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Saturday, May 10, 2008
Book Review: A Conservative History of the American Left by Daniel Flynn
The Left's tendency to repeat its mistakes over and over actually illustrates the conservative view of life: that human nature is fallen, universal, and cannot be permanently improved. May 10, 2008 -
by Kathy Shaidle
http://pajamasmedia.com/
“I write the books that I want to read,” says Daniel J. Flynn. After four years of writing and research, Flynn — whose previous books include
Intellectual Morons and Why the Left Hates America — is back with the irresistibly titled A Conservative History of the American Left.“Conservatives, unfortunately, have been content to rely on some variant of ‘It all started in the 1960s’ when tracing the origins of the Left,” Flynn continued when reached by email just before the book’s release. “My book goes back to Plymouth Rock.”
Leftists, too, are often content to believe that history began at Little Rock rather than Plymouth Rock, and no wonder: they’d rather forget their one-time embrace of eugenics and other crackpot fads.
For example, in researching early birth control advocate Margaret Sanger’s papers for Intellectual Morons, Flynn told Pajamas Media that he “came across a vile 1932 speech calling for a vast system of concentration camps in America. What do her biographers say about this, I wondered. Nothing. All of the biographers, who had access to the exact information that I had access to, decided to leave that rather consequential information out of their books. Historians shouldn’t be cheerleaders. They should be truth tellers.”
And the truth, according to Flynn, is that the Left has always attracted very peculiar people who’ve preached very peculiar “solutions” to life’s “problems.” In fact, the sameness of the Left as chronicled by Flynn actually illustrates the conservative view of life: that human nature is fallen, universal, and cannot be permanently altered for the better through education or engineering.
Certain leftist types turn up again and again through the centuries, brought back to colorful life in Flynn’s book: fanatics, altruists, adventurers, splitters, spiritualists, free spirits, and one particular type Flynn dubs the “puritanical perverts”: Alfred Kinsey, Timothy Leary, and other “overbearing personalities whose zeal for sex, drugs, or whatever other pleasure made them paternalistic libertines.”
What they all have in common, Flynn writes in Conservative History, isn’t a “laundry list of complaints and wishes” so much as “an attitude”: “It is, in its simplest form, scorn for what is and hopes for what could be. The ideology’s appeal exists in neither the experienced past nor the concrete present, but in the imagined future.”
The Left boasts enthusiasm and energy to spare, but its inability to learn from the past is its fatal flaw. As Flynn explains in the book’s introduction, “because of the suspicions of tradition inherent within radicalism, [the Left] largely ignores that past.” After all, visionaries “preoccupied with the triumphal future cannot pause to learn from the mistakes of the past.”
This refusal to check the rear-view mirror is reflected in the Left’s compulsion for coining extravagant, inapt, and frequently offensive historical analogies: these days, every conservative leader is “Hitler”, every war is “Vietnam,” and every petulant protester is the new “Rosa Parks.”
As Flynn points out to devastating effect, the sheer stupidity of such comparisons should, by rights, be enough to cripple them as rhetorical devices; alas, widespread historical illiteracy and an aversion to criticizing “protected” identity groups render healthy mockery almost impossible. Hence these poor analogies metastasize, bringing the level of public discourse down yet another notch. To cite just one of many examples throughout the book:
Gay groups, for instance, were the fiercest defenders of the bathhouses that served as incubators of the [AIDS] virus. … The publisher of New York City’s main gay newspaper, once health officials managed to order the baths closed (a move opposed by all but one San Francisco gay group), castigated a Centers for Disease Control official: “Now that you’ve succeeded in closing down the baths, are you preparing boxcars for relocation?” That the baths themselves so closely paralleled the death camp “showers,” ostensibly hygienic chambers in which victims entered oblivious to the death that awaiting them, seems never to have occurred to the miasmic authors of wildly stretched analogies.
“The conflict between a Force Left and a Freedom Left is another theme,” Flynn explained in our interview. “One Left says, ‘Smoke whatever, bed whomever, work whenever’. Another Left says, ‘We will tell you how to run your business, we will spend your money better than you do, we will uplift your behavior to conform to our ideal.’ Often, frustrated by their inability to attain their desired results, those on the Freedom Left will convert to the Force Left. The transition from Yankee anarchism to anarcho-communism in the 1880s and the mutation of some freedom-loving hippies to New Left radicalism in the 1960s would be two good examples of the friends of freedom defecting to the friends of force.
“Another theme would be the difficulty of [establishing] an American Left. The first word stands for freedom, faith, flag, family. The second word stands against all that. How to reconcile an ideology against capitalism, the nuclear family, patriotism, and traditional religion with a country so closely identified with those ideas? That’s the constant conundrum of the American Left.”
What surprised Flynn most during the research for A Conservative History of the American Left, he told me, was the influence the Bible had once had upon leftist theory and practice:
Christianity once served as the primary influence upon American leftists. … Secular reformers admired the sacrifice and the communal unity of the early religious fanatics but not, generally, the religious beliefs. Religion and politics mixed in the Social Gospel, whose enthusiasts ultimately reached for more social, less gospel. … The secular Left kept the forms without the function.
So, I asked, will liberal reviewers criticize Flynn’s latest book with the same venom they recently unleashed upon Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism?
I think honest leftists will like A Conservative History of the American Left. It outlines the Left’s failures and shows examples of success, providing a guide of what to avoid and a template for better results. The book frees the Left from the manacles of Marxism by focusing on an American Left that often has nothing to do with the European contagion spread by Karl Marx. In other words, there is a much more honorable tradition on the American Left that includes people like Henry George, Edward Bellamy, and J.A. Wayland that gets overlooked by leftist historians too preoccupied by Marxism to acknowledge that leftism and Marxism are not synonymous. By focusing on people, the book humanizes the Left. It’s clear from reading it, I think, that I admire many of the people — free-love advocate Mary Gove Nichols, Appeal to Reason publisher J.A. Wayland, and SDS founder Al Haber to name a few — I write about even if I disagree with them. I think the title of the book is truth in advertising. Alas, most leftists won’t like the book because it takes a critical view of a movement and its activists that, in their view, are above criticism.
Conservative readers, on the other hand, will appreciate Flynn’s accuracy, readability, and humor. Even longtime Left-watchers will discover new nuggets, such as Michael Moore’s old civics teacher remembering the future filmmaker: “He’s always been ugly, fat, and obnoxious, a troubled child with no close friends to speak of.”
It’s a testament to Flynn’s talent that reading A Conservative History of the American Left is as enervating as it is entertaining. In almost every chapter, the Nation issues another ridiculous prediction, another utopian starts another doomed commune, and another idealist promises the end of all war, famine, and bigotry — and attracts legions of foolish followers. Throughout, very few of Flynn’s “characters” express regret for the lives they’ve ruined or outright ended.
“People die, but the Left will endure,” Flynn told me. “The ideas of a brotherhood of man, heaven on earth, and human perfection are too beautiful to perish as ideas, even if they’re too utopian to succeed in reality. Leftists are idealists, and the havoc their ideas cause in the real world doesn’t seem to affect a rethinking of their ideas in their imaginations.”
- Kathy Shaidle blogs at FiveFeetOfFury. Mark Steyn has called her new e-book Acoustic Ladyland a “must read.”
A Three-Way Argument For Game's Integrity
By Thomas Boswell
Washington Post
Saturday, May 10, 2008; E01
Eventually, your wins, like your sins, will find you out.
In San Diego tonight, Greg Maddux will try to win his 350th game. Later this year, he may pass Roger Clemens's total of 354. But whether Maddux hits either number, the verdict is in. It arrived in the Mitchell report. The greatest right-handed pitcher since Walter Johnson is no longer the tainted Clemens but the mesmerizing Maddux.
Just as Barry Bonds's 762 homers will always be a smaller number -- arithmetic be damned -- than Hank Aaron's 755, so Maddux already has forever outdistanced Clemens.
Searching for silver linings in a steroid age is hard work. But there are some. Perhaps none is brighter than the realization that Maddux, and two of his former teammates, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz, all of them presumptive Hall of Famers, will now be among those who move up most dramatically as we reevaluate the stars of the past 20 years.
Last summer, Glavine won his 300th game; last month Smoltz got his 3,000th strikeout. Yet, Maddux and Glavine, both 42, and Smoltz, 41 next week, are all staggering to the finish. Glavine just ended his first trip ever to the disabled list and Smoltz is currently on the DL. This will be Maddux's fifth try for No. 350.
"It's coming to an end soon," the Braves' Chipper Jones said. So enjoy and value it.
"We all deserve what we've gotten," Glavine said. "Maybe people will finally pay attention to us. You don't want to be elevated on somebody else's mistakes. That's hard to deal with. I don't know Roger well. But this era is what it is and now you've got the greatest pitcher of our time caught up in it.
"But we have done it right. Hopefully, that will be appreciated more and the three of us will be a better example to kids. Maybe we will be the inspiration that you can run your miles and work in the weight room and still be successful."
"Nothing bad will come out about them," Manager Bobby Cox said of the trio that pitched for him for 11 years. "They won their games on hamburgers."
Presumably. But let's add the disclaimer that now defaces baseball: No player of this generation can be proven innocent. Thanks to Clemens and Bonds, nobody can be declared clean. What we can do is refuse to use their impossible achievements as baseball's proper benchmarks. Their seven Cy Young and most valuable player awards should never again dwarf their peers.
Now, when we look at numbers, the stats can tell us an entirely different story. We discover that, for players such as Maddux, there is circumstantial evidence of honesty.
The season when Clemens was 36, his ERA was 4.60; Maddux's was 2.62. After that, Clemens somehow pitched younger, going 18-4 at 41, then posting a preposterous 1.87 ERA at 42. Now, from baseball's own report, we assume we know part of the reason. Maddux, on the other hand, got old just as players had for the previous century. In his last five full seasons, his ERA has ranged from 3.96 to 4.24, yet he's still averaged 15 wins a year (14-11 in '07). His diminishing fastball has, at times, barely broken 80 mph.
Yet even with the anchor of age, Maddux's career ERA is now 3.12, the same as Clemens's.
"When it comes to the art of pitching, you can't out-think Maddux," Jones said. "He's the best chess player ever. He takes being smart about baseball to a different level."
In Clemens's final seasons, as he changed teams, celebrated multiple retirements, played in the World Series for both the Yanks and his hometown Astros and signed enormous contracts to play fractions of seasons, the man with the Texas-size ego did everything imaginable to attract attention. Like Bonds, he was a glutton for glory. Now, with his shadow greatly diminished, others can step into the light.
"There's never been a better one-two-three on a staff -- ever. The numbers are staggering," Jones says of the trio's 862 wins, plus 154 saves by Smoltz. "When I look back, playing with them will be the good old days."
The three seem to exist for counterpoint. Glavine was homegrown, Smoltz came in trade and Maddux was a free agent. The three even adapted to age differently. Glavine learned a cut fastball to get inside on right-handed hitters, especially after baseball eliminated the "Maddux-Glavine strike" just off the outside corner. Maddux learned to change speeds at even lower speeds, and accepted that he'd never be dominant again. After arm problems, Smoltz went to the bullpen to reduce his innings by 140 a year, then suddenly became the game's best closer, a career cherry-on-top that will presumably put him into Cooperstown. Then, his arm feeling stronger, he went back to starting.
"Smoltz might be a closer again before he's finished," said Cox, whose bullpen has been demolished this season. "You never know."
Though friends and addicted golfers, the three have few personality traits in common. "Smoltz is the most competitive, the best in the playoffs," Jones said. "Glavine is the smart guy, represented the union" in '94.
"The union didn't pick Tommy Glavine out of a hat," Cox said. "He was the chosen one. They got the right one, too. . . . He could take the heat."
As for Maddux, no major star is more camouflaged or enjoys the sly sardonic mischief of anonymity more. Out of uniform, in glasses and a ballcap, Maddux could take tickets and not be recognized. "He's just really, really crazy," Jones said. "No Mad Dog stories for print," Glavine said. "He's so goofy you can't believe it's the same guy who's so studious, a perfectionist, when he pitches. . . . He's Clark Kent and Superman."
Only in the last year, as landmarks have fallen, has it become difficult to imagine that any of the three will be left out of Cooperstown.
"There's more satisfaction now," Glavine said. "It makes some of the tougher days easier to take, because we know where we are going.
"Everything hasn't always gone swimmingly for us. That's the beauty of what we've done. More than once we've all been counted down and out, had to prove people wrong. It's a testament to our pride."
Apparently, a testament to their integrity, as well.
Washington Post
Saturday, May 10, 2008; E01
Eventually, your wins, like your sins, will find you out.In San Diego tonight, Greg Maddux will try to win his 350th game. Later this year, he may pass Roger Clemens's total of 354. But whether Maddux hits either number, the verdict is in. It arrived in the Mitchell report. The greatest right-handed pitcher since Walter Johnson is no longer the tainted Clemens but the mesmerizing Maddux.
Just as Barry Bonds's 762 homers will always be a smaller number -- arithmetic be damned -- than Hank Aaron's 755, so Maddux already has forever outdistanced Clemens.
Searching for silver linings in a steroid age is hard work. But there are some. Perhaps none is brighter than the realization that Maddux, and two of his former teammates, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz, all of them presumptive Hall of Famers, will now be among those who move up most dramatically as we reevaluate the stars of the past 20 years.
Last summer, Glavine won his 300th game; last month Smoltz got his 3,000th strikeout. Yet, Maddux and Glavine, both 42, and Smoltz, 41 next week, are all staggering to the finish. Glavine just ended his first trip ever to the disabled list and Smoltz is currently on the DL. This will be Maddux's fifth try for No. 350.
"It's coming to an end soon," the Braves' Chipper Jones said. So enjoy and value it.
"We all deserve what we've gotten," Glavine said. "Maybe people will finally pay attention to us. You don't want to be elevated on somebody else's mistakes. That's hard to deal with. I don't know Roger well. But this era is what it is and now you've got the greatest pitcher of our time caught up in it.
"But we have done it right. Hopefully, that will be appreciated more and the three of us will be a better example to kids. Maybe we will be the inspiration that you can run your miles and work in the weight room and still be successful."
"Nothing bad will come out about them," Manager Bobby Cox said of the trio that pitched for him for 11 years. "They won their games on hamburgers."
Presumably. But let's add the disclaimer that now defaces baseball: No player of this generation can be proven innocent. Thanks to Clemens and Bonds, nobody can be declared clean. What we can do is refuse to use their impossible achievements as baseball's proper benchmarks. Their seven Cy Young and most valuable player awards should never again dwarf their peers.
Now, when we look at numbers, the stats can tell us an entirely different story. We discover that, for players such as Maddux, there is circumstantial evidence of honesty.
The season when Clemens was 36, his ERA was 4.60; Maddux's was 2.62. After that, Clemens somehow pitched younger, going 18-4 at 41, then posting a preposterous 1.87 ERA at 42. Now, from baseball's own report, we assume we know part of the reason. Maddux, on the other hand, got old just as players had for the previous century. In his last five full seasons, his ERA has ranged from 3.96 to 4.24, yet he's still averaged 15 wins a year (14-11 in '07). His diminishing fastball has, at times, barely broken 80 mph.Yet even with the anchor of age, Maddux's career ERA is now 3.12, the same as Clemens's.
"When it comes to the art of pitching, you can't out-think Maddux," Jones said. "He's the best chess player ever. He takes being smart about baseball to a different level."
In Clemens's final seasons, as he changed teams, celebrated multiple retirements, played in the World Series for both the Yanks and his hometown Astros and signed enormous contracts to play fractions of seasons, the man with the Texas-size ego did everything imaginable to attract attention. Like Bonds, he was a glutton for glory. Now, with his shadow greatly diminished, others can step into the light.
"There's never been a better one-two-three on a staff -- ever. The numbers are staggering," Jones says of the trio's 862 wins, plus 154 saves by Smoltz. "When I look back, playing with them will be the good old days."
The three seem to exist for counterpoint. Glavine was homegrown, Smoltz came in trade and Maddux was a free agent. The three even adapted to age differently. Glavine learned a cut fastball to get inside on right-handed hitters, especially after baseball eliminated the "Maddux-Glavine strike" just off the outside corner. Maddux learned to change speeds at even lower speeds, and accepted that he'd never be dominant again. After arm problems, Smoltz went to the bullpen to reduce his innings by 140 a year, then suddenly became the game's best closer, a career cherry-on-top that will presumably put him into Cooperstown. Then, his arm feeling stronger, he went back to starting.
"Smoltz might be a closer again before he's finished," said Cox, whose bullpen has been demolished this season. "You never know."
Though friends and addicted golfers, the three have few personality traits in common. "Smoltz is the most competitive, the best in the playoffs," Jones said. "Glavine is the smart guy, represented the union" in '94.
"The union didn't pick Tommy Glavine out of a hat," Cox said. "He was the chosen one. They got the right one, too. . . . He could take the heat."
As for Maddux, no major star is more camouflaged or enjoys the sly sardonic mischief of anonymity more. Out of uniform, in glasses and a ballcap, Maddux could take tickets and not be recognized. "He's just really, really crazy," Jones said. "No Mad Dog stories for print," Glavine said. "He's so goofy you can't believe it's the same guy who's so studious, a perfectionist, when he pitches. . . . He's Clark Kent and Superman."Only in the last year, as landmarks have fallen, has it become difficult to imagine that any of the three will be left out of Cooperstown.
"There's more satisfaction now," Glavine said. "It makes some of the tougher days easier to take, because we know where we are going.
"Everything hasn't always gone swimmingly for us. That's the beauty of what we've done. More than once we've all been counted down and out, had to prove people wrong. It's a testament to our pride."
Apparently, a testament to their integrity, as well.
Mark Steyn: Israel's 'doom' could also be Europe's
Orange County Register
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Almost everywhere I went last week – TV, radio, speeches – I was asked about the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state. I don't recall being asked about Israel quite so much on its 50th anniversary, which, as a general rule, is a much bigger deal than the 60th. But these days friends and enemies alike smell weakness at the heart of the Zionist Entity.
Assuming Iranian President Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic fancies don't come to pass, Israel will surely make it to its 70th birthday. But a lot of folks don't fancy its prospects for its 80th and beyond. See the Atlantic Monthly cover story: "Is Israel Finished?" Also the cover story in Canada's leading news magazine, Maclean's, which dispenses with the question mark: "Why Israel Can't Survive."
Why? By most measures, the Jewish state is a great success story. The modern Middle East is the misbegotten progeny of the British and French colonial map makers of 1922. All the nation states in that neck of the woods date back a mere 60 or 70 years – Iraq to the Thirties, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel to the Forties. The only difference is that Israel has made a go of it.
Would I rather there were more countries like Israel, or more like Syria? Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East (Iraq may yet prove a second), and its Arab citizens enjoy more rights than they would living under any of the kleptocrat kings and psychotic dictators who otherwise infest the region.
On a tiny strip of land narrower at its narrowest point than many American townships, Israel has built a modern economy with a GDP per capita just shy of $30,000 – and within striking distance of the European Union average. If you object that that's because it's uniquely blessed by Uncle Sam, well, for the past 30 years the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid has been Egypt: their GDP per capita is $5,000, and America has nothing to show for its investment other than one-time pilot Mohamed Atta coming at you through the office window.
Jewish success against the odds is nothing new. "Aaron Lazarus the Jew," wrote Anthony Hope in his all but unknown prequel to "The Prisoner Of Zenda," "had made a great business of it, and had spent his savings in buying up the better part of the street; but" – and for Jews there's always a "but" – "since Jews then might hold no property … ."
Ah, right. Like the Jewish merchants in old Europe, who were tolerated as leaseholders but could never be full property owners, the Israelis are regarded as operating a uniquely conditional sovereignty. Jimmy Carter, just returned from his squalid suck-up junket to Hamas, is merely the latest Western sophisticate to pronounce triumphantly that he has secured the usual (off-the-record, highly qualified, never to be translated into Arabic and instantly denied) commitment from the Jews' enemies, acknowledging Israel's "right to exist." Well, whoop-de-doo. Would you enter negotiations on such a basis?
Since Israel marked its half-century, the "right to exist" is now routinely denied not just in Gaza and Ramallah and the region's presidential palaces but on every European and Canadian college campus. During the Lebanese incursion of 2006, Matthew Parris wrote in The Times of London: "The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and sympathy so fast. My opinion – held not passionately but with little personal doubt – is that there is no point in arguing about whether the state of Israel should have been established where and when it was" – which lets you know how he would argue it if he minded to.
Richard Cohen in The Washington Post was more straightforward: "Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself."
Cohen and Parris, two famously moderate voices in the leading newspapers of two of the least anti-Israeli capital cities in the West, have nevertheless internalized the same logic as Ahmadinejad: Israel should not be where it is. Whether it's a "stain of shame" or just a "mistake" is the merest detail.
Aaron Lazarus and every other "European Jew" of his time would have had a mirthless chuckle over Cohen's designation. The Jews lived in Europe for centuries but without ever being accepted as "European." To enjoy their belated acceptance as Europeans, they had to move to the Middle East. Reviled on the Continent as sinister rootless cosmopolitans with no conventional national allegiance, they built a conventional nation state, and now they're reviled for that, too. The "oldest hatred" didn't get that way without an ability to adapt.
The Western intellectuals who promote "Israeli Apartheid Week" at this time each year are laying the groundwork for the next stage of Zionist delegitimization. The talk of a "two-state solution" will fade. In the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, Jews are barely a majority. Gaza has one of the highest birth rates on the planet: The median age is 15.8 years. Its population is not just literally exploding, at Israeli checkpoints, but also doing so in the less-incendiary but demographically decisive sense.
Arabs will soon be demanding one democratic state – Jews and Muslims – from Jordan to the sea. And even those Western leaders who understand that this will mean the death of Israel will find themselves so confounded by the multicultural pieties of their own lands they'll be unable to argue against it. Contemporary Europeans are not exactly known for their moral courage: The reports one hears of schools quietly dropping the Holocaust from their classrooms because it offends their growing numbers of Muslim students suggest that even the pretense of "evenhandedness" in the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" will be long gone a decade hence.
The joke, of course, is that Israel, despite its demographic challenge, still enjoys a birth rate twice that of the European average. All the reasons for Israel's doom apply to Europe with bells on. And, unlike much of the rest of the West, Israel has the advantage of living on the front line of the existential challenge. "I have a premonition that will not leave me," wrote Eric Hoffer, America's great longshoreman philosopher, after the 1967 war. "As it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us."
Indeed. So, happy 60th birthday. And here's to many more.
©MARK STEYN
Friday, May 09, 2008
Film Review: The Visitor
[Don't be fooled by the rave reviews emanating from most of the film world cognoscenti...this movie is a quiet bludgeoning of condescension. It is also silly, unsophisticated and predictable. A fine cast can't save this plodding wreck...if your idea of a good film resembles being repeatedly pounded over the head with a script writer's sock full of good intentions, then this is the movie for you. - jtf]
The Visitor: The New McCarthyism
Different faces, same condescension from Station Agent director
By SCOTT FOUNDAS
LA Weekly
Wednesday, April 9, 2008 - 3:20 pm
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A lonely dwarf, a wisecracking Cuban-American and a grieving mother walk into each other’s lives, laugh together, cry together, grow, change and heal each other’s emotional wounds all in a mere 90 minutes of screen time. Cue Sundance prizes, Miramax pickup, torrent of glowing reviews and surprisingly robust indie box office. The movie was The Station Agent, and it was the sort of exercise in forced whimsy and catharsis that managed to coast by on the charm of its performers, as long as you didn’t stop to ponder why the film’s writer-director, Tom McCarthy, had his characters become apoplectic upon their first encounter with Peter Dinklage’s vertically challenged train hobbyist, or just what Bobby Cannavale’s latter-day Ricky Ricardo was doing operating a coffee cart in a supposedly unpopulated stretch of industrial New Jersey in the first place. Clearly a believer in leaving well enough alone, McCarthy has, for his second feature, brought together another unlikely threesome — except this time, he’s decided to get political, making a liberal guilt-trip movie about first-world ignorance of Third World culture.
JoJo Whildon
They've got rhythm.
Like The Station Agent, The Visitor opens in a state of mourning, with 62-year-old economics professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) staring longingly out the window of his Connecticut home, wine glass in hand, while a solemn piano sonata plays on the soundtrack. Even before we know exactly what it is, we know Walter’s lost something; as with almost every other scene in the movie, this one wears its meaning on its sleeve. Then Walter reluctantly travels to New York to deliver a paper at an NYU conference, only to find his long-untended Manhattan apartment occupied by ... a young Syrian emigré, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira), who have been swindled into thinking the place is theirs. At first, Walter kicks his unexpected houseguests to the curb; but of course, there wouldn’t be a movie here if Walter didn’t think better of that decision and tell the couple — what the hell — they can stay with him for as long as they need to. That’s when things take a turn for the pious.
I’d call Walter’s meet-cute with Tarek and Zainab accidental, but pretty much nothing in The Visitor happens by accident. It’s a screenplay that seems to have been sown, fertilized and harvested in one of those how-to screenwriting seminars you see advertised in the backs of movie magazines. That mournful piano music? It turns out to be a performance by Walter’s late wife, a classical concert pianist. And Tarek, wouldn’t you know, is a musician too, only instead of piano he plays the African drum. And before long, he’s teaching Walter how to play. And not long after that, this supposed East Coast intellectual who lectures at seminars on “economic growth in developing nations” is chowing down on his first-ever shawarma and stopping on his lunch break to listen — really listen — to the black kids beating on their plastic buckets in Washington Square Park. It’s like he’s noticing them for the first time, the way everybody in The Station Agent seems to have never seen a little person before.
So, East meets West and everyone is a little bit the better for it, until the ugly face of post-9/11 racial profiling intrudes upon Tarek and Walter’s return from an impromptu Central Park jam session, landing the undocumented Tarek in a subcontracted government detention center lined with murals of the Statue of Liberty and posters that say things like, “The strength of America ... America’s immigrants.” Irony alert! That’s Walter’s opportunity — and ours — to become outraged that such things can happen in the supposed Land of the Free (who knew?), while Tarek and Zainab marvel, wide-eyed, at the fact that some rich old white dude could possibly care about their well-being.
You have to hand it to McCarthy: He’s nothing if not an equal-opportunity patronizer. When Tarek’s doting mom, Mouna (played by the excellent Israeli-Arab actress Hiam Abbass), shows up and sees Zainab for the first time, she turns to Walter and exclaims, “She’s very black!” (Even dark-skinned people, you see, have their prejudices.) Then everyone piles onto the Staten Island Ferry for an illustrated tour of relevant New York landmarks — Ellis Island, Ground Zero — just in case we didn’t get the point that this is a movie about liberty under siege. Like every other Moslem character in the film, Mouna practically walks on water, but Abbass, to her credit, brings an emotional gravity to her scenes that does much to counterbalance the movie’s epic banality. Jenkins isn’t so lucky; one of the most resourceful character actors out there, finally given a meaty leading role, he’s been hemmed by McCarthy into a fussy, mannered performance in which everything is externalized — crippling grief in the first part, righteous indignation in the second.
McCarthy unquestionably means well, but he’s made one of those incredibly naive movies (like last fall''s Rendition) that give liberals — Hollywood liberals especially — a bad name, and which do more to regress the sociopolitical discourse than advance it. “I was struck by how little I knew about the region,” McCarthy says in the movie’s press notes, remarking on his trip to the Middle East for a U.S. cultural-outreach program. “With all the news and the headlines and the drama, we can forget that there are human beings on both sides of this. How can I eliminate that a little bit? That always is my call to arms.” A curious last choice of words there, to be sure. As for the rest, is McCarthy really this dense, or does he think he’s the enlightened one here and we are in need of his counsel? I hope it’s the former, but on the basis of The Visitor, I fear it’s the latter.
THE VISITOR | Written and directed by TOM McCARTHY | Produced by MARY JANE SKALSKI and MICHAEL LONDON | Released by Overture Films | ArcLight Hollywood, The Landmark
The Visitor: The New McCarthyism
Different faces, same condescension from Station Agent director
By SCOTT FOUNDAS
LA Weekly
Wednesday, April 9, 2008 - 3:20 pm
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A lonely dwarf, a wisecracking Cuban-American and a grieving mother walk into each other’s lives, laugh together, cry together, grow, change and heal each other’s emotional wounds all in a mere 90 minutes of screen time. Cue Sundance prizes, Miramax pickup, torrent of glowing reviews and surprisingly robust indie box office. The movie was The Station Agent, and it was the sort of exercise in forced whimsy and catharsis that managed to coast by on the charm of its performers, as long as you didn’t stop to ponder why the film’s writer-director, Tom McCarthy, had his characters become apoplectic upon their first encounter with Peter Dinklage’s vertically challenged train hobbyist, or just what Bobby Cannavale’s latter-day Ricky Ricardo was doing operating a coffee cart in a supposedly unpopulated stretch of industrial New Jersey in the first place. Clearly a believer in leaving well enough alone, McCarthy has, for his second feature, brought together another unlikely threesome — except this time, he’s decided to get political, making a liberal guilt-trip movie about first-world ignorance of Third World culture.
JoJo Whildon
They've got rhythm.
Like The Station Agent, The Visitor opens in a state of mourning, with 62-year-old economics professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) staring longingly out the window of his Connecticut home, wine glass in hand, while a solemn piano sonata plays on the soundtrack. Even before we know exactly what it is, we know Walter’s lost something; as with almost every other scene in the movie, this one wears its meaning on its sleeve. Then Walter reluctantly travels to New York to deliver a paper at an NYU conference, only to find his long-untended Manhattan apartment occupied by ... a young Syrian emigré, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira), who have been swindled into thinking the place is theirs. At first, Walter kicks his unexpected houseguests to the curb; but of course, there wouldn’t be a movie here if Walter didn’t think better of that decision and tell the couple — what the hell — they can stay with him for as long as they need to. That’s when things take a turn for the pious.
I’d call Walter’s meet-cute with Tarek and Zainab accidental, but pretty much nothing in The Visitor happens by accident. It’s a screenplay that seems to have been sown, fertilized and harvested in one of those how-to screenwriting seminars you see advertised in the backs of movie magazines. That mournful piano music? It turns out to be a performance by Walter’s late wife, a classical concert pianist. And Tarek, wouldn’t you know, is a musician too, only instead of piano he plays the African drum. And before long, he’s teaching Walter how to play. And not long after that, this supposed East Coast intellectual who lectures at seminars on “economic growth in developing nations” is chowing down on his first-ever shawarma and stopping on his lunch break to listen — really listen — to the black kids beating on their plastic buckets in Washington Square Park. It’s like he’s noticing them for the first time, the way everybody in The Station Agent seems to have never seen a little person before.
So, East meets West and everyone is a little bit the better for it, until the ugly face of post-9/11 racial profiling intrudes upon Tarek and Walter’s return from an impromptu Central Park jam session, landing the undocumented Tarek in a subcontracted government detention center lined with murals of the Statue of Liberty and posters that say things like, “The strength of America ... America’s immigrants.” Irony alert! That’s Walter’s opportunity — and ours — to become outraged that such things can happen in the supposed Land of the Free (who knew?), while Tarek and Zainab marvel, wide-eyed, at the fact that some rich old white dude could possibly care about their well-being.
You have to hand it to McCarthy: He’s nothing if not an equal-opportunity patronizer. When Tarek’s doting mom, Mouna (played by the excellent Israeli-Arab actress Hiam Abbass), shows up and sees Zainab for the first time, she turns to Walter and exclaims, “She’s very black!” (Even dark-skinned people, you see, have their prejudices.) Then everyone piles onto the Staten Island Ferry for an illustrated tour of relevant New York landmarks — Ellis Island, Ground Zero — just in case we didn’t get the point that this is a movie about liberty under siege. Like every other Moslem character in the film, Mouna practically walks on water, but Abbass, to her credit, brings an emotional gravity to her scenes that does much to counterbalance the movie’s epic banality. Jenkins isn’t so lucky; one of the most resourceful character actors out there, finally given a meaty leading role, he’s been hemmed by McCarthy into a fussy, mannered performance in which everything is externalized — crippling grief in the first part, righteous indignation in the second.
McCarthy unquestionably means well, but he’s made one of those incredibly naive movies (like last fall''s Rendition) that give liberals — Hollywood liberals especially — a bad name, and which do more to regress the sociopolitical discourse than advance it. “I was struck by how little I knew about the region,” McCarthy says in the movie’s press notes, remarking on his trip to the Middle East for a U.S. cultural-outreach program. “With all the news and the headlines and the drama, we can forget that there are human beings on both sides of this. How can I eliminate that a little bit? That always is my call to arms.” A curious last choice of words there, to be sure. As for the rest, is McCarthy really this dense, or does he think he’s the enlightened one here and we are in need of his counsel? I hope it’s the former, but on the basis of The Visitor, I fear it’s the latter.
THE VISITOR | Written and directed by TOM McCARTHY | Produced by MARY JANE SKALSKI and MICHAEL LONDON | Released by Overture Films | ArcLight Hollywood, The Landmark
Music Review: Mudcrutch
http://www.rollingstone.com
By WILL HERMES
(Posted: May 1, 2008)
4 stars (out of 5)
Even a dude with a track record as golden as Tom Petty's needs to reflect on paths not taken. Mudcrutch, Petty's pre-Heartbreakers band, released a single and little else in the mid-Seventies. And that's too bad, since they reunite here for a hot country-rock set that clearly aspires to, and gets within spitting distance of, genre classics like Sweetheart of the Rodeo, The Gilded Palace of Sin and American Beauty. If the Heartbreakers had never happened, this band would have worked out just fine.
Mudcrutch has more jammy, expansive guitar work than any Petty record ever. Yet the leader doesn't play a lick, shelving his Rickenbacker to play bass, as he did back in the day. The twin-guitar front is Heartbreaker Mike Campbell and Tom Leadon, a dazzling player who found less fame than his brother Bernie (Eagles, Flying Burrito Brothers). The pair duel on the hot-pickin' traditional tune "June Apple," run Allman Brothers tandems on the boogie-rock "Bootleg Flyer" and space-waltz Dead-style on the organ-swathed, nine-minute "Crystal River." Heartbreaker keyboard whiz Benmont Tench and journeyman drummer Randall Marsh complete the original lineup; everyone's back, and better for it.
Mudcrutch takes a bow at the Fillmore Theater, 3-16-08
The songs are mythic Americana: With help from his bandmates, Petty creates a vivid cast of road dogs, strippers and junkies that conjures Gram Parsons' Bible-haunted Southerners and Robert Hunter's cosmic Westerners. And his weathered harmonies with Leadon make them flesh; though his voice is frayed, Petty's never sounded more real. Two country-rock covers nearly match their models: The Byrds' "Lover of the Bayou" and "Six Days on the Road," a Burritos fave. If they fall a tad short, that's appropriate: Mudcrutch's ragged enthusiasm is the sound of a hungry gang getting its first taste, just a few decades late.
Charles Krauthammer: A Farewell to Hillary
Washington PostMay 09, 2008
WASHINGTON -- By the time Hillary Clinton figured out how to beat Barack Obama, it was too late. When she began the race in 2007 thinking she was in for a coronation, she claimed the center in order to position herself for the real fight, the general election. She simply assumed the party activists and loony left would fall in behind her.
However, as Obama began to rise, powered by the party's Net-roots activists, she scurried left, particularly with her progressively more explicit renunciation of the Iraq War. It was a fool's errand. She would never be able to erase the stain of her original war vote and she remained unwilling to do an abject John Edwards self-flagellating recantation. It took her weeks even to approximate the apology the left was looking for, and by then it was far too late. The party's activist wing was by then unbreakably betrothed to Obama.
But going left proved disastrous for Clinton. It abolished all significant policy differences between her and Obama, the National Journal's 2007 most liberal senator. On health care, for example, her attempts to turn a minor difference in the definition of universality into a major assault on Obama fell flat. With no important policy differences separating them, the contest became one of character and personality. Matched against this elegant, intellectually nimble, hugely talented newcomer, she had no chance of winning that contest.
She tried everything. Her charges that he was a man of nothing but words came off as a petulant, envious attack on eloquence. The power to inspire may not be sufficient to qualify for the presidency, but it is hardly a liability.
She tried a silly plagiarism charge, then settled for the experience card. In a change election, this was not a brilliant strategy. It forced her to dwell on the 1990s, playing candidate of the past to Obama's candidate of the future. Her studied attempts to embellish her experience led her into a thicket of confabulated Bosnian sniper fire.
It wasn't until late in the fourth quarter that she figured out the seam in Obama's defense. In fact, Obama handed her the playbook with Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Michelle Obama's comments about never having been proud of America and Obama's own guns-and-God condescension toward small-town whites.
The line of attack is clear: not that Obama is himself radical or unpatriotic, just that, as a man of the academic left, he is so out of touch with everyday America that he could move so easily and untroubled in such extreme company and among such alien and elitist sentiments.
Clinton finally understood the way to run against Obama: back to the center -- not ideologically but culturally, not on policy but on attitude. She changed none of her positions on Iraq or Iran or health care or taxes. Instead, she transformed herself into working-class Sally-get-her-gun, off duck hunting with dad.
The gas tax holiday was never an economic or policy issue. It was meant to position her culturally. It heightened her identification with her white working-class constituency. Obama played his part by citing economists in opposing it. That completed her narrative: He had the pointy-headed professors on his side; she had the single moms seeking relief at the pump.
It was an overreach. It not only deflected attention away from the amazing Rev. Wright at the height of his spectacular return. It also never played as the elitist-versus-working-folk issue she had hoped, because it isn't just economists who know the gas tax holiday is nothing but a cheap gimmick. Ordinary folks do too. And the gas tax idea had the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing Hillary's main character liability vis-a-vis Obama: cynical Washington pol willing to do or say anything to win votes versus the idealistic straight-shooter refusing to pander even if it costs him.
The lightness in Hillary's step in the days before Indiana and North Carolina reflected the relief of the veteran politician who, after months of treading water, finally finds the right campaign strategy. But it was far too late. And the gas tax overkill, one final error of modulation, sealed the deal -- for Obama.
There's only one remaining chapter in this fascinating spectacle. Negotiating the terms of Hillary's surrender. After which we will have six months of watching her enthusiastically stumping the country for Obama, denying with utter conviction Republican charges that he is the out of touch, latte-sipping elitist she warned Democrats against so urgently in the last, late leg of her doomed campaign.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Things look brighter for Truckers
By David Menconi
Raleigh News & Observer
May 9, 2008
Drive-By Truckers are, from left, Brad Morgan, Spooner Oldham, Mike Cooley, Patterson Hood, Shonna Tucker and John Neff. (Oldham isn't playing with the band in Carrboro.)
Things are pretty pleasant nowadays for the Drive-By Truckers, who play next week in Carrboro. Back in February, the Truckers hit a chart peak with their latest album, "Brighter Than Creation's Dark" (New West Records), which made it all the way up to No. 37 on the Billboard 200. Interpersonal relations within the band are better than they've been for a while. And the band even took a little time off this spring for drummer Brad Morgan to tend to his new baby.
But you'd never know that from the grim tone of "Brighter Than Creation's Dark," which has the Truckers' usual combination of earthy swamp-rock and desperate characters who can't seem to get out of their own way. No matter how well real life is going, the Truckers always sound downright gothic. Asked when the band might start writing cheery songs, guitarist Patterson Hood laughs.
"I sure would like that," he says over the phone from his home in Athens, Ga. "I do write one every now and then that's kinda happy, and it's not like I'm a gloomy person. But the songs on this last album were written during a pretty dark period. There was a lot of drama, plus the political and national situation, which is certainly something we've all got strong feelings about. So there are plenty of reasons why it's so dark. But to me, it's not without a certain amount of hope and faith. You just have to look for it."
Much of the Truckers' real-life drama in recent years centered on the married couple in the band, guitarist Jason Isbell and bassist Shonna Tucker. They divorced, and Isbell subsequently left for a solo career. Tucker stayed in the Truckers, and the new album has the first songs she's written for the band.
Blessing and curse
In retrospect, you can hear evidence that all was not well in the Truckers' orbit on their last album with Isbell, 2006's aptly titled "A Blessing and a Curse." While it had some solid performances and decent songs, "Curse" was still the first Truckers album that felt like a holding pattern. No one was happy with it, including the band.
"Some people do hate 'Blessing and a Curse,'" Hood says. "I don't, but I can understand why some of our longtime fans turned on it. That whole record was about us trying to find common ground at a time when there was just not much to be had. What's on the record is the closest we could come to agreement to move forward and keep it from flying apart. It was not fun at all. We knew we had serious problems coming to the surface, and we didn't know what to do about it."
Improbably, the Truckers found salvation through Bettye LaVette, the great soul veteran. LaVette's record label commissioned the Truckers to back her up, Booker T. & the M.G.s-style, on last year's "Scene of the Crime." But the collaboration got off to a rough start after LaVette was presented with a compilation of Truckers songs to get a feel for the band.
"Oh, she hated it," Hood says with a laugh. "Every bit. I think her plan was to agree to it and go down there, fire us and bring in session people instead. But it didn't work out that way, which I'm so thankful for because everybody was happy in the end."
"Scene of the Crime" was nominated for the best-contemporary-blues-album Grammy Award and it deserved to win, although it lost to J.J. Cale and Eric Clapton. But the album gave both the Truckers and LaVette a nice shot in the arm, setting things up nicely for "Brighter Than Creation's Dark."
One more song
The Truckers went into the studio last spring and cut 18 songs quickly, almost as rough as demos. The plan was to spend some time listening to those recordings and settle on 10 or 12 songs to go back and record with more care. But while listening to the songs on the touring bus last summer, they decided they already had the record -- almost.
"Crazy as we are, we were all saying, 'It needs one more song,'" Hood says. "We have our weird ways. There were reasons why this one was so long. All 18 songs felt like one big, interlocking piece that captured a mood and a vibe about where we were. And in listening on the bus, we were all in complete agreement: 'This is the record, except we need a real rockin' track three to sum up the loose ends and tie everything together.'"
At the last minute, Hood finally came up with the last piece of the puzzle: "The Righteous Path," which you might call a depiction of quiet desperation and trying to keep contradictions at bay. Except there's nothing quiet about it.
Got a beautiful wife and three towheaded kids.
A couple big secrets I'd kill to keep hid.
I don't know God but I fear his wrath.
I'm trying to stay focused on the righteous path.
They bashed out "The Righteous Path" in a single take and inserted it into the sequence as track number three, and the record was done. Given how rough and raw "Brighter Than Creation's Dark" is, its chart performance is surprising. It has sold a shade over 50,000 copies, a solid figure for this day and age.
"I never thought we'd get as far as we have," Hood says. "I'm ambitious and always wanting to move forward. But at the same time, if we can just maintain basically where we are, that could be OK. I'd like to sell more records, but the business has collapsed to the point where our sales look pretty good. We're still selling pretty much the same as we ever have, but everyone else is so much worse that we're in the top 40!
"It's like what Billy Joel told John Mellencamp when he inducted him into the Hall of Fame," Hood concludes. " 'Congratulations, John, you've outlived the music business.' I never liked Billy Joel, but I'll give him that one."
david.menconi@newsobserver.com or blogs.newsobserver.com/beat or (919) 829-4759.
Info
Who: Drive-By Truckers, Dexateens.
When: Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 p.m.
Where: Cat's Cradle, 300 E. Main St., Carrboro.
Cost: $20 advance, $22 day of show
Details: 967-9053 or catscradle.com.
Raleigh News & Observer
May 9, 2008
Drive-By Truckers are, from left, Brad Morgan, Spooner Oldham, Mike Cooley, Patterson Hood, Shonna Tucker and John Neff. (Oldham isn't playing with the band in Carrboro.)
Things are pretty pleasant nowadays for the Drive-By Truckers, who play next week in Carrboro. Back in February, the Truckers hit a chart peak with their latest album, "Brighter Than Creation's Dark" (New West Records), which made it all the way up to No. 37 on the Billboard 200. Interpersonal relations within the band are better than they've been for a while. And the band even took a little time off this spring for drummer Brad Morgan to tend to his new baby.
But you'd never know that from the grim tone of "Brighter Than Creation's Dark," which has the Truckers' usual combination of earthy swamp-rock and desperate characters who can't seem to get out of their own way. No matter how well real life is going, the Truckers always sound downright gothic. Asked when the band might start writing cheery songs, guitarist Patterson Hood laughs.
"I sure would like that," he says over the phone from his home in Athens, Ga. "I do write one every now and then that's kinda happy, and it's not like I'm a gloomy person. But the songs on this last album were written during a pretty dark period. There was a lot of drama, plus the political and national situation, which is certainly something we've all got strong feelings about. So there are plenty of reasons why it's so dark. But to me, it's not without a certain amount of hope and faith. You just have to look for it."
Much of the Truckers' real-life drama in recent years centered on the married couple in the band, guitarist Jason Isbell and bassist Shonna Tucker. They divorced, and Isbell subsequently left for a solo career. Tucker stayed in the Truckers, and the new album has the first songs she's written for the band.
Blessing and curse
In retrospect, you can hear evidence that all was not well in the Truckers' orbit on their last album with Isbell, 2006's aptly titled "A Blessing and a Curse." While it had some solid performances and decent songs, "Curse" was still the first Truckers album that felt like a holding pattern. No one was happy with it, including the band.
"Some people do hate 'Blessing and a Curse,'" Hood says. "I don't, but I can understand why some of our longtime fans turned on it. That whole record was about us trying to find common ground at a time when there was just not much to be had. What's on the record is the closest we could come to agreement to move forward and keep it from flying apart. It was not fun at all. We knew we had serious problems coming to the surface, and we didn't know what to do about it."
Improbably, the Truckers found salvation through Bettye LaVette, the great soul veteran. LaVette's record label commissioned the Truckers to back her up, Booker T. & the M.G.s-style, on last year's "Scene of the Crime." But the collaboration got off to a rough start after LaVette was presented with a compilation of Truckers songs to get a feel for the band.
"Oh, she hated it," Hood says with a laugh. "Every bit. I think her plan was to agree to it and go down there, fire us and bring in session people instead. But it didn't work out that way, which I'm so thankful for because everybody was happy in the end."
"Scene of the Crime" was nominated for the best-contemporary-blues-album Grammy Award and it deserved to win, although it lost to J.J. Cale and Eric Clapton. But the album gave both the Truckers and LaVette a nice shot in the arm, setting things up nicely for "Brighter Than Creation's Dark."
One more song
The Truckers went into the studio last spring and cut 18 songs quickly, almost as rough as demos. The plan was to spend some time listening to those recordings and settle on 10 or 12 songs to go back and record with more care. But while listening to the songs on the touring bus last summer, they decided they already had the record -- almost.
"Crazy as we are, we were all saying, 'It needs one more song,'" Hood says. "We have our weird ways. There were reasons why this one was so long. All 18 songs felt like one big, interlocking piece that captured a mood and a vibe about where we were. And in listening on the bus, we were all in complete agreement: 'This is the record, except we need a real rockin' track three to sum up the loose ends and tie everything together.'"
At the last minute, Hood finally came up with the last piece of the puzzle: "The Righteous Path," which you might call a depiction of quiet desperation and trying to keep contradictions at bay. Except there's nothing quiet about it.
Got a beautiful wife and three towheaded kids.
A couple big secrets I'd kill to keep hid.
I don't know God but I fear his wrath.
I'm trying to stay focused on the righteous path.
They bashed out "The Righteous Path" in a single take and inserted it into the sequence as track number three, and the record was done. Given how rough and raw "Brighter Than Creation's Dark" is, its chart performance is surprising. It has sold a shade over 50,000 copies, a solid figure for this day and age.
"I never thought we'd get as far as we have," Hood says. "I'm ambitious and always wanting to move forward. But at the same time, if we can just maintain basically where we are, that could be OK. I'd like to sell more records, but the business has collapsed to the point where our sales look pretty good. We're still selling pretty much the same as we ever have, but everyone else is so much worse that we're in the top 40!
"It's like what Billy Joel told John Mellencamp when he inducted him into the Hall of Fame," Hood concludes. " 'Congratulations, John, you've outlived the music business.' I never liked Billy Joel, but I'll give him that one."
david.menconi@newsobserver.com or blogs.newsobserver.com/beat or (919) 829-4759.
Info
Who: Drive-By Truckers, Dexateens.
When: Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 p.m.
Where: Cat's Cradle, 300 E. Main St., Carrboro.
Cost: $20 advance, $22 day of show
Details: 967-9053 or catscradle.com.
Jonah Goldberg: Take That, Big Oil!
The windfall profits tax slap.
http://www.nationalreview.com
May 09, 2008, 4:00 a.m.
Imagine this. You’ve built the better mousetrap. (Because lasers and pneumatic tubes are cool, let’s imagine it uses them.) You’ve persevered through years of trial and error in your garage, enduring sleepless nights, the mockery of friends, the eye-rolling of family, and the non-lethal laser wounds to the family cat. But it was all worth it. You take your invention and, with your last few pennies, manage to bring it to market. It’s a smash hit. It starts flying off shelves. You earn back the investment in raw materials and maybe something close to compensation for your time. Now you’re ready for the big payoff. There’s just one thing left to do: make an appointment with the regional Reasonable Profits Board to find out how much of your windfall is reasonable for you to keep.
Picked by Congress nominally for their expertise in analyzing the mousetrap industry but actually for their vampiric lust for entrepreneurial blood, members of the Reasonable Profits Board will determine how much of your already-taxed profits cross the “rational threshold.”
Now that’s the American dream!
What this would mean for Mousetrap 2.0 may not be a big concern for members of the board, but odds are you’ll start to feel like you’re working for them.
Replace “Mousetrap” with “oil,” and you have a good idea of how some in Congress want to bring the oil industry to heel. Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa, is offering his “Consumer Reasonable Energy Price Protection Act,” which would make oil companies supplicants of a Reasonable Profits Board. Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid, proposed their 25 percent windfall profits tax this week, while Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Alpha Centauri, has been calling for a 100 percent windfall profits tax rate for some time. Hillary Clinton is barnstorming the country talking about a windfall profits tax that will not only stick it to the corporate fat cats but will “pay” for a gas tax holiday.
“Windfall,” of course, is just another word for “undeserved,” which is why windfall profits are defined as the profits earned by someone other than you. If we were honest with the people having their profits yanked away, we’d call it the “well-earned and richly deserved profits tax.”
Now hold on a second, cry the unreasonable-profit confiscators. That analogy is bogus. ExxonMobil isn’t some garage-workshop Horatio Alger. ExxonMobil is a cold and impersonal multinational corporation!
To which I say: Exactly!
So why are Democrats keen on treating oil companies like they’re comic-book villains and the windfall profits tax is just a well-deserved enema that will teach Big Oil to pay its fair share?
In 1977, when Jimmy Carter proposed the first windfall profits tax, he said through those enormous teeth, we “will ask private companies to sacrifice just as private citizens do.” But corporations aren’t normal citizens.
If you tell oil companies that they won’t be able to keep their profits past a certain point, you know what they’ll do? They’ll make money right up until that point and then they’ll stop. Unlike the guy building the better mousetrap, oil companies aren’t in it for the glory, they’re in it for the money. No oilman will go home hungry and wake up like Scrooge on Christmas morning, having repented because of a windfall profits tax.
Now, there will be plenty of punishment doled out, more than at a Belgian S&M club during recess at the European Parliament. But the crack of the windfall whip will land in unintended places. “Corporate sacrifice” means sacrificing share value, jobs and, most of all, reinvestment.
So people dependent on pension funds — union workers, government employees and the like — will be asked to sacrifice some of their retirement income. Jobs dependent on oil and gas extraction would be cut. And, as Schumer explains, money that would otherwise be invested in exploration and improved efficiency will instead be diverted to “alternative” energies that politicians (like Schumer) think are better investments.
No wonder Schumer’s so cocky, given the boffo success of Washington’s “investment” in ethanol, which creates more greenhouse gases than oil does, contributes to deforestation, and is fueling the starvation of millions around the globe.
Meanwhile, less investment in exploration and efficiency will cause pump prices to rise (less supply = higher prices) and, as in the 1980s, cause us to rely on more foreign oil.
But, by all means, let’s do it, because Big Oil is bad and someone — or everyone — has to pay for it.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
http://www.nationalreview.com
May 09, 2008, 4:00 a.m.
Imagine this. You’ve built the better mousetrap. (Because lasers and pneumatic tubes are cool, let’s imagine it uses them.) You’ve persevered through years of trial and error in your garage, enduring sleepless nights, the mockery of friends, the eye-rolling of family, and the non-lethal laser wounds to the family cat. But it was all worth it. You take your invention and, with your last few pennies, manage to bring it to market. It’s a smash hit. It starts flying off shelves. You earn back the investment in raw materials and maybe something close to compensation for your time. Now you’re ready for the big payoff. There’s just one thing left to do: make an appointment with the regional Reasonable Profits Board to find out how much of your windfall is reasonable for you to keep.Picked by Congress nominally for their expertise in analyzing the mousetrap industry but actually for their vampiric lust for entrepreneurial blood, members of the Reasonable Profits Board will determine how much of your already-taxed profits cross the “rational threshold.”
Now that’s the American dream!
What this would mean for Mousetrap 2.0 may not be a big concern for members of the board, but odds are you’ll start to feel like you’re working for them.
Replace “Mousetrap” with “oil,” and you have a good idea of how some in Congress want to bring the oil industry to heel. Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa, is offering his “Consumer Reasonable Energy Price Protection Act,” which would make oil companies supplicants of a Reasonable Profits Board. Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid, proposed their 25 percent windfall profits tax this week, while Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Alpha Centauri, has been calling for a 100 percent windfall profits tax rate for some time. Hillary Clinton is barnstorming the country talking about a windfall profits tax that will not only stick it to the corporate fat cats but will “pay” for a gas tax holiday.
“Windfall,” of course, is just another word for “undeserved,” which is why windfall profits are defined as the profits earned by someone other than you. If we were honest with the people having their profits yanked away, we’d call it the “well-earned and richly deserved profits tax.”
Now hold on a second, cry the unreasonable-profit confiscators. That analogy is bogus. ExxonMobil isn’t some garage-workshop Horatio Alger. ExxonMobil is a cold and impersonal multinational corporation!
To which I say: Exactly!
So why are Democrats keen on treating oil companies like they’re comic-book villains and the windfall profits tax is just a well-deserved enema that will teach Big Oil to pay its fair share?
In 1977, when Jimmy Carter proposed the first windfall profits tax, he said through those enormous teeth, we “will ask private companies to sacrifice just as private citizens do.” But corporations aren’t normal citizens.
If you tell oil companies that they won’t be able to keep their profits past a certain point, you know what they’ll do? They’ll make money right up until that point and then they’ll stop. Unlike the guy building the better mousetrap, oil companies aren’t in it for the glory, they’re in it for the money. No oilman will go home hungry and wake up like Scrooge on Christmas morning, having repented because of a windfall profits tax.
Now, there will be plenty of punishment doled out, more than at a Belgian S&M club during recess at the European Parliament. But the crack of the windfall whip will land in unintended places. “Corporate sacrifice” means sacrificing share value, jobs and, most of all, reinvestment.
So people dependent on pension funds — union workers, government employees and the like — will be asked to sacrifice some of their retirement income. Jobs dependent on oil and gas extraction would be cut. And, as Schumer explains, money that would otherwise be invested in exploration and improved efficiency will instead be diverted to “alternative” energies that politicians (like Schumer) think are better investments.
No wonder Schumer’s so cocky, given the boffo success of Washington’s “investment” in ethanol, which creates more greenhouse gases than oil does, contributes to deforestation, and is fueling the starvation of millions around the globe.
Meanwhile, less investment in exploration and efficiency will cause pump prices to rise (less supply = higher prices) and, as in the 1980s, cause us to rely on more foreign oil.
But, by all means, let’s do it, because Big Oil is bad and someone — or everyone — has to pay for it.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
It's Islamic Jihad, Not Extremism, Uncle Sam
[Check out the pic...I guess "Islamic Jihad" didn't get the memo...typical jihadis...er..extremists...always acting as if the rules don't apply to them. - jtf]
By Diana West
http://www.townhall.com
Thursday, May 8, 2008
A few years ago, Harvard psychiatric instructor Kenneth Levin wrote "The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege." In this illuminating book, Levin examines the Israeli experience of concessionary negotiations with a "peace partner" openly dedicated to Israel's destruction. He also examines the historical Jewish Diaspora experience in which Jewish populations typically identified with their tormentors and even echoed their antisemitism.
Such interactions are driven by a permanent condition of siege mentality, Levin explains, and clearly manifest two kinds of delusional thinking.
First, there is the fantasy about the intentions of the aggressor (Arab Muslim or European Christian); then, there is the fantasy about changing the aggressor's intentions. Such thinking, Levin says, is common to victims of chronic abuse, particularly children. They fool themselves into thinking that they, the victims, control the abuser by linking the abuse they suffer to their own behavior.
In other words, they believe they cause their own abuse. This mind game, Levin says, actually gives victims a sense of control over situations beyond their control (an abusive parent, for instance). This allows them to avoid feelings of helplessness and despair.
And so the besieged victim pretends: Daddy doesn't really want to hurt me; if I'm a better girl, he'll stop. Israel pretends: Muslims don't really want to destroy our state, and so we'll give them land for peace. Jews in pre-Nazi Europe pretended: The anti-Semites are really right; we deserve a pogrom. Intriguingly, Levin writes:
"But the book's themes have a still broader relevance. Even ostensibly powerful and secure populations, under conditions that entail ongoing threat and vulnerability, can manifest similar trends."
I got a new one for the doctor: a trend of delusion so enormous as to beg for immediate hospitalization and a transfer of power of attorney. Problem is, the patient here is the United States government (USG), which now says: If we just stop talking about jihad, Muslims will neither become jihadis nor sympathize with them.
Such is the message of a crazy new government guide called "Words that Work and Words that Don't" urging federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, to eliminate all references to Islam when discussing, well, Islamic terrorism.
Islamic Jihad operatives praying in Gaza
Not only does that mean no more talk of "Islam," it also means no more talk of "jihad." ("Extremism" is the new "jihad.") And forget about the "caliphate." (Try "global totalitarian state.") Even such politically correct terms as "Islamist" and "Islamofascist," which take the traditional teachings of Islam off the hook, are now verboten. And so, more curiously, is the term "Muslim moderate." Says the government: "The term `moderate' has become offensive to many Muslims, who believe that it refers to individuals whom the USG prefers to deal with, and who are only marginally religious."
So "moderates" don't want to look like patsies next to "jihadists," and the USG doesn't want to be insensitive to their needs. Sounds like a rest cure for Uncle Sam is long overdue.
Of course, the no-Islam (no-"moderate") lexicon itself -- which reads like disinformation designed to confuse the American public -- is just scratching the delusional surface. Animating the directive, written with considerable input from unidentified American Muslim "experts," is the delusional belief that what we say (or don't say) has transformative power over Muslim attitudes and behaviors regarding Islamic terrorism, the Islamic caliphate, the advance of Islamic law (Sharia) and the so-called war on (Islamic) terror -- rebranded here, no kidding, as "A Global Struggle for Security and Progress." ("Liberty," Uncle Sam tells us, was "rejected" as "a buzzword for American hegemony.")
The basic idea is to shut the United States up. Or, more diplomatically: "The terminology ... should avoid helping the terrorists by inflating the religious bases and glamorous appeal of their ideology." (Glamorous?) For example, "When we respond loudly (to Osama bin Laden and other jihadists), we raise their prestige in the Muslim world."
"We" raise their prestige? Come on. If a human being thinks turning passenger jets into WMDs is an abomination, nothing anyone says can raise the perpetrators' "prestige." Could our government rationally think otherwise?
Alas, reason escapes the Oslo Syndrome sufferer.
This may explain why Uncle Sam is now actually assuming responsibility for jihad itself: "Our terminology must be properly calibrated to diminish the recruitment efforts of extremists (read: jihadists) who argue the West is at war with Islam."
News flash for Uncle Sam: Islam, in myriad forms, is at war with the West. And even if we never say the words, we can still darn well lose.
- Diana West is a contributing columnist for Townhall.com and author of the new book, The Death of the Grown-up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.
By Diana West
http://www.townhall.com
Thursday, May 8, 2008
A few years ago, Harvard psychiatric instructor Kenneth Levin wrote "The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege." In this illuminating book, Levin examines the Israeli experience of concessionary negotiations with a "peace partner" openly dedicated to Israel's destruction. He also examines the historical Jewish Diaspora experience in which Jewish populations typically identified with their tormentors and even echoed their antisemitism.
Such interactions are driven by a permanent condition of siege mentality, Levin explains, and clearly manifest two kinds of delusional thinking.
First, there is the fantasy about the intentions of the aggressor (Arab Muslim or European Christian); then, there is the fantasy about changing the aggressor's intentions. Such thinking, Levin says, is common to victims of chronic abuse, particularly children. They fool themselves into thinking that they, the victims, control the abuser by linking the abuse they suffer to their own behavior.
In other words, they believe they cause their own abuse. This mind game, Levin says, actually gives victims a sense of control over situations beyond their control (an abusive parent, for instance). This allows them to avoid feelings of helplessness and despair.
And so the besieged victim pretends: Daddy doesn't really want to hurt me; if I'm a better girl, he'll stop. Israel pretends: Muslims don't really want to destroy our state, and so we'll give them land for peace. Jews in pre-Nazi Europe pretended: The anti-Semites are really right; we deserve a pogrom. Intriguingly, Levin writes:
"But the book's themes have a still broader relevance. Even ostensibly powerful and secure populations, under conditions that entail ongoing threat and vulnerability, can manifest similar trends."
I got a new one for the doctor: a trend of delusion so enormous as to beg for immediate hospitalization and a transfer of power of attorney. Problem is, the patient here is the United States government (USG), which now says: If we just stop talking about jihad, Muslims will neither become jihadis nor sympathize with them.
Such is the message of a crazy new government guide called "Words that Work and Words that Don't" urging federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, to eliminate all references to Islam when discussing, well, Islamic terrorism.
Islamic Jihad operatives praying in Gaza
Not only does that mean no more talk of "Islam," it also means no more talk of "jihad." ("Extremism" is the new "jihad.") And forget about the "caliphate." (Try "global totalitarian state.") Even such politically correct terms as "Islamist" and "Islamofascist," which take the traditional teachings of Islam off the hook, are now verboten. And so, more curiously, is the term "Muslim moderate." Says the government: "The term `moderate' has become offensive to many Muslims, who believe that it refers to individuals whom the USG prefers to deal with, and who are only marginally religious."
So "moderates" don't want to look like patsies next to "jihadists," and the USG doesn't want to be insensitive to their needs. Sounds like a rest cure for Uncle Sam is long overdue.
Of course, the no-Islam (no-"moderate") lexicon itself -- which reads like disinformation designed to confuse the American public -- is just scratching the delusional surface. Animating the directive, written with considerable input from unidentified American Muslim "experts," is the delusional belief that what we say (or don't say) has transformative power over Muslim attitudes and behaviors regarding Islamic terrorism, the Islamic caliphate, the advance of Islamic law (Sharia) and the so-called war on (Islamic) terror -- rebranded here, no kidding, as "A Global Struggle for Security and Progress." ("Liberty," Uncle Sam tells us, was "rejected" as "a buzzword for American hegemony.")
The basic idea is to shut the United States up. Or, more diplomatically: "The terminology ... should avoid helping the terrorists by inflating the religious bases and glamorous appeal of their ideology." (Glamorous?) For example, "When we respond loudly (to Osama bin Laden and other jihadists), we raise their prestige in the Muslim world."
"We" raise their prestige? Come on. If a human being thinks turning passenger jets into WMDs is an abomination, nothing anyone says can raise the perpetrators' "prestige." Could our government rationally think otherwise?
Alas, reason escapes the Oslo Syndrome sufferer.
This may explain why Uncle Sam is now actually assuming responsibility for jihad itself: "Our terminology must be properly calibrated to diminish the recruitment efforts of extremists (read: jihadists) who argue the West is at war with Islam."
News flash for Uncle Sam: Islam, in myriad forms, is at war with the West. And even if we never say the words, we can still darn well lose.
- Diana West is a contributing columnist for Townhall.com and author of the new book, The Death of the Grown-up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.
ANN COULTER: ONE DOWN, TWO TO GO
http://www.anncoulter.comMay 7, 2008
Well, it looks like it's the end of the road for Hillary. Time for her to pack up her pantsuits and go back to -- wherever it is she's pretending to be living these days. Now we just have to get rid of the other two. Perhaps if I endorse Obama ...
This week, Bill Clinton lost his second presidential election for a protege.
Ronald Reagan was so popular, he not only won a 49-state landslide re-election for himself, but he also won a symbolic third term for his boob of a vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush (who immediately blew it by breaking his own "no new taxes" pledge).
By contrast, in addition to not being able to get half the country to vote for him in two tries, Clinton's connection to any other presidential candidate spells utter doom. Both his vice president and his wife have been defeated in elections they should have won, but lost because of their unfortunate association with him. The country has spoken. It wants to be rid of the Clintons.
The reason two elections in recent history -- the 2000 presidential election and the 2008 Democratic primary -- were razor-close is that in both cases there was some strange, foreboding, otherworldly force dragging down the presumptive winner.
Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, lost an election that should have been his in a walk. In fact, he was the first incumbent president or vice president in 100 years to lose an election in peacetime with a good economy. Mind you, that was before we even knew that Gore was a deranged conspiracy theorist who believes the Earth is in serious peril from cow flatulence.
What was the mystery factor to explain such a historic loss?
The media's pollsters may have lied to the public about Clinton's vaunted popularity, but Gore's pollsters got paid not to lie to him. And they told Gore the truth: Clinton was killing him.
After the election, Gore pollster -- and erstwhile Clinton pollster -- Stanley Greenberg told Vanity Fair magazine that if Clinton had helped, he would have "had Bill Clinton carry Al Gore around on his back." (This was when one man could still actually carry Al Gore on his back.) But research showed that whenever Clinton was mentioned, Gore's numbers went down faster than -- oh, never mind.
Steve Rosenthal, political director of the AFL-CIO, also blamed Clinton for Gore's loss, saying polls showed that voters who cared about character voted for Bush. (I know, I know. Are there actually people who care about character and vote Democrat? Yes, apparently they exist.)
Poor Gore did everything he could to distance himself from Clinton, publicly criticizing Clinton's sexual exploits with an intern, refusing to allow Clinton to campaign with him and taking as his vice president Joe Lieberman -- the first Democratic senator to scathingly denounce Clinton's antics with Lewinsky from the Senate floor.
But voters couldn't forget Gore's boss, the purple-faced lecher.
As election predictors go, the Dow Jones has been remarkably accurate. If the Dow goes up from the end of July to the end of October, the incumbent president or vice president wins; if it goes down, the incumbent loses. It has been wrong only four times since the Dow was created in 1896.
Thus, on Nov. 1, 2000, an article in The New York Times began: "The verdict of the Dow Jones industrial average is in, and it says Al Gore is headed for the White House."
And yet Gore lost. It was only the third time in more than a century that the Dow went up in the three months before the election and the incumbent lost. The two other times were: (1) Herbert Hoover in the middle of the Great Depression, and (2) Hubert Humphrey in the middle of the Vietnam War. (The only time the Dow went down and the incumbent won anyway was for popular Dwight Eisenhower.)
So we have documented proof: Americans rank Bill Clinton with national misfortunes on the order of the Great Depression and the Vietnam War. (This, of course, is an overreaction: The Great Depression wasn't that bad.)
And now Bill Clinton has wrecked Hillary's campaign, too. He's like the creepy guy who graduated last year but still hangs around the high school cafeteria chatting up sophomores.
In a Time magazine poll taken earlier this year, more than twice as many voters said Bill Clinton's involvement in Hillary's campaign made them less likely to vote for her as said they were more likely to vote for her. (Some even said that "having Bill Clinton around makes me less likely to vote for What's-Her-Name." One-third of the respondents were upset Bill didn't call the next day, like he promised.)
So before remembering that we are now left with two dangerous choices for president -- a young liberal who is friendly with terrorists or an old liberal who is friendly with Teddy Kennedy -- take a moment to revel in the fact that our long national nightmare is over. It turns out getting rid of the Clintons was the change we've been waiting for.
COPYRIGHT 2008 ANN COULTER
One of those real special nights
Posted by Stan Goldstein
http://blog.nj.com
Newark Star Ledger
May 08, 2008 1:43AM
Bruce Springsteen waves as he sings at the Count Basie Theatre Wednesday, May 7, 2008, in Red Bank, N.J., as he and the E Street Band play a benefit concert for the renovation of the Count Basie Theatre.
(AP Photo/Mel Evans)
Wednesday night's benefit show for the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, was one of those real special Bruce Springsteen performances, one that will go down in the history books as a great, great show.
For the first time, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed a whole album from start to finish, in the order the songs appear on the album.
But it wasn't just one album, it was two. Fans were treated to the entire "Darkness on the Edge of Town" album, then the entire "Born To Run" album. To cap off the night, Bruce played four fun, fun encores.
Before the show started, Patti Scialfa came out to talk to the audience. She said she goes back more than 25 years with the Count Basie Theatre. She told the crowd that she grew up in Deal, just north of Asbury Park and the movie theater she remembers was the Mayfair Theater in Asbury Park. "It was so beautiful. It has this arched ceiling with the stars and the sky. And they had little love seats in the balcony that everyone got their first kiss in. Not me though!," said Scialfa.
She said how it was so sad when the tore down the Mayfair in the early 1970s and she wants to make sure what happened to the Mayfair Theater doesn't happen to the Count Basie.
Patti Scialfa claps her hands as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play a benefit concert for the renovation of the Count Basie Theatre Wednesday, May 7, 2008 in Red Bank, N.J.
(AP Photo/Mel Evans)
Scialfa then introduced Brian Williams of NBC News. Williams, a native of Middletown and a graduate of Mater Dei High School, said he goes way back with the Jersey Shore, to the Stone Pony and to the Tradewinds. Said he spent many a night seeing the band Fresh and hitting those places after hearing rumors that Bruce might show up and play.
He talked up Jack's Music Shoppe in Red Bank, as "they sold more rolling papers than records in the 1970s."
Williams said: "I've been all over the world and there's no better place to be than right here."
Williams then introduced Bruce who came on at 8:39 p.m.
"Good evening" Bruce said to the packed house. He said: "We're going to do something different tonight. We're going to take the Darkness and Born To Run albums and play them in sequence for you.
"So that should be interesting."
Bruce said he was going to play the Darkness album first, so "we don't send you home suicidal."
He talked about writing the Darkness album. How in 1977 he was livining in a house on farm in Holmdel and it was a tough period in his life. "
When the band broke into "Badlands" the first song from the album, things were a bit messed up and Bruce said: "We ******* it up already."
Bruce Springsteen looks on as Clarence Clemons plays the saxophone as Springsteen and the E Street Band play a benefit concert for the renovation of the Count Basie Theatre Wednesday, May 7, 2008 in Red Bank, N.J.
(AP Photo/Mel Evans)
The setlist:
1. Badlands
2. Adam Raised A Cain
3. Something In The Night
4. Candy's Room
5. Racing In The Street
6. The Promised Land
7. Factory
8. Streets Of Fire
9. Prove It All Night
10. Darkness On The Edge Of Town
They took a 15-minute break and came back to play the "Born To Run" album.
Bruce talked about how it took him six months to write and record the song "Born To Run" and another six months to finish the rest of the album. He said it was make or break time for the band, as they were in danger of being dropped from Columbia Records.
Bruce Springsteen sings as he and the E Street Band play a benefit concert for the renovation of the Count Basie Theatre Wednesday, May 7, 2008 in Red Bank, N.J.
(AP Photo/Mel Evans)
11. Thunder Road
12. Tenth Ave Freezeout
They brought out a four-pience horn section for the song. Mark Pender, La Bamba, Jerry Vivino and Ed Manion played.
Bruce jumped into the crowd during the song. He jumped off the front of the stage in front of Little Steven, then walked over, past N.J. Gov. Jon Corzine, to the left side and jumped up on seats. As the crowd swarmed him, they lifted him up a bit. It was like a 1976 show again!
13. Night
14. Backstreets
15. Born To Run
16. She's The One
17. Meeting Across The River
Beautiful trumpet on this song by Mark Pender.
18. Jungleland
Encores:
19. So Young And In Love
Bruce had a lot of fun in this. He told the band to remind him that there was an instrumental part in there some where.
20 Kitty's Back
All the horn players did solos.
21. Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
22. Raise Your Hand
Show ended at 11:14 p.m.
Bruce also jumped up on Roy Bittan's piano several times and did some dancing up there.
Bruce didn't talk between songs, he just right into one song after another.
New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine was sitting in the front row, just off center. He left during the start of the encores.
Great show, great night. One of my top Bruce Springsteen shows of all time.
To see Bruce in a 1,500-seat theater at this stage of his career is phenomenal.
A very special night.
A trip down Memory Lane for Springsteen, E Street Band
By Kelly-Jane Cotter
Asbury Park Press
May 8, 2008
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band so thoroughly rocked Count Basie Theatre Wednesday night that it seemed as if the noble old venue might crumble.
The set list was a music geek's dream as Springsteen brought to life his classic 1978 album "Darkness On The Edge of Town" in sequence, track by track.
Springsteen said he had been looking at photos from the band's six-night engagement at the Red Bank theater in 1976 when it was known as the Monmouth Arts Center. He was then inspired to do "something different for this show."
The concert, the brainchild of E Street Band guitarist and Springsteen's wife, Patti Scialfa, was a benefit show for the Red Bank landmark. Scialfa is honorary chairwoman of the theater's capital campaign.
Fans paid at least $1,000 per ticket in an online auction. Proceeds from ticket sales and other donations raised $3 million for renovations to the theater and other programs.
A donation also paid for 37 wounded veterans to be bused to the concert from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The veterans received a standing ovation almost as lengthy as the one given the band.
The musicians put their hearts into every song, leading to many memorable moments, such as guitarist Nils Lofgren spinning in circles while playing "Prove It All Night."
Roy Bittan's elegant work on the piano also stood out, especially during "Racing In The Street" and "The Promised Land," as did drummer Max Weinberg's tension-filled opening on "Candy's Room."
Members of the Max Weinberg 7 provided brass instrumentation.
The evening also was historic because it was the band's first local performance since the April death of keyboardist Danny Federici.
The band currently is touring to promote the "Magic" album.
Patti Scialfa talks about her fondness for the the Count Basie Theatre before Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play a benefit concert for the renovation of the Count Basie Theatre Wednesday, May 7, 2008 in Red Bank, N.J.
(AP Photo/Mel Evans)
Corzine in audience
After an uncharacteristic 10-minute intermission, the band returned and played every track on its 1975 album "Born To Run," the crowd favorite "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)," and more.
That must have pleased Gov. Corzine, who attended the show.
"This is rock 'n' roll history at its best, right here" Corzine said before the concert.
He added, "I tend to like the earlier stuff, though the Sept. 11 album — "The Rising" — really affected me, too."
Also in attendance was NBC News anchor and Middletown native Brian Williams, who introduced the band and reminisced on stage about growing up in the days of the Red Bank mini-mall and "when Jack's sold more rolling papers than records."
The set for the first half of the show was "Badlands," "Adam Raised A Cain," "Something In The Night," "Candy's Room," "Racing In The Street," "The Promised Land," "Factory," "Streets Of Fire," "Prove It All Night" and "Darkness On The Edge Of Town."
The set for the second half was "Thunder Road," "Tenth Avenue Freeze-out," "Night," "Backstreets," "Born To Run," "She's The One," "Meeting Across The River," "Jungleland" "So Young And In Love," "Kitty's Back," "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" and "Raise Your Hand."
http://blog.nj.com
Newark Star Ledger
May 08, 2008 1:43AM
Bruce Springsteen waves as he sings at the Count Basie Theatre Wednesday, May 7, 2008, in Red Bank, N.J., as he and the E Street Band play a benefit concert for the renovation of the Count Basie Theatre.
(AP Photo/Mel Evans)
Wednesday night's benefit show for the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, was one of those real special Bruce Springsteen performances, one that will go down in the history books as a great, great show.
For the first time, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed a whole album from start to finish, in the order the songs appear on the album.
But it wasn't just one album, it was two. Fans were treated to the entire "Darkness on the Edge of Town" album, then the entire "Born To Run" album. To cap off the night, Bruce played four fun, fun encores.
Before the show started, Patti Scialfa came out to talk to the audience. She said she goes back more than 25 years with the Count Basie Theatre. She told the crowd that she grew up in Deal, just north of Asbury Park and the movie theater she remembers was the Mayfair Theater in Asbury Park. "It was so beautiful. It has this arched ceiling with the stars and the sky. And they had little love seats in the balcony that everyone got their first kiss in. Not me though!," said Scialfa.
She said how it was so sad when the tore down the Mayfair in the early 1970s and she wants to make sure what happened to the Mayfair Theater doesn't happen to the Count Basie.
Patti Scialfa claps her hands as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play a benefit concert for the renovation of the Count Basie Theatre Wednesday, May 7, 2008 in Red Bank, N.J.
(AP Photo/Mel Evans)
Scialfa then introduced Brian Williams of NBC News. Williams, a native of Middletown and a graduate of Mater Dei High School, said he goes way back with the Jersey Shore, to the Stone Pony and to the Tradewinds. Said he spent many a night seeing the band Fresh and hitting those places after hearing rumors that Bruce might show up and play.
He talked up Jack's Music Shoppe in Red Bank, as "they sold more rolling papers than records in the 1970s."
Williams said: "I've been all over the world and there's no better place to be than right here."
Williams then introduced Bruce who came on at 8:39 p.m.
"Good evening" Bruce said to the packed house. He said: "We're going to do something different tonight. We're going to take the Darkness and Born To Run albums and play them in sequence for you.
"So that should be interesting."
Bruce said he was going to play the Darkness album first, so "we don't send you home suicidal."
He talked about writing the Darkness album. How in 1977 he was livining in a house on farm in Holmdel and it was a tough period in his life. "
When the band broke into "Badlands" the first song from the album, things were a bit messed up and Bruce said: "We ******* it up already."
Bruce Springsteen looks on as Clarence Clemons plays the saxophone as Springsteen and the E Street Band play a benefit concert for the renovation of the Count Basie Theatre Wednesday, May 7, 2008 in Red Bank, N.J.
(AP Photo/Mel Evans)
The setlist:
1. Badlands
2. Adam Raised A Cain
3. Something In The Night
4. Candy's Room
5. Racing In The Street
6. The Promised Land
7. Factory
8. Streets Of Fire
9. Prove It All Night
10. Darkness On The Edge Of Town
They took a 15-minute break and came back to play the "Born To Run" album.
Bruce talked about how it took him six months to write and record the song "Born To Run" and another six months to finish the rest of the album. He said it was make or break time for the band, as they were in danger of being dropped from Columbia Records.
Bruce Springsteen sings as he and the E Street Band play a benefit concert for the renovation of the Count Basie Theatre Wednesday, May 7, 2008 in Red Bank, N.J.
(AP Photo/Mel Evans)
11. Thunder Road
12. Tenth Ave Freezeout
They brought out a four-pience horn section for the song. Mark Pender, La Bamba, Jerry Vivino and Ed Manion played.
Bruce jumped into the crowd during the song. He jumped off the front of the stage in front of Little Steven, then walked over, past N.J. Gov. Jon Corzine, to the left side and jumped up on seats. As the crowd swarmed him, they lifted him up a bit. It was like a 1976 show again!
13. Night
14. Backstreets
15. Born To Run
16. She's The One
17. Meeting Across The River
Beautiful trumpet on this song by Mark Pender.
18. Jungleland
Encores:
19. So Young And In Love
Bruce had a lot of fun in this. He told the band to remind him that there was an instrumental part in there some where.
20 Kitty's Back
All the horn players did solos.
21. Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
22. Raise Your Hand
Show ended at 11:14 p.m.
Bruce also jumped up on Roy Bittan's piano several times and did some dancing up there.
Bruce didn't talk between songs, he just right into one song after another.
New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine was sitting in the front row, just off center. He left during the start of the encores.
Great show, great night. One of my top Bruce Springsteen shows of all time.
To see Bruce in a 1,500-seat theater at this stage of his career is phenomenal.
A very special night.
A trip down Memory Lane for Springsteen, E Street Band
By Kelly-Jane Cotter
Asbury Park Press
May 8, 2008
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band so thoroughly rocked Count Basie Theatre Wednesday night that it seemed as if the noble old venue might crumble.
The set list was a music geek's dream as Springsteen brought to life his classic 1978 album "Darkness On The Edge of Town" in sequence, track by track.
Springsteen said he had been looking at photos from the band's six-night engagement at the Red Bank theater in 1976 when it was known as the Monmouth Arts Center. He was then inspired to do "something different for this show."
The concert, the brainchild of E Street Band guitarist and Springsteen's wife, Patti Scialfa, was a benefit show for the Red Bank landmark. Scialfa is honorary chairwoman of the theater's capital campaign.
Fans paid at least $1,000 per ticket in an online auction. Proceeds from ticket sales and other donations raised $3 million for renovations to the theater and other programs.
A donation also paid for 37 wounded veterans to be bused to the concert from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The veterans received a standing ovation almost as lengthy as the one given the band.
The musicians put their hearts into every song, leading to many memorable moments, such as guitarist Nils Lofgren spinning in circles while playing "Prove It All Night."
Roy Bittan's elegant work on the piano also stood out, especially during "Racing In The Street" and "The Promised Land," as did drummer Max Weinberg's tension-filled opening on "Candy's Room."
Members of the Max Weinberg 7 provided brass instrumentation.
The evening also was historic because it was the band's first local performance since the April death of keyboardist Danny Federici.
The band currently is touring to promote the "Magic" album.
Patti Scialfa talks about her fondness for the the Count Basie Theatre before Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play a benefit concert for the renovation of the Count Basie Theatre Wednesday, May 7, 2008 in Red Bank, N.J.
(AP Photo/Mel Evans)
Corzine in audience
After an uncharacteristic 10-minute intermission, the band returned and played every track on its 1975 album "Born To Run," the crowd favorite "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)," and more.
That must have pleased Gov. Corzine, who attended the show.
"This is rock 'n' roll history at its best, right here" Corzine said before the concert.
He added, "I tend to like the earlier stuff, though the Sept. 11 album — "The Rising" — really affected me, too."
Also in attendance was NBC News anchor and Middletown native Brian Williams, who introduced the band and reminisced on stage about growing up in the days of the Red Bank mini-mall and "when Jack's sold more rolling papers than records."
The set for the first half of the show was "Badlands," "Adam Raised A Cain," "Something In The Night," "Candy's Room," "Racing In The Street," "The Promised Land," "Factory," "Streets Of Fire," "Prove It All Night" and "Darkness On The Edge Of Town."
The set for the second half was "Thunder Road," "Tenth Avenue Freeze-out," "Night," "Backstreets," "Born To Run," "She's The One," "Meeting Across The River," "Jungleland" "So Young And In Love," "Kitty's Back," "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" and "Raise Your Hand."
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad
[Here's an interesting series of exchanges between Laurie Mylroie and Andrew C. McCarthy regarding Mylroie's review of McCarthy's book, Willful Blindness. - jtf.]Willful Blindness: Prosecuting the War on Terror
Review of: Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad
By LAURIE MYLROIE
New York Sun
April 23, 2008
Andrew McCarthy prosecuted the blind Egyptian cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, head of Egypt's "Islamic Group," in the wake of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. "Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad" (Encounter, 250 pages, $25.95) engagingly recounts that experience, for Mr. McCarthy is a good writer. He was also a sharp, aggressive prosecutor, and his book authoritatively makes several important points, correcting misunderstandings about the case and highlighting issues that have received insufficient attention.
To begin with, Al Qaeda was not, as many believe, involved in the February 1993 bombing, Mr. McCarthy reminds us, nor the subsequent "Landmarks Plot," which targeted the United Nations, New York's Federal Building, and two tunnels. Established in 1988, Al Qaeda was only in its infancy in 1993.
"Willful Blindness" presents a valuable portrait of the Islamic extremists in New York, although Mr. McCarthy does not make enough of his material, as he does not emphasize sufficiently the degree to which the extremists were penetrated by the intelligence agencies of several states that operated among them and used them for their own purposes.
Egypt had a spy within Sheik Omar's entourage — Abdo Haggag, a sympathetic neighbor who turned against Sheik Omar, and who came to see Sheik Omar as "a conniver" and "hypocrite," petitioning for asylum in America even as he railed against it. (The sheik was also a womanizer, and Mr. Haggag resolved to expose him for it.) Mr. Haggag began reporting to Egypt's U.N. mission, but American authorities did not know that initially, arresting and indicting him along with the others. The FBI had its own plant among the extremists — another Egyptian, Emad Salem — who also had ties to Egyptian intelligence. Mr. Salem's work after the Trade Center bombing — gathering intelligence and acting as agent provocateur — led to the Landmarks Plot, planned in conjunction with two Sudanese intelligence agents.
Such complexity is often lost in a trial, whose focus, typically, is very narrow. As Mr. McCarthy explains, "The legal system's job is not to produce the definitive version of history," but "a judgment about the provenance of facts the government chooses to put in dispute" to convict the accused. Whether the accused "may have been abetted by a rogue nation" is secondary, if not irrelevant, to a prosecutor's job. And this blind spot is the great weakness of Mr. McCarthy's work.
In April 1993, Siddig Ali, a Sudanese émigré, told Mr. Salem he wanted to bomb two armories. "Seeing he had a live one," the FBI's Salem "egged him on." Soon afterward, Ali said he wanted to bomb the United Nations instead, because "he had contacts in the Sudanese government mission who would help them obtain the credentials necessary to drive a vehicle laden with explosives into the complex." The Sudanese agents introduced Ali to a Palestinian, Mohammed Saleh, with whom they also had close ties. Saleh owned a gas station in Yonkers and agreed to provide fuel for the bombs. The trial transcript also shows one agent discussing with Ali a target for possible attack, with Ali taking direction from the Sudanese official.
"Willful Blindness" misrepresents a crucial exchange touching on just this point, leaving out key parts, although the entire discussion exists in court records. (The book regularly cites court records without providing references, diminishing its authority and usefulness.)
The transcript strongly suggests that Sudanese intelligence was far more involved in the Landmarks Plot than Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was presented by the prosecution as the central figure. In late May, Mr. Salem met privately with Sheik Omar, who suggested forcefully that Mr. Salem discard plans to attack the United Nations and focus instead on the American military. Mr. McCarthy describes Sheik Omar as "slick" and ambiguous in this exchange, suggesting that he did not rule out the possibility of targeting the U.N., and fails to report a subsequent exchange, captured on the same surveillance tape: As they drove home from Sheik Omar's apartment, Salem related the sheik's response to Ali, who understood clearly that the U.N. plan had been rejected, telling Mr. Salem, "No, I'm not going to do it." Yet before the ride ended, Ali had decided to go forward anyhow, because, he said, "I have all the people in place from the embassy."
Despite the central involvement of Sudanese agents in the Landmarks Plot, they were not indicted. The reason, Mr. McCarthy once explained to me, was that Sudan would not lift their immunity. Yet federal prosecutors indicted Panama's ruler during the Reagan administration, and Bush 41 brought him to trial. But the Clinton administration would not likely have agreed to indict the agents and demand the Sudanese government produce them for trial; focusing attention on a hostile state would have risked stirring a public outcry for more serious action.
Sheik Omar is a loathsome figure, but the case against him was weak. The FBI opposed indicting him and wanted to deport him. Mr. McCarthy devised a clever strategy in which several crimes were linked together in a conspiracy ostensibly carried out by the "Jihad Organization" of which Sheik Omar was said to be the leader, and which included the Trade Center bombing and the Landmarks Plot. This allowed the prosecution to suggest to the jury that some defendants were involved in the Trade Center bombing without really making that claim. Consequently, many people think Sheik Omar was involved in that attack. Yet as Judge Michael Mukasey, now Attorney General, affirmed of Sheik Omar and his co-defendants: "[T]hey're not charged with committing the World Trade Center bombing."
Mr. McCarthy unwittingly illustrates how President Clinton's policy of treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue caused it to be understood as one: If Mr. McCarthy had indicted the Sudanese intelligence agents, Americans would have understood Sudan's role in the Landmarks Plot, and Sheik Omar would not occupy such a central role in our collective consciousness. Perhaps we would also understand that the government has never really explained what party was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And, finally, we might have better understood the nature and scope of the terrorist threat, including the real possibility that it did not change with that bombing, as the Clinton administration claimed, but remained just what we had known it to be — state-supported violence. The misunderstanding left America vulnerable on September 11, 2001, and may yet leave this country vulnerable to another major assault.
Ms. Mylroie is an American Enterprise Institute adjunct fellow and author of "Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America."
April 30, 2008, 6:00 a.m.
Still Willfully Blind After All These Years
Laurie Mylroie pretends to review Willful Blindness.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
I hate to seem ungracious, especially when a reviewer has had at least a few nice things to say about me and my new book, Willful Blindness — A Memoir of the Jihad. But I must confess to disappointment that the New York Sun, one of the best newspapers around, decided Laurie Mylroie would be a good choice to do the review.
BASIT’S NOT BASIT
Sometime in 1993 or 1994, a briefing at the Manhattan district attorney’s office was arranged for me and a few other federal prosecutors involved in the World Trade Center bombing cases. The briefer was Mylroie, then (if memory serves) a professor at Harvard, where she’d earned her doctorate in government. She was spouting a theory that the attack had been the work of Saddam Hussein and that we ignoramuses were completely missing the boat by charging Islamic terrorists, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence that they had carried out the atrocity.
Mylroie’s theory was loopy. Indeed, for commentators (like Steve Hayes, Tom Joscelyn, and I) who have argued that there were, in fact, important ties between Iraq and radical Islam, Mylroie has been a thorn in the side for years — the analyst whose zany assertions are routinely used to discredit credible evidence of cooperation. Most notoriously, Mylroie has contended that Abdul Basit, the WTC bombing mastermind better known by his alias, Ramzi Yousef, is not really Abdul Basit. Instead, according to Mylroie, he is a shady Iraqi spy who was given the identity of Basit when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait and stole the identities of the “real” Basit family. In my book, I briefly discuss and dismiss Mylroie’s theory (at pp. 183-84 & 341-42, ch.14, n.3). Leaving aside various other implausibilities in her surmise, the government had several sources who knew Basit as Basit both before and after the time he spent in Kuwait.
Notwithstanding that at least 14 years have elapsed, I also well remember the Mylroie briefing because it was so shoddy. She contended our case against the jihadists was weak and ill-conceived, but her presentation actually had little to do with our proof that indicted defendants carried out terrorist acts. Rather, it focused on inferences she had drawn — some interesting, some daft, and none prosecution-worthy — that the conspirators were being guided by Iraqi intelligence. It was the work of a myopic academic who did not comprehend the difference between intrigue and evidence, between history and prosecution. On my questioning, she confessed that she had never read, and was otherwise unfamiliar with, the seditious conspiracy statute the defendants were charged with violating. I asked her how a student in one of her classes would fare if it turned out he hadn’t read the law used to indict a case he was attacking as unfounded. She mumbled something about planning to get to the statute soon.
Of course, even assuming for argument’s sake that Saddam had choreographed the whole 1993 bombing operation, the government’s charging of some people with a crime does not discount the possibility that others — including even state sponsors of terror — are also complicit. Mylroie seemed unable to grasp this simple concept. In a jury trial, you naturally train your sights on the defendants you have charged, placed under arrest, and brought into the courtroom. You get into uncharged conspirators only to the extent it is necessary for the jury to understand the case against those standing trial. That co-conspirators have not been charged — whether because they have diplomatic immunity, or are fugitives, or are outside the country and beyond government’s ability to apprehend, or are actors as to whom the government has not yet developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt, or any of a thousand other reasons — does not mean that they are innocent, much less that the people who actually have been charged are not guilty.
In any event, although it was not particularly complex, Mylroie didn’t understand the law or the evidence back then. Her review demonstrates that things haven’t improved.
THE “WEAK” CASE AGAINST THE EMIR OF JIHAD
Mylroie has long been on a mission to trash the case against Omar Abdel Rahman, the Blind Sheikh known to his acolytes as the “emir of jihad.” Perhaps this is because she remains studiously uninformed about the jihadist threat. Perhaps it owes to the incorrigible delusion under which she labors, namely, that if the Blind Sheikh is guilty that somehow must mean the state sponsors she prefers to blame are off the hook. In either event, she asserts in the Sun that “Sheik Omar is a loathsome figure, but the case against him was weak.” He was convicted, she elaborates, only because I devised a “clever strategy” to link several terrorist plots together in what she refers to as “a conspiracy ostensibly carried out by the Jihad Organization of which Sheik Omar was said to be the leader.”
Plainly, even all these years later, Mylroie still hasn’t gotten around to reading the relevant statutes. And while I’d love to take credit for being extraordinarily clever, the truth is that the case against Abdel Rahman was overwhelming.
We did not charge the Blind Sheikh with just “a conspiracy.” We charged him with Congress’s seditious conspiracy statute (Section 2384 of Title 18, U.S. Code) — a Civil War-era law which targets those who confederate to levy war against the United States or use force against our government. Among other offenses, we also alleged that he’d solicited an attack on the American military. The proof, in part comprised of a wealth of Abdel Rahman’s recorded statements, included his brazen instruction to a government informant to develop a plan to bomb U.S. military installations. Far from weak, it was irrefutable.
The Blind Sheikh, moreover, was also convicted of both conspiring to murder, and soliciting the murder of, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. So insurmountable was the proof on these charges that Lynne Stewart, Abdel Rahman’s chief counsel, was reduced to arguing for jury nullification — i.e., conceding that the Sheikh wanted Mubarak removed “by any means necessary” but urging that the president had it coming. Nullification is always a desperation strategy, resorted to when there is no room for doubt. That Stewart was reduced to it was no surprise to anyone who actually followed the case: quite apart from the witnesses who had heard him call for Mubarak’s death, Abdel Rahman was on tape bragging about having issued the fatwa approving the murder of Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat, and opining that Mubarak was worse and more deserving of the same fate.
“NOT INVOLVED” IN THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING
Mylroie also reprises her ignorant, oft-repeated claim that the Blind Sheikh was not involved in the World Trade Center bombing. To the contrary, the evidence showed that Abdel Rahman, emir of the Islamic Group, a vicious Egyptian terror organization, was the formative figure in the jihadist organization that emerged in the New York metropolitan area in the late 1980s. Conspirators like Sayyid Nosair (the murderer of JDL founder Meir Kahane) and Mahmud Abouhalima (a WTC bomber) reported directly to him even before he relocated to the U.S. in 1990. Nosair and Siddig Ali (supervisor of the organization’s Sudanese cell) both told a government informant that bombing attacks could not go forward unless he approved them.
Abdel Rahman called for attacks against the United States (“the head of the snake”) from the time he got here. The conspirators began plotting a major bombing campaign in 1992 (after Nosair received a lengthy sentence for firearms and other offenses despite being acquitted by a state jury of the Kahane murder). At a 1992 meeting in Attica Prison, Nosair emphasized to plotters (including a government informant) that a fatwa from the Blind Sheikh was required before any bombings could proceed. After the informant left the investigation in summer 1992, bomb-builder Ramzi Yousef arrived from Pakistan and settled in Jersey City with Mohammed Salameh (a follower of the Blind Sheikh and an intimate of Abouhalima, Nosair and Nosair’s cousin, Ibrahim El-Gabrowny). In the months before the bombing, telephone records showed constant contacts between and among the residences of Yousef/Salameh (where the bomb was being built), Abouhalima, El-Gabrowny, and Abdel Rahman. Salameh and Abouhalima took days off shortly before the bombing to make the day-long trip to meet with Nosair up in Attica (meetings that were arranged by El-Gabrowny, who had previously told the government informant that the organization was looking for “high-power explosives”).
Shortly before the bombing, the Blind Sheikh gave a major speech in Brooklyn, commanding his underlings to “perform jihad for the sake of Allah,” and not to shun the label “terrorist” because “we must be terrorists and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them, and disturb them, and shake the earth under their feet.” The bomb was detonated from within a Ryder van Salameh had rented a few days before. After the bombing, though Salameh and El-Gabrowny were quickly arrested, others fled the country, including Abouhalima. He, however, was captured in Egypt because the Blind Sheikh’s circle had been penetrated by Abdo Haggag, an informant for Egyptian intelligence. The Blind Sheikh spent the ensuing months conducting an aggressive investigation to determine who had betrayed Abouhalima.
In the teeth of this evidence (all and more of which is laid out in detail in Willful Blindness, though Mylroie opts not to discuss it in her review), Mylroie offers a peremptory wave, “[A]s Judge Michael Mukasey, now Attorney General, affirmed of Sheik Omar and his co-defendants: ‘[T]hey’re not charged with committing the World Trade Center bombing.’” This thoroughly distorts a larger legal discussion Mylroie mulishly refuses to hear, no matter how many times it is explained to her. The defendants in the Blind Sheikh case — half of whom truly had no participation in the WTC plot — were not charged with the substantive crime of bombing the World Trade Center. They were instead charged, as relevant here, with (a) seditious conspiracy to levy war against the United States, and (b) conspiring from the late 1980s through June 1993 to conduct bombing attacks. In both of those counts, the World Trade Center bombing was alleged as an overt act in furtherance of each conspiracy.
To be sure, a defendant can be guilty of a conspiracy without being guilty of all the overt acts committed during the conspiracy. His degree of culpability is assessed at sentencing. Under the guidelines that were in effect at the time, then-Judge Mukasey had to determine whether the defendants convicted of the conspiracies had been complicit in the WTC bombing (it made a significant difference in the sentences imposed).
Contrary to Mylroie’s claim, Judge Mukasey made exacting findings at sentencing that Abdel Rahman (like several but not all of his co-defendants) was deeply involved in the WTC attack. Furthermore, in upholding the Blind Sheik’s conviction and life sentence, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recounted that Judge Mukasey had “ruled that the reduction [of sentence] would be denied to those defendants whom he concluded were involved with completed [overt] acts, notably the World Trade Center bombing ([Abdel] Rahman, Nosair, Hampton-El, and El-Gabrowny)[.]” United States v. Abdel Rahman, 189 F.3d 88, 143 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 528 U.S. 982 (1999) (emphasis added); see also id. at 170 (“The evidence established that each defendant joined either the plot that resulted in the bombing of the World Trade Center or the plot to bomb major New York City tunnels and bridges, or both plots”) (emphasis added).
One might have thought reviewing a book that extensively recounts these details might have induced Mylroie to engage them. I guess it is to be expected, though, that if she won’t look at the dots, she can’t connect them. Thus, regarding the “Landmarks Plot” — a spring 1993 plan for simultaneous attacks on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and the U.N. complex — Mylroie continues to belittle the evidence against Abdel Rahman as equivocal and to complain that he was “presented as the central figure.” The prime mover, she maintains, was really the Sudanese regime, a fact she accuses me of intentionally obscuring by emphasizing Abdel Rahman’s role.
HOW I COVERED FOR SUDAN
Preposterous does not begin to describe how off base Mylroie is. To begin with, the Blind Sheik was presented as the central figure of the overall jihad organization that formed in the New York metropolitan area in the late 1980s. We did not portray him as the central figure in every plot — that was not his role (any more than the aloof, insulated mafia boss micromanages every button-man’s day-to-day). There was considerable evidence that terrorist attacks could not go forward without Abdel Rahman’s blessing. (And indeed, Osama bin Laden has since publicly credited him with issuing the fatwa that approved the 9/11 attacks.) Yet, the proof also showed that his underlings took pains to keep him above operational details, and that — except where Mubarak was concerned — Sheikh Omar carefully limited his conversations about specific plots, adopting a Delphic style with those he suspected of being informants. Abdel Rahman was the central figure in the overarching conspiracy to wage war against the U.S.; it was for him to flash the red or green light for large-scale initiatives; but he did not command jihadists in the field, and I’ve never suggested otherwise.
Nevertheless, even sillier than Mylroie’s recitation of the case against Sheikh Omar is her assessment of my role in what she fictionally portrays as the American government’s concealment of Sudan’s participation in the planned attack on the United Nations.
In 1993, our prosecution team disclosed tape-recordings which proved that Siddig Ali, a top Abdel Rahman aide and the Sudanese mastermind of the Landmarks plot, had received key assistance from Sudanese government officials. Specifically, two diplomats at Sudan’s U.N. mission in New York, Consul Siraj al-Din and Deputy Consul Ahmed Yousef, agreed to provide, among other things, the diplomatic plates that would enable Siddig to drive a bomb-laden car onto the U.N. complex. Just prior to the 1995 trial, I sent a letter to all defense counsel identifying the two diplomats and the Sudanese mission itself as potential unindicted co-conspirators.
At trial, we proved that Sheikh Abdel Rahman had close ties to Hassan al-Turabi, leader in the early 1990s of Sudan’s de facto government, the National Islamic Front; that under Turabi’s influence, Sudanese jihadists were permitted to emigrate to America; that Siddig Ali was one of these, and coordinated his activities with both the Blind Sheikh and Sudanese officials; that Siddig used his Sudanese government contacts to facilitate the flight of 1993 World Trade Center bomber Mahmud Abouhalima; that when Siddig plotted in early 1993 to murder Mubarak, he obtained information about the Egyptian president’s itinerary from his Sudanese diplomatic connections; that Siddig coordinated closely with diplomats al-Din and Yousef on both the U.N. bombing plot and arrangements for his escape therefrom; and that when the conspirators needed help with financing and fuel for bomb construction, they turned to Mohammed Saleh, a Hamas associate whom Siddig knew through his Turabi connections.
I have spoken with Laurie Mylroie one time since the briefing she gave me in 1994. She called me out of the blue about three years ago. It had been over a decade since our testy exchange, and we had a long — at times amicable, at times difficult — conversation. She now reports that I told her al-Din and Yousef were not indicted because “Sudan would not lift their immunity.” I doubt I said it the way she seems to remember it. I am quite confident there is no way Sudan’s jihadist regime would have waived sovereign immunity if it had been asked to do so, and I would not have been shy about telling Mylroie that. But I don’t know if anyone in the U.S. government ever went through the motions of asking Sudan that question. I don’t recall ever hearing that that was done, and the decision whether to try would have been made by President Clinton and Secretary of State Christopher in Washington, not by a line prosecutor in New York.
To me, however, this is all beside the point. As I explained to Mylroie (though she does not mention it in her review), the Clinton State Department publicly and quite appropriately expelled al-Din and Yousef because of their complicity in the bombing plot. Moreover, contrary to Mylroie’s bloviating, a futile indictment of the two Sudanese diplomats would not have made a bit of difference to the public’s understanding of Sudan’s role. Whether or not al-Din and Yousef were in the courtroom as defendants, we would have presented the case exactly the same way: The evidence against Siddig Ali, his Sudanese cell members, and Mohammed Saleh — all of whom were defendants on trial — was such that the case could not have been proved without showing the Sudanese regime’s participation.
In Willful Blindness, I not only describe the Sudanese treachery against the U.S. at great length; I trace the working relationship between Abdel Rahman and Turabi back to the 1980s. Moreover, ten years ago, I wrote a lengthy, feature essay for the Weekly Standard entitled, “The Sudan Connection — The Missing Link in U.S. Terrorism Policy.” That essay (which is cited and drawn on in Willful Blindness) laid out in gory detail the Sudanese complicity in the Landmarks plot; argued that Sudan’s anti-American terrorism justified President Clinton’s decision, after the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in east Africa, to order a cruise-missile strike against a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum (believed to be a joint Iraq/Sudan/al-Qaeda weapons venture); and criticized the Clinton administration for appearing to apologize for the strike rather than recounting the rich record of Sudanese complicity in jihadist terror that had been established beyond peradventure in the Blind Sheikh trial.
A central theme of my book is the incapacity of the criminal-justice system to deal adequately with a national security threat. Another is that, while the threat that confronts us is fueled by a strain of Islamic ideology, terror networks would not be able to project power on a consequential scale absent facilitation by such rogue nations as Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Sudan.
Reading Laurie Mylroie’s review, a reader would come away figuring I must have argued, in contravention of what Willful Blindness actually says, that international terrorism is merely a crime and state sponsorship a trifle. Under the guise of reviewing a book, Mylroie ignores the book, using the opportunity instead to reprise her half-baked theories and cavalier dismissal of Islamic radicalism. It’s a shame the Sun let her do it.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is author of Willful Blindness: Memoir of the Jihad and director of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
May 06, 2008, 4:00 a.m.Writing Blind
A response to Andy McCarthy.
By Laurie Mylroie
http://www.nationalreview.com
In a mixed review of Andrew McCarthy’s Willful Blindness, I criticized the book for slighting the role of states in terrorism. McCarthy’s outsize response — a 3,000-word pejorative/adjective-laden assault in National Review Online — suggests the review hit upon a significant and sensitive point. Extensive name-calling typically obscures a weak argument, or at least attempts to do so, even as this debate involves the national-security issue of the day, including why the United States is engaged in its most serious military campaign in three decades and whether the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime was correct. Few questions merit more careful consideration.
I had not expected to brief the federal prosecutors, but at the last moment, the Manhattan DA’s office decided not to take up the issue, but leave terrorism to the federal government (a policy reversed after 9/11.) My main point was that treating terrorism on the scale of the two very large and ambitious plots that had occurred in New York in 1993 as a law enforcement matter was so grossly inadequate, it would only invite more attacks. Of course, that has now become conventional wisdom, embraced by McCarthy among many others.
The essential points of that briefing were published as the lead article in The National Interest (Winter 1995/96) with Vincent Cannistraro (chief of counterrorism operations for the CIA) hailing it as “one of the most brilliant pieces of research and scholarship in the area that I have ever read.” Eric Breindel, in a New York Post editorial, endorsed the “important article” and its critique of the dangerous inadequacies of Bill Clinton’s law-enforcement approach to terrorism. And The Washington Monthly highlighted it with a “Journalism Award.”With support like that, my briefing can scarcely be dismissed as “loopy.” Indeed, if that were so, why would McCarthy sit for nearly two hours, listening to me, particularly with his trial of Sheikh Omar in progress?
2) The suggestion that Iraq was behind the February 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center is supported by New York law enforcement. Indeed, New York FBI, the lead investigative agency, suspected the attack was a false flag operation carried out by Iraq. That was reflected in the contemporary reporting, including in the New York Times. That is also why, in 1994, when ABC News and Newsweek did a joint investigation into the WTC bombing, for which I was consultant, we focused on Iraq.Jim Fox headed New York FBI and the WTC bombing investigation. As Fox wrote of Study of Revenge: “This work is the most comprehensive and best researched review of the bombing investigation. . . . I found it to be extremely accurate, and although we are unable to say with certainty the Iraqis were behind the bombing, that is certainly the theory accepted by most of the veteran investigators.”
Gil Childers, the lead prosecutor in the WTC bombing trial (Mohammed Salameh, et al), was considered to be the U.S. official who knew the most about that bombing, and he also attended my briefing. Childers’s response was quite different from McCarthy’s. Childers later spoke at the book launch for Study of Revenge and described it as “work the U.S. government should have done.”3) The case against Sheikh Omar was weak — as McCarthy himself states in Willful Blindness, “It would be a challenge to find charges that would both fit our evidence and overcome inevitable First Amendment protests against the purported stifling of religious conviction and political dissent.”
So different acts of violence, including the WTC bombing, were somewhat artificially linked to make the charges against Shaykh Omar strong. Consequently, most Americans, including even U.S. officials, believe Sheikh Omar was behind the WTC bombing — which is also the impression that Willful Blindness gives.Yet as McCarthy states in his NRO piece, his defendants “were not charged with the substantive crime of bombing the World Trade Center.” That is precisely my point — not something that I “mulishly [refuse] to hear,” as McCarthy perversely claims.
4) Once that is understood — Sheikh Omar et al. were not substantively involved in the WTC bombing — we can ask the question: Who was?The WTC bombing is of particular importance for explaining why we are fighting in Iraq. Of all the major terrorist attacks since the 1991 Gulf War in which suspicion might fall on Iraq, it is easiest to make a case for Iraq’s involvement in the WTC bombing. It was the first, and the cover was thin.
By August 1993, U.S. authorities had arrested four Islamic militants for the WTC bombing. In addition, there were two indicted fugitives — both with ties to Iraq. It is a bit odd that we did not widely suspect Saddam’s hand then. The basic problem was that the Clinton White House did not want to hear Iraq was behind the attack, because it would be obliged to address the problem in a serious fashion (that became evident to me over the course of several meetings with Martin Indyk, Clinton’s NSC adviser on the Middle East, whom I knew well, as he had brought me out of academics to work at the Washington think tank he headed, before he joined the Clinton administration.)By June 2002, U.S. authorities had identified the mastermind of the 9/11 assaults, describing him as the uncle of the WTC bombing mastermind, and both men were involved in a 1995 plot to bomb a dozen U.S. airliners. As CIA Director George Tenet told the U.S. Congress: “We now believe that a common thread runs between the first attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993 and the 11 September attacks,” explaining that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, is the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the WTC bombing.
Thus, if one can demonstrate Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing, one has also demonstrated it was behind the airline bombing plot. Most importantly, one has gone far in suggesting why a reasonable person might also think Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks — and why the Iraq war is a necessary part of the GWOT.5) A question of very broad strategic significance also looms: To what extent are the networks of Islamic militants penetrated and sometimes supported by states that use the militants for their own purposes? Despite all the injunctions against group-think issued after 9/11, McCarthy, et. al. want to impose just such a stifling consensus and silence the dissenting voices that may exist, like mine.
The Reagan years saw a fierce fight over a closely related issue. The view that prevailed was promoted by figures like CIA Director Bill Casey and journalist Claire Sterling: Major terrorist attacks, particularly against the United States, are basically state-sponsored. That remained the consensual perspective through Bush 41. Are we really sure that this changed so radically a mere month into Clinton’s first term in office?Considerable evidence exists to support the notion that Islamic networks are thoroughly penetrated by states, including evidence presented in Willful Blindness, highlighted in my review. Yet we are not allowed to consider this point and its implications, even as it, quite arguably, represents a dangerous strategic vulnerability: any enemy state that infiltrates the networks of Islamic militants can attack the United States with impunity, as long as that state takes sufficient measures to hide its hand from our incurious eyes.
— Laurie Mylroie is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein’s War Against America.Jonah Goldberg: Give Voters a Clue
Policy proposals in a presidential election.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 7, 2008 4:00 AM
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright was a sideshow, a distraction, a sham, and a shame. So sayeth many of the brightest stars in punditry. How sad that we wasted so much time on what Sebastian Mallaby of the Washington Post called an “absurd digression.” Barack Obama himself frets that we are “caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit-for-tat that consumes our politics,” which “trivializes the profound issues.” Yes, by all means, the profound issues are what the campaigners should grapple with. Grapple away on matters of substance and policy. Bread-and-butter concerns. Kitchen-table topics and pocketbook issues.
And what are those? Well, according to Obama and Clinton alike, gas prices top the list.
On ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos opened an interview with Clinton by asking how she can defend her proposal to suspend the federal gas tax for the summer when everyone knows it won’t lower gas prices. “Nearly every editorial board and economist in the country has come out against it,” Stephanopoulos noted. “Even a supporter of yours, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, calls it pointless and disappointing.”
Her response in a nutshell: Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care.
Clinton says she doesn’t mind if economists agree that her proposal would do nothing to alleviate high gas prices. Indeed, when Stephanopoulos pressed her to name one — just one! — credible economist who thinks this idea has merit, she responded: “Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.” Instead, she explained, she’s going to break with the “government power and elite opinion” and side with the little guy.
Unlike the proposal by John McCain, who also stupidly supports a gas-tax “holiday,” the Clinton plan has the added benefit of punishing those evil oil companies by making them pay the tax, even though those pointy-headed economists say it will actually reward them. Big Oil would simply pass that cost back to consumers, and the “holiday” would artificially hike demand for gas so that pump prices would jump right back up. But never mind all that.
Oh, let’s also point out that, as a matter of political reality, Clinton might as well be calling for a ban on the use of unicorn meat in dog food, because there is no way her proposal can actually, you know, happen.
Now, in fairness, we should point out that Obama opposes the Clinton-McCain proposal for many of the reasons stated above, and that speaks well of him.
But there’s a larger point here. Clinton’s new populist demagoguery is entirely symbolic. The “substance” is stage dressing, no more real than the scenery in a play. She’s trying to tell blue-collar workers that she’s on their side. The language may be economic, but the message is about values. It’s I-feel-your-pain treacle gussied up as tax policy, devoid of anything approaching intellectual seriousness. Who cares if even liberal economists like Krugman concede the stupidity of her idea; she’s taking the side of the Bubbas against all the fancy pants.
The same goes for the Daedalian debate between Obama and Clinton over health care that consumed many of the early Democratic primaries. In a riot of intellectual vanity, vast amounts of time were wasted on parsing the fine print of their respective policy proposals, with earnest journalists wading hip-deep into the actuarial tables, as if either plan would actually survive its first encounter with Congress intact. Who cares? We’re talkin’ substance here!
Presidential elections are not referendums on policy papers. Rather, policy papers are themselves mere hints, sometimes very poor hints, of where a candidate’s priorities lie. This is not to say that candidates should not offer details, but let’s do away with the charade that the dots on the “i” and the crosses on the “t” are the stuff of Serious Politics, while discussions about a candidate’s “non-economic” values are somehow irrelevant. It’s all the same conversation.
Whatever the true import of Obama’s relationship with Wright may be, or whatever the proper weight voters should give to his view that poor whites “cling” to guns, religion, and bigotry because they’ve suffered under bad economic policies, or, for that matter, whatever Clinton’s “sniper fire” story says about her, it strikes me as absurd to argue that these data are meaningless but their stance on a gas-tax holiday is of enduring importance.
We pick presidents for their judgment and values. Anything that gives us a clue as to what those might be is not only fair game, it is the game.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 7, 2008 4:00 AM
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright was a sideshow, a distraction, a sham, and a shame. So sayeth many of the brightest stars in punditry. How sad that we wasted so much time on what Sebastian Mallaby of the Washington Post called an “absurd digression.” Barack Obama himself frets that we are “caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit-for-tat that consumes our politics,” which “trivializes the profound issues.” Yes, by all means, the profound issues are what the campaigners should grapple with. Grapple away on matters of substance and policy. Bread-and-butter concerns. Kitchen-table topics and pocketbook issues.And what are those? Well, according to Obama and Clinton alike, gas prices top the list.
On ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos opened an interview with Clinton by asking how she can defend her proposal to suspend the federal gas tax for the summer when everyone knows it won’t lower gas prices. “Nearly every editorial board and economist in the country has come out against it,” Stephanopoulos noted. “Even a supporter of yours, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, calls it pointless and disappointing.”
Her response in a nutshell: Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care.
Clinton says she doesn’t mind if economists agree that her proposal would do nothing to alleviate high gas prices. Indeed, when Stephanopoulos pressed her to name one — just one! — credible economist who thinks this idea has merit, she responded: “Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.” Instead, she explained, she’s going to break with the “government power and elite opinion” and side with the little guy.
Unlike the proposal by John McCain, who also stupidly supports a gas-tax “holiday,” the Clinton plan has the added benefit of punishing those evil oil companies by making them pay the tax, even though those pointy-headed economists say it will actually reward them. Big Oil would simply pass that cost back to consumers, and the “holiday” would artificially hike demand for gas so that pump prices would jump right back up. But never mind all that.
Oh, let’s also point out that, as a matter of political reality, Clinton might as well be calling for a ban on the use of unicorn meat in dog food, because there is no way her proposal can actually, you know, happen.
Now, in fairness, we should point out that Obama opposes the Clinton-McCain proposal for many of the reasons stated above, and that speaks well of him.
But there’s a larger point here. Clinton’s new populist demagoguery is entirely symbolic. The “substance” is stage dressing, no more real than the scenery in a play. She’s trying to tell blue-collar workers that she’s on their side. The language may be economic, but the message is about values. It’s I-feel-your-pain treacle gussied up as tax policy, devoid of anything approaching intellectual seriousness. Who cares if even liberal economists like Krugman concede the stupidity of her idea; she’s taking the side of the Bubbas against all the fancy pants.
The same goes for the Daedalian debate between Obama and Clinton over health care that consumed many of the early Democratic primaries. In a riot of intellectual vanity, vast amounts of time were wasted on parsing the fine print of their respective policy proposals, with earnest journalists wading hip-deep into the actuarial tables, as if either plan would actually survive its first encounter with Congress intact. Who cares? We’re talkin’ substance here!
Presidential elections are not referendums on policy papers. Rather, policy papers are themselves mere hints, sometimes very poor hints, of where a candidate’s priorities lie. This is not to say that candidates should not offer details, but let’s do away with the charade that the dots on the “i” and the crosses on the “t” are the stuff of Serious Politics, while discussions about a candidate’s “non-economic” values are somehow irrelevant. It’s all the same conversation.
Whatever the true import of Obama’s relationship with Wright may be, or whatever the proper weight voters should give to his view that poor whites “cling” to guns, religion, and bigotry because they’ve suffered under bad economic policies, or, for that matter, whatever Clinton’s “sniper fire” story says about her, it strikes me as absurd to argue that these data are meaningless but their stance on a gas-tax holiday is of enduring importance.
We pick presidents for their judgment and values. Anything that gives us a clue as to what those might be is not only fair game, it is the game.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
New Jersey Hall of Fame welcomes first-ever class
by Carly Rothman and Julie O'Connor
The Newark Star-Ledger
Sunday May 04, 2008, 10:58 PM
If you ask the Boss, New Jersey doesn't often get the respect it deserves.
But Sunday night, as he took his place among the first-ever inductees to the New Jersey Hall of Fame, Bruce Springsteen thanked his fellow honorees for helping to show the world what the Garden State's got.
"Even with this Hall of Fame, we know another bad Jersey joke is around the corner ... (so we try) not just to do our best, but to stick it in your face," he said, getting an appreciative laugh from the crowd. "That's the fighting spirit of New Jersey."
Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-Ledger
Standing on stage with Gov. Jon Corzine (left) and actor Danny DeVito (center), Bruce Springsteen makes his aceptance speech as he is inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Springsteen and 14 other honorees were inducted into the Hall of Fame at a star-studded ceremony at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark.
One by one, famous locals or their representatives took the stage to remind their neighbors, and the world, of New Jersey's contributions.
"It's amazing what we've accomplished, and people just don't know it," said Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who presented several of the evening's awards. "This is the chance for New Jersey itself to recognize who we are."
Ol' Blue Eyes joined the Boss among the musical members of the Hall of Fame's first class.
"I always said that Sinatra owned New Jersey, but he'd rent me a little bit of it down the Shore," Springsteen said as he presented some of Frank Sinatra's family with an engraved crystal plaque.
Other inductees included Yankee Yogi Berra and astronaut Buzz Aldrin, now neighbors in Montclair, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, and writer and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison.
Posthumous awards went to Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, Green Bay Packers Coach Vince Lombardi and publisher Malcolm Forbes, represented last night by his son Steve Forbes, the publisher and former presidential candidate.
Gen. Robert Wood Johnson II, familiar to many through the philanthropic foundation that bears his name, was represented by his grandson, New York Jets owner Woody Johnson.
For Underground Railroad pioneer Harriet Tubman, organizers made an exception to the rule all inductees must live in New Jersey for at least five years. Booker presented Tubman's award to the head of the Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn, N.Y.
"Her memory still serves us. Her statues sit on my desk in the mayor's office," he said.
Actress Meryl Streep and former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley also were among those honored, but they were unable to attend the ceremony.
The New Jersey Hall of Fame is a nonprofit organization formed in 2005 by vote of the state Legislature. Gov. Jon Corzine, who signed the legislation into law, was on hand last night to honor the inductees.
"Tonight's inductees set a standard....It isn't over yet," he said, noting many other Garden State natives are worthy of the honor. "There are lots of heroes, and lots of Hall of Famers here."
The Newark Star-Ledger
Sunday May 04, 2008, 10:58 PM
If you ask the Boss, New Jersey doesn't often get the respect it deserves.
But Sunday night, as he took his place among the first-ever inductees to the New Jersey Hall of Fame, Bruce Springsteen thanked his fellow honorees for helping to show the world what the Garden State's got.
"Even with this Hall of Fame, we know another bad Jersey joke is around the corner ... (so we try) not just to do our best, but to stick it in your face," he said, getting an appreciative laugh from the crowd. "That's the fighting spirit of New Jersey."
Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-Ledger
Standing on stage with Gov. Jon Corzine (left) and actor Danny DeVito (center), Bruce Springsteen makes his aceptance speech as he is inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame.
Springsteen and 14 other honorees were inducted into the Hall of Fame at a star-studded ceremony at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark.
One by one, famous locals or their representatives took the stage to remind their neighbors, and the world, of New Jersey's contributions.
"It's amazing what we've accomplished, and people just don't know it," said Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who presented several of the evening's awards. "This is the chance for New Jersey itself to recognize who we are."
Ol' Blue Eyes joined the Boss among the musical members of the Hall of Fame's first class.
"I always said that Sinatra owned New Jersey, but he'd rent me a little bit of it down the Shore," Springsteen said as he presented some of Frank Sinatra's family with an engraved crystal plaque.
Other inductees included Yankee Yogi Berra and astronaut Buzz Aldrin, now neighbors in Montclair, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, and writer and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison.
Posthumous awards went to Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, Green Bay Packers Coach Vince Lombardi and publisher Malcolm Forbes, represented last night by his son Steve Forbes, the publisher and former presidential candidate.
Gen. Robert Wood Johnson II, familiar to many through the philanthropic foundation that bears his name, was represented by his grandson, New York Jets owner Woody Johnson.
For Underground Railroad pioneer Harriet Tubman, organizers made an exception to the rule all inductees must live in New Jersey for at least five years. Booker presented Tubman's award to the head of the Harriet Tubman Home in Auburn, N.Y.
"Her memory still serves us. Her statues sit on my desk in the mayor's office," he said.
Actress Meryl Streep and former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley also were among those honored, but they were unable to attend the ceremony.
The New Jersey Hall of Fame is a nonprofit organization formed in 2005 by vote of the state Legislature. Gov. Jon Corzine, who signed the legislation into law, was on hand last night to honor the inductees.
"Tonight's inductees set a standard....It isn't over yet," he said, noting many other Garden State natives are worthy of the honor. "There are lots of heroes, and lots of Hall of Famers here."
To the River of No Return
By Bill Croke
The American Spectator
http://www.spectator.org
Published 5/6/2008 12:08:07 AM
River of No Return
"I wasn't lost; I just didn't know where I was for a couple of weeks" -- Jim Bridger
Westerners are as a rule a transient breed. Fly-over country is also start-over country. A historically boom-bust regional economy has always dictated some bouncing around. People primarily move in search of economic prosperity, that job with a good salary, benefits -- in short, a future. But small western towns tend to be half populated by provincial multi-generational types; the other half are the relative newcomers trying to get along or making a mess of things.
Recently, at a local laundromat, I bumped into an acquaintance from my days as a security guard at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, a dozen years ago. This man had lately gone through a divorce and was just days away from packing a U-Haul and giving up the Cody ghost. After 13 years he was moving back to Iowa. And he was walking away from a good job. "I just need a change of scenery," he said.
I found this encounter interesting because after 14 years residence myself, Cody and I are also parting company. The one year sabbatical spent working for a paper in Choteau, Montana, I've covered already ("It's Hot," TAS, July 1998). And rather than bore readers with the reasons for my new move, I refer them to my recent "Cody Coda."
In the piece I speculate as to whether I'll move to nearby Big Horn County, Wyoming. But after careful thought I've changed my mind. I've decided to move to -- God willing -- Salmon, Idaho, which will offer a more reasonable standard of living. More on that later.
WESTERN TRANSIENCE encompasses the region's entire 200-year history. Mountain men, gold rushers, cowboys trailing a herd. Later, Depression-era public works projects attracted thousands of desperate people to build roads, bridges, and dams. And later still came the oil booms.
Maybe it has something to do with the vast landscapes and the ability one has to see off into far vistas. Easterners can't see very far. Low hills and dense hardwood forests block the view. No spikey peaks line the horizon fifty miles away. Those long western views have always been a stimulus to dream of flight. To go away across a wide river or mountain range. Away across the Great Divide.
Easterners don't get this. "Back East," most people think it the norm to work at the same job for life, and then retire to God's waiting room in Florida or somewhere else warm. These are the "Beach People." I have eastern relatives and friends in this category. The un-transient East (and there is nothing more un-transient than lying on a beach) does not understand the transient West. These are two distinct cultural and demographic views inhabiting the same country.
Going back to Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Jack London, transient Western writers have been the rule rather than exception. Wallace Stegner probably wouldn't have achieved any degree of greatness if he hadn't roamed the West in his youth. His family had a dozen addresses in Saskatchewan, Washington state, and Montana before landing in Salt Lake City, where the aspiring author managed to attend the University of Utah during the Depression years.
While Stegner's roaming was strictly economically driven due to the times he lived in, writers have always been after that change of scenery, new people and experiences to get the juices flowing again. Though they tend to fall into that aforementioned category of people who make a mess of things.
I've always believed that writers go stale without periodic life upheavals (good or bad) or uprootings, and lately I believe that I've fallen into this state of literary disrepair. I've digested and regurgitated Cody, Wyoming, many times, and I'm tired of it. I need a new place for a psychic tuneup, if you will.
SALMON IS A town of 3,300 people in central Idaho near the Montana border. Some 400 miles west of Cody, it's situated in the Salmon River Valley at 4,004 feet of elevation (altitude larger than multitude) and at the confluence of the Salmon River and the smaller Lemhi River. The ten thousand feet snowy peaks of the Bitterroot Mountains line the east side of the valley ten miles away.
Closer to the west are the Salmon River Mountains, and just beyond them the border of the "Frank Church -- River of No Return" Wilderness, at 1.3 million acres the largest federally designated wilderness area in the lower Forty Eight states. The "River of No Return" refers to the fact that multi-day river rafting parties can only float downstream from Salmon to take-out points along the river for up to 200 miles to Riggins, Idaho. They cannot return to Salmon via the river.
The region was visited in the summer of 1805 by the westering Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery. There the indispensable Sacagawea had a reunion with her Shoshone relatives. She had been born a few miles up the Lemhi near present Tendoy, Idaho. But modern-day Salmon claims her as its own, and a small museum called the Sacagawea Interpretive Center is devoted to her and the Lewis and Clark enterprise.
A generation after the latter, a Rocky Mountain Fur Company brigade -- including mountain man legends Jim Bridger and Thomas Fitzpatrick -- spent the winter of 1832-'33 camped on the Salmon hunting game and fighting occasional skirmishes with small parties of marauding Blackfeet. Later on came the miners, loggers, and ranchers.
SALMON IS certainly remote. Missoula, Montana (population 75,000) is 140 miles to the north; Boise, Idaho (population 200,000) is 250 miles to the southwest and over mountain roads. Yet Salmon is a modern town with good schools, a small hospital, Internet and Cable TV service, a good public library, microbrews and fancy coffee.
There is a vibrant downtown economy because -- at just 3,300 people -- it's too small to attract big box stores such as Wal-Mart, but that's good and bad. The river chugs through town, keeping a dozen local river rafting outfitters busy all summer. And packtrip outfitters get tourists on horseback to probe the "Frank Church" on weeklong jaunts. I plan on quite a bit of trailhiking there myself.
I also plan -- to paraphrase Voltaire -- to "cultivate the garden" of my "working retirement." Writing, of course, and doing God-knows-what-else to make a living. After 30 years of wandering around the American West whenever I could, Salmon may be the last stop on the trip, so to speak.
So I bid my Cody friends adieu, with invitations to visit and promises to return yearly over the mountains myself. Small future interregnums from my last hurrah on the River of No Return.
Bill Croke is a writer in Cody, Wyoming -- for now.
The American Spectator
http://www.spectator.org
Published 5/6/2008 12:08:07 AM
River of No Return
"I wasn't lost; I just didn't know where I was for a couple of weeks" -- Jim Bridger
Westerners are as a rule a transient breed. Fly-over country is also start-over country. A historically boom-bust regional economy has always dictated some bouncing around. People primarily move in search of economic prosperity, that job with a good salary, benefits -- in short, a future. But small western towns tend to be half populated by provincial multi-generational types; the other half are the relative newcomers trying to get along or making a mess of things.
Recently, at a local laundromat, I bumped into an acquaintance from my days as a security guard at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, a dozen years ago. This man had lately gone through a divorce and was just days away from packing a U-Haul and giving up the Cody ghost. After 13 years he was moving back to Iowa. And he was walking away from a good job. "I just need a change of scenery," he said.
I found this encounter interesting because after 14 years residence myself, Cody and I are also parting company. The one year sabbatical spent working for a paper in Choteau, Montana, I've covered already ("It's Hot," TAS, July 1998). And rather than bore readers with the reasons for my new move, I refer them to my recent "Cody Coda."
In the piece I speculate as to whether I'll move to nearby Big Horn County, Wyoming. But after careful thought I've changed my mind. I've decided to move to -- God willing -- Salmon, Idaho, which will offer a more reasonable standard of living. More on that later.
WESTERN TRANSIENCE encompasses the region's entire 200-year history. Mountain men, gold rushers, cowboys trailing a herd. Later, Depression-era public works projects attracted thousands of desperate people to build roads, bridges, and dams. And later still came the oil booms.
Maybe it has something to do with the vast landscapes and the ability one has to see off into far vistas. Easterners can't see very far. Low hills and dense hardwood forests block the view. No spikey peaks line the horizon fifty miles away. Those long western views have always been a stimulus to dream of flight. To go away across a wide river or mountain range. Away across the Great Divide.
Easterners don't get this. "Back East," most people think it the norm to work at the same job for life, and then retire to God's waiting room in Florida or somewhere else warm. These are the "Beach People." I have eastern relatives and friends in this category. The un-transient East (and there is nothing more un-transient than lying on a beach) does not understand the transient West. These are two distinct cultural and demographic views inhabiting the same country.
Going back to Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Jack London, transient Western writers have been the rule rather than exception. Wallace Stegner probably wouldn't have achieved any degree of greatness if he hadn't roamed the West in his youth. His family had a dozen addresses in Saskatchewan, Washington state, and Montana before landing in Salt Lake City, where the aspiring author managed to attend the University of Utah during the Depression years.
While Stegner's roaming was strictly economically driven due to the times he lived in, writers have always been after that change of scenery, new people and experiences to get the juices flowing again. Though they tend to fall into that aforementioned category of people who make a mess of things.
I've always believed that writers go stale without periodic life upheavals (good or bad) or uprootings, and lately I believe that I've fallen into this state of literary disrepair. I've digested and regurgitated Cody, Wyoming, many times, and I'm tired of it. I need a new place for a psychic tuneup, if you will.
SALMON IS A town of 3,300 people in central Idaho near the Montana border. Some 400 miles west of Cody, it's situated in the Salmon River Valley at 4,004 feet of elevation (altitude larger than multitude) and at the confluence of the Salmon River and the smaller Lemhi River. The ten thousand feet snowy peaks of the Bitterroot Mountains line the east side of the valley ten miles away.
Closer to the west are the Salmon River Mountains, and just beyond them the border of the "Frank Church -- River of No Return" Wilderness, at 1.3 million acres the largest federally designated wilderness area in the lower Forty Eight states. The "River of No Return" refers to the fact that multi-day river rafting parties can only float downstream from Salmon to take-out points along the river for up to 200 miles to Riggins, Idaho. They cannot return to Salmon via the river.
The region was visited in the summer of 1805 by the westering Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery. There the indispensable Sacagawea had a reunion with her Shoshone relatives. She had been born a few miles up the Lemhi near present Tendoy, Idaho. But modern-day Salmon claims her as its own, and a small museum called the Sacagawea Interpretive Center is devoted to her and the Lewis and Clark enterprise.
A generation after the latter, a Rocky Mountain Fur Company brigade -- including mountain man legends Jim Bridger and Thomas Fitzpatrick -- spent the winter of 1832-'33 camped on the Salmon hunting game and fighting occasional skirmishes with small parties of marauding Blackfeet. Later on came the miners, loggers, and ranchers.
SALMON IS certainly remote. Missoula, Montana (population 75,000) is 140 miles to the north; Boise, Idaho (population 200,000) is 250 miles to the southwest and over mountain roads. Yet Salmon is a modern town with good schools, a small hospital, Internet and Cable TV service, a good public library, microbrews and fancy coffee.
There is a vibrant downtown economy because -- at just 3,300 people -- it's too small to attract big box stores such as Wal-Mart, but that's good and bad. The river chugs through town, keeping a dozen local river rafting outfitters busy all summer. And packtrip outfitters get tourists on horseback to probe the "Frank Church" on weeklong jaunts. I plan on quite a bit of trailhiking there myself.
I also plan -- to paraphrase Voltaire -- to "cultivate the garden" of my "working retirement." Writing, of course, and doing God-knows-what-else to make a living. After 30 years of wandering around the American West whenever I could, Salmon may be the last stop on the trip, so to speak.
So I bid my Cody friends adieu, with invitations to visit and promises to return yearly over the mountains myself. Small future interregnums from my last hurrah on the River of No Return.
Bill Croke is a writer in Cody, Wyoming -- for now.
Israel's Predicament at 60
By Daniel Pipeshttp://www.frontpagemag.com/
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Two religiously-identified new states emerged from the shards of the British empire in the aftermath of World War II. Israel, of course, was one; the other was Pakistan.
They make an interesting, if little-compared pair. Pakistan's experience with widespread poverty, near-constant internal turmoil, and external tensions, culminating in its current status as near-rogue state, suggests the perils that Israel avoided, with its stable, liberal political culture, dynamic economy, cutting-edge high-tech sector, lively culture, and impressive social cohesion.
But for all its achievements, the Jewish state lives under a curse that Pakistan and most other polities never face: the threat of elimination. Its remarkable progress over the decades has not liberated it from a multi-pronged peril that includes nearly every means imaginable: weapons of mass destruction, conventional military attack, terrorism, internal subversion, economic blockade, demographic assault, and ideological undermining. No other contemporary state faces such an array of threats; indeed, probably none in history ever has.
The enemies of Israel divide into two main camps: the Left and the Muslims, with the far Right a minor third element. The Left includes a rabid edge (International ANSWER, Noam Chomsky) and a more polite center (United Nations General Assembly, left-liberal political parties, the mainstream media, mainline churches, school textbooks). In the final analysis, however, the Left serves less as a force in its own right than as an auxiliary for the primary anti-Zionist actor, which is the Muslim population. This latter, in turn, can be divided into three distinct groupings.
First come the foreign states: Five armed forces that invaded Israel on its independence in May 1948, and then neighboring armies, air forces, and navies fought in the wars of 1956, 1967, 1970, and 1973. While the conventional threat has somewhat receded, Egypt's U.S.-financed arms build-up presents one danger and the threats from weapons of mass destruction (especially from Iran but also from Syria and potentially from many other states) present an even greater one.
Second come the external Palestinians, those living outside Israel. Sidelined by governments from 1948 until 1967, Yasir Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization got their opportunity with the defeat of three states' armed forces in the Six-Day War. Subsequent developments, such as the 1982 Lebanon war and the 1993 Oslo accords, confirmed the centrality of external Palestinians. Today, they drive the conflict, through violence (terrorism, missiles from Gaza) and even more importantly by driving world opinion against Israel via a public relations effort that resonates widely among Muslims and the Left.
Third come the Muslim citizens of Israel, the sleepers in the equation. They benefited from Israel's open ways to grow in numbers and to evolve from a docile and ineffective community into a assertive one that increasingly rejects the Jewish nature of the Israeli state, with potentially profound consequences for that the future identity of that state.
If this long list of perils makes Israel different from all other Western countries, forcing it to protect itself on a daily basis from the ranks of its many foes, its predicament renders Israel oddly similar to other Middle Eastern countries, which likewise face a threat of elimination.
Kuwait, conquered by Iraq, actually disappeared from the face of the earth between August 1990 and February 1991. Lebanon, under Syria's control since 1976, could be officially incorporated by Damascus at any time. Bahrain is occasionally claimed by Tehran to be a part of Iran. Jordan's existence as an independent state has always been precarious.
That Israel finds itself in this company has several implications. It puts Israel's existential dilemma into perspective: If no country risks elimination outside of the Middle East, this is a nearly routine problem within the region, suggesting that Israel's unsettled status will not be resolved any time soon. This pattern also highlights the Middle East's uniquely cruel, unstable, and fatal political life. The Middle East's deep and wide political sickness points to the error of seeing the Arab-Israeli conflict as the motor force behind its problems.
Israel having survived countless threats to its existence over the past six decades, and it having done so with its honor intact, offers a reason for its population to celebrate. But the rejoicing cannot last long, for it's right back to the barricades to defend against the next threat.
Mr. Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/), director of the Middle East Forum, is the Taube/Diller Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University during the spring.
A Harlem Brown-Bag Lunch in South Korea
By Thomas Sowellhttp://www.nationalreview.com
May 06, 2008, 0:00 a.m.
Sometimes unrelated anecdotes nevertheless tell a coherent story.
One newspaper story that caught my eye recently was about two high-powered schools in South Korea where Korean girls study 15 hours a day, preparing themselves for tests to get into elite colleges in the United States. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton already have 34 students from those schools.
When a copy of the 50th anniversary report on members of the Harvard class of 1958 arrived in the mail recently, I thought back to one of my fellow students in that class who had worn a hole in the sole of his shoe but put a folded piece of newspaper in his shoe to cover the hole, rather than tell his parents.
He realized that they would buy him a new pair of shoes if they knew — and he also realized that they could not afford it.
He went on to become a professor at several well-known medical schools and to rack up various achievements and honors over the years.
From even further back in time, I received a letter recently from a man who grew up in my old neighborhood back in Harlem. When he and I were in the same junior high school, one day a teacher who saw him eating his brown-bag lunch suddenly arranged for him to get a lunch from the school cafeteria without having to pay for it.
It happened so fast that my schoolmate had already taken a bite from the school lunch when he suddenly realized that he had been given charity — and he wouldn’t swallow the food. Instead he went to the toilet and spat it out.
By now his brown-bag lunch had been thrown out, so he just went hungry that day. He went on to become a very successful psychiatrist.
Like everyone else, I have also been hearing a lot lately about Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of the church that Barack Obama has belonged to for 20 years.
Both men, in their different ways, have for decades been promoting the far left vision of victimization and grievances — Wright from his pulpit and Obama as a community organizer for the radical group ACORN, as a collaborator with former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, and as the member of the U.S. Senate with the farthest-left voting record.
Later, when the ultimate political prize — the White House — loomed on the horizon, Obama did a complete makeover, now portraying himself as a healer of divisions.
The difference between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is that they are addressing different audiences, using different styles adapted to those audiences.
It is a difference between upscale demagoguery and ghetto demagoguery, playing the audience for suckers in both cases.
People on the far Left like to flatter themselves that they are for the poor and the downtrodden. But what is most likely to lift people out of poverty — telling them that the world has done them wrong or promoting the work ethnic of the Korean girls, the dogged determination of my Harvard classmate with the newspaper in his shoe, or the self-reliance of my fellow junior-high-school student in Harlem who had too much pride to take charity?
When young people go out into the world, what will they have to offer that can gain them the rewards they seek from others and the achievements they need for themselves?
Will they have the skills of science, technology, or medicine?
Or will they have only the resentments that have been whipped up by the likes of Jeremiah Wright or the sense of entitlement from the government that has been Barack Obama’s stock in trade?
In the real world, a sense of grievance or entitlement, as a result of the mistreatment of your ancestors, is not likely to get you very far with people who are too busy dealing with current economic realities to spend much time thinking about their own ancestors, much less other people’s ancestors.
Another seemingly unrelated experience was being in a crowd at a graveside in a Jewish cemetery last week. That crowd included people who were black, white, Asian, Catholic, Jewish, and no doubt others. This country has come a long way, just in my lifetime.
We don’t need people like either Jeremiah Wright or Barack Obama to take us backward.
The time is long overdue to stop gullibly accepting the Left’s vision of itself as idealistic, rather than self-aggrandizing.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Christopher Hitchens: Are We Getting Two for One?
Is Michelle Obama responsible for the Jeremiah Wright fiasco? Posted Monday, May 5, 2008, at 11:24 AM ETSo numbed have I become by the endless replay of the fatuous clerical rantings of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that it has taken me this long to remember the significant antecedent. In 1995, there appeared a documentary titled Brother Minister about the assassination of Malcolm X. It contained a secretly filmed segment showing Louis Farrakhan shouting at the top of his lungs in the Nation of Islam's temple in Chicago on "Savior's Day" in 1993. Farrakhan, verging on hysteria, demanded to know of the murdered Malcolm X: "If we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours?" His apparent admission of what had long been suspected—that it was the Black Muslim leadership that ordered Malcolm's slaying—is not understood or remembered (or viewed) as often as it might be.
I invite you to look at the film of Farrakhan's sweating, yelling, paranoid face and to bear in mind that this depraved thug, who boasts of "dealing with" one of black America's moral heroes, is the man praised by Jeremiah Wright and referred to with respect as "Minister Farrakhan" by the senator who hopes to be the next president of the United States.
Liberal comment on Wright, and on the incredible damage that this conceited old fanatic has done to the Obama campaign, tends to dwell on the negative effect that black chauvinist rhetoric has on white working-class voters. Fair enough, I suppose. But why should a thinking black member of the working class want any truck with a Farrakhan fan or with a moral idiot who thinks that the drugs and disease in the black community are imposed by an outside conspiracy? I don't need any condescending liberal to explain to me why black Americans are inclined to be touchy about the way their forebears were treated any more than I require a patronizing former Harvard law student to guide me through the anxieties of the gun-owning and hunting community. I can quite easily understand these points without pedagogic assistance. What I won't be told is that Tawana Brawley was right, or that AIDS is the fault of the government, or that Jews were behind the slave trade, or that there is a secret Masonic code in the dollar bill. And the apologist for murder "Minister Farrakhan" and his big-mouth Christian friends flirt with this kind of half-baked garbage every day.
Nettled at last by the way in which this has upset his campaign, Sen. Obama last week cut the ties that bound him to his crackpot mentor. Well, high time. But those who profess relief at this should perhaps revisit what they thought (and wrote) about the earlier Philadelphia speech in which Obama was held to have achieved the same result with less trouble. If he was right last week, then the Philly speech was a failure on every level, and if it was a failure on every level, and thus left Obama hideously vulnerable to the very next speech made by his foaming pastor, then that must raise questions of eligibility for the highest office.
What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright's pews, and at Wright's mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama's part for Wright's views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to "Minister" Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?
This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, "Keep my wife out of it," or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse's influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.
I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she's much influenced by the definition of black "separationism" offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. I remember poor Stokely Carmichael quite well. After a hideous series of political and personal fiascos, he fled to Africa, renamed himself Kwame Toure after two of West Africa's most repellently failed dictators, and then came briefly back to the United States before electing to die in exile. I last saw him as the warm-up speaker for Louis Farrakhan in Madison Square Garden in 1985, on the evening when Farrakhan made himself famous by warning Jews, "You can't say 'Never Again' to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you're there forever." I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: "Are we getting two for one?" And don't be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it's too late to ask.
slate:http://www.slate.com/id/2190589/
- Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
Islamist Chickens Roosting in America’s Backyard
Think America is fighting Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan so we don't have to battle them here? Actually, we are fighting their poisonous ideology at home as well.
by Youssef M. Ibrahim
Pajamas Media
http://pajamasmedia.com
May 4, 2008
In the very real war on terror, a nosy squabble over “fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here” clouds a simple truth: namely, that “they” are here already. Indeed, Islamists are busy constructing a wing of jihad in America’s backyard.
A potential audience of one million Arab-speaking cable subscribers of Time Warner in the greater New York area can feast on the Arabic Channel known as TAC to choose a menu that includes:
* A daily dose of Islamic jurisprudence from a sheik — most often Egyptian Amr Khaled, who wears a suit instead of a robe, advocating “peaceful jihad.” He opines on how it is the duty of Arab-Americans to become first, second, and always members of the Muslim ummah. The softness of his jihad-chic demeanor belies its exclusionary message: segregation of Arab-American Muslims from fellow Americans.
Amr Khaled
* TAC also serves a nightly diet of Syrian TV News, direct from Damascus with Syria’s view of the world. In this diatribe of analysis and disinformation, Iraq is an American butchery, the Zionist regime of Israel is destined for obliteration, and Syria is the greatest gift to the “Arab cause.”
* For entertainment there is a sprinkling of pseudo-historic soap operas about the old Muslim empire of Europe. In Ramadan, the month-long fasting period, this proselytizing is revved up to new levels of intensity, removing footage of belly dancing and other “infidel” joys from the steady fare of old Egyptian movies.
On its website, TAC says it is now 14 years old and serves the “Greater New York City Metropolitan area, including Jersey City, Bergen County, NJ, and Mt. Vernon, NY.”
The unanswered questions are who is funding it, what keeps it going, and what is TAC’s mission description. What is clear is its unmistakable Islamist revolutionary footprint.
A similar Trojan vehicle once quietly thriving in America until shut down by presidential order in 2001 was the infamous Holy Land Foundation, recently prosecuted without success by the American government.
In the failed trial of its handlers, the U.S. District Court in Dallas charged the foundation chapters with collecting $57 million for radical Islamic causes and using the money for direct or indirect donations to terrorist organizations, including Hamas. A new trial is pending. Already known, however, are the group’s ties to Islamist donors in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE and its cozy relations with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a front for the worldwide Muslim Brotherhood movement in the U.S.
Very much part of the same “process” was the famed Khalil Gibran School of Brooklyn, NY, a saga in which a militant Islamist public school system principal disguised a project for a madrassa entity funded with public funds under the guise of multiculturalism and teaching Arabic. It was stopped by a coalition of concerned New Yorkers, but a much bigger project by Saudi Arabia to fund Islamic Saudi academies since 1984 has been thriving in Virginia and elsewhere in Europe.
The common task is to instill the notion among Arab-Americans or European immigrant communities of Muslim countries that they are not part of secular multicultural societies. Targeted Americans are instructed on how to trim their layered diversified Arab heritage to a common denominator — one veiled enveloping Islam.
For those American Muslims who do not understand Arabic, there is the new Al-Jazeera in English, whose somewhat slick broadcasters hammer the notion of a flawed, unjust, decadent America and West.
American law enforcement is getting pretty good at spotting violent transmutations that may result from this ideological brainwashing, but has no tools, nor a body of laws, to stop or intercept the implantation process. Nor are there any identifiable, or standout, “moderates” — especially among successful Muslim professionals — to reverse the trend.
Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal, who authored Faith at War and the impressive Siege of Mecca, traveling widely in the Muslim world noted: “Often, those with the most bloodthirsty ideas were the well-to-do and the privileged who have had some experience with the West, not the downtrodden and ignorant masses.” Remember that privileged millionaire engineer and highly educated fellow Osama bin Laden or his equally elitist number two Ayman al-Zawahri, a doctor, physician, lecturer, and surgeon?
- Youssef M. Ibrahim, a freelance writer and risk consultant, is a former New York Times Mideast correspondent and Energy Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Author is reachable at ymibrahim2004@yahoo.com.
by Youssef M. Ibrahim
Pajamas Media
http://pajamasmedia.com
May 4, 2008
In the very real war on terror, a nosy squabble over “fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here” clouds a simple truth: namely, that “they” are here already. Indeed, Islamists are busy constructing a wing of jihad in America’s backyard.
A potential audience of one million Arab-speaking cable subscribers of Time Warner in the greater New York area can feast on the Arabic Channel known as TAC to choose a menu that includes:
* A daily dose of Islamic jurisprudence from a sheik — most often Egyptian Amr Khaled, who wears a suit instead of a robe, advocating “peaceful jihad.” He opines on how it is the duty of Arab-Americans to become first, second, and always members of the Muslim ummah. The softness of his jihad-chic demeanor belies its exclusionary message: segregation of Arab-American Muslims from fellow Americans.
Amr Khaled
* TAC also serves a nightly diet of Syrian TV News, direct from Damascus with Syria’s view of the world. In this diatribe of analysis and disinformation, Iraq is an American butchery, the Zionist regime of Israel is destined for obliteration, and Syria is the greatest gift to the “Arab cause.”
* For entertainment there is a sprinkling of pseudo-historic soap operas about the old Muslim empire of Europe. In Ramadan, the month-long fasting period, this proselytizing is revved up to new levels of intensity, removing footage of belly dancing and other “infidel” joys from the steady fare of old Egyptian movies.
On its website, TAC says it is now 14 years old and serves the “Greater New York City Metropolitan area, including Jersey City, Bergen County, NJ, and Mt. Vernon, NY.”
The unanswered questions are who is funding it, what keeps it going, and what is TAC’s mission description. What is clear is its unmistakable Islamist revolutionary footprint.
A similar Trojan vehicle once quietly thriving in America until shut down by presidential order in 2001 was the infamous Holy Land Foundation, recently prosecuted without success by the American government.
In the failed trial of its handlers, the U.S. District Court in Dallas charged the foundation chapters with collecting $57 million for radical Islamic causes and using the money for direct or indirect donations to terrorist organizations, including Hamas. A new trial is pending. Already known, however, are the group’s ties to Islamist donors in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE and its cozy relations with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a front for the worldwide Muslim Brotherhood movement in the U.S.
Very much part of the same “process” was the famed Khalil Gibran School of Brooklyn, NY, a saga in which a militant Islamist public school system principal disguised a project for a madrassa entity funded with public funds under the guise of multiculturalism and teaching Arabic. It was stopped by a coalition of concerned New Yorkers, but a much bigger project by Saudi Arabia to fund Islamic Saudi academies since 1984 has been thriving in Virginia and elsewhere in Europe.
The common task is to instill the notion among Arab-Americans or European immigrant communities of Muslim countries that they are not part of secular multicultural societies. Targeted Americans are instructed on how to trim their layered diversified Arab heritage to a common denominator — one veiled enveloping Islam.
For those American Muslims who do not understand Arabic, there is the new Al-Jazeera in English, whose somewhat slick broadcasters hammer the notion of a flawed, unjust, decadent America and West.
American law enforcement is getting pretty good at spotting violent transmutations that may result from this ideological brainwashing, but has no tools, nor a body of laws, to stop or intercept the implantation process. Nor are there any identifiable, or standout, “moderates” — especially among successful Muslim professionals — to reverse the trend.
Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal, who authored Faith at War and the impressive Siege of Mecca, traveling widely in the Muslim world noted: “Often, those with the most bloodthirsty ideas were the well-to-do and the privileged who have had some experience with the West, not the downtrodden and ignorant masses.” Remember that privileged millionaire engineer and highly educated fellow Osama bin Laden or his equally elitist number two Ayman al-Zawahri, a doctor, physician, lecturer, and surgeon?
- Youssef M. Ibrahim, a freelance writer and risk consultant, is a former New York Times Mideast correspondent and Energy Editor of the Wall Street Journal. Author is reachable at ymibrahim2004@yahoo.com.
As goest Israel ...
If the Jewish state can't survive the onslaught of militant Islam, neither can the rest of the civilized world
Lorne Gunter, National Post (Canada)
Published: Monday, May 05, 2008
Amir Cohen, Reuters
Israel is Western civilization's canary in the coal mine. If Israel cannot survive, perhaps Western civilization -- pluralistic, democratic, individualistic, secular, free-trading and devoted to the rule of law -- will be unable to last, either.
On the eve of Israel's 60th anniversary, those of us who cherish our own fundamental freedoms had better hope the Jewish state makes it through its second 60 years; or else our own right to think, say or worship as we please (unless, of course, we come under the scrutiny of a so-called human rights commission) is in jeopardy.
To many Canadians, that may seem a farfetched warning.
What has Israel's survival got to do with us? Israel is far away. It has different enemies than we do. Even among Islamic extremists, they are battling Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO and Islamic Jihad, while the West is confronting the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Besides, if we're nice and accommodating of diversity, the terrorists will respect our attempts to honour their culture and faith and leave us alone.
Nice theory. Too bad jihadis of every label view Israel and the West as conjoined and inseparable. Even though we may not see our destiny as inextricably linked with Israel's, they do. If we give up on Israel, they will simply take that as a sign they might be able to pressure us next to give up on Quebec, Mississauga, Michigan, Birmingham and the Paris suburbs.
This week, Riyad Na'san Al-Agha, Syria's culture minister and a man long touted in the West as an intellectual moderate, told Al Hiwar TV, an Arab-language channel based in London, that he longs for the destruction of Israel (so much for his moderation) and that he is "optimistic that within 10 years, Israel will come to its end."
What then? Arabs can concentrate on driving the infidels from their neighbourhood and, who knows, perhaps even take the fight to the infidels' homelands.
Remember, this is from a government official, not from a terrorist.
Hamas, despite occasionally insisting it can live peacefully with Israel, has never given up its dream of destroying "the Zionist entity," and never will. But what would Hamas do if it ever managed to dismantle Israel: pat itself on the back and close up?
Not at all. Hamas co-founder Mahmud az-Zahar has long said that should that happy day (for him) ever come, his organization would merely turn its efforts to the spread of Islam in the rest of the West, by force if necessary. To this end, Hamas has set up training camps in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
And Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, has frequently urged Palestinians to fight not only Israel but the whole of the Western world, which he has described as satanic.
Aaron Klein, an American journalist who now lives in Israel, last year released a fascinating book, Schmoozing with Terrorists: From Hollywood to the Holy Land, Jihadists Reveal Their Global Plans -- To a Jew!. In it, he recounts how in hundreds of hours of interviews with dozens of terrorists their declared hatred of the West was nearly as great as their hatred of Israel. They were not motivated by poverty or political oppression as much as by faith and ideology, and nearly all spoke of establishing a worldwide caliphate once they had dispatched the Jewish state. They were especially enraged by our equal treatment of women and our tolerance of gays and lesbians.
Most of the Palestinian attacks on Israelis of late have been centred around the small industrial-agricultural city of Sderot. Since 2001, there have been more than 6,000 rockets and mortars launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel, an average of nearly three per day, most of them aimed at Sderot. The pace has quickened since the beginning of the year.
Seldom has a day gone by since January when Sderot's schools and markets have not been emptied by the blare of air-raid sirens that sometimes provide only 15 seconds notice of an incoming Katyusha or Qassam rocket.
If we permit Israel to lose the battle for Sderot, if we in the West wag our finger at Israel's efforts to defend herself, it may not be long before we find Sderot's plight repeated in Markham, Newark or Leeds.
lgunter@shaw.ca
Lorne Gunter, National Post (Canada)
Published: Monday, May 05, 2008
Amir Cohen, Reuters
Israel is Western civilization's canary in the coal mine. If Israel cannot survive, perhaps Western civilization -- pluralistic, democratic, individualistic, secular, free-trading and devoted to the rule of law -- will be unable to last, either.
On the eve of Israel's 60th anniversary, those of us who cherish our own fundamental freedoms had better hope the Jewish state makes it through its second 60 years; or else our own right to think, say or worship as we please (unless, of course, we come under the scrutiny of a so-called human rights commission) is in jeopardy.
To many Canadians, that may seem a farfetched warning.
What has Israel's survival got to do with us? Israel is far away. It has different enemies than we do. Even among Islamic extremists, they are battling Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO and Islamic Jihad, while the West is confronting the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Besides, if we're nice and accommodating of diversity, the terrorists will respect our attempts to honour their culture and faith and leave us alone.
Nice theory. Too bad jihadis of every label view Israel and the West as conjoined and inseparable. Even though we may not see our destiny as inextricably linked with Israel's, they do. If we give up on Israel, they will simply take that as a sign they might be able to pressure us next to give up on Quebec, Mississauga, Michigan, Birmingham and the Paris suburbs.
This week, Riyad Na'san Al-Agha, Syria's culture minister and a man long touted in the West as an intellectual moderate, told Al Hiwar TV, an Arab-language channel based in London, that he longs for the destruction of Israel (so much for his moderation) and that he is "optimistic that within 10 years, Israel will come to its end."
What then? Arabs can concentrate on driving the infidels from their neighbourhood and, who knows, perhaps even take the fight to the infidels' homelands.
Remember, this is from a government official, not from a terrorist.
Hamas, despite occasionally insisting it can live peacefully with Israel, has never given up its dream of destroying "the Zionist entity," and never will. But what would Hamas do if it ever managed to dismantle Israel: pat itself on the back and close up?
Not at all. Hamas co-founder Mahmud az-Zahar has long said that should that happy day (for him) ever come, his organization would merely turn its efforts to the spread of Islam in the rest of the West, by force if necessary. To this end, Hamas has set up training camps in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
And Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, has frequently urged Palestinians to fight not only Israel but the whole of the Western world, which he has described as satanic.
Aaron Klein, an American journalist who now lives in Israel, last year released a fascinating book, Schmoozing with Terrorists: From Hollywood to the Holy Land, Jihadists Reveal Their Global Plans -- To a Jew!. In it, he recounts how in hundreds of hours of interviews with dozens of terrorists their declared hatred of the West was nearly as great as their hatred of Israel. They were not motivated by poverty or political oppression as much as by faith and ideology, and nearly all spoke of establishing a worldwide caliphate once they had dispatched the Jewish state. They were especially enraged by our equal treatment of women and our tolerance of gays and lesbians.
Most of the Palestinian attacks on Israelis of late have been centred around the small industrial-agricultural city of Sderot. Since 2001, there have been more than 6,000 rockets and mortars launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel, an average of nearly three per day, most of them aimed at Sderot. The pace has quickened since the beginning of the year.
Seldom has a day gone by since January when Sderot's schools and markets have not been emptied by the blare of air-raid sirens that sometimes provide only 15 seconds notice of an incoming Katyusha or Qassam rocket.
If we permit Israel to lose the battle for Sderot, if we in the West wag our finger at Israel's efforts to defend herself, it may not be long before we find Sderot's plight repeated in Markham, Newark or Leeds.
lgunter@shaw.ca
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Watch the Web for Climate Change Truths
By Christopher Booker London Daily Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 04/05/2008
Last September's data, showed ice cover had shrunk over six months to just 3 million but by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km.
A notable story of recent months should have been the evidence pouring in from all sides to cast doubts on the idea that the world is inexorably heating up. The proponents of man-made global warming have become so rattled by how the forecasts of their computer models are being contradicted by the data that some are rushing to modify the thesis.
Read more from Christopher Booker
So a German study, published by Nature last week, claimed that, while the world is definitely warming, it may cool down until 2015 "while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions".
A little vignette of the media's one-sided view was given by recent events on Snowdon, the highest mountain in southern Britain. Each year between 2003 and 2007, the retreat of its winter snow cover inspired reports citing this as evidence of global warming.
In 2004 scientists from the University of Bangor made headlines with the prediction that Snowdon might lose its snowcap altogether by 2020. In 2007 a Welsh MP, Lembit Opik, was saying "it is shocking to think that in just 14 years snow on this mountain could be nothing but a distant memory".
Last November, viewing photographs of a snowless Snowdon at an exhibition in Cardiff, the Welsh environment minister, Jane Davidson, said "we must act now to reduce the greenhouse gases that cause climate change".
Yet virtually no coverage has been given to the abnormally deep spring snow which prevented the completion of a new building on Snowdon's summit for more than a month, and nearly made it miss the deadline for £4.2 million of EU funding. (Brussels eventually extended the deadline to next autumn.)
Two weeks ago, as North America emerged from its coldest and snowiest winter for decades, the US National Climate Data Center, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a statement that snow cover in January on the Eurasian land mass had been the most extensive ever recorded, and that in the US March had been only the 63rd warmest since records began in 1895.
While global warming enthusiasts might take cheer from the NOAA's claim that "average global land temperature" in March was "the warmest on record", this was in striking contrast to a graph published last week on the Climate Audit website by Steve McIntyre. Tracking satellite data for the tropical troposphere, it showed March temperatures plunging to one of their lowest points in 30 years.
Mr. McIntyre is the computer expert who exposed the infamous "hockey stick" graph - that icon of warmist orthodoxy which showed global temperatures soaring recently to their highest level for 1,000 years. He showed that the computer model that produced this graph had been so designed that it would have conjured even random numbers from a telephone directory into the shape of a hockey stick).
On April 24 the World Wildife Fund (WWF), another body keen to keep the warmist flag flying, published a study warning that Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it may soon reach a "tipping point" where "irreversible change" takes place. This was based on last September's data, showing ice cover having shrunk over six months from 13 million square kilometres to just 3 million.
What the WWF omitted to mention was that by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km (see the website Cryosphere Today), and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska that month was at its highest level ever recorded. (At the same time Antarctic sea ice-cover was also at its highest-ever level, 30 per cent above normal).
The most dramatic evidence, however, emerged last week with an announcement by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that an immense slow-cycling movement of water in the Pacific, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), had unexpectedly shifted into its cool phase, something which only happens every 30 years or so, ultimately affecting climate all over the globe.
Discussion of this on the invaluable Watts Up With That website, run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts, shows how the alternations of the PDO between warm and cool coincided with each of the major temperature shifts of the 20th century - warming after 1905, cooling after 1946, warming again after 1977 - and how the new shift to a cool phase could have repercussions for decades to come.
It is notable that the German computer predictions published last week by Nature forecast a decade of cooling due to deep-ocean movements in the Atlantic, without taking account of how this may now be reinforced by a similar, even greater movement in the Pacific.
Mr Watts points out that the West coast of the USA might already be experiencing these effects in the recent freezing temperatures that have devastated orchards and vineyards in California, prompting an appeal for disaster relief for growers who fear they may have lost this year's crops.
Mr Watts's readers are amused by the explanation from one warmist apologist that "these natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities - or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it".
It is striking, in view of the colossal implications of the current response to "the greatest challenge confronting mankind" - as our politicians love to call it - how this hugely important debate is almost entirely overlooked by the media, and is instead conducted largely on the internet, through expert websites such as those run by Mr McIntyre and Mr Watts.
On one hand our politicians are committing us to spending unimaginable sums on wind farms, emissions trading schemes, absurdly ambitious biofuel targets, and every kind of tax and regulation designed to reduce our "carbon footprint" - all based on blindly accepting the predictions of computer models that the planet is overheating due to our output of greenhouse gases.
On the other hand, a growing number of scientists are producing ever more evidence to show how those computer models are based on wholly inadequate data and assumptions - as is being confirmed by the behaviour of nature itself (not least the continuing non-arrival of sunspot cycle 24).
The fact is that what has been happening to the world's climate in recent years, since global temperatures ceased to rise after 1998, was not predicted by any of those officially-sponsored models. The discrepancy between their predictions and observable data becomes more glaring with every month that passes.
It won't do for believers in warmist orthodoxy to claim that, although temperatures may be falling, this is only because they are "masking an underlying warming trend that is still continuing" - nor to fob us off with assurances that the "German model shows that higher temperatures than 1998, the warmest year on record, are likely to return after 2015".
In view of what is now at stake, such quasi-religious incantations masquerading as science are something we can no longer afford. We should get back to proper science before it is too late.
Fairness, idealism and other atrocities
Commencement advice you're unlikely to hear elsewhere.By P.J. O'Rourke
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com
May 4, 2008
Well, here you are at your college graduation. And I know what you're thinking: "Gimme the sheepskin and get me outta here!" But not so fast. First you have to listen to a commencement speech.
Don't moan. I'm not going to "pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next." I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.
We were the moron generation. We were the generation that believed we could stop the Vietnam War by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything -- which they did, for John Belushi. We believed in free love. Yes, the love was free, but we paid a high price for the sex.
My generation spoiled everything for you. It has always been the special prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grown-ups. But my generation exhausted the Earth's resources of the weird. Weird clothes -- we wore them. Weird beards -- we grew them. Weird words and phrases -- we said them. So, when it came your turn to be original and look and act weird, all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologize.
So now, it's my job to give you advice. But I'm thinking: You're finishing 16 years of education, and you've heard all the conventional good advice you can stand. So, let me offer some relief:
1. Go out and make a bunch of money!
Here we are living in the world's most prosperous country, surrounded by all the comforts, conveniences and security that money can provide. Yet no American political, intellectual or cultural leader ever says to young people, "Go out and make a bunch of money." Instead, they tell you that money can't buy happiness. Maybe, but money can rent it.
There's nothing the matter with honest moneymaking. Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box. In a free society, with the rule of law and property rights, no one loses when someone else gets rich.
2. Don't be an idealist!
Don't chain yourself to a redwood tree. Instead, be a corporate lawyer and make $500,000 a year. No matter how much you cheat the IRS, you'll still end up paying $100,000 in property, sales and excise taxes. That's $100,000 to schools, sewers, roads, firefighters and police. You'll be doing good for society. Does chaining yourself to a redwood tree do society $100,000 worth of good?
Idealists are also bullies. The idealist says, "I care more about the redwood trees than you do. I care so much I can't eat. I can't sleep. It broke up my marriage. And because I care more than you do, I'm a better person. And because I'm the better person, I have the right to boss you around."
Get a pair of bolt cutters and liberate that tree.
Who does more for the redwoods and society anyway -- the guy chained to a tree or the guy who founds the "Green Travel Redwood Tree-Hug Tour Company" and makes a million by turning redwoods into a tourist destination, a valuable resource that people will pay just to go look at?
So make your contribution by getting rich. Don't be an idealist.
3. Get politically uninvolved!
All politics stink. Even democracy stinks. Imagine if our clothes were selected by the majority of shoppers, which would be teenage girls. I'd be standing here with my bellybutton exposed. Imagine deciding the dinner menu by family secret ballot. I've got three kids and three dogs in my family. We'd be eating Froot Loops and rotten meat.
But let me make a distinction between politics and politicians. Some people are under the misapprehension that all politicians stink. Impeach George W. Bush, and everything will be fine. Nab Ted Kennedy on a DUI, and the nation's problems will be solved.
But the problem isn't politicians -- it's politics. Politics won't allow for the truth. And we can't blame the politicians for that. Imagine what even a little truth would sound like on today's campaign trail:
"No, I can't fix public education. The problem isn't the teachers unions or a lack of funding for salaries, vouchers or more computer equipment The problem is your kids!"
4. Forget about fairness!
We all get confused about the contradictory messages that life and politics send.
Life sends the message, "I'd better not be poor. I'd better get rich. I'd better make more money than other people." Meanwhile, politics sends us the message, "Some people make more money than others. Some are rich while others are poor. We'd better close that 'income disparity gap.' It's not fair!"
Well, I am here to advocate for unfairness. I've got a 10-year-old at home. She's always saying, "That's not fair." When she says this, I say, "Honey, you're cute. That's not fair. Your family is pretty well off. That's not fair. You were born in America. That's not fair. Darling, you had better pray to God that things don't start getting fair for you." What we need is more income, even if it means a bigger income disparity gap.
5. Be a religious extremist!
So, avoid politics if you can. But if you absolutely cannot resist, read the Bible for political advice -- even if you're a Buddhist, atheist or whatever. Don't get me wrong, I am not one of those people who believes that God is involved in politics. On the contrary. Observe politics in this country. Observe politics around the world. Observe politics through history. Does it look like God's involved?
The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin. Observe the Tenth Commandment. The first nine commandments concern theological principles and social law: Thou shalt not make graven images, steal, kill, et cetera. Fair enough. But then there's the tenth: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's."
Here are God's basic rules about how we should live, a brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts. And, right at the end of it we read, "Don't envy your buddy because he has an ox or a donkey." Why did that make the top 10? Why would God, with just 10 things to tell Moses, include jealousy about livestock?
Well, think about how important this commandment is to a community, to a nation, to a democracy. If you want a mule, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don't whine about what the people across the street have. Get rich and get your own.
Now, one last thing:
6. Don't listen to your elders!
After all, if the old person standing up here actually knew anything worth telling, he'd be charging you for it.
- P.J. O'Rourke, a correspondent for the Weekly Standard and the Atlantic, is the author, most recently, of "On The Wealth of Nations." A longer version of this article appears in Change magazine, which reports on trends and issues in higher education.
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