The excellent Rep. Duncan Hunter (would that he were the Republican prez nominee) details the dangerous and destructive practice by our government of buying America's miitary hardware from foreign countries, due to a fanatical attachment to bottom-line free trade, I suppose. But sometimes free trade is not "free."

Hunter writes:

As we become increasingly dependent on other countries for military resources and innovative technologies, we are becoming less capable of meeting our own critical defense needs. In fact, when I was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and American troops began taking casualties from roadside bombs on the streets of Iraq, I sent out my team to locate more steel to armor and better protect their tactical vehicles. They found only one company left in the United States that could still produce high-grade armor plate steel. The danger of this dependency also became evident...

Read More »

...did Pre-Emptive Rage, well, pre-empt post-release Fitna Rage?

Reuters reports :  The Netherlands breathed a sigh of relief on Friday after Dutch Muslims reacted with restraint to the release of a film by a Dutch lawmaker that accuses the Koran of inciting violence.

You mean they acted like normal people who just wrinkle their noses (maybe) when they don't like a movie? Let's give them the Order of William, the Netherlands highest military honor (I looked it up). 

But 21-gun salutes for "Muslims restraint" are beside the point. The question is, why would there be no Muslim "rage"? It's very early yet, and sometimes these things take time (you think it's easy to find...

Read More »

...in their rage at Geert Wilders.

That's the subject of today's column, written in anticipation of the film's release and in reflection on the run-up to the film's release. In the  long sequence  of Islamic "rages"--Satanic Verses Rage, Koran Rage, Cartoon Rage, Pope Rages, even Teddy Bear Rage--the rage over a film no one had seen until yesterday was something new: Pre-Emptive Rage.

Watch it here.

Two thumbs up, five stars, and an instant classic.

Shameful, shocking revelations from the Thomas More Law Center (via American Thinker) about what more and more appears to be a miscarriage of justice.

New Revelations in Haditha Case - Sec. of Def. Rumsfeld Set up Shadow Body to Oversee Investigations March 26, 2008 ANN ARBOR, MI – Revelations by top Marine Generals, that former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, set up a shadow “body” composed of high-ranking administration officials to oversee the Haditha investigations, could prove to be the most damning evidence of the political motivations and influence over the ongoing prosecutions of Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Chessani, USMC [photo above], and other combat Marines involved.

Even after everything, I've always liked Rumsfeld--until now, if this is true. Lawyers with the Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest...

Read More »

“It is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers.”

--John McCain

In The Death of the Grown-Up, I make the argument that the infantilized condition of Western culture dangerously and tragically makes the West  particularly susceptible to the self-abnegating, supplicating trappings of dhimmitude (monumentally chronicled by Bat Ye'or), which may be viewed as the ultimate phase of infantilization.

Not that one has much reason to expect Switzerland to Stand Tall, but this recent display by the Swiss foreign minister (the grinning gal ogling   Ahmadinejad) offers an illustration of what dhimmitude looks like as free nations grovel for gas before genocidal jihadists at war with Western civilization.    



More pictures here,...

Read More »

Certainly, there can be no possibility of peace for Israel until there is no more Palestinian curriculum of lies instructing Palestinian schoolchildren that Israel burns children in ovens, as reported this week by Palestinian Media Watch.

This esson is being taught this month in Hamas-controlled Gaza, but don't think the Fatah-controlled West Bank (led, after all, by Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Abbas) refrains from this Big Lie. As PMW pointed out:

Palestinian Authority (Fatah) TV already already taught children in the past that Israel burned children in the Holocaust. With ovens pictured in the background and actors playing dead children as part of a musical play, an actor in a video declared:   "They [Israel] are the ones who did the Holocaust ... They opened the ovens for us to bake human beings... and when one oven...

Read More »

I have written before about the courageous anti-jihadist journalist Saleh Uddin Shoaib Choudhury (most recently here), along with his American champion Dr. Richard Benkin, whose untiring efforts to bring Shoaib's sufferings at the hands of the Bangladeshi government to the attention of US government authorities  has very likely saved Shoaib's life many times over. Today, at The American Thinker, Dr. Benkin takes us behind the scenes on Capitol Hill to ask and answer a very shocking question about which senator was most unhelpful regarding Shoaib's plight:

Who was the one lawmaker that took a pass on saving the life of an imprisoned US ally and opponent of Islamist extremism? That’s right, my own Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

Read it, as they say, all.

The AP reports:

Italy's most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service. An Egyptian-born, non-practicing Muslim who is married to a Catholic, Magdi Allam infuriated some Muslims with his books and columns in the newspaper Corriere della Sera newspaper, where he is a deputy editor. He titled one book "Long Live Israel." As a choir sang, Pope Benedict XVI poured holy water over Allam's head and said a brief prayer in Latin. "We no longer stand alongside or in opposition to one another," Benedict said in a homily reflecting on the meaning of baptism. "Thus faith is a force for peace and reconciliation in the world: distances between people are overcome, in the Lord...

Read More »

From the Washington Post today:

Hillary Clinton has been regaling supporters on the campaign trail with hair-raising tales of a trip she made to Bosnia in March 1996. In her retelling, she was sent to places that her husband, President Bill Clinton, could not go because they were "too dangerous." When her account was challenged by one of her traveling companions, the comedian Sinbad, she upped the ante and injected even more drama into the story. In a speech earlier this week, she talked about "landing under sniper fire" and running for safety with "our heads down."

According to the Post's "Pinnochio Test," Hillary's story is a Real Whopper (Four Pinnochio noses). Highlights from the fisking:

Far from running to an airport building with their heads down, Clinton and her party were greeted on the tarmac by smiling U.S. and Bosnian officials. An 8-year-old Muslim girl, Emina Bicakcic, read a poem in English. An Associated Press photograph of the greeting ceremony...shows a smiling Clinton bending down to receive a kiss....

Read More »

The new head of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, told the Washington Times that  the Danish Mo-toons are "the work of insignificant individuals who want to get famous overnight." Rather dismissive, no? Does this comment--irritatingly provocative in several ways I pass on for now (but just ask Kurt Westergaard how he is enjoying his "get famous quick scheme" that resulted in a Muslim assassination plot that has made it impossible for him and his wife to live in their home)--perhaps reveal something new about OIC tactics? After all, the OIC has consistently  depicted the Danish Mo-toons as the worst calamity for Islam since Charles Martel. All of a sudden, they're no big deal. Wade continued: "Islam is actually making undeniable progress in the West. New mosques are being erected all over Europe."

Aha. The OIC is down-grading the significance...

Read More »

From today's column:

As a conservative in no way comforted by the Clinton-Obama-Pelosi-Reid rhetoric on the war in Iraq, I should have taken heart from the president's fifth-anniversary remarks revisiting the Battle of Baghdad, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the thrill of Iraqi elections, the perfidy of Al Qaeda terrorists, the Anbar Awakening, and the success of the surge.

 I didn't.

The rest of it explains why.

This AP headline from last week really does say it all:

Iraq oil revenue soars, creating huge surplus But U.S. still investing billions in rebuilding, facing squeeze at home

Not that there isn't more to say:

Last week, Sens. Carl Levin, a Democrat, and John Warner, a Republican, asked GAO to investigate what Iraq is doing with its oil revenue. The senators estimated that Iraq will realize "at least $100 billion in oil revenues in 2007 and 2008."

A couple of questions:

1) Why isn't that oil money being used to assist with US efforts to rebuild Iraq? Back in 2003, the Bush administration told us Iraq's oil revenues would pay for our mission there. That was a great idea--unrealized due to attacks on and sabotage and general disrepair of Iraq's oil industry. It's still a great idea now as Iraq's oil biz booms. 

...

Read More »

From Worldnetdaily.com's Aaron Klein, the man who yesterday brought us Malik Zulu Shabazz's endorsement of Barack Obama:

Sen. Barack Obama's Chicago church reprinted a manifesto by Hamas that defended terrorism as legitimate resistance, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist and compared the terror group's official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America's Declaration of Independence.

The Hamas piece was published on the "Pastor's Page" of the Trinity United Church of Christ newsletter reserved for Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., ..."

The New York Times weighs in today on The Mo-toons Return Story: namely, picking up on what has happened since 17 Danish newspapers recently reprinted the Danish Mohammed cartoons in the wake of an Islamic  plot, thwarted by Danish police, to murder cartoonist Kurt Westergaard.

Two things.

One, the reporter's slant on Muslim hysteria:

Americans, for whom the presidential election seems to have become a delirious, unending sport, preoccupying their attention, turn out not to be the only ones who preferred to forget about the cartoons. So had many Danes and fellow Europeans. They were shocked by the arrests. In the days shortly after, 17 Danish newspapers, having declined to publish the offending cartoons two years ago, declared solidarity with Mr. Westergaard and printed them. This, naturally, provoked a fresh round of protests from Gaza to Indonesia.

...

Read More »

Gates of Vienna reports on the crashingly disappointing transformation of Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen from free-speech champion (he stood up to Muslim diplomatic and economic pressure during Cartoon Rage 2006 and beyond) to PC automaton, now mouthing the EU-correct platitudes  against Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, whose career is devoted to staving off the Islamization of Europe. 

In the course of an interview with Danish TV (G of V has video link to the English-language interview) during which Wilders expressed his concerns about the Islamization of Europe, the need to stop Islamic immigration, and his opinion that the Koran is a "fascist book," Wilders also praised Rasmussen for upholding Denmark's principles of freedom of expression.  Reuters wrote:

Wilders said the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard had received better support in the face of Muslim wrath from Rasmussen than he himself had seen...

Read More »

Victor Davis Hanson comes up with the perfect phrase to describe Obama's speech: an exercise in "self-serving relativism."

He explains here.

Every newspaper in the Free World should respond to Bin Laden's latest ravings by reprinting the Danish Mohammed cartoons.

Historian John David Lewis (about whom I've written here) thought he was giving a lecture at George Tech, but turns out, in the eyes of an Islamic segment of his audience, he was actually committing a thoughtcrime. He explains:

I spoke at Georgia Tech last week on "No Substitute for Victory: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism." A pro-Islamic group in the audience (some at least were students) tried to filibuster the Q&A. Their attacks openly called for Islamic law (a "good thing"), praised jihad as a "wonderful" concept, and proclaimed that subjugated peoples forced to pay the Islamic tax should be "grateful" for the "protection" they receive. They whitewashed history as well as the present situation, demanded that we stop "offending" them, said that the Iranians had no reason to trust the United States, and called me a "criminal mind." This was all-out support for a category of thoughtcrimes in American universities.

...

Read More »

...maybe I'm over-reacting. Aaron Klein reports that Malik Zulu Shabazz, national chairman of the New Black Panther Party, a virulently anti-white, anti-Jew, anti-American organization, just loved the Obama speech.

Go Team Obama.

Mine had to leave her lifelong home of Brooklyn, New York, in the mid- 1970s because of heretofore unseen urban crime in her neighborhood--crime disproportionately committed by black men. Does this condemn her as a racist in Sen. Obama's eyes?

In comparing his own grandmother's "confessed" fear of black men, to Rev. Wright's vicious racism, Sen. Obama hit a new low. Such feelings on the part of elderly women, often widows in fragile health who live alone on a fixed income in a foggy state of beleaguered bewilderment at their great age and diminished capacity, is in no way a sign of racism but of fear. Fear that a walk  to the corner market or mail box will end in a mugging, or worse. Obama should be ashamed of himself for making this disgraceful moral equivalence. But he isn't. And that is more cause to question the judgment of this man who sees nothing wrong with having been mentored by an anti-American racist for two decades.

Steve Sailer does us the favor of comparing the granny section of the...

Read More »

Commentary's blog has now weighed in on the recent BBC poll (mentioned below), seizing on rising Iraqi "optimism" and Democratic defeatism as the big story--and  ignoring the shattering finding that even now, five years after the United States deposed Saddam Hussein, 42 Iraqis in 100 think it's "acceptable" to attack Americans.   

The Drudge Report is headlining the evening with this:

Calls Mount for Olympic Ceremony Boycott.

A "Ceremony" boycott? The AP reports:

Moves to punish China over its handling of violence in Tibet gained momentum Tuesday, with a novel suggestion for a mini-boycott of the Beijing Olympics by VIPs at the opening ceremony.

A mini-boycott? How adorable. And how suitable for standing on--tiptoeing on--a mini-principle.

The story goes on to describe French,  Dutch and IOC receptivity to the mini-notion. IOC executive board member and marketing chief Gerhard Heiberg said Olympics officials can't lecture China but does raise human rights and other issues in its regular, private contacts with the Chinese.

(I'd love to see that.)

"We still maintain that the Olympics are mainly a sports event and we do not want to get involved in a sovereign state's...

Read More »

At one point in his speech today, Sen. Obama said:

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.

Imagine if he had said, "But race is an issue that I believe this nation has been far too focused on, obssesed with even to the point of blinding us all to our common humanity"--or some such truly post-racial notion. Instead, his take on the nation's revulsion over Rev. Wright's racist sermonizing, along with the five-minute flap over Geraldine Ferraro's comments about Obama's race and her sex aiding their respective careers in the Democratic Party, drove Obama to call for still more focus on race. He said:

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together...

Read More »

Still going over Sen. Obama's speech, the prepared text of which is here, but I didn't hear anything that erases the seemingly indelible impression that, yes, Barack Obama spent 20 years being spiritually mentored and advised by a minister whose racism and anti-Americanism places him beyond the pale. How does Obama thus earn the trust of the people of this country? Depends, ultimately, on how many share or have learned to  "understand" the minister's vile creed. Obama rationalized the minister's rage, and also tried to persuade voters that there was more to the minister than rage--hardly the "post-racial" thing to do.

And then there was this:

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just...

Read More »

...believe attacks on "Coalition forces"--i.e., US troops--are "acceptable." (Hat tip Andrew Bostom.)

But look on the "bright side": That figure is down 15 percent from six months ago. That is, I mean to say: That figure is down 15 percent from six months ago!!!!!!

Little wonder General Petraeus has sounded frustrated lately. 

Serving the glass-full interpretation, the survey also tells us 57 percent of Iraqis think such attacks are unacceptable--up 14 percent from six months ago. I mean: up 14 percent from six months ago!!!!!!

Not to be churlish but I find such Iraqi attitudes--after five years' worth of American blood and treasure--to be outrageous. (It's worth...

Read More »

CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight"--tonight, of course. The show starts at 7pm EST.

--"Middle East `bright side' blinding us to costly U.S. reality"--is here.

And more Commentary on last week's column is here.

The Washington Post reports:

BAGHDAD, March 13 -- Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving their political differences, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Thursday.

Petraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services.

The general's comments appeared to be his sternest to date on Iraqis' failure to achieve political reconciliation.

When will our leaders--the ones who rightly, instinctively but still blindly wish to prosecute some kind of war on global jihad (whether they realize it or not)--even begin to consider  the terrible...

Read More »

...over what the Dutch media, government and industry are doing to Geert Wilders, it's time to act. No, not riot, burn Dutch flags, or call for beheadings--that's the m.o. of the Religion of Peace. On reading in The Brussels Journal that the Dutch are trying to muscle Wilders out of public existence by not providing him with adequate security and possibly even suing him for Dutch industry losses in the Muslim world (!), I was moved to declare my own personal boycott of Unilver products, an Anglo-Dutch company with a particulatly loathesome director named Doekle Terpstra. “Geert Wilders is evil, and evil has to be stopped,” Terpstra (henceforth known as Twerpstra) said. The Unilever director, anticipating a worldwide Muslim boycott of Unilever products, has called upon the Dutch to “rise...

Read More »

While Geert Wilders means to inform the world about the dangers of jihad and other Koranic dictates through his short and, as yet, unseen film "Fitna," he has, perhaps inadvertently, revealed the revoltingly, shamefully, repulsively craven and advanced state of  Dutch dhimmitude. Thomas Landen  connects all the rotten dots today at Brussels Journal.    

Highlights:

--Dutch government AND media are demanding Wilders, a member of Dutch parliament, pay 400,000 euros for his own security at a scheduled press conference and showing of  the movie. --No Dutch broadcaster, public or private, has been willing to show the film. There are indications that Fitna will also be banned on...

Read More »

t

This, as Andrew Bostom noted, is a snapshot of a Thai organization called The Muslim Group of Peace. And, indeed, the group demonstrated "peacefully" outside the Danish embassy in Bangkok today, calling for a Thai boycott of Danish products over the Danish Mo-toons--and, according to the placard shown above, the beheading of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. Bostom writes:

And note this particularly peaceful, and ecumenical touch from the “Muslim Group of Peace” demonstrators :  There appears to be a miniature dog species in the placard, balanced upon its forelegs, with a stream of urine being propelled from between its hind quarters,  which is directed at the bloody, decapitated head of the most prominent Danish cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard.

Westergaard, 73, and his...

Read More »

..at Contentions (Commentary magazine's blog) about my last column.

The AP reports:

WASHINGTON - Iraq is not spending much of its own money, despite soaring oil revenues that are pushing the country toward a massive budget surplus, U.S. auditors told Congress on Tuesday.

The expected surplus comes as the U.S. continues to invest billions of dollars in rebuilding Iraq and faces a financial squeeze domestically because of record oil prices.

"The Iraqis have a budget surplus," said U.S. Comptroller General David Walker. "We have a huge budget deficit. ... One of the questions is who should be paying."

I know the answer--and it ain't us.

No, it's not the story about another reprobate governor, but rather a very satisfying, bittersweet 1958 novel by John P. Marquand, a top-drawer (and extremely successful) American novelist of the middle decades of the 20th century. In Marquand's perfected flashback style, in which a lifetime is fleshed out in the real-time space of  a couple of days, the novel brings us Thomas Harrow, a long successful playwright who has gone belly-up financially, as he takes stock of life, love and art.    

I just finished it and thought it was made a much better ending to the day than lurid reports of STD's and Spitzerian yuck.

And you can get it for one cent.

A new study tells us:

At least one in four teenage American girls has a sexually transmitted disease, suggests a first-of-its-kind federal study that startled some adolescent-health experts.

It startled them, did it? Where have they been? The real question is at what point do the rest of us non-experts (and that surely includes parents)  begin to recognize that the sexual revolution was a disaster for the women--and now the girls--it "liberated"? 

Roger Kimball puts it a very good word for hypocrisy--probably the most misunderstood and ambiguous "vice." Here is an excerpt:

When the story of Bill Clinton's liaison with Monica Lewinsky became public, there was plenty of condemnation, but almost nobody talked about hypocrisy: lying, yes; moral turpitude, by all means; but not hypocrisy. That is because hypocrisy is essentially an aristocratic failing. It extols "the best" even if the best is generally unattainable. This indeed is one reason that hypocrisy, among all the vices, is regarded with particular disdain and horror by egaliatarians. A hypocrite publicly upholds noble values and standards of behavior even though he knows he may sometimes fall short of the conduct they require. He does this because he recognizes that those values are worthy of support and commendation even if he cannot always embody them. La Rochefoucauld's observation that...

Read More »

I thought this story about British troops in Afghanistan building a mosque was pretty bad--as in, ask yourself what the chances are that the imam-to-be of the mosque-to-be won't exhort congregants to protest Danish cartoons and take other anti-West actions--but now it turns out, American taxpayer dollars are helping to build a nuclear reactor ... in Iran. No kidding. (Dunno how I missed this one the first time around.)

What did Lenin say about rope? Now, it's nuclear material--only we're giving it to them this time! Such  stories all fit with this week's column about the fallacy about basing our foreign policy on "allies" who are not allies--whether it is Iraq cosying up to Iran, US-military-hosting-Qatar funding Hamas, US-supported Fatah dubbing  the seminary jihadist a "martyr"...

Read More »

...with my friend Laura Ingraham tomorrow morning (Monday) at around 10:30 a.m. EST to talk about this week's column--"Whose Side Is Iraq Really On?"

Reader-mail is one of the perks of writing a column, an admittedly solitary activity. Sometimes, it starts a conversation that, in rare cases, can go on for years; even when that doesn't happen, it offers valuable feedback, good and bad. That is, usually, letters agree or disagree. Once in a very great while, however, a letter comes in to say that a column has changed someone's thinking--which is a big moment for the columnist. Here is such a letter that came in after someone read this week's column , "Whose Side Is Iraq Really On?"

I have long been a defending conservative of why we fight and die in Iraq....  Your comments are very compelling and seem to have created some re-thinking on my part as to why we help people who go out of their way to show how ungrateful they are to those who share their blood so that they can be free....

It is not enough, as the Democrats argue, to withdraw from Iraq, end of story. If we...

Read More »

This week's syndicated column

March 7, 2008 I can't think of a point of historic comparison to the figurative bed we have made for ourselves in Iraq--particularly now that our Iraqi allies have welcomed our Iranian enemies right into it. Maybe the way to understand international affairs is to turn not to history but to pulp fiction--namely, the old love triangle. The good guy (us, natch), has been betrayed by the love object he supports and defends (Iraq), having been left to watch and stew as she gallivants with his rival (Iran). In real life, of course, Iran is responsible for many of our nearly 4,000 war dead in Iraq, many of our nearly 30,000 war-wounded in Iraq, along with murders, kidnappings and torture of Americans throughout the Middle East over the past quarter-century through its terrorist proxy Hezbollah. This all makes Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Baghdad a stinging Mesopotamian slap across the American face. And don't forget that Iran's leader, the classic heavy in our plot, was quite possibly a participant in the 1979 Iranian seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and ensuing 444-day hostage crisis. ...

Read More »

Must-read piece by Kathleen Ridolfo, Radio Free Europe analyst. It chronicles Iraq's economic subordination to Iran, including this outrageous detail. It's about Bank Melli, Iran's largest bank, which the US Treasury has blacklisted for its role in both aiding Iran's pursuit of nuclear weaponry and funding terrorist groups. Last year, lo, about the time, the "surge" of American troops was reaching full strength, Bank Melli opened its Baghdad branch.

In June, Iran opened a branch of Bank Melli in Baghdad -- the same bank that the U.S. Treasury identified last year as a financial conduit to facilitating the purchases of sensitive materials for Iran's nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. The bank also provides banking services to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its Qods Force, which the United States...

Read More »

Everyone should take a look at this string of pro-Hamas cartoons (posted by Atlas Shrugs) that villify and slander Israel--which moved against Palestinian terrorists in Gaza this past week in a belated attempt to stop (Iranian supplied) rockets from firing on Israeli towns.

UPDATE: News of the jihadist massacre of eight Yeshiva  students in  Jerusalem Thursday night sparked  riotous celebrations in  the PA (naturally), along with praise for the "heroes" of the heinous assault on a school library. That's jihad-heroism for you--killing students at their desks.

So, to recap: In the psychosis of jihadist existence, the Jews are the "Nazis" (see cartoon link above) for defending their towns from Muslim rockets, and the Muslims are the heroes...

Read More »

This reverential review of Patti Smith singing American standards by the NYT's Stephen Holden caught my eye. It begins:

For some musicians the ordinary rules just don't apply. I would call the intangible quality that makes ignoring them possible [sic] purity of soul. More than artistic integrity, it has a mystical component and requires the listener to make a leap of faith.

In other words, the concert, which closed out Lincoln Center's American Songbook series, must have sounded bloody awful.

I read on, transfixed by the thought of (Holden's words) "the shamanistic poet, proto-punk rocker and voice in the wilderness"--again, must have sounded bloody awful--singing popular standards in her "quavering, ragged-but-stalwart voice" that  "suggested the spiritual call to committment of a rock 'n' roll Joan of Arc...."

...

Read More »

I never got around to commenting on this picture of Senator Obama in Somali  tribal garb--either in print or on TV. But there are several points worth returning to now that presidential race has hit a welcome lull.

As esteeemed colleagues have noted, it is indeed logical to place the senator's African dress-up photo-op in the Great National Photo Album of US leaders who have been cajoled (I do hope because they always look so darn ridiculous) into wearing the traditional dress of the countries they visit. 

But there is more to consider here. It starts with the type of garb the Illinois senator...

Read More »

Remember Geert  "Get Lost"
Wilders?

Watch this space.

After reading this week's column, which is called "Obama's Truthiness about Farrakhan," a reader wrote in to say it was time I unmasked myself. The reader put it this way:

"Please be honest that you are a supporter of Senator Clinton."

That's a hot one. But it's not simply ridiculous as anyone the slightest bit familiar with my life's Clinton-bashing knows. It also suggests that, in such a reader's eyes, any critique of Sen. Obama's revealing and disturbing inability to reject Farrakhan, lock, stock and barrel, can only constitute partisan Hillary boosterism--rather than (urgently needed) analysis and discussion of the views of the Democratic frontrunner. 

...tomorrow to give a talk in Texas about The Death of the Grown-Up. Can't  make any promises about affecting primary outcome.  

...CNN's "Lou Dobbs This Week" discussing Sen. Obama's Farrakhan problem, the president's "Sword Dance" and more with the political roundtable. That's tonight (Sunday, March 2) at 6 p.m. EST.