Stromata Blog

The Short Way With Tyrants

There were reasons for trying German and Japanese leaders for war crimes after World War II. In a few instances (Franz von Papen is an example), there was uncertainty about the extent of their culpability. Even where guilt was not in doubt, the trials performed an important function: The wartime governments of both countries had enjoyed widespread popular support, at least until it became clear that they were losing, and it was vital to instill an accurate impression of the horrors that they had committed. It was not unrealistic to worry that, without exposure of his and his leader’s crimes, Hermann Göring’s prediction might have come true: “In fifty or sixty years there will be statues of Hermann Göring all over Germany. Little statues, maybe, but one in every German home.”

Strategically clever as the war crimes trials may have been, they set a wretched precedent, as we are witnessing in Iraq today. Perhaps some of Saddam Hussein’s underlings deserve judicial proceedings to determine whether they egged on or tried to restrain the dictator, but no useful purpose has been served by putting Saddam himself on trial, as if he were a defendant in an ordinary murder case. The only people who pretend that his regime was not a brutal despotism are those who will never be convinced by any quantum of evidence. Those permanent skeptics do not include more than a small proportion of Iraqis. The Ba’athist regime came to power through force, ruled by terror and never had the backing of more than a narrow segment of society.

There is no possibility that every Iraqi home will someday sport little statues of Saddam Hussein and his underlings, but there is a danger that, by disrupting their trial, they will demoralize and discredit the rule of law in Iraq. The wiser course, when Saddam emerged from his spider hole, would have been to dispatch him to join Uday and Qusay in the nether regions.

It’s too late for that now, alas. Perhaps the Iraqis should adopt an Israeli idea and install soundproof glass booths for the defendants, as was done to prevent Adolf Eichmann from throwing tantrums.

Whatever happens in the courtroom, let’s not forget that tantrum throwing is easy in front of humane and tolerant judges. Rather than treat Saddam’s antics as some kind of “victory” for himself, which is the subliminal message of MSM coverage, we should encourage the court to be as tough as necessary to maintain decorum. If Ramsey Clark is upset – well, that will be a sign that the right balance has been struck.

The Neville-Shakespeare Theory (3): Filching from the Baconians

[Continuing my critique of Brenda James & William D. Rubinstein’s The Truth Will Out, a book purporting to prove that Sir Henry Neville was the real Shakespeare, this post examines the last of their claims of documentary evidence. Other posts in this series are –

1. The Neville-Shakespeare Theory: An Aperçu
2. The “Tower Notebook”]

The third of the documents in which James & Rubinstein claim to find proof of Sir Henry Neville’s authorship of “Shakespeare” has long been a staple of the Baconian strand of anti-Stratfordian argument. It consists of the first page of a 90 page manuscript volume. E. K. Chambers gives this description [II William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (1930), p. 196]:

The MS., reproduced as a whole in F. J. Burgoyne, Collotype Facsimile and Type Transcript of an Elizabethan MS. at Alnwick Castle (1904), is imperfect, but still contains some essays and speeches by Francis Bacon, a letter by Sidney, and a copy of Leicester’s Commonwealth. On f.1 is the beginning of a list of contents, and the rest of the page has been covered by a second hand with scribbles, which include (a) the name of ‘Mr ffrauncis Bacon’; (b) many repetitions of the whole or part of the name ‘William Shakespeare’; (c) the titles ‘Rychard the second’ and ‘Rychard the third’; (d) an inexact quotation of [Shakespeare’s] [The Rape of] Lucrece, 1086–7; (e) the word ‘honorificabilitudine’ (in Love’s Lab. Lost, v.i.44, ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’); (f) the title ‘Asmund and Cornelia’; (g) references to ‘Ile of Dogs frmnt’ and ‘Thomas Nashe & inferior plaiers’; (h) the names ‘Dyrmonth’ and ‘Adam’. . . . The date cannot be earlier than 1597, when Nashe’s Isle of Dogs was suppressed [this play, produced in July 1597 and quickly banned, is now lost] and Rich. II and Rich. III printed, and it is probably not earlier than 1598, when Love’s Lab. Lost was printed. Bacon, here ‘Mr’, was knighted on 23 July 1603.

The conjunction of Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s names is seen by Baconians as fraught with significance. J&R direct their attention elsewhere: The name “Nevill” appears at the top of the left side of the manuscript, and the Neville family motto, “Ne vile velis” (“desire nothing base”), is among the scribbles. J&R take it for granted that “Nevill” is their Neville rather than anyone else with that surname and that he was the owner of the manuscript. That is far from a necessary conclusion. The document was found in the archives of the Earls of Northumberland and originated during the tenure of the ninth Earl, Henry Percy (1564–1632, succeeded to the title in 1585). Percy, a noted bibliophile, was the son of Katherine Neville, daughter of John Neville, fourth Baron Latimer. That family connection is adequate to account for the “Nevill” references; there’s no need to drag in a distant cousin.

Challenger Day

The crew signed releases for everything in those days; a Lloyd’s associate would have laughed in your face at the notion of insuring a spaceman. The Space Precautionary Act had never been heard of, and the Company was responsible only for wages, if and when. Half the ships that went further than Luna City never came back. Spacemen did not care; by preference they signed for shares, and any one of them would have bet you that he could jump from the 200th floor of the Harriman Tower and ground safely, if you offered him three to two and allowed him rubber heels for the landing.

– Robert A. Heinlein, “The Green Hills of Earth” (1947)

Except for supposing that 21st Century astronauts would use slide rules, Robert Heinlein never made a worse prediction. He took the exploration of the New World, a dangerous enterprise boldly carried out, as the template for the exploration of space. Instead, it has proceeded with a timidity worthy of the Duke of Plaza-Toro or Larry Niven’s Hindmost.

A Heinlein story that began with a Challenger-like catastrophe would have ended with the rousing blast-off of Challenger II (probably financed by private enterprise) six months later. The moral would have been that ventures into space, like ventures to America, won’t be safe until many men have traveled the route and more than a few have died learning what doesn’t work.

I don’t have a better formula than anyone else for accelerating the ridiculously slow pace of mankind’s expansion into the universe. What’s obvious is that, if we go forward only a baby step at a time, swathing astronauts in time-consuming and money-consuming precautions, we will need centuries to gather a few years’ worth of experience, and it is only experience that will make space travel routine and affordable. If all airplanes had been grounded for intensive study after every crash, biplanes and zeppelins would still be the leading edge of aviation technology.

So, on this twentieth anniversary: To the memory of Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Ron McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnick, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe. May their example inspire, rather than intimidate, the spacemen of the future.

I Love – Whatever That Is

Melina Mercouri (1920–1994), a fetching actress, was a fervent leftist who served two stints as Minister of Culture in Greek Socialist governments. Via Cronaca, we learn of a new book, The Elgin Marbles by archaeologist Dorothy King, that gives a glimpse of Miss Mercouri’s qualifications for her position. As reported by Reuters:

Since its independence in 1832, Greece has repeatedly requested the return of the marbles [housed in the British Museum since the early 19th Century].

Recent attempts to get the marbles back, initially revived by Greek actress turned culture minister Melina Mercouri in 1982, have gathered support with such vociferous backers as Oscar-winning actress Vanessa Redgrave. . . .

In her book, King says Mercouri once turned up at the British Museum with a camera crew in tow.

Flinging herself to the floor in one sculpture gallery, Mercouri proclaimed her love for the Parthenon.

The dramatic impact was somewhat diluted when a museum curator whispered to her: “These are beautiful sculptures, Mrs Mercouri, but the Elgin Marbles are in the next room.”

“Clarifying” Is the Word

So, in a free and democratic Palestinian election, the incumbent terrorist party lost to the opposition terrorist party. The result was, to borrow a word from Cliff May and Jim Robbins and John Derbyshire, “clarifying”. A number of truths – none of them unknown but some capable of obfuscation – now glare forth, casting a dire light on platitudes about the “peace process”.

First and foremost, if there is any conciliatory, anti-terrorist current of opinion within the Palestinian electorate, it has no more voice than, say, sentiment for the Divine Right of Kings in the United States. Hamas, with a long record of murdering civilians (including many Americans, though the media invariably mention only the victims’ religious affiliation), won 60 percent of the vote and 76 of 132 legislative seats. Fatah, which, like Hamas, has an armed terrorist wing, the al-Aqsa Brigades, and whose top vote getter was, as David Bernstein points out,“Marwan Barghouti, currently residing in an Israeli jail for directing the murder of Israeli civilians a few years back”, won 43 seats. I have no information about the other 13 winners but doubt that any of them espouses peace and liberty.

That’s not to say that 100 percent of Palestinians are enthusiasts for terrorism and genocide (though let’s not forget that many, many of them danced in the streets at the news of 9/11). A substantial number might well be happy with a policy of “live and let live” toward their Jewish and Christian neighbors, but, as Cliff May puts it,

[N]o one should seriously believe that it would have been possible for dissident Palestinians to organize a serious alternative to Hamas and Fatah.

Imagine that some Palestinian had stood up on a soap box in Gaza City and said: “Vote for me and I’ll make peace with Israel immediately! We’ll have a Palestinian state and your children will leave in peace and freedom and prosperity!”

Such a candidate would have been shot dead on the spot.

In other words, as others have stated before, elections alone do not a democracy make. There also needs to be the rule of law, guaranteed minority rights and an open civil society – all of which is still severely lacking in the Palestinian territories.

This truth leads ineluctably to a second: The West cannot do business with a “Palestinian state”. Palestinia is, and for the foreseeable future will be, an enemy of civilized society. Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza and evacuation of most of the Jewish West Bank settlements did not win a dram of Palestinian good will, nor is any other Israeli or American gesture, short of self-immolation, likely to do so. All that we can do is take care that this implacable mini-nation remains a weak enemy.

General Sharon’s policy of separating the Palestinians from Israel, isolating them and responding forcefully to attacks, though much condemned on the Right as timid and defensive, looks more and more like a wise strategy. If Palestinia is left to its own devices, it will either disappear as its people flee misgovernment or return volens nolens to sanity. It’s a pity that it can’t be moved to some Himalayan mountaintop, but the civilized world can achieve much the same effect by ignoring it (except, of course, to exact punishment when it carries out murders in Israel or elsewhere).

The policy of relegation does, unfortunately, have a soft underbelly, which brings us to a third clarified truth: Many influential Westerners don’t care whether Palestinia is civilized or not. Their devotion to the Palestinian cause is unfazed by Palestinian actions. Jimmy Carter welcomed the Hamas victory by calling for more foreign aid to Palestinia and urging private donors to find ways around laws in countries (like ours) that forbid assistance to Hamas. We’ll hear much during the next weeks along the lines of, Hamas is the democratic voice of the Palestinian people, so we should work with them and see no evil. To which David Bernstein, in the post linked above, has an apt reply:

You say they were elected? So if Hamas runs a terrorist state bent on its destruction Israel should refrain from treating it as an enemy because it’s an elected terrorist government bent on Israel’s destruction? Please. By that logic, the U.S. shouldn’t have responded to the Nazis’ declaration of war.

As time goes by and the Hamas capi settle into their roles, further “clarifying” moments can be anticipated.

Further reading: David Warren, “Hamas Wins”:

Hamas, the openly terrorist party, defeated Fatah, the closet terrorist party, in an election that – our liberal media to the contrary – had nothing to do with Fatah corruption. It had much to do with the Palestinian dream of driving Israel into the sea. And it clarified, beyond doubt, that the great majority of Palestinians hold and nurture that wish above all others.

As to the notion that corruption would be the election decider, among a people who have been accustomed to it from time out of mind, my friend Lee Harris explains: “We thoughtlessly pay our onerous taxes; they thoughtlessly pay their less extortionate bribes.” Efficiency might come into it somewhere. Hamas runs protection rackets that are more efficient than Fatah’s. And Hamas wisely invests more of their take in schools and clinics, so there is something to show.

But Fatah has been, from its foundation in the 1960s, as terrorist as Hamas. The difference between the parties is merely tactical. Yasser Arafat discovered that Western (including Israeli) liberals are boobs, who could be conned into believing he was a “peace partner” if he just said so – in English only. In Arabic, Fatah has never concealed its project of driving Israel into the sea. Hamas, a little more honestly, thinks peace talks are all a sham. It’s the bombings that get results.

In a word, Hamas won the election by successfully claiming credit for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. In power, they will soon claim credit for the Israeli withdrawal of isolated settlements in the West Bank. That is how things are, how things were, and how things are going to be, and it is time for the West to catch on.

A Fresh Wind in Germany?

I’ll be surprised if this breeze retains its force between Davos and Berlin, but it is encouraging to read OpinionJournal Political Dairy’s account of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s speech to the World Economic Forum:

[D]espite a Teutonic speaking style, Mrs. Merkel delivered the most American of speeches. I lost count of the number of times she used the word “freedom” sometime after the 10th reference. And that’s to say nothing of her statement that “Christian values” were the foundation stone of her politics. No wonder George W. Bush likes this lady.

“Increasing freedom has always led to improvements in Germany,” she said, citing the great free-market guru (and architect of West Germany’s postwar economic boom) Ludwig Erhard. She railed against the heavy hand of German bureaucracy on German innovation and entreprenuership. Computers were a German invention [Karl von Babbage, eh? – ed.] yet where, she asked, was the German equivalent to a Microsoft or a Google? She described German unemployment, which has hovered around 10% for more than a decade, as “terrifying.” She was equally scathing of the political environment she’s inherited. “We are paralysed by events and situations and don’t seem to be able to overcome this,” said Mrs. Merkel. “Each rule and regulation has a political lobby associated with it,” she said, calling Germany’s problems “self-inflicted.”

On the solution side, Mrs. Merkel was clear in direction, if not in details. “We have to open the windows, breathe deeply the fresh air and see the opportunities rather than the risks and hazards,” she said. Germany “must become more flexible, develop better benchmarking, become less rigid in its laws and above all tackle bureaucracy.” She called for a “viable” tax system and reduced labor costs. She also urged free trade, lamenting the failure of the WTO talks in Hong Kong (thanks to French obstruction). The chancellor referred to Britain as a role model for economic reform, reminding her audience why she’s known as “Maggie” Merkel.

Some Europeans, it seems, are starting to notice that entrepreneurs are deserting their continent. The Daily Telegraph carried a pertinent report last week:

Europe’s most successful companies are turning their backs on EU markets because of red tape, a high-level report said yesterday.

The companies that Europe needed to survive were instead investing more money than ever in the United States and Asia, concluded the report, presented to the European Commission in Brussels.

The lack of investment was so dire that it threatened Europe’s “comfortable” way of life. “Europe has to act before it’s too late,” said the report’s author, Esko Aho, the former prime minister of Finland. . . .

Not only were US, Chinese and Japanese firms outspending Europe on research and development, the gap with Europe was growing.

Perhaps most damagingly, Europe’s most important countries were pouring more and more of their technology investment overseas, as they despaired of the European Union becoming “innovation friendly”.

Unless EU governments took bold action to increase spending on research, freed labour markets so skilled workers could move more easily, and stopped pouring taxpayers’ money into dying industries, Europe’s post-war way of life was doomed.

The report said: “Europe must break out of structures and expectations established in the post-Second World War era that leave it today living a moderately comfortable life on slowly declining capital.

“This society, averse to risk and reluctant to change, is in itself alarming but it is also unsustainable in the face of rising competition from other parts of the world. For many citizens without work, or in less-favoured regions, even the claim to comfort is untrue.”

Meanwhile, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party worries about excessive consumption of chocolate. Talk about missing the moment!

Life Imitates Scrappleface

Is it real –

To eradicate “corruption,” leading theorists of campaign-finance reform, such as Ohio State University law professor (and former Ohio state solicitor) Edward Foley, Loyola law prof Richard Hasen, and radical redistributionist philosopher Ronald Dworkin, want to replace privately financed campaigns with a system in which government would guarantee “equal dollars per voter,” as Foley puts it, perhaps by giving all Americans the same number of political “coupons,” which they could then redeem on the political activities of their choice. This superpowerful government would ban all other political expenditures and require all political groups to get operating licenses from it, with stiff criminal penalties for violators. The experts have even started calling for draconian media restrictions to achieve their egalitarian aims. In Foley’s view, the chilling of speech is “the necessary price we must pay in order to have an electoral system that guarantees equal opportunity for all.”

Or is it Scrappleface?

(2006-01-18) — Democrat National Committee Chairman Howard Dean today unveiled a four-point plan to rid Congress of the “Republican culture of corruption” by creating a “level playing field” for all citizens regardless of economic class. . . .

Mr. Dean said the measure, dubbed the Honest Open Government act includes the following provisions:

– Establishment of a $12 billion political influence fund, financed through a progressive usage tax on heat, light, oxygen and friction.

– Means testing to determine which citizens cannot already afford to make influential political contributions

– Regular distribution of Influence Stamps to all entitled citizens.

– Redemption of Influence Stamps at any Congressional office in exchange for personal or political favors.

I prefer the Scrappleface version myself.

Capitalist Contrast

On the one hand,

Maureen Dowd et al. . . . applaud Google’s decision to stand up to the American “police state” (Dowd’s words). This morning, we get the news that Google will cooperate with the Chinese police state.

On the other (via The Volokh Conspiracy),

BB&T, the nation’s ninth largest financial holdings company with $109.2 billion in assets, announced today that it “will not lend to commercial developers that plan to build condominiums, shopping malls and other private projects on land taken from private citizens by government entities using eminent domain.”

In a press release issued today by the bank, BB&T Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Allison, said, “The idea that a citizen’s property can be taken by the government solely for private use is extremely misguided, in fact it’s just plain wrong. One of the most basic rights of every citizen is to keep what they own. As an institution dedicated to helping our clients achieve economic success and financial security, we won’t help any entity or company that would undermine that mission and threaten the hard-earned American dream of property ownership.”

To be fair to Google, its refusal to cooperate with the U.S. government doesn’t involve national security and appears to be based primarily on the unreasonable burden of complying with a Justice Department subpoena for records of millions of search requests. The government wants this information in connection with litigation over the constitutionality of laws aimed at preventing the spread of child pornography, a cause that, while not unworthy, probably doesn’t justify a significant disruption of a private business’s operations. By resisting the subpoena, Google isn’t acting despicably, though it isn’t sounding a clarion call for liberty either.

About the company’s acquiescence in mainland China’s demand for a search engine that won’t find dangerous thoughts, it is hardly necessary to comment. We all know what Maureen Dowd would say about anybody who assisted a similar project under contract with an anti-communist dictatorship.

As for BB&T, its anti-Kelo stance is probably just a clever marketing ploy, but I’m delighted to fall for it. A pity that I don’t have any condo construction to finance!

Fresh Winds in the North

Thirty seats away from a majority, faced with the necessity of haggling over every bill, outnumbered by left-leaning MP’s, the Conservative Party of Canada won only a victory yesterday, not a triumph. Nonetheless, it is a victory with genuine consequences.

First, the Conservatives established themselves as Canada’s only national political party. They have MP’s, in more than derisory numbers, everywhere except the barely inhabited Territories and minuscule Prince Edward Island. Their showing in Quebec, where they finished first or second in a solid majority of ridings (47 out of 75, winning ten) and surpassed the Liberals’ popular vote, was even more impressive than it looks, in view of their utter lack of electoral infrastructure in Francophone Canada. By contrast, the Liberals won no ridings and only 15 percent of the vote in Alberta, the country’s most prosperous province. In the three Prairie provinces combined, they got five ridings (out of 56) and 19 percent of the vote. In British Columbia, they came in third, behind both the Conservatives and the NDP.

Second, while the Harper government may not be able to accomplish a lot, it can undoubtedly make sure that the criminal activity of its predecessor is exposed, publicized and punished. The conventional wisdom is that the damage to the Grits’ prospects will be limited, because they will have a fresh, untainted leader to replace Paul Martin. But just a couple of years ago, Paul Martin was the fresh, untainted leader. What the party needs is not a newer and better leader but a cellar-to-ceiling housecleaning, including jail time for guilty bigwigs. The Machiavellian strategy for Mr. Harper would be a lackadaisical investigation and minimum of prosecution. I doubt that he will be a Machiavel, which is good for his country, his party and his opponents.

Third, the outcome had an important negative benefit for Canada. Americans pay almost no attention to north-of-the-border politics. The election results weren’t headline news here. The Wall Street Journal’s story ran on page A-19. My local classical music station gave them fifth billing in its three minutes an hour of news. The general tone was, Something happened in a far off land, and now back to our regularly scheduled programming. There was a chance, however, that a Martin victory would have been noticed by, if not a huge proportion of the U.S. public, at least enough to matter. And what would have been noticed was the relentless anti-Americanism of the Liberal campaign. In its waning days, Paul Martin was hard to distinguish from Michael Moore. The damage that Jacques Chirac has inflicted on Franco-American relations is nugatory next to the havoc that could have been wreaked by a Prime Minister who believes, or purports to believe, that good relations with the President of the United States are a disqualification for office.

Of course the final tally is less than the hopes that rose during the week before the balloting. For a few euphoric days, the polls suggested that a majority government was only a few ridings out of reach. Either the pollsters were all wet or the race tightened remarkably over the final weekend. The Conservative seat count and popular vote margin were on the low end of projections: 124 seats and a six-point differential instead of the consensus of roughly 140 seats and eight to ten points. Maybe fence sitters turned timid at the last minute, as the Liberals kept up their smear-and-scare tattoo. Or is it possible that Stephen Harper’s insistence during the final days that he was a harmless dishrag who would do almost nothing, especially not on those terrifying “social issues” (at one point, he found himself to Paul Martin’s left on abortion), drained the energy from the Conservative effort? The Conservatives clearly did nothing to appeal the unrepresented electorate whose existence most commentators try to ignore. David Warren is a rare exception:

There are, I would estimate, many million people in this country who still hold views that were fairly universally held a couple of generations ago – against abortion on demand, same-sex “marriage”, pornography in public places, among many other issues. . . .

Many of them are New Canadians. Many of them came to this country for a chance to raise their children in freedom, as Christians, or as observant Jews, or Hindus, or Sikhs, or Muslims.

No mainstream political party will dare to represent these people. The Conservatives condescend to be polite to them, on the condition they will not say anything “embarrassing”. But the other three major parties contesting tomorrow’s election play directly to the elites – to the “urbane” and “enlightened” – going out of their way to mock the “dinosaurs” in the “backwaters” as a class, and accuse one another of catering to them. . . .

I refer to a “silent minority” – it may well still be a majority up here – who are the natural constituency of the Conservative Party. Many in fact vote Conservative, many still vote Liberal from past family or ethnic associations, or are conned into doing so when they fall for various rhetorical and tactical tricks. But a considerable number, and those among the toughest, seldom vote in elections, for the simple reason that no one represents their views. Or else they vote for small hopeless outfits such as the Christian Heritage Party – among the several that will split the Tory vote tomorrow, letting the Liberals hold on to closely-contested seats.

Despite all the Liberal screeching, faithfully echoed in the local media, about “Harper the right-wing extremist”, it’s not very likely that Prime Minister Harper will be so daring as to seek the backing of the “silent minority”. For instance, he declared during the campaign that he would not support the enactment of even mild restrictions on abortion. Thanks to a judicial edict some years ago, Canada is the only country in the civilized world with no abortion regulation whatsoever. The one operation for which the sclerotic nationalized medical system has no long waiting period is termination of a pregnancy. This Conservative government will shrink from any alteration to the status quo.

But, who knows? The odds are that the next election will come circa 2009. The Liberal Party’s great electoral advantage – fear of the unknown – will have withered by then, and it may be possible to look rationally at a great many issues, “social” and otherwise, about which political correctness currently forbids debate. If so, January 23, 2006, will be a memorable day in Canadian history. If not – well, anyone who has followed the fortunes of Canadian conservatism for the past half century is used to disappointment.

Freud Is Smiling

New York’s senior Senator (the one who isn’t Hillary), responding to a suggestion that “many Democrats” do not “understand the nature of the threat and the gravity of the moment America finds itself in”: “[N]o one is going to take a back seat to Democrats on fighting a tough war on terror.” Best of the Web calls this “a rare moment of agreement between Karl Rove and Sen. Chuck Schumer”.

Yo, Ho, Ho and a Guided Missile Frigate!

To any fan of Hornblower, Aubrey and other intrepid sea captains, this news can only inspire delight:

The U.S. Navy boarded an apparent pirate ship in the Indian Ocean and detained 26 men for questioning, the Navy said Sunday. The 16 Indians and 10 Somali men were aboard a traditional dhow that was chased and seized Saturday by the U.S. guided missile destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill[!], said Lt. Leslie Hull-Ryde[!] of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain.

The dhow stopped fleeing after the Churchill twice fired warning shots during the chase, which ended 87 kilometers (54 miles) off the coast of Somalia, the Navy said. U.S. sailors boarded the dhow and seized a cache of small arms. . . .

Sailors aboard the dhow told Navy investigators that pirates hijacked the vessel six days ago near Mogadishu and thereafter used it to stage pirate attacks on merchant ships. . . .

The Navy said it captured the dhow in response to a report from the International Maritime Bureau in Kuala Lumpur on Friday that said pirates had fired on the MV Delta Ranger, a Bahamian-flagged bulk carrier that was passing some 320 kilometers (200 miles) off the central eastern coast of Somalia. . . .

There are, alas, plenty more scurvy villains where those came from.

Piracy is rampant off the coast of Somalia, which is torn by renewed clashes between militias fighting over control of the troubled African country. Many shipping companies resort to paying ransoms, saying they have few alternatives.

Last month, Somali militiamen finally relinquished a merchant ship hijacked in October.

In November, Somali pirates freed a Ukrainian ore carrier and its 22 member crew after holding it for 40 days. It was unclear whether a US$700,000 ransom demanded by the pirates had been paid.

One of the boldest recent attacks was on Nov. 5, when two boats full of pirates approached a cruise ship carrying Western tourists, about 160 kilometers (100 miles) off Somalia and fired rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles.

The crew used a weapon that directs earsplitting noise at attackers, then sped away.

I look forward to hearing more from the excellently named Lt. Hull-Ryde in the months ahead. And three cheers for the jolly tars of the Churchill!

N.B.: Before anybody comments, I am aware, despite the heading to this post, that the Churchill is a guided missile destroyer (DDG) rather than a guided missile frigate (FFG). “Frigate” just sounds better.

Tora Bora on the Brain

That John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s most recent Presidential nominee, posts at nuthouse site Daily Kos is a good indicator of where his party’s ideological center lies. Can you imagine any Republican leader writing for the remnants of the John Birch Society?

And revealing of Senator Kerry’s personal seriousness is what he posts about: another trudge back to the mountains of Afghanistan to complain that President Bush was proven incompetent when American forces didn’t kill or capture Osama bin-Laden in December 2001. That is as if Adlai Stevenson had made General Eisenhower’s failure to foresee the Ardennes Offensive the centerpiece of his campaign.

Certainly the world would be a better place if Osama had gotten his 72 white grapes (vide this review for an expert look at the virgins vs. grapes question) four years ago, but he was not the world’s only terrorist, and his removal would not have demolished Islamofascism with one blow. Even if his escape from Tora Bora stemmed from avoidable mistakes by the U.S. military, and even if those mistakes can reasonably be traced to the White House, does that blunder outweigh the overall brilliance of the Afghan campaign, which overthrew the Taliban regime in a matter of days despite the handicap of long supply lines through dubiously friendly territory and reliance on dubiously competent local allies? Few operations in military history have made gigantic difficulties look so trivial. Of course, that very success is what allows Senator Kerry to obsess over the outcome of a single skirmish. Further evidence that the country made the right choice in November 2004.

Noted in Passing

Nothing to see here. How interesting that the Washington Post wants its readers to know, anent the race for House Majority Leader, that “GOP Contest Prompts Yawns Outside Beltway”. It bases that conclusion on the amazing fact that Congressmen visiting their districts say “gas prices, the new prescription drug benefit and the Iraq war are more immediate concerns among voters”. Indeed! About activity in the blogosphere, the only word is a cherry picked quote from the NRO Corner – no mention of the candidates’ press conference for bloggers, attended by heavyweights like Captain’s Quarters, Right Wing News, RedState, Michelle Malkin and nearly a dozen others. Meanwhile, more regional newspapers (The Indianapolis Star and Rocky Mountain News) have made endorsements in this “Beltway-only” race.

Of course one can overstate the level of interest, but enough Republican rank-and-file care enough to attract the attention of the candidates. This is the kind of unprecedented political phenomenon that ordinarily would attract the media’s curiosity. Maybe the decision to play it for yawns instead is merely a sign of the WaPo’s insulation from blogs to the right of Daily Kos. Or perhaps the contrast is too painful: the noisiest elements of the Democratic base peddle conspiracy theories, while the loudest mouth Republican activists are talking about spending cuts and lobbying reforms.

Osama’s Reading List. In his or his impersonator’s latest tirade against civilization, Osama bin-Laden urges Americans to read a book called Rogue State. He is unaware, I suppose, that titles are not unique. It would be a delightful irony if his recommendation led to additional sales for this book by William C. Triplett II, an excellent portrayal of North Korea, a country run by Osama’s fellow terrorists.

A Warning from the Dow

As I write, Wall Street is having a terrible day, bad enough to wipe out all of the improvement in the Dow since the beginning of the year. There is no economic news bad enough to support such a fall, so we should look beyond earnings reports and fluctuations in oil prices to what is happening in the wider world. Stock prices are, in the broadest sense, the encapsulation of the “wise crowd’s” expectations about the future. From that point of view, this week has brought together two strong reasons for pessimism.

First is worry about Iran’s nuclear program, which until recently was of concern, it seemed, only to right-wing bloggers. Now mainstream, albeit right-of-centerish, commentators (e. g., Charles Krauthammer and Simon Heffer) are noticing that the sober, non-cowboy approach to international problems – multilateralism, negotiations, resort to the U.N. – isn’t doing anything to prevent a stridently anti-Western regime headed, at least nominally, by a certifiable lunatic from progressing toward manufacture of its own atomic bombs.

Second, Congressional Democrats and the Left generally have continued to denounce the National Security Agency’s techniques for spying on terrorists without obtaining judicial warrants. Apprehension can only grow that, in the end, judges will be given a clear right to veto intelligence gathering, which would hugely handicap our side in the War on Terror. Perhaps more significant, though, is what this campaign indicates about the state of the nation.

If I believed in good faith that our government’s intelligence gathering methods violated the law, I’d place a very high priority on rectifying the law retroactively. For reasons that I’ve discussed before, dividing the function of the commander-in-chief, which is what judicial intrusion into intelligence activities does, in time of war is a disastrous idea. It’s revealing that critics of the NSA program don’t appear to regard the implications for the war effort as a matter worth talking about. They certainly aren’t clamoring to change the law, much less punish the traitors who disclosed military secrets to our enemies (using the press as an intermediary, it’s true, but that is no mitigation). Their highest priority, not so much as lightly disguised, is churning the political waters for their own benefit.

There is a term, which I won’t use here, for politicians who are more attentive to their prospects for gaining office than to their country’s well-being. A nation in which that mentality has a wide following among legislators, bureaucrats, opinion makers and perhaps even judges is “a house divided against itself”, with all the foreseeable repercussions thereof.

So investors see a major push to make war fighting impossible and a growing danger from one of the world’s most hostile tyrannies. Is it any wonder that the bears predominate today?

Vox Populi in the House

Everybody seems to have an opinion about who should be the next House Majority Leader. Hardly anybody notices how astonishing the contest is. The candidates are stumping in the Wall Street Journal (John Boehner, John Shadegg, Roy Blunt), making the Sunday morning television rounds and giving interviews to a corps of bloggers. Newspapers and magazines are making endorsements. I’m surprised at not seeing any Gallup polls. It’s all very much like a Presidential primary, yet the office at stake is the quintessence of insider positions, ordinarily drawing as much public attention as the elections at the local Elks Club.

Representatives Blunt, Boehner and Shadegg must perceive some benefit in conducting their campaigns beyond the confines of the House. Perhaps they are just taking advantage of an opportunity to generate favorable publicity for the Republican Party. In normal times, it’s rare for Republican leaders at their level to get more than passing media notice, except when they are accused of misconduct. Now they have platforms for trumpeting calls for curbing government spending and the influence of lobbyists, two perennially popular causes. The Democratic media of course won’t let them monopolize the “reform” slogan, but at least the MSM veil has been pulled back, and voters can hear Republicans speak for themselves.

Beyond the free publicity, the public campaign suggests that the candidates believe that the preferences of active Republicans will influence how House members vote. I doubt that public opinion has ever before been a factor in a Congressional leadership race. How many Republicans outside of Texas knew who Dick Armey or Tom DeLay was or cared much about where he stood on the issues?

It’s easy to see, in retrospect, that the party would be better off today if its rank-and-file had realized in 2002 that Rep. DeLay was quite the opposite of his cerebral predecessor. His principal interest was political tactics, not conservative ideas. He was probably the most effective GOP House leader ever, but was just as zealous and effective at pushing bad bills, like the Medicare prescription drug benefit, as good ones. Most fatally, he refined budgetary earmarks as a mechanism for keeping members in line, ignoring their detrimental impact on fiscal discipline. That was a classic case of letting tactics stultify strategy.

Whoever wins this time, he won’t be nearly so unknown. He also is unlikely to do nearly so good a job as Rep. DeLay in getting legislative through the House. Rep. Blunt, Acting Majority Leader for the past few months, already has a track record of failures and retreats. We can’t be sure that either of his untried opponents will do better.

Majority “Leader” is a misnomer. The “leader” is really the majority prodder, pusher and herder. The contrast between the Armey-DeLay team, which was both a political and an ideological success, and DeLay solus, content with success for its own sake, shows the danger of tactical brilliance sans ideas. On the other hand, a Majority Leader with a firm grasp of conservative principles won’t be of much use if he can’t regularly round up 218 votes on the House floor. Unfortunately, outsiders have no way to evaluate talents for prodding, pushing and herding; there the insiders know best. It’s good that the vox populi won’t be silent on February 2nd, but let’s not imagine that its choice is bound to be the right one.

Quotes of the Day

Cliff May, after squaring off against representatives of the ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights and CAIR:

Prior to 9/11/01 there were at least 19 al-Qaeda members in the United States. They had committed no acts of terrorism. But they planned to. Members of our intelligence community evidently did not listen to the phone calls they made to, and received from, their employers abroad. Nor were their communications with one another monitored.

Most Americans probably believe that should have been done – that had it been done 3,000 Americans might not have been murdered. But the CCR, the ACLU and others are essentially saying that 9/11 was a fair price to pay to guarantee their idea of privacy rights. And if we have to pay that price again, so be it.

David Warren, in the context of Canada’s coming election, but the wider application is obvious:

It is very hard to be both a politician and a Christian, to be faithful both to party and God. I know this from having met a few Christian politicians. I know it better from experiencing my own reactions, when I get into a tumbledown political fight. The desire to cut corners, to misrepresent, to exploit ignorance and subvert reason, to play to the lowest motives in one’s audience while pretending to play to the highest – these are not temptations only for others. Nor can they ever be restricted to one political party.

Politics is ritualized combat (the alternative being unritualized), and it is very hard, on the battlefield of an election campaign, to distinguish sin from sinner. Which is paradoxically why it is so important to have a clear sense of the devil. For without the devil, our opponents become devils, and instead of fighting against their errors, we fight only to destroy.

Hillary’s Souljah-and-Water Moment

Bill Clinton’s public rebuke of foul-mouthed rap performer Sister Souljah has gone down in political legend: a symbolic gesture that gave his image an instant veneer of respect for “middle American” values.

The reason why Clinton’s “Sister Souljah Moment” was so effective was that it was unequivocal. Had he merely declined to shake hands, no one would have been impressed. Indeed, he would have looked like a weak-kneed fence straddler.

Mr. Clinton’s spouse, in pursuing her own political career, has borrowed much from Bill’s tactical manual, but, as today’s OpinionJournal Political Diary (which you can get in your own e-mailbox for only $3.95 a month) points out, she hasn’t quite mastered the Souljah play.

Last week Senator Clinton and Harry Belafonte were both scheduled to speak at a Children’s Defense Fund luncheon in New York City.

Only a few days earlier Mr. Belafonte had visited Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez and used the occasion to say, “No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world George W. Bush says, we’re here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people... support your revolution.” He also told Mr. Chávez: “We respect you, we admire you.”

Mr. Belafonte uttered those remarks only days after Mr. Chávez used a televised Christmas Eve speech to attack Jews, whom he identified as “descendants of the same people that crucified Christ” who “have taken over all the wealth of the world.” . . .

Determined not to be photographed with Mr. Belafonte, Mrs. Clinton took evasive maneuvers to make sure she didn’t encounter her old friend. The New York Daily News reports that she swept into the room in the middle of the meal and didn’t even acknowledge Mr. Belafonte’s presence. She mounted the stage to deliver 10 minutes of remarks, then left moments before Mr. Belafonte was due to be introduced, which would have necessitated her applauding him. During a later news conference, Mrs. Clinton refused to discuss Mr. Belafonte and scolded a reporter for raising the issue.

Señor Chávez is not only an antisemite but a self-avowed enemy of America and friend of Iran’s insane “president”. Embracing him is a heavyweight offense compared to Sister Souljah’s penchant for dirty words. Senator Clinton’s conduct makes it obvious that she recognized that fact. Yet she could not bring herself to avow it openly, either at or after the luncheon.

Venezuela’s El Supremo is, after all, a hero to the Bush-hating Left, who applaud his efforts to embarrass the President by subsidizing heating oil sales in the northeastern United States. That propaganda maneuver diverts funds from Venezuelans to vastly more prosperous Yanquis, but what are a few starving kids in Caracas next to the chance to strike a blow at the Bushitler?

Had Senator Clinton denounced the Chávez regime and told Mr. Belafonte frankly that he is an idiot to lend support to an aspiring dictator, the Move-on/Daily Kos crowd would have erupted in vilification. She was evidently not willing to take that risk. If she can’t stand up to them, is she the woman to deal with terrorists and nuclear-armed tyrants? During the Clinton years, she gained a reputation for being mean. As her Souljah-and-water moment shows, mean isn’t the same thing as firm.

The NSA Intercepts: A Lesson from the Dutch

A group of law school professors has signed a brief, cast in the form of a letter to Congress, denying that the President has the legal authority to order warrantless surveillance of American citizens in time of war, regardless of the circumstances. Specifically included in that sweeping prohibition is listening in on conversations between citizens and known foreign terrorists. Tom Smith, a legal academic himself, has a good rejoinder to such nonsense:

Under the logic of the letter, the President could not engage in warrantless wiretapping of US persons in direct contact with foreign combatant enemies during wartime. If a US person were standing on the Capitol Mall, cell phone in hand, talking down a jetliner in so it could plough into the Capitol Building, nobody, the FBI, CIA, Air Force, nobody, could listen into that conversation (without a warrant) in an effort to stop the attack, unless, of course, the President thought to ask for such authority during the first 15 days of the war, and perhaps not even then – perhaps the attack would have to occur within the first 15 days of the war! In all seriousness I ask, can that possibly be right? . . .

This set of concerns leads quickly to the letter’s reliance on Youngstown Steel, and in particular Justice Jackson's opinion, which it is now customary not to identify as a mere concurrence. . . .

Apparently, we are supposed to conclude, on the basis of Youngstown, that Congress has the power to occupy the whole field of what would otherwise be the President’s power to act domestically in wartime to defend the country. To repeat myself, you just really have to ask, can this be true? If and when Congress passes a law that makes defense of the country by the President in wartime in some important respect impossible or highly impractical, is that just the end of the argument? . . .

I am coming to the view that it may be necessary to face the hard fact that, as shocking as it may seem, a concurrence by a not particularly distinguished Justice in a fifty year old case about steel mills may not be able to guide us through this strange new war against the let’s bring back the Caliphate crowd. . . . The sublime idiocy of the 15 day requirement is as good an illustration as one could ask for about why Congress is not so good at regulating how wars should be fought, not to imply that they are particularly skilled at other modes of regulation, just that they are notably bad in this respect, as I believe the Framers foresaw they would be.

As Professor Smith notes, the anti-surveillance brief relies heavily on Justice Jackson’s concurring opinion in Youngstown Co. v. Sawyer (1952). That decision overturned President Truman’s seizure of private steel mills to prevent a threatened work stoppage that would have interfered with armaments production during the Korean War. The Supreme Court held that executive authority does not extend that far. The majority’s diversity of opinions (a separate one for each of six Justices) focused primarily on the fact that Congress had enacted laws governing the settlement of industrial disputes, which the President could not set aside by fiat.

From that decision in that circumstance, the brief extrapolates to where we are now. Congress enacted a law in 1978 regulating foreign intelligence surveillance. On the brief’s interpretation of its terms, it requires a warrant for any eavesdropping on any communication by a U.S. person. It also establishes a procedure for obtaining warrants and includes an escape clause: Within 15 days after a declaration of war, Congress can, by resolution, reduce or eliminate the warrant requirement. So the case is, barring differences in trivial detail, on all fours with Youngstown, and the President has no authority to disregard the statute. If that’s a problem, well, Congress can make a new law. In the meantime, telephone calls to Osama bin-Laden should be protected from unapproved government intrusion.

That is the kind of logic that appeals to legal theoreticians, particularly those who would prefer that the United States engage only in rare and risk-free warfare. A generation ago, the law schools were full of profs who were convinced that American participation in the Vietnam War was unconstitutional and that the courts ought to intervene to compel withdrawal. To their disappointment, judges didn’t agree. I’m confident that they will be disappointed again.

The Constitution designates the President as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, not so that he can preside at military parades but because the framers of the Constitution regarded unity of command as essential to success in warfare. In the words of Justice Story,

Of all the cases and concerns of government, the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities, which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand [Federalist 74 cited in a footnote]. Unity of plan, promptitude, activity, and decision, are indispensable to success; and these can scarcely exist, except when a single magistrate is entrusted exclusively with the power.

As Justice Story also observed, only one limitation on the President’s role as the exclusive commander-in-chief was proposed in the course of ratification: that he should not be allowed to take command personally in the field without the consent of Congress. Otherwise, the idea of unitary military command was uncontroversial.

Is that not remarkable? Had the Founders been modern lawyers, they would surely have refused to give one man the unfettered power to direct the army and navy in his own discretion. How did they know that he wouldn’t, under cover of fighting the nation’s enemies, round up his political opponents and establish a dictatorship? Who could stop him? Shouldn’t there be a legislative or judicial veto over how the armed forces are used?

Happily, it was not necessary to speculate about such questions. What was then recent history demonstrated that splitting the command function between the branches of government carried immediate dangers, next to which the risk of a power-mad President was rather pale.

Fearful of executive tyranny, the States-General of the United Provinces of the Netherlands (whose members were styled “Their High and Mightinesses”, a title that Senators Kennedy and Schumer must envy) sent “field deputies” to accompany Dutch armies, with the power to make final decisions about what operations they would undertake. The effect was operational imbecility.

On August 2, 1702, for instance, the Duke of Marlborough’s Anglo-Dutch-German army had cornered a greatly inferior French force near Lille.

It would seem that the ideal battle situation existed: the French were committed to a perilous march straight across the front of the stronger Allied army, which was drawn up and only awaiting the word. But the order never came. The Field Deputies on Marlborough’s staff waited upon the Captain-General and expressed their unwillingness to see Dutch troops fight in an action, which, in their view, was rendered unnecessary as the foe was clearly in retreat. [David Chandler, Marlborough as Military Commander (1984), p. 101]

An Allied victory at that moment might well have brought the War of the Spanish Succession to a swift end. Instead, it dragged on twelve more years, with not a little further hindrance from the Dutch deputies, who were “obsessed with their national security [i. e., unwilling to approve the deployment of troops very far beyond the borders of the Netherlands], or concerned with keeping casualties and expenditure as low as possible – even at the cost of vetoing promising military operations” [Chandler, p. 322].

In 1787 those events were less distant than World War I is from us, and the Dutch example was specifically invoked at the Constitutional Convention as an argument against dividing the functions of the commander-in-chief. [James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention, sub June 2, 1787]

No one has yet (so far as I know) suggested that Congress appoint field deputies to oversee the War on Terror, but judicial control over intelligence gathering represents the same evil. Discovering the enemy’s intentions and capabilities is a “core function”, to use a phrase popular in legal circles, of the commander-in-chief. Furthermore, intelligence does not consist of random assembling of facts. It is effective only if it provides the information needed to further the commander’s strategy. Giving veto power to a third party, who may not understand, or may actually disagree with, the overall strategic vision, is a division of authority that invites disaster.

But isn’t it risky to let the President decide, all on his own, who are enemies and who is communicating with them and how those communications are to be intercepted? Sure it is risky, just as it would have been risky for the States-General to permit the Duke of Marlborough to control where Dutch soldiers campaigned and when and whom they fought. Risks must, however, be balanced. The men who wrote the Constitution believed that the risk of defeat in war was palpably more serious than the risk that the President would abuse his powers as commander-in-chief; and also, I suspect, that Presidents inclined to abuse would not be restrained by paper barriers anyway. Therefore, they wrote the office of commander-in-chief into the Constitution and gave Congress no more power to interfere than it would have, for example, to restrict his far less vital power to grant pardons.

If the National Security Agency’s surveillance program were ten times more intrusive than, by all non-hysterical accounts, it is, the United States would remain several parsecs away from a dictatorship. The path from spying on international phone calls to tearing up the Bill of Rights is a long and arduous one. From ignorance of what terrorists are doing to thousands of American deaths is a short, straight descent. The dispute about the legality of the NSA’s activities is, reduced to its essence, about whether the Constitution instructs us to march over a cliff.

Addendum: Captain’s Quarters quotes a pertinent passage from David Kahn’s superb book, The Codebreakers (pages 11–12 of the 1967 edition), concerning U.S. Army efforts to crack Japanese codes before World War II. It was flatly illegal, under the Federal Communications Act of 1934, to eavesdrop on communications between the United States and foreign countries. General George C. Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, treated that prohibition as “a legalistic quibble”. The military routinely intercepted radio messages and quietly persuaded some cable companies to break the law by turning over copies of cablegrams. All this took place up to two years before Pearl Harbor.

By the standards set forth in the letter/brief discussed above, General Marshall and his underlings clearly acted illegally. Are the eminent law professors willing to condemn them? If so, aren’t they endorsing the view of the Constitution as a suicide pact? If not, why not?

My defense of General Marshall is that, to the extent that the Federal Communications Act restricted military intelligence operations, an essential function of the commander-in-chief, it was unconstitutional and ineffective. If that position is correct, it applies with greater force to the present time, when we are in an actual military conflict, not just taking precautions against a potential enemy.

The Neville-Shakespeare Theory (2): The “Tower Notebook”

[Second in a multi-part series on Brenda James & William D. Rubinstein, The Truth Will Out, which posits that Sir Henry Neville (c. 1562–1615) was the true author of Shakespeare’s works. Part 1 was the first of three discussing James & Rubinstein’s claim that “concrete documentation” supports their theory.]

The “documentary evidence” that supposedly goes furthest to prove Neville’s authorship is an anonymous 196-page manuscript bearing the title, “Serieantiez of sundrie kindes, Namely, Personall Services appertaining to the thronne and kings of this Realme as well in tymes of warre as of peace and pastime, Especially at there Coronation, Copyed and collected out of the Recordes in the tower Anno 1602”. James & Rubinstein deal with only one page of this document, describing posts of honor claimed by various personages at the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533. This, they declare, “contains many parallels with the coronation scene in Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII, although Henry VIII was not written or performed until 1613, more than ten years later” [p. 44].

Unitarian Universalist Humor

Nobody who reads this site will suspect me of sympathy for Unitarianism, and they would be right. Nonetheless, I must commend the Unitarian Universalist (“UU”) Fellowship of North Central Iowa for posting a page of funny, self-depreciating jokes under the caption “Unitarian Universalism Defined” (discovered via Best of the Web Today).

What do you get when you cross a Klansman with a Unitarian?
Someone who goes out at night to burn huge wooden question marks.

What do you get when you cross a UU with a Jehovah's Witness?
Somebody who comes knocking at your door for no apparent reason.

Why are UU congregations so disjoint at hymn singing?
Because they are always reading a few lines ahead to see if they agree with the words.

A UU meeting must seem strange to outsiders. A person will speak and say nothing. Nobody listens – and then everybody disagrees.

They did, however, overlook, “A Unitarian is someone who begin his prayers, ‘To Whom It May Concern’”.

In a spirit of ecumenicism, I wish the North Central Iowa UU’s the blessings they do not expect from the Lord they do not know.

The GOP’s Best Friends

Will the Democratic Party hang its collective head shamefacedly over the performance of its Senate Judiciary Committee members during the Alito hearings? Senators Kennedy, Schumer, Durbin et al. were simultaneously repulsive and inept. Tom Smith’s critique is not one degree overheated:

In case you haven’t noticed, the Democratic Party has reduced itself to a pathetic and dysfunctional state. The best they can do is tell Bush to respect the privacy of people in the terrorist cell calling plan, and hurl around accusations of racist and homophobe the way only the most cretinous Birchers would throw around “communist.” I cannot help but think most Democrats would be embarrassed and ashamed by Kennedy’s and Schumer’s antics, if they bothered to inform themselves, and who can blame them for not doing so? Most people know intuitively that it is very wrong to impugn a person’s integrity and imply he harbors all sorts of morally disreputable motives on the basis of “evidence” the most feeble minded can see amounts to nothing. It’s offensive. I mean, for heaven’s sake, we are supposed to be so finely tuned that we can see why being “heteronormative” is offensive, but not see that calling a man financially dishonest, a bigot and a misogynist, on the off chance that some marginal political gain might be gotten out of it, is not just dandy? Is just politics? It is a risky business to underestimate the decency of the American people, and I really think the Democratic leadership has taken the wrong end of this bet.

Yes, they have. But they don’t read The Right Coast. Instead, they see news stories that unanimously characterize their solons’ interrogation of Alito as no worse than “spirited” and “aggressive” probing of the nominee’s “inconsistencies”. Not a word indicates that these guys looked more like second rate goons than pillars of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Assembly.

Nor will there be any media examination of the causes of this absurd performance, particularly the perceived need to cozy up to a party “base” that is increasingly irrational and extremist. No criticism (that is, no criticism from quarters they respect) will come the Senators’ way for parroting talking points from left-wing nuthouses and paying no attention to Judge Alito’s thorough, patient answers. All in all, the onslaught will go down in the perpetrators’ minds as a valiant, if unsuccessful, battle against the forces of darkness.

Hence, there will be no Democratic self-examination, just as there is no internal concern that Michael Moore and Daily Kos are not the ideal boon companions for a party that wants to appeal to mainstream America. Corollarily, Democratic leaders won’t restrain the gallop of the party’s left wing into the fever swamps.

From a conservative Republican point of view, there could be nothing better, yet it would all come to naught if the media were “fair and balanced”. The divergence between the dominant segment of the Democratic Party and mainstream American opinion is approaching Landon-like proportions. If the media covered what is happening, rather than playing down all radical connections, rank-and-file party members would (I’m pretty confident – I know plenty of thoughtful, liberal-but-sane Democrats) exert pressure for pulling back from the swamplands. But the information needed to spark that kind of protest remains obscured from everyone who gets his news from the TV networks and the elite press.

By way of contrast, the inadequacies of Congressional Republicans have been widely reported, stirring rebellion among the party masses and inspiring contenders for Majority Leader to pledge to put a stop to overspending and kanoodling with K Street lobbyists. Suppose, though, that the media were stridently pro-Republican. Then Tom DeLay’s lame insistence that all fat had been cut from the budget would have been trumpeted without contradiction. The “bridge to nowhere” would have garnered a few snooze-evoking paragraphs on page B7. Stories about Medicare Part D would ignore its complexities in favor of admiration for the “brilliant” political tactics behind its enactment. Whenever Jack Abramoff made the news (which would be much less often than he does in reality), there would be reminders that he directed a third of his and his clients’ political contributions to Democrats (rising to nearly half during the current election cycle) and that two of the five members of Congress under the most intense prosecutorial scrutiny are Democrats. There might also be more observations like this one from OpinionJournal Political Diary (which, I believe I’ve said before, costs only $3.95 a month):

“Jack as a Republican would often direct contributions to Republicans because he liked them, they were friends or he agreed with their positions that had nothing to do with his clients,” says one Abramoff friend. “But if Jack steered campaign cash to a Democrat you can bet that he wanted something in return for it.”

In that alternative universe of conservative media bias, Republican legislators’ decline into comfortable incumbency would be a non-story – until the cumulative effects eventuated in an economic crisis or Canadian Liberal-sized scandal, succeeded by a decade in the wilderness. Happily, the reforming impulse hasn’t been stifled by friendly reporters. If Republicans do poorly this November, they already know why and are in the process of applying remedies, so that a bad 2006 is likely to prelude an excellent 2008. The Democrats, free of any such checks and balances, won’t be reformable until after palpable disaster strikes them.

Thank you, Dan Ra^ther!

Update (1/13/06): As an example of rank-and-file pressure inspired by blessedly biased media coverage, we have an Instapundit-fueled” (with plenty of high-powered help) “Appeal from Center-Right Bloggers”, using the House Republican leadership contest as a hook to “call for major changes to increase openness, transparency and accountability in Congressional operations and in the appropriations process”. It’s impossible for an outsider to form a judgement on the merits of the candidates (whose success in office will depend on working with the insiders who elected them, not pleasing bloggers), but all three at least proclaim their allegiance to a reform agenda. That wouldn’t be the case if the media had been nice to the GOP for the past several years. (Mind you, I don’t think that it would be a bad thing if they were fair and balanced; my point is that their hostility has redeeming value for the Right.)

On the other side of the aisle, Howard Kurtz tries to pretend in today’s Washington Post that “a pretty spirited argument is taking place within the Democratic Party: not just the usual soul-searching about finding a winning message for 2008, but about the war and national security and the essence of what the party stands for”. As his evidence – an exchange between a New Republic editor and Markos “Screw ’em” Moulitsas – shows, the “debate” is one-sided, more personal than political, and all but invisible: not an uprising of the party faithful against extremism but a lonely plea by an evanescing faction, lightly brushed aside. “Screw ’em” jeers that TNR’s circulation is waning. But if an impartial press gave him half as much coverage as Pat Robertson, cyberspace would be filled with “Appeals from Center-Left Bloggers”, and Democratic leaders would have to accommodate anti-radical sentiment, not just the denizens of the ideological marshlands.

The Champions of Privacy

Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders have floated “privacy” as a possible grand theme for this year’s elections. The idea is to package the two causes that most excite the hard core of the party, i. e., abortion on request and freedom from warrantless surveillance of communications with foreign terrorists, under an attractive banner. Maybe that’s a clever strategy, but is it sincere?

At today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, the Democrats, spearheaded by Ted Kennedy, demanded the issuance of subpoenas for private papers of William Rusher, the retired publisher of National Review. Ostensibly, these documents would help the committee evaluate what role Judge Alito played, 30 years ago, in a group called Concerned Alumni of Princeton.

Let’s pass over whether his activity in CAP has any bearing on the judge’s qualifications for service on the Supreme Court. What’s striking is that leading Democratic Senators, who loudly insist that the Right to Privacy is embedded in the Constitution, have no inhibitions about rummaging through ordinary citizens’ correspondence. The Constitutional guarantee is evidently no match for the political imperative of fleshing out the picture of a judicial nominee.

Mr. Rusher, to Senator Kennedy’s chagrin, turned his CAP papers over to the committee staff without a subpoena, remarking, “I haven’t seen those files in 30 years, but I am sure there is nothing discreditable in them. Of course, Senator Kennedy can always hope.” Thus he spoiled the Democrats’ chances to wail about how “evidence” was being “withheld”.

Because Bill Rusher chose not to be stubborn about his own privacy (or, let’s not overlook, that of his correspondents), the incident will be quicky forgotten. It shouldn’t be. Whatever Democrats may say about their abhorrence of government intrusion into personal matters, their commitment seems extraordinarily shallow: You can keep any secrets except the ones that we want to know. In Ted Kennedy’s America, conversations among terrorists are deemed more worthy of privacy safeguards than letters exchanged by disgruntled Princeton alumni.

Update (1/12/06): I see that Tigerhawk shares my sentiments. His words deserve wide dissemination:

Senator Kennedy took the scary position that it was just and appropriate for the Congress to extract by coercion the private, internal records of a political advocacy group just because it was considering the nomination of a person who had once been a member of that organization.

To understand how weird this is, consider the following “thought experiment”: If the next Democratic SCOTUS nominee once belonged to the American Civil Liberties Union (as Ruth Bader Ginsburg actually did) and, say, Sam Brownback proposed issuing a subpoena for the “records” of the ACLU to help him “understand” the nominee’s testimony, what do you imagine the reaction of the mainstream media might be? The implications of Senator Kennedy’s demand for freedom of speech and association are appalling. Where’s the outrage?

Now, as it happens, William Rusher has agreed to cough up the documents (via Decision ‘08) without a subpoena being issued, so Kennedy’s hot air will go out of this bubble as quickly as it filled up. But that does not make Kennedy’s attempt to grab the CAP documents any less offensive to the speech and associational rights protected by First Amendment. [emphasis added]

Harper Derangement Syndrome

Barbara Boxer frets that President Bush intends to shut down Congress. North of the border, the Liberal Party suffers a variant of the same fever. One of its new campaign ads shrieks that Conservative leader Stephen Harper is, in addition to being for the war in Iraq and against abortion on demand, “pour la présence de l’armée en toutes nos villes”, that is, “in favor of a military presence in every urban area”. The ad is running only in French (an English version was released and then yanked almost instantly), so the target audience seems to be Québecois separatists and the implication that a Conservative government plans to use military force to hold down the province. In the rest of the country, incidentally, the Liberal line is that only they can ensure that Canada doesn’t break apart.

I suppose that Mr. Harper can respond that secessionists have nothing to fear from the Canadian Army. After years of Liberal neglect, it would be hard put to crush rebellion en une ville, much less all of them.

The Neville-Shakespeare Theory: An Aperçu

Reviewing the newest tome in the Shakespeare authorship “controversy”, The Truth Will Out by Brenda James and William D. Rubinstein, is harder than I expected. This “case” for Sir Henry Neville (c. 1562–1615) as the real Bard of Avon is such a mass of howlers, begged questions and non sequiturs that one is at a loss to decide what a critique should bring to the fore and what should be omitted for want of space. What should I do, for instance, about this bizarre effusion on page 261?

Athena, bride [sic] of Apollo (the sun god), held a great shining spear, from which the light was reflected in such a way that three sections of sunlight were said to emanate from it. She is also known as the Tenth Muse [sic], whose qualities encompass those of all the others [sic]. Her name in Greek actually means ‘spear shaker’ [sic! sic! sic!].

That isn’t central to much of anything, but how can one pass it by in silence?

The book comes near to raising its own “authorship question”: Can a discourse this ill-argued and uninformed be from the pens of two academic historians, one of whom has respectable historical works on his résumé? It’s true that Professor Rubinstein’s expertise doesn’t lie in the pre-modern era, but moving to a different terrain ought not to have deprived him of all of his capacity to read and reason. The theory that The Truth Will Out was written by a precocious but too cocky teenager and then passed off as the product of more mature minds is highly attractive. Perhaps the True Author is someone like Prince Harry, whose royal position forbids his association with a thesis that would undermine the national faith in William Shakespeare of Stratford.

Whatever the merits of that speculation, I’m going to try developing a full review by taking advantage of the blog format to examine various facets of the book in semi-random order. The first is a matter far more crucial than the etymology of “Athena”. James & Rubinstein (hereafter “J&R”) assert that Henry Neville is superior to all other Shakespearean pretenders, because there exists “concrete documentation” linking him to the works.

They proffer, in fact, three documents: a manuscript, dated 1602, summarizing “Personal Services Appertaining to the Throne and Kings of This Realm”, marginal notes in a copy of the 1550 edition of Edward Halle’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, and a page of scribbles known as the “Northumberland Manuscript”, which has long been a playground for Bacon-is-Shakespeare promoters. Today’s topic is the second item, which, if one believes J&R, represents Henry Neville’s personal notes on one of the major sources for Shakespeare’s historical dramas.

The Wind in the North

My pessimism about the January 23rd election in Canada is on record, and I’m not yet ready to recede from it. Nonetheless, the polls look promising: Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have a double digit lead and are hovering around the 40 percent mark that makes a Parliamentary majority a genuine possibility. Judging by the instant surveys, not to mention Captain Ed’s reaction, last night’s debate only helped. A new round of rather hysterical attack ads hints that the incumbents know that they are sliding fast down a greasy slope.

If my gloomy expectations are falsified by events, it will only be realistic to give a major share of the credit the Gomery Report and its revelations of pervasive Liberal corruption. Paul Martin hoped to counter with two familiar tactics: denouncing the United States and insinuating that the Conservatives have a hidden far-right-wing agenda that they are just waiting to spring on Canada with the cynical assistance of the Bloc Québecois. Last time around, those themes worked magically in the final two weeks of the campaign. This time they are undermined, first, by Mr. Harper’s failure to say anything very scary (or very conservative, for that matter) and, second, by growing public realization that the Liberals are very economical with the truth; if they lied about the sponsorship scandal, voters may suspect they also lie about what a Harper government will do. Perhaps the drummed-in fear of “scary Harper” will fade just enough to give the Tories a chance.

But I’m not yet ready to bet a lot on it.

Update (1/11/06): David Warren is, and he offers a similar take on why the time-tested Liberal strategy isn’t working this time:

I really thought the Liberals were going to pull it out of the fire again. I thought the Conservatives would play into their hands as usual, that the electorate -- well, the Ontario electorate -- would again fall for a “bwahaha”. Pinch me. I do believe the Grits have finally done themselves in. And that their increasingly wild scare campaign is going to backfire, even on NDP voters. If Stephen Harper can avoid rising to any Grit bait in the next 12 days, and maybe suppress that silly smile, we, Canadians, are going to have the most pleasure we have had from an election since 1993.

The result appeared to be clinched in Monday’s English-language debate, as Paul Martin began to unravel in front of people’s eyes. No amount of media cover can save him now.

One of my woman friends explains. If you thought Mildred down the street was a dishrag, then Ethel tells you she is “really scary”, you give Mildred a closer look. And when, after looking, you become the more convinced that she is a dishrag, it’s not Mildred’s sanity you question. It’s Ethel you start wondering about.

The Liberal propensity to clutch onto power by claiming their opposition is “really scary” has worked for them through many elections. Has worked so well, that they thought it would work forever. But the opposition made it work, by panicking whenever charged, and frequently changing its leader. This is what dishrags often do.

Truth to tell, the Conservative Party and its predecessors have never been scary. Not even Diefenbaker was scary; not even Meighen. And especially not that puppydog, Stockwell Day. None would ever have dreamed of paddling seriously out of the mainstream. We have a long history of wet cloth, on that side of the House.

But to return to our present Mildred, I mean Mr Harper. He has run twice. We’ve had a chance for a good look. And no, he is not scary. There is no grand principle of conservatism that he is prepared to defend. He’ll even shy away from policies that routinely get U.S. Republicans elected. He is a dishrag. (Well, an honest and fairly intelligent dishrag.)

Whereas Ethel, I mean Mr Martin, is beginning to put the willies in us. The prospect of losing power is sending him over the edge.

Enlightenment from the Judiciary Committee

Conservatives who are following the Alito hearings closely and commenting on them show signs of definite pain as they point out the absurdities uttered against the nominee by Democratic Senators. For examples, just scroll through NRO’s Corner and Bench Memos. A telling, though far from isolated, example is Senator Durbin’s truncation of a sentence that Judge Alito wrote while working for the Justice Department. Regarding Presidential signing statements (about which The Buck Stops Here had a definitive post last week), Mr. Alito presented, as an argument casting doubt on the usefulness of the practice, “In addition, and perhaps most important, Congress is likely to resent the fact that the President will get in the last word on questions of interpretation.” In Senator Durbin’s hands, the meaning was altered:

As a government lawyer, you pushed a policy of legislative construction designed to make congressional intents secondary to presidential intent. You wrote, and I quote, “The president will get in the last word on questions of interpretation,” close quote.

No honest or honorable man could so blatantly misconstrue the passage’s meaning. Nor is it easy to find innocent and reasonable explanations for the falsehoods, distortions and silliness emanating from Senators Kennedy, Feinstein, Biden, Schumer et al.

Democrats have every right to oppose the nomination of Judge Alito to the Supreme Court, but these particular Democrats evidently feel that the nobility of their cause emancipates them from the bonds of truth. They also, it seems, do not wish to put forward the true rationale for their position, whatever it may be.

This is what makes these hearings so enlightening, albeit the light doesn’t shine on Samuel Alito. Let’s keep in mind these liberal solons’ standards of good faith when they berate the President on matters of national security.

Echo Chambers/Sound Proofing

Unless you are an eremite in the desert (in which case you aren’t reading this), you have heard about Pat Robertson’s declaration that Ariel Sharon is the deserving victim of divine wrath.

Unless you prowl the right side of the blogosphere sedulously, you haven’t heard that Senator Barbara Boxer (D–Cal.), the Democratic Chief Deputy Whip, believes that President Bush “would prefer to do away with Congress” and may call for disbanding it during wartime, nor that Rep. John Murtha (D–Pa.), the exemplar of patriotic opposition to the American presence is Iraq, says, “I worry about a slow withdrawal which makes it look like there’s a victory”. Instead, we must have “a redeployment [sc. bug-out] as quickly as possible”, presumably so that it will look unmistakably like a defeat.

As media critic Tim Graham observes,

The overwhelming first point all conservatives should take from the latest Pat Robertson remarks is the new assembly line for conservative gaffes: from David Brock’s Media Matters for America directly to the Associated Press, and then right into the cable news networks, like CNN, which hyped them on “The Situation Room” yesterday [June 5th] in the middle of their reporting on Sharon.

Yep, CNN cut from medical updates on one of the world’s most important political figures to a rant by a guy whose influence peaked and collapsed in the 1980’s. Meanwhile, like the rest of the elite media, it muffles the ravings of leading figures in its preferred political party.

BTW, Scrappleface, who seems to me sharper than ever these days, said all that need be said about the Rev. Mr. Robertson’s latest idiocy:

Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson, who yesterday told viewers that God’s wrath spurred Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s massive stroke, today said his own “ignorant remarks are another manifestation of God’s anger.”

The popular TV personality said God punished Mr. Sharon, 77, for dividing the land that God gave to the Israelites, and that Mr. Robertson’s own periodic claims to know the Lord’s motivation behind specific events are part of God’s judgment on the American church.

“If Christians would read the Bible, instead of just watching TV, they would understand that people who claim to know exactly why God does what He does are usually false teachers,” said Mr. Robertson. “God disciplines American Christians for their willful ignorance of the Scriptures by having me embarrass them every 60 days or so with another ridiculous remark.”

The Internet’s Most Popular Blonde Joke

Meaning no offense to my blonde nieces, if Rand Simberg and David Zincavage can link to this joke, so can I. Unfortunately, I’ve heard that some people just can’t get the punch line.

Saddam’s Terrorist Trainees – Ho, Hum

Should Stephen Hayes’ new Weekly Standard article, “Saddam’s Terrorist Training Camps”, receive any notice outside the right side of the blogosphere, the predictable spin will be that it doesn’t matter; if there weren’t any WMD’s, Bush is a liar, and that’s all there is to that. We aren’t likely to see Mr. Hayes’ findings resounding in newspaper headlines and the six o’clock news.

The former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to The Weekly Standard by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps – in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak – and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. . . .

“As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Saddam Hussein’s] support for transregional terrorists,” says one intelligence official. . . .

“[Saddam] used these groups because he was interested in extending his influence and extending the influence of Iraq. There are definite and absolute ties to terrorism. The evidence is there, especially at the network level. How high up in the government was it sanctioned? I can’t tell you. I don't know whether it was run by Qusay [Hussein] or [Izzat Ibrahim] al-Duri or someone else. I’m just not sure. But to say Iraq wasn't involved in terrorism is flat wrong.”

Assuming that Mr. Hayes’ informants are describing the documents accurately (and we’ll find out soon enough, because the Department of Defense apparently is nearing a decision to release them to the public), there are two important lessons.

First, whether or not the Ba’athist regime had or aspired to have significant chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry, it had both the means and the will to fund and support terrorist operations against America and its allies. Preventing it from churning out more terrorists was, in and of itself, a sufficient casus belli.

Second, this information took two years to emerge from the masses of captured documentation. Iraq’s role in terrorist training was largely unknown before Saddam’s ouster, nor was it immediately evident as our troops swept through the country. It was therefore easy to argue e silentio that Saddam had no operational ties with terrorist groups.

The same argument from silence is the main prop of those who deny that Iraq possessed chemical weapons or was pursuing biological and nuclear warfare capabilities. It will be interesting to see what the picture looks like when more from the Saddam era trove, which reportedly amounts to over two million pages, becomes available. I doubt that it will make the Iraqi tyrant look like an innocent victim of American imperialism.

A Nuclear Irony

Peace-loving liberals will be upset if the United States or Israel attacks Iran to prevent it from continuing its nuclear weapons program. Likewise, I presume, they will not like the idea of a nuclear arsenal in the hands of a regime dominated by anti-Western fanatics. Yet, barring some improbable stroke of fortune – a democratic revolution or an abrupt outbreak of rationality within the Mullarchy – one or the other will soon come to pass. Between military action and a new threat to the Middle East, there are no middling alternatives. Ironically, peace-loving liberals are much to blame.

For 20 years, the United States has pursued a half-hearted program to devise missile defenses. The main reason why it has been intermittent, underfunded and so far not very successful is that the Left has opposed it vigorously. President Bush’s scrapping of the ABM Treaty, which placed severe restrictions on what could be researched, developed or deployed, remains one of the major liberal grievances against him.

There can’t be any real doubt, in light of the technological leaps of the past two decades, that, had America devoted real resources ABM’s, we would today have systems capable of thwarting the missiles available to Third World states. That protection would not be absolute, but it would shrink the danger posed by a nuclear-armed Iran to manageable dimensions.

I wonder how long it will be before the New York Times starts blaming George W. Bush for the lack of progress in this area. Will it allege that he was “distracted” by the War in Iraq?

Coming Soon: The Gospel According to Judas (Sort of)

An article in The Christian Century (via Tertullian.org) reports that publication of a “Gospel of Judas” is at hand. It will appear in April, showcased by a blaze of publicity from the National Geographic Society, which is financing a television special and three books about the discovery.

As I’ve noted before, this addition to the stock of New Testament pseudepigraphia is, outside of a narrow circle of specialists, an event noteworthy mostly for its curiosity value. The Coptic manuscript, dated to the 4th or 5th Century, may translate the “Gospel of Judas” that was lambasted by St. Irenaeus (fl. c. 180) in his Refutation of All Heresies and known to other Church Fathers. On the other hand, it could be a different work entirely, to which no ancient reference survives.

The National Geographic Society has sworn those involved in the project to secrecy, but the article assembles a few scraps about what “Judas” has to say:

Hardly anything is known about the document’s contents “other than a few personages” it names, said [Prof. James] Robinson [general editor of the English edition of the gnostic “Nag Hammadi Library”], identifying them as the mythological figure Allogenes (literally, “the stranger” [better, “the foreigner”]) known from some Nag Hammadi texts, and Satan, Jesus and Judas.

Another scholar, Charles Hedrick, who recently retired from Missouri State University, saw photographs of six damaged pages from the gospel in 2001. . . .

Hedrick said the last six pages of the Judas document describe a heavenly scene in which Allogenes is being tested and tried by Satan, followed by an earthly scene in which Jesus is being watched closely by scribes. At one point Judas is told, “Although you are evil at this place, you are a disciple of Jesus.” The last line of the text says, according to Hedrick: “And he [Judas] took money and delivered him [Jesus] over.”

So, Hedrick said, “it appears that Judas is working at the behest of God when he betrays Jesus as part of the divine plan.” When translations of the Gospel of Judas are released with accompanying analyses, Hedrick expects that “there will be a lot of sensationalism, but it will dribble out, leaving only the scholars interested.”

In an era that doesn’t instantly and unanimously dismiss The Da Vinci Code as raving lunacy, I suppose that plenty of New Agers will thrill to the revelations of Allogenes. The idea that Judas was doing God’s work is strangely attractive to spiritually muddled people. It was a major theme of the popular though deplorable rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar. Our Lord anticipated that some men would think that way. “The Son of Man is going to His fate, as the Scriptures say He will, but alas for the man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! Better for that man if he had never been born!” [Matthew 26:24] Judas willed betrayal freely. That good came of his evil demonstrates that the Providence of God can, as Paul Claudel said, write straight with crooked lines, not that evil is merely a variant form of good.

Update (4/8/06): Now that the text of the new “gospel” has been made public, it appears that Professor Hedrick’s recollections conflated the “Gospel of Judas” with a separate document (not yet published) in the same codex, in which “Allogenes”, who is also known from the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, appears. You can find my first thoughts on the “Judas” document here.

The Two Ends of the Democrat Sanity Spectrum

Both can be found within the borders of California. On one end is Senator Barbara Boxer, whose hallucinations are observed by OpinionJournal Political Diary (only $3.95/month to subscribe):

Some Democrats have become so obsessed with President Bush’s National Security Agency surveillance activities that they are putting the most rabid of the anti-Clinton Republicans of the 1990s to shame. Take Senator Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who serves as her party’s Chief Deputy Whip. Last month, during the holiday season, she sent a letter to legal scholars asking their opinions as to whether the Bush NSA program should compel Congress to start impeachment hearings.

Ms. Boxer’s letter had been prompted by a December 16 appearance she made at Temple Emanuel in Los Angeles with former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean, who has since become a sort of understudy to former Attorney General Ramsey Clark in his willingness to ascribe all manner of evil intent to conservative presidents. Mr. Dean, who declared the Bush record on civil liberties “worse than Watergate,” told the Temple Emanuel audience that Mr. Bush is “the first president to admit to an impeachable offense.” Ms. Boxer called that “a startling assertion” worthy of Congressional attention. During her duet with Mr. Dean, she made her own startling statement, blurting out that she feared Mr. Bush “would prefer to do away with Congress,” calling for the House and Senate to be disbanded during wartime. [emphasis added]

But not every California Democrat has been seized by strange fantasies. Here is Rep. Jane Harman, as quoted by Power Line:

As the Ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, I have been briefed since 2003 on a highly classified NSA foreign collection program that targeted Al Qaeda. I believe the program is essential to US national security and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.

Alas, I think we all know which of those sentiments will draw the greater volume of cheers from the party’s faithful.

David Cameron's “Potatoe” Moment

Dan Quayle and the spelling of the name of an edible root; Al Gore and the invention of the Internet; Bill Clinton and “I never had sex with that woman”; Howard Dean and The Scream; John Kerry and the “Global Test”. Now: David Cameron and the Chocolate Orange Menace (gleaned from Best of the Web (last item)):

Outlining a new Tory approach to health, Mr Cameron asked why WHSmith sold chocolate oranges instead of real ones. . . .

“Why? As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does WHSmith promote half-price chocolate oranges at its check-outs instead of real oranges?

“So many consumer businesses could do more to promote healthy diets and lifestyles. It simply requires corporate responsibility to be matched by marketing creativity.”

Not only is this risible nanny state thinking, but it suggests that, for all his straining to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Englishmen, Mr. Cameron doesn’t often set foot in any outlet so plebeian as WHSmith. They aren’t the sort of places where one can “creatively” install a produce department.

When the Conservatives chose Mr. Cameron as their leader, a lot of British right-wingers were delighted. Iain Murray called him “a breath of fresh air in Tory politics, having a charisma and communication style well-suited to the early 21st century”. Once in office, he turned out also to have a natural list to port, leading Mr. Murray more recently to lament that he had not “expected that at the same time as improving the party’s PR Cameron would also junk about half of conservative thought”.

The Cameron we have seen as leader is not, it appears, the Cameron we were advertised during the leadership election. I wonder how many of the senior, genuinely conservative figures that backed him in the contest following the unfortunate defeat of Liam Fox’s bid feel the same way. If Cameron is as conservative as many of us were assured he was, he needs to make that apparent soon.

The riposte by Cameron defenders is that his tactics are the path to victory: “So Tory activists – calm down dears, its only modern politics. Don't you want to win?”

Until the chocolate oranges came up, my only answer to that question was that I define winning as putting good policies into place, not as getting jobs for the boys. Now I can add, What makes you think this scolding buffoon is going to win anything except, perhaps, a kiss on the cheek from Ralph Nader?

A Clever Way to Plant a Rumor

The elite media remain determined to gin up a scandal out of the government’s efforts to keep tabs on al-Qa’eda’s communications. MSNBC has come up with a sly ploy (reported by Media Blog). First, it posted a transcript of an interview between Andrea Mitchell and anti-anti-terrorist author James Risen, during which Miss Mitchell asked, “You don’t have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?” Mr. Risen didn’t.

The network then excised that part of the transcript, saying, “Unfortunately this transcript was released prematurely. It was a topic on which we had not completed our reporting, and it was not broadcast on ‘NBC Nightly News’ nor on any other NBC News program. We removed that section of the transcript so that we may further continue our inquiry.”

Naturally, the left-wing blogosphere is filling up with shrieks about the Bushitler’s “spying on reporters”, so MSNBC gets most of the impact of making an accusation without having to back it up. It also avoids asking whether journalists should be exempt from the same surveillance as other citizens if they just happen to chat with al-Qa’eda operatives. I doubt that Freedom of the Press includes a right of unfettered communication with our enemies.

The Softer Side of Klingons

Ever wonder what Klingons think about when they aren’t eviscerating their enemies? They hook up through personal ads, like this one:

Vivacious female seeks virile male. Willing to compromise on appearance, personality, and hygiene. Big bat’leth a must.

And this:

Where are you, Cuddlegrub? I miss you so much. She meant nothing to me, I swear! Come home and we’ll work things out over a nice romantic knife fight. Your little tribble, Gnorg. P.S. Where do we keep the deep fryer?

Then, once the mating bloodbath is over and a new Klingon warrior has arrived, they read it classic fairy tales: “Snow White and the Six Dwarves She Killed With Her Bare Hands and the Seventh Dwarf She Let Get Away as a Warning to Others” or, for children nearing pubescence, who need guidance in the ways of the world, “The Hare Foolishly Lowers His Guard and Is Devastated by the Tortoise, Whose Prowess in Battle Attracts Many Desirable Mates”.

Thanx to Never Yet Melted.

Another Spitzer Moment

Not long ago, John Whitehead, one of the grand old men of New York, recounted an unpleasant exchange with Eliot Spitzer, the state’s governor-in-waiting, who declared, “I will be coming after you” in retaliation for Mr. Whitehead’s criticism of his prosecutorial tactics. Today’s OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription only; $3.95 a month cheap) has another story on the same lines:

The New York Post today surfaces another incident, described by Eric Stanger, director of affiliate relations for New York's WABC broadcast outlet. While at WABC, Mr. Stanger had earlier served as producer for syndicated radio talk-show host Sean Hannity. Mr. Stanger recalls an occasion in 2000 when Mr. Spitzer, offended by some of Mr. Hannity’s questions, later phoned his producer: “It was Spitzer, very angry, very agitated, very upset, and he said, ‘Let me tell you something: I fully intend to use the capacity of my office to act on this,’” Mr. Stanger told The Post. Mr. Spitzer seems to have quickly modified his tone when challenged by Mr. Stanger, but the anecdote suggests – entirely believably given his other performances – a characteristic confusion in Mr. Spitzer’s mind about the appropriate use of his powers as attorney general.

Mr. Spitzer will, of course, deny this, just as he claims that he telephoned Mr. Whitehead merely to “question his facts”. Isn’t it strange that liberals who accuse George W. Bush of lusting for dictatorial power aren’t worried even slightly about what the man who will soon govern our nation’s second largest state regards as the proper exercise of the powers of office?

Clarity for the New Year

The first days of 2006 are noteworthy for a number of incidents, small in themselves, that dramatically clarify where certain people and institutions stand. For instance –

• Taking effect on January 1st was a California law prohibiting minors from having parts of their bodies pierced without their parents’ consent (noted by Matthew Hoy). Last November, voters narrowly rejected a proposition that would have required minors to notify their parents before getting an abortion. May I assume that everyone who denounced abortion notification as an infringement on fundamental freedoms was a fortiori adamant against the body piercing legislation? Surely there is no one who thinks that an unborn child is less deserving than an earlobe.

• An Associated Press photo caption forthrightly calls three Palestinian suicide bombers “martyrs”. The back story – unmentioned but surely not unknown to the AP – is that one of the creatures so honored murdered five high school students. The other two would-be murderers were killed before they could emulate that shining example.

• The hetman of the Daily Kossacks has declared that conservatives are “cowards” for wanting to defend the United States against terrorist attack. To the extent that he has a rational argument, it rests on an anti-war premise I’ve noted elsewhere: “that terrorism is a trivial threat”, of so little importance that it doesn’t justify even mild restrictions on absolute liberty (such as the right to communicate with al-Qa’eda operatives). But, in truth, the hetman doesn’t mean it as a real argument. The charge of cowardice, like its cousin the “chickenhawk” insult, is a schoolyard taunt. It tells us quite a lot about the taunters, particularly that they deserve to be ignored so that adults can get on with the world’s business.

• Rep. John Murtha’s decorations for military service in Korea and Vietnam have given his reputation for patriotism a Teflon coating. Like almost all other conservatives, I’ve taken it for granted that his anti-Iraq rhetoric is misguided rather than malicious. Now I’m not so sure. According to Reuters,

  “Would you join (the military) today?,” he was asked in an interview taped on Friday.

  “No,” replied Murtha of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees defense spending and one of his party’s leading spokesmen on military issues.

  “And I think you’re saying the average guy out there who’s considering recruitment is justified in saying ‘I don’t want to serve’,” the interviewer continued.

  “Exactly right,” said Murtha.

  A patriot can criticize particular military involvements – our country is not always in the right, after all – but I don’t see how he can discourage young men from volunteering to serve. If he doesn’t approve of the way in which American military power is used, the solution is to persuade the electorate of the error of its ways, not to undermine our Armed Forces and leave us weaker in the face of our adversaries.

• Finally, I’m sure that even fierce critics of the National Education Association were startled by its first-ever report (required by new Department of Labor regulations) detailing how its spends its members’ dues:

  If we told you that an organization gave away more than $65 million last year to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Amnesty International, AIDS Walk Washington and dozens of other such advocacy groups, you'd probably assume we were describing a liberal philanthropy. In fact, those expenditures have all turned up on the financial disclosure report of the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union. . . .

  “What wasn’t clear before is how much of a part the teachers unions play in the wider liberal movement and the Democratic Party,” says Mike Antonucci of the Education Intelligence Agency, a California-based watchdog group. “They’re like some philanthropic organization that passes out grant money to interest groups.”

  There’s been a lot in the news recently about published opinion that parallels donor politics. Well, last year the NEA gave $45,000 to the Economic Policy Institute, which regularly issues reports that claim education is underfunded and teachers are underpaid. The partisans at People for the American Way got a $51,000 NEA contribution; PFAW happens to be vehemently anti-voucher.

  The extent to which the NEA sends money to states for political agitation is also revealing. For example, Protect Our Public Schools, an anti-charter-school group backed by the NEA’s Washington state affiliate, received $500,000 toward its efforts to block school choice for underprivileged children. (Never mind that charter schools are public schools.) And the Floridians for All Committee, which focuses on “the construction of a permanent progressive infrastructure that will help redirect Florida politics in a more progressive, Democratic direction,” received a $249,000 donation from NEA headquarters.

  When George Soros does this sort of thing, at least he’s spending his own money. The NEA is spending the mandatory dues paid by members who are told their money will be used to gain better wages, benefits and working conditions. According to the latest filing, member dues accounted for $295 million of the NEA's $341 million in total receipts last year. But the union spent $25 million of that on “political activities and lobbying” and another $65.5 million on “contributions, gifts and grants” that seemed designed to further those hyper-liberal political goals.

  Another interesting fact: The pay of NEA employees averages just slightly less than $100,000 a year. The average public school teacher earns half that wage. Nothing inherently wrong with that disparity, but it is, as I said, interesting.

A Real Assassination Conspiracy?

The evidence is too thin to inspire instant belief, but the Daily Telegraph has an account of a German (?!) television documentary asserting that there actually was a conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy, though not quite the one that Mark Lane and his ilk have proclaimed for so many years.

A former agent of the Cuban secret service G2 talks for the first time about how Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, was, he claims, pointed out to the Cubans by the KGB.

Oscar Marino, who fell out with the Castro regime, said the Cubans were desperate to eliminate Kennedy, an opponent of the revolution who wanted to kill Castro.

“You ask why we took Oswald?” he said to the German film maker Wilfried Huismann. “Oswald was a dissident: he hated his country. . . . [He] volunteered to kill Kennedy.”

Also proffered are “testimony by former US, Cuban and Russian agents, KGB files and Mexican archives”. Some of its sounds fishy, particularly a retired FBI agent’s story that he was pulled from the case because he had found too many signs of Cuban involvement. The supposed motive for the cover-up was Lyndon Johnson’s fear of “a Right-wing uprising in America, which would keep the Democratic party out of power for two generations”. Alexander Haig (is he really still alive?) is quoted as saying that LBJ “was convinced Castro killed Kennedy, and he took it to his grave”.

None of what I read moves me far from the “lone gunman” theory, yet it is a lot more solid than the foundations of most of the plots that so many on the Left credulously accept as truth. As Cold War archives slowly open, there may be more to be learned about the last century’s most famous crime.

Closed Borders and Tort Lawyers

Anti-immigration zealot Mark Krikorian, who poses as a conservative, comes out firmly in favor of abusive lawsuits and greedy plaintiffs’ lawyers: “The 1996 immigration law made a pattern of violations of the ban on hiring illegal aliens a predicate offense for RICO lawsuits . . . . There are several cases like this in the works, and the first-ever settlement just came through . . . . Now we’ll see what's really important to the trial lawyers – money . . . or left-wing orthodoxy.”

The answer is money, of course, so we can anticipate a host of copycat lawsuits like the one that Mr. Krikorian hails, which will lead to payments of about $65 each to fruit pickers in Yakima County, Washington, and several hundred thousand dollars in legal fees (exact amount not yet determined) for the law firm that ginned up the case. Just what the country needs: Another money making scheme for plaintiffs’ lawyers. Their left-wing consciences will be salved by recycling the proceeds into political campaigns, such as the one that defeated Proposition I-330, a medical malpractice reform proposal, in Washington State last year.

Addendum: This post has attracted a comment from a fellow who forthrightly calls himself “GreedyTrialLawyer” and restates the boilerplate defense of his corner of the legal profession: “I believe that my own quest for money has the unique consequence of moving persons who have been wronged in the direction of some compensation.”

There’s nothing wrong, needless to say, with representing clients and being paid for it. What is wrong is working systematically to unbalance the scales of justice, as the organized plaintiffs’ bar (not every single plaintiff’s lawyer, of course) has been doing for the past several decades. RICO, which Mark Krikorian is so delighted to see invoked against American businessmen, originated as a device for bankrupting organized crime through huge damage awards to its victims. In that objective, it has been an utter failure. It has now metastasized into a incentive for lawsuits that give risible compensation to those who have allegedly been wronged and outsize fees to their attorneys. The Yakima case noted above – $65 each to the plaintiff class, probably a quarter million or so to their self-appointed “advocates” – is merely an all-too-typical instance. Many more can be found at Overlaywered.

What Would a Terrific 2006 Be Like?

A friend’s New Year’s e-mail closes, “Happy 2006 to you. May it be a terrific year for you and yours.” That’s a fairly conventional sentiment, but it prompted me to think about what would happen in “a terrific year for you and yours”. I’ve limited choices to those that seem within the realm of possibility (no wishes for universal peace on Earth, a cure for cancer or the election of a Republican governor in New York). Omitted, too, are matters of purely personal interest and, since it is too obvious a hope, the Parousia.

The custom is for lists like this to have ten items ranked in order of importance, but I’ve no eagerness to submit to such discipline on a holiday. I’ll be delighted if any, much less all, of the following events occurs:

• A large number of liberals decide that al-Qa’eda is a greater enemy than George W. Bush and act accordingly.

• A large number of Europeans figure out that American power protects rather than threatens them and make life difficult for the political elite that prospers by pretending otherwise.

• A large number of anti-immigration conservatives wake up to the self-destructive folly of their position and back a sensible guest worker program.

• A large number of overexcited Christians perceive that Intelligent Design isn’t a suitable topic for high school biology classes or, at least, read Michael Behe closely before adopting him as the anti-Darwin.

• A large number of libertarians realize that virtue is liberty’s most crucial prop rather than its inveterate enemy and stop talking as if abortion, drugs, divorce, promiscuity, prostitution, etc. were positive goods. (They are free to continue arguing that they are evils better left unsuppressed.)

• A large number of Palestinians reconsider the wisdom – or, failing that, the prudence – of trying to found a state on the raison d’etre of destroying Judaism and waging eternal war against America, and oust from power the criminal gangs that are responsible for their current plight.

• A large number of people of any kind read and ponder C. S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man.

• Major media outlets to the left of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page start giving the multiple scandals centered on the United Nations and its secretary-general a substantial fraction of the attention that they devoted to the Valerie Plame kerfuffle.

• Several government employees who leaked national security secrets to the press are arrested, plead guilty and receive exemplary prison sentences. (If that doesn’t happen, a terrific 2007 will include exemplary executions.)

• The most fragile of the current pro-terrorist regimes – Iran, North Korea and Syria – are overthrown or, à la Khadafy, give in to American demands for intrusive weapons inspections.

• A few thousand more terrorists die in Iraq, and a few dozen more of their leaders are killed or captured.

• Congressional Republicans launch an anti-pork campaign, deciding that the principles of limited government and fiscal responsibility are more important than whatever marginal seats can be retained by bribing the electorate.

• The Liberal Party does not form the next government of Canada, and its successor undertakes a serious inquiry into the past decade of corruption.

• Congress passes election reform legislation requiring photo ID in order to vote, barring voting by mail except in extraordinary circumstances, repealing restrictions on political contributions and discouraging gerrymanders.

• Supporters of Social Security reform regain their morale and resume the campaign for transition to an individual account system that would turn public liabilities into private assets.

• Congress, recognizing that it has created pointless burdens, repeals section 409A of the Internal Revenue Code. (I’ll get around to explaining why one of these days.)

• The EGTRRA tax reductions are made permanent.

• Connie Willis finishes her Blitz novel, Tim Powers gets close to finishing his new book, and Ellen Asher wins a Best Editor Hugo Award for her years of work at the Science Fiction Book Club.

• The film version of Prince Caspian sticks closer to its source than did The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

• The Cubs play the White Sox in the World Series.

Okay, the last is as likely as that Republican governor of New York, but I can dream, can’t I?

Further reading: Mark Steyn, “Hail and Farewell to 2005”
James Lileks, “A 2005 Rollick”

Kim Philby Today

The biggest lesson of 2005 is that many members of the intelligentsia think that the War on Terror is worse than terrorism – so much worse that they have moved from criticizing the American war effort to frustrating it. TKS recently summarized some of the damage that can be anticipated from three recent exposés of our plans and tactics (paragraphs slightly rearranged):

The CIA’s use of prisons overseas to detain al-Qaeda terrorists and conduct interrogations. Also, it is alleged that U.S. and foreign personnel “torture” detainees at these facilities. . . . [T]here is absolutely no doubt that the leak of that information has made it harder to win the war on terror. Now any country that wishes to cooperate with the United States against al-Qaeda, but wants to keep it secret for domestic political concerns, now has to think twice about whether they want to risk the fallout that would come from some disgruntled individual within the U.S. government leaking the deal.

The torture allegations are also fine enemy propaganda, of course.

The [warrantless] NSA eavesdropping program . . . Despite the fact that the numbers, e-mail addresses, individuals and addresses that are monitored began from captured al-Qaeda files, apparently this program may be violating an al-Qaeda terrorist’s right to privacy, presuming that al-Qaeda member was a U.S. citizen. . . .

Again, there is absolutely no doubt that the leak of that information has made it harder to win the war on terror. Before the disclosure of this information, al-Qaeda leaders may have believed that member of al-Qaeda with U.S. citizenship . . . would make a useful courier or communications link, because they would assume that the citizen’s constitutional rights would make monitoring much more difficult. Al-Qaeda now knows to stop using such couriers and communicators, or to assume that they have been compromised.

And now word [from the New York Times] that the NSA has “gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications” and that “Calls to and from Afghanistan are known to have been of particular interest to the NSA since the Sept. 11 attacks.”

Again – if anybody in al-Qaeda was using the phone system – even using code words and other ways to throw off investigators - they just stopped. I’ll bet any direct communication between anybody in the al-Qaeda network in the U.S. and back in Afghanistan shut down shortly after this story.

The radioactivity detection program. The media has found law professors willing to claim that this program is somehow inherently violates the right to privacy of those who work, live, and/or pray in the buildings that are monitored for radiation. Apparently, your right to privacy includes the right to own something dangerously radioactive.

Again, there is absolutely no doubt that the leak of that information has made it harder to conduct the war on terror. Before the disclosure of this information, al-Qaeda cells may have believed that these sites were safe places to store or collect radioactive material for the construction of a dirty bomb. Now they know specifically which sites to avoid.

Intelligence gathering is important to any war and vital to one in which most enemy action consists of clandestine attacks on civilian targets. The most valuable work that a terrorist spy can perform is to discover what American security agencies are looking for and how they go about finding it. During the Cold War analogous espionage was undertaken by men like Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames. Today’s spies are just as treasonous, despite a couple of differences between them and their predecessors:

First, it isn’t necessary to hide secrets at drop-off points for pickup by a terrorist equivalent of the KGB. Instead, they are leaked to reporters who publish them in major newspapers. For our enemies’ purposes, that modus operandi is as useful as cloak-and-dagger, and carries far less risk of detection. The media see the traitors as “sources” and can be counted on to do their utmost to obstruct counterespionage. (Will the editorialists who demanded prosecution of those behind the Plame Wilson pseudo-leak call for vigorous investigation of genuinely damaging disclosures? Ha, ha, and ha!)

Second, there are interesting differences of motive. Philby, his fellow “Cambridge spies”, Alger Hiss and many ohters believed in the crooked cause of communism. Ames and the likes of Robert Hanssen and John Walker & family were in it for the money. It’s unlikely that their contemporary counterparts have embraced Islamic extremism or are being paid large sums by Osama bin-Laden. (Saddam Hussein seems to have spent his cash on opinion makers and suicide bombers rather than spies.)

Why, then, would someone holding a trusted position in the U.S. government make wartime secrets public knowledge? And why would reputable journalists, who presumably are aware that bin-Laden and Zarqawi and the rest of their gang are no friends of a free press, cooperate in subversion?

The simplest hypothesis is that three beliefs have converged: that terrorism is no more than a trivial threat, that it is mostly prompted by Western anti-terrorist actions and that the Bush Administration is using the War on Terror as a cover for dictatorial aspirations. (No one could seriously think the last? A pre-Christmas NYT editorial levels the accusation directly against Vice President Cheney and charges the Administration with “using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext [emphasis added] to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American citizens”.)

A spy to whom such opinions are facts is more dangerous than one motivated by ideology or greed. He can betray his country with an easy conscience, “knowing” that his actions do no harm to its interests. If caught, he will expect more sympathy than condemnation. The prospect of being executed, which must have worried Philby, Ames and Hiss to at least a small extent and may have deterred less strong-minded potential traitors, is utterly absent from his mind.

If they – and we – are lucky, the West retains sufficient reservoirs of strength to root out the terrorists in spite of the rats in ours walls. But every world-conquering movement, for good or ill, began in seeming insignificance, and many were aided by foes who “made use of” them. Winston Churchill urged his countrymen to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle” and to act against Hitler while he was still weak. Too few listened.

Will we look back (those of us who are allowed to look at all) a few decades from now and see the early 2000’s as the time when the Wahhabi Caliphate was born and embarked on the conquest of a decadent Christendom? Should that be our fate, I doubt that the servants of the Prophet will treat giaour helpers as generously as Moscow did Kim Philby.