Just in case you thought we didn't need nuclear bunker busters...
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
Instant gratification is not something I'm used to, but

- just last night I posted a blog entry castigating Rep. David Hobson's (R, Ohio) choice to withhold funding for development of advanced design nuclear weapons, some of them known colloquially as "nuclear bunker busters," potentially capable of digging through even deep and well-armored bunkers to destroy enemy leadership targets or special weapons by bottling it up in his House subcommittee.

- this morning, this article appears in the Yahoo osint ("Open Source Intelligence") group mail digest:

"The Associated Press - Vienna, Friday, March 4, 2005. "Facility would be resistant to an attack":

"Iran is using reinforced materials and tunneling deep underground to store nuclear components - measures meant to make the facility resistant to "bunker busters" and other special weaponry in case of an attack, diplomats said Thursday.

The diplomats spoke as a 35-country meeting of the UN atomic agency ended more than three days of deliberations focusing on Iran and North Korea, another nation of nuclear concern.

An agency review read at the meeting faulted Tehran for starting work on the tunnel at Isfahan without informing the International Atomic Energy Agency
beforehand.

The review said Iran, following prodding by the IAEA, has over the past few months provided "preliminary design information" on the tunnel in the central city that is home to the country's uranium enrichment program, and said construction began in September "to increase capacity, safety and security of nuclear material."

The IAEA also said Iran was ignoring calls to scrap plans for a heavy water reactor and continuing construction. Commenting on that Thursday, a diplomat
said satellite imagery had revealed that work in the city of Arak had progressed to the point where crews "were pouring the foundations."

Spent fuel from heavy water reactors can yield significant amounts of bomb-grade plutonium.

Asked for details on the tunnel, a diplomat familiar with Iran's dossier said parts of it would run as deep as nearly one kilometer, or about half a mile, below ground and would be constructed of hardened concrete and other special materials meant to withstand severe air attacks.

Other diplomats said such moves were motivated by Iranian concerns of a strike by the United States or Israel; both countries accuse Iran of trying to secretly build nuclear weapons. All of the envoys spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Hundreds of bunker busters were used in U.S. airstrikes on hostile fortified underground command centers, living quarters and storage areas in Afghanistan and Iran.

Last year Israel said it was buying about 5,000 smart bombs from Washington, including 500 1-ton bunker busters capable of destroying concrete walls as thick as two meters, or six feet, fueling speculation of possible preparation for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

While not ruling out the possibility of a U.S. attack, Washington has toned down its rhetoric against Iran. Washington is awaiting the results of
European negotiations aimed at getting Tehran to renounce all plans to enrich uranium in exchange for economic concessions and other forms of support - and is even considering backing such incentives.

Uranium enrichment is "dual use," which means it can generate fuel for nuclear power as well as form the core of warheads."

(BLOGGER NOTE: However, there are plenty of enrichment facilities that would sell Iran fuel rods which are not easy to re-manufacture into primary fissile elements for nuclear weapons.

Once upon a time, Iranian power plants were going to get their fuel rods made in Russia, but we're not hearing that story lately. Now the Iranians are enriching their own uranium - supposedly to make fuel rods, probably to make nukes. What a surprise. - Dr. Truth)

"President George W. Bush said fears that Washington was preparing an attack were "ridiculous," but he also said last week that "all options are on the
table."

Iran links its fear of an attack to a decision, made during a debate at the Vienna meeting, a gathering of the board of governors of the IAEA, to bar UN
nuclear inspectors from some sensitive sites.

Suggesting that leaks could be exploited by Iran's enemies, a senior Iranian envoy, Sirous Nasseri, said Tehran's worries about "confidentiality of
information" gathered on such visits "are more intense in view of potential threats of military strikes" against facilities visited by the agency.

Earlier, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the IAEA, said outside the meeting that the "ball is very much in Iran's court to come clean" by cooperating to clear lingering suspicions about possible nuclear weapons ambitions. Still, the agency has not been able to support U.S. assertions
that Iran's programs are aimed at making nuclear weapons."

(BLOGGER NOTE: Iran's just spending a lot of money for special plants to do reprocessing they'd get done for much less money by shipping their fuel rods to reprocessing facilities in Russia or France or Britain or Japan or the US.

The only difference is that by doing their own re-processing, they get to keep the plutonium produced in the fuel rods, which is useful mainly in... nuclear weapons.

And the clincher is that they're putting money into heavy water reactors, which traditionally, from the time of the Manhattan Project, have been used to make plutonium for nuclear weapons - Dr. Truth)

So there we have it - a short-term requirement for the nuclear bunker busters that Rep. David Hobson has bottled up in his House subcommittee for reasons not adequately explored either:
- in open House debate or
- open discussions with personnel from the nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos or Livermore, or
- even in news documentaries (where Rep. Hobson would likely find sympathetic ears for his assertion that we don't need advanced nuclear weapon designs).

The problem with conventional bunker busters is that they will break through two meters of concrete reliably. The Iranians know this, and can count up to three, and even beyond, and pour their concrete accordingly. If they pour thicker concrete walls around their special nuclear material storage rooms, we will have two choices:

- accept the fact that Iran, which quasi-openly supports Al-Qaeda and is the wellspring for terrorism from Hezbollah, will have nuclear weapons shortly.

Since the religious fanatics running Iran feel threatened not only by the US, but by their own democratic opposition and even from their traditional apologists in Europe, they may decide to, as Emeril LaGasse might say, "kick it up a notch" and give Al Qaeda nuclear weapons with which to finish the job they started on September 11th, 2001, or to flatten every major city in Israel and kill off the moderate, Western-inclined Arabs in Jordan and Iraq with nuclear fallout in the bargain, or

- bend every effort to destroy all Iranian special nuclear material and production facilities. If we were to do this effectively and with total assurance that nothing was left to threaten us with, we'd have to go with strategic nuclear weapons - 170 kiloton "silo busters" delivered by Peacekeeper ICBMs. We'd probably have to use several of them to get the job done, but that would probably only require the launch of a single ICBM, since the Peacekeeper has a MIRV bus and can hit several different targets with a single missile. We've got plenty of them, though.

And if we didn't do it, Israel would, out of a desperate impulse toward self-preservation. Remember that the fanatic present rulers of Iran and their rumored guest Osama bin Laden don't feel that Jerusalem absolutely must be preserved in any war to destroy the Jews in Israel. And remember that this apocalyptic rhetoric is backed up by many years of violence directed against the United States, Europe and Israel. We can't just roll over in bed and ignore this.

We might have been well on our way to a third option by now, except for Rep. David Hobson's determination for some time now to privately and personally dictate US nuclear policy by cutting off funding for the development of alternatives to the two options I've just mentioned. I don't remember electing him to do that.

Great work there, Einstein.

Davjd Hobson (R) Ohio, vs. Our Nuclear Arsenal
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Dumb Congressional Tricks
(NOTE: Please feel free to circulate the following essay. Especially, circulate it among your elected officials in Washington. The fate of the nation might one day depend on it.)


Back in what I think was the second Presidential debate of the 2004 election, John Kerry saved up what he thought might prove a "hot button" issue with voters until the end of the show - he accused Bush of wasting money on (and for the full effect, you have to imagine a motor oil-curdling sneer combined with liberal-grade hypocritical mock indignant nasal droning) "bunker-busting nukes," as though they were a particularly loathsome sexually transmitted disease contracted in singles bars outside Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Reflecting on the ploy in my blog (this one) later, I decided that Kerry and his brain (t)rust may have reasoned that this was a good way to reclaim the possible defectors to Ralph Nader in the looney-left spectrum while not doing much damage to the center-left and centrist base of Democratic voters. Of course, the Kerryistas probably had trouble conceiving anyone in their party who actually likes nuclear weapons or a Republican who doesn't.

Well, back in my younger days, I could have named you several Democrats who, if they didn't love nuclear weapons, thought they looked pretty spiffy on top of missiles aimed at the Communist Bloc. Usually, two of them represented me in the Senate and a good few of them were our state's delegation in the House of Representatives.

And there's apparently at least one Republican in the House of Representatives who just plain hates nukes - at least the new types of nukes we'll need to fight "asymmetric wars" against terrorists and rogue states who are apt to fight us from deeply buried mountain cave-and-tunnel complexes such as Tora Bora on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border or specially-prepared deep underground bunkers favored by national leaders who expect to have to hide in them one day.

We may also want to expand our capability to decapitate enemy leadership targets without significant collateral damage to enemy civilians, something we might be able to do with greater precision with ultra-small nuclear warheads optimized for specific weapons effects such as percussive shock or either low or extremely high levels of hard radiation.

The fellow against all of this is Rep. David Hobson, a Republican from Ohio, who has used his position as Chairman of the House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee to eliminate the US$27.5 million the Administration requested to continue to fund a study to determine whether those nuclear bunker busters John Kerry found so repulsive could actually be made to take out deeply-buried targets without hurting civilians.

Perspective: most of a US$2.75 trillion defense appropriations bill is apt to get through Congress without too much trouble. What the Department of Energy's research labs are asking for is 1/101000 of that budget.

If the guys who make military transports and bombers with on-board toilets just got their toilet seats from Home Depot, I'm sure we could make a good start on carving out the budget for new nuclear weapon designs. Give the DoD contract for hammers and such to Sears and we're almost out of the woods.

Of course, if the House and Senate would just stop using the Department of Defense as their private travel agency, we might pick up a quarter-billion in savings, just like that.

Let 'em use Expedia.com like the rest of us - and pay for "fact-finding missions" to the French Riviera (to salve the feelings the President hurt when he defended our national security and enforced a half-dozen UN resolutions without asking "Pardon me, but may we Poupon Saddam Hussein?") or Fiji (that famous hotbed of international tension) with their own Master Cards.

If Rep. Hobson thinks the defense budget needs trimming, his time could be better spent on other things besides limiting future Presidents' options for dealing with deeply-entrenched enemy installations or countering other threats which might be best countered with a burst of energy concentrated far beyond either the capabilities of conventional or present-technology nuclear weapons.

Bunker-busting nukes aren't the only avenues of research being blocked by David Hobson - he's also using the power of the Congressional purse to deny even preliminary funding for new warhead designs in a program called the Advanced Concepts Initiative.

Now, these might be defensible choices - but so far, Hobson's only defended them to his staff and to reporters - and, of course, to weapons labs researchers and Pentagon officials who came to him asking to be able to help defend the country 20 years from now.

I don't recall the whole House ever being surveyed on the matter of developing new nuclear weapons. I certainly don't recall bunker-busting nukes coming up in a national political debate before John Kerry used them as a cheap parting shot in a Presidential debate, and I follow that sort of thing in the news.

Since having bunker busting nukes or weapons like them may one day make the difference between national security and ruinous defeat not only for us Americans, but for Western civilization, I think it's wrong to bottle the funds to develop them up in Hobson's subcommittee on what amounts to his strong personal antipathy to nuclear weapons. The problem is the strong personal affinity that rogues, tyrants and less-than-stable democracies have for nuclear weapons - they are rapidly becoming the TEC-9 automatic of developing nations.

Our edge in the technology of destroying other nations' nuclear arsenals on the ground may one day be a major component of our total national security - if the money for even small-scale studies of new nuclear weapon technologies we need to reliably kill other countries subterranean installations ever gets out of David Hobson's House subcommittee. No one else, not even the President, has been able to overrule Rep. Hobson on this matter so far, not even to protect the country.

The rationale for Rep. Hobson's refusal to fund development of radically new types of nuclear weapons is that knowledgeable people in the field say they won't work - the sort of thing said about ICBMs in the 1940s by "Knowledgeable Men" such as FDR's science advisor Vannevar Bush, who once said he wished that people would leave the idea of hitting something on the other side of the Earth with a missile out of their thinking, because it couldn't possibly happen.

Despite this authoritative death blow to the concept of the ICBM by a Knowledgeable Man, we have purchased thousands of them over the years. During this time, we have fired one or two ICBMs from our stockpile at the Pacific Test Range on Kwajalein Island at regular intervals (with the nuclear warheads replaced by practice warheads), just to make sure that FDR's science advisor wasn't right after all. So far, Vannevar Bush has proven not only wrong, but wrong time after time after time.

This being the case, and Knowledgeable Men having been dead wrong on all sorts of things before and since Vannevar Bush and the ICBM, it might be nice if Rep. Hobson had to defend this choice he's repeatedly taken out of our hands to his colleagues in the House and the nation at large, preferably on C-SPAN where we folks in the cheap seats can watch.

We deserve better than Hobson's Choice for our tax dollars.

In Praise of Edgar Mevers....
Topic: the Denver media and me
The locally-produced public-service programs carried on the Public Broadcasting System's Boulder, Colorado affiliate (Boulder is where good liberals hope they go when they die) rarely fail to entertain, usually unintentionally. I'm reporting their latest comic coup while it is still fresh - the host only came out with it seven minutes ago (that would have been seven pm, March the second, but this account has been edited several times since then. Present tense references reflect passages written while I was watching the show).

One of the station's reliably left-wing panel discussion programs is even as I type this hosting three African-Americans, two professors and a student at the University of Colorado's home campus at Boulder, to talk about how there's STILL a civil rights problem in this country. I agree that there still is one, but I doubt that it is big and severe enough to justify the trillion-dollar governmental-industrial complex which has formed to address it. The professors on the panel probably owe the funding of their chairs to this complex, pervasive civil rights industry.

Anyway, the host of the program (an unadjectival American) was beginning it with a rapid-fire summation of the civil rights movement, when he started talking about the names of some of the pioneers of the movement and came out with "such as Edgar Mevers," stumbled, looked perplexed, then repeated "Edgar Mevers" before going on with his spiel and starting the show.

The program's host is STILL really, really uncomfortable - in fact, all four men around the table are really looking uncomfortable - and just threw out an observation about whether he was accurately reading other people's minds, and I hope for his sake that this was just a metaphor that crashed and burned.

Now one of the professors is relating the story of being hauled over for nudging over the speed limit, being caught with an expired out-of-state driver's license (we viewers didn't learn that little detail until the program's host called him on whether, as the professor tried to suggest, the arrest was racially-motivated), then arrested.

That story was intended to illustrate racial intolerance as it now exists, which goes to show that the professor leads a sheltered life.

Breakdown of the incident - A cop enforced the highway speed laws of Colorado and thus discovered a violation of the laws governing driver registration, and enforced those laws too. If the officer on the scene had decided to NOT enforce the law, THAT could have been taken as an act performed for racial motives by members of other ethnic groups.

Even I, a white conservative, have seen worse examples of intolerance than that - not much worse lately, thank God, not very many, not all against African Americans, but that the virus of intolerance exists at all is an unfortunate effect of free will. Freedom of action entails freedom to take reprehensible action, and attempts to prevent every possible reprehensible action usually result in governmental actions which are too often themselves reprehensible. That situation is called a "police state."

Now, one of my sons, who is tall, blond, blue-eyed and unquestionably European-American has also been hauled in for an expired driver's license, so the professor's premise (in that particular case) is pretty much invalid from the word go as far as I'm concerned.

Kudos to the program's host for being awake and sceptical even though he was clearly bubbling over with white liberal guilt. Despite my ribbing him over "Edgar Mevers," the guy manages to be sharp and focused, no mean feat when his show consists of, say, gender-indeterminate members of some Boulder-based political movement or another who manage to make the Daily Kos seem like the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

If you're going nuts over who "Edgar Mevers" is, the program host was thinking of former Mississippi civil rights activist and later, mayor Medgar Evers. Rest in peace, Mr. Evers.

As a conservative (who acknowledges that civil rights wouldn't have happened as soon as it did unless a lot of gutsy liberals and just plain gutsy people had marched and demionstrated and gotten sprayed by fire hoses amd tear-gassed and bitten by German Shepherds and beaten and shot by cops and Klansmen - and after the South got the point, some of those folks had to go back home to the North and get hosed, gassed, dog-bitten, beaten and shot all over again over integration in the 1970s and 1980s) I like the idea that I knew Medgar Evers' name and the program host, a professional knee-jerk liberal, didn't.

Hah.

(And if anyone is really named Edgar Mevers, this does not refer to you. Any references to a real Edgar Mevers, living or dead, corporeal or incorporeal, actual or conjectural, tangible or spectral are purely coincidental.)

Dobson, Dobson Uber Alles....
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Taking back our Culture
Just why is Doctor James Dobson against tolerance?

We're not talking about recruitment here, not promoting anything that is forbidden in the early books of the Bible (although right next to the strictures against gay-ness, we are also commanded by Leviticus 19:19 to stone people to death for planting different crops in the same field - God help all genetic engineers if Dobson decides we've got to stop tolerating that, too, because bug-resistant soybeans and corn and relatively inexpensive, pure, mad cow-free genetically-engineered insulin and Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease-free human growth hormone clearly violate the spirit of that passage).

Tolerance, as I understand the word, simply means not expressing bigotry in word or deed. Why does Dr. Dobson oppose that so much? Is the answer to be found in the Bible... or in another book, something like Mein Kampf?

Christianity has no use for the creation of scapegoats - in which the intent is to take us back beyond Orthodox Judaism in one or two specific areas in order to bless bigotry. Scapegoats are useful, however, if you'd like to get people to stop taking responsibility for their actions and start blaming other people reflexively - in other words, to STOP being Christians.

Once people stop believing in cause and effect - "if our country overspends its income, it will destroy our economy," or "Jesus told us not to judge the people at the margins of our society, but here we are about to hurt some folks that we've been told that we don't have to tolerate - shouldn't we stop that NOW?" - then they can be sold any line of crap. Artificial stupidity reigns.

And when the super-preachers like Dr. Dobson arise with their followers to play power-broker in national elections, compelling Congress to start enacting laws aimed at punishing members of specific minority groups, when they start opposing tolerance for Arab-Americans, Muslims, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Jews (always a favorite with the anti-tolerance crowd), should we be surprised when the America that emerges has more than a little resemblance to Nazi Germany?

The moral is a simple one - unless the Republican Party scrapes James Dobson and the other TV pulpit hate-mongers off of the campaign soon, 2008 will be when Libertarians and others who supported Bush - because he wasn't a nasty little lying demagogue like Kerry - go home... or even go Democrat, if that's what it takes to wake the GOP up. One Big Tent works, One Tiny Teepee doesn't - and 2008 may be when we find that out again.

1992 and 1996 are examples of what happens to a Republican Party that lets people like James Dobson control the party platform. It loses.

In the next election, I'm not going to speak out for the Presidential candidate of a party dominated by people who may decide that Cajuns are the next group our nation shouldn't tolerate. You see, most of us violate Leviticus 11:10 as often as we can by eating crawfish, crabs, shrimp, catfish and other seafood which are not on the Bible's list of approved delicacies (the catfish has no scales, and thus misses being an Biblically authorized seafood by that much, as Maxwell Smart might put it).

Has Christ given us a new dispensation (Hebrews 10:1 - "For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect," Hebrews 10:16 - "This is the Covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them" ), or is anyone free to reach back into the books of the Old Testament for a hammer to hit people he just doesn't like? And where does the process stop?

Should the Federal Government be in the business of banning pork roast and crawdads from the nation's supermarkets? That would win the Jewish and Muslim votes, for sure, but it might just hurt them in the Deep South, where the Democratic Party would jump on the opportunity to educate the voters on why we don't want to open the door to theocracy - especially theocracy which is opposed to tolerance - in this country. No more "Solid South."

Do racists get to call African-Americans "the sons of Ham" again, going to the Bible to justify that form of prejudice? The use of the Bible to prop up discrimination and prejudice is not just dangerous, it is condemned by God Himself.

Hate by any other name - apparently a name like "Focus on the Family," if the organization has to be pried off the ceiling when someone says "tolerance" a little too loudly - is just as bad as the hate my Dad (in World War II) and one of my sons (in the War Against Terror) went overseas to fight - the hate my son died defending our country from this January.

Using the Holy Bible as a pretext to spread hate around is an especially vile blasphemy, and one that intuitively one feels Christ would have opposed.

Americans shouldn't have to choose between tyranny from Wah'habi fanatic preachers overseas or tyranny from TV preachers here at home. We have other choices, and it behooves the Republican Party to give us one before 2008.

Is There Any Excuse For Michael Moore?

Praising Christopher Hitchens' prose (and his wonderful decision to come in from the Dark Side - better known as the Nation and the other environs of knee-jerk liberalism) doesn't just approach impertinence, it cuts it off going 130 in a turbocharged Porsche on the Santa Monica Freeway. But I have to do it again - I just discovered Hitchens' essay "Unfairenheit 9/11 - the lies of Michael Moore" on Slate.

Slate's combination comissariat/editorial board slips up every now and then and publishes an essay that wasn't written by a National Lawyers Guild wannabe, which is the only thing separating it from being the Washington State edition of pravda.ru. It was Hitchens' turn sometime last year, when the essay was published, and I'm sorry I missed it then.

But back to Hitchens on Michael Moore's oeuvre: "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."

I would have just called Moore a untalented, unoriginal, soul-less political whore, but Hitchens manages to be so much more vivid in his phrasing. He also manages to, in his essay, thoroughly hold Michael Moore up to the unforgiving light of day as the dimwitted hack he is, covering every outrage against the truth, every empty piece of innuendo, and every disservice to his viewers committed in Fahrenheit 9/11.

Michael Moore, by confusing hired murderers with "Iraqi patriots" probably encouraged them to step up their attacks, leading to the death of several American troops, including my son - pushing up the number of Americans who have died in Iraq to which his latest piece of cinematic dung was supposedly dedicated.

Stick your dedication up your fat ass, Moore, and stop encouraging terrorists by calling them patriots.

To remove the chance of future confusion, I have found a good entry on Blackfive on two Iraqi National Guardsmen who gave up their lives in order to engage a car bomb before the suicidal scum driving it got the chance to detonate it in a crowd. THESE guys are Iraqi patriots, along with every voter who braved the very real threat of dying in terrorist violence in order to claim their freedom.

Just to make the distinction clear to those unfamiliar with the concept of patriotism, like Michael Moore and Ted Rall, patriots fight FOR their country, not against it.

The filthy scum who lurk in civilian clothes to commit murders, then slink away to hide behind innocent Iraqis are foreigners, homegrown Wah'habi or other fanatics, and Ba'ath partisans who have deluded themselves that they can restore minority Sunni rule in Iraq. No patriots there.

Patriots make the hard calls and put their lives on the line for good things, like love of country or protecting the weak, not to impose seventh-century political and religious views on people who aren't looking for them.

Again, from Hitchens' essay: "Perhaps vaguely aware that his movie so completely lacks gravitas, Moore concludes with a sonorous reading of some words from George Orwell. The words are taken from 1984 and consist of a third-person analysis of a hypothetical, endless, and contrived war between three superpowers. The clear intention, as clumsily excerpted like this (...) is to suggest that there is no moral distinction between the United States, the Taliban, and the Baath Party and that the war against jihad is about nothing. If Moore had studied a bit more, or at all, he could have read Orwell really saying, and in his own voice, the following:

'The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States ... '

And that's just from Orwell's Notes on Nationalism in May 1945. A short word of advice: In general, it's highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It's also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history."

Hitchens hits the nail straight on the head.

If you scratch a campus 'pacifist' these days (just as it was in the 1970s when I was an undergraduate and exposed to moral equivalence in the service of Communism more than once) you'll find a tangled nest of insufficiently examined premises which support terrorism and terrorists, while opposing the United States and the only working democracy in the Middle East before our invasion of Iraq, Israel. The people who say they believe in moral equivalence do not believe in any such thing - they use "moral equivalence" to try to justify atrocities by men without consciences.

Hitchens, again: "If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed."

I was going to title this post "Michael Moore is a Political Whore," but it seems to me that every film reviewer who raved over "Fahrenheit 9/11" is also open to the charge of prostituting his or her profession to praise what has been exposed as a nasty train wreck of a political attack ad masquerading as a documentary.

It's depressing to realize that there are so many people in the business of film criticism whose opinion I used to respect who apparently cannot be trusted when they see an opportunity to advance the political fortunes of another worthless political hack from Massachusetts.

Lynne Stewart: Damned by Her Own Mouth
Mood:  irritated
Topic: No Truce with Terror!


(Quoted from "Lynne Stewart's Campus Tour," Erick Stakelbeck, in Support for Campus Terrorism, D. Horowitz and B. Johnson, eds.)

"I don't have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people's revolution." Convicted terrorist stooge Lynne Stewart to Monthly Review's Susie Day in a November 2002 interview....

"I don't believe in anarchist violence but in directed violence," Stewart told the New York Times in 1995. "That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions and accompanied by popular support."

Accordingly, Stewart held a positive view of the events of 9/11, as recounted by George Packer in the New York Times Magazine: "This warmhearted woman took the slaughter of innocents with a certain cold-bloodedness. The U.S. is constantly at war around the world and shouldn't expect its acts to go unanswered, she says. The Pentagon was "a better target"; the people in the towers "never knew what hit them. They had no idea that they could ever be a target for somebody's wrath, just by virtue of being American. They took it personally. And actually, it wasn't a personal thing."

"As for civilian deaths in general: "I'm pretty inured to the notion that in a war or in an armed struggle, people die. They're in the wrong place, they're in a nightclub in Israel, they're at a stock market in London, they're in the Algerian outback - whatever it is, people die." She mentions Hiroshima and Dresden. "So I have a lot of trouble figuring out why that is wrong, especially when people are sort of placed in a position of having no other way."
_______

Well, isn't that special... Ms. Stewart, who will probably portray herself as a martyr at her sentencing hearing, is on record as being cold-hearted and callous toward the people who have been killed and maimed by her favored brand of violence.

Lynne Stewart needs to serve the full 40 years possible on the counts of which she has been found guilty. That won't bring back any of the people she has helped kill by serving as a conduit for messages from Sheikh Rahkman to his terrorist followers, but it'll make sure the old bat never abuses the court system to do it again.

The Saudi approach to counterterrorism - blame the Jews and Christians
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
The Middle East Media Research Institute is a very useful outfit.

You see, there are two Arab worlds.

The one our televisions and one of our major political parties show us is anguished at the carnage on the West Bank, justifiably angry with Israel and with us for supporting Israel, and would be our friends if we would just give the Palestinians everything they want.

Then there's the Arab world which can be seen if you speak Arabic. That's where the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) comes in. They translate radio and TV broadcasts, newspapers and Web sites that appear in the Arabic language.

This week, a conference on counterterrorism is being held in Saudi Arabia. MEMRI's Rachel Schwartz very graciously permitted me to quote some excerpts from interviews and other broadcasts made during this conference.

From an interview with Saudi cleric Musa Al-Qarni on Iqra TV that aired on February 3, 2005:

"Musa Al-Qarni: The chaos evident today in the human race -- killing, attacks, rape, robbery and so on -- the cause of all this is that the flags of the Jews, the Christians, and other faiths are raised higher than the flag proclaiming, "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His Messenger."

Let's look at what is written in the Koran. What position should we adopt towards Allah's enemies? Is the position we Muslims have adopted towards Allah's enemies. First, we must accept. There are those who don't want us even to use the term 'Allah's enemies.' They don't want us to say that the Jews and the Christians are Allah's enemies. They don't want us to say that the Jews and Christians are the enemies of the Muslims and Islam.

Interviewer: This was said in the Koran and the Sunna.

Musa Al-Qarni: Since this was said in the Koran, how can it be that among our own tongues, our own sons, our own people, among the Muslims, there are people who deny these things, and deny the enmity between Muslims and non-Muslims? True, Allah's religion is all compassion. But if someone fights Allah's religion, fights those who love Allah, distorts the image of Islam and the Muslims, and makes efforts to weaken Islam.

This isn't just talk; let's take real examples. The Jews who now occupy the Muslims' lands, raping their women, killing their children, and destroying their houses -- are these acts being perpetrated by the Muslims or by the Jews?

Interviewer: By the Jews, the whole world knows that.

Musa Al-Qarni: OK, but now we see that anyone who--| anyone who speaks about the Jews - the term anti-Semitism has become widespread, and people are brought to trial for this. Aren't the Jews trying to make us change the Koranic verses? This verses, from the Book of our Lord, prove them to be sworn enemies and show their vile traits, their despicable defects, what they did to the prophets and their history of scheming, deception, conspiracy and treachery. They are trying to do this.

Interviewer: You cannot blame them for this. It is our fault because we agreed to change the Koran and the Sunna for their sake."

So much for those anguished folks who just want a little justice....

"Musa Al-Qarni: The terrorists are these Jews and Christians, who carry out this policy by force, oppression, and tyranny, using tanks, planes, and all the lethal weapons.

Interviewer: Sister Aisha asked about the claim that Islam spread by the sword. They always say that Islam is spread by the sword. How should we respond to them?

Musa Al-Qarni: I ask how exactly the freedom that America wants is being spread.

Interviewer: Not by the sword, but by missiles, bombs.

Musa Al-Qarni: By missiles, by B-50s, by internationally prohibited bombs, by hundred of thousands of soldiers armed to the teeth --this is how freedom has spread."

Musa Al-Qarni is apparently a little misinformed... the B-50, one of the first planes designed specifically to drop nuclear weapons on long bombruns - in short, to nuke Russia - was phased out of service in the 1950s.

But he's right about the "thousands of soldiers armed to the teeth" part. That is how freedom has spread, throughout history. Apparently he wasn't tuned in when President Bush declared a war on terror.

"Interviewer: And we don't see any freedom. We see nothing but enslavement."

Check in with those Iraqis who your hired murderers are killing for voting, you jerk. They don't think we're enslaving them.

"Musa Al-Qarni: This religion. We must first of all, accept that Allah commanded us to spread this religion worldwide. It should be spread by calling to Allah's religion - using words, friendliness, and good deeds. By letting people hear Allah's words and showing them Allah's true religion. But if there is someone who obstructs this path and wants to prevent religion an light from reaching people, such a person must be fought. This is why Allah said: "Fight them so there is no strife and religion is professed for Allah alone."

I am not one of those who deny this completely and say this religion doesn't use the sword. No. This religion uses the sword when this is necessary. Therefore, wisdom, as the religious scholars say, is to put everything in the right place. If there is need for the sword, then it is wise to use the sword, and if there is need for good deeds and preaching, then it is wise to use them.

We ask Allah to strengthen the mujahideen in Iraq, and and bring them victory over their enemies, the Jews and the Christians. I also want to stress that the Jihad waged by Muslims in Iraq in order to drive out the enemies, from among the Jews and the Christians, who are attacking both land and honor-- this Jihad is legal. It is Jihad for the sake of Allah and in defense of Muslim lands, honor, and sanctities."

Most of the people of Iraq disagree. They defied the murderers paid by people like this fellow, went out bravely and voted. The Iraqi people seem happy with the chance we gave them to pick their own leaders, to vote for someone besides Saddam Hussein.

When my son was alive and soldiering in Iraq, he told me that the vast majority of the Iraqis he spoke with were grateful to us - us Americans - for going over there and giving them a chance to live free. He was frustrated that this story never made the CBS Evening News, or PBS's News Hour, or either the New York or the Los Angeles Times, despite all the cameras and journalists infesting Iraq.

My son felt that what we are doing in Iraq IS working - but that all their work and all the good things the Iraqis were telling him and his buddies, among them the eight other men who died when his Bradley was bombed, were studiously being ignored by the press. He didn't think that was right.

I'm sure that whatever political setup evolves in Iraq will be less than perfect, with plenty of things to criticize. Whoever replaces Dan Rather may have plenty of chances to go over there in a set of khakis from Banana Republic and make grave pronouncements about the mess in Iraq.

229 years ago, we decided to try freedom in America, and we still have a political setup that is less than perfect, with plenty to criticize. It seems to be a problem with democracy - one we can live with.

Happy Birthday (late) to Luke
Topic: Martyred for Freedom
To Armand Luke Frickey
born February 2nd 1984, Houma, Louisiana, USA
died January 6th 2005, Taji, Iraq

Sorry the birthday present's a little late, but late's better than not at all, I hope.

I found a poem from A.E. Housman that I think speaks to the situation of those of us who are left behind, mourning the people who were taken away from us too soon -

"I wish one could know them, I wish there were tokens to tell
The fortunate fellows that now you can never discern;
And then one could talk with them friendly and wish them farewell
And watch them depart on the way that they will not return.

But now you may stare as you like and there's nothing to scan;
And brushing your elbow unguessed at and not to be told
They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,
The lads that will die in their glory and never be old."

Thoughts about Mr. Squarepants and Dr. Dobson
Topic: Taking back our Culture
Thoughts about Mr. Squarepants and Dr. Dobson:

First, this probably wouldn't have become the press event it has if, at least in the minds of media commentators like Dr. Dobson, there had not been a subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle campaign for the hearts and minds of kids on television and in the movies - especially during "tolerance" campaigns.

If the press is going to criticize James Dobson, it should also take a hard look at some of the dodgy stuff that the "tolerance" lobby is trying to push onto us - which sometimes goes beyond mere tolerance to advocacy.

I don't think I was the only parent in the 1980s who was more than a little suspicious of the confusing messages sent by "PeeWee's Playhouse," to provide one example - long before "little PeeWee" made his debut at that adult theatre.

I also recall episodes of "Misterrogers' Neighborhood" which were a little scary - there was this visit to the Neighborhood by an acrobatic troupe, members of which performed in Y-front briefs, for example, which led me to put Misterrogers off limits to my kids unless my wife or I were available to supervise.

All of which goes to show that the television is not a good babysitter, something parents should already know.

But the alarms among media watchdogs are a little too easy to trip. Remember Jerry Falwell and the Teletubbies? Morality in Media's flap over Mighty Mouse sniffing his "magic flowers" to get super powers (that was supposed to tell kids it's OK to use cocaine)?

I suspect that sometimes you don't get anything you don't bring with you to an analysis of children's television - if you're already convinced that there's a lot of illicit sex and drug abuse in cartoons (and "the Simpsons" and "King of the Hill" are examples of that) then maybe you'll find them if you look hard enough.
__

Dr. James Dobson's protestation that it wasn't Spongebob Squarepants as such, but his appearance on campaign for tolerance of (among other things) other people's gender arrangements was actually MORE troubling than if he'd had a problem with Spongebob's long eyelashes (for example).

Dr. Dobson seems to be confused on an important point - tolerance is not the same thing as advocacy.

Idiots who pride themselves on displays of their bigotry (toward ANY group of people) in public places or even violence toward them are not being "Christian" as I understand the use of the term, and yet Dobson seems to say nothing about THAT behavior.

If, in opposing the tolerance campaign, Dobson is actually seeking to support publicly-expressed bigotry, perhaps he ought to revisit the origins and usage of the term "Christian."

I stand ready to be corrected if someone can offer examples where I am wrong about Dr. Dobson - in fact, I hope I am wrong on that point.

Here's a simple question - what would Jesus do?

The Gospels are full of Jesus not only being tolerant of, but reaching out toward people on the margins of his society - even women who were about to be stoned to death for sexual immorality.

Jesus' outreach didn't mean He accepted or advocated the behavior that got them in trouble, just that he refused to sit on the sidelines while the crowd pretended that they were without sin and started to pronounce judgment - judgment that in the woman's case who was about to be stoned to death would have been final.

I wonder if Jesus would have gotten worked up over cartoon characters being used in tolerance campaigns or if, instead, He might have taken the opportunity to reach out to the organizers of the tolerance campaign to see if, somehow, there might be some way of addressing the concerns of people who have a problem with sex outside of marriage in general - something which needs doing badly.

Looking at the Gospels again, though, we see Jesus talking to Samaritans - scandalous behavior for a Jewish rabbi in 33 AD - and hookers, and Roman tax collectors, and publicans (people who owned bars, essentially), so perhaps He may have been (shudder) "tolerant" Himself.

Maybe Jesus wasn't as concerned as some of His modern-day followers with throwing bricks at people who didn't look like Him or live like Him or pray like Him.

Jesus' parable of the Publican and the Pharisee tells us a lot about what He thought of preachers who are quick to condemn others publicly and loudly (surely the opposite viewpoint of tolerance of others).

The harshest condemnations of behavior like that are not to be found outside of Christianity, but from within it.

The New Marine One - It's a Scandal... How It Was Covered by the Press
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Press Gets Reality Check
NBC's national news show on Saturday, January 29, 2005 featured a piece presented by Raheema Ellis on the Administration's choice of a new Presidential transport helicopter (which is unofficially called "Marine One").

Ellis started off with a hearts-and-flowers introduction in the Connecticut town where Marine Ones have rolled off the assembly line since the Eisenhower administration.

Sikorsky lost the Marines' business for new Presidential transports, and NBC chose to spend most of the Connecticut part of the segment with a middle-aged lady who spent a couple of minutes emoting and otherwise expressing her disbelief, instead of (say) a Marine helicopter pilot with the squadron which flies the President around, or an independent expert on military helicopters who might be able to offer a more meaningful opinion on the White House's choice.

The balance of the segment was spent

- with a brief "good news" spot in the town in New York state where some of the assembly of the new airframe is happening (Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor in a multi-national consortium which will build the new copters)

- and a long string of "some people say" allegations about undue influence from Lockheed Martin's "Texas connection" and Tony Blair (parts of the new copter will be built in Britain - which, considering the number of Lockheed-Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighters that the Royal Air Force and Navy are buying, still leaves us with a large trade surplus - and in Italy, where the Agusta Westland firm has been building Bell military and civilian helicopters under license since the 1960s).

If this mysterious, unexplained "Texas connection" is anything more sinister than the Bell Helicopter (a long-time collaborator and business partner of Agusta Westland which produces many Bell-designed helicopters under license) plants near Fort Worth which will also make parts of the new Marine Ones, NBC didn't mention it.

In fact, Raheema Ellis and NBC never explained what Lockheed-Martin/Agusta Westland/Bell's "Texas connection" was at all, just that some people said there was one.

Apparently NBC felt left out when Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes were bandying innuendo about the President in Texas a few months ago and decided to play a little themselves.

What else didn't NBC tell us?

First, the current Marine One helicopter which Sikorsky builds is a version of their Sea King, a design dating back to the 1960s. The White House and Marines wanting something newer for the 21st century is about as remarkable and sinister as the Air Force's ordering modern jet fighters instead of McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantoms or Convair F-106 Delta Darts.

Sikorsky has a newer executive transport, the VH-60, but the Blackhawk UH-60 helicopter on which the VH-60 is based has been plagued by fatal crashes, some of the most recent (during the Iraq war) of which are due to mechanical failures and some of which may be due to operational problems generic to the design. None of these problems make that design attractive as the basis for a Presidential transport.

NBC failed to mention this, which is odd because they and the other networks covered those Blackhawk crashes in detail when Sikorsky was a defense contractor and not a disgruntled former defense contractor... they already had the data in-house and didn't use it.

Then again, that would have been a balanced presentation of the facts.

Let's see if we can guess:

- which state's Congressional delegation (starting with Senator Joe Lieberman, D-Connecticut, who publicly squwaked about the Sikorsky plant in his state losing the Marine One contract despite the fact that the most up-to-date Sikorsky military transport available to the Marines, the Sea Hawk, is built around an airframe which has been implicated in several fatal crashes all over the world due to mechanical or other operational failures);

- whose corporate lobbyists (Sikorsky's, maybe?);

- and which Pentagon insiders (who may have hitched their post-retirement wagons to Sikorsky's star)

might have been spinning conspiracy theories about Sikorsky losing their contract for Raheema Ellis and her team at NBC....

We have to guess if all the information we have to go by is the report on NBC, because Ellis didn't disclose her sources for the dark accusations she floated against the Bush administration.

Those accusations might have looked a lot weaker and less substantial if we knew they were being made by congressional Democrats and officials of the company who lost the contract.

Second, the basic transport version of Lockheed Martin's copter (currently built by the same British-Italian Agusta Westland consortium which will build parts of new Marine Ones) has an excellent safety record, some of which was earned during the recent unpleasantness in the Balkans by NATO military forces.

It's a modern design well adapted to the specific mission of transporting people in comfort, with military performance capabilities - it's faster than the Sea King, most importantly - if needed.

And it hasn't killed anyone. Just on that score, it's understandable how the Lockheed-Agusta Westland-Bell consortium got the contract and Sikorsky didn't.

NBC didn't go into any of that, either. It took me about fifteen-twenty minutes to check these facts on the Web. They weren't hard to find.

The possibility of corruption or patronage in this matter isn't supported by any facts which NBC offered in the report.

That case goes like this:
- the President comes from Texas;
- one of several plants which will build parts for new Marine Ones, and which has been in the business of building military helicopters since the 1950s, is located in Texas (as I understand it, the big plant is going to be in New York state);
- therefore, some collusion must exist between the President and the people who run that plant.

Has Oliver Stone gone to work for NBC while no one was looking?

If Sikorsky had gotten the contract instead in a hypothetical Kerry administration, it could have been argued with equal justice that the award was made as part of a deal with Joe Lieberman and the rest of Connecticut's delegation to Congress to support the Administration during close House and Senate votes.

THAT would have been a sweet deal - it would have firmed up support for Senate Democrats' long filibusters during votes on the appointment of Federal judges, while decreasing the chances of any aisle-crossing on close votes on other issues by the people from Connecticut.

I'd like NBC to say with a straight face that they would have made THAT allegation against a sitting Democratic president.

Big scandal. Good thing we have the mainstream media to sniff stories like this out, huh?