Thursday, April 07, 2011
Ryan steals march on Obama as fiscal crisis looms.
by Michael Barone
The Washington Examiner
http://washingtonexaminer.com/
April 6, 2011
‘My worst experience was the financial crisis of September 2008,” responded House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan yesterday to a reporter’s question about Democrats’ attacks on the budget he unveiled earlier in the day.
“What if the president and your representative saw it coming and could have prevented it from happening?” Ryan said. “What would you think of them if they didn’t?” A hush came over the audience at the American Enterprise Institute (where I am a resident fellow).
It was Ryan’s way of saying that the financial meltdown arrived largely without warning, while the impending fiscal crunch is like a runaway freight train.
“This is the most predictable crisis in the history of our country,” he went on. “We are on our path to a debt crisis” like those we’ve seen recently in Europe, with the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product rising, under Barack Obama’s budget, past the 90 percent danger point on its way to 800 percent.
At some point in between, as Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff explains in the Financial Times, interest rates spike upward and the government is forced to make draconian cuts.
Those Social Security checks? They can be scratched at any time, as the Supreme Court held in Flemming v. Nestor in 1960. Congress can do that just as quickly as it voted $700 billion to bail out the banks in fall 2008.
Ryan’s budget attempts to prevent that by restructuring taxes and spending programs so that the national debt as a percentage of GDP will start sliding down.
Tax rates would be lowered and the tax base broadened, much as Congress did in 1986. Federal spending would revert to 2008 levels and be frozen for five years.
Corporate-welfare programs, including green energy, would be ended. Defense spending would be at the levels recommended by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Medicaid would be converted into block grants to the states, which would give them new incentives to hold down costs.
Medicare would be converted, for those now under 55, to a program like federal employees’ health-benefit plans and the Medicare prescription-drug program. Seniors would have a choice of plans and would receive “premium support,” federal supplements varying in size depending on income and health.
As Ryan says, this resembles welfare reform in the 1990s — one of the great public-policy successes of recent times.
Ryan’s budget is a brave attempt to reverse the Obama Democrats’ vast increase in the size and scope of government. The premise of their policies was that people can’t make rational choices to take care of themselves and are better off depending on centralized experts to limit those choices.
Ryan’s budget is based on the idea that people are capable of making decisions for themselves. And that the cumulative result of all those decisions, made by millions of people, will be greater productivity, creativity, and protection than can ever be achieved by a few experts through centralized command and control.
This is not an approach recommended by campaign consultants. Their conventional wisdom says that you never, ever recommend any changes in programs like Medicare.
Such advice has been heeded by the former community organizer now in the White House. “Hope and change” was a nice theme for an out-party candidate in 2008. But the status quo and fear-mongering seems to be the approach for the in-party candidate who this week announced the beginning of his 2012 campaign.
In the short term, Ryan’s budget resolution will likely be adopted in the Republican-controlled House and not even considered in the Democratic-majority Senate. Most of it will probably not become law this year.
But it’s also likely to shape the economic platform for the Republican presidential nominee in 2012. None of the current potential candidates has come up with anything so comprehensive. Some have already stepped up and praised Ryan’s plan.
But the political risk may be greater for the other side. “To be in a secure place for re-election,” writes Mark Penn, a key strategist for Bill Clinton in 1996, “President Obama has some tasks ahead of him that will give him the edge when (the Republican) field is narrowed.”
The first task, Penn writes, is to “take over leadership of the budget fight to turn it into a win for him and fiscal sanity.”
It seems that Penn agrees with Ryan that American voters realize that we are headed to fiscal Armageddon and that major changes must be made while we have time. What will they think of a president who disagrees?
— Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2011 The Washington Examiner.
The Washington Examiner
http://washingtonexaminer.com/
April 6, 2011
“What if the president and your representative saw it coming and could have prevented it from happening?” Ryan said. “What would you think of them if they didn’t?” A hush came over the audience at the American Enterprise Institute (where I am a resident fellow).
It was Ryan’s way of saying that the financial meltdown arrived largely without warning, while the impending fiscal crunch is like a runaway freight train.
“This is the most predictable crisis in the history of our country,” he went on. “We are on our path to a debt crisis” like those we’ve seen recently in Europe, with the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product rising, under Barack Obama’s budget, past the 90 percent danger point on its way to 800 percent.
At some point in between, as Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff explains in the Financial Times, interest rates spike upward and the government is forced to make draconian cuts.
Those Social Security checks? They can be scratched at any time, as the Supreme Court held in Flemming v. Nestor in 1960. Congress can do that just as quickly as it voted $700 billion to bail out the banks in fall 2008.
Ryan’s budget attempts to prevent that by restructuring taxes and spending programs so that the national debt as a percentage of GDP will start sliding down.
Tax rates would be lowered and the tax base broadened, much as Congress did in 1986. Federal spending would revert to 2008 levels and be frozen for five years.
Corporate-welfare programs, including green energy, would be ended. Defense spending would be at the levels recommended by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Medicaid would be converted into block grants to the states, which would give them new incentives to hold down costs.
Medicare would be converted, for those now under 55, to a program like federal employees’ health-benefit plans and the Medicare prescription-drug program. Seniors would have a choice of plans and would receive “premium support,” federal supplements varying in size depending on income and health.
As Ryan says, this resembles welfare reform in the 1990s — one of the great public-policy successes of recent times.
Ryan’s budget is a brave attempt to reverse the Obama Democrats’ vast increase in the size and scope of government. The premise of their policies was that people can’t make rational choices to take care of themselves and are better off depending on centralized experts to limit those choices.
Ryan’s budget is based on the idea that people are capable of making decisions for themselves. And that the cumulative result of all those decisions, made by millions of people, will be greater productivity, creativity, and protection than can ever be achieved by a few experts through centralized command and control.
This is not an approach recommended by campaign consultants. Their conventional wisdom says that you never, ever recommend any changes in programs like Medicare.
Such advice has been heeded by the former community organizer now in the White House. “Hope and change” was a nice theme for an out-party candidate in 2008. But the status quo and fear-mongering seems to be the approach for the in-party candidate who this week announced the beginning of his 2012 campaign.
In the short term, Ryan’s budget resolution will likely be adopted in the Republican-controlled House and not even considered in the Democratic-majority Senate. Most of it will probably not become law this year.
But it’s also likely to shape the economic platform for the Republican presidential nominee in 2012. None of the current potential candidates has come up with anything so comprehensive. Some have already stepped up and praised Ryan’s plan.
But the political risk may be greater for the other side. “To be in a secure place for re-election,” writes Mark Penn, a key strategist for Bill Clinton in 1996, “President Obama has some tasks ahead of him that will give him the edge when (the Republican) field is narrowed.”
The first task, Penn writes, is to “take over leadership of the budget fight to turn it into a win for him and fiscal sanity.”
It seems that Penn agrees with Ryan that American voters realize that we are headed to fiscal Armageddon and that major changes must be made while we have time. What will they think of a president who disagrees?
— Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2011 The Washington Examiner.
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Instead of a coronation, dismal NCAA title game was a culmination of bad habits
By John Feinstein, Tuesday, April , 3:04 PM
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
HOUSTON, TX - APRIL 04: Head coach Jim Calhoun of the Connecticut Huskies celebrate with his team and the trophy after defeating the Butler Bulldogs to win the National Championship Game of the 2011 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament by a score of 53-41 at Reliant Stadium on April 4, 2011 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)
AUGUSTA, Ga.
This was the message of Monday night’s NCAA national championship game: You reap what you sow.
This is where basketball has come after years of the powers-that-be fiddling while the sport has burned.
It is not news that the level of play — from youth basketball to the NBA — has been dropping like a stone for a good long while now, but Connecticut’s unwatchable 53-41 victory over Butler put that fact into focus on the game’s biggest stage.
There’s no doubt these were the two teams that deserved to play for the championship. Connecticut had won 10 consecutive games to get to the title game; Butler had won 14 in a row. Each had survived scares by making big plays late, and both had that little bit of luck that most national champions need.
And then they both no-showed on Monday night, except that Butler out-no-showed U-Conn. Were the Huskies the best team? Let’s put it this way: They were less bad than everyone else in the (too many) 68-team field.
Please — please — let’s not go down the “that was great defense” road. Let’s agree that the defenses were good while acknowledging that the offenses were god-awful. Butler couldn’t make a layup or an open jump shot. Matt Howard, who is as admirable a player as has ever played in the tournament, had a night that will keep him awake for years to come.
Steve Kerr, who brought some sensibility to the see-no-evil CBS telecast, can counsel Howard on what it is going to be like. Kerr had a great senior year at Arizona and played a key role in getting the Wildcats to the 1988 Final Four. But in the semifinals against Oklahoma he made only 2 of 13 shots, just a shade better than Howard’s 1-of-13 nightmare. He went on to play on five NBA championship teams.
“The only game I played in that I ever think about is the Oklahoma game,” Kerr said recently. “I can still see the shots I missed that night.”
Howard and his teammates will see their remarkable string of misses in their waking dreams for years. There is no getting around the fact that 12-of-64 shooting is horrific; it was the first time in history a team shot worse than 20 percent from the field in a championship game. Connecticut was better, but 19 of 55 is nothing to write home about — unless it is good enough to win a national championship, in which case everyone at home will be delighted to hear from you.
The larger issue isn’t that one ultimate game was a dud. This was the culmination of years of neglect by everyone responsible for running the game.
The NBA copped out a few years back with the one-and-done rule. It isn’t just that top players don’t ever go to class — lots of players don’t go to class, especially in March — it’s that their focus is on where they think they might go in that spring’s draft, not on trying to get better.
Many college coaches call this the “AAUization” of the game. Stars are coddled from the very beginning; no one tells them they have to play defense, no one teaches them fundamentals and no one gets on them if they don’t play hard. Why? Because if a star gets yelled at by one coach, he goes and finds a new coach. That’s why it is now common for players to go to three or four high schools and play on a different AAU team every summer. Then they come to college knowing they hold all the cards with their coach: They only have to deal with him for one year, so why put up with him if he makes unreasonable demands such as “Would you please try on defense?”
When the NBA and the players’ union get through with all their saber-rattling the next few months, they need to create a sensible rule for underclassmen. The one in place for baseball would be close to ideal: If you are a high school superstar and think you are the next Kevin Garnett or Kobe Bryant or LeBron James, have at it.
But once you enroll in college, you can’t go back into the draft for three years. It’s simple, it will stand up in court if collectively bargained and it is good for players, for college basketball and for the NBA.
There’s more: The three-point line is still way too close, even after it was moved back slightly a few years ago. The NCAA needs to move it back to the NBA distance at all levels and force teams to work harder to get good shots. The fact that Butler couldn’t make a two-point shot on Monday night is another example of how dependent on the three teams have become.
The NCAA is culpable in a lot of this.
For one thing, the brilliant idea of playing only in the most massive domes it can find — and placing the court in the middle of the football field so that shooters have absolutely no background — is never going to be conducive to good basketball. In the nine games played since the new system began in Detroit in 2009, the cumulative shooting percentage of the teams is 38.6 percent. In the nine Final Four games that preceded the switch, teams shot 43.2 percent.
Monday night wasn’t an anomaly, it was a culmination.
There is also the continuing issue of what everyone who cares about college athletics has known to be true for years: cheating pays. The team that just won the national championship is on probation for major rules violations.
The Hall of Fame coach who just joined John Wooden, Adolph Rupp, Mike Krzyzewski and Bob Knight as the only coaches to win at least three national titles will be suspended for his team’s first three conference games next winter because of a “lack of compliance” with NCAA rules.
In English, a lack of compliance means you cheated. (Of course, you wouldn’t know that if you were watching CBS last night).
Calhoun is a great coach and a good man but the fact is he screwed up and the punishment didn’t fit the crime. It never does in NCAA-world. Or CBS-world, where we were continually told on Saturday that John Calipari had taken three teams to the Final Four with no mention of the fact that the first two no longer exist in the record book — except a brief mention saying that Calipari was never found culpable. Pure as the driven snow, no doubt.
In the end, the NCAA cares about none of this. Its new president is a pompous blowhard who brags about “student-athletes,” knowing that almost none of the kids playing in Houston has seen a classroom in the last month.
He talks about “transparency” while running a super-secret society and won’t even answer a simple question such as “How much are you paid?” while the NCAA rolls in the TV billions for which it has sold its soul.
What saves the tournament are the games, because even though they aren’t played nearly as well as in the past, they are still extraordinarily competitive and full of compelling story lines. Butler and VCU made this tournament a joy for most of three weeks.
But the championship game ended it with a thud. Sadly, that is exactly what those running the sport deserved.
For more by the author, visit his blog at http://www.feinsteinonthebrink.com/.
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
AUGUSTA, Ga.
This was the message of Monday night’s NCAA national championship game: You reap what you sow.
This is where basketball has come after years of the powers-that-be fiddling while the sport has burned.
It is not news that the level of play — from youth basketball to the NBA — has been dropping like a stone for a good long while now, but Connecticut’s unwatchable 53-41 victory over Butler put that fact into focus on the game’s biggest stage.
There’s no doubt these were the two teams that deserved to play for the championship. Connecticut had won 10 consecutive games to get to the title game; Butler had won 14 in a row. Each had survived scares by making big plays late, and both had that little bit of luck that most national champions need.
And then they both no-showed on Monday night, except that Butler out-no-showed U-Conn. Were the Huskies the best team? Let’s put it this way: They were less bad than everyone else in the (too many) 68-team field.
Please — please — let’s not go down the “that was great defense” road. Let’s agree that the defenses were good while acknowledging that the offenses were god-awful. Butler couldn’t make a layup or an open jump shot. Matt Howard, who is as admirable a player as has ever played in the tournament, had a night that will keep him awake for years to come.
Steve Kerr, who brought some sensibility to the see-no-evil CBS telecast, can counsel Howard on what it is going to be like. Kerr had a great senior year at Arizona and played a key role in getting the Wildcats to the 1988 Final Four. But in the semifinals against Oklahoma he made only 2 of 13 shots, just a shade better than Howard’s 1-of-13 nightmare. He went on to play on five NBA championship teams.
“The only game I played in that I ever think about is the Oklahoma game,” Kerr said recently. “I can still see the shots I missed that night.”
Howard and his teammates will see their remarkable string of misses in their waking dreams for years. There is no getting around the fact that 12-of-64 shooting is horrific; it was the first time in history a team shot worse than 20 percent from the field in a championship game. Connecticut was better, but 19 of 55 is nothing to write home about — unless it is good enough to win a national championship, in which case everyone at home will be delighted to hear from you.
The larger issue isn’t that one ultimate game was a dud. This was the culmination of years of neglect by everyone responsible for running the game.
The NBA copped out a few years back with the one-and-done rule. It isn’t just that top players don’t ever go to class — lots of players don’t go to class, especially in March — it’s that their focus is on where they think they might go in that spring’s draft, not on trying to get better.
Many college coaches call this the “AAUization” of the game. Stars are coddled from the very beginning; no one tells them they have to play defense, no one teaches them fundamentals and no one gets on them if they don’t play hard. Why? Because if a star gets yelled at by one coach, he goes and finds a new coach. That’s why it is now common for players to go to three or four high schools and play on a different AAU team every summer. Then they come to college knowing they hold all the cards with their coach: They only have to deal with him for one year, so why put up with him if he makes unreasonable demands such as “Would you please try on defense?”
When the NBA and the players’ union get through with all their saber-rattling the next few months, they need to create a sensible rule for underclassmen. The one in place for baseball would be close to ideal: If you are a high school superstar and think you are the next Kevin Garnett or Kobe Bryant or LeBron James, have at it.
But once you enroll in college, you can’t go back into the draft for three years. It’s simple, it will stand up in court if collectively bargained and it is good for players, for college basketball and for the NBA.
There’s more: The three-point line is still way too close, even after it was moved back slightly a few years ago. The NCAA needs to move it back to the NBA distance at all levels and force teams to work harder to get good shots. The fact that Butler couldn’t make a two-point shot on Monday night is another example of how dependent on the three teams have become.
The NCAA is culpable in a lot of this.
For one thing, the brilliant idea of playing only in the most massive domes it can find — and placing the court in the middle of the football field so that shooters have absolutely no background — is never going to be conducive to good basketball. In the nine games played since the new system began in Detroit in 2009, the cumulative shooting percentage of the teams is 38.6 percent. In the nine Final Four games that preceded the switch, teams shot 43.2 percent.
Monday night wasn’t an anomaly, it was a culmination.
There is also the continuing issue of what everyone who cares about college athletics has known to be true for years: cheating pays. The team that just won the national championship is on probation for major rules violations.
The Hall of Fame coach who just joined John Wooden, Adolph Rupp, Mike Krzyzewski and Bob Knight as the only coaches to win at least three national titles will be suspended for his team’s first three conference games next winter because of a “lack of compliance” with NCAA rules.
In English, a lack of compliance means you cheated. (Of course, you wouldn’t know that if you were watching CBS last night).
Calhoun is a great coach and a good man but the fact is he screwed up and the punishment didn’t fit the crime. It never does in NCAA-world. Or CBS-world, where we were continually told on Saturday that John Calipari had taken three teams to the Final Four with no mention of the fact that the first two no longer exist in the record book — except a brief mention saying that Calipari was never found culpable. Pure as the driven snow, no doubt.
In the end, the NCAA cares about none of this. Its new president is a pompous blowhard who brags about “student-athletes,” knowing that almost none of the kids playing in Houston has seen a classroom in the last month.
He talks about “transparency” while running a super-secret society and won’t even answer a simple question such as “How much are you paid?” while the NCAA rolls in the TV billions for which it has sold its soul.
What saves the tournament are the games, because even though they aren’t played nearly as well as in the past, they are still extraordinarily competitive and full of compelling story lines. Butler and VCU made this tournament a joy for most of three weeks.
But the championship game ended it with a thud. Sadly, that is exactly what those running the sport deserved.
For more by the author, visit his blog at http://www.feinsteinonthebrink.com/.
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
Carter Charms the Castro Brothers
by Humberto Fontova
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
April 5, 2011
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn pose for a picture with former Cuban leader Fidel Castro during a meeting in Havana March 30, 2011. Picture taken March 30, 2011.(Reuters)
Embracing a recent invitation by the Castro brothers, Jimmy Carter visited Cuba this past week.
“We greeted each other as old friends,” gushed Carter regarding his meeting with Fidel Castro.
“In 2002, we received him warmly,” reciprocated Castro. “Now, I reiterated to him our respect and esteem.”
“Jimmy Carter was the best of all U.S. Presdients,” pronounced Raul Castro, while seeing his American guest off personally and jovially.
Jimmy Carter earned all this warmth and joviality from Cuba’s Stalinist rulers by doing everything within his power to dismantle the so-called embargo against them. “The embargo of Cuba is the stupidest law ever passed in the US,” Carter remarked in 2002. And yet, President Jimmy Carter imposed more economic sanctions against more nations than any American president in modern history. These sanctions were against Chile, Iran, Rhodesia, Nicaragua, South Africa, Paraguay and Uruguay. President Carter was extremely selective in imposing his sanctions, let’s give him that. He was careful to punish only US allies.
In Cuba, Carter also took time to visit and console some bereaved Cuban families. According to the Black Book of Communism (no outpost of the vast-right wing conspiracy), Carter’s Cuban hosts murdered 12-14,000 Cubans by firing squad. According to Freedom House, over half a million Cubans have suffered in Castro’s various Gulags, dungeons, and torture chambers, an incarceration rate higher than Stalin’s. According to the scholars and researchers at the Cuba Archive, the Castro regime’s total death toll—from torture, prison beatings, firing squads, machine gunning of escapees, drownings, etc.—approaches 100,000.[1]
So, President Carter would seem to have little trouble in finding bereaved Cuban families to meet. And he did meet the grieving families of some Cuban-born prisoners. But these prisoners were serving time in US prisons, after conviction by US juries for espionage against the nation that elected Jimmy Carter president and for conspiracy to murder his fellow citizens. These Cubans, you see, are the ones who tugged at Carter’s heartstrings.
Some background: On September 14, 1998, the FBI uncovered a Castro spy ring in Miami and arrested ten of them. Five were convicted by US juries (from which Cuban-Americans were scrupulously excluded) and became known as “The Cuban Five” in Castroite parlance. According to the FBI’s affidavit, these Castro agents were engaged in, among other acts:
•Gathering intelligence against the Boca Chica Air Naval Station in Key West, the McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, and the headquarters of the US Southern Command in Homestead, Fla.
•Compiling the names, home addresses, and medical files of the US Southern Command’s top officers, along with those of hundreds of other officers stationed at Boca Chica.
•Infiltrating the headquarters of the US Southern Command.
•Sending letter bombs to Cuban-Americans.
•Spying on McDill Air Force Base, the US armed forces’ worldwide headquarters for fighting “low-intensity” conflicts.
•Locating entry points into Florida for smuggling explosive material.
One of these Castro agents, Gerardo Hernandez, also infiltrated the Cuban-exile group Brothers to the Rescue, who flew unarmed Cessnas to rescue Cuban rafters in the Florida straits, also known as “the cemetery without crosses.” The estimates of the number of Cubans dying horribly in the “cemetery without crosses” run from 30,000-50,000. Brothers to the Rescue would often drop flowers into the sea for those they’d been unable to rescue.
These pilots risked their lives almost daily, flying over the straits, alerting and guiding the Coast Guard to any balseros, and saving thousands of these desperate people from joining that terrible tally. (Prior to Castro’s Revolution, by the way, Cuba was deluged with more immigrants per-capita than the US.)
In Feb. 1996, Castro agent Gerardo Hernandez fulfilled his mission by passing the flight plan for one of the Brothers’ humanitarian flights to Castro. With this information in hand, Cuba’s Top Guns saluted and sprang to action. They jumped into their MIGs, took off and valiantly blasted apart (in international air space) the lumbering and utterly defenseless Cessnas. Four members of the humanitarian flights were thus murdered in cold blood. MIGs against Cessnas; cannons and rockets against flowers.
Three of these murdered men were US citizens, one a decorated Viet-Nam vet. The other was a legal US resident. No record exists of Jimmy Carter ever meeting with their families. But in Havana, Jimmy Carter smilingly met with the families of the man convicted in US courts of helping murder them, and with Raul Castro himself, who personally gave the order to shoot down the defenseless Cessnas.
“I had the opportunity to meet the families of the five Cuban patriots,” said Carter during an interview with Castro media apparatchik this week (Hernandez, among them). “[W]ith their wives and with their mothers…..I’m well aware of the shortcomings of the US judicial system, but hope that President Obama will grant their pardon. He knows my opinion on this matter, that the trial of the Cuban Five was very dubious, that many norms were violated.” Apparently, Carter is less familiar with the shortcomings of the Cuban judicial system, if one can call it that.
In Castro’s fiefdom, people are sent to the firing squad and prison based on Che Guevara’s famous legal dictum: “Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. We prosecute and execute from revolutionary conviction!” Again, this system jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s.
So, during an interview with a Castro apparatchik in Havana on Wednesday, Jimmy Carter saw fit to castigate “the shortcomings of the U.S. judicial system,” and hailed Castro’s KGB- trained and US convicted spies as “patriots.”
No wonder P.J. O’Rourke famously dubbed Jimmy Carter, “that most ‘ex-’ of America’s ex-presidents.”
Link:
[1] http://cubaarchive.org/home/
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
April 5, 2011
Embracing a recent invitation by the Castro brothers, Jimmy Carter visited Cuba this past week.
“We greeted each other as old friends,” gushed Carter regarding his meeting with Fidel Castro.
“In 2002, we received him warmly,” reciprocated Castro. “Now, I reiterated to him our respect and esteem.”
“Jimmy Carter was the best of all U.S. Presdients,” pronounced Raul Castro, while seeing his American guest off personally and jovially.
Jimmy Carter earned all this warmth and joviality from Cuba’s Stalinist rulers by doing everything within his power to dismantle the so-called embargo against them. “The embargo of Cuba is the stupidest law ever passed in the US,” Carter remarked in 2002. And yet, President Jimmy Carter imposed more economic sanctions against more nations than any American president in modern history. These sanctions were against Chile, Iran, Rhodesia, Nicaragua, South Africa, Paraguay and Uruguay. President Carter was extremely selective in imposing his sanctions, let’s give him that. He was careful to punish only US allies.
In Cuba, Carter also took time to visit and console some bereaved Cuban families. According to the Black Book of Communism (no outpost of the vast-right wing conspiracy), Carter’s Cuban hosts murdered 12-14,000 Cubans by firing squad. According to Freedom House, over half a million Cubans have suffered in Castro’s various Gulags, dungeons, and torture chambers, an incarceration rate higher than Stalin’s. According to the scholars and researchers at the Cuba Archive, the Castro regime’s total death toll—from torture, prison beatings, firing squads, machine gunning of escapees, drownings, etc.—approaches 100,000.[1]
So, President Carter would seem to have little trouble in finding bereaved Cuban families to meet. And he did meet the grieving families of some Cuban-born prisoners. But these prisoners were serving time in US prisons, after conviction by US juries for espionage against the nation that elected Jimmy Carter president and for conspiracy to murder his fellow citizens. These Cubans, you see, are the ones who tugged at Carter’s heartstrings.
Some background: On September 14, 1998, the FBI uncovered a Castro spy ring in Miami and arrested ten of them. Five were convicted by US juries (from which Cuban-Americans were scrupulously excluded) and became known as “The Cuban Five” in Castroite parlance. According to the FBI’s affidavit, these Castro agents were engaged in, among other acts:
•Gathering intelligence against the Boca Chica Air Naval Station in Key West, the McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, and the headquarters of the US Southern Command in Homestead, Fla.
•Compiling the names, home addresses, and medical files of the US Southern Command’s top officers, along with those of hundreds of other officers stationed at Boca Chica.
•Infiltrating the headquarters of the US Southern Command.
•Sending letter bombs to Cuban-Americans.
•Spying on McDill Air Force Base, the US armed forces’ worldwide headquarters for fighting “low-intensity” conflicts.
•Locating entry points into Florida for smuggling explosive material.
One of these Castro agents, Gerardo Hernandez, also infiltrated the Cuban-exile group Brothers to the Rescue, who flew unarmed Cessnas to rescue Cuban rafters in the Florida straits, also known as “the cemetery without crosses.” The estimates of the number of Cubans dying horribly in the “cemetery without crosses” run from 30,000-50,000. Brothers to the Rescue would often drop flowers into the sea for those they’d been unable to rescue.
These pilots risked their lives almost daily, flying over the straits, alerting and guiding the Coast Guard to any balseros, and saving thousands of these desperate people from joining that terrible tally. (Prior to Castro’s Revolution, by the way, Cuba was deluged with more immigrants per-capita than the US.)
In Feb. 1996, Castro agent Gerardo Hernandez fulfilled his mission by passing the flight plan for one of the Brothers’ humanitarian flights to Castro. With this information in hand, Cuba’s Top Guns saluted and sprang to action. They jumped into their MIGs, took off and valiantly blasted apart (in international air space) the lumbering and utterly defenseless Cessnas. Four members of the humanitarian flights were thus murdered in cold blood. MIGs against Cessnas; cannons and rockets against flowers.
Three of these murdered men were US citizens, one a decorated Viet-Nam vet. The other was a legal US resident. No record exists of Jimmy Carter ever meeting with their families. But in Havana, Jimmy Carter smilingly met with the families of the man convicted in US courts of helping murder them, and with Raul Castro himself, who personally gave the order to shoot down the defenseless Cessnas.
“I had the opportunity to meet the families of the five Cuban patriots,” said Carter during an interview with Castro media apparatchik this week (Hernandez, among them). “[W]ith their wives and with their mothers…..I’m well aware of the shortcomings of the US judicial system, but hope that President Obama will grant their pardon. He knows my opinion on this matter, that the trial of the Cuban Five was very dubious, that many norms were violated.” Apparently, Carter is less familiar with the shortcomings of the Cuban judicial system, if one can call it that.
In Castro’s fiefdom, people are sent to the firing squad and prison based on Che Guevara’s famous legal dictum: “Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. We prosecute and execute from revolutionary conviction!” Again, this system jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s.
So, during an interview with a Castro apparatchik in Havana on Wednesday, Jimmy Carter saw fit to castigate “the shortcomings of the U.S. judicial system,” and hailed Castro’s KGB- trained and US convicted spies as “patriots.”
No wonder P.J. O’Rourke famously dubbed Jimmy Carter, “that most ‘ex-’ of America’s ex-presidents.”
Link:
[1] http://cubaarchive.org/home/
Goldstone: You Cannot Undo a Slander
How could an eminent jurist not have known the relevant facts?
by Mona Charen
http://www.nationalreview.com/
April 5, 2011 12:00 A.M.
Richard Goldstone at a 2009 hearing in Geneva discussing his controversial report on Israel's actions in Gaza.
Richard Goldstone, the formerly respected South African jurist who disgraced himself by lending his name to a sinister and libelous U.N. report condemning Israel for war crimes, has now issued a very public retraction. “If I had known then what I know now,” he wrote in the Washington Post, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”[1] New information has persuaded him, he said, “that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” by Israel.
While this recantation is better than none, it invites the question: How could Goldstone not have known the relevant facts? A ten-year-old could have known the relevant facts.
Goldstone was initially approached by the U.N. Human Rights Council and asked to preside over an “investigation” into “all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression.”
The very wording of the resolution contained enough information for a reasonable man — no less a judge — to recognize the utterly tendentious nature of the enterprise. The use of the term “occupied” to refer to Gaza might have tipped him off that something was amiss, since Israel withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005. Had his eyes been open, he might also have been given pause by the words “current aggression.”
But asking only to broaden the mandate to include human-rights violations by Hamas, Goldstone agreed to be used. And let’s not kid ourselves. He was valuable to the baying hyenas at the U.N. because he is himself a Jew.
Beyond the verdict-before-the-trial wording, Goldstone might have considered the fact that one of the commission’s four members, Christine Chinkin, signed a public letter denouncing Israel for “war crimes” before the investigation got underway.
Or Goldstone might have considered the history of the Human Rights Council. Anne Bayefsky, of Eye on the UN, outlined its record between 2004 and 2009:
The council has passed more resolutions and decisions condemning Israel than all other 191 U.N. members combined. The council has one (of only ten) formal agenda items dedicated to criticizing Israel. And one agenda item to consider the human rights of the remaining 99.9 percent of the world’s population . . . It has terminated human rights investigations on Belarus, Cuba, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And all investigations of ‘consistent patterns of gross and reliably attested violations of all human rights and all fundamental freedoms in such states as Iran, Kyrgyzstan, the Maldives, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have been ‘discontinued.’
As for Hamas, which is never labeled a terrorist organization throughout the Goldstone report, there has been copious evidence since 1987 that this offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (and client of Iran) has engaged in massive human-rights violations, including deliberate targeting of civilians (Arabs as well as Israelis), kidnapping, torture, and hiding military equipment in mosques, hospitals, and schools. The Hamas Charter states that, “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad.”
For the better part of four years, Israel suffered more than 10,000 missile attacks against its civilians from Gaza. When it finally used military force to stop the attacks, Israel, in the words of British colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.”
All of this was not just knowable when Goldstone signed on as front man for the U.N. lynch mob, it was known. The Goldstone Report was intended, and has since been employed, to stigmatize any Israeli self-defense as a war crime. In 2009, Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, cancelled a trip to London after learning of an arrest warrant. Just recently, Israeli president Shimon Peres was threatened with arrest in Switzerland.
Goldstone claims to be moved now by evidence that Israel has investigated more than 400 claims of misconduct against its armed forces whereas Hamas has done nothing to police itself. Rubbish. The aforementioned ten-year-old could have predicted that.
No, apparently Goldstone’s conscience troubled him. While that’s progress for him, the retraction cannot possibly correct his shameful contribution to lies, slander, and the moral perversion of the so-called “international community.”
— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2011 Creators Syndicate.
Link:
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering-the-goldstone-report-on-israel-and-war-crimes/2011/04/01/AFg111JC_story.html
by Mona Charen
http://www.nationalreview.com/
April 5, 2011 12:00 A.M.
Richard Goldstone, the formerly respected South African jurist who disgraced himself by lending his name to a sinister and libelous U.N. report condemning Israel for war crimes, has now issued a very public retraction. “If I had known then what I know now,” he wrote in the Washington Post, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”[1] New information has persuaded him, he said, “that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” by Israel.
While this recantation is better than none, it invites the question: How could Goldstone not have known the relevant facts? A ten-year-old could have known the relevant facts.
Goldstone was initially approached by the U.N. Human Rights Council and asked to preside over an “investigation” into “all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression.”
The very wording of the resolution contained enough information for a reasonable man — no less a judge — to recognize the utterly tendentious nature of the enterprise. The use of the term “occupied” to refer to Gaza might have tipped him off that something was amiss, since Israel withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005. Had his eyes been open, he might also have been given pause by the words “current aggression.”
But asking only to broaden the mandate to include human-rights violations by Hamas, Goldstone agreed to be used. And let’s not kid ourselves. He was valuable to the baying hyenas at the U.N. because he is himself a Jew.
Beyond the verdict-before-the-trial wording, Goldstone might have considered the fact that one of the commission’s four members, Christine Chinkin, signed a public letter denouncing Israel for “war crimes” before the investigation got underway.
Or Goldstone might have considered the history of the Human Rights Council. Anne Bayefsky, of Eye on the UN, outlined its record between 2004 and 2009:
The council has passed more resolutions and decisions condemning Israel than all other 191 U.N. members combined. The council has one (of only ten) formal agenda items dedicated to criticizing Israel. And one agenda item to consider the human rights of the remaining 99.9 percent of the world’s population . . . It has terminated human rights investigations on Belarus, Cuba, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And all investigations of ‘consistent patterns of gross and reliably attested violations of all human rights and all fundamental freedoms in such states as Iran, Kyrgyzstan, the Maldives, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have been ‘discontinued.’
As for Hamas, which is never labeled a terrorist organization throughout the Goldstone report, there has been copious evidence since 1987 that this offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (and client of Iran) has engaged in massive human-rights violations, including deliberate targeting of civilians (Arabs as well as Israelis), kidnapping, torture, and hiding military equipment in mosques, hospitals, and schools. The Hamas Charter states that, “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad.”
For the better part of four years, Israel suffered more than 10,000 missile attacks against its civilians from Gaza. When it finally used military force to stop the attacks, Israel, in the words of British colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.”
All of this was not just knowable when Goldstone signed on as front man for the U.N. lynch mob, it was known. The Goldstone Report was intended, and has since been employed, to stigmatize any Israeli self-defense as a war crime. In 2009, Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, cancelled a trip to London after learning of an arrest warrant. Just recently, Israeli president Shimon Peres was threatened with arrest in Switzerland.
Goldstone claims to be moved now by evidence that Israel has investigated more than 400 claims of misconduct against its armed forces whereas Hamas has done nothing to police itself. Rubbish. The aforementioned ten-year-old could have predicted that.
No, apparently Goldstone’s conscience troubled him. While that’s progress for him, the retraction cannot possibly correct his shameful contribution to lies, slander, and the moral perversion of the so-called “international community.”
— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2011 Creators Syndicate.
Link:
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reconsidering-the-goldstone-report-on-israel-and-war-crimes/2011/04/01/AFg111JC_story.html
Butler Bulldogs have a lot to be proud of
By Bob Kravitz
The Indianapolis Star
http://www.indystar.com/
April 5, 2011
Butler head coach Brad Stevens and team watch action against Connecticut during the second half of the men's NCAA Final Four college basketball championship game Monday, April 4, 2011, in Houston.(AP)
HOUSTON -- It was such a beautiful dream, and it lasted and lasted and seemed as if it might never end. One Butler Bulldogs victory after another, another buzzer-beater, another last-second slice of hoops heroism, another amazing comeback. It was a dream, for a second straight season, that had us all in its thrall, locally, nationally, even globally.
A beautiful dream . . . that turned, for one hideous evening, into a nightmare.
Connecticut 53, Butler 41.
They climbed basketball's Everest once again, which is remarkable in and of itself, only to stop a few breathless steps short of the summit. This doesn't often happen to basketball's pedigreed bluebloods, but for it to happen to Butler, the small school with the small budget and the humble facilities, was amazing, inspiring and redemptive.
"I feel fortunate to have been a part of this class and this whole team," Butler senior Matt Howard said later, blinking back the tears. "It's really hard to put that into words right now. We wanted a little bit more, but maybe at some point (we) can look back and be proud of what this group has accomplished."
He doesn't have to look back and be proud.
He can be proud now.
They all can.
"I don't love them any less because they lost," coach Brad Stevens said. "What they've done is remarkable."
In the end, it was a shame, a crying shame.
A crying shame for the program, which had done more with less than anybody in the country, representing the school and the state of Indiana with consummate grace and class.
A shame for Howard, who should have his jersey retired in the Hinkle Fieldhouse rafters after a model career in which he represented the best of The Butler Way. He is the ultimate scholar-athlete.
"I told him after the game," Stevens said, softly, "I don't have enough time now to tell him all the things he's meant to Butler."
And really, a crying shame for college basketball. What a marvelous moment it would have been, Butler's players and coaches standing there hoisting the trophy after a scandal-plagued year in college sports.
But wishing for the fairy-tale ending isn't enough to make it so. Especially not on a night when the opponent, Connecticut, plays as inspired a brand of defensive basketball as Butler does. Not on a night when Butler plays a historically awful brand of offensive basketball, unable to hit the few open shots it had (and there weren't many).
It's a simple game, really. You've got to make shots. Twelve-of-64 won't beat Youngstown State. It certainly won't beat UConn on the game's biggest stage. The Bulldogs' 41 points were the fewest scored in a national championship game since Oklahoma A&M had 36 in 1949.
Shelvin Mack never got loose to do damage. Howard had hands and bodies in his face all night. Andrew Smith had a game to forget (and it's fair to wonder where Stevens was hiding Khyle Marshall). UConn guarded the paint like it was fine china, dominating down low.
This game wasn't just ugly.
It had a lousy personality.
By midway through the second half, even Butler's brilliant coach was out of answers. He tried a zone -- and zones are not a part of the Butler DNA. He tried Chrishawn Hopkins. He tried every trick he had (short of Marshall).
Nothing.
Just miss after miss after miss.
Painful.
"We kept telling each other, the shots are going to go in, it's going to be fine," Howard said. "That's the mind-set you have to have."
But, you know, we're not here to talk about the intricacies of the game, to break it all down. Really, there's not much to break down. They missed shots. End of story. And UConn had a lot to do with that.
In the end, this most recent Butler run was -- again -- remarkable and inspiring and downright fun. From that Horizon League Tournament championship victory in Milwaukee, to the last-second victory over Old Dominion to the crazy final seconds with Pittsburgh to the manhandling of Wisconsin to the comebacks against Florida and on into the Final Four.
In a state whose loyalties are often bisected into Indiana University and Purdue, Butler is the one thing everybody can agree upon: It's an absolute model of what a basketball program ought to be. The way the Bulldogs play, the way the coaches and players handle themselves, the humility and the grace with which they handled the good times and the bad, it all strikes the perfect chord.
One rough night doesn't diminish what they've accomplished these past two years.
Not at all. Not in the least.
They've done something that mid-majors are simply not supposed to do. They've come from a mid-major conference, worked with mid-major funds, and built a powerhouse that can compete with and beat the sport's pedigreed bluebloods.
Know who else lost back-to-back national finals?
The Fab Five, Michigan's vaunted great recruiting class in the early 1990s.
The Bulldogs fell one shot short against Duke, losing 61-59, last year.
And they fell way short -- painfully short -- against UConn.
History will not record that Butler was a national champion, but we will all remember this as a legendary group who made two noble assaults on the summit of college basketball.
After the game, Stevens was asked about the legacy of this group of players, who will always be remembered locally and in college basketball lore.
"That they were just good guys," Stevens said with a smile and a sigh. "Just good students, people at Butler really like them, not because they're basketball players but because they treat people right and they're engaging and smart and they're all going to be very successful. . . . It's what it's all about."
It would have made for a sweeter ending -- Butler: national champions -- but the best stories don't always get written.
Bob Kravitz is a columnist for The Indianapolis Star. Contact him at (317) 444-6643 or via email at bob.kravitz@indystar.com. You can also follow Bob on Twitter at @bkravitz.
The Indianapolis Star
http://www.indystar.com/
April 5, 2011
HOUSTON -- It was such a beautiful dream, and it lasted and lasted and seemed as if it might never end. One Butler Bulldogs victory after another, another buzzer-beater, another last-second slice of hoops heroism, another amazing comeback. It was a dream, for a second straight season, that had us all in its thrall, locally, nationally, even globally.
A beautiful dream . . . that turned, for one hideous evening, into a nightmare.
Connecticut 53, Butler 41.
They climbed basketball's Everest once again, which is remarkable in and of itself, only to stop a few breathless steps short of the summit. This doesn't often happen to basketball's pedigreed bluebloods, but for it to happen to Butler, the small school with the small budget and the humble facilities, was amazing, inspiring and redemptive.
"I feel fortunate to have been a part of this class and this whole team," Butler senior Matt Howard said later, blinking back the tears. "It's really hard to put that into words right now. We wanted a little bit more, but maybe at some point (we) can look back and be proud of what this group has accomplished."
He doesn't have to look back and be proud.
He can be proud now.
They all can.
"I don't love them any less because they lost," coach Brad Stevens said. "What they've done is remarkable."
In the end, it was a shame, a crying shame.
A crying shame for the program, which had done more with less than anybody in the country, representing the school and the state of Indiana with consummate grace and class.
A shame for Howard, who should have his jersey retired in the Hinkle Fieldhouse rafters after a model career in which he represented the best of The Butler Way. He is the ultimate scholar-athlete.
"I told him after the game," Stevens said, softly, "I don't have enough time now to tell him all the things he's meant to Butler."
And really, a crying shame for college basketball. What a marvelous moment it would have been, Butler's players and coaches standing there hoisting the trophy after a scandal-plagued year in college sports.
But wishing for the fairy-tale ending isn't enough to make it so. Especially not on a night when the opponent, Connecticut, plays as inspired a brand of defensive basketball as Butler does. Not on a night when Butler plays a historically awful brand of offensive basketball, unable to hit the few open shots it had (and there weren't many).
It's a simple game, really. You've got to make shots. Twelve-of-64 won't beat Youngstown State. It certainly won't beat UConn on the game's biggest stage. The Bulldogs' 41 points were the fewest scored in a national championship game since Oklahoma A&M had 36 in 1949.
Shelvin Mack never got loose to do damage. Howard had hands and bodies in his face all night. Andrew Smith had a game to forget (and it's fair to wonder where Stevens was hiding Khyle Marshall). UConn guarded the paint like it was fine china, dominating down low.
This game wasn't just ugly.
It had a lousy personality.
By midway through the second half, even Butler's brilliant coach was out of answers. He tried a zone -- and zones are not a part of the Butler DNA. He tried Chrishawn Hopkins. He tried every trick he had (short of Marshall).
Nothing.
Just miss after miss after miss.
Painful.
"We kept telling each other, the shots are going to go in, it's going to be fine," Howard said. "That's the mind-set you have to have."
But, you know, we're not here to talk about the intricacies of the game, to break it all down. Really, there's not much to break down. They missed shots. End of story. And UConn had a lot to do with that.
In the end, this most recent Butler run was -- again -- remarkable and inspiring and downright fun. From that Horizon League Tournament championship victory in Milwaukee, to the last-second victory over Old Dominion to the crazy final seconds with Pittsburgh to the manhandling of Wisconsin to the comebacks against Florida and on into the Final Four.
In a state whose loyalties are often bisected into Indiana University and Purdue, Butler is the one thing everybody can agree upon: It's an absolute model of what a basketball program ought to be. The way the Bulldogs play, the way the coaches and players handle themselves, the humility and the grace with which they handled the good times and the bad, it all strikes the perfect chord.
One rough night doesn't diminish what they've accomplished these past two years.
Not at all. Not in the least.
They've done something that mid-majors are simply not supposed to do. They've come from a mid-major conference, worked with mid-major funds, and built a powerhouse that can compete with and beat the sport's pedigreed bluebloods.
Know who else lost back-to-back national finals?
The Fab Five, Michigan's vaunted great recruiting class in the early 1990s.
The Bulldogs fell one shot short against Duke, losing 61-59, last year.
And they fell way short -- painfully short -- against UConn.
History will not record that Butler was a national champion, but we will all remember this as a legendary group who made two noble assaults on the summit of college basketball.
After the game, Stevens was asked about the legacy of this group of players, who will always be remembered locally and in college basketball lore.
"That they were just good guys," Stevens said with a smile and a sigh. "Just good students, people at Butler really like them, not because they're basketball players but because they treat people right and they're engaging and smart and they're all going to be very successful. . . . It's what it's all about."
It would have made for a sweeter ending -- Butler: national champions -- but the best stories don't always get written.
Bob Kravitz is a columnist for The Indianapolis Star. Contact him at (317) 444-6643 or via email at bob.kravitz@indystar.com. You can also follow Bob on Twitter at @bkravitz.
Monday, April 04, 2011
UConn's Calhoun, Butler's Stevens as different as night and day
By Andy Staples
Inside College Basketball
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/
April 4, 2011
Connecticut Huskies' head coach Jim Calhoun (L) and Butler Bulldogs' head coach Brad Stevens talk before a television interview about their teams' meeting in the NCAA Men's Final Four championship college basketball game in Houston, Texas, April 3, 2011.(Reuters)
HOUSTON -- Do not expect, in 35 years, to click on some future version of YouTube and find a clip titled "Brad Stevens likes the F-word" that features Butler coach Stevens verbally undressing a reporter who asked a somewhat silly question about a recruit who got away. If you'd like to see something like that now, simply insert that phrase into Google and replace "Brad Stevens" with "Jim Calhoun."
"I want him occasionally to at least cuss or just do something out of line," UConn's Calhoun said Sunday when asked about Stevens.
As much as it may shock Calhoun and the rest of the basketball-watching world, Stevens -- the wholesome, eternally fresh-scrubbed Zionsville, Ind., native who looks like a college junior en route to a job interview -- has allowed the occasional George Carlin-approved, network television-banned word to pass his lips. "There are some," Butler guard Chase Stigall said, "but it's few and far between."
Calhoun embraces the F-word. Stevens doesn't. During games, Stevens criticizes his players' foibles with a verbal scalpel. During games, Calhoun criticizes his players' foibles with a verbal cruise missile. Calhoun, 68, is in the twilight of his career. Stevens, 34, stands near the dawn of his. Some of Stevens' players call him Brad. All of Calhoun's players call him Coach. Calhoun has been dinged by the NCAA, and depending on which story former Huskies recruit Nate Miles tells investigators when next he speaks to them, Calhoun could get sanctioned further. Stevens thinks he got grounded once or twice as a teen for being late coming home. (The smart money says the punishment was followed by someone saying "Ward, I think you were a little hard on the Brad.") Stevens rarely makes headlines with anything he says in a press conference. Once, when a reporter reminded Calhoun that he is Connecticut's highest paid state employee during a budget crunch, Calhoun didn't even let the guy finish his question before he roared "Not a dime back!"
If the two coaches in Monday's national title game were any more different, scientists probably would have to examine them to determine whether they belonged to the same species. But they do share at least one common trait. They win. A lot. In 39 seasons as a college head coach, Calhoun has won 851 games. He has two national titles, and he raised UConn from a cute little story to a name-brand powerhouse. In four seasons as a head coach, Stevens has won 117 games. He has led the Bulldogs to the national title game twice, and it appears that -- if he stays in Indianapolis -- he will raise Butler from a cute little story to a name-brand powerhouse.
The clash of styles should make for fascinating viewing, but Monday's matchup isn't a referendum on which coaching formula works better. Each man's method has its merits.
Calhoun took the more traditional route into the profession. After college, he worked as an assistant at alma mater American International College before departing to coach at three different high schools. In 1972, Calhoun was hired as Northeastern's head coach at age 29. Calhoun, who proudly describes himself as "an Irish guy from South Boston," subscribes to the theory that players will listen if the point is made at a high enough volume. His rants are not suitable for a family publication, but they do get his players' attention. Besides, UConn freshman point guard Shabazz Napier said, Calhoun's paint-peeling critiques come from the heart.
"To this day, he yells at me," Napier said. "But he does it out of love. No one really takes it as disrespect. We take it as great criticism from one of the best coaches in the world. If he's yelling at you, that means he's caring for you. He wants you to be one of the best players in the country."
Butler-UConn preview
Source: SISeth Davis, Maggie Gray and Greg Anthony break down the coaching matchup between Jim Calhoun and Brad Stevens and discuss the other x-factors for Monday's championship game. Calhoun's dry wit occasionally gets him in trouble. (See the "Not a dime back" quote, which began as a joke and turned serious as Calhoun got more perturbed with the line of questioning.) But he is consistently one of the nation's most hilarious coaches. He drew plenty of laughs Sunday. "That's good [that] God gave us two ears and one mouth," Calhoun said. "I don't subscribe to that theory, but for everybody else it's a good thing to have."
His program's recruiting practices also have gotten him in trouble. Calhoun was suspended for three games, and an assistant and UConn's director of basketball operations lost their jobs after the NCAA found a variety of violations in Miles' recruitment. Last week, Miles told The New York Times that Calhoun knew an agent was paying Miles during his recruitment. That contradicts what Miles told the NCAA last year, but if the accusation is found to be true, Calhoun could be subject to the same unethical conduct charge that recently cost Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl his job. Sunday, Calhoun declined to elaborate further on the Miles case, saying he considers the matter closed. He also said he isn't worried about the most recent allegations. "I've had three bouts with cancer," Calhoun said. "That's a lot more devastating."
With that controversy swirling, it would surprise no one if Calhoun hung up his whistle after Monday's title game. Sunday, he sounded like a man content with his career and the choices he has made. "One thing I'll guarantee you, I know who I am," Calhoun said. "I know what I've done in 39 years of coaching. You don't have to tell me, you don't have to write it, but I know who I am. Quite frankly, I'm pretty comfortable with who I am. Have I made mistakes? Yes. Do I have warts? Yeah, I do, like all of you. But I know who I am and I'm comfortable with what I've done."
Stevens seems equally comfortable in his own skin, but while Calhoun's seems like a hard-won peace, Stevens' self-confidence seems to radiate from his core like the warm glow of a campfire. Unlike Calhoun, Stevens didn't immediately enter the coaching ranks. Upon graduation from DePauw in 1999, Stevens took a job as a marketing associate at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. The pay was good. The work was soul-crushing. So Stevens quit in 2000 and took a job as a volunteer assistant on Thad Matta's Butler staff. Stevens had planned to work as a server at Applebee's to help pay the bills, but a staff shakeup allowed Matta to offer Stevens a paying gig.
Stevens didn't last long in the business world, but in some ways he never left it. While most coaches tell recruits how soon they'll start and how quickly they'll reach the NBA, Stevens sells Butler's program like the CEO of a startup pitching to an angel investor. That's precisely how Stevens sounded to guard Ronald Nored after Stevens drove from Indianapolis to Birmingham, Ala., to offer a scholarship, sell the Butler Way and steal Nored away from Harvard. "That was his major," Nored said. "His first job was in that setting. That's just the way his mind works."
Stevens also occasionally takes a page -- or rather an E Ink screen -- from Phil Jackson's playbook. Nored said that when the Bulldogs traveled to Hawaii for a tournament, Stevens handed Nored his Kindle and asked him to read the chapter on Shane Battier in SI writer Chris Ballard's The Art of a Beautiful Game: The Thinking Fan's Tour of the NBA. Stevens, who had tapped Nored as his defensive stopper, wanted to inspire Nored with the tale of a player who has made millions ignoring traditional stats and embracing defense.
Speaking of millions, Stevens could cash in at any time on Butler's two trips to the title game. Large schools are willing to throw money at him hoping he can replicate that success under higher pressure to win. In this respect, the startup analogy remains appropriate. Stevens in 2011 is the basketball version of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page at the turn of the century. Brin and Page faced a choice. They could cash in on their creation and sell to a larger company, or they could stay independent and possibly enjoy an exponentially larger payday. They chose to remain independent, and when they took Google public in 2004, they became billionaires.
Though there aren't as many zeroes involved, Stevens faces a similar choice. He can take the guaranteed payday of a BCS-conference job, or he can stay at Butler and try to build a power that annually goes deep into the NCAA tournament. Mark Few created that model at Gonzaga, and Butler already has surpassed Gonzaga in cachet thanks to Stevens. If Stevens wants to talk himself into either choice, he can consult his two former bosses at Butler. Matta has built an excellent program at Ohio State. He has reached the title game once. His Buckeyes were the No. 1 overall seed in this year's tournament and may start next season ranked in the top five. On the other side is Matta's successor, Todd Lickliter. Lickliter left Butler in 2007 for Iowa. He was fired by Iowa in 2010.
The choice will be up to Stevens, but after hearing him talk about the Butler Way -- his own personal business plan for the program -- it's difficult to imagine him leaving. "It's not rocket science," Stevens said. "It's a values-based organization driven by a mission and a vision like every other business in the world or every other collective group in the world. The key in any endeavor is adhering to those standards and trying to live up to those standards, not trying to worry about anything else. It's hard to do and easy to talk about ... The only way we address the 'Butler Way' with our team is in this regard: People know they've seen and felt something special. They just can't put their finger on it."
Calhoun is an old-school coach. Stevens is a cutting-edge CEO. Stevens belongs to the Nintendo generation. Calhoun came at the start of the Baby Boom. Calhoun screams. Stevens contemplates. Make them roommates, and you'd have a hit sitcom. Put them on opposite benches, and you have a must-watch title game.
But for all their differences, Stevens and Calhoun share a few common traits. Both are consumed by the desire to win. Most importantly, both love their players. Stevens once heard Calhoun speak at a clinic and came away impressed. "I really appreciated how he stood up for his guys no matter what," Stevens said. "You can see that in the way his team plays."
Calhoun spoke Sunday about two types of coaches -- the ones who have a lot of awards in their offices, and the ones who have a lot of pictures of former players in their offices. Calhoun is the latter, and though he doesn't have photographic proof, he's pretty sure Stevens is, too. "I watch his teams play," Calhoun said. "I can see that passion right there. It comes out of my team the same way. The instrument directing may be a little different, but the passion is there. ... If he's what college basketball is going to become, we're in good hands."
Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/andy_staples/04/04/stevens.calhoun/index.html#ixzz1IZpNWs7g
Inside College Basketball
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/
April 4, 2011
HOUSTON -- Do not expect, in 35 years, to click on some future version of YouTube and find a clip titled "Brad Stevens likes the F-word" that features Butler coach Stevens verbally undressing a reporter who asked a somewhat silly question about a recruit who got away. If you'd like to see something like that now, simply insert that phrase into Google and replace "Brad Stevens" with "Jim Calhoun."
"I want him occasionally to at least cuss or just do something out of line," UConn's Calhoun said Sunday when asked about Stevens.
As much as it may shock Calhoun and the rest of the basketball-watching world, Stevens -- the wholesome, eternally fresh-scrubbed Zionsville, Ind., native who looks like a college junior en route to a job interview -- has allowed the occasional George Carlin-approved, network television-banned word to pass his lips. "There are some," Butler guard Chase Stigall said, "but it's few and far between."
Calhoun embraces the F-word. Stevens doesn't. During games, Stevens criticizes his players' foibles with a verbal scalpel. During games, Calhoun criticizes his players' foibles with a verbal cruise missile. Calhoun, 68, is in the twilight of his career. Stevens, 34, stands near the dawn of his. Some of Stevens' players call him Brad. All of Calhoun's players call him Coach. Calhoun has been dinged by the NCAA, and depending on which story former Huskies recruit Nate Miles tells investigators when next he speaks to them, Calhoun could get sanctioned further. Stevens thinks he got grounded once or twice as a teen for being late coming home. (The smart money says the punishment was followed by someone saying "Ward, I think you were a little hard on the Brad.") Stevens rarely makes headlines with anything he says in a press conference. Once, when a reporter reminded Calhoun that he is Connecticut's highest paid state employee during a budget crunch, Calhoun didn't even let the guy finish his question before he roared "Not a dime back!"
If the two coaches in Monday's national title game were any more different, scientists probably would have to examine them to determine whether they belonged to the same species. But they do share at least one common trait. They win. A lot. In 39 seasons as a college head coach, Calhoun has won 851 games. He has two national titles, and he raised UConn from a cute little story to a name-brand powerhouse. In four seasons as a head coach, Stevens has won 117 games. He has led the Bulldogs to the national title game twice, and it appears that -- if he stays in Indianapolis -- he will raise Butler from a cute little story to a name-brand powerhouse.
The clash of styles should make for fascinating viewing, but Monday's matchup isn't a referendum on which coaching formula works better. Each man's method has its merits.
Calhoun took the more traditional route into the profession. After college, he worked as an assistant at alma mater American International College before departing to coach at three different high schools. In 1972, Calhoun was hired as Northeastern's head coach at age 29. Calhoun, who proudly describes himself as "an Irish guy from South Boston," subscribes to the theory that players will listen if the point is made at a high enough volume. His rants are not suitable for a family publication, but they do get his players' attention. Besides, UConn freshman point guard Shabazz Napier said, Calhoun's paint-peeling critiques come from the heart.
"To this day, he yells at me," Napier said. "But he does it out of love. No one really takes it as disrespect. We take it as great criticism from one of the best coaches in the world. If he's yelling at you, that means he's caring for you. He wants you to be one of the best players in the country."
Butler-UConn preview
Source: SISeth Davis, Maggie Gray and Greg Anthony break down the coaching matchup between Jim Calhoun and Brad Stevens and discuss the other x-factors for Monday's championship game. Calhoun's dry wit occasionally gets him in trouble. (See the "Not a dime back" quote, which began as a joke and turned serious as Calhoun got more perturbed with the line of questioning.) But he is consistently one of the nation's most hilarious coaches. He drew plenty of laughs Sunday. "That's good [that] God gave us two ears and one mouth," Calhoun said. "I don't subscribe to that theory, but for everybody else it's a good thing to have."
His program's recruiting practices also have gotten him in trouble. Calhoun was suspended for three games, and an assistant and UConn's director of basketball operations lost their jobs after the NCAA found a variety of violations in Miles' recruitment. Last week, Miles told The New York Times that Calhoun knew an agent was paying Miles during his recruitment. That contradicts what Miles told the NCAA last year, but if the accusation is found to be true, Calhoun could be subject to the same unethical conduct charge that recently cost Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl his job. Sunday, Calhoun declined to elaborate further on the Miles case, saying he considers the matter closed. He also said he isn't worried about the most recent allegations. "I've had three bouts with cancer," Calhoun said. "That's a lot more devastating."
With that controversy swirling, it would surprise no one if Calhoun hung up his whistle after Monday's title game. Sunday, he sounded like a man content with his career and the choices he has made. "One thing I'll guarantee you, I know who I am," Calhoun said. "I know what I've done in 39 years of coaching. You don't have to tell me, you don't have to write it, but I know who I am. Quite frankly, I'm pretty comfortable with who I am. Have I made mistakes? Yes. Do I have warts? Yeah, I do, like all of you. But I know who I am and I'm comfortable with what I've done."
Stevens seems equally comfortable in his own skin, but while Calhoun's seems like a hard-won peace, Stevens' self-confidence seems to radiate from his core like the warm glow of a campfire. Unlike Calhoun, Stevens didn't immediately enter the coaching ranks. Upon graduation from DePauw in 1999, Stevens took a job as a marketing associate at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. The pay was good. The work was soul-crushing. So Stevens quit in 2000 and took a job as a volunteer assistant on Thad Matta's Butler staff. Stevens had planned to work as a server at Applebee's to help pay the bills, but a staff shakeup allowed Matta to offer Stevens a paying gig.
Stevens didn't last long in the business world, but in some ways he never left it. While most coaches tell recruits how soon they'll start and how quickly they'll reach the NBA, Stevens sells Butler's program like the CEO of a startup pitching to an angel investor. That's precisely how Stevens sounded to guard Ronald Nored after Stevens drove from Indianapolis to Birmingham, Ala., to offer a scholarship, sell the Butler Way and steal Nored away from Harvard. "That was his major," Nored said. "His first job was in that setting. That's just the way his mind works."
Stevens also occasionally takes a page -- or rather an E Ink screen -- from Phil Jackson's playbook. Nored said that when the Bulldogs traveled to Hawaii for a tournament, Stevens handed Nored his Kindle and asked him to read the chapter on Shane Battier in SI writer Chris Ballard's The Art of a Beautiful Game: The Thinking Fan's Tour of the NBA. Stevens, who had tapped Nored as his defensive stopper, wanted to inspire Nored with the tale of a player who has made millions ignoring traditional stats and embracing defense.
Speaking of millions, Stevens could cash in at any time on Butler's two trips to the title game. Large schools are willing to throw money at him hoping he can replicate that success under higher pressure to win. In this respect, the startup analogy remains appropriate. Stevens in 2011 is the basketball version of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page at the turn of the century. Brin and Page faced a choice. They could cash in on their creation and sell to a larger company, or they could stay independent and possibly enjoy an exponentially larger payday. They chose to remain independent, and when they took Google public in 2004, they became billionaires.
Though there aren't as many zeroes involved, Stevens faces a similar choice. He can take the guaranteed payday of a BCS-conference job, or he can stay at Butler and try to build a power that annually goes deep into the NCAA tournament. Mark Few created that model at Gonzaga, and Butler already has surpassed Gonzaga in cachet thanks to Stevens. If Stevens wants to talk himself into either choice, he can consult his two former bosses at Butler. Matta has built an excellent program at Ohio State. He has reached the title game once. His Buckeyes were the No. 1 overall seed in this year's tournament and may start next season ranked in the top five. On the other side is Matta's successor, Todd Lickliter. Lickliter left Butler in 2007 for Iowa. He was fired by Iowa in 2010.
The choice will be up to Stevens, but after hearing him talk about the Butler Way -- his own personal business plan for the program -- it's difficult to imagine him leaving. "It's not rocket science," Stevens said. "It's a values-based organization driven by a mission and a vision like every other business in the world or every other collective group in the world. The key in any endeavor is adhering to those standards and trying to live up to those standards, not trying to worry about anything else. It's hard to do and easy to talk about ... The only way we address the 'Butler Way' with our team is in this regard: People know they've seen and felt something special. They just can't put their finger on it."
Calhoun is an old-school coach. Stevens is a cutting-edge CEO. Stevens belongs to the Nintendo generation. Calhoun came at the start of the Baby Boom. Calhoun screams. Stevens contemplates. Make them roommates, and you'd have a hit sitcom. Put them on opposite benches, and you have a must-watch title game.
But for all their differences, Stevens and Calhoun share a few common traits. Both are consumed by the desire to win. Most importantly, both love their players. Stevens once heard Calhoun speak at a clinic and came away impressed. "I really appreciated how he stood up for his guys no matter what," Stevens said. "You can see that in the way his team plays."
Calhoun spoke Sunday about two types of coaches -- the ones who have a lot of awards in their offices, and the ones who have a lot of pictures of former players in their offices. Calhoun is the latter, and though he doesn't have photographic proof, he's pretty sure Stevens is, too. "I watch his teams play," Calhoun said. "I can see that passion right there. It comes out of my team the same way. The instrument directing may be a little different, but the passion is there. ... If he's what college basketball is going to become, we're in good hands."
Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/andy_staples/04/04/stevens.calhoun/index.html#ixzz1IZpNWs7g
Glasvegas: 'Euphoric Heartbreak', CD review
Glasvegas's Euphoric Heartbreak has passion and purpose.
By Neil McCormick
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/
5:04PM BST 01 Apr 2011
Rating: * * * *
Columbia, £12.99
Working-class rock heroes: Scottish four piece Glasvegas
Rock may be in creative and commercial decline but there are still some things it does better than any other kind of music: big, anthemic, emotional commitment and release. Scottish four piece Glasvegas do these simple things better than most.
Built around the vulnerable, angst-filled crooning of frontman and songwriter James Allan, Glasvegas play straightforward, melodic songs constructed around familiar chord changes amped up so that effects-laden guitar distortion crashes out of the speakers with all the sonic grandeur of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, a sparkling bed of harmonic spikes and melodic accidents.
On their second album, Glasvegas evoke the ambient intensity of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music while anchoring it in songs that demand actual commitment from the listener. I worry about where they can go next with such a restrictive musical template, but here they have managed subtle refinement without sacrificing the essence of their primitive appeal.
There is a sense of flow to this set, building from intimate beginning to a genuinely euphoric climax before tailing off with wistful beauty. You have really to listen to penetrate Allan’s thick Scots accent, but as the sound opens up you discover nuances amid the noise.
Allan’s swooping melodies hint at a Roy Orbison style flair for reshaping classic rock into heartbreaking epics, and lyrics enacting the political as highly personal dramas.
It’s like a marriage of the Clash, the Smiths, the Pixies and the Jesus And Mary Chain, delivered with a passion and purpose that makes much-hyped rock saviours the Vaccines sound as vacuous as they really are.
At a time when questions are being asked about how posh rock music has become, Glasvegas are staunchly working-class heroes. Allan grew up in a single-parent family on an estate in Glasgow, experiencing years of unemployment and poverty before forming this band with his cousins. He is a tortured, sensitive soul, who clearly struggles with a lot of the prejudices of his environment.
The heart of their superb 2008 debut was 'Daddy’s Gone', a song of abandonment. Here too he sings with aching bewilderment about such themes as desire and loss, but he also embraces the kind of difficult topics that might force some sections of his audience to confront their assumptions.
'I Feel Wrong and Stronger Than Dirt' are subtitled 'Homosexuality part 1 and 2'. As the titles suggest, there is nothing arch or clever about Allan’s writing, but in its bold stating of sincere feeling lies its true power. Glasvegas are a band their audience can believe in, and that is exactly what rock needs right now.
Related:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/neilmccormick/3814349/Glasvegas-how-they-thundered-to-greatness.html
Fear and loathing in Glasvegas
By BRIAN BOYD
The Irish Times
http://www.irishtimes.com/
Monday, March 28, 2011
Life in a goldfish bowl: Paul Donoghue, Rab Allan, Jonna Löfgren and James Allan of Glasvegas
After the immediate success of his debut album, footballer-turned-rock-star James Allan found himself in a Chicago hotel singing ‘Close To You’ to his pet goldfish. This time around there’s less pressure . . .
AS HE WAS carried out of the backstage area of a rock festival on a stretcher due to a drug overdose, Glasvegas singer James Allan told people staring at him, “It’s not how it looks.” Unfortunately it was exactly how it looked.
Glasvegas were one of the big draws at the 2009 Coachella festival (the US equivalent of Glastonbury) and at the time, the official reason given for Allan not being able to perform was the old reliable “exhaustion and dehydration”.
In rock terms you can break the code of the euphemisms easily enough. “Fruit and flowers” (as on a backstage rider) is cocaine and groupies while “exhaustion and dehydration” can be anything from a psychotic breakdown to a Class A overload.
Allan’s crash and burn came six months after the release of the band’s self-titled album – a magnificent work that artfully combined the guitar noise of Jesus and Mary Chain with the orchestral production of Phil Spector. Easily the best album of 2009, Allan, now 31, says it was too much success too quickly.
“My head just wasn’t in the right place. I was exaggerating all the bad things about success,” he says. “I had been a professional footballer all my life [he played for Cowdenbeath and other Scottish league teams] and while most people who want to be in a rock band practise for a few years and learn how to write songs, all the songs on the first album were my very first attempts.
“One moment I was on the dole, the next I was on the front cover of music magazines. In fact, I remember signing on one day and producing a newspaper with mention of my name in it to the woman behind the counter. She hadn’t believed me when I told her I was in a rock band.”
What distinguished the first Glasvegas album was how, despite lyrically coming across as particularly bleak, it was so sonically extravagant. Allan wrote about racial murder ( 'Flowers and Football Tops '), absentee fathers ( 'Daddy’s Gone' ) and heroic social workers ( 'Geraldine' ).
“All music is influenced by your environment,” he says. “I wrote those songs while on the dole in Glasgow and I honestly never knew they would end up on the record – or even that there would be a record. The press said they were ‘theme’ songs but it was what I saw happening around me. I was never into the usual sort of ‘escapist’ lyrics – I prefer real events. 'Flowers and Football Tops' is about a true story – a teenager in Glasgow was stabbed to death then drenched in petrol and set alight near where I lived. I just couldn’t shake that story off.”
He found himself feted by the indie gods and traipsing from one award ceremony to the next – and it didn’t sit well with him. A desperately shy and ferociously intelligent character, Allan found “the road” hard going and on a Kings Of Leon tour in the US he became strangely attached to two goldfish.
“My sister gave them to me as a birthday present and I think I was going a bit mad at the time with the constant touring. I remember taking the goldfish to the zoo in Chicago with me and there’s some video footage of me somewhere on the 33rd floor of a hotel singing The Carpenters’ 'Close To You' to them. Yeah, that was strange alright.”
He went missing for a week in September 2009. He was supposed to show up at the Mercury Music Prize Awards (Glasvegas had been nominated) but neither bandmates, management nor label could get in touch with him.
“I wasn’t being disrespectful to the Mercury, I would have loved to have been there – I used to love sports day at school,” he says. “It’s just I was supposed to fly down to London to meet up with the rest of the band but at the airport I just decided to go and visit a friend in New York instead. The problem was I had no mobile phone – so no one could get in touch with me.
“The worst part of that, though, was my father going down to his local shop in Glasgow. The headline on one of the newspapers was ‘Glasvegas singer is missing for past five days’ and they had this on the billboard thing outside the shop. He was really upset. But I got in touch with everyone and now I do have my own mobile phone.”
TO RECORD THE follow-up album, Allan decided to write it well away from Glasgow.
“I wanted somewhere completely different and when we were touring around the US I remembered getting off the bus in Santa Monica one time and having the feeling it would be a great place to write an album. I wanted to see what would happen if you took a person out of his natural environment – and how that would effect the music. So I hassled my manager for ages and eventually we got this big beach house and moved in for a few months. I remember it being horrendously expensive so feeling under pressure to come up with the songs quickly.”
Endless strolls at night on Santa Monica beach helped him get over the overdose, and over the goldfish. “I had gone from being a nobody on the dole to a somebody and this was the first time I had to slowly and surely put myself back together,” he says.
“As a rock star you can think of yourself as important but when we went into Los Angeles you’d find yourself sitting beside Dustin Hoffman in a restaurant. And then you think of all the darkness of the rock ’n’ roll persona and how certain people are attracted to and fascinated by that. I remember walking along that beach – and it was a place of such natural beauty – and asking myself why I wanted to be in a band in the first place and trying to get back to the start again somehow. And it’s a funny thing but places of great natural beauty can make you very sad – there had been heartbreak in my life and that’s what came out on the album.”
Entitled Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\ , Allen explains the slashes are all important as they represent “the ascent, the crest of a wave and then the crash”. Eschewing the bruised social commentary of its predecessor it’s just as musically lush but a lot more introspective lyrically.
“There was a lot of uncertainty because the canvas was so blank,” he says. “But then I starting digging very deep – maybe in an unhealthy way – and then I got myself into this position . . . it’s hard to explain but it’s like as if everything around you goes silent, the sort of feeling I used to get when I was dribbling around players as a footballer, and the songs just came.
“ I really felt a lot less pressure with this one because now we’re sort of an established band – with the first one we just had no idea what was going to happen.”
Regret and contrition bleed out of almost every track. “They’re very personal, they’re very honest, but I felt that was the only way,” says Allan. “You’ve probably gathered by now that I’m a bit impressionable and the songs here are from the last two to three years when I was at my most impressionable. I did a lot and I learnt a lot. And I think the title of the album says it all.”
Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\ is out now
Glasvegas get euphoric over second album
James Allan and his bandmates return after a long lay-off.
By Alan Morrison
The Herald (Scotland)
http://www.heraldscotland.com/
29 Mar 2011
With Glasvegas it's always about the clash of extremes. It starts with the band's name, as the grit of Scotland's west coast slaps up against the glitz of the American Dream. Then it becomes a statement of intent within the music itself, as distorted guitars and a thumping beat envelop doo-wop melodies and Phil Spector soundscapes.
This was the lifeblood of Glasvegas's self-titled debut album, and it's even more prominent on the follow-up. EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ goes one step further than its predecessor, forcing those extremes, those contradictions, into its very title. Again, it's there in the music, as heavy textures of guitar, keyboards and adrenaline-rush drumming contrast sharply with the raw emotions of fragile lyrics.
"For good or bad, I try to avoid mediocrity and things being in the middle," admits singer and songwriter James Allan. "But that can sometimes get us into trouble ..."
This approach has split audiences into those who are set alight by the fire in the belly of songs like 'Daddy's Gone', 'Geraldine' and 'Go Square Go', and those who think Allan, hidden behind his rock-star Ray-Bans, is a bit arrogant and pretentious. It has also seen Glasvegas's debut album go platinum and pick up a much-deserved Mercury Prize nomination while the band dipped a steel-capped toe in the stadium lifestyle via support slots with U2 and Kings Of Leon.
It's a truth, not a cliche, to say that such success carries an emotional toll. Rather than join his band mates at the Mercury Prize ceremony in September 2009, Allan went awol in New York. A few days later, however, they all met up in Boston for the beginning of the Kings Of Leon tour, and although the band claim that reports of a later incident in Chicago were much exaggerated and merely the end product of Allan larking about on his birthday (the music gossip pages made much of him wearing only a bathrobe and singing Carpenters songs to his goldfish), exhaustion was clearly setting in. So much so that drummer Caroline McKay called it a day in March 2010.
Now, after a year away from the media glare, most of it spent writing and recording in a three-storey beach house in Santa Monica, Glasvegas are back with a new album, a new drummer and an escalating series of live dates. They've been easing latest recruit Jonna Lofgren in with low-key gigs (including a Scottish tour in early January that stretched from Orkney to Hawick), testing out new material along the way. But it's the album (released on April 4 with U2 and PJ Harvey producer Flood behind the desk) that's going to be the real focus of attention.
Musically, it's more ambitious, more layered, than the debut disc. Words-wise, it's a world apart from what typically passes for rock lyrics today. 'The World Is Yours', 'Shine Like Stars' and 'Euphoria Take My Hand' thrive on punch-the-air choruses set to ecstatic surges of energy; 'Lots Sometimes', with its vocal repetitions and acceleration of pace, is a set-list classic-in-waiting.
But it's on other tracks, where Allan strips his emotions bare then goes deep inside himself to make dark and personal discoveries, that EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ distinguishes itself. More often than not, the singer then filters those feelings through different voices, reaching for understanding or forgiveness and finding empathy by crafting characters and poetic short stories in song. These might be the perspectives of gay characters (on 'Stronger Than Dirt' and 'I Feel Wrong') or a prison inmate (closing track 'Change'); but they're the means for Allan to comfortably express and examine his own feelings.
"If you're too detached from the song, the bottom line is going to be hard to find," he explains. "But if you're not arm's length away from it, I think it becomes over-emotional. The direction, the focus, the execution of words on any poetic level - you're never going to deliver them the best way. I was right in the moment writing some of the songs on this album but, in a lot of ways, I sort of wasn't there. I was arm's length away from it, so that I could actually see it and execute it in the right way.
"It was the same with the first album. I wasn't sitting writing 'Daddy's Gone' crying into a sheet of paper. I actually had quite little emotion in me when I was writing that song. But I had a daydream, though; it was a total daydream. There's a difference between losing yourself in that little wormhole-imagination thing and being totally emotional when you're writing. There's a total hardcore focus, but it's not a total over-emotional focus."
The crossover point - and arguably the emotional high point of the album - is 'Dream Dream Dreaming', in which Allan puts words into his own father's mouth concerning the suicide of the singer's uncle. Initially the song came about as a response to 'Daddy's Gone', probably Glasvegas's best known track, which articulated, in uncompromising terms, a boy's bitter frustration with the father who had abandoned the family home.
" 'Daddy's Gone' was only one side of the coin with my father," Allan says now. "I felt a bit guilty about that song because who's to say what's round the corner for all of us, you know? I'd go on TV shows, and people would ask about it and say things about my father, and although it was only a snapshot in three minutes or whatever, it sort of ran away with itself. And I felt bad about that.
"But there were times when I'd be walking down the street, and a guy would come up to me and say how the song is about his life, how it relates to him so well, how it recognised the pain in him. Who am I to argue with those things? Who am I to say if it's right or wrong to write that song? A lot of other people have connected with it, so I'm still a fortunate person for that."
Through his love for American pop songs from the past, Allan made the mental leap from what he imagined to be his father's thoughts on the loss of his brother, to the romantic, almost tragic yearning that he hears in the likes of 'Mr Sandman' and 'All I Have To Do Is Dream'.
"I was fascinated by a human longing for something lost and something gained, something wanted and something unwanted. I was also fascinated by thinking about what a dream was. Sometimes in life, the only way to gain any kind of relief over something is through a dream. If that's all you've got, then you'll take it; you'll take anything because the longing can be that painful. Every time I go to see my father, he'll talk about his brother, every single time. He just misses him ... I've always got a picture of my uncle when we're playing that song. My dad's not actually heard it yet, but he'll hear it soon."
Allan's mother also has her place on the album, a very real physical presence on the closing track as she voices the fictional mother telling her son, about to be released from prison, to "be not led into temptation / And dare to resist not re-offending again".
"It was funny," Allan remembers. "When my mum came into the studio, she was telling Flood how to produce and telling me to swap the words around. She was like Diana Ross - bang, out the door, one take. It was the last song, and we were trying to get the rest of the songs to match each other. It was really sweet because I knew she was feeling under pressure about it. She never mentioned it, though, because she didn't want any extra pressure to go on me. Maybe I'm the guy with experience of a recording studio compared to the experience she's had, but, even in that moment, she's thinking to herself, 'I'm the mother, and I need to alleviate any pressure I can. I'll take the strain.'"
So, was there a blurring between the fiction of the lyric and the fact of the situation? "Even in the recording studio, man, she was playing the role of my mother and I was still the child," Allan agrees. "It's a memory that I'll always cherish. And she did say, 'Just think, boys: if this is the last song that you ever do, then mine is the last voice on the record ...'"
EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ is released on April 4. Glasvegas play Aberdeen Music Hall on April 23; HMV Picture House, Edinburgh on April 24; and O2 Academy, Glasgow on April 25.
By Neil McCormick
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/
5:04PM BST 01 Apr 2011
Rating: * * * *
Columbia, £12.99
Rock may be in creative and commercial decline but there are still some things it does better than any other kind of music: big, anthemic, emotional commitment and release. Scottish four piece Glasvegas do these simple things better than most.
Built around the vulnerable, angst-filled crooning of frontman and songwriter James Allan, Glasvegas play straightforward, melodic songs constructed around familiar chord changes amped up so that effects-laden guitar distortion crashes out of the speakers with all the sonic grandeur of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, a sparkling bed of harmonic spikes and melodic accidents.
On their second album, Glasvegas evoke the ambient intensity of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music while anchoring it in songs that demand actual commitment from the listener. I worry about where they can go next with such a restrictive musical template, but here they have managed subtle refinement without sacrificing the essence of their primitive appeal.
There is a sense of flow to this set, building from intimate beginning to a genuinely euphoric climax before tailing off with wistful beauty. You have really to listen to penetrate Allan’s thick Scots accent, but as the sound opens up you discover nuances amid the noise.
Allan’s swooping melodies hint at a Roy Orbison style flair for reshaping classic rock into heartbreaking epics, and lyrics enacting the political as highly personal dramas.
It’s like a marriage of the Clash, the Smiths, the Pixies and the Jesus And Mary Chain, delivered with a passion and purpose that makes much-hyped rock saviours the Vaccines sound as vacuous as they really are.
At a time when questions are being asked about how posh rock music has become, Glasvegas are staunchly working-class heroes. Allan grew up in a single-parent family on an estate in Glasgow, experiencing years of unemployment and poverty before forming this band with his cousins. He is a tortured, sensitive soul, who clearly struggles with a lot of the prejudices of his environment.
The heart of their superb 2008 debut was 'Daddy’s Gone', a song of abandonment. Here too he sings with aching bewilderment about such themes as desire and loss, but he also embraces the kind of difficult topics that might force some sections of his audience to confront their assumptions.
'I Feel Wrong and Stronger Than Dirt' are subtitled 'Homosexuality part 1 and 2'. As the titles suggest, there is nothing arch or clever about Allan’s writing, but in its bold stating of sincere feeling lies its true power. Glasvegas are a band their audience can believe in, and that is exactly what rock needs right now.
Related:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/neilmccormick/3814349/Glasvegas-how-they-thundered-to-greatness.html
Fear and loathing in Glasvegas
By BRIAN BOYD
The Irish Times
http://www.irishtimes.com/
Monday, March 28, 2011
After the immediate success of his debut album, footballer-turned-rock-star James Allan found himself in a Chicago hotel singing ‘Close To You’ to his pet goldfish. This time around there’s less pressure . . .
AS HE WAS carried out of the backstage area of a rock festival on a stretcher due to a drug overdose, Glasvegas singer James Allan told people staring at him, “It’s not how it looks.” Unfortunately it was exactly how it looked.
Glasvegas were one of the big draws at the 2009 Coachella festival (the US equivalent of Glastonbury) and at the time, the official reason given for Allan not being able to perform was the old reliable “exhaustion and dehydration”.
In rock terms you can break the code of the euphemisms easily enough. “Fruit and flowers” (as on a backstage rider) is cocaine and groupies while “exhaustion and dehydration” can be anything from a psychotic breakdown to a Class A overload.
Allan’s crash and burn came six months after the release of the band’s self-titled album – a magnificent work that artfully combined the guitar noise of Jesus and Mary Chain with the orchestral production of Phil Spector. Easily the best album of 2009, Allan, now 31, says it was too much success too quickly.
“My head just wasn’t in the right place. I was exaggerating all the bad things about success,” he says. “I had been a professional footballer all my life [he played for Cowdenbeath and other Scottish league teams] and while most people who want to be in a rock band practise for a few years and learn how to write songs, all the songs on the first album were my very first attempts.
“One moment I was on the dole, the next I was on the front cover of music magazines. In fact, I remember signing on one day and producing a newspaper with mention of my name in it to the woman behind the counter. She hadn’t believed me when I told her I was in a rock band.”
What distinguished the first Glasvegas album was how, despite lyrically coming across as particularly bleak, it was so sonically extravagant. Allan wrote about racial murder ( 'Flowers and Football Tops '), absentee fathers ( 'Daddy’s Gone' ) and heroic social workers ( 'Geraldine' ).
“All music is influenced by your environment,” he says. “I wrote those songs while on the dole in Glasgow and I honestly never knew they would end up on the record – or even that there would be a record. The press said they were ‘theme’ songs but it was what I saw happening around me. I was never into the usual sort of ‘escapist’ lyrics – I prefer real events. 'Flowers and Football Tops' is about a true story – a teenager in Glasgow was stabbed to death then drenched in petrol and set alight near where I lived. I just couldn’t shake that story off.”
He found himself feted by the indie gods and traipsing from one award ceremony to the next – and it didn’t sit well with him. A desperately shy and ferociously intelligent character, Allan found “the road” hard going and on a Kings Of Leon tour in the US he became strangely attached to two goldfish.
“My sister gave them to me as a birthday present and I think I was going a bit mad at the time with the constant touring. I remember taking the goldfish to the zoo in Chicago with me and there’s some video footage of me somewhere on the 33rd floor of a hotel singing The Carpenters’ 'Close To You' to them. Yeah, that was strange alright.”
He went missing for a week in September 2009. He was supposed to show up at the Mercury Music Prize Awards (Glasvegas had been nominated) but neither bandmates, management nor label could get in touch with him.
“I wasn’t being disrespectful to the Mercury, I would have loved to have been there – I used to love sports day at school,” he says. “It’s just I was supposed to fly down to London to meet up with the rest of the band but at the airport I just decided to go and visit a friend in New York instead. The problem was I had no mobile phone – so no one could get in touch with me.
“The worst part of that, though, was my father going down to his local shop in Glasgow. The headline on one of the newspapers was ‘Glasvegas singer is missing for past five days’ and they had this on the billboard thing outside the shop. He was really upset. But I got in touch with everyone and now I do have my own mobile phone.”
TO RECORD THE follow-up album, Allan decided to write it well away from Glasgow.
“I wanted somewhere completely different and when we were touring around the US I remembered getting off the bus in Santa Monica one time and having the feeling it would be a great place to write an album. I wanted to see what would happen if you took a person out of his natural environment – and how that would effect the music. So I hassled my manager for ages and eventually we got this big beach house and moved in for a few months. I remember it being horrendously expensive so feeling under pressure to come up with the songs quickly.”
Endless strolls at night on Santa Monica beach helped him get over the overdose, and over the goldfish. “I had gone from being a nobody on the dole to a somebody and this was the first time I had to slowly and surely put myself back together,” he says.
“As a rock star you can think of yourself as important but when we went into Los Angeles you’d find yourself sitting beside Dustin Hoffman in a restaurant. And then you think of all the darkness of the rock ’n’ roll persona and how certain people are attracted to and fascinated by that. I remember walking along that beach – and it was a place of such natural beauty – and asking myself why I wanted to be in a band in the first place and trying to get back to the start again somehow. And it’s a funny thing but places of great natural beauty can make you very sad – there had been heartbreak in my life and that’s what came out on the album.”
Entitled Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\ , Allen explains the slashes are all important as they represent “the ascent, the crest of a wave and then the crash”. Eschewing the bruised social commentary of its predecessor it’s just as musically lush but a lot more introspective lyrically.
“There was a lot of uncertainty because the canvas was so blank,” he says. “But then I starting digging very deep – maybe in an unhealthy way – and then I got myself into this position . . . it’s hard to explain but it’s like as if everything around you goes silent, the sort of feeling I used to get when I was dribbling around players as a footballer, and the songs just came.
“ I really felt a lot less pressure with this one because now we’re sort of an established band – with the first one we just had no idea what was going to happen.”
Regret and contrition bleed out of almost every track. “They’re very personal, they’re very honest, but I felt that was the only way,” says Allan. “You’ve probably gathered by now that I’m a bit impressionable and the songs here are from the last two to three years when I was at my most impressionable. I did a lot and I learnt a lot. And I think the title of the album says it all.”
Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\ is out now
Glasvegas get euphoric over second album
James Allan and his bandmates return after a long lay-off.
By Alan Morrison
The Herald (Scotland)
http://www.heraldscotland.com/
29 Mar 2011
With Glasvegas it's always about the clash of extremes. It starts with the band's name, as the grit of Scotland's west coast slaps up against the glitz of the American Dream. Then it becomes a statement of intent within the music itself, as distorted guitars and a thumping beat envelop doo-wop melodies and Phil Spector soundscapes.
This was the lifeblood of Glasvegas's self-titled debut album, and it's even more prominent on the follow-up. EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ goes one step further than its predecessor, forcing those extremes, those contradictions, into its very title. Again, it's there in the music, as heavy textures of guitar, keyboards and adrenaline-rush drumming contrast sharply with the raw emotions of fragile lyrics.
"For good or bad, I try to avoid mediocrity and things being in the middle," admits singer and songwriter James Allan. "But that can sometimes get us into trouble ..."
This approach has split audiences into those who are set alight by the fire in the belly of songs like 'Daddy's Gone', 'Geraldine' and 'Go Square Go', and those who think Allan, hidden behind his rock-star Ray-Bans, is a bit arrogant and pretentious. It has also seen Glasvegas's debut album go platinum and pick up a much-deserved Mercury Prize nomination while the band dipped a steel-capped toe in the stadium lifestyle via support slots with U2 and Kings Of Leon.
It's a truth, not a cliche, to say that such success carries an emotional toll. Rather than join his band mates at the Mercury Prize ceremony in September 2009, Allan went awol in New York. A few days later, however, they all met up in Boston for the beginning of the Kings Of Leon tour, and although the band claim that reports of a later incident in Chicago were much exaggerated and merely the end product of Allan larking about on his birthday (the music gossip pages made much of him wearing only a bathrobe and singing Carpenters songs to his goldfish), exhaustion was clearly setting in. So much so that drummer Caroline McKay called it a day in March 2010.
Now, after a year away from the media glare, most of it spent writing and recording in a three-storey beach house in Santa Monica, Glasvegas are back with a new album, a new drummer and an escalating series of live dates. They've been easing latest recruit Jonna Lofgren in with low-key gigs (including a Scottish tour in early January that stretched from Orkney to Hawick), testing out new material along the way. But it's the album (released on April 4 with U2 and PJ Harvey producer Flood behind the desk) that's going to be the real focus of attention.
Musically, it's more ambitious, more layered, than the debut disc. Words-wise, it's a world apart from what typically passes for rock lyrics today. 'The World Is Yours', 'Shine Like Stars' and 'Euphoria Take My Hand' thrive on punch-the-air choruses set to ecstatic surges of energy; 'Lots Sometimes', with its vocal repetitions and acceleration of pace, is a set-list classic-in-waiting.
But it's on other tracks, where Allan strips his emotions bare then goes deep inside himself to make dark and personal discoveries, that EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ distinguishes itself. More often than not, the singer then filters those feelings through different voices, reaching for understanding or forgiveness and finding empathy by crafting characters and poetic short stories in song. These might be the perspectives of gay characters (on 'Stronger Than Dirt' and 'I Feel Wrong') or a prison inmate (closing track 'Change'); but they're the means for Allan to comfortably express and examine his own feelings.
"If you're too detached from the song, the bottom line is going to be hard to find," he explains. "But if you're not arm's length away from it, I think it becomes over-emotional. The direction, the focus, the execution of words on any poetic level - you're never going to deliver them the best way. I was right in the moment writing some of the songs on this album but, in a lot of ways, I sort of wasn't there. I was arm's length away from it, so that I could actually see it and execute it in the right way.
"It was the same with the first album. I wasn't sitting writing 'Daddy's Gone' crying into a sheet of paper. I actually had quite little emotion in me when I was writing that song. But I had a daydream, though; it was a total daydream. There's a difference between losing yourself in that little wormhole-imagination thing and being totally emotional when you're writing. There's a total hardcore focus, but it's not a total over-emotional focus."
The crossover point - and arguably the emotional high point of the album - is 'Dream Dream Dreaming', in which Allan puts words into his own father's mouth concerning the suicide of the singer's uncle. Initially the song came about as a response to 'Daddy's Gone', probably Glasvegas's best known track, which articulated, in uncompromising terms, a boy's bitter frustration with the father who had abandoned the family home.
" 'Daddy's Gone' was only one side of the coin with my father," Allan says now. "I felt a bit guilty about that song because who's to say what's round the corner for all of us, you know? I'd go on TV shows, and people would ask about it and say things about my father, and although it was only a snapshot in three minutes or whatever, it sort of ran away with itself. And I felt bad about that.
"But there were times when I'd be walking down the street, and a guy would come up to me and say how the song is about his life, how it relates to him so well, how it recognised the pain in him. Who am I to argue with those things? Who am I to say if it's right or wrong to write that song? A lot of other people have connected with it, so I'm still a fortunate person for that."
Through his love for American pop songs from the past, Allan made the mental leap from what he imagined to be his father's thoughts on the loss of his brother, to the romantic, almost tragic yearning that he hears in the likes of 'Mr Sandman' and 'All I Have To Do Is Dream'.
"I was fascinated by a human longing for something lost and something gained, something wanted and something unwanted. I was also fascinated by thinking about what a dream was. Sometimes in life, the only way to gain any kind of relief over something is through a dream. If that's all you've got, then you'll take it; you'll take anything because the longing can be that painful. Every time I go to see my father, he'll talk about his brother, every single time. He just misses him ... I've always got a picture of my uncle when we're playing that song. My dad's not actually heard it yet, but he'll hear it soon."
Allan's mother also has her place on the album, a very real physical presence on the closing track as she voices the fictional mother telling her son, about to be released from prison, to "be not led into temptation / And dare to resist not re-offending again".
"It was funny," Allan remembers. "When my mum came into the studio, she was telling Flood how to produce and telling me to swap the words around. She was like Diana Ross - bang, out the door, one take. It was the last song, and we were trying to get the rest of the songs to match each other. It was really sweet because I knew she was feeling under pressure about it. She never mentioned it, though, because she didn't want any extra pressure to go on me. Maybe I'm the guy with experience of a recording studio compared to the experience she's had, but, even in that moment, she's thinking to herself, 'I'm the mother, and I need to alleviate any pressure I can. I'll take the strain.'"
So, was there a blurring between the fiction of the lyric and the fact of the situation? "Even in the recording studio, man, she was playing the role of my mother and I was still the child," Allan agrees. "It's a memory that I'll always cherish. And she did say, 'Just think, boys: if this is the last song that you ever do, then mine is the last voice on the record ...'"
EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ is released on April 4. Glasvegas play Aberdeen Music Hall on April 23; HMV Picture House, Edinburgh on April 24; and O2 Academy, Glasgow on April 25.
Sunday, April 03, 2011
The Senators Sway
Before they wanted to kill Qaddafi, they were celebrating in his tent.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
April 2, 2011 4:00 A.M.
John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham are the Senate’s most energetic proponents of sinking the nation ever deeper into the Libyan morass. In a joint interview on Fox last weekend, Senators McCain (R., Ariz.) and Lieberman (I., Conn.) were breathless in their rendering of the “freedom fighters” and the “Arab Spring” of spontaneous “democracy.” Friday they upped the ante with a Wall Street Journal op-ed, rehearsing yet again what an incorrigible thug Qaddafi is and how “we cannot allow [him] to consolidate his grip” on parts of Libya that he still controls.
For his part, Senator Graham (R., S.C.) told CNN Wednesday that he would like President Obama to designate Qaddafi an “unlawful enemy combatant” with an eye toward legitimizing the strongman’s assassination. He and Wolf Blitzer discussed whether the hit could be pulled off by the covert intelligence operatives President Obama has inserted in Libya. The next day, in his plaintive questioning of Defense Secretary Robert Gates at a Senate hearing, Senator Graham wondered why American air power could not just “drop a bomb on him, to end this thing.”
As a matter of law, Graham’s proposal is ludicrous — no small thanks to federal law that Graham himself helped write, about which more in an upcoming column. What was especially striking about the hearing was the tone of righteous indignation Senators Graham and McCain took in whipping the Obama administration over government blundering.
But what about their own blundering? The senators most strident about the purported need to oust Qaddafi, to crush his armed forces, and to kill him if that’s what it takes to empower the rebels, are the very senators who helped fortify Qaddafi’s military and tighten the despotic grip of which they now despair.
It was only a short time ago, in mid-August 2009, that Senators McCain, Lieberman, and Graham, along with another transnational progressive moderate, Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine), paid a visit to Qaddafi’s Tripoli compound. If they seem to have amnesia about it now, perhaps that’s because the main item on the agenda was their support for the Obama administration’s offer of military aid to the same thug the senators now want gone yesterday.
A government cable (leaked by Wikileaks) memorializes the excruciating details of meetings between the Senate delegation and Qaddafi, along with his son Mutassim, Libya’s “national security adviser.” We find McCain and Graham promising to use their influence to push along Libya’s requests for C-130 military aircraft, among other armaments, and civilian nuclear assistance. And there’s Lieberman gushing, “We never would have guessed ten years ago that we would be sitting in Tripoli, being welcomed by a son of Muammar al-Qadhafi.” That’s before he opined that Libya had become “an important ally in the war on terrorism,” and that “common enemies sometimes make better friends.”
On and on it goes, made all the more nauseating by the reality that nobody was under any illusion that Qaddafi had truly reformed. McCain made a point of telling the press that “the status of human rights and political reform in Libya will remain a chief element of concern.” Note the gentle diplomatic understatement: Qaddafi is — and was, as McCain well knew — a savage autocrat. Yet this brute fact was softened into “an element of concern” regarding “the status of human rights and political reform.” Pretty sharp contrast from the senator’s sardonic grilling of the U.S. defense secretary on Thursday. The McCain who was face-to-face with Qaddafi was very different from the McCain who today rails about Qaddafi. Back in the tent, none of his concern would dampen the cozy mood. The Arizonan swooned over “the many ways in which the United States and Libya can work together as partners.”
This would build on the partnership with Qaddafi that, as I’ve detailed, was struck by the Bush administration, a blunder if ever there was one. But did McCain, Lieberman, and Graham have a problem with it — because Qaddafi is an incorrigible terrorist enemy of the United States, who must be exterminated right away? If they did, perhaps they’ll enlighten us. None of these gents is exactly a wallflower when it comes to telling us what he thinks on matters great and small. If they were protesting our Qaddafi policy, the public record is strangely silent on the matter. Truth be told, it runs decidedly in the opposite direction.
As is his wont, President Obama took President Bush’s blunder and ran with it. Not only did the new administration continue Bush’s aid to Qaddafi, the aid was stepped up. In fact, Obama increased military aid to Qaddafi’s regime only a few weeks before the current crisis began — support Hillary Clinton’s State Department said would go to further strengthening Qaddafi’s air force (the one our no-fly zone is now shooting down), to train his military officers (the ones the senators now want to bomb to smithereens), and to support what the Obama administration, echoing the Bush administration, insisted was Qaddafi’s staunch anti-terrorism.
With eyes wide open, the interventionist senators abetted the U.S. aid to Qaddafi and the legitimizing of his dictatorial regime. Given that this policy has contributed mightily to Qaddafi’s current capacity to consolidate his grip on power and repress his opposition, one might think some senatorial contrition, or at least humility, would be in order. But, no. Having been entirely wrong about Qaddafi, the senators would now have us double down on Libya by backing Qaddafi’s opposition — the rebels about whom McCain, Lieberman, and Graham know a lot less than they knew about Qaddafi.
As for what they knew about Qaddafi, the story gets even worse.
It goes without saying that the interventionist senators’ case for why Qaddafi must go always comes back to his terrorist past and, in particular, to the bombing of Pan Am 103. What they neglect to mention is that at the very moment they were huddling with Qaddafi, reports were circulating that the dictator was pressuring British and Scottish authorities (with the knowledge of the Obama administration) for the release of the Lockerbie terrorist, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi. In fact, while the senators were on their Tripoli jaunt, the imminence of Megrahi’s release was so well-known that the American embassy in Libya began advising that, because a celebratory “youth rally” was being planned, American citizens should steer clear of downtown Tripoli on August 20 and 21. Contemporaneously, President Obama was pleading with Qaddafi not to give the bomber “a hero’s welcome.”
In the event, Megrahi was in fact released five days after the senators’ visit. Upon being escorted home by another Qaddafi son, Saif, the terrorist was given a hero’s welcome at the Tripoli airport by thousands of Libyans — the liberty-loving civilians we are now risking American blood and treasure to protect, from the country that, by percentage of population, sent more jihadists to fight American troops in Iraq than any other.
What has been much missed is that Qaddafi discussed the prospect of Megrahi’s triumphant return with his distinguished senatorial guests. The Wikileaks cable indicates that McCain took the lead on this issue. In its August 21 report on Megrahi, the Associated Press mentioned in passing that the senators had “warned Libyan officials of possible damage to U.S.-Libyan relations if Megrahi’s return were to be handled in the wrong fashion.”
“If Megrahi’s return were to be handled in the wrong fashion” — mull that one over for a moment. There was no Libyan threat to the United States when Obama ordered our troops into battle last week. Intervention proponents seek to fill that inconvenient gap by stressing Qaddafi’s history of anti-American terrorism. Lockerbie, among other atrocities, is what McCain, Lieberman, and Graham say makes it urgent that we remove or even kill Qaddafi, the sooner the better.
Yet, there they were in Qaddafi’s tent only a year and a half ago, amiably chatting about our new bilateral “partnership” and plans to give this terrorist sundry assistance, prominently including military aid. Hovering over the meeting is Lockerbie. Far from ancient history, it is very much front and center because Qaddafi’s chief perpetrator of the attack is on the cusp of being released. So, with this powerful a reminder of Qaddafi’s monstrousness staring them in the face, do the senators say, “Don’t you dare try to spring that bomber”? Do they declare Lockerbie to be Exhibit A in the case that Qaddafi is an incorrigible terrorist who must be removed? Do they assure Qaddafi that if he rubs our nose in that mass-murder again by feting the murderer, there will be hell to pay?
No. Instead, it was taken as a given that the Lockerbie bomber would be released at Qaddafi’s insistence. The only thing left to talk about was the fashion in which Megrahi’s return to Libya would be handled. There appears to have been none of the indignation reserved for televised Senate hearings. Echoing Obama, the senators merely insisted that Megrahi’s return to Libya be managed lest it disrupt our growing “partnership” with Qaddafi, lest it complicate the important work of bulking up his regime on the backs of American taxpayers.
Having taken the measure of his guests, and of President Obama, Qaddafi — being Qaddafi — went right ahead with the raucous celebration his regime had planned for its returning terrorist hero. And, just as Qaddafi figured, the U.S. responded by continuing to support his regime, then by increasing support for his regime, and, until a few weeks ago, by envisioning a long-range, bilateral partnership with steadily escalating support for his regime. All of this appears to have been done with nary a peep from McCain, Lieberman, and Graham.
We all make bad mistakes. For most of us, they are occasions for introspection, for saying, “I’m sorry.” In the case of Libya, the senators’ miscalculation about Qaddafi is a fine opportunity to acknowledge that we’ve already botched things badly enough, that maybe we should avoid additional entanglement in a place where we have no vital interests, risking more American lives and dollars at a time when we are militarily stretched and financially tapped out.
For most of us, a mistake is not an occasion for doubling down, for fits of pique, or for painting everybody else as the fool.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
April 2, 2011 4:00 A.M.
John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham are the Senate’s most energetic proponents of sinking the nation ever deeper into the Libyan morass. In a joint interview on Fox last weekend, Senators McCain (R., Ariz.) and Lieberman (I., Conn.) were breathless in their rendering of the “freedom fighters” and the “Arab Spring” of spontaneous “democracy.” Friday they upped the ante with a Wall Street Journal op-ed, rehearsing yet again what an incorrigible thug Qaddafi is and how “we cannot allow [him] to consolidate his grip” on parts of Libya that he still controls.
For his part, Senator Graham (R., S.C.) told CNN Wednesday that he would like President Obama to designate Qaddafi an “unlawful enemy combatant” with an eye toward legitimizing the strongman’s assassination. He and Wolf Blitzer discussed whether the hit could be pulled off by the covert intelligence operatives President Obama has inserted in Libya. The next day, in his plaintive questioning of Defense Secretary Robert Gates at a Senate hearing, Senator Graham wondered why American air power could not just “drop a bomb on him, to end this thing.”
As a matter of law, Graham’s proposal is ludicrous — no small thanks to federal law that Graham himself helped write, about which more in an upcoming column. What was especially striking about the hearing was the tone of righteous indignation Senators Graham and McCain took in whipping the Obama administration over government blundering.
But what about their own blundering? The senators most strident about the purported need to oust Qaddafi, to crush his armed forces, and to kill him if that’s what it takes to empower the rebels, are the very senators who helped fortify Qaddafi’s military and tighten the despotic grip of which they now despair.
It was only a short time ago, in mid-August 2009, that Senators McCain, Lieberman, and Graham, along with another transnational progressive moderate, Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine), paid a visit to Qaddafi’s Tripoli compound. If they seem to have amnesia about it now, perhaps that’s because the main item on the agenda was their support for the Obama administration’s offer of military aid to the same thug the senators now want gone yesterday.
A government cable (leaked by Wikileaks) memorializes the excruciating details of meetings between the Senate delegation and Qaddafi, along with his son Mutassim, Libya’s “national security adviser.” We find McCain and Graham promising to use their influence to push along Libya’s requests for C-130 military aircraft, among other armaments, and civilian nuclear assistance. And there’s Lieberman gushing, “We never would have guessed ten years ago that we would be sitting in Tripoli, being welcomed by a son of Muammar al-Qadhafi.” That’s before he opined that Libya had become “an important ally in the war on terrorism,” and that “common enemies sometimes make better friends.”
On and on it goes, made all the more nauseating by the reality that nobody was under any illusion that Qaddafi had truly reformed. McCain made a point of telling the press that “the status of human rights and political reform in Libya will remain a chief element of concern.” Note the gentle diplomatic understatement: Qaddafi is — and was, as McCain well knew — a savage autocrat. Yet this brute fact was softened into “an element of concern” regarding “the status of human rights and political reform.” Pretty sharp contrast from the senator’s sardonic grilling of the U.S. defense secretary on Thursday. The McCain who was face-to-face with Qaddafi was very different from the McCain who today rails about Qaddafi. Back in the tent, none of his concern would dampen the cozy mood. The Arizonan swooned over “the many ways in which the United States and Libya can work together as partners.”
This would build on the partnership with Qaddafi that, as I’ve detailed, was struck by the Bush administration, a blunder if ever there was one. But did McCain, Lieberman, and Graham have a problem with it — because Qaddafi is an incorrigible terrorist enemy of the United States, who must be exterminated right away? If they did, perhaps they’ll enlighten us. None of these gents is exactly a wallflower when it comes to telling us what he thinks on matters great and small. If they were protesting our Qaddafi policy, the public record is strangely silent on the matter. Truth be told, it runs decidedly in the opposite direction.
As is his wont, President Obama took President Bush’s blunder and ran with it. Not only did the new administration continue Bush’s aid to Qaddafi, the aid was stepped up. In fact, Obama increased military aid to Qaddafi’s regime only a few weeks before the current crisis began — support Hillary Clinton’s State Department said would go to further strengthening Qaddafi’s air force (the one our no-fly zone is now shooting down), to train his military officers (the ones the senators now want to bomb to smithereens), and to support what the Obama administration, echoing the Bush administration, insisted was Qaddafi’s staunch anti-terrorism.
With eyes wide open, the interventionist senators abetted the U.S. aid to Qaddafi and the legitimizing of his dictatorial regime. Given that this policy has contributed mightily to Qaddafi’s current capacity to consolidate his grip on power and repress his opposition, one might think some senatorial contrition, or at least humility, would be in order. But, no. Having been entirely wrong about Qaddafi, the senators would now have us double down on Libya by backing Qaddafi’s opposition — the rebels about whom McCain, Lieberman, and Graham know a lot less than they knew about Qaddafi.
As for what they knew about Qaddafi, the story gets even worse.
It goes without saying that the interventionist senators’ case for why Qaddafi must go always comes back to his terrorist past and, in particular, to the bombing of Pan Am 103. What they neglect to mention is that at the very moment they were huddling with Qaddafi, reports were circulating that the dictator was pressuring British and Scottish authorities (with the knowledge of the Obama administration) for the release of the Lockerbie terrorist, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi. In fact, while the senators were on their Tripoli jaunt, the imminence of Megrahi’s release was so well-known that the American embassy in Libya began advising that, because a celebratory “youth rally” was being planned, American citizens should steer clear of downtown Tripoli on August 20 and 21. Contemporaneously, President Obama was pleading with Qaddafi not to give the bomber “a hero’s welcome.”
In the event, Megrahi was in fact released five days after the senators’ visit. Upon being escorted home by another Qaddafi son, Saif, the terrorist was given a hero’s welcome at the Tripoli airport by thousands of Libyans — the liberty-loving civilians we are now risking American blood and treasure to protect, from the country that, by percentage of population, sent more jihadists to fight American troops in Iraq than any other.
What has been much missed is that Qaddafi discussed the prospect of Megrahi’s triumphant return with his distinguished senatorial guests. The Wikileaks cable indicates that McCain took the lead on this issue. In its August 21 report on Megrahi, the Associated Press mentioned in passing that the senators had “warned Libyan officials of possible damage to U.S.-Libyan relations if Megrahi’s return were to be handled in the wrong fashion.”
“If Megrahi’s return were to be handled in the wrong fashion” — mull that one over for a moment. There was no Libyan threat to the United States when Obama ordered our troops into battle last week. Intervention proponents seek to fill that inconvenient gap by stressing Qaddafi’s history of anti-American terrorism. Lockerbie, among other atrocities, is what McCain, Lieberman, and Graham say makes it urgent that we remove or even kill Qaddafi, the sooner the better.
Yet, there they were in Qaddafi’s tent only a year and a half ago, amiably chatting about our new bilateral “partnership” and plans to give this terrorist sundry assistance, prominently including military aid. Hovering over the meeting is Lockerbie. Far from ancient history, it is very much front and center because Qaddafi’s chief perpetrator of the attack is on the cusp of being released. So, with this powerful a reminder of Qaddafi’s monstrousness staring them in the face, do the senators say, “Don’t you dare try to spring that bomber”? Do they declare Lockerbie to be Exhibit A in the case that Qaddafi is an incorrigible terrorist who must be removed? Do they assure Qaddafi that if he rubs our nose in that mass-murder again by feting the murderer, there will be hell to pay?
No. Instead, it was taken as a given that the Lockerbie bomber would be released at Qaddafi’s insistence. The only thing left to talk about was the fashion in which Megrahi’s return to Libya would be handled. There appears to have been none of the indignation reserved for televised Senate hearings. Echoing Obama, the senators merely insisted that Megrahi’s return to Libya be managed lest it disrupt our growing “partnership” with Qaddafi, lest it complicate the important work of bulking up his regime on the backs of American taxpayers.
Having taken the measure of his guests, and of President Obama, Qaddafi — being Qaddafi — went right ahead with the raucous celebration his regime had planned for its returning terrorist hero. And, just as Qaddafi figured, the U.S. responded by continuing to support his regime, then by increasing support for his regime, and, until a few weeks ago, by envisioning a long-range, bilateral partnership with steadily escalating support for his regime. All of this appears to have been done with nary a peep from McCain, Lieberman, and Graham.
We all make bad mistakes. For most of us, they are occasions for introspection, for saying, “I’m sorry.” In the case of Libya, the senators’ miscalculation about Qaddafi is a fine opportunity to acknowledge that we’ve already botched things badly enough, that maybe we should avoid additional entanglement in a place where we have no vital interests, risking more American lives and dollars at a time when we are militarily stretched and financially tapped out.
For most of us, a mistake is not an occasion for doubling down, for fits of pique, or for painting everybody else as the fool.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
Syria’s ‘Reformer’
Why the delicacy for Assad?
By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.nationalreview.com/
April 1, 2011 12:00 A.M.
Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.
— Hillary Clinton on Bashar al-Assad, March 27
Few things said by this administration in its two years can match this one for moral bankruptcy and strategic incomprehensibility.
First, it’s demonstrably false. It was hoped that President Assad would be a reformer when he inherited his father’s dictatorship a decade ago. Being a London-educated eye doctor, he received the full Yuri Andropov treatment — the assumption that having been exposed to Western ways, he’d been Westernized. Wrong. Assad has run the same iron-fisted Alawite police state as did his father.
Bashar made promises of reform during the short-lived Arab Spring of 2005. The promises were broken. During the current brutally suppressed protests, his spokeswoman made renewed promises of reform. Then Wednesday, appearing before parliament, Assad was shockingly defiant. He offered no concessions. None.
Second, it’s morally reprehensible. Here are people demonstrating against a dictatorship that repeatedly uses live fire on its own people, a regime that in 1982 killed 20,000 in Hama and then paved the dead over. Here are insanely courageous people demanding reform — and the U.S. secretary of state tells the world that the thug ordering the shooting of innocents already is a reformer, thus effectively endorsing the Baath party line — “We are all reformers,” Assad told parliament — and undermining the demonstrators’ cause.
Third, it’s strategically incomprehensible. Sometimes you cover for a repressive ally because you need it for U.S. national security. Hence our muted words about Bahrain. Hence our slow response on Egypt. But there are rare times when strategic interest and moral imperative coincide completely. Syria is one such — a monstrous police state whose regime consistently works to thwart U.S. interests in the region.
During the worst days of the Iraq War, this regime funneled terrorists into Iraq to fight U.S. troops and Iraqi allies. It is dripping with Lebanese blood as well, being behind the murder of independent journalists and democrats, including former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. This year, it helped topple the pro-Western government of Hariri’s son, Saad, and put Lebanon under the thumb of the virulently anti-Western Hezbollah. Syria is a partner in nuclear proliferation with North Korea. It is Iran’s agent and closest Arab ally, granting it an outlet on the Mediterranean. Those two Iranian warships that went through the Suez Canal in February docked at the Syrian port of Latakia, a long-sought Iranian penetration of the Mediterranean.
Yet here was the secretary of state covering for the Syrian dictator against his own opposition. And it doesn’t help that Clinton tried to walk it back two days later by saying she was simply quoting others. Rubbish. Of the myriad opinions of Assad, she chose to cite precisely one: reformer. That’s an endorsement, no matter how much she later pretends otherwise.
And it’s not just the words; it’s the policy behind them. This delicacy toward Assad is dismayingly reminiscent of President Obama’s response to the 2009 Iranian uprising during which he was scandalously reluctant to support the demonstrators, while repeatedly reaffirming the legitimacy of the brutal theocracy suppressing them.
Why? Because Obama wanted to remain “engaged” with the mullahs — so that he could talk them out of their nuclear weapons. We know how that went.
The same conceit animates his Syria policy — keep good relations with the regime so that Obama can sweet-talk it out of its alliance with Iran and sponsorship of Hezbollah.
Another abject failure. Syria has contemptuously rejected Obama’s blandishments — obsequious visits from Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry and the return of the first U.S. ambassador to Damascus since the killing of Hariri. Assad’s response? An even tighter and more ostentatious alliance with Hezbollah and Iran.
Our ambassador in Damascus should demand to meet the demonstrators and visit the wounded. If refused, he should be recalled to Washington. And rather than “deplore the crackdown,” as did Clinton in her walk-back, we should be denouncing it in forceful language and every available forum, including the U.N. Security Council.
No one is asking for a Libya-style rescue. Just simple truth-telling. If Kerry wants to make a fool of himself by continuing to insist that Assad is an agent of change, well, it’s a free country. But Clinton speaks for the nation.
— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2011 the Washington Post Writers Group .
By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.nationalreview.com/
April 1, 2011 12:00 A.M.
— Hillary Clinton on Bashar al-Assad, March 27
Few things said by this administration in its two years can match this one for moral bankruptcy and strategic incomprehensibility.
First, it’s demonstrably false. It was hoped that President Assad would be a reformer when he inherited his father’s dictatorship a decade ago. Being a London-educated eye doctor, he received the full Yuri Andropov treatment — the assumption that having been exposed to Western ways, he’d been Westernized. Wrong. Assad has run the same iron-fisted Alawite police state as did his father.
Bashar made promises of reform during the short-lived Arab Spring of 2005. The promises were broken. During the current brutally suppressed protests, his spokeswoman made renewed promises of reform. Then Wednesday, appearing before parliament, Assad was shockingly defiant. He offered no concessions. None.
Second, it’s morally reprehensible. Here are people demonstrating against a dictatorship that repeatedly uses live fire on its own people, a regime that in 1982 killed 20,000 in Hama and then paved the dead over. Here are insanely courageous people demanding reform — and the U.S. secretary of state tells the world that the thug ordering the shooting of innocents already is a reformer, thus effectively endorsing the Baath party line — “We are all reformers,” Assad told parliament — and undermining the demonstrators’ cause.
Third, it’s strategically incomprehensible. Sometimes you cover for a repressive ally because you need it for U.S. national security. Hence our muted words about Bahrain. Hence our slow response on Egypt. But there are rare times when strategic interest and moral imperative coincide completely. Syria is one such — a monstrous police state whose regime consistently works to thwart U.S. interests in the region.
During the worst days of the Iraq War, this regime funneled terrorists into Iraq to fight U.S. troops and Iraqi allies. It is dripping with Lebanese blood as well, being behind the murder of independent journalists and democrats, including former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. This year, it helped topple the pro-Western government of Hariri’s son, Saad, and put Lebanon under the thumb of the virulently anti-Western Hezbollah. Syria is a partner in nuclear proliferation with North Korea. It is Iran’s agent and closest Arab ally, granting it an outlet on the Mediterranean. Those two Iranian warships that went through the Suez Canal in February docked at the Syrian port of Latakia, a long-sought Iranian penetration of the Mediterranean.
Yet here was the secretary of state covering for the Syrian dictator against his own opposition. And it doesn’t help that Clinton tried to walk it back two days later by saying she was simply quoting others. Rubbish. Of the myriad opinions of Assad, she chose to cite precisely one: reformer. That’s an endorsement, no matter how much she later pretends otherwise.
And it’s not just the words; it’s the policy behind them. This delicacy toward Assad is dismayingly reminiscent of President Obama’s response to the 2009 Iranian uprising during which he was scandalously reluctant to support the demonstrators, while repeatedly reaffirming the legitimacy of the brutal theocracy suppressing them.
Why? Because Obama wanted to remain “engaged” with the mullahs — so that he could talk them out of their nuclear weapons. We know how that went.
The same conceit animates his Syria policy — keep good relations with the regime so that Obama can sweet-talk it out of its alliance with Iran and sponsorship of Hezbollah.
Another abject failure. Syria has contemptuously rejected Obama’s blandishments — obsequious visits from Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry and the return of the first U.S. ambassador to Damascus since the killing of Hariri. Assad’s response? An even tighter and more ostentatious alliance with Hezbollah and Iran.
Our ambassador in Damascus should demand to meet the demonstrators and visit the wounded. If refused, he should be recalled to Washington. And rather than “deplore the crackdown,” as did Clinton in her walk-back, we should be denouncing it in forceful language and every available forum, including the U.N. Security Council.
No one is asking for a Libya-style rescue. Just simple truth-telling. If Kerry wants to make a fool of himself by continuing to insist that Assad is an agent of change, well, it’s a free country. But Clinton speaks for the nation.
— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2011 the Washington Post Writers Group .
If there's no mission, when's it accomplished?
By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/sections/opinion/
April 1, 2011
If I recall correctly, we went into Libya – or, at any rate, over Libya – to stop the brutal Gadhafi dictatorship killing the Libyan people. And, thanks to our efforts, a whole new mass movement of freedom-loving democrats now has the opportunity to kill the Libyan people. As the Los Angeles Times reported from Benghazi, gangs of young gunmen are roaming the city "rousting Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa from their homes and holding them for interrogation as suspected mercenaries or government spies." According to the New York Times, "Members of the NATO alliance have sternly warned the rebels in Libya not to attack civilians as they push against the regime of Col. Moammar Gadhafi." We dropped bombs on Gadhafi's crowd for attacking civilians, and we're prepared to do the same to you! "The coalition has told the rebels that the fog of war will not shield them from possible bombardment by NATO planes and missiles, just as the regime's forces have been punished."
So, having agreed to be the Libyan Liberation Movement Air Force, we're also happy to serve as the Gadhafi Last-Stand Air Force. Say what you like about Barack Obama, but it's rare to find a leader so impeccably multilateralist that he's willing to participate in both sides of a war. It doesn't exactly do much for holding it under budget, but it does ensure that for once we've got a sporting chance of coming out on the winning side. If a coalition plane bombing Gadhafi's forces runs into a coalition plane bombing the rebel forces, are they allowed to open fire on each other? Or would that exceed the U.N. resolution?
Who are these rebels we're simultaneously arming and bombing? Don't worry, the CIA is "gathering intelligence" on them. They should have a clear idea of who our allies are round about the time Mohammed bin Jihad is firing his Kalashnikov and shouting "Death to the Great Satan!" from the balcony of the presidential palace. But America's commander-in-chief thinks they're pretty sound chaps. "The people that we've met with have been fully vetted," says President Obama. "So we have a clear sense of who they are. And so far they're saying the right things. And most of them are professionals, lawyers, doctors – people who appear to be credible."
Credible people with credentials – just like the president! Lawyers, doctors, just like Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's No. 2. Maybe among their impeccably credentialed ranks is a credible professional eye doctor like Bashir Assad, the London ophthalmologist who made a successful midlife career change to dictator of Syria. Hillary Rodham Clinton calls young Bashir a "reformer," by which she means presumably that he hasn't (yet) slaughtered as many civilians as his late dad. Assad Sr. killed some 20,000 Syrians at Hama and is said to have pumped hydrogen cyanide through the town: there wasn't a dry eye in the house, as the ophthalmologists say. Baby Assad hasn't done that (yet), so he's a reformer, and we're in favor of those, so we're not arming his rebels.
According to the State Department, Col. Gadhafi's 27-year-old son Khamis is also a "reformer." Or at least he was a few weeks ago, when U.S. officials welcomed him here for a monthlong visit, including meetings at NASA and the Air Force Academy, and front-row seats for a lecture by Deepak Chopra entitled "The Soul of Leadership." Ten minutes of which would have me buckling up the Semtex belt and yelling "Allahu Akbar!," but each to his own. It would have been embarrassing had Khamis Gadhafi still been getting the red-carpet treatment in the U.S. while his dad was getting the red carpet-bombing treatment over in Tripoli. But fortunately a scheduled trip to West Point on Feb. 21 had to be canceled when young Khamis was obliged to cut short his visit and return to Libya to start shooting large numbers of people in his capacity as the commander of a crack special forces unit. Maybe he'll be killed by a pilot who showed him round the Air Force Academy. Small world, isn't it?
Meanwhile, the same CIA currently "gathering intelligence" on these jihadist lawyers, doctors and other allies has apparently been in Libya for some time, arming them, according to a top-secret memo on their eyes-only clandestine operation simultaneously leaked by no fewer than four administration officials to the press. A reader suggested to me that they'd misheard the Warren Zevon song "Send Lawyers, Guns And Money," and were sending guns and money to lawyers. And, if some of the guns and money end up in the hands of "al-Qaida elements," I'm sure Janet Napolitano can have it re-classified as an overseas stimulus bill. In the old days, simpletons like President George W. Bush used to say, "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists." This time round, we're with us and we're with the terrorists, and you can't say fairer than that.
So this isn't your father's war. It's a war with a U.N. resolution and French jets and a Canadian general and the good wishes of the Arab League. It's a war with everything it needs, except a mission. And, if you don't have a mission, it's hard to know when it's accomplished. Defense Secretary Robert Gates insists that regime change is not a goal; President Sarkozy says it is; President Obama's position, insofar as one can pin it down, seems to be that he's not in favor of Gadhafi remaining in power but he isn't necessarily going to do anything to remove him therefrom. According to NBC, Gadhafi was said to be down in the dumps about his prospects until he saw Obama's speech, after which he concluded the guy wasn't serious about getting rid of him, and he perked up. He's certainly not planning on going anywhere. There is an old rule of war that one should always offer an enemy an escape route. Instead, British Prime Minister David Cameron demanded that Gadhafi be put on trial. So the Colonel is unlikely to trust any offers of exile, and has nothing to lose by staying to the bitter end and killing as many people as possible.
Meanwhile, the turbulence in the Middle East has spread to Syria, Kuwait, Yemen, Jordan and beyond. In Egypt, an entirely predictable alliance between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood seems to be emerging. The "Arab Spring" turns out to be a bit more complicated than it looks on CNN, and a CIA that failed to see the bankruptcy of its own pension plan looming is unlikely to be a very useful guide to the various forces in play. For the Western powers to be bogged down in the least-consequential Arab dictatorship's low-grade civil war desultorily providing air support to incompetent al-Qaida sympathizers may be an artful, if expensive, piece of misdirection.
Either that, or we haven't got a clue what we're doing.
©MARK STEYN
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/sections/opinion/
April 1, 2011
So, having agreed to be the Libyan Liberation Movement Air Force, we're also happy to serve as the Gadhafi Last-Stand Air Force. Say what you like about Barack Obama, but it's rare to find a leader so impeccably multilateralist that he's willing to participate in both sides of a war. It doesn't exactly do much for holding it under budget, but it does ensure that for once we've got a sporting chance of coming out on the winning side. If a coalition plane bombing Gadhafi's forces runs into a coalition plane bombing the rebel forces, are they allowed to open fire on each other? Or would that exceed the U.N. resolution?
Who are these rebels we're simultaneously arming and bombing? Don't worry, the CIA is "gathering intelligence" on them. They should have a clear idea of who our allies are round about the time Mohammed bin Jihad is firing his Kalashnikov and shouting "Death to the Great Satan!" from the balcony of the presidential palace. But America's commander-in-chief thinks they're pretty sound chaps. "The people that we've met with have been fully vetted," says President Obama. "So we have a clear sense of who they are. And so far they're saying the right things. And most of them are professionals, lawyers, doctors – people who appear to be credible."
Credible people with credentials – just like the president! Lawyers, doctors, just like Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's No. 2. Maybe among their impeccably credentialed ranks is a credible professional eye doctor like Bashir Assad, the London ophthalmologist who made a successful midlife career change to dictator of Syria. Hillary Rodham Clinton calls young Bashir a "reformer," by which she means presumably that he hasn't (yet) slaughtered as many civilians as his late dad. Assad Sr. killed some 20,000 Syrians at Hama and is said to have pumped hydrogen cyanide through the town: there wasn't a dry eye in the house, as the ophthalmologists say. Baby Assad hasn't done that (yet), so he's a reformer, and we're in favor of those, so we're not arming his rebels.
According to the State Department, Col. Gadhafi's 27-year-old son Khamis is also a "reformer." Or at least he was a few weeks ago, when U.S. officials welcomed him here for a monthlong visit, including meetings at NASA and the Air Force Academy, and front-row seats for a lecture by Deepak Chopra entitled "The Soul of Leadership." Ten minutes of which would have me buckling up the Semtex belt and yelling "Allahu Akbar!," but each to his own. It would have been embarrassing had Khamis Gadhafi still been getting the red-carpet treatment in the U.S. while his dad was getting the red carpet-bombing treatment over in Tripoli. But fortunately a scheduled trip to West Point on Feb. 21 had to be canceled when young Khamis was obliged to cut short his visit and return to Libya to start shooting large numbers of people in his capacity as the commander of a crack special forces unit. Maybe he'll be killed by a pilot who showed him round the Air Force Academy. Small world, isn't it?
Meanwhile, the same CIA currently "gathering intelligence" on these jihadist lawyers, doctors and other allies has apparently been in Libya for some time, arming them, according to a top-secret memo on their eyes-only clandestine operation simultaneously leaked by no fewer than four administration officials to the press. A reader suggested to me that they'd misheard the Warren Zevon song "Send Lawyers, Guns And Money," and were sending guns and money to lawyers. And, if some of the guns and money end up in the hands of "al-Qaida elements," I'm sure Janet Napolitano can have it re-classified as an overseas stimulus bill. In the old days, simpletons like President George W. Bush used to say, "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists." This time round, we're with us and we're with the terrorists, and you can't say fairer than that.
So this isn't your father's war. It's a war with a U.N. resolution and French jets and a Canadian general and the good wishes of the Arab League. It's a war with everything it needs, except a mission. And, if you don't have a mission, it's hard to know when it's accomplished. Defense Secretary Robert Gates insists that regime change is not a goal; President Sarkozy says it is; President Obama's position, insofar as one can pin it down, seems to be that he's not in favor of Gadhafi remaining in power but he isn't necessarily going to do anything to remove him therefrom. According to NBC, Gadhafi was said to be down in the dumps about his prospects until he saw Obama's speech, after which he concluded the guy wasn't serious about getting rid of him, and he perked up. He's certainly not planning on going anywhere. There is an old rule of war that one should always offer an enemy an escape route. Instead, British Prime Minister David Cameron demanded that Gadhafi be put on trial. So the Colonel is unlikely to trust any offers of exile, and has nothing to lose by staying to the bitter end and killing as many people as possible.
Meanwhile, the turbulence in the Middle East has spread to Syria, Kuwait, Yemen, Jordan and beyond. In Egypt, an entirely predictable alliance between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood seems to be emerging. The "Arab Spring" turns out to be a bit more complicated than it looks on CNN, and a CIA that failed to see the bankruptcy of its own pension plan looming is unlikely to be a very useful guide to the various forces in play. For the Western powers to be bogged down in the least-consequential Arab dictatorship's low-grade civil war desultorily providing air support to incompetent al-Qaida sympathizers may be an artful, if expensive, piece of misdirection.
Either that, or we haven't got a clue what we're doing.
©MARK STEYN
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