Mark Steyn: Just to be clear, folks, it's a novel

There's an emerging sub-genre of Islamotopian fiction, and it's not my fault

http://www.macleans.ca
May 28, 2008



The Dominion of Canada. It was nice while it lasted:

"Nineteen Regular Army divisions, one dozen divisions of the Army National Guard, plus the Second and Fourth Marine Divisions, rolled across the border just before dawn on 11 May, 2020.

"Despite the gallant resistance put up by the main elements of the Canadian Forces, notably the Royal 22nd and Twelfth Armored, which died in defense of Quebec City, the Royal Canadian Regiment and Royal Canadian Dragoons, shattered in the forlorn defense of Ottawa, and the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry and Lord Strathcona's Horse, butchered in detail in a hopeless defense of the long western border, Canada — rather the thin strip of well-populated area that roughly paralleled the border with the United States — fell quickly."

Oh, dear. Only 12 years of "Canadian values" to go. If you want to put in for your hip replacement now, they may just get to you before the tanks roll. It's going to be mighty expensive once the Princess Margaret Hospital is renamed for whichever Halliburton subsidiary winds up running it. The author of the above passage, Tom Kratman, adds:

"It is both interesting and sad to note that it was only those most despised by the government of Canada, and its ruling party, who actually proved willing to defend that government. Those who had most despised their own forces, and who had themselves signally failed to fight, soon found themselves the center of attention of a country-wide sweep."

Hmm. Do you think he means Grits and Dippers and Péquistes and whatnot? Hey, at least they don't wind up at Gitmo:

"Almost as quickly they found themselves in various well-guarded logging and mining camps in the cold, cold lands of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories . . ."

Oh, well, could be worse. Don't ask me how. The lurid and loving description of the fall of the peaceable kingdom comes from Mr. Kratman's new novel. No, it's not about Canada. Although the author specializes in military science fiction, a U.S. invasion of the friendly neighbour to the north doesn't require a lot of imagination — unless, that is, the Canucks win, and the beaten demoralized Yanks wind up retreating across the 49th parallel vowing never again to be so foolish as to take on the genetically augmented warriors of big government: "All those stories about more MRI machines in Philadelphia than in the whole of Canada," sighed President Chelsea Clinton Obama. "Why didn't we figure out, if they're not spending the budget on MRI machines, they must be doing something else with it. To think we swallowed that hooey about the 'Toronto General' and the 'Royal Victoria' being just hospitals . . ." She was about to fire the CIA director but at that point Field Marshal Khadr of the Ontario Human Rights Commission Mounted Division entered the Oval Office on a SARS-breathing winged moose . . .

Alas, no. Mr. Kratman's novel is called Caliphate, and is set more or less a century hence in a Muslim Europe at war with an imperial America. The fall of Canada's little more than a bit of backstory to explain how things got that way. On the press release, the publisher includes a recommendation from the technothriller writer John Ringo describing Caliphate as "Mark Steyn's America Alone with a body count."



Gulp. That's not the kind of quote that's terribly helpful right now. Insofar as I understand the complaints against Maclean's before the various "human rights" commissions, it's that my hate speech could lead to body counts all over Canada, and now here comes Tom Kratman to pretty much prove the point. The thesis of my book is that the Western world is becoming more Muslim, and that this will change the nature of our societies. But an emerging sub-genre of Islamotopian fiction is beginning to delineate some of the options. Robert Ferrigno has just published Sins of the Assassin, the second novel in his trilogy set circa 2040 in the Islamic Republic of America. He recently took time out of his hectic schedule of book promotion south of the border to profess bewilderment at finding himself part of a "human rights" case up north. As evidence of my "flagrant Islamophobia," the Canadian Islamic Congress claims I "asserted" the following:

1. America will be an Islamic Republic by the year 2040 — there will be a Muslim/Islamist takeover;

2. As a result of the Muslim takeover, there will be a break for prayers during the Super Bowl, the stadium will have a stereotypical Muslim name, and the fans will be forced to watch the game in a Muslim prayer posture;

3. As a result of the Muslim takeover there will be oppressive religious police enforcing Islamic/Muslim norms on the population, important U.S. icons [such as the USS Ronald Reagan] will be renamed after Osama bin Laden, no females will be allowed to be cheerleaders, and popular American radio and television talk-show hosts will have been replaced by Muslim imams . . .

Er, no. I didn't "assert" that any of the above will happen. Robert Ferrigno did — in the plot of his splendid novel, Prayers for the Assassin. As Mr. Ferrigno put it, "It's as if that hall monitor saw the two of us walking to class and decided that it was Steyn with the squeaky shoes. Sorry pal, c'est moi." The author was as perplexed as any citizen of any free nation should be at the idea that the plot points of a work of fiction — a creative art form, an act of imagination — apparently constitute a hate crime in Canada. But he took particular umbrage at being described by the Canadian Islamic Congress plaintiffs as a "recognized Islamophobe." "For the record," he says, "I am neither Islamophobic nor recognized."

He's right. The hero of his trilogy — and, as the Islamist enforcers at the CIC apparently aren't on top of this whole fiction-type deal, I should explain that the "hero" is the chap that you the reader are meant to identify with — is a Muslim: Rakkim Epps, a veteran of the Fedayeen, "a small, elite force of genetically enhanced holy warriors." He's a cynical fellow — Joel Schwartz in The Weekly Standard recently described him as a kind of Muslim Bogart, which is the right general territory; he's Philip Marlowe crossed with certain cabinet ministers I've met from Islamic countries — decent fellows under no illusions about the societies they serve. Ferrigno's second novel puts Rakkim undercover in the part of the old United States that didn't go Muslim — the southeastern "Bible Belt," a wild raucous land of rough liquor and cartoon religiosity in which the biggest tourist attraction is the daily re-enactment of the Waco siege. Mr. Ferrigno's Belt sometimes feels like a televangelist theme park writ large. So, if Christian groups were as willing to bandy around accusations of Christophobia, they'd have as much to work with as the Canadian Islamic Congress does. And, to one degree or another, both inheritors of the old United States — the Islamic Republic and the Belt — are societies in decline, living off the accumulated capital of a lost past.



If you're minded to spot Islamophobia in everything, Tom Kratman's Caliphate may offer easier pickings. His Islamic Europe is in serious decay — a land of rutted tracks and crumbling ruins. His protagonist is a post-CIA undercover operative in Germany who hooks up with a Catholic cutie sold into slavery and then into an elite brothel. Ferrigno is stronger on character and motivation, but Kratman's dystopia is a brisk page-turner full of startling twists and bad sex. I don't just mean the pneumatic bouts of hooker sex; even the good sex comes off as bad. Whether or not Mr. Kratman is an expert in this field, I cannot say. But he's a professional military man who retired as lieutenant-colonel and was director, Rule of Law at the U.S. Army War College, so he's certainly up to speed on the military and geopolitical conceits of the book.

What I found most intriguing was not so much the 22nd-century thriller but the short 21st-century interludes between chapters, featuring the great-grandparents of Petra, the child prostitute at the heart of the novel. Robert Ferrigno inaugurates his dystopia with a big bang — simultaneous nuclear detonations that precipitate America's embrace of Islam. Tom Kratman also has bombs, but his 21st-century episodes attempt, in an impressionistic way, to capture a subtler societal transition. These scenes are set in the Germany of the here and now, beginning with an Iraq war demonstration and the aftermath of the London Tube bombings. And then slowly and subtly the recent past turns into Kratman's imagined future, as the remorseless Islamization of Europe accelerates.

We'll be seeing a lot more novels like this — although perhaps not in Canada, if the Canadian Islamic Congress and their dopey enablers in the "human rights" commission succeed in their campaign to get fictional plots rendered actionable. But, even if they do, the Islamization of Europe goes on. It's a lopsided valse macabre between two left-footed dancers.

"Why are you so certain everything's going down the tubes?" Gabi, a young German of conventional anti-American post-nationalist views, asks her Muslim boyfriend as he decides to get out of Europe.

"Because my people could f--k up a wet dream," Mahmoud answers. "And I'm beginning to think that yours can, too."

Ann Coulter: You Can't Appease Everybody....

http://www.anncoulter.com
Thursday, May 29, 2008

After decades of comparing Nixon to Hitler, Reagan to Hitler and Bush to Hitler, liberals have finally decided it is wrong to make comparisons to Hitler. But the only leader to whom they have applied their newfound rule of thumb is: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

While Ahmadinejad has not done anything as starkly evil as cut the capital gains tax, he does deny the Holocaust, call for the destruction of Israel, deny the existence of gays in Iran and refuses to abandon his nuclear program despite protests from the United Nations. That's the only world leader we're not allowed to compare to Hitler.

President Bush's speech at the Knesset two weeks ago was somewhat more nuanced than liberals' Hitler arguments. He did not simply jump up and down chanting: "Ahmadinejad is Hitler!" Instead, Bush condemned a policy of appeasement toward madmen, citing Neville Chamberlain's ill-fated talks with Adolf Hitler.

Suspiciously, Bush's speech was interpreted as a direct hit on B. Hussein Obama's foreign policy – and that's according to Obama's supporters.

So to defend Obama, who – according to his supporters – favors appeasing madmen, liberals expanded the rule against ad Hitlerum arguments to cover any mention of the events leading to World War II. A ban on "You're like Hitler" arguments has become liberals' latest excuse to ignore history.

Unless, of course, it is liberals using historical examples to support Obama's admitted policy of appeasing dangerous lunatics. It's a strange one-sided argument when they can cite Nixon going to China and Reagan meeting with Gorbachev, but we can't cite Chamberlain meeting with Hitler.

There are reasons to meet with a tyrant, but none apply to Ahmadinejad. We're not looking for an imperfect ally against some other dictatorship, as Nixon was with China. And we aren't in a Mexican standoff with a nuclear power, as Reagan was with the USSR. At least not yet.

Mutually Assured Destruction was bad enough with the Evil Empire, but something you definitely want to avoid with lunatics who are willing to commit suicide in order to destroy the enemies of Islam. As with the H-word, our sole objective with Ahmadinejad is to prevent him from becoming a military power.

What possible reason is there to meet with Ahmadinejad? To win a $20 bar bet as to whether or not the man actually owns a necktie?

We know his position and he knows ours. He wants nuclear arms, American troops out of the Middle East and the destruction of Israel. We don't want that. (This is assuming Mike Gravel doesn't pull off a major upset this November.) We don't need him as an ally against some other more dangerous dictator because ... well, there aren't any.

Does Obama imagine he will make demands of Ahmadinejad? Using what stick as leverage, pray tell? A U.S. boycott of the next Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran? The U.N. has already demanded that Iran give up its nuclear program. Ahmadinejad has ignored the U.N. and that's the end of it.

We always have the ability to "talk" to Ahmadinejad if we have something to say. Bush has a telephone. If Iranian crop dusters were headed toward one of our nuclear power plants, I am quite certain that Bush would be able to reach Ahmadinejad to tell him that Iran will be flattened unless the planes retreat. If his cell phone died, Bush could just post a quick warning on the Huffington Post.

Liberals view talk as an end in itself. They never think through how these talks will proceed, which is why Chamberlain ended up giving away Czechoslovakia. He didn't leave for Munich planning to do that. It is simply the inevitable result of talking with madmen without a clear and obtainable goal. Without a stick, there's only a carrot.

The only explanation for liberals' hysterical zealotry in favor of Obama's proposed open-ended talks with Ahmadinejad is that they seriously imagine crazy foreign dictators will be as charmed by Obama as cable TV hosts whose legs tingle when they listen to Obama (a condition that used to be known as "sciatica").

Because, really, who better to face down a Holocaust denier with a messianic complex than the guy who is afraid of a debate moderated by Brit Hume?

There is no possible result of such a meeting apart from appeasement and humiliation of the U.S. If we are prepared to talk, then we're looking for a deal. What kind of deal do you make with a madman until he is ready to surrender?

Will President Obama listen respectfully as Ahmadinejad says he plans to build nuclear weapons? Will he say he'll get back to Ahmadinejad on removing all U.S. troops from the region? Will he nod his head as Ahmadinejad demands the removal of the Jewish population from the Middle East? Obama says he's prepared to have an open-ended chat with Ahmadinejad, so I guess everything is on the table.

Perhaps in the spirit of compromise, Obama could agree to let Iran push only half of Israel into the sea. That would certainly constitute "change"! Obama could give one of those upbeat speeches of his, saying: As a result of my recent talks with President Ahmadinejad, some see the state of Israel as being half empty. I prefer to see it as half full. And then Obama can return and tell Americans he could no more repudiate Ahmadinejad than he could repudiate his own white grandmother. It will make Chris Matthews' leg tingle.

There is a third reason to talk to dictators, in addition to seeking an ally or as part of a policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur talked with Japanese imperial forces on Sept. 2, 1945. There was a long ceremony aboard the USS Missouri with full press coverage and a lot of talk. It was a regular international confab!

It also took place after we had dropped two nukes on Japan and MacArthur was officially accepting Japan's surrender. If Obama plans to drop nukes on Ahmadinejad prior to their little chat-fest, I'm all for it. But I don't think that's what liberals have in mind.

- Ann Coulter is a bestselling author and syndicated columnist. Her most recent book is Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

Today's Tune: Tom Petty - Straight Into Darkness (Live)

(Click on title to play video)

Israel's Staticide

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addresses his ministers in Jerusalem on May 25. A US millionaire testifying in a corruption probe that could end Olmert's career said he gave him envelopes stuffed with cash to fund his political ambitions and perhaps his taste for high living.
(AFP/Pool/File/David Silverman)

There is a Greek tragedy unfolding today in the Middle East. In response to past mistakes and as a result of hubristic political calculation, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is setting in motion forces that promise to lead inexorably to grief for his nation. The result could be staticide, the destruction of the Jewish State, with incalculably serious repercussions for the Free World in general and the United States in particular.

In the pursuit of peace with its neighbors, Israel has made one strategic concession after another. In 1979, it surrendered the Sinai to Egypt when Anwar Sadat promised peace and then was murdered for doing so. In 1993, Israel adopted the Oslo accords, legitimating one of its most virulent enemies, the PLO terrorist chief Yasser Arafat, and setting the stage for Palestinian control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Eight years ago this month, Israel unilaterally withdrew from South Lebanon, creating a vacuum promptly filled by Iran’s proxy army there, Hezbollah. Then, in 2005, Israel forcibly removed its citizens living in Gaza and turned the Strip over – temporarily – to Arafat’s right-hand man and successor, Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Space constraints will not permit a full rendering of the costs associated with these serial mistakes. The “peace” with Egypt proved to be a very cold one. In Sadat’s stead, the government of Hosni Mubarak has promoted virulent hatred for Israel among its people and assiduously armed for renewed conflict with the Jewish State. It has also used the Sinai to funnel ever-longer-range missiles and other advanced weapons from Iran to the Gaza Strip – now under the control of another Palestinian terrorist faction, Hamas.

The latter and its friends, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, al Qaeda and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, are now using Gaza as a safe-haven for planning and executing terrorism against Israel. It is a safe bet that Israel’s most important ally, the United States, is being targeted from there, as well.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah has not just taken over South Lebanon – its dominance of which was greatly strengthened when Olmert’s government proved incapable of decisively defeating the forces of this so-called “Army of God” in 2006. In recent days, Hezbollah launched attacks in Beirut that effectively produced a coup d’etat. The hopes for a democratic Lebanon, free of Syrian and Iranian interference, have given way to a dark future for the Lebanese people and their neighbors in Israel, alike.

Tragically, despite this sorry record of retreat followed by intensified danger, Ehud Olmert is making further and even more strategic territorial and political concessions to Israel’s enemies. By so doing, the Israeli prime minister evidently hopes to stave off accountability for these past mistakes. He also appears to be calculating that “peace-making” will spare him prosecution on myriad corruption charges.

Unfortunately, there is now no basis for depicting such a policy as one in which Israel trades “land for peace.” Today, Israel is giving up land for war.

In the illusion that that there is any appreciable difference between Fatah and Hamas, Olmert’s government is trying to turn over nearly all the West Bank and even parts of Jerusalem to Abbas and his faction’s Palestinian police force. A similar illusion is causing the United States to give Fatah’s troops training, intelligence collection equipment and arms. The latter have already used their American-supplied know-how and weapons to kill Israelis.

Olmert is also allowing the Egyptians to broker a cease-fire with Hamas. The result is predictable: Hamas will be legitimated, effectively ending international efforts to relegate it to pariah status and probably producing a unity government whereby the two Palestinian factions join forces once again. The stage will then be set for the ultimate defeat of Fatah by Hamas in the West Bank as well, putting all of Israel within range of its weapons.

These tragic steps are now being compounded by one further, potentially staticidal act: Olmert has just launched negotiations to surrender all of the Golan Heights to Syria.

This concession would place Syrian – and quite possibly Iranian – forces on high ground which, in Israeli hands, has kept the peace for 35 years. If once again at the disposal of Israel’s enemies, these heights will put northern Israel at risk of, at best, harassing fire and, at worst, a new invasion in force.

Moreover, as my esteemed colleague, Caroline Glick, observed in her Jerusalem Post column last week, if Israel can no longer use the Golan to threaten Syria, Damascus and Tehran may feel free to redouble their subversion in Iraq. Iran may even conclude the Golan can allow it to checkmate any lingering Israeli willingness to interfere with the mullahs’ pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Importantly, the Israeli people finally seem to have had enough of false peace processes. Recent polls indicate that two-thirds of Israelis oppose their country’s surrender of the Golan; a majority believe it is motivated by Olmert’s efforts to stave off prosecution. Even the Bush Administration is said to be unhappy about his Golan initiative.

This weekend, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – universally known as “the Israel lobby” – holds its annual Policy Conference in Washington. The organization exists to support the Israeli government. At this juncture, however, attendees have an opportunity and an obligation to object to that government’s increasingly reckless, and predictably tragic, conduct. After all, friends don’t let friends commit staticide.


Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the founder, president, and CEO of The Center for Security Policy. During the Reagan administration, Gaffney was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy, and a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator John Tower (R-Texas). He is a columnist for The Washington Times, Jewish World Review, and Townhall.com and has also contributed to The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, and Newsday.

Che on the Silver Screen

By Humberto Fontova
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
Wednesday, May 28, 2008



Puerto Rican actor Benicio Del Toro, left, and American director Steven Soderbergh pose at the 'Che' photo call during the 61st International film festival in Cannes, southern France, on Thursday, May 22, 2008.
(AP Photo/Carlo Allegri)

Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh unveiled his four-and-a-half-hour Che Guevara Biopic at the Cannes Film Festival last Thursday. One reviewer described the movie as “maniacally anticipated” - and Variety hailed it as Cannes' “most-anticipated” film.

But based on reviews thus far, it looks like Soderbergh blew it. After suffering what some critics described as the film's “butt-numbing” duration, Variety's Todd McCarthy branded the movie “defiantly nondramatic” and “a commercial impossibility.”

New York Magazine calls it, “something of a fiasco.” Everyone seemed bored if not actually catatonic while viewing the film. Time's Richard Corliss described Benicio Del Toro in the starring role as “seemingly sedated.” Bloomberg News wrote of the “viewers' bleary eyes.”

These reviewers, as usual, miss the point and bash the director unfairly. Director Stephen Soderbergh said flat out that the purpose of his movie was “to give you a sense of what it was like to hang out with [Che Guevara].”

Well? What did the reviewers expect? As usual, they know very little about the film's subject. In fact, Soderbergh has accomplished his goal with bells on. As exhibit one, I submit a sample of Che Guevara's sparkling conversation:

"The past makes itself felt not only in the individual consciousness – in which the residue of an education systematically oriented toward isolating the individual still weighs heavily – but also through the very character of this transition period in which commodity relations still persist, although this is still a subjective aspiration, not yet systematized."

Splash some cold water on your face and stick with me for just a little more:

"It is still necessary to deepen his conscious participation, individual and collective, in all the mechanisms of management and production, and to link this to the idea of the need for technical and ideological education, so that we see how closely interdependent these processes are and how their advancement is parallel.”

These passages come straight from the Che diaries that form the basis of the film's script. "I have no home, no woman, no parents, no brothers and no friends," wrote Guevara. "My friends are friends only so long as they think as I do politically."

To everyone familiar with the real Che Guevara it's abundantly clear that Soderbergh directed masterfully. He was not giving us Jerry Lee Lewis or John Belushi. No honest and educated reviewer can deny him massive kudus for so expertly transmitting this insufferable personality and presence to a soon snoring audience.

Soderbergh and Benicio Del Toro, who stars as Che and shares production credits, actually had an intriguing and immensely amusing theme if only they'd known how to plumb it. Soderbergh hails Guevara as "one of the most fascinating lives in the last century." Almost all who actually interacted with Ernesto Guevara (and are now free to express their views without fear of firing squads or torture chambers) know that the The Big Question regarding Ernesto, the most genuinely fascinating aspect of his life, is: how did such a dreadful bore, sadist and and epic idiot attain such iconic status?

The answer is that this psychotic and thoroughly unimposing vagrant named Ernesto Guevara had the magnificent fortune of linking up with modern history's top press agent, Fidel Castro, who for going on half a century now, has had the mainstream media anxiously scurrying to his every beck and call.

Had Ernesto Guevara De La Serna y Lynch not linked up with Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico city that fateful summer of 1955--had he not linked up with a Cuban exile named Nico Lopez in Guatemala the year before who later introduced him to Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico city-- everything points to Ernesto continuing his life of a traveling hobo, panhandling, mooching off women, staying in flophouses and scribbling unreadable poetry.

While making their film, Soderbergh and Del Toro repeatedly visited Havana to coo and peck away as anxiously as Herbert Matthews, Dan Rather or Barbara Walters while the regime tossed out its crumbs. Though rarely meeting with the Maximum Leader himself, the filmmakers, on top of relying on Che's diaries (edited by Fidel Castro) for the script, also obtained recollections from Che's widow and many of his former underling executioners. These all currently serve as ministers in a totalitarian regime. “We wanted to show the real character” boasts Soderbergh.

"I met him (Fidel Castro) for about five minutes," Del Toro said. "He knew about the project and he said to me that he was very happy that we had spent so much time researching the subject.”

“I'm here in Cuba's hills thirsting for blood,” Che wrote his abandoned wife in 1957. “Dear Papa, today I discovered I really like killing,” he wrote shortly afterwards. Alas, this killing very rarely involved combat, it come from the close-range murder of bound and blindfolded men and boys.

“When you saw the beaming look on Che's face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart,” said a former political prisoner to this writer, “you knew there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.” In fact the one genuine accomplishment in Che Guevara's life was the mass-murder of defenseless men and boys. Under his own gun dozens died. Under his orders thousands crumpled. At everything else Che Guevara failed abysmally, even comically. Yet Soderbergh and Del Toro skip over these fascinating quotes and Che's one genuine accomplishment as a revolutionary.

He's lauded as the century's most celebrated guerrilla fighter but he never fought in a querrilla war. “The Guerrilla war in Cuba was notable for the marked lack of military skills or offensive spirit in the soldiers of either side," writes military historian Arthur Campbell, in his authoritative, Guerrillas: A History and Analysis. "The Fidelistas were completely lacking in the basic military arts or in any experience of fighting.”

"In all essentials Castro's battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign, fought in New York and Washington," writes British historian Hugh Thomas.

Yet Soderbergh and Del Toro, obsessively wary of lapsing into the slightest historical inaccuracy, relied on the Castro regime as primary source -- and came up with a shoot-'em up war movie! -- albeit an apparently boring one.

He's lauded as a rebel and free-spirit yet he denounced the very "spirit of rebellion" as "reprehensible!" -- and he boasted that under his watch "individualism must disappear!" This was no idle boast either. Che Guevara co-founded a regime that jailed more of its subjects than Stalin's and murdered more people in its first three years than Hitler's in its first six. In 1959, with the help of KGB agents, the man celebrated by the beautiful people at Cannes helped found, train and indoctrinate Cuba's secret police. "Always interrogate your prisoners at night," Che ordered his goons. "A man's resistance is always lower at night." Today the world's largest Che mural adorns Cuba's Ministry of the Interior, the headquarters for Cuba's STASI and KGB trained secret police.

Too bad Soderbergh and Del Toro didn't interview the former CIA officers who revealed to this writer how Fidel Castro himself, via the Bolivian Communist party, constantly fed the CIA info on Che's whereabouts in Bolivia. Including Fidel Castro's directive to the Bolivian Communists regarding Che and his merry band might have also added drama. “Not even an aspirin,” instructed Cuba's Maximum Leader to his Bolivian comrades, meaning that Bolivia's Communists were not to assist Che in any way—“not even with an aspirin,” if Che complained of a headache.

Alas, utterly starstruck by their subject and slavishly compliant to Fidel Castro's script and casting calls, all these fascinating plots and subplots flew right over Soderbergh and Del Toro's heads.

- Humberto Fontova is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit www.hfontova.com

Today's Tune: The McCoys - Hang on Sloopy

(Click on title to play video)

Thomas Sowell: Mascot Politics

Tuesday, May 27, 2008
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/


Years ago, when Jack Greenberg left the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to become a professor at Columbia University, he announced that he was going to make it a point to hire a black secretary at Columbia.

This would of course make whomever he hired be seen as a token black, rather than as someone selected on the basis of competence.

This reminded me of the first time I went to Milton Friedman's office when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago back in 1960, and I noticed that he had a black secretary. This was four years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and there was no such thing as affirmative action.

It so happened that Milton Friedman had another black secretary decades later, at the Hoover Institution-- and she was respected as one of the best secretaries around.

When I mentioned to someone at the Hoover Institution that I was having a hard time finding a secretary who could handle a tough job in my absence, I was told that I needed someone like Milton Friedman's secretary-- and that there were not many like her.

At no time in all these years did I hear Milton Friedman say, either publicly or privately, that he had a black secretary.

William F. Buckley's wife once mentioned in passing, at dinner in her home, that she had been involved for years in working with a school in Harlem. But I never heard her or Bill Buckley ever say that publicly.

Nor do conservatives who were in the civil rights marches in the South, back when that was dangerous, make that a big deal.

For people on the left, however, blacks are trophies or mascots, and must therefore be put on display. Nowhere is that more true than in politics.

The problem with being a mascot is that you are a symbol of someone else's significance or virtue. The actual well-being of a mascot is not the point.

Liberals all across the country have not hesitated to destroy black neighborhoods in the name of "urban renewal," often replacing working-class neighborhoods with upscale homes and pricey businesses-- neither of which the former residents can afford.

In academia, lower admissions standards for black students is about having them as a visible presence, even if mismatching them with the particular college or university produces high dropout rates.

The black students who don't make it are replaced by others, and when many of them don't make it, there are still more others.

The point is to have black faces on campus, as mascots symbolizing what great people there are running the college or university.

Many, if not most, of the black students who do not make it at big-name, high-pressure institutions are perfectly qualified to succeed at the normal range of colleges and universities.

Most white students would also punch out if admitted to schools for which they don't have the same qualifications as the other students. But nobody needs white mascots.

Various empirical studies have indicated that blacks succeed best at institutions where there is little or no difference between their qualifications and the qualifications of the other students around them.

This is not rocket science but it is amazing how much effort and cleverness have gone into denying the obvious.

A study by Professor Richard Sander of the UCLA law school suggests that there may be fewer black lawyers as a result of "affirmative action" admissions to law schools that are a mismatch for the individuals admitted.

Leaping to the defense of black criminals is another common practice among liberals who need black mascots. Most of the crimes committed by black criminals are committed against other blacks. But, again, the actual well-being of mascots is not the point.

Politicians who use blacks as mascots do not hesitate to throw blacks to the wolves for the benefit of the teachers' unions, the green zealots whose restrictions make housing unaffordable, or people who keep low-price stores like Wal-Mart out of their cities.

Using human beings as mascots is not idealism. It is self-aggrandizement that is ugly in both its concept and its consequences.

- Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.

CAIR's Continuing Mystery

by Robert Spencer

http://www.humanevents.com/
Posted: 05/27/2008

CAIR Representative Ahmed Bedier speaking to media in Tampa (2006).

Some mysterious dealings at the Tampa chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) highlight some of the peculiarities of that unsavory group. As terror expert Steve Emerson’s Investigative Project has noted, Ahmed Bedier, up until recently a rising star in the organization, has left his position as the executive director of CAIR-Tampa, and no one is saying why. Since Bedier has espoused numerous questionable positions in the past, could this parting of the ways could herald a new attempt by CAIR to leave behind some of its more radical positions?

CAIR has for years presented two faces to the American people. It says that its mission is “to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.” And it is a high-profile, active, successful organization. Law-enforcement officials all over the country have received sensitivity training from CAIR. The mainstream media routinely seeks it out for a moderate Muslim perspective.

But there is another side to this organization as well. CAIR is “unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect,” according to Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL). Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) has said of CAIR that “we know it has ties to terrorism,” and “intimate links with Hamas.” CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation jihad terror funding case. Several of its former employees and board members are now doing hard time on various terrorism-related charges.

And CAIR’s co-founder and former Board Chairman, Omar Ahmad, told a Muslim audience in 1998 that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran ... should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.” In 2003, when these words started to get publicity, Ahmad denied saying this. He denies he said it, and he denies that he believes this. However, the original reporter stands by her story.
Bedier has been a superb embodiment of the double face of CAIR. On the Glenn Beck Show in 2005, he declared: “We condemn any nation, country or group that uses Islam or misuses and misinterprets Islam in violent ways.” Announcing his depature from CAIR, he explained his future plans in terms to warm any multiculturalist’s heart: “I’m going to expand on and build upon my work as a civil rights and human rights leader into broader areas of peace building, interfaith dialogue and reconciliation.”

Yet Bedier has also said that before 1995, when the State Department declared Palestinian Islamic Jihad a terrorist group, there was “nothing immoral” about associating with the group. The anti-terror advocacy group Americans Against Hate notes that “Bedier’s answer is startling, given the fact that, prior to 1995, Palestinian Islamic Jihad took credit for five terrorist attacks, which resulted in the murders of eight innocent people. This includes a suicide bombing in the town of Netzarim Junction, in November of 1994.”

And when two Muslim college students, Youseff Megahed and Ahmed Mohamed, were found with pipe bombs (and one of whom has admitted to making a video about how to use remote-controlled bombs against American soldiers), Bedier claimed that the pipe bomb material was just fireworks and said, “Both of them are really naïve kids.” On a Florida TV show several months ago, Bedier sidestepped numerous opportunities to condemn the barbaric practice of stoning.

So what does Bedier’s departure from CAIR mean at a point when he seemed to have a bright future with the national organization? Does it mean that the organization is finally going to make an attempt to live up to its self-definition, and become a truly moderate group that will work against the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism in the American Muslim community?

That’s unlikely: the Investigative Project is correct that Bedier was “one of CAIR’s most high-profile local executive directors, publicly commenting frequently on a variety issues ranging from the staunch defense of convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist Sami Al-Arian to the wearing of Islamic garments such as the hijab in public schools.” Despite the mysterious circumstances surrounding his departure for the organization, there is no indication that any of CAIR’s remaining personnel have changed course.

And that is why government, law enforcement, and the media would be well advised to treat CAIR with extreme caution, a caution they have not shown up to now.

Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)" , "The Truth About Muhammad" and "Religion of Peace?" (all from Regnery -- a HUMAN EVENTS sister company).

Sydney Pollack, 73; Oscar-winning director and producer

By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
6:08 PM PDT, May 26, 2008



Pollack, far right, came out tops at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1986. He won two Oscars as director and producer of "Out of Africa," which garnered best picture. Other big winners included William Hurt, left, (actor), Anjelica Huston (supporting actress) and Geraldine Page (actress).

Sydney Pollack, the Academy Award-winning director of "Out of Africa" who achieved acclaim making popular, mainstream movies with A-list stars, including "The Way We Were" and "Tootsie," died Monday. He was 73. Pollack, who also was a producer and actor, died of cancer at his home in Pacific Palisades, according to Leslee Dart, his publicist and friend.

"Sydney Pollack has made some of the most influential and best-remembered films of the last three decades," film scholar Jeanine Basinger told The Times recently.

In looking at Pollack's films, she said, "what you see is how he kept in step with the times. He doesn't get locked into one decade and left there. He had a very sharp political sensibility and a keen sense of what the issues of his world were, and he advanced and changed as the times advanced and changed."

After launching his show-business career as an actor and acting teacher in New York City in the 1950s, Pollack moved west in the early '60s and began directing episodic television before turning to films.



Apart from directing the 1982 comedy "Tootsie," starring Dustin Hoffman, Pollack, left, also played the star's exasperated agent. "It would be a great vacation to act in a movie if I weren’t directing it. But to do it while you’re directing interferes with your concentration," he told the New York Times. Nevertheless, he earned another Oscar nomination for best director and a New York Film Critics Circle Award.

Beginning with "The Slender Thread," a 1965 drama starring Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft, Pollack was credited with directing 20 films, including "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," a 1969 drama about Depression-era marathon dancers starring Jane Fonda that earned Pollack an Oscar nomination for best director.

Known for what New York Times film critic Janet Maslin once described as "his broadly commercial instincts and penchant for all-star casts," Pollack directed seven movies with Robert Redford, beginning with "This Property Is Condemned" (with Natalie Wood) in 1966.

The Pollack-Redford collaboration also produced "The Way We Were" (with Barbra Streisand), "Jeremiah Johnson," "Three Days of the Condor" (with Faye Dunaway), "The Electric Horseman" (with Fonda), "Out of Africa" (with Meryl Streep) and "Havana."

As a filmmaker, Pollack had a reputation for being a painstaking craftsman -- "relentless and meticulous," screenwriter and friend Robert Towne once said.

"His films have a lyrical quality like great music, and the timing is impeccable," cinematographer Owen Roizman, who shot five films directed by Pollack, including "Tootsie" and "Havana," said in 2005 when it was announced that Pollack would receive the 2006 American Society of Cinematographers Board of Governors Award for his contributions to advancing the art of filmmaking.

"He is never satisfied. . . . His passion is contagious. It inspires everyone around him to dig a little deeper," Roizman said.



Pollack, right, speaks with Steven Spielberg in 1989.

Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin said "the hallmark" of Pollack's career "has been intelligence, both in his approach and his selection of subject matter."

"Good, bad or in between, his films at the very least respected their audience," Maltin told The Los Angeles Times. "And, of course, he worked with grade-A collaborators on both sides of the camera -- the best screenwriters, the best actors -- and it shows."

"Out of Africa," the 1985 drama based on Danish author Isak Dinesen's experiences in Kenya during the early part of the 20th century and her romance with English big-game hunter-adventurer Denys Finch Hatton, earned Pollack two Academy Awards: as director and as producer of the film, which won the best picture Oscar.

Pollack also received a best director Oscar nomination -- and a New York Film Critics Circle Award -- for "Tootsie," the 1982 comedy starring Dustin Hoffman as Michael Dorsey, an unemployed New York actor who revives his career by transforming himself into a "woman" -- actress Dorothy Michaels -- who lands a role in a TV soap opera and then finds himself falling in love with an actress on the show, played by Jessica Lange. In the process of masquerading as a woman, Dorsey becomes a better man.



Pollack works on the set of the 2005 film "The Interpreter." He directed and served as executive producer on the thriller starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn.

The making of the film was marked by creative dissension between Pollack and Hoffman -- and unexpected difficulties.

"It's like working with the mechanical shark in 'Jaws,' " Pollack told the New York Times in 1982. "Dustin's breasts fall down. The high heels hurt his feet. The makeup causes pimples, and the heat makes his beard show through after a couple of hours. It's a three-and-a-half-hour makeup job, and then the makeup only has a life of four or five hours. We didn't anticipate that."

Pollack spoke of his preference for working with big stars in an interview with New York Times in 1982.

"Stars are like thoroughbreds," he said. "Yes, it's a little more dangerous with them. They are more temperamental. You have to be careful because you can be thrown. But when they do what they do best -- whatever it is that's made them a star -- it's really exciting."

Sometimes, he added, "if you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form."

Pressed by Hoffman to play his actor-character's exasperated agent in "Tootsie," Pollack finally consented to take on his first big-screen acting role since the 1962 film "War Hunt," during which he met Redford, who also was making his film debut.

"Dustin really kept after me to do the part," Pollack told the New York Times in another interview in 1982. "At one point, he even sent me flowers and signed the note, 'Love Dorothy.' The acting itself was fun. It would be a great vacation to act in a movie if I weren't directing it. But to do it while you're directing interferes with your concentration."



Pollack plays Marty Bach, the head of a corporate law firm, in “Michael Clayton,” a drama starring George Clooney that has been nominated for a best picture Oscar this year. Pollack also was a producer on the film.

As an actor, Pollack later appeared in a number of films, including Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives," Robert Altman's "The Player," Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" and the recent Oscar-nominated Tony Gilroy film "Michael Clayton." Pollack also turned up in guest roles on TV series such as "Frasier," "Will & Grace" and "The Sopranos."

"I don't care much about acting," he told the South Bend Tribune in 2002. "It's more about watching other directors work."

Basinger, head of the film studies department at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., and the author of numerous books on film, said Pollack "was a fabulous actor, and he understood actors and got the best out of them" as a director.

"Here's a man who could have himself been a movie star of a certain type had he so chosen because he really is that good an actor," she said, adding that Pollack, who spoke to film students at Wesleyan several times, also "cared about education" and was a "natural-born teacher."

Pollack's experience as an actor and acting teacher helped earn him a reputation as an "actor's director."

"He talks in a language that actors can understand," Ed Harris, who played an FBI agent in Pollack's 1993 dramatic thriller "The Firm," starring Tom Cruise, told USA Today at the time. "He won't just say 'speed up' or 'slow down'; he'll talk to you about the situation."



Pollack, right, directs Robert Redford in "The Electric Horseman" in 1979, one of seven movies the two would ultimately collaborate on.

Fonda, who earned an Oscar nomination for her leading role in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," has said the darkly dramatic film was "a turning point for me, both professionally and personally."

With Pollack's guidance, she said, "I probed deeper into the character and into myself than I had before, and I gained confidence as an actor," she wrote in her autobiography, "My Life So Far."

In a 1993 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Pollack said he liked to talk to his actors at length.

"When I start a scene I say, 'Let's not make this a movie.' It's my way of wanting it first to be realistic. You're not doing it to be observed. You're doing it alone. I tell actors, 'Watch "Candid Camera," then flick the channel to something else, then turn back. You'll see how phony the acting looks because real reaction so often means doing nothing.' It's always simple. The tendency with actors is to think that if you're doing more, you're doing more."

The son of a pharmacist, Pollack was born July 1, 1934, in Lafayette, Ind., and later moved with his family to South Bend.



Bette Davis is shown with Pollack at the 1986 Golden Globe awards ceremony. His film "Out of Africa" won best drama, a precursor to its grand showing at the Oscars.

"I think of it with great sadness," he said of his experiences in South Bend in a 1993 interview with the New York Times. "It was a real cultural desert. There weren't many Jews like us, and it was real anti-Semitic."

His parents divorced while he was growing up, and his mother, who "had emotional problems and became an alcoholic," died when Pollack was 16. Although his father envisioned him becoming a dentist, Pollack left home after graduating from high school and moved to New York to become an actor. After studying with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, Pollack became Meisner's assistant.

Pollack, whose career was interrupted by Army service from 1957 to 1959, had a small role in the 1955 Broadway comedy "The Dark Is Light Enough" and later appeared on "Playhouse 90" and "The United States Steel Hour," as well as series such as "The Twilight Zone" and "Have Gun Will Travel."

As an actor, however, he viewed teaching as his meal ticket.

"I knew I wasn't going to be any great shakes as an actor -- the way I looked I would play the soda jerk or the friend of a friend," he told the New York Times in 1993. "I taught. That's how I made my living."

Pollack's work as an actor on director John Frankenheimer's two-part adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" on "Playhouse 90," led Frankenheimer to ask him to work as a dialogue coach for two children in his "Playhouse 90" production of "Turn of the Screw."



Pollack takes a stroll through Venice while attending the Venice Film Festival in September 2000.

That, in turn, led Pollack to do similar work in Hollywood on Frankenheimer's 1961 film "The Young Savages," starring Burt Lancaster.

"Lancaster told me to come to his office one day and said, 'You should be a director,' and I said that I didn't know anything about directing, so he introduced me to Lew Wasserman [then chairman of MCA, owner of Universal Pictures]," Pollack told the New York Times.

Over the next several years, Pollack directed episodes of TV shows such as "The Fugitive," "The Defenders," "Kraft Suspense Theatre" and "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour."

In 1966, he won an Emmy award for his direction of "The Game," an episode of "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre." He also received Emmy nominations as the director of another segment of "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre" and an episode of "Ben Casey."

Pollack's other films as a director are "The Scalphunters" (with Lancaster), "Castle Keep," "The Yakuza," "Bobby Deerfield," "Absence of Malice," "The Firm," "Sabrina," "Random Hearts" and "The Interpreter."



Pollack in April 2005, days before the release of "The Interpreter," which turned out to be the last of the 21 feature films he directed.

His most recent film was a departure: "Sketches of Frank Gehry," a feature-length documentary released in this country in 2006 about his friend, the renowned architect whose work includes the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

Variety critic Todd McCarthy called Pollack's portrait of the architectural giant, shot in part with Pollack's own hand-held camera, "a rich tour of [Gehry's] artistic world and the journey that brought him to where he is today."

Pollack also had had more than 40 credits as a producer or executive producer on films such as "Presumed Innocent," "The Fabulous Baker Boys," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," "Cold Mountain" and "Michael Clayton."

Pollack, who co-founded Mirage Productions in 1985, was a founding member of the Sundance Institute, chairman emeritus of the American Cinematheque, a founding member of the Film Foundation, and a member of the board of directors for the Motion Picture and Television Fund.

He met his wife, Claire, when he was teaching and she was studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse. They were married in 1958 and had three children, Rebecca, Rachel and Steven. Steven died in a plane crash in 1993. He is also survived by six grandchildren and a brother Bernie, a Hollywood costume designer.

Services will be private.

dennis.mclellan@latimes.com

Bruce Springsteen shows why he is still the Boss

London Daily Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 26/05/2008

David Cheal reviews Bruce Springsteen in Dublin

There are bands, there are stars, there are singers, there are songwriters. And there's Bruce Springsteen.



Epic: Bruce Springsteen

This tireless bundle of feverish energy is still head and shoulders above anyone else in the world of popular music.

Whenever I see him on stage, everyone else fades into the background; all those so-called globe-conquering acts are thrown into sharp relief by the glorious wall of sound and waves of emotion that pulse from the man and his band.

He has a heart as big as a planet, he makes music that's pure joy, and he does it for hour after hour.

Here in Dublin, on the Irish leg of his first world tour with the E Street Band since 2003 - he comes to Britain this week - Springsteen started as he meant to go on.

Wearing a black shirt, sleeves rolled up in a lets-get-to-work manner, he put a harmonica to his lips, blew a sweet refrain, and threw down his arm to launch the opening song, "Promised Land", which encapsulated everything that's great about him as a live performer.

His face was twisted with passion, and the band rolled along like an express train. It was epic, it was glorious, and it had only just begun. "Radio Nowhere", from last year's Magic album, swiftly followed, and we were well and truly on the way.

And the thing about Bruce Springsteen concerts, as I began to remember as this one unfolded, is that just when you think a peak has been reached, it gets better.

With each song, as Springsteen shouted: "One, two, three, four!", the sound became warmer and richer, the crowd of 35,000 threw away their inhibitions, and Springsteen summoned up hidden reserves of energy and emotion.

Perhaps he doesn't throw himself around quite as vigorously as he used to. Perhaps his voice is losing a bit of range, becoming rougher. But hell - the man is 58 years old.

And it wasn't all about joy. "Darkness on the Edge of Town" tapped into the despairing streak in Springsteen's music, but even then, it was a glorious sort of desperation.

Then another peak was reached with "Because the Night", the song co-written by Springsteen and Patti Smith, and illuminated here by a sensational guitar solo from Nils Lofgren. Brilliant.

So it went on, as a dull Dublin sky turned dark and the drama intensified with "The River", "The Rising", "Born to Run", and finally a riotously received rendition of the traditional Irish song "American Land". He's still the Boss. No question.



May 25 /Dublin, IRE / RDS Arena
Setlist:
No Surrender
Radio Nowhere
The Ties That Bind
Spirit in the Night
Gypsy Biker
Atlantic City
Reason to Believe
4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)
Growin' Up
Because the Night
She's the One
Livin' in the Future
Mary's Place
The Promised Land
Racing in the Street
The Rising
Last to Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands
* * *
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out
Born to Run
Rosalita
Dancing in the Dark
American Land
Ramrod
Glory Days



May 23 /Dublin, IRE / RDS Arena
Setlist:
Night
Radio Nowhere
No Surrender
Lonesome Day
The Promised Land
Magic
Trapped
Murder Incorporated
Darlington County
Prove It All Night
She's the One
Livin' in the Future
Mary's Place
Girls in Their Summer Clothes
Devil's Arcade
The Rising
Last to Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands
* * *
Jungleland
Born to Run
Glory Days
Dancing in the Dark
American Land



May 22 /Dublin, IRE / RDS Arena
Setlist:
The Promised Land
Radio Nowhere
Lonesome Day
Out in the Street
Gypsy Biker
Magic
Reason to Believe
Candy's Room
Prove It All Night
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Because the Night
She's the One
Livin' in the Future
Mary's Place
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
The River
Devil's Arcade
The Rising
Last to Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands
* * *
Thunder Road
Born to Run
Bobby Jean
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out (w/ Southside Johnny)
American Land

Today's Tune: Sgt. Barry Sadler - The Ballad of the Green Berets

(Click on title to play video)

Mystic Chords of Memory

http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 23, 2008, 4:00 a.m.

From America's Founding, to the sacrifices of her sons and daughters, we remember.

By Mackubin Thomas Owens

This weekend, we mark the 140th anniversary of the first official observation of the holiday we now call Memorial Day, as established by General John A. Logan’s “General Order No. 11” of the Grand Army of the Republic dated 5 May, 1868. This order reads in part: “The 30th day of May 1868 is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers and otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land.” Logan’s order served to ratify a practice that was already widespread, both in the North and the South, in the years immediately following the Civil War.

Alas, for many Americans today, Memorial Day has come to signify nothing more than another three-day weekend, a mere excuse for a weekend cook-out. Such an observance of Memorial Day obscures even the vestiges of its intended meaning: a solemn time, serving both as catharsis for those who fought and survived, and to ensure that those who follow will not forget the sacrifice of those who died that the American Republic and the principles that sustain it, might live.

The sad reality is that Americans have forgotten how to honor their war heroes and to remember their war dead. As “Bing” West observed several years ago in his remarkable book about Fallujah, No True Glory, stories of soldierly courage deserve “to be recorded and read by the next generation. Unsung, the noblest deed will die.”

The posture Americans took toward Memorial Day started to go awry with Vietnam. The press, if not the American people, began to treat soldiers as moral monsters, victims, or both. The “dysfunctional Vietnam vet” became a staple of popular culture. Despite the fact that atrocities were rare, My Lai came to symbolize the entire war. Thanks to the press’s preoccupation with the anomaly of My Lai, Lt. William Calley became the poster boy for Vietnam. The honorable and heroic performance of the vast majority of those who served in Vietnam went largely unrecognized.

For instance, how many Americans know the story of Marine Lieutenant John P. Bobo, who received the Medal of Honor for his actions in Vietnam? Here is part of his citation:

When an exploding enemy mortar round severed Lieutenant Bobo's right leg below the knee, he refused to be evacuated and insisted upon being placed in a firing position to cover the movement of the command group to a better location. With a web belt around his leg serving as a tourniquet and with his leg jammed into the dirt to curtail the bleeding, he remained in this position and delivered devastating fire into the ranks of the enemy attempting to overrun the Marines. Lieutenant Bobo was mortally wounded while firing his weapon into the main point of the enemy attack but his valiant spirit inspired his men to heroic efforts. . . .

The reason for this disparity in coverage is simple. My Lai fit the conventional narrative of the anti-war Left; Bobo’s story did not.

The conventional wisdom concerning Vietnam has been absorbed by today’s press, even those too young to remember America’s misadventure in Southeast Asia. The resulting predisposition is to believe the worst about those who are willing to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan. Opponents of the war, for instance, pounced on the alleged killing of Iraqi civilians in Haditha three years ago, long before an investigation was complete. Employing the parlance of a country still entrenched in the Vietnam-era narrative, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a vociferous critic of the war, broke the story by claiming that Marines in Haditha had “killed innocent civilians in cold blood.”

In April of 2005, Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith, U.S. Army, became the first soldier in the Iraq war to be awarded the Medal of Honor. He was killed in action when his outnumbered unit was attacked by Iraqi forces at the Baghdad airport on April 4, 2003, and is credited with saving hundreds of lives.

In his October 4, 2007 Wall Street Journal piece,“ Modern Heroes,” Robert Kaplan observed that “according to LexisNexis, by June 2005, two months after his posthumous award, [Smith’s] stirring story had drawn only 90 media mentions, compared to 4,677 for the supposed Quran abuse at Guantanamo Bay, and 5,159 for the court-martialed Abu Ghraib guard Lynndie England.” This is nothing short of a scandal.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration bears some of the responsibility for our failure to honor the heroes and war dead of Iraq and Afghanistan. The president has publicly presented the two posthumous Medals of Honor that have been awarded for Iraq and Afghanistan, but has otherwise passed up opportunities to present Distinguished Service Crosses, Navy Crosses, or Silver Stars. This is part of the administration’s strategy to avoid public mention of the war, an approach that is is self-defeating on so many levels.

There are no doubt sound political reasons for the president to avoid the topic of the war, but the decision to do so permits the old Vietnam narrative of the American solider as victim to roam freely in the minds of Americans. Anyone who doubts the degree to which this view of the American soldier has become institutionalized in American culture should visit the Vietnam War Memorial. Instead of evoking respect for the honored dead, this structure induces on the one hand, pity for those whose names appear on the wall, and on the other, relief on the part of those who, for whatever reason, did not serve.

In a Memorial Day address I delivered ten years ago at Newport City Hall, I asked rhetorically, why are such men as John Bobo and Paul Ray Smith willing to fight and die? I observed that in his book, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, Glen Gray provided one answer: “Numberless soldiers have died, more or less willingly, not for country or honor or religious faith or for any other abstract good, but because they realized that by fleeing their posts and rescuing themselves, they would expose their companions to greater danger. Such loyalty to the group is the essence of fighting morale.”

It is my own experience that Gray is right about what men think about in the heat of combat: the impact of our actions on our comrades always looms large in our minds. As Oliver Wendell Holmes observed in his Memorial Day address of 1884, “In the great democracy of self-devotion private and general stand side by side.”

But while the individual soldier may focus on the particulars of combat, Memorial Day permits us to enlarge the individual soldier’s view, giving broader meaning to the sacrifice that was accepted of some but offered by all, not only acknowledging and remembering the sacrifice, but validating it.

In the history of the world, many good soldiers have died bravely and honorably for bad or unjust causes. Americans are fortunate in that we have been given a way of avoiding this situation by linking the sacrifice of our soldiers to the meaning of the nation.

At the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg four months after the battle, President Abraham Lincoln fleshed out the understanding of what he called in his First Inaugural Address, the “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land.”

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address gives universal meaning to the particular deaths that occurred on that hallowed ground, thus allowing us to understand Memorial Day in the light of the Fourth of July, to comprehend the honorable end of the soldiers in the light of the glorious beginning and purpose of the nation. The deaths of the soldiers at Gettysburg, of those who died during the Civil War as a whole, and indeed of those who have fallen in all the wars of America, are validated by reference to the nation and its founding principles as articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

Some will object, claiming that linking Memorial Day and Independence Day glorifies war and trivializes individual loss and the end of youth and joy. How can the loved ones of a fallen soldier ever recover from such a loss? I corresponded with the mother of one of my Marines who died in Vietnam for some time after his death. He was an only child and her inconsolable pain and grief put me in mind of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Epitaphs of the War, verse IV, “An Only Son”:

I have slain none but my mother,

She(Blessing her slayer) died of grief for me.

Kipling too, lost his only son in World War I.

But as Holmes said in 1884, “[G]rief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death — of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope and will.”

By all means, have a hot dog or a hamburger this weekend. If you’re close to a beach or a lake, take advantage of the nice weather and go. But on Memorial Day, take some time to remember the John Bobos and the Paul Ray Smiths who died to make your weekend possible.

— Mackubin Thomas Owens is an associate dean of academics and professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, and is the editor of Orbis. He is a Marine infantry veteran of Vietnam.

Michael Novak: American Energy -- and Invention

http://corner.nationalreview.com
Friday, May 23, 2008

Candidate Obama, like so many lefties, seems to believe anything bad about the United States, without even submitting it to critical thinking. He said on May 19, 2008, for example, that 3% of the world’s population (i.e., in his calculation, the United States) accounts for 25% of the greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere. In the 1970s, the lefties used to talk about 6% of the world’s population using 25% of the world’s energy. Even before Obama, they were blaming America first.

The left’s figures depend on what is meant by “energy.” Before the founding and development of the United States, “energy” meant the human back, beasts of burden, windmills, waterwheels, burning wood, coke, and coal, and the like. The United States is certainly not using 25% of the energy generated by those means today. I don’t think so, although it might be. The darn country is just so efficient.

But if we mean by “energy” only the modern sources of energy – electricity, the Franklin stove, the steam engine, the piston engine propelled by gasoline (and now by electric and/or hydrogen batteries), the processing of crude oil into gasoline, nuclear energy, the jet engine, the development of ethanol and other fuels derived from plants, and other devices – all of these except one were invented by the people of the United States, as their gift to the world. (The exception was the steam engine, invented by our cousins in Britain, and further developed here as well as there.)

In other words, the United States has invented nearly 100% of what the modern world means by “energy.” And it has helped the rest of the world to use 75%.

Why can’t the other peoples of the world learn how to discover, invent, and develop new kinds of energy? Why must the whole burden be placed upon the people of the United States?

And, by the way, it is not so hard to foresee the day when new kinds of batteries, also invented in the United States, will nearly entirely replace gasoline as the propellant of our cars. Think what will happen to the Middle East when oil becomes too expensive, too dirty, and just plain obsolete.

The smart-aleck remark of the Saudi official who recently told the Americans traveling with President Bush: “If you want more oil, buy it!” will one day be quoted quite quaintly alongside Marie Antoinette’s “If they don’t have bread, let them eat cake!”

05/23 10:41 AM

Today's Tune: The Byrds - Ballad Of Easy Rider

(Click on title to play video)

Sex and the Sissy

DECLARATIONS
By PEGGY NOONAN

The Wall Street Journal
May 23, 2008; Page A11



AP
Golda Meir never cried 'sexism.'

She was born in Russia, fled the pogroms with her family, was raised in Milwaukee, and worked the counter at her father's general store when she was 8. In early adulthood she made aliyah to Palestine, where she worked on a kibbutz, picking almonds and chasing chickens. She rose in politics, was the first woman in the first Israeli cabinet, soldiered on through war and rumors of war, became the first and so far only woman to be prime minister of Israel. And she knew what it is to be a woman in the world. "At work, you think of the children you've left at home. At home you think of the work you've left unfinished. . . . Your heart is rent." This of course was Golda Meir.

Another: She was born in a family at war with itself and the reigning power outside. As a child she carried word from her important father to his fellow revolutionaries, smuggling the papers in her school bag. War and rumors of war, arrests, eight months in jail. A rise in politics -- administering refugee camps, government minister. When war came, she refused to flee an insecure border area; her stubbornness helped rally a nation. Her rivals sometimes called her "Dumb Doll," and an American president is said to have referred to her in private as "the old witch." But the prime minister of India preferred grounding her foes to dust to complaining about gender bias. In the end, and in the way of things, she was ground up too. Proud woman, Indira Gandhi.



Indira Gandhi

And there is Margaret Hilda Roberts. A childhood in the besieged Britain of World War II -- she told me once of listening to the wireless and being roused by Churchill. "Westward look, the land is bright," she quoted him; she knew every stanza of the old poem. Her father, too, was a shopkeeper, and she grew up in the apartment above the store near the tracks. She went to Oxford on scholarship, worked as a chemist, entered politics, rose, became another first and only, succeeding not only in a man's world but in a class system in which they knew how to take care of ambitious little grocer's daughters from Grantham. She was to a degree an outsider within her own party, so she remade it. She lived for ideas as her colleagues lived for comfort and complaint. The Tories those days managed loss. She wanted to stop it; she wanted gain. Just before she became prime minister, the Soviets, thinking they were deftly stigmatizing an upstart, labeled her the Iron Lady. She seized the insult and wore it like a hat. This was Thatcher, stupendous Thatcher, now the baroness.

Great women, all different, but great in terms of size, of impact on the world and of struggles overcome. Struggle was not something they read about in a book. They did not use guilt to win election -- it comes up zero if you Google "Thatcher" and "You're just picking on me because I'm a woman." Instead they used the appeals men used: stronger leadership, better ideas, a superior philosophy.



Margaret Thatcher

* * *

You know where I'm going, for you know where she went. Hillary Clinton complained again this week that sexism has been a major dynamic in her unsuccessful bid for political dominance. She is quoted by the Washington Post's Lois Romano decrying the "sexist" treatment she received during the campaign, and the "incredible vitriol that has been engendered" by those who are "nothing but misogynists." The New York Times reported she told sympathetic bloggers in a conference call that she is saddened by the "mean-spiritedness and terrible insults" that have been thrown "at you, for supporting me, and at women in general."

Where to begin? One wants to be sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton at this point, if for no other reason than to show one's range. But her last weeks have been, and her next weeks will likely be, one long exercise in summoning further denunciations. It is something new in politics, the How Else Can I Offend You Tour. And I suppose it is aimed not at voters -- you don't persuade anyone by complaining in this way, you only reinforce what your supporters already think -- but at history, at the way history will tell the story of the reasons for her loss.

So, to address the charge that sexism did her in:

It is insulting, because it asserts that those who supported someone else this year were driven by low prejudice and mindless bias.

It is manipulative, because it asserts that if you want to be understood, both within the community and in the larger brotherhood of man, to be wholly without bias and prejudice, you must support Mrs. Clinton.

It is not true. Tough hill-country men voted for her, men so backward they'd give the lady a chair in the union hall. Tough Catholic men in the outer suburbs voted for her, men so backward they'd call a woman a lady. And all of them so naturally courteous that they'd realize, in offering the chair or addressing the lady, that they might have given offense, and awkwardly joke at themselves to take away the sting. These are great men. And Hillary got her share, more than her share, of their votes. She should be a guy and say thanks.

It is prissy. Mrs. Clinton's supporters are now complaining about the Hillary nutcrackers sold at every airport shop. Boo hoo. If Golda Meir, a woman of not only proclaimed but actual toughness, heard about Golda nutcrackers, she would have bought them by the case and given them away as party favors.

It is sissy. It is blame-gaming, whining, a way of not taking responsibility, of not seeing your flaws and addressing them. You want to say "Girl, butch up, you are playing in the leagues, they get bruised in the leagues, they break each other's bones, they like to hit you low and hear the crack, it's like that for the boys and for the girls."

And because the charge of sexism is all of the above, it is, ultimately, undermining of the position of women. Or rather it would be if its source were not someone broadly understood by friend and foe alike to be willing to say anything to gain advantage.

* * *

It is probably truer that being a woman helped Mrs. Clinton. She was the front-runner anyway and had all the money, power, Beltway backers. But the fact that she was a woman helped give her supporters the special oomph to be gotten from making history. They were by definition involved in something historic. And they were on the right side, connected to the one making the breakthrough, shattering the glass. They were going to be part of breaking it into a million little pieces that could rain down softly during the balloon drop at the historic convention, each of them catching the glow of the lights. Some network reporter was going to say, "They look like pieces of the glass ceiling that has finally been shattered."

I know: Barf. But also: Fine. Politics should be fun.

Meir and Gandhi and Mrs. Thatcher suffered through the political downside of their sex and made the most of the upside. Fair enough. As for this week's Clinton complaints, I imagine Mrs. Thatcher would bop her on the head with her purse. Mrs. Gandhi would say "That is no way to play it." Mrs. Meir? "They said I was the only woman in the cabinet and the only one with -- well, you know. I loved it."

Michelle Obama is Fair Game

By Jeff Jacoby
Boston Globe Columnist

May 25, 2008

ON THE website of the Tennessee Republican Party is a short video in which residents of Nashville talk about the pride they feel for their country. One man, for example, mentions his esteem for the First and Second Amendments. A Vanderbilt graduate student says he was proud when Ronald Reagan told Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall - "and I was prouder when it came down." A young professional woman extols the "academic and job opportunities that women have in this country." A police officer named Juan says he is proud of having immigrated to the United States, learned English, and become a citizen of this "land of opportunity and the best country in the world."

The video makes its point by alternating these upbeat comments with clips of Michelle Obama telling two different audiences in February: "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country." In an understated press release announcing the video, the state GOP welcomed Mrs. Obama to Nashville and remarked: "The Tennessee Republican Party has always been proud of America."

One would have to have skin of microscopic thinness to take offense at so gentle and indirect a critique. No surprise, then, that Barack Obama took offense, reacting as if his bride had been slimed by slurs akin to those that enraged Andrew Jackson when he ran for president. (During the campaign of 1828, supporters of John Quincy Adams maligned Jackson's mother as a "common prostitute" and mocked his adored wife, Rachel, as a "convicted adulteress" and a "strumpet.") In an interview on ABC, Obama growled that Republicans "should lay off my wife," and described the inoffensive Tennessee video as "detestable," "low class," and reflecting "a lack of decency."

If Republicans "think that they're going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign," he added ominously, "they should be careful."

Ooh, very fierce. But unless Obama is prepared to emulate Jackson - Old Hickory defended his wife's honor by fighting duels, in one of which he killed a man - he stands no chance of putting his wife's remarks off-limits to criticism. As long as he keeps sending her around the country to campaign on his behalf, everything she says is - and should be - fair game.
And unfortunately for Obama and his allegedly sunny politics of hope, what Mrs. Obama seems to say with grim regularity is that America is a scary, bleak, and hopeless place.

Here she is, for instance, in Wisconsin:

"Life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime, through Republican and Democratic administrations. It hasn't gotten much better."

And in South Carolina:

America is "just downright mean" and "guided by fear . . . We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day."

And in North Carolina:

"Folks are struggling like never before . . . When you're that busy struggling all the time, which most people that you know and I know are, you don't have time to get to know your neighbor . . . In fact, you feel very alone in your struggle, because you feel that somehow it must be your fault that you're struggling so hard . . . People are afraid, because when your world's not right, no matter how hard you work, then you become afraid of everyone and everything, because you don't know whose fault it is, why you can't get a handle on life, why you can't secure a better future for your kids . . . Fear is the worst enemy. It . . . creates this veil of impossibility, and it is hanging over all of our heads."

There is also her creepily authoritarian vision of life under an Obama administration. From a speech in California:

"Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone . . . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual - uninvolved, uninformed."

Michelle Obama is undeniably smart, driven, outspoken, and charismatic. She is also relentlessly negative about life in these United States. True, she is not the one running for president. But she is Barack Obama's closest confidante and adviser; if he is elected, her influence will be considerable. That is why her words matter. And why, whether her husband likes it or not, Michelle Obama is a legitimate issue in this campaign.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.