The Reluctant Pope

By GEORGE NEUMAYR on 2.12.13 @ 6:12AM

The American Spectator

http://spectator.org

He served out of duty, not ambition.

On Benedict XVI’s papal coat of arms appears a beast of burden (a bear with a pack-saddle), a symbol of the reluctance and dutifulness with which Benedict served in the Vatican. In fact, he had once asked Pope John Paul II if he could leave Rome and return to Germany. But the pope asked him to stay and continue to serve as the Church’s head of doctrine.

After John Paul II’s death, Benedict emerged as the indispensable man, without the least bit of angling for that role. He didn’t seek the papacy; it simply fell upon him. He had hoped the college of cardinals would select someone else. But his acute intellect, grasp of the Church’s crisis, and closeness to John Paul II made him the obvious choice.

Given this background, his resignation appears more understandable. He entered the papacy humbly and now leaves it humbly. His resignation is a great loss for the Church and the world. He represented the unity of reason and faith at a moment when the world was fast losing both. Between the West’s culture of abortion and the East’s culture of jihad, he stood as the civilizational center for life.

The media verdicts so far on his supposedly inconsequential and failed pontificate have been useless, reflecting nothing more than the progressive prejudices of reporters and pundits. Long after their spiteful articles have yellowed, his encyclicals will be read.

The truth is that they didn’t like him from the start, treating the elevation of a believing Catholic to the papacy as somehow “controversial.” Bill Keller, the former executive editor of the New York Times, once blurted out that “the struggle within the church is interesting as part of a larger struggle within the human race, between the forces of tolerance and absolutism.” That is the only prism through which the media ever saw Benedict: he fell on the wrong side of the progressive “struggle” and so became a target for endless media bias.

All the coming coverage of the papal election, sure to be absurdly ill-informed and tedious, will turn on that same standard. Candidates who appear sympathetic to the “forces of tolerance” will receive glowing coverage for weeks while the Church is lectured about the need to “modernize” and avoid a “contentious” pope. Modern liberals simply can’t rest until the Church elects a liberal pope. Hijacking the Church for their own ideological purposes has long been their goal. They dream of a pope giving his imprimatur to the sexual revolution and socialism. Then at last the “forces of absolutism” will have been defeated!

By absolutism, the Kellers ultimately mean God. That’s the absolute authority they seek to overthrow. They numbered Benedict among their historical enemies for refusing to join them in removing God from religion. He wouldn’t swallow the secularist acids they dish up as “dialogue” and so he had to be dismissed.

But historians decades from now will take his pontificate seriously. It stands as an important step toward the restoration of order and orthodoxy within the Church after many years of scandal and foolishness. While plenty of dysfunction is still on display, Benedict did what he could to curb it. Contrary to the media’s spinning, he inherited these crises; he didn’t create them.

Indeed, the moments in his pontificate that the media has worked hardest to try and trivialize and discredit will hold up the best: his battles with the “dictatorship of relativism,” his promotion of wider use of the traditional Latin Mass, his reinstitution of the ban on the ordination of homosexuals to the priesthood, his historic overture to disaffected Anglicans, his voluminous stream of speeches and writings that aimed at repairing the catechetical collapse within the Church; his insistence on the “non-negotiable” character of the natural moral law in shaping politics and culture. 

He threw out an anchor to stop the doctrinal and disciplinary drift within the Church, which future generations will appreciate even if this one doesn’t. The pressure on modern popes, both from outside and inside the Church, to pander to the permissive society is enormous. He resisted that pressure, understanding that if the Church mirrors the morality and philosophy of the world she becomes just one more force for evil and delusion in it.

He was a reluctant pope but a conscientious one, whose legacy, like that of his namesake, will be to have scattered seeds of recovery along the dark fields of Europe and the world.

Swallow Your Pride, Save Your Child

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February 12, 2013

By Daren Jonescu

It is high time for parents who care about the future of their children, their community, and their civilization to stop telling themselves comforting lies about their power to combat the degradations of public education.  Believing that reason and morality can be restored while leaving the compulsory public school apparatus intact is like imagining you are going to raise your daughter to be Jane Austen while feeding her a daily diet of Beyoncé and Lady Gaga.
Sometimes, conditions in life become so bleak that telling ourselves little white lies about the nature of the situation becomes a survival mechanism.  We must not fail to distinguish, however, between giving ourselves hope and spitting into the wind. 
The modern public school's purpose, as described by its leading theorists, advocates, and power-brokers for more than a century, is to destroy ethical individualism, to undermine the natural human impulses toward knowledge and self-reliance, and to create a society of intellectually stunted, humble, conformist workers and voters for the progressive authoritarian state.  To blind oneself to this reality, and to the obvious success of this project in undoing modern morality and liberty, is unwittingly to facilitate the gradual smothering of the human spirit.
Having written about public education frequently of late, I have naturally encountered many objections to my supposedly radical recommendations on this subject.  The objection that disturbs me most, however, is that of conservatives who agree with my analysis of the subversive influence of public schools, but then dismiss my conclusion that the solution is to remove any child within your sphere of influence from the government school system as fully as possible, and to reject any political efforts to "reform" public education that would further circumscribe private alternatives (such as by imposing new compulsory "standards") and hence limit parental authority over the raising of children.
Many decent people stubbornly hope they can offset the negative effects of public education by spending "quality time" with their children at home, limiting their television viewing, and providing moral alternatives to the school's leftist nihilism. 
Let us assume that a family is doing all of these things consistently and earnestly.  Is this enough to ensure that the government's indoctrination program is not having at least some retarding effect on their child's moral and intellectual development?  Should parents be satisfied with merelyreducing the damage done to their child's soul?  Must they not seek to prevent all such damage, to the extent within their power?  Are they not morally obligated to do so?
Children, of course, do not only learn the lessons they are explicitly taught.  Far more important in the long run are the implied messages they absorb from their experience, and from the adults they admire most.  If those messages seem contradictory or confused, the effects may be very different from what the parents imagine they are teaching.  Children are not yet capable of examining all sides of an issue rationally.  Their special strength, which slowly gives way to reasoning as they mature (if this evolution is not deformed by progressive education), is an extraordinary sensitivity to unspoken signals, emotional resonances, and subtle irregularities in the order of things. 
Let us examine the case of a couple that sends a child to public school, and then hopes to undermine the school at home by discussing the child's lessons each evening with a view to correcting historical inaccuracies, providing an alternative moral perspective, and encouraging self-reliance and confidence where the government curriculum is promoting dependency and fear.  The parents tell themselves they are doing what they can to negate the harmful effects of the child's teachers, and of the mob rule social milieu of the school.  Hence, they feel justified in rejecting suggestions that they should remove their child from public school outright. 
But consider the lessons a child learns from being confined, for several hours a day, to a social setting wherein -- according to the parents who confined him there -- what he is learning is false.  Why, he must wonder, are Mom and Dad delivering me into the hands of people who are lying to me?  Should the parents explain to their child that most of his teachers are ignorant cogs in a corrupt system, low-achievers happy to have a comfortable and respectable job with salary, vacations, a very comfortable retirement, and medical benefits protected by a powerful union with a socialist agenda?  How is that supposed to make the child feel about the fact that his parents are forcing him into hours of confinement with those teachers every day?
And what if, on the contrary, the parents think it best to conceal the gross corruption and ineptitude of the public school's teachers and curriculum, so as not to harden their child to trust, optimism and goodwill?  What confusion will their daily undermining of the school's lessons and moral outlook foster in the child's mind under this condition?  Trying to protect him from cynicism, they encourage him to respect his teachers.  That respect will, given the natural effects upon children of daily dependence and proximity, develop into a certain degree of attachment and affection toward his teachers -- along with faith in the teachers' authority and knowledge. 
Thus, in the name of protecting their child's innocence, the parents will have painted themselves into a moral corner, giving their child emotional impetus to submit to his school's invocations to relativism, egalitarianism, and soul-sapping conformism -- and then hoping to undo all of this in the evening.  Out of the noblest motives, they will, in effect, have served their child to the lions.  To present themselves as an opposing voice now will likely make the child feel like a pawn in some sort of ideological rivalry between two factions of adults whom he admires and respects -- similar to the sad psychological effects of a nasty divorce upon young children. 
And then, of course, there is the question of whether it is possible to negate the most pernicious effects of public education at all.  There is, for example, no way to estimate the damage to a child's emotional and intellectual development of having his pubescent (or pre-pubescent) erotic impulses manhandled by progressivism's crude, animalistic, anti-spiritual reductions of the sexual realm.  No parent, however well-meaning, can everundo the soul-flattening effects of modern government education's cucumber birth control lessons, alternative lifestyle presentations, and feminist sloganeering -- not to mention the effects of daily exposure to the dehumanizing "sexual activity is no big deal" attitude encouraged by the school's social environment.  (Beyoncé kills Jane Austen, period.)
When I have had occasion to teach Plato's Symposium to university students, I have been painfully aware that my most difficult task was to teach the students the perspective that was merely the common, obvious starting point for Plato's readers of the previous twenty-three hundred years -- namely that Eros is the mystery of human existence, the source of our faint notions of immortality, eternity, and wisdom.  Young people whose erotic education was gained in a progressive cucumber class are hardly prepared to go seeking the meaning of life with Socrates and Aristophanes.
To summarize: parents who are capable of providing private or home schooling, but who leave their children in public school while hoping to undo the damage at home, are fooling themselves.  Some damage can never be undone, and even that which can be somewhat mitigated would be better avoided entirely.  Furthermore, setting yourself up as parental avenger against the government's indoctrination is setting your child up for confused feelings, resentments, and disillusionments that are both harmful to his sentimental development and completely unnecessary. 
Good parents: swallow your pride and save your children.  Your efforts to fight progressive education from within -- saving your pride while allowing your children to be swallowed -- are a microcosm of the Gramsci Plan for modern society's defeat.
Some people minimize the educational crisis by declaring that the public schools were good back in their day, and have merely gone off the rails within the past few decades.  False.  The "father of modern education," John Dewey, published his first major work, The School and Social Progress, in 1899.  He was an anti-rational, anti-freedom (and later Trotskyite) dissembler who saw socialism as the only corrective for society's ills, and promoted public education as the most effective means to socialism.  He has been the dominant intellectual force behind the development of Western education for a hundred years.  Furthermore, the reason for his quick rise to preeminence in education theory is that his "radical methods" were not fundamentally inconsistent with the goals of the earlier "philanthropic" advocates of public education, namely to produce a qualified but humble underclass that would not challenge the authority of an entrenched oligarchy.  (President Obama's crony Warren Buffet has recently remarked that in the name of fairness, private schools ought to be banned outright, and all children forcibly distributed to government schools by lottery.  Plus ça change....)
In short, the past century of public education displays the fate of today's well-intentioned public school parent writ large.  Civilization always was, in effect, mitigating the compulsory school's damage at home.  In the earlier stages, the progressive degradation was more subtle, but only because public education itself had not yet become a completely closed shop.  That is to say, a hundred years ago many parents had spent relatively few years in public schools themselves; many teachers and school administrators had received alternative forms of education, as had their own teachers and university professors; government schools were still somewhat under the sway of educational models adapted from the pre-public era; and the progressive schools had not yet entirely displaced family, religion, and great literature as the primary moral influences among the majority of the population.  Civilization therefore deteriorated slowly, rather than all at once.
But it did deteriorate: today's universal public education catastrophe is not a radical shift from the schools of "your day."  It is the inevitable, logical outcome of a long war between authoritarians who sought to mold a compliant underclass of amoral collectivists, and responsible adults who sought to promote a happy and moral life for their children. 
The lesson is clear: The authoritarians won.  They always will, in the end -- until they are forcibly denied the souls they wish to corrupt. 
Take your children out of public school now -- before today's heirs to Dewey, Marx, and the early self-serving oligarchs achieve their ultimate goal, which is to deny parents the freedom to take their children out at all.  Jane Austen had no government schooling, and received most of her education at home, reading books recommended by her father.  Try it.

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Turn out the lights of Europe when you leave, Pope!

By Andrew Klavan
http://pjmedia.com
February 11, 2013

So long, you relativistic suckers!

I write this hesitantly because it’s way outside my areas of expertise (action movies and things that explode in the microwave). Plus I’m not even Catholic. But I think Joseph Ratzinger — aka Pope Benedict XVI — is one of the greatest men of the age — possibly the only great man of the age — and almost certainly the last great man Europe will produce. As far as I’m concerned, he should turn the continent’s lights out as he steps down at the end of the month.

B-16′s greatness doesn’t lie in his papacy. Or that is, if it does, I wouldn’t know. It’s his writing, his theology, his thought that elevate him in my mind. When I was but a youngish dude, pounding my way through the great works, it seemed to me that the wisdom of many of the great German thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries had been thrown aside for no good reason. Kant and Hegel had philosophically rescued the essence of Christianity for the scientific age, and had been ultimately left behind by mainstream thinkers not because they were wrong, but because they were just sort of out of keeping with the atheistic spirit of the day.

As Nietzsche understood, that God-is-dead zeitgeist would perforce lead to moral relativism. And so it has. But Ratzinger, shrugging off the zeitgeist like the cheap suit it is, humbly went on tilling the Kantian and Hegelian fields, making his way back not just to the essentials of Christianity but to the sacred person of Christ himself.

This is a great act — an intellectual feat that shows the idols of the age — men like Derrida and Lacan and Foucault — to be the mental pygmies that they are. When they are forgotten (which will be around Thursday at 4PM), the writings of Ratzinger will be remembered and read and discussed for their radical divergence away from the wisdom of the age and toward the truth. Or make that Truth.

Anyway, I know the news media will be trying anything they can to make it sound as if B-16 was somehow responsible for the execrable child-molesting business. (As far as I can tell, he had no culpability there and even helped clean up the mess.) And I know they will be focusing their energies on trying to pressure the Vatican into electing a black lesbian midget next or whatever.

But I’d like to see someone more expert than I am in these matters talk about B-16′s role as a philosopher in the great German tradition. It was that tradition that gave us Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. And I think Ratzinger was like one of those.

Commentary: Paterno legacy little changed by family's commissioned report

By David Jones
The Patriot-News
http://www.pennlive.com/patriotnews/
February 10, 2013

When Joe Paterno's family announced it was releasing a report today that would ostensibly clear him of any wrongdoing in the Jerry Sandusky scandal, I had a pretty good idea what its aim would be: To persuade people that Paterno did nothing to hide the pedophile's acts or impede his investigation.
That's never been the issue with me. Based on any evidence, including the Freeh Report, it's hard to know whether Paterno played a role in any active cover-up. That's been the debate ever since its release last July.
What I believe Paterno should be held accountable for is not what he did but what he didn't do. Not his actions, his inactions. You don't need the Freeh Report to see that, you only need Paterno's grand jury testimony and the information available in the state attorney general's presentment.

View full sizeJoe PaternoFile photo

The findings in those documents led to Paterno's firing in November 2011, as well as the ouster of Penn State president Graham Spanier, athletics director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz.
Nine months later, the Freeh Report led to the NCAA's Keystone Kops act in which it bypassed its own process and levied unprecedented sanctions against the PSU football program based on a criminal case for which it was not built to handle.
These are separate issues. Viewing the two together is a mistake.
The connector is former FBI director Louis Freeh's conclusions about Paterno. They raised the suggestion that the coach may have been involved in a cover-up so as not to smudge the Penn State football brand.
This is the heart of contention of the report commissioned by the Paternos. Former Pennsylvania governor and attorney general Dick Thornburgh, speaking this morning on ESPN's Outside The Lines, pointed out, as many have, that Spanier, Curley and Schultz were not interviewed by Freeh. They couldn't be due to their involvement in the ongoing investigation. Their lawyers were interviewed by the Paterno group:
“Personal interviews with interested parties were most important here. None of the interviews were among the principals involved in these events. And therefore, conclusions about those individuals must be viewed as pure speculation.”
Fair enough. The Paterno group, after speaking with the attorneys of the three charged Penn State officials, assessed in its statement released this morning that:
“(1) Joe Paterno never asked or told anyone not to investigate fully the allegations in 2001, (2) Joe Paterno never asked or told anyone, including Dr. Spanier and Messrs. Curley and Schultz, not to report the 2001 incident, and (3) Joe Paterno never asked or told anyone not to discuss or to hide in any way the information reported by Mr. McQueary. Joe Paterno reported the information to his superior(s) pursuant to his understanding of University protocol and relied upon them to investigate and report as appropriate.”
Then, nothing happened. It all just faded away. And that, apparently, was just fine with all involved. This is what I have a problem with. Not the question of motive. Just the very apparent aura of sheer negligence and apathy by all involved. Not action but inaction.
I like both Scott and Jay Paterno. I can try to imagine what it must be like to have your father's reputation harmed in public. I have reason to believe the last year and a half has been an inordinate shock to both of them. I don't think Joe regularly told them much about anything he did in his day-to-day job above what was necessary from a functional standpoint when Jay became an assistant coach. They are going to fight for their dad's image, as one would expect from any sons.
That is one thing. Then, there are separate issues of Penn State's reputation and the NCAA sanctions. They should not be intermingled because they deal with separate dynamics. Yes, the Freeh Report was the basis for the NCAA's misguided foray into a criminal case. What does that have to do with Paterno's reputation?
Sandusky's crimes and those who enabled them so far transcend in magnitude of importance the health of Penn State's football program and the image of the school that it's absurd to mention them in breaths less than hours apart. But for those of you so concerned, I think you should consider this:
One man who would love not to be dragging the Paterno sycophants behind him is the successor to their hero. Bill O'Brien is a not only a smart guy, he's savvy. He knows it would be counterproductive to yell out, “Enough, already! Can we move forward, please?” Even though I suspect he would love to.
For those left heartbroken that Penn State's good name has been smeared, I would suggest that the best course of corrective action would be to allow O'Brien to do what he's been doing. Unfettered by the cackling magpies debating his predecessor's legacy, unburdened by the yoke of constant regression.
I can tell you from receiving the unsolicited opinions of those around the Big Ten and around the country that O'Brien is the best ambassador you could possibly hope for. People like him in spite of their animosity toward Penn State.
The longer Paterno's legacy lingers as an issue with which Pennsylvanians appear obsessed, the worse Penn State comes off as a sheltered province of parochial zealots. The longer O'Brien stays on and implants an image of progressive demeanor and forward movement, the more Penn State's image benefits.
Doubt me if you like. Go ahead and ask some people from out of state with no dog in the fight. See what they say.
The odd thing is, I think most people from outside Pennsylvania have a pretty balanced view of Paterno. They don't discount his attributes. They always liked that he valued clean, tough football and that he insisted on sportsmanship from his players. Most seem to realize that no one ran a tighter ship when it came to lasting academic achievement, beyond its value simply to his program's reputation but toward that of his players' futures. I think most understand he genuinely cared about his players as people. But they also realize he was a football coach not a deity, a man who grew powerful and fell prey to all of unbridled power's seductive pitfalls.
So, they don't have difficulty believing that his judgment might have been warped when assessing risk to a creation he'd built block by block through decades.
I cannot know if Joe Paterno took steps to assure that Sandusky's actions were kept quiet. In fact, I'm something close to ambivalent about that issue. To some, it's critically important. To me, when assessing any detriment to Paterno's legacy, it's unessential, almost peripheral.
All I need to know is found in Paterno's Grand Jury testimony from Jan. 12, 2011. In it, he acknowledges Mike McQueary told him directly that Jerry Sandusky “was fondling... a young boy” in the Lasch Building showers. Those are Paterno's words. They are not indicative of “some amorphous incident” as former FBI special agent Jim Clemente termed McQueary's description to Paterno onOutside The Lines.
He also said this:
“Obviously, he was doing something with the youngster. It was a sexual nature. I’m not sure exactly what it was. I didn’t push Mike to describe exactly what it was because he was very upset.”
Of a sexual nature. Fondling a young boy. McQueary very upset.
These are not speculative terms or muddy thirdhand conclusions provided by an investigator. These are Joe Paterno's words, given under oath. Exactly what is ambiguous about them?
Yet, he felt the proper course of action was to wait 24 hours to inform his “superiors” so as not to “interfere with their weekends” and then watch as Sandusky traipsed around Penn State unimpeded for the next decade.
No matter what Paterno's apologists offer up as rationalization for his inaction, they always divert or equivocate in response to this question: If Paterno had heard such a story about his own grandson in a shower with Sandusky, what do you think would have happened?
I never get a straight answer from that one. The best they can come up with is, “Well, Joe is the only one who admitted he should have done more.” Then, I say, yep, that's right, he should've. A lot more.
And history will judge him in consort with that assessment.
It is a rational one. It's based on his own testimony. It can't be undone. It won't be.
Nor should it.

The Small Presidency

By Amity Schlaes
http://www.nationalreview.com
February 11, 2013

Action is something Americans of both parties demand of their presidents these days. This is natural for Democrats, whose heritage is all action, starting with Franklin Roosevelt and his Hundred Days. But Republicans like energy and a big executive as well. Over the course of the campaign this past year, any number of political stars, including Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, argued that only an energetic candidate would be up to the job of managing the U.S. fiscal crisis. Mitt Romney worked hard to let voters know his party could beat the Democrats in the legislative arena. He swore up and down that, à la Roosevelt, he would get off to a running start, sending five bills to Congress and signing five executive orders on his first day in the Oval Office.

The Grand Old Party’s abiding affection for a “bigger and better” presidency isn’t entirely logical. After all, the Obama presidency commenced with an effort to reenact the Hundred Days. Yet President Obama’s first-term economic performance itself was not “big” but mediocre, tiny even. Perhaps Republicans should consider whether inaction on the part of the White House can be desirable. Perhaps, led by Republicans, the United States could benefit from trying out an unfashionable idea: the small presidency.

Evidence from a near-forgotten period, the early 1920s, instructs us. In those days the country was suffering economic turmoil similar to our own. Because of a crisis — World War I — the government had intruded in business and financial markets in unprecedented fashion, nationalizing the railroads, shutting down the stock market, and entering the debt market with war bonds.
Central bankers warned that the only reason the government’s large debt hadn’t set off a fiscal apocalypse was that interest rates had not yet commenced what they deemed an inevitable rise. Angry veterans, many of them disabled, were having trouble finding jobs, and many people assumed a new federal entitlement, veteran pensions, would be established within the year. A recent and active president, Theodore Roosevelt, had taught the nation that the Oval Office was a “bully pulpit.”

But this was not the view of the two candidates on the 1920 Republican ticket, Warren Harding of Ohio and Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts. The pair coolly campaigned on the humdrum, underwhelming motto of “normalcy,” meaning a reduction in uncertainty. The White House was no bully pulpit; the Republican elephant should not be an elephant in a china shop. After winning the presidency, Harding continued to endorse inaction. “No altered system will work a miracle,” Harding told the crowds at his March 1921 inauguration. “Any wild experiment will only add to the confusion. Our best assurance lies in efficient administration of the proven system.” Harding wanted to ensure that government did less so that commerce might enjoy free range. He pushed for and got tax cuts for businesses hindered by large levies, and he readied a plan to privatize naval oil reserves.
Harding also provided displays of austerity. He canceled an inaugural ball that was to be held at the public’s expense, and even let his wife Florence know she would not need a ball gown. He backed and signed a budget law that helped the executive curtail congressional spending. And he crafted a compromise with veterans that enabled the government to avoid granting the expected veteran pensions: It would provide hospitals, but not cash, for vets.

But despite these measures, Harding was not really cut out to be a small president. His personality was big, and he tended to do things in a big way. The inconsistency between the man and his announced intentions was evident even on the night of the inauguration: The official ball was indeed canceled, but the Hardings put on finery and partied at an opulent private ball held by the owner of the Washington Post, Edward McLean, and his wife, Evalyn.

Harding’s friends loved him, and he loved them back — too much. More than once he appointed old cronies to office, regardless of their merits. To head the Veterans Bureau, the product of his compromise with the vets, Harding tapped his old acquaintance Charles Forbes. An Ohio buddy, Harry Daugherty, got the attorney general’s post.

Even when it came to legislating smaller government, Harding tended to favor a big style, demanding extra sessions of Congress to implement his agenda.
Soon it all went wrong for Harding. The president’s demand for special legislative sessions backfired, because it gave lawmakers more time to introduce legislation of their own, and therefore gave Harding more projects to battle. His exuberant affection for his former colleagues in the Senate made it especially difficult for him to oppose their legislation, and in the end he vetoed only six bills. The buddies he appointed to high office routinely undermined his case for small government.
The sale of some of the Navy’s oil reserves — a reasonable-sounding privatization — morphed into the scandal we know as Teapot Dome because Harding allies, including campaign donors, handled the transaction improperly. The neat Veterans Bureau compromise failed because Charles Forbes took large kickbacks on the construction of the veterans’ hospitals. When Americans saw that government-run hospitals were corrupt, demands for direct payments seemed reasonable.
Within two years, Harding’s legislative campaign had stalled, a casualty of the inconsistency between the personality and the program of the 29th president.
After Harding died suddenly in 1923 while on a trip to the West, the taciturn Coolidge became president, and he went on to be elected in his own right in 1924. Coolidge’s aims differed little from Harding’s: Indeed, he told the Post’s McLean that he aimed to carry out Harding’s plans “to perfection.” But where Harding had relished the limelight, Coolidge shrank from it. Where Harding had led, Coolidge now delegated. As vice president, the New Englander had struck Washington socialites with his silence, and as president he continued to do so.
Many rated Coolidge weak. Some were even astounded that the presidency should come to such a nonentity. H. L. Mencken wondered at a country that, given all the possible choices for president, “including thousands who are handsome and many who are wise, [would] pick out the Hon. Mr. Coolidge to be the head of state.” Thrifty to the point of stinginess, Coolidge eschewed attention and insisted the White House do so as well. Observant Washingtonians noted that the food at the White House became less good and that the liquor no longer flowed as it had in Harding’s day. Coolidge kept the White House kitchen on such a tight budget that he drove out the housekeeper who had served there since the Tafts’ day.
He so irritated many in Congress that lawmakers overrode some of his vetoes. In frustration, he resorted to the pocket veto, which could not be overridden. In total Coolidge issued 50 vetoes, among them 30 pocket vetoes. And he declined to run for reelection in 1928, forgoing a near-certain chance at victory. That earned him the contempt of his very practical party.
But Coolidge’s minimalism did not represent weakness. Sometimes it takes more strength to be small than to be big, and that was true in Coolidge’s case.
As I recently noted in these pages (“Calling Cal,” August 13), Coolidge’s modesty was an expression not of uncertainty but of an obsession with avoiding the corruption of office. By 1929, when Coolidge left Washington, he had completed the legislative tasks Harding had only started. His 50 vetoes had held back the Progressives; his federal budget contained less spending in 1929 than it had in 1924. The harmony between Coolidge’s modest goals and his modest comportment lent the whole undertaking credibility. He restored the reputation of the presidency and the federal government, wiping away the damage of Harding’s tenure.
Unfortunately, the small presidency did not last more than a few weeks beyond Coolidge’s departure from office in 1929. Even before the stock-market crash later that year, his successor, Herbert Hoover, was making big plans. “There is another atmosphere around there [in addition to] the Coolidge atmosphere,” wrote the journalist William Allen White. “It is the Roosevelt atmosphere, stepped down through a vast transformance, but still Rooseveltian, muffled but quite as vigorous. At the table Hoover lets the conversation die. Roosevelt never did. But at the desk, I fancy, Hoover gets more done than Roosevelt. And both are going in the same direction.”
My sense is that many Republican political failures, long-term or short-, can be blamed on the party’s unwillingness to try out the small presidency again. The first such failure was the unfortunate Hoover, who, as Romney might have done, favored engineering. Loving nothing better than managing the complex details of grand deals, Hoover often concluded agreements that pleased all parties but hurt the economy. An example was his meticulous negotiation of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Hoover was so pleased with his adaptations to a mechanism called the “flexible tariff” that he overlooked the damaging signal the tariff sent to foreign nations. They retaliated, accelerating the downward spiral of world trade.
Next came the Kansan Alf Landon, Franklin Roosevelt’s opponent in 1936. Landon ran on a platform only slightly less ambitious than Roosevelt’s — New Deal Lite — and lost. In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon similarly blurred the distinction between the two parties when he opted to play economic superhero at Camp David, ending the gold standard and imposing wage and price controls. These policies were popular at the time, but they hurt the party for decades: “We are all Keynesians now,” Nixon’s phrase, too often meant we were all Democrats as well. Ronald Reagan, strong as he was, also fits in here. We can see some of Coolidge in him, for, like Coolidge, he cut taxes, looked away from details, and delegated routinely. But his willingness to permit continued federal spending produced a record of deficits that would undermine the Republican reputation for fiscal probity.
Republicans who are thinking past January’s ceremony to future inaugurations might consider this strategy: For small government and big results, don’t just think small. Be small, too.
– Amity Shlaes, who directs the George W. Bush Institute’s economic-growth program, is the author of the bookCoolidge, forthcoming from HarperCollins.

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The Truth About Dorner: Leftism is Violence

by Andrew Klavan

The Truth About Dorner: Leftism Is Violence

http://pjmedia.com

February 10th, 2013 - 4:09 pm

 

There’s nothing for me to add to the great work already done by SooperMexican, Mediaite, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity and others critiquing the media coverage of alleged mad dog cop-killer Christopher Jordan Dorner. The media has been dishonest in trying to cover up Dorner’s left-wing views. They’ve been beyond hypocritical in drawing no link between Dorner’s acts and his politics — after they have repeatedly tried to link acts of violence to conservatism even when, as usual, there was no link to be made. Worst of all, as Big Government has shown, they are beginning to try to justify the slaughter.

Most of the conservative commentators listed above have been careful to point out that connections between a madman and his politics, whether right or left, should only be drawn with caution. And they all say that it’s irresponsible to blame political commentators, right or left, for the actions of a lunatic who may have taken inspiration from them.

I’m not so sure. Violence is inherent in left-wing philosophy, and the violence it inspires should be laid at its door.

Haven’t you noticed this? The American left is always waxing hysterical about right-wing violence and the true violence always comes from the American left. The American news media cry out in horror at peaceful Tea Party demonstrations and look the other way when Occupy Wall Streeters commit vandalism, rape, and even murder. The media try to pin any political assassination attempt on conservatives; yet almost all American political assassinations are committed by the left. If you want more examples as well as proof, read Demonic by Ann Coulter — who, unlike any left-wing pundit I can think of, needs a bodyguard whenever she speaks on college campuses!

What Coulter calls “Imaginary Violence from the Right vs. Actual Violence from the Left” is not an accident. Violence is an essential part of the left’s approach. The 19th century political philosopher Frederic Bastiat pointed out the fact (that Ayn Rand later popularized) that redistribution of wealth is in and of itself an unjustified use of force against the property of individuals. The fact that it’s a collective use of force in no way legitimizes it. Nor does the sanction of raw democracy which, as the old joke goes, is just two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for supper. In Bastiat’s words:

As the force of an individual cannot lawfully touch the person, the liberty, or the property of another individual — for the same reason, the common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or the property of individuals or of classes.

Leftism requires this illegitimate use of force — this use of violence — because free individuals simply will not do what leftists, in their wisdom, have decided is right and good.

The left has never bought into the central revelation of the Enlightenment: things are made to work perfectly fine without much control from above. This Enlightenment insight was inspired by the earlier work of Isaac Newton who discovered that God didn’t have to move the stars around in the sky or cause the apple to fall to earth. The Big Dude had cleverly put machinery in place that worked pretty much on its own. The economist Adam Smith translated this insight into economics when he pointed out that individuals working in their own interest frequently promote the interest of everyone as if by an invisible hand. The founders translated the idea into politics by creating a system in which individuals could act without too much government interference. These geniuses didn’t trust in individual goodness, not at all. They trusted in the handiwork of the Creator — that is, they trusted the overall human system was built to work without kings and aristocrats — or a democratic mob — forcing people to do what they wanted.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, the founding saint of modern leftism, rejected that Enlightenment wisdom. He hated the modern world and thought humanity had been better off in a state of noble savagery. In that state, Rousseau believed, men were truly free because their laws naturally followed the general will. If people in the corrupt modern age violated the general will, they had to be “forced to be free.”

The logic of Rousseau led to the guillotine. You can’t say: “Well, it’s no fair blaming the pundit Rousseau for the violence of the madman Robespierre.” The guillotine was inherent in Rousseau’s thought. And it’s Rousseau’s thought — his idea that individuals should be forced to follow the “general will” — that informs all leftist thinking — including, by the way, Obama’s second inaugural address.

So no, I don’t think we should be so quick to disconnect Dorner’s kill spree from the left-wing pols and pundits who inspired it. They are philosophically complicit.

Leftism is violence. It always was.

Also read: 

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February 10th, 2013 - 4:09 pm

Butler's Stevens keeps a level head

Brad Stevens takes new league, new challenges in stride

By John Feinstein, Published: February 9

The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com

Even on a frigid February morning, Brad Stevens went for his morning run prior to meeting his team for a pregame meal. The bus would leave to make the short trip across the Potomac River to George Washington in a couple of hours, and he looked completely serene as he sipped his second cup of coffee.
“This will be our fifth Super Bowl since conference play started,” he said Saturday morning with a relaxed smile. “Sellout crowd, team looking for a signature win, target game for everyone. It’s not something you necessarily expect when you’re the new team in a league, but we know it’s part of the deal.”
It is part of the deal when you’re Butler. If you go to two national title games in three years and become one of the college basketball programs in the country, you become a target, a signature game on someone’s schedule. It also comes with the territory when you’re tied for first place in that new league — the Atlantic 10 — and have wins over Indiana, North Carolina and Gonzaga.
And on Saturday, the No. 14 Bulldogs held off a spirited comeback by GW in front of a frenzied crowd at sold-out Smith Center to score a 59-56 win, merely their latest with the bull’s-eye on their backs.
Stevens is fine with all that.
“At this point, our guys are used to playing in games like this,” he said before the game. “We’ve never taken the approach, even after the two championship games, that a season is about winning games in March. They understand that you have to win games like this and keep getting better. That’s how you win those games when March rolls around.”
Three years after coming within inches of what would have been the most memorable national title game upset since Texas Western beat Kentucky in 1966, Stevens, now all of 36, still looks very much like what he was not so long ago — a junior executive headed up the corporate ladder at Eli Lilly, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.
Except for the fact that he’s wearing a sweatsuit instead of a three-piece suit.
“Coaching was an experiment for me when I started out,” he said. “When I got the job at [Eli] Lilly, I was a junior in college and an economics major. I had grown up 20 miles north of Indianapolis and probably had 10 friends whose dads worked at Lilly and were doing very well in those days. A job there seemed like a great fit for an econ major.
“But I was a basketball junkie. Always. The day I started on the job at Lilly after my senior year, I had spent the previous month working basketball camps at Butler.”
Stevens had been a very good Division III guard at DePauw University in Indiana and had actually tried his hand at coaching while working at Lilly the summer between his junior and senior years — working with third- and fourth-graders. The following summer, the people running the program promoted him to coach the high school juniors.
“I really did like it,” he said. “I didn’t know if I was any good at it but I knew I liked it.”
Still, the job at Lilly was there, and Stevens started in August 1999. Nine months later, he quit. The coaching bug had taken hold.
“What was interesting to me was when I told the guys I was working for at Lilly, they didn’t get mad or tell me I was nuts. Several of them said, ‘You know, when I was 23, I thought about trying this or trying that and I’ve always wondered if I should have given it a shot.’ By then they had golden handcuffs on. I didn’t.”
He called Thad Matta, who had just become coach at Butler. He’d met Matta the previous summer while working the Butler camps. Stevens asked Matta if he knew anyone in Division III who might be looking for a graduate assistant coach. Matta had a different idea.
“He said: ‘Come on over here and work with us as a volunteer. That’ll buy you some time and you can figure out if you like doing this or not in the meantime,’ ” Stevens said.
Stevens accepted. His then-girlfriend (now wife) Tracy Wilhemy was getting ready to go to law school at Case Western in Cleveland, so the two of them had a combined income of zero. Actually, it was less than that, Stevens said: “She had school loans.”
On the day he was supposed to start work as a waiter at Applebee’s, Matta offered him a paying job as an assistant for $17,000 a year..
Stevens moved up the ladder when Matta left for Xavier and Todd Lickliter became the coach, and then got the head coaching job in 2007 — at the age of 30 — when Lickliter took the Iowa job. His record is a stupefying: 159-44.
For all the success and all the talk about where he will land when he leaves Butler — when, in fact, there is no evidence that he will leave anytime soon — Stevens remains low-key and self-deprecating.
“I probably don’t enjoy the job as much as I should,” he said. “Every once in a while I have to dial myself back and say, ‘Whoa, it’s basketball, don’t get too carried away.’ I think I’m pretty good at that, but I could be a lot better than I am.”
For all the winning Stevens has done, the game people most remember was one of the losses — the national title game in 2010 against Duke, when Gordon Hayward’s 45-foot shot in the final second hit the backboard and the rim before falling off, giving the Blue Devils a 61-59 win.
“What I remember about that game is the level we played at for 40 minutes,” he said. “That game was a freaking battle played with absolute respect on both sides. I loved being part of it.”
He felt almost the same way last month when his team beat Gonzaga, 64-63, on a buzzer-beating shot by Roosevelt Jones after a midcourt steal. When Jones’s shot went in and Hinkle Fieldhouse became a madhouse, Stevens merely unfolded his arms and went to shake hands with Bulldogs Coach Mark Few — a close friend.
“I reacted that way for two reasons,” he said. “One is that the shot going in didn’t make us one bit better than we would have been one bit worse if it hadn’t gone in. It was like the Duke game — great basketball, total respect.
“The second is that Mark’s my friend. I’ve talked to him a lot about how you handle success and I’ve learned a lot from him. When the shot went in, I thought about how he felt at that moment.”
He smiled. “I’ve been on both sides.”
Next thing. Next Super Bowl. And try to pause and enjoy it along the way.
For more by John Feinstein, visit www.washingtonpost.com/feinstein

The Folly of the West's Alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood

Return to the Article

February 10, 2013

By Janet Levy

A Mosque in Munich

By Ian Johnson                                                               

Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

336 pp., $15.95


The presence of Muslims in the West is not a recent phenomenon; on the contrary, it reaches back many decades, to Nazi Germany.  Then, a group of former Soviet Muslims, seeking better treatment in Germany, defected and aided the Nazi effort.  Muslim Brotherhood (MB) cohorts in the Middle East conducted a parallel effort.  Later, under the control of U.S. intelligence, many of these same Muslims were harnessed as a bulwark against worldwide Communist domination during the Cold War.  Eventually completely taken over by the MB, these German Muslim cohorts were courted by the West as a most curious partner to counter Islamic extremism.  The locus for much of their activity, which they later used to spread Islam throughout Europe and plan major terrorist attacks in the West, including 9/11, was to become a beachhead in Europe -- the Munich mosque. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson details this history in his book, A Mosque in Munich.  Johnson examines nearly 80 years of the Muslim presence in Europe and how America helped strengthen the very community dedicated to the destruction of the West.  Most of it is on target, except for Johnson's crucial underplaying of the Muslim Brotherhood's key role in the mission to destroy America
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Muslims Fighting for Nazism


During World War II, the Nazis saw an opportunity to use disenfranchised non-Russian Muslim minorities to fight the Soviet Union.  As victims of Soviet repression, Muslims were treated as an underclass.  Their farms were collectivized, their assets were confiscated, they were persecuted for practicing their religion, and their mosques were shuttered.  Thus, they became ripe for Nazi exploitation, and, as devalued soldiers, non-Russian Muslim minorities were eager to be captured by the Germans and fight against Stalin.  In addition, since anti-Semitism was an intrinsic part of their religious doctrine, these Muslims naturally allied with Nazis efforts to exterminate Jews. 

Johnson recounts that by the 1930s, another force in the Islamic world, the MB, founded in 1928, was accepting money from the Nazis and using it to establish a military wing.  The nascent organization run by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, focused on anti-British colonialism and opposition to Jewish immigration.  In 1933, al-Husseini contacted the Nazis about supplying recruits for the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the Nazi party, and joining a collaborative effort to eliminate Jewish influence in economics and politics.

Seduced by the oil-rich Caucasus inhabited by the Muslim minorities, Hitler realized the potential of being viewed as a liberator of this oppressed region.  When the Wehrmacht seized the North Caucasus in 1942, the Germans announced to cheers that the mosques would be reopened and the SS began actively courting émigré leaders in the region in an effort to employ Islam as a motivating force to assist their fighting units.


Using Islam to Fight Communism


Just as the Nazis had used Muslims for their own ends, the U.S. government acted similarly, as Johnson recounts in A Mosque in Munich, which traces the United States' burgeoning interest in using Islam as an anti-communist tool.  As early as 1951, at the end of Harry Truman's second term in office, U.S. intelligence agencies considered using Islam to shore up the free world in the fight against Soviet Cold War influence and essentially split the Soviet Union by pitting non-Russians against Russians.  At first, the United States concentrated on working with ex-Nazi, non-Russian Muslim émigrés as part of a CIA-funded broadcast organization, Radio Liberty, headquartered in Germany and dedicated to overthrowing the Soviet Union.  At the time, U.S. Cold War policy focused on "containment," or preventing the spread of Communism.  Eventually, U.S. Cold War efforts became more aggressive, and the goal shifted to overturning communism altogether by various covert operations, economic warfare, sabotage, and propaganda.

Johnson writes that in 1953, when prominent Muslims scheduled a conference -- an "Islamic Colloquium" -- at Princeton University, they received support from the U.S. Department of State and the Library of Congress.  Prior to the conference, Muslim leaders requested a meeting with President Eisenhower who was keen to influence the Muslim world.  The overt goal of the conference was to promote Islamic "Renaissance," but it also served to cement U.S. relations with the Muslim Brotherhood.

In order to facilitate the inclusion of MB leader Said Ramadan at the Princeton colloquium, the U.S. embassy in Cairo sanitized Ramadan's career history to eliminate his close association with the Grand Mufti and his fight against Jews in Israel.  Ramadan was also treated to an Oval Office visit with President Eisenhower.  Of course, Ramadan was not interested in cultural exchanges and fiercely adhered to his political goals of expelling Jews from Palestine and the British from Egypt.  He admired the Grand Mufti, as well as one of the most influential Muslim theorists of all time, Sayyid Qutb, who plainly stated that anyone who failed to follow the Muslim Brotherhood's views was an apostate who could be killed.  A few years earlier, Ramadan and Al-Banna founded the World Muslim Congress to increase Muslim influence worldwide.  The MB leadership fought communism for the simple opportunistic reason that communist states banned or controlled religion.

By his second term, Eisenhower, a religious man who saw the utility of devout Muslims to fight the atheistic nature of Communism, was more serious about Islam and worried about the growing Soviet influences in Egypt.  By the 1950s, the Soviets recognized the political expediency of reversing their discriminatory policies against Muslims and reopened mosques, allowed for the training of imams and even sending Muslims on the Hajj.  Meanwhile, the U.S. state department, the CIA and the U.S. Information Agency decided to align closely with "reform" groups like the Muslim Brotherhood as an ally against Communism.  The United States shunned alliances with traditional Muslim groups, who were easily discredited by their Nazi pasts and weak religious credentials.  The CIA acknowledged the utility of MB leader Said Ramadan in this effort. 

When the MB was banned in Egypt under President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954, Ramadan fled to Jordan, where he was named the West German ambassador at large.  He became head of the Munich mosque, which he envisioned as a beachhead to establish Islam in Europe.  When Ramadan with American backing was able to wrest control of the mosque from the ex-Nazi Muslim émigrés from the Soviet Union, he began proselytizing widely about fighting communism in order to raise money for construction of the mosque.  He secured funding for the building from Saudi Arabia, Libya, Jordan, and Turkey.  The United States had wanted a credible voice in the Muslim world to fight communism and they found it with Ramadan. 

Johnson explains how Ramadan created an extensive structure for the MB: an array of front groups that served various functions, including a magazine as a propaganda arm; a Muslim student organization; and an international organization, the Muslim World League, designed to unite Muslims, set policy, and serve as a unified voice.  As he developed strong anti-Communist credentials, Ramadan was able to increase the influence of the MB and internationalize the German Muslims and the Munich mosque. 

In the 1960s, the United States turned away from the Muslim Brotherhood, as its attention was focused on Vietnam.  Meanwhile, Ramadan concentrated on building the MB's global influence. 

Fifteen years later, the U.S. interest in using Islam as a Cold War weapon was revived, and the government sought MB help to arm the Afghanis against the Soviets.  In 1973, alleged al-Qaeda financier Youssef Nada took over management of the Munich mosque and led it into the Saudi network.

Partnering with the Muslim Brotherhood against Terrorism

Following the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government began investigating one of Nada's investment vehicles, Bank al-Taqwa.  Johnson contends that terrorism-financing charges against Nada were never proven.  However, Nada had been active with the MB for more than 50 years, according toPatrick Poole, an anti-terrorism consultant to law enforcement and the military.  By 2001, Nada was one of the organization's international leaders.  Poole contends that Nada had been involved in money laundering and the funding of several terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda and Hamas. 

From the beginning, the Saudis dominated the Muslim World League.  They used Saudi money and the MB ideology, with Munich as its epicenter, to spread Islamic thinking throughout the West. 

In 1977, MB leaders met at a lakeside villa in Lugano, Switzerland to set up lasting MB structures, including the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), to provide the theoretical foundation for the spread of Islam in the West.  At the same time, the MB was establishing a foothold in America and decided to locate the IIIT in the United States.  They had turned their student group, the Muslim Student Association (MSA), into a national movement after founding it in America in 1962 with Saudi money.  By the 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood had an impressive headquarters in Indianapolis, its American beachhead, which housed several front groups: the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the MSA.

By 1982, the Islamic Center of Munich was headquarters to a chain of mosques and cultural centers.  MB front groups had been established across the West, coinciding with the economic needs of Europe to import workers, most of them Muslims.  The face of Europe changed as mosques proliferated along with the demand to accommodate sharia law. 

By 1990, German intelligence monitored the Munich mosque as it became associated with Islamic terrorism, including the first World Trade Center bombing and Mohammed Atta, who flew the first plane into the WTC, and fundraising for jihad by al-Qaeda's finance chief and Osama bin Laden's mentor, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim.

Johnson explains that after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, it became fashionable in Europe and the United States to work with the Muslim Brotherhood to fight terrorism and extremism.  At that point, the West, including the CIA, the state department, and the Department of Homeland Security, viewed partnering with an organization that could talk to the "Muslim street" as a viable counterterrorist measure.

Surprisingly, Johnson appears to lend validity to this tactic and states that the "Muslim Brotherhood does not embrace global jihad against the West." 

He even goes so far as to decry the initial rejection of Tariq Ramadan's entry into the United States by writing that Ramadan is "hardly a terrorist," despite Ramadan being the grandson of MB founder Hassan al-Banna, who advocates the eradication of the Jewish state and is suspected of ties to al-Qaeda.  Johnson holds this view despite the stated Muslim Brotherhood's mission to create "a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and G-d's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

In a discussion of issues related to mosque-building in Europe, Johnson opines that "racism is still a big problem" for Muslims.  The author fails to mention that there have been over 20,000 deadly worldwide Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11 and that Muslims across the globe call for "death to Israel" and "death to America" on a routine basis.  Johnson appears to take Muslim Brotherhood operatives at their word, discounting any subterfuge.  He also fails to even mention the required Muslim doctrine of deception or taqiyya. 

Although Johnson engages in a lengthy narrative on Nada and his Muslim Brotherhood involvement, he doesn't mention the discovery of a key document, referred to in counterterrorism circles as "The Project," at Nada's Lugano villa in November 2001.  "The Project" is a 12-point plan, dated December 1, 1982, to launch a "cultural invasion" and eventual conquest of the West to establish a worldwide Islamic state under sharia.  "The Project" incites hatred against Jews, calls for the subversion of Western institutions, recommends escalating conflicts by Muslims living in the West against fellow citizens, and accepts terrorism as a legitimate option to force Islamic rule on the entire world. 

In 2004, the FBI discovered a second Muslim Brotherhood document written in 1987, the "Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,"  which outlines the means to dismantle American institutions to turn the United States into a Muslim nation.

Johnson's failure to mention either document and his benign assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood are major flaws in his book.  A Mosque in Munich provides a useful account of the history that led to the establishment of the Munich mosque as a locus for Muslim Brotherhood activity in the West, and a fascinating exegesis of how Muslims were used, first by the Nazis, then by the anti-Communists, and finally today in counter-terrorism efforts.  But the conclusions Johnson draws about the nature of the Muslim Brotherhood and their ultimate intentions in the non-Muslim world fall woefully short, especially given significant documentary evidence to the contrary.