Global Warming and the Sun

We have only just now discovered how sunspots make the Earth warmer.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
September 02, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

On the last day of August, scientists spotted a teeny-weeny sunspot, breaking a 51-day streak of blemish-free days for the sun. If it had gone just a bit longer, it would have broken a 96-year record of 53 days without any of the magnetic disruptions that cause solar flares. That record was nearly broken last year as well.

Wait, it gets even more exciting.

During what scientists call the Maunder Minimum — a period of solar inactivity from 1645 to 1715 — the world experienced the worst of the cold streak dubbed the Little Ice Age. At Christmastime, Londoners ice-skated on the Thames, and New Yorkers (then New Amsterdamers) sometimes walked over the Hudson from Manhattan to Staten Island.

Of course, it could have been a coincidence. The Little Ice Age began before the onset of the Maunder Minimum. Many scientists think volcanic activity was a more likely, or at least a more significant, culprit. Or perhaps the big chill was, in the words of scientist Alan Cutler, writing in the Washington Post in 1997, a “one-two punch from a dimmer sun and a dustier atmosphere.”

Well, we just might find out. A new study in the American Geophysical Union’s journal, Eos, suggests that we may be heading into another quiet phase similar to the Maunder Minimum.

Meanwhile, the journal Science reports that a study led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, has finally figured out why increased sunspots have a dramatic effect on the weather, increasing temperatures more than the increase in solar energy should explain. Apparently, sunspots heat the stratosphere, which in turn amplifies the warming of the climate.

Scientists have known for centuries that sunspots affect the climate; they just never understood how. Now, allegedly, the mystery has been solved.

Last month, in another study, also released in Science, Oregon State University researchers claimed to settle the debate over what caused and ended the last Ice Age. Increased solar radiation coming from slight changes in the Earth’s rotation, not greenhouse-gas levels, were to blame.

What is the significance of all this? To say I have no idea is quite an understatement, but it will have to do.

Nonetheless, what I find interesting is the eagerness of the authors and the media to make it clear that this doesn’t have any particular significance for the debate over climate change. “For those wondering how the (NCAR) study bears on global warming, Gerald Meehl, lead author on the study, says that it doesn’t — at least not directly,” writes Moises Velasquez-Manoff of the Christian Science Monitor. “Global warming is a long-term trend, Dr. Meehl says. . . . This study attempts to explain the processes behind a periodic occurrence.”

This overlooks the fact that solar cycles are permanent “periodic occurrences,” a.k.a. a very long-term trend. Yet Meehl insists the only significance for the debate is that his study proves climate modeling is steadily improving.

I applaud Meehl’s reluctance to go beyond where the science takes him. For all I know, he’s right. But such humility and skepticism seem to manifest themselves only when the data point to something other than the mainstream narrative about global warming. For instance, when we have terribly hot weather, or bad hurricanes, the media see portentous proof of climate change. When we don’t, it’s a moment to teach the masses how weather and climate are very different things.

No, I’m not denying that man-made pollution and other activity have played a role in planetary warming since the Industrial Revolution.

But we live in a moment when we are told, nay lectured and harangued, that if we use the wrong toilet paper or eat the wrong cereal, we are frying the planet. But the sun? Well, that’s a distraction. Don’t you dare forget your reusable shopping bags, but pay no attention to that burning ball of gas in the sky — it’s just the only thing that prevents the planet from being a lifeless ball of ice engulfed in darkness. Never mind that sunspot activity doubled during the 20th century, when the bulk of global warming has taken place.

What does it say that the modeling that guaranteed disastrous increases in global temperatures never predicted the halt in planetary warming since the late 1990s? (MIT’s Richard Lindzen says that “there has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995.”)
What does it say that the modelers have only just now discovered how sunspots make the Earth warmer?

I don’t know what it tells you, but it tells me that maybe we should study a bit more before we spend billions to “solve” a problem we don’t understand so well.

— 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.

Why I Wrote 'Hostile Intent'

by Michael Walsh
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
Sept. 1, 2009

My new novel, Hostile Intent, is out from Pinnacle Books today. Here’s the pitch:

When terrorists seize a middle school in the Midwest and issue a list of impossible demands, the U.S. Government must activate its most secret, and lethal, resource, a man known only by his code name: “Devlin.” The top agent of a practically unknown branch of the intelligence world called the Central Security Service — the military-liaison arm of the National Security Agency — Devlin’s very existence is known only to a handful of senior Washington officials.

Operating entirely off the grid, Devlin is the “bleeding edge” of force projection, using both the technological power of the NSA and the blunt force of special ops as he and his ad hoc team of Blackwater fighters retake the school and rescue the children. The school-hostage crisis, however, is only a feint to get Devlin out of the shadows and into the kill zone. But by whom? As a series of ever-deadlier attacks strike the country, Devlin must fight his way out of the wilderness of mirrors before a monstrous plot can bring America to her knees and usher in a New World Order.

Hostile Intent is meant to kick off what we hope will become a series of books about Devlin (named after Cary Grant’s character in Notorious), an Ishmael for our time, his hand against every man’s and every man’s hand against his - especially the bad guys’. Naturally, I hope someone in Hollywood will buy it: as Dr. Johnson famously said: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

But there’s a larger issue here, too: our continuing need for heroes, whether we like them or not. After watching a parade of un-heroic flops - Lions for Lambs, Redacted, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Grace is Gone, et al. - Hollywood has backed smartly away from anything that smacks of contemporary events, preferring instead to indulge its fetishes for cartoons, kids’ toys and vampires. Movies about “terrorists” now make us especially nervous, unless the terrorists are those pesky neo-Nazis still kicking around central Europe and plotting their revanchism over cognac and cigars. And God forbid we should ever indulge in “jingoism.”

Well, the heck with that. When I created “Devlin” - a man you could walk right by and never notice, so protected is he by his cloak of anonymity - I was looking to honor the kind of men and women who fight our nation’s battles in the bazaars and back alleys of the world’s least glamorous places, with no public acknowledgement of their bravery or their accomplishments, people who often lead (as Devlin does) lives of surpassing, nearly unbearable loneliness. Not for them are family and friends, spouses and children; they take their pleasures and solaces where they can find them, and head right back into battle.

Those of you who read Exchange Alley (about a rogue KGB agent who finds death in New York and the troubled cop who must solve his murder), And All the Saints (the “memoirs” of the great gangster, Owney Madden) or even the controversial As Time Goes By, my prequel/sequel to Casablanca, which took Rick Blaine back to Prohibition New York and forward to the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, know that my lead characters are all flawed men in dire need of redemption. I can’t help it; it’s the Irish Catholic in me.

With “Devlin,” however, I’m shooting for something different. Orphaned at an early age, raised in secret by a man he despises, Devlin is a killing machine, a master of disguise, and (as “Archibald Grant”) a world-class lecturer on terrorism for the RAND Corp. He’s also a movie buff, drawing his array of operational aliases from his favorite actors’ roles. (In Hostile Intent, he cycles through James Cagney characters, starting with “Tom Powers.”) But, most important, he’s a man who’s dedicated his life to playing for keeps while out on the margins: the cyber-ghost as lethal weapon. Secure in his own abilities, and necessarily protective of his identity, he can tell the President of the United States to go fly a kite, gut an opponent in hand-to-hand combat, break into a French maximum-security prison and even make love to a mysterious, beautiful woman he hardly knows, but has to trust. If you can’t root for that guy, who can you root for?

That’s what we’re going to find out. By reflexively poking our finger into the eyes of everyone between New Jersey and Nevada - Flyover Country - we’ve alienated a good half of our potential audience. Yes, it’s true that the lion’s share of the box office is now found overseas, where we Yanks are often viewed as more vile than virtuous. But the domestic lambs still have a lot of fiscal clout, and a millions of them are waiting to cheer Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp, Robert Ferrigno’s Rakkim Epps, or Brad Thor’s Scot Harvath should they ever make it to the screen. We’d all be better off if we relearned Sam Goldwyn’s famous dictum: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”

So please say hello to Devlin. Each book of the series is meant to dramatize a prime security concern that keeps Ft. Meade, Langley and the DoD up late at night: a Beslan-style school attack, an EMP explosion and, believe it or not, even worse things, all coming to a neighborhood near you if America’s “rough men” do not remain vigilant. I have no idea how long he’ll be with us, although he’s scheduled for a re-appearance next year in Black Widow; eventually, I, the villains, or my readers will kill him off. But the things he stands for - honor, country, dedication, expertise and will power - should never die. Because they’re what heroes are made of.

Suicide of the West?

America, too, will now approach its implacable enemies with concessions and smiles.

By Thomas Sowell
http://www.nationalreview.com/
September 01, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

Britain’s release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi — the Libyan terrorist whose bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people — is galling enough in itself. But it is even more profoundly troubling as a sign of a larger mood that has been growing in Western democracies in our time. In ways large and small, domestically and internationally, the West is surrendering on the installment plan to Islamic extremists.

The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put his finger on the problem when he said: “The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.”

He wrote this long before Barack Obama became president of the United States. But this administration epitomizes the “concessions and smiles” approach to countries that are our implacable enemies.

Western Europe has gone down that path before us, but we now seem to be trying to catch up. Still, the release of a mass-murdering terrorist, who went home to a hero’s welcome in Libya, shows that President Obama is not the only one who wants to move away from the idea of a “war on terror” — as if that will stop the terrorists’ war on us.

The ostensible reason for releasing al-Megrahi was compassion for a man terminally ill. It is ironic that this was said in Scotland, for exactly 250 years ago another Scotsman — Adam Smith — said, “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”

That lesson seems to have been forgotten in America, as well — where so many people seem far more concerned about whether we have been nice enough to the mass-murdering terrorists in our custody than those critics have ever been about the innocent people beheaded or blown up by the terrorists themselves.

Tragically, those with this strange inversion of values include the attorney general of the United States, Eric Holder. Although President Obama has said that he does not want to revisit the past, this is only the latest example of how his administration’s actions are the direct opposite of his lofty words.

It is not just a question of looking backward. The decision to second-guess CIA agents who extracted information to save American lives is even worse when you look forward.

Years from now, long after Barack Obama is gone, CIA agents dealing with hardened terrorists will have to worry about whether what they do to get information out of terrorists to save American lives will make the agents themselves liable to prosecution that can destroy their careers and ruin their lives.

This is not simply an injustice to those who have tried to keep this country safe, it is a danger recklessly imposed on future Americans whose safety cannot always be guaranteed by sweet and gentle measures against hardened murderers.

Those who are pushing for legal action against CIA agents may talk about “upholding the law,” but they are doing no such thing. Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the Geneva Conventions gives rights to terrorists who operate outside the law.

There was a time when everybody understood this. German soldiers who put on American military uniforms in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge were simply lined up against a wall and shot — and no one wrung their hands over it. Nor did the U.S. Army try to conceal what they had done. The executions were filmed, and the film has been shown on the History Channel.

So many “rights” have been conjured up out of thin air that many people seem unaware that rights and obligations derive from explicit laws, not from politically correct pieties. If you don’t meet the terms of the Geneva Conventions, then the Geneva Conventions don’t protect you. If you are not an American citizen, then the rights guaranteed to American citizens do not apply to you.

That should be especially obvious if you are part of an international network bent on killing Americans. But bending over backward to be nice to our enemies is one of the many self-indulgences of those who engage in moral preening.

But getting other people killed so that you can feel puffed up about yourself is profoundly immoral. So is betraying the country you took an oath to protect.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

© 2009 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Time to Get Out of Afghanistan

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Tuesday, September 1, 2009

"Yesterday," reads the e-mail from Allen, a Marine in Afghanistan, "I gave blood because a Marine, while out on patrol, stepped on a [mine's] pressure plate and lost both legs." Then "another Marine with a bullet wound to the head was brought in. Both Marines died this morning."

"I'm sorry about the drama," writes Allen, an enthusiastic infantryman willing to die "so that each of you may grow old." He says: "I put everything in God's hands." And: "Semper Fi!"
Allen and others of America's finest are also in Washington's hands. This city should keep faith with them by rapidly reversing the trajectory of America's involvement in Afghanistan, where, says the Dutch commander of coalition forces in a southern province, walking through the region is "like walking through the Old Testament."

U.S. strategy -- protecting the population -- is increasingly troop-intensive while Americans are increasingly impatient about "deteriorating" (says Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) conditions. The war already is nearly 50 percent longer than the combined U.S. involvements in two world wars, and NATO assistance is reluctant and often risible.

The U.S. strategy is "clear, hold and build." Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.

Military historian Max Hastings says Kabul controls only about a third of the country -- "control" is an elastic concept -- and " 'our' Afghans may prove no more viable than were 'our' Vietnamese, the Saigon regime." Just 4,000 Marines are contesting control of Helmand province, which is the size of West Virginia. The New York Times reports a Helmand official saying he has only "police officers who steal and a small group of Afghan soldiers who say they are here for 'vacation.' " Afghanistan's $23 billion gross domestic product is the size of Boise's.
Counterinsurgency doctrine teaches, not very helpfully, that development depends on security, and that security depends on development. Three-quarters of Afghanistan's poppy production for opium comes from Helmand. In what should be called Operation Sisyphus, U.S. officials are urging farmers to grow other crops. Endive, perhaps?

Even though violence exploded across Iraq after, and partly because of, three elections, Afghanistan's recent elections were called "crucial." To what? They came, they went, they altered no fundamentals, all of which militate against American "success," whatever that might mean. Creation of an effective central government? Afghanistan has never had one. U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry hopes for a "renewal of trust" of the Afghan people in the government, but the Economist describes President Hamid Karzai's government -- his vice presidential running mate is a drug trafficker -- as so "inept, corrupt and predatory" that people sometimes yearn for restoration of the warlords, "who were less venal and less brutal than Mr. Karzai's lot."

Mullen speaks of combating Afghanistan's "culture of poverty." But that took decades in just a few square miles of the South Bronx. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, thinks jobs programs and local government services might entice many "accidental guerrillas" to leave the Taliban. But before launching New Deal 2.0 in Afghanistan, the Obama administration should ask itself: If U.S. forces are there to prevent reestablishment of al-Qaeda bases -- evidently there are none now -- must there be nation-building invasions of Somalia, Yemen and other sovereignty vacuums?

U.S. forces are being increased by 21,000, to 68,000, bringing the coalition total to 110,000. About 9,000 are from Britain, where support for the war is waning. Counterinsurgency theory concerning the time and the ratio of forces required to protect the population indicates that, nationwide, Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.

So, instead, forces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.

Genius, said de Gaulle, recalling Bismarck's decision to halt German forces short of Paris in 1870, sometimes consists of knowing when to stop. Genius is not required to recognize that in Afghanistan, when means now, before more American valor, such as Allen's, is squandered.

georgewill@washpost.com

For more debate on U.S. engagement in Afghanistan, read William Kristol's No Will, No Way and Topic A: A War Worth Fighting?

Kennedy and the KGB

By Paul Kengor
http://www.americanthinker.com/
August 31, 2009

Shortly after the announcement of Ted Kennedy's death, I had already received several interview requests. I declined them, not wanting to be uncharitable to the man upon his death. Since then, I've seen the need to step up and provide some clarification.

The issue is a remarkable 1983 KGB document on Kennedy, which I published in my 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperCollins). The document is a May 14, 1983 memo from KGB head Victor Chebrikov to his boss, the odious Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov, designated with the highest classification. It concerns a confidential offer to the Soviet leadership by Senator Kennedy. The target: President Ronald Reagan. (A pdf file of the original Russian language document and an English translation are available here.)

With Kennedy's death, this stunning revelation is again making the rounds, especially after Rush Limbaugh flagged it in his "Stack of Stuff." I'm being inundated with emails, asking basically two questions: 1) is the document legitimate; and 2) what does it allege of Senator Kennedy?

First off, yes, the document is legitimate. If it were not, I would have never reported it. Over the years, from my book to radio and web interviews, I've provided specifics. Briefly summarized, here are the basics:

The document was first reported in a February 2, 1992 article in the London Times, titled, "Teddy, the KGB and the top secret file," by reporter Tim Sebastian. Russian President Boris Yeltsin had opened the Soviet archives. Sebastian discovered the document in the Central Committee archives specifically. When his article appeared in the Times, other on-site researchers dashed to the archives and grabbed their own copy. Those archives have been resealed.

The Times merely quoted the document and ran a tiny photo of its heading. Once I got ahold of it later, I published the entire text (English translation) in my book.

Importantly, when I published the document, Senator Kennedy's office didn't dispute its authenticity, instead ambiguously (and briefly) arguing with its "interpretation." This was clever. The senator's office didn't specify whether this interpretation problem was a matter of my personal misunderstanding of the document or the misunderstanding of the document's author, Chebrikov. Chebrikov couldn't be reached for comment; he was dead.

So, what was the offer?

The subject head, carried under the words, "Special Importance," read: "Regarding Senator Kennedy's request to the General Secretary of the Communist Party Y. V. Andropov." According to the memo, Senator Kennedy was "very troubled" by U.S.-Soviet relations, which Kennedy attributed not to the murderous tyrant running the USSR but to President Reagan. The problem was Reagan's "belligerence."

This was allegedly made worse by Reagan's stubbornness. "According to Kennedy," reported Chebrikov, "the current threat is due to the President's refusal to engage any modification to his politics." That refusal, said the memo, was exacerbated by Reagan's political success, which made the president surer of his course, and more obstinate -- and, worst of all, re-electable.

On that, the fourth and fifth paragraphs of Chebrikov's memo got to the thrust of Kennedy's offer: The senator was apparently clinging to hope that President Reagan's 1984 reelection bid could be thwarted. Of course, this seemed unlikely, given Reagan's undeniable popularity. So, where was the president vulnerable?

Alas, Kennedy had an answer, and suggestion, for his Soviet friends: In Chebrikov's words, "The only real threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations. These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign."

Therein, Chebrikov got to the heart of the U.S. senator's offer to the USSR's general secretary: "Kennedy believes that, given the state of current affairs, and in the interest of peace, it would be prudent and timely to undertake the following steps to counter the militaristic politics of Reagan."

Of these, step one would be for Andropov to invite the senator to Moscow for a personal meeting. Said Chebrikov: "The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they would be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA."

The second step, the KGB head informed Andropov, was a Kennedy strategy to help the Soviets "influence Americans." Chebrikov explained: "Kennedy believes that in order to influence Americans it would be important to organize in August-September of this year [1983], televised interviews with Y. V. Andropov in the USA." The media savvy Massachusetts senator recommended to the Soviet dictator that he seek a "direct appeal" to the American people. And, on that, "Kennedy and his friends," explained Chebrikov, were willing to help, listing Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters (both listed by name in the memo) as good candidates for sit-down interviews with the dictator.

Kennedy concluded that the Soviets needed, in effect, some PR help, given that Reagan was good at "propaganda" (the word used in the memo). The senator wanted them to know he was more than eager to lend a hand.
Kennedy wanted the Soviets to saturate the American media during such a visit. Chebrikov said Kennedy could arrange interviews not only for the dictator but for "lower level Soviet officials, particularly from the military," who "would also have an opportunity to appeal directly to the American people about the peaceful intentions of the USSR."

This was apparently deemed crucial because of the dangerous threat posed not by Andropov's regime but -- in Kennedy's view -- by Ronald Reagan and his administration. It was up to the Kremlin folks to "root out the threat of nuclear war," "improve Soviet-American relations," and "define the safety for the world."

Quite contrary to the ludicrous assertions now being made about Ted Kennedy working jovially with Ronald Reagan, Kennedy, in truth, thought Reagan was a trigger-happy buffoon, and said so constantly, with vicious words of caricature and ridicule. The senator felt very differently about Yuri Andropov. As Chebrikov noted in his memo, "Kennedy is very impressed with the activities of Y. V. Andropov and other Soviet leaders."

Alas, the memo concluded with a discussion of Kennedy's own presidential prospects in 1984, and a note that Kennedy "underscored that he eagerly awaits a reply to his appeal."

What happened next? We will never know. None of the Kennedy admirers and court composers who serve as "journalists" bothered to ask, even with decades available to pose questions, beginning back in January 1992 when the highly reputable London Times broke the story.

In 2006, when my book was released, there was a virtual media blackout on coverage of the document, with the exception of conservative media: talk-radio, Rush Limbaugh, some websites, and mention on FoxNews by Brit Hume. Amazingly, I didn't even get calls from mainstream reporters seeking to shoot down the story. I had prepared in great detail to be grilled on national television, picturing the likes of Katie Couric needling me. I didn't need to worry.

I worked up a detailed op-ed on the document, where I even played devil's advocate by defending Kennedy, trying to get at his thinking, being as fair as possible. No major newspapers would touch it. The Boston Globe editors refused to acknowledge it or reply to my emails. The editor at the New York Times confessed to being "fascinated" by the piece but conceded that he wouldn't "be able to get it in."

One editor at a West Coast newspaper, a genuinely fair liberal, considered it carefully. We went back and forth. I was shocked to see that neither the editor nor his staff would do any investigating, not placing a single phone call to Kennedy's office. In the end, the editor rejected the piece, telling me: "I just can't believe Kennedy would do something that stupid."

Alas, here we are now, after Kennedy's death, and I'm reliving the same experience, as no one from the mainstream media has contacted me. Liberal reporters lionized Ted Kennedy in life and have begun the canonization process in death. They are liberal activists first, and journalists second.

Finally, a postscript for these liberal Democrat "journalists:" We know they don't care that Ted Kennedy did this to Ronald Reagan. Fine. Well, how about this? As the Mitrokhin Archives reveal, Senator Kennedy did something similar to President Jimmy Carter in 1980 -- his own political flesh and blood.

Does that story interest liberal reporters? No. I likewise noted that gem in 2006. I didn't get a single media inquiry.

It will be left to future generations to examine these truths. As for Senator Ted Kennedy's motivations for doing what he did with the Soviet leadership? Alas, now we can definitively say, he will never tell us. The liberal media protected him, all the way to the grave.

- Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperPerennial, 2007) and professor of political science at Grove City College. His latest book is The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan's Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007).

Kennedy Catholicism

By Daniel J. Flynn on 8.31.09 @ 6:09AM

The American Spectator

http://spectator.org/

"I have always tried to be a faithful Catholic, Your Holiness," Ted Kennedy wrote to Pope Benedict XVI, in a letter dramatically read by Theodore Cardinal McCarrick at the senator's burial, "and though I have fallen short through human failings, I have never failed to believe and respect the fundamental teachings."

Though Kennedy's words may strike detractors as a preposterous revision of history, it's worth considering that it's often the sinner rather than the saint who finds strength from the church. In a life that endured the violent deaths of four siblings, three miscarried children, and countless scandals, Ted Kennedy may have indeed, particularly during his prolonged illness, turned to his faith. Who, but God, can judge the content of a man's soul?

Getty Images
BOSTON - AUGUST 29: (AFP-OUT) Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley blesses the casket of Senator Edward Kennedy at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help August 29, 2009 in Boston, Massachusetts. Kennedy, the youngest brother of former President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, died of brain cancer on August 25.

But it's not Senator Abortion's 11th hour effort to transform himself into Senator Catholic that has the media up in arms. "Why couldn't the pope have replied in his own name?" Sam Donaldson incredulously asked on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. "I was disappointed." Time magazine found it noteworthy that a shepherd with a flock of more than 1 billion would respond in "silence" to the senator from Massachusetts's missive.

In 1939, Pope Pius XII issued the Eucharist to seven-year-old Ted Kennedy, who, biographer Joe McGinniss claims, was "the first American citizen ever to receive his first holy communion from a pope." In the seventy years since, Ted Kennedy's relationship with the Catholic Church has been problematic, to say the least. From receiving communion at Mary Jo Kopechne's funeral, to procuring an annulment for a marriage of 25 years that had produced three grown children, to revelations during the William Kennedy Smith rape trial that the senator had woke his son and nephew on Good Friday to instigate the ill-fated carousing in Palm Beach's bars, Ted Kennedy hasn't exactly acted as a model Catholic.

Highlighting this is the other major story -- the transformation of the Kennedy Compound into a museum -- to emerge from the Kennedy funeral. "Rose [Kennedy] wanted to turn the place over to the Benedictine monks before she died," Benedict Fitzgerald, the late Kennedy matriarch's personal attorney, told author Ed Klein for his book Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died. "I drew up the legal papers for her on my front porch. But when Ted found out about it, he ripped the thing in half. There was no way he was going to have the place turned into a monastery." Instead, as Fox News reported, "The Kennedy compound in Hyannis, Mass. will be converted into an educational center and museum as a tribute to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy."

With Boston archbishop Sean O'Malley offering a blessing at the senator's funeral, and the former archbishop of Washington, D.C. presiding over the burial, many of Kennedy's political antagonists are outraged, not that the Church was silent, but that it so loudly honored a man who fought to undermine church teaching.

"No rational person can reasonably be expected to take seriously Catholic opposition to abortion when a champion of the Culture of Death, who repeatedly betrayed the Faith of his baptism, is lauded and extolled by priests and prelates in a Marian basilica," C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, explained on Saturday. "This morning's spectacle is evidence of the corruption which pervades the Catholic Church in the United States."

THOUGH TED KENNEDY never won the role his supporters had scripted for him, those emotionally invested in "President Ted Kennedy" acted as though he had. Massachusetts's senior senator often played along, compiling a staff that dwarfed those of his colleagues and acting as a shadow president for various liberal constituencies outside of power in a conservative age. The prolonged made-for-TV funeral, which traveled from Hyannis to Boston and then from Capitol Hill to Arlington National Cemetery, was a mourning event fit for a president. But Ted Kennedy was a senator, not a president.

That fact alone, leaving aside Kennedy's friction with the church over abortion, gay marriage, and other hot-button issues, should explain why the pope added no further fuel to the public relations juggernaut that has dominated the American news cycle for almost a week. Those generationally, geographically, or politically tethered to Camelot mythology are befuddled why others, particularly the pope, haven't embraced their delusion that the man whom they had wished to be president should be mourned as a president -- rather than a parochial figure infused with special meaning to baby boomers, New Englanders, and the Democratic Party's left wing.

"Here in Rome, Ted Kennedy is nobody," a Vatican official bluntly told Time. "He's a legend with his own constituency. If he had influence in the past, it was only with the Archdiocese of Boston, and that eventually disappeared too."

"Running against a Kennedy is almost like running against the church," one Massachusetts pol observed during Ted Kennedy's initial run for Senate in 1962. But after Ted Kennedy enlisted as a combatant in the culture wars against his church, few conflate Kennedyism with Catholicism as they did a half century ago.

- Daniel J. Flynn, the author of A Conservative History of the American Left, blogs at http://www.flynnfiles.com/.

Little Steven & The Disciples of Soul - Under the Gun (Live)

(Click on title to play video)

President Obama should pardon CIA interrogators

By Debra J. Saunders
San Fransisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/
August 30, 2009

When he served as deputy attorney general, now Attorney General Eric Holder gave a "neutral leaning positive" recommendation that led to President Bill Clinton's pardoning of gazillionaire fugitive Marc Rich, who was on the lam in Switzerland hiding from federal charges of fraud, evading more than $48 million in taxes, racketeering and trading oil with Iran in violation of a U.S. embargo.

Holder also had a role in the 1999 Clinton pardons of 16 Puerto Rico independence terrorists -- members of the bomb-happy FALN or the splinter group Los Macheteros -- who had been convicted on such charges as bank robbery, possession of explosives and participating in a seditious conspiracy -- even though none of the 16 had applied for clemency. As the Los Angeles Times reported, two of the 16 refused to accept the pardon -- as it required them to renounce violence -- while another later was killed in a shootout with federal agents.

During his confirmation hearing in January, Holder refused to explain why the Clinton Department of Justice changed its earlier position against the 16 commutations -- citing President Clinton's claim of executive privilege.

So you'll forgive me if I don't buy into the argument that, as a simple lawman, Holder had no choice but to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate alleged abuses during CIA interrogations of high-value detainees.

The Clinton Justice Department didn't even make the 16 terrorists disclose pertinent information about the crimes they committed, just as they tied no strings around Rich. Yet 10 years later, Holder's Justice Department won't give a break to CIA officials desperate to stop another terrorist attack.

Holder's decision would be understandable if the CIA engaged in a pattern of brazen lawlessness and bloodlust that could be stopped only by DOJ intervention.

To the contrary, the CIA waterboarded all of three high-level detainees -- then stopped in March 2003 -- when Bush White House lawyers determined the technique to be legal.

Moreover, it was a CIA official who, learning that some agents and contractors may have abused detainees, began an investigation in November 2002 that resulted in an agency request for an inspector general probe in January 2003. Hence the 2004 report newly released by the Obama administration.

The agency's behavior isn't that of a coverup, but quite the opposite. A contractor was prosecuted in 2007. John L. Helgerson, the former CIA inspector general who issued the 2004 report, told the New York Times that he "personally" would not prosecute the other cases.

The Helgerson report and other documents revealed that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave up crucial information about planned terrorist attacks as a result of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. There's no way to prove that the enhanced interrogation techniques -- also known as "torture" -- led to those disclosures, but they may have saved lives by thwarting plans for attacks on London's Heathrow airport, to fly planes into tall buildings in California and even a plan to weaponize anthrax. The Washington Post notes that there is no proof that the attacks were "imminent." OK, but they were in the works.

Now the reward for those who stuck out their necks to uncover these plots is the very thing that they feared -- that their names may end up in a World Court "most wanted" list. As one operative told the IG, "Ten years from now, we're going to be sorry we're doing this ... (but) it has to be done."

As a candidate for the White House, President Obama left the door open for prosecuting alleged intelligence abuses, but straddled the controversy by noting that, if elected, he would not want to see his tenure consumed with what might be perceived "as a partisan witch hunt."

Sorry, but there is no escaping that perception now.

And it doesn't help when his own attorney general was able to support the pardon of unrepentant (but left-leaning) offenders, but he can't stop hounding professionals whose biggest fear was that they might fail to prevent another large-scale terrorist attack.

I don't know why Obama bothered to keep the Bush rendition policy in play -- there can't be many operatives who would be willing to so much as raise their voices during interrogations after Holder played the special-prosecutor card.

Hey, all operatives have to do is read a newspaper to know that inside the Beltway in 2009, there is more outrage that agents might have threatened to kill Khalid Sheikh Mohammad's kids to prevent a terrorist attack than at KSM for claiming to have beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

If Obama truly wants to move "forward," as his aides contend, he has the means -- as Holder well knows. Obama could use the presidential pardon to immunize CIA interrogators from the threat of criminal prosecution and end the constant flogging of serial investigations.

It's true, the CIA interrogators may lack the political connections enjoyed by Rich and the FALN guys. But maybe this once, Holder can overlook that.

dsaunders@sfchronicle.com

After the Governator, the Calculator

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Sunday, August 30, 2009

SAN DIEGO -- The most ominous domestic event of the 1970s was the collapse of self-government in New York City, which before being put into receivership by the state was liberalism's laboratory. Since then, California has been the slate on which liberalism boldly writes its recipe for decline -- high taxes, heavy regulation, subservience to public employees unions and environmentalism that is simultaneously apocalyptic and chiliastic.

Tom Campbell outlines how he would balance California's budget at a debate in Sacramento in May. (By Rich Pedroncelli -- Associated Press)

Because California's calamitous present -- creative accounting as a rickety bridge to the next budget crisis, coming soon -- might prefigure the nation's future, next year's gubernatorial election is portentous. An especially intriguing candidate in a colorful field is Tom Campbell. Colorful he is not. "Talk softly and carry a small calculator" could be his motto. What glitter, however, are his résumé and agenda.

He has a Harvard law degree and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago, where his faculty adviser was Milton Friedman. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White. Working in the Reagan administration in 1983, in the wake of a severe recession, he assumed Reagan would lose in 1984 ("proof of my political acumen," he says; Reagan carried 49 states) and accepted a professorship at Stanford's law school. He represented Silicon Valley in Congress for five terms. He unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for the Senate in 1992. He won the nomination in 2000 but lost the election. His third statewide run might work because, after Arnold Schwarzenegger's childlike faith in personality as the conqueror of problems, blandness may be charismatic.

There is no constitutional mechanism to do for California what the state of New York did for New York City in 1975 -- transfer to an improvised authority responsibility for problems the political process cannot solve. But having been California's financial director in 2004-05, Campbell believes politics can restore something like the "Gann limit," a constitutional provision that, from 1979 to 1989 (California's malleable constitution only intermittently constitutes), limited annual spending by a formula based on inflation and population growth.

He favors resetting the budget cycle so that the state would accumulate one year's revenue to be spent the following year, when precise knowledge would replace wishful thinking about available revenue. He would aggressively use the line-item veto by which governors can reduce as well as eliminate particular spending items. He thinks Berkeley and UCLA are providing an education comparable to Stanford's and should be priced accordingly, with higher tuition and compensating scholarships for the needy.

He favors a constitutional convention to reform the ballot initiative process by forcing proponents of particular propositions to stipulate the taxes they would raise or programs they would cut to pay for their measures. But only if a convention can be limited to specific changes stipulated in advance. He knows that the 1787 Constitutional Convention, which was called to merely revise the Articles of Confederation, scrapped them and started fresh.
Campbell's two rivals for the Republican nomination -- former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman and another tech entrepreneur, Steve Poizner, currently California's insurance commissioner -- are rich. Campbell is a professor. Whoever wins the nomination, he says, will quickly become flush with funds. Yes, but you cannot steal first base in politics either. How can he be nominated?

Like this, he says: Gray Davis, a professional politician of modest means, won the Democratic nomination in 1998 when two rich opponents nullified each other with media bombardments. Republicans are a shriveling tribe: Their registration is at a record low, 31.1 percent, and they do not have a majority of registered voters in any of California's 53 congressional districts. Democrats have a registration majority in 20 districts, and a statewide registration advantage of more than 2 million and growing. But the fastest-growing cohort of voters are independents who can vote in either party's primary. Campbell believes he is energizing them inexpensively by buying lists of likely voters (those who have voted in four of the past five elections), inviting 150,000 to call in to an enormous conference call, and discussing issues for 90 minutes with the 20,000 who do.

If nominated, Campbell will face either the once-exotic but still canny Jerry Brown, who will be 72 and perhaps familiar to a fault, or Gavin Newsom, 41, San Francisco's dashing and evidently delusional mayor, whose campaign suggests that the bankrupt state's biggest problem is its denial of same-sex marriage. If Campbell is nominated, he can win, but if Californians were sufficiently rational to nominate him, their state would not be shambolic.

georgewill@washpost.com

Remastered Beatles catalog comes together, real soon

By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/
Friday, August 28, 2009

You say you want a revelation?

Listen to the intensified punch of Come Together, the majestic breadth of The Long and Winding Road, the modern sheen on Love Me Do and the renewed thrust in I Am the Walrus.

PHOTOS: A gallery of Fab Four album covers

The Beatles catalog, digitally remastered for the first time, is arriving in stores Sept. 9 amid a joyful noise from fans.

Audiophiles have long lamented the thin, shrill results of the music's 1987 transfer to CD, flaws magnified by advances in digital technology that enriched the recordings of peers with repeated remastering rounds.

"Even people listening on lower-quality ear buds and MP3s will hear a drastic jump in quality," says Beatles historian Matt Hurwitz, who heard a sampling of the new tracks. "We're hearing something a lot closer to the stereo and mono mixes produced in the '60s. This is the way The Beatles heard it."

Though frustrating for fans, the wait has heightened drama and value, says Beatles scholar Martin Lewis.

"Fans chomping at the bit felt that Apple was painfully slow responding to demand," he says. "But at least The Beatles haven't been overly repackaged like Elvis and The Who."

The collection includes 14 stereo albums, sold individually or in a box set, each with original U.K. vinyl track listings, artwork and liner notes, plus archival photos and added historical and recording notes. New QuickTime mini-documentaries are included in each CD except Past Masters, which combines the two 1988 single volumes into one set.

The Beatles in Mono, a box catering to completists, gathers 10 mono albums and two discs of mono masters. (Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road and Let It Be are missing because they were recorded in stereo.) Monos won't be sold separately, and EMI has no plans to press more mono boxes when the first run sells out.

"That's smart, because people who want the mono mixes want all of them," Hurwitz says. "It's for hard-core fans like me who want to understand what it all sounded like back then. In 1963, kids didn't have stereos. That's why (producer) George Martin felt so strongly about releasing those (early) albums in mono. We're finally getting to hear the true excitement of those recordings."

Among the mono treats: Paul McCartney's vamping coda on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise), audible only on vinyl until now. And because bass was often suppressed on vinyl to prevent phonograph needles from jumping, expect more oomph from McCartney's Hofner.

The upgraded catalog "leaves the library pure," Hurwitz says. "It's now the definitive catalog, as close to the masters as technically possible."

The long and winding road to 09/09/09 began four years ago when Abbey Road engineers in London got the green light to transfer The Beatles tunes from analog tape to digital.

Though the original high-quality tapes showed no deterioration, the splicing-tape glue had dried up, causing segments to separate.

"It was slightly disconcerting on the first rewind of Please Please Me when the edits started coming apart," says Guy Massey, the project's senior recording engineer, during a playback session of remaster excerpts at Capitol Records.

Once tracks were ported one by one to digital files, engineers debated the extent of their scouring. Vocal pops, drop-outs, electrical clicks and bad edits were erased where possible.

"Some people argue that things like that should stay," says project coordinator Allan Rouse. "I don't agree. It's painful to listen to, and you would have dealt with it if you'd had the technology in the '60s. We've repaired those things to sound more pleasing."

Certain organic sounds, however, like Ringo Starr's creaky bass drum pedal on 1963's All I've Got to Do, stayed.

"In the piano chord at the end of A Day in the Life, you hear a squeaky chair," Massey says. "The Beatles probably would have removed it if they'd had the wherewithal. Unless they detracted from the performance, we've left things like that intact because they've become part of history."

Defying a trend toward excess, the team made modest use of "limiting," which shrinks dynamic range to make music sound louder. Only five of the 525 minutes of Beatles music was subjected to de-noising technology, used to reduce tape hiss.

Though the enhancements are subtle, fans will notice brighter, warmer sound and plenty of unearthed details. Engineers took greater liberties with the stereos than the monos.

"For the stereos, we haven't presented the original master tapes as they were, because we felt we could improve them," Massey says. "The monos are more representative of the master tapes. We've presented them in the best possible light."

Remastering significantly boosted sound quality, particularly on Revolver and The Beatles (aka the White Album). Remixing, the manipulation of separate tracks to alter the placement of vocals and instrumentation, could have yielded more dramatic results, but Apple has yet to green-light a catalog remix.

"That's the only thing that would make a massive difference," says Rouse, acknowledging that while some fans yearn for a full remix, purists regard it as retouching the Mona Lisa. "So far, some 120 Beatles songs have been remixed in 5.1 stereo for DVD, and they're great alternatives, but not replacements."

Fans who cry "revisionism" should seek out their old records or the mono set, McCartney says. "It's not like the originals have gone away. If you want what we consider an improvement, this is it, the stereo CDs. Our guys worked hard to get it faithful to the original."

John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, anticipates few objections to the retooled tunes, particularly since many consumers will be newbies.

"These songs aren't just old songs," she says. "They're new, too, because many people haven't listened to The Beatles yet."

Necks Overflowing With Rivers of Metaphor

By GINIA BELLAFANTE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
August 28, 2009

It seems like too much futile work in the heat of August — work bound to lead only to phony conclusions — to decipher how the sanguivorous have become the meat and drink of popular culture at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

Though here we are in the summer of 2009 with the rage for “Twilight” continuing, the vampire movie “Thirst” claiming this year’s jury prize at Cannes, the supernatural series “Being Human” on BBC America, and others arriving on CW and AMC.

HBO’s “True Blood” has been credited with revivifying the channel’s fortunes. The Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, which inspired the series, currently occupy seven of the top 20 spots on The New York Times’s paperback mass-market fiction best-seller list. The show, a mishmash of Flannery O’Connor aspirations and Anne Rice pop blood hunger, threatens to surpass “Sex and the City” as the most-watched series in HBO’s history after “The Sopranos.”

But “True Blood” is nothing like its mob-world forebear or anything else on HBO. Where “The Sopranos” had restraint and vast ambition, “True Blood” has excess and gall. During the current season, its second (the penultimate episode will be shown on Sunday), it has become an allegory for nearly every strain of tension in American life, despite a premise that suggested a more contained agenda. When “True Blood” appeared, it was easy to assume it was a metaphor for late-stage capitalism gone haywire, not simply because it began with an insolent store clerk reading Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” but also because the show seemed predicated on an interest in the retail addict’s belief that we’re made of what we buy.

Set in the fictional Louisiana town of Bon Temps, the series imagines vampires living among us, assimilating uneasily but subsisting on a new form of nourishment: synthetic blood sold in bars and convenience stores, negating the need (if not the desire) to make value meals out of human bodies. The hot vampire in town is Bill Compton, played by Stephen Moyer, with the same potato-flesh complexion as the character of Edward Cullen in the filmed adaptation of “Twilight.” Despite the progress they’ve made, vampires, like women bent on avoiding Botox, still can’t subject themselves to the murderous effects of sunlight.

Bill’s lack of availability for lunchtime patio dining makes him no less appealing to Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), an orphaned mind-reading waitress, who when the series began was a virgin looking at a very limited number of days of continued sexual ignorance. Bill has a courtly reserve to him, one he has kept up at least since the Civil War. It is the women of Bon Temps whose metabolisms run rapid with appetite. They like to bed down with vampires and accessories.

“True Blood” doesn’t care where those accessories come from. It isn’t interested in what we buy; it cares whether we really are who we sleep with. The sex is served in such luridly voluptuous, viewer-satiation-guaranteed portions that the show feels like nothing else on television, by which I mean television that isn’t available exclusively on $15.99 hotel-room pay-per-view. “True Blood” is also like little we’ve seen on the larger screen in years, a vestige of the ’80s forged from the musings of Adrian Lyne and the camera of David Lynch at a time when studios, unburdened by the need to sell DVDs at Wal-Mart, submitted to greater sexual permissiveness on film.

The reactionary gender politics that often attended such permissiveness are embedded in “True Blood,” even as the show’s creator, Alan Ball, works aggressively to prove what a fired-up liberal he is. As if we’ve consistently skipped those parts of the newspaper that have recounted the scandals of Jim Bakker or Ted Haggard, Mr. Ball insists on telling us that right-wing religious extremism is frequently linked with an untenable moral and sexual hypocrisy.

A Congressional candidate who makes vampire bashing (read: gay bashing) part of his platform is buying V, vampire blood with a Viagra effect on civilians, from a drag queen on the black market. Mr. Ball, as he did in “American Beauty,” which he wrote, and “Six Feet Under,” which he created and where eros and thanatos did battle every week, shoots his metaphors as if activating an armed squadron. Standing in for a hundred Jerry Falwells and the Curse of American Sexual Paranoia, one detractor on the show declaimed, “Vampires have taken our jobs and our women, and their very blood turns our children into addicts, drug dealers and homosexuals!”

The current season has set up a showdown between a psycho Christian cult called the Fellowship of the Sun, which runs a kind of conversion camp called the Light of Day Institute, and the vampires (and vampire sympathizers) the cult aims to destroy. At the same time it is libidinous women to whom bad things keep happening — and who make bad things happen.

No one in the fellowship is quite as terrifying as Maryann (Michelle Forbes), a not-entirely-human Dionysian nut job, who cooks up pot pies made of dubiously acquired organs and poses the greatest threat to the moral foundation of Bon Temps with her penchant for hypnotizing the town into states of violent, orgiastic rapture. When she is around, eyeballs start bleeding black. She wants everyone to be getting it on all the time. She also likes human sacrifice. Unchecked sexual freedom apparently isn’t what we’re supposed to be signing up for, either.

“True Blood” charges along under the spell of its own unmodulated id. That Mr. Ball seems tenuously at the rudder of his ideological ship doesn’t bother the millions of viewers who cannot get enough. “Sex and the City” — that was merely nun’s play.

Trustfund Ted

By Daniel J. Flynn on 8.28.09 @ 6:08AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/


"After all is said and done, Ted Kennedy is still the man in American politics Republicans love to hate," Republican strategist Lee Atwater, himself the victim of brain cancer, observed in 1990. Though attitudes toward Senator Kennedy softened because of his illness, he remained a figure with few admirers who weren't also colleagues, constituents, or political fellow travelers. Kennedy votaries who dismiss criticisms of the late senator as the product of partisanship or ideological bitterness tell themselves a comforting lie. Scores of Democrats shared Kennedy's politics. None elicited the heated response in conservative direct mail, campaign ads, or red-meat speeches. Ted Kennedy's politics, rather than blinding conservatives to Ted Kennedy's virtues, blinded liberals to his vices -- which were large and many.

Following a car crash that claimed the life of his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, Kennedy wears a neck brace on his way to her funeral, Hyannis, Massachusetts, July 22, 1969. Kopechne died when the senator drove off a bridge connecting Martha's Vineyard and Chappaquiddick islands. Kennedy swam ashore but Kopechne was not able to leave the car.(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The caricature that Ann Richards and others painted of George H.W. Bush -- "born on third base and thought that he hit a triple" -- more resembled Ted Kennedy, a gregarious rogue enabled by wealth, power, and a famous last name. The privilege that shielded the playboy senator from the consequences of his actions acted as a double-edge sword by ensuring that he also never learned from the mistakes he didn't suffer from.

Despite ranking in the bottom half of his class at Milton Academy, Ted Kennedy matriculated into America's most prestigious university in 1950. Grades? He was a Kennedy. His three older brothers and father had graduated from Harvard. Why couldn't he? Unable to perform in the classroom as he performed on the football field, the youngest of the Kennedy brood hired a classmate to take his Spanish exam. Those who had bent the rules to admit him abided by them in expelling him. Joe Kennedy was furious -- that his son got caught, not that he cheated.

When the immature Kennedy impulsively enlisted in the Army to save face, he discovered that his contract obliged him to a longer period of service, and exposed him to the dangers of combat. An outraged Joe Kennedy responded, "Don't you even look at what you're signing?" His father, one of the richest men in America, "fixed" the matter with a few phone calls. Ted's four-year contract became a two-year stint, and the possibility of a soldier's life on the front lines in Korea was rectified with a posh assignment in Paris guarding NATO's headquarters.

Ted Kennedy is perhaps the only senator who never -- save for his Army respite from Harvard -- held a steady paying job prior to landing one in that august body. This infuriated his opponent, Edward McCormack, in the 1962 Massachusetts Democratic primary. "If his name was Edward Moore, with his qualifications," the state's attorney general remarked in a debate, "your candidacy would be a joke." But starting at the top was the Kennedy way. If Joseph Kennedy could go from stock swindler to chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Robert Kennedy could become attorney general of the United States without ever having tried a case in court, then certainly President Kennedy's kid brother could, just three years out of law school, win a place in the U.S. Senate.

"Of course, I'm hurt," Edward McCormack reflected immediately after his loss. "I think it's unjust that he should even try for the nomination. Two years ago, I led all candidates in this state at the polls. Right now I hold the most important elective office held in this state by a Democrat. Then along came Teddy Kennedy out of the blue. If this is politics, if they can get away with this, then I don't want any part of politics."

A few years later, Ted Kennedy got away with it again. After finishing ninth in a field of 31 in a regatta, Kennedy spent a Saturday partying with six unmarried women and a group of married men. Pounding rum and cokes, Kennedy absconded from the booze barbecue with Mary Jo Kopechne, whom he drove to her death off a narrow, unlit bridge without guardrails. For almost ten hours, the senator dried out, called numerous acquaintances, and tried to get his cousin to go along with a cover story that Kopechne had been alone at the wheel -- but did nothing to alert authorities to his party companion's plight. Political fixers fixed him with a neck brace, produced a renewed driver's license for the unlicensed senator, and released incomplete phone records -- exposed by the New York Times a decade later -- that erased the calls he made between the time of the accident and the time of his reporting it. Characteristic of the treatment he had received his whole life, Kennedy avoided jail and overwhelmingly won reelection the next year. His mother responded by initially disinheriting Ted's cousin, her orphaned nephew, who refused to go along with her son's subterfuge.

Like his previous mistakes, the accident did nothing to alter Kennedy's misbehavior. Here, caught in broad daylight in the marital act on the floor of a posh Washington restaurant. There, waking his son and nephew to carouse the Palm Beach bars on Good Friday -- leading to accusations of a rape occurring within earshot of the senator. Whereas assassinations and World War II kept his older brothers forever young, Ted's reckless behavior made him the Peter Pan of the Senate. Though his jet-black hair turned snow white, and his football physique transformed into a Fritos physique, Ted Kennedy remained in suspended adolescence for most of his 47 years in the elected office.

Insulated by the consequences of his behavior, Kennedy was also shielded from the consequences of his policies. He was the champion of busing who kept his own children far from the public schools; an advocate of publicly funded campaigns who bankrolled his political career with his family's shadowy financing; an icon of feminists who used women like Kleenex, serially harassed members of the opposite sex, and spent ten hours attempting to rescue his political career as he denied the young women suffocating in an air pocket in his Oldsmobile professional rescue attempts; and the primary booster of socialized medicine who assembled a dream team of neurosurgeons to consult on his treatment for brain cancer. The proverbial limousine liberal was made real in Trustfund Ted.

Particularly galling to Senator Kennedy's amazed antagonists was the manner in which those that he wronged rewarded rather than punished their transgressor. Edward McCormack's family chose Kennedy to deliver a eulogy at his funeral. In anticipation of the 1976 race for the presidency, Joe and Gwen Kopechne offered that they would cast their votes for Kennedy should he run. More than a half century after expelling Ted Kennedy, Harvard awarded him an honorary degree and celebrated him at The Game, where Harvard Stadium's confused spectators were left wondering how Ted Kennedy '54 could have caught a touchdown pass in the 1955 Harvard-Yale game.

"My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life," Ted eulogized slain brother Bobby in 1969. More than four decades later, Ted Kennedy's conservative detractors are wondering why the senator's admirers aren't heeding such advice.

Daniel J. Flynn, the author of A Conservative History of the American Left, blogs at http://www.flynnfiles.com/.

Things only a Kennedy could get away with

And by not calling his bluff on Chappaquiddick, Americans became complicit in it.

By MARK STEYN
Syndicated column
Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion
Friday, August 28, 2009

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its "mainstream" media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's passing, America's TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there's a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:

"Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life …"

That's the way to do it! An "accident," "ugly" in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted's the star, and there's no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was … a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

"Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse."

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than "betrayed" him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it's kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of "tremendous moral collapse." When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it's usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy's biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne."

You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don't know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo's – but you're struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy's Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo "would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history … Who knows – maybe she'd feel it was worth it." What true-believing liberal lass wouldn't be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second's notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you'll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain's comparatively very minor "Profumo scandal," the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen's Privy Council and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children's playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the "Kennedy curse," a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim – and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn't, he made all of us complicit in what he'd done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.

His defenders would argue that he redeemed himself with his "progressive" agenda, up to and including health care "reform." It was an odd kind of "redemption": In a cooing paean to the senator on a cringe-makingly obsequious edition of NPR's "Diane Rehm Show," Edward Klein of Newsweek fondly recalled that one of Ted's "favorite topics of humor was, indeed, Chappaquiddick itself. He would ask people, 'Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?'"

Terrific! Who was that lady I saw you with last night?

Beats me!

Why did the Last Lion cross the road?

To sleep it off!

What do you call 200 Kennedy sycophants at the bottom of a Chappaquiddick pond? A great start, but bad news for NPR guest-bookers! "He was a guy's guy," chortled Edward Klein. Which is one way of putting it.

When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterward, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator's passing marked "the end of civility in the U.S. Congress." Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost "civility" of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution."

Whoa! "Liberals" (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored resegregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked "the end of civility" in American politics, that's a shoo-in.

If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy's comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Ted himself, who knows? He buried three brothers, and as many nephews, and, as the years took their toll, it looked sometimes as if the only Kennedy son to grow old had had to grow old for all of them. Did he truly believe, as surely as Melissa Lafsky and Co. do, that his indispensability to the republic trumped all else? That Camelot – that "fleeting wisp of glory," that "one brief shining moment" – must run forever, even if "How To Handle A Woman" gets dropped from the score. The senator's actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.

©MARK STEYN

The Get-Cheney Squad

By Patrick J. Buchanan
http://www.vdare.com/
August 27, 2009

"Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

George Orwell's truth comes to mind as one reads that Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to go after the "rough men" who, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night, went too far in frightening Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the engineer of the September massacres.

Yet, it seems now indisputable that those CIA interrogators, with their rough methods, got vital intelligence that saved American lives, as Dick Cheney has consistently contended.

According to The Washington Times, which reviewed the newly declassified CIA documents, those interrogators "produced life-saving intelligence that disrupted numerous terror plots."

They elicited the names of al-Qaida agents who planned anthrax attacks on Westerners and a massive bombing of Camp Lemonier, the U.S. base in East Africa. They got the names of 70 recruits al-Qaida deemed "suitable for Western attacks" and of the men who made the bomb used on the U.S. consulate in Karachi.

Iyman Faris, an al-Qaeda sleeper agent and truck driver in Ohio, is serving 20 years because of information the CIA got from KSM and associates.

Other operations aborted include al-Qaida "plots to fly airliners into buildings on the West Coast, setting off bombs in U.S. cities and planning to employ a network of Pakistanis to target gas stations, railroad tracks and the Brooklyn Bridge."

What were the "inhumane" techniques CIA interrogators used to uncover these plans for the mass murder of Americans?

"Interrogators lifted one detainee off the floor by his arms, while they were bound behind his back with a belt," reports The Washington Post. "Another interrogator used a stiff brush to clean a detainee, scrubbing so roughly that his legs were raw with abrasions. Another squeezed a detainee's neck at his carotid artery until he began to pass out."

The CIA, we are told, used mock executions to frighten captives and threatened to kill KSM's children and rape his mother. Power drills were brandished in interrogation rooms.

Were any children killed? No. Was anyone's mother raped? No. Was the power drill used? No.

Was anyone executed in front of a witness to make him talk? No. It was faked, as Sean Connery faked it in "The Untouchables" to get an underling to blab to Eliot Ness, aka Kevin Costner, about how he could take down Al Capone's mob.

As for threatening to kill the children of our enemies, we did not do that in "The Good War." Instead, what we did was kill them in the thousands every night in air raids over Germany and Japan.

In the Tokyo firestorm of February 1945, the Dresden raid in March, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, we killed grandparents, mothers, fathers, wives, sisters, daughters and sons of the enemy in the scores of thousands on each of those days.

Can it be that the same United States that honored Col. Paul Tibbets and put his Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, on display in its Air and Space Museum is going to prosecute a CIA agent for faking an execution and threatening, but never intending, to kill the children of Khalid Sheik Muhammad?

Why is Barack Obama allowing these prosecutions to proceed?

In 2004, career lawyers at Justice looked over the same reports and concluded that prosecutions would not serve the national interest. Obama has himself said he wants to move on.

Now, he and Holder may not like what was done back then, but who does? And where is the criminal intent? These agents are not sadists. They were trying to get intel to abort plots and apprehend terrorists to prevent them from killing us. And they succeeded. Not a single terrorist attack on the United States in eight years.

Do we the people, some of whom may be alive because of what those CIA men did, want them disgraced, prosecuted and punished for not going strictly by the book in protecting us from terrorists?

In its lead editorial Tuesday, "Following the Torture Trail," The Washington Post declaims, "The real culprits in this sordid story are the higher-ups, starting with former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Richard B. Cheney who led America down the degraded path of state-sponsored torture."

But why is Obama yielding to the clamor of a left that will not be satiated until Cheney and Bush are indicted as Class A war criminals? Is that in the national interest? Is it in Obama's interest to tear his country apart to expose and punish these CIA agents?

In the 1960s, Robert Kennedy and the boys at Justice set up a "Get Hoffa Squad" to take down Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. It was a vendetta that succeeded.

This vendetta will not. For, on the issue of national security, as Barack will painfully discover, he is not more trusted than Dick Cheney or the rough men at the CIA who did the harsh interrogations of terrorists, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.