Debra J. Saunders: Free the Border Patrol Two

Border Patrol along the fenceline- Nogales, AZ

Thursday, January 18, 2007
San Fransisco Chronicle


Prison doors clanged shut last night, leaving two Border Patrol agents locked up among the very types of felons they once helped put away. The agents' families have been wiped out financially, their kids will grow up without a father watching over them, their freedom has been stripped from them. What was the terrible crime that put agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean behind bars for sentences of 11 years and 12 years, respectively?

They fired at a drug smuggler, who had been driving a van with 743 pounds of marijuana, as he ran toward the border to avoid arrest. They say they did not know they wounded him in the buttocks, so they picked up their shells and filed a false report that didn't mention the shooting.


A U.S. Border Patrol agent patrols along the fence line of the U.S.-Mexico border in Nogales, Ariz., on Thursday, April 6, 2006. Lawmakers in Washington are debating immigration reform measures. Arrests of illegal migrants along the U.S.-Mexican border have dropped by more than a third since U.S. National Guard troops started helping with border security, suggesting that fewer people may be trying to cross. "The presence of the National Guard has had a big impact on migrants," he told The Associated Press on Tuesday Dec. 26, 2006. (AP Photo/Khampha Bouaphanh) For that, Johnny Sutton, the U.S. attorney for Western Texas, prosecuted the agents.

After a two-and-a-half-week trial, a jury found them guilty of assault with a dangerous weapon, discharge of a firearm during a violent crime, obstructing justice, lying about the incident and willfully violating the Fourth Amendment right to be free from illegal seizure of Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, the Mexican drug smuggler, who, incidentally, is suing the Border Patrol for $5 million because his civil rights were violated.

Sutton isn't happy about granting the smuggler immunity, but as he told me over the phone, he didn't have enough evidence to prosecute Aldrete-Davila.

Sutton hates being called "an overzealous prosecutor." As he said in a statement, "In America, law enforcement officers do not get to shoot unarmed suspects who are running away and file official reports that are false." And, "It is shocking that there are people who believe it is OK for agents to shoot at an unarmed suspect who is running away."

As for the long sentences, they are the doing of Congress, which tacked 10 years onto federal sentences for crimes committed with guns -- and there is no exemption for law enforcement officers.

Let me say this: Border Patrol agents do not have a right to -- and should not -- shoot at unarmed suspects. When and if they do shoot unarmed suspects, they should be disciplined -- and that includes firing them.

In this case, however, Ramos and Compean say they thought the suspect was armed. Sutton says that's not true. Ditto the drug smuggler -- but he has 5 million reasons to lie.

Two of Aldrete-Davila's family members, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, told the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin that the smuggler had been dealing drugs since age 14 and, according to one, he "wouldn't move drugs unless he had a gun on him."

Sutton responded, "There's this impression that all these dopers carry guns," but mules -- smugglers such as Aldrete-Davila -- "almost never carry guns," because federal law "tacks on five years to their sentence."

Even if everything Sutton says is true, Ramos and Compean most certainly should not spend 11 and 12 years behind bars. I don't think they should spend a single night in prison -- not for what was a mistake (if the smuggler was not armed) made in the heat of the moment, even if it was followed with a cover-up.

Americans should not put men in frustrating and dangerous law-enforcement positions, then lock them up and throw away the key if those men do one wrong thing, especially of the sort that angry, scared men sometimes do. It is not as if Ramos and Compean were crooked agents running criminal enterprises and betraying their fellow agents. If they were, they'd probably be facing a shorter sentence.

As T.J. Bonner of the agents' union, told me: "It's going to be terrible. These are good cops going to prison. It's not as if they're bad cops who are going to be accepted into the community. The very people they put away are going to be in the next cell to these guys."

Asked if President Bush would pardon the agents last Friday, White House spokesman Tony Snow noted that a jury had convicted them after a long trial. "We also believe that the people who are working to secure that border themselves obey the law."

Bonner looks at Bush's decision not to pardon the two men as a signal that Dubya doesn't particularly care about securing America's borders.

It is not as if Bush has too many friends and too much public support. I've heard from many Americans who are outraged at these excessive sentences and don't understand why Bush has not used his pardon power to commute the sentences of agents who were just doing their jobs.

If anything happens to these men while they are behind bars, then what will America think of George W. Bush?

Ann Coulter: The Stripper Has No Clothes

January 17, 2007
http://www.anncoulter.com


Stuart Taylor Jr., the liberal but brilliant legal reporter for the National Journal, described The New York Times' coverage of the Duke lacrosse rape case as "(w)orse, perhaps, than the other recent Times embarrassments." For a newspaper that carries Maureen Dowd's column, that's saying something.

As the Times' most loyal reader, this came as welcome news. I had briefly suspected the Times was engaging in fair reporting of the alleged rape case at Duke University. Taylor's article documenting the Times' massive misrepresentations restored order and coherence to my world.

The first part of the story — the lie part — was angrily reported in the Times. But as the accuser's story began to unravel, the Times gave only a selective account of the facts, using its famed lie-by-omission technique.

Among the many gigantic omissions from the Times' pretend-balanced article ("Files From Duke Rape Case Give Details but No Answers") is the fact that the only remaining particulars about the case that are not completely exculpatory come from a memo by Sgt. Mark Gottlieb — written four months after the alleged incident.

Gottlieb, the lead investigator on the alleged rape case, took no contemporaneous notes when he interviewed the accuser, but rather waited for the facts to come in — and his case to be falling apart — to write a memo recalling her statements during that initial investigation. The statements he recalled were surprisingly favorable to the prosecution!

The only problem with his memo, besides being preposterous on its face, is that it is contradicted by the contemporaneous notes taken by other people involved in the investigation. Indeed, the only thing Gottlieb's memo was consistent with were the facts as the prosecution was then alleging them.

Of course, it was hard to keep straight what facts the prosecution was alleging. The accuser made up so many stories about the incident that the Times was forced to offer her Jayson Blair's old position.

The Times "No Answers" article gave no indication that Gottlieb's memo was written four months after the alleged rape, but rather refers to it as the policeman's "case notes," falsely suggesting the notes were taken during the investigation and not after the frame-up.

Beginning with the strongest invented evidence from Gottlieb's "case notes," the Times reported that the nurse who examined the alleged rape victim told Gottlieb that the "blunt force trauma" seen in the examination "was consistent with the sexual assault that was alleged by the victim."

Or at least that's what Gottlieb wrote four months after talking to the nurse. It's not what the nurse wrote the night she examined the accuser. To the contrary, the only sign of physical trauma the nurse noted in her written report immediately after examining the accuser were some superficial scratches on the woman's knee and heel.

Indeed, in all 24 pages of the report prepared by doctors and nurses who examined the accuser the night of the alleged rape, there is no mention of any "blunt force trauma" or any injuries other than the scratches.

Also contradicting Gottlieb's hindsight memo were the notes taken by another policeman during their interview with the accuser — not four months later — saying she described her assailants as "chubby," with a "chubby face" and weighing "260-270" pounds.

That description fit none of the eventual defendants — whom she repeatedly failed to pick out of photo lineups until Gottlieb finally gave up and presented her with a photo lineup of only Duke lacrosse players, to ensure that she couldn't guess wrong.

But according to Gottlieb's hindsight memo, the accuser described one of her rapists as "baby-faced, tall, lean" — just like one of the actual defendants!

In repeatedly citing Gottlieb's after-the-fact memo as if it were the Rosetta stone of the case, the Times also neglected to mention Gottlieb's dark history with Duke students.

Gottlieb repeatedly jailed Duke students charged with minor infractions such as carrying an open beer or playing loud music, often throwing them in cells with violent criminals. He was not so tough on nonstudents, releasing one caught with marijuana and a concealed .45-caliber handgun.

A review of Gottlieb's record published in the Raleigh News & Observer showed that, in the previous year, when he patrolled an area that included both a "crime-ridden" public housing project and Duke off-campus housing, he arrested 20 Duke students and only eight nonstudents. During that same period, the three other officers in that district arrested two Duke students and 61 nonstudents.

At this point, Gottlieb's memo is the linchpin of the prosecution's case, and every single other fact in the case exonerates the defendants.

I mention all this to point out the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of the Times Jan. 15 editorial titled "Politicizing Prosecutors." The editorial had nothing to do with lunatic Southern prosecutors like Mike Nifong, Barry Krischer and Ronnie Earle threatening to put innocent people in prison for being Republican or "privileged white males."

No, the Times was upset because the law allows President Bush to fill vacant U.S. attorney slots with temporary replacements. The Times is enraged that Bush may be choosing prosecutors he likes, rather than prosecutors Sen. Dianne Feinstein likes, for these interim appointments.

If Bush were choosing the most hack, unprincipled, out-of-control Republican party operatives for these temporary U.S. attorney positions, they could not match the partisan witch-hunts of the prosecutors and policemen the Times lies to defend.

The Truth about Londonistan

London Protester- February 2006

By Aaron Hanscom
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
January 18, 2007

Critics of radical Islam just don’t grasp the concept of complexity. Such, at least, is the view of British journalist David Selbourne, who ended his recent piece in the British Spectator (“Apocalypse on the US blogosphere”) with the following reproach: “The true complexity of things is being given short shrift by ‘experts’ and by vox pop alike: after all, London is no more ‘Londonistan’ than Israel is a ‘cancer’ and America the ‘Great Satan’.”

Selbourne was specifically referring to Melanie Phillip’s book Londonistan. The book details how Islamist extremism has found a hospitable home in Britain. While Selbourne, author of the book The Losing Battle with Islam, doesn’t deny that the West faces a serious threat from radical Islam, he seems more bothered by the rhetoric of Western analysts than that of the jihadists. Clive Davis of the London Times is another serious journalist who recognizes the dangers of Islamist extremism but cares little for the “apocalyptic” style of Phillips or the “bleakly apocalyptic rhetoric” of Bruce Bawer and Claire Berlinksi, two American writers who have also written books about the threats facing Europe.

So the question naturally arises: Should the warnings in these books be dismissed as right-wing hysteria, or is the danger in Europe so great as to warrant the charged language? Put another way, is "Londonistan" just a catchy title for a book, or is the Islamification of Britain already well under way?

The facts paint the truest—and most alarming—picture. Recent undercover investigations by British media outlets have revealed plenty of apocalyptic rhetoric, emanating primarily from supposedly moderate mosques. In a Channel 4 program airing this week called Dispatches: Undercover Mosque, clerics advocating the replacement of British law with Shari’a law are plentiful. In front of a group of Muslims at Sparkbrook mosque, for example, Dr. Ijaz Mian says, “We have to rule ourselves and we have to rule the others.” Sparbrook, it must be noted, is run by the UK Islamic Mission, an organization that Tony Blair has said “is extremely valued by the government for its multi-faith and multicultural activities” and which runs 45 mosques in Britain. Londonistan, anyone?

And there’s no shortage of additional evidence. The documentary program also recorded the activities inside Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, where one cleric explains that “Allah has created the woman deficient” and another advises that if a girl “doesn't wear hijab, we hit her.” Precocious children aren’t the only ones with something to fear. According to a Green Lane cleric: “The time is fast approaching where the tables are going to turn and the Muslims are going to be in the position of being uppermost in strength and, when that happens, people won't get killed - unjustly.”

The Muslim Council of Britain accused Channel 4 of the “continuing demonization of British Muslims and the risible attempt at promoting sectarianism among British Muslims.” The tactics of the radicals portrayed on the program were less problematic to the organization.

In another investigation, British tabloid The People discovered on internet sites British-born Muslim clerics inciting hatred against their own country. In one speech, a radical named Abu Waleed says, “One day we hope to implement Shari’a law over Downing Street and Washington itself." The young cleric, Abu Muwahid, also has Downing Street on his mind when he tells a cheering crowd, “One day the black flag of Islam is going to be over 10 Downing Street, whether Tony Blair likes it or not." To his eager followers he asks: “What role are you going to play? Are you going to be one of those people who watch Osama bin Laden or the Mujahideen or the (inaudible) in the UK fulfilling their duty? You need to play an active role."

Anjem Choudary of Essex is recorded criticizing Muslims who fly the cross of St George on their cars in support of Britain’s soccer team because it “is an act of kufr {when a Muslim does something wrong} to wear a cross." But Muslims aren’t the only people who are now refraining from flying the flag. Islamic protests have forced the cable companies NTL, Heathrow airport, and the Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Agency to ban the flag out of fear.

Using anti-British propaganda to influence impressionable young people is not confined to the mosques of Britain. Last year the British government warned of Islamist groups recruiting in British universities. According to Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, students are being “groomed” by radicals posing as regular students. The Sunday Times quoted Sheikh Musa Admani, an imam, saying radical groups were adept at avoiding campus bans and joining conventional organizations. This followed a leaked Whitehall dossier commissioned by Tony Blair after the Madrid train bombings, which said: “Extremists are known to target schools and colleges where young people may be very inquisitive but less challenging and more susceptible to extremist reasoning/arguments.”

In a 20-page booklet issued by the government in 2006 to advise campus officials how to resist Islamist infiltration, several scenarios based on real events were described. One scenario had a member of a college library staff observing students watching “somebody making a homemade explosive device” on the internet. Other scenarios on campus included a speech given by a cleric who justifies attacks against British civilians and the taking over of an Islamic prayer room. The Federation of Student Islamic Societies (Fosis), which represents 90,000 Muslims students in Britain, was not appreciative of this effort by the government to warn universities about the threat of Islamist extremism. “Demonizing Muslims is unacceptable and dangerous whether in educational institutions or in communities,” a statement put out by Fosis declared.

British prisons are also grooming potential terrorists. The most famous aspiring terrorist is shoe bomber Richard Reid, who was radicalized inside Feltham young offenders’ institution. Lord Carlile, the independent watchdog on the government’s anti-terror laws, recently commented on the radicalization by imams of youths in prison. The Prison Officers’ Association has also warned of “dangerous and highly capable” prisoners, many of whom are affiliated with Al-Qaeda, who dedicate their time in prison to recruiting others to their cause. Unfortunately, the prison service admits that there is no strategy in place to tackle these Al-Qaeda operatives. Time and money are limited after all, and jails are already spending thousands of pounds on color-coded kitchen tools for Muslims and rebuilding toilets to face Mecca.

Because Britain is beholden to the tenets of multiculturalism and diversity, British Muslims have long realized that they can get away with almost anything. This was no more evident than at the 2006 Islamist demonstrations outside the Danish embassy during the Mohammed cartoon controversy. Muslims protestors held placards with such messages as “Britain you will pay - 7/7 is on its way” and "Whoever insults a prophet, kill him.” Omar Khayam arrived at the event wearing what resembled a suicide bomber’s vest.

But it is the bizarre conclusion to these demonstrations that should give pause to those who counsel a more “complex” attitude about the dangers of Islamic extremism in Britain. While the Islamists freely threatened murder against unbelievers, the only two people arrested at the protests were two men who were staging a counter-demonstration.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aaron Hanscom is a freelance writer in Los Angeles.

Yankees to host '08 All-Star Game

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

By PETE CALDERA
Bergen County Record

Ever since details to build a new ballpark in the Bronx were finalized, there was a movement to host the 2008 All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium.

Citing undisclosed major league sources, Espn.com reported Tuesday that the Stadium will indeed host baseball's Midsummer Classic in July of '08 – just nine months before the Yankees' new park opens in 2009.

The Yankees and Major League Baseball had nothing to say officially, although an announcement could be made this week at the owners' meetings in Arizona.

Yankee Stadium hasn't been the site of the All-Star Game since 1977.

Built in 1923, the Stadium – which also hosted All-Star Games in 1939 and 1960 – underwent an extensive two-year renovation before reopening in 1976.

Teams must actively pursue the hosting of an All-Star Game, but neither New York team had shown much interest -- mostly because they were waiting on construction of new ballparks.

Shea Stadium hosted its only All-Star Game in 1964, the year it opened.

The Mets' new park also is scheduled to open in 2009, in the parking lot of the existing stadium. The Yankees' new 51,800-seat home is rising from Macombs Dam Park, across the street from Yankee Stadium.

Construction began Aug. 17.

The Yankees' new ballpark will retain the unique dimensions of the current stadium, while the famous facade roof and the original entrance familiar to the pre-1976 Yankee Stadium will be replicated.

An official announcement for the 2008 All-Star Game site requires satisfaction of MLB's requirements for hotel space, transportation needs and convention center space for the Fan Fest that runs during All-Star week.

Earlier this week, baseball commissioner Bud Selig announced that St. Louis will host the 2009 All-Star Game. San Francisco will host this year's game.

BRIEFS: Reliever Luis Vizcaino and the Yankees agreed to a one-year contract for a reported $3 million, thus avoiding arbitration. The 32-year-old right-hander (4-6, 3.58 ERA, 70 games in 2006) was obtained in the Randy Johnson trade, along with three minor-leaguers. He earned $1.775 million last year with the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Shortstop Chris Basak, 28, was invited to spring training as a non-roster player. Basak, 28, spent the past seven years in the Mets' organization.

Revealing the Monet of Pencil and Paper

Photographs from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

“Bank of the Seine,” a Monet pastel on tan paper from about 1869. Monet rarely mentioned his hundreds of drawings, preferring to be known only as a painter.


By CAROL VOGEL
The New York Times
Published: January 17, 2007

Claude Monet will forever be known for his dreamy Impressionist canvases of grain stacks and cathedrals, the seaside and of course the famous water lilies and gardens that surrounded his beloved home in Giverny. Unlike Degas, Cézanne or Pissarro, contemporaries whose reputations rested on works on paper as well as canvases, Monet was the epitome of the plein-air painter.

Whenever a journalist or collector asked him how he worked, he talked incessantly about the liberating possibilities of painting outdoors, forgoing any mention of the sketches, pastels and prints he quietly produced throughout his life.

“Monet wanted to present himself as the great painter of his day,” said Richard Kendall, curator at large at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. “It was a kind of PR exercise, a way of defining himself. But the big, teasing question has always been why didn’t he want people to know he drew?”

Three years ago Mr. Kendall and James A. Ganz, the Clark’s curator of prints, drawings and photographs, set out to answer that question. Their findings are the focus of “The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings,” an exhibition of about 100 works — drawings, sketchbooks and prints, along with some related paintings — that opens on March 17 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and will arrive on June 24 at the Clark.

The curators say their exhibition will show that Monet wasn’t the anti-draftsman he led the public to believe, and that he relied on drawing both to prepare for his paintings and as an independent form of expression.

He drew throughout his seven-decade career, filling pocket-size sketchbooks when he was a truculent teenager and executing pastel drawings of seascapes when he was in his 20s. He drew in different ways using different materials, and in his final years made abstract crayon and pencil drawings as studies for his water-lily paintings.

Although Monet helped perpetrate the myth that he did not, and maybe even could not, draw, nearly 500 of more than 2,500 works mentioned in his catalogue raisonné are sketchbooks, drawings and pastels. Yet, until now, few scholars have paid much attention to them.

They figure prominently in the fifth and final volume of the catalogue raisonné, published by Daniel Wildenstein in 1991 and devoted primarily to works on paper. But when the catalogue raisonné was reprinted in 1996, that volume was dropped.

Mr. Ganz was unaware of just how little most scholars knew about Monet’s drawings until he began researching a view of Rouen drawn in crayon in 1883 and owned by the Clark Institute. “It was an object that caught my eye especially because I knew it was done after a painting,” he said.

(He said the painting, which is in a private European collection, will be united with the drawing for the first time in the exhibition.)

The more he began to dig, Mr. Ganz said, the more strongly he felt that there was no substantive scholarly examination of Monet’s drawings.

He approached Mr. Kendall about the possibility of jointly organizing a small show centering on the Clark’s Rouen drawing. But after embarking on their research, they began to envision a far larger exhibition. “We began asking colleagues about Monet’s works on paper and consistently got the same reaction — a blank stare,” Mr. Ganz said.

After approaching MaryAnne Stevens, a Monet scholar at the Royal Academy, who agreed that the potential show could travel there, the two American curators set out to find as many of Monet’s works on paper as they could. Searching in Japan as well as in Europe and the United States, they eventually came up with the nearly 100 works that will be in the show.

The Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, which owns eight of Monet’s mature sketchbooks, dating from the 1860s through the 1920s, proved a particularly useful source. A colleague there alerted them to the existence of an unpublished journal by Count Théophile Béguin Billecocq, a friend of the Monet family who was himself an amateur draftsman. The only known firsthand account of Monet’s early life, it depicts him as a young man devoted to drawing. Written over roughly a 30-year period, starting in 1854, the journal has remained in the family, passing eventually to the count’s great-grandson, Xavier Béguin Billecocq, a historian of the Persian Gulf region.

“It became clear to us that we had stumbled on something quite critical,” Mr. Ganz said of the manuscript. “It gave us a wealth of information.”

Interspersed throughout the journal are observations about Monet. When the artist was 17, for instance, Béguin Billecocq described his rapid sketching technique as “Impressionistic.”

Yet the drawings themselves, he wrote, were “detailed, as precise as reality, and delicate, representing the houses, trees, people, etc., in the best possible manner.”

In a telephone interview, Xavier Béguin Billecocq said that Monet often drew in the countryside or at the sea while on vacation with the Béguin Billecocq family. “They would go exploring the surrounding countryside, often sketching in the woods,” Dr. Béguin Billecocq said. “He drew in the country in places like Deauville and Honfleur.”

The journal also captures the flavor of Parisian life in an era when friends got together to play musical instruments, attend the opera and concerts and simply draw.

“It gives a good description of the youth and social environment of Monet,” Dr. Béguin Billecocq said. “You see him growing up, needing money. My great-grandfather would help him, giving him money to buy paper and supplies.”

The early sketchbooks described in the journal are pencil studies of local architecture, trees, sailboats and pastoral scenes. “His sketches, whether in crayon or pencil, were always excellent, even if they were rapidly executed,” Théophile Béguin Billecocq wrote in his journal. “He knew how to capture the essential characteristics of a scene.”

In another revelation he notes that around 1862, the year Monet turned 22, the artist decided to be known as Claude, his middle name, rather than Oscar, his first.

Drafted into the army and sent to Algiers, Monet had been teased by his regiment about the “ridiculous” name Oscar.

“Goodbye Oscar, long live Claude,” Béguin Billecocq writes facetiously. It explains why some of the early drawings are signed Oscar and later works Claude. (Monet signed only some of his works on paper.)

While the manuscript, titled “Grand Journal,” is too fragile to be in the exhibition, the curators say, quotations from it will be incorporated into the installation as a way of telling the story of the artist’s life.

Still, questions about Monet’s development remain. “It’s easy to separate the youthful work,” said Mr. Kendall of the Clark. “It is less distinctive and powerful.” By the mid-1860s, he said, Monet was making “brilliant” drawings of the Normandy coast with a waxy black crayon. “But we still don’t know why he did them,” Mr. Kendall said.

In the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874 in Paris, however, Monet showed seven of his pastels, their research shows, but they were not included in the catalog or mentioned by any critics. “It’s one of the puzzles in Monet scholarship,” Mr. Kendall said, adding that Monet “takes it up again in the 1880s, and for two weeks in 1901 when he went to London and his canvases didn’t arrive.”

He added, “He wanted to work, so he made pastels of London bridges and rivers.”

Of 26 pastels that can be dated to that time, 6 will be in the exhibition, along with two paintings, of the Waterloo Bridge (1901) and Charing Cross Bridge (about 1900).

Like van Gogh, Monet also created works on paper based on actual paintings. “He wasn’t consistent, but had many different manners of drawing,” Mr. Ganz said, adding: “ A lot had to do with his public-private issue. Some, that were sketchy, were meant only for his private use, while others, more in the style of his paintings, were finished works in themselves.”

Mr. Ganz said he thought the most surprising drawings were those related to the water-lily paintings. Minimalist in style and not pretty like the paintings themselves, these drawings, in black, white and violet crayon, can best be described as agitated, abstract and almost Expressionistic.

“He never meant for the public to see them,” Mr. Kendall said, adding: “It all comes back to marketing. His public image was important to him, and drawings complicated that picture. In fact, they even contradicted it.”


“The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings” will be at the Royal Academy of Arts in London from March 17 to June 10, and at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., from June 24 to Sept. 16.

Kathleen Parker- Duke Faculty: Too Smart by Half

January 17, 2007
The Orlando Sentinel

When Woody Allen said, "The brain is the most overrated organ,'' he must have had in mind North Carolina's Research Triangle, home both to the scandalous Duke lacrosse team "rape'' fiasco -- and to more Ph.D.s per capita than just about anywhere else in America.

Rarely have so many smart people behaved so dumbly.

Last week, the case took yet a new turn when discredited district attorney Mike Nifong, under pressure from the state prosecutors association, relinquished the case to the state attorney general.

In another development, the stripper who initially claimed she was beaten, raped and sodomized by three Duke University lacrosse team players -- Dave Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann -- has changed her story.

Again.

This time she says Seligmann didn't participate in the alleged assault after all, though she still insists he was there when the others did. She also changed the time of the alleged assault so that it no longer coincides with time-stamped receipts Seligmann produced months ago indicating that he wasn't at the party house when the incident supposedly took place.

A bit earlier, the dancer also decided she might not have been (children stop reading here) vaginally penetrated by a penis, which is required for a rape charge in North Carolina. Nifong dropped the rape charges, but intended to pursue the remaining charges of kidnapping and sexual assault.

And so it has gone for almost a year now. A new day, a new story.

Of all the questions still unanswered in this shameful saga, among the most perplexing is: How did so many smart people allow things to reach the level of hysteria we've witnessed in the past several months?

The answer is implicit in the question. Notwithstanding the rich brain trust created by the three points of North Carolina's "Triangle'' -- Duke in Durham, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University in Raleigh -- university communities are fertile breeding grounds for the totalitarian mindset known as political correctness.

Between a perverse form of liberation feminism that sanctifies strippers, prostitutes and porn stars -- and a dogma of victimology that places blame for all things at the feet of the white patriarchy -- the players were instantaneously presumed guilty by virtue of their being white males and privileged jocks.

By the same reasoning, the dancer was assured victimhood by her status as a black single mother/student, reduced by centuries of white-male oppression to stripping for food and tuition.

What happens next depends on the attorney general's review of evidence. In the meantime, members of the university community who participated in the demonization of the lacrosse team might examine their own souls.

The past year has not been exemplary for the keepers of the flame. Before any charges were brought against the three players, students produced a "wanted'' poster with photos of team members and demonstrated with signs reading, "It's Sunday morning, time to confess.''

Higher up the food chain, Duke faculty formed the "Group of 88'' -- a coalition of 88 faculty members representing 13 departments -- and ran an ad demanding that the lacrosse team players confess.

It's been quite a spectacle. It also has been a damning indictment of an intellectually dishonest culture that pretends to the virtue of enlightened tolerance, but only for a select few. White males are the last remaining group approved for public vilification.

In a March 2006 letter to the Duke administration just days after the alleged rape, English professor Houston A. Baker Jr. brought clarity to the anti-white male, anti-jock bias that is today entrenched on many college campuses. It reads in part:

"How many more people of color must fall victim to violent, white, male, athletic privilege before coaches who make Chevrolet and American Express commercials, athletic directors who engage in Miss Ophelia-styled 'perfectly horrible' rhetoric, higher administrators who are salaried at least in part to keep us safe, and publicists who are supposed not to praise Caesar but to damn the unconscionable ... how many?''

Got that, white-male-capitalist-pig-jocks of the world? Guilty. To Duke's credit, Provost Peter Lange responded to Houston with an eloquent reprimand against prejudgment.

Under pressure from feminist groups, college administrators long have sponsored lectures about date rape and sexual harassment, directed at young males, all of whom are presumed to be potential predators. In light of events at Duke, they might consider adding a new seminar to the roster -- one to review the rules of due process, the evil of mob rule, and the art of apology.

They might invite their faculties to attend.

kparker@orlandosentinel.com

Joel Mowbray: Boxer vs. CAIR

FrontPageMagazine.com
January 17, 2007

In what could be either a major turning point or just an aberration, Sen. Barbara Boxer recently rescinded an award given to a California resident because of his position with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—a fact she learned because of a Front Page Magazine article by Joe Kaufman.

Despite being founded by two self-identified supporters of Islamic terrorism and continually refusing to condemn Islamic terrorism, CAIR has not only survived, but thrived. In the five years since 9/11, CAIR has grown exponentially in both resources and influence, becoming the defacto voice of American Muslims in the mainstream media. It has been embraced by many sectors of the federal government, including the FBI. But politically, CAIR’s success primarily has been limited to forging alliances with leftist organizations, most notably the ACLU.

Though the long-term implications are still far from certain, Sen. Boxer’s very public disavowal of CAIR might encourage real media investigation by changing the perception that criticism of CAIR is a right-wing affair, and it could even inspire other Democrats and liberals to follow her lead.

Shortly after Sen. Boxer’s office last month presented Sacramento activist Basim Elkarra a “certificate of accomplishment,” he was notified that the award was being withdrawn because he heads the local chapter of CAIR. For Mr. Elkarra, it probably means little whether he is the recipient of the certificate or not. For CAIR, however, the move must feel like a stunning rebuke considering that the group that has masterfully courted the left by positioning itself as “America’s largest Muslim civil liberties group.”

While Sen. Boxer cited, among other things, quotes from fellow Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer of New York and Richard Durbin of Illinois that were critical of CAIR, both statements were made over three years ago—and no other prominent Democrats have said anything similar since. Although no prominent elected Republicans have joined the chorus criticizing CAIR, a fair reading of grassroots Internet activity shows that concern over the organization is largely found on the right.

CAIR claims that Boxer succumbed to the “pro-Israel lobby,” who are “anti-Muslim extremists.” The reality is that Sen. Boxer, as politically safe as any member of Congress’ upper chamber, received little flack for issuing a relatively minor certificate to Mr. Elkarra. She had little to gain, and much to lose. A savvy pol, Sen. Boxer likely realized that she would be subjected to CAIR’s well-oiled attack machine.

Sure enough, CAIR unsheathed the long knives. Calls to Sen. Boxer’s office were overwhelming against her decision, and only one group, California-based Stand With Us, actually encouraged its members to support her. But ironically, in the course of disparaging Ms. Boxer, CAIR demonstrated precisely why the Senator did the right thing.

Interviewed by Paula Zahn last week on CNN, CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper let loose a grandiose fabrication:

“We practically have a rubber stamp saying, ‘CAIR condemns blank act of terrorism.’ We’ve repeatedly, consistently condemned terrorism in all its forms, including attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas, Hezbollah. We’ve condemned it repeatedly.”

Not true.

While CAIR did condemn one specific attack committed by Hamas—the particularly gruesome Netanya Passover Massacre in March 2002—it pointedly omitted any reference to the terrorist organization. (Interestingly, CAIR’s press release also avoided acknowledging that the bombing occurred in “Israel,” writing instead that the attack happened in “the Middle East.”) As for Hezbollah, CAIR has never condemned any of that organization’s many terrorist attacks. During the month-long war last summer, CAIR issued at least eight condemnations of Israel and America—but not one of Hezbollah.

CAIR has, in fact, never condemned Hamas or Hezbollah. Given repeated opportunities to do so by outlets such as the Washington Post and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, CAIR has flatly refused to denounce either. Asked point-blank by Newsweek just last month to condemn Hamas, CAIR Executive Director (and co-founder) Nihad Awad demurred, dismissing the question as “the game of the pro-Israel lobby.”

When unaware their words were being recorded, though, both of CAIR’s co-founders have freely discussed Islamic terrorism—by voicing their support. In a speech at Barry University in Florida in 1994, Mr. Awad declared, “I’m in support of the Hamas movement.” Addressing a youth session at a 1999 Islamic Association for Palestine convention in Chicago, CAIR’s other co-founder, Omar Ahmad, praised suicide bombers who “kill themselves for Islam”: “Fighting for freedom, fighting for Islam, that is not suicide. They kill themselves for Islam.” (Transcript provided by the Investigative Project.)

Neither statement endorsing Islamic terrorism is out of character for CAIR. When they founded CAIR in 1994, Awad and Ahmad, were both high-ranking officials with the Islamic Association of Palestine, and they maintained close relations for years afterward. IAP, which appears to have ceased operations within the past two years, was an openly anti-Semitic organization long believed to be Hamas’ political front in the U.S. A civil court judge in Illinois last year confirmed those suspicions when he declared that there was “strong evidence that IAP was supporting Hamas.”

Attacks on CAIR, however, require some degree of nuance, as the group doesn’t openly advocate on behalf of Islamic terrorist organizations. Though it has fiercely and loudly defended men charged with aiding terrorism, such as now-open Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzouk and former University of South Florida professor Sami al-Arian, CAIR’s primary focus is stifling legitimate debate on the threat posed by radical Islam. Talk radio host Michael Graham was drummed out of Disney-owned WMAL in Washington because of a campaign spearheaded by the group. More recently, talk host and columnist Dennis Prager was publicly flagellated for criticizing new Congressman Keith Ellison’s decision to swear his oath of office on the Qur’an.

If only CAIR exhibited anywhere near the same kind of hostility for the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah.

That its apologism for Islamic terrorism has been remarkably slick is probably why CAIR has thus far escaped scrutiny by the left or the mainstream media. Perhaps the best example is its much-ballyhooed fatwa against terrorism and extremism—terms that intentionally were not defined. No fundamentalist Muslim considers himself “extreme,” and Hamas and its boosters maintain that the only real “terrorist” in the region is the Jewish state. Not coincidentally, CAIR claims to condemn “all forms of terrorism,” yet it almost exclusively focuses on Israel’s actions.

Seeing through CAIR’s tapestry of lies and deceptions is admittedly a tough task, but by no means an impossible one. Sen. Boxer did it with little outside prodding. How many others in the media and on the left will follow suit?


Joel Mowbray is author of Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens America’s Security.

Book Review: The Crusader

January 16, 2007
Ronald Reagan: The Crusader
By Herbert Meyer
American Thinker

The Crusader:
Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism
by Paul Kengor
Regan/HarperCollins, 412 pp, $29.95

The complicated business of understanding how Ronald Reagan led the Free World to victory in the Cold War has just become much easier. Run to your nearest bookstore and buy a copy of The Crusader. In one beautifully-written volume, Grove City College Professor Paul Kengor's got the whole story -- completely, accurately, and with more fascinating and never-before-reported details about how Ronald Reagan succeeded than any other Cold War historian, including "official biographer" Edmund Morris.

While the details in The Crusader are eye-opening -- Kengor somehow got his hands on more secret documents than the KGB -- it's the insights that leap off the page. For instance, while it's true that Reagan was the first actor ever elected President, Kengor reminds us that Reagan was also the first union president ever elected to the US presidency. And Kengor shows how Reagan's work for the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) formed his political philosophy and, perhaps more importantly, gave Reagan the practical experience both of industrial negotiations and fighting communism on the ground.

The Toughest Negotiator

Reagan was elected president of SAG seven times - which makes him among the most successful union bosses in American history, by the way - and as a result he probably engaged in more negotiating sessions with hard-headed corporate CEOs and egomaniacal prima donnas within the union itself than anyone ever elected to the White House. No wonder that, years later, Reagan ran circles around the Kremlin - and around a Democratic-controlled Congress. (Someone once asked the President if it was tough negotiating with the Russians. Reagan replied, "No, it was tough negotiating with Jack Warner.")

Moreover, in the late 1940s and early 1950s SAG was among the communists' top takeover targets. The communists wanted control of all our country's unions, of course, but SAG topped their list simply because it was "Hollywood" and so its influence on American culture was enormous. As Kengor shows, it was Reagan who led the fight to stop the communists. It's an astonishing thought, but Reagan was the only American politician who had blocked a communist takeover of anything before reaching the White House. Thirty years later, had Fidel Castro and the Kremlin's leaders remembered this, perhaps they wouldn't have been so surprised when President Reagan kicked them out of Grenada.

Kengor provides a brief but riveting summary of Reagan's public utterances during the decades between the end of his Hollywood career and his White House years. What emerges from the long-forgotten quotes that Kengor has found is not only Reagan's deep interest in and detailed grasp of world affairs - and remember, in these years he had no staffers to brief him or do his research -- but his focus on key symbolic issues long before he held the world stage. For instance, in a 1967 CBS-TV debate with Senator Robert Kennedy - it was later conceded by everyone, including RFK himself, that Reagan had won the debate handily -- Reagan got onto the subject of US-Soviet relations:


"When we signed the Consular Treaty with the Soviet Union, I think there were things we could've asked for in return. I think it would be very admirable if the Berlin Wall, which was built in direct contravention to a treaty, should disappear. I think this would be a step toward peace and toward self-determination for all people, if it were."

In early June 1987, when the draft of President Reagan's forthcoming speech at the Brandenburg Gate circulated through the National Security Council and the State Department, those officials who tried to edit out the President's now-famous line -- "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" - had no idea how strongly the President felt about this, or even that he had been calling for the Wall's destruction for more than 20 years.

Hitting the Kremlin Hard

Of course, most of The Crusader deals with the White House years, and Kengor's account of how the Reagan team ended the Cold War peacefully is a masterpiece of geo-strategic reporting. Kengor has gotten his hands on just about the entire series of "NSDDs" - National Security Decision Directives - produced by the Reagan team. And he uses excerpts from these NSDDs to explain, more clearly than any previous historian, that the President's policy initiatives were the result of a carefully thought-through, meticulously detailed strategy based on identification of the Soviet Union's key weaknesses - chief among them its imploding economy - followed by the execution of specific policies designed to take advantage of these weaknesses by putting more pressure on the Kremlin than it could withstand.

These included policies to limit Soviet energy exports, thus blocking the Soviet Union's access to desperately needed hard currency, funding and otherwise supporting anti-communist insurgencies, and of course publicly declaring the Soviet Union to be "the focus of evil in the world" - which rallied oppressed citizens from Poland to Vladivostok and which, even more importantly, terrified the Kremlin's ageing leaders because, unlike the President's domestic foes, they knew it was true.

Kengor correctly gives the bulk of the credit to the President himself, and he shows again and again how it was Reagan personally who called the shots in Washington. But Kengor also shows how the varsity team that Reagan brought with him to Washington - including Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, CIA Director William Casey, and National Security Adviser Judge William Clark - played key roles. And he generously gives credit to the various aides of these officials who labored long, hard and usually anonymously to get the job done.

What emerges from Kengor's reporting, and with a stunning clarity, is the sheer executive competence of Reagan and his team. They started with a goal - ending the Cold War with victory for the Free World -- developed a strategy to achieve that goal, worked out tactics to fulfill their strategy, then executed their plan while making whatever course corrections were required as events unfolded. In short, even though the President couldn't name all 15 members of the Politburo - in truth, he couldn't name all 10 members of his own Cabinet - he was a superb CEO. (Actually, Reagan was a superb CEO precisely because he didn't waste his time and energy on details; he focused on setting an objective, bringing on-board a team capable of achieving that objective, then leading the charge.)

The Crusader should be read by any politician who wants to understand the difference between conveying the illusion of success, and succeeding. And centuries from now, The Crusader will be read by anyone who wants to know how the Cold War really ended.

Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council.

The 'Touchstone' Evangelical

January 12, 2007
From the "Mere Comments" Page of Touchstone Magazine

Ruminating on Touchstone’s difficulty in appealing to certain kinds of Evangelical, a long-time friend of the magazine reminded the editors about a group that is dissatisfied with where Evangelicalism is going, but nervous about anything smacking too much of Catholicism. We agreed, I think, that the cure for this is in simply reading the magazine, not because we tend to avoid publishing much on disputed subjects (we have never viewed reconciliation on these matters, at least by direct argumentation, as part of our mission), but because the fundamental question troubling these traditional Evangelicals—whether Catholics, especially perhaps the unapologetically Catholic Catholics such as write for Touchstone, can be heard as Christians—will very likely be answered in the reading. I expect there to come a point at which this kind of reader either abandons us, deciding there is some subtle deceit at work here, or remains, feeling it absurd for him to question the Christianity of at least “this kind of Catholic.”

The conservative Evangelical church of my youth, full of converts from Catholicism, tried for years to convince me that Catholics would go to hell if we did not convert them because they believed they could buy their way into heaven with good works and didn't believe in being born again. But I lived in a pre-Vatican II Catholic neighborhood, had many Catholic friends--most of them girls who were interested in converting me, too--and intuited there was something wrong with what my church was trying to teach me here long before I could articulate the reasons.

Fundamentally what I noticed was that the Catholics I knew were like the Baptists I knew, rather than the caricatures and worst-cases I was given by my ministers (and my Catholics friends were evidently given by some of their priests and nuns) who occasionally seemed at war with a Bible which, to its everlasting credit, my church made sure even its children knew very well.

There were some Catholics in whom Charity dwelt, and whose confession, which included their manner of life, was the same as the holy ones among the Baptists. The language they used was often very different; the faith seemed the same. Their devotion to Mary seemed reasonable and proportionate--they made it very clear to me that they did not "worship" her as they did Jesus and God the Father--and did not distort their devotion to the Lord, whom they seemed to treat with more respect than we did. Which was worse, I wondered: being somewhat afraid of the Lord, as the Catholics seemed to be, or treating him as your “buddy,” as we were encouraged to do? I saw Jesus pretty much as I saw my father. While I was confident of his love, he was certainly not my chum. He was a friend, but not of that sort, for a friend and The Friend seemed to me categorically different. Old buddies are not terrors to evil deeds. Jesus and my father, however, were. I had no criticisms of the Catholics on that account, whereas my church, where salvation was not recognized apart from the profession of friendly or even quasi-romantic intimacy with Jesus, did.

The few Catholic fanatics I encountered, including the Marian ones, looked very much like Protestant fanatics I knew--just with different objects for their fanaticism. A lot of the Catholic nuts clustered around Mary just like the Protestant nuts (in my church, anyway) clustered around end-times prophecy—but a nut is a nut, wherever you find him. The Catholics who hated Protestants suffered from the same personality flaws as their Protestant counterparts. As far as earning their salvation by good works was concerned, I knew no official Catholic doctrine, but did notice that Catholic legalists and bean-counters, who really thought they could, were the kind of people who you would expect to: either obsessive types or people who relied on their baptisms for salvation because they preferred this to walking with God. They were a lot like the Baptists who thought their souls were eternally secure because at some time in their lives a preacher got them whupped up enough to get saved. Neither of them seemed to be trusting in the God of the Bible, who clearly was not the kind of salvation machine they took him for.

When I got a little older, my curiosity about why priests and ministers said what they did to keep us apart—and here I am talking men with orthodox sensibilities and dutiful, soldierly hearts—led to the belief, which I retain, that they belonged to religious parties that demanded it of them as a condition of belonging, and hence of their lives, livelihoods, and personal identities. Strong allegiance to, strong, if not avowed, personal investment in these parties, was secured when the clerics were young and relatively inexperienced men. When more mature reflection brought them not to denials of its basic faith or practice, but doubt of the distinctive party—the “denominational”--line, a deep melancholy, if not cynicism and a crisis of faith, often claimed them in their later years.

The divisive preaching and teaching, the deliberate ignorance and lack of sympathy, was a sign first of the dogmatism of youth, or perhaps of the convert reveling in the convert’s exultations, but later of a growing insecurity that sought to deny itself by beating back steadily encroaching doubt. Party activity toward this end intensified in mid-career, and thus came to mark the largest part of an orthodox clerical life which refused to collapse into easy liberalism on one hand, but on the other was forbidden by a church that still retained the truth of the faith to step outside the walls it had built on its own initiative to enhance and defend it. In this way the life of a faithful, orthodox presbyter became that of not only of a defender of the Christian faith against heresy and error, but at the same time, against his deeper will and desire, the life of a sectarian bigot creating other sectarian bigots in his image.


Although I knew none of this as a boy, I did recognize that the effect of this kind of clerical life was to separate us from Christian friends on what seemed to me dubious and insufficient grounds, even though I recognized, as I still do, that the kind of separation that was urged is under certain conditions good, necessary, and demanded by the Lord and his apostles. For this reason there are members of the Catholic and Protestant parties with whom I (by default, a Protestant) cannot maintain ecumenical relationships. This very separation, however, has thrown me into the company of people like the Touchstone Catholics. I think it possible a good many Evangelicals, aroused in the course of their own tribal wars, may find the same happening to them.


Posted by S. M. Hutchens at 11:09 AM

Film Review: 'We Are Marshall'

We Are Marshall (4 stars out of 5)
Gimme a hankie, coach. 'We Are Marshall' is genuinely moving.

Roger Moore
Orlando Sentinel Movie Critic
Posted December 22, 2006

'We Are Marshall'

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, David Strathairn, Matthew Fox, Ian McShane.
Director: McG.

Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

Industry rating: PG for emotional thematic material, a crash scene and mild language.

With the flood of entertaining, inspiring and perfectly serviceable sports dramas of the past few years, it's amazing to remember how long it has been since we had a good sports weeper, a "Brian's Song" for the new millennium.

"We Are Marshall" comes close to filling that bill. The requisite "inspiring" parts of this true story, the way the Marshall University football team rose from the ashes of the worst disaster in American college-sports history to play again, are routine. But the sadness and the ways people responded to that 1970 plane crash are genuinely moving.

A pretty good mid-level college football program was all but snuffed out one night, after a game in November 1970. Some 75 people -- coaches, players, the athletic director and prominent boosters -- died a short distance from home in Huntington, W.Va., when their plane went down.

Then, there were the injured players who didn't make the trip: the assistant coach (Matthew Fox of TV's Lost) who gave up his seat on the plane; the cheerleader (Kate Mara) whose fiance was on the team; the town shaker and mover (Ian McShane) whose son was that fiance; and the interim college president (David Strathairn) dropped into a tragedy, not knowing what to do next.

This atypical offering from McG, the guy who gave us the Charlie's Angels movies, stops to mourn. It takes us to memorial services. The movie even opens with a tribute to the crash that's still observed in Huntington to this day.

Some, like the father who lost his son, will embrace their grief with a death grip. Others will shut down entirely. Nobody in town can escape it. Maybe the best thing to do would be to drop the football program, Marshall's beleaguered president reasons.

But the surviving players (Anthony Mackie is their leader) and the student body won't hear of it. Their way of honoring their classmates, they figure, is to pick themselves, the school and the town up, by playing again.

Strathairn's President Dedmon is living the very definition of dilemma. The town won't accept a team reminding them, every Saturday, of their loss. The students won't accept the alternative. Nobody wants the job of building a team from scratch. The NCAA won't cut the school slack on scholarships (freshmen weren't eligible to play back then).

Then, this odd duck from the College of Wooster (Matthew McConaughey) phones. He would like to help. He wants the job.

McConaughey is at his most engaging here. He plays Jack Lengyel as eccentric, upbeat yet realistic, a stoop-shouldered straight-shooter who drawls out of the side of his mouth.

"If it's a miracle you're looking for, keep lookin'."

Pair the hustler (McConaughey) with a deer-in-headlights (Strathairn) and watch the magic.

The film then settles into the familiar rhythms of recruiting montages, "big games" and occasional moments of grief, many provided by Fox, who, as Red Dawson, embodies "survivor's guilt."

Florida State's Bobby Bowden was at Marshall's rival, West Virginia University, at the time, and played a part in this healing. Florida State alumnus (and Winter Park native) Jamie Linden wrote the script, and the narration has the warm, sentimental cadences of Earl Hamner remembering Walton's Mountain.

"Those were not welcome days. We buried sons, brothers, mothers, fathers, fiances. What once was whole, now shattered."

"We Are Marshall" (it's the rally cry of the team) doesn't always have a handle on the grief, but it does keep emotions close to the surface. That allows McConaughey to be the most refreshing, funny and believable he ever has been, even when he's giving the town, the team and us the only message in the movie that matters.

"Sometimes, winning isn't the only thing."

Rmoore@Orlandosentinel.com

December and May: Desire vs. Ick Factor

Cate Blanchett and Andrew Simpson in "Notes on a Scandal"

January 15, 2007

By CARYN JAMES
The New York Times

As a decrepit womanizer in “Venus,” Peter O’Toole has a mouth that hangs open much of the time: a sign of advanced age, and the better to drool over the young woman he desires. He is meant to be a sly old goat not a dirty old man, so harmless that the film’s creators actually make the poor guy impotent. But while Mr. O’Toole can be wonderfully charming as Maurice, an actor savoring his final lust, this film needs a reality check: there is a significant ick factor in watching Maurice leer.

Older people and the younger, at times under-age objects of their desires are appearing on screen in almost every combination, in literate films whose target audience seems to be aging, upscale baby boomers. But sometimes there is a huge gap between what the filmmakers intend and the way even a sympathetic audience may respond.

In the film of Alan Bennett’s hit play “The History Boys,” Hector, a teacher who gropes his male students, is meant to be benign, even heroic, but his behavior makes him seem venal and self-deluding. Only the deliciously wicked “Notes on a Scandal,” with Cate Blanchett as a teacher who has an affair with a 15-year-old boy, avoids creating unintentional distaste, not because this student-teacher relationship is O.K., but because the film is so lucid. “Notes” gets what these other movies don’t: the difference between predatory sexual attention (unsavory) and mutual sexual attraction (very savory).

The distaste filmmakers should be worrying about has more to do with stalking than with age, but their confusion is evident in the ridiculous ploys they use to justify their older characters’ actions. Early in “Venus” (now in New York and Los Angeles and opening in several more cities on Friday) Maurice is about to be wheeled in for prostate surgery and his doctor announces, “There’s a strong chance of impotence and incontinence.”

A little late for that warning, isn’t it? Still, the statement conveniently whisks away the question of sex in the interest of making Maurice’s attentions to Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), who looks about 20, seem purely aesthetic. But when he gets her a job as a life model for an art class, he leers as he says the word modeling. She takes the job and asks him not to watch, so he climbs a ladder to spy through a window, a moment that “Venus” (directed by Roger Michell and written by the once-daring Hanif Kureishi) turns into a sitcom pratfall.

As their friendship grows, he responds to her suspicions by saying (in case we think he has been fortunate after his surgery), “I’m impotent.” Thanks for sharing. But despite spouting Shakespeare, Maurice is no Humbert Humbert poetically justifying his love.

And Jessie is no teasing Lolita, but she’s not virginal or totally naïf either. Catching on that she can get her way by allowing Maurice small physical gestures, she says he can kiss her shoulder; he hovers over her neck in a way that inadvertently brings Dracula to mind.

“The History Boys” also assumes that the audience will embrace its lecherous hero as fully as the film’s creators do. Faithfully directed by Nicholas Hytner, who also directed the play on Broadway and in London, the movie shows the students rolling their eyes as Hector (Richard Griffiths) offers them rides home on his motorcycle, knowing that at some point he will reach behind for a feel. A gay student, disappointed at never being invited, is told his day will come. “You’re too young still,” another boy says.

This comment about youth echoes the hair-splitting Mr. Bennett has offered in many interviews. “It wouldn’t be pedophilia because they’re 17 or 18, but he is a pederast,” he told a British newspaper, The Birmingham Post, about Hector and his students. “The boys are much more knowing and sophisticated than Hector is.” They’re not history boys, apparently, but history young-men-of-consensual-age.

Mr. Bennett tilts the issue even more in the work. When the headmaster learns of Hector’s behavior, he says indignantly, “This is a school,” then continues, “It’s not normal,” referring to the homoeroticism. In that one sentence the headmaster goes from being right to being a homophobe.

He is also a hypocrite whose unwanted attention to his young female secretary is just as bad as Hector’s. But instead of demonizing both men, Mr. Bennett turns this evidence around to help Hector save his job. Another teacher, Mrs. Lintott (Frances de la Tour), has no patience when Hector pathetically calls his gesture “a benediction,” snapping, “A grope is a grope — it is not the Annunciation.” Her minority voice may speak for the audience more than Mr. Bennett cares to know.

When “History Boys” was on Broadway, the critic John Lahr, filling in as host for Charlie Rose, asked Mr. Bennett whether he expected a different reaction in the United States, “America being that much more puritanical” than Britain. But while “Venus” and “History Boys” are British, it’s not some mythical American priggishness that makes them confounding here. “Notes on a Scandal” displays no such confusion, and it’s British too: directed by Richard Eyre and written with dark wit and a strong undertow of morality by Patrick Marber, from Zoe Heller’s novel.

It is utterly clear that while Steven (Andrew Simpson) is only 15, he comes on to his beautiful teacher, Sheba (Ms. Blanchett), not the other way around. He even dupes her with a false sob story to get her sympathy. Sheba, struggling under the weight of a long marriage to an older man and two children, knows her relationship with the boy is wrong. That doesn’t stop her, but she offers no lame Hector-like excuses. There are no innocents among the main characters, just a chorus of justifiably outraged minor ones, including Steven’s mother.

“Notes on a Scandal” places creepiness where it belongs: not on sex and age themselves but on a predatory impulse, which comes not from Sheba but from her older colleague, Barbara (Judi Dench, practically a rediscovery as she breaks away from all those tiresome roles as lovable, feisty old ladies). Barbara has had a disquieting obsession with Sheba from the start, insinuating herself into Sheba’s life, manipulating her into staying close by promising to guard the secret of the affair. Here is another older-younger attraction, clearly depicted as sexual even if Barbara won’t admit as much out loud. But while Maurice and Hector’s sleaziness seeps through despite Mr. O’Toole’s warmth and Mr. Bennett’s wit, Barbara demonstrates that icky attention from an aging character can be bracing for a film, as long as the ick is intentional.

Dinesh D'Souza: Pornography - The Real Perversion

Sunday, January 14, 2007
http://www.townhall.com

On a recent trip to Istanbul I encountered a group of Muslim students who insisted that American culture was morally perverse. They called it “pornographic.” And they charged that this culture is now being imposed on the rest of the world. I protested that pornography is a universal vice. “Yes,” one of the students replied, “but nowhere else is pornography in the mainstream of the culture. Nowhere else is porn considered so cool and fashionable. Pornography in America represents an inversion of values.”

As I returned home to the United States, I wondered: are these students right? I don’t think American culture as a whole is guilty of the charge of moral depravity. But there is a segment of our culture that is perverse and pornographic, and perhaps this part of American culture is the one that foreigners see. Wrongly, they identify one face of America with the whole of America. When they protest what they see as the glamorization of pornography and vice, however, it’s hard to deny that they have a point.

Pornography has become big business in the United States. You no longer have to go places to find it; it now finds you. Once confined to “dirty old men” and seedy areas of town, pornography has now penetrated the hotel room and home. The Internet and cell phone have made pornography accessible everywhere, all the time.

The spread of porn is not surprising, and neither is its popularity. It is not the appeal of sex, but the appeal of voyeurism. After all, the actors in porn films seek to gratify not themselves but the viewer. The spectator finds himself in an unnatural position of being witness to a sexual act which is conducted fully for his benefit. It’s hard to deny that there is something degrading in the continuous exposure to increasingly hard-core pornography.

In a manner that the older generation of Americans finds scandalous, porn has become socially acceptable and lost its moral stigma. A good example of this cultural cache is that today a porn star like Jenna Jameson appears on billboards and on the cover of magazines like Vanity Fair. In some liberal intellectual circles, the advocacy of porn is now viewed as a mark of sophistication. Recently the New Yorker reported on an event held at the Mary Boone art galley in Manhattan where “artists, collectors, literati, and other art world regulars mingled seamlessly with adult-movie producers and directors and quite a few of the performers themselves.” The purpose of the event was to celebrate the publication of the book “XXX: Porn Star Portraits.” The pictures in the book are accompanied by appreciative essays by leading figures on the left like Gore Vidal, John Waters, and Salman Rushdie.

The liberal defense of obscenity and pornography began many decades ago as a defense of great works of literature and of free speech. It began as a defense of books like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover. But now some liberal advocates insist that all forms of sexual explicitness are equally deserving of legal protection and that no restriction of obscenity or pornography should be allowed.

This is the position defended in former ACLU president Nadine Strossen’s book Defending Pornography. As liberal pundit Wendy Kaminer puts it, in her foreword to the book, “You don’t need to know anything about art—you don’t even need to know what you like—in order to defend speech deemed hateful, sick or pornographic.” Kaminer even takes the view that child pornography should be permitted because “fantasies about children having sex are repellent to most of us, but the First Amendment is designed to protect repellent imaginings.” Actually this is pure nonsense: the framers were concerned to protect political speech and not depictions of pedophilia. But Kaminer’s view is a good reflection of what some liberals would like the Constitution to say.

Groups like the ACLU have taken the approach that pornography rights, like the rights of accused criminals, are best protected at their outermost extreme. This means is that the more foul the obscenity, the harder liberals must fight to allow it. By protecting expression at its farthest reach, these activists believe they are fully securing the free speech rights of the rest of us.

It is a long way, for instance, from James Joyce to a loathsome character like Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine. There would seem to be an obvious distinction between fighting to include James Joyce in a high school library and insisting that the same library maintain its subscription to Hustler. For the ACLU, however, the two causes are part of the same free speech crusade. In a sense, the ACLU considers the campaign for Hustler a more worthy cause because if Hustler is permitted, anything is permitted, and therefore free speech has been more vigorously defended.

In recent years, leading liberals have gone from defending Flynt as a despicable man who nevertheless has First Amendment rights, to defending Flynt as a delightful man who is valiantly fighting against the forces of darkness and repression. “What I find refreshing about Larry Flynt is that he doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a scumbag,” Frank Rich writes in the New York Times. “At least Flynt’s honest about what he’s doing.”

These liberal virtues—honestly and openness about being a scumbag—are on full display in Milos Forman’s film The People vs. Larry Flynt. The movie sanitizes Flynt in order to make him a likeable, even heroic figure. In reality Flynt is short and ugly; in the movie he is tall and handsome, played by Woody Harrelson. In life Flynt was married five times. His daughter accused him of sexually abusing her, a charge that Flynt has denied. All of this is suppressed in the movie, where Flynt has one wife and is portrayed as an adoring and supportive husband.

Hustler features a good deal of gross and repellent material, such as its parody of Jerry Falwell having sex with his grandmother, or its picture of a woman being processed through a meat grinder. The movie, by contrast, features mostly tasteful erotica; if Flynt goes over the line, it is always presented as mischievous fun. If there is anyone who is despicable in the movie, it is Flynt’s critics, who are unfailingly shown as smug, hypocritical, vicious and stupid.

The pornographer generally knows that he is a sleazy operator. I have read interviews with men like Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine. Typically such men do not even try and defend the social value of what they do, other than to point out that there is a demand for it. It is only the ACLU and its supporters who celebrate the pornographer as a paragon of the First Amendment and a contemporary social hero. Social liberals like Frank Rich seem to have a much higher view of Flynt than Flynt himself. If we confine ourselves to liberal culture and its apologists, my Muslim interlocutors would seem to have a justified complaint. The liberal defense of pornography is even more perverted than the pornography itself.



Dinesh D’Souza’s new book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 has just been published by Doubleday. D’Souza is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Bob Ryan: In Brady they trust

Boston Globe
January 15, 2007

SAN DIEGO -- In Tom They Trust.

Fallow stretches, uncharacteristic bad picks, whatever. Doesn't matter. Remember Magic Johnson's celebrated "Winnin' Time?" Mr. Tom Brady has one, too.

"That's Tom Brady," said Heath Evans, spare back and special teamer extraordinaire. "He's the one guy we don't ever worry about."

Tom Brady was not Tom Brady for long stretches of this memorable game, and a lot of that had to do with the San Diego Chargers. "That was as tough a game as I ever remember playing," said Brady, who had to air it out 51 times yesterday in order to produce a 24-21 triumph. "We were doing everything we could to gain 5 yards out of them."

Brady's final numbers weren't that dazzling (27 of 51, 280 yards, 2 touchdowns, 3 interceptions, and a pedestrian 57.6 rating), but when has Tom Brady ever been about the numbers? Tom Brady is about one thing, period.

He's about winning the game.

This was a long, tough afternoon for your New England Patriots, who had two leads: 3-0 and the final score. The rest of the day was a brutal struggle to keep from getting destroyed by a 14-2 team that had been 8-0 at home. But the Patriots had two big things going for them, the first being San Diego's peculiar self-destructive nature and the second being their battle-tested quarterback. In the three most crucial offensive situations of the afternoon, Tom Brady made the plays he had to make.

Ever heard that one before?

The first situation occurred late in the first half. The Chargers had just gone ahead, 14-3, with a four-play, 77-yard drive highlighted by a 58-yard screen pass and run by LaDainian Tomlinson that gave the home squad a first down at the New England 6. So the Patriots rather seriously needed a score before the half.

Ever heard that one before?

And, of course, they got one, with Brady completing passes of 17, 16, 9, 7, and finally 6 yards, a pass to the left rear corner of the end zone to the ever-improving Jabar Gaffney.

The second situation began with the Patriots taking over at their 37 after San Diego had gone in front by a 21-13 score with 8:35 remaining. The official record will show a 32-yard drive, but it was, in reality, a 63-yard drive, since it was broken in two once the Patriots emerged from a bizarre play in which Brady had thrown a fourth-down interception, only to get the ball back when Troy Brown, a.k.a. Mr. Reliable, stripped the ball from San Diego's Marlon McCree and Reche Caldwell recovered at the Chargers' 32. Brady got them to the end zone in five pass plays, and Kevin Faulk got them the needed 2-point conversion on a direct snap play featuring a superb left-to-right improvisation.

Then, of course, there was the final drive. After the defense had made a clutch stand to force a three-and-out, Brady took over on his 15, needing somewhere in the vicinity of 52 to 53 yards to give Stephen Gostkowski a reasonable chance to kick the winning field goal.

OK, OK, he cut it close. He began the drive by hitting Daniel Graham for 19 yards, but it came down to a third-and-10 at his 34. But Brady wasn't going to settle for 10.

"They were [in] press coverage late in the game," explained coach Bill Belichick. "That gave us an opportunity to go deep."

Reche Caldwell went down the right sideline. Brady was the beneficiary of superb protection when he most needed it, and he took full advantage be delivering a room-service morsel to a hungry Caldwell, who gathered the pass in for a 49-yard gain to the San Diego 17.

It was the clutchest of clutch plays. Ever heard that one before?

"He put the ball in the perfect spot and Reche made the grab," summarized Evans.

"In a situation like that," said Gaffney (10 receptions, 103 yards), "there's no one better."

You knew Brady wasn't going to do anything stupid from there on out, and he didn't. Seven would have been nice, but the only smart play was to go for 3, and that's what they got when Gostkowski nailed his third field goal of the day, from 31 yards.

You know this stuff never gets old for Brady, who lives to make the Big Play in the Big Situation. He's had a lot of satisfying games and moments, but you can be certain he will save a spot in his heart for this one. The Patriots had come into Qualcomm Stadium and knocked off the AFC's top-seeded team, a team, in turns out, that had quite a lot to say during the game for an outfit that has yet to win anything. The Patriots, as you may know, prefer to do the playing and leave the yapping to others.

And there will be no more talk about the receiving corps. To borrow a phrase, they are what they are, and in the two 2007 playoff games they have been good enough for Brady to get the W. They are getting more and more skilled at making the tough catches from the knees down that keep the chains moving. If the Gaffneys and Caldwells of the world weren't accomplished at this maneuver before they came to the Patriots, they are now. They understand that Brady will throw the low ball, and their job is to catch 'em, no questions asked.

The Chargers made them work for it; that's for sure. "It was a challenging day all the way around," Brady confirmed. "I just couldn't find any rhythm for a while. Tried the quick stuff. That didn't work. Tried the screens. That didn't work. Every time I came off the field in the first half, I'd say, 'God, we've got to try something else.' "

But he knows it's not always going to be easy, and, in fact, he expects it to be a chore, so he never even comes close to being frustrated. He is gifted with enormous patience and at this stage of his career he has the requisite experience to probe and probe until he finds something that will work.

Someone asked him to define "mental toughness."

"Mental toughness," he pondered. "It's just not letting anything get to you. You have to be mentally tough enough to fight through whatever it might be, whether it's a bad play or a situation. We've got mentally tough guys."

One in particular. That's why the Patriots' official motto might as well be "In Tom We Trust." Because they do.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail address is ryan@globe.com.

Debra Saunders: No Place Like Home Depot

January 14, 2007
The San Fransisco Chronicle

Here's one lawsuit you have to root for: A group of stockholders have filed a restraining-order request to stop Home Depot from paying a $210 million golden parachute to reward exiting CEO Bob Nardelli for not working there anymore. If more shareholders did more to curb cushy compensation packages, the American public would have more faith in the marketplace.

The American dream used to be: Work hard, make good and get rich. In this economy, make that: Work hard, make good, then don't make good, get richer. Nardelli's example shows that the real money comes when you're so underwhelming as a CEO (at least in relationship to your pay grade) that the company will pay big bucks to have you leave.

The story shows the rot behind excessive executive pay: Board members tend to be executives who think that paying other executives top dollar is the key to success in business. Hence a compensation package on steroids for Nardelli -- even as Home Depot moved to get rid of skilled, experienced employees and replace them with cheaper, less-skilled part-timers.

MarketWatch reported that Nardelli's severance deal -- the parting purse for one man -- was seven times the $30 million that Home Depot set aside last June to reward productive stores and employees for good customer service.

As The Wall Street Journal reported, Nardelli's excessive pay led to his excessive exit pay. In the six years he worked at Home Depot, Nardelli was compensated about $240 million, including stock options. Last year, the "You can do it, we can help" board awarded Nardelli with a $7 million bonus and $14.7 million in stock -- when his contract didn't require it.

That's an odd reward for a CEO, considering the company stock price declined 8 percent during his tenure, while the stock for its big, bad competitor, Lowe's, the Journal reported, rose by 188 percent. As Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., new chair for the House Financial Services Committee, noted, the argument used to be that CEOs enjoyed mega-pay for boosting their stock sales.

In this case, Nardelli's compensation doesn't even make market sense.

Which is why the Do-It-Yourself giant's board members had begun to bristle, and Nardelli's gravy train was heading toward its final destination. Home Depot hired a consultant that found Nardelli was making more than his industry peers. As the Journal reported, the board asked Nardelli to give up some perks. He was willing to give up use of six corporate jets, but reportedly didn't want a reduction in bonuses, so he relinquished his orange apron.

The big irony is that, as The New York Times revealed, the contract Nardelli signed with Home Depot when the company recruited him in 2000 is the reason he walked away with a $210 million goodbye kiss. The CEO cut a good deal when he was hot, and cashed in when he was not.

You know you've arrived in America when you get paid more not to work than to work.

Too bad some creative corporate lawyer didn't figure out a way to pay Nardelli his excessive salary only, while making him the CEO of coffee and doughnuts or something.

Frank wants the U.S. House of Representatives to get into the act, but there are elements to this story that show the problem is taking care of itself.

Last year, shareholders revolted. Nardelli didn't help himself when, at a shareholder meeting, he stonewalled questions that malcontents directed toward his pay package. Angry shareholders fought back -- 30 percent withheld their votes for 10 of the 11 Home Depot board directors. The love was gone.

As The Associated Press reported, a group of shareholders is suing Home Depot to pull the cord on the golden parachute -- arguing that the company "will suffer additional irreparable harm if Nardelli" gets the whole package. Already, the Home Depot board voted to require that hereafter two-thirds of its independent directors -- instead of a majority -- approve a chief executive's compensation.

New Securities and Exchange Commission rules will make it harder for boards to hide what they are paying their top guns. As Martha Stewart would say, that's a "good thing." If you believe in the free market, you should be rooting for an end to the welfare state for CEOs.

dsaunders@sfchronicle.com

Mark Steyn: Pelosi a Rare Example of a Woman Who 'Has it All'

January 14, 2007

Chicago Sun-Times

I don't know where they stand on apple pie, but the Democrats have come out for motherhood in a big way. In fact, who needs apple pie when you've got the extra-sugary content of the Washington Post? Last Wednesday, the capital's newspaper of record (now available in print, online and in granulated form) published a column headlined ''Grandma With A Gavel.''

Can you guess which grandma it was, boys and girls? Yes, it was Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has single-handedly, as she put it, ''shattered the marble ceiling.'' And she's right: From CNN to the New York Times, the entire press corps has lost its marbles. Grandma Smith Goes to Washington is the hit of the planet. At a time when most grandmothers are reduced to eating dog food because the Bush administration refuses to let them bulk-order prescription drugs from Saskatchewan or, even more horrifying, reduced to watching Robert Goulet in dinner theater night after night in Florida, Gran'ma Pelosi has single-handedly shattered the dinner-theater ceiling and/or dog-kennel ceiling. ''Grandma With A Gavel'' was written by hard-headed reporter Ruth Marcus, scourge of Republican Justice Departments for many years, and this column reflected her notoriously sharp forensic skills:

''The images as California Democrat Nancy Pelosi took office last week were striking -- and stirring -- in their unfamiliarity. Pelosi, holding her infant grandson swaddled in a white receiving blanket, as she sat in the well of the House, awaiting her election. Pelosi, with the assurance of a mother experienced at dispensing cookies to impatient toddlers, giving each child his -- and her -- turn with the gavel. Pelosi raising her hand to take the oath as her grandson, at her side, fiddled with grandma's papers.''

Golly. One only hopes the wee ones understand that, post-coronation, Queen Nancy's ascension to the throne might cut into all this quality time. "Gran'ma Got Run Over By Her Reign, Dears,'' as the old song so shrewdly warns. But don't Republicans have families, too? Yes, but let's face it, they creep you out, don't they? If you have the misfortune to be nominated by the Bush administration, your kids get headlines like ''An Image A Little Too Carefully Coordinated.'' That was the Washington Post's Style Section on Chief Justice John Roberts' moppets: They didn't care for ''the 1950s-style tableaux vivant,'' or the ''freshly scrubbed and adorable'' look from ''a Currier & Ives landscape''; they sniffed at the ''seersucker suit with short pants'' of ''towheaded Jack'' and his sister's ''blond pageboy''; they didn't even like the name ''Jack.''

But these Pelosi kids are in a whole other league. You have to pity those losers in Hollywood: Instead of wasting their time with that lousy Geena Davis ''Commander in Chief'' strong-career-woman thing, why didn't they do ''The Pelosi Bunch''?

''Here's the story of a lovely lady

Who was raising 30 grandkids on her own

All of them had hair of black like their gran'ma

And swaddling cloths hand-sewn.''

''Here's the story of a man named Hastert

Who was never photographed with any kids

'Cept in stories on Mark Foley's pages

And so he hit the skids . . . ''

Oh, come on. OK, Dennis Hastert doesn't bake cookies, but I can't be the only one who thinks he's a little like that cute Cookie Bear on ''The Andy Williams Show.''

I am? Oh, well.

''Having five children in six years is the best training in the world for Speaker of the House,'' Speaker Grandma said. ''It made me the ultimate multitasker and the master of focus, routine and scheduling.''

''How different is this?'' cooed Ruth Marcus. ''Imagine Margaret Thatcher threatening to deploy her 'mother-of-five voice.' ''

Boy, did Thatcher get it wrong! That old Iron Lady shtick, talking about communism, and inflation, and boring old ''issues,'' when eve feminist reporter in town was dying to hear her favorite cookie recipes.

Alas, not every Democrat has got the lioness-with-cubs routine down quite so pat. On Thursday, Sen. Barbara Boxer advanced the notion that Condoleezza Rice can't understand ''the price of war'' because she's childless. ''You're not going to pay a particular price,'' she told the secretary of state, ''with an immediate family.'' In other words, her childlessness means she will never have to experience any personal loss for the decisions she makes. ''You can't begin to imagine how you celebrate any holiday or birthday,'' Boxer continued, accusingly.

Hmm. What I can't begin to imagine is a Republican senator getting away with hammering, say, Gloria Steinem for her childlessness. But, after 12 years in the barren wilderness, the left is overjoyed at the Fecund Coming. Over at Ms. magazine, I expect they're rolling their eyes while admiring the cynicism. But the internal contradictions of the new Democrats are striking. At the ''Women's Tea'' inaugural festivities, the Dems played, inevitably, ''I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar,'' and the new speaker saluted the late Texas Gov. Ann Richards, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro honored Gov. Richards' daughter Cecile, who's now the president of Planned Parenthood.

I would wager that, when the young Nancy Pelosi had ''five children in six years,'' a hefty percentage of that parenthood wasn't planned. She is, in that sense, philosophically at odds with her party -- and, indeed, with her congressional district. San Francisco now registers more dogs that it does schoolchildren. Lest you think I'm being my usual homophobic self, I hasten to add that for once I'm not: It speaks well for the Bay Area that they had to embrace the gay life to match the collapsed birth rates European cities have managed to achieve heterosexually.
Nonetheless, at a time when fertility rates call into question the survival of Russia, Japan, Germany, Spain and Italy, the new speaker certainly presents an unusual model: She appears to be a rare example of a woman who truly ''has it all.'' She had five kids and then became the first female speaker in human history, an event (according to the media) women have been waiting for since Caveman Ug said, ''Hi, honey, I'm home!'' and clubbed the missus over the head for being late with the saber-toothed meatloaf. It's certainly not the career path feminist orthodoxy has commended these last 30 years, but it seems to have brought Pelosi happiness, and at a time of greater life expectancy it has a certain logic: Have kids in your 20s, go into politics in your 40s, serve as two-term president in your 60s. You can have it all!

I think the GOP should give up trying to demonize Nancy Pelosi. The Botox gags and bug-eyed photos won't work. Tonally, she seems very normal, in ways that, for example, certain presidentially inclined New York senators can never quite manage. But Pelosi's fellow California liberals and those gushing feminist columnists ought to ponder why ''the most powerful woman in America'' is quite so untypical: What does it say when it's the exception that proves the ruler?

©Mark Steyn 2007