Right Wing Nut House

There are times when my pessimism about what is happening in the world gets the better of me and I sink into one of two states of consciousness; blissful ignorance as I just ignore what is really going on until my curiosity gets the better of me or a simmering anger that usually explodes in some towering rant against those who would lead us (the West) to disaster because of the deliberate self delusion or ignorance of a large and influential segment of our political class.

As for the latter, while emotionally satisfying on one level, there are many times that I wish I had not hit that “publish” button. This is an occupational hazard for any blogger who becomes a slave to content and feels it necessary at times to let loose an ill favored rhetorical barrage at whatever current object of scorn, or derision, or humor that wanders into my gunsights. I realize that is part of the appeal of this site to many of you but there really are times when such writing is ill advised. Better the reasoned riposte than a heaping of calumny directed toward the wayward, the clueless, or the downright dumb.

However, there is something to be said for the former. Existing in one’s own little cocoon of information and opinion is certainly comforting. Reading only people and ideas that you agree with is not only good for one’s blood pressure, but also allows for a smug, self satisfaction to settle over one’s writing. The idea of the Revealed Truth From Rick is reinforced by many of you who leave nice comments and verbally pat me on the back for my perspicacity.

All goes swimmingly until I happen to read what I’ve written after a few weeks time and realize the trap I’ve fallen into. That’s when you must force yourself once again to examine the issues and events of the day from every possible angle so that even in disagreement, you find nuggets of truth, shades of meaning that can alter your perceptions and give a sense of wholeness to your beliefs.

In the end, that’s what this blog is all about; my beliefs. And the sooner you find out that it is silly and dangerous to believe that you have a corner on what is right or what is true, the more intellectually satisfying your search for knowledge will become.

Aristotle wrote:

“The search for truth is in one way hard and in another way easy, for it is evident that no one can master it fully or miss it wholly. But each adds a little to our knowledge of nature, and from all the facts assembled there arises a certain grandeur.”

“All the facts assembled” means that you must humble yourself in order to achieve that “grandeur” by searching out contrary interpretations of the facts. It isn’t just a matter of buttressing your own opinions by finding flaws in another’s arguments. It sometimes comes down to actually trying to wear the shoes of those with whom you disagree, seeing the issue from their perspective. Only then can you truly embrace your own conceits with the confidence that you’ve done all that is required to satisfy those pesky muses who bedevil your unconscious, whispering in your ear that “thou art but mortal” and must work like the dickens to overcome your own arrogance.

But in the face of this kind of evil, this monstrous darkness that is descending over the west largely as a result of our own stupidity and reckless disregard for our own safety, I’m tempted to gather all the Juan Coles, the Billmons, the Kossacks, and the whole lot of morally timid, incredibly myopic liberals who cannot see the horrific danger we are in from the scourge if Islamic fundamentalism and send them packing to Iran so that they can glimpse our future. It is mindboggling. And for someone brought up in a western, liberal, democratic, (small “d”) tradition, really quite perplexing.

Is there nothing in the west worth defending? Are there no values, no artistic or cultural traditions worth standing up for? Is the warm and comfortable embrace of western freedoms to be given up so cavalierly, without a fight and in some cases, even willingly?

On Thursday, the President of Iran said for the umpteenth time that the State of Israel should be eliminated. Previous incarnations of this rhetoric has been the disputed phrase about wiping Israel “off the map” and variations on the theme that the Jewish state will disappear in fire and smoke. Ahmadinejad has also suggested that the Europeans carve out some of their own territory and uproot more than 6 million Jews in order to move them “back” to Europe (the overwhelming majority of Israelis having been born in their own land, given to them by the United Nations and fought for by their fathers and grandfathers).

And yet, despite the clearly stated goals of the Islamic regime in Iran now growing bolder and more open about its intent to use proxies like Hizbullah to carry the fight to all “infidels,” all we hear from most of the left is a combination of nauseating anti-Semitism and a curious moral indistinctness between the Israelis and Hizbullah.

Hizbullah launches hundreds of rockets into Israel with the expressed intent of killing as many non-combatants as possible and the reaction on the left is, after (perhaps) a desultory condemnation of these purely terror tactics, gleeful commentary on how Israel is losing the war. On the other hand, when Israel mistakenly targets a house in Qana, apologizes profusely, and actually alters their targeting regime to try and prevent further mistakes, the moral outrage is without limit. Juan Cole:

There had been some question about whether Hizbullah’s ability to hit Israel with rockets had been degraded, or whether it was just observing the 48 hour air cease fire. On Wednesday it cleared the mystery up. The indiscriminate firing of rockets on civilian targets wounded 21 persons and one hit the Palestinian West Bank. Among the rockets fired was a long-distance Khaybar II. Targeting civilians or unnecessarily endangering them is a war crime.

Please note Professor Cole’s pro-forma recognition that Hizbullah has committed an atrocity is disconnected, unemotional, and matter of fact. He doesn’t even directly accuse Hizbullah of a war crime despite the fact that Hizbullah has now launched thousands of rockets into northern Israel trying desperately to kill as many civilians as they can.

What kind of mind can make that disconnect? The kind that can write this about Qana:

Note how by calling it a “tragedy,” Blair takes the onus off Israel for launching a total war on the Lebanese infrastructure and population. A hurricane is a tragedy, Mr. Prime Minister. This is a war. It is a war launched by specific persons, including especially Ehud Olmert and Gen. Halutz. It isn’t something that can be put into the passive voice.

Even most of the Arab world agrees that Hizbullah “launched” this war, not Prime Minister Olmert. And Cole’s blindness, comforting as it might be for him, extends to his swallowing hook, line, and sinker, this kind of Arab propaganda:

The Israelis appear to be engaged in a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Shiite towns and villages of southern Lebanon, and are indiscriminately bombing all buildings in the area south of the Litani River. They have chased hundreds of thousands of residents out, and are destroying the property they left behind in a systematic way, rather as they destroy the houses belonging to the family members related to suicide bombers. In other words, the Israelis are engaged in collective punishment on a vast scale. They maintain that rocket launching sites are embedded in these villages. But since Hizbullah keeps firing large numbers of rockets, it does not actually appear to be the case that the Israelis are hitting the rocket launchers. They are demonstrably hitting civilian houses and apartment buildings in a methodical way.

“Ethnic cleansing?” “Collective punishment?” Cole and I share a passion for reading the Daily Star of Lebanon and the individuals making claims such as he is reprinting here are Hizbullah spokesmen. There is no talk from Prime Minister Siniora of “ethnic cleansing” nor of any “methodical” razing of buildings. Cole regurgitates Hizbullah propaganda without batting an eyelash.

And herein lies the cause of my pessimism. Cole is an intelligent man, a font of information on the Middle East and its history (if you can stomach his biases). But last May, he wrote this regarding any confrontation between the west and Iran:

So sit down and shut up, American Enterprise Institute, and Hudson Institute, and Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and American Heritage Foundation, and this institute and that institute, and cable “news”, and government “spokesmen”, and all the pundit-ferrets you pay millions to make business for the American military-industrial complex and Big Oil.

We don’t give a rat’s ass what Ahmadinejad thinks about European history or what pissant speech the little shit gives.

Despite his hatred for the Iranian regime, Cole believes that we should not take Ahmadinejad at his word. If the Iranian President says that Israel will be eliminated, it is rhetoric that we can safely ignore. And when Ahmadinejad uses proxies like Hizbullah to make war on Israel and the west, I suppose we should bury our heads in the ground and pretend we shouldn’t do anything about it because the entire rationale for looking at Iran as an enemy has to do with the military industrial complex in America and has nothing to do with our own survival.

Cole, of course, is not alone. Not by a long shot. And it is legitimate to ask if Cole and his ilk would do anything to defend themselves against this kind of threat. Time and time again over the last 27 years Islamic fundamentalists have attacked us, eliciting a “proportional” response - a bombing run or lobbing a few cruise missiles at targets of opportunity. All this has gotten us is more attacks.

And Israel, trying to play by the rules laid out by the international community for the last 60 years that prevent it from removing threats to its existence so that the sensibilities of those who refuse to recognize the Jewish state as a legitimate national entity won’t be ruffled, finds itself on the frontline of this most recent war against the west. And once again, an international community more in love with “process” than with actually solving Israel’s dilemma is calling for the Jewish state to halt before it feels the job is done. No wonder the United States wants to change the failed diplomatic framework of the past that did nothing to make Israel safe and only made western politicians look good to the homefolks.

The world is becoming too dangerous to play these kinds of games anymore. Hizbullah must be disarmed. Syria must be be held to account for their meddling in Lebanon which included the brazen assassination of the beloved Hariri. And Iran must be isolated from the community of nations until they rid themselves of those who seek to lead a wordlwide crusade whose goal is the subjugation or destruction of everything we in the west find worth living for.

It is getting very late in the day not to have the left on board for this fight. And perhaps it will take a liberal leader somewhere else to explain it to them. They seem to have turned a deaf ear to anything coming from the United States and especially George Bush.

But wherever the wake-up call comes from - and it will come - the only question is will it come too late so that the west can face this latest challenge to its existence reasonably united.

The alternative is simply unthinkable.

The Israeli Air Force has changed its story on how and why the ancient village of Qana was bombed, raising questions about a host of military/civilian issues that demand answers.:

It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.

The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.

The site was included in an IAF plan to strike at several buildings in proximity to a previous launching site. Similar strikes were carried out in the past. However, there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike.

To sum up; no Hizbullah rockets launched from the building or in the vicinity, none apparently even launched from Qana that day, it was not in retaliation for a rocket launch but rather part of a “plan” to strike the building, and that “mysterious” 8 hour gap could very well not even exist:

The IDF account and those of survivors present contradictory versions of the Qana deaths. The IDF said that there is an unexplained gap of about seven hours between the IAF strike and the first report that the building had collapsed. Residents’ accounts say only 10 minutes went by between the strike and the collapse.

The survivors say rescue teams arrived only in the morning, as night conditions made the rescue mission difficult. The Red Cross in Tyre received a call for help only in the morning, explaining their late arrival.

First and foremost, those who are blogging this story should step back for a while and wait for the IDF report on the tragedy which should be forthcoming in the next couple of days. This appears to be one of those stories where the bloggers got ahead of the curve of information so far that speculation took on a life of its own and ended up making some wish they had held their fire.

The immediacy and impact of blogs makes delving into stories like the Qana bombing a treacherous undertaking. It is one thing to relay media reports like those from Qana that suggested there was an 8 hour lag time in the building’s demolition as well as IAF statements that have now turned out to be false. But it is quite another to engage in the kind of rank speculation that posited the notion that the collapse of the building was due to the enemy bringing down the building on top of those civilians instead of an Israeli bomb.

This in no way should give Hizbullah a free pass for their shameful dog and pony show with the dead bodies of children found in the rubble. Nor does it excuse the AP, Reuters, and other news organizations who always seem to be there to act as Hizbullah’s private PR team.

And while there are still legitimate questions that need to be answered about several issues surrounding the bombing, what the IAF is admitting here does not reflect well on their targeting policies. Based on the best intelligence available to them, it nevertheless appears that the IAF made a tragic and perhaps avoidable mistake.

Given the professionalism and yes, the humanity of the IDF, I fully expect an investigation into the incident to include the decision making process that led to authorizing the mission to bomb the building.

Meanwhile, Hizbullah gets a free pass from most of the world for firing missiles at Israeli cities, probably praying to Allah before launch that the rockets hit a building and kill as many Israeli civilians as possible. The contrast between the two sides should be highlighted at every possible opportunity; when Israel hits a civilian target, it is a mistake, cause for mourning and a re-examination of military protocols. When Hizbullah hits a civilian target, it is a cause for celebration and probably rates a pat on the back to those who launched the rocket.

UPDATE

Confederate Yankee makes two excellent points:

1. That the building was used to store munitions.

2. Evidence for the almost immediate collapse comes via an “eyewitness” who may or may not be telling the truth.

He also links to The Left Coaster who thinks piles on Israel’s supporters for daring to speculate that Hizbullah could have engineered the entire incident. This from a moonbat who wrote this measured, thoughtful piece on the day of the tragedy at Qana:

God damn you Mr. President for what you, yes you have done to this country. You, your satanic Vice President and Secretary of Defense, and your inept Secretary of State have besmirched the integrity and dignity of this country for far too long. I fear that we will all now pay a price for it. With his green light and wink and a nod relationship with Israel, Bush has blood on his hands tonight just as much as the Israelis. …

Burn in hell Mr. Bush. Your foreign policy team is waiting for you there. No matter how quickly you try and weasel your way away from this and towards a face-saving call for a cease fire, this hangs around your neck, and there is nothing you can do to change that.

This is what passes for rational thought on the left.

“There is something fundamentally wrong with a war where there are more dead children than armed men.”
(Jan Egeland, UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs)

Mr. Egeland is commenting on the fact that out of the more than 700 Lebanese civilians who have been killed in the Israeli-Islamist War, half have been children. The Qana tragedy, where Hizbullah terrorists deliberately sighted their rocket launchers next to a building bursting with Lebanese children and oldsters knowing that Israeli retaliation would in all likelihood result in massive civilian casualties, cost the lives of more than 3 dozen youngsters alone. And Hizbullah’s actions are at the heart of what has become the number one question for armies that fight terrorist groups like Hizbullah, Hamas, or al-Qaeda.

Who bears responsibility for a civilian’s death when one side puts a bullseye on an innocents back simply to gain a propaganda advantage by his death?

There seems to be no interest by the international community to discuss this question. The reason is simple. Since it is western armies faced with this paradox and most of the world is made up of non-western states, it is to everyone else’s advantage to pretend, as this gentleman does, that there is an absolutist position on the death of civilians; it is always wrong:

It’s been awhile so it seems again it’s time for a helpful reminder that noncombatant immunity isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law.

In other words: You’re not allowed to kill civilians.

Killing civilians is against the law. Killing civilians makes you a criminal.

Yes, but …

No buts about it. You’re not allowed to kill civilians.

And, also: You’re not allowed to kill civilians.

This is neither new nor controversial, yet putting the matter in such stark terms always seems to upset people.

On the one hand, this isn’t surprising since the killing of civilians has become a scarcely remarkable, dog-bites-man commonplace. Yet it’s still surprising that anyone could find this elementary notion upsetting: You’re not allowed to kill civilians. If you’re one of those people who finds this upsetting, bear in mind what it is that you’re upset about. Apparently someone you feel ought to be immune from criticism has been killing civilians and you feel I’m criticizing them by pointing out — in the most abstract terms, without any mention of particulars — that this is something that no one is allowed to do.

To be fair, the writer does mention that there may be extenuating circumstances where the killing of civilians is unavoidable. But that doesn’t address his moral condemnation for violating his simplistic mantra. The fact of the matter is, that there is a clear moral mandate to condemn the cynical use of civilians by Hizbullah and what’s more, place the blame for civilian deaths squarely and confidently in the bloody hands of the terrorists.

James Lewis brilliantly explains:

We have lost elementary moral distinctions over the last century. As a culture, we pretend we cannot tell the difference between accidental shootings by police in pursuit of killers, and deliberate killing by those intent on destroying innocents. This is not, as the Left likes to boast, a reflection of our higher morality. It is a loss of elementary moral discrimination. We are much less moral than our ancestors of a hundred or two hundred years ago.

One role of the New Media must be to restore that common sense morality which says that hiding behind women and children in war is murder, plain and simple. The onus for murder is on the terrorist, not the cop.

There is a solution: It is for the media and the United Nations to rediscover the elementary moral distinctions of the original Geneva Conventions. Killing innocents is murder. Drawing enemy fire on children is evil. It’s not hard.

Why then is there no outrage against Hizbullah except in the narrow ideological confines of conservative western thought and a few liberal outriders going against the grain of the lockstep left?

It is more comfortable to pretend that the old verities regarding war are somehow still operational in a real world sense. An unarmed 10 year old boy leaning out a window in Anbar directing fire against American positions in Iraq presents a wrenching moral choice for the officer in command of the action. What guides that American officer is usually contained in the Rules of Engagement. Sometimes it’s how he was trained. But it is always what is inside the officer himself - his own personal code of morality and honor. Whether the boy is targeted or not, whether his death can be justified or not is really not the point. The child is a civilian in a combat zone and according to a strict reading of the laws of war and dictates of humanity, killing him is wrong.

Or is it? This situation, hypothetical as it is, brings us all into a new moral country as do the actions of Hizbullah with their brazen use of civilians as a combination human shield and fodder for press releases. Have you heard of any gathering of the great philosophical and ethical minds of our time to address these questions? Has there been any Security Council meetings to examine the implications of not only what Hizbullah is doing but what Israel (and to a lesser degree the United States) is forced to do in response?

Has there been any effort whatsoever on the part of the naysayers, the carpers, the condemners, to look beyond their spiteful, absolutist moral positions and delve into these dilemmas? I am not looking for an ethical or moral justification for dead civilians as much as I’m seeking a moral framework that takes these tactics into account. There is none. The American officer in Iraq or the Israeli Air Force Chief of Staff targeting Qana are all alone with their agony. And I firmly believe that this need not be the case.

Again, James Lewis:

European warfare came out of a tradition of chivalry. The military uniform marks combatants from bystanders. The British Redcoats were brilliantly visible, as were Napoleon’s armies. The idea of disguising oneself in the face of musket and even cannot fire was treated with contempt. Far more, the idea of drawing enemy fire while hiding among women and children was simply criminal. The British Navy would have hung its own sailors for such crimes. European soldiers were ready to die rather than be contemptible.

The Geneva Conventions came out of this tradition. Wars were terrible, and became much worse as they become industrialized. But they still reflected some of the values of chivalry.

[snip]

For the Nazis, savagery and murder became a matter of ideology and policy. SS men sent to murder Jews and other civilians were told to reject any feelings of compassion. The Nazis explicitly rejected Christian values, a point that is constantly lost to the Left. On the hard-hearted Left, during the Lenin-Stalin period, explicit orders were constantly given to kill peasants who resisted Moscow’s orders to give up their land and huddle in communal farms.

Thus the Roman and later Christian doctrine of Just War was steadily diluted as the 20th century wore on. Israel has a similar doctrine of “purity of arms,” and has recently revised its ethics code for the protection of civilians in guerilla warfare—- war in which civilians are used to shield the warriors, and innocent deaths are desired for their propaganda value. The media, consisting of nostalgic Lefties and old Mao-worshippers, fall for the double standards every day.

I would disagree slightly with James in that the media doesn’t so much “fall” for Hizbullah’s ruse as much as they and the left pretend, as do Islamists the world over, that the outrage is solely confined to “civilian deaths” and not to those who cause them.

Michelle Malkin:

The truth about Muslim outrage over Qana is that it’s not really about the tragic deaths at Qana–just like the cartoon jihad was not really about the cartoons.

Remember: Muslim outrage over the Danish cartoons was stoked and manufactured amid attempts to bully Denmark over the International Atomic Energy Agency’s decision to report Iran to the UN Security Council for continuing with its nuclear research program. Iran blamed Israel for the cartoons:

[snip]

What better way to distract from Hezbollah’s atrocities and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s annihilation plans than to start screaming about Israel’s “war crimes” and Western crimes against humanity. John Hinderaker at Power Line points to prefab jihadi banners demonizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. EU Referendum looks at morbid photo posing. Bob Owens wonders where all the men were.

But never mind all that, right? The Muslim world is united again. And some short-sighted Westerners are allowing themselves to be duped.

With everyone pretending together - the media, the left, the enemies of Israel and the United States - it becomes relatively easy to gin up outrage not only in the streets of Arabia but also the salons of the Upper East Side and the offices of network news executives. Hence is opinion manufactured and liberal outrage assuaged.

All of this fails to take in Lewis’ main point - that the traditions in the west of wrestling with moral questions regarding war has been deliberately abandoned. Any new moral truths or clarity that would emerge from such a debate or discussion would threaten the left’s ability to use civilian deaths exactly as Hizbullah does; to beat their political opponents over the head.

It’s a shame, really. The very people who would ordinarily be at the center of helping the west in creating any new moral paradigms for fighting and winning the War on Terror are letting her down in her hour of greatest need. The 500 year old liberal intellectual traditions of moral and ethical debate have been tossed into the gutter and replaced with an unyielding, anti-intellectual absolutism that will brook no opposition to its cherished tenets and comfortable, old shoe verities.

We may yet pay dearly for their prideful ignorance before all is said and done.

UPDATE

Allah comes through with a round up of the growing pushback against the out of control condemnation by most of the non western world against Israel for Qana. Will it matter? Hard to tell from just reading the internet but my guess would be we definitely have not heard the last of Qana and that the purveyors of the storyline that says Israel is at fault will be hardpressed to defend themselves over the next few days.

Evidently not satisfied with simply being made into an internet verb, noted child molesting humor mongerer and thorn in the side of human decency Deb Frisch is back - with a vengeance.

Employing poorly disguised sock puppets, Frisch (a woman defended by some on the left despite her unhinged attacks on Jeff Goldstein and his two year old son) commented at Ace’s site thusly:

Do you think Jeff sux Satchel’s dick or just plays with it?

Of course, she didn’t use her true name. But the IP address on the comment - as well as the IP address on similar comments made at Goldstein’ site - traces back to Eugene, Oregon where Frisch currently resides. The comments left at Jeff’s site are so sickening that I’ve decided not to publish them here. Patterico has a screenshot of them if you feel the need to see depravity in the flesh.

That’s not all. According to Patterico, the IP address is eerily similar to one used by Deb Frisch herself in comments left at Aces, Goldstein’s, and Patterico’s websites in the past.

Patterico sums up the evidence:

Frisch previously left comments on my site, Ace’s site, and Jeff’s site using a slightly different Qwest IP address that traced back to Eugene, Oregon. That previous Frisch IP address was Qwest IP address 71.34.252.228, which also traces to Eugene, Oregon.

I long ago deleted the content of comment she left on my site, under the moniker “WW” (”Word Warrior”); it’s still linked here. I preserved the original text in a Notepad file.

Ace confirms that Frisch previously posted comments under her own name on his site, under that same Qwest IP address. And Jeff tells me she had previously used two Qwest IP’s on his site. One was the same as was left on my site: 71.34.252.228. The other was 71.32.126.27. That is also a Qwest IP address that traces to Eugene, Oregon, the city where Frisch lives.

In the meantime, Jeff Goldstein has felt compelled to stop posting until he can resolve his problems - “once and for all” - either through the legal system or, my recommendation, by using law enforcement if indeed any laws have been broken.

Couple this with the ongoing drama involving Seixon, Larry Johnson, Jason Leopold, and God knows who else and you have an extraordinarily disturbing picture. And I would say to my friends on the sane left who I know visit here from time to time and are kind enough to disagree with me rationally that the time has come for larger lefty blogs to stand up and be placed in the decency column by using some of that vitriol they hurl at the right and at the President with such practiced ease and send some of it in the direction of the guttersnipes, the bullies, and the dirty necked galoots who are making the internet a sewer and a place of dread.

I don’t like the direction that the blogosphere is going at all. All the great hopes for this new communications medium engendered in the lead up to and following the 2004 election are being subsumed in an avalanche of filth and threats that have gone far beyond bad jokes, inappropriate humor, or simple flame wars. It is no longer enough to “fisk” a post by a rival blogger. Now you must destroy the blogger himself, lay him low with withering personal invective of a kind that borders on threats to his person or even more disturbing, to his family.

I mentioned in my Seixon post that these tactics are a kind of hardball politics not seen on the internet before but not unfamiliar to those who have been involved in politics on the national level. Whispering campaigns of a vile nature carried out against opponents, the call in the middle of the night, siccing friendly reporters on rivals by rumormongering, digging up dirt on people’s personal lives, even veiled threats have all been part of The Big Game in Washington for decades. Somehow, you would think that the citizen journalists who inhabit the blogosphere could have immunized themselves from that kind of nastiness.

Alas, the stakes are considered so high by most that the old saw “The ends justifies the means” becomes a battle cry for those who seek the brass ring of power and the prestige that comes to those invited into the outer rings of the Councils of State. It is the politics of Court transmogrified to 20th century America. It is a game played for keeps. The victims are those who see politics as something less than life or death. And in that kind of contest, those most determined to prevail generally do.

Unless the blogosphere as one rises up in righteous anger and condemns without equivocation, without qualification, and without regard to ideology or party affiliation those who seek to sully this medium with the poisonous tactics of bullying, or threatening, or crossing over from the virtual world into the physical world in order to carry out vendettas against opponents, we will become a sideshow, a gaggle of carping, sniping, irrelevancies who deserved to be laughed at rather than taken seriously for our ideas or beliefs.

It’s not to late to take a stand. And I urge everyone that reads this to take that stand with me.

Glenn Greenwald has the right wing internet all atwitter today. And the only thing that has been running through my mind as I’ve perused the gleeful “gotchyas!” and astounded “ah has!” from my fellow righty bloggers has been a sadness born of the realization that it matters not about Greenwald’s sock puppetry or resume padding. The left will still adore him. He will still have standing with the fawning, drooling mass of brainless twits who think his nonsensical screeds against conservatives has any merit whatsoever. And the gaggle of lefty bloggers who think he’s the second coming of William O. Douglas will continue to nod with vigorous approval at his vapid, empty absolutist denunciations of anything and everything the government does in its efforts to protect us.

In short, when all is said and done, tomorrow morning the sun will still come up in the east, set in the west, and Greenwald will yet be prattling on with pious protestations regarding his monk-like objectivity and political centrism while proving to all but the most willfully self deluded that he is a hypocritical weasel whose baseless, scurrilous screeds against all things conservative are the most rank fabrications of his hysterical, hateful mind.

But a record must be made nonetheless. And Dan Riehl, a true citizen-journalist, has taken the time and trouble to research Mr. Greenwald and what he reveals in this excellent post is enough to give any decent liberal pause to reflect on their cannonization of him as some kind of civic saint and ask some questions of their own about who he is and what manner of man they are in bed with.

Dan’s article deserves to be read in its entirety. But this brief excerpt gets to the nub of Greenwald’s problems with the truth as well as the curious group of far left liberals who seem to be behind his rise to stardom:

New York Times best selling author Glenn Greenwald appears to have written a book in an attempt to lecture American patriots on how to act politically when his primary and preferred residence isn’t even within the United States - it’s actually in Brazil. Perhaps How Would An Expatriate Act would have been a more fitting title.

Several statements said book’s publisher, Working Assets, currently uses to promote the book and author appear to be false. And while Greenwald’s Liberal blogging buddies recently lambasted conservative author Ann Coulter for alleged ethical transgressions - lifting copy from her columns for inclusion in her latest book, Godless, it seems as much as ten-percent or more of How Would A Patriot Act was actually “culled” from previously published material on the author’s popular blog, Unclaimed Territory, available free to all on the Internet.

He must be a liberal given his apparent fondness for re-cycling.

New York Times best selling author, Glenn Greenwald may also have allowed readers to assume something of an exaggerated perception of his professional credential with a prestigious New York City law firm. That’s less clear, but certainly Greenwald can clear it up. Still, once you get beyond Matthew Hale, the high profile case experience associated with Greenwald’s public image isn’t exactly obvious to even a somewhat more than casual observer. Perhaps that’s another item Greenwald will eventually get around to fleshing out.

There is evidence below of a larger effort to prop up both the book and his image as part of an orchestrated campaign to elevate his visibility and status and ensure that his anti-Bush punditry was picked up on by the MSM at a critical time.

Greenwald’s completely inadequate and typically disingenuous response is here. Not only is it inadequate, it’s confusing and doesn’t directly address many of Mr. Riehl’s points about his law practice that Greenwald, in fact, now claims is dormant.

And Greenwald glosses over the most serious ethical matter associated with the oppo research that has come to light recently thanks to some excellent research by Ace, Patterico, and Goldstein regarding the curious coincidence of 5 different commenters with 5 different names all having the same Internet Provider (IP) address - an address that Patterico has confirmed belongs to one Glenn Greenwald. In addition, the comments all contain basically the same “defense” of Mr. Greenwald - bragging of his accomplishments and belittling his opponents in exactly the same language.

Greenwald dismisses the charge:

Those in the same household have the same IP address. In response to the personal attacks that have been oozing forth these last couple of weeks, others have left comments responding to them and correcting the factual inaccuracies, as have I. In each case when I did, I have used my own name.

Is it possible that Mr. Greenwald’s partner left those comments under 5 different names? While that is certainly something to consider, it begs the question as to why his companion would use so many pseudonyms when his own name was suitably anonymous. And if Greenwald did in fact leave all of those comments, it would reveal a sickness of thought and reason not to mention a towering intellectual hubris that should worry anyone who takes the man with a modicum of seriousness.

In the end, however, he’s not worth the trouble. For all the work done by the bloggers I linked above, the fact of the matter is that Greenwald’s kind is a dime a dozen on the left. He and others of his ilk will continue to use drugstore psychology, over the top invective, hysterical fear mongering, and outright lies to smear their way to stardom. And unless there are those on the right ready to refute their lies, exaggerations, and laughable attempts at armchair psychoanalysis, they will continue to have the mouth breathing masses on the left groveling at their feet in worshipful and slavish devotion.

I pointed out when I first fisked one of Mr. Greenwald’s posts the monumental task it was to attempt and refute so many strawman arguments, obfuscations, exaggerations, and dissociative explanations for conservative ideology that spewed forth from Greenwald’s pen. It reminds me of why most reputable scientists won’t spend much time debunking their pseudoscience nemeses. It simply takes too long and really isn’t very interesting work.

In essence, Greenwald isn’t worth it.

UPDATE

This is the first line from Greenwald’s defense:

“As I’ve noted several times in the last couple of weeks, my focus on the lawlessness, extremist rhetoric and violence-inciting tactics of the Bush movement and its followers in the blogosphere…”

“Lawlessness?” Who? Where? What statute? Unless Mr. Greenwald now considers it criminal behavior to criticize the press or Bush haters like him (or perhaps make tasteless but perfectly legal jokes about stringing up reporters or Greenwald himself), I fail to see any lawbreaking in writing one’s thoughts down on a blog.

Civil liberties attorney? Maybe for Kim Jong Il.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

Is this a great country or what?

Where else can a lecturer with marginal credentials, deep paranoia, and a self righteous streak a mile wide, play upon a gullible press eager for controversy to become an instant celebrity and a recognized “expert” on a subject so far removed from his own academic discipline it may as well be on the surface of the moon?

A University of Wisconsin-Madison part-time lecturer Kevin Barrett will be allowed to teach a course entitled “Islam: Religion and Culture” next term. If that were all the course was about, I would say so what? What’s one more leftist loony bird teaching our impressionable young about the grievance culture of Arabs, all the while dissing western civilization, and refighting the crusades?

The kids will probably fall asleep during class anyway.

But Mr. Barrett will apparently not stop with teaching the usual anti-western bromides and Arabian sob stories about colonialism and its deleterious effects on Islamic culture. Instead, this self described “Islamologist and Arabist” will take a week of class time to teach aspects of physics, metallurgy, thermal dynamics, engineering, and aviation.

Or not. You see, Mr. Barrett plans on teaching “alternative” theories of how the twin towers fell on 9/11. And in the name of academic freedom, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has given him the green light to do so - as long as he teaches “other viewpoints” (presumably what really happened) along with his theory that 9/11 was “an inside job” involving the American government.

Obviously, in order to present his theories, he must have a firm grounding in many scientific disciplines as well as some knowledge of engineering in order to debunk the established theory that two 737’s filled with hundreds of thousands of pounds of jet fuel plowed into two 110 story buildings at more than 500 miles per hour, igniting and burning the fuel at several thousand degrees causing support structures to weaken until the weight bearing beams holding up the top several floors gave way allowing the entire edifice to pancake down to the ground. But Mr. Barrett has so far not shown that he has any expertise in anything, much less his possessing the specialized and collective knowledge of The American Society of Civil Engineers whose brilliant analysis of why the towers fell is generally accepted in the scientific community as the best theory available about how the disaster happened.

This obviously won’t stop Barrett from prattling on about subjects of which he knows little and scientific concepts of which he knows even less. But it does raise an interesting question: Does the cherished ideal of academic freedom allow for teachers to have the absolute right to make gigantic fools of themselves?

Barrett wouldn’t be the first academic to stray from their own tiny corner of the ivory tower and branch out into silliness. Perhaps the most famous case involves the Nobel Prize winning physicist William Shockley whose startling discoveries along with his team at Bell Labs in the early 1950’s led to several breakthroughs in transistor technology which, in turn, gave us the ubiquitous silicon micro-chip and the modern world.

In his later years, Shockley settled in to teach physics at Stanford University, a job that he enjoyed and was evidently very good at. But something happened to this brilliant, stubborn man that caused him to start espousing not only theories that were for the most part scientifically untenable but also socially unacceptable.

Shockley began to espouse the “theory” of eugenics as a key that would save mankind from overpopulation. He began by giving speeches about overpopulation, an issue coming to the fore in the early 1960’s. Then in May of 1963, Shockley gave a speech at a Minnesota college suggesting that the people having the most babies in the world were the one’s least able to survive while those with the best attributes were practicing birth control and having far fewer children.

The idea was incendiary and based on poor science to boot. The theoretical notion that poor people are less capable of becoming productive has been proven to be false as even extremely modest investments in things like education and sanitation will cause the productivity of the poverty stricken to skyrocket.

But Shockley didn’t stop there. A year later, he gave an interview to US News and World Report in which he pointed out that African Americans as a group scored much lower on IQ tests while suggesting the cause was racial.

To say the good professor set off a firestorm would be an understatement. He was condemned from one side of the country to the other. In debates with opponents, his lack of specific knowledge of genetics would lead to him looking ridiculous as fellow scientists skewered his faulty conclusions. Even in later years after he immersed himself in the subject of bio-genetics, it was apparent that his theories were half baked and with little to recommend them to the scientific community.

Shockley was allowed to continue to teach at Stanford to the end of his life despite the raging controversy surrounding he and his cockamamie theories, a noble example of academic freedom in action. By the time he died, his reputation was in tatters and he had become something of a laughingstock.

But in Barrett’s case, is it really a question of academic freedom? Or is it a question of allowing someone without the specialized knowledge to give students even a rudimentary grasp of the concepts involved in the subject matter to, in effect, spout nonsense from the classroom of one of the most respected universities in America?

Why shouldn’t a Comparative Literature teacher now agitate to be allowed to teach a course in political science? Or chaos theory? Or any subject for which he has a passion? The idea that Barrett is going to be allowed to delve into subjects for which he has no formal knowledge is startling in its implications not only for the concept of academic freedom but also the very practical matter of short changing students who presumably have come to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to get an education.

Barrett may believe that the twin towers came down as the result of the US government placing explosive charges in the buildings prior to 9/11 and that the government destroyed them so that we could start a war against Islam and the Arabs. He can believe anything he wishes and should not be penalized by the school for it. But in order to “teach” such a theory while exposing his students to enough information so that they can make up their own minds about the viability of competing viewpoints, Barrett would need to give the students a solid enough grounding in the scientific principles at work in building collapse so that they would be able to judge whether the buildings fell as a result of implosion or the stresses outlined in the ASCE paper.

It should go without saying that he will be unable to do so in one week’s time. This calls into question his entire rationale for teaching the controversy in the first place in a university class devoted ostensibly to learning about Islam. What’s the point? If he’s simply going to spout his loony conspiracy theories without giving any context, any background, how on earth can this kind of shoddy scholarship be accepted by the University as proper course material?

There are many remarkable facts at large in the telling of this story, not the least of which is an eerie parallel with arguments made by proponents of Intelligent Design who wish to teach ID alongside evolution; that students somehow benefit when “other viewpoints” are revealed to them about an issue. This statement from University Provost Patrick Farrell could have been lifted from the ID vs. Evolution debate:

We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas,” Farrell said in a written statement. “That classroom interaction is central to this university’s mission and to the expansion of knowledge. Silencing that exchange now would only open the door to more onerous and sweeping restrictions.”

The problem is that there is usually a good reason that ideas are unpopular, especially scientific ones; they tend to be wrong. One wonders if some evangelical professor wanted to teach creationism “alongside” evolution whether we would hear such ringing calls for tolerance and academic freedom from liberal academics and university officials.

That example is relative to the Barrett imbroglio. There is as much scientific validity in creationism as there is in the twin towers implosion theory. Perhaps more given the circumstances of conspiracy. One could debunk the theory of government culpability in 9/11 simply by using Occam’s Razor. Is it more likely that the towers fell as a result of planes crashing into them or some gigantic plot involving certainly dozens, maybe hundreds, perhaps thousands of people all of whom have kept their mouths shut about their involvement? Anyone who has perused the pages of The American Thinker over the past two years and read in horror about the numerous leaks from the anti-Bush factions in our intelligence community would be justified in wondering why leaks about this government “plot” have not been forthcoming.

If this were just a question of academic freedom, I suspect most of us would simply roll our eyes and shrug our shoulders, chalking it up as one more example of the looniness the academy is prone to these days. But for many of us, this attempt to alter the historical narrative of 9/11 with the support of a respected university’s administration is very troubling. It goes to the heart of the the university’s mission to search for truth.

Is there truth to be gleaned from teaching that little green men live on mars? Or that Elvis is alive and well and living in Traverse City, Michigan? Or that the stork is responsible for procreation? These examples are admittedly extreme but they highlight the problem the University of Wisconsin-Madison has created for itself; where does “the free exchange of ideas” end and outright stupidity begin? And shouldn’t the intellectual mettle of a university be taken by where they draw that line?

Rigorousness in scholarship should be the hallmark of any university. The fact that the University of Wisconsin-Madison is failing in this basic academic barometer by allowing a crackpot to teach material that he is not qualified to pass judgement on is a travesty in education that the state legislature should examine thoroughly. It could be that the present administration of the school is incompetent to deliver the kind of education to their children that Wisconsin parents might expect from an institution with such a stellar reputation for learning.

By now, you’ve probably been made aware of the despicable attack on Jeff Goldstein’s family from a University of Arizona professor of psychology named Deb Frisch. If you’ve been out of circulation lately, you can get the story from Blackfive here.

Short version: Frisch made a series of what can only be termed threats against Jeff and his two year old son. The threats were both violent and sexual in nature, referring to the Jon Bennet Ramsey case and expressing the desire that Jeff’s son suffer the same fate.

This is not hate speech. Nor is it name calling. Nor is it, as the good professor has tried to minimize on her blog “over the line of nastiness.” The only line it is over is perhaps a legal line that should, if there is a prosecutor on the ball in Tempe, Arizona, result in Frisch being frog marched to either the nearest detention center or wrapped in a straitjacket and thrown into a rubber room at the local insane asylum.

Aberrational behavior on the part of one loony lefty? Or symptomatic of an ideology that enables and indeed encourages its adherents to see political opponents as sub-human or retarded and thus, expendable?

We apparently will not fully discover the answer to that question because there has not been one single blogger on the left - not a one - who has seen fit to condemn Frisch’s threats against Goldstein and his family. This despite the fact that the story has been out there for more than 48 hours, an eternity in Blogland.

And then there’s the curious coincidence of two separate denial of service attacks on Goldstein’s website. I will be very interested to see where that DOS originated from and why it occurred when it did. As I write this, Jeff’s blog is still down and he has informed PJ Media that he won’t be up for a couple of days.

High profile conservative bloggers like Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs have been hit by DOS attacks in the last several months and the company Hosting Matters (Instapundit, Powerline, Captains Quarters among many) has also been under constant assault. Is this the best the left can do? I may simply not be paying much attention, but has this level of DOS attacks occurred on lefty sites? It wouldn’t surprise me necessarily if it did but the fact that the attacks on righty bloggers seem to be more frequent in the last 6 months or so, one has to ask the question; what are liberals so afraid of that they feel compelled to silence their most visible critics?

All of those bloggers who have called Goldstein a “paste eater” are nowhere to be found when it comes to policing their own ranks and thus have aligned themselves with Frisch and her criminal behavior. Silence implies assent in my book. And the fact that liberals have taken absolutely no interest in this incident is deplorable. Ann Coulter comes out with one of her loony toons remarks about killing Supreme Court justices and several dozen righty bloggers, many of them prominent, jump down her throat. Deb Frisch threatens physical harm against a two year old and gets a pass from the left.

What does that say about the moral fiber of the netnuts? Methinks they ate it to improve their regularity.

UPDATE: FROM THE “THAT WAS QUICK” DEPARTMENT

Michelle Malkin is reporting that Frisch has evidently “resigned.” Or been fired. I won’t link to the criminal’s blogsite but Michelle has the gist of the post:

…wrote some inflammatory comments at a blog by a guy named Jeff Goldstein called protein wisdom that infuriated many bloggers and commenters. Many of these bloggers emailed my boss at the University of Arizona to tell on me.

In hindsight, the things I wrote were over the line of nastiness. I apologize to Mr. Goldstein.

I have resigned from the University of Arizona so there is no need for other enraged people to write to administrators there.

The loon is also playing the victim card:

Some blogs have posted comments that I perceive to be physically threatening. I have contacted the FBI and the Pajamas Media staff to determine how to proceed with this aspect of this unbelievable experience.

My intention in this post is to de-escalate the situation. The comments that started this all were nasty, not threatening. But I feel very threatened by the response.

Jeff - I lost my job. You won. Could you call off the troops?

After picking my jaw up off the floor, I decided to see if any liberals were taking her to task in the comments to the post. Here’s one:

You really succeeded in making liberals look like psychopaths. Can you do the rest of us a favor, and either stop posting entirely, of join the Republican Party?

Well…it’s a start. Kit, one of the hosts of Wideawakes Radio (WAR Radio) which is set to re-launch tomorrow morning summed it up nicely in her comments:

You post a large number of comments on a conservative blogger’s site that not only make references to killing, but also sexually abusing his 2-year-old child. (And that’s not counting the insults to his wife.)

If you’ve truly quit your job, then I’m glad. You are not qualified or competent to teach American college students.

Frisch can evidently dish it out but not take it as she has apparently deleted several comments from the string on that post.

Finally, a commenter called “Liberal Avenger” weighs in with just the proper amount of compassion and stupidity:

I was under the impression that you were/are suffering from some sort of mental illness in making those comments. If that is the case, seek help - but don’t resign from your job. You needn’t lose your job because of this.

1. Call your boss and tell him that you are un-resigning
2. See a mental health professional if you aren’t seeing one already
3. Ignore the hypocritical wingnuts here who pretend as if what you did was some enormous crime against decency. It wasn’t. What you did was stupid and misguided. Conservative bloggers are masters at being stupid and misguided.

Poor wittle Debwah. All she did was refer to a two year old in a sexual manner and make threats against his person. I mean, after all, the kid belongs to a conservative so anything goes, right?

Maybe Mr. Avenger and Frisch can go a-vistiting to the same shrink.

UPDATE II: 7/9

I see where this site has been linked by a couple of liberal blogs who are complaining that I’m asking them to “apologize” for Frisch’s behavior when the mad doctor is a nothing blogger and that after all, what goes on in Iraq is the real obscenity.

I can find no mention on any conservative blog of anyone asking the left to “apologize” for not posting on this subject. But a little solidarity with the right in condemning this outrageous and frightening behavior would have been appropriate and appreciated.

As I mention in the post, this story was out there for 48 hours (6th story from the bottom of Memorandum on early Friday morning) and nary a peep of condemnation was heard from anyone on the left until Confederate Yankee’s post about the silence of the left on this issue was disseminated. Then, there were mostly mild rebukes of Frisch made in passing with the real thrust of most lefty writings being that they shouldn’t have to “apologize” for Frisch and that conservatives do it too, or do it worse.

And I refuse to back down from the statement that liberalism “enables and indeed encourages its adherents to see political opponents as sub-human or retarded and thus, expendable…” When most major league lefty bloggers can refer to Goldstein as a “paste eater” and Ed Morrissey as “retarded” I would say that it becomes understandable why Frisch’s statements would not be condemned and, under most circumstances, probably applauded by the likes of TBogg, Maha, Jane Hamsher, Digby, and the unheavenly host of lefties who believe themselves to be the moral and intellectual superiors of conservatives.

What the freepers did in encouraging harm against employees of the New York Times and their families was despicable and they should be roundly and soundly condemned for their advocacy of such action. The same goes for anyone, anywhere, of any ideological stripe who advocates violence or harassment of any kind against anyone.

That said, politics is a full contact sport. And liberals who whine about being called out for either their rhetoric or lack of moral courage should take their complaints somewhere else. Don’t bring them here.

“Those boys on the other side of that ridge…They never quite seem like the enemy.”
(General James Longstreet from the movie Gettysburg)

Longstreet was speaking of Union troops at Gettysburg, some of whom he had known and commanded before the war.

So what’s the excuse of our political and intellectual elites who never quite see an enemy when thinking about or writing of radical Islamists?

And not just western elites, either. In a frightening but predictable way, the entire War on Terror is in full backsliding mode as many ordinary citizens in Europe and America tire of the endless vigilance, the troubling compromises with civil liberties, the partisan political warfare, and the constant, nagging feelings of self doubt about the righteousness of our cause encouraged by 50 years of tearing at the edifice and hammering at the foundations of Western civilization by the European and American left.

At a time when our civilization is facing the greatest threat to its existence in more than 500 years, when the need for unity in recognizing, at the very least, that we are confronted by an enemy that wishes to do us immense harm, those most capable of giving voice to a rational defense of our values, our systems of government, our art - our very way of life, are wallowing in defeatism and worse, sympathizing with those who would do us in. Nurtured at the finest palaces of thinking the world has ever known - the Western university system - we are being systematically emasculated by the trimmers, the appeasers, and those afflicted with that most curious of Western diseases, the plague of multiculturalism.

In short, when perhaps our greatest need at this point in the war against Islamism is for our intellectuals - artists, people of letters, and philosophers to instill in the rest of us a sense of our own worth as inheritors of the traditions and values of Western culture, we are treated instead to lectures about moral equivalency and outright boosterism for the cause of the jihadis. In one of the greatest historical ironies in recorded history, those who have been nurtured in the freedom and tolerance of the West now would abandon the society that celebrates those values by either cowering in the shadows or giving voice to doubts reflecting the view that there is little in Western Civilization worth saving.

As early as 2002, leftist intellectuals sought to undermine the War on Terror by rejecting the very premise that we should be fighting a war at all. The “underlying causes” of the war were examined and found wanting. Policies of past and present western governments were used as justification for the jihadis to murder innocent people. There were even those who saw any effort of the United States to defend itself against states that gladly sponsor and support these murderous thugs as immoral.

And the damage to the cause has already been done. Exactly a year ago, Great Britain experienced its own national nightmare of a day when al-Qaeda linked terrorists claimed the lives of 52 British citizens in an attack on the London subway sytsem. The response of the British people to this attack was a curious combination of sorrow and appeasement. This exchange between a London policeman and an ordinary citizen who was protesting at a radical Muslim demonstration sponsored by a group whose leader thought the subway attacks justified is indicative of how a citizenry loses faith and courage when so few support the defense of their own country against murderous attacks:

…[an] English bobby vigorously silencing such a citizen, described as a van driver, who, according to the televised report, had angrily criticized the Muslim protesters. It is tragically enlightening.

“Listen to me, listen to me,” said the policeman, shaking his finger at the van driver. “They have a right to protest. You let them do it. You say things like that you’ll get them riled and I end up in [trouble]. You say one more thing like that, mate, and you’ll get yourself nicked [arrested] and I am not kidding you, d’you understand me?”

Van driver: “They can do whatever they want and I can’t?”

Policeman: “They’ve got their way of doing it. The way you did it was wrong. You’ve got one second to get back in your van and get out of here.”

Van driver: [bitter] “Freedom of speech.”

One wonders if those best able to articulate the value of free speech as well as how this peculiarly western notion is so vital to defeating our enemies would come out from the shadows and speak up with one loud voice in defense of this major Western tradition if such a conversation would ever have taken place. The policeman is there to protect the rights of all - not just those who threaten the peace.

In fact, western intellectuals are unwittingly assisting our enemies by feeding their paranoia and fantastical worldview. Every time they remind us of the moral equivalency between Westerners and jihadis, they feed the Culture of Grievance that so dominates the thoughts of radical Muslims:

How do you win against the Culture of Grievance? Call it COG for short, and don’t think you’ve never encountered it before. It’s at the heart of the Islamic radical movement, and a prime motivator of Islamic terrorists. COG is all over the place, but especially in places like the Middle East. COG is when a culture is more concerned about real, or imagined, grievances, than in just moving ahead and fixing things. Every nation has a certain degree of COG, which most of the time means little to foreigners. But when COG spawns terrorists (which COG often does) who go abroad and kill thousands of foreigners, than COG is an international problem.

Instead of a ringing defense of our way of life, the Western left emboldens the radicals by acknowledging that their claims of victimhood have merit. And while not coming out and advocating terrorism as a response directly, by justifying the murder of innocents by pointing to this policy or that event as “cause and effect,” the left plays right into the hands of those who use such critiques to mobilize and motivate their minions of death.

Perhaps we should take a page from Israel’s playbook in this regard. While it is true that Israel has its own “Blame Israel First” crowd on the left, the self confidence and belief in what they are doing to fight for their national lives stands in stark contrast to the hand wringing in most of the west. And what is truly remarkable to watch has been the abandonment of Israel by the European left. They have picked up the cause of the Palestinian terrorists who not only wish to defeat Israel but destroy her. How they arrived at this sorry conclusion is a puzzlement. Nearly 60 years ago, the European left gave Jewish nationalism a boost with their support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Why they have abandoned Israel in her hour of need has more to do with the Culture of Grievance than with any possible defense of Israeli society being reflective of Western traditions and values.

One would think that we could acknowledge mistakes made in the past without condemning an entire civilization to the ash heap of history. But apparently, the intellectual left is incapable of such a leap of faith. They have sacrificed rationality on the altar of Good Intentions. And I’m afraid that in the end, those good intentions may be the ruin of us all.

To those of us on the right who still vigorously support the President in the War on Terror, the Hamdan ruling presents us with a golden opportunity to start repairing the damage our detainee policy at Guantanamo has inflicted upon our constitutional principles as well as our image abroad.

To those on the left who, despite the unambiguous ruling by the Supreme Court in Hamdan that we are indeed in a shooting war with al-Qaeda, but still insist that the War on Terror is some kind of gigantic Rovian plot to win elections, the decision is a godsend. It gives liberals a second chance to prove they are serious about protecting America from her enemies by joining with the President and Republicans in Congress in resolving the legal status of detainees in such a way that satisfies both the demands of justice and our national security.

Camp Delta has become an iconic symbol worldwide of American hypocrisy in the War on Terror. The name “Guantanamo” will go down in history with other notorious prisons such as the French nightmare penitentiary on Devil’s Island and the North Vietnamese disreputable POW camp known as “The Hanoi Hilton.”

Regardless of whether or not Guantanamo matched those two facilities in sheer brutality and horror, the fact remains that the narrative supplied by western media to describe Guantanamo to the rest of the world has made it so. And in propaganda, perception is everything. There are no starving skeletons or daily beatings as there were on Devil’s Island and the Hanoi Hilton. But the brutality that has been confirmed by independent observers, including our own military and the FBI, is real enough and has brought shame to the United States and damaged our reputation as a champion of justice and human rights among friend and foe alike.

These are simply the facts. It does no good to argue that what goes on at Guantanamo doesn’t rise to the level of torture. Not anymore. One of the main findings in Hamdan was that the detainees at Guantanamo - no matter how bloodthirsty and heinous their crimes - are entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. This includes being protected against “[o]utrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” This means that many of the relatively mild “stress techniques” of interrogation well documented elsewhere were and are illegal.

And that’s only the half of it. The Hamdan decision also knocked the chocks from underneath the government’s position that it could try Guantanamo detainees using the rubric of military tribunals. While sympathetic to the reasons given by the government for using the tribunals - namely that trying terrorists in open court could endanger the innocent - the Supremes nevertheless firmly ruled that such tribunals violated the Geneva Convention and hence, U.S. law.

The bottom line is that the Supreme Court ruled that the United States government acted illegally and unconstitutionally in the way it has treated detainees at Guantanamo. So the question is no longer one of right or wrong but rather what to do about the mess we have made in Guantanamo.

This mess includes the fact that our government lied to us when they informed the American people that the prisoners at Guantanamo were “the worst of the worst.” The facts contained in the military’s own records simply do not bear that out. And it is clear, at least to this observer, that one of the main reasons the government insists on holding many of these detainees is not the fear that if released they would commit heinous acts of terror but rather because by releasing them now it would prove that the military made many, many tragic mistakes in capturing, interrogating, and holding dozens of innocent men and boys.

An exhaustive examination of the military’s “Combatant Status Review Tribunals” by two National Journal reporters last February revealed this shocking conclusion:

Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence — even the classified evidence — gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It’s based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars.

Perhaps most shocking of all is that despite repeated assurances from Administration officials that the Guantanamo detainees were captured “on the battlefield” in Afghanistan, the facts contained in the military’s own records do not support that contention. In fact, it appears that many of the detainees were captured in Pakistan and were handed over to the Americans by:

“…reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability. These locals had strong incentives to tar as terrorists any and all Arabs they could get their hands on… including noncombatant teachers and humanitarian workers. And the Bush administration has apparently made very little effort to corroborate the plausible claims of innocence detailed by many of the men who were handed over….”

How little effort has been made to establish claims of innocence? The Guardian features a story today about one Abdullah Mujahid who the government claims was plotting against the United States. Two years ago, the military invited Mr. Mujahid to prove his innocence by calling witnesses in his defense before a tribunal.

A few months later, the government informed Mujahid that the witnesses could not be found which meant that his incarceration would continue indefinitely. The newspaper however, found three of the witnesses within three days. One was working for President Karzai, advising him on tribal affairs. Another teaches at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

The Guantanamo records are replete with examples of such incompetence or deliberate malfeasance, depending on your point of view. And herein lies the root of the quagmire at Guantanamo; our inability to admit we were wrong about some of these people and work to redress the injustice.

Clearly, there are many detainees at Guantanamo who should never see the outside of prison bars again. And now that the Supreme Court has offered guidance on what to do with these terrorists - specifically asking the President to go to Congress to get the legal authority to try them - those of us who are interested in both justice and our nation’s security should wholeheartedly support this effort.

But what can we do to determine the status of hundreds of others whose incarceration is a blot on American jurisprudence and shames our constitution and our most cherished values? Clearly there must be procedures using our civilian courts to weed out the innocent from the dangerous. And Congress can also intervene here by developing guidelines in concert with the Justice Department and the Department of Defense to insure that justice is done and our national security is protected.

One of the major stumbling blocks is the fact that much of the evidence gathered against detainees is of a classified nature. And evidence gathered as a result of interrogation of other prisoners, if released in open court, could endanger the person who supplied that information. For this reason, detainees cannot enjoy all the rights afforded American citizens in similar circumstances. But they should have the right to an attorney, the right to a speedy review of their case, the right to an examination of the evidence by an impartial judge, and perhaps a limited right to face their accuser if possible.

At the very least, the above gives us a basis for action. Congress has been dithering about this issue for more than three years, passing the buck to the Department of Justice and the Defense Department. Now that the Supreme Court has cleared up some of the issues surrounding detainees at Guantanamo, Congress could indeed clear up most of the others by dealing with detainee rights in a forthright manner that could begin to repair some of the damage done to our reputation as a champion of human rights and the rule of law.

We will be at war with International jihadism for many years. Besides winning on the battlefield, it is absolutely essential that we also win the hearts and minds of the hundreds of millions of Muslims who reject the violence and nihilism of the extremists and really do wish to rid themselves of the terrorists. This won’t happen as long as some of our policies reveal us to be hypocrites and worse, little better than the governments that oppress them on a daily basis.

We simply must stand for something better, something that we can be proud of. But as long as our detainee policy continues to show us at our worst, it will be impossible for many to see us at our best.

Dan Riehl is singlehandedly trying to change my mind about bloggers replacing the mainstream press.

In a series of stunning posts that deserve a helluva lot more attention than they seem to be getting, Mr. Riehl raises some troubling questions about Jerome Armstrong and MyDD, the political blog that Mr Armstrong created originally as a stock analyzing site that used astrology to help investors pick the winners.

If that were the only problem with MyDD, we could simply have some fun at the expense of the “reality based community” by gently pointing out that astrology hasn’t been considered a science since Newton got whacked on the noggin by a falling apple, which, given the prominence of Mr. Armstrong among the netnuts, sorta puts the kibosh on any claims liberals have to the rationalist high ground.

The real story here is not “Astrologer Jerome” or Armstrong’s problems with the SEC. What Mr. Riehl has uncovered with his sleuthing is what appears to be an elaborate flim flam involving a liberal PAC called BlogPac (that Markos Moulitsis transferred administration to MyDD just 10 days ago) and an apparent working relationship between Armstrong and MyDD’s Chris Bowers.

What makes that relationship significant is that BlogPac has decided not to disburse money to political candidates any longer. Instead, Blogpac’s mission “will be primarily to defend the netroots and improve the quality of online activism…”

Who then has benefited from this change in focus? Mr. Riehl:

If you look at the BlogPAC disclosure records, you’ll see that from Jan - Mar of 2005 - their only disbursements were to another blogger / consultant - Bob Bingham - from the Swing State Blog. According to slate, he was a one time employee of Armstrong, as well as a leading force behind BlogPAC. Interesting. They’ve been collecting money on line and paying it to … themselves for consulting?? I don’t know. But those filings could prove interesting, either now, or in the future.

And Riehl adds this disclaimer:

Without alleging any illegality, or malfeasance, which I am not - given Armstrong’s display of bad judgment in both political candidates and stocks, on top of his trouble with the SEC, it seems fair to at least broach the question: will the decision to turn Blog PAC over to MyDD end up helping blogs, or being a classic example of how a fool and his money can be soon parted?

Of course, assuming one thinks most liberals are fools to begin with, I suppose you could make the argument that its stupid money right from the start.

I would also like to add that there is nothing illegal in paying themselves for running the PAC. But one would think that contributors would like to be clear on the relationships at play before coughing up any money. And the relationship between Bowers and Armstrong appears to be one of employer and employee, which makes the BlogPac money a potential godsend to someone who can disburse it to bloggers who could then be employed to write paeans to Armstrong clients.

There’s no evidence for this except past history. Chris Bowers, for instance, has acknowledged being paid to consult for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The SEIU paid a company called Political Technologies LLC for which Armstrong is the Registered Agent $162,000 in 2005 for “Consulting”, “Professional Services,” and $5,000 for “Website Support.” Mr. Riehl points out that the SEIU received some glowing coverage in Armstrong’s book co-authored with Markos Moulitsis as well as many glowing references on Moulitsis’ own site, Daily Kos.

Is there more of this “pay for play” on blogs (perhaps conservative blogs as well) than anyone has guessed? For the record, I can categorically state that the only monies I have received because of this site (besides donations from readers) is the quarterly payment I get from Pajamas Media for hosting their ads - ads I have no control over as far as content or placement.

Read Dan’s entire post for some more complete background on the issues he raises.