Category: Uncategorized

William Bennett on NRO:

I agree with David Gelernter who has written that a terrorist is a tyrant out of power.

That’s an excellent formulation and a cogent dismissal that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. The difference between a man who fights in order to be left alone and live in freedom and a man who fights in order to gain ascendancy over others and exert power over their lives is polar.

Terror is a tactic, nothing more. In Iraq, neither the “terrorists” nor the occupation Coalition are freedom fighters, as neither side is attempting to bring freedom to Iraq, just different forms of bondage. One is much more desirable than the other, but the Kurds and Shiites already know that they will not be permitted self-determination, which is why the Shiites are boycotting the elections.

It will be interesting to see if all the triumphal pro-democracy noise disappears after the Iraqi elections, given that some of the favored candidates are already making noises about telling the President to remove US forces from Iraq immediately. Perhaps they’ll say one thing in public and another in private, but from the point of view of those of us outside, it will be very difficult for the US government to simultaneously claim that it is upholding freedom and democracy while rejecting the demands of a quasi-democratically elected government.

UPDATE – yes, make that SUNNIS

Dennis Prager writes on WND:

In the year 2005, nearly four centuries after Galileo was forced to recant observable scientific facts about our solar system, the president of Harvard University was forced to do a similar thing. He was compelled to apologize for advancing an idea about men and women supported by scientific research and likely to be true.

You know it’s getting completely out of hand when a female English professor is condemning the head-in-the-sand anti-scientism on the part of American academia in the New York Times. The ironic thing is that this dogmatic professoriat considers itself to be following the tradition of Galileo, when in reality they are imitating the most anti-intellectual aspects of the pre-Enlightenment Catholic Church.

The biggest problem with the current Democratic leadership is not that it has lost the will to fight but that it has lost the power to think. When was the last intellectually innovative idea you heard from Nancy Pelosi, the current minority leader, or, for that matter, from Dick Gephardt, her predecessor?

They haven’t really come up with anything new since Marx and Keynes. Everything since then is just implementation. Of course, if they were capable of thinking, perhaps the fact that their entire progressive edifice is constructed upon a foundation of logical equine ejectus might slow them down a little.

Probably not.

Bob Novak has doubts about the second term:

The inaugural address, which evoked lavish praise from many Republicans attending the ceremonies, sounded less conservative than neo-conservative in advocating a global crusade for democracy. But it was not the speech that generated unease among some of President Bush’s staunchest supporters. A re-elected president’s speech at his inauguration is not supposed to be an ideological manifesto.

Instead, concern about Bush’s second-term course is derived from a variety of signals, small and large, coming from the White House. None of them separately signifies a president abandoning the principles upon which he was elected. But taken together, they generate doubt and more than a little unease on the right….

It cannot be disputed that George W. Bush’s tone has changed since the election. The 22nd Amendment, prohibiting a third presidential term, is a two-way street. I reported last month that even loyal Republican lawmakers feel less constrained to follow a term-limited president. But that same president is under far less pressure to obey the demands of his political base.

Of course, that same president almost completely ignored the demands of his political base in his first term, so I see no reason to believe that he’ll even bother throwing the occasional bone to conservatives now that he no longer needs them. This is the drawback of falling for the “lesser of two evils” philosophy; no matter what the president does, his defenders will always argue that conservatives should be happy because the other guy might have been even worse.

And so the country continues to slide to the Left and down towards the landfill of history….

I was poking around the blogroll and discovered this gem from the Baseball Savant:

My football predictions are: Colts over Pats; Jets over Steelers, Vikings over Eagles, and Rams over Falcons. Those seem farfetched, but I really think the Colts are due to beat New England and Big Ben has to lose at some point. Plus, I really like Herm Edwards and want him to do well against everyone he plays against except for the Colts. I have to admit some ulterior motives here in that if the Colts and Jets win, then the AFC Championship game would be in Indianapolis! Sweet! Without Terrell Owens, the Vikings have a very good chance at beating the Eagles. The Falcons just look to be a very average team despite their record.

Stick to baseball, my friend. Stick to baseball. I haven’t made any playoff picks, mostly because I’ve been busy and I hate to think about the end of the season, but I’d been expecting a Steelers-Eagles Super Bowl since the first Steeler-Patriot game this year. The Eagles will shut down Mikey-Mike without too much trouble – they beat the Vikes while practically sleep-walking – so the only question is if Belicheck can come up with a plan to stop the Steelers running game.

Now, a week ago, I would have picked the Steelers, but last week was a powerful and timely reminder that Cowher is not a playoff coach, while Belicheck most certainly is. Rothlisberger also came up small while Brady is easily the best big-game QB since Montana.

Patriots vs Eagles.

UPDATE – As I expected, no more, no less. And on a related note, this tidbit from the Baseball Savant made me laugh: Do I dare make more picks for this weekend? You betcha! I’ll go with the Steelers and Falcons! So I guess that means the Patriots and Eagles will face one another in the Super Bowl. The Baseball Savant and his football picks remind me of my brother’s driving directions. Ask him which way to go and do precisely the opposite. You’ll get there every time. He was rather bitter when I put this theory into practice once when we were lost, but he quit complaining when it became clear that it worked.

So, Savant, who do you like in the Super Bowl?

Somewhere in the shadows of the White House and the Capitol this week, a small group of super-secret commandos stood ready with state-of-the-art weaponry to swing into action to protect the presidency, a task that has never been fully revealed before.

As part of the extraordinary army of 13,000 troops, police officers and federal agents marshaled to secure the inauguration, these elite forces were poised to act under a 1997 program that was updated and enhanced after the Sept. 11 attacks, but nonetheless departs from how the military has historically been used on American soil…. The precise number of these Special Operations forces in Washington this week is highly classified, but military officials say the number is very small. The special-missions units belong to the Joint Special Operations Command, a secretive command based at Fort Bragg, N.C., whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force….

A civil liberties advocate who was told about the program by a reporter said that he had no objections to the program as described to him because its scope appeared to be limited to supporting the counterterrorism efforts of civilian authorities.

Oh, well as long as its scope appears to be limited, I’m sure it’s fine. Where do they find these naive idiots? I don’t know when and I don’t know why and I don’t know what reason will be given to the public, but I have no doubt that these super troopers will eventually be shooting Americans who want nothing more than to mind their own business.

Doesn’t it bother anyone that the past predictions of the paranoid tin-foil brigade are proving to be far more accurate than those of the nice, normal, mentally-balanced naysayers? Secret commando force operating inside America? Whooh, I bet they fly in black UN helicopters with alien pilots!

Some blogs, including Evangelical Outpost, have recently addressed Greg Boyd’s surprising January 11th comments with regards to abortion. While I am pleased to consider Greg a friend of mine, it will come as a surprise to no one that I am opposed to his notion of seeking a political compromise on first-term abortion.

However, if you don’t know him, there are a few things that you should keep in mind about Greg before leaping to incorrect conclusions. First, he is an extremely intelligent, intellectually honest man with a truly open mind. If he has made erroneous statements about biology or brain death, that is because he simply doesn’t know the facts. Nor do I have any reason to believe that he would be up on the latest science, as science has never been a particular interest of his. I wouldn’t expect him to make precisely accurate statements on astrophysics either.

Second, for all that he regularly finds himself in intellectual and theological controversies, Greg is a uniter by instinct. He is not what most people consider to be pro-choice, instead, I would interpret his words as attempting to help reduce the number of abortions by finding a limit that reasonable minds on both sides of the issue could agree on. Indeed, you’ll never sell NARAL, NOW or Planned Parenthood on outlawing second- and third-trimester abortion and a compromise such as Greg has suggested would save an awful lot of unborn children. From a sheerly practical, life-saving perspective, the compromise concept has a lot to offer.

Third, Greg is relatively apolitical. He’s read my novels – one is even dedicated to him – but I doubt he’s ever read even one of my columns. He may not even remember that I write one. I doubt he realizes that compromise is simply not a possibility, not because the pro-lifers will never go for it, but because the pro-abortion forces can’t. Eliminating second- and third-trimester abortions would put a large number of abortion clinics out of business and give immense momentum to the pro-life movement, and since the passionate abortionettes realize this they’ll never be able to give an inch on the matter. They wouldn’t even back down on partial-birth abortion, you may recall.

In any event, Greg is a good man and has been used by God to lead thousands of men and women to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. He has been a large and positive influence on many lives, including mine, and I will absolutely stand by him even though I have little regard for this particular idea of his.

A reader writes to Jay Nordlinger:

“Jay, in your Impromptus about conservative caring vs. liberal caring, there is a whole arena that you don’t touch, and understandably so: that of religion. Over my life, I have attended three churches: a liberal church in a liberal denomination, a moderate church in a liberal denomination, and a conservative church in a conservative denomination. Need I answer any of the following questions? Which church gives the most to missions? Which has the most volunteers for missions and community services? As a bonus — which is the most ethnically diverse?

I was thinking about this today myself, interestingly enough. We’ve been attending the same evangelical church for three years now, and only this morning did it occur to me that we have a rather large percentage of black people attending regularly. The reason this hadn’t occurred to me before is that I know most of these people, and I’ve tended to think of them separately as “the Brazilians”, “the French-speaking family”, “the real Africans” and so forth instead of lumping them together into one big group. You simply don’t confuse a French-speaking man from the Ivory Coast with a man from south Minneapolis just because they both have dark skin, after all.

And you’ll never confuse anyone with the Brazilians, who are probably the largest single group there. They’re just as exuberant as the stereotype imagines them to be, they won’t sing without dancing and they throw in enough “glory to Gods” and “amens” during the sermons to put a fifth-generation Southern Baptist to shame.

Meanwhile, you can’t find anyone who is more than three generations removed from Scandinavia at your average pro-gay, left-wing Lutheran church.

But it’s the evangelicals who are the racists, of course. This we know, for the media tells us so….

And by cats, I mean pussies. I remember two days my senior year of high school when we had 23 inches of snow on one day and 24 the next. School was canceled the second day, but was right back on again the next day.

Space Bunny was watching Fox last night and I found myself marveling at the disaster-like tone of the reporting, until one of the reporters dramatically stuck a ruler in the snow and reported that although it wasn’t snowing at the moment, they’d already received THREE inches in Washington D.C. I’m only surprised they didn’t call out the National Guard and declare martial law.

I’m truly sorry, by the way, but when I heard about the incredible number of accidents taking place in North Carolina following a single inch of snow, my first thought was: no wonder the South lost. Driving on ice is really quite simple.

1. drive 65 percent of normal speed.

2. pump the brakes – tap – tap – tap – don’t stomp on them.

3. steer into the slide and switch when the back end does. It’s a rhythm thing.