President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has got to be secretly pleased with himself. His visit to the United States so that he can once again harangue the United Nations General Assembly with his warped and twisted view of history and current events has generated so much controversy, he must be hugging himself with glee that his name is on the lips of so many, his every move watched and commented upon.

This is unavoidable. There is a great gulf of misunderstanding between Iran and the west – largely the fault of the mystical Ahmadinejad. In a word, the Iranian President is oblivious. He has made it clear in his public utterances that he is blissfully ignorant of western values, sensibilities, and interests. Further, he has expressed no desire to be enlightened. He is an anti-intellectual in that he is not a seeker of knowledge but a purveyor of dogma. Because of that, he willfully misconstrues what he hears from America and the west, carefully twisting and shaping his take on current events to fit the preconceived outlines of his theocratic worldview.

The relativists among you will point out rather petulantly that we don’t “understand” Iran either, that Ahmadinejad’s understanding of history is formed as a result of western imperial machinations and that we shouldn’t blame him if he thinks we’re a beastly bunch of cutthroats.

And if one more lefty throws the coup against Prime Minister Mossadegh (after he had prorogued Parliament over a dispute involving compensation to the Brits for nationalizing the oil industry) in my face as a reason that the Iranians hate us, I am going to slit my wrists. We certainly supported it. But Mossadegh was not the mild mannered democrat heroically resisting US imperialism as he is so often portrayed by the left. His move dissolving parliament was done to forestall impeachment proceedings against him and caused many of his own supporters to turn against him and assist the plotters. The Iranians selective memory regarding Mossadegh has been useful to the mullahs as they lay the typical third world guilt trip on the US and the west in order to justify their hatred.

It isn’t that Ahmadinejad is misinformed. He is deluded. To believe that Israel has no right to exist as a nation and that the Palestinians are only poor, defenseless Muslims being slaughtered wholesale by the evil Jews for no reason flies in the face of reality. Ahmadinejad portrays the Palestinians as only wanting “justice” (so do many on the left in the west which calls into question their sanity as well as their judgement). The problem is, that is not all the Palestinians want. They have made it absolutely clear – both Hamas and Fatah – that nothing short of kicking the Jews out of what is now the state of Israel will satisfy their lust for “justice.” No word on where all the Jews would end up although their are huge numbers of Palestinians who would like to see them in mass graves.

So Israel continues to be roundly condemned and criticized for fighting for its own survival against a genocidal enemy who, after 60 years of negotiations, refuses to compromise on even the most basic and elemental of points; that Israel is. In any other universe, we would look upon Ahmadinejad and his supporters in the west who agree with the Palestinians and their “right of return” (think “Final Solution”) as lunatics worthy of being committed. But in the here and now, the Palestinians are portrayed as “freedom fighters” and the Israelis, in what is surely the cruelest and most nauseating irony in the long, sad history of anti-semitism in the west, are referred to as “Nazis.”

For this reason, the relativists tell us that Ahmadinejad has every right to desire nuclear weapons. After all, Israel has them, don’t they? Why don’t we take the Israelis to task for possessing the ultimate weapon?

The stupidity involved in ignoring the fact that Israel is an ally, outnumbered 10-1 by its hostile Arab neighbors (whose governments that are currently not in a state of war with the Jews are so unstable that they could be overthrown tomorrow and radicals thrown up in their place) would be shocking if we weren’t so used to it by now. The reason we vouchsafe Israel her nuclear weapons is exactly the same reason we tacitly support the Brits and French being nuclear armed; Israel is an ally and has a demonstrable need for them. This is so obvious that to try and bring some kind of childish notion of reciprocity regarding the Iranian nuclear program into the discussion is tantamount to lunacy.

But despite this sympathy for some of Ahmadinejad’s agenda, his appearance at Columbia University will no doubt draw fire from the left. But not for his anti-Israeli policies nor for the Iranian regime’s quest for weapons of mass destruction. Rather, it will be for the cultural peculiarities of the Iranian theocracy that sees gays and women a little differently than we do in the west:

A U.S. attack on Iran, which is not an inevitability but is a real possibility, would have consequences just as terrible as the invasion of Iraq. Thousands would die in initial air strikes, and more in the resulting backlash and regional conflagration. The work of Iranian campaigners for free speech, women’s rights, and lesbian and gay liberation, and against racism and anti-semitism, would be set back immeasurably. As Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi has pointed out, “Human rights are not established by throwing cluster bombs on people. You cannot introduce democracy to a country by using tanks.”

There are other means for engagement with Iran than war, and other means for disagreement with Ahmadinejad than the planned protest. We call on those who do not support a war with Iran to be wary of the vilification of Ahmadinejad, to avoid Monday’s rally, and to express vocally their opposition to military intervention.

Now here is relativism writ large. Plus a dash of laughable ignorance about the nature of the Iranian regime. All those Iranian “campaigners” for free speech are about as effective as a vegan proselytizing at a cattle auction. Those not jailed for a variety of “crimes,” are regularly silenced by shutting down their newspapers. And is anyone outside of the left not laughing uproariously at the prospect of “gay and lesbian liberation” while the mullahs are in power? These “reformers” need to become armed revolutionaries in order to achieve any of their goals.

And to use Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia to criticize those who are outraged that he is given a forum to spew his hateful nonsense makes one truly think they have fallen down the rabbit hole and entered Wonderland. Except in the left’s version of Dodgson’s universe, up is down, black is white, and the March Hare is sane.

I actually support Columbia University’s decision to invite the Iranian President to speak. Academic freedom must be as close to absolute as possible. Ward Churchill may be a fool but trying to shut him up only makes him a martyr. Similarly, hearing what Ahmadinejad has to say will be an eye opening experience for some, I’m sure. He will condemn himself out of his own mouth and save the Administration from having to gin up outrage over the danger posed by he and his government.

In the end, Ahmadinejad can’t help himself. As a man who believes that when he addressed the UN back in 2005 that world leaders didn’t blink the entire time he spoke and that there was a halo surrounding him, he will be unable to restrain himself from proving that he is insensate to reality.

He is not evil but pathetically childlike in his view of the world. Unfortunately he is determined to acquire some very dangerous toys. For that, the world should unite to deny him his perilous playthings so as to keep him from injuring himself or others.

I don’t believe that we have to go to war with him to keep the world safe – at this point. We still have time – up to 3 years if you believe the experts - before the Iranian regime would threaten the region with nuclear weapons. Diplomacy and sanctions can still work if the world can coalesce to stop them. Is this test beyond the capacity of the nations to pass?

Frankly, there isn’t much of a choice otherwise.

I have to confess that I’ve always found Keith Olbermann to be a great entertainer. He has a keen sense of timing and an educated eye for the absurdities in life and politics (and in sports as his stint at the anchor desk of ESPN showed) that makes a lot of what he does funny and even provocative at times.

In short, he is a first class clown, a talented comedian whose shtick is, unfortunately, too narrowly defined for stand-up and too intelligent for a sitcom. But he seems to have found a comfortable niche in the Howard Beal inspired “news as entertainment” field that Bill O’Reilly and other prime time cable hosts have settled into.

The problem is, like O’Reilly, Olbermann thinks he’s a journalist. Just where this notion is advanced on his show, I am unable to determine. Only an idiot would see the blatantly partisan attacks and relentlessly exaggerated rhetoric employed by Olbermann as anything except exactly what they are; an attempt to promote an ideology at the expense of informing the public by using tactics worthy of a Goebbels or TASS in order to discredit opposing viewpoints.

Well, meet an idiot:

In short, what CBS (and all the others) need is a new Ed Murrow. Good news! There’s already one out there on the launchpad who has demonstrated his qualifications. I’m talking about Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. He has the journalistic chops and the mind, heart, instincts and courage.

Olbermann, who anchors a one-hour nightly news show on MSNBC called Countdown With Keith Olbermann, closes his show every night by saying “1,547th [for instance] day since Mission Accomplished in Iraq,” an homage to Ted Koppel’s “Iran Hostage” coverage, which evolved into Koppel’s late-night ABC news show Nightline (the MSNBC show was originally Countdown: Iraq). Then Olbermann throws his crumpled script at the camera, which shatters, a simulated digital effect (something Koppel never did).

These quotes are from a gushing piece on Olbermann by Marvin Kitman in the online edition of The Nation magazine. It isn’t surprising or disturbing that Kitman likes Olbermann. But positing the notion that the Clown Prince of MSNBC is a modern day Murrow?

A tip off to Mr. Kitman’s bona fides as a judge of who is a journalist is found in the above quote where Kitman seriously informs us that Ted Koppel never crumpled his script and threw it at the camera – unlike Olbermann who does it to sign off his show.

Perhaps the reason Koppel never crumpled his script and threw it at the camera was because he was, like, you know, a real journalist and not a poseur. Real journalists don’t do histrionics. Olbermann is the master of the craft.

Kitman also shows a breathtaking stupidity about Murrow, about journalistic standards, and the difference between advocacy and news. In fact, Kitman proves himself to be an ignoramus regarding just about everything he comments on in his article with the possible exception of his references to celebrities. There, I am not competent to judge his perspicacity.

For instance, Kitman demonstrates a shocking ignorance about Edward R. Murrow and his place in broadcast news history. He believes the problem with modern day news presentation is that it tries to be balanced and objective rather than taking a decided point of view in order to advocate a clear ideological position (liberal) as Murrow’s broadcasts did:

So, as a TV critic who has logged millions of hours of viewing to help save one of my three favorite commercial networks, I decided to volunteer my services to the Save CBS Campaign. Here’s what I would do: First, I would dump the Walter Cronkite school of reporting, of which Katie Couric is the latest practitioner. The objective that’s-the-way-it-is style they use at all the network evening news shows is so old, so over. No wonder all the network news programs are falling in the ratings. Katie Couric is just the hardest hit.

What the evening news shows need is less “objectivity” and more analysis. The problem with objective journalism is that it doesn’t exist and never did. Molly Ivins disposed of the objectivity question for all time when she observed in 1993, “The fact is that I am a 49-year-old white female, a college-educated Texan. All of that affects the way I see the world. There’s no way in hell that I’m going to see anything the same way that a 15-year-old black high school dropout does. We all see the world from where we stand. Anybody who’s ever interviewed five eyewitnesses to an automobile accident knows there’s no such thing as objectivity.”

This is the tired, old canard that leftists have used for 40 years; that news written by white males is not “objective” because the journalist has no life experience as a woman or other minority to inform his writing and point of view. Somehow, this is supposed to slight issues and concerns near and dear to the hearts of liberal interest groups.

It is the “journalism as a crusade” school of thought that rejects the idea that news gathering and writing is not art, but craft. Clearly, much of the “craft” aspect of becoming a newsman has been lost today. Everyone wants to be a creative writer rather than a journalist. Newspapers especially encourage this because it makes their product livelier and, I suppose, easier to read. But for an old fuddy-duddy like me who looks in wonder even at wire service copy today and sees jaw dropping examples of blatant bias, I still believe it the job of a news writer to try their best to leave their ideological crusades at the newsroom door.

Not according to Kitman. And he holds up as a shining example of how the news should be reported, none other than the sainted Murrow:

What I’m proposing is nothing new. Before Walter Cronkite became the model “objective” newsman, there was Edward R. Murrow. In the late 1930s Murrow started the tradition of reporting the news and analyzing it, giving his opinion of what it all meant. The Murrow legend was built on his opinionated analyses on the CBS Evening News.

This is true as far as it goes. The fact is, Murrow’s editorials – which usually closed the news broadcast – were clearly labeled as such. Kitman is advocating that the entire news program be given over to editorial analysis:

For those who never saw Murrow’s news show, here’s how it would go: After running through the headlines, he would call on reporters at home and abroad to give reports on the scene. These so-called Murrow’s Boys were real TV journalists, not actors who played them on TV. CBS News in the Murrow years had people we respected because of their expertise, not because they were famous TV names. The foreign correspondents weren’t empty trench coats but real experts like William Shirer, who reported from Berlin on the menace of Hitler in the 1930s. It didn’t matter that Murrow’s Boys were bald like David Schoenbrun, who reported from Paris in the glory days, or older than the 18-49 demographic like Dan Schorr. They were specialists in specific areas.

Then Murrow would do his closing essay, in which he would comment on some hot issue, continually treading dangerous waters: McCarthyism at home, apartheid abroad, J. Edgar Hoover, the atomic bomb, stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction—all of which he opposed. He was pro-union and anti-business. He was a dissident on US foreign policy post-World War II.

The problem here is that Kitman has combined several different Murrow programs over the years in both radio and television in order to make an obscure point; that Murrow’s broadcasts had a definite ideological point of view.

Starting in the late 1930’s, Murrow’s reports from Europe were either special broadcasts (as his famous 1938 round up of European opinion about the Anschluss) or his regular reports from London that were part of H.V. Kaltenborn’s 15 minute news reading at night. Murrow was never an anchor for CBS News as Kitman intimates above. In fact, Murrow’s war reports were so good not because he injected opinion into his pieces but because he was able to write clear, concise summaries of what it was like to be in London during the blitz. Whatever opinions he gave were in the context of the deliberate targeting of civilians by Hitler – hardly courageous or even novel.

After the war, Murrow’s Hear it Now radio program and the TV version See it Now tackled the toughest controversies of the time. But these shows were totally independent of the nightly news program. It is clear by the description above that Kitman doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to Murrow’s duties at CBS. He never started See it Now by reading the headlines. The show was a one issue program. It was the beginning of TV documentaries, something that Murrow would continue to perfect until the early 1960’s when he wrote and broadcast perhaps the most memorable documentary in over the air TV history, Harvest of Shame that profiled the plight of migrant workers.

In short, Kitman’s laughable misunderstanding of what Murrow actually did for CBS News makes his subsequent gushing about Olbermann ridiculous.

And this curious historical revisionism about Murrow is almost unfathomable. It is either deliberate obfuscation of the facts or unbelievable stupidity on the part of Kitman:

“No one can eliminate prejudices—just recognize them,” Murrow said. His approach was so successful that all the other network news hours copied him.

Finally, CBS president William Paley made Ed Murrow shut up—by canceling his shows. In the dark ages after Murrow, the most powerful commentary on network news was the raised eyebrow of David Brinkley after reading a piece of news on NBC. A generation of telegenic and totally uninvolved journalists followed.

Um…no, the other networks “news hours(??)” did not try to copy him (news on TV at the time was 15 minutes). In fact, NBC steered clear of controversy as much as possible. ABC News was a joke at the time, not even considered much of a network at all.

And the fact is, See it Now as a weekly program was not cancelled by Paley but rather the weekly show went dark because it lost its sponsor in 1955, Alcoa Aluminum and was unable to secure another permanent one. This was back in the day when corporations would sponsor individual shows and losing a sponsor meant either getting another one or going dark. See it Now was on the air fitfully as a series of specials until 1958 when according to Murrow’s long time producer Fred Friendly, the broadcaster told Paley he refused to do any more shows because of the network’s habit of giving equal time to Murrow’s targets. (Something Olbermann never does).

Putting aside Kitman’s obvious lack of knowledge of who Murrow was and what he did, the question of whether Murrow was “journalist” or an “analyst” remains unanswered. As a first person witness to history he was very good, a pioneer in radio and we have Murrow to thank for much of the structure found in modern news broadcasts. As an advocate for liberal reforms, he was tireless but his legend sometimes outstrips the facts. His McCarthy broadcast was aired in March of 1954, long after most major Democratic newspapers (and even many Republican ones) came out against the Wisconsin Senator. Murrow came late to the bash McCarthy party and most historians agree the Wisconsin Senator sealed his fate a month prior to Murrow’s See it Now broadcast by sliming World War II hero Ralph Zwicker that brought widespread editorial condemnation as well as denunciations from veterans groups and finally, President Eisenhower himself.

Comparing Olbermann to Murrow then is a monumental stretch – just from the standpoint that Murrow relied on a cold, journalistic recitation of the facts in order to make his points. Olbermann wouldn’t know a “fact” if it came up and bit him on his rear end. This from his first “Special Comment” segment where Olbermann tries to evoke the memory of Murrow:

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war. I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient…. I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent. I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought. I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents. I accuse you of handing part of this Republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience and letting him run roughshod over it….

It would be tiresome to rebut what Olbermann has laid out as his “case” for a Bush resignation. If you believe that Bush “fabricated in the minds of your own people a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11” then there is no hope for you. You might as well believe in Santa Claus. I only highlight it to contrast the way Murrow went about savaging McCarthy:

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men— not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

Murrow could have been referring to Olbermann during most of that analysis.

Olbermann is a clown. An excellent clown but an entertainer nonetheless. It has been said that he is the first on-air blogger in that his rants are reminiscent of much that passes for analysis on the web. Of this, I have no doubt. His exaggeration, his cruel twisting of facts and circumstances, and his outright deliberate obscuring of the truth – 3 Congressional Committees have found Bush did not lie us into war not to mention assigning unproven and unsubstantiated motivations to the President for his actions – are part and parcel of the way many popular right and left blogs operate. But Olbermann as Murrow?

For ten minutes, Olbermann spoke with fierce clarity and surgical precision, drawing a comparison to President Nixon’s resignation. He had obviously done his homework. His recitation of Bush’s crimes concluded with his observation that the President had been “an accessory to the obstruction of justice” in the Libby case. “From Iraq to Scooter Libby,” Olbermann said at the time, “Bush and Cheney have lost Americans’ trust and stabbed this nation in the back. It’s time for them to go.” The highest praise I can give is to say I can imagine Ed Murrow speaking those words.

If Kitman can imagine Murrow saying those words, he’s a fool. Murrow would have marshaled the facts not gone off on ad hoc rants substituting ill formed opinions for clear, concise analysis. The idea that Kitman can’t recognize this only shows him to be an idiot.

Which is why any comparisons between Olbermann and Murrow are found only in the minds of Kitman and Olbermann himself. No serious journalist would entertain such a comparison nor would any serious person period. It is beyond belief that anyone could be so obtuse as to believe that Olbermann was anything except a clever entertainer who knows his audience expertly and panders to their biases and worldview.

Kitman’s vision of a future nightly news broadcast featuring Olbermann-like rants and ravings is pretty frightening. Thankfully, if such a nightmare were to occur, such relentless partisanship would appeal to an even smaller segment of the population than over the air news appeals to now which would cause Mr. Olbermann to retreat ignominiously back to the cable backwater of MSNBC where he belongs.

Every once and a while an issue emerges that exposes in stark relief the great chasm separating right from left – where the differences revealed are so profound that the two sides look at each other across this great divide and see not a political opponent but a strange and unfamiliar form of life whose habits of thought and moral calculus are so dissimilar as to make the gulf that separates them seem unbridgeable.

The on again-off again visit by President Ahmadinejad is such an issue. Rarely has the reaction to an event been so dichotomous. Perhaps not since the Terri Schiavo matter has the lines of understanding and perception been drawn so sharply that bewilderment mixed with outrage have been the dominant themes rather than the usual snark and spite that is hurled back and forth on a daily basis.

For instance, the normally sane lefty Josh Marshall goes off the deep end of idiocy here:

So what’s the problem exactly? Presumably we can be frank enough to acknowledge that the real issue here is that while Ahmadinejad is not Arab to most of us he looks pretty Arab. And he is Muslim certainly—and pretty up in arms about it at that. And we officially don’t like him. And we classify the country he runs as a state sponsor of terrorism. So even though he has absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, when you put all these key facts together, he might as well have done it himself. And what business does anyone with the blood of the victims of 9/11 on his hands have going to Ground Zero?

That’s basically it and don’t tell me it’s not.

See what I mean about bewilderment? It is incomprehensible to me that anyone could dismiss the visit to Ground Zero of someone who leads “Death to America” chants during nearly every speech he gives in Iran with the notion that those who are outraged at the thought are racists or ignoramuses who have a problem with enemy identification.

At least Marshall was earnest in his desire to understand what has so many people ticked off about the proposed visit. Others actually hit the nail on the head but dismissed the outrage as “childish:”

In the simplistic narrative that dominates Republican discourse, it doesn’t matter that Ahmadinejad and Iran had nothing to do with 9/11 or that Iran in fact publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks shortly after they occurred. All that matters is that Ahmadinejad is an Evil Islamofascist and that the attacks were carried out by Evil Islamofascists. Ipso facto, it would be the ultimate insult to allow him anywhere near Ground Zero.

And the later, the same author:

And as I wrote yesterday, having an important Muslim leader publicly pay respect to those who died on 9/11 would be a major public relations victory for us. Remember, the primary goal in the war on terror is to reduce the appeal of al Qaeda’s ideology among the world’s Muslim population.

First, as an aside, yes it is true that Iran “publicly condemned” the 9/11 attack – in the context that it mirrored the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The warped sense of history that could place 9/11 in the same moral framework as the wartime attacks on the two Japanese cities is exactly why Ahmadinejad’s visit would have been such an outrage.

But the real headshaker here is the inability of the writer and indeed most of the left to recognize the significance of allowing a terrorist enabler like Ahmadinejad to visit the site of a terrorist attack. For many on the left, because Iran had nothing to do with the event, their hands are clean. In this universe, Ahmadinejad is just some poor, Muslim pilgrim come to make nice with the Americans by piously laying a wreath where his co-religionists so brutally attacked us.

And yes I draw a direct line between Ahmadinejad and Atta. Why? Because despite the differences in their fanaticism (Atta’s inspiration came from Wahhabist radicalism while Ahmadinejad’s is from Shia mysticism), both are adherents of an ideology (not religion) that seeks to destroy the west and replace it with their own version of the Muslim ummah. We are not discussing whether it is possible or not. They both think it is and are therefore equal threats to the safety and security of the United States.

We can make fun of Ahmadinejad’s mystical utterances. They are a product of his extremely sheltered and deliberately closed off existence in Iran. And his obliviousness to American sensibilities about Ground Zero is telling indeed. But it is his determination to spread Islam – the same determination that animated Mohammad Atta – that would have made his trip to Ground Zero so inappropriate.

But for many on the left, a suspension of moral certitude takes place when dealing with America’s enemies. In their haste to see “both sides” in a conflict, many on the left forget (or deliberately choose to ignore) the nature of the Iranian regime and why the spread of that ideology must be opposed and stopped if possible. In fact, the left is so busy being even handed that it becomes impossible to take a moral stand at all.

This then is the real chasm. The right has moral certainty on this issue. The left, a moral relativeness.

Now before everyone gets all bent out of shape let me make a couple of observations. First, I believe criticism by the left of the right’s moral certainty about everything is well founded in some instances. It is just as idiotic to believe that everything is black and white as it is to believe that everything is shades of gray.

There are moral stands to be taken where there is little or no wiggle room. For or against a war would be one example. And then there is the idea that one can oppose terrorism but treat its perpetrators and enablers as they would anyone else. The United States government is at war with this man’s ideology. We are at war with most of what he wishes would come true for the Middle East and the west. We are at war with his notion of human rights and human decency.

We are not a perfect people nor are we infallible. But we can certainly stand up for those things that we feel are “inalienable” rights and therefore natural to the human condition. It has become unfashionable to believe that babies are not born into bondage to government diktats but rather free to live, breathe, speak, write, worship, and associate. It is government that takes these things away or doles out these rights like pieces of candy to little children. What Ahmadinejad/Atta represent is a complete anathema to the idea of natural rights – the basis of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and of the American way of life. There can be no more complete enemy of the United States.

There are variety of reasons the left chooses not to see the moral trap they have set for themselves by excusing Ahmadinejad’s desire to visit Ground Zero. They oppose the Iranian regime on an intellectual level but can’t make the leap to opposing them on the only level you can effectively fight them – the gut churning emotional level where you can feel something is either absolutely right or terribly wrong. Without moral certitude in fighting the Ahmadinejad/Attas of this world, we will lose. We will lose because they are certain that they are in the right .

The outrage felt by many on the right regarding Ahmadinejad’s now scuttled visit to Ground Zero and the left’s mockery and bewilderment of it open the chasm between us just a little bit wider. I have no idea how to bridge the difference between us. I hope it won’t take some cataclysmic event to make it happen.

I had a good time talking to Melanie Morgan and Brian Sussman of KSFO’s popular morning program out in true blue San Francisco.

We talked about the now scuttled Ahmadinejad trip to Ground Zero among other things. If you’d like to listen, you can stream or download the podcast here.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

I just woke up from one of the worst nightmares I’ve ever had. You’re not going to believe this but I dreamed that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in New York City for one of his semi-annual harangues to the General Assembly of the UN and decided to take a side trip to Ground Zero. Why he wanted to do this was never made clear in the dream. Maybe he wanted to dance a jig or lay a wreath honoring those martyrs to Islam he’s so fond of praising after they blow up a bunch of babies in a crowded market or die while launching missiles aimed at innocents in Israel.

Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous and would never even be contemplated in a million years but let me finish. It gets better. In my dream, would you believe the New York authorities actually negotiated this little scenario, tried to see if it could be carried off? That’s right. The police and Port Authority were seriously looking at the idea of accommodating this Holocaust denying, terrorist enabling scumbag.

As it turns out, someone must have whispered in the ear of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly that such a visit might invite a negative reaction from New Yorkers and would cause all sorts of unsightly demonstrations and protests. This just can’t be allowed under any circumstances. It doesn’t play well on TV and there’s always a helluva mess to clean up afterwards. Besides, the Police Department can’t afford the overtime paid to all those cops who would have to guard the life of a man who leads “Death to America” chants at most of his public appearances and speeches.

So in my dream, the Commish turned the Iranian President down, saying Ground Zero was closed to the public because of the construction that’s going on. You would think that this would have been the end of it. But the former Mayor of Tehran, former senior Commander in the Qods Force of the Revolutionary Guards (who almost certainly participated in the assassination of an Iranian dissident in Vienna a few years ago), and former “student” kidnapper of American diplomats was not to be deterred.

He decided to go anyway. And being a foreign dignitary, he was entitled to the protection of none other than the United States Secret Service – a dedicated group of selfless and courageous professionals who would be expected to take a bullet for this supporter of Hamas, Hezb’allah, and several other groups who make it their business to murder innocents.

Irony piled upon irony as Ahmadinejad’s entourage approached Ground Zero. New Yorkers lined the streets watching in stunned silence as the Iranian President’s car moved through lower Manhattan. The look on their faces reminded one of the old newsreel pictures of devastated Parisians who watched helplessly as the German Wehrmacht rolled down the Champs d’Elysees in 1940. Their shock and sadness at the turn of events was total. Their devastation, complete.

As his little caravan approached the site of the worst terrorist attack in world history the scene changed abruptly. Several thousand people had gathered to protect the site from being abased by a man who has said recently that he believes that the United States government was responsible for what happened that awful day when the towers fell and not his murderous co-religionists whose announced reason was to martyr themselves for his God.

Hundreds of people were lying in the street blocking the caravan from making further progress, their bodies meshed together forming a solid block of unmovable flesh. Thousands more were screaming obscenities and shaking their fist in his direction, expressing the rage felt by most Americans that this leader of a government that is currently training and supplying terrorists in Iraq who target American soldiers should have been allowed to get so close to one of our nation’s most sacred sites.

Of course, this wasn’t really a nightmare because we just experienced the possibility of this scenario playing out next Monday in real life. The chances of the dream becoming reality have become slim indeed due to what Ahmadinejad told CBS News 60 Minutes a few hours ago; that if the New York authorities can’t arrange security, he won’t go.

But in that interview with CBS, an even greater nightmare is revealed. The President of Iran, the leader of one of the most important nations in the Middle East and a world/historical figure – a beacon of resistance to western powers in the third world – didn’t have a clue that his proposed trip to Ground Zero would cause such resentment among the American people.

Here is the disturbing exchange between CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley and the Iranian President:

PELLEY: Sir, what were you thinking? The World Trade Center site is the most sensitive place in the American heart, and you must have known that visiting there would be insulting to many, many Americans.

AHMADINEJAD: Why should it be insulting?

PELLEY: But the American people, sir, believe that your country is a terrorist nation, exporting terrorism in the world. You must have known that visiting the World Trade Center site would infuriate many Americans.

AHMADINEJAD: Well, I’m amazed. How can you speak for the whole of the American nation?

PELLEY: Well, the American nation—

AHMADINEJAD: You are representing a media and you’re a reporter. The American nation is made up of 300 million people. There are different points of view over there.

This is not the tone deafness of an ignorant man. This is the leader of a nation that is striving to build a nuclear weapon and has made it crystal clear it intends to confront the United States in the Middle East and drive us out while “wiping Israel off the map.”

This is a man who is totally unaware of what goes on outside of Iran, a man whose worldview is so warped by fanaticism, religion, and his own messianic self image that the concept that he could be anything except universally loved and admired is foreign to him. I have no doubt he was sincere in believing that his offer to lay a wreath at Ground Zero was a gesture of goodwill. But the towering conceit that allowed him to believe in the impossibility that his gesture would be greeted with anything except outrage shows Ahmadinejad to be an extraordinarily dangerous man.

We are constantly told by Iranian apologists in this country that Ahmadinejad and his boss, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei are rational actors and that even if they achieve their goal of building a nuclear weapon, we have nothing to fear because of the certainty that they do not wish to commit national suicide and either launch a nuclear weapon at America or give one to terrorists so that they can do their dirty work for them. This is the MAD doctrine – Mutually Assured Destruction – that kept the world from exploding during the cold war.

But even if Ahmadinejad and Khamenei are “rational” in the sense that they are clinically sane, how in God’s name can you not look at the above statements by the Iranian President and not wonder if his warped, sheltered, and intensely narrow view of the world from Tehran hasn’t blinded him to how the world perceives his rhetoric and actions?

This is a man born to miscalculate America. He isn’t ignorant but rather oblivious – a far more dangerous state of mind when one considers that by the fact that he is unable to grasp certain realities about America and her people, he is more than likely to assume reactions by us to his provocations to be something totally different from what they truly are.

Would he, for instance, believe that exploding a nuclear weapon on American soil not cause us to retaliate? It is not likely but reading the above responses to his proposed visit to Ground Zero causes one to hesitate in saying that there is no chance he could be so obtuse. His reality is so skewed that anything is possible.

And that might be an even bigger nightmare than anything he and the New York authorities could have dreamed up at Ground Zero.

The votes are in from this week’s Watchers Council and the winner in the Council category was “2001—Our Own Odyssey Began On 9/11” by ‘Okie’ on the Lam.

There was a 4 way jam up for second:

1. “50 Million Intellectuals Can Be Wrong” by Bookworm Room

2. “The Way We Were” by Right Wing Nut House

3. “Osama’s Real Message” by Joshuapundit

4. “Voter Racism Must Be Condemned!” by Rhymes With Right

In the non Council category, the winner was “When the Left Cares, and When It Doesn’t” by Dennis Keohane at American Thinker.

If you would like to participate in the weekly Watchers vote, go here and follow instructions.

My latest PJ Media column is up. It’s about what’s going on in my little community of Algonquin and how for my neighbors, that kind of news trumps what’s going on in the rest of the world.

A sample:

The Internet is truly a seductive place. It is the 18-year-old blond hard body with legs that don’t quit, swishing through a lunchtime crowd of 40-something paunched, balding, married men wishing they didn’t have two kids, a wife with a headache every night, and a mortgage to rival the national debt. With a flick of her hip, the seductress will whisk them all away to some place where they don’t have to pick up the dry cleaning on the way home from work or take the kid to soccer practice. Instead, our middle-aged Lotharios imagine themselves… (Insert current fantasy here.)

Getting caught up in earth-shaking events and the personalities that shape them is all well and good. But there are times when instead of peering at the monitor, gleaning the latest news from thousands of miles away, we should be looking out the window instead. What’s going on in your community? Your neighborhood? Next door?

C’mon, America. Lighten up!

President Ahmadinejad being escorted to Ground Zero in New York City shouldn’t get everyone’s panties in a twist. Didn’t you hear? This is the guy who is going to end the Iraq War and allow the boys to come home. If he wants to visit Ground Zero – even though he and his rogue nation are terrorist sponsoring scum – then by God the Bush Administration and all of the Iranian apologists in this country are going to make sure he gets his wish.

In a move that has stunned New York, the Bloomberg administration is in discussions to escort the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to ground zero during his visit to New York next week, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said today.

The Iranian mission to the U.N. made the request to the New York City Police Department and the Secret Service, which will jointly oversee security during the leader’s two-day visit. Mr. Ahmadinejad is scheduled to arrive September 24 to speak to the U.N. General Assembly as the Security Council decides whether to increase sanctions against his country for its uranium enrichment program.

Mr. Kelly said the NYPD and Secret Service were in discussions with the Iranian Mission about the logistics for the possible visit, and whether it will take place at all. He said that for safety reasons related to ongoing construction at ground zero Mr. Ahmadinejad would not be allowed to descend into the pit.

Wouldn’t you like to have been a fly on the wall in the White House when the Secret Service told the President that Ahmadinejad wanted to visit Ground Zero?

The White House will deny the President was informed of the tour but I would be monumentally shocked if Bush weren’t told within 5 minutes of the request being made. Somebody somewhere somehow had to give the go ahead for such planning to occur, especially since you have so many security services involved.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of what anyone could imagine would be a bigger insult to the dead of 9/11. Yassar Arafat laying a wreath in Shanksville? How about Nasty Nasrallah being invited to tour the new wing of the Pentagon, rebuilt after the attacks?

There is no imagining what would be a bigger insult because there wouldn’t be one. The fact is, there is no more wrenching, rage inducing, fist-through-the-wall event that could take place in this day and age than allowing the President of a state that equated the 9/11 attacks with our attack on Hiroshima to visit Ground Zero.

It would be no different than if we had allowed Tojo to visit the Arizona Memorial.

THE LEAST SURPRISING UPDATE IN THE HISTORY OF THIS BLOG

Evidently, the New York City police have nixed the idea of an Ahmadinejad drop by at Ground Zero:

Earlier today, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly had said that Iranian officials had made a “formal request” that Mr. Ahmadinejad be permitted to visit ground zero and that the department, in coordination with the Secret Service, was discussing the matter with officials of the Iranian Mission to the United Nations…

A short while later, around 4:15 p.m., the Police Department’s spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said that Mr. Kelly had misspoke and that police commanders had already decided that a visit to ground zero by Mr. Ahmadinejad was not feasible.

Bush washed his hands of the responsibility for the incident faster than Pontius Pilate:

President Bush, moving quickly to respond to news that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has asked to visit ground zero, had a spokesman issue a statement aimed at Mayor Bloomberg that said – in so many words — deal with it.

“This is a matter for the City of New York resolve,” a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House, Gordon Johndroe, said. He added pointedly: “It seems odd that the president of a country that is a state sponsor of terror would visit ground zero.”

Odd? ODD? Holy Christ what a moron! Fire that flunky immediately.

Allah, by the way, has the definitive wrap-up on this mini-storm that will now probably die down, and adds this:

If it happens, if this Holocaust-denying terrorist filthbag is allowed to use the remains of the Trade Center for a photo op, the rage on the right will burn so white hot that even the anti-amnesty activism this summer will pale by comparison.

The tone deafness of that crew at the White House when it comes to the base – on up to and including Bush – never ceases to amaze me.

From Syrian President Bashar Assad’s point of view, why use words when bombs are so much louder and more attention getting?

Phalangist MP Antoine Ghanem was assassinated by a powerful blast that ripped through his car in east Beirut’s Sin el-Fil suburb Wednesday in what appears to be bloody scheme to strip the March 14 coalition of its parliamentary majority just six days before a scheduled session to elect a new president.

A 40-kilogram strong car bomb explosion shattered Ghanem’s black Chevrolet Sedan as it drove in the plush suburb, killing him and five other people, including his driver and an unidentified person who was sitting next to the slain MP on the back seat of the vehicle.

Well that’s one way for Assad to express his disapproval at Ghanem’s anti-Syrian politics although he may have gone a bit overboard with 100 pounds of explosives doing his talking for him.

Maybe we can get Jim Baker to negotiate a dignified surrender of the March 14 government to Assad. After all, he’s willing to do it for the United States.

Another assassination of a March 14th MP. Another step in gangster Assad’s plan to control Lebanon any way the world will let him. It is unbelievable to me that civilized nations continue to carry on business as usual with this thuggish tyrant. Despite mountains of evidence assembled by the Hariri Commission that these assassinations are planned and ordered at the highest level of the Syrian government, the US and the rest of the world continue to deal with Syria as if it were a sovereign nation and not a collection of murderous gangsters who brazenly flout international law and human decency in order to fulfill their twisted goals of ruin and domination of a tiny neighbor.

If there was ever a need for the nations of the world to collectively and as one step up and take on the responsibility of grabbing Assad and his henchmen by the scruff of the neck and throwing them on history’s ash heap, it is now.

Walid Phares saw this coming last June:

After the withdrawal of regular Syrian forces from Lebanon in April 2005, Bashar Assad and his allies in Tehran designed a counter offensive (which we described then and later) aiming at crumbling the Cedars Revolution. One of the main components of this strategy was (and remain) to use all intelligence and security assets of Syria and Iran in Lebanon in order to “reduce” the number of deputies who form the anti-Syrian majority in the Parliament. As simple as that: assassinate as many members as needed to flip the quantitative majority in the Legislative Assembly. And when that is done, the Seniora Government collapses and a Hezbollah-led cabinet forms. In addition, if the Terror war kills about 8 legislators, the remnant of the Parliament can elect a new President of the Republic who will move the country under the tutelage of the Assad regime.

As incredibly barbaric as it seems in the West, the genocide of the legislators in Lebanon at the hands of the Syrian regime and its allies is very “normal” by Baathist (and certainly by Jihadist) political culture. During the 1980s, Saddam Hussein executed a large segment of his own Party’s national assembly to maintain his regime intact. In the same decade, Hafez Assad eliminated systematically his political adversaries both inside Syria and across Syrian occupied Lebanon to secure his control over the two “sister” countries. So for Bashar to order the assassination of his opponents in Lebanon as of the fall of 2004 to perpetuate his domination of the little Baathist “empire” is not a stunning development: it is the standing procedure in Damascus since 1970.

The guy is psychic.

Phares points out that for this strategy to succeed, 8 pro-government legislators must be dealt with. To date, due to assassination and death by natural causes, the March 14th majority has shrunk by 6. Two more and Hizbullah will be able to name their own man for the presidency, probably paying off Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun by handing him the office on a silver platter.

Ghanem was no fool. He knew he had a bullseye painted on his back:

A Friend of the victim, speaking on condition of anonymity, quoted Ghanem as telling him Tuesday evening: “I face the threat of assassination. They want to kill me to open the door for by-elections to choose a new MP from (Michel Aoun’s) Free Patriotic Movement.”

I’ll have more on this story and the implications for the presidential elections as well as the future of the Siniora government either later today or tomorrow morning.

UPDATE

Jim Hoft has a huge roundup from both MSM and Lebanese sources as well as some pretty gruesome pictures.

Running around Capitol Hill, their white flags flapping majestically in the breeze, Senate Democrats have desperately been searching for Republican allies to help them in their quest to hand Iraq to the forces of death and destruction.

To be sure, the Bush Administration has spent much of the last 4 1/2 years doing the same thing, albeit not trying quite as hard and with considerably less planning. But for the Democrats and their hard and fast timetable for withdrawal of the bulk of American troops (and if the netnuts get their way, there won’t be a corporal’s guard left by the time the withdrawal is done), there don’t appear to be too many takers among Republicans:

Senate Democrats, who have spent weeks trying to woo Republicans to help end the war in Iraq, have taken a hard turn against compromise.

They now believe their best political strategy is to continue to play to a stalemate and blame an intransigent President Bush and his Republican congressional allies for refusing to negotiate an end to the war.

This is actually the safest political strategy possible. Knowing full well that pulling out the troops the way they are advocating would lead to a bloodbath, the Democrats will seek to cash in on people’s war weariness in 2008 by pointing out the obvious; that it was Republicans who got the country in this mess in the first place.

Not that people are liable to forget the previous 4 years of blunders, stupidities, mistakes, and miscalculations that have contributed in no small way to the chaos in Iraq today. But politicians like to think of the American people as children, the difference being the Dems want to play nanny to all of us while Republicans think it best that voters be seen and not heard. So rather than act like grown-ups themselves and cooperate on an Iraq policy that would serve our interests while allowing us to disengage, leaving behind something less than an unmitigated disaster, the two parties insist on playing “Pin the tail on the party that lost the War.”

“We haven’t found much movement with the Republicans. They seem to be sticking with the president,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday. “I think they’ve decided they definitely want this to be the Republican Senate’s war, not just Bush’s [war]. They’re jealous. They don’t want him to have it as only his war.”

That’s our Harry. First, last, and always the fool. Of course GOP Senators aren’t “jealous” of Bush nor do they ” want him to have it as only his war.” That may be the silliest political barb tossed on Capitol Hill this century. In fact, it’s borderline incoherent which makes one ask what time of day he was quoted and from which Capitol Hill watering hole Harry was coming from.

The calculus for getting the 60 votes needed to end the GOP filibuster on Iraq legislation apparently became too difficult for Reid to achieve, and a compromise could have forced anti-war Democrats to vote on softer goals for troop withdrawal, something staunchly opposed by the party’s base.

So Reid has forged ahead with an aggressive list of Iraq proposals, including a key amendment that would place hard timetables on troop withdrawal, shifting the mission in Iraq for U.S. forces from combat to supporting the Iraqi security forces, and completing the deployment.

Reid’s move essentially brings to an abrupt halt the delicate lobbying Democrats had engaged with moderate Republican senators whom they thought were vulnerable on the war issue.

Does anyone actually believe that the “base” would be satisfied with “shifting the mission in Iraq” to supporting Iraqi security forces? This has always been the dirty little secret of the Democrat’s “timetable.” No one is going to be “supporting” the Iraqi security forces. That’s because for the foreseeable future – 2 to 3 years according to the report issued by retired General James Jones – we will have to take the lead in operations involving the Iraqi army and police because only 6 or 7 brigades are judged competent enough to go it alone with Americans in support and advisory positions.

What this means is that beyond the 30,000 or so troops expected to be gone by next summer, there isn’t a whole lot we can do to reduce our troop commitment without severely damaging Iraqi security. But this isn’t about Iraqi security or American interests or fighting al-Qaeda, or any other military/political goal we might aspire to. This is about the raw, cynical use of politics by the Democrats in calculated effort to garner as many votes in 2008 as possible. That, gentle readers, is the bottom line. And what is truly shocking is that the Dems aren’t even trying to hide this fact from anybody. They are boasting about it. They are glorying in the notion of it. They are congratulating themselves, patting themselves on the back for being so clever.

But hey! Don’t call them unpatriotic.

The Iraq Tar Baby has well and truly trapped both parties. Unless Dennis Kucinich is elected president, the next Commander in Chief will come into office facing exactly the same situation in Iraq on January 20, 2009 that George Bush faced on January 19, 2009 and will have to manage the situation in Iraq so that the kind of disaster that would surely follow any “hard” timetables for withdrawal currently being pushed by Democrats can be avoided.

Some are grumbling about Bush “kicking the can down the road” so that withdrawal will be up to his successor. That may be true but I doubt whether the President – any president – would prefer that to be the case. Nor should Democrats fear that anyone who hasn’t lived in a cave for the last four years will blame them for any disasters that would befall Iraq or the Middle East following an American exit – unless they force a withdrawal under the worst possible circumstances and at the worst possible time as they are advocating now.

Simply put, the “hard” timetable pushed by the Democrats will not end up with any kind of “redeployment” but rather a full scale retreat for which their rabid base has been agitating these last few years. To pretend otherwise is to ignore both political reality and the cynicism of those who promote the surrender of American interests in Iraq to the forces of death and destruction.