Pious Agnostic

The lies of Michael Moore.
By Christopher Hitchens

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

Read it all.

Hat tip: Lileks

Update : Hmmm...this is all over the place, which isn't surprising. Via Andrew Sullivan we see a related column.

Moore isn't likely to find a more severe appraisal of his film and his work than this Slate piece by Christopher Hitchens. Read it, Mr. Moore. We invite your suit.

Our Reptilian Brains

Why was a defiant Pericles lionized in 431 and censured and fined by 430? Most likely because Spartans were in Attica and an unexpected plague was killing 80,000 Athenians. Few cared that he had nothing to do with a mysterious disease, they cared only that thousands had died on his watch. Ask Churchill's ghost why he was called on in 1939, thrown out as war ended, and brought back again as new dangers loomed.

What made Lincoln popular by October when he had been so pilloried in August? Uncle Billy Sherman had taken Atlanta and suddenly the public saw that the Confederacy was hollow rather than defiant and impenetrable. Had Sherman backed off weeks earlier, Lincoln would have been through — even though he was not much responsible for the degree of nerve and bravery shown by the Army of the West and their mercurial general.

Go read the rest.

Victor Davis Hanson on ABU GHRAIB

Do you get tired of these? Well, I don't.

What a weird war we are in. The president of the United States gives a press conference to steel our will and endures mostly inane cross examination — at the very time the New York Times best-seller list has five of its top ten books alleging that he is a near criminal. Various disgruntled, passed-over or fired employees (Clarke and O'Neill), buffoonish provocateurs (Franken), and conspiracists (Phillips and Unger) all assure us in their pulp of everything from Bush family ties with Nazis to a First Family perennially plotting to get Americans killed for nothing other than cheap oil.

If that was not enough, a U.S. senator, with a reprehensible record of personal excess and abject immorality, now in his dotage damns the war in Iraq on moral grounds — even as young Marines seek to protect a nascent and tottering consensual government from thugs and killers. An ex-president who calibrated his campaign for a Nobel Prize by criticizing his successor in a time of war to the applause of foreign powers now steps forward to call for a more principled nation. Such are the moralists of our age.

My gosh, this is a good article! The Fruits of Appeasement by VDH

Instead, the primary cause for our surprising indifference to the events leading up to September 11 lies within ourselves. Westerners always have had a propensity for complacency because of our wealth and freedom; and Americans in particular have enjoyed a comfortable isolation in being separated from the rest of the world by two oceans. Yet during the last four presidential administrations, laxity about danger on the horizon seems to have become more ingrained than in the days when a more robust United States sought to thwart communist intrusion into Arabia, Asia, and Africa.

Hat tip: lgf

Western Cannibalism

It's early, but I think I already found the "Must Read of the Day." It's by Steven Den Beste, and it's about the attrocity in Falluja.

Go read it.

Go read 9/11: For The Record by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice -- right now!

Rich Lowry on Al Franken's Lying Liers book:

Al Franken's liberal populism is a noble political tradition, which is why it's such a shame that he can't put up a better representation of it, making it seem so angry and noxious. Franken's hero Paul Wellstone was, in contrast, a happy and honorable warrior. If you're on the left, my advice is: Read this book. Enjoy it. Just don't believe it or take it too seriously. Then wash your hands.

Winds of Black Hate

Hat tip: Instapundit

Thicker than Oil

Let's examine, instead, what really happened. While fellow Arabs did little or nothing to free the Iraqi people — but apparently both cheated on and profited from the U.N. embargoes — Americans set up a consensual government. And for our part, American casualties so far mirror roughly the racial make-up of our general population. So much for the old Vietnam-era myth that people of color always die in disproportionate numbers fighting rich people's wars. Our three top officers most visible the last year in Iraq — Generals Abizaid, Sanchez, and Brooks — are an Arab American, Mexican American, and African American. The national-security adviser and the secretary of state are minorities as well. And so on. This was a war about values — not race, class, or ethnicity.

Victor Davis Hanson has another great article:

The United States is waking up from a serious malady. Once upon a time state-supported terrorism was seen as a criminal problem, not war, requiring yellow police tape, not GPS bombs. Afghanistan was turned into an anti-American terrorist base. Saddam Hussein required never-ending patrols to "box" him in. Osama bin Laden was too "hot" to be apprehended when offered up by potential captors. Pakistan and North Korea went nuclear — the greatest failure of many of the Clinton administration. Iran and Libya bought arsenals with impunity. Yasser Arafat systematically destroyed twenty years of economic progress on the West Bank and violated every accord he signed. Anti-Americanism grew in Europe without rejoinder or consequences. Saudi Arabia expected protection while our own female soldiers on patrol there hid their faces and arms — and promised not to drive. Terrorist funds flowed freely throughout the globe, as anti-Semitism and Islamicist-inspired hatred of Israel became the new pillar of trendy left-wing thought. All that has at least been recognized, checked, and is well on the way to being stopped.

The Coming of Nemesis

There were a number of legitimate areas of debate for the fall campaign — deficits, unfunded security measures at home, moral scrutiny over postwar contracts, more help for Afghanistan, greater control of domestic entitlements, unworkable immigration proposals, and the like. But instead of statesmanship from the opposition, we got slander about Mr. Bush's National Guard service, misrepresentations about intelligence failures that had hampered both previous administrations and the present congress, preference for an unsupportable European position over our own, and stupidity about what to do in Iraq.

The Democrats may have seen some short-term gains from all the attention given to their bluster, but theirs still remain untenable issues. And so nemesis will bite them like they will not believe in the autumn — and, of course, just when it matters most.

Terrific, and hilarious, new Mark Steyn

Senator Kerry has done a good job of enlarging himself but the reality is simple: George W Bush's America has won two swift wars and overthrown two enemy regimes; John Kerry was heroic in a war that America lost and whose loss he celebrated. Since then he's been a model lack-of-conviction politician. The question for anyone who thinks Kerry has "credibility" on national security is a simple one: who do you think Iran, North Korea, Syria, al-Qa'eda's Saudi paymasters and the rogue elements in Pakistan's ISI would prefer to see elected this November?

Hat tip: Allahpundit

If it was wrong and cynical to have left the Afghans to the mercy of once useful Islamic fundamentalists after the expulsion of the Soviets in the 1980s, it is right and humane now to stay and help after defeating those who further ruined Afghanistan.

If it was calculating and shortsighted not to have helped the Kurds and Shiites after the conclusion of the Gulf War in 1991, it is moral and visionary now to rectify that lapse and invest our most precious resources to set the ledger straight with them both.

You know, this guys is rapidly becoming my favorite commentator. He's erudite and sensible, and always expresses things with a measure of precision that's accurate to twelve decimal points. Go read.

Mark Steyn:

That leaves John Kerry, the tall, gaunt, dozy Massachusetts blueblood I’d written off ever since last summer when he came to the Barge Inn in Woodsville and, in the strangest political entrance I’ve ever seen, walked through the door to cheers and flags and popping cameras and worked his way through the crowd pressing the flesh until he got to the men’s room, whereupon he went in, leaving the clapping and waving to just sort of peter out as we waited for him to emerge.

Read the rest: How ‘None of the Above’ won

Victor Davis Hanson with another must read.

Victor Davis Hanson describes how our current world situation is a repeat of 30 years ago. Read this, because I don't do it justice with this summary.

The Same Old Thing

Thirty years ago, during the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, most of the Europeans of the NATO alliance refused over-flight rights to the United States. We had only hours in which to aid Israel from a multifaceted surprise attack and were desperately ferrying tons of supplies to save it from literal extinction. In contrast, many of these same allies allowed the Soviet Union — the supposed common enemy from which thousands of Americans were based in Europe to protect Europeans — to fly over NATO airspace to ensure the Syrians sufficient material to launch and sustain their surprise attack on the Golan.

Mark Steyn comments on the likelyhood of justice:

Don't leave Saddam trial to the 'jet set'

Anyone who goes goo-goo at the mention of the words ''international tribunal'' -- i.e., Clark, John Kerry, Howard Dean and the rest of the multilatte multilateralist establishment -- should look at what it boils down to in practice. Even though the court forbade Milosevic and Seselj from actively campaigning in the Serbian election, they somehow managed to. In other words, ''international law'' is unable to enforce its judgments even in its own jailhouse.

Victor Davis Hanson's latest in NRO:

Our Western intellectuals are sheltered orchids who are naïve about the world beyond their upscale hothouses. The Western disease of deductive fury at everything the West does provides a sort of psychological relief (without costs) for apparent guilt over privileged circumstances. It is such a strange mixture of faux-populism and aristocratic snobbery. They believe only a blessed few such as themselves have the requisite education or breeding to understand the “real” world of Western pathologies and its victims.

If America is struck again today, this week, this month or anytime in 2004, it will be because the cancer of radical Islam grew too large during the presidency of Bill Clinton to be excised in the space of a few years. President Bush has been reluctant to make this point because he is a gentleman, but there is a cost to that courtesy, which is the encouragement on the left of awful thinking about the nature of the enemy.

Read the rest.

Bush critics live in their own worlds

What is the nature of the guerilla resistance? Are these fighters neo-Baathists yearning to re-establish a grotesque Islamo-fascist republic, or do they represent a broad and genuine anti-occupation force? This question was skirted entirely, perhaps because the answer would fail to pass the dominant doctrinal filters at the meeting. It is perfectly acceptable for a pastor or priest to sermonize on topics of morality without first proving the existence of God, but quite another thing when a movement masquerading as a logical opposition to occupation finds it too must rely on faith to justify its premises.

This snippet doesn't do justice to this wonderful post.

Murdering for militant Islam

Such high regard for terrorists has several important implications. First, it points to the adherents of militant Islam being indeed "normal, good-natured young" people, and not misfits. In common with other totalitarian movements, militant Islam finds support among many accomplished, talented, and attractive individuals – which renders it all the more dangerous a threat.

Second, the fact that those who murder on behalf of militant Islam often enjoy psychological soundness, educational attainment, sporting success, economic achievement, or social esteem suggests that Islamist violence cannot be reduced by adopting the "root causes" approach of addressing personal poverty and despair. The phenomenon needs to be fought head-on.

Third, that terrorists are (unsurprisingly) skilled at hiding their intentions has the unfortunate consequence of making them harder to discern and therefore spreads suspicion to the larger Muslim community. This in turn points to that community's heightened responsibility and incentive to ferret out potential terrorists in its midst.

The Science Fiction author Orson Scott Card has written an essay that is terrific:

The Campaign of Hate and Fear

We are being lied to and "spun," and not in a trivial way. The kind of dishonest vitriolic hate campaign that in 2000 was conducted only before African-American audiences is now being played on the national stage; and the national media, instead of holding the liars' and haters' feet to the fire (as they do when the liars and haters are Republicans or conservatives), are cooperating in building up a false image of a failing economy and a lost war, when the truth is more nearly the exact opposite.

This is a paragraph chosen basically at random. Read the rest.

via Andrew Sullivan

Although I agreed of course that Islamophobic cartooning was the most pressing issue of the week, in my usual shallow way I'd become distracted by some of the day's more trivial stories - the 11 Hindus burnt alive by a Muslim gang in Bangladesh, the 13 Christian churches torched by Muslim rioters in the Nigerian town of Kazaure, and the 27 Turks and Britons murdered by Muslim terrorists in Istanbul.

No dead Jews in that particular day's headlines, but otherwise a good haul of Hindus, Christians and, of course, Muslims. Every society has its ugly side: in America, the problem is stone-age cartoons; in Nigeria, it's stone-age - or stoning age - reality. But one can't help noticing that polysemic cartooning seems a notably ineffective way of stirring up anti-Muslim feeling, at least when one looks at preliminary statistics for Muslims murdered in America this Ramadan, compared with Muslims murdered in, say, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

It's all equally good, or infuriating, depending, I think, on you.

Here is an article so important and interesting, I have added it to my links page:

The Real History of the Crusades

Read it all, and if you disagree with it's historical points, then site your sources.

Update: LGF reminded me of a terrific source: The Catholic Encyclopedia on-line. Here's the entry for the "Crusades"

I've blogged about this guy before, but Zeyad, the Iraqi dentist who writes Healing Iraq from Baghdad has a post up that you must read.

I am not familiar with the article that the current one is designed to dispute, but it's a wonderful description of the forces at work in the creation of the State of Isreal. So, it becomes the

Must Read of the Day!

Go and read this article by Ralph Peters in the New York Post