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Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Baltimore's Best Answers the Call
By Thomas Boswell
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Tuesday, August 12, 2008; E01
Michael Phelps of the U.S.swims in his men's 200 meters butterfly heat at the National Aquatics Center during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 11, 2008.
(David Gray/Reuters)
BEIJING- At this Olympics, China has everything. America has Michael Phelps. So far it looks like a fair fight.
Phelps knows the nature of the battle. The 23-year-old isn't just trying to surpass Mark Spitz's record of seven gold medals. During 17 days when China seeks every chance to upstage the United States, Phelps is carrying America's banner.
As he stood behind Lane 6 before the 200-meter freestyle on Tuesday, preparing for the only individual race he entered but didn't win in Athens, Phelps kept his robe around him, like a heavyweight boxer awaiting the instant of his introduction to drop his robe and reveal the body that is about to inflict defeat.
No sooner were the words, "world record holder" out of the announcer's month than Phelps, bouncing on his toes, dropped the veil. The race might as well have been over. Phelps won by nearly two seconds and set a world record of 1 minute 42.96 seconds.
In just the fourth day of this Olympics, Phelps is not merely America's best athlete, but the entire squad's leader. At the moment he hit the wall, he had three gold medals while the rest of the 596-person U.S. delegation had only one.
Within minutes two more Americans, Natalie Coughlin and Aaron Peirsol, collected backstroke golds. Word spreads fast at an Olympics. Soon, the U.S. men's gymnasts were hunting an unexpected prestigious medal, and eventually took bronze.
Michael Phelps of the U.S. prepares to swim in the men's 200 meters butterfly semi-final at the National Aquatics Center during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 12, 2008.
(David Gray/Reuters)
America needs all the adrenaline it can muster from watching Phelps. Every moment here seems consumed by some visible testimonial to China -- its athletes, people or architecture, as well as the government orchestrating it all.
China's soaring futuristic buildings are everywhere. When your taxi driver gets lost, you hope he never finds the proper turn because every new vista looks more fresh and exciting than the last. True, Beijing has farmed out its design work to the most famous architects all over the world. We can mock their makeover as checkbook modernity. But they get to live in it.
At the Games themselves, the Chinese can swell their chests as they prance to the podium. They don't just want to claim the 21st century, they'd like to do it soon. They're gifted grim grinders. Identify a flaw and they'll erase it.
At government suggestion they've even stopped spitting in public. The litter that once defined Beijing has been replaced by a scary immaculateness. In 12 days I haven't spotted a speck of rubbish. Not a stray cigarette butt or soda bottle in a city of 15 million. When China makes up its mind, everybody marches. Now, the goal is hoarding commodities -- gold, silver and bronze.
In the face of this, restrain your alarm. In one corner, we've got 1.3 billion Chinese, many of them still standing ramrod straight at 3 a.m. guarding street lamps. In the other, we have one big, laid-back lunk of a swimmer from Bal'mer. And his quest for eight golds in an Olympics that began at 8:08 on 8/8/08 is now looking just fine, thanks.
Suddenly, his toughest individual event is behind him -- the 400-meter individual medley that he won on Sunday in world record time. Also, his most likely upset, in the 400-meter freestyle relay that the U.S. lost in the last Olympics, was surmounted on Monday. That gold was salvaged for him by .08 of a second by Jason Lezak who swam an anchor leg that Confucius couldn't match.
(L-R) Michael Phelps, Garrett Weber-Gale, Cullen Jones and Jason Lezak of the U.S. celebrate with their gold medals after winning the men's 4x100m freestyle relay swimming final at the National Aquatics Center during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 11, 2008.
(David Gray/Reuters)
Phelps's dominance Tuesday fed off the karmic energy provided by Lezak. "I don't think I've ever celebrated that much after a race in my life," said Phelps on Monday night. "Five of the teams broke the world record. . . . We broke the world record by four seconds and won by eight one-hundredths of a second.
"Four guys [had to] swim the perfect race. We swam that perfect race," Phelps added. "They were showing the replay and I just started cracking up [at] mine and Garrett [Weber-Gale's] reaction. I let out a pretty fierce yell. . . . [Jason] swam an amazing race."
With the sense he's peaking at the proper time and has dodged a silver bullet in the relay, Phelps is just stroking and smoking. Like speedskater Eric Heiden when he won five individual golds (an Olympic record Phelps can match) at Lake Placid, he's going from strength to strength.
In 1980, you could hear Heiden's skates make an entirely different sound from others -- screeching as they crushed the ice in the turns. Here, the indelibly individual image may the sight of Phelps in the butterfly (his best event) that is indelibly different. In a 200-meter fly prelim Monday, Phelps entire upper body seemed to be out of the water, almost exposing his gills. Dolphins resent him.
When the final image, the world-wide snap shot of this Olympics is delivered, will it be of the 91,000-seat Bird's Nest with the 400-yard-long HDTV screen ringing the entire roof of the stadium? Will it be the $40 billion, a price tag no democracy could justify, that China paid for a can-we-rejoin-the-world-now infomercial?
Or will it be a picture of the rumple-haired not-quite-indecently exposed Phelps as he makes the most stunning Olympic venue -- the Water Cube -- his personal athletic property. Okay, China gets to keep it. But he owns it.
Michael Phelps of the U.S. celebrates with his gold medal after winning the men's 200m freestyle final at the National Aquatics Center during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 12, 2008.
REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay (CHINA)
Photo Tools
At the center of the storm, Phelps seems to be the calm eye. "I'm just here enjoying myself," he said. "I never experienced a campus dorm room [so] I enjoy the [Olympic] Village. . . . I stay in my room and watch movies or we sit around playing Spades all day."
Away from the Water Cube, China's grand Olympic plan -- Project 119 -- is showing its results. It's not a complex concept: 1.3 billion people realize the Olympics are full of arcane sports. So, let's storm 'em.
That "119" is the medal count in five sports in which China's done poorly, including kayak and canoe (12 gold medals), rowing (14) and sailing (10). Every day, China goes prospecting for that cheap gold. Meanwhile, soccer, basketball, tennis, hockey and baseball offer just nine golds.
Every hour, China seems to crow. The U.S. team, with track in drug-cheating disrepute and the Redeem Team still suspect, needs a hero to ignite 595 others. Luckily, there is one. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday: gold. With five more days of swimming, it's now plausible, not merely possible, that there will be five more to come.
China has thrown down the gauntlet to the world. Day after day, Michael Phelps waits till his name is called, then throws down his robe and answers.
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Tuesday, August 12, 2008; E01
Michael Phelps of the U.S.swims in his men's 200 meters butterfly heat at the National Aquatics Center during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 11, 2008.(David Gray/Reuters)
BEIJING- At this Olympics, China has everything. America has Michael Phelps. So far it looks like a fair fight.
Phelps knows the nature of the battle. The 23-year-old isn't just trying to surpass Mark Spitz's record of seven gold medals. During 17 days when China seeks every chance to upstage the United States, Phelps is carrying America's banner.
As he stood behind Lane 6 before the 200-meter freestyle on Tuesday, preparing for the only individual race he entered but didn't win in Athens, Phelps kept his robe around him, like a heavyweight boxer awaiting the instant of his introduction to drop his robe and reveal the body that is about to inflict defeat.
No sooner were the words, "world record holder" out of the announcer's month than Phelps, bouncing on his toes, dropped the veil. The race might as well have been over. Phelps won by nearly two seconds and set a world record of 1 minute 42.96 seconds.
In just the fourth day of this Olympics, Phelps is not merely America's best athlete, but the entire squad's leader. At the moment he hit the wall, he had three gold medals while the rest of the 596-person U.S. delegation had only one.
Within minutes two more Americans, Natalie Coughlin and Aaron Peirsol, collected backstroke golds. Word spreads fast at an Olympics. Soon, the U.S. men's gymnasts were hunting an unexpected prestigious medal, and eventually took bronze.
Michael Phelps of the U.S. prepares to swim in the men's 200 meters butterfly semi-final at the National Aquatics Center during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 12, 2008.(David Gray/Reuters)
America needs all the adrenaline it can muster from watching Phelps. Every moment here seems consumed by some visible testimonial to China -- its athletes, people or architecture, as well as the government orchestrating it all.
China's soaring futuristic buildings are everywhere. When your taxi driver gets lost, you hope he never finds the proper turn because every new vista looks more fresh and exciting than the last. True, Beijing has farmed out its design work to the most famous architects all over the world. We can mock their makeover as checkbook modernity. But they get to live in it.
At the Games themselves, the Chinese can swell their chests as they prance to the podium. They don't just want to claim the 21st century, they'd like to do it soon. They're gifted grim grinders. Identify a flaw and they'll erase it.
At government suggestion they've even stopped spitting in public. The litter that once defined Beijing has been replaced by a scary immaculateness. In 12 days I haven't spotted a speck of rubbish. Not a stray cigarette butt or soda bottle in a city of 15 million. When China makes up its mind, everybody marches. Now, the goal is hoarding commodities -- gold, silver and bronze.
In the face of this, restrain your alarm. In one corner, we've got 1.3 billion Chinese, many of them still standing ramrod straight at 3 a.m. guarding street lamps. In the other, we have one big, laid-back lunk of a swimmer from Bal'mer. And his quest for eight golds in an Olympics that began at 8:08 on 8/8/08 is now looking just fine, thanks.
Suddenly, his toughest individual event is behind him -- the 400-meter individual medley that he won on Sunday in world record time. Also, his most likely upset, in the 400-meter freestyle relay that the U.S. lost in the last Olympics, was surmounted on Monday. That gold was salvaged for him by .08 of a second by Jason Lezak who swam an anchor leg that Confucius couldn't match.
(L-R) Michael Phelps, Garrett Weber-Gale, Cullen Jones and Jason Lezak of the U.S. celebrate with their gold medals after winning the men's 4x100m freestyle relay swimming final at the National Aquatics Center during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 11, 2008.(David Gray/Reuters)
Phelps's dominance Tuesday fed off the karmic energy provided by Lezak. "I don't think I've ever celebrated that much after a race in my life," said Phelps on Monday night. "Five of the teams broke the world record. . . . We broke the world record by four seconds and won by eight one-hundredths of a second.
"Four guys [had to] swim the perfect race. We swam that perfect race," Phelps added. "They were showing the replay and I just started cracking up [at] mine and Garrett [Weber-Gale's] reaction. I let out a pretty fierce yell. . . . [Jason] swam an amazing race."
With the sense he's peaking at the proper time and has dodged a silver bullet in the relay, Phelps is just stroking and smoking. Like speedskater Eric Heiden when he won five individual golds (an Olympic record Phelps can match) at Lake Placid, he's going from strength to strength.
In 1980, you could hear Heiden's skates make an entirely different sound from others -- screeching as they crushed the ice in the turns. Here, the indelibly individual image may the sight of Phelps in the butterfly (his best event) that is indelibly different. In a 200-meter fly prelim Monday, Phelps entire upper body seemed to be out of the water, almost exposing his gills. Dolphins resent him.
When the final image, the world-wide snap shot of this Olympics is delivered, will it be of the 91,000-seat Bird's Nest with the 400-yard-long HDTV screen ringing the entire roof of the stadium? Will it be the $40 billion, a price tag no democracy could justify, that China paid for a can-we-rejoin-the-world-now infomercial?
Or will it be a picture of the rumple-haired not-quite-indecently exposed Phelps as he makes the most stunning Olympic venue -- the Water Cube -- his personal athletic property. Okay, China gets to keep it. But he owns it.
Michael Phelps of the U.S. celebrates with his gold medal after winning the men's 200m freestyle final at the National Aquatics Center during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 12, 2008.REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay (CHINA)
Photo Tools
At the center of the storm, Phelps seems to be the calm eye. "I'm just here enjoying myself," he said. "I never experienced a campus dorm room [so] I enjoy the [Olympic] Village. . . . I stay in my room and watch movies or we sit around playing Spades all day."
Away from the Water Cube, China's grand Olympic plan -- Project 119 -- is showing its results. It's not a complex concept: 1.3 billion people realize the Olympics are full of arcane sports. So, let's storm 'em.
That "119" is the medal count in five sports in which China's done poorly, including kayak and canoe (12 gold medals), rowing (14) and sailing (10). Every day, China goes prospecting for that cheap gold. Meanwhile, soccer, basketball, tennis, hockey and baseball offer just nine golds.
Every hour, China seems to crow. The U.S. team, with track in drug-cheating disrepute and the Redeem Team still suspect, needs a hero to ignite 595 others. Luckily, there is one. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday: gold. With five more days of swimming, it's now plausible, not merely possible, that there will be five more to come.
China has thrown down the gauntlet to the world. Day after day, Michael Phelps waits till his name is called, then throws down his robe and answers.
A Catholic Case Against Barack Obama
By Patrick J. Buchanan August 11, 2008
In the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama rolled up more than 90 percent of the African-American vote. Among Catholics, he lost by 40 points. The cool liberal Harvard Law grad was not a good fit for the socially conservative ethnics of Altoona, Aliquippa and Johnstown.
But if Barack had a problem with Catholics then, he has a far higher hurdle to surmount in the fall, with those millions of Catholics who still take their faith and moral code seriously.
For not only is Barack the most pro-abortion member of the Senate, with his straight A+ report card from the National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood. He supports the late-term procedure known as partial-birth abortion, where the baby's skull is stabbed with scissors in the birth canal and the brains are sucked out to end its life swiftly and ease passage of the corpse into the pan.
Partial-birth abortion, said the late Sen. Pat Moynihan, "comes as close to infanticide as anything I have seen in our judiciary."
Yet, when Congress was voting to ban this terrible form of death for a mature fetus, Michelle Obama was signing fundraising letters pledging that, if elected, Barack would be "tireless" in keeping legal this "legitimate medical procedure."
And Barack did not let the militants down. When the Supreme Court upheld the congressional ban on this barbaric procedure, Barack denounced the court for denying "equal rights for women."
As David Freddoso reports in his new best-seller, The Case Against Barack Obama, the Illinois senator goes further than any U.S. senator has dared go in defending what John Paul II called the "culture of death."
Thrice in the Illinois legislature, Obama helped block a bill that was designed solely to protect the life of infants already born, and outside the womb, who had miraculously survived the attempt to kill them during an abortion. Thrice, Obama voted to let doctors and nurses allow these tiny human beings die of neglect and be tossed out with the medical waste.
How can a man who purports to be a Christian justify this?
If, as its advocates contend, abortion has to remain legal to protect the life and health, mental and physical, of the mother, how is a mother's life or health in the least threatened by a baby no longer inside her -- but lying on a table or in a pan fighting for life and breath?
How is it essential for the life or health of a woman that her baby, who somehow survived the horrible ordeal of abortion, be left to die or put to death? Yet, that is what Obama voted for, thrice, in the Illinois Senate.
When a bill almost identical to the one Barack fought in Illinois, the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, came to the floor of the U.S. Senate in 2001, the vote was 98 to 0 in favor. Barbara Boxer, the most pro-abortion member of the Senate before Barack came, spoke out on its behalf:
"Of course, we believe everyone should deserve the protection of this bill. ... Who could be more vulnerable than a newborn baby? So, of course, we agree with that. ... We join with an 'aye' vote on this. I hope it will, in fact, be unanimous."
Obama says he opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act because he feared it might imperil Roe v. Wade. But if Roe v. Wade did allow infanticide or murder, which is what letting a tiny baby die of neglect or killing it outright amounts to, why would he not want that court decision reviewed and amended to outlaw infanticide?
Is the right to an abortion so sacrosanct to Obama that killing by neglect or snuffing out of the life of tiny babies outside the womb must be protected if necessary to preserve that right?
Obama is an abortion absolutist. "I could find no instance in his entire career," writes Freddoso, "in which he voted for any regulation or restriction on the practice of abortion."
In 2007, Barack pledged that, in his first act as president, he will sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every federal, state or local regulation or restriction on abortion. The National Organization for Women says it would abolish all restrictions on government funding of abortion.
What we once called God's Country would become the nation on earth most zealously committed to an unrestricted right of abortion from conception to birth.
Before any devout Catholic, Evangelical Christian or Orthodox Jew votes for Obama, he or she might spend 15 minutes in Chapter 10 of Freddoso's "Case Against Barack." For if, as Catholics believe, abortion is the killing of an unborn child, and participation in an abortion entails automatic excommunication, how can a good Catholic support a candidate who will appoint justices to make Roe v. Wade eternal and eliminate all restrictions on a practice Catholics legislators have fought for three decades to curtail?
And which Catholic priests and prelates will it be who give invocations at Obama rallies, even as Mother Church fights to save the lives of unborn children whom Obama believes have no right to life and no rights at all?
- Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.
Russia's Power Play
By George F. Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, August 12, 2008; A13
Musa Sadulayev/Associated Press
Russian ground forces on Sunday passed a car with a South Ossetian license plate near the town of Dzhava in South Ossetia.
Asked in 1957 what would determine his government's course, Harold Macmillan, Britain's new prime minister, replied, "Events, dear boy, events." Now, into America's trivializing presidential campaign, a pesky event has intruded -- a European war. Russian tanks, heavy artillery, strategic bombers, ballistic missiles and a naval blockade batter a European nation. We are not past such things after all. The end of history will be postponed, again.
Russia supports two provinces determined to secede from Georgia. Russia, with aspiring nations within its borders, generally opposes secessionists, as it did when America, which sometimes opposes secession (e.g., 1861-65), improvidently supported Kosovo's secession from Russia's ally Serbia. But Russia's aggression is really about the subordination of Georgia, a democratic, market-oriented U.S. ally. This is the recrudescence of Russia's dominance in what it calls the "near abroad." Ukraine, another nation guilty of being provocatively democratic near Russia, should tremble because there is not much America can do. It is a bystander at the bullying of an ally that might be about to undergo regime change.
Vladimir Putin, into whose soul President George W. Bush once peered and liked what he saw, has conspicuously conferred with Russia's military, thereby making his poodle, "President" Dmitry Medvedev, yet more risible. But big events reveal smallness, such as that of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.
On ABC's "This Week," Richardson, auditioning to be Barack Obama's running mate, disqualified himself. Clinging to the Obama campaign's talking points like a drunk to a lamppost, Richardson said that this crisis proves the wisdom of Obama's zest for diplomacy and that America should get the U.N. Security Council "to pass a strong resolution getting the Russians to show some restraint." Apparently Richardson was ambassador to the United Nations for 19 months without noticing that Russia has a Security Council veto.
This crisis illustrates, redundantly, the paralysis of the United Nations regarding major powers, hence regarding major events, and the fictitiousness of the European Union regarding foreign policy. Does this disturb Obama's serenity about the efficacy of diplomacy? Obama's second statement about the crisis, in which he tardily acknowledged Russia's invasion, underscored the folly of his first, which echoed the Bush administration's initial evenhandedness. "Now," said Obama, "is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint."
John McCain, the "life is real, life is earnest" candidate, says he has looked into Putin's eyes and seen "a K, a G and a B." But McCain owes the thug thanks, as does America's electorate. Putin has abruptly pulled the presidential campaign up from preoccupation with plumbing the shallows of John Edwards and wondering what "catharsis" is "owed" to disappointed Clintonites.
McCain, who has called upon Russia "to immediately and unconditionally . . . withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory," favors expelling Russia from the Group of Eight, and organizing a league of democracies to act where the United Nations is impotent, which is whenever the subject is important. But Georgia, whose desire for NATO membership had U.S. support, is not in NATO because some prospective members of McCain's league of democracies, e.g., Germany, thought that starting membership talks with Georgia would complicate the project of propitiating Russia. NATO is scheduled to review the question of Georgia's membership in December. Where now do Obama and McCain stand?
If Georgia were in NATO, would NATO now be at war with Russia? More likely, Russia would not be in Georgia. Only once in NATO's 59 years has the territory of a member been invaded -- the British Falklands, by Argentina, in 1982.
What is it about August? The First World War began in August 1914. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact effectively announced the Second World War in August 1939. Iraq, a fragment of the collapse of empires precipitated by August 1914, invaded Kuwait in August 1990.
This year's August upheaval coincides, probably not coincidentally, with the world's preoccupation with that charade of international comity, the Olympics. For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the Games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremonies featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi's 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film "Triumph of the Will," has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.
A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything.
georgewill@washpost.com
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, August 12, 2008; A13
Musa Sadulayev/Associated Press Russian ground forces on Sunday passed a car with a South Ossetian license plate near the town of Dzhava in South Ossetia.
Asked in 1957 what would determine his government's course, Harold Macmillan, Britain's new prime minister, replied, "Events, dear boy, events." Now, into America's trivializing presidential campaign, a pesky event has intruded -- a European war. Russian tanks, heavy artillery, strategic bombers, ballistic missiles and a naval blockade batter a European nation. We are not past such things after all. The end of history will be postponed, again.
Russia supports two provinces determined to secede from Georgia. Russia, with aspiring nations within its borders, generally opposes secessionists, as it did when America, which sometimes opposes secession (e.g., 1861-65), improvidently supported Kosovo's secession from Russia's ally Serbia. But Russia's aggression is really about the subordination of Georgia, a democratic, market-oriented U.S. ally. This is the recrudescence of Russia's dominance in what it calls the "near abroad." Ukraine, another nation guilty of being provocatively democratic near Russia, should tremble because there is not much America can do. It is a bystander at the bullying of an ally that might be about to undergo regime change.
Vladimir Putin, into whose soul President George W. Bush once peered and liked what he saw, has conspicuously conferred with Russia's military, thereby making his poodle, "President" Dmitry Medvedev, yet more risible. But big events reveal smallness, such as that of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.
On ABC's "This Week," Richardson, auditioning to be Barack Obama's running mate, disqualified himself. Clinging to the Obama campaign's talking points like a drunk to a lamppost, Richardson said that this crisis proves the wisdom of Obama's zest for diplomacy and that America should get the U.N. Security Council "to pass a strong resolution getting the Russians to show some restraint." Apparently Richardson was ambassador to the United Nations for 19 months without noticing that Russia has a Security Council veto.
This crisis illustrates, redundantly, the paralysis of the United Nations regarding major powers, hence regarding major events, and the fictitiousness of the European Union regarding foreign policy. Does this disturb Obama's serenity about the efficacy of diplomacy? Obama's second statement about the crisis, in which he tardily acknowledged Russia's invasion, underscored the folly of his first, which echoed the Bush administration's initial evenhandedness. "Now," said Obama, "is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint."
John McCain, the "life is real, life is earnest" candidate, says he has looked into Putin's eyes and seen "a K, a G and a B." But McCain owes the thug thanks, as does America's electorate. Putin has abruptly pulled the presidential campaign up from preoccupation with plumbing the shallows of John Edwards and wondering what "catharsis" is "owed" to disappointed Clintonites.
McCain, who has called upon Russia "to immediately and unconditionally . . . withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory," favors expelling Russia from the Group of Eight, and organizing a league of democracies to act where the United Nations is impotent, which is whenever the subject is important. But Georgia, whose desire for NATO membership had U.S. support, is not in NATO because some prospective members of McCain's league of democracies, e.g., Germany, thought that starting membership talks with Georgia would complicate the project of propitiating Russia. NATO is scheduled to review the question of Georgia's membership in December. Where now do Obama and McCain stand?
If Georgia were in NATO, would NATO now be at war with Russia? More likely, Russia would not be in Georgia. Only once in NATO's 59 years has the territory of a member been invaded -- the British Falklands, by Argentina, in 1982.
What is it about August? The First World War began in August 1914. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact effectively announced the Second World War in August 1939. Iraq, a fragment of the collapse of empires precipitated by August 1914, invaded Kuwait in August 1990.
This year's August upheaval coincides, probably not coincidentally, with the world's preoccupation with that charade of international comity, the Olympics. For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the Games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremonies featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi's 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film "Triumph of the Will," has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.
A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything.
georgewill@washpost.com
The West's Islamist Infiltrators
By Daniel Pipes
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Aafia Siddiqui, 36, is a Pakistani mother of three, an alumna of MIT, and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University. She is also accused of working for Al-Qaeda and was charged last week in New York City with attempting to kill American soldiers.
Aafia Siddiqui is accused of working for Al-Qaeda.
Her arrest serves to remind how invisibly most Islamist infiltration proceeds. In particular, an estimated forty Al-Qaeda sympathizers or operatives have sought to penetrate U.S. intelligence agencies.
Such a well-placed infiltrator can wreck great damage explains a former CIA chief of counterintelligence, Michael Sulick: "In the war on terrorism, intelligence has replaced the Cold War's tanks and fighter planes as the primary weapon against an unseen enemy." Islamist moles, he argues, "could inflict far more damage to national security than Soviet spies," for the U.S. and Soviet Union never actually fought each other, whereas now, "our nation is at war."
Here are some American cases of attempted infiltration since 2001 that have been made public:
* The Air Force discharged Sadeq Naji Ahmed, a Yemeni immigrant, when his superiors learned of his pro-Al-Qaeda statements. Ahmed subsequently became a baggage screener at Detroit's Metro Airport, which terminated him for hiding his earlier discharge from the Air Force. He was convicted of making false statements and sentenced to eighteen months in jail.
* The Chicago Police Department fired Patricia Eng-Hussain just three days into her training on learning that her husband, Mohammad Azam Hussain, was arrested for being an active member of Mohajir Qaumi Movement-Haqiqi (MQM-H), a Pakistani terrorist group.
* The Chicago Police Department also fired Arif Sulejmanovski, a supervising janitor at its 25th District station after it learned his name was on a federal terrorist watch list of international terrorism suspects.
* Mohammad Alavi, an engineer at the Palo Verde nuclear power plant, was arrested as he arrived on a flight from Iran, accused of taking computer access codes and software to Iran that provide details on the plant's control rooms and plant layout. He subsequently pleaded guilty to transporting stolen property.
Nada Nadim Prouty pleaded guilty to multiple charges.
* Nada Nadim Prouty, a Lebanese immigrant who worked for both the FBI and CIA, pleaded guilty to charges of: fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship; accessing a federal computer system to unlawfully query information about her relatives and the terrorist organization Hizballah; and engaging in conspiracy to defraud the United States.
* Waheeda Tehseen, a Pakistani immigrant who filled a sensitive toxicologist position with the Environmental Protection Agency, pleaded guilty to fraud and was deported. WorldNetDaily.com explains that "investigators suspect espionage is probable, as she produced highly sensitive health-hazard documents for toxic compounds and chemical pesticides. Tehseen also was an expert in parasitology as it relates to public water systems."
* Weiss Rasool, 31, a Fairfax County police sergeant and Afghan immigrant, pleaded guilty for checking police databases without authorization, thereby jeopardizing at least one federal terrorism investigation.
* Nadire P. Zenelaj, 32, a 911 emergency operator of Albanian origins, was charged with 232 felony counts of computer trespass for illegally searching New York State databases, including at least one person on the FBI's terrorist watch list.
Three other cases are less clear. The Transportation Security Administration fired Bassam Khalaf, 21, a Texan of Christian Palestinian origins, as an airport baggage screener because lyrics on his music CD, Terror Alert, applaud the 9/11 attacks. FBI Special Agent Gamal Abdel-Hafiz "showed a pattern of pro-Islamist behavior," according to author Paul Sperry, that may have helped acquit Sami Al-Arian of terrorism charges. The Pentagon cleared Hesham Islam, an Egyptian immigrant, former U.S. Navy commander, and special assistant to the deputy secretary of defense, but major questions remain about his biography and his outlook.
Other Western countries too – Australia, Canada, Israel, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom – have been subject to infiltration efforts. (For details, see my weblog entry, "Islamists Penetrate Western Security.")
This record prompts one to wonder what catastrophe must occur before government agencies, some of which have banished the words "Islam" and "jihad," seriously confront their internal threat?
Westerners are indebted to Muslim agents like Fred Ghussin and "Kamil Pasha" who have been critical to fighting terrorism. That said, I stand by my 2003 statement that "There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism."
- Mr. Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/), director of the Middle East Forum, is the Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University during the spring semester.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Aafia Siddiqui, 36, is a Pakistani mother of three, an alumna of MIT, and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University. She is also accused of working for Al-Qaeda and was charged last week in New York City with attempting to kill American soldiers.
Aafia Siddiqui is accused of working for Al-Qaeda.Her arrest serves to remind how invisibly most Islamist infiltration proceeds. In particular, an estimated forty Al-Qaeda sympathizers or operatives have sought to penetrate U.S. intelligence agencies.
Such a well-placed infiltrator can wreck great damage explains a former CIA chief of counterintelligence, Michael Sulick: "In the war on terrorism, intelligence has replaced the Cold War's tanks and fighter planes as the primary weapon against an unseen enemy." Islamist moles, he argues, "could inflict far more damage to national security than Soviet spies," for the U.S. and Soviet Union never actually fought each other, whereas now, "our nation is at war."
Here are some American cases of attempted infiltration since 2001 that have been made public:
* The Air Force discharged Sadeq Naji Ahmed, a Yemeni immigrant, when his superiors learned of his pro-Al-Qaeda statements. Ahmed subsequently became a baggage screener at Detroit's Metro Airport, which terminated him for hiding his earlier discharge from the Air Force. He was convicted of making false statements and sentenced to eighteen months in jail.
* The Chicago Police Department fired Patricia Eng-Hussain just three days into her training on learning that her husband, Mohammad Azam Hussain, was arrested for being an active member of Mohajir Qaumi Movement-Haqiqi (MQM-H), a Pakistani terrorist group.
* The Chicago Police Department also fired Arif Sulejmanovski, a supervising janitor at its 25th District station after it learned his name was on a federal terrorist watch list of international terrorism suspects.
* Mohammad Alavi, an engineer at the Palo Verde nuclear power plant, was arrested as he arrived on a flight from Iran, accused of taking computer access codes and software to Iran that provide details on the plant's control rooms and plant layout. He subsequently pleaded guilty to transporting stolen property.
Nada Nadim Prouty pleaded guilty to multiple charges.* Nada Nadim Prouty, a Lebanese immigrant who worked for both the FBI and CIA, pleaded guilty to charges of: fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship; accessing a federal computer system to unlawfully query information about her relatives and the terrorist organization Hizballah; and engaging in conspiracy to defraud the United States.
* Waheeda Tehseen, a Pakistani immigrant who filled a sensitive toxicologist position with the Environmental Protection Agency, pleaded guilty to fraud and was deported. WorldNetDaily.com explains that "investigators suspect espionage is probable, as she produced highly sensitive health-hazard documents for toxic compounds and chemical pesticides. Tehseen also was an expert in parasitology as it relates to public water systems."
* Weiss Rasool, 31, a Fairfax County police sergeant and Afghan immigrant, pleaded guilty for checking police databases without authorization, thereby jeopardizing at least one federal terrorism investigation.
* Nadire P. Zenelaj, 32, a 911 emergency operator of Albanian origins, was charged with 232 felony counts of computer trespass for illegally searching New York State databases, including at least one person on the FBI's terrorist watch list.
Three other cases are less clear. The Transportation Security Administration fired Bassam Khalaf, 21, a Texan of Christian Palestinian origins, as an airport baggage screener because lyrics on his music CD, Terror Alert, applaud the 9/11 attacks. FBI Special Agent Gamal Abdel-Hafiz "showed a pattern of pro-Islamist behavior," according to author Paul Sperry, that may have helped acquit Sami Al-Arian of terrorism charges. The Pentagon cleared Hesham Islam, an Egyptian immigrant, former U.S. Navy commander, and special assistant to the deputy secretary of defense, but major questions remain about his biography and his outlook.
Other Western countries too – Australia, Canada, Israel, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom – have been subject to infiltration efforts. (For details, see my weblog entry, "Islamists Penetrate Western Security.")
This record prompts one to wonder what catastrophe must occur before government agencies, some of which have banished the words "Islam" and "jihad," seriously confront their internal threat?
Westerners are indebted to Muslim agents like Fred Ghussin and "Kamil Pasha" who have been critical to fighting terrorism. That said, I stand by my 2003 statement that "There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism."
- Mr. Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/), director of the Middle East Forum, is the Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University during the spring semester.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Isaac Hayes, 65, a Creator of ’70s Soul Style, Dies
By BEN SISARIO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
August 11, 2008
Isaac Hayes, the singer and songwriter whose luxurious, strutting funk arrangements in songs like “Theme From ‘Shaft’ ” defined the glories and excesses of soul music in the early 1970s, died on Sunday in Memphis. He was 65.
The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said that Mr. Hayes’s wife, Adjowa, found him collapsed near a treadmill at their home in Cordova, an eastern suburb of Memphis, and he was pronounced dead an hour later. The cause of death was not known.
With his lascivious bass-baritone and flamboyant wardrobe, Mr. Hayes developed a musical persona that was an embodiment of the hyper-masculine, street-savvy characters of the so-called blaxploitation films of the era. In his theme song to Gordon Parks’s “Shaft” from 1971, the title character is summed up in a line that has become a classic of kitsch: “Who’s a black private dick/Who’s a sex machine to all the chicks?”
(Furthermore: “He’s a complicated man/But no one understands him but his woman.”)
The “Shaft” theme won an Academy Award and has become one of his best-known songs. But Mr. Hayes’s career stretched far beyond soundtracks. For much of the 1960s and into the ’70s he was one of the principal songwriters and performers for Stax Records, the trailblazing Memphis R&B label, and in the 1990s he revived his career by providing the voice for the amorous and wise Chef on the cable television show “South Park.”
Isaac Hayes was born Aug. 20, 1942, in a tin shack in rural Covington, Tenn., to a mother who died early and a father who left home. He was raised largely by his grandparents, and worked in cotton fields while going to school. He began playing in local bands, and by early 1964, when he was 21, he was working as a backup musician for Stax. His first session was with Otis Redding.
Soon he began writing songs with David Porter, and their music — numbers like “Soul Man” and Hold On, I’m Comin’ ” for Sam and Dave, and “B-A-B-Y” for Carla Thomas — came to embody the Stax aesthetic. It was tight, catchy pop, but full of sweat and grit, a proudly unpolished Southern alternative to Motown.
By the late 1960s Mr. Hayes was stepping out as a solo artist, and his reputation grew as much for his dress as for his music. The cover of his 1969 album, “Hot Buttered Soul,” pictured him in customary style: shaved head, dark shades, gold chains, bare chest. The album was similarly eccentric, consisting of just four songs, including lengthy, elaborate versions of
Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk On By” and Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” It also included spoken segments that he called raps, and the album became one of his biggest hits, reaching No. 8.
When he was approached to create the score to “Shaft,” one of the first blaxploitation films, Mr. Hayes said he also wanted the lead role. The part went to Richard Roundtree, but Mr. Hayes recorded the music anyway. It was done in four days with several members of the Bar-Kays, one of the house bands at Stax.
With a cymbal pattern borrowed from Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” which Mr. Hayes had arranged, the song layered funk guitars, horns, woodwinds and strings, prefiguring disco. It became a No. 1 hit.
In 1971 he followed up the “Shaft” soundtrack with “Black Moses,” a double album that was another ambitious expansion of the vocabulary of soul music. In its original issue, the cover folded out to reveal a portrait of Mr. Hayes in crucifix form.
In the mid-’70s Mr. Hayes’s finances collapsed and his music turned explicitly to disco, which turned out to be a career dead end. Through the 1970s and into the ’90s he acted in several films, including “Escape From New York” in 1981 and the spoof “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” in 1988. His music from this era sold poorly, but his career revived in 1997 when he began playing Chef on “South Park.” A Scientologist, he quit the show in 2006, saying that he had been offended by an episode that ridiculed Tom Cruise and other prominent Scientologists. He also had a radio show in New York in the 1990s.
Mr. Hayes had health problems in recent years but had continued to tour and work occasionally in film (he had a role in “Soul Men,” a comedy set for release in November and starring Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac, the comedian who died Saturday).
In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Porter, Mr. Hayes’s fellow songwriter, said that his friend was “recuperating from a stroke,” but added that “in the middle of all that he was still trying to have fun” and had even returned to his birthplace in Covington to go fishing.
Mr. Hayes had been married three times previously. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their son, Nana, and 11 other children.
John M. Hubbell contributed reporting from Memphis.
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
August 11, 2008
Isaac Hayes, the singer and songwriter whose luxurious, strutting funk arrangements in songs like “Theme From ‘Shaft’ ” defined the glories and excesses of soul music in the early 1970s, died on Sunday in Memphis. He was 65.The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said that Mr. Hayes’s wife, Adjowa, found him collapsed near a treadmill at their home in Cordova, an eastern suburb of Memphis, and he was pronounced dead an hour later. The cause of death was not known.
With his lascivious bass-baritone and flamboyant wardrobe, Mr. Hayes developed a musical persona that was an embodiment of the hyper-masculine, street-savvy characters of the so-called blaxploitation films of the era. In his theme song to Gordon Parks’s “Shaft” from 1971, the title character is summed up in a line that has become a classic of kitsch: “Who’s a black private dick/Who’s a sex machine to all the chicks?”
(Furthermore: “He’s a complicated man/But no one understands him but his woman.”)
The “Shaft” theme won an Academy Award and has become one of his best-known songs. But Mr. Hayes’s career stretched far beyond soundtracks. For much of the 1960s and into the ’70s he was one of the principal songwriters and performers for Stax Records, the trailblazing Memphis R&B label, and in the 1990s he revived his career by providing the voice for the amorous and wise Chef on the cable television show “South Park.”Isaac Hayes was born Aug. 20, 1942, in a tin shack in rural Covington, Tenn., to a mother who died early and a father who left home. He was raised largely by his grandparents, and worked in cotton fields while going to school. He began playing in local bands, and by early 1964, when he was 21, he was working as a backup musician for Stax. His first session was with Otis Redding.
Soon he began writing songs with David Porter, and their music — numbers like “Soul Man” and Hold On, I’m Comin’ ” for Sam and Dave, and “B-A-B-Y” for Carla Thomas — came to embody the Stax aesthetic. It was tight, catchy pop, but full of sweat and grit, a proudly unpolished Southern alternative to Motown.
By the late 1960s Mr. Hayes was stepping out as a solo artist, and his reputation grew as much for his dress as for his music. The cover of his 1969 album, “Hot Buttered Soul,” pictured him in customary style: shaved head, dark shades, gold chains, bare chest. The album was similarly eccentric, consisting of just four songs, including lengthy, elaborate versions of
Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk On By” and Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” It also included spoken segments that he called raps, and the album became one of his biggest hits, reaching No. 8.When he was approached to create the score to “Shaft,” one of the first blaxploitation films, Mr. Hayes said he also wanted the lead role. The part went to Richard Roundtree, but Mr. Hayes recorded the music anyway. It was done in four days with several members of the Bar-Kays, one of the house bands at Stax.
With a cymbal pattern borrowed from Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” which Mr. Hayes had arranged, the song layered funk guitars, horns, woodwinds and strings, prefiguring disco. It became a No. 1 hit.
In 1971 he followed up the “Shaft” soundtrack with “Black Moses,” a double album that was another ambitious expansion of the vocabulary of soul music. In its original issue, the cover folded out to reveal a portrait of Mr. Hayes in crucifix form.
In the mid-’70s Mr. Hayes’s finances collapsed and his music turned explicitly to disco, which turned out to be a career dead end. Through the 1970s and into the ’90s he acted in several films, including “Escape From New York” in 1981 and the spoof “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” in 1988. His music from this era sold poorly, but his career revived in 1997 when he began playing Chef on “South Park.” A Scientologist, he quit the show in 2006, saying that he had been offended by an episode that ridiculed Tom Cruise and other prominent Scientologists. He also had a radio show in New York in the 1990s.
Mr. Hayes had health problems in recent years but had continued to tour and work occasionally in film (he had a role in “Soul Men,” a comedy set for release in November and starring Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac, the comedian who died Saturday).In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Porter, Mr. Hayes’s fellow songwriter, said that his friend was “recuperating from a stroke,” but added that “in the middle of all that he was still trying to have fun” and had even returned to his birthplace in Covington to go fishing.
Mr. Hayes had been married three times previously. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their son, Nana, and 11 other children.
John M. Hubbell contributed reporting from Memphis.
Author's success 'just kind of happened'
By Bonnie Rochman, Staff Writer
Raleigh News & Observer
August 11, 2008
DURHAM - Andrew Britton was changing oil at the Bragtown Shell service station when he began piecing together the story of counterterrorist operative Ryan Kealey.
Kealey is a captain in the U.S. Army's third Special Forces Group, a contract operative with the CIA who has helped save the president's life. He was captivating enough to bring Britton, his creator, a book deal.
Britton was 23 when he landed a contract for his first novel, "The American," a tale of international espionage. "The Assassin" followed, continuing the adventures and escapades of Ryan Kealey and eventually securing a berth on the New York Times bestseller list. In March, his most recent novel, "The Invisible," was published. That same month, he died in his sleep of an aneurysm. Britton was 27.
Britton was born in 1981 in England and spent time in Northern Ireland, where his mother's family still lives. In 1988, his family moved to Michigan. When he was in high school, they relocated to Raleigh. Britton graduated from Leesville Road High School and attended UNC-Chapel Hill. In between, he joined the Army as a combat engineer.
A voracious reader, Britton began writing five years ago after he read a book that didn't live up to its billing. He didn't remember the name or the author, but he did remember his knee-jerk reaction.
I can do that, he thought.
So he tried.
"It wasn't really a conscious decision," he said in a February interview with bookreporter.com. "I found myself wondering if I could do better. When I realized it was all coming together, I knew I had to take it as far as I could, but I never decided I was going to write for a living. That just kind of happened."
Britton would go home after work, fire up his computer and plop down on a green tartan couch his mother gave him when he got out of the Army. Sitting there, he mapped out "The American."
It can be next to impossible to land a literary agent, but Britton had little trouble. He sent a cover letter and the first chapter of "The American" to Nancy Coffey in New York.
Intrigued, she requested the entire manuscript, read it, then signed Britton the next day.
"I thought he was the most natural storyteller I had seen in a long while," Coffey said. "Everything you want a good novel to be was in 'The American.' "
Its protagonist, Kealey, was always on Britton's mind. Britton would scribble plot lines on scraps of paper and jot dialogue on restaurant receipts. He'd peoplewatch, then work what he'd observed into a scene.
But he didn't talk much about his writing. He shunned the media and was so shy that he asked his mother to do interviews for him. She wouldn't.
Though he cringed at the requisite literary meet-and-greets, he did host his first book signing at Raleigh pub Tir Na Nog, where his mother, Annie Nice, is general manager.
He kept a low profile in the Triangle, but nationwide, book reviewers raved, comparing him to famous suspense novelists.
Readers agreed.
"Look out, Tom Clancy, this guy is going to steal your spotlight!," reads one post on amazon.com. Despite his status as a published author, Britton struggled with believing in his talent.
"The biggest challenge is the doubt," he told bookreporter.com. "Even after three books, I still find myself questioning what I'm doing, and I can't help but feel that it slows me down."
If his first novel had not been published, Britton's mother said, he never would have mentioned his writing.
In fact, he didn't share the news with his family until he had a contract in hand from Kensington Books.
Britton was about 11 when he started getting into fiction. It was snowing outside, and he complained to his mother that he had read all the books on his bookshelf.
Read an adult book, she suggested, and handed him a novel by Jack Higgins, the British author of "The Eagle Has Landed."
He was smitten.
After that, "he would nearly eat books," Nice said.
He amassed so many that Nice had to buy two extra bookshelves after he died in order to store the books in her apartment. She still has four boxes in storage.
Writing books for a living is a demanding profession. Publishers want them one after the other, so the buzz doesn't have a chance to die down. Britton was at work on his fourth novel when he died.
In the bookreporter.com interview, Britton told readers that the book opens with a "brutal, shocking event in West Darfur" but kept its ending a secret.
His mother wouldn't divulge details but said the novel will be published.
***
Andrew Britton is survived by his mother, Annie Nice; his brother and sister; his stepfather, Graham Nice; and his girlfriend, Valarie Bullaughey.
ON THE WEB: Andrew Britton's Web site: http://www.andrewbrittonbooks.com/content/index.asp
bonnie.rochman@newsobserver.com or (919) 829-4871
Meet John Edwards
The American Spectator
http://www.spectator.org/
Published 8/11/2008 12:08:30 AM
Published 8/11/2008 12:08:30 AM
In this photo provided by Robert Scoble, former Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards, right, is seen seated next to Rielle Hunter, left, on a plane from New Hampshire to Reno, Nev. Friday, Dec. 29, 2006. Edwards' political action committee paid $100,000 in a four-month span to a newly formed firm run by Hunter, who directed the production of four Web videos. On Friday, Aug. 8, 2008, Edwards admitted to having and affair with Hunter.(AP Photo/Robert Scoble)John Edwards hasn't stopped lying.
After many angry denials that he had sex with that woman, Rielle Hunter, Edwards went on Nightline Friday to confess that yes, he did have an affair with Hunter, and yes, he was caught by National Enquirer reporters while visiting Hunter last month at the Beverly Hilton.
But he was quick to add several caveats:
(A) The affair was brief; it started and ended in 2006. This was when his wife's cancer (which is now terminal) was in remission, he makes a point to emphasize.
(B) Rielle Hunter's baby, who was born in February, is not his. Because of the timing, "it's not possible."
(C) The affair happened after he hired Hunter, who had no real filmmaking experience to speak of, to film behind-the-scenes campaign videos for $114,000.
(D) He knows nothing about any hush-money Hunter has received.
(E) He knows nothing about where the National Enquirer got a picture of him holding a baby in what appears to be a Beverly Hilton hotel room.
All of these assertions are suspect. One is demonstrably false.
Start with (A). If the affair had been over so long ago, why was Edwards still visiting Hunter so recently? His answer is that he was meeting with her to convince her not to talk to the press. But why was he worried about the press?
The mainstream press, shamefully, had totally ignored the story, to the point that this is as much a media scandal as a sex scandal. The New York Times was happy to run vague innuendo about John McCain on its front page in February (the week before Hunter's baby was born) but fastidiously avoided looking into the Edwards affair, which was first reported by the Enquirer in October 2007.
A McCain spokesman declined to comment when I asked him on Friday whether there's a partisan double-standard in how the media handles adultery rumors. Readers can draw their own conclusion.
As for the Enquirer, it hadn't run anything on Edwards since December. If the goal was to keep his name out of the tabloid's pages, it was pretty dumb to risk getting caught in the same place with Hunter.
Why didn't he just pick up the phone? And if the affair was over as early as 2006, why was Hunter still on the Edwards campaign payroll through April 2007?
If his claim about the timing of the affair is false, that of course undermines assertion (B), that Hunter's baby can't possibly be his. Edwards said on Nightline that he's willing to take a paternity test. But read between the lines of the exchange:
WOODRUFF: Have you taken a paternity test?
EDWARDS: I have not, I would welcome participating in a paternity test. Be happy to participate in one. I know that it's not possible that this child could be mine because of the timing of events, so I know it's not possible. Happy to take a paternity test, and would love to see it happen.
WOODRUFF: Are you going to do that soon?
EDWARDS: I'm only one side -- I'm only one side of the test, but I'm happy to participate in one.
WOODRUFF: Has Miss Hunter said, she does not want to do this DNA test?
EDWARDS: I don't know what she has said.
That "I'm only one side" line sort of came out of nowhere, didn't it?
It should have been no surprise to careful viewers of the Nightline interview that Hunter issued a statement through her lawyer Saturday that "Rielle will not participate in DNA testing or any other invasion of her or her daughter's privacy now or in the future." Edwards seemed to be anticipating just such a response from Hunter. Rather than demanding a paternity test to clear his name, he explicitly tossed the ball into Hunter's court.
Hunter's response -- invoking her and her daughter's privacy -- is a little odd if she expects the test to come up negative. How much of an invasion of privacy is it to prove that someone isn't your child's father -- especially when you've already made public assertions about the child's paternity on the record?
THE ASSERTION THAT IS definitely untrue is (C). Sam Stein of the Huffington Post has plenty of evidence that Edwards and Hunter knew each other for seven months before Hunter was hired by the campaign. Emails from those seven months indicate that the affair was going on.
There's no mystery as to why Edwards would lie about that: It would be one thing if Edwards had an affair with someone who happened to work for him, but anyone who donated to the Edwards campaign has to be appalled to learn that Edwards hired this woman because she was his mistress. This moves the scandal beyond mere sex and into the realm of financial corruption.
Speaking of which, ABC News has confirmed that Rielle Hunter has received $15,000 a month to hide from the press in Santa Barbara, California. Her benefactor is Fred Baron, who was national finance chair to the Edwards campaign. Did Baron really drop all that coin without so much as a "don't worry, I'll take care of this" to Edwards?
(Also hiding in Santa Barbara on Baron's dime: Andrew Young, an Edwards campaign aide who has claimed that he is the real father of Hunter's baby. When Young moved to California, he brought along his wife and children. His wife is either really, really easygoing about infidelity, or she knows that her husband is taking the fall for Edwards.)
That brings us to (E), the photo of Edwards holding a baby. It's probably not from the same night that Enquirer reporters confronted Edwards -- the text accompanying the photos never says that it is, and his shirt doesn't match the dress shirt that both he and the Enquirer say he was wearing that night.
Enquirer editor-in-chief David Perel has told the Washington Post that there was at least one other meeting between Hunter and Edwards at the Hilton. Presumably we'll learn more. It's become clear that the Enquirer has been intentionally holding things back and letting them trickle out slowly, the better to sell papers.
In his Nightline interview, Edwards repeatedly derided the National Enquirer, dismissing it as just another supermarket tabloid printing spurious rumors. Now, it's true that the Enquirer doesn't adhere to standard journalistic practices. The tabloid routinely pays sources for information, which can invite mischief if sources are greedy and dishonest.
But at this point in the story, it's no longer the supermarket tabloid that has the big credibility problem -- it's John Edwards.
‘They Wanted More School’
Obama on education reform.
By David Freddoso
National Review Online
http://www.nationalreview.com/
August 11, 2008, 4:00 a.m.
In his book The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama tells of a “youth town hall meeting” he conducted in 2005 at Thornton Township High School, in what he describes as a predominantly black suburb of Chicago. To prepare for the visit by their newly elected and highly popular senator, students there were surveyed about the quality of their education, with the idea that they could present their concerns. Obama writes:
[T]heir number one issue was this: Because the school district couldn’t afford to keep teachers for a full school day, Thornton let out every day at 1:30 in the afternoon. With the abbreviated schedule, there was no time for students to take science lab or foreign language classes.
How come we’re getting shortchanged? they asked me. Seems like nobody even expects us to go to college, they said.
They wanted more school.
May 5, 2007 at a school in New Orleans.(Sean Gardner/Getty Images.)
Senator Obama probably did not know that the average teacher in Thornton Township District earned an impressive $83,000 that year, short days notwithstanding. (The figure does not include administrators, who made much more.) In fact, more than one-quarter of the district’s teachers made more than $100,000 in 2005, according to figures compiled from the Illinois Board of Education by Champion News under the state’s freedom of information laws.
But Obama did at least identify the short school day at Thornton as a problem. Unfortunately, he has been less than audacious about the same problem in the nearby City of Chicago — a place where the teachers’ union that strongly supports him has been shortchanging children for decades in precisely this same way.
The elementary-school day and year in Chicago proper are the shortest of any major U.S. city. It lasts five hours and 45 minutes, and the schools are open just 174 days per year. This is entirely a result of the intransigence of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), a staunch ally of Barack Obama and an early endorser of his presidential candidacy.
The CTU has vigorously resisted all attempts to increase instruction time in Chicago schools. In 2007, the CTU thwarted Mayor Richard M. Daley’s attempt to make teachers teach for full school days. They negotiated a new contract that contained no extra hours but significant pay raises for the next four years. Deborah Lynch, the previous CTU president, agreed in 2003 to a 15-minute increase in the school day (from five and a half hours) in exchange for a seven-day reduction in the school year and large annual raises. The minor concession she made — a net five hours of extra teaching time per year — was used against her in the next teachers’ union election, which she narrowly lost.
Chicago schools are well-funded at 20 percent above the national average, and Chicago teachers are well-paid. Unlike most Americans, they enjoy nearly absolute job security and receive sizable annual pay raises, regardless of economic conditions. And they finish the school day when many other people are headed back to the office after lunch.
At entry level, Chicago teachers earn $43,702, plus $3,059 in pension contributions from the school district, according to CTU’s salary schedules. A starting teacher this year who does nothing to further his own education during the coming summers will be making more than $60,000 by 2012. Those who take graduate-level classes will boost themselves into the $100,000 range by the end of their careers.
Chicago teachers have terrific pay and hours, and summer vacations. Their students, on the other hand, are getting a raw deal. The city’s elementary schools produce underachieving and barely literate high-schoolers. The Chicago Tribune reported in 2005 that Chicago public high schools have a four-year graduation rate of just 54 percent. According to one recent study, only 6 percent of entering freshmen in Chicago public high schools will obtain college degrees by age 25. Only 31.4 percent of Chicago high-school juniors met or exceeded state standards last year on the Prairie State Achievement Examination.
Obama has acquired an undeserved reputation for reform in education because he offers very mild rhetoric about a merit-pay program for teachers. Even here, though, he takes all of the teeth out of the idea by promising his allies that the measure of “merit” will not be determined by objective student achievement — “arbitrary tests” — but by some yet-undiscovered measure to be chosen by teachers’ unions. It is the rough equivalent of President Bush developing a plan for oil prices in conjunction with Saudi sheiks or Exxon executives.
Obama’s merit pay for teachers would also come only in exchange for six-figure teacher salaries, which many states and districts simply cannot afford. True to his ideological liberalism, he reflexively dismisses any ideas such as educational vouchers or tax credits to help Chicago children get a decent education. The unions oppose such policies, and thus so does Obama.
Obama has argued, rightly, that it is “unacceptable in a country as wealthy as ours that children every bit as special as my own children are not getting a decent shot at life.” But he quietly accepts educational failure in Chicago because — as with many issues in his career — he does not waste his political capital on reform when it might cost him something or pit him against his political allies. This is especially true of unions like CTU.
In The Audacity of Hope, he writes of CTU and the other unions whom he counts as allies: “I owe those unions. When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away. I don’t consider this corrupting in any way.”
Is it corrupting? CTU rewarded Obama for his silent loyalty in October 2007 by endorsing him for president. Everyone wins, except for the public-school children in Chicago.
Obama’s approach to education is part of a much broader pattern that characterizes his political career. As with his backing of Chicago’s machine bosses, his sponsorship of legislation and earmarks to help such donors as Tony Rezko, and his support for special-interest subsidies in Washington. Obama participates in or at least remains silent about real problems and systemic corruption that is caused by his own political allies.
Like the other special interests who have invested in Obama, the CTU knows he can be trusted never to seek real reform. He is a reliable partner who does not rock the boat.
— David Freddoso is a National Review Online staff reporter and author of The Case Against Barack Obama.
By David Freddoso
National Review Online
http://www.nationalreview.com/
August 11, 2008, 4:00 a.m.
In his book The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama tells of a “youth town hall meeting” he conducted in 2005 at Thornton Township High School, in what he describes as a predominantly black suburb of Chicago. To prepare for the visit by their newly elected and highly popular senator, students there were surveyed about the quality of their education, with the idea that they could present their concerns. Obama writes:
[T]heir number one issue was this: Because the school district couldn’t afford to keep teachers for a full school day, Thornton let out every day at 1:30 in the afternoon. With the abbreviated schedule, there was no time for students to take science lab or foreign language classes.
How come we’re getting shortchanged? they asked me. Seems like nobody even expects us to go to college, they said.
They wanted more school.
May 5, 2007 at a school in New Orleans.(Sean Gardner/Getty Images.)
Senator Obama probably did not know that the average teacher in Thornton Township District earned an impressive $83,000 that year, short days notwithstanding. (The figure does not include administrators, who made much more.) In fact, more than one-quarter of the district’s teachers made more than $100,000 in 2005, according to figures compiled from the Illinois Board of Education by Champion News under the state’s freedom of information laws.
But Obama did at least identify the short school day at Thornton as a problem. Unfortunately, he has been less than audacious about the same problem in the nearby City of Chicago — a place where the teachers’ union that strongly supports him has been shortchanging children for decades in precisely this same way.
The elementary-school day and year in Chicago proper are the shortest of any major U.S. city. It lasts five hours and 45 minutes, and the schools are open just 174 days per year. This is entirely a result of the intransigence of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), a staunch ally of Barack Obama and an early endorser of his presidential candidacy.
The CTU has vigorously resisted all attempts to increase instruction time in Chicago schools. In 2007, the CTU thwarted Mayor Richard M. Daley’s attempt to make teachers teach for full school days. They negotiated a new contract that contained no extra hours but significant pay raises for the next four years. Deborah Lynch, the previous CTU president, agreed in 2003 to a 15-minute increase in the school day (from five and a half hours) in exchange for a seven-day reduction in the school year and large annual raises. The minor concession she made — a net five hours of extra teaching time per year — was used against her in the next teachers’ union election, which she narrowly lost.
Chicago schools are well-funded at 20 percent above the national average, and Chicago teachers are well-paid. Unlike most Americans, they enjoy nearly absolute job security and receive sizable annual pay raises, regardless of economic conditions. And they finish the school day when many other people are headed back to the office after lunch.
At entry level, Chicago teachers earn $43,702, plus $3,059 in pension contributions from the school district, according to CTU’s salary schedules. A starting teacher this year who does nothing to further his own education during the coming summers will be making more than $60,000 by 2012. Those who take graduate-level classes will boost themselves into the $100,000 range by the end of their careers.
Chicago teachers have terrific pay and hours, and summer vacations. Their students, on the other hand, are getting a raw deal. The city’s elementary schools produce underachieving and barely literate high-schoolers. The Chicago Tribune reported in 2005 that Chicago public high schools have a four-year graduation rate of just 54 percent. According to one recent study, only 6 percent of entering freshmen in Chicago public high schools will obtain college degrees by age 25. Only 31.4 percent of Chicago high-school juniors met or exceeded state standards last year on the Prairie State Achievement Examination.
Obama has acquired an undeserved reputation for reform in education because he offers very mild rhetoric about a merit-pay program for teachers. Even here, though, he takes all of the teeth out of the idea by promising his allies that the measure of “merit” will not be determined by objective student achievement — “arbitrary tests” — but by some yet-undiscovered measure to be chosen by teachers’ unions. It is the rough equivalent of President Bush developing a plan for oil prices in conjunction with Saudi sheiks or Exxon executives.
Obama’s merit pay for teachers would also come only in exchange for six-figure teacher salaries, which many states and districts simply cannot afford. True to his ideological liberalism, he reflexively dismisses any ideas such as educational vouchers or tax credits to help Chicago children get a decent education. The unions oppose such policies, and thus so does Obama.
Obama has argued, rightly, that it is “unacceptable in a country as wealthy as ours that children every bit as special as my own children are not getting a decent shot at life.” But he quietly accepts educational failure in Chicago because — as with many issues in his career — he does not waste his political capital on reform when it might cost him something or pit him against his political allies. This is especially true of unions like CTU.
In The Audacity of Hope, he writes of CTU and the other unions whom he counts as allies: “I owe those unions. When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away. I don’t consider this corrupting in any way.”
Is it corrupting? CTU rewarded Obama for his silent loyalty in October 2007 by endorsing him for president. Everyone wins, except for the public-school children in Chicago.
Obama’s approach to education is part of a much broader pattern that characterizes his political career. As with his backing of Chicago’s machine bosses, his sponsorship of legislation and earmarks to help such donors as Tony Rezko, and his support for special-interest subsidies in Washington. Obama participates in or at least remains silent about real problems and systemic corruption that is caused by his own political allies.
Like the other special interests who have invested in Obama, the CTU knows he can be trusted never to seek real reform. He is a reliable partner who does not rock the boat.
— David Freddoso is a National Review Online staff reporter and author of The Case Against Barack Obama.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Limits of Solzhenitsyn
By NINA KHRUSHCHEVA
The New York Sun
http://www.nysun.com/
August 8, 2008
Russian Premier Vladimir Putin lays a wreath on the coffin of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. (Reuters)
MOSCOW — Prophets, it is said, are supposed to be without honor in their homeland. Yet Moscow has just witnessed the extraordinary sight of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — the dissident and once-exiled author of "The Gulag Archipelago" and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" — receiving what amounts to a state funeral, with Prime Minister Putin acting as chief mourner.
So, even in death, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn will, it seems, remain a force to be reckoned with. But will he be a force in keeping with the liberating vistas of his greatest works?
Sadly, art in Russia is always used to reinforce the narcissism of power. Solzhenitsyn was used in this way twice. The paradox is that, in the Soviet era, his art was used, briefly, as a force for liberation, because Nikita Khrushchev allowed the publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" in order to buttress his anti-Stalin thaw. In today's supposedly free and democratic Russia, however, Solzhenitsyn is idealized for his nationalism and Orthodox messianism, his contempt for the West's supposed decadence, all messages that Mr. Putin's regime proclaims loudly and daily.
The old Soviet iconography has broken down completely; despite heroic efforts, not even Mr. Putin could restore Lenin, Stalin, and the old Soviet pantheon. Yet the Kremlin understands that something is needed to replace them as Russia adapts to its new oil-fueled autocracy. Solzhenitsyn, one of the most famous and heroic dissidents of the Soviet era, now seems certain to become a towering figure in the iconography of Putinism.
Throughout his presidency, Mr. Putin repeatedly invoked Russia as an ancient, powerful, and divinely ordained state going back 1,000 years, a civilization separate from the West, neither communist nor a western liberal democracy. That message echoes Solzhenitsyn's famous commencement address at Harvard in 1978: "Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. For one thousand years, Russia has belonged to such a category."
The body of writer and former Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn lies in state at the Academy of Science in Moscow August 5, 2008.
REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin
For Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of the gulag system enforced by the KGB, the desire to see Russia as a great nation, its eternal spirit superior to the West's vulgar materialism, found him in old age supporting an ex-KGB man, Mr. Putin, who once said that there is no such thing as an ex-KGB man and who sees the Soviet Union's collapse as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of modern times. Despite this, Solzhenitsyn seemed to accept Mr. Putin as a "good dictator," whose silencing of his critics enhances Russia's soul.
It is a sad testament to Russia's current mindset that it is Solzhenitsyn the anti-modernist crank who is being remembered, not Solzhenitsyn the towering foe of Soviet barbarism and mendacity. Today, his writing is seen as buttressing the state, not individual freedom. Works such as "The Red Wheel" series of novels, a tedious account of the end of Imperial Russia and the creation of the USSR, or his last book, written in 2001, entitled "Two Hundred Years Together" on the history of Russian-Jewish coexistence, seems backward, preachy, conservative, unenlightened, at times even anti-Semitic, and smack of Solzhenitsyn's own grim authoritarianism.
Both Mr. Putin and Khrushchev sought to use Solzhenitsyn for their own purposes. Mr. Putin vowed to revive the moral fiber of the Russians, their glory and international respect. To achieve this goal he sought to restore high culture to a position of primacy in Russian life, and to put the press in its (politically) subservient place. Mr. Putin held up Solzhenitsyn as a model for those who stand for the ideal of Great Russia — "an example of genuine devotion and selfless serving of the people, fatherland, and the ideals of freedom, justice, and humanism."
Under Khrushchev, however, Solzhenitsyn's work was used to liberate the country from the grip of Stalinism. In choosing to allow "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" to be published, Khrushchev knew that he was undermining the entire Soviet era up to that point. But, with Khrushchev's overthrow in 1964, Leonid Brezhnev lost no time in restoring orthodoxy and purging books that threatened the Party's reputation. Solzhenitsyn was banned, driven first underground and then into exile.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, visits Alexander Solzhenitsyn, center, in his house in Troitse-Lykovo in the outskirts of Moscow, Tuesday, June 12, 2007. Shown from left in the background are, Solzhenitsyn's sons, Stepan and Yermolai, an unidentified cameraman and Solzhenitsyn's wife, Natalya. While celebrating the holiday of Russia's emergence from the crumbling Soviet Union, Putin honored the Nobel laureate and longtime exile who documented the murderous Soviet prison camp system, with an award for humanitarian achievement and visited the ailing 88-year-old author, who has not appeared in public in recent years.
Yet Khrushchev, isolated and in disgrace, continued to see a bond between himself and the great author. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in his memoir "The Oak and the Calf": "as late as 1966, he [Khrushchev] sent me New Year's greetings — which astonished me because I was on the brink of arrest. Perhaps (in his disgrace) he did not know."
One lesson of the 1989 revolution in Eastern Europe is the value of having truly democratic-minded figures lead the escape from communism. Poland had Lech Walesa, Czechoslovakia Václav Havel. Both kept their countries calm during wrenching transitions. Russia, sadly, had no one with the moral authority to soothe people's passions. Only Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov came near to Messrs. Walesa and Havel in terms of moral authority, but Sakharov was dead by the time communism collapsed, and Solzhenitsyn's ideas were too conservative, too tied to Russian nationalism, for him to become a symbol of democracy in a multinational Soviet Union.
The tragedy of Solzhenitsyn is that, although he played a mighty role in liberating Russia from totalitarianism, he had nothing to say to ordinary Russians after their liberation, except to chastise them. Yet perhaps one day we Russians will escape our false dreams, and when that day comes, the heroic Solzhenitsyn, the Solzhenitsyn who could never surrender or be corrupted, will be restored to us. But it is now that we need that Solzhenitsyn most. For to paraphrase Milton's "Paradise Lost" on the illumination of Hell, "Solzhenitsyn's is no light, but rather darkness visible."
- Ms. Khrushcheva teaches international affairs at the New School in New York, and is the author of "Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics."
The New York Sun
http://www.nysun.com/
August 8, 2008
Russian Premier Vladimir Putin lays a wreath on the coffin of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. (Reuters)MOSCOW — Prophets, it is said, are supposed to be without honor in their homeland. Yet Moscow has just witnessed the extraordinary sight of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — the dissident and once-exiled author of "The Gulag Archipelago" and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" — receiving what amounts to a state funeral, with Prime Minister Putin acting as chief mourner.
So, even in death, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn will, it seems, remain a force to be reckoned with. But will he be a force in keeping with the liberating vistas of his greatest works?
Sadly, art in Russia is always used to reinforce the narcissism of power. Solzhenitsyn was used in this way twice. The paradox is that, in the Soviet era, his art was used, briefly, as a force for liberation, because Nikita Khrushchev allowed the publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" in order to buttress his anti-Stalin thaw. In today's supposedly free and democratic Russia, however, Solzhenitsyn is idealized for his nationalism and Orthodox messianism, his contempt for the West's supposed decadence, all messages that Mr. Putin's regime proclaims loudly and daily.
The old Soviet iconography has broken down completely; despite heroic efforts, not even Mr. Putin could restore Lenin, Stalin, and the old Soviet pantheon. Yet the Kremlin understands that something is needed to replace them as Russia adapts to its new oil-fueled autocracy. Solzhenitsyn, one of the most famous and heroic dissidents of the Soviet era, now seems certain to become a towering figure in the iconography of Putinism.
Throughout his presidency, Mr. Putin repeatedly invoked Russia as an ancient, powerful, and divinely ordained state going back 1,000 years, a civilization separate from the West, neither communist nor a western liberal democracy. That message echoes Solzhenitsyn's famous commencement address at Harvard in 1978: "Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. For one thousand years, Russia has belonged to such a category."
The body of writer and former Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn lies in state at the Academy of Science in Moscow August 5, 2008.REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin
For Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of the gulag system enforced by the KGB, the desire to see Russia as a great nation, its eternal spirit superior to the West's vulgar materialism, found him in old age supporting an ex-KGB man, Mr. Putin, who once said that there is no such thing as an ex-KGB man and who sees the Soviet Union's collapse as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of modern times. Despite this, Solzhenitsyn seemed to accept Mr. Putin as a "good dictator," whose silencing of his critics enhances Russia's soul.
It is a sad testament to Russia's current mindset that it is Solzhenitsyn the anti-modernist crank who is being remembered, not Solzhenitsyn the towering foe of Soviet barbarism and mendacity. Today, his writing is seen as buttressing the state, not individual freedom. Works such as "The Red Wheel" series of novels, a tedious account of the end of Imperial Russia and the creation of the USSR, or his last book, written in 2001, entitled "Two Hundred Years Together" on the history of Russian-Jewish coexistence, seems backward, preachy, conservative, unenlightened, at times even anti-Semitic, and smack of Solzhenitsyn's own grim authoritarianism.
Both Mr. Putin and Khrushchev sought to use Solzhenitsyn for their own purposes. Mr. Putin vowed to revive the moral fiber of the Russians, their glory and international respect. To achieve this goal he sought to restore high culture to a position of primacy in Russian life, and to put the press in its (politically) subservient place. Mr. Putin held up Solzhenitsyn as a model for those who stand for the ideal of Great Russia — "an example of genuine devotion and selfless serving of the people, fatherland, and the ideals of freedom, justice, and humanism."
Under Khrushchev, however, Solzhenitsyn's work was used to liberate the country from the grip of Stalinism. In choosing to allow "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" to be published, Khrushchev knew that he was undermining the entire Soviet era up to that point. But, with Khrushchev's overthrow in 1964, Leonid Brezhnev lost no time in restoring orthodoxy and purging books that threatened the Party's reputation. Solzhenitsyn was banned, driven first underground and then into exile.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, visits Alexander Solzhenitsyn, center, in his house in Troitse-Lykovo in the outskirts of Moscow, Tuesday, June 12, 2007. Shown from left in the background are, Solzhenitsyn's sons, Stepan and Yermolai, an unidentified cameraman and Solzhenitsyn's wife, Natalya. While celebrating the holiday of Russia's emergence from the crumbling Soviet Union, Putin honored the Nobel laureate and longtime exile who documented the murderous Soviet prison camp system, with an award for humanitarian achievement and visited the ailing 88-year-old author, who has not appeared in public in recent years.Yet Khrushchev, isolated and in disgrace, continued to see a bond between himself and the great author. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in his memoir "The Oak and the Calf": "as late as 1966, he [Khrushchev] sent me New Year's greetings — which astonished me because I was on the brink of arrest. Perhaps (in his disgrace) he did not know."
One lesson of the 1989 revolution in Eastern Europe is the value of having truly democratic-minded figures lead the escape from communism. Poland had Lech Walesa, Czechoslovakia Václav Havel. Both kept their countries calm during wrenching transitions. Russia, sadly, had no one with the moral authority to soothe people's passions. Only Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov came near to Messrs. Walesa and Havel in terms of moral authority, but Sakharov was dead by the time communism collapsed, and Solzhenitsyn's ideas were too conservative, too tied to Russian nationalism, for him to become a symbol of democracy in a multinational Soviet Union.
The tragedy of Solzhenitsyn is that, although he played a mighty role in liberating Russia from totalitarianism, he had nothing to say to ordinary Russians after their liberation, except to chastise them. Yet perhaps one day we Russians will escape our false dreams, and when that day comes, the heroic Solzhenitsyn, the Solzhenitsyn who could never surrender or be corrupted, will be restored to us. But it is now that we need that Solzhenitsyn most. For to paraphrase Milton's "Paradise Lost" on the illumination of Hell, "Solzhenitsyn's is no light, but rather darkness visible."
- Ms. Khrushcheva teaches international affairs at the New School in New York, and is the author of "Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics."
The death knell of what we need to know
By Debra J. Saunders
The San Fransisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/columns/
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Not for the first time, The San Fransisco Chronicle is offering buyouts to a large number of workers -- at least 125 people for a paper that employs around 1,680 souls. Other industries have been through this drill, too. Longtime staff members weigh whether they can keep careers in an ailing, perhaps dying, industry.
I've seen some excellent professionals walk out these doors. It's heartbreaking, even though we don't yet now how many staff reductions might affect the gathering of news.
The New York Times and The Wall Street Jounal are displayed at a newsstand on Monday, July 28, 2008 in New York. News Corp. says fiscal fourth-quarter earnings jumped 27 percent, Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2008, on profit from the sale of assets and higher operating earnings in its film, cable networks and newspaper units. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
Now I gird myself for the next wave of woe -- as radio talk show hosts and other critics crow, as they do whenever newspapers buy out workers or suffer sharp circulation declines. And there will be e-mails from fans of my column, who are exultant at the decline of newspapers. Do they understand that if this keeps up, then I may not be around to write the columns they like, not to mention respond to their e-mails?
Apparently not, as many volunteer the information that they no longer buy a newspaper -- and are proud of that fact.
Conservatives like to think that newspapers are hurting because the liberal views they present have driven away readers. They aren't aware of liberals who believe newspapers are hurting because the news media are too corporate or too conservative. And then there's the laptop generation, whose members believe newspapers deserve to fail because they are, well, dinosaurs, in a technologically driven world. And didn't CDs give way to iPods? Why not dispense with paper editions -- they chime -- and publish online only? A brilliant idea, if you're looking for an even faster way for papers to lose money and shrink further. Online advertising revenues, while growing, still are but a fraction of print advertising revenues, even today.
Paperless is great -- if you want a two-story front page that doesn't break news, but only follows it. If America goes on a diet of free news only, eventually readers will get what they paid for -- nothing.
Sure, newspaper publishers haven't helped by giving away their product online -- except in their defense, to not do so is to hand the online market (and its revenue) to a rival with a robust Internet presence. But no news medium that depends on ad revenues to sustain its newsgathering efforts can compete with free ads.
The industry's problems, of course, lend credibility to the views of people who gleefully root for newspapers to fail. I've met smart people who vote who happily announce that they are too busy to read a newspaper. The problem is, they don't know what they don't know.
Some believe that if newspapers go under, then the Internet will provide.
In the case of conservatives, they often don't notice that those right-leaning sites, which they visit daily, provide them with fodder by linking to stories reported and written by newspaper reporters. While they are trashing newspapers, they're reading newspaper stories and citing them to bolster their arguments. They may not notice if, over time, as newspapers downsize and even close, websites will be linking to fewer reliable news reports.
And if they don't buy a paper, they won't see that a media, which at times got too rough with President Bush and the Republican Congress, can be just as tough on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. And when you only get your news from co-believers, as many of the left and right try to do, you miss things you need to know.
Conservatives rooting for newspapers' demise should be careful what they wish for. Yes, fewer reporters mean fewer biased stories about lesbian immigrants fighting an unsympathetic establishment. But there also won't be as many stories about sanctuary city policies gone bad, the latest zany law out of San Francisco City Hall or the growing bite that public employee pension systems are taking out of city and county services. They don't understand that Fox News and talk radio aren't going to report on stories that require local beat reporting and time-consuming and expensive investigation.
And there won't be as many nonideological stories -- about crimes or zoning or state spending -- until what was once a solvable problem festers, unreported, into a front-page disaster.
By then, there may not be a front page.
The San Fransisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/columns/
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Not for the first time, The San Fransisco Chronicle is offering buyouts to a large number of workers -- at least 125 people for a paper that employs around 1,680 souls. Other industries have been through this drill, too. Longtime staff members weigh whether they can keep careers in an ailing, perhaps dying, industry.
I've seen some excellent professionals walk out these doors. It's heartbreaking, even though we don't yet now how many staff reductions might affect the gathering of news.
The New York Times and The Wall Street Jounal are displayed at a newsstand on Monday, July 28, 2008 in New York. News Corp. says fiscal fourth-quarter earnings jumped 27 percent, Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2008, on profit from the sale of assets and higher operating earnings in its film, cable networks and newspaper units. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
Now I gird myself for the next wave of woe -- as radio talk show hosts and other critics crow, as they do whenever newspapers buy out workers or suffer sharp circulation declines. And there will be e-mails from fans of my column, who are exultant at the decline of newspapers. Do they understand that if this keeps up, then I may not be around to write the columns they like, not to mention respond to their e-mails?
Apparently not, as many volunteer the information that they no longer buy a newspaper -- and are proud of that fact.
Conservatives like to think that newspapers are hurting because the liberal views they present have driven away readers. They aren't aware of liberals who believe newspapers are hurting because the news media are too corporate or too conservative. And then there's the laptop generation, whose members believe newspapers deserve to fail because they are, well, dinosaurs, in a technologically driven world. And didn't CDs give way to iPods? Why not dispense with paper editions -- they chime -- and publish online only? A brilliant idea, if you're looking for an even faster way for papers to lose money and shrink further. Online advertising revenues, while growing, still are but a fraction of print advertising revenues, even today.
Paperless is great -- if you want a two-story front page that doesn't break news, but only follows it. If America goes on a diet of free news only, eventually readers will get what they paid for -- nothing.
Sure, newspaper publishers haven't helped by giving away their product online -- except in their defense, to not do so is to hand the online market (and its revenue) to a rival with a robust Internet presence. But no news medium that depends on ad revenues to sustain its newsgathering efforts can compete with free ads.
The industry's problems, of course, lend credibility to the views of people who gleefully root for newspapers to fail. I've met smart people who vote who happily announce that they are too busy to read a newspaper. The problem is, they don't know what they don't know.
Some believe that if newspapers go under, then the Internet will provide.
In the case of conservatives, they often don't notice that those right-leaning sites, which they visit daily, provide them with fodder by linking to stories reported and written by newspaper reporters. While they are trashing newspapers, they're reading newspaper stories and citing them to bolster their arguments. They may not notice if, over time, as newspapers downsize and even close, websites will be linking to fewer reliable news reports.
And if they don't buy a paper, they won't see that a media, which at times got too rough with President Bush and the Republican Congress, can be just as tough on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. And when you only get your news from co-believers, as many of the left and right try to do, you miss things you need to know.
Conservatives rooting for newspapers' demise should be careful what they wish for. Yes, fewer reporters mean fewer biased stories about lesbian immigrants fighting an unsympathetic establishment. But there also won't be as many stories about sanctuary city policies gone bad, the latest zany law out of San Francisco City Hall or the growing bite that public employee pension systems are taking out of city and county services. They don't understand that Fox News and talk radio aren't going to report on stories that require local beat reporting and time-consuming and expensive investigation.
And there won't be as many nonideological stories -- about crimes or zoning or state spending -- until what was once a solvable problem festers, unreported, into a front-page disaster.
By then, there may not be a front page.
Keeping It Rielle
By MAUREEN DOWD
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
August 10, 2008
WASHINGTON- John Edwards’s confession was a little bit breathtaking.
Not the sex stuff. That happens here all the time.
And certainly not covering up the sex stuff. That happens here all the time, too. First people uncover; then they cover up. Nobody’s ever had sex with that woman until, suddenly, they have.
The stunning admission Edwards made to ABC’s Bob Woodruff, and in a written statement from Chapel Hill on Friday afternoon, was that he’s a narcissist.
He admitted that wallowing in “self-focus” out on the trail and thinking you’re “special” can result in a solipsism that “leads you to believe you can do whatever you want, you’re invincible and there’ll be no consequences.”
Auto-psychoanalysis by the perp. That’s really rich. When Bill Clinton acknowledged an affair, after equally adamant denials, he simply went into an old-fashioned spiral of penitence, his allegedly long, dark night of his alleged soul.
Even in confessing to preening, Edwards was preening. His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic? Given his diagnosis, I’m sure his H.M.O. would pay.
The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologically correct.
So narcissist walks into a New York bar and meets a legendarily wacky former Gotham party girl — whose ’80s exploits were chronicled in a novel by her former boyfriend Jay McInerney because the behavior of her and her friends “intrigued and appalled me.” When you appall Jay McInerney, you know you’re in trouble.
Webcastr.com Breaks John Edwards/Rielle Hunter Videos on the Web.
(PRNewsFoto/Webcastr.com)
Photo Tools
The president manqué gives Rielle Hunter, formerly Lisa Druck, more than $114,000 to shoot vain little videos for his Web site (even though she’s a neophyte), one of which is scored with the song “True Reflections” about the Narcissus pool, which goes: “When you look into a mirror, do you like what’s looking at you? Now that you’ve seen your true reflections, what on earth are you gonna do?”
He has an affair with Hunter, while he’s honing his speech on the imperative to “live in a moral, honest, just America.” A married former aide says he’s the father when she gets pregnant, even though she’s telling people Edwards is the dad. And one of his campaign donors pays off Hunter to get her resettled with the baby out of North Carolina.
But the Breck Girl wants a gold star for the fact that he sent his marriage into remission when his wife was in remission. That’s special.
In his statement, he bleats: “You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself. I have been stripped bare.” Isn’t stripping bare how he got into this mess?
It isn’t like we didn’t know that the son of a millworker was a little enraptured by himself, radiating self-love from his smile and his man-in-a-hurry airs and the notorious $800 bill for a pair of haircuts and his two-minute YouTube hair primping to the tune of “I Feel Pretty.”
Certain men assume that power confers sexual privilege. And in American politics, there is an eternal disjunction between character and achievement. Sinners do good things, saints do bad things.
Still, it’s bizarre the way these pols spend millions getting their faces plastered everywhere and then think they can do something in secret. “Yeah, I didn’t think anyone would ever know about it, I didn’t,” Edwards said.
In one of the Web films Hunter directed, he actually flirts with the blonde, laughingly telling her that his address on morality is “a great speech” and complaining, “Why don’t you hear me give it live?”
In this image made from video and provided by Chuck Olsen, Reille Hunter films John Edwards after a rally in New Hampshire on Friday, Dec. 29, 2006. Edwards' political action committee paid $100,000 in a four-month span to a newly formed firm run by Hunter, who directed the production of four Web videos. On Friday, Aug. 8, 2008, Edwards admitted to having and affair with Hunter.
(AP Photo/Chuck Olsen)
For some reason, super-strivers have a need to sell what is secretly weakest about themselves, as if they yearn for unmasking. Edwards’s decency and concern for the weak in society — except for his own wife. Bill Clinton’s intellect and love of community — except for his stupidity and destructiveness about Monica. Bush the Younger’s jocular, I’m-in-charge self-confidence — except for turning over his presidency, as no president ever has, to his Veep. Eliot Spitzer’s crusade for truth, justice and the American way — except at home.
In the Hunter video titled “Plane Truths,” Edwards is relaxing on his plane, telling the out-of-frame director: “I’ve come to the personal conclusion that I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am, but I don’t know what the result of that will be. But for me personally, I’d rather be successful or unsuccessful based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll that you put up in front of audiences.” Ken couldn’t have said it better.
Back in 2002, Edwards sent me a Ken doll dressed in bathing trunks, Rio de Janeiro Ken, with a teasing note, because he didn’t like my reference to him as a Ken doll in a column.
In retrospect, the comparison was not fair — to Ken.
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
August 10, 2008
WASHINGTON- John Edwards’s confession was a little bit breathtaking.Not the sex stuff. That happens here all the time.
And certainly not covering up the sex stuff. That happens here all the time, too. First people uncover; then they cover up. Nobody’s ever had sex with that woman until, suddenly, they have.
The stunning admission Edwards made to ABC’s Bob Woodruff, and in a written statement from Chapel Hill on Friday afternoon, was that he’s a narcissist.
He admitted that wallowing in “self-focus” out on the trail and thinking you’re “special” can result in a solipsism that “leads you to believe you can do whatever you want, you’re invincible and there’ll be no consequences.”
Auto-psychoanalysis by the perp. That’s really rich. When Bill Clinton acknowledged an affair, after equally adamant denials, he simply went into an old-fashioned spiral of penitence, his allegedly long, dark night of his alleged soul.
Even in confessing to preening, Edwards was preening. His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic? Given his diagnosis, I’m sure his H.M.O. would pay.
The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologically correct.
So narcissist walks into a New York bar and meets a legendarily wacky former Gotham party girl — whose ’80s exploits were chronicled in a novel by her former boyfriend Jay McInerney because the behavior of her and her friends “intrigued and appalled me.” When you appall Jay McInerney, you know you’re in trouble.
Webcastr.com Breaks John Edwards/Rielle Hunter Videos on the Web.
(PRNewsFoto/Webcastr.com)
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The president manqué gives Rielle Hunter, formerly Lisa Druck, more than $114,000 to shoot vain little videos for his Web site (even though she’s a neophyte), one of which is scored with the song “True Reflections” about the Narcissus pool, which goes: “When you look into a mirror, do you like what’s looking at you? Now that you’ve seen your true reflections, what on earth are you gonna do?”
He has an affair with Hunter, while he’s honing his speech on the imperative to “live in a moral, honest, just America.” A married former aide says he’s the father when she gets pregnant, even though she’s telling people Edwards is the dad. And one of his campaign donors pays off Hunter to get her resettled with the baby out of North Carolina.
But the Breck Girl wants a gold star for the fact that he sent his marriage into remission when his wife was in remission. That’s special.
In his statement, he bleats: “You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself. I have been stripped bare.” Isn’t stripping bare how he got into this mess?
It isn’t like we didn’t know that the son of a millworker was a little enraptured by himself, radiating self-love from his smile and his man-in-a-hurry airs and the notorious $800 bill for a pair of haircuts and his two-minute YouTube hair primping to the tune of “I Feel Pretty.”
Certain men assume that power confers sexual privilege. And in American politics, there is an eternal disjunction between character and achievement. Sinners do good things, saints do bad things.
Still, it’s bizarre the way these pols spend millions getting their faces plastered everywhere and then think they can do something in secret. “Yeah, I didn’t think anyone would ever know about it, I didn’t,” Edwards said.
In one of the Web films Hunter directed, he actually flirts with the blonde, laughingly telling her that his address on morality is “a great speech” and complaining, “Why don’t you hear me give it live?”
In this image made from video and provided by Chuck Olsen, Reille Hunter films John Edwards after a rally in New Hampshire on Friday, Dec. 29, 2006. Edwards' political action committee paid $100,000 in a four-month span to a newly formed firm run by Hunter, who directed the production of four Web videos. On Friday, Aug. 8, 2008, Edwards admitted to having and affair with Hunter.(AP Photo/Chuck Olsen)
For some reason, super-strivers have a need to sell what is secretly weakest about themselves, as if they yearn for unmasking. Edwards’s decency and concern for the weak in society — except for his own wife. Bill Clinton’s intellect and love of community — except for his stupidity and destructiveness about Monica. Bush the Younger’s jocular, I’m-in-charge self-confidence — except for turning over his presidency, as no president ever has, to his Veep. Eliot Spitzer’s crusade for truth, justice and the American way — except at home.
In the Hunter video titled “Plane Truths,” Edwards is relaxing on his plane, telling the out-of-frame director: “I’ve come to the personal conclusion that I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am, but I don’t know what the result of that will be. But for me personally, I’d rather be successful or unsuccessful based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll that you put up in front of audiences.” Ken couldn’t have said it better.
Back in 2002, Edwards sent me a Ken doll dressed in bathing trunks, Rio de Janeiro Ken, with a teasing note, because he didn’t like my reference to him as a Ken doll in a column.
In retrospect, the comparison was not fair — to Ken.
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Murderer Medellin Executed At Last—No Thanks To Bush Administration
By Brenda Walker
http://www.vdare.com/
August 06, 2008
Brenda Walker Archive
With the long-postponed August 5 execution of illegal alien Mexican Jose Medellin for the brutal 1993 gang-rape and murder of two Houston girls, Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16, in 1993, a sense of relief has passed throughout Texas and beyond.
Medellin lived in jail for longer than at least one of his victims lived on earth—15 years. Too long, if you believe that justice delayed is justice denied.
Jose Medellin
Not only was Medellin a depraved gangmember of the worst kind, he had become a poster Mexican martyr—revealing much that is wrong with the White House, where the Mexichurian President took the side of the killer and worked against the families of the murdered girls. Bush leaned hard on the Texas courts to consider the objection of the International Court of Justice—that Medellin's arrest did not include informing him of his right to contact the Mexican Consulate under the Vienna Convention—yet another instance of his energetic pursuit of the well-being of Mexicans to the detriment of American citizens.
Bush's meddling was a clear violation of the separation of powers, one of the basic principles of our system of government. As Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX, and a former judge) remarked on CNN (Oct 10, 2007), "...under the separation of powers, the president hasn't—does not have any authority over any court to tell them what to do. And the highest court in Texas recently ruled, in all respect to the president, that he has no jurisdiction in this matter at all."
The Supreme Court agreed with Rep. Poe in March. It ruled in a 6-3 vote that US State courts are bound neither by the President's whim nor the dictates of European jurists. (Read Chief Justice Roberts' majority opinion.)
Back in Bush's pre-globalist days, when he was Governor of Texas, he presided over the execution of 152 inmates during six years. But as President, he has acted more like a Citizen of the World than Americans' #1 advocate, which he has never been.
Texans, from Governor Rick Perry to average folk, remained unimpressed throughout with the demands of the self-important World Court. As Sam Houston remarked: "Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from what source it may."
Bush dispatched some Washington lawyers to convince the stubborn Texans that the big picture of international relations required an attitude adjustment. No deal.
“But Gov. Perry remains resolute. Spokesman Robert Black admits the federal government has ‘a big sort of dilemma’ because the United States as a whole is obligated to abide by international treaty obligations, but individual states are not.
“Still, ‘the governor isn't feeling any pressure on this simply because he is here to uphold the laws of the state of Texas and not some foreign court in Europe,’ he said.
" ‘Two young girls were brutally gang raped and murdered, and the governor is not willing to say that any foreign national is going to get any additional protection under the law than a Texas citizen would,’ Mr. Black said.” [Federal officials try to block Texas execution to allow review of case, By Diane Jennings, Dallas Morning News, July 28, 2008]
The snooty scribblers at the Wall Street Journal [Looming Texas Execution Gets Spotlight, By Ashby Jones, August 1, 2008] typified the elite, international relations view:
"The MedellÃn case has become about more than whether a Mexican national is executed. To some, the case highlights the enduring strength of the U.S.'s federalist system; that states do not have to yield to interpretations of law made by foreign courts. To others, the case represents a chance for the U.S. to burnish its credibility in the international community or, alternatively, to risk the diminution of its citizens' rights overseas. To others still, the case is a referendum on the death penalty. "
The WSJ noted every aspect of the case but one—that it was a crime of the most terrible violence against two real victims, who are no longer alive.
Furthermore, had the Supreme Court not swatted down the World Court busybodies and upheld American sovereignty, the case would have been a new extreme for globalist legal intrusion and a very bad precedent. As Richard Samp of the Washington Legal Foundation observed on CNN August 4, "The World Court has never before this case tried to interfere with an individual criminal case going on within some country around the world, and there's no reason under United States law to make this the first case."
The word should go out to Mexico and other permissive backwaters: if you sodomize and strangle a girl in Texas—Medellin admitted killing one of the girls with his shoelace—you will eventually face the needle and be put down like a mad dog.
The Attorney General of Texas, Greg Abbott, issued a media advisory July 29 to remind people of the grim facts of the case:
"Subsequent boastful statements of Medellin and other gang members revealed that what ensued was a brutal gang rape of both girls by the gang members. After the assault, Medellin, Raul, Efrain, and Peter met at Peter's house where he lived with his brother and sister-in-law, Joe and Christina Cantu, to brag about their exploits. Christina noticed that Raul was bleeding and that Efrain had blood on his shirt. She asked the group what had occurred and Medellin responded that they ‘had fun’ and that their exploits would be seen on the television news. Medellin was hyper, giggling, and laughing. He boasted to Joe and Christina that the group had met two girls and had sex with them. He also told the couple that the two girls had been talking to them and that he punched one of the girls because she had started screaming after he grabbed her. "
One of the convicted killers, Derrick O'Brien, [VDARE.com note: Picture here.] was executed in 2006. He at least had the decency to make what sounded like a sincere apology to the Ertman and Pena families.
"‘I am sorry. I have always been sorry,’ O'Brien said as he lay on the gurney, waiting for the lethal flow of drugs to begin. ‘It is the worst mistake that I ever made in my whole life. Not because I am here, but because of what I did. I hurt a lot of people—you and my family.’” [O'Brien executed for rape-murders, Houston Chronicle, July 12, 2006]
Remorse for a heinous crime doesn't help the families, who can never be made whole. But at least we in the public are reassured somehow that the recognition of right and wrong has not been completely obliterated in modern society, even in prison.
In comparison, see the remarks of a death-row do-gooder in a letter to the editor (responding to an editorial, Gov. Perry should halt this execution) in the Dallas Morning News, August 3, 2008, This man changed my mind:
"I have met José MedellÃn. I wrote him. I have run a death row ministry in Texas for years.
“He has never shown any remorse. He has proudly confessed. I used to be opposed to the death penalty until I met José.
“Where is your respect and sympathy for the victims and their families? You have not even mentioned the two girls this sick creep murdered, or their families.
“José MedellÃn found it convenient to be a Mexican citizen when he found out it could save him. What a disgrace to all the good, honest, law-abiding Mexicans.
“Execute him already. The girls, along with their families, deserve justice."
Michael Denson, founder, Catholic Death Row Ministry, Frisco
That's quite a reversal coming from someone dedicated to ministering among prisoners.
And Denson was correct that the case had been dragged out for far too long already. A Texas Department of Criminal Justice fact sheet reports that the average length of stay prior to execution is 10.26 years. So Medellin overstayed his welcome by half.
Meanwhile in gentle Mexico (with its #6 world ranking in murders per capita and general uptick in failing state syndrome caused by criminal drug cartels that act like armies), the official view is disapproval of capital punishment. Particularly so when members of its tribe are threatened with justice for their brutal crimes in the United States.
However, in a huge anti-crime march in Mexico City attended by a quarter million unhappy citizens in 2004, many carried banners demanding the death penalty. A 2007 AP-Ipsos poll in Mexico found 71 percent supported life termination as a punishment choice. Perhaps the anti-execution viewpoint is an elite opinion only—and one useful against the hated Americans.
At any rate, Mexicans need to hear the message that American laws continue to rule in the United States despite the objection to sovereignty from internationalist one-worlders and Raza Marxicans. That intent cannot be repeated often enough.
The final curtain for Medellin did not come down until the usual last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court, which slowed the wheels of justice for a few more hours.
But finally the execution was carried out—to the satisfaction of still-grieving father Adolfo Pena who attended the execution and remarked, "We feel relieved. Fifteen years is a long time coming." (Mexican-born inmate executed for deaths of 2 Houston teenagers, KLTV, Tyler Texas)
The other father, Randy Ertman, has never minced words about the case, the politics slowing justice or his opinion of Mexico (Texas executes Mexican-born killer, Google AP, August 5, 2008).
“Randy Ertman, who lost his daughter in the attack, said Medellin's supporters were misguided.
" ‘Mexico has a big yard down there full of filth and murders and gangs and drug cartels and they're not mentioning anything about that,’ he said. ‘There's where they need to start their work.’"
There's no argument with that sentiment. But it is a hard-won wisdom—one that no parent should have to learn in such a cruel way.
- Brenda Walker (email her) lives in Northern California and publishes two websites, LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org. Even though Phil Sheridan said, "if I owned Hell and Texas, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell”, she thinks Texas looks pretty good right now.
http://www.vdare.com/
August 06, 2008
Brenda Walker Archive
With the long-postponed August 5 execution of illegal alien Mexican Jose Medellin for the brutal 1993 gang-rape and murder of two Houston girls, Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16, in 1993, a sense of relief has passed throughout Texas and beyond.
Medellin lived in jail for longer than at least one of his victims lived on earth—15 years. Too long, if you believe that justice delayed is justice denied.
Jose MedellinNot only was Medellin a depraved gangmember of the worst kind, he had become a poster Mexican martyr—revealing much that is wrong with the White House, where the Mexichurian President took the side of the killer and worked against the families of the murdered girls. Bush leaned hard on the Texas courts to consider the objection of the International Court of Justice—that Medellin's arrest did not include informing him of his right to contact the Mexican Consulate under the Vienna Convention—yet another instance of his energetic pursuit of the well-being of Mexicans to the detriment of American citizens.
Bush's meddling was a clear violation of the separation of powers, one of the basic principles of our system of government. As Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX, and a former judge) remarked on CNN (Oct 10, 2007), "...under the separation of powers, the president hasn't—does not have any authority over any court to tell them what to do. And the highest court in Texas recently ruled, in all respect to the president, that he has no jurisdiction in this matter at all."
The Supreme Court agreed with Rep. Poe in March. It ruled in a 6-3 vote that US State courts are bound neither by the President's whim nor the dictates of European jurists. (Read Chief Justice Roberts' majority opinion.)
Back in Bush's pre-globalist days, when he was Governor of Texas, he presided over the execution of 152 inmates during six years. But as President, he has acted more like a Citizen of the World than Americans' #1 advocate, which he has never been.
Texans, from Governor Rick Perry to average folk, remained unimpressed throughout with the demands of the self-important World Court. As Sam Houston remarked: "Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from what source it may."
Bush dispatched some Washington lawyers to convince the stubborn Texans that the big picture of international relations required an attitude adjustment. No deal.
“But Gov. Perry remains resolute. Spokesman Robert Black admits the federal government has ‘a big sort of dilemma’ because the United States as a whole is obligated to abide by international treaty obligations, but individual states are not.
“Still, ‘the governor isn't feeling any pressure on this simply because he is here to uphold the laws of the state of Texas and not some foreign court in Europe,’ he said.
" ‘Two young girls were brutally gang raped and murdered, and the governor is not willing to say that any foreign national is going to get any additional protection under the law than a Texas citizen would,’ Mr. Black said.” [Federal officials try to block Texas execution to allow review of case, By Diane Jennings, Dallas Morning News, July 28, 2008]
The snooty scribblers at the Wall Street Journal [Looming Texas Execution Gets Spotlight, By Ashby Jones, August 1, 2008] typified the elite, international relations view:
"The MedellÃn case has become about more than whether a Mexican national is executed. To some, the case highlights the enduring strength of the U.S.'s federalist system; that states do not have to yield to interpretations of law made by foreign courts. To others, the case represents a chance for the U.S. to burnish its credibility in the international community or, alternatively, to risk the diminution of its citizens' rights overseas. To others still, the case is a referendum on the death penalty. "
The WSJ noted every aspect of the case but one—that it was a crime of the most terrible violence against two real victims, who are no longer alive.
Furthermore, had the Supreme Court not swatted down the World Court busybodies and upheld American sovereignty, the case would have been a new extreme for globalist legal intrusion and a very bad precedent. As Richard Samp of the Washington Legal Foundation observed on CNN August 4, "The World Court has never before this case tried to interfere with an individual criminal case going on within some country around the world, and there's no reason under United States law to make this the first case."
The word should go out to Mexico and other permissive backwaters: if you sodomize and strangle a girl in Texas—Medellin admitted killing one of the girls with his shoelace—you will eventually face the needle and be put down like a mad dog.
The Attorney General of Texas, Greg Abbott, issued a media advisory July 29 to remind people of the grim facts of the case:
"Subsequent boastful statements of Medellin and other gang members revealed that what ensued was a brutal gang rape of both girls by the gang members. After the assault, Medellin, Raul, Efrain, and Peter met at Peter's house where he lived with his brother and sister-in-law, Joe and Christina Cantu, to brag about their exploits. Christina noticed that Raul was bleeding and that Efrain had blood on his shirt. She asked the group what had occurred and Medellin responded that they ‘had fun’ and that their exploits would be seen on the television news. Medellin was hyper, giggling, and laughing. He boasted to Joe and Christina that the group had met two girls and had sex with them. He also told the couple that the two girls had been talking to them and that he punched one of the girls because she had started screaming after he grabbed her. "
One of the convicted killers, Derrick O'Brien, [VDARE.com note: Picture here.] was executed in 2006. He at least had the decency to make what sounded like a sincere apology to the Ertman and Pena families.
"‘I am sorry. I have always been sorry,’ O'Brien said as he lay on the gurney, waiting for the lethal flow of drugs to begin. ‘It is the worst mistake that I ever made in my whole life. Not because I am here, but because of what I did. I hurt a lot of people—you and my family.’” [O'Brien executed for rape-murders, Houston Chronicle, July 12, 2006]
Remorse for a heinous crime doesn't help the families, who can never be made whole. But at least we in the public are reassured somehow that the recognition of right and wrong has not been completely obliterated in modern society, even in prison.
In comparison, see the remarks of a death-row do-gooder in a letter to the editor (responding to an editorial, Gov. Perry should halt this execution) in the Dallas Morning News, August 3, 2008, This man changed my mind:
"I have met José MedellÃn. I wrote him. I have run a death row ministry in Texas for years.
“He has never shown any remorse. He has proudly confessed. I used to be opposed to the death penalty until I met José.
“Where is your respect and sympathy for the victims and their families? You have not even mentioned the two girls this sick creep murdered, or their families.
“José MedellÃn found it convenient to be a Mexican citizen when he found out it could save him. What a disgrace to all the good, honest, law-abiding Mexicans.
“Execute him already. The girls, along with their families, deserve justice."
Michael Denson, founder, Catholic Death Row Ministry, Frisco
That's quite a reversal coming from someone dedicated to ministering among prisoners.
And Denson was correct that the case had been dragged out for far too long already. A Texas Department of Criminal Justice fact sheet reports that the average length of stay prior to execution is 10.26 years. So Medellin overstayed his welcome by half.
Meanwhile in gentle Mexico (with its #6 world ranking in murders per capita and general uptick in failing state syndrome caused by criminal drug cartels that act like armies), the official view is disapproval of capital punishment. Particularly so when members of its tribe are threatened with justice for their brutal crimes in the United States.
However, in a huge anti-crime march in Mexico City attended by a quarter million unhappy citizens in 2004, many carried banners demanding the death penalty. A 2007 AP-Ipsos poll in Mexico found 71 percent supported life termination as a punishment choice. Perhaps the anti-execution viewpoint is an elite opinion only—and one useful against the hated Americans.
At any rate, Mexicans need to hear the message that American laws continue to rule in the United States despite the objection to sovereignty from internationalist one-worlders and Raza Marxicans. That intent cannot be repeated often enough.
The final curtain for Medellin did not come down until the usual last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court, which slowed the wheels of justice for a few more hours.
But finally the execution was carried out—to the satisfaction of still-grieving father Adolfo Pena who attended the execution and remarked, "We feel relieved. Fifteen years is a long time coming." (Mexican-born inmate executed for deaths of 2 Houston teenagers, KLTV, Tyler Texas)
The other father, Randy Ertman, has never minced words about the case, the politics slowing justice or his opinion of Mexico (Texas executes Mexican-born killer, Google AP, August 5, 2008).
“Randy Ertman, who lost his daughter in the attack, said Medellin's supporters were misguided.
" ‘Mexico has a big yard down there full of filth and murders and gangs and drug cartels and they're not mentioning anything about that,’ he said. ‘There's where they need to start their work.’"
There's no argument with that sentiment. But it is a hard-won wisdom—one that no parent should have to learn in such a cruel way.
- Brenda Walker (email her) lives in Northern California and publishes two websites, LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org. Even though Phil Sheridan said, "if I owned Hell and Texas, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell”, she thinks Texas looks pretty good right now.
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