Sebastian D'Souza, Mumbai Photographer

This picture of one of the Mumbai terrorists, walking purposively through the city's railway station, illustrates the cold-blooded determination of the killers:

The photographer, Sebastian D'Souza, is interviewed at the Belfast Telegraph, and shares his experience:

Sebastian D'Souza, a picture editor at the Mumbai Mirror, whose offices are just opposite the city's Chhatrapati Shivaji station, heard the gunfire erupt and ran towards the terminus. "I ran into the first carriage of one of the trains on the platform to try and get a shot but couldn't get a good angle, so I moved to the second carriage and waited for the gunmen to walk by," he said. "They were shooting from waist height and fired at anything that moved. I briefly had time to take a couple of frames using a telephoto lens. I think they saw me taking photographs but theydidn't seem to care."

The gunmen were terrifyingly professional, making sure at least one of them was able to fire their rifle while the other reloaded. By the time he managed to capture the killer on camera, Mr D'Souza had already seen two gunmen calmly stroll across the station concourse shooting both civilians and policemen, many of whom, he said, were armed but did not fire back. "I first saw the gunmen outside the station," Mr D'Souza said. "With their rucksacks and Western clothes they looked like backpackers, not terrorists, but they were very heavily armed and clearly knew how to use their rifles.

"Towards the station entrance, there are a number of bookshops and one of the bookstore owners was trying to close his shop," he recalled. "The gunmen opened fire and the shopkeeper fell down."

But what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back."

D'Souza wished he had a gun rather than a camera.

More commmentary, here.

Chabad-Lubavitch Mourns Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg

The stories of tragedy are still coming in from Mumbai, India. I am personally praying for all of those whose lives were lost, and for their families.

Yet, I have been particularly moved by the deaths of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka, who were members of Chabad-Lubavitch, an outreach organization of Hasidic Judaism.

Headquartered in Brooklyn, Chabad's West Coast headquarters is located in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times has this biographical information on the Holtzbergs:

Gavriel Holtzberg was born in Israel and moved with his family to Crown Heights when he was 9. He held dual citizenship, and studied at yeshivas in New York and Argentina, also serving as a rabbinical student in Thailand and China. Rivkah was born and raised in Israel before relocating to New York.

The couple met through a matchmaker, and they moved to Mumbai soon after their marriage to serve the region's small Jewish community of businesspeople, tourists and residents and help impoverished and drug-addicted people in the neighborhood. They raised money to purchase a five-story building, which became known as the Nariman House, in the tourist neighborhood of Colaba.

The couple ran the synagogue and Torah classes. Gavriel also conducted Jewish weddings, circumcisions and ritual slaughterings. Since kosher meat was not available in India, Gavriel, a kosher butcher, prepared the meat for himself and the rest of the Jewish community there, said his cousin, Rabbi Dovid Holtzberg, 32, of Monterey, Calif.

Dovid grew up and attended school with Gavriel in Crown Heights. Speaking on the telephone from Monterey, he said: "I'm in disbelief. I cannot believe that I'm talking about my cousin in the past tense."

Dovid Holtzberg said his cousin told him life in Mumbai was busy, and that many people came to see him. About 10 days ago, Dovid and his cousin connected on the Web networking site Facebook.

The Holtzbergs were working to establish Chabad centers in other parts of India, said Dovid Zaklikowski, a friend in New York, who spoke regularly with Gavriel.

The Wall Street Journal's story notes how the Chabad members had no official relationship with the Israeli government, and hence no security against anti-Jewish terrorism:

Despite its tight connections with Israel, the Chabad House was a soft target - much easier to hit than tightly guarded Israeli diplomatic missions or the offices of Israel's El Al airline. "Chabad has no official association with Israel, so they did not have any protection," Mr. Belotserkovsky said.

The official reference is to Eli Belotserkovsky, Israel's deputy chief of mission in India.

See also, "Remembering Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg."

Mumbai: India's 9/11

Gary Fouse published these phenomenal comments, at Findalis' blog, regarding the Mumbai attacks:

I was going to wait until the tragedy in Mumbai (formerly Bombai) India was over before writing my thoughts down, but I couldn't wait. As I write this, it is said that over 150 people are dead. The courageous Indian commandos are still fighting their way through the Taj Hotel clearing out the remaining terrorist murderers and still rescuing hostages. The exact group that is responsible for this mass atrocity is still unclear, but one thing is clear; they are Muslims. Their targets were Westerners, British, Americans, and yes, Jews. One of the locations raided was Chabat House, a Jewish center. According to news reports, hostages, including Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife,Rivki, were murdered in cold blood as commandos closed in. (Their two-year-old son miraculously escaped.) I am outraged, and I am fed up with the excuses. It is long overdue, but we need to call a spade a spade and demand that the Muslim world rise up and remove this evil from its house.

By any means necessary.

Mumbai is now India's 9-11. We have suffered ours. We reacted, and at least, we can now say that two murderous regimes have been driven from power. Spain had their own 9-11. They reacted and elected a cowardly government that promptly pulled their forces out of Iraq. Britain had theirs and now prostrates itself at the feet of a hateful Muslim minority that spits in the face of British society as they demand Shariah law.

This latest incident is pretty much the final blow for me personally in trying to appeal to decent Muslims to take a stand. It is not easy. I know decent Muslims. I teach Muslim students, mostly from Saudi Arabia, who seem quite nice. I listen to the words of American Muslim leaders who speak of moderation and say they condemn terrorism. I have heard President Bush describe Islam as a religion of peace as he meets Muslim leaders. One of those leaders, whom he has invited to the White House, is Imam Muzammil Siddiqi, former head of the Islamic Society of North America and now head of the Islamic Society of Orange County-himself an Indian.

Last week, I attended a joint Jewish-Muslim discussion at Chapman University, where Dr Siddiqi spoke for Islam. (See post of last week). Dr Siddiqi is considered a "moderate Muslim", who decries terror. Yet, he has made statements in the past regarding Jihad and Shariah that many Westerners might find troubling. In the 1990s, he hosted the "Blind Sheihk" Rahman at his mosque. Let's just say I wasn't convinced at Siddiqi's words last week.

I have just checked the websites of CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, and the Islamic Society of Orange County. Only the Islamic Society of North America has a statement on Mumbai, condemning the attacks and offering prayers for the victims. That is all well and good, but nowhere-nowhere is there any mention of the fact that the perpetrators were Muslims. There is also no mention of the attack on Chabat House. This is insufficient. As for CAIR and the Islamic Society of Orange County, there is nothing on their websites about Mumbai (as of this writing). What will they eventually say? What will the Muslim Student Associations at our US universities say about Mumbai when they have their next "Islam Awareness Week"? Will they continue to claim that they are not anti-Jewish, only anti-"Zionist"? That is the constant disclaimer they use, yet the raid on Chabat House puts the lie to that. It is clear that the killers wanted to include Jews (in India) among their targets. Why?

Because they hate Jews.

There's more at the link.

Compare Gary's comments to those of Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian and filmmaker, interviewed today at the Wall Street Journal:

Since 9/11, American political leaders have struggled with the question of how to describe the ideology of the enemy without making enemies of the world's billion or so Muslims. The various terms they have tried -- "Islamic extremism," "Islamism," "Islamofascism" -- have fallen short of both clarity and melioration. Melioration is not Mr. Wilders's highest priority, and to him the truth couldn't be clearer: The problem is Islam itself. "I see Islam more as an ideology than as a religion," he explains.

His own view of Islam is a fundamentalist one: "According to the Quran, there are no moderate Muslims. It's not Geert Wilders who's saying that, it's the Quran . . . saying that. It's many imams in the world who decide that. It's the people themselves who speak about it and talk about the terrible things -- the genital mutilation, the honor killings. This is all not Geert Wilders, but those imams themselves who say this is the best way of Islam."

Yet he insists that his antagonism toward Islam reflects no antipathy toward Muslims: "I make a distinction between the ideology . . . and the people. . . . There are people who call themselves Muslims and don't subscribe to the full part of the Quran. And those people, of course, we should invest [in], we should talk to." He says he would end Muslim immigration to the Netherlands but work to assimilate those already there.

His idea of how to do so, however, seems unlikely to win many converts: "You have to give up this stupid, fascist book" -- the Quran. "This is what you have to do. You have to give up that book."

Mr. Wilders is right to call for a vigilant defense of liberal principles. A society has a right, indeed a duty, to require that religious minorities comply with secular rules of civilized behavior. But to demand that they renounce their religious identity and holy books is itself an affront to liberal principles.

Exit Question: Will America's "liberal principles" of openness and tolerance be the nation's Achilles' Heel?

Daniel Drezner, Stupendously Wrong

All of us bloggers goof now and then, publishing throwaway posts here and there, based on fraudulent information or underdeveloped reasoning.

But Dan Drezner, an expert in international affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, who is routinely feted as one of the country's top "public intellectuals," has published a note on the Mumbai attacks - commentary that should be considered in his field of expertise - that is profoundly, stupendously wrong, to the point of ignominy even.

Here's Drezner yesterday, in his "Open Mumbai Thread":

Comment away on the terrorist attacks that have stunned Mumbai over the past 48 hours. I don’t have a lot to add, except that this doesn’t feel like a linked-with-Al Qaeda attack. While there’s been carnage, these attacks have also been sloppy and messy. Because of the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., the timing of these attacks guaranteed a low level of American targets and a low level of Ameican attention.

The "sloppy and messy" part is particulary throwaway, considering that the emerging consensus among terror experts is that the attacks were "meticulously planned."

This additional comment about "the timing of these attacks" is also lame. One of Drezner's readers responded in the comments:

Dan,

I have been a reader for years, discovering your blog while I was a political science graduate student at the University of Mumbai in 2003. I am an Army Infantry officer who was the first Olmsted Scholar to India. I lived in Mumbai with my family from May 2003 to June 2005, including three months in the Taj Mahal hotel while I searched for a suitable apartment. Two of my children were born at Breach Candy Hospital in Bombay. My Masters degree is from the University of Mumbai. Neither my wife nor I are of South Asian extract, but we love India (warts and all) and it is in many ways our second country.

I dispute your notion that this event has received a low-level of attention. The news channels were full of coverage. However, we are, as a nation, so unaware of India as it really is. We think because we have seen CITY OF JOY and MONSOON WEDDING and enjoy curry and samosas that we “know” India. We have ceded interest to the very important, and economically influential, diaspora here. If we are smart, India could be an ally to us in the years to come akin to the British of the 20th Century. As to the attacks, they were executed with precision and the targets were well-chosen. That this is till ongoing, over 48 hours after the initial attacks, shows that the mujahideen who executed this were well-prepared and not amateurs. Imagine this type of attack taking place simultaneously in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. That is what Mumbai is to India.

Drezner currently has two brand-new published essays at the National Interest, "Oil Dependence As Virtue," and "Leading by Appointment."

I'll let readers go visits those pieces to see if Drezner's more hopefully deliberative commentaries are worth the time.

Mumbai and the Ideological Challenge to the West

The seige of Mumbai is now coming to an end, and answers to the horror are still being sought. It remains unclear, for example, if this was an exclusive operation of a full-blown al Qaeda affiliate or that of a newer, more localized terrorist organization, perhaps focused primarily on the Indo-Pakistan balance of power.

Mark Steyn reminds us to focus on the forest rather than the trees:

In the 10 months before this atrocity, Muslim terrorists killed more than 200 people in India, and no one paid much attention. Just business as usual, alas. In Mumbai the perpetrators were cannier. They launched a multiple indiscriminate assault on soft targets, and then in the confusion began singling out A-list prey: Not just wealthy Western tourists, but local orthodox Jews, and municipal law enforcement. They drew prominent officials to selected sites, and then gunned down the head of the antiterrorism squad and two of his most senior lieutenants. They attacked a hospital, the place you're supposed to take the victims to, thereby destabilizing the city's emergency-response system ....

What's relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets, and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin's New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan's deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you'll find local lads and wily outsiders: That's pretty much a given.

But we're in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It's the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK-47 and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You're sitting in some distant foreign capital but you're of a mind to pull off a Mumbai-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological front organizations. You've already made landfall.

It's missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the "Deccan Mujahideen" or the ISI or al-Qaida or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That's a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It's not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That's what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the central Asian 'stans to Yorkshire, and co-opted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.

Be sure to read the rest of Steyn's piece, for this is about as clear-eyed a take on events as you'll find.

In fact, contrast Steyn to the nihilists at Down With Tyranny, who argue that the terrorists in Mumbai are no different from Mormons in California (meaning those who contributed to a political initiative campaign in a democratic election):

Whether it's hate-infused, self-righteous Mormons or Muslims or Hindus or Christians or Jews, there really is no place for religionist fanatics in a civilized community. These primitive, barbaric belief systems are something that will have to be dealt with if mankind is going to survive as a species. It's long past time we stop coddling and even honoring these dangerous fanatics among us. Their path will only bring on repression and regression to their own barbarism. Religionist fanatics should be treated as the mentally deranged and sick people that they are - and should be treated, compassionately, for their illness.

I want readers to sit for a few minutes and take in the meaning of this: If Down With Tyranny is correct, we are to understand logically that Marjorie Christoffersen, the Mormon restaurant manager at El Coyote in Los Angeles, who gave $100 dollars in support of California's Proposition 8, is no different from the gunman who took seige of the hotels and Jewish centers to kill hundreds in a reign of terror this week.

That is to say, people like Marjorie Christopherson, or Mitt Romney, for that matter - who is also Mormon - are "dangerous fanatics," "religionists" who will unleash "repression," "regression," and "barbarism."

I can't say this enough: Here we can see the moral difference between conservatives - who identify and repudiate evil unequivocally - and leftists, who not only refuse to denounce evil, but combine anyone who resists their program of hegemonic neo-Stalinism as "mentally-degraded" and "sick."

And it is not just the folks at Down With Tyranny (who, not surprisingly, have no problem with demonizing neoconservative gays).

Take a look around the blogosphere: Yesterday Digby slammed the press because U.S. journalists had the temerity to report on AMERICANS who were killed in the terror: "Not everything is about the United States."

Firedoglake took this logic further:

We're told that Westerners - Brits and Americans - were singled out, and tragically some have been listed among the dead. That's one way of extending the coverage in Western news media beyond the initial attacks: isolate and focus on specific victims with whom the American audience may, for better or worse, more easily identify ....

It wasn't simply a single terror attack - it is an ongoing effort to engage our media's attention at a time they had very little else to talk about. Were our cable stations really going to air more mindless speculation about which hypoallergenic dog would be best for the Obama girls when there was blood spilled, Americans dead, and hostages still at risk? ....

Again, we're not at the center of this terror. The horror-stricken people of Mumbai are. But we are a critical part of its masterminds' very carefully selected audience.

The point for Digby and Firedoglake is to champion international solidarity with the downtrodden and oppressed. Screw the Americans who were the ultimate target of the nihilist mayhem.

Of course, the leftists are full of pure bull. The Los Angeles Times ran a front-page article yesterday on the globalization of the death and dislocation, looking at the victims of the attacks from all corners of the globe, Britain, Spain, Germany, and Israel - and the piece was careful to note:

The prize for the gunmen may have been Westerners, but as in past attacks, locals bore the brunt of the violence. Most of the dead were Indians.

But just visit any of the top blogs across the leftosphere, in any case. There's little, if any, condemnation of the terrorists, only astonishment that an attack on the West would be reported as such. See, for example, Daily Kos, Newshoggers, Open Left, or Steve Clemons, especially, who can't resist using the Mumbai attacks to denounce "U.S. forces" who kill "innocent people" ... "breeding blowback and rage."

This is how democracies perish, folks. By refusing to identify evil when it looks us right in the face.

Let us pray to God the new Obama administration repudiates the netroots hordes, who would utterly destroy the United States faster than you can say Gavriel Holtzberg.

Sarah Palin, Online Superstar

The Politico has a great story on the enduring appeal of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin:

Three weeks after the Republican ticket suffered a sweeping defeat at the polls, Sarah Palin continues to dominate search engine queries, cable news and online video sites.

The only American politician who generates comparable interest is President-elect Barack Obama. No one else is close.

Palin was the most popular Lycos search from the week she joined the ticket continuously through last Sunday, some two weeks after the election, when she was dethroned by Paris Hilton, the celebutante whom John McCain famously compared to Barack Obama.

The Alaska governor now ranks fourth, just one spot below Obama, on the weekly Lycos 50 list.

“People are still searching for her in record numbers,” said Kathy O’Reilly, a spokeswoman for Lycos. “How bizarre is that? Obama is the president-elect after the most historic election of all time and you’d think he would be dominating search activity and he only now is going ahead of her.”

Palin has been the subject of intense online fascination since her introduction as the Republican nominee on Aug. 29. In September, the Anchorage Daily News reported a 928 percent spike in traffic, according to Nielsen Online. Her mid-October “Saturday Night Live” appearance drove the show’s highest rating in 14 years, and her Oct. 2 debate with Joe Biden was the most watched vice presidential debate ever — drawing more viewers than any of the three presidential debates between McCain and Obama.

The scope of the GOP ticket’s loss — and the role her critics assigned to her in that defeat — hasn't cooled interest in Palin. She ranked as the No. 2 top news search at Ask.com this week and No. 2 (after Obama) among newsmakers on the AOL 2008 year-end hottest searches list, and she occupied two slots on Politico’s list of the site's 10 most searched terms. Palin also ranked fourth among Yahoo searches, behind “Black Friday,” a Czech model and a contestant on the hit television show “Dancing with the Stars.” She was the only politician on the Yahoo top 20 list.

A recent YouTube clip that featured her being interviewed while, unbeknownst to her, a turkey was slaughtered in the background was the site's most-viewed clip over the last week. Two of the top 10 video moments of 2008, according to Truveo, an online video search engine, also involve Palin — a “Saturday Night Live” skit that mocks her and the governor’s ill-fated interview with Katie Couric of CBS.

“It’s astounding that someone who should have faded into the background after the election is not only making headlines but being searched for in record numbers online,” said O’Reilly. “People still have a fixation with her, for whatever the reason.”

The reason is obvious: Sarah Palin is now recognized as the face of the conservative future, and as a threat to long-term Democratic dominance.

The is why the nihilist left demonizes her so aggressively, and why conservatives are mobilizing around her as the standard bearer for 2012.

Krugman's Depression

In an earlier essay, "War Mobilization Ended the Great Depression," I noted the strange veneration on the left for Paul Krugman because of his huge advocacy for a new round of New Deal-style spending programs.

It's funny, of course, that Krugman, a Princeton University economist, and Nobel laureate in international trade theory, is not a recognized expert on Keynesian pump-priming. No matter, just the mention of his name adds some kind of liberal legitimacy for those on the radical left.

In any case, Amity Shlaes, who has written a book on the Depression, takes up the debate at today's Wall Street Journal:

Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been on the attack lately in regard to the New Deal. His new book "The Return of Depression Economics," emphasizes the importance of New Deal-style spending. He has said the trouble with the New Deal was that it didn't spend enough.

He's also arguing that some writers and economists have been misrepresenting the 1930s to make the effect of FDR's overall policy look worse than it was. I'm interested in part because Mr. Krugman has mentioned me by name. He recently said that I am the one "whose misleading statistics have been widely disseminated on the right."
Mr. Krugman is a new Nobel Laureate, teaches at Princeton University and writes a column for a nationally prominent newspaper. So what he says is believed to be objective by many people, even when it isn't. But the larger reason we should care about the 1930s employment record is that the cure Roosevelt offered, the New Deal, is on everyone else's mind as well. In a recent "60 Minutes" interview, President-elect Barack Obama said, "keep in mind that 1932, 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%, inching up to 30%."

The New Deal is Mr. Obama's context for the giant infrastructure plan his new team is developing. If he proposes FDR-style recovery programs, then it is useful to establish whether those original programs actually brought recovery. The answer is, they didn't. New Deal spending provided jobs but did not get the country back to where it was before.
This reality shows most clearly in the data -- everyone's data. During the Depression the federal government did not survey unemployment routinely as it does today. But a young economist named Stanley Lebergott helped the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington compile systematic unemployment data for that key period. He counted up what he called "regular work" such as a job as a school teacher or a job in the private sector. He intentionally did not include temporary jobs in emergency programs -- because to count a short-term, make-work project as a real job was to mask the anxiety of one who really didn't have regular work with long-term prospects.

The result is what we today call the Lebergott/Bureau of Labor Statistics series. They show one man in four was unemployed when Roosevelt took office. They show joblessness overall always above the 14% line from 1931 to 1940. Six years into the New Deal and its programs to create jobs or help organized labor, two in 10 men were unemployed. Mr. Lebergott went on to become one of America's premier economic historians at Wesleyan University. His data are what I cite. So do others, including our president-elect in the "60 Minutes" interview.

Later, Lee Ohanian of UCLA studied New Deal unemployment by the number of hours worked. His picture was similar to Mr. Lebergott's. Even late in 1939, total hours worked by the adult population was down by a fifth from the 1929 level. To be sure, Michael Darby of UCLA has argued that make-work jobs should be counted. Even so, his chart shows that from 1931 to 1940, New Deal joblessness ranges as high as 16% (1934) but never gets below 9%. Nine percent or above is hardly a jobless target to which the Obama administration would aspire.

What kept the picture so dark so long? Deflation for one, but also the notion that government could engineer economic recovery by favoring the public sector at the expense of the private sector. New Dealers raised taxes again and again to fund spending. The New Dealers also insisted on higher wages when businesses could ill afford them. Roosevelt, for example, signed into law first his National Recovery Administration, whose codes forced businesses to pay an above-market minimum wage, and then the Wagner Act, which gave union workers more power.

There's more at the link.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum

Wal-Mart and the Crisis of Capitalism

Certainly, Wal-Mart will incur legal liability for the death of one of its employees in the stampede at the company's Nassau County store this morning. This tragedy is not the first time the company has seen shopping stampedes, and given the combination of increasingly crass commercialism amid the frenzy of low-priced bargains, Wal-Mart may indeed be criminally negligent not to have corporate crowd-control detachments in place for Black Friday openings.

That said, there's plenty of blame to go around in today's New York melee, not least of which should focus on the unruly mass of bargain-hunters lining up in front of the store. Indeed, initial reports indicate a violent mob mentality had taken over the crowd of shoppers, some of whom who had broken through plate-glass windows just before the store opened its doors. Pictures of the stampede can be seen, here.

Of course, like all things in American life these days, the tragedy is already being politicized, and Wal-Mart's being excoriated for its corporate practices:

I've hated that store and what it stands for for a really long time, probably since I lived in Fayetteville, AR, which is pretty close to the epicenter of evil that is the Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville. So it should come as no surprise that I hold Wal-Mart largely responsible for the the tragic events at one of their stores on Long Island this morning.

But this story is bigger than just Wal-Mart. This is a story that really shows just how desperate people are getting to continue the lifestyles they've become accustomed to during the last two bubble economies. We've spent the better part of my adult life being told that we, as a nation, can have it all: a strong economy built on outsourcing manufacturing, offshoring profits, and processing, slicing up and securitizing debt. We're told we can have the brand new cars, the huge house in the exurbs or the loft in the city (or both), all filled with the latest gadgets, because we've found yet another way to beat the system. And when, as is inevitable, the system beats us, we don't want to admit it, so when a company like Wal-Mart (and they are far from alone - they're just the trendsetter as the largest) says that if you show up at 5:00 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving, we'll give you one more hit of what you want, we shouldn't be surprised when the public reacts the way it did.

This author makes the obligatory statement, "oh sure, responsibility should be shared, of course," then continues to rail away against "capitalist exploitation" with the classic anti-globalization rants of today's neo-Stalinist left:

Shopping on Black Friday (which has a slightly different meaning to a lot of people now, I think) has been a tradition for quite some time now, but every year, the stakes get higher, and the early shoppers get more desperate. That someone died today wasn't surprising - the only surprise was that it hadn't happened earlier. For crying out loud, the Sawgrass Mills mall opened at midnight, and there were over 30,000 people there in the first two hours.

30,000 people, all chasing a limited supply of deals.

And the deals are all lies, because we never actually get to see the real cost of any of these items. We don't hear about the labor conditions the people who make this stuff have to work under. We don't see the polluted groundwater or the carbon emitted into the air. We especially don't see the damage being done to our own economy as we continue down this road of unsustainable debt. We just see cheap plasma televisions and Coach bags and trample people in order to get to them.

Desperation makes otherwise reasonable people into monsters, and I'm afraid we're only seeing the beginning of the desperation.

Compare the anti-capitalism of this essay with the lead article at the current International Socialist Review, "Capitalism’s Worst Crisis Wince the 1930s."

Then contrast these structural interpretations with the individual-level analysis at the Anchoress, "Black Friday and Love."

Humans make choices, and moral responsibility goes both ways. Rejection of mass-mob consumerism will do more to reform capitalism than a wave of corporate malpractice lawsuits, and that's to say nothing of leftist hopes for bringing about the proletarian revolution.

Mumbai Probe Focuses on Pakistani Groups

American intelligence officials are focusing the Mumbai terror investigation on Pakistani militant groups, most likely Lashkar-e-Taiba, and perhaps another cell operating out Kashmir, Jaish-e-Muhammad.

The government of Pakistan is resisting speculation that the Mumbai attacks orginated in the Pakistani state.

Meanwhile, the targeting of the Chabad-Lubavitch organization, where American Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka were killed, is one of the most disturbing elements of the attacks. The siege of the Chabad would seem an unlikely focus of exclusively local terrorist activity (Hindu-Sikh violence, for example). Plus, as many as 7 of the Mumbai terrorists have British origins with suspected ties to London's 7/7 subway attacks in 2005 (which was an al-Qaeda operation).

Scott at Powerline published this e-mail from a reader, discussing the targeting of Jews in India:

As the Indian terror event reaches it tragic end with reports of the killing of all the Jewish hostages in the Chabad House (Nariman House) there are important points that must be made. The marathon terror campaign was horrible and deadly. Despite in-depth coverage, its presentation in the Western world raises serious questions.

From the start British and American coverage concentrated on the hotels with stress of the targeting of British and Americans. The Jewish target was ignored until day two and day three. The two luxury hotels were selected by the terrorists because they are occupied by tourists. People who escaped from the hotels claimed that the terrorists asked for British and Americans. However, they were selected because they were foreigners.

Nariman House was selected by the terrorists because the Chabad building was a specific Jewish target that also included Israelis. Let me make this clear. Chabad House was the only target chosen by the terrorists in Mumbai because of its specific character - Jewish and Israeli. Hostages in Chabad House were killed because they were Jewish and Israeli.

Further indications of the anti-Western nature of the attacks are the reports that Muslims worldwide are celebrating the killlings.

See also, Bill Roggio, "Mumbai Attack Most Significant Since Sept. 11 Attack on U.S."

Gay Rights and the Postmodern Agenda

I did not know Steve Clemons was gay. In fact, the only thing I knew about Clemons, from reading his columns occassionally, was that he seemed like one more classic leftist nut spewing BDS across the blogosphere. The erudition of Clemons' essays did nothing to disguise his representation of the essential nihilism of today's postmodern left.

Clemons' Thanksgiving essay, where he discusses his sexual orientation, and his frustrations with Barack Obama, is one more example of how radically left is the progressive agenda of today's Democratic Party base:

Yes, like everyone - I'm pleased that Barack Obama won the White House. But it is only a small beginning in the right direction. But with Barack Obama, we also got Proposition 8. We have him talking about Iraq as the "bad war" and Afghanistan as the "good war". We have political appointments in both security and economic policy that either will be the height of brilliant personnel and policy maneuvering or alternatively could end up as a paralyzed cabinet and government disaster. There is only fog ahead, much yet we don't know.

We have wars going on in the Middle East that shouldn't be going on. I have friends there now being shot at - and helping to kill others - and this wasn't what the 21st century was supposed to be about.

I have been writing here for some time -- far before the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2025 report came out chronicling America's global decline - that America's mystique as a great nation had been punctured by the invasion of Iraq. We showed key limits in our military and economic capacity, leading allies and foes respectively to count on us and fear us less. The economic crisis is the punctuation point in America's fall from its once significant global perch. I'm worried about all of this - making a traditional thanksgiving very uncomfortable.

Our new president preaches inclusion, which is a good thing -- and I think he has the potential to be one of the great stewards of the White House and the executive branch authority we have given him.

But how could people who helped deliver this man to the White House also spit on my decision to enter into marriage with someone I have been with for 17 years? Europe has embraced adjustments in marriage easily and in a socially healthy way, and yet we still stoke embers of nativism and fundamentalism in this country. Barack Obama's voice was used on anti-gay marriage robocalls to African-American and Hispanic voters in California. To my knowledge, he didn't ask for his voice not to be used.

I think intolerance is what undermines the glue of a nation, stirring up fear and violence at home and in wars abroad. We have a lot of intolerant Americans who helped elect George W. Bush twice to the White House, and now we have many other intolerant Americans who have come into their civic responsibilities as voters and have tainted the hope that people like my partner and I have for a better and more just nation that recognizes our relationship in the ways it should be recognized.

I'm going to see the movie Milk today starring Sean Penn reprising brilliantly the life of the assassinated first gay elected politician in the United States - and no matter what Proposition 8 thought it achieved, I'll be wearing my ring.

So, this is an uncomfortable Thanksgiving holiday, and I hope that those who read this today do embrace their family and friends - all of them, gay ones too - and remember that this nation needs to stop dragging when it comes to bigotry.

I've written much on gay rights and the unhinged left's backlash against the majority vote on Proposition 8 (which Clemons conveniently omits).

Here I'll simply refer readers back my post on marriage and tradition, "Marriage and Procreation: Bodily Union of Spouses."

As for the rest of Clemons' rant, I'm a little surprised he's resorting to the same smears of intolerance and bigotry used by every other 9th tier leftist on the web.

Or, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised: The gay marriage movement has nothing more to argue for it than to demonize those who oppose them, which is essentially a temper-tantrum masquerading as argumentation. Leftists may indeed win the battle over marriage in the long run - with all the intimidation and claims of "rights" - as society proceeds along the path to hegemonic secularism. What's interesting here is how Clemons' gay marriage advocacy fits right in with all the other outrages against GOP governance over the last eight years.

For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction, or so they say. Conservatives are planning now for their comeback, and 2010's not too soon to make the case that the push for gay marriage is just one pillar of the larger radical program intent to destroy center-right traditionalism in this country.

Responding to Mumbai

Experts and media commentators are still determining the identity and affiliations of the terrorists behind the attacks on Mumbai. It's early, but I don't believe the perpetrators a directing their attacks exclusively against Hinduism, as has been true in previous terrorist incidents in India.

I'll have updates on this, but for now I simply want to note Matthew Yglesias' knee-jerk reaction against the use of force in combating the violence. In particular, Yglesias argues that India's violence should not occasion a reappraisal of the doctrine of preemption, which saw its most monumental use in the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq:

A lot of basically sensible people, including folks like these and these who may well find themselves with positions in the Obama administration, have suggested that maybe we don’t want to throw the alleged baby of preventive war out with the bathwater of Bushism. I always think people thinking along these lines need to keep in mind that the United States isn’t the only country on the planet. I don’t think we want a world in which India claims to have a U.S.-endorsed right to launch preventive military strikes on Pakistan, or a world in which Pakistani policymaking is dominated by fear of a potentially imminent preventive Indian military attack.

Government officials are still working to resolve the crisis on the ground, and we see Ygelias - the preeminent spokesman for pacifism in Democratic Party foreign policy - already ruling out the use of force as a potential policy in responding to this round of terrorism.

Socialism, Straight from the Horses Mouth

Folks should read this piece on the economic crisis from the International Socialist Review, "Capitalism’s Worst Crisis Since the 1930s." Here's a note from the conclusion:

The disaster of the free market makes it easier for us to argue about the failure of capitalism and the need for an alternative based on human needs. The free market, which supposedly triumphed in 1989 and brought us the “end of history,” has led to nothing but misery and the ruin of millions of people, who are mired in poverty, hunger, unemployment, and ill health, but thanks to the free-market mania of the past decades, face a shredded safety net that doesn’t begin to address these problems.

People will also be forced to ask: what does government intervention mean when this is a government not of the workers, not of the masses of people, but a government that represents the interests of the owners, the bankers, and the industrialists? The state is being used for state capitalist purposes, in order to reorganize capital, even to curb some of its excesses. But its aim is to keep capitalism and its social relations going—relations in which labor is dominated and exploited for the profits of a few. Part of the restructuring will involve, as we’ve said, an even harsher attack on working-class living standards. At the same time, nationalization opens up space for us to argue against wholesale privatization, for the defense of public schools against privatization, and even to argue for nationalized health care. But we have to be clear that state capitalist nationalization—that is, the intervention of the state in order to prop up the bankers and the industrialists at our expense and without any democratic control over the process—is no great improvement over what went before. Liberals will accept that kind of state intervention. We must demand the kind of state intervention that will come only with mass pressure and control from below—intervention to improve health care, education, unemployment benefits, to prevent foreclosures, and so on.

The Left has to operate on two levels. First, a Left has to be built, or rather rebuilt, in this country that is prepared to fight on every front in defense of working-class interests, whether it is against layoffs, against foreclosures, or against cuts in health care and social services. Second, the Left must be prepared to take part in any struggles to defend the interests of the working class, as well as creating a political and ideological alternative to the free market and its defenders, conservative or liberal. The Left must utilize the crisis to conduct an ideological offensive against capitalism and to argue for a socialist alternative.

People who keep arguing that Barack Obama is "socialist" should read the full essay carefully (the authors reject the notion that the Wall Street bailout is "socialism," since the massive infusion of capital to banking and insurance giants is designed to delay the capitalist crisis and preserve American imperial hegemony - Hank Paulson, for instance, is a banker and former executive at Goldman Sachs, a member of the financial vanguard).

But let me add two points: (1) Obama is trained in radical ecomomics and postmodern ideologies, but he's now poised to govern incrementally from the center-left. While we will see some movement toward essentially European-style social-democratic policies, Obama nevertheless remains a "running dog" of the "capitalist ruling class" as far as the folks at ISR are concerned. Yet, (2) the policy regime presented above is virtually identical to those advocated by today's progressive netroots blogs (see here, here, and here, for the tip of the iceberg).

So, interestingly, once in office, the degree of repudiation of the radical netroots will be a key indicator of how far an Obama administration is willing to openly advocate an objectively socialist (i.e., anti-capitalist) policy program.

A Malignant Outrage

A couple of weeks back, Michael Goldfarb had this to say about the Democratic-left's outrage at Joe Lieberman's continuing tenure as the chair of the Senate's Homeland Security Committee:

The Democratic party and the left won a stunning victory in this election, and while they should be savoring it (and most are) a few are busy trying to settle old scores. It’s pathetic, but it’s also cause for some optimism: these people are a cancer on the Democratic party that even a landslide victory couldn't cure.

The anger hasn't gone away, of course. Leftists are still resigning themselves to Barack Obama's shift to the political center. But Dibgy at Hullabaloo is braying tonight about the decreasing likelihood of war crimes prosecutions for Bush administration officials next year:

I have always been in favor of prosecutions for the unitary executive torture regime. Recently, however, I have reluctantly concluded that the best we could hope for is a "9/12" Commission investigation since Obama has been making it quite clear that he doesn't intend to pursue government officials through the Justice system (and congress is congenitally incapable of it.) I was impressed by Charles Homan's article in Washington Monthly that at the very least we needed to establish some official narrative of illegality and abuse of power lest this become an established option for future presidents ....

[Discussion of Dahlia Lithwick ] ....

I have been being overly "pragmatic" (depressed is more like it) in assuming that a 9/12 commission will be better than nothing. It would actually be worse than nothing, creating a shallow self-serving narrative of fine, hard working public servants who may have strayed over the line from time to time because they were only trying to keep us safe. It's always been out there ....

This movement conservative zombie was created at the time of Nixon and his pardon, extended through Iran Contra, went through the insane era of partisan investigations in the 1990s which culminated in a trumped-up, partisan impeachment, a stolen election and the lawbreaking Bush years. Nobody has ever paid a price for any of that.

This really is a psychology of vengeance. President Lyndon Johnson's adminstration is widely considered to a have launched the contemporary "imperial presidency," and the dramatic enhancement of executive power in the 1960s grew with American intervention in Vietnam and later developed into a subterranean gray zone of that fed right into the Watergate-era abuses.

Digby conveniently ignores that equally significant era.

Indeed, her essay illustrates Goldfarb's point perfectly: If this is not the kind of maligancy that Goldfarb's talking about, I don't know what is.

Picture of the Day, 11-27-08

Family members wait to recover the dead, Mumbai, India.

For more information, see Amit Varma, Richard Fernandez, and Ultrabrown.

See also, Memeorandum and RealClearPolitics.

I've provide additional analysis tomorrow.

Photo Credit: New York Times

If I Saw You in Heaven...?

Thanksgiving is a time for being with loved ones.

I thought of a song I could share, as a poignant reminder of why we give thanks for our blessings: So, please enjoy Eric Clapton's, "Tears in Heaven":

I imagine most music fans know that Clapton wrote "Tears in Heaven" as a requiem for his son, Conor, at 4 years-old, fell 53 floors to his death in New York in 1991.

Check the Wikipedia entry. It turns out that Clapton asked Will Jennings to co-write the song with him. Jennings was reluctant to tackle such a deeply personal assignment:

Eric and I were engaged to write a song for a movie called Rush ... and he said to me, 'I want to write a song about my boy.' Eric had the first verse of the song written, which, to me, is all the song, but he wanted me to write the rest of the verse lines and the release ('Time can bring you down, time can bend your knees...'), even though I told him that it was so personal he should write everything himself. He told me that he had admired the work I did with Steve Winwood and finally there was nothing else but to do as he requested, despite the sensitivity of the subject. This is a song so personal and so sad that it is unique in my experience of writing songs.

Clapton stopped performing "Tears in Heaven" in 2004, when he no longer felt the loss of his boy.

Here's to wishing all of my visitors a wonderful Thanksgiving.

I love my family, my friends, my students, my teachers, my country, and God above (with due apologies to anyone I've left out).

Be with your loved ones, and be well!

God Bless America!

"A Day of Public Thanksgiving to God"

Nothing better illustrates the polarization we see in society today than how the respective political factions commemorate our most sacred national holidays and festivities.

At this morning's Wall Street Journal, Ira Stoll wrote of the founders of our nation, and about the historical personages like John Adams who recognized the blazing moral goodness of this country's founding. America's early elites raised their arms in thanks to a divine providence that blessed this land:

When was the first Thanksgiving? Most of us think of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621. But if the question is about the first national Thanksgiving holiday, the answer is that the tradition began at a lesser-known moment in 1777 in York, Pa.

In July 1776, the American colonists declared independence from Britain. The months that followed were so bleak that there was not much to give thanks for. The Journals of the Continental Congress record no Thanksgiving in that year, only two days of "solemn fasting" and prayer.

For much of 1777, the situation was not much better. British troops controlled New York City. The Americans lost the strategic stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York, to the British in July. In Delaware, on Sept. 11, troops led by Gen. George Washington lost the Battle of Brandywine, in which 200 Americans were killed, 500 wounded and 400 captured. In Pennsylvania, early in the morning of Sept. 21, another 300 American soldiers were killed or wounded and 100 captured in a British surprise attack that became known as the Paoli Massacre.

Philadelphia, America's largest city, fell on Sept. 26. Congress, which had been meeting there, fled briefly to Lancaster, Pa., and then to York, a hundred miles west of Philadelphia. One delegate to Congress, John Adams of Massachusetts, wrote in his diary, "The prospect is chilling, on every Side: Gloomy, dark, melancholy, and dispiriting."

His cousin, Samuel Adams, gave the other delegates -- their number had dwindled to a mere 20 from the 56 who had signed the Declaration of Independence -- a talk of encouragement. He predicted, "Good tidings will soon arrive. We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection."

He turned out to have been correct, at least about the good tidings. On Oct. 31, a messenger arrived with news of the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga. The American general, Horatio Gates, had accepted the surrender of 5,800 British soldiers, and with them 27 pieces of artillery and thousands of pieces of small arms and ammunition.

Saratoga turned the tide of the war -- news of the victory was decisive in bringing France into a full alliance with America. Congress responded to the event by appointing a committee of three that included Samuel Adams, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia and Daniel Roberdeau of Pennsylvania, to draft a report and resolution. The report, adopted Nov. 1, declared Thursday, Dec. 18, as "a day of Thanksgiving" to God, so that "with one heart and one voice the good people may express the grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their divine benefactor."

It was the first of many Thanksgivings ordered up by Samuel Adams. Though the holidays were almost always in November or December, the exact dates varied. (Congress didn't fix Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November until 1941.)

In 1778, a Thanksgiving resolution drafted by Adams was approved by Congress on Nov. 3, setting aside Wednesday, Dec. 30, as a day of public thanksgiving and praise, "It having pleased Almighty God through the Course of the present year, to bestow great and manifold Mercies on the People of these United States."

After the Revolution, Adams, who was eventually elected governor of Massachusetts, maintained the practice of declaring these holidays. In October of 1795, the 73-year-old governor proclaimed Thursday, Nov. 19, as "a day of Public Thanksgiving to God," recommending that prayer be offered that God "would graciously be pleased to put an end to all Tyranny and Usurpation, that the People who are under the Yoke of Oppression, may be made free; and that the Nations who are contending for freedom may still be secured by His Almighty Aid."

A year later, Gov. Adams offered a similar Thanksgiving proclamation, declaring Thursday, Dec. 15, 1796, as "a Day of Public Thanksgiving and Praise to Our Divine Benefactor." He recommended "earnest Supplication to God" that "every Nation and Society of Men may be inspired with the knowledge and feeling of their natural and just rights" and "That Tyranny and Usurpation may everywhere come to an end."

Compare this to Karl Jacoby, in his essay at the Los Angeles Times, "Which Thanksgiving?"

Jacoby, an associate professor of history at Brown University, can't miss the opportunity to remind us of America's history of oppression, in this case, against Massasoit and the Wampanoags of Plymouth, who (according to tradition) shared a genuinely multicultural feast of thanks with some of the original settlers of North America:

About 50 years after Massasoit and his fellow Wampanoags enjoyed their harvest meal at Plymouth, the Colonists' seizures of Wampanoag land would precipitate a vicious war between Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoags, now led by Massasoit's son, Metacom.

Most of the other peoples in New England at first tried to avoid the conflict between the onetime participants in the "first Thanksgiving." But the confrontation soon engulfed the entire region, pitting the New England Colonies against a fragile alliance of Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Nipmucs and other Native American groups. Although these allies succeeded in killing hundreds of Colonists and burning British settlements up to the very fringes of Boston itself, the losses suffered by New England's indigenous peoples were even more devastating. Thousands died over the two years of the war, and many of those captured were sold into slavery in the British West Indies, including Metacom's wife and 9-year-old son.

Perhaps multi-culti academics will never cease reminding us that America is a historical abomination, built on Native American genocide, slavery, imperialism, racism, and untold more atrocities of the founding crisis.

In the meanwhile, most American families will sit down tomorrow and enjoy a feast of thanks for the blessings they have enjoyed as citizens of America, as imperfect as that national union may be.

Thinking Clearly About Global Terrorism

UPDATE: Hot Air has got an excellent running thread of updates, including this comment:

There have been six separate explosions at the Hotel Taj, apparently, and 10 separate attacks across the city in all, according to IBN. I would never have guessed that any terror group was capable of pulling this off, be it AQ, Hezbollah, or whoever.

**********

Contemporary terrorism is widely recognized as a key manifestation of transnationalism in world politics. While we may see relatively localized or isolated insurgencies (FARC) or movements for national liberation (IRA), the types of attacks that have come to characterize the post-9/11 war on terror have all the hallmarks of non-state actors taking advantage of the network politics inherent in today's globalization.

I'm thinking about this with reference to today's terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. The New York Times identifies the group claiming responsibility as "the Deccan Mujahedeen." With at least 75 people dead, the attacks are being called "particularly brazen and dramatically different in their scale and execution."

President-Elect Barack Obama had condemned the attacks. Unfortunately, some on the Democratic-left are not so serious in their appraisal of the nature of the current threats.

Apparently, the Bush administration warned today of a possible terrorist threat to the New York subway system, to which Brilliant at Breakfast responded:

I just have one question: If George W. Bush has kept us safe, why do they need to try to scare people right before the holidays? Whether Bush likes it or not, he's still in charge until January 20.

The timing of yet another "nonspecific" warning to which we shouldn't react with alarm, right before a holiday, coinciding with today's horrific attacks in Mumbai, and fast on the heels of media scrutiny given to the bailout of Citigroup, done on the weekend when no one was paying attention and right after one of Bush's Saudi buddies took a bigger stake in the company, is all too reminiscent of threats the Bushistas have done in the past when their doings were drawing attention.

The title of the essay is, "Happy Thanksgiving, Suckers!!"

Upon reading things like this from the radical netroots I must admit that Barack Obama has so far adopted a centrist approach to filling his cabinet. I know that his domestic policy proposals next year will be some of the most aggressively liberal seen in this country in decades, but if the administration hews to a realist model of international relations, all will not be lost (crossed fingers here).

Now, note something else about the globalized nature of terror I mentioned, from Sanjeewa Karunaratne, at the Asian Tribune, which illustrates why the leftist thinking at Brilliant at Breakfast is potentially catastrophic:

Growing ... evidence suggests terrorist organizations share intelligence, technology, resources and training. Moreover, these organizations fully or partially fund their campaigns through arms, drugs trafficking, smuggling, piracy and other illegal activities. By nature, these activities involve systematic collaborations between groups operating in different geographical regions. These affiliations make terrorism, not localized, but a world-wide problem. Someone’s terrorist today is everybody’s terrorist ...

P.S.: It's not just radical netroots people who have no clue about the kind of resolve needed in today's world. See Joan Walsh for example, "I'm Grateful for Barack Obama":

Watching these scenes from Mumbai, I am a little more sympathetic to arguments that Obama needs experience and stability at Defense as he takes charge. But just a little. It would be wrong to let an ugly terror attack, wherever it occurs, shake our values and our commitment to a sane foreign and defense policy. We tried that seven years ago and look where it got us.

A little more experience? You think?

And what did it the last seven years "get us"?

Victory in Iraq and no attacks on the American homeland. But Walsh, like Brilliant at Breakfast and so many others, has no clue as to what's really happening in the world today, and what it takes to protect a nation while an arc of terror builds across the international architecture.

Atheist Nihilism

Readers may enjoy FrontPageMagazine's interview the Jonas Alexis.

Alexis is the author of the book, "In the Name of Knowledge and Wisdom: Why Atheists, Sceptics, Agnostics, and Intellectuals Deny Christianity."

Here's a couple of key passages:

FP: Why has atheism become so popular today?

Alexis: Atheism is so popular because many people—even those who claim to be atheists—do not seriously examine the worldviews and detrimental ideologies that post beneath the surface. The famed mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was an avowed atheist until he debated the philosopher Frederick Copleston. Once Copleston logically showed Russell that atheism is existentially and experientially untenable, Russell immediately changed his atheism into agnosticism. In the Name of Knowledge and Wisdom simply shows that the atheist position is irrational and unliveable.

*****

FP: Why is nihilism so rampant in our pop culture today?

Alexis: ... In a nutshell, nihilism is so rampant because the nihilistic culture has no moral framework or principle upon which a person should base his or her life.

FP: What danger is there to a society embracing the concept that God is dead -- as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proposed in the nineteenth century?

Alexis: G. K. Chesterton made the point that “the first affect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.” Among the “anything” that people begin to believe is the idea that all “truth” is relative. This, by the way, is a self-defeating position. If all truth is relative, then the statement that “a ll truth is relative” is either a relative statement in itself, or it is an absolute claim. It cannot be both. If it is a relative claim, then why not include other statements such as “all truth is not relative”? Moreover, it does not take a student of philosophy to show that the claim is absolutely ridiculous. If the statement is relative, we can easily dismiss it on the basis of uncertainty because the person making the claim is not even sure that the claim is right or wrong.

Read the whole thing, here.

Feminists for Stay-Home Moms

Here's Duncan Black on Ruth Marcus' commentary on Michelle Obama's decision to be "Mother-in-Chief":

It's pretty much impossible for a First Spouse to maintain a normal life - continue her career smoothly - and trying to create a tiny bit of normalcy for her young kids is going to require heroic effort. It really doesn't mean anything beyond that.

Well, actually, it does mean something more than that.

Here's Charli Carpenter, who is an Assistant Professor at University of Massachusetts-Amherst:

To those for whom breaking the gendered glass ceiling would have felt as or more transformative than seeing a US President of color, this "Mother-in-Chief" approach could seem like a regressive subordination of women's political equality to racial equality. By this standard, Palin, with all her flaws, would have been a better feminist role model - to say nothing of Hillary Clinton, who would have combined a gender-egalitarian agenda with her trail-blazing role as the first female Commander-in-Chief. By comparison, Michelle Obama may seem at first glance to be defining her role no differently than Laura Bush, a help-meet rather than political partner. Perhaps this is a throwback to an earlier age. Perhaps feminism has been traded for racial equality in this election.

Think again. The fact that people have assumed that Michelle would take on a formal political role as first lady only underscores how normative women's political participation is today. Her unwillingness to prioritize that over her duties to her children is not a step backward but a step forward for the feminist movement: what Michelle is modeling is not indifference to politics, but policy attention to work-life balance, the missing element in the first feminist revolution [source].

Exit Question: Would liberals give a new conservative First Lady as much deference on the decision to stay home with the kids, or would she be demonized as a religious right "fem bot" hell-bent on consigning women to hard labor in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant?

Judge Admits Heckling Attorney General as "Tyrant"

Here's another example that Bush derangement has gone mainstream.

Richard Sanders, a justice of the Washington State Supreme Court, has admitted to heckling U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasy at a Federalist Society dinner last week. Mukasy collapsed, in what doctors identified as a fainting spell, while making his comments. During Mukasy's talk, Sanders stood and yelled "Tyrant! You are a tyrant!"

Sanders had previously denied inquiries seeking to confirm that he was the heckler.

Michelle Malkin made repeated requests to Sanders. Here's the letter Sanders sent Malkin upon finally admitting that he indeed called Mukasy a "tyrant":

I want to set the record straight about a dinner I attended on November 20, in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Federalist Society — a conservative and libertarian legal group of which I am a member. Attorney General Michael Mukasey was the keynote speaker.

In his speech, Attorney General Mukasey justified the Bush administration’s policies in the War on Terror, which included denying meaningful hearings for prisoners in Guantanamo, and other questionable tactics, all in the name of national security. Mr. Mukasey said those who criticize the Administration for abandoning provisions of the Geneva Conventions fail to recognize that “… Al Qaeda [is] an international terrorist group, and not, the last time I checked, a signatory to the Conventions.” Although the United States is a signatory, and these Conventions prohibit torture, the audience laughed. Attorney General Mukasey received a standing ovation. I passionately disagree with these views: the government must never set aside the Constitution; domestic and international law forbids torture; and access to the writ of habeas corpus should not be denied.

The program provided no opportunity for questions or response, and I felt compelled to speak out. I stood up, and said, “tyrant,” and then left the meeting. No one else said anything. I believe we must speak our conscience in moments that demand it, even if we are but one voice.

I hope those who know my jurisprudence will agree that to truly love the Constitution is to uphold it, to speak out for it, not just in times of peace and prosperity, but also in times of chaos and crisis.

I did not “heckle” Attorney General Mukasey, and I did not disrupt the meeting, as those who watch the video of his speech on the Federalist Society’s website will discover. I left before Mr. Mukasey had his frightening collapse. I learned of his collapse later, from news reports. It should go without saying that, despite our vastly different views on what constitutes upholding the rule of law, I hope he continues to recover and remain in good health.

Actually, I don't think it "goes without saying" that Sanders should want Mukasy to remain in good health.

Historically, "tyrants" were those whose heads the mob wanted on pikes.

Sanders, in my opinion, as an official member of the Washington state judiciary, whose courts represent one of the routes to federal ajudication in our constitutional system of federal law, has at the least committed judicial misconduct, and his actions more likely reflect the literal repudiation of the legal authority of United States government - in other words, treason.

Of course, leftists are defending Sanders for his wonderfully "impassioned dissent."