Umberto Eco: God isn't Big Enough For Some People

From The UK Telegraph:
(Filed: 27/11/2005)

We are now approaching the critical time of the year for shops and supermarkets: the month before Christmas is the four weeks when stores of all kinds sell their products fastest. Father Christmas means one thing to children: presents. He has no connection with the original St Nicholas, who performed a miracle in providing dowries for three poor sisters, thereby enabling them to marry and escape a life of prostitution.

Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms - yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious - to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest.

And we need to justify our lives to ourselves and to other people. Money is an instrument. It is not a value - but we need values as well as instruments, ends as well as means. The great problem faced by human beings is finding a way to accept the fact that each of us will die.

Money can do a lot of things - but it cannot help reconcile you to your own death. It can sometimes help you postpone your own death: a man who can spend a million pounds on personal physicians will usually live longer than someone who cannot. But he can't make himself live much longer than the average life-span of affluent people in the developed world.

And if you believe in money alone, then sooner or later, you discover money's great limitation: it is unable to justify the fact that you are a mortal animal. Indeed, the more you try escape that fact, the more you are forced to realise that your possessions can't make sense of your death.

It is the role of religion to provide that justification. Religions are systems of belief that enable human beings to justify their existence and which reconcile us to death. We in Europe have faced a fading of organised religion in recent years. Faith in the Christian churches has been declining.

The ideologies such as communism that promised to supplant religion have failed in spectacular and very public fashion. So we're all still looking for something that will reconcile each of us to the inevitability of our own death.

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

The "death of God", or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church -- from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.

It is amazing how many people take that book literally, and think it is true. Admittedly, Dan Brown, its author, has created a legion of zealous followers who believe that Jesus wasn't crucified: he married Mary Magdalene, became the King of France, and started his own version of the order of Freemasons. Many of the people who now go to the Louvre are there only to look at the Mona Lisa, solely and simply because it is at the centre of Dan Brown's book.

The pianist Arthur Rubinstein was once asked if he believed in God. He said: "No. I don't believe in God. I believe in something greater." Our culture suffers from the same inflationary tendency. The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes.

As a child of the Enlightenment, and a believer in the Enlightenment values of truth, open inquiry, and freedom, I am depressed by that tendency. This is not just because of the association between the occult and fascism and Nazism - although that association was very strong. Himmler and many of Hitler's henchmen were devotees of the most infantile occult fantasies.

The same was true of some of the fascist gurus in Italy - Julius Evola is one example - who continue to fascinate the neo-fascists in my country. And today, if you browse the shelves of any bookshop specialising in the occult, you will find not only the usual tomes on the Templars, Rosicrucians, pseudo-Kabbalists, and of course The Da Vinci Code, but also anti-semitic tracts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I was raised as a Catholic, and although I have abandoned the Church, this December, as usual, I will be putting together a Christmas crib for my grandson. We'll construct it together - as my father did with me when I was a boy. I have profound respect for the Christian traditions - which, as rituals for coping with death, still make more sense than their purely commercial alternatives.

I think I agree with Joyce's lapsed Catholic hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" The religious celebration of Christmas is at least a clear and coherent absurdity. The commercial celebration is not even that.

• Umberto Eco's latest book is The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Secker & Warburg, £17.99)

Daniel Pipes: Converts to Terror

Daniel Pipes
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
December 6, 2005

Converts to Islam are taking over the terrorist operations previously carried out mainly by Muslim-born immigrants and their children.

This was dramatically illustrated when a Belgian convert to Islam, Muriel Degauque, 38, blew herself up near Baghdad on Nov. 9 in a suicide attack on U.S. troops, becoming the first Christian-born Western woman to kill herself for Islamist purposes. And of the fourteen people arrested because of connections to Degauque, half were converts to Islam. In neighboring Holland, a just-published government report specifically worries about radicalized converts.

Islamist terror organizations particularly prize converts. They know the local culture and blend in. They cannot be deported. They can hide their religious affiliation by avoiding mosques, lying low, even drinking alcohol and taking drugs to maintain their cover. One guide counsels would-be suicide bombers going to Iraq to “wear jeans, eat doughnuts and always carry your Walkman.”

Converts who either carried out a terrorist operation or were jailed come from many Western countries. Here is a partial listing. (Converts as yet only suspected, arrested, or indicted will be listed in a separate article at my website, www.DanielPipes.org.)

· Australia: British-born Jack Roche, nine years in jail for trying to bomb the Israeli embassy in Canberra.

· France: David Courtailler, four years for abetting terrorists. Pierre Richard Robert, life for planning terrorist attacks in Morocco. Ruddy Teranova, three years for physically attacking a moderate Muslim.

· Germany: Steven Smyrek, seven years for planning a suicide mission for Hezbollah.

· Italy: Domenico Quaranta, twenty years for setting fire to a Milan subway station and trying to attack ancient Greek temples in Agrigento, Sicily.

· Netherlands: Jason Walters, the son of a black American father and a Dutch woman, belonged to the Hofstad Network, threw a hand grenade at police; his trial begins this week.

· United Kingdom: Germaine Lindsay, an immigrant from Jamaica, one of the London transport suicide bombers of July 2005, killing 26. Richard Reid, life for the “shoe bomber” who tried to bring down a Paris-to-Miami flight. Andrew Rowe, fifteen years for planning terrorist attacks.

· United States: Ryan Anderson, life for trying to aid Al-Qaeda while serving as a National Guardsman. David Belfield, assassinated a former Iranian diplomat outside Washington and fled to Iran. Clement Rodney Hampton-el, 35 years for helping bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. Mark Fidel Kools, death sentence for “fragging” and killing two of his army officers. John Muhammad, death sentence for his role as the lead “Beltway Sniper.” Randall Royer, twenty years for weapons and explosives charges “stemming from the investigation into a militant jihadist network in Northern Virginia.” Five members of Jamaat ul Fuqra, a Pakistan-based group suspected of at least thirteen murders in the United States, jailed for up to 69 years.
Lorenzo Vidino reports in Al Qaeda in Europe (Prometheus) that the authorities find “dozens of European converts have joined terrorist groups.” Nor is the problem restricted to Western converts to Islam.

· In the Philippines, for example, one convert confessed to bombing a ferry in February 2004, killing over 100, and others are linked to an attempt to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Manila. More generally, the government charges that Al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah use the Rajah Solaiman Movement, a group of converts, to carry out terror attacks.

· Non-Western converts move to the West and engage in terrorism there. Consider three American cases: Rashid Baz, born a Lebanese Druze, 141 years for murdering a Jewish boy on the Brooklyn Bridge. Wadih el-Hage, born a Lebanese Catholic, life without parole for his work with Osama bin Laden. John Samuel, born an Ethiopian Christian, awaits trial at Guantánamo, accused of entering the United States to terrorize for Al-Qaeda.

The growing prominence of converts to terrorism means that such counterterrorism tools as looking for Muslim names or excluding potential terrorists at the border do not suffice. Instead, it is now critical also to know exactly who converts to Islam and to watch converts to see which of them are radicalized.

Even without becoming Muslims, some of the persons named above could have engaged in terrorism. But security in the West, the Philippines, and elsewhere requires coming to terms with a very awkward fact: Conversion to Islam substantially increases the probability of a person’s involvement in terrorism.

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Mr. Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).

Mike Adams: Campus Crusade for Christmas

Mike Adams
http://www.townhall.com/
December 5, 2005

Recently, an atheist student organization at The University of Texas at San Antonio set up a “Smut for Smut” booth allowing students to exchange their religious scriptures (mostly the Holy Bible) for pornography. Unsurprisingly, they got the idea from another group at The University of Texas at Austin.

If the “Smut for Smut” exchanges begin to spread across the country, many readers will undoubtedly ask why such displays aren’t banned by campus speech codes due to possibly “offensive,” “disrespectful,” or “demeaning” content. Of course, the answer to that question is simple:

Campus speech codes were not designed to preserve our Judeo-Christian heritage through an equal application of rules. They were designed to destroy it through a selective application of rules.

And that is why we observe that a) atheist students are free to call the Word of God “smut” and “pornography” in between campus showings of hard-core porn films, while b) religious students are prevented from using offensive terms like “Christmas.”

It almost gets depressing when you look at schools like Auburn University – a school that is preparing for the lighting of a Holiday Tree, instead of the lighting of a Christmas Tree – a term deemed too offensive and “under-inclusive” in the postmodern era of higher education. And this kind of thing is happening at Auburn, not merely at schools like Brown and Harvard.

But note that in the last paragraph I said it “almost” gets depressing. Enter Laura Steele (steellc@auburn.edu), a member of the Auburn Student Government Association (SGA). She and a few other members of the SGA have sent forth the following resolution – one that should serve as a model for students seeking to Roll back the Tide of diversity that has consumed other southern schools like the University of Alabama:

RESOLUTION

Whereas, a decorated tree is the traditional, historical symbol of Christmas; and

Whereas, the Christmas tree is a decorated tree celebrating and symbolizing the historical Christmas season; and

Whereas, a tree has historically been known as a Christmas Tree in the State of Alabama, the United States of America and around the world; and
Whereas, the tree has historically been known as a Christmas Tree on Auburn’s campus; and

Whereas, calling the tree a Christmas Tree preserves historical correctness and embraces religious diversity; and

Whereas, in pursuit of Auburn’s spirit of diversity and tolerance of differing ideals, the Student Government Association Student Senate maintains that traditional symbols, religious and otherwise should not be suppressed; and

Whereas, labeling a Christmas Tree as a “Holiday Tree” appears to be religiously intolerant toward those who celebrate Christmas; and

Whereas, the University Administration and the Student Government Association have promoted a spirit of diversity and religious tolerance on campus; and Whereas, the name of the tree is not a legal issue rather an issue of preference and historicity; and

Whereas, even the display of a manger scene by a government body has been held to be constitutional to celebrate Christmas and its origins;

Therefore be it Resolved, that the Auburn University Student Government Association Student Senate recognizes the decorated tree on campus during the Christmas holiday season by its historical name of “Christmas Tree”; and

Therefore, Be it Further Resolved, that the decorated tree re-labeled a “Holiday Tree” be properly reinstated with its original, historical, traditional, intended, and common title and identified for what it actually is, a “Christmas Tree.”

With the help of the College Republicans, Laura Steele has so far gathered 650 signatures from students urging the SGA Senate to support the resolution. The reason for that is simple: In the name of true tolerance, she supports including other religions in the ceremony. And she thinks that Jewish students would appreciate having a University Menorah on display without having the campus thought police rename it a Mynorah to avoid sexist overtones.

Join me today in writing sga@auburn.edu to let these kids know that there is no better place to wage a war against narrow-minded political correctness than Auburn University. And there are no better leaders in our nation’s current cultural war than a young pack of War Eagles soaring high above the Tides of bigotry that masquerade as progressive thought.

Stanley Crouch: This Killing Reminds Us Cops Stay When Others Run

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Monday, December 5th, 2005

We should be able to understand the rage of the cops who were gathered in the lobby of the court to make their statement about Allan Cameron, who is accused of murdering Police Officer Dillon Stewart last Monday morning in Brooklyn. Stewart was shot in his police car after he had pulled alongside his killer. Cameron also is accused of wounding an off-duty officer at an earlier date. If it's all true, Cameron has been a very busy man.

One wonders what Stewart was thinking when he rolled up on the man who murdered him. Cops have told me that they often can feel death hiding out in the atmosphere and know that before their shift is over, someone is going to be snatched, pushed, stabbed, choked or shot from the world of the living into the long darkness from which no one returns. Of course, the cold shawl of darkness is never expected to be waiting for the officer who can feel it coming.

But it comes for whoever is available. The sympathetic noise of weeping and wailing will not be heard for long by the officer who usually does not know when the time has come for the last ride or the last walk or the last pursuit of a suspect. It goes down too fast, the cold comes over the body too quickly.

Whether life leaves them immediately or they seem to slowly edge over the cliff and take that far fall to somewhere that our eyes cannot perceive, it always feels as if it is moving at an express tempo and that we might have saved the one who is now a corpse if we had had more time.

Though Cameron pleaded not guilty, was caught with 53 bags of marijuana and says that he smokes marijuana "all day like everybody else in the ghetto," one wonders who will take this man seriously. Yes, he looks the stereotypical part of the purportedly anarchic young black man with the braided hair and the sweatshirt, but we all should know better than what that stereotype is supposed to tell us. If Cameron is proven guilty, it says nothing about braided hair, sweatshirts or young black men of any sort. If the majority of young black men who look like Cameron actually were violent criminals, our cities would have to be put under martial law because the cops wouldn't be able to handle them.

But what it is that the cops have to handle often is the result of the rough business that takes place around the sale of illegal drugs in any form, the natural plants that are bragged about because of their difference from the factory-produced powders and pills we call controlled substances. Such rough business demands a gun to protect one's product or one's turf. So perhaps what we need to think about is legalizing drugs in order to remove the profit, which just might remove the need for guns that harm so many people, in or out of law enforcement. I would rather see a lobby for that than waste money and time trying to get the death penalty back on the books.

The fact is that violent criminals are threats to everyone, even to young black men whose taste in clothes is either as casual or as bad as that of the criminals.

All we can hope for and continue to work toward is a much closer relationship between the cops and the honest people in our most dangerous communities. Even so, we should appreciate the fact that cops can end up facing danger anywhere, just as citizens can. The only big difference is that the citizens can run, but the cops shouldn't and almost never do. Dillon Stewart, like almost everyone on the NYPD, was one of those cops who do their job, no matter what it costs them.

Christopher Hitchens: Sticking Up For Saddam

Ramsey Clark admits that his client is guilty.

http://www.slate.com/
Posted Thursday, Dec. 1, 2005, at 5:51 PM ET


The best defense is ... not this guy. All must agree that Saddam Hussein is entitled to the best legal defense team, and that it is a very special responsibility of the Coalition authorities to provide cast-iron protection to those who undertake the task. (This remains true even if, as is strongly implied in a Nov. 29 article by John Burns in the New York Times, Saddam and his lawyers have been caught hinting at involuntary changes in the composition of the prosecution team.)

But the phrase "best defense" and the name "Ramsey Clark" do not have the same apposition as, say, peaches and cream. Clark used to be Lyndon Johnson's attorney general and in that capacity tried to send Dr. Benjamin Spock, Marcus Raskin, and others to jail for their advocacy of resistance to the war in Vietnam. (In a bizarre 2002 interview in the Washington Post, he took the view that he was still right to have attempted this, even though the defendants were acquitted.) From bullying prosecutor he mutated into vagrant and floating defense counsel, offering himself to the génocideurs of Rwanda and to Slobodan Milosevic, and using up the spare time in apologetics for North Korea. He acts as front-man for the Workers World Party, an especially venomous little Communist sect, which originated in a defense of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

I was wondering when Clark would pop up in Baghdad, and there he was last Monday, presenting his credentials to the judge in the Saddam Hussein case and being accepted at his face value as a defense spokesman. He lost no time in showing what he is made of.

The first charge being brought against Saddam Hussein is that in 1982, after his motorcade came under fire near the mainly Shiite town of Dujail, he ordered the torture and murder of 148 men and boys. It's a relatively minor item in the catalog, but there it is. The first prosecution witness in the case, Wadah al-Sheikh, has actually testified that he knows of no direct link between Saddam and the killings. The defense team has to hope that it can prove the same, or perhaps suggest that no such massacre occurred. Not so Ramsey Clark. In a recent BBC interview, he offered the excuse that Iraq was then fighting the Shiite nation of Iran:
He (Saddam) had this huge war going on, and you have to act firmly when you have an assassination attempt.

Just go back and read that again. Ramsey Clark believes that A) the massacre and torture did occur and B) that it was ordered by his client and C) that he was justified in ordering it and carrying it out. That is quite sufficiently breathtaking. It is no less breathtaking when one recalls why Saddam "had this huge war going on." He had, after all, ordered a full-scale invasion of the oil-bearing Iranian region of Khuzestan and attempted to redraw the frontiers in Iraq's favor. Most experts accept a figure of about a million and a half as the number of young Iranians and Iraqis who lost their lives in consequence of this aggression (which incidentally enjoyed the approval of that Nobel Peace laureate Jimmy Carter). And Ramsey Clark says that the aggression is an additional reason to justify the massacre at Dujail.

Rather than say what substance I think Ramsey Clark is made of, I shall quote from Jeffrey Blankfort. There are various Web sites devoted to undermining the war effort in Iraq, one or two of which are also devoted to attacks on my own moral turpitude. I can't read them all but I do usually look at the e-mail I get from Blankfort. He is a very serious guy with whom I have had a few exchanges. He is one of the few to have noticed what Ramsey Clark said, and here is his comment:

The problem is … that Clark is one of the most well-known representatives of the anti-war movement and represents the ANSWER coalition and in my mind this is more than the conflict of interest that it unquestionably is. Thus, the message that it sends to the Iraqi people is that the anti-war movement doesn't really care about any Iraqis other than those who have been killed by US and UK forces, that it, in fact, does not condemn Saddam for his long history of human rights violations and for his launching a bloody war against Iran that took well over a million lives.

That is to say the least of it. He adds:

It is long past time for the anti-war movement to drop its double standards. It can begin by saying Ramsey Clark does not speak for us. He certainly does not speak for me.

This is a nice twist on the self-regarding "Not In Our Name" slogan under which the anti-war movement filled the streets to hear speeches from Saddam sympathizers, Fidel and Kim groupies, and Islamic fundamentalists. Not really anti-war at all, but pro-war on the other side. It was more like a single standard if you ask me, but let's put this to the test.

So, how about it, Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore and Tim Robbins and all the rest of you? Do you need any prompting to say what you think? Or is the only crime scene to be found in the Downing Street memo and the identifying of a CIA bureaucrat? We know what Clark is made of: What about you? I meanwhile shall recline, happy in the knowledge that Saddam Hussein has engaged the services of an attorney who proclaims him to be guilty as charged.

Related in Slate

For more on why ANSWER is bad for the anti-war business, click here. Here's why Cindy Sheenan is preaching "sinister piffle." Leftist gadfly Michael Moore not only has poor taste in politics, he's also guilty of directing a film that is a "sinister exercise in moral frivolity." Team America creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker aren't fans of Tim Robbins and Michael Moore, either. If conservative agitator Ann Coulter had her druthers, this lot would be on trial for Treason. The gang at Today's Cartoons weighs in on Saddam's trial here.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.

Daniel Pipes: Muhammad Ali's "Beautiful Soul"

Daniel Pipes
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
December 1, 2005

In an article two days ago, “Muhammad Ali v. George W. Bush,” I castigated President Bush bestowing a prestigious award on former boxer Muhammad Ali and for lavishly praising Ali’s beautiful soul, his compassion, and his being a man of peace. I offered some evidence to the contrary and concluded by calling this incident “the nadir of his presidency.”

The column prompted a fair amount of comment, positive and negative. I’d like to note here two noteworthy responses. One is from Judea Pearl, father of the late Daniel Pearl, murdered by Islamists in Pakistan in 2002:

When Danny was in captivity, we pleaded with Louis Farrakhan and Muhammad Ali to use their influence in the Muslim world and issue an appeal for his release. Farrakhan said: “Not ready.” Ali did not hesitate a minute and issued a plea that only Satan could resist; it was published next day in Pakistan. Ali further called me by phone and insisted on being invited to the party, once Danny is released. Jesse Jackson then made a statement, without our even soliciting him. At that point, Farrakhan came back and said: I am ready. But by then, it was too late. I appreciate Ali’s coming forward and, when I spoke at Danny's memorial (which Ali and his wife attended), I called him “a champion of humanity.” Later on, though, when we asked him to join the Honorary Board of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, he declined on the grounds that he must focus his energy on his own foundation.

To which my response is this: I am delighted to hear that Muhammad Ali did these good deeds. But by 2002 he was far along with Parkinson’s disease, so his decisions were largely made by his handlers in his name. These do not provide real insight into his character.

That character, rather, was shown earlier, when Ali had full control of his facilities. To understand that better, I turn to Jack Cashill, author of the forthcoming book, Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King's Dream. Cashill sent me a copy of the book manuscript and it, to say the least, confirms my thesis about Ali’s poor behavior. Here is an excerpt, reviewing Ali’s negative accomplishments during his first crucial years in the public eye, 1960-75:

• Ali knowingly betrayed Malcolm X, a betrayal that led at least indirectly to Malcolm’s assassination.

• Ali publicly turned his back on his press secretary, Leon 4X Ameer, which led to Ameer’s death.

• When Nation of Islam activists executed five friends and family of the Hanafi sect—four of them children—Ali did not quit the Nation or even publicly protest. Nor did the media ask him to.

• For at least four years running Ali publicly degraded Joe Frazier, often along the crudest racial lines. “There’s a great honor about Joe,” says baseball great Reggie Jackson. “That was evident in the way he fought. And Muhammad ridiculed Joe; he humiliated him in front of the world.”

• Ali also verbally and physically abused Floyd Patterson and Ernie Terrell, two men who did not deserve it.

• Ali was an unapologetic sexist. “In the Islamic world,” he told Playboy, “the man’s the boss, and the woman stays in the background. She don’t want to call the shots.” He wrote this in 1975, three years into the doomed struggle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Feminists still wrestle over this one.

• While the black family was under assault, with its rate of unwed births nearly tripling during these fifteen years, Ali was fathering children out of wedlock with at least one teenage girl.

• He also was about to leave four of his children without a father in the home after rejecting their Muslim mother for a more glamorous, only marginally black eighteen year-old.

• Belinda Ali was the second wife he had publicly humiliated. Sonji was the first.

• Ali remained an unabashed racist, calling for an American apartheid and the lynching of interracial couples as late as 1975.

• In the years that mattered, Ali drove a wedge between the races. This may not have been evident to the cultural elite, but anyone who had been at Gary or like venues would know exactly what I mean.

• He routinely denigrated black heroes who did not share his point of view, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall among them.

• He continuously belittled and undermined Christianity, a bedrock of cultural stability in black America.

• Ali shamelessly courted some of the most brutal dictators on the planet: Qaddafi, Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier, Nkrumah, Mobutu, Marcos.

• One of those dictators, Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Wa Za Banga, was complicit in the death of the black nationalist hero, Patrice Lumumba.

• Ali helped launch the career of Don King.

• And, oh yes, he rejected his country in its hour of need and expressed no regret at the fate of those millions we all abandoned. The man who compelled him to do so had conspired with the Japanese and cheered them on at Pearl Harbor.

With due understatement, Cashill comments that this summing up, “however unpleasant, sheds some useful light both on the young Ali and the generation that made him.”

I repeat: this is not someone suitable to be honored by the president of the United States.

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Mr. Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).

George Will: The Abortion Argument We Missed

George Will
The Washington Post
1 December 2005

WASHINGTON -- Henry J. Friendly, who died in 1986, was perhaps the most distinguished American judge never to serve on the Supreme Court, and he almost spared the nation the poisonous consequences of that court's 1973 truncation of democratic debate about abortion policy. The story of that missed blessing was told recently by Judge A. Raymond Randolph of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in an address to the Federalist Society.

In 1970, Friendly, then on the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, was a member of a three-judge panel that heard the first abortion-rights case ever filed in a federal court, alleging the unconstitutionality of New York's abortion laws. Friendly wrote a preliminary opinion that was never issued because, in that pre-Roe era, democracy was allowed to function: New York's Legislature legalized abortion on demand during the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, causing the three-judge panel to dismiss the case as moot.

In 1965, the Supreme Court, citing a constitutional right to privacy, struck down a Connecticut law criminalizing the use of contraceptives. In 1968, a University of Alabama law professor, although acknowledging that legislative reforms of abortion laws were advancing nationwide, suggested a route to reform -- judicial fiat -- that would be quicker and easier than democratic persuasion. The tactic would be to get courts -- ideally, the Supreme Court -- to declare, building on the Connecticut case, that restrictions on abortions violate a privacy right that is a ``penumbral right emanating from values'' embodied in various provisions of the U.S. Constitution, as applied to the states through the 14th Amendment.

Which is what the Supreme Court did in 1973. But in 1970, when that argument reached Friendly, he warned in his preliminary opinion about the argument's ``disturbing sweep,'' and its invitation to judicial imprudence.

The assertion of such a privacy right would, he said, invalidate ``a great variety'' of statutes that existed when the 14th Amendment was adopted -- e.g., those against attempted suicide, bestiality, even drug use. And, Friendly wrote, it would be rash to suddenly find that the Constitution is an absolute impediment to the New York Legislature's deciding that a fetus deserves some protection. Declining to join the debate about when a fetus becomes a human being, Friendly wrote: ``It is enough that the legislature was not required to accept plaintiffs' demeaning characterizations of (the fetus),'' which is ``something more than inert matter.'' He continued:

``We would not wish our refusal to declare New York's abortion law unconstitutional as in any way approving or 'legitimating' it. The arguments for repeal are strong; those for substantial modification are stronger still. ... But the decision what to do about abortion is for the elected representatives of the people, not for three, or even nine, appointed judges.''

Three years later, the Supreme Court turned all policy choices about abortion -- even such details as spousal notification -- into matters of constitutional law. Who now really thinks that this exploitation of what Friendly called ``the vague contours of the 14th Amendment'' was wise?

The day after Roe was decided, The New York Times called it a ``resolution'' of the abortion issue. Not really. Roe short-circuited a democratic process of accommodating abortion differences -- a process that had produced a larger increase in the number of legal abortions in the three years before Roe than would occur in the three years after.

Since 1973, the privacy right has, as Judge Randolph says, ``morphed.'' Its original constitutional meaning pertained to preserving personal seclusion and keeping personal information secret. Now it means personal autonomy -- everyone's right to do whatever he or she pleases so long as others are not harmed.

That idea has a distinguished pedigree. John Stuart Mill wrote in ``On Liberty'' (1859): ``The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.'' That libertarian doctrine is, Randolph says, a defensible position for a legislature to take, but nothing in the Constitution's history or text suggests that Mill's philosophy is mandatory.In the polarized post-Roe politics, many Democrats are now poised to oppose the confirmation of Sam Alito on the ground that abortion rights, unlike all other rights (to free speech, private property, etc.), must be utterly unrestricted. Because Americans recoil from such immoderation, Democrats, after three decades of political difficulties, have reason to believe, if not the reasonableness to recognize, that they, especially, would have been better off if Friendly's preliminary opinion had been issued and if it had spared the nation Roe's diminishment of democracy and embitterment of politics.

© 2005, Washington Post Writers Group

Jimmy Breslin: Take a Stand? Not Our Hillary!

[I don't find myself rushing to post many articles by Jimmy Breslin but this is one has some funny stuff...some of it is shrill and sophomoric but it is entertaining and I try to never miss an opportunity to slag the Clintons. - jtf]

Newsday
November 30, 2005

Beautiful. I am in receipt today of a mailing from the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign. This is different from the letter she sent out by e-mail in a rush. I don't know who got the e-mail. She announces it is 1,600 words long. That much of her sentences could end reading. The letter I got is more than a dead dry political mailing. I found it such compelling reading that I drop everything and share with you promptly and thus prominently.

It is a four-page questionnaire with the headline, "2005 Critical National Issues Survey." I thought that this was about the more than 2,000 dead in Iraq. Not even close. I read on, thinking that the pamphlet might tell me what Hillary stands for, as she is pretty much a blank thus far.

The questionnaire begins with a statement that we can't let Republican political attacks distract Hillary from her efforts in the Senate to address the critical issues our nation needs to address. Then there is the normal space for contributions by check or credit card. The amounts are from $25 to $100 and "other." Fine so far.

Here are the critical issues:

"Economy/jobs. Environment. Social Security/Medicare. Education. Homeland Security. Health Care. Tax Cuts. Reproductive Rights. Separation of Church and State."

Absolutely marvelous. Nothing about Iraq. Or the life and death of young Americans in Iraq. Or troop withdrawals from Iraq.

I go through the rest of the pamphlet.

"How concerned are you that President Bush is not doing enough to get Americans back to work, create more jobs and get the economy moving again?

"How concerned are you that the massive budget deficits caused by Republican economic and tax policies will inevitably result in drastic cuts in Social Security, Medicare, education and social services?"

Absolutely beautiful!

There are, as stated earlier, now more than 2,000 young Americans who have died in Iraq. She wants to be a candidate for president and she doesn't even mention our dead, or our next dead.

Wait. Here is question 9:

"How concerned are you that the administration's unilateral policies have reduced our number of allies and endangered our national security?"

How absolutely marvelous!

"It depends on what your definition of 'is' is," her husband said when he was questioned about rolling around on the office carpet with a young office worker.

And she not only copies, but clearly surpasses. She deals with something important.

Hillary Clinton today holds the new North American record for fakery.

She copies. She sneaks and slithers past you with her opinion on a war that kills every day.

Hillary Clinton is in favor of the war and of executions. Sensational!

The other day, when Rep. John Murtha of Johnstown, Pa., called for a withdrawal from Iraq, and obviously did so with half the Pentagon behind him, Hillary said, no, we shouldn't pull out at this time. Oh, it would cause so much violence.

We must stay. It takes a national Alzheimer's for her to be able to try to get away with things like this.

If Hillary Clinton wants this war to go on, then she should send her daughter to fight in Iraq.

We have had in New York as United States senators, Robert F. Kennedy, Jacob Javits and Daniel Moynihan.

We now have Hillary Clinton blowing on her fingers as she goes about cracking the combination to another safe. If the one hand glistens, it is from the wedding ring that she has used to hypnotize the public so far. Beautiful.

Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.

'Walk the Line': A Faith-Lite

'Walk the Line' is a beautiful movie with a gaping hole--it separates the singer from one of his life's co-stars: God

By Mark Joseph
http://beliefnet.com

I was 19 when I fully understood that historians often can’t grasp the complexities of the characters they purport to speak of. It's something I learned once in a history class, when a professor suggested that George Washington was less than devout and merely used civil religion to unify the nation. When I raised my hand to question this, I was told to bring in evidence to the contrary--which I did the next day, reading aloud from Washington's diary, in which he expressed his deep religious faith in the manner less of a president and more of an 18th-century revival preacher.

"Who should I believe, your textbook or his diary?" I asked the professor.

"Walk The Line " the Johnny Cash biopic, features some truly inspired acting--and singing--by Joaquin Phoenix (playing Cash), and Reese Witherspoon (playing his wife, June), and some great music under the direction of T-Bone Burnett. That's the good news. The bad news is that it tries hard to do what no one was able to do in life and what my history professor tried to do to our first president: separate Johnny Cash from his God.

There were four great loves in J.R. Cash's life: music, God, June Carter, and drugs. But "Walk The Line" pretends there were only three. It is Johnny Cash for the secular set. The Almighty, omnipresent in Cash's life amidst his struggles to fight addiction, is barely worthy of a mention in "Walk The Line."

Imagine watching a movie about Kurt Cobain and hearing the name Courtney Love mentioned once or twice as an aside, or for that matter watching Bud Abbott's life story and never being introduced to Lou Costello. Such is the silliness of trying to tell the Johnny Cash story and leaving out either of his real-life co-stars, God or June Carter.

To his credit, Rick Rubin, the rock producer who took an interest in Cash and produced several brilliant records in Cash's twilight years--known as the American Recordings--understood this and never attempted to keep God out of the records he produced for Cash. It was Rubin who helped bring Cash's heretofore secular and sacred worlds together, allowing street-smart songs like "I've Been Everywhere" and "Rusty Cage" to co-exist on the same records with worshipful songs like "Redemption" and "Spiritual." But Rick Rubin didn't produce this film, and it shows.

Fortunately for those who have from experience learned to be suspicious of historians (or filmmakers), Cash, not unlike George Washington, left behind his own words to set the record straight.

"Walk The Line" is a love story, with June Carter Cash seeming to get all the credit for helping her man overcome his addictions. The message is a simple one: We are all just the right woman or the right man away from salvation. It's reminiscent of that singularly noxious line from the film "Titanic": "He saved me in every way a person can be saved."

The message is driven home by the film's relentless obsession with showing us over and over again how mismatched Cash was with his first wife Vivian and how deficient she was because of her inability to realize her husband's genius. Enter June Carter, whose determined love turned her man around. But in "Cash-The Autobiography," published shortly before his death, Cash made it clear that while June was a help, it was God who ultimately helped him overcome his addictions.

The key moment in Cash's turnaround happened when he tried a unique method of suicide--crawling through a cave hoping to never make it out alive. Cash wrote:

The absolute lack of light was appropriate, for at that moment I was as far from God as I have ever been. My separation from Him, the deepest and most ravaging of the various kinds of loneliness I'd felt over the years seemed finally complete. It wasn't. I thought I'd left him but He hadn't left me. I felt something very powerful start to happen to me, a sensation of utter peace, clarity and sobriety. I didn't believe it at first. I couldn't understand it.... the feeling persisted though and then my mind started focusing on God.... there in Nickajack cave I became conscious of my destiny. I was not in charge of my own death. I was going to die at God's time, not mine. I hadn't prayed over my decision to seek death in the cave, but that hadn't stopped God from intervening…I told my mother that God had saved me from killing myself. I told her I was ready to commit myself to Him and do whatever it took to get off drugs. I wasn't lying.

In the wake of the box office success of "The Passion Of The Christ," 20th Century Fox and other studios are seeking to capitalize on the phenomenon by creating faith-friendly products, finally coming to the obvious conclusion that eluded them for so long: Millions of Americans want to experience media that affirms their faith instead of mocking or marginalizing it. What they don't yet seem to realize is that instead of creating an endless stream of third-rate productions about the end of the world and releasing them in a handful of markets or in churches, the best way to meet the demands of the red states is simply to faithfully retell great stories that have a strong faith component while simultaneously ensuring that they remain of interest to those who may not consider themselves religious or even spiritual. Any audience will put up with a certain amount of religion, so long as it is part of the natural fabric of a good story.

"Walk The Line" is a faith-lite version of a faith-filled story, and if traditionalists are smart they will punish it for its unfaithfulness not with loud protests, but by giving it the treatment they so brilliantly dished out to another picture, "Saved," a film that depicted a Christian high school in a stereotypically negative fashion. That film's backers were practically begging for a boycott, which they correctly understood as the only thing likely to save their film from the trash heap of obscurity it so richly deserved to be tossed into. Instead what it got from the leadership of the faith community was the worst punishment of all: It was ignored.

"Walk The Line" is a gorgeous movie, smartly told with some outstanding acting that will likely garner Reese Witherspoon an Academy Award nomination. It'd be a great movie if it weren't so manifestly incomplete. It releases in theaters on November 18th, a great day to stay outdoors and honor Cash's true memory by instead picking up a copy of "Cash-The Autobiography" or Steve Turner's "The Man Called Cash" and one of his American Recordings CDs, lovingly produced by an unlikely hero named Rick Rubin. He's a man who may not have shared Cash's faith, but well understood that Johnny Cash could never be understood in the absence of the God who gave him the strength to rebuild his shattered life as best he could, provided an angel named June to give him a second start, and empowered him to continue making unforgettable music that gave hope to many.

Related Features
An Interview With John Carter Cash
Johnny Cash's Connection to Christ
Johnny, We Fondly Knew You

Dennis Prager: Opponents of the Death Penalty Have Blood on Their Hands

[Not too sure about the title of this article but there are some interesting points to be found here.]

Dennis Prager
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
November 29, 2005

Those of us who believe in the death penalty for some murders are told by opponents of the death penalty that if the state executes an innocent man, we have blood on our hands.
They are right. I, for one, readily acknowledge that as a proponent of the death penalty, my advocacy could result in the killing of an innocent person.

I have never, however, encountered any opponents of the death penalty who acknowledge that they have the blood of innocent men and women on their hands.

Yet they certainly do. Whereas the shedding of innocent blood that proponents of capital punishment are responsible for is thus far, thankfully, only theoretical, the shedding of innocent blood for which opponents of capital punishment are responsible is not theoretical at all. Thanks to their opposition to the death penalty, innocent men and women have been murdered by killers who would otherwise have been put to death.

Opponents of capital punishment give us names of innocents who would have been killed by the state had their convictions stood and they been actually executed, and a few executed convicts whom they believe might have been innocent. But proponents can name men and women who really were -- not might have been -- murdered by convicted murderers while in prison. The murdered include prison guards, fellow inmates, and innocent men and women outside of prison.
In 1974, Clarence Ray Allen ordered a 17-year-old young woman, Mary Sue Kitts, murdered because she knew of Allen's involvement in a Fresno, California, store burglary.

After his 1977 trial and conviction, Allen was sentenced to life without parole.

According to San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders, "In Folsom State Prison, Allen cooked up a scheme to kill the witnesses who testified against him so that he could appeal his conviction and then be freed because any witnesses were dead -- or scared into silence." As a result, three more innocent people were murdered -- Bryon Schletewitz, 27, Josephine Rocha, 17, and Douglas White, 18.

This time, a jury sentenced Allen to death, the only death sentence ever handed down by a Glenn County (California) jury. That was in 1982.

For 23 years, opponents of the death penalty have played with the legal system -- not to mention played with the lives of the murdered individuals' loved ones -- to keep Allen alive.

Had Clarence Allen been executed for the 1974 murder of Mary Sue Kitts, three innocent people under the age of 30 would not have been killed. But because moral clarity among anti-death penalty activists is as rare as their self-righteousness is ubiquitous, finding an abolitionist who will acknowledge moral responsibility for innocents murdered by convicted murderers is an exercise in futility.

Perhaps the most infamous case of a death penalty opponent directly causing the murder of an innocent is that of novelist Norman Mailer. In 1981, Mailer utilized his influence to obtain parole for a bank robber and murderer named Jack Abbott on the grounds that Abbott was a talented writer. Six weeks after being paroled, Abbott murdered Richard Adan, a 22-year-old newlywed, aspiring actor and playwright who was waiting tables at his father's restaurant.

Mailer's reaction? "Culture is worth a little risk," he told the press. "I'm willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this man's talent."

That in a nutshell is the attitude of the abolitionists. They are "willing to gamble with a portion of society" -- such as the lives of additional innocent victims -- in order to save the life of every murderer.

Abolitionists are certain that they are morally superior to the rest of us. In their view, we who recoil at the thought that every murderer be allowed to keep his life are moral inferiors, barbarians essentially. But just as pacifists' views ensure that far more innocents will be killed, so do abolitionists' views ensure that more innocents will die.

There may be moral reasons to oppose taking the life of any murderer (though I cannot think of one), but saving the lives of innocents cannot be regarded as one of them.

Nevertheless, abolitionists will be happy to learn that Amnesty International has taken up the cause of ensuring that Clarence Ray Allen be spared execution. That is what the international community now regards as fighting for human rights.

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Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show based in Los Angeles. He is the author of four books, most recently "Happiness is a Serious Problem" (HarperCollins). His website is www.dennisprager.com. To find out more about Dennis Prager, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Robert Spencer: Israel, Front Line of the Global Jihad

Robert Spencer
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
November 29, 2005

Israel has become the world’s new South Africa: the villain du jour, the universal oppressor, the whipping-boy of the United Nations. Its foes have even applied the South African concept of apartheid to its policies. The global Left eagerly propagates the view that Israel, which has been repeatedly attacked by its neighbors, is by virtue of its very existence actually an aggressor state. The only free Western-style democracy in the Middle East (with the increasingly shaky exception of Turkey on the northern margins of the area) has received more world opprobrium than the brutal regimes of Assad, Ahmadinejad, and even the lamented (at least by Ramsey Clark) Saddam Hussein.

Boosters of the Palestinian cause routinely refer to Israelis and their supporters as Nazis. In January 2005, Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain reached the apex of moral equivalence. He announced that his group would boycott a commemoration of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp: “we have now expressed our unwillingness to attend the ceremony because it excludes ongoing genocide and human rights abuses around the world and in the occupied territories of Palestine.”

Yet although Muslim spokesmen such as Sacranie, the international Left, and many others -- including some of the Arabic-speaking Christians with whom I am in daily contact -- believe fervently that Israel is the aggressor against an innocent and aggrieved Palestinian people, and that the conflict is wholly and solely about “stolen land,” the facts are otherwise. In reality, Israel is at the front line of the global jihad movement. Ever since the State of Israel was founded in 1948, and even before, it has faced jihadist opposition from groups adamant in their determination to destroy it utterly. Yet I expect that a poll of Americans would find only a tiny minority would affirm that Israel faces the same foe, with the same ideology, as the one the United States has faced since 9/11.

I was recently offered, and immediately seized, an opportunity to see for myself. Last week, I had the chance to:

• Explore the Muslim Quarter and other sections of Jerusalem’s Old City, the world’s holiest place and largest tourist trap. The ancient streets are barely passable, crowded as they are with tiny shops (all holding pretty much the same inventory, with a few minor variations) in which canny Muslim entrepreneurs sell Christian religious articles to eager Western visitors (“And because I love you like a brother, and see that you appreciate the finer things, I will give you a special price…”). One told me how happy he was to see tourists again, after years of intifada had driven them away.

• Visit and pray at the Western Wall, site of so much human longing.

• Peer into Syria from an Israeli bunker on the Golan Heights. The mountainous Golan is breathtakingly beautiful, although that beauty is broken here and there by the remnants of the 1967 and 1973 wars: bullet-riddled bunkers, rusted hulks of war machines. But most of this has been cleared away, for Israel has no room to spare; virtually every inch of land right up to the present border with Syria is cultivated. In stark contrast sits the Syrian ghost town of Quneitra, which the Syrians have left abandoned as a monument to Israeli atrocities ever since the Israelis withdrew from it in 1974. The international media has swallowed this tall tale as well, despite abundant evidence that Quneitra was in ruins before the Israelis ever got there.

• Travel by bulletproof bus through the West Bank, and inspect the security fence.

• Sleep (fitfully) in a Bedouin tent in the desert, and savor the stark magnificence of the rocky, mountainous landscape.

• Walk through the 700-year-old streets of Safed, modern-day home of, among other things, a notable artistic quarter. In this I was not too far from where Hizb’Allah rockets fell – unprovoked, as was noted even by the United Nations -- a few days later near Kiryat Shmona and Metulla.

• Stroll around modern Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

I also had the honor of meeting the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Jerusalem, Shlomo Moshe Amar, and Soviet dissident and heroic human rights activist Natan Sharansky. In the course of Sharansky’s moving address he noted that Israel had again and again aided Christians -- at their own request -- against Islamic violence and injustice, most notably when the Church of the Nativity was occupied by jihadists in 2002. Yet international Christian leaders, he said, have not responded with similar gestures toward Israel. This is unfortunate in the extreme both for Israel and for Palestinian Christians: those Christians are going to be in for a rude surprise when the Islamic state so many of them are abetting actually takes power, and they find life more difficult for them than it was in Israel. Christians in the Middle East are in a virtually impossible position (which is why they are streaming out of the area). If the support the Islamic agenda, they are signing their own return to the second-class status of the dhimma, as mandated by the traditional Islamic law that jihadists are bent on restoring. If they support Israel, they risk being targeted by the jihadists, who surround them on all sides.

I met a couple who had recently been evacuated by the Israeli government from their West Bank “settlement,” where they had lived and worked for twelve years, and endured daily gunfire from Palestinians since the Al-Aqsa intifada began in September 2000. I met an American who now lives and works on a kibbutz in the Golan Heights, cultivating land just across the Syrian border, in defiance of the danger involved. Like so many other Israelis all over the country, he must carry a gun at all times. I photographed a large, confidently imposing, and clearly thriving mosque near my hotel in Tel Aviv, the very existence of which stands as poignant refutation of the charge that Muslims are oppressed in Israel -- especially in light of the glaring non-existence of synagogues in Muslim lands and the precarious existence of churches in them.

Israel is a country at war, a country under siege. Everywhere I went, even into a shopping mall in Tel Aviv, armed guards stood at the entry, searching everyone. Many Israelis with whom I spoke discussed the weariness of the people after decades and decades of war. They said that many, and maybe even a majority, are willing to cut any deal, even one involving giving up half of Jerusalem, in order to buy a peace that they themselves acknowledge will last only a few years.Yet the game is by no means over. At the same time, there is a tremendous spirit among the people. I saw the greenhouses and agricultural projects making the desert bloom, and the determination of so many not to be intimidated, not to bow in the face of jihad violence. Long may they prosper.

Israel stands virtually alone in the world not only because of lingering antisemitism, but because Palestinian Arabs and their allies have succeeded in convincing opinion-makers that their land was taken illegitimately by Israel, and that they are oppressed there. The facts are otherwise, as I have discussed in a previous article here. The state was established legitimately and with the approval of the United Nations, and even the “occupied territories” were obtained according to what have been universally recognized throughout history as the rules of war. (Or should the United States give up the “occupied territories” of California, Texas, and other Western states? Should Russia withdraw from its “occupied territories” in Königsberg, eastern Finland and eastern Poland? Should Muslims across North Africa, the Middle East, Iran, India and Southeast Asia withdraw from those “occupied territories” back to Arabia?)

While I am sympathetic to genuine Palestinian Arab refugees, and with my friends from Ramallah and Jenin, I can’t help but notice the role of the neighboring Arab states in exacerbating and prolonging the refugee problem for political reasons that are ultimately rooted in the jihad ideology. I can’t help but notice that I was able to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Mount Tabor, and other Christian holy sites in Israel, which mean a great deal to me personally, while Bethlehem, under Palestinian Authority control, has become a dangerous place from which Christians are fleeing as quickly as they can. I can’t help but notice that there was no call to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza between 1948 and 1967, when those territories were under Jordanian and Egyptian control respectively -- despite the alleged difference of nationality between Palestinians and Jordanians and Egyptians.

Ultimately, if the nations of the world are interested in defending universal human rights and the equality of dignity of all people, they need to stand with Israel. Misdiagnosis of the problem -- that is, the unwillingness or inability of Western governments to acknowledge the motives and goals of the jihadists who want above all to destroy them -- has largely prevented this.

Yet as Benjamin Franklin said long ago in a far different context, we must all hang together, or we will most assuredly all hang separately.

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Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of five books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). He is also an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.

Mark Steyn: Hollywood's PC Perversion Stifles Storytelling

November 27, 2005
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

To judge from the way the weekend's box office is breathlessly reported in the news bulletins on Monday morning, more people seem to be interested in movie grosses than in the movies. Evidently, Hollywood's now recovered from this summer's all-time record "box office slump." Or at any rate news stories about the box office slump have themselves slumped. In a breathless dispatch on the opening weekend of ''Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' the Associated Press reported that ''the latest Potter movie led a lineup that helped reverse the Hollywood box-office slump."

I wouldn't say the boy wizard and his Hogwarts chums exactly "led a lineup" of slump-reversers. When you look at the weekend numbers, ''Harry Potter's'' $101.4 million is more than the gross of the rest of the top five movies combined and doubled. Indeed, the rest of the top 10 between them managed $66 million. ''Harry Potter'' is an industry apart, and tells us nothing about Hollywood's general malaise, or alleged recovery therefrom.

I chipped in my own 20 bucks or so of that hundred mil. Went to see it opening weekend. Had a miserable time. Nothing to do with the movie. Everything to do with the theater I saw it in. It was a multiplex operated by a New England chain called Entertainment Cinemas of South Easton, Mass., and they really should make critics see the films in these kinds of joints. It was a small screen at the end of a dingy room with unraked seating and, instead of letting you lose yourself in the dark to the magic of the silver screen, they keep half the lights up for the movie. I e-mailed "customer service" at Entertainment Cinemas to inquire why, but received no response.

Small multiplexes apparently save money by hiring one projectionist to run several screens. The drawback is that one or other of the semi-unmonitored machines will jam, leading the projection lamp to burn a hole in the print. To lessen the risk of this, the projectionist expands the space between the gate and the lamp -- i.e., he shows the film slightly out of focus. I don't know whether that's why the Harry Potter I saw was so dark and blurry, but, after reading about all the lavish effects-laden set-pieces Mike Newell had put in the movie, I did rather feel that I was seeing the cinematic equivalent of a digitally remastered symphony concert played back through a 1950s transistor radio.

The average multiplex is surely not long for this world. Already, 85 percent of Hollywood's business comes from home entertainment -- DVDs and the like. Suits me. Or so I thought until, on the way home from the hell of Harry Potter, I stopped to buy the third boxed set in the ''Looney Tunes Golden Collection.'' Loved the first two: Daffy, Bugs, Porky, beautifully restored, tons of special features. But, for some reason, this new set begins with a special announcement by Whoopi Goldberg explaining what it is we're not meant to find funny: ''Unfortunately at that time racial and ethnic differences were caricatured in ways that may have embarrassed and even hurt people of color, women and ethnic groups,'' she tells us sternly. ''These jokes were wrong then and they're wrong today'' -- unlike, say, Whoopi Goldberg's most memorable joke of recent years, the one at that 2004 all-star Democratic Party gala in New York where she compared President Bush to her, um, private parts. There's a gag for the ages.

I don't know what Whoopi's making such a meal about. It's true you don't see many positive images of people of color on ''Looney Tunes,'' but then the images of people of non-color aren't terribly positive either (Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam). Instead, you see positive images of ducks of color, roadrunners of color and tweety birds of color. How weirdly reductive to be so obsessed about something so peripheral to these cartoons that you stick the same damn Whoopi Goldberg health warning on all four DVDs in the box. And don't think about hitting the "Next" button and skipping to the cartoons: You can't; you gotta sit through it.

A Hollywood that's ashamed of one of its few universally acknowledged genuine artistic achievements is hardly likely to come up with any new artistic achievements. As the instant deflation of that Whoopi cushion reminds us, the movies are now so constrained by political correctness the very act of storytelling is itself endangered. That's something slightly more ominous than the feeble limousine liberalism many conservatives blame for the alleged box-office slump. Say what you like about those Hollywood writers of the '30s and '40s, but they were serious lefties. Their successors are mostly poseurs loudly trumpeting their courageous ''dissent'' while paralyzed into inanity. This year's Sean Penn thriller, ''The Interpreter,'' was originally about Muslim terrorists blowing up a bus in New York. So, naturally, Hollywood called rewrite. And instead the bus got blown up by African terrorists from the little-known republic of Matobo. ''We didn't want to encumber the film in politics in any way,'' said Kevin Misher, the producer.

But being so perversely ''non-political'' is itself a political act. If there were a dozen movies in which Tom Cruise kicked al-Qaida butt across the Hindu Kush, it would be reasonable to say, ''Hey, we'd rather deal with Matoban terrorism for a change.'' But, when every movie goes out of its way to avoid being ''encumbered,'' it starts to look like a pathology. And by the time Hollywood released this summer's ''Stealth,'' some studio exec must have panicked that, what with all this Bono/Live8 debt-relief business, it might look a bit Afrophobic to have any more Matoban terrorists. So ''Stealth'' was a high-tech action thriller about USAF pilots zapping about the skies in which the bad guy is the plane.

That's right: An unmanned computer-flown plane goes rogue and starts attacking things. The money shot is -- stop me if this rings a vague bell -- a big downtown skyscraper with a jet heading toward it. Only there are no terrorists aboard the jet. The jet itself is the terrorist.
This is the pitiful state Hollywood's been reduced to. Safer not to have any bad guys. Let's make the plane the bad guy. No wonder it's 20th century Britlit -- ''Harry Potter,'' ''Lord of the Rings,'' ''Narnia'' -- keeping those Monday morning numbers up. It's Hollywood's yarn-spinning that's really out of focus, and in the end even home entertainment revenue won't save a storytelling business that no longer knows how to tell any.

© Mark Steyn, 2005

An Appreciation: Link Wray

Prophet of the Rock Guitar
With Pick and Pencil, Link Wray Pointed the Way
By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 22, 2005; Page C01

With "Rumble," the classic 1958 instrumental first improvised at a Virginia sock hop, Link Wray invented the power chord, creating a template for modern rock guitar. Released as a single by Wray & His Ray Men, "Rumble" was gutbucket menace, awash in echo and reverb, built on Wray's slow drags across the strings of alternating major chords, capped by a run of notes up and down the fretboard.

It was the big bang of dangerous guitar.

Wray, who died this month in Denmark at age 76, and his group at the time were house band for "The Milt Grant Show," Washington's version of "American Bandstand." One night they played a Grant-sponsored show at the Fredericksburg Arena backing the Diamonds, who'd had a big dance hit with "The Stroll." Wray didn't know the song, but when his drummer (and brother) Doug Wray laid down a stroll-like beat, Link filled in with a slowly unfurling, ominous guitar sound so immediately cool the crowd demanded it three more times that very night.

When Wray went into a studio soon after to record what he initially called "Oddball," he had trouble replicating the sound he'd gotten onstage. Thinking it had something to do with the studio amps, Wray took a pencil and punched holes in his speakers, thereby inventing the fuzzbox and becoming one of the first guitarists to experiment with feedback and distortion.

Which may explain why one of his biggest fans was Pete Townshend of the Who. In liner notes to a 1974 Wray album, Townshend cited "Rumble" as a primary influence and pronounced him "the king." Bob Dylan called "Rumble" " the greatest instrumental ever"; on Sunday, Dylan opened his concert at London's Brixton Academy with a cover of the song.

England's music magazine NME dubbed Wray the man "who invented punk rock, heavy metal and every other form of sonic nastiness." For that we can thank Archie Bleyer's teenage daughter. Owner of Cadence Records in New York, Bleyer didn't like the "Oddball" demo but she loved it, saying it reminded her of the Jets-Sharks rumbles in the hot new Broadway musical "West Side Story." The song was released as "Rumble."

Apparently "Rumble" also suggested gang violence to radio programmers, some of whom banned it -- a first for an instrumental! Nonetheless, "Rumble" cracked the top 20 and sold several million copies. When Wray later went on "American Bandstand" to hype it, however, Dick Clark introduced him without ever mentioning the title.

Over the next few years -- which coincided with the last surge of classic-rock instrumental hits -- Wray crafted several other guitar standards, including "Raw-hide," "Jack the Ripper," "The Swag" and "Comanche" (one of three tribal tributes by Wray, who was part Shawnee).

Cadence dumped Wray after "Rumble," feeling he was a bit raw, dangerous and delinquent. His basic look -- black leather outfit, dark glasses, greased-back hair -- supported that finding. Subsequently recording for many labels, Wray tended to milk the raw, primitive guitar formula he'd originated and was soon supplanted by more melodic instrumental stylists like Duane Eddy, Dick Dale and the Ventures. That would doom Wray to cult figure footnote status, but anyone who really knew the music's history recognized his part in it.

By the mid-'60s, Wray had retreated to the family farm in Accokeek. Small career revivals seemed to take place periodically. A decade later punk fans embraced Wray when he teamed up with Washington's Robert Gordon for several neo-rockabilly albums; Bruce Springsteen gave "Fire" to Wray and Gordon after the death of Elvis Presley, for whom he had originally written the song.

"Bullshot," in 1979, was Wray's last American album for almost 20 years. He had moved to Denmark and married a local woman. The 1997 album "Shadowman" occasioned Wray's first American tour in 15 years, though his last Washington performance had occurred in 1985 at the Wax Museum. Efforts to book him locally were thwarted by Wray's fears of being sued over unpaid child support. When he did tour (as recently as this past spring), the aging guitarist was usually accompanied by his bass-playing son and go-go-dancing wife, Olive Julie Wray.

It was movies that reinvigorated Wray's career and refurbished his reputation. John Waters was the first to use a Wray track ("The Swag" on 1972's "Pink Flamingos"). Quentin Tarantino incorporated "Rumble" and "Ace of Spades" into "Pulp Fiction." And in 1999, Taco Bell used "Jack the Ripper" in its first television commercial featuring the talking Chihuahua.

Even in recent years, Wray pushed his equipment to extremes during concerts, rolling out the raw riffs he had pioneered almost half a century before. Link Wray never toned the music down.
He was always ready to Rumble.

A sample of "Rumble" can be heard athttp://www.washingtonpost.com/photo.

Gretzky: Still Intense Behind the Bench

November 25, 2005
The Propensity for Intensity Is Still His Style
By JASON DIAMOS
The New York Times

GLENDALE, Ariz. - More than a month into his first season as an N.H.L. coach, Wayne Gretzky said, he is asked most often whether he has the urge to jump over the boards. Gretzky, the greatest offensive player in the history of the game, is coaching one of the league's most offensively challenged teams, the
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/hockey/nationalhockeyleague/phoenixcoyotes/index.html?inline=nyt-org">Phoenix Coyotes.
The Coyotes scored 65 goals in their first 24 games. Gretzky alone once scored 50 goals in 39 games.
But the Coyotes have improved, and Gretzky, 44, seems to be holding his own behind the bench. The team opened the season 1-4-1 but has won 10 of its last 18 games.
"I've really enjoyed each and very day on the bench," Gretzky said recently. "I've enjoyed the practices and the players."

Steve Ellman, the team's principal owner, spoke about Gretzky's influence with the team beyond coaching. "Wayne's been magical for our franchise," he said.

A group led by Ellman, Gretzky and Jerry Moyes bought the Coyotes in February 2001. For Ellman, the team was essential to his $850 million real estate development next door to Glendale Arena, the Coyotes' new $220 million home. The attention that Gretzky brings to the franchise helps, Ellman said.
"We've doubled our season-ticket sales; I think a lot of that has to do with Wayne," said Ellman, who added that Gretzky - whose salary as coach is about $1 million a season - could coach the team as long as he wanted.
Ellman said that having Gretzky behind the bench had given the Coyotes national exposure that the franchise would not have with another coach.

"It's like being partners with Babe Ruth in baseball; it gave us instant credibility," Ellman said.
In addition to Ellman's real estate development, Glendale Arena abuts, and is dwarfed by, a multipurpose stadium that will house the N.F.L.'s Arizona Cardinals. The stadium will also hold college football's Fiesta Bowl, the 2007 Bowl Championship Series national-title game and the 2008 Super Bowl.
Three years ago, Ellman said, the land on which his development is rising was used to grow cotton. Cotton fields still abut Glendale Arena on three sides.

Inside the arena on Nov. 10, Gretzky's face was still flushed from yelling at the officials 20 minutes after a 4-3 loss to Calgary.
"That was my personality as a player: that I was going to do whatever it took to win the hockey game," Gretzky said, discussing his intensity as coach. "That's why I scored 87 empty-net goals. I was, for people who didn't know me, probably more tenacious than people kind of thought."

Calgary's Jarome Iginla, who played for Gretzky on the Canadian national team at the Salt Lake Olympics in 2002, said: "We don't get to see that a lot at the Olympics and stuff. He's always very calm. But you can see he has intensity on the bench.
"That's probably what made him the greatest player that ever played - that inner thing. It's probably just coming out again. And I think it's good to see, because he probably was like that in his playing days."

Before ending his playing days in 1999, Gretzky held 61 N.H.L. records. Cliff Fletcher, the Coyotes' senior executive vice president for hockey operations, recalled the reaction when Gretzky decided to coach. "I know a lot of people suggested to him that he was crazy," he said.
Was Fletcher, who was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame last year, one of them?

"Initially, I felt: 'Why, Wayne, why? What have you got to gain from this?' " he said. "I mean, the greatest player who ever played the game. Impeccable résumé, reputation. And that's just why he wanted to do it. He wanted to prove he could do it."
Gretzky's oldest son, Ty, lives with him in the Phoenix area and plays high school hockey. Janet Gretzky, his wife, and their four other children live in Southern California.
"I don't think I wanted him out of the house," Janet Gretzky said during a recent visit here. "But it was definitely a joint decision, because it was a big change for the family. And I was definitely 120 percent behind it."

Gretzky also has professional obligations. He is the Coyotes' managing partner and the executive director for the Canadian Olympic team, which will defend its gold medal at the Turin Games in February. Among his many business endeavors is a fantasy camp he held in the Phoenix area in mid-November.
While juggling all that, Gretzky has also faced some challenges as coach. During his first month on the job, he informed Brett Hull, his close friend, that his ice time would be limited. That led to Hull's retirement in October.

Gretzky then traded Jeff Taffe, who is engaged to Janet Gretzky's niece.
To complete the hat trick, Gretzky made Mike Comrie a healthy scratch for a game in Anaheim that Comrie's father attended; Comrie's father, Bill, is also a close friend of Gretzky's.
"Those are the three hardest things I've gone through in a long time," Gretzky said.

Hull said those were also the kinds of decisions that Gretzky must make to be successful.
"He's so level-headed, he knows the game and he doesn't care who you are," Hull said in a telephone interview from Dallas. "If you're not playing well, you're not going to play. He proved that with me."

Curtis Joseph, a veteran goaltender who has been the Coyotes' best player this season, played against Gretzky for several seasons.
"Obviously, as coach he demands respect, whatever he says," Joseph said. "Everybody listens and doesn't question. I've played on teams where you have healthy discussions with the coach. Sometimes there are heated battles on the bench. But I don't foresee any of that here."

Gretzky said he had encouraged his players to talk to him. Joseph was asked whether that would be intimidating.
"For sure," Joseph said. "But he wants you to go to him and tell him what you see, or how can we get better. He's all for open discussion. It's just probably that initial step for some guys to get over. But he does have a big advantage over most coaches."

Gretzky said: "It's a hard thing for me, too. I don't want to intimidate guys. And I don't want to be a complete idiot to them. I want to talk to them. And I think more and more guys are getting comfortable now."
Gretzky inherited a Coyotes team that did not qualify for the playoffs in three of the past four seasons.

Since the franchise moved from Winnipeg to Phoenix before the 1996-97 season, the Coyotes have failed to advance past the first round. And since the Winnipeg Jets left the World Hockey Association and joined the N.H.L. before the 1979-80 season, the franchise has never advanced past the second round of the playoffs. The last time the franchise made it to the second round was 1987.
Considering that history, Gretzky was asked what he would consider success in his first season as coach.
"First place," he said. "I don't think of anything else. I tell the players every day our goal is to finish first in our division."

Great athletes in the four major professional sports in North America have not fared well when they have converted to coaching.
Larry Bird, who directed the Indiana Pacers to the N.B.A. finals in 2000, was perhaps the most successful. But Bird, who was also named the N.B.A.'s coach of the year in 1998, won three championships as a player - three more than he won as a coach.

"Joe Torre was an M.V.P.," Gretzky said, referring to the manager who has guided the Yankees to four World Series titles.
But Torre, the 1971 National League most valuable player, is not considered one of the greatest baseball players ever. Ted Williams may be a better example.

Williams was named the American League's manager of the year with the Washington Senators in 1969. By 1973, however, Williams was out of baseball, his teams never finishing better than fourth.
"Maybe in some ways I'm a little bit different," Gretzky said. "I felt like as a player, I was successful because I worked my way to become a player. And so as a coach, that's the way I feel. I think that way."

Besides, Gretzky said, "People always thought I coached the teams that I played on."

Joe Starkey: Concrete Charlie

Joe Starkey
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, November 24, 2005

Don't get Chuck Bednarik started on the modern-day NFL, which has become so specialized that it's one man's job just to snap the ball on kicks.

See, they didn't have tight ends coaches, third-down backs or designated "long snappers" when Bednarik played 58 minutes in the 1960 NFL Championship. That was the game he tackled Jim Taylor just short of the goal line as time expired, clinching the Philadelphia Eagles' 17-13 victory over the Green Bay Packers (the Eagles haven't won it all since).

Bednarik was the NFL's last true, full-time player.

"I'm 80 years old, and I could snap the ball on punts, extra points and field goals, for godsakes," he says. "I call this game 'pussycat football.' Good gracious. They're a bunch of overpaid, underplayed jerks."

Like I said, don't get him started. This was a phone interview, by the way. A couple of them. One conducted a few months back, one Wednesday afternoon.

Bednarik spoke from his home in Coopersburg, Pa., where he lives with his wife of 56 years, Emma, and tends to his two-acre plot of land.

"These linemen are so overweight," he said. "In my era, nobody played at 360-370 pounds. Can you picture these guys playing football the way it originated? They'd die. For Christ's sake. It stinks. Pussycat football.

"You can quote me on that."

If you're detecting a trace of bitterness, well, Bednarik doesn't deny it. He never made as much as $28,000 in a year during his NFL career and worked a side job selling concrete. Hence the nickname "Concrete Charlie."

He's no fan of big-time college football, either, but he'll stay up tonight way past his normal bedtime of about 8:30 p.m. in order to watch the Backyard Brawl.

Bednarik will root for West Virginia, because his third cousin, Adam Bednarik, plays quarterback there. Adam, a redshirt sophomore, was getting most of the snaps this until he was injured late against Louisville on Oct. 15.

Redshirt freshman Pat White led an incredible comeback that day and has been playing well ever since, but it's likely Adam will get into the game tonight.

Adam and Chuck don't know each other well but have visited a few times, once when Adam trekked to Coopersburg. Chuck gave him an autographed, framed copy of the famous photo depicting Chuck -- then a center/linebacker/ special teams ace -- standing over a fallen and broken Frank Gifford.

The message on the photo: "Good Luck to Adam Bednarik. Be careful."

Adam has lived up to the family name, playing through several injuries and practicing throughout 2004 with what he later learned was a completely torn rotator cuff.
And when he scrambles, rest assured, he'd just as soon drop dead as slide.
"I'm proud of him," Chuck says. "I pray for him."

Chuck believes a key to his longevity is a routine that includes church every morning at 8 a.m., followed by a glass of wine at 8:30. Tracking 10 grandchildren helps keep him spry, too. He and Emma have five daughters, no sons.

"There must be a reason why God did that," Bednarik said. "I would like to have had a son, but God knows, I might have been too tough on him."
Ya' think?

Joe Starkey is a sports writer for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He can be reached at jstarkey@tribweb.com

Victor Davis Hanson: Saddam, al-Qaeda Linked

[Anyone wishing to really get the 'inside baseball" version of what's going on in Iraq should read Yossef Bodansky's book "The Secret History of the Iraq War"...Bodansky heads the Congressional Task Force on Counterterrorism and Unconventional Warfare and his book on Iraq is packed with information. I also highly recommend his other books: "bin Laden: The Man Who Targeted America" (published in 1999) and "The High Cost of Peace".

I have no use for how the war in Iraq is being conducted and I have no illussions about how successful we will be in turning the Middle East into Renaissance-era Western Europe...but anyone who thinks that Saddam did not have plenty of WMDs and ties with al-Qaeda just doesn't know the facts. - jtf]

Posted on: Friday, November 25, 2005
The Honolulu Advertiser
COMMENTARY
No hype needed: Saddam, al-Qaida linked
By Victor Davis Hanson

As American casualties mount in Iraq, politicians at home now fight over who said what and when about weapons of mass destruction and the need for going to war. One of the most frequent charges is that President Bush hyped a non-existent link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida — and that as a result, we diverted our efforts from finishing off the real terrorists to start a new and costly war to replace a secular dictator.

This charge is false for several reasons — and illogical for even more. Almost every responsible U.S. government body had long warned about Saddam's links to al-Qaida terrorists. In 1998, for example, when the Clinton Justice Department indicted bin Laden, the writ read: "In addition, al-Qaida reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al-Qaida would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaida would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq."

Then in October 2002, George Tenet, the Clinton-appointed CIA director, warned the Senate in similar terms: "We have solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida going back a decade." Seventy-seven senators apparently agreed — including a majority of Democrats — and cited just that connection a few days later as a cause to go to war against Saddam: " ... Whereas members of al-Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq."

The bipartisan consensus about this unholy alliance was not based on intriguing but unconfirmed rumors of meetings between Saddam's intelligence agents and al-Qaida operatives such as Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. Nor did the senators or the president ever claim that Saddam himself planned the Sept. 11 attacks. Instead, the Justice Department, the Senate and two administrations were alarmed by terrorist groups like Ansar al-Islam, an al-Qaida affiliate that established bases in Iraqi Kurdistan.

More importantly, one of the masterminds of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled to Baghdad to find sanctuary with Saddam after the attack. And after the U.S.'s successful war against the Taliban, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the present murderous al-Qaida leader in Iraq, reportedly escaped from Afghanistan to gain a reprieve from Saddam.
All of this is understandable since Saddam had a long history of promoting and sheltering anti-Western terrorists. That's why both Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas — terrorist banes of the 1970s and 1980s — were in Baghdad prior to the U.S. invasion and why the families of West Bank suicide bombers were given $25,000 rewards by the Iraqi government.

Saddam worried little over the agendas of these diverse terrorist groups, only that they shared his own generic hatred of Western governments. This kind of support from leaders such as Saddam has proven crucial to radical, violent Islamicists' efforts.

After Sept. 11, it became clear that these enemies can only resort to terrorism to weaken American resolve and gain concessions — and can't even do that without the clandestine help of illegitimate regimes (from Saddam in Iraq to the Taliban in Afghanistan, the theocracy in Iran, Bashar Assad in Syria and others) who provide money and sanctuary while denying culpability.
Middle Eastern terrorists and tyrants feed on one another. The Saddams and Assads of the region — and to a less extent the Saudi royal family and the Mubarak dynasty — deflected popular anger over their own failures onto the United States by allowing terrorists to scapegoat the Americans.

Yet, for a quarter-century, oil, professed anti-communism and loud promises to "fight terror" earned various reprieves from the West for these dictatorships, who were deathly afraid that one day America might catch on and do something other than shoot a cruise missile at enemies while sternly lecturing "friends."

That day came after Sept. 11. To end the old pathology, we took out the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, pressured the Syrians to leave Lebanon, encouraged Lebanese democracy, hectored the Egyptians about elections, told Libya's Moammar Gaddafi to come clean about his nuclear plans, and risked oil supplies by jawboning the Persian Gulf monarchies to liberalize.

The theory behind all these messy and often caricatured efforts was not the desire for endless war — we removed by force only the two worst regimes, in Afghanistan and Iraq — but to allow Middle Easterners a third alternative between Islamic radicalism and secular dictatorship. No wonder that wherever there are elections in the Middle East — Afghanistan and Iraq — legitimate governments there have the moral authority and the desire to fight Islamic terrorism.

Americans can blame one another all we want over the cost in lives and treasure in Iraq. But the irony is that not long ago everyone from Bill Clinton to George Bush, senators, CIA directors and federal prosecutors all agreed that Saddam had offered assistance to al-Qaida, the organization that murdered 3,000 Americans. That was one of the many reasons we went into Iraq, why Zarqawi and ex-Baathists side-by-side now attack American soldiers — and why an elected Iraqi government is fighting with us.