Columnist Kersh Kuntzman is a piece of work.

It’s not often that I sputter so much after reading something that my monitor requires a thorough cleaning. But after reading Mr. Kuntzman’s column in Newsweek regarding the recent spate of attacks on conservative speakers on college campuses in which he gleefully celebrates these assaults as a crime in which the victim “deserved” to be assailed, I realized that spitting wasn’t enough. If it had been my old monitor, I would have emptied some other bodily fluid on the screen to register my disgust with this vainglorious lickspittle’s celebration of mayhem and the stifling of free speech. As it was, I settled for leaving the monitor alone and almost punching a fist-sized hole in my living room wall.

The schedule of lecturers on college campuses around the country has begun reading like the police blotter: Conservative author Ann Coulter—hit by a pie tossed by two attackers last year. Conservative editor William Kristol—hit by an ice cream pie at a Quaker college in Indiana in March. Really conservative guy Pat Buchanan hit by salad dressing two days later. Liberal-turned-conservative author David Horowitz—hit by a chocolate cream pie a few days after that.

It’s disgusting, isn’t it? The salad dressing, I mean. Everyone knows that salad dressing is simply not an effective medium for expressing dissent. But pie on the other hand…

This fella is just too cute by half. It’s a shame that Mr. Kuntface doesn’t have the guts to come out my way and give a lecture. Other things can go in pies besides fruit or cream…and the horse that lives next door is owned by a Republican.

The last few days have seen the predictable lament that the pie-throwers represent the worst thing about democracy—people so inarticulate that the only way they can counter such toxic thinkers as Coulter is to seize the moral low ground by trying to curtail their free speech.

That is far too simple an argument. Throwing a pie at someone who deserves it is one of the most celebrated traditions in our so-called culture.

Now that’s odd. The “predictable lament” that Mr. Dickman talks about is one explanation that I haven’t heard from liberals or conservatives. Gee…ya think he just sort of, you know, made it up out of whole cloth? And calling Ann Coulter’s thinking “toxic” shows a jealosy unbecoming of a professional journalist; even toxic thoughts are better than having no thoughts at all.

To prove that Mr. Kunttwaddle doesn’t have brain cell active enough in his cranium to ask the time of day, he interviews a relic from the 1970’s, one Aron Kaye who I guess is sort of a legend among the tie-dyed and now greying members of the old/new left that conducted a reign of terror with their pie throwing (and bomb throwing) back in the 1970’s. But hey! As long as they “deserved” it…:

I called Soupy Sales, who has received an estimated 20,000 pies in his career, and was surprised to hear that a man who spent his whole life honing this slapstick routine did not object to this overt politicization of the pie.

“It’s OK as long as you’re hitting someone who deserves it,” Sales said. “Nixon would have been perfect. As long as it’s funny, it can be political.”

Kay agreed: “Pieing is an essential tool for deflating the pomposity of these politicians and commentators. I considered myself a defender of justice. But believe me, I still have a list of people who need to be pied.”

To even say “I considered myself a defender of justice” without blinking an eye at the irony bespeaks a breathtaking kind of leftist hubris that still surprises me to this day. And for Mr. Kuntwoman to not remark on it says even more.

Here’s more “cutey pie” thoughts from Mr. Kuntzman:

Clearly, throwing a pie at a lecturer is anathema to serious debate. But what’s worse is the quality of pie-throwing today. Coulter was barely grazed. A PETA pie-hurler a few years ago hit Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman in the back (the back!). Horowitz had more pie on his shirt than on his face. Perhaps, the pie itself is the culprit.

The moonbat then delves into the “art” of pie throwing (or is it the science?). He discovers that certain pies are better than others for throwing. To prove his point, he actually gets a dingbat named Shenk to act as his guinea pig. The reason I call him a dingbat is his reaction to having pies thrown in his face:

When we compared notes, Shenk felt no humiliation. “In fact, being hit by a pie is liberating,” he said. “Before the pie, a lecturer like myself is being judged—by the audience, by himself. Everyone is wondering ‘Who is this guy? Who died and made him an authority on anything.’ But once the pie hits, suddenly, there’s this swelling of support for the speaker. The pie breaks the tension.” (even Horowitz admitted that “after the pie, I probably did have some of the crowd’s sympathy.”

I don’t quite know what to say to something like that, do you? I mean, what kind of wootsucker actually enjoys being hit by a pie? I guess there’s no accounting for the stupidity and cluelessness of some people.

Finally, Kuntzman has a warning for people who disagree with him:

For my part, I learned an even more valuable lesson: If you’re going to be conservative and lecture on a college campus, bring a change of clothes.

It says on this intellectual thug’s website that he’s a “humorist.” Perhaps in later columns we can get more examples of his wit. Maybe he can write a column on how women “deserve” to be raped for wearing provacative clothing or perhaps victims of muggings who merit getting the crap beaten out of them because they were out alone after dark.

I’m sure someone with this pudknocker’s talent can come up with something witty to say about those subjects.

In an interview with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, President Bush criticized Hizbullah and went so far as to offer American “assistance” if they refused to disarm:

BEIRUT: U.S. President George W. Bush lashed out at Hizbullah on Tuesday, calling the Lebanese resistance group a “dangerous organization.” Speaking in an interview with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, Bush said: “There is a reason why we’ve put Hizbullah on a terrorist list. They’ve killed Americans in the past. We will continue to work with the international community to keep them on that list and we will continue to pressure this group.”

He added: “You can’t have a free country if a group of people are like an armed militia.”

He stressed: “Hizbullah is trying to destabilize the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. It is a dangerous organization.”

Bush added that if Lebanon failed to implement the clause in UN Resolution 1559 calling for the disarmament of all militia, and if Hizbullah refused to disarm, the U.S. would be willing to offer its assistance in doing so.

The President also had a message for Bashir Assad of Syria, who still has 1500 troops and the remnants of his intelligence service embedded in Lebanon:

He said: “The United States can join with the rest of the world, like we’ve done, and say to Syria ‘Get out – not only get out with your military forces, but get out with your intelligence services, too. Get completely out of Lebanon, so Lebanon can be free and the people can be free.’”

The U.S. president was confident Syrians “know what we expect. They have to stop their support of the Baathists in Iraq, stop inciting violence in Iraq and stop the arms smuggling into Iraq.”

In a thinly veiled threat, Bush said that if Syria doesn’t implement these demands: “We are just beginning. Diplomacy is the first course of action and if not … I’m sure diplomacy will work

Meanwhile, new Prime Minister Najib Mikati is trying to form a government, taking opposition demands into account for the first time:

Mikati’s Cabinet is made up of mostly new faces, at least eight of which are close to the pro-Syrian regime, with others close to – but not direct members of – the opposition.

Speaking after a closed-door meeting with Lebanon’s two pro-Syrian leaders, President Emile Lahoud and Speaker Nabih Berri, Mikati said: “Some people may have reservations about this Cabinet.”

He added: “But I assure you that all the members of this Cabinet will not be candidates in the elections. The government will hold parliamentary elections as fast as possible and, God willing, within the constitutional period,” which ends May 31.

Most opposition groups have given cautious support to the new government, choosing to try and end the political crisis that has gripped the country since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and the subsequent street demonstrations that demanded the ouster of Syrian troops and Syrian influence from the country:

Aley MP Akram Shehayeb, an ally of opposition leader Walid Jumblatt, said the opposition will give Mikati a vote of confidence if his ministerial statement, due to be released early next week, comprises the opposition’s longstanding demands.

He listed the demands as “the dismissal of security officials and of the public prosecutor, that the elections be held on time and that the Lebanese government be extremely positive in dealing with the international probe into Premier Hariri’s murder,” and added: “Many people in this Cabinet are extremely respectable. But others are at the service of the intelligence agencies.”

And that’s the huge problem facing Lebanon; the fact that many of its experienced leaders have demonstrated dual loyalties to both Assad’s Syria and their native country. Not only its leaders, but groups like Hizbullah have been at the beck and call of Syria’s intelligence services since the occupation began.

In a conciliatory editorial, the Daily Star is asking the Lebanese people to reach out to the Syrian people and build bridges of understanding between the two countries:

The Syrian people did not choose the operatives who served in Lebanon; they were not consulted about sending these agents, nor do they participate in the decision-making of their government. They are as subject to the abuse of power by unaccountable security agencies as we were.

We must begin building bridges with the Syrian people, not just in the name of fairness or of good relations, but in the name of the truth that we are seeking. It is incumbent upon the Lebanese people and government to begin absolving the Syrian people from the blame that their security apparatus well deserves.

Any bridges built will apparently have to deal with the fact that Hizbullah is now a force to be reckoned with politically as well as militarily. Refusing to disarm while the electoral process is underway, the terrorist group has allied itself with another pro-Syrian faction, the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM):

Representatives from Hizbullah and the Free Patriotic Movement said on Tuesday Lebanon’s best option out of the country’s worst political crisis since the end of the civil war is through rational dialog leading to parliamentary elections.

Ghaleb Abu Zeinab and Ziad Abs, representing respectively Hizbullah and the Free Patriotic Movement insisted during a panel discussion at the American University of Beirut that adopting an electoral law based on larger districts with proportional representation “will lead to the second and prosperous rebirth of the country.”

According to Abs, both the FPM and the resistance are liberation organizations with political agendas.

He added: “The difference is in the choice each has made or will make in the future on whether to remain a liberation movement or become a political party willing to transform Lebanon into a habitable country.”

And the former head of the FPM (and former Prime Minister) Michel Aoun has said he will run for President if he’s nominated.

Speaking from his headquarters in exile in France, the former General in Chief of the Lebanese Armed Forces, said “I do not run away from confrontation, and if I am nominated to be president I will not refuse, but that does not mean that I will nominate myself for presidency.”

This is typical doublespeak from someone who most observers of Lebanese politics feel is one of the slipperiest fish in that country’s political ocean. At various times he’s been pro-Syrian, anti-Syrian, pro-Christian, anti-Christian, and both an ally and enemy of current President Emil Lahoud. He’s accepted support from Saddam Hussein as well as the Saudis. In short, he’s a shameless opportunist. It’s unlikely though that even his own FPM party will nominate him for the Presidency, which is nominally reserved for someone from the faction representing Christians.

What all this adds up to is that although there have been huge demonstrations in favor of an opposition that seeks to eradicate all vestiges of Syrian influence, it’s apparent that whatever government emerges from the elections next month will have an enormous task in trying to unite all of the disparate elements of Lebanese society into a strong enough coalition so as to resist the machinations of President Assad and his murderous agents who still wield influence to this day.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

A conservative Pope has been elected! ROUND UP THE USUAL SUSPECTS!

I’ve had a difficult time trying to come up with a suitable odious metaphor to describe all of the media outlets and individuals who are now, less than 12 hours after his election, in full throated cry against the new Pope, Benedict XVI.

At first I thought maybe Anklebiters would be appropriate but then I realized that’s already been taken (Pat Hynes would have a knipshit being linked to these knaves). Then I pondered using “circling wolves” but that would be a horrible insult to such a noble and intelligent animal. I eliminated vultures because they don’t work well together, being just as keen to fight another competitor as enjoy their meal of carrion. I even contemplated an obscure reference to the flesh eating bacteria known as Necrotizing Fasciitis, but figured that would gross you out oh gentle and discerning reader.

Finally, I settled on slugs. After reading this, I realized it was actually a no brainer. If this doesn’t describe the New York Times, I don’t know what does:

Other slugs are found on land, but their soft, slimy bodies are prone to desiccation, so they are confined to moist environments. (Like the fever swamps of the left!).

Here’s the Times take on the election of Papa Ratzo:

As an ultraconservative, he had shut the door on any discussion on several issues, including the ordination of women, celibacy of priests and homosexuality, defending his positions by invoking theological truth. In the name of orthodoxy, he is in favor of a smaller church, but one that is more ideologically pure.

On Monday, at a Mass before the conclave convened, he delivered an uncompromising warning against any deviation from traditional Catholic teaching.

Well, duh! Guess what guys. THE POPE IS CATHOLIC!. The folks at the Times have become so sophisticated and so urbane that they’ve forgotten (or just simply ignored) the fact that the teachings of the Catholic Church on those issues are rooted in both tradition and theology – the revealed word of God. Now, I’m not a believer but even I can grasp the position of the Church’s hierarchy. If, by their lights, God tells them that this is the way it is, liberals here and elsewhere are going to have about as much influence in changing that position as the sun has of coming up in the west or setting in the east.

Then there’s the patron saint of looniness Andrew Sullivan whose resemblance to the slug is quite pronounced in this respect:

Slugs are hermaphroditic: having both female and male reproductive organs. Once a slug has located a mate they encircle each other and sperm is exchanged through their protruding genitalia. A few days later hundreds of eggs are laid in holes in the ground. Although some species hibernate over the winter in temperate climates, in most species the adults die in the autumn.

Various species of slug can also reproduce via tiny darts of sperm which they fling in the direction of their mate’s genitalia.

Andrew sure is “slinging” a whole bunch of something at the new pope…and it ain’t kudos:

And what is the creed of the Church? That is for the Grand Inquisitor to decide. Everything else – especially faithful attempts to question and understand the faith itself – is “human trickery.” It would be hard to over-state the radicalism of this decision. It’s not simply a continuation of John Paul II. It’s a full-scale attack on the reformist wing of the church. The swiftness of the decision and the polarizing nature of this selection foretell a coming civil war within Catholicism.

Andrew, taking his cue from yesterday’s 230th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride, has decided to gallop off the deep end while screaming at the top of his voice “The end is nigh!”

Contrast Mr. Sullivan’s hyperventilating with Dale Franks’ response to Andrew’s rants:

So, while the Apostle Paul does dwell at length on the virtue of celibacy in various epistles, he also clearly tells both Timothy and Titus that marriage is a requirement for church leaders. The Catholic Church has gone another way on this, clearly, holding the virtue of celibacy to be superior to the married priesthood.

That strikes me as extraordinarily arrogant. Or even worse, petulant and childish.

Couldn’t have said it better myself…which come to think of it, is why I included Dale’s analysis rather than try to think up something better. I think “petulant and childish” should be tattooed on Andrews forehead so that when he opens his mouth, we can be reminded of just why we think he’s such an hysteric.

And what would a roundup of moonbat reaction be without a comment or two from the Major League of moonbattery, the Democratic Underground. Their secretions are really quite slug-like:

Slugs produce two types of mucus: one which is thin and watery, and another which is thick and sticky. Both are hygroscopic. The thin mucus is spread out from the center of the foot to the edges,the thick mucus spreads out from front to back. Mucus is very important to slugs as it helps them move around, and contains fibers which prevent the slug from sliding down vertical surfaces.

Whatever they’re secreting, it’s getting pretty thick at Dingbat Central:

This is BS. Maybe we’ll get lucky he will “die in his sleep” like our 33 day “Progressive Pope” John Paul 1st, did.

Look on the bright side… this ensures that Bush** is not the most fascist leader in the known universe. Berlusconi (out-and-out fascist Fini in cabinet) might have had the edge, but this makes it official.

Whatever else may have been going on in there, I’m reasonably sure that God was not speaking to them, saying “Hey, guys, why not shake things up a little bit? Go for the Nazi!”

Ah yes…these are the discussion threads that makes one say “Is this a great country, or what?” Where else but the United States of America would the certifiably insane be given their very own website to spout their fantasies and delusions?

I’ll let Confederate Yankee introduce us to this next denizen of DU:

And the “Nurse, we need to up his meds” award goes to goclark for:

I knew he would be named. The rest of the names were just ROVE tricks to throw off everyone. He was placed there by the likes of BushCO. It sends a STRONG signal to the non white people of the world that “WHITE POWER” is the name of the game.

It was also a strong signal for WHITES to return to the church and be welcomed with open arms. They don’t care about the Hispanics and Africans that are devoting themselves to the church.

(HT: To the Con/Yank for doing all the hazardous research, plumbing the depths of depravity to come up with these gems of idiocy).

One thing’s for sure, the new Pope has his work cut out for him. If these are examples of the liberal mindset he has to overcome, I would guess a whole slew of Novenas wouldn’t be enough to conquer the kind of fatuous disdain shown toward his election by the slugs of media and politics.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

We have a Pope!

In a short conclave, the College of Cardinals has elected a new Pope! The new leader of a billion Roman Catholics around the world is Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who has chosen the name Benedict XVI for his papacy.

For only the third time in a hundred years, the conclave took 3 days to choose the new Pontiff.

Ratzinger may have sealed his election with an impassioned homily at The Mass for the Election of the Roman Pontiff that touched on several themes that are close to the heart of the conservatives, including the very traditional view of the Savior’s suffering that some more liberal theologians would like to de-emphasize in Catholic teachings:

The mercy of Christ is not a cheap grace; it does not presume a trivialization of evil. Christ carries in his body and on his soul all the weight of evil, and all its destructive force. He burns and transforms evil through suffering, in the fire of his suffering love. The day of vindication and the year of favor meet in the paschal mystery, in Christ died and risen. This is the vindication of God: he himself, in the person of the Son, suffers for us. The more we are touched by the mercy of the Lord, the more we draw closer in solidarity with his suffering – and become willing to bear in our flesh “what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ” (Col 1, 24).

Ratzinger has proved very popular all over the world to the point where he has his own “fan club.” He served as Prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith, one of the more powerful positions in the church. His nickname of “the enforcer” among some more liberal publications indicates his unwavering support for traditional church doctrine.

He’s also been known for his charm and personality:

Personally charming, quick-witted and fluent in four languages, the Cardinal is a convincing orator. Jesuit Father Thomas Reese calls him “a delightful dialog partner”, but adds that most of the Cardinal’s fellow clergy would be too worried about the prospect of excommunication to enjoy talking to him.

Ratzinger at age 78 is one of the older Popes elected in recent memory. This reflects a feeling that perhaps John Paul II served too long (27 years) and that some of the younger candidates like Cardinal Maradiaga of Honduras (age 62) or Schoenborn of Austria (59) need a little more seasoning before their turn comes.

The election of Benedict XVI comes as a huge disappointment to the America Church. They were looking for someone more open to change on issues like birth control (not abortion), married clergy, and some matters of independence from Rome. They won’t get any help on those issues from this Pope.

Perhaps this Pope will surprise us in some respects. But as a creature of the Vatican, so to speak, it’s doubtful whether he could have gotten elected unless he gave some assurances to the curiae that things wouldn’t change very much.

While some may have found last night’s episode lacking in action, excitement, and suspense, I though it one of the more interesting nights of “24” to date. And that’s because of the exploration of the legality and justification for torture that occurred regarding the American merc Joe Prado.

Recall if you will those dark days in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Those were frightening times indeed as we weren’ sure if the terrorists would strike again. At that point, there was a discussion on both the left and right regarding the efficacy of torture and when or if it would ever be justified. It was an interesting debate but not very relevant because at the time, it was theoretical. There were no cases where torture would be considered as a means of getting information.

Then the war in Afghanistan began and suddenly, we had hundreds of Al Qaida and Taliban fighters in our custody. At that point, the debate took on an entirely different tenor. It was at this point, that the Administration quietly began what has to be considered one of the most momentous internal discussions in the history of the Executive Branch. The debate went to the heart of what kind of country the United States is, how we viewed ourselves when we looked in the mirror.

It’s a shame that when the Justice Department memos came out that it was the middle of the campaign for the President. This precluded rational discussion of a vital issue. The President’s opponents tried to make the discussion of options regarding the treatment of prisoners into a “mindset” that allowed for the indefensible actions of jailers at Abu Gharaib. Any fair minded reading of those memos shows that not to be the case. Rather, the Executive Branch was dealing with a situation that no other nation in the history of civilization had ever even tried to address; how far should a nation go in defending itself.

Those memos make fascinating reading. Options are proposed, discussed, and in the end, discarded. What emerged from the internal debate was the belief that the prisoners would be treated in accordance with the Geneva convention but that the designation of “enemy combatants” would be used to allow for indefinite detention.

What caused me to revisit this issue was an exchange between Jack and the “Amnesty Global” lawyer David Weiss:

Weiss: All my client wants is due process.

Jack: Mr. Weiss, these people are not going to stop attacking us until millions and millions of Americans are dead. Now, I don’t want to bypass the Constitution, but these are extraordinary circumstances.

Weiss: The Constitution was born out of extraordinary circumstances, Mr. Bauer. This plays out by the book, not in the back room with a rubber hose.

Jack: I hope you can live with that.

Pretty good summation of the debate on both sides.

SUMMARY

Not much happened in this episode. Jack discovers exactly what information Marwan has regarding our nukes and its not good; locations and codes for a thousand or so nukes that for security reasons are always on the move. CTU and DoD are trying to get a handle on all of them but this will take time – time they don’t have because Marwan has already picked a target and has another cell on the way to intercept the in-transit warhead. The interception takes place on the Illinois-Iowa border which is about 50 miles from where I live. And since I live about 50 miles from Chicago, I think it’s safe to assume that the terrorist target is the Windy City. Later on, Marwan has a conversation with the hijackers where they inform him they are 92 miles from the target. That fits in with the distance from the border of the two states.

Meanwhile, CTU catches a break when a Marwan associate, one Yosik Katami slips up and uses the wrong credit card for gas. Realizing this, Katami calls Marwan who orders him to a marina to meet with Prado who will get him out of the country. Trying to stay one step ahead, Marwan makes a call and instructs the man on the other end of the phone to get a lawyer from “Amnesty Global” (Amnesty International?) to intercede on behalf of his associate to keep CTU from getting at what Katami knows. Who did Marwan call? We may never find out but a good guess would be one of the 3 or 4 Islamic “charities” that have been suspected to have members who support terrorist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Certainly most Islamic charities are exactly what they claim to be. But there are a few who have been set up to raise money for terrorist groups.

CTU tracks Katami’s car to the marina where the meet is taking place and where we finally get to see Curtis again. One of the more annoying habits of the writers is to build up a character for several episodes and then have them disappear for a month. Anyone remember who the Secretary of Defense is and what he’s doing? Ostensibly, he’s planning to institute martial law but we haven’t heard from him for weeks.

Curtis observes Katami and Prado as they enter the merc’s boat and has tactical move in. Before they can make the capture, Prado kills Katami and surrenders to CTU, claiming to be an innocent bystander whose boat was about to be hijacked. Prado is taken back to headquarters and Michelle orders Curtis to do what’s necessary to get information out of him. The intervention of the human rights lawyer kills that idea at which time Buchanan calls our brand new President for help.

President Jellyfish (Logan) has just had a revealing conversation with Novik:

Novik: (Referring to Marwan) It’s going to be difficult for him to leave Los Angeles.

Logan: It’s difficult to shoot down Air Force One with one of our own Stealth fighters but he managed to do that. Who knows what he’s planning? I’m sure he’s going to come after me next!

Novik: (With a look of disgust on his face) Mr. President, there’s no indication that’s his plan.

Logan: You don’t know that! I don’t know that! We don’t have enough information to know what his plan is!

Novik: Ed from the Secret Service is on his way over. He has a revised plan. I’m sure he can ease your concerns about your safety.

What a spineless sponge! Whatever bad thing that’s going to happen to him. he deserves.

When “Dugout Logan” refuses to let CTU put the screws to Pardo, Jack, thinking outside the box as usual, offers to resign so that CTU can release Pardo and he can get at the merc as a “private citizen.” Sure enough, Jack tasers the U.S. Marshall assigned to protect Pardo and, after applying a little “pressure” (to Pardo’s thumbs and fingers dislocating same) Pardo reveals a meet with Marwan later that night.

So here’s Jack, once again on the outside of the law chasing after a terror suspect and having to deal with not only the terrorist but American law enforcement as well. Talk about a loose cannon.

Yeah..but he’s our loose cannon.

BODY COUNT

Prado offs Katami. We learn that “at least” 75 people died when AF 1 crashed. Still no figures from the nuke accident.

Jack: 39

Show: 216

SPECULATION

What’s with fat geek Edgar? Is he going to go postal on us? It sure looks like it. When and if CTU gets another associate of Marwan, will Chloe be able to restrain Edgar’s rage? Will he take out Bill Buchanan? Will he take out Chloe?

Just goes to show, you can never tell with geeks. Underneath that mild mannered exterior is, well…a less mild mannered exterior? We’ll see.

I’ve been remiss in announcing this week’s results from the Watchers Council Vote, perhaps because I was throwing a tantrum over the fact that newbie Glittering Eye wrote a much better post than I did and deserved to win in the Council category. Entitled “China’s Time Bombs,” the post reveals some very interesting information about China’s growing environmental problems.

And continuing with the Chinese theme, The Redhunter brings us “War with China: 2008-2012” which won in the non-Council category. The post draws the same conclusions we did about Chinese intentions toward Taipei; the Chicoms seem to have just about run out of patience and are gearing up for war. While 2008 seems to me a long way off and Beijing may be waiting until we’re engaged somewhere else (Iran? North Korea?), that date would make a lot of sense. The Chinese naval expansion would have been completed in 2007 which would give them the amphib capability to attack and quickly overrun the island.

China will bear watching over the next few years.

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,—One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”

The image has captured the imagination of American school children for almost 150 years. A lone rider, braving capture at the hands of the British, riding along the narrow country lanes and cobblestone streets of the picturesque towns and villages of New England, shouting out defiance to tyranny, raising the alarm “To every Middlesex village and farm,” his trusty horse carrying him on his ride into legend.

To bad it didn’t quite happen that way.

Longfellow’s poem immortalized Revere’s ride in a way that would never have occurred to the silversmith’s contemporaries. It wasn’t so much that the incident went unnoticed. It’s just that Longfellow took so many liberties with the facts surrounding the event as to obscure the real story of that night and by so doing, overshadow the real accomplishments of one of the more interesting characters in the entire revolution.

Let’s forgive Longfellow his myth making. The poet was, after all, using the ride to illustrate American themes – something almost unheard of in literature until that time. Along with his other great narrative poem Hiawatha, Longfellow has been credited with introducing the rest of the world to truly American motifs and myths. Paul Revere’s Ride, while historically inaccurate, nevertheless conveys the breathless spirit of resistance of the colonists to British rule.

Revere himself joined that resistance early on. Born in 1734, Revere has been described as a silversmith. This does him an injustice. He was much more the artist than the craftsman. His involvement in the earliest stages of the revolution was a consequence of his friendship with that scowling propagandist Sam Adams. He was a prominent member of the “Committee of Safety” that was formed to protect the rights of Massachusetts citizens against threats to liberty, both real and imagined, of the colonial government. And he was one of the grand jurors who, in 1774 refused to serve after the British Parliament made the justices independent of the people by having the colonial governor pay the salaries of the judges.

Sam Adams knew a good thing when he saw it and used Revere’s talents as an artist to further the cause of rebellion. He urged Revere to engrave several inflammatory caricatures of British politicians that Adams promptly had copied and distributed. Following the Boston Massacre in 1770, Revere engraved a seditious remembrance of that event that was also widely disseminated. This use of art in the cause of revolution wasn’t necessarily new, but it showed just how imaginative Adams could be.

Revere and Adams were also behind one of the most shocking events of the revolution, the Boston Tea Party. Adams was trying to provoke the British government and succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings. England closed the port of Boston and bivouacked troops in the city.

Which brings us to Revere’s ride. Or, more accurately, the part that Revere played on that momentous night. The redcoats decided that it was prudent to both capture the more radical elements of the Sons of Liberty, the group started by Adams and John Hancock as an adjunct to the colonial militia, as well as disarm the populace. To that end they sent two company’s of elite Grenadiers into the countryside to arrest Hancock, Adams, and Joseph Warren for treason as well as seize the cannon and powder of the local militia being stored at Concord.

Revere was a member of a group known as the North End Mechanics who patrolled the streets of Boston, keeping an eye on British military activity. When it became clear the British were ready to march, Revere borrowed a horse and rode off from Charleston to Lexington where Adams and Co. were staying. Duly warned, the trio of patriots made ready to flee. Before going, Warren sent both Revere and another friend of Adams’, William Dawes, on the ride that would echo down through the ages. They left Lexington around midnight and were joined by another patriot Samuel Prescott. Making their way to Concord, the three men alerted the farms and tiny villages along the way with the news that the red coats were on the march.

Around 1:00 AM, the little group ran into a road block manned by British regulars who had been told to stop the colonists from trying to communicate with one another. Revere was captured while Dawes and Prescott got away. Prescott eventually made it to Concord and alerted the militia there.

Revere was extremely cooperative with his captors. He told them that he had already warned Hancock and his friends and that 500 militia men were assembling at that moment to resist the British. That last part was pure bluff but the regulars didn’t know that. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, the British soldiers decided to return to barracks, releasing Revere around 3:00 AM.

But what about the lanterns in the North Church, the famous “One if by land, two if by sea?” Revere had actually asked a friend to be ready to do that to warn patriots on the other side of the river in Charlestown. By the time those lanterns were hung, Revere was gone. While he probably saw them, he didn’t need to know how the British were coming, just that they were on their way.

What all this goes to show is that, while the myth may be more dramatic than what actually happened, the reality of what was going on that fateful night is certainly interesting enough. Thanks to Revere, his friends avoided the gallows for they most certainly would have been convicted of treason. And given what happened the following day in Lexington and Concord, the work done by Revere, Dawson, and Prescott to arouse the countryside contributed in no small way to events that became known as “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World.”

Revere’s participation in the revolution was by no means over. He was commissioned a Major of infantry in the Massachusetts militia in April 1776; was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel of artillery in November; was stationed at Castle William, defending Boston harbor, and finally received command of this fort. He served in an expedition to Rhode Island in 1778, and in the following year participated in the disastrous Penobscot Expedition. Upon his return from that fiasco, he was court martialed for failing to obey orders. The charges were trumped up by his commanding officer, trying to absolve himself of blame for the military disaster that cost of the lives of 500 men and 43 ships. Revere was acquitted.

After the war, Revere proved himself a canny businessman and bold entrepreneur. He took advantage of the religious revival sweeping the country after the revolution by manufacturing church bells, a business that made him wealthy. He also pioneered the production of copper plating in America and supplied the young country’s navy with copper spikes for the planking. In effect, he became one of the first successful industrialists in American history.

Where do we place Revere in the pantheon of American heroes? While not a Founding Father in that he didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence or serve in Congress, Revere played a very large role in acting as “the sharp end of the stick” the Founders sought to beat the British with. While not a part of some of the more unruly elements that took part in the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party, he and his friend Sam Adams were not above using those elements to further the cause of revolution, a goal for which he worked more than a decade to achieve. In that respect, perhaps we can call him a “Founding Brother.”

As we celebrate the 230th anniversary of his ride into history (as well as the poem that immortalized it), it’s good to remember that Revere was the quintessential American soul; an artist whose talents and ardent support for the cause of American liberty defined a generation of patriots who, to this day, we stand back and look on in awe, marveling at their accomplishments.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—-
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

UPDATE:

Welcome Michelle Malkin readers!

I’ve received two emails asking me to link to the entire Longfellow poem. Here it is.

If you like history, here’s a post I did on David McCullough’s recent lecture at Hillsdale college.

Ann Coulter describes herself as a polemicist. For years, she’s used the sharpest pen in the business to provoke, enrage, delight, and enrapture her audiences with her own peculiar brand of political commentary. In this respect, she resembles Tom Paine, the revolutionary war pamphleteer who penned the most memorable call to arms of the war:

“”These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their county; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny like hell is not easily conquered yet we have this consolation with us, the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”

Yes, ‘ole Tom could turn a phrase; especially when he turned it on his enemies, the elites:

To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and an imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and though himself might deserve some decent degree of honors of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.

Paine’s effectiveness was in the way he used language as invective, imagery as a form of character assassination, and exaggeration as metaphor. He could slice and dice his political opponents and those he saw as an enemy with the best of them. His only rival as a propagandist was Sam Adams. And Adams couldn’t write half as well but had an uncanny sense of where the jugular was. Some of his broadsides are absolute treasures:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

OUCH!

Miss Coulter follows then a long line of literary patriots whose writings have changed our politics. Ace has some excellent thoughts on this and how the mainstream media has bitten off its own nose to spite its face for years, passing up Coulter’s obvious saleability because of their own myopic political views:

Ann Coulter has been a story—a big story, a compelling story, and important political story, and, yes, a sexy story that’s pretty damn easy on the eyes—for years. But it’s only after years of studiously ignoring her that someone in the media finally realizes, “Hey, maybe I don’t like this woman’s politics, but millions of Americans do; perhaps it’s time to actually, you know, acknowledge she in fact exists.”

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, anyone? Remember them? Our fair and balanced media is still trying to forget.

Spot on. And gracing the cover (and I do mean “grace” as in “to confer dignity or honor on”) of Time Magazine, one is reminded that like Paine and Adams who spent their own hellish time in the political wilderness, Coulter has now finally come in from the cold.

Will it affect her writing? Will she soften her approach? Will she become less confrontational?

Are you serious, Superhawk?

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. – H.G. Wells

Historian David McCullough has been a favorite of mine for well over twenty years. Born in 1933, McCullough found a calling in writing popular narrative histories and biographies about America and her leaders. With a combination of meticulous research and brilliant, heartfelt prose, McCullough’s books have topped the non-fiction charts for 30 years. His biography of Harry Truman won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1993.

My favorite book by McCullough is Mornings on Horseback, a portrait of young Theodore Roosevelt and his very unusual family. To read how this sickly boy overcame his physical drawbacks to grow up and become the energetic, robust man who rode up San Juan Hill, took on the gigantic and powerful corporate trusts that had poisoned American life and politics, and run around the world engaging in the most vigorous pursuits imaginable was an astonishing experience.

McCullough has made it his mission in life to try and bridge the gap between so-called “popular” historians and academics. By calling for history to be not only accurate, but also well-written and entertaining, he has stirred up a hornets nest in the academic community. Here are some thoughts from Jeffrey L. Pasley

Of course, McCullough’s biggest applause line was a swipe at us nasty academic historians for being such friggin’ brainiacs and writing books that journalists and popular authors don’t get: “He harped on a familiar theme, the necessity of history being entertaining and pleasurable, and he delivered one line that got particular applause: ‘No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.’” ( It’s so true, if I had a dollar for every time I said to myself, “Uh oh, self, someone might want to read that paragraph—better cut it.” That’s just the way we academical types are.)

McCullough has run into the same problem that other popularizers of history like Thomas Flemming, Richard Norton Smith, and Stephen Ambrose have experienced; a lack of respect for “telling stories” or using a coherent narrative technique to illuminate history. Academics have, for the most part, rejected narrative history because of it’s subjective chronology. Their point is that too many things are going on at the same time for a narrative to reveal what’s really happening.

It’s a point well taken and frankly, I’ll let McCullough and his detractors hash it out. In the meantime, Powerline’s Scott Johnson has linked to a talk McCullough gave at Hillsdale College entitled “Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are.” Many of the themes found in McCulloughs books are fleshed out in the lecture, including McCullough’s concern regarding the ignorance of young people about their own country’s history”

We are raising a generation of young Americans who are by-and-large historically illiterate. And it’s not their fault. There have been innumerable studies, and there’s no denying it. I’ve experienced it myself again and again. I had a young woman come up to me after a talk one morning at the University of Missouri to tell me that she was glad she came to hear me speak, and I said I was pleased she had shown up. She said, “Yes, I’m very pleased, because until now I never understood that all of the 13 colonies – the original 13 colonies – were on the east coast.” Now you hear that and you think: What in the world have we done? How could this young lady, this wonderful young American, become a student at a fine university and not know that? I taught a seminar at Dartmouth of seniors majoring in history, honor students, 25 of them. The first morning we sat down and I said, “How many of you know who George Marshall was?” Not one. There was a long silence and finally one young man asked, “Did he have, maybe, something to do with the Marshall Plan?” And I said yes, he certainly did, and that’s a good place to begin talking about George Marshall.

This is truly frightening but not surprising. It was Karl Marx who said ” History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.” This attitude permeates the entire academic community from top to bottom. History is taught from middle school on with an emphasis on the wrongdoings and shortcomings of historical figures to the exclusion of just about anything else. Couple that with a serious attempt to actually supress the remarkable story of America’s founding by placing it into a context of “class struggle” or, as some marxist historians have done, a counterrevlution brought about by large economic interests and the idea of “American Exceptionalism” becomes irrelevant.

McCullough and other narrative historians have sought to address this problem by revealing the men and women behind historical events as people caught up in forces they seek to control before those forces overwhelm them:

Nobody lived in the past, if you stop to think about it. Jefferson, Adams, Washington – they didn’t walk around saying, “Isn’t this fascinating, living in the past?” They lived in the present just as we do. The difference was it was their present, not ours. And just as we don’t know how things are going to turn out for us, they didn’t either. It’s very easy to stand on the mountaintop as an historian or biographer and find fault with people for why they did this or didn’t do that, because we’re not involved in it, we’re not inside it, we’re not confronting what we don’t know – as everyone who preceded us always was.

Using narrative, McCullough is able to draw pictures with words – pictures that illustrate certain truths that a mere chronology could never do:

Keep in mind that when we were founded by those people in the late 18th century, none of them had had any prior experience in either revolutions or nation-making. They were, as we would say, winging it. And they were idealistic and they were young. We see their faces in the old paintings done later in their lives or looking at us from the money in our wallets, and we see the awkward teeth and the powdered hair, and we think of them as elder statesmen. But George Washington, when he took command of the continental army at Cambridge in 1775, was 43 years old, and he was the oldest of them. Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was 40. Benjamin Rush – one of the most interesting of them all and one of the founders of the antislavery movement in Philadelphia – was 30 years old when he signed the Declaration. They were young people. They were feeling their way, improvising, trying to do what would work. They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn’t a bank in the entire country. There wasn’t but one bridge between New York and Boston. It was a little country of 2,500,000 people, 500,000 of whom were held in slavery, a little fringe of settlement along the east coast

It would take an academic historian an entire monograph to get across the ideas that McCullough did in that one paragraph.

McCullough also tries to answer the question “Why learn history?” His answer goes to the heart of my own enjoyment:

History isn’t just something that ought to be taught or ought to be read or ought to be encouraged because it’s going to make us a better citizen. It will make us a better citizen; or because it will make us a more thoughtful and understanding human being, which it will; or because it will cause us to behave better, which it will. It should be taught for pleasure: The pleasure of history, like art or music or literature, consists of an expansion of the experience of being alive, which is what education is largely about.

Learning for the sake of learning. Acquiring knowledge just for the sheer joy of knowing. In some ways, it’s our own fault that this attitude has been lost as we’ve demanded that our academic institutiuons become “more relevant” to what will happen in the real world after our children’s formal education is complete. Unfortunately, this has dampened the enthusiasm of the young because instilling the thirst for knowledge in students is no longer the nurturing activity it once was.

McCullough bemoans this loss and illustrates the point with a fascinating story about a young John Quincy Adams, a man McCullough calls ” the most superbly educated and maybe the most brilliant human being who ever occupied the executive office.” Young John Q. was going to Europe with his father who’d been appointed by the Congress to help negotiate the treaty that would end the revolutionary war:

Little John Adams was taken to Europe by his father when his father sailed out of Massachusetts in the midst of winter, in the midst of war, to serve our country in France. Nobody went to sea in the wintertime, on the North Atlantic, if it could possibly be avoided. And nobody did it trying to cut through the British barricade outside of Boston Harbor because the British ships were sitting out there waiting to capture somebody like John Adams and take him to London and to the Tower, where he would have been hanged as a traitor. But they sent this little ten-year-old boy with his father, risking his life, his mother knowing that she wouldn’t see him for months, maybe years at best. Why? Because she and his father wanted John Quincy to be in association with Franklin and the great political philosophers of France, to learn to speak French, to travel in Europe, to be able to soak it all up. And they risked his life for that – for his education. We have no idea what people were willing to do for education in times past. It’s the one sustaining theme through our whole country – that the next generation will be better educated than we are. John Adams himself is a living example of the transforming miracle of education. His father was able to write his name, we know. His mother was almost certainly illiterate. And because he had a scholarship to Harvard, everything changed for him. He said, “I discovered books and read forever,” and he did. And they wanted this for their son.

It goes without saying that most parents would not go this far today to see that their child had the kind of education that Abigail and John Adams wanted for John Q.

What gives me hope for future generations is my own experience in learning history. In the almost 30 years since I graduated from college, I’ve read by my own calculation nearly 300 biographies and histories of Americans and America. This has had a profound effect on my politics as well as my general worldview. I’ve gone from being a liberal to a conservative. My entire outlook on America’s past has undergone a radical transformation as I’ve read the great biographies and narrative histories that illunimated the people who shaped this country. These books showed them to be not the saints portrayed in my youth or the devils portrayed in my young manhood, but rather imperfect beings who for a variety of complex reasons rose to the occasions history offered and made a difference. In short, the more I read, the more perspective I gained. Being able to put events and people into context, to travel back in time and put yourself in their shoes – that is why history is so fascinating and enjoyable to me.

It’s like jumping into a time machine. And having masters like David McCullough at the controls is what makes it fun.

Nineteen sixty four was not a good year for Republicans. Johnson was riding the crest of the legislative legacy of the martyred John F. Kennedy. And he was garnering the sympathy and respect of millions of people for the way he handled the difficult transition during that tragic time.

All this would have meant a solid victory for Johnson despite rumblings from southern Democrats over the civil rights act. By 1964, those party conservatives were already fighting a rear guard action, hopelessly out maneuvered by first Kennedy and then Johnson. Only in the 5 states of the old cotton south would that anger spill over into tangible electoral results for the Republicans as Goldwater (in a harbinger of things to come) took Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina (with Barry’s home state of Arizona being the only other state going Republican).

What turned this election from being a solid Democrat win into the biggest landslide in American history was the the Republican convention in San Francisco. It was there that Republicans sealed their own fate by proving they’d rather be “right” than win. This attitude manifested itself in the inability of Goldwaterites to recognize that by drumming the Rockefeller wing out of the Republican party, they were dooming themselves to almost permanent minority status.

That year, Democrats won an unholy 27 of 35 Senate races to give them an majority in the 88th Congress of 66-34. And in the House, Democrats gained 36 seats to give them an edge of 293-139.

It took the Republicans 30 years to recover.

Now apparently, some loyal, hardworking Republicans wish to prove once again that it’s better to be “right” than win as Ed Morrisey, Hugh Hewitt, and others want to pressure Majority Leader Bill Frist to go ahead and break the filibuster of the President’s judicial nominees. By pledging not to give any money to the GOP until Frist “goes nuclear” and allow a procedural vote that would confirm the nominees by a simple majority thus preventing filibusters, the Captain and other like minded loyal Republicans are tying Frist’s hands at an extremely delicate moment.

If Robert Novak is to be believed, Frist has all but three members of his caucus ready to vote in favor of eliminating the stalling tactics of the Democrats. But several of those votes are “soft.” And its unclear if he’ll have the same numbers on his side by mid-week.

And that’s why it appears that Frist is turning to the religious right to stiffen the backbone of a few of his wobbly colleagues. The Majority Leader is set to a appear on a TV show with James Dobson sponsored by the Family Research Council, a questionable move given that the Democrats have been making political capital selling the idea that the Republicans are controlled by the Christian extremists. Dobson is part of what I’d consider the “loonbat” wing of the Christian right with his ridiculous protests against the PBS kids show The Teletubbies, among other idiocies. Will Collier at Vodkapundit has some excellent thoughts on this angle:

And I think he’s making a mistake by associating himself so closely with the Dobson effort. There’s nothing wrong with Christian conservatives organizing to support nominees they approve of, any more than anything being wrong with Ralph Neas or the ACLU organizing lefties to oppose them (I wish some on the left and libertarian side of the blogosphere could bring themselves to admit that), but it’s also just as inappropriate for Frist to be as in bed with the Dobson group as it is for Neas to be calling the dance steps for the Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee.

Here’s the Captain’s reasoning for his protest:

The current slate of GOP leaders in the Senate have become the equivalent of Bush I. They promised action to stop the two-year obstructionism of the Democrats if only the electorate would give the GOP a solid Senate majority with which to do it. While people can debate whether the current President Bush had a mandate from this past election, no one can doubt the mandate that the GOP got in its Senate results. The Democratic leader who ran the filibusters got tossed out of the Senate and the GOP wound up with a 10-seat majority.

Alright, fair enough. But what’s the rush? Where’s the fire? Why now?

There was talk last week about the GOP possibly moving on some other legislation like tort reform before confronting the Democrats over judges. Given the consequences of a Democratic shut down of the Senate, that sounds like a sound idea to me. Who do you think the voters are going to blame for a virtual shut down of government? Let me put it to you another way; who do you think the media is going to portray as responsible? ” And I see where Frist would think it important that the Republicans have some tangible accomplishments to take to the voters if worse comes to worse.

Hugh Hewitt agrees with the Ed and adds a political note:

It is crucial that a vote be scheduled and held on breaking the filibuster before the perceived dithering benches the base for the next cycle. If we lose six GOP senators, then we will know what the problem is, and we will have an issue in Florida, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota and other red states with Democratic senators up for re-election in 2006.

Again, hard to disagree with. But we’re not even three months into the Congressional term! The “base” may be antsy, but I can’t see the need to crack up the caucus over this issue especially since over time, Frist may be able to peel off one or two Democrats.

Matt Margolis lists some of the pitfalls of the protest advocated by the Captain and Hugh:

It’s disturbing to read a fellow conservative blogger advocating that we cease donating money to the Republican Party due to disagreements with how they’ve fought for us. It’s a no win situation to not help our leaders in any way we can. You can’t be pleased with their actions all the time. It was Republican self-righteousness that ultimately gave us eight years of Bill Clinton… Think about it

Spot on. So far, the Republicans haven’t been very effective in translating their electoral victory into tangible results on the floor of the Congress. Meanwhile, the Democrats have been speaking with one voice and at the same time, absolutely skewering the Republicans on a variety of issues.

Only a united party will be able to counter the Democrats. I hope the Captain, Hugh, and other disgruntled Republicans come back to the fold before it costs us at the polls.

UPDATE

Beth at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has some contact information as well as an interesting thought on the tactics advocated by Hugh and Ed:

Let’s not eat our own like the Buchananites and the Perotistas who abandoned Bush ‘41 and ended up electing Klintoon. I’m sure most anyone can find something to criticize about the way things are done in one way or another, but isn’t it infinitely preferable to handing things over to the Left

The consequences of more activist judges are almost too horrible to contemplate. Better to stick with the devil you know than fool with the devil you don’t.