Book Review: "The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister

The Greats

MICHAEL KNOX BERAN
http://www.nationalreview.com
December 2006

John O’Sullivan does not, in this dazzling new book, indulge in schadenfreude. But he permits the reader this pleasure.

“That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years,” John Kenneth Galbraith said in 1984, when the ground was already shifting, “is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene.”

Those “in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said in 1982, as the earth rumbled around him, are “kidding themselves.”

Such were the orthodoxies Ronald Reagan, Karol Wojtyla, and Margaret Thatcher found and overthrew. What is striking is the brightness of spirit with which they did so.

A quarter of a century later, the mood of the Right is Spenglerian. The gardens of the West, or at least of Europe, have, we are told, already closed; the specter of Islam does not merely haunt, it dominates.

Very different was the mood of Ronald Reagan when Mikhail Gorbachev first looked into his eyes at Geneva in 1985. Asked what he saw in them, Gorbachev replied, “Sunshine and clear sky.”

The President could afford to be serene. “I know in my heart that man is good,” Reagan later said, “that what is right will always eventually triumph.”

Was Reagan’s messianic confidence in the future of the free state naïve?

Otto von Bismarck maintained that the “practical benefits” of a free constitution were “but little understood” by most people. A politics that exalts force and will, the German statesman predicted, would in almost every instance trump a free-state program.

But Reagan’s Freevangelical politics appears in retrospect to have been as shrewdly realistic as it was utopian. There was of course nothing original in his belief that the free system, which liberates peoples’ energies, makes possible a technological creativity that no command regime can match.

What was new, O’Sullivan shows, was the boldness with which Reagan translated technological advances in the West into strategic supremacy. SDI was ridiculed by the Schlesingerian clerisy; but Gorbachev saw in Reagan’s brainchild an innovation that the creaking Soviet economy could not possibly equal.

When Reagan, in the face of great temptation, refused to sacrifice SDI at Reykjavik in 1986, the struggle was over.

“Ronnie,” O’Sullivan quotes Charles Z. Wick as saying on Air Force One, “you just won the Cold War. They admitted they can’t compete.”

“Like a chrysalis,” Reagan said in Moscow two years later, “we’re emerging from the economy of the Industrial Revolution” into a world “in which there are no bounds on human imagination and the freedom to create.”

With his faith in the transforming power of liberty, Reagan emerges as the most visionary of O’Sullivan’s trio. Mrs. Thatcher was skeptical of SDI. John Paul was skeptical of the free market.

But the Prime Minister acquiesced in the President’s strategy, and the Pope modified his economic theory in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, in which he argued that economic freedom is an essential condition of human flourishing.

Reagan had changed the debate; the Pope, O’Sullivan writes, “revised Catholic social teaching in the light of the Reagan-Thatcher transformation of capitalism.” The free system gave the President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister an immense material advantage in the struggle against coercion.

But material causes and effects, Clausewitz observed, are “no more than the wooden handle” of a leader’s sword; the moral element is the “noble metal, the real bright-polished weapon.”

O’Sullivan shows that his protagonists prevailed, first, because they believed in the moral superiority of their ideals, and second, because they believed that men and women around the world shared their faith in them.

There was in O’Sullivan’s trio no inclination to hunker in the bunker, in Fortress America (or Britain or the Vatican). The Pope was the most peripatetic of the three evangelists of liberty; but none of the three sought to wall off the West.

The Communist world seemed in 1980 to be as resistant to freedom as the Islamic one does today. But Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul were undaunted. Their faith in the power of freedom seemed, at the time, fantastic to many, just as it seems fantastic to many today. But the three leaders were, O’Sullivan shows, adroit in their approach to exporting the constitution of liberty.

Woodrow Wilson believed that the United States could give a people a list of pedantic policy points, sponsor an election or two, and — hesto presto — a free state would emerge. This was democracy by fiat: “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men,” Wilson declared.

The Wilsonian school overlooked a lesson of Lincoln, who was as keenly interested as Wilson in the world-struggle between the free state and those novel forms of coercion that German romanticism had inspired.

Lincoln, like his contemporary Bismarck, saw that romantic neofeudal paternalism (and romantic blood-and-soil nationalism) possessed a perverse appeal. He saw also that free-state politicians were slow to counter this appeal; the romantic politics that, in their different ways, Bismarck, Marx, and such American pro-slavery thinkers as Calhoun (a student of Hegel) all embraced appeared to be gaining the upper hand.

Lincoln strengthened the hold of free-state principles on the popular imagination by linking them to the ongoing struggle in every soul between good and evil, and by connecting the free state to (what he argued was) a providential design in which man’s better impulses would prevail.

In his late orations Lincoln contended that America must suffer for having embraced slavery, an evil and despotic system. But from this evil, providence would bring forth good, would bring forth the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln, paraphrasing the rebirth theory of John 3:3, announced in the Gettysburg Address.

O’Sullivan shows that a similar strategy underlay the efforts of Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul to consign the last refuse of German romanticism, Marxism, to the ash-heap of history. In each of his three protagonists, O’Sullivan detects a “spiritual element” that explains their achievements.

Freedom, they knew, cannot be imposed upon a people, even with bayonets; for though the impulses that give birth to a free state grow out of aspirations deep in human nature, they can bear fruit only where leaders are strong enough, and imaginative enough, to make them the foundation of a culture of liberty.

With his uncanny intuition, Reagan, watching John Paul’s visit to Poland in 1979, saw that a leader had emerged who could unleash the spiritual forces that make for successful free-state revolutions.

“I have had a feeling,” Reagan said, “particularly in the Pope’s visit to Poland, that religion may turn out to be the Soviets’ Achilles’ heel.”

Undoubtedly, the moral effort the President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister made in their quest to topple Marxism was as essential as the material one. Reagan intimidated the Soviet leadership with his arms buildup; but scarcely less did his words fill the Politburo with dread.

The arresting quality of Reagan’s verbal chiaroscuro was reminiscent of Lincoln’s and Churchill’s; in the struggle between light and darkness, the Soviet regime figured of course as the Evil Empire. This messianic or providential rhetoric, which dismayed the intelligentsia of the West, was very differently received by those who lived in slavery.

“We now know,” O’Sullivan writes, that Reagan’s “speeches had a vital effect in weakening Soviet morale and encouraging dissidents throughout the Soviet bloc.” The President’s evangelism for liberty had its effect in part because the Pope had prepared the ground; had he not awakened the spirit of the Eastern European peoples, the seed might have fallen on stony places.

So successful was this strategy of moral and material maneuver that Reagan won his war, as Lady Thatcher observed in her eulogy of the President, without firing a shot. (In this respect he surpassed Lincoln; admittedly the circumstances were different.)

Tolstoy said of Lincoln that we are “still too near to his greatness, and so can hardly appreciate his power; but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”

So it is, not only with Ronald Reagan, but with his partners in liberation, Margaret Thatcher and John Paul II. With great technical skill and marvelous literary craftsmanship, O’Sullivan has compiled a case for their greatness that will inspire readers for years to come.

A splendid book.

Mr. Beran is the author most recently of Jefferson’s Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind.

Tom Purcell: The End of Charlie Brown's Christmas

Tom Purcell
CagleCartoons.com
December 22, 2006

Good grief. It has been 41 years since the "A Charlie Brown Christmas" special first aired. It was broadcast again the last Tuesday in November, and the show holds more power over me now than it did when I was a kid. I think I know why.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Americans, bolstered by stability and prosperity, married young and had large families. In my neighborhood, we had six kids, the Kreigers five, the Gillens four, the Greenaways four and so on.

The design was simple then for many folks: Many men and women believed that when they married, they became one under God. They believed their role was to sacrifice for their children, so their children could have better lives than they. Their mission was to teach their kids good values and to provide them with an excellent education. That's why so many moved into our neighborhood. It was located a few blocks from St. Germaine's Catholic Church and School.

It was a traditional time, to be sure. Most of the dads went off to work while most of the moms kept an eye on both kids and neighborhood. And although life for adults certainly had its limitations and challenges, there was no better time to be a kid.

Especially during Christmas.

At Catholic school, we kicked off Christmas preparations one month before the big day. We put up decorations, sold items to raise money for the needy and practiced for Christmas concerts (we sang real Christmas songs, too, such as "Silent Night" and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing").
We were just as busy at home.

My mother was a master at building suspense. She played Mitch Miller's Christmas albums on the stereo most nights after dinner and whistled to the tunes as we hung decorations and talked over what to get for one another. She celebrated the mystery of giving and taught us that being kind and helping others were the best things we could give.

Silly as it may sound today, the TV Christmas specials were a real event in our home. We all packed into the family room and plugged in the tree. We turned off all the lamps so that the Christmas lights would shine bright. Then we'd wait with great anticipation for the specials.

Every year I laughed out loud when the Grinch's dog, massive antlers strapped to his tiny head, jumped up on the back of the sleigh, causing the Grinch to grimace. In "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," the Abominable Snowman terrified me, but I was always relieved when he turned out a lovable fuzz ball.

But the granddaddy of them all was the "A Charlie Brown Christmas" special, a show that captured half the viewing audience when it first ran on Dec. 9, 1965.

As it goes, Charlie Brown is depressed because everyone around him fails to see the true meaning of Christmas. Lucy complains that she doesn't want stupid toys or a bicycle or clothes for Christmas, but real estate. To resolve his depression, Charlie Brown throws himself into work as the director of the Christmas play.

But that soon falls apart, too. Distraught, he follows a light in the east and finds his way to a Christmas tree lot. The only tree he can find is a small sickly one. When he brings it back, the others mock him.

But then Linus comes to the rescue. Linus tells Charlie Brown he knows the real meaning of Christmas. He tells the story of Christ's birth.

"Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace, goodwill toward men," he says, quoting from the Bible.

Suddenly, the other characters are transformed. They become compassionate and concerned. They decorate the tree and transform it into a thing of beauty. They wish Charlie Brown a Merry Christmas and sing a Christmas carol.

This show holds tremendous power over me still because it brings back powerful childhood memories -- memories of security and love and the anticipation of Christmas morning.

But I love it for another reason.

Despite Christmas being based on the birth of Christ, a historical figure – despite that the show's innocence, simplicity and honesty still make it a ratings winner – it would never be made today.

Good grief.

Tom Purcell's weekly political humor column runs in newspapers and Web sites across America. Visit him at www.TomPurcell.com.

Jonah Goldberg: Guiliani needs to be America's tough guy

December 21, 2006
The Los Angeles Times
Jonah Goldberg

America needs a Pym Fortuyn, and Rudolph Giuliani may be the man for the job.

Pim Fortuyn, you may recall, was the gay, flamboyant sociology professor turned "right-wing" Dutch politician who took a hard-line position against immigration and Islamic extremism -- two issues inextricably linked in a country where whole communities have become enclaves of Sharia law. Fortuyn was labeled as right wing by identity-politics leftists for his unapologetic view that the Netherlands should stay both liberal and libertine.

His basic view was that the Netherlands has a culture too, and there's no shame in defending civil liberties, free expression and tolerance against their opponents, even if those opponents exploit liberal guilt by casting themselves as victims. In other words, Fortuyn wanted to keep the party going, and that meant taking a strong line against the killjoys. That Fortuyn could be both libertarian and tough-minded caused great cognitive dissonance in the media and on the left -- there and here. He was assassinated by a left-wing extremist.

The United States is not the Netherlands, and Rudy Giuliani is no Pim Fortuyn in his personal life. But Giuliani is still a social liberal, as Americans define the term these days. He's for same-sex unions, though not gay marriage. He's pro-choice. A Catholic, he's been married three times. His first marriage was annulled on dubious grounds -- he suddenly discovered his wife was his second cousin. And his second marriage ended in a tabloid divorce of biblical proportions.

Giuliani also has a decidedly liberal record on immigration; how could a mayor of New York not?
But Giuliani was considered a raging right-winger as mayor. No doubt this had a lot to do with the fact that the city's political center is so far to the left. But there was a lot more to Giuliani's philosophy. When I grew up in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, the job of mayor was, essentially, to manage the city's decline. Crime was not only seen as permanent, some on the left even tried to rationalize it as part of the city's charm.

By the time Giuliani arrived, social chaos was seen as the natural order of things. Giuliani heroically challenged these assumptions on almost all fronts. He and his first police commissioner, William J. Bratton (now chief of the LAPD), refused to accept that mere containment was the best that crime fighters could hope for.

By now, many are familiar with the story of Giuliani's quality-of-life campaign against turnstile jumpers, welfare cheats, squeegee men, graffiti artists and porn shops. But what is forgotten is that Giuliani was reviled for all these efforts by the New York Times, the entertainment industry and the intellectual left -- whose numbers are so great in the Big Apple that they actually constitute a voting bloc -- and that every day he leaped back into the breach.

But Giuliani's stellar performance after 9/11 has erased this story from the public memory banks. And that's a problem, because for Giuliani to have any chance of winning the Republican nomination, he'll need to remind conservatives -- the people who vote in GOP primaries -- that he's more than just the feel-good mayor everyone suddenly loved after 9/11. To do this, he not only needs to convince conservatives that he made all the right enemies on the left, he also needs to explain how his actions in New York were consistent with conservative philosophy.

I think -- and polls corroborate -- that the conservative movement is more open to this pitch than either some of its self-interested leaders or those who report on them claim. First, observers make a grave mistake when they discount how seriously the religious right takes the war on terror. Whoever is the most plausible war president will have a good shot at the nomination. Moreover, conservatives love to talk about philosophy in the same way liberal activists love to talk about action. And contrary to the caricatures of rigid religious zealots in the mainstream press, social conservatives are often quite open to libertarian and small-government arguments.

But such arguments need to be made in the context of what Vice President George H.W. Bush once derisively called "the vision thing." Giuliani needs to articulate a Fortuynish vision for the American context. This might mean a zero-tolerance attitude on terror, a crackdown on crime (including corporate graft) and explaining how his mayoralty actually had socially conservative effects by liberating New York from the stranglehold of the identify-politics left.

Giuliani needs to tell a story of how he beat Al Sharpton at every turn. Giuliani's cheery immigrant story and his personal liberalism make him a particularly formidable spokesman for such a vision. Yes, taken piecemeal, his views on social issues could be a real albatross in GOP primaries (though it's worth noting that Giuliani, while personally pro-choice, signals that he would appoint judges in the mold of Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas). But if Giuliani can make those sorts of issues seem secondary to a broader defense of American civilization, he's got a chance to go all the way.

(C) 2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

"Sleeper Cell" will keep you awake nights

David Forsmark
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
December 21, 2006

Since it’s obvious that Nancy Pelosi’s choice to be House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Silvestre Reyes, has been daydreaming through committee meetings since 9/11, here’s an idea on how to educate him that might actually hold his interest: Send the Chairman copies of cable network Showtime’s superb, just completed antiterrorism series, Sleeper Cell.

At least then he would know that Al Qaeda is a Sunni organization. And, after witnessing a scene where a deep cover terrorist is so enraged by a moderate Shi’ite Imam that he physically attacks him over a 700 year old dispute, Reyes would at least not be ignorant of the diffrerence between Shia and Sunni.

In fact, since ol’ Silvestre seems to know more about Democrat talking points than about counter-terrorism, someone should send him a DVD set containing last season’s Sleeper Cell as well as this season’s. While it won’t make him the expert he ought to be, the following tidbits might prepare him for the shock he will no doubt receive when he is forced to start dealing with real world information:

· Unlike the portrayals in other movies, terrorists are more likely to be financed by Wahabbist sheiks than by WASP billionaires or by slick poker players at swanky European casinos.

· Surveillance of radical mosques and Islamic centers is not religious persecution but a matter of survival.

· The war in Iraq is very important to Al Qaeda leaders who do NOT consider it a sideshow.

· The conspiracy theories put out by the allies of Silvestre’s party like Moveon.org and their ilk, along with their calls for American weakness and exaggeration of enemy victories really do encourage the other side to fight on.

· High value Al Qaeda targets don’t break because they are threatened with imprisonment or asked in a constitutionally prettified way to cooperate.

Sleeper Cell: American Terror is the show’s second season, in which FBI undercover agent Darwin Al-Sayid (an intense but low key Michael Ealy) who is himself both a black man and also a faithful Muslim disturbed by the radicals’ hijacking of his faith, infiltrates an Al Qaeda cell operating in Los Angeles. The story picks up immediately after Season 1, where Darwyn thwarted a chemical attack on the Rose Bowl.

The leader of the sleeper cell, Farik (played with a menacing mix of sophisticated slickness and evangelical fervor by Israeli actor Oded Fehr) is in custody and enduring aggressive questioning by the CIA as a result of the prior attack, disrupted by Darwyn. Because Darwyn’s cover is still intact, he is selected by the imams up the Al Qaeda chain of command to lead a new cell of terrorists.

The cell this time includes a Latino Jose Padilla-lookalike who was recruited by a Muslim prison chaplain, a female Dutch radical whose husband was “martyred” in Iraq, and a homosexual Saudi mechanical engineer whose private life under more wraps than his jihadi activities.

What gives Sleeper Cell its unique edge—and makes it unlike any other television show dealing with terrorism--is that rather than use Darwyn’s religion as a politically correct mitigating factor to imply that the terrorists’ Islamism is beside the point, that they are just bad guys who happen to be Muslims, series creator Kamran Pasha, himself a Muslim, uses this device to directly engage the jihadi ideology.

American radicals also take a huge hit in both seasons of Sleeper Cell. In the first season, one of the cell members is the spoiled son of a stridently antiwar, anti-American Berkley professor. This season, Ilija—a survivior of the take down that broke the cell in the first season, is hiding out with a woman who obviously spends a lot of time on left wing websites. "You know,” she enthuses, “Every time we have sex, it's like the ultimate f--- you to Bush, Cheney and the whole 9/11 plot. I just keep picturing Giuliani and the rest of those assholes supervising the whole thing from that $15 million bunker on the twenty-third floor of Building 7. You know that's where they broadcast the homing signal from, to make sure the planes would hit the towers."

The smirk on her Al Qaeda operative lover’s face who knows full well what Al Qaeda is capable of is priceless as he answers. "I know, and the Pentagon was actually hit by a CIA Global Hawk drone so the administration could start an endless war and turn America into a police state."

We also meet Darwyn’s father--played by series director Charles S. Dutton with his signature bristle of barely controlled fury-- who is a bow-tie wearing member of the Nation of Islam. Dad is mighty ticked off that Darwin works for the FBI, and doesn’t respond well when his son points out that it was HIS crowd who “killed Malcom” and that his dad’s grievances are all over 40 years old.

On the down side, the producers of Sleeper Cell feel the need to remind us this is pay cable, so they get to show sex and nudity. With the gay subplot, I’m sure they thought they were being really daring with several very explicit scenes. There is, however, a delicious irony in cell member Salim’s conversations with his boyfriend when he points out what would happen to them in his own country if they were discovered—this at the same time that we see Salim working to force Sharia law on the rest of the world.

But for all of its cable network grittiness and occasional stabs at cynicism, Sleeper Cell is relentlessly pro-American. Even if it doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve, Darwyn’s responses to rhetorical attacks on his country are stirring.

When an Al Qaeda higher up in a climactic battle demands of Darwyn, “What kind of true Muslim works for the Americans?” Darwyn’s reply is: “I don’t work for the Americans—I AM American.” And when his father challenges Darwin by asking what color his boss is and how much he is involved in the decision making process, he answers, “It’s not my strategy, but it IS my war.” The discussion, which involved Darwyn’s army service—his dad was drafted during Vietnam, he volunteered later on, which drives the father’s resentment— even implies that the war in Iraq is part of the seamless whole of fighting Islamic terror.

Get the original Sleeper Cell on DVD. Get this one on DVD when it comes out. Watch Sleeper Cell III on Showtime next year. This is television that tells it like it is about terrorism and leaves no doubt that America is at war.

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Film Review: "Rocky Balboa"

The Sixth Coming of Rocky
Stallone returns to his religious roots.

By John J. Miller
http://www.nationalreview.com

Watching all six rounds of the Rocky epic from start to finish — the first five are available in a new DVD anthology and the sixth reaches movie theaters today — takes more than ten hours. Those who go the distance may want to leap up and declare, as Rocky does at the end of Rocky II, “Yo, Adrian! I did it!”

The images of Sylvester Stallone’s character as he trains for his sport and battles the likes of Apollo Creed (played by Carl Weathers), Clubber Lang (Mr. T), and Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) are instantly memorable. The scene of Rocky running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to the magnificent music of Bill Conti, must rank as one of the most stirring ever recorded on film.

Despite this familiarity, probably only a few die-hard movie buffs will remember that the very first person that viewers see in the very first Rocky movie isn’t anyone who wears golden gloves — but rather someone who explains the golden rule. That initial scene begins with a picture of Jesus on a wall in an old church that’s been converted into a gym. Then the camera pans down to Rocky and Spider Rico punching each other in a ring. In the background hangs a sign: “Resurrection A.C.,” as in “Resurrection Athletic Club.”

That’s called symbolism, folks, and in a series of interviews to promote Rocky Balboa, the new movie, Stallone has reminded listeners of this beginning and told them about his newfound Catholic faith. “I wanted to signal that this man will make a journey,” he said at a recent event in Washington, D.C. (Stallone not only has starred in each of the six Rocky movies, but he has written them as well — and that first screenplay has been ranked among the best ever.)

And now Rocky Balboa is being pitched specifically to religious audiences. Check out this website, for instance — or Stallone’s interview with Catholic Digest, or his dialogue with Focus on the Family and the Christian culture blog Thought Quotient.

“I really wanted to end the series on this note,” said Stallone in Washington. “I ended it badly in Rocky V. I was in a different place. I wasn’t feeling spiritual at the time. I wasn’t going to church. I was doing it all on my own. See how I do it on my own? Not very good!”

Rocky V, which was released in 1990, is widely considered the worst in the series. At the box office, it earned a pittance compared to earlier ones. “I felt so guilty that I had let everyone down and let my lifestyle ruin Rocky,” said Stallone. “I started to pray more.”

Stallone credits his faith with helping him get the Rocky series — and his life — back on track. “This thing is a spiritual journey,” he said, referring to the seven years it took for him to convince a studio to get behind Rocky Balboa. “I believed it was destined to have a final sendoff that would leave people with hope.”

He also wanted to film it before he grew much older: Stallone recently turned 60. In this sixth and presumably final installment, Rocky comes out of retirement for a final exhibition match. His determination recalls that of George Foreman, who got back in the ring and captured his second heavyweight title at the age of 45.

Stallone, the man of reborn faith, has a new slogan: “The church is the gym of the soul.” In this audio interview, Stallone explains that he knows a lot about exercise, and then expands: “You need help, you need a trainer, you need to go to a gym and you need guidance. You cannot train yourself. And I feel the same way about Christianity and I feel the same way about what the church is — the church is the gym of the soul. And the priests, the reverends, the ministers, and the pastors are the trainers. They are the ones that guide you.”

He continues: “People say ‘I can do it on my own. I can have a one-on-one relationship with god.’ Well, it isn’t quite the same, it isn’t the same. I found that out the hard way. ... The more I go to church and the more I turn myself over to the process of believing in Jesus and listening to His word and having him guide my hand, I feel as though the pressure’s off me now. ... You put in the time, you will reap the benefits.”

Want to put in the time for one more Rocky flick? Rocky Balboa is a solid piece of big-screen entertainment — not nearly as good as that first film and derivative in key ways, but a story that nevertheless holds its own.

The Rocky films are not religious movies. The new one, however, is clearly a movie made by a man of faith. You don’t have to be a churchgoer to appreciate it, though moviegoers who also attend church will find that parts of it resonate with them in agreeable ways. Crosses hang from necks and stand in cemeteries. Spider Rico returns, this time as a Bible-quoting hanger-on. (Before Balboa’s final match, Spider reads from Zechariah 4:6.) Then there’s Rocky, who crosses himself in the ring and, in one of his rough-hewn soliloquies, asks a question that Jesus might pose, if He were from the streets of working-class Philly and wanted to make a point about God’s love: “Why you gotta owe somethin’ to get somethin’?”

Film Review: "Rocky Balboa"

Return of That Fighter With a Soft Heart Inside a Hard Body

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
The New York Times
Published: December 20, 2006

Aw, ya can’t help but love da big Palooka! Under all dem muscles the champ’s still got a heart o’ gold.

Who else could that be but Rocky Balboa? Sylvester Stallone’s endearing alter ego with the droopy eyes and dungeon-master croak has slouched back onto the screen, bowed but unbroken, to fight the good fight one more time. Since he was last seen 16 years ago in “Rocky V,” this two-time former heavyweight champion, now pushing 60 (Mr. Stallone’s age), has evolved a philosophy of the ring that befits an older, slower athlete.

The measure of a prizefighter is not how much punishment you can give but how much you can take, he declares more than once. In other words, heroism equals masochism; no gain without pain. Mel Gibson would understand.

Mr. Stallone’s body is a sight. A weightlifter’s slab of aged meat, knotted with tiny hard veins popping out of the shoulders, it is just this side of muscle-bound and somewhat grotesque. It is something you might see hung in the window of a steak house and wonder what kind of carnivore would order such a leathery, sinewy carcass.

When I first learned of this film, presumably the final episode in the “Rocky” franchise, the idea of the 60-year-old Rocky going at it one last time sounded risible. Reports of audiences snickering derisively at trailers for the movie seemed to confirm my expectations.

Surprisingly “Rocky Balboa,” is no embarrassment. Like its forerunners it goes the distance almost in spite of itself. It’s all heart and no credibility except as a raw-boned fable. From the very beginning Rocky Balboa was about as lifelike a character as Popeye pumped up with spinach. But that may be the point of a series that peddles the notion that if you dream it hard enough, you can live it.

For what T. S. Eliot wrote about humans being unable to bear “too much reality” is doubly true for moviegoers. Most of us go to the movies to sit in the dark and dream the impossible dream, whether it’s fighting a heavyweight bout or playing love scenes with Brad and Angelina.
Like “Rocky,” the Bicentennial fantasy that inaugurated the series, “Rocky Balboa” is a skeletal movie, a live-action cartoon that operates on cartoon logic. Don’t ask why this former heavyweight champion still lives in squalor in South Philadelphia while owning a popular restaurant named after his sainted wife, Adrian (now five years gone from cancer)? Don’t ask why his whiny son, Robert (Milo Ventimigilia), a charmless yuppie manqué with a chip on his shoulder, does not bear the slightest resemblance to his father.

Be happy to relive the good old times and to appreciate the touchstones that are dutifully trotted out. Here comes Rocky’s combative brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young), a character seen in every Rocky movie and looking much the worse for wear, to loiter disconsolately at the restaurant for no particular reason. And here comes Bill Conti’s familiar blaring theme music when the action finally picks up.

Now more than ever Rocky Balboa seems a throwback to the era of the chaste noble athlete who is too pure for sex. He’d rather pray at the shrine of his dead wife than think of finding a new one. When the possibility of romance presents itself in the person of Marie (Geraldine Hughes), a barmaid and single mother, who in the original “Rocky” was a teenager who hurled abuse at him, he is oblivious. But she too is a throwback. Wide-eyed and pug-faced, tough but understanding, she is a true-blue sidekick for a Dead End Kid, and Rocky, in his infinite generosity, invites her to work in his restaurant.

“Rocky Balboa” drags its feet for a dangerously long time before the main course sashays onto the screen. When a computer-simulated match between Rocky (in his fighting prime) and the current heavyweight champion Mason (The Line) Dixon (the light heavyweight Antonio Tarver), determines that Rocky would win, people get excited. Dixon, though undefeated, has earned so little respect after a series of easy victories that his management decides that an exhibition match in which Dixon holds back his full power would be good for his career.

A grunting and heaving training montage follows, and finally the bout, a 10-round cliffhanger in Las Vegas with every bell and whistle activated, in which neither fighter holds back. And that’s it. Gonna fly now.

“Rocky Balboa” is rated PG (Parental Guidance suggested). It has violence, but it’s confined to the ring.

ROCKY BALBOA
Opens today nationwide.

Written and directed by Sylvester Stallone; director of photography, Clark Mathis; edited by Sean Albertson; music by Bill Conti; production designer, Franco-Giacomo Carbone; produced by Charles Winkler, William Chartoff and David Winkler; released by MGM Pictures.
Running time: 102 minutes.

WITH: Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa), Burt Young (Paulie), Geraldine Hughes (Marie), Milo Ventimiglia (Robert Balboa Jr.), Antonio Tarver (Mason “The Line” Dixon), James Francis Kelly III (Steps) and Tony Burton (Duke).

Film Review: "Apocalypto" by Stephen Hunter

'Apocalypto': Driven by A Hunter's Gut Instincts
Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 8, 2006; Page C01

"Apocalypto" turns out to be not a case of Montezuma's revenge but of Mel Gibson's: It's something entirely unexpected, a sinewy, taut poem of action.

Brazenly politically incorrect, it actually connects with another cult film of epic political incorrectness. Old-timers will immediately be put in mind of Cornel Wilde's "Naked Prey" of 1966, a brilliant if racist classic in which the "natives" of an unnamed tribe capture a Briton on safari and, after finding various colorful tortures for his companions, decide to stalk him for sport. The movie then devolves to pure narrative as the valiant, agile, resilient, tough-as-leather-bowstring hunter turns the tables on his pursuers.

The same figure is at the center of "Apocalypto": A hunter being hunted, who turns out to be equally valiant, agile, resilient and tough as leather bowstring. And, like his British antecedent, he hunts back. It isn't pretty, except of course -- by the subversive rules of cinema -- it is, especially when he puts spectacular coups de grace on the most savage of his pursuers. I liked the one where he cracks the guy in the skull with a bone-headed club and this little gurgle of blood, almost dainty, spurts out of the shattered skull. That was cool!

The scene and time demand some explication. It's Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in vaguely pre-Columbian times, in that seemingly endless epoch when the mighty Mayan city-states ruled supreme and took their pleasures from the land and surrounding peoples with no thought to consequence or brotherhood. They were rulers; everyone else was naked prey.

Our hero is no city Maya, however. He is one Jaguar Paw (brilliant, supple, expressive Rudy Youngblood), of an indigenous forest people. Certainly Gibson over-romanticizes this hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In a Potemkin village of surpassing beauty, these happy children of innocence cavort like so many Rima the Bird Girls, chattering in Yucatek (which subtitles translate into a kind of hardy peasant English, bringing to mind Frodo and his mates), joking healthily about sex, living in perfect monogamy in warm little family units under the watchful eye of the benevolent patriarch Flint Sky. Under it, I could see folk memories of Middle Earth or even, for God's sake, Winnetka.

Gibson makes decisions to tell certain forgotten truths. The opening sequence depicts a team bringing down a tapir: The movie gets not merely the necessity of the hunt, and the agony of the beast, but the exhilaration. And when these rangy guys begin the alchemy of butchery by which a corpse becomes meat, Gibson forces you (PETA people, not you ) to feel what they feel: My name will be sung at the tribal fires tonight, my children will go to bed with full bellies, and I will probably get laid.

But this is all about to end. One morning -- the portents have been over-dramatic -- the Mayans arrive in force. And why, you wonder, would the Forest People not even have heard of them and made no preparations, as they are about two days' march from a Mayan urban center? The only answer is that it suits the political agenda of the picture, which is to subvert notions about the "innocence" of native peoples and the "guilt" of usurpers from the outside. In other words, in Gibson's worldview, the Mayans are to the Forest People exactly as, sometime later, the Spaniards would be to the Mayans. It's all a question of empire prerogative.
The results are not pretty. Think of the attack on the village in "Conan the Barbarian" as if really directed by Conan the Barbarian. Gibson's view of the brutal coinage of human exchange, well publicized in "Jesus: The Movie" -- I mean, "The Passion of the Christ" -- is on graphic display, as slaughter is general and bloody, and capture is debasing and grotesque. With the survivors secured by thong and neck brace, the surviving children left to die, the Mayans herd their captives off for disposal.

This begins the film's center passage, a kind of tour of the hell that is the Mayan city-state. We see it from the dazzled captive outsider's point of view. It appears to be late in the day for Mayan rule, as slash-and-burn agriculture has finally used up the land, and so the elaborate trade routes between cities have withered. Plague has struck. The priest-kings of the Maya have turned to human sacrifice for salvation.

The extent of Mesoamerican sacrifice has always been problematic: The latest conclusion seems to be that both the Mayans and the Aztecs practiced it extensively, though the Mayans not nearly as much as the Aztecs, which prompts the question: Why didn't Gibson make a movie about the Aztecs? In any event, his portrayal of the urban lifestyle of the Mayan yuppie class will certainly raise hackles among the self-appointed enlightened, even as it mesmerizes the unwashed. He conjures up a city built around genocide as religious ceremony, and shows the swift deliverance of new victims to the temples, their quick blue paint job (actually more of a cobalt-marine candy coating) and their arrival at the pinnacle of death. There, each in turn is splayed backward over a ceremonial post, his limbs secured by four priests while a fifth performs the myocardial interruption with a flint knife. Talk about the land of the brokenhearted!

The film's version of Mayan culture is -- hmm, what can you say? It's not overly opulent, seemingly made mostly of ziggurats and shanties, with no shopping malls or T.G.I. Fridays anywhere in sight. It reminded me a little of the place where Natalie Portman lived in one of the later "Star Wars" movies, and all the women look a little Princess Padme Amidala. It's just a hair short of out-and-out kitsch and in some venues giggles and snorts will be heard, though the tattoos are very cool and the Nefertiti hairdos all the rage.

You can see where this is going, but that doesn't really prevent you from enjoying it immensely. Jaguar Paw, as it turns out, is the messenger of the gods, he who is specified in prophecy as harbinger of the end of days, according to the movie's official haunted-little-girl truth-speaker. Thus, by various largely unbelievable contrivances, he manages to escape, which sets up the film's last, best hour.

Gibson may not be much of a deep thinker -- and there's no reason why this part of this story couldn't have been set just about anywhere in the world where men kill men -- but he's a heck of a storyteller. The central device of the last hour of the film, Jaguar Paw's freedom run with a crew of Mayan thugs in hot pursuit, is helped by two exceptionally strong, almost demonic acting performances. As the Obersturmbannfuehrer, in a jawbone hat with a fancy knife, is Raoul Trujillo, who exudes aristocratic sang-froid. Then there's Rodolfo Palacios as Snake Ink, more of a weasel than a brute. A terrific actor, he makes you see Snake Ink's guile and wisdom, warped sense of humor and his enjoyment of pain infliction as minor amusement strategy. To Snake Ink, slitting a throat is kind of like buying a new tune for your iPod.

It must be said that whatever its lumpy geopolitical agitprop, Gibson's "Apocalypto" is the lowest, maybe the best kind of -- this is a strange but necessary word for a film this bloody -- fun. It really goes like hell.

Apocalypto (135 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for extreme violence and gore and disturbing images. In Yucatek with English subtitles.

Sean Daniels: The Arab Race for the Bomb

Sean Daniels
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
December 20, 2006

Iran’s Mullahs are no longer the only apparent contenders for a nuclear crown in the Islamic Middle East.

As of December 10th, six more Arab nations declared their intention to gain nuclear energy at the annual meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Riyadh. Only the day before, Iran exacerbated tensions throughout the region by announcing that it had already begun “installing 3,000 centrifuges” in the “first step toward industrial production” of “nuclear fuel.” In this context, the GCC’s actions indicate a growing perception that the U.S. is on the verge of retreating from Iraq and may negotiate with Iran in order to achieve this end, as the recent Baker report proposed. Gulf players are now beginning to act to confront the aggression of Iran in the belief that the U.S. never will, signaling even greater division in a region that edges ever closer toward a full-blown nuclear arms race.

While Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, later attempted to assuage anxiety by reasserting the council’s “peaceful purposes” in pursuing nuclear energy, Arab pundits praised the GCC’s nuke statement as a “clear, strong and courageous” response to Iran’s nuclear program and the first show of true strength among the Sunni nations toward Shiite Iran’s growing power. According to journalist Fouad al-Hashem, Sunni nations will no longer stand idly by while Shiite Iran achieves nuclear power; “with the help of [their] allies, [the Sunni nations intend to] balance the power and build [their] own reactors even if [they] don't need them.”

Gulf leaders, of course, were more diplomatic in addressing their concerns about Iran during the summit. Saudi King Abdullah opened the GCC summit with a dire warning that the “region is […] a powder keg waiting for a spark to explode.” We “do not feel threatened by Tehran,” GCC Secretary General Abdulrahman al-Attiyaha added, but we have grave concerns “about Shiite Iran’s growing role in Iraq and its standoff with the West over Tehran's nuclear program.”

The tone of the summit also revealed that the GCC nations – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman – connect Iran’s nuclear aggression with its funding of Shiite violence and terror in Iraq. In fact, a number of reports indicate that the Saudis, who are the most prominent members of the GCC and hosted the summit this year, are already involved in combating Iranian power in Iraq with “Saudi money from private donations […] being used to buy weapons” for Sunni insurgents to combat Shiia and, therefore, Iranian power in Iraq.

So far, Saudi Arabia has denied “major” involvement in the Iraq conflict, but it recently warned that it would back the Sunnis if the U.S. pulls out of Iraq. These warnings are a sign that the Sunni-Shiite divide in Iraq has begun to draw surrounding Arab countries into the fighting along sectarian ties. This is why the GCC’s nuclear statement represents a major declaration that the Sunni world will not tolerate Iranian power without nuclear and military proliferation of its own.

Kamal Nawash, president of the Free Muslims Coalition, explained the mounting tensions between Sunni and Shiite power in this way: many of the Arab nations “see that for the first time in history, the tide is changing in [Shiite] favor […] there is real concern about the future. Iran is being pretty aggressive in imposing its will, and it is not even that strong now. So they are thinking, ‘Imagine if it becomes a real regional power – it could be unstoppable.’”

According to Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a new era in Mid-East politics has arisen, one in which America’s “unprecedented influence and freedom to act” in the region over the past twenty years have come to end. [1] The GCC’s recent declarations reveal that many believe that Haass’ assessment could indeed be true, and that we are entering an era where outside influence might have a lot less impact on the fate of the region. The fact that Israeli officials actually welcomed the GCC’s nuclear intentions reveals that new alliances are forming along Sunni/Shiite lines. Fearing that U.S. action no longer necessarily guarantees a stable Middle East, Israel seeks to buffer the Iranian threat and sees the Sunni nations as potential “allies.” Where once Sunni nations used “code words” to address Iran’s nuke ambitions, now these nations “are coming out of the closet in a big way” in their opposition to Iran, said one Israeli official requesting anonymity.

Iran is also betting that the U.S. will do nothing to curb its bid for dominance in the region. Just last week in a Time Magazine interview, Ahmadinejad’s propaganda was clear: the era of American power is over and a new one is arising. “We believe that the American government cannot do anything against us,” he announced, boastfully concluding the interview.

Notwithstanding these developments, our supposed waning influence in the Arab World is by no means assured. Despite the echoes of failure that reverberate in Washington and in our national media, America still has abundant power to curb nuclear aspirations in the Arab world. Indeed, the Sunni nuclear posture may appear like a defensive, even pragmatic option in regards to the Iranian threat, but we must not forget that America went to war to keep nuclear technology out of the hands of tyrants. To renege on this now would be to accept failure not just in our very involvement in the region, but in Iraq as well.

Not all Mid-East players wish to see the U.S. bow out either. GCC statesmen privately admit that “they could not put up a credible defense [against Iranian power] without the United States.” For this reason, the GCC Sunni nations have been very careful not to commit to a full-fledged nuclear program. All of their declarations are as-yet initial; they are bidding their time, while warning of Iran’s outright efforts to set up a state within a state in Iraq. Their hesitation to commit either to nuclear technology or to explicitly confronting Iran’s hand in Iraq means, moreover, that the U.S. has a small window to act before the race for the bomb becomes too widespread to prevent or contain.

Acting against the GCC nations’ desire for nuclear power, therefore, not only would be premature, but would serve to isolate the U.S. even more from allies – of circumstance – who wish to see America remain in the Middle East. Our ability to prevent nuclear proliferation in the Arab world remains firmly rooted in the choices we will make in Iraq and towards Iranian aggression.

The first step in reaffirming our commitment to Mid-East stability would be in rejecting the Iraq Study Group’s call for immediate negotiations with Iran based so clearly on the recommended retreat from Iraq. As Robert Kagan has recently affirmed, Jim Baker’s assumption that there is no harm in trying to make a deal with Iran is fundamentally and dangerously flawed. There can be a great deal of harm, Kagan profoundly reminds us, “when we go pandering to our adversaries from a position of weakness, begging for their help.”

More importantly, the Iraq Study Group’s call for negotiations means tacitly allowing Iran to have nuclear weapons. Besides touching off a nuclear arms race among unstable Muslim nations in the Arab world, such a development significantly increases the chances of a terrorist group getting a nuclear missile, resulting in terror on an unprecedented scale.

We must also formally recognize that Iran has already declared war on us both in word and in deed. President Ahmadinejad’s announcement last year that a “world without America and Israel is both possible and feasible” to an audience chanting “death to Israel, death to America, death to England” is nothing new, but a logical extension of a war that began in 1979 when Islamists seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran. On these grounds, we must act to reclaim the Iranian issue that we so carelessly conferred to the United Nations. Clearly, the U.S. can gain no ground by relying on such an ineffective body to impose sanctions or propose action against Tehran.

Only with the determination to follow through with our Iraq mission can the U.S. confront Iran, a confrontation that must be backed by a sober threat of a strong military option. We must be clear that we are not seeking Iran’s help – neither in Iraq nor on the nuclear issue; on the contrary, we are responding in a clear and measured way to Iran’s aggression and giving it options on how to avoid military punishment. Such warnings would not be seen as a bluff. The Mullahs have only to reflect on Saddam’s arrogance before the U.S. invasion and the fact that he presently sits in an Iraqi jail cell awaiting execution.

ENDNOTES:

[1] Richard N. Haass. “The New Middle East.” Foreign Affairs. November/December, 2006.

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Sean Daniels is Frontpage Magazine's contributing editor.

Jeff Jacoby: Words that can kill

Boston Globe
December 20, 2006

SIMON BIKINDI was once the most famous musician in Rwanda. Twelve years ago he was also the most lethal.

In 1994, as Hutu militants slaughtered more than 800,000 of Rwanda's minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus, it was Bikindi's inflammatory songs that dominated the country's airwaves.
Radio Milles Collines, which egged on the death squads and coordinated their attacks, "played Bikindi's music constantly during the 100 days of killing," the New York Times recalled in 2002.
" According to eyewitness reports, many of the killers sang Bikindi's songs as they hacked or beat to death hundreds of thousands of Tutsis with government-issued machetes and homemade nail-studded clubs."

Today Bikindi is being tried by the international tribunal created to bring Rwanda's accused war criminals to justice. The central charge against him is that he incited genocide with his songs. He is not the only Rwandan to be put on trial for incitement. Among those already convicted are a founding director of Radio Milles Collines and the one time editor of Kangura, a virulently anti-Tutsi newspaper.

Words can be deadly, opening the door to murder on a vast scale. That is why the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide unambiguously makes it as much of a crime to incite acts of genocide as to physically commit them. And if that is true of words uttered by a singer or an editor, surely it is even truer of exhortations to mass murder by a head of state .

So if Simon Bikindi has been charged with incitement to commit genocide, why hasn't Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

In New York last week, a number of prominent lawyers and diplomats -- including John Bolton, the outgoing American ambassador to the United Nations -- called for making the indictment of Ahmadinejad an international priority. The gathering was organized by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which issued a brief setting out in detail the legal case for prosecuting the Iranian president and the regime he represents.

There is nothing cryptic about Iran's genocidal intentions. Ahmadinejad has called openly for Israel to be "wiped off the map." In 2005 he hosted a conference anticipating "The World Without Zionism"; last week he convened another to deny that the Nazi Holocaust ever took place. He vows that "the elimination of the Zionist regime will be smooth and simple." He demonizes Jews as "bloodthirsty barbarians" and "very filthy people" who have "inflicted the most damage on the human race." In August he warned: "They should know that they are nearing the last days of their lives."

Ahmadinejad is not some obstreperous politician whom Iran's clerics would be wise to muzzle. His words echo genocidal threats made at the highest levels of the Tehran regime.

"There is only one solution to the Middle East problem," declares Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, "namely, the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state." Former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, routinely described in the West as a "moderate," explains the asymmetrical advantage of a nuclear attack on Israel: "The use of a nuclear bomb against Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas [any Israeli retaliation] would only damage the world of Islam." Iran is aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons; it already has the long-range missiles needed to launch them. When those missiles are paraded behind signs reading "Israel must be uprooted and erased from history," it requires willful blindness not to perceive what Ahmadinejad and the mullahs have in mind.

For many months preceding the Rwandan genocide, there was similar incitement to mass-murder. Yet international authorities did nothing to silence the inciters -- with catastrophic results.

The situation in Iran today is frighteningly similar, the JCPA brief argues. With one critical difference: "While the Hutus in Rwanda were equipped with . . . machetes, Iran, should the international community do nothing to prevent it, will soon acquire nuclear weapons." At that point Tehran would be poised to commit the first "instant genocide" in history.

At the New York symposium, Ambassador Bolton remarked that historians looking back at horrific acts of evil often wonder how responsible officials at the time didn't see them coming.
"How was it that they missed . . . clear signals from the people who were about to commit acts of great barbarity and atrocity -- who never made any effort to conceal what their intentions were?"

Iran's intentions are nakedly, malignantly clear. What is not clear at all is what the civilized world will do about it. An indictment of Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention would not, by itself, eliminate the threat of a second Holocaust. It would, however, make a good first step.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

John O'Sullivan: Reagan ranch corrals heroic memories

December 19, 2006
Chicago Sun-Times

Last Friday I was standing on a mountain behind Santa Barbara on the California coastline looking out on some of the most beautiful landscape in America. High in the Santa Ynez hills is Ronald Reagan's Rancho del Cielo that from 1981 to 1989 doubled as the Western White House. I was there as the guest of the Young America's Foundation, which purchased the ranch and, with the help of generous donations from loyal Reaganites, has lovingly restored the ranch house and the property.

One of the benefits of writing a book is that you get to travel on a book tour. If you love America, as I have since I first came here as an English schoolboy in 1949, you relish the chance to see more of this vast land and to meet more of its open-hearted people. I had been asked by the YAF to speak over lunch at their Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara on the topic of my new book: The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister. This is an account of how Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher together brought about the peaceful collapse of the Soviet empire and changed the world.

Half the audience had not been born when the Soviets were invading Afghanistan, when OPEC was quadrupling world oil prices, when American hostages were languishing in Tehran, and when the West was in headlong retreat. The other half had voted for Reagan because he promised to reverse these defeats and, still more important, to dispell the "malaise" of despair that characterized not America but the Carter administration and that largely explained its helplessness. He kept his promises too. Hence the fascination of the younger generation with the Gipper and his two great allies. If they had vanquished these greater evils 20 years ago, what lessons could we learn from them in defeating the evils that today threaten America and the West?

There are many answers to this question. But one answer is that Reagan and Thatcher would not have allowed the genocidal ravings of Iran's President Ahmadinejad to go unanswered. They would have addressed the Iranian people directly as decent people not represented by their political leaders but instead oppressed by them. Our present political leaders need to be as frank and as principled.

They also need to be hopeful. All of my three heroes -- Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II -- vanquished evil with a smile and on generous terms. They believed in the moral superiority and popular appeal of freedom as well as in its practical benefits. They offered Poland and the other "captive nations" the prospect of eventual liberation through peaceful strategies of cultural and political resistance. They gave Solidarity the weapons of politics -- money, radios, cell phones, faxes -- to achieve their liberation. And they won. We need to offer the Iranians the same hope and the same weapons.

When my talk was over, I was introduced to John Barletta who had been Reagan's Secret Service detail and who remained with the president in retirement. His moving account of the public and private Ronald Reagan has been published under the title Riding with Reagan. He gave me a copy, a preview of my visit to the Reagan Ranch -- and the assurance I would understand Reagan better when I saw how he had lived and wanted to live.

"Architecture is frozen music," said Goethe. It's also frozen politics. When you see Hitler's retreat, gazing down from the heights on the villages below, you glimpse his megalomania.
The architecture of the Reagan ranch, by contrast, is hardly architecture at all. The ranch is a simple farm structure -- a low-roofed ranch house with a veranda and a paved courtyard.

Reagan carved out the wooden fences from trees he had felled himself and paved the courtyard with stones he had broken with his own hands for exercise. Inside the ranch-house is larger than you expect, but very practical, domestic and comfortable at all points, with only the occasional presidential symbol or photograph of Queen Elizabeth or Mikhail Gorbachev to remind you that it is not really a regular working farm.

Reagan did not choose a house on a high bluff, looking down on either the mountains or sea. This is no "Eagle's Nest" or "Wolf's Lair." Instead, the house is situated in a hollow and looks out on a small lake with a hill rising behind it. One can imagine a small rancher sitting out on his veranda after a hard day of riding, watching the twilight arrive and setting aside his book. Indeed, that was Reagan's day whenever he could snatch time from Washington or later in retirement. He rode around his 600 acres, cleared brush, cut down trees, fell asleep over a book and occasionally entertained distinguished celebrities.

He was distressed when it rained so hard for a visit by Queen Elizabeth that they could not ride around his estate as they had ridden around Windsor Park. She said never mind, the weather made her feel "at home." Also, the president was too polite to tell Gorbachev that he was wearing his Stetson back to front.

Eventually, the day arrived when, after a near accident, Reagan could no longer ride safely. Mrs. Reagan hadn't the heart to tell him that he would have to give up his hobby of 55 years. Barletta was asked to do so: "Knowing him like I did and understanding what horseback riding meant to him, I felt like I was telling someone I don't think he should breathe anymore. I was now practically in tears. He got up and put his hands on my shoulders and said, 'It's OK, John. I know.' That was it. We never rode again. We never talked about it. He could see how upset I was, and he was trying to make me feel OK. That was the kind of guy he was. ..."

And because Reagan was that kind of guy, he could reach the hearts of people in prison camps and palaces around the world and win them over to his side. That's statecraft because it's soulcraft.

Thomas Sowell- Duke Case: The Worst Worsens

December 19, 2006
Thomas Sowell

In his book "The Great Crash 1929," John Kenneth Galbraith said: "The worst continued to worsen." The same can be said of the Duke University "rape" case and District Attorney Michael Nifong.

After all this time, it finally came out in court last week that the DNA samples collected from the underwear and private parts of the alleged victim contained DNA from other men -- but none from the Duke lacrosse players who were accused of raping her.

The head of the DNA testing laboratory testified in court under oath that both he and Nifong knew this and kept it secret.

You think that is incredible? How about a statement made afterwards by District Attorney Nifong that he didn't say anything about this publicly because he was "trying to avoid dragging any names through the mud"?

He certainly did not avoid dragging the names of the Duke lacrosse players through the mud. He not only denounced them, they were paraded in handcuffs in front of the national media. Their pictures were on every television news program across the country.

If these young men get completely exonerated, this episode will still follow them the rest of their lives. Yet they have not been convicted of anything and have not even gone to trial -- which is scheduled for next spring, if it ever takes place.

Indeed, they have not even been interviewed by the police or by the District Attorney who issued denunciations of these white lacrosse players when he was running for office and making a play for the black vote.

Nor has the District Attorney interviewed the woman who claimed to have been raped. In a "he said, she said" situation, anyone interested in the credibility of the two sides would at least have tried to find out what specifically they claimed.

But that is only if you care about the truth, rather than the politics of the situation. Politically, the District Attorney had a black woman who claimed that white men had raped her. That's all he needed to get elected.

Nifong has shown from day one what he was interested in. Showing the "rape" victim only photographs of white Duke lacrosse players was a violation of the basic principles of a lineup.

People who are known to be innocent are included in lineups just to test the credibility of whoever is identifying those picked out as guilty.

If you pick out somebody who was known to be overseas at the time, there goes your credibility. But District Attorney Nifong was not about to risk having the accuser's credibility tested, and certainly not before his election.

All the evidence that has come out has pointed the other way. One of the alleged rapists has a paper trail that shows he wasn't even there when he was supposed to be raping the "exotic dancer."

A black cab driver says he was with him, going to a bank's ATM to get some money -- and bank records show him there at the time when he was supposed to be committing rape.

When confronted with the fact that DNA tests failed to show that any of the Duke lacrosse players' DNA was present on the "exotic dancer," Nifong said that they could have used condoms.

Every part of your body has DNA that is left wherever you have had bodily contact. When you shake someone's hand, you leave your DNA. Each Duke student would have to have had a giant condom covering his whole body to avoid leaving DNA on someone he raped.

Far more is involved in this case than the misdeeds of one District Attorney. There is a segment of the black community -- a small segment, we can hope -- that figures it is payback time for all the black men who have been railroaded to jail on trumped-up charges involving the rape of white women.

The local branch of the NAACP, an organization which fought against such injustices in times past, has thrown its weight behind those who are trying to railroad three white students, who were not even born when these other injustices occurred.

Winston Churchill once said, "If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost." Nowhere is that more true than when dealing with the explosive mixture of race and politics.

Nifong deserves to be removed from office and disbarred. If he gets away with all this, it will be a blank check for every prosecutor in the country to abuse the powers of the office.

Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate

Pat Buchanan- Person of the Year: Ahmadinejad

December 19, 2006
Patrick Buchanan

Since 1927, the year Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in his single-engine Spirit of St. Louis, Time has devoted its final cover of the year to the Man of the Year. The Lone Eagle was first.

In the 1930s and 1940s, FDR was the Man of the Year three times. Stalin, Truman and Churchill made it twice, though the selection of Churchill in 1949 seems dubious, as he had been out of power four years, while Mao was seizing China by the throat in the bloodiest revolution of the century.

Hitler was chosen in the year of Anschluss and Munich, 1938. Gen. Marshall made it twice, as did Ike, in 1944 as victor of Normandy and, 15 years later, as president.

In the 1960s and 1970s, JFK made it once, LBJ and Nixon twice. Nixon's 1972 designation was shared with Henry Kissinger. In 1979, the dark and brooding face gracing Time's cover was that of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.

And Time got it right. For Time's Man of the Year, now Person of the Year, is the figure who, for good or evil, dominates the news. Yet this year Time could not bring itself to name the obvious choice. Instead, it chose you and me, all of us citizens of the digital democracy who create on the Worldwide Web. Why the copout?

Perhaps it was Ahmadinejad's hosting of a conference of Holocaust skeptics, including David Duke, that caused Time to recoil. Perhaps it was fear that the face of the Iranian president on the cover of Time would repel the American people and be death for sales.

Surely that was the reasoning behind Time's refusal to name Osama bin Laden in 2001, choosing Rudy Giuliani instead, though history is unlikely to conclude that Rudy, his crowded hour notwithstanding, was the central figure of that annus horribilis.

Richard Stengel, editor of Time, as much as concedes he could not bring himself to choose by the traditional standard, if that meant choosing Ahmadinejad: "It just felt to me a little off selecting him."

Understandably. But the refusal to select Ahmadinejad reveals an unwillingness to confront hard truths. For putting his face on Time's cover would have done a useful service, jolting America to a painful realization. Not only George Bush, but the United States, its Arab allies and Israel, had a dreadful year, as Iran emerged as first beneficiary of a war fought by this country at a cost of 25,000 dead and wounded.

What the choice of Ahmadinejad would have said is that Iran is in the ascendancy in the Middle East and it is not inconceivable that the United States is headed for defeat, not only in Iraq but Afghanistan.

The Taliban have come back. The Pakistanis have ceded them sanctuary. Some NATO nations are refusing to risk troops in combat. And it has been some time since guerrillas who enjoyed a privileged sanctuary in that part of the world failed to expel European soldiers perceived as imperial occupiers.

Islamists control Somalia. Anti-Americanism is rampant in Lebanon -- after Condi Rice blocked a U.N. ceasefire resolution to stop Israel's bombing last summer in what was supposed to be a campaign to clear Hezbollah from her northern border. The Beirut government could fall at any moment or be forced into a coalition with Hezbollah.

Even Bush's defense secretary concedes we are not winning in Iraq. It may take a "surge" of 20,000 to 40,000 troops to stave off defeat before the end of Bush's term. On the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas and Fatah appear on the brink of civil war. The elections Bush demanded produced dramatic gains for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine and Moqtada al-Sadr in Iraq.

Eighteen months ago, Ahmadinejad was the unknown mayor of Tehran. Today, he is the visible face of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, both a cause of and the personification of our failures. He has defied Bush's demand that he give up the enrichment of uranium, split the Security Council, mocked the Holocaust, called for the end of the Zionist state and the expulsion of America from the Mideast, terrified the Sunni monarchs, and united the Arab and Islamic masses behind his defiance.

His trip to the United Nations, where he ran circles around U.S. journalists, was a diplomatic triumph. And he has done it all not with military power -- Iran would not last a week in an all-out war with the United States and has no defense against Israel's nuclear weapons -- but with theatrics and rhetoric.

He inspires all who hate Israel and Bush's America. And, according to the Zogby polling today, that is a majority which, in some once-friendly nations, is approaching near unanimity.

Ahmadinejad, a man of words without real power, is the big winner of 2006, because Bush, America and Israel were the big losers.

Why do a billion Muslims prefer Ahmadinejad to America? That is the question that needs to be addressed.

Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate

Huskers Claim NCAA Volleyball Crown For Third Time

Published Monday
December 18, 2006

Huskers accomplish goals of winning title and reaching their potential

BY CHAD PURCELL

OMAHA WORLD-HERALD

Get home, then bring it home.

It's what every player on the Nebraska volleyball team had been living for since that dark night of Dec. 17, 2005, in San Antonio.

Just get home, then we can bring it home.

Washington swept aside the Huskers' championship dreams last December inside the cavernous Alamodome. Picture some 8,000 fans outnumbered by a sea of vacant blue seats at an NCAA championship match. Imagine a picture-perfect season burning out like a flashbulb because of the 13 points NU couldn't score.

Talk about an empty feeling.

Omaha's first final four surely would be different. That became clear as a winter day in January, when college volleyball's season-ending 2006 showcase sold out in a matter of hours.

The stage at Qwest Center Omaha was set. The new dream became more clearly defined. Omaha and the Huskers' rabid red-clad nation were going to give this sport's premier week the College World Series treatment.

But could Nebraska round the bases and slide into home? Could the Huskers come up with enough hits to make it all the way to Omaha? Or would they strike out along the way?

"This team felt just an enormous amount of pressure all year long," NU coach John Cook would admit after his team's journey came full circle. "For us not to make it to Omaha, that just would've felt devastating."

The Huskers took their first big steps last spring by traveling far, far away from home. They ventured on an ambitious offseason trip to Japan and China, where they tested themselves against some of the top players in the world.

They were gone more than two weeks. It felt longer. And during those tough times when all they wanted to do was come home, all they had was each other.

When Cook and his players got back to Lincoln in June, all seemed well; all except for Christina Houghtelling's right shoulder. Houghtelling had arthroscopic surgery just a month after the Huskers returned, a development that would shelve one of the biggest hammers in Cook's toolbox for the rest of 2006.

Nebraska already had said goodbye to star seniors Jennifer Saleaumua and Melissa Elmer. How in the world would the Huskers navigate the road to Omaha without Houghtelling, the 2005 national player of the year?
Sarah Pavan promised that she wouldn't let Nebraska fail. But she wouldn't be able to do it alone.

The Huskers would need Omaha's own Dani Mancuso to take ownership of the starting spot left vacant by Houghtelling's absence. They'd need an All-America season out of Jordan Larson, the sophomore sensation from Hooper, Neb.

They'd need Cortland, Neb., product Dani Busboom - who had her handprints on 91 career wins as NU's setter - to put on a libero's jersey and put her heart and soul into playing a new position. They'd need 18-year-old redshirt freshman setter Rachel Holloway to quarterback the attack like a seasoned veteran.

It all happened. It all came together during the course of a 27-1 regular season in which NU surprisingly opened the year ranked No. 1 and emphatically remained atop the poll the entire way.

It all looked like it was going to unravel again when Minnesota overwhelmed Nebraska for a 2-0 lead in the Gainesville, Fla., regional final. But Nebraska hung tough and dug deep to stage perhaps its most pressure-packed comeback.

And it all came to a crazed crest on Saturday night in front of a record gathering of 17,209 in downtown Omaha. Pavan, Larson and company pulled away from No. 2 Stanford in a four-game victory that locked up NU's first national championship since 2000.

The Huskers' usual cast of characters shined bright in the most hyped match in NCAA history. Joining the party - and contributing in a big way against the Cardinal - were diminutive defensive specialist Rachel Schwartz, the fan favorite out of Lincoln East, and middle blocker Amanda Gates, a sophomore from Columbus, Neb., who'd been biding her time on the bench for months.

"You talk about the ultimate goal," Nebraska junior Tracy Stalls said. "Our goal we kept talking about was to max out our potential. We did, and that's the best feeling. Together, we did."

There's talk that what happened this week in Omaha - which gets to put on another volleyballapalooza at the end of the 2008 season - could mark a watershed moment in this sport's history. Whether that proves true can only be assessed in time.

But right now, at this moment, these 2006 Huskers deserve to be celebrated. They'll never know how much they'd be haunted by missing out on all of this; we'll never know what this weekend would have been like without them.

They got home, they brought it home, they brought down the house.
"They never really wavered the entire year, and they embraced it if they did," Cook said. "To win this here in Nebraska, with this group of people overcoming the obstacles to get here, this has to rank No. 1 for me as a coach."

Michelle Malkin: Hazmat License Alert

Published December 16, 2006

What's the harm in allowing illegal aliens to have driver's licenses? After all, they're just all here innocently doing the jobs Americans won't do, right? And since they're already here, we might as well let them drive legally, right? We'll all be safer, right?

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Driver's licenses are tickets into the American mainstream. They allow residents to establish an identity and foothold into their communities. They help you open bank accounts, enter secure facilities, board planes -- and drive tractor-trailers carrying hazardous materials.

But there aren't any illegal aliens out there who would use fraudulently obtained driver's licenses to threaten Americans, right? That's just xenophobic scaremongering, right?

Wrong again.

Last week, law enforcement officials arrested an illegal alien enrolled at a Smithfield, R.I., tractor-trailer training school who was trying to obtain a commercial driver's license and permit to haul hazardous materials. Not many people paid attention. You should.

Illegal alien Mohammed Yusef Mullawala, 28, of Jamaica, N.Y., had obtained driver's licenses from New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island. He was reportedly in a hurry to get a commercial driver's license and a permit to haul hazardous cargo. Because he's just so passionate about the job, right? Yeah.

A joint investigation was initiated by the Rhode Island State Fusion Center, the Federal Bureau of Investigation Joint Terrorism Task Force in Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey, and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement after driver's school officials became concerned about his suspicious behavior.

"His behavior was consistent with terrorist-type activity," Rhode Island State Police Maj. Steve O'Donnell told reporters. "He showed no interest in learning the fine art of driving a tractor-trailer. He had no interest in learning how to back up." Sort of like learning how to steer a plane, but not take off or land.

As in several other cases since September 11, it was alert private citizens who notified the Department of Homeland Security of Mullawala's suspicious behavior. (They will no doubt be labeled Islamophobes and bigots by the usual grievance-mongering mob.)

And once again, it was enforcement of immigration laws that played a critical role in detaining him. Like some of the September 11 hijackers and several al Qaeda operatives identified in the United States over the past decade, Mullawala was here on a temporary student visa that he had overstayed.

Must I remind you that the September 11 hijackers obtained some 364 separate pieces of identification, including driver's licenses, in order to conduct their murderous business? Hijackers Hani Hanjour and Khalid Almihdhar conspired with illegal alien day laborers at a Falls Church, Va., 7-Eleven to obtain government-issued photo IDs. Three other hijackers obtained IDs at an Arlington, Va., Motor Vehicle Department office.

Terrorist truck bombs have killed hundreds of Americans in Beirut, at the Khobar Towers, and in Iraq. For the operatives behind the wheel, a license to drive is a license to kill. Over the last two years, the FBI has put law enforcement officials on high alert for U.S.-based operatives connected to al Qaeda who may possess commercial driver's licenses and be planning to use truck bombs.

In Boston, suspected al Qaeda agent and illegal alien Nabil al-Marabh obtained a license permitting him to drive semi-trucks containing hazardous materials, including explosives and caustic materials.
In Minneapolis, suspected al Qaeda operative Mohamad Elzahabi, who obtained a green card through a fake marriage, was able to obtain a commercial driver's license to drive a school bus and to haul hazardous materials -- despite FBI knowledge that Elzahabi had been tied to terrorism.

Earlier this year, more than 200 Somalian and Bosnian immigrants illegally obtained, through a West Plains truck-driving school with a state contract, Missouri commercial driver's licenses or certifications to handle hazardous materials, federal prosecutors say.

In just a few short weeks, Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi -- a staunch opponent of strengthened ID laws and strict immigration enforcement -- will reassume power in Washington. An open borders-friendly White House has expressed willingness to deal with them. So we know who supports illegal alien workers and potential terrorist drivers waiting for amnesty. But who will stand up for us?

Michelle Malkin is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of "Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild."

Copyright © 2006 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Thomas Sowell: Supreme Farce, Part II

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published December 17, 2006

From time to time, the Supreme Court of the United States makes a decision that causes anger or outrage, but that reaction usually passes with time, especially since there is nothing the public can do about it -- either to change the decision or to remove from the bench those who made it.

This has emboldened many federal judges at all levels to take advantage of their lifetime appointments to make rulings that impose their own personal views and call it law. Some have even added insult to injury by rationalizing such judicial activism.

In a recent interview, Justice Stephen Breyer claimed laws are "not clear," so judges are forced to base their decisions on the "values" they see behind the laws, rather than the specific words in those laws. "Not clear" is an old ploy, and "values" are a blank check.

Most of the controversial Supreme Court decisions that have outraged and polarized the country have not involved laws or facts that were "not clear." Everybody knows what an abortion is and what the death penalty is.

Everybody knows the difference between government's power to seize private property for "public use," like building a reservoir or a bridge, and allowing politicians to grab people's homes willy-nilly, in order to turn the property over to some other private parties, such as owners of casinos, hotels or shopping malls.

"Not clear"? Even the most crystal-clear law in the world can be twisted by clever lawyers and clever judges to seem unclear, if that is all it takes to give them the power to impose their own notions as the law of the land.

To people who want to see judges impose their own views instead of applying the laws as written, "not clear" is a magic phrase like "open sesame," opening the floodgates to unbridled judicial power.

The people who use this foolish argument are not fools themselves, though they may well regard the rest of us as fools enough to buy some pretty words, at the cost of losing the right of free people to govern themselves through the democratic process. Very often both headstrong judges and their media and academic supporters act as if these elites have both the right and the duty to impose their superior wisdom and virtue on the rest of us.

Many are unduly impressed by their superiority to others within some narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns. From the fact they know so much more than the average person, at least within that narrow band, they assume they have more knowledge than all the millions of average people together, across the whole spectrum of concerns involved in decisions. That is the grand fallacy of social engineering in general.

No doubt the central planners in the days of the Soviet Union knew more economics than the average Soviet citizen. But nobody knows enough to set the 24 million prices that central planners had to set.

Yet hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens could have dealt with 24 million prices much more effectively because each individual or enterprise had only to deal with a relatively few prices in their own decisionmaking. In this, as in so many other societies, the total knowledge of the many vastly exceeded the special knowledge of the few.

That is what makes limiting the powers of the government so important -- because it is virtually impossible to limit the presumptions of government officials, whether legislative, executive or judicial.

In the United States, those limits are set by the Constitution. Yet those limits have been repeatedly and increasingly exceeded by activist judges claiming the laws are "not clear."

It is shameless sophistry. But they won't stop until they get stopped. And the only way to stop them is to start impeaching those judges who go counter to the law.

There will be outcries about a threat to an "independent judiciary." But the judiciary is not supposed to be independent of the laws, which is the dangerous situation today.

Thomas Sowell is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Mark Steyn: And Merry Xmas to You All

December 17, 2006
Chicago Sun-Times

I passed through Shannon Airport in Ireland the other day. They've got a "holiday" display in the terminal, but guess what? It says "Merry Christmas." The Emerald Isle has a few Jews, and these days rather a lot of Muslims, and presumably even a militant atheist or two, but they don't seem inclined to sue the bejasus out of every event in the Yuletide season.

By contrast, the Associated Press reports the following from Riverside, Calif.:
"A high school choir was asked to stop singing Christmas carols during an ice skating show featuring Olympic medalist Sasha Cohen out of concern the skater would be offended . . . "

I hasten to add this Sasha Cohen is not the Sacha Baron Cohen of the hit movie ''Borat.'' The Olympic S. Cohen is a young lady; the Borat S. Cohen is a man, though his singlet would not be out of place in a louche Slav entry to the ice-dancing pairs. Likewise, the skater-puts-carols-on-ice incident seems as sharply satirical of contemporary America as anything in ''Borat,'' at least in its distillation of the coerciveness of "tolerance":

"A city staff member, accompanied by a police officer, approached the Rubidoux High School Madrigals at the Riverside Outdoor Ice Skating Rink just as they launched into 'God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen' and requested that the troupe stop singing . . . "

The cop and the staffer -- "special-events employee Michelle Baldwin" -- were not acting on a complaint from the celebrity skater. They were just taking offense on her behalf, no doubt deriving a kinky vicarious thrill at preventing a hypothetical "hate crime." The young miss is Jewish, and so they assumed that the strains of "Merry Gentlemen" wafting across the air must be an abomination to her. In fact, if you go to sashacohen.com, you'll see the headline: "Join Sasha On Her Christmas Tree Lighting Tour." That's right, she's going round the country skating at Christmas tree lighting ceremonies. Christmas tree lighting ceremonies accompanied by singers singing Christmas music that uses the C word itself -- just like Sasha does on her Web site.

Nonetheless, the Special Events Commissar and her Carol Cop swung into action and decided to act in loco Cohenis and go loco. Many of my fellow pundits find themselves fighting vainly the old ennui when it comes to the whole John Gibson "War On Christmas" shtick, but I think they're missing something: The idea of calling a cop to break up the singing of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" would strike most of the planet as insane. The Rubidoux High School Madrigals should have riposted by serenading the officer with the beloved Neal Sedaka classic, "Oh, Fool, I Am But A Carol" (I quote from memory).

Now it's true there are Jews who don't dig Christmas. There was some story out of Seattle the other day about a rabbi who objected to the "holiday trees" at the airport and threatened a lawsuit unless they also put up an eight-foot menorah. So the airport goes, "Oh, dear, you're threatening a lawsuit? OK, we'll take down the trees." And in an instant the trees were history. Not "history" in the sense of a time-honored tradition legitimized by its very antiquity. But "history" in the sense of the contemporary American formulation of something you toss in the landfill in the interests of "diversity."

So then the rabbi and his lawyer are reeling under a barrage of negative publicity and suddenly it's their chestnuts being roasted on the open fire. "Whoa," they say. "Why are we the bad guys? We love Christmas trees. What made you think we had anything against Christmas trees? Just cuz we threatened to launch a gazillion-dollar lawsuit? What could be more American than that?" In Newsweek, Rabbi Marc Gellman managed to miss the point and deplored the "cowardly response" of the airport. But what "cowardly response"? Instead of going to court and almost certainly losing, they raised the stakes, put the plaintiffs on the defensive and forced them to call off the dogs. The "holiday trees" are now back.

Everyone who knows Rabbi Bogomilsky says he's an affable fellow, he doesn't want to Scrooge up anybody's Christmas, he's an all-around swell guy. No doubt. But in the week when the president of Iran hosts an international (and well-attended) Holocaust Denial Convention (which simultaneously denies the last Holocaust while gleefully anticipating the next one), this rabbi thinks it's in the interests of the Jewish people to take legal action against "holiday" decorations at Seattle Airport? Sorry, it's not the airport but the plaintiff who's out of his tree. An ability to prioritize is an indispensable quality of adulthood, and a sense of proportion is a crucial ingredient of a mature society.

This isn't about religion. Jesus is doing just fine in the United States. Forty years of ACLU efforts to eliminate God from the public square have led to a resurgent, evangelical and politicized American Christianity unique in the Western world. What the rabbi in Seattle and the cops in Riverside are doing is colluding in an assault on something more basic: They're denying the possibility of any common culture. America is not a stamp collection with one of each. It's an overwhelmingly Christian country with freedom of religion for those who aren't. But it's quite an expansion of "freedom of religion" to argue that "those who aren't" are entitled to forbid any public expression of America's Christian inheritance except as part of an all-U-can-eat interfaith salad bar. In their initial reaction, Seattle Airport got it right: To be forced to have one of everything is, ultimately, the same as having nothing. So you might as well cut to the chase.

What, after all, is the rabbi objecting to? There were no bauble-dripping conifers in the stable in Bethlehem. They didn't sing "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen," either. That's, in effect, an ancient pop song that alludes to the birth of the Savior as a call to communal merry-making: No wonder it falls afoul of an overpoliced overlitigated "diversity" regime. Speaking of communal songs, they didn't sing "White Christmas" round the manger. A Jew wrote that. It's part of the vast Jewish contribution to America's common culture.

Seattle Airport could certainly put up a menorah. And maybe a commemoration of Eid, and Kwanzaa, and something for solstice worshippers, and perhaps something for litigious atheists.

But to do that is to turn society into a kind of greater airport departure lounge -- to say it's no more than an assemblage of whoever happens to be in it at any particular time. Successful societies (unlike plastic trees) have deep roots: Nobody should be obliged to believe Jesus is the son of God, but likewise nobody should take such umbrage at trees and tinsel and instrumental versions of "Silent Night" that he would deny the reality of the land he lives in to the vast majority of his fellow citizens. Because the logic of that leads not to a diverse secular society but to an atomized ersatz non-society. And, as those other touchy types the Islamists well understand, once you put reality up for grabs, all kinds of pathologies suddenly become viable.

On which note, God rest ye merry. It's tougher than you'd think.

©Mark Steyn, 2006