Tuesday, September 06, 2011
Monday, September 05, 2011
Lee Roy Selmon's death deprives Tampa Bay of a football, and community, legend
By Gary Shelton, St. Petersburg Times Sports Columnist
http://www.tampabay.com/
Monday, September 5, 2011
This 1984 file photo shows Tampa Bay Buccaneer defensive end Lee Roy Selmon shaking hands with head coach John McKay. Selmon, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' Hall of Fame defensive end who teamed with his brothers to create a dominant defensive front and led Oklahoma to back-to-back national championships, died Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011, two days after being hospitalized for a stroke. He was 56. (AP PhotBruce Zake,File)
"Whenever I want to feel good, I think of Lee Roy Selmon," said the late John McKay, longtime coach of the Buccaneers
Today, Tampa Bay is not as kind as it was. It is not as gracious. It is not as decent. The best of us has been taken way. Lee Roy Selmon, a legend of a man with the demeanor of a common man, has died. All of the lives he touched, all of the people he enriched, mourn his passing. It is too sad for words, and it is too soon for reason. As a community, Tampa Bay was not yet done with Lee Roy. We needed to hear his soft voice, and to be comforted by his immense presence, for a while longer. He was only 56, and we needed to know he was there, and that he made the rest of us better, for years to come. Lee Roy is gone. A giant has fallen. And now, who is going to help to fill in the crater?
Josh?
Evan?
Steven?
Anyone?
The wounds are fresh, and the pain is deep. Since Friday, since the whispers of his death swept across Tampa Bay, most of us had braced for the worst. And still, it seems sudden and grim and final. He is gone, and much of us has gone with him. As an area, we are a little less than we were. Whoever can fill this void?
Gerald?
David?
Victor?
For the athletes of Tampa Bay, this should become a shared challenge. A good man has gone, and they should strive to carry the torch. One by one, they should realize they have a responsibility to help meet the standard that Selmon left behind. Oh, does Tampa Bay need it.
Above all else, the legacy of Selmon was in the consistency of his kindness. He never seemed to have a bad day, even a bad moment. He was a star who didn't act as if he were a star, a celebrity who never accepted the role. Tampa Bay loved him for that. How could it not?
On the day after his death, there are a thousand stories about encounters with Lee Roy being told across Tampa Bay, and they all sound the same. Lee Roy shook a lot of hands over the years, and his voice remained quiet, and his smile was never far away, and he treated strangers as if they were friends. He was as thoughtful as a professor, as calm as a diplomat, as honorable as a clergyman.
He was one of us. He was Lee Roy, and he set the standard for what an athlete should mean for the place in which he lived.
If you are Josh Freeman, or Evan Longoria, or Steven Stamkos, the responsibility has fallen to you. Be kinder. Make a difference. Take more time with people. Reduce the distance between yourself and those who follow you.
If you are Gerald McCoy, or David Price, or Victor Hedman, this should be a goal. Lower your voice. Raise your standards. Smile a little more. Give a little more.
In memory of Lee Roy, every athlete in Tampa Bay, from the budding stars to the players struggling to hang on, from the veterans to the rookies, needs to accept the responsibility of being a little more like Selmon. A little nicer. A little calmer. A little more like Lee Roy, the man who set the standard.
For that matter, it wouldn't hurt the rest of us to try, either.
This is how you honor Lee Roy. Not with a statue or a speech, not with a banner or a trophy. With Lee Roy, the ultimate tribute is to try to live your life a little more the way he lived his. How uncommon should common decency be?
Looking back, Tampa Bay did not merely draft Selmon 35 years ago. It adopted him, and he adopted the area right back. This is not as common as you might think. Most athletes come to a town through the accident of a player draft, and they change colors as quickly as there is bigger money to be made elsewhere.
Other athletes walk through a town and demand that the people who live there get out of their way. Too many are entitled and self-absorbed, and they convince themselves that nastiness and narcissism is the reason for their success. They love the adulation, but only as long as it keeps its distance.
Selmon's approach was different. His humility was genuine, and his decency was endless. He kept his awards in a box, and if he had any ego at all, it was in there, too. Part of his greatness was that he didn't need to bring it up.
On Friday night, after Selmon suffered his stroke, Chicago Bears pro personnel director Tim Ruskell (a ballboy for the Bucs when Selmon arrived) was talking about the last time he had seen Selmon. He had gone to visit Selmon at USF, and Selmon was giving a campus tour to prospective students.
"I wonder how many of those kids knew who Lee Roy was," Ruskell said. "Because you know he wouldn't tell them."
Ah, but if they were from Tampa Bay, they knew. Here, everyone knew.
He was more than a football player. It is odd, but the years have changed Tampa Bay, and there are more people who never saw him play than who did. Most of the people who loved Lee Roy, who idolized Lee Roy, never saw him embarrass a bigger offensive tackle with his rare speed and strength. They have read about him, and they know about his skills, and they know why he is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame (the college one, too).
Still, Selmon was an NFL player for only nine seasons.
He has been Lee Roy for the 27 years since.
As communities go, this one has been blessed with more good guys than most. Warrick Dunn. Derrick Brooks. Mike Alstott. Vinny Lecavalier. John Lynch. We have seen how athletes can affect lives.
Ah, but there has never been anyone quite like Lee Roy. He made a difference in a hundred big ways, and in a million small ways. He made people cheer, and he made people smile, and he filled Tampa Bay with his demeanor. He could have been a teacher or a plumber or a roofer, a mayor or a preacher or a lawyer, and he would have been the same guy.
Today, we mourn a loss that seems much too soon, and much too large, to comprehend. Tampa Bay is lucky that he came here, and blessed that he stayed. This was his home, and he was our neighbor.
Goodbye, Lee Roy.
Oh, and thanks.
OU, NFL football legend Lee Roy Selmon dies
Lee Roy Selmon, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' Hall of Fame defensive end who teamed with his brothers to create a dominant front and led the University of Oklahoma to back-to-back national championships, died Sunday. He was 56.
BY JOHN ROHDE, The Oklahoman Staff Writer, jrohde@opubco.com
http://newsok.com/
Published: September 4, 2011
Teammates insist the greatest player in Oklahoma football history was never knocked off his feet, but not even Lee Roy Selmon could conquer the massive stroke he suffered at home Friday.
After spending two days in critical condition and with family members by his side, Selmon died Sunday in Tampa, Fla. He was 56.
“It is with very heavy hearts that the Selmon family announces the passing of our beloved husband, father and brother, Lee Roy Selmon,” the Selmon family said in a statement. “Lee Roy passed away today surrounded by family and friends at St. Joseph's Hospital.
“For all his accomplishments on and off the field, to us Lee Roy was the rock of our family. This has been a sudden and shocking event, and we are devastated by this unexpected loss. We deeply appreciate the prayers and support shown by family, friends, the football community and the public over the past two days.”
With Lee Roy lined up alongside older brothers Lucious and Dewey, the Selmons comprised arguably the most dominant defensive line in the history of college football.
Coaches and teammates claim they never saw Lee Roy knocked on his back side.
“When you see him make plays on film, Lee Roy Selmon would make tackles and lay people down,” former OU coach Barry Switzer said. “Everybody else would have crumpled to the ground, and Lee Roy Selmon would still be standing up.”
Former OU assistant Larry Lacewell recruited the Selmons out of Eufaula High School.
“I've never seen him play bad my whole life,” Lacewell once said of Lee Roy.
Ever seen him knocked off his feet?
“That's the legend, and I can't go against it,” Lacewell said. “I've never heard a guy who's been with him, or coached against him, who didn't say he's the best they've seen. I mean everybody. It's incredible, but it's all true.”
Lucious played two seasons at OU with Dewey and Lee Roy, who were in the same class despite being born 11 months apart.
With a Selmon in the lineup, the Sooners had a combined record of 54-3-1. Lee Roy and Dewey went 43-2-1, winning back-to-back national titles in 1974-75, four Big Eight titles and going 38 consecutive games without a loss.
Lee Roy won both the Lombardi and Outland trophies as the nation's outstanding collegiate lineman in 1975.
Receiver Tinker Owens was Lee Roy's teammate for four seasons at OU and later played against him in the NFL.“I haven't seen anybody any better, even in pro football,” Owens said.
Former Detroit Lions coach Monte Clark said Lee Roy was “a grown man at work among a bunch of boys.”
The Selmons long have been considered the First Family of Oklahoma Football.
“I'm still a little bit overwhelmed any time one of us are singled out,” Lee Roy said before being honored on Owen Field at halftime of the OU-South Florida game in 2002.
“Any type of recognition is just a reflection of all those people we played with. I'm humbled by it.”
Lee Roy was the first player taken in the 1976 NFL Draft and the first player chosen in Tampa Bay Buccaneers history. That same year, Tampa Bay selected Dewey with the last pick in the second round and the brothers played together five seasons with the Bucs.
A six-time Pro Bowl selection, Lee Roy was named NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1979.
In 1995, Lee Roy became the first OU player to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He entered the College Football Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame in 1992.
Dewey presented Lee Roy at the Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Canton, Ohio, where Lucious also was in attendance.
“For 31 years, he was my celibate wife,” Dewey said that day of Lee Roy. “We went on dinner dates together. In fact, for our senior prom it was I who took him there ... I really feel with all of my heart that Lee Roy belongs here (in the Hall).”
Some believe Selmon was the best defensive end to play the game at any level.
“My firm belief is that if Lee Roy Selmon hadn't been such an extraordinarily decent man, he would have been the greatest defensive end who ever played the game,” said former Orlando Sentinel writer Jerry Greene, who covered every game Selmon played with the Bucs from 1976-84. “The only thing that kept him from clearly being the best is that he had nothing resembling a killer instinct. He did his job and he did it well, but he never took any enjoyment or got any extra thrill out of leaving a quarterback injured on the ground. He was a great football player but an even better human being.”
While Switzer was coaching the Dallas Cowboys, Pro Football Hall of Famer Howie Long once told him: “Coach, I just wanted you to know I patterned my game after Lee Roy Selmon, He was the guy I marveled at, and I wanted my game to be as good as his.”
Gary Shelton of the St. Petersburg Times wrote of Selmon: “He is perhaps the most genuine, most dignified former star who ever walked. His nature is so placid, it amazes you he could conjure such a physical player from it.”
Selmon was president of the University of South Florida Foundation Partnership for Athletics and had planned to attend USF's game at Notre Dame on Saturday.
In tribute, South Florida players wore a decal of Selmon's retired uniform number with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (No. 63) on the back of their helmets. USF wound up posting a 23-20 upset over the No. 16-ranked Fighting Irish.
Selmon served as USF's athletic director from 2001-04. He resigned from that position and returned to a fundraising role because of high blood pressure caused by heart and stress-related problems, Dewey told The Tampa Tribune in 2004.
Dewey also said their father, Lucious Sr., once had a stroke.
Mike Baldwin contributed to this report.
Related:
Lee Roy Selmon's teammates respected the player, loved the person -
http://newsok.com/article/3601282
Lee Roy Selmon was the best of the best -
http://newsok.com/tramel-lee-roy-selmon-was-the-best-of-the-best/article/3601403
Remembering Lee Roy Selmon -
http://espn.go.com/blog/nfcsouth/post/_/id/24577/remembering-lee-roy-selmon
http://www.tampabay.com/
Monday, September 5, 2011
"Whenever I want to feel good, I think of Lee Roy Selmon," said the late John McKay, longtime coach of the Buccaneers
Today, Tampa Bay is not as kind as it was. It is not as gracious. It is not as decent. The best of us has been taken way. Lee Roy Selmon, a legend of a man with the demeanor of a common man, has died. All of the lives he touched, all of the people he enriched, mourn his passing. It is too sad for words, and it is too soon for reason. As a community, Tampa Bay was not yet done with Lee Roy. We needed to hear his soft voice, and to be comforted by his immense presence, for a while longer. He was only 56, and we needed to know he was there, and that he made the rest of us better, for years to come. Lee Roy is gone. A giant has fallen. And now, who is going to help to fill in the crater?
Josh?
Evan?
Steven?
Anyone?
The wounds are fresh, and the pain is deep. Since Friday, since the whispers of his death swept across Tampa Bay, most of us had braced for the worst. And still, it seems sudden and grim and final. He is gone, and much of us has gone with him. As an area, we are a little less than we were. Whoever can fill this void?
Gerald?
David?
Victor?
For the athletes of Tampa Bay, this should become a shared challenge. A good man has gone, and they should strive to carry the torch. One by one, they should realize they have a responsibility to help meet the standard that Selmon left behind. Oh, does Tampa Bay need it.
Above all else, the legacy of Selmon was in the consistency of his kindness. He never seemed to have a bad day, even a bad moment. He was a star who didn't act as if he were a star, a celebrity who never accepted the role. Tampa Bay loved him for that. How could it not?
On the day after his death, there are a thousand stories about encounters with Lee Roy being told across Tampa Bay, and they all sound the same. Lee Roy shook a lot of hands over the years, and his voice remained quiet, and his smile was never far away, and he treated strangers as if they were friends. He was as thoughtful as a professor, as calm as a diplomat, as honorable as a clergyman.
He was one of us. He was Lee Roy, and he set the standard for what an athlete should mean for the place in which he lived.
If you are Josh Freeman, or Evan Longoria, or Steven Stamkos, the responsibility has fallen to you. Be kinder. Make a difference. Take more time with people. Reduce the distance between yourself and those who follow you.
If you are Gerald McCoy, or David Price, or Victor Hedman, this should be a goal. Lower your voice. Raise your standards. Smile a little more. Give a little more.
In memory of Lee Roy, every athlete in Tampa Bay, from the budding stars to the players struggling to hang on, from the veterans to the rookies, needs to accept the responsibility of being a little more like Selmon. A little nicer. A little calmer. A little more like Lee Roy, the man who set the standard.
For that matter, it wouldn't hurt the rest of us to try, either.
This is how you honor Lee Roy. Not with a statue or a speech, not with a banner or a trophy. With Lee Roy, the ultimate tribute is to try to live your life a little more the way he lived his. How uncommon should common decency be?
Looking back, Tampa Bay did not merely draft Selmon 35 years ago. It adopted him, and he adopted the area right back. This is not as common as you might think. Most athletes come to a town through the accident of a player draft, and they change colors as quickly as there is bigger money to be made elsewhere.
Other athletes walk through a town and demand that the people who live there get out of their way. Too many are entitled and self-absorbed, and they convince themselves that nastiness and narcissism is the reason for their success. They love the adulation, but only as long as it keeps its distance.
Selmon's approach was different. His humility was genuine, and his decency was endless. He kept his awards in a box, and if he had any ego at all, it was in there, too. Part of his greatness was that he didn't need to bring it up.
On Friday night, after Selmon suffered his stroke, Chicago Bears pro personnel director Tim Ruskell (a ballboy for the Bucs when Selmon arrived) was talking about the last time he had seen Selmon. He had gone to visit Selmon at USF, and Selmon was giving a campus tour to prospective students.
"I wonder how many of those kids knew who Lee Roy was," Ruskell said. "Because you know he wouldn't tell them."
Ah, but if they were from Tampa Bay, they knew. Here, everyone knew.
He was more than a football player. It is odd, but the years have changed Tampa Bay, and there are more people who never saw him play than who did. Most of the people who loved Lee Roy, who idolized Lee Roy, never saw him embarrass a bigger offensive tackle with his rare speed and strength. They have read about him, and they know about his skills, and they know why he is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame (the college one, too).
Still, Selmon was an NFL player for only nine seasons.
He has been Lee Roy for the 27 years since.
As communities go, this one has been blessed with more good guys than most. Warrick Dunn. Derrick Brooks. Mike Alstott. Vinny Lecavalier. John Lynch. We have seen how athletes can affect lives.
Ah, but there has never been anyone quite like Lee Roy. He made a difference in a hundred big ways, and in a million small ways. He made people cheer, and he made people smile, and he filled Tampa Bay with his demeanor. He could have been a teacher or a plumber or a roofer, a mayor or a preacher or a lawyer, and he would have been the same guy.
Today, we mourn a loss that seems much too soon, and much too large, to comprehend. Tampa Bay is lucky that he came here, and blessed that he stayed. This was his home, and he was our neighbor.
Goodbye, Lee Roy.
Oh, and thanks.
OU, NFL football legend Lee Roy Selmon dies
Lee Roy Selmon, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' Hall of Fame defensive end who teamed with his brothers to create a dominant front and led the University of Oklahoma to back-to-back national championships, died Sunday. He was 56.
BY JOHN ROHDE, The Oklahoman Staff Writer, jrohde@opubco.com
http://newsok.com/
Published: September 4, 2011
Teammates insist the greatest player in Oklahoma football history was never knocked off his feet, but not even Lee Roy Selmon could conquer the massive stroke he suffered at home Friday.
After spending two days in critical condition and with family members by his side, Selmon died Sunday in Tampa, Fla. He was 56.
“It is with very heavy hearts that the Selmon family announces the passing of our beloved husband, father and brother, Lee Roy Selmon,” the Selmon family said in a statement. “Lee Roy passed away today surrounded by family and friends at St. Joseph's Hospital.
“For all his accomplishments on and off the field, to us Lee Roy was the rock of our family. This has been a sudden and shocking event, and we are devastated by this unexpected loss. We deeply appreciate the prayers and support shown by family, friends, the football community and the public over the past two days.”
With Lee Roy lined up alongside older brothers Lucious and Dewey, the Selmons comprised arguably the most dominant defensive line in the history of college football.
Coaches and teammates claim they never saw Lee Roy knocked on his back side.
“When you see him make plays on film, Lee Roy Selmon would make tackles and lay people down,” former OU coach Barry Switzer said. “Everybody else would have crumpled to the ground, and Lee Roy Selmon would still be standing up.”
Former OU assistant Larry Lacewell recruited the Selmons out of Eufaula High School.
“I've never seen him play bad my whole life,” Lacewell once said of Lee Roy.
Ever seen him knocked off his feet?
“That's the legend, and I can't go against it,” Lacewell said. “I've never heard a guy who's been with him, or coached against him, who didn't say he's the best they've seen. I mean everybody. It's incredible, but it's all true.”
Lucious played two seasons at OU with Dewey and Lee Roy, who were in the same class despite being born 11 months apart.
With a Selmon in the lineup, the Sooners had a combined record of 54-3-1. Lee Roy and Dewey went 43-2-1, winning back-to-back national titles in 1974-75, four Big Eight titles and going 38 consecutive games without a loss.
Lee Roy won both the Lombardi and Outland trophies as the nation's outstanding collegiate lineman in 1975.
Receiver Tinker Owens was Lee Roy's teammate for four seasons at OU and later played against him in the NFL.“I haven't seen anybody any better, even in pro football,” Owens said.
Former Detroit Lions coach Monte Clark said Lee Roy was “a grown man at work among a bunch of boys.”
The Selmons long have been considered the First Family of Oklahoma Football.
“I'm still a little bit overwhelmed any time one of us are singled out,” Lee Roy said before being honored on Owen Field at halftime of the OU-South Florida game in 2002.
“Any type of recognition is just a reflection of all those people we played with. I'm humbled by it.”
Lee Roy was the first player taken in the 1976 NFL Draft and the first player chosen in Tampa Bay Buccaneers history. That same year, Tampa Bay selected Dewey with the last pick in the second round and the brothers played together five seasons with the Bucs.
A six-time Pro Bowl selection, Lee Roy was named NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1979.
In 1995, Lee Roy became the first OU player to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He entered the College Football Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame in 1992.
Dewey presented Lee Roy at the Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Canton, Ohio, where Lucious also was in attendance.
“For 31 years, he was my celibate wife,” Dewey said that day of Lee Roy. “We went on dinner dates together. In fact, for our senior prom it was I who took him there ... I really feel with all of my heart that Lee Roy belongs here (in the Hall).”
Some believe Selmon was the best defensive end to play the game at any level.
“My firm belief is that if Lee Roy Selmon hadn't been such an extraordinarily decent man, he would have been the greatest defensive end who ever played the game,” said former Orlando Sentinel writer Jerry Greene, who covered every game Selmon played with the Bucs from 1976-84. “The only thing that kept him from clearly being the best is that he had nothing resembling a killer instinct. He did his job and he did it well, but he never took any enjoyment or got any extra thrill out of leaving a quarterback injured on the ground. He was a great football player but an even better human being.”
While Switzer was coaching the Dallas Cowboys, Pro Football Hall of Famer Howie Long once told him: “Coach, I just wanted you to know I patterned my game after Lee Roy Selmon, He was the guy I marveled at, and I wanted my game to be as good as his.”
Gary Shelton of the St. Petersburg Times wrote of Selmon: “He is perhaps the most genuine, most dignified former star who ever walked. His nature is so placid, it amazes you he could conjure such a physical player from it.”
Selmon was president of the University of South Florida Foundation Partnership for Athletics and had planned to attend USF's game at Notre Dame on Saturday.
In tribute, South Florida players wore a decal of Selmon's retired uniform number with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (No. 63) on the back of their helmets. USF wound up posting a 23-20 upset over the No. 16-ranked Fighting Irish.
Selmon served as USF's athletic director from 2001-04. He resigned from that position and returned to a fundraising role because of high blood pressure caused by heart and stress-related problems, Dewey told The Tampa Tribune in 2004.
Dewey also said their father, Lucious Sr., once had a stroke.
Mike Baldwin contributed to this report.
Related:
Lee Roy Selmon's teammates respected the player, loved the person -
http://newsok.com/article/3601282
Lee Roy Selmon was the best of the best -
http://newsok.com/tramel-lee-roy-selmon-was-the-best-of-the-best/article/3601403
Remembering Lee Roy Selmon -
http://espn.go.com/blog/nfcsouth/post/_/id/24577/remembering-lee-roy-selmon
How the NYPD Gets Jihad Right
In a world of wishful thinkers, Commissioner Kelly is a realist.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com
September 3, 2011
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly
‘Every conspiracy against Islam and scheming against Islam and the Muslims — its source is America.”
“Jihad is Jihad. There is no such thing as commerce, industry, and science in jihad. This is calling things other than by its [sic] own name. If Allah says, ‘Do jihad,’ it means do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with the missile. This is Jihad. Jihad against Allah’s enemies for Allah’s cause and his word.”
“Why do we fear the word ‘terrorist’? If the terrorist is the person who defends his right, so we are terrorists. . . . The Koran mentions the words ‘to strike terror,’ therefore we don’t fear to be described with ‘terrorism.’ . . . We are ordered to prepare whatever we can of power to terrorize the enemies of Islam.”
This rhetoric was not at all unusual. It was the sort of thing you’d hear on any given Friday at mosques in Brooklyn or Jersey City. Nor is there anything ostensibly criminal about it, at least according to the hash the Supreme Court has made of the First Amendment.
That wasn’t the case in the speaker’s native Egypt. There, Omar Abdel Rahman had been notorious for such fiery Friday sermons. There, the imam known as “the Blind Sheikh,” a renowned scholar of Islamic jurisprudence, had been jailed several times for inciting Muslims — urging that they kill regime officials for allying with America and for failing to implement sharia, Islam’s legal system.
But not here, not in the land of free expression: In the United States, the authorities regarded Abdel Rahman as a respected community leader. The federal government put out its welcome mat despite his appearance on its terrorist watch lists. Federal authorities never consulted the police force responsible for protecting the New Yorkers he would attack; they just issued him a green card to work as a “religious teacher” and sent him on his way.
It was Ray Kelly, one of the great police commissioners in American history, who finally arranged to place the blind sheikh in handcuffs. This was during the summer of 1993, when Kelly was in his first go-round as NYPD commissioner.
The sheikh was holed up in a favorite New York City mosque, surrounded by his followers — at least those of them who were not already in prison or on the lam for multiple bombing plots. As I recounted in Willful Blindness, when Attorney General Janet Reno green-lighted the arrest that we prosecutors had been seeking for weeks, it was Kelly and his savvy city cops who defused the potentially explosive situation. The NYPD spoke to people in the community, the sheikh was coaxed out of the mosque, and federal immigration agents took him into custody without incident. This was no small thing: In the two decades since, dozens of innocent people have been killed by zealots demanding his release.
What I most remember about that day is Kelly’s quiet confidence, instilling calm in a room full of NYPD cops, FBI agents, and immigration officers — not to mention a thirtysomething government lawyer who happened to be on hand. A panicky supervisor from INS (called ICE now) groused that the sheikh’s arrest — initially on immigration charges — would have to wait until he could get clearance from his office. I was speechless. After all, the attorney general had already made her decision — why would we now have to wait on a midlevel bureaucrat? Because, it turned out, INS had sent the wrong bureaucrat to the meeting, the New York supervisor instead of the guy from across the river who was in charge of the INS end of the investigation. “You don’t understand,” the supervisor muttered as he reached for a phone, “the case belongs to New Jersey.”
“Yeah,” countered Commissioner Kelly, “but the streets belong to me.”
Kelly is now in his second tour of duty as commish, and New Yorkers are extraordinarily fortunate that their streets have belonged to him for most of the decade since September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens were murdered. You mightn’t think so, however, if all you had to go on was the hatchet-job published by the Associated Press last week.
By the AP’s lights, Kelly is running a rogue domestic-spying operation. To the contrary, the commissioner has crafted an unparalleled counterterrorism strategy. Ever mindful of civil rights and respectful of Islamic culture — just as the police must be respectful of the variegated cultures in the Big Apple’s ethnic goulash — Kelly has kept the world’s No. 1 terrorist target safe from mass-casualty attacks. He has managed this despite 13 known attempts — and who knows how many others that cannot be spoken of without compromising intelligence sources.
The AP hit was compiled with scads of cooperation from federal-government sources, Islamist organizations, and the Lawyer Left (fancying itself the “civil-rights community”). Its timing is no coincidence. We are approaching the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which our community-organizer-in-chief is feverishly recasting as a “community service” exhibition rather than a day of national remembrance. The AP dropped its purported bombshell hard on the heels of “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States,” Obama’s recently published strategy for countering terrorism without referring to it as “terrorism” — a term that, as the Blind Sheikh (pictured at right) inconveniently points out, has roots in the Koran (e.g., Sura 8:12, in which Allah instructs Muslims, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them”).
Make no mistake: There is a battle under way over how we should pursue national security. It is not enough to say the Left wants to move us back to a September 10 mindset — unless you mean September 10 sometime in the mid-1970s. That was when “intelligence” became a dirty word upon revelation that the CIA and various law-enforcement agencies had gathered it against such left-wing radicals as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather Underground terrorists who would later become the friends, ideological allies, and activist partners of a certain upstart Chicago pol.
The winners write the history. Thus, “domestic spying” has become That Seventies Show: the revisionist narrative the Left uses to erase the fact that it wasn’t all about cracking down on peaceful, patriotic dissent. In truth, there really were evil people who built bombs and tried to kill hundreds of Americans in an effort to foment revolution — people like Ayers, who tartly concedes that he was “guilty as sin,” even though he ended up “free as a bird.”
The difference is that today’s threat comes from a mostly alien force inspired by a known (albeit consciously ignored) ideology rooted in fundamentalist Islam — which, in much of the world, is mainstream Islam. Because that is so, service to the cause is convincingly sold to young Muslims as a religious duty. This not only makes jihadist recruitment easier, it also ensures that many of those disinclined to participate in violence will be open to lesser degrees of aggression: a posture of hostility toward America, hatred of Israel and of Jews, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s scheme of voluntary apartheid — life in a closed community of believers in a Muslim enclave that is functionally independent from the state, its laws, and their enforcement by police.
Today’s threat has also systematized jihadist training. That means its terror cells are more competent by orders of magnitude than the 1960s variety. Moreover, weaponry has evolved in the last half century. It takes fewer terrorists to project more lethal force. The horrific price of missing the signals of an oncoming attack, we learned ten years ago, cannot be calculated in dollars, cents, or lives destroyed.
That is what we are up against, and that is why Ray Kelly is a godsend. A decorated veteran who led Marines in combat, Kelly gets the difference between a crime racket and a national-security challenge. He was on the front lines when the jihad first came to these shores: when the World Trade Center was bombed in February 1993 and when, within a few months, jihadists were thwarted as they conspired to carry out a string of simultaneous attacks on New York City landmarks. He realized that the terrorists had been guided by Abdel Rahman’s sermons, had successfully drawn recruits from local Islamic centers, and had been influential fixtures in the metropolitan area’s Muslim community.
After Kelly’s first stint as commissioner, President Clinton had the good sense to make him a top Treasury Department official, with a portfolio covering counterterrorism and financial intelligence. He brought that experience to a three-year tenure as the nation’s customs commissioner. The newly elected mayor Michael Bloomberg brought Kelly back as NYPD commissioner in January 2002, while the city was still in shock over 9/11 and the War on Terror overseas increased the need for vigilance at home.
Kelly knows his city a lot better than Washington does. He appreciates that not every Muslim is a suspect — that most American Muslims are cold to the fundamentalist call and thus natural allies of law enforcement. But Kelly also grasps that Islamism is not a fringe movement, which is why cooperation with the police is fraught with risk for pro-American Muslims. It is simply a fact that our enemies have strong pockets of support in the Islamic communities.
Naturally, the AP report did not see fit to mention the findings of the Mapping Sharia project, which determined that roughly 80 percent of American mosques disseminate Islamist literature that endorses violence. The imams in these mosques tend to promote that literature. Over half of these mosques host guest lecturers known for promoting violent jihad.
The Mapping Sharia study, as its authors observe, may not accurately reflect the whole of Islam in America. Many Muslims do not attend mosques, and those who do are not necessarily receptive to the interpretation of Islam the imams are pushing. The study, however, is a stark depiction of the leadership in Muslim communities. It becomes easier to understand how Islamist ideology takes root in the young. It becomes easier to see how figures the authorities portray as respected community elders — just as the Blind Sheikh was once portrayed — are positioned to inspire anti-Americanism and worse.
Those responsible for protecting millions of lives cannot afford to be willfully blind to this sort of information. It indicates — just as common sense indicates, just as Ray Kelly’s experience indicates — that you cannot have safety without intelligence. Police need to be a visible presence in neighborhoods. They also need to be an invisible presence. When there are signs of trouble, they have to have informants willing to be their eyes and ears — meaning our eyes and ears. In Islamist hotbeds, they have to cultivate ties with pro-Western Muslims. They need to reach out not just to community leaders but to ordinary Muslims who do not want sharia enclaves, Muslims who are disposed to help police provide security but fear being ostracized as traitors if their cooperation becomes known.
Proactive, energetic, intelligence-based security is what Ray Kelly has forged. It is not an entirely new concept. It builds on Compstat, the crime-analysis and accountability system pioneered in the 1990s by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton — a system of intelligence-based policing driven by intensive analysis of crime data. The system drove city crime down by a remarkable 77 percent, and Heather Mac Donald sagely describes it as “the most revolutionary public-sector achievement of the last quarter-century.”
In our post-9/11 reality, the imperative of crime prevention has been magnified into mass-murder prevention. Kelly has thus incorporated the tactics that have worked nationally: recruiting aides schooled in CIA intelligence operations to make police better at collecting and analyzing information, and establishing liaisons overseas with foreign police and intelligence services, recognizing that attacks inside the city are often triggered from outside that city and outside the country. But, as Kelly often emphasizes, the system operates within the rigors of law-enforcement protocols.
This is not martial law, and it is not “domestic spying.” Investigations are triggered by reasonable, articulable suspicions of criminal activity — people are not targeted just because they are Muslims. The police are trained to be culturally sensitive and to avoid giving gratuitous offense. But, at the same time, culture is not treated as immunity from investigation. Police are duly deferential to community leaders, but they do not delegate their intelligence-gathering duties to them.
This is not the way the Obama administration wants things done. The president’s strategy warns against singling out any particular brand of “violent extremism” for special attention — jihadist terror is not to be regarded as any more a threat to America than other sources of violence. Obama miniaturizes the threat as “al-Qa’ida’s hateful ideology” — as if the Islamist challenge to the West were a fringe movement. He waves off concerns about Muslims’ support for Islamists with the peremptory declaration that “Muslim American communities have categorically condemned terrorism” — as if that were an incontestable proposition or one that told the whole story.
The real threat to our security, so the theory goes, is not Muslim terrorist plots against us but our provocation of Muslims by conveying the misimpression that America is at war with Islam. Therefore, the key to security is “partnering” with the leadership in Muslim communities: Let them train the police, let them be our eyes and ears, and surely they’ll let us know if there is any cause for concern.
In fact, in 2010, a working group of Obama’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, whose recommendations form the foundation of the administration’s new strategy, took a thinly veiled shot at the NYPD’s 2007 effort to study the phenomenon of Muslim radicalization. Current understanding of the “sociology of ‘radicalization’ and ‘extremism’ is still immature,” the president’s advisers pronounced. Therefore, they decreed, we must “delink” crime-reduction efforts from studies of radicalization — we must, that is, ignore the nexus between Islamist ideology and aggression by Muslims.
As we look across the Atlantic, we can see what happens when multi-culti governments convince themselves that security lies in abdicating sovereign responsibilities to a movement whose very goal is to split off from the sovereign. That this is done under the sweet-sounding guise of “partnering” with communities does not change the outcome. Good policing requires that hostile movements be understood as such. To be sure, keeping the peace counsels against antagonizing the movement’s adherents absent good cause. But it doesn’t mean “partnering” with them, and it cannot entail transferring law-enforcement chores to them. The police are a society’s manifestation of the determination to govern itself in accordance with its rule of law. They are there to protect and to serve, not to be passive observers of the society’s surrender.
The Blind Sheikh preached from his incendiary pulpit. His followers used their mosques to convene, to plot attacks, and to store and transfer weapons. They exploited Islamic community centers to recruit for the jihad and to advertise paramilitary training sessions. They found sympathizers in the community who would not join in forcible conduct but who were supportive — morally, and sometimes materially. They were able to carry out attacks that required months of planning because people who might have helped the police stop them were afraid to speak up.
This menace has not gone away. What do you suppose gives us a fighting chance to protect ourselves: Ray Kelly’s NYPD or the Obama administration’s “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism”? Do we really want to mess with ten years of success?
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com
September 3, 2011
‘Every conspiracy against Islam and scheming against Islam and the Muslims — its source is America.”
“Jihad is Jihad. There is no such thing as commerce, industry, and science in jihad. This is calling things other than by its [sic] own name. If Allah says, ‘Do jihad,’ it means do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with the missile. This is Jihad. Jihad against Allah’s enemies for Allah’s cause and his word.”
“Why do we fear the word ‘terrorist’? If the terrorist is the person who defends his right, so we are terrorists. . . . The Koran mentions the words ‘to strike terror,’ therefore we don’t fear to be described with ‘terrorism.’ . . . We are ordered to prepare whatever we can of power to terrorize the enemies of Islam.”
This rhetoric was not at all unusual. It was the sort of thing you’d hear on any given Friday at mosques in Brooklyn or Jersey City. Nor is there anything ostensibly criminal about it, at least according to the hash the Supreme Court has made of the First Amendment.
That wasn’t the case in the speaker’s native Egypt. There, Omar Abdel Rahman had been notorious for such fiery Friday sermons. There, the imam known as “the Blind Sheikh,” a renowned scholar of Islamic jurisprudence, had been jailed several times for inciting Muslims — urging that they kill regime officials for allying with America and for failing to implement sharia, Islam’s legal system.
But not here, not in the land of free expression: In the United States, the authorities regarded Abdel Rahman as a respected community leader. The federal government put out its welcome mat despite his appearance on its terrorist watch lists. Federal authorities never consulted the police force responsible for protecting the New Yorkers he would attack; they just issued him a green card to work as a “religious teacher” and sent him on his way.
It was Ray Kelly, one of the great police commissioners in American history, who finally arranged to place the blind sheikh in handcuffs. This was during the summer of 1993, when Kelly was in his first go-round as NYPD commissioner.
The sheikh was holed up in a favorite New York City mosque, surrounded by his followers — at least those of them who were not already in prison or on the lam for multiple bombing plots. As I recounted in Willful Blindness, when Attorney General Janet Reno green-lighted the arrest that we prosecutors had been seeking for weeks, it was Kelly and his savvy city cops who defused the potentially explosive situation. The NYPD spoke to people in the community, the sheikh was coaxed out of the mosque, and federal immigration agents took him into custody without incident. This was no small thing: In the two decades since, dozens of innocent people have been killed by zealots demanding his release.
What I most remember about that day is Kelly’s quiet confidence, instilling calm in a room full of NYPD cops, FBI agents, and immigration officers — not to mention a thirtysomething government lawyer who happened to be on hand. A panicky supervisor from INS (called ICE now) groused that the sheikh’s arrest — initially on immigration charges — would have to wait until he could get clearance from his office. I was speechless. After all, the attorney general had already made her decision — why would we now have to wait on a midlevel bureaucrat? Because, it turned out, INS had sent the wrong bureaucrat to the meeting, the New York supervisor instead of the guy from across the river who was in charge of the INS end of the investigation. “You don’t understand,” the supervisor muttered as he reached for a phone, “the case belongs to New Jersey.”
“Yeah,” countered Commissioner Kelly, “but the streets belong to me.”
Kelly is now in his second tour of duty as commish, and New Yorkers are extraordinarily fortunate that their streets have belonged to him for most of the decade since September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens were murdered. You mightn’t think so, however, if all you had to go on was the hatchet-job published by the Associated Press last week.
By the AP’s lights, Kelly is running a rogue domestic-spying operation. To the contrary, the commissioner has crafted an unparalleled counterterrorism strategy. Ever mindful of civil rights and respectful of Islamic culture — just as the police must be respectful of the variegated cultures in the Big Apple’s ethnic goulash — Kelly has kept the world’s No. 1 terrorist target safe from mass-casualty attacks. He has managed this despite 13 known attempts — and who knows how many others that cannot be spoken of without compromising intelligence sources.
The AP hit was compiled with scads of cooperation from federal-government sources, Islamist organizations, and the Lawyer Left (fancying itself the “civil-rights community”). Its timing is no coincidence. We are approaching the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which our community-organizer-in-chief is feverishly recasting as a “community service” exhibition rather than a day of national remembrance. The AP dropped its purported bombshell hard on the heels of “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States,” Obama’s recently published strategy for countering terrorism without referring to it as “terrorism” — a term that, as the Blind Sheikh (pictured at right) inconveniently points out, has roots in the Koran (e.g., Sura 8:12, in which Allah instructs Muslims, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them”).
Make no mistake: There is a battle under way over how we should pursue national security. It is not enough to say the Left wants to move us back to a September 10 mindset — unless you mean September 10 sometime in the mid-1970s. That was when “intelligence” became a dirty word upon revelation that the CIA and various law-enforcement agencies had gathered it against such left-wing radicals as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather Underground terrorists who would later become the friends, ideological allies, and activist partners of a certain upstart Chicago pol.
The winners write the history. Thus, “domestic spying” has become That Seventies Show: the revisionist narrative the Left uses to erase the fact that it wasn’t all about cracking down on peaceful, patriotic dissent. In truth, there really were evil people who built bombs and tried to kill hundreds of Americans in an effort to foment revolution — people like Ayers, who tartly concedes that he was “guilty as sin,” even though he ended up “free as a bird.”
Today’s threat has also systematized jihadist training. That means its terror cells are more competent by orders of magnitude than the 1960s variety. Moreover, weaponry has evolved in the last half century. It takes fewer terrorists to project more lethal force. The horrific price of missing the signals of an oncoming attack, we learned ten years ago, cannot be calculated in dollars, cents, or lives destroyed.
That is what we are up against, and that is why Ray Kelly is a godsend. A decorated veteran who led Marines in combat, Kelly gets the difference between a crime racket and a national-security challenge. He was on the front lines when the jihad first came to these shores: when the World Trade Center was bombed in February 1993 and when, within a few months, jihadists were thwarted as they conspired to carry out a string of simultaneous attacks on New York City landmarks. He realized that the terrorists had been guided by Abdel Rahman’s sermons, had successfully drawn recruits from local Islamic centers, and had been influential fixtures in the metropolitan area’s Muslim community.
After Kelly’s first stint as commissioner, President Clinton had the good sense to make him a top Treasury Department official, with a portfolio covering counterterrorism and financial intelligence. He brought that experience to a three-year tenure as the nation’s customs commissioner. The newly elected mayor Michael Bloomberg brought Kelly back as NYPD commissioner in January 2002, while the city was still in shock over 9/11 and the War on Terror overseas increased the need for vigilance at home.
Kelly knows his city a lot better than Washington does. He appreciates that not every Muslim is a suspect — that most American Muslims are cold to the fundamentalist call and thus natural allies of law enforcement. But Kelly also grasps that Islamism is not a fringe movement, which is why cooperation with the police is fraught with risk for pro-American Muslims. It is simply a fact that our enemies have strong pockets of support in the Islamic communities.
Naturally, the AP report did not see fit to mention the findings of the Mapping Sharia project, which determined that roughly 80 percent of American mosques disseminate Islamist literature that endorses violence. The imams in these mosques tend to promote that literature. Over half of these mosques host guest lecturers known for promoting violent jihad.
The Mapping Sharia study, as its authors observe, may not accurately reflect the whole of Islam in America. Many Muslims do not attend mosques, and those who do are not necessarily receptive to the interpretation of Islam the imams are pushing. The study, however, is a stark depiction of the leadership in Muslim communities. It becomes easier to understand how Islamist ideology takes root in the young. It becomes easier to see how figures the authorities portray as respected community elders — just as the Blind Sheikh was once portrayed — are positioned to inspire anti-Americanism and worse.
Those responsible for protecting millions of lives cannot afford to be willfully blind to this sort of information. It indicates — just as common sense indicates, just as Ray Kelly’s experience indicates — that you cannot have safety without intelligence. Police need to be a visible presence in neighborhoods. They also need to be an invisible presence. When there are signs of trouble, they have to have informants willing to be their eyes and ears — meaning our eyes and ears. In Islamist hotbeds, they have to cultivate ties with pro-Western Muslims. They need to reach out not just to community leaders but to ordinary Muslims who do not want sharia enclaves, Muslims who are disposed to help police provide security but fear being ostracized as traitors if their cooperation becomes known.
Proactive, energetic, intelligence-based security is what Ray Kelly has forged. It is not an entirely new concept. It builds on Compstat, the crime-analysis and accountability system pioneered in the 1990s by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton — a system of intelligence-based policing driven by intensive analysis of crime data. The system drove city crime down by a remarkable 77 percent, and Heather Mac Donald sagely describes it as “the most revolutionary public-sector achievement of the last quarter-century.”
In our post-9/11 reality, the imperative of crime prevention has been magnified into mass-murder prevention. Kelly has thus incorporated the tactics that have worked nationally: recruiting aides schooled in CIA intelligence operations to make police better at collecting and analyzing information, and establishing liaisons overseas with foreign police and intelligence services, recognizing that attacks inside the city are often triggered from outside that city and outside the country. But, as Kelly often emphasizes, the system operates within the rigors of law-enforcement protocols.
This is not martial law, and it is not “domestic spying.” Investigations are triggered by reasonable, articulable suspicions of criminal activity — people are not targeted just because they are Muslims. The police are trained to be culturally sensitive and to avoid giving gratuitous offense. But, at the same time, culture is not treated as immunity from investigation. Police are duly deferential to community leaders, but they do not delegate their intelligence-gathering duties to them.
This is not the way the Obama administration wants things done. The president’s strategy warns against singling out any particular brand of “violent extremism” for special attention — jihadist terror is not to be regarded as any more a threat to America than other sources of violence. Obama miniaturizes the threat as “al-Qa’ida’s hateful ideology” — as if the Islamist challenge to the West were a fringe movement. He waves off concerns about Muslims’ support for Islamists with the peremptory declaration that “Muslim American communities have categorically condemned terrorism” — as if that were an incontestable proposition or one that told the whole story.
The real threat to our security, so the theory goes, is not Muslim terrorist plots against us but our provocation of Muslims by conveying the misimpression that America is at war with Islam. Therefore, the key to security is “partnering” with the leadership in Muslim communities: Let them train the police, let them be our eyes and ears, and surely they’ll let us know if there is any cause for concern.
In fact, in 2010, a working group of Obama’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, whose recommendations form the foundation of the administration’s new strategy, took a thinly veiled shot at the NYPD’s 2007 effort to study the phenomenon of Muslim radicalization. Current understanding of the “sociology of ‘radicalization’ and ‘extremism’ is still immature,” the president’s advisers pronounced. Therefore, they decreed, we must “delink” crime-reduction efforts from studies of radicalization — we must, that is, ignore the nexus between Islamist ideology and aggression by Muslims.
As we look across the Atlantic, we can see what happens when multi-culti governments convince themselves that security lies in abdicating sovereign responsibilities to a movement whose very goal is to split off from the sovereign. That this is done under the sweet-sounding guise of “partnering” with communities does not change the outcome. Good policing requires that hostile movements be understood as such. To be sure, keeping the peace counsels against antagonizing the movement’s adherents absent good cause. But it doesn’t mean “partnering” with them, and it cannot entail transferring law-enforcement chores to them. The police are a society’s manifestation of the determination to govern itself in accordance with its rule of law. They are there to protect and to serve, not to be passive observers of the society’s surrender.
The Blind Sheikh preached from his incendiary pulpit. His followers used their mosques to convene, to plot attacks, and to store and transfer weapons. They exploited Islamic community centers to recruit for the jihad and to advertise paramilitary training sessions. They found sympathizers in the community who would not join in forcible conduct but who were supportive — morally, and sometimes materially. They were able to carry out attacks that required months of planning because people who might have helped the police stop them were afraid to speak up.
This menace has not gone away. What do you suppose gives us a fighting chance to protect ourselves: Ray Kelly’s NYPD or the Obama administration’s “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism”? Do we really want to mess with ten years of success?
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
Sunday, September 04, 2011
Solyndra debacle spotlights Obama's folly
Sunday, September 4, 2011
On Wednesday, Solyndra announced it was shuttering its remaining Fremont factory, laying off 1,100 workers and filing for bankruptcy. It was a sorry day for the Bay Area.
I remember that day, May 26, 2010, vividly. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to greet the president and wave to the hard hats. Venture capitalists preened. Just to show how brainy and farsighted the solar crowd is, Obama reminded the audience that his energy secretary, Steven Chu, is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.
Rube that I am, I didn't understand what Obamaland was thinking. Solyndra had not turned a profit since it was founded in 2005. The plant in which Obama stood was bankrolled with a $535 million federal loan guarantee. Two months before, PricewaterhouseCoopers questioned Solyndra's "ability to continue as a going concern."
If the president wants to send a positive message on the U.S. economy, I wondered, then couldn't his people have found a California company that didn't rely on a federal loan and actually made money?
Bad advance work, I figured.
A month later, Solyndra canceled a planned $300 million public offering. In November, Solyndra closed its older plant and cut its workforce. Today Solyndra's lights are out.
Now I am wondering: Isn't there some graybeard in the White House who - knowing that the president won't look good if the tax-funded solar plant folds - does some digging to make sure the president's choice of venue will not come back to haunt him?
Or could it be that Team Obama is composed of like-minded green true believers who insulate themselves from other points of view, much as critics contended George W. Bush surrounded himself with yes men?
Consider: The administration continues to cling to its belief that green jobs are the jobs of the future, despite evidence to the contrary. A July study by the Brookings Institution found that green jobs account for 2 percent of American jobs - and Brookings used a generous definition that included public-transit and waste-management jobs as green. Still, Brookings found that green jobs grew at a slower rate (3.4 percent annually) than the national economy (4.2 percent) between 2003 and 2010.
Some Democrats have gotten the message. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, recently observed, "Of course we want to be part of the new innovation and green jobs. But you know, the green jobs have been about a lot of talk, and not a lot has been happening on that."
But Team Obama won't give up the dream.
Then again, the administration has friends in the green-titan community. Enter Oklahoma oil magnate George Kaiser, who raised at least $50,000 for the 2008 Obama campaign and is a frequent visitor to the White House. Kaiser was a top Solyndra investor.
In September 2009, Solyndra became the first recipient of an administration energy loan program that was part of the president's stimulus package. A 2010 Government Accountability Office audit of the program found that five applicants, including Solyndra, bypassed required steps for funding. A Department of Energy spokesperson told the Washington Post that the GAO got it wrong.
The Solyndra decision baffled some industry experts, who questioned the viability of the company's solar technology. "To think they could compete on any basis, that took a very big leap of faith," solar analyst Ramesh Misra later told the Washington Post.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee has been investigating the Solyndra deal - with little cooperation from the administration. Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., who chairs the investigative subcommittee, noted in a statement, "In an apparent rush to push stimulus dollars out the door, the Obama administration wasted $535 million in taxpayer funds in guaranteeing a loan to a firm that has proven to be unviable in the global market."
Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney defended the loan program with its goal to "invest in cutting-edge technologies."
The president, his Nobel Prize-winning energy secretary and Vice President Joe Biden (via satellite) participated in events that promoted Solyndra's brand. In addition, Solyndra got to spend half a billion in taxpayer dollars - and still the solar company couldn't succeed.
Stearns and committee Chairman Fred Upton issued a joint statement that rang true. They said, "We smelled a rat from the onset."
E-mail Debra Saunders at dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/04/IN0V1KUV3L.DTL
This article appeared on page E - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle
The measure of Tampa Bay Buccaneers' Lee Roy Selmon's greatness is off the field
By Gary Shelton, St. Petersburg Times Sports Columnist
http://www.tampabay.com/
Saturday, September 3, 2011
The measure of a man is not in the games he plays. Deep down, to the twisted pits of your soul where you feel pain over Lee Roy Selmon, you know that. He was a great football player, a terrific, inspired football player. There is no arguing that. Selmon was perhaps the best to play in Tampa Bay, and perhaps the best to play in Oklahoma, one of the best to play anywhere. He won awards, and he reached halls of fame, and he defined excellence. You can choose that definition of Selmon, if you wish. Or you can remember something greater about a man who has been far more than a football player.
The measure of a man is not in the money he makes. It is not whether he has an expressway named after him, or a restaurant, or if his name is in the Bucs' Ring of Honor. It is not a bust in the Hall of Fame, or a statue that may be built on his college campus, or in the memories of a thousand black and white photographs from his playing days.
In the case of Selmon, the measure of him and his meaning should be measured by the shadow he has cast. By the lives touched. By the grace shown.
And, yes, by the depth of the ache you felt when you heard the news that he had suffered a massive stroke Friday and was in extremely critical condition.
For 31/2 decades, Selmon has been Tampa Bay's best citizen, a gentle, dignified man with never a bad word to say to or about anyone. Selmon has always led the league in class, in grace, in integrity. No one dislikes Lee Roy. If you dislike Lee Roy, it says a lot more about you than it says about him.
Perhaps that is why the news of his stroke rippled so quickly across Tampa Bay on Friday evening. Bad news always moves in a hurry, like locusts across a field. There was word that Selmon had died, and then that he had not, and then again that he had, and then again that he had not. It was as if an entire community had been gut-punched. The news was grim and devastating and overwhelming, because few men have been as admired around here as Selmon.
How does this happen to Selmon? At 56, he looked to be in terrific shape. Whenever you saw Selmon, you had to force yourself to remember that he had played defensive end. Running back, maybe. Linebacker. But defensive end? True, Selmon had a health scare seven years ago, but he looked strong enough to suit up again.
"You hear people described as 'a perfect gentleman,' " said Rich McKay, president and CEO of the Falcons, who was a teenage boy when Selmon came to Tampa Bay to play for McKay's father, John, in 1976. "You hear the word 'flawless,' which isn't true because we're human. But with Lee Roy, I'm not sure it isn't close to being true."
In sports, in life, there are a lot of a good, decent people. There are caring athletes, and charitable athletes, and socially aware athletes. But there has never been an athlete whose basic decency has come easier to him.
Selmon has never been a man who had to work at being a good guy. There are a great many athletes who work at being a good guy, who want the world to know they are being a good guy, who border on playing a role of a good guy. Not Lee Roy. Lee Roy is just being Lee Roy.
"There is nothing special about Lee Roy Selmon," he told me once. It is the one thing he has ever said that no one agrees with.
"That's so far from the truth," McKay said, "because everything was special with Lee Roy."
McKay remembers. He was 17 when the Bucs sent him to pick up Lee Roy and his brother Dewey from the airport. He remembers how nice they were even then, how humble they were, how they were almost a little intimidating.
"I have never seen Lee Roy have a bad day, and in those early years (the Bucs started 0-26), we had a lot of bad days," McKay said. "He just was such an example of how to conduct yourself day in and day out. He was about as good as it gets.
"Later on, when the team got better, you would see him sitting at his locker, waiting to go out, in a complete calm state. Around him, everyone else was losing their minds. Ours is a very physical, intimidating sport. He played it without showing emotion. It would be the height of crazy around him, but he was the senator. When he did battle, he did it with honor, and he won almost every time."
There are those who believe you have to be nasty all the time to succeed. Selmon does not. And people love him for it. I once followed Selmon around the Oklahoma campus. He might as well have been the pope. People approached him with glistening eyes, with glowing words, with their hands shaking as they reached out to touch him. Somehow, the adulation didn't change him a bit. It never has.
"He was just one of those rare, great human beings," said Tim Ruskell, a ball boy on that first Bucs team who is now the pro personnel director for the Chicago Bears. "It's unbelievable how kind he is. You can't be any better. As a football player, you can always get better, but as a human, he never disappointed you. Forget that he was a football player. The football player lessens how good he was, because you get caught up in this stereotype."
Ruskell tells a story of that first year with the Bucs. Selmon was the high-priced No. 1 draft pick, the star designate. Ruskell was a ball boy. "A nobody," he said.
But Ruskell had been a disc jockey, and he knew his way around a stereo. Selmon asked him to come over and help him hook up his new system. Naturally, Ruskell was eager to help. But when he showed up, Selmon and his wife had food waiting. They rushed him to the table.
"They wanted to know who I was and what I was about," Ruskell remembers. "It was an hour before we got to the stereo, and then it only took 20 seconds. It was unbelievable. I was an 18-year-old kid. He could have treated me the way the other players treated me."
Then again, Selmon was never like other players. At 260 pounds, he was undersized for a defensive end, but he was always quicker, always stronger than the man he was playing against. He was good enough to be NFL defensive player of the year. He was good enough to be in the College Football Hall of Fame and the Pro Football Hall of Fame. For a long, long time, until Derrick Brooks and Warren Sapp and Ronde Barber and John Lynch, he was the crown jewel of the Bucs' franchise, its only flirtation with greatness.
Again, he was a terrific football player. And yet, he has been so much more. He has been an ambassador, a role model, a citizen. He has been decent enough, and kind enough, to embarrass the rest of us.
"I appreciated the game, and I wanted to play it with my best effort, but I didn't want it to define my life," Selmon once told me. "I believed there was more to it than football. It was an important part of it, but I wasn't consumed by it. I always knew there was going to be more to life when retirement came."
He was right. Thankfully, the best of Selmon has come in the smallest of moments. He has made the people he met feel special, and he has made their moments feel important.
Above all else, that has been the measure of Lee Roy Selmon. That has been his defining greatness.
Today, it is the reason so many prayers are being offered in his name.
Related:
Bucs Could Learn From Selmon -
http://www.tampabay.com/sports/football/bucs/tampa-bay-buccaneers-could-learn-from-all-time-great-lee-roy-selmon/1050234
http://www.tampabay.com/
Saturday, September 3, 2011
The measure of a man is not in the money he makes. It is not whether he has an expressway named after him, or a restaurant, or if his name is in the Bucs' Ring of Honor. It is not a bust in the Hall of Fame, or a statue that may be built on his college campus, or in the memories of a thousand black and white photographs from his playing days.
In the case of Selmon, the measure of him and his meaning should be measured by the shadow he has cast. By the lives touched. By the grace shown.
And, yes, by the depth of the ache you felt when you heard the news that he had suffered a massive stroke Friday and was in extremely critical condition.
For 31/2 decades, Selmon has been Tampa Bay's best citizen, a gentle, dignified man with never a bad word to say to or about anyone. Selmon has always led the league in class, in grace, in integrity. No one dislikes Lee Roy. If you dislike Lee Roy, it says a lot more about you than it says about him.
Perhaps that is why the news of his stroke rippled so quickly across Tampa Bay on Friday evening. Bad news always moves in a hurry, like locusts across a field. There was word that Selmon had died, and then that he had not, and then again that he had, and then again that he had not. It was as if an entire community had been gut-punched. The news was grim and devastating and overwhelming, because few men have been as admired around here as Selmon.
How does this happen to Selmon? At 56, he looked to be in terrific shape. Whenever you saw Selmon, you had to force yourself to remember that he had played defensive end. Running back, maybe. Linebacker. But defensive end? True, Selmon had a health scare seven years ago, but he looked strong enough to suit up again.
"You hear people described as 'a perfect gentleman,' " said Rich McKay, president and CEO of the Falcons, who was a teenage boy when Selmon came to Tampa Bay to play for McKay's father, John, in 1976. "You hear the word 'flawless,' which isn't true because we're human. But with Lee Roy, I'm not sure it isn't close to being true."
In sports, in life, there are a lot of a good, decent people. There are caring athletes, and charitable athletes, and socially aware athletes. But there has never been an athlete whose basic decency has come easier to him.
Selmon has never been a man who had to work at being a good guy. There are a great many athletes who work at being a good guy, who want the world to know they are being a good guy, who border on playing a role of a good guy. Not Lee Roy. Lee Roy is just being Lee Roy.
"There is nothing special about Lee Roy Selmon," he told me once. It is the one thing he has ever said that no one agrees with.
"That's so far from the truth," McKay said, "because everything was special with Lee Roy."
McKay remembers. He was 17 when the Bucs sent him to pick up Lee Roy and his brother Dewey from the airport. He remembers how nice they were even then, how humble they were, how they were almost a little intimidating.
"I have never seen Lee Roy have a bad day, and in those early years (the Bucs started 0-26), we had a lot of bad days," McKay said. "He just was such an example of how to conduct yourself day in and day out. He was about as good as it gets.
"Later on, when the team got better, you would see him sitting at his locker, waiting to go out, in a complete calm state. Around him, everyone else was losing their minds. Ours is a very physical, intimidating sport. He played it without showing emotion. It would be the height of crazy around him, but he was the senator. When he did battle, he did it with honor, and he won almost every time."
There are those who believe you have to be nasty all the time to succeed. Selmon does not. And people love him for it. I once followed Selmon around the Oklahoma campus. He might as well have been the pope. People approached him with glistening eyes, with glowing words, with their hands shaking as they reached out to touch him. Somehow, the adulation didn't change him a bit. It never has.
"He was just one of those rare, great human beings," said Tim Ruskell, a ball boy on that first Bucs team who is now the pro personnel director for the Chicago Bears. "It's unbelievable how kind he is. You can't be any better. As a football player, you can always get better, but as a human, he never disappointed you. Forget that he was a football player. The football player lessens how good he was, because you get caught up in this stereotype."
Ruskell tells a story of that first year with the Bucs. Selmon was the high-priced No. 1 draft pick, the star designate. Ruskell was a ball boy. "A nobody," he said.
But Ruskell had been a disc jockey, and he knew his way around a stereo. Selmon asked him to come over and help him hook up his new system. Naturally, Ruskell was eager to help. But when he showed up, Selmon and his wife had food waiting. They rushed him to the table.
"They wanted to know who I was and what I was about," Ruskell remembers. "It was an hour before we got to the stereo, and then it only took 20 seconds. It was unbelievable. I was an 18-year-old kid. He could have treated me the way the other players treated me."
Then again, Selmon was never like other players. At 260 pounds, he was undersized for a defensive end, but he was always quicker, always stronger than the man he was playing against. He was good enough to be NFL defensive player of the year. He was good enough to be in the College Football Hall of Fame and the Pro Football Hall of Fame. For a long, long time, until Derrick Brooks and Warren Sapp and Ronde Barber and John Lynch, he was the crown jewel of the Bucs' franchise, its only flirtation with greatness.
Again, he was a terrific football player. And yet, he has been so much more. He has been an ambassador, a role model, a citizen. He has been decent enough, and kind enough, to embarrass the rest of us.
"I appreciated the game, and I wanted to play it with my best effort, but I didn't want it to define my life," Selmon once told me. "I believed there was more to it than football. It was an important part of it, but I wasn't consumed by it. I always knew there was going to be more to life when retirement came."
He was right. Thankfully, the best of Selmon has come in the smallest of moments. He has made the people he met feel special, and he has made their moments feel important.
Above all else, that has been the measure of Lee Roy Selmon. That has been his defining greatness.
Today, it is the reason so many prayers are being offered in his name.
Related:
Bucs Could Learn From Selmon -
http://www.tampabay.com/sports/football/bucs/tampa-bay-buccaneers-could-learn-from-all-time-great-lee-roy-selmon/1050234
Saturday, September 03, 2011
Hockey Players’ Deaths Pose a Tragic Riddle
By JOHN BRANCH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
September 1, 2011
Three N.H.L. players, all enforcers entrusted with protecting teammates through intimidation and the occasional flurry of fists, have been found dead since May, stirring debate over the role of fighting in hockey, the stress placed on enforcers and the possible impact of brain trauma on the men who absorb the sports’ biggest beatings.
The three players — Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien and Wade Belak, who died Wednesday — combined to play 945 N.H.L. regular-season games, scoring only 20 goals while accumulating more than 2,000 penalty minutes. They dropped their gloves hundreds of times to fight, sometimes against one another, while meting out hockey’s unique brand of jaw-cracking justice.
The question emerging in hockey circles is not only whether something could have been done to save the lives of each man, but whether their deaths were related to their jobs as enforcers.
“While the circumstances of each case are unique, these tragic events cannot be ignored,” the N.H.L. commissioner, Gary Bettman, and the N.H.L. Players Association’s executive director, Don Fehr, wrote in a joint statement. “We are committed to examining, in detail, the factors that may have contributed to these events, and to determining whether concrete steps can be taken to enhance player welfare and minimize the likelihood of such events taking place.”
That calculated review stands in contrast to the emotions tangled among the enforcers themselves.
“A sense of fear, especially, came over me,” said Todd Fedoruk, whose afflictions over the past decade as an enforcer included a shattered cheekbone at the hands of Boogaard and a battle over alcohol and drug addiction, which he says he has overcome. “I did what these guys did for as long as they did, or longer. And you get the sense: is this going to happen to me, too?”
The body of the recently retired Belak, 35, was found in a downtown Toronto hotel and condominium building on Wednesday. The police said the death was not suspicious but would not elaborate. The Associated Press and other news outlets reported it was a suicide.
On Aug. 15, Rypien, a 27-year-old who played for the Vancouver Canucks and recently signed a contract with the Winnipeg Jets, was found dead in his home in Alberta. Again, the cause of death was ruled unsuspicious; widespread news reports called it a suicide.
Those deaths, 16 days apart, followed the death of Boogaard, widely considered the most feared player in the N.H.L., in his Minneapolis apartment on May 13. Boogaard, a 6-foot-8, 270-pound 28-year-old, was found to have died of an accidental overdose of alcohol and prescription painkillers.
“I can’t rule out coincidence yet, but I’m definitely leaning toward the role and the bumps that we take,” Fedoruk said.
There is reluctance to tie the deaths together too tightly. Belak, married with two young daughters, engaged in more than 100 fights in his career, but if he had personal problems, they were not well known. Rypien fought depression for most of his adult life and had taken leaves of absence in the past couple years to address it. Boogaard sustained at least a dozen concussions in his career, his family believes, and was addicted to sleeping pills and painkillers the last years of his life.
“I think sometimes we get caught up in generalizations,” said Allain Roy, Rypien’s agent. “We have three sad instances where we have three young men who struggled with their lives off the ice. Whether their role played a piece in it, I think it’s almost impossible for anybody to draw that straight line through it — to say, all right, they were enforcers, and this is why this happened to them.”
But the questions left in their wake are reminiscent of what the N.F.L. endured in recent years as it slowly addressed the evidence mounting over the life-threatening nature of brain trauma among football players.
More than 20 former N.F.L. players have been posthumously found to have had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative disease caused by blunt trauma to the head. Many athletes with C.T.E., which can be found only by examining the brains of the deceased, had symptoms like drug abuse, impulse control problems and impaired memory.
Boogaard’s family saw all those symptoms in Boogaard, and donated his brain to researchers at Boston University. The final report is not complete.
In March, it was revealed that the Boston University researchers found C.T.E. in the brain of the former N.H.L. player Bob Probert, a hard-living, well-respected brawler who struggled with addiction and died of heart failure in 2010. Earlier research found the disease in the brain of the 1960s-era enforcer Reggie Fleming.
As with the N.F.L., the growing attention on one potentially life-threatening aspect of its game may force the N.H.L. to closely re-examine its rules and procedures in protecting players — particularly, perhaps, those in the most pugilistic roles.
Many enforcers described the toll — not only physically, but mentally — of being a designated fighter, used as a weapon of retribution against perceived cheap shots or simply to charge the crowd or teammates. A lot of them, including the long-feared enforcer Georges Laraque, now retired, said that sleep was rare the night before an expected fight with another enforcer.
The job can pay well (Boogaard signed a four-year, $6.5 million contract with the Rangers in 2010), and some enforcers are among the most popular players in the game. But beyond their fists, most do not have the range of hockey skills necessary to stay in the N.H.L. Each lost fight could be the last.
“The guys that have played the role have never denied how it makes them feel and what it does to them emotionally,” said Brantt Myhres, a former N.H.L. enforcer who made five trips to league-mandated rehabilitation because of alcohol and drug addictions, and now works as a substance-abuse counselor. “It’s one of the hardest jobs in sports. All people see is 20,000 people standing and cheering you on. They don’t see the dark times. They don’t see you curled up in a ball in a hotel room, scared to death for the next fight.”
On Wednesday, after news of Belak’s death emerged, the player agent Scott Norton sent a Twitter message that read: “Boogaard, Rypien and now Belak? Maybe we should spend less time worrying how they play on the ice, and more time helping em cope off?”
In an interview Thursday, Norton said that while the three cases were unique, “It’s hard to say the deaths are completely not connected.”
He added: “The common thread is that they go to war every day. What have they done in their lives to prepare themselves for that?”
Several enforcers and agents said that more work needed to be done in eroding the persistent stigma over personal problems like depression and substance abuse. Players still worry about being embarrassed by teammates and fans, and being branded by coaches and team officials.
“There are thousands of guys waiting to have your job,” Myhres said. “There has to be a way to get these guys to come forward and talk about these issues, without fear of any repercussions.”
With training camps scheduled to start this month, Fedoruk is one who expects an unforeseen amount of understanding and compassion in the dressing rooms in the wake of the three deaths.
“I think there’s going to be a level of caring among teammates like you’ve never seen before this coming year,” Fedoruk said.
Yet the question as to why three N.H.L. enforcers died this off-season, and whether their deaths can be tied to their role and the physical and mental toll it takes, will linger.
“They scare me,” said the former enforcer Ryan Vandenbussche, 38, who last played in the N.H.L. five years ago and acknowledges bouts of memory loss. “They scare me because we don’t know why this is happening.”
Eternal adolescence lacking in romance
By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
September 2, 2011
I was on a very long flight the other day and, to get me through it, I had two books: the new bestseller “Of Thee I Zing,” by Laura Ingraham, and a book I last read 20 years ago, “The Radetzky March,” by Joseph Roth. The former is the latest hit from one of America’s most popular talk radio hosts; the latter is an Austrian novel from 1932 by a fellow who drank himself to death just before the Second World War, which, if you’re planning on drinking yourself to death, is a better pretext than most. Don’t worry, I’ll save the Germanic alcoholic guy for a couple of paragraphs, although the two books are oddly related.
“Of Thee I Zing’s” subtitle is “America’s Cultural Decline From Muffin Tops To Body Shots.” If you are sufficiently culturally aware to know what a “muffin top” and a “body shot” are (and incidentally, if you don’t have time to master all these exciting new trends, these two can be combined into one convenient “muffin shot”), you may not think them the most pressing concerns as the Republic sinks beneath its multitrillion-dollar debt burden. But, as Miss Ingraham says, “Even if our economic and national security challenges disappeared overnight, we’d still have to climb out of the cultural abyss into which we’ve tumbled.” Actually, I think I’d go a little further than the author on that. I’m a great believer that culture trumps economics. Every time the government in Athens calls up the Germans and says, OK, we’ve burned through the last bailout, time for the next one, Angela Merkel understands all too well that the real problem in Greece is not the Greek finances but the Greek people. Even somnolent liberal columnists grasp this: A recent Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times was headlined “Can Greeks Become Germans?” I think we all know the answer to that. Any society eventually winds up with the finances you’d expect. So think of our culture as one almighty muffin shot, with America as a giant navel filled with the cheap tequila of our rising debt and …no, wait, this metaphor’s getting way out of hand.
These are difficult issues for social conservatives to write about. When we venture into this terrain, we’re invariably dismissed as uptight squares who can’t get any action. That happens to be true in my case, but Laura Ingraham has the advantage of being a “pretty girl,” as disgraced Congressman Charlie Rangel made the mistake of calling her on TV the other day in an interview that went hilariously downhill thereafter. So she has a little more credibility on this turf than I would. She opens with a lurid account of a recent visit to a north Virginia mall – zombie teens texting, a thirtysomething metrosexual having his eyebrows threaded, a fiftysomething cougar spilling out of her tube top, grade-schoolers in the latest “prostitot” fashions – and then embarks on a lively tour of American cultural levers, from schools to social media to churches to Hollywood. If there is a common theme in the various rubble of cultural ruin, it’s the urge to enter adolescence ever earlier and leave it later and later, if at all. So we have skanky ’tweens “dry humping” at middle-school dances, and an ever greater proportion of “men” in their thirties living at home with their parents.
Adolescence, like retirement, is an invention of the modern age. If the extension of retirement into a multi-decade government-funded vacation is largely a function of increased life expectancy, the prolongation of adolescence seems to derive from the bleak fact that, without an efficient societal conveyor belt to move you on, it appears to be the default setting of huge swathes of humanity. It was striking, during the Hurricane Irene frenzy, to hear the Federal Emergency Management Agency refer to itself repeatedly as “the federal family.” If Big Government is a “family,” with the bureaucracy as its parents, why be surprised that the citizens are content to live as eternal adolescents?
Perhaps the saddest part of the book is Ingraham’s brisk tour of recent romantic ballads. Exhibit A, Enrique Iglesias:
“Please excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude
But tonight I’m f**king you…”
Well, at least he said “excuse me,” which is more than this young swain did:
“Take my order ’cause your body like a carry out
Let me walk into your body until it’s lights out.”
Lovely: I am so hot for you I look on you as a Burger King drive-thru. That’s what the chicks dig. That’s what you’ll be asking the band to play at your silver wedding anniversary as you tell the young ’uns that they don’t write ’em like they used to. Even better, this exquisite love song is sung not by some bling-dripping braggart hoodlum of the rap fraternity but by the quintessential child-man of contemporary pop culture, ex-Mouseketeer Justin Timberlake.
It’s not the vulgarity or the crassness or even the grunting moronic ugliness, but something more basic: the absence of tenderness. A song such as “It Had To Be You” or “The Way You Look Tonight” pre-supposes certain courtship rituals. If a society no longer has those, it’s not surprising that it can no longer produce songs to embody them: After all, a great love ballad is, to a certain extent, aspirational; you hope to have a love worthy of such a song. A number like “Carry Out” is enough to make you question whether the fundamental things really do apply as time goes by.
Yet one of the curious features of a hypersexualized society is that it becomes paradoxically sexless and joyless. Guys who confidently bellow along with Enrique’s “F**king You” no longer quite know how to ask a girl for a chocolate malt at the soda fountain. It’s hardly surprising that, as Miss Ingraham reports, the formerly fringe activity of computer dating has now gone mainstream on an industrial scale. And, even then, as a couple of young ladies happened to mention to me after various recent encounters through Match.com and the like, an alarming number of chaps would rather see you naked on their iPhones Anthony Weiner-style than actually get you naked in their bachelor pads. I was reminded of “The Children Of Men,” set in an infertile world, in which P D James’ characters, liberated from procreation, increasingly find sex too much trouble.
Laura Ingraham’s book is a rollicking read. But, as I said, I picked it up after a re-immersion in “The Radetzky March,” by Joseph Roth, a melancholy portrait of the decline of the Habsburg Empire seen through the eyes of three generations of minor nobility and imperial civil servants in the years before the Great War swept away an entire world order and its assumptions of permanence. Roth was a man of the post-war era, yet he could not write his story without an instinctive respect for the lost rituals of a doomed world: The novel takes its title from the great Strauss march that the town band plays in front of the District Commissioner’s home every Sunday. As much as the Habsburgs, we, too, are invested in the illusions of permanence, and perhaps one day it will fall to someone to write a bittersweet novel about the final years of the Republic. But we will not even enjoy the consolations of a Strauss march. It doesn’t have quite the same ring if you call the book “Carry Out” or “F**king You.”
©MARK STEYN
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
September 2, 2011
I was on a very long flight the other day and, to get me through it, I had two books: the new bestseller “Of Thee I Zing,” by Laura Ingraham, and a book I last read 20 years ago, “The Radetzky March,” by Joseph Roth. The former is the latest hit from one of America’s most popular talk radio hosts; the latter is an Austrian novel from 1932 by a fellow who drank himself to death just before the Second World War, which, if you’re planning on drinking yourself to death, is a better pretext than most. Don’t worry, I’ll save the Germanic alcoholic guy for a couple of paragraphs, although the two books are oddly related.
“Of Thee I Zing’s” subtitle is “America’s Cultural Decline From Muffin Tops To Body Shots.” If you are sufficiently culturally aware to know what a “muffin top” and a “body shot” are (and incidentally, if you don’t have time to master all these exciting new trends, these two can be combined into one convenient “muffin shot”), you may not think them the most pressing concerns as the Republic sinks beneath its multitrillion-dollar debt burden. But, as Miss Ingraham says, “Even if our economic and national security challenges disappeared overnight, we’d still have to climb out of the cultural abyss into which we’ve tumbled.” Actually, I think I’d go a little further than the author on that. I’m a great believer that culture trumps economics. Every time the government in Athens calls up the Germans and says, OK, we’ve burned through the last bailout, time for the next one, Angela Merkel understands all too well that the real problem in Greece is not the Greek finances but the Greek people. Even somnolent liberal columnists grasp this: A recent Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times was headlined “Can Greeks Become Germans?” I think we all know the answer to that. Any society eventually winds up with the finances you’d expect. So think of our culture as one almighty muffin shot, with America as a giant navel filled with the cheap tequila of our rising debt and …no, wait, this metaphor’s getting way out of hand.
These are difficult issues for social conservatives to write about. When we venture into this terrain, we’re invariably dismissed as uptight squares who can’t get any action. That happens to be true in my case, but Laura Ingraham has the advantage of being a “pretty girl,” as disgraced Congressman Charlie Rangel made the mistake of calling her on TV the other day in an interview that went hilariously downhill thereafter. So she has a little more credibility on this turf than I would. She opens with a lurid account of a recent visit to a north Virginia mall – zombie teens texting, a thirtysomething metrosexual having his eyebrows threaded, a fiftysomething cougar spilling out of her tube top, grade-schoolers in the latest “prostitot” fashions – and then embarks on a lively tour of American cultural levers, from schools to social media to churches to Hollywood. If there is a common theme in the various rubble of cultural ruin, it’s the urge to enter adolescence ever earlier and leave it later and later, if at all. So we have skanky ’tweens “dry humping” at middle-school dances, and an ever greater proportion of “men” in their thirties living at home with their parents.
Adolescence, like retirement, is an invention of the modern age. If the extension of retirement into a multi-decade government-funded vacation is largely a function of increased life expectancy, the prolongation of adolescence seems to derive from the bleak fact that, without an efficient societal conveyor belt to move you on, it appears to be the default setting of huge swathes of humanity. It was striking, during the Hurricane Irene frenzy, to hear the Federal Emergency Management Agency refer to itself repeatedly as “the federal family.” If Big Government is a “family,” with the bureaucracy as its parents, why be surprised that the citizens are content to live as eternal adolescents?
Perhaps the saddest part of the book is Ingraham’s brisk tour of recent romantic ballads. Exhibit A, Enrique Iglesias:
“Please excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude
But tonight I’m f**king you…”
Well, at least he said “excuse me,” which is more than this young swain did:
“Take my order ’cause your body like a carry out
Let me walk into your body until it’s lights out.”
Lovely: I am so hot for you I look on you as a Burger King drive-thru. That’s what the chicks dig. That’s what you’ll be asking the band to play at your silver wedding anniversary as you tell the young ’uns that they don’t write ’em like they used to. Even better, this exquisite love song is sung not by some bling-dripping braggart hoodlum of the rap fraternity but by the quintessential child-man of contemporary pop culture, ex-Mouseketeer Justin Timberlake.
It’s not the vulgarity or the crassness or even the grunting moronic ugliness, but something more basic: the absence of tenderness. A song such as “It Had To Be You” or “The Way You Look Tonight” pre-supposes certain courtship rituals. If a society no longer has those, it’s not surprising that it can no longer produce songs to embody them: After all, a great love ballad is, to a certain extent, aspirational; you hope to have a love worthy of such a song. A number like “Carry Out” is enough to make you question whether the fundamental things really do apply as time goes by.
Yet one of the curious features of a hypersexualized society is that it becomes paradoxically sexless and joyless. Guys who confidently bellow along with Enrique’s “F**king You” no longer quite know how to ask a girl for a chocolate malt at the soda fountain. It’s hardly surprising that, as Miss Ingraham reports, the formerly fringe activity of computer dating has now gone mainstream on an industrial scale. And, even then, as a couple of young ladies happened to mention to me after various recent encounters through Match.com and the like, an alarming number of chaps would rather see you naked on their iPhones Anthony Weiner-style than actually get you naked in their bachelor pads. I was reminded of “The Children Of Men,” set in an infertile world, in which P D James’ characters, liberated from procreation, increasingly find sex too much trouble.
Laura Ingraham’s book is a rollicking read. But, as I said, I picked it up after a re-immersion in “The Radetzky March,” by Joseph Roth, a melancholy portrait of the decline of the Habsburg Empire seen through the eyes of three generations of minor nobility and imperial civil servants in the years before the Great War swept away an entire world order and its assumptions of permanence. Roth was a man of the post-war era, yet he could not write his story without an instinctive respect for the lost rituals of a doomed world: The novel takes its title from the great Strauss march that the town band plays in front of the District Commissioner’s home every Sunday. As much as the Habsburgs, we, too, are invested in the illusions of permanence, and perhaps one day it will fall to someone to write a bittersweet novel about the final years of the Republic. But we will not even enjoy the consolations of a Strauss march. It doesn’t have quite the same ring if you call the book “Carry Out” or “F**king You.”
©MARK STEYN
Friday, September 02, 2011
A Not-So-Amusing Day at the Amusement Park
By Rich Trzupek
http://frontpagemag.com
September 2, 2011
A confrontation between Muslims celebrating the end of Ramadan at the Rye Playland amusement park in Westchester County, New York and local authorities turned ugly yesterday, in a perfect demonstration of the toxic influence agitation outfits like the Council on American-Islamic Relations have had on American discourse. “It’s clear, this all happened because we’re Muslim,” said Dena Meawad, an 18-year-old Muslim woman who was in the midst of the action. She, of course, is the aggrieved victim of the supposedly racist, sexist and, above-all, Islamophobic American society.
Three years ago, Westchester County, which operates Rye Playland, put a policy into effect that forbids people from wearing headgear on certain rides. That rule was imposed because of safety concerns, both that a hat landing on the tracks of certain rides could cause problems and that some coverings – like a head scarf – could represent a strangulation hazard. Peter Tartaglia, deputy commissioner of Westchester County Parks, said the Muslim American Society of New York was informed about the headgear rule on multiple occasions in advance of yesterday’s event, during which about 3,000 members of the society visited the park. “Part of our rules and regulations, which we painstakingly told them over and over again, is that certain rides you cannot wear any sort of headgear,” Tartaglia said.
Some of the young women attending the event either didn’t get the message or chose to ignore it. According to reports, some Muslim women began arguing with police over the rules when they were denied entrance to rides. The confrontation escalated to the point that about 100 police converged on the park to get the melee under control. Fifteen Muslims, including three women, were taken into custody. Two park rangers were injured in the fracas.
The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was naturally quick to take offense over the incident. “In this heightened state of Islamophobia, a woman wearing a hajib is an easy target these days,” said Zead Ramadan, president of CAIR – New York. Except that’s not even remotely the way that America works “these days.”
Far from being “Islamophobic,” modern-day America bends over backwards to avoid even the slightest appearance of impropriety when it comes to interacting with the Muslim community, which is evident in everything from our public school curriculum to our airports. This is a natural outgrowth of the kind of leftist mentality that permeates our society; that America is a racist, sexist and Islamophobic nation for which we must perpetually atone. Unfortunately, some of the “victims” of this paradigm, like CAIR head-hunters, whose relevancy and power is parasitic on the fear of discrimination in the Muslim community, understand that American psychology all too well.
Organizations like CAIR trade in exploiting victimhood, and, as the Rye Playland incident too richly illustrates, that victim mentality filters down into the mainstream Muslim community most readily.
The young women at the amusement park were more than ready to take offense at a perfectly reasonable park policy, because they have been propagandized into believing they are constantly under attack. The outraged young Muslims at Rye Playland were merely acting in accordance with the leftist backstory and CAIR plot-line. They behaved in the way they should be expected to behave, given the nature of the indoctrination on “American-Islamic relations” to which they have been subject.
As has been amply documented, about 70% of all hate crimes are anti-Jewish in nature, while only about 9% of hate crimes are anti-Muslim. Yet this staggering degree of blind bigotry largely goes unnoticed relative to the comparatively minuscule number of anti-Muslim hate crimes. The grossly exaggerated portrayal of Muslim discrimination in the US directly feeds the hysteria that results in ugly incidents like that at Rye Playland and, even worse, stands to excuse them.
But the Rye Playland incident also shows that the prevailing narrative that the Islamic community is a passive, persecuted American enclave doesn’t hold up. It is in fact a politically aggressive community, whose outrages tend to be instigated by Islamophobia manufacturers and the political crowd rather than by acts of bigotry themselves. Rest assured, the more these parties are given credence by society at large, the more Rye Playland incidents we will see.
http://frontpagemag.com
September 2, 2011
A confrontation between Muslims celebrating the end of Ramadan at the Rye Playland amusement park in Westchester County, New York and local authorities turned ugly yesterday, in a perfect demonstration of the toxic influence agitation outfits like the Council on American-Islamic Relations have had on American discourse. “It’s clear, this all happened because we’re Muslim,” said Dena Meawad, an 18-year-old Muslim woman who was in the midst of the action. She, of course, is the aggrieved victim of the supposedly racist, sexist and, above-all, Islamophobic American society.
Three years ago, Westchester County, which operates Rye Playland, put a policy into effect that forbids people from wearing headgear on certain rides. That rule was imposed because of safety concerns, both that a hat landing on the tracks of certain rides could cause problems and that some coverings – like a head scarf – could represent a strangulation hazard. Peter Tartaglia, deputy commissioner of Westchester County Parks, said the Muslim American Society of New York was informed about the headgear rule on multiple occasions in advance of yesterday’s event, during which about 3,000 members of the society visited the park. “Part of our rules and regulations, which we painstakingly told them over and over again, is that certain rides you cannot wear any sort of headgear,” Tartaglia said.
Some of the young women attending the event either didn’t get the message or chose to ignore it. According to reports, some Muslim women began arguing with police over the rules when they were denied entrance to rides. The confrontation escalated to the point that about 100 police converged on the park to get the melee under control. Fifteen Muslims, including three women, were taken into custody. Two park rangers were injured in the fracas.
The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was naturally quick to take offense over the incident. “In this heightened state of Islamophobia, a woman wearing a hajib is an easy target these days,” said Zead Ramadan, president of CAIR – New York. Except that’s not even remotely the way that America works “these days.”
Far from being “Islamophobic,” modern-day America bends over backwards to avoid even the slightest appearance of impropriety when it comes to interacting with the Muslim community, which is evident in everything from our public school curriculum to our airports. This is a natural outgrowth of the kind of leftist mentality that permeates our society; that America is a racist, sexist and Islamophobic nation for which we must perpetually atone. Unfortunately, some of the “victims” of this paradigm, like CAIR head-hunters, whose relevancy and power is parasitic on the fear of discrimination in the Muslim community, understand that American psychology all too well.
Organizations like CAIR trade in exploiting victimhood, and, as the Rye Playland incident too richly illustrates, that victim mentality filters down into the mainstream Muslim community most readily.
The young women at the amusement park were more than ready to take offense at a perfectly reasonable park policy, because they have been propagandized into believing they are constantly under attack. The outraged young Muslims at Rye Playland were merely acting in accordance with the leftist backstory and CAIR plot-line. They behaved in the way they should be expected to behave, given the nature of the indoctrination on “American-Islamic relations” to which they have been subject.
As has been amply documented, about 70% of all hate crimes are anti-Jewish in nature, while only about 9% of hate crimes are anti-Muslim. Yet this staggering degree of blind bigotry largely goes unnoticed relative to the comparatively minuscule number of anti-Muslim hate crimes. The grossly exaggerated portrayal of Muslim discrimination in the US directly feeds the hysteria that results in ugly incidents like that at Rye Playland and, even worse, stands to excuse them.
But the Rye Playland incident also shows that the prevailing narrative that the Islamic community is a passive, persecuted American enclave doesn’t hold up. It is in fact a politically aggressive community, whose outrages tend to be instigated by Islamophobia manufacturers and the political crowd rather than by acts of bigotry themselves. Rest assured, the more these parties are given credence by society at large, the more Rye Playland incidents we will see.
Gibson Guitar Wails on Federal Raid Over Wood
By JAMES R. HAGERTY and KRIS MAHER
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
September 1, 2011
Federal agents with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service shut down the Gibson Guitar factory in Memphis Aug. 24 to serve search warrants. (The Commercial Appeal/Zuma Press)
Gibson Guitar Corp., a big user of ebony and other scarce woods, for years has allied itself with Greenpeace and other environmental groups to show it was serious about preserving forests.
That didn't stop the Nashville-based company, whose guitars are used by such musicians as B.B. King and Angus Young of AC/DC, from running afoul of U.S. authorities over allegedly illegal imports of wood. Though no charges have been filed, Gibson factories have been raided twice, most recently last week, by federal agents who say ebony exported from India to Gibson was "fraudulently" labeled to conceal a contravention of Indian export law.
Henry Juszkiewicz, chief executive officer of the closely held company, said in an interview that a broker probably made a mistake in labeling the goods but that the sale was legal and approved by Indian authorities.
Gibson's predicament, which raises concerns for musical instrument makers and other importers of wood, illustrates the pitfalls of complying with U.S. law while dealing with middlemen in faraway countries whose legal systems can be murky.
The law ensnaring Gibson is the Lacey Act of 1900, originally passed to regulate trade in bird feathers used for hats and amended in 2008 to cover wood and other plant products. It requires companies to make detailed disclosures about wood imports and bars the purchase of goods exported in violation of a foreign country's laws.
Leonard Krause, a consultant in Eugene, Ore., who advises companies on complying with the Lacey Act, is telling clients they should hire lawyers in countries where they obtain products. "How many people know the statutes in India?" Mr. Krause said. "The net effect is that it raises everybody's cost of doing business."
Federal agents first raided Gibson factories in November 2009 and were back again Aug. 24, seizing guitars, wood and electronic records. Gene Nix, a wood product engineer at Gibson, was questioned by agents after the first raid and told he could face five years in jail.
"Can you imagine a federal agent saying, 'You're going to jail for five years' and what you do is sort wood in the factory?" said Mr. Juszkiewicz, recounting the incident. "I think that's way over the top." Gibson employees, he said, are being "treated like drug criminals."
Mr. Nix hasn't been accused of any wrongdoing. He couldn't be reached for comment.
A Justice Department spokesman declined comment. While Justice Department officials pursue what they say is a possible criminal case against Gibson, they and the company are battling in federal district court in Nashville over whether materials seized in the 2009 raid should be returned to Gibson. That civil fight provides indications of the case the government is trying to make against Gibson.
Mr. Nix went to Madagascar in June 2008 on a trip organized by environmental groups to talk to local officials about selling responsibly harvested wood to makers of musical instruments. Afterward, in emails later seized by the government, he referred to "widespread corruption and theft of valuable woods" and the possibility of buying ebony and rosewood from Madagascar on "the grey market."
In a June 4 court filing, Jerry Martin, U.S. Attorney for central Tennessee, quoted the emails, and said "Nix knew that the grey market meant purchasing contraband."
Gibson has denied the allegation and said Mr. Nix's emails were quoted out of context.
The government has focused on a March 2009 shipment of ebony from Madagascar intended for guitar fingerboards. Madagascar law bars the export of certain unfinished wood products, according to both Gibson and the government. Gibson says the ebony had been cut into pieces and that local officials approved the export as a legal sale of finished goods.
U.S. officials described the wood as "sawn timber" and said Madagascar officials were "defrauded" by a local exporter about the nature of the product.
Gibson says the government is trying to "second guess" the Madagascar government. "The U.S. government's startling position smacks of something from an Orwell novel," Gibson said in a July 15 court filing in federal district court in Nashville.
After the 2009 raid, Gibson stopped buying wood from Madagascar. Gibson continued to use suppliers in India for ebony and rosewood.
As for last week's raid, the government said it had evidence that Indian ebony was "fraudulently" labeled in an attempt to evade an Indian ban on exports of unfinished wood.
"It is very possible that a broker made the mistake in filling out a form," Mr. Juszkiewicz said. Gibson says the ebony was partially finished for use as fingerboards and that Indian officials have endorsed such exports as legal. A spokesman for India's commerce ministry had no immediate comment.
After the 2009 raid, Mr. Juszkiewicz resigned from the board of the Rainforest Alliance, which seeks to preserve tropical forests. He said he didn't want to tar the nonprofit with bad publicity. A Rainforest Alliance spokeswoman said he wasn't pressured to step down, and the group continues to praise Gibson's efforts to promote responsible harvesting of wood.
Scott Paul, a Greenpeace official in New York responsible for forestry issues, said Gibson for years has done "great work" to promote better forestry practices. The question, he said, is whether Gibson did everything possible to avoid buying wood from dubious sources. "We have no idea," he said.
—Amol Sharma contributed to this article.
Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com and Kris Maher at kris.maher@wsj.com
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
September 1, 2011
Gibson Guitar Corp., a big user of ebony and other scarce woods, for years has allied itself with Greenpeace and other environmental groups to show it was serious about preserving forests.
That didn't stop the Nashville-based company, whose guitars are used by such musicians as B.B. King and Angus Young of AC/DC, from running afoul of U.S. authorities over allegedly illegal imports of wood. Though no charges have been filed, Gibson factories have been raided twice, most recently last week, by federal agents who say ebony exported from India to Gibson was "fraudulently" labeled to conceal a contravention of Indian export law.
Henry Juszkiewicz, chief executive officer of the closely held company, said in an interview that a broker probably made a mistake in labeling the goods but that the sale was legal and approved by Indian authorities.
Gibson's predicament, which raises concerns for musical instrument makers and other importers of wood, illustrates the pitfalls of complying with U.S. law while dealing with middlemen in faraway countries whose legal systems can be murky.
The law ensnaring Gibson is the Lacey Act of 1900, originally passed to regulate trade in bird feathers used for hats and amended in 2008 to cover wood and other plant products. It requires companies to make detailed disclosures about wood imports and bars the purchase of goods exported in violation of a foreign country's laws.
Leonard Krause, a consultant in Eugene, Ore., who advises companies on complying with the Lacey Act, is telling clients they should hire lawyers in countries where they obtain products. "How many people know the statutes in India?" Mr. Krause said. "The net effect is that it raises everybody's cost of doing business."
Federal agents first raided Gibson factories in November 2009 and were back again Aug. 24, seizing guitars, wood and electronic records. Gene Nix, a wood product engineer at Gibson, was questioned by agents after the first raid and told he could face five years in jail.
"Can you imagine a federal agent saying, 'You're going to jail for five years' and what you do is sort wood in the factory?" said Mr. Juszkiewicz, recounting the incident. "I think that's way over the top." Gibson employees, he said, are being "treated like drug criminals."
Mr. Nix hasn't been accused of any wrongdoing. He couldn't be reached for comment.
A Justice Department spokesman declined comment. While Justice Department officials pursue what they say is a possible criminal case against Gibson, they and the company are battling in federal district court in Nashville over whether materials seized in the 2009 raid should be returned to Gibson. That civil fight provides indications of the case the government is trying to make against Gibson.
Mr. Nix went to Madagascar in June 2008 on a trip organized by environmental groups to talk to local officials about selling responsibly harvested wood to makers of musical instruments. Afterward, in emails later seized by the government, he referred to "widespread corruption and theft of valuable woods" and the possibility of buying ebony and rosewood from Madagascar on "the grey market."
In a June 4 court filing, Jerry Martin, U.S. Attorney for central Tennessee, quoted the emails, and said "Nix knew that the grey market meant purchasing contraband."
Gibson has denied the allegation and said Mr. Nix's emails were quoted out of context.
The government has focused on a March 2009 shipment of ebony from Madagascar intended for guitar fingerboards. Madagascar law bars the export of certain unfinished wood products, according to both Gibson and the government. Gibson says the ebony had been cut into pieces and that local officials approved the export as a legal sale of finished goods.
U.S. officials described the wood as "sawn timber" and said Madagascar officials were "defrauded" by a local exporter about the nature of the product.
Gibson says the government is trying to "second guess" the Madagascar government. "The U.S. government's startling position smacks of something from an Orwell novel," Gibson said in a July 15 court filing in federal district court in Nashville.
After the 2009 raid, Gibson stopped buying wood from Madagascar. Gibson continued to use suppliers in India for ebony and rosewood.
As for last week's raid, the government said it had evidence that Indian ebony was "fraudulently" labeled in an attempt to evade an Indian ban on exports of unfinished wood.
"It is very possible that a broker made the mistake in filling out a form," Mr. Juszkiewicz said. Gibson says the ebony was partially finished for use as fingerboards and that Indian officials have endorsed such exports as legal. A spokesman for India's commerce ministry had no immediate comment.
After the 2009 raid, Mr. Juszkiewicz resigned from the board of the Rainforest Alliance, which seeks to preserve tropical forests. He said he didn't want to tar the nonprofit with bad publicity. A Rainforest Alliance spokeswoman said he wasn't pressured to step down, and the group continues to praise Gibson's efforts to promote responsible harvesting of wood.
Scott Paul, a Greenpeace official in New York responsible for forestry issues, said Gibson for years has done "great work" to promote better forestry practices. The question, he said, is whether Gibson did everything possible to avoid buying wood from dubious sources. "We have no idea," he said.
—Amol Sharma contributed to this article.
Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com and Kris Maher at kris.maher@wsj.com
Thursday, September 01, 2011
Obama and the Burden of Exceptionalism
Post-'60s liberals, with the president as their standard bearer, seek to make a virtue of decline.
By SHELBY STEELE
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
September 1, 2011
If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.
Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-'60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America's exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America's greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.
Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.
Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his "leading from behind" profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his "hope and change" campaign slogan came to look like the "hope" of overcoming American exceptionalism and "change" away from it.
So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.
But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America's bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?
American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.
Yet today America is fighting in a number of Muslim countries, and that number is as likely to rise as to fall. Our exceptionalism saddles us with overwhelming burdens. The entire world comes to our door when there is real trouble, and every day we spill blood and treasure in foreign lands—even as anti-Americanism plays around the world like a hit record.
At home the values that made us exceptional have been smeared with derision. Individual initiative and individual responsibility—the very engines of our exceptionalism—now carry a stigma of hypocrisy. For centuries America made sure that no amount of initiative would lift minorities and women. So in liberal quarters today—where historical shames are made to define the present—these values are seen as little more than the cynical remnants of a bygone era. Talk of "merit" or "a competition of excellence" in the admissions office of any Ivy League university today, and then stand by for the howls of incredulous laughter.
Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate. We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring and sometimes hate-driven. There's a reason al Qaeda operatives targeted the U.S. on 9/11 and not, say, Buenos Aires. They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism. They wanted to steal our thunder.
So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.
But this leaves the left mired in an absurdity: It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door. (Think of England or France after empire.) To civilize America, to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline—as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.
Since the '60s we have enfeebled our public education system even as our wealth has expanded. Moral and cultural relativism now obscure individual responsibility. We are uninspired in the wars we fight, calculating our withdrawal even before we begin—and then we fight with a self-conscious, almost bureaucratic minimalism that makes the wars interminable.
America seems to be facing a pivotal moment: Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding—by reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values, so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness?
As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.
Like me, he is black, and it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people. So the concept of the exceptionalism—the genius for freedom—of the American people may still be a stretch for him. But in fact he was elected to make that stretch. It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.
Illustration: Chad Crowe
Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (Harper/Collins, 2007).
By SHELBY STEELE
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
September 1, 2011
If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.
Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.
Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his "leading from behind" profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his "hope and change" campaign slogan came to look like the "hope" of overcoming American exceptionalism and "change" away from it.
So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.
But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America's bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?
American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.
Yet today America is fighting in a number of Muslim countries, and that number is as likely to rise as to fall. Our exceptionalism saddles us with overwhelming burdens. The entire world comes to our door when there is real trouble, and every day we spill blood and treasure in foreign lands—even as anti-Americanism plays around the world like a hit record.
At home the values that made us exceptional have been smeared with derision. Individual initiative and individual responsibility—the very engines of our exceptionalism—now carry a stigma of hypocrisy. For centuries America made sure that no amount of initiative would lift minorities and women. So in liberal quarters today—where historical shames are made to define the present—these values are seen as little more than the cynical remnants of a bygone era. Talk of "merit" or "a competition of excellence" in the admissions office of any Ivy League university today, and then stand by for the howls of incredulous laughter.
Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate. We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring and sometimes hate-driven. There's a reason al Qaeda operatives targeted the U.S. on 9/11 and not, say, Buenos Aires. They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism. They wanted to steal our thunder.
So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.
But this leaves the left mired in an absurdity: It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door. (Think of England or France after empire.) To civilize America, to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline—as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.
Since the '60s we have enfeebled our public education system even as our wealth has expanded. Moral and cultural relativism now obscure individual responsibility. We are uninspired in the wars we fight, calculating our withdrawal even before we begin—and then we fight with a self-conscious, almost bureaucratic minimalism that makes the wars interminable.
America seems to be facing a pivotal moment: Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding—by reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values, so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness?
As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.
Like me, he is black, and it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people. So the concept of the exceptionalism—the genius for freedom—of the American people may still be a stretch for him. But in fact he was elected to make that stretch. It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.
Illustration: Chad Crowe
Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (Harper/Collins, 2007).
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Screw up, move up, cover up: Fast and Furious edition
By Michelle Malkin
http://michellemalkin.com/
August 31, 2011
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' acting director Kenneth Melson speaks at a Houston news conference in April 2009. (Pat Sullivan / Associated Press)
There are now enough Operation Fast and Furious officials playing hide-and-seek in the Obama administration to fill a “rubber room.”
That’s the nickname for taxpayer-subsidized holding pens, such as the ones in the New York City public schools, where crooked employees are separated from the system and paid to do nothing. Perhaps the White House can stimulate a few construction jobs by adding an entire rubber room annex for “reassigned” scandal bureaucrats at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s getting mighty crowded.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced it was shuffling Kenneth Melson, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, out of his job. The disclosure comes amid continued GOP investigations into the administration’s fatally botched straw gun purchase racket at the border and spreading outrage over legal obstructionism and whistleblower retaliation by DOJ brass. The DOJ inspector general is also conducting a probe.
Internal documents earlier showed that Melson was intimately involved in overseeing the program and screened undercover videos of thousands of straw purchases of AK-47s and other high-powered rifles — many of which ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartel thugs, including those who murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry last December. Fast and Furious weapons have been tied to at least a dozen violent crimes in America and untold bloody havoc in Mexico.
In secret July 4 testimony, Melson revealed he was “sick to his stomach” when he discovered the extent of the operation’s deadly lapses. Join the club, pal.
Melson told congressional investigators that he and ATF’s senior leadership “moved to reassign every manager involved in Fast and Furious, from the deputy assistant director for field operations down to the group supervisor” after ATF whistleblowers went to the press and Capitol. But according to Melson, he and company were ordered by Justice Department higher-ups to remain silent about the reasons for the reassignments.
In other words: the ATF managers in the know were “effectively muzzled while the DOJ sent over false denials and buried its head in the sand,” as GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, concluded in July.
Melson has been kicked back to DOJ’s main office in a flabbergasting new slot as “senior adviser on forensic science in the department’s Office of Legal Policy.” He may have been “sick to his stomach,” but the federal careerist apparently has no intention of quitting an administration with blood on its hands. And now he’ll be advising others on how to track and handle evidence. Nice make-work if you can get it.
Others on the Fast and Furious dance card of lemons:
– Assistant U.S. Attorney Emory Hurley in Phoenix, who helped oversee the straw gun purchase disaster. He’s being transferred out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s criminal division and into the civil division.
– Assistant ATF Special Agents in Charge George Gillett and Jim Needles. Moved to other positions.
– BATF deputy director of operations in the West, William McMahon. Promoted to ATF headquarters.
– ATF Phoenix field supervisors William Newell and David Voth. Promoted to new management positions in Washington.
Keep your friends close and your henchmen on the verge of spilling all the beans closer.
There’s been only one visible Fast and Furious resignation: U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke in Phoenix, who quietly stepped down on Tuesday. One of his last acts? Opposing the request of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s family to qualify as crime victims in a court case against the thug who bought the Fast and Furious guns used in Terry’s murder.
The fish rots from the head down, of course. DOJ is run by Eric Holder, the Beltway swamp creature who won bipartisan approval for his nomination — even after putting political interests ahead of security interests at the Clinton Justice Department in both the Marc Rich pardon scandal and the Puerto Rican FALN terrorist debacle. Remember: Holder won over the Senate by arguing that his poor judgment made him more qualified for the job.
Screw up, move up, cover up: It’s the Holder way, the Obama way, the Washington way. And innocent Americans pay.
http://michellemalkin.com/
August 31, 2011
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' acting director Kenneth Melson speaks at a Houston news conference in April 2009. (Pat Sullivan / Associated Press)
There are now enough Operation Fast and Furious officials playing hide-and-seek in the Obama administration to fill a “rubber room.”
That’s the nickname for taxpayer-subsidized holding pens, such as the ones in the New York City public schools, where crooked employees are separated from the system and paid to do nothing. Perhaps the White House can stimulate a few construction jobs by adding an entire rubber room annex for “reassigned” scandal bureaucrats at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s getting mighty crowded.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced it was shuffling Kenneth Melson, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, out of his job. The disclosure comes amid continued GOP investigations into the administration’s fatally botched straw gun purchase racket at the border and spreading outrage over legal obstructionism and whistleblower retaliation by DOJ brass. The DOJ inspector general is also conducting a probe.
Internal documents earlier showed that Melson was intimately involved in overseeing the program and screened undercover videos of thousands of straw purchases of AK-47s and other high-powered rifles — many of which ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartel thugs, including those who murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry last December. Fast and Furious weapons have been tied to at least a dozen violent crimes in America and untold bloody havoc in Mexico.
In secret July 4 testimony, Melson revealed he was “sick to his stomach” when he discovered the extent of the operation’s deadly lapses. Join the club, pal.
Melson told congressional investigators that he and ATF’s senior leadership “moved to reassign every manager involved in Fast and Furious, from the deputy assistant director for field operations down to the group supervisor” after ATF whistleblowers went to the press and Capitol. But according to Melson, he and company were ordered by Justice Department higher-ups to remain silent about the reasons for the reassignments.
In other words: the ATF managers in the know were “effectively muzzled while the DOJ sent over false denials and buried its head in the sand,” as GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, concluded in July.
Melson has been kicked back to DOJ’s main office in a flabbergasting new slot as “senior adviser on forensic science in the department’s Office of Legal Policy.” He may have been “sick to his stomach,” but the federal careerist apparently has no intention of quitting an administration with blood on its hands. And now he’ll be advising others on how to track and handle evidence. Nice make-work if you can get it.
Others on the Fast and Furious dance card of lemons:
– Assistant U.S. Attorney Emory Hurley in Phoenix, who helped oversee the straw gun purchase disaster. He’s being transferred out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s criminal division and into the civil division.
– Assistant ATF Special Agents in Charge George Gillett and Jim Needles. Moved to other positions.
– BATF deputy director of operations in the West, William McMahon. Promoted to ATF headquarters.
– ATF Phoenix field supervisors William Newell and David Voth. Promoted to new management positions in Washington.
Keep your friends close and your henchmen on the verge of spilling all the beans closer.
There’s been only one visible Fast and Furious resignation: U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke in Phoenix, who quietly stepped down on Tuesday. One of his last acts? Opposing the request of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s family to qualify as crime victims in a court case against the thug who bought the Fast and Furious guns used in Terry’s murder.
The fish rots from the head down, of course. DOJ is run by Eric Holder, the Beltway swamp creature who won bipartisan approval for his nomination — even after putting political interests ahead of security interests at the Clinton Justice Department in both the Marc Rich pardon scandal and the Puerto Rican FALN terrorist debacle. Remember: Holder won over the Senate by arguing that his poor judgment made him more qualified for the job.
Screw up, move up, cover up: It’s the Holder way, the Obama way, the Washington way. And innocent Americans pay.
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