Whither The Fool?

REPORT: Saudi Publications On Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques (FreedomHouse.Org)

According to the Preface to this Report, Freedom House was “[f]ounded more than sixty years ago by Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, and other Americans concerned with the mounting threats to peace and democracy, Freedom House has been a vigorous proponent of democratic values and a steadfast opponent of dictatorship.”

The report surveys a large body of publications that have been distributed in American Islamic mosques, and funded by the government of Saudi Arabia. Our “friends” the Saudis appear to have a lot of ’splainin’ to do. However, whether our government–which unfortunately does seem to pick and choose which terrorist-sponsoring governments it will pressure and which it will not–will actually do anything about this is a pertinent question in my mind.

Some excerpts from these publications quoted in this Report are as follows:

�..[I]t is basic Islam to believe that everyone who does not
embrace Islam is an unbeliever, and must be called an
unbeliever, and that they are enemies to Allah, his Prophet and
believers.�.� [Document No. 2]

– Report, Page 19.

�..To be dissociated from the infidels is to hate them for their
religion, to leave them, never to rely on them for support, not
to admire them, to be on one�..s guard against them, never to
imitate them, and to always oppose them in every way
according to Islamic law.�.� [Document No. 45]

– Report, Page 20.

�..Whoever believes that churches are houses of God and that
God is worshipped therein, or that what Jews and Christians do
constitutes the worship of God and obedience to Him and His
Prophet, or that God likes such practices and approves of them;
and whoever assists them to keep their churches open and to
establish their religion, and does so out of a feeling of kinship
or out of a sense of obedience�..whoever does all these things
is an infidel.�.� [Document No. 52].

– Report, Page 21.

�..It is forbidden for a Muslim to be first in greeting an
unbeliever, even if he has a prestigious position.�.� [Document
No. 44]

– Report, Page 26.

“[I]nfidels can visit Muslims in their homes as long as the women
of the household are covered and segregated, and only in order
to preach Islam to them.” [Document No. 52]

– Report, Page 27.

�..[O]ur doctrine states that if you accept any religion other than
Islam, like Judaism or Christianity, which are not acceptable,
you become an unbeliever. If you do not repent, you are an
apostate and you should be killed because you have denied the
Koran.�.� [Document No. 55]

– Report, Page 38.

�..It is forbidden for a Muslim to become citizen of a country
[such as the United States] governed by infidels.�.� [Document
No. 44]

– Report, Page 39.

�..[Democracy is] responsible for all the horrible wars�.�.the
number of wars it started in the 20th century alone is more than
130 wars with more than 120 million people dead; not counting
victims of poverty, hunger and disease.�.� [Document No. 1]

– Report, Page 43.

�..To be true Muslims, we must prepare and be ready for jihad
in Allah�..s way. It is the duty of the citizen and the
government. The military education is glued to faith and its
meaning, and the duty to follow it.

�..Preparing the weapons for war and possessing them; even
better than that is building special factories for manufacturing
military vehicles, tanks, rockets, planes, and other things
needed in modern warfare.�.� [Document No. 28]

– Report, Page 57.

It goes on. So much for the mild definition of jihad as a “struggle with the inner self,” at least so far as the Wahabbis are concerned!

We have a problem. If we don’t find some way to deal with it, jihad may well come to us no matter what definition we wish to accept.

The The Doctrine That Never Died (NewYorkTimes.Com)

Surely some bright bulb from the Council on Foreign Relations in New York or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton has already remarked that President Bush’s inaugural address 10 days ago is the fourth corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. No? So many savants and not one peep out of the lot of them? Really?

The president had barely warmed up: “There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants … and that is the force of human freedom…. The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. … America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one…” when - bango! - I flashed back 100 years and 47 days on the dot to another president. George W. Bush was speaking, but the voice echoing inside my skull - a high-pitched voice, an odd voice, coming from such a great big hairy bear of a man - was that of the president who dusted off Monroe’s idea and dragged it into the 20th century.

“The steady aim of this nation, as of all enlightened nations,” said the Echo, “should be to strive to bring ever nearer the day when there shall prevail throughout the world the peace of justice. …Tyrants and oppressors have many times made a wilderness and called it peace. …The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war. … The right of freedom and the responsibility for the exercise of that right cannot be divorced.”

Theodore Roosevelt! - Dec. 4, 1904, announcing to Congress the first corollary to the Monroe Doctrine - an item I had deposited in the memory bank and hadn’t touched since I said goodbye to graduate school in the mid-1950’s!

In each case what I was hearing was the usual rustle and flourish of the curtains opening upon a grandiloquent backdrop. But if there was one thing I learned before departing academe and heading off wayward into journalism, it was that these pretty preambles to major political messages, all this solemn rhetorical throat-clearing - the parts always omitted from the textbooks as superfluous - are inevitably what in fact gives the game away.

Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to President James Monroe’s famous doctrine of 1823 proclaimed that not only did America have the right, � la Monroe, to block European attempts to re-colonize any of the Western Hemisphere, it also had the right to take over and shape up any nation in the hemisphere guilty of “chronic wrongdoing” or uncivilized behavior that left it “impotent,” powerless to defend itself against aggressors from the Other Hemisphere, meaning mainly England, France, Spain, Germany and Italy.

The immediate problem was that the Dominican Republic had just reneged on millions in European loans so flagrantly that an Italian warship had turned up just off the harbor of Santo Domingo. Roosevelt sent the Navy down to frighten off the Italians and all other snarling Europeans. Then the United States took over the Dominican customs operations and debt management and by and by the whole country, eventually sending in the military to run the place. We didn’t hesitate to occupy Haiti and Nicaragua, either.

Back in 1823, Europeans had ridiculed Monroe and his doctrine. Baron de Tuyll, the Russian minister to Washington, said Americans were too busy hard-grabbing and making money to ever stop long enough to fight, even if they had the power, which they didn’t. But by the early 1900’s it was a different story.

First there was T.R. And then came Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. In 1912 Japanese businessmen appeared to be on the verge of buying vast areas of Mexico’s Baja California bordering our Southern California. Lodge drew up, and the Senate ratified, what became known as the Lodge Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The United States would allow no foreign interests, no Other Hemispheroids of any description, to give any foreign government “practical power of control” over territory in This Hemisphere. The Japanese government immediately denied having any connection with the tycoons, and the Baja deals, if any, evaporated.

Then, in 1950, George Kennan, the diplomat who had developed the containment theory of dealing with the Soviet Union after the Second World War, toured Latin America and came away alarmed by Communist influence in the region. So he devised the third corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The Kennan Corollary said that Communism was simply a tool of Soviet national power. The United States had no choice, under the mandates of the Monroe Doctrine, but to eradicate Communist activity wherever it turned up in Latin America … by any means necessary, even if it meant averting one’s eyes from dictatorial regimes whose police force did everything but wear badges saying Chronic Wrongdoing.

The historian Gaddis Smith summarizes the Lodge and Kennan Corollaries elegantly and economically in “The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945-1993.” Now, Gaddis Smith was a graduate-schoolmate of mine and very much a star even then and has remained a star historian ever since. So do I dare suggest that in this one instance, in a brilliant career going on 50 years now, that Gaddis Smith might have been …wrong? … that 1945 to 1993 were not the last years of the Monroe Doctrine? … that the doctrine was more buff and boisterous than it has ever been 10 days ago, Jan. 20, 2005?

But before we go forward, let’s take one more step back in time and recall the curious case of Antarctica. In 1939 Franklin Roosevelt authorized the first official United States exploration of the South Pole, led by Admiral Richard E. Byrd. The expedition was scientific - but also military. The Japanese and the Germans were known to be rooting about in the ice down there, as were the Russians, the British, the Chileans, the Argentines, all of them yapping and stepping on one another’s heels. Gradually it dawned on the whole bunch of them: at the South Pole the hemispheres got … awfully narrow. In fact, there was one point, smaller than a dime, if you could ever find it, where there were no more Hemispheres at all. Finally, everybody in essence just gave up and forgot about it. It was so cold down there, you couldn’t shove a shell into the gullet of a piece of artillery … or a missile into a silo.

Ah, yes, a missile. On the day in November 1961, when the Air Force achieved the first successful silo launching of an intercontinental ballistic missile, the SM-80, the Western Hemisphere part of the Monroe Doctrine ceased to mean anything at all - while the ideas behind it began to mean everything in the world.

At bottom, the notion of a sanctified Western Hemisphere depended upon its separation from the rest of the world by two vast oceans, making intrusions of any sort obvious. The ICBM’s - soon the Soviet Union and other countries had theirs - shrank the world in a military sense. Then long-range jet aircraft, satellite telephones, television and the Internet all, in turn, did the job socially and commercially. By Mr. Bush’s Inauguration Day, the Hemi in Hemisphere had long since vanished, leaving the Monroe Doctrine with - what? - nothing but a single sphere … which is to say, the entire world.

For the mission - the messianic mission! - has never shrunk in the slightest … which brings us back to the pretty preambles and the solemn rhetorical throat-clearing … the parts always omitted from the textbooks as superfluous. “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,” President Bush said. He added, “From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth.”

David Gelernter, the scientist and writer, argues that “Americanism” is a fundamentally religious notion shared by an incredibly varied population from every part of the globe and every conceivable background, all of whom feel that they have arrived, as Ronald Reagan put it, at a “shining city upon a hill.” God knows how many of them just might agree with President Bush - and Theodore Roosevelt - that it is America’s destiny and duty to bring that salvation to all mankind.

Muslim Apostasy: When Silence Isn’t Golden — Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (FrontPageMag.Com)

Last month, Britain�..s Daily Telegraph reported that Prince Charles was leading efforts to combat the Islamic law of apostasy, under which leaving the Muslim religion is at the very least illegal and is often punishable by death. Charles had held a private summit of Christian and Muslim leaders at Clarence House to discuss the issue. There was, however, one hitch: The Muslim delegation at the summit cautioned the prince and other non-Muslims not to speak publicly about apostasy laws, and some of the Christian leaders in attendance were reportedly �..sympathetic�.� to this concern.

Although the proffered reason that non-Muslims should not speak publicly about apostasy laws was that Muslim moderates could better influence the debate without outside intervention, this argument does not stand up to scrutiny. After all, virtually every observer agrees that the West cannot prevail in the war on terror unless Muslim moderates can counter their co-religionists�.. more militant outlook, yet Westerners do publicly criticize Islamic terrorism, loudly and repeatedly. Western silence on the apostasy issue will not help Islamic moderates; rather, silence is more likely to make both Muslims and also converts out of Islam believe that the issue is unimportant to the outside world.

Many Westerners, however, appear hesitant to speak out on the issue of religious freedom for converts out of Islam. There are two apparent reasons for this hesitation. First, in our multiculturalist society, many feel awkward about speaking up on behalf of those who leave Islam out of concern that attacks on apostasy laws could be seen as criticism of Islam itself. Moreover, apostasy laws affect small numbers in comparison to the large-scale threat of terrorism. Thus, many people may believe that it is not worth making waves over the issue.

This base view should be rejected. In pursuing interfaith dialogue, the treatment of apostates from Islam is one of the crucial issues that Prince Charles and other Westerners should address because the ability to change one�..s faith is a fundamental right. Freedom of belief lies at the very heart of an individual�..s identity because one�..s theological outlook is central to one�..s moral and philosophical understanding of the world. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights thus proclaims that everybody should have the �..freedom to change his religion or belief.�.�

For the vast majority of Muslims residing within the Islamic world, this freedom does not exist. Conversion out of Islam is illegal in at least fourteen countries, and is punishable by death in at least eight. Although official proceedings against Muslim apostates are relatively rare, they do occur. Most recently, Asia News reported on December 17 that Emad Alaabadi, a Saudi Arabian convert to Christianity, had been taken into custody by Saudi authorities.

Even in Muslim states that don�..t officially prohibit conversion out of Islam, the legal system is often used against those who leave the faith. In Egypt, for example, the government refuses to issue new identification papers to converts that reflect their new religion. Without new identification papers, converts�.. children must be raised Muslim and the converts have to live their lives as though they were still Muslim. Those who attempt to raise their children in their new faith when their papers list their religion as Islam may be charged with blasphemy. Because of this, apostates in Egypt are routinely charged with falsifying documents.

But by far the greatest threat to Muslim apostates comes not from the state, but from former co-religionists who believe that apostasy should be punished and set out to enforce the law themselves.

It is difficult to quantify with certainty how many apostates from Islam are killed, because such incidents too often go unreported. Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at Freedom House�..s Center for Religious Freedom, told me in an interview that he knows of at least a dozen cases in the past year in which apostates were killed for leaving the faith, and estimates that hundreds of apostates are killed every year worldwide.

This problem is magnified by the fact that many apostates, even if not killed, are subject to physical attacks. One prominent example is Yakup Cindilli, a Turkish convert from Islam to Christianity who slipped into a coma in October 2003 after being savagely beaten for distributing New Testaments in his hometown. Marshall estimates that hundreds of Muslim apostates are beaten every year.

Beyond that, most converts out of Islam living in the Muslim world are forced to disguise their new faith because of the persecution they would face at the hands of either the state or their fellow citizens. Marshall believes that thousands of converts from Islam to Christianity are in hiding in Egypt, and that tens of thousands of Muslim apostates throughout the world are concealing their new faith.

This is not some internal Muslim issue about which Westerners should politely hold their tongues. Rather, people are killed every year for following their conscience, and many more beyond that have their fundamental right to religious freedom abridged. Westerners should put aside their hesitations, and should publicly condemn the immoral treatment of Muslim apostates.

Considering the possibility that at least one American family has been killed–and the certainty that at least one Dutch citizen was murdered–by Muslim adherents who took it upon themselves to invoke Shari’a law in violation of the laws of the nation in which the crimes took place, I’d say that it is not only Muslims residing in the Muslim nations–nor only Muslims who seek to convert, but non-Muslims who dare to “insult” Islam–that have a stake in changing the attitudes of Muslim leaders.

And we in the West are going to have to get over our silly, pettish political correctness. This is becoming a matter of life or death, and of freedom and liberty not only in the world generally but even in our own country.

Christians on PalTalk Chat Service Tracked by Radical Islamic Web Site (Counterterrorism.Typepad.Com)

Blasphemer Hit-List (Solomonia.Com)

Refer to the article by Robert Spencer on FrontPage.Com for the backstory.

This is most unsettling. Out-of-the-mainstream journalists such as Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes have sought to warn us about this since before 9/11/01.

Instead of wringing our hands over the mythical “human rights threat” posed by the Patriot Act perhaps we ought to spend more time watching what is happening right under our own noses. It seems to me that allowing law enforcement authorities to share information is an insignificant concern next to the real threat to liberty posed by the invocation and execution of Shari’a law governing those who speak against Islam right here in our own country, likely perpetrated by “guests” who use our liberty against us just as Mohammed Atta and his band of demons did.

The real irony, to me, is that the Left in the U.S. continues to coddle the Muslim activists here while simultaneously screaming every time Pres. Bush dares to utter the word “God”.

On Solomonia.Com in the article linked above, blogger Solomon writes “incidents and web sites like this demonstrate how difficult it is for us to imagine that we can withdraw behind safe borders and ignore the world around us. President John Adams’s ‘Wooden Walls’ of the American Navy are no longer proof against the dangers we face in the modern world.”

This is true, but I would venture to point out that our contining lax immigration policy–especially our reluctance to enforce laws against illegal immigration in deference to political correctness and race politics–are the prime reason that these thugs and murderers are among us.

I’m not sure how many of these “isolated, unrelated incidents” will have to occur before we realize that these people hate us and want us dead because their warped interpretation of their religion informs them so.

Turnout Higher Than Expected in Iraqi Elections (washingtonpost.com)

Millions of Iraqis turned out in greater numbers than expected Sunday to cast ballots for a parliament in the country’s first free election in a half century. The ranks of voters surged during the day as attacks by insurgents proved less ferocious than feared and enthusiasm spilled over into some largely Sunni Arab regions where hardly a campaign poster had appeared.

At least 35 people, plus nine suicide bombers, were killed in suicide bombings and mortar and rocket attacks as insurgents sought to keep voters from the polls.

But for the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, the weary capital and parts of Iraq took on a veneer of a festival, as crowds danced, chanted and played soccer in streets secured by the most relentless security crackdown in memory. From the Kurdish north to the largely Shiite south, at thousands of polling stations, voters delivered a similar message: The election represented their moment to seize their future and reject a legacy of dictatorship and the bloodshed and hardship that has followed.

Lines at polling stations that began small grew through the election’s 10 hours, sometimes dramatically, surprising even Iraqis who said they were emboldened by scenes of crowds in the streets. Afterward, many triumphantly pointed their index fingers, which were stained with deep blue ink, and hardly flinched at gunfire and explosions that interrupted the day. At one station, a woman showered election workers with handfuls of candy. “God’s blessings on you,” a veiled, elderly woman kept repeating as she voted at another station. Across town, three Iraqi soldiers carried an elderly man, in a wheelchair, two blocks to a voting booth.

“It’s like a wedding. I swear to God, it’s a wedding for all of Iraq,” said Mohammed Nuhair Rubaie, the director of a polling station in the Sunni neighborhood of Tunis, where after a slow start, hundreds of voters gathered as the cloudless day progressed. “No one has ever witnessed this before. For a half-century, no one has seen anything like it. And we did it ourselves.”

If preliminary estimates of turnout hold — and anecdotal evidence suggested they would — the election Sunday will stand as perhaps the freest, most competitive election in an authoritarian Arab world and a stunning, if rare victory for the Bush administration in Iraq.

The United States and allied Iraqi leaders had looked to the vote as a turning point in a troubled two-year occupation beset by almost daily carnage and rampant crime and frustration. Those officials had hoped that a strong turnout would deliver elusive legitimacy to a government that might enable it to defeat the insurgency in Sunni regions and begin a long-awaited economic revival.

In Washington, President Bush called the election a “resounding success” and promised the United States would continue trying to prepare Iraqis to secure their own country.

“The world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle East,” Bush told reporters at the White House at 2 p.m. Eastern time, four hours after the polls closed. He did not take questions.

Bush praised the bravery of Iraqis who turned out to vote despite continuing violence and intimidation. The president said they “firmly rejected the anti-democratic ideology” of terrorists.

Speaking earlier in the day, in an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that there “it’s not a perfect election” and there are “many, many difficult days ahead.” But she emphasized, “Every indication is that the election in Iraq is going better than expected.”

As expected, turnout appeared to be very uneven around the country, with the majority Shiite community and Kurdish areas participating in the election to a greater degree than the minority Sunnis. Voting continued in early evening in some places even after polls were scheduled to shut, to allow people to vote who were standing in line at the closing hour.

Carlos Valenzuela, the United Nations’ chief election adviser in Iraq, told CNN that he believed that overall turnout was considerably “better than expected.”

Final results will not be known for seven to 10 days, but a preliminary tally could come as early as late Sunday. The vote was to choose a national assembly to help govern Iraq temporarily and write a permanent constitution.

Iraqi election officials said that most of the country’s 5,500 polling stations managed to get open and stay open often under the heaviest security ever provided for any election day anywhere. Officials acknowledged that some stations opened late or were deserted, particularly in areas of frequent insurgent attacks dominated by Sunni Muslims such as Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra, west and north of Baghdad.

And in some places in restive cities where the polls were operating, the voters were not.

At one polling place in southeast Mosul, for example, the only voters by late in the day were 15 Iraqi security forces assigned to keep the peace.

There was no firm count of the number of people who voted, as Iraqi election officials in the evening backed away from an earlier estimate that turnout was approximately 72 percent. Sarid Ayar, spokesman for the electoral commission, said the earlier numbers were “anticipations,” and Reuters news agency quoted him as “guessing” that maybe 8 million Iraqis voted, which would be a little over 60 percent of registered voters.

Adil Allami, the chief electoral officer, said the early estimates “were based on observations and senses and interactions with the lines and the flow of people.”

While a turnout figures were yet to come, the basic pattern in the voting was not a surprise. Sunni extremists, fearing victory and ultimate control by the country’s majority Shiite population, had called for a boycott, claiming no vote held under U.S. military occupation is legitimate.

Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, looking relaxed in a navy blue blazer and white pants, beamed as he cast his vote at a polling station in the U.S.-protected Green Zone at 9:40 a.m. Baghdad time (1:40 a.m. EST). “It felt “great,” he said afterward. “It’s history in the making.”

“Iraqis have proved today that the strength of their votes is more powerful than the effects of bullets or terrorists,” said Ibrahim Jafari, an interim vice president and the head of the religiously conservative Dawa Party. He said the vote he cast Sunday was the first in his life.

“This day represents a birthday for the Iraqi people and a birthday for the political process,” he said.

The eve of the election was marked by a rocket attack on the U.S. Embassy that killed two Americans and wounded five. The military announced Sunday morning that seven insurgents had been captured by troops about an hour after the attack. They were seen fleeing the scene of the rocket launch and tracked to a residence in southeastern Baghdad, the military said.

The success and timing of the embassy rocket attack underscored the potential threat posed by the insurgents, who for months threatened to disrupt Sunday’s poll.

That threat materialized but not to the extent many had feared. In the violent climate of post-invasion Iraq, there was nothing startling about the number of known attacks or the number of dead.

Today’s death toll of 44 included at least nine suicide bombers, most of them on foot since traffic was banned from streets. In one of the deadliest attacks, a bomber boarded a minibus carrying voters to polls in Hilla, south of Baghdad, killing himself and at least four others.

A suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt in late morning at a polling station in the Zayuna neighborhood, in Baghdad’s eastern side. Police officials told The Washington Post the blast killed five people and wounded seven. The upper middle class neighborhood is a mix of Sunni and Shia Muslims.

Another suicide car bomb killed an Iraqi policeman who challenged the vehicle as it approached a polling station in Western Baghdad.

A total of six people died in other suicide bombings at or near polling stations in Baghdad, police told the Associated Press. Five more were killed in mortar attacks in the capital. In Khan al-Mahawil, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, a policeman was killed in a mortar attack on a polling place.

Later a suicide bomber blew himself up near the home of Iraq’s justice minister. Mortar attacks at scattered locations across Iraq reported by wire services accounted for the rest of the deaths. By wire service estimates, more than 50 people were injured.

“We have been waiting for this moment for a month,” said Malik Adan Hamid, 26, a polling worker at the Fine Arts Institute in Baghdad’s Mansour district. “There is no fear at all. We were trained for this.”

At the Fine Arts Institute, about 40 people, some with children, gathered at the polling station soon after it opened. About 20 policemen patrolled outside, manning checkpoints at the end of the street and near the station itself. Blasts could be heard in the distance, but the mood was festive.

“We wanted to be the first to vote here,” said Amir Mahmoud Jawad, an 18-year-old high school student. “This is our country, we have to do it. There should be no excuse for anyone not to come. These elections will decide the destiny of the country.”

“The most important thing is that fear has no place in our hearts any more,” said Samir Sabih, 37, a businessman at a polling center in Baghdad’s largely Shiite Karrada neighborhood, where hundreds waited to vote. “This is the first time in my life I go to a polling center freely.”

The turnout appeared to follow predicted lines: High in the country’s Shiite Muslim south and Kurdish north, where populations disenfranchised by the government of Saddam Hussein embraced the opportunity to gain power in Baghdad — and low in areas dominated by the Sunni Arabs where the insurgency has been centered.

In at least two cities in the Sunni Triangle polling stations were staffed by Iraqi soldiers and police. In at least one other, polls had not opened two hours after the official 7 a.m. start time.

“I came here today because I’m not frightened by any attack on us,” said Mohammed Jaffar Ali Saadi, 43, in a crowd of several dozen people looking to vote at the Beirut School in Baqubah, the city northeast of Baghdad where poll workers stayed away. “I came here to vote and to give my support to whoever deserves it.”

In Najaf, the Shiite holy city that embodies Shiite Muslim hopes for the elections, a light early turnout meant several dozen people at one station in the first hour. Among the first out was Najaha Hassan Rahadi, 58, who broke into tears when asked why she was voting.

“Six of my brothers were executed, and I spent two years in jail” under Saddam Hussein, she said from her wheelchair. “I want to elect a government that represents me.”

In Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, Iraqi National Guards assumed the role of election workers inside one school, as more than 100 U.S. forces took up positions outside. Loudspeakers mounted on Humvees urged people to come and vote, but the streets were empty of all but soldiers.

No U.S. forces were seen in Tikrit, Hussein’s home town. But resignations among poll workers forced those remaining to press police officers into finishing last-minute preparations that delayed the opening for about an hour. No voters were waiting, however.

In Mosul, the country’s third largest city where insurgents have challenged U.S. and Iraqi forces for more than two months, the streets were also empty of all but police.

“I will not vote because the price might be my life,” said Khalid Muhammed, 35, an accountant out looking to see if anyone else was taking the risk. Explosions were reported across the city.

By midmorning, Iraq’s largely Shiite south appeared to be largely quiet, except for reports of a series of explosions in Basra, the country’s second largest city. In Basra, 33 people voted in the first 30 minutes after one city center poll opened. “We came early because we couldn’t wait,” said Abdul-Hamid Sayab, who arrived with daughter Azal, 21, and voted for the Iraqi Communist Party. “This is a historic event, that we vote freely for the first time in decades.”

In Kirkuk, the ethnically diverse, oil-rich northern city coveted by ethnic Kurds as the possible capital of an independent state, security was high and so was turnout. More than 200 voters showed up in the first hour at a neighborhood populated by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. “I came today because we are here,” said Kafya Nawzad, 62, a Kurd. “We exist in Kirkuk. Despite the explosions in Kirkuk this morning, I came to vote.”

From a ballot that lists 111 parties, coalitions and individuals, voters will elect a 275-member transitional parliament that will serve for one year, produce a new executive and, most crucially, oversee the drafting of a constitution. A separate ballot lists candidates for councils in Iraq’s 18 governorates, or provinces. In addition, ethnic Kurds in three northeastern provinces will choose a regional assembly that embodies the Kurdish desire for continued autonomy from Arab Iraq.

But in a six-week campaign dominated by stark fears of insurgent attacks — almost none of the 7,700 candidates for the National Assembly campaigned publicly or even announced their names — the key issue remained turnout, and its implications for the credibility of any government it produced.

Officials had expected Iraqis to give polling places a wide berth in the morning hours, when attacks most often occur in Iraq and when insurgents likely would try to make an impression that would suppress turnout for the rest of the day. But a senior U.S. diplomat, speaking from the stricken embassy, said several factors, including the apparent disorganization of recent attacks, gave him hope that election day would be less violent than predicted.

“I have a certain faith in the human spirit,” he said. “If we get through the morning, I think there’s a very good chance it’ll snowball and turnout will be much higher than anyone expects.”

Such an outcome would be a major accomplishment for the deeply troubled American project here. After the U.S.-led invasion toppled Hussein in April 2003, Iraq was stripped of much of its government infrastructure by looters, and was then plunged into chaos by an insurgency that has killed more than 1,400 U.S. troops, more than 10,000 Iraqis and turned car bombings from exceptional events into tactical attacks that occur at the pace of a half-dozen each day.

“It goes to the heart of the issue,” said the diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly. “If Iraqis don’t want to stand up and fight for what is right for their country, we can’t do it for them.

“But if they do, and they come out, then all the naysayers ought to think a little bit about whether we ought to go home, or if we ought to stay and support that.”

The massive security reflected the importance attached to an election that is expected to give Shiite Muslims — estimated to account for 60 percent of Iraq’s 25 million people — a share of power proportionate with their numbers for the first time. High turnout was predicted in southern Iraq and other areas heavily populated by Shiites, who have been largely dispossessed since their boycott of a 1920 election and brutally persecuted by Hussein’s Baath Party government.

It occurs to me that after World War II, many newly-liberated areas of the world (Japan especially comes to mind) that had never had “true” government by the People were said to be “too backward” or “too entrenched in their traditions” to accept “Western-style” democracy.

It also occurs to me that the Declaration of Independence, that document that succinctly puts forth to the worlds the principles of Republican government on which this nation was founded–a nation that is unique in history because it is the first and only one founded on a principle, not on the basis of race, language, religion or geographic happenstance–says absolutely nothing about “Occidental” Man for example, or “Western” principles and traditions.

It seems to me that “all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” is rather all-inclusive. The Founders of this Republic believed, as we all believe even today, that all mankind, irrespective of race or color or religious tradition, has the same Creator. I think it is a negation of the core values of this Republic, then, to make such besmirching remarks regarding the Japanese in the late 1940s or the Iraqi Kurds and Arabs in the 2000s.

I believe this people do and will continue to revel in the freedom they now have, and I also believe this experiment will turn out far more successful than the Leftist naysayers here and elsewhere predict.

GOP says it found 300 illegal votes (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

The state Republican Party said in court papers filed yesterday that it has found 300 illegal votes and more than 400 that can’t be verified in the governor’s election.

With Christine Gregoire winning the governor’s race by 129 votes, Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance says he now has found far more than enough evidence to persuade a judge to nullify the election and call for a rematch between Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi.

Lawyers and Republican staffers are continuing to look county by county for votes cast by felons, in the name of dead people or by people who voted more than once, casting second votes either in other counties or other states.

“I expect this number to literally grow every day,” Vance said.

Democrats are unconcerned. Their attorneys have argued that Republicans should have challenged improperly registered voters before the election.

Republicans have identified 240 felons who voted illegally. Party workers have been comparing the state’s criminal-history database from the State Patrol to a list of voters kept by the Office of the Secretary of State.

The bulk of those are in King County. Vance said there appears to be so many felons who voted in the county that “we will probably never get to the bottom of this list.”

He also said the party has identified 44 votes cast under the name of dead people, 10 voters who voted twice in the state and six who voted here and in another state.

Vance claimed the Republicans had found 737 illegal votes, but 437 of those are mishandled provisional ballots. Those ballots were supposed to be kept separate on Election Day but instead were put in counting machines without being verified.
The party has not released the names of the people they say cast illegal votes �.. such as felons and double voters �.. but it will have to do that before a trial begins.

Yesterday, Republican lawyers filed their responses to Democratic Party motions to have the case dismissed. Republicans dispute the Democrats’ arguments that the Legislature, not the court, should hear the dispute and that the court doesn’t have authority to call for a new election.

Republicans also argue that they don’t need to show which candidate got the illegal votes, only that there were enough to cloud the results.

But Democratic Party spokeswoman Kirstin Brost said, “There’s no proof that Dino Rossi won the election, and that’s what you need to show.”

It seems to me that the converse is true: There is certainly no evidence that Gregoire won the election–except that the Democrats characteristically got their “cheat” in just as the clock ran out.

Meanwhile in Milwaukee, they have found ironclad evidence of vote fraud:

The Journal Sentinel this week reported a variety of discrepancies during the Nov. 2 election in Milwaukee, including:

�.� 7,000 more votes cast than people recorded as voting.

�.� 1,305 same-day voter registration cards that could not be processed by the city, including more than 500 where voters listed no address and dozens more where no name was written on the card.

�.� 2,800 verification cards sent to same-day registrants returned to the city as undeliverable.

The Milwaukee County district attorney’s office and the U.S. attorney’s office in Milwaukee opened investigations this week into the irregularities.

– Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, January 28, 2005

Yet except for some local news stories–and blogging–this news doesn’t seem to register with the MSM. They would rather focus on “troubling” allegations of “voting irregularities” in Ohio that amount to the normal snafus that occur in every election.

Bush won Ohio by 130,000 votes, yet lost Wisconsin by a mere 11,000! The vote fraud they found in Milwaukee–the tip of the iceberg?–represents the swing of an entire swing state!

This is the primary reason why the MSM is in deep doo-doo, and why the broadcast news networks, CNN and MSNBC are losing viewers in droves and credibility by the bucketful.

Self-Esteem and Encouragement–A Different Twist (Meridian Magazine)

This past week, for the first time, I watched the Gong Show portion of American Idol — the early rounds of competition, where the pre-screeners let through the best and the most appallingly bad acts so we can be entertained by watching them on television.

What astonished me was not how bad some of the singers were. It was how utterly convinced they were of the excellence of their performance.

Before their audition, they were shouting at the camera, “I’m the next American Idol, baby!”

Now, maybe they were coached to act over-enthusiastic, like contestants on Wheel of Fortune or Family Feud. But even in their calm and dignified moments, they would regard the camera calmly and cheerfully and explain why they were extraordinarily talented and America would love them.

This from people whose voices cried out for a radio to drown them out.

I made a promise to my children years ago — which I have kept. “I will never let you perform when you aren’t ready for an audience.”

I’ve cancelled plays rather than let the actors embarrass themselves.

Apparently some of these American Idol contestants had no one in their lives who would tell them the truth. “Darling, I love you, but you are nowhere near the right pitch. You’re tone deaf. You enjoy singing, but nobody else enjoys it when you do.”

* * *

Praising people who have done nothing to deserve praise is the lazy, selfish thing to do. It makes them like you while setting them up for embarrassment and failure later.

In the real world, we don’t honor basketball players because they’re so nice and we like them. We honor and extravagantly reward the players who bring something exceptional onto the court. Like the ability to put a ball through a hoop.

Nor do we reassure bad salesmen that it’s not their fault and we’ll go ahead and pay them commissions on sales they didn’t make. Instead, the cruel marketplace firmly urges them to change their line of work.

I’m not suggesting, not for a moment, that we should be cruel to children. After all, they’re young, and we have no idea what they could become as they mature — especially if they work hard.

* * *

My siblings and I had the advantage of being raised by the champion praiser of all time. My mother is a one-woman factory of encouragement, not just to us but to everyone around her. She really delights in other people’s achievements and is unashamed to tell them.

I think she absorbed at an early age Dale Carnegie’s admonition that we be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.”

Yet she never flattered anybody.

Because she only praised you for real achievements. She actually has a very sharp critical eye and knows exactly what you’re doing badly and what you’re doing well.

But she felt no need to tell you the bad stuff — not right away.

* * *

The truth is, encouragement and criticism play an important role in a child’s development. A child who never hears praise or encouragement is obviously disadvantaged compared to a child whose genuine achievements, however small, are pointed out and respected.

Which one is more likely to be bold, to try things, and to improve?

The trouble is, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the absurd self-esteem movement that has polluted our schools and our public life for the past few decades.

* * *

We’ve always had boosterism: “You can do it!”

Encouragement helps buoy a person’s hope so they don’t give up.

But the self-esteem movement has gone way beyond that. Claiming to have science on their side, the self-esteemers have insisted that children should receive lavish doses of praise regardless of their performance.

They claim to have science on their side, though whenever I was able to find out what was actually going on in a study that supposedly showed the benefits of self-esteem, it seemed obvious to me that the “science” wasn’t science at all.

Of course, this was the world of education and sociology we were talking about, so the standards of scientific rigor were very, very low. It was not surprising that this movement swept through the field of education without any sound science behind it.

One does not question such a “nice” idea as praising children.

Until, finally, somebody does. Roy F. Baumeister, Jennifer D. Campbell, Joachim I. Krueger and Kathleen D. Vohs published an article in the January 2005 Scientific American titled “Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth.”

Their method was not so much research as a review of research.

They went through all the published research on self-esteem and immediately eliminated all the studies that depended on self-reporting along.

* * *

And here’s what they found:

There is no statistically significant connection between high self-esteem and genuine achievement, ability, or successfulness. Not in the real world.

Except in one area: Making new acquaintances like you. If you have high self-esteem, you’re probably a little bit better at making friends (though it’s not inevitable — just slightly more likely).

But what is cause and what is effect in this case? Did self-esteem make you better at making friends, or did your ability to be liked by other people lead to your feeling good about yourself?

In the real world, there are millions of people with depressive personalities, who have low self-esteem despite the fact that they really are attractive or accomplished. So not only is high self-esteem not proof that you’re actually good at anything, but also low self-esteem is not proof that you’re bad.

So does artificially boosting your self-esteem through endlessly repeated but unearned praise lead to greater achievement later?

No. Quite the contrary. “Some findings even suggest that artificially boosting self-esteem may lower subsequent academic performance.”

Here’s what works: You teach children the connection between work and achievement.

Great achievements aren’t made by feeling good about yourself. They’re made by boldness, originality, hard work, painstaking attention to detail, long practice, self-effacing cooperation, reliability, and a host of other attributes and actions.

Whom would you rather hire to work for you? The person who thinks he’s wonderful all the time, regardless of what he does, or the person who is always questioning the quality of his own work and trying to do better?

Whom would you rather be married to? The person who is absolutely convinced of his or her attractiveness, or the person whose word is reliable and who is devoted to achieving the same goals as you?

It’s nice to have serious scientists put the self-esteem movement through a rigorous examination.

But all it really took was a micron of common sense.

Children aren’t stupid. Even stupid children aren’t stupid. They know when they’re being lied to — at least at first. Only with endless repetition do they become pathologically self-esteeming.

And even when we do succeed in convincing them that they’re wonderful no matter what lousy things they do or how lazy they are, there will come a rude awakening.

They will be in a situation where it matters that they be as good as they think they are — and to their own shock, they will not be.

On that day, they have a right to complain about the liars who kept them from preparing properly by telling them that they were already as good as they needed to be.

*

Children need encouragement — but they also need realistic assessments of their current level of achievement so they know what they need to work on.

The people who know them best and love them most are in the best position to do this.

But teachers who praise all their students equally, regardless of achievement, only make themselves worthless to all their students.

And parents who always take their children’s side, certain that no child of theirs could do badly (or do wrong), are really cocooning their children and teaching them that they never have to take responsibility for their own actions.

When you charge into the school and start abusing teachers and staff without finding out first whether the things they are saying about your child’s dreadful behavior are true — well, you’re not building your child’s self-esteem, you’re training him that he can get away with anything because nobody in his life loves him enough to draw any lines or boundaries.

And when you send a friend off to American Idol without ever mentioning that he has never actually sung the same note as the singer on the radio, then you’re a pretty lousy friend, aren’t you?

Praise real achievements, however small, and you help a child. Praise him regardless of achievement, and you do damage, either to your own credibility or to the child’s ability to know himself well enough to improve.

This is so obvious it shouldn’t even need saying.

But in the education profession right now, hardly anyone dares to say it openly.

After all, who can be against building children’s self-esteem?

Even if our esteem-building is only successful at one thing: Making teachers and parents feel better about themselves, even as they damage children.

I am a great fan of Scott Card, the novelist. I am also continually impressed with Scott Card, the curmudgeonly surveyor of societal mores and socio-political folly. Over the years he has successfully (to my mind) taken on the cult of homosexuality, the myth of careerism, and the paucity of honesty on the part of the American left.

Most of us have been aware for years that the Church of Feel-Good-About-Yourself has become the de facto religion celebrated in schools and at city hall. The horrendous consequences are easily seen in ever-lowering standards that fulfill the direst prophecies of the late Senator Daniel P. Moynihan in his arrestingly candid diatribe “Defining Deviancy Down”. (Only a Kennedy-era Democrat icon like Moynihan could have gotten away with this frank condemnation. If only his contemporaries and his party descendants would ever have listened to this wise man).

Dr. Laura Schlessinger has pointed out from time to time that much of the “counter-culture” of the youth of our time is really a “counter-civilization” that consciously awards the least common denominator. Clothing, body-piercing, tatoos, hip-hop “music,” and a general antipathy toward educational attainments especially in minority communities are all geared toward making it very, very easy to “arrive.” One need not actually accomplish much of anything, just hold still for the piercing or the tatoo needle and install very powerful amplification in one’s automobile and one earns the esteem of one’s peers.

This is the direct result of making much ado about nothing.

Thomas Friedman’s foreign policy sandbox (Townhall.Com)

Can someone please explain to me why New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman considers certain European criticism of President Bush and America “touching”? I find that offensive.

First, in fairness to Mr. Friedman, let me try to provide the context of his statement. This enlightened Europhile, “having spent the last 10 days traveling to Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland,” believes that President Bush should deliver only one three-word speech “when he comes to Europe to mend fences next month. �.�: Read my ears.”

Translation: Don’t say anything; just listen. The Europeans are so thoroughly disgusted with President Bush’s decision to attack Iraq there is nothing he can say “that will change their minds about him or the Iraq war or U.S. foreign policy. Mr. Bush is more deeply disliked in Europe than any U.S. president in history.” Friedman hasn’t met one person who has “a good thing to say about [President Bush].”

How would it benefit President Bush (or America) if he followed Friedman’s advice? Well, he would deprive Europeans of the ammunition to make fun of, mock, laugh and sneer at him.

If that doesn’t persuade you, consider this bit of vicarious patronizing Friedman issues on behalf of his beloved Bush-hating Europeans:

Listening is also a sign of respect. It is a sign that you actually value what the other person might have to say. If you just listen to someone first, it is amazing how much they will listen to you back. Most Europeans, though, are convinced that George Bush is deaf — that he cannot listen or hear. Just proving that he is not deaf, and therefore the Europeans don’t have to shout, would do wonders for Mr. Bush’s standing.

Just for fun, let’s consider whether Friedman’s theory is likely to work in practice. One might reasonably assume that the opposition party in the president’s own country would be more receptive to his goodwill overtures than his detractors in Europe, no? So if President Bush were to try this method out on the Democrats, it ought to usher in an unprecedented era of bipartisan harmony.

Didn’t Mr. Bush employ that very approach when he came to office, doing everything he could to set “a new tone”? He treated Ted Kennedy like a king, giving him almost everything he wanted in the “No Child Left Behind” bill. But did that mollify Teddy and his colleagues?

To the contrary, they’ve been calling Bush an election thief and a liar about weapons of mass destruction for years. They have even accused him of being niggardly with federal education dollars, though he has allocated more of them than any of his predecessors in either party.

Why? Because they don’t want to get along; they are implacable. They are entrenched. They are determined to obstruct. How much more so European liberals who distrust him on their own even without the persistent encouragement from their counterparts in America.

Friedman’s mushy advice on the virtues of listening sounds just peachy, but underlying it is the presumption that President Bush has not considered the full spectrum of ideas on Iraq. It naively assumes that if he would just develop an open mind — not just open ears — he would inevitably change his foreign policy.

Why is it that liberals conclude that if you don’t agree with them, you just don’t have an open — or competent — mind? The answer is simply their stunning arrogance. The president would have to have lived in a cave not to have heard a thousand times all the arguments against his foreign policy.

But what if Mr. Bush followed Friedman’s advice? What if he listened to the European ingrates but still didn’t change his mind? Would that make them love him? No. They will only be satisfied, just like American liberals, if they are calling the shots: if Bush does exactly what they say. This nonsense about open-mindedness and listening is just puerile psychobabble.

But even more annoying is Friedman’s affectionate portrayal of the European criticism: “Some of it is very heartfelt, even touching.” Why so? Because deep down they envy us and “want America to be that open, foreigner-embracing, carefree, goofily enthusiastic place that cynical old Europe can never be.” They think Bush has turned America into “a strange new land that exports fear more than hope �.� a place whose greeting to visitors has gone from ‘Give me your tired, your poor’ to ‘Give me your fingerprints.’ They look at Mr. Bush as someone who stole something precious from them.” Now I’m touched.

This is almost too much to take. But even if you have the stomach to swallow this nonsense, do you think the European attitude Friedman describes would remotely change if President Bush “would just listen” to them?

We’re not playing in the sandbox, Mr. Friedman. Foreign policy is for adults.

If you want to know what the Left–here in the USA and elsewhere–really want, listen carefully to their accusations. Typically the Left will accuse those whom they despise of having as ulterior motives exactly what they–the Left–themselves want to achieve. Thus Bill Clinton, one of the nastiest bare-fist brawlers in modern politics, coins the term “politics of personal destruction.” Democrats routinely classify legislation or policy initiatives in terms of “harming minorities” but themselves zero in on conservatives who are “people of color”; e.g. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s embarrassing attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas. And now-Senator Hillary Clinton, when she was “only” the First Lady, after a lifetime of status-seeking routinely accused others of “being in it for the money.”

And so it is that the Left here and in Europe routinely characterize Mr. Bush’s policies as “unilateral” and even “imperialistic”. But France has the Cote d’Ivoire recently added to its resume, Russia’s problems with Chechenya and vote-manipulation in Ukraine don’t redound to her credit, and Germany (and some radical Left British MPs) have inkstains on their hands from Saddam’s “oil for food” bribe…uh, vouchers.

Who are these people that we should desire their favor?

Uighur inmates prefer Guantanamo to home (opinion.paifamily.com)

I must reluctantly agree that this Uighurs must be repatriated to China. Ironically, no one will ever know their fate after the turnover because China is a Leftist regime that has no use for open inquiry and accountability to anyone.

Contrast that with the excoriation of the United States’ “ill treatment” of terrorist detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere. All you have are allegations of mistreatment, of course (plus some photographs of guys with panties on their heads).

But the Left is the source of all hypocrisy in the modern world, so this really doesn’t surpise me a bit.

The Strange Death That No One Cares About (TechCentralStation.Com)

There was a death in Washington recently that received far less attention than it deserved: the New Democrat philosophy of Bill Clinton is dead. This is a truly extraordinary development; one that should not be allowed to pass so quietly.

Consider two very different stories separated by two presidential terms — first, from 1996, The end of Social Security as we know it? (Robert Dreyfuss, November/December 1996, Mother Jones).

“Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska is agitated. Surrounded by lobbyists at a private strategy session on Social Security, he fumes, ‘I don’t know what the president thinks, but I know it’s going to take presidential leadership.’

“You might think Kerrey, a prominent Democrat, would want a re-elected President Clinton to go to the mat to protect Social Security, the crown jewel of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. But in fact, Kerrey is the chief sponsor of legislation that would begin to ‘privatize’ Social Security, and he wants Clinton’s support. Asked whether he’s worried about progressive Democrats mobilizing to defend Social Security, Kerrey bristles, “I’ll kick the [stuffing] out of any liberal who tries that.”

“So far, Kerrey is one of only a handful of politicians who have ventured out into the open on the subject. Neither Clinton nor Bob Dole has chosen to make an issue of Social Security, long considered an untouchable ‘third rail’ of American politics because of its broad popularity. But behind the scenes, a coalition of Wall Street money managers, conservative ideologues, and a growing number of heretical Democrats like Kerrey is drawing up plans to dismantle the Social Security safety net in favor of a private system of individual retirement accounts. [�.�]

“Bet on this: No matter who wins the presidential election, Social Security will be on the table in 1997. By 1999, Social Security as we know it may no longer exist.”

Obviously we made it past 1999 without Social Security being transformed — despite Bill Clinton himself calling for the creation of a new form of private retirement accounts and the investment of a portion of the Social Security trust funds in the stock markets in his 1999 State of the Union — but what ever happened to that “growing number of heretical Democrats?”

Our second story, from earlier this month, suggests the heretics have been meekly brought back to the orthodox New Deal fold, Social Security Battle Likely (Ronald Brownstein, January 5, 2005, LA Times)

“The Democratic Leadership Council, the party’s leading centrist organization, and Third Way, a new group working with moderate Senate Democrats, expect to issue statements soon opposing Bush’s push to divert part of the Social Security payroll tax into accounts that individuals could invest in the stock market, officials of the groups say.

“The opposition is significant because both groups have aggressively argued that Democrats should not flatly resist changes to Social Security. Also, in the past some of the leading officials associated with the Democratic Leadership Council have backed the type of private investment accounts Bush is promoting.”

And so the restructuring that once seemed all but certain is now cast into doubt, in no small measure because what was the Democratic center has been assimilated by the Party’s traditional Left. As recently as two years ago, New Democrats declared that: “We believe in reforming democracy and government to strip away top-down bureaucracy and give citizens and communities the power to solve their own problems. We must be willing to reform old programs in order to preserve our oldest values.” But today they have become just another force for reaction, defenders of those same “old programs” and the very “top-down” status quo they once professed to believe in reforming.

This is a stunning reversal to anyone observing it from outside the Party. Consecutive improbable losses to George W. Bush and a string of defeats at the congressional and state levels have left Democrats quite publicly groping for an explanation of what went wrong and how to become competitive again, yet they’re not just ignoring their only recent electoral successes — Bill Clinton’s election and re-election — but even the wing of the Party that engineered those victories has abandoned the formula that made them possible.

We need not determine whether Mr. Clinton was truly a centrist and a reformer at heart in order to accept the idea that when he ran in 1992 and 1996 he positioned himself as someone who would pursue the Third Way, the middle ground between the extreme statism of liberal Democrats and the laissez-faire of the far Right. This was most evident in his advisor Dick Morris’s strategy of “Triangulation” — which cast Bill Clinton as the lonely voice of reason, defending us not just from the mercurial Newt Gingrich and the Republicans in Congress but also from the equally untrustworthy Democrats. Never mind the Third Way; he was practically a one-man third party. Whatever one may think of a game plan that essentially threw his fellow Democrats under the bus, the fact is it worked. The middle turned out to be pretty fertile turf for a national politician.

The article above is excerpted. There’s so much good stuff here for countering the spin of the Left and their media cronies, I don’t know where to begin.

Social security has got to go as it currently is constituted. We have got to move to an ownership society post haste and the last vestiges of the Old Deal ought to be swept away.

Democrats in their usual way took advantage of tragedy of global proportions to convince the majority of Americans that only a paternalistic Federal government, caring for their every “need,” could save us from the excesses of capitalism. They further tightened their grip on power by pandering to “special interests” such as minorities and vilifying anyone who dared raise the question that liberty is worth the price of some not succeeding by their own choice and actions.

I do not know if we will ever fully swing the pendulum back to a time when government is the servant of the people and not the other way ’round. I have little faith that Republicans are any more inherently responsible than Democrats; the lure of perpetual power is just too great. Already there are signs that entrenched Republican legislators have lost their qualms about pork barrel spending.

But there has been progress made against “Progressivism,” that debiilitating disease of the body politic and enemy of freedom.

One has to have hope.