Remembering the Duke Again

In Memoriam

By Larry Thornberry on 6.10.09 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

My heroes haven't always been cowboys. (There's been Stan Musial, Chuck Yeager, Walker Percy, Margaret Thatcher, et al.) But one of them was certainly America's number one cowboy, perhaps America's number one patriot, and a fierce defender of its best values.

Marion Mitchell Morrison, springing from humble beginnings in Winterset, Iowa, was known to millions of movie-viewers as John Wayne, and to his friends as "Duke." He breathed his last at 5:23 P.M., June 11, 1979. Thirty years ago tomorrow. In those years we haven't seen his like, and probably won't again. The cultural soil just isn't here to grow another giant like the Duke.

Looking at the post-Duke culture, and the consequent train wreck of our politics, we haven't done so well without him showing the way in his vigorous but charming pre-Miranda style.

Although the Duke was probably the most popular movie star in Hollywood history, the current tinsel town of Sean Penn, George Clooney, Susan Sarandon, and the various Baldwins probably wouldn't have any place for the Duke. (The answer to the question, "How many Baldwin brothers are there?" is the same as the answer to, "How many timeouts are there in a basketball game?" Answer: No one knows for sure, but there's A LOT.)

It's fashionable since the sixties, at least in elite circles, to disparage the kind of conservatism and unrepentant patriotism the Duke represented. On top of being conservative, the Duke was unapologetically masculine, a man's man before this became politically incorrect. Even while millions of middle-Americans (and millions overseas) flocked to the Duke's movies, critics sneered and sniped at what they considered the Duke's overly simple moral code and his refusal to adopt their cynicism and irony.

There have been many biographies of the Duke. Some take the Hollywood hype approach. Others, like Garry Wills' John Wayne's America, attempt to deconstruct the Duke and Duke's America. We need not trouble with these.
Of the serious attempts to tell the Duke's story, the gold standard is 1995's John Wayne: American, by Randy Roberts and James S. Olson. Both are professors, but their writing is free of academic obscurity, theory, or liberal tics. These guys are no dusty dons or ideological red-hots. The book is still available and worth the reading time.

Here's how Roberts and Olson sum up the Duke's crosswise position to the literati and glitterati:

As the cultural elite turned increasingly liberal, Wayne remained wedded to rock-ribbed, traditional values. He was no ideologue. He was a classical liberal in a true Barry Goldwater sense, a mainstream American small-town conservative and a mainstream 1940s anti-communist….. In person and in his films, John Wayne insisted that evil had to be punished, violently if necessary. Communism, he believed, was an incorrigible evil, socialism and liberalism were mere fellow travelers, and he remained unrepentant in his convictions. Liberal critics could never give John Wayne his due because they could never see beyond his politics.

But American movie-goers gave the Duke his due. After World War II, the country had endured a Great Depression and had taken the largest part in defeating well-armed fascism (with no personal help from the Duke except in patriotic movies and USO tours it must be pointed out -- the Duke felt guilty for the rest of this life about his lack of military service in The Big One). We were confident and ready to go on the gaudiest and most successful roll in history. Americans were more united than they had been in any time in their history, and almost certainly more than we ever will be again.

The Duke was prefect for these times, and his career took off. Before it was done, The Duke had starred in 150 films (including the B films where he learned his craft in the 1930s). For a quarter century, 1949 to 1973, he was the biggest box-office draw in movies.

It's not hard to see why. The Duke's action flicks are morality plays, where good and evil have a vigorous go at each other and there's no difficulty telling which is which. The Duke played some subtle roles -- for example the sixtyish Captain Nathan Brittles in 1949's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, a role the Duke took on when he was only 42, or 1976's The Shootist, the Duke's final role, where he plays John Bernard Books, an aging gunfighter dying of cancer when the Duke himself was an aging actor dying of cancer. But there is very little moral nuance to be found in the Duke's movies, and no angst at all. No pity parties.

Values like patriotism, honesty, fidelity, personal responsibility, and doing the hard and necessary job whether we want to or not are celebrated in the Duke's movies. (No one in the Duke's movies is getting in touch with his inner child, or taking a mental health day.) For this reason his movies are civics lessons as well as entertainments.

The Duke's movies are beautifully filmed, with many of the westerns unfolding in the incomparable Monument Valley (where Arizona and Utah come together). They were directed by some of Hollywood's best, John Ford and Howard Hawks, to name just two. Even the music in the westerns is stirring, the work of some first rate composers such as Elmer Bernstein, Dimitri Tiomkin, and John Williams.

The Duke's movies are still widely available for purchase, through the various rental outfits, and for free loan at various public libraries. So on this sad anniversary, TAS readers might consider remembering and celebrating the Duke while being entertained at the same time by watching the Duke again. As morality plays, the movies stand up well over time.

The Duke liked a drink (or several) about as well as the next guy. So if adult beverages are part of your dinner plans tomorrow, I'd ask you to raise your glass to the Duke. A great American (even if he didn't take arms against America's sea of troubles in uniform). And one of a kind.

We could sure use you today, big guy.

Larry Thornberry is a writer in Tampa.

Plan to Combat Global Warming? Pie in the Sky

Even decades from now, the benefits would still dwarf the cost.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
June 10, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

Whenever you hear a politician start a sentence with, “If we can put a man on the moon . . . ,” grab your wallet.

For years, Democrats, enthralled by the cargo cult of the Kennedy presidency, have used the moon landing as proof that no big government ambition is beyond our reach.

The latest example of anthropogenic-lunar empowerment is global warming. Al Gore and Barack Obama routinely cite the Apollo program as proof that we can make good on the president’s messianic campaign pledge to stem the rising ocean tides and hasten the healing of the planet.

The problem with the “if we can put a man on the moon, we can certainly spend trillions on this or that” formulation is that it sees political and scientific accomplishments as interchangeable. The moon landing was a daunting but nonetheless discrete challenge. Throw in enough brainiacs and blank checks — and heroes willing to risk their lives — and it is almost foreordained that someone will make that small step for man and that giant leap for mankind.

But politicians see things through a political lens — every great accomplishment looks like a political accomplishment. Kennedy cultists seem to think that JFK’s pledge succeeded in part because he was eloquent and inspiring and popular. No doubt all that helped. But if Kennedy had promised that by the end of the decade America would have a fully functioning perpetual-motion machine, his grand challenge would be remembered as a joke.

Recall that Kennedy’s successor, with far more political capital than Kennedy had, promised to defeat poverty. Historian Steven Hayward notes that in 1966, Lyndon Johnson’s commander in the War on Poverty, Sargent Shriver, told Congress that the White House believed poverty in America would be eliminated within ten years. “Why,” Hayward wryly asks, “should social science be more difficult than rocket science?”

I don’t know that one is more difficult than the other, but I do know that they are not interchangeable. Physics is good at figuring out how to split atoms. And what has sociology figured out? Not very much.

Obama seems to be on both sides of the lesson. The president says he wants to invest massively in scientific research, eventually spending 3 percent of gross domestic product on scientific R&D, with a big chunk devoted to energy research. Who knows? That might work.

But at the same time, the Democrats are pushing their cap-and-trade scheme — the Waxman-Markey climate bill — through Congress, and it surely won’t work.

The Apollo engineers’ motto was “Waste anything but time.” Waxman-Markey seems to do that one better, promising to waste everything, including time. It’s a legislative blunderbuss that fails any remotely honest cost-benefit analysis, as Jim Manzi painstakingly demonstrates in the current issue of National Review. Under the bill, the government would sell or give away waivers — call them ration cards — for carbon emissions, worth tens of billions of dollars. The system is destined to become politicized. Waivers will be granted to favored industries and donors in states with political clout.

If everything worked exactly according to plan, it would cost the economy trillions of dollars over the coming decades. Meanwhile, climatologist Chip Knappenberger — administrator of the World Climate Report, an avowedly global-warming-skeptical blog — uses standard climate models to show that the payoff would be to reduce global temperatures by about 0.1 degree Celsius by 2100. Sponsors of the legislation haven’t offered a competing analysis.

“The costs would be more than ten times the benefits,” writes Manzi, “even under extremely unrealistic assumptions of low costs and high benefits.” All the while, China, India, and other countries are simply scoffing at the suggestion they curtail their carbon emissions.

Now, I am more skeptical about the threat of global warming than Manzi is, never mind the Al Gore chorus. But let us assume the chorus is right and it is the moral equivalent of a war for our very survival as a civilization. The question remains: Why? Why this approach? Why see global warming as an excuse to expand government regulation and taxation rather than invest in problem-solving?

The U.S. government could spend trillions on research into scrubbing carbon from the air, bioengineering organisms to eat greenhouse gases, or crafting substances to reflect more heat back into space. We could establish prizes for development of long-life batteries or clean coal technologies. And if any of these investments paid off, decades from now the benefits would still dwarf Waxman-Markey at a fraction of the cost. It hardly takes a rocket scientist to see that.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

© 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Material Support on the Ropes?

Will a key anti-terror tool fall victim to Obama’s Muslim outreach?

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
June 09, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

On the same day Barack Hussein Obama enthralled an Egyptian audience with his airbrushed version of Islam and its historic interactions with the United States (complete with adoption of CAIR’s grossly inflated account of America’s Muslim population), Attorney General Eric Holder echoed the president, committing the Justice Department (DOJ) to a major role in this “new beginning between the United States and the Muslim community.” A “top priority,” Holder promised, would be what he called “a return to robust civil rights enforcement and outreach in defending religious freedoms and other fundamental rights of all of our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the housing market, in our schools and in the voting booth.”

Holder’s gall is sadly hilarious — and I’m not even talking about his absurd suggestion that the Justice Department (or for that matter, the whole U.S. government) has not been twisting itself in knots, for years, in cloying displays of solicitude toward Muslims: the Civil Division’s “Initiative to Combat Post-9/11 Discriminatory Backlash” (which backlash failed to materialize); the annual FBI braying about its “outreach” and aggressive investigations of “hate crimes” against Muslims (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here); the careful listing of some of the FBI’s “Arab-American Outreach Partners”; FBI Director Bob Mueller’s appearance at the American Muslim Council’s annual convention even as the AMC persisted in supporting terrorists; the FBI’s attempts to provide awards and special access to Muslims with dubious ties (see here); the DOJ’s bragging about vandalism prosecutions when the victims were Muslims (here and here — with the FBI chiming in here); the government’s publication of a CAIR press release on a Department of Homeland Security website in order to brag that our investigative agencies were being compelled to endure Islamic sensitivity training (see here); and so on.

I refer instead to the attorney general’s indignant reference to rights of “our fellow citizens . . . in the voting booth.” It came only days after he and his fellow DOJ political appointees quietly vanquished enforcement efforts by career prosecutors against jackbooted thugs from the New Black Panther Party. These Obama supporters, in patent violation of the civil-rights laws, intimidated McCain supporters (especially white ones) who attempted to vote in Philadelphia on Election Day. And under Holder’s guidance, the Civil Rights Division has just vitiated efforts to crack down on voter fraud in Missouri and Georgia, ensuring that many of “our fellow citizens” will see their franchise nullified by the votes of ineligible and often illegal aliens.

“There are those who will continue to want to divide by fear,” intoned the attorney general — so anxious to slay his imaginary dragons while cowering before the real thing (“You’re about to be ruled by the black man, cracker,” said one Panther). But Holder wants to assure you — for the umpty-umpth time — that he refuses to be put to a “false choice” that pits “our national security against our civil liberties.” No siree, we’re going “to protect our people while we also protect our principles.”

I wonder. There was so much jaw-slacking stuff in Obama’s Cairo stemwinder that this fleeting bombshell dropped unnoticed:

Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together. We must always examine the ways in which we protect it. For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation. That’s why I’m committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.

Zakat is the obligation of giving alms. It occupies a central place in Islam (one of the religion’s five “pillars”), just as it does in religious traditions more familiar to the West — you know, the charitable giving that Obama wants to saddle with less favorable tax treatment.

Do we really have “rules on charitable giving” that, as the president claims, make it especially difficult for Muslims — as opposed to others — to give? No. What we have are federal laws against material support for terrorism. These were enacted by Congress in 1996. They have been the bedrock of the DOJ’s anti-terrorism enforcement ever since.

The purpose of these laws is obvious, as has been the stepped-up effort to use them since 9/11. If we are going to prevent terrorist strikes from happening, rather than content ourselves with prosecuting any surviving terrorists after our fellow citizens have been murdered and maimed, we have to identify cells and choke off their resources before attacks can be planned and executed. Thus, a donor who gives to an organization, including an ostensible charity, that he knows to have been formally designated as a terrorist entity under U.S. law, or that he knows facilitates terrorist activity, is liable.

That shouldn’t be a problem, should it? The law does not target Muslim charities or organizations, and, indeed, several non-Islamic entities have been prosecuted.

Yet the inconvenient fact is that numerous Islamic charities have proved to be fronts for terrorist activity, at least in part. These include the Holy Land Foundation (whose top operatives were recently convicted for underwriting Hamas in a prosecution that exposed CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator) and the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, one of the world’s largest Muslim charities, headquartered in Saudi Arabia (which hosted the president for private talks last week). So material-support statutes have become a sore subject for Muslims because the vast majority of terrorism — including virtually all anti-American terrorism — is carried out by Muslims.

In our politically correct, increasingly “progressive” times, of course, there can be equal protection of the laws only if those laws produce equal outcomes for disparate grievance groups. Thus, if our material-support laws are causing a problem for Muslims in particular, it couldn’t possibly be that this is due to a peculiar nexus between Islam and terrorism. It must be that our laws themselves are flawed. Evidently, regardless of their vital role in keeping us safe from domestic terror attacks for the last eight years, those laws must now be kneaded into something acceptable to the Islamic activists that DOJ is so determined to “partner” with.

There’s a problem, though. It’s not just that we know, based on experience, that zakat often tends to find its way to jihadists. The inconvenient fact is that it is supposed to find its way to jihadists. As explained at the Center for Security Policy’s new website, Shariah Finance Watch, under the Islamic legal code, recipients of zakat alms-giving include “those fighting for Allah, meaning people engaged in Islamic military operations for whom no salary has been allotted in the army roster [i.e., ‘volunteers for jihad without remuneration’].” Such jihadists must be “given enough to suffice them for the operation, even if affluent” — including “weapons, mounts, clothing, and expenses,” as well as support for the families they have left behind.

Last I checked, we’re still operating under U.S. law, not sharia. U.S. law already provides a legal process by which an organization that contends that it has been erroneously designated as a terror facilitator can challenge that designation. Moreover, the material-support statutes already carve out humanitarian exceptions that permit donations of medical care and religious items. And no one can be convicted of providing material support absent proof that he knew he was giving to a terrorist organization or knew his contributions were abetting terrorist activities.

What more, exactly, are Obama and Holder planning to do to eliminate this particular “false choice” between our security and “our” values?

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Because the Night (Live 1978)

(Click on title to play video)

Take me now baby here as I am
Pull me close try an understand
I work all day out in the hot sun
Stay with me now till the mornin' comes
Come on now try and understand
The way I feel when I'm in your hands
Take me now as the sun descends
They can't hurt you now
They can't hurt you now
They can't hurt you now

Because the night belongs to lovers
Because the night belongs to us
Because the night belongs to lovers
Because the night belongs to us

What I got I have earned
What I'm not I have learned
Desire and hunger is the fire I breathe
Just stay in my bed till the morning comes
Come on now try and understand
The way I feel when I'm in your hands
Take me now as the sun descends
They can't hurt you now
They can't hurt you now
They can't hurt you now

Because the night...

Your love is here and now
The vicious circle turns and burns without
Though I cannot live forgive me now
The time has come to take this moment and
They can't hurt you now

Because the night...

My 1970 GTO

By Mike Adams
http://townhall.com/
Monday, June 08, 2009

In the summer of 1980, I was looking forward to turning 16 and getting a driver’s license. All of my friends were looking forward to driving but none as much as me. My friends would be driving used Mazdas and Toyotas that got good gas mileage. But my dad bought me a 1970 GTO. He didn’t care that it got nine miles to the gallon. It looked like it was going thirty miles an hour when it was just sitting in the driveway.

Even though that old GTO was fast it had worn hydraulic lifters that were sucking away horsepower and badly wearing down the stock Pontiac cam shaft. Nonetheless, I put the pedal to the floor and burned rubber every chance I got – that is, as long as the Houston Police were nowhere in sight.

One night on Highway Three I began to hear an unfamiliar sound just after I floored the accelerator. I didn’t realize it at the time but I had merely dented the flywheel cover running over something in the road. But the sound it was making – coupled with the fact that it started just after I hit the accelerator – made me think I had spun a bearing on the crank shaft.

So dad and I went into the garage and pulled out the motor. After it was secure on the engine lift we could see the source of the noise. And we knew we could just pull off the flywheel cover and hammer out the dent to fix the problem. But we also knew it would be so much more fun to rebuild the old motor. My dad must have figured that if I was going to finish at the bottom of my class academically I might as well have the fastest car among the 3300 students at Clear Lake High School.

For weeks, after I got home from school – and my dad got home from work – we toiled away on that engine. First we started with the internal restoration. A Crane Blazer camshaft was the first high-performance extra installed. That went with new rings and bearings, new lifters, and a nice valve job – on 10-to-1 heads with 2.11-inch intake valves.

Then we got to all the really unnecessary aftermarket items. A Holly double pump carburetor sat on a new Edelbrock manifold. Headmond headers ran just below the stock chrome valve covers. We topped it off with a small chrome air filter that allowed people to better see what we had beneath the hood (plus, you could hear it sucking in air from inside the passenger compartment). Finally, there were nice Thrush mufflers to let people know we were coming long before we got there.

When we were done, my friend Jim Duke joked that he hoped his dad would hurry up and have a midlife crisis - so he could build him a hot rod, too. My buddy Terry Cohn said I had the coolest dad in town. Terry has always been wise beyond his years.

That GTO had other benefits, too. The first time I asked Jane out on a date she said she’d go because she heard I had a cool car. When I picked her up she said “This is it?” She was disappointed that it wasn’t much to look at. But after I laid waste to a few Corvettes and Trans Ams she changed her mind.

Those nights in Houston were legendary. Like the time I buried the speedometer at 140 on Interstate 45 on the way to Galveston. Or the time I beat James Armand’s 1970 Camaro in a race up Falcon Pass. That night, I took everyone’s money on the Clear Lake High School soccer team. Those were the days.

But my reign as the king of Falcon Pass would end in less than a year. Billy Peters had a cool dad, too. He bought him a 1967 Camaro with a 427 engine. Billy had all the extras put on that engine, too. And he topped it off with something I didn’t have; namely, a 4.11 posi-traction rear axle.

People always said that car would be the death of me. But, ironically, it saved my life – along with my buddy Wes Armour - in the summer of 1984. A fellow tried to end an argument using a 12-gauge shotgun in the parking lot of Burger King. We left the guy standing, literally, in a cloud of tire smoke. His Jeep wasn’t going to catch up with that GTO.

A few years later, cancer – under the vinyl top, in the trunk, and behind the wheel wells – would claim that old GTO. We would take the Holly and the Edelbrock and bolt it on top of the 400 engine in our mint condition 1973 Grand Am.

But things were never the same. In 1971, Congress would put a halt to the golden era of great muscle cars in America. Emissions requirements would flood the market with low compression, two-barrel, single exhaust versions of the old cars we used to love. They were merely shadows of their former selves.

Now President Obama is determining the compensation of GM employees. He’s getting rid of board members at GM and replacing them with those of his choosing. He’s preparing to impose new fuel economy requirements. He’s even using the IRS to make people buy cars they really don’t want.

Congress started steering the auto industry in the wrong direction many years ago. This new president is merely pushing down the accelerator and keeping steady hold upon the wheel. Meanwhile, our memories of the glory days, like so many youthful dreams, are fading in the rear view mirror.

Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

- Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina - Wilmington and author of Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts "Womyn" On Campus.

Health-Care Bill Is the Ball Game

More competition, not less. More market discipline, not less.

By Mona Charen
http://www.nationalreview.com/
June 09, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

You might suppose that President Obama has his hands full running two wars, administering General Motors, “rescuing” the banking system, attempting to empower unions over management, hushing up whispers about hypocrisy regarding Guantanamo detainees, managing the mortgage crisis, imposing “clean energy” on the nation, handling nuclear North Korea and nearly nuclear Iran, “stimulating” the economy, reviving the “peace process” between Palestinians and Israelis, inaugurating a new relationship with Russia and with the Muslim world, and reversing the rise of the world’s oceans, but no, he has one more agenda item — overhauling U.S. health care.

The administration is hoping that a health bill will be voted on by early August, which may be overly optimistic but still means that this summer will be dominated by the health-care debate. Its outcome will determine the overall success or failure of Obama’s effort to torque America toward the European model of statism. It isn’t just that the health-care sector accounts for 17 percent of the U.S. economy. It is also the case that, if enacted, a nationalized health service — no matter how crushingly expensive or bureaucratic — will vitiate arguments about the proper scope of government. All future pleas for reducing the size of the state will run into the accusation that the small-government advocate is eager to take antibiotics from the mouth of a child or insulin from a diabetic.

Whereas the Clinton administration advertised the overhaul of American health care primarily as a means of covering the uninsured, President Obama is making the bolder claim that revamping health care is a way to save money. Really? Medicare is already the program that ate the government, scheduled to go into bankruptcy itself in 2019. As the trustees' report put it, “While Medicare’s annual costs were 3.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2008, or about three quarters of Social Security’s, they are projected to surpass Social Security expenditures in 2028 and reach 11.4 percent of GDP in 2083.” Or consider the Massachusetts health-care reform introduced by Gov. Mitt Romney. Like every other government health-care program, Romney’s has vastly exceeded cost projections. Initially projected at $125 million per year, the program actually cost taxpayers $133 million in 2007, $647 million in 2008, and $869 million in 2009, and could top $1.1 billion next year.

“Health-care costs,” President Obama intoned as he kicked off a summit on the subject, are “causing a bankruptcy every 30 seconds.” Cord Blomquist on Openmarket.org observed that in 2008, a big year for bankruptcies, there were a total of 1.1 million bankruptcies. Adding up Obama’s numbers — 120 bankruptcies per hour times 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year equals 1,051,200 bankruptcies per year — would suggest that only 100,000 of those were for non-medical expenses. Does that make sense in the midst of a collapsing housing market? The study Obama based his numbers on was flawed in other ways as well, as ABC’s Gary Langer noted on the ABC News website.

Beware of politicians bearing statistics. But what is even more galling than misleading (or outright false) statistics is to watch politicians rail about the expense of health insurance without once acknowledging their own role in jacking up the price. Health care is expensive, of course — though it also delivers value by improving the quality and length of life. But our jerry-built system has made buying insurance much more expensive than it should be. State mandates require insurance companies to cover a variety of specialized medical services (usually at the behest of lobbyists for the relevant service providers) including: in vitro fertilization, marriage therapy, smoking-cessation classes, hormone-replacement therapy, chiropractor visits, and so on. That makes it impossible for companies to offer cheap, no-frills, high-deductible plans for the young and healthy. As Sally Pipes notes in The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care, there were only 252 mandates in force 30 years ago. Today there are 1,901, an average of 38 per state.

Government involvement in the health-care system, through mandates, has reduced competition (such as forbidding shopping for insurance across state lines). A skewed tax deduction that permits only employers and not employees to deduct the cost of health coverage has made health care more expensive than it ought to be. Yet President Obama proposes that a hair of the dog — vastly more government involvement — will bring down costs and improve quality.

If he follows the lead of Great Britain, Canada, or other countries whose systems he admires, he can definitely bring down costs. He can do it the way they have, by rationing care. But Americans should bear in mind this summer that when the president promises to get health-care costs under control he is really promising less care. There is a better way. More competition, not less. More market discipline, not less. This will affect every American for generations to come. The stakes could hardly be higher.

— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Media Takes Whitewashing of Islam to a Whole New Level

We are, make no mistake, deep into Orwellian territory here.

By Bruce Bawer
http://pajamasmedia.com/
June 9, 2009

In the days since President Obama’s highly touted “speech to the Muslim world,” a number of commentators have pointed out that Obama, a self-described “student of history,” managed to serve up a pastiche of half-truths, exaggerations, and utter nonsense about Islamic history, and that even in his supposedly gutsier moments — as when he criticized the treatment of women in Muslim societies — he was hardly as forceful as the circumstances warrant.

It’s no coincidence that the commentators who have made these points have done so, almost without exception, not in major media organs but in places like Pajamas Media. For the flattering account of Islam that Obama served up in Cairo — the celebration of imaginary Islamic achievements in science and culture, the evocation of a golden-age Andalusia where Christians and Jews were treated with respect and equality, and the references to the Koran that made it sound like the Sermon on the Mount — are of a piece with the fictions about Islam found regularly in the mainstream press. This is certainly true of the New York Times, and it’s equally the case with the Washington Post — a fact that will be obvious to any reader of my new book, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom, in which the index includes the following entry:

Washington Post, 66, 102, 103, 149-51, 156, 163-64, 238, 262, 263-64, 276

Now, with the single exception of the very last Post reference (the one on page 276, which is a thumbs-up for columnist Anne Applebaum), my mentions of the Post in Surrender all point to the reliability with which the newspaper clings to what one might call a wishful-thinking view of Islam — as if Islam were, say, nothing more than Episcopalianism with prayer rugs and burkas.

On page 102, for example, I recount a 2008 speech in which Post managing editor Philip Bennett “lamented that the media, including his own newspaper, had failed to give the American public a clear understanding of Islam.” He was right — but his point was not that the Post routinely skirts the severity of Islamic doctrine and whitewashes Islamic views of freedom of speech and religion, women’s rights, and so forth. No, his argument was that his and other newspapers portray Islam too negatively. The answer to this dilemma, in his view? Employ more Muslim reporters and editors.

Then there’s page 150, where I cite a blog on the Post/Newsweek website by top-tier Islam apologist John Esposito. Esposito is the founding director of something called the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University — which means that the Saudi royal family pays his salary. Which, in turn, means that a man on the payroll of the world’s most oppressive Islamic regime is engaged by the Washington Post and Newsweek to provide their readers with objective facts about Islam. This perverse state of affairs is, alas, par for the course in today’s mainstream media.

Turn to page 156 of my book and you’ll read about a softball Post Q & A with media darling Tariq Ramadan that utterly failed to address, among other things, Ramadan’s refusal to condemn the stoning of adulteresses or to challenge this out-and-out Islamist’s bald-faced effort to come off as moderate. On page 164, I note that the Post and New York Times, on the very same day (June 20, 2007), published op-eds by Hamas spokesman Ahmad Yousef; on page 238 I point out that while the Post op-ed page ran not only Yousef’s propaganda but also similar material by other Hamas and Hezbollah heavies, it rejected an op-ed it had commissioned from author Sam Harris to write about Geert Wilders’s short film Fitna for being “too critical of Islam.” In short, as I put it in the book: “Harris was too extreme for the Post, but Hamas wasn’t.”

Finally, on page 263, I mention a 2008 Post/Newsweek website article by Feisal Abdul Rauf arguing for nothing less than “the integration of Sharia law” into Western law — a change which Rauf presents as nothing less than fair, even though it would entail (among much else) making homosexuality and adultery capital crimes.

As this sorry record suggests, the Washington Post has, in the years since 9/11, taken an unequivocal stand on Islam: in the name of liberalism and tolerance, it has chosen to minimize or overlook entirely the many extremely illiberal and intolerant aspects of the faith of Muhammed. And while embracing the mendacities of John Esposito and his ilk, and legitimizing terrorists’ disinformation by publishing it on its op-ed page, the paper routinely dismisses, distorts, and demonizes those who dare to speak uncomfortable truths about Islam.

No surprise, then, that when the Post ran a review of Surrender last Sunday it proved to be yet another splendid example of the Post’s Islam policy. Surrender contains nearly three hundred pages of meticulously documented evidence that Western leaders, media, writers, artists, and others (some motivated by fear, others by a misguided multicultural “respect”) are censoring and self-censoring, prettifying the facts about Islamic belief, practice, and history, and pillorying those who don’t follow their lead — and, as a result, eroding precious liberties. This is a genuine crisis for the free world. But the Post’s review treated the hard facts as if they were the feverish delusions of a crackpot.

Take my comments on the Islamic Society of North America. Terrorism expert Steve Emerson has described the ISNA as a “Muslim Brotherhood front group with a long and documented history of support for terrorism.” Yet the Post’s reviewer, Paul A. Barrett, mocked my criticism of the ISNA, calling it “innocuous” and its leader “moderate.” Indeed, it now seems that just about any Muslim or Muslim organization that professes to eschew violence — no matter what his, her, or its religious beliefs, social views, long-term goals, and sub rosa connections may be — qualifies as “innocuous” and “moderate” in the eyes of papers like the Post.

Barrett further wrote that “Bawer veers into self-parody when he asserts that Muslims have cowed skeptics into self-censorship and inaction.” It is as if the countless examples that I cite in my book simply did not exist. We are, make no mistake, deep into Orwellian territory here. What to make of reality-denial on such a colossal scale? How can even the most bone-rattling fear of retribution (or of being called a racist or Islamophobe) lead supposedly responsible-minded members of the West’s cultural establishment to say that two plus two equals five?

“His own work,” Barrett sneered, “shows that critics of Islam have no trouble publishing.” Yes, and the butchering of Theo van Gogh, and the current lifestyles of people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Geert Wilders, Robert Redeker, and Fianna Nirenstein — who must be accompanied everywhere they go by armed bodyguards — show that some of Islam’s critics have to go to a good deal of trouble to stay alive. But the travails undergone by these brave champions of freedom plainly mean nothing to the likes of Barrett — or, I’m sorry to say, to the editors of the Washington Post.

- Bruce Bawer’s book While Europe Slept is now in paperback. His website is at www.brucebawer.com.

What Pittsburgh (Don’t Laugh) Can Teach Obama

Struggling cities like Detroit could learn a lot from the Pennsylvania city's rebirth.

Howard Fineman
Newsweek Web Exclusive
http://www.newsweek.com/
Jun 6, 2009

Before jetting off to the Middle East and Europe, President Obama took care of another piece of international diplomatic business: He announced the city in which the U.S. will host the next G20 summit in September. His choice drew laughter and puzzlement from reporters and diplomats alike.

Pittsburgh? Are you serious?

As a proud native, I understand and agree with the president's decision. Pittsburgh's story is inspiring and impressive. It was a rusting steel-making behemoth that, through struggle, pain and creativity, retooled itself as a surprisingly vibrant, 21st-century leader in education, computer science, medical research, sports entertainment and boutique manufacturing.

By most measures—unemployment and foreclosure rates, to name two—Pittsburgh is an island of calm in the raging recession.

But I'm dubious about the next step in the White House's reasoning: Pittsburgh's success, officials say, offers hope that Obama's own economic policies will work for Detroit and other beleaguered cities and industries. No, in fact, it doesn't.

Simply put, what worked in Pittsburgh won't work for the auto industry, and what the president wants to do for Detroit isn't the kind of thing that worked in my old hometown. Pittsburgh's rebirth is about the grit, sacrifice and hustle of locals—not the sweeping plans and power of federal bureaucrats.

As the steel industry was dying, no one (certainly no one in Pittsburgh) suggested or would have accepted a federal bailout, let alone a federal takeover. There was and is too much pride and stubbornness; the Whiskey Rebellion was two centuries ago, but the suspicion of Washington's motives remains.

In its first heyday, Pittsburgh produced as much or more steel than the rest of the world combined. Even into the '60s and '70s, the sky on cloud-covered nights glowed orange, reflecting the pulsing fires of open-hearth furnaces along the rivers below.

When the industry faltered—hit by cheap imports, lax management, labor strife and declining domestic demand—steel's leaders sought and won years of tariff and quota protection. So to that extent, the city and its leading industry did turn to the feds.

But ultimately a sense of realism—a trait of the city that sometimes borders on bitter cynicism—won out. The locals realized that the old steel industry was a lost cause, and they moved on.

A way of making a living ended, but not a way of life. The old determination found a new focus, which wasn't anymore a lifetime job in the mill, but a college education—and more education.

And that, above all, has been the key to the city's survival: pride in and commitment to local education. The city school system avoided the kind of collapse that faced other urban centers; schools in surrounding suburbs of Allegheny County have risen in stature. This was largely a local choice, with local and state money.

The same is true with higher education. Pittsburgh is one of only a handful of cities with two institutions—Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh—in the 62-member Association of American Universities, a prestigious alliance of the nation's leading research schools. True, CMU and Pitt get a lot of federal research money, and federal grants and loans help pay the tuition of many of their students. But the schools wouldn't be what they are had it not been for the vision of locals, from Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Mellon to the thousands of Pittsburgh schoolkids who contributed pennies toward the construction of the main building on the Pitt campus.

Believe it or not, Pittsburgh today is a college town, with one of the highest ratios of students to full-time residents in the nation.

At the center of the university complex (there are dozens of other universities and colleges in the area) is health care; and again, its creation was the result of local initiative. Affiliated with Pitt, UPMC has become one of the nation's largest, most advanced (and entrepreneurial) hospital and health-care providers.

HHS didn't tell them to do it.

"Now we're the city of 'eds and meds'," says Ira Morgan, a savvy player in Pittsburgh real estate.

Morgan and others see a revival of manufacturing, too—but on a smaller, more dispersed scale. The old open-hearth behemoths are gone; the cleared land along the rivers is now home to startups in computer systems and software and metals fabrication. "The industrial parcels are cheap and the business in them is strong," said Morgan.

The key to all of this is civic pride and lots of time. The city, pretty much left to its own devices, suffered for two decades, its wounds salved by the Steelers and other local sports teams, but the pain was very real. Pittsburgh has half the population it once did (though the Allegheny County metro area has retained its size). Some graceful old neighborhoods are collapsing under the weight of crime and drugs, even as most of them remain remarkably well maintained.

But the point is that this is largely a local story, not a national one. The lesson for the auto business and the auto-producing regions is not the one that President Obama wants them to hear. It is that the old world will inevitably disappear, and that creating a new one is up to you, not someone else.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/200991

If Islam is the Religion of Peace, Why Do They Have to Keep Reminding Us?

By Don Feder
http://www.grasstopsusa.com/
Monday, June 08, 2009

“Last week, four Southern Baptists were arrested for plotting to blow up St Patrick’s Cathedral. The men, who became born-again Christians in prison, wanted to kill and terrorize Catholics.”

If that was the opening paragraph in a newspaper story you were reading, your gut reaction would be – huh? Baptists don’t do things like that in the name of their faith. Neither do Catholics, Presbyterians, Seventh Day Adventists or Mormons.

But when we read the headline in a May 21st New York Times’ story – “4 Accused of Bombing Plot at Bronx Synagogues” – it was ho-hum stuff.

It wasn’t exactly a revelation when The Times informed us, in the 9th paragraph, “They are all Muslims, a law enforcement official said” – just in case you thought the conspiracy involved Episcopalians, Rotarians or the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.

If you hear about a hijacking, suicide bombing, sniper attack or the beheading of a hostage anywhere in the world, your first reaction is: a Muslim did it. Why? Because 9 times out of 10 a Muslim did do it.

In the case of The Newburgh Four, here’s what we know:

1. Their names are David “Daoud” Williams, James “Abdul Rahman” Cromitie, Onta “Hamza” Williams and Laguerre “Amin” Payen. At least two were prison-converts to the Big Peaceful.

2. They planned to blow up two synagogues with what they thought was C-4 explosives, supplied by the FBI.

3. They wanted to obtain Stinger missiles to shoot down military aircraft.

4. As Assistant US Attorney Eric Snyder stated when the defendants were arraigned in federal court, “These are people who were eager to bring death to Jews and the Jewish community.”

5. According to an informant, Cromitie said of the Jewish people: “I hate those motherf-----s, those f---ing Jewish bastards. I would like to get a synagogue.” Also, while scoping out a Jewish community center as a potential target, Cromitie is alleged to have said of nearby pedestrians that if he had a gun at the time, he would “shoot each one in the head.”

If Islam is such a “religion of peace,” why do they have to keep reminding us? Nobody’s running around saying “Christianity is a religion of peace” or “Judaism is a religion of peace” – because neither proposition is in doubt.

Yet, George W. Bush felt compelled to regularly reassure us (especially after 9/11) that Islam was about as peaceful as a religion can get.

Speaking at a 2005 dinner marking the end of Ramadan, Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, said Mohammedanism was the "religion of love and peace.” For Condi, being peaceful wasn’t enough. Islam had to be warm and cuddly too. “We in America know the benevolence that is at the heart of Islam,” Rice absurdly remarked. “We’ve seen it in many ways” – including in glorious Technicolor, in the video of the decapitation of Daniel Pearl.

President Obama boasts of his Muslim relations and his upbringing in Jakarta. In a speech to the Turkish parliament during his first trip abroad as president, Barack Hussein Obama assured the Muslin world that America “will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better, including my own country.”

When was the last time a U.S. president conveyed deep appreciation for the Christian faith?

So, Islam is a religion of peace and love, as well as a benefactor of humanity. If this is intuitively obvious, why do they have to keep saying it? Perhaps because the vision of a compassionate Islam is so often obscured by explosions, flying body parts, collapsing skyscrapers, rolling heads, and rabid imams preaching hate the Jews, hate the Christians, hate America, hate the West, etc.

If Islam is so gentle and kindly, why does it have such appeal for the most violent element in our society – those filled with resentment and rage, who like to hurt people (a lot)?

Question: Under what circumstances is an infidel most likely to convert to Islam: 1. While volunteering at a hospice or homeless shelter? 2. While working at a day-care center? 3.While planting flowers and singing Kumbaya at a peace rally? or 4. While incarcerated at a state or federal prison? What’s that? Someone told you, didn’t they?

Conversions behind bars are so common that Mitch Silber, chief NYPD intelligence analyst, says cops have a name for it “Prislam.” Chuck Colson of The Prison Fellowship Ministries was warning us of the coming jailhouse jihad almost a decade ago.

More than 2 million are imprisoned in the United States, of which an estimated 6% are members of the religion of rest-in-peace. Sometimes their real-world experience at hurting people (a lot) is put to good use as newly-minted Muslims.

Have you ever noticed how converts to a faith, or those with a newfound commitment to the religion of their birth, tend to be, well – nicer. Born-again Christians – including those who come from dysfunctional backgrounds – often exemplify the New Testament admonition to be “salt and light,” likewise committed Catholics and those who’ve moved from a secular Jewish identity to orthodoxy.

Islam is the exception.

By all accounts, John Walker Lindh, born into an upper-middle class family, was as normal as a child of broken home in Marin County, California can get. Then, at age 16, he converted to Islam and began calling himself Suleyman al-Faris.

In 1998, at age 17, John/Suleyman traveled to Yemen, to study Arabic so he could read the Koran in its original language. From there, the religion-of-peacenik went to Pakistan to study at a madrassa. The spring of 2001 found him at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.

When captured by U.S. forces in November 2001, Lindh was fighting for the blissful rule of the Taliban. Now, he’s serving a 20-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana, and probably proselytizing the other inmates, when he isn’t studying his peace-manual.

Other converts to Islam, unlikely to be mistaken for Mister Rogers, include:

* John Muhammad – Born John Allen Williams, he converted to Islam in 1987. Mr. Prophet was a member of the Nation of Islam for a time and reportedly provided security for Farrakhan’s 1995 “Million Man March.” Along with his boy companion, Lee Boyd Malvo, Muhammad shot and killed 16 people in 7 states in the fall of 2002. In custody, Muhammad told authorities that he was following in the footsteps of his idol, Osama bin Laden. He’s currently on death row in Virginia.

* Jose Padilla (AKA: Abdullah Al Muhajir) – Joining a Puerto Rican street gang as a teen, Padilla compiled an impressive juvenile and adult rap sheet, including attempted theft, aggravated assault and unlawful weapons possession. In 1998, Padilla became a jihadi tourist, traveling to Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan in search of the peace only Islam can bring. Padilla was trained at the camp of an al Qaeda affiliate in Afghanistan in 2000. Bin Laden deputy Abu Zubaydah sent Padilla back to the United States with $20,000 and an elaborate scheme to set off a radioactive “dirty bomb.” Apprehended, he’s now serving the remainder of a 17-year sentence.

* Richard Reid (Aka: Abdul Raheem, AKA: the Thom McAnn of terrorists) – Born in London the son of a Jamaican immigrant, he spent time in a number of British prisons, where he converted to the ROP. As a member of al Qaeda, Reid was assigned to blow up American Airlines Flight 63, en route from Paris to Miami, by igniting explosives hidden in his shoes. In this religious duty, Reid/Raheem failed, and is now serving a life sentence in the U.S.

* Sgt. Hasan Akbar – While stationed at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait (preparing to deploy to Iraq), on March 23, 2003, Akbar attacked other soldiers with grenades and a rifle, killing two officers and wounding 14 servicemen. His diary revealed a man of all-consuming hatred. (“Destroying America is my greatest goal.”) Prior to the murders, Akbar confessed in his journal “I will have to decide to kill my Muslim brothers fighting for Saddam Hussein or my battle buddies.” It didn’t take much thought. A military court convicted Akbar of the murders and sentenced him to death. He temporarily resides at Ft. Leavenworth, on his way to a rendezvous with 72 virgins.

The apologists for Islam (Crescent-kissers) respond that these ex-cons and psychos are no more representative of Islam than Bernie Madoff is of Jewish financiers or Ted Haggard (former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who had a relationship with a gay hooker) is of Christian leaders.

This is a plausible argument, at first blush. But if the Johnny jihadists, snipers, and homicidal anti-Semites got Islam wrong, who gets it right?

How about the Muslim-American groups which, in a rare show of empathy, rushed to condemn the Newburgh Four, including the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American –Islamic Relations?

Putting aside the fact that each of these groups has questionable connections, what are they actually doing to fight terrorism other than paying lip-service to the cause?

Robert Spencer, the editor of Jihad Watch, muses: “One might wonder why Muslim groups don’t become more proactive, and institute programs in mosques and Islamic schools in the West (as well as in the Islamic world) to teach Muslims why the views of Osama bin Laden et al are wrong, and how true Islam eschews violence against and hatred of unbelievers. Yet CAIR, ISNA, MPAC and the rest have never instituted or even called for such a program. They are ready with the condemnations after arrests or explosions, but why wait passively? Why not head off jihadist activity by Muslims”? This is a rhetorical question.

Who gets Islam right? How about a Palestinian religious figure who took the bold move of attending the Second Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace in 2008? Attendees vowed to “condemn any negative representation” of each others religions.

For Zaid Abu Alhaj that pledge lasted about a year. On April 3, 2009, he gave a sermon on Al-Aqsa TV which included the following prediction: “The time will come, by Allah’s will, when their property will be destroyed and their children will be exterminated, and no Jew or Zionist will be left on the face of the earth.”

Oh, fine, this crazy Palestinian cleric probably also doesn’t understand the religion he’s practiced his entire life either. How about Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al Sudais, who – as imam of Mecca’s Grand Mosque – holds the most prestigious Moslem pulpit in the world?

In a 2003 sermon, Al Sudais prayed that Allah would “terminate” the Jews, who he called “the scum of humanity, the rats of the world, prophet killers … pigs and monkeys,” also “evil,” “tyrannical,” ‘treacherous,” and part of a “continuum of deceit.”

Cairo’s Al-Azhar University is the Vatican of the Muslim world. Is it reasonable to suppose that Sheik Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, grand imam of Al-Azhar since 1996, knows a thing or two about Islam?

The Shriek tells us the Koran condemns Jews for “their own particular degenerate characteristics” including “corrupting” the words of Allah, “consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics, caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness.” But, there is hope. “All Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.”

You’d think the Muslim chaplain at Harvard could put a happy face on his faith.

According to the April 14 Harvard Crimson, in an e-mail response to a query from a Muslim student, Taha Abdul-Basser wrote that there was “great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostates]) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.” Thankfully, the Islamic world isn’t troubled by that darned hegemonic modern human rights discourse.

Harvard’s official chaplain later explained that he was merely expressing a position that “I do not hold … personally” – but which contains “great wisdom” and which “one should not dismiss out of hand.”

What is the West’s response to the Rampaging Religion of Peace?

As Obama-appointed Director of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano doesn’t have time to watch the jailhouse jihadists. She’s too busy staking out pro-life demonstrations, NRA conventions and American Legion meetings. This is where the real danger to our national security lies, Napolitano informed us in the DHS report “Rightwing Extremism: Radicalization and Recruitment,” issued on April 7.

Napolitano's counterpart in the United Kingdom, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, focuses on fighting evil Islamaphobes – witness her decision to ban the likes of Dutch parliamentarian and “Fitna”-producer Geert Wilders and talk-show host Michael Savage from the shores of Albion.

So PC is she that Smith wants British officials to begin referring to Islamic terrorism as “anti-Islamic activity.” Not only are terrorists' acts no reflection on Islam, they’re giving the religion of peace a bad name!

Smith knows Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. How? Muslims told her so. “As so many Muslims in the U.K. and across the world have pointed out, there is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorize, nothing Islamic about plotting terror, pain and grief.” If I was a used-car salesman, I’d pray Smith would wander onto my lot.

In the U.K. each bombing and kill-the-infidels sermon becomes an indoctrination moment to assure the credulous that to call attention to slaughter committed in the name of Islam and condoned by the words of Islam (contained in the Koran), slanders Islam. Oh for the days when Labor governments only wanted to destroy Britain’s economy, not the nation itself.

Napolitano prefers the designation “man-made disasters” to terrorism.

Obama is too busy fighting a war on capitalism and trying to close down Guantanamo (and mainstream the jihadists into the U.S. prison population) to pay much attention to an ideology backed by guns and bombs and bent on world domination.

The day is approaching when TV and radio broadcasts will be interrupted every 15 minutes with the message “Islam is – you betcha – a religion of peace.” Otherwise, we’re bound to forget.

Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.

Roger Federer fulfils grand ambition to take his place at game's summit

By Neil Harman, Tennis Correspondent, Paris
From The Times of London
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/
June 8, 2009

Nothing, not a courageous but ultimately ill-matched Swede, not a crackpot interloper, not those chanting “Vamos Rafa”, not infuriating bouts of drizzle, not the seizures of self-doubt that he would have been inhuman not to feel, was able to prevent Roger Federer joining the Légion d’honneur of men’s tennis yesterday. The best of the best prevailed and how we marvelled at him.

Roger Federer returns a ball to Robin Soderling during their French Open tennis men's final match on June 7, 2009 at Roland Garros Stadium in Paris.(LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/Getty Images)

Within five minutes of Federer’s 6-1, 7-6, 6-4 victory over Robin Söderling, it began to rain so hard that had they still been out there jousting, a halt would have been called.

The mind went back to last year’s Wimbledon denouement, when Federer got into a huff about the light and it cost him dear, possibly the title itself to Rafael Nadal. If those two are able to contest the same match again in a month — Nadal has a series of tests on his knee today and tomorrow to determine his fitness — it will be the play-off for Federer’s fifteenth grand-slam title.

That the record-equalling fourteenth should come at Roland Garros, a place where excellence as a player was never enough, serves only to enhance Federer’s mystique. Of course, all those he may have expected to play in the later stages were stripped from his path — the highest-ranked player he met was No 5 — but that made the sensation of his becoming the sixth man in history to win all four of the grand-slam championships all the more vivid.

As did the fact that he had to deal with a moment so hideous that it should provoke a big rethink about security. In the fourth game of the second set, at 15-15, a man leapt on to the court and confronted Federer, taunting him, waving a Barcelona football flag and trying to place the red hat he had been wearing on Federer’s head. The Swiss, defenceless bar his racket, initially cowered and had to wait more than ten seconds before the black-shirted heavies rushed on.

Pascal Maria, the umpire, was down from his chair quicker than the security moved in, which is shameful.

For the next three points, Federer was all at sea, it could have done irreparable harm to his prospects. Then, slowly, he rediscovered the elements of his game, which meant that however close Söderling felt he was to establishing a foothold in his first grand-slam final — he had never been past the third round before — he was never really a serious threat.

The Swede’s best chance was to keep the rallies as short as possible, three or four shots at most, and then go for broke with the groundstrokes that had trapped Nadal. That might have been possible had Federer not returned serve as well as he ever has, not been untouchable on the slice, not used the drop shot so cleverly and not served so well at critical moments.

Four of the seven points he needed to win the second set tie-break, from which there was no coming back, were aces. Clutch points to which he found clutch shots — it is the personification of this giant of a player.

PARIS - JUNE 07: (L to R) Roger Federer of Switzerland, Andre Agassi, Jean Gachassin President of the FFT and Robin Soderling of Sweden pose following the Men's Singles Final match on day fifteen of the French Open at Roland Garros on June 7, 2009 in Paris, France. (Photo by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)

There was one potentially nervous moment when he served for the match and, at 30-30, decided to move up the court and attempt to put away a chest-high volley. The ball smacked into the clay five yards beyond the baseline. A break point, could

Söderling possibly use it to his advantage? The ensuing rally was tight, the shots stressful, but Söderling mis-timed first and the ball shot into the sky from his frame. The job was almost done.

At its close, as a forehand by Söderling bobbled into the net, Federer fell to his knees, rose and returned to rest on his haunches, as if he might have been going to be sick. No, he was simply drinking in the moment, letting the emotion wash through his body, that here, on his eleventh visit to the French Open, he had finally prevailed.

This was the first time he had had to play two five-setters to reach a grand slam final. He eked the tension out, there were tortuous matches against José Acasuso, Paul-Henri Mathieu and, especially, Tommy Haas, to whom he was two sets, 4-3 and break point down. He preyed on our nerves and his own. Ultimately his were the stronger.

His record of endurance is astonishing. This was his 38th successive such event and he equalled Pete Sampras’s record in his fortieth overall, whereas the American required 52. There is no doubt now who is the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time). Debate over.

Remarkably, a fortnight ago, the fascination centred on whether Nadal, chasing his fifth successive title on this famed red clay, could possibly complete the calendar grand slam of all four in a year.

It has come to an end with talk of how many Federer can win before it becomes a bit blasé. Wimbledon? He is the overwhelming favourite for sure, the more so if Nadal does not play. The US Open? He has won the last five in New York. Six? Pah. That would be 16 in total, rendering argument as to his place in history fatuous.

Söderling clambered up the rostrum to receive his runner’s-up prize and talked of being given a lesson in how to play tennis. Federer came up, patting the head of the ball girl who had held his hand to its steps, hugged Andre Agassi, whose grand slam on all four surfaces he had matched a decade on and raised the Coupe des Mousquetaires as if he had been handed a bag of feathers. In his giddy state yesterday, he could have lifted an anvil with one hand.

Roger Federer ties Pete Sampras with 14 major titles, but Rod Laver is unmatched

By Mike Lupica
New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/
Monday, June 8th 2009, 4:00 AM

There will be those who say that Roger Federer didn't have to go through Rafa Nadal to get to the French Open trophy Sunday in Paris, and all that will be is point-missing. Guess what? Tiger Woods has never had a Nadal in his life since the day he started winning majors, and nobody ever asks him to apologize for anything.


Stockman/Getty

Roger Federer realizes quest is finally over and French Open is finally his.

The last major Woods won was against Rocco Mediate. It was one of the great stories because he did it playing on one good leg, and in the end, as gracious and charming an opponent as Mediate was, this was about Woods' greatness, and his grace, and his athletic character. And so it is with Federer, now that he has finally won the French, now that he has finally completed the career Grand Slam, now that he has tied Pete Sampras at 14 majors.

"Now the question is: Am I the greatest of all time?" Federer said when it was over yesterday. "We don't know, but I definitely have many things going for me ..."

He does. This was big stuff Sunday in Paris, even if the final was played against Robin Soderling, who did something at the French that Federer never did and might never do: Beat Nadal. It was big stuff in sports because Federer is as big a player as his sport has ever produced. Whether he has lost six big finals to Nadal or not.

I was at Wimbledon last summer, the Wimbledon that would end with the best tennis match ever played anywhere, between Federer and Nadal. You could see even in the first week that Nadal was better than he ever was on grass and that Federer was not the same player he had been, even going for six Wimbledons in a row.

His confidence was not the same, his forehand was not as reliable (it would be forehand errors that finally cost him six Wimbledons in a row) as it had been. At the time it seemed like some kind of perfect storm: Federer was a little older, his strokes weren't as sure and neither was he, because here came this kid with Nadal.

Federer got to No. 13 at the Open, not having to beat Nadal there, beating Andy Murray in the final. But when he lost to Nadal in the Australian final, you started to wonder what it would take for him to catch Sampras. And before Nadal came along, all it took to make Federer the favorite to win a major was to get his application in on time.

Only now Soderling does him maybe the biggest favor in all of tennis history by upsetting Nadal. And you know something? If anybody ever deserved a break like that, it is Federer, who by making all those finals against Nadal came closer to winning the French Open than Pete Sampras ever did.

So now he is tied with Pete. As always there are three men's players to talk about when you try to decide the greatest player of all: Federer, Sampras, Rod Laver. Laver doesn't have the majors that Federer and Sampras do, but he wasn't allowed to play the majors for more than five years after he won the Grand Slam in 1962. When the sport finally became "Open," all Laver did was come back and win the Grand Slam again in 1969.


Roger Federer returns a ball to Robin Soderling during their French Open tennis men's final match on June 7, 2009 at Roland Garros Stadium in Paris. (BERTRAND GUAY/AFP/Getty Images)

He also never faced the kind of clay court specialists that Sampras did and Federer does. Laver still won two Slams, seven years apart, one of the amazing sports achievements of all time. But so is this: Federer making 20 major semis in a row. It is as likely as anybody will do that again as it is that another Laver will come along to win two Grand Slams.

Sampras went up against Andre Agassi when both of them were at their best. But I think Nadal will end up winning more majors than Agassi did.

There are all sorts of layers to this conversation, one of the best of its kind you could have in sports. Here are the guys Laver beat to win his Grand Slam titles: Ken Rosewall, Roy Emerson, Neale Fraser, John Newcombe, Tony Roche, Marty Mulligan, Andres Gimeno, Chuck McKinley.

There is no right answer here, except for this one: No one has ever had more game than Federer does, nobody ever had more shots, nobody ever had more talent and grace for hitting a tennis ball.

Of course when it was time for Federer to accept the trophy he was as fluent on the podium in French as he was in English. His game has always had the kind of fluency as he has gone from surface to surface, year after year.

He didn't have to beat Nadal yesterday. There is no rule passed in sports, especially for immortals, that they have to beat the other top guy to make history. What you do is show up and play who you play.

Federer has done that for a long time. He shows up for every major, every year, he takes on all comers, no matter what, then he makes the semis at least. On all surfaces. A lot of guys have had the chance to make 20 major semis in a row, win 14 majors, get a career Slam. Roger Federer has done all that. Now he finally has the French. Try telling him he's not the best who ever played.

Today's Tune: Townes Van Zandt - If I Needed You

(Click on title to play video)

Beyond the legend of Townes Van Zandt

Steve Earle gets to the real man

BY DAVID MENCONI, Staff writer
Raleigh News & Observer
http://www.newsobserver.com/
June 7, 2009

On the surface, at least, the legend of the late great Townes Van Zandt makes for a familiar cliche.

He was a tortured, under-appreciated genius whose darkly poetic music was inextricably linked to his self-destructive tendencies. A dozen years after he succumbed to years of self-abuse at age 52, Van Zandt is as well-known for his excesses as for "Pancho and Lefty," "To Live Is To Fly" or any of the other classic songs he left behind.


Steve Earle's latest album pays tribute to his mentor. - PHOTO BY TED BARRON

To the extent that it's possible, Steve Earle would like to set the record straight about Van Zandt. Few people, living or dead, would be better-qualified to do so.

Earle came of age four decades ago in Texas, very much in Van Zandt's shadow. He studied at the feet of the master and regularly covered his mentor's songs. That includes the 15 Van Zandt compositions on his new tribute record, "Townes" (New West Records), which will make up a sizable chunk of the set when Earle plays a sold-out Carrboro ArtsCenter on Wednesday.

Van Zandt was given to mysterious pronouncements like, "There aren't but two kinds of music: There's the blues ... and there's zip-a-dee-doo-dah." Earle has also been known to make an outrageous pronouncement or two (for example: "Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that"). And he spent a long dark period struggling with the same substance-issues that Van Zandt could never kick.

"We all over-romanticize things, including me," Earle says, calling from a tour stop in Portsmouth, N.H. "Townes was an alcoholic and also probably mentally ill -- and one of the best artists who ever lived. And those are three totally separate things. Now I survived the same disease, but Townes never even tried to get sober. I have no explanation for that, although it does kind of prove there's an indirect correlation between artistry and problems."

From heckler to hero

Earle and Van Zandt actually got off to a rough start. They met in Houston in 1972, when Earle was playing a show and Van Zandt was heckling him from the audience. Earle finally seized control of the situation by playing one of Van Zandt's own songs to shut him up, "Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold" (which Earle covers on "Townes" as a duet with his son, Justin Townes Earle).

Commercially, at least, Earle soon surpassed Van Zandt. Though never a huge seller, Earle has earned two gold records and he plays to consistently sold-out houses.

Earle traveled just as hard a road as Van Zandt, bottoming out in the early 1990s with a prison term for drug and firearms violations. But incarceration finally enabled Earle to kick his drug habit, and he has worked at a feverish pace since leaving prison in late 1994.

"Townes" is the ninth album Earle has released in 14 years. During that time, he has also acted (an acclaimed cameo role in "The Wire," plus his feature-film debut in Tim Blake Nelson's "Leaves of Grass" opposite Edward Norton), worked tirelessly on anti-death penalty causes and published a short-story collection. He is also just about finished writing a novel, "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive," in which the ghost of Hank Williams figures prominently.

There's no denying that Earle has come into his own since getting sober. It's hard not to wonder what Van Zandt might have accomplished had he been able to conquer his demons.


Steve Earle, left, with his mentor, Townes Van Zandt.

"Townes was the same as Vincent Van Gogh," Earle says. "Was he a little too sensitive, and did he use that as a tool? Yeah, you bet. But he also was like Vincent Van Gogh in that he shot himself in the foot every chance he got. It's mostly Townes' own fault that he's not better known. Other people were involved, but he chose to associate with them. He made a lot of bad decisions."

A daunting catalog

Given their relationship, a Van Zandt tribute album was a natural for Earle. And there were some songs that definitely had to be on it, most notably the bookends. "Pancho and Lefty," the rambling historical epic that is best-known as a 1983 hit for Willie Nelson, opens "Townes," and it closes with the elegiac "To Live Is To Fly."

"I recorded those two right away, at the very beginning," Earle says. "Sort of like you go and try to knock out the biggest guy in the yard on your first day in jail so you can keep your radio. I did those first on purpose, to get them out of the way. I didn't want to do the rest of the record with those two hanging over my head."

The day he began recording, Earle had a list of 28 Van Zandt songs on a legal pad. Eventually he winnowed those down to the 15 that made the final cut. The album has some intriguing re-arrangements -- especially "Lungs," which features turntable scratching and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello. But most of Earle's renditions are pretty straightforward, filtered through his long-ago memories of Van Zandt in performance.

"Now I don't claim these versions are accurate, necessarily," Earle says. "But I was there and I did see Townes at the top of his game, which not everybody can say, and these versions are based on my recollections of how he played them. Those of us who saw Townes play in his prime, between about 1968 and 1975 -- that's what this record is based on. With recording, something was always lost in translation with Townes. He never could quite commit to recording the way he could to live performance."

david.menconi@newsobserver.com, blogs.newsobserver.com/beat or 919-829-4759


Steve Earle
Where: ArtsCenter, 300-G E. Main St., Carrboro
When: 8:30 p.m. Wednesday
Tickets: Sold out
Contact: 929-2787 or artscenterlive.org

15 Hard Questions about the Cairo Speech

By Walid Phares
http://www.americanthinker.com/
June 06, 2009

Perhaps the most challenging task for analysts and commentators to accomplish after having listen to President Obama's speech in Cairo (addressed to the "Muslim World") is to know how to read it, understand the links between the points he made, capture the arguments inserted by his speech writers and thus analyze the text as a major policy change since 9/11.

In short, I would recommend for readers to establish a "map of the speech" before venturing to its various exotic suggestions and hints. Evidently, each political constituency in America, the region and the international community has its priorities and will jump to the part it deems most pressing, either exciting or depressing. However, I suggest looking at the whole idea of addressing the "Muslim world" or as the President coined it often in his speech, "the Muslims" (two different things), and understand where Obama is coming from and going to. To help in this analytical task -- and to simplify what seems to be complex -- I propose to raise the following questions and address them separately in the debate before re-sowing them as a one bloc of ideas. Here are the ones I identify as building blocks of the Obama "Muslim platform" drawn from his speech

1. Is the equation of mending relations between a nation state, America, and a whole civilization, Islam, rational? Is it academically sound to put one country and fifty two other countries in one framework of relationships? Are all 52 Muslim countries in one basket and America in another? Who framed this equation?

2. The speech mentioned "violent extremists" several times as the foe to contain and isolate. Is there not a clearer explanation of what is "violent extremism" and who are the followers of such a behavior? Is about violence only? Are all those who practice violence, from household abuse, gangsterism to mass murder part of one group? Of course not. So what constitutes extremism? Do "violent extremists" have an ideology, a platform, goals, strategies? Are they the Jihadists that the whole world knows about? Why wouldn't President Obama simply name them as such?

3. The speech argued that Americans were "traumatized" because of 9/11 and thus their view of Islam changed. Why would their view of a religion change because of an attack perpetrated by 19 hijackers? Who is drawing this conclusion? In short, if indeed Americans had a change in perception after 9/11, what was their perception before? Is this reality or is it the framing of the war of ideas by the apologist elite? Why is there a complex of guilt forced on Americans?

4. The speech argued directly and indirectly that the US government -- because of 9/11 -- did things it was not supposed to do constitutionally (or ethically). Among these breaches Mr. Obama mentioned the opening of Guantanamo. The question is: Is opening a detention center in a state of war (even not declared officially) in which active elements of the armed opponents are detained is an act aimed against an entire religion? Who said so and who framed it as such?

5. The speech delved in the claim that Islam "has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality." While it is perfectly legitimate for academics to engage in such research and draw the conclusions they wish, can an elected President in a liberal democracy make philosophical assertions in the field of controversial and debated conflicts -- not part of his or her national realm?

6. The speech -- rightly so -- praised the integration of Muslim-Americans in their own country. But did the President mention why a large number of American citizens fled many Muslim countries, including Muslim-American citizens?

7. The speech -- rightly so -- rejected stereotypes about Muslims and America. However who made these stereotypes, who propagated the narrative that they exist and who is indoctrinating segments of societies about the latter?

8. The President gladly (after significant messaging preceding the speech) mentioned Darfur. But he never called it genocide, why? Moreover, what is to be done about it? The speech was generous about what Israel and Hamas must do, and about U.S. forthcoming spending in the region, but left the audiences clueless about what to do about the first genocide of the 21st century. Why?

9. The speech called Iraq's war one of choice but stated that Iraqis are better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Doesn't this statement need more explanation? Is the conclusion that it is better to leave people under tyrannies even if they are subjected to mass killing? As for Afghanistan, the President didn't mention the Taliban once. Who are NATO, the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan facing off with? Is it normal that the one Jihadi force which protected al Qaeda as launched the 9/11 attacks and is on the offensive against democracies in two Muslim countries is not identified in the speech to the Muslim world?

10. The speech reasserted - logically -- a U.S. standing policy of supporting a two-states solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, if Israel and the Palestinian Authority have agreed on such principle already in 1993, who then is obstructing the process? Why wasn't the obstructing force, Hamas and Iran, named as such?

11. The speech granted Iran a right to develop a peaceful nuclear program, but who denied it to the Iranian people to begin with? The question is about the Iranian regime's expansionist agenda in the region not the type of technology. Nuclear capacities in the hands of a terror regime will become dangerous and armed. Is it not about the intentions of the regime?

12. The speech mentioned that there has been a controversy about democracy in the region, particularly because of the Iraq war. The question is: what is that controversy about, and thus where does the U.S. stand in this debate? Are there different values for different countries and cultures when it comes to freedom? What are they?

13. The speech advocated religious freedoms. The question is who is breaching them? The President mentioned the Maronites and the Copts but didn't explain who is causing them harm?

14. The speech addressed women's rights and the President rejected one Western position in the debate about Muslim women's freedom assessment, and asserted the rights of some women to wear the Hijab unquestioned. However why didn't he list the grievances of Muslim women who do not want to wear the Hijab and are forced to do so? The President argued that the real issue in women's status is education. But isn't their education a political and fundamental right? How can women practice the right to education if they cannot practice their freedom to choose it?

15. The speech announced - gladly -- that the United States will be spending money to help Muslim communities develop on multiple continents. But why didn't the President ask the rich elite in these countries to share the burden if not to assume it fully? Why would a nation in the northern part of the Western Hemisphere be footing the bill of development in remote regions where the financial establishment is buying shares of and controlling the American economy?

These are only few questions about a speech that will be studied and used by the current administration, its opposition, future administrations, regimes in the region, the Jihadists and dissidents alike for many years to come. It is essential that the students of such text focus on the essence and draw the proper conclusions. Indeed words matter, especially in the midst of a raging war of ideas, even if the author of the speech and the speech writers' main goal is precisely to end such a war.


- Dr Walid Phares is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the author of The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy.