

When the Republican governor of California and the Democratic assembly failed to win the public's constant for new taxes on the ballot, the immediate response from many pundits was to argue that the people of California had failed to make the right decision, and with adduced proof from their previous votes against illegal immigrants and gay marriage, should no longer be able to vote on ballot measures.

In East Germany, Erich Honecker once stated that the government had lost confidence in the people, and that they would have to regain the government's trust. There may come a time when the government loses confidence in the American people. As the King of England once lost confidence in his subjects.

Against that day, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

That is what freedom means. Government is either a slave of the citizenry or its master. In a free nation, government is a slave. In a slave nation, it is a master.

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Confronting the New Islamic Imperialism

Talk of colonialism and imperialism is all the rage when academic leftists sit down to critique the problems of terrorism and the clash of civilizations. But where a century ago terms such as colonialism and imperialism were easy enough to define, back when European governments held actual colonies and protectorates in Africa, Asia and the Middle East-- what do the terms actually mean today?

There are no European colonies today. And the lands that are at the center of the controversy are themselves non-Muslim. When Muslims attack Europe, America or Israel... it may very well be imperialism and colonialism, but it is no longer European imperialism and colonialism, but Islamic imperialism and colonialism.

It is Islamic ideologies and nations that seek Lebensraum, that work to expand their way across borders and even oceans, to create colonies on foreign soil, spread their religion at the expense of native beliefs and hold governing power abroad.

Today it is no longer the European who sails to foreign countries to spread the faith and "civilize the savages", it is the Muslim. The new Cecil Rhodes' and William Walker's are a lot more likely to be based out of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Their oppression and ruthless is equally directed at Europeans, as at Africans, Jews, Filipinos and any number of native peoples who stand in their way.

Long before the sun stared without setting down on the British Empire, Islamic Empires had been carved with brutal unyielding force across the face of the globe. Long before the American South saw a single slave, Muslim slave traders were moving human cargo back and forth, kidnapping and seizing slaves from Africa to the English coastline.

Islamic imperialism and colonialism was there long ago until recent times. The current clash of civilizations is the product of the Islamic attempt to revive those ancient empires they consider to have been wrongly taken from them.

To argue as the left does, that Islamic terrorism is the product of oppression, is as absurd and false as describing Nazi violence as the product of oppression. Any honest academic should have as much sympathy for Bedouin Muslim territorial claims to Israel or Spain, as he would for French claims to Algeria. Yet the academic double standard treats European colonialism as illegitimate, and Islamic colonialism as legitimate.

This brings us to the obscene charade in which the world denounces one of the Middle East's native peoples for managing to form their own country and defend its narrow borders against its former Bedouin Muslim conquerors. Only the ugliest forms of historical revisionism could paint the Jews as foreign interlopers with no rights to a piece of land that is recognized as theirs by three of the world's major religions... and the Muslim Bedouin hordes who overran the land, wiping out native religions and cultures as the "oppressed peoples".

This sort of obscene political farce goes on all over the world. Muslims today hold equal rights in Europe, America, Israel and Australia. By contrast Europeans, Americans and Jews are inferior under the law throughout the Muslim world. Muslims have free access to Jerusalem and Rome. Jews and Europeans have no access to Mecca, despite the fact that it had a substantial Jewish presence, before being massacred and enslaved by the murderous warlord, Mohammed, who is also considered by Muslims to be their ultimate prophet.

When the likes of Jimmy Carter bellow that Israel is guilty of Apartheid, while ignoring that his Saudi sponsors have actual Apartheid, not simply for non-Muslims, but even for Muslim women-- they perpetuate the agenda of Islamic Imperialism.

When American or European civil rights groups raise a storm over some remark made to a Muslim-- while turning a blind eye to the fact that these very same Muslims are importing the vilest bigotry, misogyny, anti-semitism, homophobia-- the teachings of Islamic Imperialism inherent in the Koran, the resulting rapes, murders, hate crimes and bombings become the fruits of Islamic Colonialism.

What is the awful and terrible crime being committed by Western nations, the acts of colonialism and imperialism against the Muslim world. It is nothing more than the desire to survive. To not be murdered by bigoted savages in bomb vests determined to resurrect their lost slave empires at any cost. The desire to be free in one's own country from bombings, robberies and gang rapes by Muslim youths who have been told by their Imams that under Koranic law they have a right and a duty to fight the infidel and seize what belongs to him.

Checkpoints, walls of separation, immigration restriction; these are what academics use to charge the West with imperialism and colonialism, while turning a blind eye to the fact that these measures are only defenses on home soil against Islamic imperialism.

Survival has become the new colonialism and imperialism in the West. We have come to that out of a failure to confront the new wave of Islamic imperialism. Just as Nazi Germany's reign of terror was born out of the guilt of the Allies and their failure to hold Nazism to account-- Islamic imperialism is the product of guilt and cowardice. It will take courage and moral certainty to confront Islamic Imperialism, to fight back and hold it to account.

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Obama: A Profile in Cowardice

Meet Barack Hussein Obama. The man who turned his own middle name into a no-go zone during the election, only to bring it out of the closet when he trotted down to a Muslim country. The man whose associates labeled talk about his Muslim background as racist, only to proclaim his Muslim background loudly and proudly from the podium of a Muslim country.

There's a word for a man like that. Coward.

Meet Obama, the bright young Senator with a phony biography geared to playing up his biracial angst for the college campuses. Who promised his leftist volunteers an end to rendition, detentions, eavesdropping and a whole bundle of other things, only to pull a bait and switch on them.

After all tools like that come in handy, even if they're less likely to be used against Muslim terrorists, than they are against Tea Party protesters.

Meet Barack Obama, the man who was going to bring an end to the American coercion of other countries. No more would the White House tell the rest of the world what to do. Except of course to dictate where Jews can live in Israel, how the Honduran judiciary can operate and who can head the Muslim community in Greece.

Of course Obama has drawn the line somewhere. He has drawn the line against standing up to Ahmadinejad, Chavez or any Socialist or Muslim tyrant. Instead Obama has browbeaten America's democratic allies, in support of Muslim and Socialist tyrannies. You can read that as Obama putting his own political and religious loyalties ahead of America's interests. Or you can read it as the act of a craven coward who hopes to sacrifice America's remaining allies in order to win over America's enemies.

When the Iranian youth came out to protest against Ahmadinejad, Obama mumbled and fumbled for something to say. He dragged it out long enough to send a loud and clear message to the Iranian regime, that America would not interfere no matter what they did. And the regime got the message. Obama cannot be held completely responsible for the ruthless crackdown that has followed, but some of the blood is certainly on his well manicured hands and sleeves.

As the supposedly most cyber-aware fellow in the White House, Obama could have followed up on the British effort to provide social networking access to Iranian protesters, or on the one proposed by Senator John McCain, the man the media lambasted as tech-illiterate and out of touch. He could have imposed sanctions on Nokia for aiding in the repression of political dissidents and compelled them to make the plans for the technology they sold to Iran, public.

Harnessing America's status as a world power and his own supposed global goodwill, Obama could have organized an international diplomatic response to the crackdown. He could have made any nuclear negotiations contingent on the treatment of the protesters. He could have done a dozen things, but aside from making a series of fumbling statements when his inaction became humiliating even for his own party, Barack Hussein Obama did nothing.

Behold the man. Behold the coward.

By contrast when Honduras' legislature and supreme court acted to remove President Manuel Zelaya, a close ally of Chavez, who had fired the head of the army and attempted to stage a coup by violating the Constitution, Obama and his people have been working around the clock to restore Zelaya to power, even while stating that they want the whole thing to be "free from external influence and interference" (the hypocrisy on that line alone is almost enough to choke even Chavez himself). The question is why?

But of course it's not that difficult of a question. Not when you think like a coward. Not when you think like Obama.

Why wouldn't Obama panic at the sight of a Congress and Supreme Court removing a left wing Socialist President who violated the Constitution in pushing to make himself el-presidente for life, by violating term limits. Let alone the military dumping said President across border.

Obama no doubt has nightmares of waking up on a C-31 transport to Kenya, after enough of his wrongdoing leads him to being booted out of the White House by what remains of the American legislative and judicial infrastructure.

Today Manuel "ALBA" Zelaya. Tomorrow it could be Barry "Hussein" Obama. And Barry knows better than anyone else the full catalog of lies, crimes and scandals brewing beneath his regime. Obama's rise to power has been part of an American hemisphere trend that covers the likes of Chavez, Zelaya, Correa, Silva and even the return of Kerry's old buddy, Ortega, to power in Nicaragua. What all of them have in common with Obama is a left wing socialist agenda that ignores the rule of law. An attack against Zelaya, could in Obama's mind be seen an attack against him equally.

If the rollback of socialist tyranny begins in Honduras, it might spread. If Brazil, Venezeula and Ecuador follow-- might not the democractic revolution spread to America as well, and make the Prince of Chicago's throne shakier than ever?

That is how a coward thinks, and Obama is nothing if not a coward. And like all cowards, he knows how little he deserves what he has, and how easy it would be for him to lose it all. A gang of greedy and deluded followers, and a nationwide 24/7 propaganda blitz can only do so much. After all there isn't a socialist tyrant in the hemisphere who hasn't had the same thing. And yet the latest of them is enjoying a well deserved vacation in Venezuela.

Heavy hangs the head that wears the ill-gotten crown. From one corner of the globe to another, Obama flits back and forth, delivering speeches and posing for photos. Like a rat rubbing against a rosebush, hoping some of the loose petals will attach themselves to him so that he can appear more like a rosebush and less like a rat, Obama hopes that going through the motions of being a world leader will actually get people to confuse him with a world leader.

Yet his mumbling silence on Iran speaks far more eloquently about the sort of man Obama is, than all his scripted speeches ever could. Obama has been compared to JFK, but what he represents is no profile in courage, but a profile in cowardice. A liar and a manipulator who serves his own ends first and his host country's, last. Who proclaims, Ask not what I can do for your country, Ask what your country can do for me. And above all else, a craven coward.

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WWJCD - What Would Jimmy Carter Do?

In Obama's fumbling response to the June Revolt in Iran, it was not hard to see that he was relying on the not particularly time-honored maxim of WWJCD, or What Would Jimmy Carter Do?

WWJCD is a handy tool for Democratic Presidents to make the worst possible foreign policy decisions at a critical time, with the worst possible consequences for the United States. Having picked up where Jimmy Carter left off by pandering to Islamic terrorists in general, and Iran in particular, it is little wonder that WWJCD is such a valuable guide for Barack Hussein Obama.

If your embassy is taken hostage by Islamic terrorists, WWJCD says that you should;

A. Kill the terrorists

B. Praise the terrorists

C. Apologize to the terrorists

D. Praise the terrorists, apologize to them and promise to never open an embassy without their approval again.

If you answered D. then you're really in tune with the spirit of Jimmy Carter and the ideals of WWJCD. If you answered C. you're only a Cindy Sheehan. If you answered B. you qualify for Patty Murray at most. And if you answered A. you haven't been eating your granola and arugula.

Now say that an Islamic terrorist group hijacks 4 planes, flies two into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and tries to fly a fourth into the White House, killing over 3,000 Americans.

Do you;

A. Kill the terrorists

B. Explain that the terrorists were motivated by justified anger at the foreign policy decisions of the Port Authority police and Cantor Fitzgerald Securities

C. Apologize to the terrorists for putting up towers that are larger than any Mosque, which is something that Sharia law forbids infidels to do.

D. Free the captured terrorists and send them home to commit new acts of terrorism against you.

E. All of the above, except A.

If you answered E. then the spirit of Dhimmi Carter is truly with you.

Finally, if an American ally is threatened by one of America's enemies, do you;

A. Support your ally

B. Oppose your ally

C. Demand that your ally make extensive concessions to terrorists in order to appease your enemies.

D. Apologize for having allies. Apologize for having enemies and terrorists. Apologize for your country even existing in the first place.

That's right, it's another D for Dhimmi. But these days it could just as well be an O or a big fat zero. Not that it matters much. Both the D and the O are a border without nothing inside, which is a good summary for both administrations.

Had Jimmy Carter possessed a sense of style and an abjectly worshipful press, we would be calling him Barack Obama, no Hussein please. Deprive Obama of his teleprompter and fuse him together with Joe Biden, and you'd get Jimmy Carter. Somewhere after Carter, Mondale, Jerry Brown and Howard Dean; American's leftists realized that they would have to repackage their socialist candidates in a less flaky package. That's why Obama is on the ticket and Joe Biden, a worthy successor to the lunatic likes of Carter, Brown and Dean, is in the background telling knock knock jokes.

When is Jimmy Carter not a punchline? When you harness all the resources of Hollywood and the dying dinosaur media to make him look good. Keep him slim, African-American and tethered to a teleprompter. Cover him in more haloes than all the frescoes in the Vatican, photograph him next to Superman, tall buildings and with his head tilted back as if he's waiting for the dentist to finally drill that tooth. Give him his own model to lip sync his praises on YouTube and his own logo and slogan. And when you've done all that and six months in, he still has no idea what he's doing because he's following WWJCD, then you'd better hope all the photo ops at local eateries can somehow save the day.

Somehow the left and the Democratic party drew the wrong conclusion from the Carter Administration's "One Term One Hit Wonder" which is that it wasn't Carter's policies that failed, but his public image. That Reagan beat Carter on style not on substance. And so with Obama they spent their time tinkering in the lab, swapping in Carter's brain from a jar, until finally they threw the switch, saw the lightning bolt flash, heard the thunder, and cried, "It's alive. It's alive. The defeatist policies of left wing socialism are alive at last!"

But it wasn't just style that failed Carter. As terrible and embarrassing as his public presence was, it managed to get him elected once. Carter's policies failed on substance, just as Obama's policies are. Obama has invested so much energy into the style of his presentation, that like an executive who has worked for months on the perfect pie charts, he puts it up on the screen, only to realize that there's no money to pay for anything on the pie chart.

Perhaps the worst disaster of the last half century of American politics and business has been to confuse presentation with performance. Smiling CEO's who went to the trendy self-help guru have tanked major corporations and parachuted away trailing a golden canvas printed on million dollar bills. Politicians who looked the part and acted confident talked their way into office and away with the national debt and anything else lying around the premises.

Obama is the culmination of that error, his election is a political fall from grace for American democracy into the mire of the politics of the mob, as had always been darkly predicted for the American experiment. And there he sits now, carefully conscious of his artificial pose, his lighting and his diction-- even as his own clue for what to do comes from WWJCD.

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An Understated Stoning

The reviews of “The Stoning of Soraya M.", a movie that tells the true story of a woman being stoned to death in fundamentalist Iran, are in... and the critics seem to have a common complaint, that the movie is just too outraged by the whole stoning business.

At the Boston Globe, critic Wesley Morris complains that “The Stoning of Soraya M." is "less a movie than a blunt instrument, a bit of political parable, a bit more outrage, and nary a scrap of real drama or finesse."

In other words there just isn't enough finesse to the whole blunt stoning business. It lacks the kind of nuance that a John Kerry or Barack Obama could bring to the story of a woman being stoned to death.

At Slant Magazine, Nick Schager posits that the movie, "...requires a defter hand than that shown by Nowrasteh, who—aside from a nicely surrealistic aside involving a travelling carnival troupe—resorts to such overblown histrionics (wailing music, kneeling characters beseeching the heavens, Saturday Morning serial-evil villains, an embarrassing "triumphant" coda)"

Yes sadly there just aren't enough surrealistic asides, instead there are evil villains, regional music and kneeling characters praying. Which continues the theme of "there's just not enough nuance".

At the Village Voice, Vadim Rizov dismisses it as a movie for those people "ambivalent about whether stoning women to death is a cruel punishment or not... self-congratulatory fare for people who feel more 'politically conscious' when reminded that women in the Islamic world can have it rough". Because naturally the only justification for a movie dealing with the consequence of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran is for people who are "ambivalent" about it. Meanwhile good progressives who are already know about it and have dismissed the issue in favor of more vital stuff, like agitating for Leonard Peltier, can sneer at anyone who still cares about it for not being truly "politically conscious" like them.

Scott Tobias at the Onion A.V. Club however discards with all the ducking and weaving of the previous reviews to say what they really mean;

It takes zero political courage to speak out against the obvious barbarism of public stonings or the oppressive patriarchy of sharia law , but the film whips out the megaphone anyway, eager to extrapolate the martyrdom of an innocent woman into a broader condemnation of the Muslim world.

Get that? It takes zero political courage to speak out against Sharia law. Which the growing death toll in Tehran testifies to. Now though it takes zero political courage for Hollywood to attack the War on Terror, the Onion A.V. Club praised "In The Valley of Elah", Uncovered: The War on Iraq, War. Inc, Body of War, Stop Loss and just about any half-assed rant against the Bush Administration hammering the same message into the ground. By contrast with Phil Donahue's propaganda piece or an MTV movie against the war, “The Stoning of Soraya M." clearly lacks "political courage."

Except of course the slams from left wing movie critics demonstrate the exact opposite, that it takes far more political courage to create a movie condemning the murder of countless women in Iran... than it does to trot out another self-congratulatory Hollywood movie or documentary based on a mostly fictional article in a trendy magazine some producer read while waiting for his dentist's appointment.

The arrogance of a white liberal film critic condemning an Iranian-American filmmaker for lacking political courage by making a movie protesting against the abuse of women in Iran is truly stunning. So stunning that I suspect Tobias would never get it. In his narrow leftist little world the only Iranians who have political courage are those who denounce George W. Bush.

Tobias complains that the movie extrapolates this to the entire Muslim world, which of course naturally takes even less political courage, what with criticizing Islam being a criminal offense in much of the Muslim world. He follows this up with a series of by the book leftist smears that remind you that the progressive left so often trades in dogmatic ideological condemnations for actual original thought, that no content remains.

"The Stoning Of Soraya M. has a neocon’s sense of good and evil, which could politely be called “moral clarity,” but is more accurately described as narrow, tone-deaf, and thoroughly banal."

This is a variation on the complaint that "The Stoning of Soraya M." isn't nuanced or subtle enough, it has a sense of good and evil, rather than being broadminded and sophisticated enough about stoning women to death.

How would one go about making a broadminded and sophisticated take on stoning a woman to death. I suspect that it would involve her husband working for the CIA and the oil companies, and the entire movie turning on the revelation that it was American colonialist involvement in the region that was responsible for her suffering. Plug in a guest starring role for George Clooney as a slimy oil executive and CIA agent, it would be a lock for next year's Oscars.

Now that would be true "political courage".

With a more shrill outlet at his disposal, Tobias takes the offensive with a preemptive attack of "neo-con", which follows up his earlier claim that the movie is an attack on the entire Muslim world. Which of course means that supporting it makes you a genocidal warmonger just like George W. Bush.

Tobias finishes this off with, "There’s no denying the dramatic force of the killing—just as no right-thinking person would endorse the odious practice, or the outrageous miscarriage of justice that leads to it. But Nowrasteh constantly overplays his hand, not realizing that some horrors speak for themselves."

But of course how exactly do horrors speak for themselves anyway? And isn't "some horrors speak for themselves" really just a subtle way of saying, "shut the hell up about those horrors already, because these aren't the horrors we're interested in."

All this call for nuance, for an understated stoning, was absent when it came to the shrillest anti-war movies and documentaries. Which was par for the course when it came to lambasting the Bush Administration. But when it comes to “The Stoning of Soraya M.", it's suddenly a time for nuance, for subtlety, for being broadminded and sophisticated about it. It's not a time to be blunt about what happens to women like her under Islamic law.

Tobias claims that "no right-thinking person would endorse the practice" and yet by attacking a movie on the subject matter alone, as Tobias, Morris and Rizov do... that is exactly the message being sent. They may not endorse stoning a woman to death, but they endorse a politically enforced silence on the topic, a whitewashing by default.

It isn't murder, it isn't an outrage, it's "the practice." What better way to render a gruesome act into neutral colors than to describe it as "the practice."

And it is of course precisely reactions like this that justify The Stoning of Soraya M's so called heavy-handedness, and its forcible outrage. Because the truth of the matter is not nuanced or sophisticated or deft. It isn't sipped over cocktails or reduced to a neutral formula. It isn't "the practice", it's blood, bone and flesh being spilled, broken and torn.

It's a good rule of thumb that people want to see blunt depictions and and an uncompromising stand on the things that outrage them, and want to see finesse, nuance and deftness on the things whose blunt depiction make them too uncomfortable and conflict with their politics.

It's why progressives wallow in endless depictions of Bush's decision making and the hunt for WMD's, because it diverts them from having to deal with the reality of Saddam's brutality and the extent to which their anti-war activism was complicit in it. And remains complicit in dictatorships all over the world.

It's why the reality of Islamic law is such an uncomfortable subject that it has to be finessed by claiming that only the naive and the unsophisticated need to see a movie about it. The progressives have condemned it. Finished, now let's move on. But no, the killing continues and we can't move on.

So if “The Stoning of Soraya M." can remind morally deadened progressives of the blunt reality of the "practice" they would rather deftly finesse, so much the better.

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Friday Afternoon Roundup - World's Most Famous Pedophile Dies, World Mourns

With the week coming to a close, Iran's regime has somewhat predictably decided to escalate the crackdown, reversing their brief deescalation. That deescalation of course had given the Iranian opposition enough time to find its feet and gain some confidence, and refuse to give up. This has once again demonstrated that the Iranian Islamic Republic which overthrew the Shah, had learned very little from that overthrow, and are repeating many of the Shah's mistakes.

While Putin and Medevev, unlike Jimmy Carter, can be expected to back the Ayatollahs to the hilt, with Russian TV mimicking Iran's stream of anti-opposition propaganda (predictably picked up by politicians like Ron Paul, who also backed Putin on Georgia), the problem isn't simply limited to the supply of firearms. There are only so many protesters the authorities can massacre, particularly since their reliance on Basji militia and imported Iran backed Arab terrorist groups such as Hizbullah and Hamas, reveals a basic weakness.

But besides the support of the Supreme Council, Ahmadinejad has caught one more lucky break with the death of the World's Most Famous Pedophile.

If there was one thing sure to distract major portions of the free world, from someone else's struggle for freedom, it's the death of a major celebrity. Particularly a depraved one.

The House has already held a moment of silence for Michael Jackson, which is really nice of them to take a break from spending America deep into debt, in order to remember a man who had so much money he could molest as many kids as he wanted and pay off them by the millions. There's some sort of lesson to be learned from that, but it's probably not worth learning.

This pathetic national disgrace interrupted a debate on whomping Americans with the highest energy tax in history, so that Rep. Jesse Jackson jr, who was willing to pay out six figures to Governor Blagojevich for a Senate seat, could offer a tribute, from one unconvicted criminal to another.

Meanwhile Obama was desperate to get in on the pedophile action, but he had no problem. No reporter actually asked him anything about Michael Jackson. This made Obama really sad, since no celebrity story is complete without the Prince of Chicago being involved in it. Sadly this time the Obama Camp couldn't prep a Huffington Post reporter to ask the question...

So Robert Gibbs held another press conference and still no one asked him about Michael Jackson! This was shocking as the death of a celebrity is a common fodder at White House press conferneces. So Robert Gibbs tactfully suggested that reporters were too shy to ask the TOTUS about Michael Jackson, and delivered a statement from Obama on the death of Michael Jackson.

It's hard to even process the depth of this pathetic charade. Is it the inability of Obama to stay out of any story, or the desperate need to get out a statement on a subject that doesn't actually concern him in any way?

In America's present day celebrity oriented culture, we expect the media to behave like fools. We expect something better from our elected officials. Or at least we did before they turned into celebrities too.

While the Iranian government is hitting bottom, so are we. The same House of Representatives that did not hold a moment of silence for Neda or any of the victims of terrorism, held one for the world's most famous pedophile.

Is there really anything left to say after that?

American political culture is a consenquence of America popular culture. By corrupting the latter, the former has also been corrupted. It is why the unacceptables of 20 years ago become acceptable with each generational turn of the wheel.

If Michael Jackson has any political relevance, it is that he shares one thing with Obama, he was and is a symptom of cultural degeneration. Once upon a time Americans would not have elected an admitted cocaine user to the White House. But before that could change, drug abuse had to become legitimized through popular culture. And it did.

Once upon a time a pedophile would have been beyond the pale in popular culture. People like Michael Jackson, Roman Polansky and Woody Allen proved that didn't have to be the case. The only question remains, when will we elect our first pedophile to the White House?

Hey, as long as he's cool and the kids love him, right? That's how we got the guy we have now.

In the general roundup, the Scottish flag is now apparently racist, as Scotland gets to enjoy the same political correctness already enjoyed by millions of Americans.

The result was an e-mail to all staff warning that such nationalistic displays could "intimidate non-Scottish colleagues".

The e-mail, from Alexandra Miller, director of customer services, said: "I am very disappointed to see that (staff] continue to have inappropriate material bedecking their workstation. This includes several saltires and a lion rampant, and the personalisation of a chair with red tartan."

Ms Miller reminded employees of the policy of not having anything on desks which could be regarded as "sexist or racist".

Note that the left's association of anything nationalistic with racism continues, even if it is in a context that makes absolutely no sense. Is the Scottish flag sexist? Is it racist? If it's a national flag of a non-third world country, the message seems to be that it is.

Newt Gingrich's American Solutions site has a petition to stop the Energy Tax

Maggie's Notebook comments on the absurdity of Michael Jackson's death hijacking the nation's news coverage

Michael Jackson is dead. From Fox News to the BBC, it has already been decided, this is the major issue of the day. Forget about nuclear proliferation. Forget about escalating threats and impending confrontations. Forget about the Global War on Terror. The Western World has spoken, they have made their priorities known. The Western World has decided what is truly important today, and what is not. And you, Ahmadinejad, and you Kim Jong Ill, just don't have what it takes to compete with this current crisis.

I haven't actually watched any of the news coverage, and it's times like this that make me glad I no longer bother with television and get my news online. Watching even serious news programs, or supposedly serious news programs turn into cheap tabloids is a dispiriting and depressing sight for any citizen of a democratic country.

Meanwhile Israpundit has Elliot Abrams article disproving Hillary Clinton's claim that there was no agreement made with Israel on settlements.

It is true that there was no U.S.-Israel “memorandum of understanding,” which is presumably what Mrs. Clinton means when she suggests that the “official record of the administration” contains none. But she would do well to consult documents like the Weissglas letter, or the notes of the Aqaba meeting, before suggesting that there was no meeting of the minds.

Mrs. Clinton also said there were no “enforceable” agreements. This is a strange phrase. How exactly would Israel enforce any agreement against an American decision to renege on it? Take it to the International Court in The Hague?

Regardless of what Mrs. Clinton has said, there was a bargained-for exchange. Mr. Sharon was determined to break the deadlock, withdraw from Gaza, remove settlements — and confront his former allies on Israel’s right by abandoning the “Greater Israel” position to endorse Palestinian statehood and limits on settlement growth. He asked for our support and got it, including the agreement that we would not demand a total settlement freeze.

For reasons that remain unclear, the Obama administration has decided to abandon the understandings about settlements reached by the previous administration with the Israeli government. We may be abandoning the deal now, but we cannot rewrite history and make believe it did not exist.

The key point of course is that there is nothing Israel can do to enforce any such agreement, but that inherently makes any agreement with the Obama Administration worthless. Which is why it's a shame that Netanyahu appears to be going soft now, dismantling checkpoints which help save lives, and pulling back.

He is making the same mistake he did back in his first term.

Whcih is why this Arutz 7 article is an important reminder of the real face of Israel's "peace partners"

Members of Fatah put on a show recently boasting that Fatah leads other organizations, particularly Hamas, in anti-Israel terrorism. The event was attended by former Palestinian Authority leaders.

The performance was videotaped and shown on Fatah TV -- the television station cpntrolled by Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority

In the pro-Fatah performance, actors portrayed a classroom setting in which pro-Fatah students debated their pro-Hamas classmates and teachers over which of the two groups deserved most credit for attacks on Israel. The play includes a segment in which pro-Fatah students criticize Hamas for failing to attack Israel more frequently since taking control of Gaza:

The full article contains the video itself.

At Forbes Magazine, Anna Bayefsky takes Obama to task for his failures on human rights

A week later there were multiple casualties, injuries and threats, and 46 million voters wrenched away from that doorway to freedom that had opened--if only a crack. But when the president was asked Tuesday: "Is there any red line that your administration won't cross where that offer [to talk to Iran's leaders] will be shut off?" He answered: "We're still waiting to see how it plays itself out."

And when asked again, "If you do accept the election of Ahmadinejad … without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of what the demonstrators there are working to achieve?" He answered: "We can't say definitively what exactly happened at polling places."

And asked again: "Why won't you spell out the consequences that the Iranian people…" He answered: "Because I think that we don't know yet how this thing is going to play out."

And yet again: "Shouldn't the present regime know that there are consequences?" He answered: "We don't yet know how this is going to play out."

Also at Forbes, Joel Kotkin looks at challenges to Obama from the left

Glenn Greenwald at Salon meanwhile notes that the Washington Post fired one of its most popular liberal columnists, who regularly criticized Obama. Froomkin's statement seems to suggest that he was fired precisely because the Post no longer wanted a White House Watch in the Obama era

I’m terribly disappointed. I was told that it had been determined that my White House Watch blog wasn’t "working" anymore. But from what I could tell, it was still working very well. I also thought White House Watch was a great fit with The Washington Post brand, and what its readers reasonably expect from the Post online.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I think that the future success of our business depends on journalists enthusiastically pursuing accountability and calling it like they see it. That’s what I tried to do every day. Now I guess I'll have to try to do it someplace else.

Considering that Froomkin's next to last column was harshly critical of Obama, from a left wing perspective, it's not too hard to figure out why he was let go. Greenwald and co. can try to blame it on the neo-cons, but it's not the neo-cons who have a problem with criticism of Obama. Nor do they run the Washington Post.

Gateway Pundit meanwhile makes an excellent point about the Sanford case

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) answered an ad placed in a Washington, D.C. homosexual paper, the Washington Blade, by Stephen Gobie, a male prostitute. Gobie became Barney Frank’s live-in sexual companion, and was soon running a male prostitution ring from Barney Frank’s condo. Today Frank chairs the Financial Services Committee.

Rep. Mel Reynolds (D-IL) was indicted for sexual assault and criminal sexual abuse for engaging in a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old campaign volunteer that began during the 1992 campaign. Despite the charges, he continued his campaign and was re-elected that November. Reynolds initially denied the charges, which he claimed were racially motivated. He was convicted on 12 counts of sexual assault, obstruction of justice and solicitation of child pornography.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt)- in a 1985 television appearance Leahy disclosed classified information that one of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's telephone conversations had been intercepted. The information that Leahy revealed had been used in the operation to capture the Arab terrorists who had hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship and killed American citizens, and the Union-Tribune claimed that Leahy's indiscretion may have cost the life of at least one of the Egyptian operatives involved in that operation. Because of his several leaks he was forced to step down from his seat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Today he is Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) kills girl . Leaves her in pond to drown. Today he is second longest serving member (next to the former kleagle) in the Senate.

Of course there are almost as many tears being shed for Ted Kennedy, as for Michael Jackson.

Is it really any surprise in a culture that celebrates the worst of human behavior?

Finally, view Jew with a View, an excellent article by Jack Englehard, "Obama's Jewish Experts"

A few days ago, George Mitchell once again expressed his position, and opposition, even to “natural growth” in Judea and Samaria. Both Mitchell and Hillary Clinton speak for themselves and for President Barack Obama, who’s made this – Jewish life in the “settlements” – his priority above all other international disputes.

Even the language is disturbing. Mitchell – top Middle East envoy along with Clinton – explained that the controversy centered on “the number of Jewish births.”

Where have we heard this before? To my mind, as someone who was born under similar conditions, in France under Vichy, where Jews were kept within “restricted zones,” this sounds too much like Verboten!

When I hear American diplomats, and Obama himself, count the number of children allotted per Jewish family, at the same time measuring Jewish growth by the inch, the images that come to mind, to my mind, are of an earlier time, though not so long ago, when the Third Reich confronted the “Jewish Problem” by way of the Nuremberg Laws and the Wannsee Conference.

I picture Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann. They, too, were “Jewish Experts.”

Indeed, and the entire premise of leveraging blame on Israel for the terrorism directed against it, was very much the attitude of those who may not have perpetrated the Holocaust, but nevertheless allowed it to happen... because they felt that the Jews were to blame for the Nazi persecutions of them.

That is an attitude that Ben Hecht ably chronicled in A Guide for the Bedeviled, writing that they were like a policeman interrogating a corpse demanding to know what he had done to upset his murderer. There are no shortage of corpse interrogators in the liberal ranks, in the foreign service or in the Obama Administration all certain that the only way to solve the Middle East's problems with Muslims, is to make whatever lands Muslims consider to be theirs, Judenrein.

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The Two State Solution is a Victory for the Proxy War against Israel

When Hitler wanted to carve up Czechoslovakia he began by demanding the Sudetenland, inhabited by the Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia. The world thought this was entirely reasonable and Czechoslovakia was forced to give in. Of course Hitler did not simply want the Sudetenland, anymore than he simply wanted the Rhineland. He was after a much vaster program of conquest.

By coining the term "Volksdeutsche" Hitler created an artificial identity for large numbers of Czechs, Poles and citizens of other Eastern European nations. He used that identity to create regional fifth columns that engaged in terrorism and then used them as justification to invade and seize other nations. Only by the time his ambitions reached Poland did Western Europe wake up to realize what their appeasement toward Nazi Germany had wrought.

By the time it was all over nearly 80 million were dead, a continent lay in ruins, Eastern Europe was in the hands of the Communists and Western Europe's Great Powers would never come into their own again.

"Palestine" like Volksdeutsche is an artificial identity created in order to maintain a fifth column and use them to conduct a proxy war against Israel, by the same Arab Muslim powers who had tried and fail to defeat Israel on the battlefield.

The tactic of course long predates and postdates Hitler. Alexander the Great made use of it in his conquests. The Russians used it only last year when they wanted to invade Georgia. But in the post-WW2 era it has most effectively been employed against Israel.

The absurdity of taking a Greco-Roman name for the region and trying to turn it into two things it never was, a nation and an ethnic identity, would have been inconceivable without heavy backing from both the Soviet Union and Western liberals. But by painting the genocidal urge of both Arab Marxists and Islamists as a drive to liberate "Palestine", the proxy war by Arab terrorists backed by Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and more recently by Iran, was successfully repackaged by an oppressed people to liberate a land that never existed.

As "Volksdeutsche" gave Hitler the right to carve up and eventually annex Czechoslovakia, "Palestine" has given the Muslim world and assorted leftists the right to carve up and destroy Israel under the pretext of aiding the "Palestinian People."

In 1937, Awni Abd al-Hadi told the Peel Commission stating, "Palestine is a term the Zionists invented.... Our country for centuries was part of Syria,"

As late as 1980 the Jordanian Prime Minister stated, "The Palestinians and Jordanians do not belong to different nationalities. They hold the same Jordanian passports, are Arabs and have the same Jordanian culture."

In 1977, Zuheir Mohsen, head of the second largest militia within the PLO and once considered a potential successor to Arafat, stated the premise of the proxy war quite frankly;

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

Arafat himself expressed the same basic idea in his infamous U.N. speech in 1988, saying, "The State of Palestine is an Arab State; its people are an integral Part of the Arab nation."

Hamas' Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahour repeated it in an Economist interview in 2008;

He certainly would not now “accept the reality” of Israel, as some of his senior colleagues have hinted. It may, instead, become “an eternal issue”, he says, looking ahead to a distant future when, “like your European Union”, the Arab nation will form one state across its historic lands, joining up with other Muslim nations such as Turkey. “We [Palestinians] were never an independent state in history,” he notes. “We were part of an Arab state and an Islamic state.”

That "Great Arab State" or "Great Islamic State", or Caliphate, has always been the endgame. Palestine is to the Caliphate, what the Sudetenland was to Hitler's Thousand Year Reich.

Israel is a stubborn little non-Arab non-Muslim state that stands in the way of the great dream of the Caliphate, a vast Muslim empire stretching across the Middle East into Turkey, Asia and even the heartland of Europe itself.

The fury directed at Israel from the Muslim world is in direction proportion to Israel's obstruction of this messianic vision of an Islamic Arab ruled Ummah stretching across the entire globe and fulfilling the vision of Mohammed.

It was never about "Palestinian rights", because not only is there no Palestinian people, but the refugee camps were themselves created by the Arab world as a first stage for the proxy war.

They began by alternately luring and badgering Arabs out of Israel during the War of Independence, for example;

"Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit....It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."

The Economist, October 2, 1948

And naturally as renegades they would have been treated the same as the Jews, or perhaps even worse, during what was then seen as the "inevitable conquest" of Israel by the neighboring Arab states. At the very least that would mean the loss of property and land. At most it would mean outright massacre.

Once out they became refugees, kept in camps, and maintained as displaced persons, to serve as fodder for both terrorist recruitment and world outrage against Israel. As succinctly stated by UNRWA Director Ralph Galloway in 1958, "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die."

After two lost wars, the "open sore" was transformed into a new Palestinian nation that had never existed but was being suppressed by Israel. Palestinian Terrorism became global, as part of a proxy war conducted by Arab states against Israel, itself part of a proxy war being conducted by the USSR against the West. With the fall of the USSR, the proxy war has shed its Arab Marxist colors in favor of Arab Islamist ones, replacing Fatah, once backed by Arab Socialist regimes in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, in favor of Hamas, backed by Islamist regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The Two State solution is the Sudetenland solution, carving up Israel and creating a sovereign and legally independent terrorist regime at war with Israel... inside Israel. With weapons flowing from around the Middle East and Pakistan through open borders, the real job of destroying Israel will finally begin.

Supporting the Two State solution means quite simply supporting the endgame of the proxy war against Israel. The solution has nothing to do with Palestinian rights or stabilizing the Middle East. There is no "tough love" in it, as Obama insists, or love of any kind. It is simply the final phase in the destruction of Israel, which itself is only one phase in the creation of a global Islamic empire.

Advocating the Two State solution means advocating genocide and ethnic cleansing. It means destroying the Middle East's only democracy to make way for a monstrosity that would be the worst of the Taliban writ large across the region and the globe. It means stoning, amputation and a thousand uncounted brutalities. And most of all it brings WWIII or a global clash of civilizations that much closer.

There are two kinds of people who support the Two State Solution. Those who know what they support and those who do not.

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Why Iran's June Revolt Emphasizes Obama's Absence of Leadership

The Bush Administration's guiding policy on the Middle East was that stability comes from aiding and promoting the spread of Democracy. The Obama Administration's guiding policy on the Middle East is that stability comes from discarding or even outright suppressing Middle Eastern democracies, particularly if they are not run by Arab Muslims, as sources of instability in the region.

The Bush Administration pursued a military war to overthrow a tyrant and liberate Iraq. The Obama Administration is pursuing a diplomatic war against Israel to overthrow a democratic government and establish a terrorist state. The contrast between the Bush and Obama administrations is the contrast between America's ideals in action and the same cynical pandering to Muslim dictatorships, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, that has the Middle East a source of terrorism in the first place.

The advocates of stability naturally turn out to be the greatest supporters of appeasement, giving the murderous squeaky wheels whatever grease they think will keep them from going on homicidal purges. This failed policy dominated the Clinton Administration, which shelled out aid to the Taliban, took nothing but cosmetic action when Saddam attempted to assassinate a former United States President and actually wound up going to war to create a new Muslim state in the Balkans. Naturally pressuring Israel to create a Palestinian Arab terrorist state in the middle of one of the most prosperous countries in the Middle East was high on the agenda, and was Bill Clinton's most admired foreign policy accomplishment.

17 years later, the Palestinian territories are a festering sore filled with Islamist terrorists who are continually innovating new terrorist tactics that have then been used against Allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile the breakup of Yugoslavia has led to a vast drug and human smuggling pipeline into the heartland of Europe. Members of the Clinton backed KLA, which financed itself through the drug trade, have become crime bosses all through Europe... those who haven't gone on to become Islamist terrorists that is. It was left to the Bush Administration to deal with Saddam Hussein and with Osama Bin Laden, but not before the latter managed to kill 3000 Americans.

So much for stability.

As an advocate of bringing stability by appeasing tyrants and terrorists, Obama's fumbling response to the Iranian street protests is exactly what one would expect from a man who took Democracy off the table in Cairo and pushed diplomacy with the regime of the Mullahs as his foreign policy agenda.

The Iranian June Revolt has badly upset the Obama applecart, which was working to appeasing Muslim tyrannies by forcing concessions from Israel, while pandering to the Iranian regime. And now in the absence of leadership America has no useful response to make. Rather than demonize the Iranian street protests against Ahmadinejad, the way that it demonized the Venezulean street protests against Chavez, the left has increasingly chosen to side with them. This leaves Obama stuck fumbling for increasingly bolder statements on the riots to appease his domestic supporters, even as he tries to reassure the rest of the Muslim tyrannies that the United States would never interfere in their internal affairs. (A privilege apparently reserved by Obama for Israel, Greece, Germany and other Democratic nations.)

The June Revolt in Iran is bursting through the illusion that Obama is any kind of leader. The illusion of Obama's leadership has been maintained through scripted speeches, head thrust back poses and prominent liberal figures enthusiastically praising his leadership. But the real test of leadership is a crisis. And in this crisis, Obama has sat on the sidelines, gone for ice cream, fumbled and done absolutely nothing.

During the election, Biden predicted, "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy... Remember, I said it standing here, if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy... He’s going to have to make some really tough - I don’t know what the decision’s going to be, but I promise you it will occur."

He then called on the donors to be prepared to rise to Mr. Obama’s defense because he will need to make some difficult and unpopular choices in response. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

Biden's likely reference was to the Bay of Pigs, which occurred several months after JFK took office. It was sabotaged by Kennedy's refusal to provide aid and naval support to the Cuban liberation forces, resulting in the deaths of both Cuban fighters and American personnel on the ground. That "difficult and unpopular" choice was only partially later redeemed by Kennedy's actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In 1940 Kennedy had responded to Churchill's While England Slept, a warning against appeasement, with Why England Slept, a defense of the appeasement propounded by his father, Joe Kennedy. As President, Kennedy discovered that America did not have the luxury of sleep, and learned from his mistakes. What he did not need however, was the uncritical support that Biden asked on behalf of Obama. Real leaders don't need to be pandered too or given uncritical support, they need to be challenged.

That is why Obama is not a leader. Beneath his media haze, Obama is a little man sitting in a big chair, distributing graft to his backers, and tiptoeing around the world to promise America's enemies that America is no longer a threat.

But the fight for freedom is not limited to America. It never was. Obama chose to keep America on the sidelines, to enable tyranny and suppress freedom. Nevertheless with the June Revolt, freedom has sprung up anyway.

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