VP Sent To Hospital

Vice President Dick Cheney experienced "shortness of breath" and was taken to a hospital this morning, the AP reports:

"On the recommendation of his doctors, the vice president is going to George Washington University Hospital for some tests," spokesman Ken Lisaius said. "He experienced some shortness of breath Saturday morning and has had a bad cold, which could be the cause for the shortness of breath."

President Bush was notified, Lisaius said.

Besides wishing the best for Dick Cheney and his family on a personal level, the incapacitation of the VP would be a tough blow for the Bush Administration. Cheney provides a philosophical focus and operational expertise to the war on terror, and losing those talents even for a short time will be tough to overcome.

How You Can Support The Troops

I got this e-mail yesterday from CQ reader and commenter LoveMyMarine, a Marine Corps wife who works on behalf of her husband and his comrades in arms. She lets us know how we can help support our troops in the field, especially the Marines that just celebrated the Corps' 229th birthday by battling to eliminate the terrorists in Fallujah.

Our six year old started a banner that states simply, "THANK YOU MARINES". We were at the VRE station on Nov 10th (Marine Corps Birthday) and at the Vietnam Wall Nov 11th asking people to sign the banner, which I will be sending to Iraq along with the Christmas Care Packages for 1st Marine Division.

I wonder if I could please ask you to post a link to two other worthwhile grassroots organizations? Wounded Warriors got a plug on Bill O' Reilly, but as I called to remind them, they forgot that the Marines also have fund, started by an Intensive Care nurse and a Marine Spouse. Former Commandant Gen Al Gray and LtGen Newbold (USMC Ret) are now on the Board of Directors. Semper Fi is 100% all volunteer, grass roots, no red tape. Semper Fi was started because of the red tape involved in getting funds for our Devil Dogs through the "established" charities, in many cases, only to be turned down.

Rene was on 60 Minutes (Wed), but all the support we can get & everyone who can help by putting the word out would be most gratefully appreciated.

Thanks,

Proud Wife of a Deployed US Marine

UPDATE: Here's another way to support the troops: A Million Thanks, a website started by a patriotic 15-year-old girl who wants to get letters and cards of appreciation into the hands of our fighting men and women overseas.

The Games Are Too Long As It Is

Baseball has decided to postpone looking at instant replay after major-league GMs split on continuing its review:

Upon further review, baseball will hold off on taking a look at instant replay. After watching umpires reverse almost every missed call in the postseason, major league general managers split 15-15 Thursday on whether to keep exploring the subject.

"Based on that vote, it's unlikely we'll do anything substantive in the next year to pursue instant replay," MLB executive vice president Sandy Alderson said.

In the past twenty years, baseball games have bloated from an average running time of two hours to well over three hours now. I used to be embarrassed for Los Angeles fans who ducked out after the sixth inning, but now if you have kids you can't keep them up past that time for a night game. Increased advertising time, needed to pay the skyrocketing salaries of the players, combined with egotistical batters and pitchers playing mind games to make one baseball game last as long as doubleheaders did in years past.

Now they want to use instant replay? Putting that in place will make an average ball game last longer than the director's cut of Lord of the Rings: The Return Of The King. If the experience of the NFL is any gauge, the extra time won't result in significantly better calls, as most challenges seem to result inconclusively.

One possible solution to the plague of marathon games came up in the meetings:

Alderson and umpire supervisor Rich Rieker made a presentation to the GMs on Thursday, showing that nine-inning games were played in an average of 2 hours, 47 minutes, up a minute from 2003.

In something that could someday lead to a speed up, the Arizona Fall League is experimenting with a rule requiring hitters to keep one foot in the batter's box, rather than stepping out after each pitch. The penalty is an automatic strike, and Alderson said the rule might get a tryout in a low minor league next season.

Now that's more like it. Nothing gets more frustrating that watching a batter take a stroll between every pitch. It's bad enough at the park, and it's excruciating on television, where the commentators fill the void with inane anecdotes. This sounds like a good approach to the problem, and hopefully it will be combined with a time limit on pitchers as well.

Baseball should concentrate on "Play Ball!" instead of "Roll Tape!"

The Result Of Desperation

Government exists to protect its citizens, and free societies give up a certain level of their liberty in order to enable their government to fulfill its mandate. The definition of protection varies, but the concept is the same; in America, we traditionally limit government to national defense and a certain level of social support for the neediest, while countries like France and Germany define protection in their cradle-to-grave social systems. But the one definition on which we all agree is the guarding of our lives and our ability to exercise our freedom.

When government fails in this primary obligation, the social contract breaks down and people take action themselves for their own security -- and the chaos that results creates a further distortion in society. Vigilante justice becomes the tyranny of the strong and the law, which exists to ensure liberty and equal treatment for all, no longer functions as people lose more and more confidence in it and its providers. Unfortunately for the Netherlands, at least a few of its citizens have decided that the Dutch government has lost the ability to protect them from Muslim extremists:

Flames engulfed a mosque in southeastern Netherlands early Saturday, the latest in a string of fires at Muslim institutions since the killing of a Dutch filmmaker who was critical of Islam. ...

There have been more than 20 incidents of fires or vandalism at Muslim buildings — and a handful of retaliatory attacks on Christian churches — since the Nov. 2 killing of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a suspected Muslim radical.

Van Gogh, a distant relative of the famous painter, was shot and stabbed to death while cycling on an Amsterdam street. A note pinned to his chest with a knife threatened Islamic holy war, or Jihad, against non-Muslims.

It's fair to say that the Dutch populace took that threat more seriously than European politicians have so far during this age of Islamofascist terror. After seeing one of their favorite filmmakers butchered on the street for simply speaking his mind, and casting their gaze around the general fecklessness of Europe's leadership against terror, a few Dutch citizens decided to answer this particular declaration of war.

Their actions, unfortunately, do nothing constructive to address the problem and will wind up radicalizing the rest of the Muslims in the Netherlands. Violence unchecked forces everyone to take sides. Unless Europe begins to seriously address their Muslim problem, the entire continent will start to resemble the Balkans. Given their long failure to resolve the conflicts in that small corner of their backyard, they cannot afford to replicate it across the Mediterranean. If they want to avoid that result, Europe's governments have to show their citizens that they offer more for their security than a pension check and a boatload of multicultural pablum.

Don't Let Scowcroft Back In

Former Bush 41 advisor Brent Scowcroft published an opinion piece in today's Washington Post that should remind us all that American cluelessness in Middle East policymaking has a rich bipartisan history. Scowcroft's advice to George Bush in his second term explains why 43 famously bypassed his father's counsel in favor of prayer.

The first red flag for me popped up when Scowcroft writes that our new aim in securing peace in the Middle East requires us to "reach out" to Europe in generating a new policy:

But American resolve will not suffice without the willing engagement of other states, especially those of Europe and the region itself. Our appeal to the Europeans, with whom our differences over the Middle East have been significant, must be based on reaching out to them on the Palestinian peace process and Iran, and soliciting their help on Iraq.

Unfortunately, what Scowcroft wants us to do to reach out to our European partners is to significantly undermine our support for Israel. Europe has a long history of antagonism to Israel and has openly supported the prototype terrorist, Yasser Arafat, right up to his death. While Europe lionized Arafat and toasted the Palestinian cause, Palestinian terrorists slaughtered Israeli citizens on buses and pizzerias. Scowcroft wants us to pressure Israel into removing the defenses against such attack that they have slowly built as an entreé to peace negotiations:

The United States should insist that Israel stop construction of its wall on the West Bank and mirror its withdrawal from Gaza with the evacuation of the West Bank. In return, the wall and Israeli troops would be replaced by an international force, principally European or perhaps NATO troops.

The staggering uselessness of these suggestions surprises even me. While I know that Scowcroft has always been a rabid enthusiast of whatever status quo can be found, I honestly thought he knew better than to go backwards to the status quo circa 1990. He proposes not only that Israel withdraw from the West Bank -- a reasonable position, but not forced on Israel as a precondition of a settlement -- but also that they dismantle the wall which has been the only effective defensive deterrent to terrorist attacks.

And what does Scowcroft propose to do to protect Israeli citizens from Hamas and Islamic Jihad? A contingent of European or NATO troops! Ask the Bosnians of Srebenica how well that worked out for them. The Europeans cannot be bothered to conduct their own security operations in Europe, and given their historical hostility to Israel, it's highly doubtful that European troops would ever act to defend Israel against any kind of attack. Once the bullets start flying or the bombs start exploding in Tel Aviv, you can bet the "peacekeepers" will head directly back to their barracks, just as they did in Kosovo.

After stripping Israel of its only effective non-lethal defense measure, Scowcroft gives away more Israeli concessions, a la Chamberlain and Daladier in Munich:

A unified Jerusalem would serve as capital to both peoples. While the "right of return" could be left as a principle, the reality is that most Palestinian refugees will remain outside Israel, just as most Jewish settlers will return to Israel.

I'd like to hear exactly how one city could possibly be the capital of two different countries without a partition. Scowcroft never explains it, nor has it ever happened before in human history. Even so-called "open cities" wind up under one sovereignty eventually. Danzig, for one example, did nothing but provoke ill will on behalf of both countries which claimed it. Scowcroft's concession on the right of return is flatly hypocritical. Again, Scowcroft fails to explain how it can be left as a principal without any intent of fulfilling it -- or, if he intends on honoring it, he gives no advice on how Israel can maintain its integrity as an independent state.

Why is Scowcroft so anxious to give the store away on Israel? He labors under the delusion that the region's volatility can be resolved by implementing a two-state solution:

Substantial, visible progress on the Palestinian issue would significantly improve the atmosphere in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, including Iran, the third side of this triangle of tension and violence.

No, it won't, because the Arabs don't object to the lack of a two-state settlement between Israel and the Palestinians; they object to Israel itself. The Palestinians have never been anything except a handy excuse for the various kleptocrats and mullahs in the region to stoke the fanaticism among their oppressed masses, mostly to divert attention from their own lack of freedom. Wherever Palestinians have traveled, they have been treated like second-class citizens, unable to immigrate as the Arab nations refuse to admit them as anything other than temporary refugees. Casting their anti-Western terrorism and antagonism as an altruistic response to a lack of resolution on the Palestinian question misses the point entirely, and Scowcroft's response -- sacrificing Israeli security -- plays directly into the hands of the people trying to kill us.

Not only does Scowcroft essentially cave on Israel, he then argues for the same retreat on Iran and encourages us to get the Iranian mullahcracy involved in the rebuilding of Iraq:

We should actively embrace the European position, urge the Russians to join us and jointly approach Iran. Such an approach would support Iranian efforts to develop nuclear power, including the offer of an ensured supply of nuclear reactor fuel (low enriched uranium) at concessionary prices -- or even gratis -- in exchange for a comprehensive, verifiable freeze of Iran's uranium enrichment program.

Iran not only has strong interests in the future of Iraq but a powerful influence through its religious connections to the Shiite majority there. We should engage Iran about the future of Iraq, comparing our separate perspectives and emphasizing our joint interests. In that regard, the multilateral discussions over Iraq scheduled later this month at Sharm el-Sheikh should become the start of a dialogue, with U.N. participation.

So we should assist a theocratic tyranny in its efforts to create its own nuclear industry -- when they have vast oil resources for generating energy already -- and give them a seat at the table in determining how to implement democracy in Iraq. Note to Scowcroft: the reason why we're pushing democracy in Iraq is to destabilize the Iranian mullahcracy, not to lend it credibility. The Iranians know this and intend on doing anything they can to stop it. And you expect them to join with us to give constructive support to Iraq?

If I set out to write a parody of cluelessness in foreign policy, I could hardly have done better than this idiocy by Brent Scowcroft.

Northern Alliance Radio In For Hugh Hewitt Tonight!

Tonight, the Northern Alliance Radio Network fills in for Hugh Hewitt, who has the evening off. Make sure you tune in to hear Mitch, King, myself, and the other members of the NARN gang hijack Hugh's show from 5 pm - 8 pm CT tonight. If Hugh isn't on the air in your neighborhood, you can get the show on the Internet; check out Hugh's site for more details.

Of course, tomorrow we will be on the air in the Twin Cities and on the Internet in our regular time period, 12-3 CT. Be sure to catch us then as well!

Don't Blame The Medium For The Message

The New York Times reports on the flurry of post-election conspiracy theories and, somewhat conveniently, leaves the blame at the doorstep of the blogosphere. Tom Zeller notes the proliferation of assertions that the 2004 Presidential election was somehow stolen from John Kerry in Florida and Ohio and determines that the paranoia springs from freedom of speech:

In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week's presidential election took root and multiplied.

But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them go. ...

"It becomes a snowball of hearsay," said Matthew Damschroder, the director of elections in Columbus, Ohio, where an electronic voting machine malfunctioned in one precinct and allotted some 4,000 votes to President Bush, kicking off its own flurry of Web speculation. That particular problem was unusual and remains unexplained, but it was caught and corrected, Mr. Damschroder said.

"Some from the traditional media have called for an explanation," he said, "but no one from these blogs has called and said, 'We want to know what really happened.' "

Whether that is the role of bloggers, Web posters and online pundits, however, is a matter of debate.

Who does Zeller reference while blaming the entire blogosphere for being a rumor mill? Those titans of the Internet -- BlackBoxVoting.org, Ustogether.org, and Freepress.org. The Daily Kos got a mention as a rumormonger, but other than that, Zeller's sample hardly represents the blogosphere as a whole. It's equivalent to saying that the newspaper industry is insane because of the Weekly World News.

The problem with the blogosphere isn't the blogosphere itself, it's individual blogs that indulge in paranoid conspiracy theories without doing some fact-checking. The blogosphere is merely the medium, and individual blogs build or destroy their credibility based on what they publish. Mainstream media sources operate the same way, although reports published there come with a certain level of built-in credibility with the amount of money spent in publication.

However, this year we have seen the mainstream media fail to vet their stories properly, notably CBS News' foisting of forged and fraudulent documents in the TANG report for 60 Minutes -- and CBS News partnered with the New York Times on that story. Zeller omits that notorious failure in his rundown on rumormongering. Nor do I see Zeller, in his zeal to fault the blogosphere for improper research and sourcing, mention how often his own paper reports items out of context (Al Qaqaa arms dump, for instance) or uses anonymous sourcing for exposes. Finally, while Zeller discusses how quickly experts debunked the stolen-election theories, he completely overlooks the fact that the blogosphere published these retorts -- and that the major blogs played a crucial role in squelching the rumors.

All in all, Zeller's analysis provides yet another Gray Lady potshot at her critics, and a poorly constructed one at that.

Addendum: Zeller does include this revealing quote from the Kerry campaign spokesman, David Wade, on their concern for the nation's well-being:

"I'd give my right arm for Internet rumors of a stolen election to be true," said David Wade, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, "but blogging it doesn't make it so. We can change the future; we can't rewrite the past."

He doesn't wish that people would have voted for his candidate legitimately -- he wants the election to be fraudulent. I guess Kerry's campaign consisted of upper-case-D Democrats exclusively.

Iran Lied! (Gasp!)

The AP reports that a deal supposedly hammered out by the EU is collapsing due to Iran's renuncuiation of the agreement:

A deal committing Iran to suspend activities that Washington says are part of a nuclear arms program was close to collapse Friday, with diplomats suggesting that Tehran had reneged on an agreement reached with European negotiators just days ago. ...

The deal leaves open the exact length of the suspension but says it will be in effect at least as long as it takes for the two sides to negotiate a deal on European technical and financial aid, including help in the development of Iranian nuclear energy for power generation.

But on Friday the diplomats told The Associated Press that Iranian officials had presented British, French and German envoys in Tehran with a version of the agreement that was unacceptable to the three European powers.

Well, color me shocked -- the Iranians reneged on an agreement to limit their nuclear research and development. Iran wants to continue refining uranium into a precursor of uranium hexafluoride, a gas essential to breeding weapons-grade fissile material. The EU-3 insists that this option never was part of their agreement ... and so we're back where we began.

I'm no fan of the UN Security Council, but the nonproliferation agreement uses it as the next step in enforcing its requirements. The EU-3 needs to step aside and get this issue in front of the UNSC so that sanctions and other penalties can be implemented. Iran has played this string out as long as possible and will continue to stall the West until they have their nuclear bomb. Sitting atop their new Shahab-3 missiles, they can threaten eastern Europe and force a stalemate in Southwest Asia. If we are to stop them, we need to do it now.

Captain's Caption Contest #35: Watch Your Back Edition

It's Friday, so it must be time for another Captain's Caption Contest! With all of the hullabaloo surrounding Senator Arlen Specter's comments last week and the efforts being made to derail his ascension to the chair of the Judiciary Committee, you'd expect that he and George Bush would barely be on speaking terms. On the other hand, the two GOP stalwarts still have enough in common to work together ... or so it seems. What do you suppose this conversation was like?

You tell me -- enter your best caption into the comments on this post! NO e-mailed entries, please! E-mailed entries will be sequestered in Ramallah for two years, and afterwards get slobbered on by Jacques Chirac. The contest will end on Sunday, November 14th at 8 pm CT, when our guest judge will select the winners.

Let the games begin!

Pew Research: Moral Values Far Overblown In Exit Polling

It's probably too late to change the conventional wisdom on the presidential election now, but a Pew Research Center analysis of exit polling and their own new survey throws cold water on the notion that "moral values" provided the primary motivation for voters. Even for those who did prioritize morality first, it doesn't reflexively relate to conservative outlook:

When "moral values" was included in poll questions, it was named more often than any other issue. But when voters were just asked to name the issue most important in their vote for president — without being given a list of answers — moral values trailed the war in Iraq and the economy, according to the Pew survey.

"The advantage of the open-ended question is it tells you what's at the top of mind for voters — what they're thinking," said Cliff Zukin, a veteran pollster and professor of public policy at Rutgers University. "Much too much has been made of the moral values answer."

Suggesting "moral values" tripled its likelihood of being selected as a primary motivation, Pew found. In its control sample, where the question was open-ended (no choices provided), only 9% chose moral values; it tied with terrorism, oddly enough, and trailed Iraq (27%) and the economy (14%). But when given on a list of choices, 27% selected moral values, with Iraq sliding to 22%. And Pew found that "moral values" extended beyond abortion, into areas that tend to favor liberals:

The Pew poll found that voters' reasons for picking "moral values" varies. Just over four in 10 of those who picked "moral values" from the list mentioned social issues like gay marriage and abortion, but others talked about qualities like religion, helping the poor, and candidates' honesty and strength of leadership.

"We did not see any indication that social conservative issues like abortion, gay rights and stem cell research were anywhere near as important as the economy and Iraq," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "'Moral values' is a phrase that's very attractive to people."

I always thought that the "moral values" meme provided a too-easy simplification of the presidential election. The media loved it because it gave them a handy way to discredit the red-state voters as a bunch of ignorant hicks who wanted to create Jesusland out of Middle America. The Christian conservatives, intriguingly, played along with the mass media in order to magnify the clout they showed in their support for George Bush. No one asked why the war wouldn't be first in the minds of votes, during wartime when our soldiers face real bullets and our homeland had been attacked.

Sorry to disappoint the Janeane Garofalos and Michael Moores of the world, but Americans voted for Bush for very rational reasons. Moral values played a part, as they do in every important decision people make, liberal or conservative, but they're applied to specific issues. The American electorate is far more sophisticated than the media or groups vying for power wish to acknowledge.

Blackwill Abused Female Staffer: WaPo

You can scratch recently retired diplomat Robert Blackwill from the list of potential Cabinet appointees in the second Bush term. Condoleezza Rice herself scolded the architect of Bush's Iraq policy after he verbally and physically abused a female staffer, according to the Washington Post:

Robert D. Blackwill, who resigned last week as the White House's top official on Iraq policy, was recently scolded by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told her that Blackwill appeared to have verbally abused and physically hurt a female embassy staffer during a visit to Kuwait in September, administration officials said.

The incident took place as Blackwill was rushing to return home after a visit to Baghdad to join a campaign swing planned by President Bush. As six officials describe the incident, he arrived at the Air France counter at the Kuwait airport and learned he was not on the flight manifest. Blackwill then turned in fury to an embassy secretary who had accompanied him to the airport and demanded that he be given a seat on the flight, grabbing her arm at one point, the officials said.

Powell found out about the incident and informed Rice. He then had staff members gather facts and materials to present to Rice, including photographs of the woman's arm, a State Department official said.

I find it interesting that Glenn Kessler and Al Kamen found a half-dozen or more witnesses to the action that would speak with them in a White House supposedly obsessed with secrecy. Assuming the story is true, their sources have two possible motives. Either they don't want to have to work for Blackwill again, or the White House wants to make sure everyone knows why Blackwill won't be invited back. In any case, the reprimand must have been somewhat awkward for Rice, as Blackwill was her mentor earlier in her career.

The Post's White House sources insist that the incident did not cause Blackwill's resignation, but undoubtedly it will ensure that Blackwill does not return to Bush's staff. His behavior, if true, was reprehensible and inexcusable, and its extreme nature suggests that this incident was probably not unique. Kessler and Kamen mention in this article that Blackwill has a reputation as a difficult boss, but I recall that even at the time of his resignation that Blackwill had twice been the subject of an unfavorable management analysis prior to this incident.

Unfortunately, some of the most talented people in any business treat their peers and subordinates badly, even ironically in the diplomatic world. When they refuse to control their behavior or simply are unable to do so, their talent never outweighs the damage they do to the organization. The Administration may miss Blackwill's abilities, but they should not be tempted to bring him back.

Terrorists Get Desperate

The AP reports that terrorists trapped in Fallujah tried to break through an American cordon to the south of the city to escape. The failed attack is another bid to take the pressure off of the Islamofascists and Saddam holdouts, as their brethren in Iraq desperately attacked all around the country to distract the Americans:

Insurgents tried to break through the U.S. cordon surrounding Fallujah on Thursday as American forces launched an offensive against concentrations of militants in the south of the city. Some 600 insurgents, 18 U.S. troops and five Iraqi soldiers have been killed in the four-day assault, the U.S. military said.

In an apparent bid to relieve pressure on their trapped allies, insurgents mounted major attacks in Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city 220 miles to the north. Guerrillas assaulted nine police stations, overwhelming several, and battled U.S. and Iraqi troops around bridges across the Tigris River in the city, where a curfew was imposed a day earlier.

Not only have the Iraqis and Americans cornered the terrorists, but they've discovered at least one of the houses where they butchered their hostages for video rebroadcast. A Fox News journalist embedded with the 5th Marine Regiment also reported that five bodies were found in another Fallujah house, all shot in the back of the head execution style, and all apparently civilians. But the AP informs us that the terrorists didn't just keep their activities confined to Fallujah residences -- they turned the City of Mosques into the City of Arms Caches:

At a U.S. camp outside Fallujah, Maj. Gen. Richard Natonski, commander of the 1st Marine Division, said the operation was running "ahead of schedule" but he would not predict how many days of fighting lay ahead.

He said troops had found an arms cache in "almost every single mosque in Fallujah."

So much for the Religion of Peace, and so much for respecting the Islamic sensibilities of our enemies.

Going home

My 10 year high school reunion is this weekend, so I'll be packing and driving back to Arkansas tonight. My parents only have dial-up (the horror!) so posting will be light for me this weekend.

Insurgents Discover That French Reporters Uphold Gallic Military Tradition

Jackie Spinner at the Washington Post hosted a live-chat Q&A on the war in Iraq and journalists' efforts to cover the action. Spinner joined the chatroom live from an Army outpost near Fallujah, and the very first question asked about the benefits of embedding reporters within military units as opposed to freelancing in a war zone:

Q - Is it preferrable to report from an embedded military unit, or do you prefer to roam about the city without their protection? I presume the quality of reporting is better if you aren't chained to a branch of the military, but it certainly seems much more dangerous to move about Iraq without their security. ...

A - Unfortunately, it is impossible to roam about the city without protection. The only way we can cover this offensive for now is with the military. I should note that the insurgents offered embed spots to us as well. Only a French photographer took them up on it. He was detained by US forces yesterday as he fled his embed.

Not for the first time, I presume the Ba'athist remnants and Islamist terrorists may be regretting their strategy of bribing the French to put up a facade of legitimacy for them. Last year, a French journalist made waves by embedding himself with "insurgents" and photographing them while they shot and fired missiles at American soldiers. It seems the French get a lot less courageous when someone fires back ... but then, we learned that decades ago.

Jimmy Carter Eulogizes Terrorist; No One Surprised

To no one's great shock, Jimmy Carter decided to wax eloquent about the world's premier terrorist at his passing. Carter continues his unbroken streak of poor judgment in his remarks on Yasser Arafat, his fellow Nobel laureate who incidentally murdered a whole lot of people, Americans included:

Former US President Jimmy Carter called Yasser Arafat "a powerful human symbol and forceful advocate" who united Palestinians in their pursuit of a homeland. "Yasser Arafat's death marks the end of an era and will no doubt be painfully felt by Palestinians throughout the Middle East and elsewhere in the world," Carter said.

"He was the father of the modern Palestinian nationalist movement. A powerful human symbol and forceful advocate, Palestinians united behind him in their pursuit of a homeland," he said in a statement distributed by his Atlanta, Georgia-based Carter Center.

To hold up Arafat as a "powerful human symbol" after all of the death and destruction he has wrought on innocents around the globe sickens me. By Carter's reckoning, Pol Pot should be recognized as an advocate for change and Stalin would be remembered as an ardent patriot and powerful beacon of hope for the Russian people. It demonstrates a breathtaking and willful ignorance of the evil that Arafat inflicted throughout his entire life, directing the murders of women and children while he fleeced the very people he claimed to lead by stealing their money.

Carter's spokesman informed the press that the former President would not be attending Arafat's funeral. One presumes he is too overwhelmed with grief to show his face. He should be ashamed to appear anywhere after that statement of support for the pioneer of modern terrorism.

Censoring Private Ryan

From USA Today:

Many ABC affiliates around the country have announced that they won't take part in the network's Veterans Day airing of Saving Private Ryan, saying the acclaimed film's violence and language could draw sanctions from the Federal Communications Commission.

The decisions mark a twist in the conflict over the aggressive stand the FCC has taken against obscenity and profanity since Janet Jackson flashed the world during the last Super Bowl halftime show.

Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning movie aired on ABC with relatively little controversy in 2001 and 2002, but station owners — including several in large markets — are unnerved that airing it Thursday could bring federal punishment. The film includes a violent depiction of the D-Day invasion and profanity.

"It would clearly have been our preference to run the movie. We think it's a patriotic, artistic tribute to our fighting forces," Ray Cole, president of Citadel Communications, told AP Radio. The company owns WOI-TV in Des Moines, KCAU-TV in Sioux City and KLKN-TV in Lincoln, Neb.

Equating a film depicting the herroric sacrifce of our World War II veterans with a tacky publicity stunt would be outrageous, even for the parental FCC.

And Cole's self-serving statement falls rather flat when he offers this follow-up:

"We're just coming off an election where moral issues were cited as a reason by people voting one way or another and, in my opinion, the commissioners are fearful of the new Congress," Cole said.

This is nothing more than network backlash at the Red Staters. The voters were not thinking about TV programming when casting their ballots. They were instead focusing on the characteristics of leaders demonstrated in the very movie the networks have chosen not to air: patriotism, clarity of vision, and self-sacrifice.

Sarin nerve gas found in Fallujah

CQ reader Jeff Miller has alterted us to Glenn Reynolds' post on sarin gas in Fallujah. According to NPR's Anne Garrels, a reporter embedded with a Marine unit in Fallujah, the Marines found a suitcase filled with cannisters labeled "sarin nerve gas." You can listen to her report here. No word yet on how many cannisters were found or the origin of said weapons. Looks like some of Saddam's "nonexistent" WMDs didn't make it to Syria after all. (Hmm . . perhaps they did leave the country but have been imported back.)

I'm not surprised the terrorists had a nerve agent. I'm only confounded by the fact they didn't either use the weapons against the Marines or take them with while fleeing the city. Must have been in a real rush to get out of there. Or they have more stashed away somewhere.

In the immortal words of Matt Drudge: Developing . . . .

Marines Free Hostages In Fallujah

In another demonstration of the need for action, a US Marine Corps contingent freed four hostages taken by terrorists in Fallujah during their efforts to eliminate the Islamofascist and Ba'ath remnants in the city:

US-led troops involved in fighting against insurgents in the Iraqi city of Falluja have found four imprisoned men believed to be Iraqi hostages. Three of the men were contractors working for the US military, a US marines spokesman said, and the fourth said he was a taxi driver.

All of the men had been beaten and starved and were wearing handcuffs. ... They were found blindfolded, handcuffed and in a locked room.

In the same building, marines found surface-to-air missiles, night-vision equipment, black uniforms, computers and a weapons cache. They also retrieved what they called anti-coalition propaganda and videotapes showing torture of hostages and weapons training.

In a moment of farce, the BBC reports that this provided the "first concrete proof" that terrorists had bases in Fallujah. I suppose the charred bodies of four American contractors dragged through the city streets last April didn't convince the Beeb, nor did having two of the bodies strung up over the Euphrates while the sick bastards in Fallajuh danced on the remains of the other two make an impact on their reporting.

If the terrorists abandoned their safehouses so quickly that they could not transport their hostages, it may indicate that they underestimated the ability of the Americans and the Iraqi forces to penetrate Fallujah. Leaving them alive may also show that their "courage" failed them once they realized a reckoning was near. We may have some hope that the bulk of the terrorists did not escape Fallujah before the hammer fell.

Arafat As Rohrschach Test

The death of uberterrorist Yasser Arafat, the man who masterminded hundreds of attacks on civilians and inspired thousands of Islamic lunatics, provides a moment of clarity and insight into the leaders of our time. While heads of state should exercise judicious diplomacy in their official reactions in order to reach out to the Palestinians that Arafat victimized almost as badly as he did everyone else, the extent of their remarks provide an interesting look at the values of so-called friends.

For instance, Bush gave a carefully-crafted statement which avoided even speaking about Arafat or his deadly legacy. Instead, Bush wisely focused on the future:

The death of Yasser Arafat is a significant moment in Palestinian history. We express our condolences to the Palestinian people. For the Palestinian people, we hope that the future will bring peace and the fulfillment of their aspirations for an independent, democratic Palestine that is at peace with its neighbors. During the period of transition that is ahead, we urge all in the region and throughout the world to join in helping make progress toward these goals and toward the ultimate goal of peace.

Some leaders allowed more of their personal views on Yasser Arafat to come through. Two long-time allies of the US weighed in on Arafat's death. First, we have John Howard of Australia, whose country has staunchly supported our war on terror and the effort to liberate Iraq:

Mr Howard says many people regard Yasser Arafat as a terrorist and it is hard to believe that he could not have done more to restrain militant Palestinian groups.

"I think history will judge him very harshly for not having seized the opportunity in the year 2000 to embrace the offer that was very courageously made by the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barack, which involved the Israelis agreeing to 90 per cent of what the Palestinians had wanted," he said.

On the other hand, we have Jacques Chirac of France, whose country siphoned millions of dollars in oil-for-food money from the Iraqis and who tried to stop us from deposing Saddam Hussein, a man Chirac supported for three decades:

French President Jacques Chirac, confirming Yasser Arafat's death, has hailed the Palestinian leader as a man of courage and conviction who embodied the Palestinian struggle for a state.

"It is with emotion that I have just learnt of the death of President Yasser Arafat, the first elected president of the Palestinian Authority," Chirac said in a written statement on Thursday. "I offer my very sincere condolences to his family and to people close to him."

Which of these men do you think understands the threat of terror? Which one would you consider a staunch ally against terrorists? I had an emotion, too, when I read Chirac's statement: disgust.

Happy Veteran's Day From Captain's Quarters

Today is Veteran's Day, when we honor the sacrifice of our men and women who served and are serving to defend and protect our nation and spread liberty around the world. When I got up this morning, I wondered how I would celebrate veterans like my father, my uncles, and many friends and co-workers and the many who have served among CQ's readership. Fortunately for me, CQ reader Bob S. forwarded another e-mail from his neice's husband, a major in the Marine Corps currently stationed in Iraq. Not only does he speak eloquently regarding the Corps' birthday yesterday, but he reminds us of the spirit and sacrifice of the US fighting men and women in all branches of the service.

Camp Victory, Iraq
10 November 2004

A “Thought” from Iraq – Traditions & Reality

In 1921, then-Commandant of the Marine Corps John A. Lejeune, initiated the now storied tradition of a focused celebration of the Marine Corps’ birthday every year on the anniversary of the founding of our brotherhood, which occurred with a resolution of the Continental Congress on 10 November 1775. Ever since that time the intent of remembering our birthday has been simply celebrate ourselves and our Corps and cause Marines, young & old, retired & veteran to set aside a special time to remember what it is about our Corps that made us want to be part of it, and keeps us proud to wear the title today.

Some celebrations are elaborate, choreographed events that include live music and dancing through the night, and take place in luxury hotels or Officers’ Clubs throughout the Corps. Other events are more subdued, but all usually include music, the reading of General Lejeune’s birthday message from 1921 and then the current Commandant’s message for the year, and then the traditional cutting of the birthday cake. The first piece of cake is given to the oldest Marine present – whether he or she is still on active duty, retired or only served a couple years is irrelevant. After taking a bite of that piece, the oldest Marine then passes it to the youngest Marine present – representing the unbroken line of tradition & honor that is passed from generation to generation of Marines.

In my career I have celebrated the Marine Corps’ birthday aboard a Navy ship docked in Rota, Spain, in hotels, gymnasiums, Officers’ Clubs and in a US Embassy, but this year I celebrated the USMC’s 229th birthday in a place that a year ago or so I never would have even considered – in a palace that used to belong to Saddam Hussein. Tonight we had a terrific ceremony in the huge rotunda of the Al-Faw palace here aboard Camp Victory, and then adjourned to the ballroom for a steak dinner. Now, we ate the steak off of plastic plates with plastic utensils, but we were in the ballroom of a palace of a tyrannical dictator, with all the ornamentation & ostentation of the interior decorating still very much part of the ambience.

The palace is on an island in the middle of a man-made lake, so to get to it you have to cross a causeway from the south side of the lake. As I was in the middle of the causeway on my way into the palace for the ceremony today, I happened to look out into the western sky and saw thick black smoke rising on the horizon and wafting to the north. That smoke was from the battle for Fallujah that is still going on as I sit at my keyboard. It is incredibly humbling and moving to having been part of our USMC birthday celebration here today knowing that as we reflect on what it means to be a Marine, many of our brothers tonight, at this very moment, are slugging it out in the streets of a city whose name meant nothing to most of us twelve months ago. The fact that they are fighting on the Corps’ birthday will not be lost on any of the Marines out there tonight. It will cause them to fight with even more pride and resolve. No one wants to let his fellow Marine down, especially on the day we celebrate our birthday. In the weeks & months ahead we will hear stories about how Marines in Fallujah celebrated this night in the alleys and rubble, and renewed their own commitments to our Corps and thereby, to each other.

Our Commandant and the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps make a video every year to say, “Happy Birthday” to all Marines. In this year’s video message, the Commandant told a story of a young Corporal, a squad leader, who, during the invasion of Iraq was wounded by an enemy grenade. This Marine refused evacuation and continued to guide his squad until he passed out from loss of blood. Recovering at a US Army hospital in Germany, he convinced his doctors to release him, “borrowed” a set of camouflage utilities from a Navy Corpsman, called his wife and told her that he wasn’t coming home because his Marines who were depending on him, and then talked his way onto an Air Force transport back to Iraq. He had the “golden ticket.” He was headed home as a war hero with the medals to prove it, but he just couldn’t bear to let his Marines down, so he schemed & connived, as only a good Marine NCO can, and got himself back into the fight. There are those who will call that kind of response foolish. Then may God grant that I be such a fool. You may question the wisdom of that Marine, but he’s the kind of man you want on your side when the chips are down. You should have heard the reaction of the ballroom full of Marines to that story. That one action has now inspired thousands of fellow Marines – many of them very senior to that Corporal – to press on and live our lives as Marines our families, and our nation, would be proud of.

I’ll close tonight with an explanation of the attachment. A Marine lawyer here is a very accomplished vocal musician and conductor. He put out the word and we have assembled a men’s chorus made of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine personnel (plus one Royal Australian Navy officer). We have performed a couple times, but tonight we had our first “big” showing as part of the USMC birthday celebration. At rehearsal the other night we recorded the four-part version of, “The Star-Spangled Banner” that we sing. I thought you might like to hear what our “Hard-Corps Chorale” sounds like. Hope you enjoy.

To all Marines who end up receiving this – HAPPY BIRTHDAY from Iraq!

Happy Veterans Day to all.

Minnesota Teen Democrats Take 'Moonbat' Label Seriously

Two days after John Kerry lost to George Bush, three of his teen supporters got into a dispute with a Bush-supporting schoolmate at their Minnesota Zoo School of Environmental Studies, and after some juvenile taunting, the budding Democrats beat the other teen with a baseball bat:

Three high school students, one allegedly armed with a bat, were charged with attacking a pro-President Bush classmate after he reportedly said only gays would support Sen. John Kerry. ...

The alleged assailants have all been charged: one with felony assault — because he allegedly went to his car to get a bat during the assault, prosecutors said — one with misdemeanor assault and one with disorderly conduct.

In fact, both sides called the other "gay" for their political views, which still managed to outstrip the maturity level in some of the public debate from this election. Perhaps Lawrence O'Donnell counseled these young Democrats.

Oddly enough, however, when i turned to my trusty hometown newspaper for more extended coverage than the AP provided, I discovered that the Star Tribune wrote more words but provided less coverage. Here's the lead from the Strib:

Three teens are accused of attacking two classmates in an election-related assault near the school they attended at the Minnesota Zoo in Apple Valley.

The Nov. 4 fight started in a computer room at the School of Environmental Studies with students calling each other "gay" for supporting either President Bush or Sen. John Kerry, Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom said.

Missing from the entire article is any mention of which side attacked whom, while the AP made the fact that the three assailants supported John Kerry. Now obviously this doesn't reflect on Democrats in general -- no one's attacked me with a baseball bat, at least not yet -- but why would the Strib deliberately hide that fact from its readers when the AP found it interesting enough to make it into the lead for the story?

See Ya, Yasser

The world's first celebrity terrorist died peacefully today, a fate that he denied thousands of others during his murderous life:

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, 75, the leader who passionately sought a homeland for his people but was seen by many Israelis as a ruthless terrorist and a roadblock to peace, died early Thursday in Paris.

Arafat had been sick with an unknown illness that had been variously described as the flu, a stomach virus or gallstones. He flew to Paris nearly two weeks ago seeking medical treatment and was hospitalized with what Palestinian officials said was a blood disorder.

He had been on a respirator since slipping into a coma November 3.

A hospital spokesman said he died at 3:30 a.m. Thursday (9:30 p.m. Wednesday ET).

For all the crimes he committed and people he terrorized, the most ironic legacy Arafat left was the utter poverty and degradation he rained onto his own people -- while he and his wife lived it up on their money. And now the people of the West Bank will send him off with a hero's funeral, compounding the irony.

Maybe God will forgive him; I don't presume to know His will and judgment. All I know is that Arafat hastened a whole lot of innocent people into His personal audience. Arafat may be hoping He's grateful for the business ... but I rather doubt it.

Bush Picks Gonzalez

George Bush made the first Cabinet-level selection of his second term, nominating Alberto Gonzalez, Jr for Attorney General. Gonzalez will replace John Ashcroft, who resigned on Election Day. Unfortunately, given Gonzalez' history, I suspect that Gonzalez will also replace Ashcroft as a lightning rod:

In tapping Gonzales for the post, Bush picked a fellow Texan who has stirred controversy himself for his role in memos condoning the possible torture of terrorist suspects and arguing that prisoners captured in Afghanistan are not protected by the Geneva Conventions. But the soft-spoken lawyer also has been described as a relative moderate whose conservative credentials are sometimes viewed with suspicion by Bush's more rightist supporters.

Gonzalez didn't write the first memo mentioned, nor did he endorse it, but the Post reported that the Justice Department consulted heavily with the White House before drafting it. Both cases give ammunition to partisans in Congress for attempting to derail the nomination, or at the very least turning it into a television spectacle and reopening the mudslinging over Abu Ghraib. If that wasn't enough, conservatives will grumble, as the Post put it, at Gonzalez' centrism on social issues.

It seems to me that Bush did little for himself politically with this selection. Perhaps Rudy Giuliani and Larry Thompson made it known that they were not interested, but in the short time frame that the decision was made, it simply appears that Gonzalez was the pick all along. Either Giuliani or Thompson would have had a much easier time going through the confirmation process. Giuliani's star quality would have made him a highly effective proponent for the Patriot Act renewal, and his track record would have lent more trust to its implementation. Thompson would have been a smooth transition, professional and low-key, whose conservative bent would have kept Bush's base happy.

While I believe Gonzalez to be qualified to do the job, I don't think he was the most effective pick. Look for more challenges and partisan sniping from both the confirmation process and the Patriot Act renewal campaign in the upcoming session.

Cleaning House In Fallujah

The AP reports that Iraqi armed forces have found the houses where terrorists led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi beheaded their hostages, a grisly confirmation of the necessity of cleaning up Fallujah:

Iraqi troops have found "hostage slaughterhouses" in Fallujah where foreign captives were held and killed, the commander of Iraqi forces in the city said Wednesday.

Troops found CDs and documents of people taken captive in houses in the northern part of Fallujah, Maj. Gen. Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassem Mohan told reporters. ...

"We have found hostage slaughterhouses in Fallujah that were used by these people and the black clothing that they used to wear to identify themselves, hundreds of CDs and whole records with names of hostages," the general said at a military camp near Fallujah.

If nothing else, we've now confirmed that the ghouls that perform these beheadings stationed themselves in the so-called City of Mosques, and that our military attack has dislodged them and forced them to regroup. As we go farther into Fallujah and work our way through each area, I suspect we'll see a few more of these places. Hopefully we can find them before they butcher any more innocent civilians, or anyone else.

Happy Birthday, USMC!

Today is the 229th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. Our brave men and women have guarded this nation since before it officially existed and have been the vanguard of American power and service to the world. Few are foolish enough to doubt their courage, their intrepidity, and their determination, and for those a quick introduction to any Marine past or present suffices to educate them. I am honored to have Marines as friends and family, including one uncle on my mother's side who fought in Viet Nam, and my father-in-law, a Marine pilot in WWII and Korea who is now deceased -- but still a Marine.

Through the centuries, the Coprs (and all of our armed forces) have distinguished themselves with their honor, courage, and dedication to this nation and the pursuit of freedom and liberty nationwide. Congratulations, Marines! In your honor, I'm posting the Marines' Hymn, which are the lyrics to their instantly-recognizable march:

You Don't Bring Me Flowers

In response to the continuing post-mortems on the presidential election, various women's groups noted that George Bush made significant inroads with women. Exit polling showed that John Kerry only narrowly edged Bush in this demographic, 51-48, while Al Gore had claimed an 11-point gap in 2000. The groups blamed John Kerry and claimed he took them for granted:

Leaders of several women's groups said Tuesday that Democrat John Kerry fell short in his bid for the White House because he didn't make a more direct appeal for support from women voters. ...

"There was an assumption women would be behind the Kerry campaign," said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women. The Bush campaign referred to the liberation of Afghan and Iraqi women to appeal to women voters, said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority. But "Kerry never drew a very strong contrast with Bush" on women's issues until the end of the campaign, said Martha Burk, chair of the National Council of Women's Organizations.

Part of Kerry's problem sprang from his constant need to pander to all constituencies rather than declare his convictions and let the chips fall where they may. His lifelong support for abortion rights, among the most liberal of any politician, suddenly transformed itself into a reluctant disinclination to act upon his supposedly true belief of life beginning at conception -- and pro-choicers just as suddenly had no idea where Kerry would go once in office. The soft issues that normally concern women, such as child-care and education issues, wound up just as murky given that Bush had increased education spending a whopping 56% over Clinton-era budgeting.

Mostly, though, women found out that they were more concerned with security and resoluteness in wartime than any of the issues these groups pushed as primary causes. Women decided in almost the same numbers as men that John Kerry's vacillations left them unable to see him as someone determined to do whatever it takes to keep them safe, too willing to retreat in the face of political criticism rather than pick a course and stick with it. Besides, as the Bush campaign loved pointing out, it's hard to argue with the track record of liberating women in the Middle East that Bush built in the past three years.

In ordinary times, pandering on Head Start and latchkey kids buys votes, especially from NOW and Feminist Majority. In wartime and especially in the age of terror, moderate women tend to focus on the candidate least likely to sit back and allow their families to get blown up. Kerry simply could not earn their trust, and no amount of flowers brought or love songs sung could make the difference.

Taking On The SEIU

An anti-union watchdog group has filed a complaint against the largest government workers union in the country, alleging that the group illegally spent millions of dollars in dues on partisan political campaigns:

An anti-union group is urging the Federal Election Commission to investigate one of the largest unions in the country, claiming the Service Employees International Union unlawfully spent workers' dues to elect Democrats in last week's election.

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation said Wednesday that SEIU gave millions of dollars from members' dues to a partisan political group, America Coming Together, which in turn spent the money illegally to finance political campaigns through the Democratic National Committee.

Using dues, which get extorted from workers in closed shops, for political purposes has been banned for at least the last two years. Unions have to raise money through PACs or 527s with voluntary donations in order to contribute to political campaigns. The SEIU, which endorsed Howard Dean in the primaries and John Kerry in the general election, claims to have spent $65 million, legally, in the 2004 election cycle. That amount of money makes this reply from the SEIU sound rather suspicious:

"We are confident we are in compliance with the law," said spokeswoman T.J. Michels. "It's not surprising an anti-union group is making these allegations about a political mobilization spearheaded by thousands of SEIU members who want to put our country back on track for working families."

If "thousands" of union members donated $65 million for this electoral cycle, it would represent a rather substantial amount per member, wouldn't it? 100,000 members would have to had donated an average of $650 to the effort. I suppose that's possible, but if SEIU members have seven C-notes just wasting space in their wallets as a matter of course, then I suspect we've found one place where a deficit hawk like Kerry could find some cost savings. And that assumes that "thousands" adds up to six figures, which also seems somewhat doubtful.

Lkke John McCain himself admitted after the 527 debacle this year, money always finds a way back into the process. I'd say that if the SEIU itself claims it spent that much money on this cycle, then at least some of that funding came from the mandatory taxes dues it collects from its membership. Hopefully the FEC will act with haste in investigating this complaint.

Arizonans Take Security Seriously

Arizona voters passed a referendum last week that requires people to demonstrate their citizenship when registering to vote, produce ID when actually voting, and identify themselves as citizens or legal residents when receiving government services, despite the opposition of leading state politicians of both parties. Despite being outspent 5-1 along with all of the opposition, Arizonans sent a message on immigration to Washington by voting in favor, 56-44, and other states now may copy Arizona's effort:

Initiative proponents, arguing that illegal immigration in Arizona is out of control, said Proposition 200's passage on Nov. 2 was a crucial first step in reducing a glut of illegal immigration and sends messages to government officials in both Washington and Mexico that illegal immigration will not be condoned.

The initiative -- opposed by key elected officials in Arizona, including Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano and Republican Sen. John McCain; several Hispanic advocacy groups; labor unions and community and civil rights organizations -- passed with 56 percent of the vote.

Stricter border enforcement efforts by federal authorities in California and Texas have funneled hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens into Arizona, where they have placed huge demands on schools, hospitals and other public services.

Of course, this exercise in democracy and citizen action has produced the usual result -- a lawsuit. MALDEF and La Raza have both prepared suits to be filed as soon as the election results are certified to block Prop. 200's implementation, and if history is any guide, they will probably succeed in tubing 200. La Raza spokeswoman Janet Murguia argued that the 5-1 advantage they had in opposing 200 still didn't give them an oppotunity to convince people that 200 was bad policy:

Janet Murguia, head of the National Council of La Raza, said opponents would have been successful in defeating the initiative if they had more time to reach out to voters. She said the organization "continued to be frustrated by the immigration situation, but we want to remind folks this still is not the answer."

It appears that despite the heavy opposition and the disparity of the campaign spending, voters in Arizona supported 200 anyway. The idea that an election in which several months have passed between certifying a referendum and voting on it does not give highly organized groups like MALDEF and La Raza time enough to get its message out has no merit. Some of 200 may be bad policy, but it doesn't violate the Constitution; once again, one has to question the commitment to democracy of people who oppose citizen activism in creating laws they deem desirable. And certainly after all the wailing and crying we've heard from the past four years about electoral practices, ensuring that foreign nationals are not perverting our voting results should be one point on which all Americans can agree.

In a time of terrorist attacks on the US, having people pour over the Mexican border unregulated and unchecked becomes more than just an economic issue -- it's a security issue as well. Arizona just sent a big message to Washington that they are tired of being on the front lines all by themselves. Lawsuits may blunt the impact of the referendum, but the message itself will resonate.

Kristofian Hysteria

Nicholas Kristof would probably conclude that the cause of rainy days can and should be laid at the feet of the Bush Administration, based on his hysterical rant today about the freedom of the press. Kristof blames a rash of judges holding reporters in contempt for their secrecy on George Bush, not because any of the judges are Bush appointees (they're not), but because he sets an example of -- get this -- secrecy!

Paging China! Help us! Urge the U.S. government to respect freedom of the press!

It does sound topsy-turvy, doesn't it? Generally, it's China and Zimbabwe that are throwing journalists in prison, while the U.S. denounces the repression over there.

But now similar abuses are about to unfold within the United States, part of an alarming new pattern of assault on American freedom of the press. In the last few months, three different U.S. federal judges, each appointed by President Ronald Reagan, have found a total of eight journalists in contempt of court for refusing to reveal confidential sources, and the first of them may go to prison before the year is out. Some of the rest may be in prison by spring.

In each of these cases, reporters have used confidential sources to produce blockbuster exposés on crimes within the government. After garnering their big ratings and generating lots of ad revenue by publicly outing wrongdoers, these reporters suddenly get a case of terminal shyness when it comes to prosecuting the same criminals they've exposed. Reporters have claimed the First Amendment allows them to keep their sources confidential, but federal courts have never agreed to that interpretation. Only in California, where this privilege specifically exists in the state constitution, can reporters avoid their civic responsibility to not withhold evidence of criminal behavior on the part of others.

Take, for example, the Valerie Plame case. A government official leaked the status of Plame as a CIA agent in order to either (a) explain why her husband, the discredited Ambassador Joe Wilson, was inexplicably given a CIA assignment for which he was not qualified and which he performed poorly, or (b) in revenge for Wilson's outspoken opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Robert Novak broke the story, but two other reporters have specific knowledge of the leaker and refuse to divulge their sources, and have been found in contempt for not revealing them. (For some reason, as Kristof points out, Novak has escaped a contempt charge, and I agree with Kristof that Novak should be treated the same.)

Kristof wails about medieval treatment of these two reporters, but let's not forget that the press made this an issue in the first place, and the New York Times spent weeks clamoring for greater cooperation from George Bush in uncovering the leaker. The press demanded a full investigation and, again led by the Times, accused Bush of deliberately blocking the probe to protect high government officials from prosecution -- an impeachable offense. After making these accusation, however, and indeed after creating the entire controversy, the press refuses to back up its accusations with any kind of proof. It deliberately does the exact same thing that it acccuses the Administration of doing -- withholding evidence -- and expects to be treated as heroes for doing so.

All of this belongs to the same tropes that have existed since Watergate -- where the press sees itself as avenging heroes of truth. Unfortunately for Kristof, the avenging part seems to be in full play this year for the press but the truth part has been somewhat deficient. For the entire year we have been bombarded with stories of George Bush's National Guard sevice as if it were the equivalent of My Lai, culminating in the Times' partner, CBS, foisting a series of forged documents on its viewers in order to smear Bush.

Kristof acknowledges that the press is "seen as arrogant and biased", neatly maneuvering around the fact that they are arrogant and biased, and that their determination to be treated differently than anyone else defying a subpoena provides prima facie evidence of that arrogaance. The bias comes out in Kristof's assignment of blame to the Bush administration:

Responsibility lies primarily with the judges rather than with the Bush administration, except for the demand for phone records and for the appointment of Inspector Javert as special prosecutor. But it's probably not a coincidence that we're seeing an offensive against press freedoms during an administration that has a Brezhnevian fondness for secrecy.

It's probably less of a coincidence that the same news organizations that make accusations against the Bush administration fail to provide any evidence of wrongdoing and their reporters refuse to testify to bolster those charges. Blaming Bush for the actions of the judiciary, especially when the judges in question were appointed more than a decade before Bush took office, is not only ludicrous but hysterical, a lazy sky-is-falling, the-second-Dark-Ages-have-come reporting that completely undermines any argument Kristof might have for enshrining his interpretation of the First Amendment into law.

Being a member of the press does not confer upon reporters a special class of citizenship and a right to disregard the law. It doesn't even require that they be fair and objective, and in these days of forged National Guard memos and double standards for partisan differences, press membership doesn't imbue even a rudimentary sense of fair play. Reporters need to quit being hypocrites and start following the same laws they demand the rest of us respect.

Ashcroft Resigns, Presents Bush With Golden Opportunity

Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans resigned today, the first cabinet-level departures after George Bush's re-election. Ashcroft plans on staying until a successor is named, while the plans of longtime Bush confidante Evans were less clear. CNN has the details:

In the first signs of a second-term shakeup for the Bush administration, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans have resigned, the White House announced Tuesday evening.

Ashcroft's resignation will become effective upon confirmation of a successor, Justice Department officials said. There were no immediate details on when Evans' resignation would take effect.

Ashcroft, a former senator and two-term governor of Missouri, has garnered criticism during his nearly four years as attorney general on issues like the Patriot Act, which backers say helps the government in its fight against terrorism and critics say infringes on civil liberties.

I probably have a different view of Ashcroft's departure than many of my friends on the right. While I think that Ashcroft has been a good AG, no one can doubt that Ashcroft served as a political lightning rod. Most of that came from Democrats itching for a partisan war, but Ashcroft's demeanor and occasionally petty decisions did not help endear him to the American public. His dour public personality fostered a sense of secrecy and disengagement, while the decision to cover up a bare-breasted statue in the DoJ press briefing area gave his enemies an easy opportunity to paint Ashcroft as Puritan and theocratic. Ashcroft served his country well operationally, but he would have been an albatross in 2005 for the Bush Administration.

And in 2005, Bush cannot afford distractions from its fight against terror. The Patriot Act expires in 2005 and requires renewal from Congress. More importantly, law enforcement needs more tools to keep track of potential domestic threats, and the White House planned to introduce some form of the Patriot Act II to address some of those needs. With Ashcroft at the helm, Congress and the media would have torn the country apart, casting Ashcroft in the familiar role of a creepy Big Brother trying to peek under every windowshade and listen in on every breathy act of passion in American bedrooms.

With Ashcroft gone, Bush has an opportunity to make a strong bipartisan gesture, bolster the chances for both the Patriot Act renewal and Patriot II enactment, and bring a big gun on board for his second term. Bush should press Rudy Giuliani into service as the next Attorney General. Not only has Giuliani built nationwide appeal as America's Mayor after 9/11, his role on the front lines that terrible day gives him enormous gravitas on terror-related issues. His years as a high-profile federal prosecutor -- the bane of Mafioso in New York -- builds his resumé as a bona-fide operational AG rather than a mere political appointment.

Conservatives may decry Giuliani's centrist politics, arguing that after the base turned out for Bush in 2004 he owes them this appointment, especially since a hardliner like Ashcroft is leaving. In particular, pro-lifers will probably object to his more pro-choice bent. They should get over it. The AG will have little effect on abortion until the Supreme Court has changed radically to reverse Roe v Wade, and that is years away and has nothing to do with the Department of Justice. Giuliani's centrism will guarantee a speedy confirmation process and allow Bush to show that he has made the first "healing" gesture, while his overwhelming public support for the Patriot Act will cause hardly a burp in his nomination.

Bush needs to keep his partisan powder dry for the upcoming Supreme Court nominations and the critical renewal of the Patriot Act. While Bush could count on Giuliani's support whether Rudy remains outside the administration or not, having Giuliani on the team gives Bush a much better opportunity to leverage Giuliani's appeal to broaden his own and to get more bipartisan support for the Patriot Act. Hopefully Giuliani can be convinced to join up -- if the Administration recognizes the golden opportunity Ashcroft's resignation has provided them.

Caption Contest Winners!

Je le regrette le jeux sont fait -- as Jacques Chirac is certainly saying now that the last Captain's Caption Contest has closed out and the winners are about to be announced. In fact, Jacqui -- do you mind if I call you Jacqui, mon ami? -- appears to be eagerly debating the wonderful entries CQ readers submitted for this week's contest:

Sacre bleu! Voila, maintenant ... le winners:

Captain's Award (Leap of Faith) - Nathan:

"Well, his French isn't all bad. He does know how to pronounce 'Lambeau'."

You Have The Conn #1 (Death Imitates Art) - ff1047:

Trust me, it'll be just like "Weekend at Bernies", we can pull this off. For christs sake, the Democrats propped up a dead body as a candidate, we can prop up a dead terrorist as a "leader".

You Have The Conn #2 (The Untold Story) - Brian Wohlgemuth:

Luis Zapatero stands unimpressed as Jacques Chirac decscribes how Saddam Hussein was able to move Chirac's mouth as he sat on Hussein's lap.

You Have The Conn #3 (Die Hard With A Vengeance Award) - Swede:

Yes, yes, of course I know he won, you fool1 I just got off the phone wit zat idiot Bush! By the way, what does "Yippee Ky Yay Mother F'er" mean?

Report to Sick Bay (Or The Morgue, Depending On Who You Believe) - Betalune:

Chirac: "This hand, gentlemen, THIS HAND is the very hand that wiped the drool from Arafat's chin when I visited him last night. Pardon me, gentlemen, I . . . I can't continue. Give me a moment alone, please.

Thanks to everyone who entered, and congratulations to the winners! Remember, here at CQ, everyone's a winner -- just some of us have higher winning percentages than others. Comments on this post will remain open, as usual, in order for the winners to gloat, the others to disparage my intellect and/or my parentage, and for any other entries submitted just for the sheer enjoyment of amazing your friends and confounding your enemies.

Send me a photograph or an e-mail with a link to a great picture you think should be the subject of our next Caption Contest, and let me know if you'd like to be the guest judge!

Marines Rout Fallujah Terrorists

The Marines are steadily and successfully killing terrorists and breaking things in Fallujah. The AP reports:

Faced with overwhelming force, resistance in Fallujah did not appear as fierce as expected, though the top U.S. commander in Iraq (news - web sites) said he still expected "several more days of tough urban fighting" as insurgents fell back toward the southern end of the city, perhaps for a last stand.

Some U.S. military officers estimated they controlled about a third of the city. Commanders said they had not fully secured the northern half of Fallujah but were well on their way as American and Iraqi troops searched for insurgents.

The commander on the ground, Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, believes al-Zarqawi escaped Fallujah before the assault. This is unfortunate, but I’m certain there is still a Hellfire missile with his name on it.

The Marines are advancing rapidly toward victory. Of course the question has never been if the US forces would succeed but rather how long the battle for Fallujah will last. Wretchard from The Belmont Club provides this prediction:

Today's news will tell whether American commanders have decided to keep up the tempo and profit from enemy confusion or slow down and reduce the remainder by fire. One of the factors will be the condition of the Iraqi troops fighting alongside Americans. As suggested in the article above, Iraqi troops are employed to clean out areas like mosques that have been bypassed by US forces. This is dangerous and exhausting work. The limited number of trained Iraqi troops may enforce a limit on tempo. As the enemy fragments it will become a battle of small unit holdouts in dozens of locations. Each enemy position is doomed but they will take time to clean out.

The Marines exemplify professional fury, and I don't expect the commanders in the field to restrain them any more than necessary. The Marines will finish this job with all due haste and then it's on to Ramadi.

For insightful and expert analysis of the conflict, visit The Adventures of Chester, authored by a former Marine officer who served in Iraq war. Apparently, he has some special posts planned for tonight.

BTW: You know the election is over when the AP reports a story about US forces in Iraq without using the phrases "quagmire" and "bogged down" in the first paragraph.

You Know Aero Mexico Laughed At This One

This isn't the most pleasant article to read the day after flying in from Southern California, but it's good to keep in mind for future travel plans. Just make sure you take your own bottled water on your next flight while traveling domestically:

New water quality inspections on airliners were initiated Tuesday by the Environmental Protection Agency in response to the discovery of coliform bacteria in the drinking water of one in every eight planes it tested. ...

In August and September, the EPA tested drinking water aboard 158 randomly selected domestic and international passenger aircraft and found that 12.6 percent did not meet federal standards.

Twenty of the planes that were tested — which ranged from small commuter aircraft and jumbo jets — tested positive for total coliform bacteria, signaling the possible presence of other harmful bacteria. Two planes tested positive for E. coli bacteria, which can cause gastrointestinal illness if it is severe enough.

EPA officials have advised passengers whose immune systems are compromised to avoid drinking water from airplane galleys or lavatories.

It's really no laughing matter; the First Mate takes immunosuppressive medication and an infection from these types of bacteria could create a serious health emergency. Fortunately, she drank bottled water almost exclusively, except for a cup of tea on the return flight on Northwest. I doubt that the water ever reached boiling temperature, but hopefully it got hot enough to kill anything worrisome.

The US airline industry should feel embarrassed with the results of this survey. These findings would shut down restaurants if local health departments found them there instead of on airplanes. The airlines have steadily reduced food quality to meet the demands of competition and profit expectations, and while that experience has been understandably disappointing gastronomically, we don't expect it to be potentially deadly. After bailing out the airlines in the wake of 9/11, is an expectation of sanitary conditions and potable drinking water really too much to ask?

Caption Contest Winners Delayed

Sorry for the delay in the caption contest -- I will announce the winners later tonight. My vacation caused a miscommunication on this edition, which is why I still haven't announced the winners. Thanks for your patience and the gentle but pointed reminders you've sent today ...

All Hail The New Victims -- Democrats

Just when I thought it was impossible for Democrats to sink any lower in their post-election tantrums -- after all, it's hard to top secession as a political strategy for the arrested-development set -- now they have their very own psychological disorder, according to the Boca Raton News:

The Boca Raton News reported Tuesday that Palm Beach, Florida trauma specialist Douglas Schooler alone has already treated 15 clients and friends with intense hypnotherapy since the Democratic candidate conceded on November 3.

"I had one friend tell me he's never been so depressed and angry in his life," Schooler said. "I observed patients threatening to leave the country or staring listlessly into space. They were emotionally paralyzed, shocked and devastated," he told the daily.

"We're calling it 'post-election selection trauma' and we're working to develop a counseling program for it," said Rob Gordon, the Boca Raton-based executive director of the American Health Association.

I have a theory that Democrats are secretly thrilled to have lost this election to George Bush, and this report confirms it. Nothing makes a Leftist happier than to belong to a victim class, and now they have created one that may exceed any that came before. It makes them feel more complete than even an official apology would. Next up, of course, is forcing employers and health-care providers to recognize it as a disability under ADA.

I would have thought that such a report could only be published by the Onion, but unfortunately this may be the least irrational reaction by Democrats this week. We've had MS-NBC's Lawrence O'Donnell call for secession, his colleague Keith Olbermann proclaim the election rigged (while providing no evidence whatsoever), and massive requests for immigration information from Kerry supporters to everywhere except, oddly enough, France.

So far, the Democrats are demonstrating that they are anything but; in order to support democracy, one has to accept when their candidate loses as well as when they win. I'd like to ask how it feels to be less committed to democracy than the Afghanis, whose opposition candidates readily accepted their election results despite numerous hardships and difficulties. It's embarrassing when mainstream voices in a major party call for the breakup of the United States, and it's an insult to the men who gave their lives to keep the Union together less than 150 years ago, especially since the stakes are so superficial and petty.

At least they gave the "illness" a good name. Post-election selection trauma, or PEST, describe these summer patriots to a T.

Misunderestimated No More

CNN's Carlos Watson takes an unusual tack for the mainstream media, analyzing George Bush and his history and determining him to be a political genius:

Whether you are a Democrat, a Republican or an independent, it is hard not to look at President Bush's re-election victory last week and conclude that he is probably one of the three or four most talented politicians of the last half of a century.

Why do I write that? Think about it. In 10 short years, George Walker Bush has won not just one but three high-profile political races that most able politicians would have lost.

In 1994, with no real previous political experience, he beat a popular incumbent governor in the nation's second most populous state. Six years later, he beat a sitting vice president during a time of peace and prosperity. And last week, with a mediocre economy, an unpopular war and a well-funded and unified opposition, he not only won his race but also helped increase Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

Watson points this out just a bit late for all of Bush's opponents who have underestimated his strangled syntax for stupidity. With the re-election success, Bush has written his name into the history books and erased the one-term stigma of his father. Bush has done all this by always challenging the prevailing wisdom. Ann Richards was too popular to lose the governorship to a political neophyte. Al Gore should have been invincible after the illusion of eight years of peace and prosperity, a chimera that fell away within months of the Clintons leaving office but a powerful perception in November 2000. Despite the conventional wisdom of leaving political space between the sitting president and mid-term elections, Bush put on a high-profile campaign and bucked history, winning back effective control of the Senate and extending the GOP's thin margin in the House. Kerry's combat experience and a wave of Bush-hatred, combined with a hostile and unethical mainstream media, should have buried Bush this time around.

And all of this while his opponents derided him as a brain-dead chimp.

If you look closer at his personal electoral history, you can see another, more personal dynamic at work, one that also belies the "amiable dunce" facade that critics also hung on Reagan. Rumored to be his father's ruthless hatchet man in the first Bush presidency, his political victories have had a distinctive resonance to them. In his first foray, he soundly thumped the woman who had derided his father at the 1992 Democratic convention by saying that "Poor George" had been born with a silver foot in his mouth. Two years later, Ann Richards was supposedly still ascendant when Bush cut short her political career. In 2000, he defeated the running mate of the man who made his father a one-termer. In 2004, he managed to beat a man who may have been the first to dismiss him as an intellectually inferior frat boy back in his days at Yale, although that pairing had little to do with Bush's choice; it just seems serendipitous in retrospect.

Watson apologizes in advance for any unintentional endorsement of Bush's policy stances, but he drives the point home that Bush may be an unrecognized political genius in the mold of Reagan and Clinton. I'd argue that Bush more emulates Reagan and Truman than Clinton, whose political genius sprang from his singular ability to be all things to (almost) all people. Whichever one chooses, no one can seriously doubt the skills of the man who prevailed in three sure-loser political battles. Too bad the Democrats didn't open their eyes a little bit sooner.

Zapatero: We Don't Need No Stinkin' Americans

The Sun (UK) reports in its typically urgent prose that Spanish PM Jose Zapatero has declared that the EU will become the dominant power in the world within 20 years, and pledged Spanish partnership with France and Germany to create the new hyperpower:

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero brazenly declared the ultimate aim was to challenge America.

He declared: “Europe must believe that it can be in 20 years the most important world power. We want to arrange the European future at the side of France and Germany. Spain sees itself with France and Germany as never before.” ...

Zapatero was quizzed by German magazine Der Spiegel about the EU’s continuing need for US troops to deal with crises in the Balkans under the Nato umbrella.

He said: “Naturally it will still last some time, until we develop a closed defence policy. That can happen only after the agreement on a common foreign policy. The EU constitution is an important step in this direction.

“In 15 to 20 years we will surely have a foreign service for the EU.”

The Sun lambastes Tony Blair for signing onto the new EU constitution, claiming that it creates difficulties for Britain in maintaining its close relationship with the US. (The Sun also claims that George Bush refused to take Zapatero's congratulatory phone call after the election results became clear.) But the only problem Bush and Blair will likely have is restraining their laughter at the notion that Europe's three largest socialist economies could combine to form any kind of military power, let alone a hyperpower that could cow the US and undo the Anglo-American alliance.

One of the reasons that France and Germany have been able to create the socialist paradises they have now is because they have been able to avoid spending much money on defense for the past fifty years. Even though France withdrew from NATO, Paris has always relied on the deterrence that NATO provided against that other extreme socialist entity, the Soviet Union. American taxpayers footed the bill while France and Germany created the social programs that now threaten to bury them economically as their birth rates fall and the necessary new workers to create funding have disappeared. France and Germany have failed to implement the modest economic reforms demanded of their EU membership; where exactly does Zapatero think the new money will come from to transform the decaying economies of the Big Three into the powerhouses needed to fund this massive military buildup?

Zapatero has a habit of making wild prognostications, so taking him seriously may be a bit of a fool's errand anyway. The Spanish certainly covered themselves in glory when they elected this reluctant warrior, the man who predicts military glory after bugging out of Spain's pledges to help reconstruct Iraq, the first opportunity he had to make Spain militarily irrelevant. France and Germany so far have remained quiet on Zapatero's ambition. Perhaps they're tired of giving the world so many reasons to laugh at them. (hat tip: CQ reader Amelia)

Are They Keeping Arafat Alive To Find The Money?

As Yasser Arafat lies dying, a conclusion that appears less in doubt each day, the AP reports that the search has begun for millions -- possibly billions -- of dollars that the PLO leader may have stashed away during his forty-year reign as Palestinian leader:

In his four decades as Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat has run a murky financial empire that includes far-flung PLO investments in airlines, banana plantations and high-tech companies, and money hidden in bank accounts across the globe. ...

Forbes magazine ranked him No. 6 on its 2003 list of the richest "kings, queens and despots," estimating he was worth at least $300 million. Shalom Harari, a former top Israeli intelligence official, said Arafat may have stashed away up to $700 million, part of it for an emergency such as a new exile, especially with Israel threatening to expel him.

Two names frequently come up in connection with Arafat's money — Rashid and Arafat's wife, Suha.

In the past 10 years, Rashid has handled hundreds of millions of dollars in Palestinian Authority revenue Arafat diverted from the treasury — though a reformist finance minister, Salam Fayyad, said the money was invested on behalf of the Palestinian Authority and has since been restored to public control.

Suha Arafat, Arafat's wife of 13 years and mother of his daughter, lives in Paris and has received monthly payments of $100,000 from the Palestinian coffers, according to a senior official in Arafat's office. This year, French prosecutors launched a money-laundering probe into transfers of $11.4 million into her accounts. She has refused to talk to reporters about Palestinian finances.

Over the past few days, a feud has erupted between the cosmopolitan Suha Arafat and the Palestinian Authority leadership. Suha has barred Arafat's aides from contacting his doctors or seeing Arafat at the hospital, while stories of Suha's expensive tastes have floated to the surface in the international press. In the meantime, conflicting stories regarding Arafat's condition have been reported, ranging from brain-death to coma to unconsciousness.

This morning, the AP reports that the hospital itself finally acknowledged that Arafat has sunk into a coma and that his prognosis is poor:

Estripeau said the deterioration in the Palestinian leader's condition "marks a significant stage."

"The state of health of President Yasser Arafat worsened in the night of Nov. 8 to Nov. 9," Estripeau said. ... "The comatose state that led to his transfer to intensive care grew deeper this morning," he said.

As they announced this for the first time, PA leaders Ahmed Qureia and Mahmoud Abbas made arrangements to rush to Paris to see Arafat and, one presumes, to have a showdown with Suha. Suha claimed that the PA was trying to bury her husband alive and insists he will recover and return to Ramallah.

It has all the hallmarks of either a money grab or a power struggle -- usually the two are entertwined anyway, and given Suha's near-complete indifference to Palestine in the past, it's much more likely to be the former. Despite being married to Arafat for 13 years, she hasn't been to the West Bank in four years, preferring to live in Paris. Given her lavish lifestyle, Suha obviously has some access to the money that Arafat has stashed away and doesn't want anyone to come between her and the fortune that Arafat skimmed from the Palestinian cause. Abbas and Qureia just as obviously want to take over whatever assets Arafat has for themselves.

It's a sad but appropriate exit for the world's oldest terrorist: to be nothing more than a pawn in his last days of those closest to him in a grubby tug-of-war over his extortion proceeds. Despite all of the adulation he received from his people for murdering and terrorizing the West, in the end he was never more than a dollar sign to those closest to him.

Not Just A River In Egypt, Part 37B

The Washington Post's Mike Allen reports that John Kerry is "fired up" and plans to be an activist when he returns to the Senate in the next session. In fact, he's giving the impression that he wants to give the presidency another shot in 2008:

Democrat John F. Kerry plans to use his Senate seat and long lists of supporters to remain a major voice in American politics despite losing the presidential race last Tuesday, and he is assessing the feasibility of trying again in 2008, friends and aides said yesterday.

Kerry will attend a post-election lame-duck Senate session that begins next week and has said he is "fired up" to play a highly visible role, the friends and aides said.

If so, it would be the first time in twenty years. His previous visibility remained limited to six bills in twenty years and the Iran-Contra investigation from over seventeen years ago. If he pushes through two bills in the next year, he'll have increased his visibility sixfold.

Bob Shrum, Kerry's chief campaign consultant, told reporters during a Democratic panel yesterday that Kerry "will not do what Al Gore did after the last election -- he will not disappear."

"He will be active and vocal," Shrum said. "He has one of the most powerful lists in the Democratic Party and one of the most powerful fundraising bases in the Democratic Party, and I think he intends to use it to speak out."

Several Democrats expressed skepticism about Kerry's plans, saying they believe the party needs a fresh face and must turn a corner. One well-known Democratic operative who worked with the Kerry campaign said opposition to Bush, not excitement about Kerry, was behind the senator's fundraising success. "If he thinks he's going to capitalize on that going forward, he's in for a surprise," said the operative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Al Gore disappeared because no one could imagine a sitting vice-president losing a presidential bid in a time of supposed peace and prosperity. John Kerry at least can convince himself that he fell short because Americans don't dump a president in the middle of a war, but he's living in denial if (a) he thinks that the Democrats will trust him with the keys to the car again, and (b) that he inspired any significant segment to support him rather than hate George Bush. And George Bush won't be running in 2008, which eliminates his primary qualification for his candidacy.

A Gift That Keeps On Giving

I'm brushing off the long-abandoned DeanWatch category, as it appears the Democrats are about to reinforce their cluelessness by replacing three-time loser Terry McAuliffe with the darling of the International ANSWER set, former Vermont governor Howard Dean:

Former presidential candidate Howard Dean is considering a bid to become chairman of the national Democratic Party.

"He told me he was thinking about it," Steve Grossman, himself a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Monday. Grossman was a Dean backer during the former Vermont governor's failed presidential bid.

Dean, who was in Albany, N.Y., Monday night to give a speech, said he hasn't decided about the top party job, noting he'd received thousands of e-mails urging him to try for it. He said he's still uncertain about his future.

"It's a lot easier to run for president when you don't know what you're getting into," he said. "I will stay involved, believe me."

I believe him -- especially after watching his meltdown as it occurred in Iowa ten months ago. Afterwards, reports revealed that Dean had not believed winning possible and was unprepared for his role as frontrunner. It's not likely after that performance that the Democrats would trust him for another run, especially after their string of poor national performances in the last three election cycles. The last person they'll put at the top of their ticket in 2008 is a Northeastern liberal with demonstrated stability issues and a radical base.

However bad Terry McAuliffe is -- and he's been a catastrophe for the Democrats -- putting Howard Dean in charge may only have the effect of a slight change in tone. It does nothing to drag the party back to Middle America. Let's not forget that Howard Dean famously left his church in a fit of pique over their lack of support for a bike path; is this the man who could bridge the gap between the urban secularists of the blue states and the wide swath of red between the coasts?

Of course, Dean hasn't even tossed his hat in the ring for the DNC chair yet. The e-mail barrage he's received from disappointed Democrats still points to an essential cluelessness about their poor performance in this election as well as 2000 and 2002. The only positive aspect of a Dean chairmanship is that it couldn't possibly be worse than McAuliffe's leadership. Putting Dean in charge would only make the marriage beween the radicals at International ANSWER and the Democrats much stronger and put more distance between the Democrats and mainstream America.

In the words of their latest candidate ... bring it on.

How About This: Kerry Was A Lousy Candidate?

I took a peek at the headlines this morning, while I'm wrapping up my vacation in Southern California, and the one story that really caught my eye was Howard Kurtz's piece on post-election analysis by the media. If you listen to the talking heads on TV, you hear all sorts of notions about why George Bush beat John Kerry: gay marriage, evangelicals, Michael Moore, red-America brain death, and so on. Kurtz analyzes the analysts in his own somewhat cynical style:

The Democrats were clueless on moral values. John Kerry was a lousy candidate. A northerner can't win anymore. The Bush team was better at manipulating the press. No one trusts the Democrats on national security. The gay marriage issue badly hurt the party. The Democrats need to move right, or left, or south, or undergo a personality transplant, or change the Constitution so Bill Clinton can run again. ...

The sudden focus on "family values" comes from the 22 percent of voters in exit polls who named that as their top issue, followed by 20 percent who chose the economy. But as Simon notes, "all that is based on the same flawed exit polls" that journalists are criticizing for a tilt toward Kerry. And how many are willing to tell pollsters that moral values aren't important?

Goldberg, a card-carrying conservative, says that since his side won, it's pundits on the left who are taking their hand-wringing to a higher level: "Liberals need to come up with grand theories. Their explanations are far more existential. They get to be very literary and metaphorical and Freudian and flowery."

What has been missed in the avalanche of what Goldberg calls grand theories is a prosaic truth: elections are about trust. In the end, the Democrats nominated a man that most voters cannot trust, based on a public track record of politically expedient reversals and his post-Vietnam activities. Democrats thought the latter would actually be Kerry's strength in an age of terror, which shows how out of touch they really are.

The media, which exerted itself mightily on Kerry's behalf and may well have wounded itself mortally in the process, has tried to explain away the results in a number of fashions, most of them focusing on the ignorance of the voter. They use the same discredited exit polling which showed Kerry winning by a landslide to determine that George Bush won because middle America wants to turn the Midwest into Jesusland. What piffle! If it hadn't been for the unrelentingly negative coverage given Iraq (and Afghanistan, before the success of the elections surprised the media), Kerry would have lost the election by ten points, maybe fifteen.

Its true that the Democrats have lost touch with mainstream America, it's true that Hollywood repels voters in huge numbers, and it's true that morality and values inform our public choices -- even John Kerry asserted that while he explained his support for partial-birth abortions. And none of that would have mattered one iota had the Democrats nominated a candidate that people could trust.

John Kerry was a lousy candidate and an inept campaigner, something that should have been obvious in 1996, when the Kennedy protege nearly lost what should have been a gimme election to William Weld. Why did the Democrats nominate him instead of their VP candidate from 2000, who should have logically been the standardbearer this year? Now that's the question they should be asking themselves.

Campaign Finance Reform Lays A Very Expensive Egg

The New York Times performs a post-mortem on the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act as implemented in the 2004 election cycle, and while Glen Justice never mentions the word "failure" in his analysis, the data more than suggests that verdict:

The McCain-Feingold law, which did more to change how American political campaigns are financed than any legislation since the 1970's, got its first real-world test in this year's election. And now its critics are more emphatic than ever in arguing that the law has fallen short of its goals, and even some supporters are calling for revisions. ...

The major advocacy groups at work in this year's elections, called 527 groups after the section in the tax code that created them, raised more than $350 million, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, which tracks campaign finance.

While it is axiomatic in politics that each race will cost more than the last, and while final numbers will not be in for weeks, the figures posted through mid-October set records even though candidates and parties were restricted for the first time to only hard-money donations.

The field of presidential candidates raised about $851 million (including public financing), a 70 percent increase over 2000. National political parties raised more than $1 billion, 12 percent more than when they were able to gather six- and seven-figure soft-money checks.

In total, this year's races for Congress and the White House are estimated to have cost roughly $3.9 billion, about a third more than they did four years ago, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending.

John McCain promised at the time his eponymous act passed that the new law would eliminate "checkbook politics" and lead to cleaner elections. Within two years, in the very next election cycle, McCain was proven to be as wrong as possible. The richest people in America wrote checks like crazy -- George Soros spent $29 million alone, and he wasn't running for office.

McCain and the rest of the campaign-finance reformers make the same mistake in assuming that money corrupts the system. The corrosive effect of money comes from the secrecy in which it passes through the hands of politicians, not from the money itself. By setting up artificial and silly categories of money, all that the government has done is forced the financing out of the hands of people who exercise the most responsibility for its use -- the political parties themselves -- and into groups with no political accountability whatsoever. The result was the meanest, ugliest presidential campaign in recent memory.

McCain insists that the FEC simply didn't adjust to the new uses of campaign cash quickly enough, but that can't be done without authority from Congress. The truth was that McCain's bill was poorly written and allowed a number of loopholes, and the nebulous nature of the bill guaranteed that the FEC could do little except allow events to run their course. Nor will suggestions for excising these loopholes correct the main problem, and chances are these ideas will not pass First Amendment muster with the Supreme Court now that they've seen the results of their initial approval of the reform laws.

The only method of reforming politics and financing is to require full, personal, and immediate disclosure of all contributions and ensure that the money goes directly to the candidates. In that way, the public will see whose money supports which candidate and the candidates can be held directly responsible for the use of the financing. Playing games with money by creating artificial categories and Byzantine regulations regarding its use only benefits the lawyers that campaigns are forced to hire by the gross and ultimately piles more mystery on its origin and control. It's far past time to scrap the entire "reform" machinery and rely on full disclosure and the resourcefulness of the voters and press to hold candidates accountable.

Rove's Analysis: Kerry Voting Record Sealed The Election

Many analysts have made a second career out of postulating how George Bush managed to beat John Kerry in the presidential election. Most of the speculation has centered on anti-gay marriage initiatives in eleven states, even though a thorough analysis of voting between 2000 and 2004 show a slight decrease in support for Bush in comparison. The one person given credit as the architect for the victory, Karl Rove, insists that the real reason is much more prosaic:

Tactically, Kerry's decision to vote for the $87 billion in funding for troops and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then deciding in October 2003 to vote against it, was a bonanza for the president's campaign, "the gift that kept on giving," Rove said.

Kerry's record in general and his shifting support for the war in Iraq caused the most problems for him among voters, Rove insisted. Exit polling has been widely reported to state that voters felt that Kerry didn't represent their moral values, but Rove disputed that. He told the AP that his review of polling showed that the war in Iraq turned out to be the most important issue when ballots were cast. Conventional wisdom had Iraq as Bush's Achilles heel (as opposed to the overall war on terror, where he scored big numbers over Kerry), but even Iraq helped more than it hurt.

Rove also believes that the country has become more Republican over the last two election cycles and told the AP that more people voted as Republican than Democrat -- the first time that has happened in many decades. The national results appear to bear this out. Democrats lost an additional ten seats in the House, where Texas redistricting accounted for at least half of that number. More significantly, the GOP picked up four more seats in the Senate overall, coming in 6-2 in reversals this cycle. It marks the third straight election in which the GOP have gained seats in the upper chamber and their biggest majority there since before WWII. The only seats they lost were in Colorado, where a conservative Democrat holding statewide office beat a first-timer in politics, and in Illinois where the GOP ran a ridiculous carpetbagger in Alan Keyes against the charismatic and centrist Barack Obama.

The American electorate has been realigning itself ever since the 1998 mid-terms, when the Clinton impeachment damaged Republican efforts. The country has moved farther to the right while the Democrats have allowed their party to be hijacked by the radical left, with people like Michael Moore and Jimmy Carter and organizations like International ANSWER and MoveOn setting their agenda. The two leading candidates in their primaries both kowtowed to the radical anti-American activists in these organizations while the majority of voters found themselves appalled by their protests and accusations.

If Democrats want to be taken seriously as a national party in the future, they need to stop kidding themselves about why they lost this election. Gay marriage did not bury John Kerry, whose position on the issue almost exactly mirrored that of Bush. Values and morals played a part, but much more impact came from Kerry's temporizing on American independence on security issues and the company he kept on the campaign trail. Democrats need to marginalize the Stalinists (I-ANSWER) and the aging hippies (Kerry, Hollywood) to return to their progressive, pro-engagement past. Until they do, they can expect to see the slivers of blue at both ends of the country continue to shrink and cement their status as a long-term minority party.

Marines Unleashed at Last

The Marines have finally been given the green light for the assault on Fallujah. From Fox News:

U.S. forces stormed into western districts of Fallujah (search) early Monday, seizing the main city hospital and securing two key bridges over the Euphrates River (search) in what appeared to be the first stage of the long-expected assault on the insurgent stronghold.

An AC-130 gunship (search) raked the city with 40 mm cannon fire as explosions from U.S. artillery lit up the night sky. Intermittent artillery fire blasted southern neighborhoods of Fallujah, and orange fireballs from high explosive airbursts could be seen above the rooftops.

U.S. officials said the toughest fight was yet to come — when American forces enter the main part of the city on the east bank of the river, including the Jolan neighborhood where insurgent defenses are believed the strongest.

Europe Reconsiders Muslims In Wake Of Filmmaker's Murder

AP religion analyst Brian Murphy reports that tensions are rising between mainstream European society and the growing Muslim community in its midst, especially after the brutal murder of Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who criticized Islamic practices with regards to women. More Muslim threats against Dutch politicians followed the murder, and Europeans are beginning to ask themselves whether Muslims can ever be assimilated into their communities:

But those big issues fade on the streets of many European centers. Here — even in places like tolerant Amsterdam — it's often expressed as a gnawing feeling that militant factions in Islamic immigrant communities are gaining ground and chipping away at values such as free speech and secular politics.

"There is a general feeling that a social collision is becoming inevitable," said Jan Rath, co-director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies at the University of Amsterdam. "People think it's been building for years and now finally coming to the surface."

The landmarks along the way included the 1989 death threat "fatwa," or religious edict, against British writer Salman Rushdie for alleged insults to Islam in "The Satanic Verses," the rise of neo-Fascist movements, the assassination of Dutch anti-immigrant politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and France's ongoing showdown with Muslims over a ban on headscarves and other religious apparel in schools.

"My impression is the European voices that say, `Everyone is equal, but we are more equal than Muslims,' are growing," Rath said.

Curiously, we seem to have avoided the same kinds of confrontation with Islam in America that the Europeans have experienced, probably because the immigration levels have not been as heavy here. But I think there may be other reasons as well, having to do both with the relative lack of the nanny state and a tradition of religious freedom. For all of the talk about how Bush's election victory portends the establishment of Jesusland, the truth is that America has always been more welcoming of all religious faiths and has been less bound by religious traditions, and especially sectarian conflict, than Europe.

Europeans have faced off against Muslim invasions in centuries past, and Muslims still carry the memories of Islamic ascendancy on the Continent. That history drives the conflict in the Balkans to this day, and the long memory of Islam guarantees that any co-existence with Christian or secular Europe will necessarily be an uneasy one at best. With extremists and terrorists calling for the reconquest of Andalusia and Muslims agitating for their own European state in Kosovo and elsewhere, both sides have awoken to the fact that Islam is not about free assimilation with other cultures.

What lessons can America learn from this? Bear in mind that Islam never had any foothold in the Western Hemisphere, and so the historical issues that cause so much turmoil in Europe have no counterpart here. However, until mainstream Islam speaks out against such ambitions and tactics with a strong and clear voice -- which they have yet to do -- we should monitor our own immigration policies from Islamic nations and ensure that we do not have our own flood of agitators to band together and cause civil disruption.

The Muslims that emigrate here tend to do so because they work for a living, as we lack the vast social programs of Europe and survival requires hard work. That tends to turn people pragmatic instead of giving them too much time to radicalize and organize. It probably also attracts those Muslims more inclined to working hard instead of rabble-rousing. We need to maintain those policies while keeping a close eye on those we allow to migrate to the US. For Europe, that option closed many years ago, and now they have to decide whether to cut off immigration altogether or to surrender to the inevitable overwhelming influence of Islam in two or three decades.

The only long-term solution that ensures the peace and stability of all these regions, Southwest Asia included, is the reduction of radicalism through the introduction of truly representative democracies in Arabia. Only by reducing the radical fervor at its source will Europe be secure in the long run. Shortsightedness, America-envy, and a twisted sense of political correctness -- along with a healthy dose of plain, old-fashioned cowardice -- keeps the old guard of Europe from seeing this. Until Europe as a whole develops the political will to solve the illness instead of decrying its symptoms, the murder of Theo Van Gogh will just be the first in a long string of asymmetrical attacks on Europe's will to resist the ummah and the dhimmitude radical Islamists have planned for them.

Iraq Declares Martial Law As Talks Drag On

After a series of bombings that killed dozens of people yesterday, the Iraqis declared a country-wide emergency, excluding Kurdistan. The measure placed the country into an equivalent status of martial law while the Allawi government continued its efforts to negotiate with the terrorists of Fallujah:

Iraq's interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi declared martial law on Sunday and said a U.S.-led military offensive against the rebel-held city of Falluja could not be delayed much longer. ...

Allawi was doing all he could to find a peaceful solution, his spokesman Thair al-Naqib said. "He still hopes that it may be possible to avoid a major military confrontation in Falluja ... He is, however, not optimistic," Naqib said.

The Americans say they are only awaiting the word from Allawi, who returned from Europe on Saturday, to attack.

Why does Allawi hesitate? First, the battle of Fallujah will certainly be bloody, more bloody than Samarra or Ramadi. I believe that some elements of the Governing Council remain sympathetic to the Fallujan insurgents and will use the casualty rate coming from any assault to attack Allawi politically. The defense minister has already stated his opposition to military action against Zarqawi's stronghold -- which calls into question his appointment. Obviously, the terrorists have the capability of attacking, and the defense minister doesn't appear to have the stomach to respond.

Allawi cannot afford to give the same impression. He needs to quit pandering to public opinion in Old Europe and the good graces of Kofi Annan. Neither want Allawi to succeed anyway, and no matter what he does short of resignation, they won't lift a finger to help. Talking with Fallujans have only given them the impression that they have something to hold over Allawi. He's given the peaceful solution the best shot, and now it's time to attack the terrorists before more of his own people get killed while he dithers.

The run-up to Fallujah reminds me of the Najaf campaign, where Allawi had to drag himself into facing off against rebels and insurgents and had the annoying habit of starting and stopping military action to chat a bit more with his enemy. With the Imam Ali shrine at risk, hesistancy was somewhat understandable for political reasons. In Najf, however, he faced off against a rather conventional opposition, which styled itself as an army with a single leader. In Fallujah, he's facing a much different foe, and the political stakes are reversed. Doing nothing only assures more destruction around the country, more senseless civilian deaths and butchery. Allowing this to continue while negotiating with terror masterminds will convince Iraqis that Allawi is too weak to protect them from the killers.

The time to act is now. The elements are in place. All that's needed is political intelligence and a bit more moral certitude from Ayad Allawi.