Stumbling All Over Academic Freedom

From Dennis Byrne, at the Chicago Tribune:

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently allowed itself to be bullied by an anonymous student into firing a faculty member. All because the course content "offended" the student.

It's time to send those school officials responsible for the firing to a remedial course on the meaning of academic freedom and the idea of a university. If not that, then it's time to do some housecleaning to restore academic rigor to the state's blue chip public university.

This could happen in today's university environment only if the sensibilities that were offended were liberal ones. In this case, the sensibilities were on the side of stamping out views inconsonant with homosexual dictates.

Here. Here.

RTWT.

I've got some personal experience with folks trying to "stamp out" that which they can't rebut, so I'll be following this one. Byrne suggests that once the media glare winds down, the university may well give the permanent boot to Professor Kenneth Howell.

E.D. Kain Joins Balloon Juice: 'Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself'

Hey, that didn't take long. E.D. Kain's found his bone (e.g., "True/Slant Shuts Down — Charles Johnson, E.D. Kain Looking for New Digital Media Bones to Suck Dry").

Turns out the lying freak-blogger's joined John Cole's Balloon Juice, and the title of his post is fully apropos: "Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself." And hey, there's a song for that:

Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith

And I was 'round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate ...

Folks might not get my meaning, but those reading my blog for awhile will recall the E.D. Kain's a man of ZERO principle who sold his soul to the reigning zeitgeist of the leftist blogosphere. The secret that shall never be revealed at Balloon Juice is that E.D. Kain once published an up-and-coming neocon blog portal called Neo-Constant. Beaman's interview with British neocon Douglas Murray was first published there. Later though, folks like Beaman never did find out what happened to Neo-Constant, since E.D. Kain decided to close up shop without so much as a final thank to all of those who contributed there. I have written about this a number of times. I'm bothered not so much that E.D. Kain's an immature prima donna without a shred of principle, but that in his new blogging life he turned himself into a lackey of Charles Johnson and Andrew Sullivan. Totally lame. And after I started published some hot and heavy reports on this, E.D. Kain launched a campaign of workplace intimidation to get me to STFU. It went around for a while, getting to the point where E.D. had the gall to appeal to Christian ethics for me to stop. Right. No skin off my back though. It's yet another example of the evil I uncover so much around here. I'm all for self-interest, and if that was E.D.'s motivation for switching sides I'd have no problem. But when one then mounts unhinged Blitzkrieg assaults against the very icons of the former movement that rattles some sensibilities. It's thus fitting for E.D. to have staked his next double-crossing claim at Balloon Juice. John Cole's got a reputation of the same sort, although I can't vouch for it personally. I'll just leave it up to Cole's own words for folks to get an idea of the kind of digs slime-blogger E.D. Kain now claims as his own. See John Cole, "Let’s Be Blunt":

Go fuck yourself. To death.

I am tired of being patient with you nannies and your stupid self-serving rules and your slippery slopes and your bullshit and your need to be tough on crime and your earnest concerns about society. Mind your own business, get your own house in order, stop fucking interns and little boys and cheating on your wives and on your taxes and being found dead wearing two wetsuits with a dildo shoved up your ass. Just mind your own damned business, and let people do what they must to deal with their own screwed up lives, and let people handle their pain the best way they can.

I am sick of the bullshit. Life is hard for most people out there, and damned near impossible for people in chronic pain. Quit making it worse, you allegedly compassionate sons-of-bitches.

And that diatribe is all over some lady who committed suicide because authorities were gonna cut off her "medicinal" marijuana. Perhaps John Cole should take a couple of tokes himself --- calm down there buddy, sheesh. I'd have to check the archives, but it's a good bet that John Cole's pro-assisted suicide anyway, so perhaps the lady saved people time, no offense and God rest her soul. That said, it's a bit much to blame Bush/Cheney, dontcha think:

Robin Prosser is dead, and George Bush doesn’t even know or probably care who she is, but his government had a hand in her passing ... I didn’t think that was too much to ask until I realized what Bush and Cheney and their allies in Congress have done to this country. It is beyond time for them to grab their bibles and get the fuck out of the way.

And this begs the question: With that pedigree, why did E.D. sign on, unless it's just about fulfilling another lie?

John alluded to me as a ‘sane conservative’ and I’m sure plenty of people would take issue with both descriptors, but I’ll take what I can get. I look forward to stirring the pot around here a bit with my perfectly lucid advocacy of free markets, limited government and fiscal discipline. You may also find that I’m anti-war, anti-torture, anti-stupid-arguments-against-building-mosques, and anti-death-penalty. Indeed, I’m pro-life across the board though I have little interest in immersing myself in the endless culture war debates.

I also have very little interest in bashing other conservatives or, for that matter, liberals. Bashing has very limited utility. And others are better at it in any case.

E.D. Kain is a sane conservative the way that Andrew Sullivan is a sane conservative, which is to say not so much. The lead post at Balloon Juice right now is E.D.'s entry, "No Newt is good Newt." Click through and read it. So much for "no interest in bashing other conservatives"?

I don't like him, in any case. And I'm not going to pull punches or play nice. This is the blogosphere we're talking about ... know what I'm saying?

President Obama's Birthday

Obambi's 49 today. We should be nice, right? Perhaps. Although some folks want August 4th to be a national holiday. I can do without that. Maybe I'll take a holiday from posting Photoshops, although that photo with Rangel below is the real thing. And I'm no fan of Alex Jones (9/11 trutherism is not cool), but you gotta give the guy props at the clip for the creepy Obama overtones to the global conspiracy he's concocted.

Meanwhile, more on the conspiracy thing, from Keith Koffler at Politico, "Don't Celebrate President Obama's Birthday":

Today is President Barack Obama’s 49th birthday, which the president seems to think is an unhappy day. He has taken to lamenting his fading youth and graying hair, showing all the signs of a midlife crisis — minus the red Corvette. But unfortunately for the rest of us, his supporters are busy making Aug. 4 a sad day for the country by trying to turn the occasion into a kind of national celebration.

In an effort to drum up enthusiasm — and increase membership — the political operatives who run Organizing for America, an activist group devoted to the president, are set to stage hundreds of birthday parties around the country, giving Obama’s day of birth the feel of a holiday.

OFA members are being urged to bake birthday cakes, photograph them and send the image to OFA’s website for its blog. A letter from first lady Michelle Obama, posted on the Democratic National Committee website, directs people to the OFA site, where they can sign a “birthday card” for the president.

We don’t, as a country, generally celebrate our politicians’ birthdays. Except for those chosen few — like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

Other nations, founded on nationalism, religion or rigid ideologies, reaffirm their existence by glorifying rulers they believe embody these notions. They have constructed palaces to celebrate them during their lifetimes and embalm them in mausoleums to maintain their presence after death

But the United States is built on enduring democratic principles and ideas. Our leaders don’t represent us as the greatest nationalist or the exemplar of an ideology. Our Constitution limits the power of presidents and lawmakers. They are not symbols of the nation but temporary custodians of our freedoms. Power ultimately resides with the people.

The birthday parties are just the latest manifestation of a kind of worshipfulness that surrounds this president. His image and slogans are everywhere, emblazoned on shirts, hats, posters, walls, bumper stickers and even — uniquely for a sitting present — a few street signs.

More at the link.

The Washington Post is spreading the word, dontcha know? "Obama's birthday bash seen as a way to reengage his base."

Righteous & Wrong

Malise Ruthven takes on Paul Berman, at New York Review:

The Flight of the Intellectuals
by Paul Berman
Melville House, 299 pp., $26.00

Nomad: From Islam to America
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Free Press, 277 pp., $27.00

Terror and Liberalism
by Paul Berman
Norton, 220 pp., $13.95 (paper)

Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents
by Ian Buruma
Princeton University Press, 132 pp., $19.95

Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
by Timothy Garton Ash
Yale University Press, 464 pp., $35.00 (to be published in September)

**********

At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, stands an exhibit that is for some more unsettling than the replicas of the Warsaw Ghetto or the canisters of Zyklon B gas used at Auschwitz and Treblinka. Next to blown-up photographs of emaciated corpses from the death camps there is a picture of the grand mufti of Palestine, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, reviewing an honor guard of the Muslim division of the Waffen SS that fought the Serbs and antifascist partisans. The display includes a cable to Hajj Amin from Heinrich Himmler, dated November 2, 1943: “The National Socialist Party has inscribed on its flag ‘the extermination of world Jewry.’ Our party sympathizes with the fight of the Arabs, especially the Arabs of Palestine, against the foreign Jew.” There is also a quote from a broadcast the mufti gave over Berlin radio on March 1, 1944: “Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This is the command of God, history and religion.”

As the Israeli historian Tom Segev suggests, “the visitor is left to conclude that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs’ enmity to Israel.” Paul Berman’s new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, makes the connection even more explicit. Although defeated in Europe, the virus of Nazism is, in his view, vigorously present in the Arab-Islamic world, with Hajj Amin the primary source of this infection. Instead of being tried as a war criminal, Hajj Amin was allowed to leave France in 1946, after escaping from Germany via Switzerland. A trial, Berman suggests, might have “sparked a little self-reflection about the confusions and self-contradictions within Islam” on matters Jewish, comparable to the postwar “self-reflections” that took place inside the Roman Catholic Church.

Hajj Amin received a hero’s welcome on his arrival in Egypt, where he renewed his connections with Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom he had previously supplied with funds from Nazi Germany and ideas for SS-type military formations. The Brotherhood proved fertile soil for the Nazi bacillus. As a result of Hajj Amin’s return, Berman concludes, “the Arab zone ended up as the only region in the entire planet in which a criminal on the fascist side of the war, and a major ideologue, to boot, returned home in glory, instead of in disgrace.”

Planet Berman evidently excludes India, where Subhas Chandra Bose, who broadcast anti-British propaganda for the Nazis before creating the Indian National Army to fight with the Japanese, is now honored in the pantheon of national heroes in Delhi’s Red Fort. It also excludes Finland, where Gustaf Mannerheim, commander of the Finnish forces that fought with the Germans against the Soviets and volunteered recruits for the Waffen SS, was elected by parliament to serve as the country’s president from 1944 to 1946. In 2005 he and his predecessor, Risto Ryti, who served a ten-year prison sentence for allying Finland with Nazi Germany, were voted the country’s top two national heroes in a survey by the Finnish Broadcasting Company. Berman, however, is not to be bothered by inconvenient truths that might arrest the flow of his rhetoric. His vision is crassly ideological: facts that might interfere with his argument—such as al-Banna’s stated belief that Nazi racial theories were incompatible with Islam, as well as other complicating factors—are liable to be discarded or ignored.

The thrust of his book lies in its title—a homage to La Trahison des clercs (1927), Julien Benda’s attack on the intellectual corruption of his contemporaries. In his famous essay Benda lamented the demise of philosophical universalism, accusing his peers of abandoning Enlightenment ideals in favor of nationalist particularisms and partisan ideologies. Published before Martin Heidegger joined the Nazis, and long before Jean-Paul Sartre “bit his tongue” about Stalin’s horrors to avoid discouraging the French working class, the book had a prophetic ring and is justly regarded as a manifesto for intellectual integrity. However, as his title suggests, Berman is less concerned with the betrayals or corruption of the intellectuals he excoriates than with what he claims to be their moral cowardice. One aspect of this is their “refusal to discuss or even acknowledge the Nazi influence that has turned out to be so weirdly venomous and enduring in the history of the Islamist movement.”

The charge is disturbing, but not without foundation. France and Belgium have seen an increase in anti-Semitic episodes, most of them laid at the door of Muslim immigrants or their descendants. Muslim polemics in Europe—reflecting the anti-Israeli rhetoric of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah as well as traditional fulminations against Jews derived from the Koran and prophetic traditions—have long mixed anti-Semitic tropes derived from European sources in a toxic mix of diatribes.

The most egregious example is a reference to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a notorious tsarist forgery adopted and circulated by the Nazis—in the charter of Hamas, the Islamist movement now controlling Gaza. Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading ideologue who was executed by Nasser in 1966, was an outspoken anti-Semite, with views as extreme as Hitler’s, an issue that Berman addressed with considerable insight in Terror and Liberalism (2003). As Berman sees it, the poison of European anti-Semitism was subsumed in the broader eddies of Muslim totalitarianisms—Nasserist, Baathist, and Islamist. The atrocities these movements inflicted on Muslim societies (in Iraq, Sudan, and Algeria) turned out to have been “fully as horrible as the fascism and Stalinism of Europe” with victims numbered in millions. Instead of facing reality, Western politicians and intellectuals have engaged in “ideological systems of denial.” The wake-up call came on September 11. The War on Terror that followed

was an event in the twentieth-century mode. It was the clash of ideologies. It was the war between liberalism and the apocalyptic and phantasmagorical movements that have risen up against liberal civilization ever since the calamities of the First World War.

The Flight of the Intellectuals elaborates on the theme of an embattled liberal civilization facing a totalitarian or fascist onslaught. Where Terror and Liberalism took a broad-brush approach toward the modern appeasers—heirs to the “useful idiots” on left and right who defended or ignored the dangers of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism—The Flight points an accusing finger at two particular writers—Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash—whom Berman regards as exemplifying liberal intellectual pusillanimity. The book—originally published as a lengthy article in The New Republic—tries to perform a detailed autopsy on Buruma’s New York Times profile of Hassan al-Banna’s Swiss-born grandson, Tariq Ramadan, whose work I have reviewed in these pages

Not sure what to think. I'm with Berman on his earlier book, Terror and Liberalism, and I'm not one to play up the Islam/Nazi tie-in too much. Not only that, Ruthven's no appeaser. He sees Islam as a "religion of victory," but deals at a level of sophistication that we don't get in blog debates too often. Yet this is the New York Review, and that's pretty much a strike against, so what can you do?. RTWT. I'm thinking about this one a bit more.

Liberal Piety and the Memory of 9/11

Scotty Lemieux is too predictable on the news from New York: "Landmark Preservation Commission To Bigots Who Despise Principles of American Constitutionalism: Drop Dead."

And I don't call folks like him "liberals" (they're radical leftists), but Dorothy Rabinowitz nails it anyway:

Americans may have lacked for much in the course of their history, but never instruction in social values. The question today is whether Americans of any era have ever confronted the bombardment of hectoring and sermonizing now directed at those whose views are deemed insufficiently enlightened—an offense regularly followed by accusations that the offenders have violated the most sacred principles of our democracy.

It doesn't take a lot to become the target of such a charge. There is no mistaking the beliefs on display in these accusations, most recently in regard to the mosque about to be erected 600 feet from Ground Zero. Which is that without the civilizing dictates of their superiors in government, ordinary Americans are lost to reason and decency. They are the kind of people who—as a recent presidential candidate put it—cling to their guns and their religion ....

Long discussion of Mayor Michael Bloomberg (hardly a commie like Lemieux, but a fellow traveler in hopeless political correctness nevertheless), and then:

In the plan for an Islamic center and mosque some 15 stories high to be built near Ground Zero, the full force of politically correct piety is on display along with the usual unyielding assault on all dissenters. The project has aroused intense opposition from New Yorkers and Americans across the country. It has also elicited remarkable streams of oratory from New York's political leaders, including Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

"What are we all about if not religious freedom?" a fiery Mr. Cuomo asked early in this drama. Mr. Cuomo, running for governor, has since had less to say.

The same cannot be said for Mr. Bloomberg, who has gone on to deliver regular meditations on the need to support the mosque, and on the iniquity of its opponents. In the course of a speech at Dartmouth on July 16 he raised the matter unasked, and held forth on his contempt for those who opposed the project and even wanted to investigate the funding: "I just think it's the most outrageous thing anybody could suggest." Ground Zero is a "very appropriate place'' for a mosque, the mayor announced, because it "tells the world" that in America, we have freedom of religion for everybody.

Here was an idea we have been hearing more and more of lately—the need to show the world America's devotion to democracy and justice, also cited by the administration as a reason to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City. Who is it, we can only wonder, that requires these proofs? What occasions these regular brayings on the need to show the world the United States is a free nation?

It's unlikely that the preachments now directed at opponents of the project by Mayor Bloomberg and others will persuade that opposition. Those fighting the building recognize full well the deliberate obtuseness of Mr. Bloomberg's exhortations, and those of Mr. Cuomo and others: the resort to pious battle cries, the claim that antagonists of the plan stand against religious freedom. They note, especially, the refusal to confront the obvious question posed by this proposed center towering over the ruins of 9/11.

It is a question most ordinary Americans, as usual, have no trouble defining. Namely, how is it that the planners, who have presented this effort as a grand design for the advancement of healing and interfaith understanding, have refused all consideration of the impact such a center will have near Ground Zero? Why have they insisted, despite intense resistance, on making the center an assertive presence in this place of haunted memory? It is an insistence that calls to mind the Flying Imams, whose ostentatious prayers—apparently designed to call attention to themselves on a U.S. Airways flight to Phoenix in November 2006—ended in a lawsuit. The imams sued. The airlines paid.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser—devout Muslim, physician, former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy—says there is every reason to investigate the center's funding under the circumstances. Of the mosque so near the site of the 9/11 attacks, he notes "It will certainly be seen as a victory for political Islam."

The center may be built where planned. But it will not go easy or without consequence to the politicians intent on jamming the project down the public throat, in the name of principle. Liberal piety may have met its match in the raw memory of 9/11, and in citizens who have come to know pure demagoguery when they hear it. They have had, of late, plenty of practice.

This should be a ragin' discussion all day, for example, at the far-left Salon, "Michael Bloomberg delivers stirring defense of mosque" (and the links at Memeorandum). Sigh. Those "enlightened" leftists. What would we do without them?

NewsBusted — Oliver Stone: 'Jewish-Dominated Media' Prevents Hitler from Being Portrayed 'In Context'

How Tracking Cookies Work (How to Control Your Privacy Online)

Fascinating piece at WSJ, "On the Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only":

You may not know a company called [x+1] Inc., but it may well know a lot about you.

From a single click on a web site, [x+1] correctly identified Carrie Isaac as a young Colorado Springs parent who lives on about $50,000 a year, shops at Wal-Mart and rents kids' videos. The company deduced that Paul Boulifard, a Nashville architect, is childless, likes to travel and buys used cars. And [x+1] determined that Thomas Burney, a Colorado building contractor, is a skier with a college degree and looks like he has good credit.

The company didn't get every detail correct. But its ability to make snap assessments of individuals is accurate enough that Capital One Financial Corp. uses [x+1]'s calculations to instantly decide which credit cards to show first-time visitors to its website.

In short: Websites are gaining the ability to decide whether or not you'd be a good customer, before you tell them a single thing about yourself.

The technology reaches beyond the personalization familiar on sites like Amazon.com, which uses its own in-house data on its customers to show them new items they might like.

By contrast, firms like [x+1] tap into vast databases of people's online behavior—mainly gathered surreptitiously by tracking technologies that have become ubiquitous on websites across the Internet. They don't have people's names, but cross-reference that data with records of home ownership, family income, marital status and favorite restaurants, among other things. Then, using statistical analysis, they start to make assumptions about the proclivities of individual Web surfers.

"We never don't know anything about someone," says John Nardone, [x+1]'s chief executive.

Capital One says it doesn't use the full array of [x+1]'s targeting technology, and it doesn't prevent people from applying for any card they want. "While we suggest products that we believe will be of interest to our visitors, we do not limit their ability to easily explore all products available," spokeswoman Pam Girardo says ....

Its technology works like this: A visitor lands on Capital One's credit-card page, and [x+1] instantly scans the information passed between the person's computer and the web page, which can be thousands of lines of code containing details on the user's computer. [x+1] also uses a new service from Digital Envoy Inc. that can determine the ZIP code where that computer is physically located. For some clients (but not Capital One), [x+1] also taps additional databases of web-browsing history.

Armed with its data, [x+1] taps consumer researcher Nielsen Co. to assign the visitor to one of 66 demographic groups.

In a fifth of a second, [x+1] says it can access and analyze thousands of pieces of information about a single user. It quickly scans for similar types of Capital One customers to make an educated guess about which credit cards to show the visitor.

And check the interactive page, "How to Control Your Privacy Online."

'State of Fear'

It's interesting to see how leftists and immigration activists view the law. Background on this documentary here. Longtime readers will see some familiar images, for example, the effigy of Sheriff Joe Arpaio:

Missouri Voters Oppose Mandatory Health Insurance

At WSJ:

Voters in Missouri overwhelmingly opposed requiring people to buy health insurance, in a largely symbolic slap at the Obama administration's health overhaul.

The referendum was the first chance for voters to express a view on the overhaul, although turnout in the state was low and Republican voters significantly outnumbered Democrats.

With more than half of precincts reporting, 73% of voters supported Proposition C, establishing a state law that says Missouri cannot compel people to pay a penalty or fine if they fail to carry health coverage. Twenty-seven percent voted against the proposition.

Professor Kenneth Howell Reinstated at University of Illinois

At Fox News, "University of Illinois Reinstates Instructor Fired Over Catholic Beliefs":

A Catholicism instructor fired from the the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for saying he agrees with the church's teaching that homosexual sex is immoral has been reinstated.

Adjunct professor Kenneth Howell said he was fired at the end of the spring semester after sending an e-mail explaining Catholic beliefs on homosexuality to his students preparing for an exam.

Now the University of Illinois says Howell will return next semester.

"The department of religion will continue Kenneth Howell's adjunct appointment for the fall semester, and has offered him the opportunity to teach Religion 127, Introduction to Catholicism," school spokesman Robin Kaler said in a statement.

RTWT, and check the links, especially the letter in support of Howell from the Alliance Defense Fund. (Plus, more at the ADF blog.)

One Big Pile

That would be Brain Rage's argument for drug decriminalization, although Charles Johnson comes to mind as well:

While Not Quite Hate Mail...

...There's definitely a lot of anger in this anonymous comment from yesterday:

You are so active in degrading obama. Where were you when our last president ran our nation into the ground? In the next five years as we see our recovery, you will feel like a total idiot for being on the wrong side. Do you have political amnesia? Do you know what the Republicans have done to our economy? How can you sit there and hold your ignorant anti-obama sign knowing our actual history. Not the history that exists in the fantasy in your dreams, but the history that actually just happened in 8 years of national rape. Do you honestly choose this as your life battle? To deny the nation a new try at something people just like you have been F***** up for the past three decades????????????? You think our biggest problems are mexicans and affordable health care? SERIOUS??? What about the billions wasted on useless wars? What about the right wing ideas of a free-market that enabled the banking industry and wall street to bend us over and economically rape us for 8 years strait? How can you not recognize you're on the wrong side???? Are you just plain stupid???

Truly Madly Deeply

How about something more beautiful, compared to all the anti-demonology blogging yesterday? Enjoy Savage Garden:

Hot on the Trail: Immigration Enforcement in Arizona After SB 1070 Takes Effect

Readers can let me know if they find on the ground coverage at the other networks. But this one from Fox is pretty cool (Griff Jenkins is awesome):

And we're supposed to feel sorry for the lady here taken into detention?

And the mainstream press continues to make Arizona the bad guy. At LAT, "Arizona was once tolerant of illegal immigrants. What happened?", and NYT, "The Hunt for American Decency in the Arizona Quicksand."

Obama's Iraq Speech at Disabled American Veterans National Convention

That main story's at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "President draws mixed reaction during visit." But see Peter Feaver, at Foreign Policy, "Obama's Iraq speech: another missed opportunity":

President Obama's speech on Iraq was a disappointment. Not a surprise, but a disappointment.

It was disappointing because it was yet another missed opportunity. He could have shown real statesmanship by acknowledging he was wrong about the surge. He could have reached across the aisle and credited Republicans who backed the policy he vigorously opposed and tried to thwart, a policy that has made it possible (but by no means certain) to hope for a responsible end to the Iraq war. He could have have told the truth about his Iraq strategy, that what he has pursued thus far has not been what he was arguing for in the campaign -- that would have involved the departure of all U.S. troops by mid 2008 -- but rather he has followed, in a more or less desultory fashion, a script written in the status of forces agreement negotiated by President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki.

Instead of giving such a speech, Obama gave a campaign address trying to claim credit for anything that is going well in Iraq and trying to avoid blame for anything that is going poorly. That may be shrewd campaign politics, but it is not the statesmanship the occasion warranted. The commander-in-chief missed an opportunity, and I worry that it will come back to haunt us ....

The truth is that Obama is running out of pages in the Bush playbook on Iraq and so increasingly it will fall to Obama to forge his own Iraq policy. Once the playbook is entirely his, he will bear full responsibility for the consequences. The only real change he made to the Iraq playbook he inherited was to signal to the Iraqi leaders that he was, in Charles Krauthammer's words, "washing his hands of Iraq." Where President Bush signaled a commitment to succeed regardless of the political cost, President Obama has signaled, perhaps unintentionally, a commitment to abandon Iraq regardless of the national security costs.

It is a commitment I don't think he can really stick to unless the Bush surge really has produced irreversible progress in Iraq -- something that no Bush alum would ever claim. If Iraq spirals into chaos, Obama will encounter the very same national interest calculation Bush encountered: What happens in Iraq matters greatly for U.S. national security, even more than what happens in Afghanistan (this is why Bush prioritized Iraq over Afghanistan in 2006-2008 when both were in trouble).

Adverse developments in Iraq will be (and will look to be) increasingly a function of the Obama Team taking their eye off of the ball and rushing to declare mission accomplished. Yes, in such a scenario the Iraqis should bear most of the blame, but the part that is due to U.S. action or inaction will be Obama's responsibility. And it will matter. Iraq is at the center of a region that every president since Jimmy Carter has identified as vital to our national security. Iraq is next door to, and the playground for mischief from, the most thorny national security challenge the United States faces: a nuclear-weapons-seeking Iranian regime. These inconvenient facts mean that if the Iraqi situation demands more focused and costly U.S. attention, it will likely get it. At that point, what sort of domestic coalition will be available for President Obama's Iraq policy?

Democrats Getting Clobbered

New clip from the Senate Republican Conference:

Hat Tip: Sean Hackbarth.

RELATED: Michael Barone, "Democrats Are Poised for Big Loss."

Plus, at Ruby Slippers, "Democratic Mass Hypnosis Continues."

BONUS: From Mark Blumenthal, "Democratic Surge In Polls Is Just Noise."

Afghanistan War a Mistake?

"Another of our country's children, giving his life for our freedom from terrorism. God bless you, soldier, thank you for your ultimate sacrifice. You will never be forgotten." --- From the comments at the Orange County Register.

The photo shows U.S. Marine Michael Chang grieving at the memorial for his best friend, Army Sgt. Daniel Lim. The Orange County Register has the front-page story and slideshow, "O.C. soldier's love for family and friends ran deep." A picture of Chang is also on the front-page of the hardcopy edition of today's Wall Street Journal. Looking at the images from the Sgt. Lim ceremonies, can we really believe the war was a mistake? Have the lives of those who've sacrificed been for naught? I don't believe so. But at almost 9 years, the war in Afghanistan may be stretching the limits of America's patience.

The partisan political splits have been longstanding. The Democratic Party used the war for cheap political purposes during the Bush administration. Democrats argued that America was fighting the wrong war in Iraq, that Afghanistan was the "good war" in the post-9/11 era. But as soon as it looked like the U.S. has secured a lasting stability --- if not all-out victory --- in Iraq, the Democrats' political calculus turned to antiwar mobilization against the Afghanistan deployment. Sober analysts are correct to contrast and justify the commitment of U.S. resources with the war aims in Afghanistan. They've suggested that U.S. goals have not always been well-defined and that nation-building seems supported more by U.S. contingents on the ground than the Afghan political officials being propped up by American power. Then you have the neo-communist leftists, who have two political cards against the modern capitalist system: "racism" and "neo-imperialism." Some of these folks have in fact given direct support to our enemies, treasonous behavior that sadly reaches to the Obama administration itself. Not far behind the left are the "realist" paleocons, who for my money are not much better than the neo-communists in their wild conspiracies of alleged U.S. neo-colonial adventures. Such talk ultimately aids and abets our enemies. It places such a narrow desideratum on our interests that basically the U.S. would never intervene abroad unless a couple of our largest cities were incinerated by nuclear mushroom clouds.

In any case, I'm prompted to this discussion by today's front-page report at USA Today, "Poll: Waning Support for Obama On Wars," and more specifically, the Gallup Poll behind it, "In U.S., New High of 43% Call Afghanistan War a 'Mistake'." Ed Morrissey focuses on the political angle, and the likihood the USA Today buried the lede on Obama's collapsing numbers. That's important, although it's the Gallup entry that's more interesting to me, since the poll cites WikiLeaks as a reason for the declining support:

After the Internet publication of tens of thousands of leaked classified documents on the war in Afghanistan, 43% of Americans now say the United States made a mistake in sending troops there, up slightly from just before the release (38%). While Americans are still more likely to support than oppose the war, the percentage who say it was a mistake to get involved is at a new high ....

The 43% of Americans calling the decision to send U.S. military forces into Afghanistan a mistake marks the high point in the nearly nine-year war, although a slight majority continue to support the decision. Public support persists even though for most of the last several years Americans have generally thought the war has been going badly for the United States, and many more currently disapprove than approve of President Obama's handling of the situation.

Thus, the leaking of the documents may not be providing new information to the general public about the progress of the war. And given Americans' subdued attention to the story, it's also not clear that Americans are highly familiar with what information those documents reveal.

But the documents do remind Americans of the challenges the United States is facing in Afghanistan, and they may have caused an increasing number to question whether the efforts there are worth it. Last week, Congress approved President Obama's request for continued funding of the war, though by a narrower margin than last year.

That sounds like a decent assessment. I'd simply add that most MSM outlets are in the tank for WikiLeaks, and this despite the fact that Julian Assange is almost certainly running a criminal enterprise. I think at this point the U.S. is now to a point of winding down the Bush-era wars. President Obama has never embraced them as his own. Of course he campaigned vociferously against Iraq in 2007-08 and is today claiming credit for victory there; and on Afghanistan he's been at most lukewarm in his support, while some of his decision-making has in fact put U.S. troops in greater danger. But there's more to the WikiLeaks story than meets the eye. American interests remain great in Afghanistan. Despite the increasing drumbeats for a precipitous withdrawal, AfPAK will remain a top global security threat for years to come. We'd be foolish to cut and run. On that score, I'll give the last word to Thomas Jocelyn at Weekly Standard. See, "The Taliban's Savagery: The Documents Released by WikiLeaks Say Much About the Evil of Our Enemies":

When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced the massive leak of more than 90,000 classified documents, he claimed that he was exposing “thousands” of possible American war crimes. The documents show nothing of the sort. Some of the documents do detail the brutality of war, and the unsurprising fact that mistakes are made. Assange’s anti-American myopia prevented him from seeing what the documents really demonstrate: American-led forces face an especially savage enemy.

Of course, we didn’t need the WikiLeaks cache of documents to tell us this. There is plenty of evidence for the whole world to see. Still, the documents demonstrate just how pervasive the Taliban’s brutality is in this fight. The Taliban and its jihadist allies have an unparalleled lust for blood, beheading their enemies (both real and imagined) on a regular basis. It is difficult to think of a more savage act.

Here are just some examples, chosen from many, found in the documents released by WikiLeaks ....

RTWT.

Impact: United Airlines Flight 175 September 11, 2001

At Israel Matzav, "Why There Shouldn't Be a Mosque at Ground Zero."

More on Flight 175 here.

RELATED: "'WE HAVE SOME PLANES'."

BREAKING: Dan Senor, at WSJ, "An Open Letter on the Ground Zero Mosque" (via Memeorandum):

Our deeper concern is what effect Cordoba House would have on the families of 9/11 victims, survivors of and first responders to the attacks, New Yorkers in general, and all Americans. As you have seen in the public reaction to the Cordoba House, 9/11 remains a deep wound for Americans—especially those who experienced it directly in some way. They understandably see the area as sacred ground. Nearly all of them also reject the equation of Islam with terrorism and do not blame the attacks on Muslims generally or on the Muslim faith. But many believe that Ground Zero should be reserved for memorials to the event itself and to its victims. They do not understand why of all possible locations in the city, Cordoba House must be sited so near to there.

And the contrary opinion from Wordsmith at Flopping Aces, "Refudiating the Islamophobes." And Jennifer Rubin, "The Left Defends Ground Zero Mosque."

The Pacific and Adjacent Theaters in WWII

I think I've linked this before, but Blazing Cat Fur reminds us of a Denver Post photo-essay from March, "Captured." My dad had a bunch of Life Magazine books on World War Two. This photo always struck me as a boy, especially how the bodies washed into the sand:

Losers Welcome...

Heh ...

Yo, JBW, 'nuff said: