The Karzai Fiasco

Echoes of Vietnam in a spat that only helps the Taliban.

REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news-opinion-commentary.html
APRIL 7, 2010

President Obama isn't faring too well at converting enemies to friends, but he does seem to have a talent for turning friends into enemies. The latest spectacle is the all-too-public and counterproductive war of words between the White House and our putative ally, Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The only winner so far in this spat is the Taliban.

The Obama Administration seems to have had it out for Mr. Karzai from the day it took office, amid multiple reports based on obvious U.S. leaks that Vice President Joe Biden or some other official had told the Afghan leader to shape up. The tension escalated after Mr. Karzai's tainted but ultimately recognized re-election victory last year, and it reached the name-calling stage late last month when President Obama met Mr. Karzai on a trip to Kabul and the White House let the world know that the American had lectured the Afghan about his governing obligations.


European Pressphoto Agency
Afghan President Hamid Karzai

The public rebuke was a major loss of face for Mr. Karzai, who later returned fire at the U.S., reportedly even saying at a private meeting that if the Americans kept it up, he might join the Taliban. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs kept up the schoolyard taunts yesterday by suggesting that Mr. Obama might not meet with Mr. Karzai as scheduled in Washington on May 12.

"We certainly would evaluate whatever continued or further remarks President Karzai makes, as to whether it is constructive to have that meeting," said Mr. Gibbs, in a show of disdain he typically reserves for House Republicans.

The kindest word for all of this is fiasco. American troops are risking their lives to implement a counterinsurgency strategy that requires winning popular support in Afghanistan, and the main message from America's Commander in Chief to the Afghan people is that their government can't be trusted. That ought to make it easier to win hearts and minds.

Mr. Karzai has been disappointing as a nation-builder, has tolerated corrupt officials and family members, and can be arrogant and crudely nationalistic. Presumably, however, Mr. Obama was well aware of these defects last year when he recognized the Afghan election results and then committed 20,000 more U.S. troops to the theater.

You go to war with the allies you have, and it's contrary to any diplomatic principle to believe that continuing public humiliation will make Mr. Karzai more likely to cooperate. On the evidence of the last week, such treatment has only given the Afghan leader more incentive to make a show of his political independence from the Americans.

All the more so given that Mr. Karzai has already heard Mr. Obama promise that U.S. troops will begin leaving Afghanistan as early as July 2011. This shouting spectacle will also embolden the Taliban, who after being run out of Marjah have every reason to tell the citizens of Kandahar that even the Americans don't like the Afghan government and are short-timers in any case.

This treatment of an ally eerily echoes the way the Kennedy Administration treated Ngo Dinh Diem, the President of South Vietnam in the early 1960s. On JFK's orders, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge refused to meet with Diem, and when U.S. officials got word of a coup against Diem they let it be known they would not interfere. Diem was executed, and South Vietnam never again had a stable government.

By contrast, President George W. Bush decided to support and work closely with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during the 2007 U.S. military surge in Iraq. The Maliki government was sectarian and sometimes incompetent, and some of its officials were no doubt corrupt, but Mr. Bush understood that the larger goal was to defeat al Qaeda and to stabilize the country. From FDR to Reagan, Presidents of both parties have had to tolerate allied leaders of varying talents and unsavory qualities in the wartime pursuit of more important foreign-policy goals.

Coming on the heels of the U.S. public chastisement of Israel's government, the larger concern over the Karzai episode is what it reveals about Mr. Obama's diplomatic frame of mind. With adversaries, he is willing to show inordinate patience, to the point of muffling his objections when opposition blood ran in the streets of Tehran. With allies, on the other hand, the President is unforgiving and insists they follow his lead or face his public wrath. The result will be that our foes fear us less, and that we have fewer friends.

How Much Taxation Is Enough?

by Jonah Goldberg
http://www.townhall.com/
April 7, 2010

Congratulations! This is your last week working for the man -- at least for this year. The Tax Foundation calculates that Tax Freedom Day for 2010 is April 9, which means that by Friday, Americans will have spent nearly 100 days working just to pay their taxes. If Democrats have their way, Tax Freedom Day will keep getting later and later.

Hold that thought. Imagine for a moment that Tax Freedom Day was Dec. 31. In other words, picture working 365 days a year for the government. Now, the government would "give" you a place to sleep, food to eat and clothes to wear, but all your income would really be Washington's income to allocate as it saw fit. Some romantics might call this sort of arrangement "socialism" or "communism." But another perfectly good word for it is "slavery," or, if you prefer, involuntary servitude.

No one is proposing any such arrangement. But it's an important point conceptually. A 100 percent tax rate would be tyrannical not just because you have a right to own what you create, but because the government would necessarily decide what you can and can't have. Reasonable people can of course differ about where a tax rate becomes tyrannical, and we're far from that line in historical terms. But any amount of taxation can be unjust if it is being used for bad reasons, is applied discriminatorily or if it's taken without representation. (That's how the American Revolution started, after all.)

Individual liberty is far from the only concern, either. The kind of country we want to be is deeply bound up in taxation. The Tax Foundation estimates that some 60 percent of American families already get more from the government than they pay in taxes (and the top 10 percent of earners pay more than 70 percent of the income taxes). If all of President Obama's plans are enacted, that percentage will increase. We are heading toward being a country where instead of the people deciding how much money the government should have, the government decides how much money the people should have.

Only after they passed "ObamaCare" did Democrats clarify that this was one of their motives. ObamaCare's appeal has less to do with saving money -- which it won't do -- and more to do with spreading the wealth around. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., recently admitted that alleviating the "maldistribution of income in America" from the haves to the have-nots is one of the legislation's real benefits.

Of course, this will fuel the national debt, which has soared on both parties' watches ($12 trillion now and heading for $20 trillion in a decade), choking liberty in another way. We are levying tax obligations for generations to come. Our grandchildren didn't have much representation in that taxation.

There's also the simple fact that taxes impede growth, and low economic growth curtails the pursuit of happiness for everyone. Democrats are increasingly skeptical about this transcendently obvious point because they have convinced themselves that since government is better than the private sector when it comes to spending money wisely, it only makes sense to take money from the dumb private sector and let the smart government sector decide what to do with it. Well, no matter how dumb America's wealth-creators might be, they're smart enough to respond to incentives and disincentives. Indeed, since 1950, no matter where their tax rates have been, from as low as 28 percent to as high as 91 percent, the government's take has held at about 19.5 percent of GDP, suggesting that squeezing taxpayers harder doesn't necessarily yield more juice.

Personally, I have never understood liberalism's blind spot for liberty when it comes to taxation. A 24-hour waiting period before a teenager can have an abortion is an allegedly grotesque violation of individual freedom, but a federal government that takes vast amounts of your money -- the means by which you exercise your every freedom -- to distribute as it sees fit is "progressive"? The USA Patriot Act, whose threat to privacy was somewhere between entirely theoretical and nonexistent for the overwhelming majority of Americans, shocked the liberal conscience. But our income tax system -- made idiotically complex by both parties -- that demands countless hours of preparation and requires law-abiding citizens to reveal (and document!) many of their most private decisions to government inspectors every year is "reasonable." Yet many liberals even think complaining about this is a sign of right-wing dementia.

Now, under ObamaCare, the IRS is going to branch out into the field of health care, enforcing mandates and collecting fees. Perhaps it's not entirely paranoid to fear that this will make the IRS's past intrusions of proctological exactitude even less metaphorical.

I bring this up because many in the Democratic Party and in the news media have a hard time understanding what the "Tea Party" crowd is talking about when it complains of incipient tyranny and intrusive government. This might be why much of the media keep making up motives for the tea partiers rather than taking them at their word (as when a CNN reporter told viewers that the tea parties were driven by "anti-CNN" passions). Again, reasonable people can disagree with where the line between necessary taxation and injustice lies. But the line exists. Tax Freedom Day is going to come later and later, no matter what. Maybe we should figure out now where on the calendar we should mark down that line.

- Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

The bad-nukes myth

By RALPH PETERS
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
April 7, 2010

Nuclear weapons are not evil. Terrifying, yes. But their horrific capabilities prevented a Third World War. It all depends on whose finger is on the button.

Until yesterday's formal announcement of the administration's new Nuclear Posture Review, nukes also kept us safe from a range of threats short of a doomsday scenario: Our enemies risked going only so far. Nukes didn't prevent all wars -- but wars remained local.

Yesterday, we threw away a significant part of history's most successful deterrent.

This looks like an act of reckless vanity on the part of the administration, but let's allow that this weakening of our national defense is the result of misguided idealism. The important thing isn't the politics, but the practical consequences.

Summarizing the changes in a Pentagon briefing yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates looked weary and chastened. The new posture emerged only after months of bitter argument between realists and activists. Without Gates, it would have been even worse.

Still, it must be painful to Gates -- a great American -- to accept that this policy went into effect on his watch.

Of all its malignant provisions, from accomodating Russian demands to preventing overdue updates for our arsenal, the most worrisome is the public declaration that, if the US suffers a biological, chemical or massive cyber attack, we will not respond with nukes.

This is a very real -- and unilateral -- weakening of our national security. In the past, our ambiguity made our enemies hesitate. The new policy guarantees that they'll intensify their pursuit of bugs, gas and weaponized computers.

Intending to halt a nuclear arms race, we've fired the starter pistol for a rush to develop alternative weapons of mass destruction.

Will this policy be the inspiration for an engineered plague that someday scythes through humankind? Chemical attacks are horrible, but local; cyber attacks are potentially devastating. But an innovative virus unleashed on the world could do what Cold War nuclear arsenals never did: Kill hundreds of millions.

This change leaves us far less safe. If a thug has a knife, but knows you're packing a gun, he's considerably less likely to attack you. Why promise him that you won't use the gun -- and might not use your knife?

Idealism has devolved into madness.

The left has never been willing to accept that deterrence works. In the left's world-view, hostile foreign actors aren't the problem. We are. If we disarm, surely they will . . .

This no-nukes obsession dates back to the early Cold War, when the Soviets used every available means, from dollars to earnest dupes, to persuade Western leftists that America's nuclear weapons were about to wipe out humanity. The USSR couldn't expand its European empire in the face of US nukes -- so the Soviets brilliantly portrayed us as the aggressors. (And the left praised Stalin as a man of peace.)

Massive ban-the-bomb demonstrations filled Western streets for decades (but not the streets behind the Iron Curtain). The left rejected deterrence as a security model.

The seeds sown by the deceased USSR put down durable roots. Pursuing a nuke-free world became a litmus test for the left.

Now we have a president who's taken on that goal as his personal grail. He's absolutely right that nukes have horrifying power -- but the paradox of deterrence is that, the more monstrous the weapons you possess, the less likely you are to ever need to employ them.

The new policy won't stop Iran and other rogue states from pursuing nukes (even though Iran and North Korea were singled out as policy exceptions). But it will accelerate the proliferation of other weapons of mass destruction. And it certainly won't reduce the probability of war.

It will also ensure that our aging arsenal will have to be content with a few Band-Aids; that we won't develop new, safer nuclear weapons -- and that we'll increasingly have to rely on the kindness of strangers.

Idealists just invited the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to ride a little closer.

Ralph Peters' new book is "Endless War."

Thoughts on Allies Gone By

[Victor Davis Hanson]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/
Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Whatever the protestations of the Obama administration, many in both Britain and Israel feel that 2009–10 marked a watershed, the beginning of an era in which America was no longer a special friend to either whether gauged by serial symbolic snubs or real policy differences on things like Jerusalem and the Falklands.

Why does this matter, other than that it is stupid for a country to treat old friends like belligerents and old belligerents like friends?


Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in Quebec, Canada (September 12, 1944).

In the case of Britain, history resonates. Over the last century it was Britain that, sometimes alone, defended liberal constitutional government, whether from Prussian militarism or the hydra of fascism, Nazism, and Japanese militarism. It was always a reliable partner in the Cold War, and aside from normal periodic spats was a loyal ally in most of America’s postwar fights. We forget sometimes the courageous record of the British in Korea, or their lonely alliance with us in Iraq. Note that this is all apart from the British role in general in the shaping of Western liberal political history, and in particular the protocols and values that underlie so much of the American experiment, from a common language to a rich heritage of literature and thought. For an American president to be woefully ignorant of all that, and why it should count, is nothing short of unbelievable.

Obama is equally clueless about why, for a half-century at least, both Republican and Democratic presidents have forged a second special relationship, this one with Israel. There certainly were not always strategic advantages in doing so, given the Arab world’s vast petroleum reserves, its huge size and population in comparison to tiny Israel, and the global fear, first, of rampant Soviet-inspired Palestinian terrorism, and, subsequently, its radical Islamic epigone.

Instead, the United States again, keen to both history and values took on the special defense of the Jewish state for a variety of principled considerations that went well beyond the concerns of Jewish Americans. We understood the long history of anti-Semitism and how, when freely expressed and practiced without objection, it devolves into pogroms and its ultimate nightmare in the Holocaust. We acknowledged the role of Judaism in the foundation of the Western Judaeo-Christian religious experience. And the American public was impressed that a tiny country without natural resources was able not only to survive in a sea of hostility, but to do so under the aegis of consensual government and an open society.

Last, such special consideration for Israel was predicated on some ugly realities. Most of the autocratic world, and some of the contemporary West, simply mask personal prejudice and realpolitik with a postmodern veneer of fashionable multicultural sympathy for the “other” despite the illiberal and often fascistic tendencies of both radical Islam and Arab dictatorship that so galvanize most of Israel’s Middle Eastern enemies. But when the U.S stood by Israel, there was a sort of equilibrium established.

The United Nations knew that nearly half of its resolutions aimed at Israel would come under fire from the United States. We would bite back in New York at the fiery speeches of an extremist like Arafat or Qaddafi. The Arab summits accepted that yet another pan-Arabic resolution damning the Jewish state would go nowhere in convincing the West to drop its alliance. And European triangulators accepted that their flagrant dislike of Israel would always encounter American resistance.

The net result, again, was that Israel’s front-line enemies, whether terrorists or state autocracies, accepted that it was futile to try to destroy Israel, and difficult to galvanize world opinion to turn it into a global pariah.

Now, however, the Obama administration through its symbolic snubs and choice of personnel, and through real policies concerning Jerusalem has sent a message to Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Iran, the United Nations, and the European Left that America is no longer particularly interested in playing its traditional role in defending Israel either intellectually or politically and thus perhaps soon not through military assistance either. That will only encourage new adventurism, as a mostly opportunistic world rushes to pile on, at first rhetorically, but soon through material action and global indifference to Israel’s fate.

The origins of Obama’s apparent distaste for both Britain and Israel have been explored, but why the party of Truman and JFK abetted his transformation of American foreign policy is a more complex, but equally disheartening, matter.


04/07 02:00 PM Share

Lift Up Your Hearts

What Pope John Paul II taught the world.

By Newt Gingrich and Callista Gingrich
http://www.nationalreview.com/
April 6, 2010 4:00 A.M.

Following Pope John Paul II’s death five years ago, the world prayerfully reflected on a life that had transformed the lives of millions of people worldwide.

Today, the world continues to reflect on the life of Pope John Paul II because his teaching and his actions point the way forward to building a future worthy of man.

How best to serve our fellow man? This is the timeless challenge of both political and religious leaders, but it was Pope John Paul II who most resolutely taught the world, religious and non-religious alike, that a future worthy of man must be rooted in recognition of the incomparable dignity of the human person and a commitment on behalf of the human person.

From his election in October 1978, Pope John Paul II constantly preached that it was only through an understanding of Jesus Christ that man could fully understand his great dignity — the dignity of the human person — and therefore no country anywhere in the world had a right to separate man from the pursuit of knowing and loving God.

This demand for freedom of faith had powerful social and political implications.

When the Pope preached this message in June 1979 in Warsaw’s Victory Square, on an altar with the backdrop of a 50-foot cross, 1 million of his fellow Poles responded in affirmation with 14 minutes of applause, interrupted by singing in one voice: “Christus Vincit, Christus Regnat, Christus Imperat” (“Christ Conquers, Christ Reigns, Christ Governs”). In an officially atheistic country, the Polish people dramatically bore witness that God, not the state, was sovereign.

Later in the same homily, when the Pope recalled the great sacrifices made by the Poles during the Warsaw Uprising, the people responded by singing an old Polish song, “We Want God.”

It became evident to us in working on our new documentary film about the Pope’s 1979 pilgrimage to Poland — Nine Days that Changed the World — that the Pope’s bedrock insistence on the freedom to pursue God, the freedom to “want God,” proved too much for the Communist system to bear.

Ten years later, the system slowly collapsed. It started on June 4, 1989, with the Polish elections that resulted in a Solidarity-led government. Then, on Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Finally, on Dec. 25, 1991, the Communist hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, signaling the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

But the history of the 1980s shows that the political freedom won by the Polish people was not due merely to the Poles’ expanded freedom to pursue God. No, it was also due to the Poles’ actual pursuit of God.

Freedom for faith was a necessary precondition, but the Polish people ultimately achieved freedom through faith, inspired by the courageous witness of Pope John Paul II and a countless number of his fellow Poles.

Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly on Oct. 5, 1995, Pope John Paul II reflected on what contributed to the revolutions of 1989:

A decisive factor in the success of those non-violent revolutions was the experience of social solidarity: In the face of regimes backed by the power of propaganda and terror, that solidarity was the moral core of the “power of the powerless,” a beacon of hope and an enduring reminder that it is possible for man’s historical journey to follow a path which is true to the finest aspirations of the human spirit.

This message of solidarity was given powerful voice by Pope John Paul II during his first pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979. In Victory Square, he said the Polish nation could not understand itself if it rejected its 1,000-year community rooted in Christ. He prayed that Christ would not cease to be an open book for the future life of Poland.

This prayer did not go unanswered, as Poland indeed became, in the words of the Pope, “the land of a particularly responsible witness” — with global repercussions.

Millions of Poles turned out to see the Pope in person during the 1979 pilgrimage and subsequent visits. Young people joined burgeoning Christian renewal movements like Oasis, which offered a needed island of resistance — a foundation of Christian community — against the desert of the Communist state. One by one, hearts were transformed. Millions of Poles made individual decisions that they would no longer make compromises with the daily lies of life under Communism. Oasis founder Father Franciszek Blachnicki urged Poles to overcome their fears and challenge the Communist regime by “living in the truth.”

A critical experience of solidarity occurred during the August 1980 strikes in Gdansk. At a very intense moment in the early days of the strike, workers arranged for a Mass to be said within the shipyard for the very first time. Zenon Kwoka recalled that day: “Permission for Mass in shipyard was breakthrough in my opinion. Something incredible happened, because all of the city arrived for that Mass and stood at the closed gate. The front of altar was directed to the shipyard and at its back was the shipyard’s main gate. Delegates and shipyard workers stood at one side, at the other side were people of Gdansk. All of the people sang religious songs and there was a kind of duet. There was an incredible feeling. I never experienced anything like that before. During Mass, that stress disappeared and many workers around me cried. During Mass, people got rid of fear.”

For some, the call to live a particularly responsible witness led to martyrdom. Father Jerzy Popieluszko was a Solidarity chaplain murdered by Polish Communist secret-service officers in October 1984 because he dared to remind his fellow Poles that their first duty is to God and not to the state. His challenge to Communist authority was too much for a totalitarian system that could not tolerate dissent.

In June 2009, 30 years after Pope John Paul II’s first pilgrimage to Poland, the mayor of Warsaw, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz — in the presence of the president of Poland, a company of soldiers, the archbishop of Warsaw, and thousands assembled — dedicated a 30-foot cross in the same square in commemoration of the Pope’s Mass there in 1979. The mayor described the impact of Pope John Paul II’s prayer for the renewal of Poland in this way:

The message of John Paul II met with our highest national and social aspirations. It poured hope into our hearts. Then, for the first time in decades, we saw how many of us are here. We felt what it meant to be together, free, and in community. Soon, August 1980 arrived and Solidarity was established. Then the tragedy [martial law] of December 1981, and thanks to those who went through that and did not reject hope, June 1989 arrived. . . . From this day forth in Warsaw, in the heart of Poland, opposite of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a symbol of bravery of Poles, there will be a Cross standing which is a symbol of faith, perseverance, and hope. . . . And living here and now we are taking responsibility not only for a free Poland, but also for the solidarity of all of Europe. This cross is a symbol that what is impossible becomes possible.

Just after the mayor unveiled the memorial cross, a recorded message of Pope John Paul II played: “Today, I look at the whole of Poland, from the Tatra Mountains to the Baltic Sea, and this cross says to whole of Poland, sursum corda, lift up your hearts.”

The cross, as carried by Pope John Paul II, not only lifted the hearts of the Poles, it also lifted the hearts of millions around the world. Italian senator and philosopher Marcello Pera says that it is important to remember not only John Paul’s II contributions to the political struggle against Communism, but also the way he went about it: “Against Communism he proposed the cross. And it was the cross as displayed by John Paul II that, according to me, was the decisive factor in the collapse of Communism in Poland and then elsewhere.”

In the 1980s, the world learned from John Paul II and the Polish people that tyrants and dictators are no match when millions of hearts are lifted high. This Polish experience of freedom through faith serves as a timeless warning to governments anywhere that threaten religious freedom, including those in democratic societies.

— Former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and his wife, Callista, are hosts and executive producers of the documentary film Nine Days that Changed the World, which will premiere in the United States on April 9 and will be screened in Poland and Italy in June. This article first appeared in Wprost, a Polish weekly magazine.

Smearing Ralph Peters

Posted by Rich Trzupek on Apr 6th, 2010
http://www.frontpagemag.com/


If you want to gauge how important an issue is to the Left, the best indicator is to observe how it reacts when the issue is raised. Last Friday, Ralph Peters (Lt. Col., USA, retired) penned a column for Front Page in which he opined that extending voting rights to eleven million illegal immigrants currently residing in this country would be a disaster for America. In response, Terry Krepel, a member of George Soros’ steno pool Media Matters, penned an outraged response slamming Peters for raising such a ridiculous, inflammatory issue. How dare he!

Ralph Peters doesn’t actually need anyone coming to his defense. He’s a real American hero who spent ten years in military intelligence defending this nation in ways that journalists like Terry Krepel could not imagine. Legendary novelist W.E.B. Griffin has singled Peters out as one of the “new breed” protecting our nation, who – in Griffin’s words – wrote the best analysis of our war on terror that Griffin has ever read. But, whatever Griffin, me or anyone else thinks of Ralph Peters’ service record doesn’t matter much to the Left. They’re not going to treat him as a worthy adversary with whom they might disagree. They’re going to fight back using any means at their disposal, employing the very tactics that they accuse conservatives and libertarians of using: invective, distortion and hyperbole.

To that end, Media Matters tries to make the case that Peters is a racist, extremist, blood-thirsty lunatic. Indeed, Media Matters dedicates a fair chunk of space chronicling what Peters has said and written. Peters has been an unapologetic advocate of taking and keeping America’s gloves off while fighting the war on terror. There’s good reason for his position: Peters believes that the war on terror can actually be won, if the West has the courage to pursue victory fearlessly, absent the self-imposed hobbles of political correctness, handicaps that do not constrain our enemies.

On the other hand, the Left believes that America can never defeat the terrorists because, to them, terrorism is the logical, inevitable reaction to American arrogance, imperialism and greed. Unless we reform our ways, the “disadvantaged” classes in the world, who have a legitimate gripe in their view (although, they will admit, a rather poor way of expressing their opinion) will continue to blow innocent people up in suicidal fireballs of righteous indignation. In contrast, Peters views the war on terror in much the same way that Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman viewed the War Between the States: as a conflict that ought to be pursued ruthlessly, because doing so will end a brutal war more quickly and once it is over – to paraphrase Grant’s hopeful, century-old words – the reasonable majorities on both sides could then return to the happy task of becoming friends again.

Supporting or attacking Peters’ stance on the best way to fight the war on terror isn’t germane if we are to consider the validity of his views when it comes to immigration policy. However, criticizing Peters’ stance on the war on terror is useful if somebody wants to marginalize any of his other opinions. The gist of Krepel’s riposte, such as it was, involved constructing a straw man of massive proportions so that the flames generated when he burnt it down would illuminate the supposed folly of Peters’ position on immigration beyond any reasonable doubt. Krepel believes – and if you read Peters’ piece, you’ll have as hard a time reaching this conclusion as I did – that Peters’ thinks illegal aliens are going to be given the right to vote without becoming citizens. In Krepel’s words:

“Nobody, let alone Obama, is proposing to allow undocumented immigrants to vote. Peters barely attempts to make the argument that creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, who would then be allowed to vote, is a bad thing. But Peters is on a roll: No voting rights for illegals! Mob rule! Never mind that President Reagan’s granting amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants didn’t exactly result in ‘mob rule.’”

Of course Reagan’s “amnesty” didn’t grant citizenship to illegal undocumented alien immigrants. What the Gipper actually did was to grant some illegal aliens “temporary resident status,” which did not include citizenship and the right to vote. That’s quite a bit different that president Obama’s plans. As part of his immigration plan, the president said that he would support “…a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.”

Peters didn’t argue that Obama was going to pass out voter registration cards to illegals. Any discerning, intelligent reader understood that Peters’ concern is about making illegals citizens – as the president has suggested we do – and therefore granting them votes. I’m not sure why those particular dots needs connecting, but apparently they do, at least at Media Matters.

The only part of Peters’ column that I would disagree with is when he discussed the possibility of mob rule in the future. It rather looks like we’re already there. Ramming health care through a reluctant Congress and past a disgusted populace required the kind of arm-twisting, bullying and mind-numbing populist propaganda that are the hallmarks of mob rule. It’s not the sort of mob rule that features vigilantes toting torches, throwing stones and shouting threats, but is instead a genteel mob rule of the political sort. Bullies are bullies, whether they’re riding on horseback carrying a noose they hope to fill with a deserving neck, or whether they’re strolling down the streets of Washington clutching a gavel that appears to have come from the Paul Bunyan collection of legislative essentials.

Immigration reform may be stalled for the time being, but only a fool would think that it’s been forgotten by the administration. The payoff is just too tempting. If even a few million illegal immigrants get citizenship, that’s a few million new voters who are – for the most part – poor, not very well educated and are therefore badly in need of government goodies. Might they therefore be expected to vote for Democrats — the party of big government — in overwhelming numbers? They’d be foolish to do anything else. That’s an end game worth the fight. Ralph Peters understands that and, based on the vehemence of their reaction when somebody raises the possibility, so does the Left.

Long shot almost came in

By Bob Ryan, Boston Globe Columnist
http://www.boston.com/sports/
April 6, 2010

INDIANAPOLIS — The dream was possible even after the buzzer sounded.

Trailing by 2, Gordon Hayward came galloping upcourt, came hard off the dribble, and launched a running bomb from just past midcourt. Halfway there, it didn’t look bad. As it approached the goal, it looked as if it had a chance. The ball hit the square above the backboard, hit the front rim . . . and fell off.

“Felt good, looked good,’’ sighed Hayward. “Just wasn’t there.’’

No NCAA championship for Butler.

Butler's Gordon Hayward shoots, but misses, on a potential game-winning basket over Duke's Nolan Smith in their NCAA national championship college basketball game in Indianapolis, Indiana, April 5, 2010. (Reuters)

Nope, it was Duke 61, Butler 59 for the championship of the college basketball world. It was the fourth title for coach Mike Krzyzewski, and it had to be the most satisfying one since the first, 19 years ago.

That’s because this was not supposed to be a championship year for Duke, and because Butler made the Blue Devils earn it. Duke huffed and puffed all night long, and Butler just would not go away. Duke never led by more than 6, and after going up by 5 (60-55) with 3:16 to go and seemingly on the verge of putting it away, Butler scrapped back one more time, cutting it to 60-59 on a Matt Howard basket with 54.9 seconds left, and then giving themselves a chance to win by stopping Duke on the ensuing possession.

It was right there for the Bulldogs, who were down 1 and in possession of the ball with 33.7 seconds remaining. The unthinkable, the unimaginable, the miraculous actually had a chance to materialize. Butler was one possession away from winning the NCAA championship.

But the opponent was Duke. The guys with pedigrees have dreams, too, and nobody outworks this Duke team. Butler had not gotten anything easy all night and it surely wasn’t going to change with the national championship at stake.

A pass by the Bulldogs’ Shelvin Mack was knocked out of bounds with 13.6 seconds to go. Butler called time. Hayward tried to make an inbounds pass and had to call time when he couldn’t find anyone open. Howard replaced him as the inbounds man, and he got it to Hayward, isolated with Kyle Singler at the top of the key. He tried to get into the lane. Nope. He wound up taking a tough right corner fadeaway, which, had he hit it, would have represented his first outside shot of the night. It hit the far side of the rim and bounded away.

Duke’s 7-foot center, Brian Zoubek, grabbed the rebound, and of course he was fouled. The big guy swished the first one and deliberately missed the second. But Hayward grabbed the rebound and started toward the other basket. This is where we came in.

“I can’t really put it into words, because the last couple of plays were just not normal,’’ said Singler, the deserved tourney Most Outstanding Player with 40 points, 18 rebounds, 7 assists, and some very timely baskets in the two Final Four games. “It could have gone either way, and I am just glad we came out with a victory.’’

It was a great game and it was an absolutely wonderful ending to one of the great NCAA Tournaments ever. Things were set in motion back on the afternoon of March 3, when, in the first game of the first conference tournament, Atlantic Sun No. 8 seed Kennesaw State knocked off top seed Lipscomb. We should have known we were off on a wild adventure right then and there.

We had a spectacular tournament, with some great upsets and a bunch of truly memorable games, and when we came out of the regionals we had one of the great NCAA stories ever, when Butler, the Horizon League champion whose campus is located fewer than seven miles from Lucas Oil Stadium, where these games were played, made it to the Final Four and then knocked off Michigan State in the semifinals.

The world had thus been introduced to a very smart and very scrappy team that had not lost a game since Dec. 22 and that played tremendous defense. The world had been introduced to great kids such as point guard Ronald Nored (a coach in the making), Mack, Willie Veasley, Howard, and Hayward, a 6-foot-9-inch do-everything who had chosen Butler over Big Ten schools all because he felt it was a perfect fit for his temperament and personality and personal goals, one of which is to play in the NBA.

Most of all, the world was introduced to 33-year-old Brad Stevens, who now appears to be the Next Great Thing in the coaching profession. He said and did the right things all week long, as he has done since he was hired by Butler athletic director Barry Collier two years ago.

Stevens matched wits with Hall of Famer Krzyzewski, and there was no clear victor. Duke won this game because, in the end, it had more good players, not because Coach K laid a clinic on Brad Stevens.

There were times you’d ask yourself how Butler was in the game. The Bulldogs, who had gone 11 second-half minutes without a field goal during their conquest of Michigan State, only had three field goals in the final 13:36 last night. But they hung in by virtue of their usual killer D and their willingness to attack the rim, thus getting themselves to the foul line. Man for man, the matchups almost all favored Duke, especially in the size category, but Butler is not about individual matchups and it was able to hang with the Blue Devils.

And, oh, that final Hayward shot. It really had a chance.

“I was standing at halfcourt, and I thought it was going in,’’ said Howard, whose participation had been in doubt after sustaining a blow to the head against Michigan State. “That makes it a little more devastating.’’

What an ending that would have been. But the Duke kids have dreams, too, and theirs came true.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist and host of Globe 10.0 on Boston.com. He can be reached at ryan@globe.com.


This ending fell just short of perfect

By John Feinstein
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, April 6, 2010; 12:45 AM


INDIANAPOLIS- It was that close to being the perfect ending. There was Gordon Hayward grabbing the final rebound of an extraordinary national championship game Monday night and finding his way through pressure to just across the midcourt line and somehow getting a shot off over Kyle Singler. The buzzer went off with the ball in the air.

In the movies, the ball would have hit the backboard and dropped through the hoop to create the most amazing finish in NCAA tournament history. Instead, it hit the backboard and then the front rim and . . . rattled off. The shot missed by perhaps two inches - at most.

And so the finish to this remarkable 18 days of basketball was written in Durham, N.C., not Hollywood, as Duke barely hung on for a 61-59 victory in a national title game that will be remembered for years even without a finish worthy of a motion picture.

INDIANAPOLIS - APRIL 05: Kyle Singler #12 of the Duke Blue Devils attempts a shot against Willie Veasley #21 of the Butler Bulldogs during the 2010 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball National Championship game at Lucas Oil Stadium on April 5, 2010 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Duke won 61-59. (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)

For Duke and Coach Mike Krzyzewski it meant a fourth national title, putting Krzyzewski into the most rarified coaching air there is - short of John Wooden. He has now won more national championships than any coach other than Wooden (10) and Adolph Rupp (four). That said, Krzyzewski's four titles have come in an era in which it is far more difficult to win the championship.

"All due respect to Coach Wooden and Coach Rupp, it's much harder now to win one, much less four," said Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim. "What Mike's done is one of the greatest accomplishment in the history of the game."

Although Butler came up short - or, more accurately, two inches long - the Bulldogs' run in this tournament won't be forgotten anytime soon. This game was no different than the previous four they had won to get here. Every time they fell behind and appeared to be in trouble, they found a way to make a play at one end of the court or the other to get right back in the game.

The final sequence of the season played out almost exactly like that. After Duke had taken a 60-55 lead with 3 minutes 16 seconds remaining on two Nolan Smith free throws, the Bulldogs scored the next four points and then got the stop they had to have when Smith missed a runner in the lane with 33 seconds left.

Trailing 60-59, the Bulldogs set up their Jimmy Chitwood - Hayward - but his well-defended baseline jumper bounced out and Brian Zoubek, Duke's unsung hero throughout this tournament, grabbed the rebound with 3.6 seconds on the clock. He made the first free throw and then missed the second intentionally so Butler wouldn't have a chance to run a play off an inbounds pass.

That strategy almost backfired thanks to Hayward, who got a great screen from Matt Howard and actually had some space to launch his shot. When it missed, the air went out of most of the crowd of 70,930 packed into Lucas Oil Stadium, except at the end where the Duke fans and students were seated.

These are the names to remember: Hayward, Shelvin Mack, Ronald Nored, Willie Veasley, Zach Hahn, Avery Jukes, Matt Howard and Coach Brad Stevens, who matched one of the game's great masters chess move for chess move all night long. That said, Duke has to be credited for taking every Butler punch and responding, including coming up with a great defensive possession when the season was on the line. As good as Hayward is, he had to force a fallaway jumper with his team down one and Singler - as he had been all night - in his face.

As sad as the ending was for Butler, to say the Bulldogs have much to be proud of is a vast understatement. Just as they had done against Syracuse, Kansas State and Michigan State, they made it clear from the start against Duke that they weren't at all intimidated by the opponent or the setting.

In fact, if you were really looking for a clue to how Butler was going to approach this game, it came on the final play of Saturday's semifinal victory over Michigan State. When Hayward grabbed the final clinching rebound, he simply turned and put one finger in the air, jogging toward midcourt with the ball in his hands.

No celebration. No euphoria. It was simply game over, what's next.

That might explain why when Duke went on an 8-0 run to take a 26-20 lead with 5:08 left in the first half, there was absolutely no panic on the Butler bench. Stevens called a timeout and with Krzyzewski trying to steal some rest for Scheyer, the Bulldogs went on a quick 7-0 run to take the lead back in less than 90 seconds.

By then any notion that Duke was going to dominate Butler the way it dominated West Virginia had been laid to rest. Right from the start, it was apparent that the game was going to be played at Butler's pace. In their four victories leading to Monday night, the Bulldogs didn't score more than 63 points and didn't give up more than 59. There was little doubt that sort of game would suit them just fine and Duke appeared willing to play along.

Stevens also seemed to understand that attacking Duke's big men was a way to take away some of the Blue Devils' size advantage. Even though Howard was having trouble finishing around the basket, he quickly drew two fouls on Lance Thomas, forcing Krzyzewski to send in his Plumlees (Miles and Mason) earlier than he would have liked.

Like any team cast in the role of the villain, Duke looked tight. Smith missed three free throws, including the front end of a one-and-one that could have stretched Duke's halftime margin to 35-32. The most stunning statistic at the break though was the rebounding: Butler had a 24-17 margin, including 12 offensive rebounds that helped make up for 34 percent shooting from the field.

The other difference was the bench: Jukes produced 10 points for Butler, critical in the final moments of the half with Hayward struggling against very tight defense being played on him by Singler. Hahn also chipped in a three. Duke's bench produced zero points and one rebound.

All of which set up exactly the kind of game Butler had hoped for: close, low-scoring and, with each passing minute, the pressure growing on the favorites. The second half started much the way the first half ended: Butler attacking the basket, Duke trying to get something going on the perimeter. A pretty drive by Shelvin Mack put Butler up 40-38 with 16 minutes left but Smith, realizing he wasn't having any luck outside, sneaked inside to tie the game at 40.

It rocked back and forth from there, Duke building small leads of four and five, but unable to pull away. Butler's defense got stops when it had to and the Bulldogs seemed to make every bit shot they had to - until the very last one.

On Sunday night, Jim Scheyer, Jon's dad, went to get takeout for his son, who was sitting in his hotel room trying to kill time before the last and most important game of his college basketball career.

"The tough thing about this is knowing that if you don't win this game, you don't get to go down in history with the great teams," he said. "You can talk about all the great things these kids have accomplished but they all know this game is the one they're going to remember forever."

Actually, this was a game everyone will remember forever. As corny as it might sound, no one lost this game. And the biggest winner wasn't Duke - although the Blue Devils deserve all possible kudos for hanging on to win - it was the game of basketball.

In Indiana, that's the way it always should be.

For more from the author, visit his blog at www.feinsteinonthebrink.com.


Butler's ride is over, but the dream lives on

By Bob Kravitz
The Indianapolis Star
http://www.indystar.com/
Posted: April 6, 2010

This is not the way the fairy tale ends. Little Red Riding Hood doesn't get mauled by the big, bad wolf. Cinderella doesn't show up two hours late for the ball because of traffic on I-65. The Three Little Pigs don't get evicted from their home before the dyspeptic fox even thinks about blowing their house down.

Duke 61, Butler 59.

Where were Norman Dale and Jimmy Chitwood when you needed them? Where was Hollywood when Gordon Hayward's fall-away jumper from the corner, on line but slightly long, bounced off the rim and out? Where were the writers when Hayward's desperation try from just over midcourt hit the backboard, a tad too hard, leaving the ball to hit the front of the rim and fall to the floor?

That close. That heart-piercingly painful.

"If felt good, it looked good," Hayward said of his penultimate miss, the fall-away jumper near the baseline. "It just wasn't there. They did a nice job. It just didn't go in."

Said Butler's Shawn Vanzant: "It just hurts. I don't think a loss ever hurt this bad before. We were right there."

Ultimately, there was too much Duke, too much of the Big Three -- Jon Scheyer, Nolan Smith and mostly Kyle Singler -- too much terrific Blue Devils defense and too little offense down the stretch from a Butler team that found a way to win this kind of game throughout the tournament.

Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, a four-time national champion, now stands with the giants of the game -- although the decision to have Brian Zoubek intentionally miss a second free throw was odd, to say the least. He tied Adolph Rupp with four and trails only John Wooden, who has the unbreakable mark of 10.

Give them credit; they came into the most hostile environment conceivable, the majority of the 70,930 screaming their lungs out for Butler and the story almost everybody wanted to see. On the way to this title, Duke beat Baylor in Baylor-crazy Houston, blew out West Virginia in the national semifinal and came into Butler's literal backyard and held off the Bulldogs.

That said, let everyone else hail the Dookies, deserving national champions. This is about Butler. This is about a joyride that absolutely captured the heart of this community and this country. This is about the smallest school in the 64-team era -- and the fourth-smallest school in NCAA Tournament history -- taking us all to a place that seemed unreachable and unimaginable.

Nobody will forget this journey -- although, just like Larry Bird and the 1979 Indiana State Sycamores, the story didn't end quite right. It's right there with Milan 1954, with the perfect Hoosiers of 1976, the Keith Smart game-winner in 1987.

"There's not much to say,'' coach Brad Stevens said later. "I'm proud of our guys. We came up one possession short in a game with 145 possessions. It's hard to stomach when you're on the wrong end of that. But I told them, when you coach these guys with the effort, focus and determination they showed, you're at peace with whatever the result is on the scoreboard because we've got a group that gave it everything they had."

If this magical, marvelous run didn't renew a little bit of your faith in sports -- and specifically college basketball -- it means you've already drowned in cynicism and are beyond hope. Unless you're a Duke fan -- and maybe even if you're a Duke fan -- how can you fail to see the beauty in what Butler accomplished these past few weeks?

In our world, bigger is better, and that's especially true in revenue-producing college sports. You've got to have the highest-paid coaches. You've got to fill your roster with McDonald's All-Americans. You've got to play in a gleaming new arena and have a practice facility with more bells and whistles than an Air Force jet fighter. You've got to spend, and spend some more.

Or, well, maybe you don't.

"I know we left it all on the court," said Butler guard Shelvin Mack. "We brought nothing back to the locker room."

Butler changes everything, the reality of college basketball and the perception of college basketball. Gonzaga began it years ago, consistently pulling upsets and reaching the Sweet Sixteen. Then there was George Mason in the Final Four. And now, it was Butler, one field goal short of winning it all.

Now, will we go back to seeing pedigreed teams and million-dollar coaches from power conferences the next five years? Yeah, that's possible, even likely. But Butler has shown the little guy CAN get to the final. The little guy CAN take mighty Duke down to the final possession. Maybe next time, a Butler -- or another mid-major -- will finish the job.

They just need a chance. And that was Stevens' fervent hope when he spoke after the game, that teams like Siena, 17-1 in the regular season, don't have to win their conference tournament to reach the NCAA Tournament.

"I hope this brings to light that teams like that should not have to play perfect," he said. "We should not have to play to that standard. There are a lot of good teams outside the power six conferences."

If ever there was a right time to have a parade for a team that came up one possession short, this is it.

"You listened to our three guys (Mack, Hayward and Avery Jukes, who came into the interview room); they're crushed," Stevens said. "This matters."

But eventually the pain will subside, and the sun will come out, and we will come to understand what this group has done for this area and college basketball.

The best team beat the best story, but just by the slightest and most crushing of margins.

"This was a classic," Krzyzewski said. "A game we won. They didn't lose it."

So close.

So painful.

And yet, as wonderful as anything we'll ever witness.

Ever.


Coach K moves up the list

By Caulton Tudor
The Raleigh News & Observer
http://www.newsobserver.com/sports/
April 6, 2010

INDIANAPOLIS Make room, Adolph Rupp. Mike Krzyzewski needs a seat on your row.

Near speechless in the wake of his fourth NCAA basketball championship, the Duke coach on Monday night joined the late legendary Kentucky patriarch as No. 2 on the title list.

INDIANAPOLIS - APRIL 05: Head coach Mike Krzyzewski and the Duke Blue Devils celebrate after their 61-59 win against the Butler Bulldogs during the 2010 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball National Championship game at Lucas Oil Stadium on April 5, 2010 in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)

Only former UCLA coach John Wooden has more - a lot more. Odds are no one will match Wooden's 10 titles, but Krzyzewski and Duke have pulled even with Adolph Rupp, whose Wildcats teams ruled in 1948, '49, '51 and '58.

With a breathtaking 61-59 victory over Butler at Lucas Oil Stadium, Krzyzewski put the 2010 title atop those his teams won in '91, '92 and '01.

"This was the best championship game of the eight we've been at," said Krzyzewski, who called Butler "an amazing team."

Duke didn't get a chance to exhale until Bulldogs star Gordon Hayward barely missed a last-second heave from near mid-court that would have stood the college basketball world on its ear had it connected.

"It's hard for me to believe we're the national champions," Krzyzewski said. "We beat a great team. We played a great game, but we still just managed to get by. What a way for this team to spend its last day together."

Throughout the season, Krzyzewski refused to call his team a "great" one - only a very good one with a great will to improve.

"I don't know if any team is great at the start of a season, any team. You might have exceptional talent," Krzyzewski said before the title game. "For these guys, we have really good talent, and they've gotten better throughout the year."

But Duke (35-5) was definitely great with great motivation and needed more of it against Butler (33-5) than at any time during the season.

Seven-point underdogs, Brad Stevens' Horizon League champions used a combination of depth, quickness and uncompromising defense to scare Duke throughout the game. To the delight of 70,930 fans, the Bulldogs provided enough memories to last forever.

"With this team, you're always at peace," Stevens said. "What they've done will last a lot longer than one night."

Although Duke's Big Three were indeed big - Kyle Singler (19 points, nine rebounds), Jon Scheyer (15 points, six rebounds, five assists) and Nolan Smith (13 points, four assists) - Brian Zoubek was even bigger at the end.

Playing with four fouls much of the second half, the 7-foot center grabbe the final Duke rebound and the last point of the game to finish with eight points, 10 rebounds and two blocked shots.

On the potential winning shot by Hayward, Zoubek was able to put on just enough pressure to be a factor.

"I can't put all of this into words," Zoubek said. "We won a national championship with defense. There's nothing else to say about it."

As much as Krzyzewski gave the credit to his players, there's little doubt that the 2009-10 season rates as his best coaching job. At the beginning of the NCAA, almost no one had the Devils in the same class with Kansas, Kentucky and some of the Big East Conference powers.

"He's our leader, and he's had a great year," Smith said. "An Olympic gold medal and now this. It's special for us, but just as special for him."

And at 63 and in good health, there's no reason to think Krzyzewski won't get a chance to win No. 5 - maybe more - before he retires.

Earlier Monday, a report surfaced that the NBA's New Jersey Nets were willing to offer Krzyzewski $12 million annually to go pro. He quickly sent out a news release that emphasized his intention to stay put.

That's good news for Duke but bad news for those who hoped he may have lost his tournament touch.

caulton.tudor@newsobserver.com or 919-829-8946

Today's Tune: Colin Hay - Waiting for My Real Life to Begin

(Click on title to play video)

The Pope, the Scandal, and the Crib Notes for Journalism 101

Media Matters

By Patrick O'Hannigan on 4.5.10 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/



Here we are among the calla lilies, many of us meditating on the eternal resonance of events in and around old Jerusalem, yet spring chores still need doing, and the crabgrass of ignorance is even more stubborn than the weeds that threaten suburban lawns.

Could anyone familiar with the people involved think the Old Gray Lady of American journalism would pass up a chance to encumber a target who rejects conventional wisdom about abortion, gay marriage, and the ordination of women?

Nothing else perfumes the air of a newsroom like a whiff of self-righteousness, or intoxicates certain reporters faster than evidence of mismanagement and hypocrisy at the Vatican.

When it comes to brand management at the New York Times, the snark of Maureen Dowd, the delusion of David Brooks, the bitterness of Paul Krugman, and the name-dropping of Thomas Friedman are well known, but recent developments mark perhaps the first time that that quartet of vices has purchased vacation property: Snark, delusion, bitterness, and shallowness -- the Four Horsemen of the Obamalypse -- now gallop freely between different sections of the publication.

Senior religion correspondent Laurie Goodstein unwittingly exposed this pattern in her March 24 story about the case of a priest in Wisconsin who sexually abused as many as 200 deaf boys. Together with a clutch of similar stories about the abhorrent behavior of some priests in Ireland and Germany, the Goodstein report on Fr. Lawrence C. Murphy was meant to shed light on a culture of buck-passing that allegedly infected even Pope Benedict XVI.

Ms. Goodstein has written that she strives to give views other than her own a fair shake. I believe her. Beyond that, I appreciate reporters who are game enough to spar verbally with comedian Stephen Colbert, as Goodstein did when divisions within the Anglican Communion were making news. But in trying to undercut the moral witness of the pope by suggesting that as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger he was too forgiving of the monstrous Fr. Murphy, Goodstein committed errors of fact, interpretation, context, and journalistic procedure that together make nonsense of any claim to objectivity on the part of the New York Times.

Here (for the benefit of Maureen Dowd and others who have forgotten Journalism 101) are some of the ways that Goodstein and her editors botched the "Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys" story. Anyone following the hyperlinks will see that I've paraphrased published comments from priests, laypeople, and journalists not working for the New York Times.

Issue One: Chronology. If you want to charge a man with trying to cover up a scandal, the questions that demand answers are "What did he know and when did he know it?" But Fr. Murphy disgraced his priesthood long before Pope Benedict was in any position to notice, as even the New York Daily News observed. When Fr. Murphy's conduct eventually came to the attention of the Vatican, then-Cardinal Ratzinger's office approved a request for trial, and waived the statute of limitations that would otherwise have precluded trying a priest for crimes he had committed more than twenty years before.

Issue Two: Sourcing. Would you write an investigative report that relied on documents provided by a morally compromised bishop whom you had already written sympathetically about, and lawyers with a financial interest in squeezing reparations out of the institution you're looking at? Would you also miss a chance to interview the judge who presided over the trial relevant to your story? If you answered "no" to both questions, you're a step ahead of the New York Times.

Issue Three: Interpretation. Here's a pop quiz: 1. Metaphorically speaking, is it more appropriate to think of the church as a hospital for sinners or a hotel for saints? 2. Has Pope Benedict, with an eye on sexual abuse cases worldwide, warned bluntly and repeatedly against "filth" in the church? 3. Do Cardinals supervise the daily activities of most priests?

The questions are not hard. Reporters like John Allen, and comedians like Stephen Colbert, would answer them correctly without even stopping to think. But neither Allen nor Colbert works for the New York Times, and one could be forgiven for supposing that the people who do cash checks from the Times seem to think that Easter is mainly an excuse to wear pastels and eat chocolate bunnies.

Issue Four: Context. You wouldn't know from reading the Times that Pope Benedict has influential enemies within the church, or that he has been out front in fighting the scourge of predatory priests. For context there, it's hard to beat the observations of Lutheran theologian John Stephenson, who writes (among other perceptive things) that "Neither apostates within Holy Christendom nor naked unbelievers outside her borders will ever forgive Ratzinger for the grave breach of secularist, pluralist etiquette involved in the first volume of his Jesus of Nazareth. It goes without saying (and around the Holy Week of each year the several forms of mainstream media say it loudly, often, and emphatically) that Jesus was an ordinary man, a wacko apocalyptist, or a failed political revolutionary. Stones must fly and clubs be brandished against a learned man fully familiar with all the 'Jesus of history' literature from Reimarus to the present, who winsomely draws on believing scholarship of all confessions to offer a calm and cogent argument that the real, actual Jesus is the one who meets us in the Gospel record."

Dr. Stephenson does not mean to suggest that papal handling of moral issues has been above reproach, and I would not say that, either. But neither will I pretend to objectivity that I do not have: Pope Benedict writes accessibly. He brought back the red shoes, unshackled the Latin Mass, and annoys professional dissidents just by getting up in the morning. He doesn't think "children" and "church" are opposing terms. What's not to like? Beyond that, I once dabbled in journalism, and learned from my mistakes. Taking occasional shots at big media goes with the territory. In this case, the New York Times deserves a few licks. It's a matter of "Here I stand; I can do no other." And if Laurie Goodstein has to Google the origins of that phrase, religion reporting at the paper of record has fallen on hard times indeed.

topics:New York Times, Pope Benedict XVI, Catholic Church

Patrick O'Hannigan is a writer in North Carolina.

The Democrats' Fake Hate Crime

Saturday, April 03, 2010
[Mark Steyn]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/

Jonah mentioned this the other day in his column, but the tireless Andrew Breitbart returns to the theme, to devastating effect.

On March 20th, something truly extraordinary happened. On the eve of the health care vote, a group of black Democrat Congressmen (eschewing the private tunnels they usually use to cross from their offices to the Capitol) chose to walk en masse through a crowd of protesters, confident that the knuckledragging Tea Party goons they and their media pals have reviled for a year now would respond with racial epithets.

And then, when the crowd didn't, the black Congressmen made it up anyway. Representative Andre Carson (Democrat, Indiana) insisted he heard the N-word 15 times. He's either suffering from the same condition as that Guam-flipper from Georgia, or he's a liar. At a scene packed not only with crews from the Dem poodle media but with a gazillion cellphone cameras, not one single N-word has been caught on audio. (By contrast, see my post yesterday for how easy it is to get it on tape when real epithets are flying.)

I disagree with John Lewis (Democrat, Georgia) politically but I have always respected him as a genuine civil rights warrior. And I feel slightly queasy at the thought that he would dishonor both the movement and his own part in it for the cheapest of partisan points - in the same way I would be disgusted by a Holocaust survivor painting a swastika on his own door and blaming it on his next-door neighbor over a boundary dispute.
But that's what the Democratic Party has been reduced to - faking hate crimes as pathetically as any lonely, mentally ill college student.

Congressmen Carson, Lewis, Cleaver and the rest have turned themselves into the Congressional equivalent of the Duke University stripper. Except that they're not some penniless loser but a group of important, influential lifetime legislators enjoying all the privileges and perquisites of power, and in all probability acting at the behest of the Democrat leadership.

Isn't that what societies with functioning media used to call "a story"?
Apparently not. As they did at Duke, the brain-dead press went along with it - and so, predictably enough, did much of the Republican leadership.

04/03 01:50 PM Share

Saying Goodbye To America's Post 9/11 TV Hero

By Claudia Rosett, 04.01.10, 12:01 AM ET
http://www.forbes.com/


After eight seasons, the Fox series 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, America's one-man do-or-die counterterrorism force--is due to go off the air when the current season wraps up on May 24.

I'll miss Jack. It's only television, but I think he's summed up something important about the American spirit: a will to defend his country, against all attackers, no matter what the odds. That fighting spirit is still evident among American troops on the battlefield. But in Washington's political quagmires, over the nine years since Sept. 11, it's been substantially snuffed out. Instead, policy revolves endlessly around denial of real threats and the impulse to Mirandize enemies on foreign fields of war and bestow upon them the rights of U.S. citizens at home--even if that means releasing them to kill Americans again.

24 is a thriller wrapped around a gimmick: Each season presents a single, action-packed day, spread out across 24 one-hour episodes (occasionally doubled up for an extra kick), all supposed to take place "in real time." Each second of the ticking digital clock is meant to correspond to a second in yet another day from hell for hero Jack, as he battles to save America from scheming terrorists and their weapons of mass destruction.

Conceived before Sept. 11, and scheduled to air in the initial fall lineup of 2001, 24's premiere was briefly delayed. The producers were worried that the subject cut too close to the horrors of the real attacks. In November 2001, they went ahead. 24 was a hit. America was ready for a hero devoted round-the-clock to foiling terrorists.

When I first tuned in, with the pilot show, I found the real-time premise ridiculous. Jack was working for the "Counter-Terrorism Unit" (CTU) in Los Angeles. If the show had lived up (or down) to its billing of horological verisimilitude, he would have spent most of the episode stuck in L.A. traffic.

But I also found the show utterly addictive. It takes more than gridlock to stop Jack, who will do anything and everything to honor his word, defeat the terrorists and save America. Moving at a hectic clip, communicating via an endless supply of cellphones with the faithful tech-wiz Chloe (his most enduring sidekick), Jack tackles at least one deadly crisis per episode, and usually more. Meanwhile, the subplots proliferate into love interests, treachery, coup conspiracies, shootouts, inter-agency rivalries, anguished decisions and--always--some weapon of mass destruction being hauled around, dickered over and primed to go off. Since 2002, the show has rung all the changes on major WMD, some more than once, from chemical to biological to nuclear weapons.

This season the chief setting is New York City with trouble spilling out from a summit at the United Nations. The weapon, courtesy of Middle East politics and the Russian mob, is a rogue cargo of nuclear fuel. Over the past 14 hours, Jack has already been knocked flat by an exploding helicopter, stabbed in the belly, tortured with electrical shocks and, above all, impeded by the usual in-house idiocy and conniving of CTU's latest bosses. Yet he goes on, apparently recovering from his wounds during the commercial breaks.

But as the episodes have stacked up, so have the controversies and the scars, both on-screen and off. Though he struggles on, our hero is weary. It's not just the extras who bite the dust. Every so often, major characters die too--felled by everything from poisoned gas and car bombs to radiation and bullets. Part of the suspense is that you never quite know when something is going to go mortally wrong. Since the show began, Jack has seen his wife murdered and close friends killed. Jack himself has suffered heart attacks under torture, acquired (and kicked) a heroin addiction in order to infiltrate a WMD-dealing drug mob, and received what should have been a fatal whiff of a horrendous bioweapon that would have killed anyone else on the planet.

Meanwhile, out there in the real world, there have been protests over Jack's no-holds-barred interrogation techniques--never mind that this is just a TV show. The producers have been increasingly at pains to weigh down Jack with angst and provide a multicultural parade of villains, including stock Hollywood variations on the motif that the worst enemies are those within. A recurring theme is perfidy among trusted characters, with shadowy groups and ruthless traitors--including at one point Jack's own brother--plotting to attack the country and seize the White House.

Some of this has been far more inane than the real-time premise. What's redeemed it, repeatedly, is the Jack Bauer character. Played by Sutherland as a modest guy sporting a T-shirt and beat-up leather jacket, Jack is the man you want in your fox hole. When he goes to work to stop terrorists, he doesn't quit. No matter if his bosses betray him, his colleagues shun him, Congress tries to pillory him and the terrorists just keep coming. He finds a gun, phones Chloe for some hi-tech backup and soldiers on.

That job has been getting ever tougher. In Season 6, three years ago, Jack returned to the U.S. dazed and angry after an interlude in which Washington let him languish in a Chinese prison. When Season 7 opened, he had the U.S. law on his tail and was living in self-imposed exile in Africa. The current season began with Jack in New York, newly become a grandfather, declaring he was fed up with counter-terrorism, and wanted nothing more than to fly back to California with his daughter and her husband and spend his days in tranquil retirement, dandling his grandchild.

But each time a fresh crisis yanks him back into action. He is the only man who can stop the next attack. Except after May he will be gone. It seems there are plans for a Jack Bauer movie to follow, also starring Sutherland. But that won't be the same as that weekly hour of escape that since Sept. 11 has allowed us to forget the endless absurdities of real-world politics and watch a guy whose mission in life is to protect us, no matter what obstacles the bureaucrats and politicians--not to mention the terrorists--throw in his way. That might just be the definition of a modern hero.

Claudia Rosett, a journalist in residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.

Parochially Post-American

It wasn’t the “reset” button President Obama hit; it was the ejector-seat button.

By Mark Steyn
http://www.nationalreview.com/
April 3, 2010 12:00 A.M.

Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, was in Canada last week. She criticized Ottawa for not inviting aboriginal groups to a meeting on the Arctic, and for not including the facilitation of abortion in the Canadian government’s “maternal health” initiative to developing countries. These might seem curious priorities for the global superpower at a time of war, but, with such a full plate over at the State Department, it’s no wonder that peripheral matters like Iranian nuclear deadlines seem to fall by the wayside.

Stephen Harper, prime minister of Canada, took U.S. criticisms in his stride. “Whether it comes to our role in Afghanistan, our sovereignty over our Arctic, or ultimately our foreign aid priorities, it is Canada and Canadians who will make Canadian decisions,” he said. Judging from the chill in the room at his and the secretary of state’s joint photo-op, the Canadian Arctic now extends pretty much to the U.S. border.

The Obama administration came into office promising to press the “reset” button with the rest of the world after eight years of the so-called arrogant, swaggering Texan cowboy blundering his way around the planet offending peoples from many lands. Instead, Obama pressed the ejector-seat button: Brits, Czechs, Israelis, Indians found themselves given the brush. I gather the Queen was “amused” by the president’s thoughtful gift of an iPod preloaded with Obama speeches — and, fortunately for Her Majesty, the 160GB model only has storage capacity for two of them, or three if you include one of his shorter perorations. But Gordon Brown would like to be liked by Barack Obama, and can’t understand why he isn’t.

There is much speculation on the “root cause” of presidential antipathy to America’s formerly closest ally. It is said his grandfather was ill treated by the authorities in colonial Kenya in the 1940s, which seems as good a basis as any on which to reorder 21st century bilateral relations, or at any rate as good as the proportion of the Canadian overseas-aid budget devoted to abortion promotion. But I doubt insensitive British policing two-thirds of a century ago weighs that heavy on the president. After all, his brother back in Kenya lives on twelve bucks a year, and that doesn’t seem to bother him, so it’s hard to see why ancient slights to his grandfather would — except insofar as they confirm the general biases of his collegiate-Left worldview.

In that sense, those who argue that, having been born in Hawaii and been at grade school in Indonesia, he lacks the instinctive Atlanticism of his predecessors are missing the point. Yes, he has no instinctive Atlanticism. But that’s not because of a childhood spent in the Pacific but because of an adulthood spent among the campus Left from Bill Ayers to Van Jones, not to mention Jeremiah Wright. That also conveniently explains not just the anti-Atlanticism but the anti-Zionism, at least until the scholars uncover some sinister Jewish banker in Nairobi who seized the family home after the braying Brit-imperialist toff tossed Grampa Obama behind bars. Perhaps a singing Mountie yodeling selections from Rose-Marie beneath his jailhouse window all night explains the president’s revulsion to Canadian Arctic policy. Perhaps the Gujarati fakir sharing his cell and keeping Grampa up all night with his snake charming accounts for Obama’s 18-month cold shoulder to India. And you can hardly blame him postponing his trip to Australia given the lingering resentments after Grampa was bitten by a rabid wombat down by the billabong who then ran off with his didgeridoo.

Fascinating as these psychological speculations are, we may be overthinking the situation. It’s not just the president. The entire administration suffers, to put it at its mildest, from systemic indifference to American allies. It wasn’t Obama but a mere aide who sneered to Fleet Street reporters that Britain was merely one of 200 countries in the world and shouldn’t expect any better treatment than any of the others. It wasn’t Obama but the State Department that leaked Hillary Clinton’s dressing down of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Ally-belittling comes so reflexively to this administration that it’s now doing drive-by bird-flipping. I doubt Secretary Clinton intended to change American policy when she was down in Argentina the other day and out of the blue demanded negotiations on the Falkland Islands. I would imagine she is entirely ignorant and indifferent on the subject, and calling for negotiations seemed the easy option — works for Iran and North Korea, right?

As to Canadian funding of Third World abortion, the secretary of state was simply defaulting to her own tropes: If she sounds more like the chair of Planned Parenthood than the principal spokesman for American foreign policy, well, hasn’t she always? In a 2003 autobiography almost as long and as unreadable as the health-care bill, she offered little on world affairs other than the following insights: France’s Bernadette Chirac is “an elegant, cultured woman.” Nicaragua’s Violeta Chamorro is “an elegant, striking woman.” Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto is “a brilliant and striking woman.” Canada’s Aline Chrétien is “intelligent, sharply observant and elegant.” But Russia’s Naina Yeltsin is merely “personable and articulate.” Alas, since taking office, the Obama administration hasn’t found Gordon Brown, Stephen Harper, Binyamin Netanyahu, Nicolas Sarkozy, Václav Klaus, or Manmohan Singh the least bit elegant, cultured, striking, elegant, brilliant, elegant, striking, elegant, sharply observant, elegant, or even personable and articulate.

One of the oddest features of the scene is attributed to the president’s “cool,” which seems to be the euphemism of choice for what, in less stellar executives, would be regarded as an unappealing combination of coldness and self-absorption. I forget which long-ago foreign minister responded to an invitation to lunch with an adversary by saying “I’m not hungry,” but Obama seems to reserve the line for his “friends.” Visiting France, he declined to dine with the Sarkozys. Visiting Norway, he declined to dine with the king at a banquet thrown explicitly in Obama’s honor. The other day, the president declined to dine with Netanyahu even though the Israeli prime minister was his guest in the White House at the time. The British prime minister, five times rebuffed in his attempt to book a date, had to make do with a perfunctory walk ’n’ talk through the kitchens of the U.N. Obama’s shtick as a candidate was that he was the guy who’d talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Instead, he recoils from all but the most minimal contact with the world.

John Bolton calls him “the first post-American president” and is punctilious enough to add that he doesn’t mean “un-American” or “anti-American.” In his Berlin speech, he presented himself as a “citizen of the world,” which, whatever else it means, suggests an indifference to America’s role as guarantor of the global order. The postponement of his Australian trip in order to ram health care down the throats of the American people was a neat distillation of the reality of his priorities: A transformative domestic agenda must necessarily come at the price of America’s global role. One-worldism is often a convenient cover for ignorance: You’d be hard pressed to find a self-proclaimed “multiculturalist” who can tell you the capital of Lesotho or the principal exports of Bhutan. And so it is with liberal internationalism: The citoyen du monde is the most parochial president of modern times.